Tag: commercial

Blue Origin finally gets FAA license to launch New Glenn, now targeting January 6, 2025

2:27 pm

The first completely assembled New Glenn, on the launchpad
The first completely assembled New Glenn,
on the launchpad

The FAA, after months of apparent delays, today finally issued Blue Origin a license to launch its New Glenn rocket for a period covering the next five years.

As has now become the FAA’s custom, in issuing this license it also brags about its success in issuing the license “well in advance of the statutory deadline” for doing so.

What a crock. Blue Origin and NASA were originally targeting an October launch of New Glenn carrying two Mars orbiters, but had to cancel when the rocket couldn’t lift off during the six-day launch window. Though delays at Blue Origin certainly contributed to this cancellation, I suspect the FAA’s red tape played a major factor as well.

According to another source, Blue Origin is now targeting a launch date of January 6, 2025. The company is presently doing a static fire test on the launchpad.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Eutelsat-OneWeb stock plummets

10:02 am

Despite its merger with Eutelsat in 2023, the stock value of the combined Eutelsat-OneWeb satellite company has plummeted in the past year, more than halving the value of the OneWeb portion that was saved from bankruptcy by both the government of the United Kingdom and investors from India in 2020.

The collapse means the UK’s investment is worth €133m (£110m), representing a near £300m paper loss for the taxpayer. … However, while the all-share deal implied a value of €12 per share, Eutelsat’s stock has since imploded. In the past 12 months, it has halved and is trading at record lows of €2.58.

Eutelsat was facing its own collapse before the merger, as its business was geosynchronous communications satellites which are now losing their business to the low-Earth orbit constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlab and OneWeb’s. The merger was the company’s attempt to join this new market.

OneWeb however has had its own repeated problems completing that its constellation, and faced bankruptcy in 2020 because of delays from the COVID panic as well as delays in launching the Ariane-6 rocket. Then Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 meant it lost all its remaining planned launches, forcing it to scramble to find other launch providers.

Stock market analysts don’t expect the combined company to begin earning profits for at least the next three to five years, which casts an even greater pall on its future.

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Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

10:01 pm

A Christmas Eve pause: As I have done now for several years on Christmas day, I bring you the classic 1951 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring Alastair Sim. In my opinion still by far the best adaption of the book and a truly wonderful movie.

And as I noted in a previous year:

Dickens did not demand the modern version of charity, where it is imposed by governmental force on everyone. Instead, he was advocating the older wiser concept of western civilization, that charity begins at home, that we as individuals are obliged as humans to exercise good will and generosity to others, by choice.

It is always a matter of choice. And when we take that choice away from people, we destroy the good will that makes true charity possible.

It is also most important that we all heed the words of Christmas Present: ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both, but most of all beware this boy.’”

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Dubai-based AI/3D printing company successfully test fires an aerospike engine

9:15 am

LEAP71's aerospike test engine
Click for original image.

The Dubai-based startup LEAP71, focused on using AI software to quickly develop rocket engine designs it can then 3D print, has successfully test fired a prototype aerospike engine on December 18, 2024 during a static fire test campaign conducted in the United Kingdom.

Aerospikes are more compact and significantly more efficient across various atmospheric pressures, including the vacuum of space. They forego the conventional bell-shaped nozzle by placing a spike in the center of a toroidal combustion chamber [as shown in the photo to the right]. Since it is surrounded by 3,500ºC hot exhaust gas, cooling the spike is an enormous challenge.

Josefine Lissner, CEO and Co-Founder of LEAP 71, stated: “We were able to extend Noyron’s physics to deal with the unique complexity of this engine type. The spike is cooled by intricate cooling channels flooded by cryogenic oxygen, whereas the outside of the chamber is cooled by the kerosene fuel. I am very encouraged by the results of this test, as virtually everything on the engine was novel and untested. It’s a great validation of our physics-driven approach to computational AI.”

The spike in the center acts as one wall of the nozzle, and the changing pressure of the atmosphere acting as the other side of the nozzle, allowing the nozzle size to change as the rocket rises, thus making its thrust as efficient as possible.

This test was apparently with a small scale prototype, not a full scale engine. LEAP71 engineers are going to have to go though a lot more iterations using their AI software and 3D printing to get to a version usable on a rocket. The company claims that development will go far faster this way. That this company did its testing in the UK but is based in Dubai suggests its capital comes from that Middle Eastern country, which is trying to develop a space industry of its own, but it is mainly relying on British designers — at this point — to get things done.

It will have to do so quickly, since another startup, German-based Polaris Spaceplanes, in November 2024 actually completed the first test flight ever of a prototype using an aerospike engine.

After decades of speculation about the advantages of an aerospike engine but no successful flights, we now have a race between two companies to be the first to fly one, and the effort is going on in Europe.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites

10:44 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched 21 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Kennedy in Florida. Thirteen of the satellites were configured for direct-to-cell capabilities.

The first stage completed its fourteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

134 SpaceX
64 China
16 Russia
14 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 154 to 96, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 134 to 116.

Tonight’s launch was also the 250th worldwide in 2024, a record that approximately triples the average number of successful launches each year from 1957 to 2017, when SpaceX and China began to ramp up their launch counts.

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NASA awards four companies contracts to provide communications for operations in Earth orbit

11:30 am

Capitalism in space: Rather than continue to build its own constellation of communications satellites, NASA yesterday awarded four companies contracts to provide that service to the agency’s many Earth orbit operations.

The work will be awarded under new Near Space Network services contracts that are firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts. Project timelines span from February 2025 to September 2029, with an additional five-year option period that could extend a contract through Sept. 30, 2034. The cumulative maximum value of all Near Space Network Services contracts is $4.82 billion.

The companies are Intuitive Machines, SSC Space, Viasat (based in Georgia), and the Norwegian company Kongsberg Satellite services.

Not only will these companies provide a better service faster and at less cost than the NASA TDRS satellite constellation, that there are four of them provides redundancy as well as fosters competition.

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Defunct Pentagon weather satellite breaks up

10:40 am

According to the Space Force as well as two commercial space tracking companies, a defunct military weather satellite launched in 1997 has broken up into more than fifty pieces.

The satellite, dubbed DMSP-5D2 F14, was in a sun-synchronous orbit over the poles. What makes the break-up significant is that it is not the first of this design of weather satellites to do so.

DMSP-5D2 F14 is part of a family of spacecraft that have suffered breakups in orbit. The F12 satellite broke up in October 2016, following the breakup of F13 in February 2015. In 2004, the F11 spacecraft broke up, creating 56 pieces of tracked debris. All the satellites had a battery assembly with a design flaw that made them vulnerable to explosion.

A similar spacecraft design was used for a line of civilian polar-orbiting weather satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The NOAA-16 satellite broke up in November 2015, followed by NOAA-17 in March 2021.

Overall the military launched nine satellites of this design, while NOAA launched three. Of these twelve satellites six have now broken apart. We should expect a large percentage of the remaining six to also break up.

This story explains why in the last ten years a number of companies have appeared attempting to develop the technology to remove space junk. There is a desperate need in the satellite industry for this capability, and those space junk companies are aiming to make profit from this need.

Note I do not expect or want the government to take the lead in this. This issue is mostly a need of the satellite industry, of which the world’s governments are merely just one more participant. This industry should band together to set up a fund to pay for this work, with those governments joining as just one more partner.

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Liechtenstein signs the Artemis Accords

10:16 am

The tiny nation of Liechtenstein in Europe yesterday became the 52nd nation to sign the Artemis Accords.

The full list of nations now part of this American space alliance: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

There has been a flurry of new nations signing the accords since the November election of Trump. I suspect his coming encouraged these nations to sign, knowing the moribund leadership of Biden will soon be replaced with something more robust. It is also likely that these nations see a renewal of Trump’s original goals for the Artemis Accords, to create an international alliance, led by the United States, with the goal of overcoming the Outer Space Treaty’s limitations on private property.

I hope this turns out to be true. This alliance gives Trump a powerful lobby he can wield to force change.

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SpaceX and Rocket Lab complete two launches overnight

10:04 am

Though one SpaceX launch early last night had a launch abort, both SpaceX and Rocket Lab completed additional launches later in the evening.

First, SpaceX completed its second Bandwagon in which 30 payloads were sent to mid-inclination orbits, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage flew its twenty-first flight, landing successfully back its landing site at Vandenberg. The two fairings completed their 14th and 18th flights.

Next, Rocket Lab completed its sixth launch of sixteen for the commercial satellite company Synspective, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. This was the 14th successful launch for Rocket Lab in 2024, a significant increase from the nine and eight launches it flew in 2022 and 2023.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

133 SpaceX
64 China
16 Russia
14 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 153 to 96, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 133 to 116.

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