Tag: commercial

Celestis recovers astronaut’s remains from suborbital rocket explosion

10:06 am

Celestis, the company that specializes in sending people’s ashes into space, has successfully recovered the remains of a former Apollo astronaut Philip Chapman (who never flew in space) after the suborbital rocket they were on exploded four seconds into flight.

“All 120 flight capsules are safely in the hands of launch personnel and will be returned to us awaiting our next flight as soon as UP and Spaceport America complete their investigation and any required fixes are implemented,” Celestis said in a statement on Wednesday. The recovered payloads are set to fly again on board the company’s upcoming Perseverance Flight. The company said it only launches a “symbolic portion” of ashes or DNA sample from its participants.

Celestis has sent remains of many celebrities as well as ordinary customers on a number of orbital and suborbital flights over the years. The recovery of the remains and their expected reflight in this case enhances its business model, since none of its customers want their ashes lost in a rocket failure, before reaching space.

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Lockheed Martin reorganizes its space divisions to better compete in the new commercial market

9:58 am

Lockheed Martin today announced that it is reorganizing its space divisions to make them better aligned with the new commercial market, and thus better able to win market share.

The company will streamline its operation from “five lines of business to three,” the first focused on commercial space, the second focused on classified military projects, and the third focused on military missile work.

As a big space company, Lockheed Martin has made a great effort in recent years to break into the commercial rocket industry. It was a major investor in Rocket Lab, and is also a major investor in the rocket startup ABL, which it is sending a lot of business. It also realigned its satellite construction business to focus on smallsats, including investing a lot of money in the smallsat company Terran Orbital.

This reorganization is clearly an effort to underline these changes. Whether it will work remains to be seen. Often such reorganizations in big older corporations end up being nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

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ESA finally admits — sort of — that private enterprise can do it better

9:48 am

Stephane Israel, the architect of ESA's rocket failure
Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace and the
architect of its failure to compete in the field of rocketry.

Today there was a news report in which Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace, kind of admitted at last that the expendable design of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket was a mistake, and that it will take a decade more to fix it.

“When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket,” said Israël, according to European Spaceflight.

He added that it will not be until the 2030s before Europe begins flying its own reuseable rocket.

Israël’s comments illustrate the head-in-the-sand approach he has exhibited now for decades. He claims the European Space Agency (ESA) chose to make Ariane-6 expandable so that it would be ready quickly, but its development has not been fast, and in fact is now more than three years behind schedule. When it finally begins flying operational it will have taken almost a decade to create it.

His comments also are his lame attempt to push back against a recent ESA report [pdf], issued in late March, that strongly rejected the decades-long model that ESA has used to build its rockets. Up until now and including the construction of Ariane-6, ESA designed and built its rockets, using Arianespace, headed by Israël, as its commercial arm. In other words, the government ran the show, much like NASA did for most of the half century following the 1960s space race. The result was slow development, and expensive rockets. Arianespace for example never made a profit in its decades-long existence, despite capturing half the commercial market in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The March ESA report rejected this model, and instead advocating copying what the U.S. has done for the past half decade by shifting ownership and design to the private sector, as advocated in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in space. To quote the ESA report:
» Read more

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Hozier & Annie Lennox – Take Me to Church / I Put a Spell on You

6:01 pm

A evening pause: Performed live 2015.

Hat tip Doug Johnson. Note too that this does not come from youtube, but from metatube. Let’s find more alternative video resources like this, just to increase some competition.

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Weird dome near Starship candidate landing zone on Mars

1:47 pm

Weird dome near Starship candidate landing zone on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as domes in Arcadia Planitia, one of the many large northern lowland plains of Mars.

This to me is a “What the heck?” image. I won’t dare try to explain the warped concentric ringed pattern at the top of the mesa, nor the bright and dark splotch that surrounds it. The small craters around it appear to have glacier material within them, and the terrain here likely has a lot of near surface ice, being at 37 degrees north latitude in a region where the data suggests such ice exists. The different colors here likely indicate the difference between dust (orange) and coarser material (aqua).

The location, as shown in the overview map below, makes this mesa more tantalizing.
» Read more

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Maxar sale closes and company goes private

9:44 am

With the purchase today for $6.4 billion of the satellite company Maxar by two private investment firms, its stock was removed from the NY stock exchange and is no longer traded publicly.

The company was acquired for $53 per share by the U.S. private equity firm Advent International and minority investor British Columbia Investment Management Corp. in a deal announced in December. “With the closing of the transaction, Maxar will remain a U.S.-controlled, owned and operated company,” the company said. Maxar’s common stock will also be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Maxar started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2017. It officially became a U.S. corporation in 2020 when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA.

The desire of these private investors to spend so much strongly indicates that Maxar has real value. It also indicates indirectly the strength of the emerging new commercial launch market. These investors clearly believe that this launch market will continue to grow and force the launch price of its satellites to go down.

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SpaceX launches 56 Starlink satellites into orbit

12:41 am

Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully placed 56 Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their eighth and ninth flights, respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India

American private enterprise now leads China 32 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 32 to 28. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including American companies, 29 to 31.

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Irish startup lobbies for Irish spaceport

9:26 am

According to an official from the startup SUAS Aerospace, Ireland is an ideal location for the creation of a new spaceport.

Mr O’Halloran, who is now vice chairman of Irish space company SUAS Aerospace, said space vehicles could be launched from Ireland for telecommunications, environmental monitoring, or medical experiments.

…He later told the Irish Examiner: “There are loads of companies in Europe that need to have a facility of a launch pad, or a spaceport, and by and large they are all heading towards the Azores. The UK is now starting to set up spaceports, but they are now outside the EU. Ireland is ideal as a launching site.”

This Irish company’s focus, according to its website, is “…to build a leading European Space Port providing flexible commercial satellite launch facilities with provision for engine and rocket testing.” And it wants to do it in Ireland. O’Halloran’s speech was an effort to gin up both private and government support for the project, including a commitment of the Irish government to provide it the land it needs for such a site.

There are already three spaceports under development within the EU, in Spain, Norway, and Sweden, all of which at the moment are for suborbital rockets exclusively. Ireland’s location could make it a better choice for orbital launches, as it has many more options for flight paths over the Atlantic without crossing land.

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Suborbital rocket explodes four seconds after launch in New Mexico

9:15 am

An UP Aerospace suborbital rocket exploded yesterday only four seconds after launch in New Mexico, destroying a number of private and NASA science and commercial payloads.

An UP Aerospace rocket, 20 feet tall and carrying a NASA payload, exploded moments after liftoff today. The unfortunate event not only affected the NASA TechRise Student Challenge payloads but also delayed a poignant tribute to the late NASA astronaut, Phillip K. Chapman, and chemist Louise Ann O’Deen.

The rocket was set to launch the cremated remains of Chapman, NASA’s first Australian-born American astronaut, finally granting him his long-awaited journey to space.

Chapman and O’Deen’s remains were payloads from the commercial company Celestis. The thirteen NASA payloads were part of its TechRise Student Challenge program for 6th to 12th grade students.

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AC/DC – Thunderstruck

6:01 pm

An evening pause: A bit of energy to start the week. Performed live 1991. For those unfamiliar with this rock piece (like me), I think it helpful here to turn on captions to find out what the performers and audience are singing.

Hat tip James Street.

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