Tag: commercial

Private company developing concept for resurrecting Spitzer Space Telescope

9:11 am

Using a $250K development contract from the Space Force, the small startup Rhea Space Activity hopes to develop a mission for resurrecting Spitzer Space Telescope, now several hundred million miles from Earth and out of operation for three years.

The “Spitzer Resurrector” mission would be a small spacecraft that could fit into a 1-meter-by-1-meter box and be ready to launch as soon as 2026, Usman said. It would then take about three years to cruise to the telescope, during which time the spacecraft will make observations of solar flaring. “We plan to be busy right from the start of the mission,” said Howard Smith, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, which is operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian, who is involved in the proposed rescue flight.

Once the resurrector spacecraft reaches the telescope, it would fly around at a distance of 50 to 100 km to characterize Spitzer’s health. Then it would attempt to establish communications with the telescope and begin to relay information back and forth between the ground and telescope. This would allow scientists to restart observations.

Essentially, the servicing satellite would act as a relay communications satellite, allowing Spitzer to resume doing the limited infrared observations it had been doing in the last eleven years of its life, after its coolant ran out.

The actual mission of course has not yet been funded, nor is Rhea much more than a startup, with only ten employees. The concept however illustrates the growing practicality of flying such missions. The number of servicing missions to defunct satellites is growing in leaps and bounds, and Rhea, as well as its other partners at the Smithsonian and the Applied Physics Laboratory, are simply using that knowledge for their own benefit.

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Italy awards $256 million contract for testing in-orbit robotic satellite servicing

8:59 am

The new colonial movement: The Italian Space Agency yesterday issued a $256 million contract to a partnership of several private European companies — most of which are Italian — to fly a mission testing a variety of in-orbit robotic satellite servicing capabilities.

Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales of France and Leonardo of Italy, said the group is contracted to design, develop, and qualify a spacecraft capable of performing a range of autonomous robotic operations on satellites in low Earth orbit.

The company did not disclose details about these satellites or specifics about the mission, but said the servicer would have a dexterous robotic arm and test capabilities that include refueling, component repair or replacement, orbital transfer, and atmospheric reentry. The servicer will be launched with a target satellite, Thales Alenia Space spokesperson Cinzia Marcanio said, and both will be fitted with an interface for a refueling mission.

The partnership also includes the Italian companies Telespazio, Avio, and D-Orbit.

The significance of this deal is that Italy has gone outside the European Space Agency (ESA) to do it. For decades all European projects would be developed and flown through ESA. Italy appears to be have finally realized that it does not need that partnership, that in fact that partnership acts to hinder its own companies by requiring any mission to use companies from other nations. This deal instead keeps almost everything inside Italy.

We have seen a similar pattern in both Germany and the United Kingdom. The former has been working to encourage private German rocket companies, independent of ESA. The latter is doing the same in the UK, while also encouraging private British spaceports to launch those rockets.

These efforts strongly suggest that ESA’s monumental failure with the Ariane-6 — which is years late and will cost too much to fly — has been causing its member nations to rethink that partnership, and increasingly go it alone. ESA failed to provide them a competitive alternative for getting their payloads into orbit. They are now looking for ways to do it themselves.

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Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc successfully completes first drop test of payload

9:16 am

On May 13, 2023 Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc took off with a Talon-0 engineering test vehicle attached to its fuselage and successfully released that test vehicle, completing the plane’s first drop test.

Saturday’s outing was the 11th flight test for Stratolaunch’s flying launch pad — a twin-fuselage, six-engine airplane with a record-setting 385-foot wingspan. The plane is nicknamed Roc in honor of a giant bird in Middle East mythology.

Roc carried the Talon-A separation test vehicle, known as TA-0, during three previous test flights. But this was the first time TA-0 was released from Roc’s center-wing pylon to fly free. The release took place during a four-hour, eight-minute flight that involved operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range, off California’s central coast.

With this success the company appears ready to fulfill its military contract to use its Talon-1 payloads to fly hypersonic flight tests.

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SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit

10:57 pm

Using its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 7th and 8th flights, respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

31 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 35 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 31 to 33 in launches this year.

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Intuitive Machines’ first mission to land on Moon delayed

5:52 pm

Intuitive Machines officials revealed during their quarterly report that the first mission of its Nova-C lunar lander has been delayed from June to late August or September.

The company announced in February plans for a June landing at Malapert A, a crater near the south pole of the moon. That date was a slip from a previously scheduled March launch, which the company said was linked to NASA’s decision to move the landing site to Malapert A.

Altemus said the company made “significant progress” in testing of the lander in recent months, such as structural tests to confirm the vehicle could handle the stresses of launch and cryogenic tanking demonstrations. “We have some functional testing” still to do on the lander, he said, but did not elaborate on the nature of those tests or their schedule ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 launch.

Two private companies have so far attempted and failed to land on the Moon, Israel’s SpaceIL and Japan’s Ispace. Two American companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are both racing to achieve this goal in the coming months. This delay now puts Astrobotic in the lead, with its launch now targeting the summer.

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Scientists rediscover the advantages of nuclear power for moving probes through the solar system

10:21 am

Scientists appear to have once again discovered the advantages of nuclear powered thrusters for moving much heavier interplanetary missions more quickly and more efficiently to the farther reaches of the solar system.

A new paper published last month in the journal Acta Astronautica argues that a fusion-powered drive, capable of delivering propulsion while powering onboard electronics, could be a way to get more power and cargo to outer moons like Titan, and designed a scenario revealing what a DFD-powered [direct-fusion-drive] Titan mission would look like.

A 2021 study from an international research team revealed that a DFD could transport 2,220 lbs to Titan in 31 months. Right now, the Dragonfly mission [to Saturn’s moon Titan] weighs in at about 990 lbs. This new paper says that the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) concept developed at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is essential for powering the mission.

The irony of this story is that scientists and engineers knew these obvious facts and proposed many versions of nuclear-powered thrusters back in the 1960s. NASA even had a very successful project called NERVA in the last 1960s, with plans to begin using the technology by the 1980s.

All such research was canceled however in the 1970s, partly because of budget cutbacks but mostly because of the paranoia that began developing at that time against using nuclear power for anything. The idea of launching a rocket into space that carried a nuclear rocket engine was considered environmentally too risky.

Has that fear now subsided? We shall see. There are plenty of environmental activist groups that we can expect to immediately oppose such technology. The question will be whether a large enough private industry will evolve capable of exerting its own political weight to resist that opposition.

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Ariane-6’s first launch now likely delayed again, until 2024

9:49 am

According to officials from the German company OHB, which makes parts of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket, its first launch will not take place before the end of this year, as presently scheduled by Arianespace, the commercial arm of the European Space Agency (ESA).

In a May 10 earnings call, executives with German aerospace company OHB predicted that the rocket will make its long-delayed debut within the first several months of 2024, the strongest indication yet by those involved with the rocket’s development that it will not be ready for launch before the end of this year.

“It’s not yet launched, but we hope that it will launch in the early part of next year,” said Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, of Ariane 6 during a presentation about the company’s first quarter financial results. A subsidiary of OHB, MT Aerospace, produces tanks and structures for the rocket. Later in the call, he estimated the rocket was no more than a year away from that inaugural flight. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” he said. “I think we are within a year of the first launch and that is psychologically very important.”

These delays seriously impact many projects of ESA and other European companies. Ariane-6 was originally supposed to launch by 2020, overlapping the retirement of its Ariane-5 rocket by several years. Ariane-5 now has only one launch left, presently scheduled for June. Once that flies, Europe will have no large rocket available until Ariane-6 begins operations. This situation is worsened for Europe in that its other smaller rocket, the Vega-C, failed on its last launch and has not yet resumed operations.

It is not surprising therefore that many European projects have been shifting their launch contracts away from Ariane-6 to SpaceX and others. It is also not surprising that there is now an increasing move in Europe to develop new competing private rocket companies, rather than relying on a government-owned entity like Arianespace.

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Space Perspective buys ship to use for launching and recovering its passenger balloons

9:38 am

The high altitude balloon company Space Perspective has now purchased a 292-foot long ship to use as both a launch and recovery vessel for its planned flights of its Neptune capsule carrying tourists to 20-plus miles above the Earth.

Named in honor of the Voyager 1 space probe, the vessel was acquired to allow the company to launch and recover its spacecraft capsule Neptune from anywhere in the world, starting with pre-approved locations near Florida. The company completed its first test flight in June 2021, launching from land near Kennedy Space Center. The capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico roughly seven hours later. On that occasion, the capsule was recovered from the water using a chartered commercial vessel, GO America.

Building on that first recovery, Voyager will have the capability to both launch and recover the spacecraft in an integrated, flexible solution that can also relocate to avoid bad weather — a problem that often plagues traditional rocket launches and marine capsule recovery operations. Space Perspective has previously stated it expects Voyager to be the first in a fleet of marine spaceports globally.

It is now expected that Voyager will begin operations late this year, when Space Perspective begins test flights of Neptune.

The article also notes near the end the growing congestion at Port Canaveral due to the numbers of space-related ships, either already operating or anticipated. It appears a marina for these ships will soon become necessary, as the port does not want them taking up docking space when not in use.

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SpaceX successfully launches another 51 Starlink satellites

1:18 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 51 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage successfully completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings completed their second flight in space.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

30 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 34 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 34 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 30 to 33 in launches this year.

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SpaceX to launch Vast’s first space station module as well as two manned missions to it

12:11 pm

Vast Haven-1 station inside Falcon-9 fairing
Vast Haven-1 station inside Falcon-9 fairing

SpaceX and the private space station company Vast today revealed a deal whereby SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 rocket to launch VAST’s first space station module, dubbed Vast Haven-1, followed soon thereafter by two manned missions using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and lasting up to 30 days.

The announcements claim that first launch will occur by August 2025, which will make it the first privately-owned manned space station to reach orbit, well ahead of the plans by the three space station companies that NASA has issued contracts (by teams led by Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space, and Nanoracks). The only other private station hoping to beat this date, Axiom, won’t be flying independent, but will be attaching its first module to ISS in 2024.

In addition, Vast says that this module will be the incorporated into its proposed larger spinning-wheel station.

Vast is owned and financed by billionaire Jed McCaleb, who doesn’t need NASA seed money for development. In fact, it appears he and SpaceX want to remain as independent of the government as possible, considering the high fees NASA is charging to dock and stay at ISS as well as the stringent research rules it is demanding from private astronauts. This approach also appears to be the same one that Jared Isaacman is taking with his series of private missions on Dragon and Starship.

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UAE asteroid mission will rendezvous with seven asteroids and will include lander

10:08 am

Though the mission was first announced in 2021, the UAE only recently revealed at a science conference the mission’s specific targets and plan.

From the conference poster [pdf]:

The mission will launch in 2028 and visit 7 main belt asteroids, including 6 high-speed flyby encounters en route to a rendezvous with the asteroid 269 Justitia. The mission is enabled by solar electric propulsion and gravity assist flybys of Venus, Earth, and Mars, bringing the total number of mission encounters to 10. The trajectory design presented will include the overall timeline of the mission, launch targets, launch period, overall duration of the encounters, design of the encounters, and trajectory modeling. Mission design analyses include designing the Deep space maneuvers (DSMs) prior to the rendezvous with Justitia and design Justitia’s orbits and maneuvers to accomplish the lander deployment.

As with the UAE’s Al-Amal Mars Orbiter, the country is relying on an American university, the University of Colorado, as well as the commercial company, Advanced Space, to design, build, and operate the spacecraft. In this sense the UAE is paying these American entities to fly the mission while requiring them to train its own engineers and scientists.

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UK regulators give okay on Viasat’s purchase of Inmarsat

9:46 am

After months of delay, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) regulators has finally admitted that Viasat’s purchase of Inmarsat would not reduce competition in the communication satellite industry, and has approved the purchase unconditionally.

The evidence analysed by the panel shows that, while Viasat and Inmarsat compete closely– specifically in the supply of satellite connectivity for wifi on flights – the deal does not substantially reduce competition for services provided on flights used by UK customers.

The evidence also shows that the satellite sector is expanding rapidly – a trend that is set to continue for the foreseeable future. This is due to increased demand for satellite connectivity, driven largely by the ever-growing use of the internet by business and consumers.

The CMA press release is a classic of bureaucracy blather. Essentially, it tries to make it sound like this agency did lots of difficult hard work to discover what is patently obvious, that without this merger these two companies will almost certainly not be able to compete with the emerging new satellite communications companies coming on line.

The best thing that the UK could do to encourage competition and new industries in the UK would be to defund this agency, now. Its existence accomplishes nothing other than to stand in the way.

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Momentus and Astroscale team up to propose Hubble servicing mission

11:29 am

Capitalism in space: The two orbital tug companies Momentus and Astroscale announced today that they have partnered to propose a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, designed to boost the telescope and extend its life.

The proposed mission concept, a commercial solution to extend the life of this important national asset without risk to humans, includes launching a Momentus Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle (OSV) to low-Earth orbit on a small launch vehicle. Once on orbit, Astroscale’s RPOD technology built into the OSV would be used to safely rendezvous, approach and then complete a robotic capture of the telescope. Once mated, the OSV would perform a series of maneuvers to raise the Hubble by 50 km. Removal of surrounding and threatening space debris in Hubble’s new orbit using the Vigoride and Astroscale’s RPOD capabilities will be prioritized after the completion of the primary reboost mission.

As I have written repeatedly, Hubble is a telescope that refuses to die. I predicted that come the 2030s, when its orbit had decayed to a point that it either had to be de-orbited (NASA’s preferred option in the past when it ran everything) or be lifted to a higher orbit to extend its life, people would find a way to lift it.

Now that private enterprise is running the show, NASA is taking advantage of that to ask for private solutions to save Hubble, and not surprisingly it is quickly getting them.

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Space junk removal company ClearSpace signs deal to launch on Vega-C

9:59 am

The European company ClearSpace has signed a launch deal with Arianespace to fly the first test of its space junk removal robot on a Vega-C rocket set to launch some time in the second half of 2026.

The development of ClearSpace’s robot, which will use four grappling arms to surround and then capture its target, was paid for under a European Space Agency (ESA) $121 million contract which also required it to be launched on an Arianespace rocket. The problem right now is that it will fly as a secondary payload, and a primary payload has not yet been found.

Finding that primary payload is going to be difficult. First, Vega-C failed on its second launch last year and has not yet flown again. Second, it is expendable, and though cheaper than Arianespace’s other rocket, Ariane-6 (which has not yet launched), it is still more expensive than other commercial rockets now available. Third, the customer of that primary payload must also want to go into an orbit that will allow ClearSpace’s robot to reach its target, an abandoned Vega Payload Adapter from a previous launch.

As has been typical of Europe, this development is proceeding too slowly and is being hampered by requirements unrelated to profit and loss. By ’26 expect several other space junk removal companies — Astroscale and D-Orbit come to mind — to have already demonstrated their capabilities and already garnering market share, before ClearSpace even flies.

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Momentus test orbital tug successfully raises orbit using water-ionized thrusters

9:29 am

Momentus’s Vigoride test orbital tug has successfully raised its orbit using a ion thrusters that use water as their fuel, proving that the tug can be used to bring smallsats launched as secondary payloads to their preferred orbits.

According to tracking data, Vigoride-5 is in an orbit at an average altitude of 524.3 kilometers as of late May 7, about two kilometers higher than it was in early April, when the maneuvers started. The vehicle’s orbit had been gradually decaying since its launch in early January on the SpaceX Transporter-6 smallsat rideshare mission, descending about five kilometers before the maneuvers started.

The test of the MET is a major milestone for Momentus, which is relying on the technology to propel its tugs that will deliver satellites to their desired orbits. Technical problems with its first tug, Vigoride-3, launched nearly a year ago, kept the company from testing the MET on that vehicle.

Vigoride-5 is carrying a single smallsat, for Singapore-based Qosmosys, that it will release, although the companies have not disclosed the planned orbit for that spacecraft. The tug will also operate a hosted payload from Caltech to demonstrate space-based solar power technologies for several months.

The company already has another Vigoride in orbit that launched in April, carrying its own set of payloads for orbital transport.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches two NASA hurricane monitoring cubesats

6:11 pm

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket today successfully placed NASA’s two Tropics hurricane monitoring cubesats into orbit, lifting off from New Zealand ((May 8th New Zealand time).

This is the first of two Rocket Lab launches to get the entire four-satellite Tropics constellation into orbit, with the second schedule for two weeks from now.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 33 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 33 to 28.

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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:
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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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