Tag: competition

Launch of two South Korean satellites threatened by Russia’s Ukraine war

10:02 am

According to South Korean officials, the launch later this year of two new home-built satellites on Russian rockets is now unlikely because of the sanctions imposed because of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

South Korea’s CAS500-2 remote sensing satellite is set to launch in the first half of this year on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. South Korea’s KOMPSAT-6 multipurpose satellite, equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is due to launch in the second half of the year on a Russian Angara rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.

“For now, nothing has changed to the plan,” Korea Aerospace Research Institute spokesman Roh Hyung-il told SpaceNews. “We are taking a close look at how the situation unfolds because it could have a significant impact on our missions.” He admitted that it’s “very likely” that the satellites won’t be launched as planned.

Those officials also said that losing Russia as a launch option will be a “serious blow” to South Korea’s entire space effort. I find that puzzling. There are plenty of other rocket companies now available. Why South Korea feels a need to depend on Russia seems short-sighted.

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Shetland spaceport gets third launch customer

9:52 am

Capitalism in space: The United Kingdom’s Shetland spaceport, SaxaVord, announced today that it has signed a third launch customer, the smallsat rocket startup Venture Orbital Systems.

Venture Orbital Systems (VOS), a developer of micro launchers and rocket engines based in Reims, France, plans to use the site at Unst as part of its aim to reach 15 launches of its Zephyr rocket by 2026 and 40 by 2030.

The new spaceport, presently under construction, already has ABL as a future rocket compan. ABL, mostly owned by Lockheed Martin, hopes to launch before the end of the year.

The UK’s has a second spaceport under construction in Sutherland, Scotland. It will be interesting to see if both can garner enough business to prosper.

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Former CEO of Virgin Galactic sued over his pump-and-dump stock sale

9:44 am

Buyer beware: Chamath Palihapitiya, who recently stepped down as CEO of Virgin Galactic, has been sued by some of the company’s stockholders for using his insider position to pump-and-dump his stock while keeping vital information secret illegally.

The complaint, filed on behalf of Virgin Galactic to seek damages from its directors and officers, also alleges that founder Richard Branson pocketed $301 million by dumping his shares while the stock price was “artificially inflated.”

Leaders of the company were well aware of defects in its spacecraft three years before they were publicly disclosed last year, according to the complaint filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.

It is unclear from the article whether Branson is being sued as well.

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OneWeb scraps further launches from Russia

9:12 am

OneWeb’s board of directors has voted to cancel all further launches of its satellites from Russia, refusing to meet Russia’s demand that the United Kingdom divest its half share in the company.

On Thursday, OneWeb said the company’s board had voted to suspend all launches from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where the Russian spaceport operated by Roscosmos is based.

OneWeb didn’t elaborate on the vote. But the UK’s Business and Energy Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, said his government had refused to divest from OneWeb, which received funding from British authorities in 2020 to stave off a bankruptcy. “The UK Government supports OneWeb’s decision,” Kwarteng tweeted on Thursday. “In light of Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, we are reviewing our participation in all further projects involving Russian collaboration,” he added.

OneWeb hasn’t commented on the company’s contingency plans. But it’s almost certainly looking for a new launch partner. Russia’s Roscosmos previously helped OneWeb send up 428 of 648 satellites for its internet system, which is designed to serve enterprise users.

This decision, combined with Russia’s decision to suspend further Soyuz-2 rocket launches from French Guiana, essentially ends Russia’s partnership with Arianespace. It also likely ends for many years Russia’s place in the international launch market. OneWeb and Arianespace were its last remaining international customers, and their business is now gone. Even if the Ukraine War was settled today, I suspect neither would wish to renew their business with Russia.

As for OneWeb, it has a number of options in the growing launch market, with Arianespace’s rockets its most likely choice. Financially, the delay hurts them in two ways: First, they have paid Russia for a number of launches already, and Russia has said it will not refund the money. Thus, those launches will cost twice as much. Second, the delay hurts them in their effort to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.

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Romania signs Artemis Accords

9:08 am

Romania on March 1st became the sixteenth nation to sign the Artemis Accords, designed to get around the Outer Space Treaty’s restrictions on private enterprise and property rights in space.

Romania is now the third former Soviet block nation to sign the accords, joining Poland and the Ukraine. The full list of signatories now includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

Up to now Germany and France — two of the west’s most important major space powers — have resisted signing, probably because both countries have had strong partnership ties with Russia, and Russia opposes the accords. The Russian invasion of the Ukraine however has caused Germany to break off all such Russian cooperation, which suggests it now may be more amendable to signing. I also suspect France may become more willing, though predicting France in these matters is always difficult.

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Rogozin halts launch of OneWeb satelllites planned for March 5

8:41 am

The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, today announced that he has halted all launch preparations for the March 5th launch of 36 OneWeb satellites on a Soyuz-2 rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan unless he received reassurances by March 4th that they would not be used for military purposes against Russia.

Roskosmos head Dmitry Rogozin announced that the mission would not proceed unless he received assurances by 21:30 Moscow Time on March 4 of non-military use of the satellites. Rogozin also demanded that the British government give up its stake in OneWeb.

I suspect Rogozin’s action here is a response to SpaceX’s delivery of Starlink terminals and the activation of its use for the Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion.

It is now certain that all the planned Soyuz-2 OneWeb launches this year will likely not occur, unless the situation in the Ukraine becomes settled quickly. This means OneWeb will have to scramble to find a new launch provider and pay for the launches a second time, since they have already paid Russia for, according to sources I spoke to last night, the next four Russian launches. It won’t get a refund from Russia, for sure.

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NASA IG: SLS/Orion cost per launch equals $4.1 billion and is “unsustainable”

12:40 am

The real cost of SLS and Orion

At a House hearing today the NASA Inspector General Paul Martin stated unequivocally that the cost of NASA’s SLS rocket, Orion capsule, and the associated ground systems is about $4.1 billion per launch, which made the entire program, in his words, “unsustainable.”

Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA’s Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their “very poor” performance in developing these vehicles.

Martin said that the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion. This is, he said, “a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.” With this comment, Martin essentially threw down his gauntlet and said NASA cannot have a meaningful exploration program based around SLS and Orion at this cost.

Martin’s testimony confirms what was contained in his November 2021 report, from which I took the graphic above. The article at the link details at length Martin’s testimony today, which was amazingly harsh. He also said that

NASA is obscuring costs that it is spending on the Artemis program and that, in aggregate, his office believes NASA will spend $93 billion from 2012 to 2025 on the Artemis program. “Without NASA fully accounting for and accurately reporting the overall costs of current and future Artemis missions, it will be much more difficult for Congress and the administration to make informed decisions about NASA’s long-term funding needs—a key to making Artemis a sustainable venture,” Martin said.

Martin has merely confirmed what I have been writing now for more than a decade, and documented at great length in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space. In fact, let me quote from one of my earliest essays on this subject on Behind the Black, from 2011:
» Read more

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NASA buys three more manned Dragon flights from SpaceX

10:10 am

Capitalism in space: NASA today officially announced that it has extended its contract with SpaceX for manned Dragon flights by three, paying the company an additional $900 million.

Prior to the modification, SpaceX was contracted to fly three more missions to the ISS: Crew-4 and Crew-5 in 2022 and Crew-6 in 2023. With the extension, which is “fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity,” per NASA’s statement. SpaceX’s period of performance now runs through March 31, 2028 — a nice regular paycheck for the growing launch and space operations company.

This contract extension raises what NASA is paying SpaceX for manned launch services from $2.6 billion to $3.49 billion.

While it is likely NASA would have brought more Dragon flights, it is also likely that some of these flights would have instead been bought from Boeing, if its much delayed Starliner manned capsule had been available. It is not, so SpaceX gets the business.

Boeing’s next attempt to complete Starliner’s first unmanned demo mission to ISS is now scheduled for May.

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Shetland spaceport construction to begin in March

10:03 am

Capitalism in space: Construction of the United Kingdom’s first spaceport in more than a half century is now set to begin this month in the Shetland Islands, with the first launch expected before the end of the year.

The Lamba Ness peninsular in Unst will be home to the £43 million spaceport, with builders set to start work in late March, after Shetland Islands Council gave the project planning permission.

Three launchpads will be built at the SaxaVord spaceport, allowing for the launch of small satellites into either polar or sun-synchronous low-Earth orbits.

The company is aiming to launch 30 rockets a year, and has set the target of seeing its first orbital launch from UK soil after the third quarter of this year.

It appears now that the United Kingdom is going to have two different competing spaceports, one on the Shetland Islands and the second in Sutherland, Scotland. It appears the UK rocket startup Skyrora as well as a partnership between Lockhead Martin and the smallsat rocket startup ABL will launch from Shetland, while the UK company Orbex will use Sutherland.

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Rocket Lab to build new Neutron rocket at Wallops Island in Virginia

9:53 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced yesterday that it will build the manufacturing factory for its new Neutron rocket at the Wallops Island in Virginia, close to the company’s launchpad there.

The complex will be home to a rocket production, assembly, and integration facility, as well as a dedicated launch pad for the Neutron rocket located on the southern end of Wallops Island. The estimated 250,000 square foot state-of-the-art complex will be constructed on a 28-acre site adjacent to the Wallops Island Flight Facility and will include a Launch Control Center, Rocket Lab’s fifth global operations center for launch activities and on-orbit operations. To support rapid production of the Neutron rocket, current plans for the complex include automated fiber placement robotic production systems capable of laying up meters of Neutron’s new, specially formulated carbon composite structures in minutes. As a reusable rocket, Neutron is designed to land back on the launch pad after a mission and from there it would be returned to the production complex for refurbishment and re-flight.

The Wallops Island spaceport hopes the state of Virginia will commit $45 million of its own money to this project, but that money still needs to be approved by the state’s legislature.

“Assuming that is done and blessed by the legislature, and we have no reason to believe it will not be, $15 million will go into construction for the facility, and the 30 million will be geared toward the construction of the new launch pad,” Mercer said, noting that the pad would be multi-purpose, not a Neutron exclusive.

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Scientists: Yutu-2 spots tiny glass globules similar to those found by Apollo astronauts

9:45 am

According to a paper just published Chinese scientists running the Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon have spotted several tiny glass globules similar to those found by Apollo astronauts.

Xiao and his team believe the small spheres, which are between 0.59 and 0.79 inches (1.5 to 2.5 centimeters) across, were probably formed by relatively recent meteor impacts. Specifically, the researchers believe that the globules formed from anorthosite, a volcanically-formed rock rich in the mineral feldspar, after a high-energy impact melted the rock and reformed into spheres.

In appearance these Yutu-2 globules appear translucent, unlike the Apollo globules which were either dark or opaque. Since the rover did not do spectroscopy on these objects before moving on, however, their actual make-up is unknown, with the speculations by the researchers above merely that, speculations, though reasonable.

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OneWeb launches from Russia threatened by Russian war in the Ukraine

9:34 am

While all signs suggest that this week’s launch from Kazakhstan of another 36 OneWeb satellites will proceed as planned, later Soyuz-2 launches either from Russia or French Guiana now seem doubtful.

Russia has suspended all further Soyuz-2 launches from French Guiana. And though all the Kazakhstan launches have been paid for and Russia appears willing to proceed, the war has created issues.

But even if Baikonur remains open, it is unclear whether export restrictions could affect the transport of OneWeb satellites from where they are made in Florida to the launchpad in Kazakhstan.

Another potential wrinkle, unrelated to sanctions: OneWeb has traditionally used An-124 aircraft that are operated and maintained by Ukraine’s Antonov to ship its spacecraft overseas. Availability issues aside, airspace restrictions over Europe could complicate otherwise routine logistics.

It will not surprise me if OneWeb will look for other launch services, though this will certainly damage its bottom line. First, it will likely not get a refund from Russia for the Soyuz-2 launches, which means it will pay twice for those launches if it switches to another rocket company. Second, the war is likely going to delay further launches regardless, which will delay roll out of its service and thus prevent it from obtaining customers.

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First delivery of new Starlink terminals arrives in the Ukraine

5:09 pm

The first promised deliver by Elon Musk of new Starlink terminals arrived in the Ukraine today, only two days after promised.

Ukraine digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who tagged Musk in a request on Twitter on Saturday, posted that Starlink was “here” in Ukraine — with a photo showing more than two dozen boxes of the company’s user kits in the back of a truck.

Each Starlink kit includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod and a Wi-Fi router. It’s not known how many kits SpaceX is sending to support Ukraine.

Fedorov thanked Musk in his tweet; Musk responded: “you are most welcome.”

Ukraine-based Oleg Kutkov tweeted a screenshot of an internet speed test on Monday, saying “Starlink is working in Kyiv” and thanked SpaceX for the company’s support.

Two dozen Starlink terminals is only a drop in the bucket, but with a first delivery this quickly, many more are likely to follow, and make a significant difference in helping the Ukraine block Russia’s invasion.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches Japanese radar satellite

1:56 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully completed its first launch in 2022 as well as the first launch from a second launchpad in New Zealand, using its Electron rocket to place in orbit a Japanese commercial radar satellite.

At the moment of writing the upper stage has not yet deployed the satellite, though deployment should happen momentarily. UPDATE: Satellite deployed successfully.

The new launchpad gives Rocket Lab three launchpads, two in New Zealand (both operational) and one in Virginia (delayed due to the NASA bureaucracy but about to go operational).

Rocket Lab is now tied with five other rocket operations, 4 private and 2 government, all with a single launch in ’22. The leaders in the 2022 launch race remain unchanged:

8 SpaceX
4 China
2 Russia

The now U.S. leads China 12 to 4 in the national rankings. At this same point in 2021, the U.S. had only completed 8 launches, so the pace this year is significantly higher. If this pace is maintained, the U.S. will complete 72 launches, which will just break the country’s best previous year of 70 successful launches in 1966. This total would also more than double the average yearly launch total for U.S. since 1966.

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China successfully launched rockets twice today

8:45 am

China successfully launched two rockets this morning, one a Long March-4C carrying an Earth observation satellite and the second a Long March-8, carrying 22 smallsats.

The Long March-8 is one of China’s next generation rockets, meant to launch from its coastal spaceport and use less toxic fuels. Also, according to the state-run press article, its manufacture process is aimed at allowing for a launch rate of once per week.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

8 SpaceX
4 China
2 Russia

The U.S. leads China 11 to 4 in the national rankings.

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SpaceX successfully launches 50 Starlink satellites

10:22 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched another 50 Starlink satellites using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage, on its fourth flight, landed successfully on the drone ship in the Pacific. The fairings completed their third flight. The satellites themselves have not yet been deployed, as of this moment. Deployment is expected in about an hour.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

8 SpaceX
2 China
2 Russia

SpaceX is so far maintaining a launch rate of one launch per week in ’22, as the company had predicted.

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Space spat between Biden and Rogozin over Russian invasion of Ukraine

9:23 am

Yesterday saw harsh words expressed by both President Biden and the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, concerning the partnership of the two countries at ISS, with Biden imposing sanctions and noting these will specifically harm Russia’s space industry, and Rogozin responding by threatening to dump ISS on either a U.S. or European city.

In Biden’s statement, he said, “We estimate that we will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, and it will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It will degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,”

Rogozin’s response came in a series of tweets on Twitter, with his most bellicose statements as follows:

Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?

This is how you already do it by limiting exchanges between our cosmonaut and astronaut training centers. Or do you want to manage the ISS yourself? Maybe President Biden is off topic, so explain to him that the correction of the station’s orbit, its avoidance of dangerous rendezvous with space garbage, with which your talented businessmen have polluted the near-Earth orbit, is produced exclusively by the engines of the Russian Progress MS cargo ships. If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?

Meanwhile, it isn’t Russia’s space industry that will suffer the most from this invasion, but Ukraine’s. For example, the American company Launcher, which has had a software team in the Ukraine, has moved most of that team to Bulgaria for their safety.

As a precaution given the escalating political situation, during the last few weeks, we successfully relocated our Ukraine staff to Sofia, Bulgaria, where we opened a new Launcher Europe office. We also invited their immediate family to join them in this move and funded their relocation expenses. We continue to encourage and support five of the support staff and one engineer who decided to remain in Ukraine.

The company’s press release makes it clear that it is no longer dependent in any way with facilities in the Ukraine.

Launcher’s actions will not be the last. Expect all Western commercial efforts linked to the Ukraine to break off ties in order to protect their investments. Moreover, if Russia should recapture the Ukraine entirely, it will likely not give much support to its space industry, as Roscosmos has developed its own Russian resources in the past two decades and will likely want to support those instead.

Thus, the expected destruction of that country’s aerospace industry by Russia’s invasion proceeds.

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Stratolaunch’s Roc successfully completes 4th test flight

9:02 am

Capitalism in space: Stratolaunch’s Roc airplane, the largest ever flown, successfully completed its 4th flight yesterday, testing for the first time the retraction and extension of its landing gear.

The flight lasted one hour and forty-three minutes.

The company is now aiming to begin full operations in the second half of ’23, when it hopes it will also be dropping versions of its Talon-A test vehicle from the bottom of Roc to perform hypersonic tests for the military as well as commercial companies.

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The deadly impact of Russia’s Ukraine invasion on commercial space, on ISS, and beyond

11:50 am

The International Space Station
The Russian invasion might be signaling the end of the ISS partnership.

Though the international ramifications of the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia in the past week will be far reaching and hard to predict, we can get a hint by reviewing the impact on Russia’s long-standing partnership on ISS as well as the effect the invasion will have on a number of commercial enterprises dependent on both Russian and Ukrainian space rocketry.

The International Space Station

All signs so far from the western partners on ISS indicate that they are guardedly hopeful that the cooperation with Russia will continue unimpeded. According to two stories (here and here) describing a panel discussion today at George Washington University Space Policy Institute, state department officials expressed complete confidence that the partnership at ISS will continue without interruption, as it did in 2014 when Russia invaded the Crimea, taking it from the Ukraine. From the first link:
» Read more

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Astra releases update on February 10th launch failure

9:50 am

Capitalism in space: Astra yesterday released an update on its investigation into its February 10th launch failure at Cape Canaveral.

The update doesn’t provide any conclusions, but merely notes that the company has completed its review of all “video and telemetry” from the event, and has reconstructed a full timeline from that data.

It is now reviewing that timeline to create what engineers call “fault trees”, each a specific scenario path pointing at a possible cause of the failure. Once that cause has been identified, engineers can then propose a solution.

According to the press release, the company is already “implementing corrective actions”, though the release provides no information as to what the cause was or what they are doing to correct. It states instead that once the investigation and corrections have been completely, the company will then release a full report.

Meanwhile, it appears that at least six law firms are considering suing the company, which became a publicly traded company in July 2021. These law firms “…are seeking clients who lost significant amount of money after purchasing the stock.” The launch failure caused the stock value to drop significantly, and these law firms apparently think that the company has made false claims about its plans — such as its claim that it will eventually be launch 300 times per year — and wish to put together a class action lawsuit based on this accusation plus the drop in stock price.

Whether Astra can meet its goal of 300 launches per year is certainly at this time questionable. However, it is too soon to call the company a failure. Once it recovers from the launch failure and resumes launches — a process that for any new rocket company generally takes a few years — that stock price will certainly recover, and will rise with each successful launch.

Only should Astra fail to resume launches, or continue to fail with each launch, will the stock truly crash, and thus provide these law firms with a possible case.

At the same time, in a free society we are supposed to recognize the concept of “buyer beware.” If you buy a product or a stock, it is at your own risk. If you fail to do due diligence beforehand, your loss is your responsibility, not the company who made the product or whose stock crashed.

It appears, based on everything Astra has so far done, an investment in its stocks while quite risky has not been an unreasonable gamble, making the present case for these lawsuits somewhat weak. Time will tell however whether that changes in the future.

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China denies the rocket stage about to hit the Moon comes from its rocket

9:23 am

A Chinese official yesterday claimed that the abandoned rocket stage that will hit the Moon on or about March 4th does not come from its 2014 Long March 3C rocket that tested technology for the later launched Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission, as suggested by amateur astronomers and an engineer at JPL.

“According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the rocket related to the Chang’e-5 mission entered into Earth’s atmosphere and completely burned up,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Feb. 21.

Space tracking data from the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron suggests that 2014-065B—the international designator for the rocket stage in question—reentered the atmosphere in October 2015, a year after launch, apparently backing China’s claim.

We are thus left with a mystery. If that abandoned upper stage did not come from either a SpaceX or Chinese launch, what launch did it come from? Or is it a rocket stage at all? Could it be a previously unidentified asteroid?

There is also the possibility that it is a piece from that Chinese launch, considering how the orbital data matches so well. The stage could have split or broken apart, with one part falling in the ocean as monitored by the Space Force, and the other section now heading for the Moon. If so, China is likely denying this fact for propaganda reasons.

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Northrop Grumman to launch new satellite serving mission in ’24 on Falcon 9

9:12 am

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumman yesterday announced that it has awarded the contract for the first launch of its Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) — designed as a robot capable of installing multiple mission extension pods (MEP) on satellites — to SpaceX for a launch scheduled in 2024.

Once in orbit each MEP [Mission Extension Pod] is captured by the MRV and stowed for transport to the client satellite. The MRV rendezvous and docks with the client to install the MEP, which operates like an auxiliary propulsion device and uses its own thrusters to maneuver the client vehicle. Then the MRV detaches itself and moves on to grab another MEP for the next customer. The MRV is designed to stay in orbit for 10 years.

Anderson said the company expects to install as many as 30 propulsion pods over the life of the MRV.

“Our manifest for the MRV is full through mid 2026,” he said. Besides Optus, five other customers have signed term sheets to purchase mission extension pods.

Essentially, Northrop Grumman upgraded its Mission Extension Vehicle design to separate the repair section from the robot that installs it so that it is cheaper to launch everything. It can now launch multiple lighter and smaller repair pods as needed, with the robot already in orbit ready to go.

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Northrop Grumman launches Cygnus freighter to ISS

8:29 am

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grummann yesterday used its Antares rocket to successfully launch its Cygnus freighter to ISS.

This fact about this Cygnus is important:

This is the first Cygnus mission featuring enhanced capabilities to perform a re-boost to the space station’s orbit as a standard service for NASA; one re-boost is planned while Cygnus is connected to the orbiting laboratory.

In other words, Cygnus has been enabled to replace the boost capability that the Russians and Japanese provided.

The 2022 launch race:

6 SpaceX
2 China
2 Russia
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA
1 India
1 Europe (Arianespace)
1 Northrop Grumman

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Virgin Galactic chairman resigns

8:54 am

Getting out while the getting is good: Chamath Palihapitiya, who has been chairman of Virgin Galactic’s board since it went public in 2019, suddenly announced today that he has resigned from the company.

Palihapitiya’s SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, took Virgin Galactic public in October 2019. The company’s stock has faced volatile trading since then — climbing above $60 a share in the months ahead of Sir Richard Branson’s test spaceflight, but it recently fell below its public debut price on news of a further delay in the start of commercial service.

The now-former chairman sold his personal Virgin Galactic stake in early 2021 that was worth over $200 million at the time. But he indirectly owns about 15.8 million shares through Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings.

Like Richard Branson, Palihapitiya sold the majority of his stock when the price was high, about the time the company flew its first and only passenger flight in July, with Richard Branson on board. His exit now suggests he wants out before the company’s dismal future prospects become obvious.

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You can now buy payload space on a lunar rover!

11:18 am

Capitalism in space: Lunar Outpost, which is building a mini-rover that will fly on the private Intuitive Machines lunar lander scheduled for launch later this year, has now partnered with the company Copernic to sell the rover’s spare payload space to whoever wants to buy it.

Lunar Outpost of Evergreen, Colorado, is preparing to send a 10-kilogram robotic rover to the moon on an Intuitive Machines lander and SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later this year. While the lander’s primary payload is a Nokia LTE 4G technology demonstration, Lunar Outpost is working with Copernic Space to sell an additional 3.475 kilograms on its first Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP).

…Copernic Space created the online platform to streamline the process of buying and selling space-related products and services like shares in a space startup, satellite sensor tasking or payload space. By applying blockchain technology, Copernic Space converts space assets into non-fungible or digital tokens, which are designed to be bought and sold online.

For the next 11 days, Lunar Outpost is selling a gram of payload capacity on its MAPP Lunar Rover for $4,250. The minimum order is 100 grams. In April, the public sale begins, allowing people to buy or sell as little as one-hundredth of a gram of payload space.

It appears purchase will be by using blockchain currency, and appears to also involve the purchase of “non-fungible or digital tokens”.

Normally I would applaud this effort, but the addition of these digital tokens makes the sale process seem less than straightforward and even a little suspicious. What exactly are customers buying? And what exactly will go to the Moon? Copernic’s website describes this process, but even there its seems exceedingly vague and uncomfortably like a con game.

From what I can gather, customers who buy payload space can use Copernic to create these non-fungible tokens which can then be resold to others to make back some of the cost. I wonder, however, why would anyone buy these tokens in the first place. As far as I can tell, they have absolutely no value in the real world.

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Astroscale about to resume space junk capture test

10:06 am

Capitalism in space: After several weeks of delay due to unstated technology issues, the Japanese company Astroscale has begun maneuvers in its test to see if its robot satellite can approach from a distance and capture a target satellite acting as orbital space junk.

The Japanese startup has started moving its 175-kilogram servicer spacecraft closer to the 17-kilogram client satellite ahead of deciding whether to restart the demonstration, Astroscale said in a social media post.

According to Astroscale, it has made “good progress in working through solutions to the anomalous spacecraft conditions that we identified with ELSA-d,” or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration.

The company did not disclose the nature of the issue, when it could restart the mission or the distance between the two objects.

That no specifics have been stated, and that the company also says it is “keeping regulators and key partners updated on our status,” suggests that maybe the problem wasn’t technical, but bureaucratic. Maybe some Biden administration functionary got nervous, and demanded Astroscale slow down the test so that he or she could review what was happening.

This would not surprise me in the least, though I admit it is nothing more than some wild speculation.

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