Tag: competition

SpaceX: Only five more launches needed to complete Starlink direct-to-cell constellation

9:11 am

According to a tweet posted by SpaceX shortly after yesterday’s first launch from Vandenberg, the company needs only five more launches to complete its first constellation of Starlink direct-to-cell satellites.

More information here. At the moment the company has launched 260 of this version of its Starlink satellites. Since each launch places 13 more satellites in orbit, that means the first full iteration of the constellation will contain 325 satellites.

The satellites will allow cell phone users on the ground to use the constellations like a cell tower, thus providing service in areas where ground cell tower service does not exist. At the moment T-Mobile has a deal with SpaceX, so its subscribers will be able to use this service as soon as it is operational.

When when this be achieved? This story once again illustrates the speed in which SpaceX operates. The first launch of direct-to-cell Starlink satellites occurred on January 2, 2024, and in the last ten months the company has completed 23 launches to get the constellation where it is presently. At that pace the entire consellation might be complete before the end of this year.

The competition for this service is certainly fierce. The other satellite company offering this service, AST Mobile, has launched the first five satellites in its constellation, and has deals with AT&T and Verizon. Its design is different, and will only require 110 satellites to complete the constellation. At the moment five are about to become operational. It hopes to start regular launches next year to complete the constellation.

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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

3:13 pm

SpaceX this afternoon completed its second launch today, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral carrying 23 Starlink satellites.

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

The earlier launch was from Vandenberg, also with a payload of Starlink satellites.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

107 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 124 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 107 to 89.

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SpaceX launches 20 more Starlink satellites

9:38 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully launched another 20 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

106 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 123 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 106 to 89.

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Sutherland finally gets the okay from local council

9:16 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

After multiple submissions of its plan to build a spaceport off the coast of Scotland, the Sutherland spaceport’s most recent proposal has finally been approved by the local council.

Most significant about the decision is that it rejected the legal objections of billionaire landowner Anders Holch Povlsen, who has previously fought the spaceport and is also an investor in the competing spaceport SaxaVord in the Shetland Islands. Povlsen had objected to the spaceport placing small tracking antennas on a nearby mountain where other larger communications antennas already operated.

This decison could still face the veto of the Scottish ministry. It will be no surprise if Povlsen uses his clout to cause difficulties at this level.

Meanwhile, it is more than two and a half years since Sutherland’s prime launch customer, Orbex, submitted its launch license to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), with no approval. At the moment the company hopes to launch next year.

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China launches new crew to its space station

3:55 pm

China today successfully launched a new three-person crew to its Tiangong-3 space station, its Long March 2F rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s side boosters or lower stages, using toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed inside China. The crew will dock with the station mid-day tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

105 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 122 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 105 to 89.

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A return to Phantom and the reminiscences of an Apollo astronaut

3:04 pm

Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut
Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut

Yesterday I had to pleasure of getting my second tour of the Phantom Space facilities, located here in Tucson. Jim Cantrell, the founder of the Tucson-based rocket/satellite company Phantom Space, had last week graciously invited me to attend the event he was holding there, where astronaut Charles Duke, from the April 1972 Apollo 16 lunar landing, would be giving a talk to the company’s employees, investors, and customers. Duke had become an advisor for the company, and this would be his first visit to its operations.

First, the talk by Charles Duke, describing his life and Apollo 16 walk on the Moon, was as usual awe-inspiring, mostly because Duke spoke like every astronaut I’ve ever met so matter-of-factly about what he had done. During the second of three excusions on the surface with his commander John Young, they drove their rover up the slope of nearby Stone Mountain, climbing to an elevation of 500 feet, the highest any human has so far been on the lunar surface. From there he could look back and see for miles, including the entire valley where the lunar module was nestled as well as the mountains and craters that surrounded it.

When I asked him if he had had any sense of his remoteness from humanity, his response was a good-natured laugh. “We felt at home there!” They had done so much study of the terrain beforehand, including simulations, that from the moment they approached to land it all looked very familiar. This is where they were supposed to be!

Following Duke’s presentation we all were given a tour of the facility. My first visit there had been in 2022. At the time Cantrell’s effort was to aggressively succeed from his earlier failure at the rocket startup Vector, focusing this new company on building its Daytona rocket. After the tour I concluded as follows:
» Read more

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Successful deployment of large array antennas on all five AST’s satellites

12:48 pm

AST SpaceMobile has now successfully unfolded the large array antennas on all five the satellites it launched in September, and did so six weeks ahead of schedule.

“The unfolding of the first five commercial satellites is a significant milestone for the company. These five satellites are the largest commercial communications arrays ever launched in low Earth orbit,” commented Abel Avellan, founder, Chairman and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a statement. “It is a significant achievement to commission these satellites, and we are now accelerating our path to commercial activity.”

The satellites are designed to act like cell towers in space, providing direct satellite-to-cellphone coverage and fill gaps in ground-based cell service. ATT has already signed a contract with AST to use these satellites.

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ExoAnalytic now identifies more than 500 pieces from Intelsat satellite breakup

9:57 am

The private commercial space tracking company ExoAnalytic has now identified more than 500 pieces from Intelsat 33e satellite breakup.

Some of the smaller debris might actually quickly disappear as these pieces are possibly bits of solid fuel that will evaporate.

Much of the press has suddenly decided this failure is all Boeing’s fault, because the satellite was built by that company a decade ago. This seems a bit unfair, since Boeing’s problems now seem far removed from its design and construction of satellites then. At the same time one must wonder. Boeing built four of these type satellites for Intelsat, and the first was lost in 2019 when either it was hit by a meteor or had “a wiring flaw, which led to an electrostatic discharge following heightened solar weather activity.”

That means two of the four satellites have been lost, though the second, 33e, didn’t break-up until twelve years of operation, almost its expected lifespan. Furthermore, the other two satellites are still working fine.

All in all, that suggests to me that though there may be a technical cause that can be traced back to the company, it is more likely we are simply seeing a random expression of the dangers of space to engineering, by anyone.

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Old rockets clash with new rockets in Europe

9:35 am

Two stories today from Andrew Parsonson at his website Europeanspaceflight.com today illustrate the battle going on in Europe’s vast space bureaucracy over its future rocket development, and clearly tell us who is winning.

First Parsonson described a presentation put forth by Arianespace officials at an “Ariane-6 User’s Club” meeting two weeks ago, outlining the planned and proposed upgrades Arianespace intends for the Ariane-6 rocket over the next decade. All the upgrades are focused on increasing the rocket’s payloac capacity. None will make any of the rocket reusable in order to lower its high cost which makes it uncompetitive in the modern launch market.

What was significant about Parsonson’s report is that he also noted that many of these upgrades need to be approved by the European Space Agency (ESA), and its officials won’t make that decision until 2025 during a planned conference. Thus, this presentation by Arianespace was essentially a lobbying effort to convince ESA to approve these upgrades.

Parsonson’s second story then told us what ESA is approving, right now.

The European Space Agency has selected Rocket Factory Augsburg, The Exploration Company, ArianeGroup, and Isar Aerospace to develop reusable rocket technology.

On 9 October, ESA held its Future Space Transportation Award Ceremony in Paris. During the event, the agency announced the four awardees under two initiatives focused on the development of reusable rocket technology: the Technologies for High-thrust Reusable Space Transportation (THRUST!) project and the Boosters for European Space Transportation (BEST!) project.

Except for ArianeGroup, these are new startups. The German companies Rocket Factory and Isar are developing their own rockets, while the French company Exploration has so far focused on making cargo capsules to supply future space stations.

ArianeGroup meanwhile is the joint partnership between Airbus and Safran that built and owns the Ariane-6, and actually has more say on its future than Arianespace, which is merely a government agency that in the past (but no more) managed and controlled all of Europe’s rockets. ArianeGroup hasn’t abandoned Ariane-6 by no means, but clearly is shifting its interests in new directions.

Interestingly, the final decisions on some of these reusable projects will be made at that same 2025 conference.

Want to bet that ESA at that conference shifts its focus from upgrading the non-reusable Ariane-6 and instead goes whole hog for reusability? I expect that, especially because all recent political signs at ESA has indicated no interest in maintaining Arianespace any longer. For example, ESA has taken the Vega family of rockets away from Arianespace and given it back to Avio, the Italian company that manufactures it. ESA has also returned management of French Guiana from Arianespace to France’s space agency, which owns the site.

Designed as the commercial arm of ESA, it no longer has a function, now that Europe is shifting from the Soviet-model of its rocket operation run by the government (Arianespace) to a capitalism model where competing independent companies provide products and services to that government.

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ISRO head unveils new timeline for major missions

10:06 am

The head of India’s space agency ISRO, S. Somanath, yesterday unveiled a new timeline for several of that nation’s major missions, both manned and unmanned.

The new timeline is as follows:

  • 2025: NISAR: a joint Indian-American radar orbiter, long delayed
  • 2026: Gaganyaan-1, India’s first manned orbital mission
  • 2028: Chandrayaan-4, an unmanned sample return mission to the Moon
  • 2028: Chandrayaan-5, a joint lander-rover to the Moon

The last project will be done in partnership with Japan, with India building the lander and Japan the rover.

2028 will be a very busy year for India in space. The Indian government had previously announced that ISRO would launch in 2028 the first module of its space station as well as a Venus orbiter.

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SpaceX yesterday launched another 23 Starlink satellites

5:34 pm

SpaceX yesterday successfully launched 23 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

While the video link above says 23, a UPI report said the launch placed 22 satellites in orbit. I have no idea which is right, as the number of Starlinks on these launches range from 20 to 23.

The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

105 SpaceX
48 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 122 to 71, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 105 to 88.

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One unidentified astronaut hospitalized after return to Earth today

9:04 pm

Though NASA has released very little information, including the indentity of the astronaut, one of the four crew who were brought back to Earth early today has ended up in the hospital.

NASA said Friday one its astronauts is in a hospital in Florida for medical observation after a “normal” predawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico inside a SpaceX capsule.

The mission’s other three crew members were cleared to return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston after their own medical evaluations, NASA said.

The hospitalized astronaut “is in stable condition and under observation as a precautionary measure,” a NASA spokesperson said in a statement. The agency did not identify the astronaut or provide any more details about their condition, citing medical privacy protections.

That the other three astronauts returned to their home base at Johnson in Houston strongly suggests the hospitalized astronaut is the one Russian, Alexander Grebenkin, Normally Russians head back to Russia relatively quick after landing.

This remains speculation. We will have to wait for more information.

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