Tag: competition

Proposed private GPS-type satellite constellation raises $19 million

9:56 am

Capitalism in space: Xona, a company that wants to build a commercial GPS-type satellite constellation, has now raised $19 million in private investment capital.

The round was led by Future Ventures and Seraphim Space. New investors NGP Capital, Industrious Ventures, Murata Electronics, Space Capital, and Aloniq also joined the round.

Xona is developing a commercial positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) service through a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites. The company plans to offer the service as an alternative or backup to the Global Positioning System.

It appears the commercial users of GPS want more than one American-owned system in operation in case the government’s present constellation goes out, either because of an attack, jamming, or a major technical failure, and are willing to pay for it. Xona’s constellation, once built, could initiate the full transfer of GPS responsibility from the government to the private sector.

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ULA signs contract to build a second transport ship for its Vulcan rocket

9:45 am

ULA yesterday announced it has issued contracts for the construction of a second transport ship for bringing its Vulcan rocket from the factory in Alabama to the launch sites in Florida and California.

ULA awarded Bollinger Shipyards a contract to build a second roll-on/roll-off vessel classed for both ocean-going and river service. Construction has just begun on the 356-ft-long ship at Bollinger’s shipyard located in Amelia, Louisiana with delivery to ULA expected in January 2026.

…“ULA currently has its first ship called RocketShip that has been in service for decades and with this second ship called SpaceShip our maritime fleet will enable enterprise transportation capacity of four Vulcan launch vehicles across two voyages to either the East or West Coast,” said Ellerhorst.

ULA also hired a company in Rhode Island to design and supervise the construction. The company needs two ships because it has a lot of launches scheduled over the next few years, including 38 for Amazon to help launch its Kuiper internet satellite constellation as well as a number the U.S. military.

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A French rocket startup enters the competition

9:35 am

A new French rocket startup, Hyprspace, has assembled the engine and body of a first stage demonstrator, dubbed Terminator, to be used to test that new engine in preparation for the first suborbital test launch.

On 4 May 2024, the company shared the first glimpse of the Terminator demonstrator at its facility in Le Haillan, France. According to the update, teams had worked through double shifts over a three-week period to prepare the demonstrator for its test firing. The test will be conducted at a Direction générale de l’armement missile test facility in Gironde, France. HyPrSpace has not yet revealed when the test is expected to take place.

This engine will eventually be used in the company’s planned orbital Baguette-1 rocket for launching smallsats.

We now have at least five European rocket startups, three in Germany (Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar, Hyimpulse), one in Spain (PLD), and one in France (Hyprspace). We also have Avio in Italy taking over ownership from Arianespace of its Vega family of rockets. That company is about to begin static fire testing a Vega-C upper stage, its engine nozzle completely redesigned following a launch failure. It hopes to resume flying by the end of the year.

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China launches earth observation satellite

9:02 pm

China this evening (May 9th in China) successfully launched an earth observation satellite into orbit, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

No word on where the first stage crashed in China, though there was a report in the Philippines that an upper stage landed near Rozul Reef and Patag Island in the West Philippine Sea. All the stages use toxic hypergolic fuels.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

48 SpaceX
20 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 55 to 32. SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 48 to 39.

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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

12:07 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

48 SpaceX
19 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 55 to 31. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 48 to 38.

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A former SpaceX employee gives a fascinating account of what it is like to work there

10:29 am

Link here. The account is everything you would expect. The work culture is open, efficient, and aggressive. You need to provide value and be self-motivated or you will not survive.

This one story reveals a lot:

[I]f I was in a meeting and it was adding value to what I did daily, stay, or if I was adding value based on my expertise, stay — but if neither of those things were happening, you should get up and respectfully walk out.

In one instance, a government customer came in with a 50-slide deck. Six slides into the presentation, 75% of the room had walked out. I had to tell him that if he didn’t get to the point, I’d be the only person left in the room — and only because I had to walk him out. He skipped ahead to his last five slides. That kind of environment makes you much more efficient.

I bet there are a lot of corporate workers reading this that fervently wish they had the right to walk out of a meeting that was wasting their time. Furthermore, consider that government customer: He or she brought a slide deck where 90% of the slides were fluff. That indicates the kind of work atmosphere he or she comes from.

For smart people who want to be creative, it would be an incredible pleasure to work in such an environment. No wonder SpaceX produces such good products.

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Redwire developing a satellite designed to fly in extremely low orbits

10:07 am

The orbital manufacturing company Redwire is now developing a satellite, dubbed SabreSat, to fly for long periods in extremely low orbits where the atmosphere would normally cause the orbit to quickly decay.

SabreSat, Redwire Space’s satellite for very low Earth orbit, looks more like a dart than a traditional spacecraft. “As you think about aerodynamics, you want the dart to be skinny and long, not stubby and fat,” Spence Wise, Redwire senior vice president for missions and platforms, told SpaceNews.

Redwire is designing SabreSat for government intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

The satellite would fly in orbits from 55 to 200 miles altitude. By flying so low it will get far better images and ground data than spacecraft in higher orbits. It will also be less vulnerable to attack compared to high altitude aerial reconnaissance balloons or airplanes.

Its dart-like shape will meanwhile reduce friction so that less fuel will be required to maintain its orbit.

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Orbital tug startup Starfish Space wins $37.5 million contract from Space Force

9:55 am

Even though problems with another company’s deployment system prevented a docking test in orbit last month of its Otter Pup tug, the orbital tug startup Starfish Space has won a $37.5 million contract from Space Force to further develop its autonomous rendezvous and docking system.

The newly announced $37.5 million Space Force contract will support the development of an Otter demonstration spacecraft over the course of the next four years. In its announcement of the fixed-price contract — which was awarded through the Strategic Funding Increase program, or STRATFI — the Department of Defense said the project’s goal is to “improve maneuverability on-orbit and enable dynamic space operations docking and maneuvering of Department of Defense assets on-orbit.”

Though the docking test was prevented when the tug deploying Otter Pup (owned by a different tug company, Launcher) went into an unplanned spin, Otter Pup was deployed and brought under control. Those maneuvers however used up most of its fuel. Engineers were still able to work with another orbital tug company, D-Orbit, to maneuver and rendezvous with that company’s ION tug and thus succeed in demonstrating Pup’s rendezvous technolgoy.

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Chang’e-6 enters lunar orbit

9:42 am

Chang'e-6 landing zone

China’s Chang’e-6 sample return spacecraft successfully entered lunar orbit today, in preparation for its mission to land and bring back material from the the far side of the Moon. The landing zone is indicated by the red box on the map to the right, on the southern rim of Apollo Crater in the southern hemisphere. That crater is inside South Aitkin Basin, one the Moon’s largest impact basins.

The spacecraft will next adjust its orbit to prepare for sending its lander-ascender sections down to the surface. If the landing goes well, it will drill into the surface, place some material into the ascender section, which will then lift-off and dock with the orbiter-return section in orbit. The material will be transferred into the return section, which will separate and bring the material back to Earth, sometime in late June.

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Launch of first manned flight of Starliner rescheduled for May 17, 2024

9:31 am

Because ULA engineers have decided they need to replace the valve that forced a launch scrub on May 8th, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule to ISS has now been rescheduled to May 17, 2024.

The oscillating behavior of the valve during prelaunch operations, ultimately resulted in mission teams calling a launch scrub on May 6. After the ground crews and astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams safely exited from Space Launch Complex-41, the ULA team successfully commanded the valve closed and the oscillations were temporarily dampened. The oscillations then re-occurred twice during fuel removal operations. After evaluating the valve history, data signatures from the launch attempt, and assessing the risks relative to continued use, the ULA team determined the valve exceeded its qualification and mission managers agreed to remove and replace the valve.

Replacing the valve is a somewhat routine procedure, but it will take a few days, causing the two-week delay.

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Sweden’s Esrange spaceport gets its first orbital customer

3:23 pm

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Sweden’s Esrange spaceport today announced it has signed its firs orbital rocket customer, Perigee Aerospace from South Korea.

In its 7 May announcement, SSC explained that Perigee Aerospace expected to launch the first Blue Whale 1 mission from Esrange no earlier than 2025 following a successful maiden flight from South Korean soil.

…Blue Whale 1 is a two-stage rocket that will stand approximately 21 metres tall and feature a reusable first stage.

Esrange was originally built by an earlier version of the European Space Agency in 1964, then transferred to Sweden in 1972. Until until a orbital launchpad was installed 2023 it was solely dedicated to suborbital flights. It now is attempting to attract the new commercial rocket industry, as well as compete with the other new nearby spaceports, as shown on the map.

This new rocket from South Korea is also news, as it indicates that the fever for capitalism in space has even reached that country.

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Musk: SpaceX and Starlink don’t use artificial intelligence

10:31 am

During an interview at a recent conference Elon Musk admitted that both SpaceX and Starlink have found artificial intelligence (AI) lacking, and don’t use it at all.

The irony was that prior to this admission, Musk had been extolling AI’s potential, predicting it would someday do wonderful things.

Musk, who answered questions during 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, spent a sizable portion of his talk extolling the benefits of artificial intelligence. At one point, he said a “truth-seeking” AI could “foster human civilization” when asked about the role the technology would play in human’s everyday lives.

But when asked whether AI could “accelerate” his efforts in space exploration, he seemed less excited about the technology. …”I mean, oddly enough, one of the areas where there’s almost no AI used is space exploration,” Musk replied. “So SpaceX uses basically no AI, Starlink does not use AI. I’m not against using it. We haven’t seen a use for it.”

Musk continued, saying that he’s been testing improved AI language models by asking them questions about space — and the results have been disappointing. “With any given variant of or improvements in AI, I mean, I’ll ask it questions about the Fermi paradox, about rocket engine design, about electrochemistry — and so far, the AI has been terrible at all those questions,” Musk said.

Here we see the visionary meet the practical engineer/businessman. Musk always looks to the future with grand visions, but when it comes time to build those visions, he never allows his vision to interfere with practicality. AI is still essentially garbage-in-garbage-out. The rush by businesses and tech-firms to blindly use has resulted in more than a few disasters.

Musk doesn’t do anything blindly. He tested AI first, found it wanting, and thus put it aside, despite believing it will someday do wonderful things.

If only more companies used this approach. If they had, they might not have blindly pushed DEI and ESG requirements that have done nothing but harm to their companies, their work forces, and their bottom lines.

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