The new colonial movement: The United Kingdom’s proposed space industry bill has now been introduced in the House of Lords, the first step to making it law.
I have not had a chance to read it, but the claim is that this bill will establish a regulatory framework, under the Outer Space Treaty, to attract private commercial space to Great Britain.
The recent blockade imposed against Qatar by other Middle East countries, supposedly because of its support of terrorism, threatens the world’s supply of helium.
Qatar is the world’s largest exporter of helium and its second-largest producer, accounting for 25% of global demand (see ‘Helium supplies’). So the blockade will inevitably cause shortfalls over the next few months, says Phil Kornbluth, a consultant based in Bridgewater, New Jersey, who specializes in the helium industry.
Countries likely to be most affected are those closest to Qatar. But Asian countries such as India, China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore are also at risk. “But none of us are immune,” adds William Halperin, a researcher in low-temperature physics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of helium, producing about twice as much as Qatar. That production is for our local markets, while Qatar exports it worldwide.
For reasons that are not clear, SES’s AMC-9 satellite, launched in 2003 and nearing the end of its 15 year design life, appeared on June 17 to suddenly break into at least two pieces.
The video at the link requires patience to watch, but it shows the satellite go from one bright spot to about two at around two minutes. These two spots then slowly drift apart.
The first test flight of World View’s Stratollite balloon, planned for 4 days, was ended after only 17 hours because of a leak in the balloon.
Though the mission was the longest yet for the balloon, and though they managed to test the attitude control, communications, and solar power systems, they need to find out why the balloon did not hold pressure as expected before they can begin flying missions lasting from months to even a year.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch of a commercial communications satellite was once again aborted today 10 seconds before launch.
They have not yet pinned down what caused the abort, but assuming they can figure things out, they will try again tomorrow, since the launch abort took place at the end of today’s launch window.
This story notes that the failure of the Long March 5 launch occurred 30 minutes after launch, when the second stage and the satellite were due to separate.
The link also includes footage of the launch through first stage separation and ignition of second stage engines.
It appears therefore that the failure was not in the Long March 5 rocket itself. When satellite separation occurs the second stage has completed its work, so the rocket apparently did its job getting the satellite into orbit. What happened next however remains unknown.
Based on this information it would appear that this failure might not delay later launches of the Long March 5 that much.
Capitalism in space: The first Dragon capsule to make a second flight to ISS splashed down and was recovered successfully today in the Pacific.
Meanwhile, they apparently have identified and fixed the cause of yesterday’s launch abort, and will try to launch a commercial satellite today at 7:37 pm Eastern.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today aborted its commercial Falcon 9 launch 10 seconds before liftoff when computers sensed something was not right.
If they can pinpoint and fix the issue they plan to try again tomorrow.
The new colonial movement: China has announced that the second launch of its Long March 5 rocket was a failure.
They have provided no other details. Since this is the rocket that they plan to use to launch their space station modules as well as launch this year’s unmanned lunar mission, this failure is probably going to impact those schedules.
Capitalism in space: Surrey Satellite Technology, one of the first companies to build smallsats and cubesats, is closing its U.S. factory in Colorado and concentrating its satellite work once again in the UK.
It appears the company might have gotten a little fat and lazy, and has allowed the competition to begin passing it by:
Parker said the exact number of people SST-US will let go has not been determined. SSTL’s decision to layoff workers in the U.S. is not related to the decline in geostationary telecommunications satellite orders that triggered a reduction in workers at Space Systems Loral, Parker said. The majority of SSTL’s business is in remote sensing, navigation and science — spacecraft typically found in non-geosynchronous orbits.
Instead, Parker said it was more out of concern that the smallsat movement the company had championed for years had picked up steam and was moving without SSTL. “We had grown slightly fatter, slightly more complacent, so we are doing a lot of work on our organization. We started last year and changed our organizational structure internally. We changed the way our teams are organized so we now have a much flatter structure with more autonomy,” she said.
SSTL is not reducing its headcount in the U.K., Parker said.
This kind of reminds me of ULA’s recent effort to streamline its operations, faced with competition from SpaceX. Here, Surrey is finding itself getting beat by a lot of new players, and had found it needs to reshape itself to survive.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX yesterday successfully completed the static fire dress rehearsal countdown for its planned Sunday Falcon 9 launch, which would be the third SpaceX launch in 9 days.
The article also provides some good information about the company’s efforts to recover the first stages and the fairings from the past two launches. For example:
This mission [the Florida launch of a Bulgarian satelltie] also included another test per SpaceX’s fairing recovery aspirations. Classed as the best attempt to date, SpaceX has added steerable parachutes to guide the fairing halves to the ocean surface, before it deploys a “bouncy castle” that protects it while it awaits recovery. The technology is still being refined, but Elon Musk believes full recovery could be achieved later this year.
Link here. The Russian airline company S7 wants to resume use of the Ukrainian Zenit rockets on the Sea Launch platform. They also want to fly that rocket several times from Baikonur. The problems have been getting Russia and Ukraine to work together.
Despite good progress on the engineering front of the Angosat-1 mission, political problems continued hampering the preparations of the Russian-Ukrainian launch. As of the end of June 2017, the planned liftoff for Angosat-1 slipped to October 21, however, even that date was considered optimistic within the industry. At the time, the Ukrainian team, which had to perform a scheduled maintenance on the Zenit rocket, was still waiting for permission to travel to Baikonur from the Ukrainian authorities.
Earlier, there were disputes from Russia that delayed work.
