Tag: freedom

Ispace’s 3rd lunar lander to be larger, built entirely in U.S.

9:06 am

Capitalism in space: The private Japanese company Ispace announced yesterday that its third lunar lander will be larger (to provide more payload space for customers) and built entirely in U.S. (to better garner NASA contracts).

The lander, being developed by the company’s U.S. office in Denver, will fly as soon as 2024 on the company’s third mission to the moon.

A major difference in the new design, company officials said in interviews, is the payload capacity. While the lander ispace is building for its first two missions in 2022 and 2023 can carry 30 kilograms of payload to the lunar surface, the new lander will have a payload capacity of 500 kilograms to the surface. It will also be able to deploy an additional 2,000 kilograms of payloads to lunar orbit.

The company is also hardening the lander to survive the two week long lunar night.

The decision to shift operations to the U.S., and partner with U.S. companies General Atomics and Draper, makes Ispace a viable competitor for later NASA contracts, which in turn can encourage other privately funded payloads to sign on.

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Boeing to buy part of Virgin Orbit for $3.2 billion

3:18 pm

Capitalism in space: In a stock market merger/investment deal, Boeing is going to buy a part ownership in Virgin Orbit for $3.2 billion, with the deal to close by the end of the year.

After the deal completes, Branson’s Virgin group will hold about 68 per cent of Virgin Orbit. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Company, is an existing investor in Virgin Orbit and will have about 17 per cent, while the Pipe and other private investors will hold about 15 per cent of the group. Boeing’s share was not disclosed.

My first thought was that Boeing wanted to get into a space company that was doing things better than anything Boeing was trying. And considering that Virgin Orbit a Richard Branson space company, albeit one with some real success, that indicates how badly everything else is at Boeing

My second thought was: Where is Boeing getting the cash? My impression is that because of its various problems with the 737-Max, it has sold almost no planes in the past two years, and has even had to refund money from many purchasers. Its cash flow with Starliner is nil until they fly it. SLS has brought them money as the contract is cost-plus, but hardly enough to pay for this deal.

My third thought was that this deal indicates the continuing cash problems at Branson’s Virgin Group. The Wuhan panic cut airline traffic significantly. It appears Branson is still digging for cash to bail out these operations.

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Why only NOW is there mounting concern over President Biden’s mental health?

12:36 pm


Biden as he forgets what truths we hold as self-evident in March 2020.

A Daily Mail story from last week reported on the growing concern of doctors and other health experts about the mental state of Joe Biden, the oldest American president ever.

Questions have been raised about US President Joe Biden’s cognitive wellbeing after a car crash interview over his handling of the unfolding Afghanistan crisis. America’s oldest president provided jumbled responses to questions and mixed up details about his son in an interview with ABC. The stumbles did not make the broadcasted version but were revealed when a full transcript of the interview was published overnight.

It revealed the President incorrectly stated his late son Beau Biden worked for the Navy in Afghanistan, before correcting himself that he served for the Army in Iraq. It follows a spate of gaffes and slips of the tongue since the 78-year-old ran his successful presidential campaign in 2019.

This story only highlights a growing slew of news stories and op-eds that have appeared recently during the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, in both the right and leftwing press, that have noticed how President Biden appears repeatedly confused in interviews while showing signs that he does not quite understand what is going on around him.

Of course, for the press and the political class to recognize these facts now, after Biden has become president, is equivalent to closing the barn door after the animals have escaped. As I noted in October 2020, before the election, these cognitive issues have been obvious for the last two years, and had been getting steadily worse throughout 2020 during the election campaign. As I wrote then,
» Read more

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Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations for orbital test flight

9:15 am

Starship prototype #20 being prepped
Screen capture from Labpadre live stream, available here.

Link here. In sum it appears that SpaceX is getting very close to launch, with the permit approval of the FAA increasingly becoming the biggest obstacle to progress.

Although the completion of all of this testing could take a long time, in Elon Musk’s mind, the path to returning B4 and S20 to being an integrated stack could be during this month.

A week ago, Musk tweeted that the “first orbital stack of Starship should be ready for flight in a few weeks, pending only regulatory approval.” Ultimately, once the vehicle is in its launch configuration, there will be a lengthy process of passing the aforementioned regulatory approval, with an environmental public comment period triggered ahead of launch. This has to be completed before the launch license can be granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The screen capture above shows Starship prototype #20 sitting on the suborbital flight test pad, as workers on cherry-pickers work on its exterior. The orange, green, and white tiles are likely tile locations still needing some level of installation work.

Based on SpaceX’s normal pace of operations, the engine testing for both Starship and Superheavy will take several weeks, once both are ready for such testing. While Starship appears just about ready, Superheavy apparently needs more work. When SpaceX stacked both together on the orbital launchpad several weeks ago, it suggested both were closer to launch than they were. Their present status suggests engine testing will likely begin in September, with Starship at the beginning of the month and Superheavy at the end of the month. That would make a launch possible sometime in late October, assuming the federal government doesn’t decide to shut this entire operation down by refusing to issue a permit.

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Top engineers and managers fleeing Blue Origin

3:58 pm

According to this story today, Blue Origin this summer lost at least sixteen top management and engineering employees, all leaving in a very short time.

At least 16 key leaders and senior engineers have left Blue Origin this summer, CNBC has learned, with many moving on in the weeks after Bezos’ spaceflight.

…Others quietly updated their LinkedIn pages over the past few weeks. Each unannounced departure was confirmed to CNBC by people familiar with the matter. Those departures include: New Shepard senior vice president Steve Bennett, chief of mission assurance Jeff Ashby (who retired), national security sales director Scott Jacobs, New Glenn senior director Bob Ess, New Glenn senior finance manager Bill Scammell, senior manager of production testing Christopher Payne, New Shepard technical project manager Nate Chapman, senior propulsion design engineer Dave Sanderson, senior HLS human factors engineer Rachel Forman, BE-4 controller lead integration and testing engineer Jack Nelson, New Shepard lead avionics software engineer Huong Vo, BE-7 avionics hardware engineer Aaron Wang, propulsion engineer Rex Gu, and rocket engine development engineer Gerry Hudak.

Those who announced they were leaving Blue Origin did not specify why, but frustration with executive management and a slow, bureaucratic structure is often cited in employee reviews on job site Glassdoor.

There is another possibility that would be more hopeful. It could be that Jeff Bezos is shaking up the company because of its poor accomplishments during the past four years, since CEO Bob Smith was hired.

That Smith however is still there makes this guess unlikely. The article also notes that Smith’s approval among Blue Origin employees is abysmal, with only 15% approving his management, when compared to high numbers given to the management leaders at SpaceX and ULA.

Thus, this exodus is more likely a sign that that the rats are fleeing what they see as a sinking ship.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Blue Origin however. The company is swimming in dough because of Bezos’ deep pockets, and he is free to do what he thinks must be done to fix things. Under such conditions it is very unlikely Blue Origin will disappear. More likely Bezos will straighten things out, though the company now has to play big catch up, not only against SpaceX but also against the fleet of new orbital rocket companies about to come on line — all doing so ahead of Blue Origin.

There is also the possibility that this story has got its facts wrong. It makes a very big error near the beginning, claiming that former SpaceX engineer Lauren Lyons had left Blue Origin to join SpaceX, when she had actually left SpaceX to take a big promotion at Firefly. My mistake. Lyons had moved from SpaceX to Blue Origin. This job change was leaving Blue Origin to go to Firefly.

Hat tip to reader Jay.

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British court dismisses billionaire’s lawsuit against Sutherland spaceport

10:52 am

A British judge today dismissed entirely [pdf] the lawsuit filed by billionaire Anders Povlsen, who had been trying to block the construction of a spaceport in Sutherland, Scotland, a region where he owns thousands of acres and is involved in many environmental issues.

Povlsen instead has been lobbying to have a spaceport instead built in the Shetland Islands, by a company he has invested in.

The ruling on all points went against Povlsen. The judge concluded:

Since I have held that none of the grounds of challenge is well founded it is unnecessary to [do anything], and I do not propose to do so (other than to say what I have already said….)

I shall sustain [the defense’s case and]… repel the petitioner’s pleas-in-law, and refuse the petition. I shall reserve meantime all questions of expenses.

This likely clears the way for construction of the Sutherland spaceport, from which the British smallsat rocket company Obex wants to launch. Lockheed Martin has said it would launch smallsats from Sutherland, but it has also said it would launch from Shetland too.

Povlsen’s opposition based on environmental concerns was of course a smokescreen to get this competing spaceport closed so that the one he has invested in in Shetland would get all the business. For more than three-quarters of a century launches have taken place at both the Kennedy and Vandenberg spaceports in the U.S., with neither doing any harm to the surrounding wildlife. Moreover, at Kennedy that spaceport forced the creation of a wildlife preserve, which prevented development. As long as they are operated with care and properly, spaceports are good for wildlife.

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NASA freezes work on SpaceX’s lunar lander version of Starship

9:23 am

In response to Blue Origin’s lawsuit that is attempting to cancel the contract award to SpaceX for adapting its Starship upper stage rocket as a manned lunar lander, NASA yesterday officially paused all work by it and SpaceX on this project.

From NASA’s statement:

NASA has voluntarily paused work with SpaceX for the human landing system (HLS) Option A contract effective Aug. 19 through Nov. 1. In exchange for this temporary stay of work, all parties agreed to an expedited litigation schedule that concludes on Nov. 1. NASA officials are continuing to work with the Department of Justice to review the details of the case and look forward to a timely resolution of this matter.

The optics for Blue Origin remain ugly. Not only does the company appear more interested in fighting court battles than building spaceships and rockets, it now is acting to prevent others from doing so.

The timeline of events however is interesting. Blue Origin filed its lawsuit on August 13th. NASA issued the first $300 million payment to SpaceX for this $2.9 billion contract on August 16th. Even with this announcement today, the payment suggests that NASA is doing what it can to make the contract award an accomplished fact that the courts will not find easy to overturn.

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Two new smallsat rockets now set for launch

8:57 am

Capitalism in space: The launch dates of two different new smallsat rockets is now confirmed.

First, Astra has obtained from the FAA a launch operator license that will allow it to launch rockets from now until March 2026. This license now allows the company to proceed with its August 27th first orbital launch of its Rocket-3 rocket. If successful, Astra hopes to move to monthly launches before the end of the year.

Second, Firefly has announced that it will attempt its own first orbital launch of its Alpha rocket on September 2nd. The company had been promising a launch before the end of the year, but until now had not set a date. The successful completion of a static fire test of the rocket cleared the way.

Three other smallsat rocket companies, Relativity, ABL, and Aevum, have also said they are targeting this year for their first orbital launches, but none has set any dates yet.

If successful, these companies will join Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit in providing launch capabilities for tiny satellites like cubesats and nanosats.

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The knives aimed at SpaceX are getting sharpened

10:01 am

Starship must be banned!
Banning Starship: The new goal of our leftist masters.

Two stories today mark what appears to be a growing political campaign focused on squelching by any means possible the continued unparalleled success of the company SpaceX. And the simultaneous publication of both stories on the same day also suggests that this campaign is deliberately timed to force the FAA to shut down SpaceX at Boca Chica.

First we have a story at Space.com aimed at SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, making it the big villain in the growing threat of satellite collisions.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites alone are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, that’s about 50 % of all such incidents, according to Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K. These encounters include situations when two spacecraft pass within a distance of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from each other.

Lewis, Europe’s leading expert on space debris, makes regular estimates of the situation in orbit based on data from the Socrates (Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space ) database. This tool, managed by Celestrack, provides information about satellite orbits and models their trajectories into the future to assess collision risk.

Though his data appears accurate and the growing risk of collisions is real, it appears from the story that Lewis, one of only two experts interviewed, has a strong hostility to SpaceX. He doesn’t like the fact that SpaceX is so successful in such a short time, and appears to want something done to control it.

The article also nonchalantly sloughs off one very significant fact: Very few satellite collisions have actually occurred. While the risk is certainly going to increase, that increase is not going to be fueled just by SpaceX. At least four large constellations are presently in the works, all comparable to Starlink in some manner. To focus on SpaceX in particular makes this article appear like a hatchet job.

Then we have a news story from CBS and its very partisan and leftist news show, Sixty Minutes+, providing a loud soapbox for the very small number of anti-development environmentalists fighting to block SpaceX’s operations in Boca Chica, Texas.
» Read more

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Firefly hires noted SpaceX engineer

9:03 am

Capitalism in space: Firefly Aerospace announced earlier this week that it has hired as it chief operating officer Lauren Lyons, a former SpaceX engineer familiar to many for her regular appearances as a announcer on SpaceX’s launch telecasts.

The company said that Lyons will focus on “transitioning Firefly from an R&D environment to a production environment” for its Alpha small launch vehicle, Space Utility Vehicle tug and Blue Ghost lunar lander. “Firefly is entering a pivotal and exciting phase of its growth,” Lyons said in the statement. “I’m thrilled to take on the challenge of leading the efforts in scaling the company’s infrastructure to support rapid growth, high execution rate, and deliver exceptional value and service to our customers.”

Translation: Using Lyons expertise from SpaceX, Firefly intends to operate much like SpaceX, upgrading its rockets and spacecraft continuously even as they operate commercially.

The launch date for the company’s first orbital attempt remains unannounced, though it says it will occur before the end of the year. It appears they are ready to go, except for one component of their flight termination system.

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Arizona’s governor moves to block any local school mask mandates or closures

3:39 pm

Doug Ducey, the less than useless Republican governor in Arizona during this past year of Wuhan panic, has apparently finally seen the light, and has begun to take action to prevent the Democratically-controlled local school boards and city governments from imposing new mask and vaccine mandates as well as shutting schools out of an unjustified fear of COVID-19.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday announced schools that impose mask mandates in the state will not have access to a $163 million grant program backed by coronavirus relief funds he controls.

The Republican governor said schools with mask mandates or that have closed due to COVID-19 concerns will not be eligible for an additional $1,800 per student. The announcement comes one day after he issued an executive order banning cities and counties from mandating vaccinations.

Ducey also announced a grant program to award parents if their schools require quarantining or isolation of students.

The governor also announced a $10 million grant that intends to award parents $7,000 for each student if their public school required isolating or quarantining due to COVID-19 exposure or if it gave preferential treatment to vaccinated children or mandated masks.

As expected, the Democrats in the state legislature railed against such measures, not because the mandates actually prevent the spread of any disease, but because Ducey’s actions rob them and their allies in local government of the unbridled power they have enjoyed for the eighteen or so months. Before they simply had power, and it corrupted them somewhat. Since the arrival of the Wuhan panic they have had absolute power, and it corrupted them absolutely. They are addicted to it, and can’t tolerate giving it up.

Meanwhile, it should not take a governor to recognize the right of the people to live their lives as they choose. That Ducey has to do this tells us that the public has ceded to much power to the government, no matter who is in charge. That too has to change, and it has to change at all levels, from the smallest local school board to the presidency of the entire nation.

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Revolt in San Diego over Democrat-imposed mask and vaccine mandates?

3:27 pm

At a board of supervisors public meeting in San Diego yesterday it appeared that a major revolt is rising against the local government’s demand that businesses impose mask and vaccine mandates on their employees and customers.

Hundreds of businesses have already signed a Business Equality Pledge and posted a Proclamation pledging not to discriminate. Citizens are also signing a petition to refuse to comply with these arbitrary and unconstitutional requirements. The rally attendees are not anti-vax, but they are simply against all medical mandates.

The community members and leaders were fired up, and to put it simply, directly called out the San Diego County Board of Supervisors for their overreaching rule, telling them to their face they have forgotten their oath to protect the constitution.

The article includes almost two dozen videos of statements by various citizens and business owners, telling the supervisors to their face, and by name, that they face a quick recall if they don’t back off and instead try to impose these mandates. These are definitely worth watching, as they indicate the rising anger and frustration many Americans are feeling over the mindless and very damaging and totalitarian government actions over the past year and a half.

The videos and the crowd responses suggest that the public in this southern California town at least has finally turned against their government leadership, which presently has a Democratic Party majority. If so, it will be a welcome and long overdue development.

At the same time, based on past experience one should not get too confident. Many past such protests were not matched by the voters. Moreover, this is California, where the election process has been badly corrupted and is very unreliable. Even if the voters vote to throw these bums out, the bums might very well have the power to revise that result to their favor.

I will not breathe easy and feel real hope until I see some actual electoral changes, at that ballot box, something that has not really occurred since World War II. Even when the voters threw the bums out of Congress in 1994 and 2010, nothing really changed.

And at the local level the public has been less than uninterested in who wins elections. This more than anything has got to change to actually change the government we live under.

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Blue Origin files lawsuit against Starship lunar contract award

8:40 am

What a joke: Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin on August 13th filed a lawsuit in federal court, attempting to overthrow the contract award NASA gave SpaceX’s Starship in its manned lunar lander Artemis project

In a court filing on Friday, Blue Origin said it continued to believe that two providers were needed to build the landing system, which will carry astronauts down to the Moon’s surface as early as 2024. It also accused Nasa of “unlawful and improper evaluation” of its proposals during the tender process. “We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America,” Blue Origin said.

The article then goes on to list the basic facts that make this lawsuit absurd. First, NASA had not been appropriated enough money by Congress to award two contracts, and had it done so, it would have violated the law. Second SpaceX’s bid was the lowest bid, far less than Blue Origin’s expensive price. Third, SpaceX was already test flying early prototypes of its Starship lander, while Blue Origin had built nothing. Fourth, many other technical issues made SpaceX’s bid superior.

Finally, the GAO, as an independent arbitrator, has already ruled against a Blue Origin protest, stating unequivocally that NASA had done nothing wrong in its contract process.

This lawsuit makes Blue Origin appear to be a very unserious company. Rather than putting its energies towards building rockets and spacecraft to demonstrate its capabilities, it focuses its effort on playing legal games in the courts. Such behavior will only make it seem less appealling when next it bids on a NASA or Space Force contract.

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China, politics, and space

11:17 am

This interesting essay today describing China’s space policy and its ramifications for the United States found this most significant quote from a Chinese official:

A senior official with the CNSA’s lunar program has been reported by the Daily Beast as saying the moon and Mars (and presumably myriad other rocks out there) are the equivalent of the islands in strategic locations in the Indo-Pacific region that China contests with Japan and other countries:

The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.

The fact the CCP views real estate in the solar system the same way as real estate on Earth is both instructive and amusing.

I don’t find this Chinese attitude amusing in the least. It suggests quite starkly China’s intention to claim all the land it occupies in space, in direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty. Unlike the western nations, it doesn’t care that under that treaty’s restrictions, it can’t provide property rights to its citizens. It will possess everything it gets in space, for itself.

All the more reason for the U.S. to push for the Artemis Accords, which China rejects, as those accords bypass the restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty and make property rights possible in western space settlements. In the end, every nation that establishes a base or colony in space is going to claim it, notwithstanding the Outer Space Treaty, so establishing a framework for U.S. law in those colonies is essential. The accords are a first step in doing so.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Farm banned from farmers market because owners are Christian

1:36 pm

Country Mills Farms-banned!
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!

They’re coming for you next: A Michigan farmer was banned from a local farmers market by the city government of East Lansing because the owners, Steve and Bridget Tennes, are Christian and had publicly stated their opposition to homosexual marriage.

The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.

The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.

[C]ity officials asserted that the Tennes’ expression conflicted with East Lansing’s marriage views and its new market policy. The policy requires vendors to agree to comply with the city’s “Human Relations Ordinance and its public policy against discrimination while at the market and as a general business practice.”

It’s illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression…” among other designated classes. [emphasis mine]

In other words, East Lansing wants to forbid any dissent to the modern and very perverse sexual movement. You will not be allowed to disagree, under any condition. And if you try, you will be blackballed, censored, and squashed, as is the right of our all-knowing government.

Stalin would be proud. So would Hitler, Mussolini, and all past despots who liked killing people who disagreed with them.
» Read more

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Boeing to return Starliner to factory

11:11 am

Capitalism in space: According to a Wall Street Journal story today, Boeing and NASA have decided to remove the Starliner capsule from the Atlas-5 rocket and return it to Boeing’s factory in order to do a more thorough inverstigation into the capsule’s failing valves.

This decision means that the launch of the second unmanned demo test flight of Starliner will not occur in August, and will likely be delayed several more months. NASA and Boeing just held a press conference in which they made this decision official. During that conference they said they think the moist environment at Kennedy might have caused corrosion in the valves, which caused them to stick.

I once again wonder if Boeing has any quality control systems at all. For such a serious problem — the failure of 13 valves out of 24 — to suddenly pop up just hours before launch, when they have been developing this capsule for years, and even had an extra year and a half to check the capsule out after the failures during the first unmanned demo flight in December 2019, is somewhat astonishing, and very disturbing.

Others will argue that problems like this can always appear unexpectedly in space hardware. I say hogwash. Boeing is not inventing something new with Starliner. This is a capsule, using heritage engineering first invented in the late 1950s. It should not be so hard to get this right.

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South Korean company invests $300 million in OneWeb

10:51 am

Capitalism in space: Hanwah, a South Korean conglomerate, has now invested $300 million in private capital in the satellite communications company OneWeb.

U.K.-headquartered OneWeb expects regulatory approvals to complete the Hanwha transaction in the first half of 2022, bringing its total investment since emerging from bankruptcy protection in November to $2.7 billion. The startup has said it only needed $2.4 billion to fund its initial constellation of 648 satellites in low Earth orbit.

It reached that in June, after Indian telecom company Bharti Global doubled its investment to $1 billion to secure what would have been a 38.6% stake before Hanwha’s announcement. The U.K. government, French satellite operator Eutelsat and Japanese internet giant Softbank were each in line for just under 20% after making their own investments. U.S.-based Hughes Network Systems, which is supplying parts for OneWeb’s ground segment, also had a small stake.

Hanwha also wishes to build its own 2,000 satellite constellation, targeted for operation by 2030. This investment gives it access to OneWeb’s technology which it can later use.

For OneWeb, this new capital solidifies its full recovery from bankruptcy, and makes it a very viable competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.

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Branson sells more than ten million shares of Virgin Galactic

10:07 am

Capitalism ?in? space? Continuing his steady off-loading of Virgin Galactic stock since the company went public, Richard Branson has sold another 10.5 million shares, lowering his steadily shrinking ownership share another 4% to 18% total.

The sale garnered him $300 million in cash.

When the company went public in 2019, Branson reserved for himself 51% ownership. Since then he has periodically sold off large chunks, usually well timed to specifically planned events that worked to pump up the stock’s price. This last sale obviously was planned to take advantage of the publicity following Branson’s own suborbital flight in July.

While Virgin Galactic might have a future in suborbital space tourism, I remain very skeptical. It certainly does not have a future in the larger orbital market, as it has no experience building real rockets (Virgin Orbit was spun off this company years ago, taking with it all that experience). Thus, the company has very limited possibilities. As the orbital market grows and becomes dominant, I can’t see there being that much long term interest in short suborbital hops.

I think Branson agrees with me, which is why he is getting out when the getting is good. That he is following the classic and very corrupt method of “pump and dump” only solidifies my belief that he is an outright con-man.

That the mainstream press continues to genuflect before him only tells us how corrupt and incompetent that press has become.

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The number of new smallsat rocket startups continues to grow

9:31 am

Capitalism in space: According to a new annual report, the number of new smallsat rocket startups that have been proposed continues to grow, though the number presently in actual development or operation declined slightly in the past year.

That total has grown to 155 vehicles, he said, ranging from 10 vehicles in operation to several dozen that have gone defunct since the survey started in 2015, when about 30 vehicles were included. “I was really expecting to see a slowdown in the number of new launch vehicles that we were seeing coming out of the woodwork in the last few years,” he said during a conference session Aug. 11. “It turns out that slowdown has not happened at all.”

There have been some changes in the industry, though. He found the number of vehicles in active development declined slightly from last year, to 48, with a decrease as well in the number of vehicle concepts on a “watch” list that have not yet entered active development. More than 40 vehicles are now classified as defunct, about 10 more than last year. “This is not surprising given the challenges of getting one of these vehicles fielded,” he said.

The U.S. has the most smallsat startups in development, 22, but China has the most that the report defines as operational, six of ten. This last number should change considerably if the planned launches of six or so American smallsat rocket startups occur as promised in the next six months.

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Intuitive Machines awards SpaceX another lunar lander launch contract

9:36 am

Intuitive Machines Nova-C lunar lander
Artist’s impression of Intuitive Machines lunar lander,
on the Moon

Capitalism in space: Intuitive Machines announced yesterday that it has awarded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket the launch contract for its third unmanned lunar lander, making SpaceX its carrier for all three.

The key quote however from the article is this:

Intuitive Machines’ first two lander missions are carrying out task orders for NASA awarded under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. However, IM-3 is not linked to any CLPS missions. Marshall said that the mission “has an open manifest for commercial and civil customers.”

In other words, this third launch is being planned as an entirely private lunar robotic mission. Intuitive Machines is essentially announcing that it will launch the lander and has room for purchase for anyone who wants to send a payload to the Moon. This opportunity is perfect for the many universities that have programs teaching students how to build science payloads and satellites. For relatively little, a school can offer its students the chance to fly something to the lunar surface. Not only will it teach them how to build cutting edge engineering, it will allow those students to do cutting edge exploration.

This is the whole concept behind the recommendations I put forth in my 2016 policy paper, Capitalism in Space. If the government will simply buy what it needs from the private sector, and let that sector build and own what it builds, that sector will construct things so that their products can be sold to others, and thus expand the market.

Since around 2018 NASA and the federal government has apparently embraced those recommendations, and we are about to see that policy bear fruit in unmanned lunar exploration. Below is a list of all planned robotic lander missions to the Moon, all scheduled for the next four years:
» Read more

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