October 13, 2017

Rare Last-Minute Scub for Russian Cargo Launch (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
Less than a minute before it was to take to the skies to deliver the Progress MS-07 cargo freighter to the International Space Station, an unknown issue with the Soyuz 2.1a launch vehicle prompted a rare scrub for the Russian space agency’s workhorse rocket. Liftoff was expected at 5:32 a.m. EDT on Oct. 12 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (10/13)

Morgan Stanley Predicts Space Industry will Triple in Size (Source: CNBC)
SpaceX launched its 15th rocket this year on Wednesday, the National Space Council met last week for the first time in nearly a quarter-century and satellites the size of shoeboxes are vaulting into orbit. The cost of space access is plummeting. Morgan Stanley estimates the space industry, worth about $350 billion today, will grow into an economy worth more than $1.1 trillion by 2040, a team of analysts wrote in a note Thursday. Click here. (10/12)

UCF Students Building Satellite Destined for Space (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
University of Central Florida researchers and their students have started to build a small satellite that will head into space next year to study the process that forms planets. In 2015, NASA funded the project, known as Q-PACE, or CubeSat Particle Aggregation and Collision Experiment. The cubesat will conduct more than 100 experiments while in orbit, with the work expected to be documented using a high-speed camera. The date and vehicle to be used for the launch has not been finalized yet. (10/12)

Russian Rockot Rocket Rockets Science Satellite to Space (Source: BBC)
A Russian rocket launched a European Earth sciences satellite early this morning. The Rockot lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia at 5:27 a.m. Eastern carrying the Sentinel-5P satellite. The spacecraft is designed to demonstrate the ability to monitor air quality for use on later Sentinel-5 satellites. The satellite is the latest in the overall Copernicus program of Earth-observation spacecraft by the European Space Agency and the European Union. (10/13)

ILS Hopes Smaller Proton Rocket Can Compete with Falcon 9 (Source: Space News)
International Launch Services hopes to compete directly with SpaceX's Falcon 9 using the new Proton Medium rocket. The company expects the Proton Medium, which lacks the third stage of the existing Proton and can place 5 to 5.7 metric tons into geostationary transfer orbit, to be price-competitive with the Falcon 9. ILS hopes that Proton Medium can serve the "sweet spot" of the commercial launch market, and help it win business. ILS has only one commercial Proton launch on its manifest for 2018. (10/13)

Electric Thrusters Slowly (But Efficiently) Deliver Eutelsat to Intended Orbit (Source: Space News)
The largest commercial satellite to rely exclusively on electric propulsion has made it to its final orbit in record time. Eutelsat-172b, built by Airbus Defence and Space for Eutelsat, arrived at its location in geostationary orbit this week, only about four months after its launch on an Ariane 5. The satellite weighed three and a half tons at launch, and used electric propulsion exclusively to go from its transfer orbit to geostationary orbit. Airbus says that if the spacecraft used conventional chemical propulsion it could have arrived in geostationary orbit in a week, but would have weighed nearly two tons more. (10/13)

Virgin Expects Powered Flight Tests This Year (Source: Las Cruces Sun-News)
The president of Virgin Galactic says the company expects to begin powered flight tests of SpaceShipTwo by the end of this year. Speaking at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico Thursday, Mike Moses said that "we hope to be in space by the end of this year" with powered test flights of the vehicle. The second SpaceShipTwo has been performing a series of glide flights leading up to the start of powered flights. Company founder Richard Branson recently said the company was "hopefully about three months" from reaching space, and "maybe six months" before Branson himself could fly. (10/13)

General Atomics Considers Railgun for Microsatellite Launches (Source: Space News)
One company thinks it has the solution to launching smallsats: a railgun. General Atomics, the company best known for building the Predator drone, is getting into the smallsat market through its acquisition of Huntsville-based Miltec last February. General Atomics is working on cubesats but hopes to scale up to larger smallsats, principally for defense customers. General Atomics is also looking at electromagnetic railgun technologies for launching smallsats, which could be far less expensive than rockets, but the company acknowledges there are many hurdles to developing such a system.

Editor's Note: This has long been considered a possibility, but the extreme stresses of near-instantaneous zero-to-orbital velocity, and the requirement to circularize the orbit (with moving parts operable after the launch stresses) have made this a difficult nut to crack. (10/13)

Can SpaceX Grow to a $50 Billion Enterprise? (Source: CNBC)
A new report predicts SpaceX could become a $50 billion company. The report by a team of Morgan Stanley analysts said that the growth in the company's value would come through the development of a satellite broadband system that could generate far more cash than its launch business. A recent funding round valued SpaceX at $21 billion. SpaceX has no plans for an initial public offering of stock, but the Morgan Stanley report concluded it is "reasonable" to consider the company doing so in the future to raise money for future projects. (10/13)

Asteroid Flyby Gives NASA Practice for Tracking (Source: Space.com)
A small asteroid made a close flyby of Earth Thursday, providing a test for telescopes designed to track such objects. Asteroid 2012 TC4 passed 42,000 kilometers from the Earth early Thursday. The asteroid, estimated to be 10 to 15 meters across, posed no impact threat to the Earth. The flyby, though, offered a test of various telescope systems used for tracking near Earth asteroids. (10/13)