July 11, 2018

NASA Studying Larger Lunar Landers (Source: SpacePolicyOnline)
NASA is studying ways to accelerate the development of larger lunar landers. The "quick-look" study, expected to take one month, will examine alternatives to current plans to fund development of medium-sized and large lunar landers expected to start launching in the mid to late 2020s. That study could support planning for NASA's fiscal year 2020 budget request. NASA is already working with industry to buy payload space on smaller commercially developed landers, and it's not clear the role industry would have with larger landers. (7/10)

Demolition of LC-17 at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: Florida Today)
Two historic launch towers at Cape Canaveral will be demolished this week. The twin towers at Launch Complex 17 will be brought down by controlled detonations Thursday morning. The complex, used for Delta 2 launches, last hosted a launch in 2011, and the site is currently used by Moon Express to develop and test, but not launch, its commercial lunar landers. (7/11)

Hispasat to Invest in LeoSat Broadband Constellation (Source: Space News)
Hispasat has agreed to invest in broadband satellite constellation startup LeoSat. Hispasat's investment in LeoSat matches the undisclosed amount another satellite operator, Sky Perfect JSAT, made in LeoSat last year. The company is still working to close a $100 million Series A round of funding, with the overall system projected to cost $3.6 billion. LeoSat also announced it's dropped plans to launch two demonstration satellites next year after concluding technology demonstration efforts on the ground were sufficient to prove out key subsystems, including intersatellite links. (7/11)

Kepler Communications Works With UK For Third Satellite (Source: Space News)
Canadian startup Kepler Communications will work with a British organization to build its third satellite. Kepler said it teamed up with the Satellite Applications Catapult, who will partially fund the satellite and help Kepler establish a U.K. office. That cubesat is planned for launch in mid-2019. Kepler currently has one cubesat-class satellite in orbit, demonstrating store-and-forward communications services, with a second one scheduled to launch later this year. (7/11)

The Race to Get Tourists to Suborbital Space is Heating Up (Source: WIRED)
Already, you can buy tickets for (as-yet-unscheduled) flights aboard SpaceShipTwo, the crew vehicle developed by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. And at a NewSpace conference in Seattle last month, Blue Origin—helmed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—announced that it has plans to sell tickets to wannabe space tourists as early as next year. Both companies have solid plans to cash in on human space travel (and then, of course, there’s SpaceX, which will focus first on shuttling astronauts to and from the space station).

Branson has said that Virgin Galactic is in a race with itself, not other companies, to achieve safe human space flight. But with Blue Origin aiming to start selling tickets next year, both companies could be competing for business sooner rather than later. They’ll have to work hard to differentiate themselves: Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic plan to offer pretty much the same experience. Neither will take tourists into orbit; instead, they’ll touch of the edge of space, crossing an imaginary boundary known as the Kármán line 62 miles up.

The differences come down to propulsion. Virgin Galactic’s plan is to launch its two-winged SpaceShipTwo while it’s attached to a carrier vehicle, WhiteKnightTwo. Reminiscent of the X-planes that originally broke the sound barrier, the SpaceShipTwo will drop from its carrier, ignite its rocket engines, and then land on a runway like a commercial airliner. Blue Origin, meanwhile, will use a more traditional capsule and booster, both of which are designed to be reusable. (7/11)

NASA Spends 72 Cents of Every SLS Dollar on Overhead Costs (Source: Ars Technica)
According to a new report published by the nonpartisan think tank Center for a New American Security, NASA has spent $19 billion on rockets, first on Ares I and V, and now on the SLS. Additionally, the agency has spent $13.9 billion on the Orion spacecraft. The agency hopes to finally fly its first crewed mission with the new vehicles in 2021. If it does so, the report estimates the agency will have spent $43 billion before that first flight, essentially a reprise of the Apollo 8 mission around the Moon.

These costs can then be compared to the total cost of the entire Apollo program, which featured six separate human landings on the Moon. According to two separate estimates, the Apollo program cost between $100 billion and $110 billion in 2010 dollars. Thus just the development effort for SLS and Orion, which includes none of the expenses related to in-space activities or landing anywhere, are already nearly half that of the Apollo program.

The new report argues that, given these high costs, NASA should turn over the construction of rockets and spacecraft to the private sector. It buttresses this argument with a remarkable claim about the "overhead" costs associated with the NASA-led programs. For Orion, according to the report, approximately 56 percent of the program's cost, has gone to NASA instead of the main contractor, Lockheed Martin, and others. For the SLS rocket and its predecessors, the estimated fraction of NASA-related costs is higher—72 percent. (7/11)

Why China Wants A Super Rocket Like NASA's Space Launch System (Source: Forbes)
The principle mission of SLS, though, is not to get to Low Earth Orbit. It is designed to support deep space exploration, with an eye to one day visiting Mars -- the only other Earth-like planet in the solar system. However, China has announced no plans for going to Mars. So why does it want a rocket that can lift even more than SLS?

The official story is that China too wants to pursue deep space exploration, but here's another possibility. Like SLS, China's planned super-heavy-lift rocket will have a much bigger diameter than anything in the current Long March fleet. That means the payload fairing at the top will also be wider -- wide enough to accommodate novel spacecraft that today could only be orbited with great difficulty. Spacecraft that might give the Peoples Liberation Army significant new capabilities. (7/10)

NASA Funds Study on SpaceX BFR as Option for Massive Space Telescope Launch (Source: Teslarati)
Dr. Debra Fischer briefly revealed that NASA had funded a study that would examine SpaceX’s next-gen BFR rocket as an option for launching LUVOIR, a massive space telescope expected to take the reigns of exoplanet research in the 2030s.

Conceptualized to follow in the footsteps of NASA’s current space telescope expertise and (hopefully) to learn from the many various mistakes made by their contractors, the LUVOIR (shorthand for Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor) concept is currently grouped into two different categories, A and B. A is a full-scale, uncompromised telescope with an unfathomably vast 15-meter primary mirror and a sunshade with an area anywhere from 5000 to 20000 square meters (1-4 acres).

B is a comparatively watered-down take on the broadband surveyor telescope, with a much smaller 8-meter primary mirror, likely accompanied by a similarly reduced sunshade (and price tag, presumably). Remember, this is a space telescope that would need to fit into the payload fairing of a rocket, survive the launch into orbit, and then journey nearly one million miles from Earth to its final operational destination, all before deploying a mirror and starshade as large or larger than Mr Steven’s SpaceX  fairing recovery net. (7/10)

NASA Adding More SLS Block 1 Launches to Manifest (Source: Space News)
With two more launches of the Block 1 version of the Space Launch System now planned, NASA is starting work to procure and human-rate additional upper stages.

NASA originally expected to fly the Block 1 version of the SLS only once before moving to the more powerful Block 1B version of the rocket. The Block 1 uses an upper stage known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), based on the Delta 4 upper stage. The Block 1B will replace the ICPS with the Exploration Upper Stage, a larger upper stage under development.

However, with funding from Congress provided in the fiscal year 2018 omnibus appropriations bill to build a second mobile launch platform, NASA now expects to use the Block 1 version more than once. Those additional launches can take place using the existing mobile launch platform while the new one, designed for Block 1B, is built. That move is designed to reduce concerns about a long gap between SLS missions had NASA gone through with original plans to modify the mobile launch platform after the first SLS mission so it could be used for the Block 1B. (7/10)

Commercial Chinese Companies Set Sights on Methalox Rockets, First Orbital Launches (Source: Space News)
One of China’s emerging commercial launch companies says it has designed a methane- and liquid-oxygen-powered rocket it aims to test launch in 2020. Beijing-based Landspace is developing the Zhuque-2 (ZQ-2) rocket with the goal of completing ground testing in 2019 ahead of debuting the launch vehicle the following year.

The two-stage ZQ-2 was presented July 5 at a press conference in Beijing and will measure 48.8-meters tall with a diameter of 3.35 meters, giving it apparent similarities to the state’s established hypergolic Long March 2 series rockets. The company claims the launch vehicle will also be economical, capable of being mass produced and reusable, and plans to follow up with much larger ZQ-2A, B and C three-stage rockets in the future. (7/10)

Space Investment Quarterly: Q2 2018 (Source: Space Angels)
In our previous issue, we saw massive momentum in commercial launch from 2017 carry into the first quarter of 2018, leading us to predict 2018 to be the Year of Small Launch. So far, we are seeing this prediction hold true, as 62% of non-government equity investment year-to-date in the space industry has gone into Launch companies. While Launch has certainly carried strongly into 2018, we also saw a surge in Satellite investment in Q2: the number of Satellite deals has increased 25% in just three months. Click here. (7/10) 

Alaska Aerospace Launches Subsidiary Company to Reduce Costs (Source: The Eagle)
Alaska Aerospace has launched a subsidiary company that aims to save taxpayer money by reducing personnel costs, officials said. The state-owned corporation announced last week the opening of the Anchorage-based Aurora Launch Services, which will be the exclusive service provider at the spaceport complex on Kodiak Island. The corporation has struggled to break even over the last seven years, receiving at least $16 million in operating funds from the state and $3 million for a capital improvement project. (7/10)

Whoops! NASA Burned Best Evidence for Life on Mars 40 Years Ago (Source: New Scientist)
In 1976, NASA’s twin Viking landers conducted the first experiments that searched for organic matter on the Red Planet. Researchers had long known that all planets receive a steady rain of carbon-rich micrometeorites and dust from space, meaning that Mars should be smothered in organic molecules. But the Viking landers found nothing, leaving researchers dumbstruck.

“It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew,” says Chris McKay at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California. Haunted by Mars’s missing molecules, researchers proposed one explanation after another, but none seemed to fit – until yet another probe came into play. Click here. (7/10)

Hunt for Dark Matter Turns to Ancient Minerals (Source: Nature)
Minerals deep inside Earth might contain telltale traces of collisions with dark matter — the elusive stuff that researchers think makes up most of the matter in the Universe. Experiments designed to search for these traces could one day complement or even compete with ongoing efforts to detect dark matter directly.

Researchers using sophisticated detectors sunk deep underground have searched for signs of dark matter for decades. But now, Katherine Freese, a physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues suggest that minerals such as halite (sodium chloride) and zabuyelite (lithium carbonate), can act as ready-made detectors.

Minerals such as halite and zabuyelite are already deep inside Earth and thus are shielded from cosmic rays. According to the team’s analysis, published last month on the preprint server arXiv, if a WIMP were to smash into the nucleus of an atom of, say, sodium or chlorine, the nucleus would recoil. This would etch a path anywhere from 1 to 1,000 nanometres long in the mineral. (7/10)

Rocket Lab Selects Four Finalists for U.S. Launch Site (Source: Space News)
Rocket Lab announced July 10 that it has selected four potential locations for an American launch site for its Electron rocket, with a final decision to come in August. In a statement, the company said it had shortlisted Cape Canaveral, Florida; Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska; Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia as the potential locations of what it calls Launch Complex 2.

Rocket Lab said it will select from among those four sites for the complex in August and start construction “immediately” thereafter. The company said it expected to have the site completed and ready to host its first launch in the second quarter of 2019. Editor's Note: I'm surprised to see that Georgia's proposed spaceport is not listed among the finalists. (7/10)

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