October 14, 2019

Getting Commercial Crew Flying, At Last (Source: Space Review)
Nearly two weeks after the head of NASA appeared to criticize SpaceX’s lack of emphasis on commercial crew, the two appeared to get back on the same page about the importance of that program. Jeff Foust reports on the progress both SpaceX and Boeing have made as they now hope to start flying people early next year. Click here. (10/14)
 
How to Make an Urgent and Affordable Return to the Moon (Source: Space Review)
A rush to return to the Moon may not be sustainable unless launch costs can be sharply reduced. Ajay Kothari examines how that can be done with emerging launch vehicles. Click here. (10/14)
 
Modern Monetary Theory and Lunar Development (Source: Space Review)
Governments have taken new approaches to stimulating their economies since the financial crisis a decade ago. Vidvuds Beldavs describes how similar approaches could be used to support long-term space development. Click here. (10/14)

Musk Says SpaceX is Still Building a Third Drone Ship – But for Falcon or Starship? (Source: Teslarati)
Unprovoked on October 9th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted “A Shortfall of Gravitas” – the name of a third drone ship settled on a year and a half ago – and reaffirmed that plans were still afoot to build a third rocket recovery vessel. Musk said it would be based on the East Coast "to support high flight rates for F9 and dual ocean landings for FH side boosters.

This is the first update on SpaceX’s newest drone ship in more than a year and comes just a few months after drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) – formerly stationed in California – was sent East through the Panama Canal. News that A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) is still in the works raises the questions: what’s the holdup and what role(s) will the new drone ship play in SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet?

SpaceX may have paused work for a variety of reasons and changed ASOG’s design to account for a new role in the recovery fleet. That new role would likely center around the extremely rapid progress SpaceX is making with Starship as it pursues a series of ambitious flight tests that could begin before the end of 2019. (10/14)

New Stratolaunch Management Still Undisclosed (Source: Space News)
Stratolaunch has a new, but unidentified, owner as it seeks to press ahead with development of an air-launch system. In a statement Friday, the company said it had "transitioned ownership" after being owned since its founding in 2011 by Vulcan, the holding company of the late Paul Allen. Stratolaunch, though, declined to identify the new owner or the value of the transaction. Stratolaunch's future had been in question since Allen's death a year ago, and the company had made no public statements since the first and, to date, only test flight of its giant aircraft six months ago. Stratolaunch is hiring a number of people, including test pilots, as it moves flight operations in house after previously working with Scaled Composites.

Editor's Note: I that Mark Bitterman is a vice president of the renewed venture, having previously served as Stratolaunch's Senior Director for government relations. Mark is a veteran Government Relations official at multiple launch companies, including Orbital Sciences Corp. and ULA. (10/14)

SLS Debut Could Slip to 2021 (Source: Space News)
A NASA official said last week the first launch of the Space Launch System could slip to as late as the middle of 2021. In a conference presentation, Ken Bowersox, acting associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that while the current but "very aggressive" schedule for SLS calls for its launch in late 2020, it's "more likely that we will move out into 2021," possibly as late as the middle of 2021. A formal reassessment of the SLS schedule will wait until after NASA hires a new associate administrator, something NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine recently said is "weeks away." (10/14)

Contingency Buy: NASA Considers One More Soyuz Ride (Source: Space News)
NASA is considering the purchase of at least one more Soyuz seat from Russia as insurance against continued commercial crew delays. Both Bridenstine and Bowersox said last week that discussions are underway about ensuring a U.S. presence to the ISS after next September, when NASA's access to Soyuz seats under existing agreements runs out. Boeing and SpaceX say they expect to launch crewed test flights of their commercial crew vehicles to the ISS in the first quarter of 2020, but those programs have experienced significant delays and run the risk of more. Any agreement to buy additional seats may require Congress to extend an existing waiver of sanctions against Russia that runs out at the end of 2020. (10/14)

Boeing Reorganizes Top Positions (Source: New York Times)
Boeing's board has separated the positions of chairman and chief executive. The company announced late Friday that Dennis Muilenberg, who had been both CEO and chairman, would lose the latter title. David Calhoun, the lead independent board director, was named as the company's new chairman. The decision was made in response to criticism of the company for a lax safety culture after the crashes of two 737 Max airliners that has grounded the worldwide fleet of those planes for months. The board announced it would soon name a new director with "deep safety experience and expertise" to address safety concerns. (10/14)

Descartes Labs Raises $20 Million for Space Imagery Analytics (Source: Space News)
Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs raised an additional $20 million. The company announced the Series B-2 bridge funding round Friday, led by Union Grove Venture Partners with the participation of existing investors, bringing the total raised by the company to nearly $60 million. The company will use the new funding to pull in data from a diverse group of satellites to create Earth’s "digital twin" that gives customers access to "analysis-ready images of the entire world." (10/14)

Apollo Astronauts Weren’t Just Heroes—They Were Fantastic Photographers (Source: WIRED)
Ask people to name a seminal photographer and they'll probably say Ansel Adams. A few might suggest Dorothea Lange, and the really knowledgeable may offer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Fine photographers, all of them, but ask Dutch designer Simon Phillipson, and he'll start naming the 33 astronauts of the Apollo missions. To his mind, their work stands apart, because it expanded our understanding of what it is to be human, "to live on a delicate little orb circling the sun." Click here. (03/2017)