October 9, 2019

GEOshare Says ‘Mondo Condo’ Satellite Drawing Interest From Prospective Tenants (Source: Space News)
Commercial operators have been known to share satellites, splitting the costs of building and launching a big geostationary comsat, like Kacifc and Sky Perfect JSAT did when they ordered a Boeing 702 due to launch this year. GEOshare is trying to build on that willingness to double up by building satellites that would house communications payloads for up to five operators.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, GEOShare is working to aggregate customers on a single Lockheed Martin LM2100 bus that would supply between 250 and 500 gigabits of total capacity. “People would share a very-high-throughput satellite with separate beams serving different areas, but as a result of the economics, they will be able to get a very low gigabit-per-second [price],” GEOshare CEO Lon Levin said an interview ahead of the Satellite Innovation conference. (10/9)

How to Estimate the Number of Aliens in the Milky Way (Source: Medium)
The so-called Drake equation is a probabilistic argument purposed to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. Subject to the assumptions that give rise to these variables, estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy have ranged widely from as low as 0.000000000091 (we are probably alone in our galaxy) to as high as 15,600,000 (our galaxy is populated by millions of intelligent civilizations). The following animation eloquently explains the factors that go into the estimation. Click here. (10/6) https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/how-to-estimate-the-number-of-aliens-in-the-milky-way-3e9a43c17a5

SpaceX Plans First Polar Launch From Florida Spaceport (Source: SPACErePORT)
Argentina's SAOCOM 1B satellite, originally planned for launch by SpaceX from California into a polar orbit, will instead be launched from Florida. The mission will be the first to use a new Southern Polar Corridor for high-inclination/polar launches from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, enabled by the Falcon-9 rocket's use of an automated flight termination system. Such missions were previously prohibited due to safety concerns from flight over populated areas downrange.

Florida typically hosts lower inclination and equatorial launches. The ability to conduct polar launches from Cape Canaveral could allow companies like SpaceX to cut costs associated with the deployment of personnel to other spaceports. (10/9)

Deep Space Systems Loses Protest Over NASA CLPS Lunar Contracts (Sources: Law360, Parabolic Arc)
The Government Accountability Office has denied a Colorado-based company’s protest over a $77 million lunar delivery task order awarded to a Houston contractor, ruling that NASA had reasonably analyzed whether a competitor's proposed prices were realistic. Deep Space Systems filed the protest over NASA’s decision to award Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts to three rival companies. On May 31, NASA awarded contracts worth $253.5 million to Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond to carry up to 23 payloads to the moon on three commercial missions scheduled for launch between September 2020 and July 2021. (10/8)

Russian Proton Launches Commercial Satellites, Including US Satellite Servicer (Source: Space News)
A Proton rocket lifted off this morning carrying two commercial satellites. The Proton launched on schedule at 6:18 a.m. Eastern from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The rocket's Breeze M upper stage will deploy the two spacecraft it is carrying, Eutelsat 5 West B and Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) 1, nearly 16 hours after liftoff, placing them into supersynchronous transfer orbits. Eutelsat 5 West B is a communications satellite built by Northrop Grumman for Eutelsat, while MEV-1 is a satellite life extension spacecraft for Northrop's subsidiary SpaceLogistics. (10/9)

SpaceX Plans Rideshare Launch On Schedule Regardles of Late Payloads (Source: Space News)
SpaceX says it will launch its smallsat rideshare missions on a set schedule even if the missions are not full. Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX, said at a conference Tuesday that the launch provider learned the importance of setting firm departure dates from the experience of Spaceflight's SSO-A mission that launched 64 smallsats on a Falcon 9 nearly a year ago. Ochinero said the company understood the challenges of getting all the payloads together for that mission, and when it begins its own regular series of Falcon 9 rideshare missions it will launch them on schedule even if the rocket is not full. (10/9)

SpaceX Plans Commercial Crew Test Flights Before 2020 (Source: Ars Technica)
SpaceX hopes to have all the hardware in place for its commercial crew test flights by the end of the year. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday that he believed all the testing needed to fly the crewed Demo-2 mission should be done by December, with the vehicles to fly that mission in Florida by then. Musk said an in-flight abort test, where a Dragon spacecraft will launch on a Falcon 9 and jettison itself from the booster, should be ready to go in late November or early December. Delays by both SpaceX and Boeing have raised concerns about NASA's access to the ISS once its existing Soyuz seats run out in the fall of 2020. (10/9)

Smallsat Launch Market Evolves (Source: Space News)
The smallsat launch market is changing in both the types of satellites being launched and the orbits they want to fly to. Philip Bracken, engineering director at Spaceflight, said Tuesday that his company is seeing increasing demand from "decent size" microsatellites, weighing 150 kilograms or more, and not just more cubesats. Besides low Earth orbit, he said his company is finding increasing interest in smallsat missions to geostationary orbit and even to the moon. (10/9)

Boeing-Owned Millennium Space Systems Eyes Growth with Government Smallsats (Source: Space News)
A smallsat developer now owned by Boeing plans to focus on government customers. Millennium Space Systems wants to grow its government business and is especially enthusiastic about opportunities in NASA science missions, company CEO Stan Dubyn said Tuesday. Dubyn founded Millennium Space in 2001, and Boeing acquired the company a year ago. Dubyn said Millennium Space currently has 15 satellite orders on its books, and seven spacecraft in various stages of integration, with the Air Force as its biggest customer. He said the company has looked at doing business with the commercial sector, but "I do not find it compelling." (10/9)

UCF and Purdue Football Teams Sport Space Themed Uniforms (Source: Lafayette Journal & Courier)
Football fans at Purdue University and the University of Central Florida (UCF) are in heated debates — about space-themed uniforms. Purdue recently announced that, at its game this Saturday against Maryland, it will wear all-white uniforms meant to mimic astronaut suits, with a lunar landscape printed on the "P" logo on their helmets. UCF fans countered that Purdue was simply copying what their university did in the last two seasons in uniforms for a "Space Game" that they plan to reprise later this season. The two teams, unfortunately, won't be able to settle this debate on the field, as they're not scheduled to play each other for the foreseeable future. (10/9)

Astronomers Win Nobel Prize (Source: Nobel Prize)
Three astronomers will share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for two different discoveries. Half of the prize will go to James Peebles, an astronomer at Princeton University, for his research in cosmology, including models of the universe that conclude that it is made primarily of dark energy and dark matter. Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva will share the other half of the prize for their discovery in 1995 of the first exoplanets around sun-like stars, starting a new era in the study of planets outside our solar system. (10/8)

Kepler Communications to Launch Two Sats on Soyuz (Source: Space News)
Kepler Communications will launch the first two operational satellites on a Soyuz next year. The Canadian company announced Monday that the two 6U cubesats will launch as rideshares on a Soyuz rocket operated by GK Launch Services in mid-2020. The company is developing a 140-satellite constellation to provide Internet-of-Things connectivity. The company is reconfiguring its constellation plans after SpaceX said it would place its Starlink satellites in a similar orbit, shifting its satellites in order to avoid potential close approaches and signal interference. (10/8)

NASA Seeks Proposals for Supporting Commercial Space Stations (Source: Space News)
NASA has issued a draft call for proposals to support development of commercial space stations. The draft solicitation, part of NASA's NextSTEP program, would fund initial studies of commercial space stations and potentially offer additional support for their development. That effort is part of NASA's broader low Earth orbit commercialization strategy, which also includes adding commercial modules to the International Space Station. At a conference panel Monday, former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called on industry to step up the development and use of commercial space stations, citing the limited lifetime for the ISS. (10/8)

Canada Likely to Provide Robotic Arm for Gateway (Source: SpaceQ)
Canada is likely to retain its commitment to providing a robotic arm for NASA's lunar Gateway even if there is a change in government this month. A member of parliament from the Conservative Party said at a recent event that if the party wins the federal election in Canada later this month it would likely honor the announcement made by the ruling Liberal Party early this year to develop the Canadarm3 as its contribution to the Gateway. A Conservative government would also push for space-related regulatory reform. (10/8)

Sea Launch Ships Readied for Permanent Departure From California Port (Source: Sputnik)
The Sea Launch ships may soon depart California. A Russian industry source said that preparations are underway to move the command ship and mobile launch platform from the Port of Long Beach, which has served as the home port for the vessels since the venture's inception more than 20 years ago, to the Russian Far East. Sea Launch started as a multinational venture, but was eventually sold to Russia's S7 Group and hasn't performed a launch in five years. (10/8)

NASA Astronaut Wins Russian Government Honor (Source: TASS)
NASA astronaut Nick Hague will receive an award from Russian President Vladimir Putin. A decree signed by Putin Tuesday awards the country's Order of Courage to Hague "for courage and high professionalism" during the aborted Soyuz launch to the ISS a year ago. Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were unhurt when their Soyuz spacecraft aborted its malfunctioning rocket and landed downrange of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The two launched to the station successfully earlier this year and returned from orbit just last week. (10/8)

Astronomers Find More Saturn Moons (Source: Space.com)
Astronomers have discovered 20 moons orbiting Saturn. The discovery, announced Monday, is based on images from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. The moons are no larger than five kilometers across, and 17 are in retrograde orbits that go in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation. The discoveries bring the total number of known moons of Saturn to 82, three more than Jupiter. (10/8)

Boeing Invests in Human Spaceflight Pioneer Virgin Galactic (Source: Boeing)
Boeing is investing $20 million in Virgin Galactic, a vertically integrated human spaceflight company. The companies will work together to broaden commercial space access and transform global travel technologies. "Boeing's strategic investment facilitates our effort to drive the commercialization of space and broaden consumer access to safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible new forms of transportation," said Brian Schettler, senior managing director of Boeing HorizonX Ventures. "Our work with Virgin Galactic, and others, will help unlock the future of space travel and high-speed mobility." (10/8)