August 7, 2020

Pentagon Picks ULA and SpaceX for Major Launch Services Contract (Source: Space News)
The Pentagon has selected SpaceX and United Launch Alliance for contracts to launch national security satellites for the next five years. The two companies won National Security Space Launch Phase 2 awards, with ULA receiving 60% of the launches using its new Vulcan rocket and SpaceX 40% for its existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. The two companies beat out Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, which also submitted bids. (8/7)

Bezos Sells More Than $3 Billion in Amazon Shares, Blue Origin a Likely Beneficiary (Source: CNBC)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos this week has sold more than $3.1 billion worth of shares in his company, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The sales were part of a prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan, according to the filings. Earlier this year, Bezos sold more than $4.1 billion worth of shares in the company. The sales this week bring his total cash out in 2020 to slightly more than $7.2 billion so far. He still owns more than 54 million shares, worth more than $170 billion, making him the richest person in the world.

By way of comparison, Bezos sold $2.8 billion worth of shares in 2019. Bezos has previously said he’s selling about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. Amazon shares are up 73% for the year, including a 2.1% gain on Wednesday. (8/7)

Veteran Satellite Manufacturers Question Pricing Strategy of Newcomers (Source: Space News)
NanoAvionics, a relative newcomer in the small satellite business, is attracting orders thanks in part to low prices. For customers, “it’s never just price but it usually comes down to that in the end for selection,” said Brent Abbott, CEO of NanoAvionics US, part of the Lithuanian startup founded in 2014. “Our growth has been in expanding our share of the existing market based on low cost points, credibility in the market and experience on orbit.

Veteran manufacturers questioned that strategy during an Aug. 6 SpaceNews webinar and suggested customers to look beyond price tags. Customers shouldn’t simply buy the least expensive satellite, said Brian Rider, chief technology officer for LeoStella, a joint venture of Thales Alenia Space and Earth observation company BlackSky. “They need to be able to rely on that satellite to work,” Rider said. “They need to be able to get the efficiency and the capability out of it that is baked into their business models. If they don’t get that done it’s really just a loss of value from an operations perspective and from an infrastructure perspective.” (8/7)

Astronomers Use Breakthrough Radio Wave Method to Spot Exoplanet Around Wiggling Star (Source: Sputnik)
The newly tested method has proved to be a real milestone in the detection of exoplanets, currently the top priority endeavour undertaken by astronomers and astrophysicists. After more than a year of painstaking observations of a cool star, the red dwarf TVLM 513–46546, 35 light-years from Earth, astronomers have succeeded in catching a glimpse of a previously unseen Saturn-size exoplanet.

It is not, however, the object that is most remarkable in the endeavour but the method the scientists used to keep track of the movement of the star through the galaxy. In particular, they managed to register and record a wobble, or rather wiggling that is typical of the star’s pace affected by its circling exoplanets. The approach is called the astrometric technique, and this is the first time it's been successfully deployed using a radio telescope - the continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). (8/7)

Mysterious 'Fast Radio Burst' Detected Closer to Earth Than Ever Before (Source: Live Science)
Thirty thousand years ago, a dead star on the other side of the Milky Way belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy. On April 28, 2020, that belch swept over Earth, triggering alarms at observatories around the world. The signal was there and gone in half a second, but that's all scientists needed to confirm they had detected something remarkable: the first ever "fast radio burst" (FRB) to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way, according to a study published July 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Since their discovery in 2007, FRBs have puzzled scientists. The bursts of powerful radio waves last only a few milliseconds at most, but generate more energy in that time than Earth's sun does in a century. Scientists have yet to pin down what causes these blasts, but they've proposed everything from colliding black holes to the pulse of alien starships as possible explanations.  So far, every known FRB has originated from another galaxy, hundreds of millions of light-years away. (8/7)

NASA's IXPE Smallsat Mission Sees Delay From Pandemic (Source: Space News)
The launch of a NASA astrophysics smallsat mission will slip several months next year because of the pandemic. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission was scheduled to launch next May on a Falcon 9, but in a presentation at the Small Satellite Conference this week an engineer with Ball Aerospace, which is providing the spacecraft bus, said the launch is now scheduled for September. Delays shipping X-ray detectors from Italy and assembling mirror components at the Marshall Space Flight Center contributed to the delay. (8/7)

Competition Testing for Satellite Hacks (Source: WIRED)
Hackers will spend this weekend trying to break into a satellite from the comfort of their homes. The Hack-a-Sat competition, sponsored by the Air Force and Defense Digital Service, selected eight teams in May as finalists to first work on a set of challenges involving a "flat sat" in a lab. If successful, they will then attempt to take control of an unnamed satellite in orbit and direct it to take an image of the moon — "a literal moon shot," as Will Roper, the head of acquisition for the Air Force, put it. Because of the pandemic, members of the teams are working remotely rather than gathering in one location. (8/7)

NASA Considers More Diversity and Inclusion in Astronomical Naming (Source: NASA)
NASA will reexamine the nicknames it uses for some astronomical objects as part of diversity and inclusion efforts. The agency said this week that it will no longer use the name "Eskimo Nebula" for one object, planetary nebula NGC 2392, or the name "Siamese Twins Galaxy" for the galaxies NGC 4567 and NGC 4568. NASA said it will work with diversity, inclusion, and equity experts in the astronomical and physical sciences to identify other names that are considered insensitive or actively harmful. (8/7)

Black Holes Could Be Orbited by Planets (Source: Space.com)
The black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy might host thousands of planets. Astronomers argued in a recent paper that such planets would likely form from the dust disk surrounding the supermassive black hole, millions of the times the mass of the sun, in much the same way planets form in the protoplanetary disk around stars like the sun. Such planets, which astronomers called "blanets" in a paper, are more likely to form around smaller supermassive black holes like the one in our Milky Way, which are cool enough to allow ice-coated dust particles, a key element of planetary formation, to exist. (8/7)

SpaceX Launches 57 Starlink Satellites, Recovers Booster on Droneship, Misses Fairings (Source: Space News)
SpaceX launched another set of Starlink satellites, and two BlackSky imaging satellites, early this morning. The Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 1:12 a.m. Eastern and deployed the two BlackSky satellites a little more than an hour after liftoff, followed by 57 Starlink satellites a half-hour later. The rocket's first stage, making its fifth flight, landed on a droneship successfully, but SpaceX was unable to catch the two payload fairing halves. The launch had been delayed several times since late June, which SpaceX said was caused by weather and payload issues, and not problems with the rocket itself. (8/7)

SES Orders Four Satellites From Boeing (Source: Space News)
SES has ordered four more O3b mPower satellites from Boeing. The new high-throughput communications satellites join seven ordered by SES from Boeing in 2017 and are based on Boeing's new 702X series of software-defined satellites. Those satellites were expected to launch by the end of 2021 on a pair of SpaceX Falcon rockets, but current plans call for launching the first three late next year, six more in 2022,  and the final two in 2024. Each O3b mPower satellite will have the ability to beam 50 megabits to "multiple gigabits per second" to customers, according to Boeing. (8/7)

Maxar Doubts Win on Telesat Constellation Bid (Source: Space News)
Maxar no longer expects to win Telesat's competition to build a broadband satellite constellation. Maxar CEO Dan Jablonsky noted in an earnings call this week that Telesat has continued to delay a decision on selecting a manufacturer for a constellation of several hundred satellites, and that he no longer expects to win any business, at least initially, for the system. Maxar originally was cooperating with Thales Alenia Space to build the Telesat LEO satellites, but those companies went their separate ways in late 2019. Thales is now collaborating with Airbus Defence and Space. Telesat said last week it expects to make procurement and manufacturing announcements "in the coming months." (8/7)

Space Coast Provides Grants for Small Business During Pandemic (Source: Florida Today)
Brevard County is tripling its grant targeted to temporarily subsidize jobs for small businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. County commissioners voted Thursday night to increase its funding for the program to $2.25 million, up from the previously approved $750,000. The program is administered by CareerSource Brevard. The money comes from the $105.03 million federal allocation to Brevard County through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. Judy Blanchard, vice president of industry relations for CareerSource Brevard, said 160 companies applied for subsidies, under which up to 16 weeks of wages for a hired or rehired worker would be covered by a grant. (8/7)

RoscosmosTeases Names of Next Year's ISS Tourist Group Flight (Source: Sputnik)
Since 2001, only seven people have traveled into space as tourists with American company Space Adventures. The industry appears to be blossoming, however, as several other firms, including Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Zero2Infinity have announced plans to offer space jaunts. The Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that the names of two space tourists who will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) will be revealed in the beginning of 2021.

The upcoming flight with two tourists accompanied by one experienced cosmonaut should become the first in the space tourism history. Apart from announcing the 2021 tour under a contract with Space Adventures, Roscosmos said that negotiations are ongoing with other American companies to send tourists into space.

In 2019, NASA said it would make commercial flights to ISS available, using American spacecraft. According to reports, NASA is planning to use the SpaceX Dragon capsule and Boeing's Starliner orbital vehicle. In February 2020, Space Adventures announced plans to offer space tourists rides in the Space X Crew Dragon capsule. Trips could be capable of spending up to five days in a low-Earth orbit. As of now, every space tourist has traveled to orbit in a Russian-made Soyuz space vehicle, with the prices reportedly varying from $20-50 million dollars for each traveler. (8/7)