October 6, 2020

Virgin Orbit Has a Unique Launch Capability, But it’s Come at a High Price (Source: Ars Technica)
Virgin Orbit stands among more than a dozen well funded, credible ventures in the US and abroad seeking to develop reasonably priced rockets capable of delivering small satellites into orbit. The challenge for Dan Hart and his company is that one of the enabling features of this new generation of smallsat launchers is their low price. These new companies, of which Rocket Lab has been the first and only competitor to reach orbit, are promising makers of small satellites timely and low-cost rides to precise orbits. To accomplish this, they must be able to build their rockets for less and run a lean operation.

As Virgin Orbit drives toward its second launch attempt late in 2020, it is not clear whether the company will be able to pull this off. Virgin Orbit has not revealed how much it has spent to date, but industry officials estimate it has expended between $500 million to $700 million developing LauncherOne and the infrastructure to support it. A lot of this money has been spent on building a large, capable team. The company says it has 575 employees now as it seeks to reach orbit and build multiple rockets for subsequent flights. By industry standards, it's a relatively large team.

“The way to keep your cost in check is to keep your team size reasonably small,” said Rob Meyerson, who served as president of Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017 before founding a consulting business, Delalune Space. “The years add up, and 575 people is a lot for building a small launch vehicle.” Sources for this article unanimously agreed that spending one-half to three-quarters of a billion dollars to reach an initial launch attempt represents an outsized amount of money for a purely commercial company. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said his company spent nearly $100 million getting its Electron rocket into space. (10/6)

Mars Ain’t the Kind of Place to Take Your Kid: Netflix’s “Away” (Source: Space Review)
The new Netflix series “Away” is about the first human mission to Mars. Or rather, as Dwayne Day describes, it’s more like a Lifetime movie in space, one where the Red Planet gets little more than a cameo. Click here. (10/5)
 
Battle of the Titans (Source: Space Review)
Around the time the Air Force was moving ahead with what would become the Titan IV, it was making plans to bring back another Titan vehicle. Wayne Eleazer examines how converting the Titan II from ICBMs to space launch vehicles turned out to be more expensive than promised. Click here. (10/5)
 
Commercial Space, and Space Commercialization, Weather the Pandemic (Source: Space Review)
While the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has severely hurt many industries, space has avoided the worst of those effects. Jeff Foust reports on how the industry has fared, including how new initiatives have continued amid the crisis. Click here. (10/5)
 
Why Addressing the Environmental Crisis Should be the Space Industry’s Top Priority (Source: Space Review)
The theme of World Space Week, being celebrated this week, is “Satellites Improve Life”. Loïs Miraux argues that the space industry will have to adapt to remain relevant in a future where climate change and other environmental issues play an increasingly central role. Click here. (10/5)

Constellationizing Space: Chinese Company Seeks Approval to Launch Nearly 13,000 Satellites (Source: Parabolic Arc)
A Chinese company named GW has filed for spectrum allocation from the International Telecommunication Union for two broadband constellations called GW-A59 and GW-2 that would include 12,992 satellites. The size of GW’s request indicates that the company would compete globally with broadband constellations being built by SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon.

Two other Chinese constellations designed largely for domestic use. The Hongyun constellation would include 864 satellites to provide service to that country’s remote regions. The Hongyan constellation of 320 spacecraft would focus on providing communications services for maritime, aviation and other sectors. One thing is clear: there will be a lot of satellites in orbit. The rush to constellationize space comes at a time when there are growing concerns about space debris. There are no international standards on how to clean up the debris that is already there or avoid creating more of it. (10/6)

775 Starlink Satellites Deployed After SpaceX Launches 60 More, Booster and Fairings Recovered (Source: Space News)
SpaceX launched a new batch of Starlink satellites this morning as it deorbits some of the original spacecraft in the constellation. A Falcon 9 lifted off at 7:29 a.m. Eastern from the Kennedy Space Center, deploying the 60 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit 61 minutes later. The rocket's first stage landed on a droneship while one of two payload fairing halves was caught by a ship. SpaceX has now launched 775 Starlink satellites, although a majority of 60 "v0.9" satellites launched in May 2019 have deorbited, mostly in the last two months. SpaceX hasn't disclosed why it is deorbiting them, but rejected claims by other companies that the satellites have failed. (10/6)

L3Harris and SpaceX to Develop DoD Missile Tracking Satellites (Source: Space News)
L3Harris and SpaceX won contracts Monday from the Space Development Agency (SDA) to build an initial set of missile tracking satellites. The contracts, valued at $193.5 million for L3Harris and $149 million to SpaceX, fund development of four satellites by each company to be delivered by September 2022. Each satellite will have a "wide field of view" overhead persistent infrared sensor (OPIR) capable of detecting and tracking advanced missile threats from low Earth orbit. Each satellite also will have an optical crosslink so it can transfer data to relay satellites. SpaceX proposed a new satellite design that is based on its Starlink bus, with a subcontractor supplying the OPIR sensor. L3Harris will develop both the satellite and sensor in-house. The satellites are the first in a potentially much larger SDA constellation of sensor satellites known as Tracking Layer Tranche 0. (10/6)

UAE Building Lunar Rover for 2024 (Source: Space News)
The UAE is building a small lunar rover it plans to send to the moon in 2024. The Emirates Lunar Mission will be a 10-kilogram rover equipped with a suite of scientific and technology demonstration payloads. Project officials said they will not build a lunar lander, instead striking a deal with either another space agency or company to carry the rover to the moon on their lander. The rover mission will leverage the experience built up in the UAE through a series of Earth observation missions and its Hope Mars orbiter, with future lunar rover missions also under consideration. (10/6)

ExoTerra to Build Virgin Orbit Upper Stage (Source: Space News)
ExoTerra will build an upper stage for Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne for missions going beyond low Earth orbit. ExoTerra said it received a NASA Small Business Innovative Research award to support development of the solar-electric stage that could transport payloads from LEO to geostationary orbit, the moon and beyond. The stage will use a Hall Effect electric thruster developed by ExoTerra using technology licensed from JPL. The companies didn't disclose when the stage would be ready for missions, but Virgin Orbit said it's seen "robust demand" from potential customers interested in using LauncherOne for missions beyond LEO. (10/6)

Russia Plans $880 Million Investment in Reusable Rocket Similar to Falcon-9 (Source: TASS)
Russia is planning to spend $880 million on the development of a rocket seeking to compete with the Falcon 9. The Amur rocket, to be developed by the Progress Space Rocket Center under a contract with Roscosmos, will use a methane/liquid oxygen propulsion system, with a first stage intended to land like the Falcon 9. Roscosmos claims that the rocket will be able to launch medium-class payloads for $22 million, with a first launch no earlier than 2026. (10/6)

Canada Funds Earth Observation Studies (Source: SpaceQ)
Eight companies have won Earth observation study contracts from the Canadian Space Agency. The awards, each worth about $435,000, will study concepts for future Canadian Earth observation systems that would succeed the Radarsat Constellation Mission currently in operation. The winning companies include Airbus, MDA and UrtheCast. (10/6)

NASA Inches Closer to Green Run Test (Source: NASA)
NASA is one step closer to the Green Run hotfire test of the Space Launch System core stage. NASA said Monday it completed a practice countdown for the hotfire test, covering the powering up of the stage through the final minutes before ignition. That simulation was the sixth of eight milestones in the overall Green Run testing campaign, with the final two being a wet dress rehearsal, where the core stage is fueled, and then the hotfire test itself. (10/6)

Black Hole Scientists Win Nobel Phisics Prizes (Source: Physics World)
The Nobel Prize in physics went Tuesday to three astrophysicists for their study of black holes. Roger Penrose, an Oxford University professor, received half the prize for his theoretical studies of how black holes were a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity. Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute and Andrea Ghez of UCLA will share the other half for their discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Ghez is just the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics. (10/6)

Space Force Fears COVID Loss Of Commercial Startups (Source: Breaking Defense)
Financial instability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening the space supply chain, especially commercial startups that DoD has been counting on to bring both innovation and cost savings to future Space Force modernization efforts, frets Gen. DT Thompson, the newly confirmed vice chief of space operations. “While we don’t expect to be anchor tenants, we can commit to being a part of a business base, [but] a lot of the rest of the business basis dried up as a result of the contractions that have occurred in the face of COVID."

"I’m very concerned about especially those small innovative companies,” said Thompson. “I thought, you know, let’s say a year ago today, we were potentially on the cusp of an explosion in terms of what I’ll call opportunities presented by the creativity and the energy and the ingenuity in the commercial space mark,” Thompson explained. But now, that is in danger of slipping away — and DoD has yet to figure out how to help. “I’m not sure yet if we figured out a way to ensure part of that will survive. If we do, it will serve us greatly. If not it may take us years to recover, back to the point where I think we were prior,” he lamented Thompson. (10/1)

NASA Contract Termination Presents Key Bid Protest Lessons (Source: Law360)
The U.S. Government Accountability Office's recent decision requiring NASA to re-award the Marshall Space Flight Center's MOSSI operations services contract, citing conflict of interest, illustrates the difference between protests alleging specific bad faith actions and those alleging behavior that casts a cloud over procurement integrity regardless of motive, say attorneys Andrew Shipley and Philip Beshara. (10/1)

Russian Cosmonauts to Test New System for Extracting Water from Urine on ISS (Source: Sputnik)
The urine-reclaming system helps decrease the amount of water that needs to be shipped to the ISS via cargo spacecraft. Russian cosmonauts on board of the International Space Station are getting ready to test the effectiveness of a new experimental water recycling system. The new piece of equipment, designated SRV-U-RS and installed in the Rassvet module of the station, allows extracting water from humane urine, to be used for drinking.

As Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner explained on Twitter, as part of the experiment called "Separatsia" (Separation), they "put a bucket of distilled water from the urine regeneration system into condensed water regeneration system which will regenerate into potable water". The urine recycling technology helps decrease the amount of water that needs to be shipped to the ISS via cargo spacecraft; the tech itself is hardly a novelty, and the American module of the station also features a device for reclaiming water from urine. (10/5)