November 30, 2020

Virgin Orbit Planning Second LauncherOne Mission for December (Source: Space News)
Virgin Orbit is preparing to perform a second flight of its LauncherOne small launch vehicle in the second half of December, carrying a set of NASA-sponsored cubesats. A Nov. 24 “Local Notice to Mariners” by the U.S. Coast Guard stated that Virgin Orbit “will conduct hazardous operations” offshore from San Nicolas Island, California, between Dec. 18 and 21. Those operations will take place during a four-hour window that opens at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The notice does not explicitly state that a launch will take place, but Virgin Orbit used the same language in a Coast Guard notice for its first orbital launch attempt in May. That earlier notice, which also cited “hazardous operations,” had the same four-hour window and location for the operations. The company has not announced a formal launch date yet, but has stated it intends to carry out a second launch before the end of the year. (11/27)

LIA Aerospace Plans Space Launches From Argentina (Source: LIA Aerospace)
We are making the small sat Launch Vehicle of the future. State of the art technology mixed with the right amount of creativity and smart choices make the best possible design to meet the expectations of the growing market of Launch Vehicles. We will take advantage of the earth's rotation by launching our rockets from the Argentine Atlantic Coast -specifically from Punta Indio, Bahía Blanca and Puerto Deseado-. It's also a strategic geographical location due to its low demographic density. All this adds up to reducing costs and launching times! Click here. (11/29)

FCC's Pai To Step Down On Inauguration Day (Source: Law360)
Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced Monday he will depart the agency on president-elect Joe Biden's inauguration day, ending his four-year chairmanship that saw a contentious deregulation of net neutrality policies as well as major crackdowns on illegal robocallers and Chinese telecom equipment. (11/30)

Seraphim Space Fund Backs New Forms of Intelligence, Adding Opteran to the Portfolio (Source: Seraphim)
A UK startup called Opteran is forging a paradigm shift in intelligence that is not based on today’s Deep Learning AI, which is simply sophisticated deterministic pattern matching. A hardware approach to address the limitations of today’s Deep Learning AI to empower smaller, lighter, ultra-low power, more accurate solutions that offer efficiency on the edge of the network – importantly without the training data required by AI.

Opteran is a neuromorphic computing spin-out from the University of Sheffield (UK) leveraging £7m in grant funding and 8 years of research to emulate the brain structures of a honey bee onto silicon chips to provide computer vision, object sensing/avoidance, and ultimately autonomy for machines. The company is a graduate of Seraphim Space Camp #5, building a strong syndicate of investors alongside Seraphim Space Fund including IQ Capital, Join Capital and Episode 1 Ventures. (11/27)

The Solar Discs That Could Power Earth (Source: BBC)
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, so there’s a lot at stake. From rising global temperatures to shifting weather patterns, the impacts of climate change are already being felt around the globe. Overcoming this challenge will require radical changes to how we generate and consume energy. Renewable energy technologies have developed drastically in recent years, with improved efficiency and lower cost. But one major barrier to their uptake is the fact that they don’t provide a constant supply of energy.

Wind and solar farms only produce energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining – but we need electricity around the clock, every day. Ultimately, we need a way to store energy on a large scale before we can make the switch to renewable sources. A possible way around this would be to generate solar energy in space. There are many advantages to this. A space-based solar power station could orbit to face the Sun 24 hours a day. The Earth’s atmosphere also absorbs and reflects some of the Sun’s light, so solar cells above the atmosphere will receive more sunlight and produce more energy. (11/26)

Smallsat Market More Than Quadruples in the 2020s, Euroconsult Finds (Source: SpaceWatch)
The market for small satellites is growing exponentially in the next decade, the latest Euroconsult smallsat report found. In its “Prospects for the Small Satellite Market”, Euroconsult forecasts that two mega-constellations will account for half of the smallsats to be launched between 2020 and 2029, yet only for one fifth of the total smallsat market value due to economies of scale, mass manufacturing and batch launches.

The 2020s are predicted to be the decade of small satellites with an annual average of 1,000 smallsats to be launched, Euroconsult said. In 2019, the number of smallsat launches amounted to 385, generating a market value of $2.8 billion, the study found, of which 70 percent was for the manufacturing and 30 percent for the launches. (11/30)

Aerion Supersonic Partners with Spire Global on Weather Intelligence (Source: Aerion)
Aerion Supersonic, the leader in supersonic technology, and Spire Global, Inc., a space-powered Earth information company, today announced a collaboration to support Aerion’s Boomless CruiseTM technology for the AS2, the first-ever privately built supersonic commercial aircraft. Aerion will use Spire Data and forecasting capabilities to facilitate the AS2 flying supersonically without delivering a sonic boom to ground level. In addition, Spire technology will also enable significant reduction in unwanted high-altitude contrails. (11/23)

Nüwa, the Design for a Self-Sustaining City on Mars (Source: InHabitat)
As part of scientific work for a competition organized by the Mars Society, an American non-profit dedicated to exploring the Red Planet, architecture firm Abiboo has unveiled design concepts for a sustainable city on Mars. The project, called Nüwa, ranked as a finalist among 175 projects submitted from around the world for the 2020 competition. Click here. (11/23)

Weather Delays Soyuz Launch From French Guiana (Source: Arianespace)
Weather has delayed a Soyuz launch from French Guiana. Controllers scrubbed a launch attempt Sunday night of the Soyuz 2 rocket minutes before its scheduled liftoff, citing lightning in the area. Weather concerns also postponed a launch attempt Saturday. Arianespace said the launch is now scheduled for no earlier than 8:33 p.m. Eastern tonight. The rocket is carrying the Falcon Eye 2 imaging satellite for the United Arab Emirates. (11/30)

Axelspace Developing Four Satellites for Earth Observation (Source: Space News)
Earth observation company Axelspace plans to launch four satellites early next year. The company said the four satellites will launch on a Soyuz-2 rocket in March from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, joining the company's first satellite, launched in 2018. The satellites provide medium-resolution imagery for customers seeking to detect changes in agricultural fields and forests in addition to tracking economic trends and conducting environment monitoring. (11/30)

Russia: Indian Satellite Nearly Impacts Russian Satellite (Source: India Today)
Russia claimed an Indian satellite passed dangerously close to one of its own last week. Roscosmos said Friday that India's Cartosat-2F satellite passed within 224 meters of Russia's Kanopus-V satellite. Both are Earth imaging satellites in sun-synchronous orbits. The Indian space agency ISRO disputed that claim, stating that by their calculations the two satellites came no closer than 420 meters. ISRO would have performed a collision avoidance maneuver had the satellites been predicted to come within 150 meters of each other. (11/30)

Canada Working with NASA on Lunar Payloads (Source: Space News)
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is working with NASA to fly payloads, including a small rover, to the moon. CSA announced Friday it selected six proposals for lunar science payloads for initial feasibility studies. The agency is also preparing to seek proposals for the development of a 30-kilogram rover that would fly to the moon on a NASA-sponsored commercial lander mission in the mid-2020s, carrying both NASA and CSA payloads. The efforts are part of a five-year Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program to support lunar science and technology development, in addition to the country's development of a robotic arm for the lunar Gateway. (11/30)

Earth May Have Captured a 1960s-Era Rocket Booster (Source: NASA)
Earth has captured a tiny object from its orbit around the Sun and will keep it as a temporary satellite for a few months before it escapes back to a solar orbit. But the object is likely not an asteroid; it's probably the Centaur upper stage rocket booster that helped lift NASA's ill-fated Surveyor 2 spacecraft toward the Moon in 1966. This story of celestial catch-and-release begins with the detection of an unknown object by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope on Maui in September.

Astronomers at Pan-STARRS noticed that this object followed a slight but distinctly curved path in the sky, which is a sign of its proximity to Earth. The apparent curvature is caused by the rotation of the observer around Earth's axis as our planet spins. Assumed to be an asteroid orbiting the Sun, the object was given a standard designation by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts: 2020 SO. But scientists at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA JPL saw the object's orbit and suspected it was not a normal asteroid. (11/12)