November 9, 2020

NASA Chief Plans To Step Aside Under Biden (Source: Aviation Week)
Even if asked by the President-elect Biden administration, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine told Aerospace DAILY he would pass on staying on as head of the U.S. space agency, not for partisan reasons but to ensure that, politically, NASA has the best chance of thriving under new leadership. “The right question here is ‘What’s in the best interest of NASA as an agency, and what’s in the best interest of America's exploration program?’ Bridenstine said on Nov.  8, the day after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“For that, what you need is somebody who has a close relationship with the president of the United States. You need somebody who is trusted by the administration…. including the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), the National Space Council and the National Security Council, and I think that I would not be the right person for that in a new administration,” Bridenstine said. (11/8)

L3Harris, Raytheon, and BAE Win Contracts for DoD GPS Receivers (Source: Space News)
Three companies won more than $500 million in contracts to develop electronics for GPS military receivers. Raytheon Technologies, L3Harris' Interstate Electronics Corp. and BAE Systems collectively received $552.5 million in contracts Friday from the U.S. Space Force Space and Missile Systems Center for circuit cards known as MGUE Inc 2 MSI ASIC. The new generation of military GPS circuit cards are low power and about the size of a silver dollar, and compatible with a secure military signal broadcast by GPS satellites. (11/9)

SpaceX Gets Canadian Approval for Starlink Service (Source: Canadian Press)
SpaceX has secured approval from the Canadian government to provide Starlink services in the country. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada announced Friday it approved SpaceX's application to offer broadband internet access with Starlink, weeks after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission provided its own approval. SpaceX did not announce when service in Canada would begin, but the company has started beta testing the service in parts of the northern U.S. and previously said the beta test would also include southern Canada. (11/9)

Another Cable Snaps at Arecibo (Source: WMFE)
The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has sustained additional damage. The University of Central Florida, which operates the observatory for the National Science Foundation, said a second support cable snapped Friday night, three months after a cable came loose from a tower and fell to the dish, damaging it. The latest incident caused additional damage to the dish and other structures. Engineers are still investigating what caused the first cable to break. (11/9)

China's Plans for Reusable Rocket Include 2025 Capability (Source: Space News)
China's main space contractor is working on reusable launch vehicles. Wu Yansheng, a senior official with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), said the country will have a launch vehicle capable of vertical takeoff and landing by 2025. CASC is working on reusable versions of the new Long March 8 and existing Long March 6, which may include the aerial recovery of stages. Chinese launch startups are also pursuing reusability, and could beat CASC. (11/9)

SLS Green Run May Move to December (Source: Space News)
The Green Run test of NASA's Space Launch System is facing another delay. NASA announced late Friday that a combination of issues linked to the passage of Hurricane Zeta near the Stennis Space Center last month, as well as a technical issue with the SLS core stage, will delay the final phases of the Green Run test campaign. NASA and prime contractor Boeing said last month they were planning a hotfire test, the final milestone in the Green Run effort, in mid-November. NASA now says it expects that test to take place by the end of the year, but was not more specific. (11/9)

Space Watchers Anticipate Biden-Harris Transition (Source: NASA Watch)
One of the top priorities listed by the Biden-Harris Transition Team is Climate Change . While climate science/ Earth science is not explicitly mentioned, understanding how our planet's climate is changing is at the top of the list of science priorities for agencies such as NASA and NOAA. And the Biden folks like to use that word "science". How the Transition Team conducts itself will be guided by a Code of Ethical Conduct and Ethics Plan. We'll just have to wait and see if the Trump Administration allows a professional level of cooperation during the transition - or not.

Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016 they had a team with tickets to place them at National Airport on the day after election day and had planned to wrap up their activities by Thanksgiving 2016.

The Trump Transition Team was a mess. They had not expected to win so they stumbled around when they did. Eventually a bunch of people - many of them from the campaign - were part of a "landing Party" that parachuted into NASA. None of them had a plan. In short order they started to compete internally and stab each other in the back. Then, one after another, they were ejected from NASA. To his credit Robert Lightfoot held things together until Jim Bridenstine arrived. (11/9)

Satellogic Touts High Res Imagery Throughput with Growing Constellation (Source: Space News)
Satellogic says its latest high-resolution imaging satellites will put it ahead of other companies. Ten of its ÑuSat satellites launched last week on a Chinese rocket, and the Argentine company now has 21 satellites in orbit, 14 of which produce high-resolution imagery. The company argues it can now produce more imagery per day than competitors like Maxar and Planet. The company says there is strong demand for such imagery, particularly from government agencies. Satellogic plans to add more satellites to its constellation through a series of SpaceX rideshare launches. (11/9)

Virgin Galactic Says Each Spaceport it Launches From is a $1 Billion Annual Revenue Opportunity (Source: CNBC)
Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said he sees the company bringing in as much as $1 billion in annual revenue per spaceport in the years ahead. “To reach this objective, we are embarking on a multi-year effort that will lead to flights not once a month, or even once a week – but targets flying 400 flights per year per spaceport,” Colglazier said while discussing the company’s third quarter results on Thursday.

A daily launch tempo is years away still for Virgin Galactic, with the company having flown two spaceflights in the past two years and planning to fly two more test flights in the coming months before it flies founder Richard Branson. UBS analyst Myles Walton highlighted that $1 billion in annual revenue and 400 flights per year implies a ticket price of about $400,000 for Virgin Galactic flights. (11/6)

Clay Subsoil at Earth's Driest Place May Signal Life on Mars (Source: Space Daily)
Earth's most arid desert may hold a key to finding life on Mars. Diverse microbes discovered in the clay-rich, shallow soil layers in Chile's dry Atacama Desert suggest that similar deposits below the Martian surface may contain microorganisms, which could be easily found by future rover missions or landing craft. Scientists now offer a planetary primer to identifying microbial markers on shallow rover digs in Martian clay. In that dry environment at Atacama, the scientists found layers of wet clay about a foot below the surface. (11/6)

Sen. Cantwell Wants More Accurate Timeline for Artemis Lunar Ambitions (Source: Space News)
A key senator said she had her doubts about the goal of a 2024 human return to the moon. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a speech Friday that while there was broad support for Artemis in general, there were questions about the 2024 target date, noting it would require "an enormous amount of resources." She called for NASA to provide "an accurate timeframe" for achieving humans on the moon. Cantwell also said that she will continue to push for passage of a NASA authorization bill during a lame-duck session of Congress, and if that is not possible seek passage of a similar bill early next year by the next Congress. (11/9)

Raytheon Joins Airbus in Protesting Missile Tracking Contracts to L3Harris and SpaceX (Source: Space News)
Airbus and Raytheon are protesting Space Development Agency (SDA) awards of missile-tracking satellite contracts to L3Harris and SpaceX. Airbus said that a debrief after last month's awards "identified concerns about the government's evaluation process" that prompted it to file a protest with the GAO. Raytheon declined to comment on its protest. L3Harris and SpaceX received contracts worth $193.5 million and $149 million, respectively, to build four satellites each for what SDA calls Tracking Layer Tranche 0. It's not clear what impact these protests could have on the program's schedule. (11/9)

China's Galactic Energy Launches First Orbital Mission (Source: Space News)
A Chinese startup carried out its first orbital launch Saturday. The Ceres-1 four-stage solid rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 2:12 a.m. Eastern and placed the 50-kilogram Tianqi-11 satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit. The launch was the first by Galactic Energy, one of several nominally private Chinese companies working on small launch vehicles. The company raised a $30 million Series A round earlier in the week, and $43 million since its founding in 2018. (11/9)

Next ISS Crew Astronauts Arrive at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
The astronauts flying on the Crew-1 commercial crew mission arrived at the Kennedy Space Center Sunday. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will make final preparations for their launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled for Nov. 14. Weather could be an issue, though, as Tropical Storm Eta passed over South Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. Poor weather led SpaceX to delay a static-fire test of the Falcon 9 first stage by a day, to Tuesday, although the launch remains scheduled for Saturday. (11/9)

Could Astronauts Grow Plants in Soil? (Source: Washington Post)
Thirty-six vials of soil will be kept at the International Space Station (ISS). After 30 days, the soils will be frozen until they can be sent home December 29. "We’re trying to understand how the microorganisms in soils react in a microgravity environment,” Morgan Irons says. NASA has already experimented with growing plants in space hydroponically — in water,without soil. Astronauts have experimented with growing them in clay “pillows” and in a special kind of gel. But this is the first time research is being done on whether they could be grown with natural soil taken from our own environments. (11/9)

Meet Launcher, the Rocket Engine Bbuilder with Just Eight Employees (Source: Ars Technica)
Max Haot is not your typical rocket scientist, and Launcher is not your typical rocket company. To be fair, Haot really isn't a rocket scientist at all. He's more of a video and technology guy. Haot did not start Launcher in March 2017 with the intent of madly racing toward the launch pad as quickly as possible, as Elon Musk had done with SpaceX and other companies were trying to do. He didn't have that kind of money. Rather, he would keep his company small—really small—to keep expenses low and use additive manufacturing where possible. He had a ten-year plan to reach profitability. And he has stuck to that.

The Brooklyn, New York-based company has just eight US employees, along with another 10 people in Ukraine helping with design work. The first step of Haot's plan is developing a rocket engine with 22,000 pounds of thrust. This would not be a super-powerful engine, but this "Engine-2" would have nearly four times the thrust of the Rutherford engines that power Rocket Lab's Electron booster. Haot set a goal of developing and testing this engine within four years—and for $10 million or less. (11/9)