January 30, 2021

NASA, Rio De Janeiro Extend Disaster Preparedness Partnership (Source: Space Daily)
NASA and the city of Rio de Janeiro have extended an agreement to support innovative and collaborative efforts to better understand, anticipate, monitor and respond to natural hazards and other impacts affecting the city. The collaboration leverages the unique attributes of NASA's satellite data and modeling frameworks and Rio de Janeiro's management and monitoring capabilities to improve awareness of how the city may be impacted by hazards and affected by climate change. The original five-year agreement was signed in December 2015 and was designed to share data, models and scientific and management expertise. (1/28)

Roscosmos Reaches Agreements to Build Satellites for Several Countries (Source: TASS)
Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is planning to ink a number of contracts in 2021 to build satellites for other countries, agreements in principle have already been achieved with several states, Roscosmos Deputy General Director for International Cooperation Sergei Savelyev told TASS. According to him, Roscosmos expects to sign such contracts in 2021. "It is not just telecommunication spacecraft. Foreign companies also show great interest in spacecraft for remote sensing of Earth," he explained. (1/29)

Artificial Intelligence Behind 21st Century Spaceflight (Source: ESA)
ESA has just published the latest space environment numbers: some 28,210 debris objects big enough to damage or destroy a functioning satellite are up there. Clearly, it’s time to act. “The need to automate collision avoidance is just one example of how 21st Century spaceflight is dramatically increasing in complexity,” says Thomas Reiter, Interagency Coordinator and Advisor to the Director General at ESA.  “Artificial intelligence is becoming vital to handle this complexity, to operate, network, coordinate and protect our space infrastructure and to get the most out of the data acquired by our scientific satellite missions.”

To respond to this need, ESA and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) are establishing a new technology transfer lab located on the premises of DFKI in Kaiserslautern, Germany. On 27 January, the two organizations launched ‘ESA_Lab@DFKI’, a place to work together on AI systems for satellite autonomy, the interpretation of extensive, complex data delivered by missions, collision avoidance capabilities and many other applications. The lab will take advantage of DFKI’s proximity to ESA’s European Space Operations Center (ESOC), in Darmstadt, Germany, mission control for 22 ESA spacecraft and center for the Agency’s Space Safety Program, focussing on hazards posed by space debris, risky asteroids and space weather. (1/28)

NASA’s Past Tragedies Remind Workforce Of Human Spaceflight Risk (Source: WMFE)
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center hosted a day of remembrance Thursday honoring people who died while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery. The annual memorial pays tribute to those astronauts who died including three Apollo 1 astronauts, the seven crew members of Space Shuttle Challenger and seven astronauts of Columbia. As Kennedy Space Center returns to hosting human space launches, NASA leaders said remembering the tragedies of the past serves as a reminder of the risk of spaceflight.

“This year we will be launching astronaut crews on new vehicles, and many in our workforce today did not have first hand experiences with these tragedies,” said KSC deputy director Janet Petro. “Today serves as a reflection point where we pause and we share the lessons of the past with our workforce. Each tragedy involving life permanently changed NASA, and each anniversary is an opportunity to reflect with gratitude on the lives that were honorably given in pursuit of the goal to explore, learn and to discover.” (1/28)

Britain’s Launch Into the Space Race Looks Shaky (Source: The Economist)
During the second world war Lamba Ness (pictured) hosted a radar base with 150 people scanning the skies over the North Sea for enemy aircraft. Today, sheep and migratory geese graze around its remains. But crowds may once again look heavenward from this quiet spot on Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands. On January 18th the Shetlands Space Centre filed for planning permission to build Britain’s first space launch site there.

Britain has a sizeable satellite-building business, but its share of the global space industry has been shrinking. The government wants to reverse that decline—to which end it and its predecessors have spent more than half a billion pounds on space in the past decade. There have been investments in rocket propulsion and satellite testing. Seven launch sites are proposed. And the state now owns a 45% stake in OneWeb, which is building and launching a constellation of satellites. (1/28)

SpaceX is finalizing a Massive New Funding Round (Source: Business Insider)
SpaceX has already lined up more than enough investors for its next massive round of private funding. It's a deal that could close in February and skyrocket the company's valuation to at least $60 billion, according to three people who are familiar with the deal and known to Insider. These people said deal specifics were still being hammered out and that it was possible SpaceX's valuation could reach as much as $92 billion — double what it was valued at in its most recent funding round in August.

The company, founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, started taking commitments from investors toward the end of last year and allocated the majority of the round to investors by mid-January. But there has been so much interest that the company is still in the process of finalizing details, the sources said. One unknown is the exact number of shares the company will issue. That detail will determine the size of the round, meaning the total amount of money SpaceX will raise, as well as the new valuation of the company. (1/29)

The Space Force Wants a More Resilient Architecture (Source: C4ISRnet)
The Space Force’s chief portfolio architect says it needs a more resilient architecture, one that can continue to deliver critical space-based capabilities even if one or more satellites are disabled or destroyed. To get there, the service will need an architecture that is more distributed and maneuverable, with a larger focus on satellites operating in low Earth orbit, said Col. Russell “Russ” Teehan, portfolio director at the Space and Missile Systems Center. That’s a different approach for the U.S. military, which has traditionally built its space systems around a handful of very expensive, large satellites operating in geosynchronous orbit.

The change is driven by those systems’ vulnerability to anti-satellite weapons. The Pentagon’s most pervasive message in the establishment of the Space Force is that space is now a war fighting domain. Among other things, that means America can no longer assume that its satellites won’t be targeted, disabled or destroyed in any given conflict. The development and testing of various anti-satellite weapons by adversaries was the focus of several DoD reports and statements calling attention to the vulnerability of the nation’s satellites. (1/28)