November 23, 2023

China’s Landspace Aims to Build a Stainless Steel Rocket (Source: Space News)
Chinese launch startup Landspace has unveiled plans to develop a reusable stainless steel rocket. The Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird 3) will use stainless propellant tanks and clusters of Tianque methane-liquid oxygen propellant rocket engines, according to a presentation by Landspace CEO Zhang Changwu. The two-stage launcher will have a payload capacity of 20 metric tons to LEO when expendable. Recovery of the first stage downrange will allow 16.5 tons to LEO, while a landing back at the launch site will offer a capacity of 11 tons to LEO.

A render of the rocket shows grid fins and deployable landing legs on the first stage. Developing the rocket will pose numerous challenges related to the weight and properties of steel, including manufacturing and fabricating complexities. The launcher, once operational, will also face competition domestically. Fellow startup Space Pioneer is planning to launch its Tianlong-3 rocket next year. That rocket will be capable of lifting 17 tons to LEO, or 14 tons to 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. (11/22)

2024 Brings Spike in Astronaut Launches at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
The business of sending humans into space has not yet risen to the levels seen during the space shuttle program, but 2024 could see the most U.S.-based orbital launches in 15 years. There are seven missions slated from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport that look to place 26 humans into orbit. It’s the highest number of crew launching from the Space Coast since 2009. That year saw five shuttle launches with 35 humans on board.

The seven planned launches would also be the most since the eight space shuttle launches in 1997. The record for human spaceflight from Florida came in 1985 when the space shuttles launched nine times flying up 58 people. The program sent up eight shuttles in both 1992 and 1997, with both years putting 53 people in space. Of the potential 26 in 2024, only 14 will be from NASA and its traditional space partners from Japan, Canada, the European Space Agency and Russia. The other 12 will be flying through commercial endeavors. (11/20)

Canadian Space Agency Announces Two Astronaut Flight Assignments (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
Two Canadian Space Agency astronauts received flight assignments for missions, one to the International Space Station and another as a backup for Artemis 2. During a Nov. 22 announcement, the CSA announced Joshua Kutryk will fly to the ISS for a six-month mission in 2025. Additionally, Jenni Gibbons was selected to serve as the backup for Jeremy Hansen, who Canada chose to fly with NASA astronauts for the Artemis 2 lunar flyby mission as early as late 2024. (11/22)

Space Stocks Take a Hit But Deals Could Bring Upside (Source: Yahoo! Finance)
Space stocks have taken a beating in 2023 as the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes have made it more expensive for companies to borrow, hitting capital intensive industries particularly hard. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) is down about 37% year to date while satellite imagery company Planet Labs (PL) is trading nearly 50% lower. Rocket launch services startup Astra Space (ASTR) is down 80% this year.

Companies in the space industry spend loads of cash on uncharted technologies. Even the industry's most dominant player, Elon Musk's privately held rocket and satellite company SpaceX, reportedly just eked out a profit in the first three months of the year after two years of losses. “Higher interest rates are not helping any company in the space industry,” says Andrew Chanin. Investors looking to play in the space industry can also opt for diversified companies, including defense and aerospace giants like Raytheon (RTX), Northrup (NOC), and Lockheed Martin (LMT) as safer bets. (11/17)

Japan's Wooden Satellite Coming Together (Source: CNN)
Koji Murata, a researcher at Kyoto University, has been exploring how biological materials could be used in space. Murata wondered if he “could build a wooden house on the moon or Mars,” and decided to test the theory — by creating a wooden satellite. Wooden satellites would be better for the planet while still providing the same functionality as their metal counterparts, says Murata.

“At the end of their life, satellites re-enter the atmosphere. The difference is, the wood in the LingoSat will burn up and eventually become a gas, whereas metals become fine particles instead,” says Murata. Murata and his team have been working on the project for four years and sent wood samples to space in 2021 to test the material’s resilience to space conditions. Now, they are working with Japan’s space agency (JAXA) and NASA to send the prototype satellite, called LingoSat, into orbit early next year. (11/7)

Spaceflux Secures UK Government Contracts to Enhance Sovereign Space Domain Awareness Capabilities (Source: SpaceFlux)
A UK space technology company focused on providing Space Domain Awareness (SDA) services based on high-quality optical data from its proprietary global network of optical sensors has won lucrative contracts with UK Space Command and the UK Space Agency. The contracts have been awarded to London headquartered Spaceflux to provide tracking data about satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) and to build a new, national, ground-based SDA sensor in Cyprus.

The satellite tracking data will be acquired using Spaceflux’s global optical sensor network with 10 unique locations across 5 continents. The data will be used by the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and Space Command to monitor various satellites in geostationary orbit and to protect UK space assets from collisions and adversarial actions. (11/22)

Sorry, Doubters: Starship Actually Had a Remarkably Successful Flight (Source: Ars Technica)
Beyond simply getting Starship to space, it must become an orbital vehicle, and both the booster and spacecraft must be made to reliably land. Then SpaceX must learn how to rapidly refurbish the vehicles (which seems possible, given that the company has now landed a remarkable 230 Falcon 9 rockets). The company must also demonstrate and master the challenge of transferring and storing propellant in orbit, so that Starship can be refueled for lunar and Mars missions. Starship must also show that it can light its Raptor engines reliably, on the surface of the Moon in the vacuum of space, far from ground systems on Earth.

But the first step is often the hardest step. And for SpaceX, getting Starship flying to gather that data was the critical step. Now that the company has shown the ability to launch Starship safely from South Texas, the regulatory process should ease up, allowing for a higher flight rate, yielding more data and starting to address all of those challenges cited in the previous paragraph. A high flight rate will solve a lot of ills, and with Saturday's flight SpaceX is on the cusp of doing just that.

SpaceX's culture was created by Musk and is maintained by Musk. He is a hard-charging leader who pushes back on bureaucracy. He wants to move fast and break things. And he does break things. Those very public failures and his recent comments and actions have certainly hurt his reputation, and to some extent, that of SpaceX. But to denigrate the prodigious rocket science on display in Texas this weekend for this reason, alone, is a mistake. (11/20)

Should We Cheer for an Elon Musk Company? (Source: Ars Technica)
A lot of the media angst this weekend was undoubtedly driven by antipathy for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The guy's a fraud, right? His companies are a grift, right? I can only really speak to SpaceX, but Musk is definitely not a fraud. He has his flaws, certainly. Some of his politics and public statements are deeply unsettling to many. But the dude founded SpaceX and remains the vital force impelling the company forward. He has dumb ideas. He has brilliant ideas. But mostly, he gets things done. (11/20)

Interstellar Lab Partners with Astrolab to Grow Flowers on the Moon (Source: Interstellar Lab)
Interstellar Lab, a pioneering biotech startup that develops, builds, and operates biofarming solutions on Earth and in Space announces its collaboration with Astrolab on an ambitious lunar mission named LITTLE PRINCE. With Mission LITTLE PRINCE, Interstellar Lab is looking to grow flowers on the Moon in transparent controlled-environment plant pods and capture data and pictures of this first step towards making any life multi-planetary. (11/21)

NASA May Pay $1 Billion to Destroy the International Space Station, Here's Why (Source: Scientific American)
In the coming months, NASA will be evaluating commercial proposals for vehicles capable of “decommissioning” the ISS—that is, of safely dropping it into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up. The agency has said it expects to pay nearly $1 billion for this service to avoid relying on multiple Russian vehicles. The brutal ending is scheduled for early next decade but is already proving a delicate matter for aerospace engineering and international diplomacy.

The laboratory’s doom comes from its location in low-Earth orbit. There, whatever goes up must come down, pulled back to our planet by a steady wash of speed-sapping atmospheric particles. Without periodic boosts, as a spacecraft in low-Earth orbit loses speed, it loses altitude as well, eventually sinking deep enough to break apart and burn up as it plunges through our planet’s atmosphere. Most of the ISS’s orbit-maintaining boosts come from a steady supply of Russian Progress cargo vehicles that, once docked with the station, periodically fire their engines to counteract the space station’s constant sinking.

Theoretically, NASA and its collaborators could raise the ISS to an orbit at which it would leave Earth’s atmosphere entirely. But lofting so much mass so high would be extremely expensive. And even if the station were to be abandoned in such a “graveyard orbit,” the ISS would still pose hazards: because it is so old and unwieldy, its eventual disintegration would be inevitable and would generate enormous amounts of debris that could damage other satellites. (11/21)

Beyond Gravity Unveils Reusable Fairing Concept (Source: European Spaceflight)
Zurich-based Beyond Gravity has announced a reusable fairing concept that would be recovered along with the first stage of a rocket. The company’s concept would see the rocket’s payload bay and second stage encased in the vehicle’s fairing. When ready, the fairing’s forward section would split in two, allowing the rocket’s second stage to continue its mission. The fairing halves would then close and would return to Earth with the first stage. (11/22)