June 22, 2018

Many in U.S. Have Confidence in What Private Space Companies Will Accomplish (Source: Pew Research)
Most Americans express confidence that private space companies will make meaningful contributions in developing safe and reliable spacecraft or conducting research to expand knowledge of space, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Private companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are becoming increasingly important players in space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has paid private companies $6.8 billion to develop launch systems that might send astronauts into space as early as this year. These companies are also setting their sights on going to the moon or Mars in the future.

A large majority of Americans (81%) are confident that private space companies will make a profit from these ventures. Some 44% of Americans have a great deal of confidence that private space companies will be profitable, and an additional 36% have a fair amount of confidence. But Americans are also cautiously optimistic that private companies will make contributions that benefit U.S. exploration efforts. (6/22)

Starliner Test Flight Slips (Source: Parabolic Arc)
ULA chief Tory Bruno revealed that the next Atlas launch will be  Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) communications satellite, which is set for launch on Oct. 5. That would mean that Atlas V launch carrying an uncrewed Boeing CST-100 Starliner would be postponed from its current late August date until sometime after the AEHF mission. The Starliner mission is one of two flight tests needed to qualify the spacecraft to carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station under the agency’s commercial crew program. The second mission will carry a crew. (6/21)

These Astronauts Will Break Ground When SpaceX, Boeing Fly to the ISS (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
Astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and two colleagues from Germany and Russia blasted off to the International Space Station this month. But before the big trip, Auñón-Chancellor had another long trip: traveling about 6,800 miles to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The facility is the only place humans have been able to launch into space since the U.S.-based space shuttles were retired in 2011.

But that will soon change. NASA plans to return manned space station launches to American soil. And the government agency is going to have help. NASA has paired with two companies - Boeing and SpaceX - to carry its crews into space. The companies are still working on the rockets, but they are aiming to take off at the end of the year. NASA has chosen four astronauts - - all of whom have been to the space station  - - to fly on those missions. The astronauts will soon find out which two will go on which rocket, and they will begin special training. (6/20)

Tory Bruno, the Other Rocket Man (Source: Air & Space)
Tory Bruno resists the temptation to trash-talk Elon Musk, for the most part. Holding back can’t be easy. Among space enthusiasts, Musk and the company he founded, SpaceX, are the disrupters, the swashbuckling innovators whose cheap, reusable rockets will pave the way for an explosion of orbital commerce and creativity. Old Space, according to this construction, stays hopelessly mired in the past.

Bruno is in charge of the establishment empire striking back. The imperium in this case is United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of America’s two aerospace titans, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, mashed together a dozen years ago to create a reliable national delivery service for U.S. military spacecraft and NASA. Reliable ULA has been, its Delta and Atlas rockets completing 122 successful launches as of last fall, and five more since.

“One of the subtle things you would notice, if you hung out with us, is that we count,” says Bruno, during a break from an executive meeting held at a hotel near the company’s manufacturing center in Decatur, Alabama. (Corporate headquarters is near Denver.) “We have a slide we show internally, which shows 122 boxes with little pictures of rockets, and a little blank box at the end. That’s the most important mission: the very next one.” (6/22)

SpaceX Wins Falcon Heavy Certification and Contract From Air Force (Source: Space News)
SpaceX has won a $130 million Air Force launch contract for a Falcon Heavy mission. The Air Force announced the contract Thursday for the Air Force Space Command 52 payload, a classified mission scheduled for launch late in fiscal year 2020 from Florida. The Falcon Heavy beat out United Launch Alliance's Delta 4 Heavy for the contract, the fifth competitive procurement under the current EELV Phase 1A program. The Air Force has also certified the Falcon Heavy for EELV missions. (6/22)

Alabama Rep. Expects Mandated Space Corps Report to Include Space Force Plan (Source: Space News)
A leading advocate for a separate military space branch says he expects the Defense Department to offer a plan to do so in an upcoming report. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) said Thursday he predicts a report due to Congress Aug. 1 will recommend the creation of a Space Force, as directed earlier this week by President Trump. Rogers has advocated for creating a Space Corps within the Air Force, but said he has no problems jumping ahead directly to an independent Space Force. Rogers added he expects the Pentagon to offer a plan that creates a Space Force "responsibly" without causing major disruptions to the rest of the military. (6/22)

White House: NASA Should Consider Converting Some Centers (Source: Space News)
The White House has asked NASA to study converting one or more of its field centers into more independent organizations. The proposal, part of a broader package of proposed government reforms, would examine the benefits and drawbacks of turning government-operated centers into federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), which are owned and funded by the government but operated by a contractor. JPL, run by Caltech for NASA, is the agency's current sole FFRDC. A 2004 report by the Aldridge Commission also suggested turning NASA centers into FFRDCs as an alternative to closing one or more centers, but the administration and Congress did not act on that recommendation.

Editor's Note: There also has been discussion (which could factor into this study) to establish a federally empowered spaceport authority to operate the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, including responsibilities currently held by Kennedy Space Center. Such an entity would allow NASA and the Air Force to act as anchor tenants at the spaceport, relieved of the burdens of property and infrastructure management. Like Space Florida but with broader federal powers, this spaceport authority would put a priority on maximizing the productive government and commercial use of the spaceport's capabilities. (6/22)

Blue Origin Suborbital Tickets On Sale Next Year (Source: Space News)
Blue Origin plans to start selling tickets for commercial suborbital spaceflights next year. In a speech earlier this week, Rob Meyerson, a senior vice president at the company, said test flights of Blue Origin's New Shepard would start carrying people "soon" with the company beginning ticket sales next year. New Shepard has flown eight suborbital test flights to date, most recently in April. The company has offered few details about when it would sell tickets for flights on the vehicle or an estimated cost. (6/21)

Solicitation Readied for Lunar Gateway Component (Source: GeekWire)
NASA has issued the draft solicitation for the first element of its planned Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. The solicitation for the Power and Propulsion Element follows the guidance the agency had previously offered for the vehicle, including the use of a public private partnership to develop and procure the spacecraft. The element is designed to produce 50 kilowatts of power and be equipped with electric propulsion to maneuver the Gateway in cislunar space. An industry day is scheduled for July 10 at the Glenn Research Center, and a final solicitation is expected to be released later this summer. (6/21)

Georgia Congressional Representatives Publicize Support of Spaceport (Source: WABE)
Georgia's congressional delegation is now fully behind the development of a commercial spaceport in the state. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) sent a letter this week to the FAA, signed by all 14 House members from the state, asking the agency to issue a license for Spaceport Camden, on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Georgia. Georgia's two senators previously offered their support for the launch site. The comment period for a draft environmental assessment of the spaceport, a key part of the spaceport licensing process, recently closed. (6/21)

Kepler Data Mining Spots Dozens of Exoplanet Candidates (Source: MIT)
In a tuneup for NASA's next exoplanet hunter, scientists used an existing spacecraft to swiftly discover dozens of potential new planets. In a paper published Thursday, astronomers reported the discovery of nearly 80 exoplanet candidates in data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft. The research used computer analysis to sift through data and find the planets just weeks after the raw data from Kepler was made available to them. Astronomers plan to use those techniques to enable rapid discovery of exoplanets in data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), currently being commissioned after a successful launch in April. (6/21)

China’s Looming Land Grab in Outer Space (Source: Daily Beast)
Given its vast territorial ambitions that span global waters from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean to the Arctic, it really should come as no surprise that the Chinese Communist Party is also aiming upward, far beyond the confines of the Blue Planet. Five years ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised the nation that China will send a taikonaut to the moon by the 2030s. (So far, 11 have flown into space.)  As with the other policies that Xi has shaped as his forthcoming legacy, there has been a strict follow-through, with the nation’s aerospace experts improving their craft at dizzying speed.

There is one Party official who is extremely outspoken about China’s astral aspirations: Ye Peijian is a 73-year-old aerospace engineer and head of the Chinese lunar exploration program. While fielding scripted questions from a reporter at the CCP’s annual plenary sessions in Beijing last year, he left quite an impression. When asked why China is going to the moon, Ye said, “The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don't go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.”

Responses like Ye’s are part explainer, part propaganda, all dog whistle. The Diaoyu Islands, as China calls them, are an uninhabited 1,700 acres that are known as Senkaku in Japan, and sovereignty over these small patches of bare rock has been a flashpoint between the two nations for decades. In the same vein, Huangyan refers to Scarborough Shoal, a reef in the South China Sea that is also claimed by Taiwan and the Philippines. By invoking the names of these contested outposts, Ye delivered a crystal-clear message that left no room for misunderstanding among a domestic audience. (6/22)

Substantial Momentum for Spaceport Camden as Draft EIS Comment Period Closes (Source: Spaceport Camden)
The FAA formally closed the comment period on the Spaceport Camden Draft Environmental Impact Statement on June 14, 2018. In the waning weeks of this comment period, a substantial number of supportive comments from influential voices throughout Georgia and the United States were submitted to the FAA. In particular, the entire Georgia Congressional delegation - including all 14 members of the House and both Georgia Senators - wrote in favor of the project.

Georgia’s Congressional delegation was joined by former Speaker of the House and National Space Council Advisory Group member, Newt Gingrich; Georgia’s Superintendent of Schools, Richard Woods; The Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF); the Coastal Regional Commission of Georgia; ACCG and Vector Space Systems, all advocating for the swift approval of the Draft EIS and issuance of the launch site operator’s license for Camden County.

A common theme among the above commenters is the increased need for launch capacity amidst growing demand from the commercial space industry. The National Space Council and the Trump Administration have made streamlining launch and reentry licensing a focus of our national space policy. But as CFS President, Eric Stallmer noted, “Streamlining launch and reentry licensing without increasing launch capacity simply shifts the innovation bottleneck from regulatory licensing to launch delays and range congestion.” (6/20)

Chinese Hackers Tried Again to Hack U.S. Satellites (Source: Cyberscoop)
Chinese hackers tried to gain control of U.S. satellites in late 2017, leading a cyber firm to notify the U.S. government. Symantec's protection software blocked some of the tools used by attackers known as "Thrip" that attacked two satellite companies, a Defense Department contractor, and a geospatial-imaging firm. Thrip appears to have reemerged after two years of dormancy.

Thrip had ceased activity after a 2015 agreement between then U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping on cyber espionage. The attacks were discovered about four months ago amid talk about a U.S.-China trade war. Symantec did not disclose which satellite operators were affected, but said Thrip did gain access to some company networks. (6/20)

ESA Laser Satellite Preps for 2019 Launch (Source: ESA)
A long-awaited European Space Agency laser relay satellite is undergoing final tests ahead of a 2019 Ariane 5 launch. ESA's European Data Relay System-C satellite, EDRS-C, is being prepared for thermal vacuum chamber tests at private company IAGB's Munich, Germany facility. The satellite was originally expected to launch in 2015, but ran into manufacturing setbacks.

OHB System is building the satellite with optical terminals from Tesat-Spacecom. EDRS-C also carries an MDA Corp.-built Ka-band hosted payload for Avanti to provide broadband connectivity services. The EDRS system uses lasers to beam information from low Earth orbit up to geostationary satellites and then to users on the ground in near-real time. EDRS-A, the first node, launched in 2016 on the Eutelsat-9B satellite. (6/21)

Israel to Buy Israeli Satellite (Source: Haaretz)
The Israeli government will likely buy a telecommunications satellite from state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, but not " just for the sake of IAI,” according to Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. IAI lost a competition to build the Amos-8 satellite for Israeli operator Spacecom, threatening the company's ability to maintain a telecom satellite manufacturing capability.

Lieberman hinted that interest in buying from IAI is rooted in national security, but didn't say outright that IAI would get the contract. "We need to see in detail the satellite being offered and its price and compare offers. ... There’s no room for protectionism,” he said. (6/21)

With Three Words, President Trump Fortifies a Flawed Perception About NASA (Source: Ars Technica)
Fresh off an appearance at a National Space Council meeting Monday, space was evidently on his mind when President Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota, on Wednesday night. "Our beautiful ancestors won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and put a man on the face of the Moon," he told his adulatory crowd. "And I think you saw the other day, we're reopening NASA. We're going to be going to space."

The crowd responded by chanting, "Space Force! Space Force!" The most obvious response to such a comment is to laugh. NASA has never closed, of course. NASA's budget, in terms of raw dollars, has never been larger. Additionally, the Space Force has nothing to do with NASA; it is a military enterprise. And the United States, thanks to SpaceX, is launching as many orbital rockets today as almost any time in history. We have never been more in space than we are now.

And yet for NASA, these are truly painful words. With regard to human spaceflight, the space agency has struggled with public perception following the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. Since then, NASA may have relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the ISS, but overall the agency has done a lot of valuable things. As I talked to a couple of astronauts Wednesday night, their general sentiment was dismay that the president truly was clueless about NASA's activities. This is especially disappointing because Vice President Mike Pence has taken his role as leader of the National Space Council so seriously. "Does he even talk to Pence??" one astronaut asked. (6/21)