October 18, 2018

South Korea’s KARI To Develop Two Variants of KSLV-II Launch Vehicle (Source: SpaceWatch)
As the Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) prepares to conduct a rocket engine test later this month for its Korean Space Launch Vehicle II (KSLV-II), it has also been announced that KARI will develop two other variants of the KSLV-II. The South Korean government has begun drawing up plans to develop an improved, lighter, version of KSLV-II. At the same time, it will also develop another version of the vehicle, which will be smaller and cheaper than KSLV-II.

The South Korean Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute  will work together to create a blueprint for the new launch vehicle, to carry a 1.5 ton satellite, this year. The next-generation launch vehicle project is likely to continue for eight to 10 years from 2021, with the vehicles’ initial launch expected to be carried out in 2025 or later.

The development period for a smaller and cheaper launch vehicle is scheduled for 2025 to 2030. The purpose of this project is to develop a vehicle capable of launching a small satellite with a weight of 500 kg or less. The development of the original KSLV-II is scheduled to be completed in 2021, with plans for two launches in 2021 and once each year in 2022, 2023 and 2024. (10/18)

Rocket Lab Takes Steps Toward High Launch Cadence (Sources: Morgan Stanley, New Zealand Herald)
It may have been nine months since Rocket Lab has launched its Electron booster, but the company is growing both in people in facilities. The New Zealand Herald reports that Rocket Lab's staff has nearly doubled, to 330, in the past year, with around 200 in New Zealand and the remainder in the United States. The company plans to hire another 180 employees over the next year.

More production, too ... Earlier this month, the company opened a second rocket development and production facility in Auckland, New Zealand. And on Wednesday, Rocket Lab announced the location of its second launch site, Wallops Island in Virginia, on the East Coast of the United States. "We're not focusing on the next rocket. We're focusing on the next 100 rockets," CEO Peter Beck said. Rocket Lab is making the right moves for long-term success. Not it just needs to execute. Its third launch could come in November.

The new production building includes a new Mission Control Center, which will oversee launches from Rocket Lab's Mahia Peninsula launchpad, plus its pending new facility in the US. Founder and chief executive Peter Beck says 16 flights are planned for next year. By 2020, he wants a launch a week - hence the ramping up of production capacity. (10/18)

Rocket Lab Picks Virginia Spaceport for U.S.-Based Launches (Sources: The Verge, NasaSpaceFlight.com, Space News)
US aerospace startup Rocket Lab has decided to build a second launch site at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia. Up until now, the fledgling rocket company has had only one launch site — a private facility on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand — but this new Virginia site will give the company more options for its missions and could potentially allow Rocket Lab to launch more frequently in the future. “Really, it’s to increase our overall launch capability,” said CEO Peter Beck. “And also, not all customers want to travel to New Zealand to launch. It gives us the US soil location.”

“There’s a lot going on at the Cape right now, with lots of different launch providers launching out of there,” says Beck. “Whereas Wallops is comparatively very quiet.” In July, the company announced that it would pick a spot at one of four government-operated spaceports: Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg Air Force Base; Wallops Flight Facility; or the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska. Ultimately, Rocket Lab settled on Wallops because much of the infrastructure is already in place to support a new launchpad, such as places to store propellant and stations to track launching rockets. Plus, there’s not a lot of traffic out of Wallops.

Rocket Lab will invest more than $20M into the launch site, with first launch planned in the 3rd quarter of next year. The state of Virginia is providing incentives to Rocket Lab, including a $5 million grant, to help fund development. They will start work on construction immediately, with the design closely mirroring their current New Zealand launch site with the integration and control buildings. The company recently unveiled a new rocket factory in New Zealand, complete with a new mission control center for monitoring fights out of the Mahia Peninsula. The factory adds to the one that Rocket Lab has at Huntington Beach, California. (10/17)

Space Florida Hoped Rocket Lab Would Choose Florida (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
Rocket Lab is targeting its first Electron rocket U.S. launch from Virginia's spaceport for the third quarter of 2019. The company will, however, maintain its agreement with Cape Canaveral to conduct launches from its existing pads as required, and it’s still eyeing additional U.S. launch sites in the future. In the meantime, Space Florida is trying to ensure the Cape has the right facilities for future launch providers. In September, Space Florida signed a formal Right of Entry agreement with the Air Force for Launch Complex 20 at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. The agreement allows Space Florida to do the preliminary work toward accommodating new launch operators at the site. (10/18)

Russia Understands Cause of Soyuz Incident (Source: Space Daily)
Russian experts understand what caused the failure of a Soyuz rocket booster that aborted this Thursday's launch of a manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the head of the mission to the station's Russian segment said. "We are quite clear about what happened. A series of measures are needed to avert such incidents in the future. We will continue flying," said cosmonaut Vladimir Solovyov, who also serves as first deputy general designer at Russia's Rocket and Space Corporation Energia. (10/16)

Advanced Antennas Needed for Megaconstellations (Source: Space News)
The success of planned satellite megaconstellations depends on the development of advanced, yet low-cost, antennas. More than a dozen companies are developing flat-panel antennas intended for use in ground systems for those constellations, but face the challenge of ramping up production and lowering costs to the level satellite operators say is needed for widespread adoption. Companies hope to win initial business in niche markets willing to pay more for the advantages those antennas can provide before moving into broader markets where reduced costs will be critical. (10/18)

Chinese Company Plans "Artificial Moon" to Light Night Sky (Source: People's Daily)
A Chinese company says it has plans for an "artificial moon" to light up the night sky. The chairman of the Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co. said at a recent conference that his company is developing a spacecraft that will reflect sunlight onto a region 10 to 80 kilometers across on the surface, creating "a dusk-like glow" on the ground. The company claims the satellite will be ready for launch in 2020, but provided few other details. Russia attempted a similar project in the 1990s, called Znamya, but it failed to generate much light on the ground.  (10/18)

ULA Welcomes Competition, But Sees Room for Few (Source: Space News)
The head of United Launch Alliance welcomes new competition in the launch business. In an interview, Tory Bruno said the growth of competitors, including Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman who, like ULA, won Launch Service Agreements from the Air Force, shows "a broadening of the lift industrial base." Unlike the earlier EELV program, where Boeing and Lockheed Martin were unable to win enough commercial business to supplement government orders and were forced to merge their launch operations into ULA, Bruno said he believes there is now "enough space in the market for two domestic launch providers," but cautioned there likely isn't enough demand for more than two. (10/18)

Analyst: We Need More Detail on Adversary Capabilities in Space (Source: Space News)
The U.S. should be doing more to understand the larger space infrastructure that potential adversaries are operating. Jeffrey Gossel, senior intelligence engineer at the Space and Missile Analysis Group of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said in a recent talk that if a military conflict extended into outer space, it's imperative the United States knows in precise detail the type of satellites and sensors that other countries have on orbit, which could be targets for U.S. counterspace systems. "We need to know what they can see and what they can hear," he said. (10/18)

Three Soyuz Launches Planned Before More Crewed Missions (Source: TASS)
Russia plans to carry out at least three launches of the Soyuz rocket before allowing it to be used for a crewed mission. Sergei Krikalev of Roscosmos said Wednesday that those launches, which would include a Progress cargo mission and a satellite launch from French Guiana, would provide "more than enough" confirmation that the problem with the Soyuz rocket in launch week's launch abort had been corrected. Krikalev suggested the next crewed Soyuz mission could take place in early December, but there's been no updated schedule formally announced yet as the investigation into last week's accident continues. (10/18)

India Struggles to Meet Twice-Monthly Launch Cadence (Source: Express News Service)
The Indian space agency ISRO is running into problems meeting a goal of two satellite launches a month. The agency recently said it would launch two satellites a month starting this month through 2019, but it appears increasingly unlikely ISRO will be able to perform two launches this month. An ISRO official said that launch dates for its next missions would be finalized in the next week. (10/18)

Our Solar System Is Even Stranger Than We Thought (Source: Scientific American)
In addition to our solar system, we now know of over 400 multi-planet systems, thanks largely to the Kepler Mission. Kepler is a NASA spacecraft (named after the 17th century German astronomer) that was launched in 2009 for the sole purpose of discovering exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars.

planets in the same system tend to be the same size. For example, if one planet is 1.5 times the radius of Earth, the other planets in the system are very likely to be 1.5 times the radius of Earth, plus or minus a little bit. This is not at all what my colleagues and I expected. In our solar system, planets range from the size of Mercury (less than half the radius of Earth) to Jupiter (more than ten times the radius of Earth).

The whole population of exoplanets discovered by Kepler ranges from one quarter the size of Earth to about twenty times the size of Earth. Yet, despite this wide range of possible sizes, planets tend to be about the same sizes as their neighbors. One of my collaborators decided they looked like “peas in a pod,” and that moniker became our shorthand for the pattern. (10/16)

Why Was Delta 2 So Reliable? (Source: Space News)
Despite its reputation as a reliable workhorse, every Delta 2 launch campaign was unique. “I can’t recall there ever being an attitude of complacency on Delta 2; be it at the factories or the launch site, not once,” Elizabeth Jones, Aerojet Rocketdyne program manager for the Delta 2’s RS-27A and AJ10 engines, said by email. “The commitment to continuous improvement and taking our time to get it right has always been at forefront.”

Before every launch, the Delta 2 rocket team would welcome the spacecraft team. “It’s an interesting relationship,” said Bill Cullen, the ULA launch director who worked on Delta 2 throughout his career. “Collectively, we become one for the launch campaign.” Cullen has been associated with the Delta 2 since he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1985. Then, it wasn’t Delta 2. It was simply McDonnell Douglas’ proposal for a Medium Launch Vehicle.

Editor's Note: I believe Delta 2's record of success had a lot to do with the fact that it was selected to deploy 24 early GPS satellites. With launch after launch of nearly identical missions, the Delta 2 launch hardware processing flow was perfected and the team lost only one of the satellites to a launch failure. (10/15)

City Council Approves $18.8 Million for Phase 1 of Houston Spaceport Project (Source: Houston Airports)
City Council today approved more than $18.8 million in funding for Phase 1 of the Houston Spaceport project at Ellington Airport. The completion of work on the design-build agreement with Texas Sterling-Banicki, JV LLC will provide infrastructure vital to the development of the 90 acres set aside for Phase 1, including streets, water, wastewater, electrical power distribution facilities, and communications facilities necessary to attract future development.

The majority of the funding — more than $13.1 million — will go to pre-construction and design services, and construction phase services. Funding for the project will come from the Houston Airport System Airport Improvement Fund. Granted the 10th commercial spaceport license in June 2015, the Houston Spaceport will become a focal point in the region for aerospace operations, such as the launching of micro satellites, astronaut training, zero gravity experimentation, spacecraft manufacturing and a host of other potential activities.

Phase 1 will offer tenants and partners a unique environment and an operational platform to achieve critical business objectives. By housing organizations from across several industries and disciplines on one campus, the spaceport will support aerospace engineering activities, including: component and composite development and fabrication; space vehicle assembly; microgravity scientific and medical experiments; microsatellite deployment; astronaut training and development; and space tourism. (10/17)

Is the Soyuz Debacle the Nail in the Coffin for Russian-American Space Relations? (Source: Daily Beast)
With the exception of the Chinese, we’re stuck on Earth. And the U.S.-Russian space partnership, one of the last venues of peaceful cooperation between the two powers, might never recover from the twin blows of the rocket failure and the discovery in late August of a hole in a separate Soyuz docked at the space station. "We can and should worry," John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast.

Sensing it might get cut out of the Lunar Gateway, in September Roscosmos threatened to build its own moon station. But it's an empty threat unless Moscow suddenly gets a lot richer and its space tech makes huge forward leaps. "Russia is not able to act in space separately," Luzin said.

Increasingly, Russia can't act in space cooperatively, either. Leaking capsules and crashing rockets have undermined the country's once-leading role in international space exploration. And while America can afford to develop its own spacecraft and space stations Russia can't. The more Russian space hardware fails, the less likely other countries are to work with the Russians. (10/17)
 
Why Does SpaceX Stay in the Costly Los Angeles Area? It's Where the Talent Is (Source: LA Times)
A 19-acre site at the Port of Los Angeles populated by dilapidated buildings and rusted cranes is playing a key role in SpaceX’s long-standing plan to colonize Mars. In two to three years, hundreds of workers could be swarming over SpaceX’s massive BFR rocket and spaceship system there. About 20 miles north, at SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters, thousands of employees already build Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft.

That’s a lot of heavy manufacturing planned for a region — and state — that are often derided for chasing away factories and large headquarters operations with high costs and regulations. Although SpaceX has facilities outside California — launch and rocket refurbishment in Florida, test sites in Texas — and it recently accepted an incentive agreement to expand in Coryell County near Waco, Texas, the Elon Musk-led venture is staking its expansion plans on Southern California for a reason. It wants to take advantage of the region’s vast aerospace talent pool.

The majority of SpaceX’s more than 6,000 employees are based locally. “More important than anything is quality of people,” especially in engineering, said Greg Autry, director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the USC Marshall School of Business. SpaceX isn't the largest aerospace employer in the L.A. area by a long shot. Northrop Grumman Corp. has 16,600 employees in the county. (10/17)