February 24, 2019

Astronaut Parade Planned in Cocoa Beach for Apollo 11 Anniversary (Source: ASF)
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation will be hosting multi-day events highlighting one of the most memorable moments in history – man’s first steps on the Moon – and the exploration efforts that followed bringing the United States towards today’s deep space exploration. This year ASF, with the support of the City of Cocoa Beach, will host an Astronaut Parade as a part of our weekend celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11. You won't want to miss this event! Click here for more information. (2/23)

Dragon Capsule Will Splash Down Off Florida Coast on March 8 (Sources: Space News, Florida Today)
The current schedule calls for a launch at 2:48 a.m. Eastern March 2, in an instantaneous launch window. The Falcon 9, lifting off from Launch Complex 39A at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, will put the Crew Dragon into orbit. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the ISS one day later and remain there until March 8, when it will undock and splash down several hours later in the Atlantic Ocean. As expected, Crew Dragon splashdown will be a couple hundred miles off the coast of Florida. (2/22)

Firefly to Focus on Small Rocket Niche at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: UPI)
Firefly will make smaller orbital launch rockets in a new factory just outside Kennedy Space Center, across the street from OneWeb's new satellite plant. And it will offer launches for small satellites at much cheaper rates than SpaceX or United Launch Alliance's bigger rockets. Company officials said Friday they have 1.3 billion in launch business lined up. "If you can get a rocket into space these days, you're going to have clients," Firefly CEO Tom Markusic said.

A ride on a Firefly Alpha rocket would cost $15 million, Markusic and acting CFO Mark Watt said Friday. A Falcon 9 launch is set at $62 million, according to SpaceX. The cost of a SpaceX launch is sometimes split among clients. Markusic once worked for SpaceX. He said Friday he considers Firefly to be one of the second-generation companies in the "new space" era. Watt said Firefly's plant in Florida would initially be capable of producing 24 smaller Firefly rockets, the Alpha version, per year. But it will be built so that an expansion could enable it to churn out 100 such rockets annually. (2/22)

Pensacola Group Challenges Incentive Grant for Aerospace Project (Source: Pensacola News Journal)
A group of Pensacola residents have formed a committee that will attempt to force a city-wide referendum on the agreement to pay $5 million of city sales tax money to fund the ST Engineering expansion project at the Pensacola International Airport. The group is invoking a rarely used provision of Pensacola's City Charter that allows for citizens to challenge a vote of the City Council with a city-wide voter referendum if 10 percent of registered city voters agree.

The Pensacola City Council voted 4-3 on Feb. 6 to approve an interlocal agreement with Escambia County agreeing to increase the city's funding for the $210 million project from $10 million to $15 million. The project will expand ST Engineering's aircraft, maintenance and overhaul facility and bring in 1,325 jobs on top of the 400 promised for the hangar that opened in 2018. (2/22)

NASA Tests Urban Drone Traffic Management in Nevada, Texas (Source: Space Daily)
NASA has selected two organizations to host the final phase of its four-year series of increasingly complicated technical demonstrations involving small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), commonly known as drones. The Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems in Las Vegas and the Lone Star UAS Center for Excellence and Innovation in Corpus Christi, Texas, will host demonstrations to confirm NASA's UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system can safely and effectively manage drone traffic in an urban area. (2/20)

OneWeb Satellite Launch Could Be Postponed After Soyuz Anomaly (Source: Sputnik)
The launch of the first test satellites of the OneWeb constellation into orbit from the Kourou spaceport using the Soyuz-ST carrier rocket may be postponed due to an emergency situation during the launch of Egyptian Egyptsat-A satellite on board a Soyuz-2.1b rocket on Thursday. The long-awaited OneWeb satellite launch has been recently rescheduled for Feb. 27. "Both carrier rockets use the same engine on their third stages, therefore, an investigation [into Soyuz 2.1b emergency] will be required, which means that the launch on February 27 from the Kourou space center may be postponed," the source said.

The Soyuz rocket failed to bring the first stage carrying the Egyptian satellite to a target orbit, but the Fregat booster was able to use reserve fuel to compensate for the orbiting error. Russia's State Space Corporation Roscosmos ultimately confirmed that the EgyptSat-A earth observation satellite had been delivered to its designated orbit and is operating in a regular regime. (2/22)

Technology Developed in Brazil Will Be Part of ISS (Source: Space Daily)
A new version of equipment developed in Brazil - the Solar-T - will be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) to measure solar flares. It is estimated that the Sun-THz, the name given to the new photometric telescope, will be launched in 2022 on one of the missions to the ISS and will remain there to take consistent measurements. (2/20)