October 1, 2019

Rocket Lab Launch Switcheroo Shows the Flexibility of the New Orbital Economy (Source: Tech Crunch)
New Zealand-based launch provider Rocket Lab  has announced its next commercial mission, “As The Crow Flies,” taking an Astro Digital satellite to orbit in October. Interestingly, this launch originally had a different payload, but was switched out on fairly short notice — not exactly a common practice in this business. The launch, scheduled for a two-week window starting October 15, will take a single spacecraft created by Astro to low Earth orbit. Corvus — the genus to which crows and ravens belong — is the name of the series of imaging satellites the company has already put up there; hence the name of the mission.

But this mission wasn’t scheduled to launch for some time yet. October’s launch, the fifth this year from Rocket Lab, was set to be another customer’s, but that customer seems to have needed a bit of extra time to prepare — and simply requested a later launch date. And because the weather is fine, and one Electron rocket is much like another, Rocket Lab and Astro Digital just decided to use that launch window anyway and head to orbit a bit early. (9/30)

Alien 'Lurkers' Could Be Covertly Watching Us From Space, Physicist Says (Source: Science Alert)
They're called 'lurkers', and they may have been covertly surveilling us from space for millions of years – since before we even existed, perhaps. That's the bold proposal being made in a new scientific paper by American physicist James Benford. But even though Benford's ideas sound radical, they draw upon a long history of conjecture in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community.

In 1960, Stanford radiophysicist Ronald Bracewell first suggested the idea that "superior galactic communities" could disperse autonomous interstellar probes as "hypothetical feelers" throughout space in order to observe, monitor, and maybe even communicate with other life-forms, including those on Earth. "A probe located nearby could bide its time while our civilisation developed technology that could find it, and, once contacted, could undertake a conversation in real time," Benford explains. "Meanwhile, it could have been routinely reporting back on our biosphere and civilization for long eras." (9/30)

Air-Launched Rocket Arrives at Cape Canaveral for Satellite Delivery Mission (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
A Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket is back at Cape Canaveral after a cross-country ferry flight Tuesday under an L-1011 carrier jet, ready for final checkouts and a countdown dress rehearsal before an airborne launch off Florida’s east coast Oct. 9 with NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer satellite. The L-1011 carries jet, named “Stargazer,” touched down at the Skid Strip runway at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport on Tuesday after a nearly six-hour flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, where teams readied the Pegasus rocket for flight.

Technicians mated the 634-pound ICON spacecraft to the Pegasus XL rocket Sept. 10, then encapsulated the satellite inside the launcher’s payload shroud in a clean room at Vandenberg. Then ground teams transferred the 57-foot-long (17-meter) Pegasus XL rocket to the Vandenberg airfield for attachment underneath the L-1011 carrier plane. (10/1)

Relativity Raises $140 Million From Venture Firms (Source: CNBC)
Space start-up Relativity Space just raised the money it needs to transform the rocket supply chain in the U.S. with 3D printing. The four-year-old company in Los Angeles, Calif., said it has the funds it needs to reach orbit. Relativity announced on Tuesday it closed $140 million in new fundraising, led by Bond Capital – a fund whose partners include Mary Meeker – and recently-formed Tribe Capital. Meeker helped spin Bond out of Kleiner Perkins last year and the $1.3 billion fund’s investment in Relativity is its first in the space industry. (10/1)

Florida Creates Talent Development Council to Boost Workforce Development (Source: EOG)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced the Florida Talent Development Council, with a mission to develop a coordinated, data-driven, statewide approach to meeting Florida’s needs for a 21st-century workforce that employers and educators use as part of Florida’s talent supply system. The Florida Talent Development Council, administered by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, is tasked with creating a strategic plan to ensure 60 percent of working-age Floridians hold a high-value postsecondary credential by 2030. (9/30)

Janet Epps is Still Among the Candidates To Be the First Female Astronaut to Walk on the Moon (Source: Business Insider)
As NASA races to launch humans back to the moon in five years — a program called Artemis, named after Apollo's sister — astronaut and aerospace engineer Jeanette Epps sees hope springing eternal. Back in January 2018, NASA inexplicably bumped Epps off the main crew of a six-month mission to the International Space Station. Had Epps flown, she would have been the first African-American person to live and work aboard (though not visit) the floating laboratory. NASA has yet to explain its decision, apparently including to Epps herself.

"I don't know where the decision came from and how it was made, in detail, or at what level," Epps said during a festival that June, later adding it was not medically related. "There were Russians, several of them, who defended me in the sense that it's not safe to really remove someone from a crew that has trained together for years." Then in August, the space agency announced its picks for the first Commercial Crew members: astronauts who'd get the glory of testing and flying SpaceX and Boeing's new private spaceships and spacesuits. Epps was not among those selected.

Any reasonable person might have called it quits, but in true astronaut form, Epps did not. If you ask her about any of this today, her answer is short, reflective, and resolute. "Sometimes things don't go the way that you planned. But I'm still in the astronaut corps," she recently. (9/30)

Leonardo Eyes Northwest Florida for Helicopter Production (Source: GCAC)
Leonardo Helicopter said it will build a 100,000 square-foot customer support center adjacent to Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Northwest Florida if it's selected to supply the Navy’s Advanced Helicopter Training System. Leonardo is offering TH-119 single-engine helicopter to replace the Navy’s TH-57 training helicopters. The other competitors are Airbus Helicopters and Bell, which built the TH-57.The Navy is expected to make its selection for the 130 helicopters by the end of 2019. (9/29)

NASA is Close to Finding Life on Mars But the World Isn't Ready for the Discovery (Source: CNN)
NASA's next mission to Mars will be its most advanced yet. But if scientists discover there was once life -- or there is life -- on the Red Planet, will the public be able to handle such an extraterrestrial concept? NASA chief scientist Jim Green doesn't think so. "It will be revolutionary," Green told the Telegraph. "It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don't think we're prepared for the results. We're not."

The agency's Mars 2020 rover, set to launch next summer, will be the first to collect samples of Martian material to send back to Earth. But if scientists discover biosignatures of life in Mars' crust, the findings could majorly rock astrobiology, said Green, the director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA. "What happens next is a whole new set of scientific questions," he said. "Is that life like us? How are we related?" (9/30)

C-Band Satellite Spectrum Could Shift to 5G (Source: Space News)
Spectrum regulators around the world are considering debating transferring more C-band satellite spectrum to 5G services. C-band reallocation, though a subject of major debate in the U.S., is not on the agenda for the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) that starts in late October. But given that many countries are already introducing 5G services in C-band, momentum is growing for a renewed discussion about allocating more of the spectrum on a global level during the next WRC in 2023. Satellite operators will likely fight attempts to take away more C-band, though many have acknowledged the pressure is increasing. (9/30)

Senators Block Upgrade of Commerce Department Space Office (Space Policy Online)
Senate appropriators are blocking a proposal to convert the Office of Space Commerce to a bureau. The Senate's fiscal year 2020 commerce, justice and science spending bill criticized the Commerce Department for not responding to questions about various space-related initiatives, including plans to take over civil space traffic management responsibilities from the Air Force. It instead called on the Commerce Department to have the National Academy of Public Administration perform a study of the proposal to create a Bureau of Space Commerce, due in one year. (9/30)

Chinese Company Plans Cheap Orbital And Sounding Launches (Source: Aviation Week)
Chinese space launch company Link Space is working toward a 2022 first flight of a reusable rocket intended to place 180-kg (400-lb.) payloads in sun-synchronous orbits for a price of 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) a shot. Before that, a reusable sounding rocket is due to fly in July 2020, Link Space CEO Chu Longfei said at Aviation Expo China, held in Beijing Sept. 18–20. The company has flown two demonstrators

A reusable sounding rocket will be the first product. Privately owned Link Space flew a technology demonstrator in 2018 and another this year. They were also reusable but were fueled by alcohol-powered engines; the production rockets will burn methane with liquid oxygen. All of Link Space’s rockets are designed to land vertically on four legs. The greatest technological challenge has been developing the flight control system, Chu said.

JZYJ (Beijing) Space Technology is developing and building engines for Link Space. The main engine will be the LY-10, generating 10 metric tons (22,000 lb.) of thrust at sea level. Its turbopumps are driven by the well established open gas-generator configuration, which a JZYJ engineer said was chosen for simplicity and low difficulty. (10/1)

ULA Gets $1.18 Billion for Five Delta-4 Heavy National Security Launches (Source: Space News)
United Launch Alliance has received a $1.18 billion contract from the Air Force for the final five launches of the Delta 4 Heavy rocket. The contract, announced Monday, covers the launch operations costs for five classified NRO missions: NROL-44, NROL-82, NROL-91, NROL-68 and NROL-70. The Air Force already had acquired five Delta 4 Heavy rockets for these missions under previous contracts awarded to ULA in 2017 and 2018. The Air Force said the NRO missions were sole-sourced to ULA because the Delta 4 was determined to be the only rocket that could satisfy the demands, even as the Air Force says it wants to move away from sole-sourcing and transition to a competitive launch procurement program. (10/1)

NASA Issues Call for Proposals for Human Lunar Landers (Source: Space News)
The final version of a call for proposals for human lunar landers includes a loophole regarding the Gateway. NASA issued Monday the solicitation for the Human Landing System procurement, with proposals due to the agency Nov. 1. One of the changes from earlier drafts is that companies can propose docking their landers directly with an Orion spacecraft rather than using the lunar Gateway, at least for the initial lunar landing mission in 2024. NASA, though, still considers the Gateway "essential" to its long-term exploration plans, and expects companies to use it for later missions even if they don't plan to for a 2024 landing. The one-month schedule for submitting proposals, NASA said, is tight but based on the months of comment industry provided to two earlier drafts of the solicitation. (9/30)

Musk: Crew Dragon Could Fly Astronauts in 3-4 Months (Source: CNN)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in an interview this weekend that the Crew Dragon vehicle could be ready in three to four months. Bridenstine, who criticized SpaceX for commercial crew delays prior to the company's Starship event, doubted that schedule in part because the company had yet to demonstrate its abort system, which suffered what he called a "catastrophic failure" in April, destroying a Crew Dragon capsule. Bridenstine also said Boeing's CST-100 Starliner was behind schedule, and combined with SpaceX's delays could force NASA to buy more Soyuz seats in 2020, if any are available. Formal updates to commercial crew schedules will wait until NASA hires a new associate administrator for human exploration and operations, which Bridenstine said would be in the "coming weeks or months." (9/30)

France's UnseenLabs Developing Constellation to Monitor Maritime Traffic (Source: Space News)
A French company plans to launch up to six ship-tracking satellites next year after successfully getting its first one in orbit. UnseenLabs launched its first satellite on a Rocket Lab Electron mission in August, and early tests have shown that it can detect radio-frequency signals from ships attempting to avoid detection. UnseenLabs is developing a constellation of tens of satellites to monitor maritime traffic, using orbiting sensors to track ships that turn off their automatic identification system, or AIS, transponders. The company expects to launch five or six of the satellites next year based on launch slots booked with an unnamed launch provider. (9/30)

NOAA's DSCOVR Satellite Still Being Repaired in Orbit (Source: Space News)
NOAA is making progress recovering the DSCOVR satellite, but may not return the satellite to normal operations until early next year. The satellite has been in a "safehold" since late June because of an unspecified performance issue. NOAA said Monday tests of a software fix to address that problem are going well, but that it doesn't expect that revised software to be incorporated into the satellite until the first quarter of 2020. DSCOVR is used by NOAA to collect space weather observations, and also includes a camera that provides full-disk images of the Earth. (9/30)

Rocket Lab Launch in October to Carry Astro Digital Satellite (Source: Rocket Lab)
Rocket Lab announced Monday the customer for its next Electron mission. That launch, scheduled for no earlier than Oct. 14, will carry a single satellite for Astro Digital, a company developing a constellation of Earth imaging smallsats. Rocket Lab moved up the Astro Digital payload, which had been scheduled for launch later in the year, when an unidentified customer who was next on the manifest requested a delay. (9/30)