November 29, 2019

Astronaut Snoopy Floats on Space Station, Flies in Macy's Parade (Source: CollectSpace)
Snoopy, "the world famous astronaut," has reached new heights — above the streets of New York City and aboard the International Space Station. The Peanuts comic strip beagle took flight in real life on Thursday (Nov. 28), as a new, NASA-inspired giant balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and as a plush doll floating aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA crew members Jessica Meir and Christina Koch from on board the space station revealed the Astronaut Snoopy doll in a video shown as part of NBC's television coverage of the holiday celebration. (11/28)

Japanese Company to Launch Artificial Meteor Shower Satellite (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
A small Japanese satellite scheduled for launch Friday on a Rocket Lab Electron booster will release hundreds of colorful sky pellets to fall into the atmosphere next year, creating an artificial meteor shower that could be visible to millions. The satellite, built and owned by Tokyo-based Astro Live Experiences, will launch into a 250-mile-high  polar orbit to prepare for next year’s sky spectacle. On-board thrusters will help target re-entry over a specific region for the artificial shooting stars. ALE has not announced the location or exact time for the meteor shower demonstration. (11/28)

Europe Gets a $15.9 Billion Funding Boost for its Space Exploration Plans (Source: CNN)
The European Space Agency has received a 14.4 billion-euro ($15.9 billion) funding boost from its 22 member states as it seeks to launch new missions and safeguard its role in space exploration and research. The agency, which concluded a two-day ministerial meeting in Seville, Spain, on Thursday, agreed a budget of 12.5 billion euros for the next three years or 14.4 billion euros over five years.

The agency's budget is still much smaller than NASA's, which was estimated to be $19.4 billion for 2019. ESA's director-general, Jan Woerner, said in a live-streamed news conference that the amount countries had pledged was more than the agency had initially proposed. In particular, more money than expected was committed to expand Europe's Copernicus Program, a group of satellites that monitor the status of the planet. (11/28)

A 2018 Law is Changing the Way Space Industry Startups Raise Money (Source: Space News)
The U.S. Treasury Department hasn’t issued final regulations implementing the 2018 Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), but space industry entrepreneurs already feel the law’s effect. “It hurts,” Mike Collett, founder and managing partner of Promus Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Chicago, said at the World Satellite Business Week conference in September. “I understand, as a U.S. citizen, what the administration is trying to do. But this is having a very negative effect on funding rounds.”

The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act expanded the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency panel led by the treasury secretary to examine investments with potential impacts on national security. Prior to 2018, CFIUS (pronounced SIFFee-yus) primarily reviewed mergers, acquisitions and investments that gave foreign persons or entities at least a 10% stake in U.S. companies. Under the new law, CFIUS can review any investment in critical infrastructure and critical technologies if an investor obtains certain rights, such as a seat on a company’s board of directors or access to technical information that is not publicly available.

FIRRMA does not single out investment from specific countries. However, the legislation is designed to encourage added scrutiny of certain investments, including Chinese investments, and to create a more efficient process for clearing investments from U.S. allies that do not raise national security concerns, said Brian Curran, a Hogan Lovells partner, who previously worked as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. (11/27)

Japanese Company to Launch Artificial Meteor Shower Satellite (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
A small Japanese satellite scheduled for launch Friday on a Rocket Lab Electron booster will release hundreds of colorful sky pellets to fall into the atmosphere next year, creating an artificial meteor shower that could be visible to millions. The satellite, built and owned by Tokyo-based Astro Live Experiences, will launch into a 250-mile-high (400-kilometer) polar orbit to prepare for next year’s sky spectacle. On-board thrusters will help target re-entry over a specific region for the artificial shooting stars.

ALE has not announced the location or exact time for the meteor shower demonstration. “I’m excited for the upcoming launch of our second satellite, ALE-2,” said Lena Okajima, ALE’s chief executive. “I’m delighted to have an earlier launch date than I expected. With this launch, we are a step closer to realize the man-made shooting star.” The 165-pound ALE-2 satellite measures 2 feet by 2 feet by 2.6 feet. It’s the biggest of seven spacecraft scheduled for launch on Rocket Lab’s 10th Electron rocket Friday. (11/28)

Blue Origin’s Expansion Plans Rush Ahead at its Seattle-Area HQ — and in Los Angeles (Source: GeekWire)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is rapidly expanding on several fronts, ranging from its headquarters facility south of Seattle to a new beachhead in the Los Angeles area — within the orbit of its main competitor, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Just three and a half years ago, Blue Origin’s workforce amounted to 600 employees, and even then, Bezos said his company’s 300,000-square-foot office and production facility in Kent was “busting out of the seams.”

Now the employee count is at around 2,500, heading toward 3,500 in the next year. That’s according to a report from a Bangkok space conference quoting Clay Mowry, Blue Origin’s vice president for global sales, marketing and customer experience. To be sure, there are lots of places to put those employees — including a rocket test facility nestled amid 165,000 acres of Bezos-owned ranch land in West Texas; a 750,000-square-foot New Glenn rocket factory in Florida, plus a leased launch complex and a servicing center; a 200,000-square-foot BE-4 engine factory in Alabama; and a business office in Arlington, Va.

Now you can add Los Angeles to the list: Blue Origin is ramping up a California propulsion system design and development operation in the L.A. area to support the teams in Kent, Texas and Alabama. For now, the Engines Design Office accounts for only seven of the nearly 700 open positions at Blue Origin. Most of the openings for propulsion engineers (and other jobs, for that matter) are still at the Kent HQ. And the exact location for the L.A.-area office isn’t mentioned in the job listings or current California business filings. But the fact that there’ll be a California presence seems to serve as recognition of Southern California’s continuing importance as a locale for rocket development. (11/29)

Blastoff For 3-D Printing: How Virgin Orbit Harnesses High Tech for Low-Cost Rockets (Source: GeekWire)
Virgin Orbit aims to blaze a trail on the final frontier, but in order to do that, it has had to push into new frontiers on the factory floor. Case in point: The Lasertec 4300 3D additive-subtractive hybrid machine that’s turning out rocket parts at Virgin Orbit’s 180,000-square-foot manufacturing facility here in Long Beach. Like a 3-D printer, the room-sized machine builds up a component from the ground up, using laser light to fuse metal powder into each layer. But along each step of the way, the part is fine-tuned by shaving off the excess bits. (10/14)