January 5, 2020

How Earth-Bound Mining Lawyers Think About Space Mining (Source: Mining.com)
The asteroid mining market is already valued at up to trillions of dollars, but a single drill from earth has yet to make it to space. European scientists have announced plans to start mining the moon as early as 2025. Space mining is a concept still out of this world to most, but it is real for the mining industry. After being considered mostly science-fiction, governments are now implementing programs and legislation that allow them to join the race for mining in space.

Scot Anderson, attorney and Global Head of Energy & Natural Resources with Hogan Lovells in Denver, has a podcast on asteroid mining, and has compiled compelling legal implications and insider tactics for getting in the asteroid mining business.  Anderson spoke with MINING.com to break down the issues, challenges and opportunities. Click here. (1/3)

Tiny Satellite for Studying Distant Planets Goes Quiet (Source: NASA JPL)
Mission operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have lost contact with the ASTERIA satellite, a briefcase-sized spacecraft designed to study planets outside our solar system. The last successful communication with ASTERIA, short for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics, was on Dec. 5; attempts to contact it are expected to continue into March 2020.

ASTERIA belongs to a category of satellites called CubeSats, which vary in size but are typically smaller than a suitcase. Deployed into Earth orbit from the space station on Nov. 20, 2017, the technology demonstration mission showed that many technologies necessary for studying and potentially finding exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our Sun) can be shrunk to fit on small satellites. Long-term, the mission aimed to show that small satellites could one day be used to assist larger exoplanet missions, such as NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey (TESS). (1/3)

SpaceX’s 2020 Ambitions Tempered by 2019 Outcomes (Source: Space News)
SpaceX enters 2020 with ambitious launch, spacecraft and other plans, but those expectations are modulated by what that company achieved, and didn’t achieve, in 2019. SpaceX is scheduled to perform its first launch of 2020 Jan. 6, when a Falcon 9 launches a third set of 60 Starlink satellites. That launch will be one of as many as four launches the company carries out in January, including two other Starlink missions and an in-flight abort test of the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, currently set for Jan. 11.

That launch rate, along with missions for NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and commercial customers, including its new smallsat rideshare program, should allow the company to rebound from a slow 2019. While SpaceX performed 21 launches in 2018, it conducted only 13 launches in 2019, a decline of nearly 40%. That included a three-month gap in launches between August and November 2019, the longest hiatus since the pre-launch explosion of a Falcon 9 carrying the Amos-6 satellite in September 2016 that grounded the rocket for more than four months. (1/3)

Vandenberg Air Force Base Leading Space Race (Source: Pacific Coast Business Times)
The Central Coast will play a key role in shaping the newest branch of the military as tech giants Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go head to head at Vandenberg Air Force Base on reusable rockets. (1/3)