April 1, 2020

OneWeb Satellites in Florida Not Part of Larger Bankruptcy (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
OneWeb set up a 50-50 joint venture with Airbus to mass-produce 325-pound (147-kilogram) satellites at a rate of up to two per day. The joint venture, named OneWeb Satellites, operates a 105,500-square-foot (9,800-square-meter) factory at Exploration Park, just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. OneWeb Satellites announced Monday that it is reducing workforce at the Florida factory, effective immediately, citing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.

The satellite manufacturer said the furloughs will primarily be temporary in nature. OneWeb Satellites said it is still operating with no plans to file for bankruptcy. As of February, OneWeb satellites counted around 250 employees at the company’s factory and test center in Florida, with another 115 or so working for OneWeb Satellites in engineering support roles in Toulouse, France. OneWeb Satellites said it has adjusted shift times to limit the exposure of employees to the virus, and all personnel still working at the factory will practice social distancing. (3/30)

Analyst: OneWeb an Investment Opportunity for U.S. Defense Contractors (Source: Space News)
Space internet startup OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday after failing to secure funding from investors. “This is tangible evidence of how the pandemic is impacting the funding of startups that offer commercial technologies and services with defense applications,” industry analyst Byron Callan, of Capital Alpha Partners, wrote in an email to clients. He suggested this presents an “opportunity for defense contractors to accelerate venture investing in firms with technology that is relevant to security needs.”

OneWeb is now for sale and “could be salvaged and proceed with its plans for a proliferated LEO satellite constellation that offers high-speed communications,” Callan wrote, warning that if COVID-19 blows a hole in the venture capital funding streams that have driven U.S. innovation, that could put the U.S. at a disadvantage. (4/1)

Iridium Is Not OneWeb (Source: Seeking Alpha)
The market has left Iridium behind a little during the current bounceback. We suspect this is due to the negative news around OneWeb, a satellite business which has just filed for bankruptcy. Iridium stock may have been caught in the backwash.  But Iridium is a growing, predictable, cash generative business and its stock is on sale.

In addition, it is one of the companies whose earnings we expect to be impacted least by Covid-19. We're recommending to buy this stock as a result. The stock held up better than the market at large until the start of the final leg down; it then moved up as the market fell and has kept rising since that time. So far so good. But in the last 2-3 days the stock price growth has simply kept pace with the market. (3/31)

Air Force Identifies 23 Units for Transfer to Space Force (Source: Space News)
The U.S. Air Force has selected 23 units that will be transferred to the U.S. Space Force in the next several months. The goal is to transfer 23 Air Force units and 1,840 Air Force billets located at bases in Colorado, California, Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico and Maryland from the Air Force into the Space Force within the next three to six months. The personnel assigned to these units that will transfer will remain members of the U.S. Air Force who are assigned to the Space Force, with the Air Force planning a separate process "in the coming months" for Air Force personnel to volunteer to join the Space Force. (4/1)

NASA's Mars Helicopter Makes Last Spin on Earth beforeBefore July Launch (Source: Space.com)
NASA's next mission to Mars will carry what is meant to become the first aircraft to fly on another planet, and that experimental helicopter just spun its blades on Earth for the last time. The Mars Helicopter is scheduled to launch in July with the new Mars rover, now dubbed Perseverance, as an add-on project to the primary Mars 2020 mission. NASA is still striving to meet that launch date despite continuing closures enacted to slow the spread of the serious respiratory disease COVID-19 caused by a new coronavirus.

All the components of the Mars 2020 mission are currently undergoing their final prelaunch tests at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Among those components are the cruise stage vehicle, which recently finished a test to confirm its mass properties, NASA said in a statement, and the helicopter. (3/30)

In Exactly A Year Our Knowledge Of The Cosmos Will Change Forever. This Is The $10 Billion Reason (Source: Forbes)
In precisely one year—on Tuesday, March 30, 2021—the almost US$10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) will launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, “Webb” will study the solar system, directly image exoplanets, photograph the first galaxies, and explore the mysteries of the origins of the Universe. By detecting infrared light, Webb will be able to look further back in time than any other telescope thus far (all telescopes look back in time; when it takes images of a galaxy 13 billion light years away, it’s capturing light from 13 billion years ago). (3/29)

SpaceX Releases a Payload User’s Guide for its Starship Rocket (Source: Ars Technica)
SpaceX has released the first edition of a Payload User's Guide for its Starship launch system, which consists of a Super Heavy first stage and the Starship upper stage. The six-page guide provides some basic information for potential customers to judge whether a launch vehicle meets their needs for getting payloads into space. The new guide is notable because it details the lift capabilities of Starship in reusable mode, during which both the first and second stages reserve enough fuel to return to Earth. In this configuration, the rocket can deliver more than 100 metric tons to low-Earth orbit and 21 tons to geostationary transfer orbit.

The killer application, however, is the potential to refuel Starship in low-Earth orbit with other Starships, enabling transportation deeper into the Solar System for 100 tons or more. "The maximum mass-to-orbit assumes parking orbit propellant transfer, allowing for a substantial increase in payload mass," the document states. SpaceX has yet to demonstrate this technology—which has never been done on a large scale in orbit—but the company's engineers have been working on it for several years and partnered with NASA last summer. (3/31)

Reality Check: U.S. Back to the Moon? Anxiety over Artemis (Source: Inside Outer Space)
“With the current health crisis situation and the stand down of the Artemis team, it makes absolutely no sense to continue to push for that date,” Logsdon told Inside Outer Space. A much more fundamental issue, Logsdon added, “is whether the White House, the Congress, and indeed the U.S. public will continue, as we emerge from this trauma, to support human space exploration in the face of unprecedented demands on the government budget.”

Requesting $71 billion over the next five years to go back to the Moon by 2024, a politically-inspired date, on top of everything else NASA does, was a big ask to begin with, says Marcia Smith. “In the current climate, with trillions – that’s with a t – being spent to keep the country afloat economically, I think it will be a bridge too far,” Smith said. “Generally speaking, Congress loves NASA, and space exploration, so I don’t think the goal will change, but almost certainly the timeline,” Smith said. (3/28)

Astronauts Assigned to SpaceX Commercial Crew Mission (Source: Space News)
NASA has assigned two more astronauts to the first operational SpaceX commercial crew flight. NASA astronaut Shannon Walker and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi will fly on the Crew-1 mission, joining NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Vic Glover, who were assigned to the mission in 2018. A date for that mission has not been set, and will depend on when the Demo-2 crewed test flight takes place and its outcome.

No Russian cosmonauts were assigned to the mission despite desires previously expressed by NASA for "mixed crews" on both Soyuz and commercial crew flights, which would ensure there would be at least one American and one Russian on the station in the event one vehicle was unavailable. At an International Space Station Advisory Committee meeting Monday, chairman Tom Stafford said Roscosmos officials did not want to assign cosmonauts to commercial crew flights until there had been successful launches of them. (4/1)

Pandemic Brings Uncertainty to Appropriations Process (Source: Roll Call)
The coronavirus pandemic has created uncertainty about the appropriations process for fiscal year 2021. Both the House and Senate are out until at least April 20, and could remain away from the Capitol for even longer if the pandemic worsens. House appropriators say they have no hearings or markups of bills scheduled currently, but remain "hard at work" both on future legislation to deal with the pandemic and the regular series of appropriations bills. Senate appropriators are considering virtual hearings, or none at all, but still hope to mark up spending bills by the July Fourth recess. (4/1)

Canada Increases Space Agency Funding (Source: SpaceQ)
Canadian Space Agency budget increases 20% for 2020-21 - The Canadian Space Agency budget is increasing by 20% over last years budget according to its recently released Departmental Plan. This isn’t an April Fools joke, it does however require some context. Canada’s civil space agency will see its planned spending rise from $328.9 million last year, to $394.9 million for the fiscal year 2020-21 which starts today.

While this is a 20% increase over the previous year, it is also a 35.5% increase on what had been projected for the 2020-21. The CSA’s projected spending from last years documents had this years projection at $291.4 million. That would have continued an ongoing trend of decreasing annual funds available to the agency. (4/1)

KSC Visitor Complex Furloughs Employees (Source: Florida Today)
The operator of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex has furloughed most of its staff. Delaware North, which operates a number of attractions that, like the KSC visitor's center, are closed because of the pandemic, said it placed on "temporary leave" more than two-thirds of its full-time staff, continuing benefits for eight weeks but only providing one week of pay. Part-time employees are no longer being scheduled for shifts or being paid. The company didn't say how many employees at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex were affected, but a 2019 economic impact report said the center had nearly 1,000 employees. The visitor's center has been closed since mid-March because of the pandemic. (4/1)

GPS Ground Hardware Costs Rise With Change From Chinese Supplier (Source: Space News)
Changing computer hardware for the GPS 3 ground system will cost $378 million. Raytheon was awarded a $378 million modification by the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) to its existing OCX contract to remove the system's IBM computers and install new Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) hardware. That contract, awarded to Raytheon in 2010, now has a cumulative value of $3.7 billion. Delays to the OCX program meant that that the development contract had to be modified to replace the IBM computers, now owned by Chinese company Lenovo, rather than making the change to a later sustainment contract. (4/1)

Space Industry Employment Rose in 2019 (Source: Breaking Defense)
Space industry employment rose in 2019, according to a new report. The Space Foundation's Space Report found a 4.1% increase in the number of people employed in the space industry, to 141,520, the third consecutive year of employment growth. The report acknowledged that the ongoing pandemic will "drastically change the trajectory" of the overall economy but argued that the space industry may be better insulated from those changes than other sectors. (4/1)

Chinese Rover Tops 425 Meters on Moon (Source: Xinhua)
China's Yutu-2 rover has now driven nearly 425 meters across the lunar surface. Chinese officials said the rover and the Chang'e-4 lander have completed their 16th lunar day, with the rover's odometer now at 424.455 meters. The rover, which has been on the surface since January 2019, holds the record for the longest-operating lunar rover, and both it and the lander continue to be in good condition. (4/1)

Astronaut Nyberg Leaving NASA (Source: NASA)
NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg is leaving the agency. Nyberg, whose last day at NASA was Tuesday, joined the astronaut corps in 2000. She flew on the STS-124 shuttle mission in 2008 and spent five and a half months on the ISS in 2013 as part of the Expedition 36 and 37 crews. (4/1)

NASA Selects Mission to Study Causes of Giant Solar Particle Storms (Source: Parabolic Arc)
NASA has selected a new mission to study how the Sun generates and releases giant space weather storms – known as solar particle storms – into planetary space. Not only will such information improve understanding of how our solar system works, but it ultimately can help protect astronauts traveling to the Moon and Mars by providing better information on how the Sun’s radiation affects the space environment they must travel through. The new mission, called the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE), is an array of six CubeSats operating as one very large radio telescope.

NASA has awarded $62.6 million to design, build and launch SunRISE by no earlier than July 1, 2023. NASA chose SunRISE in August 2017 as one of two Mission of Opportunity proposals to conduct an 11-month mission concept study. In February 2019, the agency approved a continued formulation study of the mission for an additional year. SunRISE is led by Justin Kasper at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. (3/31)

Antisatellite Systems Proliferating (Source: Space News)
New studies released Monday warned that antisatellite systems are proliferating. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said that satellite jamming and spoofing devices that broadcast fake GPS signals are increasingly part of the arsenals of many countries' militaries and "could gradually become normalized." One of the take-aways from the research is that the United States military has to take action to protect satellites from a growing array of threats, CSIS concluded. A separate report by the Secure World Foundation examined counterspace developments in several countries, and found evidence of "broad research" in those systems. (3/31)

Orbit Fab Wins NSF Grant for Satellite Docking (Source: Space News)
Satellite refueling startup Orbit Fab has won an NSF grant to test its satellite docking technology. The award, part of NSF's "America's Seed Fund" program, will support work on the design and initial testing of a cooperative docking system that is a key part of the company's plans to provide in-space satellite refueling. Orbit Fab said that while the NSF program is similar to SBIR programs at agencies like NASA and the U.S. Air Force, it has a greater emphasis on commercialization, helping the company develop a successful product. (3/31)

Canadian Space Agency Contracts With MDA for ISS Support (Source: SpaceQ)
The Canadian Space Agency has issued a new contract to MDA for International Space Station operations. The $133 million contract, awarded last week, covers engineering and logistics support of the Canadian robotic arm system on the ISS for the next four years. That system includes the Canadarm2 arm as well as a mobile base system and the Dextre manipulator. (3/31)

China's Crewed Spacecraft Appears Compatible with ISS Docking System (Source: Space.com)
China's next-generation crewed spacecraft appears to use an international docking adapter. An image of the spacecraft, being prepared for an uncrewed test flight next month, showed a docking system that looks to be compatible with the International Docking System Standard used on the ISS. While that could technically allow the spacecraft to dock with the station, political hurdles make such a mission unlikely for the indefinite future. (3/31)