July 3, 2020

OneWeb Assets At Auction This Week (Source: SpaceQ)
The US bankruptcy auction of OneWeb assets is being held July 2 and many analysts expect a strong bid by the UK government will win. The Financial Times is reporting today that while the auction will be held today, “it will not be until July 10 that the victor will be formally declared after a US judge rules whether the company, with operations on both sides of the Atlantic, and its employees are best served by the winning bid.” Whoever wins the auction, it’s a gamble with an outcome we won’t know for some time.

For Telesat, acquiring OneWeb assets and adding to the its planed LEO Satellite constellation might help to get its service up and running sooner. And that’s something it may need to do as it competes with SpaceX for customers. SpaceX currently has 540 Starlink satellites on-orbit with at least another 7 launches planned this year for an additional 406 satellites. (7/2)

Commercial Launch Industry Off to Slow Start in 2020 (Source: Space News)
The first half of 2020 has been sluggish for the commercial launch industry, but its problems can’t be explained solely by the coronavirus pandemic. There were 45 orbital launch attempts in first six months of 2020, including four failed launches. That would put the overall launch industry on a pace for 90 launches in the year, somewhat less than the 102 launches attempted in 2019.

Of those 45 launches, just over half — 23 — were carried out or otherwise brokered by Western launch companies. That includes Arianespace, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, ULA and Virgin Orbit. The rest were performed by Chinese organizations, the Russian government and Iran.

Most of those 23 launches, though, were not for commercial customers. Arianespace performed two Ariane 5 launches early in the year that carried either commercial communications satellites or government satellites whose launches were commercially competed. It also brokered two Soyuz launches of OneWeb satellites before OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March. (7/2)

Starlink Satellites May Have Stifled the Best Chance to Find Planet 9 (Source: CNN)
A new telescope in South America might, astronomers have hoped, decrypt some of the universe's mysteries and — assuming it exists — even provide the first glimpse of Planet Nine, a giant world that some scientists predict is lurking in the outskirts of our solar system. But standing between the telescope and its potential discoveries are hundreds of internet-beaming satellites that belong to Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Astronomers say trails of light given off by the satellites could pockmark thousands of images captured at the Rubin Observatory, where the telescope will be housed, despite recent efforts SpaceX had made to dim its Starlink. "The astronomy community was not prepared for this, and certainly not funded for it," Tony Tyson, the Rubin Observatory's chief scientist, said. SpaceX did not respond to requests to comment. (7/2)

Coronavirus Work Stoppage Likely to Delay Launch of NASA X-ray Astronomy Mission (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
A nearly three-month stoppage of on-site work due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus at NASA’s Marshall Space Fight Center in Alabama is expected to push back the launch of the IXPE X-ray astronomy satellite from May 2021 until some time later next year, a senior space agency official said. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, mission is assigned to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport.

IXPE is designed to measure the polarization of high-energy cosmic X-rays, collecting data that will allow astronomers to study the unseen environment around black holes, neutron stars and pulsars, the extremely dense collapsed remains left behind by exploding stars. Astronomers hope IXPE will reveal the spin of black holes, and yield new discoveries about the extreme magnetic fields around a special type of neutron star called magnetars. (7/2)

Boeing Announces More Layoffs (Source: Seattle Times)
Last week Boeing handed out a second round of layoff notices, notifying approximately 1,030 employees companywide that they will lose their jobs by Aug. 28. Boeing said these layoffs are the next wave in its previously announced plan to shrink the size of the workforce overall by about 10%, due to the dire impact on the aviation industry of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because that impact is felt mostly in the Commercial Airplanes division, Washington state is set to take a bigger hit, with more than 15% of jobs here to be cut, Boeing said.

In the first round of job cuts announced in late May, Boeing announced almost 12,300 U.S. jobs would go through a combination of slightly more than 5,500 voluntary buyouts and almost 6,800 layoffs. The company had already announced more than 600 job losses in Australia and Canada, so that brought the total reduction close to 13,000 employees, or about 8% of the total workforce of just over 160,000. The second round of layoffs bumps up the reduction to almost 14,000 employees overall, which isn’t quite 9% of the total. So there are likely another 2,000 job losses ahead companywide. (7/2)