April 29, 2021

China Launches Space Station Core Module (Source: Space News)
China launched the core module of its space station Wednesday night. A Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket lifted off from the coastal Wenchang spaceport at 11:23 p.m. Eastern, deploying the Tianhe module into low Earth orbit. Tianhe, or "harmony of the heavens,"  is now expected to raise its orbit to around 370 kilometers above the Earth. The uncrewed Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous and dock with Tianhe in mid-late May, ahead of the visit of three astronauts aboard Shenzhou-12 in June. Those will be the first of 11 launches across 2021 and 2022 to build the planned 66-ton, three-module orbital outpost. (4/29)

Arianespace Vega Rocket Launches Satellites (Source: Space News)
Europe's Vega small launch vehicle returned to flight Wednesday. The rocket lifted off at 9:50 p.m. Eastern from French Guiana, deploying the Pléiades Neo 3 imaging satellite and five secondary payloads. The launch was the first since a November launch failure blamed on cables that were improperly connected in the upper stage of the rocket, which Italian rocket maker Avio builds. Pléiades Neo 3 is the first in a constellation of four imaging satellites built and operated by Airbus, capable of taking images with a resolution of 30 centimeters. (4/29)

SpaceX Launches Starlink Satellites, Recovers Booster (Source: Space News)
SpaceX launched another batch of Starlink satellites late Wednesday. The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:44 p.m. Eastern and released the 60 Starlink satellites about 65 minutes later. SpaceX has now launched more than 1,500 Starlink satellites, of which 1,434 remain in orbit. The launch came a day after the FCC approved a modification of SpaceX's license for Starlink, allowing the company to operate more satellites in lower orbits. (4/29)

SLS Core Stage Transported to VAB for Integration (Source: Space News)
The core stage of the first Space Launch System rocket is now at the Kennedy Space Center but faces a "challenging" schedule to launch this year. The barge ferrying the core stage from the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi arrived at KSC this week, and the stage will soon be moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building for integration with the other SLS components and the Orion spacecraft. NASA's acting administrator, Steve Jurczyk, said this week that while NASA still hopes to launch the SLS before the end of this year, it will be challenging to do so given the lack of schedule margin after technical and other delays earlier in the program. (4/29)

SpaceX's Boca Chica Venture Has All the 'Versus' Categories Covered (Source: My San Antonio)
Remember the “Types of Conflict” lesson in English class? Humans versus: humans, nature, technology, destiny, society. And there’s subcategories — citizens versus business and government; a fast-moving corporation versus federal bureaucracy; pristine wilderness versus development; technology versus physics; fans versus opponents; past versus future. Or becoming an interplanetary species versus depending solely on Earth? Some would say survival versus extinction. The list goes on. These conflicts are the marrow of amazing stories, so it’s easy to get drawn in.

The FAA investigation remains open on Starship SN11, the craft that blew up in the fog and rained debris on marshlands on March 30. According to the FAA, SpaceX won’t be authorized to fly its next Starship, which is on the launch pad, until the investigation is closed or the craft is deemed safe. There’s a $20-million lawsuit against the company by a family who crashed into a truck turning into the SpaceX complex. The accident killed the father and injured the rest of the family.

The FAA and Army Corps of Engineers are doing environmental reviews of SpaceX’s expansion requests. And in Brownsville there’s a small, but growing, group of opponents who are getting louder. Developing a relationship with the citizens of the Rio Grande Valley could help educate citizens about the company, and there are ways to do this beyond the guerilla marketing that thrills SpaceX fans. Transparency builds trust. While SpaceX is open about their testing — posting updates and broadcasting live feeds — there’s not much formal interaction with the community beyond that. (4/28)

Elon Musk’s War on Regulators (Source: Wall Street Journal)
He’s become one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs by reinventing industries from electric cars to rockets. Along the way, he’s also rewritten the rules of engagement with U.S. regulators. Elon Musk has emerged a winner in a series of run-ins with a range of regulatory agencies that have watched as he sidestepped rules or ignored enforcement attempts. He has overmatched an alphabet-soup of agencies that oversee financial markets and safety in the workplace, on highways and in space flight.

Most chief executives try to avoid regulators—or at least stay in their good graces. Many accused of overstepping have paid fines or agreed to make improvements. Mr. Musk, revered by some investors for his iconoclastic approach, has taken a different tack on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the world, not letting regulations hinder his goals to revolutionize transportation with Tesla Inc.’s electric cars or colonize Mars using SpaceX rockets. Federal agencies say he’s breaking the rules and endangering people. Mr. Musk says they’re holding back progress. (4/29)

Roper Joins Ursa Major Board (Source: Space News)
The former head of procurement for the U.S. Air Force has joined the board of a rocket engine startup. Ursa Major Technologies named former Air Force procurement official Will Roper to its board Wednesday. Roper served as assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics from February 2018 until January 2021 and previously ran the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office. The company, which develops rocket engines to sell to launch vehicle companies, said it brought Roper on board because of his "vision and leadership within the Air Force to establish on-ramps for innovative companies." (4/29)

Space Foundation Plans Hybrid Symposium in August (Source: Space News)
One of the biggest space conferences of the year is returning this summer in a hybrid format. The Space Foundation said it's planning to move forward with its 36th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in August, with its conference facilities operating at 50% capacity, or nearly 6,000 people. The event will be streaming keynote remarks, presentations, and panel discussions for those unable to attend. The conference is likely to be the first event in the United States to bring the commercial, civil and military space communities together after a year of events cancelled or moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (4/29)

Nelson Nomination Moves in Senate (Source: Space News)
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced Bill Nelson's nomination to be NASA administrator Wednesday. On a voice vote, the committee favorably reported his nomination to the full Senate for confirmation. Nelson testified before the committee last week, and no members expressed any reservations about the former senator becoming head of the space agency. The Senate has not yet scheduled a confirmation vote for the nomination. (4/29)

NASA Infrastructure Could Find Home in Bill (Source: Space News)
The chair of the House space subcommittee wants NASA to be included in an infrastructure bill. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) said Wednesday he is working with the White House and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to include funding for NASA infrastructure in that spending package. He noted that NASA has more than $2.6 billion in deferred maintenance of its facilities that could be addressed by the bill. Beyer said he has a full agenda for his subcommittee, from reviewing NASA's plans for the Artemis program to space traffic management. (4/29)

Air Force NTS-3 Navigation Satellite to Launch in 2023 (Source: Space News)
The launch of an experimental Air Force navigation satellite will slip to 2023. The NTS-3 spacecraft had been scheduled for launch in 2022 but will now launch in 2023 as a rideshare on a classified launch by United Launch Alliance. The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) said the schedule for that primary mission, and not the spacecraft itself, is the reason for the delay. NTS-3 is one of AFRL's most ambitious space experiments. Officials said the satellite could bring significant new capabilities for secure positioning, navigation and timing to supplement current GPS satellites that operate from medium Earth orbit. (4/29)

Space and the New ESG Business Climate (Source: Space News)
A new emphasis on environment, social and governance (ESG) offers an opportunity for space companies. ESG is a set of non-financial criteria that community-minded and bottom-line investors alike are increasingly using to value businesses. The "E" in ESG is getting another boost as the United States rejoins the climate change fight, and space promises to play a central role. A lot of ESG data about the Earth can only be gained from the vantage point of satellites beyond it, putting space in the center of this international trend. (4/29)

Surrey to Provide SAR Imagery to Space-Eyes (Source: SSTL)
Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) has signed a deal to sell synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery to an American company. Space-Eyes will buy SAR data from the NovaSAR-1 satellite that SSTL built and launched in 2018. Space-Eyes plans to combine the SAR imagery with "contextual maritime threat evaluation data for the maritime domain" for tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance applications. (4/29)

Has Space Tourism Arrived? Experts Say Not So Fast (Source: Spectrum News)
Branson’s SpaceShipTwo has been preparing to take people on suborbital trips for a brief ride in microgravity. Setbacks, including a high-profile explosion in which a test pilot died, have set Branson back time and again. And questions remain about who exactly would pay for the honor of such a trip and how much it would cost. SpaceX’s goals have always been more ambitious. Once, space tourism looked like a possibility to fund Musk's bigger ideas, but he has already achieved many of his bigger goals and plowed into markets with huge financial upside.

Adding a space tourism business to his already voluminous portfolio could be more of a distraction than financial boon, analyst Marco Caceres said. “Once you’ve been hired to be NASA’s taxi to the space station, you don’t get better publicity taking tourists to space.” While a launch of civilians to the moon would undoubtedly grab headlines, a lot has to happen for the mission to launch in 2023. Starship has already blown up in testing, often a routine step in development for launch vehicles. Still, Starship needs further testing before it can carry human cargo.

Caceres said launching civilians into space could backfire. If any are hurt or killed, that would be adverse publicity — bad enough to harm his relationship with NASA, a far more important ally than glitzy, celebrity spaceflights. The first American civilian selected to take flight in space, high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, was tragically killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion. What space tourism may need is more affordable rides on a monthly basis with more to do in space than a short trip through weightlessness. (4/28)

20 Years Since Dennis Tito, Companies Line Up to Launch Tourists to Space (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
On April, 28 2001, Dennis Tito paid his way into orbit to become the first real space tourist. The cost for the former engineer who made a fortune in investment management was reportedly around $20 million, and he did it without NASA’s assistance, hitching a ride up to the International Space Station with the Russian space program on board one of its Soyuz capsules.

20 years later, there have been only a handful more space travelers like Tito, but the ranks of those who can lay claim to having “been to space” is set to swell in the next few years as private businesses get their space tourism plans off the ground. Part of that includes NASA’s shift in attitude from what Tito and other space tourists faced 20 years ago. As of 2019, NASA stated it would begin welcoming what it has called “space participants” to the ISS, and that it would like to one day hand over the low-Earth orbit space station to commercial companies, of which NASA would just become a customer.

Not all space tourism will be bound for the orbiting space station, though. Some aim to just let people see the curvature of the Earth for a few minutes, and even experience weightlessness. And a lot of it won’t take millions of dollars, although price tags are still way more than taking a cruise. Here’s a rundown of some major players. (4/29)

Finding my Father Among the Astronauts (Source: GQ)
Out in the California high desert, a new breed of astronaut is being built in the race to make private space exploration a reality. When Nicholas Schmidle was granted rare access to the test pilots at Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, he hoped he might discover something about ambition and courage. He didn’t expect to confront the legacy of his own fighter ace father.

The pitch I had made to Virgin Galactic was that I wanted to embed with the company as it built another spaceship and returned, after the 2014 crash, to rocket-powered flights. Like Buzz Bissinger had done with the high school football team for Friday Night Lights, I said. I knew this was a big ask. A football coach had fragile egos to protect; Virgin had to worry about corporate secrets and all the risks that came with allowing an outsider access to inside information. Frankly, letting a reporter embed with a high-performance flight test program was unheard-of. “Keep that man away,” Neil Armstrong once said about a journalist. “He’s a ghoul.” Click here. (4/28)

NASA's Dilemma: Put Humans On The Moon Or Feed Big Aerospace (Source: NASA Watch)
Congress has consistently appropriated a small fraction of what is needed to continue with Human Lander work. The proposed FY 2022 budget from the Biden Administration still falls far short of what NASA has said that it needs to implement the Artemis program of record. Faced with a substantial shortfall in funds, NASA had to take that fact into account as it evaluated HLS proposals. Significant technical merits and issues aside, the numbers from Dynetics and Blue Origin were simply beyond the possible. SpaceX was much cheaper at $2.89 billion and an adjustment in its stated cost was possible. So, NASA went to the lowest bidder and asked if they could adjust their price. They did.

Blue Origin has stated that its bid was $5.99 billion. NASA stated that the Dynetics bid was "significantly higher" than the Blue Origin bid. It seriously stretches the imagination to think that they could match the SpaceX bid. Now they are protesting the decision. NASA has not said whether they will pause work with SpaceX or on-going work with Blue Origin and Dynetics while GAO examines the two protests. Protests like these rarely succeed. The only real impact these protests will likely have is to delay work on meeting Artemis programmatic goals.

Even if GAO dismisses these two HLS contract award protests, NASA still faces a lot of resistance as it strives to put Americans back on the lunar surface. Of course Big Aerospace could dial up their lobbying game and push Congress for billions more to build their systems. NASA Administrator-in-waiting Bill Nelson has been a big SLS fan since Day One, so you know that he'd certainly be listening to that option with some lingering interest. (4/28)

Michael Collins Dies at 90 (Source: New York Times)
Colonel Collins, who had begun flying in 1952, had hurtled through the skies as a test pilot and orbited the Earth 43 times in the Gemini 10 capsule. In 2019, he recalled his orbit of the moon for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. “I had this beautiful little domain,” he told The New York Times. “I was the emperor, the captain of it, and it was quite commodious. I had warm coffee, even.” (4/28)

The World’s Richest Men Are Brawling Over the Moon (Source: The Atlantic)
The full moon looked stunning this week. The lunar phase coincided with the moon’s closest approach to Earth, making the object look bigger and brighter than usual. It glowed orangey-pink low in the sky—a trick of the atmosphere—and then blanched brilliant white as it rose into the darkness. Meanwhile, down here, a couple of space billionaires are sparring over how to reach it.

In one corner is Jeff Bezos, the founder of the rocket company Blue Origin, and the richest person in the world. In the other is Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, and the second-richest person in the world. Bezos and Musk have pitched their respective businesses to NASA in the space agency’s search for new technology to land astronauts on the moon. It is a massive opportunity. Astronauts haven’t set foot on the moon since the final Apollo mission, in 1972. But American officials have long called for a triumphant return, longer stays, and even the construction of a permanent base. And in recent years, they have turned to the private sector for help. Click here. (4/28)

Earth's Glaciers Are Melting Faster Than Ever, Satellites Show (Source: Huffington Post)
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers. Scientists blame human-caused climate change.

Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year. (4/28)

Virgin Orbit to Launch From Brazil's Spaceport (Source: Virgin Orbit)
The Brazilian Space Agency (Agência Espacial Brasileira; AEB) and Brazilian Air Force (Força Aérea Brasileira, FAB) announced today that Virgin Orbit has been selected to bring orbital launch capability to Brazil, a country which has never successfully completed a domestic launch to orbit. Thanks to the unique mobility and small footprint of Virgin Orbit’s air-launched system architecture, launches to a wide range of orbital inclinations could quickly become possible without the need for new permanent infrastructure, nor the expansion of existing facilities.

Launches would occur from the Alcântara Launch Center (Centro de Lançamento de Alcântara, CLA) on Brazil’s northern coast, located just two degrees south of the equator. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne system, which uses a customized 747 aircraft as its flying launch pad and fully reusable first stage, could conduct launches from the existing airbase at the site, flying hundreds of miles before releasing the rocket directly above the equator or at other locations optimized for each individual mission. The approach enables Alcântara to become one of the only continental spaceports in the world capable of reaching any orbital inclination. (4/28)

Virgin Orbit to Launch Hyperspectral Imaging Constellation (Source: Virgin Orbit)
Virgin Orbit has been selected by defense and security company QinetiQ and geospatial analytics company HyperSat to launch a series of six hyperspectral satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). To develop the satellites, HyperSat has awarded a design-phase contract to QinetiQ to lead a team of engineering and technology organizations which includes Redwire, Millennium Engineering and Integration, and Brandywine Photonics. Virgin Orbit will provide launch services for each satellite via its LauncherOne system.

The team selected Virgin Orbit as the launch provider in part because of the unparalleled agility, mobility, and responsiveness afforded by air-launch, which allows for shorter call-up times and more flexible scheduling for customers, as well as direct injection into precise target orbits. In addition to the value for commercial customers, this capability enables a major strategic advantage to government customers seeking to maintain unencumbered overhead intelligence. (4/21)