December 17, 2020

Space Tourism Company Space Perspective to Bring 240 Jobs, and Factory to Titusville (Source: Florida Today)
Space tourism company Space Perspective will build a headquarters and manufacturing complex at Space Coast Regional Airport in Titusville, creating about 240 jobs by the end of 2026. The company said the jobs will pay an average of $80,000 a year. Space Perspective announced Thursday that it plans to build a campus on what it is referring to as the "Space Coast Spaceport" site for its capsule and balloon manufacturing facility, laboratories and operations infrastructure for everything from launch to mission control.

Space Perspective plans to launch its suborbital flights at the Launch and Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, the Space Coast Regional Airport and Cecil Spaceport in Jacksonville. Commercial fights could begin as early as late-2024.

Unlike other space-tourism companies, Space Perspective is not relying on rockets to send its passengers to space. Instead, it will use a 300-foot-diameter balloon to carry its roomy pressurized "Spaceship Neptune" capsule up to 100,000 feet before gently coming back down to Earth and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico. (12/17)

NASA's Lunar Experiment (Source: Quartz)
NASA is in the midst of a great experiment: Can commercial partnerships—like the ones that now provide cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station—deliver the same cost savings in deep space? Compared to so-called cost-plus contracts, in which the government is on the hook for any cost overruns or program delays, commercial partnerships are fixed price. Cost overruns are borne by the contractors.

This approach saved NASA billions of dollars in low-Earth orbit when the agency needed to replace capability lost by the retirement of the space shuttle. It also enabled the rise of SpaceX, the world’s most successful private space company. Heady with that success, NASA is extending its commercial ambitions toward the Moon. Spacesuits, a new lunar space station, payload delivery systems, and even the human lunar landing system itself are being developed with fixed-priced commercial contracts. Dozens of companies are vying to provide these services. (12/15)

NASA-NOAA Tech Will Aid Marine Oil Spill Response (Source: Space Daily)
Just off the coast of Santa Barbara, thousands of gallons of oil seep through cracks in the seafloor and rise to the surface each day. But this isn't a disaster zone: It's one of the largest naturally occurring oil seeps in the world and is believed to have been active for thousands of years. The reliability of these seeps makes the area an important natural laboratory for scientists, including those with the Marine Oil Spill Thickness (MOST) project, a collaboration between NASA and NOAA to generate operational automated oil spill detection, oil extent geospatial mapping analytics, and oil thickness characterization applications.

The MOST team is working to develop a way for NOAA - the lead federal agency for detecting and tracking coastal oil spills - to use remote sensing data to determine not just where oil is, but where the thickest parts are, one of the critical missing pieces to direct response and remediation activities. The team recently concluded a fall field campaign in Santa Barbara. (12/15)

Space Florida’s Incredible Shrinking Rivian Stake (Source: Tech Crunch)
Until last year, Space Florida, believed that it owned 3% of Rivian as a result of a canny lease-back agreement made a decade earlier. Following Rivian’s blockbuster IPO in November, that stake would have been worth nearly $3 billion based on Rivian’s current market capitalization — a more than 1,000-fold return on Space Florida’s investment. That investment, which totaled nearly $2 million, included buying prototypes from Rivian in exchange for warrants in the company as well as the cost of buying the stock.

Instead — and through a mechanism that neither the agency nor Rivian can explain — Space Florida has ended up holding just 60,000 shares in the company, worth less than $7 million, public records from the agency show. So why did a commercial space booster get involved with an EV pickup maker in the first place, and how did its supposed ownership evaporate?

Space Florida began working with Rivian before it was called Rivian. In 2009, RJ Scaringe founded Mainstream Motors as a spin-out from his father’s R&D firm in Rockledge, Florida. His original plan was to design an ultra-efficient gas-powered coupe capable of 60 miles per gallon and bring it into production in Florida using lightweight materials and modular manufacturing, all by the end of 2013. “Originally, there was a potential that it would bring an automobile manufacturing plant to Florida,” said Dale Ketcham, VP of Space Florida. “But it was more the possible applications off-planet, whether on the moon or Mars, that piqued our interest.” Click here. (12/14)

Type One Ventures Raises $34 Million for Space Startups (Source: Space News)
Type One Ventures has raised $34 million of the $50 million it plans to invest in space and other technology startups through its second fund. Type One was founded in 2019 to support founders focused on "heavy problems" related to space technology ans so-called deep technology, such as artificial intelligence, robotics and financial technology. The company has invested in several startups as well as SpaceX; it also invested in Made In Space before its acquisition by Redwire last year. (12/16)

Honeywell Teams with Skyloom for Laser Satellite Terminals (Source: Space News)
Honeywell is teaming with telecommunications startup Skyloom to produce laser crosslink terminals for commercial and military satellites. Honeywell will work with Skyloom to qualify laser communications terminals for the Pentagon's Space Development Agency. Those companies are supporting York Space Systems, which won a contract last year to produce 10 communications spacecraft for SDA's Transport Layer Tranche 0. (12/16)

18th Flight For Ingenuity Mars Helicopter (Source: NASA)
Ingenuity is about to make its 18th flight on Mars. JPL announced Wednesday that the flight of the Mars helicopter was scheduled for no earlier than that day, although there was no word as of early Thursday if the flight had occurred. A communications glitch delayed the return of data from its previous flight Dec. 5 but controllers later confirmed that the flight was a success. The helicopter has now racked up more than 30 minutes of flight time, traveling nearly 3.6 kilometers. (12/16)

Biden Nominates Calvelli for Air Force Space Acquisition Post (Source: Space News)
President Biden nominated Frank Calvelli to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition Wednesday. Calvelli worked for 30 years at the NRO, including more than eight years as its principal deputy director, and in September joined Booz Allen Hamilton to lead the company's space and intelligence programs. If confirmed by the Senate, Calvelli will become the first-ever senior procurement executive in charge of military space programs, a post mandated by Congress in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. He will oversee a reorganization of the Space Force procurement enterprise. (12/16)

Senate Passes $740 Million NDAA (Source: Space News)
The Senate passed the final version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act Wednesday. The bill passed on an 89-10 vote after the House approved the bill last week. The NDAA authorizes $740 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2022, about $25 billion more than what the Biden administration requested. Among its space-related provisions is a classification review of space programs and a report on how the Space Development Agency will be integrated into the Space Force. The bill does not include a provision in the original House bill that authorized the creation of a Space National Guard. (12/16)

Raytheon Wins $67 Million Space Force Contract for Weather Satellite (Source: Space News)
Raytheon won a $67 million Space Force contract for a weather satellite prototype. The contract, announced Wednesday, is for a satellite to provide imagery of cloud cover and other data needed for military operations. Raytheon, along with General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, and Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates, won contracts in 2020 to develop space sensor prototypes for the Electro-Optical Infrared Weather System. The new contract awarded to Raytheon funds additional development work beyond what was required under the original contract. Raytheon said it can deliver a satellite ready for launch by 2025. [SpaceNews]

Iceye to Provide Satellite for MDA Radar Constellation (Source: Space News)
Iceye will provide a satellite to MDA's radar constellation, Chorus. The companies announced Wednesday that Iceye will provide a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite operating in X-band, which will operate in the same orbit as a C-band SAR satellite MDA will build. The two satellites will allow MDA to use images from the C-band satellite to select targets for higher-resolution imagery by the X-band satellite. The partnership also includes an agreement to allow MDA to distribute Iceye imagery to its customers. (12/16)

NASA Plans Four Earth Science Missions in 2022 (Source: Space News)
NASA has four Earth science missions scheduled to launch next year. The agency discussed the missions, intended for weather, oceans and other observations, this week at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The two biggest ones are the JPSS-2 polar-orbiting weather satellite, scheduled to launch in September, and the Surface Water and Ocean Topography spacraft launching in November. Also scheduled is a set of six cubesats called TROPICS to monitor tropical storms, and the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that will be installed on the space station. (12/16)