December 23, 2021

Brevard County Commission Resolution Commends Blue Origin’s Reconstruction of Launch Pad (Source: MyNews13)
As Blue Origin prepares for its first orbital launch using the New Glenn rocket in the new year, the aerospace company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos received some accolades from the Brevard County Commission. On Tuesday, commissioners presented members of Blue Origin’s team with a resolution commending the work that the company has done to prepare Launch Complex 36 to launch New Glenn in 2022.

Speaking before the commission, Scott Henderson, the vice president of test and flight operations and Florida site director for Blue Origin, noted that the company’s investment of more than $1.5 billion into the Florida economy is a key part of their goals. Henderson said that Blue Origin has hired more than 1,000 people in Florida and an average of 500 construction workers have been working at the LC36. A ribbon cutting was held at the site in October. (12/21)

Space Force Eyes Lower-Cost Sensors to Monitor Geostationary Orbit (Source: Space News)
GEOST, a small company based in Tucson, Arizona, won two U.S. Space Force contracts worth $38 million to develop an optical sensor payload that could be hosted on government or commercial satellites to scan the geostationary belt more than 22,000 miles above Earth. The contracts awarded to the company — $6 million in November 2020 and $32 million in December 2021 — include the design and development of the sensor, ground infrastructure, technical support and integration with the host platform and launch vehicle.

But the actual payload is less than $10 million, a key price point that the Space Force believes would make it possible to deploy these in large numbers, said GEOST vice president and general manager Joshua Hartman. Hartman said the company’s payload will be ready to launch in 2023. The Space Force has not yet identified a host satellite but the whole idea behind this program is to build sensors that could go on almost any U.S. or allied government, or commercial satellite to provide space domain awareness. The Space Force wants to proliferate these sensors across geostationary orbit, so the $10 million target price is key to make that a reality, said Hartman. (12/22)

Harvard Professor Convicted Of Lying About China Ties (Source: Law360)
A renowned Harvard University professor was convicted Tuesday of hiding his ties to a Chinese research program while accepting U.S. grant money, handing prosecutors a signature victory in a controversial line of criminal cases targeting academics. (12/21)

A Significant Association Between CHIME Fast Radio Bursts and Low-Energy IceCube Neutrinos (Source: Cornell University)
Despite numerous studies, the sources of IceCube cosmic neutrinos have hitherto been unidentified. Using recently released IceCube neutrino and CHIME FRB catalogs, we examine the possibility of an association between neutrinos and FRBs for both the entire FRB population and individual FRBs using the directional matching method. We report an association between FRBs and low-energy IceCube neutrinos with energies 0.1 -- 3 TeV at a significance level of 21.3σ. We also identify 20 FRBs that are candidate association sources of neutrinos, all of which are apparently non-repeating FRBs. (12/21)

Long March 7A Lifts Classified Chinese Satellites to Orbit (Source: Space News)
A Long March 7A rocket launched a pair of classified Chinese satellites early Thursday. The Long March 7A lifted off from the coastal Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 5:12 a.m. Eastern and deployed the Shiyan-12 (01) and (02) satellites, with a successful launch reported 40 minutes later. The identity of the satellites was not announced before the launch and are described only as performing space environment studies and related technical tests developed by the China Academy of Space Technology. The launch was the 52nd Chinese orbital mission of the year, shattering the record of 39 launches from 2018 and 2020. (12/23)

Japan's H-2A Launches Inmarsat Satellite (Source: Space News)
A Japanese H-2A rocket launched Inmarsat's first dual-band satellite Wednesday. The H-2A launched from the Tanegashima Space Center at 10:32 a.m. Eastern and deployed the Inmarsat-6 F1 satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit 26 minutes later. Using its onboard electric propulsion, the satellite will take 200 days to reach its slot in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean. I-6 F1 is the first of two identical satellites Inmarsat ordered from Europe's Airbus Defence and Space equipped with a hybrid L- and Ka-band payload. (12/23)

Propellant Leak Kept Sherpa Tug Off (Source: Space News)
A propellant leak will cause a Sherpa tug to miss its ride to space on a SpaceX rideshare launch next month. Spaceflight said technicians discovered the propellant leak Tuesday after integrating the Sherpa-LTC onto payload adapters for the Transporter-3 Falcon 9 launch scheduled for mid-January. The tug will be taken off the flight to investigate the source of the leak. Ten cubesats were manifested on that tug from a mix of commercial, government and academic customers, and Spaceflight said it is working to find new rides for those satellites. (12/23)

GAO: Cloudy Progress on Space Force Software Effort (Source: Space News)
The GAO issued another report Wednesday critical of a U.S. Space Force program developing software tools to track objects and potential threats in space. Space C2 uses agile software methods to develop apps intended to help operators identify and monitor threats to U.S. and allied space assets, as well as communicate and share information. GAO concluded the information provided to Congress over the past two years on Space C2 makes it difficult to determine if the program has made any real progress. The Air Force started Space C2 in 2018 after spending more than $1 billion on a customized platform called Joint Mission System (JMS) to track satellites and debris; JMS was eventually canceled. (12/23)

Winning Bidder Gets Chance to Fly with Blue Origin (Source: Space News)
A cryptocurrency entrepreneur says he's getting a second chance to go to space after missing a flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard this summer. Justin Sun announced Wednesday he made the $28 million winning bid for a seat on the first crewed New Shepard flight, only to miss that July mission. Sun said he's reached an agreement with Blue Origin for a dedicated New Shepard flight in 2022 he will share with five people, ranging from artists to crypto personalities, to be selected in the coming months. Sun didn't explain in his announcement what scheduling conflicts caused him to miss the July flight. (12/23)

Space Force Picks GEOST for Orbital Tracking (Source: Space News)
The Space Force selected a small company to develop sensors to better track activities in geosynchronous orbit. GEOST, a small company based in Tucson, Arizona, won two U.S. Space Force contracts worth $38 million to develop an optical sensor payload that could be hosted on government or commercial satellites to scan the geostationary belt. GEOST says the sensors themselves cost less than $10 million each, which could make it possible to deploy large numbers of them to improve monitoring of GEO. (12/23)

Russia Detaches Progress Module From ISS for Re-Entry (Source: TASS)
A Progress service module used to deliver a Russian space station module has departed the station and reentered. The Progress M-UM module undocked from the station's Prichal node module at 6:03 p.m. Eastern Wednesday and reentered over the South Pacific five and a half hours later. The Progress delivered Prichal to the station last month. (12/23)

Pandemic Resurgence Impacts AAS Conference (Source: AAS)
The latest wave of the pandemic forced the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to cancel the in-person portion of an upcoming conference. The AAS announced Wednesday that its board decided to cancel the AAS 239 meeting, scheduled for Jan. 9-13 in Salt Lake City. The organization cited surging cases linked to the omicron variant of COVID-19 that had already caused some participants to back out of the meeting. After three consecutive virtual meetings, AAS had planned AAS 239 to be a hybrid meeting, with in-person attendance required for full participation. The organization says it will study in the coming days the viability of holding a scaled-down virtual meeting. (12/23)

Astronomers Discover Dozens of Rogue Planets (Source: Space.com)
Astronomers have discovered dozens of "rogue" planets not orbiting any star. The study, published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy, looked at one region of space 420 light-years away using several observatories. Astronomers found infrared emissions correlated to between 70 and 170 gas giant planets not orbiting a star. Such rogue planets were likely ejected from solar systems early in their formation. (12/23)

Japanese Billionaire Urges Elites to Visit Space After ISS Trip (Source: Space Daily)
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on Wednesday urged the world's elites to visit space to give them a new perspective of Earth, speaking after his own voyage to the International Space Station. Together with assistant Yozo Hirano and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, Maezawa spent 12 days aboard the ISS, where they made videos documenting daily life in space for his one million YouTube subscribers. (12/22)

Virgin Orbit Expands Space Solutions Business With Hypersat Investment (Source: Space Daily)
Virgin Orbit, the responsive launch and space solutions company that has announced a planned business combination with NextGen Acquisition Corp. II, has announced an agreement to acquire a 17.5% stake in geospatial analytics company Hypersat LLC. This investment will further expand Virgin Orbit's space solutions business by providing highly accurate electro-optic and hyperspectral imagery capabilities, which can provide vital information to customers in the agriculture, defense, energy, insurance, and minerals industries, among others.

The investment by Virgin Orbit is part of the company's strategy to leverage the relationships with its satellite launch customers and space solutions end users. As part of that strategy, Virgin Orbit has previously announced investments in ArQit Quantum, SatRevolution, and Sky and Space Global. Previously, Hypersat announced that it had selected Virgin Orbit as its launch platform for its six-satellite constellation, which is being built by an international team led by QinetiQ and includes Redwire, Millennium Engineering and Integration, and Brandywine Photonics. (12/20)

Honeywell, SES and Hughes Demonstrate Multinetwork Airborne Connectivity (Source: Space Daily)
Honeywell, SES and Hughes have successfully demonstrated multinetwork, multiorbit high-speed airborne connectivity for military customers, a technological breakthrough that will enable government and military personnel to communicate between the ground and air more efficiently and securely than ever. Honeywell's JetWave MCX broadband satellite communication (SATCOM) solution, using an HM-series modem from Hughes Network Systems, was paired with SES' medium earth orbit (MEO) high-throughput, low-latency network, and multiple SES geostationary satellites, including the government-dedicated GovSat-1 satellite.

Airborne demonstrations showed that Honeywell's JetWave MCX terminal is compatible with various Ka-band network capabilities and can provide military customers with network resilience that supports primary alternate contingency and emergency (PACE) communication requirements. Additionally, SES' MEO constellation provided both lower latency and fiber-like connectivity during the demo flights, with full duplex data rates of more than 40 megabits per second. This is noteworthy due to government customers' demand for robust uplink, as evidenced by multiple simultaneous HD video feeds. (12/21)

Kepler Communications Announces Testing of Aether Network with Spire Global (Source: Space Daily)
Kepler Communications has signed a contract with Spire Global to launch a test of Kepler's Aether network. This will serve as an initial test bed for Kepler's Aether service and will also help Spire evaluate how the technology can support its goal to collect accurate, timely and global data. Announced at Satellite 2021, Aether is the fulfilment of Kepler's mission to enable the space economy by delivering the infrastructure for always-on, real-time connectivity to space-based assets.

With Aether, Kepler will solve one of the key challenges facing low earth orbit missions, which is limited connectivity with Earth, by relaying data through the Aether network. Without an always-on, real-time communications link, operators must wait until the satellite is above a ground station to learn about the health of the asset, confirm satellite location, or identify anomalous behavior. (12/17)

Research Into Ageing Set to Blast Into Space (Source: Space Daily)
Scientists at the University of Liverpool, funded by the UK Space Agency, are using space to understand what happens to human muscles as we age, and why. When astronauts spend time in space, without the effects of gravity, their muscles get weaker, just as they do in older age, before recovering when they return to Earth. By studying what happens to muscle tissue in space, the team can compare the findings to what happens on Earth.

This new experiment, called MicroAge, will take human muscle cells, the size of a grain of rice, that are grown in a lab and carefully put them into small 3D-printed holders the size of a pencil sharpener. Once in space, these will be electrically stimulated to induce contractions in the muscle tissue, and the scientists will look closely to see what happens. (12/21)

More Private Rocket Companies are Set to Light Up Space Coast with Launches in 2022 (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
While SpaceX and United Launch Alliance have been sending rockets up at an increased pace the past several years, the Space Coast is about to get much busier with more commercial rocket companies set to join the launch party. The first half of 2022 is slated to see two companies launch for the first time from Cape Canaveral from two older launch complexes while some massive new rockets are waiting on new engines in the hopes of lifting off before the end of the year.

For one company, Relativity Space based in Long Beach, California, its first planned launch from Space Launch Complex 16, will be its first liftoff ever. Its rockets are fabricated using 3D printing technology and are projected to take as little as 30 days to create, from the nose cone to the engine. Its first rocket is called Terran 1 while a much larger reusable version is in the works called Terran R. Click here. (12/22)