February 17, 2022

Astroscale Preparing to Restart Debris-Removal Demo (Source: Space News)
Astroscale said Feb. 17 it is preparing to resume an attempt to capture a satellite acting as a piece of debris in low Earth orbit, after pausing the demonstration three weeks ago to troubleshoot undisclosed problems. The Japanese startup has started moving its 175-kilogram servicer spacecraft closer to the 17-kilogram client satellite ahead of deciding whether to restart the demonstration, Astroscale said in a social media post.

According to Astroscale, it has made “good progress in working through solutions to the anomalous spacecraft conditions that we identified with ELSA-d,” or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration. The company did not disclose the nature of the issue, when it could restart the mission or the distance between the two objects. (2/17)

Aerojet Positioned to Continue Growth, Profitability (Source: Space Daily)
Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc. has reaffirmed its strong foundation for substantial value creation following the termination of its merger agreement with Lockheed Martin Corporation. The Company issued the following statement: "We are poised to deliver substantial value to our shareholders driven by our continued leadership in key space exploration and defense growth markets, including by advancing hypersonics and strategic, tactical and missile defense systems. Aerojet Rocketdyne has delivered strong shareholder returns of 166% over the five years prior to the transaction announcement, significantly outperforming the Aerospace and Defense Index by 33% and the S&P 500 by 62%." (2/15)

Microgravity Worms Help Solve Astronauts' Muscle Troubles (Source: Space Daily)
A new study on nematode worms reveals that physical contact with objects can help prevent neuromuscular decline in simulated microgravity. The research, which was published in the journal iScience, provides new insights into maintaining human health in space. Over the past 60 years, hundreds of humans have flown into space, sometimes spending up to a year on the International Space Station. Spaceflight subjects the body to near weightlessness or microgravity, which can negatively impact health.

"Progressive neuromuscular decline in microgravity is a major health concern for humans spending time in space," explains Atsushi Higashitani. "Our international team investigated the underlying reasons for these changes." They tested worms grown in space and in simulated microgravity on Earth for the levels of two molecules: dopamine, a chemical messenger in the nervous system known to be involved in movement and detecting physical contact, and COMT-4, an enzyme responsible for breaking down dopamine. They found that the microgravity-grown worms had reduced levels of both molecules. (2/16)

How to Design a Sail That Won't Tear or Melt on an Interstellar Voyage (Source: Space Daily)
Astronomers have been waiting decades for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which promises to peer farther into space than ever before. But if humans want to actually reach our nearest stellar neighbor, they will need to wait quite a bit longer: a probe sent to Alpha Centauri with a rocket would need roughly 80,000 years to make the trip.

Igor Bargatin, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, is trying to solve this futuristic problem with ideas taken from one of humanity's oldest transportation technologies: the sail. As part of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, he and his colleagues are designing the size, shape and materials for a sail pushed not by wind, but by light.

Using nanoscopically thin materials and an array of powerful lasers, such a sail could carry a microchip-sized probe at a fifth of the speed of light, fast enough to make the trip to Alpha Centauri in roughly 20 years, rather than millennia. Given that the lasers' target would be a three-meter-wide structure a thousand times thinner than a sheet of paper, figuring out how to prevent the sail from tearing or melting is a major design challenge. (2/17)

New Laser Station Lights the Way to Debris Rreduction (Source: Space Daily)
ESA's Izana-1 laser ranging station in Tenerife, Spain, has recently undergone months of testing and commissioning, passing its final tests with flying colours. As it reached 'station acceptance', it was handed over to ESA from the German company contracted to build it, DiGOS. The station is a technology testbed and a vital first step in making debris mitigation widely accessible to all space actors with a say in the future of our space environment.

Imagine lasers pointing from Earth into the skies, seeking out satellites and bits of space trash and measuring their positions and trajectories to prevent catastrophic collisions. You don't have to try too hard - this is very nearly the day-to-day reality at ESA's new Izana 1 (IZN-1) laser ranging station in Tenerife, Spain. IZN-1, developed and now operated by ESA, is a testbed for future technologies and was installed in mid-2021 at the Teide Observatory. (2/16)

ESA Committee to Plan European Human Space Exploration (Source: Space News)
ESA will establish a committee to study options for a future European human space exploration program. ESA announced at the end of a one-day European space summit meeting in Toulouse, France, Wednesday that it would establish a "high-level advisory group" to develop options for human spaceflight, with an interim report expected in time for the ESA ministerial meeting in November. The committee, proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron, will feature people from both inside and outside the space industry to offer economic, geopolitical and historical perspectives. The summit also backed other ESA and the European Union initiatives, including a broadband constellation. (2/17)

Project Athena: A Challenge to ESA to Develop Crew Launch Capabilities (Source: ESA)
As ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano’s passionate speech at the European Space Summit 2022 in Toulouse once again ignites the question of whether or not Europe should develop independent crew launch capabilities, we have some thoughts. If European governments and industry are to develop crew launch capabilities, national pride is never going to be enough. There needs to be a commercial application for the technology to ensure a strong financial incentive. We just don’t have the funding capacity to spend billions on what is essentially a vanity project.

Project Athena aims to fast track the development of an expendable crew launch system that leans on work being done by Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space with the development of the European Service Module (ESM) and Lunar Gateway modules for NASA. Both companies also have heritage in previous European crew launch initiatives including the Crew Space Transportation System and the Automated Transfer Vehicle Evolution initiative.

The spacecraft would have space for a crew of three with both pressurized and unpressurized cargo capabilities. It would have on-orbit capabilities to support three-month missions powered by a pair of deployable solar arrays. Although the trunk would be optimised for low Earth orbit operations initially, a service module more in line with the Airbus Defence and Space ESM could extend its reach beyond low Earth orbit to support crew operations for NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station. (2/16)

Space Force Creates Front Door for New Commercial Collaborations (Source: Space News)
The Space Force's procurement arm is starting a new effort to attract commercial space companies that do not typically work with the government. The "SSC front door" initiative by Space Systems Command will place Space Force representatives across the United States to engage companies and identify Space Force investment opportunities in "high-potential technologies," said Joy White, executive director of the Space Systems Command. The command has set a goal of transforming the military's space architecture from one dominated by huge satellites in geostationary Earth orbit to more proliferated networks deployed in lower and higher orbits that would be more difficult for adversaries to attack. (2/17)

Belgium's Aerospacelab Raises $45.5 Million (Source: Space News)
Belgian geospatial intelligence company Aerospacelab raised 40 million euros ($45.5 million) in a new funding round Wednesday. Airbus Ventures and XAnge, a European venture capital firm based in Paris and Munich, led the round in Aerospacelab, which has now raised 60 million euros to date. Aerospacelab is a vertically integrated company that designs, manufactures, tests and operates satellites and sensors. It will use the funding to develop data fusion technologies and start work on new satellites for "intra-daily monitoring" of Earth. (2/17)

Switzerland's ABB to Develop Imaging Systems for EarthDaily Analytics Constellation (Source: Space News)
Switzerland-based technology provider ABB won an order to provide imaging systems for a constellation of 10 satellites by EarthDaily Analytics. The $30 million deal is ABB's largest space hardware order to date from a private customer. Those systems, designed to provide imagery in 22 spectral bands with resolution down to five meters, are slated to launch starting in 2023. (2/17)

Progress Cargo Craft Docks with ISS (Source: TASS)
A Progress cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station overnight. The Progress MS-19 spacecraft docked with the Poisk module of the station's Russian segment at 2:03 a.m. Eastern, a little more than two days after launch. The spacecraft delivered more than two tons of supplies, water and fuel for the station. (2/17)

Personnel Shifts at FAA and OSTP (Sources: Space Policy Online, Washington Post)
FAA Administrator Steve Dickson will resign from the agency at the end of March. Dickson said he was leaving halfway into a five-year term as head of the agency because it was "time to go home" to his family. The White House announced two temporary appointments for science advisory positions. Alondra Nelson, deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, will serve as acting director of the office. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, will be acting presidential science adviser. They replace Eric Lander, who resigned last week as head of OSTP and presidential science adviser. (2/17)

NASA Considers Other Alternatives to Launch GeoCarb Instrument (Source: Space News)
NASA is abandoning plans to fly an Earth science instrument as a commercial hosted payload. The agency originally intended to fly the GeoCarb instrument, designed to monitor greenhouse gases and plant health in the Americas, as a hosted payload on a commercial GEO communications satellite. However, NASA issued a solicitation last week seeking information on alternative rides to space for the instrument. An agency spokesperson said that market research found "no apparent options for commercial hosting" of GeoCarb. The agency is now planning to procure a spacecraft and launch for it. NASA hopes to launch GeoCarb by the end of 2024. (2/17)

Phase Four Wins DARPA Work on Smallsat Propellant (Source: Space News)
Phase Four won a DARPA contract to test an alternative propellant with its radio-frequency thrusters. Under the one-year DARPA contract announced Wednesday, Phase Four is developing a new smallsat RF thruster prototype. The company did not disclose the value of the contract or the propellant that will be tested. Phase Four has tested thrusters with different propellants, including air, water, iodine and a green propellant called ASCENT. In addition, Phase Four is investigating propellants that could be harvested in orbit, on planetary bodies or collected from other rocket engines. (2/17)

Chandra Instrument Problem Halts Science Observations (Source: Space.com)
An instrument problem has halted science observations by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. A power supply for the spacecraft's High Resolution Camera malfunctioned last week, and controllers put all four science instruments into safe mode while investigating the problem. NASA expects to resume science operations with one instrument by early next week as engineers continue work on the camera. Chandra launched in 1999 and is an extended mission that could run through 2030. (2/17)

NASA Restarts Advisory Council (Source: NASA)
NASA is restarting an advisory group. The agency announced Wednesday it had appointed several new members to the NASA Advisory Council, including former administrator Charles Bolden, former Army Secretary Eric Fanning and former Rep. Jane Harman. The council will meet March 1-2, the first meeting of the full council since late 2019. (2/17)

Isaacman Mission Includes Two SpaceX Employees (Source: Quartz)
The crew Isaacman selected includes a former Air Force pilot who works for Isaacman’s companies, Scott Poteet, and two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. They’ll be the first SpaceX employees to fly on the Dragon—and also a reminder that SpaceX could have easily crewed this mission itself, by throwing a rock inside their HQ and asking whoever it hits if they’d like to go. For all the risk involved in spaceflight, the participants in this mission, just as with Inspiration4, won’t actually control the automated spacecraft in flight.

In an emergency, they’ll push the automatic deorbit button. Their job is to be guinea pigs to make future passengers can survive. The most dangerous moments will be during the space walk, when the entire space capsule will be open to the vacuum of space. The moment harkens back to the days of Gilded Age tycoons commissioning expeditions to the north pole, or a bit later on, Howard Hughes designing and testing the aircraft his company built. (2/17)

Biden to Seek More Than $770 Billion in 2023 Defense Budget (Source: Reuters)
President Joe Biden is expected to ask Congress for a U.S. defense budget exceeding $770 billion for the next fiscal year as the Pentagon seeks to modernize the military, according to three sources familiar with the negotiations, eclipsing the record budget requests by former President Donald Trump.

Ongoing budget talks between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have coalesced around a proposed defense request of higher than $770 billion for the 2023 fiscal year starting Oct. 1, the sources said. Negotiations are ongoing within the administration and the final amount could change before the budget request is made in the coming months, the sources added. (2/16)

Doghouse Hit By Meteorite Expected to Fetch Over $200K at Auction (Source: Fox News)
This is one expensive dog house. Typically, dog houses cost a lot less than a regular house, but this is not a regular dog house. In April of 2019, it was struck by a meteorite. Now, it's going up for auction and it's expected to sell for between $200,000 to $300,000. Christie's auction house confirmed it is hosting an auction that includes a dog house from Costa Rica that was struck by a meteorite on April 23, 2019. The occupant of the house, a German Shepard named Roky, wasn't injured during the incident. The auction is part of an online-only series called Deep Impact: Martian, Lunar and Other Rare Meteorites, which is running until Feb. 23. (2/15)

Astronomers Discover New Type of Star with Puzzling Origins (Source: New Atlas)
German astronomers have discovered a new type of star, and exactly how these weird white dwarfs came to be remains a mystery. The stars are covered in a layer of “ash” that’s usually produced by burning helium, indicating they may have formed through collisions between other stars. When stars in a certain mass range run out of fuel and explode, they leave behind a dense core that can no longer undergo fusion. This remnant, called a white dwarf, slowly cools to the background temperature of the universe over the next few trillion years.

But now, astronomers have discovered two white dwarfs that don’t quite fit the usual description. White dwarfs have atmospheres dominated by hydrogen or helium, but these new ones have surprisingly high amounts of carbon and oxygen in their atmospheres – rather than the usual trace amounts if anything, the team detected concentrations of both elements that were as high as 20 percent. (2/15)

Shanghai Signs Agreement with China’s Megaconstellation Group, Aims to Foster Commercial Space Hub (Source: Space News)
Shanghai local government entered an agreement with the state company responsible for China’s planned broadband megaconstellation Wednesday, while also aiming to foster a space hub to support  reusable rockets and satellite mass production. Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang met with Zhang Dongchen, chairperson of China Satellite Network Group, and Yang Baohua, the group’s general manager, for the signing ceremony of the strategic cooperation framework agreement in the city Feb. 16.

China Satellite Network Group, sometimes abbreviated to “Xingwang” or SatNet, was established in 2021 to oversee a national project to establish a low Earth orbit megaconstellation consisting of around 13,000 satellites. Shanghai and SatNet agreed to in-depth cooperation and to achieve win-win results in various fields but planned developments were not detailed. The move follows SatNet establishing two companies in the city of Chongqing in southwestern China in December. (2/17)

Firefly Founder Dramatically Exits Company, Selling 58% Position in Company for $1 (Source: SpaceExplored)
Firefly has been a promising startup with a (failed) launch under its belt and hard at work on its Alpha launch vehicle. The US Government has been attempting to oust one of the company’s founders, Max Polyakov, citing national security concerns with his Ukrainian origins. He had previously stepped down from the board to help ease tensions, but things got serious early in December 2021 when Firefly halted plans for the second launch after the US Government asked Polyakov to divest his share in the company (owned through his company Noosphere Venture Partners).

Noosphere Venture Partners said it had retained a firm to handle selling its interest. Now, it appears Polyakov is trying to make it so the company can succeed rather than focusing on financial gain from the sale (though he is clearly unhappy with the position he’s been put in). "I am giving up for 1 usd consideration all my 58% stake in Firefly to my co-founder and partner Tom. Dear CFIUS, Air Force and 23 agencies of USA who betrayed me and judge me in all your actions for past 15 months. I hope now you are happy. History will judge all of you guys."

Firefly Space Systems had filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and Polyakov and Noosphere Ventures acquired the assets of the company making Firefly Aerospace. Firefly has made massive progress since then, redesigning the rocket, performing a test launch, it has plans for a larger “Beta” vehicle, and more. (2/16)

Virgin Galactic Opens Ticket Sales to the Public Again (Source: Albuquerque Journal)
Virgin Galactic is opening ticket sales for members of the public to reserve their spots on flights to space. The announcement comes seven months after Sir Richard Branson took one of the inaugural flights to space and more than a decade after the company announced its intention to bring space travel to the public. Virgin Galactic expects flights to begin later this year, after conducting extended upgrades and repairs on its spacecraft. The tickets will cost $450,000 in total with an initial deposit of $150,000. (2/15)

Billionaire Space Tourism Has Become Insufferable (Source: Scientific American)
Last summer, at a time when the pandemic had strained many people’s finances, inflation was rising and unemployment was still high, the sight of the richest man in the world joyriding in space hit a nerve. On July 20 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode to the edge of space onboard a rocket built by his company Blue Origin. A few weeks earlier ProPublica had revealed that he did not pay any income taxes for two years, and in other years he paid a tax rate of just 0.98 percent.

To many watching, it rang hollow when Bezos thanked Amazon’s workers, whose low-paid labor had enriched him enough to start his own rocket company, even though Amazon had quashed workers’ efforts to unionize several months before. The fact that another billionaire, Richard Branson, had also launched himself onboard his own company’s rocket just a week earlier did not help. All their flights did was give the impression that space—historically seen as a brave pursuit for the good of all humankind—has just become another playground for the 0.0000001 percent. (2/16)

OneWeb Faces Fraud Claim From Trump Associate (Source: The Telegraph)
Taxpayer-backed OneWeb is being sued for alleged fraud, breach of contract and misrepresentation by a former business partner of Donald Trump. Giorgi Rtskhiladze, an American-Georgian businessman, claims that he was not paid for arranging launch rights for OneWeb in Kazakhstan. The company received public (UK) funding in 2020 after filing for bankruptcy and winning the support of Dominic Cummings, then the Prime Minister's most senior adviser. The $30m claim alleges that Mr Rtskhiladze successfully lobbied the Kazakh government to allow OneWeb to launch satellites from Kazakhstan and operate a ground station for its internet network but was not paid. (2/13)