March 14, 2022

Armagno Promoted at Space Force (Source: SpaceWerx)
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, U.S. Space Force Director of Staff, is the only person to have commanded both the 30th Space Wing and the 45th Space Wing in the United States Air Force, and she is the first woman General Officer commissioned in the United States Space Force. (3/14)

Astronics Test Systems Moves Headquarters to Orlando (Source: News Orlando)
Astronics Test Systems (ATS), a subsidiary of Astronics Corporation (NASDAQ: ASTRO), is moving its headquarters from Irvine, California to Orlando. The company currently employs 125 employees in Orlando and plans to add 60 new local hires over the next two years paying an average wage of $92,000, 60 percent higher than the average wage in Orange County.

The new ATS headquarters will feature modern engineering laboratories and a state of the art production flow. The Orlando location is closer to the majority of ATS customers and is centrally located among the six ATS sites that include facilities in England and India. ATS provides test solutions to high-tech industries that rely upon electronic systems to work exactly as designed, every time. The company is now hiring, and available positions can be found at https://www.astronics.com/careers. (3/7)

Virginia Spaceport 'Shares Concerns' About Ukraine War's Effect on Rocket Program (Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch)
On Monday, Virginia Space CEO Roosevelt Mercer said he expected the next Antares launch in August to remain “on track, on schedule,” despite concerns about the future of a space station that relies on cooperation between the United States and Russia, now in a tense standoff over Ukraine. “We share the concern about what this is going to mean,” said Mercer, a retired U.S. Air Force general. Last year, he became CEO of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, which operates the regional spaceport.

Virginia has a stake in the outcome because of a $160 million state investment in the spaceport. Its three launch pads serve a number of different customers, including Northrop Grumman — the Fairfax County company conducting the space station supply missions under contract with NASA. Northrop Grumman and NASA issued brief, terse statements in response to concerns about the future of the program, after Russian space agency leader Dmitry Rogozin blasted President Joe Biden on Twitter last week for imposing economic sanctions. (2/27)

Embry-Riddle Professor Wins Air Force Grant to Control Flexible Satellites (Source: ERAU)
Dr. Riccardo Bevilacqua, Aerospace Engineering professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, is on a mission. His goal: enable flexible spacecraft, equipped with either mounting appendages or large membranes, to autonomously control their motion, in-orbit. The three-year project, funded by a $450,000 Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant, could yield a variety of applications upon its completion — repairing damaged satellites, for one, deploying solar sails, and supporting future missions such as the Air Force Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research. (2/4)

Astra Readies for Alaska Return-to-Flight (Source: Space News)
Astra is preparing for a return to flight of its Rocket 3.3 vehicle today as part of a new launch agreement with Spaceflight. This morning, the company said it received an FAA license for its next launch, scheduled for 12:22 p.m. Eastern today from Kodiak Island, Alaska, at the start of a one-hour window. The launch will be the first since the vehicle failed to reach orbit on a launch last month from Florida when the rocket's payload fairing failed to separate properly. The launch is the first in a multi-launch agreement with Spaceflight, the companies announced Monday, and will carry payloads from three customers, including NearSpace Launch and the Portland State Aerospace Society. (3/14)

Methalox Race Likely to Be Won in 2022, but Winner Not Yet Clear (Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
Right now, several methane-fueled rockets are in a race to orbit. With Starship from SpaceX, Vulcan from United Launch Alliance (ULA), and Neutron from Rocket Lab, all of the most active US launch providers are committed to using methalox-methane and oxygen. Upcoming launchers such as New Glenn from Blue Origin and the Terran family from Relativity Space are also on the way toward flight, while the Chinese ZhuQue-2 rocket from Landspace may even be a favorite to fly before any of the American vehicles.

The answer to why methane-fueled rockets have not flown before is a matter of chemistry and engineering complexity. But as new designs prioritize reusability as well as in-site resource utilization (ISRU) for missions to Mars, the combination of methane and oxygen has become the standard for next-generation launch vehicles.

Combustion stability is especially problematic in comparison to the two most common liquid propellant combinations: kerolox (kerosene and oxygen) and hydrolox (hydrogen and oxygen). The boiling points of hydrogen and Rocket Propellant-1 (RP-1) kerosene are very different from that of liquid oxygen (LOX). However, the boiling point of methane is very close to its oxidizer. (3/13)

Space Coast Company Vaya Space Hits Milestone with Recycled Plastic-Fueled Rocket (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
The test rocket wasn’t very big and it didn’t go that high, but officials with Space Coast company Vaya Space were thrilled with the results. “We attempted to launch a rocket for the first time,” said company CEO Grant Begley about the Jan. 29 liftoff from a test site in Mojave, California. “The launch was successful, and that is highly unusual that a rocket company does a successful launch on the first attempt. That is a foot stomper.”

The company previously known as Rocket Crafters is based in Cocoa with testing and manufacturing facilities in Cape Canaveral. The company last year got the OK from the Federal Aviation Administration to prove that its 3-D printed fuel using recycled plastics could work. It had already performed 90 test fires of the hybrid rocket engine from its Brevard County facilities. (3/13)

Nield to Join Davidson on March 23 Blue Origin Suborbital Flight (Source: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin's next New Shepard launch is scheduled for next week. The company announced Monday the NS-20 suborbital flight is scheduled for March 23 from West Texas. Pete Davidson, the "Saturday Night Live" star previously reported to be interested in flying on New Shepard, is among the six people on board. The others are executive Marty Allen, executive Marc Hagle and his wife Sharon, business school professor Jim Kitchen and George Nield, the former FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation. (3/14)

With More Funding for Space, Congress Urges Space Force to Use More Commercial Tech (Source: Space News)
While Congress provided the Defense Department with more money for space, it also included criticism of those programs. Appropriators added nearly $1.3 billion for U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency projects above what the Biden administration requested. That additional funding covered technology development projects run by the Space Force, an additional GPS satellite and more spending on small launch services and Space Development Agency (SDA) missile-detecting satellites. But the spending bill also includes language critical of DoD's management of space programs and calls for the Space Force to incorporate cutting-edge commercial technologies into military systems. (3/14)

Ingenuity "Good as New" After 21st Flight on Mars (Source: Space News)
NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is "as good as new" after nearly a year of flights. Ingenuity completed its 21st flight last week and has flown more than four and a half kilometers since its first flight in April 2021. At a conference last week, scientists said Ingenuity has proven useful as a scout for the Perseverance rover, the role the helicopter now plays after completing its original technology demonstration mission. There's been no sign of degradation of the helicopter's performance despite, in many cases, using commercial off-the-shelf components. (3/14)

GOES-T Resumes Orbit Raising (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
The GOES-T weather satellite has resumed orbit raising after a glitch earlier this month. The spacecraft cut short the first in a series of orbit-raising maneuvers March 3 because of an issue with a temperature sensor in the spacecraft's main engine. The problem was not with the engine itself but a change in the location of the sensor from previous spacecraft that led the spacecraft's software to think the engine was running too hot. The spacecraft resumed maneuvers to go to geostationary orbit two days later. (3/14)

Bahrain Joins Artemis Accords (Source: Space News)
The addition of Bahrain to the Artemis Accords is a sign the agreements are expanding beyond traditional space nations. The country became the 17th to sign the Accords regarding safe and sustainable space exploration earlier this month. The country established a space agency less than a decade ago and launched its first satellite, a cubesat jointly developed with the United Arab Emirates, from the ISS last month. One former NASA official called it an example of how the Artemis Accords "are expanding the benefits of Artemis to a new and diverse set of international partners." (3/14)

China Plans Three More Robotic Lunar Missions (Source: Xinhua)
China is planning three more robotic missions to the moon this decade. Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program, said the Chang'e-6 lunar sample return mission and Chang'e-7 mission to land in the south polar regions of the moon are both scheduled to launch around 2025. Chang'e-8 will follow later in the decade to study using lunar resources. (3/14)

NASA ISS Astronaut Vande Hei to Return on Soyuz Capsule with Russians (Source: TASS)
Roscosmos said it still plans to return NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei from the International Space Station at the end of the month. Roscosmos said Monday that the NASA astronaut, who flew to the station on a Soyuz nearly a year ago, will return as scheduled at the end of the month on another Soyuz spacecraft. The statement came after Western media reports suggested Vande Hei might be "stranded" on the station, reports that were based on tweets by the head of Roscosmos, notably a video showing the Russian segment detaching from the rest of the outpost. Roscosmos, though, has contacted the other ISS partners, asking them to lift sanctions imposed on Russia in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (3/14)

Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization “Will Inevitably Fail” (Source: Ars Technica)
Near the film's end, the camera crew visits a Brazilian commune whose members believe they are direct descendants of an alien species that originated centuries ago from a planet light-years away. Yet when Rudolph asks this group how Earth's denizens might ever travel to another planet, its members respond with a warning: human biology is in no way designed to withstand millennia of space travel or extreme radiation. Stay on Earth.

Werner agrees with the Brazilian commune. "We know the next planet outside of our solar system is at least 5,000 years away," he tells Ars. "It's very hard to do that, and [whatever is there is] probably uninhabitable. And we know that on Mars, there's permanent radiation that will force us underground in little bunkers. We know that we have no breathing or water [on the surface], and Elon Musk once suggested exploding nuclear bombs at the poles to melt the ice and then, of course, with gigantic systems of pipelines, bring it somewhere to a city." He pauses. "Good luck with that," he says. (3/12)