August 30, 2022

Expanding Influence of Private Commercial Spaceflight. Moses to Speak at Florida Tech in September (Source: Florida Tech)
Virgin Galactic executive Mike Moses will be featured at a Sep. 22 lecture sponsored by Florida Tech in Melbourne. Moses is the president of space missions & safety at Virgin Galactic, overseeing the commercial suborbital spaceflight program. He leads the team in all aspects of safe and successful spaceline operations, including VMS Eve and SpaceShipTwo vehicle processing, flight planning and flight crew operations. He earned a master’s degree in space sciences from Florida Tech in 1991. Click here. (8/29)

NASA Scrubs Artemis I Launch Today, Economics Will Scrub the Rocket Tomorrow (Source: Faster, Please!)
Today’s Artemis launch scrub is hardly disappointing for some pro-space Artemis critics who prefer to scrub the project for reasons I’ll highlight in a moment. As for me: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” That pretty much sums up my attitude toward NASA’s Space Launch System. With all due respect to the engineers of Boeing and NASA, the SLS is already an obsolete rocket whose roots are in the since-canceled Constellation program. It existed initially to keep funding and jobs flowing to certain districts and states. It actually precedes the Artemis program by six years. (8/29)

SatixFy SPAC Deal Valuation Drastically Cut (Source: Globes)
Israeli satellite technology company SatixFy, which is in the process of a merger with a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company), will have to make do with a substantially lower valuation than it was given just six months ago. The company, which announced a merger in March at a post-money valuation of $813 million, will now be merged at a valuation less than half that, of just $365 million. The final date for completion of the deal is November 7.

It turns out that the forecasts that SatixFy made six months ago are no longer relevant, following changes in the assumptions on which they were made. Among other things, these concerned the number of new contracts that the company will be able to sign, and an improvement in supply chain conditions. SatixFy also reports a rise in the price of the raw materials for producing its chips, and cites uncertainty in the inflation environment, making its previous profit forecasts obsolete. (8/24)

AFRL's Ambitious Space Plans (Source: Space News)
The new head of the Air Force Research Laboratory's space vehicles directorate has ambitious plans for the next three years. Col. Jeremy Raley, who assumed command of the directorate last month, said he is looking to shore up its technical workforce and partner with private companies to carry out work that includes a GPS-like navigation satellite, a solar power spacecraft and a deep-space mission to monitor regions around the moon. He said he is seeking junior and mid-level engineers, in particular, to help on those and other missions while also looking for outside contractor help from the space industry. (8/30)

China Considers Reusability Upgrades to Long March 2D (Source: Space News)
China's main space contractor is looking to upgrade a venerable launch vehicle and make it reusable. The Long March 2D, which conducted its 63rd launch last week, currently uses toxic dinitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine propellants. However, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and its subsidiary, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, are studying replacing the rocket's current engines with those that use kerosene and liquid oxygen. The organizations have previously tested adding grid fins to the rocket as a step toward recovering and reusing the booster. (8/30)

Diversified Astra Wins Order for OneWeb Satellite Thrusters (Source: Space News)
Astra announced Monday it won an order for spacecraft electric thrusters from Airbus OneWeb Satellites. Astra did not disclose details about the size of the order for its Astra Spacecraft Engines, an electric propulsion system developed by a startup Apollo Fusion, that Astra acquired last year. With Astra discontinuing its existing Rocket 3.3 launch vehicle earlier this month, the company says that sales of its Astra Spacecraft Engine will account for most of its revenue through next year. Airbus OneWeb Satellites, which offers the Arrow line of smallsat buses for government and commercial customers, previously used electric thrusters from a Russian company, Fakel, that are now unavailable after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (8/30)

US Government-Funded Space Research Will Become Freely Available (Source: Science)
A new federal policy directs that papers about research funded by U.S. government agencies be made freely available. The policy, announced last week by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, states that papers discussing the results of research funded by government agencies, including NASA, be released to the public as soon as the final manuscript is approved for publication in a journal. Existing policy allows those papers to remain behind a journal's paywall for a year. The new policy, which goes into force by the end of 2025, will also require the underlying data to be made available. (8/30)

New Mexico Legislators Wonder if Spaceport America Will Ever be Self Sufficient (Source: AP)
New Mexico lawmakers raised new questions about whether Spaceport America in the state will ever be financially self-sufficient. At a hearing Monday, spaceport officials said about 65% of the facility's revenue comes from customers like Virgin Galactic, but that it needs state funding to stabilize its budget. The state government provided $2 million from its general fund to the spaceport in the most recent fiscal year. The spaceport is conducting a study on what it would take to end any dependence on state funds, but it will be six months before it is completed. One legislator suggested the spaceport get into the "freight business" of launching satellites as a means of generating additional revenue. (8/30)

Einstein Wins Again (Source: Space.com)
Einstein's theory of general relativity passed another test. The Dark Energy Survey looked for subtle distortions called weak gravitational lensing in distant galaxies that might indicate changes in the strength of gravity over time. However, the survey of 100 million galaxies found no deviations from predictions from general relativity. Astronomers plan to continue their tests by pushing deeper into the universe with the upcoming Euclid and Roman Space Telescope missions. "There is still room to challenge Einstein's theory of gravity, as measurements get more and more precise," said one researcher. (8/30)