November 14, 2022

CAPSTONE Enters Lunar Orbit (Source: Space News)
A NASA-funded cubesat entered orbit around the moon Sunday night. The CAPSTONE cubesat, operated by Advanced Space, completed a 16-minute maneuver that placed it into a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon, the same orbit that will be used by NASA's lunar Gateway. CAPSTONE will perform two small "clean up" maneuvers this week to refine the orbit. CAPSTONE will test the stability of that orbit while also demonstrating autonomous positioning technologies. CAPSTONE is the first spacecraft to operate in NRHO and the first cubesat to orbit the moon. (11/14)

SES O3b Constellation's First Launch Coming in December (Source: Space News)
SES is eagerly awaiting the first launch of its O3b mPower satellites. The first two satellites are scheduled to launch in December on a Falcon 9, with the remaining nine launching on four more Falcon 9 launches over the next year. Each of the 11 satellites in the O3b mPower constellation can generate up to 5,000 spot beams to provide broadband services. (11/14)

China Launched Two Rockets Hours Apart on Friday (Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
China conducted a pair of launches hours apart Friday night. A Long March 6A lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 5:52 p.m. Eastern and placed into orbit Yunhai-3, a satellite described by Chinese media as performing atmospheric and environmental research. A Long March 7 lifted off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 9:03 p.m. Eastern carrying the Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft. That spacecraft docked with China's Tiangong space station two hours later. While both launches were successful, U.S. Space Command reported Saturday that the upper stage from the Long March 6A launch appeared to have broken up in orbit hours later, with at least 50 pieces of debris being tracked in low Earth orbit. (11/14)

SES and Hughes Test Drone-to-Satellite Internet Service (Source: Space News)
SES and Hughes tested satellite internet service on a General Atomics drone. The companies announced last week that the MQ-9B SkyGuardian remotely piloted aircraft successfully communicated with SES satellites in medium and geostationary Earth orbits during a ground test. The companies said the demonstration showed how the military could use high-throughput satellite connectivity to transmit live video faster and more reliably than traditional single-orbit networks. (11/14)

Delayed JPL VERITAS Venus Mission Could Affect International Partnerships (Source: Space News)
The leader of a Venus mission facing a three-year delay is lobbying for a reprieve. NASA announced earlier this month that it would postpone the launch of the VERITAS Venus orbiter mission by at least three years, to no earlier than 2031, because of cost and workforce issues at JPL that delayed the Psyche mission.

At a meeting last week, the principal investigator for VERITAS warned that the delay could affect international partners involved on both VERITAS and ESA's EnVision Venus mission, launching at the same time, as well as disrupt project science and engineering teams. The mission is hoping to at least reduce the delay, noting there are several launch opportunities between its original targeted launch date of late 2027 and 2031. (11/14)

ESA Seeks Funding for SatNav Projects (Source: Space News)
ESA hopes to secure funding for several satellite navigation projects at this month's ministerial meeting. ESA officials said last week they're requesting about 500 million euros over three years for several projects, including one that would place 6-12 smallsats in low Earth orbit to test the feasibility of providing navigation services in that orbit rather than medium Earth orbit. Another project would develop a communications and navigation system for the moon. (11/14)

ATSpace Delays Suborbital Kestrel 1 Launch After Storm Damage (Source: Cosmos)
A suborbital launch from Australia is on hold indefinitely after the rocket suffered storm damage. ATSpace planned to launch its Kestrel 1 rocket in the coming weeks from a launch site in South Australia operated by Southern Launch. However, a recent severe storm, with extensive lightning, damaged electrical systems on the rocket while on the launch pad. The launch is on hold while the rocket is repaired, and ATSpace did not estimate how long those repairs would take. The rocket is intended to fly to an altitude of 200 kilometers and serve as a precursor for the company's Kestrel 5 orbital launch vehicle. (11/14)

First Private Firm Flies to the Moon to Mine Dust (Source: The Telegraph)
A small Japanese spacecraft will launch and embark on a three-month journey to land on the Moon at the end of the month. Although the mission has gone largely under the radar, it is set to usher in an entirely new era of space use, marking the first time that a private company has done business on the lunar surface. The company, Ispace, will be collecting regolith – the grey sandy Moon dust which covers the surface of the satellite – and selling it to NASA.

Although the contract is for a nominal $5,000 (£4,200), it will be the first business transaction ever to take place off-Earth. The mission raises important questions about who owns the Moon, or any other space resource, and who should be allowed to exploit it. Last year, Japan passed a law granting Japanese companies permission to prospect for, extract and use various space resources. Last week, it granted Ispace a licence to conduct business activity on the Moon. (11/12)

Sidus Space Financial Results Reported (Source: Sidus Space)
Space Coast-based Sidus Space announced financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2022 and provided company business updates. Revenue increased to $1.32 million for the three months ended September 30, 2022 from $500,000 in the comparable period of 2021, an increase of 164%. On a year-to-date basis, the Company has generated gross profit of 25% as compared to (19%) for the previous 2021 period. On a year-to-date basis, the Company’s cost of revenue has benefited from variation in types and lengths of contracts and an increase in its higher margin Satellite-as-a-Service business line. (11/14)

ClearSpace to Work with Intelsat on Commercial GEO Life-Extension Mission (Source: ClearSpace)
ClearSpace, a European provider of in-orbit services, announces a collaboration with Intelsat, operator of the world’s largest integrated satellite and terrestrial network, to promote a more sustainable space economy through the development and use of satellite life extension services. This collaboration represents the expansion of ClearSpace’s in-orbit services to geostationary operators and  will focus on one of Intelsat’s operational assets that will be approaching the end of its nominal service life in the 2026-2028 timeframe.

This program builds upon ClearSpace’s core capabilities being developed under the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ClearSpace-1 debris removal mission and its work with the UK Space Agency to develop a reusable, refuellable, servicing platform. To date, Intelsat is the only satellite operator in the world to have employed commercial life extension services, and with this endeavour, Intelsat continues its tradition of facilitating the emergence of cutting-edge satellite services. (11/14)

Will Triton Finally Answer, 'Are We Alone?' (Source: Universe Today)
We recently examined how and why Saturn’s icy moon, Enceladus, could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? With its interior ocean and geysers of water ice that shoot out tens of kilometers into space that allegedly contains the ingredients for life, this small moon could be a prime target for future astrobiology missions. But Enceladus isn’t the only location in our solar system with active geysers, as another small moon near the edge of the solar system shares similar characteristics, as well. This is Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, which has been visited only once by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989.

But are Triton’s geysers the only characteristics that make it a good target for astrobiology and finding life beyond Earth? Due to its geysers, which Voyager 2 identified as dark streaks, Triton is only the third known planetary body in the solar system to be volcanically active, aside from Earth and Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon, Io. Unlike the geysers of Enceladus, which is believed to be caused through tidal heating, Triton’s geysers are the result of solar heating, where the dim sunlight that reaches the moon causes the frozen nitrogen on the surface to slowly melt and eventually erupt. The active geology also explains the lack of craters on its surface, as well, and it turns out that Triton holds another feature similar to Earth. (11/12)

What Does it Take to be a NASA Flight Director These Days? (Source: FNN)
Over the summer, NASA announced its latest class of flight directors to oversee operations of the International Space Station, commercial crew and Artemis missions to the Moon. I wanted to know more about these new recruits and also how the job has evolved over the years and I found the perfect person for that. Zeb Scoville has been a flight director at NASA for nearly a decade and the Space Hour had a chance to ask him about these very topics. Click here. (11/9)

SpaceX Just Bought a Big Ad Campaign on Twitter for Starlink (Source: CNBC)
Elon Musk’s aerospace business SpaceX has ordered one of the larger advertising packages available from Twitter, the social media business he just acquired in a $44 billion deal and where he is now serving as CEO. The campaign will promote the SpaceX-owned and -operated satellite internet service called Starlink on Twitter in Spain and Australia, according to internal records from the social media business viewed by CNBC.

The ad campaign SpaceX is buying to promote Starlink is called a Twitter “takeover.” When a company buys one of these packages, they typically spend upwards of $250,000 to put their brand on top of the main Twitter timeline for a full day, according to one current and one former Twitter employee who asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. (11/13)

Satellites Can Track CO2 Emissions in Real-Time, Leaving Polluters Nowhere to Hide (Source: Cosmos)
To ensure that countries keep their climate commitments, more needs to be done to rein in ‘super-emitters’ such as power plants, megacities, refineries, and giant factories. These together are responsible for nearly half of humanity’s total output of greenhouse gases. Now, scientists have shown that for these large super-emitters of carbon dioxide ‘tracking-at-the-source’ is already possible, even with existing satellites.

A new study, published in Frontiers in Remote Sensing undertook a “proof-of-principle,” using five years of carbon dioxide measurements from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) and OCO-3 – which is attached to the ISS. The researchers found that they were able to track the emissions from Europe’s largest fossil fuel power plant – the Bełchatόw Power Station in Poland – 10 times over 5 years. Each of those tracked emissions – called ‘top-down’ reporting – matched closely with what the power station estimates it had emitted at that time – known as ‘bottom up’ reporting. (11/13)

Why the Space Force is Getting Serious About On-Orbit Servicing (Source: C4ISRnet)
With fresh requirements in hand and a new unit focused on in-space servicing and maneuver, the U.S. Space Force is making moves to leverage a growing commercial market for on-orbit logistics, according to the head of the service’s mobility enterprise. Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy, commander of Space Systems Command’s Assured Access to Space Directorate, said the prospect of refueling, cleaning up debris and even repairing and building satellites in space has long been an interest for the service, but never a mission.

That may be changing, he said at an Oct. 20 industry conference in Los Angeles. “Elements of that have actually been in the Space Force doctrine since the beginning, but we’ve had no operational units do it, no acquisition programs. It’s not been something that we’ve had a chance to get to,” Purdy said at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Space Industry Day conference. “So, our organization is getting after it in a serious way.”

One indication of the service’s burgeoning interest is its investment. In June, the Space Force’s technology arm SpaceWERX chose 125 teams for the first phase of its Orbital Prime program, which aims to mature in-space servicing and debris removal technologies. Each team received $250,000 to create early designs of their proposals and the service plans to choose a subset of those companies this year for round-two awards of up to $1.5 million each. (11/10)

SpaceX Launches Falcon 9 Booster Into Retirement on Intelsat Mission (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
SpaceX launched one of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters for the last time Saturday on a rare expendable mission for Intelsat, devoting all of the launcher’s propellant toward placing a pair of television broadcasting satellites into orbit. Intelsat says it paid SpaceX an additional fee for the expendable mission.

Intelsat decided to pay SpaceX extra money to get all of the Falcon 9’s lift capability, reducing the amount of fuel the Galaxy 31 and 32 satellites need to burn to reach their final operating positions in geostationary orbit. SpaceX typically reserves some of the booster’s propellant for landing maneuvers, but on this mission, all of the rocket’s fuel was burned during the climb into space. The reusable first stage booster, designated B1051, made its 14th and final flight.

The booster debuted March 2, 2019, with the first unpiloted test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, a precursor to SpaceX’s later astronaut missions. It launched again in June 2019 with Canada’s Radarsat Constellation Mission. Later in its career, the booster launched SiriusXM’s SXM 7 radio broadcasting satellite, and flew on 10 missions carrying SpaceX’s own Starlink internet satellites. Most recently, the Falcon 9 booster launched July 17 on a Starlink mission. (11/12)