November 2, 2022

SpaceX is Now Building a Raptor Engine a Day, NASA Says (Source: Ars Technica)
A senior NASA official said this week that SpaceX has done "very well" in working toward the development of a vehicle to land humans on the surface of the Moon, taking steps to address two of the space agency's biggest concerns. NASA selected SpaceX and Starship for its Human Landing System in April 2021. In some ways, this was the riskiest choice of NASA's options because Starship is a very large and technically advanced vehicle. However, because of the company's self-investment of billions of dollars into the project, SpaceX submitted the lowest bid, and from its previous work with SpaceX, NASA had confidence that the company would ultimately deliver.

Two of NASA's biggest technological development concerns were the new Raptor rocket engine and the transfer and storage of liquid oxygen and methane propellant in orbit, said Mark Kirasich, NASA's deputy associate administrator who oversees the development of Artemis missions to the Moon. During a subcommittee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council on Monday, however, Kirasich said SpaceX has made substantial progress in both areas.

The Raptor rocket engine is crucial to Starship's success. Thirty-three of these Raptor 2 engines power the Super Heavy booster that serves as the vehicle's first stage, and six more are used by the Starship upper stage. For a successful lunar mission, these engines will need to re-light successfully on the surface of the Moon to carry astronauts back to orbit inside Starship. If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die. (11/2)

Space Force’s Calvelli Issues Acquisition ‘Guideposts’ (Source: C4ISRnet)
The Space Force’s top development and procurement official sent a message to the acquisition workforce this week, calling on the enterprise to prioritize speed as it fields satellites and ground systems. “Former approaches of developing a small amount of large satellites along with large, monolithic ground systems that took many years to develop on cost-plus contracts can no longer be the norm,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration Frank Calvelli said in an Oct. 31 memo.

“In the space domain, the department will reduce adversary incentives for early attack by fielding diverse, resilient and redundant satellite constellations,” the National Defense Strategy states. “We will bolster our ability to fight through disruption by improving defensive capabilities and increasing options for reconstitution.” (11/1)

Virgin Galactic Expands in SoCal (Source: Orange County Business Journal)
The local landing base for Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. recently got a boost. The upstart space tourism company inked a lease to expand its headquarters by 33,755 square feet at the Flight office campus at the Tustin Legacy development, bringing its total footprint there to 110,226 square feet, brokerage reports indicate. It’s a rapid expansion for the company, which occupied just 12,000 square feet of office space in Orange County a year ago.

Virgin Galactic moved its headquarters designation from New Mexico to the Tustin office campus in March. That official relocation came several months after the company moved its main executive offices to Tustin shortly following the hiring of Chief Executive Michael Colglazier, an OC local and the former president of Anaheim’s Disneyland Resort from 2013 to 2018. Last year also saw the company set up new engineering and design division at Flight, with the approximately 61,000-square-foot Tustin spot serving “our primary hub for R&D and the design of our new vehicles,” Colglazier previously told analysts. (11/1)

China’s Mystery Spaceplane Releases Object Into Orbit (Source: Space News)
China’s secretive reusable spaceplane has released an object into orbit, according to tracking data from the U.S. Space Force. China carried out the second launch of its “reusable experimental spacecraft” from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert atop a Long March 2F rocket Aug. 4. The spacecraft has now been in orbit for 90 days. Two weeks ago the spacecraft raised its perigee—or the point during its orbit at which a spacecraft is closest to Earth—to shift to a near-circular 597 by 608-kilometer orbit. (11/2)

It’s Official: Space Force Sets Sights on Smaller Satellites (Source: Defense One)
The U.S. Space Force will buy cheaper, smaller satellites in the future instead of the bespoke, multi-billion dollar behemoths it has relied on for decades, according to the service’s acquisition chief. The long-anticipated move to smaller satellites is now official policy, according to an Oct. 31 letter from Frank Calvelli, the Space Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition and integration. (11/1)

Why the UAE Can Become a Major Space Tourism Hub (Source: Khaleej Times)
When UAE resident Hamish Harding wanted to experience the thrill of a rocket flight and several minutes of zero gravity this past summer he had to fly 15 hours to the United States, and then drive several more hours to the desert of West Texas to fulfill his dream. Imagine if Hamish, and thousands of other dreamers and adventurers from around the world, could have the same experience from here in the UAE. Imagine if the UAE were to build a space tourism hub, with launch facilities and runways, astronaut training centers and desert camps, entertainment, and hotel stays for family and friends.

Blessed with a suitable year-round climate, excellent air connections across the UAE’s 10 commercial airports that link two-thirds of the world’s population within an eight-hour flight, (Dubai International Airport is projected to receive 55.1 million passengers in 2022, up from 29.1 million in 2021) regional centres for business, education, culture and tourism, a world-class hospitality and entertainment industry, and a proud space pedigree, the country is an ideal location to create a global space tourism hub. (11/1)

Northrop Grumman Picks Leidos to Provide Infrared Sensors for Missile Tracking Constellation (Source: Space News)
Northrop Grumman selected Leidos to supply infrared sensor payloads for the Space Development Agency's missile-tracking satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. Leidos said Tuesday it will provide the infrared sensor payloads for the 14 Tracking Layer Tranche 1 satellites Northrop is building under a $617 million contract awarded in July. Leidos previously worked as a subcontractor to SpaceX under a $149 million contract SpaceX won in 2020 to build four satellites for the Space Development Agency's Tracking Layer Tranche 0, but SpaceX reportedly does not plan to compete in future rounds of the program. (11/2)

Rocket Lab to Attempt Mid-Air Recovery of Booster (Source: Space News)
Rocket Lab will attempt another mid-air recovery of a booster on a launch this week. The company announced Tuesday its next Electron launch, called "Catch Me If You Can," scheduled for Friday. The company says it will use a helicopter to catch the booster, descending under a parachute, recovering it for potential reuse. The company tried a similar recovery in May, but the helicopter let go of the booster moments after catching it because of unexpected loads. The launch will place into orbit MATS, a Swedish atmospheric science satellite. (11/2)

DARPA Picks Spire to Develop Very-Low-Orbit Satellite (Source: Space News)
Spire won a DARPA contract to build a small satellite for operations in very low Earth orbit. Spire will design a cubesat, based on its existing LEMUR design, to carry a sensor intended to learn how radio signals behave in the ionosphere. The award is part of DARPA's Ouija program, a project to deploy sensors on satellites to study high-frequency radio wave propagation in the ionosphere. DARPA launched the Ouija program in May and plans to launch several satellites in very low orbits to monitor radio wave propagation. (11/2)

Wyvern Raises $7 Million for Hyperspectral Satellites (Source: Space News)
Hyperspectral imaging startup Wyvern raised $7 million in additional seed funds before deploying its first satellites. Venture capital firm Uncork Capital led the funding round with participation from earlier investors MaC Venture Capital and Y Combinator. The Canadian startup has raised $15 million in total to support work on hyperspectral satellites equipped with foldable telescopes to increase their imaging performance. Scotland's Clyde Space is building Wyvern's first three 6U cubesats, without the folding telescopes, for a launch early next year on an undisclosed rocket. (11/2)

Saudi Astronauts to Visit ISS on Axiom Commercial Mission (Source: Space News)
Two Saudi Arabian astronauts will fly to the International Space Station on a private astronaut mission next year. A NASA official speaking at an advisory committee meeting Tuesday said the two Saudis, whose names have not yet been released, will be part of Axiom Space's Ax-2 mission launching no earlier than next May. Axiom and the Saudi Space Commission announced in September plans to fly Saudi astronauts to the station, but did not disclose when they would fly. Training for the crew started last month, although the inclusion of the Saudis is still pending formal approval by a multilateral ISS committee. (11/2)

Orbex to Construct UK Launch Site for Prime Rocket (Source: Space News)
Orbex will start construction "imminently" on a launch site in northern Scotland for its Prime rocket. The company announced Tuesday it signed a lease agreement for Spaceport Sutherland with Scotland's Highlands and Islands Enterprise development agency. Orbex plans to spend $23 million over three years to build and operate the facility, with Jacobs, the U.S. engineering company that participated in Orbex's recent Series C funding round, serving as prime contractor. The U.K. Space Agency selected the site in 2018 as the country's first vertical launch site, but development had been delayed by environmental and regulatory reviews. (11/2)

Space Force Studies AI for Monitoring Satellites (Source: Space News)
The Space Force is funding a project to study the use of artificial intelligence to predict satellite failures. RS21, a data science startup developing artificial intelligence tools for autonomous space operations, won an SBIR contract worth $375,000 for the project, which will be tested on the STPSat-7 experimental satellite launching next year. The AI-powered monitoring system performs fault detection to predict satellite malfunctions. It uses real-time satellite telemetry data and anomaly messages to predict a lead time before satellites fail, according to the company. (11/2)

New DoD Space Policy Review is Classified (Source: Breaking Defense)
The Pentagon has completed a major space policy review but plans to keep it classified. The Defense Department confirmed that its Strategic Space Review has been approved by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and sent to the White House. The review examined a range of national security space issues and was requested earlier this year by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. However, the Pentagon says it does not plan to release an unclassified summary, unlike other policy documents it's completed recently, such as the National Defense Strategy, and amid concerns by some within the Pentagon itself about over-classification of space issues. (11/2)

Aerojet Rocketdyne Earnings Rise in Third Quarter (Source: Zacks)
Aerojet Rocketdyne reported slightly higher earnings than expected in the third quarter. The company reported an adjusted net income of $36.7 million in the quarter on $549.8 million in revenue. The revenue was slightly below analysts' predictions, but the earnings were slightly higher than predicted. During a call with analysts, company executives did not discuss reports that it was seeking bids for the company after Lockheed Martin terminated a merger agreement over antitrust concerns early this year. (11/2)

Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possible Hints of Dark Matter (Source: Quanta)
On Sunday, October 9, Judith Racusin was 35,000 feet in the air, en route to a high-energy astrophysics conference, when the biggest cosmic explosion in history took place. “I landed, looked at my phone, and had dozens of messages,” said Racusin, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “It was really exceptional.”

The explosion was a long gamma-ray burst, a cosmic event where a massive dying star unleashes powerful jets of energy as it collapses into a black hole or neutron star. This particular burst was so bright that it oversaturated the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an orbiting NASA telescope designed in part to observe such events. “There were so many photons per second that they couldn’t keep up,” said Andrew Levan, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

The burst even appears to have caused Earth’s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, to swell in size for several hours. “The fact you can change Earth’s ionosphere from an object halfway across the universe is pretty incredible,” said Doug Welch, an astronomer at McMaster University in Canada. (10/27)