February 9, 2023

Artificial Intelligence Aiding the Space Business Across the Board (Source: Space News)
Space companies are finding new ways to exploit artificial intelligence for commercial and national security applications, executives said Feb. 8 at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California. “Whether you’re running a constellation or operating any space system, AI is paramount,” said Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co-founder of Leanspace, a French startup building a cloud infrastructure to run space missions.

AI and machine learning technologies, for example, allow operators of remote-sensing constellations to plan satellite operations, run simulations and identify what resources are needed where, he said. “Optimizing resources is the real breakthrough … for how can we apply these technologies to build more sustainable businesses in space.” (2/9)

Boeing and Millennium Cite Benefits of Partnership (Source: Sace News)
Boeing and Millennium Space Systems executives are convinced that the whole created by the 2018 merger of the two companies has proven greater than the sum of its parts. “There’s a handful of programs that we won that we would not have been able to win by ourselves and Boeing wouldn’t have been able to win by themselves,” Millennium CEO Jason Kim said. (2/9)

Military Agency Praised for Leading the Way on Laser Communications (Source: Space News)
By requiring suppliers of laser terminals to comply with a common set of standards, the U.S. Space Development Agency has helped propel the industry forward, executives said. The Space Development Agency (SDA), an arm of the U.S. Space Force, is building a mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit to serve as a data transport layer for the U.S. military. Each satellite will have anywhere from three to five laser links so they can talk to other satellites, airplanes, ships and ground stations.

In 2021, SDA issued a set of technical specifications that optical terminal manufacturers have to comply with in order to compete for SDA contracts. SDA is buying satellites from multiple manufacturers and all their satellites have to be interoperable. SDA’s move to set standards and force suppliers to coalesce around them has been game-changing for the industry, said Sven Rettig. (2/9)

Mysterious Russian Satellites are Now Breaking Apart in Low-Earth Orbit (Source: Ars Technica)
On Christmas Day, 2013, the relatively small Russian Rokot rocket launched from the Plesetsk site in the northern part of the country. The mission carried three small military communications satellites, but observers noted that the mission appeared to eject a fourth object into orbit. A few months later Russia confirmed that this object was a satellite, and it came to be known as Cosmos 2491. To the surprise of many sky watchers, this satellite then began to perform novel orbital maneuvers, such as raising and lowering its orbit, that demonstrated rendezvous and proximity operations.

Then it happened again. In May 2014, another Rokot booster carried three communications satellites into orbit as well as a fourth object, which was designated Cosmos 2499. Finally, this happened a third time in April 2015, with a third mystery satellite known as Cosmos 2504. There is no evidence they were part of a weapons test, experts say. However, the Object E satellites are now causing more significant concern in low-Earth orbit. In 2019, Cosmos 2491 shed about 20 pieces of debris. Then, on Monday, the US military's 18th Space Defense Squadron confirmed that Cosmos 2499 had broken apart in early January. This breakup occurred at an altitude of 1,169 km and resulted in 85 pieces of trackable debris. (2/8)

ViaSat Reports Q3 Loss, Misses Revenue Estimates (Source: Zacks)
ViaSat came out with a quarterly loss of $0.61 per share versus the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a loss of $0.35. This compares to loss of $0.09 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of -74.29%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this provider of satellite and wireless networking technology would post earnings of $0.22 per share when it actually produced a loss of $0.97, delivering a surprise of -540.91%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. (2/7)

Mars Rover Finds Rippled Rocks Caused by Waves (Source: France24)
NASA's Curiosity rover has found wave-rippled rocks -- evidence of an ancient lake -- in an area of the planet expected to be drier. "This is the best evidence of water and waves that we've seen in the entire mission," said Ashwin Vasavada. The rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2012, beamed back stunning pictures of rippled patterns on the surface of rocks caused by the waves of a shallow lake billions of years ago. (2/8)

Iridium’s Matt Desch Lands 2023 Wash100 Award for Government Collaborations, Technology Innovation (Source: Executive Gov)
For the last decade, the Wash100 Award has been the gold standard for recognizing the government contracting and federal sectors’ best and most brilliant change-makers. Matt Desch this year earned his ninth consecutive Wash100 Award. He celebrated a company-best EBITDA of $105.9 million in the second quarter of FY 2022 and a subscriber base of 1.97 million by the end of the third quarter, attributed in part to a growing demand for Internet of Things technologies. (2/8)

Amazon Gets Key FCC Approval for More Than 3,000 LEO Broadband Satellites (Source: Space News)
The FCC approved Amazon’s plan to deploy and operate 3,236 broadband satellites, subject to conditions that include measures for avoiding collisions in low Earth orbit (LEO). Amazon got initial FCC clearance for its Ka-band Project Kuiper constellation in 2020 on the condition that it secured regulatory approval for an updated orbital debris mitigation plan.

The FCC said its conditional approval of this mitigation plan allows “Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world.” The conditions include semi-annual reports that Kuiper must give the FCC to detail the collision avoidance maneuvers its satellites have made, whether any have lost the ability to steer away from objects, and other debris risk indicators. (2/8)

India Tests New Vikas Rocket Engine (Source: Deccan Herald)
The Indian Space Research Organization has successfully tested the throttling of Vikas, its workhorse launch-vehicle engine. The space agency said on Wednesday that the first throttling demonstration hot-test of the engine was successfully accomplished on January 30, for a targeted 67 percent thrust level throttling, for a duration of 43 seconds. (2/9)

Setting Australia’s Space Priorities (Source: ASPI)
Australia is an Indo-Pacific country with a democratic ethos. Its role in shaping the discourse on strategic policy—in areas such as representative governance structures, the rules-based international order and responsible space development—is well documented. Australia is a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue along with three major democratic, space-faring nations (India, Japan and the US) that is aimed at ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific. Click here. (2/9)

Space is Full of Rubbish – It’s Everyone’s Job to Clean It Up (Source: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change)
The ongoing space boom provides an opportunity for the commercial sector to step into a leadership role to address the clean-up and mitigation of space debris. The density of objects in orbit around Earth is growing rapidly due to a booming space industry, the increased availability of small satellites at a lower cost and a lack of agreed mitigation strategies or governing policies. Until recently, governments were the main contributors to the creation of space debris and they have left it largely unchecked for the past 50 years owing to a lack of technology and strategic agreements.

In coming decades, however, the growing commercial space sector is expected to be the leading cause of debris. Public and private sharing of responsibility has the potential to facilitate sustainable and long-lasting mitigation strategies, as well as innovation for the development and deployment of space-debris-removal technologies. (2/10)

US Students’ ‘Big Idea’ Could Help NASA Explore the Moon (Source: Voice of America)
Last November, Northeastern University student Andre Neto Caetano watched the live, late-night launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a cellphone placed on top of a piano in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in California. “I had, not a flashback, but a flash-forward of seeing maybe Artemis 4 or something, and COBRA, as part of the payload, and it is on the moon doing what it was meant to do,” Caetano told VOA during a recent Skype interview.

Artemis 1 launched the night before Caetano and his team of scholars presented their Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator (COBRA) rover project at NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The team hoped to impress judges assembled in the remote California desert. That skepticism, said Caetano, came from the simplicity of their design. “It’s a robot that moves like a snake, and then the head and the tail connect, and then it rolls,” he said. (2/8)

A ‘$10 Quintillion’ Asteroid (Source: New York Times)
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is leading a NASA mission to explore an asteroid rich with metals  supposedly worth $10 quintillion that’s orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid’s name is Psyche, after the Greek goddess of the soul. This is totally cool, but there are a few caveats on that eye-catching dollar value. First, it’s Elkins-Tanton’s own estimate, which she told me she ballparked about six years ago when reporters first came calling about the mission. (She estimated that the nickel alone was worth that much.)

Second, to sell all the metal in Psyche someone would have to bring it all to Earth, which is almost inconceivable. And third, if that much metal really could be brought to Earth, there would be far more than anyone needs, and its value would crash. Let’s start with how much $10 quintillion is. It’s $10,000,000,000,000,000,000. Equivalently, it’s $10 million million million. One flaw in the quintillion calculation is that how much something is worth is inseparable from the question of whether you can obtain it. (2/8)

Space Startups Are Trying to Make Money Going to the Moon (Source: Bloomberg)
For years, NASA has been planting the seeds of what it hopes will one day sprout into a full-fledged lunar economy. In the future, private companies could ferry people and cargo to and from the moon, creating a base to conduct science and, eventually, mine resources and even lunar ice as an ingredient to make rocket propellant. It’s a grand vision that could start to take shape this year and eventually lead to a marketplace in which companies could use the lunar environment to turn a profit as they do now with orbiting satellites.

Much will have to go right for that future to coalesce over the next decade or so, starting with making trips to and from the moon as routine as satellite launches. For now, the lunar economy consists mainly of money from NASA contracts, and it will probably stay that way well into the decade. If a self-sustaining lunar economy is to emerge, private companies will have to find ways to do business on the moon that doesn't rely on government money.

For the last decade, the space industry’s biggest investments have been much closer to home. Some 99 percent of investment in space over that time, or about $272 billion, has gone toward satellites and the rockets that carry them to Earth orbit. The fledgling lunar market is part of a broader category of emerging market investments, Anderson said, which includes satellite servicing and space habitats. Altogether these markets made up just $3.3 billion of space investment in the last decade. (2/8)

NASA Awards Mars Science Mission Launch to Blue Origin’s New Glenn (Source: Blue Origin)
NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) awarded Blue Origin’s New Glenn the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) contract. ESCAPADE is part of the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program; it is a dual spacecraft mission to study Mars’ magnetosphere.

ESCAPADE is a twin-spacecraft Class D mission that will study solar wind energy transfer through Mars’ unique hybrid magnetosphere. Providing launch service for ESCAPADE is a task order under NASA's Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. Blue Origin was on-ramped to the NASA VADR launch services Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract on January 26, 2022, with a five-year period of performance.

“ESCAPADE follows a long tradition of NASA Mars science and exploration missions, and we’re thrilled NASA’s Launch Services Program has selected New Glenn to launch the instruments that will study Mars’ magnetosphere,” said Jarrett Jones, senior vice president, New Glenn, Blue Origin. (2/9)