Space News May 2023

Starship leaves everyone in the dust

INSIDE

n Space surveillance arms race in full swing

n Big opportunities for big science with big rockets

n Sizing up the GEO manufacturing battleground

May 21-24 • St. Louis, Missouri

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Hon. Avril Haines Director of National Intelligence

LTG Scott Berrier, USA Director of Defense Intelligence Agency

Hon. John Sherman Chief Information Officer at Department of Denfense

Hon. Chris Scolese, Ph.D. Director of National Reconnaissance Office

VADM Frank Whitworth, USN Director of National GeospaitlalIntelligence Agency

David Applegate, Ph.D. Director of United States Geological Survey

LTG Maria Gervais, USA Deputy Commanding General and Chief of Staff, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

Were the SpaceX employees, not to mention their fans gathered in person on South Padre Island or virtually online, right to cheer a launch that ended explosively four minutes into a 90-minute flight?

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NOAA's new weather satellite campaign begins with a free-flying sounder and continues over decades with launches of small to medium-sized satellites.

17

Maxar

The moon-to-Mars architecture NASA presented at the 38th Space Symposium represents a fundamental change in how NASA plans its exploration programs.

Sizing up the 2023 GEO manufacturing battleground

Competition among builders of the world’s largest communications satellites is intensifying in a shrinking market.

In an interview, Maxar President and CEO Daniel Jablonsky said the company is trying to seize a crucial opportunity created by the U.S. Space Development Agency’s proliferated LEO constellation.

ABOVE: SpaceX’s first integrated Starship on April 15, two days before a launch attempt was converted to a wet dress rehearsal. Credit: SpaceX COVER: Starship creates a large cloud of smoke and debris as it lifts off April 20 from Boca Chica, Texas. Credit: Trevor Mahlmann / LabPadre

NOAA kicks off NEON weather satellite program

Grading Starship on a suborbital curve

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SIGNIFICANT DIGITS $250M

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson warned April 18 that the agency’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) program could need $250 million more over the next two years. Nelson, testifying to Senate appropriators, said he learned of the additional costs projected for the current 2023 fiscal year and 2024 during a recent visit to JPL. He did not disclose what problems led to the increased costs. Senators said they were concerned that cost growth in MSR would hurt other agency science programs. Nelson said that while NASA is seeking a record $8.26 billion for science in 2024, “you can’t fit 10 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack.”

$60M

X-Bow Systems, a startup developing solid propulsion systems, won $60 million in funding. The funding came through a U.S. Air Force Strategic Funding Increase, or STRATFI, agreement, that augments private funding. X-Bow plans to use the funding to continue work on solid rocket motors that use advanced technologies, like additive manufacturing, for aerospace applications such as launch vehicles.

$20M

Geospatial data analytics company Hydrosat has secured $20 million in grants and investment. The funding is a combination of a $15 million Series A round from a group of investors and $5 million in government grants. Hydrosat said the funding will allow the company to develop two satellites for launch in 2024 to measure water stress in plants along with other indicators of climate change.

So close

A lander built by Japanese company ispace likely ran out of propellant and crashed on the lunar surface. The HAKUTO-R M1 lander was scheduled to land at 12:40 p.m. Eastern April 25 in the vicinity of Atlas Crater on the moon. The company said it lost contact with the lander just before the scheduled touchdown and could not restore contact. In a later statement, ispace said telemetry showed propellant reached the “lower threshold” during final descent, after which the lander’s speed increased, suggesting it ran out of propellant for its engines. The company acknowledged that the spacecraft made a hard landing and that restoring communications “is no longer achievable.” The lander carried a set of payloads for commercial and government customers, including a small rover from the United Arab Emirates.

Going through PDR under a CR

ISS extension

The International Space Station will remain operating through at least 2028 after Russia joined the other partners in an extension. NASA confirmed April 27 that Roscosmos had informed it and the other partners earlier this week that the Russian government had agreed to remain on the station to 2028. Russian officials had earlier suggested they might leave the station after 2024. Canada, Europe and Japan have previously followed the lead of the United States to extend the ISS to 2030 and then transition to commercial space stations.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the House Science Committee on Thursday that NASA and Roscosmos continue to work well together on the station.

The U.S. Air Force secretary is asking Congress to allow the service to start some programs before funding is provided for them.

Frank Kendall said April 19 at Space Symposium that it is “troubling” that the U.S. Air Force and Space Force have not been able to start critical programs to compete with China because of the lagging budget process. That includes new missile-warning satellites and remote sensing satellites to track moving targets and hypersonic vehicles, which are on hold until Congress passes a final appropriations bill for 2024, which may not happen if Congress instead passes a full-year continuing resolution (CR). Kendall said he’s asked Congress to allow programs to start while funding is finalizing, proceeding to the preliminary design review (PDR) phase.

The International Space Station as seen from a Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2021.

QUICK TAKES

QUICK TAKES

Spectrum sharing

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules April 20 governing how operators in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) share spectrum amid an unprecedented flood of proposed satellites. Operators approved by the FCC in later processing rounds must coordinate with, or show how they will protect, their predecessors under the new measures. However, these protections will be phased out 10 years after the first NGSO system receives a license in a later processing round. That move, said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, is intended to support innovation while limiting the “regulatory privilege” that first-mover systems currently enjoy.

Meet COMSO

The Space Force’s Space Systems Command is rebranding an office that works on procuring commercial services. The command said its commercial services office is being renamed Commercial Space Office, or COMSO. It will incorporate other organizations that work with the commercial space industry, like SpaceWERX. Brig. Gen. Jason Cothern, deputy commander of Space Systems Command, said it makes sense to bring different organizations under one roof to help improve the government’s access to commercial technology while making it easier for companies to seek contracting opportunities. Col. Richard Kniseley, a senior materiel leader at Space Systems Command, has been named head of the office.

Reusing Rutherford

Rocket Lab will reuse an engine on an upcoming Electron launch. The company said April 19 that a Rutherford engine from a booster that was recovered after a May 2022 launch will be integrated into an Electron launching in the third quarter. That takes the company a step closer to reusing the entire booster, although Rocket Lab has not stated when they expect that to happen. Rocket Lab also announced this week the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) vehicle, a version of the Electron rocket designed for suborbital tests of hypersonic technologies. The first HASTE launch is scheduled for later this quarter from Wallops Island, Virginia.

n Firefly Aerospace says it plans to offer a new medium-class rocket for the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL) competition. The medium-lift rocket it is developing in partnership with Northrop Grumman, projected to launch in 2025, is being designed to compete for NSSL Phase 3, the company said. Firefly expects its two-stage medium vehicle, projected to lift 16,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, to be able to challenge Rocket Lab’s Neutron and Relativity Space’s Terran R for NSSL awards.

Coordinating ILRS

China’s space agency will soon create an organization to coordinate its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) development. The International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organization will coordinate and manage the construction of the ILRS moon base, with founding members expected to be announced by June. The Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, whose members include China, Bangladesh, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand, signed an agreement on cooperation for ILRS this week. Several other countries have expressed interest. China also outlined plans for future robotic missions launching to the moon later this decade.

A Rutherford engine recovered from the booster used on an Electron launch in May 2022 will be reflown on an Electron launching in the third quarter of 2023.

Rendering of Firefly’s Next Generation Medium-Lift Vehicle

A render depicting phase 3 of the ILRS roadmap

Astra wins Space Force task order

Astra won a Space Force deal for a launch of its Rocket 4 vehicle in development. The company said April 21 it secured a task order worth $11.5 million as part of the Orbital Services Program OSP-4 contract. The mission, named STP-S29B, is scheduled to fly in April 2025 on Rocket 4, a vehicle in development that could be ready for test launches by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Astra announced April 24 that a version of Ursa Major’s Hadley engine will be used on the upper stage of Rocket 4, which Astra hopes to begin test launches of late this year. The Hadley engine, in its vacuum-optimized version, produces 6,500 pounds-force of thrust. Ursa also supplies engines for Phantom Space and Stratolaunch.

Inflation infatuation

Sierra Space and ILC Dover will cooperate on developing inflatable space station modules and spacesuits. ILC Dover will be the exclusive partner in providing soft goods for Sierra Space’s Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) modules it is developing for commercial space stations and future moon and Mars missions. The companies will also collaborate on spacesuits for Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser and spacewalks. The announcement is part of efforts by Sierra Space to build up a commercial human spaceflight program to serve research and other markets.

“Space program in a box”

Axiom Space has rolled out a new program to provide turnkey human spaceflight programs for governments. The Axiom Space Access Program features a series of tiers, from providing advice and insight to flying government astronauts and co-developing Axiom’s commercial space station. Several countries have signed up for the program, some of which had previously been working with Axiom. The company sees government business as one part of an overall market that also includes private astronauts and corporate R&D.

Something old, something blue

The Space Force plans to start replacing decades-old parabolic satellite dishes in 2025 with electronic phased array antennas developed by BlueHalo. That company won a $1.4 billion contract from the Space Rapid Capabilities Office last year to update 12 military ground stations with modern systems. BlueHalo will use a new mobile electronically steered antenna, called Badger, that is now in development. Badger can maintain simultaneous contact with up to 20 satellites while existing parabolic dishes can talk with only one satellite at a time.

Can you hear me now?

AST SpaceMobile said it has made its first voice calls using the company’s test satellite. The company announced April 25 it made the call using an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22, communicating directly with its BlueWalker 3 satellite on AT&T spectrum. The companies have not disclosed any details about the performance of these tests, which they said are continuing as part of plans to offer broadband services including voice, text, data and video for phone users outside terrestrial coverage. The test took place using an FCC license enabling limited experimental use of cellular frequencies as AST SpaceMobile seeks broader approvals for providing commercial services.

A model of BlueHalo’s phased array antenna is on display at the Space Symposium.

AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan (left) and a company engineer conduct test calls in Texas.

Sierra Space will work with ILC Dover on a series of progressively larger inflatable modules called LIFE for use on commercial space stations and missions to the moon and Mars.

Axiom Space is developing a series of commercial modules it plans to install on the ISS as a precursor to a commercial space station.

Grading Starship on a suborbital curve

For most launches, determining success or failure is fairly straightforward. If the rocket places its payload into its desired orbit, the launch is a success. If the rocket fails to reach orbit, it’s a failure. The only shades of gray emerge in those occasional cases where the rocket places a payload into

JEFF FOUST

something other than a desired orbit. There, the degree of partial success depends on how the payload can be salvaged and the effects on it on its mission, a debate that involves the launch provider, customers, insurers, and their lawyers, among others.

When it comes to test launches, those shades of gray become a kaleidoscope. Even with ground tests and extensive modeling, the only way to fully test a

launch vehicle is to launch it, accepting that there is a chance that something will keep the rocket from reaching orbit. That would make the launch a failure, in the sense it could not complete its mission and place any payload into orbit. Yet the data collected might be entirely satisfactory for engineers to revise the vehicle’s design and ensure future vehicles do make it to orbit: success in the long run.

That superposition of failure and success comes to mind with last week’s longawaited first integrated launch of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. The company had flown the Starship upper stage several times on low-altitude test flights — most ending with crashes and/or explosions- — but this would be the first time that it would lift off atop its Super Heavy booster with 33 Raptor engines. It would, most definitely, be a test flight.

It would not even be an orbital test flight. While SpaceX had referred to the launch as an orbital flight test for some time, it switched to calling it an integrated flight test in the weeks closer to launch, reflecting the true nature of the flight. If all went according to plan, Starship would complete less than one orbit of the Earth, splashing down off the Hawaii coast 90 minutes after liftoff without performing any orbit insertion or deorbit burns. An FAA official, talking to reporters in a background briefing in the days before launch, called the flight a “nearly orbital” trajectory that would reach a peak altitude of about 235 kilometers.

Of course, the launch did not go according to plan. The first launch attempt was scrubbed less than 10 minutes before the scheduled liftoff April 17 at 8:20 am local time from Boca Chica, Texas, when a valve that is part of the system used to pressurize tanks in the first stage became stuck. The company kept the countdown going to the T-40 second mark, using the remaining minutes as a wet dress rehearsal for the vehicle. SpaceX later said moisture in the valve froze.

SpaceX initially said they would need

SpaceX’s first integrated Starship vehicle lifts off April 20 from Boca Chica, Texas, on a brief test flight.

48 hours before making another launch attempt in order to replenish supplies of liquid oxygen and methane propellants, then pushed it back another day to April 20. Crowds returned to the tip of South Padre Island, the closest public viewing site for the launch, and this time the valves behaved. At 8:33 am CDT, the Raptor engines fired up and, at T+6 seconds, the vehicle started to ascend.

It was clear almost immediately, though, that the launch was not going precisely as planned. SpaceX, to its credit, displayed graphics on its webcast that showed the vehicle’s speed, altitude, propellant levels, and the status of its engines. When that graphic first appeared at T+15 seconds, three of the Raptor engines were off: two next to each other in the outer ring and one engine in the center that, unlike those in the outer ring, can gimble for attitude control.

As the flight continued, more Raptor engines shut down, with at least six out of service at some phases of flight. There was also debris that came off near the base of the booster at about T+30 seconds, with some flaring visible in the plume. Yet the rocket continued to accelerate and ascend, powered by its remaining Raptor engines and, seemingly, the ever-louder cheers of SpaceX employees at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters that drowned out the commentary on the launch webcast.

The vehicle powered through max-Q, or maximum dynamic pressure, and continued to fly, but by about two and a half minutes into the flight the vehicle began a slow tumble. The webcast commentators at first suggested this was part of stage separation activities, with Starship set to separate from Super Heavy at T+2:52, according to the timeline SpaceX provided before launch.

That time came and went, though, without a shutdown of the remaining Super Heavy engines or stage separation. The slow tumble continued, but the vehicle remained intact. The cheers in Hawthorne

faded. “We should have had separation by now,” acknowledged SpaceX’s John Insprucker on the webcast at T+3:45. “Obviously, this does not appear to be a nominal situation.”

Seconds later, just before the T+4 minute mark, the vehicle burst into a white cloud with only a faint hint of a fireball. (SpaceX later said it triggered the flight termination systems on both Super Heavy and Starship.) The first integrated flight of Starship and Super Heavy was over, far short of that planned splashdown near Hawaii. Yet, counterintuitively, cheers erupted again from Hawthorne. “Everyone here is absolutely pumped to clear the pad and make it this far into the test flight,” Siva Bharadvaj, another host of the SpaceX webcast, explained.

“This is not something that is a sure thing at all”

Were the SpaceX employees, not to mention their fans gathered in person on South Padre Island or virtually online, right to cheer a launch that ended explosively four minutes into a 90-minute flight? SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk thought so. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” he tweeted shortly after the launch. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

Congratulations came from outside the company as well. “Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s first integrated flight test!” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson in a tweet shortly after the flight. “Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test--and beyond.”

NASA, of course, has a very strong interest in Starship, having selected that vehicle to serve as the lunar lander for at least the first two crewed Artemis landings, Artemis 3 and 4, under contracts with a combined value of more than $4 billion. The test flight was not an official milestone in those contracts

but one that the agency was nonetheless watching closely.

“They’re doing a lot of great work down in Boca right now,” Amit Kshatriya, director of NASA’s new Moon to Mars Program Office, said at a briefing during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs hours after the April 17 scrub. He added that NASA “certainly can empathize” with SpaceX given the setbacks the agency suffered getting the first Space Launch System vehicle off the pad last year.

“Everything is proceeding per the plan. We need those guys to get off the ground. We need them to get uncrewed demos done,” he added.

What effect this test will have on that plan, and the overall Artemis schedule, is unclear. A NASA manifest released in March with its fiscal year 2024 budget request projected Artemis 3 launching in December 2025, giving SpaceX only about two and a half years to get Starship ready to carry astronauts to the lunar surface. That will likely require dozens of test flights to demonstrate the performance of the overall launch system as well as cryogenic refueling of the lunar lander Starship.

Of course, that assumes the launch isn’t delayed for other reasons: NASA currently has Artemis 2 scheduled for launch in November 2024, which means it thinks it can turn around ground systems and other elements of Artemis in about a year after projecting two years between Artemis 1 and 2. Nelson, testifying before House appropriators the day before the launch, hinted that Artemis 3 could slip into 2026.

Others outside the agency also weighed in, supporting SpaceX. “This flight is an important milestone and much will be learned from the engineering data,” Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a former NASA official, said in a statement. “With Starship, SpaceX is taking bold steps that are helping us accelerate the future of

humans living and working off our planet. Flight tests and taking risks will lead to this future.”

Musk himself set expectations low going into the flight. “This is a very risky flight. This is not something that is a sure thing at all,” he said in a discussion for paying subscribers of Twitter, the social media company he acquired last year, the day before the first launch attempt.

Getting off the pad would be good enough, he said. “It would probably take us several months to rebuild the launch pad,” he said of the scenario where the rocket immediately blew up. “So, my top hope is please, may fate smile upon us and we clear the launch pad before anything goes wrong.”

In retrospect, he may not have achieved that. As the Raptor engines ignited, they kicked up huge plumes of dust and sand from around the pad on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. They may have also picked up chunks of the pad itself. One video released by SpaceX showed material falling into the waters of the Gulf as the rocket ascended, presumably large pieces of pad material, rocks, or other debris liberated by the rocket’s plume.

When photographers who set up remote cameras for the launch were able to return two days later to retrieve their cameras, they also documented extensive damage to the launch mount and nearby tank farm. (Many of the cameras were also damaged or destroyed by the force of the launch.) Unlike other launch complexes, there was no flame trench or other system to divert the exhaust of the rocket at liftoff.

Musk shrugged off the damage. “3 months ago, we started building a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount,” he tweeted the day after the launch. It wasn’t ready in time but SpaceX went ahead with the launch, thinking that the concrete would be eroded instead of shattering. (The problem wasn’t seen in a static-fire test in February, he added, because the

engines ran at only half their rated power.) “Looks like we can be ready to launch again in 1 to 2 months.”

Musk, though, is known for his aspirational timelines. In addition to the time to rebuild parts of the launch pad and install the plate or other equipment to mitigate the force of the launch, SpaceX still needs to investigate what happened during the flight. Were the failed Raptor engines, for example, damaged by pad debris, or did they suffer other problems?

SpaceX may also need to address the environmental effects of the launch. Residents of the town of Port Isabel, near South Padre Island, reported finegrained debris — presumably sand — falling on the town, kicked up from the launch plume. There were also isolated reports of broken windows. The FAA, which licensed the launch, will look into those issues as part of its oversight of the launch mishap investigation.

An April 26 statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, responsible for a neighboring wildlife refuge, said it found debris from the launch spread over 385 acres, as well as a 3.5-acre brush fire started by the launch. The plume of “pulverized concrete” from the launch deposited material more than 10 kilometers to the northwest. However, it added it found no evidence of birds or other wildlife killed by the launch.

Going into the launch, SpaceX anticipated repeating this first flight. In an environmental document filed the same day that the FAA issued the launch license for the first Starship integrated launch, the agency mentioned establishing an additional zone in the Pacific uprange from Hawaii “to account for the potential Starship debris field for the second and third launches of Starship that are not configured to survive atmospheric reentry.” That suggests SpaceX is planning multiple similar launches until it gets it right.

“Maybe the second one will be or maybe the third one will be, but tomorrow probably will not be successful, if by success one means reaching orbit,” Musk said in his Twitter conversation before the first launch attempt. “If we get any information that allows us to improve the design of upcoming builds of Starship, then it is a success.”

Success won’t be clear until Starship regularly flies, carries satellites to orbit, and lands astronauts on the Moon. SpaceX has a record of trying and failing repeatedly until it achieves success: the first flights of the Falcon 1, landing Falcon 9 boosters, and early Starship flights. The same may be true here, but it may be years before we know whether to count this abbreviated test flight as a success or not. SN

A mini van near the Space X Starship launch pad at Star Base, in Boca Chica, Texas, was damaged by a major piece of debris during the April 20 launch.

NASA creates an architecture for long-term human exploration

There were few major surprises when NASA rolled out a detailed architecture for human exploration of the moon and Mars at the 38th Space Symposium April 18. The 150-page document largely reinforced plans for the initial series of Artemis missions to the moon using the Space Launch System, Orion, Gateway, Human Landing System and other programs in development for years.

“The Architecture Concept Review

JEFF FOUST

details plans for early human exploration of the moon’s south pole,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in a conference speech announcing the architecture. “It provides more definition for plans through Artemis 4 and sets the stage for the first crewed missions to Mars.”

However, the architecture represents a fundamental change in how NASA plans its exploration programs. The Architecture Concept Review document and supporting white papers are intended to tie long-term objectives

for human exploration to current and future programs. That’s intended to provide coherence and — NASA hopes — durability against inevitable technical and political challenges that will allow Artemis to continue when past efforts have failed.

GETTING OFF THE ROLLER COASTER

“It’s a pivot to a new kind of approach, a new methodology,” said Kurt “Spuds” Vogel, director of space architectures at NASA and one of the people leading the development of the new architecture. He described work on the architecture in a talk April 24 at a meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC), a group of companies and organizations working on technologies for lunar exploration.

Vogel came to NASA in mid-2021

Left: A NASA render of an astronaut sifting lunar regolith. Above: NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy at the 28th Space Symposium in April.

from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the request of Melroy, a former DARPA deputy director. He recalled Melroy asking him to come to NASA to provide “another set of eyes” on the agency’s plans.

He saw an opportunity to get out of the cycles of past efforts to return humans to the moon and go on to Mars that started with great fanfare but fell apart within a few years. “This has been a 30-plus-year ride,” he said, going back to President George H.W. Bush’s announcement of the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989 and its resurrection 15 years later by his son’s 2004 Vision for Space Exploration speech and the “Apollo on steroids” Constellation program that followed. “We’ve been on this roller coaster, and one of the big dips in that roller coaster ride is when Constellation got canceled,” he said. “There’s a lot of PTSD that everyone experienced from that, both inside the agency and our partners.”

NASA then switched to a “capabilities-based” approach of developing programs, like the Space Launch System and Orion, without a broader architecture. Now it was time, Vogel and others

at NASA believed, to develop a more comprehensive architecture into which those programs and others could fit. That would show policymakers and international partners that NASA had a rigorous plan.

It would also provide guidance within the agency. Without that architecture, “everyone tells their own story, where the thing they’re working on is the most important,” he said. “They’ve got their own vision of how it fits.”

That creates confusion inside and outside NASA. “We want to get out of this cycle,” he concluded.

ARCHITECTING FROM THE RIGHT

Throughout the development of the architecture, NASA repeated two phrases. One is what Melroy called the overarching goal or “bumper sticker” of the effort: “Create a blueprint for sustained human presence and exploration throughout the solar system.”

The second is one that defined the overall process: “Architect from the right and execute from the left.” That meant starting from the goal and working backward to develop the plans and

programs needed to achieve the goal, then carrying them out.

That process publicly started last May when NASA released a set of 50 objectives for achieving that goal in science, transportation, infrastructure and operations. NASA took public feedback on those objectives and held workshops with both industry and international partners, resulting in a revised, expanded list of 63 objectives Melroy announced at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last September.

NASA then took each objective and broke it down into “characteristics and needs,” or the features or products needed to achieve those goals. Those are then further decomposed into functions needed to achieve those characteristics and needs, as well as use cases that describe how those functions are used. Those functions and use cases can then be grouped together to identify similar features and “sub-architectures” in areas like transportation and habitation.

“We broke down the objectives that are tied to human lunar return into characteristics, needs, use cases, functions and requirements,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in an interview shortly before the release of the architecture document. “We’ve connected the big-picture agency strategy to these near-term missions.”

The intent, he said, was to link all the objectives to individual programs. “In our documentation, you’ll actually be able to see in the appendices the breakdowns from objectives to specific parts of the mission and elements of the architecture.”

From left: Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy and Kurt “Spuds” Vogel, NASA director of space architectures, lead a Moon to Mars workshop last summer at the Royal Institution in London.

For example, one of the objects is to “develop cislunar systems that crew can routinely operate to and from lunar orbit and the lunar surface for extended durations.” NASA broke that down into five characteristics and needs for transporting crew and cargo from Earth to lunar orbit and from orbit to the surface. That, in turn, became six use cases, like “crew transport between cislunar space and lunar surface,” and 17 functions that ranged from stacking and integrating launch vehicles to recovering crew and cargo after splashdown.

The report focused on the first phase of the overall moon-to-Mars effort, “human lunar return, “ which included missions through Artemis 4. NASA found nearly 40 use cases and more than 50 functions relevant to the objectives tied to those missions, then examined which program or programs were fulfilling them.

Fortunately for NASA, those use cases and functions match up with the existing programs in development for the early Artemis missions. Only three, all related to crew training, were not allocated to any specific program, which NASA said in the report reflected the nature of how the human systems sub-architecture was defined, and not any actual gap in planning for those missions.

WHITE PAPERS AND NEXT STEPS

Along with the main architecture document, NASA released several white papers going into detail about specific aspects of the architecture. One, for example, discussed why NASA selected the near-rectilinear halo orbit for the Gateway and compared that orbit against alternative orbits.

“They’re very important to me personally,” Melroy, a former space shuttle commander, said of the white papers

in an April 25 talk at the LSIC meeting. It reflected the experience from the years when Melroy, an Air Force combat veteran who’s also worked for the FAA and Lockheed Martin, was not at NASA. “I often took a look at the agency and said, ‘Why are we doing that?’” The papers, she said, helped explain the technical trades the agency made when choosing parts of the architecture.

The architecture document is intended to be a living document. Melroy said NASA will solicit feedback on it with workshops this summer. “The objectives will stay with us, but we know that the architecture is going to evolve,” she said, reflecting new technologies and new capabilities.

The goal is to hold the next architecture concept review in November, holding them annually to refine and extend the architecture. “It’s a very tight turnaround for us to get to November, but that’s what is going to align us with the budget,” she said.

The future reviews will look further out. This document focused on human lunar return, only the first of four phases of the overall exploration campaign. More advanced lunar exploration, called “foundational exploration” and “sustained lunar evolution,” will

go through a similar process of converting objectives into functions and use cases, identifying programs that can achieve them or gaps that need to be filled with new capabilities. A fourth phase is devoted to initial human missions to Mars.

Even as that work gears up, NASA is rethinking some aspects of later Artemis missions. NASA originally talked about establishing a single “Artemis Base Camp” on the moon, building up infrastructure like rovers and habitats there.

Free, though, said at Space Symposium that NASA is instead thinking of creating a few smaller bases because of changing lighting conditions at the south pole, where missing a launch window for a particular site might delay a mission there by months. Multiple sites could also improve science. “We could maybe have two or three sites to go to that help our science diversity,” he said.

Those trades will come later. “NASA has positioned this strategy for longevity and success,” Melroy said in her Space Symposium speech. “This is a critical milestone for us in our moon-to-Mars strategy. We feel very aligned with our partners. We want to continue to stay that way.” SN

NASA rendering of a lunar base camp.

Nelson supports continuing restrictions on NASA cooperation with China

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he supports continuing current restrictions on the agency’s ability to work with China in spaceflight as he warns of a “space race” between the countries.

Nelson told members of the House Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice and science subcommittee at an April 19 hearing about NASA’s proposed fiscal year 2024 budget that he felt the so-called “Wolf Amendment,” which sharply restricts bilateral cooperation between NASA and Chinese organizations, should be maintained.

“I think the Wolf Amendment, as it’s written, is adequate,” he said when asked by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) if it should be strengthened. “I think the Wolf Amendment is sufficient for where it is right now.”

The amendment, included in annual appropriations bills since 2011, does allow NASA to cooperate in limited circumstances, provided there is a security review and congressional notification. Nelson gave one example of that cooperation in discussions two years ago regarding “deconfliction” of the orbits of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter with NASA spacecraft orbiting the planet.

He showed little desire, though, to expand cooperation, citing a lack of transparency in actions like recent Long March 5B launches that left core stages in orbits that resulted in uncontrolled reentries.

“I would hope that China, the Chinese government, would finally come to realize that they’ve got to be more open and transparent about all of their stuff falling back to Earth and that we could cooperate together,” he said.

He also reiterated comments about competition with China in space exploration. “Not the same as Apollo, but we’re in a space race with China,” he said when asked by the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), if there was a space race between the U.S. and China.

“China has, in the last 10 years, established a very successful human space program,” Nelson said, describing development of China’s space station and long-term plans for human missions to the moon. “So, is that a space race? Yes, sir, I believe it is.”

He added, though, that NASA was not returning to the moon simply to beat China there. “But there are other reasons that we go to the moon, because we’re going to Mars,” he said, describing how future human lunar missions will test technologies and operations needed for later missions to Mars.

Yet, later in the hearing, he said NASA and its partners needed to get to the lunar south polar region, thought to harbor deposits of water ice, before China arrived and claimed them. “We need to protect our interests going to a very critical part of the moon’s surface,” he said when asked about past comments along those lines by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.)

“If you let China get there first,” Nelson warned, “what’s to stop them from saying, ‘We’re here, this is our area, you stay out.’ That’s why I think it’s important for us to

JEFF FOUST

get there on an international mission and establish the rules of the road.”

SLOWDOWN WARNING

There was little criticism, or critical questioning, of Nelson by members of the subcommittee during the hearing. Instead, many members used the hearing to ask how broader political and economic issues could affect NASA.

The hearing took place the same day as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced legislation to increase the debt ceiling that would also reduce federal discretionary spending to 2022 levels. Several Democratic members of the committee asked Nelson how that would affect NASA.

“A 22% cut or a continuing resolution that would leave the funding at the ’23 level would cause a slowdown of programs at NASA across the board,” Nelson told Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), ranking member of the subcommittee. The 22% figure was one estimate of the potential cut to non-defense discretionary spending if the reduction to 2022 levels excluded defense programs.

NASA had outlined the potential impacts of such a cut in a letter in March to the top Democrat on the full committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) Nelson said in that letter that a 22% cut “would have devastating and potentially unrecoverable impacts” to NASA programs, delaying or canceling many science and exploration missions.

The House hearing took place one day after a hearing by its Senate counterpart, where members worried about the impact on science programs from cost growth in Mars Sample Return. That topic did not come up in the House hearing until near the end, when Ruppersberger asked about perceived budget cuts and potential delays in the Dragonfly mission to Titan.

“We are still planning on launching Dragonfly in ’27. That has not changed,” Nelson said. “Right now, there is not any plan for a cut in fiscal year ’24.” SN

Bill Nelson, NASA administrator

“A profound moment”

Q&A: Victor Glover on being a part of Artemis 2

On April 3, NASA revealed the crew of Artemis 2, the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft that is slated for launch as soon as late 2024. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will be the first humans to go to the vicinity of the moon since the Apollo 17 landing in 1972, flying around the moon on the 10-day mission.

Glover, the pilot for Artemis 2, joined the astronaut corps a decade ago after serving as a naval aviator. He flew to the International Space Station on the Crew-1 mission in late 2020, spending nearly six months there. At the time NASA selected him for the mission, he was in a management role in the astronaut office.

A few hours after the crew announcement event, Glover sat down with SpaceNews to talk about the experience of being named to the mission and what’s next. A condensed version of the interview follows.

When did you find you were going on Artemis 2?

On Tuesday, March 7. The chief astronaut set up meetings with all of us at the same time, and each one had a different title. We were all supposed to meet at crew quarters, the astronaut quarantine facility. I was coming from a luncheon with my staff. Christina thought it was a virtual meeting, so she was at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. Reid had something else due to his retirement from the Navy. So we were all different places, and we’re late.

When we got there, not only was our boss there, but our boss’s boss, so we all feel terrible. After a little bit, Norm

JEFF FOUST

[Knight, director of flight operations] says to us, “How would you feel about flying on Artemis 2?” It was a profound moment, a shocking moment. It’s a humbling but important thing to be a part of.

When do you start training for the mission?

Training starts in June. We’ll start suit fittings actually next week, but training starts in earnest in June. There’s also not just training but, because this is the first crewed flight, there’s still plenty of development work. We’ve got engineering evaluations, verification events that we still have to for Orion and even some of the ground systems. We have a lot of work to do.

Is there any part of the mission you’re particularly looking forward to?

Splashdown. Every moment on a space mission can turn into a critical thing, so splashdown is the first time we get to really exhale. But as a human being, I’m really excited about this journey I get to take with these three other people representing this amazing Astronaut Office, which represents our country and humanity. In this next two or three years of training, I’m just looking forward to every moment — the training, the testing, the interviews — because there’s so much excitement about this moment.

Has it sunk in yet that you’re going to be part of the first crew to go beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century?

No. I’m the assigned crew branch chief. The folks that are on the space station right now like Frank Rubio, Crew-6, the cosmonauts up there, the folks that are training to launch very soon and the folks that just got back, those are all part of my branch’s mission. That’s such a rewarding but very busy job that I really haven’t had time to switch gears. I’m glad we have until June because over the next couple of months, as I transition to the new person who’s replacing me, I need to give myself time to transition. I mean, it’s not just flipping a switch.

What was your family’s reaction?

I was in California and my daughter is in college there, so we drove down to where she was. I had the chance to get my whole family together and tell them — my wife already knew, but I got to tell my kids all together at least. I was blown away by how excited they were. They’re all in.

Do you have any regrets that, because you’re going around the moon on Artemis 2, you won’t get to walk on the moon on Artemis 3?

No regrets. The best mission is always the next thing smokin’ and so the chance to fly on this is amazing. Being on this mission, meaning that I’m not going to fly on Artemis 3, doesn’t make me feel bad. When I showed up at NASA, there was no lunar lander program. I had made peace with the fact that going into low Earth orbit for six months is the mission, and I’m happy to do the mission. This opportunity is a gift. Artemis 3 will be a gift for someone else, but I’m really happy with this gift right now. SN

Left: NASA astronaut Victor Glover is announced as one of four members of the Artemis 2 crew.

An engineer inspects Inmarsat-6 F1, the first-born twin of Airbus’s most recently completed commercial GEO comsat that launched Feb. 17 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Sizing up the 2023 GEO manufacturing battleground

Competition among builders of the world’s largest communications satellites is intensifying in a shrinking market.

After a C-band clearing shopping spree that saw Intelsat and SES order a combined 13 of the 18 geostationary satellites ordered in 2020, satcom operators worldwide bought just 11 GEOs in 2022 — down from 12 in 2021.

And the competition this year is off to a slow start.

Just three contracts for commercial GEO communications satellites had been announced as of late April, including two to be built by Californian startup Astranis that are part of a new breed of smaller, more regionally focused geostationary spacecraft.

Industry veteran Maxar Technologies secured the other contract with an order from its long-term client Dish Network. Maxar is basing the TV broadcaster’s next satellite on its 1300 series platform, which with a mass of up to 6,800 kilograms, is about 17 times heavier than an Astranis satellite.

One manufacturer hoping for a larger pool of orders for more conventionally large satellites this year is Airbus.

According to Euroconsult research, Airbus’ strong performance in recent years culminated in 2019 when it won 40% of the 10 GEOs ordered; however, it left the arena empty-handed in 2022.

Didier Radola, head of satcom programs at Airbus Defence and Space, told SpaceNewsin February that it hoped to get back on track this year by capturing as many as six of the 15 or so GEOs he expects to be tendered in 2023.

Standing in its way is Thales Alenia Space, Airbus’ main competitor in Europe. The joint venture of French multinational Thales Group and Italian aerospace contractor Leonardo shows no signs of letting up in the increasingly competitive GEO market after winning seven of last year’s 11 orders.

Maxar and Boeing, which are both based in the U.S. and picked up one and two GEO orders in 2022, respectively, are also hungry for more contracts this year.

FIERCE BATTLEGROUND

Competition wasn’t always as brutal. GEO builders used to vie for 15 to 20 large orders annually.

But amid the uncertainty caused by the rise of non-geostationary constellations and, more recently, the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers have been competing for a smaller pool of contracts for half a decade now — ignoring the one-time bonanza of government-stimulated C-band satellites in 2020.

The Federal Communications Commission is covering all the costs of those satellites, which operators need to clear part of their C-band in the United States for Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and other 5G telcos that won the frequencies in an auction that raised more than $80 million.

GEO CHALLENGES

Last year’s GEO order performance shows “signs of market recovery that began in previous years appear to be more cautious than hoped,” Euroconsult principal adviser Maxime Puteaux warned.

Orders placed in 2022 were mainly made to replace aging satellites that are reaching the end of their typical 15-year design lives, he said, rather than for a significant expansion strategy.

Astranis and other new players offering much smaller GEO satellites that are cheaper and more flexible, albeit with less capacity than their larger cousins, are also distorting the market for legacy manufacturers.

Intelsat, which has ordered large satellites from Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, and other established manufacturers, last year became 3D printing

GEO ORDERS

GEO ORDER CHART 2000 THRU 2022

According to Euroconsult, 334 GEO comsats were ordered worldwide between 2000 and 2022, averaging roughly 15 per year.

sites to monitor and assist with complicated development tasks.

The manufacturer has suffered its share of satellite production delays in recent years, including for Telesat’s LEO constellation, which remains on ice while the Canadian operator attempts to finalize its funding.

In addition to supply chain challenges and scarce GEO demand that is putting “some pressure on prices,” Euroconsult’s Puteaux said Airbus’ and Thales Alenia Space’s growth strategies also face technological risks.

A good portion of their recent contract wins is for newly developed software-defined satellites that can be reprogrammed in orbit.

specialist Swissto12’s first customer for a dishwasher-sized satellite, about a tenth the size of a conventional GEO.

GETTING BACK ON TRACK

Radola pinned Airbus’ 2022 no-show on aggressive competition from players battling over slim pickings in the GEO market.

While he expects slightly more orders up for grabs this year, he said Airbus has also been busy finding operational efficiencies to increase its competitiveness, including work to get “closer to our suppliers in order to be positioned to better monitor them.”

Manufacturers will need to have more than just the best or cheapest product to be successful this year as supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic continue to delay satellite projects, according to Radola.

“What will be a differentiator in the coming months will be the capacity for the industry to deliver on time,” he said.

“We see how it is today — nobody is able to deliver on time,” he added, “and the delays are significant.”

In November, Echostar said it is being compensated by Maxar following production issues for its Jupiter 3 satellite, which has seen its launch move from 2021 to later this year in one of the industry’s most recent high-profile delays.

And despite Airbus’ lack of fresh GEO contracts, the company said it still “has a significant GEO backlog” and managed to secure orders for nearly 60 low Earth orbit (LEO) platforms last year.

STRENGTHENING THE LEAD

Marc-Henri Serre, senior vice president of telecoms at Thales Alenia Space, only expects roughly 10 to 12 GEO communications satellites to be ordered in 2023, and annually in the near term.

While he said the market is too unpredictable to give a clear forecast for the number of orders it expects to win 2023, the company stressed it is not under capacity and is continually chasing new contracts.

Thales Alenia Space is also focusing on operational efficiencies this year, and has been sending employees to supplier

“Now both companies need to deliver to customers,” he said, “and one needs to keep in mind the extreme complexity of fully software-defined satellites and” the risks associated with demonstrating first generations.

MULTI-ORBIT COMPETITION

Thales Alenia Space and Airbus are also increasingly bumping heads for satellite manufacturing contracts beyond GEO. Both hope to play a leading role in developing IRIS² — or Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite — Europe’s 6 billion euro ($6.5 billion) multi-orbit sovereign connectivity constellation currently seeking proposals.

And as OneWeb wraps up the deployment of first-generation satellites built via a joint venture the LEO broadband operator shares with Airbus, Thales Alenia Space is getting ready to make a move for follow-on business.

“We all know that OneWeb is preparing its second generation,” Serre said, “so we are [also] positioned for this constellation, and we have other projects in which we are working” on. SN

Amid the uncertainty caused by the rise of non-geostationary constellations and, more recently, the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers have been competing for a smaller pool of contracts for half a decade now.

SPACENEWS GRAPHIC BY ROBIN MCDOWALL

SOURCE: EUROCONSULT

MAXAR pursuing defense deals for its new line of small satellites

CEO

Maxar Technologies is set to deliver in early 2024 the first of 16 satellite buses ordered

SANDRA ERWIN

by L3Harris for a military constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) run by the U.S. Space Development Agency.

L3Harris is the first customer for Maxar’s newly designed small satellite

bus, tailored for the megaconstellation market. The bus is now offered to other defense contractors competing for SDA satellite contracts.

Maxar President and CEO Daniel Jablonsky said the company is trying to seize a crucial opportunity created by SDA’s large LEO constellation — which includes a Transport Layer of satellite for communications and a Tracking Layer for missile detection.

The satellite bus selected by L3Harris for SDA’s Tracking Layer is the smallest of the Maxar line, designed for proliferated constellations that require faster production rates.

“We’re pretty nascent on the defense side right now, but we’re coming up the chain fast,” Jablonsky told SpaceNews April 20.

L3Harris in July won a $700 million contract from SDA to produce 14 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1, plus two additional satellites for a missile-tracking demonstration. All 16 satellites are projected to launch in mid-2025.

“It’s a growing market opportunity for us,” said Jablonsky. “Budgets for defense applications are going up around the world. And they’re particularly going up for robust space capabilities.”

The contract with L3Harris marks a major milestone for Maxar. Only five years ago, the company was exploring options to sell or even shut down its commercial spacecraft manufacturing business due to dwindling orders for geostationary communications satellites. Instead, Maxar restructured its business to focus on smaller satellites and government sales.

Dan Jablonsky: Space Development Agency is a ‘growing market opportunity’

Left: Maxar CEO Dan Jablonsky speaks to reporters April 17 at the 38th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

PURSUING DEFENSE INDUSTRY PARTNERS

Maxar, in 2021, unsuccessfully bid for an SDA satellite contract as a prime contractor and filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office. The protest led SDA to change its contracting approach from traditional procurements to a more flexible contracting mechanism known as Other Transaction

Authority, which requires large defense contractors to team up with commercial players.

In the two years since, Maxar shifted its focus to hardware manufacturing and has sought teaming arrangements with prime contractors.

“We’re very proud of the partnership we have with L3Harris,” said Jablonsky. Maxar is also in discussions with other defense firms. “We’re a commercial

company, and we’re very happy to work with the primes.”

Since the rollout of the LEO bus platform, he said, “people are excited about the capability, and we’re getting inbound requests for proposals.”

TWO BUSES PER MONTH

Joe Foust, Maxar’s vice president of proliferated low Earth orbit constellations, told SpaceNews the company

spent the past two years developing the small satellite bus for the LEO market in hopes of competing more aggressively in the commercial and national security sectors.

The buses, made at Maxar’s satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, will be shipped to L3Harris’ assembly facility at Palm Bay, Florida.

After the first delivery in early 2024, Maxar will start producing buses at a

Left: Maxar rendering of the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1 satellited.

rate of approximately two per month, Foust said.

Foust said Maxar’s small bus is being offered in the commercial LEO market primarily for communications constellations.

The 325-kilogram bus can support payloads anywhere from 200 to about 500 kilograms, he said.

Supply chain problems, some caused by the covid pandemic, slowed down Maxar’s satellite deliveries over the past two years, Foust noted, but now the company is working to prevent such delays going forward.

As soon as the contract with L3Harris was signed in August, “we were ready to place those orders pretty quickly,” said Foust. “So we got all our long-lead items on contract within a month or two.”

Maxar plans to extensively test the new bus in its lab before the first one is shipped to L3Harris, said Foust. “We’ll go through a very rigorous test campaign to make sure it works as a space vehicle.”

Because of its modular design with standard components, he said, production can scale up pretty rapidly.

LEGION BUS FOR REMOTESENSING CONSTELLATIONS

The plan to diversify Maxar’s satellite business includes its mid-size bus, originally designed for its WorldView Legion high-resolution Earth imaging constellation.

Jablonsky said the company rebranded its buses into three lines. The smaller bus it sold to L3Harris is the Maxar 500 series. The WorldView Legion bus is the Maxar 600, and the large buses used for geostationary communications satellites are the Maxar 1300 line.

The Legion bus was selected in 2018

by Swedish broadband operator Ovzon, and Maxar is now actively marketing it for remote-sensing applications. Jablonsky said the platform is best suited to carry a sensor package for electro-optical or radar imaging. “Lots of other things can be put on that bus.”

GEO SATELLITES NOT GOING AWAY

On the geostationary satellite front, there are still hopeful signs for Maxar, even though the market has lost ground to LEO constellations.

A U.S. Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction helped Maxar secure an order from Intelsat in 2020 for four GEO satellites. Intelsat and other operators have to clear the C-band spectrum for cellular 5G networks to qualify for billions of dollars in FCC incentive payments.

While the C-band auction created an artificial bump in the market, other orders have been placed by satellite broadcasters.

SiriusXM last year bought two GEO satellites from Maxar to expand its radio broadcasting constellation. And last month the Dish Network placed a GEO bus order to expand its broadcast services over North America.

“The GEO customers that we have continue to have business cases,” said Jablonsky. “There are certain things that are very efficiently done from GEO, and broadcasting I don’t think is going anywhere, anytime soon.”

The 1300 series platform, he noted, is being applied to other uses besides geostationary satellites. An example is NASA’s Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), a spacecraft designed to provide electrical power for future elements of the agency’s lunar Gateway outpost in deep space. The launch of the Gateway mission is currently targeted for 2024.

“There’s all these ecosystems on the civil side that I think are very interesting,” Jablonsky said. SN

Maxar eyes summer launch of first WorldView Legion satellites

After years of delays, Maxar Technologies is preparing for the first launch of its next-generation imaging satellites WorldView Legion.

“We’ve got everything we need at this point” to get the first pair of WorldView Legion high-resolution imaging satellites to orbit this summer, the company’s president and CEO Daniel Jablonsky told SpaceNews April 20 at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

The Earth-observation satellites, equipped with Raytheon-made imaging payloads, are slated to launch on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Maxar plans to send six WorldView Legions into sun-synchronous and mid-inclination orbits two at a time on three separate Falcon 9 rockets.

The WorldView Legion constellation is years behind schedule due to hardware supplier problems and other setbacks, including delays in the delivery of the imaging instruments, production shutdowns during the covid pandemic and a shortage of Ukrainian Antonov cargo

aircraft used to transport spacecraft from the factory to the launch site.

Jablonsky said the new technology in the Legion satellites also caused additional delays. “It’s a first-of-its-kind, complicated space program,” he said. “It’s a very exquisite type of technology.”

Two more Legions planned Maxar is preparing to finalize a deal to be acquired by the private-equity firm Advent International. The company’s shareholders approved the $6.4 billion acquisition April 19.

The six-satellite Legion constellation is key to the future of the company’s Earth intelligence division which currently relies on three legacy WorldView and one GeoEye optical imaging satellites.

Jablonsky said the company’s investors have agreed to move forward with producing two additional WorldView Legion satellites due to the growing demand for imagery fueled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The seventh and eighth Legions will be “substantially along the same technology lines” as the six already built but

will have some upgrades. Long-lead-time parts, such as the optics package, are already on order, he said.

Maxar is the U.S. government’s primary provider of commercial electro-optical imagery. The company won a $3.2 billion contract last year from the National Reconnaissance Office to continue supplying imagery and mapping services over the next decade. “We are seeing a lot of demand,” he said.

New types of remote sensing

The war in Ukraine created an appetite not just for optical imagery but for other sensing phenomenologies such as synthetic aperture radar — to see through clouds — and radio-frequency mapping for the detection of electronic jammers.

Maxar, in recent months, has moved to expand in both the SAR and RF markets. The company in February announced a deal with SAR startup Umbra to get dedicated access to the company’s radar imaging constellation. Maxar also acquired radio-frequency mapping startup Aurora Insight, a year after it made a strategic investment in the company.

Jablonsky would not comment on any other planned acquisitions but said these recent efforts are indicators of Maxar’s Earth-imaging business strategy. The company, in recent years, also added 3D imaging and machine-learning technologies to its portfolio with the acquisitions of Vricon and Wovenware.

“As you’ve seen from my track record, we’ve had a heavy acquisition strategy, even during the turnaround phase of the company,” said Jablonsky. “Especially as we generate good returns on the business, that gives us an opportunity to invest back in the business, either technologies that we create inside or companies we might buy,” he added. “We never talk publicly about what they are, but we are always pleased to announce them once they occur." SN

Above: Rendering of Maxar’s next-generation imaging satellites WorldView Legion.

NOAA kicks off NEON weather satellite program

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new weather satellite campaign begins with a free-flying sounder and continues over decades with launches of small to medium-sized satellites.

“It’s not going to be, if things work out the way we expect, large satellites but multiple small satellites,” said

DEBRA WERNER

Steve Volz, NOAA assistant administrator for satellite and information services.

NOAA is drafting plans for the successor to the Joint Polar Satellite System, the latest generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites. The new program, called Near Earth Orbit Network or NEON, will overlap with JPSS.

When JPSS ends around 2038, NEON will continue as one of NOAA’s

Above: Ball Aerospace is designing, building and integrating the small satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Follow-On mission.

primary initiatives for gathering data for weather forecasting, environmental observation, climate monitoring and public safety.

NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service is adopting a portfolio approach to data gathering. Groups within NESDIS will focus on observational areas: lowEarth orbit, geostationary orbit and space weather.

QUICKSOUNDER

The low-Earth orbit program kicks off with QuickSounder.

LEO PROGRESSION CHART

NOAA plans to launch an Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder engineering development unit refurbished by manufacturer Northrop Grumman on a commercial satellite bus.

NOAA is working with NASA to select a company to integrate the ATMS engineering development unit with the bus, fly it on a small launch vehicle and operate it for three years. The contract will include two single-year options to extend the QuickSounder mission.

Unlike traditional NOAA programs that often come together over a decade, QuickSounder is expected to launch within three years and immediately begin supplying data to National Weather Service models.

“We want to show we can launch assets when and where they are most needed,” Tim Walsh, NOAA Joint Polar Satellite System program director, told SpaceNews.

JPSS satellites fly in an early afternoon sun-synchronous orbit. In contrast, QuickSounder will fly in a terminator orbit.

“Data from different orbital locations gives our users, the National Weather Service and many others, a better global snapshot for their numerical weather prediction modeling,” Walsh said.

NEON SERIES ONE

NOAA’s next-generation microwave sounder, the Sounder for Microwave-Based Applications, is expected to launch around 2030.

Through a program called NEON Series One, NOAA will launch new microwave and infrared sounders, which supply critical data for weather models, on common buses.

“Those are the first two instruments that we will be developing under the NEON program,” Walsh said. “We’re going to build a number of these infrared and microwave sounders. They will fly on the first series of spacecraft.”

How many satellites?

“We should know roughly how many orbital planes, how many instruments per orbit and what their launch cadence will be by the end of the fiscal year,” Walsh said.

For a program like GeoXO, NOAA defined the requirements for all the instruments up front. NEON, in contrast, is a loosely coupled program. NOAA can carry out various projects to test sensors, satellite buses, acquisition and launch strategies as the agency charts its course.

NEON SERIES TWO

Scientists will determine which sensors fly on NEON Series Two.

Like JPSS, NEON Series Two satellites may be equipped with instruments like the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite and Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite “or something different perhaps, like a scatterometer,” Walsh said. “The nice thing about the NEON program is it allows us to iterate with our scientists to find those measurements that are most useful to weather prediction.”

CONCLUDING JPSS

NOAA’s 2024 budget proposal seeks $342.4 million in fiscal year 2024 for the Polar Weather Satellites program, which includes JPSS. That program received $183.5 million in 2023 after NOAA requested $350.2 million.

The requested funding would allow NOAA to continue work on the JPSS-3 and -4 satellites, currently scheduled for launch in late 2027 and late 2032, respectively. However, at a March meeting of a committee of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, Volz said the agency was considering swapping the order of those launches to allow more testing of a NASA instrument called Libera to measure solar radiation reflected by the Earth and thermal radiation emitted by it. Libera will be hosted on JPSS-3. SN

Above: Northrop Grumman won a $13.3 million contract in December to refurbish the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder engineering development unit for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s QuickSounder program.

Zeroing in on technologies of the future

many of the products so they can converge too.

It makes sense to have the ability to look at these critical future technologies across all of the businesses. That’s where I’m focusing.

Why was the chief technologist position created?

There were examples in the company of where we modernized product architectures and software. We want that to be unified.

Ball Aerospace is growing rapidly. The backlog for the Westminster, Colorado, company’s portfolio, which includes sensors, spacecraft, data services and components, jumped 20 percent between 2021 and 2022 to reach $3 billion. Another $5 billion in Ball contracts booked were not yet added to the backlog, the company reported in February.

Jake Sauer, in his newly created role as Ball’s vice president and chief technologist, is identifying the critical technologies that underpin Ball’s work for NASA, the Defense Department, intelligence agencies, military services and commercial customers around the world.

Sauer, who previously served as vice president and general manager of Ball’s Tactical Solutions business, joined Ball in 2012. Before that, Sauer worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory. Sauer earned undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from Germany’s University of Cologne as well

DEBRA WERNER

as a master’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in quantum computing and control from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

What is in your portfolio?

Ball has some core businesses that are underpinned by core technologies. We see convergence between government and commercial customers in certain areas, also convergence among government customers. A good example of the military convergence would be Joint All-Domain Command and Control. JADC2 needs the ability to join up the sensors across domains and cue them to shooters, potentially across domains. It’s no longer just a single service problem.

We’re undergoing a transformation as the customers change. Part of this is rearchitecting systems. In many cases, the users don’t care which platform the data comes from. Yet in years past, different organizations would have platform-specific software and platform-specific interfaces. As the missions start to converge, we have to rearchitect

Another reason is we want to focus our investments in a few key areas that will have the biggest impact. The new cross-domain capabilities, products and product architectures are big and complicated. We want to make a few choices and do a good job.

Are you more selective because Ball Aerospace is not as large as Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman?

We have to be more selective because we compete with those groups; we work for them and with them, and occasionally, they work for us. We’ve grown so much over the past few years. The way we’ve been successful is by carefully selecting a few things and then doing the very best job to have a higher chance of success.

Where will you

Jake Sauer, vice president and chief technol ogist at Ball Aerospace.

Q& A: SpaceNews spoke with Jake Sauer, Ball Aerospace’s new vice president and chief technologist, to learn how the company will focus its investments.

focus your investments?

First and foremost will be modeling and simulation. The value of modeling is the ability to make a decision based on the modeling output. A model that’s easy to run and doesn’t have to be adapted too much can give you a lot of information.

Then there’s the talent, the people that think through the problems. No tool will replace the thoughtfulness that goes into a solid analysis that tees up courses of actions for key decisionmakers.

In a future where Ball has capabilities and systems and products that operate in a new way, we would like to have a really good way to imagine how that works. We want to do that across all domains with a unified modeling and simulation effort.

Where else are you focusing?

Ball Aerospace has contracts and a backlog that will last for many years. There are certain things that we won’t change. But as we introduce new products and new programs, we are going to be introducing new architectures. In a few key areas of the business, we’ve rearchitected systems to have processing capability where we didn’t have processing capability before, we call it edge processing.

If it’s a camera or a communication system, or a transmitter, it may have limited resources. If you wait for a long feedback loop to point the camera, you might not be good at tracking something that happens to be very fast. It turns out, the sensor can do that on its own. The exciting

thing about edge processing is that not only can we come up with ways to enable sensors to do more with limited resources, but we can give other sensors that capability too. In a recent example, we’re integrating third-party algorithms to run at the edge. When they need heavy compute, they can draw on the cloud. When something needs very little latency, they process it at the edge.

Any other focus areas?

I would like to optimize some of our processes to increase the pace of

discovery, particularly at the system and the system-of-systems level. In the future, I see us having certain product architectures that are almost always running and doing things. We would get to try new ideas by plugging in a new type of hardware or trying a new type of algorithm that allows you to use the sensor or the data in a different way. Then you would get that feedback as you’re developing, as you’re designing, as you’re creating and as you’re dreaming. The trick here is to enable groups to be able to work at a faster pace and still work together, of course, but also to work towards different goals, different customer needs and in different domains. SN

Thisinterviewhasbeeneditedforclarity and length.

Then there’s the talent, the people that think through the problems. No tool will replace the thoughtfulness that goes into a solid analysis that tees up courses of actions for key decisionmakers.

The Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument launched April 7, 2023, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. TEMPO, mounted on Intelsat-40e, a commercial communications satellite built by Maxar, is designed to make hourly observations of air quality in North America during the day.

America’s SPAC funded NewSpace industry is crashing

Congress must preserve America’s edge in space

The Discord classified document leak highlights that China has the space capability “to hold key U.S. and Allied space assets at risk.” Yet much of America’s “NewSpace” industry, our best hope to keep our technological edge over China in space and to bring competition to the major defense contractors, is crashing to earth. Virgin Orbit, despite $60 million in loans from Richard Branson since November, has largely ceased operations, laid off most of its employees and filed for bankruptcy. Stock exchanges have sent delisting notices to Astra, which has launched satellites to orbit, Momentus, a space tug company, and Spire, which

uses nanosatellites for weather forecasts, because their share prices have dropped to under a dollar.

An array of NewSpace companies were funded through billions raised through SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) and venture financing and are at the cutting edge of providing new and cheaper space products. In the launch industry, these include ABL, Astra, Firefly, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab, and Virgin Orbit are producing low cost rockets. In the earth observation industry, Planet Labs competes with satellites from big defense contractors in photo-reconnaissance and Capella Space with a constellation that provides low-cost radar imaging. Axiom

is building commercial space stations.

The exciting innovation, competition, expansion of our industrial base, deepening of our supply chain and jobs these companies bring provides America the boost it needs to stay ahead of adversaries and bring down defense costs. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that many of these companies are struggling for two key reasons. First, because of the high cost of capital due to rising interest rates, the decline of SPACs and the drying up of venture capital. Venture and other early-stage financing in the space industry dropped by 50% in 2022, according to venture firm Space Capital. The stock prices of many of the publicly traded NewSpace companies, a good measure of the health of the industry, have dropped from 75-95% by one index.

REGULATORY RED TAPE

The second reason our startup space industry is threatened is government policies that raise costs for the industry and slow innovation. The space industry faces a myriad of federal agencies as well as state rules. To launch Starship, SpaceX needed permission from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Fish and Wildlife Service and many others. Each of these agencies imposes burdensome and time-consuming regulations.

The FAA, for example, gives itself 180 days to approve a launch license. While this may seem like a reasonable timeframe in the bureaucratic context, it creates delays and raises costs for companies. Moreover, the FAA often requests additional information and on other occasions, a company makes tweaks to the launch plan during the review process. When this happens, the FAA can reset the 180-day clock. This is very challenging for start-ups that

Virgin Orbit employees celebrate the company's late 2021 debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection April 4.

are smaller than SpaceX and operate on tight timelines and thin margins due to their cash positions. They need to move quickly to stay competitive and improve their technology. The launch approval process is just the start. When a launch fails, as recently happened with SpaceX’s Starship as well as rockets from ABL, Firefly and Astra, the FAA requires detailed reports on why a rocket failed before it can return to flight. In June of last year, the FAA proudly announced in a press release that it would require 75 environmental actions by SpaceX before launching Starship. These required actions were in addition to the agency’s safety, risk, and financial responsibility requirements.

Other agencies impose burdensome regulations on other aspects of the industry. For example, the FCC recently required that satellites at altitudes of 2,000 kilometers or lower be deorbited within five years of when they stop functioning. This was done without the agreement of other U.S. agencies or international coordination and puts American satellites at a disadvantage to satellites lacking such a requirement.

NASA requires information on the mass and size of the components of satellites as part of the overall U.S. licensing process. This is problematic for experimental communications satellites, for example, since an FCC experimental license takes months or years to obtain, and expires after six months or a year, and requires NASA satellite component mass and size component data for approval. Because the combination of agencies’ authorizations takes so much time, the U.S. Space Development Agency has gone to regulators to ask for an exception to the normal process for its latest test satellites because, according to SDA head Derek Tournear, “That could push [us out] many months.” With experimental

satellites, the manufacturer may not have this information until late in the process since they may source components from different vendors. Thus, the combination of agency rules mean that it may take years from conception until regulatory approval. And then the companies need a launch license!

Regulation to protect public safety, the environment, wildlife, and the use of spectrum, among other goals, is important, but the U.S. currently does this in an unnecessarily burdensome, slow, and uncoordinated manner. The result may be companies running out of cash as instead of engineers they have to hire compliance teams and law firms.

Government action can solve both the problems of the capital crunch and the regulatory quagmire facing the industry.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee in March that DoD’s 2024 budget request would “make long-term investments of $33.3 billion in the resilience of our space architecture in the event of an attack.”

In the past, all too much of this spending has gone to a small number of large defense contractors. Yet such funding provides a great opportunity for American innovation to succeed if it is used to help grow the NewSpace industry. SpaceX, a former start-up, was saved in 2008 by government contracts to supply the space station when both the company and Elon Musk were out of cash.

The U.S. government can preserve America’s technological edge in space by providing a fair shot and helping hand to the NewSpace industry. Not cash subsidies, but rather open competition and contracts that promote the development of the industrial base by tasking these companies to provide the products and services DoD, the intelligence community, NASA, NOAA, and other agencies need.

For example, Congress, over the last few years, has added funding to the defense budget for a Tactically Responsive Space, which funds demonstration projects for companies to launch small satellites on short notice. For the first time, the White House budget provided $30 for this program, which is less than Congress has in the past but is still progress. NASA’s Venture Program has helped satellite companies by purchasing low-cost Earth science missions. But these are very small programs. In satellite services, the happenstance of the war in Ukraine brought new government business to Planet Labs and Capella Space to provide, respectively, photo and radar imagining. U.S. National Reconnaissance Office satellites do this for our government, but we do not wish to share this sensitive data with Ukraine, so the U.S. government turned to these private companies to provide them with imaging from these commercial companies.

Instead of chance, we should have a specific plan for funding to preserve competition in each aspect of the space industry.

We should also have a coordinated industry approach to reduce regulation. While that is a tall order, the FAA needs Congressional reauthorization this year. This must-pass legislation provides a legislative vehicle to reform regulation across the industry.

China’s space program is accelerating rapidly. In 2022 they had 62 successful launches, second only to the U.S., which had 72. The next closest was Russia, with 21. And 61 of the U.S. launches were by SpaceX. China is advancing on other fronts. The new head of the Space Force, Gen. Chance Saltzman, testified before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee in March that China has operational anti-satellite missiles and is “testing on-orbit satellite

COMMENTARY Edward Hearst

systems which could be weaponized… to physically control and move other satellites.” The recently leaked classified documents indicated that China can also electronically seize control of American satellites.

The innovative, NewSpace industry will not only help us meet the challenges from China abroad, it will also help us address the problem of a decades-long process of defense industry consolidation at home. Elon Musk and SpaceX made the space industry sexy again, and it attracted entrepreneurs who might otherwise have gravitated to startups in other parts of the technology

industry. The NewSpace companies these innovators founded or joined can provide increased competition on price and innovation to companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. But we are already seeing the beginnings of consolidation in the industry. Lockheed bought a share of launch provider ABL, and Northrop Grumman is partnering with Firefly. The U.S. needs to act soon to avoid failures and fire sale acquisitions.

The NewSpace industry has given hope that America can rebuild and diversify its defense industrial base. This will lead to lower costs, more innovation,

and provide the United States with the technological edge it needs to stay ahead of its adversaries. But if Congress fails to reform U.S. space procurement policy, that hope will be in vain. SN

EDWARD HEARST IS AN ATTORNEY AND GOVERNMENT RELATIONS EXPERT. HE IS A FORMER EXECUTIVE AT SPACE LAUNCH COMPANY ASTRA, AND FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS (ACTING), SENIOR ADVISOR AT THE COMMERCE DEPARTMENT AND SENIOR COUNSEL ON THE HOUSE ENERGY AND COMMERCE COMMITTEE.

Vladimir Baranov, Scott Nelson, and assistance by ChatGPT

The dramatic influence of generative AI on the space industry

This spring, more than 1,000 top tech leaders and expert researchers sounded the alarm on artificial intelligence (AI) and called for regulation on the emerging technology’s “profound risks to society and humanity,” in an open letter published by Future of Life Institute.

Should we also fear AI when it comes to our safety and security in space? Or should we be excited about the possibilities it might bring?

WHAT IS GENERATIVE AI?

ChatGPT is part of OpenAI’s family of large language models, often abbreviated as

LLMs. These newer breeds of AI models emerged around 2018 and fall under the category of “generative AI” - capable of learning patterns and structures in human language or image content and can have powerful reasoning and problem solving capabilities. While the technology world has seen some impressive accomplishments in the world of AI over the past 2 decades, we will likely see more impact from these new models in the next 1-3 years than in the last 10 combined. Nearly every industry will see new and powerful AI systems try to reshape it.

However, most people are still looking at these new AI models as fun or

convenient tools that can help with things such as recipes and writing articles. The truth: LLMs have ushered in a completely new paradigm in software engineering and will likely have a significant impact on the space industry, both by increasing the speed of development but also due to the vast cybersecurity risks these technologies will pose to our in-space infrastructure.

COMMENTARY

COMMENTARY Vladimir Baranov, Scott Nelson, and assistance by ChatGPT

RISKS FOR THE SPACE DOMAIN

The U.S. space industry is facing a rapidly evolving technology landscape. Many nations and adversaries will be drastically increasing their budgets and focus on developing AI capabilities, as the world is (slowly) coming to understand how much of a leap has been made even just in the last 5 years. We believe that U.S. space agencies (both civil and defense) and commercial organizations will need to be equally determined to better understand, develop, and deploy new capabilities to be able to defend themselves from potential threats.

Furthermore, the rise of LLMs will enable many, previously immature adversaries, to enhance their capabilities, posing new challenges to established powers. The rise of LLMs feels reminiscent of the early days of the internet, where our national security was attacked by individuals (i.e., Solar Sunrise–1998) or nation states who adopted and matured their technological capabilities quickly.

OPPORTUNITIES

The most profound impact that generative AI will likely have is in code generation and system development. The combination of fine-tuning models for specific tasks, new architectures emerging on a weekly basis, and developers gaining experience with implementing models will lead to significant automation. As of today, boilerplate code and simple applications are being auto-written but we don’t see why entire production codebases couldn’t be autonomously generated by themselves in the near future. This would dramatically increase the productivity of teams and free up engineers to build at higher levels of abstractions. One likely outcome is that we could see more vertical integration coming from teams as the

output of their software and hardware teams increases.

One of the core strengths of new AI models is their ability to create, rewrite, review, and summarize written artifacts. Given the enormous amount of contracting and other administrative efforts happening within space agencies, we can see a clear path towards drastically improving their ability to manage the vast amount of data they process, filter out noise, and equip their workforce with only the most important information in real-time. This should have broader benefits to the commercial space industry, with faster and more efficient contract processing and capital allocation coming to mind.

Another benefit of extracting intelligence from vast amounts of data will be our ability to provide significantly better and actionable information to operators, allow them to manage more systems at once, and help them identify the best strategic decisions. Any data stream in today’s world can now be analyzed in seconds by highly capable algorithms to provide valuable strategic recommendations.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To effectively capture the emerging value of modern AI models, we see a couple first logical steps that most organizations should pursue.

n EDUCATE & TRAIN

Invest in comprehensive education and training to ensure employees understand how these technologies work, their pros and cons, and their limitations. Allow teams to explore building with these systems in a safe and controlled environment to foster internal knowledge of their capabilities and how systems could be enhanced to improve our space

capabilities. Also, foster collaboration and partnerships with industry and academia to increase awareness and knowledge transfer.

n ESTABLISH GUIDELINES FOR ETHICAL AND RESPONSIBLE USAGE

As previously stated, there are numerous risks to developing AI technologies and no shortage of well respected individuals who are urging caution at a global scale as technology companies continue to push the boundaries of what LLMs can do. It is therefore pertinent to combine education with strict guidelines that reflect ethical and responsible usage of such systems. Ideally, experts should be consulted to determine how to avoid their misuse.

CONCLUSION

As we find ourselves amidst a tectonic technology shift, adopting AI systems will undoubtedly prove critical in protecting our national security and our space infrastructure. By increasing our awareness and education of these technologies, we can aim to safely enhance our operational effectiveness and ensure our space agencies are equipped to operate and thrive in this rapidly changing environment.

It is unclear what the exact impact of these technologies will be in the medium to long term, and how the space industry in particular will change as a result. However, we have seen how quickly progress is happening and wanted to share our understanding with a wider audience to foster discussions about how the space industry can best adopt AI safely and responsibly. SN

VLADIMIR BARANOV IS THE CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AT SCOUT. SCOTT NELSON IS SCOUT'S VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT AND STRATEGY.

Diversifying into in-orbit servicing

Agrowing in-orbit servicing opportunity is tempting satellite builders to branch out of communications, imagery, and other standard fare to get a foothold in this emerging market.

So far this year, Astroscale, Starfish, and Clearspace have raised around $119 million in total for their in-orbit servicing ventures, all from early-stage investors confident enough in their prospects to shrug off challenging macroeconomic conditions.

And after helping pioneer the satellite life extension part of this market with two ongoing missions in geostationary orbit (GEO), Northrop Grumman plans to deploy a more elaborate robotic servicer next year to expand its capabilities significantly.

LeoStella, which mostly builds low Earth orbit (LEO) remote sensing satellites and primarily for its part-owner BlackSky, is watching the growing activity with a keen eye, so far from the sidelines.

“There’s nobody that has an off-the-shelf commercial solution yet,” LeoStella business development vice president Mike Kaplan said, “so, of course, it’s tempting as a satellite builder.”

He said LeoStella is open to partnering with a company that could use the up-to-500-kilogram buses it builds for LEO for a satellite life extension business in GEO.

“The way that we look at that business is we see the basic vehicle as a standard smallsat bus that we make,” he said, “and we see the robotics, the sensor suite for proximity operations for rendezvous, capture — all that as part of the payload.”

LeoStella has “been in touch with some firms that are interested in pursuing this business,” Kaplan added, “so we’re starting to take a look at it.”

But while LeoStella has 19 satellites in orbit after starting from scratch five years ago, Kaplan noted moving to GEO and into servicing would be a big leap for the company.

Demand is also not quite there yet for a company that specializes in building constellations of satellites.

LeoStella would need to see a need for five to 10 life-extending servicers, according to Kaplan, and while there is

interest out there, he said, “I haven’t seen something put in front of me yet that says it’s quite ready for primetime.”

“It’s almost there,” he added, “I mean, it could be six months or a year away.”

Astranis already builds small GEO satellites with a mass of under 400 kilograms for communications customers. It plans to bring its first spacecraft into service later this year following a Falcon Heavy launch slated for April 28 as of press time.

However, while in-orbit servicing presents an interesting diversification opportunity, Astranis CEO John Gedmark said it is not one the company is actively pursuing.

Still, there are more than 130 companies looking to play a role in in-orbit servicing, according to Joseph Anderson, vice president of operations and business development for Northrop’s satellite servicing subsidiary SpaceLogistics.

During the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Anderson said the number of companies has been accelerating because of growing government support for more in-orbit capabilities and work to standardize and regulate the market.

The two aging Intelsat satellites SpaceLogistics’ Mission Extension Vehicles are currently attached to were built independently of any future servicing possibility.

However, Anderson said starting in 2025 or 2026, he believes all new satellites should be starting to include items that make them easier to be serviced, “starting with things such as refueling ports, or power and data ports, so that they can be repaired or upgraded over time.”

For Starfish CEO Trevor Bennett, “what is truly changing the game here is that there’s a trust that’s starting to build up” in the industry.

As multiple providers come into this market with their own solutions, he said satellite operators would soon be able to rely on an ecosystem of servicers rather than having to bank on the success of one company.

That said, very few missions have actually flown to date, and this emerging market’s success remains highly dependent on the right mix of successful technology, policy, and economics. SN

Sandra Erwin

The space surveillance arms race is in full swing

For some time now, alarms have been sounding in the United States military over activities of Chinese and Russian spacecraft in orbit that are viewed as potentially threatening.

U.S. military leaders have called out Russia for deploying so-called inspector vehicles in close proximity to American spy satellites, raising suspicions about their intentions. And they expressed concern when a Chinese spacecraft equipped with a robotic arm towed a defunct geostationary satellite to a graveyard orbit, raising the specter of a future system that could be used to seize U.S. assets.

To keep an eye on these potentially hazardous activities, military officials have called for improved capabilities to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in orbit, also known as space domain awareness.

Ensuring the U.S. is fully aware of what rivals are doing in space “is a genuine concern,” said Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements.

“Physics absolutely makes it hard,” Garrant said. “It’s not just tracking and monitoring but also characterizing what type of spacecraft it is, and anticipating its behavior.”

To tackle this challenge, the Space Force is ramping up spending on sensors and data analytics, Garrant said. The 2024 budget proposal includes $584 million for space domain awareness programs, or $100 million more than what was allocated in 2023. He noted that most

of the added spending is focused on geosynchronous orbit, where the military parks its most valuable satellites.

Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, told reporters at the Space Symposium last month that the military looks forward to the deployment of SilentBarker, a space surveillance satellite co-developed by the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office to improve situational space awareness in geostationary Earth orbit.

SilentBarker, scheduled to launch to orbit later this year, will supplement the coverage provided by six Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites that have been in orbit for several years. The two newest GSSAP satellites launched to orbit in January 2022.

NRO Director Chris Scolese told reporters at the Space Symposium that there will be “more than one” SilentBarker. “We expect it will be a useful capability, and we’ll be looking for additional satellites,” he said.

COMMERCIAL OPTIONS

Besides government-built satellites, there are now commercially available technologies for in-orbit space domain awareness. Shaw said the military doesn’t necessarily care where the capabilities come from as long as they work. “I do think our solution set to this problem is probably a blend of a lot of things,” he said.

Shaw noted that one of the problems with GSSAP and other big-ticket DoD spacecraft is their limited ability to

maneuver so they can get a better view of an object. These satellites were built to stay in orbit for decades and live off their existing fuel supply, so their movement has to be minimized.

In response to the military’s demand for maneuverable surveillance systems, the commercial space industry is working on new products.

Redwire, for example, plans to demonstrate later this year a small camera that could be put on satellites to observe and characterize suspicious objects. Pending the outcome of the demonstration, Redwire says it could mass produce the camera and offer it to the military.

The startup True Anomaly plans to launch an experiment with two small satellites this fall where one will attempt to chase down an uncooperative object and take pictures up close. The company plans to market these vehicles to the military to boost domain awareness.

Another startup, Katalyst Space, is working on a space surveillance sensor designed to be mounted on satellites to help track debris and other threats in orbit. The company wants to partner with a large defense contractor to test the payload.

These are technologies the industry believes will help the U.S. hold China and Russia accountable for aggressive actions in space and possibly deter such behavior.

If more of these assets are put in orbit, the data collected by government and commercial sensors could be crucial for American military planners to monitor potential threats and develop appropriate response measures. SN

ON THE HORIZON

2-4 Space Tech Expo USA www.spacetechexpo.com Long

21-24 GEOINT Symposium usgif.org/geoint-symposium St. Louis, Missouri

JUNE

5-6

Military Space USA smgconferences.com/defence/ northamerica/conference/milspaceusa

7-8 Space-Comm Expo space-comm.co.uk

19-21

19-25

12th IAA Symposium on the Future of Space Exploration iaaspace.org/iaa-symposium-on-thefuture-of-space-exploration

Italy

Paris Air show www.siae.fr France

FOUST FORWARD Jeff Foust

Big opportunities for big science with big rockets

Attendees of this year’s Space Symposium were understandably distracted by what was going on a thousand miles from Colorado Springs. The conference was bookended by SpaceX’s first attempt to launch Starship, scrubbed April 17 because of a frozen valve, and its liftoff on the second attempt three days later. In between, there was plenty of speculation about when it might launch, whether it would be successful and what it meant for the space industry.

Starship has gotten attention for its critical role in NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign and for SpaceX’s own second-generation Starlink constellation. But others are thinking about what Starship and other super-heavylift rockets, like Blue Origin’s New Glenn and NASA’s Space Launch System, can do, particularly for science missions.

“Starship can enable next-generation science,” said Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA satellite missions at SpaceX, during a panel at Space Symposium April 18. That comes in part from the sheer payload performance of the rocket. “You can imagine an interplanetary probe or an interstellar probe where you don’t need to track mass by the gram.”

The benefits go beyond mass, though. “It comes down to time, volume and mass,” said John Blevins, NASA SLS chief engineer. The volume comes from the rockets’ larger payload fairings, seven meters or more in diameter. That

enables larger spacecraft and reduces the need for deployable systems like those developed for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Time comes from faster transits to distant destinations. “People forget how big the solar system is,” said Louise Prockter, chief scientist for the Applied Physics Lab’s Space Exploration Sector. She has worked on outer solar system mission concepts that require a decade or more of travel time, even for small spacecraft. “That has consequences in terms of power sources and the complexity of the mission.”

All three factors help reduce complexity. “In addition to giving us the opportunity to maybe not fold up the aperture quite as much as we would normally do, it also gives us a lot of volume and mass margin, and that’s very important on these very large missions,” said Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division. He has made the capabilities of such large vehicles one of the guiding tenets for the development of NASA’s next large space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

That reduced complexity brings with it the promise of lower costs. Scheiman noted that traditionally there has been a strong correlation between cost and mass of spacecraft: heavier ones cost more. “I can only hope that we can totally break that cost model,” she said, with heavier but less complex spacecraft.

But by how much? Proponents of

big rockets are reticent to quantify cost savings. “It’s not something that we can share easily,” said Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist best known for leading the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions who is now chief scientist at Blue Origin.

Asked about those cost savings on the panel, he noted Blue Origin was still developing New Glenn. “We’re taking that very seriously, and time will tell how much we can bring it down.”

Part of that reticence stems from the competitive nature of the launch industry. Still, it would benefit both companies and scientists to work together to publicly quantify how much money can be saved through big rockets. Design studies of even hypothetical missions, such as space telescopes or outer planet orbiters, could show how much complexity, and thus cost, can be saved.

That’s vital given the strains facing NASA’s science portfolio. At the same time as that panel, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was describing to Senate appropriators the budget challenges his science missions are facing, as cost growth on Mars Sample Return eats into other missions. “In the largest science budget ever, you can’t fit 10 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack,” he said.

It’s in the interest of scientists and companies alike to show how the benefits of big rockets can enable big missions, making that five-pound bag a little roomier. SN