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SPACE NEWS APRIL 4, 2011
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VOLUME 22 ISSUE 13 $4.95 ($7.50 Non-U.S.)
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DAVE HODGSON
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INSIDE THIS ISSUE CIVIL SPACE
Russia Eyes Glonass Station in Israel
An Israeli-based Glonass ground station is one of several scientific and dual-use commercial projects that could emerge from a Russian-Israeli agreement. See story, page 10
Juno Goes from Prelude to Main Event
With a Jupiter flagship mission increasingly unlikely, NASA’s Juno mission may be scientists’ only chance for a decade to study the jovian moons. See story, page 12 SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS
Globalstar Growth Up but Hurdles Remain
Globalstar said its 2010 revenue increase was the beginning of a return to full service and profitability promised by its second-generation satellite constellation. See story, page 6
Inmarsat Acquires Maritime VSAT Provider
Inmarsat, in a bid to secure a market for its next-generation satellite system, purchased Norwegian VSAT maritime communications services provider Ship Equip. See story, page 10 SATELLITE MANUFACTURING
Six Firms Vying to Build Thor 7 Satellite
Telenor Satellite Broadcasting has received bids from six manufacturers in Europe and the United States wanting to build the Thor 7 telecommunications satellite. See story, page 16
>FEATURES
3NEWS BRIEFS/ 16SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS/ 18COMMENTARY
United Space Alliance (USA) technicians back Space Shuttle Discovery out of Orbiter Processing Facility 3 at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., in September. NASA is asking Congress for $548 million to cover a shortfall in an employee pension plan USA is terminating as it prepares for a leaner post-shuttle future.
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GMES Delay Prompts Envisat Extension
The first two satellites for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) program are behind schedule, forcing an extension of the Envisat mission. See story, page 7
NASA PHOTO BY DIMITRI GERONDIDAKIS
Obama Officials Push Back on Heavy Lift
Obama administration officials continue to push back against congressional direction to build a rocket that would salvage elements of the Constellation program. See story, page 5
NASA Facing $548 Million Payment To Cover USA Pension Fund Shortfall T BRIAN BERGER, WASHINGTON
he single biggest check NASA expects to write next year will go to United Space Alliance (USA) to cover a half-billion-dollar shortfall in the space shuttle contractor’s pension fund. It is not NASA’s fault USA’s pension fund — held in stocks, bonds and other assets company officials said are worth between $600 million and $700 million — has just a little over half of the money it needs to guarantee retirement pay promised to 11,000 past and current employees. But the U.S. space agency is legally obligated to make up the shortfall, which totaled more than $500 million as of January, because USA operates the shuttle fleet under a cost-reimbursable contract that entitles the company to charge the government for personnel costs, including pay and benefits.
The bill is coming due now because the rapidly downsizing USA is closing out its pension plan as it prepares for an uncertain postshuttle future. Houston-based USA announced in December that it had begun taking steps to terminate its pension plan, a benefit the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture offered its employees until several years ago, when it switched to a less costly 401(k) retirement savings plan for new hires. USA and NASA have been working on a termination plan with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a federal agency that regulates pensions and steps in to pay benefits when companies fail. NASA has asked Congress for $548 million in 2012 to ensure USA’s pension plan is fully funded before the plan’s assets are transferred to new trustees that will offer USA retirees a lump sum distribution or annuity. The actual
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amount of the shortfall — and thus NASA’s liability — will continue to fluctuate as the stock market and interest rates rise and fall. NASA Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Robinson told Space News that even though the agency is legally obligated to “make the USA pension fund whole” upon the termination of the company’s longstanding shuttle operations contract, the agency “is happy to do so.” For many years, Robinson said, “USA workers have provided critical services for NASA’s shuttle program, and they deserve a solid financial footing in retirement.”
A Bill a Long Time Coming
USA, created in 1995 to streamline space shuttle operations, is the only NASA contractor agency officials know of that still has on its books a defined-benefit pension
SEE PENSION PAGE 4
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NEWS BRIEFS Ariane 5 Launch Aborted After Main Engine Ignition
A European Ariane 5 rocket aborted its attempted launch of two new communications satellites March 30 due to a main engine glitch seven seconds after the engine ignited. The Ariane 5 rocket was poised to blast off at 5:45 p.m. EDT from a launch pad at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, when the malfunction occurred. As the countdown clock reached zero, the unmanned rocket ignited its main liquid-fueled engine, then shut down on its own when it failed an automated systems check, officials with the rocket’s manufacturer Arianespace said in a statement. The automatic shutdown aborted the launch attempt before the vehicle’s twin solid-rocket boosters — which cannot be shut down once activated — had ignited. The 50-meter tall Ariane 5 rocket’s main engine’s checkout process “was not completed successfully, preventing the boosters’ ignition and thereby aborting the mission,” Arianespace officials said. “The Ariane 5 and its two payloads remain in a safe mode on the launch pad.” Arianespace officials plan to haul the rocket back into a hangar building to investigate the problem. “We do not take any risks, and therefore it is very important we determine the causes,” said Arianespace Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jean-Yves Le Gall in a statement. The Ariane 5 rocket uses a Vulcain 2 first-stage engine assisted by two solidrocket boosters to launch satellite payloads into orbit. The Vulcain 2 engine is fueled by cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and is designed to burn for about 600 seconds to boost payloads into space. Two different communications satellites are packed aboard the Ariane 5 rocket awaiting a trip to orbit. One satellite is Yahsat 1A, a craft built for the Al Yah Satellite Communications Co. of Abu Dhabi. Yahsat 1A is designed to provide direct television broadcasts and secure communications for government and military customers for several countries, including the United Arab Emirates. The other satellite is New Dawn, a $250 million satellite built by Dulles, Va.based Orbital Sciences Corp., for the satellite fleet operator Intelsat of Washington and Luxembourg. Both satellites are destined for geostationary orbits 36,000 kilometers above Earth A new launch date for the Ariane 5 rocket and its two satellites will be determined pending the results of the malfunction investigation.
NASA OKs $436M Add to USA Space Shuttle Contract
NASA said March 31 it completed negotiations with United Space Alliance (USA) for six one-month options that will be used to keep employees of the Houston-based space shuttle operator on the job through the fly-out of the two remaining space shuttle missions. The options
April 4, 2011
could add as much as $436 million to USA’s Space Program Operations Contract (SPOC), an originally $6.4 billion contract that had been set to expire March 31. NASA plans to exercise four onemonth options to support the current shuttle manifest, which ends with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis’ congressionally mandated STS-135 mission in late June. The series of one-month options keep USA employees supporting flight activities while NASA and the company negotiate a two-year SPOC extension covering shuttle transition and retirement activities.
NASA Weighs Options for Recovering Lost Glory
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NASA does not expect to fly an exact copy of its Glory climate observation satellite lost in a March 4 launch attempt, according to an agency official. “We’re certainly not going to do a carbon reflight of Glory, and that’s largely owing to the fact that the Glory [spacecraft] bus was a repurposed bus to begin with and it is largely obsolete at this point,” Charles Gay, NASA deputy associate administrator for science, said at the Goddard Memorial Symposium in Greenbelt, Md., March 30. The $424 million satellite was destroyed when the protective shroud on its Taurus XL rocket failed to separate. Both the rocket and the satellite were built by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va. Glory, which used a spacecraft platform originally built for the long-canceled Vegetation Canopy Lidar mission, was designed to operate in polar orbit to monitor aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere and continue NASA’s uninterrupted 30-year history of observing solar energy output. It carried the Aerosol Polarimetr y Sensor (APS), built by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems of El Segundo, Calif., and the Total Irradiance Monitor, built by the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Gay said NASA is currently assessing options for recovering the science opportunities lost when Glory failed to reach orbit. “We’re looking at the impact of the loss of the Glory mission measurements and looking at that in the context of what we have flying now, what we have flying in the near-term and to identify where the gaps are,” he said. “Also in parallel we’re looking at what would be the kind of instrument that would be needed to best fill that gap. Is it a reflight of the APS instrument, is it a different instrument given the technology we have today?” Ultimately, Gay said, if there is a gap in mission needs, NASA will assess options for filling it. “Is it a free-flier or is it an instrument we could put on another spacecraft to get some synergy on an upcoming mission we already have planned for flight?” he said, adding that NASA could benefit from cost savings in the latter case. Gay said NASA will spend the coming months costing options and building them into its 2013 budget request. “We’ll be doing that over the next several months and will factor that into our
Boeing: SLS Rocket Work Needed To Avert Layoffs
Boeing will be laying off some 800 employees this summer unless NASA immediately agrees to incorporate the company’s work on the canceled Ares rocket program into the agency’s planned heavy-lift rocket mandated by Congress, the head of Boeing’s space exploration division said March 31. In a briefing with reporters, Brewster Shaw said most of the Boeing work force currently assigned to the U.S. space shuttle, plus those who have been working on the now-canceled Ares 1 rocket upper stage, have nowhere to go within the company other than to NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS). Waiting for NASA to send out and evaluate bid requests for the work as part of a competitive procurement would take months, if not more than a year, Shaw said — too long for Boeing to maintain the staff now working on the shuttle and the expiring Ares 1 contracts. If the last space shuttle is launched in June as planned, Shaw said, Boeing would begin dismissing shuttle workers in July. If these engineers cannot transition into a new NASA heavy-lift launcher program, or find work in NASA’s Commercial Crew Development project, “then we will lose that work force,” Shaw said. “They will be laid off. If NASA does a competitive procurement, then it is inevitable.” In January NASA issued a preliminary report to Congress outlining a design for a space-shuttle-derived heavylift launcher as directed in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. However, the agency is assessing alternative designs for the SLS and does not expect to settle on a final architecture until the end of June. In the meantime, NASA continues to evaluate potential acquisition strategies for the new launch vehicle. “Given that the current [heavy-lift vehicle design] utilizes heritage systems from shuttle and Ares, NASA is evaluating existing Ares and shuttle contracts — and potential money-saving improvements and modifications to them — to determine whether those contracts could be used for development work on budget development process,” he said.
Raytheon Awarded $312M SM-3 Interceptor Contract
Raytheon Missile Systems of Tucson, Ariz., was awarded a $312 million contract from the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to manufacture 24 Standard Missile (SM)-3 Block 1B interceptors, the company announced March 31. Raytheon has delivered more than 130 SM-3 Block 1A interceptors, which are used by the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system to defeat ballistic missiles. The more advanced SM-3 Block 1B interceptor features a two-color infrared seeker, advanced signal processor and throttleable divert and attitude control system, the press release said. Raytheon has delivered only one SM-3 Block 1B interceptor to date, which will be fired in a flight test this summer, Wes Kremer, Raytheon’s SM-3 program director, said in an April 1 interview. The 24 new interceptors will be delivered over the next two years and will also be used for flight testing, Kremer said. The company expects to receive a contract to produce the first batch of SM-3
NASA CONCEPT
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Shuttle/Ares heavy-lift design the SLS and whether doing so would be the most affordable and efficient option for developing the SLS,” Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA’s exploration systems, said in prepared testimony before the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee March 30. However, Boeing could get at least a partial reprieve the week of April 4 when NASA is expected to announce the winners of a second round of Commercial Crew Development contracts worth a combined $270 million, according to one industry source. The company won $18 million in economic stimulus money from NASA last year to continue work on technologies for a seven-person crew capsule it is developing in collaboration with Bigelow Aerospace to launch atop a United Launch Alliance-built Atlas 5 rocket. Shaw said a report by the NASA inspector general concluding that Boeing’s Ares 1 cryogenic upper stage could not easily be modified to serve the agency’s planned heavy-lift rocket is inaccurate, perhaps because the report’s authors never saw fit to consult with Boeing. “They didn’t ask us for our input,” Shaw said. Block 1B interceptors for operational use in early 2012, Kremer said. The MDA expects to have taken delivery of 223 SM-3 Block 1B interceptors by 2017, budget documents show.
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