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WASHINGTON — The Senate Appropriations Committee in a report Nov. 10 criticized the practice by some agencies of procuring launch services directly from commercial providers, bypassing the National Security Space Launch program run by the U.S. Space Force. Appropriators expressed these concerns in an “explanatory statement” accompanying the $696 billion markup of the Defense Department spending bill for Fiscal Year 2021 released on Tuesday .   The committee questioned “recent moves by some agencies to procure launches outside of the space launch enterprise through direct commercial contracts or delivery on orbit contracts,” the report said. Agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office procure delivery-on-orbit contracts for classified payloads . These are contracts for complete end-to-end services that include the satellite and the launch bundled into the same contract.   Many NRO missions are launched by the U.S. Space Force under the National Security Space Launc...

SAN FRANCISCO – In spite of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated business challenges, 2020 has been a good year for Airbus Defence & Space satellite sales. “It will be probably one of the best years that we’ve had in terms of orders,” Jean-Marc Nasr, Airbus Defence & Space executive vice president for space systems, said Nov. 9 during a World Satellite Business Week panel. “Stay tuned for more announcement to come before year end.” Airbus announced orders in 2020 to sell one satellite apiece to Australian satellite operator Optus, Emerati fleet operator Yahsa t and Arabsat of Saudi Arabia . In addition, Yahsat obtained an option for an additional satellite. Plus, 11 of the 13 C-band satellites operators ordered to clear C-band spectrum for 5G in the United States have Airbus equipment onboard, Nasr said. Nasr’s fellow satellite manufacturers on the panel expressed similar optimism that overall demand for satellite communications would remain strong. They cautioned, however ...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force was a signature initiative of the Trump administration. President-elect Joe Biden has said he plans to reverse a number of Trump policies but he is expected to continue to support the U.S. Space Force, experts told SpaceNews. “If Space Force did not already exist, I think Joe Biden probably would not create it. However I think it’s pretty unlikely that Biden would seriously try to eliminate Space Force at this point,” said David Burbach, associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.   Burbach said his views are his own and he does not speak for the government. The Space Force is enshrined in Title 10 of the U.S. Code as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed services so any move to dismantle it would require congressional legislation.   With Republicans poised to control the Senate, that would be a non-starter, Burbach said. “No way the Republican Senate would go along with undoing that accomplishment for Tru...

HELSINKI — Chinese rocket firm Galactic Energy successfully sent a small satellite into orbit Saturday with the first launch of its Ceres-1 launch vehicle. The Ceres-1 four-stage solid rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center near the Gobi Desert at 2:12 a.m. Eastern Saturday. First indications of launch came from spectators posting footage on Chinese social media. Chinese state media announced launch success around 30 minutes later. The 50-kilogram Tianqi-11 satellite was sent into a 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Shanghai ASES Spaceflight Technology Co. Ltd., developed the satellite, nominally part of the Tianqi (“Apocalypse”) narrowband Internet of Things constellation for Beijing Guodian Gaoke Technology Co. Ltd.  The successful mission means Galactic Energy becomes the second nominally private Chinese launch company to reach orbit. Chinese NewSpace boost Galactic Energy is the fourth Chinese private launch company overall to make an orb...

SAN FRANCISCO – Maxar Technologies plans to launch its first two WorldView Legion satellites as early as September 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. “We continue to make progress on the integration, assembly and test of all six spacecraft and instruments, and we expect to go into environmental testing early next year,” Dan Jablonsky, Maxar president and CEO, said during a Nov. 5 earnings call. “This is a complex program and many elements need to come together to ensure the level of quality and mission success we expect.” Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Maxar planned to begin launching WorldView Legion satellites in the first quarter of 2021. Due to the pandemic, however, “some of the vendor hardware is showing up just a little later than we originally planned,” Jablonsky said. Those delays impact the timeline for full integration, which means environmental testing also occurs a little later, he added. Maxar plans to launch the second two W...

WASHINGTON — A key senator says she will continue to push for passage during a lame-duck session of a NASA authorization bill that supports the Artemis lunar exploration program, but not necessarily the agency’s goal of return humans to the moon by 2024. In a talk Nov. 6 at a conference organized by the University of Washington’s Space Policy and Research Center (SPARC), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, said she remained hopeful that Congress will pass a NASA authorization bill before the end of the year. “We are trying to pass the NASA Authorization Act of 2019,” she said. Cantwell is one of the co-sponsors of the bill, which the Commerce Committee favorably reported nearly one year ago but has yet to be passed by the full Senate. Cantwell said she believed that, despite the lack of progress, the bill can still make it through Congress before the end of the year. “I’m hopeful that we will be able to get this authorization bill done. ...

WASHINGTON — Raytheon Technologies, L3Harris’ Interstate Electronics Corp. and BAE Systems collectively received $552.5 million in contracts to develop and produce integrated circuit cards for military GPS receivers. The contracts announced Nov. 6 by the U.S. Space Force Space and Missile Systems Center are for tiny circuit cards known as MGUE Inc 2 MSI ASIC — short for Military GPS Users Equipment Miniature Serial Interface Increment 2 Application Specific Integrated Circuit. The new generation of military GPS circuit cards are low power and about the size of a silver dollar. They are compatible with the secure Military Code (M-Code) signal broadcast by the newer GPS satellites. A GPS 3 satellite launched by SpaceX on Nov. 5 was the 23rd M-Code signal-enabled GPS space vehicle on orbit. This signal is harder to jam and spoof. The three companies received five-year contracts to design, develop, build, integrate and qualify the receiver cards to enable production of M-Code-capable...

SAN FRANCISCO – EchoStar Corp. plans to launch the Jupiter 3 broadband satellite in the first quarter of 2022 but has not yet selected a launch provider, company officials said during a Nov. 5 earnings call. EchoStar originally planned to launch the 500 gigabit-per-second Ka-band satellite in 2021 to expand broadband capacity over North and South America before the COVID-19 pandemic slowed satellite manufacturing and created uncertainty in the launch market. Rather than incurring additional launch costs as a result of the delay, EchoStar may benefit from changes in the launch market. “There’s a lot going on in the launch industry,” EchoStar CEO Mike Dugan said during the earnings call. “We’re not expecting anything but a positive situation there.” EchoStar reported revenues of $473.5 million for the quarter that ended Sept. 30, a $1.2 million increase over the same period in 2020. For the first nine months of 2020, EchoStar reported revenues of nearly $1.38 billion, nearly $17.5 ...

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic executives said Nov. 5 that the company is ready to begin a final series of test flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle as the company attempts to move into commercial operations in 2021. In its release of its third quarter financial results and accompanying earnings call, the company said it is preparing to perform its first powered SpaceShipTwo flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico between Nov. 19 and 23. That flight will carry two pilots, CJ Sturckow and Dave Mackay, going beyond above the 80-kilometer altitude that the company, like U.S. government agencies, defines as space. The flight, the first time SpaceShipTwo has flown under rocket power since February 2019 , will be used to test the new cabin interior design developed for future commercial flights. Mike Moses, president of space missions and safety at Virgin Galactic, said on the earnings call that the flight will test cameras and communications systems for livestreaming future f...

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Dankberg, Viasat founder, chairman and CEO moved into the newly created role of executive chairman Nov. 3 as Rick Baldridge, Viasat’s former chief operating officer, became Viasat’s new CEO while retaining his role as president. “I’ve held the CEO title for almost 35 years, but Rick has been doing most of the executive management for the last few years,” Dankberg said during a Nov. 5 Viasat earnings call. “I’m happy he accepted the CEO position.” In his new role, Baldridge is focused primarily on the three-satellite ViaSat-3 constellation and getting ready for the launch of the first satellite, Viasat-3 Americas, in late 2021 . In preparation for that launch, Viasat is working in Mexico, Central America and Brazil to establish its distribution network. In addition, the company is beginning to test its Viasat-3 ground network with existing satellites. “There’s a lot of work that has to be done: partnerships, distribution networks and making sure we have the rig...

WASHINGTON — The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency announced Nov. 5 that Planet and BlackSky imagery will be added to the unclassified system that delivers geospatial data to the Defense Department, the intelligence community and other government agencies. Planet and BlackSky imagery will be available through the Global Enhanced Geoint Delivery known as G-EGD, a decade-old system that up until now only provided access to Maxar’s unclassified imagery over the internet.  The Planet and BlackSky data that will be made available through G-EGD was purchased through existing contracts. Juan Sainz, NGA chief of commercial mission integration, said geospatial data delivered through G-EGD is used by national security agencies and civilian agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Center for Disease Control and other emergency management and health organizations that rely on satellite data for COVID-19 response efforts. The integration of Planet and BlackSky i...

WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a U.S. Space Force GPS 3 satellite Nov. 5. The rocket lifted off at 6:24 p.m. Eastern from from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.   The Falcon 9 carried the Lockheed Martin-built GPS 3 Space Vehicle 4 — the 4th satellite of the GPS 3 constellation that provides positioning, navigation and timing signals to military and civilian users. About eight and a half minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9’s brand-new first stage touched down on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean. This was SpaceX’s second attempt to launch SV 4. The mission was aborted Oct. 2 two seconds before liftoff.   SpaceX vice president Hans Koenigsmann told reporters Oct. 28 that the engine anomaly that triggered the automatic abort was caused by material that blocked a relief valve in the engine’s gas generator, which powers the engine’s turbo pumps. The last-second abort...

WASHINGTON — NASA is delaying the launch of an ocean science satellite on one Falcon 9 rocket, but says that delay will not affect another Falcon 9 launch of a commercial crew mission. The agency announced Nov. 3 it was delaying the launch of the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California from Nov. 10 to Nov. 21. The reason for the delay, the agency said, was to give SpaceX time to replace two engines in the rocket’s first stage. The performance of the Falcon 9’s Merlin engines had been under scrutiny since a launch abort seconds before the scheduled liftoff of a Falcon 9 carrying a GPS 3 satellite Oct. 2. An investigation eventually blamed the abort on a “masking lacquer,” a coating used to protect engine components when they are anodized for corrosion protection. The lacquer was not properly cleaned after anodizing, blocking a relief valve in the gas generator of one of the Merlin engines in the stage. At an Oct. 28 briefing,...

WASHINGTON — A new “national initiative” wants to promote the development of satellite servicing and in-space assembly technologies among U.S. government agencies that have differing views on the value of such capabilities. The On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (OSAM) National Initiative is intended to exchange information and establish partnerships among government agencies, and with industry and academia, on the use of such technologies to repair existing satellites and create new capabilities in space. “It’s going to be really important to work together collaboratively, because we want to move forward with these OSAM technologies and advance them collectively as a suite of capabilities,” said Deborah Tomek, NASA senior advisor for OSAM and one of the leads of the new initiative, said during an Oct. 29 presentation at the Global Satellite Servicing Forum, a conference organized by the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS). The OSAM...

SAN FRANCISCO – Spacebit is inviting university researchers to share data the London-based company plans to obtain from two miniature rovers scheduled to travel to the moon with Astrobotic Technology and Intuitive Machines in 2021. Spacebit’s sensor-laden rovers are designed to transmit data through the Astrobotic and Intuitive Machine landers to the company’s mission control center in the United Kingdom. “Our chief scientist will get the first access to the data,” Spacebit Founder Pavlo Tanasyuk told SpaceNews. “Then, we plan to release a certain degree of granularity of that data to the world scientific community. We want to encourage studies based on what we find there.” Spacebit announced plans in October to send a wheeled rover to the moon in the 2021 onboard Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander . Spacebit announced a contract in 2019 to send Asagumo, a 1.3-kilogram rover that travels on four legs, to the moon on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander flight in 2021. “Having a sec...

U.S. military space activities today are confined to Earth orbit. That could change in the coming years as NASA begins to establish a permanent presence at the moon and works with the private sector to develop a cislunar economy. The military foresees playing a role protecting those interests if they were challenged by a foreign power. The Space Force echoes that thinking in a doctrine document published in August, which says the service must prepare for a future when the moon and the volume of space around it could become the next military frontier. The Pentagon made known its interest in deep space in spring 2019, when then-director of the Space Development Agency Fred Kennedy revealed that tracking objects in the lunar sphere was on the agency’s priority list. A key development last month was the announcement by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate that it will embark on an experiment to investigate technologies to monitor cislunar space. “It’s a brave...

T wenty years ago, the joint U.S.-Russia space mission Expedition 1 docked with the first modules of the International Space Station (International Space Station). An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts arrived to, in effect, bring the station to life. They turned on the lights, unpacked the boxes, and set up the kitchen. Over 136 days and two Space Shuttle deliveries with more International Space Station modules, the pioneers of Expedition 1 began two decades of continuous human habitation in space. Since that flight, some 240 people from 19 countries have lived and worked on the International Space Station. The station has hosted thousands of experiments encompassing biology, physics, technology, Earth science and more. If you watch on a clear night, you can see it with your own eyes, and it is poetic that the third brightest point in the night sky is a shining reflection of what we can do when international cooperation and ambition meet in space. Today, our gaze on what...

WASHINGTON — A new study by the MITRE Corp. says the U.S. commercial geospatial intelligence industry is being outpaced by foreign competitors and the U.S. government could do more to help. U.S. investment in commercial geoint has been relatively flat over the last five years, while foreign investment has “increased tremendously within the last two years,” says the MITRE study written by a team of analysts .   MITRE, a nonprofit that operates federally funded research centers, did the study at the request of its Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of former U.S. military and intelligence officials. The study contends there is a bias against commercial providers in U.S. defense and intelligence agencies “where personnel think nationally produced geoint is superior to commercial and has the least associated security issues.” This mindset is rooted in history and “often causes the government to either disregard outright or, at a minimum, accord secondhand status to commercial ge...

SAN FRANCISCO — General Atomics announced Oct. 28 the acquisition of Guidestar Optical Systems, a space and defense company based in Longmont, Colorado, which it plans to integrate into the General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) group. “We are excited to bring the Guidestar team on board to further enhance our diverse portfolio of laser technologies,” GA-EMS President Scott Forney said in a statement. “Guidestar’s expertise in adaptive optics has led to significant advancements in laser communications, high-energy laser technologies, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and atmospheric measurement and forecasting. This acquisition expands our ability to design, build, test and deliver an extensive set of optical technologies to our customers.” GA-EMS is working with the U.S. Space Development Agency to conduct a series of tests of optical intersatellite links using GA-EMS’s internally developed laser communication terminals. Guidestar Optical Systems, founded i...

SAN FRANCISCO — The Federal Communications Commission approved the creation Oct. 27 of a 5G Fund for Rural America to distribute as much as $9 billion over the next decade to extend 5G wireless broadband connectivity to rural communities. The FCC plans to distribute the funds through a series of reverse auctions. During the first phase, the FCC will award as much as $8 billion to extend coverage to areas without unsubsidized 4G LTE or 5G mobile broadband service. Providers serving tribal lands will be eligible to receive $680 million of the $8 billion fund, according to the FCC Report and Order approved Oct. 27. During the second phase of the program, the FCC plans to award an additional $1 billion, along with any money not awarded during the first phase, to encourage “deployment of technologically innovative 5G networks that facilitate precision agriculture,” according to the Report and Order. Satellite service providers who can delivery broadband service with a latency of 100 mil...