* South African variant most worrying due to E484K
* UK genome boss urges humility in battle with virus (Adds latest genome data published)
By Guy Faulconbridge
CAMBRIDGE, England, March 15 (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain’s effort to sequence the virus’s genomes told Reuters.
The novel coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require tweaks to vaccines.
Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) which has sequenced nearly half of all the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed in the “cat and mouse” battle with the virus.
“We have to appreciate that we were always going to have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t last forever,” Peacock told Reuters at the non-profit Wellcome Sanger Institute’s 55-acre campus outside Cambridge.
“We already are tweaking the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution – so there are variants arising that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.
Peacock said she was confident regular booster shots – such as for influenza – would be needed to deal with future variants but that the speed of vaccine innovation meant those shots could be developed at pace and rolled out to the population.
COG-UK was set up by Peacock, a professor at Cambridge, exactly a year ago with the help of the British’s government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread across the globe to Britain.
The consortium of public health and academic institutions is now the world’s deepest pool of knowledge about the virus’s genetics: At sites across Britain, it has sequenced 349,205 genomes of the virus out of a global effort of around 778,000 genomes.
On the intellectual frontline at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many with PhDs, many working on a voluntary basis and some listening to heavy metal or electronic beats – work seven days a week to map the virus’s growing family tree for patterns of concern.
Wellcome Sanger Institute has sequenced over half of the UK total sequenced genomes of the virus after processing 19 million samples from PCR tests in a year. COG-UK is sequencing around 30,000 genomes per week – more than the UK used to do in a year.
MUTATION LEADERBOARD
Three main coronavirus variants – which were first identified in Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1)and South Africa (known as B.1.351) – are under particular scrutiny.
Peacock said she was most worried about B.1.351.
“It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a gene mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity is reduced against that virus,” Peacock said.
With 120 million cases of COVID-19 around the world, it is getting hard to keep track of all the alphabet soup of variants, so Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of “constellations of mutations”.
“So a constellation of mutations would be like a leaderboard if you like – which mutations in the genome that we’re particularly concerned about, the E484K is must be one of the top of the leaderboard,” she said.
“So we’re developing our thinking around that leaderboard to think, regardless of the background and lineage, about what mutations or constellation of mutations are going to be important biologically and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects.”
Peacock, though, warned of humility in the face of a virus that has brought so much death and economic destruction.
“One of the things that the virus has taught me is that I can be wrong quite regularly – I have to be quite humble in the face of a virus that we know very little about still,” she said.
“There may be a variant out there that we haven’t even discovered yet.”
There will, though, be future pandemics.
“I think its inevitable that we will have another virus emerge that is of concern. What I hope is that having learned what we have in this global pandemic, that we will be better prepared to detect it and contain it.” (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
SpaceX has delivered another 60 Starlink satellites to orbit — meaning it has sent 180 in total to join its 1,000+ strong constellation in the past two weeks alone. Today’s launch also set a record for SpaceX for its Falcon 9 rocket reusability program, since it was the ninth flight and ninth landing for this particular first-stage booster.
The booster was used previously on a variety of missions, including five prior Starlink launches, as well as the Demo-1 mission for the company’s Crew Dragon capsule, which was the uncrewed test flight that proved it would work as intended from launch all the way to docking with the International Space Station and then returning back to Earth.
SpaceX set its prior reusability record in January this year – another Starlink launch – using this very same refurbished first stage, which had just flown in December of last year before that. SpaceX not only wants to continue to show that it can re-fly these boosters more and more times, but also that it can turn them around quickly for their next mission, since both speed and volume will have a significant impact on launch costs.
Rocket reuse is of particular importance when it comes to these Starlink missions, which are happening with increasing frequency as SpaceX pushes to expand the availability of its Starlink broadband internet service globally. As mentioned, this is the third launch of 60 satellites for the constellation in just 10 days — the most recent launch happened just Thursday, and the first of this trio took place the Thursday before that.
From here, expect SpaceX to just continue to launch at roughly this pace for the next little while, since it has two more planned Starlink launches before March is over, including one tentatively set for next Sunday. As the company is its own customer for these missions, it’s eating the cost of the launches (at least until Starlink starts operating beyond its current beta and bringing in more revenue) so re-flying boosters is a good way to help mitigate the overall spend.
Despite the 95 percent effectiveness at preventing coronavirus infection after two doses of its vaccine, Pfizer is now seeing what a third dose might do.
The company announced Thursday that a booster dose is being studied among people who received their first doses of the vaccine more than six months ago.
Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak
In an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the hope is that a third dose will boost the immune response even higher, offering better protection against variants.
“We believe that the third dose,” Bourla said, “will raise the antibody response 10- to 20- fold.”
The new study will monitor the safety and efficacy of a third dose in two age groups: those 18 to 55 and those 65 to 85. The participants come from a group of people who were among the first to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine: people who volunteered for Pfizer’s initial Phase 1/2 clinical trial, which began in May.
During that trial, participants received two doses of the vaccine three weeks apart. The same dose interval is what’s currently recommended.
The third shot will be exactly the same as what participants got a year ago.
Pfizer also plans to begin testing whether a modified version of the vaccine works well against the variant from South Africa.
Indeed, as SARS-CoV-2 changes, the vaccines may have to be tweaked. The Food and Drug Administration issued guidance Monday saying vaccine manufacturers may be able to ease away from lengthy clinical trials to prove safety and effectiveness for vaccines that have been tweaked to account for variants.
That’s not unlike how the flu shot changes from year to year, accounting for the strains most likely to infect people.
“Every year, you need to go to get your flu vaccine,” Bourla said. “It’s going to be the same with Covid. In a year, you will have to go and get your annual shot for Covid to be protected.”
That suggests that even when the pandemic ends, Covid-19 may be here to stay. Ongoing studies of re-engineered vaccines are necessary to understand when boosters may be needed, outside experts said.
“You need to cast a wide net to find Goldilocks,” said John Grabenstein, a former executive director of medical affairs for vaccines at Merck and a former Defense Department immunologist. “You want to look at shorter intervals, you want to look at longer intervals, to determine when is the best time, if needed, to re-vaccinate.”
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So far, evidence suggests that the existing Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine remains effective against variants first identified in the U.K., Brazil and South Africa.
Bourla said the company’s goal if and when another variant emerges is to pivot and tweak the current vaccine within 100 days.
Moderna, which makes a similar Covid-19 vaccine, announced Wednesday that it had also started studying the effects of adding a third dose to its regimen and has developed a version of the vaccine designed to target the variant from South Africa.
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Erika Edwards is a health and medical news writer and reporter for NBC News and “TODAY.”
NASA’s moon megarocket is facing yet another testing delay ahead of the vehicle’s expected first flight for the Artemis program.
For months, NASA personnel have been conducting a series of tests called a “green run” on the first core stage of the agency’s massive new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). The tests are occurring at the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi ahead of being shipped to Florida for the uncrewed Artemis 1 launch from the NASA Kennedy Space Center, near Orlando.
In a short update Monday (Feb. 22), NASA said it is “reviewing the performance of a valve on the core stage” of the SLS, forcing the agency to delay the second “hot fire” test. A new date for the hot fire has not yet been announced.
Video:How NASA’s SLS megarocket engine test works
The agency confirmed that the valve in question worked properly during the first hot fire test, conducted on Jan. 16. That procedure ended after only 67 seconds, instead of the planned eight minutes, prompting the agency to schedule the upcoming second test to gather all the required data for confirming the rocket works as planned.
That test was scheduled to occur on Feb. 25. But during checkout preparations last weekend, engineers found that one of the eight valves on SLS “was not working properly,” according to NASA, prompting the delay. The green run process has been hitting delays since late 2020, when the seventh test in the series, a “wet dress” rehearsal, also needed two takes.
NASA was facing a tight deadline to get the SLS rocket shipped to Kennedy for a planned uncrewed flight around the moon by the end of the year, a milestone in the schedule for landing humans on the moon for Artemis 3 in 2024.
Recent weeks have seen some hints that the 2024 deadline may no longer be a firm goal, however. Earlier this month, the administration of President Joe Biden committed to continuing work to land humans on the moon , but the discussion contained no language about the 2024 goal, established by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Further, acting NASA administrator Steve Jurczyk — just appointed last month when the administration turned over — recently told Ars Technica he felt the deadline was no longer “realistic,” given that NASA has not received its full request for Artemis appropriations in past budgets — including the human landing system (HLS). NASA also paused the selection process for HLS earlier this month.
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A Falcon 9 rocket takes off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:59 p.m. EST Monday (0359 GMT Tuesday) with 60 more Starlink internet satellites. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now
SpaceX successfully launched 60 more Starlink internet satellites Monday night from Cape Canaveral, but lost the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable first stage booster during a landing attempt on a drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 10:59:37 p.m. EST Monday (0359:37 GMT Tuesday) from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a day after weather kept the mission on Earth.
Heading northeast with 1.7 million pounds of thrust from nine Merlin main engines, the kerosene-fueled rocket fired into a clear late-night sky over Florida’s Space Coast on SpaceX’s fifth Falcon 9 launch of the year.
The first stage finished its job two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, and dropped away moments before the Falcon 9 ignited its single-engine second to stage to deliver the 60 flat-panel Starlink satellites into orbit.
The booster extended grid fins and arced downrange on a ballistic trajectory, then oriented for the plunge back into the atmosphere. The first stage was programmed to fire three of its nine Merlin engines for an entry burn, then reignite a single engine for a final braking maneuver just before attempting a propulsive landing on SpaceX’s drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” positioned roughly 400 miles (630 kilometers) downrange from Cape Canaveral.
But something appeared to go wrong with the entry burn. A live video feed from an on-board camera showed the rocket trailing a fiery plume after the end of the entry burn, moments before telemetry data from the vehicle cut off. A camera from SpaceX’s drone ship showed an orange glow in the sky as the rocket presumably crashed into the Atlantic.
The booster flown on Monday’s mission — designated B1059 — was on its sixth trip to space. SpaceX says the most recent version of the Falcon 9 booster can make 10 flights with only inspections and minor refurbishment in between missions, and can fly on additional launches after a major overhaul.
There was an unusual signature at the end of the Falcon 9 booster’s entry burn tonight, followed seconds later by the end of telemetry from the rocket.
The booster crashed in the Atlantic Ocean near SpaceX’s drone ship.https://t.co/iSV3bbx5ro pic.twitter.com/HqY06KmxiL
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) February 16, 2021
SpaceX’s most-used Falcon 9 booster has flown eight times.
The company’s recovery and reuse of Falcon 9 first stages is unparalleled in the launch industry. No other commercial launch company has landed and reused boosters on orbital-class missions. Going into Monday night’s launch, SpaceX had recovered Falcon booster cores 74 times since 2015, including 24 straight successful landings since the last time the company lost a first stage in March 2020.
The loss of a rocket stage will almost certainly garner an investigation at SpaceX, and could impact the company’s near-term launch schedule. SpaceX has six Falcon 9 boosters left in its inventory. Three of those are earmarked for future missions for NASA and the U.S. Space Force: SpaceX’s next crew launch to the International Space Station in April, and launches with a GPS satellite and NASA asteroid probe in July.
SpaceX is building more Falcon cores, including boosters for the next triple-body Falcon Heavy launch later this year, but none are on the cusp of reaching the launch pad.
While the once-experimental rocket landings are a secondary objective on each mission, the successful recovery of Falcon boosters is more critical than ever for SpaceX’s ability to maintain its high-tempo launch cadence, especially for flights adding to the company’s Starlink internet network. The launch Monday night was SpaceX’s third in less than a month dedicated to the multibillion-dollar Starlink program, and officials planned two more Starlink missions before the end of February.
Before Monday night’s launch, SpaceX planned the next Falcon 9 flight — using a different first stage booster — from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center as soon as 12:55 a.m. EST (0555 GMT) Wednesday. It was not immediately clear how the booster’s failed landing might impact those plans.
SpaceX officials did not provide any details on why the booster failed to land on the drone ship Monday night. The second stage accomplished the primary goal of the flight, and used two burns of its Merlin-Vacuum, or MVAC, engine to inject the 60 Starlink satellites into an on-target orbit less than 200 miles (300 kilometers) above Earth.
SpaceX lost the Falcon 9 booster on descent.
A brief flash from the rocket’s landing burn was visible in a camera view from the drone ship.
This was the 6th flight of this reusable booster.
The upper stage is safely in orbit with 60 Starlink payloads.https://t.co/iSV3bbx5ro pic.twitter.com/Z76zdXuyQq
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) February 16, 2021
“We were not able to land the first stage, which is a bummer, but our second stage did have two successful burns of the MVAC engine,” said Jessie Anderson, a SpaceX engineer who hosted the company’s launch webcast Monday night.
The upper stage spun itself up for release of the 60 Starlink satellites a little more than an hour after liftoff. The quarter-ton satellites, built by SpaceX in Redmond, Washington, flew free of the Falcon 9’s second stage before commencing automated activation procedures to unfurl their solar arrays and begin standard post-launch checkouts.
The satellites will turn on their krypton ion thrusters to climb into their operational orbit 341 miles (550 kilometers) in altitude, with an inclination of 53 degrees to the equator.
SpaceX has more than 1,000 satellites in its Starlink constellation, well on the way to finish deployment of its initial tranche of 1,584 Starlink stations later this year. SpaceX won’t stop there, with plans to launch additional orbital “shells” of Starlink satellites into polar orbit to enable global coverage, with a first-generation fleet totaling some 4,400 spacecraft.
The Federal Communications Commission has authorized SpaceX to eventually operate up to 12,000 Starlink satellites.
Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now
SpaceX began accepting preorders from would-be Starlink users last week, charging $99 for a potential customer to get in line for the broadband service. Once confirmed, customers will pay $499 for a Starlink antenna and modem, plus $50 in shipping and handling, SpaceX says. A subscription will run $99 per month.
SpaceX says the service should be available throughout the United States later this year.
Beta testing of the Starlink network has been underway for months in the northern United States, Canada. SpaceX said more than 10,000 users in the United States are abroad are already on the Starlink service, according to a Feb. 3 regularly filing with the FCC.
“Starlink continues to improve as SpaceX deploys additional infrastructure and capability, averaging two Starlink launches per month, to add significant on-orbit capacity alongside activation of additional gateways to improve performance and expand service coverage areas across the country,” SpaceX wrote in the filing.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, tweeted Feb. 9 that SpaceX’s Starlink subsidiary will go public once it has a predictable cash flow.
“Once we can predict cash flow reasonably well, Starlink will IPO,” Musk tweeted.
Until then, SpaceX will be spending cash at a high rate to maintain the Starlink network’s high-tempo deployment, from satellite launches at an average pace of every couple of weeks to the manufacturing of user ground terminals. SpaceX has said the entire project could cost more than $10 billion, but Musk has said the revenue opportunities are even higher, providing resources for SpaceX to advance its audacious plans to send people to Mars.
SpaceX confirms the 60 Starlink broadband satellites successfully deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage in orbit. This brings the total number of Starlinks launched to 1,145 satellites.https://t.co/iSV3bbx5ro pic.twitter.com/8GkPqSk5h1
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) February 16, 2021
“SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable,” Musk tweeted. “Every new satellite constellation in history has gone bankrupt. We hope to be the first that does not.”
The FCC awarded SpaceX nearly $885 million in government subsidies in December through a program aimed at expanding broadband access for rural Americans.
WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched another set of Falcon 9 satellites Feb. 15, but suffered a rare failed landing of the rocket’s first stage during the mission.
The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:59 p.m. Eastern, after unfavorable weather conditions caused a one-day delay. The rocket released its payload of 60 Starlink satellites in orbit 65 minutes after liftoff.
The rocket’s first stage, however, did not land on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean as planned. Video from the droneship around the time of landing showed a glow in the distance, suggesting a problem with the booster that either caused it to go off-course or to deliberately divert from the landing attempt. SpaceX did not immediately disclose what took place during the failed landing.
The failure broke a streak of 24 consecutive Falcon 9 launches with successful landings, either on droneships or on land. The last failure took place in March 2020, and was the second failure in three Falcon 9 launches. The March failure was caused by engine cleaning fluid that was trapped inside and interfered with a sensor, while the earlier failure was blamed on incorrect wind data.
The booster on this launch made its sixth flight. It first flew in December 2019 on a cargo Dragon mission, then was used for another cargo Dragon in March 2020. It subsequently launched a set of Starlink satellites, along with three SkySats for Planet, in June, followed by SAOCOM-1B in August and the NROL-108 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office in December.
The primary purpose of the mission, though, was a success, adding to the growing constellation of Starlink satellites. SpaceX is expanding its beta testing program, and now has more than 10,000 users in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, according to a Feb. 3 filing with the Federal Communications Commission.
SpaceX, though, is facing renewed opposition from some organizations regarding the nearly $885.5 million in FCC Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) awards it won in December. In a recent white paper, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) argued that the FCC should closely scrutinize SpaceX’s plans to provide broadband internet service via satellite. Those groups say bids by rural cooperatives for RDOF funding to provide broadband service were shut out by both SpaceX as well as fixed wireless networks.
“While delivering broadband service at the speeds promised by these applicants may appear to be viable, this service is currently in beta testing and commercially available on a limited basis in extremely limited areas, and questions remain,” the paper states. “Awarding bids to experimental and unproven LEO satellite service is a direct contradiction” to the rules of the RDOF program, it argued.
“I’m really struggling on the physics and economics” of satellite broadband, said Tim Bryan, chief executive of the NRTC, in a Feb. 4 call with reporters. He claimed there were “anecdotal reports” of people who signed up for Starlink beta but were having problems getting connections any faster than four megabits per second, but didn’t elaborate.
“Starlink’s performance is not theoretical or experimental,” SpaceX noted in its Feb. 3 FCC filing. The company said it had already demonstrated it could meet or exceed key performance tiers, including 100 megabits per second of data to customers and 20 megabits per second of data from them, as well latencies of 31 milliseconds or less.
Bryan said his group’s issue was how Starlink could scale up to serve larger numbers of customers. “My concern is mostly around the capacity not of one or two users, but what happens when you get to 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 thousand users,” he said.
“I have no doubt that the Starlink constellation could be successful in some areas, and in some cases, providing coverage over areas like the deep blue seas and those sorts of places,” he said. “I struggle to see how it’s going to reliably deliver 100-megabit service to the literally hundreds and thousands of customers in the census block groups that it bid for.”
Enlarge / The Transporter-1 mission launches from Florida on January 24, 2021.
Welcome to Edition 3.33 of the Rocket Report! Plenty of news this week about NASA awarding contracts to launch companies and also some new details about a pair of German rocket startups seeking to develop orbital boosters.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Firefly wins lunar lander contract. NASA has awarded Texas-based Firefly $93.3 million to deliver a suite of 10 NASA-sponsored science and technology demonstration payloads to Mare Crisium in the Moon’s Crisium Basin. Firefly’s “Blue Ghost” lunar lander will deliver the payloads to the lunar surface in 2023 in fulfillment of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services task order, the company said.
How will it fly to the Moon? … “This award is further validation of Firefly, its team and its mission to become a versatile provider of a broad range of space-related services,” said Max Polyakov, founder of Noosphere Ventures, the largest investor in Firefly. What’s not clear is how the sizable lander will get to the Moon, as the mission is too large to launch on the company’s Alpha booster. A company spokesman said a launcher has yet to be determined. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Iran tests new solid rocket named Zoljanah. Iran has test-launched a new rocket with its “most powerful” solid-fuel engine to date, Iranian state television reported, according to Israel Hayom. Ahmad Hosseini, spokesman for the Iranian Defense Ministry’s space division, said, “This three-stage carrier can compete with the world’s current carriers, and has two stages of solid propulsion and a single liquid one.” Hosseini added that the rocket had been launched for “research purposes.”
Launch from anywhere? … Hosseini said that the Zoljanah rocket was capable of putting a payload with a mass of up to 220kg into a 500km orbit. The Zoljanah can be launched from a mobile platform, Hosseini said. Last April, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the country’s first military satellite, the Nour, into orbit after a similar launch had failed two months earlier. (submitted by arstechmfw)
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ABL chosen to launch from the United Kingdom. Lockheed Martin says it has selected California-based ABL Space Systems to launch the first orbital rocket from the United Kingdom—a mission that is expected to launch from Scotland in 2022. No rockets have ever launched into orbit from UK soil, Ars reports.
RS1 to debut this spring? … The launch is part of an agreement between the British government and Lockheed to foster a commercial small-satellite launch industry in the country. In choosing ABL Space, Lockheed has chosen a company that has not yet launched a rocket, although its RS1 vehicle is expected to make its debut during the second quarter of this year.
Rocket Factory Augsburg to seek 25 million euros. The German launch startup said in a news release that it will seek the new round of funding to boost its growth. “We want to build the best and cheapest rockets and microlaunchers,” said Hans Steininger, deputy chairman of the supervisory board and founding investor of Rocket Factory. “With freight costs of €3 million per launch, we will be able to offer by far the cheapest launch service in the world.”
Would be a great value … The company is one of the most promising new space ventures in Germany, and it nominally has plans to launch a rocket capable of lifting about 1 ton to low Earth orbit from the Norwegian island of Andøya in 2022. If it really can delivery that level of performance for less than $4 million, it would be a tremendous price. But first, the company has to do it.
Rocket Lab set to deploy 100th satellite. The company said its 19th Electron launch is now scheduled for mid-March, and this flight will bring the total number of satellites launched by Electron to 104. This “They Go Up So Fast” mission will carry seven satellites as part of its manifest.
Stepping stone to the Moon … Most intriguingly, the mission will launch Rocket Lab’s Photon Pathstone spacecraft, which was designed and built in-house. The vehicle will operate on orbit as a risk-reduction demonstration ahead of Rocket Lab’s mission to the Moon for NASA later this year. In space, Photon Pathstone will demonstrate power management, thermal control, and attitude control subsystems, among other features. (submitted by Ken the Bin and platykurtic)
HyImpulse will launch from Scotland. Germany-based HyImpulse Technologies plans to begin engine testing and launching sub-orbital sounding rockets in Shetland this year, with a view toward its first orbital flight in 2023, Parabolic Arc reports. The decision is a hopeful sign for efforts to develop a spaceport at the Shetland Space Centre on the British island of Unst.
From Germany to Scotland … HyImpulse Co-CEO Christian Schmierer said, “We have signed letters of intent with several potential customers to take their payloads into orbit. It was therefore very important for us to secure a launch pad and site ahead of time and to start with our mission planning. Shetland Space Centre allows us to offer frequent, reliable access to space with a great variety of efficient flight routes.” The company is developing a sounding rocket, SR75, and a SL1 orbital rocket. (submitted by platykurtic)
Are launch investors headed toward “venture fratricide?” In a roundup from the 2021 SmallSat Symposium this week, SpaceNews covers the varying opinions on the glut of launch companies seeking to develop rockets for small satellites. While some observers saw a surge of launch vehicle development efforts as a sign of an “overheated” market, others see those efforts as a sign of shifting demand.
Unsure of value of nimble launch services … Perhaps the most colorful comment came from Steve Jurvetson, a SpaceX board member skeptical that small launch vehicles can compete against the prices offered by Falcon 9 ride-share missions. Commenting on investors in those companies, he said, “That’s astounding: billions of dollars going to fundamentally the exact same market segment. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, calling all of the investment going into those companies “venture fratricide.” (submitted by platykurtic)
SpaceX sees strong demand for ride-share. During a separate panel discussion at the 2021 SmallSat Symposium this week, a SpaceX official said the company has two more dedicated ride-share missions scheduled this year after its Falcon 9 Transporter-1 launch in January, SpaceNews reports. “Customer demand has been extremely strong. Demand is growing, so we’re certainly going to have some very full rockets coming up,” said Jarrod McLachlan, senior manager of ride-share sales at SpaceX.
“Enabling people to be creative” … Notably, the company says it is seeing the satellite market react to a lower price point of $5,000 per kilogram and the size and mass of SpaceX’s offering. “We’re seeing some people who are optimizing their spacecraft and their constellation design around that volume, as well as some of the integrator/broker partners out there who are doing multiple spacecraft in a single port,” Jarrod McLachlan said. “Being so public with our pricing and our requirements is really enabling people to be creative. (submitted by Ken the Bin and platykurtic)
NASA selects Falcon 9 to launch SPHEREx mission. The space agency said it will use a Falcon 9 rocket to launch the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx mission, as early as June 2024. The total cost for NASA to launch SPHEREx is approximately $98.8 million, which includes the launch service and other mission related costs.
Answering cosmic questions … The mission will take place from Launch Complex-4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The astrophysics mission will survey the sky in the near-infrared light to answer cosmic questions involving the birth of the universe and the subsequent development of galaxies. It also will search for water and organic molecules. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
NASA selects Falcon Heavy to launch Lunar Gateway. On Tuesday, the space agency said it plans to launch the power and propulsion element combined with the habitat module on a Falcon Heavy. The mission is set for no earlier than May 2024, and once in its orbit around the Moon, the Gateway will serve as a waypoint for astronauts traveling down to the lunar surface.
Good money if you can get it … SpaceX will receive $331.8 million, including the launch service and other mission-related costs, for the flight. This is considerably more than the advertised price of a Falcon Heavy. However, by 2024 the only other rocket capable of launching the Gateway, NASA’s Space Launch System, would likely cost $1.5 billion to $2 billion for a comparable mission. And NASA is not expected to have a spare SLS rocket anyway, due to the long time needed to manufacture an SLS rocket core. (submitted by Tfargo04, platykurtic. and Ken the Bin)
SLS proponent won’t run for reelection. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has used his seniority in the US Senate to wield enormous power over NASA’s human spaceflight program for the better part of a decade. He championed funding for the Space Launch System rocket and sought to reduce funding for Commercial Crew. But now, he is in the minority after Democrats took control of the Senate. And this week, Shelby announced that he would not run for reelection in 2022.
So what happens now? … As Ars reports, it seems probable that Shelby’s departure would make it easier for the Biden White House to cancel the SLS rocket program should it continue to face technical difficulties, such as the incomplete hot-fire test of the core stage. It will also make the program’s end all the more inevitable should SpaceX succeed in launching Starship into orbit on its Super Heavy rocket. Without a potent backstop like Shelby, the reality of a heavy-lift rocket that costs significantly less than SLS, has a greater lift capacity, and is capable of multiple reuses should be impossible to ignore.
NASA confirms it won’t launch Clipper on SLS. It’s finally official. NASA is no longer considering launching the Europa Clipper mission on the Space Launch System, deciding instead to launch the spacecraft on a commercial rocket it will procure in the next year, SpaceNews reports. During a February 10 presentation at a meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group, leaders of the Europa Clipper project said the agency recently decided to consider only commercial launch vehicles.
End of a long battle … “We now have clarity on the launch vehicle path and launch date,” Robert Pappalardo, project scientist for Europa Clipper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. That clarity came in the form of a January 25 memo from NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office to “immediately cease efforts to maintain SLS compatibility” and move forward with a commercial launch vehicle. Thus ends a long political battle fought by Sen. Richard Shelby (see item above) to keep Clipper on the SLS. (submitted by BH)
Next three launches
Feb. 12: Falcon 9 | Starlink-19 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 05:25 UTC
Earth’s second moon will make a close approach to the planet next week before drifting off into space, never to be seen again.
“What second moon,” you ask? Astronomers call it 2020 SO – a small object that dropped into Earth’s orbit about halfway between our planet and the moon in September 2020.
Temporary satellites like these are known as minimoons, though calling it a moon is a bit deceptive in this case; in December 2020, NASA researchers learned that the object isn’t a space rock at all, but rather the remains of a 1960s rocket booster involved in the American Surveyor moon missions.
This non-moon minimoon made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 1 (the day before NASA identified it as the long-lost booster), but it’s coming back for one more victory lap, according to EarthSky.org.
Minimoon 2020 SO will make a final close approach to Earth on Tuesday (Feb. 2) at roughly 140,000 miles (220,000 kilometers) from Earth, or 58 percent of the way between Earth and the moon.
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The booster will drift away after that, leaving Earth’s orbit entirely by March 2021, according to EarthSky. After that, the former minimoon will be just another object orbiting the sun. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will host an online farewell to the object on the night of Feb. 1.
NASA learned that the object has made several close approaches to Earth over the decades, even coming relatively near in 1966 – the year that the agency launched its Surveyor 2 lunar probe on the back of a Centaur rocket booster.
That gave scientists their first big clue that 2020 SO was man-made; they confirmed it after comparing the object’s chemical makeup with that of another rocket booster, which has been in orbit since 1971.
Godspeed, minimoon 2020 SO. We built you. We abandoned you. And now, you abandon us.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
