File photo of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch in April 2019. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now
NASA announced Tuesday it has awarded SpaceX a $331 million contract to launch the first two pieces of the Gateway lunar outpost in 2024 using a modified version of the Falcon Heavy rocket to hurl the massive core of the deep space station toward the moon.
The Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element and Habitation and Logistics Outpost will launch in tandem no earlier than May 2024 aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The $331.8 million launch services contract, awarded by NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy, includes the Falcon Heavy launch and “other mission-related costs,” the agency said in a statement. The $331 million contract value is nearly three times the price NASA is paying for a Falcon Heavy launch in July 2022 with the Psyche asteroid probe.
The PPE and the HALO modules are the first two pieces of the Gateway mini-space station, which NASA envisions will serve as a waypoint for astronauts in transit to and from the moon’s surface in the space agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program. Contributions from international partners, such as a joint European-Japanese habitation module and a Canadian robotic arm, will eventually join the Gateway in orbit around the moon, forming an outpost about one-sixth the size of the International Space Station.
The Power and Propulsion Element, built by Maxar, will be powered by large solar array wings, and will use plasma rocket jets for deep space maneuvers. It will also provide communications and attitude control for the Gateway complex. The HALO, developed by Northrop Grumman in partnership with Thales Alenia Space in Italy, will provide the initial living quarters for astronauts on the Gateway, and will have docking ports arriving and departing cargo and crew ships.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket will haul the PPE and HALO into a high-altitude orbit around Earth. The PPE’s solar-electric thrusters will guide the stack toward the moon, where the Gateway will enter an elliptical lunar orbit to take position for the docking of Orion crew capsules with astronauts. NASA intends for human-rated lunar landers to also link up with the Gateway in orbit around the moon, and the landing craft could be refueled at the Gateway for multiple trips to and from the lunar surface.
The combined function of the HALO and Orion life support systems will sustain up to four astronauts for up to 30 days on the Gateway, according to NASA.
The Trump administration set a 2024 schedule goal for the first astronauts to return to the moon’s surface in NASA’s Artemis program. The Biden White House has said it supports the Artemis program, although the new administration has not said whether it will stick with the 2024 schedule, which was already facing stiff technical and funding headwinds before President Trump left office.
NASA decided year to launch the PPE and HALO elements on the same rocket. The decision reversed NASA’s previous Gateway acquisition strategy, which would have launched the two elements on separate rockets before they automatically docked in deep space.
Artist’s illustration of the Gateway’s PPE and HALO modules in lunar orbit. Credit: NASA
The tandem launch of the PPE and HALO sections requires a rocket with an extended payload shroud. The payload fairing currently flying on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is not long enough for the job, but SpaceX plans to introduce an extended fairing for future U.S. national security satellites, along with a new vertical integration hangar at pad 39A to enable the attachment of military payloads in a vertical orientation at the launch site.
The new fairing design and launch pad integration tower are part of a Pentagon launch services agreement SpaceX won last year. ULA won a similar Defense Department launch contract, and the two companies will share national security launch duties through 2027.
The fairing and integration building are required for SpaceX to be able to launch all of the military’s space missions, and the enlarged shroud is also an enabler for the Falcon Heavy to launch the Gateway.
SpaceX is on contract for other parts of NASA’s Artemis architecture.
The company’s Dragon XL cargo vehicle will deliver supplies to the Gateway space station. The Dragon XL missions will also launch on Falcon Heavy rockets.
A version of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship vehicle, which engineers are designing as a fully reusable rocket, could be used as a lunar lander to transport crews to and from the lunar surface. SpaceX is competing against teams led by Blue Origin and Dynetics for the full lunar lander development contract.
NASA plans to launch astronauts from Earth aboard Orion capsules flying on top of the government-owned Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket.
SpaceX has launched three Falcon Heavy rocket missions to date, all successfully, and the company has at least two more scheduled this year. With the Gateway launch contract, SpaceX has seven confirmed Falcon Heavy missions in its backlog, including two U.S. Space Force missions this year, launches of a Viasat broadband communications satellite and NASA’s Psyche asteroid explorer in 2022, and two Dragon XL cargo missions to the Gateway.
The Falcon Heavy is made up of three modified Falcon 9 first stage boosters connected together in a triple-core configuration. The rocket’s 27 Merlin main engines produce some 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, more than any other currently operational rocket.
NASA’s inspector general reported in November that the agency has spent more than $500 million on Gateway design work to date.
Despite the decision to combine the PPE and HALO onto a single launch, which NASA said would save money and simplify development, the launch of the Gateway’s power element has been delayed from December 2022 to May 2024.
“The development schedules for both the PPE and HALO have been negatively impacted by the agency’s still-evolving Gateway requirements, including NASA’s decision to co-manifest and launch the two elements on the same commercial rocket rather than separately as initially intended,” the inspector general said last year.”
The Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element and HALO habitation module will now launch together inside an extended payload fairing. Credit: NASA
The inspector general also cited the Trump administration’s 2024 schedule goal for returning astronauts to the moon, although NASA was not counting on using the Gateway for the first Artemis lunar landing mission, at least as proposed in the previous administration.
“Compounding these issues is the 2024 lunar mandate that drove the accelerated development schedule in the first place and resulted in a lack of schedule margin in the Gateway program,” the inspector general said.
NASA’s choice to co-manifest the PPE and HALO will add 10 months to the modules’ travel time to their operating post in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, the inspector general said.
“The decision to launch the PPE and HALO together, while avoiding the cost of a second commercial launch vehicle, has contributed to cost increases due to the redesign of several components, an elevated launch risk, and a longer duration flight to lunar orbit,” the inspector general said.
Under the original Gateway launch strategy, Maxar was responsible for booking the launch for the Power and Propulsion Element. Maxar had already contracted SpaceX for the solo launch of the PPE, an agreement that the inspector general said was terminated in favor of the combined launch of the PPE and the HALO, which came with additional requirements, such as the Falcon Heavy with the extended fairing.
Maxar had already paid SpaceX $27.5 million in payments for the PPE launch contract before terminating the agreement, the inspector general said.
“In our judgment, NASA’s acceleration of the acquisition for both the PPE and HALO before fully defining the Gateway’s requirements added significant costs to the projects’ development efforts and increases the risk of future schedule delays and additional cost increases,” the inspector general said.
Artist’s illustration of the Hope spacecraft at Mars. Credit: MBRSC
The first interplanetary probe from the United Arab Emirates is set to enter orbit around Mars on Tuesday, the first of three robotic missions taking aim on the Red Planet this month.
The Emirates Mars Mission spacecraft, also known as Hope or Al Amal, is set to begin a 27-minute firing of its six main thrusters around 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) Tuesday to slow down enough for Martian gravity to capture the probe into orbit.
If successful, the Hope orbiter will join spacecraft from NASA and the European Space Agency exploring Mars. But it is scheduled to receive company within days, with the scheduled arrival of China’s Tianwen 1 orbiter and rover Wednesday, and the landing of NASA’s nuclear-powered Perseverance rover Feb. 18.
The Hope, Tianwen 1, and Perseverance missions launched last July, rocketing into the solar system from spaceports in Japan, China, and Cape Canaveral. The trio of missions, all developed independently of one another, took advantage of a once-ever-26-months alignment of Earth and Mars to permit the direct trip to the Red Planet.
The roughly $200 million Emirates Mars Mission is the Arab world’s first interplanetary probe. Engineers and scientists from the UAE partnered with U.S. researchers to develop the spacecraft and its three scientific instruments, all aimed at bringing into focus the structure and dynamics of the Martian atmosphere.
“Anything that you want to attempt to do in space is hard,” said Pete Withnell, program manager for the Emirates Mars Mission at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “And something as sporty as getting a spacecraft into orbit around another planet is even harder.
“Many people may know the statistics,” Withnell said in a virtual press briefing in late January. “Less than half of those spacecraft that have been sent to Mars have actually made it successfully. So there are some statistics that are very sobering, but … this is a highly practiced, highly simulated, highly analyzed event on EMM. I cannot imagine being better prepared than we are right now. We are very fortunate to have a very healthy spacecraft, and everything is looking very good at the moment, so I’m optimistic.”
The Emirates Mars Mission launched July 19 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, riding a Japanese H-2A rocket procured by the UAE government from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The H-2A hurled the 3,000-pound (1,350-kilogram) Hope spacecraft on a high-speed trajectory escaping the bonds of Earth’s gravity.
After deploying its solar panels and completing a post-launch checkout, the spacecraft fired its thrusters several times to adjust its course toward Mars, setting the stage for the critical Mars Orbit Insertion, or MOI, maneuver Tuesday.
“Right now, the team has prepared as well as they can possibly prepare to reach orbit around Mars,” said Sarah al-Amiri, the Mars mission’s lead scientist and the UAE’s minister of state for advanced sciences.
“It’s useful to first consider the fact that the Al Amal spacecraft is moving at exactly the right velocity to get it from Earth to Mars,” Withnell said. “Once it arrives at Mars, it’s moving too fast to get into the relatively small gravitational field of that planet. So the spacecraft has to slow itself down. If we do nothing, then the spacecraft will simply stay in an orbit about the sun, much like an asteroid.”
The Mars Orbit Insertion burn will cap a 307 million-mile (494 million-kilometer) interplanetary journey. At the current distance of Mars, it will take radio signals about 11 minutes to travel from the Hope spacecraft back to ground teams gathered at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai.
“So what the spacecraft principally needs to do is slow itself down,” Withnell said. “So a very short time prior to MOI, roughly an hour, the spacecraft will rotate. It has spent the vast majority of its time in the last seven months either pointing its solar arrays at the sun, or its antennas toward Earth… But neither of those orientations work for MOI.
“So we need to reorient the spacecraft so that the thrusters are pointed in the right direction, and they then burn for 27 minutes, and take out roughly 1,000 meters per second (2,236 mph) of velocity relative to Mars,” Withnell said. “And then we’re captured into into what is called a capture orbit about the planet. So fundamentally that’s what Mars Orbit Insertion is all about.”
The UAE’s Hope mission is on the home stretch of a 307 million-mile (494 million-kilometer) journey to Mars. Credit: MBRSC
The Mars Orbit Insertion Burn is a pivotal moment in the life of the Emirates Mars Mission, which the UAE government first announced in July 2014. Along with the launch, the MOI maneuver is one of the two riskiest parts of the mission, according to David Brain, deputy science lead on the mission from LASP.
“Of course, there’s some worry there, but overall I feel confident. I feel like the team has practiced, the spacecraft has been tested. There’s a chance that it might not go well, and we’ll deal with that when it happens,” Brain said. “Mostly, I’m feeling some anticipation, and like there is about to be a firehose of data headed my way.”
Navigators on Earth say the Hope spacecraft is right on target for the insertion burn. Hitting the aimpoint after the more than 200-day trip from Earth is comparable to an archer hitting 2-millimeter target from a kilometer away, Withnell said.
Ground controllers back on Earth will be in “observing mode” during the one-shot Mars arrival maneuver, according to Withnell.
“We have no opportunity to have any meaningful real time impact on what’s happening,” Withnell said. “So a lot of the engineering emphasis has been on making the MOI event completely autonomous, which of course means that the spacecraft needs to have some level of smarts on-board to take care of maybe some events that are not completely expected. So to some degree, the spacecraft can take care of itself. If a thruster fails and whatnot, then the spacecraft actually knows how to react to that. So during the event, we are observers, and we get to see what’s happening. But we do not interact in real time.”
Engineers will be watching telemetry streams from the spacecraft to confirm it is pointing in the right direction, and then verify that the burn started on time. Ground teams will monitor the Doppler shift in the radio signals from the spacecraft to measure how much it has slowed down relative to Mars, and the Hope probe itself will be calculating its trajectory autonomously.
Assuming the burn goes according to plan, the Hope spacecraft will swing into a preliminary capture orbit ranging between 600 miles and 30,700 miles (1,000-by-49,380 kilometers) from Mars. The science instruments will collect their first data at the Red Planet in the coming weeks, setting the stage for Hope to steer into an operational science orbit by mid-May that ranges between approximately 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers) and 26,700 miles (43,000 kilometers) above Mars.
During parts of each 55-hour semi-synchronous orbit, the spacecraft’s move at roughly the same speed around Mars as the planet’s rotation. That will give the orbiter’s science instruments sustained views of the same region of Mars in much the same way weather satellites in geostationary orbit provide uninterrupted views of the same part of Earth.
In addition to the LASP facility in Colorado — where the spacecraft was built — and Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center — where the probe will be operated — scientists from Arizona State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Northern Arizona University contributed to the Hope mission.
The UAE’s government set the nation on a course for a Mars mission by outlining several objectives, including inspiration for Arab youth, revitalizing the UAE’s high-tech sector, introducing a culture for research and development, and aligning the mission’s arrival at Mars with the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence in 1971.
The Hope mission has already largely met those objectives, al-Amiri said.
The spacecraft was built for a fraction of the cost of NASA’s recent Mars orbiters, and still has the instrumentation necessary to investigate key unanswered questions about the Martian climate.
And the mission has gone a long way toward inspiring Arab youth, according to al-Amiri.
“Within a circle of people within the Arab region that I’m with, a lot of them are people that I’ve had discussions with even prior to the launch of this mission, and they were highly speculative with whether or not we will be able to achieve this objective,” she said. “And for them it’s been a reality check on what is possible from this region, and a reality check on how we can go about creating more and more positive change from the region. And I think a lot of the youth, especially over the course of at least the last six to seven years, have been really frustrated with instability and are looking for the creation of stability.
“Mars has been visible in the sky,” al-Amiri said. “Almost every child that I come into daily contact with … they’ll be able to point out Mars in the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever lived through a time where that was normal conversation in family settings.”
More than 450 people worked on the Emirates Mars Mission, according to UAE officials. About 200 members of the team have come from the UAE, and about 150 people from LASP in Colorado have worked on the project. Of the 200 Emiratis assigned to the mission, more than a third have been women.
This infographic illustrates the Hope mission’s journey to Mars. Credit: MBRSC
Brain said the instruments aboard the Hope spacecraft are similar to sensors flown on past space missions, but the UAE’s probe will go into a unique orbit that lingers higher above Mars.
The Emirates Mars Mission will put the instruments “into this new orbit that opens up all new science for us to investigate the Martian atmosphere,” Brain said. “So there are three aspects of the science orbit that are important. No. 1, it’s a very high altitude orbit, much higher than most other Mars science missions. That high-altitude orbit lets our instruments observe Mars from the global perspective. We’ll always be seeing roughly half of Mars, no matter where we are in the orbit when we look at the planet.
“No. 2, the orbit is fairly close to parallel with the Mars equator, and by this, I mean something like how the moon orbits Earth,” Brain said. “EMM will have a moon-like orbit around the planet unlike many other Mars spacecraft, which orbits over the top of the North Pole, and then over the bottom of the South Pole. They have highly inclined orbits that are very polar. Those kinds of orbits are great for science, but they force the spacecraft to always observe at the same time of day, 2 a.m., 2 p.m. 2 a.m., 2 p.m. When you lay that orbit on its side like the moon orbits the Earth, suddenly every time you go around the planet, you visit at every time of day. You get above midnight, you get above noon, you get above 3 p.m. You’ve seen all the times of day, which is great for our science.”
“The last part of the orbit that’s important here is that it still is elliptical. Sometimes the spacecraft is close to Mars, sometimes far from Mars,” Brain said. “So when it’s far from Mars, it’s moving slowly, it’s above one time of day, while Mars spins underneath. So it can observe many geographic regions at a single time of day. When the whole probe gets close to Mars it speeds up, and it can match the speed at which Mars is spinning on its axis. It can hover above a single geographic region like the big volcano Olympus Mons and study the atmosphere there at many times of day.”
Many of the science goals of the Emirates Mars Mission build on discoveries made by NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, which arrived at the Red Planet in 2014. Scientists have analyzed data from the MAVEN mission to confirm that the bombardment of the solar wind and radiation stripped away the Martian atmosphere, transforming the planet from a warmer, wetter world into the barren planet of today.
The Hope probe will track oxygen and hydrogen escaping from the Martian atmosphere into space, and will peer deeper into the planet’s atmosphere than MAVEN. Scientists want to investigate possible links between Martian weather and climate with the escape of atmospheric particles.
A color camera on the mission was developed by LASP at the University of Colorado at Boulder and MBRSC. Infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers were produced by LASP, Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with Emirati scientists.
“Overall, the science goal of EMM is to get a global understanding of sort of how the atmosphere works together, transport in the atmosphere, how weather above Olympus Mons influences weather completely on the other side of the planet, or at a different time,” Brain said.
“The first science objective is to understand the lower atmosphere of Mars in a global sense, and how the lower atmosphere of Mars varies geographically with time of day, and over the Martian seasons,” Brain said.
The Hope mission will also probe the outermost layers of the Martian atmosphere, where hydrogen and oxygen are escaping into space.
“We’ve learned from past missions that the loss of the atmosphere over time, over Martian history, we think, is important. But we need to do more to quantify that loss to understand how the rest of the atmosphere influences that loss to space,” Brain said.
The Hope spacecraft’s other primary science goal is to study the link between weather in the lower atmosphere and the conditions at the top of the atmosphere.
“If there’s a dust storm in the lower atmosphere, does atmospheric escape increase, and how?” Brain said. “If there is some change in the lower atmosphere, or a bunch of cloud formations, how does the upper atmosphere respond? In the past we’ve had missions that study the upper atmosphere, we’ve had missions to study the lower atmosphere, usually at just a single time of day, but we haven’t had a lot of observations that help us how understand how the atmosphere works from bottom to top, so EMM will provide that information.”
“We’re going to get complete coverage of the Martian atmosphere every nine Martian days, and by complete coverage, I mean we will have observed every geographic region at every time of day every nine days,” Brain said.
But first, the Hope spacecraft has to get itself into position to make those observations. That hinges on the Mars Orbit Insertion maneuver Tuesday.
What if something goes wrong?
“We continue on,” al-Amiri said. “It’s not a a one-off program. It is not something that you quit. We’ve had a taste of planetary exploration, and I think we will continue delving in for more.”
SpaceX may be a lot of things conflicting things, but you have to admit one thing: NASA approves. So much so that it’s going to use SpaceX as launch company for the SPHEREx program.
The SPHEREx project is a seriously cool one. The name stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (you can see why it needs a nickname), and it’s intended to answer two big questions. First, it’s supposed to help us understand how our universe evolved. Second, it’s designed to track down the common building blocks of life across the galaxy—basically, how common are certain elements and in which combinations do they need to appear for life to happen?
Here’s a little more info from Space:
The SPHEREx instrument will be able to gather optical and near-infrared light from a mind-bogglingly large number of sources: more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way itself and more than 300 million other galaxies. It will manage to tackle two different but equally fundamental questions in those two different purviews.
All told, SPHEREx will scan through the whole sky and gather data in 96 different wavelengths of light. Within our Milky Way galaxy, SPHEREx will map water and organic molecules, which are both fundamental ingredients for life as we know it. And beyond our galaxy, it will look back into the very first moments of our universe. Scientists will be able to use its data to prioritize observing targets for other future space telescope missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.
The probe will hopefully launch as soon as 2024, hitching a ride on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The launch will still be managed by NASA, and NASA is still going to be in charge of all the data—it just needs SpaceX as a way to hitch a ride out of the atmosphere.
With the money it had to pay to SpaceX, we’re looking at a mission that costs around $98.8 million—which seems like a lot but could be a small price to pay to discover more about the mysteries of the universe.
A Falcon 9 rocket climbs into a moonlit sky over Cape Canaveral after liftoff at 1:19 a.m. EST (0619 GMT) Thursday. Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now
Sixty more SpaceX-owned Starlink internet satellites rocketed through a moonlit winter sky over Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 launcher early Thursday, while another Falcon 9 stood on a different launch pad a few miles away to loft another 60 Starlink payloads Friday.
Nine Merlin 1D engines flashed to life and sent a rumble across Florida’s Space Coast at 1:19 a.m. EST (0619 GMT) Thursday. Hold-down clamps released to allow the 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket to climb off pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The Falcon 9’s guidance system steered the rocket northeast from Cape Canaveral to align with planned orbital inclination of the Starlink satellites.
After surpassing the speed of sound, the Falcon 9 soared into the rarefied uppermost layers of the atmosphere and shed its 15-story first stage booster around two-and-a-half minutes into the flight. An upper stage engine ignited to continue accelerating into orbit with the 60 Starlink satellites, while the first stage — designed B1060 in SpaceX’s reusable rocket inventory — descended to an on-target landing on SpaceX’s drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” nearly 400 miles (630 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
The first stage’s landing punctuated the fifth trip to space and back for this booster, and it broke a record for the fastest turnaround between flights of a SpaceX booster, besting the previous mark of 38 days set last month.
Here’s a replay of the Falcon 9 rocket launching minutes ago from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
This was the fourth Falcon 9 launch of the year, and the 107th Falcon 9 flight overall since 2010.https://t.co/TyXGKQ0Tf3 pic.twitter.com/7zhgSix4m9
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) February 4, 2021
The booster on Thursday’s mission last flew Jan. 7 with the Turksat 5A communications satellite, just 27 days ago.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage reached a preliminary orbit with the 60 Starlink satellites about nine minutes after liftoff Tuesday, then reignited its engine for one second to maneuver into a targeted orbit ranging between 155 miles and 180 miles (250-by-291 kilometers) in altitude.
The 60 Starlink satellites deployed from the rocket a little more than an hour after liftoff, while flying over the Pacific Ocean near New Zealand.
With the fresh broadband relay stations launched Thursday, SpaceX’s Starlink fleet appears to have grown to more 1,000 active satellites, according to data gathered by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global satellite and launch activity.
In total, the company has launched 1,085 satellites to date, including prototypes and failed spacecraft that are no longer in orbit.
Another 60 Starlink satellites are mounted on a Falcon 9 rocket awaiting liftoff from pad 39A, a few miles north of pad 40 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. That launch has been grounded several days to await better weather conditions in the offshore booster landing zone in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX briefly planned to launch both Falcon 9 rockets less than five hours apart early Thursday, but the company said Wednesday afternoon that the mission from pad 39A would be pushed back until Friday morning at 5:14 a.m. EST (1014 GMT) “to allow additional time for pre-launch checks.”
Flying 170 miles above Earth near New Zealand, the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage just deployed 60 more Starlink internet satellites to join SpaceX’s ever-growing fleet of broadband relay platforms in orbit. https://t.co/TyXGKQ0Tf3 pic.twitter.com/TARFqiuqf6
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) February 4, 2021
SpaceX has both of its ocean-going rocket landing platforms, or drone ships, deployed in the Atlantic Ocean for the two Starlink missions.
The two missions will be the 18th and 19th dedicated Falcon 9 flights for the Starlink network, which SpaceX is building out to provide broadband internet services around the world. Thursday’s mission was SpaceX’s fourth Falcon 9 launch of the year, and the 107th Falcon 9 flight overall since 2010.
SpaceX says the Starlink network is providing preliminary low-latency internet service to users in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom through a beta testing program. Commercial service will begin after SpaceX has its initial network of around 1,584 satellites in orbit, including spares.
The quarter-ton Starlink satellites are built by SpaceX technicians and engineers in Redmond, Washington.
The initial block of Starlink satellites, including the 60 launched Thursday, fly in mid-inclination orbits tilted 53 degrees to the equator. The new Starlink satellites will unfurl their solar panels and activate their automated krypton ion thrusters to reach their final operating positions in the network.
Once operational, they will orbit at an altitude of 341 miles, or 550 kilometers, to provide broadband coverage over nearly all of the populated world.
SpaceX plans to launch more Starlink satellites into polar orbit to enable global coverage for maritime and aviation customers, including the U.S. military. The company has regulatory approval to launch around 12,000 Starlink satellites.
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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will launch SpaceX’s next batch of approximately 60 Starlink broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
SpaceX’s live webcast will be available on this page beginning around 15 minutes before launch.
If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member. If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.
If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member. If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will launch SpaceX’s 18th batch of approximately 60 Starlink broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Credit: Spaceflight Now
Spaceflight Now Members can watch a live view of the Falcon 9 rocket on pad 39A. SpaceX’s live webcast will be available on this page for everyone beginning around 15 minutes before launch.
If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member. If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.
Video created from a series of still images taken by Solar Orbiter. The brightest objects, from left to right, are Venus, Earth, and Mars.Gif: ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI/Gizmodo
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day.
On November 18, 2020, the Solar Orbiter managed to capture three of our solar system’s eight planets in a single frame, according to a European Space Agency statement. The resulting four-second movie was stitched together from a series of still images taken across 22 hours.
Venus is the largest and brightest of the objects, followed by Earth and then Mars to the lower right of the frame. What’s particularly cool about this vantage point is that the probe is peering back into the solar system as it heads away from the Sun and towards Venus.
Venus, Earth, and Mars, as spotted by the Solar Orbiter.Image: ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI
When the photos were taken, Solar Orbiter was 30 million miles (48 million km) from Venus, 156 million miles (251 million km) from Earth, and 206 million miles (332 million km ) from Mars. The Sun is out of frame to the lower right, but its glow is clearly visible.
The spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, was en route to Venus for a gravitational assist when the images were taken using its Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) camera. Solar Orbiter eventually flew past Venus on December 27. A steady diet of flybys with Earth and Venus will bring the probe closer to the Sun and also tilt its axis of orbit such that it can observe the Sun from different angles.
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Launched in February 2020 and equipped with 10 different instruments, Solar Orbiter is a mission to study the Sun from up-close. The closest images ever taken of the Sun, made last July, showed previously unknown “campfires” on the surface of our star, uncovering stellar processes only dreamed about in theory.
The probe is also studying conditions in its immediate vicinity, namely the solar wind, or charged particles, pouring out from the Sun into space. The resulting data will help scientists to predict inclement space weather that can harm communications and technology on Earth.
A false-color mosaic Titan’s polar regions. Kraken Mare is the dim splotch to the right of center. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho
Data gathered by NASA’s Cassini probe has allowed scientists to estimate the depth of Kraken Mare—the biggest methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan.
New research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research is expanding our knowledge of Titan’s hydrocarbon seas, specifically Kraken Mare. This sea, approximately 600 miles (1,000 km) long, is larger than all five of North America’s Great Lakes combined and holds around 80% of the moon’s surface liquids. The seas on Titan contain lots of methane and ethane and are comparable to liquified natural gas on Earth.
Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to host an atmosphere. The thick, nitrogen-rich blanket that covers the moon hides a complex hydraulic system on the surface, but instead of liquid water, the rivers, lakes, and seas on Titan consist of oily black methane. Titan features other curiosities as well, such as gigantic dust storms, ice volcanoes, and enormous sand dunes.
As the new research shows, the deepest parts of Kraken Mare could be more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep. The team, led by Valerio Poggiali, a research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, can’t actually be sure of that figure, because the radar pings used to determine sea depth never actually reached the seafloor.
False-color image of Kraken Mare. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Agenzia Spaziale Italiana/USGS
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, and scientists have already studied some of the smaller seas on Titan using Cassini’s onboard altimeter. On August 21, 2014, Cassini flew to within 600 miles (970 km) of Titan’s surface and was able to send radar pings into Kraken Mare. Interestingly, this was the same flyby that resulted in the discovery of Ligeia Mare—a “magic” vanishing island on Titan.
Researchers at Cornell and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory devised a neat technique for determining the depth of Titan’s seas, which involves measuring differences between the time it takes radar to bounce back from the surface of the sea as opposed to the sea bottom. This technique helps to estimate sea depth, but the researchers have to make certain assumptions about the density of fluids on Titan and how quickly radio waves pass through them.
Using this technique, the team measured the depth of Moray Sinus, a northern estuary on Kraken Mare, which they found to be 280 feet (85 meters) deep. The absorption rate of the radar waves suggests the liquid in this part of the sea consists of 70% methane, 16% nitrogen, and 14% ethane. The scientists were expecting more methane than this due to the size and location of the sea, but this discovery suggests a more uniform distribution of chemicals across the moon’s various bodies of water.
Altimeter scans done across the main portion of Kraken Mare were less conclusive. As the authors write in the study, the NASA probe found “no evidence for signal returns from the sea floor, suggesting the liquid is either too deep or too absorptive for Cassini’s radio waves to penetrate.” That said, if the liquid in this part of the sea is similar in composition to the liquid found at Moray Sinus, then it must be deeper than 330 feet (100 meters) and possibly as deep as 1,000 feet (300 meters), according to the study.
Poggiali is hopeful that a robotic submarine might be sent to Titan one day to explore Kraken Mare or some other body of water. And in fact, he sees the new research as a step in that direction.
“Thanks to our measurements, scientists can now infer the density of the liquid with higher precision, and consequently better calibrate the sonar aboard the [future robotic submarine] and understand the sea’s directional flows,” explained Poggiali in a Cornell University statement.
A conceptual plan from 2015 showed how such a mission might look, but nothing has actually been approved in this regard. That said, NASA will be sending an aerial drone, called Dragonfly, to Titan, which should arrive at the moon at some point in the mid-2030s.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off Sunday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket Sunday from Cape Canaveral with 143 small satellites, a record number of spacecraft on a single mission, giving a boost to startup space companies and stressing the U.S. military’s tracking network charged with sorting out the locations of all objects in orbit.
The 143 small spacecraft, part of SpaceX’s “Transporter-1” rideshare mission, took off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT), a day after thick cloud cover prevented the rocket from leaving Earth.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket soared toward the southeast from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, then vectored its thrust to fly on a coast-hugging trajectory toward South Florida, before flying over Cuba, the Caribbean Sea, and Central America.
The unusual trajectory was similar to the track followed by a Falcon 9 launch in August 2020, which was the first launch since the 1960s from Florida’s Space Coast to head into a polar orbit.
The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage booster — flying for the fifth time — landed on SpaceX’s “Of Course I Still Love You” drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean southeast of Miami nearly 10 minutes after liftoff. SpaceX said it also retrieved the rocket’s payload fairing halves after they parachuted back to Earth in the Atlantic.
The rocket’s second stage powered into orbit with its 143 satellite passengers, flew over Antarctica, then briefly reignited its engine while heading north over the Indian Ocean.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket with a record-setting 143 satellites heading for sun-synchronous orbit. https://t.co/cx1fjVHPpb pic.twitter.com/MzMVoESrUu
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) January 24, 2021
The launch Sunday carried payloads for Planet, Swarm Technologies, Kepler Communications, Spire, Capella Space, ICEYE, NASA, and a host of other customers from 11 countries. The payloads ranged in size from CubeSats to microsatellites weighing several hundred pounds.
The Falcon 9 rocket will also delivered 10 more of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites into space, the first Starlink craft to head for a polar orbit.
SpaceX aimed to placed the satellites into an orbit roughly 326 miles (525 kilometers) in altitude, with an inclination of 97.5 degrees to the equator. The company confirmed an on-target orbital injection after the second burn of the Falcon 9’s upper stage engine, setting the stage for a carefully-choreographed payload deployment sequence that took more than a half-hour to complete.
The mission Sunday broke the record number of satellites on a single launch, exceeding the 104 spacecraft launched on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in 2017.
Record rideshare launch challenges tracking capabilities, raises questions for regulators
U.S. military radars and optical sensors scattered around the world were ready to detect and track all 143 satellites after separation from the Falcon 9 rocket.
That data will be fed to the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, where sophisticated computers and military personnel will generate datasets, or orbital elements, for each object and add them to the catalog of more than 27,000 human-made objects tracked in orbit.
The Space Force is responsible for maintaining the catalog of artificial space objects, and screening for potential collisions between satellites and space debris, which could generate even more junk in orbit.
“We’re in the business of space domain awareness,” said Lt. Col. Justin Sorice, commander of the 18th Sapce Control Squadron, in an interview with Spaceflight Now last year. “That means we want to understand what’s going on in the domain so that we can be responsible and we can alert owner-operators.
“We’re kind of like the lighthouse,” Sorice said. “We’re not the air traffic controllers, so I can’t tell other owner-operators from either the U.S. or other countries to move their satellites. But what we can do is give them plenty of warning.”
But it could take some time to sort identify each of the 143 satellites, along with debris generated from the Transporter-1 launch.
“Releasing so many objects on the same launch presents a huge challenge for the people that are tasked to track and identify those objects,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning and technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation. “It’s really difficult for them to do that unless they have a lot of advance knowledge about how many payloads there are, when are they going to be deployed, what orbit are they deployed in, how are they going to be deployed? There are a lot of little nuances there that can help, but they have to know that information.”
This photo shows the stack of 143 small satellites aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission before encapsulation inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload shroud. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX is “generally pretty good” about providing the Space Force with information about the orbits targeted by its missions, Weeden said. That helps radars and optical sensors know when and where to look to detect the new satellites.
“Imagine you’re the 18th Space Control Squadron, and you now see, let’s say, 100 things that are all roughly 10-centimeter cubes?” Weeden said. “How the heck do you know which is which?”
Falcon 9 launches carrying batches of 60 Starlink satellites at a time have become the norm, and SpaceX typically releases its orbital targets and deployment times. The process is more simple for a Starlink launch, where SpaceX owns all the satellites, than for a rideshare mission with numerous customers.
“If the satellite operator knows where it is, and can contact their satellite quickly after launch, this is not a huge problem,” Weeden said. “But if they can’t contact quickly after launch, and then they turn to the military for help in trying to find their satellites so they can talk to it, that’s where it becomes a real problem.”
SpaceX provided predicted orbital information to the space traffic management community before the Transporter-1 mission, but only for satellites and support hardware that would separate directly from the Falcon 9 upper stage, not the payloads riding on carrier vehicles, or space tugs, designed to deploy small satellites hours or days later.
“They’ll be tracking them relatively quickly,” Weeden said. “They won’t have them identified and catalogued for probably days, if not weeks.”
T.S. Kelso, an astrodynamicist who manages AGI’s Center for Space Standards and Innovation, agreed it could take weeks to identify and catalog all the objects from the Transporter-1 mission.
“I do think it is important to get all operators that are capable of independently tracking their satellites to publicly share their data, for the common benefit of all operators in Earth orbit,” Kelso wrote in an email to Spaceflight Now.
“I have been trying to get that message out, but with many new operators who are not familiar with the limitations of current legacy systems, we continue to see operators just assuming that tracking and identifying their satellites is a done deal, or believing that all they need to know is where their satellites are located,” said Kelso, who also runs the website CelesTrak.com.
Although SpaceX provides the space traffic management community with predicted orbital parameters before most of its launches, there’s no requirement for a launch or satellite company to do so.
SpaceX did not publicize the total number of satellites on the Transporter-1 mission until less than 24 hours before the first launch attempt, and the company has not released a comprehensive list of every satellite carried to orbit Sunday.
Many customers disclosed their participation in the Transporter-1 launch well in advance. Others announced they had payloads on the mission just days before liftoff, and some declined to publicly reveal their satellites were on the flight until after it launched.
“Interesting to see the varying amounts of transparency from the many companies involved in the Transporter-1 launch,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer who tracks space activity, shortly after Sunday’s launch. “Some have already tweeted about their successful deployments, and some have not even yet acknowledged that they were on the flight.”
Spaceflight Now was able to create a list of the payloads using regulatory filings, customer disclosures, and other industry sources.
James Russell, principal investigator for NASA’s AIM atmospheric research satellite at Hampton University, said launches of large clusters of satellites can put other spacecraft at risk. Russell said the AIM satellite flies at roughly the same altitude as the Transporter-1 mission’s target orbit.
“It’s an uncalculated collision risk,” Russell told Spaceflight Now “They have not calculated what the collision probability is once they launch the smaller satellites.”
This photo shows the stack of 143 small satellites aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission before encapsulation inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload shroud. Credit: SpaceX
Many of the satellites on the Transporter-1 mission have no way to change their orbit. AIM also carries no propulsion system, so there would be no way to steer clear of a collision, according to Russell.
Russell called for the U.S. government to “create policy” and for Congress to “make laws” setting safety requirements to limit the chances of in-space collisions.
“That doesn’t exist right now,” Russell said. “I think the process for getting this in place is moving, but it’s moving at a snail’s pace.”
The Federal Communications Commission decided last year not to immediately introduce any new major requirements for commercial satellite operators. The FCC discussed requiring commercial satellites above a certain altitude — where they might remain in orbit for decades — to have propulsion to maneuver and deorbit at the end of their missions.
“They did not fundamentally change the actual requirement because they got a huge amount of pushback from industry,” Weeden said. “So all of the serious changes got pushed to another round.”
The FCC licenses all satellites that transmit radio signals, giving it outsized influence over a large swath of the commercial space industry. Other agencies in the federal government’s disjointed space regulatory regime include the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial launches and re-entries, and NOAA in the Department of Commerce, which oversees commercial remote sensing satellites.
The FAA also reviews payloads flying on commercial space launches. Publicly available regulatory filings can give some hints about what payloads are flying in rideshare missions like Transporter-1, but they are often published months in advance of a launch.
In the rideshare launch business, payloads can be added or removed from a mission with little or no public notice.
Sensing explosive growth in the commercial space industry, the Obama administration started re-assessing the government’s regulatory approach to commercial spaceflight nearly a decade ago, but never implemented any significant changes.
The Trump administration issued a space policy directive in 2018 that would transition space traffic management responsibility from the military to the Department of Commerce. The Trump administration also directed the Commerce Department take on a “mission authorization” function, which would review, authorize and supervise commercial space activities that don’t fall under the regulatory authority of the FAA, the FCC, or NOAA.
“That’s not ideal,” Weeden said. “That is, I would say, about as light touch as you can possibly get, but it would at least put someone, a government agency, nominally responsible for looking at this stuff.”
A visualization of space debris in low Earth orbit. Credit: NASA
Congress would need to act to give the Commerce Department the mission authorization authority. But that is “probably not going to happen for a while,” Weeden said.
Until then, there is no specific federal agency empowered to look into issues like space debris mitigation or public disclosures about commercial space activity.
“This is why the FCC is involved because right now, since they regulate spectrum, that means they touch just about every single commercial satellite out there,” Weeden said. “So they’re really the only existing entity that already has regulatory authority over all these commercial activities.
“That is why right now they’re the vehicle for regulating these large constellations,” Weeden said. “But they’re probably not the ideal way to do that because they do spectrum. They don’t really do debris mitigation and this other stuff.”
Governments are required to provide the United Nations with basic information about the orbit and purpose of satellites under the Registration Convention. But that information is usually published well after a launch.
Space traffic management experts have also developed radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags that could help identify satellites in orbit. But that, too, has gotten little traction beyond a few technical experiments.
“There’s a lot of interest and support for that from the technical community, but the Trump administration was not wiling to put any kind of requirements on companies like that,” Weeden said. “Unknown if the Biden administration will.”
Without regulatory requirements in place, government agencies urge commercial satellite operators to follow guidelines and “best practices” to avoid generating more space junk.
“But in the end these companies, in this case SpaceX, they’ve got a financial incentive to launch these small satellites, so they have to make their own decisions,” Russell said. “And they’re very, very tight-lipped about what they’re launching because they have individual agreements with different people.
“I think we need to take some action now to step up the process to get regulations in place where not only the private interests but the public interests can be met, and it’ll help everybody.”
SpaceX’s rideshare launch prices are the ‘cheapest to date’
SpaceX announced its small satellite rideshare launch offering in 2019, and Sunday’s launch was the first of a series of Transporter missions set to take off every four months. SpaceX’s next dedicated rideshare launch, Transporter-2, is tentatively scheduled to launch in mid-2021 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
On its website, SpaceX says it charges customers as little as $1 million to launch a payload of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) on a dedicated rideshare flight to sun-synchronous orbit. Enabled by cost reductions from reusing Falcon 9 rocket hardware, the SpaceX prices are significantly less than the rate charged by any other launch provider for a payload of similar mass.
“These launches are very cost-efficient, the cheapest to date,” said Jeanne Medvedeva, vice president of launch services at Berlin-based Exolaunch, a rideshare broker that arranged the launch of 30 of the 143 satellites on the Transporter-1 mission.
Companies like Exolaunch reserved ports on the Transporter-1 payload stack, then divided that capacity among multiple small satellite customers. Spaceflight, based in Seattle, the Italian company D-Orbit, the Dutch small satellite launch broker Innovative Solutions in Space, Houston-based Nanoracks, and Maverick Space Systems of California all booked capacity on the Transporter-1 mission, then divvied their slots among their customers.
Artist’s illustration of Swarm’s tiny SpaceBEE satellites. Credit: Swarm
“When we launch more than one satellite on each port, we make the price even better for the customer,” Medvedeva said in a pre-launch interview with Spaceflight Now. “SpaceX sells a 200-kilogram port … I know few satellites which are 200 kilograms precisely, so if you are lighter than 200, there is a chance to add other payloads just to share the slot.”
SpaceX’s prices undercut those of small satellite launch companies like Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit. Those launch providers offer rides for payloads into different types of orbits, where the small satellite owner has the choice of altitude and inclination.
The Transporter missions from SpaceX are more akin to a train or bus line than a taxi or an Uber, says Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO. They are cheaper, but don’t always get you exactly where you need to go.
Sun-synchronous orbit, in which satellites fly in a north-south direction around Earth, is a popular destination for Earth observation satellites because it offers regular revisits over imaging targets at the same time of day, allowing the collection of imagery under the same lighting conditions.
SpaceX launched a rideshare mission to sun-synchronous orbit in December 2018 with 64 small satellites on-board. But that mission, named SSO-A, was managed by Spaceflight, which purchased the full capacity of a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. Spaceflight returned to SpaceX as a customer on the Transporter-1 mission, opting to buy a fraction of the Falcon 9’s overall capacity rather than booking the entire rocket.
Spaceflight’s Sherpa space tug carried 13 of the satellites on the Transporter-1 mission, plus a pair of non-separating hosted payloads. The hosted customers included a pod containing the cremated remains of 104 people, a commercial service provided by Celestis.
The Sherpa-FX vehicle separated from the Falcon 9’s payload stack as a single unit, then commenced a mission scheduled to last several hours to release its 13 satellites.
“Effectively, to SpaceX, we’re just another microsat sitting on their vehicle,” said Ryan Olcott, Spaceflight’s mission manager.
“Spaceflight can come in and do what we’ve always done, fractionalize the cost of launch, and figure out smart ways to bring in hardware and know-how,” Olcott said. The Sherpa system is designed to “get everyone where they want to go a little bit cheaper, and make us a little money in the process,” he said.
Artist’s concept of Spaceflight’s Sherpa orbital transportation vehicle. Credit: Spaceflight
The battery-powered Sherpa-FX spacecraft was designed to test out systems for more advanced Sherpa tugs in the future. Spaceflight is developing Sherpa vehicles with propulsion, attitude control systems, and solar panels to ferry small satellites into different orbits than the altitude and inclination targeted by massive rideshare launches like SpaceX’s Transporter missions.
Another space tug from D-Orbit, a company headquartered in Italy, was also deployed on the Transporter-1 mission. Similar in function to Spaceflight’s Sherpa, D-Orbit’s ION SCV Laurentius vehicle carried 20 small satellites for Planet and Swarm.
Exolaunch and Nanoracks deployed their customers’ payloads directly from carriers that remained on-board the Transporter-1 stack. And Maverick Space Systems integrated three small NASA CubeSats into a deployer mounted on the rear of the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage, near the Merlin engine.
Transporter-1 payloads begin menagerie of missions
The 143 satellites launched Sunday have missions ranging from communications to Earth observation, scientific research, and technology demonstrations. The payloads come from customers in the United States, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and Turkey.
Planet, a San Francisco-based company, had 48 shoebox-sized SuperDove nanosatellites aboard Sunday’s mission. They join more than 150 other small satellites in Planet’s fleet providing daily remote sensing imagery around the world.
There were 36 tiny SpaceBEE data relay satellites on Sunday’s launch from Swarm Technologies, each weighing less than 2 pounds (1 kilogram). The “BEE” in SpaceBEE stands for Basic Electronic Element.
Swarm, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is developing a low-data-rate satellite communications fleet the company says could be used by connected cars, remote environmental sensors, industrial farming operations, transportation, smart meters, and for text messaging in rural areas outside the range of terrestrial networks.
The company said the 36 SpaceBEEs, each about the size of a slice of bread, doubled the number of satellites in its network.
There were eight nanosatellites launched Sunday for Kepler Communications, a Toronto-based company with plans to field a fleet of 140 small spacecraft for data relay and Internet of Things services. Kepler’s eight “GEN1” nanosatellites were built at the company’s own production facility in Toronto.
Kepler previously launched three prototype nanosatellites and the first two GEN1 satellites in September. The GEN1 satellites, based on a 6U-XL CubeSat bus, are production models with higher power and improved antennas to support Ku-band and narrowband communications capabilities, according to Kepler.
“We’re excited to continue our network deployment in response to the overwhelming global demand for our network capacity. As our network continues to grow, we move closer to recognizing Kepler’s vision of providing connectivity on and off the surface of the Earth,” said Mina Mitry, Kepler’s CEO, in a statement.
Eight Lemur-2 CubeSats from Spire Global were also on the launch. They join Spire’s fleet of smallsats providing aircraft and maritime tracking services, and collecting atmospheric data for use in weather forecasting.
Radar imaging satellites also received a boost Sunday. All are microsatellites weighing up to a couple hundred pounds, bigger than most of the payloads on the Transporter-1 mission.
Three radar remote sensing spacecraft from the Finnish company ICEYE were on the Sunday’s launch. Capella Space, an ICEYE competitor in the United States, launched its second and third radar imaging satellites for commercial use, named Capella 3 and Capella 4.
A Japanese remote sensing company named iQPS launched its second radar surveillance satellite on the Transporter-1 mission.
HawkEye 360, a U.S. company planning a satellite constellation to monitor terrestrial radio signals, said its second cluster of formation-flying spacecraft were on Sunday’s launch. They were to be deployed from Spaceflight’s Sherpa-FX space tug.
HawkEye 360’s three newest satellites. Credit: HawkEye 360
“The expansion of our pioneering constellation is the first of several strong steps we have planned to multiply our existing capabilities and explore new possibilities for RF geospatial intelligence,” said John Serafini, HawkEye 360’s CEO. “We are proud to be the leading provider of RF insights to U.S. government, international governments, commercial and humanitarian interests, and we believe our newest deployment, which increases the frequency, quality and quantity of insights we are able to deliver, will be an invaluable resource for our customers.”
The company’s satellites are capable of detecting, characterizing, and locating the source of radio transmissions. Such data are useful in government intelligence-gathering operations.
Astrocast, a Swiss company, had five CubeSats on Sunday’s mission, also on the Sherpa-FX tug. The nanosatellites are the latest in Astrocast’s planned network of 80 small spacecraft to collect and downlink data from weather buoys, wellhead sensors, pollution monitors and other remote stations.
The Transporter-1 rideshare mission also delivered into orbit a small satellite designed to monitor greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. The GHGSat-C2 satellite, also known as “Hugo,” is owned by a startup named GHGSat based in Montreal.
Some missions had to drop off the Transporter-1 mission in final weeks before launch, including a pair of tech demo Mandrake 2 satellites for DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development agency.
The two 187-pound (85-kilogram) satellites were damaged during launch processing at a SpaceX facility at Cape Canaveral, according to DARPA. The twin Mandrake 2 satellites were designed to test inter-satellite broadband links in orbit.
The first Vigoride space tug developed by the in-space transportation startup Momentus was also removed from the Transporter-1 launch. Momentus said in regulatory filings that the Vigoride mission did not clear an FAA review in time.
The Vigoride space tug was supposed to maneuver into a slightly higher orbit after separating from the Transporter-1 stack, then deploy five small CubeSats for commercial customers. The Vigoride tug and its five satellite ridealongs were all removed from the Transporter-1 mission.
SpaceX responded to the late subtractions by requesting and receiving FCC approval to add 10 more Starlink satellites to the Falcon 9 rocket. The quarter-ton flat-panel satellites are the first Starlinks to launch into a polar orbit, joining more 1,000 other Starlink platforms flying in lower-inclination orbits from previous Falcon 9 flights.
The Starlink network is designed to provide low-latency broadband connectivity. Polar-orbiting satellites will extend the network’s coverage globally.
Here’s a list of all 143 satellites launched on the Transporter-1 mission:
48 SuperDove satellites for Planet
36 SpaceBEE satellites for Swarm
10 Starlink satellites for SpaceX
8 GEN1 satellites for Kepler
8 Lemur-2 satellites for Spire
5 Astrocast satellites
3 HawkEye 360 satellites
3 ICEYE satellites
3 V-R3x satellites for NASA
3 ARCE-1 satellites for the University of South Florida
2 Capella satellites
Sherpa-FX space tug for Spaceflight
D-Orbit’s ION SCV Laurentius space tug
iQPS-2 for iQPS of Japan
YUSAT for Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology
IDEASSAT for Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology
Artist’s impression of an Artemis mission to the Moon. Image: NASA
Despite the ongoing pandemic, there’s much to be excited about in space this year. NASA’s Perseverance rover is less than a month away from landing on Mars; the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on Halloween; and the Space Launch System—NASA’s most powerful rocket ever—could see its inaugural launch later this year. And of course, there’s the Artemis program, which is supposed to deliver a woman and man to the lunar surface in just three years.
We will learn much in the coming weeks and months about President Biden’s NASA policy and what his administration believes is the best path forward for the American space program. In the meantime, we reached out to space experts, asking a very simple question: What should be Biden’s NASA priorities?
John Mogsdon, a professor or political science and international affairs from the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: “I think it is important for President Biden and his administration to early on indicate a commitment to sustaining a human space exploration effort, with a return to the Moon as its first objective. The details of the current Artemis plan are likely to change, but it is well past time for the United States to once again be sending humans to distant destinations.”
Indeed, NASA is full-steam-ahead on the upcoming Artemis missions. The space agency originally planned for a lunar landing in 2028, but the Trump administration bumped that to 2024. It’s widely suspected that Biden will return NASA to its original timeline, but we can only speculate at this point.
Howard McCurdy, a professor of public affairs in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C., hopes that Biden keeps his eye on this prize—and other prizes to come. “His main space priority should be establishing a lunar/Mars exploration plan that lasts more than five years—also determining the future of the Boeing Starliner, launching the [James] Webb space telescope, and cementing the fate of the International Space Station,” said McCurdy. “He will have many science priorities, but NASA is not near the top of the list.”
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The whole Boeing Starliner thing is certainly worth a think, as this project—a spacecraft for delivering astronauts to the ISS—has been beset by problems and delays. The first crewed test of this system still appears to be a way’s off.
At the same time, SpaceX has delivered in the form the CrewDragon spacecraft, which successfully transported NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS last year. McCurdy also brings up a good point about Mars, as the Artemis Moon program is a skipping stone for the first human journey to the Red Planet, which could happen in the 2030s.
Jessica West, a program officer at Project Ploughshares and the managing editor of its Space Security Index, had this to say: “The future of the Artemis program is essential. NASA’s international partners are going to want assurances and clarity on the scope of the U.S. commitment and timeline. Cooperation is key, both to succeed at space exploration and to ensure that our planet and humanity share in the benefits. This starts with diplomacy. NASA has drafted the Artemis Accords as a tool for the development of norms for space exploration. But it’s not clear how or if it will work with the wider international community to turn this into a more inclusive process, at a time when other states also have lunar ambitions.”
“The Biden Administration should also be sensitive to the effects that the Space Force–and it’s rhetorical emphasis on warfighting and domination–have on NASA and the global perceptions of it’s lunar ambitions,” West added.
West raises a very good point about the Artemis Accords. Humanity’s tendrils into space are growing longer and more numerous with each passing year, making things more complicated from a geopolitical perspective. It would be good to get buy-in from the international community on such matters, which may prove difficult with countries like Russia and China.
Peter Singer, a strategist at New America and author of Ghost Fleet and Burn-In, also chimed in about Space Force, the newest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. “Trump created Space Command, mostly for the reason he saw it as an applause line at his rallies,” he said. “So how does NASA and this new military organization co-exist over the long term? They will need to work together when it makes sense, but to also ensure that we don’t risk the actual, or just appearance, of militarization of space in our civilian activities.”
Ah yes—the ongoing threat that we might militarize space. That’s tricky one, particularly as the U.S. tries to keep pace with its aggressive adversaries and as Space Force works to achieve “spacepower” in this prospective warfighting domain.
Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas, recommended the following: “The National Space Council—an organization that focuses and reports out on various national activities with regards to space, both in government, academia, and industry—should be allowed to continue under Biden. NASA has a footprint in the National Space Council, and that should be allowed to continue.”
Jah added: “There should be a dedicated emphasis in space safety and sustainability, including as it relates to space traffic management. In 2018, Trump signed Space Policy Directive-3 [which focused on space traffic management]. The former administration called on the Office of Space Commerce to take the lead role—and I’m good with that. As for NASA’s role, it should provide input and oversight to the government regarding the science and technology needs of space traffic management.”
Space traffic management will most certainly be an issue moving forward. As it stands, the rules surrounding what goes into space, and how much of it, are fairly loose. As of January 20, SpaceX has over 1,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, with plans to add thousands more. That satellites might crash into each other, creating large and dangerous clouds of debris, is a possibility that increases with each successive satellite added to low Earth orbit. We need someone to play traffic cop up there, as well as someone to take out the trash.
Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission and professor at the University of Arizona, hopes that the Biden Administration will maintain or increase funding for the NASA Science Mission Directorate. “This Directorate performs essential research to monitor and predict the effects of climate change, explore the Solar System, and survey the Universe,” he said. “Budgets over the past four years have been favorable, and this is one area of the U.S. federal government where science activities remain healthy. The amazing achievements of NASA science programs serve as shining examples of what we can do as a nation when we unite and focus on a common vision.”
Well said. It would be sad to squander all the good things NASA has going at the moment, including satellites to help us predict bad space weather and weather on Earth, surveys to monitor melting glaciers, and spacecraft careering into the Sun and interstellar space. And, per Lauretta’s interests, grabbing surface samples from a nearby asteroid.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had plenty of sensible advice for President Biden: “NASA is the one part of the U.S. government that is not burning down right now, so don’t mess with (for the most part) success. What the human spaceflight program needs most is for the political leadership not to pull another 180, so continue Artemis despite its flaws, but remove the unrealistic 2024 deadline and appoint leaders who are not afraid to hold Boeing to account.”
McDowell also recommended firming up a plan for the end of the International Space Station, which has now been in orbit for more than 22 years and is showing its age. “Keep ISS going for a few more years to reap the investment made on CrewDragon and Starliner, but decide on the shutdown plan.”
“On the robotic/science side, fund it fully—supporting the climate science satellites and the education work the previous Administration tried to cut, get the Webb telescope into space and working, and let the science community pick the priorities going forward,” McDowell said. “Above all, don’t misuse the science program as a justification for the human space stuff—for example by forcing an emphasis on lunar-related science to provide a spurious justification for Artemis, which is the sort of thing that’s been done in the past.”
We also heard from Avi Loeb, an astronomy professor at Harvard University, whose recommendations were both philosophical and practical. “Given the wide interest in space exploration from the public, the scientific community and the commercial sector, it is essential to establish a new, bold vision that will maintain the leadership of the U.S. in space,” Loeb said. “This goes well beyond national security interests and relates back to JFK’s vision from 1962, the year I was born. The public is eager for inspiring initiatives, and space offers an ideal backdrop for an exciting vision that would advance our nation’s technological superiority. The importance of such a vision also builds on the immediate needs to add satellites that will allow better control of our effect on the climate and improve internet connectivity across the globe.”
Here, here. Space investment is often considered superfluous or indulgent, particularly as we face no shortage of problems on the surface. The challenge for Biden will be in achieving a fine balance—one that meets our needs here on Earth, while continuing to fulfill the legacy and potential of the American space program.
