| | | | |  Jeff Foust — After leaving the space community waiting and wondering for months, the White House is expected to nominate Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) as NASA administrator as soon as Sept. 5.
Several space industry sources, speaking on background, said they anticipated a formal nomination of Bridenstine to run the space agency on Sept. 5, the day after the Labor Day holiday. That schedule could slip, though, depending on other events and general uncertainty about the timing of administration decisions. Bridenstine emerged as an early favorite for NASA administrator immediately after Donald Trump won the presidential election last November. Bridenstine has been active on space issues in Congress and was also a staunch supporter of Trump's candidacy in the general election. See Full Story | | |  Debra Werner — At least eight of the nine cubesats sent by the Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket into a 600-kilometer orbit July 14 alongside a larger spacecraft, the Kanopus-V-IK Russian Earth-imaging satellite, are not responding to commands from their operators.
Three GeoOptics Cicero GPS radio-occultation satellites sent into that orbit are not functioning, according to a source who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the program. GeoOptics declined to comment based on a company policy not to confirm the status of individual satellites or launches. In addition, the UTE-UESOR cubesat built cooperatively by Ecuador's Equinoctial Technological University and the State University of Southwest Russia (UESOR) is not responding, Fausto Rodrigo Freire Carrera, UESOR representative in Ecuador, said by email. See Full Story | | |  Caleb Henry — Two separate propulsion problems will shorten the expected lifespan of Intelsat's second high-throughput satellite by an estimated 3.5 years, the company told SpaceNews Aug. 31.
Both anomalies are part of a $78 million insurance claim the Luxembourg- and Washington-based satellite operator filed in March, according to Dianne VanBeber, Intelsat's vice president of investor relations and corporate communications. Intelsat disclosed the insurance claim through its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings in March and July, but only mentioned a previously disclosed problem with Intelsat-33e's primary thruster. The thruster malfunctioned following Intelsat-33e's successful August 2016 launch atop an Ariane 5. The Boeing-built satellite, part of Intelsat's Epic series of broadband satellites, took until December to reach its 60-degrees east orbital location. A second propulsion problem cropped up a short while later when Intelsat initiated in-orbit testing and routine station keeping maneuvers to maintain the satellite's position above the Earth. See Full Story | | |  Jeff Foust — An Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) failed to place a navigation satellite into its planned orbit Aug. 31 when the rocket's payload fairing failed to deploy.
The PSLV, flying a mission designated PSLV-C39, lifted off on schedule at 9:30 a.m. Eastern from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the east coast of India. Initial phases of the launch appeared to go as planned, but observers noted that, as the flight progressed, the vehicle appeared to deviate from its planned trajectory according to telemetry displays shown during the webcast. Launch controllers later confirmed that vehicle's upper stage and payload, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) 1H satellite, had reached a lower orbit than planned. The payload was in an orbit of 167 by 6,555 kilometers, while the planned transfer orbit for the mission was 284 by 20,650 kilometers. SEE FULL STORY | | |  Michael Fabey — The latest North Korean missile tests come at time when the U.S. defensive shield is weakened, missile-defense analysts say, by this summer's loss of a pair of warships specially outfitted for ballistic-missile defense (BMD).
Those two guided-missile destroyers — the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald — collided with commercial ships, cutting down immediate regional U.S. maritime BMD capability by at least 14 percent. The chinks in the ocean-going parts of the shield and the subsequent tests, the analysts say, show a need to develop and deploy more space-based sensors to guarantee full and continuous missile-defense coverage. A more robust space-based layer would also provide a more encompassing picture of threats than ship- or land-based radars. SEE FULL STORY | | |  Debra Werner — The Trump administration has identified representatives of the various government agencies who will serve on the National Space Council, which is likely to hold its first meeting "very, very shortly," Greg Autry, the administration's former NASA liaison, said Aug. 30.
The National Space Council led by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Executive Director Scott Pace will focus on defense and economic policy rather than science and exploration, Autry said at the Space Technology and Investment Forum here. The administration will use the National Space Council to offer a cohesive U.S. government strategy and prevent NASA, the Defense Department, the National Reconnaissance Office and Congress from moving in different directions. "We all want to achieve a viable space economy and that's where we should all be moving," Autry said. SEE FULL STORY | | | Caleb Henry — Ground-based observations of PT Telkom's 18-year old Telkom-1 satellite show a large cloud of debris generated the night the satellite lost contact with customers across Indonesia. ExoAnalytic Solutions, a commercial space-situational-awareness company that employs a network of telescopes to track satellites and other orbital objects, recorded the event Aug. 25. That was the same day Indonesian satellite operator PT Telkom says Telkom-1 experienced its antenna problem. "There were definitely several larger pieces that we can track individually," Doug Hendrix, ExoAnalytic Solutions CEO, told SpaceNews. "The question is: was there a cloud of very small pieces, too? That is what we are trying to figure out." ExoAnalytic Solutions uses a network of more than 160 optical telescopes to monitor the geostationary arc, a 36,000 kilometer-high belt around the Earth where most telecommunications satellites reside. Those telescopes can detect objects down to 0.4 meters in size, Hendrix said, and with post-processing, down to 10 centimeters. SEE FULL STORY | | | Winners will be featured in the Dec. 18 issue of SpaceNews. - We seek to honor headline-grabbing breakthroughs as well as outside-the-limelight innovations that may have escaped our attention.
- A formal announcement on the awards program — including eligibility, criteria, and selection process — will be made in September.
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