| | | | |  Sandra Erwin, WASHINGTON — With Congress still months away from agreeing on military funding levels for fiscal year 2018, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry continues to press the case that the prolonged political morass is having real national security impact.
In his latest "defense drumbeat" Oct. 20, Thornberry cautioned the budget impasse will keep the Air Force from acquiring additional Space-Based Infrared Warning System satellites, known as SBIRS. The delay is of concern, he noted, as North Korea keeps threatening to launch missile strikes on the United States and its allies. This constellation is a "pillar of our nation's ability to gather intelligence on, identify, and track missile launches around the globe," the statement said. "The fact that North Korea has launched over 20 missiles this year, in addition to the increasingly sophisticated Iranian missile program, highlights how important these satellites are to our overall missile defense system." | | |  Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — Telesat is some three to five months ahead of OneWeb in launching low-Earth orbit telecommunications satellites, and barring a surprise launch from SpaceX, will likely be the first new mega-constellation to put hardware into operation.
Two prototype satellites ordered in April 2016 are awaiting launch before year's end — one on a Russian Soyuz and another on an an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle — paving the way for a larger constellation of over 100 small satellites. Telesat LEO is the biggest satellite project the company has undertaken in its 50-year history. A conservative company even by satellite industry standards, Telesat holds its cards close ahead of most major moves. But that doesn't mean it's afraid to make them. A contract to build Telesat LEO is in the works, with a recipient expected next ye | | |  Jeff Foust, ATLANTA — Blue Origin announced Oct. 19 that it conducted the first successful test of its BE-4 engine, a major milestone for both the company's launch vehicle plans as well as for United Launch Alliance.
Blue Origin, in a tweet, said its first hotfire test of the BE-4 engine was a success. The company included a six-second video, taken from several angles, of the engine firing on a test stand, but provided no other information, including the date, duration or thrust level of the test. A Blue Origin spokesperson said the company was not releasing additional information about the test at this time. "First hotfire of our BE-4 engine is a success," tweeted company founder Jeff Bezos. "Huge kudos to the whole @BlueOrigin team for this important step!" | | | Debra Werner, LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is drafting a comprehensive plan for grappling with the aerospace industry's rapid adoption of additive manufacturing. "Three to four years ago, none of my peers believed we would see additive manufacturing of safety-critical parts," Michael Gorelik, Federal Aviation Administration chief scientific and technical adviser for fatigue and damage tolerance, said Oct. 19 at the Additive Aerospace conference here. "We don't have them yet, but based on the leading indicators I see it's coming and it's coming fairly fast." | | | Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — XCOR Aerospace, a company forced to lay off its staff earlier this year when it ran into financial problems, has only weeks left to find an investor willing to rebuild the company or else face liquidation, the company's chief executive says. In an Oct. 19 interview, Michael Blum, a member of the board of directors of XCOR who took over as chief executive at the end of June, said the company has been in discussions with potential strategic partners and other investors interested in its propulsion technology and Lynx suborbital spaceplane, but those negotiations have taken longer than expected to finalize. | | | Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — Bigelow Aerospace and United Launch Alliance said Oct. 17 that they are cooperating on the development of a habitat orbiting the moon that they hope to build in a public-private partnership with NASA. The companies said they are working together on a concept for a "lunar depot" using an expandable module provided by Bigelow and launched by a next-generation ULA rocket that could support both NASA and commercial uses as soon as 2022. | | | Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — Earth-observation data shows that one in three C-band satellite dishes registered with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission either don't exist or aren't in use, a spectrum official at Google said last week. The number of unregistered C-band dishes dwarfs that of registered dishes, according to fleet operator Intelsat, but the paucity of hard data on how heavily C-band is truly used is a recognized irritation to the FCC and other telecom regulatory agencies. | | | Sandra Erwin, WASHINGTON — For all the hype and promise around artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in military applications, it always comes down to what specifically can be done with it. The industry keeps rolling out new gee-whiz artificial intelligence tools but the defense and intelligence communities still are trying to figure out how to use them and whether they really work as promised. According to a new study, there is one area where deep machine learning algorithms can definitely help the government, and that is to analyze satellite imagery. | | | Tereza Pultarova, LONDON — The Oct. 13 launch of the air-pollution-monitoring satellite Sentinel 5P was a bittersweet moment for the UK space sector. The craft, part of the European Commission's Copernicus Earth-observation program was built by Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, some 50 kilometers north of London. With the country's pending withdrawal from the European Union, questions remain to what extent will UK space companies retain access to such lucrative contracts in the future. | | | Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — Problems with infrared detectors provided by NASA will delay a European Space Agency astronomy mission, potentially by a year or more, a NASA official said Oct. 18. Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said engineers found problems during recent testing of infrared detectors being provided by NASA for ESA's Euclid space telescope, which had been planned for launch in 2020 on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. | | | Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — Mobile satellite services provider Iridium will use previously flown Falcon 9 first stages for its next two launches in order not to miss its mid-2018 goal for completing the Iridium Next constellation. The first Iridium mission with a previously flown Falcon 9 first stage will take place Dec. 22 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, according to an Iridium statement. That launch, its fourth with SpaceX overall, will be followed by the second pre-flown mission early next year. | |
Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON —A Soyuz spacecraft returning three people to Earth in April experienced a partial loss of pressure during the final stages of its descent, but did not put the crew's lives in danger. The incident, revealed during an Oct. 16 meeting of NASA's International Space Station Advisory Committee, is one of a series of events that have raised questions about the reliability of Russian vehicles supporting the station. | | | | | | |
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment