Mantis Society Study Center: SpaceNews This Week | Orbital ATK lands second Intelsat satellite servicing deal; Falcon Heavy rolls out to pad and back

Friday, January 5, 2018

SpaceNews This Week | Orbital ATK lands second Intelsat satellite servicing deal; Falcon Heavy rolls out to pad and back

January 5, 2018

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Orbital ATK lands second Intelsat satellite servicing deal

Sandra Erwin and Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON – Orbital ATK almost two years ago struck a groundbreaking deal with Intelsat to add years of service life to an aging communications satellite. The companies on Thursday announced they are solidifying their partnership with a second contract to service another satellite.

Orbital's first "mission extension vehicle" known as MEV-1 is scheduled to launch later this year on a Proton rocket from International Launch Services. In a vote of confidence, Intelsat has signed an order for a second vehicle, the MEV-2.

"The first vehicle is progressing quite well," Tom Wilson, president of Orbital ATK's Space Logistics subsidiary told SpaceNews. "We're really excited about Intelsat making a move to want a second one."

Sorry sci-fi fans, real wars in space not the stuff of Hollywood

Sandra Erwin, WASHINGTON — The public's idea of a war in space is almost entirely a product of Hollywood fantasy: Interstellar empires battling to conquer the cosmos, spaceships going head to head in pitched dogfights

The reality of how nations will fight in space is much duller and blander. And some of the key players in these conflicts will be hackers and lawyers.

Savvy space warriors like Russia's military already are giving us a taste of the future. They are jamming GPS navigation signals, electronically disrupting satellite communications links and sensors in space. Not quite star wars.

SpaceX targeting late January for Falcon Heavy debut

Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — SpaceX is now planning to attempt the first launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket around the end of this month, the company's chief executive said Jan. 4.

In a posting on the social media website Instagram that featured a video of the rocket, Elon Musk said the heavy-lift rocket would launch from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A after a static-fire test on the pad scheduled for next week.

"Hold-down test fire next week. Launch end of the month," he wrote.

Air Force acquisition nominee a champion of commercial technology

Sandra Erwin, WASHINGTON — President Trump announced Wednesday that he is nominating William Roper to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition. Since 2012 Roper has served as director of the Pentagon's "strategic capabilities office," an organization he created with then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter to advance efforts to inject innovative technology into the military.

If confirmed, Roper stands to bring a new perspective to Air Force big-ticket acquisitions, including space systems. As the leader of the SCO, Roper was known for contrarian views and for rejecting conventional approaches to weapons acquisitions. He criticized the Pentagon procurement bureaucracy for over-designing systems and building "exquisite" hardware instead of tapping less costly off-the-shelf commercial technology to update existing weapons.

Before joining the SCO, Roper was acting chief architect at the Missile Defense Agency and a national security analyst at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

NASA streamlines management requirements for some science missions

Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — NASA has enacted new policies intended to streamline the management of low-cost science missions with the highest tolerance for risk.

The new policies for what are known as Class D missions, briefed at scientific meetings last month and a town hall meeting at NASA Headquarters Jan. 3, will reduce the number of reviews and level of documentation levied on such missions to give them more freedom to take innovative approaches.

"We want to make sure that we're not over-managing these missions," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said at a NASA town hall meeting Dec. 12 during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in New Orleans. "What I mean is that we don't weigh down the missions with more process than is needed and suffocate the innovation than enables them."

ArianeGroup stands up GEOTracker service to watch geostationary arc

Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — An internal research and development program using widely available telescopes has evolved into a space situational awareness business for ArianeGroup.

France's Joint Space Command on Dec. 14 became ArianeGroup's first customer for GEOTracker, a network of ground-based telescopes monitoring the geostationary arc some 36,000 kilometers above the Earth, the orbit where most large satellites reside.

December's deal validated what ArianeGroup CEO Alain Charmeau described as an effort to simulate an entrepreneurial atmosphere inside the European space giant to create new products and services.