Space situational awareness experts urge Russia to join orbital neighborhood watch

Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — To prevent collisions in space, nations with advanced orbital monitoring abilities need to share data with each other. Russia, being skilled in space situational awareness (SSA), should be part of the global effort to protect the space environment, experts said March 15 at the Satellite 2018 conference here.

"The Russians have a very, very good space surveillance network, however they have a very different approach to sharing that information with others: they don't," said Frank Rose, a Brookings senior fellow who was the Obama administration's deputy assistant secretary for space and defense policy before becoming the assistant secretary in charge of arms control and treaty verification.

"The United States does provide conjunction notifications to both Russia and China, I would note. We have not seen a lot of reciprocity."

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SpaceNews Satellite 2018 wrap up

Defense official: Trump is serious about creating a space force

Sandra Erwin, WASHINGTON — After President Trump told Marines in California that he believed the U.S. military should have a space force, there was confusion. Was he serious? Was it an off-the-cuff riff? And why would he endorse an idea adamantly opposed by his own Defense Department?

The president apparently was not joking.

"He is very interested in ensuring that the department is best organized and equipped to achieve our vital missions in space," Kenneth Rapuano, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security, told lawmakers on Thursday.

Rapuano testified at a hearing of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces on the administration's fiscal year 2019 budget request for national security space rograms.

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NASA investigation linked 2015 Falcon 9 failure to design error

Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — A NASA investigation into a 2015 SpaceX launch failure concluded a design flaw, rather than a manufacturing defect, likely initiated the chain of events that destroyed the vehicle.

NASA released March 12 a public summary of the report by an independent review team convened by NASA after the June 2015 accident during the launch of a Dragon cargo spacecraft bound for the International Space Station, a mission known as CRS-7.

The investigation was a challenge, NASA noted in its report, because the accident happened so quickly, with no sign of "obviously degrading or trending conditions" prior to the event.

"In other words," the report stated, "the vehicle went from flying fine to conflagration in less than a second, or 'within a blink of an eye.'"

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ULA to focus more attention on commercial launch market

Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance plans to increase its activities in the commercial launch market using both the current Atlas and future Vulcan rockets, while acknowledging that the U.S. government will remain its major customer for the foreseeable future.

Speaking on a panel at the Satellite 2018 conference here March 12, ULA president and chief executive Tory Bruno said it was devoting more attention to the commercial market because the company no longer had to help the U.S. government solve a "crisis" of national security space launches.

"We've done our duty. Our job for the first decade was to help the United States avoid a serious crisis in space," by launching primarily national security payloads. "The assets were aging out. The replacements were late. We were asked to be able to fly with perfect reliability because you couldn't afford to lose any."

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