THE ASTROPHYSICS ISSUE NASA’s next planet hunter · 2018-01-15 · guard in the hunt for...
Transcript of THE ASTROPHYSICS ISSUE NASA’s next planet hunter · 2018-01-15 · guard in the hunt for...
NASA’s next planet hunter
THE ASTROPHYSICS ISSUE
JANUARY 15, 2018BUSINESS | POLITICS | PERSPECTIVE
I N S I D E
■ Zuma■ Space warfare■ Small rockets
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ABOVE: Technicians at Orbital ATK work on the fully integrated TESS telescope, a planet-hunting spacecraft launching this spring atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
ON THE COVER: NASA ARTIST’S CONCEPT OF TESS. THIS PAGE: NASA PHOTO
C O N T E N T S 0 1 . 1 5 . 1 8
DEPARTMENTS
FEATURES
10A changing of the guard in the hunt for exoplanetsAs Kepler nears its ends,
NASA’s TESS mission is
gearing up for launch.
18A 3D map of the starsEurope’s Gaia mission is
gathering info on more than
a billion stars. The hard part
happens on the ground.
13Some assembly desiredScientists and engineers are
pushing for servicing and
assembly of future space
observatories.
20Looking for daylightWith GEO satellite orders still
weak, solar panel providers
are wading into the smallsat
market.
15The James Webb Space Telescope finally takes shapeWith launch a little more
than a year away, the long
wait for JWST is nearly over.
23Sorry, Sci-Fi fansReal wars in space are not
the stuff of Hollywood.
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3 QUICK TAKES
6 AWARDS RECAP
Photos from the Space News Awards for
Excellence & Innovation
luncheon
8 NEWS ANALYSIS Russia sneers at
Trump’s moon directive,
but misses the point
26 COMMENTARY
Bob Richards Applauding the Google
Lunar X Prize
28 COMMENTARY James Dunstan
Do we care about orbital
debris at all?
30 ON NATIONAL SECURITY Can the new Air Force
weapons buyer
accelerate space
modernization?
32 FOUST FORWARD Riding a big wave of
small rockets
2 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
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2The number of Mission Extension Ve-hicles (MEV) that Intelsat has ordered from Orbital ATK to extend the life of an orbiting satellite. Intelsat, which signed up in 2016 as Orbital ATK’s first customer for the MEV-1 mission launching late this year, announced Jan. 4 that it will also be a customer for MEV-2 launching in mid-2020.
4The number of months two com-mercial crew test flights planned by SpaceX this year have been delayed, according to a NASA schedule re-leased last week. An uncrewed test flight is now planned for August, fol-lowed by a crewed test flight in De-cember; the previous schedule listed those flights as planned for April and August, respectively. The sched-ule left unchanged Boeing’s sched-ule, which calls for an uncrewed test flight in August and a crewed mission in November.
7The number of geostationary com-mercial communications satellites or-dered in 2017 (See full list, p.22).
$2.4MThe size of the grant Spanish startup PLD Space received from the Euro-pean Commission’s Horizon 2020 program to assist its development of the Arion 1 sounding rocket and the Arion 2 orbital rocket. PLD said it is close closing an “A2” investment round, valued at nearly $10 million.
SIGNIFICANT DIGITS
Z FOR ZUMAWhen a big-ticket military system
goes off the rails, the Pentagon as a rule
does not deflect media questions to the
contractor that the government hired to do
the work.
So reporters at the Pentagon were
shocked Jan. 11 when the Defense Depart-
ment’s top spokesperson, Dana White, not
only refused to comment on the apparent
failure of a classified mission codenamed
Zuma, but referred reporters to SpaceX,
which launched the mystery payload Jan.
7 on behalf of Northrop Grumman.
“I would have to refer you to SpaceX,
who conducted the launch,” White said.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell,
speaking at a conference in Houston the
same day as the Pentagon briefing, said she
could not discuss the mission: “You know
I can’t talk about that. It’s not my story to
tell.”
Northrop Grumman — which supplied
the Zuma payload and adapter — has de-
clined to comment on the status of Zuma,
which some sources claim reentered
shortly after launch.
SpaceX has denied that its Falcon 9
malfunctioned in any way during the
launch, saying Jan. 9 that the rocket “did
everything correctly.”
SpaceX, meanwhile, is moving ahead
with preparations for up to three launches
on the schedule for January: the debut of
the Falcon Heavy and a pair of Falcon 9
launches both slated for NET Jan. 30 (one
from Vandenberg, the other from Cape
Canaveral).A Falcon 9 first stage lands at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after launching the mysterious Zuma mission for Northrop Grumman on Jan. 7.
LOCK
HEE
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/IAF/
ISRO
4 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
QUICK TAKES
CHANGE AT THE TOP The head of China’s space agency is leaving
after just half a year on the job. Tang Dengjie,
appointed administrator of the China National
Space Administration (CNSA)
in June, has stepped down
to become acting governor
of Fujian Province. Tang’s
departure is not expected
to have a major effect on
China’s space program, as
CNSA is primarily an office
for interactions with other
countries’ space programs.
India’s space program
is also getting a new boss.
K. Sivan will succeed A. S.
Kiran Kumar as chairman of
ISRO for a three-year term,
the government’s announced Jan. 10. Sivan is
currently director of ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai
Space Center.
OUT WITH THE OLD…NOAA has retired a 10-year-old weather
satellite now that its replacement is in
operation. NOAA announced Jan. 8 that the
GOES-13 satellite, launched in 2006, had been
powered down now that GOES-16, launched
in late 2016, was operational as the GOES-East
satellite. GOES-13 can be reactivated if needed
should there be a problem with an operational
satellite. Another weather satellite, GOES-S, is
scheduled for launch in March to eventually
replace the GOES-15 satellite.
NOMINATED, AGAINThe White House has resubmitted
nominations for the leaders of
NASA and NOAA to the Senate. The
administration announced Jan. 8 it was
renominating Jim Bridenstine to be
administrator of NASA and Barry Myers to
be administrator of NOAA, part of several
dozen nominations being resubmitted
to the Senate. The nominations were a
procedural move to comply with a Senate
rule that returns nominations to the
White House at the end of a session if the
Senate does not confirm or reject them.
The Bridenstine and Myers nominations,
which were previously approved on
party-line votes by the Senate Commerce
Committee, face a narrower path to
confirmation with Republicans now
holding only a 51–49 majority in the
Senate.
GOES-T, part of the GOES-R series of weather satellites Lockheed Martin is building for NOAA.
DENGJIE
KUMAR
GOES-13
SPACENEWS.COM | 5
ARIA
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/ULA
/ISRO
/SN
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QUICK TAKES
SPACENEWS.COM | 5
ROCKET RIVALRIES
NOT DREAMINGSierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) said Jan. 5 that NASA
has confirmed its recent Dream Chaser test flight met
requirements for a milestone award. The glide flight of the
Dream Chaser test article in November went as planned, but
company officials said at the time they needed to wait until NASA
reviewed the data to confirm it met the requirements for the final
funded milestone in a commercial crew award made in 2012.
NASA has since confirmed that is the case, making it unlikely
the company will fly another test of the vehicle. The company is
moving ahead with a critical design review later this year of the
cargo version of Dream Chaser, which is slated to begin delivering
cargo to and from the International Space Station in 2020.
• Arianespace expects to
carry out a record number
of launches in 2018. The
company said Jan. 9 it is
planning 14 launches this
year, including seven Ariane
5, four Soyuz and three Vega
missions. Arianespace also
announced that it signed a
contract with Intelsat for two
launches, including of the
Galaxy-30 communications
satellite Intelsat just ordered
from Orbital ATK. Arianespace
also placed an order for a final
batch of 10 Ariane 5 rockets
that will cover launches into
the early 2020s as the new
Ariane 6 rocket enters service.
• China has ambitious
launch plans for 2018 that
could result in shattering
the country’s record for the
the most launches in a year.
At a conference Jan. 11, the
China Aerospace Science
and Technology Corporation
announced its “work model”
for 2018 called for 35 launches
in the year, including two
launches to support the
Chang’e-4 mission to land
on the far side of the moon
and the return to flight of the
heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket.
Launches planned by private
Chinese ventures not included
in that assessment could bring
the total number of launches
to more than 40. China carried
out 18 launches in 2017, and its
record for the most launches in
a year is 22, set in 2016.
• The general in charge of
Cape Canaveral is planning a
busy year for the spaceport.
U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Wayne
Monteith said Jan. 9 he is
projecting up to 35 launches
from the Eastern Range in
2018, a figure that includes
some submarine-launched
Trident missile tests off the
coast. Monteith said the range
is working to support up to
48 launches a year, or one
a week with two two-week
maintenance periods each
year.
• India’s Polar Satellite
Launch Vehicle successfully
returned to flight Jan. 11.
The PSLV placed into orbit a
Cartosat 2 imaging satellite and
30 secondary payloads. Among
the secondary payloads were
four Dove cubesats for Planet,
four Lemur-2 cubesats for
Spire, a prototype broadband
smallsat for Telesat and the
first synthetic aperture radar
smallsat for Finnish company
Iceye. The launch was the first
for the PSLV since an August
mission that failed when the
rocket’s payload fairing did not
separate.
6 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
THE SPACENEWS AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE & INNOVATION LUNCHEONTUESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2017 | THE CITY CLUB OF WASHINGTON
SpaceNews honored the winners of its 1st annual Awards for Excellence and Innovation at a sold-out luncheon organized by the Washington Space Business Roundtable. After handing out the 10 awards, the SpaceNews editorial team provided a forecast for 2018.
Photos by Kate Patterson
EVENT RECAP
Luncheon attend-ees dine ahead of the awards cer-emony and 2018 forecast panel dis-cussion.
Brian Berger, Paige McCullough and Greg Thomas of SpaceNews.
Jason Crusan of NASA and Aaron Rogers of SSL.Sandra Erwin, Caleb Henry, Debra Werner and Brian Berger of SpaceNews.
Jeff Hassannia of Cobham.
SPACENEWS.COM | 7
EVENT RECAP
Sandra Erwin of SpaceNews and Lt. Col. Jack Lovin of USSTRATCOM.
Marcy Steinke of Maxar Technologies and Caleb Henry of SpaceNews.
Sandra Erwin and Col. Steven Lang of the 45th Space Wing.
Rich Leshner of Planet, Amb. Sylvie Lucas of Luxem-bourg, Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX, Kirk Pysher of ILS, Col. Steven Lang of the 45th Space Wing, Lt. Col. Jack Lovin of USSTRAT-COM, Marcy Steinke of Maxar Technolo-gies and Jason Cru-san of NASA.
Debra Werner and Rich Leshner of Planet.
Caleb Henry of SpaceNews and Kirk Pysher of ILS.
Debra Werner of SpaceNews and Ambassador Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg.
Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX and Caleb Henry.
8 | SPACENEWS 01.15.17
NAS
A/JO
EL K
OW
SKY
Russia sneers at Trump’s moon directive, but misses the point
There are many valid critiques of U.S. President Donald Trump’s new direction for NASA. Few, if any, would be new.
NASA has, for decades, been redirected
by nearly every new administration to take office.
But Russian government officials saw an oppor-
tunity for domestic attention and took a stab at it.
“A ‘resumption’ of flights to the moon? How
nice,” Alexey Pushkov, a prominent Russian hawk
and chairman of the information policy committee
in the country’s upper house in parliament, wrote
Dec. 19. “But how are the Americans going to get
there without rocket engines? Already they can’t get
to the [International Space Station] without ours.”
It was a familiar refrain from the more outspoken,
pro-Kremlin circles of Russian officialdom. Never
mind the fact that NASA is developing its own new
rocket for such missions, or that many U.S. rockets
are propelled by domestically manufactured engines
— the fact that any American dependency exists
has been fodder for cheap domestic messaging in
Russia since 2014.
While NASA and its Russian counterpart Ros-
cosmos have managed to keep things professional
amid the most drastic deterioration of U.S.-Russia
relations since the Cold War, Russian government
officials play a different game. Domestic politics
here often descends into a spectacle where players
compete for standing in public demonstrations of
patriotism.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, whose
portfolio of responsibilities in government includes
oversight and reform of the Russian space indus-
try, could possibly be credited with bringing space
exploration into the mix in 2014 when, in response
to U.S. sanctions for Russia’s annexation of Crimea
from Ukraine, he suggested NASA use a trampoline
to reach the ISS.
Curiously, though perhaps it shouldn’t
have come as much of a surprise, a challenger
MATTHEW BODNERRussian technicians check NASA astronaut Scott Tingle’s pressure suit ahead of his Dec. 17 launch to the ISS aboard a Soyuz capsule.
NEWS ANALYSIS TROLLING
SPACENEWS.COM | 9
WH
ITE
HO
USE
emerged last month to answer Pushkov and Rogo-
zin. The Russian Foreign Ministry’s outspoken, and
sometimes controversial, spokeswoman — Maria
Zakharova — added her own twist to the ongoing
mockery of American dependence on Russian
space technology in a Facebook post.
“Pushkov asked a reasonable question,” Zakharova
began, “In my opinion, although the question is
logical, the answer is obvious — they will be de-
livered there by ‘Russian hackers.’ As we all know,
they can do anything,” she concluded. The post
was more of a commentary on U.S. obsession
with Russian hackers than U.S. dependencies, but
it was instructive.
And to be fair, Russians were not the only ones to
have fun with Trump’s moon declaration. His re-
marks were met with ridicule in China, too, accord-
ing to the China’s English-language Global Times
news outlet. Social media users there posted jokes
about Trump flying to the moon to take a selfie,
while others commented on how every U.S. pres-
ident comes up with such a plan.
Russian officials continue to beat the drum
when it comes to U.S. purchases of RD-180 rocket
engines for Atlas 5 launches, and the fact that Rus-
sia’s Soyuz rocket remains the only crewed means
of reaching the International Space Station, but
there seems to be very little public discussion about
what an end to this state of affairs would mean for
Russia’s space industry.
While the U.S. is certainly dependent, for the
time being, on the RD-180 rocket engine built by
Russia’s Energomash, Russia is also dependent on
U.S. purchases of these engines to keep Energomash
alive. Domestic projects are creating more demand
for Energomash engines in Russia, but the bigger
problem for the Russian space program is found
aboard the Soyuz spacecraft.
Since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttles
in 2012, Russia has been able to charge NASA and
its partner agencies up to $70 million per ticket for
flights to the ISS and back aboard the three-seat
Soyuz. Sometimes foreign astronauts have taken
two of those seats at a time.
This amounts to a heavy subsidy for Russia’s
manned space launches, says independent Russian
space industry analyst Pavel Luzin. Roscosmos will
receive 1.4 trillion rubles (almost $24 billion) under
the current 2016-2025 space program budget, and
roughly half of that will be devoted to manned space
efforts, Luzin says.
“In ruble terms, one seat aboard Soyuz will cost
up to 5 billion rubles (and the price will go up to
$81 million in 2018),” Luzin explained. “So, each
American astronaut contributes up to 5 percent
of Roscosmos’ annual budget — at least in terms
of funding sourced from the federal government
via the federal space program.”
The budget cushion provided by NASA and
other foreign agencies is soon to disappear, yet no
one in Russia seems to be talking about it. Recent
NASA statements indicate the agency may stop
buying seats on Soyuz after 2019 — the current
horizon for purchased seats. It is unclear what will
happen after 2019, but the U.S. commercial sector
will have a huge impact.
U.S. launch provider (and soon-to-be astronaut
transporter) SpaceX has a busy year ahead. In addition
to tests of the Falcon Heavy booster, it will conduct
two test missions of its crewed Dragon vehicle; the
first, in April, will be unmanned, while the second
test in August will feature a crew. Presumably, it
won’t be long until SpaceX, and its competitor
Boeing, are flying American astronauts to the ISS.
And when that happens, Russia will lose a valued
avenue for trolling the United States.
“Roscosmos will also face a sensitive decline
in its income,” Luzin added. “However, the main
challenge is thus: what will Russian astronauts do
in orbit? Already they do very little, but America
pays for a large part of the launches. Without their
money, Russia will have to fund it all. This means
they’ll have to reevaluate the goals of manned
missions (beyond carrying the flag).” SN
President Trump holds up his freshly signed Space Policy Directive 1 during a Dec. 11 ceremony at the White House.
XXXX
10 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
PLANET HUNTING
A changing of the guard in NASA’s hunt for exoplanetsJEFF FOUST
SPACENEWS.COM | 11
Sometime later this year NASA’s Kepler
spacecraft, orbiting the sun more than
150 million kilometers from the Earth,
will fire its thrusters for the final time.
The spacecraft is running out of the hydrazine
fuel used by those thrusters to maintain the
spacecraft’s orientation. Once the thrusters
sputter and shut down, their fuel exhausted,
Kepler will no longer be able to control its
pointing, and the mission will end.
The project isn’t quite sure exactly when that
will happen, since the calculation depends on
rates of fuel usage and the challenges of mea-
suring just how much hydrazine is left in the
spacecraft’s tanks. “The fuel is expected to last
somewhere between the spring and summer
of 2018,” said Gary Blackwood, manager of NA-
SA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program, at a Jan. 7
meeting of a NASA exoplanet advisory group.
He added that the spacecraft’s manufacturer,
Ball Aerospace, “has found very creative ways”
to stretch out that remaining fuel.
Kepler is otherwise working well, perform-
ing since 2014 an extended mission called
K2 that is looking at different parts of the sky
for a few months at a time. “The spacecraft is
behaving completely nominally,” said Jessie
Dotson, K2 project scientist at NASA’s Ames
Research Center, at a town hall meeting about
the mission Jan. 9 during the 231st Meeting of
the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in
suburban Washington.
The K2 mission is currently performing a set
of observations called Campaign 16, scheduled
to run through late February. Mission scien-
tists have plans for Campaigns 17, 18 and 19
that would run through the end of the year in
a best-case scenario.
“I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll make it
through Campaign 16,” she said. “Anything
past that is gravy.”
ENTER TESSBut as Kepler approaches the end of its life,
NASA’s next mission to search for exoplanets is
gearing up for launch. At an Orbital ATK facility
near Washington Dulles International Airport,
technicians are completing final tests on the
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a
NASA mission scheduled for launch this spring.
TESS, like Kepler, will look for exoplanets
by detecting very small changes in brightness
of stars as orbiting plans cross, or transit, their
disks. But while Kepler initially examined a
single, small area of the sky in an effort to
determine the fraction of stars with planets,
TESS will instead perform an all-sky survey,
focused on the brightest stars nearest to Earth.
That search is intended to find exoplanets
well-suited to follow up observations by other
telescopes, including the upcoming James
Webb Space Telescope, that can help determine
their mass and composition, and even study
their atmospheres.
“TESS is tiny, but it punches above its weight,”
said George Ricker, principal investigator for
TESS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy, during the Kepler town hall. “It’s a finder
scope for JWST.”
The spacecraft, 1.5 meters tall and weigh-
ing a few hundred kilograms, will ship in early
February to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for
launch processing. TESS will launch no earlier
than March 20 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
into an elliptical orbit that is in a 2:1 resonance
with the moon.
That orbit, Ricker said, is very stable and also
allows for high data rates from the spacecraft.
However, it limits the days on which TESS can
launch in order to phase into the proper
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is nearing the end of its extended mission.
NAS
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12 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
trajectory. Ricker said there were
about 40 days through June on which
TESS could launch.
The four cameras on TESS will map
nearly the entire sky over its two-year
primary mission. Astronomers expect that
TESS will detect thousands of exoplanets,
many of which will be ideal for follow-up
observations by other telescopes, includ-
ing the James Webb Space Telescope, to
characterize them. Any extended mission,
Ricker said, would allow TESS to fill in
gaps in observations from its primary
mission or do follow-up studies in other
parts of the sky.
SHIFTING FOCUSTESS has not been without its problems,
though. NASA confirmed last July that
engineers discovered that the focus in the
four cameras on TESS would drift once the
cameras cool to operating temperatures
after launch. At the time, the agency said
that it believed the issue would not be a
major problem for the mission, although
other astronomers expressed concern
it could affect the spacecraft’s ability to
detect exoplanets.
Additional testing and analysis since
then has given those involved with the
mission greater confidence that they un-
derstand the focus issue and that it won’t
adversely affect the mission’s science.
“Subsequent testing that we did starting
this summer and then into the fall indi-
cated that there is a model” for explaining
the focus change, Ricker said at a Jan. 9
briefing about the mission during the AAS
conference. “This is a very reproducible
crystallization effect for one of the ma-
terials used to manufacture the lenses.”
Ricker said the mission did four months
of testing on a flight spare camera to
understand long-term focus effects.
Those tests show that the focus of the
camera drifts for about one week, then
stops. “There’s essentially no measurable
change after that,” he said, calling the is-
sue a one-time “focus shift” rather than a
more continuous “focus drift.”
That focus shift, he said, won’t affect
the ability of TESS to meet its primary,
or “Level One,” science requirements,
which call for eventually measuring the
mass of at least 50 planets similar in size
to the Earth. The mission’s primary focus
on photometry — measuring very small
changes in brightness of stars — also min-
imizes the importance of a sharp focus.
“This is a photometry mission, not
an imaging mission,” he said. “What this
means is that it’s not important to have a
sharp focus across the entire field of view.
This was never part of the design. But it
is important that the focus be stable, and
that’s what we’ve been able to establish.”
A WIDE RANGE OF SCIENCETESS has also attracted interest from other
astronomers wanting to use spacecraft
data for other research. Padi Boyd, di-
rector of the guest investigator program
for TESS at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center, said at the briefing that there was
a very strong response to a first call for
proposals to participate on the mission,
with scientists proposing to use TESS data
for topics ranging from other exoplanet
PLANET HUNTING
studies to stellar astrophysics and extra-
galactic astronomy.
“We were very excited to see how the
broader scientific community really re-
sponded to this opportunity,” she said,
adding that the initial set of guest investiga-
tions will be announced in about a month.
While TESS has a two-year primary
mission, Ricker said he believed that the
spacecraft could operate for much longer.
The stability of its orbit, he said, requires
no station-keeping, and hence limits the
use of thrusters. “The operational life of
the mission could very well extend for
more than two decades,” he said.
For Kepler, the science will continue
long after the spacecraft exhausts its
fuel later this year. As with TESS, Kepler
attracted astronomers interested in using
the spacecraft for more than just exoplanet
science during the K2 mission, particular
as the spacecraft looked at different parts
of the sky.
Dotson said she expects astronomers
to tap into the archive of Kepler data for
various research for years to come. “While
we’re running low on fuel,” she said, “the
science is just getting going.” SN
EXOPLANET MISSONS
SOME ASSEMBLY DESIREDScientists and engineers push for servicing and assembly of future space observatories
SPACENEWS.COM | 13
NAS
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IN-ORBIT SERVICING
Between 1993 and 2009, astronauts repaired and upgraded Hubble five times.
lives as well as the on-orbit assembly of
future observatories too large to launch
in a single piece.
While JWST is not designed for servic-
ing — Grunsfeld said it might be possible,
but risky, to do some kind of robotic re-
fueling mission for the telescope about
10 years after launch — the Wide Field
Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the
next flagship mission after JWST, will
have some support for robotic servicing.
Adding latches and modular interfaces
for such servicing increases the cost of
WFIRST only slightly, he said, and those
costs can be recovered by savings during
integration and test.
The group is also working to convince
the teams working on four ongoing
Grunsfeld, who as a NASA astronaut flew
on three of those servicing missions.
“Had it not been serviceable, we would
have long ago abandoned it.”
Grunsfeld is among those who be-
lieves NASA should embrace servicing,
and even assembly, of future space
telescopes. During a panel discussion
at the AAS conference, he and other
members of an ad-hoc group formed
last year to study the topic argued that
servicing and assembly techniques, in-
volving astronauts or robots, could enable
servicing of telescopes to extend their
For all the attention and concern
that the development of the James
Webb Space Telescope gets, the
real nail-biting will begin after
the spacecraft finally launches in 2019.
In the weeks following liftoff, JWST will
perform a complex sequence of activities
to deploy its giant sunshield and unfold
its mirror.
All that will happen when the telescope
is hundreds of thousands of kilometers
from the Earth, with no one able to fix it
should something go wrong. “Once we
launch it, James Webb will start, on its
own, doing all of these deployments by
commands,” said John Grunsfeld, for-
mer NASA associate administrator for
science. “No one is up there to give it a
little shake if anything sticks.”
To drive that point home, Grunsfeld
displayed a slide during a Jan. 9 pre-
sentation at the 231st Meeting of the
American Astronomical Society (AAS)
in suburban Washington. “This is the
full description of the James Webb Space
Telescope servicing plans,” he said. The
slide was blank.
The approach NASA has taken with
JWST, with no ability to repair or upgrade
the telescope after its launch, stands in
sharp contrast to what it did with JWST’s
predecessor, the Hubble Space Tele-
scope. It was repaired and upgraded on
five shuttle servicing missions between
1993 and 2009, allowing the telescope to
overcome initial problems and improve
its performance.
“When Hubble was launched in 1990,
it was not a very good telescope,” said
JEFF FOUST
IN-ORBIT SERVICING
14 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
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studies of large mission concepts for
space observatories, intended to support
the next decadal survey for astrophys-
ics to be completed in 2020, that they
should incorporate in-space servicing
or assembly technologies.
“Some of the teams are very receptive,
and others are just pedaling as fast as they
can to get some of their concept studies
done prior to the decadal,” Grunsfeld said.
Representatives of all the mission design
teams were at a November meeting to
discuss servicing and assembly technol-
ogies, he added. “Some of them hadn’t
considered any kind of serviceability.
I think we actually opened their eyes”
to concepts like making instruments
modular and easily replaced.
NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gate-
way, a human-tended outpost in cislunar
space, could also support servicing and
assembly of space telescopes, serving as
a base of operations for astronauts work-
ing on such spacecraft. “If that comes
about, it would certainly make a huge
advance to assembling them in space,”
said Ronald Polidan of Polidan Science
Systems and Technology.
Polidan said that the group, at its No-
vember meeting, suggested that NASA work
with industry and academia to study the
roles the Gateway could play in assembly
and servicing of observatories. That needs
to be done in the near future, he said, to
ensure that any specific requirements for
those activities are incorporated into the
overall requirements of the Gateway, as
well as ensure the Gateway design itself
does not preclude such work.
Whether or not the Deep Space Gateway
is used for building and repairing space
telescopes, Polidan and others argued
that in-space assembly will ultimately
be needed as the research demands by
astronomers lead to observatories too
large to be launched from the ground,
and perhaps too expensive as well.
Polidan said that the largest telescopes
that could be launched by current and
upcoming vehicles, including NASA’s
Space Launch System, have apertures
of no more than about 15 meters. Some
of the concepts under study for the 2020
decadal, like the Large Ultraviolet/Opti-
cal/Infrared Surveyor, or LUVOIR, space
telescope, are that large. “The launch
vehicle ‘wall’ is imminent,” he said. “Af-
ter this next round of telescopes, more
likely than not what we would like to fly
will not fit in a single launch.”
Servicing, he added, can extend the
lives of space telescopes and upgrade their
instruments, as was the case with Hubble,
making them more cost-effective in the
long run. “You now have the equivalent
of a ground-based observatory that you
can upgrade and change,” he said. “It is
now a facility rather than one you have
to build, throw away, and build again.”
“The James Webb Space Telescope is
incredibly audacious, and it’s going to be
amazing. For many of you, it’s going to
be your future in astronomy,” Grunsfeld
said to an audience of astronomers at the
conference. “What’s next? Are we going
to go small because we’re afraid of asking
for too much money, or afraid of risk,
or are we going to go big and keep at
the forefront of scientific research?” SN
NASA’s WFIRST spacecraft is being designed with latches and modular inter-
faces to permit robotic servicing.
JWST exits its thermal vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center after completing nine months of cryogenic testing. The nearly $9 billion telescope is not designed to be serviced in orbit.
SPACENEWS.COM | 15
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JEFF FOUST
FLAGSHIP IN FOCUS
The James Webb Space Telescope finally takes shape
Last January, at the 229th Meeting of
the American Astronomical Society
(AAS) in suburban Dallas, astronomers
were growing increasingly excited
about the progress the James Webb
Space Telescope was making towards
a launch then expected in late 2018. A
town hall session about the mission
spent only a little time on the assembly
and testing of the spacecraft, focusing
much more on planning for the initial
rounds of observations it will perform.
“We’re in the phase of the program
where there will be many new chal-
lenges, different kinds of challenges
than we’ve had before,” Eric Smith, the
JWST director at NASA Headquarters,
said at that town hall. “The team that has
been working together so well, so when
problems arise, I’m really confident that
the team will solve them.”
A year later, at the 231st Meeting of
the AAS (it meets twice a year) outside
Washington, the mood wasn’t nearly as
celebratory. While project officials pro-
moted the progress they had made in the
last year, including recently completing
a thermal vacuum test of the telescope
and instruments at the Johnson Space
Center, they couldn’t avoid the fact that
JWST’s launch had slipped from Octo-
ber 2018 to sometime between March
and June 2019.
At a December hearing by the House
Science Committee’s space subcommit-
tee, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate
administrator for science, said the delay
was not because of a specific technical
problem with the spacecraft but simply
testing delays at prime contractor Technicians perform a
“lights out” inspection of JWST in March 2017.
16 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
tennis court, that will keep the telescope
cold in space. The overall test, includ-
ing repackaging of the sunshield, took
longer than anticipated.
“The actual harder part is not de-
ploying it, in terms of time, but folding
it back together,” he said. “Deploying
took a couple weeks, but folding it takes
nearly two months.”
That was one of the reasons, he said,
NASA decided to push back JWST’s launch.
Another problem was with thrusters on
the spacecraft bus. “We had to resolve
an issue with the thrusters in terms of
how the valves close,” he said. Northrop
decided to refurbish all of the valves in
FLAGSHIP IN FOCUS
Northrop Grumman that exhausted
the program’s margin.
“The sunshield and spacecraft bus ex-
perienced delays during their integration
and testing at Northrop Grumman,” he
said. “Following a schedule assessment
of the remaining activities, the Webb
launch date was changed from October
2018 to between March and June 2019.”
In an Jan. 9 interview during the AAS
meeting, Scott Willoughby, vice presi-
dent and program manager for JWST at
Northrop Grumman, said the company
had recently successfully tested the de-
ployment of the sunshield, made of five
layers of Kapton material the size of a
“By the end of 2018, we’ll have an observatory,” said Scott Willoughby, Northrop Grumman vice president and program manager for JWST, refer-ring to completion of the spacecraft’s assembly.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope emerged from Chamber A at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in December.
SPACENEWS.COM | 17
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JAMES WEBB INSIDE AN ARIANE 5 ROCKET
question, and is in preparing to
reinstall the thrusters on the bus
and test them again.
Those issues, he said, led to
a mutual decision by NASA and
Northrop to delay the launch.
“It was really the team coming
together and saying we’ve now
done most— not all — of the
first-of-a-kind type of op-
erations,” he said. There was
also a decision, he said, to
back off trying to do some
activities in parallel.
“When we looked at all
of that, we said that, for the
work we have in front of us,
we need more time,” he said.
Much more of the work
in the coming months will
be similar to what’s been
done before, such as ad-
ditional deployments of
the sunshield after various
tests to the spacecraft. That
will help save some time,
but won’t drastically ac-
celerate the schedule. “There will be a
little bit of a learning curve, but it won’t
be two months down to two weeks” for
refolding the sunshield, he said.
The sunshield and bus will soon be-
gin a series of acoustic, vibration and
thermal vacuum tests. During that time,
the telescope and instrument section of
JWST, known as the Optical Telescope
Element and Integrated Science, or
OTIS, will arrive at Northrop’s facility in
Southern California from Houston. Wil-
loughby said OTIS will be installed on the
spacecraft bus in August or September,
after another series of deployment tests.
The observatory, at long last a single
spacecraft, will undergo yet another
set of environmental and deployment
tests at Northrop before it’s loaded onto
a ship for transport to French Guiana.
That will likely take place in early 2019,
he said, or about three months before
the spacecraft’s launch on an Ariane 5.
NASA has not yet provided a more
specific launch window for JWST than
March to June of 2019. Zurbuchen said
in his congressional testimony in De-
cember that NASA expected to provide
an updated launch date in January or
February, after an independent review
of the mission’s plans. “At this moment
in time, with the information that I have,
I believe it’s achievable,” he said of the
March-to-June window.
Willoughby emphasized the overall
progress Northrop has made on JWST,
despite the schedule slip. “A year ago,
it was about deploying the sunshield.
That was the biggest newness,” he said.
“That was really big.”
Lost in that test were other milestones.
He said another major milestone last
year was commanding the spacecraft
bus for the first time from the mission
operations center at the Space Telescope
Science Institute in Baltimore. “We’re
going to have to command it from a
million miles away, so we should be
able to do it from 2,500. But still, it’s a
big deal to do flight commanding, and
that was a fantastic success.”
“By the end of 2018, we’ll have an
observatory,” Willoughby said, referring
to the completion of JWST’s assembly.
Astronomers who have been wait-
ing for years, through many previous
delays and cost overruns, can probably
handle a delay of another six months or
so for a telescope that still promises to
revolutionize their field. SN
18 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
ASTROMETRY
MAKING A 3D MAP OF THE STARS
The European Space Agency team
operating the star-mapping Gaia
space telescope is preparing for
its most comprehensive data
release to date while defending its over-
taxed data-processing network against
budget cuts.
Since science operations began in
mid-2014, the 700-million-euro ($843
Analysis Consortium (DPAC) has been
in place since 2006, or seven years be-
fore Gaia’s launch. Funded primarily by
France, Germany, Spain and the U.K., it
also gets a sliver of the 19 million euros
ESA spends annually on Gaia operations.
Fred Jansen, the Gaia mission man-
ager at ESA, said astronomers are gen-
erating meaningful research from Gaia,
producing “something like one paper
every day and a half,” but continued CALEB HENRY
million) Gaia mission has collected more
than a trillion measurements, capturing
star characteristics such as brightness,
position and motion to create a 3D map
of the Milky Way galaxy. The return on
investment, measured in peer-reviewed
papers, is strong at 250 and climbing. The
processing of Gaia’s raw observations
into meaningful measurements involves
hundreds of astronomers spread across
20 countries. Gaia’s Data Processing and
The European Space Agency’s Gaia astrometry observatory undergoes pre-launch preparation at Europe’s South American spaceport in 2013.
ESA
Europe’s Gaia is gathering information on more than a billion stars. Turning that data into meaningful measurements is where the hard part comes in.
SPACENEWS.COM | 19
biennial delivery of refreshed Gaia data
troves are not a given. Other astronomy
missions are competing for the limited
resources going into the DPAC, which
has the arduous task of preparing Gaia
data for dissemination.
“There are a number of highly ambi-
tious projects running in Europe at the
moment which use a similar paradigm
as Gaia [for] processing the data because
it’s too complex for a single organization
to do it,” Jansen said, mentioning ESA’s
Euclid dark matter mission launching
in 2020 and the exoplanet hunter Plato
launching in 2026. Those missions will
need their own data-processing consor-
tiums, he said, and their needs could put
pressure on Gaia funding.
Astronomers got their first taste of
Gaia data in September 2016: position and
brightness info for 1.14 billion stars and
a more advanced set of measurements
for 2 million of the brightest of those
stars thanks to a combination of Gaia
measurements with archival data from
Hipparcos, a four-year ESA astrometry
mission launched in 1989. Early hardware
problems, including one that let stray
light into Gaia’s telescope, contributed
to a nine-month delay in Data Release-1.
Another contributor was the underes-
timated complexity of processing Gaia’s
star data. Prior to launch, Jansen said,
the Gaia team thought it could release
a new data set annually. As it turns out,
the best Gaia can promise is once every
two years. Data Release-2, scheduled for
April, will included the more-advanced
measurements for over a billion stars — a
500-fold increase over the 2016 release.
Jansen said a third release planned
for late 2020 will build on the first two.
DPAC chairman Anthony Brown
said ESA member states funding Gaia
research are putting pressure on DPAC
to cut costs by shedding people. Around
450 people calibrate and process Gaia
data, Jansen said. Close to 180 work full
time, said Brown.
Gaia officials see no easy way around
the mission’s processing needs, which
includes use of one of the world’s most
powerful computers, the MareNostrum
supercomputer in Barcelona. Brown and
Jansen estimate that a 10 percent cut of
DPAC’s budget — which they declined
to quantify —would be bearable, but any
more than that would jeopardize research.
Gaia’s data-processing needs stem
less from the quantity involved — just
under 50 terabytes collected as of De-
cember — and more from the fact that
nearly every pixel in every image has
scientific meaning.
“Gaia is ’big data’ not so much in the
sense of the amount of data — CERN,
Google, Facebook, etc., handle much
larger amounts — but certainly when it
comes to the complexity,” Brown said.
“Every bit in our raw data counts, and
the design of the measurements neces-
sitates processing all data together in
order achieve the ultimate performance,
where all calibrations have to be derived
from the same data.”
Furthermore, with each cycle, Gaia’s
3D map of the Milky Way becomes much
more detailed, increasing its science
value but putting a heavier burden on the
pan-European team of experts creating
and correcting the catalog.
“Normally, you would think that by
repeating processing sufficiently you get
into a routine and it becomes easier so
you can divest resources, but in our case
for the next three to four years things will
be getting more complex because we are
getting more precise,” Brown said. “Once
we are well into an extended phase of
the mission, it should be able to do with
less resources.”
Prior to Gaia’s launch, the DPAC gave
input on the telescope’s payload design
(which carries sensors for astrometry,
photometry and spectroscopy), worked
on data processing requirements and
software, and researched scientific algo-
rithms, according to Brown. The DPAC
also spent “a lot of effort” producing sim-
ulated Gaia telemetry, which supported
large operational rehearsals ahead of
launch, he said.
Gaia’s five-year mission ends next
year, but Jansen said the spacecraft is
healthy enough to reach 2024. If Gaia’s
mission is extended the full five years,
it would need three additional years of
DPAC processing. Euclid should be in or-
bit by then and Plato will be much closer
to launch. Should Gaia lose some DPAC
resources by then, it would slow — but
not stop — data harvests.
“We may have to sacrifice a few things,
but at the moment it looks like we can
keep the bulk of the necessary and guar-
anteed outputs,” Jansen said.
Extending Gaia would be well worth
the effort, said Roger Davies, president
of the European Astronomical Society.
“It is a mission which makes its impact
by looking at how the sky changes over
time,” he said. “Obviously it’s greatest
impact comes at the end of the mission
when it’s finished an it has the maximum
baseline. We can expect things to get
better and better.”
Davies described it as “a central mis-
sion for understanding galaxies,” and a
mission that gave ESA its own research
niche, building off Hipparcos, which
he credited with reinvigorating astrom-
etry, “making it essential to modern
astrophysics.”
“What Gaia is doing is now capitalizing
on that position,” he said. SN
Launched in December 2013 to Lagrange Point 2 some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, Gaia ob-serves the full sky every three to six months.
ESA
20 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
SOLAR SUPPLIERS
SPEC
TRO
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With GEO satellite orders still weak, solar providers eye smallsat business as offset
Suppliers of solar panels and re-
lated equipment for the space
industry are pivoting to serve
customers planing satellites
for low and medium Earth
orbits as the slow down in geostationary
satellite orders persists.
Commercial satellite operators ordered
just seven geostationary telecommuni-
cations satellites in 2017 — well below
the 20 to 25 orders considered normal
in years past. Orders for 2016 and 2015
topped out in the teens (still below av-
erage, but better than last year).
Space solar panel providers say they
see a shift toward other orbits that they
must prepare to meet with different
products and manufacturing techniques
in addition to the large panels built to
support the slower flow of GEO satellites.
“It’s well known that number of GEOs
in 2017 especially [was] down, but then
there have been other programs, other
orbits, other missions that have either
been announced — or are in progress and
haven’t been announced — that dictate
the total demand of power,” Tony Muel-
ler, president of Spectrolab, a solar-panel
manufacturer owned by Boeing, told
SpaceNews. “In general there’s been less
demand from larger satellites over the past
several years in terms of the GEO order
bookings, but overall solar demand pops
up in one segment of the market while
another may be going down.”
Factoring in the seven-satellite order
that fleet operator SES placed in September
for the medium-Earth-orbit O3b mPower
constellation does dampen the impact of
2017’s low GEO count, but only for Boeing
Satellite Systems International, the winner
of what turned out to be the year’s largest
CALEB HENRY GEO satellites have guided demand for space solar power, but as satellite operators diversify the sizes and orbits of their spacecraft, the types of solar panels they rely on also change.
SPACENEWS.COM | 21
said. “Everybody is trying at the moment
to find their position, or to position better
in the new industry order that is still not
defined how it will look like.”
CHASING NEW ORBITSSatellite ventures don’t always reveal
their suppliers, but Albuquerque, New
Mexico-based SolAero is OneWeb’s ap-
pointed provider of solar panels for its
first 900 LEO smallsats. Clevenger counts
SolAero as “a successful, early entrant
into the emerging smallsat arena,” but
cautioned that there is a gap between
demand,” added SolAero CEO Brad Cle-
venger. “So, the slow down to about half
of the typical number of GEO satellites
ordered each year has produced a chal-
lenging couple of years.”
Heizmann said the low GEO order
count has led both manufacturers of
satellites to take on more work typically
delegated to suppliers, and supplier to
push upward to higher levels of space-
craft integration.
“At the prime level of satellite manufac-
turers and also at the supplier level there
is uncertainty and reorganization,” he
comsat order. Last year’s other big win,
in terms of dollar value, was Space Sys-
tems Loral’s contract to build Jupiter-3.
SSL president Dario Zamarian said in
September the contract was worth three
to four normal GEO comsat wins. If that
becomes a trend, it could make satellite
manufacturing an even “lumpier” busi-
ness with peaks and valleys determined
by single orders.
Constellation programs such as Telesat
LEO and the soon-to-launch LEO systems
of SpaceX and OneWeb may also soon
fill the void made by the dearth of GEO
satellite purchases, but the full magni-
tude of these changes remains unclear.
“There is quite an uncertainty on the
level of the satellite operators if they should
invest in additional geostationary satellites
or if they should invest in constellations,
or maybe not going to big constellations
of hundreds of very small satellites, but
replacing one big GEO bird by [buying]
four or five smaller mid-sized satellites,”
said Jürgen Heizmann, managing director
of Azur Space Solar Power in Heilbronn,
Germany. “I think the biggest issue is the
delay in decision-making and results
from this uncertainty about the right way
forward in the new market.”
“Historically, about 60 percent of
satellite manufacturing revenues have
been driven by commercial GEO satellite
2017 GEO Commercial Satellite Orders
Satellite Customer Manufacturer Month
Kacific-1/JCSAT-18 Kacific and Sky Perfect Jsat Boeing February
Palapa-N1 Palapa Satelit Nusantara Sejahtera,an Indosat Ooredoo and Pasifik Satelit Nusantara JV
CGWIC May
Inmarsat-5 F5 (Global Xpress) Inmarsat Thales Alenia Space June
EchoStar-24/Jupiter-3 EchoStar SSL August
Star One D2 Embratel Star One SSL October
Turksat-5A Turksat/Turkey Airbus November
Turksat-5B Turksat/Turkey Airbus November
Jürgen Heizmann
AZU
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ACE
22 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
SOLAR SUPPLIERS
BOEING
the waning of GEO and the rise of
LEO constellations.
“The GEO slowdown began in 2015,
and many major non-GEO initiatives have
not yet begun satellite production. Based
on what we see in the market, demand
will grow and likely exceed prior highs
once some of these new programs enter
production,” he said.
SolAero’s Clevenger and Azur Space’s
Heizmann both see the surge in varia-
tion among spacecraft sizes and orbits
as likely to be a permanent change. GEO
satellites aren’t going away, they say, but
both expect multiple large non-geosyn-
chronous systems to succeed.
Mueller said Sylmar, California-based
Spectrolab “will have to wait and see how
the next few years play out.” Commercial
GEO satellite orders are in an unusually
long downcycle, he said, but LEO con-
stellations promised new business in
the 1990s and didn’t deliver. That said,
Mueller pointed to a mix of government
programs and constellations as balancing
out the demand for spacecraft power.
IMPACT ON THE FUTURE OF SOLAR GEO satellites have historically driven
much of the development in spacecraft
solar power given their dominant market
share. Now that smaller and more diverse
satellite types are rising in number, they
bring variations in solar cell size and
shape, thickness and radiation tolerance.
“The complexity we are going to in
this industry makes it more difficult than
in the past to invest in R&D,” Heizmann
said, adding that the biggest driver from
commercial GEO satellites was on opti-
mizing solar cell performance all the way
through to end of life 15 or 20 years after
launch. “We are continuing our invest-
ment in end-of-life, radiation-hardened
solutions that are important for long-term
missions in the geostationary market,
and also for orbit raising, but at the same
time we need solutions for more short
life missions, especially constellations
that have even higher cost pressure, as
we have seen in OneWeb for example,
or other constellation requirements, but
have not as hard end of life requirements.”
Mueller said smallsat builders often
prefer solar panels that are “either directly
part of the spacecraft or are immediately
mounted to the spacecraft body,” reduc-
ing the need for large complete panel
assemblies.
“Typically, customers in the smallsat
solar arena are wanting to procure either
individual solar cells that they put on
themselves, or ‘strings,’ circuits of solar
cells where we put a number of solar cells
together and the smallsat builder then
populates on their spacecraft long with
other components,” he said.
Clevenger said the goal of building solar
technology for peak performance remains
the same regardless of orbit, but the way
they are produced is changing. Last year
SolAero expanded its Albuquerque plant
to vertically integrate panel production
— solar cells, composite substrates, and
integration — in preparation for OneWeb.
The scale and standardization of man-
ufacturing small satellites could spin in
new techniques and technologies that
benefit larger spacecraft, he said.
“As these new production practices
and capabilities come online, the costs
of producing smallsats will decline much
faster than those of larger satellites without
sacrificing quality or relative capability.
In time, some of these innovations will
make their ways back into the production
of larger satellites, but only to a limited
extent due to their sizes, complexities
and uniqueness.”
Clevenger added that the notion that
safety in numbers for smallsat constella-
tions makes them more risk tolerant and
thus easier to build “is a misperception.”
“The stakeholders in every company
or program want to be successful and
program assurance remains a central
part of every undertaking,” he said. SN
Boeing employees extend the solar panels on Intelsat-35e, which launched last July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
SPACENEWS.COM | 23
U.S
. AIR
FO
RCE
SPAC
E CO
MM
AND
SPACE WAR
SORRY, SCI-FI FANS REAL WARS IN SPACE NOT THE STUFF OF HOLLYWOODHackers and lawyers, rather than soldiers and states-men, are key players in real-life space warfare
SANDRA ERWIN
The Global Strategic Warning and Space Surveillance System Center at Cheyenne
Mountain, Colorado.
The public’s idea of a war in space is
almost entirely a product of Hollywood
fantasy: interstellar empires battling to
conquer the cosmos and spaceships go-
ing head to head in deafening dogfights.
The reality of how nations will fight
in space is much duller. And some of
the key players in these conflicts will be
hackers and lawyers rather than soldiers
and statesmen.
Savvy space warriors like Russia’s mil-
itary 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.
This form of electronic warfare in
space is serious enough, however, that
the U.S. military is moving to defend its
satellites and other space assets. There
is in fact a real conversation under way
about war in space, albeit one of cyber
and electromagnetic attacks, not
24 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
SYFY
SPACE WAR
spacecraft shooting at each other.
“There are legal and practical limits
on armed conflict in space,” said Brian
Weeden, director of program planning
at the Secure World Foundation in
Washington.
“Most people experience space through
Hollywood movies, TV shows and sci-
ence-fiction books,” he said during an
online discussion last month hosted by
the American Bar Association. In almost
all cases, the depictions of warfare and
combat in space are fictional. “They take
extreme liberties and show outright ig-
norance of the laws of physics, orbital
mechanics, conservation of energy and
other things in order to make stories
more dramatic and exciting.”
Weeden mentioned SyFy’s “The Ex-
panse” as a rare example of a TV show
that depicts space warfare pretty close
to the way it would happen, but he in-
sisted that the gap between fiction and
reality with regard to space war is stark.
Space, indeed, has turned into an im-
portant battlefront, and for good reasons.
It is critical to nearly all aspects of national
security and military power, including
intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance,
communications, precision timing and
navigation, attack warning, and target-
ing of potential threats. The issue for
the United States is to figure out how to
thwart attacks within the boundaries of
current treaties and legal frameworks,
Weeden said. “Counterspace is now part
of conventional warfare because space
itself is part of conventional warfare.”
Non-kinetic attacks like jamming and
interference are occurring more often.
They are cheaper and easier to pull off
than full-on kinetic destruction of sat-
ellites that would require a high-power
laser or a ballistic missile.
As the Pentagon maps out strategies
and tactics to defend its satellites, military
lawyers are actively investigating how
international law applies to outer space.
“Any operation in outer space must
comply with the same law that is appli-
cable to other domains, like sea, air and
ground warfare,” said Michael Hoversten,
chief of space, cyber, international, and
operations law at Air Force Space Com-
mand headquarters at Peterson Air Force
Base, Colorado.
As with other uses of military force,
actions in space are restricted by interna-
tional rules. If U.S. satellites were attacked,
there is no ambiguity, he said. “The right
to use force in self defense applies.”
International law concernsThe preeminent statute of international
space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,
but some of the language is becoming
harder to interpret in today’s environ-
ment, Hoversten said. “The treaty states
that the moon and other celestial bodies
must be used exclusively for peaceful
purposes” but it does not specifically say
that outer space is exclusively a haven for
peaceful purposes. The phrase “peaceful
purposes” has been interpreted as “no
military use” and also as “nonaggressive
military use consistent with international
law and the UN charter.”
The reality is that many countries
use space for military purposes, he said.
SyFy’s “The Expanse,” a science-fiction television series set in a future where humanity has finally col-onized the solar system, is a favorite of space analysts for its realistic depiction of space warfare and interplanetary poltics.
SPACENEWS.COM | 25
And most are reluctant to sign on to new
treaties that might restrict their ability
to exploit space in national security or
economic activities.
The majority view is that military use
is permissible, provided that it’s non-
aggressive and consistent with inter-
national law and UN charter, Hoversten
said. There is no consensus, however,
about the meaning of “militarization” and
“weaponization” of space, and different
states use these terms differently. Space
has been militarized for decades, but
that is not the same as weaponization.
“There is a common misconception that
weapons of all kinds are illegal in outer
space. That is not the case.” The only
specific prohibition is against so-called
weapons of mass destruction — nuclear,
biological, chemical and radiological.
Electronic arms like lasers or jammers,
or even conventional kinetic weapons
can lawfully be placed in orbit, he said.
Some countries, notably China and
Russia, for the past decade have champi-
oned efforts to prohibit all kinds of space
weapons. The United States has opposed
bans primarily because of difficulties in
defining what a weapon is, Hoversten
explained. Theoretically, any satellite
that is capable of maneuvering can be
used as a weapon. U.S. officials also have
argued that an arms control treaty for
space weapons would be unverifiable.
Also a topic of debate is how the
U.S. military would justify the use of
countermeasures. So far it remains a
fuzzy issue, said Maj. Ross Brown, chief
of space, international and operations
law at 14th Air Force headquarters at
Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
“Below an armed attack, the most ap-
plicable response is a countermeasure,”
he said. But the devil is in the details.
“Countermeasures must be proportional.
Must not be forceful. They must be con-
strained. Must be reversible,” Brown said.
“It’s a ‘mushy’ requirement.”
Another concern is that the response
must be “proportionate to the injury be-
ing suffered,” he said. “That is difficult to
measure.” Disruptions to satellite links
can cause material damage but also
“strategic harm” if the military is cut off
from access to information.
As the Pentagon and others sound
alarms about cyber threats to space, the
reality is that very little is known about
the frequency of attacks or even the
scope of the danger.
“Public data on cyber attacks on any
satellites, military or commercial, is
extremely scarce,” said Weeden. “Mil-
itaries, governments, space agencies,
companies are pretty reluctant to talk
publicly about cyber attacks, whether
successful or unsuccessful.”
There have been widely publicized
incidents like the jamming of an HBO
satellite signal in 1986 by a hacker dubbed
“Captain Midnight.” On the government
side, Congress has openly chided NASA
for cyber attacks against its aging com-
mand-and-control infrastructure. But
there are very few details.
“We have satellites and ground con-
trol infrastructure that are, easily, one
to three decades old,” Weeden said. “I
don’t think it’s a stretch to really wonder
just how hardened they may be against
sophisticated cyber attacks. But we don’t
have any good data on that.”
Satellite providers that are under
contract to the Defense Department are
required to report breaches. Otherwise,
commercial companies would not want
vulnerabilities or weakness known that
can hurt their business and might invite
additional attacks.
Commercial communications pro-
viders are now investing billions of
dollars in cybersecurity technologies
as they seek to attract government and
military customers. They are putting up
high-throughput satellites with smaller
beams that are more resilient against
jamming. And they are shielding sat-
ellite uplinks and downlinks with Pen-
tagon-approved encryption.
Hoversten said a number of space
agencies and governments are coming
together to draft a new rulebook on military
uses of outer space. “A comprehensive
manual is a few years down the road.” SN
“Public data on cyber attacks on any satellites, military or commercial, is extremely scarce. Militaries, governments, space agencies, companies are pretty reluctant to talk publicly about cyber attacks, whether successful or unsuccessful.”
Brian Weeden
26 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
MO
ON
EXP
RESS
The creation of the $30 million
Google Lunar X Prize competi-
tion in 2007 was a masterstroke
to incentivize bold new dreams
of commercial space ventures beyond
Earth orbit. The competition was built
on the legacy of the $10 million Ansari
X Prize that was announced in 1996 and
won in 2004 with the successful subor-
bital flights of SpaceShipOne.
The winning of the Ansari X Prize was
one of the biggest stories of the decade,
shattering broadcast and online media
records and demonstrating that incen-
tive prizes work in our modern world.
But what would X Prize do next? How do
you top the world’s first private spaceship
redefining the possible in accomplish-
ing something only superpowers had
done before?
Well, you can top it with a bigger
and bolder challenge, something at the
raggedy edge of the possible. In Silicon
Valley such things are called “moon-
shots.” And what better moonshot than a
literal moonshot? X Prize pitched a lunar
competition concept to Google in early
2007, and the $30 million Google Lunar
X Prize was born and announced Sept.
13, 2007, challenging private teams to
reach for the moon.
It’s difficult to put a deadline on a
future that has such massive and un-
precedented dependencies, particularly
when it’s calling on a privately funded
group to do something that only three
super-powers have accomplished to date.
When the competition was announced,
it was envisioned that the prize could be
won by 2012.
Well, perhaps not too surprisingly, it’s
taking a little longer. Here we are in 2018
with X Prize and its prize sponsor Google
still hanging in there after more than 10
years. I think they should be applauded
for that. The winning of the Google Lunar
X Prize would, of course, be triumphant
to X Prize, Google and any competitor
who wins it. The $20 million grand prize
remains to this day the largest incentive
prize in history, but the competition has
in many ways already achieved a sig-
nificant amount of its original purpose.
A number of aspirational and serious
efforts to reach the moon have been
inspired by the competition; youth have
been motivated to enter science and
technical careers; some efforts are still
in existence outside of the competition;
and some are still contenders. Like all
incentive prizes, the value is not just in
the winning of them, but in the reaching
for them. From the prize sponsor’s per-
spective, achievements in inspiration,
education, diversity, public and market
awareness, and out-of-the-box thinking
are all of significant value. But there have
been tangible and credible advances as
well by some of the contenders among
the colorful assortment of, at one time,
over 30 competing teams.
The Google Lunar X Prize competition
has inspirational roots and legacies dating
back to Blastoff! and other heroic efforts
COMMENTARY Bob Richards
Applauding the Google Lunar X Prize They don’t call it a ‘moonshot’ for nothing
Artist’s concept of the MX-1 robotic explorer Moon Express intends to send land on the lunar surface.
SPACENEWS.COM | 27
at commercial lunar business ventures.
In turn, the competition has inspired a
number of aspects of today’s emerging
commercial lunar industry, which is
finding its way and gaining momentum
(but we’re not there yet). Regardless of the
ultimate outcome of the competition, a
huge bow of appreciation should go to
X Prize, Google and everyone who has
taken enormous personal and financial
risks on this incredibly hard challenge of
expanding commercial space activities
beyond Earth orbit.
Understandably, I get asked about the
Google Lunar X Prize by people follow-
ing Moon Express through the lens of
the competition. The competition has
certainly been an important element in
the landscape of the re-emerging global
focus on the moon, and personally I’ve
been involved in the competition since
it’s onset through two team registrations
and three team acquisitions. With Moon
Express, we have always been supportive
of the competition and have continued
to include plans for one or more prize at-
tempts in our maiden mission operations.
I was proud to be at the Google Lunar
X Prize’s 2007 launch event, joining in the
enthusiasm and optimism of the unveil-
ing of this incredible new challenge. At
that time it was the first and only prize
competition announced by X Prize be-
yond the Ansari X Prize. I was also there
when that original “X Prize ” was boldly
launched on May 18, 1996, beneath the
St. Louis Gateway Arch; and I was there
when it was won and made history on
Oct. 4, 2004. I’ll never forget the thrill of
that day, captured brilliantly in Julian
Guthrie’s “How to Make a Spaceship.”
The profoundly transformational experi-
ence of the Ansari X Prize influenced my
motivation in 2007 to become the first
registrant in the Google Lunar X Prize
with my first commercial lunar venture,
Odyssey Moon and in 2010 to enter Moon
Express into the competition.
In addition to the positive impact the
Google Lunar X Prize has had on the world,
and its important history, for me, and for
Moon Express, the competition has always
been a sweetener in the landscape of the
business case, but it’s never been the
business case itself (because it can’t be).
Our commercial lunar business model is
based on lowering the cost of access to
the moon and other solar system desti-
nations, elevated by but not dependent
on governments, and fundable within
the reach of private investment capital.
It seems to take about 10 years for really
important commercial space developments
to mature and take hold. The creation of
the Google Lunar X Prize in 2007 was a
bold move that helped rekindle public
interest in the moon and bolster aware-
ness at NASA and other space agencies
of an emerging commercial interest and
potential of private investments into lunar
exploration and development.
As it stands today, a little over 10 years
since the launch of the Google Lunar
X Prize, the landscape for commercial
lunar activity and opportunity couldn’t
be more positive. There is a global rise
in lunar mission planning among space
agencies; the U.S. has declared a return
to the moon as a cornerstone of new
space policy; and entrepreneurial efforts
for commercial space activity focused
on the moon and other cis-lunar and
deep space destinations are everywhere.
At Moon Express, we continue to focus
on our core business plans of collapsing
the cost of access to the moon and our
long-term vision of unlocking lunar re-
sources for the benefit of life on Earth and
our future in space. The recent change
in U.S. space policy focused on a return
to the moon is a thrilling development,
and we look forward to our continued
partnership with NASA developing com-
mercial lunar landing systems that will
support a new paradigm of public-private
commercial lunar activity.
Moon Express continues to work to-
ward our maiden lunar expedition as we
cheer on Rocket Lab and other launch
providers who will become our rides to
orbit. Our maiden lunar expedition is
just the beginning of a continuing series
of expeditions using our MX family of
flexible, scalable robotic explorers. We
are very appreciative of the results we
achieved with the U.S. government in
2016 gaining our mission approval for the
first private venture beyond Earth orbit
and to the moon; and are very excited
about the rising national and global tide
back toward the moon.
Throughout all of this, the Google Lu-
nar X Prize has been a clear and present
opportunity that has inspired and in-
centivized new investments, customer
commitments, entrepreneurial efforts
and public engagement around the world
toward a new era of lunar exploration and
discovery. And the story is not over yet.
I applaud X Prize and Google for issuing
a bold challenge with a big prize attached
and sticking with it all these years. The
existence of the prize has been and will
continue to be an important part of the
history of humanity’s permanent return
to the moon. If X Prize continues to offer
lunar incentive prizes, we’ll continue to
pursue them.
The Google Lunar X Prize has in many
ways become a legacy itself, while con-
tinuing to motivate and inspire. And the
final chapters of the legacy are yet to be
written. SN
BOB RICHARDS IS A FOUNDER OF THE
INTERNATIONAL SPACE UNIVERSITY,
SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY, SEDS, SPACE
GENERATION & MOON EXPRESS, WHERE HE
HAS SERVED AS CEO SINCE FOUNDING THE
COMPANY IN 2010 WITH NAVEEN JAIN AND
BARNEY PELL.
SES
Last year, in the space of a few months,
four geostationary satellites failed in
orbit. Each had reached, or exceeded,
its design life. Each incident created,
or posed a high risk of creating, debris that
could endanger other satellites; debris that
could linger for thousands of years.
This alarming string of failures didn’t stop
the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
— at the end of November — from authorizing
SES to move its AMC-1 satellite and operate it
until 2021, 10 years beyond its design life. No
one objected, but someone should have, given
last summer’s incidents:
• June: SES lost control of AMC-9 (14 years old),
which began drifting from its 83-degrees-west
orbital slot. Reports suggest at least two pieces
broke off of AMC-9. The satellite’s builder de-
nies it and SES claims the debris pose little risk
of collision with other satellites.
• July: Twelve transponders suddenly failed
on SES’s NSS-806 satellite (19 years old).
• July: PT Telkom’s Telkom-1 (18 years old)
mysteriously exploded, releasing thousands
of pieces of debris at the 85.5-degrees-east
orbital slot. The incident was caught on
ground-based video.
• July/August: The FCC authorized moving
EchoStar-3 (20 years old) to a new geostation-
ary position. On Aug. 2, EchoStar lost contact
with the satellite, which began drifting across
the geostationary arc — posing a collision risk
to the satellites whose path it crossed. After a
month, EchoStar regained contact, moving
EchoStar-3 into a safe graveyard orbit.
That’s one outright disaster, two major mal-
functions, and one harrowing near-miss.
All four satellites were at or beyond their 15-
year design lives. Lockheed Martin built three
of them. Two (EchoStar 3 and Telkom-1) used
the venerable A2100 satellite bus, which has
flown over 75 times since being introduced
in 1996. Maybe that’s a coincidence, or maybe
the issue really is about age.
The very first A2100 satellite is still operat-
ing. Launched in 1996, AMC-1 is already over
21 years old — ancient for a satellite. Yet just
at the end of November, the FCC authorized
SES to move AMC-1 to a new orbit (from 130.9
to 129.15 degrees west), extending its license
Last summer’s string of incidents should have been a wakeup call for the FCC
COMMENTARY James E. Dunstan
28 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
SES’s AMC-9 satellite began drifting last June accompanied by still-unexplained debris.
SES’s NSS-806 satellite lost 12 of its transponders last summer.
Do we care about orbital debris at all?
until June 30, 2021 — for a total of 25 years,
and 10 years beyond its design life. SES said
it needed to move the satellite so that it could
transition traffic to SES-15, to be launched next
year. AMC-1 carries television programming
(including educational programming) to cable
system headends throughout North America.
AMC-1 isn’t just old. The original A2100
satellites lack a key safety feature the FCC
began requiring in 2004: they cannot vent
onboard fuel. So it’s critical that they’re moved
to a graveyard orbit before operators lose
control; dead satellites with pressurized tanks
can, like Telekom-1, explode if something hits
them, creating dangerous debris fields. SES’s
application to the FCC did not discuss the age
of the satellite, stating only that, according to
SES’s calculations (satellites don’t actually have
onboard fuel gauges), AMC-1 has enough fuel
left to move orbits now and shift into a grave-
yard orbit at end of life in 2021.
This application should have set off alarm
bells at the FCC — indeed, across the satellite
industry. The A2100 may be an engineering
marvel, but the fact that these satellites can
operate beyond their design lives doesn’t mean
it’s worth the risk to do so.
The FCC desperately needs a way to model
and weigh the trade-offs at stake. Yes, it’s ul-
timately consumers who will bear the costs
if satellite operators are forced to retire func-
tioning satellites prematurely. But it’s also
consumers — if not in the near future, then
someday — who will bear the cost of satellites
being damaged or destroyed by debris. In the
worst case scenario, entire geostationary slots
could simply be rendered unusable.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has promised to
integrate better economic analysis across the
commission’s work. Orbital debris would be a
fine place to start, and the sooner the better.
The FCC will be asked to grant additional li-
cense extensions for an aging generation of
satellites. And right now, the agency doesn’t
seem to know how to avoid a tragedy of the
commons, or even recognize that it’s facing
one. SN
JAMES E. DUNSTAN IS A SPACE LAWYER AND
SENIOR ADJUNCT FELLOW AT TECHFREEDOM, A
WASHINGTON-BASED TECHNOLOGY POLICY THINK
TANK.
SPACENEWS.COM | 29
AGI
An AGI visualization of the Echo-Star-3 satellite that its operator moved to a graveyard orbit last year after regaining control of the drifting spacecraft.
ON NATIONAL SECURITY Sandra Erwin
30 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
established relationships.”
With regard to space, “He’s got tre-
mendous familiarity with the space sys-
tems architecture,” Tierney said. “I think
people are encouraged.”
It will be interesting to see if Roper is
able to bridge what some see as a wid-
ening gap between the defense and the
commercial markets. Air Force Secretary
Heather Wilson told an industry audience
this month that she worries the military
is “too hard to work with” and that arcane
procurement methods scare away many
companies in the space and technology
sectors that otherwise would consider
jumping into the military market.
Government contracting expert Karri
Palmetier, a former United Launch Alli-
ance lawyer who advises small businesses,
pointed to the dichotomy Roper and other
leaders have to contend with. “Reform is
needed to allow innovation because DoD
is hard to work with,” she said. But the
complex Pentagon procurement process
will continue to exist because the military
has unique needs. “The trick will be to find
ways to use, adapt, modify or overhaul
the acquisition system to adjust to each
acquisition as appropriate.”
The Air Force is in a tough position
when it comes to space. As space comes
under threat, there is growing pressure to
modernize but the military is not willing
to take risks with technology. And that
could deter efforts to push commercial
solutions. Some commercial firms are a
bit naïve about the realities of the military
market, analysts caution. The NewSpace
community is offering apps and services
that the military may not be prepared to
buy. The traditional contractors know that
it will take major muscle movements in
the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to get
dollars obligated and capabilities on orbit.
Is the rhetoric going to be matched
by actions and dollars? “We’re not there
yet,” said Tierney. “But the personnel
changes are positive.” SN
The recent news about the nom-
ination of Pentagon procure-
ment “disruptor” Will Roper to
be assistant secretary of the Air
Force for acquisition has reverberated
across the industry, stirring up specu-
lation about what new ideas he might
bring into air and space modernization
programs.
The initial reaction is that this could
be good news for the burgeoning com-
mercial space industry that is now driving
the innovation agenda. “Roper’s record
suggests he will favor less complex solu-
tions for accomplishing space missions,”
said industry consultant Loren Thompson
of the Lexington Institute.
A looming question is whether Roper’s
embrace of commercial technology as head
of the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities
Office will lead to changes in how the Air
Force buys satellites and launch services.
Industry insiders see Roper’s philosophy
aligning with that of Gen. John Hyten, the
commander of U.S. Strategic Command,
who has chastised the Air Force for fa-
voring large, so-called exquisite satellites
that make “juicy targets” for the enemy.
The obvious alternative is to buy a
larger number of less expensive satellites.
Thompson sees Roper possibly making
bold moves in this area. “It’s hard to build
resilience and flexibility into a space
constellation when each node costs a
billion dollars,” he said. “The question,
though, is whether this can be achieved
without a significant loss of capability.”
A transition to commercial technol-
ogy will require tradeoffs, a concept that
Roper has championed. Does a missile
warning satellite need to have both a
staring and a scanning sensor? Well,
no, but it will function more effectively
if it does. Thompson predicts Roper’s
penchant for “better-faster-cheaper”
solutions will be challenged in areas like
space launch because while non-tradi-
tional providers may be less expensive,
they are also less reliable.
Space industry adviser Mike Tierney
of Jacques & Associates said companies
in the commercial sector are excited
about the Roper nomination and hope
he can break a lot of china. “A lot of the
rhetoric is very positive,” he said. “But
industry will want to see actual change
in acquisition strategies and in procure-
ments.” Executives who have worked
with Roper have been impressed, Tier-
ney said. “When folks in the industry
would want to engage with DoD about
commercial or available technology that
would fill mission need, it was Dr. Roper
that they would go see,” he said. “There’s
CAN WHITE HOUSE NOMINEE, WILL ROPER, HELP
ACCELERATE SPACE MODERNIZATION?
Early excitement (and questions) about new Air Force weapons buyer
SPACENEWS.COM | 31
ON THE HORIZON
15-19 Space Traffic Management Conferencecommons.erau.edu/stm
Daytona Beach, FL
21-24 Pacific Telecommunications Conferenceptc.org Honolulu, HI
FEBRUARY
DATE EVENT PLACE DATE EVENT PLACE
5-7 SmallSat Symposiumsmallsatshow.com
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Washington, D.C.
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Silicon Valley, CA
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16-19 Space Symposiumspacesymposium.org
Colorado Springs, CO
APRIL
JANUARY
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Luxembourg City
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Los Angeles, CA
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MAY
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JUNE
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AUGUST
FOUST FORWARD Jeff Foust
On Jan. 11, Rocket Lab announced it
plans to carry out another launch
attempt for its Electron vehicle in a
nine-day window that opens Jan. 19.
The company had tried in December to launch
the small rocket for the first time, after a partially
successful first launch in May, but was stymied by
poor weather and technical glitches. If successful,
though, Rocket Lab says they’ll be ready to begin
commercial missions immediately thereafter.
That development is just one sign of the growing
wave of small launch vehicles that has been building
over the last few years. Other companies, like Vector
and Virgin Orbit, are planning inaugural launches
of their vehicles later this year, with more vehicles
under development. Will that wave of activity con-
tinue to swell this year, or will it break and crash?
What is remarkable is the amount of activity going
into a market whose demand remains so uncertain.
A few years ago, Carlos Niederstrasser and Warren
Frick of Orbital ATK started keeping track of the
small launchers in service or in development. They
represented the results at the annual Conference
on Small Satellites at Utah State University, and
the interest was so strong they have continued to
update what has become a growing list.
Their list focuses on vehicles capable of placing
no more than 1,000 kilograms into orbit. By that
metric, five vehicles qualify as operational, having
successfully performed at least one launch: their
company’s own Pegasus and Minotaur 1, and the
Chinese Kaitouzhe-2, Kuaizhou-1A and Long
March 11 rockets.
Riding a big wave of small rockets
However, the list now includes 35 vehicles
actively under development, at least based on
publicly available information, compared to just
20 in 2015. “There was a period of time last year
where I was finding a new vehicle almost every
week,” Niederstrasser said during a panel discus-
sion about small launch vehicles at the annual
meeting of the Transportation Research Board in
Washington Jan. 7.
Just over half of those vehicles are American, with
Chinese, British and Spanish projects accounting
for most of the rest. In addition, Niederstrasser said
he maintains a “watch list” of 30 more small launch
vehicle projects about which there isn’t yet enough
information to determine how serious they are.
Clearly, not all of these 65 small launchers will
actually make it to a launch pad, let alone perform
a successful flight. But even if only a small fraction
does so, those rockets enter a smallsat market where
the numbers of satellites are growing, but so are
alternative launch options, like launching from the
International Space Station or as secondary pay-
loads. Many smallsat developers may not be able
to afford the premium cost of a dedicated launch
on one of these rockets.
So why gamble on a small launch vehicle? Nie-
derstrasser attributes the interest at least in part to
“launch fever” created by SpaceX’s success. New
launch ventures don’t want to compete head-to-
head with SpaceX but think there’s a niche in the
smallsat market they can capture, despite the fact
that SpaceX and other established launch service
providers have given up on small launchers of
their own.
Others on the panel believe companies, and
their investors, are going into this with their eyes
wide open to the risks. “I think the venture capital
community is used to having a high attrition rate,”
said Frank Slazer, vice president of space systems for
the Aerospace Industries Association, citing their
experience with internet and biotech companies.
“There will be failures, business as well as technical,
but that’s just part of the process.”
So, this year may be key to the future of the
small launch vehicle industry. As vehicles start
flying — or, at least, attempt to start flying — we will
see if crashing rockets and business plans lead to
a broader industry wipeout. SN
AT LAST COUNT, AT LEAST 35 SMALL LAUNCH
VEHICLES WERE IN DEVELOPMENT. SOME OF THEM
MAY ACTUALLY FLY.
32 | SPACENEWS 01.15.18
INNOVATION AND LEADERSHIP IN AEROSPACE
April 25–29, 2018
Berlin ExpoCenter Airportwww.ila-berlin.com
2017
2018
20 payloads orbited
19 launch contracts, including first contracts for Ariane 6 and Vega C
11 successful launches in a row
58 launches in the order book
Up to 14 launches planned