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Orbion partners with US Department of Defense on small satellite propulsion tech
Michigan-based in-space propulsion startup Orbion is working with a major new partner: The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Orbion has secured a research contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate, specifically aimed at helping the DOD “enhance resiliency of U.S. systems in space.”
Basically, it sounds like that will boil down to seeing how Orbion’s propulsion technology can be applied to DOD satellites when used in larger constellation form, to provide those satellites with the ability to move propulsively while in orbit, and to do so in a way that can scale cost-effectively. In a press release announcing the news, Orbion CEO Brad King says that volume is a strategy when it comes to fortifying U.S. systems in space against potential foreign attack.
“One way to increase the resilience of space systems is to improve our nation’s ability to build and deploy small satellites in large numbers at low costs,” said King in a statement, “Orbion is developing mass-production techniques to build propulsion systems for commercial customers. With this research contract we are investigating how or if our manufacturing processes must be modified to meet DOD requirements.”
It’s true that in the past, the U.S. and other international powers with access to space have mostly focused on large, expensive, singular pieces of orbital hardware as their strategic assets. Shifting to the small satellite constellation approach currently being pursued by a number of private companies definitely has advantages in terms of redundancy and replaceability.
Orbion’s entire business proposition as a startup is that it’s applying mass-production to in-space thrusters, which will bring down costs and make their technology accessible to a much wider range of potential clients, and practical for application in small satellite design. The DOD may not have the same budget-constraint issues as a cash-strapped satellite startup, but long-term cost savings that also comes with a tactical advantage is a hard bargain to pass up.
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Max Q: NASA signs up new Moon delivery companies
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There were lot of highlights in the space industry this past week (even though a rocket launch that was supposed to happened is now pushed to Monday). The biggest news for commercial space might just be that NASA signed on five new companies to its list of approved vendors for lunar payload delivery services, bringing the total group to 14.
SpaceX is among them, and Musk’s company had its own fair share of news this week, too – some good, some bad. One things’ for sure: Even going in to the last week in November, there’s still plenty of news to come in this industry before the year’s out.
Artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.
The five include Blue Origin, SpaceX, Ceres Robotics, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean all or any of these companies will actually fly anything to the Moon on behalf of NASA, but it does mean they can officially bid for the chance. Alongside 9 other companies selected previously by NASA, their bids will be considered by the NASA based on cost, viability and other factors.
This is the bad news I referred to earlier: SpaceX’s Starship Mk1 prototype in Texas blew up just a little bit during cryo testing. This test is designed to simulate extreme cold conditions that the spacecraft could endure during flight, and it clearly didn’t. But Elon Musk was optimistic, saying just after the incident that they’ll move on to a more advanced design right away.
SNC’s Shooting Star module. Credit: SNC.
One of the companies that is now included in NASA’s lunar payload service provider list is Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC). They’re currently developing and building their Dream Chaser spacecraft, which is reusable and lands like the Space Shuttle. At an event at Cape Canaveral in Florida, they unveiled what they call the ‘Shooting Star’ – an ejectable single use cargo container for the Dream Chaser that can really add to its versatility.
This demonstration mission is just a start, but the tech that Nanoracks is launching aboard a future SpaceX launch will be able to cut metal in space, marking the first time a robotic piece of equipment has done that. The ultimate goal is to use this tech to take spent spacecraft upper stages and give them new life – as research platforms, satellites or even habitats in orbit.
That’s one of Saturn’s moons, and it’s made up of icy oceans. Normally, that’s not an optimal place for a rover to get around, but the agency’s laboratory has been testing a design in the Earth’s coldest oceans to see how viable it will be, and now they’re going to use the Antarctic, which is where it’ll test it for months at a time.
Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s crazy, beautiful, ugly, strange Cybertruck pickup last week, and he noted that the stainless steel alloy that makes up its skin is the same material that SpaceX is developing and using on its new Starship spacecraft. Sometimes, being CEO of both a car company and a space company at the same time really pays off.
A lot of large companies outsource at least part of their innovation management and design, and with the space boom on, there’s a new opportunity for companies to emerge that specialize in helping those same large companies find out where they fit in this new frontier. Luna is one such co, putting the puzzle pieces together for health tech companies.
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Luna is a new kind of space company helping biotech find its footing in microgravity
Toronto-based startup Luna Design and Innovation is a prime example of the kind of space company that is increasingly starting up to take advantage of the changing economics of the larger industry. Founded by Andrea Yip, who is also Luna’s CEO, the bootstrapped venture is looking to blaze a trail for biotechnology companies who stand to gain a lot from the new opportunities in commercial space – even if they don’t know it yet.
“I’ve spent my entire career in the public and private health industry, doing a lot of product and service design and innovation,” Yip told me in an interview. “I was working in pharma[ceuticals] for several years, but at the end of 2017, I decided to leave the pharma world and I really wanted to find a way to work along the intersection of pharma, space and design, because I just believe that the future of health for humanity is in space.”
Yip founded Luna at the beginning of this year to help turn that belief into action, with a focus on highlighting the opportunities available to the biotechnology sector in making use of the research environment unique to space.
“We see space as a research platform, and we believe that it’s a research platform that can be leveraged in order to solve healthcare problems here on Earth,” Yip explained. “So for me, it was critically important to open up space to the biotech sector, and to the pharma sector, in order to use it as a research platform for R&D and novel discovery.”
The International Space Station has hosted a number of pharma and biotech experiments.
NASA’s work in space has led to a number of medical advances, inducing digital imaging tech used in breast biopsy, transmitters used for monitoring fetus development within the womb, LED’s used in brain cancer surgery and more. Work done on researching and developing pharmaceuticals in space is also something that companies including Merck, Proctor & Gamble and other industry heavyweights have been dabbling in for years, with experiments conducted on the International Space Station. Companies like SpaceFarma have now sent entire minilaboratories to the ISS to conduct research on behalf of clients. But it’s still a business with plenty of remaining under-utilized opportunity, according to Yip – and tons of potential.
“I think it’s a highly underutilized research platform, unfortunately, right now,” she said. “When it comes to certain physical and life sciences phenomena, we know that things behave differently in space, in what we refer to as microgravity-based environments […] We know that cancer cells, for instance, behave differently in short- and longer-term microgravity when it comes to the way that they metastasize. So being able to even acknowledge that type of insight, and try and understand ‘why’ can unlock a lot of new discovery and understanding about the way cancer actually functions […] and that can actually help us better design drugs, and treatment opportunities here on Earth, just based on those insights.”
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. Credit: Blue Origin .
Yip says that while there has been some activity already in biotech and microgravity, “we’re on the early end of this innovation,” and goes on to suggest that over the course of the next ten or so years, the companies that will be disrupting the existing class of legacy big pharma players will be ones who’ve invested early and deeply in space-based research and development.
The role of Luna is to help biotech companies figure out how best to approach building out an investment in space-based research. To that end, one of its early accomplishments is securing a role as a ‘Channel Partner’ for Jeff Bezos’ commercial space launch company Blue Origin. This arrangement means that Luna acts a a sales partner for Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket, working with potential clients for the Amazon founder’s rocket company on how and why they might seek to set up a sub-orbital space-based experiment.
That’s the near-term vision, and the way that Luna will seek to have the most impact here on Earth. But the possibilities of what the future holds for the biotech sector start to really open up once you consider the current trajectory of the space industry, including NASA’s next steps, and efforts by private companies like SpaceX to expand human presence to other planet.
“We’re talking about going back to the Moon by 2024,” Yip says, referring to NASA’s goal with its Artemis program. “We’re talking about going to Mars in the next few years. There’s a lot that we will need to uncover and discover for ourselves, and I think that’s a huge opportunity. Who knows what we’ll discover when we’re on other planets, and we’re actually putting people there? We have to start preparing for that and building capability for that.”
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Small satellite startup Kepler opens sign-ups for its IoT developer kits
Kepler Communications, the Toronto-based startup that’s focused on developing and deploying shoebox-sized satellites to provide telecommunications services, is opening up registration for those interested in getting their first developer kits. These developer kits, designed to help potential commercial customers take advantage of its Internet of Things (IoT) narrowband connectivity deploying next year, will then be made available to purchase for elect partners next year.
This kind of early access is designed to give a head start on testing and integration to companies interested in using the kind of connectivity Kepler intends on providing. Kepler‘s service is designed to provide global coverage using a single network for IoT operators, at low costs relative to the market, for applications including tracking shipping containers, railway networks, livestock and crops and much more. Kepler says that its IoT network, which will be made up of nanosatellites designed specifically for this purpose it plans to launch throughout next year and beyond, is aimed at industries where you don’t need high bandwidth, as you would for say HD consumer video streaming, but where coverage across large, often remote areas on a consistent basis is key.
IoT connectivity provided by constellations of orbital satellites is an increasing area of focus and investment, as large industries look to modernize their monitoring and tracking operations. Startup Swarm recently got permission from the FCC to launch its 150-small satellite constellation, for instance, to establish a service to address similar needs.
Kepler, founded in 2015, has raised more than $20 million in funding, and has launched two small satellites thus far, including one in January and one in November of 2018. The company announced a contract with ISK and GK Launch Services to deploy two more sometime in the middle of next year aboard a Soyuz rocket.
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Legged lunar rover startup Spacebit taps Latin American partners for Moon mission
U.K.-based lunar rover startup Spacebit, a company developing robotic exploration hardware for use on the Moon, announced two new partners that will help it develop and finalize its technology ahead of its target mission date of 2021. The Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA) and Mexico’s Dereum will be providing the technology that Spacebit will employ on both its deployer and the robot rover it’s preparing for use on the Moon.
This marks the first time that Latin American companies will participate in a mission to the lunar surface, and Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk was joined by Dereum CEO Carlos Mariscal and EXA COO Ronnie Nader to talk about the news at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C.
“We have Ecuador and Mexico as our technical partners,” Tanasyuk said. “So in addition to this being the first lunar mission from the U.K., it also is the first Latin American mission with a consortium of Latin American countries participating along with the U.K.”
Both the EXA and Dereum have strong technical chops when it comes to spacecraft and space-based robotics, with the EXA focusing on developing technology that is “efficient, cheap and reliable,” according to Nader, while Dereum’s Mariscal said that his organization is well-known globally for its work on building robots for use in space, with an extensive track record. Their expertise should help a lot in Spacebit’s efforts to build, test and validate its robotic lunar rover, which employs a novel walking system for getting around, whereas all rovers to date have used wheels for transportation.
Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk
“We are planning on doing a swarm technology exploration plan, where we have multiple small spider walking rovers deployed from a wheeled mothership, along with being able to have some redundancy and the ability to do 3D lidar scanning of the interior lunar caves and lava tubes,” Tanasyuk said.
“It’s essentially a data as a service business model,” he added, explaining how they’ll seek to monetize the business. “Our primary focus for early missions are to do exploration and mapping of lunar lava tubes to be able to characterize the lunar subsurface environment for potential suitability for future human habitation.”
Spacebit, founded in 2014, is funded privately via Tanasyuk himself, along with a couple of other private investors. He said that his company is fully funded through its first mission, a berth aboard the Peregrine Moon lander being launched by Astrobotic in 2021 (which itself has a price tag of $1.7 million he said). The first mission won’t be an entire swarm, but a single rover sent up as a demonstration unit to prove out its technology.
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Why Maxar CTO Walter Scott thinks now is the time to address the orbital traffic boom
The number of objects in orbit around Earth has been growing, and growing fast. Before 1957, of course, there were a total of zero human-made objects in the orbital region of outer space just beyond Earth’s atmosphere. There were 4,987 satellites orbiting the globe at the start of this year, according to the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, which is up nearly three percent from the year before. 2017 was a record year for orbital object launches, but with ambitious new satellite constellations planned by SpaceX and others, that’s a record that’s likely to be beat in relatively short order.
Nor are all of those satellites equipped with modern technology: All told, 8,378 objects have been launched to orbit according to the UNOOSA records, and a sizeable percentage of those spacecraft are more than a few years old.
In fact, earlier this month, Bigelow Airspace was informed by the U.S. Air Force that there’s a 5.6 percent chance that one of its satellites could collide with a Russian ‘zombie’ satellite no longer in operation, and one of Starlink’s satellites had a near-miss with one operated by the European Space Agency.
A new industry organization called the Space Safety Coalition has just issued guidelines outlining best practices for companies operating spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, with signees including Immarsat, Iridium, Planet, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and more.
I spoke with Walter Scott, the Chief Technical Officer of publically-traded space tech company Maxar Technologies, about the new initiative, in which longtime space operator Maxar is a founding member, and why now is the right time for the satellite industry to self-regulate when it comes to sharing low-Earth orbital space.
“The best time to solve a problem is before it’s a crisis, even though that doesn’t seem to be normal human behavior,” he told me.
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JAXA launch for HTV-8 cargo mission to International Space Station officially scrubbed
During a press conference held just after 6 AM JST, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Launch Director Atsutoshi Tamura and the Director of JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center Takeshi Fujita detailed what the two partners knew so far about the cause of their aborted HTV-8 mission on Tuesday.
The launch, scheduled to take place at 6:33 AM JST, instead was officially scrubbed at around 4:34 AM JST due to a fire on the mobile launcher upon which the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIB rocket was sitting ready for launch. The fire began at 3:05 AM JST according to Tamura, and efforts began immediately to extinguish it immediately, with the fire finally being completely put out (as far as JAXA and MHI can tell) by 5:10 AM JST.
So far, all that is known about the fire is that it occurred in a small hole in the platform located between the third and fourth solid propellant boosters, which is designed to provide a venting channel for fire put out by the rocket’s engines when it’s operating normally during launch. This aperture is made of metal, and surrounded by fire retardant materials, which makes it very unlikely for it to catch fire normally. Both Tamura and Fujita confirmed that this specific situation has not happened previously with any prior launches.
The actual cause of the fire remains unknown, and so far, JAXA and MHI staff have not been able to approach the launch vehicle for a closer inspection due to safety considerations. They are confident based on observation from a distance that they’ve succeeded in putting the fire out, and anticipate being able to approach the rocket later today to perform an in-person inspection.
The vehicle was fully fueled when the fire began, but the fuel was quickly siphoned out when the fire was discovered. It’s not yet clear what damage to the launch vehicle has resulted from the incident. The cargo, which included a significant amount of supplies for ISS astronauts, doesn’t initially appear to have been damaged but further inspection will be required, per MHI and JAXA. There isn’t an urgent need for those supplies, however, JAXA confirms.
At the very earliest, the next launch attempt will be September 17, MHI shared, but this date is highly dependent on the results of the investigation into the cause of the fire.
The original article, including updates, follows below.
[Update 09/11/19 4:34 AM JST: JAXA and MHI confirm the launch is scrubbed for today. We’ll find out more at a press conference at 6 AM JST, including whether there is any chance of making an attempt in the backup window.]
[Update 09/11/19 4:07 AM JST: JAXA and MHI confirm that there is a fire on the Mobile Launcher upon which the H-IIB is loaded to roll out to the launch pad. The fire, described as ‘small,’ started at 3:10 AM JST and continues as of this writing at 4:07 AM JST, while attempts are underway to extinguish it, as you can see in the photo captured on site by TechCrunch below. We’ll provide more updates as they become available.]
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’s Launch Services division is all set to send a crucial cargo payload to the International Space Station from JAXA today. The launch is scheduled for 6:33 AM Japan Standard Time (5:33 PM ET/2:33 PM PT), and will take off from Tanegashima Island, at JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center.
The rocket used for this launch is the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) H-IIB, and this is the eighth flight launch of the H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) that MHI designed and built in Japan.
In the H-IIB configuration, the MHI-built rocket that will transport he HTV includes a liquid propellant central core, along with four solid propellant rocket boosters to give it additional life capacity. This particular mission will see the HTV loaded with 5.3 metric tons (just under six U.S. tons) of supplies for the ISS on board in both pressurized and unpressurized cargo containers, which divvy up the total capacity.
One of the crucial pieces of cargo going up is a small satellite deployment device, called “Kibo,” created by the Kyushu Institute of Technology and the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science. It’ll be used to deploy a range of super compact CubeSats also on board, including a propulsion tech demo created by the University of Tokyo and startup Space BD, which is the first company awarded a contract by JAXA to be the commercial operator for deploying smallsats from the ISS via Kibo.
NASA TV will be carrying the launch live via the stream above, with their coverage kicking off around 5 PM ET (2 PM PT/6 AM JST).
Disclosure: MHI covered the travel costs associated with this launch.
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Satellite internet startup Astranis books first commercial launch on SpaceX Falcon 9
Y Combinator-backed startup Astranis is now set to launch its first commercial telecommunication satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, with a launch time frame currently set for sometime starting in the fourth quarter of next year. Astranis aims to address the market of people who don’t currently have broadband internet access, which is still a huge number globally, and they hope to do so using low-cost satellites that massively undercut the price of existing global telecommunications hardware, which can be built and launched much faster than existing spacecraft, too.
Astranis satellites are much more cost-efficient because they’re smaller and easier to make, which changes the economics of deployment for potential carrier and connectivity provider partners. Its approach has already attracted the partnership of Microcom subsidiary Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage company that was formed to expand satellite broadband access in Alaska. This will be the goal of the company’s first launch with SpaceX, to deliver a single satellite to geostationary orbit that will add more than 7.5 Gbps of capacity to the internet provider’s network in Alaska, tripling capacity and potentially reducing costs by “up to three times,” according to Astranis.
This isn’t the first-ever satellite that Astranis has sent up to space — it launched a demonstration satellite in 2018 to show that its tech could work as advertised. Astranis’ approach is distinct from others attempting to offer satellite-based connectivity, including SpaceX’s own Starlink project, because it focuses on building satellites that remain in a fixed orbital position relative to the area on the ground where they’re providing service, as opposed to using a large constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that offer coverage because one or more are bound to be over the coverage area at any given time as they orbit the Earth, handing off connections from one to the next.
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Japan’s ispace now aims for a lunar landing in 2021, and a Moon rover deployment in 2023
One of the private companies aiming to deliver a commercial lunar lander to the Moon has adjusted the timing for its planned mission, which isn’t all that surprising, given the enormity of the task. Japanese startup ispace is now targeting 2021 for their first lunar landing, and 2023 for a second lunar mission that will also include deploying a rover on the Moon’s surface.
The company’s HAKUTO-R program was originally planned to include a mission in 2020 that would involve sending a lunar orbital vehicle for demonstration purposes without any payloads, but that part of the plan has been scrapped in favor of focusing all efforts on delivering actual payloads for commercial customers by 2021 instead.
This updated focus, the company says, is due mostly to the speeding up of the global market for private launch services and payload delivery, including for things like NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, wherein the agency is looking for a growing number of private contractors to support its own needs in terms of getting stuff to the Moon.
Although ispace itself isn’t on the list of nine companies selected in round one of NASA’s program, the Japanese company is supporting American nonprofit Draper in its efforts, which was one of the chosen. The Draper/ispace team-up happened after ispace’s initial commitment to its 2020 orbital demo, so its change in priorities makes sense given the new tie-up.
HAKUTO-R will use SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for its first missions, and the company has also signed partnerships with JAXA, Japan’s space agency, as well as new corporate partners including Suzuki, Sumitomo Corporation, Shogakukan and Citizen Watch.
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Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket will go reusable, with the company aiming for mid-air helicopter recovery
Private rocket launch startup and SpaceX competitor Rocket Lab made a big announcement today: It’ll be looking to re-use the first stage of its Electron rockets, returning them to Earth with a controlled landing after they make their initial trip to orbit with the payload on board. The landing sequence will be different from SpaceX’s however: They’ll attempt to catch the returned first stage mid-air using a helicopter.
That’s in part because, as Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told a crowd when announcing the news today, the company is “not doing a propulsive re-entry” and “we’re not doing a propulsive landing,” and instead will leach off its immense speed upon return to Earth through a turnaround burn in space before releasing a parachute to slow it down enough for a helicopter to catch it.
There are a number of steps required to get to that point, but already, Rocket Lab has been looking to measure all the data it needs to ensure this is possible through its last few launches. It’s upgrading the instrumentation for its eighth flight to gather yet more data, and then on flight 10 it’ll have the rocket splash down into the ocean to recover that rocket for even more learning. Then, during a flight to be determined later (Beck is unwilling to put a number on it at this stage) they’ll try to actually bring one down in good enough shape to reuse it.
As for why, there’s a clear advantage to being able to re-fly rockets, and it’s a simple one to understand when you realize that there’s a huge amount of demand for commercial launches.
“The fundamental reason we’re doing this is launch frequency,” Beck said. “Even if I can get the stage done once, I can effectively double production ratio.”
Beck also added that the biggest difficulty will be braking the rocket’s speed as it returns to Earth — a feat next to which he said the actual mid-air capture of the Electron via helicopter is actually pretty easy, from his POV as an amateur helicopter pilot in training.
Rocket Lab has an HQ in Huntington Beach, Calif. and its own private launch site in New Zealand; it was founded in 2006 by Beck. The company has been test launching its orbital Electron rocket since 2017, and serving customers commercially since 2018. It also intends to launch from Virginia in the U.S. starting in 2019.
The company revealed its Photon satellite platform earlier this year, which would allow small satellite operators to focus on their specific service and use the off-the-shelf Photon design to skip the step of actually designing and building the satellite itself.
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