The NASA NEA Scout is a solar sail propelled CubeSat that will visit a Near-Earth Asteroid. Solar sails present a very efficient way to travel around the inner Solar System. Credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Welcome to The Space Resource monthly newsletter for July 2021. Branson and Bezos launch on suborbital flights, SpaceX secures NASA Human Lander System contract, and Blue Origin working on reusable second stage, in-space propulsion, and ISRU tech.

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Asteroids

Additional observations of 16 Psyche show it is a differentiated body and not a bare metal core. Several new surface details were described in a recent paper studying data from multiple telescopes. One interesting discovery was that several spots on the asteroid were highly reflective to both visible light and radar, hinting that some surface locations have a higher concentration of metal than in other parts. The paper goes on to speculate that these regions of dual reflectivity may be areas of ferro-volcanism, where volcanoes erupted metal onto the surface long ago. This therefore implies that 16 Psyche is actually a differentiated body and not the naked metal core of a once larger object, as has been long thought. This new insight is directly relevant for preparing for the arrival of NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission that will visit 16 Psyche in 2026 and 2027. Link.

Solar sailing asteroid mission integrated on SLS for upcoming launch. Called the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout, the 6U CubeSat sized mission will use a 925 square foot solar sail as its main propulsion to travel to an asteroid within 1 AU of Earth. The currently likely target is asteroid 1991 VG, a 5 to 12 meter object in the Apollo group. NEA Scout will be NASA’s first mission that uses solar sails for interplanetary propulsion, yet will be followed up by the Solar Cruiser mission, which will have a sail area over 19 times as big as NEA Scout. Large scale solar sail propulsion technology is still quiet novel, thus these technology demonstration missions are critical for proving and developing the technology. The expected launch date for NEA Scout (and Artemis I) is late November 2021. Link.

NASA’s clean room ready for Ryugu samples. In a partnership agreement with the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), NASA will receive about 500mg of regolith samples that were retrieved by the Hayabusa2 mission. Hayabusa2 was a sample-return mission that was the first to directly sample the surface of a C-type asteroid. After returning to Earth and landing in Australia in Dec 2020, JAXA promptly recovered the capsule and samples, starting a multi-year analysis process. This is exciting because we have never analyzed raw C-type asteroid material in the advanced laboratories available on Earth, thus many discoveries are likely to be made. NASA’s portion of the sample (10% of the total) will be delivered to Johnson Space Center in Dec 2021. Link.

Ground system of NASA’s upcoming Roman Space Telescope ready for construction. Having passed its critical design review, the design, schedule, and budget have been approved. The Roman Space Telescope is a space based telescope based on a similar design of the Hubble Space Telescope, both of which have a 2.4 m primary mirror. The Roman Space Telescope, however, will have a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble, making it ideal for whole sky surveys. The ground station will be able to handle over 20 petabytes just within the first five years of operations. While large, this is still less than the 30 Terabytes generated per night by the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory (formerly the LSST). Link.

TransAstra CEO Joel Sercel outlines progress in developing asteroid mining technology during a recent podcast.

CISLUNAR

Blue Origin is rumored to have started two new major space projects. Anonymous sources told Eric Berger, a senior space editor at Ars Technica, that Blue Origin has started two projects outside their traditional Earth launch work. One project is focused on in-space propulsion and the other is on developing and testing in-space resource utilization (ISRU) technologies. After rapid hiring related to these new projects, the inside source said Blue has one of the best space resources teams in the industry. Keep your eye out for additional job postings, which have so far covered engineering and legal fields. Link.

Artemis Gateway Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) $935 million contract signed. Northrop Grumman signed a firm, fixed-price contract with NASA this month to build, attach, and test the HALO. This also includes integrating it with the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) that is being built by Maxar Technologies. Once Northrop Grumman integrates and prepares the two for launch, SpaceX will launch on a Falcon Heavy no-earlier-than November 2024. Once in space, Northrop Grumman will manage the activation and checkout of the two elements on their journey to lunar orbit. Link.

Moon

GAO denies National Team and Dynetics HLS protest, allowing SpaceX to proceed. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied the protests from Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper (collectively called the National Team) and Dynetics, which sought to reverse the selection decision of NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) contract competition. In the end, SpaceX was awarded $2.9 billion for its Lunar Starship design. This protest had been under consideration by the GAO for months, during which SpaceX’s award and their work for it has been put on hold. Now that the protest has been denied, SpaceX can proceed with work on the contract. NASA has stated that a new phase of the HLS competition will open up soon, being open to any firm who submits a bid. Link.

While it was for naught, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos offered up to $2 billion reduction for HLS bid. Just days prior to the GAO decision, the founder of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, sent a letter to the NASA Administrator with monetary terms to bolster their bid. In the letter, he offered up to a $2 billion in payments waived from their prior HLS bid. Additionally, he committed to a fixed price contract, accepting any cost overruns. This late-game letter is unusual because the bidding-phase is no longer occurring, NASA doesn’t have the additional funds required to award the National Team, and NASA must follow the procurement regulations that prevent accepting unsolicited offers. View the letter here.

$70 million raised for second SpaceIL lunar mission. This mission, called Beresheet 2, will comprise an orbiter and two lunar landers. These landers will be the lightest lunar landers thus far, weighing around 60 kg (132 lb) dry. Beresheet 2 was announced soon after the landing failure of Beresheet in 2020. The target mission date is 2024. Link.

Second orbital test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew vehicle delayed. Boeing’s second orbital test of its CST-100 Starliner crew vehicle was delayed from its original July 30th flight to August 3rd due to the post-docking incident of the Russian Nauka (Multipurpose Laboratory Module; MLM) at the ISS. This incident saw the MLM thrusting in an uncontrolled manner after docking to the ISS, causing NASA to declare a spacecraft emergency. While the ISS was able to regain orientation and the MLM’s fuel vented, the unusual activity caused Starliner’s launch to be delayed. Link.

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Starship

Elon Musk urges hundreds of SpaceX employees to Starbase. Due to a stated goal of completing the Starship orbital launch pad, tower, ground support equipment, and full Starship and Super Heavy stack by August 5th, all available employees were urged to immediately get to Starbase (Boca Chica), Texas. This huge influx of employees has seen a large acceleration in the already rapid progress on site over the last few days of July, as well as some hotels in the area reaching max capacity. Link.

Starship and Super Heavy progress diagram: https://twitter.com/_brendan_lewis/status/1421390782536187906/photo/1

Launch Tower progress diagram: https://twitter.com/Furqan263/status/1420801071811907591/photo/1

terrestrial

Astroscale and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plan missions to clean space junk. In a joint collaboration between Astroscale and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the two companies will work together to conduct joint technology development and joint missions. Link.

WILD RIDE mission from D-Orbit successfully deploys 12 hosted payloads. D-Orbit, the space logistics and transportation company, announced that it has successfully completed the deployment phase of its WILD RIDE mission. As part of this phase, D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier (ION), the company’s proprietary space transportation vehicle, successfully deployed all six satellites hosted onboard and will now proceed with the in-orbit demonstration of 12 hosted payloads. Link.

Over $100 million committed to a Caltech space based solar power effort. This project is working to develop technology to generate solar power in Earth orbit and beam it to the surface using microwaves. Space solar power offers the potential of continuous power anywhere on Earth, however, the technical, financial, and legal/societal challenges of deploying such a system remain daunting. Regardless, this funding will aid the fundamental research required to make such a system feasible. Link.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic launch sub-orbital flights with founders. Richard Branson, two pilots, and 3 other passengers had their flight up 86 km on July 11 aboard Virgin’s VSS Unity. Jeff Bezos and three other passengers were launched up 107 km aboard Blue’s New Shepard on July 20. The flight for Blue Origin was also notable because this was their first crewed flight, and also launched the oldest person (Wally Funk, 82) and youngest person (Oliver Daemen, 18) into space so far.

SpaceX or ULA will launch future Space Development Agency (SDA) satellites. SDA will be seeking bids in late 2021 to launch up to 150 satellites for the Transport Layer Tranche 1. Launches are currently planned to start in late 2024. The first 28 satellites that SDA awarded for launch went to SpaceX, who was paid $150.4 million to launch them in 2022 and 2023. Link.

Astranis is finishing assembly of first internet satellite set to compete with Starlink. This first geostationary satellite is nearly complete and set to launch early in 2022. Astranis is developing some of the smallest geostationary satellites that it hopes will provide a strategic advantage against mega-constellations. Once deployed in space, this satellite will provide internet access to rural Alaska, managed by Pacific Dataport Inc. The current plan is to offer regional internet services for less than half of OneWeb’s planned prices. Astranis has been able to raise $250 million dollars from a Series C investment round, which aid building a new satellite production facility to be used to build dozens then hundreds of their 400kg satellites. Link.

Momentus continues its road to SPAC merger, amid legal controversies. Stable Road Acquisition Corp revised its SPAC merger agreement with Momentus amid controversies regarding Momentus’ founders. The Department of Defense had previously denied Momentus launch authorization due to national security concerns, and SpaceX had discontinued work until those issues were resolved. Additionally, multiple parties involved in the proposed merger have been charged by the SEC for misleading investors, failing due diligence obligations, and overstating the results of technology demonstrations. Momentus’ valuation was reduced from $1.1 billion to $566 million, and some PIPE (private investment in public equity) investors participating in the merger have pulled out. Parties implicated in the SEC lawsuit have reportedly reached a settlement with the SEC to allow the merger to continue.

Launch

SpaceX will launch NASA's Europa Clipper mission. A Falcon Heavy rocket will launch the Europa Clipper on it’s flyby mission of Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Originally, NASA was going to use the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch the mission. NASA awarded the $178 million contract to SpaceX for the October 2024 launch, which will save NASA hundreds of millions of dollars over using the SLS. This award was expected after Congress gave NASA flexibility on launch providers in the 2021 spending bill, whereas it was previously required to utilize the SLS for the mission. Link.

Rocket Lab successfully resumes Electron launches with a U.S. Space Force mission. An Electron successfully launched the small satellite from the firm's New Zealand launch site. This comes after Rocket Lab was able to identify the cause of it’s prior Electron launch failure: the second stage engine ignitor system. Link.

Reusable second stage development started at Blue Origin. Three anonymous sources from within Blue Origin confirmed to Eric Berger, editor at Ars Technica, that the company has a rapid innovation program, called “Jarvis”, which is meant to design a reusable upper stage for their upcoming New Glenn rocket. The purpose of this program was stated as being “the difference between taking a profit and a loss on New Glenn launches”. Additionally, this development program is apparently occurring as a walled-off project from the rest of the company, ideally to encourage more rapid development with less bureaucratic overhead. Link.

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