A new kind of #space politics .

On July 16 2024, #Elon #Musk shouted from the proverbial rooftops that he will move SpaceX out of California to Boca Chica, Texas. By his own admission, he is not moving only for corporate advantage, value, or profitability, but also for politics. (He is also moving X, aka Twitter, from San Francisco to Austin, likewise for political reasons; he originally bought Twitter for ideological reasons.)

Ironically, Musk’s announcement came the day after another Musk company, Tesla, reversed a large number of recent California layoffs in Fremont, CA. Likewise, only two years after moving Tesla’s management to Texas with great fanfare, he brought the global engineering team back to Palo Alto, CA.

While #Elon Musk’s resources may permit him to do whatever he wants, I suspect the SpaceX story will end up looking a lot like Tesla’s. If so, in a few years, SpaceX management might in a few years be right back where they started.

It is very easy to say you are moving a company.

It is only a little bit harder to actually move a company of programmers and office workers. Aside from employees who may not want to go, the barriers to doing so are relatively low.

Moving a #manufacturing operation like that of the #Falcon 9 is a whole different kettle of fish. You’re not just moving computers and monitors and people to another already furnished office. You’re moving multiple entire factories, including jigs, tooling and heavy machines.

#SpaceX cleared to launch Falcon 9 rocket after rare failure

#Russia to launch five Earth imaging satellites by yearend — #Roscosmos. The space vehicles slated for launch include two Aist-2T stereoscopic imaging satellites, a Kondor-FKA remote sensing satellite, a Resurs-P observation satellite and an Obzor-R multipurpose observation #satellite

#India to build first phase of its own space station by 2028
We have completed or rather engineered the detailed #design, which is capable of being launched by the LVM3, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said

On several occasions, debris from trunk sections of Dragon spacecraft, which are jettisoned from the capsule before the capsule performs a deorbit burn, have been found on land. They include debris from the Crew-1 Crew Dragon trunk, found in Australia in 2022; the Ax-3 Crew Dragon, which fell in Saskatchewan in February; and the Crew-7 trunk, fragments of which were found in May in North Carolina.

In August 2022, shortly after the Crew-1 debris was found in Australia, a SpaceX official downplayed the incident as an isolated case. “This was all within the expected analyzed space of what can happen,” said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, at a NASA briefing. “Nonetheless, just like we do for launches and any return, we look very closely at the data, we learn everything that we can and we always look for ways we can improve things.”

After the more recent debris sightings, NASA and SpaceX now acknowledge that improvements are needed. The agency recently stated that initial studies expected the trunk to burn up fully upon reentry. “NASA and SpaceX will continue exploring additional solutions as we learn from the discovered debris,” NASA stated.

“We did analysis back before Demo-2 and clearly the models don’t deal with the trunk very well,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said in an interview after a Starliner briefing ahead of that mission’s June 6 launch. He said it’s likely because of the composite materials used in the trunk. “It’s almost like a thermal protection system.”

HELSINKI — China’s main space contractor has carried out a successful static fire test of a rocket first stage designed to take astronauts to the moon.

A Long March 10 first stage test article was fired in Fengtai district of Beijing, Friday, June 14. The stage started normally, operated steadily, and shut down on schedule, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) stated via its WeChat channel.

The test was conducted by the Institute 101 of the Sixth Academy of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor.

The successful test is a step towards China’s goal of putting astronauts on the moon before 2030. NASA currently aims to land humans on the moon once more with Artemis III no earlier than 2026.

The test article had three YF-100K kerosene-liquid oxygen engines installed across its 5.0-meter diameter. The full Long March 10 first stage will be powered by seven such engines. The rocket’s center stage will have two similar stages attached to it.

The engines may have been limited to three due to the capacity of the test stand. The static fire was however deemed a complete success, with simultaneous firing of the three engines.

“The test is basically a comprehensive verification of our first-stage,” Xu Hongping, an engineer with CASC, told CCTV. “It was a complete success, laying a solid foundation for our subsequent research and development and the realization of our entire manned lunar exploration program,”

LOS ANGELES — Redwire announced a contract June 17 to serve as prime mission integrator for a DARPA satellite with a novel propulsion system for very low Earth orbit (VLEO).

SabreSat, Redwire’s VLEO satellite for government intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, will house “air-breathing” electric propulsion systems being developed through DARPA’s Otter program.

Phantom, another VLEO platform, is being developed by Redwire’s European office for the European Space Agency’s Skimsat mission.

“We are taking an innovative approach to developing a new breed of spacecraft that bridge the gap between air and space,” Spence Wise, Redwire senior vice president for missions and platforms, told SpaceNews by email. “DARPA Otter is the first major win for our SabreSat VLEO platform, and it extends our leadership as a prime integrator and international pioneer in VLEO.”

Redwire did not disclose the value of the multi-year DARPA Otter contract, which includes pricing for design through on-orbit operations.

TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon Web Services is busy positioning its cloud infrastructure business to capitalize on the promise of generative artificial intelligence for transforming space and other industries.

More than 60% of the company’s space and aerospace customers are already using some form of AI in their businesses, according to AWS director of aerospace and satellite Clint Crosier, up from single digits around three years ago.

Crosier predicts similar growth over the next few years in space for generative AI, which uses deep-learning models to answer questions or create content based on patterns detected in massive datasets, marking a major step up from traditional machine-learning algorithms.

Mathematical advances, an explosion in the amount of available data and cheaper and more efficient chips for processing it are a “perfect storm” for the rise of generative AI, he told SpaceNews in an interview, helping drive greater adoption of cloud-based applications.

TAMPA, Fla. — Regulatory delays in India have knocked #Eutelsat off course for reaching 90% of the world with its OneWeb low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband constellation by summer, the French satellite operator said May 14.

The company said last year it was the first to get permission to provide commercial satellite broadband services from IN-SPACe, India’s newly created space regulator, but radio waves from the country’s government still needed to be allocated.

Eutelsat is “on track in terms of landing rights and operating permits with the exception of India” for reaching its mid-2024 coverage goal, chief financial officer Christophe Caudrelier told investors during the operator’s May 14 earnings call.

With 633 satellites in LEO, the operator had planned to start worldwide services in early 2024, before falling behind on regulatory approvals and rolling out gateways for the network.