A full-scale test model of an Ariane 6 rocket stands on its launch pad in French Guiana last year. Credit:
ESA-Manuel Pedoussaut
On the eve of launching its first ViaSat 3 internet satellite on a SpaceX rocket, Viasat says it has moved the launch of an identical spacecraft off of Europe’s long-delayed Ariane 6 rocket, and is considering bids from other rocket companies.
The decision means the launch contract is up for grabs for the third ViaSat 3 internet satellite, the last of a three-satellite constellation Viasat is deploying to provide global broadband connectivity from space.
Viasat announced in 2018 it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Arianespace to each launch one ViaSat 3 satellite, awarding launch contracts to three industry leaders.
SpaceX is set to launch the first ViaSat 3 satellite on a Falcon Heavy rocket as soon as Sunday night from Kennedy Space Center, following a series of delays throughout April for technical and weather concerns. The second ViaSat 3 satellite remains booked to launch on ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket in late 2023 or early 2024.
The first two ViaSat 3 satellites will provide internet service over the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
But the third ViaSat 3 satellite, designed to serve the Asia-Pacific region and called ViaSat 3 APAC, will no longer launch on Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket, according to Dave Ryan, Viasat’s president of space and commercial networks.
The first test flight of the Ariane 6 rocket, which the European Space Agency and ArianeGroup are developing to replace the workhorse Ariane 5, is now scheduled for no earlier than the end of this year, following years of delays. Once the Ariane 6 is flying, payloads from European governments and ESA will be first in line to fly on operational Ariane 6 missions, according to Ryan.
Some of those satellites were moved off of Russian Soyuz rockets in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The Ariane, unfortunately, we had to change because they were having difficulties getting the Ariane 6 ready to go, and then secondly, when the war broke out, some of the launches that they were responsible for on Russian launchers had to be transferred over to their Ariane vehicles,” Ryan said in an interview with CBS News.
“That pushed us later in line,” Ryan said. “So it got so late that we had to put that third satellite out for bid, and we’re evaluating the proposals right now.”
A ViaSat 3 satellite during ground testing. Credit: Viasat
Viasat, based in Carlsbad, California, is deploying the three-satellite ViaSat 3 constellation into geosynchronous orbit to expand the reach of its consumer internet service from the Americas to global markets. Each Boeing-built ViaSat 3 satellite has a launch mass of more than 6 metric tons (more than 13,000 pounds), and carries a Ka-band communications payload developed by Viasat.
The heavy weight of the ViaSat 3 satellites, and Viasat’s preference for launchers to place the satellites close to their final operating altitude, likely mean the company will only consider the most powerful available commercial rockets for the ViaSat 3 APAC mission.
The final Ariane 5 rocket is set for launch in June, and all of ULA’s remaining Atlas 5 rockets are booked until the company retires the vehicle in favor of the new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Japan’s new H3 rocket, which could be technically capable of launching a satellite as heavy as a ViaSat 3 spacecraft, failed on its inaugural launch in February.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is not expected to be available for a commercial mission in time for when Viasat says the third ViaSat 3 satellite will be ready for launch in mid-2024.
That leaves SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and ULA’s Vulcan rocket as the most likely contenders for the contract to launch the ViaSat 3 satellite for the Asia-Pacific region.
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with the ViaSat 3 Americas broadband satellite. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
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Watch a replay of our live coverage of the countdown and launch two SpaceX rockets — a Falcon 9 and a Falcon Heavy — less than two hours apart on Friday, April 28. Follow us on Twitter.
Weather permitting, SpaceX will go for a launch doubleheader Friday with two missions set for liftoff from Florida’s Space Coast less than two hours apart. A Falcon 9 rocket will launch a pair of O3b internet satellites for SES from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:42 p.m. EDT (2142 UTC), and a Falcon Heavy is poised for blastoff from Kennedy Space Center with a Viasat broadband satellite at 7:29 p.m. EDT (2329 UTC).
The Falcon 9 rocket launch from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral — the first of the back-to-back missions — will send the second pair of Boeing-built satellites into space for SES’s O3b mPOWER network, a constellation of equatorial orbiting internet relay platforms for telecom operators and mobile connectivity services.
Three-and-a-half miles to the north, SpaceX is readying a Falcon Heavy rocket — made by combining three Falcon 9 first stage boosters — for a ride to a high-altitude orbit more than 20,000 miles (about 35,000 kilometers) over the equator with the ViaSat 3 Americas broadband satellite, also made by Boeing.
Forecasters predict iffy weather Friday evening for both launches. The Falcon Heavy launch was scheduled for Thursday evening, but SpaceX delayed the flight 24 hours due to severe weather impacting Florida’s Space Coast.
If both launches take off as scheduled, it would be the shortest span between two SpaceX missions in the company’s history, and the shortest turnaround between two orbital-class launches from Cape Canaveral since 1966.
Separate SpaceX launch teams will oversee the nearly simultaneous countdowns for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
A Falcon 9 rocket (left) stands on pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for liftoff with two O3b mPOWER internet satellites. In the background, a Falcon Heavy stands on pad 39A for liftoff on the ViaSat 3 Americas mission. Credit: SpaceX
The O3b mPOWER satellites awaiting liftoff on the Falcon 9 rocket from pad 40 will beam high-speed internet services around the world, providing “fiber-like” connectivity to users between 50 degrees north and south latitude, according to SES, the Luxembourg-based operator that owns the O3b fleet. Airplanes, cruise ships, energy companies, research institutions, and remote communities can remain connected using the O3b network.
The two O3b spacecraft on the Falcon 9 rocket, when combined, weigh roughly 9,000 pounds (4,100 kilograms) in launch configuration, according to Boeing. The Falcon 9’s first stage booster will attempt landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
SES already has 20 O3b first-generation satellites in Medium Earth Orbit. They flew to space on Russian Soyuz rockets under a launch services contract with Arianepace.
The new O3b mPOWER satellites will operate in a similar Medium Earth Orbit, or MEO, over the equator as the original O3b satellites. The first two O3b mPOWER satellites launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in December.
O3b stands for “Other 3 Billion” in recognition of the billions of people without access to reliable internet service.
The two O3b mPOWER satellites, Nos. 3 and 4 in the fleet, stacked in launch configuration before encapsulation inside SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket payload fairing. Credit: SpaceX / SES
The original O3b satellites, built by Thales Alenia Space nearly a decade ago, had 10 user beams per spacecraft. The new O3b mPOWER satellites, built on Boeing’s 702 spacecraft platform, each have more than 4,000 beams that can be adjusted to focus bandwidth on high-demand areas.
SES has focused on developing broadband satellites for a MEO constellation constellation, which puts the relay stations closer to Earth than geostationary orbit some 22,000 miles over the planet. That reduces the latency, or lag, in internet signals compared to geostationary satellites. As few as three geostationary satellites could provide global coverage, but more satellites in MEO required to reach around the world.
But that number is still far fewer than the hundreds or thousands of internet satellites companies like SpaceX and OneWeb are launching into low Earth orbit. Satellites flying less than 1,000 miles above Earth reduce latency even further than MEO satellites, but many more spacecraft are needed for global coverage.
Falcon Heavy set for sixth launch on commercial flight to GEO
The Falcon Heavy mission will be the sixth launch of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket since 2018, and the second of as many as five Falcon Heavy flights the company plans this year. It’s the first Falcon Heavy launch in which SpaceX will intentionally dispose of all three first stage boosters. SpaceX is dedicating all of the rocket’s propellant to deploying the roughly 6-metric-ton (13,000-pound) ViaSat 3 Americas satellite and its two co-passengers into a near-geosynchronous orbit (GEO).
The mission will take about four-and-a-half hours to reach its targeted orbit, requiring three burns by the upper stage engine. A direct insertion into geosynchronous orbit is one of the most challenging mission types in the launch industry. The profile requires extended battery life on the upper stage, plus a custom band of gray thermal paint on the rocket to help ensure the kerosene fuel does not freeze during the hours spent in the cold environment of space.
Viasat has not said how much it paid SpaceX for the launch. Intelsat officials said last year SpaceX charged a premium for a launch where the booster is expended.
The center core for the ViaSat 3 Americas mission is brand new, while the side boosters are reused from previous SpaceX missions.
ViaSat 3 Americas is the first of three new-generation broadband satellites for Viasat, which beams internet signals for underserved consumers, businesses, and governments. Based in Carlsbad, California, Viasat has agreements to provide in-flight WiFi to passengers on Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, and other commercial airlines.
The ViaSat 3 Americas satellite inside Boeing’s factory in El Segundo, California. Credit: Boeing
The satellite is as big as a school bus, and its solar panels will unfurl in orbit to generate more than 30 kilowatts of power in orbit, more than a quarter the electrical power produced by all the solar arrays on the International Space Station.
The spacecraft has one of the largest antenna reflectors ever sent into space, and will rely on all-electric propulsion for fine orbital maneuvers and station-keeping. After separating from the Falcon Heavy rocket, the spacecraft will use its plasma thrusters to raise its orbit the final 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) to geostationary orbit, where its velocity will match the rate of Earth’s rotation.
That will allow the ViaSat 3 Americas spacecraft to hover over the same geographic position along the equator at 88.9 degrees west longitude, providing coverage over North and South America and adjacent maritime regions. Viasat and Boeing are working on two more satellites to provide similar internet service over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Smaller rideshare communications satellites for Astranis and Gravity Space, both commercial startups, will hitch a ride to orbit on the Falcon Heavy rocket.
Astranis’s satellite, called Arcturus with a launch weight around 660 pounds (300 pounds), will provide broadband internet services to Alaska. Gravity Space’s microsatellite will help an Indonesian company retain regulatory rights to an orbital slot in geostationary orbit with the International Telecommunication Union, which doles out geostationary positions to commercial satellite operators.
NASA’s Perseverance rover glimpsed the Ingenuity helicopter earlier this month after the rotorcraft’s 50th flight. This view shows dust accumulation on the vehicle. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s pioneering Mars helicopter Ingenuity continues to outperform its design specifications, having now notched up more than 50 record-breaking forays across the Red Planet’s surface, 10 times as many flights as originally planned for.
Ingenuity’s historic 50th flight took place on April 13, when it flew 1,057 feet (322.2 meters) in just under three minutes and reached a record altitude of 59 feet (18 meters) before descending into Belva Crater, which stretches for about half a mile.
Five days later, its mothership the Perseverance rover, which carried Ingenuity to Mars in 2021, traveled to within only 75 feet (23 meters) of the helicopter, its closest ever approach in the mission to date.
Perseverance took the opportunity to snap a series of closeup photos which show the helicopter’s rotors coated in Martian dust that was likely kicked up by Ingenuity during takeoff, hovering and landing maneuvers.
Ingenuity is the first machine to achieve powered flight across the skies of an alien world – a significant accomplishment given that the thin Martian atmosphere makes it difficult to achieve lift. To counteract this, Ingenuity is equipped with enlarged, specially shaped blades that rotate about 10 times faster than what is needed to fly on Earth.
The Mars helicopter’s first flight took place on April 19, 2021, some two months after it landed attached to the Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater. Since then the helicopter has far exceeded its originally planned technology demonstration mission of up to five flights.
At the outset, engineers hoped Ingenuity would be able to show that a solar-powered drone could function in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars – but the experiment has ended up wildly exceeding expectations. Ingenuity is no longer a simple technology demonstrator but has become an integral part of Perseverance’s operations.
It also serves as an “airborne” scout for Perseverance — which is searching for evidence of past microbial life and collecting samples for future return to Earth — and its successful test of powered flight on another world could aid in future sample return missions from Mars.
“Just as the Wright brothers continued their experiments well after that momentous day at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the Ingenuity team continues to pursue and learn from the flight operations of the first aircraft on another world,” said Lori Glaze, director of the planetary science division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Beyond facing more challenging terrain, Ingenuity will also now fly at a greater frequency in the coming weeks because the helicopter needs to remain within electronic earshot of Perseverance, which with its AutoNav capability can travel hundreds of meters each day.
“Ingenuity relies on Perseverance to act as a communications relay between it and mission controllers here at JPL,” explained Josh Anderson, Ingenuity operations lead at NASA’s JPL in California. “If the rover gets too far ahead or disappears behind a hill, we could lose communications. The rover team has a job to do and a schedule to keep. So it’s imperative Ingenuity keeps up and is in the lead whenever possible.”
NASA’s Perseverance rover is visible at upper left in this aerial view from the Ingenuity helicopter flying over a dried-up river delta at Jezero Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Built with many “off-the-shelf” components, such as smartphone processors and cameras, Ingenuity is now 23 Earth months and more than 45 flights beyond its expected lifetime. The helicopter has flown for over 89 minutes and more than 7.1 miles (11.6 kilometers).
“When we first flew, we thought we would be incredibly lucky to eke out five flights,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL. “We have exceeded our expected cumulative flight time since our technology demonstration wrapped by 1,250 percent and expected distance flown by 2,214 percent.”
Surpassing expectations like this comes at a cost, however. With some helicopter components showing signs of wear and the terrain becoming more challenging, the Ingenuity team recognizes that every great mission must eventually come to an end.
“We have come so far, and we want to go farther,” added Tzanetos. “But we have known since the very beginning our time at Mars was limited, and every operational day is a blessing. Whether Ingenuity’s mission ends tomorrow, next week, or months from now is something no one can predict at present. What I can say is that when it does, we’ll have one heck of a party.”
During its 51st flight on April 22, Ingenuity returned Perseverance’s photo compliment by taking a spectacular image of the rover from 40 feet (12 meters) above the Martian surface. In the photo, Perseverance can be seen motionless in the planet’s red soil in the background, nearly indistinguishable from large rocks strewn across the Red Planet landscape.
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Veteran NASA astronaut Steve Bowen and Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi suited up and floated outside the International Space Station Friday for a spacewalk to prepare the outpost for new solar arrays and retrieve a disabled S-band antenna for eventual return to Earth. Alneyadi became the first Arab astronaut to perform a spacewalk.
The astronauts switched their NASA spacesuits to internal battery power at 9:11 a.m. EDT (1511 UTC) to mark the official start of the spacewalk, which was expected to last about six-and-a-half hours.
Bowen, designated EV1 or lead spacewalker, opened the hatch and exited the space station’s Quest airlock module first, following minutes after by Alneyadi. The excursion is the eighth spacewalk in Bowen’s astronaut career, and the first for Alneyadi, who flew to the space station on a SpaceX Dragon crew capsule last month under an agreement between NASA, the United Arab Emirates, and the Houston-based company Axiom Space.
“Just a quick note to congratulate the UAE for having their flag on an EMU (spacesuit) outside the International Space Station for the first time,” NASA astronaut Anne McClain radioed from mission control in Houston.
“Thank you so much,” Alneyadi replied.
Alneyadi, 41, was selected as one of the United Arab Emirates’ first two astronauts in 2018, and is the first person from the Arab world to live and work on the International Space Station for a long-duration flight. He launched from Florida on the same SpaceX mission as Bowen, a 59-year-old former U.S. Navy submarine officer, along with NASA pilot Warren “Woody” Hoburg and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev for a planned six-month expedition.
The tasks for Friday’s spacewalk include completing preparations on the space station’s power truss for the arrival of two new roll-out solar arrays on a SpaceX cargo mission in June. Bowen and Alneyadi will relocate a foot restraint, route and stow cables, and configure multi-layer insulation around two brackets installed on a previous spacewalk to accommodate the power-generating solar panels.
The astronauts will also retrieve an S-band antenna assembly that was replaced on a spacewalk in 2021. The spacewalkers will bring the antenna back inside the space station for return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship. Engineers on the ground will repair, refurbish, and relaunch the antenna back to the space station as a spare unit.
Emirati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi wears a NASA spacesuit with a UAE flag on his arm. Credit: NASA/MBRSC
For Alneyadi and the burgeoning UAE space program, the spacewalk Friday holds special significances.
“Counting down the hours until we pass through the ISS airlock into space,” Alneyadi tweeted before the spacewalk Friday. “Wearing the spacesuit and proudly bearing the UAE flag on my arm, I will soon be undertaking the Arab world’s first spacewalk. Wish us luck!”
“After a long period of training, we are ready to take on the challenge and create a new milestone for our mission,” Alneyadi tweeted.
The excursion is the 261st spacewalk in support of International Space Station assembly and maintenance, and the fourth spacewalk outside the station so far this year. Two Russian spacewalks are planned next month to continue outfitting of the Nauka lab module, the newest pressurized element of the space station which arrived at the complex in 2021.
[…] with particularly strong storms anticipated offshore tonight. A triple-barreled Falcon Heavy—already scrubbed two days in a row, thanks to continuing poor weather—is now set to rise from historic Pad 39A at Florida’s […]
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After Thursday's scrubbed launch attempt of #FalconHeavy, a game of musical chairs (and possibly a new launch-to-launch record) are on tap for Friday. All eyes, however, are on Mother Nature.
[…] КИЕВ. 27 апреля. УНН. Взрыв ракетоносителя Starship во время летных испытаний был прогнозируемым, но степень разрушения стартовой площадки и ущерб окружающей среде значительно превысила предварительные оценки. Это станет основой для расследования Федерального управления гражданской авиации, которое может занять несколько месяцев, пишет УНН со ссылкой на AmericaSpace. […]
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[…] early Thursday. The veteran B1061 core—which previously flew 12 times between November 2020 and last month—was seemingly stricken with cruel luck yesterday as she aimed for her 13th launch and 2023’s […]
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@SpaceX has launched a record-setting 3rd Falcon 9 of the month out of Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., as weather trends marginally upward for tonight's Falcon Heavy launch from the East Coast.
this is Ulrich, one of the two German astronauts on STS-55. Thanks for giving this excellent throwback. The crew had a beautiful 25th anniversary tour in May 2018 through Germany, unfortunately without Steve who passed away earlier. We still meet yearly on ASE conferences, this year in Bursa/ Turkey.
Best
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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the Starlink 3-5 mission with 46 Starlink internet satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
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SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket for the ViaSat 3 Americas mission inside the hangar at Launch Complex 39A. The three Falcon Heavy boosters will be powered by 27 kerosene-fueled Merlin engines. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX rolled a Falcon Heavy rocket back to its launch pad in Florida Tuesday night for liftoff Wednesday with a high-power Viasat broadband satellite, following an eight-day delay for a launch vehicle engine swap.
The Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled for launch at 7:29 p.m. EDT (2329 UTC) Wednesday with ViaSat 3 Americas, a large Boeing-built internet satellite, and two small rideshare payloads. SpaceX’s heavy-lifter will place the satellites into a circular orbit near geostationary altitude more than 20,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) above Earth.
Three booster stages will combine to generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust to propel the Falcon Heavy off the launch pad. Each booster is powered by nine Merlin main engines, and a single modified Merlin engine drives the Falcon Heavy’s second stage, which will guide the mission’s three satellite payloads into their high-altitude orbit.
Riding a transporter/erector, the fully-assembled rocket emerged from SpaceX’s hangar just south of Launch Complex 39A and rolled along rails up the ramp to the launch pad. Once in position over the flame trench at pad 39A, the rocket will be raised vertical in preparation for Wednesday’s countdown.
It’s the second trip to the launch pad for this Falcon Heavy rocket, following a test-firing of its 27 main engines April 13. Following the hold-down firing, SpaceX rolled the rocket back to the hangar for attachment of its payload fairing containing the ViaSat 3 Americas satellite and two rideshare spacecraft.
At that time, officials planned to launch the mission April 18, but SpaceX announced an eight-day delay to April 26 without giving a reason. Multiple sources said mangers ordered the delay to replace at least one engine on the rocket after the test-firing. The static fire test provides an opportunity for SpaceX engineers to make sure all launch vehicle and ground systems are working properly before proceeding into a real countdown.
No details were available on what caused SpaceX to perform the engine replacement.
SpaceX’s ground crew removed the rocket from its transporter/erector for the engine swap, then reinstalled the Falcon Heavy on its carrier structure for the return to pad 39A Tuesday. Technicians also installed the payload fairing with the mission’s three satellite passengers.
The mission will be the sixth launch of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket since 2018, and the second of as many as five Falcon Heavy flights the company plans this year. It’s the first Falcon Heavy launch in which SpaceX will intentionally dispose of all three first stage boosters. SpaceX is dedicating all of the rocket’s propellant to deploying the roughly 6-metric-ton (13,000-pound) ViaSat 3 Americas satellite and its co-passengers into a near-geosynchronous orbit.
The mission will take about six hours to reach its targeted orbit, requiring three burns by the upper stage engine. A direct insertion into geosynchronous orbit is one of the most challenging mission types in the launch industry. The profile requires extended battery life on the upper stage, plus a custom band of gray thermal paint on the rocket to help ensure the kerosene fuel does not freeze during the hours spent in the cold environment of space.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket rolls to its launch pad Tuesday evening at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: Spaceflight Now
Viasat has not said how much it paid SpaceX for the launch. Intelsat officials said last year SpaceX charged a premium for a launch where the booster is expended.
The center core for the ViaSat 3 Americas mission is brand new, while the side boosters are reused from previous SpaceX missions.
ViaSat 3 Americas is the first of three new-generation broadband satellites for Viasat, which beams internet signals for underserved consumers, businesses, and governments. Based in Carlsbad, California, Viasat has agreements to provide in-flight WiFi to passengers on Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, and other commercial airlines.
The satellite is as big as a school bus, and its solar panels will unfurl in orbit to generate more than 30 kilowatts of power in orbit, more than a quarter the electrical power produced by all the solar arrays on the International Space Station.
The spacecraft has one of the largest antenna reflectors ever sent into space, and will rely on all-electric propulsion for fine orbital maneuvers and station-keeping. After separating from the Falcon Heavy rocket, the spacecraft will use its plasma thrusters to raise its orbit the final 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) to geostationary orbit, where its velocity will match the rate of Earth’s rotation.
That will allow the ViaSat 3 Americas spacecraft to hover over the same geographic position along the equator at 88.9 degrees west longitude, providing coverage over North and South America and adjacent maritime regions. Viasat and Boeing are working on two more satellites to provide similar internet service over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Smaller rideshare communications satellites for Astranis and Gravity Space, both commercial startups, will hitch a ride to orbit on the Falcon Heavy rocket.
Astranis’s satellite, called Arcturus with a launch weight around 660 pounds (300 pounds), will provide broadband internet services to Alaska. Gravity Space’s microsatellite will help an Indonesian company retain regulatory rights to an orbital slot in geostationary orbit with the International Telecommunication Union, which doles out geostationary positions to commercial satellite operators.
SpaceX’s payload fairing, containing the ViaSat 3 Americas satellite, moves from SpaceX’a payload processing facility to the Falcon Heavy hangar during the final phase of launch preparations. Credit: SpaceX
The eight-day delay for the Falcon Heavy launch will have a ripple effect on two upcoming SpaceX launches from pad 39A to send a crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
The launch of Axiom Space’s second commercial crew mission, called Ax-2, on a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft from pad 39A has been delayed from May 8 to no earlier than May 17 as a result of the Falcon Heavy delay. It takes about three weeks to reconfigure the launch pad and SpaceX’s strongback and transporter/erector structure between a Falcon Heavy mission and a Falcon 9 astronaut mission. That timeline also includes days for a rocket test-firing and crew dress rehearsal, which are not part of every SpaceX mission.
The Ax-2 mission will launch on a nearly two-week flight to the International Space Station. The mission is commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, a veteran of three long-duration flights on the space station and now an employee of Houston-based Axiom. Three private astronaut passengers — one American businessman and two Saudi Arabian government astronauts — will join Whitson for the flight to the station.
After the departure of the Ax-2 mission from the space station in late May, SpaceX plans to launch its 28th cargo resupply flight to the station from pad 39A around June 3, two days later than previously planned. A SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule will ferry a pair of upgraded solar arrays to the space station, along with several tons of scientific experiments and crew supplies.
Executives from ispace (lower left) watch animation of the Hakuto-R landing sequence Tuesday in Tokyo. Credit: ispace
A small spacecraft attempting to become the first privately-funded probe to accomplish a controlled landing on the moon likely fell to the lunar surface after running out of fuel Tuesday, according to the Japanese company ispace, which managed the mission.
The Japanese company lost communication with the Hakuto-R lander moments before its scheduled touchdown in Atlas crater, a 54-mile-wide (87-kilometer) impact basin on the near side of the moon. The spacecraft was on final approach for an automated landing at 12:40 p.m. EDT (1640 UTC) Tuesday.
Scenes broadcast from ispace’s Tokyo control center showed nervous looks on the faces of engineers gathered to monitor telemetry from the spacecraft. Smiles and chatter among ispace executives turned into silent waiting as ground controllers stopped receiving the live data stream from the Hakuto-R lander, a car-size spacecraft that launched in December from Cape Canaveral on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, said in remarks a few minutes after the landing attempt that ground teams received communication from the spacecraft until the “very end” of the descent sequence, but were unable to reestablish contact.
“So we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” Hakamada said.
A data display on ispace’s live webcast of the landing attempt appeared to show the last confirmed telemetry from the Hakuto-R spacecraft indicated the lander was at an altitude of 90 meters (295 feet) and descending at 33 kilometers per hour (20.5 mph). If successful, a landing would have made ispace the first company to safely put a privately-funded spacecraft on the surface of another planetary body.
In a statement later Tuesday, ispace reported that a successful landing was “not achievable.”
A preliminary analysis of data from the spacecraft indicated the estimated remaining propellant was “at the lower threshold,” then the lander’s descent speed rapidly increased, ispace said. If the spacecraft ran out of propellant, the lander’s engines would have shut off, causing it to fall to the surface.
“Based on this, it has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the moon’s surface,” ispace said in a statement.
The company said its engineers are examining data to clarify details of the events that led to the loss of the mission.
Engineers inside ispace’s mission control center in Tokyo watch their display screens with nervous faces moments after contact was lost with the Hakuto-R lander. Credit: ispace
Hakamada established the enterprise that became ispace in 2010. Following starts, stops, and wholesale changes in scope, ispace’s first moon landing mission — called Mission 1 — finally launched in December.
The original impetus for Hakamada’s company was the pursuit of the Google Lunar X Prize, the sweepstakes that offered a $20 million grand prize to the first privately-funded team to put a lander on the moon. Hakamada’s group, called Hakuto, worked on designing a lunar rover to ride to the moon on another lander. But the Google Lunar X Prize shut down in 2018 without a winner, leading some of the teams to dissolve or struggle to find new purpose.
Hakamada redirected ispace’s efforts to design and develop its own moon lander, a reboot the firm calls Hakuto-R. Hakuto means “white rabbit” in Japanese.
Despite the landing failure Tuesday, Hakamada said he is “very proud” of ispace’s team. The Japanese company has another lunar lander scheduled to launch on Mission 2 in 2024, and a Mission 3 using a larger spacecraft design is in the early stages of development for launch in 2025. Mission 3 will attempt to land on the far side of the moon, accompanied by two small communications relay satellites to enable contact between the lander and Earth.
Hakamada said ispace’s Mission 1, despite the crash landing, is a “great achievement” to provide experience and knowledge to feed into preparations for following mission. Engineers acquired “valuable data and know-how” throughout the Hakuto-R lander’s flight to the moon, up until the final moments of the landing sequence, according to ispace.
“We will keep going,” Hakamada said. “Never quit the lunar quest.”
The lunar landing attempt by ispace was the second time a privately-funded spacecraft has tried to land on the moon. The Israeli Beresheet mission, developed by a non-profit organization, crashed on the moon during a landing attempt in 2019.
Now boasting a staff of more than 200 employees, ispace has raised its funding through equity financing and bank loans. Hakamada’s investors include Suzuki, Japan Airlines, the Development Bank of Japan, Konica Minolta, Dentsu, and numerous venture capital and equity funds.
“For startup companies, the financing is really important,” said Jumpei Nozaki, chief financial officer of ispace. “We are very proud, and we are very fortunate that we could raise more than $300 million in money so far to support not only one single mission, but all three missions together.”
The company says it “specializes in designing and building lunar landers and rovers,” with an objective to “extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world by providing high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the moon.”
“We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” says Takeshi Hakamada, founder & CEO of ispace.
Ground teams had data from the lander during its descent, but lost the signal before landing.
After launching in December, the Hakuto-R spacecraft took a longer but more fuel efficient route to the moon than the direct trajectory followed by NASA’s Apollo missions or the Orion spacecraft in the U.S.-led Artemis program. The Hakuto-R lander, which ispace calls its “Series 1” design, reached a distance of 855,000 miles (nearly 1.38 million miles) from Earth in February, becoming the farthest privately-funded, commercially-operated spacecraft in history.
The solar-powered spacecraft was then pulled back toward the moon by gravitational forces, and then Hakuto-R performed another engine burn March 21 to be captured into lunar orbit. Another 10-minute engine firing April 13 steered the spacecraft into a circular 60-mile-high orbit around the moon, setting up for the landing attempt Tuesday.
The lander’s propulsion system, provided by the European aerospace company ArianeGroup, consisted of a main engine to provide most of the thrust needed to slow for landing. There were six smaller “assist” thrusters clustered around the main engine, providing pulses for additional deceleration. Eight reaction control system thrusters provided pointing control for the the spacecraft.
The main engine ignited about an hour before the landing time for a braking maneuver to slow the spacecraft’s velocity enough to drop out of its orbit around the moon. Closer to the surface, the lander performed a pitch-up maneuver to point its main engine toward the moon, followed by a final descent phase to guide toward the landing site in Atlas crater.
According to ispace, data from the Hakuto-R lander indicated it was in the expected vertical orientation when ground controllers lost contact Tuesday. A few moments before landing, the main engine was supposed to switch off, allowing pulses from the six assist thrusters to control the spacecraft’s descent rate until it settled onto the lunar surface.
Shock absorbers on the spacecraft’s four landing would have helped cushion the final touchdown.
Guidance, navigation, and control software developed by Massachusetts-based Draper controlled the Hakuto-R spacecraft’s automated landing sequence. The lander’s solar panels were supplied by Colorado-based Sierra Space.
Assuming the landing was successful, the spacecraft was designed to operate for about 10 days on the surface, long enough to deploy the two mobile payloads from the United Arab Emirates and Japan. The stationary landing craft was designed to relay communications signals from the deployable payloads back to Earth. The mission would have ended when sun set on the landing site to begin the two-week-long lunar night.
The Hakuto-R lander carried about 24 pounds (11 kilograms) of customer payloads. By far, the largest of the payloads lost on the landing attempt was a rover from the United Arab Emirates developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center. While the rover took up most of the Hakuto-R lander’s payload capacity, it was still small in stature, measuring just 21 inches by 21 inches (53-by-53 centimeters).
The UAE’s moon rover, named Rashid, weighed about 22 pounds (10 kilograms) in Earth’s gravity. The rover would have rolled off the Hakuto-R spacecraft a couple of days after landing, then surveyed the landing site with a pair of French cameras, and microscopic and thermal imagers to study rocks and soils. The rover had two Langmuir probes to measure the plasma environment at the moon, which can lift dust particles and transport them across the lunar surface.
Engineers also embedded small samples of different materials on the rover’s four wheels, part of a technology experiment to evaluate how well the materials withstand the abrasive rock and dust on the moon.
But with the crash landing Tuesday, the UAE’s lunar program will have to wait for a future opportunity to explore the moon.
Also lost on the Hakuto-R lander were a tiny mobile robot developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Japanese toy company Tomy, a solid-state battery technology demonstration experiment, a 360-degree imaging system from Canadensys, an artificial intelligence flight computer from Mission Control Space Services, and a demonstration for NGC Aerospace’s crater-based autonomous navigation system.
The Hakuto-R lunar lander captured this view of Earthrise from an altitude of about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface. Credit: ispace
Government-led missions from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China have landed on the moon, but so far, no commercial company has accomplished the great without government backing.
Aside from the payloads mounted on the lander, ispace aimed to fulfill a contract with NASA with the first Hakuto-R mission. NASA awarded contracts in 2020 to purchase lunar regolith from commercial companies, including a $5,000 deal to ispace. All of the agreements were relatively low in monetary value.
The initiative is part of NASA’s Artemis moon program. NASA wants to eventually contract with commercial companies to acquire resources, such as minerals and water, that could sustain a future moon base. The transfer of ownership of lunar soil from a private company to NASA will help officials on both sides of the transaction sort through legal and regulatory issues.
While ispace’s Mission 1 landing attempt was a purely commercial mission, ispace is working with Draper and other space companies to develop a larger robotic moon lander to transport up to a half-ton of cargo to the moon for NASA. Draper and ispace won a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, contract last year to deliver multiple NASA science instruments to the moon’s surface in 2025 on ispace’s Mission 3.
NASA’s first two CLPS missions will be flown by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines. Both of those companies plan to launch their first privately-developed moon landers later this year. The Peregrine lander from Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic will launch on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket, while the first Intuitive Machines mission, called IM-1, will send the company’s Nova-C lander to the moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
With ispace’s crash Tuesday, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines now have a chance to make history as the first company to achieve a soft landing on the moon.
“We congratulate the ispace team on accomplishing a significant number of milestones on their way to today’s landing attempt,” Astrobitic tweeted. “We hope everyone recognizes today is not the day to shy away from pursuing the lunar frontier, but a chance to learn from adversity and push forward.”
“From the launch of Hakuto-R to the descent and approach to the moon’s surface, ispace has demonstrated its expertise in space exploration and its commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Houston-based Intuitive Machines. “The technologies developed and tested by ispace continue to pave the way for future advancements in space exploration and cast a positive light on the emerging lunar economy.”
I missed how a company that we thought knew how to successfully launch rockets showed that it still has much to learn. Like, you know, how to build a launchpad properly, how to code-up a booster G&C so that it terminates itself when it goes off-nominal, or abort code to, you know, abort when the booster isn’t working properly.
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The Martian moon Deimos, with the Red Planet in the background, was captured in imagery by the UAE’s Hope orbiter March 10. Credit: Emirates Mars Mission / MBRSC
The United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe has seen the far side of the Martian moon Deimos up close for the first time, collecting compositional data suggesting it may have formed from material that broke off of Mars long ago, and not from a captured asteroid.
The Hope probe, known as Al Amal in Arabic, flew about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Deimos on March 10. The Emirati spacecraft’s three science instruments observed Deimos during the encounter, with the probe’s camera recording stunning views of the moon passing across the sunlit side of Mars far below.
The flyby with Deimos was first time a spacecraft has taken detailed images of the side of Deimos facing away from Mars. Deimos is tidally locked with the Mars, meaning the same side of the moon always faces the Red Planet. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has pointed its high-resolution telescope toward Deimos before, but it flies much closer to Mars, meaning it only saw one side of the moon.
Deimos is the smaller of Mars’ two moons. Phobos orbits closer to Mars, and has been more often observed by spacecraft exploring the Red Planet.
The UAE’s Hope spacecraft orbits farther from Mars, regularly passing near the orbit of Deimos more than 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers) from the planet’s surface. Last year, ground teams commanded the Hope spacecraft to adjust its orbit to set up a series of close encounters with Deimos, an irregular-shaped object about 7.7 miles (12.4 kilometers) across.
“We are unsure of the origins of both Phobos and Deimos,” said Hessa AlMatroushi, science lead for the Emirates Mars Mission at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai. “One long-standing theory is that they are captured asteroids, but there are unresolved questions about their composition. How exactly they came to be in their current orbits is also an active area of study, and so any new information we can gain on the two moons, especially the more rarely observed Deimos, has the potential to unlock new understanding of Mars’ satellites.”
Images from the spacecraft’s main camera showed the far side of Deimos to be unexpectedly smooth, scientists said. The flyby March 10 was the closest any spacecraft has been to Deimos since NASA’s Viking 2 orbiter in the 1970s.
Funded by the Emirati government, the Hope probe was built by a joint team of Emirati and U.S. engineers at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, at the University of Colorado at Boulder. U.S. and Emirati scientists also developed the mission’s three instruments, with teams from the MBRSC in Dubai collaborating with researchers at LASP, Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Along with its set of spectacular imagery, the Hope spacecraft recorded the first extreme and far ultraviolet observations and thermal imagery of Deimos. The joint U.S.-Emirati science team presented the initial results from the Deimos encounter Monday at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union.
“The new observations challenge the longstanding theory that Mars’ moons are captured asteroids and instead point to a planetary origin,” tweeted Sarah Al Amiri, the UAE’s minister of state for advanced technology, chairperson of the UAE Space Agency, and former lead scientist on the Emirates Mars Mission.
Artist’s illustration of the Hope spacecraft at Mars. Credit: MBRSC
The Hope probe’s EMIRS instrument, an infrared spectrometer, measured thermal energy coming from Deimos. The measurements suggest the surface of Deimos is “rough at small scales and blanketed in fine regolith material, similar to Photos and Earth’s moon,” officials from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics wrote in a press release.
The data also show Phobos and Deimos are composed of dark volcanic rock similar to the composition of Mars itself.
“The findings to date suggest that both of Mars’ satellites may have formed from debris left over from an impact on Mars,” said Christopher Edwards, EMIRS instrument scientist from Northern Arizona University, in a press release. “These early findings are exciting and have big implications for understanding the formation of moons in our solar system. Differentiating between the captured asteroid and coalesced Mars debris hypotheses is something to which EMM is well positioned to make significant contributions.”
The Hope spacecraft’s EMUS instrument, which measured ultraviolet sunlight reflected off Deimos, found “no strong signatures” of carbon minerals of organic materials, according to Justin Deighan, deputy science lead for the mission at LASP.
“These findings suggest that Deimos may not be a D-type asteroid, the kind we’d expect if Mars’ gravity had captured an asteroid into orbit,” Deighan said in a statement. “Thanks to the orbiter … we expect to build a better understanding of the origins and evolution of both Phobos and Deimos and to advance our fundamental understanding of these two moons of Mars.”
The Hope spacecraft will make additional flybys of Deimos to collect additional data on the Martian moon, which could provide more insight into its origin. The Japanese Martian Moons Explorer, or MMX, mission is scheduled to launch next year on a journey to explore both of Mars’ moons. The robotic MMX spacecraft will attempt to collect a sample of Phobos for return to Earth.
Originally designed for Martian weather and climate observations, the Hope spacecraft launched in July 2020 on a Japanese H-2A rocket and arrived in orbit around Mars in February 2021, become the Arab world’s first interplanetary probe. The probe is about the size of a small car, with two solar array wings to produce electrical power.
The Emirates Mars Mission was supposed to last at least two years after entering orbit in 2021. Al Amiri announced Monday the Hope mission’s scientific observations would be extended at least another year until 2024.
“The remarkable performance of the Mars Hope probe has supported a whole range of new observations in addition to meeting our originally stated science mission goals,” Al Amiri said. “In the circumstances, Hope exceeding all expectations, we are extending the Emirates Mars Mission for a further year.”
The Hakuto-R lunar lander captured this view of Earthrise from an altitude of about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface. Credit: ispace
The Japanese company ispace could become the first commercial firm to achieve a controlled landing on the moon Tuesday, when its privately-funded unpiloted Hakuto-R lander attempts to touch down inside a crater to deliver a small Emirati rover and other research payloads to the lunar surface.
The Hakuto-R lander will begin an hour-long descent sequence at 11:40 a.m. EDT (1540 UTC) Tuesday, when it will drop out of its 60-mile-high (100-kilometer) orbit around the moon and begin a series of propulsive maneuvers to target a landing zone inside Atlas crater, a 54-mile-high (87-kilometer) impact basin on the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon.
If all goes according to plan, the history-making autonomous landing is scheduled around 12:40 p.m. EDT (1640 UTC).
The Hakuto-R lander is about the size of a compact car, with four landing legs that extended soon after a successful launch Dec. 11 from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The four-and-a-half month journey from the Florida launch base has included multiple engine firings, first to boost ispace’s Hakuto-R lander out of Earth orbit toward the moon, then to guide the spacecraft toward an intercept with the moon last month.
The spacecraft took a longer but more fuel efficient route to the moon than the direct trajectory followed by NASA’s Apollo missions or the Orion spacecraft in the U.S.-led Artemis program. The Hakuto-R lander, which ispace calls its “Series 1” design, reached a distance of 855,000 miles (nearly 1.38 million miles) from Earth in February, becoming the farthest privately-funded, commercially-operated spacecraft in history.
The solar-powered spacecraft was then pulled back toward the moon by gravitational forces, and then Hakuto-R performed another engine burn March 21 to be captured into lunar orbit. Another 10-minute engine firing April 13 steered the spacecraft into a circular 60-mile-high orbit around the moon, setting up for the landing attempt Tuesday.
About two-thirds of the lander’s launch mass was hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants to feed Hakuto-R’s engines. The dry mass of the spacecraft is about 750 pounds (340 kilograms). With its legs extended, the lander stands 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) wide.
“What we have accomplished so far is already a great achievement, and we are already applying lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace. “I would like to once again express my heartfelt thanks to those who have worked so hard on this mission, including the engineers who are carrying out the long-term operations since our launch back in December. The stage is set. I am looking forward to witnessing this historic day, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial lunar missions.”
Engineers at a mission operations center in Tokyo will oversee Hakuto-R’s final decent to the lunar surface, but the spacecraft will perform the final descent maneuvers on its own.
The lander’s propulsion system, provided by the European aerospace company ArianeGroup, consists of a main engine to provide most of the thrust needed to slow for landing. There are six smaller “assist” thrusters clustered around the main engine, providing pulses for additional deceleration. Eight reaction control system thrusters provide pointing control for the the spacecraft.
The thrusters will ignite for a braking maneuver to slow the spacecraft’s velocity enough to drop out of its orbit around the moon. Closer to the surface, the lander will perform a pitch-up maneuver to point its main engine toward the moon, followed by a final descent phase to guide toward the landing site in Atlas crater. Shock absorbers on the four landing legs will help cushion the final touchdown.
Guidance, navigation, and control software developed by Massachusetts-based Draper will control the Hakuto-R spacecraft’s automated landing sequence. The lander’s solar panels were supplied by Colorado-based Sierra Space.
This illustration shows the Hakuto-R lander’s sequence to ascent to the lunar surface. Credit: ispace
Assuming the landing is successful, the spacecraft is designed to operate for about 10 days after touchdown, long enough to deploy the two mobile payloads from the United Arab Emirates and Japan. The stationary landing craft will relay communications signals from the deployable payloads back to Earth. The mission will end when sun sets on the landing site to begin the two-week-long lunar night.
The Hakuto-R lander carries about 24 pounds (11 kilograms) of customer payloads. By far, the largest of the payloads is a rover from the United Arab Emirates developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center. While the rover takes up most of the Hakuto-R lander’s payload capacity, it is still small in stature, measuring just 21 inches by 21 inches (53-by-53 centimeters).
The UAE’s moon rover, named Rashid, weighs about 22 pounds (10 kilograms) in Earth’s gravity. The rover is scheduled to roll off the Hakuto-R spacecraft a couple of days after landing, then will survey the landing site with a pair of French cameras, and microscopic and thermal imagers to study rocks and soils. The rover has two Langmuir probes to measure the plasma environment at the moon, which can lift dust particles and transport them across the lunar surface.
Engineers also embedded small samples of different materials on the rover’s four wheels, part of a technology experiment to evaluate how well the materials withstand the abrasive rock and dust on the moon.
“The samples have been bonded to the outside of the rover’s magnesium alloy wheels,” said Ugo Lafont, a materials engineer at the European Space Agency, which provided four of the material samples for the Rashid rover’s wheels. “The rover’s high-resolution camera will inspect the sample panels over time, so we will be able to observe the incidence of factors such as abrasion, discoloration and whether dust stays stuck to the samples or not.”
The Hakuto-R lander is also hauling an even smaller mobile robot developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Japanese toy company Tomy. The so-called transformable lunar robot weighs just a half-pound (250 grams) and is some 3 inches (80 millimeters) wide before it deploys tiny wheels to roll across the lunar surface and collect data and imagery to aid in the design of a future pressurized rover to transport astronauts on the moon.
A payload from NGK Spark Plug, another Japanese company, will test the performance of solid-state batteries. The Hakuto-R landing craft also has payloads from three Canadian companies: A 360-degree imaging system from Canadensys, an artificial intelligence flight computer from Mission Control Space Services, and a demonstration for NGC Aerospace’s crater-based autonomous navigation system.
The primary landing site for ispace’s first lunar lander is Atlas crater, located on the southeastern edge of Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, on the near side of the moon. This region is located at the top-center of this map. Backup landing regions are also labeled. Credit: ispace
First, ispace’s lander has to reach the moon’s surface. Government-led missions from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China have landed on the moon, but ispace is using a commercial business model.
Aside from the payloads mounted on the lander, ispace aims to fulfill a contract with NASA with the first Hakuto-R mission. NASA awarded contracts in 2020 to purchase lunar regolith from commercial companies, including a $5,000 deal to ispace. All of the agreements were relatively low in monetary value.
The initiative is part of NASA’s Artemis moon program. NASA wants to eventually contract with commercial companies to acquire resources, such as minerals and water, that could sustain a future moon base. The transfer of ownership of lunar soil from a private company to NASA will help officials on both sides of the transaction sort through legal and regulatory issues.
“It’s only the conceptual transfer of ownership,” Hakamada said in an interview with Spaceflight Now last year.
Bits of dust kicked up by the landing engine are expected to settle on the footpads of the lander’s legs.
“The regolith will come in and cover the pad, and we declare the capture of the lunar regolith, and then transfer the ownership of the regolith on this pad. We don’t move this regolith somewhere else, we don’t expect that for this first mission.”
Hakamada said ispace has a second contract to sell lunar regolith to NASA on the company’s next lunar landing mission, scheduled for 2024. On that mission, ispace may attempt to scoop up some soil from the lunar surface.
While the first Hakuto-R Series 1 lander is a purely commercial mission, ispace is working with Draper and other space companies to develop a larger robotic moon lander to transport up to a half-ton of cargo to the moon for NASA. Draper and ispace won a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, contract last year to deliver multiple NASA science instruments to the moon’s surface in 2025.
NASA’s first two CLPS missions will be flown by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines. Both of those companies plan to launch their first privately-developed moon landers later this year.
The Hakuto-R moon lander launched Dec. 11 from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now
“Our mission is privately funded,” Hakamada said. “However, we have some relationships with governments, like our payload from the UAE Space Agency and MBRSC, and we also have a JAXA payload as well. But even these payloads are commercial contracts, with no R&D funding from the government, so totally different than the past engagement with the government.”
Hakamada’s investors include Suzuki, Japan Airlines, the Development Bank of Japan, Konica Minolta, Dentsu, and numerous venture capital and equity funds.
The ispace moon lander mission is the culmination of 12 years of engineering development and fundraising, an effort that included starts, stops, and wholesale changes in scope.
The Google Lunar X Prize, the sweepstakes that offered a $20 million grand prize to the first privately-funded team to put a lander on the moon, was the original impetus for Hakamada to establish the company that eventually became ispace. Hakamada’s group, called Hakuto, worked on designing a lunar rover to ride to the moon on another lander. But the Google Lunar X Prize shut down in 2018 without a winner, leading some of the teams to dissolve or struggle to find new purpose.
Hakamada redirected ispace’s efforts to design and develop its own moon lander, a reboot the firm calls Hakuto-R. Hakuto means “white rabbit” in Japanese.
Now boasting a staff of more than 200 employees, ispace said last year it had secured $237 million in equity financing and bank loans to pay for the Hakuto-R lunar transportation program, although ispace has not disclosed the standalone cost of the first mission. The company says it “specializes in designing and building lunar landers and rovers.”
The goal of ispace is to “extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world by providing high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the moon,” according to the company’s website.
India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on Saturday. Credit: ISRO
An Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off Saturday and flew to an altitude of more than 360 miles (580 kilometers) to deploy two Singaporean satellites, one for all-weather radar imaging surveillance and another for technology demonstrations.
The PSLV took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s east coast at 4:49 a.m. EDT (0849 UTC) to begin a 20-minute mission to deploy the two Singaporean satellites. After releasing the two satellites, the rocket’s upper stage was expected to extend power-generating solar panels and continue operating for a month with seven experimental hosted payloads.
The 145-foot-tall (44-meter) rocket vaulted away from its launch pad on Sriharikota Island, located north of the Indian city of Chennai, at 2:19 p.m. local time Saturday. The PSLV flew in its so-called “core alone” configuration without any strap-on boosters. Its solid-fueled core stage produced more than a million pounds of thrust for nearly two minutes, then jettisoned as the second stage lit a hydrazine-fueled Vikas engine to continue accelerating into orbit.
A solid-fueled third stage and liquid-fueled fourth stage finished the job of placing Singapore’s TeLEOS 2 and Lumelite 4 satellites into orbit. The PSLV’s fourth stage released the TeLEOS 2 radar imaging satellite, the larger of the two payloads, about 19-and-a-half minutes into the mission. Less than a minute later, the smaller Lumelite 4 spacecraft deployed from the rocket.
“The PSLV has placed both of the satellites, TeLEOS 2 and Lumelite, into the intended orbit,” said S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization.
The rocket targeted an orbit about 364 miles (586 kilometers) above Earth at an inclination of 10 degrees to the equator. The unusual low-inclination orbit will allow the TeLEOS 2 radar remote sensing satellite to more frequently observe Singapore and neighboring regions. Most radar imaging satellites fly in higher-inclination orbits for more global Earth observation coverage.
TeLEOS 2 will provide high-resolution imagery for the Singaporean government and commercial users. The spacecraft was developed by ST Engineering, a Singaporean defense and technology company, in partnership with the Defense Science and Technology Agency, the acquisitions and systems development division for the Singapore Armed Forces.
NewSpace India Ltd., the commercial arm of ISRO, arranged for the launch of TeLEOS 2 and Lumelite 4 with their Singaporean owners.
“The PSLV has once again demonstrated its high reliability and its suitability for commercial missions of this class,” Somanath said after Saturday’s launch.
Singapore’s TeLEOS 2 radar satellite during pre-flight preparations at the Indian launch site. The radar antenna on the TeLEOS 2 satellite is seen stowed in its launch configuration. Credit: ISRO
The 1,633-pound (741-kilogram) TeLEOS 2 satellite was expected to unfurl its four power-generating solar panels and radar antenna following separation from the upper stage of the PSLV rocket. The synthetic aperture radar instrument, made in Singapore, will transmit radar beams down to Earth and measure the exact time it takes for the signals to reflect back to a receiver on-board the spacecraft.
That information will be used to generate images. Radar remote sensing offers a benefit over optical Earth-imaging instruments. Radars can observe the ground through darkness and cloud cover, providing an all-weather, day-and-night imaging capability.
“The development and launch of TeLEOS 2 represent another milestone in our journey in building up indigenous capabilities for the expansion and commercialization of our satellite technologies,” said Low Jin Phang, president of digital systems at ST Engineering. “It will further propel the growth of Singapore’s space industry and strengthen ST Engineering’s position in the global space market.”
TeLEOS 2 will collect radar imagery at 1-meter (3.3-foot) resolution, monitoring shipping routes, disaster zones, and natural resources. The satellite will supply imagery to Singaporean government agencies, including the Civilian Aviation Authority of Singapore, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, and the National Environment Agency.
Singapore’s Ministry of Defense will also use TeLEOS 2 imagery for military and security purposes.
“TeLEOS 2’s ability to capture images under all weather conditions, during both nighttime and daytime, at an average of 14 passes a day, unlocks multiple possibilities for commercial applications,” said David Tan, executive director of Singapore’s Office for Space Technology and Industry. “This includes hotspot monitoring, oil spill detection, and air and maritime search and rescue operations.”
Last year, an Indian rocket launched a Singaporean optical Earth observation satellite named DS-EO and a radar imaging technology demonstration satellite named NeuSAR. An Indian PSLV rocket launched the TeLEOS 1 optical imaging satellite in 2015.
A model of the TeLEOS 2 satellite as it will appear in orbit, with solar panels and its radar antenna unfurled. Credit: ST Engineering
The Lumelite 4 satellite flew to space as a rideshare payload on the PSLV mission Saturday. Developed by the National University of Singapore’s Satellite Technology and Research Center, the 35-pound (16-kilogram) Lumelite 4 will test a VHF Data Exchange System payload designed to improve real-time ship tracking, and maritime ship-to-ship and ship-to-port communications.
After deploying the TeLEOS 2 and Lumelite 4 satellites, the PSLV’s upper stage was expected to transform into a hosted payload platform. There are seven experiment and tech demo packages on the PSLV’s fourth stage, including an on-board computer, an ionospheric research instrument, an electric propulsion system, an experimental star tracker system for small satellites, and a new CubeSat deployment mechanism.
The launch Saturday marked the 57th flight of a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle since 1993, and India’s third space launch of the year.
After last week's partial success of 1st Starship, @SpaceX is set to close out April with a 3-flight #LaunchWeek from both coasts of the United States. But the watch word remains: Weather.
Gotta love the high and mighty folks….you will take your imagined high road so your ego can bolster your imagined moral superiority, but not before running your mouth for 20 minutes. As I said before….either climb out from under Elon Musk’s desk, wipe the cum off your mouth, and find something useful to do or stay under there and be ignorant.
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