Virgin thinks it can make its way to orbit — but can it compete with SpaceX?
Category: satellites – Page 159
FIRST UP | Intuitive Machines hires SpaceX for 2021 rideshare • Maxar awards contract for Gateway arrays • OrbitFab raises $3M for propellant depots
Lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines has signed a contract with SpaceX for its first mission to the moon. The company announced this week that a Falcon 9 will launch its Nova-C lander in 2021 as part of a rideshare mission, but terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company won a contract from NASA in May to carry five payloads to the moon on that mission as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Separately, a federal appeals court this week upheld a verdict in favor of the company in a suit against Moon Express, another commercial lunar lander company. That suit, involving work disputes between the companies, led to Intuitive Machines receiving $4.1 million in cash and stock. [SpaceNews]
Maxar Technologies awarded a contract to Deployable Space Systems to manufacture flexible solar arrays for the first element of NASA’s lunar Gateway. The contract this week is for a pair of Roll Out Solar Array solar panels, each capable of producing 32.5 kilowatts of power. The arrays will be used on the Power and Propulsion Element that Maxar is building for NASA that will serve as the foundation for the Gateway in orbit around the moon. [SpaceNews]
A startup planning propellant depots in orbit for refueling satellites has raised $3 million. OrbitFab announced Thursday it raised the seed round of funding from venture capital fund Type 1 Ventures, Techstars and others. The company is working on technology to allow for refueling of satellites using small depots in orbit, and recently tested that technology on the International Space Station. At a conference in Washington earlier in the week, the company said it was still working on raising a funding round but hopes to have its first tanker in orbit by the end of next year. [TechCrunch].
Toyota tests solar-powered Prius in quest for plugless electric car
TOKYO (Reuters) — Inspired by new ultra-thin solar panels developed for satellites, a project led by Toyota Motor Corp is experimenting with a sun-powered Prius that it hopes will one day require no plugging in.
In the Japanese government-funded demonstration project, Toyota engineers fitted solar panels designed by Sharp Corp to the hood, roof, rear window and spoiler to see how much juice the sun can generate.
The electricity from the panels goes directly to the drive battery, so the Prius can charge while moving or when parked.
A European Spacecraft Almost Collided With A SpaceX Satellite
The tradition of road rage on earth does not apply to space where someone can yell at you to move. There has to be a channel of communication form the earth’s control centres and even then, those emails can be missed. Well, this may have almost caused two assets to run into each other about 350 km above Earth last weekend. This involved a Starlink satellite belonging to SpaceX and the European Space Agency’s Aeolus satellite.
The incident actually started on Wednesday when the US Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron issued a risk warning to both organisations. The unit that monitors space vessels and debris warned that the collision might happen around September 2nd at 7 am ET, with a 0.1% probability.
SES Selects SpaceX to Launch Groundbreaking O3b mPOWER MEO Communications System
LUXEMBOURG—( BUSINESS WIRE )—SES announced today that it has selected SpaceX as a launch partner to deliver its next-generation Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellation into space on board Falcon 9 rockets from Cape Canaveral. The two companies have disrupted the industry in the past when SES became the first to launch a commercial GEO satellite with SpaceX, and later as the first ever payload on a SpaceX reusable rocket. Their next launch, in 2021, will be another one for the records as the revolutionary terabit-scale capabilities of SES’s O3b mPOWER communications system disrupt the industry again.
The global O3b mPOWER system comprises an initial constellation of seven high-throughput, low-latency MEO satellites, each capable of generating thousands of electronically-steered beams that can be dynamically adjusted to serve customers in various markets including telecom and cloud, communications-on-the-move and government. O3b mPOWER also will include a variety of intelligent, application-specific Customer Edge Terminals integrated with SES’s terrestrial network and dynamically optimised using the recently announced Adaptive Resource Control (ARC) software system, further boosting O3b mPOWER’s market-leading flexibility.