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 An image of the Crown Perth entertainment complex in Perth, Australia, taken by the SkySat-1 spacecraft shortly after its launch last year. Google is reportedly interested in buying the company. (credit: Skybox Imaging) Skybox Imaging has blazed a number of paths in the commercial space industry, announcing plans a few years ago for a constellation of small commercial remote sensing satellites to provide high-resolution imagery, then going out and raising more than $90 million in venture capital. Now the company has attracted the interest of one of the most powerful companies in the world.
The Silicon Valley trade publication The Information [subscription required] reported Monday that Google was in “early talks” to acquire Skybox Imaging for an disclosed sum. Google would be interested in the company to access the high-resolution images the company’s fleet of satellites will provide. While Google currently relies companies like DigitalGlobe for imagery that goes into Google Maps and Google Earth, an in-house source may be less expensive in the long run for Google. Moreover, Skybox’s plans to be able to refresh its imagery quickly—daily or even multiple times a day, depending on the configuration of the satellite fleet—would allow Google to ensure its imagery is up to date.
While it’s too soon to know if Google will go through on the acquisition, it seems likely that Skybox will need additional funds to deploy its satellite constellation. Earlier this year the company announced a contract with Space Systems/Loral to manufacture its next 12 satellites, and a separate contract with Orbital Sciences to launch the first six of them on a Minotaur-C rocket. Since Skybox probably is not generating much revenue from its one satellite currently in orbit, the $91 million it’s raised to date is unlikely to cover the costs of fulfilling those contracts even if it hadn’t spent any of it yet.
The question for Skybox, then, is whether current or new investors are willing to put more money into the company to fund the development and launch of its satellites, or if those investors instead are looking for an exit—and a return on what they’ve invested to date—and letting Google or another company fund Skybox’s satellite system.
Late last week, SpaceX released video of a static fire test of its Falcon 9R (F9R) test vehicle, the successor to its Grasshopper vehicle used to test technologies for reusable launch vehicles. The static fire lasted about five second seconds, with the vehicle remaining on the pad at the company’s McGregor, Texas, test site.
“The F9R testing program is the next step towards reusability following completion of the Grasshopper program last year. Future testing, including that in New Mexico, will be conducted using the first stage of a Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) as shown here, which is essentially a Falcon 9 v1.1 first stage with legs,” the company said in the video’s description. “F9R test flights in New Mexico will allow us to test at higher altitudes than we are permitted for at our test site in Texas, to do more with unpowered guidance and to prove out landing cases that are more-flight like.”
The mention of New Mexico above is a reference to SpaceX’s deal last year to conduct test flights from Spaceport America there. In October, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said those flights would begin by late December, but have yet to start. In comments Tuesday during a launch services panel at the Space Tech Expo conference in Long Beach, California, she said free flights of the F9R would begin soon, first in Texas and later from Spaceport America.
“We’re going to do some jumps with that in central Texas, and then once we finalize the pad in New Mexico, which I think we’re about a month away from that, then we’ll do as many flights as we can in New Mexico,” she said.
The F9R is one part (one leg?) of SpaceX’s reusability effort, with another being attempts to recover first stages of Falcon 9 rockets on missions like the upcoming launch of SpaceX’s third cargo mission to the ISS. Shotwell reiterated comments she made in a March radio interview that the company hopes to bring a Falcon 9 rocket stage back to a landing pad near the launch site before the end of this year, and reuse a stage on a launch in 2015.
Shotwell said she hopes they need as few as “one or two” recovery tests of Falcon 9 stages, but acknowledged the difficulty in attempting to bring back a rocket stage intact. “This is hard. This is actually really hard,” she said at Space Tech Expo. “We keep chipping away at it, though.”
 Interorbital System’s Common Propulsion Module Test Vehicle (CPM TV) lifts off from the Mojave Desert on March 29. The rocket’s payload included one for musician John Frusciante, but that satellite is not in orbit today. (credit: IOS) If you read music publications, you might be forgiven in believing there’s been a major milestone in space commercialization. “On Saturday, March 29th, at a ‘remote High Desert location in California,’ the album was loaded onto the ‘experimental Cube Satellite’ Sat-JF14 and blasted into the great beyond onboard Interorbital Systems’ NEPTUNE Modular Rocket,” reported Rolling Stone on Monday, referring to a new album by John Frusciante, a former member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “John Frusciante’s ‘Enclosure’ Album Is Streaming From Space,” proclaimed the headline of an article by SPIN on Monday.
Both publications got their news from a statement by Frusciante posted on his website which said that the satellite in question was “launched into space aboard an Interorbital Systems’ NEPTUNE Modular Rocket” on March 29. It also advertised an app that claims to track the satellite. “When Sat-JF14 hovers over a users’ geographic region, ENCLOSURE will be unlocked, allowing users to listen to the album for free on any iOS or Android mobile device,” his statement claims.
So, is there really a Sat-JF14 orbiting the Earth, broadcasting a rock musician’s latest album? Well, there was a launch on March 29 from the Mojave Desert by Interorbital Systems, the company announced. The company’s Common Propulsion Module Test Vehicle (CPM TV), powered by a 7,500-pound-force engine, lifted off from the Friends of Amateur Rocketry test site in the Mojave. Included in the rocket’s payloads was one for Frusicante.
The catch? Experimental Cube Satellite Sat-JF14, or whatever Frusicante’s payload was on that rocket, is not in orbit, nor was it even intended to be in orbit. “Due to a center of pressure anomaly, the rocket reached 10,000 feet, which was half of its calculated altitude,” the Interorbital statement notes. “The rocket’s health and recovery system adapted to the problem and returned the rocket and its payloads safely to the ground.” In other words, anyone listening to his album using that smartphone app while on a commercial airliner are several times higher above the ground than the “satellite” ever reached. (For those thinking this was an April Fools’ Day prank, note that this was announced, and the articles published, on March 31, not April 1.)
Setting Frusicante’s satellite claims aside, the launch was a major step forward for Interorbital, which in the last couple of years had limited its testing to static engine tests. The company is still planning to develop the NEPTUNE orbital launch system, although it didn’t indicate a schedule in its release for future tests, suborbital or orbital, for that rocket. As recently as last August, the company said it was planning to launch nearly 60 small satellites into orbit on a NEPTUNE in 2014, so it needs to keep making progress if it has any shot of achieving that goal.
 An Orbital Sciences Corporation Cygnus spacecraft departs from the ISS in February at the end of the first of that company’s eight CRS cargo missions to the station. (credit: NASA) As NASA begins to plan for a follow-on contract to transport cargo to the ISS, the agency announced plans Monday to extend its current contracts with Orbital Science and SpaceX. In a procurement synopsis posted Monday, NASA said it will perform a no-cost extension of its current Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contracts with the two companies, extending the contracts from December 2015 to December 2017.
The announcement doesn’t indicate how many additional cargo missions would be awarded to the two companies; both contracts include options for additional missions. “There’s a lot of work ahead before we’d have a number of flights,” a NASA spokesperson told Space News Monday.
To date, SpaceX has performed two of the twelve CRS flights under its contracts, with a third planned for launch likely later this month, after a problem with the launch range at Cape Canaveral postponed a March 30 launch attempt. Orbital has flown one of its eight CRS missions, with a second planned for launch in early May, a date that could slip depending on when the SpaceX mission flies.
Even without additional flights, the extension would likely be needed in order to accommodate all the currently contracted flights in the original CRS contracts. A schedule of ISS missions included in the fiscal year 2015 budget justification document for NASA indicates that SpaceX’s eighth CRS mission, the last listed, is slated for launch in June 2015, while Orbital’s fifth CRS mission is planned for launching July 2015. At the projected pace of missions—about four per year for SpaceX and three per year for Orbital—the companies’ final missions under their current contracts would extend into at least mid-2016.
 John Carmack speaking at the QuakeCon conference in Dallas on August 1, 2013, in a screenshot from the webcast of his speech. Last August, John Carmack announced that his small space venture, Armadillo Aerospace, was in “hibernation mode” because of a lack of funding. Carmack, discussing the status of Armadillo during a question-and-answer session during the QuakeCon conference in Dallas, said he was actively looking for outside investors willing to fund operations. “If we don’t wind up landing an investor, it’ll probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,” he said at the time.
There’s been no news about Carmack finding an outside investor for Armadillo, but there may have been a “liquidity event” for Carmack. Days after his QuakeCon appearance, Carmack announced he had joined Oculus VR, a startup company pursuing virtual reality technology with a headset called Oculus Rift, as the company’s chief technology officer. Yesterday, Facebook announced it was acquiring Oculus VR in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $2 billion. That is a pretty big liquidity event.
How much of that windfall will go to Carmack, a relatively senior but recent hire by the company, is unclear, as is whether he’ll set aside any of that as “crazy money” with which he feels comfortable funding Armadillo. (He noted last August that funding the company “always been a negotiation with my wife.â€) Since the deal was announced late yesterday, Carmack has indicated via Twitter that he’s busy focusing on Oculus software at the moment:
Update 3/30: Carmack, in a tweet posted Saturday evening, indicated that the windfall he expected to get from the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR would help him get back into aerospace, but not in the immediate future:
In response to a question another person posed, Carmack played down the size of the money he would have available to any future space venture:
 The Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the next Dragon spacecraft late Sunday evening is shown in its hangar in a photo released by SpaceX earlier this month. This is the first Falcon 9 to feature landing legs on its first stage. (credit: SpaceX) In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I write about SpaceX’s upcoming launch, including its plans to test the recovery of the Falcon 9’s first stage, as part of a broader look at some of the issues facing the launch industry in general today. The article includes some quotes from SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, who appeared Friday on David Livingston’s The Space Show program for an interview. Shotwell made some additional comments in the interview that didn’t make it into the article but are still worth noting.
In the interview, she said that the contamination detected in the trunk of the Dragon spacecraft was not the sole cause of the delay of the launch from March 16 to March 30. That contamination was just one of several factors, which she said included “struggling on some buffering with data transfer between here and Houston” and more time needed to work with the range regarding the recovery of the first stage. In addition to the contamination, she hinted that the Dragon team needed some time to catch their breaths. “So, it was really the combination of those four things where we said, ‘You know what, we need to step back'” and take more time to resolve all of those issues, she said.
Shotwell also discussed some of the changes SpaceX made since their previous attempt to try and recover the Falcon 9 first stage from September. She said engineers are “optimizing” the reentry burn by the first stage after separation and the landing burn before splashdown. “In addition, we have to get a little more stability on that stage as it comes in,” she said, which they’re doing with the optimized burns and an attitude control system.
Shotwell emphasized that these were test flights: “We’ll continue to make a little progress, probably take a step back, make some more progress, take another step back,†she said. “This is a really hard problem. I do believe we will solve it.†She did state that the company hopes to return a Falcon 9 stage to a landing site on land (rather than splashing down in the ocean, as this stage will do) later this year, and reuse a Falcon 9 first stage next year.
The reusable Falcon 9, she said, won’t have any affect on the payload capacity as published on its website. “Overall, this upgraded Falcon 9, which has flown three times, has about 30 percent more performance than what we put on the web, and that extra performance is reserved for us to do our reusability and recoverability demonstrations right now,” she said. That would explain why SpaceX has a contract to use a Falcon 9 to launch the SES-10 satellite in 2016, despite SES-10 weighing in at about 5,300 kilograms, above the published capacity of 4,850 kilograms.
Besides the Falcon 9 and its reusability, SpaceX is also hard at work on a crewed version of its Dragon spacecraft. Despite concerns about US access to the ISS given current tensions with Russia and NASA’s current reliance on Soyuz, Shotwell said she didn’t think it was feasible to greatly accelerate the development of a crewed Dragon. “We proposed a pretty forward-leaning program” for commercial crew, she said. “I don’t want to say that we couldn’t speed things up: we probably could, but it would have to be in lockstep with NASA.” She added that SpaceX current believes it can have a crewed Dragon ready “a little bit faster” than current NASA plans for flights in late 2016 or early 2017.
The launch of the next SpaceX cargo mission to the International Space Station is back on for the evening of March 30, NASA and SpaceX confirmed Friday. The launch, which had been scheduled for the early morning hours of March 16, was postponed a few days before launch after engineers detected contamination in the unpressurized “trunk” section of the Dragon spacecraft. The contamination was said to be a concern for two payloads being carried to the station in the trunk, a laser communications experiment and a high-definition camera system.
However, SpaceX and NASA determined that the contamination was not an issue, and that the Dragon can launch “as-is,” Florida Today reported, citing a statement it received from the company. “All parties agree that the particular constituents observed in Dragon’s trunk are in line with the previously defined environments levels and do not impose additional risk to the payloads,” that SpaceX statement (not widely distributed to media, nor posted on its website) continued.
The launch is now scheduled for 10:50 pm EDT Sunday, March 30 (0250 GMT March 31), with a backup launch date of 9:39 pm EDT April 2 (0139 GMT April 3) from Cape Canaveral, Florida. There appear to be no other significant changes to the mission, the third of twelve currently contracted by NASA to SpaceX to ferry cargo to and from the ISS.
On Wednesday evening, the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted it annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, this year on the topic of “Selling Space”, or the commercialization of spaceflight. Host Neil DeGrasse Tyson brought together both officials from a couple commercial space companies (Bigelow Aerospace and Space Adventures) as well as other experts, spending nearly two hours discussing various aspects of commercial spaceflight. Much of the discussion tread familiar ground, but there were a few interesting items brought up during the discussion:
A Space Adventures Soyuz seat goes for $52 million currently. It’s been widely known for some time that the approximate cost of flying to the International Space Station on a Soyuz spacecraft with Space Adventures is about $50 million—assuming that a seat is available, which today is rare since all the Soyuz seats are being used for ISS crew transfers. At Wednesday’s event, though, Space Adventures president Tom Shelley said on more than one occasion that the price is $52 million. That’s about $20 million less than NASA pays for Soyuz seats, the panelists noted, although the NASA contract includes additional services.
Space Adventures believes there’s price elasticity in the orbital space tourism market. When Shelley said that $52 million price, there was an audible reaction from the audience at the museum, one of shock. Tyson later asked Shelley if he believed the demand curve for orbital space tourism was elastic: would demand go up if prices went down? “If you dropped the price in half, would you have twice as many people signing up?” Tyson asked. “More than twice as many people, we believe,” Shelley responded. He added that the demand Space Adventures has already demonstrated for space tourism has helped support investment in other commercial space transportation systems that could later carry people into orbit.
Space Adventures is still pursuing a circumlunar commercial mission. The company has been quiet in recent years about plans to fly two people on a Soyuz spacecraft that would loop around the Moon, a mission with a current estimated ticket price of $150 million each. In early 2011, for example, Space Adventures said they had sold one seat and were “finalizing” a deal for the second seat. Calling that circumlunar mission “my personal favorite,” Shelley said they planned to carry out the mission by 2017 or 2018. “We have a couple clients under contract and we hope to take that forward,” he said.
People still get hung up on the definition of “space.” How high up to you have to go to be considered to have reached outer space? During the debate, Tyson was critical of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from “the edge of space,” and the panelists agreed that his jump was nowhere near any such edge. They differed, though, on some of the proposed suborbital flights to altitudes of 100 kilometers or so. Tyson said that some people have the “operating definition” of space where you can see stars in the daytime, which he said is about 100 kilometers. (In fact, 100 kilometers, also known as the Kármán line, is often used as the “boundary” of space and is based on aerodynamics, not the visibility of stars.)
Tyson got so wound up about this he managed to confuse suborbital and orbital spaceflight. “When you say ‘low Earth orbit,’ you’re going up to 100 kilometers and going back,” Tyson said at one point, as members of the panel tried to correct him.
People disagree on whether commercial human spaceflight is inspirational. Do people get excited about private citizens going to space in the same way as they do for government astronauts? Space historian John Logsdon doesn’t think so. “I don’t think commercial space is going to serve as inspiration. That’s where the government comes in,” he said. “Rich people taking joyrides is not inspirational.”
Space Adventures’ Shelley strongly disagreed. “We get calls and emails from people on a daily basis saying, ‘I am so inspired by what it is you’re doing, opening up space. I never thought it was going to be possible for me to be able go to space'” as a government astronaut.
Risk remains a major concern. Spaceflight is in inherently risky, and there was some debate if private spaceflight was riskier than government missions, or if private space travellers would be more willing to accept risks. “One of the big differences in this shift from public-sponsored human travel to private-sponsored human travel is the acceptance of higher risk in the private sector,” said Logsdon, noting that some who attempt to climb Mount Everest die in the attempt, but accept that risk given the rewards of scaling the world’s highest mountain—even if thousands of people have done it before.
Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace stressed that less expensive private spaceflight, though, was not inherently riskier than government sponsored missions. “Lower cost does not inherently mean less safe,” he said. “There’s this pernicious misperception that commercial space is going somehow to be less safe or more dangerous or we care more about money than NASA. Nothing could be further from the truth… If we have a bad day, we lose everything.”
Wanda Austin, president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, did argue that spending a little more on “mission assurance” activities (which she said did not have to cost “oodles” of money) was worthwhile. However, at the end of her brief appearance (she appeared via videoconference for the first half-hour of the event because of a prior commitment in California), she did answer positively when Tyson asked her if commercial spaceflight was “ready for prime time.” “We are taking the right steps,” she said. “We’ve already walked through the door, Neil. This is not something that maybe will happen, this is something that is already happening.”
A long-time launch vehicle executive, and son of a famous moonwalker, is leaving United Launch Alliance to become president of one of the leading teams in the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition.
Moon Express announced Tuesday that Andrew Aldrin is the company’s new president. Aldrin will be responsible for day-to-day activities at the company, which is developing its MX-1 lander to travel to the Moon by late next year. Co-founder Bob Richards had been serving as president and CEO; he retains the CEO position with the addition of Aldrin.
Aldrin was previously director of business development and advanced programs at ULA, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that manufactures Atlas and Delta rockets. Aldrin had worked at Boeing prior to the formation of ULA. “I am thrilled to be part of an entrepreneurial company that is helping transform the commercial space industry,” he said in a statement. “It is exciting to join a pioneering enterprise filled with passion and dedication to the bold dream of unlocking the Moon’s mysteries and resources, and putting the United States back on the surface of the Moon in a permanent way.”
Aldrin is also the son of Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut. “Andy’s experience will be invaluable to MoonEx, and I have every confidence in an Aldrin piloting us toward the Moon,” quipped Richards in the announcement.
The Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the next Dragon spacecraft is shown in its hangar in a photo released by SpaceX earlier this week. This is the first Falcon 9 to feature landing legs on its first stage. (credit: SpaceX) The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) will have to wait a little longer for its next batch of supplies, and fans of reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) will have to wait a little longer for a key technology test.
SpaceX announced late Thursday that the launch of its next Falcon 9, on the third of twelve Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) missions to the ISS, had been postponed. The launch, previously planned for 4:41 am EDT (0841 GMT) Sunday, is now planned for the evening of March 30, with a backup launch date on April 2. The company was vague regarding the delay, saying only it needed to “allow additional time to resolve remaining open items.” However, CBS News reported the delay was triggered after engineers found contamination of some kind in the unpressurized trunk of the Dragon cargo spacecraft that could adversely affect two payloads contained in it: a laser communications experiment and high-definition cameras, both to be installed on the ISS.
(True to form, SpaceX was stingy with the information it provided, distributing the press release to a select group of media by email late Thursday afternoon, but not posting anything to its social media accounts, including Twitter and Facebook, for several hours. As of this writing, more than 12 hours after the announcement of the delay, there’s still no copy of the press release or other notice about the delay on the company’s website.)
The primary purpose of the launch is to deliver the Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. The spacecraft, flying a mission the company calls CRS-3 and what NASA designates at SpX-3 (to differentiate it from Orbital Sciences’ CRS missions), will carry nearly 2,100 kilograms of supplies to the station and return about 1,600 kilograms of cargo to Earth at the end of its mission, according to the mission press kit.
Many people, though, have been interested in this mission for reasons other than the Dragon spacecraft. Company officials have said they plan, after the first stage separates, to attempt what might be considered a “soft splashdown” of the stage, reigniting engines during descent to slow the stage down. SpaceX attempted something similar on the first Falcon 9 v1.1 launch in September, achieving some success, although the spinning of the stage pushed the remaining propellant to the walls of their tanks, shutting down the engines prematurely. This Falcon 9 is the first to be equipped with landing legs on the first stage that, eventually, will allow the stage to make a powered vertical landing on land; the legs clearly won’t be used for that on this mission, but will be tested during the descent.
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