Tag: Satellites

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Space station crew arrives; satellite lifts off

GOES-R launch
An Atlas 5 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, sending the GOES-R weather satellite into space. (United Launch Alliance Photo)

NASA and its space partners juggled an arrival and a departure today: First, three new crew members docked with the International Space Station to begin a months-long stay in orbit. Then the next-generation GOES-R went into space for a 20-year weather-monitoring mission.

One operation went by the book. The other almost didn’t happen.

The crew’s arrival aboard a Russian Soyuz craft brings the space station’s staffing back to its full strength of six spacefliers. The new arrivals include NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who already has served two tours of duty aboard the station and is due to break the U.S. record for cumulative time in space during her current flight.

At the age of 56, Whitson is the oldest woman to fly in space.

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SpaceX applies for 4,425-satellite network

Image: SpaceX and Space Needle
During SpaceX’s Seattle announcement about an Internet satellite network in January 2015, the company’s logo lit up Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center. (GeekWire photo)

SpaceX has laid out further details about a 4,425-satellite communications network that’s expected to provide global broadband internet access, with its Seattle-area office playing a key role in its development.

The plan is explained in an application and supporting documents filed on Tuesday with the Federal Communications Commission.

SpaceX is only one of several ventures aiming to deploy satellite-based internet services over the next few years. The others include OneWeb, a consortium with backing from Airbus, Virgin Galactic and other telecom players; and the Boeing Co., which envisions a low-Earth-orbit constellation with more than 1,000 satellites.

OneWeb is up against a 2019 regulatory deadline for beginning its service, but the time frame is squishier for SpaceX and Boeing.

In the technical information that accompanied its application, SpaceX said it would start commercial broadband service with 800 satellites.

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BlackSky satellite delivers its first pictures

Image: Chinese mountain
An image from Spaceflight Industries’ BlackSky Pathfinder-1 satellite shows farms and industrial sites around Beijing. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: Spaceflight Industries / BlackSky)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is sharing some of the first pictures of Earth ever taken by its low-cost, high-resolution BlackSky Pathfinder-1 satellite – and they’re spectacular.

The roughly 100-pound (50-kilogram) Pathfinder-1 spacecraft was launched from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sept. 26 as a ride-share payload on a PSLV-C35 rocket. Spaceflight Industries says the satellite cost $10 million to build and launch, which is relatively cheap for orbital imaging capability.

The Pathfinder-1 images released today confirm that the BlackSky concept works. The pictures provide breathtaking views of farms and industrial sites near Beijing, the suburbs surrounding Tokyo, and mountain ranges in China and Afghanistan.

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WorldView-4 joins Earth-watching armada

WorldView-4 launch
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket rises from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, sending the WorldView-4 satellite and seven CubeSats into space. (Credit: ULA)satelsatelspsce

DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-4 satellite was sent into orbit today to capture high-resolution, multispectral imagery of Earth, almost two months after California’s wildfires forced a launch delay.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 10:30 a.m. PT to send the RV-sized satellite into space. About 45 minutes later, DigitalGlobe received signals from the spacecraft confirming that it was in good health in its intended near-sun-synchronous orbit.

Like WorldView-3, which went into orbit in 2014, WorldView-4 can provide black-and-white imagery of Earth’s surface with one-foot resolution, and multispectral views to a resolution of 4 feet per pixel. The visible-light pictures feed into the mapping services provided by the likes of Google, while the multispectral views can be used to monitor crop growth and urban planning.

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Spaceflight signs up Google for satellite launch

Terral Bella's SkySat satellites
An artist’s conception shows Terra Bella’s SkySat satelltes in orbit. (Credit: Terra Bella)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries says it’s made a deal with Terra Bella to have the Google subsidiary’s Earth-observing satellites launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket next year.

The agreement makes Terra Bella, which was known as Skybox Imaging before Google bought it for $500 million in 2014, the lead payload provider on a dedicated-rideshare mission arranged through Spaceflight Industries’ launch services entity, known simply as Spaceflight.

“At this point, it looks like Terra Bella may be the only lead,” Spaceflight’s president, Curt Blake, told GeekWire in an email today. So far, seven of Terra Bella’s SkySat satellites have been put into orbit, and that number is expected to grow to 24. Blake declined to say how many of Terra Bella’s satellites would be launched on Spaceflight’s mission in late 2017.

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Stratolaunch teams up (again) with Orbital ATK

Stratolaunch with Orbital ATK rockets
An artist’s rendering shows the Stratolaunch twin-fuselage airplane with Orbital ATK’s Pegasus XL air-launch vehicles slung underneath. (Credit: Vulcan Aerospace)

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems has renewed its partnership with Orbital ATK on a platform that will make use of the world’s biggest airplane to launch rockets into orbit.

Allen started up Stratolaunch five years ago, and since then the venture has been developing a 385-foot-wide, twin-fuselage airplane inside a giant hangar at Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The company, which is part of Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace group, aims to start launching payloads by 2020.

Stratolaunch teamed up with Orbital Sciences Corp. back in 2012, with the idea of having Orbital supply rockets that would be launched from the airplane in mid-flight. Since then, Orbital merged with ATK, and Stratolaunch had to rethink its partnerships amid the changing market for launch services.

Today, the two companies announced that they’ve forged a multi-year, production-based partnership, under which Orbital ATK will provide its Pegasus XL rockets for Stratolaunch’s system.

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Google offers a quadrillion bytes of satellite views

Brisbane
An image from the Sentinel-2 satellite shows the Australian city of Brisbane and its surroundings. (Credit: ESA / Google)

How do you channel a flood of almost 5 million images into useful applications? Google Cloud is doing it with more than 30 years’ worth of satellite imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 missions, for free.

Satellite views have long been part of Google’s global mapping operation, of course. But putting them on the cloud is a different matter.

One of the newly added data sets draws upon the complete catalog of pictures from Landsat 4, 5, 7 and 8, amounting to 1.3 petabytes of data that go back to 1984. The other data set takes advantage of more than 430 terabytes’ worth of multispectral imaging from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite, which is part of the Copernicus program to monitor global environmental indicators.

The Landsat database keeps track of 4 million scenes, while the Sentinel-2 set offers 970,000 images. More pictures are being added daily.

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India launches BlackSky Pathfinder satellite

PSLV launch
India’s PSLV-C35 rocket rises from its launch pad, carrying eight satellites into space. (Credit: ISRO / Doordharshan via YouTube)

A satellite that’s meant to blaze a trail for Seattle-based BlackSky Global’s Earth-imaging constellation rose into orbit tonight atop India’s four-stage PSLV-C35 rocket.

BlackSky’s Pathfinder 1 was among eight satellites launched from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota at 8:42 p.m. PT Sept. 25 (9:12 a.m. Sept. 26 local time). Over the course of more than two hours, the spacecraft were deployed into two separate sets of orbits.

For India, the star of the show is the 800-pound SCATSAT-1, which will provide data for improved weather forecasting, particularly for tropical cyclones. But for BlackSky Global, a subsidiary of Seattle’s Spaceflight Industries, it’s all about Pathfinder 1.

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Facebook founder bummed over satellite loss

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg saw the Amos-6 satellite as the first step in Facebook’s plan to provide satellite internet access to underserved regions of the world.

Today’s loss of a Falcon 9 rocket and its satellite payload was a bummer for Facebook billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as for SpaceX billionaire founder Elon Musk.

“As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post (of course).

This weekend’s scheduled launch of the Amos-6 telecommunications satellite on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket would have marked the first step in Zuckerberg’s vision of providing low-cost internet access via satellite for millions if not billions of people in underserved regions of the world.

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Why small satellites are big for startups

Image: Arkyd 6
An artist’s conception shows Planetary Resources’ Arkyd 6 prototype Earth-observing satellite, which is due for its maiden launch this year. (Credit: Planetary Resources)

Small satellites, and the startups that make them, are becoming a big deal – and there’s a fresh flurry of industry reports that explain why.

The bottom line is that new types of satellite data can give earthbound businesses an edge.

For example, a hedge-fund manager can estimate how much revenue Walmart will report by counting the cars in the stores’ parking lots. Farmers can use custom-delivered, hyperspectral imaging to monitor how their crops are doing. Petroleum companies can get a quick alert on potential pipeline leaks.

Seattle-area companies like Planetary Resources and Spaceflight Industries are betting millions of dollars on the rapid growth of next-generation satellite services. And then there’s the rush to deliver internet services via satellite: That’s the focus of SpaceX’s Seattle office.

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