Tag: SmallSat

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Rocket Lab will try to recover rocket boosters

Rocket Lab booster recovery
An artist’s conception shows an Electron rocket making a re-entry. (Rocket Lab Illustration)

Taking a page from SpaceX’s playbook, Rocket Lab’s CEO says the company will try to recover the first-stage booster of its Electron rocket to save time and money.

“Electron is going reusable,” CEO Peter Beck announced today at the annual SmallSat conference in Logan, Utah.

But Rocket Lab will take a different route to rocket reusability: Rather than having the booster fire its engines for a retro landing on its feet, the rocket core will be built to withstand the fiery forces of atmospheric re-entry and pop open a parachute to slow itself down. Then it would get plucked from the sky by a helicopter flying out from a ship stationed in the Pacific near Rocket Lab’s New Zealand launch complex.

Beck explained that doing reusability the SpaceX way wouldn’t work for Rocket Lab’s “smaller is better” business model. “That takes a small launch vehicle and turns it into a medium launch vehicle,” he said.

The plan for recovering and reusing boosters is a turnabout for Rocket Lab, which has focused on low-cost production of its currently non-reusable, carbon-composite-based Electron rocket and 3-D-printed Rutherford rocket engines.

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Spaceflight will get first crack at India’s next rocket

PSLV rocket
India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle will be smaller than its workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, shown here on its launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Center. (ISRO Photo)

Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s purchased the first commercial launch of India’s next-generation Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, or SSLV, and has already committed all of the available payload space to a U.S.-based satellite constellation customer.

The deal, announced today in conjunction with the annual SmallSat conference in Logan, Utah, builds on Spaceflight’s existing relationship with the Indian Space Research Organization and India-based commercial ventures.

ISRO developed the SSLV with a payload capacity of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) to mid-inclination low Earth orbit, or LEO, and 300 kilograms (660 pounds) to sun-synchronous orbit. That’s more suited for launching small satellites than India’s workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV, which can put 1,100 to 1,600 kilograms (2,425 to 3,500 pounds) into sun-synchronous orbit and has served as a go-to rocket for Spaceflight.

The SSLV launch was purchased from New Space India Limited, or NSIL, and is due for liftoff from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center later this year.

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‘Terminator Tape’ will fight orbital debris

Terminator Tape
One version of the Terminator Tape system is designed to be integrated onto a 4-inch-wide CubeSat. A dime is included in the picture for a size comparison. (Tethers Unlimited Photo)

Bothell, Wash.-based Tethers Unlimited will have its technology for deorbiting space debris put to its most ambitious test next year, during a satellite mission that will be conducted in league with TriSept Corp., Millennium Space Systems and Rocket Lab.

The technology, known as Terminator Tape, involves placing a module on a small satellite that can unwind a stretch of electrically conductive tape when it’s time to dispose of the satellite.

“This tape will significantly increase the aerodynamic cross-section of the satellite, enhancing the drag it experiences due to neutral particles,” Tethers Unlimited says in an online explainer. “In addition, the motion of this tape across the Earth’s magnetic field will induce a voltage along the tape. This voltage will drive a current to flow up the tape, with electrons collected from the conducting ionospheric plasma at the top of the tape and ions collected at the bottom. This current will induce a ‘passive electrodynamic’ drag force on the tape.”

The increased drag should dramatically shorten the timetable for dragging a satellite down to its fiery atmospheric re-entry.

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The satellite rideshare market is heating up

SpaceX smallsat launch
Artist’s conception shows a SpaceX rocket deploying a satellite carrier in orbit. (SpaceX Illustration)

Seattle-based Spaceflight has made a name for itself by putting together bunches of small satellites for launch on someone else’s rockets, but now the owners of some of those rockets are aiming to take the business for themselves.

The promise and the perils of the dedicated-rideshare launch business came into the spotlight today in Logan, Utah, at the annual AIAA / Utah State University Conference on Small Satellites, better known as SmallSat.

On the plus side, Spaceflight announced that it’s getting ready for the second of several rideshare launches from New Zealand on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The mission, dubbed “Look Ma, No Hands,” is due to put three satellites into orbit for Spaceflight’s customers during a launch opportunity that opens Aug. 16.

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Exec shifts from biggest plane to smaller satellites

York satellite
An artist’s concept shows a York Space Systems satellite in orbit. (York Space Systems Illustration)

Two years ago, Chuck Beames presided over Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s effort to build the biggest airplane in the world. Now he has his eyes set on another big frontier: small satellites.

Beames, who left the president’s post at Allen’s Stratolaunch venture in 2016, is gearing up for his first launch as executive chairman and chief strategy officer for York Space Systems, a startup based in Denver.

“It’s very exciting,” Beames told GeekWire during an interview on the sidelines of last week’s SmallSat Conference in Logan, Utah. “We’re really democratizing space for the entrepreneur.”

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Small-satellite plans soar, but few end up flying

The latest “State of the Industry” report for small orbital-class launch vehicles tracks 101 reported efforts to create such rockets, compared with a mere 31 in 2015. But many of those efforts are defunct or in limbo, Northrop Grumman’s Carlos Niederstrasser said today at the SmallSat Conference in Logan, Utah. “We’re definitely starting to see attrition” in the industry, he said.

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NASA official details big plans for small satellites

Thomas Zurbuchen
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the science mission directorate, gives a keynote address at the SmallSat Conference in Logan, Utah. (NASA Photo via Twitter)

LOGAN, Utah — NASA is already deep into small-satellite science, but today the space agency’s associate administrator for science signaled that NASA will be getting in even deeper.

“We think, in science, smallsats are big,” Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in a keynote address to the SmallSat Conference here in Logan.

Zurbuchen turned the spotlight on several initiatives that will heighten NASA’s use of small satellites and commercial services, balancing a mission portfolio that has big-budget missions such as the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope on other end of the cost spectrum.

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‘Launch Unit’ created for medium small satellites

Launch Unit satellite
The Launch-U standard is designed to apply to satellites bigger than a CubeSat but smaller than an ESPA-class secondary payload. (Aerospace Corp. Photo)

LOGAN, Utah — Tiny satellites have their own 4-inch CubeSat standard size, and bigger satellites have a size standard as well. But there’s an awkward gap where no one can agree on exactly how big a satellite should be. Until now.

Today The Aerospace Corp. took the wraps off a proposed size and weight standard it calls the “Launch Unit.” According the standard, a Launch-U satellite and its separation system would fill a volume of 45 by 45 by 60 centimeters (1.5 by 1.5 by 2 feet), or about the size of an end table or two carry-on pieces of luggage strapped together. (Or, for that matter, a pirate chest.)

The mass could range from 60 to 80 kilograms (132 to 176 pounds), with a roughly balanced center of gravity, according to a technical paper issued to coincide with the SmallSat Conference here in Logan. For vibration purposes, the payload’s fundamental frequency would have to be above 50 Hz in any direction.

Launch-U builds on the 10-by-10-by-10-centimeter Cubesat standard, which can apply to 1-unit satellites (1U) or bigger satellites (for example, a 6U satellite, which would be roughly 10 by 20 by 30 centimeters). One Launch-U equals roughly 96 CubeSat units.

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Spaceflight to put 71 satellites on SpaceX launch

Satellite deployers
An artist’s conception shows Spaceflight’s satellite deployers emerging from their SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle. (Spaceflight Illustration)

LOGAN, Utah — Seattle-based Spaceflight is confirming that it has more than 70 satellites from 18 countries signed up for launch on a first-of-its-kind dedicated rideshare mission, due to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket by the end of the year.

The dozens of spacecraft include two SkySat high-resolution Earth-imaging satellites from Planet, which are designated as the lead payloads. But there’ll also be more exotic payloads on board — including an art project that’s designed to shine in the night sky, and a satellite built by middle-schoolers to test the viability of bacteria in the vacuum of space.

The current tally of 71 satellites on Spaceflight’s SmallSat Express won’t set the record for the most satellites launched at one time. That distinction will still belong to the Indian Space Research Organization, which launched a PSLV rocket with 104 satellites on board last year. But it will represent Spaceflight’s first purchase of the full capacity of a Falcon 9 rocket, and the first use of an innovative set of satellite deployers known as the Upper Free Flyer and the Lower Free Flyer.

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How small satellites are tackling big challenges

HaloSat
An artist’s conception shows the HaloSat X-ray-detecting mini-telescope against a background of stars and nebulas. (HaloSat / Univ. of Iowa Illustration)

LOGAN, Utah — No one has ever built a satellite in space, but thanks in part to a team of students from Idaho, that could soon change.

Other teams are building miniaturized satellites to look for missing sources of mass around our Milky Way galaxy, or find out how much deadly ultraviolet radiation hits alien planets, or zoom past Mars and track a bigger spacecraft as it descends to the Red Planet’s surface.

Those are just a few of the science experiments detailed over the weekend here at the AIAA / Utah State University Conference on Small Satellites, better known as SmallSat.

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