Lifeboat Foundation

This article originally appeared in the Aug. 19, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine.

When the Aerospace Corp. launched the Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration in 2017, one mission objective was to test water-fueled thrusters. At the time, the idea was fairly novel. Two years later, water-based propulsion is moving rapidly into the mainstream.

Capella Space’s first radar satellite and HawkEye 360’s first cluster of three radio-frequency mapping satellites move in orbit by firing Bradford Space’s water-based Comet electrothermal propulsion system. Momentus Space and Astro Digital are testing a water plasma thruster on their joint El Camino Real mission launched in July. And an updated version of the water-fueled cold gas thrusters the Aerospace Corp. first flew in 2017 launched in early August.

Nanoracks wants to expand from hosting experiments on board the International Space Station to running their own mini stations built from used rockets, with a first launch scheduled for a SpaceX Falcon 9 next year.

Gamma-ray bursts appear without warning and only last a few seconds, so astronomers had to move quickly. Just 50 seconds after satellites spotted the January explosion, telescopes on Earth swiveled to catch a flood of thousands of particles of light.

“These are by far the highest-energy photons ever discovered from a gamma-ray burst,” Elisa Bernardini, a gamma-ray scientist, said in a press release.

Over 300 scientists around the world studied the results; their work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

NASA has recruited SpaceX’s Starship, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon and three other commercial lunar lander ideas to join its Artemis moon program.

Today (Nov. 18), NASA announced the selection of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp., Ceres Robotics and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Inc. to join its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS). The five companies can now vie to deliver robotic payloads to the lunar surface for NASA, helping to pave the way for the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024.

WASHINGTON — Military space operators at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, are working with the Department of Commerce to help ease the transfer of space traffic management responsibilities, Maj. Gen. Stephen Whiting said Nov. 15.

“We’re eager for that to happen,” Whiting said at a Mitchell Institute event on Capitol Hill.

Whiting is the commander of the 14th Air Force and the Combined Force Space Component Command under U.S. Space Command. He oversees the two major organizations — the Combined Space Operations Center and the 18th Space Control Squadron — that help to maintain a catalog of space objects and notify satellite operators around the world when other satellites or debris threaten to collide with spacecraft.

A powerful commercial communications satellite to broadcast Internet signals over the Asia-Pacific region has arrived at Cape Canaveral for final launch preparations ahead of a planned Dec. 15 liftoff on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 communications satellite, based on Boeing’s 702MP satellite design, is a shared spacecraft between Sky Perfect JSAT Corp. of Japan and Kacific, a startup telecom company headquartered in Singapore.

Kacific announced the satellites’s arrival at Cape Canaveral on Thursday. Ground crews will complete final testing on the spacecraft and load it with maneuvering propellant ahead of its launch next month.

OHB, which started as a ship-maintenance business, doesn’t want to rely on the aerospace giants anymore.

Investors shouldn’t underestimate the importance of launching people into space, Morgan Stanley said in a research report released Tuesday.

The Wall Street investment bank expects communication satellites, Earth observation technology and transportation to be the economic drivers of a space economy, but investors should not underestimate human space exploration as a “critical enabler of public will.”

X launched 60 Starlink satellites into orbit on its most flown Falcon 9 rocket yet, which made a historic fourth launch and landing on Monday (Nov. 11).