The space firm, which has previously plucked a rocket booster out of the sky, will also launch NASA’s ‘swarm’ satellite, Starling.
Rocket Lab’s upcoming Electron mission, called “Baby Come Back”, will see the US and New Zealand-based company perform another marine recovery attempt of its rocket booster.
Rocket Lab announced in a press statement it will lift a number of satellites to low Earth orbit before attempting to retrieve its rocket booster from the ocean. The company is developing two reusability methods, one that plucks boosters out of the sky using a helicopter and the marine recovery method.
Optical data communications lasers can transmit several tens of terabits per second, despite a huge amount of disruptive air turbulence. ETH Zurich scientists and their European partners demonstrated this capacity with lasers between the mountain peak, Jungfraujoch, and the city of Bern in Switzerland. This will soon eliminate the necessity of expensive deep-sea cables.
The backbone of the internet is formed by a dense network of fiber-optic cables, each of which transports up to more than 100 terabits of data per second (1 terabit = 1012 digital 1/0 signals) between the network nodes. The connections between continents take place via deep sea networks—which is an enormous expense: a single cable across the Atlantic requires an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. TeleGeography, a specialized consulting firm, announced that there currently are 530 active undersea cables—and that number is on the rise.
Soon, however, this expense may drop substantially. Scientists at ETH Zurich, working together with partners from the space industry, have demonstrated terabit optical data transmission through the air in a European Horizon 2020 project. In the future, this will enable much more cost‑effective and much faster backbone connections via near-earth satellite constellations. Their work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.
Building a satellite and putting it in orbit was until very recently something only a nation had the resources to accomplish, and even then only a select few. Oh sure, there were a few amateur satellites that somehow managed to get built on a shoestring budget and hitch a ride into space, and while their stories are deservedly the stuff of legends, satellite construction took a very long time to be democratized.
Fast forward a half-dozen or so decades, and things have changed dramatically. Satellite launches are still complex affairs — it’s still rocket science, after all — but the advent of the CubeSat format and the increased tempo of launches, both national and commercial, has pushed the barriers to private, low-budget launches way, way down. So much so, in fact, that the phrase “space startup” is no longer something to snicker about.
After Russian hackers destroyed Viasat satellite ground receivers spanning Europe, SpaceX provided coverage via Starlink, its Lower Earth Orbit satellite constellation, and soon began noticing cyberattacks and software interferences. Now, a year later, the U.S. Department of Defense announced Russia is still attempting to complicate connections within the satellite constellation and others like it.
Documents were leaked by U.S. National Guard airman Ryan Teixeira, as reported by The Washington Post back in April of 2023. Ukraine has also stated it is experiencing similar security issues.
“Russia’s quest to sabotage Ukrainian forces’ internet access by targeting the Starlink satellite operations that billionaire Elon Musk has provided to Kyiv since the war’s earliest days appear to be more advanced than previously known, according to a classified U.S. intelligence report.”
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carrying the PSN Satria satellite successfully launched and deployed at 6:21 PM ET (22:21 UTC).
The launch had a 178-minute window, and upper-level winds delayed the first launch attempt at the opening of the window, but SpaceX had plenty of time to work with and launched just a bit later into the launch window.
The PSN Satria Indonesian Telecommunications was first contracted to be built in 2020 by Thales Alenia Spaceby the Indonesian government and delivered to the launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in May 2023.
The transition to renewable energy, critical for the world’s future, is limited today by energy storage and transmission challenges. Beaming solar power from space is an elegant solution that […] promises a remarkable payoff for humanity: a world powered by uninterruptible renewable energy.
The California Institute of Technology reports the first successful beaming of solar energy from space down to a receiver on the ground, via the MAPLE instrument on its SSPD-1 spacecraft.
Space-based solar power. Credit: Caltech.
In recent years, space-based solar power has attracted growing interest from both governments and businesses. Driven by advances in satellite technology, materials science, and energy transmission methods, experts increasingly view it as a feasible option for clean energy that is likely to be a commercial reality within the next two decades.
One California-based startup, Varda Space Industries, is betting that big business will lie in relatively unassuming satellites that will spend days or months in Earth’s orbit quietly carrying out pharmaceutical development. Its research, company officials hope, could lead to better, more effective drugs — and hefty profits.
“It’s not as sexy a human-interest story as tourism when it comes to commercialization of the cosmos,” said Will Bruey, Varda’s CEO and cofounder. “But the bet that we’re making at Varda is that manufacturing is actually the next big industry that gets commercialized.”
Varda is expected to launch its first test mission Monday aboard a SpaceX rocket. A window for take-off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California begins at 2:19 p.m. PT.
NASA and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by[MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.
[NASA] and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by [MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.
TBIRD makes passes over an ground station having a duration of about six-minutes. During that period, multiple terabytes of data can be downlinked. Each terabyte contains the equivalent of about 500 hours of high-definition video. The TBIRD communication system transmits information using modulated laser light waves. Traditionally, radio waves have been the medium of choice for space communications. Radio waves transmit data through space using similar circuits and systems to those employed by terrestrial radio systems such as WiFi, broadcast radio, and cellular telephony. Optical communication systems can generally achieve higher data rates, lower loses, and operate with higher efficiency than radio frequency systems.
TBIRD is a 3U sized satellite payload, meaning it is approximately the size of box of tissues. The TBIRD payload is carried aboard NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) satellite. PTD-3 is a CubeSat measuring about the size of two cereal boxes stacked together. The satellite is synchronized to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun such that it passes over the same ground station at the same times, twice each day.
Texas-based Firefly Aerospace says it has acquired Bellevue, Wash.-based Spaceflight Inc. and will shift the operation’s focus from satellite rideshare logistics to its line of orbital transfer vehicles.
Firefly says the strategic acquisition will add to its portfolio of low-cost space transportation services, ranging from launch vehicles to its Blue Ghost lunar lander.
“Spaceflight’s flight-proven orbital vehicles, facilities and mission management expertise will support Firefly’s rapid growth, provide a robust roadmap for investors, and meet the high demand for our on-orbit and responsive space services,” Firefly Aerospace CEO Bill Weber said today in a news release. “The acquisition further accelerates Firefly’s timeline to support end-to-end missions with launch, lunar, and in-space services.”
