With a deadline for an agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union on British involvement in, and funding for, Copernicus come and gone, the European Space Agency is pressing ahead on several missions in the hopes a deal can eventually be reached. British and European negotiators had been working toward a Nov. 30 deadline regarding British participation in the E.U. aspects of Copernicus post-Brexit, including a British contribution of 750 million euros ($850 million) to the program. That deadline passed, though, without a deal. Without an agreement, the Copernicus program faces a funding shortfall that could jeopardize work on six new Earth science missions approved at ESA’s 2019 ministerial meeting, contracts for which ESA awarded in July 2020. The issue came up at the latest meeting of the ESA Council that concluded Dec. 15. Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, mentioned the 750 million euro funding shortfall during a media briefing after the meeting. Several options were under consideration, he said, including simply delaying the deadline on an agreement for as long as possible. “One [option] that is most likely to be brought forward is to keep the door open and postpone the decision point into the future,” he said, specifically until the critical design review (CDR) for the missions. “We can, with some arrangements and negotiations with industry, we could push this date into 2024, which would give us three more years to negotiate and, basically, find the 750 million. The participation of the U.K. is still a priority and our preferred option.”
The Copernicus Carbon Dioxide Monitoring, or CO2M, mission is one of six Copernicus missions whose development is jeopardized by a 750 million euro funding shortfall caused by a lack of an agreement on U.K. participation in E.U. elements of the program. Credit: OHB
That would mean that the CDR, where final approval is given to move into full-scale assembly of the spacecraft, would become what he called the “break point or go/no-go decision” on proceeding based on available funding.
That plan poses complications for the companies working on those missions. “What we expect from our institutions is to come up with an agreement in between the PDR and the CDR,” said Philippe Pham, senior vice president for Earth observation, navigation and science at Airbus Defence and Space, during a panel at World Satellite Business Week Dec. 16. The preliminary design review, or PDR, of those Copernicus missions is scheduled for 2022, with CDRs between late 2023 and 2024.
“It gives us some room for maneuver for final agreement to preserve the six missions,” he said. “What we expect is that the E.U. will come up with a solution for the missing Brexit budget and keeping the schedule of the six missions.”
“It’s so important that we protect all the six missions,” said Massimo Comparini, deputy chief executive of Thales Alenia Space, on the same panel. He said that while the missions have a high level of technical maturity, there shouldn’t be any attempt to compress development schedules between reviews, or from CDR to launch.
“We’re talking about such important missions that we cannot have any kind of shortcut,” he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration awarded a license Dec. 20 to a proposed commercial launch site in Georgia, but that facility still faces legal and business challenges. The FAA issued a launch site operators license, also known as a spaceport license, to Camden County, Georgia, for the proposed Spaceport Camden. The license came after years of environmental reviews of the site that slowed the licensing process, as well as the county’s decision two years ago to focus on small launch vehicles rather than larger ones originally envisioned for the site. The license came after a formal “record of decision” by the FAA regarding those environmental reviews. The document outlined the assessed environmental impacts of the proposed site, supporting a dozen launches a year of small launch vehicles, and the measures required to mitigate those effects, concluding that “all practicable means to avoid or minimize environmental harm from the Selected Alternative have been adopted.” County officials, who have invested an estimated $10 million into spaceport plans, hailed the decision as a boost to the area’s economy. “This once in a generation opportunity will provide a new frontier of economic prosperity for Camden, the region and the state of Georgia,” said Steve Howard, county administrator and project leader for the spaceport, in a statement. The license is a necessary but not sufficient step toward enabling launches from the site. Any company that seeks to launch from Spaceport Camden would have to get an FAA launch license, a process that includes environmental reviews. The terms of the license also prohibit the county from entering into an agreement with a launch provider until the county has a purchase or lease agreement for the property where the launch facility would be built.
An earlier concept for Spaceport Camden in Georgia. While the FAA issued a license for the spaceport, the site still faces legal and business obstacles. Credit: Spaceport Camden
The county has an agreement with Union Carbide, the company owns the property, to purchase it. However, a petition signed by several thousand county residents seeks a referendum on whether to allow the county to spend any money acquiring the property. A state court is reviewing the petition to see if the referendum should go forward in early 2022 and also whether to block the county from acquiring the land in the meantime. Should the referendum pass, it would effectively kill the project.
Another challenge for the county is identifying potential users of the spaceport. While there are dozens of small launch vehicles under development, none has formally committed to launching from Spaceport Camden.
The county statement about the FAA license included a quote from James Cantrell, chief executive of Phantom Space, which is working on a small launcher. “Phantom Space is thrilled to see Spaceport Camden open for business,” he said. “The additional launch capacity aligns well to our efforts to make access to space commonplace with reliable and responsive space transportation systems.”
Cantrell was previously chief executive of Vector, which conducted a low-altitude test flight of a vehicle prototype from the Spaceport Camden site in 2017. He departed Vector in 2019 when the company lost financing, leading eventually to Vector’s bankruptcy and liquidation. Earlier this month, the liquidating trustee for Vector filed suit in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware against Cantrell for breach of fiduciary duty during Cantrell’s time as chief executive, alleging “disloyal and systematic looting of Vector for his own personal financial gain in order to fund Cantrell’s personal racing hobby and other business ventures unrelated to Vector.”
Spaceport Camden backers have argued that demand for small launches can’t be met by other spaceports, notably Cape Canaveral. However, small launch vehicle company Astra Space announced Dec. 6 it would perform its next launch from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in January. That facility was previously used for Athena launches but had been idle in recent years other than an Orion launch abort test in 2019.
A Long March 4B launched the Shijian-06 (05) group of satellites Dec. 9, marking the 400th launch of China’s Long March family of launch vehicles. The Long March 4B lifted off from Site 9401 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:11 p.m. Eastern, rising into a dark blue pre-dawn desert sky. The Shijian-6 (05) satellites, which could be a pair of satellites to join four earlier pairs satellites in the series, with the previous launch occurring in 2010, were developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) and Aerospace Dongfanghong Satellite Co., Ltd. The satellites will be used for space environment exploration and technology verification tests, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC). No images of the satellites have been published.Western analysis of the series and their roughly 585-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbits suggests Shijian-6 satellites are designed for signals intelligence or electronic intelligence purposes. The Long March 4B was provided by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) which like CAST is a major CASC subsidiary. The launcher uses hypergolic propellant and is capable of carrying 2,800 kilograms of payload into Sun-synchronous orbit. The mission was China’s 49th orbital launch of 2021, extending a new national record for calendar year activity. The vast majority of launches have been Long March rockets, with additional launches from commercial firms Expace, iSpace and Galactic Energy.
Thursday’s launch was also the 400th Long March rocket launch. The official space industry newspaper China Space News marked the Long March achievement with the term “YYDS,” a Chinese equivalent of the abbreviation of GOAT, or “the greatest of all time.”
The relative speed at which the new milestone was reached illustrates the rapid acceleration of China’s launch rate in recent years.
The first Long March launch took place April 24, 1970. It took until June 2007—or 37 years—to launch the first 100 Long March rockets, when a Long March 3A launched Xinnuo-3. The 200th launch followed seven and a half years later, in December 2014.
The 300th launch was conducted three and a half years later, in March 2019, meaning the latest 100 launches were carried out inside a period of two years and nine months.
The Long March rocket family has been responsible for 92.1 percent of China’s orbital launches in the 51 years since the country’s first launch, sending more than 700 spacecraft into space, with a launch success rate of 96.25 percent, according to CASC.
In comparison, SpaceX, a U.S. private company, has conducted more than 130 launches of its Falcon 9 family of rockets since the first in 2010, suffering one failure and one partial failure, while also developing and establishing first stage reusability.
CASC’s first generation of Long March rockets are hypergolic, with the new Long March 5, 6, 7 and 8 rockets using cryogenic or kerosene fuel. With the demonstration of reusability by SpaceX, CASC is also working on a reusable variant of the Long March 8 and has reusable concepts for its future super heavy-lift launcher.
One major driver of Chinese launches in recent years has been the construction of Beidou, the country’s own Global Navigation Satellite System. China is also building remote sensing and communications space infrastructure which other leading space powers already have on orbit.
In 2014 China also opened a new, coastal launch site at Wenchang to facilitate launches of new large, cryogenic and kerolox rockets for space station and deep space missions.
Chinese space-related activities are also increasing with the emergence and fostering of a commercial space sector since 2014. New spaceports are being constructed to allow for expanded launch activity and remove bottlenecks, including new facilities for sea launches.
NASA issued awards Dec. 2 valued at more than $400 million to three groups of companies to advance development of commercial space stations, keeping those efforts on track to succeed the International Space Station by the end of the decade despite skepticism from the agency’s inspector general. NASA announced three funded Space Act Agreements as part of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program, an initiative to support work on commercial stations that the agency hopes to have in place by late this decade, allowing it to transition from the ISS. The awards will allow the winning companies to mature the designs of their proposed stations through 2025. The largest award, at $160 million, went to a team led by Nanoracks and includes Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin. Those companies announced a space station concept called Starlab Oct. 21 that could be ready as soon as 2027. A second award, valued at $130 million, went to a team led by Blue Origin for the Orbital Reef space station announced Oct. 25. That project includes Boeing, Redwire and Sierra Space, among others, with a goal of entering initial operations in the latter half of the 2020s. The third award, worth $125.6 million, went to a previously undisclosed concept from Northrop Grumman. That proposed station would leverage the company’s work on the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, Mission Extension Vehicle satellite servicing program and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost module it is building for NASA’s lunar Gateway.
Northrop Grumman, one of three companies winning commercial space station development awards from NASA Dec. 2, proposes building a station leveraging work on its Cygnus cargo spacecraft and HALO module, among other projects. Credit: Northrop Grumman
Rick Mastracchio, director of business development for human exploration at Northrop Grumman, said in a call with reporters that a single launch could place in orbit a facility able to support four people, with the ability to expand. “This allows for low risk and rapid deployment,” he said. The station, which he said doesn’t yet have a name, is being developed with Dynetics, with others to be announced in the near future.
NASA selected the three concepts from 11 proposals the agency received in August. “Almost all of the proposals represented viable concepts for commercial LEO destinations,” said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, in the call.
All the bidders and others will be eligible to compete for the second phase of the program in the middle of the decade, where NASA will issue contracts to certify commercial space stations for use by NASA astronauts and purchase initial services from those stations.
The program is part of NASA’s overall strategy to retire the ISS while maintaining a presence in LEO for scientific research and preparation for missions beyond Earth. That strategy includes an award made to Axiom Space in early 2020, giving that company access to a port on the ISS to which the company plans to attach a series of commercial modules starting as soon as 2024. Those modules will eventually be detached from the ISS to form a commercial station.
Axiom said in a statement that it did not submit a CLD proposal. “With active hardware development on pace to meet a late 2024 delivery to orbit of the first Axiom Station module and strong support from the market already in hand, Axiom declined to bid on CLD,” the company said.
The announcement came two days after a report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that warned of a gap between the end of the ISS and commercial stations. The report said that while NASA’s initial efforts to support commercial stations “show promise,” it raised concerns about several aspects of that work, including cost and schedule.
“In our judgment, even if early design maturation is achieved in 2025 — a challenging prospect in itself — a commercial platform is not likely to be ready until well after 2030,” the report stated. “We found that commercial partners agree that NASA’s current timeframe to design and build a human-rated destination platform is unrealistic.”
McAlister said he agreed with many of the conclusions of the OIG report. “What they said primarily is that a gap in U.S. human presence in LEO would be disastrous for the LEO economy,” he said. “A gap would be bad, and that is exactly why we’re making these awards today, to help ensure that there is no gap.”
The winning companies reiterated their confidence that their stations would be ready before the end of the decade. “The technologies, the equipment, the habitats that we are using for Starlab are under development today,” said Kirk Shireman, a former NASA ISS program manager now at Lockheed Martin. “I believe it’s certainly feasible to meet the schedule we’ve laid out with NASA.”
“There are two pieces to an end-to-end service: there’s transportation and destination,” said Brent Sherwood, senior vice president of advanced development programs at Blue Origin. The transportation systems that Orbital Reef will rely on, including Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser, will be in service in the next few years. “And with respect to the destination systems, we’re building already.”
He added the importance of addressing another issue raised in the OIG report: uncertain NASA funding for the CLD program. “It’s very important that we all work on sustaining and growing stakeholder for what NASA is trying to do,” he said. “It is critically important that the West not lose its foothold in LEO and have a gap.”
NASA requested $101.1 million for commercial LEO development in its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal. A House bill provides about half that amount while a Senate bill would fully fund the program. Congress has yet to finalize spending bills for the fiscal year, which started Oct. 1.
McAlister said the CLD awards assume that NASA receives full funding for commercial LEO development in 2022 and later years. That budget proposal projected spending $186.1 million on commercial LEO development per year in fiscal years 2023 through 2026. If there is a funding shortfall, “we could rephase some of the milestones to accommodate reduced levels of funding.”
He added that, in the near term, a continuing resolution (CR) passed by Congress Dec. 2 funding the government through Feb. 18 at 2021 levels should not affect the CLD awards, although the agency may have to revisit those plans if Congress later extended the CR through the rest of the fiscal year. “If we got a full-year CR,” he said, “we would obviously have to do some replanning.”
