Christopher Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris Technologies, said Jan. 27 regulators continue to review the company’s proposed $4.7 billion acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne and expects the merger to close in 2023. L3Harris, headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, is a global defense and aerospace firm with more than $17 billion in annual revenue. In December it announced an agreement to buy Aerojet Rocketdyne, a Sacramento, California-based manufacturer of rocket engines and propulsion systems for space vehicles, ballistic missiles and military tactical weapons. During a fourth-quarter earnings call, Kubasik said the company has been answering questions from Federal Trade Commission antitrust regulators. He said L3Harris executives have met with Pentagon officials to address questions on the acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne and its potential impact on defense programs. Kubasik did not comment on a recent letter sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to block the transaction. The FTC last year blocked Lockheed Martin’s proposed $4.4 billion bid for Aerojet Rocketdyne, arguing that the combination would give Lockheed — a major supplier of tactical missiles — the ability to “cut off other defense contractors from the critical components they need to build competing missiles.” L3Harris said it does not expect to face these same challenges because the combination with Aerojet would be a “horizontal move” rather than a vertical integration of a missile manufacturer and a key supplier of propulsion systems.
An Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engine is tested at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, Dec 14, 2022. Credit: NASA
If the acquisition is approved, Kubasik said, there are no plans to close major facilities but he estimates about $50 million in overhead cost savings during the first year. “We both have offices in D.C. We both have offices in Huntsville. There’s some low hanging fruit there,” he said.
This would be L3Harris’ second of two back-to-back acquisitions. Earlier this month the company closed a nearly $2 billion purchase of Viasat’s tactical data links business.
“We got TDL done in 92 days, and the integration is already underway, so we can focus on getting Aerojet Rocketdyne approved, and then start the integration,” said Kubasik.
“I don’t foresee us doing any acquisitions for a couple of years, as you would imagine,” he told analysts. “There’s some non-core assets that we’re going to sell, and we’re going to use those proceeds to bring down our debt over the next few years.”
NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will cooperate on the development and flight demonstration of a nuclear propulsion system with applications for both national security and space exploration. During a special session of the AIAA SciTech Forum Jan. 24, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the two agencies would work together on DARPA’s existing Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program to demonstrate nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), a technology that offers more efficient propulsion than conventional chemical rockets. “NASA will partner with our longtime partner, DARPA, to develop and demonstrate advanced nuclear thermal propulsion,” Nelson said in brief remarks at the conference. “Our goal is to launch and demonstrate a successful nuclear thermal engine as soon as 2027.” The partnership is governed by a non-reimbursable agreement signed by the two agencies earlier this month. NASA will be responsible for the development of the nuclear engine, with DARPA handling integration of that propulsion system into a spacecraft and launching it. “We’ve been focused on structuring with clear lines of responsibility,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy on a panel after Nelson’s announcement. NASA had been cooperating on DRACO at a lower level before this announcement. “The bottom line is that we have really strong communication,” said DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins on the panel. The teams at both agencies “will adapt as needed” over the course of the program.
NASA and DARPA will partner on future phases of the DRACO program to demonstrate a space nuclear thermal propulsion system launching as soon as 2027. Credit: DARPA
Neither DARPA nor NASA have disclosed details about the DRACO demonstration mission itself, using a spacecraft called X-NTRV in the agreement. Melroy said on the panel that the vehicle would operate in orbit at an altitude of at least 700 kilometers, and perhaps as high as 2,000 kilometers, to ensure that any radioactive materials would have decayed to acceptable levels before reentry.
The two agencies had been separately pursuing NTP projects. DARPA started DRACO with three Phase 1 awards in April 2021 to teams led by Blue Origin, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin to work on preliminary designs of reactors and spacecraft.
In May 2022, DARPA announced it was soliciting proposals for DRACO Phases 2 and 3 to develop and test the engine and perform a flight demonstration, then planned for fiscal year 2026. DARPA had not selected an awardee at the time of the NASA partnership, but Tompkins said an award could come in “a couple of months.”
NASA has also been working on NTP technologies, including awards in July 2021 in cooperation with the Department of Energy to teams led by BWX Technologies, General Atomics and Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies. Those contracts, valued at $5 million each for one year, covered NTP reactor design.
NASA has been pushed by Congress to invest in NTP, with appropriations bills setting aside funding for such work at levels often far above what the agency requested. NASA leadership, though, has embraced that technology more recently as critical to future human missions to Mars, a finding from a February 2021 National Academies study that called on NASA to pursue “aggressive” development of nuclear propulsion so that it would be available for a human Mars mission in the late 2030s.
“The key thing is that this will allow us to evaluate the opportunity to move faster,” Melroy said of NTP, referring to its potential to shorten travel times to and from Mars because of its higher efficiency. “If we have swifter trips for humans, they are safer trips.”
DARPA, and the broader national security community, is interested in NTP because of the much greater maneuverability that it offers, Tompkins said. Asked about what kinds of maneuverability, she responded, “all of the above.” DARPA has previously discussed using the technology for operations in cislunar space between the Earth and moon, an area of increasing national security interest.
“Our goals are not in conflict,” Tompkins added. “We are very much looking for the same thing.”
The United States and Israel are finalizing an agreement that would see NASA contribute to an upcoming Israeli astrophysics mission. The focus of the agreement, which could be signed as soon as later this month, involves a mission called Ultrasat under development by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science with support from the Israel Space Agency and German research center DESY. As part of the agreement, NASA would provide the launch of Ultrasat, which will operate in geostationary orbit. NASA will likely arrange to fly Ultrasat as a secondary payload on a commercial GEO launch, said James Rhoads, NASA project scientist for Ultrasat, during a session of the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society Jan. 11. Ultrasat will carry an ultraviolet telescope with a wide field of view. That wide field of view along with high sensitivity in the near-ultraviolet are the key characteristics that set Ultrasat apart from other ultraviolet astronomy missions, said Eli Waxman, principal investigator for Ultrasat at the Weizmann Institute of Science, during the session. The spacecraft is being built by Israel Aerospace Industries, with DESY providing the ultraviolet camera. The spacecraft has a total mass of about 1,100 kilograms, more than half of which is propellant to take the spacecraft from a geostationary transfer orbit to its final location in GEO at 4 degrees west. Ultrasat has a three-year prime mission, but Waxman said it will carry enough propellant to operate for six. He said development of the spacecraft is on schedule for a launch in the first quarter of 2026. Ultrasat has two primary goals. One is to look for ultraviolet signatures from gravitational-wave events, such as mergers involving neutron stars. The second is to study supernova explosions.
NASA will provide the launch of Ultrasat, an Israeli ultraviolet astrophysics mission, under an agreement soon to be finalized. Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science
Those goals match well with NASA’s own research priorities. “Ultrasat and NASA’s science goals are well-aligned,” Rhoads said, citing broad science themes from the Astro2020 decadal survey that range from stellar and galactic astrophysics to gravitational waves. “There are Ultrasat contributions to all of these areas anticipated.”
Of particular interest is Ultrasat’s role in time domain and multimessenger astrophysics, or TDAMM, an emerging field that combines observations at various wavelengths of light with detections of gravitational waves or particles. Astro2020 emphasized the importance of TDAMM for addressing key scientific questions.
“Ultrasat really shows the value of international coordination when we talk about how we’re going to achieve our Astro2020 TDAMM goals, meeting the recommendations that were made by the decadal survey,” said Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, at the session.
In addition to providing the launch of Ultrasat, NASA will also fund participating scientists on the mission and establish a U.S.-based science archive. The agency hasn’t disclosed the value of its contribution to the mission, although Waxman said the overall cost of Ultrasat, including launch, was about $110 million.
Rhoads said he expected final signatures of the agreement regarding NASA’s role on Ultrasat in the next one to months. However, at a Jan. 17 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, one committee member, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said NASA anticipated the agreement will be signed later this month.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 18 lifted off at 7:24 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, carrying a U.S. Space Force GPS satellite. The Falcon 9 launched the Lockheed Martin-built GPS 3 SV-06 — the 6th of the newest version of the satellite known as GPS 3. The GPS constellation of 31 satellites operated by the U.S. Space Force provides positioning, navigation and timing signals to military and civilian users. GPS satellites operate in medium Earth orbit at an altitude of 12,550 miles. The launch of SV-06 was SpaceX’s fifth GPS mission, its second national security space launch of 2023 and Falcon 9’s 196th flight. The first stage booster supporting this mission previously launched Crew-5 astronauts to the International Space Station. Approximately two and a half minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage separated. Following separation, the first stage landed on the “A Shortfall of Gravitas” drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. The second stage performed two engine burns to inject the GPS satellite into the intended orbit one hour and 29 minutes after liftoff. SpaceX in a tweet confirmed the satellite deployment was successful. SpaceX had previously launched four GPS 3 satellites under contracts awarded in 2016 and 2018. The first launch was on Dec. 23, 2018, the second and third on June 30 and Nov. 5, 2020, and the fourth on June 17, 2021. After five launches on Falcon 9, next GPS satellite will fly on Vulcan
The next GPS satellite due for launch, SV-07, will fly to orbit on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. ULA received the task order in May 2022 under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 agreement which splits national security missions 60/40 between ULA and SpaceX.
Based on the timing of the award and Vulcan’s still uncertain schedule, SV-07 will launch in 2024 at the earliest.
ULA said Vulcan will be ready to perform its debut launch mid-2023 and the vehicle has to complete two successful commercial missions to be certified for NSSL launches. The first mission awarded to ULA that would have been flown by Vulcan, USSF-51, was changed to an Atlas 5 to keep the mission on schedule. According to the current plan, Vulcan’s first NSSL missions would be USSF-106, USSF-87 and GPS SV-07.
World View, a company that is developing stratospheric balloon platforms as an alternative to spacecraft for research and tourism, announced Jan. 13 it will go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger. World View said it will merge with Leo Holdings Corp. II, a SPAC on the New York Stock Exchange, in a deal that would value the company at $350 million. The companies said they expect the deal to close in the second quarter of the year. Bloomberg first reported the impending deal Jan. 12. World View would receive up to $121 million in gross proceeds from the SPAC, assuming there are no redemptions by shareholders. However, many SPAC deals have seen high redemption rates, where SPAC shareholders ask for their money back rather than participate in the merged company, reducing the proceeds. The companies said in the announcement that the gross proceeds may be accompanied by up to $75 million in additional financing, but the announcement offered no further details about the proposed financing. It is not uncommon for SPAC deals to be accompanied by a private investment round. World View says it will use the funding from the SPAC deal to expand its business developing stratospheric platforms that can complement, or compete with, satellites. The company has conducted more than 120 stratospheric flights, working with a variety of companies and government agencies. “Today’s announcement represents a major milestone in World View’s business model,” Ryan Hartman, president and chief executive of World View, said in the statement. “This merger with Leo allows us to scale our demonstrated expertise and strong foundation of strategic partnerships to meet the growing market demand for data and analytics from the stratosphere.”
World View was founded a decade ago to provide stratospheric tourist flights, offering views meant to emulate those from space. The company later pivoted to uncrewed balloon platforms it called “stratollites” that could carry communications, imaging or research payloads for applications that traditionally used either satellites or aircraft.
In October 2021, World View announced it would return to the tourism business, developing a balloon system and pressurized cabin to take up to 10 people to altitudes of about 30 kilometers for flights lasting 6 to 12 hours. The company says 1,200 people have reserved seats on those flights, with a ticket cost of $50,000, although the company has not disclosed how much revenue it has collected from those reservations.
World View provided little financial information as part of the SPAC announcement. Unlike some similar deals involving space or space-adjacent companies, there was no conference call to discuss the merger, and they did not release an investor presentation with financial details or projections.
Hartman said in October 2021, when the company announced its tourism plans, that the company was fully funded for the initial stage of development of the tourism system but did not disclose its anticipated cost. World View’s last announced financing before the SPAC deal was a $26.5 million Series C round in 2018.
The SPAC deal comes days after supervisors in Pima County, Arizona, approved a new lease agreement with the company for its headquarters. The county built the $14 million facility as part of an economic incentive package for the company, but a state court ruled, in a suit brought by a third party, it violated a “gift clause” provision in the state constitution.
According to local media, World View stopped paying rent on the facility while awaiting a new lease and was $400,000 behind in lease payments, but agreed to pay it back in the new lease agreement. As part of the lease, the company agreed to have at least 90 full-time employees working there this year, with a long-term goal of 125. The original lease agreement required the company to ultimately employ 400 people there.
Canada’s NorthStar Earth and Space said Jan. 5 it has raised $35 million ahead of plans to deploy its first three satellites this year for tracking objects in orbit. U.S.-based private equity firm Cartesian Capital led the Series C funding round, which NorthStar CEO Stewart Bain said brings the total amount the company has raised to nearly $100 million. NorthStar aims to use proceeds to accelerate plans for a constellation of 24 Space Situational Awareness (SSA) satellites, which would scan out from low Earth orbit (LEO) to track other satellites and debris. The company hopes to track objects as small as one centimeter in LEO, about seven centimeters in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and “somewhere between 50 and 40” centimeters even farther out in geostationary orbit (GEO), Bain said in an interview. Spire Global is building the first three satellites for NorthStar, each the size of 16 cubesats, for a launch around the middle of 2023 with Virgin Orbit. Bain said it had not been decided whether these satellites would be deployed from Virgin Orbit’s base in California, or be part of the air-launch company’s first batch of missions from England. NorthStar’s contract with Spire includes options for up to 30 satellites, and Bain said the company is now looking at “when to pull the trigger” on the next set of spacecraft. “It’ll probably be another set of three,” he said, “and then after that we’ll probably do them in blocks of six.” There “is an argument to be made of letting the first few get up, see how they operate, and then pushing the button on the next set,” he added, “or leading that by a certain amount of time” to help ensure the timely delivery of parts amid the industry’s supply chain issues.
The first three satellites have already secured commitments from a mix of commercial and government customers, according to Bain, although he declined to disclose them.
He said a U.S. government pilot project that picked NorthStar and five other commercial firms in December to prototype space traffic data platforms helped highlight commercial SSA opportunities and attract business.
“It’s not like we weren’t already contacting both government and private sector operators,” he said, “but that really got people to wake up and say, wow, here we go.”
Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES last year announced plans to use NorthStar’s data to help manage its fleet of satellites in GEO and MEO.
Bain said a space development fund supported by SES and Luxembourg’s government participated in NorthStar’s Series C funding round.
Other investors included the government of Quebec and a family-owned Canadian technology fund called Telesystem Space.
Airbus Defence and Space is joining a commercial space station project led by Voyager Space, a move that could potentially make it easier for European governments to use the station after the retirement of the International Space Station. Denver-based Voyager Space announced Jan. 4 a partnership with Airbus on its Starlab commercial space station project. Airbus will provide “technical design support and expertise” for Starlab, the companies said, but did not disclose additional details about the partnership or financial terms. Voyager Space announced plans for Starlab in October 2021 working with Lockheed Martin. Starlab, as described at the time, would feature in inflatable module, docking node and bus, capable of hosting up to four astronauts at a time. Voyager Space, through its subsidiary Nanoracks, won one of three NASA Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development, or CLD, awards from NASA in December 2021. The $160 million Space Act Agreement is intended to support design work on Starlab as NASA prepares to transition from the ISS to commercial space stations by the end of the decade. That transition will also involve NASA’s international partners on the ISS, something that both Airbus and Voyager Space officials alluded to in the announcement of their partnership. “Working with Airbus we will expand Starlab’s ecosystem to serve the European Space Agency (ESA) and its member state space agencies to continue their microgravity research in LEO,” Dylan Taylor, chairman and chief executive of Voyager Space, said in the announcement.
Voyager Space announced plans for Starlab in the fall of 2021 and won NASA funding to support design work for it in December 2021. Credit: Nanoracks
“This collaboration is an important step in making Starlab a reality, providing a foundation for long-lasting European and American leadership in space,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, executive vice president of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, in the same statement.
ISS partners have pondered how they will make use of commercial space stations run by American companies. Current ISS arrangements, where space agencies barter for services, are unlikely to apply to commercial facilities, where agencies may have to work directly with the station’s operator rather than through NASA.
“We need to find ways to work together, certainly in other ways than we did before,” said Peter Gräf, director of applications and science at the German space agency DLR, during a panel discussion at the AIAA ASCEND conference in October. “There are a lot of options available and the main players are in heavy discussions on that.”
Direct payments from European governments to American companies for use of commercial space stations could be politically problematic. “The taxpayers in Europe don’t want to pay directly to private American companies,” said Nicolas Maubert, space counselor at the French Embassy in the U.S. and representative of the French space agency CNES in the U.S., at the conference panel. Those concerns may be alleviated, though, if companies from Europe and other ISS partners are involved with the stations.
ESA officials, who are beginning work on their post-ISS plans, are aware of those concerns. “Shall we pay directly to commercial providers in the U.S.? We can, of course, but that is euros directly supporting U.S. industry. Is that something Europe wants to do, that our member states want to do?” said Frank De Winne, head of ESA’s European Astronaut Center, in an interview during ESA’s ministerial council meeting in Paris in November.
How ESA will deal with commercial space stations is something the agency will study leading up to its next ministerial council meeting in 2025, but he said one option would be for ESA to fund development of a European crewed vehicle that could service those stations.
“If we talk to the commercial providers today, to the CLDs that are being funded by NASA, they all tell us the same thing: they are interested in transportation,” he said. “For them to keep their costs low on transportation, they want competition. It’s as simple as that.”
Airbus is not the first European company to be involved in a commercial space station project. Thales Alenia Space is building modules for Axiom Space that will initially be installed on the ISS but eventually be detached to form a commercial space station.
After a record-setting year of launch activity in 2022, SpaceX kicked off the new year Jan. 3 with a Falcon 9 launch of more than 110 smallsats. The Falcon 9 lifted off on the Transporter-6 dedicated smallsat rideshare mission at 9:56 a.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. The rocket’s first stage, making its 15th flight, landed back at the Cape’s Landing Zone 1 eight and a half minutes after liftoff. The rocket’s upper stage started releasing its 114 payloads into sun-synchronous orbit nearly an hour after liftoff, a process involving 82 individual deployments that took more than a half-hour to complete. SpaceX was able to confirm 77 of the deployments in real time. The largest single customer on the launch, in terms of number of satellites, was Planet, which had 36 of its SuperDove imaging satellites on board. Planet has now launched more than 500 satellites, mostly cubesats like the SuperDoves.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off Jan. 3 on the Transporter-6 dedicated smallsat rideshare mission. Credit: SpaceX webcast
Some of the other major payloads on Transporter-6 included:
- Six LEMUR cubesats for Spire, which operates a constellation for collecting weather and tracking data; - Four imaging satellites for Satellogic, which has slowed the deployment of its constellation after revenues fell short of projections in 2022;
- Four radio-frequency intelligence satellites for Luxembourg-based Kleos and the BRO-8 radio-frequency intelligence satellite for French startup Unseenlabs; - Three synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites for Iceye and two SAR satellites for Umbra; - Two satellites for Lynk, which is developing a constellation to provide direct-to-handset connectivity services; Twelve SpaceBee internet-of-things satellites for SpaceX-owned Swarm Technologies; - Gama Alpha, the first satellite by French company Gama to test solar sail technologies; - The Electro-Optical/Infrared Weather Systems (EWS) technology demonstration cubesat for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
Several of the payloads on Transporter-6 are orbital transfer vehicles that will later deploy satellites. They include two ION vehicles from D-Orbit, the second Vigoride tug from Momentus and Launcher’s first Orbiter vehicle.
Transporter-6 is the sixth in a series of smallsat rideshare missions by SpaceX, which performed the first two Transporter missions in 2021 and three in 2022. The company said in August that it continues to see strong demand for the services despite the rise in small launch vehicles that offer dedicated launch options for smallsats. All of SpaceX’s Transporter missions for 2023 are full, the company said then, although last-minute opportunities may arise.
A record 2022
Transporter-6 was the first orbital launch globally in 2023. It comes after a record 2022, when there were 186 orbital launch attempts, 40 more than 2021. A total of 179 launches were successful, compared to 136 in 2021.
Orbital launch activity has doubled in just the last five years. In 2017 there were 86 successful orbital launches in 90 attempts. SpaceX is responsible for much of that growth, having gone from 18 launches in 2017 to 61 in 2022, while Chinese launches increased from 18 in 2017 to 64 in 2022.
With the exception of New Zealand, which went from the first Rocket Lab Electron launch in 2017 to nine in 2022, other countries saw flat or reduced launch activity over the last five years. That includes Europe, which went from 11 launches in 2017 to 6 in 2022, and Japan, which had seven launches in 2017 but only a single, unsuccessful Epsilon launch in 2022.
SpaceX, whose 61 launches in 2022 were nearly double the 31 launches it conducted in 2021, will attempt to set another launch record in 2023. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has suggested the company will attempt as many as 100 launches in 2023, a total that likely include its Starship vehicle, whose first orbital launch is expected some time this year.
NASA's Juno spacecraft is recovering its memory after a download disruption following its December flyby of Jupiter. NASA's Juno probe is continuing to recover its memory at Jupiter after a data disruption interrupted communications between the spacecraft and its operators on Earth following a flyby of the giant planet in December. The Juno spacecraft's latest flyby of Jupiter, its 47th close pass of the planet, was completed on Dec. 14. But as its operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were receiving science data from the flyby they found they could no longer directly access the spacecraft's memory. The team successfully rebooted Juno's computer and on Dec. 17 they placed the spacecraft into "safe mode" with only essential systems operating as a precaution. As of a Dec. 22 NASA update(opens in new tab), steps taken by the team to recover Juno's science data had been proceeding positively. Juno's operators are now successfully downlinking the flyby data. "The science data from the solar-powered spacecraft's most recent flyby of Jupiter and its moon Io appears to be intact," NASA wrote in the update. The interruption is currently believed to have been caused when Juno flew through the intense radiation of a portion of Jupiter's magnetosphere. There is no indication that the radiation spike has damaged data from its close approach to Jupiter or its flyby of the volcanic Jupiter moon Io. The remaining data from Juno's latest flyby is expected to be beamed back to Earth the next few days at which point operators can assess if it has been affected by the disruption. Juno left Earth in August 2011, traveling 1.7 million miles and entering orbit around the gas giant planet 5 years later on July 4, 2016. Becoming the first spacecraft to see through Jupiter's dense clouds, Juno’s aim was to answer questions about Jupiter’s composition and origins.
NASA's Juno spacecraft made its 47th flyby of Jupiter in December. It was mind-blowing as in, the probe lost its memory.(Image credit: NASA) Juno takes 53 Earth days to orbit Jupiter, with its primary mission of Juno calling for 35 orbit, during which it collected 3 terabits of scientific data and some incredible images of Jupiter and its moons. Because Jupiter is thought to be the solar system's oldest world, learning more about it could reveal information about the formation of the solar system itself.
This data changed many of the ideas planetary scientists had about Jupiter’s atmosphere and interior by revealing an atmospheric weather layer stretching far beyond its water clouds as well as a deep interior with a dilute heavy element core.
The spacecraft’s primary mission ended in July and the spacecraft is expected to continue its extended science operations until at least 2025 according to the Planetary Society (opens in new tab).
The spacecraft was expected to exit safe mode this week and will make its next flyby of Jupiter on Jan. 22, 2023.
