Falcon Heavy sends Jupiter-3 broadband giant toward geostationary orbit

SpaceX launched EchoStar’s more than nine metric ton Jupiter-3 spacecraft July 28 and successfully dropped off the world’s heaviest commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous transfer orbit. The Maxar Technologies-built satellite lifted off on a dedicated Falcon Heavy at 11:04 p.m. Eastern from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, separating from the rocket about three and a half hours later. Both Falcon Heavy side boosters landed at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station just over seven minutes after launch for reuse. They had supported two earlier Falcon Heavy missions, both for the U.S. Space Force: USSF-44 in November and USSF-67 early this year. The mission was delayed from July 26 to allow more time for vehicle checkouts after an abort was called with about a minute remaining in the countdown for reasons SpaceX did not detail. EchoStar’s Hughes Networks Systems subsidiary, which is set to provide Jupiter-3’s broadband services, confirmed the satellite has started sending and receiving its first signals post-launch, and that engineers had deployed its solar arrays. Jupiter-3 is set to double the capacity of the operator’s Jupiter fleet with an additional 500 gigabits per second, after reaching its 95 degrees west orbital slot and completing health checks the operator expects to wrap up in the fourth quarter. The broadband services would address rising demand over the Americas, where it has been losing subscribers as capacity constraints weigh on the business.

EchoStar's colossal Jupiter-3 satellite launches on a Falcon Heavy July 28. Credit: SpaceX

EchoStar recently said Hughes broadband subscribers are using about 15% more bandwidth on average year-on-year amid intensifying competition in the market, including from SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation.

Jupiter-3 enables the company “to start growing again in our key markets where we’ve been hesitant to add new customers because of the capacity limitations,” EchoStar chief operating officer Paul Gaske said, “and it also allows us the opportunity to improve plans for our existing customers.”

He said the company has a number of “pinch points” to address but its constraints are highest in the United States, where it intends to put the largest chunk of Jupiter-3’s capacity to work.

Heavyweight champions

EchoStar ordered Jupiter-3 (also called EchoStar-24) in 2017 from Space Systems Loral before it rebranded as Maxar Technologies, and had initially planned to launch it in 2021 before the pandemic led to production issues at Maxar and other satellite manufacturers.

Maxar said Jupiter-3, at about the size of a standard school bus when antennas and solar panels stowed and with a wingspan of a Boeing 737 when fully deployed, is the largest spacecraft it has ever made.

Jupiter-3 unseats Telesat’s Telstar-19 Vantage that launched in 2018 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 as the largest commercial communications satellite ever deployed.

Maxar-built Telstar-19 Vantage had a launch mass of roughly seven metric tons.

Varda waiting on FAA license to return space manufacturing capsule

A startup that launched its first mission to test space manufacturing technologies last month is waiting on a Federal Aviation Administration license to be able to bring what it produced back to Earth. Varda Space Industries launched its first spacecraft, called W-Series 1, on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare mission June 12, to test the ability to produce crystals in microgravity. Those crystals would be brought back to Earth in a reentry capsule set to return as soon as July 17. However, Varda said July 20 it was delaying the capsule’s return as it works with “our government partners to ensure everyone is fully ready.” The company didn’t elaborate on those issues or estimate when it would be ready to return the capsule. In a July 24 interview, Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said the company was still working with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation for a reentry license for the spacecraft. That office, best known for licensing commercial launches, is also responsible for overseeing reentries by commercial spacecraft. A key issue, he said, is that Varda is the first to seek a reentry license under new FAA regulations known as Part 450. Those regulations were enacted by the FAA more than two years ago to streamline the launch and reentry licensing process. “I think a lot of the collaborations that we’ve had with the FAA have been trailblazing, and we recognize that, given we’re the first, we set the standard for what future Part 450 reentry looks like,” he said. Varda started discussions with the FAA in early 2021, shortly after the company’s founding.

Varda Space Industries' W-Series 1 spacecraft includes a capsule designed to return pharmaceutical experiments. The company is waiting on an FAA license to be able to return the spacecraft. Credit: Varda Space Industries

For the commercial launch industry, the Part 450 regulations have become an area of concern. Only a handful of Part 450 launch licenses have been issued to date as the FAA begins a transition to the new regulations, but those licenses have taken longer to complete than expected, in some cases missing a 180-day statutory deadline. Industry officials raised the issue at a July 13 hearing of the House Science Committee and at a July 11 meeting of an FAA advisory group, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee.

“Part 450 is a new regulatory regime that obviously comes with challenges,” he said. “But we’re also excited to hopefully help set the standard for what this should look like on the reentry side of things.”

Asparouhov said his company didn’t have a firm date for returning the 120-kilogram capsule but was making plans for a potential reentry in early to mid August. In addition to the FAA reentry license, Varda has to coordinate with the FAA’s air traffic organization on airspace closures and with the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range, where the capsule will land.

There are no pressing technical issues that require the capsule to return by a specific deadline, but the company would like to bring the capsule back sooner rather than later. “There’s no reason why you’d want to add on risk by extending a mission beyond what it was designed for,” he said. “Our goal is to bring it home as quickly as possible given the positive business and technical implications for it.”

During its time in orbit, the spacecraft tested the ability to produce crystals of a drug called ritonavir used to treat HIV/AIDS. Telemetry from the spacecraft indicates the experiment went as planned, but the company wants to get the crystals back to verify it did produce the expected crystals.

Varda has “a lot of very eager customers” in the pharmaceutical industry interested in the results from this mission, Asparouhov said. The company will also sell data collected during the capsule’s return to Earth for government customers.

“We are a startup and delaying day by day burns capital day by day,” he said. “I prefer to make progress in shorter periods of time.”

The company is working on its second spacecraft that, like the first, will be manufactured by Rocket Lab using that company’s Photon bus. That spacecraft will launch on the Transporter-10 rideshare mission late this year or early next year.

Future spacecraft will carry more sophisticated equipment for producing crystals for pharmaceutical applications. “This first mission on board had the equivalent of a toaster in terms of like pharma manufacturing capabilities. We definitely need to build the convection oven, the blender and the mixer, a ton more capabilities to satisfy our clients,” he said. “But we’re super happy that we managed to make a little bit of toast.”

First Astranis satellite sidelined by post-deployment glitch

The first Astranis-built satellite won’t be able to provide commercial broadband over Alaska for local telco Pacific Dataport because it can’t keep solar arrays pointed at the sun, the Californian manufacturer’s CEO John Gedmark said July 20. Despite the failure of both solar array drive assemblies on Arcturus, used to position solar panels that power the satellite, Astranis estimates it can get six to 12 hours a day of service from the spacecraft. While that is not enough to provide continuous broadband over Alaska as intended, Gedmark said the spacecraft could still be used as an in-orbit test bed or another alternative mission. He said fixing the component issue through software and hardware changes on other Astranis satellites in production should only delay its next batch of four satellites — known as Block 2 — by a couple of months. Among these Block 2 satellites Astranis still hopes to launch on a Falcon 9 before the end of the year is a previously undisclosed spacecraft called UtilitySat, which Gedmark said can serve as a partial Arcturus replacement until a dedicated satellite for Pacific Dataport can be launched in 2025. Gedmark said he is unwilling to give technical details about the component issue because it is one of a small portion of spacecraft parts it does not build in-house. He also declined to discuss the component’s provider, flight history, or whether the issue is covered by the insurance the company took out on the satellite, designed to provide 7.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput in Ka-band.

A rendering of an Astranis small geostationary satellite. Credit: Astranis

Viasat’s 6,400-kilogram ViaSat-3 Americas satellite was Falcon Heavy’s primary passenger and has not been able to deploy a critical antenna needed to start its promised terabit broadband services. Gedmark said Astranis has not seen anything suggesting a connection between the two incidents.

A third communications satellite on the Falcon Heavy mission, a smaller cubesat from Washington-based Gravity Space, has passed all health checks and is preparing to enter service in the coming weeks, its CEO Mark Thompson said.

Arcturus backup

UtilitySat is equipped with transponders in Ka, Ku, Q, and V band spectrum to serve a variety of mission needs and has customers lined up globally, Gedmark said, although it will now focus on providing connectivity over Alaska.

The same size as a typical Astranis satellite at around 400 kilograms, and also with an eight-year design life, UtilitySat’s flexibility means it is not capable of the same level of throughput as a dedicated spacecraft from the manufacturer.

Gedmark said Astranis plans to deploy a full replacement for Pacific Dataport in early 2025 under a commercial arrangement he declined to discuss.

“That satellite will have significantly more capacity than Arcturus” was designed to have, he said, by “rolling in all the improvements we’ve done over just the last couple of years.”

While replacing a traditional large geostationary satellite following an in-orbit anomaly would historically cost hundreds of millions of dollars and many years, he said Astranis satellites can be built faster and in higher quantities to mitigate any shortfall.

U.S.-based mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu ordered two other satellites joining UtilitySat as part of Block 2, and cellular backhaul provider Andesat of Peru has bought the other.

Astranis also plans to launch another five satellites as part of Block 3 next year on an undisclosed dedicated rocket.

Customers for three of these have been disclosed so far: Two for Mexican telco Apco Networks and one for Orbits Corp, the satellite services arm of Philippine internet service provider HTechCorp.

Gedmark said Astranis plans to have multiple UtilitySats on orbit at any given time, enabling the company to respond to unexpected surges or changes in connectivity demand.

ESA preparing for “assisted reentry” of Aeolus spacecraft

The European Space Agency is in the final stages of performing an “assisted reentry” of an Earth science spacecraft, an effort that will attempt to bring the satellite down over the ocean in a little more than a week. A series of maneuvers will lower the perigee of the Aeolus spacecraft to enable a reentry, projected over the Atlantic Ocean, on July 28. The maneuvers are intended to minimize any chance that debris from the spacecraft that survives reentry would land in populated areas. The first set of maneuvers is scheduled for July 24 and will lower the spacecraft’s perigee from 280 to 250 kilometers, said Isabel Rojo, Aeolus operations director, during a July 19 briefing. A second set of maneuvers on July 27 will further lower the perigee to 150 kilometers. A final maneuver on July 28 will lower the perigee to 120 kilometers. “After the execution of that last maneuver, the satellite is then expected to reenter within five hours,” she said. That last maneuver is timed to have reentry take place during a track the spacecraft’s sun-synchronous orbit takes over the Atlantic Ocean. Limitations of the spacecraft, though, mean that ESA can’t target a specific area for the reentry. “This spacecraft was designed and developed just before any guidelines came in place” mandating a controlled reentry, said Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Safety Office. That led to what the agency calls an “assisted reentry” approach, which lacks the precision of a controlled reentry but avoids an uncontrolled reentry. “It will further reduce the risk, which is already small, on the ground that is posed by the reentry,”

Aeolus, launched in 2018, collected wind data using a lidar instrument through April 2023. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

ESA expects up to 20% of Aeolus, which weigh about 1,100 kilograms excluding propellant, to survive reentry. The agency said that the assisted reentry approach, if successful, would reduce the risk of debris hitting someone, already extremely small, by a factor of 42.

Krag said this is the first time he is aware of any satellite operator attempting an assisted reentry. The closest comparison he offered is the reentry of NASA’s Skylab space station in 1979, where spaceflight controllers turned off gyros to make the spacecraft tumble in an effort to control the reentry location.

ESA officials billed the assisted reentry as part of a broader commitment to space safety by the agency. That included an announcement during the Paris Air Show June 22 that ESA would work with several European satellite manufacturers on a “Zero Debris Charter” where signatories would commit, by 2030, to deorbiting their satellites at the end of their lives or hiring companies that provide active debris removal services to deorbit them.

“I think ESA has always been a responsible actor and, with that action on Aeolus, we are demonstrating once more that we are willing to achieve anything, even with a space system that was not originally prepared for this,” Krag said.

The reentry will mark the end of Aeolus, launched in 2018 on what was originally planned as a three-year mission to demonstrate the ability of a lidar to measure wind speeds globally. Science operations of Aeolus formally ended in April.

“After almost five years, it has exceeded all the expectations and gone beyond what were the original objectives,” said Tommaso Parrinello, Aeolus mission manager. That included using Aeolus data in operational weather forecasting and filling in gaps in wind data when commercial airline traffic, also used to collect wind data, dropped significantly during the onset of the pandemic.

At ESA’s November 2022 ministerial meeting, member states approved plans for a two-satellite follow-on mission, Aeolus 2, slated to launch at the end of the decade in cooperation with Eumetsat. “This decision taken last year is the most tangible and most solid demonstration of the value of the success of this mission, which perhaps was not obvious at the beginning,” he said.

Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s director of Earth observation, said at the briefing that Aeolus was often called the “impossible mission” because of the many technical challenges it faced in development. “It’s a real success story.”

Hubble telescope captures stunning shot of spiral galaxy (photo)

A dazzling new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a distant galaxy that hosted a supernova explosion not long ago. The featured galaxy, known as UGC 11860, is located roughly 184 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. It's a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way, exhibiting the telltale arms that curve out from its dense, bright central region. UGC 11860 appears to float serenely in space in the new Hubble photo, which NASA shared on July 7. However, it recently hosted an almost "unimaginably energetic stellar explosion," according to a statement from the space agency. When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it dies in a dramatic explosion called a supernova. Supernovas are incredibly luminous and powerful, blasting large amounts of material into space and creating expanding shells of gas and dust that can be observed as a supernova remnant. "The hugely energetic processes during supernova explosions are predominantly responsible for forging the elements between silicon and nickel on the periodic table," NASA officials said in the statement. "This means that understanding the influence of the masses and compositions of the progenitor star systems is vital to explaining how many of the chemical elements here on Earth originated."

Hubble photo of the spiral galaxy UGC 11860, which is located roughly 184 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko, J. D. Lyman)

The observations of UGC 11860 were taken in 2014, using Hubble's Wide Fi

eld Camera 3. Data from the space telescope has allowed astronomers to study the aftermath of the stellar explosion and lingering remnants in the galaxy. Observations of supernova remnants like the one in UGC 11860 can help astronomers learn more about the star systems that fuel such cosmic explosions.