Stratolaunch performs first powered Talon flight

Stratolaunch conducted the first powered flight of its Talon vehicle March 9, reaching “high supersonic” speeds in the uncrewed test. The Talon-A vehicle, designated TA-1, took off attached to the company’s Roc aircraft from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 10:17 a.m. Eastern according to flight tracking data. The plane flew west to a location in the Pacific off the central California coast, where it released TA-1 at an unspecified time. Roc returned to Mojave more than four hours after takeoff. Stratolaunch executives said in a call with reporters that they could not disclose the top speed or altitude of the TA-1 on its flight, citing “proprietary agreements” with unspecified customers. They were, though, satisfied with the flight. “As part of our successful achievement of the test objectives, we did reach that high supersonic regime approaching hypersonic flight,” said Zachary Krevor, president and chief executive of Stratolaunch. Hypersonic flight is typically defined as speeds higher than Mach 5. Aaron Cassebeer, senior vice president of engineering and operations, said the TA-1 achieved its major test objectives, including release from Roc and ignition of its engine, sustained acceleration and climb through high supersonic speeds while maintaining control, then decelerating and gliding to an ocean splashdown. TA-1, an expendable vehicle, was not recovered. “Overall, we’re incredibly pleased with how TA-1 performed today,” he said. “As it stands right now, we are well positioned to continue our planned test series.”

Stratolaunch's Roc aircraft, with the Talon TA-1 vehicle attached between its fuselages, takes off March 9 from Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Credit: Stratolaunch/Matt Hartman

The company’s next vehicle, TA-2, is its first reusable hypersonic vehicle. It is scheduled to begin flight tests in the second half of the year, with another reusable vehicle, TA-3, under construction. Stratolaunch is also modifying a Boeing 747 is acquired last year in Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy auction to serve as a second air-launch platform.

Stratolaunch was founded more than a decade ago by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen with the initial goal of providing air-launch services using a giant twin-fuselage, six-engine aircraft. The company at various times considered a variant of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, a vehicle concept called Thunderbolt by Orbital ATK (now part of Northrop Grumman) and that company’s existing, but much smaller, Pegasus XL rocket. It then started work on its own launch vehicle and engine.

The company pivoted after the 2018 death of Allen. The company dropped plans for its own launch vehicle and was later sold to a private equity firm, Cerebus. The company announced in 2020 it would focus instead on developing hypersonic vehicles that would be air-launched by Roc.

The TA-1 flight was also a milestone for Ursa Major Technologies, the company that developed the Hadley engine that powers the vehicle. That engine, which uses liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants, is designed to produce 5,000 pounds-force of thrust. Ursa Major had not disclosed any flight tests of that engine before the TA-1 flight.

Cassebeer said the Hadley engine fired for about 200 seconds on the flight. “The Hadley engine performed very well today. It met all of our expectations,” he said.

Italian space startup Kurs Orbital raises $4 million in seed funding

Kurs Orbital, an Italian startup developing technology for in-space satellite servicing, announced March 7 it has secured $4 million in seed funding. Based in Turin, Italy, Kurs was co-founded in 2021 by former director of Ukraine’s space agency Volodymyr Usov. The company relocated to Italy in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and set up operations at the European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Center. The funding round was led by the European firm OTB Ventures. Other participants include Credo Ventures, Galaxia, In-Q-Tel and Inovo. Usov, who is Kurs’ chief executive, said the seed funds will help to accelerate the development and commercialization of an interface module, called ARCap, that Kurs designed to facilitate in-orbit docking and maneuvers known as rendezvous and proximity operations.

 

Illustration of Kurs Orbital’s interface module, called ARCap, designed to facilitate in-orbit docking and maneuvers. Credit: Kurs Orbital

Module offered to satellite manufacturers

The company does not intend to build servicing vehicles and plans to offer the ARCap as a stand-alone product.

“With the help of our investors, we will be able to reach the market sooner, enabling many other startups and companies to start debris removal and satellite servicing operations,” said Usov.

He said Kurs aims to deliver a “flight ready” ARCap module by late 2025.

“The interface is designed with a modular architecture in mind to be scaled up and down based on application and orbit to be utilized at,” said Usov. The first flight ready system will be developed for missions in low Earth orbit.

Usov said Kurs has several agreements with satellite manufacturers and space logistics companies, including Clearspace, Thales Alenia and D-Orbit.

NASA cancels OSAM-1 satellite servicing technology mission

NASA has canceled a multibillion-dollar project to demonstrate satellite servicing technologies that had suffered extensive delays and cost overruns. In a brief statement March 1, NASA announced it was ending the On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (OSAM) 1 mission. OSAM-1 was being developed to refuel the Landsat 7 spacecraft and then perform the in-orbit assembly of a Ka-band satellite antenna. NASA said it was canceling OSAM-1 “due to continued technical, cost, and schedule challenges, and a broader community evolution away from refueling unprepared spacecraft, which has led to a lack of a committed partner.” The agency said that, after formal congressional notifications of its decision, it would start the process for an orderly shutdown, which would include transferring hardware and “pursuing potential partnerships or alternative hardware uses.” NASA said it would also review how to mitigate the impact of the cancellation on the workforce at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was leading OSAM-1. NASA spokesperson Jimi Russell said there are approximately 450 NASA employees and contractors working on OSAM-1, and that NASA “is committed to supporting project workforce per plan through fiscal year 2024.” OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities.

The OSAM-1 satellite servicing technology demonstration mission suffered significant cost and schedule overruns. Credit: NASA

The mission, though, suffered significant cost overruns and delays. As of April 2022, the mission’s total cost, once projected to be between $626 million and $753 million, had grown to $2.05 billion and its launch delayed to December 2026. NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in an October 2023 report, concluded the project would likely suffer additional overruns, with an estimated cost at completion as high as $2.17 billion and a launch of between March and June 2027.

A key factor in OSAM-1’s problems, the report concluded, was the performance of Maxar, which is supplying both the spacecraft bus as well as the robotics payload, called Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER), under contracts with a combined value of nearly $316 million. Maxar delivered the OSAM-1 bus in September 2023, two and a half years behind schedule, and was running more than two years late with the deliveries of SPIDER components, OIG found.

Maxar acknowledged in the report that they had “significantly underestimated the scope and complexity of the work” modifying one of its 1300-series satellite buses, designed for commercial geostationary orbit communications satellites, for use on OSAM-1 in low Earth orbit. The company also had technical problems with SPIDER as well as issues managing subcontractors. NASA said in September 2023 it has removed one element of SPIDER called MakerSat, which would have manufactured a composite beam, to focus on its servicing and assembly technologies.

That report traced the problems with the OSAM-1 bus and SPIDER to the use of fixed firm price contracts that, OIG concluded, gave NASA no means to incentivize the company’s performance. NASA at times stepped in, providing an estimated $2 million in labor to help with the OSAM-1 bus in 2022 and 2023.

“In our discussions with Maxar officials, they acknowledged that they were no longer profiting from their work on OSAM-1,” OIG noted in its report. “Moreover, project officials stated that OSAM-1 does not appear to be a high priority for Maxar in terms of the quality of its staffing.”

Maxar spokesperson Eric Glass said the company had delivered to NASA a pallet for the SPIDER payload, as well as one of its three robotic arms, with the other two robotic arms planned for delivery later this year. “While we are disappointed by the decision to discontinue the program, we are committed to supporting NASA in pursuing potential new partnerships or alternative hardware uses as they complete the shutdown,” he said.

One problem OSAM-1 did not have was funding. Congress regularly exceeded NASA’s requests for funding for the mission. The OIG report noted that NASA requested $808.5 million for OSAM-1 between 2016 and 2023 but Congress appropriated more than $1.48 billion. NASA requested $227 million for OSAM-1 for fiscal year 2024 and both the House and Senate versions of spending bills fully funded the mission.

OSAM-1’s cancelation comes as many companies are commercially pursuing satellite servicing technologies, in many cases using more cooperative approaches such as designing satellites with refueling ports that reduce the complexity of refueling. At the annual meeting of CONFERS, a satellite servicing industry group, in October 2023, an audience member noted there had been little discussion about OSAM-1 in conference presentations.

Bo Naasz, who leads satellite servicing capability development at NASA, acknowledged the difficulty in developing a spacecraft designed to refuel a spacecraft “not prepared” for servicing. “It’s really hard,” he said. He argued the value of OSAM-1 was to demonstrate robotic technologies that could be transferred for other applications while gaining experience in satellite servicing.

“We can help convince the consumer that we know how to do this and that it’s ready,” he concluded. “I think it is, but I also think it’s hard.”

China launches classified military satellite towards geostationary belt

China launched the TJS-11 classified satellite early Friday as the country continues to build its geostationary capabilities. A Long March 5 lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan island at 6:30 a.m. Eastern (1130 UTC), Feb. 23. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC), announced launch success just under an hour after launch. The announcement also provided the first official statement on the payload: TJS-11 (Tongxin Jishu Shiyan-11). The satellite is described as being mainly used to carry out multi-band, high-speed satellite communication technology verification. Neither CASC nor Chinese state media provided further details on the satellite which belongs to a series of classified geosynchronous satellites for the Chinese military. TJS satellites are thought by observers to serve a range of purposes including early warning, signals intelligence and more. Buildup to the mission was shrouded in secrecy, despite the open location of the coastal launch. There were no official reports of the rollout of the rocket, in contrast to previous missions. Notably it is the shortest time between launches of the Long March 5, at 70 days since the launch of Yaogan-41. Like the Yaogan-41 launch, the TJS-11 mission used an elongated 18.5-meter-long, 5.2-meter-diameter payload fairing. Standard fairings are 12.3 meters long. This is the first TJS satellite launched on a Long March 5, China’s most powerful launch vehicle. The Long March 5 can loft 14,000 kilograms into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The launcher is required to launch China’s largest satellite bus, the DFH-5.

The satellite series and its activities has caught the attention of observers in recent years. For instance, China’s TJS-3 (Tongxin Jishu Shiyan-3) satellite launched in 2018 and released a payload of unstated purposes.

Assessments of the pair’s maneuvers suggest the spacecraft moved in concert and carried out operations including spoofing. This involves coordinated maneuvers at certain times in an attempt to confuse rivals’ space tracking networks. Orbital data reveals that TJS-3 has been making close approaches to American satellites.

The U.S. Space Force recently stated its growing concern at China’s advancing capabilities in geostationary orbit (GEO). Assets of note include the Ludi Tance-4 (01) L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite and the Yaogan-41 optical satellite, with an estimated resolution of 2.5 meters. China launched the pair separately in the second half of 2023.

“Paired with data from other Chinese surveillance satellites, Yaogan-41 could provide China an unprecedented ability to identify and track car-sized objects throughout the entire Indo-Pacific region and put at risk numerous U.S. and allied naval and air assets operating in the region,” Clayton Swope, a former U.S. intelligence official and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said Jan. 30.

Furthermore, a Long March 7A rocket launched the mystery TJS-10 satellite towards GEO in November last year.

The launch of TJS-11 was the seventh flight of the Long March 5. It was also China’s ninth orbital mission of 2024. CASC has yet to provide an outline for its overall launch activities for 2024, in contrast to previous years. China launched a national record 67 times last year with one failure.

Known major activities include Shenzhou missions to the Tiangong space station and the pioneering Chang’e-6 lunar far side sample return mission. The latter mission will fly on the next Long March 5. Launch is expected in May, following the launch of the requisite Queqiao-2 relay satellite on a Long March 8 next month.

Chinese commercial launch providers are expected to continue to build on a breakthrough 2023. The debut of new liquid-propellent launch vehicles including the Tianlong-3 (Space Pioneer), Nebula-1 (Deep Blue Aerospace) and Pallas-1 (Galactic Energy) expected in the second half of 2024.

Eutelsat scales back OneWeb Gen 2 upgrade plan

Eutelsat has decided to hold off deploying significantly upgraded OneWeb broadband satellites to instead focus on adding continuity of service capacity for customers with long-term contracts, the French fleet operator said Feb. 16. The shift to a progressive approach for improving low Earth orbit satellite capacity and performance shaves off nearly one third of the company’s previous $4 billion budget for a second-generation constellation, Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said during an earnings call. Berneke said the strategy still leaves Eutelsat open to potential public sector funding from programs such as IRIS², Europe’s sovereign broadband project, for financing the development of new technologies that could be added to the constellation. “But it’s also really to make sure that the timeline works,” she continued, “I mean, it’s very important to us that we keep the continuity of service with our customers in these multi-year contracts and set them up over time, and then bring the new functionality when it’s ready.” After testing a OneWeb Gen 2 technology demonstrator last year, Eutelsat has been speaking to manufacturers about a constellation of around 300 satellites that could begin deployments as soon as 2025. Most of the 633 satellites in OneWeb’s current generation were launched between 2020 and 2023, and the constellation has a design life extending to around 2027-2028. The satellites were built by a Florida-based joint venture with Airbus of France, which recently bought Eutelsat out of the group for an undisclosed sum.

Eutelsat says integrating its geostationary broadband network with OneWeb’s low Earth orbit satellites is the best way to meet future global connectivity needs. Credit: OneWeb

Eutelsat did not detail how many satellites are under its revised strategy.

The operator has previously said a Gen 2 constellation could be smaller than Gen 1 partly because newer satellites would leverage Eutelsat’s geostationary satellites over high-demand areas.

During the Feb. 16 earnings call, Eutelsat chief financial officer Christophe Caudrelier said the company is talking to government-backed export credit agencies (ECAs) in India, the United Kingdom, and France to support the majority of Gen 2 costs.

The planned ramp-up of OneWeb’s commercial services worldwide would also support the investment.

Although all the satellites OneWeb needs for worldwide coverage are in position, ground segment delays are currently holding back global services.

Previously slated to begin global low Earth orbit services in early 2024, Eutelsat recently said it expects to have completed only 90% of OneWeb’s ground network by the end of June following a mix of installation and licensing setbacks.

Key enterprise and government customer markets for OneWeb that are waiting for services to come online include India and Saudi Arabia.

Eutelsat reported around 700 million euros ($754 million) in OneWeb customer backlog as of the end of December, up 23% from three months earlier and continuing to grow.

Customers in areas where OneWeb services are available, such as Alaska, are experiencing up to 195 megabits per second download and 32 Mbps upload speeds, according to Eutelsat, with a latency of 70 milliseconds.

GEO wins the day

Services from recently launched geostationary satellites Konnect VHTS and Eutelsat 10B helped put the operator on track for a return to growth following years of annual revenue declines thanks to its waning legacy video business.

Eutelsat recorded 572.6 million euros in revenue for the six months to Dec. 31, up 1% compared with the same period in 2022 when adjusted for currency changes on a like-for-like basis.

Video was the only Eutelsat business unit that did not post revenue growth, falling 8% year-on-year to 331.1 million euros — but still representing the bulk of the company’s total sales. Non-renewed and scaled-down broadcast contracts dragged the division down, along with sanctions against Russian and Iranian channels.

Government services, mobile connectivity, and fixed connectivity were up 10.5%, 35.6%, and 9.2%, respectively.

These three verticals included some contribution from OneWeb, Caudrelier said, underlining Eutelsat’s rationale for acquiring the company last year to boost its pivot to connectivity services.

Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, stood at 365.6 million euros Dec. 31, down 12.7% compared with 419 million euros a year earlier.