SpaceX completes record year with Israeli imaging satellite launch

SpaceX capped off the busiest year in its two-decade history Dec. 30 with a Falcon 9 launch of a commercial Israeli imaging satellite. A Falcon 9 lifted off at 2:38 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The rocket’s first stage, flying its 11th mission, landed back at the launch site eight minutes after liftoff. The Falcon 9 upper stage deployed its payload, the EROS C3 imaging satellite, nearly 15 minutes after liftoff. The satellite was released at an altitude of nearly 500 kilometers in an unusual mid-inclination retrograde orbit, rather than the sun-synchronous orbit commonly used for optical imaging spacecraft. EROS C3 was built by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) for ImageSat International, a Tel Aviv-based commercial imaging company. The 400-kilogram satellite, based on IAI’s OPTSAT-3000 bus, is designed to take images at a resolution of 30 centimeters. ImageSat International, which went public in February on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, stated in a prospectus filed as part of that process that EROS C3 cost the company $186 million, a figure that included the spacecraft itself, the launch and insurance. The company planned to use part of the $100 million raised from going public to pay some of the remaining costs to build and launch the spacecraft. EROS C3 joins EROS B, launched in 2006, as satellites owned and operated by ImageSat International. The company also offers imagery from two other satellites, which it calls EROS C1 and EROS C2, that are owned by an unnamed third party but have capabilities similar to EROS C3. Those satellites may be part of the Ofeq series of Israeli reconnaissance satellites, also built by IAI, which operate in mid-inclination retrograde orbits similar to EROS C3 because of the limitations of launching from Israel.

A Falcon 9 lifts off Dec. 30 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying the EROS C3 imaging satellite on SpaceX's 61st and final launch of 2022. Credit: SpaceX webcast

EROS C3 is part of ImageSat’s EROS NG constellation, which includes EROS C1 and C2 as well as a planned future imaging satellite, EROS C4, slated for launch in 2026. EROS NG will also incorporate two synthetic aperture radar satellites that will be owned by an unnamed third party and commercialized by ImageSat.

The launch of EROS C3 completed the most active year to date for SpaceX. The company performed 61 launches, all successful, in 2022. All but one, a Falcon Heavy launch for the U.S. Space Force, were of the company’s Falcon 9 vehicle, which has become a workhorse for the global space industry.

SpaceX nearly doubled its launch rate from 2021, when the company performed a then-record 31 Falcon 9 launches. That launch activity was driven by the company’s Starlink constellation, which accounted for 34 of the 61 launches in 2022.

The 61 launches SpaceX performed in 2022 exceeded a goal of 60 set by Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, in a tweet in March. Musk has not publicly stated how many launches he expects SpaceX to conduct in 2023, but SpaceX’s first launch of the new year, the Transporter-6 dedicated rideshare mission, is scheduled for no earlier than Jan. 2 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40.

Thales Alenia Space studying reusable spacecraft for in-orbit manufacturing

Uncrewed rather than crewed spacecraft will be key to realizing an emerging in-orbit manufacturing industry, according to a European venture that has tasked Thales Alenia Space to develop a vehicle called REV1 for missions starting in late 2025. Thales Alenia Space signed a first phase contract for the REV1 reusable and pressurized “space factory” in early December with REV, an eight-year-old Luxembourg-based venture seeking funds to develop a microgravity research and manufacturing business. While Texas-based Axiom Space closes in on a sizable investment round to develop a crewed commercial space station, Space Cargo Unlimited says an uncrewed system like REV1 could be more flexible and cheaper by avoiding the numerous safety measures needed to support human activities. “Safety measures on space stations will rightfully always protect human lives to the detriments of the payload at stake,” Space Cargo Unlimited CEO and co-founder Nicolas Gaume told SpaceNews. “To scale in-space manufacturing, we do not believe in multipurpose vehicles with humans on board,” Gaume added. “In fact, we believe that the approach to in-space manufacturing should be driven from the payload, not the vehicle.” Thales Alenia Space is responsible for designing, engineering, and developing REV1, which is about the size of a compact car and would be owned and operated commercially by Space Cargo Unlimited. The first phase contract gets Space Cargo Unlimited up “to the ability to start manufacturing,” a spokesperson for the venture said. REV1 is being designed to carry up to 1,000 kilograms of payload for several months in low Earth orbit, where it would dock with a Reusable Orbiting Service Module that Thales Alenia Space is also developing.

Thales Alenia Space is designing REV1 to spend several months in orbit before returning to Earth. Credit: Space Cargo Unlimited

This service module would have solar panels and electric thrusters to remain in orbit for about 10 years, according to Gaume, or roughly 20 REV-1 missions.

After completing its mission, a heat shield fitted to REV1 would enable it to reenter Earth’s atmosphere for a parachute-assisted landing.

Target markets include biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturers looking to develop new materials from space.

REV1 has “a number of exciting in-space manufacturing payloads from defining customers we will be unveiling as we get closer to launch,” Gaume said.

The spacecraft would also assist agricultural experiments the venture has already been facilitating on the International Space Station for growing vines and maturing wine in microgravity.

Gaume said REV1 has lined up “a number of” other in-orbit development and validation projects, including test beds for propulsion systems.

“The first case for the failure of satellites lies with their propulsion systems,” he said via email. “And if you think about it most of the satellite’s propulsion systems are not tested in Space, and when they are, they do not come back, increasing dramatically the cost and timing of developing a new system.

“By opening the possibility to test rapidly and return, we accelerate and support the whole Space ecosystem.”

Space Cargo Unlimited and Thales Alenia Space hope to build a “space garage” in Turin, Italy, for maintaining, repairing, and overhauling REV1 and other spacecraft.

European private equity firm Eurazeo is Space Cargo Unlimited’s main financial backer and is a shareholder.

Space Cargo Unlimited said it has also secured investments from Thales’ venture capital arm and European early-stage investor Geodesic for its plans.

Other companies developing uncrewed spacecraft for in-orbit manufacturing and other applications include Space Forge, a British startup planning to launch its first satellite on Virgin Orbit’s inaugural mission from the United Kingdom early next year.

James Webb Space Telescope's 1st year in space has blown astronomers away

Just one year after launch, the James Webb Space Telescope is exceeding all expectations, and astronomers are thrilled. Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, the $10 billion infrared observatory was designed to learn how galaxies form and grow, to peer far back into the universe to the era of the first galaxies, to watch stars be born inside their nebulous embryos in unprecedented detail, and to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets and characterize some of the closest rocky worlds. However, the complexity of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST), including its fold-out, segmented 21-foot (6.5 meters) mirror and its delicate sun-shield the size of a tennis court, meant that astronomers were on tenterhooks as to whether the JWST would perform as hoped. It turns out, they needn't have worried. "I guess we really weren't expecting the results to be this good," Brenda Frye, an astronomy at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. "It's amazing," Steve Longmore, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., told Space.com. "It's delivering at least as well, and better in a lot of circumstances, than what we were expecting." And if it exceeds its own targets, it definitely surpasses those of its predecessors. "It's leaps and bounds better than what we've been able to see before," Susan Mullally, JWST's deputy project scientist from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, which operates the observatory, told Space.com, adding that she is "blown away by the imagery, honestly. The images are beautiful."

The James Webb Space Telescope launched atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Dec. 25, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The rings of Neptune

The main reason that JWST is performing so well is because of its superlative optics, which are able to achieve their maximum potential resolution for the majority of infrared wavelengths that the telescope observes in. This success means that JWST's images have a clarity to them that were unobtainable by the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope, or larger telescopes on the ground such as those at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, whose vision is blurred by Earth's atmosphere.

But with JWST, individual stars so close together they were once indistinguishable can now be resolved; the structures of very distant galaxies are now discernible; and even something close by such as the rings of Neptune pop with the most detail seen in decades.

The James Webb Space Telescope's stunning view of Neptune, with its rings clearly visible. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI)

"When the JWST's images of Neptune first came out, both Heidi [Hammel, an interdisciplinary scientist on JWST and an expert on the outer planets of the solar system] and myself looked at them, and then at each other, and asked, 'are we really looking at Neptune'?" Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com.

Although the Keck Observatory has imaged Neptune's rings, our most impressive view before JWST came from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989. "Heidi had not seen the rings [this well] since Voyager 2, and I had never seen the rings like this because Voyager was before I was born!" Rowe-Gurney said.

Normally, faint details or features around a bright object, such as the dark and tenuous rings around blue Neptune, are difficult to see against the glare of the bright object. To counteract this, an instrument is required to have the characteristic of "high dynamic range" to take in both the faint and the bright at the same time.

"We didn't realize that JWST would have this amazing dynamic range and be able to resolve really faint things like the rings of Neptune and the small moons and rings of Jupiter," Rowe-Gurney said.

Alien atmospheres

It's not only the planets of our solar system that JWST is scrutinizing. A key aim of the telescope is to detect the composition of exoplanets' atmospheres using a technique called transmission spectroscopy. As a planet transits its star, the star's light shines through the planet's atmosphere, but atoms and molecules within that atmosphere can block some of the light at characteristic wavelengths, which gives away the composition of the atmosphere.

The first exoplanet result released from JWST was the transmission spectrum of WASP-39b, which is a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star located 700 light-years away. JWST detected carbon dioxide in WASP-39b's atmosphere, the first time the gas has ever been detected on an exoplanet. Other gases present included carbon monoxide, potassium, sodium, water vapor and sulfur dioxide, the last of which can only be created through photochemistry when atmospheric gases react with the ultraviolet light from the planet's star — another exoplanet first.

The James Webb Space Telescope's analysis of the atmospheric composition of WASP-39b. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/J. Olmsted (STScI))

"I keep being amazed by what we're able to do with the exoplanet data, like the carbon dioxide and the photochemistry that was found in the atmosphere of WASP-39b," Mullally said. "That was really cool, and I don't remember people talking about [detecting photochemistry] ahead of time. I'm really looking forward to seeing what we can do with the terrestrial exoplanets orbiting the cool M-dwarfs and seeing what their atmospheres are made of."

In particular, the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system of seven worlds orbiting an M-dwarf 40 light-years away is a key target of the JWST. Preliminary results, which failed to detect thick blankets of hydrogen surrounding some of the TRAPPIST-1 worlds, were released during a conference held at STScI in December, but we'll have to be patient for more comprehensive results from these planets, of which up to four could reside in their star's habitable zone.

WASP-39b was an easy first target because its star is bright and the planet's signal is strong. M-dwarfs like TRAPPIST-1 are much fainter, despite being closer.

"We have to wait until we can get enough transits of these guys to build up the signal-to-noise, because you can't do it with just one or two transits," Mullally said. "I think we're going to have to wait until at least the end of the cycle 1 observations [summer 2023] before anybody is going to be in a position to say if they've found anything really spectacular."

Star formation near and far

Another aspect of JWST's mission is to not only observe exoplanets, but to better understand how they, and their stars, form. Star formation in particular is a crucial process to understand it because it connects so many things in the universe both near and far.

Longmore is leading a study to use JWST to observe frantic star formation in a region at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, called the central molecular zone, some 26,000 light-years from us. The center of our galaxy hosts the highest concentration of stars, and at our distance they all appear packed in — indistinguishable to the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope — while copious amounts of dust shroud most of them from view in optical light. Look with a large-aperture infrared telescope like JWST, however, and those two concerns are shoved aside.

"These are the JWST's two capabilities that are going to blow my field apart," Longmore said. The telescope's superb optics are able to resolve individual baby stars in the center of the galaxy, and infrared light will pass right through the dust to reach the observatory.

"Ordinarily, with Hubble, it's like trying to point your telescope at a brick wall and see through it," he added, "But the JWST is looking through a window in that wall and can count individual stars."

The star-forming Pillars of Creation, imaged in mid-infrared by the JWST in what will surely become an iconic picture. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/J. DePasquale (STScI)/A. Pagan (STScI))

It's taking longer to gather all the data from the center of the galaxy, but that's because it's such a complex environment, with bright, diffuse emission everywhere, and all that has to be disentangled from the relevant signal of star formation via determined and careful data processing.

"On all the projects I'm on, people are still fighting with calibration and things, but hopefully in the next six months that will change," Longmore said. He added an amusing story of how one of his team's observations had been blighted by a mysterious circle on the image. After deeper investigation, it turned out that this wasn't some mysterious new phenomenon, but that JWST had previously been looking at bright Jupiter, and the giant planet's after-image had not yet been properly flushed out of the instrument's electronic sensors!

Longmore and his colleagues are targeting the central molecular zone because it is the region in our galaxy that most resembles star-forming conditions in the early universe, when the star-formation rate was high and dense clusters of stars formed. In the Central Molecular Zone, the astronomers intend to measure a property called the initial mass function (IMF), which describes the range of stellar masses in a star-forming nebula.

Currently, astronomers do not understand what determines why stars form with the masses that they have, only that low-mass stars are much more common than luminous high-mass stars, at least in the local universe. Was this still the case over 13 billion years ago in the first galaxies? Answering that question could help explain both how galaxies formed and what ended the universe's dark ages.

Deep fields and the first galaxies

After she saw President Joe Biden reveal the first deep-field image from the JWST, of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, a "gravitational lens" whose massive gravity magnifies objects behind it, Frye and her student, Massimo Pascale at the University of California, Berkeley, raced to analyze the image.

"We didn't sleep for three-and-a-half days, and our paper was one of the first two papers submitted on JWST data," Frye said.

Together, they found 42 new gravitationally lensed images of 14 different high-redshift galaxies, galaxies located so far away that the expanding universe has stretched their light, making them appear redder. Further studies and more deep fields followed, and a host of high-redshift candidates were discovered by Frye's team and others, including some galaxies at record-breaking redshifts of 12, 13 and above; these redshifts mean that we see the galaxies as they existed less than 300 million years after the Big Bang.

These high-redshift galaxies have proven something of a surprise, in that they appear more luminous than models of galaxy formation predicted they should be.

"One possible explanation is that they're producing too many high-mass stars, that they have a top-heavy IMF," Longmore said, noting the importance of measuring the IMF in the central molecular zone to understand stellar masses in young neighborhoods.

Why the IMF would be different over 13.5 billion years ago is not understood, but then again the early universe seems to have been a far more intense place than it is today. "In the present day, galaxies in general are not forming stars so actively, but many galaxies formed stars more actively in the early universe," Frye said.

Frye is a member of the PEARLS (Prime Extragalactic Area for Reionization and Lensing Science) team. PEARLS is a JWST project to image a variety of deep fields, including two apparently sparse regions of sky and a number of galaxy clusters and proto-clusters, to observe the first few billion years of galaxy formation.  

The PEARLS field looking toward the North Celestial Pole. Inset are numerous types of galaxy, from interacting galaxies to ruby-red dusty star-forming galaxies. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Rolf A. Jansen, Jake Summers, Rosalia O'Brien, Rogier Windhorst (ASU)/Aaron Robotham (UWA)/Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)/Christopher Willmer (University of Arizona)/JWST PEARLS Team)

In December, the PEARLs team released their first dataset, of an extraordinary field of distant galaxies close to the North Ecliptic Pole. This region is directly above the main plane of the Milky Way and so is constantly visible to JWST, and it's also high above interfering features such as zodiacal dust.

Within the image are a whole host of galaxies. Some interact and some show a clear spiral structure; the collection exhibits a whole range of colors, from cobalt blue to ruby red. The latter are of great interest to Frye.

"We can now observe [in the PEARLS image] an abundance of red disk galaxies, which we think might be red spirals," Frye said. "This type of galaxy is very interesting because they are analogs of what the Milky Way might have looked like when it was younger."

The reddening is caused by huge amounts of dust in these galaxies; the dust is the result of rapid formation of massive stars that quickly die in supernova explosions and spill vast amounts of dust into space. Such galaxies are completely hidden from Hubble, but infrared light can pass through the dust and make the galaxies visible to JWST.

"The analogy is a New Year's Eve fireworks display," Frye said. "If you have a lot of fireworks going off then eventually they are obscured by dusty smoke."

The JWST has impressed scientists in the six months that it has been gathering data since becoming fully operational in June, but the real fireworks are still to come with major discoveries awaiting us.

It's slow going, requiring patience, Frye said. "There's too much for any one person to be able to study or understand on really short timescales, it's going to take us a long time to process all the data."

The results, though, will be worth it.

"It's going to completely change our understanding of our place in the universe, how the solar system formed and evolved, and how the very first stars and galaxies formed," Mullally said. "We've made great headway with this telescope, and it's going to do spectacular things."

 

Virgin Orbit receives license for U.K. launch

British regulators have issued a launch license to Virgin Orbit for its first LauncherOne mission from the United Kingdom, now expected to take place in January. The U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced Dec. 21 it issued launch and range licenses to Virgin Orbit for its “Start Me Up” mission, which will take off from Spaceport Cornwall in southwestern England. The CAA previously issued a spaceport license for Spaceport Cornwall. The licenses are the first issued by the CAA for commercial launches from the U.K. Virgin Orbit now has all the regulatory approvals needed for its first launch from the U.K. that is now expected for January, although the company has not announced a specific launch date. The launch will carry seven satellites for commercial and government customers, including the U.K. Ministry of Defence, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the government of Oman. “Receiving Virgin Orbit’s range and launch licenses takes us one step closer to the first satellite launch takeoff from U.K. soil,” said Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, in a statement. “This is a major milestone for the CAA and represents the successful completion of an enormous effort, which has included the construction of new regulations, new processes and new teams.” Hart, in a company earnings call in November, had complained that the licensing process was taking longer than expected and requiring more effort by the company. Virgin Orbit had projected conducting the launch before the end of the year, and before that earnings call was still expecting to return the LauncherOne air-launch system to the U.S. for another launch before the end of 2022. However, the company announced Dec. 8 it was postponing the launch, then scheduled for mid-December, “for the coming weeks.” The company blamed the delay in part on a lack of a launch license but also said additional technical work was needed to prepare the vehicle for launch.

Virgin Orbit now has all the licenses needed for its first launch from the United Kingdom, now expected to take place in January. Credit: Virgin Orbit

“This is another major milestone in enabling the very first orbital space launch from U.K. shores and these licenses will assist Virgin Orbit with their final preparations for launch,” Tim Johnson, director for space regulations at the CAA, said in a statement.

“Effective licensing forms an integral part of U.K. space activity, and with public safety at the heart of our decision making, we’ve worked with Virgin Orbit to assess their applications and issue licenses within our expected timelines,” he stated. The CAA has previously estimated the launch licensing process to take 9 to 18 months, and in the statement noted it awarded the license to Virgin Orbit in 15 months.

The delays in the first U.K. launch had added to concerns about Virgin Orbit’s financial condition. The company, which had anticipated performing up to six launches in 2022 when the year started, has performed only two.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Dec. 20, Virgin Orbit announced it had raised an additional $20 million from Virgin Investments Limited, an investment arm of the Virgin Group. The funding came through a convertible note, a loan that can be converted into equity. Virgin Orbit said in the filing that it will use the funding for working capital.

Vega C fails on second launch

The second flight of Arianespace’s Vega C failed to reach orbit Dec. 20 after its second stage malfunctioned, destroying two Pléiades Neo imaging satellites. The Vega C rocket lifted off at 8:47 p.m. Eastern from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying the Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 imaging satellites for Airbus. The liftoff took place on schedule and the initial phases of flight appeared to go as planned. However, on-screen telemetry showed that the rocket was deviating from its planned trajectory within four minutes of liftoff, during the burn of the rocket’s Zefiro-40 second stage. Arianespace said in a later statement that the stage malfunctioned 2 minutes and 27 second after liftoff, seconds after ignition of the stage. The flight continued for several minutes, including separation of the second stage and ignition of the third stage, as well as payload fairing separation, even as the stage reached an apogee of 110 kilometers and started to descend. “After the liftoff and the nominal ignition of the P120C, which is the first stage of the Vega, an underpressure has been observed on the Zefiro-40, which is the second stage of the Vega,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said on the launch webcast a few minutes later. “After this underpressure, we have observed the deviation of the trajectory and very strong anomalies, so unfortunately we can say that the mission is lost.” He did not provide additional details about the problem. “We will now have to work with all of our partners to better understand why the Zefiro-40 has not worked properly tonight, triggering the failure of the mission,” he said, apologizing to Airbus Defence and Space, the customer for the launch. Arianespace then terminated the launch webcast.

The launch was the second for the Vega C after a successful inaugural launch of the rocket July 13 carrying a set of institutional payloads. This was the first commercial launch of the Vega C. The launch was postponed from late November because of a problem with the pyrotechnics in the payload fairing separation system.

The Vega C is an upgraded version of the Vega rocket with increased payload performance. Among the changes is the introduction of the Zefiro-40 solid-fuel second stage, which replaced the less powerful Zefiro-23 used on the Vega. Avio is the prime contractor for the Vega C.

The Vega suffered two failures in three launches in 2019 and 2020. A 2019 Vega launch of the UAE’s Falcon Eye 1 imaging satellite failed because of a problem with the thermal protection system on part of the rocket’s second stage. A Vega launch in November 2020 failed when its Avum upper stage tumbled immediately after ignition because of what Arianespace later determined to be improperly connected cables.

The failure of the Vega C deals another blow to European efforts to maintain autonomy in launch. The Vega C was one of the cornerstones of that strategy, along with the still-in-development Ariane 6, with the European Union awarding Arianespace a contract Nov. 29 for five Vega C launches of Sentinel satellites. That contract brought the Vega C backlog to 13 launches, along with two remaining launches of the original Vega.

The launch failure also hurts Airbus, which had counted on the launch to add to its constellation of high-resolution imaging satellites. Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 were similar to the previously launched Pléiades Neo 3 and 4 but included laser links for faster transmission of imagery. An unspecified “equipment issue” with Pléiades Neo 3 led Airbus to file a partial insurance claim after its April 2021 launch. Airbus said the launch of Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 would allow it to work around the issues with Pléiades Neo 3 and meet all its customer commitments.