Ispace revises design of lunar lander for NASA CLPS mission

The American subsidiary of Japanese company Ispace has revised the design of a lunar lander it is providing for a NASA mission, pushing back the launch of that mission by a year. The company, ispace technologies U.S., unveiled the new lander design, called APEX 1.0, at a Sept. 28 event at its new headquarters in the Denver suburb of Centennial, Colorado. The lander will be used on a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission awarded to Draper in July 2022 that, at the time, planned to use a lander called Series-2. The lander redesign was driven by the needs of the NASA payloads. “The environmentals didn’t close on the Series-2 design, particularly in the area of vibration,” said Ron Garan, chief executive of ispace U.S., in an interview. “We needed to do a complete redesign of the vehicle in order to accommodate that.” The redesign, he said, ensures that the lander can accommodate the widest possible range of payloads. APEX 1.0 will be able to host up to 300 kilograms of payloads, with the ability to expand to 500 kilograms. The lander also supports the ability to release satellites in lunar orbit, which will be used for the CLPS mission to relay communications from its landing site on the lunar farside. Garan said there is strong interest from other customers in flying payloads both on the CLPS mission, called Mission 3 by ispace and CP-12 by NASA, and subsequent ones. That includes rovers as well as experiments in in situ resource utilization (ISRU). “We’re going after both commercial and government contracts to supplement CP-12. We have payload capacity right now,” he said.

The APEX 1.0 lander from ispace U.S. was designed to better accommodate payloads such as those flying on a NASA CLPS mission in 2026. Credit: ispace U.S.

The APEX 1.0 design has completed preliminary design reviews, with ispace projecting it will pass its critical design review (CDR) by March 2024. Garan said CDR is currently scheduled for December.

The revised lander, though, will delay the mission. When NASA selected the Draper-led team for the mission last year, it projected launch in 2025. That launch has now slipped to 2026, ispace said, because of the lander design.

That has financial implications for the company. In a Sept. 28 statement, ispace, traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said it was lowering its sales forecast for the current fiscal year, which runs through March 2024, by more than 50% to 3.05 billion yen ($20.4 million) because the delays in Mission 3 mean payload sales will be recognized in later years.

Separately, ispace said it was lowering its projected net loss for the year by 3.385 billion yen to 4.5 billion yen, citing the payout from an insurance policy on its HAKUTO-R M1 lander that crashed attempting to land on the moon in April.

The company anticipates growing demand for lunar landers, which motivated the decision to move into a new 4,600-square-meter U.S. headquarters. “If we win some more contracts, we’re going to take off on a steeper exponential curve of growth, and so we need a facility that will enable that,” Garan said.

The facility will be able to support production of future landers, although other partners will handle the assembly, integration and testing of the Mission 3 lander. It will also host a growing engineering workforce. Garan said that ispace U.S. had about 50 employees when he joined three and a half months ago, and has now grown to 85. He projected the company will have more than 100 employees by the end of the year.

“It took ispace U.S. a little bit of time to get off the ground, to get going. We are firing on all cylinders now,” he said. “Out goal is to be a significant player, to make a significant contribution to the establishment of lunar infrastructure.”

China’s Galactic Energy suffers first launch failure

Chinese commercial rocket firm Galactic Energy experienced its first failure Thursday with its 10th launch attempt. Airspace closure notices pointed to a launch attempt from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China at around 1:00 a.m. Eastern, Sept. 21. The window passed without notification of a launch, which would typically follow within an hour of liftoff. Galactic Energy published an article confirming the loss of a Ceres-1 rocket and its payload via its WeChat social network account roughly six hours after launch. The company stated a four-stage Ceres-1 solid rocket lifted off from Jiuquan at 12:59 a.m. Eastern, carrying the Jilin-1 Gaofen-04B satellite for commercial remote sensing firm Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST). The specific reasons are being further analyzed and investigated, according to the Galactic Energy statement. The firm also expressed sincere apologies to its customers.The launch was the firm’s first major setback. All of its nine previous launches were successful, starting in November 2021. Galactic Energy had been executing a high-density period of launches, carrying out four missions between July 22 and Sept. 5, including a first launch from a mobile sea platform off the coast of Shandong province. Ceres-1 has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). This was the first launch to 800 kilometers.

The company, which was founded in February 2018, is meanwhile also preparing for the first launch of its Pallas-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher.

The reusable two-stage Pallas-1 will be capable of carrying 5,000 kilograms to LEO or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO. The first expendable launch is slated for the third quarter of 2024.

CGST is an offshoot from the state-owned Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Established in 2014, CGST has more than 100 satellites in orbit.

The company announced last year that it intends to expand its Jilin-1 constellation from a planned 138 satellites to 300 satellites by 2025.

Galactic Energy’s impressive record up to today appears to have secured it vital contracts to launch Jilin-1 satellites.

The launch was China’s 44th orbital mission of 2023 and the first failure. China’s state-owned main contractor has carried out 30 launches so far of a planned 60 or more, suggesting an intense period of launch activity in the remaining months of the year. The breakdown also highlights the growing role of commercial launch service providers in China.

Crew-7 launches to the space station

A Falcon 9 launched a multinational crew to the International Space Station Aug. 26 after a one-day delay to check the spacecraft’s life support system. The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 3:27 a.m. Eastern on the Crew-7 mission for NASA. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage a little more than 12 minutes later. Endurance, with its crew of four, is scheduled to dock with the zenith port on the Harmony module of the ISS at 8:39 a.m. Eastern Aug. 27. That will kick off a roughly six-month stay on the station. The launch was scheduled for Aug. 25 but postponed several hours before the scheduled liftoff. NASA said that engineers needed more time to review a component of the Crew Dragon’s life support system, known as ECLSS. NASA did not initially state what that component was but later said it was valves in an air supply system. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the post-launch briefing that after discovering corroded valves in the propulsion system of a cargo Dragon in June, SpaceX “out of an abundance of caution” decided to review all valves on the spacecraft, including for life support and propulsion. The review was designed to check the “force margin,” or the ability of the valve to open and close. “It took a little bit more time to get through the ECLSS valves,” he said, which led to the one-day slip. “We said, let’s stand down for 24 hours and make sure we understand it before we go fly.” That review confirmed that the valves were working properly and required no changes.

A Falcon 9 lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center Aug. 26 on the Crew-7 mission to the ISS. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

During the launch countdown, controllers reported a sensor issue that was cleared shortly before liftoff. At the post-launch briefing, officials said that sensors had detected trace amounts of nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO, from the Crew Dragon spacecraft that indicated a possible propellant leak. NTO is one of the two hypergolic propellants used by the spacecraft’s thrusters.

Benji Reed, senior director of the human spaceflight program at SpaceX, said at the post-launch briefing that the levels of NTO detected were about 0.25 parts per million. Three engineers independently calculated what level of leak could cause that reading and all three came to the same conclusion. “The good news was that the number that we came up with was well within the range of what you might normally see.”

That assessment, though, came down to the wire. “We were working the problem and we cleared it within the last two minutes of the count,” he said.

Crew-7 is the first commercial crew flight to carry people from four different agencies. The mission is commanded by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli on her first flight to space. European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen is the pilot; he made a 10-day trip to the station on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2015. Satoshi Furukawa of the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov are mission specialists. Furukawa flew a long-duration mission to the ISS in 2011 while Borisov is on his first trip to space.

That multinational lineup was simply how the crew assignments worked out, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, at a preflight briefing Aug. 21. “The way the timing worked out for this one with our integrated crew agreement that we have with Roscosmos, it was time for these other folks to fly,” he said.

Stich said at that briefing that another milestone for Crew-7 is having a non-NASA astronaut, Mogensen, be a Crew Dragon pilot for the first time. “It’s a very big deal for us,” he said then.

Such multinational crews will not always be the case. The next Crew Dragon mission to the ISS, Crew-8 launching in early 2024, will have three NASA astronauts and one Roscosmos cosmonaut.

The arrival of Crew-7 will allow NASA to begin preparations for the return of the Crew-6 mission, which has been on the station for nearly six months. Montalbano said at the post-launch briefing that the agency was planning a five-day handover between Crew-6 and Crew-7 before Crew-6 departs on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour. That timing, though, will depend on weather at splashdown locations off the Florida coast, which could be affected by the expected formation of a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico in the next several days.

Space Development Agency awards $1.5 billion to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for 72 satellites

The Space Development Agency announced Aug. 21 it awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to build and operate 72 satellites. The Space Development Agency (SDA), an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a mesh network of military satellites in low Earth orbit. The 72 satellites will make up a portion of SDA’s network known as Tranche 2 Transport Layer. SDA is building a large constellation called the proliferated warfighter space architecture that includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Northrop Grumman’s contract for 36 satellites is worth approximately $733 million. The agreement with Lockheed Martin, also for 36 satellites, is worth $816 million, SDA said. Transport Layer Tranche 2 “will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe,” the agency said. The 72 satellites ordered from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are the “Beta” portion of Tranche 2 Transport Layer. They will be deployed in orbital planes of 12 satellites each, with the first plane projected to launch in September 2026.

Rendering of the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 2 Transport Layer-Beta data transport satellites. Credit: Northrop Grumman

Commercial-like model

SDA uses a commercial-like model to acquire satellites, incrementally adding new technologies as they become available, in contrast to DoD’s traditional method of funding one large acquisition over many years.

“We are now solidly in the procurement phase for Tranche 2 of the PWSA to support a 2026 delivery,” said Derek Tournear, SDA director. “Tranche 2 brings global persistence for all our capabilities in Tranche 1 and adds advanced tactical data links and future proliferated missions.

The Beta variant of the Tranche 2 Transport Layer vehicles are similar to the 126 Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites that SDA ordered last year from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and York Space.

The Tranche 2 contracts make Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman the largest awardees of SDA satellite contracts. In February 2022, SDA selected Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems to each produce 42 satellites for the Tranche 1 Transport Layer. Northrop Grumman in July 2022 also won a contract for 14 missile-tracking satellites for SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 1.

To date Lockheed Martin has won SDA contracts for 88 satellites and Northrop Grumman has won orders for 92 satellites.

True Anomaly opens spacecraft manufacturing facility in Colorado

True Anomaly, a startup based in Denver, opened a manufacturing facility where it plans to produce small satellites designed for surveillance and reconnaissance of objects in space. The company on Aug. 17 unveiled the 35,000 square-foot facility in Centennial, Colorado. True Anomaly designed a spacecraft called Jackal aimed at the U.S. military and intelligence market. The satellite, equipped with three cameras, will be capable of performing rendezvous and proximity operations, and servicing missions, the company said. The first two Jackals are scheduled to launch to low Earth orbit in early 2024 on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare. CEO Even Rogers said True Anomaly has obtained licenses from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for Jackal vehicles to perform in-space surveillance.

True Anomaly’s GravityWorks facility in Centennial, Colorado. Credit: True Anomaly

NOAA, FCC licenses

A commercial remote-sensing license from NOAA authorizes the company to conduct non-Earth imaging. The FCC authorized the company to conduct ground tests of Jackal transmitters and to demonstrate spacecraft-to-spacecraft rendezvous in close proximity with its two Jackal vehicles.

The non-Earth imaging license includes radar, shortwave infrared, longwave infrared, and visible wide and narrow field of view imagery. “This variety of sensor phenomenology will enable Jackal to collect data even in poor lighting conditions such as when the spacecraft is in Earth’s shadow,” Rogers said.

Rogers said obtaining these licenses are “significant milestones in True Anomaly’s mission to define the next generation of space security.”

At the new facility, called GravityWorks, the company plans to produce more Jackal vehicles and other systems, said Rogers. “GravityWorks will be able to produce a fully-tested, mission-ready satellite every five days.”