Five years ago, the idea of easing export controls on commercial satellites was politically unthinkable. That mindset has changed during the last half-decade, as the idea that those restrictions are harming both national security and the U.S. industrial base has gradually gained traction. And now, during a year in which the U.S. Congress barely passed even routine bills, lawmakers came together to shed long-standing restrictions on the export of commercial satellites.
Engineers reached a milestone in the development of the parachute recovery system for NASA’s Orion deep space crew vehicle on Dec. 20, as a 21,000-lb. spacecraft simulator floated to an intact landing at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, following an intentional drogue chute failure. Drop tests of the four-person capsule are scheduled to resume in February with an intentional main chute failure.
An engineering board has cleared the first element of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) for preliminary manufacturing, keeping the big new government-owned rocket on track for a first flight with the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle in 2017.
It's a classic chicken or egg dilemma. Small satellites are not being built because there is no cheap way to launch them, and small launchers are not being built because there are no satellites to launch on them. So the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is attacking the problem from both directions simultaneously, with dual programs to develop $500,000 imaging satellites of less than 100 lb. and air-launched boosters to place them in low Earth orbit for $1 million a flight.
Lawmakers are constantly caught between balancing the needs of the federal government while staying true to the voters at home. Such is the case in this year's fight to maintain the Air National Guard (ANG) and Reserve, which lends a hand to the active duty military while also standing ready to serve all 50 states. Congress balked at the Air Force's initial proposal to cut 287 aircraft and 11,600 personnel, ordering a freeze on retiring or transferring aircraft.
A year-end deadline for the Air Force and Navy to disclose the target initial operational capability (IOC) dates for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was extended until June 1, 2013, in the last days of congressional conference negotiations over the 2013 defense budget. Programs are considered to have reached the benchmark once they complete initial operational test and evaluation.
After a year of bureaucratic dithering by others, a core group of scientists and engineers has agreed to spearhead utilization of the U.S. National Laboratory on the International Space Station. The permanent board of the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (Casis) has a steep learning curve, but its members appear willing to spend some serious time putting out the word that there's a unique microgravity research facility available in orbit to anyone with a good idea for using it, free of charge.
In November 2008, the year Wanda Austin became CEO of The Aerospace Corp., Aviation Week & Space Technology featured her on the cover with a three-page profile inside. “The fact that Austin is a woman and an African-American is impossible to miss,” the magazine wrote.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), currently the longest-serving woman in Congress, will now become the first woman to lead one of what is perhaps its most powerful panels, the Senate Appropriations Committee. Mikulski takes control of the committee after the recent death of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who had chaired the full committee since 2009 and led Democrats on the defense subcommittee since 1989. And she will serve alongside Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), who will lead Republicans on the panel.
Teeing up an issue for Congress in 2013, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), have introduced a bill that would push the FAA to begin setting privacy rules for the use of UAVs in civilian airspace. UAVs can carry “infrared thermal imagers, radar and wireless network 'sniffers,' with the capability to collect sensitive detailed information while operating in the skies above,” according to Markey. As such, he is seeking to regulate their use.
Two of the leading contenders for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize have merged, pooling their technical and marketing resources to push for a robotic mission to the Moon’s surface early in 2015. Moon Express Inc., a Silicon Valley startup going after the X Prize as its first step toward a commercial payload-delivery business, acquired the Rocket City Space Pioneers team in an acquisition agreement with Dynetics.
A system developed to provide precise positioning in areas denied signals from navigation satellites is to be deployed to enable testing of military GPS receiver performance during jamming. The ground-based non-GPS positioning system from Locata is also being looked at as a backup at critical national infrastructure sites that use GPS for precise timing, such as mobile communications, electronic commerce and power-grid synchronization.
Government satellite operators in the U.K. and Mexico are taking delivery of two large telecommunications satellites following the night launch of the 10th Ariane V mission this year. Liftoff of the big European rocket came at 4:49 p.m. EST (6:49 p.m. local time) Wednesday from the European launch center at Kourou, French Guiana. On board were Skynet 5D and Mexsat Bicentenario.
ANOTHER TRY: The U.S. Air Force is planning to use the RL10B-2 engine for a late February flight of the fifth Wideband Global Satcom satellite on a Delta IV rocket, according to Dave Madden, who directs the Air Force’s military satellite communications system program office. The Delta IV, which uses the RL10B-2 to power the upper stage, malfunctioned during an Oct. 8 GPS IIF launch and has not flown since. Air Force officials have yet to find a root cause for the low-thrust anomaly.
Doubts still hang over the military utility of small satellites, holding back progress on low-cost, quick-reaction systems that could be launched at short notice to fill gaps in space coverage. To prove their viability, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has begun a program to demonstrate that small satellites produced and launched on demand can provide imagery on request directly to individual soldiers.
HOUSTON — A Russian Soyuz rocket reached orbit early Dec. 19 with a three-man multinational crew that includes veteran astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is scheduled to become the first Canadian to command the International Space Station in mid-March. The Soyuz TMA-07M capsule carrying cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and Hadfield was on course to dock with the 256-mi.-high station’s Rassvet module on Dec. 21 at 9:12 a.m., EST.
NASA’s fuel-depleted Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (Grail) A and B lunar mission probes slammed into a mountain near Goldschmidt crater at the Moon’s North Pole late Dec. 17, ending a one-year mission. The carefully targeted impact of the two washing machine-sized spacecraft, renamed Ebb and Flow, occurred on schedule, with Ebb striking first at 5:28 p.m. EST, and Flow striking 32 sec. later. The spacecraft impacted the Moon at 3,800 mph.
A small engineering firm on Florida's Space Coast is looking to recover some of the revenue and jobs the region lost with retirement of the space shuttle fleet by offering maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services to the commercial spaceflight industry that the Obama administration hopes will take the shuttle's place.
Amy Svitak (London), Frank Morring, Jr. (Washington)
Thales Alenia Space and Gazprom Space Systems are confident that efforts to recover Russia's Yamal 402 Ku-band commercial telecom satellite will succeed, but it remains unclear how much of the spacecraft's 15-year service life will be lost. A premature shutdown of the Briz M upper stage on its International Launch Services (ILS) launch vehicle Dec. 9 left Yamal 402 in the wrong orbit, and controllers are using its onboard station-keeping/attitude control propellant to adjust it.
