BRAZILIAN SPACE: Brazil’s Visiona Tecnologia Espacial S.A. has signed contracts with Thales Alenia Space and Arianespace to build and launch a civil/military broadband communications satellite for the Brazilian government’s Geostationary Satellite Defense and Strategic Communications (SGDC) system. Visiona, a joint venture of Embraer and Brazil’s state-owned telecommunications company Telebras, is to become a satellite integrator for Brazilian space agency AEB. Near-term, the company has been tasked with integrating SGDC under Brazil’s national broadband initiative.
PARIS — The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its €940 million ($1.3 billion) Gaia star-mapping spacecraft Dec. 19 after postponing the mission one month due to technical issues involving a component flying on another satellite already in orbit. Equipped with twin silicon-carbide telescopes built around a single, 1-billion-pixel focal array, Gaia is designed to survey a billion stars in the Milky Way, providing a precise 3-D map to better understand the galaxy’s composition, formation and evolution.
MUNICH — EADS Astrium has signed an agreement with Inmarsat to resell commercial and military broadband capacity on the London-based fleet operator’s new constellation of all-Ka-band Global Xpress satellites, giving them privileged access to the globally available mobile broadband network.
LOS ANGELES — Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are poised to push the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) suborbital vehicle to new heights and speeds during the third, and longest yet, powered flight test, which is planned for the coming days. The flight, from Scaled Composites’ Mojave, Calif., base, will be the most ambitious to date and is scheduled to include the first attempt at a supersonic re-entry using the vehicle’s tail-plane feathering braking system.
After sending the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to orbit atop a Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Center (CSG) Dec. 19, European launch services provider Arianespace confirmed the dates of its first two Ariane 5 launches in 2014.
BEIJING — Chinese development engineers encountered great challenges in developing the main engine for Chang’e 3 lunar probe, says the chief designer for the propulsion program, Jin Guangming.
HOUSTON — U.S. astronauts aboard the International Space Station area readying their NASA spacesuits, including the protective garment that leaked water into a helmet during a July 16 excursion, for a series of spacewalks intended to repair a crippled external cooling system.
BEIJING — China’s Chang’e 3 lunar probe, despite encountering unexpectedly extreme temperature disparities on the Moon’s surface, has six of its eight scientific instruments activated and operating properly. Optical and ultraviolet imaging experiments have begun, but as of Dec. 17 controllers had not yet activated an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and an imaging spectrometer operating in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The probe arrived on the Moon on Dec. 14 GMT.
Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) has completed all its milestones under NASA’s Commercial Crew Development 2 (CCDev2) program, which culminated in the first free-flight test and runway landing of its Dream Chaser spacecraft. Other milestones in the development of the reusable, lifting-body human spacecraft included a systems requirement review, flight simulator development, the creation of a vehicle avionics integration laboratory, a system definition review, a flight control integration laboratory and a preliminary design review, the company said Dec. 16.
Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center exerted almost 1 million lb. of force on a simulated rocket tank before it failed in the second round of testing designed to improve design models and take weight out of the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) and other vehicles.
HOUSTON — NASA began testing software patches intended to restore fine control over a crippled external cooling loop aboard the International Space Station on Dec. 17, while setting Dec. 21 to begin a three-spacewalk repair campaign. At the same time, NASA postponed until January plans for the Orbital Sciences “ORB-1” resupply mission to the six-person orbiting laboratory.
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), a sharp critic of NASA management and a vocal human rights advocate, announced Dec. 17 he will not seek re-election next year. Wolf’s decision opens the chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the U.S. space agency, and may allow closer space cooperation between the U.S. and China.
HOUSTON — The International Space Station’s mission operations team reported some progress Dec. 16 in its bid to manage the crippled thermal control system aboard the six-person orbiting science laboratory, but not enough to rule out unscheduled spacewalks this week to replace an external pump module housing the faulty flow control valve that is the source of the station’s ills.
KICKED UP: Scientists monitoring the lunar dust environment with NASA’s new Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) and two other spacecraft did not detect any initial effects from Saturday’s touchdown of China’s Chang’e 3 lunar lander and subsequent operations with its small rover.
BEIJING — China will launch a sample return mission to the Moon in 2017, officials say, while declaring complete success for the current Chang’e 3 mission to land and deploy a lunar rover. The next mission, Chang’e 4, will be similar to the current effort, using a backup spacecraft and rover, but will be adapted to prove technologies for the sample-return mission, Chang’e 5, says Wu Zhijian, a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
In a bid to boost the ability to track orbital debris that could endanger satellites, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is seeking methods for the uncued detection of objects in low-inclined low Earth orbit (LILO). The LILO project is part of Darpa’s OrbitOutlook (O2) program to bolster the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) with new sensor, database and validation capabilities. The SSN is tasked with observing and tracking space objects.
ON HOLIDAY: The U.S. House of Representatives recessed for the holidays without taking up a Senate version of legislation to extend third-party indemnification for the space-launch industry, but contracts already in the works will not be affected when indemnification expires at year-end. Both houses of Congress have adopted extensions of indemnification, which protects launch companies if third parties are injured in a launch failure. But the House bill extends indemnification for only one year, while a Senate measure adopted Dec. 12 would grant a three-year extension.
After more than a decade of design work and pathfinder fabrication, the lightweight five-layer sunshield that will keep the sensitive infrared detectors on the James Webb Space Telescope at 40K is in deployment testing at prime contractor Northrop Grumman.
Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson defines close-mouthed, but as his secretive startup begins to notch some success in its plan to develop reusable space launchers, he is opening up a bit. He was unusually chatty during a press teleconference on the results of a full mission-cycle test of the clean-sheet BE-3 rocket engine Blue is developing to power its reusable suborbital New Shepard crew vehicle.
