Spaceflight

https://spacenews.com/free-tacos-for-us-if-mir-hits-floating-taco-bell-ocean-target-taco-bell-sets-40-by-40-foot-target-in-south-pacific-for-mirs-re-entry/

A 7-year-old launch company that has yet to have a rocket successfully lift off announced a radical pivot on Thursday. Its new plan? Focusing on missile defense.

"We have made the decision to focus our efforts on national defense, and specifically on missile defense technologies," Piemont said. "We’ll have more to share soon on our roadmap and traction in this area. For now, suffice to say we see considerable opportunity to leverage RS1, GS0, the E2 engine, and the rest of the technology we’ve developed to date to enable a new type of research effort around missile defense technologies."

Over the last half decade or so, three US companies have credibly vied to develop rockets in the 1-ton class in terms of lift capacity. ABL has been competing alongside Relativity Space and Firefly to bring its rockets to market. ABL never took off. In March 2023, Relativity reached space with the Terran 1 rocket, but, due to second-stage issues, failed to reach orbit. Within weeks, Relativity announced it was shifting its focus to a medium-lift rocket, Terran R. Since then, the California-based launch company has moved along, but there are persistent rumors that it faces a cash crunch.

Of the three, only Firefly has enjoyed success. The company's Alpha rocket has reached orbit on multiple occasions, and just this week Firefly announced that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. The 1-ton rocket wars are over: Firefly has won.

A Chinese official expressed willingness to cooperate with the United States in space exploration, interest that appears unlikely to be reciprocated.

Speaking at the Beyond Earth Symposium here Nov. 13, Zhou Guolin, minister counselor for science and technology at the Chinese Embassy here, said China was open to some level of cooperation with the United States on spaceflight, without going into specifics.

“China welcomes participation from space agencies all over the world, including the United States of America, of course,” he said. “History has proved that isolation is not a solution, and that cooperation is the only solution to go forward.”

Interaction between NASA and China has historically been limited. It includes a 2006 visit by then-administrator Mike Griffin to China as well as working group meetings from 2008 to 2010 on topics such as the exchange of Earth and space science data. That was largely severed with the passage by Congress 2011 of the so-called “Wolf Amendment” that sharply restricted bilateral cooperation between NASA and Chinese organizations.

The Wolf Amendment has persisted in annual appropriations bills since 2011 with little effort to remove or significantly change it. NASA’s current administrator, Bill Nelson, told a House committee in 2023 he supported the provision.

“I think the Wolf Amendment, as it’s written, is adequate,” he said in an April 2023 House appropriations hearing. “I think the Wolf Amendment is sufficient for where it is right now.”

Nelson has, on other occasions, warned of China landing humans on the moon ahead of NASA’s own human lunar return, suggesting that China might lay claim to desirable locations at the lunar south pole and prevent NASA from accessing them. He also used an image from China’s Zhurong Mars rover at a 2021 House hearing to warn the U.S. “about our need to get off our duff” on lunar exploration.

Boeing has shipped the first pair of O3b mPower satellites with fixes addressing power issues that have hobbled the initial six in SES’s next-generation medium Earth orbit (MEO) broadband network.

Boeing said Nov. 13 the satellites with redesigned power modules were sent via truck from its facilities in El Segundo, California, and are due to arrive at Cape Canaveral in Florida next week for their December SpaceX launch.

We shouldn't overreact, as Berger points out none of the relevant appointments have been made. It's still a stunning report with huge implications. Here's the full quote:

To be clear we are *far* from anything being settled, but based on what I'm hearing it seems at least 50-50 that NASA's Space Launch System rocket will be canceled. Not Block 1B. Not Block 2. All of it. There are other ways to get Orion to the Moon.

XCancel link to tweet