#WASHINGTON — Spanish defense contractor Indra has teamed up with local air navigation services provider Enaire to order two #satellites next year to test their proposed air traffic surveillance and communications constellation.

Their joint venture, Startical, said March 18 it has ordered a 20-kilogram satellite from GomSpace and a 110-kilogram satellite from Kongsberg NanoAvionics — the first of more than 270 spacecraft planned for low Earth orbit.

Startical said the #GomSpace satellite would be deployed in early 2025, followed by NanoAvionics around the middle of the year, but did not disclose launch details.

#WASHINGTON — Manufacturers of traditional geostationary communications satellites insist demand for their products is not going away thanks to technological advances and interest in multi-orbit solutions.

During a panel at the #Satellite 2024 conference here March 18, executives with several manufacturers acknowledged demand for their satellites had dropped significantly from historical levels of 20 to 25 orders a year but that the market itself was not dying.

“GEO’s not dead,” said Chris Johnson, chief executive of Maxar Space Systems. “By no means is it dead, but it has evolved.”

#WASHINGTON — Astranis said March 18 it has sold a small geostationary broadband satellite slated to launch in 2025 to Orbith, a remote connectivity provider based in Argentina.

The Californian manufacturer has now announced customers for all five satellites in Block 3, its third batch of spacecraft due to launch together on an undisclosed rocket.

Orbith currently leases capacity from satellite operators to connect customers across Latin America, but says availability and prices have held back the company’s growth in countries such as Argentina.

At around 400 kilograms, washing machine-sized satellites from Astranis are scaled for smaller, regional coverage and are cheaper than typical geostationary spacecraft weighing thousands of kilograms — although they also have about half the design life at eight years.

#WASHINGTON — After years of delays, #Maxar Technologies is finally on the home stretch to launching the first two satellites of its next-generation #WorldView Legion Earth-imaging constellation.

The company announced March 18 that the first two of six planned high-resolution WorldView Legion satellites have arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, paving the way for liftoff as soon as April aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

This marks a crucial milestone for the WorldView Legion program, which has suffered repeated setbacks since Maxar started developing the spacecraft in 2017.

The Legion program is vital for Maxar to augment its existing fleet of three WorldView and one GeoEye electro-optical imagery #satellites. The company in 2021 deorbited its newest WorldView satellite which suffered an on-orbit hardware failure and could no longer collect usable imagery

#HELSINKI — #China is set to launch its Queqiao-2 communications relay satellite to support upcoming moon missions late March 19.

A Long March 8 rocket was vertically transferred to a launch pad at Wenchang #Satellite Launch Center early March 17. The rocket will launch Queqiao-2 towards the moon in preparation for the Chang’e-6 lunar far side sample return mission in May.

Queqiao-2 has a mass of 1,200 kilograms and is equipped with a 4.2-meter parabolic antenna. Its elliptical orbit will allow it to maintain communication with both Earth and lunar far side, which never faces the Earth.

#WASHINGTON — Turion Space’s debut satellite should be ready to start imaging objects in space by May after nearly a year of commissioning in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to CEO and cofounder Ryan Westerdahl.

The three-year-old Californian space situational awareness (SSA) startup first opened the door to the imaging sensor on its 32-kilogram Droid.001 spacecraft a couple of months ago, Westerdahl said, following its SpaceX launch in June.

“We wanted to make sure we had good control of the satellite before doing it because we didn’t want to damage the optical sensor,” he told SpaceNews in an interview, “like for example if all of a sudden the satellite was staring at the sun.”

Peregrine payloads returned useful data despite no lunar landing.
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Despite not making it to the moon, #NASA and others flying payloads on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander say they still got useful data from the mission.

Peregrine launched Jan. 8 on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. The #spacecraft, though, suffered a propellant leak hours after launch that ruled out any chance of attempting a lunar landing. The spacecraft instead reentered a week and a half after launch.

Although Peregrine did not reach the moon, many of the payloads on board were tested during the flight. “In transit, we were going to keep most of those payloads in a survival mode,” said Dan Hendrickson, vice president of Astrobotic, during a March 11 session about the mission at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference here. “But as our mission deviated, the plan deviated as well, much to the benefit of all the payloads.”

While many of the science payloads on Peregrine weren’t able to collect their intended data from the surface of the moon, they were able to be tested in space and, in some cases, perform some science.

THE #WOODLANDS, Texas — Efforts by scientists to use a Mars rover to collect samples are continuing even as #NASA wraps up a new assessment of when and how those samples will be brought back to Earth.

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has filled 26 of its 43 sample tubes, scientists involved with the mission said in presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC) here March 12. The rover is climbing up the remains of a river delta that once flowed into Jezero Crater.

Of those 26 tubes, 20 contain rock cores, said Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who serves as principal scientist for Mars Sample Return (MSR) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Two contain regolith and another holds a sample of the atmosphere, while the other three are “witness tubes” that serve as controls to identify any terrestrial contamination in the other tubes.

#WASHINGTON — Space infrastructure company #Redwire plans to continue its growth and its push to profitability by seeking larger contracts for its lines of components while moving up the value chain, including a new satellite design.

In financial results released after the markets closed March 14, Redwire reported revenue of $243.8 million in 2023, a 51.9% increase over 2022. When excluding the contribution from QinetiQ Space NV, a Belgian company Redwire acquired in late 2022, Redwire’s revenue still grew by 26.9%.

The company also reported positive adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $15.3 million, versus an adjusted EBITDA loss of $11 million in 2022. The company still reported a net loss of $27.3 million in 2023, but that was an improvement of $103.4 million over 2022

#TAMPA, Fla. — U.S. regulators have approved ground rules for allowing #SpaceX and other satellite operators to use radio waves from terrestrial mobile partners to keep smartphone users connected outside cell tower coverage.

The Federal Communications Commission voted March 14 unanimously in favor of its Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) regulatory framework.

SCS providers would operate as a secondary service to companies providing Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) with conventional frequencies already approved for use from space.

This means an SCS operator would have to immediately cease operations if they interfere with an MSS provider or terrestrial telco with primary rights. The SCS regulatory framework also includes protections to guard against interference with astronomy.