By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: a new White House policy seeks to sharply increase launches, SpaceWERX selects 11 companies for financing deals, Landspace's rocket reuse plans and more.
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Top Stories
The White House released a new space transportation policy Thursday with a goal of sharply increasing launch rates. The policy, updated for the first time since 2013, sets a goal of being able to support at least 1,000 launches and reentries a year from U.S. facilities by 2030, a roughly fivefold increase from current rates. A major focus of the policy is on spaceports and related infrastructure, including new launch sites and a new federal reentry site. Other elements of the policy include development of a space transportation industrial base strategy and coordination of government purchases of commercial launch services. [SpaceNews]
The general in charge of Golden Dome offered new insights into that missile defense system. Speaking at an event Thursday in North Dakota hosted by the state's two senators, Gen. Michael Guetlein offered an expansive account of the threats Golden Dome is being designed to counter, portraying the system as considerably broader than a shield against nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. He also provided new details about a recent integrated missile defense test he mentioned earlier this month, saying the system took hardware representing elements of the architecture into a test "about three or four weeks ago" and "shot down everything that we put in the air in a matter of 34 minutes." The event comes less than three months before the midterm elections and as the Pentagon and Congress confront an unresolved question over how to finance Golden Dome in fiscal 2027. [SpaceNews]
The innovation arm of the Space Force selected 11 companies for a new round of public-private financing. SpaceWERX announced Thursday agreements with the companies with a combined value of $562.5 million from government organizations and private investors, including $245 million from the government. SpaceWERX did not provide details of the individual projects funded in the agreements, which are intended to move space technologies from prototypes to operational systems. The winning companies are Agile Space Industries, Antares Nuclear, EO Solutions, Hydrosat, Kall Morris, Method Security, Muon Space, Scout Space, Sedaro, Star Catcher Industries and ThinkOrbital. [SpaceNews]
Chinese launch company Landspace plans to refly a booster it landed earlier this week in the next several months. A company representative told Chinese financial outlet STAR Market Daily that Landspace plans to conduct a reflight test of the recovered Zhuque-3 stage within six months. The company said it made several technical changes to the booster after a failed landing on the rocket's first flight last December. Those changes included a reduced number of engines used in the landing burn and improved thermal protection to handle the extreme reentry heating and structural loads. The company's goal is to fly each booster at least 20 times. [SpaceNews]
Elve has qualified its 100-watt millimeter-wave Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier platform for spaceflight. The company used a Space Force SBIR award to qualify a family of products for spaceflight and expects to fly the amplifiers on a satellite within a year. The amplifiers promise higher data rates for spacecraft. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
Rocket Lab launched a Japanese radar-imaging satellite Thursday. An Electron rocket lifted off from the company's New Zealand launch site at 9:04 a.m. Eastern and placed into orbit the QPS-SAR-18 for Japanese company iQPS. This was the the ninth Electron launch of an iQPS satellite with nine more under contract. It was the 14th Electron launch so far this year, including three HASTE suborbital missions, and company executives said in an earnings call earlier this month that the company expects this year to break last year's record of 21 Electron launches. [SpaceNews]
NASA is revising plans for its next International Space Station spacewalk. NASA said Thursday that the spacewalk, scheduled for next Tuesday, will involve astronauts Anil Menon and Sophie Adenot installing a new antenna outside the station. That antenna was supposed to be installed on a spacewalk Tuesday by the two astronauts, but it took longer than expected to remove an old antenna at the location where the new one will be installed. The agency said that, if time allows, the astronauts will also replace a retroreflector on a docking port of the station, one of the tasks originally planned for the upcoming spacewalk. The agency is considering adding another spacewalk on Sept. 1 to carry out additional maintenance. [NASA]
Blue Origin is now publicly linked to a major manufacturing project in central Texas. Williamson County commissioners approved on Thursday an economic development agreement for a factory spanning 1.3 million square feet in Hutto, Texas, north of Austin. The vote was the first time that Blue Origin was publicly named as the company planning the project, which previously has been discussed using code names, although the company had been rumored to be associated with it. Neither the company nor the commissioners disclosed what would be produced there, but officials said it would create 2,000 jobs over 10 years. [Austin American-Statesman]
The Space Force plans to extend the life of aging weather satellites to at least 2028. The Space Force had planned to decommission the last three Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) polar-orbiting weather satellites this year, but the service said it will keep operating them for at least two more years as it works on a new satellite architecture that includes a mix of smaller spacecraft and some commercial satellites and data. A provision of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act instructed the Space Force to continue operating the DMSP satellites for as long as possible to provide critical weather data for the military as well as civilian agencies. [Air and Space Forces Magazine]
A Virginia county has backed off from plans to request a name change to at least part of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. The Accomack County Board of Supervisors approved a resolution last month proposing that the launch complex at Wallops be renamed after Tom Young, the retired NASA and aerospace industry official who is a native of the county. That proposal, though, prompted criticism from some residents who wanted to retain the Wallops name. At a meeting Wednesday, commissioners voted to rescind the earlier resolution and wait until NASA requests input on any process to rename all or part of the facility. [WBOC-TV Salisbury, Md.]
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Rocket, Rocket, Rocket
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"Everyone's [social media] post just been like, rocket, rocket, rocket, rocket, rocket… the whole feed was just rockets. There's been a bit of excitement around it, it seems."
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– Svyatoslav Shanygin, a resident of Australia's Christmas Island, about the arrival this week of SpaceX's Starship just off the coast as part of the company's efforts to recover the vehicle after a launch last month. [Australian Broadcasting Corp.]
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