Plus: Rules for orbital data centers
By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: K2's $500 million round, making rules of the road for orbital data centers, NASA's Roman Space Telescope is on track for launch in a month and more.
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Top Stories
Satellite manufacturer K2 Space has raised $500 million to expand production for commercial and government customers. The Series D round, led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ, values the company at $6.8 billion, the company announced Thursday. K2's valuation has more than doubled since it raised a $250 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation last December. The new financing gives K2 the resources to expand production as it works toward the capacity to build as many as 100 large satellites a year. The company is working on defense programs including those linked to Golden Dome, while its largest disclosed commercial project is tied to a planned SES communications network in medium Earth orbit. [SpaceNews]
Now is the time to start developing rules of the road for giant constellations of orbital data center satellites. At a panel discussion this week, government and industry officials said proposals for constellations of up to 1 million satellites require thinking about adapting best practices from existing satellite constellations such as Starlink. One issue is that most proposed orbital data center constellations plan to use a special orbit, a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, to maximize solar power. That can mitigate concerns about high numbers of conjunctions among those satellites, provided operators agree to fly their satellites in the same direction in those orbits to avoid risks of head-on collisions. [SpaceNews]
NASA's Roman Space Telescope is on track for launch in a month. At a briefing Wednesday, NASA officials said preparations were going as planned for Roman, set to launch Aug. 30 on a Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center. Once launched, Roman will take about 100 days to reach the Earth-Sun L-2 Lagrange point, and during that time engineers will work to calibrate the telescope and its instruments. Roman is on track to launch nine months early, which project officials previously credited to careful planning as well as adherence to a cost cap. [SpaceNews]
NASA is not ready yet to set a date for the next Boeing CST-100 Starliner flight. At a briefing Thursday about upcoming International Space Station spacewalks, the agency said they are working with Boeing to correct problems with Starliner and making "good progress." However, the next Starliner flight, a cargo-only mission called Starliner-1, was not included in a list of missions planned through the end of the year to the station. NASA said only it will schedule Starliner-1 "when it's ready to go and when we have a spot for it on ISS." On Tuesday, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg suggested the main issue for Starliner was working with NASA to schedule a date for Starliner-1. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
Thales Alenia Space won a contract to build an Earth observation satellite for the Italian space agency ASI. Thales Alenia announced this week that it was selected by prime contractor OHB Italia to provide the spacecraft for the PRISMA Second Generation mission, which will carry a hyperspectral instrument. The spacecraft will use Thales Alenia's PRIMA-S bus designed for Earth observation missions. It is scheduled for launch in 2031. [Thales Alenia Space]
Interlune is expanding its partnership with an industrial equipment manufacturer to explore ways to support NASA's lunar base plans. Interlune announced last year it was working with Vermeer Corp. on developing equipment that could extract helium-3 from lunar regolith. On Thursday, the companies said they are now examining how to use similar systems for work that will likely be needed for a lunar base, including building roads and digging trenches. The companies said they will work on a tool that could be sent to the moon by the end of the decade to test site preparation work. [GeekWire]
Elon Musk is denying reports Tesla is preparing to spin off its operations with China to prepare for a merger with SpaceX. Sources said Tesla executives have been told to prepare to spin off or sell its China business, a move intended to enable a merger between Tesla and SpaceX. Musk said in a Tesla earnings call last week that he could not discuss combining the two companies. He responded to the report about the potential Tesla China spinoff as "fake news" and that the company has never discussed getting rid of its China business. SpaceX is scheduled to hold its first earnings call as a public company on Tuesday. [Wall Street Journal]
Planetary scientists have discovered the first "three-headed" asteroid. Observations of the main-belt asteroid 44 Nysa taken with telescopes in Arizona and Chile indicate the asteroid likely is a "trinary", or three lobes connected together. While many two-lobed asteroids have been found, Nysa would be the first three-lobed asteroid. The images also revealed Nysa has a small moon, about a kilometer across, orbiting it at a distance of 170 kilometers. [Space.com]
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