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A Japanese spacecraft landed on the moon Friday but lost power hours later. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) lander touched down at Shioli crater at about 10:20 a.m. Eastern Friday. While the spacecraft appeared to be transmitting data back to Earth after landing, JAXA did not immediately confirm that the landing was a success. At a briefing two hours after landing, the agency said that the spacecraft's solar panels were not generating power. In an update Monday, JAXA said that it believes the spacecraft landed in the wrong attitude such that its solar panels are not facing the sun. Controllers turned off SLIM about two and a half hours after landing to conserve battery power, hoping that later in the two-week lunar day that sunlight will reach the panels and allow SLIM to resume operations. The landing makes Japan the fifth country to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon. [SpaceNews]
Astrobotic will soon start a formal review of its failed Peregrine lunar lander mission. The company said in a briefing Friday that it will convene a review board to examine what went wrong with the lander, which suffered a propellant leak hours after launch two weeks ago. The leading hypothesis remains that a valve failure overpressurized an oxidizer tank, rupturing it. The mission ended last Thursday when the spacecraft reentered over the South Pacific. Astrobotic said it will incorporate lessons learned from the mission into Griffin, the larger lander it is developing to send NASA's VIPER rover to the moon. NASA says it wants to fully understand what happened with Peregrine before going ahead with the "very sophisticated and costly" VIPER mission. [SpaceNews]
AST SpaceMobile has secured $155 million from investors that include AT&T and Google. The company announced the funding last week, which it said will go towards the production and launch of spacecraft intended to provide direct-to-device services to unmodified smartphones. The company, which plans to launch five Block 1 spacecraft by the end of March, is working on Block 2 spacecraft twice as large and with 10 times the capacity. AST SpaceMobile went public in a SPAC merger in 2021 but burned through the $417 million it raised in that transaction as well as subsequent deals. [SpaceNews]
A top Space Force general says that responsive space should mean more than just launching satellites quickly. Speaking at a CSIS event Friday, Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations for the Space Force, said the service needs to think more unconventionally about backup solutions in the event of a conflict. That could include agreements to use space assets by allies or commercial providers, he said. The Space Force plans to pursue other responsive launch demonstrations that build upon the success of Victus Nox, which successfully launched a satellite on short notice in September. [SpaceNews]
The Office of Space Commerce has selected three companies to participate in a commercial pathfinder program for its space traffic coordination system. The office announced Friday it awarded contracts to COMSPOC, LeoLabs and Slingshot Aerospace to participate in a Consolidated Pathfinder project to test how the office can incorporate commercial space situational awareness (SSA) data. LeoLabs and Slingshot will provide SSA data from their networks of radars and optical telescopes, respectively, while COMSPOC will provide orbital determination services using those data. The project is part of the Office of Space Commerce's efforts to establish its Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), a civil space traffic coordination system that will use commercial and government data. [SpaceNews]
Advocates of space-based solar power (SBSP) are pushing back against a recent NASA report that offered a pessimistic assessment of the technology. The report by NASA's Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy, released earlier this month, concluded that SBSP systems, designed to turn solar power into electricity and beam it down to Earth using microwaves, would produce power at 12 to 80 times the cost per kilowatt-hour of terrestrial renewable systems like wind and hydropower. The space-based systems also offered no improvements in greenhouse gas emissions over terrestrial renewable alternatives. Supporters of SBSP argue that the NASA study, while rigorous, used unreasonable assumptions, like launch costs that in two decades will be no different from today. The NASA study comes as several countries and agencies are performing their own analyses of SBSP. [SpaceNews]
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A private astronaut mission arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom docked with the ISS at 5:42 a.m. Eastern, about 36 hours after its launch from Florida. The four-person Ax-3 crew entered the station a couple hours later. The spacecraft is scheduled to be docked to the station for two weeks as the Ax-3 crew performs research and outreach activities on the station. [Space.com]
Iran launched a satellite Saturday in a demonstration of its missile technologies. A Qaem 100 rocket lifted off around 1:30 a.m. Eastern and placed the 50-kilogram Soraya satellite into a 750-kilometer orbit. That orbit is higher than those achieved in past launches by Iranian vehicles. The United States and its allies argue that such satellite launches violate a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Iran not to test ballistic missile technologies. [AP]
Sierra Space has tested a full-scale version of an inflatable space station module. The company announced Monday it performed a burst test of its Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) module, demonstrating it exceeded NASA safety recommendations by 27%. LIFE, with a volume of 300 cubic meters when fully inflated, is intended for use on commercial space stations like Orbital Reef. Sierra Space plans additional tests of LIFE this year. [SpaceNews]
Redwire will supply solar panels and other components for Blue Origin's Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle. Redwire announced Monday it won a contract from Blue Origin to provide four of its Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) systems, along with cameras and power distribution units. Blue Origin announced the Blue Ring project last year, describing it as a vehicle for transporting satellites and hosted payloads to high Earth orbit, cislunar space and beyond. [SpaceNews]
NASA temporarily lost contact with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Friday that it lost communication between Ingenuity and the Perseverance rover while the helicopter was descending on its most recent flight. That led to fears that the helicopter had crashed, but JPL said Saturday that it had restored communications with Ingenuity. Engineers are studying what caused the loss of communications during the flight. [X @NASAJPL]
A movie set on the ISS failed to achieve liftoff at the box office over the weekend. The movie, called simply I.S.S., is a thriller that pits American and Russian space station crews against each other after war breaks out on Earth. The movie generated just $3 million in its opening weekend, finishing a distant seventh, with poor reviews from both critics and moviegoers. [Variety]
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If speed like that is what your organization needs, get in touch with us here. |  | | The Week Ahead
Monday: Tuesday: Tuesday-Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: - Spaceport America, N.M.: Scheduled flight of Virgin Galatic's VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane on the Galactic 06 mission.
Saturday: - Mahia Peninsula, N.Z.: Rescheduled launch of a Rocket Lab Electron on the "Four of a Kind" mission at 1:15 a.m. Eastern.
Sunday: - Kennedy Space Center, Fla.: Scheduled launch of a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites at 6:04 p.m. Eastern.
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