Top Stories
The U.S. Space Force and Space Command have identified more than $2 billion in unfunded requirements to protect spacecraft from anti-satellite threats. The items in the Space Force's $1.1 billion and Space Command's $1.2 billion lists did not make it into the fiscal year 2025 budget proposal the Pentagon submitted to Congress on March 11, which included $29.4 billion for the Space Force. The vast majority of the funds requested are for classified programs aimed at space control, space superiority and space domain awareness, broad categories of technologies sought by the military to protect U.S. assets in orbit from anti-satellite weapons being developed by China and Russia. [SpaceNews]
Boeing and a subsidiary have filed suit against Virgin Galactic over work on a new "mothership" aircraft project. In the suit, Boeing and Aurora Flight Sciences allege that Virgin Galactic has failed to pay more than $26 million in invoices under a contract announced in 2022 to develop an aircraft that would serve as the air-launch platform for Virgin's suborbital spaceplanes, replacing the current aircraft called VMS Eve. Boeing and Aurora also claim that Virgin has failed to destroy proprietary documents linked to that project that include trade secrets, some of which were provided inadvertently. Virgin Galactic denies the allegations. [SpaceNews]
Ingersoll Rand is acquiring spacesuit developer ILC Dover. The companies announced Monday that Ingersoll Rand would acquire ILC Dover for $2.325 billion in a deal expected to close in the second quarter. Most of ILC Dover's business is in pharmaceutical and life sciences, but the company is known in the space business for developing spacesuits going back to the Apollo program as well as inflatable structures. The announcement did not disclose what changes, if any, would come to ILC Dover's space work. [SpaceNews]
The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) is trying to demystify military space acquisitions. AIA released an infographic Monday describing the roles played by 15 organizations in the Space Force, Defense Department and intelligence community in acquiring space capabilities. AIA said it developed the infographic because it regularly receives inquiries from people struggling to understand the bureaucratic labyrinth of military space acquisition. [SpaceNews]
A Boeing corporate leadership shakeup is not likely to have near-term effects on its space business. Boeing announced Monday that its current CEO, Dave Calhoun, will retire at the end of the year. The chair of the company's board, Larry Kellner, is also stepping down and will be replaced by Steve Mollenkopf, who will lead the effort to hire a new CEO. The moves were prompted by continued difficulties with the company's commercial aviation business, with the head of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Stan Deal, also retiring. None of the changes appear to have an immediate impact on the company's defense and space unit. [Boeing]
| | Footprints on the Moon Begin with L3Harris
For six decades, L3Harris has teamed with NASA to develop technology that's been critical to the evolution of human spaceflight. In fact, our technology has been part of every crewed NASA mission: from Project Mercury to Apollo to the Space Shuttle to the International Space Station era and now beyond – as part of NASA's Artemis campaign. L3Harris' contributions to NASA's Artemis missions include propulsion, communications and launch avionics for NASA's Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft and Gateway lunar space station. Learn more. | | Other News
SpaceX launched — you guessed it — another set of Starlink satellites Monday evening. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 7:42 p.m. Eastern and placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. Nineteen of SpaceX's 29 Falcon 9 launches so far this year have been Starlink missions. [Spaceflight Now]
A Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Monday. The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft docked with the station's Prichal module at 11:03 a.m. Eastern, a little more than two days after launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The launch was postponed two days after a last-second scrub linked to a low voltage reading in the rocket's first stage. The Soyuz delivered NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and Marina Vasilevskaya, a spaceflight participant from Belarus, to the station. Dyson will stay on the station for six months while Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya will return at the end of next week with NASA's Loral O'Hara on Soyuz MS-24. [CBS]
Apex says it has successfully commissioned the first payload on its inaugural Aries satellite and has the pics to prove it. The company released Monday an image taken by the spacecraft, showing part of the spacecraft with the Earth in the background. Apex launched the spacecraft three weeks ago on the Transporter-10 rideshare mission to demonstrate its capabilities, with payloads from several undisclosed customers on board. Apex was one of several companies to fly their first spacecraft on Transporter-10, with others still working through the commissioning process. One, True Anomaly, said last week it ran into problems with its first two Jackal spacecraft that will prevent the company from testing rendezvous and proximity operations as intended. [SpaceNews]
A startup has pans to send a mission to a near Earth asteroid. ExLabs said it is planning to launch a mission to the asteroid Apophis in 2028, a year before that asteroid makes a very close, but safe, flyby of Earth. The mission would place three cubesats into orbit around the asteroid to demonstrate technologies for future space resources and other in-space missions. ExLabs did not disclose the cost of the mission or how it would be funded. [SpaceNews]
George Abbey, former director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, has died at the age of 91. Abbey joined NASA in the mid-1960s and later became director of flight operations, selecting astronauts for shuttle missions. After a stint at NASA Headquarters, he returned to JSC, serving as director from 1996 to 2001. He retired from NASA in 2003 and worked on space policy issues at Rice University. [Houston Chronicle]
| | NASA Cool Points
"Thank you very much for the glasses, because he told me the other day that we needed special glasses and he's very much looking forward to the eclipse. You have definitely gotten me some cool points today."
– Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.), mentioning her son and eclipse glasses provided by NASA at a hearing Thursday of the House Science Committee's space subcommittee on NASA science programs.
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