Top Stories
A Crew Dragon spacecraft returned four people from the International Space Station this morning. The spacecraft Endurance splashed down off the Florida coast near Pensacola at 5:47 a.m. Eastern, a little more than 18 hours after undocking from the ISS. The splashdown marked the end of the Crew-7 mission, returning NASA's Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA's Andreas Mogensen, JAXA's Satoshi Furukawa and Roscosmos' Konstantin Borisov after more than six months in space. [SpaceNews]
A fiscal year 2025 budget proposal includes steady funding for the U.S. Space Force. The budget proposal, released Monday, offers $29.4 billion for the service, down from the $30 billion requested for 2024 but in line with projections last year for the service's funding in 2025. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that the 2025 request is an "acceptable" budget for the Space Force, but not an optimal one, allowing key programs to move forward but at not quite the pace that the Pentagon would like. While the Space Force budget remained relatively flat, many in the commercial space industry will be disappointed it did not create new funding lines for emerging services, one analyst said. The Pentagon is also requesting $144 million for its new Office of Strategic Capital, created to help bring private investment to companies developing dual-use technologies with both commercial and national security applications. With financing tools like loan guarantees, the office aims to boost tech firms that typically shun government work. [SpaceNews]
NASA says that it's faced with "hard choices" for its programs because of spending caps. The agency released its 2025 budget proposal Monday, seeking nearly $25.4 billion in 2025, the same as the agency received in 2023 and a half-billion more than it received in the final 2024 spending bill last week. The budget requests proposals to delay, cancel or restructure several science missions, including canceling the Geospace Dynamics Constellation heliophysics mission and cutting back operations of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The budget left funding for Mars Sample Return (MSR) as "TBD" as plans to restructure the program wrap up this spring. NASA will later amend the budget request to include funding for MSR, but doesn't plan to increase the $2.7 billion overall request for planetary science. [SpaceNews]
SAIC has won a $444 million contract to modernize launch range infrastructure. The company beat out multiple rivals to secure the highly contested Digital Transformation, Acquisition, Modernization and Modification (DTAMM) contract from the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command. The contract covers work over five years to modernize the launch instrumentation and information systems at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Vandenberg Space Force Base. [SpaceNews]
Flat panel antenna maker Kymeta is changing its leadership team. The company announced Monday that co-CEOs Walter Berger and Doug Hutcheson, who are also president and chair, respectively, are retiring at the end of March after leading the company for five years. Rick Bergman, most recently executive vice president for computing and graphics at chipmaker AMD, is replacing Berger as president and CEO. Nicole Piasecki, a Kymeta board member since May 2022, will become its chair. The change comes as the company prepares to start shipping its first multi-orbit broadband user terminal. [SpaceNews]
SpaceX has secured conditional approval to use extremely high-frequency E-band spectrum for its Starlink satellites. The FCC announced Friday it will allow SpaceX to use E-band spectrum for communications between second-generation Starlink satellites and gateways on the ground. Use of E-band, which is at higher frequencies than Ka- and Ku-band, enables higher bandwidth communications. SpaceX said using E-band radio waves for backhaul would enable Starlink Gen2 to provide about four times more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations. [SpaceNews]
| | Other News
Space companies are interested in making greater use of AI, but the love isn't mutual. Those companies say that while they are impressed with the capabilities AI offers, implementing them on spacecraft is difficult. They cite the need for power-hungry computers that are vulnerable to radiation in the space environment, as well as the need to revise software. Still for certain missions, the potential benefits of onboard AI are too impressive to ignore, so companies are shielding terrestrial components and space-qualifying AI-optimized chips and circuit boards. [SpaceNews]
A Space Systems Command office is seeking to better leverage commercial space capabilities. The Commercial Space Office, or COMSO, has the mantra, "Exploit what we have, buy what we can and build only what we must." The head of COMSO, Col. Richard Kniseley, explained that means using existing capabilities in new ways and buying what is commercially available before the Space Force considers building its own systems. He noted that a commercial system that meets 70% of their needs now is preferable in many cases to building a new system. [SpaceNews]
Standalone terminals that can switch between satellites in GEO and LEO are about to get into customer hands for the first time. Legacy GEO operators have been busy drawing up acquisitions, partnerships and new constellations to offer multi-orbit services. That is partly in response to competition from LEO-only heavyweight Starlink but also to meet evolving connectivity needs in the air and other places terrestrial networks can't reach. For that multi-orbit approach to be most effective, it requires terminals that companies like Kymeta, ThinKom and others are developing that can communicate with both GEO and LEO satellites. After extensive testing, those antennas are just now reaching the market. [SpaceNews]
Space camera maker Simera Sense has raised nearly $15 million. The company, which produces cameras for satellite manufacturers that include AAC Clyde Space, Open Cosmos and OHB System, says the funding will allow it to expand system assembly facilities out of South Africa and closer to its component producers in Europe. The funding will also will help the company fast-track the development of higher resolution and more advanced shortwave infrared camera products. Founded in 2018, Simera Sense is a specialized business unit within Simera Group, a 14-year-old multi-disciplinary engineering company based in South Africa. [SpaceNews]
Launch vehicle developer Phantom Space has raised a bridge round of funding. The company did not disclose the size of the round, announced Monday, but said it raised $37 million to date. Phantom Space is developing Daytona, a small launch vehicle capable of placing 500 kilograms into orbit, as well as a line of smallsats. The company is led by Jim Cantrell, who previously was CEO of another small launch vehicle company, Vector Space, until it went bankrupt in 2019. [SpaceNews]
A startup is proposing to place data centers in orbit. Lumen Space raised a $2.4 million pre-seed round that it announced Monday. The company says it has ambitions to place hundreds of satellites in orbit that will perform "edge processing" of data from other spacecraft, reducing the amount of information sent back to Earth. The funding supports work on a prototype satellite planned for launch in 2025. Several other companies are also pursuing similar plans to create in-space data centers. [GeekWire]
| | Wild Despair
"When NASA asked for this endeavor, I immediately said yes, and then I was immediately thrown into a wild despair when I realized I would actually have to write the poem."
– U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, describing at the South by Southwest conference Friday writing a poem that is engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft launching this October.
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