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Spanish launch vehicle developer PLD Space has raised additional funding. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of 78 million euros ($83 million) in outside investment to date, but did not disclose the size of the latest tranche of funding from its shareholders. The company has also received 42 million euros from the Spanish government in the last year. The funding will allow PLD Space to expand its manufacturing and test facilities for its Miura 5 small launch vehicle. That rocket is slated to make its first flight in 2025 and enter commercial service in 2026. [SpaceNews]
The Pentagon has declassified some information about space electronic warfare technologies and training. Space Force Col. Christopher Fernengel said on a recent podcast that the service has moved that information, which had been at a "top secret special access program" level, down to secret or top secret, making it easier for the Space Force to collaborate with allies. Space electronic warfare involves manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, including offensive actions like jamming or spoofing to hinder adversaries as well as defensive measures to protect friendly space assets. [SpaceNews]
NASA is continuing efforts to respond to a decadal survey that set lofty goals for its biological and physical sciences (BPS) research. That report, released last September, recommended NASA pursue 11 key science questions and implement two research campaigns in those fields with costs in the billions of dollars. It also called for increasing NASA's BPS budget by a factor of 10 over the decade. The director of NASA's BPS division says the agency is developing a strategy to implement the decadal's recommendations while acknowledging a 10-fold increase in the budget may not be realistic in the current fiscal environment. The strategy will also address a shift in research from the International Space Station to commercial stations as well as lunar and Mars research. [SpaceNews]
Injury rates at SpaceX continue to exceed industry averages. Data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 2023 showed that SpaceX had injury rates higher than the space industry average and, in some cases, higher than the company reported in 2022. Its Starbase facility in Texas, for example, reported 5.9 injuries per 100 workers in 2023 compared to 3.8 injuries per 100 in 2022 and an industry average of just 0.8 injuries per 100. One expert warned that high injury rates could be a sign of poor production quality. [Reuters]
| | 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
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is once again returning data to Earth. NASA said Monday that the spacecraft successfully transmitted engineering data last week, five months after suffering a computer problem that caused the spacecraft to return only garbled data. Engineers traced the problem to a corrupted memory unit in a spacecraft computer and rewrote software to use other memory units on the spacecraft. Additional software revisions are planned to allow the spacecraft to resume sending science data. [NASA/JPL]
The Indian space agency ISRO is gearing up for a drop test of its Gaganyaan spacecraft. In the upcoming test, a capsule will be dropped from a helicopter at an altitude of 3.5 to 4 kilometers to confirm the performance of the spacecraft's parachutes before splashing down. ISRO has not announced a date for the test, but it could take place within a week depending on the status of test preparations and weather conditions. [India Today]
Australia's space agency is facing criticism for spending money training an astronaut who will have few opportunities to fly. The agency spent $466,000 to include Katherine Bennell-Pegg, its space technology director, in a European Space Agency astronaut training class that graduated on Monday. Unlike the ESA astronauts in that class, Bennell-Pegg is not eligible for ESA flight assignments, leaving commercial missions as the most likely option for her to go to space. The cost of seats on commercial missions to the ISS, though, exceeds the agency's annual budget of $34 million, prompting one senator to formally question the agency about its human spaceflight plans. [The Guardian]
A private organization says it has signed an agreement for a dedicated Blue Origin New Shepard flight. The Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA) announced Monday that it will buy all six seats on an upcoming, but unscheduled, New Shepard flight, reserving five of the seats for participants from countries that have none or only a few people into space. The sixth seat would be open people from any nation. SERA, previously known as the Crypto Space Agency, arranged the flight of one person on a New Shepard flight in 2022, funded through the sale of digital collectibles called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. [SERA]
| | Can't Have an Earth Day Without a Sunday
"I love Earth Day. I was talking with a group of students this morning and I was saying that I think it's a shame that there's only one Earth Day per year but there's a Sunday every week. Not cool."
– Karen St. Germain, NASA Earth science division director, at an agency event Friday to commemorate Earth Day.
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