 | Top Stories
The FCC has approved a SpaceX plan to upgrade its first-generation Starlink satellites. The commission approved a license modification requested by SpaceX for its 4,408 Gen1 satellites, allowing SpaceX to deploy upgraded Starlinks under the Gen1 license with technology developed for the company's second-generation constellation. That upgraded technology includes upgraded beam-forming and digital processing equipment, enabling SpaceX to provide broadband with narrower beams and increase network capacity. [SpaceNews]
Astroscale has finalized a contract with the Japanese space agency JAXA for a debris removal mission. The company announced this week it signed the contract, valued at 12 billion yen ($82 million) for the ADRAS-J2 mission. That spacecraft will fly to the same H-2A upper stage in low Earth orbit being inspected now by the company's ADRAS-J spacecraft and deorbit it. Astroscale said in an presentation this week that it is projecting a sharp increase in revenue from that contract and other projects, and expects to reach breakeven on an operating profit basis in its 2026 fiscal year. [SpaceNews]
AstroForge, an asteroid mining startup, has raised $40 million as it races to complete its second mission. The company announced the Series A round Tuesday, led by Nova Threshold. Those funds will enable a third mission, called Vestri, scheduled for launch late next year that will rendezvous with and touch down on an M-class asteroid that may have high concentrations of metals. The company is working to complete its second mission, Odin, scheduled to launch at the end of this year as a secondary payload on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 lunar lander mission to fly by that asteroid. AstroForge took work on Odin in house earlier this year after problems with the development of the spacecraft by an outside vendor. [SpaceNews]
TrustPoint, a startup developing a next-generation global navigation satellite system, has won a pair of U.S. Space Force contracts. The company announced Wednesday it won contracts from SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the Space Force, worth $3.8 million to demonstrate a ground control segment that does not rely on GPS and an advanced position, navigation and timing (PNT) security application. TrustPoint plans to establish a C-band constellation in low Earth orbit to provide commercial PNT services, and has launched two satellites to date. [SpaceNews]
A government contracting firm has spun out a new venture focused on space weather forecasting. The digital services contractor Ensemble Consultancy announced last week that its space weather business would be spun off as an independent startup, Ensemble Space Labs. The company is developing advanced forecasting tools to predict solar storms and their impacts on Earth. Ensemble Space is using its expertise in data science and machine learning to build a platform to take in space weather data from various sources to provide more tailored insights for commercial and government customers. The new venture is partially funded by U.S. government small business contracts and plans to seek venture capital in the coming months. [SpaceNews]
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| Other News
SpaceX used a Starlink launch to break in a new Falcon 9 booster. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 9:20 a.m. Eastern Tuesday and placed 22 Starlink satellites into orbit. The launch was the first for the booster, designated B1085. SpaceX had originally planned to fly the Crew-9 mission on the booster's first launch, but a one-month delay in that mission as well as a desire to confirm that a moisture intrusion issue in the booster's propellant tanks had been resolved led SpaceX to use a Starlink mission for the rocket's first flight. [Spaceflight Now]
A NASA experiment has shown the potential for autonomous navigation of satellite swarms. The agency tested its Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment, or StarFOX, using its four Starling cubesats launched last year. The satellites were able to calculate their orbits using images from their star trackers, exchanging data with each other through intersatellite links. Because the technology does not rely on GPS, it could be used for missions orbiting the moon or other planets, researchers noted. [SpaceNews]
ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission has completed a dual flyby of the Earth and moon. The spacecraft passed about 750 kilometers above the moon on Monday, followed 24 hours later by a flyby 6,840 kilometers above the Earth. The flyby, the first time a spacecraft has made gravity-assist swingbys of the moon and Earth, puts JUICE on course for a Venus flyby next August. That will be followed by two more Earth flybys in 2026 and 2029 before the mission arrives at its destination, Jupiter, in 2031. [ESA]
A new study suggests that we may be relatively alone in the universe. The analysis is based on the premise that, given a group of similar Earth-like planets, life should arise on nearly all of them or none of them given the lack of differences that would cause life to arize on some of them. That would mean that intelligent, technological life should also either be very common or very rare. The lack of evidence so far, from decades of SETI projects, to detect signals from other civilizations then led scientists to conclude that such life may therefore be rare, for any number of reasons. [Space.com]
| |  | And Yet…
"Building a spacecraft in three and a half months is stupid. Building it for deep space in three and a half months is really stupid."
– Matt Gialich, CEO and co-founder of AstroForge, acknowledging the challenges his company faced of rapidly build its Odin spacecraft for launch late this year after concluding the company it had hired to build the spacecraft could not complete the job.
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