 | Top Stories
A Chinese robotic spaceplane landed Thursday night after nearly nine months in orbit. The experimental reusable spaceplane likely landed around 9:10 p.m. Eastern at the Lop Nur landing site, based on orbital data. Chinese media announced that the spaceplane had successfully landed but provided no other details. The spaceplane spent 267 days in orbit on its third flight, including carrying out proximity operations with a small satellite it released. [SpaceNews]
NASA has confirmed plans to cancel a $2 billion satellite servicing mission. The agency announced Thursday that it will close out the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) project at the end of the month, reaffirming a decision it announced in March. Congress had directed NASA to develop an alternative plan to revise the mission to enable a 2026 launch, but NASA said it concluded that alternative was not feasible. NASA was developing OSAM-1 to refuel the Landsat 7 spacecraft and test on-orbit assembly of an antenna, but the mission has fallen far behind schedule and over budget. NASA still needs congressional approval to cancel OSAM-1, but released later Thursday a request for information seeking concepts to repurpose the hardware developed for the mission. [SpaceNews]
Viasat won a U.S. Army contract to modernize a system used for tracking friendly forces. The $153 million contract covers technical support to update the Blue Force Tracker (BFT) system that the Army uses to know where allied units are on the battlefield. BFT utilizes GPS technology to track troop and vehicle locations, allowing soldiers and commanders to view updated positions on screens in vehicles and aircraft. The system leverages Viasat's global L-band network, which is used for emergency data transmission and voice communications. [SpaceNews]
Blue Origin is racing the clock to launch its first New Glenn rocket next month. The company announced this week that it rolled out the second stage of the first New Glenn to the launch pad for an upcoming static-fire test, and that the ship that will serve as the landing platform for the first stage had arrived in Florida. The company is working to get the rocket ready for a launch between Oct. 13 and 21, the window that its payload, NASA's ESCAPADE mission, requires in order to get to Mars. NASA only recently disclosed the exact launch window for the mission after previously being unusually vague about when the mission would launch. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp acknowledged last week that the company has "lots to do" to be ready in time. [SpaceNews]
KBR completed its acquisition of LinQuest to expand its work on national security space programs. KBR said this week it closed the $737 million deal that it announced in July. KBR, with a global workforce of 36,000, will absorb LinQuest's 1,500 employees into its national security business. A KBR executive said that the acquisition will help it meet the U.S. military's growing demand for classified space programs at a time when the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are increasingly seeking contractors with secure facilities and personnel cleared to work on sensitive projects. [SpaceNews]
European smallsat manufacturer Aerospacelab has opened a factory in the United States. The company's new 3,300-square-meter factory in Southern California is capable of producing two satellites a week on a single shift. The company sees opportunities from the U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency as well as American companies, but has not disclosed how many satellites it has under contract in the U.S. Aerospacelab's original factory in Belgium can produce 24 satellites a year and is building a new factory there capable of 500 satellites annually. [SpaceNews]
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| Other News
A Falcon 9 launched the third set of satellites for an NRO constellation Thursday night. The Falcon 9 lifted off at 11:20 p.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the NROL-113 mission. The launch was the third in a series of launches carrying imaging satellites developed by SpaceX and Northrop Grumman for a proliferated constellation. NRO did not disclose how many satellites were on the launch, but the first two launches each carried about 20 satellites. [SpaceNews]
Another Falcon 9 launched Starlink satellites Thursday. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:33 a.m. Eastern after a one-day delay because of weather, and deployed 21 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. With this launch SpaceX has now launched more than 7,000 Starlink satellites, with more than 90% of them still in orbit. [Spaceflight Now]
A Chinese company launched 10 satellites for its own communications constellation. A Long March 6 lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center at 2:30 p.m. Eastern Thursday and placed 10 satellites into orbit for Geespace, a subsidiary of automaker Geely. The satellites are part of a constellation that would provide communications and navigation services for vehicles. [Reuters]
Startup Canopy Aerospace won two Air Force contracts to develop thermal protection systems. One contract covers work on a transpiration-cooled thermal protection system, while the other involves embedding sensors into that material. The contracts have a combined value of $2.8 million. Canopy was founded three years ago to develop heat shields using automation and 3D-printing technologies for spacecraft and hypersonic vehicles, but has expanded to apply those thermal protection technologies to other markets. [SpaceNews]
NOAA has awarded nearly $10.4 million in task orders to two companies for satellite radio occultation weather data. NOAA said Thursday it selected PlanetiQ and Spire for the task orders to provide 3,000 near-real-time global navigation satellite system radio occultation data profiles per day for a year. Those profiles are used to support weather forecasting models. PlanetiQ won about two-thirds of the overall funding. [NOAA]
NASA says a solar sail smallsat is working well now that the sail is deployed. The agency released the first image from the spacecraft Thursday, showing part of the roughly 80-square-meter sail. The spacecraft is tumbling, which explains the variations in brightness noticed by some observers, but NASA says that tumbling is intentional as controllers turned off the spacecraft's attitude control system for the sail deployment. Once engineers complete their analysis of the deployed sail and its booms, that attitude control system will be turned back on and the sail used for maneuvers. [NASA]
| |  | Not Rocket Science
"When I retired and came back to California, I wanted to get back on a tractor. Once I started selling grapes to a winery, I looked at that process and thought, this is not rocket science. I took it into my own hands and developed three wine varieties."
– Retired astronaut José Hernández, who now owns a vineyard and produces wines under the label Tierra Luna Cellars. [National Geographic]
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