Plus: Rocket Lab's bid for Space Force contract and Soyuz launches over 50 satellites.
| | | A SpaceNews daily newsletter | | | | | The Australian government has canceled a multibillion-dollar military satellite contract with Lockheed Martin. The Australian Department of Defence said Monday it was canceling the JP9102 program, which planned to develop three to five GEO satellites that would provide dedicated military communications services, and will instead examine multi-orbit solutions. Lockheed Martin won the contract, with an estimated value of $5 billion, 18 months ago. The decision to end JP9102 is yet another sign of the disruptive impact that low Earth orbit space internet services, led by the rapid growth of SpaceX's Starlink, are having on the traditional satellite communications industry and government procurement models. [SpaceNews]
Rocket Lab plans to offer its Neutron rocket to the Space Force in an upcoming contract on-ramp. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in an interview that the company will respond to a request for proposals released last week by the Space Force for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, which currently has contracts with Blue Origin, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. The Space Force offers annual on-ramps for new providers, and the current call for proposals is open to companies that will be ready for a first launch by December 2025. Beck said he expects Rocket Lab to have Neutron ready by that deadline. Lane 1 is designed for missions that can accept higher risks and is intended to facilitate faster launches of less sensitive payloads. [SpaceNews]
Rocket Lab carried out an Electron launch this morning for a confidential customer. The Electron lifted off at 5:54 a.m. Eastern from the company's Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, and Rocket Lab declared success about an hour later. The "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" carried a payload for an undisclosed commercial customer, with Rocket Lab adding the mission to the manifest just last month. Rocket Lab did not disclose any details about the payload or customer. One potential customer for the mission is E-Space, which filed for an authorization to launch a payload in September according to New Zealand government documents. [SpaceNews]
SpaceX launched a Dragon cargo spacecraft Monday night. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A at 9:29 p.m. Eastern and deployed the Dragon into orbit nine and a half minutes later. The Dragon, flying the CRS-31 cargo mission, is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station at about 10:15 a.m. Eastern this morning and deliver 2,762 kilograms of supplies and experiments. Later this week NASA will use the Dragon to conduct a reboost maneuver for the station, the first time a Dragon has been used for that purpose. NASA and SpaceX said that maneuver is a test to expand the capabilities of visiting vehicles like Dragon and give SpaceX experience for the Dragon-derived U.S. Deorbit Vehicle it is building for NASA to deorbit the ISS at the end of its life. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | A Soyuz rocket launched more than 50 satellites Monday. A Soyuz-2.1b rocket launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Far East at 6:18 p.m. Eastern. The primary payload for the launch was a pair of Ionosfera-M heliophysics satellites. The rocket also carried 53 secondary payloads, including 28 smallsats by Russian company Sputnix for ship tracking and other applications and two satellites from Iran. [TASS]
NASA expects to determine next steps for the canceled VIPER rover mission by early next year. At a conference last week, officials said they received 11 responses to a request for information about potential partnerships through which a company or organization would take over the lunar rover mission, and is currently evaluating them to see which may be worth pursuing. NASA announced in July it was canceling VIPER because of cost and schedule overruns, even though the rover is now complete. VIPER has since completed environmental testing with flying colors. [SpaceNews]
Two spaceports are making progress towards hosting their first launches. A local council last week approved proposed modifications for the Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland, changing the layout of the launch pad and moving tracking antennas to the summit of a nearby mountain. The spaceport will be used by Orbex starting as soon as next year. Halfway around the world, Australian officials gave final approvals for the development of the Whalers Way launch site in South Australia, allowing spaceport operator Southern Launch to conduct up to 36 orbital launches annually there. Southern Launch says it expects to have the site operational by the end of 2025. [Aberdeen (Scot.) Press & Journal | Australian Broadcasting Corp.]
An "interstellar fireball" claimed by some scientists may not be from out of this solar system after all. The 2014 fireball had a measured velocity of 44.8 kilometers per second, higher than the sun's escape velocity, suggesting that the object was from out of the solar system. A reanalysis of that data shows that the errors on the velocity are large enough to make it unlikely that the object came from outside the solar system. Researchers added that even if the object was traveling that fast, it would have burned up completely upon entering the Earth's atmosphere, contrary to claims by scientists like Harvard's Avi Loeb who said they scooped up fragments of that object from the ocean floor. [Space.com]
| | | | | | Do Astronauts Feel the Same About Pop Stars?
"This is a very oddly specific question that I ask guys on first dates. I always ask them if they think that they would want to go to space. And if they say yes, I don't date them. I just think if you want to go to space, you're a little too full of yourself, because I think it's just weird."
– Singer Olivia Rodrigo in a recent interview with Netflix. [Instagram]
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