| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: NASA and Roscosmos leaders to meet, KSAT and AWS collaborate to speed up satellite data delivery, breaking up with Starlink is costly for Ontario and more.
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| | | | | | Top Stories
The acting administrator of NASA will meet with the head of Roscosmos for the first face-to-face meeting between agency leaders in nearly seven years. Roscosmos said this week that its director general, Dmitry Bakanov, would visit the United States this week to attend the Crew-11 launch, scheduled for midday Thursday, and while there meet with NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy. NASA has not publicly announced the meeting, although Duffy said at a Capitol Hill event that he wanted to maintain partnerships between the U.S. and Russia in space despite "wild disagreement" over the war in Ukraine. The last time the heads of NASA and Roscosmos met in person was in October 2018 while attending a launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. [SpaceNews]
A small air leak persists in a Russian module on the International Space Station despite recent repair efforts. Sergei Krikalev, Roscosmos deputy director general, said at a briefing Wednesday on the Crew-11 mission that recent repair work by Russian cosmonauts on the long-running leak in part of the Zvezda module initially gave leaders hope that the leak had been fixed. He said it's now clear the leak persists, but at a reduced rate. That leak has raised safety concerns within NASA, and Krikalev said that NASA and Roscosmos experts are working together to better understand the cracking in the module that caused the leaks. [SpaceNews]
Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) and Amazon Web Services are expanding their alliance to accelerate the flow of satellite data to customers. KSAT announced Wednesday it will integrate AWS Ground Station capabilities into its network, which will include more than 200 antennas at 40 locations around the world. The companies said the goal of that integration is to shorten the time users will receive data from tasked satellites, with a goal of 10 minutes from receiving the tasking order to having the data available in the cloud. [SpaceNews]
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced the nomination of Neil Jacobs to be NOAA administrator. The committee favorably reported the nomination to the full Senate on a voice vote Wednesday, although several Democratic senators requested to have voted no on the nomination. The vote comes less than a week after NOAA placed on administrative leave Stephen Volz, head of the agency's satellite unit, NESDIS. In a LinkedIn post earlier this week, Volz said he did not know what prompted the move, and concluded "I am resigned to the reality that I will not be able to lead NESDIS again as I have." [SpaceNews]
The government of Ontario will pay SpaceX to cancel a Starlink contract. The province's premier, Doug Ford, said earlier this year that the government would cancel a contract previously announced with SpaceX, valued at $100 million Canadian, for subsidized rural broadband services after the Trump administration announced tariffs on Canadian imports. Government officials said this week that they finalized the cancellation of the contract and will pay SpaceX a breakup fee, but declined to disclose the amount. [Canadian Press]
| | | | | | Other News
China launched a new batch of satellites for its Guowang constellation on Wednesday. A Long March 8A rocket lifted off at 3:49 a.m. Eastern from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Center. The launch carried an undisclosed number of satellites for the Guowang constellation. A Long March 8A launch in June for Guowang carried nine satellites. Guowang is widely seen as China's answer to Starlink, offering a sovereign, dual-use satellite network to secure both civil and strategic communications infrastructure. [SpaceNews]
China launched a remote sensing satellite for Pakistan late Wednesday. A Kuaizhou-1A launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 10 p.m. Eastern, putting into orbit the Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite (PRSS‑01). This was the second flight of the modified Kuaizhou-1A, with upgrades to its first and second stages as well as a redesigned payload fairing to improve its payload performance. PRSS‑01 was developed by Pakistan's space agency, SUPARCO, in collaboration with a Chinese organization, and joins two other Pakistani satellites to provide civil remote sensing data. [SpaceNews]
Chinese commercial launch company LandSpace has filed to go public. The company is planning to go public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market, according to a document from a securities regulator released this week. LandSpace did not disclose how much it is planning to raise in the IPO. The company is developing the Zhuque-3 rocket, which features a reusable booster, and plans a first launch of the rocket before the end of the year. [Reuters]
Blue Origin's next suborbital launch is scheduled for Sunday. The company said Wednesday that the New Shepard NS-34 mission is set to launch at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Sunday. Blue Origin announced last week the six people who will fly on NS-34, including Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who won an auction in 2021 for a seat on the first crewed New Shepard mission but backed out, citing a scheduling conflict. [GeekWire]
Two former SpaceX employees have filed wrongful-termination lawsuits against the company, alleging safety issues led to their firing. One suit, filed by a longtime supervisor at the company, claims he warned the company that technicians were being overworked and that part of the payload fairing recovery process could result in injury or death to workers. He said he was fired months after making those warnings. In a separate suit, a former plumber at the company said he was fired after the company refused to accommodate multiple on-the-job injuries he suffered. The unrelated suits were moved from Los Angeles County Superior Court to a U.S. district court earlier this month. [TechCrunch]
| | | | | | Couldn't Hurt to Try
| "We're one person short, so I suggest everyone contemplate the place of man in the universe."
| | – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), filling time until there was a quorum during a session of the Senate Commerce Committee Wednesday.
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