| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: a military spaceplane readies for its next mission, NASA may have its LEGS cut out from under it, Smallsat moves to the big city and more.
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| | | | | | Top Stories
The Space Force's X-37B spaceplane is gearing up for its next mission. The Space Force said Monday that the X-37B will launch no earlier than Aug. 21 on a Falcon 9 for the OTV-8 mission. This upcoming mission continues the X-37B program's pattern of flying long-duration, secretive and tech-forward flights aimed at bolstering U.S. dominance in space operations and experimentation. The Space Force said payloads on the mission include one to test laser intersatellite links and a quantum inertial sensor that would provide navigation data in the absence of GPS signals. The Space Force did not disclose how long this mission would last; the previous seven missions have spent between 224 and 908 days in orbit. [SpaceNews]
House appropriators want the Office of Space Commerce to rely more on the Defense Department for its space traffic coordination system. A report accompanying an appropriations bill released last week would provide $50 million for the office, rejecting the administration's proposal to cancel the office's Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) project. However, the report called on the office to "prioritize the acquisition and integration of existing, government-proven technologies" from the Space Force rather than develop its own systems. The language appeared to clash with the original intent of establishing TraCSS of taking away the burden on Defense Department systems for civil space traffic coordination activities. [SpaceNews]
NASA is pausing procurement of ground stations intended to support communications for lunar missions. NASA stated in a procurement notice Friday it was putting on hold plans to issue a request for proposals for the Lunar Exploration Ground Sites (LEGS) program, citing "the current uncertainty in our budgetary situation." LEGS is part of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation program, whose funding would shrink by 25% in the administration's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal. LEGS would establish ground stations in New Mexico, South Africa and Australia to handle communications with missions on and around the moon as well as at the Earth-sun L1 and L2 Lagrange points, taking some of the load off the Deep Space Network. [SpaceNews]
EraDrive, a Stanford spinoff, won a $1 million NASA contract to detect, identify and track space objects. EraDrive will develop software and services to track satellites and orbital debris with star trackers on NASA's Starling spacecraft swarm. It was the first contract for the Palo Alto, California, startup founded earlier this year by Stanford University's Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB) director Simone D'Amico and two others. [SpaceNews]
Next month's Small Satellite Conference will be bigger than ever, but also in a new location. More than 4,000 people have registered for the conference, which moved from its longtime home at Utah State University to Salt Lake City. The move, organizers said, was necessary to accommodate the growth of the conference, and comes with benefits such as improved access to hotels and transportation and the ability to host everything in one building, rather than spread across a university campus. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
A Chinese commercial rocket launched a satellite early Tuesday. The Hyperbola-1 rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 12:11 a.m. Eastern. It placed an undisclosed satellite into orbit on the successful launch. The launch was the first for the Hyperbola-1, also known as the SQX-1, since a failure a little more than a year ago. [Xinhua]
A sensor issue caused the abort of a static-fire test of a Falcon 9 ahead of the Crew-11 launch. The static-fire test was auto-aborted 57 seconds before the scheduled ignition of the rocket's first stage engines Monday afternoon. NASA and SpaceX said that an error with an indicator that gives the position of the transporter-erector's cradle arms had triggered the abort, with the arms themselves in the proper position. SpaceX rescheduled the static-fire test for Tuesday but did not state if that would delay Thursday's scheduled launch of Crew-11. [Spaceflight Now]
A Utah committee has started work to determine if a spaceport is feasible in the state. The Spaceport Exploration Committee, established by a state law passed earlier this year, met for the first time Monday and directed the Utah Department of Transportation to begin feasibility studies of two potential spaceport locations. Committee members said such a facility could support development of the state's space industry, but the effort faces difficulties from identifying users of an inland spaceport. [KUER-FM Salt Lake City]
Thales Alenia Space won an order for a military communications satellite. GovSat, a joint venture of satellite operator SES and the government of Luxembourg, announced last week it ordered the GovSat-2 satellite from Thales. The satellite, based on the Spacebus 4000B2 platform, will provide X-, Ka- and UHF- band secure communications from GEO. The announcement did not disclose a proposed launch date for GovSat-2. [Thales Alenia Space]
The fishing industry in Florida wants compensation from the space industry for disruptions caused by launches. Groups like the Southeastern Fisheries Association say that their businesses are being harmed by the increase in launches from Florida's Space Coast, which result in maritime closures. They also claim that debris from launches damage fishing nets, although it was not clear how they determined the debris was from space activities. Fishing vessels based in Brevard County, home to Cape Canaveral, brought in 4.5 million pounds of seafood in 2022, second-most among counties on Florida's Atlantic coast. [Florida Today]
| | | | | | Europe Prepares for the World Cup
| "We are absolutely excited and looking forward to the successful launch on the 12th of August. He hope that it will be successful and we will have a football team, a Copernicus football team: 11 Sentinels will then be flying."
| | – Catharina Bamps, policy officer in the Earth Observation Unit of the European Commission, during a briefing Monday about the upcoming launch of the Sentinel-5 Earth observation mission.
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