By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: the Space Force's secretive spaceplane begins its latest mission, more Chinese launch vehicles in development, ESA and JAXA collaborate on an asteroid mission and more.
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Top Stories
A Falcon 9 launched the Space Force's X-38B spaceplane on its eighth mission overnight. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 11:50 p.m. Eastern Thursday and placed the X-37B into orbit. The Space Force confirmed a successful deployment four hours after liftoff. The X-37B mission, designated Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) 8, continues the X-37B program's pattern of long-duration and secretive missions. The payloads aboard OTV-8 include experiments from the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit, including a laser communications demonstration and a quantum inertial sensor. The U.S. Space Force has not disclosed a planned duration for the OTV-8 mission; the previous mission, OTV-7, spent 908 days in orbit. [SpaceNews]
Government services contractor Amentum has started work at the nation's space launch ranges after a rival dropped its legal challenge. Amentum won the Space Force Range Contract in May, worth up to $4 billion over 10 years, but incumbent company Range Generation Next (RGNext) protested the award in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. RGNext dropped its protest last week, allowing Amentum to start work. Beyond providing day-to-day sustainment and launch support, the company is tasked with modernizing the ranges to handle higher launch rates. While Amentum is the newcomer for this Space Force range contract, it has extensive experience working with NASA through Jacobs Technology, which it acquired in 2024. [SpaceNews]
Britain's space industry has some concerns about plans to move the U.K. Space Agency (UKSA) inside another government department. Under the plan announced earlier this week, UKSA will become part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology next April. British companies said the move "seems to have come out of nowhere" and could reduce visibility into spending on space activities. However, the change could also provide more government oversight into the agency's activities. About three-quarters of UKSA's budget goes to the European Space Agency, and ESA's director general, Josef Aschbacher, said he was reassured the change would not hurt British contributions to his agency. [SpaceNews]
Even more new launch vehicles are under development in China. China Rocket, nominally a commercial spin-off from state-owned space giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said a variant of the Long March 10 called the Long March 10B had been approved for development. With its first stage recovered, it would be capable of carrying 16,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. New Beijing-based company Arktech announced Thursday that it had secured tens of millions of yuan for development of its Bingchuan-1 (Glacier-1) rocket, capable of placing up to 40,000 kilograms into LEO. Those and other rockets are emerging despite an already competitive field and imminent test flights of vehicles already in development. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
The Japanese space agency JAXA said it will collaborate with ESA on an asteroid mission. The vice president of JAXA, Masaki Fujimoto, said Friday that JAXA will provide an H3 rocket to launch the Ramses mission being developed by ESA to study the asteroid Apophis, which will make a close approach to Earth in April 2029. JAXA would also offer spacecraft components for Ramses and fly its own asteroid mission, DESTINY+, as a rideshare payload on that launch. Fujimoto said that "JAXA must increasingly support Ramses to study Apophis through Japan-Europe collaboration, on behalf of humanity worldwide" given that a NASA mission to Apophis, OSIRIS-APEX, faces termination in NASA's 2026 budget request. [Reuters]
The first launch of India's Gaganyaan crewed spacecraft is set for December. The G1 mission will place a Gaganyaan spacecraft, with no people on board, into orbit to test spacecraft life support and other systems. While Gaganyaan will be uncrewed, the spacecraft will carry Vyommitra, described as a "half-humanoid robot" to monitor operations. [The Times of India]
A novel spacecraft propulsion system will be put to the test on a cubesat mission launching next year. South Korea's K-RadCube spacecraft is one of four cubesats hitching a ride on the Artemis 2 mission, and will be placed into a highly elliptical orbit with a perigee of effectively zero. That means it must have its own propulsion system to raise its perigee in a matter of hours to avoid reentry. K-RadCube is carrying a thruster from British company SteamJet Space Systems that generates steam from water to produce thrust. The company said at the recent Small Satellite Conference that ground tests gave them confidence that the thruster can produce enough thrust within 14 hours to raise the perigee to more than 180 kilometers, enough to avoid reentry. [SpaceNews]
Avio has secured a license to operate Vega launches from French Guiana. The license from the French government, issued this week, will allow Avio to serve as the launch operator for Vega C launches from Kourou for 10 years. Those launches have been handled by Arianespace, but it is transferring that responsibility to Avio, the prime contractor for Vega, as part of a 2023 agreement. [European Spaceflight]
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High Precision
| "Imagine we are in New York and there's a firefly in Florida that is bright for a thousandth of a second… Localizing an FRB to a specific part of its host galaxy is analogous to figuring out not just what tree the firefly came from, but which branch it's sitting on."
| – Shion Andrew of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research on research that pinpointed the location of a fast radio burst (FRB) in a galaxy 130 million light-years away. [MIT]
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