By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Muon Space unveils a Starship-class satellite bus, the NRO director nominee emphasizes commercial partnerships and AI, Senate appropriators delay markup of a NASA spending bill and more.
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Top Stories
The nominee to be director of the National Reconnaissance Office said advances in commercial capabilities, along with artificial intelligence, will reshape the agency. Appearing June 2 before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing, Roger Mason said the NRO is in the midst of a transformation driven by commercial innovation, growing volumes of intelligence data and increasing threats to U.S. assets in space. Mason said the NRO's growing fleet of satellites is generating increasing amounts of intelligence data that require new methods for prioritizing collection and distributing information, including the use of AI. Mason, currently chief growth officer at V2X Corp., would succeed Christopher Scolese, who has led the NRO since 2019. [SpaceNews]
Muon Space plans to develop a large satellite platform for orbital data centers that can launch on SpaceX's Starship. The Condor-Ultra platform, announced Wednesday, would initially offer 20 kilowatts of baseline power and more than 18 square meters of nadir payload area, with Starlink Mini Lasers from SpaceX to use its broadband constellation for inter-satellite data relay. The satellite manufacturer says Condor-Ultra is designed to scale depending on mission requirements to 100 kilowatts of power, with "native Starship stackability" for deployments of hundreds to thousands of satellites at some point after the rocket enters service. Muon Space plans to launch a first pathfinder Condor-Ultra satellite in 2028. [SpaceNews]
Blue Origin wants to resume New Glenn flights before the end of the year. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said that damage to Launch Complex 36 from a New Glenn explosion May 28 was not as bad as feared, with some key infrastructure "in good shape." The company believes it can repair, rather than demolish and rebuild, the main launch tower at the pad, and will use an "alternative vertical conop" for transporting the rocket to the pad rather than replace the destroyed transporter-erector. A NASA official said at a National Academies meeting Tuesday it was too soon to know how the accident would affect NASA's Artemis plans, which use New Glenn to launch Blue Origin's Blue Moon lunar landers. [SpaceNews]
The Space Force says safety procedures in the event of an accident worked as planned when New Glenn exploded. Col. Brian Chatman, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, the unit that oversees Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, said emergency response plans were "spot on across the board" after the accident, keeping both base personnel and the public safe. The Space Force handed control of the pad back to Blue Origin on Sunday, allowing the company to move ahead with work to repair the pad. Windows were blown out at the Cape's Hangar C assembly building nearby, and the Space Force is working with companies using adjacent pads to identify any damage. While the Space Force warned that some debris from the explosion might wash up on beaches, none has been reported so far. [Florida Today]
Britain's military has started using SpaceX's Starshield network. Starshield is a version of Starlink adapted for military uses, including enhanced security, and originally developed by the company for the U.S. military. Sources said the British military started using Starshield earlier this year while continuing use of Starlink for non-operational purposes, such as allowing deployed personnel to communicate with their families. SpaceX has pushed militaries to use Starshield for operations, stating that it is against its terms of service to use the commercial Starlink service for weapons systems. [Reuters]
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Other News
SpaceX is expected to set the pricing terms of its IPO as soon as today. The company is planning to release an updated prospectus that will disclose how many shares it plans to sell and the price range. Analysts project to sell $60 billion to $80 billion in stock at a price that would value the company at $1.75 trillion, somewhat below earlier estimates that valued the company as high as $2 trillion. However, a report this week by research firm Morningstar said it believes SpaceX is worth about $780 billion based on its projected cash flows. The firm also said the company's growth prospects are ambitious given "highly uncertain" plans for orbital data centers for AI applications. [Wall Street Journal | Business Insider]
Aerospace industry supplier Applied Aerospace and Defense is raising $650 million in an IPO. The company announced Tuesday it will sell 32.5 million shares at $20 each, with trading scheduled to begin on the New York Stock Exchange today. That would value the company at $3.4 billion. Applied Aerospace and Defense is a component supplier that, in the space field, makes items such as structures, solar arrays and antennas. The company reported a net loss of $15.1 million on revenue of $134.4 million in the first quarter of this year. [Bloomberg]
The Senate Appropriations Committee has postponed consideration of a funding bill that includes NASA and NOAA. The committee was scheduled to hold a markup Thursday morning of three bills, including Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS), which funds NASA and NOAA along with the National Science Foundation. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the committee, postponed the markup Tuesday after Democratic members said they would introduce amendments targeting Department of Justice funding in the CJS bill, including the "anti-weaponization" fund and plans to keep FBI Headquarters in Washington. The committee has not announced a new date for the markup. [Politico]
Japan's IHI Aerospace has been banned from bidding on projects by the Japanese space agency for five months. IHI said Tuesday that JAXA banned the company from bidding after finding the company made improper cost claims on work maintaining equipment used to produce space hardware, stating that work had been completed when it remained unfinished. The claims did not involve any defects in production of hardware. IHI said it has cooperated with JAXA on the investigation and is assessing the impacts of the ban on its earnings. [Investing.com]
NASA is acquiring an aircraft for reduced gravity research. NASA said Monday it awarded a $8.4 million contract to Denmar Technical Services to modify a Boeing 737 for parabolic aircraft flights. Such flights can provide brief moments of reduced gravity, including microgravity. NASA said it will own and operate the plane when the modification work is complete, using it to test equipment in lunar gravity conditions. NASA had previously acquired parabolic flights as a service from Zero-G Corporation, but that company's plane has reportedly been out of service since last year. [NASA]
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Mean Regolith
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"Regolith is, I just call it mean. It's sharp, it's small, it likes to get into anything and everything it can and, when it does, it causes a lot of damage. It doesn't mean to be mean, but it's a mean thing."
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– Greg Stover, NASA's acting associate administrator for space technology, talking about the challenges posed by lunar regolith during a National Academies meeting Tuesday.
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