Plus: A spacewalk is underway
By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Blue Origin tracks down the cause of the New Glenn explosion, the NRO awards radar imaging contracts, an ISS spacewalk is underway and more.
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Top Stories
Blue Origin has traced the explosion of a New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test to a valve in a BE-4 engine. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a social media post Wednesday that the investigation into the May 28 explosion concluded the problem started in the main liquid oxygen valve in one of the rocket's seven BE-4 engines. He did not disclose specifics of the problem but said the company is making "small modifications" to the valve that will be incorporated into engines that have already been produced. The BE-4 is used by both New Glenn and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan, although Vulcan has been out of service since an unrelated problem with a solid rocket booster on a February launch. [SpaceNews]
The National Reconnaissance Office awarded synthetic aperture radar imaging contracts to three companies. The NRO said Wednesday it selected Capella Space, Iceye U.S. and Umbra for awards under its Commercial Radar Capabilities program. That establishes a direct pathway for users to order SAR collections, archive imagery and derived products as well as work to develop new capabilities to meet mission requirements. The NRO said the radar imaging awards leverage lessons learned from a similar program to acquire optical imagery from commercial providers. [SpaceNews]
Chinese launch company Orienspace is starting preparations for an IPO as it raises more private financing. The company announced this week it raised tens of millions of dollars in a pre-C round from several investors. Orienspace said the funds will go toward research, development and production of Gravity-2, a large liquid-propellant reusable rocket. The company is also starting preparations for an IPO, joining a growing cohort of Chinese commercial rocket makers such as LandSpace, CAS Space, Space Pioneer and Galactic Energy that are racing toward listings on Shanghai's STAR Market. [SpaceNews]
Satellite manufacturing is alive and well in California despite high costs and regulatory challenges. While a few space companies have moved manufacturing or their headquarters out of the state, other are expanding production in both Southern California and the Bay Area. The state's large engineering workforce is the main factor in those plans as well as access to capital. Those factors outweigh the high cost of living and of doing business in the state. [SpaceNews]
NASA and Roscosmos continue to extend an agreement to barter seats on spacecraft going to the International Space Station. Russian media reported in July that the agencies had agreed in principle to extend an agreement to swap seats on Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions, ensuring there will be crew from both agencies on the station if either vehicle is sidelined for an extended period. At a briefing earlier this week about the upcoming Crew-13 mission, NASA officials did not say how long the agreement has been extended but noted they look ahead about 18 months when planning missions. The agreement does not yet include Boeing's Starliner as NASA and Boeing continue to work to resolve propulsion system problems. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
Rocket Lab launched a Japanese radar-imaging satellite Thursday more than a month after the previous attempt was aborted. An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand launch site at 5:18 a.m. Eastern, deploying the QPS-SAR-13 satellite 50 minutes later into low Earth orbit. The launch was scheduled for the end of June but was scrubbed just as the Electron's engines ignited. Rocket Lab did not disclose what caused that abort or the lengthy delay. The customer for this launch was iQPS, a Japanese company developing a SAR constellation. It will also be the customer for the next Electron launch, scheduled for late this month. [SpaceNews]
NASA astronauts have started a spacewalk at the ISS. Astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon officially started the spacewalk at 8:33 a.m. Eastern, scheduled to last six and a half hours. The two will conduct work to prepare a power channel on the station for the installation of new solar arrays that will be sent to the station later this year. This is the first of three spacewalks planned by NASA at the ISS this month. [NASA]
Startups planning broadband constellations are seeking niches to avoid directly competing with Starlink and Amazon Leo. Startups that include Logos, Rivada, CesiumAstro, Astra, LTS Systems/Theia and SpinLaunch's SN Space subsidiary applied for more than 13,700 satellites in the FCC's latest processing round for satellite systems in the Ka-, Ku- and V-bands last month. Analysts say those companies will need to avoid directly competing against existing providers, instead providing services for enterprise and government customers. However, if those niches prove attractive, they could again face competition from major providers. [SpaceNews]
A Falcon 9 upper stage hit the moon Wednesday but few were able to detect the impact. The stage, weighing about four tons, hit the moon at 2:35 a.m. Eastern on the western limb. Astronomers did not detect the impact itself or a prominent plume of material, but a few observatories reported seeing traces of the impact, such as sodium and lithium detections. South Korea's space agency, KASA, said its Danuri lunar orbiter spotted the impact site in images taken hours later, showing a black spot not visible in images of the area taken before the impact. [New York Times | Yonhap]
The sharpest images taken to date of the sun are helping scientists understand its activity. In a paper published Wednesday, researchers described how they used high-resolution images of the sun taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii to detect swirls of magnetized plasma on the sun's photosphere. Those swirls, seen throughout the image, could be the source of instability that leads to the formation of solar flares and may also explain the heating of the sun's corona. Those swirls were only seen now because of the resolution of the telescope's images, which can see features just tens of kilometers across. [Science News]
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Space Belly Flop
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"A lot of people describe a feeling of falling when you go out of the airlock and just see the Earth out beneath you, and I was a little bit worried about that. But, thankfully, I didn't really have that feeling. I will be honest. I practiced a few times going into the cupola and trying to kind of float belly down in the cupola to get that sense of floating over the Earth."
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– NASA astronaut Chris Williams discussing at a briefing Tuesday how he prepared for a spacewalk during his time on the ISS.
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