By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: another big funding round for a Chinese launch company, Vast expands to the moon, the Chamber of Commerce pushes for space acquisition reform and more.
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Top Stories
Chinese launch startup Space Epoch has raised $343 million as it prepares for the first launch of a reusable rocket. The company recently announced it had completed a B++ funding round, bringing the total raised across its B series to more than $343 million (2.3 billion yuan) over the past half year. Space Epoch said the financing will be primarily used for mission support for the first flight of the Yuanxingzhe-1 rocket, verification of recovery and reuse, and development of commercial delivery capabilities. The company says the rocket will be ready for its first flight by the end of the year. The reusable Yuanxingzhe-1 is a 4.2-meter-diameter, stainless steel methane-liquid oxygen rocket and is designed to place up to 13,800 kilograms into low Earth orbit. [SpaceNews]
Commercial space station developer Vast has plans for the moon. The company announced Wednesday it has created a lunar program division that will offer infrastructure to support NASA's lunar base plans. Vast plans leverage capabilities for its Haven series of commercial space stations for a lunar power system, airlock and lunar habitation modules. Vast announced in May plans to develop high-power satellites and the company now says it wants to use those satellites to provide communications and navigation services at the moon. Several other companies working on commercial space stations, including Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Voyager Technologies, are also developing lunar systems. [SpaceNews]
Impulse Space won a contract from the U.S. Space Force for a mission using its Mira spacecraft. The $31.2 million contract, announced Tuesday, is for a 2029 space domain awareness mission using an optical sensor in low Earth orbit to monitor objects as far away as geosynchronous orbit. Mira will carry a government-furnished optical payload built by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The award is the latest expansion of an existing Space Systems Command contract that began with two tactically responsive space demonstrations and has grown to cover five Mira spacecraft for several military missions. Mira is a small spacecraft powered by chemical thrusters and designed to host or deploy payloads while making relatively rapid changes to its orbit. [SpaceNews]
Satellite servicing company ClearSpace signed an ESA contract to mature technologies for a future life-extension mission. The contract provides a European framework for advancing core rendezvous, proximity operations, docking and servicing technologies for the Phoenix mission. That mission would extend the life of a GEO satellite retiring between 2028 and 2030. The ESA contract is funded under the agency's Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) program, although nether ESA nor ClearSpace disclosed the size of the award. Headquartered in Luxembourg, ClearSpace was founded in Switzerland eight years ago with an initial focus on developing spacecraft to remove debris from orbit. [SpaceNews]
A business group is advocating for Space Force acquisition reform. A report released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls for multiyear funding for major space programs, a strategic reserve of critical satellite components, more launch providers and infrastructure, and procurement rules that make the Pentagon justify building capabilities that are already available commercially. The Chamber report, though, questions whether bringing organizations such as the Space Development Agency into a more centralized Space Force acquisition structure will spread their faster buying practices across the service, or instead smother what made them different in the first place. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
NASA has rescheduled the next crewed mission to the International Space Station to next week. The agency said Tuesday it is targeting no earlier than 11:10 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 1 for the launch of the Crew-13 mission. That Crew Dragon mission was scheduled to fly in mid-September but postponed because of oxidizer leak in the spacecraft. The mission will deliver a crew from NASA, Roscosmos and the Canadian Space Agency to the station for a six-month mission. [NASA]
Exolaunch is the latest customer for SpaceX's Starfall reentry vehicle. Exolaunch this week said that it purchased a Starfall mission in 2029, and will aggregate microgravity research and manufacturing payloads to fly on the spacecraft. This is the first time that Exolaunch, which has focused on providing rideshare launch services, has expanded into microgravity research. Exolaunch follows Redwire, which purchased a Starfall mission last month, and Space Cargo Unlimited, which acquired a separate mission last week. [SpaceNews]
A European antitrust regulator says the proposed joint venture of three European space companies will not get special treatment. Teresa Ribera, an executive vice president of the European Commission who oversees antitrust regulations, said the proposed Project Bromo will still be subject to reviews even after the commission's president, Ursula von der Leyen, endorsed the joint venture in a speech earlier this month. Von der Leyen's comments prompted criticism from other European politicians who feared the commission would be "rubber-stamping" the merger. Bromo would combine the space divisions of Airbus, Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space. [Bloomberg]
ESA's JUICE mission will swing by Earth next week on its way to Jupiter. JUICE, or the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, will pass 8,640 kilometers from the Earth's surface during the Sept. 28 flyby, part of a series of gravity-assist maneuvers to send the spacecraft to Jupiter. One more Earth flyby will take place in early 2029 before JUICE makes it to Jupiter, entering orbit in 2031. [ESA]
A proposed large observatory has rejected an offer to build the telescope in the Canary Islands. The Spanish government offered 1 billion euros ($1.15 billion) in incentives for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) if the consortium planning the observatory built it atop La Palma in the Canary Islands. However, the Astrophysics Institute of the Canaries said the consortium, which includes several universities and national agencies, could not reach the consensus needed to accept the proposal. TMT was planned for Mauna Kea in Hawaii but has faced opposition there from native Hawaiians, and the project has also struggled to raise the money needed to build the massive telescope. [Science]
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Poor Choices
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"We come at it from, How do we keep everybody alive? Cutting a hole in the side of your pressure vessel and installing something like glass to replace that hole is a really poor choice."
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– Lynda Estes, spacecraft transparencies discipline lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center, on efforts to replace glass used in spacecraft windows with other materials, like acrylic. [Space.com]
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