Archives for July 2020

Satellite Applications Catapult‘s official GRAVITY Challenge 02 Launch Event and Challenge Announcement will occur on Monday, August 3, 2020, at 8:00 a.m., BST (British Summer Time) / 5:00 p.m., AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time).

This interactive virtual event will feature keynote speakers from the global space ecosystem, an announcement of the company’s GRAVITY 02 Challenges and an overview of the 12 week mission the firm’s space innovation teams will embark on — register at at this direct link…

The GRAVITY Challenge is an international technology innovation program that brings together Challenge providers (corporates, government agencies and other businesses) and Innovators (entrepreneurs, RTO’s, universities, start-ups and SMEs) to collaborate and create solutions to some of business and society’s biggest challenge using space data and space capability.

GRAVITY Challenge 02 is an opportunity for bilateral engagement between Australian and the UK Innovators and Challenge providers to gain visibility and access to international end users, customers and collaborators.

In 2020, UK and Australian Innovators will be able to put forward concepts and solutions for development with Australian and UK Challenge providers. Innovators can register as an independent team or in collaboration with other innovators (both Australian and UK) to create new solutions, regardless of geographic location.

Myriota has announced a new partnership with Future Fleet International, an Australian telematics provider that delivers advanced fleet management solutions.

With this partnership, Future Fleet will reduce the carbon footprint for multiple industries by developing a new vehicle and asset tracking technology – the NX-01 intelligent tracking solution – underpinned by Myriota’s low-power IoT technology and smallsat connectivity.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Queensland, Future Fleet is one of the leading providers of advanced telematics for fleet management across Australia and New Zealand, with plans to expand into global markets. Powered by Myriota’s pioneering satellite IoT connectivity, Future Fleet plans to advance its capabilities across fleet management with the first asset tracking device on Myriota’s global network.

Myriota’s patented direct-to-orbit transmission is the perfect fit for the mobile asset tracking industry with its ability to transmit data without the need for terrestrial infrastructure, anywhere in the world.

The NX-01 intelligent tracking solution will be Future Fleet’s most advanced asset tracking device to date – brought to life via Myriota’s low-power secure satellite IoT connectivity. Together, the partnership will provide Future Fleet customers across agriculture, mining, and logistics and transport with a more reliable and cost-effective tracking solution to complement traditional cellular-based GPS tracking devices especially in remote and isolated areas.

The new solution will launch in Q4 2020, massively accelerating Future Fleet’s savings on asset tracking by more than 50 percent, while also strengthening service, security and battery life for its customers.

At the onset of COVID-19, industries, such as mining and long-haul transport, faced an uncertain new reality with less staff on the ground than ever before due to social distancing restrictions. The ability to reliably and affordably track assets is key to the stability of these industries during a time when there is a cap on available labor, and decision-makers are looking to save resources for a long-term business outlook.

Executive Comments

“Our partnership with Future Fleet is a testament to the forward-thinking nature of both organisations. Together, we’re creating an opportunity to not only rapidly advance the capabilities of the transport and logistics sector at large, but also lower the sector’s carbon footprint through optimised routes and reduced fuel consumption,” said Alex Grant, CEO, Myriota. “Future Fleet’s new NX-01 intelligent tracking solution is the culmination of two best of breed companies working together, providing transport organisations with a distinct advantage over their competition and total visibility of their assets.”

“Future Fleet has always been a customer-centric business, providing the best service and technologies possible to our customer base. Our partnership with Myriota provides us with the capability to revolutionize how our customers track and manage their assets – allowing for a more reliable and cost-effective technology across the board,” said Richard Saad, GM, Future Fleet. “When analyzing the IoT landscape as a whole, we knew quickly that we wanted to partner with Myriota as they’ve consistently been ahead of the competition in driving innovation in IoT and growing a global network. We’re thrilled to work closely with Myriota and bring its global network of satellite IoT connectivity to our customers.”

Dawn Aerospace has unveiled the firm’s suborbital spaceplane, the “Mk-II Aurora,” ahead of an intensive 12 month flight test campaign.

The Mk-II Aurora is the latest development in a series of test vehicles that will one day launch satellites into space. It is the second rocket-powered aircraft or “spaceplane” produced by Dawn Aerospace. It will be capable of flights to above 100 km altitude, the border to space, before returning to land at an airport. Upon landing it can be refueled and flown again within hours. The Mk-II Aurora will be the first vehicle to ever be capable of such a feat multiple times per day.

The Mk-II Aurora will demonstrate the core technology for daily access to space in a subscale vehicle. It has a modest payload capacity, enough to bring scientific experiments to space, but too little for an orbital second stage. The later generation Mk-III will be based on the Mk-II design, but with a larger payload capacity. This will allow a 50-100 kg smallsat to be delivered to orbit.

The Mk-III will deliver smallsats into orbit using an expendable second stage. After releasing a satellite, the second stage burns up in the atmosphere and accounts for about 6 percent of the whole vehicle, making the whole system 94 percent reusable.

Current rockets have to fly out of special launch sites and secure, exclusive airspace. This means they have to shut down busy travel routes, such as around Cape Canaveral in Florida, or travel to far-flung places where air and sea traffic is low. Dawn Aerospace will fly its spaceplanes from existing airports under aircraft laws. They are working closely with the NZ Space Agency (NZSA) and Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to make that happen.

Dawn signed an MOU with Waitaki District Council earlier this year for suborbital flights out of Oamaru Airport. The company is also in talks with other airports around New Zealand.

Dawn Aerospace acquired seed funding of 3.3 million NZD in December 2018, as well as funding for the project through Callaghan Innovation. They were awarded a grant of $500,000 from NZSA for development of non-toxic satellite propulsion. The company also has a major facility in Delft, The Netherlands.

Test flights of the Aurora will start in late 2020. For preliminary testing, it will be powered by two jet engines and will fly the first scientific experiments in 2021. The paint scheme was designed by the winner of the “paint my plane competition,”,Prague-based company, LOOP Studios.

Executive Comments

“The Aurora represents a massive step forward in space transportation,” said Stefan Powell, Chief Technology Officer of Dawn Aerospace. “Using the same vehicle hundreds or even thousands of times means we don’t need a factory to produce rockets. We can operate a fleet of vehicles to access space daily. And we don’t have to pollute the ocean with rocket debris as we do it.”

“The challenge of getting to space is equal parts the vehicle, the launch infrastructure and the regulation,” said James Powell, General Manager and CFO. “Building a cheaper rocket, as many are trying to do, only helps with the first part. Dawn’s spaceplane addresses all three factors. The CAA and NZSA have established the best regulatory system in the world, which makes this possible. We are privileged to be working with them.”

The first scientific experiment will fly on the Aurora in 2021 and will be built by the Centaurus High School Physics Club from Denver, Colorado. The experiment will measure airborne pollutants in the mesosphere, which is too high to be measured by any other means.

Although primarily a technology demonstrator for the Mk-III, the Aurora will also be extraordinarily useful for scientific research. It will be capable of accessing parts of the atmosphere too high for regular aircraft or balloons, but too low for satellites.

“We know very little about these parts of the atmosphere,” said Stefan Powell. “In some cases, we have less data to go on than we have on Jupiter or Saturn, yet we know that these high layers in the Earth’s atmosphere have a profound effect on weather down on the surface and long-term climate models. The Aurora could allow us to get 1000x the data within a year which will dramatically improve climate models. That’s very exciting for the scientific community.”

The annual Small Satellite Conference is a premier space conference that is devoted entirely to smallsats and among the best places to find out what’s happening in the smallsat industry. Orbital Transports will be participating in this event.

Usually held in Logan, Utah, this year’s virtual SmallSat conference will be held from August 1-6, 2020 — registration is free.

Orbital Transports is participating this year and invite all to visit the company’s virtual exhibition booth. There will be a live video chat channel where you can talk with company representatives — plus, don’t miss CEO David Hurst’s webinar on Tuesday about the firm’s new Get Spaceborne service. Details below:

Live Chat: Orbital Transports SmallSat Virtual Booth August 3-6, 2020 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM MDT

Webinar: Get Spaceborne – Flight Heritage for Your Product Tuesday, August 4, 2020 11:30 – 11:45 AM MDT

Check out the Space Catalog, Orbital Transport’s digital portal for the smallsat industry that showcases some of the industry’s most innovative and reliable companies. Featuring smallsat buses, COTS hardware components, ground station services and mission operations software, orbital transfer services, hosted payloads, and satellite servicing and refueling technologies, the Space Catalog provides a convenient go-to resource to check out the latest and greatest that the smallsat industry has to offer.

It’s no surprise anymore that work is different — at Benchmark Space Systems, the company wanted to offer an opportunity for the propulsion community to stay connected – even if that is harder working from home.

In early July, the Benchmark team produced a 2.5 hour workshop entitled “Propulsion Systems 101 Interactive Workshop – A guide to selecting the right propulsion technology for your Small Satellite mission.” In the firm’s opinion, this workshop was a great success. The company wanted to share some highlights and lessons learned for others wanting to build a learning experience for the community during COVID.

The propulsion workshop focused on providing brand-agnostic summaries of different propulsion technology as well as topics that relate to spacecraft in general – such as launch operations, mission design and financial decisions that impact the economics of a mission. While these are topics in which the firm could have easily deep dived into the technical weeds, all of the speakers focused on making their content accessible to the wider audience. This paid off greatly when it came time for the actual workshop – with more than 150 attendees, there was a huge swath of experience and backgrounds ranging from college students to industry veterans.

Working with amazing people makes the whole process infinitely more enjoyable. At Benchmark, several team members were present. Jake Teufert presented a summary of chemical propulsion systems, Isa Peterson discussed the mission level impacts that drive propulsion decisions and Chris Carella acted as the MC for the event. Other colleagues rounded out the conversation:

• Grant Bonin (Spaceflight Industries) discussed launch site considerations and advice for propulsion manufactures
• Ian Christensen (Secure World Foundation) spoke on regulatory impacts coming soon and how that might impact the propulsion and spacecraft industries
• Jason Wallace (Phase Four, Inc) discussed brand-agnostic electric propulsion systems
• Jared Bottoms (Kepler) enlightened us on the economic considerations for having a propulsion system for your spacecraft fleet

All these contributors brought sizable impact to this workshop.

The main goal of this workshop was to put together an event that every attendee in the audience would walk away from having learned something in an enjoyable way. Keeping the topics dynamic, brand agnostic and light in nature offered a safe space for the audience to learn together and ask questions without feeling like they were getting a sales pitch for three hours.

In addition to the conversation and presentations, a mega mission design tool was created. This high-level, criteria driven tool allows mission designers of all capability and program maturity to consider different propulsion systems side by side for the mission they are building. Toggles include total delta-V,mission life, de-orbiting preferences, and more. Benchmark hopes this tool enables designers the ability to quick trade options in the future.

Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) has revealed a new line of high-performance, low-cost cubesat buses — these are the 3U (“THUNDER”), 6U (“SPARTAN”) and 12U/16U (“JAEGER”) cubesats, which complement SFL’s legacy suite of space-heritage smallsats, fulfilling mission size requirements from 3 to 500 kg.

SFL will discuss its new cubesats and legacy buses at the virtual Small Satellite Conference (SmallSat 2020) that is being held online Aug. 1-6, 2020.

SFL was among the first in the world to launch cubesats that included the CanX-1 CubeSat in 2003 and CanX-2 in 2008, with capabilities that exceeded the state-of-the-art at that time. Since then, SFL has focused on somewhat larger, more capable satellites for more challenging missions, garnering a reputation for “quality at low cost.” As SFL delivered high-performance, high-quality smallsats for more than two decades, the cubesat market matured and the number of commercial opportunities increased.

The new product line of high performance CubeSats leverages SFL’s quality platform technologies while addressing the need for aggressive, disruptive missions and satellites that are as small as possible to meet highly constrained business demands. This represents a return to cubesats for SFL but with the ability to leverage more than 22 years of experience and technological advancements.

Bringing to bear the accumulated power of SFL know-how and technologies will satisfy the now mature demand for platforms that perform well and are compatible with commercial-off-the-shelf cubesat deployers and aggregated launches.

With demonstration and operational programs in mind, SFL has also announced Newspace (accelerated) and Microspace (standard) development options for the new cubesat line. The accelerated procedures are designed to move demonstration satellites quickly through the development process and into orbit for short-term proof-of-concept performance.

They can also be used operationally in scenarios where rapid replenishment is planned. Microspace, or SFL’s standard development approach, which has been perfected at SFL for more than two decades, ensures the reliability of operational spacecraft built for long-duration missions in orbit.

SFL satellites have achieved more than 121 cumulative years of operation in orbit. These microspace missions have included SFL’s trusted attitude control and, in some cases, formation-flying capabilities. Other core SFL-developed components include modular (scalable) power systems, onboard radios, flight computers, and control software.

The new SFL cubesats will be ideal for NewSpace programs that are intended to either disrupt commercial markets or operate from a long-term rapid replenishment strategy. The industry-accepted form factors of cubesats make them attractive for proof-of-concept programs or programs that involve repetitive quick replenishment where cost constraints are critical. They fit the cost models of some businesses because they are built for orbital deployment from, and aggregation of relatively inexpensive, standardized dispensers being mass produced on the market today.

SFL’s heritage of on-orbit successes includes missions related to Earth Observation (EO), atmospheric monitoring, ship tracking and communication, radio frequency signal geolocation, technology demonstration, space astronomy, solar physics, space plasma, and other scientific research.

At SmallSat 2020, SFL will present a paper on “Guidance, Navigation, and Control for Agile Small Spacecraft with Articulating Solar Arrays” during (cubesat) Workshop, Session I: Advanced Concepts I (Session Q&A Webinar, Noon to 1pm MDT, Tuesday August 4). SFL will also host live Zoom sessions to answer questions from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m., MDT, on August 3, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., MDT, on August 4-5, and 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., MDT, on August 6.

The SFL SmallSat 2020 Zoom link is
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/96150927505

Executive Comment

“SFL can accommodate the budget and performance objectives of any microspace mission,” said SFL Director Dr. Robert E. Zee. “And we are positioned to meet the evolving spacecraft development and business model requirements of different organizations – from disruptive demonstration missions to fully operational constellations. The new line of high-performance cubesats will allow us to offer something for everyone, from market disruption to long-term operational stability. The spectrum of SFL platform offerings will enable staged roadmaps to larger missions for some customers. Having platforms that cover the full range of capability will make transitioning and forward compatibility easier for our most demanding clients.”

Zee continued, “Every satellite we build – whether CubeSat, nanosat, or microsat – incorporates the same flight heritage, avionics, and attitude control that we have developed and refined after developing 52 distinct satellites – either launched or launching soon – the Microspace Way,” said Zee. “Regardless of the demands of the mission, we use the same generic core and scale the platform as necessary to meet specific mission objectives. Once a demonstration CubeSat is launched and successfully commissioned, SFL is able to trigger mass production for rapid deployment and replenishment or leverage the success to take our client’s business model to the next step. This may involve transitioning to longer lifetime CubeSats and/or our legacy microspace platforms which can be done with relative ease.”

Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES) will participate in the consortium, led by the U.K. Government and Bharti Enterprises (“Bharti”) that will acquire OneWeb out of bankruptcy.

Hughes has agreed in principle to invest $50 million in the consortium. Additionally, Hughes will continue as a trusted technology and distribution partner to OneWeb, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite operator which had launched 74 satellites before filing for Chapter 11 protection in March.

Consummation of the consortium is contingent upon execution and effectiveness of definitive agreements. Confirmation of OneWeb’s reorganization is contingent on certain conditions established by the Bankruptcy Court.

Through its Hughes Europe division, which is headquartered outside of London, and sister company EchoStar Mobile Limited, Hughes has worked closely with the U.K. Government. Furthermore, Hughes Communications India Ltd, (HCIL), a majority-owned subsidiary of Hughes, and Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”), a leading Indian telecom provider affiliated with Bharti, are in the process of combining their satellite broadband operations in India.

The merger, which was announced in 2019, is pending regulatory approvals and is expected to bring greater scale, operational efficiencies and market reach to deliver solutions for enterprise and government networks.

Executive Comments

“We are pleased to be part of this winning team, along with the British Government and Bharti,” said Pradman Kaul, President, Hughes. “Our continuing and strengthened involvement with OneWeb extends naturally from our position as a leading geostationary satellite operator and ground network innovator, along with a meaningful partnership with Bharti and longstanding relationship with the U.K. through our business operations in both countries. This global consortium brings the right players together to fulfill the promise of the OneWeb constellation in deploying low-latency services for communities, enterprises, governments, airplanes and ships – complementing geostationary connectivity and ushering in the new era of multi-transport services that will serve growing bandwidth demand around the world. We look forward to doing our part in developing this groundbreaking technology and bringing those services to market.”

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman, Bharti Enterprises, added, “We are delighted to welcome Hughes to the consortium. The investment by Hughes underlines OneWeb’s exciting commercial prospects, reflected in the ongoing discussions with some of the world’s leading strategic and financial investors.”

RHEA Group and GomSpace have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to further combine their expertise on Security for Space and the development and operations of large constellations of smallsats.

The MOU consolidates a closer collaboration between the two companies as a result of past and ongoing activities in related fields. Under this MOU, the companies are partnering on security developments and monitoring operations associated with GomSpace’s present and future on-orbit satellite constellation activities, including taking advantage of RHEA’s Cyber-Range and Cyber Security Operations Centre (C-SOC).

The two companies are joining forces to address the need from customers for secure and cyber-resilient satellite constellations. The partnership will focus on security throughout the design, development and operations of the GomSpace satellite constellations.

Executive Comments

“We are delighted to be working closely with GomSpace, which is a thriving example of the new era of space companies. Its innovative approach to the development and use of SmallSat systems and subsystems is very exciting and is a perfect match to the RHEA way of working. This partnership will provide a unique offering for customers needing an end-to-end secure satellite constellation solution,” said Arne Matthyssen, RHEA Group Chief Solutions and Innovation Officer.

Niels Buus, CEO at GomSpace, added, “GomSpace and RHEA have worked together on some very interesting projects and we are delighted to consolidate the relationship through this MOU. RHEA has proven to be a front runner in Security and Cybersecurity for Space, and this alliance will enable both parties to benefit from each respective domain expertise and provide GomSpace with a unique selling proposition in the SmallSat market. There is no question that security aspects of future missions are becoming more important for our customers.”