Saturday, March 12, 2016

Seeing stars: UAE Space Agency to launch four new satellites by 2020


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UAE Space Agency, UK Space Agency sign MoU


UAE Space Agency inks MoU with UK counterpart to boost collaboration in space field
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Abu Dhabi: The UAE Space Agency has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the United Kingdom Space Agency. The MoU covers collaboration in various aspects of space exploration including space science, technology, applications, policy, law, regulation and human capital development. It also encourages the establishment of joint working groups to examine and define proposals for joint programmes in areas decided by the two agencies to support space programmes in both countries.
The MoU also covers the promotion of educational activities in space science and technology, as well as the promotion of the use of products and services developed under the agencies’ programmes.
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Boeing, Airbus assess export credit and satellite demand for 2016


by  — 
Eric Beranger (left) and Mark Spiwak (right) are the satellite production chiefs at Airbus and Boeing, respectively. Credit: Airbus/Boeing
Eric Beranger, head of Airbus Defense and Space's satellite division, and Mark Spiwak, president of Boeing Satellite Systems International. Credit: SpaceNews, Airbus, Boeing
PARIS — Will export-credit financing for the satellite sector dry up as a result of the 2015 bankruptcy of NewSat of Australia, which had received backing from both the Export-Import Bank of the United States and France’s Coface?
Will the stress on commercial launch manifests, especially SpaceX’s, slow development of new satellite programs?
Both issues were addressed by two of the principal satellite manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus Defence and Space, in separate interviews. They also gave their assessment of what the market in 2016 is likely to be.
The two companies have made extensive use of export-credit financing. Both their home agencies, Ex-Im for Boeing and Coface for Airbus, were deeply involved in the NewSat bankruptcy, with Ex-Im taking the bigger financial hit.
NewSat was the first large satellite failure for Ex-Im and Coface, and whether that experience will cause either to raise the bar on financing of future satellite projects, especially those from start-up operators, is an open issue.
Airbus’ joint venture with OneWeb LLC of Britain’s Channel Islands to design a constellation of 900 satellites in France and to build most of them in the United States, and to launch 700-plus of them with Arianespace, is likely to seek support from both Coface and Ex-Im.
On launch manifests, Arianespace of Europe is just about full until 2018. Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX’s manifest, showing at least 16 and perhaps more launches planned for 2016, is a question mark.
The March 4 launch of the SES-9 telecommunications satellite for SES of Luxembourg marked the first use of SpaceX’s redesigned Falcon 9 Full Thrust variant for a customer that needed all the rocket’s power.
Whether SpaceX can, on the back of the SES-9 launch, throttle up its launch cadence to work off its backlog will be one of the most-watched developments in the space industry in 2016.
Here is how Mark Spiwak, president of El Segundo, Calfornia-based Boeing Satellite Systems International; and Eric Beranger, head of Airbus’ satellite division, addressed them:

On export-credit financing:

Spiwak: We are still trying to figure out how this plays out with Ex-Im, and what the impact is of NewSat’s bankruptcy and how Ex-Im sets its qualification parameters for customers.
They have to get a new board set up and I think they’ll get that done. But the question is how they view startups versus established operators. What is their risk posture?
We had the ABS-8 contract [for ABS of Bermuda] before the Ex-Im shutdown occurred. We are now trying to help ABS get financing.
Beranger: Ex-Im and Coface are both pros and I think they will be able to make their judgments based on the satellite market and not be overly concerned [with the NewSat bankruptcy].
The market is the prime motivator and I see no reason why that should change. Remember we had a couple of spectacular bankruptcies a decade or so ago, and after that people were more cautious for a time. But eventually the market returned to equilibrium. I think the same thing will happen here.
In the specific case of Airbus, we have not yet confronted a problem here.

On whether the full SpaceX and Arianespace launch manifests pose an issue for the industry and start-up projects:

Spiwak: We have satellites in the factory ready to go and start generating revenue for their owners. They don’t generate much revenue in our factory. The Eutelsat 117 West B and ABS -2A satellites have been in storage for several months now.
Beranger: The people we talk to about new satellite projects are aware of the situation and can factor the state of launch manifests into their programs. So it really doesn’t affect their decision.

How does the market look in 2016?

Spiwak: I hope it’s better than 2015, which despite a screaming end, with lots of orders, was a sub-par year. So we are hoping for a par-plus year in 2016, with 20-25 commercial geostationary satellites ordered.
Beranger: I recall everyone was predicting a weak year in 2015 and in the end it was not so bad. I would expect a reasonably good year in 2016.
- See more at: http://spacenews.com/boeing-airbus-assess-export-credit-and-satellite-demand-for-2016/#sthash.wDG5Tpuc.dpuf
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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Black Arrow

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Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Rest in Peace on the moon for $12,000



Many people dream of travelling to the moon, but if all else fails, they can now be laid to rest there. 
Celestial funeral firm Elysium Space is now offering a "Lunar Memorial," in which your cremated remains are privately dispatched to the moon. But it'll cost you—the early bird rate starts at $9,950 for the first 50 participants, but costs $11,950 thereafter.
A small box that holds about 1 gram of human ashes is included in Elysium Space's memorial kits.
Courtesy Elysium Space
A small box that holds about 1 gram of human ashes is included in Elysium Space's memorial kits.
The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2013 and launched the service in August after clinching a contract with space logistics company Astrobotic Technology. The first batch of ashes will hitch a ride on Astrobotic's inaugural lunar mission, which the space logistics firm told CNBC it hopes to launch in the second half of 2017. 
"Families who choose our celestial services have a special connection with space or the night sky, for poetic reasons, or because they love the idea of a memorial spaceflight," Elysium founder and former NASA engineer, Thomas Civeit, told CNBC via email.
Families of the departed will be mailed a kit, including an engravable metal box, into which a small amount of cremated remains— approximately one gram —is entered. The remains are then sent back to Elysium, which places them alongside around 100 other portions of cremated remains to be prepared for take-off.
Astrobotic's Griffin Lander spacecraft will then deliver the ash-filled capsules to the moon's surface.
Astrobotic Technology aims to launch their private mission which will deliver the first batch of human ashes to the moon in 2017.
Courtesy Elysium Space
Astrobotic Technology aims to launch their private mission which will deliver the first batch of human ashes to the moon in 2017.
Elysium's ambitions also extend beyond the solar system. The company hopes to offer a "Milky Way Memorial" by year-end that will see human remains sent into deep space, "leaving the solar system to traverse the infinite universe." An exact launch date and price for the service are yet to be set.
In addition, the company has been soliciting reservations for its $1,990 "Shooting Star memorial" since 2013. This will launch its first 100 ash capsules into space later this Fall and hopes to send a second batch by year-end. These capsules will orbit the earth for several months before falling back to earth and burning up through the atmosphere—like shooting stars.
The Shooting Star service is far cheaper than the Lunar Memorial, with Civeit describing the former as "within reach of most families." The average cost of an adult funeral in the U.S is $7,000, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.
"People often think about technology when they think about space. However, space has other inherent values, like the beauty of the night sky, which can be used to create poetic memorial services," Civeit said.
"The idea that humankind can look up at the Moon and poetically commune with its ancestors is probably as old as the human culture itself."
Ashes will be delivered via Astrobotic Technology's Griffin Lander.
Courtesy Elysium Space
Ashes will be delivered via Astrobotic Technology's Griffin Lander.
Space memorials may not be mainstream just yet, but Civeit said his company was sustainable, with the Shooting Star service already turning a profit. The company has also received an undisclosed amount of funding from an angel investor.
However, Elysium has competition.
Celestis, an affiliate of Space Services, a Houston-based aerospace company, is advertising a rival "Luna Service" for a starting price of $12,500 and hopes to start delivering batches of cremated remains by the latter half of 2018.
Currently, Celestis delivers ashes for $1,295 to low orbit, where the capsules burn up and return to earth shortly after reaching zero gravity. Its Shooting Star-equivalent is called "Earth Orbit" and costs $4,995, while its deep space "Voyager Service" has a $12,500 price tag and is due to launch in 2017.
Celestis has partnership agreements with Astrobotic, like Elysium Space, and also with commercial space company Moon Express. They'll also be latching onto Astrobotic's first lunar launch with their own collection of human ashes.
Charles Chafer, CEO and founder of Celestis, told CNBC that over the past 20 years, he's learned that there's more to the space funeral business than meets the eye.
"We assumed we'd just be receiving ashes, putting them in container and then taking them to launch site…But we're dealing with people, and dealing with various stages of grief and joy," Chafer said.
"It's a personal service. That's been biggest learning curve we've had."
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These Companies Are Racing To Sell You High-Speed Internet From Space



A globe-circling fleet of small satellites could deliver high-speed internet to all corners of the Earth. It’s the new space race — and the kings of Silicon Valley all want to win.

OneWeb / Via virgin.com
A race to space is playing out on Earth, aimed at providing everyone on the planet with broadband internet access and sparking a fierce fight for orbital turf among would-be space moguls.
On Monday, Europe’s Airbus Group announced at the Paris Air show that it will build 900 internet satellites for OneWeb, a space internet start-up backed by Virgin Galactic billionaire Richard Branson, with a goal to start swathing Earth with internet signals by 2018.
The announcement came just weeks after Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket firm filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission to launch two small experimental “MicroSat” satellites in 2016, in a first step toward a swarm of 4,000 broadband satellites.
These companies are heralding ever-smaller satellites as the next space revolution.
Older telecommunications satellites — used by the likes of Dish Network and HughesNet — weigh more than 13,000 pounds and fly some 22,000 miles high. Their long distance from Earth means laggy internet connections, loading web pages with a half-second stutter that suffers badly in comparison to fiber optic and cable services on the ground.
Space internet companies are promising much higher speeds by using smaller satellites that are closer to Earth.
The space internet firm O3b, for example, already has eight 1,500-pound satellites circling the globe in a 4,970-mile-high constellation that has become thelargest internet provider in the Pacific Ocean region, and a staple of cruise ships.
Much smaller machines — spanning just a few inches, even — are on the way, set to fly just a few hundred miles overhead. If you believe their makers, these small floating cubes will deliver the internet’s cacophony where wires can’t go, to the countryside and continents lacking in fiber connections, such as Africa.
It’s unclear how (and whether) space internet companies will deal with international regulations and insurance costs. But their broad plan, eventually, is to have thousands of microsatellites working together in a network, splitting the labor once done by a single massive satellite among many little ones.
Only some 1,300 active satellites are in orbit now, satellite expert Dave Baiocchi of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, told BuzzFeed News, making the proposed broadband satellite constellations look quite ambitious.
“Space is a very big place, so there is room for large [satellite] constellations,” Baiocchi said. “We’ll just have to see how large.”
youtube.com

It’s a sweeping vision, but these space firms still have to prove it can work.


In its FCC filing, SpaceX said that after launching two experimental satellites in 2016, it “plans to deploy a large constellation of small satellites for low-latency, worldwide, high-capacity internet service in the near future.”
Airbus, meanwhile, says it will eventually build four satellites a day, each one about three feet tall and 330 pounds, for OneWeb, which is also backed by the communications electronics firm Qualcomm. OneWeb’s space broadband constellation will cost less than $2 billion, its founder and CEO Greg Wyler toldReuters.
The jousting between the space broadband rivals is almost incestuous in its intensity.
Wyler had headed Google’s space broadband efforts until September, when the search engine giant turned to a proposed balloon-powered internet project calledLoon. Next, Wyler reportedly spent time discussing space broadband details with SpaceX late last year, before striking out on his own bid. Then in January, Google and Fidelity backed SpaceX with a $1 billion investment in its rocket-building efforts.
As those moves played out, groups anonymously filed requests with the International Telecommunication Union to claim pieces of the radio spectrum in space, sparking talk of a satellite internet “gold rush” that has tantalized the space industry.
Those filings started the clock for firms to get their space networks on orbit by 2022 or else lose the allotment of radio spectrum they have requested.
In addition to technological hurdles, these firms face unpredictable government regulations and insurance costs.
“The projects are certainly ambitious and the goals are worthy,” industry analyst Teresa Mastrangelo of BroadbandTrends in Roanoke, Virginia, told BuzzFeed News by email. “Nonetheless, 4000 satellites, albeit microsatellites, is a lot of objects flying around in space. I imagine it will be an uphill battle to gather government and regulatory approval from nearly every government on this planet.”

Airbus / Via airbusgroup.com

The largest constellation now in orbit is the Iridium satellite telephone system, with 72 satellites orbiting 485 miles high.


For today’s space firms, Iridium is a cautionary tale: It almost went broke after its 1998 start and suffered the unexpected loss of a satellite in a 2009 collision with a defunct Russian military spacecraft. (Iridium is now also contemplatingproviding internet service with future satellites.)
After a decade of false starts, the advent of smaller and cheaper satellites is making constellations that would dwarf Iridium’s look reasonable.
The $2 billion price tag that Wyler estimated for OneWeb is far less than the $9 billion one that doomed Telesdesic, an 840-satellite orbital broadband service backed by Bill Gates in the 1990s.
“Round One to Wyler,” wrote satellite industry analyst Tim Farrar on his blog earlier this month, reporting that OneWeb has secured $500 million in funding for its own broadband microsatellite constellation.
Cheaper launch costs allow small satellites to disrupt other parts of the space industry as well. Seattle-based startup BlackSky Global, for example, plans to launch a network of 60 Earth-watching spacecraft as secondary payloads on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets. Backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the firm announced this week that each of its smallsats will weigh 110 pounds, and start launches later this year.
Eventually, the broadband satellites envisioned by SpaceX and OneWeb might be replaced by even smaller “cubesats,” boxes just four inches high on each side, according to satellite expert Richard Welle of the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.
Cubesats could send internet signals by laser instead of radio, cutting power costs even more and obviating the spectrum-hogging behavior that SpaceX complained about in March.
“Pushing that kind of capability down to cubesats means things will get very, very interesting,” Welle told BuzzFeed News. “Smaller satellites are just the way the industry is evolving.”
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Space mining is closer than you think, and the prospects are great


In this week’s Q&A on the ABC, the American cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson gushed about the prospects of mining in space, and the benefits that might afford humanity.
How about mining an asteroid for natural resources? […] There are more natural resources on asteroids than have ever been mined in the history of the Earth. So in 100 years […] all wars over limited resources are over because we have access to the unlimited resources of our back yard and that new back yard is our solar system.
Is this really plausible? What can we mine in space? And will it really deliver world peace, or just another realm for competition and conflict? Perhaps a look at the immediate past and near future may help us answer some of these questions.

Not science-fiction

In the two years since I first wrote about off-earth mining, a number of things have changed, and at least one relates to “world peace”.
One asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources, launched its first spacecraft from the International Space Station. This was the company’s second attempt after an earlier one wasincinerated in the failed Antares launch.
Another asteroid miner, Deep Space Industries (DSI), won two NASA grants. One was to investigate creating propellant from asteroid material, and the other to create an asteroid regolith simulant, so equipment can be tested on Earth. That followed the award to DSI of a contract to help develop BitSat, which transmits Bitcoin transactions.
We, at the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at UNSW, along with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also won funding to investigate mining water to support NASA’s planned Mars colony.
In the US, the ASTEROIDS Act (yes that’s an acronym) was thankfully renamed the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act before it passed Congress. It tries to deal with the gaps in the Outer Space Treaty relating to ownership of space resources. It states that “any asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained such resources, which shall be entitled to all property rights thereto, consistent with applicable provisions of Federal law.”
A UNSW study has shown, for a particular iron-rich asteroid, given the existence of a market and other assumptions, the return on investment is 85 years if the ore is returned to Earth, but five years if used in space.

Not so costly

Despite all this activity, sceptics remain unconvinced about the prospects for space mining for reasons such as expense and time.
Mining in space will certainly be expensive. The total budget of the project to send Curiosity to Mars and operate it for 14 years was US$2.5 billion.
But mining on Earth is also expensive. In 2014, Rio Tinto reduced its exploration budget from US$948 million in 2013 to US$747 million. A single study can cost over US$650 million.
The corresponding figures for BHP Billiton are US$1,047 million in 2013 down to US$716 million. That’s the sort of money these companies are already spending, trying to find new terrestrial deposits. So, the absolute scale of an investment in space mining is not beyond existing mining companies.
Space mining is a staple of science fiction, but it’s rapidly becoming a reality. Ryan Somma, CC BY
Things are similar in terms of time frames. Mining operations last for decades. So neither the costs nor the time-frames are prohibitive. As we see, the asteroid mining companies are already getting into space. It’s happening, and it’s being funded.
So, where are the immediate problems? For one thing, the study that told us to use the iron ore in space rather than return it to Earth assumed a market in space.
For high-value commodities, like rare earth minerals or platinum group metals, there may be a case for return to Earth, but certainly, the “common” resources that could be mined in space are best used there.
The common argument is that it costs about US$20,000 per kilogram to launch to deep space from Earth, so if you can produce that kilogram in space for less than $20,000, you’re ahead.
In fact, SpaceX publishes its launch costs on its website. Currently, for its Falcon 9, that figure is about US$12,600. But a market does not exist at present, and may need an artificial demand to kick it off (e.g. someone like NASA could contract for a delivery of water on-orbit).
This dilemma was recently debated at SpaceUp Australia. Without that kick-start, early demand for water may come from space tourism, but the most likely place for this type of economy to kick off is probably satellite refuelling. Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used to fuel satellites.

World peace or wild west?

In terms of world peace, there are a number of problems with the US Space Act (variously discussed here, here, here, and here), including that the law is not necessarily consistent with existing treaties, is likely to be ignored by other countries, and is unenforceable.
A bus could drive through the existing treaties and not touch the sides, so there is a lack of uncertainty about what can and can’t be done, or enforced. My own view on this is that it will be the wild west out there until the slow processes of the law finally catch up with reality off the ground.
As far as world peace goes, I think things in space will get worse before they get better (space piracy, anyone?). But once order is established, there is every possibility that deGrasse Tyson is right, perhaps in less than 100 years.
The world leaders on all of these contentious topics, as well as representatives from the off-earth mining companies will be meeting to debate these issues at the second Off-Earth Mining Forum, to be held in Sydney in November.
To maximise interaction between space experts and mining experts, the event has been co-located with the third Future Mining Conference. Members of the public are welcome to attend and get a sense of whether deGrasse Tyson might be right.
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