Author: NASA Official

TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite industry veteran Mark Rigolle is taking the helm of ABS after Amit Somani’s sudden departure early this year in the latest shake-up for the Dubai-based regional satellite operator, the company announced April 16.

Rigolle, most recently chief operating officer for the proposed Rivada Space Networks low Earth orbit constellation (LEO), will join ABS as CEO April 29.

Somani left in January after less than two years with ABS for personal reasons, the company said, which recently changed its name from Asia Broadcast Satellite to Agility Beyond Space after moving headquarters from Hong Kong.

Somani had joined from Yahsat, a regional satellite operator also based in the United Arab Emirates.

ABS announced its rebranding in October 2023, saying it reflected a push toward building strategic, long-term relationships in the industry after recently coming under new ownership.

The geostationary satellite operator has not announced its new ownership structure and did not respond to requests for comment. 

British private equity firm Permira, which bought a majority stake in ABS in 2010 and first tried to sell the company about six years later, lists the operator as sold on its website but did not provide details about the deal.

In its latest earnings results Jan. 10, when ABS announced Somani’s departure, the company said it recorded increasing revenue from sales to other operators with satellites reaching the end of their design life. 

The company did not detail these arrangements. Total sales came in flat at $69 million for the year to Sept. 30.

ABS chair Parm Sandhu said in the earnings release that the company is in active partnership talks regarding its spectrum rights covering Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific “to unlock the hidden value in our holdings,” including two orbital slots with permission to beam military Ka-band radio waves.

ABS provides connectivity and broadband services over these regions with five satellites: ABS-2, ABS-2A, ABS-3A, ABS-4/Mobisat-1 and ABS-6.

Founded in 2006, the operator also moved company accounts from Bermuda to the UAE as part of its strategy refresh. 

Going through changes

Somani joined ABS as CEO in October 2022 to replace James Frownfelter, who took over from Jim Simpson in 2018 when he left after just a year in the role.

Rigolle’s career has also seen its fair share of changes. Before Rivada, he served as the chief financial officer for SES and was CEO of its medium Earth constellation O3b Networks. 

He also co-founded regional geostationary satellite operator Kacific and was CEO of LEO startup LeoSat until its collapse following a lack of investment.

“The exceptional breadth of his experience in our industry will enable him to hit the ground running,” Sandhu said in a statement.

“We look forward to benefiting from his leadership and from his insights into multi-orbit constellations during this time of rapid market evolution.” 

Rigolle noted he was joining ABS “at this pivotal time for the company and indeed the whole [fixed satellite services] industry,” as geostationary players face mounting competition from SpaceX’s sprawling LEO network.

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TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat is considering investing in spacecraft with other Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) operators as the promise of direct-to-smartphone technology drives unprecedented cooperation among historically isolated networks.

“What you’ve seen in MSS in the past is every operator has to have its own satellite, its own ground segment, its own type of terminals [and] they only use their own spectrum,” Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said.

“But what we’re envisioning is creating an environment where you can roam from MSS operator to MSS operator seamlessly, and you can do that in different geographies or within the same geography.”

Pooling radiowaves in the same area could deliver more capacity for direct-to-smartphone services, enabling higher bandwidth text, voice, and data capabilities for phones outside cellular coverage.

Dankberg is chair of the Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA), a non-profit group of MSS operators founded in February to push the fledgling direct-to-smartphone market to adopt their radio waves, rather than spectrum sourced from terrestrial mobile network operators.

Other founding MSSA members include Terrestar Solutions, Ligado Networks, Omnispace, and Yahsat. Iridium Communications has also said it is considering joining MSSA after pivoting from a proprietary direct-to-smartphone strategy to an open network approach.

MSS operator Globalstar, which thanks to its close relationship with Apple has been enabling space-based SOS services on the latest iPhones since late 2022, is not part of MSSA.

“A satellite is just a cell tower in space,” Dankberg said in an interview. “The payload is what does the work. So just like in terrestrial, where you can put a payload — or a network — from multiple carriers on the same tower, why can’t we make the same satellites for all of our needs?”

Similar to how cell tower companies operate on the ground, he said sharing infrastructure in space could save costs and attract capital.

“We can have tower companies in space that can serve all of us [and are] far more capital efficient,” he added, “we can do similar things with ground infrastructure in particular markets.”

Coordination agreements among MSS operators currently separate them from each other to avoid radio wave interference. Through MSSA, the operators hope to create a standards-based framework that could pave the way for contractual agreements to share and empower their orbital resources. 

Partnerships mobile network operators have with cell tower companies on the ground include leasing and revenue-sharing business models. 

Dankberg pointed to Indian cellular operator Reliance Jio, which has helped lower barriers to entry through partnerships with power companies, network providers, and handset makers.

“What we’re looking to do is to figure out which of those we can replicate in what sequence,” he said.

“Maybe the MSS operators themselves cooperate, maybe third parties come in to invest in the space segment.”

The aim is to help build scale globally and drive out costs as direct-to-smartphone operators SpaceX, Lynk Global, and AST SpaceMobile seek more mobile network operator partners for their terrestrial spectrum approach.

“Coopertition is kind of the buzzword for that,” Dankberg added, “whereby cooperating we make the market bigger and we compete on that larger market, but that’s a way better way to compete than on the small market scales that at the MSS operators have now.”

According to Dankberg, existing regulations already support MSS spectrum pooling, and it is up to MSSA members to coordinate among themselves.

Regulatory clarity is one of the strengths of the MSS direct-to-smartphone approach because these radio waves are already cleared for use from space, although services to standard smartphones must wait for standardized chips to be released.

Satellites using cellular radio waves can reach smartphones already in circulation because these devices use these frequencies with land-based cell towers. 

However, these terrestrial partnerships must first navigate new rules that must be put in place to guard against the possibility of interference in each country they wish to operate in.

The United States is taking the lead on this, and the Federal Communications Commission recently issued nationwide ground rules for what it calls Supplemental Coverage from Space that is expected to inspire other countries.

Meanwhile, Lynk Global is currently enabling intermittent texting services with five satellites in parts of a handful of island nations. Like fellow early-stage venture AST SpaceMobile, which does not expect to launch initial commercial satellites until at least July, Lynk is seeking more capital to expand its constellation.

Leveraging significantly greater financial resources, SpaceX aims to enable direct-to-smartphone texting services in the United States this year, with voice and data services slated to come soon after.

Omnispace, however, has warned that SpaceX’s plans to use T-Mobile’s cellular radio waves from space could cause interference that would derail its proposed MSS constellation.

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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is home base for building pioneering spacecraft that have probed every planet in our solar system, including the Sun.

Federally funded by NASA and managed by Caltech, JPL and its cadre of engineers and scientists are led by Laurie Leshin, the first woman to serve as JPL director, who took on the role in May 2022 following a career as a geochemist in academia and NASA.

Leshin points to space technology achievements, but has also been plagued by program setbacks and space budget woes, especially regarding the JPL-led Mars Sample Return project.

Leshin spoke with SpaceNews about JPL’s path forward and steps to retain and bolster the revered laboratory’s capabilities.

How do you characterize your concerns about NASA’s overall budget and its impact on JPL?

There is good news for sure, such as the VERITAS Venus orbiter coming back and that we’re now re-planning and ramping back up. Most of the [NASA] science budget is fairly flat which, while not great, is not terrible. Planetary science, however, finds itself in a very, very difficult position. It is a fairly unprecedented threat to the nation’s deep space capability which is resident at JPL, so I have major concerns.

How impactful were February’s budget-related layoffs on the lab’s future?

We hire only great people. So we will miss all those who were laid off. We’re supporting them in every way we can think of through their transition. While it cut to depth, it did not eliminate any core capability. We worked very hard in spite of having to make the deep cuts and to make sure those capabilities were intact.

What is an example of a core capability at JPL?

Our nation’s Mars exploration capability is resident at the lab. No other organization has landed on Mars in the United States except us — with partners always, but we have led every one of those missions. But if the budget challenges continue or decisions continue to be deferred, those capabilities will be at risk. I don’t know how to say it other than that.

Our job as a nation is to have some hard conversations about what being spacefaring for the future really means. How do we make sure that there’s Mars in our moon-to-Mars program? There’s no moon-to-Mars without Mars and there’s no Mars without JPL.

Any other NASA budget concerns?

A science versus human spaceflight moment is not good for our community. We all need to pull together to support the diverse portfolio that NASA has. In tight budget times, we tend to fight with each other and that is always a bad idea.

JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission. All on track for liftoff this October?

Europa Clipper just came out of JPL’s thermal vacuum chamber. You shake it. You bake it. You look for magnetic cleanliness. End-to-end missions tests to simulate launch, solar array deployment, deep space cruise, orbit insertion at Jupiter, flybys of Europa. We’ve done all of that. We’re in really good shape. We’re on track to ship it to Florida in the May timeframe and get it ready to fly on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

There’s another look looming at the costly and complex Mars Sample Return program. What’s coming?

I can’t talk about it at this time. That review is coming relatively soon… to be released in the spring. NASA has funding challenges. It’s a really important set of decisions they are making. Mars Sample Return was the next big thing at JPL. So we need to make sure that gets back on track as quickly as possible.

So you see a way forward for Mars Sample Return?

It’s a difficult moment. There’s a way to move forward with this mission that will cost less on an annual basis than the prior plan and it’s very much in line with what we’ve spent on other large missions. NASA has a chance to go down that path. I hope they will… and then I’ll breathe.

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COLORADO SPRINGS — Astrobotic is partnering with Canadian space software company Mission Control on a small rover that will go to the Moon on Astrobotic’s next lander mission.

The two companies announced April 8 that they will use Mission Control’s Spacefarer software to operate Astrobotic’s first CubeRover, which will go to the moon on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander scheduled for no earlier than late this year. The CubeRover will be one of several secondary payloads on that lander, which will also deliver NASA’s VIPER rover.

The shoebox-sized rover will test its maneuverability and communications on this first mission. It will also demonstrate the Spacefarer software’s ability to control the rover, including semi-autonomous navigation across the surface and analysis of images taken by the rover’s cameras.

“We chose to work with Mission Control because of the extensive capabilities that they have in Spacefarer and also the very simple interface they built,” said Mike Provenzano, vice president of advanced development programs at Astrobotic, during a briefing at the 39th Space Symposium.

Spacefarer is a cloud-based mission operations tool, said Ewan Reid, founder and chief executive of Mission Control, providing easy access to telemetry and other data as well as the ability to command a spacecraft through a point-and-click interface. It provides, he said, “all sorts of different tools that users need to try to make the best smartest decisions in the shortest amount of time.”

The software will enable distributed control for CubeRover, with mission operations handled both at Astrobotic’s Pittsburgh headquarters and Mission Control’s Ottawa headquarters. “It’s truly going to be a joint mission with operators at both locations,” said Provenzano. “That’s really exciting and something that Spacefarer enabled.”

Mission Control flew a version of Spacefarer on another lunar lander mission, ispace’s HAKUTO-R M1 lander, but that spacecraft crashed attempting to land on the moon in April 2023. Reid said that the software would have been able to receive and analyze data from that lander but not command it.

Flying Spacefarer on CubeRover, he said, will help Mission Control open up new opportunities for his company, demonstrating that Spacefarer can handle operations of spacecraft. Those customers, he argued, can focus on their specific technologies, “and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for an operations platform.”

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) stimulated the development of Spacefarer through its Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), intended to help Canadian companies demonstrate technologies for lunar missions. “The CSA recognizes that without that step in our development timeline, without having validated something that has flown and operated on a real mission, it’s very hard for us to sell it around the world,” Reid said.

“Commercial companies are at the very beginning of creating a new market and economy at the moon,” said CSA President Lisa Campbell. “LEAP was created to provide thias wide range of opportunities for Canadian science and technology activities in lunar orbit, on the moon’s surface and beyond.”

She said the agreement between Astrobotic and Mission Control is “validating something that we believe in at the agency, which is we need to try things, we need to be bold. The world wants more of what Canada has to offer.”

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WASHINGTON — The first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has slipped from late April to early May because of International Space Station schedule conflicts and not due to any issues with the spacecraft itself.

In a media advisory released by NASA late March 8, the agency said the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, previously scheduled to launch no earlier than April 22, was now scheduled for early March. The agency said the slip was “due to space station scheduling” but did not elaborate.

At recent briefings, NASA managers said the key factor in the schedule for CFT was other missions to the station. “What we’ve been doing is watching how we progress with the Crew-8 launch and the CRS-30 mission,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, in a briefing after the March 3 launch of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission to the ISS.

SpaceX’s CRS-30 cargo mission is scheduled for launch in mid-March and will stay at the station for about a month. After it departs, the Crew-8 spacecraft will move from its current forward docking port on the Harmony module to the zenith port to allow Starliner to use the forward port. Those ports are the only two available on the station for both Starliner and Dragon spacecraft.

“The thing that’s pacing when we go fly is really this complicated traffic management,” Stich said.

At that briefing and earlier ones, Stich said that preparations for Starliner itself were going well. “The spacecraft is in really good shape. There’s not much work left to go,” he said at a Feb. 25 briefing.

He said then that NASA and Boeing had addressed technical issues that delayed CFT from last summer, including performing a final parachute test in January to confirm the performance of redesigned links in those parachute lines to increase their strength as well as the removal of wiring tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable. They also resolved issues with valves in a thermal control system.

“Those three big issues that we had last summer have been resolved and we’re in the middle of some final certification work on the parachutes and a few other things,” Stich said.

The CFT mission, launching on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5, will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS. They will remain on the station for up to two weeks before returning to Earth. A successful flight would clear the way for NASA certification of the spacecraft for crew rotation missions, starting with Starliner-1 in early 2025.

NASA separately announced March 8 plans for the return of Crew-7, which has been on the ISS since late August 2023. The agency said that the four members of Crew-7 — NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA’s Andreas Mogensen, JAXA’s Satoshi Furukawa and Roscosmos’ Konstantin Borisov — will depart in their Crew Dragon spacecraft at 11:05 a.m. Eastern March 10. The spacecraft would splash down off the Florida coast March 12 at 5:35 a.m. Eastern.

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Date: March 6th, 2024
Time: 11 AM ET

Join us on Wednesday, March 6, 2024 for an exclusive online event with Derek Tournear, Director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), as we take a look back at SDA’s remarkable journey over the past 5 years.

In just half a decade, the SDA has been at the forefront of space innovation, utilizing government demand in new ways to build the Defense Department’s first low Earth orbit constellation, known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

Director Tournear will share the most significant lessons SDA has learned from its projects and collaborations with the private sector, and how these lessons will influence the agency’s strategies moving forward.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from the leader of one of the most dynamic and innovative agencies in the space sector.

Derek M. Tournear
Director
Space Development Agency

Sandra Irwin
Senior Staff Writer
SpaceNews

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WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin is experiencing a growth spurt in an unexpected corner of its business: small satellites. While traditionally known for its expertise in GPS and giant geostationary (GEO) satellites, the company has quietly built a backlog of 100 smallsats on order from Department of Defense and intelligence customers.

“This is probably a different picture than many of you may have in our minds” about what the company does, Johnathon Caldwell, head of Lockheed Martin’s military space business, told a military conference Feb. 14.

Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Conference in Aurora, Colorado, Caldwell said a greater focus on small satellites began with the company’s pursuit of Space Development Agency contracts. SDA is building a proliferated mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit for the Defense Department, and unlike traditional cost-plus defense programs, the agency demands fixed-price bids from satellite manufacturers.

Lockheed Martin last year opened a new smallsat assembly facility near Denver, Colorado, with capacity to manufacture 180 spacecraft per year. Most of Lockheed’s smallsats are made with buses from Terran Orbital.

Upcoming tech demo

Caldwell said the smallsat business has to operate with the mentality of a startup. Taking advantage of the new production line, the company is funding its own space missions to demonstrate technologies that it believes the government will want to buy. 

In 2022 it launched a satellite-servicing demonstration mission and most recently in December an antenna experiment that ended up in the wrong orbit.

The next experiment, called Pony Express 2, is scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s upcoming Transporter 10 smallsat rideshare. Two Terran Orbital Renegade-class cubesats will attempt to form a Ka-band mesh network in space.

“They will demonstrate a handful of interesting new technologies that we’ve been investing in through our venture fund,” said Caldwell.

These include open standards mesh networking and autonomous tasking of satellites. He said the company will allow military units to use the satellites in wargames and exercises.

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WASHINGTON — Uruguay signed the Artemis Accords outlining best practices in space exploration Feb. 15, the second country in as many weeks to do so.

In a ceremony at NASA Headquarters, Omar Paganini, foreign minister of Uruguay, signed the Accords on the behalf of the country. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other officials from both the United States and Uruguay attended the signing.

“We are honored to have the opportunity to introduce space cooperation as a new chapter in the robust bilateral agenda between Uruguay and the U.S.,” Paganini said in a statement about the signing, calling it “the beginning of a new bilateral track” of cooperation between the countries.

Uruguay does not have a significant space program, but announced last year plans to establish a national space agency. Uruguay has hosted the headquarters of Satellogic, a company developing a constellation of Earth observation satellites, although the company said in September it planned to redomicile the company in the United States to allow it to compete for U.S. government business.

The signing took place as part of bilateral ministerial meetings between the United States and Uruguay. In a readout of those meetings, the U.S. State Department said the United States “agreed to support Uruguay exploring civilian and commercial space industries,” but did not elaborate on those plans.

“The United States and Uruguay share a commitment to democracy and peace, and now, we expand these principles in the cosmos to commit to the safe and transparent exploration of space,” Nelson said in a statement about the signing.

Uruguay is the 36^th country to sign the Accords, established in 2020, and the second in as many weeks after Greece signed the documents Feb. 9. The signatories range from countries with advanced space programs to those like Uruguay that are only starting to develop space capabilities.

The Artemis Accords outline best practices for countries to follow in space exploration activities, building upon the Outer Space Treaty and other international agreements on topics ranging from registration of space objects to utilization of space resources.

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HELSINKI — Chinese launch firm Space Circling has secured more than 100 million yuan ($13.9 million) in funding to back its work on innovative engines to power commercial space activities.

Space Circling, also known as Shaanxi Tianhui Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd., secured the funding in December last year and announced the Series A funding Feb. 18.

Strategic investors including Changsha Kaifu District Zhongxin High-tech Fund, Mianyang Kefa Fund, Xi’an Fulao Fund, SIRI New Materials and Xi’an Talent Fund participated in the round. The latter is a local government-backed policy guidance fund. Such funds are used to deploy capital to strategic and emerging technologies such as space.

The funding will mainly go towards construction of an industrial base for the company’s rocket engines, including mass production.

Space Circling has been developing its Honglong-1 and Qiaolong-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket engines since it was established in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, in March 2021.

The Qiaolong-1 is a staged combustion, tap-off cycle with two combustion chambers. It has no gas generator in order to simplify its structure, according to Space Circling. It is designed to produce 85 tons of thrust at sea level and able to fit five engines into a 3.35-meter-diameter stage — a standard sizing among Chinese Long March and commercial launch vehicles. Space Circling conducted a successful hotfire test of the engine Jan. 31.