Category: Science

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — CesiumAstro won a NASA contract to design a space-qualified wideband active phased array terminal to communicate with commercial and government networks.

Under the $396,000 award, CesiumAstro will identify barriers, challenges and solutions for integrating the Ka-band terminal for satellites in low-Earth orbit with NASA’s Near Space Network.

“CesiumAstro is proud to support NASA’s efforts in fielding cost-effective, multi-constellation terminals,” Trey Pappas, CesiumAstro vice president of business development, told SpaceNews by email. “This opportunity will expand CesiumAstro’s current terminal development to fully support Near Space Network space relay frequencies, along with traditional commercial and military Ka-band.”

NASA is moving toward greater reliance on commercial satellite communications. In 2022, the space agency awarded Communications Services Project contracts with a combined value of $278.5 million to six companies to begin demonstrating how commercial providers could support missions that currently rely on NASA’s own Tracking and Data Relay Satellite constellation.

“CesiumAstro is honored to provide a commercially available product to advance reliable, secure and continual space communications for long-term operations,” said Shey Sabripour, CesiumAstro founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We’re proud to leverage CesiumAstro’s existing expertise in active phased array space communications and explore innovative wideband solutions that can help guide NASA toward the successful commercialization of the Near Space Network.”

In addition to supporting government missions, CesiumAstro sees commercial applications for its phased array wideband terminals. The NASA contract will cover the development of a wideband terminal engineering model and three or four flight models scheduled for delivery by late 2027.

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WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic will conclude its schedule of suborbital spaceflights this year with a mission in early November whose crew will include a longtime advocate of suborbital research.

The company announced Oct. 18 that the next flight of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane, Galactic 05, is scheduled for a window that opens Nov. 2 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. It will be the fifth commercial flight for the company and the sixth flight of Unity this year, all since late May.

Galactic 05, like the Galactic 01 mission in June, is described as a research flight by the company. It will carry among its crew two researchers, Alan Stern and Kellie Gerardi. A third customer is described by the company only as a Franco-Italian private astronaut.

Stern, an associate vice president of Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) space science division, will evaluate a harness used for collecting biomedical data as well as test a mockup of an astronomical camera planned for a future suborbital flight. Gerardi, representing the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS), a research and educational organization, will test a biomonitoring device and collect other biomedical data while also conducting a fluid dynamics experiment.

Stern has been a leading advocate for using commercial suborbital vehicles like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo to conduct research more rapidly and less expensively than alternative platforms, giving scientists access to several minutes of microgravity and other aspects of the space environment. That interest has included running a series of conferences since 2010 devoted to commercial suborbital research.

Stern was the first scientist selected by NASA in 2020 for an award through the agency’s Flight Opportunities program that would allow him to go on a commercial suborbital vehicle to conduct research. This flight, though, is funded by SwRI and will serve as training for that future NASA-funded mission.

“What sets this flight apart from others, and which likely represents a new kind of space activity, is that more than anything else I will be training — in space — for future space experiments I will be performing with NASA funding,” Stern said in a statement. “Virgin’s suborbital costs are low enough to open up space training actually in space as a viable opportunity, and that is a game changer.”

IIAS signed an agreement with Virgin Galactic in 2021 to fly Gerardi, who has worked with IIAS for several years. “This mission represents the beginning of a new era of access to space for the research community, and the culmination of a personal lifelong dream,” she said in a statement. “I’m looking forward to paving the way for our many talented researchers who will follow, using space as a laboratory to benefit humanity.”

The company has highlighted suborbital research as an alternative application for its vehicles versus space tourism, and one that is potentially more lucrative on a per-seat basis. “We’re thrilled to offer a wide breadth of high-quality and reliable access to space-based research,” Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said in a company statement. “Insights from this flight will be used to enhance and refine the research capabilities of our future Delta fleet.”

The mission will be commanded by Mike Masucci with Kelly Latimer as pilot and Colin Bennett as the in-flight astronaut instructor. The company said that Galactic 05 will be the last to carry an astronaut instructor, with Galactic 06 and subsequent flights carrying four private astronaut customers. Colgalzier said in an earnings call in August that the company would likely replace the astronaut instructor with a fourth customer “as we move into 2024.”

While Galactic 05 continues a roughly monthly cadence of Virgin Galactic suborbital missions dating back to late May, it will also be the last of the year. The company said Galactic 06 will take place in January to give the company time for “routine, planned annual vehicle inspections.”

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WASHINGTON — Industry officials used a Senate hearing to request reforms to the Federal Aviation Administration’s launch licensing process, warning of dire commercial and geopolitical implications if changes aren’t made.

Witnesses at a hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee Oct. 18 argued that the strong growth the industry has seen in the last several years is in jeopardy because of the strain on the FAA office that regulates launches as well as the implementation of current and potential future regulations.

“The pace of American regulation must match the pace of American innovation. We are falling behind,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX. “We are at a breaking point.”

Gerstenmaier and other witnesses called for providing the FAA’s commercial space transportation office, known as AST, with additional resources. He specifically recommended doubling AST’s budget, $37.9 million in fiscal year 2023, provided those additional resources go exclusively to the office’s licensing work.

Those additional resources and other regulatory reforms, like accelerated reviews of launch licenses, are needed to keep the company on track. Gerstenmaier said the company continued to target up to 100 launches this year — it has performed 75 so far this year, including the Starship test flight — and 144 next year.

The changes are also needed to keep its work on the lunar lander version of Starship on track. “When we have regulatory delays, such as we’re facing right now, that slows down developmental test flights and ultimately slows down our support to NASA and slows down our support for what we need to do to return humans back to the surface of the moon again,” he warned. “A continuous delay in each and every test flight adds up and, eventually, we will lose our lead and we will see China land on the moon before we do.”

The five witnesses at the hearing were united in a call for Congress to extend the “learning period” that restricts the FAA’s ability to regulate safety of spaceflight participants on commercial vehicles. That learning period, included in a 2004 law and originally intended to last eight years, has been extended several times, including a three-month extension to January 2024 that was part of a stopgap funding bill passed in late September.

The learning period was designed to give companies time to build up experience and best practices upon which regulations could be based, but the industry development was far slower than anticipated when the learning period was first enacted. Only now, witnesses argued, is the industry now gaining that experience as vehicles enter commercial service.

“We are at an inflection point. The companies here on the panel have entered commercial operations for human spaceflight,” said Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research at Virgin Galactic. An extension of the learning period, she said, would create a transition period where industry can work with the government on what those safety regulations should look like.

There was not a firm consensus on how long the learning period should be extended, beyond that it should be several years. “About eight years is our timeline,” she said.

Wayne Monteith, a former FAA associate administrator for commercial space who is currently president and general manager of National Aerospace Solutions, suggested an alternative where Congress sets a no-earlier-than date for publication of spaceflight participant safety regulations, but delay the date any regulations become effective by at least 18 months to give Congress time to step in if there are issues.

Witnesses also criticized FAA regulations known as Part 450, finalized in 2020, intended to streamline the launch licensing process. “Recent changes to the FAA regulations have not resulted in streamlined licensing reviews,” said Caryn Schenewerk, president of CS Consulting. “Instead, Part 450 has proven more cumbersome and costly.” She noted that of the four Part 450 launch licenses issued to date, two exceeded the 180-day timeline required for the FAA to review them.

“The FAA needs a more streamlined process. To keep pace with industry, both the substance and administration of launch regulations should be improved,” said Phil Joyce, senior vice president of the New Shepard business unit at Blue Origin.

Senators at the hearing appeared open to addressing the concerns raised by witnesses. “We must the learning period, mission authorization and other pressing matters in a way that looks ahead to the future,” said Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), chair of the subcommittee, in her opening remarks.

She and others were less specific about how to tackle those pressing matters. An extension of the learning period could be handed in the final version of an overall FAA reauthorization bill. However, increasing the budget for AST would require action by appropriators rather than the Commerce Committee.

Witnesses, like Gerstenmaier, said it was urgent for Congress to take action. In his written testimony he discussed his concerns about Part 450. “But, as AST transitions licenses for vehicles previously approved under legacy regulations to Part 450 over the next two years, the entire regulatory system is at risk of collapse,” he wrote. “AST’s workload over the next 12-24 months could result in the grounding of U.S. space launch capability if action is not taken immediately.”

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Researchers recently identified a previously unknown compartment in mammalian cells. They call it the exclusome.

It was in the cell plasma that the researchers found this new compartment, which is rare and hasn’t been characterized before. This is exceptional because eukaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) usually keep most of their DNA in the cell nucleus, where it is organized into chromosomes.

The exclusome is made up of DNA rings known as plasmids. Some of the plasmids that end up in the exclusome originate from outside the cell, while others—known as telomeric rings—come from the capped ends of chromosomes, the telomeres. Particularly in certain cancer cells, the ones from the telomeres are regularly pinched off and joined together to form rings. However, these don’t contain the blueprints for proteins. The researchers are the first to show that the cell nucleus weeds out such DNA rings and deposits them, together with the plasmids coming from outside the cell, in the cell plasma.

This proves that cells can differentiate between, on the one hand, DNA that is their own and still needed and, on the other hand, DNA that is foreign or presumably no longer required, which they then eject from the nucleus. “It’s one of the key hygiene functions cells perform to protect the chromosomes. Plasmids that can’t be separated off could theoretically embed themselves in the chromosomes. More likely is that the nuclear plasmid genes of viruses or bacteria are translated into proteins, which disrupts the cell physiology,” says Ruth Kroschewski from the Institute of Biochemistry at ETH Zurich.

The researchers report the details of their discovery in the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell.

Does the exclusome trigger autoimmune responses?

It’s not yet clear what other functions the exclusome performs. Kroschewski, who coordinated the study, believes the exclusome could play a role in cellular immunological memory. For many years now, biologists all over the world have been studying a special protein that latches on to DNA, especially to that found in cell plasma. It has already been established that this protein binds on to DNA rings as well. In doing so, it possibly triggers a signal cascade that prompts cells to produce and release inflammatory messenger substances. These tell the body that there might be a problem with a pathogen, such as a virus, that warrants an immune response.

Kroschewski and her team think it’s possible that the protein in question latches on to the DNA rings present in the exclusome, resulting in the prolonged illusion of an infection. “The body keeps getting the signal that the problem is still there,” says Kroschewski. This means the immune system has no choice but to respond to the inflammatory messenger, she says. “And as the pro-inflammatory signaling cascade doesn’t subside but rather continues, this may well facilitate autoimmune responses such as systemic lupus erythematosus.”

Kroschewski presumes that the exclusome dates back to early evolution when eukaryotes emerged. It’s commonly understood that the first eukaryotic cells resulted from the fusion of an early form of bacteria with an archaeon, a single-celled organism like a bacterium. Their ring-shaped DNA, which came from the two different organisms, had to be organized and protected against degradation. As evolution advanced, a mechanism developed to ensure that DNA molecules were automatically enclosed in a membrane envelope—which is happening at the newly discovered exclusome.

Although the exclusome envelope resembles that of the cell nucleus, it is much simpler, as Kroschewski explains: “The exclusome envelope features gaps that can be seen in the nuclear envelope only in the early stages of its formation.” In the case of the nuclear envelope, these gaps close over time or are filled in with specific pore proteins. By contrast, the exclusome envelope does not develop any further. “Perhaps the exclusome is a first attempt at producing a cell nucleus,” Kroschewski says.

Why plasmids get wrapped up in an incomplete membrane envelope remains unclear. “It looks like only chromosomal DNA is deemed ‘good enough’ to be encased within a fully formed nuclear envelope, and extra-chromosomal DNA is not,” Kroschewski says. Ring-shaped DNA from outside and self-made plasmids with the sequence from chromosome ends appear to lack the required characteristic. “We don’t yet know what this characteristic is,” Kroschewski says. The same holds true for so many aspects of this recently discovered organelle.

Kroschewski and her team now plan to unravel the mysteries of the exclusome by examining cellular changes at the plasmid DNA as well as the “license” for depositing plasmids into the exclusome.

Source: ETH Zurich

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Government funding for the space sector is helping blunt the impact of a decline in private investment.

At the Satellite Innovation conference here, industry analysts, entrepreneurs and observers agreed that investors are far more cautious than they were in 2021, “a peak capital year with $12 billion in private capital coming into sector,” said Brooke Stokes, McKinsey and Co. partner.

While private investment is no longer pouring into space companies, it “hasn’t nosedived as much as some of the talk may suggest,” Stokes said Oct. 17. For now, “it’s leveled out at about $8 billion dollars.”

Shift in Government Contracting

Meanwhile, U.S. government funding for space programs is climbing.

“There’s a 20% increase in the government funding in the U.S.” said Raghavan Alevoor, Deloitte Consulting principal. “There’s the silver lining.”

The U.S. government’s approach to buying space-related products and services also is changing.

“A decade ago, 75 percent of all space U.S. government spending was via traditional contracts,” following federal acquisition regulations, Stokes said. “That has now shifted to only 60%.”

Rather than demanding companies comply with voluminous regulations, government agencies have increased their use of other transaction authority agreements and “other more commercial acquisition models,” Stokes said.

Alevoor sees another silver lining related to the private investment climate. For companies that still have access to capital, “this is an opportunistic time for them to look for acquisitions,” he said.

Potential Hurdles

The panel discussed potential impediments to space sector growth including high interest rates.

“We do see some softness in the market because people think interest rates are going to remain higher or rise,” said Don Claussen, ST Engineering iDirect CEO. “Customers outside the United States are also concerned that a strong dollar will reduce their buying power.”

Claussen also thinks rising geopolitical tensions will create supply chain disruptions.

“If we look at who’s innovating and where they’re innovating, some of our partners are in regions of the world under intense conflict right now,” Claussen said. “It’s going to slow that innovation in those smaller companies and that is going to limit some of our access to that next technology.”

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WASHINGTON — Industry executives argue that SpaceX’s dominant position in the launch market is making it difficult for small launch vehicles to compete, as a prominent investor warns of a wave of bankruptcies among launch companies.

In a panel at the Satellite Innovation conference Oct. 17, executives said that SpaceX’s line of smallsat rideshare missions has had a “hugely chilling” impact on the small launch industry that struggles to compete on price.

“They definitely control and have a dominant position in the market,” said Curt Blake, former chief executive of launch services company Spaceflight who now leads the commercial space group at law firm Wilson Sonsini, of SpaceX. “I think the real question is pricing, and what is their cost, and why so low, so dramatically low?”

SpaceX started offering rideshare launch opportunities for smallsats as low as $5,000 per kilogram. The company has since raised those prices to $5,500 per kilogram and plans annual increases in future years. However, in most cases those prices are far below what dedicated small launch vehicles offer.

“I don’t think they had to go that low to have a commanding share of the market,” he said, estimating SpaceX could have gained significant business at prices of $10,000 to $12,000 per kilogram. “That had to have a hugely chilling effect on any other money flowing into startup launch companies.”

SpaceX’s Transporter line of rideshare launches has focused on missions to sun-synchronous orbit, where the bulk of demand is today, but the company announced in August a new series of missions, Bandwagon, that will go to mid-inclination orbits. “They are, little by little, taking over what the small launch vehicles are able to accomplish,” he said, adding there is still room for dedicated small vehicles for missions to different inclinations. “But you have to think of it as a threat.”

Concerns about SpaceX’s pricing of its smallsat rideshare missions are not new. At World Satellite Business Week in September, Marino Fragnito, senior vice president of the Vega business unit at Arianespace, said SpaceX was offering pricing that “was not sustainable” in the market, driving out other companies. “Launcher companies could not live with that level of pricing.”

“Is SpaceX squeezing other people out of the market? I think to a certain extent yes,” said Adam Spice, chief financial officer at Rocket Lab, on the Satellite Innovation panel. “It would be a bit naïve to think their strategies around rideshare aren’t very targeted towards limiting competition.”

SpaceX’s position in the market reduces “forgivable failure” by other companies, he said, and its approach is exacerbated by the difficulties many companies are facing raising funding even as SpaceX has “seemingly endless access to capital” in private rounds. “It makes that a very difficult entity to compete with, and they can do very unnatural things for long periods of time to make it difficult on everybody else.”

Other panelists said they were looking for niches for their vehicles as ways to remain competitive in the market. “The one-size-fits-all launch market isn’t necessarily the best way to go for the long terms in order to meet all the different government and commercial needs out there,” said Patrick McKenzie, director of government business development at Firefly Aerospace.

He cited the company’s success with the Victus Nox responsive launch mission for the U.S. Space Force, launched Sept. 14 on an Alpha rocket, as an example of such a capability not offered through rideshare launches. But, he added, those services still need to be cost competitive. “You’ve got to get your price down. You’ve got to compete at a competitive price.”

Pablo Gallego, senior vice president for sales and customers at Spanish launch vehicle developer PLD Space, said SpaceX has helped build demand for smallsat launches at those low prices. His company has received interest in the company’s Miura 5 small launch vehicle in development for dedicated missions that can’t be served by rideshare missions.

“The market is so big,” he said, allowing room for both dedicated small launch vehicles and low-cost rideshare missions.

Wave of bankruptcies

The market may not be big enough, though, to support many small launch vehicle companies. Earlier at the conference, Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and an early investor in SpaceX and Planet, said he was puzzled by the large number of companies pursuing such rockets.

“You have a lot of companies chasing it. It’s not clear to what end,” he said, citing data that claimed nearly 200 small launch vehicles in various stages of development and operations, although nearly 50 of them are classified as either dormant or canceled.

Jurvetson expects many more would fail. “I sadly predict over 100 of them will go bankrupt in the next two years, and that’s going to put a pall on the investment domain for things like this or anything adjacent to it,” he said. “I think, unfortunately, there’s going to be a bit of a hangover in the investment community that may ripple through the whole space economy.”

He claimed that many investors in startups working on small launch vehicles were unaware of the scope of competition, many thinking there were no more than 10 other companies in the field. “It’s astounding,” he claimed. “It’s the weirdest delusion and lack of knowledge I’ve seen in the investment sector.”

In the later panel, Rocket Lab’s Spice took issue with some of Jurvetson’s data. “I think that’s a nonsensical number,” he said of Jurvetson’s estimate of the number of small launch vehicle companies. “This is just a difficult thing to do that to think that there’s 190 organizations that could pull it off, I don’t buy it.”

However, he agreed with predictions of a wave of failures. He noted that, at the SmallSat Symposium in February, he predicted a “bloodletting of aspirational launch companies” because of the technical and financial challenges companies face in developing small launch vehicles.

He said he “took a lot of heat” for those comments but feels vindicated because of what has happened in the industry since then. For example, at the February conference he appeared on a panel that included Virgin Orbit, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April. Rocket Lab acquired that company’s headquarters and manufacturing equipment in a bankruptcy auction.

“There’s been a lot of bloodletting,” he said. “We’ve seen market cap destruction, from companies that have gone from billions of dollars of market cap to single millions or tens of millions.”

“People think that this business is going to be an upward curve to the right, everybody’s going to be successful,” he said. “It’s not that. It’s an incredibly difficult industry to operate in.”

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A new nontoxic process for making cellulose gels takes inspiration from a small bird’s use of spit when making its nest.

The freeze-thaw process is simple, cost-effective, and can create cellulose gels that are useful in a number of applications, including tunable gels for timed drug delivery. The process also works with bamboo and potentially other lignin-containing plant fibers.

Cellulose is a wonderful material for making hydrogels—which are used in applications ranging from contact lenses to wound care and drug delivery. But creating hydrogels from cellulose is tricky, and often the processes used to create the hydrogels are themselves toxic.

“Normally, you have to first dissolve the cellulose and then induce it to crosslink or form the structure of interest, which often requires the use of difficult to handle, unstable, or toxic solvents,” says Lucian Lucia, professor of forest biomaterials and chemistry at North Carolina State University and co-corresponding author of the study in the journal Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials.

Enter the Swift family of birds—small birds who use their saliva to hold twigs in place when building their nests.

“My then PhD student Zhen Zhang noted that when birds do this, the saliva acts like a natural resin that holds the nest together and encourages the fibers within the nest to interconnect or crosslink,” Lucia says.

“Which is exactly what we want the dissolved cellulose to do when making hydrogels. So we asked ourselves, ‘what if we mimic the birds?’”

Zhang, currently a postdoc at Texas Tech University, is a co-corresponding author.

The researchers added a water soluble cellulose called carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) to an acid solution and dissolved the CMC. Then they added powdered cellulose fiber to the solution and subjected it to four rounds of freezing and thawing. The result was cellulose gel.

“Think of it as adding a thickener to water, like you would a pie filling,” Lucia says. “By changing the pH of the CMC, the water essentially becomes sticky. Freezing and thawing the solution causes the cellulose to compact and interweave itself into the sticky network, giving you a more organized structure, just as Swifts do when they create their nests. Only we don’t have to use beaks and saliva to do it.”

Freeze drying the gels resulted in cellulose foam. The researchers repeated the process with bamboo fibers as well, which suggests that it could be useful with many other lignin and cellulose containing fibers.

“The cellulose gels are robust, stable at room temperature, and can be tuned to degrade on a schedule, so would be useful in drug delivery applications, among others,” Lucia says. “This opens a promising new window for using biomimicry to process these insoluble cellulosic materials in a greener way.”

Noureddine Abidi of Texas Tech University is a co-corresponding author of the work.

Source: NC State

WASHINGTON — A plan to establish a commercial space reserve to ensure the U.S. military has access to commercial satellites during conflicts is moving closer to completion, U.S. Space Force leaders said Oct. 18.

Under a program known as Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR), the Space Force will establish agreements with companies to ensure services like satellite communications and remote sensing are prioritized for U.S. government use during national security emergencies.

U.S. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said a plan to implement a commercial space reserve has been approved by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. He described the program as an example of prudent planning so the military rapidly access commercial services if a crisis erupts.

CASR is about “doing the planning and the expectation management before you actually need the capability,” Saltzman said during a fireside chat at the Center for a New American Security.

The strategy identifies “areas that we know we can use commercial augmentation,” he said, such as satellite communications and imagery. 

“In a time of crisis or in a natural disaster, I may need to increase the scale of imagery that’s available,” said Saltzman. 

CASR would “pre-work the contract vehicles, stating how we would get access to services rapidly if we needed to, so that when the crisis occurs, we don’t then start the contracting action and we’ve already done a lot of that legwork.”

Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of the Space Systems Command, said Oct. 18 that the funding for the CASR program would be requested in the 2025 and 2026 budgets. 

“We’ve got permission from the Secretary of the Air Force to move out on that strategy,” Guetlein said at the AFCEA Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles.

“A commercially augmented space reserve is about building capacity for times of crisis or conflict during peacetime,” said Guetlein. “How do I build in the business processes, the relationships, the exercises, the funding during peacetime, so during times of crisis or conflict, we don’t start with an RFP [request for proposals] as our point of departure.”

“We’re hoping that it will be rolled out by the administration this fall,” said Guetlein. “And then the funding will start to roll behind in the 2025 or 2026 timeframe.”

Separately from the CASR program, the Space Force is working on a commercial strategy, or a blueprint for how it will integrate commercial satellite services into routine military activities. 

Saltzman last month said an early draft of the strategy did not pass muster and was being revised. 

“I didn’t think it provided the necessary specificity that would really help industry give us what we need,” he said at the CNAS event. 

The commercial strategy work is led by Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy and Programs Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant.

Saltzman said the blueprint is being updated to “provide some tangible guidance that I think industry is looking to get from us.”

The strategy has to answer basic questions such as, “Do we procure data the same way we procure software?  Are we looking for commercial services or are we looking for commercial assets to be operated by the government? And how do we decide what are the inherently governmental functions that have to be performed by the Space Force, versus services I could outsource?” he added. “We didn’t have really good solid answers.”

The Space Force has established commercial procurement programs for launch services, for example. But Saltzman said there is a need for specific guidance on emerging space industry services — such as rapid-revisit satellite imaging and in-orbit surveillance of space objects — many of which have only become available in recent years.

“I just felt like it was important that we answered those questions first” rather than put out an “aspirational” strategy, said Saltzman. “It’s about getting to the next level of specificity.”

He said he could not provide a specific timeline for when the strategy might be released but is pressing his staff to move as quickly as possible. “I’m pushing hard because I know there’s a hunger for this.” 

Guetlein said the Space Systems Command’s new Commercial Space Office has been laying some of the groundwork for the Space Force’s commercial strategy. 

The command’s commercial office, known as COMSO, set up shop in Chantilly, Virginia, in order to be closer to other defense agencies, Congress and the Pentagon. 

Guetlein noted that Saltzman had put the Space Force’s commercial strategy on pause “because it wasn’t aggressive enough … So he’s asked General Garrant to go back and rewrite that plan to be more aggressive, to get after better partnerships, stronger partnerships.”

COMSO over the past several months has started forging partnerships with industry and identified missions where the Space Force could take advantage of emerging commercial services, such as positioning, navigation, and timing; and space domain awareness, said Guetlein.

The work done by COMSO will support the Space Force strategy, “to make sure we’re aligned across the entire DoD,” he said. 

Guetlein noted that COMSO has acquired about $250 million worth of commercial space data. The commercial satellite communications office “continues to grow like gangbusters,” with 70 different contracts worth $3.6 billion. 

The Space Force’s acquisition executive Frank Calvelli is planning an “architecture day” next month, said Guetlein. “He is personally going to look at how we integrate better across commercial satcom and where does the DoD really need to invest in satcom.”

“That is a mindset shift change across the department that we weren’t able to get through just two years ago,” said Guetlein. “COMSO is leading the way.”

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WASHINGTON — As Axiom Space gears up for its third private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, the company says it has refined the training needed to effectively carry out those missions.

Axiom Space is preparing for its Ax-3 mission, scheduled to launch as soon as January on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. The mission will be commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría with three customers on board: Walter Villadei of Italy, Alper Gezeravcı of Turkey and Marcus Wandt of Sweden.

During a briefing about the mission Oct. 16, López-Alegría and his crewmates said the training for the projected two-week mission is going well, incorporating lessons from the company’s first two missions, including Ax-1 that López-Alegría commanded in 2021.

“It has changed in a fairly significant way,” he said of the training for Ax-3. “We have learned, from the two missions that have preceded this one, how to really optimize the training.” He noted that the training for Ax-1 included activities that “probably weren’t relevant” for the mission and didn’t emphasize “ops products,” or the ability of the crew to manage their time while on the station.

He said that his schedule of experiments would be reduced compared to Ax-1 to give him more time to assist his crewmates and reduce their reliance on the professional astronauts on the station. The company followed a similar approach on the Ax-2 mission in May, commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, and that worked well, he said.

He said SpaceX training for Crew Dragon has become more efficient as well. “I feel like we are asymptotically getting towards that perfect answer, and I would say we are very close to it by the time we did the training on Ax-3.”

Another factor that has helped in the training is that all four members of the crew have backgrounds as military pilots, with Gezeravcı and Villadei active members of their countries’ respective air forces. “This is an amazingly prepared crew. For a private astronaut mission, it’s exceptional,” said López-Alegría. “The level of training and experiences that these folks bring to our crew is really remarkable.”

The ongoing training, which started nearly six months ago, has been supported by their earlier experience in military aircraft, said Gezeravcı. “That was a really big benefit for all of us.”

Villadei, who will be pilot of Ax-3, has additional relevant experience: he flew to space in June on Virgin Galactic’s first commercial SpaceShipTwo mission, Galactic 01, accompanied by two other Italian researches to conduct a suite of experiments on that suborbital flight.

“The Virgin Galactic flight was an amazing experience,” he said. “From a training standpoint, it was very useful to me as a kind of initial test flight,” helping test skills and approaches that could be used on a later flight.

However, he stopped short of recommending a suborbital flight as a requirement for an ISS mission. “It’s not strictly necessary,” he said. “It’s an added value to put together this combination of different flights.”

Wandt is flying through an agreement involving Sweden’s space agency and the European Space Agency. He was selected as a “reserve” astronaut by ESA less than a year ago, able to be called up if a flight opportunity becomes available, and has yet to complete the full ESA astronaut training program.

“It’s been going really fast. I feel very confident, though, and the training has been good,” he said. “When it comes to my training, it’s a little bit backwards: I’m doing the mission training first and then we’re building on extra things that I didn’t have from the European Space Agency in the beginning.”

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A vaccine designed to protect against three different deadly coronaviruses shows success in mouse studies.

The finding demonstrates the viability of the pan-coronavirus vaccine.

As reported in the journal Cell Reports, the single nanoparticle vaccine includes components of a previous vaccine that was shown to protect mice and primates against multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19.

In this study, the vaccine protected mice from SARS-CoV-1, another form of SARS coronavirus that can infect humans, and a MERS coronavirus that has led to periodic, deadly outbreaks around the world.

“We are making important progress toward a broadly protective coronavirus vaccine,” says senior author Kevin O. Saunders, associate director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. “These are pathogens that cause or have the potential to cause significant human infections and loss of life, and a single vaccine that provides protection could slow down or even prevent another pandemic.”

Saunders and colleagues built the tri-valent vaccine using a nanoparticle loaded with a key fragment called a receptor binding domain from each of the coronaviruses. The fragment—a docking site on the virus that enables it to infiltrate the body’s cells—provides enough information for immune cells to build an effective response against actual coronaviruses that enter the body.

In earlier studies in mice and primates, the researchers demonstrated that an earlier iteration of the nanoparticle vaccine was effective against multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants. Human tests are planned next year for a version that carries immunogens to different SARS-CoV-2 strains, including those that have dominated since the original outbreak in late 2019.

The current work expands the components of the vaccine to include an additional SARS-related virus and MERS virus. In lab studies, as well as in mice, the researchers found that the vaccine candidate generated inhibitory immune molecules called antibodies against all three pathogenic human coronavirus types.

Importantly, vaccinated mice did not grow sick when challenged with either SARS-like or MERS-like viruses.

“This study demonstrates proof-of-concept that a single vaccine that protects against both MERS and SARS viruses is an achievable goal,” Saunders says. “Given that one MERS and two SARS viruses have infected humans in the last two decades, the development of universal coronavirus vaccines is a global health priority.”

Additional coauthors are from Duke and the Yale School of Medicine.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, funded the work.

Source: Duke University