Category: Science

HELSINKI — Azerbaijan signed up to China’s International Lunar Research Station project Tuesday, on the sidelines of a major international space conference.

Li Guoping, chief engineer of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Samaddin Asadov, chairman of the Board of Azercosmos, Azerbaijan’s space agency, signed a joint statement on cooperation on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) Oct. 3 during the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), hosted by Azerbaijan, in the capital Baku. CNSA announced the agreement Oct. 8 via a statement on its webpages.   

The agreement, as with a statement released on South Africa joining the ILRS last month, does not provide specifics of the cooperation.

The statement said the agreement will see CNSA and Azercosmos carry out extensive cooperation in the demonstration, implementation, operation and application of the ILRS, as well as training and other areas.

The ILRS project aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s. The initiative is seen as a China-led, parallel project and potential competitor to the NASA-led Artemis Program.

China has now attracted around 15 signatories to its ILRS initiative, according to representatives of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) under the CNSA. However, a list of these partners is not yet available. The partners are known to consist of organizations and institutions as well as countries.

Russia, Venezuela and South Africa have signed up. The Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), Swiss firm nanoSPACE AG, the Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), and the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT) have also signed joint statements. Pakistan is also thought to have signed up.

China and Russia presented a joint ILRS roadmap in 2021 in St. Petersburg. Beijing has however since apparently taken the role of lead of the project since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

China is setting up an organization, named ILRSCO, in the city of Hefei in Anhui province to coordinate the initiative. DSEL said earlier this year that China aims to complete the signing of agreements with space agencies and organizations for founding members of ILRSCO by October.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is growing the number of signatories to its Artemis Accords. Last month Germany became the 29th country to sign up to the Accords, the political underpinning of the Artemis lunar program. 

The Accords have signatories from each continent. A working group from the Accords stated at IAC that it drafted ideas to boost transparency in lunar cooperation.

China is already working on a series of robotic missions to launch later this decade as precursors to the ILRS. The 2026 Chang’e-7 lunar south pole mission and 2028 Chang’e-8 in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission will lay the basis for the larger plan, according to CNSA. NARIT will be involved in Chang’e-7 through the Sino-Thai Sensor Package for Space Weather Global Monitoring payload.

China will next year also launch Chang’e-6, which will be a first-ever lunar far side sample return mission. Pakistan will be involved in a CubeSat to fly with the mission.

A relay satellite named Queqiao-2 will be launched ahead of that mission early in 2024. The Queqiao-2 satellite will provide communications support for the Chang’e-6, 7 and 8 missions.

Russia’s Luna 25 mission was nominally part of the ILRS. That mission launched in August this year, but crashed into the moon during an anomalous orbital maneuver.

Azercosmos was founded in 2010. It operates a pair of telecommunications satellites, while communication with its only remote sensing satellite, Azersky, launched in 2014, was lost in April this year. Chinese commercial telemetry, tracking and command firm Emposat operates two ground stations in Azerbaijan.

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WASHINGTON — When Russia launched the Luch Olymp K-2 geostationary spy satellite in March, analysts expected it would carry out signals intelligence-gathering missions much like its predecessor Luch Olymp-K-1 that has been in orbit since 2014. 

Slingshot Aerospace, a space data analytics firm focused on spaceflight safety, this week unveiled data that shows that Russia’s new spy satellite, also known as Luch-2, is conducting operations akin to those of its predecessor Luch-1, raising fresh concerns about espionage in space. 

The company’s space tracking software identified multiple maneuvers by Luch-2 that are highly reminiscent of the behavior exhibited by Luch-1, which in 2015 caused an international stir when it parked itself between two Intelsat commercial communications satellites for five months.

A series of manuevers that began Sept. 26, according to Slingshot, show that Luch-2 drifted westward at a speed of about 1 degree per day before slowing down Oct. 2 to visit another “neighborhood” of GEO spacecraft. 

Looking for abnormal behaviors

Slingshot’s vice president of strategy and policy Audrey Schaffer said these maneuvers were detected by the company’s automated software that tracks all satellites. 

“We weren’t necessarily watching this satellite. We were just looking for things that stood out, for abnormal behaviors,” Schaffer told SpaceNews. 

Slingshot did not disclose what satellites Luch-2 might have been spying on. But Schaffer said this information could be helpful for any government or commercial satellite operator concerned about security in space.

“We think that these insights are actionable, from a military and from a commercial perspective,” she said. Luch-2 does not get close enough to any satellite to set off a collision warning from the U.S. Space Force, known as a conjunction alert. “But just because it’s not close enough to be a safety threat doesn’t mean it doesn’t potentially present a security threat,” Schaffer said.

“If you are a commercial communication satellite company you may not want a Russian spy satellite listening in on your communications,” she added. 

According to Michael Clonts, director of space domain awareness initiatives at Kratos Defense, Luch-2 carried similar payloads to the earlier model. However, “with a decade of additional technology development available to Luch-2, it likely packs more advanced signals intelligence capabilities and operational techniques.”

Slingshot describes its space tracking software as a “machine learning-based object profiling engine” that pulls data from multiple sources. 

The system tracked Luch-2’s westward drift and predicted where it was headed, said Schaffer. 

Capabilities to predict a satellite’s trajectory are not easy to achieve, she  said. “The difficult aspect of maneuver detection is that when you look backwards, historically it can be obvious that a satellite maneuvered.” In real time, however, “it’s difficult to tell if a satellite is maneuvering on purpose or if it has been misplaced by data tracking systems.”

Slingshot’s algorithm was able to detect Luch-2’s maneuvers as soon as they were available in the data without having to look back at long-term patterns, she said.

The algorithm is trained to decide what is normal or abnormal for a particular orbit and sends a notification when something is unusual and needs to be looked at. “So we went back and tasked our sensors to essentially validate that what we were seeing from our algorithms was correct,” Schaffer added.

Inspector satellites like Luch-1 and Luch-2 are expected to drift by, take pictures, and continue on their way. A signals intelligence spy satellite will loiter for long periods of time near its target satellite or group of satellites. “That’s what we saw historically with the original Luch-1 satellite,” Schaffer said.

Luch-2 stayed in the same area from May until late September, when it started to drift, she said. “The takeaway is that its pattern of life is very similar to the pattern of life of the original Luch.”

Schaffer, a former White House space policy official, said these types of satellite manuevers raise suspicion. “There are a number of international conversations going on right now about what are the right norms of responsible behavior in outer space,” she said. “And activities like this should absolutely be considered when the international community develops those rules of the road that apply to space operators.”

It’s also notable, she said, that private companies are providing insights and space domain awareness that previously were only accessible from military systems. “But that’s really not true anymore,” Schaffer said. “You have companies that are generating their own space domain awareness data with their own telescope networks.”

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SAN FRANCISCO — In a dramatic expansion of the Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program, NASA announced Oct. 2 that seven companies will compete for contracts with a maximum value of $476 million over five years.

Airbus DS Geo, Capella Space, GHGSat, Maxar, PlanetiQ, Spire Global and Umbra were selected under the fixed-price, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to provide Earth observation data and services. The contract includes an option to extend services for an additional six months.

NASA established a Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition pilot program in 2017 to see whether commercial observations could augment or complement government datasets. Once the space agency realized the datasets were valuable, contracting mechanisms and licensing agreements were established to ensure ongoing access.

In the past, NASA has purchased commercial Earth observation data from Maxar, Planet, Spire and Teledyne Brown Engineering. In addition, NASA purchases high-resolution Digital Elevation Models produced by the EarthDEM Project, a collaboration that includes the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center, Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center, and the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and based on Maxar satellite data.

NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program is provides data for NASA’s Earth science research and application activities. NASA is particularly eager to obtain “data acquired by commercial satellite constellations, affording the means of complementing NASA’s Earth observations data with higher resolutions, increased temporal frequency or other novel capabilities,” according to the NASA news release.

Early in the Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program, NASA struggled with end user license agreements that constrained data sharing with other government agencies and international partners. Under the new contract, NASA will acquire data under “end user license agreements to enable broad levels of dissemination and shareability of the commercial data,” according to the news release.

Under a separate $18.5 million contract, NASA extended its purchase agreement for Planet Earth imagery through 2024. The contract gives researchers funded by U.S. civil agencies and agency employees access to PlanetScope, imagery captured by more than 130 satellites in Planet’s Dove constellation.

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WASHINGTON — The head of the Space Development Agency — a U.S. Space Force organization that uses unconventional procurement methods to acquire satellites and build a space network — is pushing back at critics who presumably don’t want the military acquisition culture to change, SDA’s director Derek Tournear said in a recent social media post. 

“Recently, I was told to stop playing the role of ‘bad cop’ on behalf of the Space Development Agency and our mission. It was suggested that I might damage relationships among my peers,” Tournear wrote. 

Established just four years ago, SDA is moving ahead with an ambitious plan to build a low-Earth orbit constellation of communications and missile-detection satellites by relying on a broad base of suppliers for commercially produced spacecraft and laser communications terminals. 

In its early days SDA faced opposition from Air Force leaders and skepticism on Capitol Hill. But it has since gained widespread support and has been recognized as a “constructive disruptor for space acquisition.”

SDA’s boss Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, has championed the agency’s methods of buying satellites as a model for the Space Force to follow in other programs.

“We really want to go fast, we have got to stop the traditional way of building satellites, and the sort of large seven-year cost-plus contracts and go to smaller systems that are more proliferated,” Calvelli said last year at an industry symposium.  

Blowback from the acquisition bureaucracy

Tournear’s post suggests the recent blowback is coming from inside the DoD bureaucracy.

He said SDA’s unconventional approach has helped achieve some progress — with two successful satellite launches achieved in 2023 — but is being met with resistance from defenders of the established system.

“While I’m proud of SDA’s progress, the path to two successful launches was paved with the challenges — and yes, sometimes scars — of building an acquisition ecosystem within, and opposed to, the status quo,” Tournear wrote. 

There are entrenched interests within the defense procurement establishment that feel threatened by SDA’s model, he noted. But to deliver technologies that DoD needs to modernize its space architecture, “we have no choice but to change,” Tournear added. “Change is hard; change is necessary. And nothing fights change like the paralyzing behavior of going along to get along.”

Traditional DoD space programs have focused on developing technologies no matter how long it took, Tournear added. “SDA flips that paradigm to deliver what is ready on schedule — when the warfighter needs it.” For that reason, “constructive disruption required someone to play the ‘bad cop.’”

Tournear in his post staunchly defended SDA’s approach, emphasizing that military forces need access to cutting-edge technologies in a timely manner and that the traditional methods often have fallen short.

“I cannot stand by and watch wasteful, thoughtless procedures that will only benefit our enemies by delaying delivery to the warfighter,” he wrote. “Calling that out won’t always make friends, but it will make our nation stronger.”

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Climate change that has occurred over the past 260 million years and brought about mass extinctions of life during these periods was due to massive volcanic eruptions and subsequent environmental crises, a team of scientists concludes .

Their new analysis, which appears in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, shows the eruptions released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to extreme greenhouse climate warming and bringing about near-lethal or lethal conditions to our planet.

Significantly, these phenomena—which occur every 26 to 33 million years—coincided with critical changes in the planet’s orbit in the solar system that follow the same cyclical patterns, the researchers add.

“The Earth’s geologic processes, long considered to be strictly determined by events within the planet’s interior, may in fact be controlled by astronomical cycles in the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy,” says senior author Michael Rampino, a professor in New York University’s biology department. “Crucially, these forces have converged many times in the Earth’s past to foreshadow drastic changes to our climate.”

The researchers caution that their conclusions have no bearing on 20th- and 21st-century climate change, which scientists have shown to be driven by human activity. The studied pulses of volcanic eruptions last occurred about 16 million years ago.

However, the analysis nonetheless supports the well-established impact of carbon dioxide emissions on climate warming.

The scientists focused on continental flood-basalt (CFB) eruptions—the largest volcanic eruptions of lava on Earth, with flows covering nearly half a million square miles—and other major geological events over the past 260 million years.

These included ocean anoxic events—periods when the Earth’s oceans were depleted of oxygen, thereby creating toxic waters—as well as hyper-thermal climate pulses, or rapid rises in global temperatures, and resulting periods of mass extinctions of marine and non-marine life.

They found that CFB eruptions frequently coincided with these other lethal geological phenomena, illuminating the larger impact of volcanic activity. The connection with astronomy is evidenced by the commonality of the multi-million-year regular cycles of volcanism and extreme climate with known cycles of the Earth’s orbit in our solar system and in the Milky Way galaxy.

The authors found that the agreement between the geological and astrophysical cycles is much too close to be merely a chance occurrence. A major remaining question, they add, is determining how the planet’s astronomical movements perturb the Earth’s internal geological engines.

“This is an unexpected connection and predicts a convergence of both astronomy and geology—events that take place on the Earth do so in the context of our astronomical environment,” Rampino says.

Additional researchers are from the Carnegie Institute for Science and Barnard College.

Source: NYU

A new, bio-inspired drug restores the effectiveness of immune cells in fighting cancer, researchers report.

In mouse models of melanoma, bladder cancer, leukemia, and colon cancer, the drug slows the growth of tumors, extends lifespan, and boosts the efficacy of immunotherapy. The research, published in the journal Cancer Cell, could be a game changer for many cancer patients.

Many cancers delete a stretch of DNA called 9p21, which is the most common deletion across all cancers, occurring in 25%-50% of certain cancers such as melanoma, bladder cancer, mesothelioma, and some brain cancers. Scientists have long known that cancers with the 9p21 deletion mean worse outcomes for patients and resistance to immunotherapies—the treatment strategies designed to supercharge a patient’s natural immune response to cancer.

The deletion helps cancer cells avoid getting detected and wiped out by the immune system, in part by prompting the cancer to pump out a toxic compound called MTA that impairs normal functioning of immune cells and also blocks the effectiveness of immunotherapies.

“In animal models, our drug lowers MTA back down to normal, and the immune system comes back on,” says Everett Stone, a research associate professor in the molecular biosciences department and associate professor of oncology at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin who led the work.

“We see a lot more T cells around the tumor, and they’re in attack mode. T cells are an important immune cell type, like a SWAT team that can recognize tumor cells and pump them full of enzymes that chew up the tumor from the inside out.”

Stone envisions the cancer drug being used in combination with immunotherapies to boost their effectiveness.

The 9p21 deletion leads to the loss of some key genes in cancer cells. Gone are a pair of genes that produce cell cycle regulators—proteins that keep healthy cells growing and dividing at a slow, steady rate.

When those genes are lost, cells can grow unchecked. That’s what makes them cancerous. Also deleted is a housekeeping gene that produces an enzyme that breaks down the toxin MTA. It’s this loss, according to Stone, that lets cancer cells acquire a new superpower: the ability to deactivate the immune system.

“Cancer gets a two-for-one when it loses both of these genes,” Stone says. “It loses the brakes that normally keep it from growing in an uncontrolled manner. And then at the same time, it disarms the body’s police force. So, it becomes a much more aggressive and malignant kind of cancer.”

To create their drug candidate, Stone and his colleagues started with the helpful enzyme that’s naturally produced by the body to break down MTA and then added flexible polymers.

“It’s already a really good enzyme, but we needed to optimize it to last longer in the body,” Stone says. “If we injected just the natural enzyme, it would be eliminated within a few hours. In mice, our modified version stays in circulation for days; in humans it will last even longer.”

The researchers plan to do more safety tests on their drug, called PEG-MTAP, and are seeking funding to take it into human clinical trials.

The study’s co-first authors are Donjeta Gjuka, a former UT postdoctoral researcher and currently a scientist at Takeda Oncology, and Elio Adib, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and currently a resident physician at Mass General Brigham.

The National Cancer Institute, the Doris Duke Foundation, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Joan and Herb Kelleher Charitable Foundation, the Kidney Cancer Association, the V Foundation, and the US Department of Defense supported the work.

University investigators involved in this research have submitted required financial disclosure forms with the University. Stone and Gjuka are inventors of two patents related to this work owned by The University of Texas at Austin.

Source: UT Austin

TAMPA, Fla. — United Launch Alliance launched two prototypes Oct. 6 for the more than 3,200 Project Kuiper broadband satellites Amazon plans to build and deploy over the next six years.

An Atlas 5 rocket carrying the satellites lifted off 2:06 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and dropped them off in low Earth orbit about 18 minutes later.

The launch was delayed six minutes following an alert that its trajectory would have passed too close to another object already in space. 

It was the 99th launch of an Atlas 5, and the eighth time the rocket has flown in its 501 configuration after debuting April 2010. 

It is also the 20th mission the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture has performed for a commercial client, out of 158 launches since ULA’s formation in 2006.

Updated 3:15 p.m. Eastern with social media posts from PLD Space.

WASHINGTON — Spanish company PLD Space launched its first suborbital rocket Oct. 6, with the company calling the flight a success despite reaching a lower altitude than planned.

The company’s Miura 1 rocket lifted off from the El Arenosillo Experimentation Centre, a test site in southwestern Spain operated by the country’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology, at 8:19 p.m. Eastern (2:19 a.m. local time Oct. 7.) The rocket flew on a suborbital trajectory for 306 seconds before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The company said in a statement it was working to recover the rocket from the ocean.

The rocket reached a peak altitude of 46 kilometers on the flight. In a press kit issued before the launch, PLD Space said the rocket had a planned apogee of 80 kilometers and a flight time of 12 minutes.

PLD Space did not initially disclose why Miura 1 fell short of its planned altitude but called the flight a success, stating that the vehicle achieved “all technical objectives” related to its performance.

In a later series of social media posts Oct. 7, Raúl Torres, co-founder of PLD Space and launch director for the mission, said that the company changed the trajectory for “safety reasons,” lowering the apogee and increasing the portion of the flight over the Atlantic. “This was done to mitigate the affected area in the event of vehicle failure,” he wrote. He did not state when the company made that decision.

“All vehicle subsystems performance was nominal, without any significant deviation or degradation of trajectory. Vehicle flown perfectly,” he added.

PLD Space has offered Miura 1 for suborbital microgravity research, and this launch carried a payload for Germany’s Centre for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity, or ZARM. The company, though, considered Miura 1 primarily a technology demonstrator for its Miura 5 small launch vehicle in development. It said Miura 1 will help validate 70% of the design and technology planned for Miura 5.

“We developed Miura 1 as a steppingstone to accelerate the technological advancement of Miura 5. With this mission’s success, our team is poised to rapidly progress towards the inaugural flight of Miura 5 – our ultimate goal,” said Raúl Verdú, co-founder and business development manager at PLD Space.

The launch makes PLD Space the “frontrunner in the European space race,” claimed Ezequiel Sánchez, PLD Space’s chief executive, but the company is unlikely to be the first European launch startup to reach orbit. The company is currently projecting a first launch of Miura 5 in 2025 from Kourou, French Guiana.

Several other companies are planning first launches before then. Germany’s Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are developing vehicles with first launches projected to take place by next year. In the United Kingdom, Orbex and Skyrora are also working on small launch vehicles, although without clear dates for their first launches.

PLD Space has said they are focused more on reliability than being first. “We see a race, of course, to be the first one,” Verdú said in a panel discussion at World Satellite Business Week Sept. 12. “But I see the most challenging part is to be reliable. This is why we made the decision at PLD Space to develop a demonstrator. We learned so many things in Miura 1.”

The company had hoped to launch Miura 1 earlier this year. A launch attempt in late May was called off because of strong upper-level winds. A second attempt June 16 was aborted just as the vehicle’s engine ignited when an umbilical cable failed to separate from the rocket as expected. PLD Space concluded that the cable had separated, but a tenth of a second later than planned, enough to trigger an abort by the flight computer.

The company said in late June that it would postpone the next launch attempt until at least September to comply with restrictions in Spanish law intended to prevent wildfires.

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Researchers have found an inexpensive, sustainable alternative to mechanical cooling with refrigerants in hot and arid climates, and a way to mitigate dangerous heat waves during electricity blackouts.

As the planet gets hotter, the need for cool living environments is becoming more urgent. But air conditioning is a major contributor to global warming since units use potent greenhouse gases and lots of energy.

The researchers set out to answer how to achieve a new benchmark in passive cooling inside naturally conditioned buildings in hot climates such as Southern California.

They examined the use of roof materials that radiate heat into the cold universe, even under direct sunlight, and how to combine them with temperature-driven ventilation. These cool radiator materials and coatings are often used to stop roofs overheating. Researchers have also used them to improve heat rejection from chillers. But there is untapped potential for integrating them into architectural design more fully, so they can not only reject indoor heat to outer space in a passive way, but also drive regular and healthy air changes.

“We found we could maintain air temperatures several degrees below the prevailing ambient temperature, and several degrees more below a reference ‘gold standard’ for passive cooling,” says Remy Fortin, lead author and PhD candidate at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. “We did this without sacrificing healthy ventilation air changes.”

This was a considerable challenge, considering air exchanges are a source of heating when the aim is to keep a room cooler than the exterior.

The researchers hope the findings will be used to positively affect communities suffering from dangerous climate heating and heat waves.

“We hope that materials scientists, architects, and engineers will be interested in these results, and that our work will inspire more holistic thinking for how to integrate breakthroughs in radiative cooling materials with simple but effective architectural solutions,” says Salmaan Craig, principal investigator for the project and assistant professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.

The research appears in Cell Reports Physical Science. Additional researchers from McGill University, UCLA, and Princeton contributed to the work.

Source: McGill University

TAMPA, Fla. — Propulsion problems on four satellites using the same kind of power modules are expected to result in at least $50 million in claims for insurers already facing more than $800 million in losses this year following two major spacecraft failures.

According to multiple insurance sources, Yahsat’s Al Yah 3, Avanti Communications’ Hylas 4, and Northrop Grumman’s two Mission Extension Vehicles (MEV-1 and MEV-2) are operating with reduced power to their thrusters following a problem with onboard Power Processing Units (PPUs).

The PPUs from Aerojet Rocketdyne provide the electrical power their thrusters need for station-keeping in geostationary orbit (GEO). One of the sources said Al Yah 3, Hylas 4, and MEV-2 have each lost one of two onboard PPUs since the issue emerged in 2022. The youngest of these spacecraft, MEV-2, launched in 2020.

While reducing the voltage remaining PPUs supply thrusters appears to have stopped the power modules from failing altogether, insurers say the workaround will have some impact on their 15-year design life.

Mary Engola, a spokesperson for space propulsion and power systems at Aerojet Rocketdyne — recently sold to L3Harris — referred questions to Northrop Grumman, which built the satellites based on its Orbital ATK-heritage GEOStar-3 platform. Northrop Grumman spokesperson Jessica Kershaw declined to comment.

All four affected spacecraft were built at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Dulles, Virginia, and launched to geostationary orbit between 2018 and 2020. The PPU problem only affects satellites built using the hybrid chemical-and-electric version of the GEOStar-3 satellite bus.

Source: Radar-Space by McKinsey. All data is collected from publicly available sources; no privately sourced company information is included in this analysis.

UAE-based Yahsat did not respond to requests for comment about the health of Al Yah 3, the first satellite built on the GEOStar-3 platform. Al Yah 3 was launched short of its target orbit by an Ariane 5 rocket in January 2018, requiring the satellite to burn through fuel reserves to get back on track in an initial hit to its service life.

Avanti’s Hylas 4 launched in April 2018 on an Ariane 5. An Avanti spokesperson said all of the British operator’s satellites “are healthy and operating normally” but would not elaborate.

An insurance source said the expected reduction in service life for Hylas 4 is not enough to trigger an insurance claim.

Northrop Grumman’s MEV-1 and MEV-2 were launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and are currently extending the missions of two separate Intelsat satellites they are attached to in GEO.

Operating under Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics in-orbit-servicing subsidiary, the MEVs are using their onboard propulsion so their fuel-drained clients can maintain station-keeping.

MEV-1 and MEV-2 docked with Intelsat 901 and Intelsat 10-02 in 2020 and 2021, respectively, and are under contract with these satellites for five years before undocking to serve other customers that SpaceLogistics has yet to announce.

“We don’t anticipate any changes to the MEV missions for Intelsat,” Intelsat spokesperson Melissa Longo said.

David Todd, head of space content at analysis firm Seradata, told SpaceNews the MEV issue is likely to result in a $50 million insurance claim. Yahsat made a claim of around $115 million for Al Yah-3’s earlier launch issue, he added, which would likely reduce a payout resulting from its PPU trouble.

Some insurers will add the PPU claims to the roughly $300 million in losses racked up last year for accounting reasons, which would still result in a profit for 2022.

This year is a different story. Insurers expect total loss claims totaling $770 million from just ViaSat-3 Americas and Inmarsat-6 F2 alone, in addition to $40 million from Arcturus, and around $25 million from Azersky/Spot-7.

One insurer said the Capella Space radar imaging satellite lost in a Rocket Lab Electron launch failure Sept. 19 will also likely result in a claim of around $5 million, and that a payload from remote sensing firm Changguang Satellite Technology on the Chinese Ceres-1 rocket that failed Sept. 21 was also insured.

Capella spokesperson Sarah Preston confirmed the company’s Acadia 2 satellite was insured but declined to comment on the amount.

Insurers had at one point expected $550 million in total premium income in 2023 — which could be reduced if launches are delayed, meaning the market is on track for a heavy loss for the year.

While many claims are still being finalized, the space insurance market has not seen this level of potential annual losses for two decades, and sources say several underwriters are considering withdrawing from the sector in a move that would reduce capacity for covering sizable risks.

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