Category: Science

NEW YORK — Despite an overwhelming vote of support by the United Nations General Assembly six months ago, advocates of a moratorium on one type of anti-satellite tests say they are still working to get more countries to adopt it.

The U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution in December 2022 encouraging countries not to conduct destructive direct-ascent (DA) ASAT tests. A total of 155 nations voted in favor of the resolution while nine, including China and Russia, voted against it. Nine other nations, including India, abstained.

“That kind of vote count indicates a very strong base of support,” said Audrey Schaffer, director of space policy at the National Security Council, during a June 13 presentation at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability here.

However, she noted that the resolution was non-binding. “It doesn’t commit states to the norm. It encourages states to make national commitments to this norm,” she said. “To truly establish an internationally recognized norm banning destructive DA-ASAT missile testing, we need a critical mass of nations to actually make the commitment.”

So far, 13 nations have made that commitment, most recently Italy in April. “Our work in curtailing these irresponsible acts is not finished,” she said. “We have to continue the drumbeat of nations making commitments to this emerging international norm.”

The United States was the first to commit to no longer conduct destructive DA-ASAT tests in April 2022, five months after Russia conducted such a test, destroying the defunct Cosmos 1408 satellite and creating thousands of pieces of debris. Vice President Kamala Harris, who announced the ban, encouraged other nations to make similar commitments.

The first to join the United States was Canada in May 2022. “It is simple to recognize. It is easy to attribute. Given that it’s very detrimental, this was one of the top threats that needed to be addressed,” Maryse Ducharme, special advisor on space for Canada’s Department of National Defence, said of Canada’s decision to adopt the test ban, during a conference panel June 14.

She agreed that more nations need to make similar commitments. That could, she said, lead to a legally binding international ban on such tests, which she said Canada would support.

Hyerin Kim, second secretary in the disarmament and non-proliferation division of South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a June 14 conference speech that discussions like those held by a U.N.-chartered working group on reducing space threats helped create a “whole-of-government common understanding” on the dangers posed by destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests. South Korea formally committed not to conduct such tests in October 2022.

Kim said South Korea was pleased 155 nations voted in favor of the U.N. resolution in December. “We understand that other states that voted for the resolution but have not yet joined the commitment need some time to thoroughly review the domestic effects” of such a commitment, she said. “Korea is also making efforts to raise awareness of the danger posed by ASAT testing.”

While some work to get more countries to commit not to conduct destructive DA-ASAT tests, others are looking to go further. “These are wonderful first steps, but we must do more as a community to work towards a ban on all ASATs,” said Mark Mozena, vice president of government affairs at Planet, which operates hundreds of satellites at risk from orbital debris, during a June 13 talk.

He said an overall ban would address criticism that a moratorium does not hurt the United States, having previously tested ASATs. “We can push past this criticism by pushing for binding international agreements to ban all debris-creating activities and weapons and not just limit the testing of those systems,” he said. “We need to move to a prohibition and not a voluntary moratorium. Working towards an international prohibition to ban all use of kinetic ASATs is a worthwhile goal which will help protect space for generations.”

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Updated at 10:30 p.m. Eastern with Firefly statement.

WASHINGTON — Firefly Aerospace has agreed to buy Virgin Orbit’s remaining assets — inventory at two company production facilities — as part of Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy proceedings.

In June 15 filings with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware overseeing Virgin Orbit’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, representatives of the companies said that Firefly agreed to buy the assets that has not been sold at auction in May for $3.8 million.

The assets, designated Segment 5 in bankruptcy proceedings, are the inventory at Virgin Orbit’s two facilities in Long Beach, California. That includes engines and other components built or in production for the LauncherOne vehicles that Virgin Orbit manufactured there. It also includes two engines in storage at a Virgin Orbit test site in Mojave, California.

That inventory was not sold at a May 22 auction that disposed of most of the rest of the company’s assets. In that auction, Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 and related equipment was acquired by Stratolaunch, the company’s main production facility in Long Beach was sold to Rocket Lab and the Mojave test site was purchased by Launcher. A liquidation company, Inliper Acquisition LLC, bought the machinery and equipment in a second Long Beach facility.

At the time of the auction, Virgin Orbit said that it “deemed it in the best interests of the Debtors’ estates” not to sell the inventory at the Long Beach facilities. In one of the June 15 filings, a representative of Ducera Partners LLC, hired by Virgin Orbit to assist in the sale of the assets, said that Firefly made a bid for the inventory assets at the auction but at “a level that was not acceptable.”

Negotiations continued after the auction with several parties, concluding with the $3.8 million offer from Firefly. The filings did not disclose the identities of the other parties involved in the discussions for the assets.

It’s unclear what Firefly’s plans for those assets are. The company is developing its own launch vehicle, Alpha, which has flown twice; a third launch is expected in the near future for the U.S. Space Force. The company is also developing lunar landers called Blue Ghost and an orbital transfer vehicle called the Space Utility Vehicle.

“Firefly strategically bid and purchased the Virgin Orbit inventory for the significant cost savings on common off-the-shelf components that we use in our product lines, and the benefit of eliminated supply chain lead-times associated with critical flight components,” Firefly Aerospace said in a statement late June 16. “Firefly will not be utilizing all of the inventory and plans to provide additional information to parties who may be interested in purchasing.”

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SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $87 million in a Series E funding round to support its campaign to gather weather and climate data.

Boston-based Tomorrow.io announced the news June 14 after launching its second satellite, R-2, on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare flight.

Tomorrow.io’s $87M Series E round was led by Activate Capital. Joining the round were RTX Ventures, Seraphim Space and Chemonics. Existing Tomorrow.io investors, SquarePeg Capital, Canaan, ClearVision, JetBlue Ventures and Pitango, also provided funding. 

Tomorrow.io launched its first radar satellite, R-1, April 15. Since then, the company has confirmed that all systems including its space-based radar are functioning well.

“This is the world’s first commercially built weather radar satellite,” Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews. “Only a handful of weather radar satellites have flown” and those were developed by NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA and the European Space Agency.

Soon, Tomorrow.io will begin sharing radar data from R-1 and R-2. Tomorrow.io satellites equipped with microwave sounders are expected to begin launching in 2024.

In addition to weather data, Tomorrow.io radar satellites will provide detailed information on ocean surface winds and sea surface heights. “Altimetry is a hidden capability of the instrument,” Goffer said.

Military Applications

To date, Tomorrow.io has received more than $30 million in contracts from the Defense Department.

In May, the company won $10.3 million in U.S. Space Force funding for two weather satellites. The money, awarded through the Defense Department’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program, will “augment the existing commercially-owned, managed, and sustained weather constellation to support weather data-as-a-service use by the military,” according to a May 22 news release.

Tomorrow.io is also one of five companies that won contracts to demonstrate the integration of commercial data into the U.S. Air Force Weather Virtual Private Cloud. 

In terms of private capital, Tomorrow.io’s previous funding round, Series D, was completed in 2021 when the company was known as ClimaCell.

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To get kids into science for the long haul, new findings suggest it’s best to engage them alongside their families.

The finding runs counter to the current framework, in which children attend science-related summer camps and after-school programs apart from their families. That approach may diminish the long-term potential of what they learn.

“We wanted to see if we could support families as a whole, as opposed to giving a student a really amazing one-off experience and sending them home to parents who potentially aren’t familiar with the content or don’t know how to help them pursue classes they could take on the subject,” says lead author Megan Ennes, assistant curator of museum education at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Ennes and coauthors report their findings in the journal Research in Science Education.

In partnership with North Carolina State University, the researchers based their study on a family science program hosted at three museums. Over the course of 10 months, families met on weekends for science-themed events, beginning each day with a communal meal.

Afterward, the cohort participated in hands-on activities and attended an information session led by professionals with careers in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM), giving families first-hand accounts of what it’s like to work in those fields. A local teen coding club demonstrated the nuances of programming by having families construct a Rube Goldberg machine in one session, and an astronaut visited to discuss the promise and perils of space travel in another.

During an event with a focus on local wildlife, an ornithologist helped families capture birds with mist nets and band the ones that hadn’t been caught before to monitor their populations. Shared experience strengthened these formative activities.

“After the bird banding, one of the parents bought a feeder so they could continue talking about birds at home,” Ennes says. “Our goal wasn’t to convince students to become scientists, because not everyone wants that. But if we can help families see science as something they do for fun together, then we can help ensure they have a lifelong engagement with it.”

The museums intentionally recruited families from low socioeconomic backgrounds, including groups that have been historically underrepresented in STEM careers. According to a 2018 report by the Pew Research Center, 11% of jobs in the United States are held by African Americans, compared with only 9% in STEM. The gap is even wider among Hispanics and Asians, who respectively make up 16% and 17% of the workforce but hold only 7% and 10% of STEM jobs.

The researchers also focus the program’s content and activities geared toward elementary school students, who are often more perceptive of the natural world around them than their older peers.

“Most kids have an innate interest in science,” Ennes says. “For them, it’s about curiosity and wonder, but research shows that as they make their way through middle school, there’s a significant decline in who remains interested and chooses to take optional science classes in high school. So we wanted to focus on upper elementary school, where children still have that curiosity, so that we could build a support system around it.”

Children who participated in the program were more likely to envision themselves as scientists in the future than the students in the control group, who attended regular after-school programs during the same time period. Program participants also increasingly saw science as something they’d continue to use and engage with in the future, compared with children in the control group, whose perception of the importance of science waned throughout the year.

And despite the focus on younger students, the programs benefits also extended to other family members. Through exit surveys and personal correspondence, the authors noted that families began visiting other museums in their free time, and the program sparked or renewed an interest in science in siblings and parents.

“By designing programs for the family we are able to build in extended support for STEM interests,” says study coauthor Gail Jones, a professor of science education at North Carolina State University. “Our families reported changing holiday gifts to include more gifts that build STEM interests; they reported spending more time exploring science together at home; and they sought out new experiences for STEM in their community.”

One parent told Ennes that their seventh-grade student had failed their science classes through most of their schooling. After engaging in science activities with their family for a year, the student not only brought their grade up to an A but also received an award for academic achievement from their school as well. A sibling from another family applied to become a museum volunteer, and three parents made the decision to go back to school and potentially obtain a degree in science.

Scientists are often portrayed as lone mavericks who make ground-breaking discoveries, but according to Ennes, engaging as a community is much closer to how scientists actually operate.

“Some of the greatest challenges and opportunities our society is faced with will be solved by teams rather than by individuals,” she says. “Helping families see science as something they do together with a community can help build 21st-century skills needed to be successful in science and society, such as collaboration and flexibility. It also builds a supportive network to allow youth and families to explore new careers and lifelong hobbies related to science.”

Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation.

Source: University of Florida

LOS ANGELES – The UK Space Agency has a direct message on space sustainability.

“We’re going to stop making it worse. And we’re going to start making it better,” Julie Black, UK Space Agency director of missions and capability for discovery and sustainability, said June 13 at the Secure World Foundation’s Space Sustainability Summit.

Toward that goal, the UK Space Agency is continuing to encourage and prioritize space sustainability, both domestically and internationally.

“A cross-agency space sustainability program is designed to mitigate the risks caused by space debris and promote the responsible use of space through a combination of regulation, standards development technology development, and national and international missions,” Black said.

Active Debris Removal

For example, the UK divisions of Japan-based Astroscale and Switzerland-based ClearSpace are conducting design studies for a UK mission in 2026 to deorbit a piece of UK space debris.

“Crucially, at the end of that mission, the service that will be refuelable and will be ready to be used again,” Black said.

In 2028 the UK plans to send a satellite to repair, replenish or refuel a UK spacecraft. And by the end of the decade, the UK intends “to have developed orbital assembly or manufacturing, where we’re using the spacecraft previously launched to remove debris or perform the servicing mission,” Black said.

Investing in companies working to address space sustainability through innovation is a UK Space Agency priority, Black said.

Space Surveillance and Tracking

For the first time, the UK is establishing a space surveillance and tracking service for UK-licensed satellite operators. The service will warn operators of potential collisions so they can maneuver as necessary.

International partnerships with the European Space Agency and global organizations will help the UK achieve its space sustainability goals, Black said.

The UK intends to “be a thought leader by championing change, but we just can’t do that alone,” Black said. “We’re here to work together as sustainability champions to take collective action now, to mitigate the effects reduce the burden on future generations and ultimately, to ensure the safe and responsible use of space.”

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WASHINGTON — The Space Force awarded data analytics company Palantir $110.3 million in contract extensions for the company’s cloud-based data services.

The Space Systems Command announced June 15 it has added one more year to Palantir’s existing contracts for data-as-a-service. Under a project called Warp Core, the Space Force since 2021 has used the company’s cloud platform and analytics services to aggregate large amounts of data from disparate sources.

The one-year contract extensions include:

• $58.4 million for automatic data ingestion across the Department of the Air Force, continually pushing personnel, equipment, planning, health and other readiness data sources into a common data foundation. 
• $32.7 million for commercial software licenses in support of Space Command and Control (C2) and space situational awareness for users at the National Space Defense Center and the Combined Space Operations Center. This contract also enables the platform to ingest Special Access Program data. 
• $19.2 million for data services in support of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command. This contract allows the commands’ operations centers to ingest data from across DoD and combatant commands for joint all-domain command and control. 

Under these data-as-a-service contracts, the Space Force is transitioning legacy data stovepipes into the Warp Core data analytics platform.

Warp Core is based on the Palantir Data platform that integrates and manages data from disparate sources.

According to the Space Systems Command, Warp Core “provides a common data interface, and enables better data sharing, streamlining of manual reporting processes and decommissioning of legacy systems.”

Industry analyst Louie DiPalma, from the William Blair market research firm, estimated that, before these latest contract extensions, Palantir has been awarded more than $195 million in contracts for the Warp Core project since it started in 2021.

DiPalma noted that the new contract extensions for Palantir, although significant, are not guaranteed to continue indefinitely as the Space Force recently added new vendors to its data-as-a-service program.

According to DiPalma, “going forward, growing the long-term revenue for Palantir’s Space Force program is at risk because the Space Force in March added 17 other vendors to the $900 million IDIQ contract, and only extended Palantir for one year rather than a customary multi-year agreement.”

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WASHINGTON — The former chief executive of Spaceflight has joined a major law firm to lead its efforts in supporting the commercial space industry.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati announced June 15 that Curt Blake had joined its Seattle office as senior of counsel as the firm starts a NewSpace industry group serving a growing number of clients in the industry.

Blake was co-founder and chief executive of Spaceflight Inc., stepping down earlier this year. Spaceflight, which arranged launches of smallsats on a variety of rockets and developed the Sherpa line of orbital transfer vehicles, was acquired by Firefly Aerospace June 8.

“I’m here to help kickstart and expand an already existing practice,” Blake said in an interview. Wilson Sonsini has several space companies as clients, including Astranis, BlackSky and Slingshot Aerospace. However, there had been no concerted effort to attract space companies and support them.

He said he plans to combine his legal background — he has a law degree and held executive and legal roles at several technology companies before Spaceflight — with his experience running Spaceflight to help other space companies. That ranges from how to work with regulatory agencies to understanding the nuances of launch contracts.

“Having been CEO and living through all the legal issues that came up, I’m pretty knowledgeable on the practical side of things,” he said. “My role is to bring in that practical knowledge from the client’s voice, but also helping with business development.”

While Wilson Sonsini has won business with a number of space companies as part of its overall work in the technology sector, there had been no major effort before now to attract such companies as clients. Blake said his connections in the industry built up during his time at Spaceflight, working with launch providers and companies developing satellites that need launches, will be valuable.

“You’d be talking to pretty much huge swathes of the industry,” he said of his time at Spaceflight, which he believes will help make connections for clients.

“It’s really amazing to see how the NewSpace sector is very much alive with activity and potential,” said Craig Sherman, a partner at Wilson Sonsini who represents companies and investors in the space industry, in a statement about hiring Blake and establishing the new industry group.

“With Curt’s background and the experience that others in the firm have amassed through their own prior space-related roles or client representation, this is an ideal opportunity for us to work more closely with the innovators and established companies leading the way forward in the NewSpace sector,” he said.

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WASHINGTON — Arianespace has postponed the final launch of the Ariane 5, potentially for several weeks, after discovering a potential problem with pyrotechnical systems on the rocket.

Arianespace announced June 15 it was postponing the 117^th and final launch of the Ariane 5, which had been scheduled for June 16 from Kourou, French Guiana. A brief statement, made shortly after rollout of the rocket from its final assembly building to the launch pad was canceled, said only that there was “a risk to the redundancy of a critical function” on the rocket.

In a briefing a few hours later, Pierre-Yves Tissier, chief technical officer at Arianespace, said that the company was informed June 9 of a “nonconformance” in pyrotechnical transmission lines like those used on the Ariane 5 during acceptance testing for another program. X-ray inspections of the Ariane 5 raised doubts about three lines on the vehicle, one used in the separation system for one of the two solid rocket boosters, and two in the “distancing” system used for the boosters.

Both the separation and distancing systems have redundancies to ensure they operate, but Tissier said the company’s policy was to launch only with that redundancy intact. Arianespace then decided to test four lines with characteristics similar to the three suspect lines, with those tests taking place June 14 and 15.

“Because these tests were not all successful, and therefore were not able to give us sufficient confidence on the reliability of the redundancies, it was decided not to go in flight and to replace these doubtful lines,” he said.

Arianespace has not set a new launch date for the mission. Tissier said the company would provide an update in the last week of June about the progress in replacing the lines and planning for a new launch attempt. That suggests a delay of at least a few weeks, and perhaps longer.

The launch, designated VA261 by Arianespace, is carrying two government communications satellites. One, Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit, was built by OHB for the German Space Agency, working in collaboration with other German government agencies. The spacecraft will test advanced communication satellite technologies, such as onboard processing. The other, Syracuse 4B, is a communications satellite built for the French military by a consortium of Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space.

The launch, when it does occur, will mark the retirement of the Ariane 5. The vehicle made its first, unsuccessful launch in June 1996, and suffered a partial failure on its second launch in October 1997 before an unqualified success on its third launch in October 1998. For much of its career, the Ariane 5 was a major player in the commercial launch market, capable of launching two large geostationary communications satellites at a time.

With the retirement of Ariane 5, Europe will be left temporarily without the ability to launch large satellites on its own rockets. Arianespace had expected to overlap the end of the Ariane 5 with the introduction of the Ariane 6, but that vehicle has suffered development delays that pushed back its first launch by several years. Arianespace and the European Space Agency have not announced a new projected date for the first Ariane 6 launch, but executives with OHB, which is a supplier for the program, said in May they now expected the first launch to take place in early 2024.

The Ariane 6 delays are exacerbated by a failure of the Vega C in December 2022 that has grounded that vehicle, as well as the withdrawal of the Soyuz rocket from French Guiana after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This has created what some in Europe have called a “launcher crisis” for the continent.

“It is true that, for some months, we will not have independent access for Europe into space with our own rockets, but this is very temporary,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said June 5 during the Financial Times’ “Investing in Space” event. He noted Vega C should return to flight by the end of the year.

“If, for a couple of months, there’s not a rocket available, it’s bad enough. I’m the first one to call this a crisis,” he said. “But this is not something permanent.”

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WASHINGTON — Members of the House Armed Services Committee in a report last week expressed support for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s use of commercial satellite data. They also asked NGA for details on its plans to integrate commercial data and services into “base programs of record.”

“The committee notes that the domestic commercial satellite imagery industry continues to develop rapidly with new capabilities available from constellations of satellites dedicated to daily monitoring of the entire planet along with a growing domestic geospatial intelligence analytic industry,” said the report by the HASC strategic forces subcommittee.

The congressional language reflects concerns by remote-sensing space companies that U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are not adopting commercial products and services at the pace and scale they hoped. 

Images collected by commercial Earth-watching satellite tracked the movement of troops after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and helped document the toll of the conflict. NGA was at the center of U.S. government efforts to tap commercial providers of satellite imagery to fill the demand.   

The conflict has been a prominent use case for commercial imaging satellites and their power to deliver crucial intelligence. But that has not translated into growing demand for imagery outside of the Ukraine crisis, noted David Gauthier, former director of NGA’s commercial and business operations 

Gauthier, who is now chief strategy officer at the consulting firm GXO Inc., said companies are concerned about the “lagging adoption” of commercial imagery and analytics services by U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. 

“What’s happening in Ukraine is special and it should be a benchmark for all other U.S. combatant commands in areas where the warfighter needs to operate with the benefit of open source intelligence and commercial remote sensing,” Gauthier told SpaceNews.

“My take on this is that the commercial market developed capability faster than the government could react to it,” he added. “Investors put money in, and companies expect the government to purchase more imagery and other commercial data and services faster.”

NGA and the National Reconnaissance Office are the industry’s top customers. The Space Force also has indicated interest in buying more commercial imagery and data analytics services. 

The NRO awarded large contracts to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky and Planet for electro-optical imagery. Commercial remote sensing from space has rapidly expanded into other phenomenologies, like synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio-frequency (RF) mapping and hyperspectral imaging. 

About 20 companies in the SAR, RF and hyperspectral imaging sectors have signed agreements with the NRO to conduct experiments. 

“These companies have small dollar study contracts, and they are all waiting in line for the big programs to deliver data to the U.S. government,” Gauthier said. 

“The NRO has done a good thing by getting out in keeping pace with industry on study contracts. But they’re not following it up with large programs,” he said. “So this is a huge concern for the industry that’s now out on a limb, that has created capacity believing there would be a way to sell that at scale. And so far, there’s nothing in the budget to show us that can happen.”

The concern is notable in the SAR sector, considering that radar became the breakout remote-sensing technology of the Ukraine conflict because it can see through clouds.

“Commercial SAR is making huge headways,” Gauthier said. “And we have study contracts for it, but there’s no significant budget in either the NRO or the Defense Department to actually put commercial SAR in at the scale that will be necessary to sustain our industrial base and to deliver it to the battlefield for mission effects.”

Jason Mallare, vice president of government programs and strategy at Umbra, a commercial operator of SAR imaging satellites, said this nascent sector of the industry is reliant on government support. 

“The U.S. commercial SAR portion of the industrial base is at a critical tipping point and the U.S., as the world’s largest consumer of SAR data, has a need and an opportunity” to take advantage of domestic capabilities, Mallare said in a statement. “We are working closely with the NRO, NGA and the DoD to make sure the warfighter and taxpayer can benefit from the investment and technology that is presently available.”

Startups need revenue

Transitioning from research projects to revenue-generating contracts has been a challenge for startups in this sector, said John Serafini, CEO of HawkEye 360, a commercial provider of space-based RF data that works primarily with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

“I think the U.S. government writ large has gotten very good at early stage research, development, testing and evaluation engagements” with industry, Serafini said June 15 at the Defense One Tech Summit.

“There are plenty of RDT&E programs out there” sponsored by agencies like the Defense Innovation Unit, AFWERX and In-Q-Tel, he said. 

“But sometimes they’re doing RDT&E projects for the sake of RDT&E projects,” Serafini said. “They’re not doing it for the sake of actually bringing it through the contracting process to deliver a fully embedded fielded capability to the warfighter.”

Meanwhile, “young companies are desperately seeking access to revenue to showcase validation for investors,” he added. Small business innovation research contracts are not going to help companies survive, he added. “They’re not building fully tested, ready-to-go products that can go out to the warfighter and support the analysts.”

Some pockets within the government, however, are getting “pretty good at understanding that transition paradigm,” Serafini said. “They come with transition partners before they start the RDT&E engagement, they come with transition money and earmarks ready so when the technology does successfully scale, they can build programs of record.” But that is usually the exception, not the rule, Serafini noted.

Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager of Maxar Public Sector Earth Intelligence, said some government agencies have adopted “buy commercial first” approaches but changing the culture takes time.

Speaking at the Defense One Tech Summit, Frazier said NGA is looking to expand the Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) program where commercial companies compete for data analytics task orders. 

Some military organizations are seeing the value of commercial data analytics, said Frazier. The Navy, for example, subscribes to Maxar’s vessel detection service. “They’re not buying pixels, they’re trying to understand illegal fishing activity and share insights with allies and coast guards.”

Interest in commercial services is growing, he said, “but it just takes time to transition a mission that historically has been done in house.”

NGA plans to start a new program, called Luno, that will be modeled after the EIM program but with a broader scope. The plan is to use commercial monitoring services to track global military and economic activity.

Gauthier said he expects Luno to be a “substantial contract for commercial analytics services of many types.”

“This is good for the remote sensing industry because they not only can sell imagery into the NRO, and potentially imagery into the Space Force, but then they can also sell analytics to the NGA, combatant commands or any warfighting element that needs answers instead of raw data.”

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TAMPA, Fla. — SES said June 15 that Luxembourg has approved a program to carve out capacity from its O3b mPower medium Earth orbit (MEO) broadband network for the country and NATO allies.

Luxembourg’s government is acquiring 195 million euros ($211 million) worth of O3b mPower capacity under the 10-year MEO Global Services (MGS) program, targeting defense, security, and disaster recovery missions.

Capacity from the operator’s next-generation constellation is being made available for other sovereign government missions under a NATO contracting vehicle set up last year in partnership with the United States.

The U.S. Space Force has allocated $59 million in its proposed 2024 budget to buy services from O3b mPower, which is slated to provide initial services this year following the launch of two more satellites. 

SpaceX had been slated to launch the fifth and sixth of 11 Boeing-built O3b mPower satellites from Florida in early June; however, Luxembourg-based SES said June 12 they were still undergoing tests at manufacturing facilities in El Segundo, California.

Each O3b mPower satellite is designed to scale up to multiple gigabits per second of throughput, about 10 times more throughput than those in the 20-strong first-generation O3b constellation.

Outgoing SES CEO Steve Collar described parliamentary approval for MGS as an important step in Luxembourg’s defense space strategy to bolster government satellite communications capabilities.

Luxembourg Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense François Bausch said in February that the program would consolidate its position as a reliable partner in space, and help “reinforce Euro-Atlantic joint deterrence and defence” activities.

Governments do not typically sign up for new constellations until they are in service and have truly proven capabilities.

However, Luxembourg has a symbiotic relationship with publicly listed SES. They also have a public-private joint venture called GovSat that has its own satellite dedicated to governmental and institutional users.

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