GREENBELT, Md. — The U.S.-Japanese Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM), a complex environmental-monitoring spacecraft with the potential to improve forecasting of the trajectory and strength of hurricanes, is set to enter the thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center this week as it moves toward launch as early as February 2014.
Loral Space & Communications Inc. is cooperating with its principal Canadian ownership partner in Ottawa-based Telesat for a potential initial public offering, Loral CEO and President Michael Targoff told a Nov. 9 shareholders teleconference.
PARIS — Members of the French parliament say Europe’s Arianespace launch consortium is ill-prepared to lose any commercial Ariane 5 business to competitors in Russia, China, India or the U.S., where startup Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is making a splash with its low-cost Falcon 9 rocket.
The coming decade should bring strong growth to the global satellite production and launch industry, according to the Paris-based consulting company Euroconsult, which forecasts $198 billion in revenues for the 2012-2021 period, a 36% increase over the previous 10 years. Demand from established government space programs, as well as a commercial sector faced with replacing aging telecommunications spacecraft, will drive the anticipated demand despite global economic concerns.
Boeing Defense, Space and Security is restructuring its business units once again, undoing some of the changes it enacted only two years ago in an effort to reap savings that it can pass on to more frugal defense customers worldwide.
Researchers in three projects will split grants from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (Casis) totaling $1.2 million to take advantage of the microgravity environment on the International Space Station for pharmaceutical research. Casis, set up to run the public portion of the U.S. National Laboratory on the ISS, awarded its first research grants to scientists at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, California Institute of Technology and iXpressGenes Inc.
NASA’s Glenn Research Center is looking for large fairings and adapters for the agency’s heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS). In a request for information published Nov. 1, the Cleveland-based field center asks industry to suggest options for fairings and payload adapters that can expand the big rocket’s ability to carry cargo and spacecraft to orbit.
Controllers are checking out two large spacecraft built by Russia’s ISS-Reshetnev after their successful tandem launch on a Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome Nov. 2. Separating from the Proton’s Breeze-M upper stage were the Yamal 300K telecommunications bird, and a space station relay satellite designated Luch 5B.
An Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket first stage apparently will be able to undergo a hot-fire test later this month on its seaside launch pad, despite the high winds and water that blasted NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia during Hurricane Sandy. A company spokesman said Nov. 2 that work crews were able to reach access hatches and environmental-data recorders on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 to complete their initial inspection of the kerosene-fueled rocket stage. “Everything apparently looks good,” he said. Dress Rehearsal
BRUSSELS — The European Space Agency (ESA) is seeking ideas for an orbital waste-management service capable of grabbing defunct satellites circling in low Earth orbit and disposing of them through controlled reentry into the atmosphere. By year-end, the 20-nation space agency plans to issue a tender for up to three industry study contracts dealing with concepts for orbital-debris removal o be awarded early next year.
As Iridium readies to launch its Aireon global aviation monitoring venture, the level of investment to come from partner Nav Canada remains in question. Iridium established Aireon in June to provide global aircraft tracking capability through Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receivers to be built into Iridium NEXT, the McLean, Va.-based satellite fleet operator’s second-generation communications satellite constellation scheduled to launch in 2015.
As Iridium readies to launch its Aireon global aviation monitoring venture, the level of investment to come from partner Nav Canada remains in question. Iridium established Aireon in June to provide global aircraft tracking capability through Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receivers to be built into Iridium NEXT, the McLean, Va.-based satellite fleet operator’s second-generation communications satellite constellation scheduled to launch in 2015.
ALL GROWN UP: The U.S. Air Force’s second Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite has completed its on-orbit testing in preparation for transfer for operational use. The satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, was launched in May. In addition to the on-orbit testing of its own systems, it also executed trials to link with AEHF-1.
Europe’s second Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), considered by some forecasters the best of its kind in the world, has gone into service on Eumetsat’s Metop-B polar-orbiting weather satellite. Developed by France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and Thales Alenia Space, the IASI measures infrared wavelengths across 8,461 different spectral channels to generate high-resolution vertical profiles of the atmosphere’s temperature and humidity. The data is crucial to numerical weather prediction models.
