Work from home (10/26/22)

Good morning. Anyone catch the partial solar eclipse yesterday?

In today's newsletter:🔭 Citizen debris tracking🏛️ Indopacom/USSF🚀 A Q&A with Tim Ellis💸 The term sheet

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Debris Tracking For All

If you’ve been wondering how you can contribute to space debris mitigation efforts, you may be in luck.

Privateer, a space debris tracking startup founded by Alex Fielding, Steve Wozniak, and Moriba Jah, has taken space sustainability efforts unto itself through its collision risk assessment tool, Wayfinder. Yesterday, Privateer announced it has partnered with consumer telescope maker Celestron to allow amateur astronomers to contribute to Wayfinder from home.

“The perfect partnership between us and Celestron is us being able to take advantage of crowdsourcing and citizen science by developing an application that leverages their own systems,” Jah, space environmentalist and chief scientist of Privateer, told Payload. “What we want to do with Celestron is have an application where anybody who has one of these [telescopes] can just put it on their deck or backyard or whatever, and they can start looking at the sky.”

Why space sustainability? Jah and his high-profile team founded Privateer last year to help ensure that the space environment remains clean and operable for good. The startup sees mitigating space debris as an existential problem for humanity.

“Space environmentalism and sustainability looks like us doing everything that we can to minimize pollution in space,” Jah said. “It looks like us focusing on reuse and recycling of satellites, minimizing single-use satellites to develop a circular economy in space. It looks like us properly disposing of objects and not just letting these things reenter, leaving it to Mother Nature to cleanse.”

Finally, Jah said, “it also means that we as a global community come together to actually plan and coordinate the holistic use of the environment.”

Why citizen science? Jah has spent the better part of the last decade advocating for space sustainability. Though the people he speaks with are sympathetic to the cause, they generally don’t see any way they could personally move the needle. 

“When I go around the globe talking to people about this, there's a lot of ‘well, what the heck can I do? I'm just, you know, the average global citizen—how can I contribute to this?’” Jah said.

The partnership’s next steps: Privateer and Celestron will offer people the chance to meaningfully contribute to debris tracking using at-home telescopes. The details so far:

• Users can set up their Celestron telescope in their yard, and it will autonomously scan the sky for satellites and debris objects.

• The telescope will send these observations to Privateer, where they’ll be integrated into Wayfinder.

• From their homes, contributors will be able to track how their observations were used for collision avoidance and situational awareness.

Jah compared the crowdsourcing capability to a Waze for space. Instead of reporting a pothole or cop car by the side of the road, observers’ telescopes will report objects moving through the night sky.

“Because we can measurably demonstrate the utility of any given observation towards keeping track of objects, each person that contributes will know exactly what their contribution did,” increasing the transparency, predictability and accountability of these observations, Jah said.

INDOPACOM Gets Space Boost

The US military command focused on deterring China will beef up its space footprint next month, the Space Force’s #2 officer, Gen. David “DT” Thompson, said Tuesday.

The US Indo-Pacific Command will establish a Space Force component command on Nov. 22, said Thompson, who is the service’s vice chief of space operations, at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. It will be the three-year-old service’s first group sent to a command that oversees a geographic area, rather than placing Guardians within existing Air Force components. 

Component command, defined: Combatant commands oversee personnel in the region they control but don’t have permanently assigned troops. To fill their ranks, services send members to the combatant command as a component command. Indo-Pacific Command, which directs American troops in that region, already has component commands from the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, and Air Force.

Adding a Space Force group will make sure the service understands what the broader military needs operationally in orbit, and also ensure leaders in the Pacific “truly and deeply understand the space capabilities available to them,” Thompson said.  

Why does this matter? One word: China. Thompson said Beijing could threaten “an extinction-level event” for America’s space capabilities with its anti-satellite weapons, 260+ spy satellites, and an “incredible pace” of innovation. 

How good? “Their space capabilities are still not quite as good as ours, but they are really, really, really good. We have to assume that they are a peer competitor in that regard,” he said. “I can’t really sit here and tell you today, at this point in time, when will they be a threat? They are a threat today.” 

What’s next? Other combatant commands will get space detachments too. Thompson said European Command and Central Command, which oversee military operations in the Middle East, will establish space component commands “very shortly.” 

Elsewhere…Combatant commands that oversee special operations forces in South America and Africa “can and should and must exploit the commercial sector heavily,” Thompson said. 

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A Q+A with Relativity Boss Tim Ellis

Relativity is in the final innings of prep work for “Good Luck, Have Fun,” its first orbital flight attempt. The Relativity team is integrating Terran 1 in its Space Coast hangar right now, and plans to roll the rocket out to the launchpad in the coming weeks. And while all eyes may soon be on the Relativity’s Terran 1, the 3D-printed, 1,250 kg rocket only tells part of the story. 

The launch unicorn says it’s been laser-focused on parallel development of the much-larger Terran R (20,000 kg, first flight targeted for 2024). Relativity has spent hundreds of millions on its Terran R this year alone and plans to have more than half its workforce working on the program by next year. 

Read our full Q+A with Relativity's Tim Ellis here.

In Other News

• Raytheon ($RTX) reported Q3 sales of $17B (+5% YoY), with Collins Aerospace and the contractor’s Intelligence & Space division pulling in ~$5.1B (+11%) and $3.63B (-3% YoY), respectively. 

• Ash Carter, who established the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit and championed faster acquisition, died at the age of 68.

• SpaceX passed Boeing ($BA) to become NASA’s second largest vendor in FY 2022, trailing only Caltech (H/T Irene Klotz). 

• Falcon Heavy rolled out to pad 39A yesterday and will undergo a test firing today ahead of its USSF mission at the end of the month. 

• Russia launched a resupply mission to the ISS from Baikonur.

The View from Space

NASA and JPL’s new EMIT mission is spotting methane “super-emitters” from space.