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A StarMax is born (11/21/22)

A StarMax is born (11/21/22)

Jessica Lis, Rachael Zisk & Ryan Duffy
November 21, 2022

Good morning, and happy Monday morning. It’s a short week here in the States. Some Payload housekeeping, to that effect: We won’t be sending the newsletter on Thursday or Friday, in order to accommodate all the extra tryptophan in our systems. Parallax and Pathfinder are also taking the week off, but they’ll be back and better than ever before you know it.

In today's newsletter:🌛 American cislunar strategy 🛰️ Gravitics ditches stealth🤘 Austin happy hour🗓️ The week ahead

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How About That Timing...?

13 candidate landing regions identified for the Artemis III mission. Image: NASA

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its first National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy on Thursday. The document lays out a whole-of-government R&D plan for American science and technology leadership in service of “responsible, peaceful, and sustainable exploration and utilization of cislunar space, including the Moon.”

Cislunar, what? OSTP defines cislunar as “the three-dimensional region of space beyond Earth’s geosynchronous orbit but still within the gravitational influence of the Earth and/or the Moon…includes the Earth-Moon Lagrange point regions, trajectories utilizing those regions, and the Lunar surface.”

Walk the walk, talk the talk…The strategy confirms at least a focus on preserving US leadership in space science, technology, and exploration. It outlines how the administration views cislunar space as a major upcoming economic opportunity for the US space establishment. The policy is also consistent with the White House’s US Space Priorities Framework made public at the end of last year and includes all three of the Space Force’s development priorities.

The Four Objectives

Objective 1: Support research and development to enable long-term growth in cislunar space

Meaning: enduring human presence, understanding effect of space environment on humans, workforce, space science, lunar tech

Objective 2: Expand international science and technology cooperation in cislunar space

Meaning: International Lunar Year, peace, responsible practices, safety, new international cooperation

Objective 3: Extend US space situational awareness capabilities into cislunar space

Meaning: identifying existing gaps, associated reference systems, data sharing, early warning systems, object catalog

Objective 4: Implement cislunar communications and positioning, navigation, and timing capabilities with scalable and interoperable approaches

Meaning: foundational communications and navigation systems, scalability, interoperability, lower barriers to entry

OTSP developed the policy after consulting with DoD, Commerce, Energy, State, NASA, other agencies, and industry leaders this July.

Near and Far

The strategy’s near-term goals include Artemis, robotic missions in cislunar space, lunar mapping and surveying from lunar orbits, surface missions, radio/astronomy observations, and in-situ resource utilization. A whole lot of basic infrastructure is needed to support these near-term goals: communications, PNT, transportation, and RF spectrum management.

The longer term goals allude to a stronger geopolitical focus with regard to lunar surface rights and international laws. The strategy mentions interest in Moon’s farside, aka the “shielded zone of the Moon,” noting that the area may enable radio astronomy observations not possible elsewhere.

Per the White House…“The decade ahead is critically important for exploration of cislunar space, including the Lunar surface. NASA estimates that over the next ten years, human activity in cislunar space will be equal to or exceed all that has occurred in this region since the Space Age began in 1957.”

Share this with someone who listens to The Dark Side of the Moon a little too much:

Gravitics Raises $20M

Gravitics, a startup building human-rated space station modules, has closed a $20M funding round to build StarMax, its first product.

Type One Ventures led the round, with participation from Draper Associates, FJ Labs, The Venture Collective, Helios Capital, Giant Step Capital, Gaingels, Spectre, Manhattan West, and Mana Ventures.

Introducing Gravitics

The Seattle-based startup emerged from stealth last week with plans to begin testing its space station modules as early as 2023 and bringing them to market by 2026. That timing sets them up to provide modules for a slew of planned space stations in the late 2020s and early 2030s.

The core team includes alumni from major players across the space industry. The development team is currently led by Bill Tandy, former mission architect for Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef space station, and Scott Macklin, former head of propulsion at Virgin Orbit.

Gravitics is working on developing StarMax, its core module, out of a 42,000 sq ft facility near Seattle. Prototype production is currently underway.

Right now, the team is working on completing that first prototype and prepping for tests, but the company’s future aspirations are hidden in its name. “It reflects our aspirational goal to provide the technology for future spin gravity space stations and settlements,” Mike DeRosa, Gravitics’ CMO, told Payload via email.

Building the building blocks: The StarMax module would be the roomiest model on the market, with 400 cubic meters of usable volume. That’s equivalent to roughly half of the ISS’s volume per module, per Gravitics marketing materials.

Interoperability with various station designs and rockets is key to the company’s goal to provide space station modules to a variety of operators. StarMax is designed to be compatible with any of the planned space stations in the next decade, as well as any of the market’s new heavy-lift rockets—SpaceX’s Starship, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and ULA’s Vulcan.

“How impractical would it be to not make it interoperable?” DeRosa said. “Space is expensive and successful space operations need many different things to go right. We can only build the infrastructure in space we need if we can count on key components working together.”

Share this story with a friend who can't wait to take a trip to space:

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Austin Readers, We're Coming For You

After two great events in LA, it's time to expand our happy hour series. Austin, you're next.

Join Payload, CesiumAstro, and Firefly Aerospace for a space industry happy hour in Austin on December 6th. There will be food, drinks, and, most importantly, plenty of space chatter.

In Other News

Orion spacecraft performance is “exceeding expectations,” NASA says.
OMOTENASHI, Japan’s lunar lander on the Artemis I mission, is not doing as well. The team has not been able to maintain radio communication with the CubeSat.
SpaceX intends to build one more Crew Dragon, bringing its fleet total to five (the company currently has four cargo variants).
ISRO conducted an airdrop test of the parachute for its Gaganyaan crewed spaceflight program.
JWST will keep its name, after a NASA historical investigation found no evidence that James Webb was involved in firing LGBTQ staff for their sexual orientation.

The Week Ahead

All times in Eastern.

Monday, Nov. 21: Orion is performing its first powered lunar fly-by, and made its closest approach to the Moon’s surface (~80 miles) at 7:57am. The National Space Council is holding its second listening session on novel space capabilities, authorization, and supervision at 1pm. ABL is targeting 5pm for its RS1 first orbital attempt, and at 9:57pm, SpaceX will launch Eutelsat 10B.

Tuesday, Nov. 22: SpaceX will launch its 26th commercial resupply service mission (CRS-26) to the ISS at 3:54pm. CRS-26 is the first flight of this specific Dragon (rounding out a rotation of four cargo ships).

Wednesday, Nov. 23: ESA will announce its new class of astronauts at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris at 8:20am.

Thursday, Nov. 24: A Long March 2D will launch a trio of Yaogan 36 satellites at 8:45am, and 12 hours later, a Vega C will launch a pair of Airbus's Pléiades birds.

Friday, Nov. 25: Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin will conduct the second of four spacewalks at 6:00am. Then at 4:52pm, Orion's will fire its engines for an insertion burn into distant retrograde orbit around the Moon, where the spacecraft will remain for about a week before beginning its return to Earth.

Saturday, Nov. 26: At 1:26am, ISRO will launch PSLV-C54 with the Oceansat-3 maritime monitoring satellite and eight nanosatellites, including Anand, Pixxel's third hyperspectral satellite.

The View from the 64th Parallel

Image: Iceland

Iceland’s tourism department launched an admittedly hilarious marketing campaign that trashes the concept of traveling to space and instead advocates for visiting the Land of Fire and Ice.

The ad's actor asks would-be space travelers: “Did you know there’s an out-of-this-world experience that’s a lot closer, doesn’t cost millions of dollars, and has oxygen?” The country has also launched a billboard into the stratosphere that reads: "Iceland: better than space."