Ditched (10/17/22)

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In today's newsletter:🛰️ Space + security strategy🚀 Skyrora postmortem🗓️ The week ahead

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The Latest on US Space Strategy

The Biden administration’s National Security Strategy highlights America’s exploration goals and economic opportunities in orbit, but some critics say it misses the mark on national security and largely ignores threats in orbit.

The 48-page, unclassified document released last week has one paragraph dedicated to America’s space ambitions, including a pledge to lead the way in setting norms of behavior in orbit and establish a system for space traffic management. The top two American space norm projects that come to mind are:

• The Artemis Accords

• A ban on kinetic, destructive antisatellite (ASAT) tests

“Space exploration and use benefits humanity, from creating economic opportunities to developing new technologies and enabling climate surveillance,” the strategy says. “Working with allies and partners, we will develop policies and regulations that enable the burgeoning US commercial space sector to compete internationally.”

Not so fast: Republicans slammed the document for taking “a significantly weaker approach” in orbit than previous policies from the Trump and Obama administrations, which more explicitly talked about threats America faces in space, including ASAT weapons and the need for technology to deter attacks in orbit (peace through strength from above).

“The document mentions ‘space’ in a security context only 15 times, and mostly in one paragraph that emphasizes exploration and constraint, while ‘climate’ is discussed 63 times,” Rep. Doug Lamborn, the top Republican on the House subcommittee that oversees the Pentagon’s space mission, told Payload. “Rather than providing a call to action on vital national security concerns such as defense space, this NSS is yet another messaging platform from which the Biden Administration is endeavoring to broadcast their doomed domestic policy agenda.”

Cooperation in orbit?

The strategy also opens the door for working with Beijing on areas of mutual interest, including climate change mitigation. Though it doesn’t specifically address partnering in space, officials have highlighted missions where the two nations could collab.

Scott Pace, the leader of Trump’s National Space Council, said sharing space tracking data and exchanging scientific samples are two other areas for potential collaboration. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said last month that his agency has recently worked with China to deconflict the orbits of spacecraft around Mars, even though bilateral cooperation is severely restricted by the Wolf Amendment. The Wolf Amendment is a 2011 law that requires NASA to get approval from Congress and the FBI to work with the Chinese government.

What’s changing? POTUS’s top science advisor at the Office of Science and Technology Policy will get a seat on the National Security Council, and the organization will be elevated to a cabinet-level agency. The strategy will also establish a special envoy for critical and emerging technologies at the State Department.

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Skyrora Skylark L Debut Ditched into Norwegian Sea

Skyrora revealed last week that the debut of its suborbital Skylark L vehicle ended abruptly after the rocket suffered an as-yet unidentified anomaly.

The UK-based startup conducted the launch on Oct. 8 from a mobile launch site erected in Langanes, Iceland.

Let bygones be bygones? In April, Skyrora published an article decrying the Icelandic government for holding up what it referred to as the “biggest launch from European soil.” Despite the lack of any public notice, the company appears to have been granted its long-awaited license to launch from the country.

Skyrora did not announce the launch attempt publicly, and apart from an easily missed NOTAM, it launched with little to no fanfare. The company also waited several days to announce the failure of its launch attempt, posting a press release on October 13.

According to Skyrora, the Skylark L “experienced an anomaly” after leaving the launch pad. Not long after, the rocket landed in the Norwegian Sea, approximately 500 meters away from the launch site.

In a video shared by the BBC, the Skylark L can be seen veering horizontally out to sea just moments after it left the launchpad.

Despite the failure, COO Lee Rosen, who is a veteran of SpaceX, said the launch attempt provided the Skyrora team with “valuable experience in operations procedures, logistics coordination, and execution of the rapid setup and pack-down of our mobile launch complex, experience which will propel us forward monumentally in our mission to reach orbit.”

According to CEO Volodymyr Levykin, an investigation will be launched to discover the nature of the anomaly once “pack-down” procedures for the mobile launch pad have been completed. The company also stated that they were in the process of attempting to recover the rocket from the Norwegian Sea, but have not yet revealed whether those efforts had been successful.

What’s next? The Skylark L suborbital vehicle is a tech demonstrator for Skyrora’s larger orbital-class Skyrora XL launch vehicle. According to the company, 70% of the technology aboard the suborbital vehicle will be applied to the Skyrora XL vehicle. Even though the October 8 launch failed, Levykin still believes that Skyrora will be able to launch the first Skyrora XL mission by 2023.

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In Other News

• SpaceX will supposedly keep Ukraine operations free, after recently asking the Pentagon to pick up the tab.

• Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13F satellite launched successfully into geostationary transfer orbit on a Falcon 9.

• TESS, NASA’s exoplanet surveyor, has resumed normal operations.

• Virgin Orbit’s ($VORB) LauncherOne rocket arrived in Cornwall, ahead of the first launch from UK soil later this year.

The View from Earth

Welcome back to Earth, Crew-4!