Mine the Moon (4/24/23)

Good morning and happy Monday. We’re kicking off another busy week of space news, which is set to include two earnings calls, the NASA chief’s visit to Capitol Hill, and potentially the first commercial Moon landing. We’ll keep you up to date as it all unfolds.

In today's edition...⛏️ In-situ space resources⭐ A star sensor to help small sats🗓️ The week ahead

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. 

Officials Talk In-space Resources in Luxembourg

Government officials, industry employees, and researchers working toward a mining economy in space gathered last week in Luxembourg to discuss what lessons space miners could learn from their Earth-bound counterparts—and who should oversee the nascent industry in orbit. 

The annual Luxembourg Space Resources Week is organized by the European Space Resources Innovation Centre (ESRIC), which was founded in 2020 by ESA, the Luxembourg Space Agency, and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, all of which co-hosted this year’s conference.

Who is in charge? Both government space programs and commercial ventures are pursuing in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). As the international space resources community grows, ESRIC’s Director Kathryn Hadler wants her institution to become the international “center of expertise of in-situ resource utilization.”

In the US, NASA’s ISRU System Capability Lead, Gerald Sanders, said the agency is getting ready to release an industry overview identifying technology gaps in the supply chain. He highlighted the agency’s “big emphasis on commercial scale operations.” 

Building the industry: ESRIC announced the establishment of a Lunar Space Resources Accelerator, to be launched before the end of 2023. ESRIC will provide funds to entrepreneurs who can match its contribution with self-funding—for example, by raising capital from VCs.

Lessons from Earth: Interest in a prospective ISRU industry is not confined to academia and government agencies. Legacy mining companies are starting to take note, and can claim the advantage of centuries of experience.

Jeff Plate, VP of mineral economics and business development at mining consultancy Watts, Griffis and McOuat Ltd., stressed the need to adapt terrestrial reconnaissance and prospecting technologies to lunar exploration.

Using artificial intelligence, WGM in cooperation with Lunar Station, a new space company that recently emerged from stealth after seven years, has developed probability maps of water ice distribution at the lunar south pole. With the right funding in place, Plate, who is also the founder and CEO of Interstellar Mining, said industrial scale ice mining on the Moon could start within five years.

Gray gold: Lunar regolith is at the center of many mining projects on the Moon. The material contains water, oxygen, and metals, including iron, aluminum, and the composite ore ilmenite. Technologies are being developed to make regolith useful to humans–in space and on Earth, including extractors used to separate metals and a process to break up the material’s watery components into hydrogen and oxygen–crucial resources for a long-term human presence on the Moon, according to Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Colorado School of Mines Space Resources Program.

Sponsored

The OS for spacecraft and complex operations

Are your spacecraft testing and ops procedures stuck on documents, spreadsheets, and wikis?

Are you still using paper checklists or Confluence pages for your procedures?

Time to join the revolution with Epsilon3.

Epsilon3 modernizes space missions and complex engineering and testing by building the industry standard of operational software.

They produce a web-based platform for managing complex spacecraft/aerospace operational and testing procedures that provides coordination, assurance, and risk reduction. The top-notch team came from Northrop, NASA, Google, and SpaceX, where they ran operations to bring American astronauts to the ISS.

Innovate reliably, securely, at speed and scale. Let Epsilon3's platform worry about managing complex operational procedures, saving you time and reducing errors.

Request a demo on Epsilon3's website to learn more. (Or if you’re a software engineer, apply to join their team.)

Meet Starberry-Sense

Cubesats may soon be able to find their way in space at a lower cost thanks to a new star sensor developed by Indian researchers that launched to space on Saturday.

Starberry-Sense hopes to help small satellites determine their orientation in space in relation to surrounding stars for just 10% of the cost of currently available commercial options, which can cost more than an entire cubesat, says the Indian Department of Science and Technology.  

The 470-gram module, which was developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, is powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero computer. The demo mission is expected to last three to six months.

A modified Starberry-Sense will be utilized in the Indian Astronomical Observatory at Ladakh.

What else is onboard: The ISRO PSLV rocket launch also deployed two commercial payloads for Singapore: the TeLEOS-2 synthetic aperture radar satellite and the LUMELITE-4 smallsat, a maritime-related technology demonstrator.

TeLEOS-2, which was developed by Singapore’s domestic space industry, can do fully polarimetric radar imaging at 1-meter resolution. It’s the country’s second EO satellite; the first TeLEOS-1 launched aboard a PSLV in 2015.

A focus on reusability: The launch is the third time ISRO repurposed the PSLV’s fourth stage as a stabilized, solar-powered platform for onboard payloads. This affords organizations low-cost access to space for demonstrating their technologies ahead of use in future missions. ISRO calls the platform the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module, or POEM. The Starberry-Sense module is mounted on it.

On this launch, POEM is home to seven payloads, notably including an ionospheric analyzer and a privately developed Hall-effect thruster. In a post-launch briefing, ISRO officials said this POEM is the first to sport deployable solar panels, which increases its power generation capacity from 150 watts to 500.

Ramping up: The PSLV that launched on Saturday was integrated at ISRO’s new namesake facility near the first of the two launch pads at Sriharikota. The PSLV Integration Facility cuts down assembly time by several weeks, enabling ISRO to launch a PSLV a month. At the same time ISRO and NSIL are working on increasing PSLV’s production rate by having them fully built by industry as part of a $104M contract awarded to a consortium of major PSLV contractors.

It's That Time Again 

Join Payload with Machina Labs, Bank of America, and Moss Adams for a space industry happy hour in LA on May 17. There will be food and drinks, provided by us, and plenty of space conversations, provided by you. 

In Other News

• Evolution Space became the ninth privately-funded American startup to reach space with its launch on Saturday.

• The FCC voted to update its spectrum-sharing framework for non-GEO satellites.

• NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stands behind current restrictions on US collaboration with China in space.

• SpaceX plans to install a water cooled steel plate underneath Starship’s orbital launch mount to prevent pad damage. 

• Starship's launch kicked up sand that rained down on residents in a nearby town. 

• China is considering including a helicopter in its Mars sample return mission. 

• Sweden signed an LOI with Axiom to send one of its astronauts to the ISS.

The View from Space

Work smarter, not harder. Webb took less than 24 hours to image the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, seen in this photo. The same work took Hubble 11 days.