Paragliding home (4/6/23)

Good morning. The Florida space coast is already preparing for hundreds of thousands of tourists to descend on Cape Canaveral for the Artemis II launch, including boosting the number of hotel rooms available, according to local news station WESH. While the astronaut reveal also juiced our excitement, we’re waiting to buy our tickets until we’re a little closer to the 2024 launch.

In today's edition:⛴️ Outpost nabs DoD contract🛫 Spaceplane takes flight💲 The contract report

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Exclusive: Outpost Scores $1.7M DoD Contract

Outpost has won a $1.7M DoD contract to help fund development and testing of its Ferry satellite, which can bring payloads safely back to Earth without burning up in the atmosphere.

The Direct to Phase II Orbital Prime SBIR contract from SpaceWERX is the startup’s first contract with the Defense Department, Paul Tomko, the director of business development at Outpost, told Payload.

The idea: Outpost was founded in 2020 on the idea that countries and companies were making big plans to launch hundreds of thousands of satellites into megaconstellations, but no one was giving any thought to bringing them back down—or to the environmental impact of tens of thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere.

Based on the planned scale of satellite constellations, “if you don’t have any way to bring [them] back to earth, you literally are just burning up 30,000 satellites in the atmosphere every year,” Tomko said.

The tech: The Ferry platform will launch with a customer payload aboard any rideshare rocket. When it’s time to come back to Earth, the Ferry will deploy an inflatable heat shield to protect the satellite as it re-enters the atmosphere. An autonomous paraglider platform will safely guide the satellite the rest of the way to Earth, ensuring it a smooth and precise landing, Tomko said.

Outpost has tested its inflatable heat shield, which was developed in conjunction with NASA, and has also tested its paraglider system with a high altitude balloon drop test. The next step will be a full-scale demonstration mission returning a payload to Earth, which is expected in late 2024 or early 2025, Tomko said.

The benefits: Getting payloads back quickly has lots of potential use cases, Tomko said. For biological experiments in space, having the spacecraft touch down on land means researchers can get to their data much faster than if it splashed down in the ocean. It will also allow startups to send their tech to space for a short time and rapidly iterate based on their findings after getting the hardware back.

“We would love to be a one-month satellite…so you can see what changed, what worked, and what didn’t,” he said.

What’s next: At first, Outpost will launch with a customer payload on board and bring that same payload back to Earth. But eventually, Tomko said the company hopes to be able to retrieve defunct satellites or other space junk and return them to Earth after deploying a satellite.

Dawn’s Spaceplane Takes Flight

New Zealand startup Dawn Aerospace announced Wednesday that it successfully completed three flights of its rocket-powered Mk-II Aurora suborbital spaceplane last week. During the test flights, the vehicle reached an altitude of over 6,000 feet.

“When we set out to change how we access space, we didn’t want an iterative step on expendable rockets – there are plenty of others doing that well. We want genuine revolution,” said CEO Stefan Powell.

Mk-II Auroa: The Mk-II is a fully reusable spaceplane capable of horizontal take-off and landing on airport runways. As the suborbital plane progresses out of the test phase, the Kiwi startup has set performance expectations high, including

• Flying between 100 and 1,000 launches per vehicle before retirement

• Increasing maximum flight altitude to 100 km

• And flying twice a day

Dawn plans to sell the high-altitude flight service to Earth monitoring, microgravity research, and disaster management customers.

Spaceplane ups and down: Dawn is betting the spaceplane will disrupt the space transportation market by offering a significant cost and flexibility advantage over conventional rockets.

• Yet, building efficient spaceplanes has historically been a challenging endeavor, as evidenced by the expensive NASA Shuttle program and, more recently, the inconsistent performance of Virgin Orbit’s mid-air launch system, and Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity.

Mk-III and orbital goals: Dawn views the Mk-II as a stepping stone to its primary objective, achieving orbital flight. As soon as the vehicle can achieve twice-a-day flight, Dawn will turn its attention to building Mk-III, a next-gen orbital spaceplane.

“Dawn’s ultimate goal is an orbital spaceplane. We are under no illusion there is a long way to go before these vehicles reach space, let alone getting a second stage to orbit,” said Powell.

To help with development, Dawn raised NZ $20M (~$13M) late last year. According to the company, Mk-III will be outfitted with a second-stage rocket capable of delivering a 250-kg satellite to orbit.

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MDA: We’ll take you there

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While MDA is getting ready to deliver Canadarm3 to the Artemis program, the Canadian company – with global reach – is developing a suite of commercial space robotics enabled by Canadarm3 technology, paving the way for a range of new business models and commercial use cases on orbit.

MDA has completed two commercial sales of space robotics products derived from Canadarm3 to Axiom Space, the Houston-based company building the world’s first commercial space station in low Earth orbit. With the first hardware delivered to Axiom Space in March 2023, MDA is well positioned to meet the needs of the emerging commercial space economy.

MDA is a trusted international space mission partner and a pioneer in space robotics, in-orbit operations, satellite systems and Earth observation with a 50+ year story of firsts on and above the Earth. With over 2,700 employees across Canada, the US and the UK, MDA is helping lead the charge towards viable Moon colonies, enhanced Earth insight, and communication in a hyper-connected world.

Heading to Space Symposium? Visit MDA’s booth #1327 in the North Exhibit Hall and learn more about MDA and its commercial robotics offerings.

In Other News

• China vertically landed a test micro-rocket at sea. The small rocket flew to an altitude of 1,000 meters before completing a controlled descent onto a landing pad at sea.

• India also announced that it successfully landed a reusable spaceplane prototype.

• The SDA (Space Development Agency) has entered its demonstration era after Sunday’s launch.

• The Space Force is boosting its cyber defenses with its Digital Bloodhound program.

• Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy filing has broader implications for Spaceport Cornwall and the UK space industry.

• The Planetary Society is leading the charge to #SaveVERITAS with a joint letter to Congress.

• All three US Artemis II astronauts nearly missed the meeting where they were informed of their selection.

• Blue Origin and ULA will be “space partners” on the “Helios,” a sci-fi movie set in space.

The View from Space

Astronauts aboard the ISS captured photos this week of severe flooding in Ethiopia.