Lawnmower (6/16/22)

Good morning. Yesterday, our lovely email provider launched in-newsletter polling. Naturally, that means today we're running our first in-newsletter poll. Find it after our first story–and stay tuned for the results.   

In today's newsletter:👩🏽‍🚀 Sierra LEO corps 🚁 QuadSAT📝 Contract report

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. 

The Private Astronaut Pool is About to Get Bigger 

Sierra Space announced on Tuesday that it will begin its own astronaut training program, led by Janet Kavandi, the company’s president and a retired NASA astronaut. 

As Sierra edges closer to the debut flight of Dream Chaser and, later on, the buildout of Orbital Reef, it’s thinking in advance about future LEO staffing needs. 

• Dream Chaser = the company’s spaceplane 

• Orbital Reef = a planned private space station from Blue Origin, Sierra Space, and their partners

The program: The company plans to get going pretty quickly, selecting its first class in 2023, beginning training in 2024, and graduating a cohort by 2026.

• Sierra Space will release more info as it begins selecting a class. Details for now are sparse.

• The application process will probably look similar to NASA astronaut selection, with tens of thousands of applicants being whittled down to a handful of elite rookies.

• Sierra “will be taking at least some people from within the company to help us staff on-orbit destinations,” Kavandi said in a Q&A on Sierra’s blog, and has been informing new hires of this for a while now. Trips to LEO…not the worst company perk. 

Break it down…Kavandi explains that three different types of astronauts will be trained to work aboard Orbital Reef:

1. Professional astronauts, the full-time station professionals who would work similarly to the NASA program we know and love. These astronauts would train for a year and a half to learn the ins and outs of the station and how to keep it up and running.

2. Specialist astronauts, who Kavandi envisions as experts in another field, such as researchers who will perform highly sensitive experiments in microgravity. These astronauts would train for 3-6 months and lease space aboard Orbital Reef.

3. Experiential astronauts, who are what NASA calls “spaceflight participants,” and the rest of us might call space tourists. They would undergo safety training and have a minimal support role aboard the station.

But first…Dream Chaser, the highly anticipated reusable vehicle, has a debut flight planned for early 2023. The company has assembled its prototype, which should be shipped to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio in August or September to begin thermal vacuum testing. 

The spaceplane was developed with NASA funding to deliver cargo to the ISS. The crewed version of Dream Chaser is being funded out-of-pocket by Sierra, and the company is hoping to have it ready to go by 2026.

Share this story with your friend who wants to work in space.

QuadSAT Banks Additional €500,000

QuadSAT said today that it’s received €500,000 ($520,000) in additional ESA funding under the ARTES program. The European funds are earmarked for satcom companies looking to productize and commercialize core technology they’ve developed. 

QuadSAT’s core technology: The Danish startup has paired specialized radiofrequency (RF) payloads with quadcopter drones. The company’s engineers have also written code for flight automation and frequency measurement features. Put it all together, and here’s is what you get: 

• QuadSAT’s drone flies in front of a satellite antenna, scans the entire area in a lawn-mower fashion, and generates “a heatmap of the entire performance of the antenna,” CEO Joakim Espeland told Payload last fall. 

• As we wrote earlier this year, “by using drones rather than space assets for antenna diagnostics and calibration, [satellite] operators could theoretically minimize downtime and the opportunity costs of using [space assets] for ground segment testing.”

Heritage: QuadSAT is already flying with Telespazio and OneWeb, and earlier this year, it ran tracking tests on the 15- and 13-meter antennas at ESA’s Kiruna Earth Station.

The business case: “The highest value per measurement comes from large antennas,” Espeland said last year. “What I really want to do…is make drones just another tool in the toolbag for satellite technicians and antenna engineers.” QuadSAT success at scale would look like cutting “the price per measurement so much that it would be negligent not to measure an antenna whenever a technician visited.” 

Still, overnight successes are hard to come by when your bread and butter involves drones, satellite communications, and AI. QuadSAT has its work cut out for it, from more R&D and production to QA and business development. Ultimately, the new, non-dilutive ESA funding should help on these fronts.

Send this to someone who got a drone for Christmas, used it once, and never flew again.

In Other News

• Firefly CEO Tom Markusic is transitioning into the role of chief technical advisor, effective today. Markusic is succeeded by Peter Schumacher of AE Industrial Partners in an interim capacity until a permanent replacement is found. 

• The House appropriations subcommittee on defense approved the FY ‘23 defense funding bill by voice vote. The bill ups funding for space procurement and R&D. 

• The Fed raised rates by 0.75% to a target range of 1.5% –1.75%. It’s the biggest increase in the fed funds rate since 1994. In other words, the era of cheap capital is o-v-e-r. 

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) has another Electron on the pad. The rocket completed its wet dress rehearsal and will fly shortly after NASA’s CAPSTONE mission lifts off.  

• SES says its geostationary SES-17 satellite is positioned and fully operational over the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic.

• SpaceX will launch another batch of 53 Starlink satellites on Friday. 

• China published, then unpublished, research saying its “Sky Eye” radio telescope, the world’s largest, picked up signals that could be from an extraterrestrial civilization. The report was already making waves on Chinese social media before it was taken down. 

The View from Space

NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered an unexpected item on the surface of Mars: a piece of thermal blanket, perhaps from its own descent stage as it landed last year. But that landing was ~2km away. On Twitter, the rover asks: “Did this piece land here after that, or was it blown here by the wind?”