Sci-fi design (7/6/22)

Good morning. We're now under one week until JWST releases its first high-res color images...It's not like the Payload team has had July 12 blocked out on our calendars with red ink for weeks or anything. Definitely not.

In today's newsletter:🎙️ Aurelia Institute Q+A🌕 CAPSTONE update💸 The term sheet

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Meet the Aurelia Institute

Miniature TESSERAE self-assembling space station tiles float in the ISS cupola during the Ax-1 mission. Image: Aurelia Institute

Miniature TESSERAE self-assembling space station tiles float in the ISS cupola during the Ax-1 mission. Image: Aurelia Institute

Humanity has dreamed about different visions of what a human civilization in space might look like for longer than the Payload team has been alive.

We’ve been planning ways to sustain human life in orbit and on other planets for decades. Now, it feels like we’re within reach of that goal—and we need to be ready for it.

The newly formed Aurelia Institute aims to prep humanity for a long-term presence in space through R&D, policy, and outreach. Recently, the group sent a tech demonstration of self-assembling, magnetic tiles for a future space station to the ISS with the Ax-1 mission.

Payload sat down with Aurelia founder Ariel Ekblaw to talk about accessibility in spaceflight, space station R&D, the Ax-1 tests, and sci-fi interior design inspiration. Here’s a sneak peek of what Ekblaw had to say…

  • On spaceflight accessibility: “The goal of democratizing access to space is to allow more people around the world to see themselves in that future.”

  • About the Ax-1 demo: “We were able to demonstrate a successful, autonomous assembly. With no human in the loop, two tiles are able to come together, dock, and form a perfect, good bond.”

  • About designing the next generation of space stations: “We're assessing over 50 different space habitat concepts from science fiction and real demonstrated ideas, and choosing between something like artificial gravity or something like an origami or inflatable station.”

Update on NASA’s Latest Moon Mission

Image: NASA

Following a successful launch on Rocket Lab’s Electron and deployment from its Lunar Photon, NASA’s moon-bound CAPSTONE satellite is not phoning home.

Timeline: On July 4, the satellite broke Earth’s orbit. On Tuesday, the US space agency said the spacecraft has experienced “communications issues” while in contact with the Deep Space Network, a series of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia that support communications with missions to the farthest edges of our solar system.

Advanced Space, which built the craft’s CAPS (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System) instrument, shared additional details Tuesday.

  1. The spacecraft was performing nominally for its first 11 hours after its deployment.

  2. CAPSTONE successfully deployed its solar arrays and began charging its batteries.

  3. The spacecraft pointed toward Earth and communicated with DSN stations in Madrid.

  4. Teams commissioned CAPSTONE’s propulsion system and the craft prepared for its first trajectory correction maneuver (which has now been delayed).

Holding out hope: NASA engineers are working to understand the root cause of the issue and reestablish contact with the satellite. “If needed,” per NASA, “the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days.”

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In Other News

  • Russian cosmonauts on the ISS displayed the flags of the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic, regions of Ukraine currently occupied by Russian forces, and shared misinformation about the war.

  • Rocket Lab ($RKLB) will launch satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) on its next two missions, with launch windows opening July 12 and 22.

  • Chinese companies are preparing to launch test flights on a bevy of new orbital and suborbital vehicles from the Jiuquan spaceport, per SpaceNews.

  • The Large Hadron Collider is operational again, after 3+ years of maintenance and upgrades.

  • Synspective released the first SAR images from its StriX-β satellite.

The Term Sheet

  • Integrate Space, a launch services startup, tells Payload that it has raised a $970,000 pre-seed round.

  • Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace announced it will acquire a majority stake in Lithuanian smallsat manufacturer NanoAvionics for an enterprise value of €65M ($67M) (via Payload).

  • L3Harris ($LHX) made a strategic investment in Mynaric ($MYNA), investing €11.2M ($11.4M) to acquire 409,294 new bearer shares of Mynaric and initially own 7.2% of the company’s total shares.

  • Avio received €340M ($358M) in pandemic recovery funds from the Italian government, which it will use to develop launch vehicles.

  • Latitude, the French launch startup formerly known as Venture Orbital Systems, closed a €10M ($10.4M) Series A round led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation and Expansion (via Payload).

  • Space Florida and the Israel Innovation Authority awarded ninth-round Innovation Partner Funding to five teams, each consisting of one Floridian company and one Israeli company.

  • Vectrus and The Vertex Company completed their combination to become V2X Inc., a provider of critical mission solutions. V2X will trade on the NYSE under the ticker “VEC” through tomorrow, but will trade as “VVX” afterward.

The View from Italy

Left: technicians hold a section of gold-coated mirror with a blurry image on it. Right: in infrared, a technician's reflection is shown.

Image: Media Lario

NASA’s ASTHROS mission will send a telescope 130,000 feet in the air using a high-altitude balloon that’s larger than a football field. Construction of the telescope’s 8.2-foot primary mirror concluded last month in Italy. Here’s a comparison of the gold-and-nickel-coated mirror’s reflectivity in visible versus infrared.

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