Need a lift? (8/15/22)

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In today's newsletter:🤝 ESA looks for launch✔️ Space rules🗓️ The week ahead

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ESA + SpaceX

The space industry hasn’t yet completely resolved the gap in access to launch stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To get some of its stranded sats back on their mission timelines, ESA has begun preliminary talks with SpaceX, Reuters reports.

The story so far: The war in Ukraine has poked holes in Europe’s spaceflight plans over the past few months, as sanctions on Russia cut off all access to Soyuz flights. ESA’s Ariane 6 rocket is poised to fill a lot of that missing launch capacity, but delays in development have sparked concerns over that capability in the near term.

• Ariane 6 was meant to fly this summer, but its debut flight has now been bumped to 2023.

Across the pond: ESA has opened exploratory discussions with SpaceX to launch missions aboard the Falcon 9 workhorse while Ariane 6 is still on the ground. ESA head Josef Aschbacher emphasized that the agency is in the beginning stages of these talks and that nothing is yet official. Moving a payload between launchers, after all, is more complicated than just signing a new contract.

“We of course need to make sure that they are suitable. It's not like jumping on a bus," Aschbacher told Reuters. “We are looking into this technical compatibility but we have not asked for a commercial offer yet. We just want to make sure that it would be an option in order to make a decision on asking for a firm commercial offer.”

New friends: SpaceX has stepped up already to launch missions left stranded by the loss of access to Soyuz.

• OneWeb, the European B2B competitor to Starlink, opted to partner with SpaceX on launch rather than risk its constellation staying grounded.

• Last week, Northrop Grumman booked three Falcon 9 missions while it works with Firefly to replace the Russian-made engines on its Antares rocket.

Looking forward…ESA is not thinking that SpaceX will be a long-term filler solution. Instead, it’s hoping to fill that capacity with in-house rockets, including the forthcoming Ariane 6 and the proven Vega C, which made a successful debut flight last month.

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New Rules of the Road

The commercial space industry is moving fast, and the US government is making moves to keep up with the times. In response to this rapid growth and development of the orbital environment, VP Kamala Harris said Friday that the government aims to develop a new rules framework for space activities.

“We must write new rules to provide the clarity that all of us require, to provide certainty,” Harris said in Oakland, CA Friday afternoon. “We must write new rules to provide flexibility to incorporate the innovation that is occurring in real time.”

What rules? Harris said that the regulations in place now are left over from the last century of spaceflight, which was primarily driven by governments and by commercial satcom in GEO. The commercial space landscape is vastly different now, and calls for rules to match.

Harris didn’t dive into the specifics of what new rules might crop up. Right now, launch activities are regulated by the FAA, remote sensing by NOAA, and frequency band allocation by the FCC.

• That leaves a lot of space activity unregulated, including debris mitigation and proximity operations in orbit—each fraught and often-discussed topics.

The National Space Council will discuss new potential regulations for the space industry at its next meeting Sep. 9.

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In Other News

• NASA and USSF said that they have extended the certification for the flight termination system on SLS to cover all three potential launch dates.

• The US Army is officially handing off control of ground stations to the Space Force today. USSF will control the Wideband Global Satcom and Defense Satellite Communications System constellations.

• D-Orbit has officially called off its SPAC merger with Breeze Holdings Acquisition Corp., citing market conditions.

• Moldova deployed its first satellite, a tech demo called TUMnanoSAT, from the ISS.

• ESA created a Nordic startup accelerator for pre-seed companies building space tech to create commercial value on Earth.

• SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink satellites to orbit on Friday.

The View from 1966