Plug and play (3/29/23)

Good morning and happy Wednesday. On this day in 1996, the STS-76 crew woke up in space to John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever." We hope your alarm was equally as upbeat.

In today's edition...🌜 Lockheed’s lunar plans📈 Space Force budget updates💸 The term sheet

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Lockheed Shoots for the Moon

Lockheed Martin is establishing Crescent Space Services, a lunar infrastructure subsidiary focused on communication between the Earth and Moon, the contractor announced Tuesday.

“We've seen the Artemis program and how it has been able to really get the attention of the world,” Crescent CEO Joe Landon told Payload. “We sat down and said how can we accelerate that process? What can we do to make every mission easier? And we came up with communications and navigation, because it's fundamental infrastructure.”

The details: Crescent will deploy a satellite network to lunar orbit called Parsec. The birds will facilitate fast communication between the Moon and Earth.

• Lockheed Martin will build two Parsec satellites on its Curio small-sat platform.

• Crescent’s 10-person team will then assume ownership of the birds and operate them using an infrastructure-as-a-service model.

• The subsidiary filed for a special blanket authorization to be able to offer government and commercial customers broad usage of the Crescent lunar communication network.

“[Customers] can just plug into our network, much like your cell phone connects to the nearest cell phone tower,” Landon said.

The lunar opportunity: With the Artemis program aiming to establish a permanent presence on the Moon by the end of the decade, Lockheed Martin is proactively setting up lunar communication infrastructure in advance of demand.

Going forward: Crescent anticipates it will deploy its first satellite to lunar orbit by 2025. As the cislunar economy grows, the company may look to expand its product offerings to include a broad range of infrastructure services.

Space Force: FY24 Cuts Would Pose Dire Consequences

It would be “catastrophic” if the Space Force had to operate under fiscal 2022 funding levels, the military’s top space official told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Under a spending plan backed by a wing of the Republican party, dollars for research and development, launch, modernization, recruitment, missile defense, and domain awareness could all be at risk said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the ranking member of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees defense spending. She asked military leaders specifically how each branch could be affected.

“The Space Force of FY22 doesn’t look anything like the Space Force of FY24,” Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations, told the subcommittee. “Probably the most important concern I would have is the loss of time…when we are moving as fast as possible to address the threat."

Some context: When Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was lobbying to secure support in his bid to become House speaker, he made a deal with some members of the Republican caucus to cut annual spending in fiscal 2024 back to fiscal 2022 levels. While some GOP members said the plan represents an “aspirational goal” rather than a hard cap on spending, other lawmakers have emphasized that everything–even defense–is on the chopping block in their quest to balance the budget.

By the numbers: The Space Force asked for $30B in fiscal 2024. That’s almost double the $18B the service received in fiscal 2022, when it was a little over one year old. The service also looks quite different than it did in March 2022, when Congress passed that year’s appropriations bill. For example, the Space Development Agency–and its multi-billion budget–has transferred into the service since then.

Not all Republicans: It’s important to note that this plan is not backed by all Republicans, and is strongly opposed by defense hawks within the party. At the hearing, subcommittee chair Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) said, “I just want to be on the record that I’m not a big fan of sequestration either, so I hope we can get this appropriation bill completed.”

Sponsored

Access reviews are mission critical: Here’s how to get security risk management right

There is so much sensitive data flowing through corporate servers and enterprise databases at space companies, it makes sense for space leaders to implement user account management controls to prevent unauthorized access to critical data.

Access reviews are mission critical for the security your company. In this eBook, you’ll learn:

• What access reviews are and how to perform them

• Access review pain points

• Why automated matters

In Other News

• Maxar ($MAXR) launched Vivid Standard, the first 30cm global basemap.

• The temperature inside the damaged Soyuz capsule would have been ~50°C (122°F) upon reentry if there had been people on board, a Roscosmos rep told the ISS crew.

• McKinsey released a report that makes the case for businesses to incorporate space into their strategies.

• The TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) instrument arrived at KSC ahead of its April launch.

• China plans to begin launching its own Starlink-esque broadband megaconstellation later this year.

• BlackSky ($BKSY) successfully commissioned the two EO satellites launched on Electron last week within 18 hours of takeoff.

• An asteroid the size of 33 armadillos passed Earth on Sunday. (To be precise, we’re talking unrolled nine-banded armadillos. For some reason.)

The View from Space

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which is preparing for its 49th flight as early as today, captured this image of Mars’ surface on March 22.