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Rocket Lab plans to return to flight in November By Jeff Foust

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ocket Lab announced Aug. 6 that it plans to resume launches of its Electron rocket in November, with two launches scheduled through

the end of the year.The company said the Electron launch of

several small satellites, postponed several times from April, is now scheduled for early Novem-ber from the company’s launch site on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.

Problems with a motor controller in one of the first stage engines forced the company to postpone a launch attempt in April. A second attempt in late June was scrubbed shortly before liftoff when the problem re-occurred.

“We saw some strange behavior again and we’ve decided we’re going to make a hardware modification to the motor controller,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview during the AIAA/Utah State University Conference on Small Satellites here. “We made the decision to bite the bullet. We’ll go in there and make some changes to the hardware, some components of the motor controller.”

Those changes, he said, will require the company to perform a “complete qualifica-tion program” of the engines using the revised

controller. That test program, he said, drives the decision to reschedule the launch for November, even though the company has flight hardware “stacked up left, right and center” at its facilities.

“We could put a vehicle on the pad right now,” he said. “But we just don’t take risks. There’s a race on for small launch, but we’re not going to race to launch on any timeline. For us, it’s about being 100 percent perfect because that’s what, at the end of the day, everyone remembers.”

The payload manifest for the November launch remains the same as what the company announced in May. The launch will carry two Lemur-2 cubesats for Spire, a company that operates a constellation of such spacecraft for tracking and weather services. A satellite built by Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems for GeoOptics, another company planning to operate a weather satellite constellation, is on the launch, as well as IRVINE01, a cubesat built by high school students in Southern California.

The mission also carries a hosted payload developed by German company High Perfor-mance Space Structure Systems GmBH to test drag sail technologies. That payload, integrated on the Electron’s upper stage by Ecliptic Enter-prises, will remain attached to the stage after satellite deployment.

Rocket Lab plans to follow that launch in December with its next Electron mission for NASA, fulfilling a Venture Class Launch Services contract the company won in 2015. That launch will carry 10 cubesats from NASA centers and universities, according to a manifest on the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative website.

The back-to-back launches, which will be the third and fourth to date for the Electron, reflect the company’s efforts to ramp up both the production and launch rates of the rocket.

With production of the Electron now ap-proaching a rate of one vehicle a month, a goal a company set early this year, Beck said Rocket Lab is planning as many as 16 launches in 2019. The manifest of those missions is largely full, but with some room for cubesat rideshare payloads.

That 2019 schedule includes at least one launch from a U.S. launch site the company will develop over the next year. The company selected four finalists — Cape Canaveral, Pacific Spaceport Complex - Alaska, Vandenberg Air Force Base and Wallops Flight Facility — in July, and plans to select the winning site soon.

“Right now it’s an incredibly even race. There’s not one clear winner over anybody else,” Beck said of the U.S. launch site selection process. “It’s been a fantastic process for us, and you’ll see an announcement very shortly.”

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meet us at booth 137and view our thrusterlive in action

“We could put a vehicle on the pad right now. But we just don’t take risks,” said Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck.

“There’s a race on for small launch, but we’re not going to race to launch on any timeline.”

Huber Subhner

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ASA is responding to the growing interest in, and capabilities of, small satellites for science applications with an initiative that will spend

$100 million a year on a series of projects.In a speech at the AIAA/Utah State Univer-

sity Conference on Small Satellites here Aug. 6, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate ad-ministrator for science, outlined that initiative, which includes efforts ranging from a call for proposals for technology demonstration mis-sions to new launch opportunities for smallsats.

“We’re in business for small satellites and cubesats,” he said, citing as “proof points” both ongoing smallsat missions and new programs he announced in his address. “We’re going to realize the importance of small satellites not just as a platform but as an enabler to do science that is otherwise not achievable.”

Those efforts are part of an overarching initia-tive within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate that will spend $100 million on smallsat projects, starting in the current fiscal year. That figure was finalized only about 10 days ago, he said, with the final approval of the overall operating plan for the agency for this year.

“This was the first initiative I put in place when I joined two years ago,” he said, citing his experience chairing a National Academies study on the scientific utility of cubesats released in 2016 just a few months before he joined the agency as head of the Science Mission Direc-torate. “I felt, because of that Academies study, that it was absolutely critical that we do this.”

Part of that initiative is an effort to purchase Earth science data from constellations of sat-ellites. Zurbuchen announced that the agency was making first awards from that program to DigitalGlobe, Planet and Spire, companies that operate fleets of satellites that provide imagery or weather data. He did not disclose the size of the individual awards or their total value, although original plans estimated spending $25 million on such data.

Zurbuchen said NASA was interested in buying data from companies that have already made use of it from primary customers. “If you have data that is of value to the science community, if you’ve expended the value that comes from latency and so forth, and you want a secondary market, we’re in business,” he said.

NASA first announced plans to make such data purchases in 2016, then restarted the effort late last year with a goal of making awards in early 2018. “Thanks for your patience. Thanks for sticking with it,” he said.

NASA currently has a growing fleet of cubesat and other smallsat missions, primarily in Earth science and heliophysics. One such satellite is a cubesat called RainCube recently deployed from the International Space Station to test the use of Ka-band radar for measuring pre-cipitation. The spacecraft just performed the first successful test of its radar, Zurbuchen announced at the conference.

Another element of the smallsat initiative is a new announcement of opportunity for technology demonstration missions in helio-physics. Zurbuchen said NASA is planning to invest up to $65 million in smallsat missions that would fly along with the Interstellar Map-ping and Acceleration Probe, which will launch

in 2024 to the Earth-sun L-1 Lagrange point.“This is really a novel type of application

because of the fact that it deliberately focuses on enhancing the technological capabilities in that area,” he said. “If successful, this will not only teach us new science but will protect technological infrastructure that is sensitive to space weather.”

NASA bolsters smallsat science programs By Jeff Foust

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“We’re going to realize the importance of small satellites not just as a platform but as an enabler to do science that is otherwise not achievable,” NASA associate administrator for science Thomas Zurbuchen said Aug. 6.

“If you have data that is of value to the science community … and you want a secondary market, we’re in business.”Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate

administrator for science

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paceflight announced Aug. 6 that it’s beginning final preparations for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch later this year carrying more than

70 smallsats for a variety of commercial, gov-ernment and educational customers.The SSO-A “SmallSat Express” launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 represents the largest rideshare mission to date on an American launch vehicle. The Falcon 9, launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will place 71 small satellites into sun-synchronous orbit.

“We’re beginning the integration process,” Curt Blake, president of the Seattle-based launch services company, said in a recent interview. Some of the satellites will be integrated into the overall payload stack at the company’s facilities, with the rest being done at the launch site.

A company statement said only that the launch was scheduled for later this year, but Blake said Spaceflight expects the SSO-A mis-sion to launch in the fourth quarter. “We don’t have an exact date yet, but we’re definitely in the fall,” he said. One source with a payload on the mission said they’ve been told to plan for a mid-November launch.

The biggest single customer on this mission is Planet, which plans to launch two of its SkySat high-resolution imaging satellites and several Dove medium-resolution imaging cubesats. Planet is also sponsoring two university-built cubesats on the mission.

About three-quarters of the payloads are from companies. Besides Planet, they include Astrocast, Audacy, Capella, Fleet and HawkEye 360, all of whom have plans for smallsat con-stellations. Several universities have payloads on the mission, as well as one from the Nevada Museum of Art and another from a high school.

“It’s a really broad spectrum across industry, universities, governments,” Blake said. “It’s a really broad base.”

Spaceflight announced plans for the SSO-A mission, then known as “2017 Sun Synch Express,” in September 2015. At the time the company planned to perform such dedicated rideshare missions on an annual basis, starting with that launch in the second half of 2017.

That mission was delayed by a year because of other delays in the SpaceX launch manifest. Blake said the company was open to doing

similar missions in the future, but wanted to wait until after the SSO-A mission launched before making plans. “I think there’s definitely a chance of us doing more, like an SSO-B and an SSO-C and the like,” he said.

Future dedicated rideshare missions, though, might use smaller medium-class launch ve-hicles, such as Arianespace’s Vega or India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. “They’re easier to fill, certainly,” he said. “At the various dif-ferent price points, it makes it easier to get a mission together.”

Spaceflight is best known for providing ride-share opportunities for small satellites on larger launch vehicles, but has recently also been working with small launch vehicles. In June, the company announced separate deals with Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit for missions on those companies’ Electron and LauncherOne vehicles, respectively.

“We’re definitely seeing some demand in the small launch vehicle space,” Blake said. Even with small launchers, he said, there are ride-share opportunities for small satellites. “We’ve

been working with those providers to help them round out their offerings.”

Blake described the rideshare market over-all as “booming,” with Spaceflight planning to launch 97 satellites on several missions, including SSO-A, through the end of 2018. The company has about 10 rideshare missions planned for 2019.

He said Spaceflight is being approached both by customers seeking rideshares as well as launch companies offering secondary pay-load opportunities. “Customers come to us be-cause they want to have a portfolio of launch options that spreads their risk portfolio out among a bunch of different launch providers,” he said. “The launch providers are coming to use when they have some excess capacity and asking us to help fill out a mission to make it more profitable.”

“It’s a really big undertaking,” Blake said of the SSO-A mission. “I think it’s going to change what people think is possible with rideshare and showcase our technical capabilities to make big missions come together.”

Spaceflight gears up for 71-satellite Falcon 9 launch By Jeff Foust

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“We’re definitely seeing some demand in the small launch vehicle space,” Spaceflight President Curt Blake said. “We’ve been working with those providers to help them round out their offerings.”

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o create space architectures that can withstand system failures and attacks by adversaries, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies see

promise in resilient networks built around constellations of small satellites.

“The tough part is not figuring out how to mass produce a satellite bus or build a lot of little payloads,” said Fred Kennedy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Tactical Technology Office director. “The hard part is getting that entire network to be responsive to a bunch of requirements we have to satisfy soon.”

Defense and intelligence leaders have become increasingly vocal about threats to space systems and the need to stop buying what Gen. John Hyten, who leads U.S. Strategic Command, memorably called “big satellites that make juicy targets.”

Defense and intelligence experts speaking at the 2018 Small Satellite Conference here said satellites alone will not produce resilient space networks, but they are part of the solution.

The Army, for example, is exploring the use of small satellite constellations “linked together with multiple pathways that switch automatically,” said David Weeks, systems engineer and senior technical adviser embedded with the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala-bama. This type of constellation will require an emphasis on security for the space and ground segments, added.

“Ground systems too often are thought about as an afterthought,” Weeks said. “They have to be directly addressed in the initial concepts as we go to stronger architectures.”

The U.S. Army and National Geospatial-In-telligence Agency are voracious consumers of

satellite imagery because both organizations are eager to keep watch on targets of interest. In the past, both organizations relied almost exclusively on large government owned and operated satellites. While that is beginning to change, widespread adoption of inexpensive commercial satellites and data sources requires a cultural shift, the panelists said.

“We have a risk-averse culture,” Kennedy said. “It wants to spend a lot of time testing and fixing and testing reviewing. That’s a problem in the defense community because we are outside the turning radius of our adversaries. Our adversaries are figuring out how to do things more quickly, more cheaply.”

To begin addressing that problem, DARPA created the Blackjack program which seeks to develop a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit to offer persistent, global coverage for military operations. DARPA is interested in the “ground segment, the space segment and the user segment,” Kennedy said.

“We want it all and we want to change the cul-ture, because if things get cheaper and simpler to build, if we can innovate more rapidly, we won’t care about losing stuff. It’s okay if [a satellite] goes

in the drink or fails on orbit if you know you can build another one in short order to get it back up.”

NGA is grappling with even more fundamen-tal change due to an overwhelming number of data sources and little time to analyze the data and offer answers to its customers, said Gregory Black, NGA senior geointelligence authority for commercial imagery and services.

To make sense of all the available data, NGA needs to augment its machine learning and machine vision capabilities, Black said. That requires “cultural change on every level, from trusting others to help us get answers to trusting machinery, which is one of the biggest concep-tual challenges for geographers or analysts on the intelligence side.”

Still, change is happening. About 20 percent of NGA’s intelligence missions are “being met through something other than a national source or a national supplier,” Black said.

The Army, meanwhile, is looking to commercial industry for small satellites and small payloads “all the way from cubesats up to a couple hundred kilograms,” Weeks said. “We can build more of them faster and less expensively as long as every-thing is tied together as an intelligent system.”

Smallsats increasingly figure into DoD’s resiliency calculations By Debra Werner

“It’s okay if [a satellite] goes in the drink or fails on orbit if you know you can build another one in short order to get it back up.”

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“We have a risk-averse culture,” DARPA’s Fred Kennedy said Aug. 6. “It wants to spend a lot of time testing and fix-ing and testing reviewing. That’s a problem in the defense community because we are outside the turning radius of our adversaries. Our adversaries are figuring out how to do things more quickly, more cheaply.”

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erran Orbital raised $36 million in a Series B round from investors, including Lockheed Martin, Beach Point Capital managed funds and

Goldman Sachs, the company announced Aug. 6.With the new funding, Terran Orbital plans

to expand its workforce and buy manufactur-ing equipment for a new 40,000 square foot facility designed to produce as many as 150 satellites a year.

“We just finished building a 40,000 square foot facility in Irvine, California, and are rais-ing money because we are growing fast and require more equipment and personnel,” Marc Bell, Terran Orbital Corporation co-founder and chairman, told SpaceNews.

Lockheed Martin Ventures announced its first investment in Terran Orbital of Irvine, California, in June 2017. That investment showed many nanosatellite builders and investors that aero-space giants were beginning to see the promise of tiny cubesats. Terran Orbital owns Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, a business established

in 2011 by cubesat inventor Jordi Puig-Suari and Scott MacGillivray, who led nanosatellite programs for Boeing Phantom Works.

“Lockheed Martin chose to expand upon our existing relationship with Terran Orbital, as both an investor and a customer, to support the LM 50 Series Satellite Bus System,” Chris Moran, Lockheed Martin Ventures executive director and general manager, said in a state-ment. “Together, we work to provide responsive and innovative solutions for our customers. We look forward to continuing our work together so we can better enable our customers to con-front the challenges of today.”

Terran Orbital is expanding alongside the small satellite market as a whole. “The economics of what we do continues to improve because people can do more and more of the jobs pre-viously performed by traditional satellites with less money and more quickly,” Bell said.

Terran Orbital will consider further acquisi-tions as the small satellite market consolidates, Bell said.

Telesat awarded two contracts last week — one to Airbus Defence and Space and the other to Maxar Tech-nologies and Thales Alenia Space — to

work on competing designs for a constellation of broadband satellites the Canadian fleet operator intends to deploy three years from now.

The study contracts position Airbus and the Thales-Maxar team as frontrunners to ultimately build the multi-terabit, 117-satellite system when Telesat makes an award in mid-2019, Telesat said.

Telesat said both contenders will perform “a series of engineering activities and tech-nical reviews” in close collaboration with Telesat over the coming months before the company makes a final selection. Telesat is funding the work, but did not reveal the size of the contracts.

Telesat’s schedule for manufacturing and service activation has slipped by about a year.

The company now plans to have the low-latency constellation in service in 2022 instead of 2021.

Telesat is currently testing a prototype sat-ellite from Airbus-subsidiary Surrey Satellite Technology Limited that launched in January on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. An earlier prototype from Maxar’s Space Systems Loral division and the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory was lost during a No-vember 2017 Russian Soyuz failure.

Thales Alenia Space has constellation ex-perience as the manufacturer for the 81 LEO satellites in Iridium Next and has a study contract with startup LeoSat for its proposed constella-tion of 84 broadband satellites. Maxar’s MDA division in Canada is a supplier to OneWeb for the company’s 900-satellite constellation.

Airbus is already under contract to build 900 small telecom satellites for OneWeb through a joint venture with the startup called OneWeb

Satellites. The first 10 satellites are scheduled to launch by year’s end on a Europeanized Soyuz rocket operated by Arianespace.

It is not clear what role OneWeb Satellites could play in building satellites for Telesat, however, because Telesat has hinted its space-craft will be materially larger than OneWeb’s 145-kilogram satellites, and OneWeb Satellites has said it doesn’t plan to build satellites much bigger than that.

Winning the Telesat LEO manufacturing contract would be significant for Maxar — even though it would mean splitting revenue with Thales Alenia Space — as the ongoing slow-down in telecom satellite orders has led the company to consider exiting the business of building large geostationary satellites.

Telesat said the manufacturer of its constella-tion will also be responsible for ground segment infrastructure and system integration.

Telesat awards LEO constellation study contracts By Caleb Henry

Terran Orbital owns Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, a company that builds cubesats not much larger than a can of soda.

Terran Orbital raises $36 million in Series B investment round By Debra Werner

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olorado startup Ursa Major Technologies is building a line of rocket engines that it hopes small-sat launch companies will chose

over building their own engines in-house. Ursa Major Technologies shipped its first

product, a 5,000-pound-force liquid oxygen and kerosene engine called Hadley, to cus-tomer Generation Orbit this spring and has begun serial production of the engines while also working on a larger variant.

Founded in 2015, Ursa Major raised $8 mil-lion last fall with participation from the Space Angels Network, a syndicate of early stage investors who have also backed NanoRacks, Made In Space, Planet and other prominent space startups. The company counts former U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and former Northrop Grumman CEO Ronald Sugar as advisers.

Ursa Major has taken up the challenge of trying to convince launch startups to outsource their engines rather than follow the models of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

“The first gut response is ‘our engines are special and we don’t have a company without our engines,’ but if there is a way to increase their margin by flying someone else’s engines, most companies will be interested in coming around,” Ursa Major founder and CEO Joe Laurienti says.

Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Vector Space Systems — three frontrunners fielding dedi-cated smallsat launchers — are building engines in house. Currently, just two launch startups — Generation Orbit and ABL Space Systems — have gone public with plans to depend on Laurienti’s 26-person team in Berthoud, Col-orado, to supply the engines for the satellite launchers they’re developing.

Atlanta-based Generation Orbit test fired its first Ursa Major rocket engine in June at Jacksonville, Florida’s Cecil Spaceport. The

integrated ground test showed that the Hadley engine, fed by “flight-like” liquid oxygen and kerosene propellant tanks, should be able to boost Generation Orbit’s air-launched GO1 single-stage rocket to hypersonic speeds.

ABL Space Systems, an El Segundo, Cal-ifornia-based startup led by former SpaceX and Virgin Orbit engineers, is designing its $17 million-a-launch RS1 rocket around a Hadley-powered second stage and a pair of first-stage “Ripley” engines Ursa Major is designing to deliver a combined 70,000 pounds of thrust. ABL is aiming for a 2020 maiden flight.

Laurienti says Ursa Major’s ability to fo-cus solely on engines enables the company to produce better systems than companies that spread their resources thin building the entire rocket. He foresees the launch industry following the same route as aviation, with launch providers making their money through operations, not building hardware.

“In the aircraft industry, you don’t see Boeing building aircraft engines, and you certainly don’t see United Airlines building engines,” said Laurienti. “Much like United Launch Alliance or SpaceX, United Airlines’ value proposition is to get something from

A to B. We want to enable companies to not have to vertically integrate.”

Prior to Ursa Major, Laurienti held positions at SpaceX and Blue Origin, as did more than half of Ursa Major’s employees. In the fall of 2016, Laurienti’s team moved into a 585 square meter building in Berthoud, Colorado, that once belonged to Ball Aerospace, and hot-fired its first Hadley engine the following spring.

After 16 months designing and fabricating the first engine, Ursa Major has built eight to date, according to Laurienti. The company an-ticipates completing the larger 35,000-pound-thrust Ripley engine (also LOX-kerosene) in 2020. Even if only a single-digit number of launch startups succeed, that would constitute a large enough market for Ursa Major, he said.

Ursa Major aims to disrupt vertical integration trend By Caleb Henry

Three of the eight Hadley LOX-kerosene rocket engines Ursa Major has built since starting serial production.

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Ursa Major CEO Joe Laurienti worked for SpaceX and Blue Origin before starting a propulsion company now building and testing its engines in a former Ball Aerospace hangar an hour north of Denver.

Most launch ventures want to build their engines in house. Ursa Major wants to change that.

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axar Technologies is setting up a new organization focused solely on small satellites while continuing to downsize its geo-

stationary satellite manufacturing business at Space Systems Loral.

Howard Lance, Maxar’s chief executive, said the company is still examining strategic alterna-tives for its business of building large multi-ton geostationary communications satellites — one of which is exiting that line of work altogether — but has not yet made a decision.

Speaking last week on a conference call with analysts, Lance said Maxar is laying off staff in Palo Alto, California, where SSL builds satellites of all sizes, while scaling up the new division in nearby San Jose to focus on a grow-ing smallsat business.

“We continue to exit leased buildings and consolidate our footprint on the Palo Alto cam-pus,” he said. “We are establishing a separate

organization structure and bringing in new talent to focus on execution of the U.S. government and commercial smallsats growth opportunities at a new facility in San Jose with a healthy pipeline of smallsat and U.S. government opportunities that we believe will lead to sustained growth well into the 2020s.”

Lance didn’t say how many people Maxar plans to cut from SSL. The company has had at least two rounds of layoffs since mid-2017.

Maxar reported a 3 percent decline in space systems-related revenue companywide for the months of April, May and June, a decrease slowed but not stopped by growth in smallsat work. Rev-enue was down roughly 18 percent year over year from geostationary, or GEO, communications satellites and the nearly finished construction of the Canadian government’s three-satellite Radarsat Constellation Mission bound for low Earth orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 this November.

Lance said Maxar’s new smallsat division

will focus on satellites ranging from 100 to 500 kilograms. The San Jose facility “is much more appropriate for the overhead costs and physical structure requirements that smaller satellites need,” he said.

GEO communications satellite orders split among all the world’s manufacturers will likely land around eight this year, Lance said, similar to last year. Historically, satellite operators have purchased 20 or more GEO communications satellites from manufacturers, with SSL often claiming the lion’s share.

“We do not believe at this point we will see much in the way of a market recovery for GEO,” Lance said.

Satellite manufacturing demand is strong for low- and medium-Earth-orbit spacecraft, which are typically smaller. GEO demand is coming mainly for replacement spacecraft, he said. These market conditions, he concluded, appear to be the new norm.

Loft Orbital unveils supply chain for small condosat missions By Caleb Henry

Maxar creates smallsat division By Caleb Henry

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Loft Orbital, a startup that raised $3.2 million last year to run a satellite fleet for people who want to put payloads in space but not operate them, has

announced a team of 21 partners to build, launch and communicate with its future spacecraft.

Loft Orbital estimates it can get a customer payload on a satellite and in orbit within 12 to 18 months of a request thanks to its network of “inSpace” mission partners, which includes man-ufacturer Space Systems Loral, launch provider Rocket Lab, and 19 others spanning from ground segment operations to launch to data analytics.

Pierre-Damien Vaujour, Loft Orbital co-founder and head of product, told SpaceNews that the company has designed hardware and software to enable plug-and-play interoperability for sensors, cameras and other payloads, allowing for quicker mission timelines.

Loft Orbital intends to announce its first missions in the coming months, he said. Based in San Francisco, Loft Orbital plans to operate a constellation of small “condosat” satellites be-tween 50 and 150 kilograms, that carry multiple payloads from customers who don’t want to be-come satellite operators. Along with spacecraft

construction and launch, Loft Orbital handles insurance, satellite operations, licensing and other details associated with each mission.

Vaujour said part of the reason for hav-ing such a wide range of suppliers is to offer condosat missions entirely with U.S. provid-ers as well as entirely non-U.S. options. U.S. export-control regulations that treat and cus-tomer preference among Loft Orbital’s early buyers necessitated having several foreign partners, he said.

Loft Orbital is still finalizing compatibil-ity of its hardware and software interfaces with all its partners. Vaujour said the com-pany’s “Payload Hub” hardware interface and “Cockpit” software interface are fully vali-dated with two satellite bus providers, and a third is nearly complete.

“We know we are compatible with them, we just haven’t done the testing with the last few ones yet,” he said.

Vaujour said increased standardization of satellite buses larger than cubesats is mak-ing faster missions possible for other types of smallsats. Loft Orbital intends to add more partners over the course of time, he said.

LOFT ORBITAL’S PARTNERS BY CATEGORY:

Satellite Bus: LeoStella • Space Systems Loral • OHB/LuxSpace • Satrec Initiative • Blue Canyon Technologies

Launch Services: ECM Launch Services • Spaceflight Industries • Rocket Lab • Vector Launch • Firefly Aerospace

Ground Segment Services: Kongsberg Satellite Services • Swedish Space Corporation • Infostellar

Payload: GomSpace • AirPhoton • EmTroniX • Media Lario • Satlantis Moog

Data Analytics: Orbital Insight • EarthCube

Cubesat co-inventor sails into the sunset By Debra Werner

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ordi Puig-Suari, the California Polytechnic State University pro-fessor who along with Bob Twiggs, now a professor at Morehead State

University in Kentucky, invented the cubesat in 1999 as a university teaching tool, is preparing to head off into the sunset. Literally. After his annual trip to Logan, Utah, for the Small Satel-lite Conference, Puig-Suari along with his wife and 15-year-old son will head west in a 50-foot sailboat across the Mediterranean Sea on a trip around the world.

It’s a voyage he’s always dreamed of mak-ing and the time feels right since cubesats are “All Grown Up.” That was the theme of the 15th annual CubeSat Developers Workshop April 30 to May 2 at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Cal-ifornia. With about 2,000 cubesats launched by schools, companies, government agencies and organizations worldwide, Puig-Suari no longer feels the need to help shepherd the cubesat community and the cubesat standard. SpaceNews correspondent Debra Werner spoke recently with Puig-Suari, who was in Greece preparing his sailboat for the journey ahead.

Where are you headed?We are headed west. We are sailing into the sunset. The idea is to go around the world.

How long does that take?If you are racing, you can do it really fast. For normal people, it takes a couple of years. We’ll probably take a little longer than that. We are in no rush.

Is this retirement or a leave of absence?It’s more like dream fulfillment than retirement. Right now, I’m a retired person and we’ll see what I do next. There are a few things that will happen along the way. At times when we have to stop for the weather, to ride out the hurricane season for example, there may be opportunities to teach somewhere or work for a while. It will always be shorter-term things that sound like fun.

As you prepare for your trip, are you looking back over your career and the invention of the cubesat?Yes. To some extent the timing of the trip is not necessarily random. For a long time, there was a group of people nurturing the cubesat standard and the community to make sure it

flourished. That has happened already. It’s doing very well on its own. It’s no longer something that needs the kind of tending that it needed at the beginning. To some extent that’s extremely satisfying. It was also cool to be the center of the universe when Cal Poly was launching all the cubesats. But it’s a huge success that now everybody can do it and everybody is doing it.

I often see them launched from the Inter-national Space Station.All the time. For a time, I knew every single cubesat that was launched. I gave up when we had a week with 50-something launched. That’s when I said, “I cannot keep up with it.”

What is important about the cubesat? How did they change the space industry?To me, a few things are important. Some are obvious and some not so much. It is important for universities and people to be able to put a satellite up without the kind of risk NASA and

commercial companies faced. They could try some crazy thing. Before cubesats, we were so conservative nobody was willing to try anything out of the ordinary. When we did, we discovered some of the things everybody said would not work, did work. The fundamental change was that there was a mechanism to go try to those things. Some will work and some will not, but it allows us to try them and that was very infre-quent before cubesats arrived. That was really important. That was the big change. Commercial electronics were exploding at the same time. It was serendipitous, and we demonstrated that they did work fairly well in space, at least in low Earth orbit. That was a huge change in the capability of the small spacecraft. When Bob and I started, we really wanted a Sputnik. We didn’t feel like there was much more these things could do until students started pillaging cell phone technology and all kinds of other stuff. Next thing you know the National Science Federation is interested in smallsats.

Cubesat co-inventor Jordi Puig-Suari stands on the sailboat he plans to sail around the world with his wife and son.

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Now, in addition to students, com-panies, NASA, intelligence agencies and governments around the world are launch-ing cubesats.That’s another thing that has been a game-changer. Once the price dropped so dramati-cally, lots of entities — companies, countries or schools — that would never have considered launching a spacecraft on their own or being involved with space systems, had access to space. So we started to see countries in Africa get serious about space and a Columbian space company. In Finland, the cubesat team from Aalto University started Iceye, the first company to launch a synthetic aperture radar microsatellite. That is very satisfying. It used to be space was a very small club because it was so expensive. Now, all these young students play with it in school, build a cubesat, make a bunch of mistakes and then say, “I could do XYZ with a cubesat.” They do it as a commercial entity. The success rate is pretty high, surprisingly so.

Has it also changed the workforce because the students have designed, built and op-erated a small satellite?Yes and they come out of the experience with very high self-image. It’s very satisfying and empowering because they have done the whole thing. Some of them continue to work on smallsats, some of them start their own companies. Even the ones that go work for Boeing and Lockheed come in with a different perspective. We see them asking more ques-tions. They ask, “Why do we have to do it this way? That’s not the way I did it and it worked.” Many times there is a very good answer on why industry does it this way. But every once in a while, industry considers changing the way it’s done it for 20 years. I think that’s an important question to ask yourself every once in a while.

Lately, I’ve heard about new standards like the Aerospace Corp.’s Launch Unit. Is it useful to have more standards?

Access to space is very important. What is critical is not simply mass to space, a lot of rockets have excess capacity, it’s making it easy enough for whoever is putting a rocket together to incorporate a secondary pay-load as painlessly as possible. Once that is accomplished, they will do it. We saw that going from 3u to 6u was a relatively simple step because things looked similar and the mission managers and launch providers were familiar with it. It was another box-like thing. We went to 12u. The idea that it is a standard and everybody is going to follow the same constraints and it is going to be easy for the integrators to put it in the rockets is key. For any standard, one of the important things to ask is, “What is the minimum service that the satellites require.” Don’t give them any more than that because that makes it complex for the launch vehicle. Make it as simple and as easy as possible. We also learned that these things take some time. When we went back and looked at launch activity, It took about ten years for things to really take off. There were a few launches before that but it wasn’t instantaneous. People needed to gain some comfort that these standards are going to be around for a while. They are going to exist when I finish my satellite in a few years and then they started building.

What else are you thinking as you embark on this journey?It’s been a hell of a ride. It’s been fun but it’s a good point for me to take a break and do something that we’ve been dreaming about doing for a long time. It’s also something that we don’t think we can do when we get to a certain age. We want to do it now and we’ll see what we do next. I don’t think that’s the end of the road. It’s going to be good to think about other things and think about the world in a slightly different way; to see places that don’t function the way we do in the U.S. and see what comes out of that.

The other thing I was thinking is that space people always talk about exploration, how hu-mans were meant to explore and that’s why we should go to Mars. I agree whole-heartedly but I’m not going to go to Mars. I’m going backwards. I’m not trying to relive what the first explorers did because I have GPS and AIS but get a better understanding of what the first explorers were thinking when they embarked on their journeys. Maybe that will help me think about the next level of explo-ration as cubesats go to Mars and Venus and other places.

Jordi Puig-Suari, right, co-invented the cubesat with Bob Twiggs in 1999 as a university teaching tool.

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