And here’s the megafeed of everything I’ve been doing.
Very special thanks to the 422 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off for the month of June. MECO is entirely listener- and reader-supported, so your support keeps this blog and podcast going, growing, and improving, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.
NASA recently established the Suborbital Crew office within the Commercial Crew Program, which will focus on developing a plan to fly personnel on suborbital spaceflights. At the same time, Virgin Galactic signed an agreement with NASA to provide private orbital spaceflights to the ISS.
Jake and Anthony are joined by John Johnson. John is an expert on exoplanet research at Harvard University, having done work for NASA on Kepler but also as Principal Investigator for the MINERVA project. He also founded the Banneker Institute at Harvard, an organization dedicated to helping people of color enter astronomy and the subject of our current fundraiser.
Grant Bonin, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Spaceflight joins me to talk about everything they’ve been up to lately, including being acquired, signing deals with SpaceX for rideshares on Starlink missions and on dedicated flights to SSO, signing deals with new launch companies and international providers, and a lot more including manifesting satellites, last-mile services, and about what makes Spaceflight unique.
Most interesting is the contract Raytheon won for $37 million, under which they will supply Overhead Persistent Infrared payloads—the same type of payloads they’re supplying for the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning satellites.
Relativity now has a hell of a backlog, plenty of facilities, and the holy grail that is both an east and west coast launch site, if they can successfully build one at Vandenberg. I honestly wouldn’t bet on the latter.
Mark Wiese, Manager of NASA’s Gateway Deep Space Logistics, joins me to talk about the logistics architecture for Gateway and, specifically, the selection of SpaceX and Dragon XL for missions in the future. He even lets me get really nerdy and responds to some of my complaints and questions from past episodes!
Intelsat ordered four from Maxar and two from Northrop Grumman, while SES ordered two each from Boeing and Northrop Grumman with two more yet to be announced. This is huge for satellite manufacturers who have been hurting in recent years after a dip in orders. This is all in preparation for clearing C-band spectrum that has been reallocated towards 5G deployment in the US and will be auctioned off late this year.
It was never a question that Spaceflight would be interested in the SpaceX rideshare program. It’s a perfect match—inexpensive slots offered by SpaceX which can be taken advantage of to sell the end-to-end services offered by Spaceflight at a solid margin. They’re also manifesting two BlackSky satellites on the next Starlink flight, just like we saw a few days ago with Planet flying SkySats on the previous flight.
Still a long way to go on this, but this has been part of the work the Space Acquisition Council has been doing to try and stabilize small launch providers through the economic instability of recent months. They’re purchasing two rideshare launches from each of the following: Aevum, Astra, X-BOW, Rocket Lab, Space Vector, VOX Space (Virgin Orbit).
Big podcasting week. I just posted an episode here, had NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Off-Nominal, and I also appeared on my friend Brendan Byrne’s Are We There Yet? podcast, as well.
Northrop Grumman was awarded $187 million for the Gateway Habitat design, which caps off NASA’s 2020 budget work for Artemis components. Additionally, Kathy Lueders was named head of human spaceflight at NASA, which is huge and fantastic news. We take a look at the Artemis program’s acquisitions so far and the road ahead under Lueders’ leadership.
After the bizarre departure of Doug Loverro and the epic triumph of SpaceX DM-2, this news makes perfect sense and I, like damn near everyone who follows space, am thrilled to see it.
Importantly, this contract is only for work through 2020, culminating with Preliminary Design Review. That means there is going to be an additional contract or two for the development, launch, and checkout of the vehicle.
NASA is relying more and more on the private sector to help its exploration efforts — from building the next moon lander to transporting astronauts to the International Space Station.
So what does the future look like for this new dawn of commercial exploration? We’ll talk with Main Engine Cut Off podcast host Anthony Colangelo about the latest space business news and how leveraging commercial companies will help NASA reach places like the moon and Mars.
This feels like a natural extension for Astroscale, who until now has been focused on satellite end-of-life and debris removal services.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine joins Jake and Anthony for the first episode of Off-Nominal Origins. We talk about how he got interested in space and aviation, his time at Rice University, his years as a Navy pilot, his continuing fascination with the Rocket Racing League, and a whole lot more.And yes, obviously, we talk about the time Jake and Anthony started a weird little sideshow at IAC 2019 with The Jim Bridenstine Fan Club.
Jake and Anthony stop by with a quick update on our donation campaign to help two wonderful organizations, Black Girls Code and the Banneker Institute. The response has been incredible so far, so let’s keep it up!
We’ve put together a fundraiser with the help of our Off-Nominal Discord community to benefit two fantastic organizations that are helping make our space industry a better place: Black Girls Code and the Banneker Institute at Harvard.
Here at Off-Nominal, we've been following the demonstrations against racial inequality and police violence in the United States, Canada, and around the world with concern. These events have highlighted deep problems with how we treat each other in many domains, and space exploration is not exempt.While we have been processing this in real-time, it has become obvious that we must do our part and use our platform to speak up against these inequalities and take action to stop them. We have been engaging with our Discord community this past week to come up with a plan.