AIR FORCE AWARDS IRIDIUM $738M DEAL FOR SATELLITE SERVICES - Iridium Communications said it received a $738.5 million, seven-year contract for unlimited satellite services through Air Force Space Command, continuing a decades long relationship between the Pentagon and the Virginia-based company. The contract, announced Sept. 13, was awarded through the Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services program. As part of the contract, Iridium will provide global secure and unsecure voice, broadcast and other services via 66 satellites in low earth orbit. Iridium has supported the EMSS program for 20 years, but according to the company, a seven-year term of the contract is unprecedented. The EMSS program was previously managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.    More
(Source: C4ISRNet - Sep 17)

FIRST COMMERCIAL SPACE HOTEL TO HAVE LOW-GRAVITY BASKETBALL, ROCK CLIMBING - One company is catering to people's fascination with space by planning to build an enormous hotel for tourists who want to experience life beyond Earth's atmosphere. The Gateway Foundation plans to build a rotating space station that will produce varying rates of artificial gravity, according to its website. Utilizing existing technology from the International Space Station, the accommodations are geared toward guests who want to experience life in space but in the luxury and comfort of a hotel.   More
(Source: ABC News - Sep 16)

TAURUS-1 WITH CODEC-2 TRANSPONDER LAUNCHED - Taurus-1 (Jinniuzuo-1) carrying an amateur radio FM to Codec-2 transponder was launched on a CZ-4B rocket from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center on Thursday, September 12 at 0326 GMT. Taurus-1 is a CubeSat project developed by Aerospace System Engineering Research Institute of Shanghai for youth education and amateur radio.   More
(Source: AMSAT-UK - Sep 15)

CHINA LAUNCHES EARTH-OBSERVING SATELLITES, SOLAR SAIL EXPERIMENT - Two Earth-imaging satellites and an experimental solar sail payload rocketed into orbit Thursday aboard a Chinese Long March 4B launcher, the first flight for China’s Long March 4 rocket family since an upper stage failure in May. The liquid-fueled Long March 4B rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan space center in northern China’s Shanxi province at 0326 GMT Thursday (11:26 p.m. EDT Wednesday), according to state media reports.    More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 15)

RELATIVITY SPACE TO LAUNCH SATELLITES FOR MOMENTUS - Relativity Space signed a Launch Services Agreement (LSA) to launch Momentus’ small and medium satellite customers on Relativity’s Terran 1 rocket. Momentus will then deliver their customers’ small and medium sized satellites to Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) using the Momentus Vigoride Extended in-space shuttle service.   More
(Source: Via Satellite - Sep 14)

BIGELOW’S B330 – AN AUTONOMOUS, EXPANDABLE INDEPENDENT EXPLORATION SPACE STATION - While Bigelow Aerospace’s expandable module, BEAM, continues to perform above all expectations while attached to the International Space Station (ISS), the company has larger ambitions for its range of modules, centered around the B330 – a huge inflatable module. The key focus is on attracting NASA to select B330 as a transportation module for long-duration trips to Mars. Bigelow already has a wealth of experience in space, ranging back to the days of its Genesis modules that tested the technology that has matured into their latest designs.   More
(Source: NASASpaceFlight.com - Sep 14)

FIRST EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITE WITH AI READY FOR LAUNCH - A few months from now will see the launch of the first European satellite to demonstrate how onboard artificial intelligence can improve the efficiency of sending Earth observation data back to Earth. Dubbed ɸ-Sat, or PhiSat, this revolutionary artificial intelligence technology will fly on one of the two CubeSats that make up the FSSCat mission—a Copernicus Masters winning idea. As the overall 2017 Copernicus Masters winner, FSSCat, was proposed by Spain's Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and developed by a consortium of European companies and institutes.   More
(Source: Phys.org - Sep 13)

SPACEX SAYS IT WILL DEPLOY SATELLITE BROADBAND ACROSS US FASTER THAN EXPECTED - SpaceX says it plans to change its satellite launch strategy in a way that will speed up deployment of its Starlink broadband service and has set a new goal of providing broadband in the Southern United States late next year. In a filing on August 30, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to "adjust the orbital spacing of its satellites." With this change, each SpaceX launch would deploy satellites in "three different orbital planes" instead of just one, "accelerating the process of deploying satellites covering a wider service area."   More
(Source: Ars Technica - Sep 13)

GOES-13 GETS DRAFTED? - On the afternoon of Sunday, September 8, 2019, I was leisurely monitoring deep space when I noted an S-band signal that shouldn’t have been where it was if all was normal with the GEO belt world… GOES-15 presently lives at 128W and GOES-17 at 137W, so what was a GOES N,O,P series spacecraft doing in between them? A quick check of Space-Track.org data revealed it was GOES-13. But why was it here and drifting westward? As we will see GOES-13 isn’t lost, it’s just wandering.   More
(Source: Riddles in the Sky (blog) - Sep 12)

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