This July, NASA is sending a team of four six-unit (6U)-sized CubeSats into orbit around Earth to test cooperation without real-time updates from mission control. While that kind of autonomous cooperation may not sound too difficult for humans, this team will be robotic – composed of small satellites to test out key technologies for the …
In June 2023, Firefly Aerospace acquired Spaceflight Inc. to strengthen Firefly’s on-orbit solutions and service the entire lifecycle of customers’ satellites and spacecraft. The acquisition further supports Firefly’s robust portfolio of low-cost space transportation services, including responsive launch and in-space mobility, on-orbit hosting and servicing, and lunar delivery operations. Spaceflight’s flight-proven orbital vehicles provide payload …
The US Space Development Agency (SDA) is issuing this Other Transaction Authority (OT) solicitation to establish the foundation for Tranche 2 (T2) of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). The PWSA’s operational utility is predicated on the availability of a ubiquitous data and communications Transport Layer provided by a proliferated constellation of relatively small, mass-producible …
There are several companies working to develop solutions for space debris and some are working on refueling, recovering and reusing satellites. Outpost is working to make satellites re-usable. They plan to build in a heatshield (shown above) that would enable a satellite to return to earth. After re-entry, they want to deploy a high altitude …
There are various Youtubers who make weekly videos attacking SpaceX, Tesla and Elon Musk. They are able to make a few thousand dollars a month making these attack videos. One of these people is someone who calls himself the “Common Sense Skeptic”. He claims that SpaceX Starlink will not live up to its promises. Incorrect …
SpaceX is completing a Texas Starlink factory that is 521,000 square feet and cost $43,000,000. The SpaceX factory is designed for high volume manufacturing. It is to make millions of consumer facing devices. The Starlink Kit and include the antenna (or dish) that connects to the satellites, Wi-Fi routers and antenna mounting hardware. SpaceX recently …
The U.S. Space Force’s $30 billion budget request for Fiscal Year 2024 is about $3.9 billion over what was enacted for the service in FY2023. More than 60% of the Space Force budget, about $19.2 billion worth, is aimed at research, development, testing and evaluation. $27.2 billion is the requested budget for NASA’s 2024 fiscal …
More accurate counts of tanks in Russian storage tell us when Russia’s ability to replace destroyed tanks will drop. This will be a further drop in Russia’s military capability. The other key take away is that traditional military assessment sources like the International Institute for Strategic Studies (British research institute) are likely less accurate than …
Julien Villa-Massone has a table with graphics and specifications for the various versions of the Starlink satellite. He has detailed analysis of Starlink and using Starlink to enhance Tesla communications and technology. Julien identified that glass antennas exist and can be used on top of Tesla and other vehicles for mobile communication via Starlink. This …
Machine Learning techniques will improve the service performance and management NTN (satellite to earth) connectivity. Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) have been gaining importance in the last years due to their technological improvements and the integration in the 3GPP standards. Direct satellite-to-device connectivity will have more than 25 million subscribers by the end of 2023 due to …
6G networks could one day allow you to hit max speeds of one terabit per second (Tbps) on an internet device. This would be a thousand times faster than 1 Gbps, which the fastest speed available on most home internet networks today. It’s 100 times faster than 10 Gbps, the hypothetical top speed of regular …