India's diminished role in small satellite launch. The head of the Indian Space Organization, S. Somanath, says his country's once leading position in the market for launching small satellites has eroded in recent years. A few years ago, Russian launchers and India's PSLV rocket were the prime players in the nascent commercial rideshare launch market. SpaceX's Transporter missions have changed the equation, and Somanath says India will only launch four satellites from customers from other countries, after tallying 435 in total to date.
Competitiveness ... "We could only get this much, but our launch capabilities are three times the demand," Somanath said, according to The Economic Times. "We are not able to use our capacity because satellites are not there." The kinds of satellites that used to fly on PSLV rideshare missions now fly on SpaceX's Transporter missions, which offer lower prices, taking advantage of SpaceX's rocket reuse program. While it's true more than 70 percent of SpaceX's missions so far this year have been for the company's own Starlink network, the addressable commercial market for launch services is growing. The problem for India and other launch providers is that most of these satellites are flying on SpaceX rockets. "At ISRO, we have PSLVs, but we have no demand," Somanath said. "I have a problem: Rockets are built and kept in stock but not finding customers."
Vulcan's second flight won't have a payload. The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket will take off in September with a dummy payload in place of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane, preserving a chance for ULA to begin launching US military satellites on the new rocket by the end of the year, Ars reports. There was little hope Dream Chaser would be ready to make its first resupply run to the International Space Station before the end of the summer, so ULA opted to complete the second Vulcan test flight as soon as possible to allow the Space Force to certify the new rocket for national security missions. This will allow ULA to begin launching a backlog of 25 military space missions assigned to Vulcan.
An update on BE-4 reuse … Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, also provided an update on the company's progress on efforts to eventually recover and reuse BE-4 engines from the Vulcan first stage. He said ULA has spent "tens of millions of dollars" on technology development to enable engine recovery and reuse, but he declined to provide a timetable for when the company will actually introduce engine reuse on the Vulcan program. ULA is working with NASA on an inflatable heat shield to allow the engines to survive reentry and redesigning the aft engine section of the Vulcan booster to make the engine pod detachable in flight. The rest of the booster, including the main airframe and propellant tanks, will still be expended.
Falcon Heavy flies again. A powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket boosted a hurricane-hunting GOES weather satellite into orbit Tuesday, the final member of a four-satellite fleet at the heart of an $11 billion upgrade to the nation's forecasting infrastructure, CBS News reports. "NOAA's geostationary satellites are an indispensable tool for protecting the United States and the 1 billion people who live and work in the Americas," said Pam Sullivan, GOES program director. "They provide a constant real-time view of weather and dangerous environmental phenomena across the Western hemisphere." This satellite, known as GOES-U and soon to be renamed GOES-19, will provide constant vigil from geostationary orbit to track severe storms and tropical cyclones, wildfires, and other phenomena.
Fresh from the factory … This was the 10th flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket and one of two Falcon Heavy flights SpaceX has on its schedule this year. All three first-stage boosters were brand new, and the two side boosters returned to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for reuse. The upper stage deployed the GOES-U spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, into a transfer orbit. GOES-U will use its own propulsion to maneuver into its final operational orbit over the equator to begin a 10-year operational lifetime.
Next three launches
June 29: Falcon 9 | NROL-186 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03:14 UTC
June 29: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 12:00 UTC
June 30: H3 | ALOS-4 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 03:06 UTC
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