Will Kammerer @willkspace

This is the 6th of the 2nd generation "Chinese TDRS" satellites beaming data from other satellites & in-flight rockets, the 4th launched in the last 2 years. It certainly had a wild ride... Photo by 黑白猫名字被占用: m.weibo.cn/detail/5323947… (+) Note: human intervention required

Damn this one is even more crazier than Apollo 12 and that Soyuz-2 that got hit launching at Plesetsk several years ago - the lightning strike actually clearly hit the ground here! m.weibo.cn/detail/5323939…

Katalyst Space 'LINK' spacecraft appears to have made a maneuver in the last few hours, proving that it is in a healthy state! 'LINK' is the spacecraft responsible for rescuing the Swift Observatory and boosting its orbital altitude. @planet4589

BR-1 is ready to awaken! Safe-to-Mate testing complete. All electrical connections & components are safe to connect together, ensuring correct wiring, proper voltage levels, and no risk of damage when the spacecraft is first powered on. More to come…

Shijian-31: a satellite with an orbit we have never seen before China launched Shijian-31 on June 16 from Xichang, officially described as a "space environment detection" mission. The orbital elements suggest more going on. The inclination 63.46° sits at the value where perigee advance goes to zero. Anyone who's tracked Molniya-class satellites will recognize that immediately. But the resemblance stops there. A classic Molniya parks its apogee over high northern latitudes and dwells for hours, that's the whole design premise. SJ-31's argument of perigee is 171°, which puts perigee near the equator and its apogee on the opposite side. (Image 1: SJ-31 at 171° argument of perigee vs. a generic Molniya at 270° argument of perigee.) So the long dwell isn't over any particular latitude — it's over altitude. Apogee reaches ~39,900 km, about 4,100 km above the operational GEO belt where comms and missile-warning satellites sit. Nearly a third of each 12.5-hour orbit is spent above that shell, crossing it twice per pass at a steep 63° angle. (Video 1: SJ-31's orbit visualized with example GEO assets.) It's also not fixed on one region. The period is just off a clean repeating ground track, so the sub-apogee point slowly drifts around the globe — sweeping past every longitude roughly once every 24 days. Net effect: an orbit that periodically looks down on the entire GEO belt from above, at an angle, on a rotating schedule, rather than fixating on one target. What's it actually doing up there? @SpaceNews_Inc @BreakingDefense @joroulette @shell_jim @planet4589 @IntegrityISR

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Get ready for a front row seat to Artemis III. NASA has selected @SpaceX to provide laser communications capabilities from the Orion spacecraft for the mission. They will deliver high-def imagery as astronauts test rendezvous & docking operations between Orion and commercial systems. go.nasa.gov/4pJGMzn

.@eutelsat plans 528-satellite constellation w/ 60-deg inclination, possible laser inter-satellite links in addition to the 440-satellite @AirbusSpace contract for OneWeb Gen 1 replenishment & Eutelsat commitment to @defis_eu #Iris2 constellation. @FCC.spaceintelreport.com/eutelsats-440-…

ispace reports that Draper and NASA have mutually agreed to end the CP-12 CLPS task order. ispace-US was a subcontractor to Draperthat contract is terminated. ispace-US plans to propose to NASA’s CLPS 2.0 program.

ispace @ispace_inc

a week ago

Today, we are sharing an update regarding NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) CP-12 task order, including our outlook for ispace-U.S. and the opportunities ahead. As we look ahead to NASA's CLPS 2.0 framework, we remain committed to advancing lunar transportation

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Katalyst has released new photos from LINK, the robot that's off to rescue Swift! First one is of LINK's solar arrays deployed, and second is its thrusters being tested. So far, so good. 🤞

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We see you! Otter Pup 2 has acquired @GilmourSpace's ElaraSat. Acquisition is the moment Otter Pup 2 first detects and begins tracking its client spacecraft using its onboard cameras and computer vision, rather than relying on navigation inputs from the ground. Here's the view from approximately 6.5 km away, captured during our ongoing relative navigation operations. This is the first time an Otter Pup mission has reached this milestone and marks a major step forward in our docking mission.

Less than 100 miles away, about 50 tons of steel and copper are spinning at exactly 3,600 RPM. A giant rotor slews magnetic fields through copper windings and, per Faraday and Maxwell, induces a synchronized 60 Hz sine wave across an entire grid. That electromagnetic wave propagates through grain oriented silicon steel, laminated transformer cores, kilometers of aluminum conductor steel reinforced cable, SF₆ insulated switchgear, substations switching hundreds of kilovolts, distribution transformers, oxygen free copper wiring, silicon MOSFETs, ferrites, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the USB C cable plugged into my phone. There, power feeds a capacitive touchscreen. A transparent matrix of indium tin oxide is deposited on glass. The controller continuously scans the grid. My finger changes the mutual capacitance by a fraction of a picofarad, perturbing the local electric field just enough for dedicated analog front ends to detect before software reconstructs the touch. Iron ore. Bauxite. Silica sand. Copper ore. Lithium brines. Rare earths. Refined. Alloyed. Crystallized. Doped. Implanted. Deposited. Etched. Polished. We purified sand into nearly perfect single crystal silicon, grew boules, sliced wafers, placed dopant atoms with nanometer precision, fabricated chips containing tens of billions of transistors, synchronized them with clocks billions of times per second, and engineered them to execute matrix multiplications at a scale no human could comprehend. Somewhere along the way, matmuls started to look like us. That is an astonishing thought. The towers of abstraction are staggering. No one person built this. No one person fully understands it. Yet every morning millions of people wake up tired, answer emails, argue over specifications, chase margins, fix defects, make payroll, and try to cover their mortgages. Somehow the whole machine keeps humming. A planetary Swiss watch assembled from physics, markets, bureaucracy, ambition, error, and human necessity. And after all of that, I touch a piece of conductive glass and step into the Roman forum of modern thought, where millions of minds test ideas against one another in real time. Clockwork humanity. It staggers the mind.

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Satellite lasercom builder @TesatSpacecom: Production ramping to 5/day w/ single shift. 1,200 terminals on order, with biggest from @MDA_space for @Telesat Lightspeed constellation. @defis_eu @bundeswehrInfo @KeplerComms @SemperCitiusSDA.spaceintelreport.com/satellite-lase…

Nova-C at scale for NASA's Moon Base Intuitive Machines has secured a firm-fixed-price NASA contract valued at up to $148.3M to deliver a production-line-qualified Nova-C lander to the Moon no later than 2028. By scaling manufacturing processes to support high-volume production, Intuitive Machines is creating a standardized and repeatable lunar transport utility service. @NASAArtemis and @NASAMoon Base News Article | Intuitive Machines

The launch of Pegasus with the Katalyst Swift reboost mission today was scrubbed due to weather: science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/20… They'll try again tomorrrow, July 1.

Astrobotic has been selected by @NASA to deliver a suite of agency payloads to the lunar surface in support of NASA’s Moon Base...these awards will fly two Peregrine lunar landers to the Moon by the end of 2028. 🌙🚀 astrobotic.com/astrobotic-awa…

After successfully approaching within 10 km of ElaraSat, Otter Pup 2 has transitioned into relative navigation. Up to this point, Otter Pup navigated using absolute position information provided from the ground. Now, during the Acquisition phase, it begins navigating based on what it sees - also known as relative navigation. Using Starfish's computer vision software, CETACEAN, Otter Pup detects ElaraSat with its onboard cameras and continuously estimates the client's position and motion relative to itself. This shift from ground-provided data to onboard sensing is a key step toward autonomous rendezvous and docking. Otter Pup 2 is now making navigation observations and maneuvering decisions using its own observations. This autonomous decision-making will continue all the way through Otter Pup 2’s final approach for a docking attempt.

Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications Inc – one of the most transformative deals in the space industry. By combining our launch capability and satellite manufacturing with @IridiumComm’s global satellite communications network and rare spectrum, Rocket Lab becomes a fully integrated, self-launching, tier-1 space power, delivering critical communications capability to millions of users worldwide. Full details and important information: bit.ly/4eyKLL4

The launch of Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft on a Pegasus rocket to reboost the Swift observatory from Kwajalein is now scheduled for June 30 EDT (instead of June 27 EDT). science.nasa.gov/missions/swift…