Trump's threats fuel concerns over the UK's reliance on US satellites
The contest between Airbus and Lockheed Martin to supply SkyNet 6 programme has become a lightning rod for Whitehall debate.
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Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The View from Space.
🛰️ Donald Trump’s threats to western allies are fuelling concern in parts of the UK government about London’s reliance on Washington for defence, with a multibillion-pound contract to build the next-generation military satellites set to become a key flashpoint.. The FT reports:
‘‘Questions are growing in Whitehall about the wisdom of awarding the SkyNet 6 programme to American defence giant Lockheed Martin at a time when the US administration is becoming increasingly unpredictable.
Trump’s threats over Greenland and rhetoric undermining Nato troops’ efforts in Afghanistan have intensified the debate. Lockheed Martin is vying for the satellite contract in competition with European aerospace and defence group Airbus, which has overseen the UK’s existing space programme for more than 25 years.
Some UK officials are now questioning whether Britain should rely on a US-headquartered company for such a crucial military capability, according to people familiar with the matter.’
🚀 It has been 40 years since the Challenger disaster. The Washington Post considers what we can learn from the tragedy:
‘The belief that there are still lessons to learn from the disaster is what led Russell last year to take an extraordinary step that, until now, has received no public notice. He visited NASA centers across the country, telling the Challenger story in hopes that similar mistakes will not occur as the space agency prepares to launch four astronauts on Artemis II, which is scheduled to fly by the moon as soon as February.
The lesson of Challenger is not just about the O-rings that failed. For Russell and colleagues who accompanied him on the NASA tour, understanding the human causes behind the Challenger disaster provides still-crucial lessons about managers who fail to heed the warnings of their own experts. Russell made his tour to make sure NASA officials “heard it from us, and heard the emotional impact that we felt.’
🪵 Wood has entered the space age, reports The Economist:
‘Wood has several advantages over metal alloys as a satellite material. One is to reduce the amount of metal vaporising when satellites burn up on re-entry. In 2023 some 290 tonnes of space junk fell into the atmosphere. A study published that year found a tenth of the stratospheric sulphuric-acid particles it sampled contained such metal.
How much that matters, if at all, is unclear. But some people fear a build-up of metals at altitude will trigger chemical reactions which might, for instance, destroy ozone, a form of oxygen that absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation. And build up they surely will. One forecast suggests that, by 2035, more than 2,800 tonnes of space junk a year will fall from orbit….
Wood has another advantage. Regulators are tightening the “design for demise” rules, intended to stop chunks of falling spacecraft reaching the ground. Satellites weighing more than about 300kg usually need special guidance systems to comply with these rules by ensuring controlled re-entry into a deserted part of the ocean. Dr Sakraker’s team think incorporating wood, which would burn up in the atmosphere, might permit spacecraft weighing up to a tonne to duck that additional cost and re-enter uncontrolled.’
📡 The next space race will be won on the ground, argues NewSpace Capital Partner Martin Halliwell in Satellite Today:
‘For most of the history of the industry, satellites were designed to endure. They were capital assets, built to sit in orbit for decades, and updated only when fuel ran low or the next generation of hardware finally justified the expense. But that world has gone; and today, the marriage of market pressures and furious advances in technology have compressed commercial life spans to around eight years or ten at the most. Starlink, racing from Gen1 to Gen4 in short order, has set the pace and the standard. Now, if a system cannot evolve and cannot evolve quickly, it risks obsolescence.
What’s driving this trend isn’t just the satellite hardware itself but what is demanded of them. Modern spacecraft can steer thousands of beams in milliseconds, carving up coverage dynamically to meet user demand. The bottleneck, curiously enough, isn’t the hardware, but the human beings trying to choreograph this complex dance with tools built for a different age. This is the problem of orchestration, which at its heart is a traffic-light problem. It’s about deciding who gets capacity, where they get it, and then they get it.’
🤢 It turns out train-loving TikToker Francis Bourgeois also loves space. He is in a new documentary, in which he, um, ‘blows chunks in zero-G.’