U.S., Russian solidarity after launch safely aborted

OVERNIGHT: NASA DEPUTY CONFIRMED. The U.S. Senate, in closing out its business before going home for a final stretch of campaigning before Election Day, confirmed James Morhard to be the number 2 at NASA late Thursday.

Morhard, who was previously the Senate deputy sergeant-at-arms and a congressional staffer, was not the first choice of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who publicly expressed the desire for a second-in-command with a technical background. But Morhard won over skeptical senators with his management experience and pledges to take climate science seriously — despite questioning the role of humans in climate change in the past.

PRE-FLIGHT BRIEFING

A STARK REMINDER OF THE U.S.-RUSSIA SPACELIFELINE. Bridenstine’s first face-to-face this week with his Russian counterpart, Roscosmos Director-General Dmitry Rogozin, ended with a bang — but not the kind they had hoped for. Both men were on hand at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday when the launch of a Soyuz rocket heading toward the International Space Station was aborted in mid ascent after what appeared to be a booster failure.

American Nick Hague and Russian Aleksey Ovchinin safely aborted (at about 7Gs) less than three minutes into the flight of the workhorse launch vehicle, which has conducted some 1,700 missions and has been NASA’s only ticket to orbit since the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011. NASA immediately pledged to support the Russian investigation into the mishap. But one major fear: an empty space station, at least for a while.

Focus on enhancing space cooperation. NASA spokeswoman Megan Powers, who was traveling with her boss, relayed that in meetings Wednesday Bridenstine also got an update from Rogozin on the Russian investigation into the recent “depressurization event” on the ISS, which is set to conclude next month. “The leaders reaffirmed their commitment to work closely together to establish the root cause of the accident,” she reported. The two leaders also discussed ways their space agencies and other international partners can do more with the space station — including using commercially-built American spacecraft soon to come online and a new Russian space laboratory module. NASA’s chief also provided an update on America’s space exploration plans to the moon, Mars and beyond– including international plans for a so-called Gateway vehicle in lunar orbit. The two space leaders also discussed possible cooperation on robotic missions to the moon and Venus in the next decade, according to Powers.

NASA’s NEW SPACE LAUNCH VEHICLE ALSO HITS A SNAG. The agency’s inspector general had some harsh words this week for the Space Launch System, the U.S. government’s next-generation means to get astronauts to space. Its reporttook aim at the core stage of the rocket Boeing is building. “At its current rate, we project Boeing will expend at least $8.9 billion through 2021 — double the amount initially planned — while delivery of the first Core Stage has slipped 2½ years from June 2017 to December 2019 and may slip further,” the inspector general wrote.

NASA will be unable to launch the first uncrewed test flight of the SLS as planned between December 2019 and June 2020. In fact, it’s “hard to see how they could put boots on the moon even in a Trump second term” using the SLS, said Greg Autry, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business who served on the Trump administration’s NASA transition team.

Boeing insisted that the IG relied on outdated data. “The program described in the OIG’s report does not represent theSpace Launch System (SLS) program today,” the company said, adding that “we are refining our approaches and tools to ensure a successful transition from development to production.”

One thing is for sure: SLS will be light years ahead of thespacecraft that NASA astronauts used to get to the moon 50 years ago. As our colleague Bob King reports after screening the new film about Neil Armstrong, ‘First Man,’ at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum last night: “It was an intense movie, genuinely suspenseful for much of it, and really makes you appreciate how precarious it was for humans to go into space in those rickety metal buckets built with 1960s technology.” Those on hand applauded at the end.

WELCOME TOPOLITICO SPACE, our weekly briefing on the policies and personalities shaping the new space age in Washington and beyond. Email us at [email protected] or [email protected] with tips, pitches and feedback, and find us on Twitter at @bryandbender and@jacqklimas. And don’t forget to check out POLITICO’s space policy page here.

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SPACE Q&A

‘GPS IS ALL AROUND US.’ Residents evacuated when massive Hurricane Michael was barreling toward the Florida Panhandle and the Southeast this week, in part thanks to improved weather monitoring made possible by the Global Positioning System. It’s just one example of how the constellation of Air Force navigation satellites has become integral to modern day life, from turn-by-turn directions on our mobile phones to the timing stamp on every ATM transaction. But The GPS Innovation Alliance, under the new leadership of David Grossman, a former Federal Communications Commission chief of staff, is stepping up efforts to educate policymakers on the critical role of the satellites and advocate in Washington for the need to enhance their capability. The industry group was founded in 2013 by Garmin, John Deere and Trimble.

Among the alliance’s top focus areas: ways to make available more of the electromagnetic spectrum for GPS; ensure steady funding for the next-generation Air Force GPS III satellites; and educating lawmakers on how many industries rely on the system. “It’s used for accessibility in terms of applications used by the blind and visually impaired,’ Grossman says. “First responders rely on GPS to route vehicles to an emergencies, improving response time and potentially saving lives.” Grossman, who also previously worked on Capitol Hill, also talked about the alliance’s mission, what lawmakers he deals with most in Congress and how GPS III will change the landscape. Read our full interview here.

IN ORBIT

WHAT ARE THE RULES FOR REPAIRING SATELLITES IN ORBIT? Technological advances will soon enable companies to repair, refuel and update satellites in orbit — collectively known as satellite servicing. But what guidelines should this new industry follow? Representatives from space companies, U.S. government departments and international space agencies will gather next month in D.C. to identify those principles at the first-of-its-kind Global Satellite Servicing Forum.

“If we don’t establish best practices and ways to communicate your orbit … and your planned maneuvers, we open ourselves up to having unsafe conditions in space where we potentially even collide,” said Dan Oltrogge, director of the Center for Space Standard and Innovation at Analytical Graphics, a space software company that will be presenting at the conference. Space situational awareness is also an important part of the discussion, Oltrogge said, because companies first need to find satellites to service and maneuver around any neighboring satellites.

The forum is being hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and its Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations. The industry consortium expects to announce an initial set of principles and best practices crafted over the past six months in meetings in Washington, Los Angeles and Bremen, Germany, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Security World Foundation, a group that serves as part of the consortium’s administrative office.

SPACE TRAFFIC COP WANTED: The international space community could use a standard for space traffic management as well — and it should be driven by industry, Audrey Schaffer, the director of space strategy and plans in the office of the Defense secretary, argued Wednesday at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “Starting at the political level and working our way back down, that’s where challenges arise.”

“The commercial sector recognizes that either they set these practices up or they’ll be set up for them, and it’s to their benefit to make sure they’re involved in the conversation,” added Victoria Samson, the director of the Secure World Foundation’s D.C. office.

The U.S. isn’t the only game in town. While governments around the world all want to collaborate with the U.S. on tracking space objects, “the U.S. is not the only partner of choice,” said Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a government-funded think tank. “Partnerships amongst non-U.S. countries are growing and fostering greater independence from the U.S.,” she added, pointing specifically to China, Chile and South Africa as potential partners for international governments.

INDUSTRY INTEL: SPACEX COMES AWAY EMPTY-HANDED: News that SpaceX did not receive an Air Force contract to develop a prototype for a new launch vehicle rocked the space world on Wednesday. The service announced it had awarded a combined nearly $2.3 billion to Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Orbital ATK, which was recently acquired by Northrop Grumman.

The move is “very much surprising,” USC’s Autry said. He said the space professionals gathered at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in La Cruces, N.M., were “all shocked” when the news broke. But Autry said it may be SpaceX’s own success that hurt it in this competition. It’s unclear which launch vehicle SpaceX offered in its, bid but Autry suspects it was the Falcon 9 — a mature, proven system. The Vulcan from ULA, New Glenn from Blue Origin and Omega from Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems are all “unproven,” Autry said. “The government understands they are trying to procure services that are reliable, low-cost and follow the space policy directives to promote entrepreneurial economic growth,” he said, adding: “You could interpret that as saying it should be used to fund new systems. SpaceX has done such a good job, they’ve oddly put them in a weaker position.”

SCIENCE FACT VERSUS FICTION: Hulu’s new drama series “The First,” which tells the story of the first humans to go to Mars, may be more science than fiction. Many of the challenges the crew face on their trip — and the technology they use to overcome them — are close to reality, thanks in part to Charles Elachi, who led NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 2000 to 2016 and consulted on the show. Elachi, who oversaw multiple rover missions to Mars during his time leading JPL, provided advice on a range of topics, from how long it takes to get to Mars to the challenges of landing on the planet to how you can generate power once you’re on the surface. NASA is working on solutions for these challenges, Elachi said. For example, the next unmanned mission to Mars, which will launch in 2020, includes a small prototype device to make oxygen using carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — something that will need to be done on a much larger scale if humans are to live on Mars. Elachi said it’s important to bring some realism to entertainment to serve as “a prelude to the excitement” of the first real Mars mission.

TOP DOC: IS E.T. OUT THERE? NASA should make finding life in the universe a key part of all future exploration missions, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said in a report this week. The congressionally mandated study also recommended that NASA expand the potential evidence of life it evaluates — to detect lifeforms both like and utterly unlike what we know on Earth — and work with commercial partners to make the study of life’s origins a priority at every stage of mission planning. Non-space technologies such as “biomedical applications and artificial intelligence” provide prime areas for establishing partnerships with the commercial sector,” the report said.

OUTER LIMITS

‘ALIENS AT THE PENTAGON.’ A new documentary delves into the backstory of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerial Threat Intelligence Program. The secret UFO research effort was established a decade ago through a congressional earmark steered by then-Sen. Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada — and first revealed by POLITICO and the New York Timesin December. One reviewer calls the film “paranoid but nevertheless provocative.” And if these guys are right ... Let’s hope they aren’t.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “An accident with the booster, 2 minutes, 45 seconds. That was a quick flight. We’re tightening our seatbelts.” — Aleksey Ovchinin, Russian Air Force major and cosmonaut after the launch of a Soyuz rocket set to take him and American astronaut Nick Hague to the International Space Station was aborted during mid-ascent on Thursday in Kazakhstan.

WEEKEND READS

— How to control the cost of a Space Force.

— Army secretary still unsure what parts of his service could join a Space Force.

— Pentagon choose three winners to build launch vehicle prototypes.

— Shake-up in space industry likely to mean volatile launch prices in the short-term.

— Jeff Foust has a deep dive in Philanthropy about the burgeoning space race.

— Richard Branson says Virgin Galactic will get to space ‘within weeks.” He also has some advice for Elon Musk: ‘Get some sleep.’

— Blue Origin delays space flight plans.

— Did Boeing hire a DC lobby firm to plant negative information about SpaceX?

— How much will it cost you to go to space?

— Cape Canaveral is preparing to launch Americans into space once again.

— Debating reusability.

— Alaska spaceport sets rocket launch.

— Next census to rely on space cameras.

— China is boosting investment in its growing commercial space sector.

— Is Russia losing in the new space race?

— French space agency becomes the first to open shop in the United Arab Emirates.

— One of Jupiter’s moon could harbor life — but could be an especially difficult to land on.

— The Apollo mission that nearly ended in mutiny.

— Neil Armstrong biopic ‘First Man’ hits theaters this weekend.

— ICYMI: The incredible photos of SpaceX’s launch over Los Angeles

— If only our doorstop turned out to be a $100,000 space rock.

EVENT HORIZON

TODAY: The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies hosts an event with Jeff Gossel, senior intelligence engineer of the Space and Missiles Analysis Group at the Nation Air and Space Intelligence Center.

MONDAY: The two-day VSAT Congress begins in Washington.

TUESDAY: The Canadian Global Affairs Institute hosts an event in Ottawa on Canada’s future in space featuring Sylvain Laporte, director of the Canadian Space Agency.

THURSDAY: The Mid-Atlantic chapter of Space and Satellite Professionals International and George Washington University are hosting an event on cube sats, including a tour of a lab at the university.