Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Illustration of a human landing system. (credit: NASA)

For the first time in a dog's age, NASA's human spaceflight program seems to be in a hurry. Although few in the aerospace industry expect the agency to meet its 2024 goal of landing humans on the South Pole of the Moon, this deadline has nonetheless spurred the space agency to move quickly with contracts on offer for a lunar space station, spacesuits, Moon cargo delivery, and more.

And then there is the space agency's grand prize. At the end of September, NASA asked industry to bid for large contracts—which eventually will be worth at least several billion dollars—to build a "human landing system" that will take astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon's surface. There is a lot to digest in these documents, which entail three-dozen attachments and several amendments. But now the time has nearly expired—the deadline for companies to respond is November 5.

These are hugely consequential contracts. If NASA's return to the Moon survives into future Presidential administrations, the company that builds a human lunar lander will earn both prestige for landing astronauts on another world, but also potentially long-term contracts that may one day include landing humans on Mars.

Enlarge / The Electron launch vehicle is ready to soar. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 2.21 of the Rocket Report! As always, there are intriguing developments in the world of lift this week. We particularly liked the Russian plans to develop a low-cost, reusable small rocket ... seven years from now. Around that same time, Japan says it is mulling an impressive, heavy version of its H3 rocket with three cores. Now that's something we'd like to see take flight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Enlarge / Following in the footsteps of major ISPs in North America and Europe, Japanese ISP J:COM is offering Plume superpods directly to its customers. (credit: J:COM)

Wi-Fi mesh provider Plume announced a deal with another major ISP Thursday. J:COM—the largest cable-TV operator in Japan, with 5.5 million subscribers—is now offering Plume technology in its cable boxes and Plume pods and superpods to its customers for additional coverage where needed.

This is Plume's first deal in Asia, and it follows similar deals with large ISPs in America, Canada, and Europe such as Comcast, Bell Canada, Armstrong, TalkTalk, and more. Plume has been crystal clear since its launch that embedded distribution within ISPs was a primary goal, with direct sales to retail customers being as much for the PR as for the business itself. With large ISP partners on three continents, Plume seems to be making significant progress toward that goal.

ISP partners so far all follow a monthly "subscription" model, with little or no up-front cost and a small monthly fee per pod. This is the model Plume itself favors. To wit, the company quietly deprecated its earlier lifetime membership option earlier this year (grandfathering in the existing lifetime membership customers), and it now only offers new customers $100 per year annual memberships. ISPs most commonly charge $5 or $6 (or equivalent) per month, sometimes with additional fees for extra pods.