A Handy-Dandy Satellite Mount:
The Space and Missile Systems Center and Air Force Research Lab have developed a device that will enable a launch vehicle to carry up to six additional small satellites—saving the cost of multiple launches. It is dubbed the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Secondary Payload Adapter, or ESPA ring. It’s a half-inch thick aluminum ring—about five feet in diameter and two feet tall—that fits between the rocket and the largest satellite, with mounts around the ring to attach additional satellites. The Air Force plans to fly the inaugural ESPA this fall.
Special-ops aviators, a physicist from the intelligence community, and an enlisted Marine with decades of deployments: U.S. Space Command’s military and civilian leaders who spoke May 7 were as likely to come from strictly space backgrounds as not. These are some of the day’s insights from inside the command, which…