Press Clips (Week 38-2021)

TOP NEWS

Watchdog Launches Probe Of How FAA De-Conflicts Space And Regular Flights

The Transportation Department’s inspector general says it is reviewing how officials prevent everyday flights and commercial space flights from sharing the same airspace and potentially colliding. The review of the department’s Federal Aviation Administration comes as space flights have exploded in frequency since 2016, and shortly after the agency grounded a prominent commercial spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, until an investigation into founder Richard Branson’s flight is complete. During that July flight, the company’s SpaceShipTwo supersonic spaceplane flew outside of its designated FAA airspace for nearly two minutes.

Read more at: CNN

Passengers On First All-Civilian Spacex Flight Share Incredible Video Of Earth From Afar Featuring ‘Alien’ Cameo

Passengers aboard the world’s first all-civilian space flight have posted spectacular footage of the Earth from their trip. SpaceX’s Inspiration4 touched back down to Earth safely last week after a three-day mission in space. More onboard images from the all-civilian crew of Inspiration4 have begun to grace social media and the results are spectacular.

The crew included mission commander Jared Isaacman, who financed Insipiration4’s trip, Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, aerospace data engineer and Air Force veteran Christopher Sembroski and Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist.

Read more at: indy100

Tianzhou 3 Cargo Spacecraft Launches From S China’s Hainan Island

A Long March 7 rocket carrying Tianzhou 3 blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the coast of the southern island province of Hainan at 3:10 pm on Monday.

Atop the 53-meter rocket, the craft entered a low Earth orbit, unfolded its solar panels at 3:22 pm and began to execute rapid autonomous rendezvous and docking procedures with China’s Tiangong space station, the China Manned Space Agency said in a statement.

Read more at: Chinadaily

NASA Shows Off New Images And Video Of The Space Launch System – The ‘Most Powerful Rocket’ Its Ever Built And The One That Will Take Artemis 1 To The Moon

NASA has unveiled new images and video of the ‘most powerful rocket’ the U.S. space agency has ever built, the Space Launch System (SLS), intended to have its first launch later this year.

Contractors working on the SLS completed the Umbilical Release and Retract Test (URRT) on September 19 in preparation for the Artemis I mission, scheduled for November.

The umbilicals – which connect the rocket to ground support equipment before launch – provide power, communications, coolant, and fuel to the rocket and Orion prior to ignition and liftoff.

Read more at: Dailymail

SPACE HAZARDS AND STM

Discovery About Meteorites Informs Atmospheric Entry Threat Assessment

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign watched fragments of two meteors as they ramped up the heat from room temperature to the temperature it reaches as it enters Earth’s atmosphere and made a significant discovery. The vaporized iron sulfide leaves behind voids, making the material more porous. This information will help when predicting the weight of a meteor, its likelihood to break apart, and the subsequent damage assessment if it should land.

“We extracted samples from the interiors that had not already been exposed to the high heat of the entry environment,” said Francesco Panerai, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at UIUC. “We wanted to understand how the microstructure of a meteorite changes as it travels through the atmosphere.”

Read more at: Spacedaily

Congress, Industry Chivvy Space Force On Commercial SSA

Despite the long-standing efforts by DoD to improve the military’s aging space tracking system’s accuracy and timing by incorporating commercial data and services, both defense lawmakers and industry are getting impatient with the lack of progress.

“Congress is getting lobbied hard by the commercial SSA companies and in turn keeps asking the DoD for a strategy, and they’re not getting much back,” one source following the issue said. “So over the last few years they’ve been adding more and more of a ‘mandate’ for the DoD to have a strategy for using commercial SSA data. And it’s probably also related to the broader push for the DOD to use commercial services across remote sensing, weather, communications, etc.”

Read more at: Breaking defense

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Wants To Clean Up Space Junk With New Company

Apple’s co-founder plans to bring disruption to a new industry: the long-standing effort to clean up dangerous space junk.

Steve Wozniak said he plans to make a private space company “unlike the others” in a cryptic tweet Sunday (Sept. 12). The tweet included a link teasing his planned company, called Privateer Space.

The company is in stealth mode and we thus know little about its business model, potential customers and potential sources of revenue. Wozniak, who played a key role in developing the Apple I and many early-stage company products, has a reported net worth of $100 million. As such, it’s likely he will be a heavy early investor in the business.

Read more at: Space.com

It’s Time to Develop a Global Space Traffic Management System, White House Adviser Says

Earth’s orbits are becoming increasingly crowded with government and commercial satellites and other technology-driving elements, plus heaps of problematic space debris.

This poses many complex challenges, but to the National Security Council’s Director for Space Policy Audrey Schaffer, it also presents a meaningful chance for the United States to help chart a path towards a global space traffic management system before it’s too late.

“When you look at the changes in the number of space objects that are anticipated to be on orbit in the next 10 years, it is an exponential shift,” she explained Tuesday during the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Maryland.

Read more at: nextgov

Revolutionary Tech Could Allow Near-Real Time Space Tracking, MITRE Says

The Space Force is testing out new software that could not only improve the accuracy of its current system for tracking satellites and dangerous junk in space, but also enable actual tracking in near-real time that would allow the service to keep better tabs on adversary spacecraft seeking to hide from prying eyes.

The software package was developed by The MITRE Corporation, a non-profit federally funded research and development center, and was turned over to Space Systems Command (SSC) in July for operational prototyping after two years of internal MITRE development and testing, said MITRE senior systems analyst Bob Carden.

Read more at: Breaking defense

Space Force Calls For ‘Trash Trucks’ For All The Orbiting Junk

There is a need for industry capabilities to clean up burgeoning amounts of space junk, and at the same time an urgency to getting a civil authority for managing orbital traffic up and running, according to Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt, vice commander of Space Force Space Operations Command.

“We need to pick up debris — we need trash trucks. We need things to go make debris go away,” she told the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference here on Wednesday. “That’s definitely a need, and I think there is a use case for industry to get after that as a service-based opportunity.”

Read more at: Breaking defense

Satellite Operators Need More Accurate SSA Data

Space situational awareness data used by satellite operators isn’t accurate enough to support the decisions they need to make on whether and how to maneuver their spacecraft to avoid potential collisions.

In a paper presented at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies, or AMOS, Conference here Sept. 15, officials with the COMSPOC Corporation, which specializes in commercial space situational awareness (SSA), looked at the various approaches satellite operators used to determine if they need to make a collision avoidance maneuver and compared it to the accuracy of the data they use to base “go/no-go” decisions for those maneuvers.

Read more at: Spacenews

NEW SPACE/COMMERCIAL

South China City Strives For New Engine Of Commercial Aerospace Industry

The city of Wenchang in south China’s island province of Hainan, known for its spacecraft launch center, is endeavoring to turn itself into a new engine of China’s commercial aerospace.

The small city boasts the only coastal launch center in China, namely the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, which is also the fourth launch center of the country, following three others in Jiuquan, Xichang and Taiyuan.

Since its maiden rocket launch in 2016, the Wenchang launch center has handled a number of launch missions, including the launches of the Long March-7 and Long March-5 rockets. It also witnessed the launch of China’s first Mars mission “Tianwen-1” and Chang’e-5 probe.

Read more at: people.cn

ABL Space Systems To Launch NASA Technology Demonstration Mission

Small launch vehicle developer ABL Space Systems has won a contract to launch a NASA technology demonstration spacecraft in 2023.

ABL Space Systems said Sept. 16 it will launch the NASA Cryogenic Demonstration Mission spacecraft on its RS1 rocket in 2023. NASA selected a team led by Lockheed Martin in 2020 to develop the smallsat mission, which will test cryogenic fluid management technologies in orbit using liquid hydrogen, under a $89.7 million contract.

Read more at: Spacenews

A Spacecraft So Simple Anyone Can Fly It

Welcome to Quartz’s newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extraterrestrial sphere. Please forward widely, and let me know what you think. This week: Orbital tourism is back, Spire needs a bigger boat (tracking network), and Wozniak’s worries about space trash. Go beyond the astronaut experience and the philanthropy, and what does SpaceX’s ability to hurl four private citizens into space really add up to?

Read more at: Qz.com

The FAA Releases Initial Report On Boca Chica Launches, And It’s Not Terrible

The Federal Aviation Administration released a draft environmental review of SpaceX’s plans for orbital launches from South Texas on Friday, kicking off a 30-day public comment period.

The long-awaited procedural step is the first of several regulatory hurdles that SpaceX must clear before obtaining final permission to launch its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from a site near Boca Chica, Texas. Such a launch likely remains months away, but it now appears that the feds will ultimately greenlight South Texas for orbital launches. That seemed far from assured before today.

Read more at: Arstechnica

Pvt Space Activity Gains Pace, 2 Firms Ink Key Pacts With Isro, 3rd Opens New Lab, 4th Readies For Launch

In enactment with the government’s ambitions of encouraging backstage enterprises successful the abstraction sector, manufacture enactment is gaining gait with 2 cardinal memoranda of understanding, 1 laboratory opening successful conscionable 1 week, portion different steadfast is readying to motorboat its archetypal satellite. Two abstraction startups, Skyroot and Agnikul — some gathering rockets/launch vehicles — person signed important agreements with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) that volition let them to summation entree to the abstraction agency’s facilities and expertise towards improvement and investigating of systems, portion Bellatrix Aerospace opened a caller lab. All 3 developments happened betwixt September 11 and 17.

Read more at: Times of India

Glasgow Prestwick Spaceport Announces Launch Partner

Prestwick Spaceport has secured a launch partner for its spaceport development in a landmark deal that will boost Scotland’s space industry ambitions and create an important strategic asset for the UK.

The spaceport, represented by Glasgow Prestwick Airport and South Ayrs0hire Council, yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Astraius, the leading UK based, commercially operated horizontal ‘air launch’ company. The organisations will collaborate closely alongside other key project partners, including Scottish and UK governments, to prepare for the orbital launch of small satellites from 2023.

Read more at: Spacedaily

The Billionaire Space Race: Analyzing the Prospects of a Corporate Outer Space

SpaceX’s September 15th civilian voyage into orbit marked the latest in a series of corporate entities seeking to make their mark on the final frontier. Along with other tech giants such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, SpaceX has been a part of the so-called billionaire space race, a rivalry amongst wealthy entrepreneurs who have recently entered the space industry. The race marks a major change from the early era of space travel and innovation which, these days, is increasingly centred in the private sector rather than considered the purview of the government. While this may have some economic benefits, whether it is an overall positive change remains to be seen, given the many potential pitfalls of an increasingly privatized space sector.

Read more at: mjps

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Why We Need Plutonium Power For Space Missions

All spacecraft need electrical power to function. Most use solar panels that harvest energy from the Sun, but this solution has its limitations. Missions exploring the distant reaches of the solar system cannot generate enough energy from the distant, dim Sun. Shadowed craters, two-week-long lunar nights, and the dusty plains of Mars also prevent dependence on solar energy for long-lived missions. We need another source of power to explore these extreme cosmic locales.

That solution is Plutonium-238 (Pu-238), a non-weapons-grade radioactive material that generates large amounts of heat. This heat is used to generate electricity for spacecraft day or night, dusty or clear, distant or not.

Read more at: Planetary.org

Carbon dioxide Reactor Makes Martian Fuel

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati are developing new ways to convert greenhouse gases to fuel to address climate change and get astronauts home from Mars.

UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a carbon catalyst in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the “Sabatier reaction” from the late French chemist Paul Sabatier, it’s a process the International Space Station uses to scrub the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generate rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit.

Read more at: Marsdaily

SpaceX Satellite Signals Used Like GPS To Pinpoint Location On Earth

Engineering researchers have developed a method to use signals broadcast by Starlink internet service satellites to accurately locate a position here on Earth, much like GPS does. It is the first time the Starlink system has been harnessed by researchers outside SpaceX for navigation.

The Starlink satellites, sent into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are designed to provide broadband internet connections in remote locations around the world. The researchers used signals from six Starlink satellites to pinpoint a location on Earth within 8 meters of accuracy.

Read more at: GPSdaily

SpaceX Launches First Dedicated Polar Starlink Mission

SpaceX launched its first dedicated polar Starlink mission Sept. 13 as the company moves into the next phase of deployment of its broadband satellite constellation.

A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 11:55 p.m. Eastern. The rocket’s payload of 51 Starlink satellites deployed 15 and a half minutes after launch, although it took an additional 11 minutes to confirm the satellites separated as expected.

The rocket’s first stage, making its tenth flight, landed on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean nearly nine minutes after liftoff. The booster, the second to have reached the ten-flight milestone, had previously launched seven other Starlink missions as well as the Telstar 18 Vantage and Iridium-8 missions.

Read more at: Spacenews

NASA Selects Five U.S. Companies to Mature Artemis Lander Concepts

NASA has selected five U.S. companies to help the agency enable a steady pace of crewed trips to the lunar surface under the agency’s Artemis program. These companies will make advancements toward sustainable human landing system concepts, conduct risk-reduction activities, and provide feedback on NASA’s requirements to cultivate industry capabilities for crewed lunar landing missions.

The awards under the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP-2) Appendix N broad agency announcement are firm fixed-price, milestone-based contracts. The total combined value for the awards is $146 million, and the work will be conducted over the next 15 months.

Read more at: NASA

Humanity Needs A Space-Rescue Capability, Report Stresses

With an increasing cadence, humans from multiple nations are rocketing into Earth orbit, and soon some will head outward to the moon. Given the boost in commercial and governmental flights, the chances of a stranded crew requiring an in-space rescue are on the rise.

But the United States government and commercial spaceflight providers have no plans in place to conduct a timely rescue of a crew from a distressed spacecraft in low Earth orbit, or anywhere else in space. Without orchestrated rescue planning, today’s space travelers will journey at their own risk. 

Read more at: Space.com

Strong Magnet-Revolutionized Aerospace Engineering

Magnets in aeronautics and aerospace engineering have been used for a long time and are specifically designed to be used in extreme environments and work for long run. The aerospace industry is a sector that has experienced great technological and scientific advances in recent years.

Therefore, as the demands and temperatures of the challenges have increased, it becomes necessary to manufacture magnets that maintain them and accomplish difficult missions.

Read more at: Spacedaily

ISRO To Experiment Vertical Landing Of Rockets, Aims To Make GSLV Mk3 Reusable

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is conducting studies and mini-projects to enable the vertical landing of its rockets. According to senior officials, this possibility is being explored primarily with regards to the heavy-lift rocket GSLV Mk3, which is powered by three stages of engines – solid-fuel, liquid-fuel and cryogenic fuel.

ISRO is aiming to recover the first two rocket stages of the GSLV Mk3 as this would imply a huge cost-advantage and savings, owing to reusability.

Read more at: Zeenews

All-Female Crew In Water-Tank Spaceflight Study

This week 20 women are tucking themselves in a waterbed for five days as part of a dry immersion study to recreate some of the effects of spaceflight on the body. The campaign kicked off yesterday with the first two subjects at the Medes space clinic in Toulouse, France.

Volunteers lay down in containers similar to bathtubs covered with a waterproof fabric to keep them dry and evenly suspended in water. As a result, the body experiences ‘supportlessness’ – something close to what astronauts feel while floating on the International Space Station.

Read more at: Spacedaily

SPACE POLICY

NASA Adviser Blasts Lack Of Congressional Action On Space Traffic Dangers

The chair of NASA’s independent safety panel blasted Congress on Thursday for not designating a federal agency to spearhead space traffic management.

Chairwoman Patricia Sanders, a former Department of Defense senior executive, said NASA’s Safety and Advisory Panel has called on Congress to increase oversight of growing space traffic for years, but to no avail.

“We noted during this week that SpaceX is seeking to launch an additional 30,000 Starlink satellites,” Sanders said in a quarterly, virtual meeting of the panel held online Thursday afternoon.

Read more at: Spacedaily

Exclusive: UK Pushes New UN Accord On Military Space Norms

The United Kingdom is circulating a draft UN resolution that calls for new discussions designed to create international norms and principles for responsible behavior for military activities in space.

The proposal, obtained by Breaking Defense, would set up what is a called an Open Ended Working Group to meet twice in 2022 and 2023 in the hopes of reaching consensus on voluntary measures to restrain actions in orbit likely to be seen as threatening by other nations.

Read more at: Breaking defense

Moon Contract Signals New Direction For Europe

The contract has been signed that will see the first UK satellite go to the Moon in 2024. Lunar Pathfinder is a relay platform for telecommunications. It will feed the telemetry and data from other spacecraft at the Moon back to Earth. This will make those other missions simpler and cheaper to operate. The contract was signed in London between the European Space Agency and Pathfinder’s manufacturer, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL). It is a service agreement. Esa is not funding Pathfinder’s build; it’s merely purchasing a proportion of its relay capacity.

Read more at: BBC

The New Era of Commercial Human Space Flight Means Little News

One day after the launch of the first all-commercial human space flight mission there is little to report. As soon as the Inspiration4 crew reached orbit last night, public channels of communication ended. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted today that all is well, but the public silence from the crew underscores how different this new commercial era is from what has come before.

Throughout the past six decades, NASA has gone to great lengths to keep the public informed of what its astronauts are doing in space other than for the space shuttle missions that conducted classified activities.

Read more at: Spacepolicy online

Blue Origin Lawsuit: 4 Facts Revealed From Released Court Documents

Blue Origin was denied a lucrative NASA lunar lander contract — but it’s refusing to go down without a fight. Now unsealed court documents show the nature of its SpaceX-centered lawsuit against the government agency.

The court document, posted in PDF form on CNBC, reveals Blue Origin believes NASA cut corners in order to grant SpaceX a contract, and shut Blue Origin and competitor Dynetics out. It accuses the agency of flouting rulemaking regulations in an “arbitrary, capricious, and irrational” way, and allowing SpaceX to address potential problems and skimp on Flight Readiness Reviews.

Read more at: Inverse

SPACE DEFENSE

MIT, US Space Force To Explore Opportunities For Research And Workforce Development

Advancing human understanding and exploration in space is a long-standing pursuit of researchers and students at MIT. For the U.S. military, space technologies and discovery have wide-ranging implications on national security. With that history and context in mind, the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) hosted an on-campus event on Aug. 31, marking a new research engagement between MIT and the United States Space Force (USSF) to explore mutual interests and identify opportunities in research and education.

Read more at: Spacewar

U.S. Generals Planning For A Space War They See As All But Inevitable

A ship in the Pacific Ocean carrying a high-power laser takes aim at a U.S. spy satellite, blinding its sensors and denying the United States critical eyes in the sky.

This is one scenario that military officials and civilian leaders fear could lead to escalation and wider conflict as rival nations like China and Russia step up development and deployments of anti-satellite weapons.

If a satellite came under attack, depending on the circumstances, “the appropriate measures can be taken,” said Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command.

Read more at: Spacenews

Disrupting Exploitable Patterns In Software To Make Systems Safer

While much attention is paid to detecting and remedying flaws or vulnerabilities in software, the way a system is designed can also create large opportunities for attackers. System designers primarily focus on ensuring a program is adept at executing a specific task, focusing on how a design can best support intended features and behaviors and on how they will be implemented within the design.

Attackers have also discovered that these design structures and implementation behaviors can be repurposed for their own malicious purposes. Unexpected – or emergent – behaviors that these features could exhibit are not often taken into consideration at the time of design.

Read more at: Spacewar

Space Force To Consider Space Sustainability In Any Future Conflict

The U.S. military will take space sustainability factors into account should it have to respond to an attack on its satellites, a Space Force official said Sept. 16.

Speaking at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies, or AMOS, Conference here, Col. Scott D. Brodeur, director of the National Space Defense Center and director of operations for Joint Task Force Space Defense, discussed what the U.S. military might do in a space conflict with China, which demonstrated an anti-satellite weapon in a 2007 test that created thousands of pieces of debris.

Read more at: Spacenews

US House Approves $1 Billion for Israel’s Iron Dome

US lawmakers green-lit $1 billion Thursday to resupply Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system after funding was controversially stripped from a separate bill following a revolt from the Democrats’ left flank.

The money had originally been included in legislation addressing a looming government shutdown and a potential October debt crisis.

But a group of progressives in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives said they would tank that unless Iron Dome funding was yanked from the wording.

Read more at: Spacewar

DoD To Update Satellite Cyber Rules For Megaconstellations

Space Force hopes to soon wrap up a new cybersecurity certification process for commercial communications megaconstellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) — while allowing industry as much leeway as possible to come up with innovative solutions, a Space Force official said today. “Internally with our office, there’s a desire to be more agnostic, so when we go out with acquisitions we really want to let industry be creative in their proposals,” Jared Reece, program analyst at the service’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO), told the SATELLITE 2021 conference in Ft. Washington, Md.

Read more at: Breakingdefense

VARIOUS

Virgin Galactic Brings Disney VP to Serve as Chief People Officer

Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SPCE) (the “Company” or “Virgin Galactic”), a vertically integrated aerospace and space travel company, today announced that veteran human resources executive Aparna Chitale will join the company as its Chief People Officer (CPO) on September 30, 2021.

Chitale brings over 20 years of strategic experience at multi-national organizations, where she has scaled and led global teams at both public and privately held companies. Most recently, she served as Vice President of Human Resources at Disney Parks Experiences and Products.

Read more at: Parabolic arc

Sergei Korolev Achieves Lift-off

On 20 July 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the Moon, speaking the now ubiquitous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Moon landing rocketed the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the “race to space”.

NASA says the race was initiated on 4 October 1957 with the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik I, “the world’s first artificial satellite”, which “orbited the Earth in 98 minutes on an elliptical path”.

Read more at: Cosmos Magazine

Read more at: Conversation

U.S. Air Force Academy Honors Airman and Astronaut Colonel Fred Gregory

The Academy honors an Airman and Astronaut in formal ceremonies on Thursday, Sept. 16, naming the Consolidated Education and Training Facility for the retired Air Force Colonel Fred Gregory.

Gregory is a Distinguished Graduate of USAFA’s Class of 1964, a decorated Airman with 6,976 hours in over 50 aircraft, and a respected former NASA astronaut and administrator.

Read more at: Fox21 news

Antony Hewish (1924–2021)

Antony (Tony) Hewish was a pioneering radioastronomer. His research student Jocelyn Bell (later Bell Burnell) made the first detection of a strange scintillating radio source that they subsequently showed was the first identified pulsar. These sources emit intense bursts of radio emission at precise time intervals, like the beam of a lighthouse. At first jokingly called LGM for ‘little green men’, these enigmatic sources were almost immediately identified as magnetized, rotating neutron stars, one of the end points of stellar evolution. Hewish was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “decisive role” in the discovery. He has died aged 97.

Read more at: Nature

CGTN Exclusive: China’s Manned Space Missions

Read more at: CGTN