Press Clips Week 43-2018

Landspace Fails To Reach Orbit With Milestone Private Chinese Launch

Landspace suffered an issue with the third stage of its Zhuque-1 solid launch vehicle Saturday as it bid to become the first Chinese private launch company to reach orbit.

The three-stage Zhuque-1, named after the Vermillion Bird from Chinese mythology, lifted off from a mobile platform at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, northwest China, at 4 a.m. Eastern (4 p.m. local time).

No live coverage or reporting was available, but space enthusiasts tracking Chinese launches attended, posting apparent images and footage of the launch on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like microblogging service.

Read more at: Spacenews

Roscosmos To Complete Soyuz Accident Investigation This Month

The final report into the launch failure that forced the abort of a crewed Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled for completion by the end of the month, the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos announced Oct. 20.

In a brief statement, Roscosmos said the state commission investigating the Oct. 11 accident met Oct. 20 and approved a “preliminary report” on the cause of the failure during the Soyuz MS-10 launch. Roscosmos did not disclose any details about the report’s contents, such as what cause the investigators identified.

Roscosmos said that the final report, including recommendations to prevent a similar problem from occurring again, will be completed on Oct. 30. It didn’t state when that report, or some summary of it, will be publicly released.

Read more at: Spacenews

Cosmonaut Brains Show Space Travel Causes Lasting Changes

Our fleshy forms evolved to work within the tug of gravity. Take that pull away, and the clockwork operation of bodily functions just doesn’t keep ticking at the same steady beat. From fluids floating the wrong way to DNA expressing differently, space travel is tough on even the healthiest human body.

Now, a study of recently active cosmonauts adds to the concern for one particularly vital organ: the brain. The results suggest that deformations to brain tissue caused by weightless conditions can linger even after space travellers have had their boots back on Earth for seven months.

Read more at: National Geographic

Magnets To Help Protect Cosmonauts From Solar Wind In Inter-Planetary Flights

Russian scientists want to protect cosmonauts from the solar wind in inter-planetary flights with the help of magnets, according to a program of joint work of the Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems and the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences obtained by TASS on Friday.

The solar wind is ionizing radiation and a major component of the inter-planetary environment.

“The research into possible methods of the magnetic protection of manned missions,” the document says, indicating the area of the research.

Crew members on manned missions beyond the Earth’s boundaries that last more than twelve months need protection from galactic and solar cosmic rays, the document notes.

Read more at: TASS

Bridenstine Reiterates December Launch to ISS on track, and Other Space Council Tidbits

As we reported, yesterday’s Space Council meeting focused on the Space Force, but other topics were discussed as well.  Here are some tidbits from Space Council members NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, representatives from the Department of Commerce and Department of State, and the chairman of the Council’s Users’ Advisory Group.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine:

• reiterated what he said on October 12 that he is “fully anticipating” that the next launch to the International Space Station (ISS) will take place in December as planned despite the October 11 Soyuz MS-10 launch failure.  “We have a really, really good idea of what the issue is” and there will be a “number of Soyuz launches in the next month and a half” before a launch with a crew.  He called it the “most successful failed launch we could have imagined.”  (Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the Council, remarked that the failure was a “wake up call” for the United States to be able to launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil and that day is rapidly approaching.)

Read more at: Spacepolicy online

Virgin Orbit Moves Closer To Launching A Rocket To Space From A 747

On Wednesday, Virgin Orbit attached its prototype rocket, LauncherOne, to a modified 747 for the first time at an airport in Long Beach, California. The company hopes to send the rocket into orbit early next year.

LauncherOne is 70 feet long and weighs 57,000 pounds. It’s designed to carry small satellites into orbit around Earth. But instead of blasting off directly from the ground like a typical rocket, LauncherOne will start its journey on a runway. The rocket was attached to Cosmic Girl, a 747 that used to carry passengers as part of the Virgin Atlantic fleet.

“The team were carrying out the integration check of the rocket with Cosmic Girl to verify mechanical, electrical, software, and dynamics all work together for the first time,” Virgin Orbit owner Richard Branson wrote in a blog post. “It’s an incredibly exciting moment for us, as Virgin Orbit’s first test flights move ever closer.”

Read more at: Verge

Pegasus Rocket Launch Postponed

Continuing a series of delays keeping NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer on Earth, NASA announced Tuesday that the satellite’s launch aboard an air-dropped Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket will not occur as scheduled Friday.

The $252 million science mission was set launch from an airborne carrier jet around 4:05 a.m. EDT (0805 GMT) Friday, but NASA said Tuesday mission managers decided to delay the flight “to conduct further pre-launch testing on the rocket.”

The space agency said in a brief statement that a new launch date will be established upon completion of the testing. No further information was released by NASA or Northrop Grumman.

Read more at: Spaceflight Now

ISRO Successfully Tests Lander For Soft Landing On The Moon

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully conducted crucial tests to ensure smooth and precise landing of Vikram, the lander aboard Chandrayaan 2 on Thursday.

The aim of the Lander Actuator Performance Test (LAPT) was to assess the performance of the navigational system onboard the lander for steering the module horizontally and vertically to reach a predefined target.

“The test proved the navigation capability of Vikram. The test module had all the actual navigational system that will be sent to the moon on board. Only the mass had been reduced to 1/6th the actual lander…,” said K Sivan, chairman of ISRO.

Read more at: Hindustan Times

Kepler in Safe Mode Again

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has once again entered a safe mode as the aging spacecraft appears to be running out of fuel.

In a brief statement Oct. 23, NASA said that, during a routine communications session on Oct. 19, controllers found that the spacecraft had entered a “no-fuel-use sleep mode” that disrupted operations. “The Kepler team is currently assessing the cause and evaluating possible next steps,” the agency stated.

NASA didn’t disclose what those possible next steps are or a timeline for making a decision. “NASA is still analyzing the data to determine the next steps, and will provide an update when we can,” project spokesperson Alison Hawkes said Oct. 25.

Read more at: Spacenews

After Encountering Glitches, Hubble And Chandra Space Telescopes Make Recoveries

Things are looking up for two of NASA’s Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Both telescopes had to go out of service this month due to different types of problems experienced by their gyroscopic pointing systems.

On Oct. 5, one of the three active gyros being used by the 28-year-old Hubble Space Telescope failed, triggering a safe-mode condition.

Hubble has six gyros on board, but two of them had failed already and a third one was glitchy. Having four non-working gyros forced the Hubble team members to consider whether they’d have to go to a less efficient mode of operation, in which only one gyro would be used for pointing at celestial targets and the other one would be reserved as a backup.

Read more at: Geekwire

NASA To Soon End Active Efforts To Restore Contact With Opportunity

NASA expects to soon end efforts to contact the Opportunity Mars rover, silent for more than four months after a major dust storm, but will continue to listen for signals from the spacecraft for months to come.

Opportunity, which has been on Mars since January 2004, last contacted Earth June 10. A powerful globe-spanning dust storm blocked the sun and deprived the rover of solar power, putting it into a low-power mode.

On Sept. 11, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that the optical depth, a measure of the haziness of Martian skies, had dropped to a level low enough to allow enough sunlight to reach the rover for it to generate power. At that point, controllers started an effort known as “active listening” where they transmitted commands to the rover in the event it was unable to revive itself and listened for any transmissions by the rover in response.

Read more at: Spacenews

Why Are Spacex And Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program Spacesuit Designs Different?

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) has seen two private firms develop new spacecraft to transport astronauts to low-Earth orbit. It also has seen different spacesuits designed for the astronauts who would fly on them. As opposed to the orange “pumpkin suits” of the shuttle era, these new suits are blue and white and are as distinctive as the companies that produced them.

Recent events and announcements have helped show that the two current CCP contractors, Boeing and SpaceX, are allowed some latitude in the designs of the suits themselves.

Boeing unveiled their spacesuit in 2017 with former NASA astronaut Christopher Ferguson, a veteran of three flights to orbit, displaying the unique blue design of the company’s CCP spacesuit design.

Read more at: Spaceflight Insider

Hazardous Space Junk Is Piling Up. Can This Satellite Help?

Space is vast. But around our planet, it is getting a bit crowded — with space junk.

More than a half million chunks of decommissioned, human-made satellites, lost tools, broken parts and trash the size of a pea or larger whiz at more than 17,000 miles per hour around the planet. Space junk threatens the lives of astronauts on the International Space Station and the functionality of satellites scattered across low Earth orbit.

That is why space enthusiasts are excited about RemoveDEBRIS, the first-ever satellite capable of actively collecting space debris. On Sept. 16, this junk collector deployed a net that snared a piece of space garbage mid-flight in a one-time, groundbreaking demonstration.

Read more at: PBS

What You Need To Know About China’s First Private Orbital Launch

China might achieve a major milestone for its private space business as soon as this weekend.

LandSpace, a Beijing-based startup founded in 2015, is expected to launch a solid-propellant rocket and put a satellite into orbit on Saturday (Oct. 27), according to space news site gbtimes.com. LandSpace earlier told Quartz it was planning an orbital launch for the last three months of the year, but wouldn’t confirm a date.

If LandSpace’s launch succeeds, it would be a big step for China’s space development. “Overall, if the launch is successful and the satellite can complete its mission in orbit, I think it marks a significant turning point for Chinese private space more generally,” wrote Blaine Curcio, founder of Hong Kong-based satellite market research firm Orbital Gateway Consulting, in an email to Quartz.

Read more at: QZ

Meet Shuttle, the Company that is Building a Booking Agent for Spaceflight

Avery Haskell  says he first knew he wanted to be an astronaut ever since he was a boy growing up in Houston near NASA’s  Johnson Space Center.

The 24-year-old Stanford graduate who counts Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan as his heroes grew up in an entrepreneurial family. In the early days of the internet his mother, an accountant in the oil and gas industry, and father, an information technology technician for a railroad, launched their own startup called “Neighbornet” — an early version of Zillow  (which never got off the ground).

Read more at: Techcrunch

Atlas 5 Rocket Begins Arriving In Florida For Commercial Crew Test Flight

The Centaur upper stage destined to send Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule into orbit on its first unpiloted test flight next year has arrived at Cape Canaveral after a sea journey aboard United Launch Alliance’s Mariner transport ship.

Fitted with two Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engines, the stage arrived at Cape Canaveral on Friday, when a truck offloaded the Centaur, wrapped in a protective covering, from the Mariner ship docked at Port Canaveral. The Centaur was transported to the Atlas Space Operations Center, where crews planned checks to verify the stage weathered the journey by river and sea from ULA’s rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama.

Read more at: Spaceflight Now

The Case Against Colonizing Space To Save Humanity

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns us that climate change could be shaping up to be even more catastrophic than we feared. Too many world governments are still armed with nuclear weapons that they’ve nearly deployed by accident on occasion. We’re unprepared for pandemics, and technological advancement is bringing within reach new threats to our world.

So do we need a backup plan? Or a backup planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both seem to think so.

Read more at: Vox

Oxygen-Rich Liquid Water May Exist on Mars

The possibility of life on Mars may not be consigned to the distant past. New research suggests our neighboring world could hide enough oxygen in briny liquid water near its surface to support microbial life, opening up a wealth of potentially habitable regions across the entire planet. Although the findings do not directly measure the oxygen content of brines known to exist on the Red Planet, they constitute an important step toward determining where life could exist there today.

Aerobic respiration, which relies on oxygen, is a key component of present-day life on Earth. In this process, cells take in oxygen and break it down to produce energy to drive metabolism.

Read more at: Scientific American

NASA’s Return to the Moon Could Include a Reusable Lunar Lander

Somewhere inside America’s sprawling space apparatus, a newly assembled team of NASA engineers has begun designing a spacecraft to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon. It would be humanity’s first visit since the glory days of the 1960s.

The Lander Study Group, as it’s called inside NASA, put its very first ideas on paper within the past few weeks—that’s according to a NASA presentation seen by Popular Mechanics. What’s most exciting about this nascent work is that the new lunar lander won’t be a one-and-done like that of Apollo 11. This 21st century lander will make a round trip.

Read more at: Popular Mechanics

How to Build a Moon Base

Next year, astronaut Matthias Maurer expects to walk on the surface of the Moon — but without the hassles of a rocket flight, zero-gravity nausea and a risky landing. Instead he’ll stroll close to home in a leafy meadow near Cologne, Germany, which is set to host the largest Moon mock-up ever made. On a pit of artificial lunar dust covering more than 1,000 square metres, Maurer and other scientists will be attached to crane-and-pulley systems that allow them to leap as if experiencing the Moon’s weaker gravity, and work under adjustable lamps that simulate lighting at different lunar sites. Sometimes, they will retreat to lunar-style living quarters: an airlock-connected module the size of a shipping container.

Read more at: Nature

Mars 2020 Parachute a Go

In the early hours of Sept. 7, NASA broke a world record.

Less than 2 minutes after the launch of a 58-foot-tall (17.7-meter) Black Brant IX sounding rocket, a payload separated and began its dive back through Earth’s atmosphere. When onboard sensors determined the payload had reached the appropriate height and Mach number (38 kilometers altitude, Mach 1.8), the payload deployed a parachute. Within four-tenths of a second, the 180-pound parachute billowed out from being a solid cylinder to being fully inflated.

Read more at: NASA

Plant Hormone Makes Space Farming A Possibility

With scarce nutrients and weak gravity, growing potatoes on the Moon or on other planets seems unimaginable. But the plant hormone strigolactone could make it possible, plant biologists from the University of Zurich have shown. The hormone supports the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots, thus encouraging plants’ growth – even under the challenging conditions found in space.

The idea has been bounced around for a while now – and not just by the likes of NASA, but also by private entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk: that of one day establishing colonies for people to live on the Moon or on other planets.

Read more at: Space daily

A New Way To Measure Nearly Nothing

Many semiconductor fabricators and research labs are under increasing pressure from, of all things, vacuum. These facilities need to remove greater amounts of gas molecules and particles from their setups as new technologies and processes demand lower and lower pressures.

For example, the vacuum chambers in which microchip manufacturers lay down a series of ultrathin layers of chemicals step by step – a process that must be utterly free of contaminants – operate at about one hundred-billionth of the air pressure at sea level. Some applications need pressures at least a thousand times lower than that, approaching the even more rarefied environments of the Moon and outer space.

Read more at: Space daily

White House Temporarily Lifts Sanctions on Russia’s Space Chief for U.S. Visit

The White House has temporarily lifted an entry ban imposed on the head of Russia’s federal space agency to allow him to visit the United States, the head of NASA has said in an interview with Russian media.

The U.S. banned entry to and froze the assets of ex-Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, along with other officials it blames for Moscow’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula in March 2014. Rogozin, 54, oversaw Russia’s powerful arms industry before he was appointed to head the Roscosmos state space agency earlier this year.

Rogozin will now be able to travel to the U.S. under a workaround that removes the sanctions for the duration of his visit, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told the state-run TASS news agency Friday.

Read more at: Moscow Times

Spaceport Gets Lawyer, Responds To Nmpolitics.Net’s Lawsuit

The N.M. Spaceport Authority has finally hired an attorney and responded to NMPolitics.net’s lawsuit alleging violations of the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act.

Las Cruces attorney Blaine Mynatt entered his appearance in court as the state agency’s attorney on Oct. 18. That was two days after NMPolitics.net published a commentary in which I shared that our attorney had filed a motion asking a judge to rule in our favor because the Spaceport Authority had failed, for more than 60 days, to respond to our lawsuit despite being required to do so.

Read more at: NM politics

A Comparison Of American And Japanese Space Policy Structures

In order to grasp US governmental activity on space policy and its influence on the other country, it is important to understand the mechanism of US governmental structure in space policy. That changed recently when the Trump Administration revived the National Space Council (hereinafter “Space Council”) in June 2017.

Japan, the author’s country, changed its governmental structure in promoting space policy in 2012. But due to the shortage of materials translated into English, it seems not to be broadly known internationally about the Japanese government’s space activities including governmental structure and behavior.

Read more at: Space review

Cruz Vs O’Rourke Race Puts NASA’s Future On The Texas Ballot

The space program has not become an issue in the race for the U.S. Senate in Texas between the incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, and his opponent, Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, the Democratic challenger.

One reason is that space policy is not a partisan issue on the same level as, say, immigration, taxes, and gun rights. The second reason is that O’Rourke, as far as can be determined, has not expressed an opinion one way or the other about NASA, President Trump’s plan to return to the moon, or even the proposal for a Space Force. Repeated inquiries to the O’Rourke campaign have been met with silence.

Read more at: Hill

ESA on the Way to Space19+ and Beyond

European ministers in charge of space activities met this week at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid, Spain, to preview ESA’s vision for the future of Europe in space.

Called the Intermediate Ministerial Meeting, this was a milestone on the road to ESA’s next Ministerial Council, called ‘Space19+’, which will be held in November 2019. This week, the ministers from ESA Member States were presented with the strategic guidelines that will shape ESA Director General Jan Wörner’s proposal for Europe’s future in space, to be submitted at Space19+.

Ministerial Councils bring together ESA’s Member States and observers every two to three years to decide on new proposals and funding for ESA’s next years of work. The last one was in 2016, and this week’s Intermediate Ministerial Meeting was an important step towards Space19+.

Read more at: ESA

Revised Remote Sensing Regulatory Rule Nears Release

The Commerce Department plans to soon release a new rule designed to streamline licensing of commercial remote sensing systems with what one official called a “fundamentally different” approach for licensing.

During a presentation at the National Space Council meeting in Washington Oct. 23, Karen Dunn Kelley, the acting deputy secretary of commerce, said that the department submitted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a day earlier a draft rule on revising commercial remote sensing licensing processes.

Read mroe at: Spacenews

Op-Ed | The Legal Mandate For A U.S. Space Force

Since President Trump announced he would form the U.S. Space Force, there has been a lot of debate over the validity, possibility, and even sanity of his proposal. Existing military services deny the need while they persist in stultifying US space utilization to only providing services to existing fighting forces on the ground, in the air and on the seas, while ignoring the growing space industry and work by some, like SpaceX, intent on settling Mars.

I am reminded of the 1920s and 1930s, when U.S. air power was controlled entirely by the Navy and Army. Most of their air power was in the form of blimps, which they used as forward observers for artillery and for anti-submarine warfare.

Read more at: Spacenews

President Trump’s Space Force Is a Recipe for Wasteful Spending

President Donald J. Trump has made the news with his proposed Space Force—a military space organization on par with existing services like the Air Force and Navy. This undertaking will be an expensive, rushed intensification of the militarization of space.

Militarization aside, what particularly concerns me is that President Trump’s enthusiasm for making the initiative as splashy and dramatic as possible will undermine regulation of costs and will consequently drive the cost figures much higher than people realize—into the double digits of billions of dollars.

President Trump is the first President to call for a Space Force, although the current Congress has taken a much less dramatic step in this direction by authorizing a space combatant command. Arguments in favor of the Space Force emphasize that the increasing strategic importance of space satellites and missiles warrants greater resources and reorganization to boost space warfare efforts.

Read more at: thereg review

DOD “Moving Out” on Space Force as Space Council Approves Six Recommendations to President

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told the White House National Space Council today that DOD is “moving out” on the Space Force.  Shortly thereafter, the Council unanimously approved six recommendations to the President offered by Shanahan to take the next steps forward. The Trump Administration’s goal is to create a sixth military service, the Department of the Space Force, by 2020.

Vice President Mike Pence chairs the Space Council, which held its fourth public meeting today at Ft. McNair in Washington, D.C.  The main focus was discussing progress to date and next steps to create the Space Force. About an hour earlier, Pence also was interviewed by Washington Post national political reporter Robert Costa about the Space Force as part of the Washington Post Live’s “Transformers: Space” event.

Read more at: Space policy online

A Never-Before-Seen Russian Missile Is Identified As An Anti-Satellite Weapon And Will Be Ready For Warfare By 2022

A never-before-seen missile photographed last month on a Russian MiG-31 interceptor is believed to be a mock-up of an anti-satellite weapon that will be ready for warfare by 2022, three sources with direct knowledge of a U.S. intelligence report say.

The Russian anti-satellite weapon, which is attached to a space launch vehicle, is expected to target communication and imagery satellites in low Earth orbit, according to one source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. For reference, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope travel in low Earth orbit.

Images of the mysterious missile on a modified Russian MiG-31, a supersonic near-space interceptor, appeared in mid-September.

Read more at: CNBC

Pentagon Presents Recommendations On Space Force To Trump

Read more at: Defense news

Disruptive Technology In Space Transportation

Earlier this year I stopped by NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, to get some information about their latest reentry heat shielding. I ended up talking with Dan Rasky, director of the Space Portal, a NASA industry outreach program. In addition to sharing some insights into how SpaceX operates, Rasky strongly recommended reading the book The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. This book has long received attention from promoters of commercial space. Tim Fernholz’s Rocket Billionaires, published earlier this year mentions that Alan Marty, a venture capitalist working with NASA, was handing out dozens of copies of The Innovator’s Dilemma. Rasky also recommended the concept of “blue ocean” markets (thosse without competitors) versus “red ocean” markets with competitors, which is set forth in Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

Read more at: Space review

We Don’t Deserve Elon Musk

It has been four years since lead and other toxins were found to be tainting the water supply in Flint, Mich. This month, Flint community schools thanked billionaire Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation for donating almost $500,000 to install new water fountains with filtration systems in all its schools.

Read more at: Washington Examiner

Head Of Soviet Space Shuttle Program Dies Aged 89

Vakhtang Vachnadze, a Soviet and Russian space engineer who headed the project to build the Buran space shuttle orbiter, has died at the age of 89, the Roscosmos state corporation said late on Thursday.

“On October 25, Vakhtang Dmitrievich Vachnadze passed away. He was a designer directly involved in setting up production and developing the manufacturing processes for our country’s first long-range ballistic missiles and launch vehicles; first unmanned spacecraft and satellites; space systems under the manned Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz missions; the L1 and N1-L3 lunar programs; the Salyut and Mir orbital station programs; rocket upper stages Block D and DM; and the Progress cargo spacecraft. He was also in charge of work to develop the reusable space system Energia-Buran,” Roscosmos said in a statement.

Read more at: TASS

“Safe Passage to Mars” Design Challenge

“Safe Passage to Mars” is a design challenge for undergraduate students. Enabling safe space exploration of Moon, Mars and beyond requires the application of the concepts of Engineering Psychology to design and build hardware (tools, devices, or equipment) which can mitigate critical human performance issues associated with long-duration spaceflight.

Read more at: ISSF

10th IAASS Conference

15 – 17 May 2019 – Los Angeles, USA

The tenth IAASS Conference “Making Safety Happen” is an invitation to reflect and exchange information on a number of topics in space safety and sustainability of national and international interest. The conference is also a forum to promote mutual understanding, trust, and the widest possible international cooperation in such matters. The once exclusive “club” of nations with autonomous space access capabilities is becoming crowded with fresh, and ambitious new entrants. New commercial spaceports and near-spaceports are in operations and others are being built.

Read more at: IAASS Conference