Sane Reasons To Be A Mars Colonizer (Source:
Popular Science)
Is it insane to sign up for a one-way trip to Mars? Mason Peck would
like to assure you it is not. He addressed the sanity of Mars
colonizers in a post yesterday on the Mars One website. Peck is a Mars
One adviser who previously served as NASA's Chief Technologist; Mars
One is the company that plans to send one-way missions to colonize the
Red Planet starting in 2024.
Mars One is now in the process of interviewing hundreds of applicants,
out of an initial pool of more than 200,000. Eventually, the company
wants to find just 24 to 40 colonizers to go permanently into space.
Meanwhile, the company has launched a forum where experts answer
ethical questions about the private mission. Peck's answer to "Is a
one-way journey wrong?" is the forum's first post.
"There are many motivations for becoming one of the first settlers on
Mars, none of them insane in my opinion," he wrote, before listing
four. Later, he wrote, "In fact, I think we may be morally obligated to
permit people the freedom to do so, and not impede their desire to
realize their dreams by imposing our own fears or superstitions based
on uninformed perspectives." (8/5)
ULA Standing By for RD-180 Deliveries
Through 2017 (Source: Space News)
Economic sanctions the United States and Europe levied against the
Russian government in July following the downing of a passenger jet by
what U.S. authorities say was a Russian missile operated by Ukrainian
separatists will not disrupt the flow of Russian-made RD-180 rocket
engines to United Launch Alliance, a company executive said here Aug. 5.
“At our level, it’s business as usual,” Mark Peller, director of the
hardware value stream for Denver-based ULA, said here in a panel
presentation at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’
Space 2014 conference. Peller said ULA signed a contract earlier this
year with RD-180 reseller RD Amross, a joint venture of the engine’s
Moscow-area manufacturer, NPO Energomash, and United Technologies
Corp., that calls for delivery of 29 engines through 2017. (8/6)
NASA Engineering Competition Will
Include KSC Forum (Source: FSGC)
NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) invites you to
participate in the exciting 2015 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems
Concepts-Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Engineering Design Competition.
Since 2002, RASC-AL has been challenging the brightest students at the
nation’s top engineering schools to develop innovative, revolutionary
concepts to solve challenges pertaining to NASA’s near and long term
mission goals.
Teams that are selected will receive a $6,000 stipend to facilitate
full participation in the Forum held in Cocoa Beach, Florida in
May/June 2015. This year’s RASCAL themes are looking for innovations in
crafting NASA exploration strategy as it relates to extending
humanity’s reach beyond low Earth Orbit (LEO).
Optimally, the RASC-AL themes lend themselves to a long-term class
project or senior/Master’s thesis, where students develop scenarios for
the synergistic application of innovative capabilities and/or new
technologies for evolutionary architecture development to enable future
missions, reduce cost, or improve safety. In an effort to help you
incorporate a RASC-AL framework into your coursework (if interested),
we are providing you with a sneak preview of the 2015 RASC-AL themes –
2 months earlier than ever before! Click here.
(8/6)
Space Should be "Weapons Free" Zone
(Source: Russia Today)
Ensuring that weapons are never deployed in space is one of Russia's
key international security objectives, according to former Russian
Ambassador to the U.K. Alexander Yakovenko. In this commentary,
Yakovenko writes that Russia will continue collaboration efforts with
the EU on a draft International Code of Conduct for Outer Space
Activities. "Russia firmly believes that space belongs to all mankind
and should be exploited by all states in a peaceful, transparent and
open manner," he writes. (8/5)
For the Record Books (Source:
Space KSC)
The just-under-22-days turnaround for SpaceX at LC-40 is a modern-era
(2000 - present) record for shortest turnaround of a CCAFS pad to
launch again. The previous record holder? SpaceX, earlier this year —
34 days between SES-8 on December 3, 2013 and Thaicom 6 on January 6,
2014.
The other pads researched were Launch Complex 37 with the Boeing Delta
IV, Launch Complex 41 with the Lockheed Martin Atlas V, and Launch
Complex 17 with the Boeing Delta II. LC-17 went inactive in 2012; it
had two pads, so each pad was counted as a separate facility. Click here.
(8/5)
Dream Chaser Program Expands
(Source: SpaceRef)
Sierra Nevada Corp. has announced an expansion of its Dream Chaser
program, which now includes a mix of small businesses, legacy aerospace
firms, university partners, and foreign space operation organizations,
in "32 states, 50 Congressional districts, and 2 foreign nations."
Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president of SNC Space Systems,
announced that the "Dream Chaser" spacecraft is "on track for its
anticipated first launch in November, 2016." Sirangelo said the
November launch would be unmanned and would be the first of two
required flights for certification. A crewed launch will follow in
2017, and Sirangelo expects "5 test flights in all, 3 of them crewed."
The Dream Chaser team now includes: "Lockheed Martin, United Launch
Alliance, Draper Laboratory, Aerojet Rocketdyne, MacDonald Dettwiler
& Associates Ltd. (MDA), UTC Aerospace Systems, Jacobs, Moog Broad
Reach, Siemens PLM Software, Southwest Research Institute, and a number
of companies categorized as small and disadvantaged businesses that
have or are supporting the program such as Craig Technologies, David
Clark Company, Special Aerospace Services, AdamWorks, and Arctic Slope
Research Corporation." (8/5)
Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist
Looks For ‘Disruption’ Before Investing (Source: Aviation Week)
Steve Jurvetson, one of the most successful venture capitalists on Sand
Hill Road – the Wall Street of Silicon Valley – says he spent 10 years
looking for a suitable space startup to back before he found Elon Musk.
Musk was an attractive bet, Jurvetson said, because he’d already
invested $100 million of his own dot-com money in the Falcon 1 space
launch vehicle. But what closed the deal was Musk’s idea of colonizing
Mars.
The "disruptive" startups he has convinced his partners at Draper
Fisher Jurvetson to back are ready to tackle "the things they think of
that are unique, are so big, so audacious, that it’s almost crazy to
the average person." That approach gives a startup an "unfair
advantage" that it can take to the bank. (8/5)
Captains of Industry Explore Space's
New Frontiers (Source: AFP)
With spacecraft that can carry tourists into orbit and connect Paris to
New York in less than two hours, the new heroes of space travel are not
astronauts but daring captains of industry. This new breed of space
pioneers are all using private money to push the final frontier as
government space programmes fall away.
Times have changed. Once the space race was led by the likes of the US
space agency NASA that put the first man on the moon in 1969. Today it
is entrepreneur Elon Musk -- the founder of Tesla electric cars and
space exploration company SpaceX -- who wants to reach Mars in the
2020s. The furthest advanced -- and most highly-publicised -- private
space project is led by Richard Branson, the British founder of the
Virgin Group. Click here.
(8/3)
China's Circumlunar Spacecraft Unmasked
(Source: Space Daily)
Later this year, China will send a spacecraft out to the Moon, then
return it to Earth. The uncrewed vehicle will fly around the far side
of the Moon and use the Moon's gravity to slingshot it back to Earth.
As it approaches the home planet, the spacecraft will release a capsule
that will parachute to a soft landing.
Officially, the mission is designed to test a re-entry capsule to be
used in a future robotic lunar-sample return mission. In this analyst's
opinion, the mission is also designed to prepare for a future Chinese
astronaut launch to the Moon. Filling this information vacuum, I have
now prepared a rough diagram of the expected layout of China's first
circumlunar spacecraft. China has slowly trickled out details on this
mission, but has yet to release any illustrations of the entire vehicle.
China has disclosed that the main module of the spacecraft is based on
the same design as the Chang'e-1 and 2 lunar orbiters. This is a boxy
structure that is itself derived from a Chinese communications
satellite design. Using this basic structure again makes sense. It has
a proven track record on two previous lunar missions. China has also
released photographs of the re-entry capsule. It's a small scale-model
of the Shenzhou re-entry module used to launch and return China's
astronauts. (8/3)
Can A ‘Planet-Like Object’ Start Its
Life Blazing As Hot As A Star? (Source: Universe Today)
Nature once again shows us how hard it is to fit astronomical objects
into categories. An examination of a so-far unique brown dwarf — an
object that is a little too small to start nuclear fusion and be a star
— shows that it could have been as hot as a star in the ancient past.
The object is one of a handful of brown dwarfs that are called “Y
dwarfs”. This is the coolest kind of star or star-like object we know
of. These objects have been observed at least as far back as 2008,
although they were predicted by theory before. Click here.
(8/5)
Holly Branson Likely Out of First
SpaceShipTwo Commercial Flight (Source: Parabolic Arc)
It would seem that Richard Branson’s daughter Holly will not be joining
her famous father and brother Sam on the first SpaceShipTwo commercial
flight, which is scheduled for the end of the year from Spaceport
America in New Mexico. "Freddie and I are delighted to share the happy
news that we are expecting twins!” Holly Branson announced on Tuesday
in a blog post on the Virgin Group’s website. (8/5)
NASA's Next Opportunity for CubeSat
Missions Focuses on States (Source: NASA)
NASA is opening the next round of its CubeSat Launch Initiative, part
of the White House Maker Initiative, in an effort to engage the growing
community of space enthusiasts that can contribute to NASA's space
exploration goals. The CubeSat Launch Initiative gives students,
teachers and faculty a chance to get hands-on flight hardware
development experience in the process of designing, building and
operating small research satellites.
One goal is extend the successes of space exploration to all 50 states
by launching a small satellite from at least one participant in each
state in the next five years. To this end, NASA is particularly focused
this round on gaining participation in the District of Columbia, Puerto
Rico, and 21 states not previously selected for the CubeSat Launch
Initiative. These states are: Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa,
Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire,
New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming. (8/5)
Smartphone Advances Drive Smallsats
(Source: Aviation Week)
Terrestrial smartphone technology, based in part on government space
research, is finding its way back into space as low-cost, rapidly
evolving processors, cameras, GPS receivers and other gear used in bulk
by the burgeoning smallsat movement. In Silicon Valley, where the
lifetime of a state-of-the-art smartphone is about one year, engineers
at Ames Research Center have been plugging smartphones into spacecraft
to get the most capable hardware into space quickly.
That approach has migrated into the commercial sector, where groups of
Ames alumni are applying it to constellations of low-orbit smallsats
that they are evolving toward the day when they can provide daily
remote-sensing updates over the entire Earth. “We don’t actually use
any phones anymore, but we do use consumer electronics, and all the
chips that are in phones,” says Will Marshall, one of the founders of
Planet Labs Inc. and a veteran of NASA’s PhoneSat project at Ames. (8/4)
Cubesats Headed For The Moon
(Source: Aviation Week)
Tiny cubesats, once a teaching tool to give engineering students
hands-on experience developing simple spacecraft, are about to make the
leap to serious science as a low-cost way to find and quantify deposits
of water ice on the Moon for future human explorers to use.
Students, their professors and their industry suppliers have pushed
cubesat capabilities beyond simple low Earth orbit exercises with
little more capability than the first Sputnik. In recent papers they
addressed what it would take to send cubesats to the Moon, and both are
working to realize that goal. Click here.
(8/4)
Europe's Rosetta Arrives At Comet 67P
Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Source: Space Daily)
After a decade-long journey chasing its target, ESA's Rosetta has today
become the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, opening a new
chapter in Solar System exploration. Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
and Rosetta now lie 405 million kilometres from Earth, about half way
between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, rushing towards the inner Solar
System at nearly 55 000 kilometres per hour.
The comet is in an elliptical 6.5-year orbit that takes it from beyond
Jupiter at its furthest point, to between the orbits of Mars and Earth
at its closest to the Sun. Rosetta will accompany it for over a year as
they swing around the Sun and back out towards Jupiter again. Through a
comprehensive, in situ study of the comet, Rosetta aims to unlock the
secrets within. (8/5)
Extreme Volcanism On Io
(Source: Space Daily)
During the middle of 2013, Jupiter's moon Io came alive with volcanism.
Now, an image from the Gemini Observatory captures what is one of the
brightest volcanoes ever seen in our solar system. The image, obtained
on August 29, reveals the magnitude of the eruption that was the "grand
finale" in a series of eruptions on the distant moon.
Io's volcanism is caused by the tidal push-and-pull of massive Jupiter,
which heats the satellite's interior - making it our Solar System's
most volcanically active known body. Katherine De Kleer's paper
examines the powerful late-August eruption in detail, concluding that
the energy emitted was about 20 Terawatts and expelled many cubic
kilometers of lava. "At the time we observed the event, an area of
newly-exposed lava on the order of tens of square kilometers was
visible" says de Kleer. (8/6)
Despite SpaceX Plans, Nelson Pushes
for Brevard Launches (Source: Florida Today)
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson on Tuesday downplayed the news that SpaceX CEO
Elon Musk selected Texas for the site of a private launch complex.
Nelson, an Orlando Democrat, said many of SpaceX's launches would
remain here and that the Cape is taking steps to welcome more
commercial launches. "I think you're going to see a lot of commercial
activity that is going to be there and on the Kennedy Space Center,"
Nelson said. "So I think we have a robust future."
Florida officials have rued the loss of those commercial launches — up
to 12 a year — as evidence that the Space Coast is failing to adapt to
a changing launch industry. Nelson said SpaceX's Texas site has some
limitations. For example, he said, it is suitable only for missions to
equatorial orbits that must "thread the needle" between the Florida
Keys and north coast of Cuba. "How many launches will be financially
viable for them to do that from there?" he said. "I think that's a
story still to be told." (8/5)
Editorial: Abolish the Air Force
(Source: Aviation Week)
Institutionally speaking, we are living in 1947. We created military
services in order to provide institutional voice to certain kinds of
capabilities. Interwar airpower enthusiasts argued that aviators needed
an independent service because land and sea commanders could not
appreciate the transformative implications of military aviation.
Innovation, industry and doctrine would suffer as the parochial
interests of the Army and Navy prevented aviators from spreading their
wings, so to speak.
I argue that our institutions need reform, and that the Air Force
should be folded into the Army and the Navy. Today the U.S. operates
five air forces, each with distinct procurement, training and mission
priorities: the U.S. Air Force and the aviation branches of the Navy,
Marine Corps, Army and Coast Guard. Each operates by its own rules and
has its own set of complicated relationships with other organizations.
The creation of services inevitably results in the manufacturing of
bureaucratic barriers between warfighters.
We don’t have endless disputes over close air support and the A-10
because either Air Force or Army officers are bad or stupid. Rather, we
have these disputes because we have structured our system so that two
services compete over resources and have an incentive to shirk joint
capabilities. The borders that divide the services may (or may not)
have made sense in 1947, but now they hamper good strategic and
tactical thinking and contribute to a utterly broken procurement
process. Killing a government bureaucracy is hard, but it can be done.
Click here.
(7/31)
Universal Space Network Opens Network
Management Center (Source: USN)
Universal Space Network (USN) recently celebrated a ribbon cutting
ceremony for its Chantilly Network Management Center (NMC) in
Chantilly, Va. At USN, the NMC acts as the customer interface for
satellite operators to connect into, allowing access to the global
network of antennas providing bent-pipe connectivity to their
satellites in real-time. This NMC replaces a recently closed facility
in Newport Beach, Calif. and provides USN with lower cost operations,
increased resiliency and improved geography. (8/5)
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