Five Space Coast Companies Get Help
from NASA (Source: Florida Today)
The Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast recently
announced that five local companies were selected to partner with NASA
subject matter experts. This partnership is the result of the EDC’s
Technology Docking program first introduced in January.
Technology Docking is a strategic alliance between the EDC and NASA’s
national pilot program for Regional Economic Development (RED). The
partnership provides small to medium-sized manufacturers and technology
based companies the opportunity to work with NASA to solve a technology
challenge. Those companies selected were: Alluvionic, Melbourne; GeNo
LLC, Cocoa; Helical Communication Technologies Inc., Rockledge;
Knight’s Armament Co., Titusville, and SeaDek Marine Products,
Rockledge. (7/11)
France Supports ISS Extension to 2024,
Ambivalent on Ariane 6 (Source: Space News)
The French space agency CNES supports an extension of the ISS but is
skeptical about the cost benefits of reusable rockets. CNES President
Jean-Yves Le Gall said Friday he expects the European Space Agency, the
only ISS partner yet to endorse an extension of the station to 2024, to
finally do so at a ministerial meeting in December.
Le Gall said that the Ariane 6 vehicle under development now would be
cost competitive if it was operating today, but said it wasn't clear
that efforts by SpaceX and others to develop reusable systems would be
able to lower launch costs. He also said he expected the European
Commission to eventually approve plans by CNES to sell its stake in
Arianespace to Airbus Safran Launchers, giving that joint venture a
majority stake in the launch services provider. (7/10)
Aerojet Plans Stennis Expansion for AR1
(Source: Aerojet Rocketdyne)
Aerojet Rocketdyne will expand its facilities at the Stennis Space
Center to support work on its AR1 engine. The company announced early
Monday that assembly and testing of the engine will take place at its
Stennis facility currently used for the RS-25 and RS-68 engines. The
expanded facility will be the company's center of excellence for large
liquid rocket engine assembly and test. The company is developing the
AR1 as a potential successor to the RD-180. (7/11)
China Plans Next Lab Module Launch in
September (Source: Xinhua)
China's second space lab module is at the spaceport for a launch in
September. Chinese officials said the Tiangong-2 module arrived at the
Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre on Saturday to begin preparations for a
mid-September launch. Once in orbit, it will be able to support two
astronauts for stays of up to 30 days, starting with the Shenzhou-11
mission scheduled for launch in October. (7/11)
World View Balloon Plan at Arizona
"Spaceport" Concerns Airline (Source: Arizona Daily Star)
One airline is concerned about plans for a "spaceport" adjacent to
Tucson International Airport. Spaceport Tucson will be a pad for
launches of high-altitude balloons developed by World View, whose new
headquarters are under construction just south of the airport. A
Southwest Airlines manager said placing the spaceport next to the
airport is a "terrible idea" that "erodes safety." World View officials
said the balloon launches will take place early in the morning and be
woven into the airport's overall traffic flow, exiting controlled
airspace within four minutes. (7/10)
If We Want to Find Aliens, We Need to
Save the Arecibo Telescope (Source: Vice)
Luckily for people involved in the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence (SETI), telescope technology has improved so drastically
in the last few decades that some astronomers think we'll make first
contact with alien life within 20 years. Those strides are, in part,
owed to one of the most important tools in SETI research: the Arecibo
Observatory.
Arecibo is a radio telescope—by far the largest in the world, at least
until China's massive FAST telescope comes online later this year—and
since the 1960s, it's allowed astronomers to search for aliens deeper
in space than any other telescope. Arecibo is also used to research the
atmosphere of our own planet and hunt for giant asteroids that may be
on a collision course with Earth. But now, Arecibo is at risk of being
shut down for good, which could seriously bruise the search for
extraterrestrial life.
The problem is that searching for aliens ain't cheap. Despite Arecibo's
usefulness, budget cuts have threatened the observatory's existence
since 2006, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) recommended
slashing Arecibo's budget from $10 million to $4 million between 2007
and 2011. Without an alternative source of funding, that would've
forced the observatory to close. "If we lose Arecibo, then we are
losing about two-thirds of the volume of galaxy that we can search."
Click here.
(7/8)
Magnetic Rope Observed for the First
Time Between Saturn and the Sun (Source: UCL)
A twisted magnetic field structure, previously never seen before at
Saturn, has now been detected for the first time, using instrumentation
built at UCL and Imperial College. When the Sun’s magnetic field
interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field (the magnetosphere), a
complex process occurs called magnetic reconnection which can twist the
field into a helical shape.
These twisted helically structured magnetic fields are called flux
ropes or “flux transfer events” (FTEs) and are observed at Earth and
even more commonly at Mercury. The conditions that allow FTEs to be
generated at a planet worsen with distance from the Sun, however they
have been observed at all the planets out to Jupiter. The observation
of this phenomenon at Saturn has been elusive.
Searches have been undertaken to find an FTE with NASA’s Cassini
spacecraft, with reports published of none being found. Up until now.
Cassini has observed the first FTE at Saturn. The observed magnetic
signature was successfully compared to that of a model to show that
Cassini indeed observed a flux rope at this giant magnetosphere, and
that the spacecraft passed close to the structure’s center. It is also
estimated that the flux rope could be up to 8300 kilometers wide. (7/6)
India May Buy Russian Microcircuits
for Its Space Program (Source: Space Daily)
Russia's Angstrem microelectronics manufacturer is in talks on
supplying some 10,000 radiation-resistant circuits for India's space
program, local media said. Angstrem has contacted a private Indian
company working as a subcontractor for the Indian Space Research
Organization (ISRO), offering to supply $200,000 worth of electronic
circuits, the company told the Izvestia newspaper. (7/11)
Selling Secrets to the Russians? Jason
Bourne Fan Arrested in Spy Drama of His Own (Source: LA Times)
Gregory Allen Justice had a sick wife, a job at which he felt
unappreciated and a fascination with cinematic secret operatives such
as Jason Bourne and James Bond. He had a special love for “The
Americans,” the FX series about KGB spies in the United States.
As an engineer on the night shift at a large defense contractor,
Justice, 49, of Culver City had access to sensitive technical data
about military and commercial satellites, according to federal
authorities. He was arrested Thursday on charges that he sold
information to a man he believed was an agent of Russian intelligence.
Click here.
(7/9)
LBJ, Influential Lawmakers in
Washington Gave Houston an Advantage (Source: Houston Chronicle)
When Houston landed the Manned Spacecraft Center - later to be known as
the Johnson Space Center - in 1961, the city was over the moon with the
idea that anything was possible. Of course, Houstonians already knew
that. The city had harnessed the power of air conditioning to make the
swampy area livable, dug the Houston Ship Channel to create one of the
country's largest ports, and was on its way to becoming the capital of
the nation's oil and gas industry.
Today, the $1.5 billion complex on 1,620 acres in the Clear Lake area
serves as mission control, astronaut training center, leads NASA's
International Space Station operations, among other projects, and is
one of NASA's largest research and development facilities. Though NASA
consists of 20 facilities across the country, the Johnson Space Center
is the home of the nation's manned space program, and for some, the
heart of the agency.
Not only was Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson - who was instrumental in
passing the 1958 legislation creating NASA as majority leader in the
U.S. Senate - a Texan, but other officials in influential positions
also hailed from the Lone Star state: U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn,
House Appropriations Chairman Albert Thomas from the district
neighboring Clear Lake, Rep. Bob Casey and Rep. Olin E. Teague on the
House Committee on Science and Astronautics, with Teague heading the
subcommittee on Manned Space Flight. (7/10)
Code that Took America to the Moon was
Just Published to GitHub, It’s Like a 1960s Time Capsule
(Source: Quartz)
When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to
develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the
mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent
it. They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called
“rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly
programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s
programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily
understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer
(AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code.
The AGC code has been available to the public for quite a while–it was
first uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003, after he’d
transcribed it from scanned images of the original hardcopies MIT had
put online. That is, he manually typed out each line, one by one.
“It was scanned by a airplane pilot named Gary Neff in Colorado,”
Burkey said in an email. “MIT got hold of the scans and put them online
in the form of page images, which unfortunately had been mutilated in
the process to the point of being unreadable in places.” Burkey
reconstructed the unreadable parts, he said, using his engineering
skills to fill in the blanks. (7/9)
Eiffage Lands €200m Kourou Spaceport
Contract (Source: Construction Index)
France’s national space agency has awarded an Eiffage-led consortium a
€200m contract for construction of a launch complex in Guiana. The
scope of work for the consortium led by Eiffage Génie Civil covers all
Ariane 6 "ELA 4" launch complex structures, including the launch pad
and its two flame trenches, the 6,000t, 90m-high mobile service gantry
and the launcher assembly building. (7/10)
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