July 13, 2018

Blue Origin Suborbital Tickets at Least $200,000 (Source: CNBC)
Jeff Bezos' rocket company plans to charge passengers about $200,000 to $300,000 for its first trips into space next year, two people familiar with its plans told Reuters. Potential customers and the aerospace industry have been eager to learn the cost of a ticket on Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle, to find out if it is affordable and whether the company can generate enough demand to make a profit on space tourism. One Blue Origin employee with first-hand knowledge of the pricing plan said the company will start selling tickets in the range of about $200,000 to $300,000. That price would be similar to what Virgin Galactic charges for seats on SpaceShipTwo suborbital flights. (7/12)

First Space Tourist Flights Could Come in 2019 (Source: Space Daily)
The two companies leading the pack in the pursuit of space tourism say they are just months away from their first out-of-this-world passenger flights -- though neither has set a firm date. Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, are racing to be the first to finish their tests -- with both companies using radically different technology. (7/13)

DARPA Invites Payload Ideas for Launch Program (Source: Space Daily)
To maximize use of launch vehicle performance during its 2019 Launch Challenge, DARPA has released a request for information (RFI) seeking payload ideas from the space community. It is anticipated that Launch Challenge competitors will have a wide range of low Earth orbit (LEO) mass delivery capabilities, from roughly 10 to 500 kilograms. (7/13)

Senate Staffer Nominated as NASA's Deputy Administrator (Source: Space Daily)
The White House has nominated a Senate staffer with little space experience to be NASA deputy administrator. James Morhard, deputy sergeant at arms for the Senate, was nominated Thursday for the position, which requires Senate confirmation. Morhard has spent much of his career in the Senate, including service as chief of staff of the appropriations committee and staff director of the subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA. However, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine had previously advocated for a space professional with extensive scientific and technical expertise to be his deputy. Bridenstine, in a statement, said, "I look forward to working with Mr. Morhard upon his confirmation." (7/13)

Northrop Grumman Announces Leadership Changes (Source: Bloomberg)
The chief executive of Northrop Grumman will step down at the end of this year. The company announced late Thursday that Wes Bush will resign from the CEO post effective Jan. 1, but remain as chairman until July 1, 2019. Kathy Warden, the current president and chief operating officer of the company, will take over as CEO. The company didn't announce the reason for Bush's departure. (7/13)

Dual Manifesting Planned by Blue Origin (Source: Space Daily)
Blue Origin plans to offer dual satellite launches on future flights of its New Glenn vehicle. Ted McFarland, Blue Origin’s commercial director of Asia-Pacific business, said the company will offer a dual-manifesting capability, similar to that provided by the Ariane 5, starting with the sixth New Glenn launch. The first five, he said, are missions dedicated to a single customer as the company demonstrates the performance of the vehicle and ability to reuse the first stage. He acknowledged that most customers prefer a dedicated launch, but that with the vehicle's large payload fairing and performance, it could easily accommodate two or even more GEO satellites on a single launch. (7/13)

NASA Open to Another Israeli Astronaut (Source: JTA)
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the agency would be open to flying another Israeli astronaut. Bridenstine, meeting with Israeli officials Thursday on his first foreign trip since becoming administrator, said he would consider a request from Ofir Akunis, Israel's science and technology minister, to fly an Israeli astronaut on an unspecified future mission. Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was part of the crew of the STS-107 shuttle mission lost when Columbia broke up during reentry in 2003. (7/13)

Launch Complex 17 Demolished, Paving Way for Moon Express (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
A piece of the Cape's launch history came to an end with the demolition of Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 17. The site where NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers began their epic voyage to the Red Planet have been reduced to rubble. SLC-17 won’t stay dormant for long, Moon Express has already laid claim to the site with plans to use it for tests of a lunar vehicle to provide services to NASA and other potential clients. “Operations at SLC-17 will now move from Delta to Moon Express, it’s part of history which is what we’re doing every single day out here on the Range and we’re doing it with our partners from NASA, from the NRO, our commercial partners and our contracting partners,” USAF Gen. Wayne Monteith said. (7/12)

Trump’s Space Force Will Guard the U.S. From Above, NASA Chief Says (Source: Bloomberg)
NASA’s administrator is a strong defender of President Donald Trump’s proposals for space -- including an armed force and a permanent presence on the moon -- and says he wants Americans to realize how much their well-being depends on what happens far above Earth. “Every banking transaction requires a GPS signal for timing,” Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. “You lose the GPS signal and guess what you lose? You lose banking.”

“If you look at what space is, it’s not that much different than the ocean,” added Bridenstine, who made 333 aircraft-carrier landings as a Navy pilot. “It’s an international domain that has commerce that needs to be protected.” How to establish U.S. security in space has been debated for at least two decades. An independent commission -- led by Donald Rumsfeld before he became defense secretary -- reported in 2001 that "in the longer term it may be met by a military department for space." (7/12)

Astronomers' Long Hunt for Source of Extragalactic "Ghost Particles" Pays Off (Source: Scientific American)
Ever since the 1950s, when physicists first dreamed up the idea of doing astronomy with neutrinos, the holy grail has been to observe the first object outside our solar system that emits these ghostly particles. IceCube, a strange telescope made of deep glacial ice at the South Pole, has detected neutrinos from a distant, luminous galaxy. IceCube consists of a billion tons of diamond-clear Antarctic ice about two kilometers deep, monitored by more than 5,000 light detectors.

The neutrino is nearly massless and flies through space at almost the speed of light. Its nickname, “ghost particle,” points to the fact it rarely interacts with any form of matter and is therefore devilishly difficult to detect. IceCube can tell the direction of some neutrinos to better than a quarter of a degree. This past September IceCube detected a neutrino carrying about 20 times the energy of any particle that could possibly be created by the most powerful man-made accelerators. The instrument broadcast an automated alert.

Several days after IceCube’s alert, astronomer Yasuyuki Tanaka realized the neutrino was pointing within two tenths of a degree of a known blazar named TXS 0506+056. Blazars are giant elliptical galaxies with rapidly spinning, supermassive black holes at their cores that gobble up nearby stars and other material in a sort of continuous cosmic earthquake and send out laserlike jets of light and other particles from their north and south poles. The various models for neutrino emission from blazars, developed in blissful theoretical isolation, have now had their first encounter with real data, and theorist Eli Waxman believes the models “will require a complete modification.” (7/12)

Never Prebook Your Return Flight From a Rocket Launch (Source: WIRED)
Anyone who travels to rocket launches regularly knows three things: Bring snacks, wear sunscreen, and don't book your flight home for the night after the scheduled takeoff. Chances are, you'll either miss the launch or your plane. A company called Rocket Lab provides no exception. The commercial space organization hopes to send up rockets just the right size for smaller satellites. But of three total launch attempts, it has delayed or scrubbed all of them.

That chronological stuttering can feel like a contradiction. Rocket Lab cultivates a persona of quickness: Its engineers 3-D-print the engines, it aims to launch one rocket a month, it's agile, an upstart. But despite its marketed image, Rocket Lab has been cautious about actually lobbing rockets. On June 22, Rocket Lab started the countdown for its first real launch, in operational and not experimental mode. But they were the only things that would go up that day: The launch was called off at T-minus-23-minutes when a tracking dish, an antenna that communicates with and pinpoints the rocket, acted up.

On June 26, the Electron stood up to try again. But minutes after the launch window opened, the company said there was "an issue" with the motor controller, which manages commands sent to and from hardware and software on the rocket. Rocket Lab had already delayed this inaugural commercial launch by two months, for a similar motor-controller problem. (7/6)

Love Navigated by Beidou (Source: Space Daily)
They provide positioning and navigation to vehicles, ships, shared bicycles and drones, as well as tracking wild animals, and China's Beidou satellites have also guided a young couple to love. Ten years ago, Cui Bo, a designer for the Beidou power system, wrote a poem lauding those dedicated to space exploration to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). He met his colleague Wang Lu, who recited his poem at the anniversary ceremony.

Wang, a designer for the Beidou payloads, was just like the people in his poem: dedicating all her knowledge and efforts to the development of China's own satellites. They fell in love. They had, in fact, both graduated from Beihang University, which specializes in aeronautical and astronautical education and research, but they hadn't known each other then. (7/12)