July 15, 2019

Aerospace Corporation Finds New Purpose in Space (Source: Space News)
Founded in 1960 to help the U.S. Air Force develop the first missiles, rockets and satellites, the El Segundo, California-based nonprofit currently finds itself increasingly called upon to help the Defense Department navigate a rapidly evolving commercial space industry. Kevin Bell, vice president of space program operations within The Aerospace Corporation’s Space Systems Group, describes the 59-year-old organization as an “innovation shop that helps invent and maintain essentially the corporate knowledge for the U.S. government.”

Commercial advances in space, and the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of the space industry, are reshaping how the federally funded research and development center accomplishes that mission. “[Our] big role is changing from an inventor or innovator to an aggregator who is taking advantage of technology progress across all kinds of fields,” Bell said. He cited artificial intelligence as one area with growing application for space where the commercial sector is investing at a rate far beyond what Aerospace Corp. could match. (7/14)

NASA Awards $73.7 Million to Made In Space for Orbital Demonstration (Source: Space News)
NASA awarded a $73.7 million contract to Made In Space to additively manufacture ten-meter beams onboard Archinaut One, a small satellite scheduled to launch in 2022. “As manufacturing progresses, each beam will unfurl two solar arrays that generate as much as five times more power than traditional solar panels on spacecraft of similar size,” NASA said. Archinaut One is scheduled to launch from New Zealand as early as 2022 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.

“In-space robotic manufacturing and assembly are unquestionable game-changers and fundamental capabilities for future space exploration,” Jim Reuter, NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate associate administrator, said in a statement. “By taking the lead in the development of this transformative technology, the United States will maintain its leadership in space exploration as we push forward with astronauts to the Moon and then on to Mars.”

The contract announced July 12 extends Archinaut work Made In Space began in 2016. Since then, Made In Space has continued to enhance its Archinaut technology and prove the 3D printed hardware it produces is durable enough to operate in space. Made In Space’s Archinaut partners include Northrop Grumman, NASA Ames and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (7/12)

Facebook-Driven Area 51 Storming May Be Countered With Force, Says US Air Force (Source: Deadline)
Fun and games on Facebook may have serious consequences for the foolish. That was the message delivered by the US Air Force, who have responded to a Facebook’s group’s efforts to have 450,000 people storm a top secret military base. Conspiracy theorists have always believed that Area 51 in Nevada holds information about extra-terrestrial activities on our planet, possibly including actual alien remains and aircraft. That belief spawned a Facebook group suggesting that a wave of humanity could overwhelm the defenses at the base and discover the truth.

More than 400,000 people have joined a Facebook event page calling for storming Area 51, with many more indicating interest. The proposed event is scheduled for Sept. 20. (7/14)

Using Satellite Information to Help Rebuild After a Disaster (Source: Space Daily)
ESA and the Asian Development Bank have joined forces to help the Indonesian government use satellite information to guide the redevelopment following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the provincial capital of Palu and surroundings last year. On 28 September 2018, the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was struck by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake. The epicentre was on the island's northwest coast - 77 km north of Palu, which lies at the head of a long narrow bay.

The quake triggered a tsunami that swept huge surges of water - as high as 10 m - along the bay and swamped the city. The combination of the earthquake, tsunami, soil liquefaction and landslides claimed well over 2000 lives, destroyed homes, buildings, infrastructure and farmland in several districts. (7/13)

House Committee Members Skeptical of NASA LEO Commercialization Plans (Source: Space News)
Members of a House committee took a skeptical view last week of NASA's low Earth orbit commercialization plans. At a hearing of the House space subcommittee, members raised questions about whether plans to allow commercial activities on the station would save NASA any money, and whether that was the best use of the station's resources as NASA also uses the station to conduct research needed for missions to the moon and Mars. NASA defended the strategy, noting that commercial activities take up on a small fraction of ISS resources and that it's part of an effort to eventually transition to commercial stations. (7/15)

India Scrubs Moon Launch (Source: The Hindu)
India scrubbed the launch of its Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission less than an hour before the scheduled liftoff. The Indian space agency ISRO said a "technical snag" prompted the launch postponement, but provided few other details. No new launch date has been announced, and according to one report it may take 10 days to study the problem with the GSLV Mark 3 rocket before ISRO can announce a new launch date. Chandrayaan-2 is India's second lunar mission, and includes both an orbiter and a lander, the latter carrying a rover. (7/15)

Bridenstine: Personnel Changes Linked to Need for Speed (Source: Space News)
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview Friday that the urgency in getting humans back to the moon by 2024 led him to make changes in the leadership of its explorations. Bridenstine said NASA doesn't have "a lot of time to waste" and thus he decided last week to reassign to top officials, including associate administrator for human exploration and operations Bill Gerstenmaier, in order to keep the program on track. Bridenstine, in the same interview, said he believed that commercial partners could reduce the estimated $20–30 billion cost of the Artemis program through 2024, but also raised doubts about whether commercial crew vehicles will be ready to fly NASA astronauts by the end of the year. (7/15)

House Passes Defense Bill, Including Launch Competition Provisions (Source: Space News)
The House passed its version of a defense authorization bill Friday, retaining a number of space launch reforms. The National Defense Authorization Act passed on a party-line vote, with no Republicans voting in favor of the bill. The final version of the bill included provisions sought by Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, that are intended to open up national security launches to greater commercial competition. The Senate's version of the bill does not include those provisions, which the White House also opposes. (7/15)

Amazon’s Rising Stock Gives Jeff Bezos ‘Financial Muscle’ in Outer Space Equal to Whole Countries (Source: CNBC)
Jeff Bezos is better known for building the e-commerce empire of Amazon than his entrepreneurial work at rocket-builder Blue Origin — but Morgan Stanley says that may change. “We believe investors may want to pay far more attention to another emerging force for the advancement of efforts in Space that has both the will and, increasingly, the financial muscle to put to work. That force is Jeff Bezos,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in a note Thursday. “Investors may want to take notice.”

Bezos pours about $1 billion of his Amazon stock into his space venture each year, with Blue Origin expected to begin competing directly with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2020. Morgan Stanley estimated Bezos’ Amazon shares are worth about $160 billion — in other words, “equal to around 16 years worth of NASA expenditures on Space exploration,” the firm said. Morgan Stanley advised its clients to take note of that comparison as Bezos’ wealth continues to grow.

“As the value of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon stake approaches $200 billion, his ability to influence private, commercial, and even government efforts in space grows, potentially accelerating capabilities and capital formation,” Jonas said. Amazon shares briefly passed $1 trillion in market cap for the first time on Sept. 4, joining Apple as the only publicly traded U.S. company above the benchmark. Analysts cite the company’s ever-diversifying portfolio as a value driver. Bezos has said publicly that Blue Origin is “the most important work” he’s doing, Morgan Stanley noted. (7/13)

Headed to Mars? Pack Some Aerogel -- You Know, For Terraforming (Source: WIRED)
As most humans busily make Earth less and less habitable, a few humans propose making Mars more Earth-like, via a process called terraforming. Carl Sagan pitched the idea back in 1971, and even then he knew the main problem would be that gossamer atmosphere. It lets in too much ultraviolet radiation and lets out too much infrared—that’s heat—to turn Mars’ ice into hospitable-to-life water. Either the planet already lost all its insulating CO2, or it’s bottled up underground somehow. On Earth, the greenhouse effect is about to go runaway; on Mars, it ran away.
And yet: “sunlight penetrating a few centimeters through the surface into the snowpack can cause great increases in temperature, leading to sublimation,” says Robin Wordsworth, a planetary scientist at Harvard. The frozen CO2 turns to gas and geysers out of the ground. It’s called a solid-state greenhouse effect—light penetrates the surface, passes through the translucent ice, and then hits darker regolith, which warms up. And so Wordsworth, who studies the climate, evolution, and potential habitability of other worlds, wondered: Could you do that artificially? Could an insulating material create a solid-state greenhouse effect warm enough to make Mars habitable?

“If you wanted to take an atmosphere and compress it down to a few centimeters, what would you need?” Wordsworth asks. “The key is how transparent the material is, how light propagates through it, and how thermally insulating it is.” Wordsworth proposes a candidate: silica aerogel. You remember this stuff—it’s the “solid smoke” that the Stardust probe used to collect dirt in space, a mostly-air nanocrystalline matrix of silicon oxide that has an extremely low thermal conductivity. Which is to say, it’s an insulator good enough for spacecraft. Click here. (7/15)

Airbus to Build Earth Imaging Satellites for France (Source: Space News)
Airbus won a contract last week to build for Earth imaging satellites for the French space agency CNES. The four satellites, referred to as the CO3D system, are expected to launch in 2022 aboard a Vega C rocket, with each satellite capable of imaging the Earth at a resolution of 50 centimeters. The system, jointly funded by Airbus and CNES, is viewed Airbus as a steppingstone to a larger constellation of 20 or more satellites. (7/15)

Moon-Landing Technology May Help New Transportation Take Flight (Source: Wall Street Journal)
The Apollo program spawned a host of well-known spinoffs in the decade following its last moon mission in 1972. Examples range from materials that insulate against the cold of space to the Dustbuster cordless vacuum cleaner. But even as some of the commercial offshoots remain in use today, more cutting-edge technologies derived from the Apollo program are now being harvested for the next generation of transport and travel. Click here. (7/14)