August 19, 2019

Musk Concerned We Have 'No Defense' Against Potential Killer Asteroid (Source: Fox News)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that a large asteroid will eventually hit Earth and his concern is that "we currently have no defense" for it. Responding to a tweet from podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk said Sunday he would not worry about the asteroid Apophis, which is expected to fly past Earth in 2029. However, a "big rock" will eventually hit Earth and as of right now, there's nothing we can do about it. (8/19)

SpaceX’s West Coast Drone Ship Begins Panama Canal Transit on Journey to Florida (or Texas) (Source: Teslarati)
After traveling more than 3500 miles (5600 km), SpaceX autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) began its eastbound transit of the Panama Canal on August 18th, placing the vessel roughly two-thirds of the way to its unknown destination. JRTI’s move came as a bit of a surprise and it’s still anyone’s bet if the SpaceX recovery vessel heads for Texas or Florida immediately after exiting the Panama Canal. Nevertheless, JRTI’s presence at either (or, more likely, both) possible destinations arguably centers around the imminent demands of a planned ramp-up of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation launch cadence, as well as an equally imminent need for recovery assets to support the first suborbital Starship test flights. (8/19)

Newt Gingrich Trying to Sell Trump on a Cheap Moon Plan (Source: Politico)
Newt Gingrich and an eclectic band of NASA skeptics are trying sell President Donald Trump on a reality show-style plan to jump-start the return of humans to the moon — at a fraction of the space agency’s estimated price tag. The proposal, whose other proponents range from a three-star Air Force general to the former publicist for pop stars Michael Jackson and Prince, envisions creating a $2 billion sweepstakes pitting billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other space pioneers to see who can establish and run the first lunar base.

That’s far less taxpayer money than NASA’s anticipated lunar plan, which relies on traditional space contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin and is projected to cost $50 billion or more. Backers of the novel approach have briefed administration officials serving on the White House National Space Council, several members of the group confirmed, though they declined to provide specifics of the internal conversations.

Trump has yet to weigh in on the idea, at least publicly. But the proposal, designed to offer a big incentive for private players who are already planning their own moon missions, comes while the president has expressed skepticism that NASA can achieve his goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2024 without bold departures from the status quo. Gingrich maintains that space entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos can rise to the challenge. And some of the companies told POLITICO they are intrigued by the idea of such a competition. (8/19)

Rocket Lab Electron Launches Four Smallsats (Source: Space News)
Rocket Lab launched four small satellites Aug. 19 on a mission that also brings the company one step closer to reusing the first stage of its Electron rockets. The Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s launch site on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 8:12 a.m. Eastern, three days after high winds scrubbed a previous launch attempt. The four satellites carried on the rocket’s Curie kick stage deployed successfully about 53 minutes after liftoff into a circular orbit 540 kilometers high at an inclination of 45 degrees.

Rocket Lab launched four small satellites Aug. 19 on a mission that also brings the company one step closer to reusing the first stage of its Electron rockets. The Electron rocket lifted off from the company’s launch site on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 8:12 a.m. Eastern, three days after high winds scrubbed a previous launch attempt. The four satellites carried on the rocket’s Curie kick stage deployed successfully about 53 minutes after liftoff into a circular orbit 540 kilometers high at an inclination of 45 degrees. (8/19)

NASA Robots Rove Through Caves for Underground DARPA Competition (Source: Space.com)
Robots from all over the world are about to go on a subterranean adventure, competing against each other in mining tunnels to determine which ones can best navigate and find objects underground and do so autonomously. DARPA is hosting the Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition on Aug. 15-22 as a way to develop technology for the military and first responders to map and search subterranean areas. A team led by NASA JPL will be one of 11 teams taking part in the competition with wheeled rovers, drones and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles. (8/18)

NASA Asks American Companies to Deliver Supplies for Artemis Moon Missions (Source: NASA KSC)
In another major step toward landing American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024, NASA is asking industry to respond to a Request for Proposals to deliver cargo, science experiments and supplies to the Gateway to support Artemis missions to the lunar surface. Commercial supply services will support the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program which includes sending the first woman and the next man to surface of the Moon within five years, and preparing for human exploration of Mars.

The agency is seeking capabilities from American companies to deliver a logistics spacecraft with pressurized and unpressurized cargo to the Gateway for six months of docked operations followed by automatic disposal. The logistics spacecraft must launch on a commercial rocket. “We chose to minimize spacecraft requirements on industry to allow for commercial innovation, but we are asking industry to propose their best solutions for delivering cargo and enabling our deep space supply chain,” said Mark Wiese, NASA’s Gateway logistics element manager at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (8/19)

Northrop to Assemble OmegA Rocket at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: GovCon Wire)
Northrop Grumman has selected a building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to serve as the assembly and testing site for its OmegA rocket. A NASA blog post published Friday says Northrop and the space agency signed a Reimbursable Space Act Agreement to pave the way for the use of the vehicle assembly building’s High Bay 2 to build the intermediate/heavy-class rocket under a launch services agreement with the U.S. Air Force.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held Friday at High Bay 2 led by Kent Rominger, vice presdent and OmegA capture lead at Northrop; Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center; and Col. Thomas Ste. Marie, vice commander of the Air Force’s 45th space wing. It was also attended by spaceport employees and lawmakers. Northrop has begun modification work on mobile launcher platform-3 to facilitate the assembly and launch of the rocket. (8/19)

Canceled SpaceX Projects: Falcon Heavy Propellant Crossfeed (Source: Elonx)
One of the announced and abandoned SpaceX projects was crossfeed funcionality for Falcon Heavy. It is a unique way of fuel transfer between the side boosters and the rocket’s center core. The idea is that each side booster would, in addition to its own engines, supply fuel and oxidizer to three of the nine center core engines. Therefore, only the remaining three center core engines would be supplied from the center core tanks. Using this method (which has never been used in practice), the center core would have consumed only about 15% of the propellant in its tanks by the time the side boosters separated. This results in a more efficient use of propellant which leads to higher payload capacity.

First, let’s look at the history of the concept of propellant transfer between rocket stages. In 1947, Mikhail Tichonravov came up with the idea of parallel stages. In his scheme, three parallel boosters were used, but the engines in the central stage were fueled from the side boosters until they were depleted and discarded. This approach is more efficient than traditional sequential staging because the engine in the second stage is never just dead weight. Later, the Soviets conducted engineering studies comparing rockets with sequential and parallel stages, with and without fuel transfer between stages. The result of this study was the R-7 Semyorka rocket. It became the basis of today’s Soyuz rocket, but it doesn’t actually use fuel transfer between stages.

Transferring propellant across stages during flight is a hard engineering problem which might not be worth solving when it results in a 10% increase of an already-high payload capacity. On top of that, Falcon Heavy’s payload capacity has increased by 17% since 2011, even without crossfeed technology. It’s possible that if SpaceX wasn’t focusing on Starship, they might have eventually developed crossfeed for Falcon Heavy. But because there is no need for this type of technology for Starship, which will eventually replace Falcon Heavy anyway, crossfeed seems to be a dead end and was therefore canceled or postponed indefinitely. (8/16)

China's Small Launcher Places Satellites in Orbit (Source: Xinhua)
A Chinese small launch vehicle had a successful first launch Saturday. The Jielong-1, or Smart Dragon-1, rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 12:11 a.m. Eastern and placed three small satellites into low Earth orbit. The solid-fueled rocket, developed by Chinarocket Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, is capable of placing 200 kilograms into a sun-synchronous orbit. Chinarocket is planning five more launches of the rocket through next year. (8/19)

OneWeb Shares Valuation Drops With New Funding Round (Source: The Telegraph)
OneWeb's largest investor has written down the value of its stake in the broadband satellite company. SoftBank took an impairment loss of £380 million ($460 million) on its stake in OneWeb earlier this year, according to a source, while others investors reportedly have lost up to half the value of their stakes in the company. A company spokesperson acknowledged that a $1.25 billion funding round earlier this year diluted the stakes of existing investors, but that "the enterprise value continues to increase." (8/19)

APT Gets Insurance Payout From Satellite Failure (Source: Space News)
APT Satellite has received an insurance payment for the partial failure of one of its satellites last year. The $21 million payment covers a loss of performance from the 14-year-old Apstar-6 satellite from a partial failure of its solar panels. The company moved Apstar-6 into an inclined orbit after the power issue, and accelerated commissioning of the Apstar-6C satellite to fill the gap. APT Satellite's next spacecraft is Apstar-6D, but its delivery has been delayed from later this year to next year for undisclosed reasons. (8/19)

India to Outsource PSLV Production to India (Source: The Hindu)
India's space agency ISRO is planning to outsource construction of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles. ISRO's commercial arm, NewSpace India Ltd., announced it is seeking "expressions of interest" from companies able to produce five PSLV rockets initially, with a long-term goal of producing 12 such rockets a year. The effort is intended to reduce ISRO's own manufacturing burden and meet growing demand for the rocket. (8/19)

UC Berkeley Plans Development on NASA Ames Center (Source: Daily Californian)
The University of California Berkeley is in talks with NASA's Ames Research Center about a new development project on the center's property. The project would redevelop 36.2 acres of property at Moffett Field for research, education and housing. The project would be separate from the agreement NASA has with Google, which leases the airfield and other property with plans to develop offices and housing. University officials said its proposed project would require third-party financing from industry partners. (8/19)

Here’s the Stupid Reason Elon Musk Wants to Nuke Mars (Source: The Next Web)
Elon Musk is on social media yapping about nuking Mars again. He’s not trolling; he’s not acting as a provocateur; he really wants to bombard the surface of our planetary neighbor with actual nuclear weapons. Here’s why: he thinks it’ll kick-start the planet and make it habitable by releasing trapped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He’s been pushing this theory since at least 2015 when he told Stephen Colbert that Mars was a “fixer-upper” and that we could fix it by nuking it. According to scientists, he’s mostly wrong.

NASA research indicates that dropping nuclear weapons on Mars will release some carbon dioxide, but not enough to alter conditions so they’re remotely close to what we have on Earth. A 2018 study indicates that there simply isn’t enough carbon dioxide on the planet to make that big a difference. Currently, Mars‘ has an atmospheric carbon dioxide content of about 0.6 percent of the Earth‘s. If we let Elon Musk fire off nukes at it, scientists believe that’ll raise it to a mere 7 percent of the Earth‘s content. (8/17)

Catch Rockets With a Helicopter? Yep, That's the Plan (Source: WIRED)
In the span of just four years, reusable rockets have gone from never-been-done to almost routine, at least at SpaceX. Blue Origin was the first to land a rocket booster, in 2015, after a suborbital flight to space. The following month, SpaceX landed the first-stage booster of a Falcon 9 rocket that had gone into orbit. Since then, SpaceX has landed boosters on drone ships in the ocean, and earlier this year it landed all three boosters from its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. If any other rocket maker hopes to compete, it has to figure out how to recover its own rockets too.

While midair recovery of rockets sounds complicated, its proponents argue that it’s actually less complex and less expensive than guiding a rocket back to a landing pad. In many ways, it’s the same problem faced by an outfielder trying to catch a fly ball in baseball. But in this case the ball weighs thousands of pounds and is traveling several times the speed of sound. Oh yeah, and the outfield is over 100 square miles of open ocean. Easy enough.

In Rocket Lab’s design, its Electron rocket jettisons its payload and then begins to fall back toward Earth. According to Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, this is the toughest moment. As the booster sheds kinetic energy due to air resistance, it heats up the atmosphere around it, creating a blistering pocket of air. At the same time, a high-pressure area at the leading end of the booster generates intense shockwaves. (8/15)

How NASA is Becoming More Business Friendly (Source: Phys.org)
A new case study demonstrates the steps being taken by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) to make it easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs to understand its needs and do business with it. The detailed case study, which provides insights on the design, results, and lessons learned from these efforts, is published in New Space: The Journal of Space Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Jennifer Gustetic, NASA Headquarters, and colleagues from NASA Ames , REI Systems, and the US Department of Energy coauthored the article entitled "Making NASA More Business Friendly: A Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Case Study."

They describe the three core initiatives of the effort to make NASA more open to collaboration with small businesses. These included developing an annual Request for Information (RFI), which offered an opportunity for businesses to provide input and submit ideas. A second initiative was the establishment of Industry Day, an annual small business-NASA event that provided a forum in which small business customers and NASA subject matter experts could convene, to increase the likelihood for commercialization of innovations and successful uptake of new technologies by NASA.

Lastly, NASA prioritized the modernization of its Electronic Handbook, an IT system used to manage the solicitation of proposals and awards process. The authors discuss the results of these efforts, draw conclusions, and suggest future steps that can be taken to further improve collaboration between NASA and the small business community. (8/19)

Turning a Corner on Mars (Source: Space Review)
For decades, scientists have sought to bring back samples from Mars for study in terrestrial labs. Van Kane and Pat Nealon describe how those efforts are now picking up momentum with a series of missions that could return Martian samples within a little more than a decade. Click here. (8/19)
 
Macron’s Space Force: Why Now? (Source: Space Review)
Last month, French government officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, outlined plans to take a more active military space role, including its own space force. Taylor Dinerman examines why France is taking the lead on such efforts among its European allies. Click here. (8/19)
 
An “Operationally Ready” Spaceport (Source: Space Review)
Virgin Galactic took another step closer to commercial operations last week not with another test flight of SpaceShipTwo but instead updates to Spaceport America in New Mexico. Jeff Foust reports on the significance of what might seem to be a trivial milestone. Click here. (8/19)
 
The Future of Commercial Space Transportation (Source: Space Review)
Today, the term “commercial space transportation” usually refers to rockets for placing payloads into orbit. Dallas Bienhoff describes how that will soon expand to in-space transportation services, either in orbit around the Earth or for missions to the Moon. Click here. (8/19)