August 1, 2020

Getting to Mars is the Easy Part, Landing on Mars is Harder (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
When NASA’s Perseverance rover arrives at Mars, mission managers will be watching, helpless to do anything. The $2.4 billion spacecraft will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph and then come to a complete stop seven minutes later. That the 1-ton rover will end up on Mars on the afternoon of Feb. 18 is nearly certain. The spacecraft navigators will have put the robotic explorer on a collision course with the planet. The only question is whether Perseverance will be on the ground in one piece or smashed to bits.

Spacecraft from Europe and the Soviet Union have made it all the way to the red planet, only to end up as expensive scorch marks on its dusty surface. But NASA has a good track record with Mars. It is the only space agency so far to pull off a successful mission on the surface of the red planet. Perseverance is largely the same design as the Curiosity rover, which set down in 2012 and will have the same convoluted but now tried-and-true “sky crane” landing choreography.

One major addition to Perseverance is what NASA calls “terrain-relative navigation.” A camera on the spacecraft will take pictures of the landscape and match them with its stored maps. It would then steer to what looks like the safest landing spot it can. “I don’t need the whole place to be flat and boring,” Chen said. “I just need parts of it that I can reach to be flat and boring.” Without this system, there would be more than a 1-in-5 chance that Perseverance would end up somewhere unfortunate — damaged by a boulder, tipped over on a steep slope or surrounded by sand traps. That would be an unacceptably high risk for such a high-profile, expensive mission. (6/30)

Artemis SLS Hardware Arriving at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
One more piece and NASA will have all the parts needed for the biggest rocket to ever blast off from Earth. Kennedy Space Center got its hands on the second to last piece of hardware for Space Launch System rocket to be used on the Artemis I mission to moon. The launch vehicle stage adapter made its way to Kennedy aboard NASA’s Pegasus barge this week and was transported on Thursday into the Vehicle Assembly Building. The adapter fits on top of the massive core stage of SLS, the one piece that has yet to arrive to KSC, to connect it to the upper stage, and also acts as protection for the upper stage’s engine, which will be what propels the Orion spacecraft to the moon. (7/30)

Rocket Lab Pinpoints Cause of July 4 Launch Failure (Source: Business Insider)
As Rocket Lab's six-story Electron vehicle thundered off a New Zealand launch pad on July 4, a pernicious electrical problem that would ultimately doom the vehicle began to set in. The private firm's rocket worked normally for the first leg of its flight, successfully using up and shedding its heavy, nine-engine lower-stage booster. This freed the vehicle's single-engine upper-stage rocket — which contained a payload of seven small satellites on top — to continue on its way to low-Earth orbit.

Instead, about two minutes into the upper-stage engine's burn, it shut down. Rocket Lab lost its video feed of the launch, and the upper stage later disintegrated as it tumbled through the atmosphere, taking the would-be satellites with it. In a call with reporters on Friday, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said a nearly month-long investigation, conducted in partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration, concluded that a single electrical connection of a battery pack in the upper stage failed. This disconnection severed a vital source of power to the rocket's components, triggering the engine to stop blasting, the rocket body to slow, and the mission to fail. (7/31)

Boeing Donates $500,000 to U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s 'Save Space Camp' Campaign (Source: WAAY)
Boeing has donated $500,000 to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s “Save Space Camp” campaign. The center said on July 28 that it must raise a minimum of $1.5 million to keep the museum open past October and to reopen Space Camp in April 2021. Since the campaign's launch, more than 6,000 donations have been made. The center says Boeing's donation brings the amount of funds raised to more than $1.1 million, as of Friday afternoon. (7/31)

Amazon Will Invest Over $10 Billion in its Satellite Internet Network After Receiving FCC Authorization (Source: CNBC)
The Federal Communications Commission declared on Thursday that Amazon may build its ambitious satellite internet system, which would compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network. Amazon’s project, known as Kuiper, would see the company launch 3,236 satellites into low Earth orbit. Amazon says it will deploy the satellites in five phases, with broadband service beginning once it has 578 satellites in orbit.

“We conclude that grant of Kuiper’s application would advance the public interest by authorizing a system designed to increase the availability of high-speed broadband service to consumers, government, and businesses,” the FCC secretary Marlene Dortch said in its authorization order. After the FCC announced the authorization, Amazon said that it “will invest more than $10 billion” into Kuiper. (7/31)

Whistling Past The Graveyard: Why Space Comedy Is No Laughing Matter (Source: Forbes)
Netflix’s slapstick Space Force is getting praise from all corners during this election year. Even General Jay Raymond, America’s first Chief of Space Operations, was quick with a joke when comparing himself to his fictional counterpart. But none of us can afford to pretend for a second that the existential threats the real Space Force is facing are a joke.

The most recent deployment of a co-orbital space weapon by Russia demonstrates how at-risk and vulnerable our nation’s most precious and expensive space systems are, and how easily they can be rendered useless. It also carries a scary implication: that our adversaries could easily (and soon) have hundreds more of these weapons on orbit, ready to strike at our satellites with a single keystroke.

It isn’t clear yet why our government, and the clandestine groups who develop and operate these systems, would openly acknowledge this particular event. But if past experience is prologue, there are very likely numerous more of these events occurring that cannot be publicly acknowledged for operational reasons - not to mention the many more that our government doesn't even know about but should. (7/31)

The Space Economy Has Grown to Over $420 Billion and is ‘Weathering’ the Current Crisis (Source: CNBC)
The global space economy continued to grow last year and reached $432.8 billion, according to a report by the Space Foundation, although the industry’s past decade of growth is now threatened by the coronavirus pandemic. Total output by the world’s governments and corporations in the realm of rockets, satellites and more has climbed steadily, with the space economy expanding more than 70% since 2010. But like any industry, the recent expansion in space, which has seen record private investment, has been put at risk due to this year’s crisis.

A big driver for last year’s growth was from the commercial side. By Space Foundation’s definition, commercial is essentially any revenue or sales that doesn’t stem from a government organization such as the military or NASA. For the U.S., Zelibor noted that non-government spending in space rose 7.7% last year. “That’s really continuing to be the dominant part of the space economy,” Zelibor said. What brought down the U.S. space economy’s growth last year was noted declines on the government side, according to the Space Foundation. While NASA’s spending increased 3.7%, the Department of Defense’s fell 9% and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s dropped 19%.

The U.S. now has about 183,000 people employed by the space industry, the report said. While the U.S. workforce grew just 2% in 2019, that is a notable bounce back from recent declines over the past decade. “If you look at the last four years, from 2016 till now, it’s actually rebounded,” Zelibor said.  “We’re launching astronauts from U.S. soil again, we’re putting satellites up there, we’re going to Mars. I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be involved in the space community.” (7/30)