September 6, 2020

Colorado Rivals Could Be Top Space Command HQ Picks (Source: The Gazette)
The biggest competitor Colorado Springs faces in its bid to keep U.S. Space Command in town might be just an hour's drive north if traffic is light. Buckley Air Force Base, the last bastion of a vast military complex that kept the Denver-area economy humming through the Cold War, has many of the same characteristics the Pentagon finds at its bases in the Pikes Peak region, along with the hip creative culture that made the Army house its Futures Command in Austin, Texas. (9/5)

NASA Megarocket Blasts Past Cost Estimates, Forces Congress Notification (Source: Space.com)
NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and associated ground infrastructure have soared past original cost estimates to a degree that requires the agency to notify Congress about the ballooning budget. The recently appointed leader of NASA's human spaceflight efforts, Kathy Lueders, announced the new cost estimates in a blog post published on Aug. 27.

"The new development baseline cost for SLS is $9.1 billion, and the commitment for the initial ground-systems capability to support the [rocket's first] mission is now $2.4 billion," Lueders wrote, without elaborating on what the previous baseline costs were. Congress had previously approved a $7 billion commitment for the SLS' development, according to 2019 fiscal numbers. (9/5)

Are Aliens Hiding in Plain Sight? (Source: The Guardian)
We only know of one kind of life: the terrestrial sort. All living things on Earth are made from cells adapted to a watery environment, using molecular machinery built from proteins and encoded as genes in DNA. Few scientists think that extraterrestrial life would rely on the same chemicals. We need to escape the straitjacket of Earth-based thinking about life. They propose introducing a broader category called “lyfe”, of which life as we know it is just one variation.

They suggest four criteria for lyfe: 1) It draws on energy sources in its environment that keep it from becoming uniform and unchanging. 2) It grows exponentially (for example by replication). 3) It can regulate itself to stay stable in a changing environment. 4) It learns and remembers information about that environment. Darwinian evolution is an example of such learning over very long timescales: genes preserve useful adaptations to particular circumstances.

The researchers say there are “sublyfe” systems that only meet some of these criteria, and also perhaps “superlyfe” that meets additional ones: lyfe forms that have capabilities beyond ours and that might look on us as we do on complex but non-living processes such as crystal growth. “Our hope is that this definition frees our imaginations enough to not miss lyfe that might be hiding in plain sight.” They suggest that some lyving organisms might use energy sources untapped here on Earth, such as magnetic fields or kinetic energy, the energy of motion. (9/5)

Spy Satellites Destined for Scottish Spaceports (Source: The Ferret)
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) wants to launch surveillance and intelligence-gathering satellites from rocket launch pads planned for the A’ Mhoine peninsula on the north coast of Sutherland, and on Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands. Multinational arms companies, including Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Raytheon and Chemring, are also maneuvering to take advantage of the spaceports, and to cash in on the expected boom in the UK’s £15 billion space business. (9/5)

NASA Certifies Orion for Flight to the Moon on Artemis-1 Next Year (Source: AmericaSpace)
NASA’s deep-space Orion Crew Capsule has cleared a key milestone and rigorous review where program managers analyzed every spacecraft system, all test data, inspection reports, and analyses that support verification, to ensure every aspect of Orion has the right technical maturity. With both the System Acceptance Review and Design Certification Review finished, Orion is now certified for its flight to the moon in late 2021 on the agency’s first SLS rocket on the Artemis-1 mission. (9/5)

China's First Reusable Spacecraft Lands After 2-Day Flight (Source: ABC News)
China’s first reusable spacecraft landed Sunday after two days in orbit, a possible step toward lower-cost space flight, the government announced. The secretive, military-run space program has released few details of the craft, which was launched Friday aboard a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s desert northwest. The craft landed as planned at Jiuquan. State media have yet to publish any photos. (9/6)

Branson’s Small Satellite Bid To Match Musk And Bezos In The Billionaire Space Race (Source: Forbes)
Virgin Orbit’s small satellite launch service had come a long way since it was spun out of Branson’s larger spaceflight operation Virgin Galactic in March 2017, with the business plan of launching small satellites into space for companies around the globe. Still, failure is expected for first-timers like Virgin, and the pandemic applied even more pressure. By the time the 747 took off, with a Virgin Orbit rocket beneath its wing, Branson had already sunk an estimated $700 million into the venture.

Sir Richard watched on, alongside the 500 Orbit staff in a hastily arranged live stream, falling on a national holiday and featuring snaps of staff members’ spouses, children, dogs and cats. Having taken off as planned and successfully dropped the rocket from the wing of the 747, the engines ignited and for “five seconds or so” it rose. But it didn’t last. To Branson’s disappointment, the rocket sputtered and stopped in what would later be determined to be the failure of a high-pressure fuel line.

The May launch proved that “the basic concept and all of the core technologies” that make Virgin’s rocket “different from every other rocket” all worked, says Pomerantz, who joined Virgin Orbit in 2011, when it was just an idea on the “back of a napkin.” “For the first time we had a real photograph and real video of actual ignition and a rocket flying,” he says, “The hardest problem on the exam we had aced. And that was a good feeling.” (9/6)

UK's Big Advantage That Will Spark European Dominance in Post-Brexit Space Tourism (Source: Express)
The UK's rural areas are being scouted for a big space tourism project by Virgin Galactic, a British spaceflight company within the Virgin Group. Space tourism seeks to give tourists the ability to become astronauts and experience space travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes. Conservative Chair of the Parliamentary Space Committee David Morris spoke about why this was good news for the UK.

He said: "The reason that Virgin want to have a space port down in the southwest of England is because space tourism would work so well from that point there. "If you put a spaceship up into the upper atmosphere of the Earth into lower space, from there you will see literally everything from the north down to the equator. "You will see quite a large area of the Earth from up there so space tourism is very beneficial for the UK. "We're placed to do that and the weather is more conducive further south we go to doing this kind of a project."

Mr. Morris continued: "The UK is not just about putting up satellites. We've got space tourism coming along, we've also got other applications that we can use, and we're very good at doing that. "So I do think it's a very positive outlook for the UK industry. "The UK Space Agency has been working very hard over the years to ensure that. "I do think it's now time that we had a dedicated Space Minister that brings all of this together and brings partners in touch with one another under a banner of where we want to go with it." (9/6)

A Bizarre Form of Water May Exist All Over the Universe (Source: WIRED)
Powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions. This “superionic ice” is a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot.

A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe. Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds. (9/6)