December 26, 2020

NASA Awards Contract for Research and Education Support Services (Source: NASA)
NASA has awarded the NASA Research and Education Support Services-II (NRESS-II) contract to Agile Decision Sciences LLC of Huntsville, Alabama. This is an 8(a) small business set-aside, cost-plus fixed-fee indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum value of $212 million. The period of performance is five years, beginning Feb. 1. Individual task orders may extend for up to one year past the expiration of the ordering period.

The purpose of the NRESS-II contract is to facilitate the announcement of research opportunities and/or outreach programs, collect and manage proposals/applications, review proposals/applications, and provide support for selection of proposals/applications for awards. The NRESS-II contract will provide professional support services, information technology support, and other related services for the NRESS program that support the agency’s peer review life cycle and the research objectives of the agency directorates. (12/16)

NASA, UN Sign Memorandum of Understanding on Peaceful Uses of Space (Source: Space Daily)
NASA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) pledging cooperation in areas of science and technology to support the peaceful use of outer space. The MOU, signed Thursday, Dec. 17, brings together NASA's wealth of publicly available Earth observation data and dynamic exploration opportunities with UNOOSA's unique position as the only U.N. entity dedicated to outer space affairs. (12/18)

China's Long March 8 Rocket Makes Debut Flight (Source: Space Daily)
Five days after China concluded its historic 23-day Chang'e 5 lunar mission, Chinese space engineers made a new achievement with the debut flight of the country's newest carrier rocket. The Long March 8, the latest in China's Long March launch vehicle fleet, lifted off at 12:37 pm on Tuesday from a coastal launchpad at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern China's Hainan province. After about 15 minutes, the 50.3-meter rocket reached a sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 512 kilometers and then deployed the New Technology Demonstrator 7 experimental satellite and four small private satellites. (12/23)

Space Force Focuses on Digitization (Source: Breaking Defensde)
Maj. Gen. Kim Crider, acting chief technology innovation officer of Space Force, said space-based capabilities are key in Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) operations. She stated that the service is focusing on infusing "digital technologies, digital capability, digital processes, digital skill sets, and the application of digital skills across the service."

Crider, whose position within Space Force is new and unique among the services, actually is an old hand with regard to creation of JADC2, and the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) program that is developing technologies to underpin JADC2. She is the brains behind the creation of the Unified Data Library (UDL), in her former position as the Air Force’s first chief data officer. (12/23)

Why I'm Flying to Space to do Research Aboard Virgin Galactic (Source: The Hill)
Unlike researchers in virtually every other field of science, space researchers have long been limited to operating their experiments by remote control. Why? Because for many decades it was simply not possible or not practical to send themselves into space to do their work. This forced us to routinely have to incorporate expensive and often failure prone automation into our experiments to replace the human operator.

But now, that paradigm is shifting, thanks to the development of crew-carrying commercial suborbital space vehicles by companies such as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. These reusable, new-generation spacecraft will fly to space with increasing frequency, and at dramatically lower price points than older spacecraft, even those that do not carry people. For over a decade now, it's been recognized that these new vehicles can do much more than just take tourists to space - their original purpose. They also allow scientists and engineering researchers alike to routinely and relatively inexpensively travel into space to do their work. (12/24)

Japanese Spacecraft’s Gifts: Asteroid Chips Like Charcoal (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
They resemble small fragments of charcoal, but the soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing. The samples Japanese space officials described Thursday are as big as 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) and rock hard, not breaking when picked up or poured into another container. Smaller black, sandy granules the spacecraft collected and returned separately were described last week. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft got the two sets of samples last year from two locations on the asteroid Ryugu, more than 300 million kilometers (190 million miles) from Earth. (12/24)

Congress Approves Boost for Office of Space Commerce, Funding for Weather Satellites (Source: Parabolic Arc)
Congress approved a budget boost for the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) as it gears up to oversee civilian space traffic management (STM) and space situational awareness (SSA). Congress provided OSC with $10 million and approved its plan with the merge with the Office of Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 approved on Monday. The amount is $5.9 million above the total the two offices received fiscal year 2020.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had wanted to elevate OSC into a bureau that would report directly to him. However, Congress elected to keep the office within the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS). (12/24)

Firefly Aerospace's Debut Alpha Launch Set to Demonstrate Space Electric Thruster System (Source: Space Daily)
The SETS system was developed in order to increase the working duration of satellites and assist in safe deorbiting. Space Electric Thruster System (SETS), a Noosphere Ventures aerospace company, will undergo field testing in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as part of the debut launch of the Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket, which is scheduled for the beginning of 2021 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, U.S.A.

"The goal of the first SETS mission is to demonstrate and confirm the space worthiness and performance of the system under real conditions, and receive the necessary telemetry," commented SETS CEO Viktor Serbin. The 200W SPS-25 propulsion system is a proprietary technology developed by SETS, and is composed of an ST-25 Hall-effect thruster (HET), modular Xenon Feed System (XFS), fuel tank, and Power Processing Unit (PPU). The system is intended to transport spacecraft to their final orbit following payload separation. (12/24)

European Space Agency Hoping for UK Involvement in EU-Funded Space Programs (Source: Irish Examiner)
The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes the UK can strike a deal in Brussels for involvement in European Union (EU) funded ESA programs. While ESA is non-governmental and the UK’s membership is not in question, some of the agency’s programmes are financed by the EU. But for other projects, such as the Earth observation programme Copernicus, the situation is a bit more complicated. Copernicus is based on mixed contributions where some satellites are paid for by ESA, and others are directly funded by the EU but implemented by ESA. (12/25)

We’re Never Going to Mine the Asteroid Belt (Source: Bloomberg)
It’s wonderful that people are shooting for the stars — but those who declined to fund the expansive plans of the nascent space mining industry were right about the fundamentals. Space mining won’t get off the ground in any foreseeable future — and you only have to look at the history of civilization to see why. One factor rules out most space mining at the outset: gravity. On one hand, it guarantees that most of the solar system’s best mineral resources are to be found under our feet. Earth is the largest rocky planet orbiting the sun. As a result, the cornucopia of minerals the globe attracted as it coalesced is as rich as will be found this side of Alpha Centauri.

Gravity poses a more technical problem, too. Escaping Earth’s gravitational field makes transporting the volumes of material needed in a mining operation hugely expensive. On Falcon Heavy, the large rocket being developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, transporting a payload to the orbit of Mars comes to as little as $5,357 per kilogram — a drastic reduction in normal launch costs. Still, at those prices just lofting a single half-ton drilling rig to the asteroid belt would use up the annual exploration budget of a small mining company.

Power is another issue. The international space station, with 35,000 square feet of solar arrays, generates up to 120 kilowatts of electricity. That drill would need a similar-sized power plant — and most mining companies operate multiple rigs at a time. Power demands rise drastically once you move from exploration drilling to mining and processing. Bringing material back to Earth would raise the costs even more. Japan’s Hayabusa2 satellite spent six years and 16.4 billion yen ($157 million) recovering a single gram of material from the asteroid Ryugu and returning it to Earth earlier this month. (12/21)

NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins Harvests Radishes Grown in Space (Source: Space.com)
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins harvested fresh radishes grown in space, opening new doors for producing food in microgravity to sustain future longer-term missions to the moon and Mars. The radishes were grown in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) aboard the International Space Station. NASA shared a time-lapse video of the radishes as they grew inside the APH over the course of 27 days.

On Nov. 30, Rubins harvested 20 radish plants from the APH, wrapping each in foil and placing it in cold storage. The radish plants will be sent down to Earth early next year on SpaceX's 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission, according to a statement from NASA. (12/25)

Ashes of Star Trek’s Scotty smuggled on to International Space Station (Source: Sunday Times)
As one of Star Trek’s most beloved characters, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott spent a lifetime exploring the galaxy on the USS Enterprise, boldly going beyond the final frontier. Now it can be revealed that in death the actor who played the starship’s chief engineer has travelled nearly 1.7 billion miles through space, orbiting Earth more than 70,000 times, after his ashes were hidden secretly on the International Space Station. (12/25)

Roscosmos Sues its Subsidiary Over Satellite That Stopped Working in Orbit (Source: TASS)
Russian space agency Roscosmos filed a lawsuit against its subsidiary, the Progress Rocket and Space Center, for producing a satellite that stopped working in the orbit, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said. "Several years ago, our subsidiary used a rocket that it had manufactured to put into the orbit a satellite that it had also manufactured. Soon, the latter had ‘died’ in the orbit," he wrote. "In line with the current legislation, we are obliged to file a lawsuit in connection with the satellite’s failure."

According to the space official, Roscosmos is obliged to seek compensation for the faulty satellite and the launch services. In his words, the top management of the space corporation and its subsidiary has since been reshuffled. "Those guilty left long ago, but we are obliged to punish the enterprise and its current employees for the mistakes committed by people who have not been working at this plant for quite a while," Rogozin said. (12/26)

China’s Long March 8 Rocket Successful in Debut Launch (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
A new Chinese launch vehicle, the Long March 8, has successfully placed five payloads into orbit on its first mission, debuting an expendable booster intended to eventually be outfitted for recovery and reuse. The Long March 8 rocket took off from the Wenchang satellite launch center on Hainan Island, China’s newest spaceport, at 11:37 p.m. EST Dec. 20. The medium-lift launcher is the latest in a series of new additions to the Long March rocket family, following the introduction of the Long March 5, Long March 6, and Long March 7 vehicles in recent years. (12/26)

Not All Space Capabilities Should Reside in Space Force (Source: Space News)
Space control is an umbrella term for a broad set of warfighting capabilities that are not unique to a single service. It is broadly defined in Joint Publication 3-14 as “operations to ensure freedom of action for the United States and its allies in space and deny an adversary freedom of action in space.” Specifically, space control operations include both offensive and defensive capabilities that create effects in the space domain to support military activities in all domains.

While Space Force should be solely responsible for developing capabilities and systems that operate in space, it should not be the only service responsible for developing systems that create effects in space. As it develops into a mature warfighting domain, the other services will find it necessary to continue to build and integrate space control systems capable of protecting and enabling forces in their respective domains.

The space control missions that should be retained by the other services are most analogous to the air defense mission of the Army. While the Army does not operate aircraft for the purposes of protecting land forces from air attack, it has always retained various air defense systems designed to defend land forces from air threats. Absent its air arm, the Navy also conducts the air defense mission from surface vessels in a manner that another service could not replicate. (12/24)