February 13, 2021

Historic Rocket Launch Makes Maine a Viable Spaceport Location (Source: Bangor Daily News)
bluShift’s Aerospace’s successful launch on Jan. 31 not only put the Loring Commerce Center on the map as a viable spot for vertical and horizontal rocket launches, but likely helped with efforts to establish a statewide spaceport complex. bluShift’s successful launch of a rocket powered by bio-derived fuel raised awareness for the spaceport, Terry Shehata, executive director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium — of which bluShift is an affiliate — said.

SpacePort Maine, an initiative led by the nonprofit Maine Space Grant Consortium, would utilize locations across the state, including the Loring Commerce Center, which was once the site of the Loring Air Force base, and Brunswick Landing, which was once the site for Brunswick Naval Air Station, and bring entrepreneurs, researchers and students together in an effort to build space programs within the state. (2/13)

Report: NASA’s Only Realistic Path for Humans on Mars is Nuclear Propulsion (Source: Ars Technica)
Conducted at the request of NASA, a broad-based committee of experts assessed the viability of two means of propulsion—nuclear thermal and nuclear electric—for a human mission launching to Mars in 2039.

The committee was not asked to recommend a particular technology, each of which rely on nuclear reactions but work differently. Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) involves a rocket engine in which a nuclear reactor replaces the combustion chamber and burns liquid hydrogen as a fuel. Nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) converts heat from a fission reactor to electrical power, like a power plant on Earth, and then uses this energy to produce thrust by accelerating an ionized propellant, such as xenon. (2/12)

DARPA Space Manufacturing Project Sparks Controversy (Source: Breaking Defense)
DARPA’s new project to research and develop novel materials and processes for manufacturing in space — in particular on the Moon — is stirring a legal and political dust storm about what DoD can and cannot do in cislunar space under the Outer Space Treaty. “From an international perspective, DARPA doing anything on the Moon looks bad. It raises suspicions about the intentions of the U.S. space program there, and rightfully so,” Jessica West, senior researcher at Canada’s Project Ploughshares and managing editor of the widely-respected Space Security Index project, said in an email yesterday.

“I really, really hope there’s some miscommunication here and the DoD is not actually planning on building illegal military bases on the Moon,” tweeted Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden. The program, Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D), and first reported by colleague Sandra Irwin, “seeks to pioneer technologies for adaptive, off-earth manufacturing to produce large space and lunar structures,” according to DARPA’s website. (2/12)

After 300 Million Miles, NASA's Perseverance Rover Set for Mars Touchdown (Source: Florida Today)
Now it’s time for NASA’s next robotic explorer – Perseverance – to follow in the dusty tracks of its predecessors. After a 293 million-mile trek across the expanse since its July 2020 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the upgraded rover is slated to land on the red planet at 3:55 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. Its target: Jezero Crater, a harsh surface feature that was likely once a deep lake fed by rivers of running water.

“Perseverance is our robotic astrobiologist, and it will be the first rover NASA has sent to Mars with the explicit goal of searching for signs of ancient life,” Zurbuchen said. But before it can begin roving its targeted landing site at a neck-breaking 0.1 mph, Perseverance has to pull off a series of risky landing maneuvers all by itself. (2/12)

Despite its Small Size, Space Force Plans to Have its Voice Heard in the Pentagon (Source: Space News)
The Space Force is by far the smallest branch of the U.S. military and will have to “punch above its weight” to get its share of military funding and other resources, said Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, deputy chief of space operations. The Space Force was carved out of the former Air Force Space Command so it has people with lots of experience operating satellites and launching rockets. But as an independent military service, it now has to become proficient in the bureaucratic processes that all the services have to navigate in order to get funding and support for their initiatives. (2/12)

Could Space Greenhouses Solve Earth's Food Crisis? (Source: Space.com)
Could food grown in space greenhouses save us here on Earth? Commercial space services company Nanoracks plans to use orbiting greenhouses to create super-resilient crops that would thrive in the harshest environments on Earth and help to ward off the looming food crisis resulting from climate change, the company announced in 2020.

The company, based in Houston, Texas, signed a contract with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) to open a space farming research center in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that would research resilient crops, fly them in space and subsequently test the ability of the crops to grow in arid conditions on our planet. (2/11)

SpaceX Starlink Satellite Internet Aces Online Game Test (Source: Teslarati)
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system is still only in its beta, but it is already proving to be quite impressive. The system has performed well despite its dish being covered in snow, and more recently, it has also proven its mettle in one of the internet’s most important uses—online games. One of YouTube’s premier tech channels, Linus Tech Tips, was able to acquire a Starlink kit from SpaceX. True to the channel’s spirit, the group opted to check out how well Starlink works when running increasingly heavy tasks. These included loading pages with media, streaming 4K on YouTube, streaming multiple 4K videos at once, and playing games online. (2/12)