April 11, 2022

Company That Aims to Race SpaceX to Mars Plays with Fire (Source: Ars Technica)
There's a small rocket company based in eastern California named Pythom Space. And like a lot of space startups, it has big dreams. In this case, co-founders Tina and Tom Sjögren have the goal of flying to Mars in 2024—and if not then, by 2026. This seems naïve, of course. Even SpaceX, which from the beginning was well-funded and able to hire excellent early employees, is still years away from sending humans to Mars after its founding in 2002.

So Pythom Space is pressing ahead with its ambitious goal of building a rocket, a spacecraft, and a Mars lander. The company's first step is to build a small rocket, Eiger, with the capability to lift 150 kg to low Earth orbit. According to the company's website, 90 percent of a rocket's cost in the traditional space industry is related to personnel. Accordingly, the website says, "Pythom runs small teams and tight facilities, building in the spirit of early explorers such as Lewis & Clark and Roald Amundsen."

One area in which Pythom appears to be saving personnel costs is its safety and mission assurance department. On March 19, the company conducted a hold-down test of the first stage of its Eiger rocket with a single engine. (The complete first stage will have nine small engines.) The video shows a number of instances in which Pythom employees appear to be handling the Eiger rocket and its hypergolic propellants (furfuryl alcohol and nitric acid) with less than industry-standard care. (4/11)

Houston Astros Launch New 'Space City' Uniforms with Nods to NASA (Source: CollectSpace)
The Houston Astros are celebrating their home city's connection to space exploration with a new uniform inspired in part by NASA's astronaut wear and materials. The Major League Baseball team debuted their new Nike City Connect uniforms ahead of the players wearing them for the first time when they face the Los Angeles Angels on April 20.

The new uniform's jersey features "Space City" stenciled boldly across the chest in a font inspired by NASA's logotype affectionally known as the "worm." Houston adopted "Space City" as its official nickname in 1967 after NASA established its Manned Spacecraft Center (today, Johnson Space Center) in southeast Houston. (4/10)

South Korea Needs a National Space Policy (Source: JoongAng Daily)
“Does Korea have a space policy?” a U.S. official asked me when I visited the State Department a few years ago. He knew of the government research projects on space exploration in Korea, but was unable to identify a specific space-related public policy. The official had been handling space-related affairs for decades, but his counterpart in Seoul was replaced every one or two years.

Space development can demonstrate full national capabilities as it is connected and coordinated with science and technology and industrial, military, political and diplomatic capabilities. Over 70 governments have state agencies devoted to space development. Korea does not have one. It merely has a space technology division at the Ministry of Science and ICT. This is why a U.S. State Department official can ask if Korea has a space policy.
 
The government must ready a space vision timed with the 100th anniversary of liberation in 2045. The new president must establish a government office on space programs to guide the country’s next century. Korea is No. 10 in terms of GDP. Russia, a space powerhouse, is 11th. (4/10)

South Korea to Launch Reconnaissance Satellite on Falcon 9 (Source: Yonhap)
South Korea will launch a military reconnaissance satellite on a Falcon 9 next year. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Agency for Defense Development said Sunday they will launch an 800-kilogram reconnaissance satellite next year, the first of five the country's military plans to place in orbit by 2025. Four of the satellites will have synthetic aperture radar payloads. The fifth will carry an electro-optical payload.  (4/11)

Musk Participates in Chinese Space Event (Source: South China Morning Post)
A Chinese space outreach event had a cameo appearance by Elon Musk. The event Saturday at the Chinese Embassy in Washington included students asking questions of Chinese astronauts on their space station. The event featured a brief recorded message by Musk, who said he looked forward "to humanity working together to form a self-sustaining civilization on Mars and other planets." Two former NASA astronauts, Barbara Morgan and Don Thomas, also participated in the event. (4/11)

Congressional Leaders Seek Halt to NTSB Involvement in Space Accidents (Source: Space News)
The leaders of the House Science Committee have asked the White House to withdraw controversial proposed spaceflight regulations by NTSB. In a letter to President Biden last week, the chair and ranking member of the committee said the proposed regulations by NTSB that would allow it to investigate any commercial launch or reentry accident were “plainly unlawful” since federal law delegates that responsibility to the FAA through the Secretary of Transportation. Much of the industry criticized the regulations as disruptive and duplicative during a public comment period earlier this year. (4/11)

ULA Buys 116 RL10C-X Upper Stage Engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne (Source: Aerojet Rocketdyne)
ULA has awarded the largest RL10 contract ever to Aerojet Rocketdyne to deliver 116 RL10C-X engines for its Vulcan Centaur rocket. The new engines will support ULA as it works to fulfill its commitments under a contract they recently received from Amazon to support the launch of its Kuiper satellite constellation.

The RL10C-X uses a 3D-printed main injector and main combustion chamber, as well as a 94-inch monolithic lightweight composite (carbon-carbon) nozzle. The specific impulse, or Isp, of the RL10C-X is 461 seconds, which puts it near the very top of the RL10 engine family in terms of performance. Similar to gas mileage in a car, specific impulse measures the amount of thrust generated by a rocket engine per unit of propellant consumed per second. (4/11)

Space Force is Releasing Decades of Tracking Data on a Thousand Bright Meteor Fireballs (Source: Universe Today)
When a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere at a very high speed it heats up. This heating up produces a streak of light and is termed a meteor. When a meteor is bright enough, about the brightness of Venus or brighter, it becomes a fireball. Sometimes these fireballs explode in the atmosphere, becoming bolides. These bolides are bright enough to be seen even during the day.

Studying bolides as they pass through the atmosphere can help model larger asteroids, something of interest to the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) which is run by NASA. These asteroids can be deadly if they are large enough, and learning how to predict their behavior is essential to protecting our planet from a devastating impact with long-term implications for the survival of many species on Earth.

Information on these bolides is collected by U.S. government sensors run by the U.S Space Force and is shared with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). NASA has been tasked with detecting and categorizing near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that may be detrimental to our planet in an effort to find ways to divert or otherwise remove the threat they pose. The information they have for nearly one thousand bolide events goes back to 1988. (4/10)

Japan's Warpspace Developing Inter-Satellite Laser Comm Tech (Source: Space News)
Warpspace, a Japanese space startup developing an inter-satellite laser communications system, is establishing a U.S. presence. The company incorporated a U.S. subsidiary to better partner with American companies and seek government contracts. The company is developing an optical intersatellite data-relay service in medium Earth orbit called WarpHub InterSat, with the first operational satellites slated for launch in 2024. (4/11)

ESA to Launch Radar Imaging Satellite on Vega C Rocket (Source: Space News)
ESA will launch the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite on a Vega C next year. Josef Aschbacher, ESA's director general, said six Ukrainian-built engines for the Vega C's upper stage had been delivered, supporting planned launches through 2023. ESA continues to look into options for replacing the engines should that supply be interrupted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  (4/11)

Is the Origin of Dark Matter Gravity Itself? (Source: Space.com)
A new model of the very early universe proposes that the graviton, the quantum mechanical force carrier of gravity, flooded the cosmos with dark matter before normal matter even had a chance to get started. The proposal could be a way to connect two of the biggest outstanding puzzles in modern cosmology: the nature of dark matter and the history of cosmic inflation.

When inflation ended, it triggered the creation of all known particles. So, presumably, that same event also manufactured dark matter. Cosmologists aren't sure what dark matter is made of, but an abundance of evidence suggests that it's some new, unknown kind of particle. Whatever this particle is, it accounts for over 80% of all the matter in the universe.

Now, a pair of physicists proposed a new mechanism to generate lots of dark matter in the early universe, even if the inflaton didn't like to produce dark matter. And that new mechanism relies purely on gravity. This mechanism, which the physicists outlined in a paper in the preprint database arXiv, assumes that the inflaton and the dark matter don't talk to each other, so the dark matter particle isn't produced in the normal way at the end of inflation. (4/10)

NASA Modifies SLS Rehearsal Tests, Including VAB-Based Valve Fix (Source: Space News)
NASA is delaying and modifying the countdown rehearsal for the Space Launch System because of a faulty valve. NASA said Saturday it would delay the next wet dress rehearsal for the SLS from Monday to Thursday after discovering a malfunctioning helium check valve in the rocket’s upper stage. The agency says it will modify procedures for the countdown test for “minimal propellant operations” on that upper stage. NASA will replace the valve after the vehicle rolls back to the Vehicle Assembly Building at the end of the wet dress rehearsal. (4/9)

Space Tourism: the Arguments in Favor (Source: Space Daily)
To its many detractors, space tourism amounts to nothing more than joy-rides for the global super rich that will worsen the planet's climate crisis. But the nascent sector also has supporters, who, while not rejecting the criticism outright, argue the industry can bring humanity benefits too. Click here. (4/9)

Ten New Gravitational Waves Found in LIGO-Virgo's O3a Data (Source: Space Daily)
In the last seven years, scientists at the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) have detected 90 gravitational waves signals. Gravitational waves are perturbations in the fabric of spacetime that race outwards from cataclysmic events like the merger of binary black holes (BBH). In observations from the first half of the most recent experimental run, which continued for six months in 2019, the collaboration reported signals from 44 BBH events.

But outliers were hiding in the data. Expanding the search, an international group of astrophysicists re-examined the data and found 10 additional black hole mergers, all outside the detection threshold of the LVC's original analysis. The new mergers hint at exotic astrophysical scenarios that, for now, are only possible to study using gravitational wave astronomy.

Notably, the observations included phenomena from both high- and low-mass black holes, filling in predicted gaps in the black hole mass spectrum where few sources have been detected. Most nuclear physics models suggest that stars can't collapse to black holes with masses between about 50 and 150 times the mass of the sun. (4/8)

Differences Between the Moon's Near and Far Sides Linked to Colossal Ancient Impact (Source: Space Daily)
The face that the Moon shows to Earth looks far different from the one it hides on its far side. The nearside is dominated by the lunar mare - the vast, dark-colored remnants of ancient lava flows. The crater-pocked far side, on the other hand, is virtually devoid of large-scale mare features. Why the two sides are so different is one of the Moon's most enduring mysteries.

Now, researchers have a new explanation for the two-faced Moon - one that relates to a giant impact billions of years ago near the Moon's south pole. A new study shows that the impact that formed the Moon's giant South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin would have created a massive plume of heat that propagated through the lunar interior. That plume would have carried certain materials - a suite of rare-Earth and heat-producing elements - to the Moon's nearside. That concentration of elements would have contributed to the volcanism that created the nearside volcanic plains. (4/8)

New Message Prepared for Sending to Extraterrestrials (Source: Space Daily)
An updated, binary-coded message has been developed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy. The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System's time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth's surface.

The message concludes with digitized images of the human form, along with an invitation for any receiving intelligences to respond. Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed. (4/8)

Astronaut: Without ISS Russia Has a Mission to Nowhere (Source: CNN)
As Russia threatens to withdraw from the International Space Station, former ISS Commander Leroy Chiao tells Bianca Nobilo why he believes they won't follow through on that threat. "Russia doesn't really have the infrastructure and the funding to go anywhere else." (4/8)

Air Force Research Lab to Conduct More Than 100 Experiments with New Navigation Satellite (Source: FedScoop)
The Pentagon’s experimental satellite for positioning, navigation and timing will be used to conduct more than 100 experiments after it is launched next year, the commander of the Air Force Research Lab said. The project has been designated a Vanguard program, making it a top science and technology priority for AFRL aimed at delivering game-changing capabilities for the U.S. military.

The Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3) initiative comes at a time when GPS satellites, which the U.S. military, private sector and the average citizen depend on, are at risk of being jammed. The spacecraft, which is expected to remain in orbit for about a year, is slated to be incorporated into the Space Force’s USSF 106 launch mission, which is currently scheduled for late 2023. (4/7)

SPACECOM Agrees To Increased Cooperation With UK, Sweden (Source: Aviation Week)
U.S. Space Command signed two new agreements with partner nations within two days this week as the Pentagon plans to further increase its space information sharing. Gen. James Dickinson signed an agreement for enhanced space cooperation with UK Royal Air Force Vice-Marshal Paul Godfrey, the commander of the UK’s SpaceCom. The agreement is a nonbinding framework for more military cooperation in space, including information sharing, collaboration with requirements and identifying potential collaborative studies, projects or activities, an announcement said.

On April 7, Rear Adm. Michael Bernacci, SPACECOM’s director of strategy, plans and policy, signed a Space Situational Awareness (SSA) sharing agreement with Maj. Gen. Carl-Johan Edstrom, commander of the Swedish Air Force. This is part of a broader effort for spaceflight planning and enhancing the safety and security of space operations, an announcement said. (4/8)

Air Force Sends $4.6B Unfunded Priorities List to Congress; Space Force Requests Additional $600M (Source: Air Force Magazine)
The Air Force’s unfunded priorities list—things it wants but couldn’t squeeze into its fiscal 2023 budget request—would leave it to Congress to boost the F-35 fighter buy, as part of a list of things it would acquire if it had another $4.6 billion to spend. The Space Force offered Congress its own $600 million unfunded priorities list. More than half that request ($327 million) would go to classified programs, while the rest would be split between more resilient missile warning and missile tracking ($200 million) and weapons systems sustainment ($112 million). (4/8)

U.S. Quietly Paying Millions to Send Starlink Terminals to Ukraine, Contrary to SpaceX Claims (Source: Washington Post)
After Russia launched its invasion, Ukrainian officials pleaded for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to dispatch their Starlink terminals to the region to boost Internet access. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” Musk replied to broad online fanfare. Since then, the company has cast the actions in part as a charitable gesture. “I don’t think the U.S. has given us any money to give terminals to the Ukraine,” said SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell.

But according to documents obtained by The Technology 202, the U.S. federal government is in fact paying millions of dollars for a significant portion of the equipment and for the transportation costs to get it to Ukraine. On Tuesday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it has purchased more than 1,330 terminals from SpaceX to send to Ukraine, while the company donated nearly 3,670 terminals and the Internet service itself. (4/8)

Spaceport America Open House Postponed; Space Fest Activities Moved to Nearby Mall (Source: Las Cruces Sun-News)
Spaceport America is postponing an open house scheduled for Sunday, April 10, due to predicted inclement weather. Spaceport America is near Upham in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin close to White Sands Missile Range, outside the city of Truth or Consequences. High winds are predicted over the weekend.

The open house was to include a “fly in” for a limited number of small aircraft, other static aircraft displays, and a view into the Gateway to Space facility used by Virgin Galactic and other companies. Numerous vendors and community organizations were planning to participate in the open house, which was due to be the final event of the Las Cruces Space Festival. (4/8)

Stardust Technologies Launches Stardust Alliance With Over 20 Partners (Source: SpaceQ)
At the 37th Space Symposium, Stardust Technologies which had already made news for its partnership on the Rocket Innovation Challenge, today announced the details of its new not-for-profit Stardust Alliance. Stardust Technologies said that the “Alliance, (is) an umbrella non-profit composed by an ensemble of like-minded stakeholders, will spearhead the company’s community engagement initiatives, and in particular its youth outreach, as well as B2B cooperation to promote space and STEM research and implement a collaborative agenda for space equity and accessibility.”

The first project the Stardust Alliance will undertake is what it calls the Turtle Island Space Initiatives. The initiatives are aimed at “making space research accessible to and inclusive of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, in particular the youth.” The first activity will be rocket payload challenge. “The best payload ideas will be rewarded with a coveted prize: one of three available payload slots aboard the largest student-built rocket in the world, currently in the final stages of production at Space Concordia in Montreal.” (4/8)

India Outsources Production of PSLV Rockets (Source: Times of India)
Manufacture of India's Polar Space Launch Vehicles (PSLVs) has shifted from in-house production by India's space agency, ISRO, to a corporate consortium, HAL-L&T. The consortium will develop five PSLV rockets. The move is expected to pave the way for commercialization of this and other Indian government-designed rockets (SSLV and GSLV). (4/9)