June 13, 2022

FAA Environmental Review to Allow Texas Starship Orbital Launches After Changes (Source: Space News)
An FAA environmental review has concluded that SpaceX can conduct orbital launches of its Starship vehicle from its Texas test site, but only after completing dozens of mitigations to reduce impacts on the environment and the public. The FAA issued June 13, after nearly half a year of delays, what is formally known as a mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for SpaceX’s proposal to perform orbital launches of its Starship vehicle, atop its Super Heavy booster, from Boca Chica, Texas.

The mitigated FONSI means that SpaceX is cleared, from an environmental standpoint, to carry out those launches once it implements more than 75 measures to mitigate environmental effects. Among those mitigations is changes in closures in the road that leads to both the SpaceX site, called Starbase, as well as a public beach. SpaceX will provide more advanced notice of closures for testing and launches. It will be prohibited from closing access during 18 holidays and will be limited to five weekend closures per year.

Closures will be limited to 500 hours a year for normal operations and up to 300 more hours “to address anomalies.” The review is for up to five orbital launches per year, as well as five suborbital launches and ground tests. Other mitigations include changes in lighting at the facility, monitoring of wildlife in the area by a “qualified biologist” and use of shuttles to transport employees to and from Starbase to limit traffic. In addition, SpaceX modified its proposal to eliminate infrastructure such as a desalination plant and a power plant that the company says it no longer needs to support launch operations. (6/13)

SpaceX Faces NASA Hurdle for Starship Backup Launch Pad (Source: Reuters)
NASA wants Elon Musk's SpaceX to ensure its plan to launch its next-generation Starship rocket from Florida would not put at risk nearby launch infrastructure critical to the International Space Station, a senior space agency official told Reuters. The new hurdle further complicates and could potentially delay the launch plan for the rocket, which faces an already protracted regulatory review of its primary launch site in Texas.

Musk wants to show customers that Starship, which he sees as humanity's path to Mars, can successfully reach orbit, a long-delayed pivotal milestone in the rocket's development. SpaceX's proposals to address NASA's concerns, which include a plan to be able to launch U.S. astronauts from a different launchpad in Florida, could take months to get agency approval. SpaceX last year accelerated construction of an orbital Starship launchpad at its facilities on the Cape Canaveral Spaceport.

SpaceX has already invested heavily in building a Starship pad some hundreds of feet from pad 39A's launch tower. It has responded by pitching NASA on a plan to outfit its other Florida pad - Launch Complex 40, five miles away on Space Force property - with the means to launch U.S. astronauts, according to a person familiar with the plans. The company is also studying ways to "harden" 39A, or make the launchpad more resilient to both an explosive Starship accident and the immense forces emitted from a successful Starship liftoff, Lueders said. (6/13)

NASA to Ask Industry for Enabling Technologies for Future Near-Hypersonic Passenger Aircraft (Source: Military Aerospace)
NASA announced plans Wednesday to kick off a new project to develop enabling technologies for future near-hypersonic commercial passenger aircraft that travel at speeds of nearly five times the speed of sound. Officials at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland say they will issue a formal solicitation in August for the NASA High-Speed Endoatmospheric Commercial Vehicle Conceptual Design Study and Technology Roadmaps Development project. (6/10)

Venus Aerospace Unveils Mach 9 Hypersonic Spaceplane Stargazer (Source: Space Daily)
Venus Aerospace, a startup developing hypersonic aircraft, introduced the "Stargazer", the company's first conceptual vehicle design, at the Up.Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas. The Venus Vehicle Engineering Team has been working on this iteration since the company's founding in 2020. Backed by leading Venture Capitalists and with $1M in government funding, Venus has since raised over $33M to build a Mach 9 hypersonic drone and Mach 9 spaceplane, both capable of one-hour global travel. (6/8)

Women in Space Analogues Demonstrate More Sustainable Leadership (Source: Space Daily)
A new study based on Mars Desert Research Station commanders' reports reveals differences in female and male leadership behaviour. Although both genders are task-focused, women tend to be more positive. The genders also differ in their approach toward their team - while men focus on accomplishments, women emphasise mutual support. According to the author of the study, Inga Popovaite, a sociologist at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) in Lithuania, the findings suggest that women may be better suited for long-term space missions.

According to the researcher, as of 2021, only three women have served as commanders in the International Space Station during two decades of its operations. Although the space is becoming more diverse, little is known about gender differences in leadership in isolated, confined, and extreme environments. (6/10)

The Women at the Forefront of New Zealand's Space Industry (Source: New Zealand Herald)
She was 26 and working as an engineer in the petroleum industry in Western Australia in 2019. "Just looking up at the night sky at all the planets and the stars [wondering] what's going on out there in the universe, is pretty cool. "I had an epiphany one day that while they need engineers in the petroleum industry, they also need them in the space industry.

First, she looked up the local observatory and started volunteering there. "I had my eye on what was happening overseas - all these awesome impressive rocket launches going to space - but then I heard about Rocket Lab back home doing impressive things. "It opened up my eyes to see actually we can do this, Kiwis can work in the space sector. And I started basically charting a bit of a path to get there." She's now a project engineer for Rocket Lab - managing changes on the Electron launch vehicle from its initial concept until it is flying to space. (6/4)

Rocket Lab Selected by Ball Aerospace to Power NASA's GLIDE Spacecraft (Source: Space Daily)
Rocket Lab has been selected by Ball Aerospace to manufacture the Solar Array Panel (SAP) to power NASA's Global Lyman-Alpha Imager of Dynamic Exosphere (GLIDE) mission spacecraft planned to launch in 2025. GLIDE is a heliophysics mission intended to study variability in Earth's atmosphere. The SAP will utilize SolAero by Rocket Lab's high-efficiency, radiation-hardened, quadruple-junction Z4J solar cells, laid down on carbon composite facesheet panels manufactured at the company's facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The GLIDE spacecraft will launch with another Rocket Lab-powered spacecraft, also built by Ball Aerospace, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). SWFO-L1 is a heliophysics mission that will collect solar wind data and coronal imagery to meet NOAA's operational requirements to monitor and forecast solar storm activity. (6/10)

The Giant Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy Isn’t All That Gentle (Source: Grid)
The first snapshot of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way showed a placid “gentle giant,” but astronomers now say our galaxy instead hides more of a sleeping monster. An international team in May released the first images of the jumbo black hole, called Sagittarius A*, some 4.1 million times heavier than the sun, in simultaneous news conferences worldwide.

Astronomers lucked out to catch Sagittarius A* having a quiet decade, it turns out. And Earth is lucky to be close enough to see it — but not too close. The image showed a red-ringed darkness, a view of superheated particles zipping around the stark “event horizon” surrounding the black hole from which even light can’t escape. Peeks at the black hole provide a check on Albert Einstein’s predictions of how gravity bends both space and time at its most extreme, and offer insight into how its encircling ring behaves at temperatures far higher than anything seen anywhere else.

In reality, say astronomers, we are only here to see it because Earth is far enough away from the Milky Way’s center to have not been fried by one of the black hole’s violent past outbursts. (6/13)

Evolution Space to Launch Xenesis Constellation (Source: Space News)
Launch startup Evolution Space signed a memorandum of understanding to launch a small satellite constellation for optical communications startup Xenesis. Under the agreement, Evolution Space will conduct 5 suborbital and 25 orbital launches for Xenesis starting in 2025 using small launch vehicles Evolution Space is developing. The deal has a potential value of $120 million if the agreement becomes a contract.

Evolution, originally called Sugarhouse Aerospace, was founded in Salt Lake City in 2018. Since rebranding one year ago, the company has assembled a staff of 10 people, which it plans to double within a year. “We’re solid propulsion geeks. We build every piece of our rockets” from the propulsion to starter pellets, Heller said. (6/10)

AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 Gets Launch Window (Source: Space News)
SpaceX plans to launch the prototype for AST SpaceMobile’s cellphone-compatible broadband constellation in the week of Aug. 15, the Texas-based startup announced. The launch window announcement comes days after AST SpaceMobile CEO and chair Abel Avellan revealed the BlueWalker 3 satellite had successfully conducted end-to-end tests. “We also got the satellite fueled for our planned summer launch,” Avellan tweeted on Friday.

The 1,500-kilogram satellite has a 64-square-meter phased array antenna that is designed to unfold in space to connect standard smartphones and other devices at broadband speeds. The startup has an experimental license for in-orbit Blue Walker 3 tests that will help it configure ground equipment and software for significantly larger operational satellites called BlueBird, which AST SpaceMobile expects to start deploying next year. (6/13)

DoD Modifies Constellation Plan (Source: Space News)
The Pentagon's Space Development Agency (SDA) is changing plans for a series of experimental satellites. The SDA is looking to acquire as many as 10 satellites to host military payloads for experiments in low Earth orbit through a project called the NExT experimental testbed. It replaces an earlier plan, called T1DES, for 18 satellites with experimental payloads that would be integrated into the Transport Layer Tranche 1 broadband constellation. (6/13)

GAO: CASIS Not Making Full Use of Advisory Committee (Source: Space News)
The GAO found that the organization that runs the portion of the ISS designated a national lab is not making full use of an advisory committee. The report last week said that while CASIS established a User Advisory Committee in 2020 in response to an independent review, it was not seeking input from the committee on resource allocations or providing enough information on payloads going to the station. NASA said it would work with CASIS on those issues. (6/13)

Russia May Extend Cosmonaut Stay on ISS to Accommodate Belarusian (Source: TASS)
A Russian cosmonaut may have to spend an extra six months on the ISS to accommodate a flight by a Belarusian cosmonaut. One of the cosmonauts on the Soyuz MS-23 mission launching next spring would have to stay on the station to allow a Belarusian cosmonaut, yet to be selected, to go to the station in the fall for a short stay and return on Soyuz MS-23. A similar situation unfolded last year, when NASA's Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos' Pyotr Dubrov spent a year on the ISS to allow Roscosmos to send up a filmmaker and actress for a short stay. (6/13)