May 15, 2023

Lunar Flashlight Burns Out (Source: Space News)
NASA brought a lunar cubesat mission to an end after problems with its propulsion system. JPL said Friday it was ending the Lunar Flashlight mission after engineers were unable to clear obstructions in propellant lines on the spacecraft that kept it from generating enough thrust to either enter orbit around the moon or go into a distant Earth orbit that would regularly fly by the moon. Scientists planned to use a laser reflectometer instrument on Lunar Flashlight to look for water ice in craters at the south pole of the moon. NASA emphasized it successfully tested other technologies on the cubesat, including a new flight computer and upgraded radio. (5/15)

Astroscale and Momentus Offer Hubble Solutions (Source: Space News)
Two startups have offered NASA one solution for raising the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. Astroscale and Momentus said they responded to a recent NASA request for information (RFI) on options for reboosting Hubble with an approach that uses a transfer vehicle developed by Momentus with docking technology from Astroscale. The vehicle would dock to Hubble and raise its orbit by 50 kilometers, then undock. It could then be used to remove debris in orbits similar to Hubble. NASA said it received eight responses to the RFI that it is evaluating. NASA separately signed a Space Act Agreement with SpaceX to jointly study how a Crew Dragon mission could reboost Hubble; that study is complete, NASA said, and is also being reviewed by the agency. (5/15)

Stratolaunch Conducts Drop Test of Hypersonic Prototype (Source: GeekWire)
Stratolaunch conducted a drop test of a hypersonic vehicle prototype Saturday. The TA-0 vehicle was dropped from the company's giant Roc aircraft off the California coast during a four-hour flight. The vehicle was an unpowered prototype of its Talon-A series of hypersonic vehicles, and the test successfully demonstrated it could be safely released from the aircraft. A powered flight of the company's TA-1 is planned for late summer. (5/15)

Spain Could Be Next to Sign Artemis Accords (Source: White House)
Spain could soon sign the Artemis Accords. In a readout released by the White House of a Friday meeting between President Joe Biden and Spanish President Pedro Sanchez, the countries said they would increase cooperation on science and technology issues, "including through the Artemis Accords on responsible use of outer space." The statement also mentioned an unspecified "new partnership" between NASA and its Spanish counterpart. (5/15)

NASA Balloon Mission Cut Short After Leak (Source: Otago Daily Times)
A NASA high-altitude balloon carrying an astrophysics instrument was forced to end its flight after a leak. The "super pressure" balloon launched from a New Zealand airport late Friday, but controllers decided to terminate the flight a day and a half later after detecting a leak that caused the helium balloon to lose altitude. The balloon and its payload, the Extreme Universe Space Observatory 2 instrument, fell in the Pacific Ocean. A similar NASA balloon, which lifted off from New Zealand a month ago, remains in the stratosphere on its fourth circuit of the Earth. (5/15)

Welsh Space FIrm Devises 'Shuttlecock' Heatshield (Source: BBC)
A Welsh space start-up has developed a novel heatshield to enable it to re-use satellites brought back to Earth. It's a large flexible sheet that can be folded tightly for launch but then spring out like a shuttlecock to protect a spacecraft when it returns. Cardiff-based Space Forge envisions flying a fleet of "mini factories" in orbit to manufacture high-value, high-fidelity materials and components. These would be used in fields such as electronics and pharmaceuticals. (5/15)

After 15 Year Journey, NASA Suddenly Redirecting Deep Space Mission to New Target (Source: Futurism)
For almost 15 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been blasting through the cosmos on a journey to study the farthest reaches of our solar system. But now that it's gotten there, NASA has made a surprise announcement: that the mission's primary target is changing from the mysterious objects lurking in our system's Kuiper asteroid belt to studying the environment at the distant reaches of the Sun instead — a necksnapping change that has upset the scientists in charge of the mission.

"NASA spent almost a billion dollars to get this spacecraft to the Kuiper Belt," Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, told Gizmodo. "You spend a billion dollars to get a spacecraft all the way across the solar system and then divert it from its primary objective." It all raises an interesting question: why change the primary objective? And why now? The brewing controversy — which, according to Stern, could result in a takeover by a different team next year — highlights the difficulty of finding scientific consensus over a billion-dollar mission that has been going on for almost 15 years. (5/11)

NASA Webb Telescope Discovers Planet with Truly Mysterious History (Source: Mashable)
NASA turned the powerful James Webb Space Telescope to a world 48 light-years away, a type of planet called a "mini-Neptune" that's bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. "The planet is totally blanketed by some sort of haze or cloud layer," said Eliza Kempton, an exoplanet astronomer at the University of Maryland. "The atmosphere just remained totally hidden from us until this observation." What astronomers found raises many questions about the planet's past. Might it have once been a water world blanketed in oceans?

Today, the atmosphere is likely "steamy," meaning there could be lots of vaporized water in the hot atmosphere. Yet where did all this water come from? GJ 1214 b whips closely around its star every 1.6 days, and a star's front doorstep is a torrid place that's not outwardly friendly to sustaining a watery world. But, mused Kempton, it may have started off as a world teeming with water and other icy materials. In fact, this curious world may have formed deeper in its solar system, where it's colder. Then, the planet could have migrated closer to its star, a red dwarf that's smaller, less bright, but more long-lived than the sun. (5/13)

Will Environmentalists Derail the Artemis’ Return to the Moon? (Source: The Hill)
While SpaceX assesses the data derived from the Starship test flight and seeks to repair the launch pad, it now has to worry about the environmental lawsuit. The process would likely take just short of five years, delaying and perhaps even derailing the Artemis III moon landing. NASA is depending on a working Starship, outfitted as a lunar lander, to take astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as late 2025.

It’s not as if SpaceX was allowed to flagrantly endanger the environment by launching the Starship/Super Heavy stack. The FAA required the company to take 75 separate actions, including hiring a biologist to monitor the effects that its operations have on surrounding wildlife. In order to avoid triggering a full-blown environmental impact study, SpaceX “ditched proposals for an on-site fuel manufacturing facility, a desalination plant and a power plant.”

The idea that the future of human space exploration could be determined by the whim of the courts, egged on by environmental activists, is outrageous on its face. An opinion piece in the Washington Examiner suggests that had NEPA been passed in 1960, the Johnson Spaceflight Center and the Kennedy Space Center would never have been built and Americans would never have walked on the moon. (5/14) 

How Will SpaceX Mitigate a Starship Lunar "Rock Tornado"? (Source: SPACErePORT)
SpaceX is under contract to NASA to ultimately land and launch a Starship spacecraft on the lunar surface. During the recent Starship/Super Heavy launch from Texas, its engines blasted a "rock tornado"of concrete, shooting debris thousands of feet around the launch pad, potentially damaging equipment in the vehicle's engine bay. This raises questions about the Starship's lunar landing/launch site, which probably will not feature a hardened pad. Although the first lunar surface landing/launch will use fewer engines, they will almost certainly blast regolith far and wide with the lower lunar gravity, potentially into the engine bay. (5/15)

Lueders Joins SpaceX (Source: CNBC)
Kathy Lueders, the most recent top human spaceflight official at NASA, has joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX after retiring from the agency a couple of weeks ago. Lueders’ role will be general manager, and she will work out of the company’s “Starbase” facility in Texas, reporting directly to SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. It’s a key hire for SpaceX as the company aims to make its massive Starship rocket safe to fly people in the coming years. Lueders, a respected expert in the sector, is already familiar with the company’s human spaceflight work to date. (5/15)

New Deal Inked to Space Test Meta-Optical Surfaces (Source: ARC)
A new engineering study has been commissioned by the European Space Agency (under PECS, the Program for European Cooperating States), to prove the reliability of meta-optical elements for space use in a collaboration between the ESA, Bulgarian start-up company LaboraXpert and TMOS, the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems. In the first study of its kind, it will determine whether meta-optical components can withstand the pressures of space launch and prolonged exposure to the space environment. (5/14)