October 15, 2023

Creating a Space Talent Pipeline in New Mexico (Source: Space News)
Public and private organizations in New Mexico are undertaking a concerted campaign to ensure citizens know of opportunities to work in the burgeoning space economy. Starting in elementary school and continuing through early careers, companies and government agencies are developing curriculum, mentoring and career services to encourage students and young professionals to opt for space-related jobs. They call the concept Pathways to the Stars.

Casey DeRaad, CEO of NewSpace Nexus, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit with a mission to “unite and ignite” the space industry nationally, tells companies, “You can’t just think about the workforce when you’re doing job placement.” She urges executives to fund robotics clubs and rocket programs, provide internships and serve as mentors. What’s happening in New Mexico is unusual because of its breadth. Schools and companies are working with local and state agencies and nonprofits like NewSpace Nexus to establish Pathways to the Stars. (10/14)

America Officially Has its First Space Ranger (Source: Task & Purpose)
Capt. Daniel Reynolds graduated from the U.S. military’s Ranger School this week, becoming the first Space Force Guardian to earn a Ranger tab. He is effectively the military’s first “Space Ranger.” Reynolds was awarded his Ranger tab on Friday, Oct. 13. At the graduation ceremony, Capt. Reynolds was presented the Ranger tab by his father, Army Col. John Reynolds, himself a Ranger. (10/14)

How to Avoid "Zombie" Satellites Causing Atmospheric Destruction? Send Them to This Ocean Graveyard (Source: Salon)
Larger objects like the ISS are guided back down to Earth through a controlled re-entry procedure. Several hundred spacecraft remnants have fallen into this area of the ocean since the space junk issue arrived on the space agency’s radar in the 1980s, Seitzer said. Through this process, anything roughly two tons or less will burn up in the atmosphere and not make it to land — although this depends on the object's compostiion — but objects larger than that will fragment on their way down, Frueh said. Those pieces will then rain from the sky in the most remote corner of the Pacific Ocean, 3,000 miles from New Zealand and 2,000 miles north of Antarctica.

Also known as the “pole of inaccessibility,” or Point Nemo, this region is about four kilometers deep and home to sea cucumbers, coral branches and sea urchins, said Autun Purser, Ph.D., an oceanographer at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Germany. However, due to having very low flow conditions, marine life is relatively quiet in the area. Most of the seafloor in the region is made up of soft mud, so metal scraps or hard bits from any decommissioned satellites rust and fall apart over time if they’re not slowly buried, Purser said. (10/14)

India's Space Economy Has Potential to Reach $44 Billion by 2033, says IN-SPACe Chief (Source: Republic World)
India's space economy has the potential to reach $44 billion by 2033 with about eight percent of the global share. Presently the country's share in the global space economy is two percent. IN-SPACe Chairman Pawan Goenka says ISRO is opening its doors wider than ever to private sector participation. (10/10)

America’s ‘Gold Standard’ GPS Risks Falling Behind Rival Systems (Source: Wall Street Journal)
China, Russia and the European Union have developed satellite networks offering global-positioning services as the U.S. system ages. Nearly 50 years since its founding, the U.S. Global Positioning System is in danger of losing its cachet as the world’s gold-standard location service. The U.S. military, which runs GPS, is upgrading the system with more-modern satellites that can give nonmilitary devices more-precise coordinates in more indoor and hard-to-reach spaces. But the next-generation GPS service for civilians isn’t expected to go live for several years.

While academics and national-security officials caution that the delayed upgrades don’t mean that GPS is failing, they say that other countries’ more modern systems could give them influence over global commerce at Washington’s expense. China, for instance, uses its advanced-satellite service as a selling point for business and research partnerships in presentations to officials from African and Asian countries. In an extreme case, a government could feed inaccurate data to rival countries, making smartphones and vehicles that depend on their signals unusable during a conflict. (10/15)

China Launches One More Earth-Observing Satellite (Source: Xinhua)
China on Sunday launched a Long March-2D rocket placing a new Earth-observing satellite into space. Coded Yunhai-1 04, the satellite was lifted at 8: 54 a.m. (Beijing Time) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China and soon entered the preset orbit. It will provide services for the detection of the atmospheric, marine and space environments, disaster prevention and mitigation, and scientific experiments. (10/15)

Can Bezos’s Project Kuiper Catch Up to Musk’s Starlink? (Source: Guardian)
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and world’s third richest man (Musk is the richest), is launching his own bid to influence the Earth’s orbit. His first satellites went up into orbit just over a week ago. Now there is a risk that near-Earth space could come to be dominated by two ultra-wealthy men, at least one of whom is prone to impulsive acts.

“Anytime you have that much power concentrated in one decision-maker, it’s something to think about,” said Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on space sustainability. Bezos plans to launch 3,236 satellites by 2029, but Amazon enters the space satellite race with a yawning gap between it and SpaceX. “Amazon’s [plan to have] 3,000 satellites is looking adorable now, when you see how many SpaceX satellites there are,” Samson said. (10/15)

NASA Considering Budget Cuts for Hubble and Chandra Space Telescopes (Source: Space News)
NASA is considering cutting the budget of two of its biggest space telescopes as it faces broader spending reductions for its astrophysics programs. In an Oct. 13 presentation to the National Academies’ Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said he was studying unspecified cuts in the operating budgets of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope to preserve funding for other priorities in the division.

The potential cuts, he said, are driven by the expectation that his division will not receive the full request of nearly $1.56 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2024 because of legislation passed in June that caps non-defense discretionary spending for 2024 at 2023 levels, with only a 1% increase for 2025. (10/14)

There's No Easy Answer to Being a Space Janitor (Source: Engadget)
Currently, the US Department of Defense’s Space Surveillance Network tracks more than 25,000 objects larger than 4 inches wide, most of which are concentrated in low Earth orbit, and there are an estimated millions of smaller objects still that are trickier to pinpoint.  Proposals for removing this debris fall into two broad (and imperfect) categories: pushing them further from Earth into graveyard orbits where they pose less risk, or pulling them towards Earth where they'll deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

One such system is being developed and tested by Astroscale. The company, headquartered in Japan, demonstrated a magnetic capture-and-release tactic in 2021 with its ELSA-d mission, which simulated the strategy using an extra satellite it brought with it as mock debris. In a real-world scenario, its magnet would lock on to debris floating through space and drag it down to deorbit. Astroscale is selling its own docking plates that satellite operators can affix to their equipment ahead of launches, so it can easily be removed after a mission’s end. Click here. (10/13)

Space Force to Create 'System Deltas' to Sync Space Tech with Operator Needs (Source: Space News)
The U.S. Space Force is taking steps to bridge the gap between technology developers and operators, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman announced Oct. 13. The Space Force will establish new “system delta” units in an effort to increase collaboration between units that use equipment and those that develop and acquire it, Saltzman said in a memo to the entire force. The plan reflects Saltzman’s view that guardians operating satellites and ground systems should inform requirements for new systems and provide feedback during procurement. (10/13)

Riverside Research to Develop Software to Analyze Space Objects in Congested Orbits (Source: Space News)
The U.S. Space Force awarded a $1.45 million contract to Riverside Research to develop software that automates the analysis of data on space objects. The one-year contract announced last week is for the development of a software tool to help Space Force units characterize and detect objects in the more congested low Earth orbits, said Lt. Matthew O’Rourk, program manager for the DEEP-SDA project, short for Data Exploitation and Enhanced Processing for Space Domain Awareness. (10/13)

New Stars Forming Uncomfortably Close to the Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole (Source: Universe Today)
Astronomers examining a star cluster near Sgr A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, found that the cluster has some unusually young members for its location. That’s difficult to explain since the region so close to the powerful black hole is infused with powerful radiation and dominated by the black hole’s extremely powerful gravitational force. According to our understanding of stellar formation, young stars shouldn’t be there. (10/12)

The Accidental Monopoly (Source: Space News)
The lack of launch options has become frustrating to some companies. “We have a duopoly, right? It’s just two of those guys,” said John Serafini, chief executive of HawkEye 360. The company has launched its satellites both on Electrons and on SpaceX Transporter rideshare missions. He had no complaints about the performance of either company but lamented the lack of options from others.

SpaceX’s dominance in the launch market became an unofficial theme of World Satellite Business Week, starting with the very first panel. “Having such a dominant launch service provider is probably not healthy in general for the commercial prospects of the industry,” said Vikram Nidamaluri, managing director of the telecom, media, and entertainment group at investment banking firm Lazard. “No one wants a monopoly choking off one point of the value chain.”

He suggested that increased government investment might be needed to bolster competition in the launch market. “I think critical and continued increases in government budgets focused on space and communications are going to be essential to pushing forward technologies,” he said, “and maybe even enabling a second or third launch company.” Click here. (10/13)

The Baikonur Launch Complex, From Which Gagarin Flew, Will Turn Into a Museum (Source: TASS)
“The Roscosmos State Corporation proposed to the Kazakh side to withdraw the Gagarin Launch from the lease and create a museum complex on its basis with the placement as exhibits of real samples (models) of space technology located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome and which have no prospects for further use for their intended purpose,” - noted the press service.

As the Roscosmos clarified, this is necessary to preserve the historical heritage and to expand the attractiveness of the Baikonur tourist area. The issue was considered at the ninth meeting of the Russian-Kazakh intergovernmental commission on the Baikonur complex, which was held on September 6-8 in Astana. (10/13)