March 11, 2024

A New Shape for Small Spacecraft (Source: Aerospace America)
In 2025, the payload fairing of a small launch vehicle is scheduled to be jettisoned in low-Earth orbit to reveal a curious-looking cylinder. Inside that aluminum can, four flat, circular satellites — each a meter in diameter and only 2.5 centimeters thick — will be stacked like pancakes, separated by contact points between them. If all goes as planned, a geared mechanism will elevate each satellite to the top of the can and hurl it out into orbit.

This won’t be some orbital publicity stunt by the International House of Pancakes but the first demonstration of the DiskSat concept — small, flat, meter-wide satellites built to a format that could soon join cubesats among the leaders in the small satellite field. The carbon composite and aluminum chassis structures of the four that are planned for the test launch next year arrived in January at the Aerospace Corp. (3/9)

Stratolaunch Launches Talon Hypersonics Test Vehicle (Source: Space News)
Stratolaunch successfully launched its first Talon vehicle intended for hypersonics research. The Talon TA-1 vehicle launched from the company's Roc aircraft Saturday off the coast of central California, after the plane took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port. Stratolaunch said TA-1 reached its intended "high supersonic" speeds approaching Mach 5 on the flight, then glided to a splashdown in the Pacific. Stratolaunch was founded more than a decade ago to develop an air-launch system, but pivoted to hypersonics after the death of its founder, Paul Allen. (3/11)

SpaceX Launches Bi-Coastal Starlink Missions, Hours Apart (Source: Space.com)
SpaceX launched a pair of Starlink missions five hours apart Sunday night. One Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 7:05 p.m. Eastern and placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. A second Falcon 9 lifted off at 12:09 a.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and placed another set of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. (3/11)

ISS Battery Pallet Reenters (Source: Ars Technica)
A pallet of batteries from the ISS reentered over the Gulf of Mexico Friday. The used batteries, weighing more than 2,600 kilograms, reentered while passing between Mexico and Cuba. The pallet, the largest debris from the ISS to reenter to date, was supposed to make a controlled reentry attached to a Japanese HTV cargo spacecraft. However, scheduling problems linked to the delayed launch of a new crew to the station in 2018 meant that the pallet was released in 2021 for an uncontrolled reentry. (3/11)

Some Progress on Restoring Voyager 1 Computer (Source: Pasadena Star-News)
The Voyager project team is seeing progress in restoring a faulty computer on Voyager 1. That spacecraft has been unable to properly transmit data since last November, instead sending "gibberish" because of an apparent problem with its flight data system. Engineers now say that, after months of work, the computer appears to be improving, sending back data that, while not correct, looks more familiar to them than what it had previously been transmitting. Those recovery efforts have been painstaking because of the long round-trip travel time for communications with the spacecraft, as well as going through computer source code developed a half-century ago. (3/11)

Avanti Secures Authorization for HYLAS 4 Satellite Gateway in Senegal (Source: Avanti)
Avanti Communications has been granted the authorization required for its HYLAS 4 satellite gateway station in Diamniadio, Senegal. The Infrastructure Operator Authorization means the gateway’s infrastructure will now become operational. Avanti will now move on to the final phase of testing before launching its services. The launch will provide Senegal with complete high-speed national satellite coverage. (3/4)

Who Has Been To Space, And Who Hasn’t? Depends On Your Definition (Source: Forbes)
Where does outer space begin? That’s a good question, given all of the recent activity in the aeronautics and space tourism areas, much of it within the private sector. During the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, it was an orbit of the Earth which the average Joe considered space. Click here. (3/10)

Richard Truly and the Death of the Space Exploration Initiative (Source: The Hill)
The sad story of Truly’s term as NASA administrator and his role in the demise of President Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative is recounted in “Mars Wars” by Thor Hogan as part of the NASA History series. It notes that Truly had gotten the job running the space agency almost by default, for being a friend of then White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. The Bush administration selected Truly without much discussion or study, based more on his status as an astronaut than any proven administration skills. The decision proved to be a fateful one.

The reaction in Congress and among the American public was unenthusiastic. Sen. Al Gore (D-TN) reflected the attitude of many in Congress, saying: “By proposing a return to the Moon and a manned base on Mars, with no money, no timetable, and no plan, President Bush offers the country not a challenge to inspire us, but a daydream.” A Gallup Poll taken soon after Bush’s speech suggested that just 27 percent of the American public favored increasing spending on space.

Nevertheless, Truly and NASA were tasked with developing a plan to make President Bush’s plan a reality. NASA released a 90-day study on Nov. 20, 1989. It proposed five reference approaches with a cost ranging from $541 billion to $471 billion. The initiative would have required doubling NASA’s budget and a time frame of 35 years, from 1991 through 2025. (3/10)

New Ideas Might Make Active Shielding Viable (Source: Ars Technica)
The Orion spacecraft that is supposed to take humans on a Moon fly-by mission this year has a heavily shielded storm shelter for the crew. But shelters like that aren’t sufficient for a flight to Mars—Orion’s shield is designed for a 30-day mission. To obtain protection comparable to what we enjoy on Earth would require hundreds of tons of material, and that's simply not possible in orbit. The primary alternative—using active shields that deflect charged particles just like the Earth’s magnetic field does—was first proposed in the 1960s. Today, we’re finally close to making it work.

In the 1960s, NASA funded multiple studies looking into three active shielding concepts: plasma shields, electrostatic shields, and magnetic shields. In 1967, Richard H. Levy and Francis W. French delivered a report saying that plasma and electrostatic shields were promising, but they both needed 60 million volts to work—even by today’s standards, that number is ridiculous. In 1995, the Antimatter Study Group proposed putting a device called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the ISS. Click here. (3/11)

Talking on the Moon: The Quest to Establish Lunar Wi-Fi (Source: BBC)
"We will expect 4K resolution from the Moon almost in real time coming from the landing. It's going to be up to 500 megabits of data coming back," said Matt Cosby. "In this day and age, and with social media, grainy black and white photos and videos from the Moon's surface will be unacceptable." Between 2021-23 NASA's LunarLites project evaluated how Earth's 4G and 5G technologies could translate to the lunar environment and now has two new ongoing projects.

The Lunar Surface Propagation (LSP) project is studying how wireless communications systems will perform in the lunar surface environment. NASA's Lunar Third Generation Partnership (3GPP) is also researching how to deploy wireless technologies on the Moon. Once 4G and 5G are available on the Moon, any astronaut on the surface can communicate reliably with their rovers, instruments and crew members. Any data coming back to Earth can then be sent over one link – an efficient way to communicate when large ground stations are often in high demand. (3/10)

Astroforensics: Pioneering Blood Behavior Research for Space Crime Solving (Source: Space Daily)
As more people seek to go where no man has gone before, researchers are exploring how forensic science can be adapted to extraterrestrial environments. A new study by Staffordshire University and the University of Hull highlights the behaviour of blood in microgravity and the unique challenges of bloodstain pattern analysis aboard spacecraft. (3/11)

NASA to Accept Astronaut Applications Through April 2 (Source: Space Daily)
NASA will accept applications through April 2 for future Artemis astronauts who could go to the moon and beyond. The opening of the application period concurred with 10 new astronaut graduates completing an initial two years of training. (3/11)

Orbit Fab Announces Strategic Leadership Reorganization to Propel Space Refueling Innovation (Source: Space Daily)
Orbit Fab had announced a significant reorganization of its leadership team across the United States and the United Kingdom, aligning with the swift uptake of its RAFTI refueling ports for future missions. Jacob Geer, a distinguished figure in the UK's space and defense landscape, takes the helm as Orbit Fab's UK Managing Director. Meanwhile, Manny Shar, the architect behind the UK office's transformation into a multimillion-dollar operation since its 2022 inception, steps into the role of Chief Strategy Officer. (3/9)

Refined Chinese Approach to Tracking Maneuvers of Space Targets Enhances Accuracy (Source: Space Daily)
Researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology have made significant strides in tracking non-cooperative space targets through maneuvering, unveiling a novel methodology that substantially boosts tracking accuracy. Their study, focusing on maneuvering trajectories, introduces a dual-model approach for real-time and precise tracking, marking a leap in space surveillance capabilities.

The study initially presents two foundational models for capturing the intricate movements of space targets: the relative dynamics model and the indirect measurement model. The former tackles the challenge of maneuvering trajectory tracking by dissecting short time intervals, while the latter converts radar measurements into the Local Vertical Local Horizontal (LVLH) system for immediate applicability. (3/11)