September 12, 2017

Irma Keeps Spaceport Closed for Now (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
Hurricane Irma’s aftermath has forced NASA to close Kennedy Space Center’s visitors’ center until further notice. The agency announced on its website that officials continue to assess the center’s status but also reported that “we seem to have weathered Hurricane Irma without major damage, including Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Rocket Garden.” The update blamed power and utility issues for the extended closure and said a reopening date had not been determined.

Kennedy Space Center’s government operations will remain closed through Tuesday to all but essential personnel as a hurricane damage assessment is completed. The U.S. Air Force has recalled all personnel to Patrick Air Force Base from an evacuation ordered in preparation for Hurricane Irma. Other assessments have been ongoing to determine how launches would be affected, Space Florida Vice President Chief of Strategic Alliances Dale Ketcham said. “We have a lot of work to do before resuming flight operations,” he said. “But we have been through this before and we know what to do.” (9/11)

You’ll Be Able To See This Sculpture As It Orbits Earth (Source: FastCoDesign)
The artist Trevor Paglen will launch a long, reflective satellite into space next year, a project 10 years in the making.
There are several thousand satellites orbiting the Earth at any given moment. From GPS satellites and television satellites to communications satellites and defense satellites, all of them are in space for a military or commercial reason. The artist Trevor Paglen, however, is launching a new type of satellite: a giant sculpture that will orbit the Earth purely as art.

The space sculpture, called Orbital Reflector, is a 100-foot-long diamond-shaped balloon that will zoom around the planet, reflecting the sun off its silver surface. Anyone on Earth will be able to look into the night sky and see it slowly making its way through the cosmos like a man-made comet. It will even be visible from cities–Paglen says the satellite will be as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper.

Orbital Reflector will launch in early 2018 as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. To bring the project to fruition, Paglen is collaborating with the Nevada Museum of Art, which currently hosts a spherical prototype of the sculpture. They are now raising money on Kickstarter to contribute at least $70,000 of the total $1.3 million cost. (8/30)

LeoLabs and Planet Collaborate on Space Tracking (Source: Space News)
Planet and LeoLabs, the Silicon Valley startup building a network of radars to track objects in low Earth orbit, are working together to demonstrate how satellite operators can use commercial tracking data to prevent collisions. For six months, Planet has been sharing with LeoLabs the conjunction warnings it receives from U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base. LeoLabs uses the data to provide Planet with additional information on debris threatening its satellites. (9/12)

SES Selects Arianespace for Launch of SES-17 (Source: Arianespace)
SES has selected Arianespace to launch its high-power, high-throughput satellite SES-17 on an Ariane 5 in 2021 from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. Weighing more than six metric tons at launch, SES-17 will be among the ten largest telecom satellites launched by Arianespace since the company’s founding. SES-17 is the third all-electric satellite for which SES has chosen an Arianespace launch. (9/12)

Orbital ATK Begins Assembly of Industry's First Commercial In-Space Satellite Servicing System (Source: Orbital ATK)
Orbital ATK announced significant progress on the industry’s first commercial in-space satellite servicing system. The Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) spacecraft successfully completed its critical design review earlier this year and is now in production with about 75% of the platform and payload components already delivered to the company’s Satellite Manufacturing Facility in Virginia. The spacecraft will begin system-level testing in spring 2018 with launch planned late next year. MEV-1 will provide satellite life extension services to its anchor customer, Intelsat S.A., beginning in early 2019. (9/11)

SpaceX’s Internet Satellite Strategy Faces Possible Setback After FCC Decision (Source: Teslarati)
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) responded Sep. 7 to requests for modification to existing satellite communications regulations and FCC practices from a number of prospective constellation operators, including OneWeb, Telesat, and SpaceX. The FCC ultimately decided to avoid one major rule change that could force SpaceX to completely reconsider its strategic approach to its proposed Low Earth Orbit broadband constellation.

To grossly oversimplify, SpaceX had requested that the FCC apply their non-interference rules for lower orbit communications satellites to internet constellations operating both inside and outside the physical United States. These rules require that communication satellites operating in non-geostationary orbits (NGSO) share the available wireless spectrum equally among themselves when two or more satellites pass within a certain distance of each other relative to ground stations. In simpler terms, consider your smartphone’s cellular connectivity. The FCC’s rule for satellites in lower orbits can be thought of like multiple smartphones using the same cell tower to access the internet: the cell tower simply acknowledges the multiple devices it needs to serve and allows each device a certain amount of bandwidth.

However, the FCC is admittedly a domestic Commission focused on administering communications rules and regulations in the United States, and an agency already exists for coordinating global communications needs, called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU’s Radio Regulations are considerably more simplistic. Rather than the FCC’s more nuanced and reasonable methods of spectrum sharing, the ITU allows the first satellite operator actively using a certain orbit or spectrum to become the primary coordinator for all interference issues. Put more simply, it gives those who launch communications satellites first a “first come, first serve” advantage that lets those entities then set the rules for interference with their constellation. (9/12)

Proton Launches Amazonas Satellite (Source: Space News)
A Proton rocket successfully launched a communications satellite Monday. The Proton lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:23 p.m. Eastern and released the Amazonas-5 satellite into its planned orbit nine hours and 12 minutes later. The launch is the second of three planned commercial Proton missions this year, with the third, carrying AsiaSat-9, scheduled for late this month. (9/12)

Britain's Biggest Rocket Fueled by Burned Tires Blasts Off in Pursuit of Space Tourism Dream (Source: Telegraph)
It was launched from a flatbed truck, its sole occupant a teddy bear from the local primary school. But the successful, if brief, launch yesterday of Britain’s largest rocket paves the way for the UK to take a giant leap in the space race with the development of a three-seater capsule fuelled by recycled tires. Entrepreneur Steve Bennett, who founded his own company in a bid to send people into space, believes he is now just two years away from realising his dream.

The next step is the development of the Nova II, a rocket powered by fuel uniquely made partly from recycled tyres, and which he hopes will be capable of lifting a capsule that can carry human beings. It was all dependant on the success of the Skybolt 2, fired into the atmosphere from the back of a converted truck in Northumberland before breaking up and descending back to Earth by parachute some 30 seconds later. (9/11)

Russia Sees Vostochny Cosmodrome as Deep Space Exploration Hub (Source: Spaceflight Insider)
Russia intends to launch deep space exploration spacecraft from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s Far East. Latest statements made by Russian officials show that Roscosmos plans to push forward with construction of the required infrastructure for interplanetary missions. Russian state-run press agency TASS reported on Thursday, Sep. 7, that Roscosmos wants to make Vostochny capable of launching super-heavy rockets with interplanetary spacecraft. Therefore, the cosmodrome could be used in the future for a variety of space launches, including deep space exploration missions. (9/12)

Farewell to the Greatest Space Mission of Our Time (Source: Popular Mechanics)
It has been a journey of unprecedented discovery. "It may go down as one of NASA's greatest planetary missions, simply because we've had a fire hose of data come back over 13 years," says Linda Spilker, Cassini Project Scientist. Spilker, a veteran of the Voyager mission, has been working on Cassini for decades, yet you need only ask her about the composition of Saturn's great rings or the icy geysers erupting from Enceladus, and the sparkle of discovery lights up in her eyes. "We have literally rewritten the textbooks about the Saturn system," she says.

Thirteen years and two months later, and the Cassini team has watched Saturn go through nearly two whole Saturnian seasons. One trip around the sun for Saturn takes about 29 Earth years, meaning each season lasts a little more than 7 years. Cassini arrived during wintertime in the planet's northern hemisphere, but winter faded into spring shortly after the conclusion of the spacecraft's primary mission in 2008.

Cassini earned two extensions to keep it going. During the two-year Equinox Mission, so-named because it included the spring Equinox of Saturn in August 2009, scientists glimpsed exactly how far icicle spires and pillars stretched above and below the rings of Saturn, as evidenced by their shadows as the sunlight hit the rings directly. The second mission extension came in February 2010—the Solstice Mission. (9/11)

Israelis' Chance to Work at NASA (Source: Jerusalem Post)
Young Israeli researchers can now apply for an internship at the Ames Research Center in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. Those selected will receive scholarships to participate in the development of scientific products and research in space, gain experience in space research and contribute their own knowledge. The program to send Israeli researchers to NASA is part of a broad agreement signed about a year ago with the Israel Space Agency, which is part of the Science and Technology Ministry. It is designed for students with a bachelor’s or master’s degree in space-related sciences who want to join as guest researchers at Ames. (9/12)

Boeing to Build Seven Satellites for SES’ O3b Broadband Network (Source: GeekWire)
Boeing Satellite Systems International has signed up to build a fleet of seven satellites that will provide broadband internet connectivity from medium Earth orbit for SES’ O3b network. O3b was set up a decade ago to provide internet access to the “Other 3 Billion” in the world who have been left out because they’re too remote or too poor to get connected. Last year, SES took over majority ownership of O3b Networks, which currently has 12 first-generation satellites in a 5,000-mile-high orbit.

Eight more of the first-generation satellites, also built by Boeing, are to be launched in 2018 and 2019 on Russian-built Soyuz rockets by the European Arianespace consortium. Boeing’s next-generation O3b mPower satellites are due to go into orbit starting in 2021. (9/12)

Blue Origin Space Venture Provides Hints About Amazon’s HQ2 Plan (Source: GeekWire)
What do Jeff Bezos and his lieutenants look for when they’re in an expansive mood? That’s a key question in the multibillion-dollar contest to attract Amazon’s second headquarters, and the Blue Origin space venture – Bezos’ other multibillion-dollar enterprise – may well offer clues to the answer. Over the past few years, Blue Origin has gone through not just one, but two high-profile nationwide searches for expansion sites.

The scale of Amazon’s HQ2 project will be much bigger: An estimated $5 billion in investment and about 50,000 jobs are at stake for the host city – as opposed to $205 million in investment and 330 high-tech jobs for Blue Origin’s Florida operation, and $200 million and 350 jobs for Alabama. Nevertheless, it’s not unreasonable to think that at least some of the calculations behind Bezos’ HQ2 process will be similar to those that drove Bezos’ Blue Origin process. Click here. (9/12)

China, Russia and Europe Consider Lunar Sample Sharing (Source: Scientific American)
China is in talks with Europe and Russia about sharing samples from its upcoming lunar sample return mission. A European Space Agency scientist said the agency has had "exploratory talks" about joint studies of samples that will be returned by the Chang'e-5 mission, and an upcoming China-Russia agreement on space cooperation is also likely to include studies of samples. Similar cooperation with NASA, though, is hindered by U.S. law that prohibits bilateral cooperation between the agency and its Chinese counterparts without congressional approval. Chang'e-5 was scheduled to launch late this year, but its launch date is now uncertain after the July failure of a Long March 5 rocket. (9/12)

Rutgers Team Vies for Alka Rocket World Record (Source: Daily Targum)
A team of 11 Rutgers students is competing to set a Guinness World Record for the highest alka-rocket launch ever. If they win, their names will be in the Guinness Book of World Records and they will receive a prize of $25,000. The competition, which is sponsored by the pharmaceutical technology company Bayer, is open to students from all Big Ten universities. An alka-rocket is powered by a controlled chemical reaction caused by mixing water with alka-seltzer, which creates carbon dioxide. (9/12)

SSL and Tethers Unlimited Get NASA’s Nod for On-Orbit Assembly System (Source: GeekWire)
California-based SSL, formerly known as Space Systems Loral, says it’ll receive continued funding from NASA for an on-orbit satellite assembly program known as Dragonfly. SSL and its partners, including Bothell, Wash.-based Tethers Unlimited, recently completed a successful ground demonstration of the Dragonfly system, which is designed to assemble pieces of space hardware in orbit robotically. The next step is to move forward with a detailed design for a semi-autonomous assembly system that could be sent into space sometime in the 2020s. (9/11)