January 14, 2018

Missile Warning Satellite Set for Cape Canaveral Launch on Atlas V (Source: Florida Today)
An Air Force ballistic missile warning satellite was encapsulated in a protective fairing this week ahead of its Thursday launch from the Space Coast on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, according to builder Lockheed Martin.

The fourth Space Based Infrared System satellite, labeled SBIRS GEO Flight 4, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 41 during a 40-minute window that opens at 7:52 p.m. The roughly 10,000-pound spacecraft will join a constellation of three other SBIRS satellites more than 22,000 miles above the equator, bolstering the Air Force's ability to detect missile launches and support ballistic missile defense. (1/13)

Romney Should Open His Mind to Space Exploration (Source: Salt Lake Tribune)
The news that Orrin Hatch will retire from the Senate means, at least according to conventional wisdom, that Mitt Romney — former presidential candidate, former governor of Massachusetts and current resident of Utah — will run for his seat. Romney is said to be so popular that he is all but a shoe-in. However, one issue from the 2012 campaign has left questions in the minds of a few across the nation who have followed Mr. Romney’s career. The question involves an issue that came up during the Florida primary.

One of Romney’s opponents, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, proposed the building of a lunar base by the year 2020, then eight years away. Mr. Romney took the occasion of a presidential debate in Tampa to savagely mock the idea of going back to the moon. “If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’”

Many space policy experts were curious about Romney’s stance at the time because he had several advocates of returning to the moon advising him, including former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and the late commander of Apollo 17, Gene Cernan. One wonders what they thought of their chosen candidate heaping ridicule on the idea. Since the exchange between Romney and Gingrich, a number of studies, including one done by MIT, suggest that the moon should be the next destination for American astronauts. (1/14)

NASA's New Power Source Could Provide Energy for Manned Missions to Mars (Source: Herald Scotland)
NASA is getting ready to make a major announcement about a new energy source which could put man on Mars. The US space agency has been testing an affordable fission nuclear power system which could run processing equipment to transform resources on the Red Planet into oxygen, water and fuel. The Kilopower project is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s (STMD) development program and experts will gather at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas on Thursday to make an announcement on progress.

Patrick McClure, project lead on the Kilopower work at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory, where testing took place, said: “A space nuclear reactor could provide a high energy density power source with the ability to operate independent of solar energy or orientation, and the ability to operate in extremely harsh environments, such as the Martian surface.” (1/13)

Reusability as a Driver for Florida's Polar Corridor (Source: SPACErePORT)
The Air Force has indicated that an Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) is a must-have for allowing rockets to use the conceptual Polar Launch Corridor on the Eastern Range. But there are other prerequisites. I believe SpaceX's reusability also enables the polar option. SpaceX has demonstrated that the downrange risk from falling first-stage components can be mitigated with their controlled re-entry and landings. Perhaps this reusability-based risk reduction, coupled with high-elevation trajectories, makes southbound launches less of a concern for overflight for islands in the Bahamas and Cuba further downrange.

If/when ULA switches to AFSS for its Atlas, Delta, and Vulcan rockets, would they too be able to go polar from Florida? Is Vulcan's planned approach to engines-only reusability -- with the first stage tank still falling downrange after the engine pod is snatched in mid-air -- acceptable? Another set of users that could benefit are air-launch programs like Virgin Orbit, Generation Orbit (GO), Stratolaunch, and CubeCab, whose rocket performance wouldn't suffer from the Dogleg maneuver and may not have to establish a duplicative West Coast operational base.

Also, it seems that if these factors enable polar launches from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, they would also allow polar launches from Northwest Florida's Gulf Coast (as was considered for Santa Rosa Island on Eglin Air Force Base property in the early 1990s)...perhaps for those microsatellite launchers currently without designated launch sites. Here's a rough-cut graphic I drew up to show the corridor. (1/14)

Unknown Polar Corridor Impacts on Aviation and Maritime Traffic (Source: SPACErePORT)
Other factors include the "exclusion zone" for downrange maritime traffic, and the busy aviation corridors into and out of South Florida. Typically, "all ocean-going traffic is restricted from entering an area measured from nine miles north and south of the launch pad and extending 64 miles east into the ocean." Encroaching this zone can scrub a launch attempt. How would this exclusion zone be structured for Polar Corridor missions?

And the FAA's Miami Center currently has air traffic management responsibility all the way up to Volusia County, including the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. This FAA Center re-routes air traffic when launches are scheduled on the Eastern Range, but these launches currently have little impact on South Florida aviation corridors. This would certainly change with launch vehicles taking a path between the Bahamas and South Florida. (1/14)

China's Bold Proposal to Zap Space Junk From Earth's Orbit with Lasers (Source: WIRED)
There's a new proposal for how we could get rid of some of this junk – or at least make it more manageable. A team of researchers from China has come up with a plan to blast the debris into smaller, less harmful bits using a laser flying around Earth.

Quan Wen and colleagues at the Air Force Engineering University in China used a numerical simulation to test how a laser might impact the amount of space junk floating around now. A laser would be mounted to a satellite itself, launched into orbit. From there it would emit short bursts of near-infrared light, sending 20 bursts a second for a few minutes. This should be enough to break the debris down, the authors say.

Editor's Note: I believe WIRED is not describing this correctly. The laser would not "break the debris down." I think it would slow, or raise/lower the debris item's orbit so that it would more quickly re-enter the atmosphere. (1/14)

Daughter of Chinese Astronaut Recalls Shenzhou-7 Mission, False Fire Alarm (Source: Xinhua)
Liu Qianting said her father was selected for Shenzhou-7 in 2008 and started four months of intense training while she was preparing for her senior middle school entrance exam, but her father managed to make time to see her at school before the mission. "I will never forget the day on Sept. 25, 2008, when the spacecraft blasted off, carrying my father, as well as my mother's heart and mine, into space," she said.

Liu Qianting recalled when the live broadcast showed her father and Zhai preparing for the spacewalk when a fire alarm rang out. "My mother and I were both terrified. I knew that a fire in such circumstance had killed American astronaut Edward White," she said. "My strength vanished and I could not hear any sound at all." A spokesperson with China's manned space program explained later that the fire alarm was caused by a sensor error. (1/14)

How the Future of Space Travel is Being Redefined (Source: New Statesman)
There is a widening divide between “old space” – the domain of government agencies – and “new space”, which includes glamorous projects like rockets to Mars. Rates of technological advancement and decreasing costs of production have enabled private companies to move from manufacturing low-orbit satellites to rather improbably advertising commercial flight to Mars. These kinds of changes are fairly unprecedented, but the last few years have demonstrated the ability of commercial entities to come up with completely novel ways to explore space.

David Baker, from the British Interplanetary Society, the oldest space advocacy organisation globally, said: “Space is about applications – such as communications, weather forecasting, TV, data relay, navigation, monitoring Earth’s resources –  which are being increasingly handled by private companies, and exploration, which is the job of the big space agencies. (1/9)

Multi-Planet System Found Through Crowdsourcing (Source: NASA JPL)
A system of at least five exoplanets has been discovered by citizen scientists through a project called Exoplanet Explorers, part of the online platform Zooniverse, using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. This is the first multi-planet system discovered entirely through crowdsourcing. A study describing the system has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

Thousands of citizen scientists got to work on Kepler data in 2017 when Exoplanet Explorers launched. It was featured on a program called Stargazing Live on the Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). On the final night of the three-day program, researchers announced the discovery of a four-planet system. Since then, they have named it K2-138 and determined that it has a fifth planet -- and perhaps even a sixth, according to the new paper. (1/11)

Meet the Amateur Astronomers Who Track Secretive Spy Satellites for Fun (Source: Popular Science)
If Zuma is still up there, there’s a small group of people who will be ready and watching for it to reappear in a week, when its projected orbit should bring it out of Earth’s shadow and into the daylight. If it’s there, reflections of light glinting off the satellite should be visible from the ground in some parts of Europe and North America. And across the world, satellite trackers—-who devote their spare time to seeing what some governments would really rather remained unseen—-will be waiting to catch a glimpse of that glint.

It’s a short jump from meteors to falling satellites, and Langbroek soon became interested in things that fell from the sky that humans had put up there to begin with—satellite re-entry. The change in direction led to a new, loosely-knit network of amateur observers that keeps tabs on the orbits of hundreds of classified satellites that continuously orbit the planet.

“I discovered you could do all kinds of observations on secret satellites, and that captured my imagination, because, well, it’s secret. That’s exciting,” Langbroek, who's based in the Netherlands, explains with a laugh. “Seeing what you’re not to supposed to see is always a thrill." (1/11)

Physicists Say They've Created a Device That Generates 'Negative Mass' (Source: Science Alert)
Physicists have created what they say is the first device that's capable of generating particles that behave as if they have negative mass. The device generates a strange particle that's half-light/half-matter, and as if that isn't cool enough, it could also be the foundation for a new kind of laser that could operate on far less energy than current technologies.

This builds on recent theoretical work on the behaviour of something called a polariton, which appears to behave as if it has negative mass – a mind-blowing property that sees objects move towards the force pushing it, instead of being pushed away. (1/14)

NASA to Study Weather in Boundary Layer Between Earth and Space (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
At 60 miles in altitude, Earth’s ionosphere is host to a little-understood interplay between the electrically-neutral upper atmosphere and the rarified soup of electrically-charged particles created from solar radiation. This boundary layer is susceptible to influences from Earthly weather events and solar outbursts alike, and may be key to understanding how to better protect humans on the ground or hundreds of miles above it.

Scheduled to launch atop an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket on January 25, 2018, the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) instrument will settle into a geostationary orbit as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite.

From its vantage point some 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above the equator, GOLD will image Earth in the far-ultraviolet spectrum. This view of our planet should allow scientists to observe changes to the ionosphere that they would otherwise be unable to see and allow for tightening of predictive models. (1/14)

ICEYE Launches World’s First SAR Microsatellite and Establishes Finland’s First Commercial Satellite Operations (Source: ICEYE)
ICEYE, the leader in synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) technology for microsatellites providing expanded access to reliable and timely earth observation data, today announced the successful launch of its proof-of-concept satellite mission, ICEYE-X1, on ISRO’s PSLV-C40 rocket. The success of the launch, from Satish Dhawan Space Center in India, distinguishes ICEYE-X1 as the world’s first microsatellite equipped with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) to ever be deployed in space and as Finland’s very first commercial satellite. Making further history, ICEYE has also successfully established communications with the 70 kg satellite now in orbit, signaling the next step in the mission’s success. (1/12)

New Astronaut Training Attraction Opening at KSC (Source: KSCVC)
Two all-new experiences launch Feb. 14 at the KSC Visitor Complex. Nowhere else on Earth can you train to go to Mars as an astronaut, and be transported to the Red Planet to work for the day at Mars Base 1. Put your teamwork, communication and collaboration skills to the test! Participants train to live and work in the harshest environment through exciting and immersive simulation technology in the all-new Astronaut Training Experience. Mars Base 1, the companion program, is set in a landscape of the future. You have the unique opportunity to travel, live and work on Mars while performing base operations with real science and engineering challenges. Click here. (1/13)

Astronomers Peer Into a Lair of a Mysterious Source of Cosmic Radio Bursts (Source: USRA)
Using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, a team from Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and other institutions today announced that mysterious bursts of radio emission, called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), may be coming from near a giant black hole.

Fast Radio Bursts are a strong and very short flash of radio waves first identified in 2007 using archival data obtained in 2001. Interestingly, most of the bursts have not been observed again, with the exception of one. “FRB121102 was found to repeat and is the only known FRB source to do so”, noted Dr. Andrew Seymour, an Astronomer with USRA at Arecibo Observatory. “Even then, no pattern to the bursts have been identified, unlike with other radio phenomena, such as pulsars”, continued Dr. Seymour. (1/10)

Why It’s a Bad Idea to Launch Rockets Over Land (Source: The Atlantic)
On Friday morning in China, a rocket blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the Sichuan province with a pair of navigation satellites bound for orbit around Earth. As the rocket climbed higher and higher, the four strap-on boosters that launched with it began to fall away. This is supposed to happen; the boosters provide extra lift in the minutes after launch, and when they burn through their fuel, they separate and fall back down to Earth.

The satellites made it safely into orbit. But back on the ground, there were flames. One of those four discarded boosters had landed near a town in the Guangxi region and exploded. Video captured by onlookers and shared on social media shows the booster falling from the sky and striking the ground behind buildings. Screams are heard as flames erupt when it makes contact. Other footage shows bystanders approaching the flaming wreckage in a grassy area. Flames billow out from one end of the booster, and the ground is littered with chunks of debris.

The incident, which was first reported by Andrew Jones at GB Times, is actually not uncommon in China. Three of the country’s four launch facilities—Xichang in the Sichuan province, Jiuquan in the Gobi desert in Mongolia, and Taiyuan in the Shanxi province—are located deep inland, hundreds of miles from open water. For China to send satellites and other payloads into space from these spots, rockets must fly over land. The setup contrasts that of the U.S. and other nations that host rocket launches, where facilities are located near the coastline and rockets travel over oceans as they ascend. (1/13)

Falling Rocket Booster Explodes Near a Town in China (Source: The Verge)
Following a launch on Friday local time, a Chinese rocket booster fell near a small town in southwest China, where it exploded and caught fire, GBTimes reports. It was one of four strap-on boosters used on China’s Long March 3B rocket, which had lofted two satellites into orbit before the crash. People living in the town Xiangdu, located in China’s Guangxi region, caught video of the booster as it fell perilously close to buildings and then erupted in flames.

“There are notices released for the drop zones, depending on what kind of launch and where it’s going,” Andrew Jones, a freelance journalist covering China’s spaceflight program, tells The Verge. “For some places, they’ll evacuate a town or an area, and they try to calculate these drop zones quite carefully to avoid as many inhabited areas as possible.” (1/12)

China Approves Advanced Radio Telescope Project (Source: Xinhua)
China is to have a new radio telescope to "listen" to the universe. Proposed by the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory, the world's largest fully steerable single-dish radio telescope will be built in Qitai County in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The telescope will be 110 meters in diameter, over 100 meters tall and weigh around 6,000 tonnes. Scheduled to go into service in 2023, it will cover three-fourths of the sky. (1/12)

Cambodia to Buy Chinese Satellite as Relations Tighten on Belt and Road Initiative (Source: Space News)
China Great Wall Industry Corp. landed a new satellite order Jan. 11 on the back of a bilateral meeting between Chinese and Cambodian officials that included an agreement to increase trade between the two countries. The Chinese satellite manufacturer inked a “framework agreement” with the Royal Group of Cambodia, an investment firm with companies in transportation, telecommunications and other fields, to build and launch a communications satellite called Techo-1. (1/12)

2018 Could See Return of US Human Spaceflight (Source: News13)
2018 could provide for some exciting, history making moments on Florida’s Space Coast. NASA expected to send astronauts on spacecraft in 2018. NASA’s website says the first crewed flight on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is scheduled for Nov. 2018. SpaceX’s first manned launch on Crew Dragon is set for Dec. 2018. The return of human spaceflight would be welcomed news for local businesses after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. (1/12)

Three Minutes of Microgravity is Worth the Cost of a Small House (Source: Quartz)
Forget seven minutes in heaven. For some scientists, the real indulgence is three minutes of microgravity. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, is expected to fly its New Shepard suborbital rocket and space capsule multiple times this year in a final round of developmental testing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also testing a suborbital rocket plane, VSS Unity, that it hopes to bring into operations in the years ahead.

These vehicles are designed to carry passengers and cargo up to the edge of space, approximately 100 kilometers up, where they will spend three to four minutes in microgravity. The commonly-used term “zero-g” is a misnomer: gravity is always present in space, but these vehicles experience apparent weightlessness briefly before they fall back to earth. (Faster vehicles can experience apparent weightlessness continuously, when they go into orbit around the planet.)

The suborbital rockets are marketed as luxury thrill rides for would-be space tourists, but both companies have found eager customers in researchers who want to perform experiments in microgravity and the upper atmosphere. In December 2017, Blue Origin flew its seventh test mission of the New Shepard with a dozen research payloads onboard; the company expects to fly several more times this year. (1/12)

Canadian Mega-Projects on Launch Pad: Which Ones Most Likely to Fly? (Source: Chronicle-Herald)
There are several large development proposals making the news. The ones to be excited about are those where substantial private money is being invested. Perhaps the most surprising is Maritime Launch Services, whose website tells us that it is “well on its way to expanding the Canadian commercial space industry. With the rapidly growing global demand for space launch services, MLS will bring the long established and mature space launch technology of Ukraine to Nova Scotia.

Canso, Nova Scotia has been selected as the launch site and design activities are underway for both the launch systems and spaceport.” This is a substantial and rapidly growing field. There were 90 launches by commercial and state operators in 2017, each typically carrying multiple satellites. MLS hopes to grow to 12 launches per year, at a cost to customers of US$45 million per launch. (1/13)

'Potential' for a Spaceport in Outer Hebrides, Scotland (Source: BBC)
The potential for creating a spaceport in the Western Isles is being explored by the Scottish government. Business Minister Paul Wheelhouse is to visit North Uist for talks on the idea. Scotland has previously been suggested as a location for the UK's first designated spaceport from where satellites could be launched. The Western Isles' SNP MP Angus MacNeil believes such a facility in the Outer Hebrides would create much-needed skilled jobs for the islands.

The isles are already the location of the UK's largest military rocket range from where a new record for the largest and highest object launched into space from the UK was set last year. The Terrier Oriole rocket was launched from Benbecula during a Nato exercise. (1/12)

Space Travel Could Be Coming to Mississippi (Source: WLOX)
South Mississippi could be the next place to add space travel to its list of offerings. The Hancock County Port and Harbor Commission is leading the effort to make that a reality. At Stennis International Airport in Hancock County, the aircraft that operate there are 60 percent military and about 40 percent private operations. With the possibility of space travel, there could soon be more traffic at the airport.

The Hancock County Port and Harbor Commission has paid close to $100,000 to the firm RS&H to study the feasibility of obtaining a launch site operator license that would ultimately allow space travel. Officials said it would open the county up to private and commercial space flight. The study will look at public safety, existing infrastructure and market for space travel. "So depending on where you're located within the US, you can get into orbit at different points," said Carothers.

Carothers said the study would begin later on this month and wrap up in July. If the firm discovers Hancock County is a viable option, then companies that need it would not have to travel to get their products into space. "If we could do the rocket testing at Stennis Space Center and then actually launch them from close, a lot of that transportation cost would be saved," Carothers said. (1/12)

Corporate Giants and Aerospace Startups are Flying High in Dallas-Fort Worth (Source: Dallas Innovates)
Lockheed Martin and Boeing are some of the big guns that anchor Dallas-Fort Worth’s aerospace and aviation industry, a major engine for the region’s economy. But these corporate giants aren’t the only ones with the right stuff. A number of aerospace startups in North Texas are also flying high.

“The things that make DFW stand out for aerospace startups, in particular, are our direct connection to all the major companies we have here, but also the abundant space available for budding rocket companies,” said Marshall Culpepper, founder of Denton-based Kubos.

Meanwhile, inside a hangar at a small airport in Caddo Mills, about 40 miles east of Dallas, EXOS Aerospace is making rockets. Not any rockets, but reusable ones for suborbital commercial flights for research as well as educational and medical experiments. The startup says its space flights would be faster, affordable, and reliable because its rockets are reusable. Exos hopes to launch its new rocket soon from Spaceport America in New Mexico. (1/12)

India's PSLV-C40 Puts 31 Satellites in Space (Source: The Hindu)
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on Friday launched its 42nd Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The PSLV-C40, which took off at 9.29 a.m, placed 31 satellites, originating from seven countries, in two orbits. ISRO termed the successful launch a New Year’s gift to the nation. (1/13)

Vast Sheets of Ice Have Been Found on Mars (Source: Seeker)
Scientists just uncovered eight, massive ice sheets on Mars hidden below the surface. A co-author of a paper published Jan. 11 in the journal Science noted that future explorers can probably use the ice as a source of water, given the ice is only one to two meters (3.3 to 6.5 feet) below the surface.

"Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need," study co-author Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said in a statement. NASA has said that future Mars-exploring astronauts could use ice deposits close to the surface. In 2016, for example, a separate science team uncovered a deposit of water in Mars' Utopia Planitia that has the equivalent volume of Lake Superior.

Early observations indicate some of these sheets are at least 100 meters (330 feet) thick. Like the Utopia find, these eight zones are located in the mid-latitudes of Mars. They likely were deposited there as snowfall. And the deposits are just a few examples of subsurface ice on the Red Planet; the Science paper notes that one-third of the Martian surface has subsurface ice of some sort. (1/11)

If We Ever Get to Mars, the Beer Might Not Be Bad (Source: New York Times)
Here’s an interplanetary botany discovery that took college students and not NASA scientists to find: Hops — the flowers used to add a pleasant bitterness to beer — grow well in Martian soil. “I don’t know if it’s a practical plant, but it’s doing fairly well,” said Edward F. Guinan, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University. Last semester, 25 students took Dr. Guinan’s class on astrobiology, about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

Martian soil is very dense and dries out quickly — perhaps better for making bricks than growing plants, which have trouble pushing their roots through. That includes potatoes, the savior food for the fictional Mark Watney in “The Martian,” the book by Andy Weir and later a movie starring Matt Damon about a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars. (1/12)

The Universe Still Seems to be Expanding Faster Than it Ought To (Source: New Scientist)
The heat death of the universe is coming for us, but we don’t know when. The cosmos is constantly expanding, and the speed of that inflation is measured by a value called the Hubble constant. We have two ways to determine this rate, and they have always returned different values, leaving researchers at an impasse. A new study of the stars we use to measure the distance to other galaxies has deepened the divide. Click here. (1/12)