February 3, 2018

Lockheed Starts Building Spaceship for Missions to Moon, Mars (Source: Fox Business)
U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin (LMT) announced Thursday it had begun construction on a spaceship that could one day return humans to the Moon. Called the Orion, the craft is designed for deep space exploration and taking humans further into the solar system than ever before, according to Lockheed. Beyond a mission to the moon, the Orion is ultimately expected to be used for human missions to Mars, as prioritized by the White House late last year.

Multiple new launch systems currently under development will further disrupt the international space transportation industry and bring costs down to a level allowing greater involvement in the space economy by new commercial and government players. Lower costs for access to space will enable more entrepreneurial space ventures and more public-private partnerships. Lockheed called its new project “the most advanced spacecraft ever built.”

The first two pieces of the craft’s crew module, which will house astronauts, were welded together at a NASA facility in New Orleans on Thursday. Construction on this piece of the spaceship is designed to be completed by September, when it will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Students Researching New Planets and Ages of Stars at Embry-Riddle (Source: ERAU)
Patrice Majewski remembers her mom waking her up as a child at 3 a.m. to lie on the front lawn and watch meteor showers. Looking up to the skies in Palm Coast, Florida, to see shuttle launches was also a regular occurrence. Alexander Stone-Martinez was in the third grade when he became engrossed in a television mini-series about galaxies and space.

Those experiences sparked a fascination with stars and planets for Majewski and Stone-Martinez, now students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach Campus. Both are currently working on projects to uncover data on binary stars, including possible new planets and the age of certain stars, through grants from NASA and the Florida Space Grant Consortium. (1/31)

United Launch Alliance and Florida Space Institute Partner to Develop Lunar Mining (Source: FSI)
Dr. Phil Metzger and Dr. Julie Brisset have been contracted by the United Launch Alliance (ULA) to study the extraction of water from the Moon’s polar regions. They will use computer modeling to develop the optimum arrangement of thermal extraction wells to obtain water at the lowest cost. This is in collaboration with researchers at the Colorado School of Mines, whose work shows that lunar water is an economic resource that will reduce launch operations.

Water can be mined by thermal extraction then lifted into lunar orbit and lowered down to Low Earth Orbit where it can be sold to a launch provider like ULA at an orbiting propellant depot. Metzger and Brisset will optimize the mining design to lower the expected cost of mining water as far as possible. If NASA adopts the use of in-space resources for its trips to Mars, it could dramatically reduce the cost of exploration, leading to more and better science for the taxpayers. ULA is funding this work as part of its CisLunar-1000 strategy to revolutionize the space economy. They predict $2.7 trillion dollars of commercial space business within 30 years. (1/18)