March 3, 2018

Telesat Touts LEO Constellation Over M&A as Best Growth Strategy (Source: Space News)
Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said his company has refrained from running headlong with other fleet operators in adding new telecom satellites over areas now burdened by an oversupply of capacity. That glut of satellite capacity in Asia, Africa and Latin America puts pressure on fleet operators to consolidate, but the industry shouldn’t look to Telesat to initiate any mergers or acquisitions, he said.

Goldberg said Telesat is focusing instead on deploying a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), which would be differentiated from other systems in order to capture “surging” demand for broadband around the world. Telesat has one prototype LEO satellite in orbit, and has maritime connectivity customer OmniAccess as a partner to test the satellite. Goldberg said other customers will be joining the test, as will companies building user terminals for the system. (3/2)

More Weird Mars Geology (Source: Behind the Black)
Yesterday the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team released 460 images taken by the spacecraft’s high resolution camera, HiRISE, as part of their normal and routine image release program. The images show some strange and inexplicable geology on the floor of an unnamed crater as well in its confusing central peak region. Click here. (3/2)

The Ever-Receding Space Launch System (Source: Behind the Black)
NASA's decision to forego development of a new SLS mobile launcher will push back the first manned SLS/Orion launch. At present, the first unmanned mission is likely to go in June 2020 (though don’t be surprised if that date sees further delays). If it takes 33 months after that launch to reconfigure the launcher for the first manned mission, that manned mission cannot occur any sooner than April 2023.

That second launch however is planned to be the first to use SLS’s new upper stage. To put humans on it untested seems foolish, doesn’t it? NASA is going to have to fly an extra mission to test that upper stage, which is going to add further delays to the schedule. Now however it appears that the Trump administration wants to shift Europa Clipper to a commercial launch vehicle, probably Falcon Heavy. This means that either astronauts will be flying on an untested SLS upper stage, or NASA will have to add a test launch in April 2023. (3/1)

Space Oddity (Source: 1843)
“Orbital Reflector” is the work of Trevor Paglen, an artist best known for his work photographing America’s surveillance state. In the years after the September 11th 2001 attacks, he began documenting the listening stations used by the NSA and the air-strips and secret prisons employed by the CIA in its rendition program.

He has also spent years on a project called “The Other Night Sky”, in which he photographs all the classified spy satellites in orbit, visible in the heavens but missing from the UN’s official log of spacecraft, their passages appearing as long white scratches against the blackness of space. Click here. (3/2)

Neighbors Concerned SpaceX Could Transform South Texas (Source: TPR)
“You can’t see it now but we have a beautiful view of Port Isabell. We see deer up here a lot of coyotes. I mean yeah it’s like right there, like boom,” Terry Heaton said, pointing towards the coast. Heaton lives in Boca Chica village, a lonely 45-minute drive from the border city of Brownsville. Boca Chica Village is composed of more than 30 houses on two streets, about two miles from Boca Chica state beach. They moved to the remote coastal neighborhood for the value, he said. The houses were cheap, they had beach access, and it was quiet.

The Heatons are one of two year-round families in what is predominantly a vacation community many are upper Midwesterners. It’s the kind of community that invites a reporter in from the rain before declining to be interviewed. From Heaton’s kitchen table you can see the towering antennas of spaceflight company, SpaceX. Heaton is convinced their new neighbor jeopardizes the peace and quiet he enjoyed in this neighborhood. The launchpad for the company is less than two miles away. (3/2)

Russia’s New Cruise Missile Has Crashed in Testing (Source: MDAA)
The Pentagon said Thursday the U.S. was “not surprised” by the new nuclear missile systems disclosed Thursday by Russian President Vladimir Putin and said “the American people should rest assured that we are fully prepared.”

A U.S. official says Russia’s new nuclear-powered cruise missile is still being tested and has crashed in recent testing. On Thursday, Putin announced that one of those missiles, a new cruise missile would render existing missile defense systems obsolete and that its nuclear-powered engine would give it unlimited range. (3/2)

Only One Way For Humanity to Survive: Go To Mars (Source: National Geographic
Michio Kaku is one of the most recognizable faces of science, with several bestselling books and numerous television appearances, including on the Discovery Channel and the BBC. In his new book, The Future Of Humanity, he argues passionately that our future lies not on Earth, but in the stars.

"If you take a look at evolution on Earth, 99.9 percent of all life forms have gone extinct. When things change, either you adapt or die. That’s the law of Mother Nature. We face various hazards. First of all, we have self-inflicted problems like global warming, nuclear proliferation and bio-engineered germ warfare. Plus, Mother Nature has hurled at the Earth a number of extinction cycles. The dinosaurs, for example, didn’t have a space program. And that’s why the dinosaurs are not here today.

"We should cure Earth's problems without having to leave for Mars or another planet, because it’s impossible to remove the entire population of Earth to Mars. We’re talking about an insurance policy—a backup plan in case something does happen to the Earth." (3/2)

UCF Graduate Student and Aerial Acrobat Recognized for Aerospace Work (Source: UCF)
Estefania Bohorquez is an artist, aerial gymnast, engineer, historian, aerospace visionary - and the only person in Florida to receive the 20 Twenty Award from Aviation Week. Bohorquez is currently working on a master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCF. Click here. (3/3)

New Mexico’s Sad Bet on Space Exploration (Source: The Atlantic)
This is the road to Spaceport America, which bills itself as “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport.” But to believe the tourist-bus video, it’s not just a dormant industrial park erected with the promise of economic revitalization. It’s the latest stop in humankind’s ageless reach for the stars.

Spaceport America lies about 20 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences, roughly 50 miles north of Las Cruces, and at a perpetually indeterminate moment in the near future. Although the spaceport has been flight-worthy since 2010, the first launch by its anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic, still hasn’t taken off. While the private space industry appears to be at a major turning point elsewhere in the world, its impacts haven’t quite reached the small New Mexico cities banking on its future.

There aren’t many places where a spaceport like this, meant to service an international community, is feasible. Given the state’s large and controversial investment in the project, its success or failure might have broad impact on private space travel. For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. Click here. (3/3)

Transparency Takes Hit with New Mexico Governor’s Actions (Source: Santa Fe New Mexican)
Transparency took a beating Friday as Gov. Susana Martinez signed a bill to ensure secrecy for certain business dealings at Spaceport America and vetoed another bill meant to fix a loophole that open government advocates say allows untold thousands of dollars of lobbyist expenses to go unreported. In her veto message for Senate Bill 67, Martinez said she has “fought hard to make state government transparent.” (3/2)

Researchers are Figuring Out How to Pack a Supercomputer Into a Nanosatellite (Source: GeekWire)
Putting a supercomputer in a package that’s roughly the size of a loaf of bread is one thing. Making sure the supercomputer is radiation-hardened to survive the harsh conditions of space is quite another. A team headquartered at the University of Pittsburgh is trying to do both, for an experiment that’s backed by the Department of Defense, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The payload has an unwieldy name: Space Test Program-Houston 6 / Spacecraft Supercomputing for Image and Video Processing, or STP-H6/SSIVP. But it’s designed for a relatively simple function: taking high-resolution pictures of Earth from the space station’s exterior with its dual cameras. The key is to see how well STP-H6’s circuitry processes the images amid the exposure to space radiation, and how well it sheds the heat generated by the electronics. (3/3)

The Surprising Reason Why NASA Hasn't Sent Humans to Mars Yet (Source: Business Insider)
We could have been on Mars 30 years ago. At the peak of the Apollo era in the early '70s, NASA was already planning its next step into the unknown. Its plans included building multiple space stations, continued trips to the Moon, and the first crewed mission to Mars by the 1980s. Can you imagine watching astronauts walk on Mars the same time the walkmen came out?

But NASA never sent humans to Mars in the '80s. And here we are 30 years later, still dreaming of the possibility. But the reason isn't necessarily a matter of technology or innovation. It actually comes down to politics. As a government agency, NASA's goals are determined by the Executive Branch. Since its inception, NASA has served under 12 presidents. And it was clear near the start that not every president would support NASA equally.

"So what's happened throughout all of space history after the Apollo program was over was to start, stop, start, stop, cancel. President comes in like Bush comes in to go to the Moon, back to Mars and next president comes in and cancels that. The agency is unable to sustain consistent funding to do anything." It wasn't until the Space Shuttle Program was nearing retirement that a crewed mission to Mars was finally considered and funded by a US president. (3/2)

Globalstar Plays Up Constellation's Spectrum Strategy as Debt Deadline Looms (Source: Space News)
Low-Earth-orbit satellite fleet operator Globalstar is meeting with telecom regulators around the world in an effort to globally authorize some of its satellite spectrum for mobile broadband services. Jay Monroe, Globalstar’s chairman and CEO, said Feb. 22 that the company has met with regulators in more than 30 countries to gain approval for terrestrial communications using S-band that, if approved, would cover around 1.1 billion people.

Successful monetization of some 16.5 MHz of S-band spectrum could help Globalstar meet upcoming debt payments that current revenues are insufficient to fulfill. Globalstar generated $112.7 million in revenue for 2017, up 16 percent annually, but not enough to generate a profit. The Covington, Louisiana-based operator reported a loss of $89.1 million for the year and of $132.6 million in 2016. Globalstar expects to be short “between $40 and 50 million” for debt payments in December. (3/2)

Rideshare Mission for U.S. Military Confirmed as Second Falcon Heavy Launch (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
More than two dozen satellites from the U.S. military, NASA and research institutions will ride into orbit on SpaceX’s second Falcon Heavy rocket launch, a mission currently scheduled for liftoff in June, a military spokesperson said. The flight is one of three Falcon Heavy missions that could blast off in 2018, after a successful maiden test flight Feb. 6 and the launch of an Arabsat communications craft around the end of the year.

Known as the Space Test Program-2, or STP-2, mission, the Falcon Heavy launch will launch with 25 spacecraft inside its nose cone, according to a spokesperson from the U.S. Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center. The Air Force reserved the STP-2 launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket in December 2012. At the time, officials said the mission would lift off in 2015, but the target launch date is currently no earlier than June. (3/1)

Harris Shows Off New Imager with Rocket Launch Footage (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
The launch of a powerful imaging satellite from Florida this week was recorded in footage captured by one of its predecessors. Melbourne-based Harris Corp. shared two image sequences Friday of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket taking off, carrying with it the weather imaging satellite GOES-S — which becomes the GOES-17 when it reaches orbit.

The footage, which patches together images taken each minute, was captured by the GOES-16 satellite, which launched in November 2016. “The older generation of GOES satellites could not have captured this because the image rate was too infrequent,” said Paul Griffith, a chief scientist for Harris. (3/2)

Could This Bold New Technique Boost Gravitational-Wave Detection? (Source: Space.com)
Gravitational waves that we can detect here on Earth are generated by the most energetic events in the cosmos, from colliding black holes to merging neutron stars. To spot these space-time ripples, which have traveled billions of light-years in some cases, scientists must build some of the most sensitive equipment the world has ever seen. But the very sensitivity of this gear means that vibrations, turbulence and even gas molecules in our atmosphere can drown out even the most powerful gravitational-wave signals in a crescendo of background noise.

Ingenious engineering solutions are therefore needed to pull the weak signal of gravitational waves out of the noise. In new research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists describe a potentially powerful new method that could, theoretically, be used to remove a key component of noise from gravitational-wave detectors and, in doing so, remove the requirement of having to build costly and complex vacuum chambers. (3/2)

Russia, China Strike Deal to Jointly Explore Outer Space (Source: Sputnik)
Russia's Rosсosmos and the China National Space Administration signed an agreement of intent for cooperation in the sphere of exploration of the Moon and the outer space as well as on the creation of the Joint Data Center on the lunar projects. (3/3)

A Mountain Range on Saturn’s Moon Iapetus May be a Former Ring (Source: New Scientist)
Saturn’s moon Iapetus resembles a walnut, with a ridge 20 kilometers high running around its centre. A new model suggests it could be made of rubble from the collapse of a former ring. And data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft could confirm it. Iapetus’ mountain range runs 1400 kilometers around the equator of the tiny moon. Scaled to Earth proportions, its peaks would reach over 100 kilometers high. Astronomers initially thought internal geological processes could have pushed the ridge up, but their models struggled to demonstrate this. (3/2)

March 6 Set for Next Facon-9 Launch at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: Florida Today)
SpaceX has been given the all-clear to proceed with an early Tuesday Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with a commercial communications satellite. SpaceX's fifth mission of the year – and second overall launch from the Space Coast in as many days – will target a 12:33 a.m. liftoff from Launch Complex 40. Teams have two hours to launch the satellite for Spain-based Hispasat. (3/3)

A Purpose-Driven Space Program? (Source: National Review)
On February 12 the Trump administration revealed its proposed budget for NASA. While the $19 billion in total funding provided was not much different from the levels approved by the Obama and Bush administrations, the new plan did manage to increase the incoherence in space-agency thinking to truly remarkable levels. Particularly outstanding examples of illogic were the administration’s decisions to cancel the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) while proceeding with a lunar-orbiting space station dubbed Deep Space Gateway. The planned lunar-orbiting space station is a solution in search of a problem.

Deep Space Gateway (recently renamed Lunar Orbital Platform–Gateway) is a boondoggle that will cost several tens of billions of dollars at the least and serve no useful purpose. We do not need a lunar-orbiting station to go to the Moon, or to Mars, or to near-Earth asteroids. We do not need it to go anywhere. There is nothing worth doing in lunar orbit, nothing to use, and nothing to explore. It is true that one could operate rovers on the lunar surface from orbit, but the argument that it is worth the expense of such a station in order to eliminate the two-second time delay involved in controlling them from Earth is absurd.

Yet the problem with Deep Space Gateway is much bigger than the waste of decades of time and tens of billions of dollars. The deeper problem is the form of thinking it represents. NASA’s astronomy and robotic planetary-exploration programs have achieved epic accomplishments because they are purpose-driven. In contrast, since the end of Apollo, NASA’s human-spaceflight program has been purpose-free. As a result, its accomplishments have been negligible. (3/2)

European Astronaut Center Shifts Emphasis to Deep Space Missions (Source: Room)
The European Astronaut Center (EAC) in Cologne, Germany, was established in 1990 by ESA for the selection, training, medical support and flight assignments of the European astronaut corps. It has become the ‘home’ of European astronauts. Human spaceflight is one of the key activities undertaken by ESA on behalf of its Member States and optimal health, as well as physical and technical training of astronauts, is crucial to the success of the human spaceflight program.

EAC has unique training, medical operations and astronaut operations/support expertise in Europe. While currently focused on the International Space Station (ISS) program, a large part of EAC’s competencies is relevant for any future human spaceflight program and its operational experience is a particular asset, having a heritage in spaceflight from earlier decades. EAC is now also focused on future exploration beyond the ISS and low Earth orbit (LEO) operations, and is actively developing collaborative programs related to deep space exploration missions. (3/2)

Here’s How Future Astronauts Could Survive the Radiation of Space (Source: Futurism)
NASA and the other space agencies thoroughly train, prepare, and equip their astronauts for spaceflight, but there’s one area that hasn’t been given much thought — primarily because, up until quite recently, extended stays in space hadn’t seemed imminent. Astronauts face a number of considerable health risks, many of which we’re still trying to understand, but exposure to radiation is one that would preclude longer and farther-reaching trips.

Unless we can figure out how to keep astronauts from succumbing to extended exposure — or reducing that exposure to survivable levels — radiation will dash our hopes of life on Mars. In fact, it would even prevent us from taking a vacation there. In an attempt to promote research on this often overlooked area, an international team from the NASA Ames Research Center and others have set out to devise a “roadmap” for what they call “human radioresistance.” Click here. (3/2)

Former NASA Astronaut: Not So Bad to Transfer ISS to Private Management (Source: LA Times)
Former NASA astronaut Sandy Magnus said that stepping away from the space station could be seen as a sign of progress toward the eventual goal of sending humans out into the solar system. By transferring management of the ISS to private industry, she said, NASA still could lease space to continue its research in low Earth orbit while focusing more of its efforts on places like the moon and Mars.

“It’s a question of, does NASA own the building or is it leasing the building?” said Magnus, who lived on the space station for 4 1/2 months in 2008 and 2009. Editor's Note: Maybe not a bad idea. Look at the success governments have had with privatizing our prisons! (3/2)