May 5, 2018

NASA, ULA Launch Mission to Study How Mars Was Made (Source: NASA)
NASA’s Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission is on a 300-million-mile trip to Mars to study for the first time what lies deep beneath the surface of the Red Planet. InSight launched at 7:05 a.m. EDT (4:05 am PDT) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

“The United States continues to lead the way to Mars with this next exciting mission to study the Red Planet’s core and geological processes,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “I want to congratulate all the teams from NASA and our international partners who made this accomplishment possible. As we continue to gain momentum in our work to send astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, missions like InSight are going to prove invaluable.”

First reports indicate the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket that carried InSight into space was seen as far south as Carlsbad, California, and as far east as Oracle, Arizona. One person recorded video of the launch from a private aircraft flying along the California coast. (5/5)
    
CRS-14 Dragon Returns Experiments, Hardware to Earth (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule returned to Earth with some 4,000 pounds of material. Among that downmass were several experiments. These include samples from the Metabolic Tracking study, which is designed to study techniques to improve pharmaceuticals in microgravity; the APEX-06 investigation, which grew grain crops so that scientists can understand the development of the seedling’s gene expression; and the third Fruit Fly Lab, which is studying the effects of microgravity and the space environment on innate immunity.

NASA said it was also returning Robonaut2, a humanoid robot that was launched in 2011 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery during STS-133. While it has been in space for more than seven years and was even given a set of “legs,” complications with its hardware never allowed it to fully operate as designed. In fact, it has remained packed away for most of its stay aboard the outpost with astronauts occasionally attempting repairs. (5/5)

Air Force Awards Contracts to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman for Missile-Warning Satellite Constellation (Source: Space News)
The Air Force has selected two contractors to begin work on a new missile-warning constellation. The two sole-source contracts are to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for the next-generation overhead persistent infrared program. Lockheed Martin will develop the geosynchronous orbit satellites and Northrop Grumman will work on the polar system.

The GEO contract will be sole-sourced to Lockheed Martin Space to “define requirements, create the initial design and identify and procure flight hardware for a satellite to operate in geosynchronous orbit,” said an Air Force news release. The second contract will be sole-sourced to Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems to define polar system requirements. Lockheed also will be responsible to conduct a payload competition. (5/4)

Creating the Next Generation of Space Innovators (Source: CSA)
Young Canadians are the innovators who will take the Canadian Space Program into the future. What better way to learn about space engineering than to design, build, launch and operate your own satellite? Post-secondary students from each province and territory have won the chance to design, build and launch into space their own CubeSat through the Canadian CubeSat Project. Today, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jenni Sidey unveiled the teams selected to participate in this new national student space initiative. (5/4)

Commercial Space Travelers Will Soon Be Able to Send a Tweet From Space (Source: FOX News)
Customers, passengers, and employees have grown to expect access to the Internet wherever they are. Many businesses and individuals can’t get anything done without it. So as billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk work to make commercial space travel not just a reality but a norm, one group is working to make sure people can stay connected while they are in zero gravity.

“We want to be able to live and work in space, have fun in space, and vacation in space. And when we get there we want to make sure we have Internet,” said Brian Barnett, CEO of Santa Fe, NM-based Solstar. Space may be the final frontier, but it’s no longer the final place people can go to disconnect. On Sunday, Solstar sent the first tweet from space, using only commercial infrastructure. (5/4)

Boeing CEO Foresees Busy Commercial ‘Ecosystem’ in Earth Orbit (Source: GeekWire)
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg predicts that the number of space destinations will grow from one — the International Space Station — to 10 or 12 over the next couple of decades, creating an “economically viable marketplace” in Earth orbit. And he sees Boeing being in the thick of it.

Tonight Muilenburg sketched out a vision of space commerce and exploration that extended from low Earth orbit to Mars and beyond. Muilenburg repeated his controversial pledge that NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System, which has Boeing as one of its lead contractors, will be the first rocket to send humans to Mars. (SpaceX and its fans might beg to differ on that point.)

But it was his vision for a commercial transportation system in low Earth orbit that showed how many of Boeing’s interests — ranging from airplane and satellite manufacturing to its work on the Phantom Express space plane and CST-100 Starliner space taxi — come together on the final frontier. (5/2)

Lockheed-Boeing Space Launch Venture Seeks to Maintain Edge (Source: Politico)
United Launch Alliance is building its new rocket to support military leaders who say that space will soon become a warfighting domain, the company’s CEO said. Tory Bruno, who has led the launch company since 2014, said ULA is designing its Vulcan rocket to go above and beyond the capabilities the government requested to make sure it can be useful in the future contested space environmenty.

Bruno said the rocket will be able to fly to more orbits than the government wanted, and will be able to carry more mass to those orbits — “in some cases, a lot more mass, because we anticipate in future years as the threat evolves and the country’s architecture to deal with that becomes finalized, that the requirements will change.”

Despite having this additional capability, Bruno said, the rocket will still be able to meet the price goal of under $100 million per launch set by Hyten, though he declined to get into specifics amid the ongoing competition for the Air Force’s launch services agreement contract. (5/4)

ULA Workers to Vote Sunday on Strike (Source: Decatur Daily)
Employees of United Launch Alliance, one of the area’s largest employers, could go on strike Monday, depending on the results of a union vote Sunday.

The negotiations committee for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers last week recommended that its members reject management’s three-year contract proposal and authorize a strike. The recommendation came after ULA management gave its “last, best and final offer.” The existing three-year contract expires Sunday.

The contract covers 300 hourly employees located in Decatur’s 607-employee plant and another 300 at ULA’s launch sites in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. (5/4)

Small Rockets, Big Dreams: More Spaceports are Taking Root Across the U.S. (Source: USA Today)
A ribbon of concrete runway on Colorado’s eastern plains is poised to become the cutting edge of civilian spaceflight if local boosters realize their long-held dreams to travel anywhere in the world in just minutes.

Known as Spaceport Colorado, the nascent launch complex about 30 miles east of Denver is awaiting final federal approval to join nearly a dozen sites around the country hoping to cash in on the commercialization of space travel and inexpensive satellite launches.

Because most of the sites are in out-of-the-way places, such as Kodiak Island, Alaska, or Truth or Consequences, N.M., they've largely remained under the radar and out of the public eye. Instead, high-profile sites like California's Vandenberg Air Force Base — set to launch a Mars probe Saturday — grab the spotlight. Click here. (5/3)

Are We There Yet? (Source: The Atlantic)
Before InSight endures its terrifying descent to the surface of Mars, NASA has to get through six months of waiting. During the long cruise, InSight’s team of scientists, engineers, and other staff will practice operations, test out command sequences, and exercise a whole lot of patience.

The journey begins with a collective sigh of relief from the people InSight leaves behind on Earth. By the time a spacecraft reaches the launchpad, virtually every piece of it has been vigorously tested—dunked into cryogenic chambers, shaken violently from side to side, blasted with loud noises. It’s held together with heavy metal, but also some blood, sweat, and tears. When the spacecraft finally launches into space, a weight is lifted in more ways than one.

Most of the cruise is one giant dress rehearsal. Staff undergo a barrage of operations-readiness tests. They practice the operations, data collection, and analysis that their spacecraft will experience once it’s on Mars. They simulate everything from the deployment of instruments to planning meetings. They test how and when to send commands, making sure a set from one team doesn’t interfere with another’s. (5/4)

Artificial Intelligence Spots Gravitational Waves (Source: Physics World)
A deep-learning system that can sift gravitational wave signals from background noise has been created by physicists in the UK. Deep learning is a neural-inspired pattern recognition technique that has already been applied to image processing, speech recognition and medical diagnoses, among other things. Chris Messenger and colleagues at the University of Glasgow have shown that their system is as effective as conventional signal processing and has the potential to identify gravitational-wave signals much more quickly. (5/4)

America’s Space Industry Has a Hiring Problem, and it Must Battle the Silicon Valley to Solve it (Source: Space News)
For years, the U.S. space and satellite industry benefited from the strength of the military and broadcast sectors. When space companies needed to hire more engineers, they could use defense-backed research and development contracts to create positions, or they could lure professionals away from the television industry and apply their skills to satellite transmissions.

That’s not currently the case. Broadcast companies are keeping headcounts low as Netflix and other over-the-top internet streaming becomes more widespread. And the defense sector, with a renewed focus on reducing costs, is not the skilled-workforce catalyst it once was. Today, tech talent is being lured away from the space industry. Web giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon are snapping up engineering graduates wooed by high-paying jobs and a sprawling work campus rife with amenities.

The result is a “graying” aerospace industry — one that is losing people to retirement faster than it can backfill jobs with fresh talent. “For every person that’s leaving, we are not seeing a one-to-one replacement,” said Jeff Matthews, a Deloitte consultant with a background in the space industry. “The people that are driving these massive programs at the top, their median age is in the mid-50s, which is the highest it’s ever been for the satellite and national security space side in several decades.” Comparatively, the median age across all engineering fields in the U.S. is between the late 30s and early 40s, according to Deloitte. (5/3)