July 26, 2018

SpaceShipTwo Completes Longest Powered Flight to Date (Source: Parabolic Arc)
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity completed the program’s longest and highest powered flight this morning. Preliminary information was the engine burn lasted 42 seconds and the ship reached Mach 2.2 and an altitude of about 170,000 feet. The ship made a supersonic feathered descent as it deployed its twin tail booms in a shuttlecock configuration. The spacecraft was piloted by Dave Mackay and Mike ‘Sooch’ Masucci. On the previous flight at the end of May, the hybrid engine burned for 31 seconds and the vehicle reached Mach 1.9 and 114,500 feet. (7/26)

NASA May Ask Russia for Additional Soyuz Seats Due to Delayed U.S. Ships' Certification  (Source: Interfax)
The United States may fail to certify its manned spaceships before August 2020, in which case NASA will need additional seats on Russian Soyuz ships, according to the United States Government Accountability Office. "Additional delays could result in a gap in U.S. access to the space station as NASA has contracted for seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft only through November 2019," the GAO said.

"The earliest and latest possible completion dates for certification in NASA's April 2018 schedule risk analysis indicate it is possible that neither contractor would be ready before August 2020, leaving a potential gap in access of at least 9 months," it said. A source in the Energia Corporation told Interfax that because of the extended period of operation of Russia's Soyuz spaceships, the last NASA astronaut will be transported under the contract concluded via Boeing in January 2020, instead of November 2019.

"Hence, the United States and its partners may temporarily lose access to the ISS for seven months, instead of nine," the source said. NASA could ask Roscosmos for assigning additional seats for its astronauts on Russian Soyuz spaceships, he said. "If the United States fails to certify its manned spaceships by August 2020, they may need additional seats on Russian Soyuz manned ships. Yet it is physically possible to assign just one seat per Russian spaceship, which is meant for tourists. Two other seats are reserved for Russian crewmembers of the ISS," the source said. (7/12)

Iran’s Private Sector to Get More Involved With the Country’s Space Program (Source: Techrasa)
The Director of the Iranian Space Agency (ISA), Morteza Barari, said that in ISA, a proper program has been developed for the withdrawal of the state administration in the country’s space sector. According to Barari the license for the private telecommunication operators is one of these actions and they are developing a license for the private satellite operators.

“Our main goal in the second ten-year space plan is to consolidate and develop the infrastructure and making space applications and services more inclusive in the community. At the moment, all of the world’s top reports focus on the pivotal economy of space, and now as the space sector has been linked to the private sector, statistics show that from $345 billion revenue of this sector, $260 billion of it is from the private sector,” Barari added.

“Our goal is to increase and highlight the role of the private sector in the country’s space sector, as the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (ICT), accounted 92% of the ICT area to the sector,” he said, emphasizing the necessity of serious and effective participation of the private sector in the development of space technology. Iran Space Agency (ISA) is also planning to fund an Iranian satellite navigation system. ISA is also planning to set permanent space centers in northeastern and western parts of the country. (7/1)

TESS: Our New Planet Hunter (Source: Air & Space)
The next generation of humans will see the night sky entirely differently from the way we see it today. Even in cities, where the glare of lights drowns out all but the brightest stars, people will be able to look up, locate a distant sun, and describe the alien worlds that orbit it. Giant telescopes on frigid mountaintops will have scrutinized those worlds, helping astronomers discern their sizes and basic compositions. A telescope orbiting Earth will have peered into their atmospheres, and may have found signs of life. By staring at star glint—the bright reflection of light off an ocean—astronomers should be able to map planetary continents and discover many of their alien Everests and Grand Canyons.

No longer a sea of nearly identical stars, the night sky will be populated by places: planets with names and characteristics we will come to know almost as intimately as those of Jupiter or Mars. This era of discovery begins now, with NASA’s latest planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Launched in April, the TESS mission marks a new chapter in the way scientists study exoplanets. We will no longer be astounded—as we have been over the last decade—by the sheer number of planets in the cosmos, but by the diversity of their structures and constituents. (7/26)

Latest Falcon 9 Fairing Recovery Attempt Foiled by Weather (Source: Teslarati)
Just a handful of days after SpaceX’s second-ever successful launch and landing of their upgraded Falcon 9 Block 5, the company has completed the same feat on the opposite side of the U.S., debuting the Block 5 rocket with a launch and booster recovery from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB). Sadly, the vessel’s Iridium-7 fairing catch attempt was sullied from the start by inclement weather – primarily wind shear –  that significantly hampered the accuracy of each fairing halve’s parafoil guidance, meaning that Mr Steven’s crew did see the parasailing halves touch down, but too far away to catch them in Mr Steven’s large net. (7/25)

The New Rockets Racing to Make Space Affordable (Source: Bloomberg)
Humankind has been flinging scientific equipment, satellites, and even living things (including the occasional astronaut) into orbit for more than 50 years, often for eye-watering sums of money that only governments could afford. But unlike during the early days of NASA preeminence, the rocket launch business over the past few years has matured into one where dozens of private companies around the globe are racing to see how cheaply they can send material into space.

For some outfits, that means developing smaller rockets that are designed to carry just a few hundred kilograms into low earth orbit (LEO)—generally altitudes of 2,400 kilometers or less—at a cost of as little as $250,000. If you’re a micro-satellite operator who can’t sit around waiting for a larger launch vehicle to sell all its payload slots to other customers, this is a game-changer. Click here. (7/26)

The Little Ion Engine That Could (Source: Bloomberg)
Inside an old brick candy factory north of Boston, 30 young rocket scientists with scruff fringing their hairnets shuffle among machines and curl over microscopes, tinkering with tiny tools like watch-makers. Accion Systems Inc. essentially makes one product, a device about the size of a deck of cards that’s designed to slowly and silently nudge satellites, spacecraft, and other galactic ephemera through the blackness. Technically, the Tile—an acronym for tiled ionic liquid electrospray—is an ion engine, which is to say it runs on a stream of charged particles, much like a battery. Stick enough of them onto a giant craft, and you can putter out to Mars. (7/26)

The Cosmic Radiation Forecast Could Be Bad for a Human Mars Mission (Source: Bloomberg)
Research has shown that exposure to space radiation (in all forms, including from the sun itself) increases astronauts’ risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer later in life. Younger astronauts are particularly susceptible, and women are more likely to get lung, breast, and thyroid cancer. To date, only the 12 Americans who flew the Apollo moon missions from 1969 to 1972 have ever left the magnetosphere, but they didn’t encounter particularly ferocious radiation baths. “You look at the life span of the average American, and the Apollo astronauts exceed that,” says NASA's J.D. Polk.

The Orion, the ship NASA wants to use for its proposed moon mission, was built with integrated warning systems. At a meeting in Westminster, Colo., in April, solar scientists got a preview of how a live crew might fare in the event of a radiation spike. A short video clip revealed a warning system that’s both toddler-certified and scientifically sound: Following an alarm, crew members would empty the Orion’s closets of equipment, then climb inside and pile as much stuff as possible onto themselves. The expected exposure level could drop by half.

Just how big a problem cosmic radiation will be is an open question. Schwadron’s grand minimum theory has gained some traction among scholars, if not wide acceptance. At the meeting of solar scientists in Colorado, McIntosh asked those who supported the hypothesis to raise their hands. His own hand shot up in support, as did a few others’, but most in the audience were skeptical. Grand minimums are easier to observe than to predict. Click here. (7/26)

Jeff Bezos Wants to Send You to Space, Too (Source: Bloomberg)
Guiding Blue Origin LLC “is the most important work I’m doing. It’s crucial,” Bezos told an audience in May at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference. He founded the rocket company 18 years ago in an old warehouse south of Seattle, originally stocking it with tinkerers and science fiction authors who could help reimagine space travel.

Now the company, known in the space business as Blue, employs more than 1,500 software engineers and rocket scientists, most of them at its headquarters in Kent, Wash., and the West Texas launch site. It plans to launch New Shepard with test pilots on board as soon as this year, and in 2019 it will sell tickets to brave tourists who want to sit atop a tank of combustible liquid hydrogen and oxygen to experience four minutes of sublime weightlessness in suborbital space. (7/26)

Welcome to the New Space Age (Source: Bloomberg)
A trail marker was laid down in February, when SpaceX equipped a Falcon Heavy rocket with a Tesla Roadster and a data crystal containing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and fired it toward Mars, then landed two of the Falcon’s boosters in synchrony at Cape Canaveral. At least 2.3 million people watched the YouTube livestream—high by internet standards, if far short of the hundreds of millions who tuned in for the first moon landing.

Where the Apollo era was marked by singular, cost-is-no-object technological feats and suffused with political and cultural meaning, the new one has been more diffuse and democratic, fueled by ever-cheaper launches that have opened space to startups, researchers, and smaller countries. A full-fledged space economy is within reach, and with it, perhaps, a permanent human presence above.

Technology has, in stunning fashion, shown us that we can become a spacefaring species. But those of us who don’t speak vector calculus will be more than gawkers. We’ll help to determine how we go. The shift to a more accessible, urgent, and potentially profitable era of space exploration means there are decisions to make about ownership, environmental impact, and more. Click here. (7/26)

Natalie Portman Is Almost Unrecognizable as She Transforms Into NASA Astronaut for Pale Blue Dot (Source: People)
Natalie Portman’s new look is out of this world. The Oscar winner had fans doing a double take Wednesday after she revealed her transformation into fictional NASA astronaut Lucy Cola for the film Pale Blue Dot. In the photograph, Portman, 37, sported a bright blue NASA jumpsuit and a lanyard, along with a brown wig cut in a small bob. The film centers around Cola after she returns to Earth from a mission to outer space and how her grip on reality unravels as she becomes entangled in a love affair with a fellow astronaut (played by Jon Hamm). (7/26)

Air Force and NASA Look to Collaborate on Deep Space Medicine (Source: Air Force Times)
In early June, the U.S. space agency provided a presentation on manned deep space missions and how medical researchers at Travis AFB fit into their long-term vision. “NASA is being chartered to come up with medical capabilities for long-term exploration,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Leonardo Tato, director of the Clinical Investigation Facility, or CIF, within the 60th Medical Support Squadron. “Currently, their medical capacities are based on their mission to 230 miles low orbit.”

Dr. David Loftus at NASA sees Travis AFB as a potential boon to space medicine research. “With our medical technologies and their abilities to test them with real-world application through research, the partnership will be vital to our success," he said. The collaboration between NASA and Travis is a perfect fit because of the similarities they share, said Lt. Col. Ian Stewart, a medical doctor at the 60th Medical Support Squadron. (7/26)

We’ll Soon Have Ten Times More Satellites in Orbit – Here’s What That Means (Source: The Conversation)
There are currently 1,738 active satellites in orbit. Mega constellations will increase that by an order of magnitude in the next few years. As well as the strain on bandwidth, the Earth’s orbit is going to become much more congested. This raises important environmental questions. Some operators such as OneWeb have made encouraging noises about managing the end of life of their satellites, but serious concerns remain. There’s an opportunity for the next generation of space entrepreneurs to be true pioneers by establishing a sustainable way of working in space.

This aside, the industry’s growth potential looks staggering. A recent report from Morgan Stanley predicted the space industry would grow from US$350 billion in 2016 to over US$1.1 trillion by 2040. But one vital question is, where will it leave incumbents like Iridium? These players have crucial advantages: above all, they are there. They have attracted the investment and have put the hardware into space. They offer an established platform based on reliable, proven technology; many customers will prefer that over cheaper, experimental solutions. (7/25)

Satellite Broadband Moving Toward Reality with Mega Constellations (Source: The Conversation)
Until now, satellite broadband has had significant disadvantages compared to Earth-based alternatives like ADSL and fibre optic. Due to the distance the signals have to travel and the weather, there are issues with latency and sluggish responses, which is problematic for the likes of gamers. The speed of satellite internet is substantially slower than even the cheapest cable-based provider. It’s currently seen as little more than a back-stop in rural or hard-to-access areas.

The vision is to use mega constellations of satellites to disrupt the domestic and home broadband market with affordable, low-latency, global internet coverage at speeds comparable to ASDL. At the forefront is OneWeb, a US-based start-up launching the first in its series of satellites later this year. It hopes to have “fully bridged” the divide with cable-based broadband by 2027.

Where Iridium NEXT uses 66 satellites weighing 860kg each, OneWeb is starting with over 640 satellites, each weighing 150kg. Other companies, meanwhile, such as the UK’s Sky and Space Global, are proposing to use a constellation of 200 very small satellites, each only weighing 10kg, to provide voice or text communications on mobile phones to people in hard-to-access areas. (7/25)

Space Tourism Economics – Financing and Regulating Trips to the Final Frontier (Source: The Conversation)
American engineer and businessman Dennis Tito paid US$20m in 2001 to become the world’s first official space tourist. He travelled to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Russian Soyuz capsule and then spent eight days on board, prompting some debate about the appropriateness of using the facility for financial gain. Since Tito, six other commercial passengers have visited the ISS – each on Soyuz spacecraft at US$20m a piece.

To the ordinary person, commercial space travel may seem like a pipe dream, but at an embryonic level a few well-funded space companies are creaking into action. Jeff Bezos has announced that a passenger flying with his aerospace company, Blue Origin, will pay between US$200,000 and US$300,000 for a ticket – comparable to Virgin Galactic’s proposed price of US$250,000. Passengers will experience weightlessness for three to six minutes, and enjoy unparalleled views of the stars and the curvature of the Earth.

The New Shepard rocket which Blue Origin plans to use for commercial trips has been in development since 2006. It will carry six commercial astronauts on each launch, and launches cost tens of millions of US dollars. Elon Musk has said that it costs US$62m to launch his Falcon 9 rocket, and US$90m for the much larger Falcon Heavy. If this seems like a lot, then consider the billions the rockets cost to develop. Jeff Bezos reportedly liquidates around US$1 billion per year to fund Blue Origin, and the cost of the company’s New Glenn rocket alone was US$2.5 billion. Click here. (6/25)

Branson Hopes Virgin Galactic Can Get Him to Space This Year (Source: C/Net)
Richard Branson believes Virgin Galactic is "on the verge" of fulfilling its 14-year-long dream of getting to space. "Before the end of the year I hope to be sitting in a Virgin Galactic spaceship, going to space," Branson said. "Space is tough -- it is rocket science," he continued, alluding to the company's troubled launch history. Charting a course to space has not been easy, with a test flight crashing in the Mojave Desert in 2014, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another. In May, a series of successful test flights put Virgin Galactic back on track -- but can it really get to space before the end of the year?

Branson's claims should be taken with a mighty grain of salt. He has made similar declarations throughout the life of Virgin Galactic's service and come up short. In 2007, he believed his spacecraft would take its maiden flight within 18 months. In October last year, he again suggested that spaceflight was only months away. After 14 years and one catastrophic failure, there's reason to be skeptical of this updated timeline. (7/25)

Japanese Official Arrested as Ministry is Rocked by JAXA Bribery Scandal (Source: Asahi Shimbun)
The education ministry is reeling from the arrest of a second high-ranking bureaucrat this month. Investigators with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office on July 26 arrested Kazuaki Kawabata, 57, director-general for international affairs at the education ministry, on suspicion of accepting bribes in the form of wining and dining when he was assigned to work as a vice president at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) between August 2015 and March 2017. He was in charge of general affairs and personnel matters, according to sources. At one time, he was in charge of evaluating contracts for projects open to bidding. (7/26)

Boeing's CEO Is Bullish on Trump's Space Force (Source: The Street)
Trump's Space Force -- and his overall push back into space exploration -- could be a huge opportunity for Boeing. "I am very encouraged by what I see is the Administration leaning forward on investing in all dimensions of space, not just Space Force but more broadly, the work going into space exploration and the re-invigoration of that entire ecosystem," Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg told TheStreet on a post earnings media call Wednesday.

Muilenburg says he views space as a growth opportunity through Boeing's satellites and deep space/low Earth orbit products. "[Space travel] It's good for business, it creates growth opportunities for us and is also a way to develop STEM talent for the future." (7/25)

Debate on Space Force is Helpful, Says SecAF (Source: Space News)
Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said Wednesday that the debate about establishing a separate Space Force has been "tremendously helpful." Wilson, interviewed at a Washington Post event, said that the debate has raised awareness of how space has become a warfighting domain, something that was difficult for the Pentagon to previously acknowledge. Wilson carefully avoided taking a stance on the creation of a separate Space Force, though. "It's all about the ability to fight," she said. "And if we focus on that, and not on which boxes move around, we'll do the right thing for the nation." (7/25)

Is Mars' Soil Too Dry to Sustain Life? (Source: Space Daily)
Life as we know it needs water to thrive. Even so, we see life persist in the driest environments on Earth. But how dry is too dry? At what point is an environment too extreme for even microorganisms, the smallest and often most resilient of lifeforms, to survive? To help answer this question, a research team from NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley traveled to the driest place on Earth: the Atacama Desert in Chile, a 1000 kilometer strip of land on South America's west coast.

Scientists have a few tools to figure out whether a sample is growing or just surviving. One important sign is stress. Living long enough to grow and adapt in extreme deserts like the Atacama - or potentially on Mars - is no easy task. If life is really growing in this extremely dry environment, it's going to be stressed, while dormant life simply surviving will not. Because dormant life is not able to even try to grow or reproduce, there are no stress markers, like changes in the structure of certain cell molecules. Astrobiologists can look for some tell-tale signs of this stress to search for evidence of growth in the parched soils.

The science team collected soil samples from across the Atacama Desert and brought them back to their lab at Ames. There, they performed tests to identify stress markers in the samples by looking at features common to all known living organisms. One stress marker can be found in lipids, molecules that make up the outer surface of a living microbial cell, known as its membrane. When cells are exposed to stressful conditions, their lipids change structure, becoming more rigid. Scientists found this marker in less dry parts of the Atacama, but it was mysteriously missing from the driest regions, where microbes should be more stressed. (7/25)

NASA May Delay WFIRST to Compensate for JWST Overruns (Source: Space News)
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Wednesday that the agency could delay the WFIRST astrophysics mission to cover the cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope. Bridenstine, testifying in the first half of a two-part House Science Committee hearing on JWST's cost overruns, said that he recommended "that we move forward with WFIRST after we move forward with JWST."

A NASA spokesperson later said that covering the $490 million in additional funds needed for JWST in 2020 and 2021 from WFIRST would roughly cut that later mission's budget by a third in those two years, resulting in a launch delay of "up to a few years." The second part of the hearing will take place this morning, with Wes Bush, CEO of prime contractor Northrop Grumman, scheduled to testify. (7/25)

ESA's BepiColombo Ready for Mid-October Launch to Mercury (Source: ESA)
ESA has set a mid-October launch date for its first mission to Mercury. The agency said Thursday that the launch of the BepiColombo mission on an Ariane 5 is scheduled for the early morning hours of Oct. 19 from Kourou, French Guiana. BepiColombo is a joint mission with JAXA that includes an ESA-built orbiter to study the planet and a JAXA-built spacecraft to study the planet's magnetosphere. The launch window will be open through late November. (7/26)

LeoLabs Raises $13 Million in Series A Funding (Source: Space News)
LeoLabs has raised $13 million to expand its space tracking network. The company raised the Series A round to build additional radars outside the United States and enhance its software platform for tracking objects in low Earth orbit. The funding round was led by WERU Investment of Tokyo and Airbus Ventures, the European aerospace giant's early-stage investment group. (7/26)

NASA Shifts Commercial Crew Astronauts Announcement From KSC to JSC (Source: NASA)
NASA confirmed Wednesday that it will name the astronauts flying on the first commercial flights next week. The agency said it will make the announcement next Friday at the Johnson Space Center, naming the crews not just for the crewed test flights by Boeing and SpaceX but also the first post-certification missions by each company. The announcement was previously expected to take place at the Kennedy Space Center, possibly with Vice President Mike Pence in attendance. Instead, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and other agency and company officials will make the announcement. (7/25)

Space is Open for Business (Source: Tech Crunch)
Students at Cal Poly and Stanford were using those same cell phone components to assemble what they called CubeSats. In LEO, where satellites naturally de-orbit within five years because of drag from atmospheric particles, they don’t need exotic radiation-proof parts. Standard modules for DIY CubeSats can now be procured on hobbyist sites as easily as buying a book on Amazon. Like the DARPA engineers who coded the internet protocol, these students hadn’t appreciated the impact of their invention.

CubeSats sparked a realization that true scalability comes not from bigger satellites, but many cheap small ones, and suddenly five accumulated decades of Moore’s Law turned the space industry upside down. Venture-backed startups like Planet Labs and Skybox (now merged) developed constellations of micro-satellites to image the Earth far faster than enormous, lumbering incumbents. Other ventures like SpaceX and OneWeb are deploying massive constellations to serve the planet with internet and IoT communications. (7/24)

Scientists Find Liquid Water on Mars (Source: Tech Crunch)
After years of observation and analysis, researchers announced today that they have identified liquid water on Mars — a ton of it. It’s a mile underground and is likely only liquid because it is briny and under great pressure, but nevertheless, this groundbreaking discovery could change both our understanding of the Red Planet and our plans to one day go there ourselves.

The discovery was made by Italian researchers from a variety of institutions, led by Roberto Orosei at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Bologna; the paper describing their work detecting and characterizing the water was published today in the journal Science. How did they do it? The study used data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, or MARSIS, aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter. It’s a ground penetrating radar that has already contributed to the story of water on Mars, with its readings suggesting basins and other features indicating there were once oceans there. (7/25)

Russia's New Rocket Project Might Resurrect a Soviet-Era Colossus (Source: Popular Mechanics)
On November 15, 1988, the Soviet Union's Buran spaceplane lifted skyward on an Energia rocket, joining NASA's space shuttle as a new breed of reusable spacecraft. But with the USSR on the brink of collapse, that hopeful first launch would be the orbiter's last. While the Buran spaceplane remains resigned to history, a 21st century update means that the Energia could become the basis for Russia's new super heavy rocket.

Russia again wants a super rocket. A few months ago its state space agency, Roscosmos, began a year-long study that will consider three designs, one of them resembling the ill-fated Energia. If this new super-heavy rocket becomes reality, it would join the largest class of heavier-than-air flying machines known to humanity, on par with the famous Saturn V rocket.

In its proposed form, the new Energia would be able to haul up to 80 tons of cargo into the low orbits and around 20 tons into the orbit around the Moon. Whereas the original Energia carried a side-mounted space plane, the new vehicle is designed to carry payloads in its nose cone, sending them on lunar-bound trajectories. (7/24)

Russia's Soyuz Spacecraft Could Find New Life as a Lunar Taxi (Source: Popular Mechanics)
On June 28, the new head of the Roscosmos State Corporation Dmitry Rogozin said that Russia could begin human missions to the Moon before completing the development of its next-generation spacecraft Federatsiya (Federation). Instead, Russia will once again rely on its 50-year-old legend. Rogozin says moonshots could be possible with the existing Soyuz spacecraft, which currently taxis crews to the ISS . "The Soyuz was originally developed for the (Soviet) lunar program and that means its upgrade (for lunar missions) is quite possible, until we get the new vehicle," Rogozin says. (7/6)

Top Five Teams Win a Share of $100,000 in Virtual Modeling Stage of NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Competition (Source: NASA)
NASA and partner Bradley University of Peoria, Illinois, have selected the top five teams to share a $100,000 prize in the latest stage of the agency’s 3D-Printed Habitat Centennial Challenge competition. Winning teams successfully created digital representations of the physical and functional characteristics of a house on Mars using specialized software tools. The teams earned prize money based on scores assigned by a panel of subject matter experts from NASA, academia and industry. The judges interviewed and evaluated submissions from 18 teams from all over the world. (7/23)

Launch Delay Raises Concerns of Limited Window for NASA's Solar Probe (Sources: Florida Today, Aviation Week)
A NASA science satellite that is to become the first spacecraft to sample the Sun’s atmosphere will miss half of its 19-day launch period due to processing issues during flight preparations. After the latest glitch in launch preparations, the $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe mission to “touch the sun” may have as few as nine days to fly from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport next month before having to stand down until next year.

NASA is now targeting a liftoff before dawn on Aug. 11 atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket. The seven-year mission must launch by Aug. 19 to line up flybys of Venus that are critical to setting the trajectory away from Earth and toward the sun. (7/25)