October 8, 2018

Climate Report: Scientists Urge Deep Rapid Change to Limit Warming (Source: BBC)
It's the final call, say scientists, the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. Their dramatic report on keeping that rise under 1.5 degrees C states that the world is now completely off track, heading instead towards 3C. Keeping to the preferred target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels will mean "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society".

It will be hugely expensive - but the window of opportunity remains open. After three years of research and a week of haggling between scientists and government officials at a meeting in South Korea, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a special report on the impact of global warming of 1.5C.

The researchers have used these facts and numbers to paint a picture of the world with a dangerous fever, caused by humans. We used to think if we could keep warming below 2 degrees this century then the changes we would experience would be manageable. Not any more. This new study says that going past 1.5C is dicing with the planet's liveability. And the 1.5C temperature "guard rail" could be exceeded in just 12 years in 2030. (10/8)

We May Not Have Found Aliens Yet Because We’ve Barely Begun Looking (Source: Science News)
With no luck so far in a six-decade search for signals from aliens, you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Where is everyone?” A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching the volume of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans, astronomer Jason Wright at Penn State and colleagues say in a paper posted online September 19 at arXiv.org.

“If you looked at a random hot tub’s worth of water in the ocean, you wouldn’t always expect a fish,” Wright says. Still, that’s far more space searched than calculated in 2010 for the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. In that work, SETI pioneer Jill Tarter and colleagues imagined a “cosmic haystack” of naturally occurring radio waves she could sift through for the proverbial needle of an artificial, alien beacon. (9/30)

Griffin Proposes New Space Agency That ‘Disrupts’ Traditional Procurement (Source: Space News)
Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin is recommending that the Pentagon create a Space Development Agency to take over next-generation space programs and transform how the military acquires space technologies. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan had requested that Griffin and Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson submit separate proposals for how to create a Space Development Agency.

The standup of a Space Development Agency is one piece of a broader effort to form a new military service for space. Wilson submitted her plan in a Sep. 14 memo on how to organize a Space Force as a separate military department. Griffin’s proposal takes a very different approach. Wilson suggested the Space Development Agency should be organized under the existing Space Rapid Capabilities Office, geographically and organizationally connected to U.S. Space Command.

Griffin is proposing a new D.C.-based agency with a staff of 112 government personnel that would report to him initially, but eventually would shift to the control of a new assistant secretary of defense for space, an office that would first have to be approved by Congress. Griffin has been a frequent critic of the slow pace and high cost of military technology developments, and he contends that the Space Development Agency should lead a DoD-wide effort to accelerate innovation. (10/7)

Boeing Plans Changes to SLS Upper Stages (Source: Space News)
With NASA’s decision to continue using an interim upper stage for additional flights of the Space Launch System, Boeing is working on changes to both that stage and a more powerful upper stage. In an Oct. 3 call with reporters, John Shannon, vice president and program manager for the Space Launch System at Boeing, said NASA has asked Boeing to look at changes to the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) to improve its performance.

Those changes were prompted by the decision NASA made earlier this year to delay the introduction of the EUS. That stage was originally planned to enter use with the second SLS mission, Exploration Mission (EM) 2. Instead, the first flight of what’s known as the Block 1B configuration of SLS has been delayed to the fourth SLS launch, likely no earlier than 2024. (10/5)

SpaceX Launches Argentine Satellite, Posts First Ground-Landing on West Coast (Source: Space News)
SpaceX conducted its seventeenth launch of the year Oct. 7, sending an Argentine radar satellite into low-Earth orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission was also SpaceX’s first to include a successful land recovery of the rocket’s booster stage at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. All previous recoveries in California used a drone ship to land boosters out at sea.

The Falcon 9 Block 5 lifted off at 10:21 p.m. Eastern during an instantaneous launch window. The satellite, Saocom-1A, separated from the launcher’s upper stage about 13 minutes later. SpaceX landed the rocket’s first stage at a newly built landing pad called LZ-4 that is located near Vandenberg’s SLC-4E launch pad where the rocket took off. The company views ground-based rocket landings as better for expediting reuse, since drone ship landings require time to return to port.

SpaceX used the same first stage for the Saocom-1A mission that launched 10 satellites for Iridium about 10-and-a-half weeks ago, also from Vandenberg. Saocom-1A is a 3,000-kilogram synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite for the Argentine space agency CONAE that was originally contracted in 2009 for a launch in 2012. (10/8)

Blue Origin’s Anticlimactic Victory and Aerojet’s Plan B (Source: Space News)
ULA didn’t explain why it waited until now to select the BE-4. Some industry sources speculated that the announcement was delayed until the companies worked out final terms of the deal for the engines. However, Bruno said in April he already had a firm fixed-price deal for an initial set of engines that Blue Origin planned to produce at its headquarters in Kent, Washington.

Later sets of BE-4 engines will be assembled at a new factory Blue Origin plans to construct in Huntsville, Alabama, a site it announced in June 2017 but was pending a final decision on Vulcan. That choice not only allowed Blue Origin to tap into another pool of aerospace talent, but also secure additional political support. Aerojet's AR1 was long considered the underdog, in part because the engine was well behind the BE-4 in development.

Aerojet is now required to only “design, build and assemble” a single prototype engine by the end of 2019. Aerojet Rocketdyne spokesman Steve Warren said that the company was still interested in developing the AR1, arguing that the engine could instead be used to power medium-class launch vehicles. It’s unclear any such vehicles are actively being considered given the focus on both large vehicles like Vulcan and much smaller vehicles intended for smallsats. (10/5)

Hypersat Raises $85 Million (Source: Space News)
A startup company planning to develop hyperspectral imaging satellites emerged from stealth mode recently with a large funding round. HyperSat LLC said it has raised $85 million to launch two hyperspectral satellites, each weighing 200 to 300 kilograms, in 2020. The company sees demand from defense agencies as well as the agriculture, energy and natural resources sectors. Several other companies have proposed developing hyperspectral satellite systems, although some of those efforts failed before getting satellites launched. (10/8)

Kopra Departs Astronaut Corps (Source: NASA)
NASA astronaut Tim Kopra left the agency last week. Kopra, selected as an astronaut in 2000, spent 244 days in space on two International Space Station expeditions in 2009 and 2015–2016. Kopra, who retired from NASA Oct. 1, did not announce his future plans, but he is listed as a partner in Blue Bear Capital, which invests in companies in the energy industry. (10/8)

Higher Atmospheric CO2 Levels Could Keep Orbital Debris Aloft (Source: E&E News)
Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could affect the population of orbital debris. While an increase in carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere, it also cools the upper atmosphere, lowering its density. That reduces the amount of drag that objects in low Earth orbit experience, increasing their lifetimes. That helps operational satellites, but also means it takes longer for atmospheric drag to remove debris from those orbits. (10/8)