November 25, 2018

Musk: There's a 70% Chance That I Personally Go to Mars (Source: Axios)
Elon Musk, age 47, told "Axios on HBO" that he sees a 70% chance that he'll live to ride one of his SpaceX rockets to Mars. "I know exactly what to do," he said. "I’m talking about moving there." The big picture: That prediction is dismissed as fantasy by some experts. But Musk said he can envision a flight as soon as seven years from now, with a ticket price of "around a couple hundred thousand dollars." Musk shrugged off the objection that a Mars voyage could be an escape hatch for the rich for problems on this planet. (11/25)

ESA Would Not Like A Divorce With The UK Space Program (Source: Forbes)
‘It might be surprising to hear that 37% of Copernicus Earth Observation funding program derives from the ESA budget, so it makes sense to make our voices heard on the critical issue of the future of our collaboration with the U.K., even in the case of no deal Brexit’.

This is how Jan Worner, ESA Director General started his speech on a short visit in Athens, Greece. He outlined that the intention of the Organization is to be in good terms with the U.K. space program independently of the outcome of Brexit. Apart from Copernicus, this partnership can be taken for granted since, according to J. Worner, the ESA is an international organization beyond the scope of any single European country and in this framework cooperation with the U.K. has been settled.

However, the issue of Copernicus project is far more head-scratching, for one thing, because the E.U. is the main financial contributor with 63% and for another even if an agreement is reached for the financial issues, there are still some land-based stations in the U.K. that complicate things further. It has already been decided that the data center which supports the operation of the program will be transferred to Bologna by 2020. (11/24)

California Has Silicon Valley. Could Colorado Become Home to “Aerospace Alley? (Source: Denver Post)
When Joe Laurienti talks about his team designing a rocket engine in a rented attic in the early days of his aerospace company, it brings to mind stories about Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies that started as projects in somebody’s garage. Laurienti’s story about his company, Lafayette-based Ursa Major Technologies, might one day be part of industry lore if Colorado becomes known as “Aerospace Alley.”

It’s not really a moonshot kind of goal, considering that Colorado’s aerospace economy is already second only to California’s. Colorado has 180 aerospace companies and more than 500 businesses that provide space-related products and services. It has the highest concentration of private aerospace employment in the country: 26,620. And the industry in Colorado supports 190,880 direct and indirect jobs while pumping $15.4 billion into the economy each year. After someone suggested Colorado could be the Silicon Valley of aerospace, Barry and others spun off the idea of “Aerospace Alley” and have been spreading the word.

Representatives of the military, defense industry, Colorado Springs and state economic development agencies, private companies and the state’s congressional delegation are working together to position the state as the epicenter of “national security space” operations, Rich Burchfield said. The military bases, Air Force Space Command, universities and aerospace companies in the state have created an ecosystem to make that happen, added Burchfield, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and the chief defense development officer for the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Corp. (11/24)

Reaching for the Stars: Costa Ricans’ Role in Space Exploration (Source: Tico Times)
Last September, the book “To the Stars: Costa Rica in NASA” was launched by the Costa Rican Institute of Technology’s publishing house. This bilingual book, which I co-authored, introduces readers to the Costa Ricans who were hired by NASA or work(ed) at NASA centers as contractors. Their stories are related in an easy-to-read interview format and provide concrete advice from 10 exceptional Costa Ricans who achieved their NASA dreams as engineers, scientists and technicians. Click here. (11/25)

U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy (Source: New York Times)
A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”  (11/23)

NASA's $830-Million Mars Mission is About to Land (Source: Business Insider)
If you aren't nervous for NASA's InSight Mars probe, you probably should be. Getting a rocket ride to the red planet is the easy part. It's touching down on Mars that aerospace engineers consider to be one of the greatest challenges in the solar system; in fact, about a third of missions successfully launched to the red planet don't survive a landing. "It takes thousands of steps to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, and each one of them has to work perfectly," says Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The 789-lb lander will officially begin its descent to Mars at 2:40 p.m. ET on Monday and touch down by 2:54 p.m. ET. After that, NASA hopes to use InSight to decode the internal structure of Mars, among other mysteries. Here's a minute-by-minute look at the biggest moments of InSight's landing sequence — any of which could doom the robot. (11/24)

Mars InSight Probe: Listening to the Silence of Space (Source: BBC)
The UK team sending three tiny seismometers to Mars switched on their sensors during the long cruise to the Red Planet. What you hear is the sound from two of the microseismometers, speeded up 1,000 times. The background hiss is the noise from the sensors themselves, and the chirps are the thrusters of the InSight spacecraft as it keeps the solar arrays pointing at the Sun. Click here. (11/24)