November 27, 2018

InSight Lands on Mars After Another 'Seven Minutes of Terror' (Source: Space News)
NASA's InSight spacecraft successfully landed on Mars Monday. The spacecraft landed in the Elysium Planitia region near the Martian equator at 2:53 p.m. Eastern. Confirmation that the spacecraft's two solar arrays had unfolded and were generating power came about seven hours after landing. The spacecraft is in good condition, officials said, and in a location that appears to be ideal for its scientific mission. Spacecraft controllers will spend the next few months scouting out locations near the spacecraft to place its two main instruments, a seismometer and heat flow probe, and then deploy them. InSight has a two-year prime mission to study the structure and composition of the interior of Mars. (11/27)

Trump Claims He Has 'Reawakened' NASA After Years-Long Mars Mission Makes Landing (Source: Space.com)
President Trump mentioned the InSight landing, and Space Force, at a campaign rally Monday. Trump, in Mississippi to campaign for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) ahead of a runoff election Tuesday, mentioned the landing in a rally. "They were celebrating at NASA. We have reawakened NASA, and that's a good thing," he said. Trump also mentioned plans to create a Space Force and his support of private sector efforts to develop new rockets. "Just make sure you have an American flag on the rocket." (11/27)

India Plans to Launch 30 Microsatellites Along with HysIS Satellite (Source: PTI)
India plans to launch a cluster of small satellites late Wednesday. A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle is scheduled to launch at about 11 p.m. Eastern Wednesday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The primary payload is HysIS, a hyperspectral imaging satellite. It is also carrying 30 small satellites as secondary payloads, including small satellites for Planet, Spire and other companies. (11/27)

Crofters May Take Stottish Spaceport to Court (Source: The Herald)
Despite a recent vote by landowners, plans for a Scottish spaceport may still face a legal dispute. Members of the Melness Crofting Estate voted recently to approve construction of a spaceport on their land, but the minority who opposed the deal may take the case to the Scottish Land Court. Resolving a dispute there could take years, delaying development of the launch site. (11/27)

3D Printed Body Parts Being Studied for Future Astronauts (Source: Room)
It is now becoming increasingly commonplace to build rockets from parts made from additive manufacturing, but could a different type of 3D printing involving the human body soon be the new normal for keeping astronauts alive on long duration flights beyond low Earth orbit? Heading to the International Space Station (ISS) in December, is an experiment that gives body-building a whole new meaning.

Due for delivery onboard a Soyuz MS-11 manned transportation spacecraft set for launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, is a copy of an Organ-Avt bioprinter – a device used to grow living tissue. The printer, a version of which could one day 3D print organs, is part of an experiment devised by a Russian start-up bio-technical research laboratory known as 3D Bioprinting Solutions and it will be the world's first experiment on printing organ tissue in space.

The experiment was bound for the ISS last month, but the aborted launch of the Soyuz-FG booster that was carrying it, resulted in the printer coming to an abrupt end as it was jettisoned from the habitation module before the spacecraft plummeted back to Earth. The original program was comprised of 56 experiments, including the growth of small 2-3 millimetre samples of human cartilage tissue and the thyroid gland of a rodent from a hydrogel-based material. (11/23)

Harris Corporation Delivering Its Largest Mirror Ever for Ground-based Telescope (Source: Harris Corp.)
Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS) has shipped its largest mirror ever for a ground-based observatory that will produce the deepest, widest, views of the universe. Harris is part of the National Science Foundation team assembling the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) on the Cerro Pachón ridge in Chile.

The company is providing the 3.5 meter, 3,500-pound secondary mirror and associated ground support equipment. In addition, Harris is delivering the cell assembly that stabilizes the mirror to offset the effects of gravity during operation. LSST will conduct an unprecedented, decade-long survey of the entire visible sky, detecting billions of new objects and contributing to the study of dark matter and dark energy. Operations are scheduled to begin in 2022. (11/26)

MarCO Success Validates Use of Cubesats on Deep Space Missions (Source: Space News)
The success a pair of cubesats achieved in relaying telemetry from NASA’s InSight Mars lander demonstrates that such spacecraft can play increasing roles in future deep space missions, spacecraft designers believe. The twin Mars Cube One, or MarCO, cubesats launched as secondary payloads with the InSight spacecraft in May and flew by Mars as InSight landed on the planet. The cubesats, intended primarily as technology demonstrations, were designed to provide a realtime relay of telemetry from InSight during landing, without which it would have been hours before controllers knew if the spacecraft had landed successfully. (11/26)

Florida's Once-Struggling Space Coast Booms from Aerospace, Defense Firms (Source: UPI)
The economy of Florida's Space Coast is getting a boost from space and defense companies that are bringing back high-paying tech jobs to an area hit hard by the 2008 recession and the 2011 retirement of NASA's space shuttle program. The shuttle retirement resulted in the loss of nearly 10,000 jobs. The economic hemorrhage came at a time when Brevard County was still reeling from the 2008 recession. When the final shuttle, Atlantis, was retired, unemployment in Brevard County was about 12 percent, compared to the U.S. average of 9.1 percent. All economic indicators showed a significant downturn, including drops in home-building and consumer spending.

However, over the past few years, Brevard County has seen all those downturns reverse. Between October 2010 and September 2017, 49 new private projects were announced on Florida's Space Coast, according to data from the Space Coast Economic Development Commission. The EDC estimates that total investment came up to $1.68 billion with an economic impact of nearly $2.5 billion, which led to 8,718 new jobs, as well as more than 7,000 retained jobs. Although government agencies like NASA gave the Space Coast its moniker, it is largely private space companies and defense companies with lucrative government contracts that have accounted for the current growth.

Vehicle manufacturing, as well as satellite and missile production, has been carried out by a slew of companies, ranging from American defense giant Lockheed Martin to German aerospace firm RUAG, leading to a more diverse aerospace economy than in the past. Dale Ketcham at Space Florida  said diversifying the area's aerospace economy away from a reliance on government agencies was a "conscientious effort" by state and federal delegations ever since the announcement of the shuttle retirement in 2004. Click here. (11/26)