December 15, 2018

NASA Named Best Place to Work in Federal Government (Source: AL.com)
NASA has once again been named the best place to work in the federal government. The U.S. space agency has earned the distinction for seven straight years, according to a Partnership for Public Service survey of almost 600,000 federal workers. The rankings are based on employee engagement – defined as worker satisfaction and commitment of the workforce and willingness of employees to put forth discretionary effort to achieve results. The rankings are divided among large, medium and small federal agencies. (12/13)

NASA Doesn't Have Enough Nuclear Fuel For Its Deep Space Missions (Source: Forbes)
As 2018 comes to a close, NASA scientists are celebrating a milestone: for only the second time in human history, an operational spacecraft is leaving the Solar System. Voyager 2 joins its twin, Voyager 1, as the only two human-made objects to pass beyond the heliopause and enter what's commonly defined as interstellar space. Despite being over 40 years old, and despite being farther away than any other spacecraft ever, we are still receiving signals from these deep space missions.

Why is that? Because the Voyager spacecraft, like the overwhelming majority of our successful missions that have traveled to the outer Solar System, are powered by a particular radioactive source. We produced it in great abundance from the 1940s through the 1980s, but barely produce any of it anymore. As a result, NASA's deep space mission plans are severely hamstrung. Here's the problem, and what we can do about it. (12/13)

Why Wannabe Astronauts Shouldn't Get Too Excited About Virgin Galactic's Flight to 'Space' (Source: TIME)
For the first time in a very long time, Sir Richard Branson has some good space news to report: at 7:11 a.m. Pacific time Thursday, his Virgin Galactic company at last succeeded in launching honest-to-goodness astronauts into honest-to-goodness space. Sort of. Maybe. If you’re grading on a really, really generous curve. But that’s not the breathless way the news is being framed. The bare facts of the flight are not in dispute. Virgin Galactic’s eight-seat VSS Unity spacecraft, with pilots Mark “Forger” Stucky and C.J. Sturckow aboard, was carried aloft by the WhiteKnightTwo mother ship.

At an altitude of 43,000 feet, the mothership released the Unity, the pilots fired their engines and accelerated to Mach 2.9, or nearly three times the speed of sound. The ship climbed to a maximum altitude of 51.4 miles and performed a graceful backflip in near-zero gravity before returning safely home. Whatever Sturckow’s and Stucky’s flight is called—wherever they’re said to have gone—there’s no denying that plenty of people would like to follow them there. In the run-up to Thursday’s flight, lay handicappers were already speculating whether it would be Branson and Virgin or Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin rocket company to fly paying passengers first.

They might benefit from asking themselves why. Both men are engaged in a small-bore race for very low stakes—a 50-mile lob shot to a sorta, kinda space—a pale parody of the U.S.-Soviet contest that got Americans on the moon. In both cases, the danger is mortal; in only one case was it worth it. (12/13)

Why Defining the Boundary of Space May be Crucial for the Future of Spaceflight (Source: The Verge)
In the short term, altering the definition for the boundary of space seems inconsequential. It might change around a few historical statistics about who has actually been beyond Earth (and the pilots who just flew Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane can boast that they were astronauts today.) But having an internationally agreed upon legal definition for space could have some big implications for the future of the spaceflight industry. For instance, it could complicate which vehicles we consider to be spacecraft and aircraft, changing how we regulate these vehicles in the future.

“Where does someone’s airspace stop? That’s clearly of interest,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard and spaceflight expert, says. After combing through numerous sets of orbital statistics for spacecraft over the years, he came up with an estimate that he says is more precise than the one currently used by the FAI: 80 kilometers, plus or minus 10 kilometers. In easy-to-understand terms, this is the lowest altitude a satellite can go and still complete orbits around the Earth. To stay in orbit, and also reach such a low altitude, the vehicle has to be in an elliptical orbit.

McDowell says that 80 kilometers is the point at which gravity becomes more important than the atmosphere. “You’re in space if you can basically ignore the atmosphere,” he says. “And that doesn’t mean it has no effect, but gravity is the dominant thing you have to worry about.” You need to be going that fast in order to get into a constant state of revolution around our planet. Unfortunately, our atmosphere is too thick to allow an object to orbit the Earth lower in the sky at similar speeds. (12/13)

The Virgin Galactic Hype Totally Misses the Point (Source: Popular Mechanics)
Branson just beat Bezos in sending a person to suborbital space, yes. Yet this milestone is a little hollow. Consider that Bezos’ company has created a new engine for the United Launch Alliance, is building major manufacturing facilities at Cape Canaveral, and has an active lunar landing program. All of this makes a suborbital flight pale in comparison. In some ways, Bezos has the fewest headline-making achievements to point to, yet perhaps the best market position as the industry matures.

Meanwhile, it's hard to say that Branson beat Elon Musk to space when Musk's company is already delivering cargo to the International Space Station and launching orbital payloads for a host of customers, including Uncle Sam. SpaceX (along with Boeing) has also booked pending crewed missions to the ISS—true orbital spaceflight with astronauts on board.

Comparing a suborbital test flight with a crewed mission to ISS, then, is like comparing a diving bell to a deep-sea submarine. Adding insult to injury, both Musk and Bezos have an eye on human interplanetary exploration, with Blue Origin looking at the moon and SpaceX fixated on Mars. Musk even has a paying customer looking at a cruise past the moon and back. Now that’s space tourism! None of this is to say we shouldn't celebrate Virgin's achievement. But keep the good champagne on ice, because the truly remarkable breakthroughs in spaceflight are right around the corner. (12/13)

First Commercial Launch of Japan’s H3 Rocket Set for 2022 (Source: Aerospace Testing International)
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has said development and testing of its H3 rocket is progressing steadily after communications satellite company Inmarsat committed to be the first user of the launch vehicle. The H3 is a 63m (205ft) tall, two-stage liquid-propellant rocket that can accommodate up to four solid rocket boosters and two types of fairing. The H3 is intended to launch commercial satellites of up to 6,500kg. Its maiden launch is planned for 2020.

The Japanese rocket has been in development since 2014 at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tanegashima Space Center in the south-east of Japan. Testing of its LE-9 engine has been conducted there since April 2017. In a milestone for the development program, this week Inmarsat said it is planning to deploy the launch vehicle from 2022 and become the first user of the H3. (12/14)

NASA is Planning Four of the Largest Space Telescopes Ever. But Which One Will Fly? (Source: Science)
For NASA astronomers, this was not a good year. In June, a review board found that the agency's prized observatory—the already overdue and vastly overbudget $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—was still years away from taking flight and capturing the faint light of the universe's first stars. The holdup: torn sunshields and loose bolts.

Also in trouble was the next big astrophysics mission in line, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), intended to pin down the nature of mysterious dark energy by surveying wide swaths of the sky. Not even off the drawing board, WFIRST was predicted to burst its $3.2 billion budget by $400 million, another review panel found—not a plus for a mission that the administration of President Donald Trump was already thinking of canceling.

Yet astronomers are about to look skyward and dream even bigger dreams. The decadal survey in astrophysics, which sets priorities for future missions by NASA, the NSF and Department of Energy, began last month. Dozens of astronomers, broken into committees, will identify science goals and develop a wish list of telescopes, both on the ground and in space, that could best address them. One of the toughest tasks will be to decide which—if any—of four proposed successors to the JWST and WFIRST most deserves to fly. It would be launched in the 2030s to L2, a gravitationally balanced spot between the sun and Earth. Click here. (12/13)

Breathing in Moon Dust Could Release Toxins in Astronauts’ Lungs (Source: New Scientist)
The surface of the moon is dusty – and nasty. The Apollo astronauts quickly learned that the sharp grains of moon dust could tear spacesuits and irritate their lungs, but now it seems the lunar surface is even worse for human health than we thought. By studying lunar dust samples brought back by astronauts, we discovered that they contain certain minerals that are known to quickly react with human cells and generate toxic hydroxyl radicals. These hydroxyl radicals have previously been linked to lung cancers. (12/14)

Russia Hands Over Three Rocket Engines to US (Source: Tass)
hree Russian engines RD-181 have been handed over to the Orbital Sciences Corporation, the research and industrial association NPO Energromash said on its website on Friday. "On December 12, three RD-181 engines were handed over to the US customer," the Orbital Sciences Corporation said. This is a second consignment of engines delivered to the US company this year. Two RD-181 engines were handed over in June. (12/14)

5 New Additions to Look Forward To at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex (Source: Florida Today)
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is constantly changing and evolving to give guests a better experience. Before the year is up, the visitor complex will have renovated restaurants, new attractions and a whole new entrance. Starting Dec. 15, the complex will have a newly renovated Milky Way Ice Cream Shop for the sweet tooth in the room, as well as the new piezoelectric pathway for guests to generate electricity while launching their own rockets. Click here. (12/13)

Uranus and Neptune Should Be Top Priority, Says Report (Source: EOS)
Launching a small orbiter with an accompanying atmospheric probe to the solar system’s ice giants—Uranus and Neptune—should be a top priority for NASA in the coming decade, say planetary scientists who conducted a review of potential missions to do so. Beyond being scientifically valuable, such a mission to each planet is technologically feasible, the team said.

“It is important that the next mission to an ice giant study the entire system: the planet itself, the atmosphere, the rings, the satellites, and the magnetosphere,” Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Eos. Hofstadter is a coauthor of the June 2017 report that reviewed the mission potential for Uranus and Neptune. “Every component of an ice giant system challenges our understanding of planetary physics in a unique way,” he said.

Here are five key questions the team wants to answer with dedicated missions to Uranus and Neptune. The team presented its findings and the state of ice giant science on Wednesday, 12 December, at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2018 in Washington, D. C. Click here. (12/15)