January 3, 2019

Work Accelerates at SpaceX's Texas Launch Site (Source: Brownsville Herald)
All that’s been missing from SpaceX’s Boca Chica beach launch site has been an actual rocket, but not for much longer. As revealed via Twitter by SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk in the wee hours of Dec. 23, a stainless-steel prototype of “Starship” — formerly Big Falcon Spacecraft — is under construction at Boca Chica, 25 miles east of Brownsville.

He tweeted that “hopper” test flights at Boca Chica could begin as early as March or April — substantially earlier than the company had previously projected. In recent months the site has taken delivery of a 95,000-gallon liquid oxygen tank and an 80,000-gallon methane tank to support space vehicle tests. SpaceX, which opened an engine-testing facility in McGregor in 2012, announced early in 2018 that it plans to manufacture Starship and Super Heavy in a former Los Angeles shipyard.

Still, at the official groundbreaking for the Boca Chica launch site in September 2014, Musk said he expected the site to eventually have a “fairly significant engineering and (research and development) presence... Some of our larger rockets, in the future, are so big, they’re not going by road,” he said. The alternative would be building them at Boca Chica, Musk said, adding, “That would be the wise move.” (1/3)

2019 Expected To See Return of Americans Going To Space From Florida (Source: Spectrum News 13)
Returning humans to space while launching them from Florida's Space Coast is expected to be the highlight of 2019. Years of building, training and testing comes down to 2019: the return of American astronauts launching from Florida's Space Coast. After facing numerous delays, Space Florida's Dale Ketcham is optimistic that this is the year Americans will stop relying on Russians to get to the International Space Station.

"Americans need to launch from American soil," the vice president of government and external relations said. Both SpaceX and Boeing are working on spaceships to carry astronauts to and from the ISS. First up are demonstration flights with no humans on board to test the systems and make sure the Crew Dragon and CST 100 Starliner can get to space and back. (1/3)

Get Ready for These Rocket Milestones in 2019 (Source: MIT Technology Review)
2018 ended with a slew of rocket launches. That momentum is carrying into 2019. This year will see a series of milestones from all around the world. While a lot of focus will be on SpaceX and Boeing preparing to launch astronauts from US soil once again, other countries, like China, India, and Israel, have also got some momentous launches planned. Here are the ones we will definitely be watching closely (very likely on our second monitor at work). Click here. (1/3)

Imagine Giving Birth in Space (Source: The Atlantic)
Delivering a child in microgravity may sound like science fiction. But for one start-up, it’s the future. SpaceLife Origin, based in the Netherlands, wants to send a pregnant woman, accompanied by a “trained, world-class medical team,” in a capsule to the space above Earth. The mission would last 24 to 36 hours. Once the woman delivered the child, the capsule would return to the ground.

“A carefully prepared and monitored process will reduce all possible risks, similar to Western standards as they exist on Earth for both mother and child,” SpaceLife Origin’s website states. The company has set the year 2024 as the target date for the trip. The concept raises a host of questions—we’ll get to those later—but perhaps the most immediate may be this: Why?

Egbert Edelbroek, one of the company’s executives, says spacefaring childbirth is part of creating an insurance policy for the human species. Should a catastrophe someday render Earth unlivable—climate change, Edelbroek suspects—he hopes the human species will move off-world and settle elsewhere. Wherever they land, they will plant roots, build homes, and start families. (1/3)

Kacific to Double in Size as First Satellite Launch Nears, Mulls Second Satellite (Source: Space News)
With less than a year to go before the launch of its first telecom satellite, Kacific is planning a hiring spree to prepare for service across the Asia Pacific. Based in Singapore with an office in the island nation of Vanuatu, Kacific has been running an interim connectivity service since 2017 using a network built on a patchwork of Ku-band coverage from other satellites. (1/3)

Alien Worlds Rich in Oxygen Still Might Not Harbor Life (Source: Space.com)
Oxygen may not be quite as compelling a sign of alien life as astrobiologists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers running laboratory experiments with various types of simulated exoplanet atmospheres managed to generate oxygen, as well as carbon-containing organic molecules, the chemical building blocks of life as we know it.

Uncertainty stems from an incomplete understanding of the exoplanet on which the oxygen and methane (or other potential biosignatures) were found. Perhaps there's some weird abiotic chemistry going on there that mimics the atmospheric signals that life produces here on Earth. The new study suggests that such concerns are indeed justified. (1/3)

Earth is Missing a Huge Part of its Crust. Now we May Know Why (Source: National Geographic)
The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth’s history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing.

Known as the Great Unconformity, this massive temporal gap can be found not just in this famous crevasse, but in places all over the world. In one layer, you have the Cambrian period, which started roughly 540 million years ago and left behind sedimentary rocks packed with the fossils of complex, multicellular life. Directly below, you have fossil-free crystalline basement rock, which formed about a billion or more years ago.

So where did all the rock that belongs in between these time periods go? Using multiple lines of evidence, an international team of geoscientists reckons that the thief was Snowball Earth, a hypothesized time when much, if not all, of the planet was covered in ice. (12/31)

New Horizons Signals Successful Flyby of Ultima Thule (Source: SpaceFlight Insider)
While many around Earth were ringing in the new year, a group of scientists and engineers celebrated the moment a tiny spacecraft raced by a small world, virtually unknown, to complete the farthest exploration of any Solar System object. At 12:33 a.m. EST Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons, having flown by Pluto 3.5 years and 1 billion miles ago, zipped past Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule at about 32,000 mph (51,500 kph). At its closest approach it was a mere 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) from its surface.

As expected, this first stream of data from the farthest encounter in human history was just a status check with the spacecraft letting those who operate it on Earth know that it survived the encounter. It also signaled it had a memory full of data, indicating that science objectives were likely accomplished.

Once the signals were sent by New Horizons, it resumed its final outbound science gathering. The next signal home is expected to be received by tracking stations on Earth sometime in the afternoon of Jan. 1. As of the post-flyby press conference, the signals with the new data, traveling at the speed of light, were about halfway in their six-hour journey from the spacecraft. (1/1)

A Close Look at the Most Distant Object NASA Has Ever Explored (Source: The Atlantic)
The most distant object that nasa has ever investigated up close, 2014 MU69, orbits near the edge of the solar system, well beyond Pluto. Because of the desolate conditions out there, it’s remained virtually unchanged since the beginning of the solar system. Less than five years ago, astronomers didn’t even know it existed. Now they know what it looks like, thanks to images captured by a passing spacecraft.

The New Horizons spacecraft arrived at 2014 MU69—4 billion miles away from Earth—on New Year’s Eve, snapped hundreds of photographs, and then continued on, headed even deeper into space. On Wednesday, NASA released the first set of photographs. Seen from Earth, 2014 MU69 looks like a tiny speck of light. Up close, it resembles, delightfully, a snowman. (1/3)

In a World First, China Lands a Spacecraft Gently on the Moon’s Far Side (Source: The Verge)
This evening, China became the first nation to land a spacecraft gently on the far side of the Moon, according to China Global Television Network America. A Chinese robotic lander and rover, which launched from China in early December, descended into a crater on the side of the Moon that’s always facing away from Earth. The touchdown marks a significant technological feat for the country, and puts China in an elite category of spaceflight achievement all its own.

The landing is part of China’s Chang’e-4 mission — one of a series of planned missions to explore the lunar surface. Prior to this program, China sent a lander and a rover to the Moon, making it the third country to ever softly land on the lunar surface. That lander, part of the Chang’e-3 mission, went to the Moon’s near side, the one we see at all times.

No one has ever been able to pull off a far side landing before, because it’s so difficult to communicate with robots on the side of the Moon we cannot see. Without a direct line of sight with Earth, there’s no simple way to get radio signals to spacecraft on the lunar far side. But China was prepared for that. The country launched a lunar satellite in May, one that will sit in space near the Moon and provide a communications relay between the Chang’e-4 spacecraft and Earth. (1/3)

The Far Side of the Moon: What China and the World Hope to Find (Source: New York Times)
In a spaceflight first, China’s Chang’e-4 has landed where no spacecraft has touched down in one piece before: the far side of the moon. “This is a historic step in international scientific exploration of the moon, opening up the ‘Luna Incognita’ of the lunar far side to surface exploration for the first time,” said James Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University.

If successful, the mission could answer fundamental questions about Earth’s only natural satellite. There are still mysteries, for example, about the moon’s formation and early evolution, which, in turn, hold clues to the history of the entire solar system. Additionally, the mission will conduct the first radio astronomy experiments from the moon’s far side and the first investigations to see whether plants can grow on the moon — a crucial step toward long-term human missions beyond Earth. (1/3)