March 14, 2019

NASA's Super Sized Launch System Might Be Doomed (Source: WIRED)
It's no secret that NASA’s Space Launch System is struggling to meet its schedule. The multi-billion-dollar launcher is expected to ferry humans and cargo into deep space. The problem is, the agency has vocally committed to sending an American craft to the moon next year. NASA’s new lunar taxi, called Orion, is almost ready to go. But its ride—the big and bloated SLS—is still years from completion.

On Wednesday morning, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine appeared before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to discuss America’s leadership in space. During his testimony, he revealed an unexpected twist. For the first time, Bridenstine said that the agency would consider commercial rockets to get its crew capsule off the ground. For NASA, travel to deep space would no longer be SLS-or-bust.

Before the retirement of NASA’s storied space shuttle program, the agency began laying out its vision for its next-generation rocket. In 2011, development began on SLS, which it hoped would become the biggest rocket in the world. But year after year, as it missed its targets and blew through its budgets, the agency faced criticism for the project’s shortcomings. Dubbed the rocket to nowhere by its critics, SLS was at times derided as more of an agency-wide jobs program than a real ride to space. That is until 2017, when the rocket received a new goal: ferry astronauts to the moon. (3/14)

Party like it’s $1,999: Jeff Bezos and Robert Downey Jr. Will Headline re:MARS Fest in Vegas (Source: The Hill)
Amazon didn’t have to look very far for one of the biggest headliners due to appear at re:MARS, the Seattle-based company’s open-to-the-public event focusing on artificial intelligence and other tech frontiers. Billionaire founder Jeff Bezos will share the stage with actor/producer Robert Downey Jr. and a cavalcade of CEOs, researchers and Amazon executives. Today Amazon is taking the wraps off the starting lineup for the first re:MARS conference, set to take place June 4-7 at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas — and is letting the world know that registration will open at 6 a.m. PT March 28. (3/14)

Industry and Lawmakers Go to Defense of SLS (Source: New Scientist)
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine’s surprise announcement March 13 that NASA is considering moving Exploration Mission 1 off of the Space Launch System took many in the industry by surprise, but some have reacted by defending the use of the SLS. Bridenstine, testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee, said the agency was looking at using a pair of commercial launch vehicles, likely provided by SpaceX and/or United Launch Alliance, to launch the Orion spacecraft and an upper stage that would propel the uncrewed spacecraft to the moon. A decision on the feasibility for doing so could come in the next few weeks, he said.

Bridenstine said the study was prompted by continued delays in the development of the SLS, which NASA no longer expects to be ready for launch by the middle of 2020 as previously planned. The goal would be to fly the EM-1 mission on those commercial vehicles by June of 2020, he said, while continuing to develop SLS for EM-2 and later missions.

Senators at the hearing made little reaction to the plan, other than a comment by the committee’s chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) that he’d “sure like to keep us on schedule.” Later in the day, though, the Senate’s most influential advocate for the SLS weighed in against a plan to shift EM-1 off that rocket. “While I agree that the delay in the SLS launch schedule is unacceptable, I firmly believe that SLS should launch the Orion,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) said. Shelby is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and his state is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, which is NASA’s lead center for SLS development. (3/14)

Space Force Transition Plan Due March 22 (Source: Space News)
The Air Force plans to deliver a Space Force transition plan next week. The report to Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, due March 22, will outline a five-phase approach, over five years, for moving capabilities to the Space Force if Congress does agree to the administration's proposal to establish it. The report, through, is not expected to address key issues such as the size and organizational structure of the Space Force. (3/13)

Telesat Gains OmniAccess as Customer for LEO Constellation (Source: Telesat)
Telesat has won a customer for its planned broadband LEO satellite constellation. OmniAccess, which provides specialized maritime connectivity solutions, signed a multi-year contract with Telesat, announced Wednesday, to use the constellation. OmniAccess plans to provide broadband services to "superyachts" and other vessels in the high-end maritime market using the constellation. OmniAccess is the first broadband provider worldwide to contract for Telesat's LEO services. (3/13)

UAE and Virgin Galactic Consider Space Tourism Flights (Source: The National)
The UAE Space Agency is working with Virgin Galactic to set up space tourism flights in the country. Mohammad Al Ahbabi, director of the UAE Space Agency, said his agency is in talks with Virgin Galactic about operating its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle from Al Ain International Airport, an airport in the country that has a relatively small number of commercial flights. Those flights would begin in "the coming years," but the agency didn't offer a specific schedule or address issues such as U.S. export control regulations that could pose challenges to operations there. (3/13)

Aldrins End Legal Dispute Over Buzz's Mental State, Children's Financial Management (Source: Florida Today)
Buzz Aldrin has ended a legal dispute with members of his family. Aldrin said Wednesday he dropped a lawsuit against two of his children and his family foundation that accused them of mishandling his finances, while his children announced they were ending efforts to win legal guardianship of Aldrin, who they claim is suffering from dementia. Aldrin said the decision to drop the legal disputes is intended to "restore family harmony" in the months leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. (3/13)

HASC Chair: Space Force Plan Too Expensive (Source: Space News)
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee says the administration's proposal to establish a Space Force is too expensive. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) said at a conference Wednesday that the proposal costs too much and created unnecessary bureaucracy. More four-star generals are "not going to make us stronger in space," he said. His comments came the same day that members of the Senate Armed Services Committee raised their own questions about the Space Force and its bureaucracy. "I don't want to rain on this Space Force parade, but I do think we ought to have a cold day of reckoning here," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).  (3/13)

Shanahan Formally Creates Space Development Agency (Source: Space News)
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has officially established the Space Development Agency. Shanahan announced the formal creation of the new office in a memo Tuesday. That agency will be overseen by Mike Griffin, the former NASA administrator and current undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, and led by Fred Kennedy, previously the head of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office. The agency will "unify and integrate the development of space capabilities … to reduce overlap and inefficiency," Shanahan wrote in the memo. (3/13)

Griffin: Space Development Agency to Focus on New Capabilities (Source: Space News)
Griffin said the Space Development Agency will focus on developing new capabilities. The agency, based at the Pentagon with a staff of about 100 people, will have as its first task to design and architect a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit that will be used for communications and surveillance, making use of commercial satellites and payloads. Griffin acknowledged in a briefing Wednesday that the agency faced opposition from the Air Force, including outgoing Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, who argued that the agency appeared to duplicate existing capabilities. "Everybody didn't agree. That's unfortunate but it's a fact," Griffin said. (3/13)

Trump’s Defense Secretary Faces Ethics Complaint Over Promoting Boeing Products (Source: Military Times)
A government watchdog group has asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate whether Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan violated ethics rules by promoting Boeing weapons systems while serving as a government official. Shanahan, 56, worked at Boeing for more than 30 years prior to being tapped by President Donald Trump to serve as deputy secretary of defense under former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. When Mattis submitted his resignation in December, Shanahan was named by Trump as acting defense secretary.

Since coming to the Pentagon, Shanahan has faced criticism over reports that he has touted Boeing’s line of aircraft over rival Lockheed Martin. In the fiscal year 2020 budget released Tuesday, the Air Force is set to purchase up to 80 F-15Xs over the next five years — a system, made by Boeing, that the Air Force has said it does not want. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in February that the “budget proposal that we initially submitted did not include additional fourth-generation aircraft.”

Wilson’s comments confirmed reports that the decision to buy new F-15X aircraft was essentially forced upon the Air Force. Previous news reports indicated that Shanahan has disparaged Lockheed Martin’s fighter, the F-35, and other Lockheed weapons systems in private Pentagon meetings. The questions over Shanahan, who could be nominated by Trump as early as this week to serve officially as the Pentagon’s defense secretary, come as Boeing faces international scrutiny over its commercial passenger jet, the Boeing 737 Max-8. (3/13)

Reaction Engines’ Sabre Rocket Engine Demo Core Passes Review (Source: Aviation Week)
The demonstrator core of Reaction Engines’ air-breathing Sabre rocket propulsion system has successfully passed a preliminary design review held in collaboration with the UK and European Space Agencies. The assessment clears the way for a follow-on critical design review and the subsequent development and test of the core at a newly-built facility in Westcott, England, in 2020.  The complete engine, which will ultimately build on the core to incorporate a pre-cooler, rocket engine and ramjet, is designed to provide air-breathing thrust from the runway to Mach 5 and beyond for hypersonic aircraft and, in rocket mode, low-cost access to space. (3/14)

NASA Aero Funding Raises Questions About Future X-Planes (Source: Aviation Week)
NASA’s fiscal 2020 budget request for aeronautics supports the ongoing X-57 Maxwell electric-propulsion and X-59 QueSST low-boom supersonic flight demonstrators, but some within the agency are concerned that proposed outyear funding will not support further X-planes. NASA is requesting $666.9 million for aeronautics in fiscal 2020. This is up from the $633.9 million requested for fiscal 2019, but down from the $725 million eventually appropriated by Congress. In addition to the X-planes, NASA plans to step up research into urban air mobility in 2020.

The fiscal 2020 budget will complete assembly of the X-59 by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, under a $247.5 million contract awarded in 2018. The demonstrator is scheduled to fly by 2022. The aeronautics funding profile laid out in the budget request calls for $673.6 million in fiscal 2021 and $680.3 million in 2022, but it is then set to decline to around $587 million per year in 2023 and 2024. (3/12)

Physicists Reverse Time Using Quantum Computer (Source: Phys.org)
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

"This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future," said Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT. Most laws of physics make no distinction between the future and the past. Click here. (3/13)

Trump’s Space Force May Get its First $72 Million Next Year (Source: CNBC)
The Pentagon is requesting $14.1 billion in the fiscal 2020 budget to invest in space operations, and a key part of that is the first allocation of funding for President Trump’s Space Force. More than $72 million would be to establish a headquarters for the Space Force. The Pentagon also wants $13.6 billion for missile defense capabilities, of which $174 million will finance missile warning systems to address hypersonic threats. (3/13)

SpaceX Satellite Network Faces Canadian Competition (Source: Forbes)
SpaceX's Starlink constellation has Canadian competition. Satellite communications firm Telesat is working on its own low-Earth orbit constellation -- and that is not the only other company competing in this growing playing field. Telesat's constellation was recently highlighted in Canada's long-awaited space strategy.

The Canadian Space Agency said the global constellation will give "access to high-speed broadband Internet globally, including rural and remote areas of Canada." The far north of Canada faces many of the same challenges as areas of Africa and Asia, all of which are far from cities and at times face difficulties in getting online. "We have our own digital divide challenges in Canada, and for a Canadian company to take a global lead and move forward with a state of the art new satellite constellation ... it's a good thing," said Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg in an interview, adding that it potentially means a lot of jobs for Canadians.

It's also an interesting time for Telesat, which reported revenues of just over $900 million CDN (roughly $672 million USD) for the year ending December 31, 2018. While that's a lot of money for Canada, it's not much compared to the deep pockets of SpaceX and its billionaire founder Elon Musk. But Goldberg expressed confidence that Telesat's experience would allow it to compete in what surely will be a crowded satellite market in the 2020s. (3/13)

SpaceX Satellite Network Faces Canadian Competition (Source: Forbes)
SpaceX's Starlink constellation has Canadian competition. Satellite communications firm Telesat is working on its own low-Earth orbit constellation -- and that is not the only other company competing in this growing playing field. Telesat's constellation was recently highlighted in Canada's long-awaited space strategy. The Canadian Space Agency said the global constellation will give "access to high-speed broadband Internet globally, including rural and remote areas of Canada."

The far north of Canada faces many of the same challenges as areas of Africa and Asia, all of which are far from cities and at times face difficulties in getting online. It's also an interesting time for Telesat, which reported revenues of just over $900 million CDN (roughly $672 million USD) for the year ending December 31, 2018. While that's a lot of money for Canada, it's not much compared to the deep pockets of SpaceX and its billionaire founder Elon Musk. But Goldberg expressed confidence that Telesat's experience would allow it to compete in what surely will be a crowded satellite market in the 2020s. (3/12)

Surprise! Dust Ring Discovered in Mercury's Orbit (Source: Space.com)
Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system. Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus' neighborhood, another new paper concludes. "It's not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system," Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the Venus study and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "This is right in our neighborhood." (3/12)

Harvard Scientists Say Their Wild Plan to Dim The Sun Could Actually Work Safely (Source: Science Alert)
For something that's supposed to help save the planet, solar geoengineering sure has a lot of enemies. Critics warn that artificially reflecting sunlight to cool the planet could unleash drastic, unintended consequences – but a Harvard-led team of scientists insists that such fears are overblown. In a new study, researchers say spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to 'dim the Sun' has never been a magical fix-all to cure humanity's dangerous addiction to burning fossil fuels, but if used carefully – with a goal of only halving global temperature increases – it could safely work after all.

While solar geoengineering is over half a century old, it's only in more recent times – since Earth's climate catastrophe came into clearer focus – that the science has been more fully explored. Indeed, over 100 papers have researched the possibilities of this seemingly radical idea to cool down the planet with sunlight-reflecting atmospheric particles. Amongst this body of research, Harvard's scientists have gone further than most, launching the world's largest solar geoengineering study – expected to conduct its first field experiments this year – to actually see how these chemicals behave in the sky. (3/12)

A Quantum Experiment Suggests There’s No Such Thing as Objective Reality (Source: MIT Technology Review)
Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities.

Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to establish objective facts. But if they experience different realities, the argument goes, how can they agree on what these facts might be?

That’s provided some entertaining fodder for after-dinner conversation, but Wigner’s thought experiment has never been more than that—just a thought experiment. Last year, however, physicists noticed that recent advances in quantum technologies have made it possible to reproduce the Wigner’s Friend test in a real experiment. In other words, it ought to be possible to create different realities and compare them in the lab to find out whether they can be reconciled. (3/12)

Sound May Be Carried by Tiny Particles With Negative Gravity (Source: Futurism)
Conventional wisdom in physics dictates that sound waves are massless fluctuations in pressure that travel through materials like air, water, and eardrums — and can’t travel through empty space. That’s why the recent discovery that sound waves actually do carry a trace amount of mass is so shocking — it’s been right under scientists’ noses for centuries. Even more surprising, according to Scientific American’s reporting on the finding, is that sonic waves seem to carry negative mass: they appear to slowly drift upwards rather than falling down to Earth.

New research found that sound waves carry trace amounts of mass in the form of tiny, particle-like “phonons”. Previous research by one of the same scientists first found this negative gravity phenomenon, but only when the sound was traveling through specific materials called superfluids, through which waves can flow with zero resistance. But in this new study, physicists calculated that sound waves can also carry mass through more conventional liquids, as well as solids and gases. (3/11)

Ice Samples Reveal a Massive Sun Storm Hit Earth in Ancient Times...And It Could Happen Again (Source: Live Science)
A gigantic solar storm hit Earth about 2,600 years ago, one about 10 times stronger than any solar storm recorded in the modern day, a new study finds. These findings suggest that such explosions recur regularly in Earth's history, and could wreak havoc if they were to hit now, given how dependent the world has become on electricity.

The sun can bombard Earth with explosions of highly energetic particles known as solar proton events. These "proton storms" can endanger people and electronics both in space and in the air. Now, researchers have found radioactive atoms trapped within ice in Greenland that suggest an enormous proton storm struck Earth in about 660 B.C., one that might dwarf the Carrington Event. Previous research found that extreme proton storms can generate radioactive atoms of beryllium-10, chlorine-36 and carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Evidence of such events is detectable in tree rings and ice cores, potentially giving scientists a way to investigate ancient solar activity. (3/11)