June 14, 2019

Five Lessons From Apollo for the New Space Age (Source: Politico)
The Apollo moon landings that began in 1969 were spectacular, an unparalleled demonstration of engineering and scientific prowess, not to mention political skill. But what did we get from Apollo? Critics — then and now — see the moon landings as a space travel cul de sac, a one-off achievement that didn’t open the solar system to human exploration. But Apollo did teach us how to fly in space, how to develop the technology to do that and also how to manage a sprawling, complicated, risky project across many years. Click here. (6/13)

Here’s Why Women May Be the Best Suited for Spaceflight (Source: National Geographic)
If you're packing for an interplanetary space mission—one that’s very long and might involve populating a faraway world—sending an all-female astronaut crew could be an intelligent choice. Before you raise an eyebrow at the prospect, remember that NASA recruited and flew only all-male crews for decades. In fact, in the 58 years that Earthlings have launched humans into orbit, about 11 percent of them—63 individuals—have been women.

“An all-female mission tends to be something that NASA has avoided in assignments because it seems like a stunt,” says Margaret Weitekamp. But in some ways, women are potentially better suited for space travel than men. Let’s focus on four factors. Women are generally smaller. Women suffer less from some problematic physical effects of spaceflight. Women have some personality traits more innately suited for long-duration missions. And last but hardly least: Populating another world requires reproduction, and so far that isn’t possible without biological women. Click here. (6/13)

Who Owns the Moon? (Source: Politico)
Back in 1980, a former ventriloquist and car salesman named Dennis Hope was out of work, going through a divorce and struggling to make ends meet. As he tells it, he was driving along wondering what he could do for cash flow when he looked through the car window, saw the moon and thought: “Now there’s a lot of property.”

Hope did some research in a college library and discovered the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, a pact in which dozens of nations, including the United States, laid out the basic legal guidelines for dealing with celestial bodies. Hope thought he saw a loophole: The treaty declares that no nation can assert sovereignty over the moon, but it fails to say clearly that individuals can’t. Click here. (6/13)

If We Commodify Space, Who's In Charge Of The Cosmos? (Source: WBUR)
NASA recently announced that starting next year, the International Space Station (ISS) will be open to tourism and other commercial opportunities, such as advertising. Currently, the ISS houses a variety of research experiments by companies other than NASA, but the announcement heralds “a huge different way for us to do business,” according to NASA associate administrator William Gerstenmaier. The big question is whether this shift will slow the agency’s progress in meeting its already murky goals — or worse, whether it will change those goals entirely.

Space tourism is one aspect of the ISS’s new “Commercial Use Policy,” designed to “support the development of a sustainable low-Earth orbit economy," revenue generated by activity in near-Earth space. That makes sense in the long term — commercial and economic activity is vital to establishing a more regular and active human presence in space. If people end up living on the moon or on Mars, commerce will play a role in the success and eventual independence of those communities.

At the same time, opening up the ISS to the highest bidders — a trip would cost tens of millions of dollars -- sets a dangerous precedent that could compromise NASA’s work, as well as its financial and public support. The notion that space is only for the rich makes the cosmos, like so much else in this world, seem exclusive. Space itself does not belong to anyone (in fact, per a 1967 UN treaty, it cannot), but making the ISS a playground for the rich and companies leveraging zero-gravity marketing opportunities entrenches the narrative that space science is under the purview of the “liberal elite.” (6/13)

At Today’s NASA, Success Is Not an Option (Source: National Review)
The Trump administration has proposed Artemis to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 and Mars by 2033. The program will include some 37 launches by 2028, kicked off by the maiden launch of the agency’s new Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift booster in October 2020. Unfortunately, the program as currently conceived is very unlikely to succeed, as it appears to be designed primarily as a mechanism for distributing funds, rather than for accomplishing goals in space. This was made clear when Bridenstine said that a baseline condition for the program would be that all piloted missions would use the SLS booster and the Orion crew capsule, neither of which has yet flown, rather than much cheaper alternatives that have flown.

Furthermore, at 26 tons the Orion is so heavy that the SLS cannot deliver it to low lunar orbit with enough propellant for it to fly home. So rather than using a SpaceX Dragon (which at 10 tons is still 50 percent larger than the Apollo crew capsule), NASA is proposing to build a new space station, called the Deep Space Gateway, in a high orbit around the Moon, as a halfway house accessible to Orion. NASA is trying to justify the Gateway with platitudes claiming that it will “provide a command center,” “create resilience,” and “establish a strategic presence around the Moon,” but this is all nonsense. The lunar-orbiting space station is a liability, not an asset.

It is not needed to support flights to the Moon and is certainly not, as NASA claims, necessary or even useful as a base for flights to Mars. It will cost a fortune to build and maintain and will impose significant-to-severe propulsion and timing-constraint penalties on any mission that is forced to make use of it — as they all surely will be, to avoid public exposure of the Gateway’s uselessness. And NASA does not have enough money for development of a lunar lander. The agency has therefore made a request for more cash, which the White House has supported with the kiss of death — a requirement that the funds be drawn from Pell Grants, guaranteeing rejection in the Democrat-controlled Congress. Apparently, success is not an option, so the key priority is to assign blame. (6/12)

India Unveils Spacecraft for Moon-Landing Mission (Source: Space Daily)
India on Wednesday unveiled a spacecraft which is expected to take off for the moon next month, making the country only the fourth to achieve the feat. The mission is India's second to the moon, and if successful it will put the nation in the league of the US, the former Soviet Union and China. Named Chandrayaan-2, the craft is made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It will be launched from Sriharikota space centre on July 15 and is expected to land near the lunar South Pole on September 6. (6/12)

Fusion-Powered Spacecraft Could Be Just a Decade Away (Source: Space.com)
Fusion-powered spacecraft may not be just a sci-fi dream for much longer. The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) engine could take flight for the first time in 2028 or so, if all goes according to plan, the concept's developers said. That would be big news for space fans; the minivan-size DFD could get a 22,000-lb robotic spacecraft to Saturn in just two years, or all the way out to Pluto within five years of launch, project team members said. (NASA's Cassini mission made it to Saturn in 6.75 years, and it took the New Horizons probe 9.5 years to get to Pluto.)

And the engine doubles as a potent power source, meaning the technology could have a broad range of off-Earth applications. For example, the DFD could help power NASA's planned moon-orbiting Gateway space station. The DFD is a variant of the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC), a fusion-reactor concept invented in the early 2000s by Samuel Cohen of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The DFD is basically a PFRC reactor with an open end, through which exhaust flows to generate thrust, Thomas explained. (6/12)

A New Moon Race is On. Is China Already Ahead? (Source: Politico)
Fifty years after the Apollo landing, the moon is now the target of the biggest flurry of human activity in history, more intense even than in the heyday of the Apollo program. India plans its own mission to the moon’s south pole later this summer, when it expects to send an orbiter, lander and rover as a trial run for sending humans to the surface within three years. Japan has teamed up with carmaker Toyota to build a moon rover. Israel sent a privately funded robot to the moon this spring, a mission that failed when it crashed into the surface, but it is already working on a second attempt. Russia has said it plans to build a moon colony.

Unlike the first moon race, a largely symbolic Cold War contest in which the United States decisively prevailed over the Soviet Union, this one has hard resources at stake. In this new race, powered partly by private enterprise and highly capable new space vehicles, there’s an increasingly realistic chance for the winners to stake a claim to the moon’s untapped mineral and other resources and commercialize them.

The most focused and ambitious new entrant is China, which plans to follow its Chang’e 4 lander with more robotic craft to explore both the icy poles, offering the game-changing prospect of extracting water from the ice deposits and using it to power space vehicles and sustain life. China is stepping up its human spaceflight program as well, and its plans call for a permanent Chinese colony scheduled for 2030. (6/13)

Industry Worries Friction Twixt NRO-NGA On Commercial Imagery (Source: Breaking Defense)
Nearly two years after authority to procure commercial satellite imagery for military and intelligence uses passed from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), that process continues to suffer growing pains, according to industry, former officials and government insiders.

Despite best efforts by NRO and NGA to work out and articulate their respective roles, a number of sources tell me that the lines between the two agencies’ responsibilities remain fuzzy, and that the process of contracting commercial capabilities is slowing down. There also are indications that ‘cracks and seams’ may be developing between the two in setting priorities and interpreting requirements for commercial providers, industry sources say.

Finally, many in the GEOINT community harbor lingering fears that NRO can’t serve as an honest broker for commercial companies, given its central role in developing, building and operating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites. (6/13)

Bigelow Space Wants to Launch You Into Orbit with SpaceX for $52 Million (Source: Space.com)
Bigelow Space Operations plans to take advantage of the increased commercialization of the International Space Station (ISS). The Nevada-based company just announced that it has reserved up to four flights to the ISS aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. Bigelow Space Operations (BSO) intends to charge about $52 million per seat on these initial missions, which will last one to two months and carry up to four people apiece, company representatives said.

Bigelow did not disclose how much it cost to book the flights, saying only that "BSO paid substantial sums as deposits and reservation fees" back in September 2018. NASA announced last Friday (June 7) that it's opening the ISS to greater commercial use. The increased opportunities include the accommodation of up to two private-astronaut missions per year. These paying customers can fly aboard Crew Dragon or Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule, which is also in development. (6/12)

HASC Chairman Smith Earmarks $500M Giveaway For SpaceX, Potentially Aborting Air Force Space Plans (Source: Forbes)
The U.S. Air Force, which leads Pentagon space efforts, has spent the last five years reorganizing how the military and intelligence agencies get their satellites into orbit. Pursuant to congressional mandates, it has had three goals: (1) stop using Russian rocket engines, (2) assure access to all key orbits by selecting two capable launch providers, and (3) foster competition between those providers to discipline price and performance.

The service has made good progress, sharing the costs of developing new launch vehicles with prospective providers and preparing to select two winners next year. But now comes Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), Chairman of the House Armed Service Committee, with a plan to overturn the Air Force’s efforts by arbitrarily giving up to $500 million to the one company that failed to win a launch services agreement from the service in competitive bidding last year. (6/12)

A New Fuel for Satellites is So Safe it Won't Blow Up Humans (Source: WIRED)
Later this month, a small satellite will hitch a ride on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for the world’s first demonstration of “green” satellite propellant in space. The satellite is fueled by AFM-315, which the Air Force first developed more than 20 years ago as an alternative to the typical satellite juice of choice, hydrazine. If successful, AFM-315 could make satellites vastly more efficient, shrink satellite deployment time from weeks to days, and drastically reduce the safety requirements for storing and handling satellite fuel, a boon to humans and the environment.

Looking to the future, scientists working on the fuel say it will play a large role in helping get extraterrestrial satellite operations off the ground. Hydrazine is a volatile fuel that will ruin your day—and perhaps your life—if you’re exposed to it. To fuel a satellite you need a lot of safety infrastructure, including pressurized full-body “SCAPE suits” just to handle the stuff. AFM-315, on the other hand, is less toxic than caffeine, so all you need is a lab coat and a pump. (6/12)

Keep Landsat Data Free, Panel Urges Department of the Interior (Source: Science)
A federal advisory panel today called on the Department of the Interior (DOI) to keep access to the imagery from its long-running Landsat satellite program free and open. Any effort to collect fees for such data would generate little money and would actively damage the U.S. remote sensing industry, the panel said in a report. (6/12)

NASA Overcomes Military’s GPS Tweaks to Peer Inside Hurricanes (Source: Science)
A mission to probe winds deep inside hurricanes, where most satellites cannot see and few aircraft venture, is showing signs of success despite an unexpected obstacle linked to tensions in the Middle East.

A constellation of eight microsatellites has harvested data that—if folded into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) weather models—could have sharpened forecasts of several recent hurricanes, including Michael, a category-5 storm that hit Florida last year. "We're finally getting stuff that really looks useful," says Frank Marks, who leads hurricane researchers exploring the data at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami. (6/12)