June 3, 2019

Five Ethical Questions for How We Choose to Use the Moon (Source: The Conversation)
How humans should interact with space and celestial objects is central to the emerging field of space ethics. It’s something I’ve been involved with since 2015, when I taught my first class on consent for the use of celestial objects at Yale University’s Summer Bioethics Institute. As we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, here are five things we need to reflect on regarding ethical considerations for various future uses of the Moon. Click here. (6/3)

Key Northrop Grumman OmegA Rocket Test Succeeds, Despite Hiccup (Source: Breaking Defense)
Northrop Grumman’s OmegA rocket successfully completed its first static fire test yesterday, despite an anomaly right at the end of the engine firing. The success keeps the program on the path towards a 2021 first launch, and gives the company a crack at the Air Force’s hotly contested national security launch program. The test verified the performance of the motor’s ballistics, insulation and joints as well as control of the nozzle position, according to the company.

The hiccup at the end involved the exit cone, that seemed to have caught fire. Rominger told reporters at a video press conference after the test: “At the very end when the engine was tailing off, we observed the exit cone and maybe a portion of it doing something a little strange that we need to go further look into.” The company, he said, will investigate. Northrop Grumman is one of four launch companies vying for the Air Force’s National Security Space Launch  Phase 2 contract. (6/3)

Elon Musk Was Right: Competition Is Rocket Fuel For The Space Race (Source: Forbes)
With swagger and audacity never seen at the time, a visiting tech industry titan and budding space entrepreneur named Elon Musk paced the hallways of the Pentagon. It was 2011 and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) had recently reported that the United States Air Force was paying about $350 million per launch of a satellite. Without flinching, Elon was promising that he could deliver national security space launches for as little as $60 million.

Of course, the incumbents scoffed at him, the Pentagon staff said it was impossible and Congress was already circling its wagons to protect its constituent interests. One person though, the newly appointed chief weapons buyer for the entire defense department, took notice and that made all the difference. Promoting competition, we were to learn, was one of Frank Kendall’s key acquisition tenets.

Kendall decided to leverage Musk’s simple promise to save taxpayer money, but what ensued was so much more: a renaissance for national security space and ultimately for the country. By reducing the Air Force sole source rocket contract from 50 to only 36, he was able to direct a head to head competition for the other 14 launches. His unprecedented decision, directly challenging a service’s existing acquisition program with stable pricing and performance, sent a shock wave throughout the space business. (5/30)

SpaceX: Starlink Satellites Working As Planned (Source: Space News)
SpaceX says it's in contact with all 60 of its Starlink satellites, most of which are working as planned. In a statement Friday, the company said the satellites, launched May 23, had deployed their solar arrays and made contact with the ground, and most of them are raising their orbits using their electric propulsion systems. Tracking data indicates that several of the satellites, though, are not raising their orbits. SpaceX also noted that the visibility of the satellites, which has caused consternation among astronomers, should decrease as the satellites move into higher orbits.(6/3)

Maxar Gaining Air Force Business (Source: Space News)
Maxar announced Monday that it's won $95 million in U.S. government contracts for geospatial intelligence services. The contracts from the U.S. Air Force, Special Operations Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency include $70 million from the Air Force to develop a platform to test the use of automated intelligence and machine learning in military operations. The contracts are part of an evolution at the company as it moves from being a supplier of satellite imagery to a broader intelligence services provider of data and predictive analytics. (6/3)

JWST and SLS Drive Cost Growth and Schedule Delays at NASA (Source: Space News)
Problems with the James Webb Space Telescope and Space Launch System contributed to growing cost and schedule challenges at NASA. A report by the Government Accountability Office found continued cost and schedule growth among the agency's major programs, with average schedule delays of 13 months, the highest GAO had recorded since it started annual assessments a decade ago. JWST and SLS were the major reasons for that growth, and the GAO report warned additional delays and overruns were likely. (6/3)

SpaceX Valuation Exceeds Tesla (Source: CNBC)
SpaceX is, by one estimate, now more valuable than Elon Musk's other company, Tesla. Industry sources estimate that, after the latest funding rounds by SpaceX recently disclosed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is valued at $33.3 billion. By comparison, publicly traded Tesla has a market cap of $32.7 billion based on its stock price at the close of trading Friday. (6/3)

Falcon 9 Could Launch Multiple Private Moon Landers in the 2020s (Source: Teslarati)
NASA has announced awards worth $253M for three commercial Moon landers, scheduled to attempt their first lunar missions as early as 2020 or 2021. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets is reportedly scheduled to launch at least two of the three spacecraft.

Known as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), the NASA program was created in 2018 to both take advantage of and expand a small undercurrent of commercial lunar spacecraft development. Including NASA’s latest awards, more than half a dozen companies are now seriously pursuing the production of commercial or partially commercial Moon-bound spacecraft, all with launch debuts sometime in the early 2020s. For the majority of those companies, the mixture of performance and affordability offered by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a critical enabler. (6/3)

SpaceX Readying Starhopper for Hops in Texas (Source: NASASpaceFlight.com)
With the arrival of a new Raptor engine at their Boca Chica launch facility, SpaceX is gearing up for a second round of testing with the Starhopper vehicle in South Texas. The latest test campaign is slated to begin in mid-June and is expected to include the first untethered hop of Starhopper. Meanwhile, on the Florida side, SpaceX continues to make progress with their plans to utilize Pad 39A for the Starship program.

The Starhopper vehicle is a testbed for the development of SpaceX’s upcoming Starship spacecraft. The launch provider hopes to one day utilize the fully reusable Starship system to launch humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars. Starhopper performed its first two hot-fire tests at the beginning of April. During the tests, a single Raptor engine was fired for a couple of seconds to verify that Starhopper was ready for more rigorous testing including untethered hops to higher altitudes.

The first untethered hop is currently scheduled for mid-June – with the Starhopper expected to target an altitude of around 20 meters. However, prior to the hop, SpaceX is also set to perform fueling, ignitor, and preburner testing along with a static fire of the Raptor engine. That being said, it should also be noted that the test plans for the Starhopper vehicle are rapidly evolving, so the events are heavily subject to change. For instance, up until recently, the company was planning to utilize Raptor SN4 for the untethered hops. However, the company has now decided to utilize this engine only for fit checks, and will instead perform the hops with SN5 – the latest Raptor to come out of SpaceX’s factory in California. (6/3)

Starhopper Pad 39A Plans Materialize in Florida (Source: NASASpaceFlight.com)
The Texas-based vehicle has been designated Mk.1 while the Florida-based vehicle is Mk.2. The Texas and Florida-based teams are competing to see which is most effective at building and launching the spacecraft. SpaceX already has two launch pads in Florida, but both are being actively used to support the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Therefore, the company had been looking at a variety of options for launching Starship.

However, Pad 39A has recently become the frontrunner to support Starship. While it is perhaps the obvious choice when considering its large size, the launch complex is also needed to support critically important Falcon launches. The good news is that Air Force and NASA missions will likely only be launching from Pad 39A a couple of times a year, and thus there will be plenty of downtime for the Starship testing. Therefore, SpaceX is exploring the addition of a second launch mount to the east of the existing Falcon infrastructure, plus plans for a landing zone.

SpaceX wants to land the vehicle following launches at a proposed landing pad inside the fence of Launch Complex 39A. Specifically, current plans call for the landing zone being placed on the east side of the pad between the Horizontal Integration Facility and the Falcon launch pad. While the plans for both the launch and landing complexes are still in the early design phase and are subject to permitting and environmental reviews – several sources have confirmed that these plans are under serious consideration. Potential modifications to Pad 39A may include the ability to support Super Heavy – not just Starship test flights. (5/3)

When We Blast Our Dead Loved Ones to Space (Source: Supercluster)
Just before dawn, clusters of families and friends arrived on two coach buses. They’d been roused from their hotel rooms and taken on a ride through the pitch dark desert to arrive in time for launch, set to occur shortly after sunrise. About 100 people gathered at the complex, situated smack in the middle of nowhere—many of them parentless children, or childless parents, elder widowers and middle-aged grandkids—to watch a little piece of their loved ones blast into the blue sky.  

They’re a group among a wider trend of space-based memorial services, where companies offer to send cremains—usually a “symbolic” few ash grams in a capsule—of a loved one to the edge of space, the moon, or endless earth orbit.

Starseeker was one of Celestis’ “Earth Rise” packages, which start at $2,495. For another $2,500, a couple grams of your loved one can go into orbit aboard a satellite or rocket. The next step up, the Luna service, promises to place their DNA on the moon, forever—for $12,500. For the same price, Celestis' Voyager service sends their DNA or remains into deep space. These far-flung missions haven't occurred yet, and won’t until NASA or a private company sends a mission to deep space. But when they do, a portion of Gene and Majel Roddenberry’s cremains will be aboard the inaugural Voyager flight. (6/3)

SpaceX Starship Hopper Testing Pushed Back to June 11-13 (Source: The Monitor)
Cameron County announced Friday afternoon that closures related to SpaceX testing at Boca Chica Beach have been rescheduled. The county had posted notice earlier this week that testing scheduled for late May was rescheduled to the week of June 3, but those plans are now on hold for another week. According to a notice posted on the county’s website, State Highway 4 to Boca Chica Beach is scheduled to close from 2 to 8 p.m. on June 11 and/or in the alternative on June 12 and/or on the alternative on June 13. (6/2)

Questions Surround NASA’s Shutdown of an International Cosmic-Ray Instrument (Source: Physics Today)
In February NASA quietly pulled the plug midway through the expected three-year life of a functioning cosmic-ray detector attached to the outside of the International Space Station (ISS). The unusual step came after a majority of scientists in the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass for the ISS (ISS-CREAM) collaboration rejected outright NASA’s demand to replace the project’s principal investigator (PI), University of Maryland (UMD) physicist Eun-Suk Seo, with the agency’s hand-picked successor.

“We asked the University of Maryland and the science team to make changes,” says NASA astrophysics program director Paul Hertz. “They did not make those changes, so we did not continue the mission.” A three-sentence note at the top of the ISS-CREAM collaboration’s webpage was the only notice of the project’s demise. NASA was providing $1.2 million a year for ISS-CREAM operations. It paid $22.4 million to build, launch, and install the refrigerator-sized device on the ISS. South Korea, home to two universities in the collaboration, contributed an additional $10 million. Hertz says the agency will entertain proposals to resume ISS-CREAM operations.

The collaboration “did not generate any science in its first year,” he says, noting that reviewers recommended against continuing the project under its existing leadership. “It’s up to somebody to write a proposal and demonstrate that if we were to turn it on and give them money, then we would get science, and the science would be worth the money.” ISS-CREAM was installed on the ISS in August 2017 to study properties of high-energy cosmic rays that are believed to originate from the universe’s most violent events. The four-instrument detector was adapted for spaceflight from a set of similar instruments, known as CREAM, that were carried aloft on seven high-altitude balloon flights over Antarctica beginning in 2004. Seo was PI on that project. (6/1)

The End of the Egolauncher (Source: Space Review)
A news report last week indicated that Stratolaunch may soon cease operations after a single flight of its giant aircraft. That outcome is disappointing, Dwayne Day writes, but also not terribly surprising. Click here. (6/3)
 
Defanging the Wolf Amendment (Source: Space Review)
An appropriations bill the House will consider later this month retains language that restricts bilateral cooperation between NASA and its Chinese counterparts. Jeff Foust reports that some believe it’s time to revisit that provision to allow for greater civil space cooperation between the countries. Click here. (6/3)
 
A Mighty Thunderous Silence: The Saturn F-1 Engine After Apollo (Source: Space Review)
Long after the last Saturn V lifted off, NASA and industry examined ways to preserve and even use new versions of the rocket’s F-1 engine. Dwayne Day recounts those efforts that continued up until several years ago. Click here. (6/3)
 
Saving Colonel Pruett (Source: Space Review)
Fifty years ago, the movie Marooned offered one of the more realistic portrayals of spaceflight of that era, depicting an Apollo spacecraft stuck in orbit. John Charles explains how that dilemma could have been avoided, and thus one of the film’s characters could have survived, had they only known about backup procedures. Click here. (6/3)

NASA Rover’s Clay Discovery Likely Remnants of Ancient Martian Lake (Source: Daily News)
The Curiosity rover has feat of clay. The Mars rover recently detected the finely grained soil while digging on the Red Planet, pointing to a once-flowing lake. In a May 29 blog entry from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the agency revealed that Curiosity found two rock samples, known as “Aberlady” and “Kilmarie,” consisting of “the highest amounts of clay minerals ever found during this mission.”

Researchers are fairly certain that water, at some point in the planet’s history, ran freely on Mars. Now, they’re hoping to learn if conditions were conducive to life formation billions of years ago. Curiosity is exploring a planet section called the “clay-bearing unit. It has been fitted with a drill that allows it to analyze rocks and its mineral compounds. The clay samples appear to justify that an ancient lake flowed at the spot eons ago. (6/3)

NASA Looking at “Hard Decisions” Within its Budget to Pay for Artemis Plan (Source: Ars Technica)
Over the last two months, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has repeatedly said the agency's ambitious new Artemis plan for sending humans to the Moon in 2024 will not require raiding other areas of its budget, such as its broad array of science programs, technology research, or aeronautics work. The reason, he said, is simple. The surest way to torpedo support for a program inside the agency is to take funding from someone else to pay for the new plan, and the surest way to lose support in Congress is to take work away from various field centers around the country.

"We can't cannibalize one part of the agency to feed another part of the agency," Bridenstine told Ars in April, which reflects comments he has made many times. "We can't cut the Science Mission Directorate to feed human exploration. We can't cannibalize the International Space Station to feed the Moon mission. So if we go in those directions, which have all been tried in the past, it never works politically. We can't do the same thing again and be upset that it didn't work." (6/3)

If We Sent Astronauts to Mars Right Now They’d Almost Certainly Die (Source: BGR News)
Mankind seems destined to one day set foot on Mars. NASA and other space agencies around the world are already making big plans for sending humans to the Red Planet, but we’re not nearly ready to actually stick human travelers in a ship and send them on the historic journey. As the European Space Agency explains in a new blog post, it’s not just a matter of having the rocket and spacecraft technology available to push a crewed capsule to Mars; it’s the fact that anyone we sent on the mission today would almost certainly never live long enough to make it back to Earth. The killer? Radiation.

Even astronauts to spend time aboard the International Space Station receive a massive amount of cosmic radiation compared to their counterparts back on Earth. A mission to Mars and, potentially, back to Earth would likely be a suicide mission even if the travelers made it back to Earth in one piece. “As it stands today, we can’t go to Mars due to radiation. It would be impossible to meet acceptable dose limits,” Marco Durante, a physicist with the ESA, explains. “The real problem is the large uncertainty surrounding the risks. We don’t understand space radiation very well and the long-lasting effects are unknown.”

But if space radiation is so bad, how will we ever be able to travel the cosmos? Scientists are working on various possible solutions to the problem, including special shielding that could protect a crewed space vehicle from the levels of radiation that researchers believe would be detrimental to travelers on long-haul missions. By the time crewed Mars missions will be possible from a technological standpoint — in the 2030s and beyond, according to many experts — we’ll have a better understanding of the threats posed by cosmic radiation and, hopefully, some solutions to keep space travelers safe. (6/3)

SpaceX Beginning to Tackle Some of the Big Challenges for a Mars Journey (Source: Ars Technica)
Earlier this month, the principal Mars "development engineer" for SpaceX, Paul Wooster, provided an update on the company's vision for getting to the Red Planet. During his presentation at the 2019 Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, DC, Wooster said SpaceX remains on track to send humans to Mars in the "mid-2020s." He was likely referring to launch opportunities for Mars in 2024 and 2026, but he also acknowledged that much work remains to reach that point.

SpaceX plans to bring humans to Mars with a two-stage rocket: the Starship upper stage and a Super Heavy booster (the latter formerly known as the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR). Iterative design versions of the Starship are being built at facilities in both Boca Chica, Texas, and near Cape Canaveral, Florida. SpaceX founder Elon Musk is expected to provide an update on their development in late June.

Wooster said that SpaceX is working to "minimize the number of things that we need to do in order to get that first mission to Mars." Part of that minimization involves a massive payload capacity. Starship, once refueled in low-Earth orbit, is planned to have a capacity of more than 100 tons to Mars. This will allow SpaceX to take a "brute force" approach, which will greatly simplify the overall logistics of the first missions. For instance, this will allow for taking more consumables instead of recycling them, more equipment and spare parts, and other infrastructure, Wooster said. (6/3)

NASA Reaches New Milestone on SLS Rocket (Source: NASA)
NASA achieved a significant milestone in manufacturing the first large, complex core stage that will help power the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on upcoming missions to the Moon. NASA and lead contractor Boeing have assembled four-fifths of the massive core stage needed to launch SLS and the Orion spacecraft on their first mission to the Moon: Artemis 1.

“Building and assembling this massive integrated propulsion and avionics stage for the world’s most powerful rocket, the only launch vehicle that can return astronauts to the Moon, is an engineering feat,” said Julie Bassler, SLS stages manager. “To manufacture the Space Launch System, we are working with more than 1,000 companies across the country. It’s truly America’s rocket.”

This significant program milestone comes after crews completed the second of three major activities to join the liquid hydrogen fuel tank to the upper part of the core stage. The upper part is made up of three previously connected large structures: the forward skirt that houses the rocket’s flight computers, the liquid oxygen propellant tank, and the intertank that holds more avionics and attaches to the rocket’s powerful boosters. Technicians horizontally connected the liquid hydrogen tank to the intertank using 360 bolts. NASA and Boeing, the SLS prime contractor, will now complete outfitting the engine section before integrating it, along with the four RS-25 engines, to the rest of the stage, completing the immense core stage in its entirety. (6/3)

Ahead of John Glenn's Spaceflight in 1962, the BBC Highlights Cocoa Beach (Source: Space Coast Daily)
On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn launched from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 14 to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Ahead of Glenn’s spaceflight, Panorama was in Cocoa Beach, to gauge the mood of the people and the man himself. Panorama is a BBC television investigative current affairs documentary program first broadcast in 1953 and is the world’s longest-running current affairs television program. (6/2)

Mission Accomplished: Penetron Repairs Russia’s Mission Control (Source: Penetron)
Like NASA's famous Mission Control in Houston in the USA, the RKA Mission Control Center (TsUP or ЦУП) in Korolyov, about 17 miles northwest of Moscow, (), has been the center of Russia’s (previously Soviet Union) space programs and today’s Russian Federal Space Agency. The Agency recently commissioned a wide scale repair and upgrade program for the TsUP facility.

The Penetron team was called into the project during the planning phase to assess how to best repair and renovate TsUP’s deteriorated concrete structures. Most of the repair work was focused on the foundation and below-grade concrete. After an inspection of the facility and careful review of the project plans, Penetron proposed a comprehensive application of topical crystalline materials to bring new life into the structures – and allow the work of the Mission Control Center to continue. (6/3)