November 11, 2019

SpaceX Launches its Falcon 9 Rocket with 60 Starlink Satellites on Veterans Day (Source: Parabolic Arc)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport on Nov. 11. The rocket carried 60 Starlink communications satellites for SpaceX. This was the fourth use of the Falcon-9 first stage, and the second use of the rocket's fairing. Te Falcon 9’s first stage supported the Iridium-7, SAOCOM-1A, and Nusantara Satu missions, and the fairing was previously flown on Falcon Heavy’s Arabsat6A mission earlier this year.

Following stage separation, SpaceX landed the Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Recovery of the two fairing halves was originally planned by called off on the day prior to launch. (11/11)

Telesat Postpones Constellation Manufacturer Selection (Source: Space News)
Telesat will postpone the selection of a manufacturer for its satellite constellation until next year. Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said last week that decision, which had been expected this year, will now come in the first quarter of 2020. That decision was originally between Airbus Defence and Space and a team of Maxar Technologies and Thales Alenia Space, but Maxar and Thales have split and are now competing separately. Goldberg didn't say in an earnings call if that split was a factor in Telesat's decision to push back a selection. (11/11)

Kepler Demonstrates Polar Coverage (Source: SpaceQ)
Kepler demonstrated the ability of its satellite system to provide high-bandwidth communications in polar regions. The Canadian company said a German icebreaker participating in a scientific expedition near the North Pole was able to communicate with Kepler's two demonstration satellites at a rate of 100 megabits per second. Kepler said the demonstration showed the potential of its planned constellation to provide store-and-forward communications of large amounts of data. (11/11)

New Russian Medium Lift Rocket Ready in Mid-2020s (Source: Space News)
A new Russian medium-lift rocket won't enter commercial service until the mid-2020s. GK Launch Services said in a recent interview that the Soyuz-5 rocket likely won't be commercially available in 2026, with flight tests scheduled to begin in 2023. The current design of the vehicle makes use of versions of existing rocket engines, including the RD-171 engine in its first stage, and launches from Baikonur will use facilities originally developed for the Zenit rocket. The Soyuz-5 will be able to place up to 17.3 tons in low Earth orbit and 5 tons in geostationary transfer orbit, but the company isn't disclosing a price for the rocket. (11/11)

Space Industry Works with Government in New Info Sharing Center (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
The acknowledgement of space assets as critical infrastructure has enabled the establishment of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center to help ward off cyberthreats. "We think this is a great opportunity for us to be able to bring some of that expertise in -- in how you protect data and how you move data around and the threats that go along with that -- to the ISAC," said Chris Bogdan, who leads Booz Allen Hamilton's aerospace unit.

There are about two dozen ISACs within the US. These nonprofit organizations essentially act as an industry go-between, sharing knowledge about cybersecurity and other threats. “Because these ISACs are sector-focused and member-driven, they can select the specific cyberthreat information and perform analysis on what is particularly relevant to the industry in which the members operate.” But until this year there was no ISAC dedicated to space. (11/8)

NASA Scientists Detect Huge Thermonuclear Blast Deep in Space (Source: Science Alert)
NASA recently detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space. The culprit seems to be a distant pulsar, the space agency reports, which is the stellar remains of a star that blew up in a supernova but was too small to form a black hole. NASA spotted the burst because it sent out an intense beam of x-rays that got picked up by the agency's orbital observatory NICER. All in all, it serves as a potent reminder: space is an extremely dangerous, extremely metal place. (11/10)

Virgin Galactic’s IPO Launches a Pivotal Phase for Space Tourism (Source: Quartz)
The route to success in the space tourism industry is bound to be a wild ride and Branson is hoping his first mover advantage will bring healthy returns in the long run. Indeed, this high-risk venture could well pay off–it’s just a question of when. Although it has yet to fly any paying passengers and is currently loss making, Virgin Galactic aims to be profitable by 2021, based on completing 115 flights that generate $210m in revenue. By 2023, it is forecasting revenues of $590m and expects to have flown more than 3,000 passengers.

Since that number is a tiny portion of the target market of high net-worth individuals with assets of at least $10m, its projections could well be achievable. And, currently, Virgin Galactic appears to be ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin in fulfilling the vision of space tourism. While Virgin Galactic has failed to deliver on expectations in the past–it missed its own targets for flights commencing and experienced a catastrophic accident in 2014–it has more recently made substantial progress. (11/8)

University of Florida Lab Investigates Space Debris (Source: MIT Technology Review)
On a sweltering day in August, in a windowless strip mall office in north-central Florida, Rafael Carrasquilla and a dozen other students wore surgical gloves as they picked through piles of dust with tweezers. They were hunting for tiny slivers of carbon fiber only millimeters long, almost invisible to the naked eye. There were no ventilation fans, no sneezing or sudden movements at the lab bench. When they found one, they logged its appearance in a database, bagged it, tagged it, and placed it among tens of thousands of others painstakingly organized in ranks of plastic bins.

Carrasquilla leads the fragment characterization effort for the University of Florida, part of a NASA-led experiment called DebriSat that began in 2011. DebriSat was created to answer a question: What happens when a piece of orbital debris slams into a satellite at thousands of miles per hour? If such a collision occurs in orbit, it’s impossible to keep track of the resulting chaos. The only way to answer that question with confidence is to cause a catastrophic impact in a laboratory down here on Earth, where conditions can be carefully controlled and results meticulously catalogued.

Orbital debris comes in many shapes and sizes, from fragments similar to those Carrasquilla’s group was analyzing to full-size rocket boosters left in space. In orbit, even miniature fragments are capable of damaging satellites or penetrating space suits. Kinetic energy increases with the square of an object’s velocity—and impacts in orbit typically happen at over 20,000 miles per hour, so that even tiny carbon-fiber needles can cause damage. “The biggest mission-ending risk to operational spacecraft comes from small, millimeter-size orbital debris, not big fat objects,” says NASA's Jer Chyi “JC” Liou. Click here. (11/11)

There’s Growing Evidence That the Universe Is Connected by Giant Structures (Source: Motherboard)
Galaxies within a few million light years of each other can gravitationally affect each other in predictable ways, but scientists have observed mysterious patterns between distant galaxies that transcend those local interactions. These discoveries hint at the enigmatic influence of so-called “large-scale structures” which, as the name suggests, are the biggest known objects in the universe. These dim structures are made of hydrogen gas and dark matter and take the form of filaments, sheets, and knots that link galaxies in a vast network called the cosmic web.

We know these structures have major implications for the evolution and movements of galaxies, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of the root dynamics driving them. Scientists are eager to acquire these new details because some of these phenomena challenge the most fundamental ideas about the universe. “That’s actually the reason why everybody is always studying these large-scale structures,” says Noam Libeskind, a cosmographer. “It’s a way of probing and constraining the laws of gravity and the nature of matter, dark matter, dark energy, and the universe.”

For instance, a study published in The Astrophysical Journal in October found that hundreds of galaxies were rotating in sync with the motions of galaxies that were tens of millions of light years away. “This discovery is quite new and unexpected,” said lead author Joon Hyeop Lee, an astronomer at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, in an email. “I have never seen any previous report of observations or any prediction from numerical simulations, exactly related to this phenomenon.” (11/11)

The Space Artist Who Saw Pluto Before NASA (Source: Guardian)
On 7 November, David Hardy opens a new exhibition called Visions of Space alongside 19 fellow space artists. Space art (or astronomical art) is an art movement just like modernism or impressionism. Its early pioneers included American artist , who painted what he saw in a telescope, and French astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux, who made an atlas of the Milky Way – and created impossibly accurate paintings of Mars in the 1920s and 1930s. Together, they’re known as the Fathers of Modern Space Art. Click here. (11/11)