January 12, 2020

Space Force Preparing for Everything, Even Interplanetary Operations (Source: Federal News Network)
The Space Force is facing some of its most daunting existential questions as it prepares to present to Congress its plan for how it will become the next military service. The Air Force secretary must deliver the plan to Congress by Feb. 1. Maj. Gen. John Shaw, leader of Space Force’s Space Operations Command said the new service is building itself for the far future.

“This is a huge opportunity. We have the opportunity to create a warfighting service from scratch,” Shaw said Friday at an Air Force Association event in Washington. “I’ve been telling the team, ‘Don’t think about a warfighting service for the next decade. Create a warfighting service or the 22nd century. What is warfighting going to look like at the end of this century and into the next?’” That may include interplanetary operations, Shaw said.

“Technology will change on the fly, maybe even by the second,” he said. “What we see is code writing that used to take years that now takes weeks or even hours. That will actually be done in microseconds, and maybe artificially. It’s going to be highly technology dependent and not human capital dependent.” So how does the Space Force organize around that world? It’s creating a doctrine center to do some of that thinking. It also has some tenets it decided will be important for going forward. One of the main ones is being independent, but not insular. “We have to bring balance to the space force,” Shaw said. “It’s a different domain, the physics are different.” (1/10)

Space Force Unit Coming to Hawaii Air National Guard (Source: Military.com)
The Hawaii Air National Guard, picked to have one of four offensive space control squadrons nationally in the Air Guard, expects to start selecting candidates in April. Eighty-eight military members will make up the unit, likely to be called the 293rd Space Control Squadron, said Brig. Gen. Ryan Okahara, commander of the Hawaii Air Guard. The squadron will be based at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai. (1/12)

Space Force to Stand Up a Doctrine Hub (Source: Defense News)
The Space Force is setting up a “space doctrine center” where the brand-new American armed service can begin to hammer out how to optimally operate in space, the head of Space Operations Command said. The Space Force was formally established on Dec. 20 as an independent military branch inside the Department of the Air Force. But much still needs to be done to get the fledgling service up on its feet, including laying out its organizational structure, creating a logo, potentially changing the name of bases and transferring airmen over to the Space Force.

“We have been authorized some billets for a space doctrine center, and we’ll be holding a space doctrine conference in Colorado Springs next month,” Shaw said at a Jan. 10 breakfast event. “So I think we’re already thinking about how do we think about this anew.” The service had identified an initial planning cadre that would hammer out many of the major details needed to stand up the Space Force. That plan includes 30-, 60- and 90-day goals, and Barrett herself is responsible for meeting one major, near-term deadline by Feb. 1, when a proposal for the initial structure of the Space Force is due to Congress. (1/11)

Due Date Looms for Space Force’s First Org Chart (Source: Nature)
The Space Force has three weeks to come up with an initial organization plan that Congress wants by Feb. 1, a service official said Jan. 10. Maj. Gen. John Shaw, who serves as both US Space Command’s combined force space component commander as well as the Space Force’s Space Operations Command boss, said at an AFA Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies breakfast that they’re considering who the Space Force should recruit and how, what new groups should comprise the service, and how doctrine will shape the path forward. Shaw emphasized the plan must improve on how space assets work with air, land, sea, and cyber forces, and how the US collaborates with other countries. (1/10)

Japanese Billionaire Looking for Love to Take on Musk Moon Trip (Source: Bloomberg)
Call it “The Bachelor: Moon Edition.” An eccentric, lonely Japanese billionaire planning to fly to the moon on Elon Musk’s rocket is looking for the love of his life to join him on his journey. He just hasn’t found her yet. Yusaku Maezawa, the first paying passenger on SpaceX’s maiden tourist voyage to the moon in 2023, tweeted a link Sunday to a website where women can apply to be his companion on the week-long space flight. (1/12)

Could invisible Aliens Really Exist Among Us? (Source: The Conversation)
Life is pretty easy to recognise. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym “MRSGREN” to describe it. It stands for movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. But Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial College London, recently said that alien lifeforms that are impossible to spot may be living among us. How could that be possible?

While life may be easy to recognize, it’s actually notoriously difficult to define and has had scientists and philosophers in debate for centuries – if not millennia. For example, a 3D printer can reproduce itself, but we wouldn’t call it alive. On the other hand, a mule is famously sterile, but we would never say it doesn’t live. As nobody can agree, there are more than 100 definitions of what life is. An alternative (but imperfect) approach is describing life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”, which works for many cases we want to describe. (1/10)

UAE Space Agency Launches NewSpace Innovation Program (Source: Gulf News)
The UAE Space Agency has announced its collaboration with the Abu Dhabi-based global innovation hub, Krypto Labs, to launch the UAE NewSpace Innovation Programme, which aims to maximise the growth of space technology start-ups in NewSpace, the rising private spaceflight industry. The program comes as part of the UAE Space Agency’s efforts to accelerate the growth of technology start-ups in the field of space sciences.

The program falls under the National Space Investment Promotion Plan which aims to heighten the role of the space industry in contributing to the economy of the UAE, while encouraging a culture of interest in the space sector, in efforts to establish a knowledge-based competitive national economy built on innovation and the latest technologies. (1/11)

Revised Georgia Spaceport Application Questioned (Source: Brunswick News)
A longtime critic of a proposed spaceport in Camden County believes the odds of a commercial rocket launch are now “one in a million.” Steve Weinkle, who lives less than 10 miles from the proposed spaceport, said the project was already in trouble before the county chose to revise its application to the Federal Aviation Administration in December. Camden is changing its focus to small launch vehicles, which county officials said pose fewer environmental and safety concerns.

“Given the regulatory uncertainty and shift in the potential market, Spaceport Camden determined it must focus on the interest from the small launch operators,” said Bob Hope, a spaceport spokesman for the county. But Weinkle said the FAA’s restriction to one launch trajectory from the site, and Camden’s decision to change its application, are only part of the problem. In a letter sent to Camden County Commission Chairman Jimmy Starline on Dec. 16 in response to the revised application, FAA officials agreed to amend the application. But the letter also raised concerns that “have not yet been satisfactorily resolved,” by county officials. (1/11)

The Woman Who Paid $250,000 to Go Into Space (Source: BBC)
Ketty Maisonrouge has waited 15 years for a trip that she knows will be out of this world. The 61-year-old business school professor signed up back in 2005 for the promise of five minutes in zero-gravity, paying $250,000 (£190,500) to travel beyond the earth's atmosphere. Now the company that sold her the ticket, Virgin Galactic, says it will finally begin flights this year. Its founder, Sir Richard Branson, will be on the first trip, and Mrs Maisonrouge won't be far behind.

If all goes to plan, Virgin Galactic will be the first private company to take tourists into space. The company says 600 people have already purchased tickets, including celebrities like Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio. But rival firms are close behind. Blue Origin, started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has also starting speaking to possible passengers for trips it hopes to start this year, while SpaceX, founded by Tesla's Elon Musk, announced in 2019 that a Japanese billionaire would be its first passenger for a trip around the moon. (1/12)

Seek and Destroy: How NASA Protects Us from Thousands of Asteroids (Source: WCVB)
Just days in the new year, an 86-foot wide asteroid blasted past Earth at an estimated 14,000 miles per hour. The rock would have exploded if it hit our atmosphere, but we still would have felt the impact. In 2013, a similar sized asteroid exploded over a Russian city, sending heat and shock waves that reportedly shattered windows and injured 1,500 people. James Green is the chief scientist at NASA, where the agency is a on a mission to intercept asteroids before they threaten Earth. He joins Soledad O’Brien in the studio to discuss the new methods they are using to protect our planet. (1/11)

ULA Completes Fueling Test on Next Delta 4-Heavy Rocket (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
United Launch Alliance engineers filled a Delta 4-Heavy rocket with super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants Friday at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport during a practice countdown before the heavy-lifter’s scheduled liftoff in June with a top secret U.S. government spy satellite. The countdown rehearsal Friday is known as a wet dress rehearsal. The mock countdown provided an opportunity for ULA’s launch team to practice launch day procedures and verify the Delta 4-Heavy’s readiness for flight, reducing chances of a problem cropping up during the real countdown. (1/11)

Lucy Mission Has a New Destination (Source: SpaceRef)
Less than two years before launch, scientists associated with NASA's Lucy mission, led by Southwest Research Institute, have discovered an additional small asteroid that will be visited by the Lucy spacecraft. Set to launch in 2021, its 12-year journey of almost 4 billion miles will explore the Trojan asteroids, a population of ancient small bodies that share an orbit with Jupiter.

This first-ever mission to the Trojans was already going to break records by visiting seven asteroids during a single mission. Now, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Lucy team discovered that the first Trojan target, Eurybates, has a satellite. This discovery provides an additional object for Lucy to study. (1/9)

NASA’s Path to the Moon Leads Through Congress. Good Thing NASA’s No. 2 Knows His Way Around Capitol Hill (Source: Space News)
Jim Morhard may be a newcomer to space, but not to astronauts. The NASA deputy administrator often tells the story of how, as a six-year-old in Arlington, Virginia, he and his older brother knocked on the door of a famous neighbor. “He let us pet his cat, gave us a drink of water, and my brother got his autograph,” he recalled in a recent speech. “That was the first time that I met John Glenn.”

It’s been a little more than a year since Morhard, a longtime Senate appropriations staffer, was sworn in as the agency’s 14th deputy administrator. In recent months, he’s taken on a bigger public profile, with more speeches and presentations and even a Twitter account, highlighting NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the moon as a precursor for even more ambitious exploration efforts. (1/11)