July 18, 2020

UK Minister: Space Will Be Next Battleground, Must Prepare for Satellite War with China, Russia (Source: Brietbart)
Britain’s defence minister has said that the UK must evolve its defence capabilities to respond to new threats from the skies from hostile actors like Russia and China. Addressing the Air and Space Power conference on Wednesday on the future of combat air systems, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said that to prepare for modern warfare, defence strategy “requires a rebalancing from Industrial Age to Information Age capabilities – investing in cyber, space, electronic warfare, AI, robotics, and autonomy – coupled with their integration with the best of what already exists”.

In terms of defending the West’s fragile communications system, the defence minister said that “we know, all the while, that Russia and China are developing offensive weapons in space, [which is] a major cause for concern given that satellites don’t just provide our global communications, critical intelligence, and surveillance and navigation, but underpin our critical national infrastructure from mobile phones, to cashpoints, to the stock market. (7/17)

Is Commercial Space Travel Finally Taking Off? (Source: Brink)
While Earth-bound citizens grapple with quarantines, a new era of space exploration is blasting off. After years of only gradual expansion, emerging players and new technologies have reignited the space race in the 21st century. Dramatic technological advances and lucrative business models have changed the conversation, and private companies are making up for lost time. New investments and fresh private-public partnerships mean that booking a berth in space could happen sooner than we think. Countries like Japan, China, India and the United Arab Emirates are jumping in, too, expanding the borders of geopolitics.

According to George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic seeks to “expand space access to everyone, so that it’s not just the province of professional astronauts; it becomes the province of you and I, and the benefits of space accrue to everyone.” Whitesides explained that partnerships between NASA and the private sector reignited public interest in space to levels unseen since the Apollo moon landing. He said he predicts that “there’s going to be this wave of human space flight innovation coming up, and that’s something that really captures the attention of the American public and the international public.” (7/17)

The Closest Images of the Sun Ever Taken Reveal ‘Campfire’ Flares (Source: Science News)
Get out the marshmallows and toasting sticks. The closest images yet taken of the sun show tiny flares dubbed “campfires,” astronomers announced in a news conference on July 16. The images are the first from Solar Orbiter, a new sun-watching spacecraft that’s a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. The pictures were better than the science team expected. “When the first images came in, the first thought was, ‘This is not possible! It cannot be that good.’”  

These never-before-seen campfire flares are thought to be little relatives of larger solar flares, powerful magnetic outbursts that shoot bright spurts of radiation into space. Campfire flares are a million to a billion times as small as typical solar flares. The smallest ones in the Solar Orbiter images are a few hundred kilometers across, “about the size of a European country,” Berghmans said. It’s not clear yet whether the flickers are just scaled-down solar flares, or if the two phenomena have different driving mechanisms. (7/16)

Japan Launch of UAE Mars Probe is Rehearsal for Own 2024 Mission (Source: Nikkei)
A Mars-bound spacecraft will soon launch from Japan, part of a historic mission that, if successful, will showcase the reliability of the country's space exploration technology and serve as a springboard for its own mission in 2024. JAXA plans its own Mars exploration mission in 2024 at a cost of roughly 46 billion yen ($430 million). The project, nicknamed MMX, will launch a probe toward the Martian moon Phobos. The mission will bring back samples and utilize the new H-III rocket. Mitsubishi Electric has won the contract to build the probe system. Yamazaki Heavy Industries is developing the sample-collecting arm for the Phobos leg of the mission, as well as the capsule used for the return to Earth. (7/17)

NASA Touts Russia Ties as Rogozin Dismisses Artemis as Political (Source: Sputnik)
As multiple nations have unveiled ambitious plans to take humanity back to the Moon, earlier this month the Trump administration unveiled its so-called 'Artemis Accords' principles for Moon exploration, subsequently described by Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin as a "political project" and likened to the US invasion of countries back on Earth.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said on 14 July he was still hoping for support from Russia in implementing the ambitious US Artemis lunar program. The American space agency has been in talks about it building an airlock for the Lunar Gateway, a small space station in orbit around the Moon - a key piece of the American "Artemis" program. Speaking in an interview with the agency Bridenstine emphasized that "the relationship between NASA and Roscosmos is solid" and vowed that international partners would be granted a key role in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's plan to bring humans to the surface of the Moon by 2024 and install a space outpost in lunar orbit. (7/16)

India Considers Satellite Based Lightning Detection (Source: Times of India)
To better the country's lightning monitoring system, in order to check hundreds of casualties annually, the ministry of earth sciences is in talks with ISRO for installing a lightning detector on its upcoming GEO satellites. (7/17)

Florida Splashdown Planned on Aug. 2 for Dragon and Crew (Source: CNBC)
NASA plans to return astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. The spacecraft is scheduled to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on Aug. 2, off the Florida coast. Splashdown and recovery would mark the conclusion of NASA and SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission, the first time Elon Musk’s company has flown astronauts. Editor's Note: This would also be the first-ever crew splashdown in the waters off Florida's coast. SpaceX has based a retrieval vessel at Port Canaveral for this and future splashdowns. (7/17)

Lockheed Martin to Use Former Astronaut Hall of Fame for Orion Work (Source: Florida Today)
A Titusville building once used for honoring American astronauts will continue its spaceflight legacy when Lockheed Martin begins using the facility next year for work related to NASA's Orion crew capsule. The former Astronaut Hall of Fame, located just west of the NASA Causeway on State Road 405, will become the aerospace giant's newest location for Orion, a program expected to speed up locally in the coming years as NASA begins launching the spacecraft for its moon-focused Artemis program. Lockheed Martin is leasing the facility from Delaware North, which owns the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. It was also named the Astronaut Training Experience, or ATX Center, before it and the hall of fame were recently moved to the visitor complex's main campus six miles to the east. (7/17)

SpaceX Scraps Florida Starship Mk2 Prototype (Source: Teslarati)
Beginning a few months after work began on Starship Mk1 at SpaceX’s South Texas production facilities, a separate team in Cocoa, Florida was tasked with building a similar Starship Mk2 prototype. Not much is known about Mk2 relative to its much more publicized sibling but unofficial photos and videos taken over the course of 2019 suggested that SpaceX had effectively completed most of Starship Mk2 by the end of last year. However, built dozens of miles and several waterways away from a practical test facility, actually testing a Starship prototype assembled at SpaceX’s Cocoa facilities was always going to be an uphill battle.

To warrant the cost and effort that would be required to transport something as large as a vertical Starship from Cocoa, Florida to Cape Canaveral, Mk2 would have to be able offer something invaluable during testing. Now eight months after Starship Mk1 was destroyed during one of its first real tests, that was sadly not the case and SpaceX has chosen the simplest route forward – scrapping Mk2 where it sits. Long story short, the methods SpaceX used to build Starship Mk1 and Mk2 were already proven redundant more than six months ago and buried even deeper in May 2020. Aside from serving as a museum piece, Starship Mk2’s fate was sealed – the only real question was how and when it would be scrapped. For now, SpaceX’s Starship program will be almost exclusively stationed in South Texas, where it appears to be in good hands. (7/17)