July 17, 2021

The Most Random Space Crew Ever (Source: The Atlantic)
Jeff Bezos has finalized the manifest for his company’s first passenger flight to space, and it’s a rather unusual bunch. There’s Bezos himself, the richest person in the world, who sold some of his Amazon stock to fund his space venture, Blue Origin. His brother, Mark, with whom he wanted to share the experience.

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old American pilot who in the early 1960s passed the same training tests designed for male astronauts, but was rejected by NASA. And Oliver Daemen, a Dutch 18-year-old who graduated high school just last year. When they take off on Tuesday, they will each fulfill a personal dream, but as a crew, they’re making history: No group like this one has ever gone to space together before. Even the participants of the most diverse missions to the International Space Station have had far more in common with one another than this quartet. (7/15)

South Korea Seeks to Move Up Its Spot in Global Space Race (Source: Bloomberg)
South Korea’s space program is set for a major boost with new satellites to keep it at the forefront of the 6G communications competition and more eyes in the sky for national security purposes, the science minister said. Lim Hye-sook said this means launching multitasking satellites on home-grown rockets, and eventually a mission to the moon. “Space exploration will be the platform for new businesses,” said Lim, who received her doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Texas.

South Korea saw limits removed on its rocket development earlier this year when the U.S. lifted restrictions in a bilateral agreement, which could help the country build more powerful rocket engines and quickly play catch-up in the commercial space business. U.S. President Joe Biden and President Moon Jae-in ended bilateral missile guideline in May that had long restricted Seoul’s development of missiles to under the range of 800 kilometers (500 miles).

One big test comes in October when South Korea plans to launch its three-stage Nuri rocket, a $1.8 billion project designed to put a 1.5-ton satellite into a orbit about 600 to 800 kms above the Earth. It would be a major advancement over its two-stage Naro space vehicle built with domestic and Russian technology that was hit by delays and two failed launches before a successful flight in 2013 -- carrying a 100-kilogram (220-pound) research satellite. (7/15)

In New Space Race, China is Closing Fast (Source: Politico)
In policy circles, when you hear talk about the “new space race,” it is almost always uttered in the same breath as China — not Russia, which was the United States’ main competitor in the first era of the space age. Beijing has logged a series of head-spinning achievements in the past few years. It now has a fully manned space station from which Chinese taikonauts just conducted their first space walk. It has retrieved samples from the moon and orbited a remote spacecraft around it.

A Chinese rover is operating on the Martian surface alongside two from the United States. Meanwhile, Beijing is designing a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle like SpaceX's Starship for deep space missions and recently inked a partnership with Russia to build a research base on the moon. Unlike the Cold War race between Washington and Moscow, however, this expanding competition is about far more than planting a flag: It’s about seizing the high ground for military advantage and turning space into a commercial engine that could change life on Earth.

How worried should Washington be? If you talk to those studying the national security implications of a preeminent Chinese space power, the U.S. is at serious risk of losing the advantage and putting its military and economic security in jeopardy, if it doesn’t get its act together. A major reason is that the Chinese, by all accounts, have a comprehensive strategy and the will, from the Communist Party leadership on down, to execute it. (7/16)

SpaceX Starlink Broadband Service Is Now Available In Ireland (Source: Tesmanian)
SpaceX started to accept pre-orders of its Starlink broadband service on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis via Starlink.com early this year. Ever since, over half-a-million customers pre-ordered the beta service. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that all 500,000 customers will be connected to the network within the next 12 months. This week, SpaceX emailed potential Irish customers announcing that –“Starlink is now available in limited supply in Ireland!

Users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s [megabits per second] over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all,” the company wrote in the e-mail, “As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically.” (7/15)

Scotland Landowner Lobbied Ministers on Spaceport (Source: The Ferret)
Scotland’s biggest private landowner has been attacked as “manipulative” and “undemocratic” after The Ferret revealed that his company secretly lobbied the Scottish Government to stymie plans for a spaceport in Sutherland. A letter released under freedom of information law shows that Wildland Limited — which runs three large estates across Scotland for Danish billionaire, Anders Holch Povlsen — warned the former rural economy minister, Fergus Ewing, that its planned investments could be endangered by the spaceport. Some campaigners are angered by the lobbying, while others are disappointed. Land reformers criticize the political influence wielded by large landowners. (7/16)

City-Sized Asteroids Smacked Ancient Earth 10 Times More Often Than Thought (Source: Space.com)
Asteroids the size of cities, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, slammed into the ancient Earth way more often than previously thought, a new study has found. Approximately every 15 million years, our evolving planet would get a hit by a piece of rock about the size of a city, or even a bigger province, scientists with the new study said in a statement. The research was presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference last week. This violent period, which took place between 2.5 and 3.5 billion years ago, saw the planet in upheaval on a regular basis, with the chemistry near its surface undergoing dramatic changes that can be traced in the rocks in the ground even today, the researchers said. (7/15)