February 19, 2022

Antares Rocket Launches From Virginia with 8300 Pounds of Cargo for ISS (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket launched Saturday from Virginia, hauling 8,300 pounds of crew provisions, life support hardware, biomedical and plant growth experiments, and technology demonstrations to the International Space Station. The mission, known as NG-17, is also carrying a modification kit to prepare for the arrival of a new pair of upgraded solar arrays at the space station on a future SpaceX cargo flight. There's also a trash disposal system that will allow garbage to be jettisoned out of the Nanoracks airlock. This Cygnus mission will also debut a new capability to reboost the altitude of the space station. (2/19)

Florida Coast Can Expect 1-Foot Sea Level Rise by 2050 (Source: TIME)
Ever since NASA launched the first American weather satellite, in 1960, part of the space agency's mission has been to monitor our home planet—a mission that's never been as important as it is now, in the era of convulsive climate change. Currently, NASA has 16 Earth-observing satellites orbiting the planet. This week, the work of those satellites—as well as research by NOAA, the EPA, the U.S. Geological Survey and others—paid off in an illuminating, if deeply troubling, way, with a new study predicting global sea level rise over the next 30 years.

As NASA reports, the findings aren't pretty. Within the next three decades, sea levels along the U.S. coasts will rise by 25 to 30 cm (10 to 12 in.) over current levels, eroding beachfront land, inundating coastal communities, driving down property values and displacing residents. The biggest driver of the sea level rise, of course, is melting glaciers and ice sheets, which are calving away from Greenland and elsewhere and flowing into the oceans.

Just in case the crisis does not feel personal enough, NASA has released an online tool allowing users to see just how bad sea level rise will be in their own communities in every decade from the 2020s to the 2150s. Call Cape Canaveral home? You're looking at a .33 m (1 ft.) sea level rise by 2050. The message from NASA: keep looking up and out—that's what a space agency does, after all. But we neglect our own world at our very grave peril. Click here. (2/18)

SpaceX to Split its Private Stock 10-for-1 (Source: CNBC)
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is splitting the value of its common stock 10-for-1, CNBC has learned, with the company’s valuation having soared to more than $100 billion. The split means that for each share of SpaceX stock owned as of Thursday, a holder now has 10 shares after the conversion. With SpaceX valued at $560 a share during its most recent sale, the split reduces SpaceX’s common stock to $56 a share, according to a company-wide email. “The split has no impact on the overall valuation of the company or on the overall value of your SpaceX holdings,” the email said. (2/18)

SpaceX to Close Out February with Two More Starlink Launches (Source: Teslarati)
Continuing the company’s busiest planned year yet, SpaceX has dispatched a drone ship for the first of two more Falcon 9 Starlink launches scheduled before the end of the month. While there were signs a few weeks ago that SpaceX had as many as four Starlink launches planned this month, that appears to have shrunk to three. In theory, SpaceX could have finished refurbishing both of its East Coast launch pads – LC-40 and LC-39A – earlier this week after supporting launches on January 31 and February 3.

SpaceX may be taking an extra week to better understand a space weather anomaly that recently destroyed more than three-dozen Starlink satellites, to conduct deeper pad maintenance, to refurbish well-worn Falcon rockets, or to simply give its launch workforce a bit of respite but either way, the company’s next Falcon 9 launch appears to be scheduled no earlier than (NET) 9:54 am EST, Sunday, February 20. (2/17)

Keep Capitalists Off the Moon (Source: Jacobin)
Libertarian think tanks are already gearing up to make the dystopian case for extending private property rights to the Moon. It’s a blueprint for expanding the power of the world’s plutocrats on a scale never seen before. Today, what passes for futurist optimism is often more a sign of civilizational paralysis and economic stagnation — the increasingly absurd billionaire space race offering us a counterfeit vision of utopian promise in the form of climate-destroying vanity flights and dystopian fanfiction about Martian colonies.

Something like this is at least the implicit premise of a new report from the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute entitled Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon, which mounts a Lockean case for the ownership of land off-world. To researcher Rebecca Lowe’s credit, the argument is intellectually quite rigorous and represents a philosophically consistent application of classical liberal thinking.

In true libertarian fashion, the case for property rights is asserted as axiomatic and advanced as fundamentally egalitarian in spirit. “Moral property rights,” Lowe writes, “are rights that simply reflect truths about morality, and which do not depend on positive law.” While democratic nations, she argues, may be in a position to “share fairly amongst their citizens the opportunities of the national appropriation of space,” the existence of authoritarian societies means some will be unable to reap the off-world bounty. Click here. (2/18)

Don’t Cede the Space Race to China and the Billionaires (Source: New York Times)
If NASA’s plan holds, its Artemis program will land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon in 2025. And this, NASA says, is just the beginning. The agency envisions at least 10 lunar landings. Its administrator, Bill Nelson, is waging a campaign to beat other nations in placing “boots on the moon” — not just boots but also, in time, a base. And “the sooner we get to the moon,” NASA has said, “the sooner we get American astronauts to Mars.”

But why bother? There is certainly much of interest on Mars — NASA’s newest rover, Perseverance, and its companion, the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, have made that clearer than ever. What is less evident is the role, the value, of human explorers. To most Americans, machines seem sufficient to the task. If the administration fails to sharpen and press its case, if it shies from insisting that humans, not just our inventions, should roam the heavens, the United States will likely cede the moon — and a good deal more than that — to more determined competitors.

Chief among them is China. Its goal is plain: to become a “great space power,” as President Xi Jinping has said. If anyone is as bullish on the new frontier as China, it is the billionaires. Their ambitions, too, should spur NASA to stay in the game. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might or might not be visionaries, but they are easily the most powerful people on this planet to speak with a straight face about colonizing other ones. But there is an essential difference between exploration and colonization, and both are a far cry from commercialization. Left to the billionaires, space is less likely to become a haven for humanity than a playground for its wealthiest members. (2/18)

Amazon Web Services Partners with Brazil’s Space Agency (Source: GeekWire)
Amazon Web Services and the Brazilian Space Agency are joining forces to support long-term growth of the space industry in Latin America’s largest country. The statement of strategic intent and cooperation, signed by AWS and the space agency (known in Portuguese as the Agência Espacial Brasileira, or AEB), follows similar agreements that Amazon has made with Greece and Singapore.

But Brazil is a higher-profile case: Last year, Brazilian space and defense officials announced that Virgin Orbit would conduct orbital launches from the country’s Alcântara Space Center. Brazil is also a participant in the International Space Station program, and it has signed onto NASA’s Artemis Accords for moon exploration. The newly signed agreement, which also involves collaboration with Brazil’s U.S. embassy, lays out three initiatives aimed at supporting Brazil’s space activities.

AWS will offer space industry stakeholders access to data-processing credits, technical training and business support through a program called the Brazil/AWS Space Collaboration for the Economy and Development, or B/ASCEnD, Another initiative will create a centralized repository for space data. The third initiative will bring together representatives from AWS and Brazil’s space agency to discuss policy and regulatory strategies in support of Brazil’s space goals. (2/17)

Just a Few Months in Space May Permanently Rewire Your Brain (Source: Daily Beast)
For the most part, research from NASA’s trailblazing Twins Study and other investigations show that free-floating thousands of miles above solid ground can cause big changes on immune system function, gene expression, metabolism, and even gut bacteria. Most of these physiological changes, however, reverse themselves once an astronaut is back on Earth. Others can be offset through diet, exercise, and other actions. But when it comes to the brain, changes may be more permanent for space travelers, as found by one new peer-reviewed study published Friday in Frontiers of Neural Circuits.

In a collaborative effort between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian space agency Roscosmos, a team of researchers found that long-duration spaceflight leads to very small but widespread changes in regions of the brain involved in sensorimotor integration—the parts of our brain that help us pick up sensory information and use it to interact with our external environment. These changes were particularly notable in a type of brain tissue called white matter, which acts as a sort of network cable connecting the brain’s computing centers (gray matter) together. (2/18)

If We Ever Travel to Another Star, We’re Going Here (Source: The Atlantic)
By cosmic standards, Proxima Centauri is right next door. At 4.2 light-years away, it is the closest star to our sun, which makes the planets around Proxima the closest planets to us of any in the universe.

Right now, one of the best ways to get information about our neighboring planets is from a very sophisticated telescope instrument in Chile that astronomers use to peer beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Exoplanets are everywhere, and researchers have detected several thousand of them around the Milky Way, but there’s something special about finding an exoplanet close to home. And that instrument—the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, or ESPRESSO—recently gave astronomers that extra kick, evidence of a new potential planet.

Even this close, we can’t swing by for a visit, of course, not with current technology. But if human beings ever embark on an interstellar journey, Proxima Centauri is the place they’ll go. Researchers, no doubt fueled by actual cups of espresso, are already thinking deeply about what it would take to reach the cosmic neighborhood where the star resides, starting with tiny robots that could fly faster than traditional spacecraft and shorten the journey from thousands of years to mere decades. (2/18)