July 2, 2022

McBride Retires as Longest Serving NASA Armstrong Director (Source: AeroTech News)
When David McBride first came to NASA’s remote outpost in the Mojave Desert in 1982 as a cooperative education student, he didn’t imagine becoming its center director. “I was expecting to be here for one semester, but right away I was captivated by the work and more importantly the people who do the work,” McBride said. “It kept me interested and excited over the last 40 years of seeing the progress, the technology, and some cool airplanes.” His NASA journey will concluded when he retired June 30, 2022, as the longest serving center director at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. (7/1)

Funky Mars Rocks Complicate NASA Rover's Sampling Dreams (Source: CNET)
NASA's Perseverance rover is investigating the immensely exciting river delta region of Jezero Crater. It has big plans to pick up some rock samples there that might hold evidence of past life. But the rocks aren't cooperating. Yet. In a mission update this week, Denise Buckner, a student collaborator at University of Florida, detailed the trials and tribulations Perseverance is going through to try to find a good rock to sample. "Sometimes, fragile materials fracture, crack, or even crumble during the abrasion and coring process, and other rocks have tricky shapes and angles that make drilling difficult or impossible," Buckner wrote.

The rover team had been eyeing an intriguing layered target nicknamed Betty's Rock that appeared to have fallen from an outcrop above. The rock's "jagged layers and awkward shape" foiled plans for collecting a sample from it. It was too tough to get the rover's sampling drill into place. NASA intends to pick up the rover's samples from Mars and bring them back to Earth with a future mission. Perseverance already has a small rock collection from other areas in the crater, but anything gathered in the river delta will be particularly prized. The delta's history of water makes it a prime place to look for signs of ancient microbial life. (7/1)

Virgin Orbit Launches Seven Satellites for US Space Force and NASA (Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
Virgin Orbit launched its fifth flight of the LauncherOne rocket, after scrubbing an attempt on Wednesday because the propellant temperature was deemed to be “slightly out of bounds”. That decision was made prior to the take-off of Cosmic Girl, the carrier aircraft. A nominal take off and launch occurred on Friday for the mission, named Straight Up, consisting of seven satellites from the US Space Force and NASA destined for low Earth orbit. Straight Up was Virgin Orbit’s first nighttime launch.

The launch was procured by the Space Force’s Rocket Systems Launch Program, with payloads provided by the Space Test Program. The USSF designation for the mission is STP-S28A. Two of the satellites are also part of the ELaNa (Educational Launch of Nanosatellites) 39 mission for NASA. All seven satellites are being deployed into a low Earth orbit at an altitude of 500 km, inclined 45 degrees. (7/1)

ULA Atlas Launches USSF-12 Mission for Space Force, Department of Defense (Source: AmericaSpace)
ULA is now deep into the final “quarter-century” of flights of its Atlas V, as it prepares to retire this workhorse and transition to Vulcan-Centaur. A rarely-used variant of the “Mighty Atlas”—numerically designated “541”, equipped with a 17.7-foot-diameter (5.4-meter) Short Payload Fairing (SPF), four strap-on solid-fueled boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage—took flight from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport on Friday, following a 24-hour delay due to poor weather. ULA’s fourth mission of 2022 is tasked with the deployment of the dual-satellite USSF-12 payload “stack” for the U.S. Space Force and the Department of Defense. (7/1)

Agile to Consolidate Operations in New Colorado Plant (Source: Space News)
Agile Space Industries is preparing to consolidate propulsion design, manufacturing and production this summer in a new 1,860-square-meter facility in Durango, Colorado. “The goal is to move all of our design, manufacturing and production processes under one roof,” said Bryce Dabb. “In addition to active lunar lander and other commercial contracts in place today, we’re recognizing increased market demand from new customers and have recently begun receiving recurring engine orders from existing customers.” Agile Space Industries was incorporated in August 2019, after combining Agile Space Propulsion and Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test. (7/1)

Too Early to Speak About Starliner Seats for Russian Cosmonauts (Source: TASS)
It would be premature to discuss orbital flights of Russian cosmonauts aboard US-made Starliner spacecraft under the cross-flight program, the press service of Russia’s state-run space corporation Roscosmos has told TASS. "So far, not a single Starliner mission, carried out as part of its flight trials, proceeded without a hitch. That is why it would be too early to speak about the possibility of Russian cosmonauts flying aboard it," the corporation said. (7/1)

Roscosmos Providing Information and Intelligence Support to Russian Army (Source: TASS)
Russia’s Roscosmos state space corporation provides satellite images of Ukraine to the Defense Ministry, ensuring information and intelligence support to the Russian military, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said. "We don’t publish them but hand them over to those who are the natural consumers of this information. In this case, it’s the Defense Ministry. All images go there. The images, along with footage made by the Defense Ministry’s devices, are meant to ensure information and intelligence support for the Russian Armed Forces’ operation," he noted. (7/2)

Is the Electric Grid Ready for Extreme Space Weather? (Source: Space.com)
Experts are in the process of designing and deploying instruments to better assess the threat, and they are still navigating the collaborations among research institutions, governmental entities and private industry that will likely be required to tackle an issue with highly technical scientific and engineering problems, as well as practical and social hurdles. Since the 1989 blackout, "The community has learned a great deal; there's still more work to be done," said Bill Radasky, president and managing engineer of Metatech, an electromagnetic engineering consultancy.

Although space weather researchers may like to see more changes to U.S. policies, in the past decade the federal government has taken notice of the threat of extreme space weather and the need to understand it much better. Notably, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Order 779 in 2013, which directed the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit intermediary that issues standards to power companies, to develop plans to mitigate the effects of a "geomagnetic disturbance" and create benchmarks to describe the severity of any such event. 

This step was a "game changer," said Bill Murtagh, director of the NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. This was the first federal regulation to recognize the potential impact of space weather on the electrical grid, Murtagh said. In addition, a 2019 FEMA document identified the most concerning possible natural disasters, and space weather was on the list. Whether the increased attention is enough to prevent a worst-case scenario in the event of a major solar storm over the coming years remains to be seen. (6/2)