August 31, 2022

To Prevent a Martian Plague, NASA Needs to Build a Very Special Lab (Source: New York Times)
“The likelihood that such pathogens exist is probably small,” Carl Sagan wrote, “but we cannot take even a small risk with a billion lives.” Scientists have long considered Sagan’s warnings in mostly hypothetical terms. But over the approaching decade, they will start to act concretely on backward contamination risks. NASA and the European Space Agency are gearing up for a shared mission called Mars Sample Return. A rover on the red planet is currently scooping up material that will be collected by other spacecraft and eventually returned to Earth.

No one can say for sure that such material will not contain tiny Martians. If it does, no one can yet say for sure they are not harmful to Earthlings. With such concerns in mind, NASA must act as if samples from Mars could spawn the next pandemic. “Because it is not a zero-percent chance, we are doing our due diligence to make sure that there’s no possibility of contamination,” said Andrea Harrington, the Mars sample curator for NASA. Thus, the agency plans to handle the returned samples similarly to how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handles ebola: carefully.

“Carefully,” in this case, means that once the Mars samples drop to Earth, they must be initially held in a structure called the Sample Receiving Facility. The mission’s planners say the structure should meet a standard known as “Biosafety Level 4,” or BSL-4, which means it is capable of safely containing the most dangerous pathogens known to science. But it also has to be pristine: functionally, a giant cleanroom that prevents substances on Earth from contaminating the samples from Mars. (8/31)

NASA Slams a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid This Month (Source: Space.com)
It's time to get ready to watch a spacecraft slamming into an asteroid. You can watch all the action from NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Mission (DART) live here at Space.com and on NASA TV, including on impact day (Sep. 26). DART will slam into Dimorphos, the moonlet of a near-Earth asteroid called Didymos. If successful, the spacecraft will alter the path of Dimorphos in its orbit around Didymos; just how much Dimorphos' orbit changes will be confirmed in the months and years after impact. (8/30)

Why Is NASA’s Hold Music So Catchy? (Source: The Atlantic)
Hundreds of reporters from around the world traveled to the Cape Canaveral Spaceport this week to cover the launch of the first Artemis mission. As journalists flitted around the press center just three miles from the launchpad, waiting for more details about what went wrong and when NASA would try again, I thought about what we had in common: not the assignment that had brought us there, but a certain tune that most of us probably know by heart. If prompted—if someone started singing a few familiar notes—the press site could probably break into a rousing rendition of NASA’s hold music.

The music precedes every NASA telephone press conference, and it lives rent-free in our brains. And it’s not just reporters: Astronomers, engineers, and personnel at NASA and commercial space companies alike have been subjected to the trademark music. For years, it has accompanied nearly every major NASA announcement to the press. The hold music is the overture before a rover lands on Mars, a space telescope is deployed, or a moon rocket launches (or not). It is, in a way, the soundtrack of the American space program. (8/30)

US Seeks Broader ASAT Testing Ban (Source: Space News)
The United States is working to secure more support for a direct-ascent ASAT testing ban. The U.S. announced in April that it would not conduct such tests because of the debris they generate, a moratorium that both Canada and New Zealand have since announced they will join. At a panel discussion last week, a State Department official said the U.S. was looking at ways to "multilateralize" the ban, either through a U.N. General Assembly resolution that would be non-binding or a legally binding agreement, which would take longer. A U.N. working group on norms of behavior for reducing space threats is scheduled to hold its second meeting in mid-September to continue discussions on this and related issues. (8/31)

DoD Meeting to Focus on Novel Chinese and Russian Space Weapons (Source: Defense News)
The Defense Department will hold a meeting next week to discuss potential development by China and Russia of "novel" space weapon systems. The meeting of the Defense Policy Board, according to a public agenda of the closed meeting, will include potential work by those countries on fractional orbital bombardment systems (FOBS) and space-to-ground weapons. Other topics include Chinese and Russian space policy briefings, U.S. space and missile defense capabilities and space arms control. U.S. officials have not previously discussed publicly any work by China and Russia on FOBS or space-to-ground weapons. (8/31)

Orbit Fab Unveils Hydrazine Refueling Spacecraft Plan (Source: Space News)
Orbit Fab says it will start offering hydrazine refueling services for satellites in GEO as soon as 2025. The space refueling startup plans to place hydrazine fuel depots just above GEO and develop "fuel shuttles" that can carry hydrazine from the depot to satellites to refuel them. Alternatively, servicing spacecraft from other companies can obtain hydrazine at the depot for their own servicing missions. Orbit Fab says it will charge $20 million for up to 100 kilograms of hydrazine, and announced the price to help satellite operators better understand the economics of satellite servicing. (8/31)

Canadian Spaceport Gets Approval to Proceed (Source: SaltWire)
Maritime Launch Services (MLS) has obtained permission to start building a spaceport in Nova Scotia. The company said this week it satisfied all the conditions of an environmental assessment for the launch site after securing a lease for the property earlier this month. Construction will start in the spring and take 18 months, followed by six months of commissioning. MLS said it's continuing plans to use the Ukrainian-built Cyclone-4M rocket but added there are "options available should they be necessary" to use another medium-class rocket from an unnamed company. (8/31)

Voyager Telemetry Glitch Resolved (Source: NASA)
Engineers have resolved a telemetry glitch on Voyager 1. Controllers noticed earlier this year garbled data from the 45-year-old spacecraft's attitude control system, although that system and the spacecraft itself appeared to be operating normally. Engineers concluded the data was being routed through an onboard computer that malfunctioned years ago, corrupting the data, and resolved the problem by rerouting the data through a functioning computer. They don't know why the data was going through the malfunctioning computer but suspected a faulty command from another onboard computer may have triggered it. (8/31)

Blue Origin Postpones Texas Suborbital Launch (Source: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin postponed a New Shepard launch scheduled for this morning because of weather. The company said it would provide a new launch date for the NS-23 mission, which had been scheduled to launch at 9:30 a.m. Eastern from its West Texas site, "soon" but did not provide additional details. The flight is the first payload-only New Shepard mission in a year and will carry several dozen payloads from NASA and others. (8/31)

SpaceX Launches Starlink Cluster From California (Sources: PC Magazine, NasaSpaceFlight.com)
SpaceX launched another set of Starlink satellites overnight. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 1:40 a.m. Eastern Wednesday and deployed 46 Starlink satellites into a polar orbit. The rocket's first stage landed on a droneship on the 150th recovery attempt of a Falcon booster, 139 of which have been successful. The launch came after the Starlink system suffered a global outage early Tuesday, starting around 3 a.m. Eastern, lasting up to three hours. SpaceX didn't provide details about the outage beyond telling customers there was a "known network issue." (8/31)

Cruise Line Plans Starlink Broadband (Source: Space News)
Royal Caribbean Group announced Tuesday it is the first cruise liner to adopt SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband services. The company plans to install Starlink by the end of March on some 50 ships operated under its Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises brands. It follows trials of Starlink's network onboard Royal Caribbean Group's Freedom of the Seas cruise ship. The company said the service would "enable more high-bandwidth activities" for its customers and crew, including video streaming and video calls. (8/31)

South Korea Plans Lunar Lander in 2031 (Source: Space News)
South Korea is considering a lunar lander mission launching in 2031. The proposed $459 million mission would send a 1.8-ton lander to the moon carrying a set of scientific instruments as well as a rover for a one-year surface mission. The mission would be South Korea's second lunar mission after the Danuri orbiter launched early this month and is scheduled to go into orbit around the moon in December. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute, which is proposing the mission, presented details about it at a recent public hearing as a first step toward securing funding for it. (8/31)

Chinese Space Nuclear Reactor Passes Review (Source: Space Review)
A Chinese nuclear reactor for providing power and propulsion in outer space has passed a review. The reactor, designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is intended to generate one megawatt of electricity for spacecraft power and propulsion. Reports last week said the project passed a comprehensive performance evaluation but provided no technical details about the design of the reactor. China has proposed deep space missions, such as a Neptune orbiter, that could use the reactor. (8/31)

Scientists Puzzled Because JWST is Seeing Stuff That Shouldn't Be There (Source: The Byte)
Over the past several weeks, JWST has allowed humankind some unprecedented glimpses into the farthest reaches of our universe. And unsurprisingly, some of these dazzling new observations have raised more questions than they've answered. For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. (8/31)

Rocket Lab Could Surge 55% as Leader in Launch Market (Source: CNBC)
Rocket Lab stock is ready for takeoff, according to Cowen. The firm on Wednesday upgraded shares of the company to outperform from market perform and raised its price target to $8.00 from $6.50. The new target price is a 55% upside to where shares currently trade. “We’re upgrading RKLB to Outperform for key execution milestones, an improved competitive position, and benefits from Russian sanctions,” analyst Cai von Rumohr wrote. These milestones support an estimated 35% to 40% revenue growth with profitability and positive free cash flow in 2024, they added. (8/31)

Starlink Suffered a Global Outage Overnight (Source: The Verge)
Starlink users around the world complained on Tuesday that Elon Musk’s internet from space service was down. My own Starlink RV service in the Netherlands went down for about 30 minutes. It’s now reporting “Degraded Service” which the SpaceX company is investigating, according to the Starlink app. My outage began at 3AM ET which coincides with initial reports found on Twitter and Reddit. Starlink users from the US, New Zealand, Mexico, the UK, and beyond all reported outages. Access returned to most as of 7AM ET, although many are still reporting degraded throughput. (8/30)