June 9, 2024

Turkish Astronaut Atasever Voices Support for Palestinians From Space (Source: Daily Sabah)
Tuva Cihangir Atasever, Türkiye’s second space traveler, expressed sorrow on Saturday over the plight of Palestinians. "The suffering experienced by the Palestinian people is a situation our world's beauty does not deserve," said Atasever. Atasever said he carried the Palestinian scarf "keffiyeh" with him during his suborbital mission on Saturday. (6/9)

Vandenberg SFB Sees Third Launch of Week with SpaceX Rocket’s Liftoff (Source: Noozhawk)
SpaceX continued expanding the Starlink constellation’s direct-to-cell capabilities by sending another 13 satellites plus seven others into orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched early Saturday from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The 20 new Starlink satellites, including a baker’s dozen with direct-to-cell capabilities, lifted off at 5:58 a.m. Saturday as a stubborn marine layer interfered with those hoping to see it. (6/8)

Above The Earth's Wars, Starlab Aims To Be Orbital Beacon Of Peace (Excluding Russia) (Source: Forbes)
The American co-founders of Starlab Space, who have formed an alliance with European, Canadian and Japanese space-tech leaders, predict their orbiting station could help keep the celestial peace despite the armed clashes and nuclear brinkmanship now upending the Earth. The Starlab Space Station is first and foremost a hyper-modern habitat and science lab, designed to enable astronauts around the world to conduct experiments in microgravity or deploy imaging satellites, all while circling the planet at 28,000 kilometres per hour.

Yet Starlab, modelled after the International Space Station and designed to help replace the ISS when that station is decommissioned in 2031, is like its forebear a microcosmic United Nations in space. With Starlab, Jeff Manber says, “We intend to replicate the ISS partnership on a commercial basis but without the Russians.” Russia's ongoing aggressions are killing off any future for Kremlin collaboration with the democratic space powers, Manber says. (6/8)

Space Force Agency Taps 20 Companies for $1 Billion Ground Systems IDIQ (Source: Space News)
The Space Rapid Capabilities Office, a specialized unit within the U.S. Space Force tasked with fast-tracking critical space technologies, selected 20 companies for an Indefinite-Delivery/Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) multi-year contract for the development of ground-systems software.

The estimated $1 billion IDIQ contract — a pre-negotiated agreement between the government and multiple vendors — is for a program known as R2C2, short for Rapid Resilient Command and Control, focused on developing a next-generation ground system built on a commercial cloud architecture. (6/7)

SpaceX Wants to Build 1 Starship Megarocket a Day with New Starfactory (Source: Space.com)
SpaceX now aims to build on the progress with its Starship program as continues work on Starfactory, a new manufacturing facility under construction at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. As it looks to use Starship to eventually make humanity interplanetary, SpaceX has stated the ambitious goal of producing one new Starship rocket every single day at the new facility.

The new version of Starship is designed to be more easy to mass produce, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on social media. "Note, a newer version of Starship has the forward flaps shifted leeward. This will help improve reliability, ease of manufacturing and payload to orbit," Musk shared on X. (6/8)

Starliner Helps ISS Process An “Awful Lot Of” Stored Urine (Source: Inverse)
Thanks to the Boeing Starliner, astronauts can soon pee in peace. When the new human-rated spacecraft successfully ferried NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS on Wednesday, it added a last-second high-prized payload along with it: A brand new pump for the urine processor. The pump onboard was scheduled to be replaced this coming Fall, but failed earlier than expected.

Since then, the ISS has had to store a lot of urine on the ship. The pump for the urine processor was a high priority. “They had to rearrange a few things because we have a processor that we really need to get on the space station.” To get the large pump onboard they had to replace suitcases of astronaut clothes to make room for the pump. Depending on how it goes to get the processor up and running, “that will probably factor into our decision when we all come to an undock decision together as a team.” (6/7)

Why More Space Launches Could Be a Good Thing for the Climate (Source: Scientific American)
Rockets and space travel are carbon-intensive: a single launch can emit hundreds of tons of greenhouse gases. But Rocket Lab's Peter Beck says that shouldn’t preclude space companies acting sustainably and serving worthy climate causes—while also expanding access to low-Earth orbit and beyond. He explains that growing competition in the commercial space industry may help boost climate science.

The Electron has launched NASA’s Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE), a 10-month mission to measure how much heat emanates into space from Antarctica and the Arctic. The satellites’ data will help inform models projecting the magnitude of one of climate change’s most frightening effects—the melting of polar ice sheets and the resulting sea-level rise. (6/7)

‘We’re Trying to Find the Shape of Space’: Scientists Wonder if the Universe is Like a Doughnut (Source: The Guardian)
We may be living in a doughnut. It sounds like Homer Simpson’s fever dream, but that could be the shape of the entire universe – to be exact, a hyperdimensional doughnut that mathematicians call a 3-torus.

This is just one of the many possibilities for the topology of the cosmos. “We’re trying to find the shape of space,” says Yashar Akrami of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, a member of an international partnership called Compact (Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology). In May, the Compact team explained that the question of the shape of the universe remains wide open and surveyed the future prospects for pinning it down. (6/8)

Reflections on North Korea's Failed May 27 Satellite Launch (Source: 38 North)
Judging by the drop zones announced by North Korea, the intended orbit for the Malligyong-1-1 spy satellite is a sun-synchronous orbit, a type of low Earth orbit frequently used for Earth observation satellites. Currently, the size and configuration of this new type of rocket are unclear. But, if the North Korean state media announcement is true, the “new-type” rocket would be the first North Korean carrier rocket powered by liquid oxygen (LOX)-kerosene propellants.

This would reflect a notable departure in the country’s liquid-propellant engine development, in pursuit of more efficient SLVs, but is unlikely to have much practical impact on the country’s ballistic missile capabilities. North Korea has already developed the “March 18” series IRBM/ICBM engines with a maximum thrust of approximately 80-ton force that use storable (not LOX) propellants. With this engine, North Korea can build a whole family of carrier rockets that could satisfy a wide range of missions ranging from high orbit launches to crewed space missions. (6/7)

NOAA's GOES-U Hurricane-Watching Satellite Sports L3Harris-Made Imager (Source: Florida Today)
An L3Harris-developed imager on the GOES-U weather satellite will soon launch from Cape Canaveral and settle into orbit 22,236 miles above Earth, serving as "Florida's new sentinel in the sky" monitoring the atmosphere for tropical cyclones and severe weather.

"It's of local interest — especially in Florida — because one of the primary missions is for tracking hurricanes. Whenever these hurricanes form, say as waves coming off of Africa, we don't have surface radars out there. There's only a few ships around. How do we know about them?" asked Dan Lindsey, a NOAA program scientist. (6/6)

American Ingenuity Taking US to New Frontier in Space (Source: Fox Business)
SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin and other private businesses are expanding their horizons with a new role in space outside the U.S. government. "This is American ingenuity taking us to the frontier that we have always held and will continue to hold as we have more launch companies shuttle not just astronauts, but cargo to the International Space Station," former NASA executive Ezinne Uzo-Okoro said. "We are in a very exciting and emerging time for the private sector in space, where they are taking over a lot of innovations that are usually done within the government," she said. (6/8)

Navy, NASA Want to Renew Kaua‘i Leases – West Side Locals Show Support, Opposition (Source: Kauai Now)
Representatives of the US Navy and NASA entered the Kaua‘i community last week – soliciting questions, comments and concerns during a three-night run of public scoping sessions held at locations across the Garden Isle. The three meetings marked the beginning of a two-year process to create an environmental impact statement covering West Side lands the state of Hawai‘i has leased to the Navy and NASA since the mid-1960s: namely, the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Barking Sands and the Mānā Plain, and the Kōkeʻe Park Geophysical Observatory within Kōke‘e State Park. (6/9)

Can a Robot Map a Planet as Well as a Human Can? (Source: The Atlantic)
Since Apollo, extraterrestrial fieldwork has been done exclusively by robots—wheeled rovers, orbital sensor arrays, even a flying drone. But a person’s ability to gather useful data in the field is “leaps and bounds” better than a rover’s, Huff says. Robots are painfully slow and offer only a narrow field of vision to Earth scientists crowded around computer monitors, whereas astronauts can quickly absorb huge amounts of information themselves and home in on what’s special or interesting. They can piece together the story of a landscape in real time. That ability, as much as anything, is what scientists hope to ship off-world with Artemis, and one day with a crewed mission to Mars.

Yet not everyone believes that this is the dawn of humanity’s solar-system age; some argue that it is, rather, the last gasp of a human-centric sense of what it means to explore the cosmos. “Our emotional preference for human rather than robotic explorers rests on sentiments that each of us formed before we ever attempted to use reason as a guide,” wrote the astrophysicists Martin Rees and Donald Goldsmith in their 2022 book, The End of Astronauts.

A crewed spacecraft could take six years or more to reach orbit around Jupiter, at least a couple of decades to reach Pluto. Humans would be fussy passengers on a trip like that. We need a lot of oxygen and water, and can’t eat sunlight. And unlike humans, robots will keep getting better at everything they do until they’re better at pretty much everything than we are. P. Michael Furlong, a former NASA roboticist who now works at the Computational Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Waterloo, told me there’s “nothing magical about humans … Any capacity we have, given the time and resources, can be automated.” (6/8)

NASA Needs SpaceX's Starship to Work (Source: Inverse)
And if NASA wants to realize its ambitions on the Moon, and eventually Mars, the agency and its contractors will need to store and transfer more cryogenic propellant, for longer flights, than ever before. That’s where SpaceX comes in, along with a few of its competitors. Starship is working on a particular piece of the problem, called slosh. Once Starship’s main engines cut off, there’s no acceleration forcing the propellant to sit neatly at one end of its tank, where it’s easy to measure. Instead, you get a bunch of little blobs of super-cold fluid bouncing around in the tank.

If there’s not enough pressure to keep the propellant all together, then the engine may end up pulling in a bunch of vapor, rather than propellant, which means it won’t fire. One way Starship deals with this problem is by using header tanks: a pair of smaller propellant tanks that can keep the propellant under enough pressure that it doesn't have room to slosh. The header tanks provide the initial sip of propellant the engines need to restart in orbit. Once the engines restart, their thrust will push the liquid in the main tanks back into the right position to flow to the engines and keep them firing. (6/8)

Researcher Suggests That Gravity Can Exist Without Mass, Mitigating the Need for Hypothetical Dark Matter (Source: Phys.org)
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that is implied by gravitational effects that can't be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present in the universe than can be seen.

The researcher contends the "excess" gravity necessary to bind a galaxy or cluster together could be due instead to concentric sets of shell-like topological defects in structures commonly found throughout the cosmos that were most likely created during the early universe when a phase transition occurred. A cosmological phase transition is a physical process where the overall state of matter changes together across the entire universe. (6/7)

US Launches Two Unarmed Minuteman III Missiles at California Spaceport (Source: Defense News)
The U.S. military test-fired two unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles this week, with the Air Force noting they were not driven by “current world events.” The tests, which involved the Air Force and Space Force, took place June 4 and June 6 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, Air Force Global Strike Command noted in its news releases. That command is tasked with handling two legs of the United States’ nuclear triad, which is made up of land-, submarine- and bomber-launched nuclear weapons. (6/6)

China Sees Commercial Sector as Next frontier in US Space Race (Source: Space Daily)
A world-first launch from the far side of the Moon this week showcased China's progress in space, and Beijing now wants its commercial sector to catch up to rivals such as Elon Musk's SpaceX. Chinese companies lag far behind American frontrunners led by SpaceX, which plans to launch Starship, a massive prototype rocket that may one day send humans to Mars, on Thursday.

The gap is narrowing, however, as Beijing realises the value a solid commercial sector can add to its existing capabilities, experts told AFP. It could even become similar to the development of electric vehicles where EV pioneer Tesla, also founded by Musk, was an early mover in China but now faces fierce competition from a host of homegrown rivals, said analyst Chen Lan. "In five years, SpaceX may feel pressure," Chen told AFP. (6/6)

Galactic Energy Launches Third Rocket in 10 Days (Source: Space Daily)
Galactic Energy, a private rocket maker in Beijing, conducted a launch on Thursday afternoon, marking its third launch in the past 10 days. The company reported that the rocket lifted off at 1 pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern Gobi Desert, sending three remote-sensing satellites into a sun synchronous orbit about 545 kilometers above Earth. (6/7)

Stealth Gas Contracts Awarded Amid High Profile Crewed Starliner Mission (Source: Space Daily)
NASA has awarded key contracts to a half dozen companies that will supply liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen in support of operations at agency centers and facilities across the United States, the space agency announced. While not the most high-profile element of the space program, scientists would be unable to perform the work they need to without access to large amounts of critical gasses.

"The commodities will support current and future aerospace flight, simulation, research, development, testing and other operations at the following NASA centers and facilities," the administration said in a statement. (6/7)

Japan's Nagoya University Develops Advanced Heat-Switch for Lunar Rovers (Source: Space Daily)
Astronauts driving vehicles on the Moon face extreme temperature fluctuations, with highs of 260F and lows of -280F. Reliable machines capable of operating under these conditions are crucial for future lunar missions. Nagoya University in Japan, in collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has developed a heat-switch device designed to extend the lifespan of lunar rovers. Their study was published in the journal Applied Thermal Engineering. (6/7)

China Open to Space Collaboration with the US (Source: Space Daily)
China has expressed its willingness to engage in space exchanges and cooperation with the United States, urging the US to eliminate barriers hindering such collaborations. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning noted the establishment of the working group on Earth science and space science cooperation and the China-US civil space dialogue. Additionally, at the request of the US, the two nations have set up a mechanism to exchange orbit data on their respective Mars probes. (6/7)