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U.S. Transportation Command to study use of SpaceX rockets to move cargo around the world

The U.S. military command that oversees logistics operations has signed an agreement with SpaceX and XArc to study the use of space launch vehicles to transport supplies in an emergency. Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, announced the agreement Oct. 7 at a National Defense Transportation Association virtual conference. “Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said. The C-17 is a very large military cargo plane capable of transporting a 70-ton main battle tank.

Transportation Command has signed a cooperative research and development agreement, known as CRADA, with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to study concepts for rapid transportation through space. “There is a lot of potential here,” said Lyons He noted that one of the challenges of military logistics is the “tyranny of distance and time, and global access.” Space transportation is weight- and volume-constrained compared to airlift, and has limited options for launching and recovery operations. “As industry advances to overcome these challenges and decrease costs, a space transportation capability to put a crucial cargo quickly on target at considerable distances makes it an attractive alternative,” said U.S. TRANSCOM Deputy Commander Vice Adm. Dee Mewbourne.

‘Self-eating rocket’ tech snags funding from UK government

The U.K. government aims to spur the development of rockets that gobble themselves up on the way to orbit. The Ministry of Defence’s Defence & Security Accelerator (DASA) has pledged £90,000 — about $117,000 USD at current exchange rates — for the continued development of the “autophage” rocket engine, which is being built by researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The tech is a great fit for small rockets “because scaling down a rocket reduces the mass of the propellant more than it reduces the mass of all the other components, including the tanks that hold the propellant itself,” Patrick Harkness, of the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering, said in a statement. “The autophage concept is simple: burn the tanks as well,” Harkess said. “That saves the excess mass, and it means that we can miniaturize the vehicle without hitting this wall.”

The Glasgow team has already test-fired a version of the autophage engine that burns all-solid propellant. The DASA money will help fund research into the use of a more energy-rich hybrid propellant, team members said. “The body of a hybrid autophage rocket will be a tube of solid fuel, containing a liquid oxidizer,” Harkess said. “The entire assembly will be consumed, from the bottom up, by an engine which will vaporize the fuel tube, add the oxidizer and burn the mixture to create thrust. The engine will have consumed the entire body of the rocket by the time the assembly reaches orbit, and only the payload will be left. It is a much more mass-efficient process.” The hybrid engine will be test-fired next year, at Kingston University in London, if all goes according to plan.

Saturn’s chaotic moon Titan may be a lot younger than we thought

Saturn is a busy planet. The gas giant is known for its mysterious rings made up of comets, asteroids and broken rocky objects, and has the largest number of moons of any other planet in the Solar System, beating Jupiter by three more moons. Saturn’s many moons are believed to have formed around the same time as the Solar System, at least 4 billion years ago. However, a new model suggests that the orbiting moons may be a lot younger than previously thought, with some forming only a couple of million years ago.

A study, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, has major implications for our understanding of Saturn’s moon Titan and its chaotic, liquid-filled terrain. Samuel Bell, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, and lead author of the new study, looked at the rate of impact on the different moons that orbit Saturn in order to develop a new chronology for the natural satellites. When looking at the impact craters on Saturn’s moons to help estimate their age, previous models had assumed that the impacts were a result of comets orbiting around the Sun. But there is an increased amount of evidence that the craters were formed from objects orbiting Saturn itself, smaller moonlets that are too small to detect with current telescopes. The new chronology for Saturn’s moons suggests that Titan is a much younger moon than previously believed, shaving off a few million years of its life. “The surface of Titan is younger than its neighbouring moons, it could in fact be way younger,” Bell says. “It may be around 15 million years, which is a very young, active, kind of environment.”

See a rare Earth-grazer meteoroid skim us and ‘bounce’ back into space

A chunk of space rock spectacularly survived a close encounter with Earth. Little pieces of asteroids and comets come at Earth all the time. Some of them pass on by. Some of them burn up in the atmosphere, creating bright fireball streaks across the sky. And, every once in a while, a fragment comes in close and then escapes. These are known as “Earth-grazers.” Meteoroid is the term used for a small body that travels through space. If it reaches Earth’s atmosphere and turns into a “shooting star,” then it’s a meteor. If a leftover piece of it survives all the way to the ground, then it’s a meteorite. “This is only the fifth documented Earth-grazer of this size,” Vida told CNET in an email. “There are probably more because not all observations are published, but they are significantly more uncommon than ordinary meteors.”

The Global Meteor Network, a network of sky watching cameras, spotted a rare Earth-grazer meteoroid and captured its elegant movement in a dramatic GIF. It shows the meteoroid arcing through the night sky over northern Germany and the Netherlands on Sept. 22 before “bouncing” back into space. The European Space Agency highlighted the dazzling footage in a statement last week. “The network is basically a decentralized scientific instrument, made up of amateur astronomers and citizen scientists around the planet each with their own camera systems,” Global Meteor Network founder Denis Vida told ESA.

World Space Week: Satellites Improve Life

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, there are safe and exciting ways to celebrate World Space Week this year, running from Sunday 4th October to Saturday 10th October. One way is to observe satellites. The World Space Week 2020 theme, Satellites Improve Life, encourages students and the public to learn about satellites and the many ways they improve life on Earth. A first step is to simply observe satellites from your backyard. If you can see stars from where you live, you can probably see some satellites. Observing satellites is simple. After sunset when the sky is dark, go outside and turn off any outdoor lights. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness. Look at the stars. You can easily tell a satellite from a star because the satellite is moving slowly. Sometimes it may appear to blink because it is rotating. Satellites will move across the sky from horizon to horizon. You can see satellites in the early evening because, although it is dark where you are standing, there is still sunlight above you in low-Earth orbit (LEO). You can see LEO satellites because they reflect light from the sun to your eyes. On a typical evening with dark skies, you can easily see several satellites. This technique also works just before dawn.

You can also look for events and further information about World Space Week here:

Small air leak on space station traced to Russian service module but the exact location remains unknown

The case of the small air leak on the International Space Station may be nearly cracked. Investigators have traced the source of the leak to the “main work area” of the Zvezda Service Module, the heart of the Russian part of the station, NASA officials announced today (Sept. 29). “Additional work is underway to precisely locate the source of the leak,” agency officials wrote in an update today. “The leak, which has been investigated for several weeks, poses no immediate danger to the crew at the current leak rate and only a slight deviation to the crew’s schedule.” The leak is causing an atmospheric pressure decrease of 1 millimetre every 8 hours, officials with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, said via Twitter this morning. They also stressed that NASA’s Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who have been living onboard the orbiting lab, remain safe.

The International Space Station is not completely airtight. The orbiting complex continuously loses tiny amounts of gas to space and is regularly repressurized using nitrogen tanks brought up by cargo spacecraft. In September 2019, station managers noticed a slight uptick in that normal background rate. It took a while to characterize the leak fully, because crewmembers and station managers were occupied with spacewalks, spacecraft arrivals and departures, and other big-ticket orbital activities, NASA officials have said. The leak investigation didn’t really get going until last month.

NASA launching new space toilet and more to space station this week

A private cargo spacecraft will lift off from Virginia on Tuesday (Sept. 29). The mission, known as Cygnus NG-14, will be deliver 7,624 lbs (3,458 kilograms) of cargo on the14th flight for Northrop Grumman’s robotic Cygnus spacecraft and the resupply craft’s 13th mission to the International Space Station. Cygnus will launch atop an Antares rocket Sept. 29 at 10:27 p.m. EDT (0227 a.m. GMT Sept. 30) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Northrop Grumman has named the Cygnus spacecraft the S.S. Kalpana Chawla to honour astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who was one of seven astronauts who died in the Columbia shuttle tragedy in 2003.

The spacecraft will be carrying tons of fresh supplies to the International Space Station, including scientific experiments, skincare and a brand-new space toilet. The $23 million space toilet, which was created with astronaut input, will be among the important experiments and equipment sent with this launch. This toilet is 65% smaller and 40% lighter than the toilet currently on the space station, NASA officials said. The cargo will also include a radish-growing experiment known as Plant Habitat-02; the Onco Selectors investigation, which will focus on cancer therapies; a novel water recovery system experiment; a specialized camera that will capture what it’s like to be aboard the space station in 360-degree virtual reality; bottles of skincare serum from Estée Lauder; and much more.

NASA details Artemis program plan to land on the Moon in 2024

NASA has revealed details of its accelerated Artemis mission plan to land humans on the Moon in 2024, more than 50 years after the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972. The U.S. space agency’s plan specifies key milestones for building, testing and launching its powerful new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft to land humans on the Moon. NASA aims for a first unmanned mission, Artemis I, in 2021, following the completion of the Orion spacecraft and the final rocket tests. “The spacecraft is complete while the core stage and its attached four engines are undergoing a final series of tests that will culminate in a critical hot fire test this fall”, the agency said in a press release on 21 September.

Following this test, the core stage of the rocket will be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to integrate it with the spacecraft and launch SLS and Orion together on two test flight around the Moon. “The first mission – known as Artemis I – is on track for 2021 without astronauts, and Artemis II will fly with crew in 2023,” NASA said. The agency foresees “humanity’s return to the surface of the Moon” for 2024, with Artemis III landing astronauts on the lunar South Pole. “Wearing modern spacesuits that allow for greater flexibility and movement than those of their Apollo predecessors, astronauts will collect samples and conduct a range of science experiments over the course of nearly seven days. Using the lander, they will return to lunar orbit before ultimately heading home to Earth aboard Orion.”

Saturn’s ocean moon Enceladus has fresh ice in unexpected place: Enceladus may be even more interesting than we thought.

Saturn’s geyser-spewing moon Enceladus may be even more active than scientists had thought. Fresh images created using data from NASA’s dead Cassini spacecraft show that Enceladus’ northern hemisphere was resurfaced with ice relatively recently. This new information adds to the known activity in the southern hemisphere, where Cassini spotted more than 100 geysers blasting icy water into space. Researchers spotted the northern changes after looking at the heat signature of Enceladus, using reflected sunlight parsed with Cassini’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument, or VIMS. “Thanks to these infrared eyes [on Cassini], you can go back in time and say that one large region in the northern hemisphere appears also young and was probably active not that long ago, in geologic timelines,” Gabriel Tobie, a study co-author and VIMS scientist at the University of Nantes in France, said in a NASA statement.

The team combined VIMS data with visible imagery captured by Cassini to create a new, global map of Enceladus in multiple wavelengths of light, both infrared and visible. The map shows that the infrared signals correlate with recent geologic activity on the moon, the researchers said. To the surprise of scientists, however, the new map also shows infrared features in the moon’s northern hemisphere. The data suggests that icy resurfacing also happened up north, but how is not yet clear. The changes could have been due to more icy jets, or slower ice movements through cracks in the crust, team members said. Enceladus is one of the most promising abodes for alien life in the solar system. In addition to the subsurface ocean and geological activity, the moon likely has an energy source that organisms could tap into — chemical reactions perhaps similar to those that sustain life near Earth’s deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Space Hero reality TV contest to send civilian to ISS in 2023

The London-based TV series and show producer Space Hero is planning to send the winner of a global reality TV competition to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2023, Space Hero announced last week. Space Hero has secured a seat on a 2023 mission to the ISS and launched what Space Hero describes as the world’s first global space casting show. Space Hero did not specify which mission it will use to send a civilian to space and launch its global reality TV contest. Space Hero was created in 2008 in Berlin and moved its headquarters to London in 2016. “Space Hero’s mission is to break barriers and create avenues for greater participation by the Public, bringing Millions of People into the New Space economy…Through new media, Space Hero will help advance humanity and continue the ground-breaking progresses in Space Exploration,” Space Hero says in its LinkedIn profile.

Rocket Lab gears up for 1st launch from US soil but a launch date has not yet been set.

Rocket Lab is nearly ready to launch its first mission from American soil. The California-based company, which has launched 14 missions to date from its New Zealand site, just wrapped up a “wet dress rehearsal” at its Launch Complex 2 (LC-2), at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia. During the exercise, a Rocket Lab Electron booster was rolled out to the newly built pad, raised vertical and fuelled. Mission managers then took a simulated countdown all the way to 0, to verify that all procedures will work as planned on launch day.

“With this major milestone complete, the Electron launch vehicle, launch team and the LC-2 pad systems are now ready for Rocket Lab’s first launch from U.S. soil,” company representatives said in a statement on Thursday (Sept. 17). There is still one major box left to tick, however: NASA must finish certifying Rocket Lab’s autonomous flight termination system, which is designed to end a mission automatically if something goes wrong during launch. Indeed, a targeted launch date will not be set until this hurdle has been cleared, company representatives said.

Big find! Scientists spot giant alien planet orbiting close to dead star’s corpse

We may now have direct evidence that planets can survive unscathed the violent churn that attends their host star’s death. Astronomers have spotted signs of an intact giant planet circling a super dense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, a new study reports. The white dwarf in question, called WD 1856, is part of a three-star system that lies about 80 light-years from Earth. The newly detected, Jupiter-size exoplanet candidate, WD 1856 b, is about seven times larger than the white dwarf and zips around it once every 34 hours.

“WD 1856 b somehow got very close to its white dwarf and managed to stay in one piece,” study lead author Andrew Vanderburg, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. “The white dwarf creation process destroys nearby planets, and anything that later gets too close is usually torn apart by the star’s immense gravity,” Vanderburg said. “We still have many questions about how WD 1856 b arrived at its current location without meeting one of those fates.”

Rocket Lab’s plan to search for life on Venus in 2023 just got more exciting

The 2023 life-hunting mission will be just the beginning, if all goes according to plan. The California-based company aims to launch a private Venus mission in 2023 to hunt for signs of life in the clouds where scientists just spotted the possible biosignature gas phosphine. But that landmark effort will be just the beginning, if all goes according to plan. “We don’t want to do one mission — we want to do many, many missions there,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told Space.com Monday (Sept. 14), hours after scientists unveiled the Venus phosphine discovery. Beck has long wanted to help explore Venus, which he thinks has not yet received the scientific attention it deserves. “Venus is well and truly undervalued,” he said.

Venus was once a temperate world like Earth, with plentiful surface water — including, many scientists believe, large oceans that may have persisted for much of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. But a runaway greenhouse effect eventually took hold on the second rock from the sun, baking out Venus’ water and transforming its surface into the scorched, high-pressure hellscape it is today. And “hellscape” really isn’t an exaggeration: Surface temperatures on Venus hover around 872 degrees Fahrenheit (467 Celsius), hot enough to melt lead. Learning exactly what happened to Venus, and why, is of great interest to planetary scientists. And the planet’s evolution serves as a sort of cautionary tale for Earth, where human activity has ushered in a period of dramatic warming, Beck noted.

Then there’s Venus’ astrobiological potential, which may not be restricted to the ancient past. Though the planet’s surface turned infernal, researchers think a pocket of potential habitability remained high in the clouds, about 30 miles (50 kilometres) up, and survived into the present day. Way up there, temperatures and pressures are quite similar to those found on Earth at sea level (though Venusian clouds are mostly made of sulfuric acid rather than water vapor). That cloud layer is where a team of scientists recently spotted the fingerprint of phosphine, a gas that here on Earth is produced only by microbes and human activity, as far as we can tell. And it’s the environment that Rocket Lab wants to probe with that 2023 mission and its hoped-for successors.

SpaceX gearing up for 12-mile-high test flight with Starship SN8 prototype

The next big leap for SpaceX’s Mars-colonizing Starship spacecraft appears to be right around the corner. Two full-size Starship prototypes, known as SN5 and SN6, recently performed 500-foot-high (150 meters) test hops at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, near the village of Boca Chica. And the next vehicle in line is nearly ready to soar much higher, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said. “SN8 Starship with flaps & nosecone should be done in about a week. Then static fire, checkouts, static fire, fly to 60,000 ft [18,300 m] & back,” Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (Sept. 12).

Static fires are routine engine tests conducted while a vehicle is tethered to the ground. The engines that will be tested in this case are SpaceX’s next-generation Raptors — likely three of them, to get the SN8 up so high. SN5 and SN6 sported only a single Raptor, and those vehicles didn’t have nosecones or control-improving body flaps, either. (SN7 was a test tank that SpaceX intentionally burst during a pressure trial this past June, in case you were wondering.)

SpaceX is iterating toward a final version of Starship that will feature six Raptors and, Musk has said, be capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. The 165-foot-tall (50 m) Starship will launch from Earth atop a gigantic rocket known as Super Heavy, which will be powered by about 30 Raptors of its own. The Starship vehicle will be powerful enough to blast itself off the moon and Mars, whose gravitational pulls are much weaker than that of our planet, Musk has said.