Tag • #space

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SpaceX’s next Starship launch—and first catch—could happen this weekend

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 8 October, 2024

We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

The world's most powerful launcher could fly again as soon as Sunday, SpaceX says, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn't expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX's next Starship test flight before late November.

There's some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend. The launch window Sunday opens at 7 am CDT (8 am EDT; 12:00 UTC), about a half-hour before sunrise at SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas.

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Scientists excited to find ocean of one of Jupiter’s moons contains carbon

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 21 September, 2023

Discovery adds weight to view that Europa’s ocean could be most promising place in solar system to look for alien life

The vast subterranean ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, contains carbon, one of the crucial ingredients for life, scientists have discovered.

The observations, by the James Webb space telescope, indicate that carbon dioxide ice on the moon’s surface originated from the salty ocean that lies beneath a 10-mile thick crust of ice. Although the findings do not answer the question of whether alien life is lurking in the cold, gloomy depths, they add weight to the view that Europa’s ocean could be the most promising place in the solar system to go looking for it.

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Scottish spaceport near protected areas approved despite local opposition

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 25 July, 2023

Project close to bird sanctuaries in Outer Hebrides gets go-ahead after no objections from Scotland’s environment agencies

Plans to build a spaceport on the small Hebridean island of North Uist, close to heavily protected bird sanctuaries, have been given the green light despite significant local opposition.

The proposed spaceport at Scolpaig Farm, on the north-west coast of the island in the Outer Hebrides, will host up to 10 launches a year, firing small sub-orbital rockets out over the Atlantic.

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SpaceX teases another application for Starship

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 July, 2023

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of a Starship vehicle in low-Earth orbit.

You've probably heard about SpaceX's plans to use its giant new Starship vehicle to land people on the Moon and Mars, send numerous Starlink satellites or large telescopes into space, or perhaps even serve as a high-speed point-to-point terrestrial transport for equipment or people.

There's another application for SpaceX's Starship architecture that the company is studying, and NASA is on board to lend expertise. Though still in a nascent phase of tech development, the effort could result in repurposing Starship into a commercial space station, something NASA has a keen interest in because there are no plans for a government-owned research lab in low-Earth orbit after the International Space Station is decommissioned after 2030.

The space agency announced last month a new round of agreements with seven commercial companies, including SpaceX. The Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities (CCSC) program is an effort established to advance private sector development of emerging products and services that could be available to customers—including NASA—in approximately five to seven years.

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After bopping an asteroid 3 years ago, NASA will finally see the results

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 July, 2023

Enlarge / A look inside the clean room where OSIRIS-REx's samples will be stored. (credit: NASA)

Christmas Day for scientists who study asteroids is coming in just two months when a small spacecraft carrying material from a distant rubble pile will land in a Utah desert.

The return of the OSIRIS-REx sample container on September 24 will cap the primary mission to capture material from an asteroid—in this case, the carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid Bennu—and return some of its pebbles and dust to Earth.

It has been a long time coming. This mission launched seven years ago and has been in the planning and development phase for over a decade. To say the scientists who have fought for and executed this mission are anxious and excited is an understatement. But there is an additional frisson with OSIRIS-REx, as scientists are not entirely sure what they've been able to pull away from the asteroid.

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The big idea: Why the laws of physics will never explain the universe

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 24 July, 2023 • 1 minute

We should think of the cosmos as more like an animal than a machine

It is hard to come to terms with the sheer scale of space: hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and, at a minimum, trillions of galaxies in the universe. But to a cosmologist there is something even more intriguing than the boggling numbers themselves, which is the question of how all these stars and galaxies were created over a period of 13.8 billion years. It’s the ultimate prehistoric adventure. Life cannot evolve without a planet, planets do not form without stars, stars must be cradled within galaxies, and galaxies would not exist without a richly structured universe to support them. Our origins are written in the sky, and we are just learning how to read them.

It once seemed that, for all its immensity, the cosmos could be understood through the application of a small number of rigid physical laws. Newton encapsulated this idea, showing how apples falling from trees and planetary orbits around our sun arise from the same force, gravity. This kind of radical unification of earthly and heavenly phenomena survives in modern teaching: all the innumerable molecules, atoms and subatomic particles in the universe are expected to obey the same set of laws. Most of the evidence suggests that this assumption holds true, so it should follow that perfecting our understanding of these laws will resolve any remaining questions about cosmic history.

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Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May to release 3D atlas of asteroid

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 July, 2023

The rocker astrophysicist is co-author of a three-dimensional atlas of Bennu, an asteroid explored by the Osiris-Rex probe in 2020

A new book on the world’s first complete atlas of an asteroid is set to be released by University of Arizona planetary science expert Dante Lauretta and the more unlikely figure of Queen’s lead guitarist and little-known astrophysicist Brian May.

The duo have teamed up to author Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid, a book that has been described as the first complete and three-dimensional atlas of an asteroid.

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Amazon is getting ready to launch a lot of broadband satellites

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 22 July, 2023

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of Amazon's Kuiper satellite processing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. (credit: Amazon )

Within a few years, Amazon hopes to be building and launching up to 80 satellites per month to populate the company's Kuiper constellation , a $10 billion network that is similar to fleets already operated by SpaceX and OneWeb providing Internet connectivity around the world.

In the next six months, Amazon plans to begin production of operational Kuiper satellites at a new 172,000-square-foot factory in Kirkland, Washington. On Friday, officials from Amazon and the Florida government announced that a 100,000-square-foot facility under construction at NASA's Kennedy Space Center will serve as a satellite processing facility dedicated to the Kuiper program.

Inside this facility near the old space shuttle landing strip, engineers will mount Kuiper satellites onto huge orbital deployer mechanisms standing several stories tall, then encapsulate the structure inside the nose cones of their rockets. The fully integrated payload compartments will then move out to launch pads operated by United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin—the space company established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles away.

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A promising Internet satellite is rendered useless by power supply issues

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 21 July, 2023

Enlarge / An Astranis satellite is seen in the company's factory. (credit: Astranis)

Astranis, a company seeking to provide Internet connectivity from geostationary space, said in May that its "Arcturus" satellite was successfully deployed following a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

After taking control of the satellite, Astranis then began to send commands and update the flight software before raising Arcturus' orbit and slotting it into a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite linked up with an Internet gateway in Utah and communicated with multiple user terminals in Alaska.

Sometime after this, however, the satellite experienced what Astranis characterized as an abrupt anomaly with a supplier's component on the solar array drive assembly. In an update on Friday , Astranis co-founder John Gedmark explained that this assembly rotates to solar arrays to ensure they are always pointed at the Sun, allowing the spacecraft to remain fully powered at all times.

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