Researchers see both benefits and risks in the company’s increasing power. It has lowered the cost of spaceflight through innovations such as reusable stages and fairings, saving NASA money. With its outsize capacity, Starship could cheaply put large telescopes in orbit and heavy science experiments on moons and planets. Yet SpaceX, with a fast-and-loose Silicon Valley mindset, has overlooked the potential for its technologies to contaminate night skies and pristine planets. Some worry the company, led by brazen billionaire Elon Musk, could jeopardize NASA’s long-standing culture of safety. “NASA tries to model everything to the nth degree,” says David Todd, an analyst at Seradata, which tracks launches and satellites. “SpaceX works on the basis of ‘test it until it breaks.’”.
First commercial crew flight deepens ties between company and space agency.
WASHINGTON — Planet announced that its next six SkySat satellites will fly to low Earth orbit on SpaceX Starlink missions scheduled later this summer.
The six SkySats will be evenly split across two launches on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Planet said May 13 in a news release. Planet’s spacecraft will be rideshare payloads on the Starlink launches.
The first three — SkySats 16–18 — will launch on SpaceX’s ninth Starlink mission expected to launch in June. The next three — SkySats 19–21 — will launch later this summer. Both missions will lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plans to launch the first experimental satellites of the Blackjack program in late 2020 and early 2021, the agency said May 11.
DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office started the Blackjack program in 2018 to show the military utility of low Earth orbit constellations and mesh networks of low-cost satellites.
As many as 20 satellites will be launched by 2022.
The U.S. space agency National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon May 30–31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the global Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge, participants from around the world will create virtual teams that – during a 48-hour period – will use Earth observation data to propose solutions to COVID-19-related challenges ranging from studying the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and its spread to the impact the disease is having on the Earth system. Registration for this challenge opens in mid-May.
“There’s a tremendous need for our collective ingenuity right now,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “I can’t imagine a more worthy focus than COVID-19 on which to direct the energy and enthusiasm from around the world with the Space Apps Challenge that always generates such amazing solutions.”
The unique capabilities of NASA and its partner space agencies in the areas of science and technology enable them to lend a hand during this global crisis. Since the start of the global outbreak, Earth science specialists from each agency have been exploring ways to use unique Earth observation data to aid understanding of the interplay of the Earth system – on global to local scales – with aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak, including, potentially, our ability to combat it. The hackathon will also examine the human and economic response to the virus.
ESA will contribute data from the Sentinel missions (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-5P) in the context of the European Copernicus program, led by the European Commission, along with data from Third Party contributing Missions, with a focus on assessing the impact on climate change and greenhouse gases, as well as impacts on the economic sector. ESA also is contributing Earth observation experts for the selection of the competition winners and the artificial-intelligence-powered EuroDataCube.
“EuroDatacube will enable the best ideas to be scaled up to a global level,” said Josef Aschbacher, director of Earth Observation Programmes at ESA. “The pandemic crisis has a worldwide impact, therefore international cooperation and sharing of data and expertise with partners like NASA and JAXA seems the most suitable approach.”
JAXA is making Earth observing data available from its satellite missions, including ALOS-2, GOSAT, GOSAT-2, GCOM-C, GCOM-W, and GPM/DPR. “JAXA welcomes the opportunity to be part of the hackathon,” said JAXA Vice President Terada Koji. “I believe the trilateral cooperation among ESA, NASA and JAXA is important to demonstrate how Earth observation can support global efforts in combating this unprecedented challenge.“ Space Apps is an international hackathon that takes place in cities around the world. Since 2012, teams have engaged with NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space. The COVID-19 Challenge will be the program’s first global virtual hackathon. Space Apps 2019 included more than 29,000 participants at 225 events in 71 countries, developing more than 2,000 hackathon solutions over the course of one weekend.
Philippine developers used NASA’s free and open data to solve real-world problems on Earth and space.
Many Filipinos participated in this annual hackathon since 2016. Recently, a dengue mapping forecasting system was developed by data scientists from CirroLytix using satellite and climate data with the goal of addressing the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. This web application, called Project AEDES won globally for the best use of data. “Earth observation data has the potential to be used in fighting epidemics and outbreaks threatening humanity nowadays, as well as to analyze its socio-economic impact,” according to software developer Michael Lance M. Domagas, who led the Philippine hackathon in collaboration with De La Salle University, PLDT, Department of Science and Technology, United Nations Development Programme, and the U.S. embassy. The very first Philippine winner used citizen science and environmental data to develop a smartphone application informing fishermen the right time to catch fish. ISDApp is currently being incubated at Animo Labs.
Space Apps is a NASA-led initiative organized globally in collaboration with Booz Allen Hamilton, Mindgrub and SecondMuse. The next annual Space Apps Challenge is scheduled for October 2–4.
The next flight of the U.S. military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane — scheduled for liftoff May 16 from Cape Canaveral — will carry more experiments into orbit than any of the winged ship’s previous missions, including two payloads for NASA and a small deployable satellite built by Air Force Academy cadets.
Military officials announced new details about the upcoming X-37B mission Wednesday, and confirmed its target launch date of May 16. The Boeing-built spaceplane was mounted on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket Tuesday inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 launch pad.
The unpiloted spacecraft launches inside a payload shroud on top of a conventional rocket, unfurls a power-generating solar array in orbit to generate electricity, and returns to Earth for a runway landing like NASA’s retired space shuttle.
In 2015, Elon Musk announced that his company, SpaceX, would be deploying satellites to orbit that would provide high-speed broadband internet access to the entire world. Known as Starlink, SpaceX began deploying this constellation in May of 2019 with the launch of the first 60 satellites. As of April 22, a total of 422 satellites have been added to the Starlink constellation, and the response hasn’t been entirely positive.
In addition to fears that we’re adding to the problem of “space junk,” there are also those who’ve expressed concern that Starlink and other constellations could have a negative impact on astronomy. In response, SpaceX recently announced that it will be instituting changes in how the satellites are launched, how they orbit the Earth, and even how reflective they are in order to minimize the impact they have on astronomy.
These changes were the subject of a presentation made during the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020) hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. As part of the Optical Interference from Satellite Constellations Meeting held on Monday, April 27th, the Starlink Panel (which included Musk) presented how the company hopes to minimize light pollution caused by their constellation.
Amazon is among the players in a bankruptcy bidding game with the assets of the OneWeb satellite venture at stake, according to Space Intel Report.
Quoting unnamed industry officials, Space Intel Report’s Peter B. de Selding says other potential bidders include two Chinese organizations that are apparently acting on behalf of the Chinese government; the Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat, which apparently has the backing of the French government and several other European Union member states; and Cerberus Capital Management, a New York-based private equity firm with interesting connections.
Space Intel Report also quotes the officials as saying that SpaceX was among those expressing interest, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk denied that was the case. “Not SpaceX,” Musk wrote in a tweet.
A truck-sized asteroid has careened past Earth in one of the closest flybys ever recorded – but none of satellites scanning the skies to protect our planet saw the space rock coming.
The previously unseen asteroid, 2020 JJ, whizzed past at a distance of around 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) this week. In astronomical terms, that’s an incredibly close shave, and it makes it one of the closest passes of our planet ever recorded.
In a development that might worry those tasked with protecting Earth from being smashed by space objects, the asteroid was only discovered by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona at almost exactly the time it reached its closest point to Earth.
A new sunshade, or visor, designed to reduce the brightness of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband Internet satellites will debut on the company’s next launch, a measure intended to alleviate astronomers’ concerns about impacts on observations through ground-based telescopes, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said.
Beginning with the next launch of Starlink satellites — scheduled for 18 May from Cape Canaveral — SpaceX will try out a new light-blocking panel to make the spacecraft less visible to skywatchers and astronomers.
“We have a radio-transparent foam that will deploy nearly upon the satellite being released (from the rocket),” Musk said on 27 April at a virtual meeting of the National Academies’ Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 panel, a committee charged with setting the top priorities for US astronomy for the next decade.
