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Let's have some fun today. Let's send each of you to space for the ride of your life! Elliana Sheriff began life in Southern California. She graduated from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is attractive, bright, eloquent, and adventurous. She was a natural for the television news business. She went into the television news business. She did well. Her career took her to Austin, Texas. (By the way, she is one of that special group of people who is a Tesla owner.) Like many other bright and special people, she decided to reinvent herself. She started the podcast Ellie in Space. She staked out a market niche. She wanted to humanize spaceflight. She tried to make it understandable to the regular watcher like me. She has prospered. She is now close to 100,000 subscribers. Ellie talked about normal people like us hitching a ride into space last night. She drew an analogy between the early days of commercial aviation in the 1930s. Long ago, you would fly around in an unpressurized, unheated aircraft like a DC-3. If you wanted to fly roundtrip from New York to Los Angeles, the round-trip ticket was $275. In those days this was almost half the price of a new Ford or Chevrolet. Here is a link to her podcast, I urge you to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NYHOJqGKB8 As of today, you have four options if you want to take a ride into space as follows: Virgin Galactic: 15-minute suborbital flight is a space plane: $450,000 per seat. Blue Origin: 15-minute suborbital flight in a space capsule: Up to $30 million per seat. Space-X: Orbital flight that could take you to the I.S.S.: $55 million per seat. Russia Soyuz capsule orbital flight to I.S.S.: $90 million per seat. If you are more adventurous and want to take a manned flight around the moon, Space-X has such a flight on offer for a reported $150 million per seat on a Space-X Dragon capsule that I presume will be launched by a Falcon Heavy. Some people have already signed up for this flight and paid a huge deposit. Elon Musk declines to disclose the names of these civilian astronauts with "deep pockets." One Japanese billionaire is rumored to be on this flight. As soon as the Starship is operational, a special version of the second stage will be configured to carry 100 colonists on a one-way trip to Mars. I have seen some plans for this spacecraft. Each colonist will have their own state room and a lot of creature comforts that most prior astronauts could only dream of. Elon has said that a ticket on this ship will cost you $500,000. Elon says that one can sell their house and buy a seat on this spacecraft. If I was 40 years younger, I would "Go for it!"

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Russian Research On Space Nukes And Counterspace Weapons

Russian research on space nukes and alternative counterspace weapons (part 1) by Bart Hendrickx Monday, May 13, 2024 Bookmark and Share In February, White House officials asserted that Russia is developing a space-based anti-satellite system that would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. They later confirmed media speculation that the system in question is a nuclear weapon. Part 1 of this article summarizes what has been revealed about the alleged weapon so far and attempts to chart academic and laboratory research on nuclear explosions in space done in Russia in recent years. It also examines a Russian satellite launch that the US believes is related to the development of the weapon. Part 2 will explore Russian work on alternative directed-energy weapon systems that would mimic some of the effects of nuclear explosions in space without having the same devastating consequences. Reports on a Russian space-based nuclear weapon The commotion over the weapon began on February 14 with a post on social media by House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner, who said his panel had information concerning ”a serious national security threat” and called on President Joe Biden to declassify all information relating to the threat. Turner did not elaborate on the nature of the threat, but press reports the same day claimed it was a Russian space-based nuclear weapon. Responding to the reports on February 15, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed that it involved a Russian anti-satellite capability, but that it was ”not an active capability that’s been deployed” and did not pose an immediate threat to anyone’s safety. In Kirby’s words, it was not a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction on Earth. President Biden told reporters that US intelligence had found that Russia had a capacity to launch a system into space ”that could theoretically do something that was damaging.” Kirby did not address questions about whether the system was a nuclear weapon or was simply powered by nuclear energy, but did say that it was space-based and would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which specifically forbids the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space, including nuclear arms. He also said that the intelligence community’s general knowledge of Russian pursuit of this kind of capability went back ”many, many months, if not a few years”, but that only in recent weeks it had been possible to assess with a higher sense of confidence exactly how Russia continues to pursue it. Kirby stated that the intelligence community had serious concerns about a broad declassification of this intelligence and assessed that ”private engagement” rather than immediately publicizing the intelligence could be a more effective approach.[1] According to the Washington Post, the intelligence was obtained under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[2] This allows the US government to collect foreign intelligence by targeting non-US persons located abroad who use US electronic communication services such as email and phone calls. Kirby John Kirby addressing reporters on February 15. The following day, President Biden told reporters that US intelligence had found that Russia had a capacity to launch a system into space ”that could theoretically do something that was damaging.” He stressed that there was no nuclear threat to the people of America or anywhere else in the world, saying the system was designed only to damage satellites in space. He added that there was no evidence that Russia had made a decision to go forward ”with anything in space.” This is all that the White House publicly revealed at the time about the Russian space weapon. All the additional information on it came from anonymous sources quoted by leading US media outlets. On February 16, NBC quoted ”a US official and a congressional official familiar with the intelligence” as saying that the threat was a Russian nuclear-powered space asset that could be weaponized, rather than a nuclear bomb.[3] This led to speculation that the weapon in question might be Ekipazh, a nuclear-powered satellite under development at the KB Arsenal design bureau that was first revealed in The Space Review in 2019. There were strong indications at the time that the satellite would be used for space-based electronic warfare and this is backed up by additional evidence that has appeared more recently.[4] While the White House did not categorically state that the weapon was a nuclear warhead, its claim that it violates the Outer Space Treaty strongly pointed in that direction. The treaty does not forbid the deployment in orbit of satellites powered by nuclear energy. Moreover, even a constellation of nuclear-powered electronic warfare satellites like Ekipazh would hardly constitute a weapon of mass destruction. The fact that the weapon is nuclear-armed was also confirmed by sources consulted by ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. CNN provided the most specific information, reporting that the weapon would produce a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and a flood of highly charged particles that could potentially cripple a vast swath of commercial and government satellites orbiting the Earth. According to one defense official quoted by CNN, there had been a stream of intelligence reporting in recent months on Russian efforts to develop nuclear-powered anti-satellite capabilities (a possible reference to Ekipazh), but Russia had recently also made progress in efforts to build a nuclear EMP weapon. It might render large portions of particular orbits unusable by creating a minefield of disabled satellites that would then prove dangerous to any new satellites that the US might try to launch to replace or repair the existing ones. [5] On February 17, the New York Times reported that American intelligence officials had become aware of the new Russian capability after analyzing ”a series of secret military satellite launches” carried out by Russia around the time of its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Another New York Times story on February 21 seemed to refer to a single test conducted in early 2022. It had reportedly taken US intelligence agencies some time to figure out that the test was a practice run for putting a nuclear weapon into orbit. Also, US intelligence agencies had told their closest European partners that if Russia was going to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit, it would probably do so this year, although they were divided on whether it would be a harmless dummy warhead or a real one.[6] An official reaction from the Kremlin came during a televised meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on February 20. Putin strongly denied the existence of the weapon, saying Russia had always been categorically against the deployment of nuclear weapons in space and was still against it. Shoigu accused the White House of having made the allegations to force Congress to support aid for Ukraine and also encourage Moscow to re-enter nuclear arms control talks that had been suspended amid the tensions with the US over Ukraine. Plumb said that a sufficiently powerful nuclear detonation in the right location could render low Earth orbit unusable for up to a year. In an apparent response to these developments, the US and Japan drafted a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on all nations to reaffirm their commitment not to deploy nuclear weapons in space and also to pledge not to develop them either, something not specifically stipulated in the Outer Space Treaty. When the resolution was submitted to a vote on April 24, it was supported by 13 of the 15 council members, with China abstaining and Russia casting a veto. Dismissing the resolution as a ”dirty spectacle,” Russia’s UN ambassador Vasiliy Nebenzia said it didn’t go far enough in banning space-based weapons. Russia and China subsequently proposed an amendment to the US-Japan draft that would ban the placement of any type of weapon in orbit, but the US was one of seven countries that voted against. In a reaction to the Russian veto of the Security Council resolution, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reiterated the US assessment that Russia is developing ”a new satellite carrying a nuclear device,” adding that if Russia had no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space, as claimed by Vladimir Putin, it would not have vetoed the resolution.[7] Final confirmation that the suspected device is indeed a nuclear weapon came from Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on May 1. He said that a sufficiently powerful nuclear detonation in the right location could render low Earth orbit unusable for up to a year. Plumb declined to elaborate in an open session on the development status of the weapon, repeating only that it was not considered an imminent threat.[8] Nuclear weapons in space In the absence of any concrete evidence for the existence the weapon, the reports have drawn the necessary skepticism from analysts. While a nuclear explosion in space is the only effective way of knocking out entire constellations of satellites (like SpaceX’s Starlink), it would also disable a significant portion of Russia’s own satellite fleet. The only logic seen behind the deployment of such a weapon is its use as a deterrent or as a last-ditch weapon in case all other options are exhausted. Questions were also raised about the wisdom of actually orbiting a nuclear weapon, which makes it more vulnerable to detection and even attack. A nuclear weapon can just as well be delivered to space by intermediate or intercontinental ballistic missiles flying on a suborbital trajectory. That is the way both the United States and the Soviet Union conducted a number of high-altitude nuclear explosions between 1958 and 1962. The largest of these was the US Starfish Prime test on July 9, 1962, in which a 1.44-megaton nuclear bomb was detonated 400 kilometers above the mid-Pacific Ocean. The artificial radiation belt produced by the explosion led to the failure of several of the relatively few satellites orbiting the Earth at the time and its electromagnetic pulse blew out hundreds of streetlights in Hawaii and caused widespread telephone outages. Starfish Prime Images of the 1962 Starfish Prime test. The worst effects of a Soviet high-altitude test were from the electromagnetic pulse of a 300-kiloton weapon detonated at an altitude of 290 kilometers above Kazakhstan on October 22, 1962. Although far less powerful than Starfish Prime, the weapon was tested over a large, populated landmass and at a location where the Earth’s magnetic field was greater. Among other things, it induced a current surge in an underground power line that caused a fire in a power plant in the city of Karaganda. The tests clearly demonstrated that the impact of nuclear detonations in space is not restricted to satellites. In fact, the higher the altitude of the detonation, the bigger the EMP field on the ground. While the EMP is not dangerous to humans, it can have a major impact on critical ground-based infrastructure (such as the electric grid) and therefore directly affect people’s lives. If Russia is indeed developing such a weapon, the White House’s claim that it is solely aimed against satellites should therefore be taken with a grain of salt. While the EMP is not dangerous to humans, it can have a major impact on critical ground-based infrastructure (such as the electric grid) and therefore directly affect people’s lives. The high-altitude nuclear tests of the late 1950s and early 1960s contributed to the signing of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, outer space, and under water, allowing countries to proceed only with underground nuclear tests. Despite the ratification of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 (which prohibited stationing nuclear weapons in orbit), the Soviet Union did continue work on a project to launch a nuclear weapon that would be de-orbited before completing a single revolution around the Earth and approach the United States from the south, thereby evading most of the country’s missile early warning systems, which were predominantly pointed towards the North Pole. It became known in the West as the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS). Tests flights with dummy warheads were carried out between 1965 and 1971.[9] Since then, there have been no clear signs that the orbiting of nuclear weapons has been part of the Soviet Union’s or Russia’s military doctrine. At least some insight into current Russian thinking on counterspace weapons was provided by a lengthy two-part article that appeared last year in ”Voyennaya Mysl” (”Military Thinking”), the flagship theoretical journal of Russia’s Ministry of Defense. The article gives a general outline of counterspace systems that could potentially be fielded in the future and, quite unusually, also mentions two currently existing Russian anti-satellite systems by name, namely the Nudol direct-ascent ASAT missile (which destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite in November 2021) and the ground-based Peresvet laser system, designed to dazzle or blind optical reconnaissance satellites trying to follow the movements of Russian mobile ICBM forces. When discussing nuclear explosions in space, the authors refer to the 1962 Starfish Prime test to illustrate their far-reaching consequences. Describing them as ”effective”, they also call them a ”double-edged sword” because they destroy not only the enemy’s satellites, but also those of the country that detonates the weapon. A similar test carried out today would disable an estimated 90% of satellites in low Earth orbit and would make piloted space missions impossible ”for some time,” the authors write. They don’t specifically mention the possibility of placing nuclear weapons into orbit. Still, that should not necessarily be seen as evidence that such an option is not being considered. Although the affiliation of the authors is not given, they can be linked through other sources to the KB Arsenal design bureau and the Mozhaiskiy Military Space Academy and are therefore unlikely to be in a position to be privy to all the details of Russia’s counterspace efforts.[10] New Russian research on high-altitude nuclear explosions Notwithstanding the fact that the high-altitude nuclear explosions of the 1950s and 1960s provided a considerable amount of data on their effects on satellites and ground-based infrastructure, any new efforts in this field would undoubtedly require fundamental research into such things as the formation of artificial radiation belts, the propagation of electromagnetic pulses through the ionosphere (which stretches from about 50 to 1,000 kilometers above Earth) and their impact on orbiting hardware. The results of such research may well appear in the academic literature without being tied to any concrete projects or even to nuclear weapons as such. This would provide at least some clues about any renewed interest in the use of nuclear weapons in space, irrespective of whether they are deployed in orbit or delivered by a suborbital missile. One organization that would almost certainly play a key role in such work is the Russian Federal Nuclear Center – All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Experimental Physics (RFYaTs-VNIIEF), which operates under the wings of the Rosatom State Corporation. Situated in Sarov in the Nizhniy Novgorod region some 400 kilometers east of Moscow, this is Russia’s leading research center in the field of nuclear weapons, although it also specializes in other areas such as laser technology. RFYaTs-VNIIEF also has ties to the space program. It has a so-called Center for Space Instrument Building that is involved in several scientific projects (such as the Spektr-UV ultraviolet observatory and the Gamma-400 gamma observatory) and also works on space-based laser communications systems. The institute also has infrastructure to test the effects of space radiation on satellite components. Besides that, RFYaTs-VNIIEF is known to have some kind of involvement in KB Arsenal’s Ekipazh project, acting as a subcontractor to Krasnaya Zvezda, the producer of the satellite’s thermionic nuclear reactor. Moreover, it is also the prime contractor for the Peresvet anti-satellite laser dazzling system. There is no direct evidence that RFYaTs-VNIIEF is doing any specific research into the effects of nuclear blasts on satellites, but it does have the infrastructure needed to do this. A search of the RFYaTs-VNIIEF literature does indeed turn up recent papers discussing the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions. One name appearing in most of them is Vadim A. Zhmailo, who works for VNIIEF’s Institute of Theoretical and Mathematical Physics (ITMF), which performs theoretical studies in support of Russia’s nuclear weapons programs. Using data from the 1962 US Starfish Prime test as a starting point, Zhmailo’s team has employed new computer simulation techniques to better understand the consequences of such events. Their main interest seems to lie in the artificial radiation belts spawned by nuclear explosions in space. These result from highly energetic electrons (so-called beta particles) that become trapped in the Earth’s geomagnetic field. These belts, which can last for several years, can seriously affect satellites, degrading their electronics and solar panels.[11] The research is not purely theoretical. Zhmailo has collaborated with other researchers to simulate the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions in the laboratory. Since nuclear tests in space have been banned since 1963, this obviously is the best way to learn more about them. One RFYaTs-VNIIEF department engaged in this work is the Institute of Laser Physics (ILFI). This has three testbeds (Luch, Iskra-5/MKV-4 and MIK) that are at least partially intended to simulate the formation of artificial radiation belts resulting from high-altitude nuclear explosions. In the experiments, laser beams are aimed at small metal targets inside a vacuum chamber to generate highly energetic electrons that are subsequently trapped in a small magnetic field. The properties of the electrons are then measured using magnetic spectrometers and dosimetric sensors. The experiments, which in some articles are unambiguously linked to high-altitude nuclear explosions, go back to at least 2012 and the latest results were reported in 2023, indicating the work is still ongoing.[12] vacuum chamber The MKV-4 vacuum chamber, a testbed connected to the Iskra-5 laser facility. (credit: RFYaTs-VNIIEF) Other experiments are being carried out at RFYaTs-VNIIEF’s Scientific Production Center of Physics (NPTsF) in a testbed called NPM-01, which became operational in 2013. It is a 7.5-by-1-meter plasma chamber surrounded by selenoids that create a magnetic field to trap high-speed particles. NPM-01 was designed specifically to study ”physical processes accompanying large-scale phenomena in near-Earth space.” Articles on the experiments (many of which are co-authored by Zhmailo) link them to studies of the Earth’s radiation belts. They can help calculate changes in radiation belts spanning from several seconds to several years. More specifically, NPM-01 can be used to study a ”wide range of electromagnetic waves” affecting the distribution of electrons in radiation belts. The most recently reported experiments have focused on the simulation of so-called magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves, which according to one of the papers can have ”a natural or technogenic origin.” The latter may refer to the so-called magnetohydrodynamic electromagnetic pulse, one of three types of electromagnetic pulses generated by a nuclear explosion. Also known as E3, it is caused by the detonation’s temporary distortion of the Earth’s magnetic field and has similarities to solar-induced geomagnetic storms.[13] testbed The NPM-01 testbed. (Source) There is no direct evidence that RFYaTs-VNIIEF is doing any specific research into the effects of nuclear blasts on satellites, but it does have the infrastructure needed to do this. Operating within its Institute of Nuclear and Radiation Physics (IYaRF) is a Center for Radiation Studies and Tests which specializes in studying the effects of natural space radiation on satellite components to certify them for use in space. Equipped with a wide array of test installations, it carries out orders for several companies belonging to Roscosmos. It is worth noting that one of the specialists taking part in the tests has also been involved in the research on high-altitude nuclear explosions. [14] In 2021, plans were announced to significantly expand these capabilities with the construction of a synchrotron complex. A synchrotron is a cyclic particle accelerator that can accelerate charged particles to phenomenal speeds through sequences of magnets. Two linear accelerators (one for protons and one for both light and heavy ions) as well as a so-called booster synchrotron will successively accelerate particles before they are injected into the main synchrotron or ”storage ring.” Particles from both the booster and main synchrotron can be diverted via ”beamlines” to laboratories, where their interaction with various materials can be studied. A similar synchrotron complex is used by NASA’s Space Radiation Laboratory at the Brookhaven National Laboratory near New York, but here only particles extracted from the booster synchrotron are used for research related to spaceflight. At the complex under construction at RFYaTs-VNIIEF, studying the interaction of radiation with satellite components will be the main goal of both the booster and main synchrotron. In 2021, the facility was expected to enter operation in 2027.[15] In addition to that, a sister organization of RFYaTs-VNIIEF, called RFYaTs-VNIITF and based in Snezhinsk near Chelyabinsk in the Ural mountains, reported in August last year that it had broken ground for a building housing a cyclotron that is also specifically designed for such experiments. It is supposed to become operational by 2026.[16] At least part of the reason for the expansion of these capabilities may be the need to certify a growing number of Russian-built electronic components now that access to Western space-rated components has become difficult due to economic sanctions imposed on Russia. synchrotron building Drawing of the building that will house RFYaTs-VNIIEF’s synchrotron complex. The main synchrotron is the big yellow circle. (Source) Research on high-altitude nuclear explosions is also being done at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computer-Aided Design (IAP) in Moscow, which specializes in computer simulations in support of a wide field of areas such as astronomy, physics and medicine. The person leading the research is Yevgeniy L. Stupitskiy, who has written papers on the subject for several decades. Stupitskiy also holds a teaching position at a university called the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI). One of his co-researchers was Aleksandr S. Kholodov, another MFTI professor, who headed IAP until his death in 2017. Stupitskiy’s research has focused mainly on the behavior of plasma waves generated by nuclear explosions, more specifically on their propagation through the ionosphere and their effects on orbiting satellites. An important part of the work in recent years has been to study the interaction between plasma waves created by two high-altitude nuclear explosions carried out with an interval of just seconds (as seen in the computer-simulated view heading this article). The altitudes studied have ranged from 100 to 1,000 kilometers, with the explosions taking place either at different altitudes or at the same altitude.[17] Before moving to IAP, Stupitskiy was affiliated with 12 TsNII, the Ministry of Defense’s leading research institute on nuclear explosions and their effects. The institute is based in Sergiyev Posad, some 100 kilometers north of Moscow. Some of its research has focused on protecting satellites against nuclear blasts. One paper published by 12 TsNII discussed how ground-based ionospheric heating facilities could inject very low-frequency radio waves into the ionosphere to mitigate some of the damaging effects that artificial radiation belts have on satellites. Russia operates such a facility (named ”Sura”) about 100 kilometers east of Nizhniy Novgorod.[18] It should be cautioned that the research described above is not necessarily a sign that Russia is actively working on a space-based nuclear weapon. It merely demonstrates that there is continuing interest in studying the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions. Similar theoretical work is taking place in the United States and China, although it is hard to assess on what scale. For instance, scientists at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have in recent years used declassified data from the Starfish Prime test to develop a code (named Topanga) that enables them to make 3D simulations of the E3 portion of the electromagnetic pulse.[19] In late 2022, a team of Chinese researchers published the results of computer simulations they had done of a nuclear explosion at an altitude of 80 kilometers and its effects on orbiting satellites [20]. What does seem to be unique to the Russian research is that it has moved to the stage of laboratory experiments, although the significance of that is difficult to assess. Kosmos-2553 As mentioned earlier, two New York Times stories in February quoted sources as saying that one or more tests related to the suspected nuclear weapon had taken place around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. More specific information was provided early this month by Mallory Stewart, State Department Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability. Speaking about the Russian nuclear space weapon at an event in Washington on May 3, she talked about a suspect Russian satellite that had enabled the US to make ”a more precise assessment” of Russia’s progress on the weapon. While the satellite is indeed exposed to higher doses of radiation in its 2,000-kilometer orbit, there are compelling reasons to believe that it is a military radar reconnaissance satellite. Stewart said the satellite had been launched into ”a region not used by any other spacecraft” and that Russia had claimed it was going to be used for scientific goals, namely the testing of electronics in a high radiation environment. She pointed out that while the orbit was indeed in a region of higher radiation than normal lower Earth orbits, the radiation levels were not high enough to allow ”accelerated testing of electronics”. Stewart thereby implicitly seemed to suggest that the satellite has something to do with the nuclear weapon, although she did not specify exactly what and why that orbit would be suited for it. She did repeat the earlier White House assessment that the weapon was not an immediate threat, which implies the satellite is not believed to actually carry a live nuclear weapon.[21] All this makes it possible to identify the satellite as Kosmos-2553, launched on February 5, 2022, into a circular 2,000-kilometer orbit inclined 67.1 degrees to the Equator. An insider on a Russian space forum identified it as 14F01, which is the military index for a satellite that is referred to in several publicly available documents as Neitron (”neutron”) and occasionally also as Tekhnolog (”technologist”). The project began in December 2011 with a contract awarded by the Ministry of Defense to NPO Mashinostroyeniya in Moscow, a company that traces its roots to the Soviet-era design bureau founded by Vladimir Chelomei. Kosmos-2553 launch The launch of Kosmos-2553 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in February 2022. (credit: Russian Ministry of Defense) After the satellite’s launch, which seems to have taken place years behind schedule, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it would study the effects of radiation and charged particles on newly developed onboard systems. Most likely, this was just a cover story for its true mission. While the satellite is indeed exposed to higher doses of radiation in its 2,000-kilometer orbit, there are compelling reasons to believe that it is a military radar reconnaissance satellite. First, the only satellites that NPO Mashinostroyeniya has built after the turn of the century are radar imaging satellites of the Kondor type and it can be determined from a variety of sources that Neitron shares several design features with the Kondor bus. The three Kondor type satellites launched so far (one of which was built for South Africa) have been used for a mix of civilian and military purposes. Neitron could well be a modified version of those satellites that is on a dedicated military mission. Kondor-FKA The civilian Kondor-FKA satellite, launched in May 2023. (Credit: NPO Mashinostroyeniya) Second, Kosmos-2553 repeats its ground track with an accuracy of about one kilometer every four days, which is strongly indicative of an Earth remote sensing mission. It would be ideal for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) imaging, a technique that requires a satellite to pass over exactly the same region at different times and obtain images from slightly different viewing angles to generate 3D maps of features on Earth. The high orbit shortens the ground track repeat cycle and also offers a wider field of view. For comparison, America’s Topaz military radar reconnaissance satellites are in 1,100-kilometer orbits (also a region rarely used by satellites) and have a two-day ground track repeat pattern, most likely for the same reason. There were indications that Neitron was going to be joined in orbit by a sister satellite, possibly to expand the radar interferometry capabilities, but that launch has so far not taken place.[22] Still, it is not impossible that the satellite is performing radiation studies as a secondary mission. Possible evidence for that comes from a study most likely related to Neitron that was conducted by Moscow State University’s Skobeltsyn Scientific Research Institute of Nuclear Physics (NIIYaF) in early 2012. It focused on the effects of ”ionizing space radiation” (both solar energetic particles and particles trapped in the Earth’s natural radiation belts) on satellites operating in challenging radiation environments. The researchers calculated the radiation dose that the satellites would receive behind ”flat and spherical protective screens” to determine the location of radiation detectors aboard the satellites.[23] It should also be noted that in August 2013 NPO Mashinostroyeniya signed a contract for Neitron with RFYaTs-VNIIEF. This is known from a court document published in 2021.[24] All that is known about its role in the project is that it was to carry out certification tests of a device known as NTSZ ATS35012, the purpose of which is unclear. Possibly, it involved the use of RFYaTs-VNIIEF’s infrastructure to certify radiation-hardened components for installation aboard the satellite. In short, there are no obvious signs from publicly available source material that the mission of Kosmos-2553 has any direct connection with the suspected nuclear weapon. Based on the available information, all that it could potentially be testing with relation to such a weapon would be shielding to protect satellites from the effects of its detonation. It could also demonstrate the ability to operate satellites in what is sometimes called a ”nuclear-safe orbit,” one that is high and stable enough for a nuclear device (whether that be a bomb or a reactor) to be stored safely for an unlimited period of time. Delivery systems If Russia does intend to place nuclear weapons into orbit, it may elect to do so with modified ICBMs rather than with conventional launch vehicles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several ICBMs were converted into space launch vehicles, mainly to serve the needs of the commercial launch industry. None of these programs are currently active, but two are expected to be resurrected in the near future. One is Rokot, a liquid-fuel rocket based on the UR-100UTTKh ICBM, which used to be marketed by a joint Russian-European venture named Eurockot. During a visit to the Plesetsk cosmodrome in late April, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that a modified version of the rocket will start flights from the cosmodrome next December. If Russia does intend to place nuclear weapons into orbit, it may elect to do so with modified ICBMs rather than with conventional launch vehicles. Another converted ICBM scheduled to make its comeback is Start, a launch vehicle derived from the Topol-M solid-fuel ICBMs of the MIT Corporation that is launched from a transporter erector launcher. A new four-stage version of the rocket known as Start-1M is expected to be launched from both Plesetsk and the Vostochnyy cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East beginning in 2026. Recently, plans have also emerged for a mysterious missile named Bureya that seems to be very similar in concept to Start-1M. It is based on the MIT Corporation’s Topol-M or Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles and is designed to be launched from the same type of transporter erector launcher. It can be outfitted with two types of ”kick stages” that may very well give it an orbital capability. According to environmental impact reports published in 2023, test flights of the missile will be staged from both Plesetsk and the Kapustin Yar test range near Volgograd. The payloads for these test flights (identified only as ”Product G”) will be either mock-ups or ”telemetry measurement systems”. [25] No satellite payloads have been announced for any of these rockets so far. If they ultimately fly, they will undoubtedly be used mainly to place Russian military payloads into orbit and could potentially also orbit a nuclear weapon, the very type of payload they were originally designed to carry. In that case, it would have to be delivered to a relatively low orbit given the limited payload capacity of these rockets. References John Kirby’s full press conference is here. S. Harrios, E. Nakashima, J. Hudson, Officials sound alarm about new Russian ‘space threat’, The Washington Post, February 14, 2024. R. Shabad, Biden says ‘no nuclear threat’ to U.S. as Russia considers potential space weapon, NBC, February 16, 2024. B. Hendrickx, Ekipazh: Russia’s top-secret nuclear-powered satellite, The Space Review, October 7, 2019 ; updates in the Ekipazh thread on the NASA Spaceflight Forum. K. Lillis, J. Sciutto, K. Fisher, N. Bertrand, Russia attempting to develop nuclear space weapon to destroy satellites with massive energy wave, sources familiar with intel say, CNN, February 17, 2024. U.S. Fears Russia might put a nuclear weapon in space, New York Times, February 17, 2024 ; U.S. warns allies Russia could put a nuclear weapon into orbit this year, New York Тimes, February 21, 2024. Statement from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, April 24, 2024. Video of the House Armed Services Committee hearing, May 1, 2024 (54:00–1:19:10); Written testimony by John Plumb, May 1, 2014, p. 4. A. Siddiqi, The Soviet Fractional Orbiting Bombardment System (FOBS): a short technical history, Quest, 2000. Two-part article published in 2023 (part 1 (p. 35–52), part 2 (p. 45–63)) Articles published in 2012 (p.91), 2015 and 2019. Articles published in 2012 (p. 142–143) (with English translation), 2018 (p. 3–4) (plus three others no longer online), 2019 and 2023 (no longer online). Articles published in 2018 (no longer online), 2019 (p. 253), 2020 (p. 308), 2022 (p. 276), and 2024 (p. 342). Article published in 2018. Press release by RFYaTs-VNIIEF, September 17, 2021 ; Articles published in 2021 (1 (p. 22), 2 (p. 113–116)) Press release by RFYaTs-VNIITF, August 30, 2023. Articles published in 2012, 2016, and 2020; Monograph published in 2020; PhD dissertation published in 2023. Article published in 2016 (p. 79–82). L. Boatman, Sixty years after, physicists model electromagnetic pulse of a once-secret nuclear test, APS News, November 10, 2022; Paper on the Topanga simulations published in 2024. Article published in the South China Morning Post, October 20, 2022 (paywalled). A summary is here. Video of Mallory Stewart appearing at an event organized by the Center for Strategic & International Studies, May 3, 2024. For more details on the project, see the Neitron program thread and the Kosmos-2553 mission thread on the NASA Spaceflight Forum. Summary of a study carried out under the name ”Tekhnolog”, an alternative name used for Neitron. Court document published in December 2021. Environmental protection reports for test flights of Bureya from Plesetsk and Kapustin Yar. For analysis of these reports, see the latest post in this thread on the NASA Spaceflight Forum. There could be a link with the Aerostat project. Bart Hendrickx is a longtime observer of the Russian space program.

Should The FAA Get Out Of The Space Business?

Falcon 9 launch The growth of commercial launch and reentry activity had been led by SpaceX, such as with this Falcon 9 launch May 6 from Florida. (credit: SpaceX) Is it time for space to come out from under the FAA’s wings? by Jeff Foust Monday, May 13, 2024 Bookmark and Share Spaceflight is not routine in the same way as other modes of transportation, but it is becoming more commonplace. Through less than four and a half months of this year, there have been more than 90 orbital launches worldwide. Commercial launches, predominantly by SpaceX, have driven that growth, far offsetting declines by some other countries and companies. “Breaking records is becoming routine to all of us,” Coleman said of the pace of commercial spaceflight activity. That growth in commercial launch activity puts pressure and scrutiny on the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, which licenses and oversees commercial launches and reentries. At an April 23 meeting of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), Kelvin Coleman, the FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, noted the office licensed 117 launches and 7 reentries in 2023. As of the meeting, the office had already licensed 43 launches and 3 reentries to date in 2024. “If we continue at the current rate, we could see 150 operations this year,” he said, referring to the combination of launches and reentries. AST oversaw 17 operations in March alone, he said, breaking a monthly record of 13 operations set two months earlier. “Breaking records is becoming routine to all of us.” Breaking records, though, raises concerns in industry about AST breaking down. Last fall, for example, officials with launch companies said at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing they were concerned that AST lacked the resources and processes to keep up with growing demand as companies enter the market and ramp up launch activities. “AST’s workload over the next 12–24 months could result in the grounding of US space launch capability if action is not taken immediately,” warned SpaceX vice president Bill Gerstenmaier (see “The launch industry strains launch licensing”, The Space Review, October 23, 2023). The FAA is taking steps to address those concerns. In February, Coleman announced at the annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference that the agency would establish a rulemaking committee to examine a new set of launch licensing regulations called Part 450. The regulations took effect in 2021 with the intent of streamlining the launch and reentry licensing process, but many companies have reported running into problems trying to work with them. The Part 450 regulations, he said at the conference, were “developed pretty quickly, and we are all learning together as we go along. We’ve considered some opportunities, however, to smooth out a few wrinkles and enhance it to better meet its objectives.” He said the committee would start work by the fall to examine the regulations and offer recommendations for improving its implementation, which is critical as all launch companies must move over to Part 450 licenses by March 2026. The office is working to hire more staff as well. Coleman said at the COMSTAC meeting that AST now has 146 employees with “more good people in the pipeline” to address licensing and related work. “Recruiting, hiring, and training are a top priority for us.” In its fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, the FAA requested $57.1 million for AST, up 36% from the $42 million it received in 2024. Much of that increase would go towards hiring more workers to deal with the increasing number of license applications and launch activity. “AST needs additional licensing and permitting evaluators, environmental protection and stakeholder engagement specialists, and safety analysts to double its average annual new authorization determination capacity from 5 to 10 while keeping pace with requests for modifications and renewals,” the FAA stated in its budget documents. Moving AST out of FAA Some in industry, while supporting measures like higher budgets and changes to licensing processes, are looking for bigger changes. They see the challenges faced by AST as symptoms of a more fundamental problem: it is a space office located within an aviation agency. “Space has changed,” Nield said. “The whole environment has changed, and we need to figure out how to deal with that more quickly.” “I think it’s fair to say that, in the opinion of many people, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation has not always been receiving the time and attention from senior leadership, the resources it needs to carry out its mission, and advocacy and support in resolving key issues in a timely fashion,” said George Nield, a COMSTAC member, at the committee’s April 23 meeting. He has first-hand experience: he was head of the office for a decade from 2008 to 2018. Within the FAA, AST is so small, with about a third of a percent of the agency’s budget and workforce, that it gets little attention compared to issues like air traffic management and aircraft certification. That is a problem now as spaceflight activity grows. “Space has changed,” he said. “The whole environment has changed, and we need to figure out how to deal with that more quickly. So that means we need to have somebody at the table, flagging important issues, asking for decisions, getting feedback, and raising other concerns.” His solution could be filed under “back to the future”: move AST out of the FAA and make it an independent office under the Secretary of Transportation. When the Reagan Administration established the Office of Commercial Space Transportation in 1984, that was where the office was located. In the mid-1990s, though, the Clinton Administration moved the office to the FAA as part of a “reinventing government” initiative. Doing so, he argued, would elevate space transportation to the same level as other modes of transportation, such as aviation, shipping, roads, and railways. “You’d have access to the cabinet secretary. You’d have a seat at the table. You’d have the ability to more clearly make your case for needed resources and ask for help when there’s important issues to be decided.” An example is another issue he raised at COMSTAC, support for spaceports. There are federal programs for funding infrastructure for other modes of transportation, he noted, “but today there is no comparable program to provide federal funding for space-related infrastructure, such as for spaceports.” Spaceports, he said, are not eligible for grants from the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program; spaceports that are also airports can only seek funding for projects that are used for aviation and not exclusively for space. He recommended that the FAA provide significant funding for the existing Space Transportation Infrastructure Matching Grants Program, which is authorized to support spaceport projects but not funded to any meaningful degree. The idea of moving AST out of the FAA is not new, having been discussed from time to time for many years among industry officials and members of Congress with no action. The prospects of such a move may be improving, though, given the growth of the industry and concerns about the level of attention and resources the office is getting. COMSTAC members, after a brief discussion, unanimously adopted a recommendation for the Secretary of Transportation to move the office out of FAA. “This is the first time that any government body, and not just a few individual congressmen, have endorsed creating a separate agency for space transportation licensing and promotion,” said Muncy. Others outside of COMSTAC agreed with the recommendation. Jim Muncy of PoliSpace said after the meeting that the FAA was a good host for the office in its early years but that “as industry started to build up momentum in the 2010s, big FAA wasn’t able to respond with enough attention, resources, and flexibility to meet industry’s needs.” An example, he said, was “FAA resistance” to giving AST resources to develop updated launch licensing regulations until the National Space Council intervened in the Trump Administration, which led to the rushed development of the Part 450 regulations. What happens next is uncertain. The Secretary of Transportation could move AST out of the FAA and back into a standalone office with a stroke of a pen, in much the same way the office was moved into the FAA nearly 30 years ago. “But, given the importance of this, I think the right approach would be to have Congress weigh in on it, as well as the White House,” Nield said. One vehicle for doing so would be a commercial space bill. Muncy noted that groups like the Space Frontier Foundation and the Alliance for Space Development included moving AST out of FAA among their taking points during meetings with congressional offices in March, finding “real interest” among member for including such a move in a future bill. However, there is precious little time to get a bill passed this year, given the November elections and other pressing matters. There are also questions about how much attention an independent Office of Commercial Space Transportation would get from the leadership of the Transportation Department. Industry officials have privately noted that the current leadership of the department, including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, pay little public attention to commercial space, often with little more than brief, recorded messages at COMSTAC meetings and the FAA’s annual commercial space transportation conference. When they do talk about space, industry doesn’t always like the message. Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of transportation who was acting FAA administrator for several months last year, appeared to reject calls for increased funding for AST at a COMSTAC meeting last November, suggesting it may be time for the industry to pay user fees or taxes to cover the office’s costs. “We’re an agency that has the ability to generate revenue and I think that’s going to be a question for this industry,” she said, adding that she was offering her own opinion and not that of the department itself. “Does the industry need to start, frankly, contributing some revenues to solve the funding challenges that AST has?” (Last month, the New York Times reported that the Biden Administration included a proposal in its fiscal year 2025 budget request to levy taxes on commercial launches to cover the costs of airspace closures. However, Coleman said at the Space Symposium a week after the report that there was no such tax provision in the budget request, only discussions within the FAA about the potential for such a tax in the future, adding that “there’s still a ways to go before we see something concrete in that regard.”) Muncy said it might be to the benefit of both FAA and the Department of Transportation to move AST out of the FAA. “It is one thing to argue that keeping AST in FAA is bad for space. Now we are seeing that FAA is having trouble carrying out its primary mission of aviation safety,” he said. “If space is a distraction from fixing big FAA, then even Secretary Pete [Buttigieg] might see the value in allowing FAA to focus on its problems, and moving space over to a single-focus agency that can promote industry and protect public safety.” The benefit of the COMSTAC recommendation, he concluded, is that, in effect, the call for change was coming from inside the house. “This is the first time that any government body, and not just a few individual congressmen, have endorsed creating a separate agency for space transportation licensing and promotion.” Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

Space Planes-Why We Need Them

Radian One spaceplane Despite the failures of dozens of past efforts, companies like Radian Aerospace continue to pursue spaceplanes. (credit: Radian Aerospace) Spaceplanes: why we need them, why they have failed, and how they can succeed by John Hollaway Monday, May 13, 2024 Bookmark and Share “Rockets are terribly inefficient and expensive.” This admission can be found here in NASA’s own educational piece on the equation that governs rocket performance, also known as Tsiolkovsky's equation. But what is the alternative? Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the space age is our inability to create the obvious one: a successful spaceplane. This is a launch vehicle that takes off like an airplane, flies up to orbit, and returns to settle back on the runway. This feat is known as single stage to orbit (SSTO) and if you look this up in Wikipedia, here is what you find: It is considered to be marginally possible to launch a single-stage-to-orbit chemically fueled spacecraft from Earth. The principal complicating factors for SSTO from Earth are: high orbital velocity of over 7,400 meters per second (27,000 km/h; 17,000 mph); the need to overcome Earth's gravity, especially in the early stages of flight; and flight within Earth's atmosphere, which limits speed in the early stages of flight due to drag, and influences engine performance. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the space age is our inability to create the obvious one: a successful spaceplane. “Marginally possible.” This gloomy observation has not inhibited attempts to overcome the challenge of creating a spaceship that can fly up and down like an aircraft. Indeed, if you go to Wikipedia you will find a list of some 60 spaceplane projects since 1945 that had this objective. None can have been said to have succeeded. A more recent review was given by Joe Scott. Unsurprisingly to aerospace engineers, the villain sabotaging this dream is Tsiolokovsky’s Equation. Konstantin Tsiolokovsky was a Russian mathematician who, in 1896 demonstrated that Newton’s laws, when applied to rockets propelled with oxygen plus a reductant, results in a formula that limits all the non-propellant mass—the unfueled rocket and the payload—to a small fraction of the total weight. Specifically, when launching to low earth orbit at the minimum speed required of 7,400 meters per second, and not allowing for losses from atmospheric drag and from gravitational pull, the equation gives this table: Propellant Specific Impulse (Isp) Maximum Non-Propellant Mass Liquid Hydrogen plus LOX 450 18.7% Kerosene plus LOX 330 10.1% Solid Rocket Motor (SRM) 270 6.1% In practical terms the ultimate problem is that, because space has no oxygen, rockets have to carry up about 2.4 tons of it for every ton of fuel they carry. Not surprisingly, given this constraint, rockets which reduce their mass to orbit by dropping off empty sections on the way up—staging—is the system that has been universally adopted to maximise the non-propellant mass (another Tsiolokovsky insight). A further drawback of SSTO’s is that they must haul along a pair of wings that are useful only for a very small part of the flight path, which further limits the thin weight margin available for the payload. In the last decade spaceplanes have become even less competitive. The development of reusable rockets by SpaceX has brought payload costs to low Earth orbit (LEO) down from over $10,000 a kilogram to around $3,000. Under these circumstances, SSTO concepts might be expected to have a vanishingly small chance of being economically viable. Yet still they come. Radian Aerospace, based in Renton, Washington, is planning to develop a delta-winged spaceplane about the size of a small commercial jet air transport. This will launch horizontally using a rocket-powered sled to allow the craft to conserve as much fuel as possible. Once aloft, three rocket engines put the spacecraft into orbit under a low-g ascent, followed by reentry and landing on a runway three kilometers long. But Radian is right: spaceplanes are going to be essential if we are to continue to use satellite-based services. We are painting ourselves into a corner here, with ever-larger rockets carrying ever-larger numbers of satellites up, but with no means of servicing them in orbit. Radian have raised $27.5 million of what they call “seed capital,” so presumably the final cost will be of the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the price squeeze originating from SpaceX it is difficult to see a justification for this. With a two-ton payload and assuming a net revenue of $1,000 per kilogram, cash recovery will be $2 million a launch, so at least 50 launches will be needed just to break even. But Radian is right: spaceplanes are going to be essential if we are to continue to use satellite-based services. We are painting ourselves into a corner here, with ever-larger rockets carrying ever-larger numbers of satellites up, but with no means of servicing them in orbit. They cannot be easily repaired or their positions adjusted, and they cannot be readily deorbited when they become obsolete. The problem can be seen most clearly in the space debris challenge. In November 2022, the US Space Surveillance Network reported tracking 25,857 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, of which 5,465 were operational satellites. However, those 20,000-odd other objects represent the tip of an iceberg; they are the space debris items that are big enough to be trackable. There are now, according to NASA, perhaps a hundred million orbiting objects with a diameter between 1 and 10 centimeters, and over 36,500 pieces with diameters greater than 10 centimeters. NASA also has a good survey of the scores of debris capture proposals and the regulatory situation here. What is lacking is a vehicle that can go about deorbiting space junk by whatever means, come back to Earth for re-equipping and return back up to continue its work. A space plane. Checkmate, or so it may seem. The way forward lies again in Tsiolokovsky’s equation. The form that is of use here is: ln (Initial Mass/Final Mass) = Delta V/(g0 * Isp) So there are just two variables involved, the increase in velocity and the specific impulse. There is nothing to be done about the Isp once the choice of propellant and oxidizer has been made, but what about the effect of gravity and drag losses on the delta V? Conceptually, if we are able to use air-breathing ramjets to take the spaceplane to the edge of space before handing over propulsion to a rocket motor, then not only will the ensuing rocket drag loss be small enough to be almost negligible, the initial velocity of this second stage could be more than Mach 5, countering the gravitational drag. The evidence for this speed comes from several sources, such as: The Boeing ramjet-powered ASALM missile demonstrated its hypersonic ability in 1980 when it reached Mach 5.5 (about 1,900 meters per second) at 12,000 meters after a fuel valve stuck open. In 1951 NACA (the NASA predecessor) launched a ramjet powered missile which reached an apogee of 159,000 feet (48.5 kilometers). This missile was launched at a 75-degree angle and ran out of fuel at 67,200 feet (20.5 kilometers) when it was passing Mach 2.92 (about 1,000 meters per second). It is possible to gain a measure of gravitational drag from the trajectory of the air-launched Pegasus rocket, which was developed by Orbital ATK in 1990 and later built and launched by Northrop Grumman. Its Users Guide, issued in October 2015, gave operating data that showed that the zoom effect between the first and second stage gave an altitude gain of nearly 16 kilometers in return for a delta V loss of about 58 meters per second, a penalty of 3.6 meters per second per kilometer. This is happening at an altitude of over 70 kilometers, so this loss is almost solely from gravitational drag. From these figures it appears that the gravitational penalty for a SRM being used in our spaceplane to lift it from about 50 kilometers up at about 1,000 meters per second to 200 kilometers at the minimum orbital speed of 7,400 meters per second would be, very roughly, 150 x 3.6 meters per second, or about 540 meters per second. So gravitational drag will require us to add this value to the required orbital speed, giving a total of 7,940 meters per second. Because of the uncertainties surrounding this value, we can round it up to 8,000 meters per second. However, if there is a first-stage ramjet propulsion stage for our spaceplane, and it achieves Mach 5.5 at 70 kilometers, this would remove about 1,700 meters per second from this orbital speed target, reducing the delta V-to-orbit requirement of the spaceplane’s rocket stage to about 6,300 meters per second. If this work is undertaken using a simple SRM with an Isp of 270, then the available non-propellant mass of 6.1% shown in the table above increases to 10.8%, or rather better than a kerosene plus lox liquid-fueled rocket on the same basis. What does this mean in terms of a spaceplane? It will be necessary to make a number of informed guesses on the non-propellant mass items at this stage; here they are: Item Mass Payload 0.5t Spaceplane structure 1.5t* Cold gas thruster fuel 1.0t** Control Systems 0.5t Total Non-Propellant Mass 3.5t *This may seem light, but there is no undercarriage on this vehicle. It is launched and captured on a separate carriage on a track controlled by a linear induction motor. Additionally, the ramjets are expected to need to run for no more than about three minutes after launch, and so can be made of thin heat-resistant steel. ** For the extensive in-orbit movements required of an orbital service vehicle, perhaps nitrogen or possibly propane from left-over ramjet fuel. If this non-propellant mass of 3.5 tons now represents 10.8% of the total at the point where the SRM takes over from the ramjets, then the SRM propellant mass would be 32.4 tons approximately, giving a launch total of about 35.9 tons. In addition, at launch there would be an extra two to two-and-a-half tons of propane as fuel for the ramjets and perhaps for in-orbit thruster use as well. So, finally, a practical spaceplane. A bonus is that by being able to reach orbit with ramjets and a simple SRM it will have almost no moving parts. The concept is expanded upon in www.swalarlv.com.

Book Reviews-Alien Earths

book cover Review: Alien Earths by Jeff Foust Monday, May 13, 2024 Bookmark and Share Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger St. Martin’s Press, 2024 hardcover, 288 pp., illus. ISBN 978-1-250-28363-4 US$30 In a paper published last week, astronomers reported the detection of an atmosphere around a rocky “Earth-like” exoplanet, a first. The problem with the announcement, though, was that the exoplanet in question, 55 Cancri e, didn’t seem much like Earth: a diameter twice the size of Earth and a temperature of more than 1,500 degrees Celsius. (“To describe 55 Cancri e as ‘rocky,’ however, could leave the wrong impression,” a press release stated, noting its surface is likely molten.) Combine that with an atmosphere made of carbon monoxide and/or carbon dioxide, and 55 Cancri e doesn’t appear to be particularly hospitable to life. Astronomers, though, hardly consider the discovery a setback, pointing instead to how it shows the James Webb Space Telescope, which conducted the observations, can help find other potentially habitable worlds. “It is truly enabling a new type of science,” said the lead author of the study, Renyu Hu, in a statement. “Asking the right questions is crucial in science because you have only one lifetime to figure things out,” she writes. But, she adds, “some of the answers are written in the night sky.” Since astronomers found the first exoplanets around a sunlike star nearly three decades ago, scientists have studied which ones could be habitable. That has coincided with much of the academic and professional career of Lisa Kaltenegger, the director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell University. In her new book Alien Earths, she describes the efforts to search for worlds beyond our solar system, including those that could support life. The book is, in large part, a broad introduction to exoplanet science and astrobiology. Kaltenegger examines many of the key topics in those fields, from what it takes for a world to be habitable, or even inhabited, to the diversity of exoplanets discovered to date, many of which scientists once thought were impossible. For those who have been following the search for exoplanets and habitable worlds, much of this material will be familiar, but is presented well here. Interleaved in the book are anecdotes from her own career as well as other aspects of her life. Kaltenegger has been studying the formation of exoplanets and ways to determine their habitability. This is an effort that transcends astronomy, as she makes clear in the book, as exoplanet science evolves into an interdisciplinary field that incorporates geology and biology. She describes that in passages in the book about doing lab research at Cornell to determine what the spectra of those worlds would be depending on their composition and presence of life. That includes, she noted, dealing with clashes in terminology, with words as simple as “metal” and “glass” meaning different things for astronomers versus geologists. That interdisciplinary work, language difficulties aside, is critical to the future of the search for worlds beyond Earth that might host life. She now occupies the same office at Cornell as Carl Sagan, leading the institute named after him that brings together researchers from many fields on the key questions in astrobiology. “Asking the right questions is crucial in science because you have only one lifetime to figure things out,” she writes. But, she adds, “some of the answers are written in the night sky.” Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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Europe Looks To End Its Launcher Crisis

Ariane 6 The first Ariane 6 is taking shape at the spaceport in French Guiana for a launch as soon as this summer. (credit: ESA/ArianeGroup/Arianespace/CNES) Europe looks to end its launcher crisis by Jeff Foust Monday, May 6, 2024 Bookmark and Share In the early morning hours of April 28, the European Space Agency and European Commission celebrated the launch of the latest two Galileo navigation satellites. But in the announcements of the launch and confirmation that the two satellites were working well in orbit, there was something missing: just how the satellites got into orbit. “Statistically, there’s a 47% chance the first flight may not succeed or happen exactly as planned,” Aschbacher said, citing the track record of first launches of new large launch vehicles. For example, the release by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), the EU office that manages Galileo, highlighted not their launch so much as their “their successful injection into orbit.” You might not even know that this injection was done by a rocket at all beyond a passing reference to “a launcher” used to deploy them. The name of that launcher was never mentioned. It's understandable, though, why the EU in particular was giving the rocket the Lord Voldemort treatment. Unlike previous Galileo satellites launched on Ariane 5 and Soyuz rockets from French Guiana, these two were launched on a Falcon 9 from Florida. The EU reluctantly agreed to turn to Falcon 9 because of the retirement of the Ariane 5 and loss of the Soyuz had created a “launcher crisis” for Europe, temporarily depriving it of the means of launching Galileo or other large satellites on its own. There are signs, though, of an end to that crisis. If all goes well, by the end of the year Europe will have several options to launch satellites on European rockets, from the long-delayed successor to the Ariane 5 to a new lineup of small launch vehicles making their way to launch pads. The key vehicle to those efforts is the Ariane 6, the successor to the Ariane 5 once planned to begin launches in 2020 to overlap with Ariane 5 but which will instead fly at least a year after the final flight of the Ariane 5. Late last year, ESA and its partners on the vehicle set a target launch period for the Ariane 6’s debut: between the middle of June and the end of July of 2024. For now, the Ariane 6 team is sticking to that schedule. On April 26, ESA formally announced the start of the launch campaign for that inaugural flight. At the spaceport in French Guiana, the two solid rocket boosters for the vehicle were moved into place on either side of the Ariane 6 core stage. “Having the rocket stages together on the launch pad marks the start of a launch campaign and shows we are almost there: soon we will see this beauty soar to the skies,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general, said in a statement. Neither ESA nor the others involved with the launch, like vehicle prime contractor ArianeGroup, have provided an update on the launch date. In an April 26 joint update, the partners said they were wrapping up a qualification review for the launch that officials earlier said would allow them to refine the projected launch date. The results of the review were to be announced at the “beginning of May,” the update stated. As of May 6, the Ariane 6 team had not provided another update. The stakes of the first Ariane 6 launch are high, and Aschbacher, speaking at the 39th Space Symposium last month, worked to set expectations. “Statistically, there’s a 47% chance the first flight may not succeed or happen exactly as planned,” he said, citing the track record of first launches of new large launch vehicles. “We’ll do everything we can to make it a successful flight but I think it’s something that we have to keep in mind.” “We’re getting very, very close to launch,” said Isar’s Guillen. “Our first launch is scheduled for the summer.” There is also the Vega C, a smaller vehicle that failed on its second flight in December 2022. ESA has said it is working to return that vehicle to flight by the end of this year, as prime contractor Avio works to fix the problems with the vehicle’s solid-fuel second stage motor. Aschbacher confirmed that schedule for Vega C’s return to flight in his Space Symposium presentation. Meanwhile, other European companies are racing to get their smaller rockets to the pad, seeing who can be first to get to orbit. Last month, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) announced it had shipped the first stage for its first RFA ONE rocket from its German factory to SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands. There, the stage will undergo a hotfire test ahead of a first launch later this year. RFA is racing with Isar Aerospace, another German company whose Spectrum rocket is being prepared for launch from Andøya Spaceport in Norway. The company has not provided recent updates on the status of launch preparations but a company executive said in March they were aiming for a launch this summer. “We’re getting very, very close to launch,” Stella Guillen, chief commercial office of Isar Aerospace, said during a panel at the Satellite 2024 conference March 20. “Our first launch is scheduled for the summer.” HyImpulse SR75 HyImpulse launched its SR75 sounding rocket May 3, testing technology for a future orbital launch vehicle. (credit: HyImpulse) A third German company, though, recently beat the other two in terms of getting a rocket launched—just not to orbit. Last Friday, HyImpulse launched its SR75 sounding rocket from a facility in South Australia run by spaceport company Southern Launch. The SR75 rocket “operated as planned,” HyImpulse said in a statement, but did not disclose the vehicle’s peak altitude. SR75 is designed to carry up to 250 kilograms of payload to an altitude of 250 kilometers using a hybrid propulsion system: solid paraffin fuel and liquid oxygen. It is also a technology precursor for SL1, a small launch vehicle the company is developing to place up to 600 kilograms into low Earth orbit. “We’re signaling Germany’s prowess as a spacefaring nation and expanding Europe’s access to space,” Mario Kobald, cofounder and co-CEO of HyImpulse, said in a statement, adding that the company planned to conduct its first orbital launch attempt as soon as the end of 2025. Other launch companies in Europe are making progress with another key aspect of launch vehicle development: raising money. Spanish launch vehicle developer PLD Space said last month it had now raised 120 million euros ($129 million) from both investors and the Spanish government. The company, which successfully launched its Miura 1 suborbital rocket last October, is now working on the Miura 5 small launch vehicle. That 120 million euros is over the life of the company, and it did not disclose the size of any new round. “The funding for our work has been one of the most difficult tasks in developing our Miura family of rockets. Despite this, the successful launch of Miura 1 has bolstered our position as leaders in the industry, an achievement acknowledged by investors and clients,” Raúl Verdú, co-founder and chief business development officer of PLD Space, said in a statement. PLD Space said its funding will go towards an expansion of its production facilities and work on a launch site in French Guiana. It plans an initial demonstration launch of Miura 5 next year with commercial launches beginning in 2026. Orbex, a launch vehicle developer based in Scotland, also announced last month it has raised an additional $21 million as an extension to an earlier Series C round. Orbex is developing Prime, a small launch vehicle it plans to launch from a site called Sutherland Spaceport it is developing in northern Scotland. “Our technology is pivotal in making the U.K. a hub for European orbital launch, and we are entering a critical phase of development,” Orbex CEO Phillip Chambers said in a statement about the new funding. “This additional funding will support our goal to push on into an operational launch phase, and scale our business when the time comes.” “If they were not there,” PLD Space’s Gallego said of SpaceX, “maybe we would not be here.” It’s not clear, though, when that time will come, as Prime has suffered extensive delays and Orbex changes in leadership: when Chambers was named CEO early this year, he was the fourth person to hold the post in a permanent or acting manner in less than a year. The company declined to offer an estimate for when Prime will launch. This all suggests that, soon, Europe will have an array of options for launching smallsats and restored capability for larger ones when Ariane 6 is introduced and Vega C flights resume. However, they will continue to face challenges from the same company Europe is now relying on for launching critical missions: SpaceX. At the Satellite 2024 panel, for example, executives from European and other launch companies were worried that SpaceX’s current dominant position could be further entrenched by Starship, with greater mass to orbit and lower per-kilogram costs. “Starship for sure will disrupt further the launch business and the space business in general,” said Marino Fragnito, senior vice president and head of the Vega business unit at Arianespace. “One scenario is that Musk could really monopolize everything.” That included one scenario where Starship, outfitted with orbital transfer vehicles, could provide tailored launches of smallsats on rideshare missions—similar to what SpaceX offers now with Transporter and Bandwagon smallsat rideshare missions on Falcon 9—delivering payloads to their desired orbit for far less than small launch vehicles. In that scenario, he concluded, “it will be difficult for small launch vehicles.” Others on the panel, though, said they were focusing on their own vehicles, or even thanking SpaceX for stimulating smallsat demand through low-cost rideshare launches. “If they were not there,” Pablo Gallego, vice president of customers and sales at PLD Space, said of SpaceX, “maybe we would not be here.” The Galileo launch last month was the first European government mission to launch on Falcon 9 this year but not the last. In the coming weeks, ESA will launch its EarthCARE spacecraft on a Falcon 9, followed by its Hera asteroid mission this fall on another Falcon 9. Two more Galileo satellites are also scheduled to launch later this year on a Falcon 9—or, rather, “a launcher.” Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

Boeing Starliner-An Important Milestone For Commercial Space Flight

Starliner on the pad Starliner is set to launch as soon as Monday night on its first crewed flight. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky) Boeing’s Starliner, an important milestone for commercial spaceflight by Wendy N. Whitman Cobb Monday, May 6, 2024 Bookmark and Share The Conversation If all goes well late on May 6, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will blast off into space on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Launching from the Kennedy Space Center, this last crucial test for Starliner will test out the new spacecraft and take the pair to the International Space Station for about a week. The mission’s troubled history also shows just how difficult the path to space can be, even for an experienced company like Boeing. Part of NASA’s commercial crew program, this long-delayed mission will represent the vehicle’s first crewed launch. If successful, it will give NASA—and in the future, space tourists—more options for getting to low Earth orbit. From my perspective as a space policy expert, Starliner’s launch represents another significant milestone in the development of the commercial space industry. But the mission’s troubled history also shows just how difficult the path to space can be, even for an experienced company like Boeing. Origins and development Following the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle in 2011, NASA invited commercial space companies to help the agency transport cargo and crew to the International Space Station. In 2014, NASA selected Boeing and SpaceX to build their respective crew vehicles: Starliner and Dragon. Boeing’s vehicle, Starliner, was built to carry up to seven crew members to and from low Earth orbit. For NASA missions to the International Space Station, it will carry up to four at a time, and it’s designed to remain docked to the station for up to seven months. The capsule where the crew will sit is slightly bigger than an Apollo command module or a SpaceX Dragon. Boeing designed Starliner to be partially reusable to reduce the cost of getting to space. Though the Atlas 5 rocket it will take to space and the service module that supports the craft are both expendable, Starliner’s crew capsule can be reused up to 10 times, with a six-month turnaround. Boeing has built two flightworthy Starliners to date. Starliner’s development has come with setbacks. Though Boeing received $4.2 billion from NASA, compared with $2.6 billion for SpaceX, Boeing spent more than $1.5 billion extra in developing the spacecraft. On Starliner’s first uncrewed test flight in 2019, a series of software and hardware failures prevented it from getting to its planned orbit as well as docking with the International Space Station. After testing out some of its systems, it landed successfully at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. In 2022, after identifying and making more than 80 fixes, Starliner conducted a second uncrewed test flight. This time, the vehicle did successfully dock with the International Space Station and landed six days later in New Mexico. Still, Boeing delayed the first crewed launch for Starliner from 2023 to 2024 because of additional problems. One involved Starliner’s parachutes, which help to slow the vehicle as it returns to Earth. Tests found that some links in those parachute lines were weaker than expected, which could have caused them to break. A second problem was the use of flammable tape that could pose a fire hazard. A major question stemming from these delays concerns why Starliner has been so difficult to develop. For one, NASA officials admitted that it did not provide as much oversight for Starliner as it did for SpaceX’s Dragon because of the agency’s familiarity with Boeing. And Boeing has experienced several other problems recently, most visibly with the safety of its airplanes. Astronaut Butch Wilmore has denied that Starliner’s problems reflect these troubles. Starliner is important not just for NASA and Boeing, but also to demonstrate that more than one company can find success in the commercial space industry. But several of Boeing’s other space activities beyond Starliner have also experienced mechanical failures and budget pressure, including the Space Launch System. This system is planned to be the main rocket for NASA’s Artemis program, which plans to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era. Starliner crew The Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, after the spacecraft and its Atlas 5 rocket rolled out to the pad May 4. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky) Significance for NASA and commercial spaceflight Given these difficulties, Starliner’s success will be important for Boeing’s future space efforts. Even if SpaceX’s Dragon can successfully transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, the agency needs a backup. And that’s where Starliner comes in. Following the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia shuttle accident in 2003, NASA retired the Space Shuttle in 2011. The agency was left with few options to get astronauts to and from space. Having a second commercial crew vehicle provider means that NASA will not have to depend on one company or vehicle for space launches as it previously had to. Perhaps more importantly, if Starliner is successful, it could compete with SpaceX. Though there’s no crushing demand for space tourism right now, and Boeing has no plans to market Starliner for tourism anytime soon, competition is important in any market to drive down costs and increase innovation. More such competition is likely coming. Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser is planning to launch later this year to transport cargo for NASA to the International Space Station. A crewed version of the spaceplane is also being developed by the company. Blue Origin has also shown interest in its own commercial crew orbital vehicle. Though SpaceX has made commercial spaceflight look relatively easy, Boeing’s rocky experience with Starliner shows just how hard spaceflight continues to be, even for an experienced company. Starliner is important not just for NASA and Boeing, but also to demonstrate that more than one company can find success in the commercial space industry. A successful launch would also give NASA more confidence in the industry’s ability to support operations in Earth’s orbit while the agency focuses on future missions to the Moon and beyond. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Dr. Wendy N. Whitman Cobb is Professor of Strategy and Security Studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS). Dr. Whitman Cobb received a BA and MA from the University of Central Florida, both in political science, and a PhD in political science from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on the political and institutional dynamics of space policy, public opinion of space exploration, and the influence of commerce on potential space conflict.

Boeing's Starliner Is About To Launch 1st Crewed Mission To Orbit!

Space Junk Is A Danger To Us On Earth

ISS The ISS was the source of a piece of debris that hit a Florida home in March. (credit: NASA) The rising flood of space junk is a risk to us on Earth by Thomas Cheney Monday, May 6, 2024 Bookmark and Share The Conversation A piece of space junk recently crashed through the roof and floor of a man’s home in Florida. NASA later confirmed that the object had come from unwanted hardware released from the International Space Station. The Florida incident is illustrative of the legal hazards of the proliferation of space objects without adequate end-of-life planning. The hardware, 10 centimeters long and weighing 700 grams, was expected to burn up, NASA said. But even a relatively small piece of junk can cause considerable damage when falling from space. This raises several important questions. Who is liable for damages caused by human-made objects that fall from the sky? Can anything be done to prevent this happening? Luckily, international treaties provide some answers to the first question, while recent developments help with the second. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says that the country that authorized the launch (known as the “launching state”) is responsible for damage caused to people or things on Earth. The UN’s liability convention, which came into force in 1972, also makes this liability absolute for damage on Earth or to aircraft in flight. Debris NASA analysis confirmed the debris that hit a Florida home came from a pallet jettisoned from the ISS. (credit: NASA) The concept of absolute liability means that responsibility applies regardless of whose fault it was. Countries are also liable for spacecraft and rocket sections launched by private companies. This is because Article 6 of the Outer Space Treaty makes nations responsible for the activities of their citizens in outer space. So if a piece of space junk launched by one country lands in another, the launching state is responsible for any financial compensation that may result from the costs of damage or clean up. It is important to note that these principles relate to international law. A US object damaging US property is a matter for US law. All objects in Earth orbit are falling towards Earth. Active satellites engage in “station keeping” to remain in their intended orbit. Inactive satellites—those that no longer work or are disabled in some way—will not be able to perform this task. Their orbits will steadily drop until they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Of around 11,000 satellites in orbit today, about 3,300 are estimated to be inactive. There are two main options for best practice when the lifetime of an active satellite comes to an end. One is to either move the satellite into a higher orbit—known as a graveyard orbit—to delay the date of re-entry by hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Another is to re-orient the satellite to ensure that it either re-enters in a manner that ensures it burns up in the atmosphere or that it can cause only minimal damage on the ground. However, due to malfunctions or damage, some space objects still undergo an unplanned re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and can thus land anywhere. Earth is big, however, so the risk of a given space object causing harm to people or property is low, particularly as a space object also needs to survive the searing heat of re-entry that causes many pieces of space junk to burn up. However, space junk can sometimes reach the ground. Some, such as debris from Skylab, the first US space station, came down in western Australia in 1979 but caused no damage. Other space debris, like Cosmos 954, a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite, spread dangerous radioactive debris across northern Canada when it re-entered in January 1978. While that cleanup cost the Canadian government $14 million Canadian, the Soviet Union reimbursed the Canadian government for $3 million. This remains the most significant test of the space treaties and shows the limitations on the protections provided by international law because the compensation was a fraction of the clean-up cost. The object that recently damaged the home in Florida was American, so that incident will not test the space treaties, as the incident occurred on US soil and will therefore be a matter for US law. A piece of space junk should re-enter on a trajectory that guarantees that it burns up or crashes somewhere it is unlikely to do damage. However, it is illustrative of the legal hazards of the proliferation of space objects without adequate end-of-life planning. The more objects launched into outer space, the more of them will return to Earth. Indeed, they will all eventually enter the atmosphere and not all of them will burn up in the process. Mitigating space junk Two sets of UN guidelines present an encouraging picture for what happens to space debris. Recent work to incorporate more long-term planning into these non-binding agreements encourages the development of end-of-life plans for space objects such as satellites. The guidelines are primarily aimed at dealing with the growing problem of space debris rather than preventing objects from causing damage on Earth. However, planning for the end of a space object’s life will also reduce the risk of an impact on the ground. A piece of space junk should re-enter on a trajectory that guarantees that it burns up or crashes somewhere it is unlikely to do damage. While the guidelines are non-binding, the liability provisions of the space treaties are not, thus motivating compliance by launching states. The risk of a piece of space junk crashing through the roof of your house remains very low. As more spacecraft are launched though, the risk from falling space junk will edge up marginally. However, space law is on your side, and efforts to tackle the problem will reduce the risk to people and property. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Thomas Cheney is a Vice Chancellors Research Fellow in Law at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne. He is active in researching space law, policy and governance. His research focuses on planetary protection and environmental aspects of space governance, as well as space resources and property rights. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.

Book Review-The Asteroid Hunter

book cover Review: The Asteroid Hunter by Jeff Foust Monday, May 6, 2024 Bookmark and Share The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System by Dante S. Lauretta Grand Central Publishing, 2024 hardcover, 336 pp., illus. ISBN 978-1-5387-2294-7 US$30 Many people can identify a particular point where they found their purpose in life. It can be an event of some kind, either celebratory or traumatic; a chance encounter with someone; or maybe a book. For Dante Lauretta, it was an ad in a student newspaper. “WORK FOR NASA” declared the full-page ad that he stumbled across while perusing the Arizona Daily Wildcat after a shift as a short-order cook in a Tucson restaurant. Lauretta was at the time a student at the University of Arizona, about to graduate but unsure of what he would so next. The prospect of working with NASA—in this case on the agency’s short-lived support for SETI research—provided that purpose: “It was as if the dirty window I had been looking through my whole life was wiped clean. I had found my path,” he recalls in his memoir, The Asteroid Hunter. The story of OSIRIS-REx is one of science and engineering, but also of people: “the magnificent ensemble of scientists, engineers, and cosmic aficionados who had rallied together to manifest this vision,” he writes. The bulk of the book follows Lauretta after returned to the university about decade later, this time on the faculty at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), with an interest in cosmochemistry and astrobiology. The director of LPL, Mike Drake, offered him an opportunity to take a leadership role in a mission being developed by the lab and Lockheed Martin: returning samples from an asteroid. Drake would be the principal investigator (PI), handling the “up and out” management of the mission, while Lauretta took care of the “down and in” of overseeing the science. LPL and Lockheed twice pitched the mission, dubbed OSIRIS, for NASA’s Discovery program of relatively low-cost science missions, but was not selected. An opportunity then emerged to offer a scaled-up version of the mission for the larger New Frontiers program. That version of the mission, now known as OSIRIS-REx (for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer), was selected in 2011 for development. That selection was both the culmination of years of development but also just the beginning. OSIRIS-REx would face many of the familiar technical and programmatic challenges of any mission, exacerbated by tragedy: Drake, in ill health for several years, died just a few months after NASA selected the mission, making Lauretta the PI. Now he would have to deal with the up and out aspects of managing a mission. The book offers a detailed insider’s perspective of developing and then operating OSIRIS-REx as it made its way to the asteroid Bennu to collect samples that it returned to Earth last September. For those that have followed the mission, there are not too many new details the book discloses that had not been mentioned throughout the course of the mission, but it was interesting to read how he and the mission team dealt with various obstacles. (One interesting item: at one point Lauretta and the OSIRIS-REx team caught wind that JPL was lobbying NASA Headquarters to cancel the mission, yet to be formally confirmed for development, and devote its resources to the Asteroid Redirect Mission, arguing that ARM was a presidential priority and that it could return tons, not grams of material. NASA decided to proceed with OSIRIS-REx, and ARM soon died.) The story of OSIRIS-REx is one of science and engineering, but also of people: “the magnificent ensemble of scientists, engineers, and cosmic aficionados who had rallied together to manifest this vision,” he writes in the book’s epilogue. The journey that started with seeing a newspaper ad continues with samples from an asteroid now being studied in labs by scientists like Lauretta, hoping to better understand our solar system and ourselves—and perhaps be that thing that provides inspiration for another generation. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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