Space News and Discussions

[raklian]

By no means a small feat!

[Time_Traveller]

Blue Origin touts capabilities of Blue Ring transfer vehicle

February 2, 2024

ORLANDO, Fla. — Blue Origin is highlighting the capabilities of an orbital transfer vehicle design it announced last year, including the ability of the spacecraft to serve as a fuel depot.

The company publicly announced last October its Blue Ring vehicle, which it described as providing a wide array of “in-space logistics and delivery” services from Earth orbit to cislunar space and beyond. The company had been hinting about development of a space tug for at least a year before the announcement.

That announcement provided few details about the technical capabilities of Blue Ring, but a company executive said there has been strong interest in the vehicle. “We’re bringing Blue Ring to market to do a lot of the missions that are starting to emerge from national security, civil and eventually commercial,” said Lars Hoffman, vice president of national security sales at Blue Origin, in a presentation at the SpaceCom conference here Feb. 1.

Blue Ring, he said, has 12 docking ports, each able to accommodate payloads weighing up to 500 kilograms. A top deck on the spacecraft can carry payloads weighing up to two and a half tons. The spacecraft offers 3,000 meters per second of delta V, or change in velocity, to maneuver to different orbits.

The “core mission” of Blue Ring is to deploy satellites in their desired orbits, but the spacecraft can also be used as a bus for hosted payloads. “We can serve as a very capable bus,” Hoffman said, with a design life of three to five years initially.

https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-touts ... r-vehicle/

[weatheriscool]

Double the James Webb Space Telescope Mirror With SpaceX Starship Telescope
February 1, 2024 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/02/d ... scope.html

Felix Schlang at What About It?, ercxspace on twitter and adonaisf have rendered a space telescope built inside the structure of a SpaceX Starship. Elon Musk has said SpaceX is working on designing a Space Telescope built into a Starship.

The Hubble space telescope mirror is 2.4 meters across.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter and is made of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium. The James Webb scope cost about $10 billion. The still to be built Luvoir A space telescope design would have a 15 meter mirror. Luvoir is planned for 2039.

A 9 meter telescope mirror built into the structure of a Starship could be very affordable. The SpaceX Starship upper stage will likely soon cost $20 million or less and could drop to about $2m to $3 million. The 36 mirror segments of the 10 meter Keck telescope cost $170 million.

[Time_Traveller]

Huge stadium-sized asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth for centuries today (Feb. 2)

about 5 hours ago

A "potentially hazardous" football stadium-size asteroid will zip safely past Earth on Friday (Feb. 2), and, in doing so, will reach its closest point to our planet for more than 100 years. It will also be at least several centuries before the space rock ever gets this close to us again.

The massive asteroid, named 2008 OS7, is around 890 feet (271 meters) across and will pass by Earth at a distance of around 1.77 million miles (2.85 million kilometers), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). For context, that is more than seven times further away than the moon orbits Earth.

You can watch the asteroid flyby for yourself thanks to a live stream from The Virtual Telescope Project, which will begin at 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) on Feb. 2.

As it passes by Earth, the asteroid will be traveling at a speed of around 41,000 mph (66,000 kph), according to JPL.

To compare this space rock's girth to that of other asteroids, it is around half the size of asteroid Bennu, which NASA visited and took samples of, and at least 70 times smaller than the Vredefort meteor — the largest known space rock to ever hit Earth.

https://www.space.com/stadium-size-aste ... ruary-2024

[Time_Traveller]

Russian cosmonaut sets record for most time in space - more than 878 days

February 4, 202412:32 PM GMT

MOSCOW, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko on Sunday set a world record for total time spent in space, surpassing his compatriot Gennady Padalka who logged more than 878 days in orbit, Russia's space corporation said.

At 0830 GMT Kononenko broke the record, Roscosmos said. Kononenko is expected to reach a total of 1,000 days in space on June 5 and by late September he will have clocked 1,110 days.

"I fly into space to do my favourite thing, not to set records," Kononenko told TASS in an interview from the International Space Station (ISS) where he is orbiting about 263 miles (423 km) from the earth.

"I am proud of all my achievements, but I am more proud that the record for the total duration of human stay in space is still held by a Russian cosmonaut."

The 59-year-old took the top spot from Padalka, who accumulated a total of 878 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes and 48 seconds, Roscosmos said.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spac ... 024-02-04/

[weatheriscool]

Stoke Space Follows SpaceX Fast Steel Prototyping for Reusable Rockets
February 4, 2024 by Brian Wang

Stoke Space is following the SpaceX path of fast steel prototypes for fully reusable rockets. The will have a steel heat shield and a ring of engines around the base of a second stage.

As of October 5, 2023, Stoke Space has a total funding of $175 million, including a $100 million Series B investment. The funding round included participation from the University of Michigan, Sparta Group, Long Journey, and other investors. Steve Angel, Linde plc’s Chairman of the Board, is also on Stoke’s Board of Directors.

Space ops are still slow, expensive, and unreliable compared to every other mode of transportation…especially if you consider schedule. Rapid upper stage reusability will change the situation.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/02/s ... ckets.html

[Time_Traveller]

NASA compiling lessons learned from Artemis 1

February 5, 2024



ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA is wrapping up an effort to collect lessons learned from the Artemis 1 mission that address both technical and programmatic issues that the agency hopes to apply more broadly to the overall Artemis lunar exploration campaign.

During a panel at the SpaceCom conference here Jan. 31, NASA and industry officials discussed a wide-ranging effort to formally collect lessons from the 2022 mission that can be used to assist both future Artemis missions as well as other parts of its exploration portfolio.

“We wanted to come up with a way to capture all the lessons learned, to have Artemis 2 be as successful as possible,” said Janet Karika, principal advisor for space transportation at NASA, who is leading the effort capture lessons learned from the mission. “So, we took a new approach to lessons learned.”

That involved, she said, talking to people throughout the workforce at all levels, as well as other internal and external stakeholders. The effort also involved experts in knowledge capture to ensure that the lessons learned are, in fact, learned.

“It’s not just about documenting the lessons. It’s about the behavior and process of transferring those lessons to individuals,” said Zudayyah Taylor-Dunn, chief knowledge officer of NASA’s space operations and exploration systems development mission directorates.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-compiling-le ... artemis-1/

[Time_Traveller]

NASA Earth science mission once slated for cancellation ready for launch

February 4, 2024



WASHINGTON — A nearly billion-dollar mission to study the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere is ready to launch after surviving several cancellation attempts earlier in its development.

A Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 Feb. 6 at 1:33 a.m. Eastern. The vehicle will place into sun-synchronous orbit NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, spacecraft.

PACE carries three instruments designed to study the ocean as well as clouds and aerosols in the atmosphere. Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), the primary instrument, will provide information on ocean color from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths. It is accompanied by the Hyper Angular Research Polarimeter (HARP2) and Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration (SPEXone), which will provide data on atmospheric clouds and aerosols as well as support atmospheric correction of OCI data.

“PACE is going to so profoundly advance our understanding about how our oceans work and how they are related to the broader Earth system and the changing climate,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division, at a Feb. 4 briefing about the mission.

A key focus of PACE will be studying phytoplankton on the ocean surface. That includes being able to differentiate among phytoplankton species, said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist. “Now we’ll know where the harmful ones are, where the beneficial ones are, where the beneficial ones are moving to.”

https://spacenews.com/nasa-earth-scienc ... or-launch/

[firestar464]

A long, long time ago in a galaxy not so far away: Research unearths clues to conditions of the early universe

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-galaxy-un ... early.html

[weatheriscool]

US to launch next moon mission on Valentine's Day

This handout picture from NASA shows the Nova-C lunar lander encapsulated within the fairing of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in preparation for launch.

US companies are set to launch for the moon on February 14, less than a month since a similar mission ended in failure with the spaceship burning up in the Earth's atmosphere, NASA said Wednesday.

The upcoming attempt features a lander built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines fixed to the top of a SpaceX rocket, while the last try involved a United Launch Alliance rocket and Astrobotics lander.

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-moon-miss ... e-day.html