October 29, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- China narrows its choice for manned lunar rover to two
Both are proposed by different agencies, with one to be selected for the actual mission
- China awards two space station cargo supply contracts to different pseudo-companies
If successful, it will give the Chinese multiple options for getting cargo up to its station.
- Pentagon increases its budget for commercial satellite internet services 13-fold, to $13 billion
The military has found it pays to buy such services from the private sector, rather than trying to build it itself.
- Another study posits another underground ocean, this time within the Uranus moon Miranda
Based on a computer model, so take the claim as serious as you want.
- ISRO revises its proposed Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV)
It has reduced the number of rocket configuations from four to three.
- On this day in 1998, John Glenn returned to space on the space shuttle Discovery
For those who studied politics at the time, it seemed obvious that Glenn got this flight because he did such a good job acting as Bill Clinton’s attack dog in the Senate.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- China narrows its choice for manned lunar rover to two
Both are proposed by different agencies, with one to be selected for the actual mission
- China awards two space station cargo supply contracts to different pseudo-companies
If successful, it will give the Chinese multiple options for getting cargo up to its station.
- Pentagon increases its budget for commercial satellite internet services 13-fold, to $13 billion
The military has found it pays to buy such services from the private sector, rather than trying to build it itself.
- Another study posits another underground ocean, this time within the Uranus moon Miranda
Based on a computer model, so take the claim as serious as you want.
- ISRO revises its proposed Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV)
It has reduced the number of rocket configuations from four to three.
- On this day in 1998, John Glenn returned to space on the space shuttle Discovery
For those who studied politics at the time, it seemed obvious that Glenn got this flight because he did such a good job acting as Bill Clinton’s attack dog in the Senate.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
”Pentagon increases its budget for commercial satellite internet services 13-fold, to $13 billion”
That’s several times what SpaceX has spent developing, building, and launching Starlink, which currently has over 200 terabits / sec. capacity! What on earth is the Pentagon sending across the open internet that they need that kind of bandwidth? Do they just not believe in data security any more?
In other news that seems pertinent to this site, the FCC has granted AstroForge a license to operate a radio in deep space, defined as more than two million kilometers from Earth (about five times as far as the moon). It is the first private company to ever receive such a license.
Comet burns up on approach to sun.
https://www.space.com/comet-s1-atlas-sun-soho-spacecraft-video
A licence to operate a radio in deep space. We and the FCC have truly lost the plot
Buzz Aldrin endorsed Trump.
https://x.com/TheRealBuzz/status/1851628221013622787
Yes, Buzz endorsed him, followed in the replies by Homer Hickam, whose blog Bob of course has long had linked on his sidebar here.
Naturally, of course, some of Buzz’s follows on X are unhappy about this, in the usual colorful language.
mkent,
Starlink isn’t exactly the “open Internet.” Even ignoring the fact that all military transmissions are encrypted, Starlink is quite difficult to snoop. Uplinks are all narrow-beam phased array transmissions, all data transport between uplink and downlink birds is via laser links – essentially impossible to snoop at scale. The downlink phased array beams are narrow enough that they can’t be “heard” unless the snooper is quite near the intended downlink addressee – obviously quite a risky place to be anent the U.S. armed forces.
On the bandwidth question, the Starshield birds seem to be pretty much Starlink birds with Mil-spec inter-satellite laser links instead of the Starlink standard ones, plus a big, fancy hi-res IR sensor made by Northrop. So a lot of Starshield’s bandwidth is needed to downlink all that continuous hi-res IR imagery. Even with some degree of on-bird preprocessing that comes to a lot of gigabytes. The total population of UAVs operated by the various service branches is exponentially increasing so there’s where all that supplemental bandwidth demand is coming from for “civilian” Starlink.
sippin_bourbon & Richard M,
Good for Buzz and Homer, though these endorsements are hardly a surprise. Harris has been about as useful “running” the National Space Council as she has been anent the border. But one suspects these endorsements to be based on far more than just Harris’s all but ignoring her notional space-related responsibilities.
I still half-think Miranda was strip-mined :)