Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

More than 1,000 sign up to compete for four UAE astronaut positions

9:32 am

The new colonial movement: More than 1,000 people have signed up to compete for four United Arab Emirate (UAE) positions as astronauts.

Those chosen will undergo three years of training in order to prepare them for a trip to ISS. The article does not say how the UAE will get them there, but I suspect at some point the country will sign a contract with either Russia, Boeing, SpaceX, or China for a seat on one of their manned capsules.

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Vector gets launch contract

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: The smallsat rocket company Vector has signed a launch contract with Astro Digital.

Vector, a nanosatellite launch company comprised of new-space and enterprise software industry veterans from SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Sea Launch and VMware, today announced that it will join forces with Astro Digital, a leader in real-time satellite imagery data, to conduct a dedicated launch in 2018 featuring one of Astro Digital’s satellites for remote sensing applications. Astro Digital plans to engage Vector to launch at least twelve such satellites as part of a larger constellation, with an option to then continue operations at a pace of two to four dedicated satellite launches per year.

The press release notes that Astro Digital flew a test payload on Vector’s suborbital test flight on one of Vector’s two test flights, and that experience convinced the company to sign this new contract.

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Initial analysis of radio observations of Oumuamua detect no artificial signals

1:34 pm

The initial analysis of the first set of radio observations of Oumuamua by Breakthrough Listen has so far not detected any artificial signals.

No such signals have been detected, although the analysis is not yet complete. So far, data from the S-band receiver (covering frequencies from 1.7 to 2.6 GHz) has been processed, and analysis of the remaining three bands is ongoing. A subset of the S-band data is now available for public inspection in the Breakthrough Listen archive3, and additional data will be added as it becomes available.

The data is stored in specialized formats, and analyzing it may be challenging for non-experts. We invite those who are interested to study the tutorial material provided by the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, Berkeley, SETI Research Center and to assist with the analysis not only of this intriguing object, but of the entire Breakthrough Listen dataset.

They still plan three more observation sessions.

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New exoplanet makes eight in rival solar system

1:27 pm

comparing solar systems

Worlds without end: Astronomers using Kepler data mined by computers have discovered an eighth planet in another solar system, making that system somewhat comparable to our own.

The newly discovered Kepler-90i — a sizzling hot, rocky planet orbiting its star once every 14.4 days — was found using computers that “learned” to find planets in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler finds distant planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, by detecting the minuscule change in brightness when a planet transits (crosses in front of) a star.

Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan fellow at UT Austin, and Shallue, a Google machine learning researcher, teamed up to train a computer to learn how to identify signs of an exoplanet in the light readings from distant stars recorded by Kepler. Similar to the way neurons connect in the human brain, this “neural network” sifted through the Kepler data to identify the weak transit signals from a previously missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, a sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. “For the first time since our solar system planets were discovered thousands of years ago, we know for sure that our solar system is not the sole record holder for the most planets,” Vanderburg said.

The image to the right compares the planet sizes between this solar system and ours. It does not show that, for this distant star, all eight planets have orbits closer to the star than the Earth, and would therefore be very unlikely to harbor life.

One more thing: This story is very cool, but it also is another one of those NASA press releases that the agency PR department overhyped beforehand, even allowing some reporters to think that it might involve the discovery of life beyond Earth. Not surprisingly, several news sources and radio shows asked me to talk about it. To their disappointment I said I’d rather wait, since NASA has overhyped more than a few stories like this in recent years. Once again, my instincts were right. This story has nothing to do with alien life, and though interesting, is actually not that big a deal.

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This week in fascist academia

1:04 pm

The childish nature of modern American culture often gets me very depressed. Sadly, this depression is worsened by the fascist and intolerant culture that dominates much of America academia and that I have been noting with regular weekly reports since October. If our intellectual community acts like jack-booted thugs how can we expect our overall culture to be mature and civilized?

Anyway, here are a few more stories from the past week that unfortunately intensify my depression and the lack of enthusiasm I presently have for posting anything related to culture or politics. It all seems to be a cesspool, and horribly the academic community appears to relish the idea of swimming in it.

First, some stories indicating the close-mindedness and intolerance of the teaching community:

The second story is especially disturbing. The professor, Donna Riley, is head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue. This is what she advocates for her school’s engineering program:

She claims that rigor can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students,” adding that “decades of ethnographic research document a climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.” She evens contends that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” asserting that in the field of engineering, there is an “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias…all under a guise of neutrality.”

To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do away with” the notion of academic rigor completely, saying, “This is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

So, would you want to fly on a rocket built by engineers taught at Purdue, under this professor’s program?

Next we have stories that show that the intolerance is definitely not confined to the teachers, that the students are becoming as intolerant and as fascist.
» Read more

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A variety of geological activity caused bright areas on Ceres

10:33 am

Occator Crater

Based on the data obtained of Ceres from Dawn scientists have concluded that a variety of geological activities caused the bright areas on the planet, and that some of those activities could still be happening today.

Since Dawn arrived in orbit at Ceres in March 2015, scientists have located more than 300 bright areas on Ceres. A new study in the journal Icarus, led by Nathan Stein, a doctoral researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California, divides Ceres’ features into four categories.

The first group of bright spots contains the most reflective material on Ceres, which is found on crater floors. The most iconic examples are in Occator Crater [shown in the image above, reduced and cropped to post here], which hosts two prominent bright areas. Cerealia Facula, in the center of the crater, consists of bright material covering a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) pit, within which sits a small dome. East of the center is a collection of slightly less reflective and more diffuse features called Vinalia Faculae. All the bright material in Occator Crater is made of salt-rich material, which was likely once mixed in water. Although Cerealia Facula is the brightest area on all of Ceres, it would resemble dirty snow to the human eye.

More commonly, in the second category, bright material is found on the rims of craters, streaking down toward the floors. Impacting bodies likely exposed bright material that was already in the subsurface or had formed in a previous impact event.

Separately, in the third category, bright material can be found in the material ejected when craters were formed.

The mountain Ahuna Mons gets its own fourth category — the one instance on Ceres where bright material is unaffiliated with any impact crater. This likely cryovolcano, a volcano formed bythe gradual accumulation of thick, slowly flowing icy materials, has prominent bright streaks on its flanks.

The report is somewhat vague about why they think that there might be some geological activity even today.

The image above, released as part of this press release, gives us a simulated oblique look at Occator Crater and its bright areas. It is definitely worth it to look at the full resolution image.

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Sea Launch will assemble rockets in U.S.

10:14 am

Capitalism in space: S7, the Russian company that now owns Sea Launch, announced today that it plans to assemble its rockets in United States.

This means the dock for the floating launch platform will remain in California. The article also indicates that S7 will continue to use Ukrainian Zenit rockets, which the platform was designed for, despite the desire of the Russian government to cut off all dependence on Ukrainian technology. There is also this tidbit:

The S7 company, which is about to resume the Sea Launch program, has enough clients, S7 Group co-owner and chair of the board of directors Natalia Filyova told the press. “We have [launch] orders, there is a long line [of clients], and we offer a good price. We are expecting revenue, but this will not happen right away. We will be investing heavily but we realize that we will make money,” Filyova said.

No details of the clients or the launch schedule were announced, however, so I remain skeptical. Meanwhile, Roscosmos announced today that it is negotiating with Boeing for future space tourism flights. This second story is directly related to Sea Launch, but you would only know this if you read Behind the Black. To pay off Boeing, which used to be a half partner in Sea Launch and was owed $320 million by the Russians, Roscosmos gave Boeing an unspecified number of seats on future Soyuz capsules to sell to others. Two of those seats were sold to NASA.

These new negotiations probably are an effort to arrange further sales for Boeing to help it get its money back. Boeing’s lawsuit for that money has placed a lien on the Sea Launch platform, and until its concerns are satisfied, S7 really can’t begin operations.

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Negotiations underway to shift 1st stage landings at Kennedy to new site

9:58 am

Capitalism in space: Negotiations between the Air Force, NASA, and Space Florida (which runs the spaceport) have begun to establish a new location at Kennedy for 1st stage rocket landings.

The goal would be to lessen the burden landings impose on the Cape’s nearby industrial area, which workers must evacuate for hours during some missions. “If we have to stop operations for a launch during the middle of day, it is severely impacting to other customers,” Brig Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, said Tuesday during a transportation conference at Port Canaveral.

As outlined in KSC’s master plan, the new landing pad could be built near the northern end of the spaceport’s secure perimeter — north of pad 39B and south of State Road 402 leading to Canaveral National Seashore’s Playalinda Beach. “We have land further to the north that’s not populated like the industrial area of the Cape is, and that might make for a really good location for a new landing zone for an increased landing rate,” said Nancy Bray, KSC’s director of spaceport integration and services.

I expect that SpaceX, should it be forced to shift landings from its just built landing sites, will also need to be in these negotiations since it will likely want some reimbursement for that work.

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Rocket Lab pins down cause of launch abort

9:48 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has identified the cause of yesterday’s abort of its Electron rocket, and is ready to proceed tomorrow with the launch.

Rocket Lab says its launch yesterday was aborted due to rising liquid oxygen (LOx) temperatures feeding into one of the Electron’s nine engines. The launch attempt was aborted two seconds before lift-off from its range on Mahia Peninsula between Gisborne and Napier.

It says it will attempt to launch again tomorrow – after 2.30pm – and that the 17m rocket or pad equipment wasn’t damaged.

The company said the slight LOx temperature increase was a result of a ”LOx chill-down bleed schedule” that was not compatible with the warm weather.

This is not that different than the kinds of issues SpaceX experienced in its early launch attempts of both its Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets. It appears that getting the temperature and pressure of the liquid oxygen right is critical, and requires some in use trials to figure it out. With SpaceX, they eventually were able to enhance the process enough to allow them to cool the oxygen to make it more dense and thus get more of it in the tanks to increase the rocket’s launch capacity.

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Orbital ATK gets first FCC license approval for space repair mission

9:38 am

Capitalism in space: Orbital ATK has gotten its first FCC license approval for its Mission Extension Vehicle 1 (MEV-1) robotic space repair mission, set to launch late in 2018.

Space Logistics [a subsidiary of Orbital ATK] has a contract with fleet operator Intelsat of Washington and Luxembourg to provide in-orbit servicing with MEV-1 — the first in a proposed fleet of satellite servicers Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital ATK intends to build — with service beginning in early 2019.

In a public notice issued Dec. 8, the FCC authorized Space Logistics to use four different frequency bands for telemetry, tracking, and command (TT&C) of MEV-1 as the servicer completes post-launch maneuvers, reaches the graveyard orbit for decommissioned geostationary satellites some 300 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc, and attaches to Intelsat-901.

Space Logistics’ MEVs works by connecting to a satellite and taking over station-keeping, using fuel onboard the servicer to propel the satellite and extend its life. Most geostationary satellites are forced into retirement after 15 years or more due to a shortage of fuel. “It is in our plan for Intelsat-901 that at the end of the five-year life extension mission that we would return the IS-901 to the graveyard orbit and release them there. After that release the MEV would then proceed onto our next client,” Anderson said, adding that the next client has not yet been identified.

They will still need to obtain additional permits from both the FCC (for future operations) and from NOAA (because the spacecraft’s cameras, needed for docking, might also look at the Earth).

Why NOAA has this permitting power astonishes me, but then, in today’s government-run America, I probably should not be surprised. If we were trying to settle the west today we would likely have a whole range of government agencies requiring wagon train approval, route approval, and scheduling approval.

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Ariane 5 successfully launches 4 European GPS satellites

9:27 am

Capitalism in space: Using its Ariane 5 rocket Arianespace yesterday successfully placed four European Galileo GPS satellites in orbit.

This is expected to be Arianespace’s last launch for 2017. The standings for the most launches in 2017 as of today:

27 United States
18 Russia
16 SpaceX
15 China
11 Arianespace

SpaceX and Russia each have two scheduled launches, while China has one. China however does not release information about all of its upcoming launches, so it might surprise us with more.

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Saturn’s rings are very young

8:57 am

Data from Cassini’s last ring-diving orbits has now strengthened the hypothesis that Saturn’s rings formed very recently, just a few hundred million years ago.

Saturn acquired its jewels relatively late in life. If any astronomers had gazed at the sky in the time of the dinosaurs, they might have seen a bare and boring Saturn.

It was then that some sort of catastrophe struck the gas giant. Perhaps a stray comet or asteroid struck an icy moon, tossing its remnants into orbit. Or maybe the orbits of Saturn’s moons somehow shifted, and the resulting gravitational tug-of-war pulled a moon apart. However it happened, two new lines of evidence from Cassini make it clear that the rings were not around in the early days of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, as scientists had long believed, says Jeff Cuzzi, a ring specialist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “It rules out the primordial ring story,” Cuzzi says. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

At the moment there is no consensus on what might have caused the rings formation so recently.

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Blue Origin successfully flies upgraded New Shepard capsule

8:48 am

Capitlism in space: Blue Origin yesterday successfully completed the first flight of its upgraded suborbital reusable New Shepard spacecraft.

Further details noted this test was called Mission 7 (M7), featuring a next-generation booster – powered by its BE-3 engine – and the first flight of Crew Capsule 2.0, a spacecraft that now features real windows, measuring 2.4 x 3.6 feet.

The test flight also carried 12 payloads and even a passenger – specifically an instrumented dummy brilliantly named “Mannequin Skywalker”.

Further details noted the flight time was 10 minutes and six seconds, launching at 10:59 a.m. CT from Blue Origin’s West Texas test site. The booster achieved Mach 2.94 on ascent & Mach 3.74 on descent. It again showed its landing skills, as shown on the video released by Mr. Bezos.

I have embedded the company’s video below the fold.
» Read more

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MU69 might have a moon

1:51 pm

Worlds without end: Observations of stellar occultations this past summer of 2014 MU69, New Horizons’ Kuiper belt target for a January 1, 2019 fly-by, suggest that the object is not only very elongated or two objects practically touching as they orbit around each other, but it might have a moon orbiting it.

The data that led to these hints at MU69’s nature were gathered over six weeks in June and July, when the team made three attempts to place telescopes in the narrow shadow of MU69 as it passed in front of a star. The most valuable recon came on July 17, when five telescopes deployed by the New Horizons team in Argentina were in the right place at the right time to catch this fleeting shadow — an event known as an occultation – and capture important data on MU69’s size, shape and orbit. That data raised the possibility that MU69 might be two like-sized objects, or what’s known as a binary.

The prospect that MU69 might have a moon arose from data collected during a different occultation on July 10, by NASA’s airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Focused on MU69’s expected location while flying over the Pacific Ocean, SOFIA detected what appeared to be a very short drop-out in the star’s light. Buie said further analysis of that data, including syncing it with MU69 orbit calculations provided by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, opens the possibility that the “blip” SOFIA detected could be another object around MU69. “A binary with a smaller moon might also help explain the shifts we see in the position of MU69 during these various occultations,” Buie added. “It’s all very suggestive, but another step in our work to get a clear picture of MU69 before New Horizons flies by, just over a year from now.”

All of this is somewhat speculative. We really won’t know until New Horizons arrives next year.

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Flying through Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

8:40 am

Cool movie time! In conjunction with the release yesterday of data from Juno’s first close fly-over of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the science team also released an animation of what it would be like to fly down into the Spot.

You can also download the mp4 file here. It is definitely worth watching. It illustrates forcefully how daunting and challenging it will be for the human race to ever explore the vastness of Jupiter. This simulated plunge only goes into the Great Red Spot a few hundred miles, and barely touches its dynamics.

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Rocket Lab launch aborted at engine start

10:27 pm

Capitalism in space: The second test flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket was aborted just after engine start today (December 12 in New Zealand).

Members of Rocket Lab’s launch team called out ignition of the first stage’s engines as the countdown ticked off the final few seconds before liftoff, followed by an abort.

“Umbilicals in, power’s all up,” one member of the launch team called out over a loop broadcast on Rocket Lab’s live video stream. “Confirm Stage 1 engines have stopped,” an engineer later announced.

A countdown graphic on Rocket Lab’s video feed stopped at T-minus 2 seconds. “As you can see, the vehicle had an abort during the launch auto sequence,” said Daniel Gillies, Rocket Lab’s mission management and integration director who provided commentary on the company’s webcast. “At this stage of flight, the vehicle flight computer is actively monitoring a wide range of vehicle performance parameters, and when any of these parameters are violated, the vehicle determines that its not ready of flight and holds the count.”

The rocket is fine. Though they have not said what caused the abort, they have set their next launch attempt for two days from now, in the evening in the U.S.

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Juno’s look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

3:10 pm

The Juno science team released its results from the spacecraft’s first close fly over of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in July 2017.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a giant oval of crimson-colored clouds in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere that race counterclockwise around the oval’s perimeter with wind speeds greater than any storm on Earth. Measuring 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) in width as of April 3, 2017, the Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth.

“Juno found that the Great Red Spot’s roots go 50 to 100 times deeper than Earth’s oceans and are warmer at the base than they are at the top,” said Andy Ingersoll, professor of planetary science at Caltech and a Juno co-investigator. “Winds are associated with differences in temperature, and the warmth of the spot’s base explains the ferocious winds we see at the top of the atmosphere.”

The future of the Great Red Spot is still very much up for debate. While the storm has been monitored since 1830, it has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In the 19th century, the Great Red Spot was well over two Earths wide. But in modern times, the Great Red Spot appears to be diminishing in size, as measured by Earth-based telescopes and spacecraft. At the time NASA’s Voyagers 1 and 2 sped by Jupiter on their way to Saturn and beyond, in 1979, the Great Red Spot was twice Earth’s diameter. Today, measurements by Earth-based telescopes indicate the oval that Juno flew over has diminished in width by one-third and height by one-eighth since Voyager times.

The storm’s estimate depth, about 200 miles, seems gigantic, but then we must remember this storm is on a gas giant that is about 88k miles in diameter, about ten times larger than Earth. The relative size of this storm to the size of Jupiter therefore is really not that much different than the relative size of big hurricanes on Earth. At the same time, the realities here are daunting, filled with unknowns, chief of which is the fact that unlike Earth, the Great Red Spot is a storm that is floating high in the atmosphere with no solid surface below it.

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Trump signs new space policy directive, making Moon 1st priority again

2:57 pm

Yawn. President Trump today signed a new space policy directive that makes the Moon the U.S.’s first exploration priority again.

“The directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery,” said President Trump. “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints — we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

As I wrote above, yawn. Same old same old. In 2004 Bush declared we will go to the Moon. In 2010 Obama declared we will go to an asteroid. In 2017 Trump declares we will go to the Moon.

In all those years, where have we actually gone? Nowhere. The government’s effort during all that time to build a rocket and a manned spacecraft to do any of this stuff has come up completely empty. Neither will carry humans into space for at least another five years, if not longer.

The only thing these empty promises have accomplished is to waste a god-awful amount of taxpayer money, now about $33 billion, with appropriations likely to increase that to more that $43 billion before that first manned SLS/Orion flight.

I predict that this government promise will come up empty as well, at least in the manner the government and NASA is trying to sell it. It won’t be the government rocket and capsule that will get us back to the Moon, but a host of new private companies, making profits and doing things efficiently and fast, that will get us there. And I am firmly confident that they will do it before the government even gets off the ground.

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New method to 3D print entire objects simultaneously, without layering

10:56 am

Life imitates science fiction: Engineers at Lawrence Livermore Lab have developed a new 3D method that creates entire objects in one piece instead of building them up with layering.

Developed by LLNL in collaboration with UC Berkeley, the University of Rochester, and MIT, volumetric printing replaces layering with a process that creates the entire object simultaneously. It does this by using three overlapping lasers beamed in a hologram-like pattern into a transparent tank filled with photosetting plastic resin. A short exposure by a single beam isn’t enough to cure the resin in a short time, but combining three lasers can induce curing in about ten seconds. After the object is formed, the excess resin is then drained off to reveal the complete unit.

“The fact that you can do fully 3D parts all in one step really does overcome an important problem in additive manufacturing,” says LLNL researcher Maxim Shusteff. “We’re trying to print a 3D shape all at the same time. The real aim of this paper was to ask, ‘Can we make arbitrary 3D shapes all at once, instead of putting the parts together gradually layer by layer?’ It turns out we can.”

Volumetric printing is not only faster, but eliminates the need for temporary support structures, is more flexible, and provides more geometric flexibility. So far, it’s been used to create squares, beams, planes, struts at arbitrary angles, lattices, and complex, curved objects.

The process still has problems, as the article describes. Nonetheless, this is just one more step in the invention process that is making a Star Trek replicator possible.

Hat tip reader Mike Buford.

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Breakthrough Listen to observe Ourmuamua

10:47 am

Breakthrough Listen, one of billionaire Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough initiatives, is going to do an observation campaign of the interstellar object Ourmuamua using the Green Bank Radio telescope.

It has a highly unusual structure for an asteroid – an elongated cigar shape, hundreds of meters in length but with width and height perhaps only one tenth as long.

Researchers working on long-distance space transportation have previously suggested that a cigar or needle shape is the most likely architecture for an interstellar spacecraft, since this would minimize friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust. While a natural origin is more likely, there is currently no consensus on what that origin might have been, and Breakthrough Listen is well positioned to explore the possibility that ‘Oumuamua could be an artifact.

Listen’s observation campaign will begin on Wednesday, December 13 at 3:00 pm ET. Using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, it will continue to observe ‘Oumuamua across four radio bands, from 1 to 12 GHz. Its first phase of observations will last a total of 10 hours, divided into four “epochs” based on the object’s period of rotation.

If anything, this observation will provide us more information about Ourmuamua itself, which unfortunately is very limited because the object was already on its way out when it was discovered.

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Lawsuit reveals two customers for Soyuz circumlunar tourist flight

8:50 am

Capitalism in space: A lawsuit against Space Adventures, the company that has previously organized tourist trips to ISS using Russian rockets, has finally revealed the names of the two individuals who had purchased tickets for a circumlunar flight around the Moon using a modified Soyuz capsule.

The details are included in a lawsuit now winding its way through U.S. District Court in Virginia. Harald McPike, a wealth Austrian investor and adventurer who resides in the Bahamas, has sued Space Adventures, its chairman and CEO Eric Anderson, and its president Thomas Shelley seeking to recover the $7 million down payment he put down on the flight in March 2013.

The other lunar tourist? The lawsuit says Space Adventures told McPike that it was Anousheh Ansari, who flew to the International Space Station (ISS) as a tourist in 2006 on a Soyuz in a deal the company brokered with the Russians. Ansari’s family also sponsored the $10 million Ansari X Prize won by Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne in 2004.

The dispute centers on McPike’s realization, after paying $7 million of the $30 million down payment, that Space Adventures probably could not deliver on its promises, mostly because of a Russian reluctance to sent tourists on such a mission. He wants his money back, and Space Adventures doesn’t want to return it.

While several modified Soyuz capsules, called Zond, were sent around the Moon during the 1960s, that was a very long time ago. Configuring the modern Soyuz for such a manned mission would require a lot of work, and I suspect the Russians didn’t want to do it without money up front. Moreover, I’m not even sure that the $300 million from the two tourists would have been sufficient.

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Update on Russia’s troubled Sea Launch

8:35 am

Link here. It appears that the launch platform faces numerous additional obstacles before it can become operational again, including complex political maneuvering withing Russia and with Ukraine.

Yuzhmash officials [in Ukraine] gave their Russian counterparts at the S7 Group a list of components which are no longer available for the Zenit [rocket]. One of the most important items on the list is the ignition systems produced in the Lugansk region which has been taken over by pro-Russian rebels and remains practically cut off from the rest of Ukraine. The igniters burning black powder are used to initiate small solid-propellant motors which generate reverse thrust to facilitate the safe separation of the first and second stages during the ascent of the Zenit rocket to orbit.

According to industry sources, the S7 company has been so far unable to secure the delivery of Russian equivalents of the necessary hardware and materials, probably due to lack of permissions from Moscow. Instead, the S7 Group asked KB Yuzhnoe to organize the production of missing components in Ukraine. However, in the case of black powder, launching its production in Ukraine would not make economic sense due to lack of other applications beyond the very small amount required for the ignition systems, one source said.

Some observers question whether the S7 company has a real motivation to see the Sea Launch venture through because the airline with no prior experience in the space launch business ended up with the Sea Launch assets in its lap likely under pressure from the Kremlin. [emphasis mine]

S7 has also proposed using the Sea Launch platform to launch Russia’s next generation unmanned freighter, but this faces numerous technical issues. Regardless, the highlighted sentence above indicates how much the Russian government and the top-down Russian approach to everything interferes with efficient operations. It suggests that S7 didn’t buy into Sea Launch because it thought it could make money on it, but because of political pressure. Such pressure does not produce effective and profitable companies.

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Blue Origin to resume New Shepard test flights next week?

3:41 pm

Capitalism in space: An FAA airspace notice published yesterday strongly suggests that Blue Origin will resume test flights of its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft next week.

The Notice to Airman, or NOTAM, published by the FAA on its website Dec. 9 closes airspace above Blue Origin’s test site between Dec. 11 and 14, from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern each day. The closure is to “provide a safe environment for rocket launch and recovery.” The NOTAM does not give additional details about the planned activities, but does identify Blue Origin as the point of contact regarding the airspace closure.

The flight will test a new capsule and propulsion unit, as the vehicle that was test flown multiple times in the previous test flights has been retired. What is interesting is that the company says it is building more than one. This will give them a fleet which will allow them a rapid launch rate.

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New Horizons successfully does course correction

8:54 am

New Horizons yesterday successfully fired its engines for 2.5 minutes to refine its course and January 1, 2019 fly-by of Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69.

The maneuver both refined the course toward and optimized the flyby arrival time at MU69, by setting closest approach to 12:33 a.m. EST (5:33 UTC) on Jan. 1, 2019. The prime flyby distance is set at 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers); the timing provides better visibility for DSN’s powerful antennas to reflect radar waves off the surface of MU69 for New Horizons to receive – a difficult experiment that, if it succeeds, will help scientists determine the reflectivity and roughness of MU69’s surface.

The spacecraft will next be put in hibernation on December 21, and stay in that state until June.

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ARCA’s CEO provides update on charges against him

8:34 am

Capitalism in space: The CEO of ARCA, Dumitru Popescu, yesterday released a youtube video where he provides an update on the fraud and embezzlement charges against him.

He spends most of the video describing what happened when he was arrested. However, he also says that he and his attorney have now seen the evidence against him, and though he cannot discuss it yet he is confident that he will be found innocent in court.

The man appears sincere, but who knows. We shall see. He also says that ARCA is moving forward, though he also admits that his arrest was a setback for the company.

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