Cosmic Log
SpaceX suffered a setback in preparations for its first crewed launch to the International Space Station today when one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft experienced an anomaly during an engine test firing in Florida.
No injuries were reported, but the anomaly threw up a huge pillar of smoke from SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 during testing of the Dragon’s Super Draco thrusters. The static-fire test was being conducted in preparation for an in-flight abort test.
Is the final frontier the next frontier for cloud computing?
One of the presentations planned for Amazon’s re:MARS conference in June suggests that Lockheed Martin is putting serious thought into the idea of space-based cloud services. The presentation, titled “Solving Earth’s Biggest Problems With a Cloud in Space,” features Yvonne Hodge, vice president and chief information officer at Lockheed Martin Space.
Just because an executive is talking about the subject doesn’t necessarily mean the aerospace giant has a plan in the works. But the concept would fit in nicely with Lockheed Martin’s previously announced partnership with Amazon on AWS Ground Station, a cloud-based satellite communications and control service.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon unveiled plans this month for a 3,236-satellite constellation, code-named Project Kuiper, which would make broadband internet access available to the estimated 4 billion people around the world who are currently underserved.
Extending cloud networks into space would provide yet another boost for global commerce, and potentially for global welfare as well.
It may not yet be clear how societies will guard against the potential downside of artificial intelligence — including algorithmic bias, invasions of privacy and unjustified profiling — but it’s already abundantly clear that safeguards are needed.
That’s the bottom line from April 17’s panel discussion on AI bias, presented in Seattle by EqualAI and LivePerson.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has signed an agreement with NASA for the use of a historic test stand at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Under the terms of a Commercial Space Launch Act agreement, Blue Origin will upgrade and refurbish Test Stand 4670 to support testing of its BE-3U and BE-4 rocket engines, NASA said today.
“This test stand once helped power NASA’s first launches to the moon, which eventually led to the emergence of an entirely new economic sector – commercial space,” NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard said in a news release. “Now, it will have a role in our ongoing commitment to facilitate growth in this sector.”
The 300-foot-tall, vertical firing test stand was built in 1965 to test rocket engines for NASA’s Saturn V rocket, and was later modified to support testing of the space shuttle external tank and main engine systems. It hasn’t been used since 1998.
NASA identified the test stand as an underused facility and posted a notice of availability in 2017 to gauge commercial interest in its use. Blue Origin responded to the notice, and a team was commissioned to explore a partnership.
Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver helped lead the charge for commercial space ventures, and now she’s leading a brand-new space campaign to address the climate change challenge.
Garver is the CEO of Earthrise Alliance, a philanthropic initiative that will leverage space connections and satellite data get policymakers, educators and the public fired up about climate action.
She noted the connection between observing Earth from space and taking action on the environment goes back 50 years or so, to Apollo 8’s famous Earthrise photo in 1968 and the first Earth Day in 1970.
“Investment in space activities have driven scientific and technological advances that have transformed our understanding of Earth’s changing climate,” Garver said in a news release. “Earthrise Alliance was created to translate this knowledge into meaningful action and to inform critical decision making that supports and sustains humanity on planet Earth.”
Almost four tons of supplies, hardware and science payloads are heading to the International Space Station after today’s launch of a robotic Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship.
The spacecraft, dubbed the SS Roger Chaffee in honor of one of the astronauts killed in the 1967 Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, was sent into orbit from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast at 4:46 p.m. ET (1:46 p.m. PT) atop Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket. The afternoon launch could be seen from a wide area of the East Coast’s mid-Atlantic region.
Cygnus’ 7,600-pound shipment includes experiments aimed at manufacturing high-quality optical fiber in zero-gravity, as well as nanoparticles that could someday be used for drug delivery. A host of nanosatellites are on board and due for deployment either from the space station or from the cylindrical Cygnus craft itself.
A manually entered command apparently set off a chain reaction of events that led to last week’s crash of an Israeli-built lunar lander during its attempt to touch down on the moon, the mission’s managers said today.
Preliminary results of an investigation into the crash indicate that the manual command was entered into the spacecraft’s computer, which caused the main engine to switch off and stay off during the Beresheet lander’s descent.
The Jerusalem Post reported that problems started with a malfunction in an inertial measurement unit that kept track of the spacecraft’s orientation and motion.
“There was no incident like this since the mission began,” the Post quoted SpaceIL CEO Ido Anteby as saying. “After it occurred, an activation command was sent to [the inertial measurement unit], causing a chain of events in which the main engine stopped and was unable to return to continuous operation.”
All attempts to restart the engine failed. That led to the failure of the nearly $100 million lunar mission, which took its name from the Hebrew words for “In the Beginning.”
Just days after the publication of scientific results from NASA’s first “Year in Space” mission, the space agency says two more extended stays on the International Space Station are in the works.
One of the missions will set a world record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, and it’s already in progress. NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who went into orbit in March, is having her tour of duty extended to 328 days.
That exceeds the 288 days spent in orbit by NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the current record-holder among women astronauts for continuous time in space. And it comes close to the 340-day NASA record set by Scott Kelly in 2015-2016. (But for what it’s worth, the duration falls far short of the 437-day, 18-hour record set by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on Russia’s Mir space station in 1994-1995.)
Koch said spending nearly a year in space will be “awesome.”
The era of engineering proteins for medical applications just got a lot closer, thanks to a five-year, $45 million grant from The Audacious Project at TED to the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
The institute, headed by UW biochemist David Baker, is among eight recipients of Audacious grants announced today at the annual TED conference in Vancouver, B.C.
“We’re really thinking of this as a protein design revolution, parallel to the digital revolution at Bell Labs. … If you can design proteins exactly to order from first principles, you can solve a lot of problems that are facing humans today — primarily in medicine, but also in materials and energy,” Baker told GeekWire.
Among the potential products are a universal flu vaccine, non-addictive painkillers, smart proteins capable of identifying and treating cancer cells or the out-of-control cells that cause autoimmune disorders, potential treatments for neurodegenerative disorders and self-assembling proteins for solar cells or nanofabrication.
It’s taken 20 years, but executives at Seattle-based Nonlinear Materials Corp. are finally putting the pieces in place for what they say could be a revolution in electro-optical processing.
“Everything in tech is about timing,” said Nonlinear Materials CEO Gerard Zytnicki, a Microsoft veteran who’s served as a consultant for a wide range of tech ventures. “And we think that from all perspectives, the timing is right for this technology to basically take off.”
NLM’s technology aims to turbocharge chip processing speeds by taking advantage of optical computing, which manipulates photons of light rather than electrons. That, in turn, could open up new frontiers for a field in which progress seems to be slowing down.