Month: December 2019

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Starliner makes flawless landing after flawed flight

Starliner landing
Boeing, NASA, and U.S. Army personnel put a protective cover over Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft shortly after its landing at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. (NASA Photo / Bill Ingalls)

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner space taxi made a flawless automated landing in New Mexico today, marking the end of an orbital test flight that was cut short due to a glitch with the craft’s timing system.

Because of the glitch, NASA and Boeing had to forgo Starliner’s planned trip to the International Space Station. But the uncrewed transport notched a first in space history nevertheless by becoming the first crew-capable U.S. space capsule to make its return from orbit on land.

The spacecraft also got its christening from NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who is scheduled to fly on the craft after its refurbishment.

“A little homage to other explorers and the ships that they rode on,” Williams said during a NASA webcast. “I think we’re going to call her Calypso.”

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NASA, Boeing trace roots of Starliner’s bad timing

Starliner
An artist’s conception shows Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner space taxi in orbit. (Boeing Illustration)

NASA and Boeing say they’ve learned more about the timing glitch that kept Boeing’s uncrewed CST-100 Starliner space taxi from making its planned rendezvous with the International Space Station — and they’re getting “an enormous amount of data” in advance of Sunday’s planned touchdown.

Starliner was launched early Dec. 20 on what was supposed to be the last flight test before astronauts climbed on board. About a half-hour after launch, the mission went awry when a scheduled orbital insertion burn didn’t happen.

Ground controllers scrambled to get the autonomously controlled spacecraft into a stable orbit, but in the process, so much thruster fuel was used up that the boosting maneuvers for getting to the space station had to be canceled.

NASA and Boeing decided to pursue as many of the test objectives as they could without flying to the station, and made plans for Dec. 22’s early touchdown at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

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Trump signs the Space Force into existence

Trump signs bill into law
President Donald Trump signs the National Defense Authorization Act as VIPs including First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Karen Pence look on. (White House via YouTube)

Amid military fanfare, President Donald Trump signed a defense authorization bill into law to create the U.S. Space Force as a sixth branch of the armed forces.

“This is a very big and important moment,” Trump told hundreds of military personnel and VIPs who gathered at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for today’s signing ceremony.

The Space Force is intended to bring together military resources focusing on the high frontier, including potential threats from GPS jammers, anti-satellite weapons, space-based weapons and hypersonic attack vehicles.

Trump said the creation of the Space Force recognizes that the final frontier has evolved into a distinct warfighting domain.

“American superiority in space is absolutely vital,” he said. “We’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough. But very shortly, we’ll be leading by a lot.”

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Apple reportedly working on secret satellite project

Image: Satellite web
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (Credit: OneWeb)

Apple has joined SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon and other companies in targeting the market for satellite internet services, Bloomberg News reported today.

Bloomberg quoted unidentified people familiar with the work as saying that the California-based company has a secret team working on technologies that it could use to beam internet services directly to devices, bypassing wireless networks. The effort is reportedly still in its early stages and may not necessarily come to fruition.

Apple did not immediately respond to GeekWire’s inquiries about the report.

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Starliner space taxi falls short on first flight

Starliner launch
Boeing’s Starliner space taxi lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. (NASA Photo / Joel Kowsky)

Boeing’s Starliner space taxi blasted off for the first time today on an uncrewed mission to the International Space Station, but ran into a problem that precluded a space station rendezvous.

The anomaly is sure to complicate preparations for the crewed Starliner mission that’s supposed to follow up on the uncrewed test flight. But NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the crewed mission could go ahead as planned without first having to do another uncrewed test.

“I think it’s too early for us to make that assessment,” Bridenstine said at a post-launch news conference.

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Real-life planet quest goes far beyond Star Wars

Luke Skywalker on Tatooine
Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, and its two suns are a good example of science echoing Star Wars. Or is it the other way around? (Lucasfilm / 20th Century Fox Photo)

Over the past 42 years, filmgoers have seen exotic worlds come to life in a succession of Star Wars movies — a series that is now coming to a climax with “Star Wars: Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker.” But are those exoplanets really all that exotic anymore?

Sure, we’ve seen two suns in the sky over the sands of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet. We’ve been to an ice planet (Hoth) and a lava planet (Mustafar). We’ve even spent time on a habitable exomoon that’s in orbit around a gas giant (Endor).

Back in 1977, most of us might have thought those types of worlds to be science-fiction fantastical. Today, they’re seen as totally plausible categories in the study of thousands of planets beyond our solar system. And Rory Barnes, a University of Washington astronomer who focuses on astrobiology and the habitability of exoplanets, suspects Star Wars creator George Lucas knew this could happen.

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Scientists puzzle over ‘super-puff’ planets

Super-puff planets
An illustration depicts the sunlike star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that have an extraordinarily low density. (NASA / ESA / STScI / Hustak, Olmsted, Player and Summers)

Readings from the Hubble Space Telescope have shed light on a bizarre class of alien planets that have the density of cotton candy.

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Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite team is moving

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, speaks at the Satellite 2017 conference in Washington, D.C. (Via Satellite Magazine via YouTube)

Amazon announced today that its Project Kuiper satellite operation has outgrown its current office space, and will move into 219,000 square feet of space that it’s leasing in Redmond, Wash. — the same city where one of its chief rivals, SpaceX, has its own satellite operation.

The new headquarters facility, spread across two buildings, will include offices and design space, research and development labs and prototype manufacturing facilities, Amazon said today in a news release.

“Renovations on the facility are already underway, and the Kuiper team will move into the new site in 2020,” Amazon said.

Kuiper HQ will be in the same locale as Microsoft’s world headquarters, and within about an hour’s drive (on a good day) from the growing HQ for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ other big space venture, Blue Origin, south of Seattle in Kent, Wash.

Redmond Commerce Center, which is about a half-mile from SpaceX’s original Redmond office building, seems the likeliest prospect for Project Kuiper’s headquarters. It has two buildings that were recently leased to new tenants, with a total of just over 219,000 square feet. Renovation work is underway, according to Redmond city records. The property’s parking lot has spaces for 300 vehicles.

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Rocket Lab begins building third launch pad

Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1
An artist’s conception shows Rocket Lab’s Pad 1-B at the upper corner of its Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. (Rocket Lab Illustration)

Just days after officially opening its Virginia launch pad, Rocket Lab announced today that it has started construction of yet another pad at its original New Zealand home base.

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First Mode strikes $13.5M deal for mining tech

Mine haul truck
An ultra-class haul truck carries tons of ore. (Anglo American Photo)

First Mode, a Seattle engineering firm founded by veterans of the Planetary Resources asteroid mining venture, says it’ll be working on innovations for the earthly mining industry under the terms of a three-year, $13.5 million agreement with Anglo American.

The deal demonstrates that First Mode is branching out from space applications, a year after it was founded.

The company has been providing design, engineering and system development services for projects including NASA’s next Mars rover, the Psyche mission to an iron-rich asteroid, the Europa Clipper spacecraft and a proposed moon rover — but Anglo American, one of the world’s largest mining companies, is its first announced client for terrestrial technologies.

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