Cosmic Log
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch space company says it’s on track to conduct the first test flight of its mammoth airplane this summer, and use it to send rockets into orbit as early as 2020.
The status check came today during a background briefing here at the 34th Space Symposium, conducted under background-only conditions that precluded quoting sources by name.
NASA and SpaceX say they’ll take more time to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey System, or TESS, just to make sure the $337 million mission will be on the right track to hunt for planets beyond our solar system.
TESS’ liftoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket had been scheduled for today, but in an online update, NASA said “launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional guidance, navigation and control analysis.”
The launch was retargeted for April 18, with an anticipated liftoff time of 6:51 p.m. ET (3:51 p.m. PT).
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Trump administration is getting set to sign off on a new set of procedures for managing space traffic and minimizing space junk, Vice President Mike Pence said today.
During an opening address to the 34th Space Symposium here, Pence talked up efforts to boost human spaceflight, set a course for the moon and Mars, and trim back regulations on the space industry.
“Under President Donald Trump, America is leading in space once again,” said Pence, who chairs the White House’s National Space Council.
Pence called on the Senate to confirm Trump’s choice for NASA administrator, Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., whose nomination has been stalled for months. He also announced that Jim Ellis, former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, would head the space council’s Users Advisory Group.
But it was Pence’s comments on a new space traffic management system that drew the most attention.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — A year after Blue Origin put its New Shepard rocket booster on public display for the first time, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture has brought its BE-4 rocket engine here for one of the nation’s premier space conferences.
But this time, Colorado-based Sierra Nevada Corp. is taking up at least as much of the spotlight at the 34th Space Symposium with the prototype for its Dream Chaser mini-space shuttle.
STANFORD, Calif. — NASA has been looking for life on Mars for more than 40 years, but the quest could get a lot more complicated when earthly life arrives en masse, perhaps within the next decade.
“There is a ticking clock now,” Princeton astrobiologist Chris Chyba said at last week’s Breakthrough Discuss conference, conducted at Stanford University.
The issue has the potential to pit scientists like Chyba against rocketeers like SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, who wants to start sending settlers to Mars by the mid-2020s. When humans and all the supplies they need start arriving by the tons, there’s a risk that their biological signature could overwhelm any faint traces of ancient or modern-day life on the Red Planet.
STANFORD, Calif. — Are there microbes falling in the snows of Enceladus? Could a drone fly to biological hot spots on Titan? Is life floating in the sulfurous clouds of Venus?
All those extraterrestrial locales — plus Mars and Europa — had their turn in the spotlight on Thursday at the third annual Breakthrough Discuss conference on Stanford University’s campus. The gathering was organized by the Breakthrough Initiatives, a program created by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and his wife Julia to spotlight future frontiers in the search for life beyond Earth.
The program is supporting the radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, through Breakthrough Listen. It’s also backing Breakthrough Starshot, a decades-long campaign aimed at sending blizzards of beam-powered nanoprobes to the Alpha Centauri star system.
This week’s proceedings signal that Breakthrough’s quest will focus broadly on our own solar system as well.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg says it’s possible that humans will set foot on Mars in the next decade, and he’s convinced the first people will get there on a Boeing-built rocket.
Muilenburg’s comments, made today during a Q&A at the first Politico Space conference, could be interpreted as yet another challenge to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who also has plans to send people to Mars within a decade.
Politico’s founder and publisher, Robert Allbritton, gave Muilenburg ample opportunities to reflect on the SpaceX effect during the session.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s seagoing sleuths are reporting one more find in their quest to locate sunken military vessels from World War II.
This time it’s the USS Helena, a St. Louis-class light cruiser that was hit during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but went on to meritorious service in three Pacific naval battles. Its service was so meritorious that the Helena became the first U.S. ship to receive a Navy Unit Commendation.
Boeing’s HorizonX venture investment arm is placing a big bet on hypersonic flight.
Today it announced that it’s going in with Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems on a $37.3 million Series B investment round for Reaction Engines, a British aerospace startup focusing on a hybrid rocket-jet propulsion technology that could send aircraft zipping into space and back at multiple times the speed of sound.
Regulations for the proper use of artificial intelligence are almost as inevitable as the rise of AI itself — but the way it’ll be done is far from clear.
“This isn’t as simple as just ‘trust,’ ” said Kay Firth-Butterfield, project head for AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “This is more complex, because the technology itself is very fast, changing all the time, and is complex as well.”
Firth-Butterfield and other policy experts weighed in on the challenges of regulating AI, and dropped some hints about the road ahead, today at the Carnegie Mellon University – K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and AI in Pittsburgh.