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FAA suggests a marketplace for Moon Village

Moon Village
An artist’s conception shows a permanent lunar base that’s part of the European Space Agency’s “Moon Village” vision. (Credit: ESA)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – If the world wants to create a village on the moon, the Federal Aviation Administration is willing to start up an online trading post for lunar services.

George Nield, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, says he doesn’t even need to wait for the village to be built.

Nield offered to set up what he called LMASS – the Lunar Marketplace and Swap Shop – during one of today’s sessions at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.

“Think of it as a corkboard,” Nield said. The potential traders could include businesses that are working on ways to move cargo from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit, or on moon landers, or on habitats, or surface transportation, or communication services, or other technologies that will eventually be needed for lunar operations.

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Blue Origin sets sights on Mars and the moon

Image: Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, inspects Blue Origin’s launch facility in West Texas before a test flight in April 2015. (Credit: Blue Origin)

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – SpaceX isn’t the only billionaire-backed company that’s planning to go to Mars: Blue Origin, the space venture created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is also taking aim at Mars, the moon and other deep-space destinations.

Those missions are implied in Bezos’ long-term vision of having millions of people living and working in space, Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson said today at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.

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Moon Express wins U.S. green light for moonshot

Image: Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows the Moon Express MX-1 lander in lunar orbit. (Credit: Moon Express)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Moon Express says it has received preliminary clearance for the robotic lander that it plans to send to the moon next year, after a voluntary payload review involving the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies.

The clearance doesn’t represent final regulatory approval for the mission, although some reports may be giving that impression. The FAA will still have to grant a launch license before Moon Express can blast off.

Nevertheless, Moon Express’ executives hailed the successful payload review as a significant step toward what could be the first commercial mission to another celestial body. Moon Express CEO Bob Richards called it a “landmark decision.”

“We are now free to set sail as explorers to Earth’s eighth continent, the moon, seeking new knowledge and resources to expand Earth’s economic sphere for the benefit of all humanity,” Richards said in a statement issued today.

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Stage set for private missions to moon, Mars

Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows Moon Express’ MX-1 lander extending its robotic arm to take a “selfie” of the spacecraft on the lunar surface with Earth in the background. (Credit: Moon Express)

After months of discussion, federal agencies are closing in on a process to approve commercial missions to other celestial bodies – including the moon, Mars and asteroids.

The groundwork for the process was laid in April, when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told Congress that the Transportation Department was the most appropriate entity to approve new kinds of commercial space missions such as on-orbit satellite servicing and trips beyond Earth orbit.

Now the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies are “working through the interagency process to ensure a mechanism is in place that permits emerging commercial space operations,” FAA spokesman Hank Price said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

The issue was brought to a head when Moon Express, one of the companies chasing the Google Lunar X Prize, asked the FAA to review its plans to put a lander on the moon next year. The FAA is part of the Transportation Department. Its Office of Commercial Space Transportation is currently in charge of approving commercial space launches and re-entries, but not activities in orbit or in deep space.

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Moon or Mars: Which will next president pick?

Image: Moon Village
An artist’s conception shows a permanent lunar base that’s part of the European Space Agency’s “Moon Village” vision. (Credit: ESA)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Over the past eight years, the focus of NASA’s space vision has shifted from the moon, to a near-Earth asteroid, to the journey to Mars. The European Space Agency’s director-general, meanwhile, has been talking up the prospect of building a Moon Village. And one of the latest buzzwords for commercial space ventures is “cislunar” – that is, space operations in the vicinity of the moon.

What’s a future president to do?

Space policy ranks among the least prominent issues on the campaign agenda: GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump, for example, says he loves space exploration but thinks it’s more important to fix potholes on Earth. Nevertheless, leaders of the space industry say the next president will play a key role in determining the world’s future course on the final frontier.

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Moon Express asks FAA to review lunar mission

An artist’s conception shows the Moon Express MX-1 spacecraft orbiting the moon. (Credit: Moon Express)
An artist’s conce[t shows the Moon Express MX-1 lander orbiting the moon. (Credit: Moon Express)
Moon Express, the lunar exploration venture backed by Seattle tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, says it’s asking the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct a payload review of its spacecraft and plans for a mission to the moon in 2017.

The request is aimed at heading off regulatory uncertainty about the mission, which is aimed at winning the Google Lunar X Prize.

Moon Express ranks among the front-runners in the $30 million competition, which calls for teams to send landers to the moon, travel along the surface and send back real-time video by the end of next year.

Such a feat would represent a first for commercial space ventures, but because it’s unprecedented, it’s not fully clear what kind of regulatory go-ahead would be required for a U.S.-based company. So far, only governmental space programs have sent probes beyond Earth orbit.

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‘Moon Shot’ focuses on rocketeers’ moon race

Image: "Moon Shot" scene
“Moon Shot” focuses on the rocketeers who are aiming for the moon. (Credit: GLXP)

Film director/producer J.J. Abrams has been in on two of the biggest space-movie franchises ever, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” – so maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising that he’s also in on “Moon Shot,” an online documentary series that tracks the teams vying for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

Abrams is the executive producer for the Google-backed project announced today. That suggests he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day shooting. But the director of “Moon Shot,” Orlando von Einsiedel, has some top-drawer entries on his resume as well. “Virunga,” his 2014 documentary about conservationists in the battle-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, has won dozens of awards and was nominated for an Oscar.

The nine-part “Moon Shot” series tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 16 teams that are developing spacecraft for trips to the moon.

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Moon stamps make a full-moon debut

Image: Moon stamps
You can get 10 “Global Forever” moon stamps on a sheet that looks like the night sky looming above a row of trees. © 2016 USPS

Now you can moon your mail carrier … not in the scatological sense, but in the philatelic sense.

To celebrate this week’s full moon, the U.S. Postal Service officially released its circular moon stamp on Feb. 22. One stamp sells for $1.20, and provides “Global Forever” postage for sending a 1-ounce letter to most countries around the world. (Technically, they can go to any country that’s reachable by First Class Mail International service.)

You can buy the stamps at post offices or online. And if you’re a hard-core stamp collector, you can get a first-day-of-issue postmark or first-day cover by following the instructions in the postal service’s news release.

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Giant rocket will carry tiny high-tech satellites

Image: Lunar Flashlight
An artist’s conception shows Lunar Flashlight flying above a crater on the moon. (Credit: NASA)

NASA says it’ll send 13 miniaturized satellites – including a pop-up solar sail and a “lunar flashlight” – beyond Earth orbit when it flies its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket for the first time in 2018.

The main payload for the test flight, known as Exploration Mission-1 or EM-1, is an uncrewed prototype for NASA’s Orion spaceship. The SLS will send Orion into a highly eccentric orbit that ranges beyond the moon and back.

But there’s also room inside the rocket’s adapter ring for a baker’s dozen of CubeSats, boxy spacecraft of a standard size that are becoming increasingly popular for low-cost space missions.

“They’re really on the cutting edge of technology,” NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said today during a news conference at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

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Scientists trace link between the moon and rain

Image: TRMM
Readings from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, shown in this artist’s conception, provided evidence to support a link between lunar tides and rainfall patterns. (Credit: NASA)

When the moon is high in the sky, its gravitational pull warps the atmosphere enough to reduce rainfall ever so slightly. At least that’s the conclusion that researchers from the University of Washington reached after reviewing 15 years of detailed rainfall data.

The evidence is laid out in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Readings from the U.S.-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, collected between 1998 and 2012, suggest that rainfall is reduced by about 1 percent if the precipitation falls when the moon is directly overhead or underfoot.

Those findings are in sync with a 2010 study that laid out a similar link between phases of the moon and precipitation. Both papers show that lunar tides have an effect on the atmosphere.

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