NASA and the Private Sector - Page 94

With a number of successful Falcon booster landings behind it, SpaceX is getting ready to try something likely to be a bit more challenging: three nearly simultaneous landings. This doesn't mean SpaceX is upping its launch schedule; instead, the three boosters will all be part of the planned Falcon Heavy vehicle.

Essentially three standard Falcons strapped together, the big rocket will be capable of lifting 54 metric tons into orbit. SpaceX is planning on the first Falcon Heavy test launch later this year. A video posted earlier this year made it clear that those plans include treating each of the three boosters as a regular Falcon once they've separated from the payload. That includes a return flight to Florida or a barge offshore.

Right, now, the company is using either the barge or an on-land site at Cape Canaveral to recover the boosters, with the choice depending on how high and far downrange they travel. And the company wants the option of returning all three to land if the opportunity arises (though two by land and one by sea might be an option). And so the company told The Orland Sentinel that it was asking the government for permission to build two more landing pads near its original facility.

The Sentinel notes that the public has until August to file complaints about the proposed new facility. If we assume that SpaceX will want to try recoveries from the very first launch, then this implies that the first test will, at the earliest, be toward the end of this year.

WASHINGTON — NASA estimates that SpaceX is spending on the order of $300 million on its Red Dragon Mars lander mission, a down payment on the company’s long-term ambitions for human Mars missions.

At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s technology committee in Cleveland July 26, Jim Reuter, deputy associate administrator for programs in NASA’s space technology mission directorate, provided an overview of NASA’s agreement with SpaceX, announced in April, to support that company’s plans for an uncrewed Mars landing mission that could launch as soon as May 2018.

That agreement, in the form of an unfunded Space Act Agreement, does not include any exchange of funds between NASA and SpaceX. Reuter said NASA estimates it will spend approximately $32 million over four years, primarily in the form of NASA personnel providing technical support for SpaceX. About $6 million of that will be spent this fiscal year, he added.

This summer, Luxembourg became the first country in the world to invest in asteroid mining, with a pledge of €200m ($223m) in funding for the space-mining industry.

Yet the country thinks it has more to offer the sector than just money: it also hopes to inject its intellectual capital into the mix.

Luxembourg is mobilizing homegrown talent at the University of Luxembourg to help private asteroid-mining company Deep Space Industries develop robotic technology for its prototype exploration spacecraft.

The University of Luxembourg's Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT) will develop an optical vision system for the company's experimental Prospector-X spacecraft.

The research group at the University of Luxembourg's Automation and Robotics Research Group, which is part of the university's SnT Centre, has built up expertise in robotic automation and unmanned aerial vehicle vision systems.

In addition to its optical vision system for Deep Space Industries, the group is developing other technology tailored to mining asteroids but which is not specifically for DSI.

"Spaceships need to be automated," Holger Voos, head of the Automation and Robotics Research Group at the University of Luxembourg, tells ZDNet. "This can't be done by remote control, these mining tasks."

One of Voos's group's main areas of research is mobile robotics. Within that domain, researchers there have already started working with the Luxembourg-based microsatellite company LuxSpace to develop robotic manipulators for space-debris removal.

The group plans to adapt these manipulators for asteroid mining activities. Voos's group also plans to redesign the sensor systems that it has developed for unmanned aerial vehicles for asteroid mining spacecraft.

In a race against global superpowers, Moon Express — a private venture founded by billionaire entrepreneur Naveen Jain, space technology guru Dr. Barney Pell and space futurist Dr. Bob Richards — has cleared a path for private U.S . companies looking to explore and commercialize space.

Today the company is the first private enterprise in history to receive U.S. government approval to travel beyond Earth's orbit and undertake a deep space mission. The goal: to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon's surface in 2017 and analyze and explore its valuable resources that can be used on Earth.

In a race against global superpowers, Moon Express — a private venture founded by billionaire entrepreneur Naveen Jain, space technology guru Dr. Barney Pell and space futurist Dr. Bob Richards — has cleared a path for private U.S . companies looking to explore and commercialize space.

Today the company is the first private enterprise in history to receive U.S. government approval to travel beyond Earth's orbit and undertake a deep space mission. The goal: to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon's surface in 2017 and analyze and explore its valuable resources that can be used on Earth.

The moon is a treasure chest that has vast amounts of iron ore, water, rare Earth minerals and precious metals, as well as carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and helium-3, a gas that can be used in future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive waste. Experts concur that the value of these resources are in the trillions of dollars.

The moon can also serve as a fuel depot station for interplanetary space exploration. It has massive amounts of ice (H2O) trapped on the lunar poles that can be used for rocket fuel.

"Getting this approval shows what a few entrepreneurs are capable of," said Chairman Naveen Jain. "It's a good first step for commercial space pioneers."

The landmark ruling issued by the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation provides for interagency approval of the Moon Express 2017 lunar mission under the authority of the Secretary of Transportation, NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal agencies to review and license commercial payloads missions in outer space. It adds a series of voluntary disclosures to help the federal government fulfill its supervisory obligations under the Outer Space Treaty and ensure U.S. national security.

Moon Express required this special ruling because the U.S. government has no standard method in place that would authorize and license private commercial mission operations to outer space, including the moon.

LOGAN, Utah — NASA is casting a wider net in its search for designs of a habitat module that could support deep space missions, awarding contracts Aug. 9 to six companies for a new round of studies.

NASA awarded the contracts, with a combined value of $65 million, as part of its Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) 2 program to develop concepts for habitats that could be used on missions in cislunar space and eventually to Mars. Each company is expected to contribute at least 30 percent of the total cost of the selected project.

In 2015, NASA awarded contracts to four companies in the original NextSTEP solicitation for habitat concepts: Bigelow Aerospace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Orbital ATK. Each of those companies won a NextSTEP-2 award as well, which will focus on refining those concepts and building module prototypes for ground testing.

In addition, NASA awarded NextSTEP-2 contracts to teams led by NanoRacks and Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC). These companies will focus on design studies rather than module prototypes over the course of their two-year contracts.

The NanoRacks-led team, known as Ixion and including United Launch Alliance and Space Systems Loral, plans to study the conversion of a Centaur upper stage into a habitat module, rather than the construction of a dedicated habitat module. They argue that such an approach is more cost effective than building a dedicated habitat module.

On August 16 2016 16:53 ApocAlypsE007 wrote:
Apparently ESO have found a potentially habitable exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri (the closest star to our Sun). Granted, red dwarf stars are much more unstable and probably it is tidely locked to PC, but nonetheless there may be a chance we will get a spacecraft there in my lifetime.

On August 16 2016 18:29 Gorsameth wrote:

? Did I miss some amazing discovery in propulsion tech? Because last I read the travel time to Proxima Centauri was measured in a thousand + years.

On August 16 2016 18:29 Gorsameth wrote:

? Did I miss some amazing discovery in propulsion tech? Because last I read the travel time to Proxima Centauri was measured in a thousand + years.