Aurora to Design New Motherships for Virgin Galactic Space Flights – Aviation Today

Posted on by

A computer-generated rendering of the mothership that Aurora has been contracted by Virgin Galactic to build for future spaceflight missions (Photo courtesy of Virgin Galactic)

Aurora Flight Sciences has reached a new agreement with Virgin Galactic that will see the Virginia-based Boeing subsidiary become a partner in the design and manufacturing of Virgin's next generation motherships.

Virgin Galactic's new agreement reached with Aurora comes two months after the company reported its first quarter 2022 results that confirmed its next VSS Unity test space flight is expected to occur in the fourth quarter of this year. Virgin's work under the partnership agreement with Aurora has already begun, as the two companies have been spending the "past several months" developing design specifications and workforce and resource requirements for the two-vehicle contract.

With Aurora, we are accessing the best of the nationwide aerospace ecosystem, Swami Iyer, President of Aerospace Systems, said, commenting on the new agreement. As a subsidiary of the worlds largest aerospace company, Aurora has some of the industrys top engineers and manufacturing facilities.

The motherships that Aurora is developing will provide the air launch capability needed by Virgins spaceship spaceship to be released into suborbital flight at an altitude of approximately 50,000 feet.

Virgin Galactic Chief Executive Officer Michael Colglazier, commenting on the Aurora agreement, said the motherships under development are "integral to scaling our operations. They will be faster to produce, easier to maintain and will allow us to fly substantially more missions each year. Supported by the scale and strength of Boeing, Aurora is the ideal manufacturing partner for us as we build our fleet to support 400 flights per year at Spaceport America."

Aurora's new partnership with Virgin Galactic comes a year after the "Unity 22" sub-orbital spaceflight of their SpaceShipTwo-class VSS Unity that occurred in July last year. Since then, Virgin has committed to launching its next "Unity 23" mission in 2022 that will carry three paying crew members from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council. Their focus with Unity 23 is to measure the effects of the transitional phase from gravity to microgravity on the human body.

Virgin has also established limited availability for purchasing of tickets on future space flights for a total price of $450,000. As of April 25, 750 people have made reservations for their piloted flights, according to an article published in the June 2022 edition of Via Satellite, a sister publication to Avionics International.

Manufacturing activities for the motherships being built by Aurora will occur at the company's Columbus, Mississippi, and Bridgeport, West Virginia, facilities, with final assembly occurring at Virgin Galactic's facility in Mojave, California.

The first new Aurora-built mothership is expected to enter service in 2025, the same year Virgin Galactics first Delta-class spaceship is expected to begin revenue payload flights. The companys upcoming commercial missions are expected to begin by the first quarter of 2023.

Visit link:

Aurora to Design New Motherships for Virgin Galactic Space Flights - Aviation Today

World’s rockets on pace for record year of launch activity Spaceflight Now – Spaceflight Now

Posted on by

From left to right: A Chinese Long March 2F rocket launches June 4 with the Shenzhou 14 astronaut mission; A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches Feb. 3 with a batch of Starlink internet satellites on Feb. 3; A Soyuz rocket launches Feb. 10 with a cluster of OneWeb internet satellites. Credit: Xinhua/SpaceX/Arianespace

If it feels like there are more rockets launching into orbit than ever before, its not just you. The worlds launch operators, led by SpaceX and Chinas state-run enterprises, launched 72 missions into orbit in the first half of 2022, on pace to break last years record of 135 orbital deliveries.

There were 15 launches to add spacecraft to SpaceXs Starlink internet network, three crew missions to the International Space Station and an astronaut launch to Chinas space station, and missions to deploy satellites for the U.S., Chinese, and Russian military.

The launch cadence in the first half of the averaged one mission every two-and-a-half days, driven primarily by the rapid-fire launch rate by SpaceX and China.

Last year, the worlds launch providers broke the record for the highest number of orbital missions in a calendar year. The 135 successful orbital launches in 2021 dont include 11 failed orbital launch attempts. The previous record for the most successful orbital launches in a year was 129, set in 1984.

But declining post-Cold War military budgets led to lower launch rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Chinas growing aspirations in space and the rise of SpaceX have reversed that trend, with annual launch numbers now exceeding those of the 1970s and 1980s.

Here are some statistics for orbital launches from Jan. 1 through June 30:

Ten of the launches in the first half of the year used small-class rockets capable of carrying less than a metric ton (about 2,200 pounds) of payload into low Earth orbit. The remainder of the missions used medium or heavy-lift rockets.

There were three launch failures in the opening six months of 2022, all by light-class launchers. Two commercial rockets developed by Astra failed to reach orbit on missions in February and June for NASA to deploy CubeSats into orbit. And a Hyperbola 1 rocket developed by the by the Chinese company i-Space failed on a launch attempt in May.

China closed out the first half of the year with three more launches.

A solid-fueled Kuaizhou 1A launcher lifted off June 22 at 0208 GMT (10:08 p.m. EDT on June 21) from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China. The Kuaizhou 1A rocket deployed a small research satellite named Tianxing 1 into a low-altitude polar orbit less than 180 miles (290 kilometers) above Earth.

Chinas state-run Xinhua news agency said the Tianxing 1 satellite will be mainly used for experimentssuch as space environment detection.

The Kuaizhou rocket family is operated by Expace, a subsidiary of the government-ownedChina Aerospace Science and Industry Corp., or CASIC. Expace developed the Kuaizhou rocket family based on Chinese military missile technology to pursue a growing commercial space market in China.

The Kuaizhou 1A rocket is capableof injecting 660 pounds (300 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit, according to Expace.Kuaizhou means speedy vessel in Chinese, a name indicative of its purpose as a satellite launcher that can be readied for liftoff in a short time period.

The launch of the Tianxing 1 satellite marked the 15th flight of a Kuaizhou 1A rocket.

China launched a Long March 2D rocket with three military payloads at 0222 GMT on June 23 (10:22 p.m. EDT on June 22). The three satellites make up the second group of spacecraft in a family of Chinese military platforms in low Earth orbit.

Chinese officials said the satellites were collectively part of the Yaogan 35 fleet. The first three Yaogan 35 satellites launched on a Long March 2D rocket in November 2021.

The exact purpose of the Yaogan 35 satellites is unknown, but the Yaogan name is typically used as a cover for Chinese military spacecraft. U.S. military tracking data showed the satellites orbiting at an altitude of about 300 miles (500 kilometers) and an inclination of 35 degrees to the equator.

Another Chinese launch June 27 deployed the third in a line of Gaofen 12-class remote sensing satellites. A Long March 4C rocket took off from the Jiuquan launch base at 1546 GMT (12:46 p.m. EDT) to haul the Gaofen 12-03 imaging satellite to a polar orbit at an altitude of approximately 370 miles (600 kilometers).

The Gaofen 12 satellites carry microwave remote sensing instruments for Earth observations.

Chinese officials say the Gaofen satellites are part ofthe China High-Resolution Earth Observation System, or CHEOS.

China says the CHEOS satellite fleet is a civilian-operated program comprising optical and radar imaging spacecraft. Chinese authorities have published high-resolution imagery taken by previous Gaofen satellites, suggesting there is a civilian component to their missions. Other satellites, like the Yaogan series, are for primarily military purposes.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

Read the original post:

World's rockets on pace for record year of launch activity Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now

SpaceX rolls Starship prototype to launch pad ahead of orbital test flight (photos) – Space.com

Posted on by

We may not have to wait too much longer for the first-ever orbital test flight of SpaceX's Starship deep-space transportation system.

SpaceX is developing Starship to carry people and cargo to Mars, the moon and other far-flung destinations. The system consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable:a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.

Starship prototypes have conducted a handful of high-altitude test flights to date, but the vehicle has yet to go orbital. SpaceX plans to change that soon; the company is gearing up to launch an orbital test mission with the system, which will also mark the spaceflight debut of Super Heavy.

Photos: SpaceX lifts huge Super Heavy rocket onto launch stand

And those preparations are ramping up. Ship 24, the Starship vehicle that will fly the orbital mission, just rolled out to the launch pad at Starbase, SpaceX's South Texas facility, company representatives announced via Twitter today (opens in new tab) (July 6). In that same post, SpaceX shared three photos of the big spacecraft on the move.

Ship 24 will launch atop a Super Heavy known as Booster 7. That rocket is already at the pad and may conduct a static fire test a prelaunch trial in which a rocket's engines are lit while the vehicle stays anchored to the ground in the coming days.

Both Starship and Super Heavy are powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine. The spacecraft sports six Raptors, and the booster features a whopping 33, as SpaceX showed in another recent Twitter post (opens in new tab) that shared photos of both vehicles with all of their engines installed.

For comparison, SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket incorporates nine of the company's Merlin engines in its first stage and one Merlin in its upper stage. And Merlins are considerably smaller and less powerful than Raptors.

SpaceX recently cleared a significant regulatory hurdle on the road to Starship's first orbital launch: Last month, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that SpaceX could continue its Starship work at Starbase, provided the company takes more than 75 actions to mitigate the effects of that work on the surrounding area, which is a biodiversity hotspot.

There are other such boxes to check, however; for example, the FAA must still grant SpaceX a launch license ahead of the upcoming orbital attempt.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There (opens in new tab)" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).

Go here to see the original:

SpaceX rolls Starship prototype to launch pad ahead of orbital test flight (photos) - Space.com

Search for habitable exoplanets included in China’s upcoming space missions – Space.com

Posted on by

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has selected candidates for its next round of space missions, which are projected to launch between 2026 and 2030.

Out of the 13 missions proposed, it is expected that between five and seven will be chosen for launch, SpaceNews reported.

The new missions will be part of CAS's third Strategic Priority Program (SPP III) project, also known as the New Horizons Program (The program has no relation to NASA's New Horizons mission.). A description of each of the 13 candidates was published in a paper in the Chinese Journal of Space Science on June 28, 2022.

Related: China is on the hunt for 'Earth 2.0' with proposed space telescope

Three of the proposed missions will conduct astrophysics and astronomy research:

Four of CAS's 13 potential missions are heliophysics efforts:

Four of the potential missions are aimed at studying Earth and other members of our solar system:

Finally, two missions would search the cosmos for habitable exoplanets:

Each of the 13 proposed New Horizons Program missions will be assessed by a CAS committee on criteria such as budgetary requirements, technological readiness level and how quickly the required technologies could be manufactured ahead of Chinas 15th Five-year plan, which begins in 2026. The New Horizons Program also includes funding for research projects that would support future science missions.

Email Brett at BTingley@Space.com or follow Brett on Twitter at @bretttingley. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.

See the rest here:

Search for habitable exoplanets included in China's upcoming space missions - Space.com

Brevard County restaurant owner to fly to edge of space on Blue Origin rocket – WESH 2 Orlando

Posted on by

With some of the most exciting news of his life, Indialantic resident Steve Young had to keep quiet.That was extremely tough. We are a small town and I had to get waivers from anyone that I told, Young said.And that big secret was that Young will be flying to space on the next Blue Origin flight from Texas. He found out that he got the ticket to fly back in December but had to keep it quiet.He sold his telecom business a few years ago and built the three-story Pineapples restaurant in Eau Gallie to run as a family business with his son.Young moved to the Space Coast back in 1969 as a child. Witnessing first-hand the evolution of spaceflight, he holds intense pride that he will be representing the community on this flight.They label you technically an astronaut, but there are real astronauts that live in this area, Young said.So while the flight feeds his thrill-seeking personality, its also about being part of something bigger to come, according to the 59-year-old. Pioneering something that people are going to do on a regular basis. Hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years, Young said.Although it might be subtle, Young drives around town with the Blue Origin feather logo on the side of his pick-up. But the next vehicle he gets into with that feather will be going a lot faster.I was rewarded with lots of money on the sale of my business, Young said. And who better to spend it on than myself for something very special.Hes not allowed to reveal how much he paid and does not yet know who else will be in the capsule nor when he will blast off in the New Shepard rocket.

With some of the most exciting news of his life, Indialantic resident Steve Young had to keep quiet.

That was extremely tough. We are a small town and I had to get waivers from anyone that I told, Young said.

And that big secret was that Young will be flying to space on the next Blue Origin flight from Texas.

He found out that he got the ticket to fly back in December but had to keep it quiet.

He sold his telecom business a few years ago and built the three-story Pineapples restaurant in Eau Gallie to run as a family business with his son.

Young moved to the Space Coast back in 1969 as a child. Witnessing first-hand the evolution of spaceflight, he holds intense pride that he will be representing the community on this flight.

They label you technically an astronaut, but there are real astronauts that live in this area, Young said.

So while the flight feeds his thrill-seeking personality, its also about being part of something bigger to come, according to the 59-year-old.

Pioneering something that people are going to do on a regular basis. Hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years, Young said.

Although it might be subtle, Young drives around town with the Blue Origin feather logo on the side of his pick-up.

But the next vehicle he gets into with that feather will be going a lot faster.

I was rewarded with lots of money on the sale of my business, Young said. And who better to spend it on than myself for something very special.

Hes not allowed to reveal how much he paid and does not yet know who else will be in the capsule nor when he will blast off in the New Shepard rocket.

Continued here:

Brevard County restaurant owner to fly to edge of space on Blue Origin rocket - WESH 2 Orlando

Gaganyaan: What will Indias astronauts eat during their space flight? DRDO Chief reveals – The Financial Express

Posted on by

Six menus comprising vegetarian and non vegetarian Indian food items are being prepared for the crew of the countrys first human spaceflight aboard the Gaganyaan. The crew of the first ever human mission from India will have a large variety of food to choose from which is being prepared by Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) Mysore, a lab under Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Confirming this to Financial Express Online, in an exclusive conversation, Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman DRDO Dr G Satheesh Reddy said, Developing food consumption in zero gravity space is a new and unique challenge, and our scientists are relishing this opportunity.

The initial feedback received was incorporated and modified food products are ready for second phase of evaluation, Dr G Satheesh Reddy added.

According to him, DFRL has a lot of experience in developing food for extreme conditions. This includes soldiers posted in Siachen glacier, sailors in submarines, and scientists on expeditions to Antarctica etc.

What is on the menu?

There will be a wide choice for the crew of the first human mission. The six different menus which are expected to include very light items like upma, poha, idli for breakfast; there will be a choice of meat and vegetarian biryani for lunch and for dinner they can choose from chapatis and some gravy with vegetables and meat preparation to choose from.

Will they get dessert and other food items?

Yes. They will get an option of either halwa or any other alternative. There will be a choice for different fruit juices and tea/coffee.

According to reports, the DFRL is expected to treat the food as mildly spicy and in case there is a need to make it spicier there will be sachets to add on.

The first human mission is expected to be of a short flight of a week, therefore the food packages will be semi-hydrated. And the crew will have to add water to the package and warm it up. Due to zero-gravity, there is a fear of water spillage and to control that the water will have to be added in a confined space.

Is there any bread on the menu?

No. as there is a fear of the bread crumbles floating in the space station.

And there will be special straws for enabling the crew to have water or other liquids. And the special straw is being made by the scientists at DFRL.

Has DFRL made food items for space?

Yes. This DRDO lab has the distinction of making special mango bars for the first Indian in space Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma, who in 1984 was on board Russias Soyuz T-11.

See the rest here:

Gaganyaan: What will Indias astronauts eat during their space flight? DRDO Chief reveals - The Financial Express

Ariel Ekblaw explains the future of space stations – Fast Company

Posted on by

Humanity has dreamed about different visions of what a civilization in space might look like for longer than most of us have been alive.

Weve been planning ways to sustain human life in orbit and on other planets for decades. Now, it feels like were within reach of that goaland we need to be ready for it.

The newly formedAurelia Instituteaims to prep humanity for a long-term presence in space through R&D, policy, and outreach. Ariel Ekblaw, founder of both the Aurelia Institute and the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, spends her time thinking about and designing the next generation of space stations.

Ekblaw sat down to discuss accessibility needs for human spaceflight, technology demonstrations aboard the ISS, and drawing inspiration from real life and science fiction for future space stations.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to found Aurelia in the first place?

I have led a lab at MIT for the past six years, the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. We have worked on a very broad range of artifacts for life and space, but what I saw as a gap, and something that I wanted to fill by founding Aurelia, is a focus on technology, R&D, and infrastructure for life in space. As wonderful as it is to be able to envision all of these different artifacts that we would use on the inside of a habitat, we actually still have a lot of work to do to build the habitat structures themselves in a way that will scale to allow more people to go into orbit.

The stations that we see coming online in the next few years that we all are really excited about, like Axiom or Orbital Reef, theyre still based on the International Space Station axial model with a relatively limited amount of total crew size. What I would love to do is for Aurelia to contribute in partnership or in collaboration with Axiom and Orbital Reef and NASA and others to the next generation of technology beyond ISS-like approaches. And that could be things like self-assembly, or even something like artificial gravity.

The technology to develop these long-term human habitats in space is developing really quickly. How quickly do we need humanity to prepare for a long-term human presence in space? Are we going to be ready when that tech is ready?

I think we will be ready. I think were ready now, in a really wonderful way. The goal of democratizing access to space is to allow more people around the world to see themselves in that future. Right now, if the real estate in orbit is very small and very elite and very hard to access, then that itself is a big gatekeeper to be able to share space with a lot of people. I really do think that the time is now to begin thinking about scaling infrastructure in space. The other piece of Aurelia that complements the R&D work is trying to get more people ready and offer them a chance to really participate in the space exploration feature.

The perception I had growing up, and I think its a common one, is that the people who go into space have to be incredibly smart and well-educated and in incredible physical shape. Is there any truth to that perception? And how do you get that to change?

I think it was absolutely true in the past, right? It was a requirement to be able to get into the astronaut crew to be amazingly healthy, you know, top of the human population. However, that is changing.

One example of that is that we partnered with AstroAccess for several zero-G flights last year. I supported their inaugural flight in October and then we welcomed them back on our flight in May to show that we can begin to prepare space exploration and microgravity environments to be welcoming to people that may have disabilitiesand also recognizing that certain things that we think of as disabilities on Earth could make people very well suited to life in space. As a concrete example, we know that our legs are very overpowered for life in microgravity. Astronauts often have to relearn not to push off too hard, because all the muscle strength that weve gained over a lifetime and gravity is overkill for micro-G. So folks who are in wheelchairs might find themselves particularly free and dexterous and able to move around because they dont need legs in microgravity in the same way that they might need them on Earth.

Well see the beginning of everyday citizens getting to go to space. There might be some limitations on health risks, but I dont see it being much more extreme than the typical health risks that you would go through with your doctor before doing a zero-G flight or before going on a roller coaster.

What do you have to consider from a technical perspective when building more accessible human spaceflight programs?

NASA has done an amazing job with designing the ISS for the top .001% of human talent. So the first step is to design the interior like an architect would on Earth, where you say, Okay, what are the human users? What are their user profiles? What is their experience going to be on the station? What are their abilities or disabilities? How can we actually design the interior vernacular architecture of a space station to be able to be used by people that arent trained like fighter pilots or PhD mission specialists?

Aurelia is working on building TESSERAE, a self-assembling, modular space station that sprung up from your PhD thesis at MIT. Why is it that something like TESSERAE could allow for more people to live and work in space than something like the International Space Station?

The modules for the ISS are prefabricated on Earth, which means that you have to have a rocket big enough to fit that whole module in. That means that the module can be no bigger than the biggest rocket. With something like TESSERAE, you can design tiles that pack flat in the rocket, like Legos or Ikea furniture. Once those tiles are released in orbit to stochastically self-assemble, you can build a sphere, or essentially a buckyball, that is much bigger than that biggest rocket payload fairing. The bigger the structure, the more occupancy. We have many years of work to be able to really convert TESSERAE into habitat-ready technology, but its something were working on.

TESSERAE had a technology demonstration on Ax-1, the first private astronaut mission to the ISS. Tell me a little bit about what you were thinking about going into that mission, and what you were able to learn from those experiments.

We were thrilled to be part of Ax-1. Its a historic mission, a fully private mission to the International Space Station. It was a really good fit for us as well, with the goals that we have around democratizing access to space.

What we tested was a miniature platformthe TESSERAE tiles, about the size of my palm, that allowed us to assess whether our electronics or the custom magnets that we designed to be the joints of the structure and the hardware are working in our theoretical conception or not. So we were actually able to get sensor data about how these tiles are assembling or disassembling in microgravity. And then that informs the next iteration towards a human scale tile.

Can you share anything about how that demonstration went on Ax-1?

We actually just got a bunch of great results, which were very excited about! We were able to demonstrate a successful, autonomous assembly. With no human in the loop, two tiles are able to come together, dock, and form a perfect, good bond. We actually saw that happen with up to three tiles across just a matter of seconds.

We also saw two tiles come in where they dont quite bond right, but they have enough sensing on board to detect that on their own, again autonomously, and they pulsed off, which is great because these are the corrective maneuvers that we need to see.

The third thing we were wondering is, with this many magnets packed into a small space of say, a partial dome of tesserae, would our sensors pick up on that density of magnetic field as an error and close the tiles away when actually theyre happy and theyre in the dome? We were really happy to see that after a dome was manually assembled by one of the astronauts that was helping us with the experiment, it stayed stable, which was really great. It means that the combination of our electronic sensing and the magnet polarity map is working really well.

Amazingcongratulations! Whats the next step after that demonstration?

One of the next steps in this technology roadmap would be to test more tiles. The Ax-1 test was only seven. We would love to test a full 32 title set, which is whats required to form an entire closed buckyball. The second goal is to go bigger, which means we probably have to leave the cocoon of the International Space Station for testing and actually deploy a system off of a CubeSat in orbit, that still contains the tiles in some way because we dont want them flying really far off away from each other but allows us to deploy more tiles.

Are you working on development for the next stages of this project now?

Were actually working on two things in parallel. Were working on the next stages of development for the TESSERAE project, and were starting Aurelia on will be the next project after TESSERAE. So were doing a trade study where were assessing over 50 different space habitat concepts from science fiction and real demonstrated ideas, and choosing between something like artificial gravity or something like an origami or inflatable station.

Why do you need to do the trade study before picking the next project?

Theres been decades of really amazing work in space habitat conceptual design, so we want to make sure that were not reinventing the wheel and that were also being really respectful of all of the amazing shoulders on which we stand. Were standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say.

The trade study helps us assess the trade offs between different concepts. How many separate launches worth of material does it take to create a TESSERAE habitat at scale vs. an artificial gravity habitat or vs. an origami habitat? What are the costs of those three different models? How much total interior breathable air can you get at a certain volume with these different models?

What do you mean when you say youre pulling from sci-fi space station concepts? Is it possible well end up with a Death Star out there somewhere?

We do have a rule within the team, and we try to pull from utopia. So no Death Star from us!

When we pull from science fiction, we do think a lot about the interior design of artifactsa lot from Star Trek. For the actual scale of space structures. Ive been really inspired by two different books. One was Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, where they convert the ISS into this amalgam kind of growing, expanding structure. They also have this notion of little modular spacecraft called arklets that can dock and separate and dock and separate for reconfigurable space architecture. The second science fiction inspiration, really a longtime inspiration for me, is Ringworld by Larry Niven.

A lot of our work is inspired by the NASA 1975 Summer Study, where they pulled together a bunch of really interesting people and developed this report about the future of space architecture. Its where those photos of what looks like 1960s, 1970s suburbia inside of a space habitat of some sorta lot of Gerry ONeill images, Wernher von Braun-inspired images. So thats kind of a crossover between science fiction and planned for reality but never built.

This storyoriginally appearedonPayload and is republished here with permission.

Read this article:

Ariel Ekblaw explains the future of space stations - Fast Company

How the Star Trek saga blazed new trails for space exploration with a hand from superfan Jeff Bezos – GeekWire

Posted on by

Jeff Bezos celebrates after his Blue Origin spaceflight in 2021, at left, and plays it cool as a Starfleet officer in the 2016 film Star Trek Beyond. (Photos: Blue Origin / Paramount via Justin Lin)

Over the course of five decades, advances in space science and exploration have changed the Star Trek saga but its obvious that the sci-fi TV show has changed the course of space exploration as well.

You need look no further than Amazons billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, who took inspiration from Star Trek to green-lighttalking computersand his very ownBlue Origin space effort. The same goes for SpaceX founder Elon Musk, whosmentioned in the same breath as the Wright Brothersin a Star Trek: Discovery episode.

I cant imagine a version of the world where Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exist, for better or worse, however you feel about them, without Star Trek, says Ryan Britt, the author ofPhasers on Stun,a new book chronicling the history of the Star Trek sci-fi franchise.

Im not saying that those guys embody all of Star Treks ideals, because they may not, Britt says in the latest episode of theFiction Science podcast. But there is an audacity to space travel, whether it is from a government like NASA or another nations government thats putting people in space, or if its from the private sector.

In his book, and in the podcast, Britt traces the ups and downs of Star Treks evolution from a relatively short-lived TV show that creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned as aWagon Train to the Starsto a fan phenomenon that has engendered two dozen spin-offs. The latest Trek incarnation,Strange New Worlds,wraps up its first season on the Paramount+ streaming service this week.

Some of the concepts that Star Trek popularized palm-sized communicators, quantum teleportation, holodecks and medical tricorders have made the leap from fiction to fact well in advance of the 23rd century. But theres another side to the equation: Real-life science and technology have changed Star Trek as well.

Take black holes, for instance. Gravitational singularities and their time-warping effects have been a Trek standby since 1967 (when anencounter with a black starthrew the Enterprise into the 60s). But Britt says Star Trek has upped its black hole game, thanks to science consultantErin McDonald.

The way that theyve depicted the black holes in the contemporary Star Treks, starting in Discovery season two, is very close to how contemporary science thinks that they would look and behave, Britt says. In the original series, sometimes Kirk would throw out what a quasar is, and it wasnt quite right. But now, its very close in terms of the way the spatial phenomena look. In the new shows, its very cutting-edge.

The same goes for communicating with aliens. Star Treks crew members leaned heavily onGoogle Translate er, I mean theiruniversal translator to decipher alien languages. But theres never been any guarantee that the aliens will look like prosthetic-wearing humanoids who communicate through speech. (Seattle-area sci-fi author Ted Chiangexplored an alternate scenarioin ashort storythat was adapted into a screenplay for the 2016 movieArrival.)

Britt says Star Treks writers addressed the issue in a Star Trek: Discovery episode focusing on analien species that the crew couldnt figure out how to communicate with. It ends up being pheromones it communicates through these sorts of feelings and these emotions, Britt says. They can translate that back into math, and then they can go from there and create a bridge language.

In retrospect, it shouldnt be so surprising that Star Trek anticipated technologies such as communicators, translators and tricorders. Britt points out that Roddenberryworked with a researcher at the Rand Corporationto figure out which sorts of way-out innovations would lend authenticity as well as a gee-whiz vibe to his sci-fi show.

Arguably, Star Treks most valuable contribution to science and exploration came in the form of inspiration: Britt recountsthe story of how Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded Nichelle Nichols to stick with the showbecause her Uhura character provided a rare opportunity to inspire fellow African-Americans. Nichols, in turn, took on acampaign to inspire women and minorities to apply for spots in NASAs growing astronaut corps.

When Nichelle started her campaign, NASA had very few Black or female applicants, Britt quotes documentary filmmakerTodd Thompsonas saying in the book. Im not saying zero. ButSally RideandRon McNair; yes, they were there as a direct result of her campaign with NASA.

More recent Trek shows have continued to widen diversity on the final frontier: Star Trek: Discovery, for instance, featureda romance between a non-binary human character and a trans alien character played, respectively, by a non-binary actor and a trans actor.

One of the worlds most prominent Trekkie techies is Jeff Bezos: He was just 2 years old when the original Star Trek premiered, but the show inspired one of his favorite childhood games. Wed fight over whod get to be Captain Kirk, or Spock, and somebody used to play the computer, too,Bezos told The Washington Post in 2016. Wed have little cardboard phasers and cardboard tricorders.

Decades later, Bezos acquired a more expensive prop: a model of the Starship Enterprise that was used in the early Star Trek movies and is now on display at Blue Origins headquarters in Kent, Wash. And in 2016, Bezos played Star Trek for real: He talked his way intoa cameo as an alien Starfleet officialin Star Trek Beyond.

It was super-fun for me, Bezos said. It was a bucket-list item.

Five years later, Bezos made a different sort of bucket-list item come true for Star Trek actor William Shatner. The guy who played Captain Kirkfinally got his chance to fly into space for real, courtesy of Bezos and Blue Origin. What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine, Shatner told Bezos afterward.

Elon Musk has his own set of Star Trek ties. In April, when Musk declared his intention to buy Twitter,Shatner jokedthat the billionaire should dump the bird and hire him as the face of Twitter.

You will always be my Captain,Musk tweeted in reply.

Like Bezos, Musk was given a moment of Star Trek immortality: On an episode of Star Trek: Discovery, a character named Captain Gabriel Lorca (played by Jason Isaacs) upbraids a fellow officer by asking him if he wants to be remembered as a pioneer like the Wright Brothers and Elon Musk or as a failed fungus expert.

Spoiler alert: Theres a bit of irony to the reference, in that later episodes reveal Captain Lorca to be more nefarious than he seems.

Britt says he doesnt mind that Star Treks accolades for Elon Musk come from a controversial character like Lorca. In fact, he thinks the controversies in which Musk is currently enmeshed fit right in with one of Star Treks major themes: that we humans may be flawed, but that we are nevertheless capable of doing great things.

These things that happen when humanity leaps forward are not always going to be without their drawbacks, Britt says.

I always thought that was also a secret commentary on Gene Roddenberry himself, oddly, Britt adds. I thought that was like a way of saying the person that created this will be sort of deified, but here they are when theyre actually in the trenches building it, and theres messiness. I like that Star Trek is willing to do that.

Will Star Trek continue to live long and prosper? Britt, whos in his early 40s, says theres a chance hell still be writing about the Star Trek saga when the franchise turns 100 years old in 2066.

It will have to do a couple more radical reinventions, though, to stay relevant, Britt says. And I think that some of that might be a true reboot, right? Where you just completely throw it all out and you just start over, and you say, Well do Starfleet,the Prime Directiveand the Enterprise, but thats all. And then everything else can bereinvented.

Check out the original version of this item on Cosmic Log to find out how close Star Trek came to predicting the course of early 21st-century history, and to look back at 20 years of Trek tech talk. Stay tuned for future episodes of theFiction Science podcast via Anchor, Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Reason.

Alan Boyles for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writerwho lives in Berkeley, Calif. To learn more about Phetteplace, check out her website,DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Visit link:

How the Star Trek saga blazed new trails for space exploration with a hand from superfan Jeff Bezos - GeekWire

Planned NASA mission to the ‘ignorosphere’ could improve space weather forecasts – Space.com

Posted on by

There is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that scientists know very little about. Dubbed the "ignorosphere," this layer at the edge of space plays a huge role in determining the intensity of space weather events.

A new space mission is in the works that will attempt to shed more light on the processes that take place there, but it won't be ready before the current solar cycle ends.

When bursts of charged particles from the sun that form the solar wind hit Earth, strange things happen in the planet's gaseous coat. Those heavy particles (protons, electrons and heavy ions) collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere, energizing them, Juha Pekka Luntama, the head of space weather at the European Space Agency (ESA), told Space.com.

Related: Solar storms can destroy satellites with ease a space weather expert explains the science

Most of this energy exchange happens in the thermosphere, the second-highest layer of Earth's atmosphere that extends between altitudes of 60 miles to 360 miles (100 to 600 kilometers). The excess energy warms up the thermosphere and makes it swell. The density of the thin gases that fill this region of space increases. In turn, satellites in low Earth orbit face more drag and sometimes prematurely fall to Earth.

"It's like running against the wind," Anja Stromme, the manager of ESA's Swarm mission, which recently experienced problems maintaining altitude due to bad space weather, told Space.com.

Most of these changes happen in the lowest layer of the thermosphere at altitudes of 60 miles to 120 miles (100 to 200 km), just above the Karman line, a widely recognized boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. Scientists sometimes call this region "the ignorosphere," due to the dearth of data collected there.

"It's too high for balloons but too low for satellites," said Stromme.

Without these measurements, space weather forecasters have little means to improve their predictions of changes that happen in this region in response to solar flares and other sun eruptions. They have no way of providing proper insights to satellite operators whose spacecraft are at risk. In February this year, SpaceX experienced first hand how serious this risk can be when it lost 40 brand-new Starlink satellites that were victimized by bad space weather right after launch.

"When we see an event on the sun, we can give a warning to satellite operators to be cautious and aware," Luntama said. "But it's very difficult to forecast exactly how big the impact is going to be and how much the atmospheric drag for the satellites will increase."

NASA and ESA have plans for a satellite mission that would help fill those gaps. Making such a mission work, however, is quite a challenge, as it would be at very high risk of succumbing to the exact phenomenon it would be launched to study.

"The problem is that, in this region, around 150 kilometers [90 miles] from Earth's surface, there is still too much atmosphere to slow satellites down," said Luntama. "If you were flying a mission there, it would stay in orbit only for a short time, and then it would spiral into the atmosphere and burn."

The two space agencies want such a mission to remain in orbit for years so that it gets exposed to space weather events of various frequency and intensity. The frequency with which the sun produces sunspots, which are the source of solar flares and eruptions that affect Earth, varies based on the sun's 11-year cycle of activity. To ensure that such a mission keeps providing insights as the sun moves through this cycle, mission engineers have to very carefully design the spacecraft's orbit so that it makes only very brief dips into the low altitudes of the ignorosphere while following an elliptical path.

"The perigee [the closest point to Earth] should be between 100 and 150 kilometers [60 and 90 miles] so that we can get the measurements," said Luntama. "The apogee [the farthest point from the planet] should be several hundreds of kilometers 500 or 600 km [300 or 360 miles] which is clearly away from the atmosphere."

The spacecraft would circle the planet about every 90 minutes, Luntama said, using an on-board propulsion system to compensate for the loss of speed during the flight through the dense low-lying regions.

"We would like to measure the charged particles [from the sun] but also the density of the atmosphere in this region," said Luntama. "We also need information about the magnetic field of Earth, because that changes during solar storms. And lastly, we need precise information about how the atmosphere slows down the satellite."

The mission, however, is still in the planning stages and will not make it into the ignorosphere before this solar cycle ends, Luntama added.

"We have established a science team that consists of scientists from Europe and the U.S., and we are now working on defining the mission," Luntama said. "Once we define more precisely the mission objectives and the measurements that we want, then the engineering teams can start to look at how to build such a mission that can do this."

In the meantime, solar weather experts do what they can to improve their forecasts while the sun keeps exceeding their earlier predictions, producing many more sunspots, solar flares and eruptions than expected. After its first-hand encounter with the whims of space weather, SpaceX joined forces with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and started providing some basic data about the drag Starlink satellites experience during orbit-raising after launch, Tzu-Wei Fang, a NOAA space scientist, told Space.com in an earlier interview.

NOAA uses this information to improve its Whole Atmosphere Model, which attempts to predict space weather near Earth just like meteorologists model weather on the planet.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

See the article here:

Planned NASA mission to the 'ignorosphere' could improve space weather forecasts - Space.com

UAH student-built payload goes to space for the first time in almost a decade – UAH News

Posted on by

Victoria Tarpley solders the device while Tyler Ardrey, at left, looks on.

Space Hardware Club

For the first time in almost a decade, a payload created by a student-led group at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has rocketed to space.

Students are now analyzing the data sent back by the flight monitoring equipment they built as part of the Terminus Spaceflight Research Group (TSRG) operating under the auspices of the Space Hardware Club (SHC) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System.

The payload rocketed to a suborbital flight to space and back aboard a Terrier-Orion rocket out of NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on June 24, with 32 other university student projects in the NASA RockOn and RockSat-C programs. The last UAH student-led project to go to space was the SHCs ChargerSat-1 in 2013.

We were really happy it worked and we had data available the same day it launched, says Ben Campbell, a masters student in aerospace systems engineering who is TSRGs founder and project manager. Campbell, a graduate research assistant who says his career goal is to become an astronaut, used his undergraduate spacecraft development experience and connections to teach the team to produce the device and then to get it into space.

At the moment, we have a large collection of raw data that was recorded by all the sensors, and we are now in the process of correlating everything together to basically produce the big picture, or life story, of what our payload experienced during the mission, Campbell says.

We have things worked out for the initial ascent phase of the launch, where we have clear data indicating events such as the operation of the two stages that were used on the launch vehicle, and our crossing of the Karman line which is the boundary of space thats about 100 kilometers above sea level at around 114 seconds after liftoff.

The team is still going through data to determine activity while in space and when the rocket began to re-enter the atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.The UAH payload has been retrieved by a boat team, brought back to land and is being shipped back to campus.

The payload was essentially a small deck of electronics, about the size of a dinner plate, which hosted a suite of various sensors to monitor flight conditions throughout the mission, Campbell says.

Ben Campbell holds the payload. Hes flanked by, from left, Matthew Bray, Tyler Ardrey, Tristan Carter and David Tutunzhiu.

Space Hardware Club

Sensors onboard included:

The payload was designed so students could use a collection of systems familiar to them from past work, such as common sensors, microcontrollers and other electrical components, and apply them to a spacecraft to be flown in suborbital space with all the design and manufacturing considerations that go into making a payload flight-ready.

Campbell has been working for over a year on TSRG, making use of contacts he made while in three CubeSat programs and two sounding rocket projects as a mechanical engineering undergraduate at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.

I started the group so I could try to use some connections and resources I have from my time prior to coming here to establish routine access to space for UAH to try and getus back to space, he says. Through that, I can use it as a way to give students here the opportunity to interact with NASA personnel and be involved in every step of spacecraft development beyond just building something and giving it to NASA, like what's traditionally done with a lot of CubeSat projects.

The completed flight monitoring payload.

Space Hardware Club

The goal is to have UAH students regularly building spacecraft and going to a NASA launch center to participate in activities like payload integration, sequence testing, vehicle assembly, launch pad prep, recovery and other activities.

The group aims to climb the levels of NASAs student launch programs. NASAs RockOn program is introductory suborbital spaceflight research, RockSat-C is the next level up with a larger payload size and RockSat-X is the third level, where there is maximum freedom of design and purpose. The three programs are a collaboration of the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia and NASAs Wallops Flight Facility.

With each program's increasing intensity, the students get to become more involved with the whole process of working with NASA, up to the point where students have the capability of helping assemble and test the rocket itself, Campbell says. There are tons of great and capable students in theSHC thatwant to send things to space, and this is one way I know to make that happen.

Campbell credits ChrisKoehler, a contact from his past who directs the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, with helping get the first TSRG project off the ground.

He runs the RockOn, RockSat-C, and RockSat-X programs. He's a really awesome guy who knows a lot, has a passion for helping teach students about space, and is really fun totalk with, Campbell says. He was our main point of contact with getting things situated with us joining RockOn 2022 and everything supporting that.

The team is considering future projects that include communications systems, propulsion technology, experimental avionics, geology, biology, heliophysics and atmospheric science.A possible mission to the lunar surface is also being discussed.

One of the great things about the situation we are in right now is that, depending on the nature of different experiments, we can try to combine multiple experiments onto a single flight, and if some concepts don't get flown this coming year, we can try to pursue them a later year, Campbell says.

By working to establish routine access to space at UAH, Terminus will help enable future space missions supporting a wide field of research areas and help grow the technical expertise of UAH students.

Read more:

UAH student-built payload goes to space for the first time in almost a decade - UAH News

Podcast #815: What It’s Like to Spend a Year in Space – Art of Manliness

Posted on by

In March of this year, Mark Vande Hei returned to earth after spending 355 days in outer space. Today on the show, I talk to Mark about what it was like to spend nearly a year in orbit, and how he ended up setting a new record for the longest spaceflight by an Americanastronaut. We first talk about how Mark went from being a soldier in the Army who served twice in Iraq, to working for NASA. Mark explains the application process for becoming anastronautand what he thought were the hardest parts of his training. He then shares how you exercise in space, what a typical work day on the International Space Station is like, and how it feels to do a space walk. I ask Mark whether he wasworried when the Russians threatened to abandonhim in space, whether life on the space station is hard on morale, what its like physically to returnto earth, and whether theres a letdown when its time to hang up yourastronautpack.

Photo Credit: NASA

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code manliness at checkout.

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. In March of this year, Mark Vande Hei returned to earth after spending 355 days in outer space. Today on the show I talk to Mark about what it was like to spend nearly a year in orbit, and how he ended up setting a new record for the longest space flight by an American astronaut.

We first talk about how Mark went from being a soldier in the Army, he served twice in Iraq, to working for NASA. Mark explains the application process for becoming an astronaut and what he thought were the hardest parts of his training. He then shows how you exercise in outer space, what a typical work day in the International Space Station is like, and how it feels to do a space walk.

I ask Mark whether he was worried when the Russians threatened to abandon him in space, whether life on the space station is hard to morale, what its like to physically return to Earth, and whether its a let down when its finally time to hang up your astronaut pack. After the shows over check at our show notes at aom.is/space.

Mark Vande Hei, welcome to the show.

Mark Vande Hei: Well thanks, Brett. Its great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are an astronaut and you just got back in March from a nearly year-long stay in the International Space Station, and were gonna talk about it cause thats an American record. Well talk about the day, how that happened. But before we do, lets talk about just being an astronaut, how long youve been an astronaut, whats kind of the stuff youve been doing as an astronaut?

Mark Vande Hei: Oh, I became an astronaut in 2011. Prior to that, I was an astronaut candidate here at Johnson Space Center, started in 2009. And from 2011 on, a lot of its maintenance training, trying to make sure youre ready for a space flight, and I served as the director of Operations in Russia for a year, so I spent that year in Star City, Russia, where the three members that were then assigned to launch in a Soyuz spacecraft to get to the space station were training. That was definitely a highlight for me of that time.

I also studied Russian a lot, quite honestly, in the intervening years. Theres a lot of neutral buoyancy lab training we do to get ready for spacewalks, thats a big part of it, and thats some of the recurring training I mentioned. And probably about once a month, I would do a public affairs event, where I go and talk to anything from organization to elementary school.

Brett McKay: How many missions have you flown as an astronaut?

Mark Vande Hei: I have flown two, both to the space station and both getting there and back on a Soyuz spacecraft.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And so is being an astronaut, is this like, were you like a typical kid who, When I grow up, I wanna be an astronaut.? Was that something youve always wanted to do, or did it just kind of happened?

Mark Vande Hei: It wasnt something that I wanted to do, only because I didnt think it was possible. It was I think I was just trying to be too cool. I didnt want to say I wanted to be an astronaut some day, cause it felt a lot like saying I wanted to be Spider-Man or Superman someday, and it just, that wasnt something that I thought made sense.

I still am quite shocked that I actually have gotten to be an astronaut, and even getting to go through the interview process to be an astronaut I thought was amazing, and being able to say that Ive actually been to space as long as I have, Im still a little puzzled by that.

Brett McKay: Well, whats interesting about you and your career, unlike a lot of astronauts who get to NASA via the Air Force, theyre a pilot or fighter pilot, something like that, you had a military career but it was through the Army. So how did the Army lead you to NASA? Cause you typically dont think of Army and space in the same thing.

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah. Actually, we have pretty consistently had at least one Army officer in most, not every, but most astronaut candidate classes. Its something that the Army, unlike the other services though, initially it wasnt getting very well represented and we dont have high performance jet pilots in the Army. So in that regard. And that was what NASA is looking for initially, almost exclusively.

So at some point, if I understand correctly, the Army said, Hey, what can we do? Weve got some really good people, and then I think the Johnson Space Center director at the time said, Why you let us borrow a few of them, and then well see how they do? And so we would send typically helicopter pilots eventually, once that was a thing for the Army, sent in helicopter pilots here, and again, they werent high performance jet pilots, but they were great leaders and did a wonderful job, and so that was a way to get those folks in.

And for me, it was kind of a strange path. I had switched Because I got the opportunity to go to grad school as part of the preparation to teach at West Point, I was in grad school studying physics and the physics as I was most interested in was space physics. And then at the same time I was in grad school, the Army opened up a new career field called Space Operations, and I recognized that I was gonna spend five years away from the tactical environment I was familiar with in academia, and recognized that was gonna potentially, in a 20-year career that was gonna set me back quite a bit.

So when Space Operations came up as a possibility, I thought, Wow, I should This is something that might be uniquely suited to help out with. So I checked into it, I thought it sounded really interesting, and I managed to become a Space Operations Officer. And then it turned out that because this whole field was new, there was an Army astronaut who was talking to the general in charge of Army space operations and are talking about this new career field and how it would be nice to have the ability to broaden the experience base of Space Operations offices by having one of them actually work at the astronaut office and be exposed to human space flight in that regard, and then come back to the Army.

And so, shockingly at some point, I got invited to work at NASA, when I always thought it would be cool to work at NASA, but I never thought it would actually happen. So thats kind of a long story for how I ended up working at NASA in the first place. I actually started working at NASA in 2006.

Brett McKay: So youre more of like a liaison between the Army and NASA?

Mark Vande Hei: Actually, what I did when I was working here as what we call an engineer in the astronaut office was I was working as a capsule communicator, so my job was to have the astronauts perspective and work in the mission control center and understand enough of what the mission control, the flight controllers were talking about in the mission control team.

So that when the flight director said, Tell the crew this, I understood well enough what that was about to be able to explain to the crew. Which was a fantastic job. Youre sitting Youre communicating, history is happening, youre getting to watch what theyre doing in space as part of your work day. I just, I loved it. It was fantastic.

Brett McKay: Tell me a bit more about space operations in the Army. This is new to me, I didnt know this existed. What is the Army trying to do with space operations?

Mark Vande Hei: Granted, I have been out of it for quite a while, because the last time I was really involved in Army space operations was prior to 2006, so a lot of it might have changed, but the Army recognized that there is a lot with all the digitization thats coming on, that the Army can take great advantage of assets in space. But we werent really doing a good job of influencing investments in space that would benefit the Army, so we recognized that was a lack.

So that was part of it, getting some people in the Army, all with some experience in the field, pretty fairly senior officers at least with 10 years under their belt, typically back then, getting involved in space operations. And space operations in the Army was We could provide some promotional imagery, for example. There are some detection assets that we had access to.

Theres satellite communications we could help out with. It was really to help the military units were supporting take full advantage of the space assets that are available to the country.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay, so you end up at NASA, youre working there, an opportunity arises for you to apply to be an astronaut. Whats the application process like? Its very thorough, I imagine.

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah, it actually starts out with something pretty simple. Its just you go to usajobs.gov, and its the same application process that you use if you want to be a fireman for the federal government. Every federal government job is out there, including astronaut. So thats where you start. And if you make it through the thousands of applications to actually get an interview, then it definitely gets more intense.

Brett McKay: How long does the application process take?

Mark Vande Hei: Oh gosh, its probably on the order of more than six months, I would think, because And thats really because every one of those applications gets reviewed by somebody, and weve had up to 18,000 applicants in some recent classes. And that process gets the, that number down to about 400 that are considered really highly qualified, and then we start checking references. And after that, once the references have been checked, well pick a 120 people or so to actually start coming in for the first round of interviews.

Brett McKay: Thats really competitive. And then so theres multiple rounds of interviews, and I imagine theres tests involved too. Are they doing psychological tests to make sure this is your fit for this position?

Mark Vande Hei: There are definitely psychological tests, and Im not sure if this is a good idea, but I admitted during my first interview week that after three hours of filling in the dots, I stopped. So at first, every dot I filled in I thought, What are they gonna think about me when I put this in there? and I was really, really putting a lot of thought into everything. And then after three hours of that I just didnt care.

I just wanted to finish the darn thing. So I told them that they had definitely gotten the real me at some point because I was, I just was exhausted by the process.

Brett McKay: Alright, so you go through this process, youre selected. Lets talk about training to become an astronaut. Now, I imagine a lot of people who apply to be an astronaut, theyve been training to be an astronaut their entire lives, either physically training and doing all the math and getting hours in the cockpit. What did your training look like after you got picked?

Mark Vande Hei: After I got picked. So weve got this astronaut candidate time period, you effectually call the people that are in that situation, you call them ass cans.

Its two years where you are Almost everybody passes. We have had some people not make it through. The training is everything you need to do to demonstrate potential to be assigned to a space flight. So we train people on EVAs in our neutral buoyancy lab, in a very large pool. We And when I say EVAs, I mean spacewalks.

We train people on the International Space Station systems, and when we had a shuttle program, were training people on the shuttle system as well. So whatever spacecraft we have available, we train people on those systems. We use a T-38, thats a NASA jet, that helps get people in an operational mindset.

The other things we do, weve got robotics training, thats a very challenging task too, learning how to operate the robotic arm that we have on the space station, so we put people through a course on that. And then its, our space station program is an international program so, and theres a lot of training that happens in Russia. So a big part of the training is a learning Russian, and that is no small task either.

Brett McKay: Are you now fluent in Russian?

Mark Vande Hei: I would say I have been pretty fluent in Russian, but its a surprisingly perishable skill. I think the most fluent I was in Russian was on the day I launched for my first flight. Because I had spent so much time in Russia learning how to be a co-pilot for a Russian spacecraft, and I felt pretty comfortable.

I was fluent enough to be able to talk on the radio very publicly, to make reports about their spacecraft in Russian and understand what they were saying. So in some regards yes, but theres so much further to go. Theres certainly topics, many, many topics I could get into where I would be very clueless about how to communicate.

Brett McKay: Weve had another astronaut on the podcast, and he mentioned part of the training was like wilderness survival training. Did you do that?

Mark Vande Hei: We have what we call Land Survival Training. Im not sure, I think youre talking about Terry Virts, is that correct?

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah.

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah, I listened to that podcast too. [chuckle] And actually, I was an office neighbor with Terry for a while. We do land survival training up in Maine, and back then, at least we used to, I think its changed now, it used to be run by the Navy. I think we switched down to the Army at Fort Rucker in Alabama. Alabama, I hope Im saying the right thing.

Brett McKay: Out of all the stuff you had to do, this two-year process, what was the most difficult component of your training that you had?

Mark Vande Hei: Oh I would say both the Russian and EVA training. And theyre very different. The EVA training, the space walk training is very physically demanding, but its also very mentally demanding, so its a combination of being in good enough shape to have enough mental capacity left over to do the right things in an environment where you really do not wanna mess that up.

And then the Russian is just so humbling. Its one of those things where I think if youre a person who really likes to know that youve got a grasp on this and this is gonna work out, its just something about language just feels like Its shocking that it works, but you dont Its either there or its not. Its a skill, and you dont really know Im not sure how to describe it. Its just challenging.

Brett McKay: So being in space without gravity is surprisingly hard on the body, and were gonna talk about that here in a bit. So what did you do as far as fitness training to get ready for a space mission?

Mark Vande Hei: I always liked exercising, so I dont think I changed anything specifically to get ready for a space flight, I just did the variety. I would look Honestly, I would look at the CrossFit website, Im not trying to condone any products, but they had a variety of workouts and I would pick one of their workouts and I would go for it.

I did recognize at my age if I try to do the prescribed workout set, I would hurt myself. So I recognized that if I hit muscle failure five times, it was time to stop that exercise or drop the weight to half of what I was doing, something like that. So I certainly had a learning process with how to survive those workouts.

Brett McKay: Does NASA just have astronauts prepare physically on their own, or do they set out like, Heres a suggested workout plan.? Or is it like, Well, its up to you.? It sounds like you just did whatever you wanted to do.

Mark Vande Hei: I did. Theres a wide variety of enthusiasm about exercise in the astronaut office, and certainly people tend to be much more on the fit side, but some people like to work out in the facilities we have here on Johnson Space Center, other people like to do it at home or in a different facility.

The nice thing is youve got a lot of resources here to help you out, so weve got some strength and conditioning and rehab specialists that are fantastic coaches. In fact, one of the things Ive been working on is snatches lately, and the strength coach that helps out, hes fantastic, so thats just a wonderful resource.

Brett McKay: Well, lets talk about exercise in space. What does that look like and how do you do that in zero-G?

Mark Vande Hei: Great question. We have three devices we use for exercise on the space station. One of them is called ARED, it means Advanced Resistive Exercise Device. Its a very large device we use for, the closest we can get to weightlifting, cause weightlifting doesnt really makes sense in space.

So the way it works, the way I like to describe it is imagine that you have a seesaw and theres a kid on the other side thats pulling up on their end of the seesaw and you wanna pull up on your end of the seesaw, and that kid always applies the same amount of force. So if you put the fulcrum right in the middle, youre gonna pull on To change the position of that seesaw youre gonna have to exert a little more force than the kid on the other side of the seesaw.

But lets say you wanna vary that, you can change the pivot point between you and that kid, and then you can make it a very small amount of force to a very large amount of force based on what mechanical advantage or disadvantage you give yourself. So hopefully that helps you visualize what Im talking about, but the way it works is we have that lever arm with a pivot point thats adjustable and allows us to change the force from 20 pounds to 600 pounds.

And that kid on the other side of the seesaw is a couple of vacuum cylinders. So when you pull up on the bar or the cable that youre pulling up on, you are forcing a couple of plates that are being pushed on by the air pressure in the space station, and thats what provides the force.

Brett McKay: What kind of things were you doing with this thing? Squats, shoulder presses?

Mark Vande Hei: You can do squats, shoulder presses, dead lifts, Romanian dead lifts. Curls, crunches, bench press.

Brett McKay: Pretty much anything.

Mark Vande Hei: Pretty much, although we tried doing things like thrusters, where you use the cable and you put the bar on your shoulders and go from a deep squat into a standing position with the bar over your head, but having that cable run across your chest and across your face makes it not quite the right position, so I actually didnt like doing that in the launcher. And then for another thing, I tried doing kettlebell swings using the cable, but you dont have momentum like you would. Thats one thing we really dont have.

So in a kettlebell swing, that momentum that you generate with your hips and your legs prevents you from, ideally prevents you from having to use your shoulders as much, but it started feeling like it was just a front raise for me when I was trying to do a kettlebell swing.

Brett McKay: So you got this resistance device. What other devices you have on there for physical fitness?

Mark Vande Hei: Weve got two devices we use for cardiovascular fitness. One is T2, its a treadmill, and thats interesting in space, because if you just ran on a treadmill, as soon youve pushed off with your foot, you would depart the treadmill. So what we have is a, what I would describe as a backpacking harness minus the backpack.

And that is a fairly comfortable harness which we attached some chains to on the side, and those chains attach to bungee cords, and you can adjust the length of the chains because in that case it changes the length of the bungee cords, and that allows you to adjust to At my height, it was about upto 130 pounds of force, so it still wasnt as much as I actually weight.

But I talked to Weve got some pretty impressive athletes in the astronaut office, and one of them mentioned to me that they actually just added a second set of bungee cords and doubled it, and I was blown away. Cause for some reason 130 pounds, it feels a lot like youre wearing 130 pounds on your back and your hips. So its not comfortable at all. It really starts to wear

In fact, there was I went for a two-hour walk one time, and by the time I finished, those hip pads had worn a hole in the skin on my hips. So its not comfortable, I was not a big fan of it. Although Ill tell you what, if I ever get to weigh only 80 pounds, I can run really, really fast.

Brett McKay: Whats the other cardio device?

Mark Vande Hei: The other cardio device is called CVIS, I dont know what every letter in the acronym means. But its an ergometer, its a bicycle. A bicycle without a seat cause you dont need it. And I love that one, thats a really challenging exercise device. You can go up to 350 watts. And yeah, I really got some brutal thigh burning workouts of that machine.

Brett McKay: And so this physical activity during space is important because when youre up in space, what happens to your body in zero-G?

Mark Vande Hei: Yeah, humans are very adaptable, so we adapt quickly to the space environment. Which means your body recognizes you dont need the skeletal structure to help you be able to stand upright on the floor, and you dont need as much musculature, so very quickly all those things would atrophy, and so its very, very important to workout.

Because of that, every single day NASA schedules an hour and a half for resistive exercise and an hour for the cardio exercise. Sometimes actually, because again I like exercising, I would try to do two hours of resistive exercise instead of an hour and a half, and I actually got up earlier in the morning just to be able to try to do that.

Brett McKay: Were gonna take quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So when you went to space, what was your job on the space station? Why were you there and what were you doing?

Mark Vande Hei: Everything every crew member is doing on the space station is to support the science mission that weve got. Theres science were doing to help with exploration, theres science were doing that actually helps people out on the ground today. Theres technology demonstrations, for example, as well.

Every crew member, I think of them as laboratory technicians, where were not the scientist per se, were not the ones who design the experiments, a lot of times we dont do any observations or gather data for the experiments, and were certainly not analyzing the data and writing papers about those experiments later, the scientists are doing all that.

Were just making sure that what theyve dedicated so much of their life to is functioning as well as possible on the space station. Well help troubleshoot, make sure they have all the resources they need, and things like that.

Brett McKay: So what did a typical work day look like for you? What time would you wake up? Thats another thing, I guess time is different up in outer space, but how long was a work day for you?

Mark Vande Hei: The work day officially starts with a morning planning conference, typically at 07:30 in the morning, and ends with an evening planning conference that finishes around 07:30 at night. And that sounds like a really long day. Those are only the weekdays. Ideally, Monday through Friday would be that. We have weekends off with a couple hours of house cleaning on the weekend.

But in that 12 hours on a weekday, weve got an hour for lunch, and weve got the two and a half hours I mentioned for exercise. So it ends up being about an eight and a half hour work day.

Brett McKay: So you did space walks. What was your first space walk like? And did you have any sort of spiritual or awe-inspiring experience with it?

Mark Vande Hei: Its definitely awe-inspiring. I would say the spiritual stuff that I ran into was just looking out the windows on the space station before the space walks actually happened. I would say So as far as the emotions associated with doing a space walk, you study a lot to make sure youre ready, cause its a very public eight-hour shift, or six and a half hours, seven hour shift working outside.

The first emotion I remember is the sense of the lighting changing inside of the crew lock. So imagine youre in this clunky space suit with another crewmate and youre head to toe, and the more experienced crew member or the person in charge of the space walk is the one who opens the hatch.

And so on my first space walk I was EV-2, extra vehicular crew member number two, the less experienced person, and I didnt have my face over the hatch, I had my feet over the hatch. But when Randy Bresnik, was in charge of that EVA, opened up that hatch, there was the bright light shining, reflecting off of the Earth into that space that previously just had artificial lighting, and it was clearly outdoor lighting, it was like looking through a storm door on a winter day in Minnesota. It was just very bright all of a sudden, an I had the sensation that, Whoa, thats outside, and this is real, this is really gonna happen.

Once I actually got outside, it was nighttime, which probably made it a little bit easier on me, and the neutral buoyancy lab that I mentioned earlier, does such a good job of making us familiar with the terrain of the outside of the space station that that seemed like a very familiar environment. And all I can say about Its just hard to get your head wrapped around the distances that youre looking at.

When youre holding onto a spacecraft going at 5 miles a second and its dark outside, its just, the distance between you and the Earth is hard to grasp. The distance between you and the stars, this vast openness that youre in this space suit in. Its hard to get your head wrapped around it. And honestly you got a lot of work to do so you dont wanna spend too much time trying to dwell on it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And some people dont realize this about the EVAs, this is a gruelling thing. Youre in there, like you said, for six hours.

Continue reading here:

Podcast #815: What It's Like to Spend a Year in Space - Art of Manliness

NASA criticizes Russia for using space station to promote invasion of Ukraine – SpaceNews

Posted on by

Updated 7:45 a.m. July 8 with comment from ESAs Aschbacher.

WASHINGTON NASA strongly criticized Russia for using the International Space Station to promote its invasion of Ukraine, a break from the agencys approach of emphasizing ongoing cooperation despite the war.

In a statement late July 7, NASA said it strongly rebukes Russia for political activity on the station related to Russias ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The brief statement did not specify what incident prompted the statement.

NASA strongly rebukes Russia using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the stations primary function among the 15 international participating countries to advance science and develop technology for peaceful purposes, the agency said in a statement emailed to reporters.

The statement appears to be in response to images released by the Russian space agency Roscosmos July 4 that showed the three Russian cosmonauts on the station Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev holding flags associated with the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic and Donetsk Peoples Republic. These are regions of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces but whose independence is recognized by only Russia and Syria.

The flags were displayed to mark the Russian occupation of Lysychansk, the last city in Luhansk to fall to Russian forces. In the Roscosmos statement posted on the Telegram social media network, the agency said it and the cosmonauts on the station congratulated the Luhansk Peoples Republic government on the capture of the city.

The NASA statement stands in contrast to its past efforts to publicly minimize the effect of the war on the ISS partnership. NASA leadership had in the past noted a long-running relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union in spaceflight that dated back to the Cold War.

On the station are Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, and they are all very professional. The relationship between the mission control in Houston and in Moscow is very professional, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 during a joint press conference with his European Space Agency counterpart, Josef Aschbacher, when asked about relations with Russia.

Despite the tragedies that are occurring in Ukraine by President Putin, the fact is that the international partnership is solid when it comes to the civilian space program, he said.

Aschbacher offered a comment similar to the NASA statement in a July 8 tweet. It is unacceptable that the ISS becomes a platform to play out the political or humanitarian crises happening on the ground, he wrote. The purpose of the ISS is to conduct research & prepare us for deeper exploration. It must remain a symbol of peace and inspiration.

Its unclear if this incident will have any lasting effect on ISS cooperation. NASA and Roscosmos have yet to finalize a seat barter agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew spacecraft and American astronauts to go on Soyuz spacecraft. In a separate Telegram post July 6, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said he expected a final version of the agreement in one to two weeks.

A European Space Agency astronaut on the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, is scheduled to perform a spacewalk from the stations Russian segment July 21 with Artemyev. The two will work on a European robotic arm on the stations Nauka module.

More here:

NASA criticizes Russia for using space station to promote invasion of Ukraine - SpaceNews

NASA’s flying SOFIA observatory on last New Zealand trip – Space.com

Posted on by

After eight years of science work, jet-turned-telescope SOFIA is preparing to take its final flight. But before its end of service on Sept. 30, the flying observatory is taking one last trip abroad.

Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and consists of a modified Boeing 747 aircraft with a special door built into its side that opens mid-flight to reveal observational instruments. Now, SOFIA is spending its final international deployment in Christchurch, New Zealand, where it has spent six previous deployments.

"We are thrilled to be returning to Christchurch to continue to study and discover the infrared universe," Naseem Rangwala, the SOFIA project scientist, said in a statement.

Related: A photo tour of NASA's SOFIA flying observatory

Because SOFIA can fly above 40,000 feet (12,000 meters) in altitude, it can make clearer infrared observations than ground-based telescopes. In particular,the telescope flies above 99% of the atmosphere's water vapor, which can interfere with infrared imaging.

Although SOFIA is usually based in Palmdale, California, at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, where it typically takes four overnight observation flights per week, it travels internationally to observe different parts of the sky. One of its most frequent destinations is Christchurch.

SOFIA's original mission lasted just five years, although its anticipated lifespan was 20 years. But based on the most recent astrophysics decadal survey-- a document published by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that suggests research priorities and crunches budgets for the next decade NASA and DLR decided to end the SOFIA program on Sept. 30. Its high operational costs, to the tune of $85 million a year, simply didn't provide enough return on the investment, the panel behind the report determined.

During its final stint in Christchurch, SOFIA will make an estimated 32 flights with two main science goals. The observatory will use its High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera Plus (HAWC+) instruments to map the Milky Way galaxy's magnetic fields; it will also use the German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies (GREAT) to study stellar feedback, or the interaction of stars with their local environment.

"We are committed to delivering a strong finish for this unique astrophysics mission, from a place of strength and pride, by giving our scientific community as much data as possible from the Southern Hemisphere," Rangwala said.

Data from SOFIA's flights in New Zealand will be made available in NASA's public archives.

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

More:

NASA's flying SOFIA observatory on last New Zealand trip - Space.com

Inside the Universe Machine: The Webb Space Telescopes Chilly Sun Shield – IEEE Spectrum

Posted on by

When Apollo astronauts sent back the first pictures of Earth as a disk in space, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote of it as that bright loveliness in the eternal cold. He was not far off. Deep space has a temperature of 2.7 kelvinsjust 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

If the James Webb Space Telescope is to worklooking so far out and therefore so far back in time that it can see the first galaxies forming after the big bangit will have to image objects so faint that they barely stand out from the cold around them. The world will begin finding out how well the observatory works as soon as next week, when JWST is expected to release its first trove of scientific images and spectroscopic data.

So, for arguments sake, lets assume all indications so far do in fact point to a successful kickoff of the (hopefully long and storied) scientific data-gathering phase of Webbs mission. How then did the engineers and designers of this massive telescope ever make it possible to cool the telescope down enoughall at a remove of nearly four times the distance from Earth to the moonto possibly do its job?

After more than 25 years work and technological hurdles beyond counting, the Webb team has launched and stationed its mammoth observatory in solar orbitand brought its instruments below 40 kelvins (-233 C), cold enough to see the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago. Remarkably, most of the cooling has been done passively, by shielding the telescope from the sun and letting physics take care of the rest.

Webb is not just the product of a group of people. Its not the product of some smart astronomersWebb is truly the product of our entire worlds capability, says Keith Parrish, a leader on the Webb team at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Taken as a whole, Webb is truly the result of our entire know-how of how to build complex machines.

Parrish joined the project in 1997, ultimately becoming its commissioning manager through the years of design, assembly, testing, delay and, finally, launch on 25 December 2021. He says almost everything about itits shape and location, the materials from which its madewas dictated by the need to have an observatory that would survive for years at supercold temperatures.

In this photo, the five-layered JWST sunshield is being unfurled and inspected in a clean room. The layers of coated Kapton E never touch, minimizing the transmission of heat from one layer to the next. Alex Evers/Northrop Grumman

The Webb is an infrared observatory for many reasons, not the least of which is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of light from distant objects is lengthened, causing dramatic redshift. Infrared is also good for seeing through cosmic dust and gas, and for imaging cold things such as comets, Kuiper Belt objects, and perhaps planets orbiting other stars.

But infrared radiation is often best measured as heat, which is why its important for the Webb to be so cold. If, like the Hubble Telescope, it were in low Earth orbit, and it had no shielding from the sun, most of its targets would be drowned out by the sun and ground, and by heat in the telescope itself.

If my signal is heatand infrared is heatthen what I cant have is other heat sources that are noise in the system, says Jim Flynn, the sunshield manager at Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the Webb.

So the Webb has been sent to circle a spot in space called L2, 1.5 million kilometers away, opposite the sun, one of the locations known as Lagrange points, where the gravity of Earth and the sun roughly cancel each other out. Its a good compromise: Earth is distant enough that it doesnt interfere with observations, but close enough that communication with the spacecraft can be relatively fast. And since the ship isnt flying from day to night and back on every orbit, its temperature is relatively stable. All it needs is a really, really good sunshade.

Four [layers of sunshield] would have probably done the job. Five gave us a little bit of an insurance policy. Id like to say it was way more sophisticated than that, but thats really not what it was at all.Keith Parrish, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The engineering was pushed above and beyond to meet the scientific goals, says Alexandra Lockwood, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Webb. It is specifically designed the way that it is because they wanted to do intensive infrared science.

It makes for an ungainly-looking ship in many renderings, with the telescope assembly, intentionally open to space to prevent heat buildup, attached to its silvery sunshield, about 14 meters wide and 21 meters long, with five layers of insulating film to keep the telescope in almost total darkness.

From its sunlit side the sunshield roughly resembles a kite. The elongated shape, engineers found, would be the most efficient way to keep the Webbs optics out of the sun. They considered a square or octagon, but the final version covers more area without much more mass.

Its no larger than it needs to be to meet the science field-of-view requirements, and that unique kite shape is the result, says Parrish. Any larger than it is now, it just makes everything more complex.

The shields five layers are made of Kapton E, a plastic film first developed by DuPont in the 1960s and used for spacecraft insulation and printed circuits. The layers are coated in aluminum and silicon. Each is thinner than a human hair. But engineers say they are, together, very effective in blocking the suns heat. The first layer reduces its strength by about an order of magnitude (or 90 percent), the second layer removes another order of magnitude, and so on. The layers never touch, and theyre slightly flared as one gets away from the center of the shield, so that heat will escape out the sides.

The result: Temperatures on the sunny side of the shield approach 360 K (87 C), but on the dark side theyre below that all-important 40 K (-233 C). Or, put another way: More than 200 kilowatts of solar energy fall on the first layer, but only 23 milliwatts make it all the way through the fifth.

STScI/NASA

Why five layers? There was a lot of computer modeling, but it was hard to simulate the shields thermal behavior before flight. Four would have probably done the job. Five gave us a little bit of an insurance policy, says Parrish. Id like to say it was way more sophisticated than that, but thats really not what it was at all.

The ability to cool the telescope naturally, first calculated in the 1980s to be possible, was a major advance. It meant the Webb would not have to rely on a heavy, complex cryogenic apparatus, with refrigerants that could leak and shorten the mission. Of its four main scientific instruments, only one, a midinfrared detector called MIRI, needs to be cooled to 6.7 K. Its chilled by a multistage cryocooler, which pumps cold helium gas through pulse tubes to draw heat away from the instruments sensor. It uses the Joule-Thomson effect, reducing the temperature of the helium by making it expand after its forced through a 1-millimeter valve. Pressure comes from two pistonsthe cryocooler systems only moving partsfacing opposite directions so their movements will cancel each other out and not disturb observations.

Building the telescope proved immensely complicated; it fell years behind while its budget ballooned toward US $10 billion. The sunshield needed lengthy redesign after testing, when Kapton tore and fasteners came loose.

We just bit off way more than we could chew, Parrish says now. Thats exactly what NASA should be doing. It should be pushing the envelope. The problem is that eventually Webb got too big to fail.

But its finally deployed, sending data, and surprising engineers who expected at least some failures as it began to operate. Keith Parrish, his work done, is moving on to other projects at Goddard.

I think Webb, he says, is just a great product of what it means to be an advanced civilization.

From Your Site Articles

Related Articles Around the Web

See more here:

Inside the Universe Machine: The Webb Space Telescopes Chilly Sun Shield - IEEE Spectrum

Pillars of Creation: $16B Space Telescope vs $500 Backyard Photo – PetaPixel

Posted on by

Photographer Andrew McCarthy recreated NASAs famous Pillars of Creation photograph of the Eagle Nebula using a $500 telescope.

The original iconic image, taken by the Hubble telescope, shows an active star-forming region featuring towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas in the heart of the Eagle Nebula, cataloged as M16.

It was first photographed in 1995 by NASA and has had a huge cultural impact with the image being featured on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs, reports National Geographic.

McCarthy spoke to PetaPixel about how he recreated the Pillars of Creation from his backyard in Arizona with a 12-inch Newtonian telescope and a monochrome camera using narrowband filters to create a vibrant color image.

I shoot the Pillars of Creation a couple times a year. Its a surprisingly accessible target, near the Sagittarius star cloud in the core of the Milky Way, explains McCarthy.

I used special software to remove all the stars in the image, so this unobstructed view really shows off the vast structures of gas and dust within the Eagle Nebula.

The image was shot over several hours across multiple nights, while my telescope was guided along the stars using a sophisticated tracking mount that compensated for the earths rotation.

McCarthy posted the image to Reddit where its received almost 10,000 upvotes. He believes that theres not as big of a gap between very expensive government-sponsored telescopes and amateur star-gazers shooting from their backyard.

However, McCarthy says that the biggest barrier for amateurs is the atmosphere.

The atmosphere completely blocks quite a few photons and distorts the rest. Hubble, James Webb, spitzer, etc, are all at an advantage that they are able to collect photons from targets completely unfettered by the atmosphere.

But with commercial space flight opportunities expanding, amateur-operated space telescopes could soon become a thing, he adds.

McCarthy accepts that a giant budget will still get you far more detailed images the backyard hobbyist, but believes there arent as many limits as people may think.

With smaller telescopes, you can generally just spend more time shooting a target to see deeper into space. I can see objects billions of light-years away with my telescopes. Since Im just using it to take pictures, theres not much of a need for me to go further than that.

More of McCarthys work can be seen on his website and Instagram.

More:

Pillars of Creation: $16B Space Telescope vs $500 Backyard Photo - PetaPixel

Record $10bn lost to internet disruptions this year – and it’s only July – TechRadar

Posted on by

From internet shutdowns to social media blocks and severe throttling, internet users across the globe will probably remember 2022 as an expensive year for both digital rights and the bottom line.

So far, 54 internet blackouts in 16 countries have already been reported. A total of over 19,000 hours of downtime cost the global economy more than $10 billion, according to Top10VPN data (opens in new tab). This represents the biggest losses linked with internet disruptions ever recorded.

Although, as Top10VPN explains in its report: "This damage is both direct, in terms of the economic and human cost, and indirect, in that it forces people to use unsafe VPNs to try to circumvent the restrictions imposed upon them."

Alongside disrupting the trade of most businesses that rely on digital technologies, internet shutdowns can scare off new investments and hinder a country's economy growth. According to the last UN report (opens in new tab), these economic shocks greatly exacerbate pre-existing social economic inequalities.

Russia is responsible for the most expensive internet disruption recorded so far, costing over $8 billion to the economy.

Following the Ukraine invasion, the Kremlin first throttled and then completely blocked the access to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Russian authorities also censored major international news sites in an effort to prevent war news from spreading within the country.

As generally happens in these cases, VPN downloads have skyrocketed in Russia and Ukraine since the conflict started.

In second position we have Myanmar. With around 8,800 hours of blackout, the country experienced the longest internet shutdown to date. What's more, the military junta is even trying to criminalize VPNs to halt users trying to circumvent restrictions.

The approximate cost for Kazakhstan is over $410 million, where authorities cut access to the web in January during mass anti-government protests across the country. Iran follows suit with over $190 million of losses, impacting almost 72 million people.

More recently, Sudan and Uzbekistan have both suffered severe internet disruptions between the end of June and the start of July.

Even though a full internet blackout cannot be circumvented as the connection drop makes it impossible to go online, there are a few methods to bypass other restrictions and avoid a complete social isolation.

1. Connect to a reliable VPN service

As we mentioned before, VPN demand generally soars among users experiencing internet disorders. The security software enable users to bypass restrictions by hiding your real IP address. It can also protect your online data from snoopers by using an encrypted tunnel.

However, it is important to choose one of the best VPN services around as unsafe VPNs can often cause more harm than good. This is why you should opt for a reliable and private VPN that employs a strict no-logs policy. This means that none of your data will be stored, shared or leaked. If you still want to go for a free VPN instead, Proton VPN is our #1 recommendation right now.

As government restrictions work hard to block VPNs and prevent citizens from circumventing the restrictions in place, you should look out for those services offering an effective obfuscation technology. Among our favorites areExpressVPN,NordVPNandSurfshark.

2. Use Tor browser

'Onion routing,' is the concept behind theTor browser infrastructure: your traffic heads through multiple servers and is encrypted each step of the way.This enables users to browse the internet while protecting their privacy and anonymity as much as possible. It's free and open-sourced, of course.

Even though this is very similar to how VPNs work, Tor is generally regarded as more secure as it routes your data through at least three servers instead of only one. In terms ofencryption,it employs multiple layers that getpeeled offas you travel from server to server. Despite resulting in slower connection speeds, activists and journalists living under a high-censorship regime should consider combining the two services for extra privacy.

3. Exchange information via Bluetooth mesh networks

When the internet connectivity is blocked and you can't use either a VPN or Tor, you need to find alternative ways to communicate. Mesh networks use Bluetooth technology to allow messages exchanges between devices without the need to rely on the internet. Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters used both FireChat and Bridgefy apps to stay connected during the 2014 and 2019 demonstrations respectively.

4. Get a roaming SIM card

As internet shutdowns are becoming a common tactic on authoritative governments' playbooks, citizens might have time to prepare in advance to be able to react. As foreign mobile data is often unaffected by country's blocks, getting an international roaming SIM card may allow you to go online as usual during a shutoff at no extra cost.

See the original post:

Record $10bn lost to internet disruptions this year - and it's only July - TechRadar

Tor Browser Bundle – Free download and software reviews – CNET Download

Posted on by

The free Firefox-based Tor Browser Bundle integrates the Tor network's enhanced privacy and security. If you would have thought Onion Routing involved wooden crates and flatbed trucks or maybe a sandwich order, you might be surprised to hear it's actually an online security technology. Think of an onion's layers: in Onion Routing, layers of encryption make it impossible to trace messages back to their point of origin. Once a secret project of the U.S. Naval Research Lab, it's now the concern of the Tor Project, an open-source community devoted to developing Tor, the software implementation of second-generation Onion Routing technology, and to maintaining the Tor network.

It includes the Vidalia network connection utility, but it's much less fiddly than previous Tor implementations. Basically, the Tor Browser does it all for you. Both the Tor Browser and access to the Tor network are free.

We extracted and opened the Tor Browser, which includes the Vidalia Control Panel, a small dialog box for configuring and managing your connection to the Tor network. But the software did it all itself, connecting and opening the browser in a Tor start page. Though the browser uses a green globe icon, it's basically Firefox 10 with Tor-specific features added to the toolbar. The Tor Browser's extras include NoScript, which by default is set to Forbid Scripts Globally. The green onion icon is called the Torbutton; it's the key to Tor's features and settings. Its menu let us create a New Identity, open the Cookie Protections manager, and set the program's Preferences on three tabs: Proxy, Security, and Display settings. The Security Settings offers by far the most choices, with eight submenus of options.

In use, we found the Tor Browser to be just like other Firefox clones. We know what you're asking: did the Tor Browser slow down our surfing? Yes; there's no doubt that some familiar pages loaded more slowly than usual. Was it annoying? Hardly. Most users will see similar slowdowns on a daily basis. Bottom line: the Tor Browser Bundle makes it easy to take advantage of Tor's proven benefits.

More:

Tor Browser Bundle - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download

Tor Browser 11.0.15 Download | TechSpot

Posted on by

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Note: You can also download the latest beta version here.

Tor began gaining popularity among activists and tech-savvy users interested in privacy, but it was still difficult for less-technically savvy people to use, so starting in 2005, development of tools beyond just the Tor proxy began. Development of Tor Browser began in 2008.

With Tor Browser having made Tor more accessible to everyday internet users and activists, Tor was an instrumental tool during the Arab Spring beginning in late 2010. It not only protected people's identity online but also allowed them to access critical resources, social media, and websites which were blocked.

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.

Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?

A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.

The Tor Browser is the flagship product from the Tor Project. The web browser is based on a modified version of Mozilla Firefox ESR that includes extras like the Tor proxy, TorButton, TorLauncher, NoScript, and HTTPS Everywhere extensions.

The Tor Browser uses the Tor network, which consists of more than six thousand relays located worldwide, to hide the users' location and online traffic. This ensures anonymity and avoids your activities from being seen by others.

Tor is not a VPN. Tor is a free browser similar to Chrome or Firefox, but it includes features that encrypt your IP address, making your browsing sessions private. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is software that can change your IP address when you use any browser installed on your PC. To learn more about VPNs, you can read this article.

Tor Browser Alpha updated to 11.5a12.

Tor Browser 11.0.14 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

Tor Browser 11.0.14 updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 91.10.0esr.

We use the opportunity as well to update various other components of Tor Browser:

NoScript 11.4.6

All Platforms

Tor Browser Gets A New Look

Earlier this year, Firefox's user interface underwent a significant redesign aimed at simplifying the browser chrome, streamlining menus and featuring an all-new tab design. Firefox ESR 91 introduces the new design to Tor Browser for the first time.

To ensure it lives up to the new experience, each piece of custom UI in Tor Browser has been modernized to match Firefox's new look and feel. That includes everything from updating the fundamentals like color, typography and buttons to redrawing each of our icons to match the new thinner icon style.

In addition to the browser chrome itself, the connection screen, circuit display, security levels and onion site errors all received a sprucing-up too - featuring some small but welcome quality of life improvements to each.

Welcome Screen

Our old screen had way too much information for the users, leading many of them to spend great time confused about what to do. Some users at the paper experiment spent up to 40 min confused about what they needed to be doing here. Besides simplifying the screen and the message, to make it easier for the user to know if they need to configure anything or not, we also did a 'brand refresh' bringing our logo to the launcher.

Censorship circumvention configuration

This is one of the most important steps for a user who is trying to connect to Tor while their network is censoring Tor. We also worked really hard to make sure the UI text would make it easy for the user to understand what a bridge is for and how to configure to use one. Another update was a little tip we added at the drop-down menu (as you can see below) for which bridge to use in countries that have very sophisticated censorship methods.

Proxy help information

The proxy settings at our Tor Launcher configuration wizard is an important feature for users who are under a network that demands such configuration. But it can also lead to a lot of confusion if the user has no idea what a proxy is. Since it is a very important feature for users, we decided to keep it in the main configuration screen and introduced a help prompt with an explanation of when someone would need such configuration.

As part of our work with the UX team, we will also be coordinating user testing of this new UI to continue iterating and make sure we are always improving our users' experience. We are also planning a series of improvements not only for the Tor Launcher flow but for the whole browser experience (once you are connected to Tor) including a new user onboarding flow. And last but not least we are streamlining both our mobile and desktop experience: Tor Browser 7.5 adapted the security slider design we did for mobile bringing the improved user experience to the desktop as well.

Final Deprecation Of V2 Onion Services

Last year we announced that v2 onion services would be deprecated in late 2021, and since its 10.5 release Tor Browser has been busy warning users who visit v2 onion sites of their upcoming retirement. At long last, that day has finally come. Since updating to Tor 0.4.6.8 v2 onion services are no longer reachable in Tor Browser, and users will receive an "Invalid Onion Site Address" error instead.

Should you receive this error when attempting to visit a previously working v2 address, there is nothing wrong with your browser - instead, the issue lies with the site itself. If you wish, you can notify the onion site's administrator about the problem and encourage them to upgrade to a v3 onion service as soon as possible.

It's easy to tell if you still have any old v2 addresses saved in your bookmarks that are in need of removal or updating too: although both end in .onion, the more secure v3 addresses are 56 characters long compared to v2's modest 16 character length.

More:

Tor Browser 11.0.15 Download | TechSpot

The dangers of the dark web: being safe online – Open Access Government

Posted on by

Lead security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, Javvad Malik explores security awareness and security issues primarily with a focus on the human element.

A) If youre using the web regularly then Id say make sure your website is up to date and that your device is up to date and fully patched thats number one. Id say using something like a password manager is really good practice because that will help you choose a unique and strong password for every single website that you need an account for.

What we find is that a lot of people use the same password across many different websites. So if I somehow guess one of your passwords or break into it on one website, then the first thing Im going to do is use that password against every other website I can think of. And if youre reusing the same password, I can get into lots of your other accounts, including maybe your corporate accounts. So using a password manager to have unique passwords is good.

And the other thing is just turning off any services you dont need. So sometimes you get a new computer or a phone and you have these apps on it that you maybe dont need or dont use or thered be extensions on your browser. So just turn them off, disable them or uninstall them. If you dont need it, then dont have it there because all of these unnecessary apps could potentially be an avenue through which someone could gain access to your system.

A) I think its kind of like an aspirational tagline in that regard. What we can do, we can just reduce the risk. And thats what its all about. Its like you can have all the safety features in the world on anything. Its like saying, will an aeroplane never have a crash? No, you cant actually say that, but with all the controls and safety measures we have in place, youre really confident that when you get on a plane, its going to get you to your destination. You think youve got to be unlucky to have a crash.

Were trying to get to a point where we can reduce the risk to a point where browsing the Internet in a normal manner and logging onto websites, becomes relatively safe. We also want to reduce the likelihood of you being hacked or someone stealing your information or getting into your browsing. We want it to become the exception and not the norm.

Cybersecurity isnt just relevant to organisations and digital firms

I think ultimately the human element plays into everything that we do. Whatever happens, even if its a computer-based attack, theres someone that coded that or implemented that or architected it. So its something that will be ongoing, but I think its something that we need to focus on beyond just even corporations, its something that impacts everyone in our daily lives. All of our lives are digitised nowadays. Its like everything resides on an electronic device somewhere. We access stuff through an app. So being more aware of what you should post, who you should share stuff with, and whats relevant or not, I think that it becomes more of a societal issue. Cybersecurity isnt just relevant to organisations and digital firms.

A) Identity theft is a really hard thing to protect from because it depends on where the criminals get the information from. Say, if theyre able to hack into a government website, say they get into the DVLA, then theres nothing as individuals we can do, because we have to provide them with our information stored by them, and we trust them. And if they get breached, then that information is there. That can be used for identity theft.

But I think more on an individual level, we should just be really mindful about the amount of information we share with who and for what purposes. So a lot of websites will sometimes ask for information, and if you look at it, its not really relevant to that. So I dont give up information unless you absolutely need to. Dont be scanning or taking photographs, like your ID, or your passport, uploading that to websites just to get on a new social media platform or something like that. Look at their privacy policy sometimes, especially in Europe, were covered on GDPR, and you can see whether theyre committed to it.

And if you feel like an organisation has used your information for other reasons than why you gave them the information, say you signed up for one service, and suddenly you start getting spam from another. You can report them online, like to the ICO, the information commissioners office, and other such organisations, and they can investigate that, and where relevant, they can penalise those organisations. The final part is: that you can set up things like credit monitoring services or identity monitoring services just to see if someones taking out a loan in your name or someones taking a credit card in your name or doing something similar. So whatever you do, you can get tracked, and you can get alerted whenever any such activity happens. So these are all things you can do to try and minimise the risk of identity theft.

A) There are a couple of different types of data that are commonly traded. I suppose certain datas quite easy to get hold of. So credit card information, payment information thats really quite frequently skimmed and stolen, because you can take payment data if you can compromise, say, like a point of sale terminal or something, you can skim a lot of that information quite quickly. Thats traded normally very quickly because those cards get blocked very quickly. As soon as you see a few dodgy transactions, you can block your card. And so theyll trade, but theres a very small window and normally they go for quite cheap.

We see lots of people losing massive amounts of entire life savings

More personal information starts to go for a lot more and thats where the bigger trades happen. So if its personal information, name, address, phone number, thats one level. But then if you can add in things like national insurance numbers, social security numbers, or medical records and things like that, the value goes up and they start being packaged into individual identities as a service. And then those can be used for either multiple things like creating new passports or buying properties or taking out loans or just using them to set up fake identities further on down the line as well.

So those things become more useful because they are really hard to change. If your name and address get leaked, its really hard to change them. Whereas a credit card, thats got breached, lets just reject that and order a new one.

A) It is very common. Its not common as everyone will know someone that suffered from it, but people will often be within two degrees away from someone that suffered from either wholesale identity theft or some form of fraud or online sort of scam. So it does happen quite frequently. A lot of times it will be like a small transactional thing. We see a lot of pensioners being targeted. A criminal will ring up with only a few bits of information about that person, their name, and their address, but thats sometimes all they need to establish credibility. The scammer will lie that they are from the individuals bank and say something along the lines of We need to move your pension pot, go online and can you do this? And so we see lots of people losing massive amounts of entire life savings in some cases to some of these scams.

A) Theres no way to guarantee it isnt. But there are some monitoring services available and even some of these credit monitoring or personal identity monitoring services, they have tie-ins to some of these companies. And there are dedicated threat intel companies who will spend a lot of time on the dark web, where they have analysts who set up their fake profiles to gain access to these forums on the dark web.

Oftentimes, especially in these criminal forums, you need someone to vouch for you to say that this person is not an undercover police officer

So to access the dark web, its not as straightforward as the normal web. Oftentimes, especially in these criminal forums, you need someone to vouch for you to say that this person is not an undercover police officer. They will vouch for you. Youll have to spend some time gaining their trust and observing and then theyll give you access to that forum on the dark web and then you can start scouring some of the information thats there and not there. So there are many organisations that do that, but it is quite an intensive process and you might not catch all the information thats available there. You probably get broad strokes.So you can get a rough idea, but you cant say for certain that device details are in there or not.

A) Yeah, it can be quite dangerous, especially if youre not careful as an analyst. Some of those people can track you back to who you are and thats one thing you dont want to happen. So thats why its not advised that average people try this. So within these organisations, they normally have a safe network set up and they have their safe machines and they dont log in with their real names or anything like that. So it gives them that additional level of protection. Its also an expensive and labour-intensive process. It takes time.

A) So its really like what you can do with it and the longevity of the information. So if you have someones date of birth and national insurance number, thats not going to change forever. So that will go for more than just credit card information which will be changed in two weeks. Sometimes it also depends on the volume of data. So if theres a big dump from a large organisation thats been hacked, and theyve got two million records, then an individual record might not cost much, but the bidding on that volume of information can go up. Its very similar to eBay some items theyll list on there, and bidding will begin because so many criminals want that particular piece of information. Its not always clear what drives that demand, but certain things are needed at that time, because we saw when code first hit, and lots of governments were offering these COVID relief packages. So at that time, there was a lot of demand in the underground forums for these packages.

A) The dark web was set up with good intentions. The Tor Project believed that too many governments were spying on and oppressing people across the world. So it was a way of allowing people to freely express their views or share information. Theres that level of anonymity and privacy afforded, youll see criminals set up shop there as well. So while Tor is used to access the dark web, it isnt the entire dark web. The dark web itself is very much like the normal web from an operational perspective. The data is held on servers around the world. So its just because its not directly accessible from the main internet, as we browse it, you have to go through the Tor browser. It gives you that anonymity. So its not been completely taken over. But I think nowadays, whenever anyone thinks of the dark web or using the onion ring, then they think of something dodgy.

Editor's Recommended Articles

Continued here:

The dangers of the dark web: being safe online - Open Access Government

The 8 Genders of the Talmud – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Posted on by

The Jewish obligation to observe commandments is traditionally divided along male/female lines: men pray three times daily, while women dont have to; men put on tefillin, while women do not. Some womens recent efforts to observe the religious privileges theyre exempt from have made ripples in the Jewish world, and even the news.

But what if we told you that the foundation for all this was wrong? That Judaism recognized not two, but as many as eight genders? The Mishnah describes half a dozen categories that are between male and female, such as saris or ailonit the terms refer to an non-reproductive version of the male or female body, respectively and categories that refer to ambiguous or indeterminate gender.

Although these terms seem to provide the refreshing view that a binary view of gender in Judaism is relatively recent, a closer look shows that Mishnaic rabbis were apt to privilege maleness in the case of indeterminate or multiple genders. But contemporary scholars like Rabbi Elliot Kukla are repurposing that halakhic discourse to provide a road map for our recognition of non-binary people in todays Judaism. Gender-neutral restrooms start to look like small potatoes.

November 9, 2015

Follow this link:

The 8 Genders of the Talmud - Jewish Telegraphic Agency