Monthly Archives: March 2022

China is looking to spark interest in space tourism by opening its soon-to-be-completed space station to everyday citizens.

Yang Liwei, who made history in 2003 by becoming China's first astronaut in space, told Chinese media earlier this month that people without formal astronaut training could soon visit the Tiangong space station.

"It is not a matter of technology but of demand," Yang said when asked if the general public would be able to tour Tiangong. "And it can be realized within a decade as long as there is such demand."

Yang was speaking as a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which forms part of China's ongoing annual political sessions in Beijing. Adding further weight to the comments was Zhou Jianping, known as the chief designer of China's human spaceflight program, who later said the country's Shenzhou crew spacecraft could be used for space tourism. Taken together, the comments suggest that China is looking to establish a market for space tourism.

Related: The latest news about China's space program

But first, China needs to complete the three-module, T-shaped space station and make it fully operational. China plans to launch six missions this year to complete Tiangong. These will be launches of two new modules, a pair of cargo supply missions and two crewed missions, Shenzhou 14 and Shenzhou 15. The two three-person missions are also expected to carry out the first crew handover, which will temporarily see six astronauts aboard the space station.

But Shenzhou spacecraft, which launch from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert on an established Long March 2F rocket, won't be the only option for getting tourists into space. China is working on a reusable rocket for human spaceflight, which would be capable of launching a new, larger and partially reusable crew spacecraft to the space station, Space.com previously reported. The new approach would mean more people could fly to space at once.

Whereas Shenzhou spacecraft can transport only three astronauts, the new generation of crewed space transportation vehicles will be capable of carrying six to seven astronauts, Huang Kewu, a human spaceflight official with the country's main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said last year.

Commercial options are also being developed. CAS Space, a commercial spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is aiming to offer rides to space for tourists as soon as 2025, apparently drawing inspiration from Blue Origin. Meanwhile, space plane company Space Transportation is developing a "rocket with wings" for space tourism and point-to-point travel, targeting a first suborbital flight in 2025. Orbital flights are planned for around 2030.

Wu Ji, a researcher with the CAS' National Space Science Center, told the Beijing Review last year that he hoped Chinese companies could compete in the international space tourism market. "Commercial programs can help lower costs and improve the efficiency of space activities, which will also benefit the traditional players in this area," Wu said.

China's first space-tourism flights may not take off for a few years, but the country seems set on establishing multiple ways for tourists to reach space.

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China plans to open its Tiangong space station for tourism within a decade - Space.com

Its an ISS meet-cute! Two robots working aboard the International Space Station finally met after two years of working in different parts of the station. NASA shared an image of an Astrobee robot and a Project CIMON (Crew Interactive MObile companioN) robot meeting for the first time. While science fiction movies make it clear that robots uniting in space is a giant red flag, this image from the ISS is very charming.

NASAs Ames Research Center shared the delightfully robotic image in a post outlining the robots roles aboard the ISS. The Astrobee pictured (on the right) is one of three identical robots launched to the ISS by NASA. The only difference between the three is the color of their shell. Bumble, pictured above in blue, launched in 2019. The other two robots on Team Astrobee are also named after bees. Honey has a yellow shell and Queen has a green one. Their role aboard the ISS is to perform general assistance tasks like taking inventory or monitoring the environment aboard the station.

The Project CIMON, meanwhile, is a longtime ISS resident. The free-flying robot first launched to the space station back in 2018. Hailing from the German Space Agency, its the ISSs first artificial intelligent assistant. True to its title, Project CIMON is a hands-free database, computer, and camera to support research. But it also has another important task. The teams monitoring the robot are also examining how to use AI for social purposes. The astronauts aboard the ISS find incredible ways to pass the time. But it must be isolating being away from their friends and family. Not to mention their general confinement to the expansive research station. Hopefully, Project CIMON and its technology can help reduce the stress astronauts face.

While the robots couldnt look more distinct from one another, they both play vital roles in the ISSs day-to-day operations. In the post, NASA wrote,These free-floating helpers come from different countries and have unique functions, but they share a mission to assist astronauts, support station operations, and enable research that will take humans to the Moon and on to Mars.

Both robots have pretty vital roles on the ISS. But we hope this isnt their first and last hang session. In fact, get the whole Team Astrobee crew and Project CIMON together for a little robot party. Nothing could go wrong there.

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Two Robots Aboard the International Space Station Finally Met - Nerdist

Today marks 21 years since Russia's space station, Mir, returned to Earth.

As the rhetoric from Russian space agency Roscosmos intensifies, it is worth taking a look back at the deorbit of the Mir complex, the first components of which were launched during the Soviet era.

Assembly of the International Space Station (ISS) was well under way when Mir met its demise. Indeed, it was Russia's commitment to the ISS that ended the veteran station; funding simply did not exist to keep both programs running.

Continuous occupation of Mir ended in 1999, with the return to Earth of the EO-27 crew. One more visit occurred in 2000, with a pair of cosmonauts spending two months aboard the outpost with a view to it being used for commercial purposes, but those plans came to naught other than delaying Mir's fate to 2001.

Operators were keen to de-orbit the complex while it remained under control. On December 26, 2000, contact was briefly lost due to a power drain, and a crew was put on standby to supervise the procedure from onboard the station. They were not required. In January, Mir's computer and gyrodynes (used to maintain attitude) were brought back online and a Progress freighter, loaded with extra fuel, docked on January 27.

There were hopes that the station could yet endure and be boosted to a higher orbit ahead of a possible reoccupation, but the rate of decay coupled with the sheer age of the complex meant that a de-orbit was inevitable.

Leaving the station to come down through atmospheric drag could have resulted in debris striking inhabited regions (NASA's Skylab had sprayed Australia two decades earlier) so the engines of the attached Progress were fired three times on 23 March 2001. Mir's orbit was first dropped to 103 x 137 miles with the initial two firings. The third and final firing was sufficient to set the station on a course to the Pacific ocean.

The complex encountered the atmosphere soon after passing over Japan, and its solar arrays were torn off by the force of re-entry. Its modules came off as it passed over the Pacific, and the demise of the station was visible from Fiji. Anything that survived re-entry fell into the ocean and was not recovered. Mir had, as Russia put it, "ceased to exist."

But the project lives on. Mir 2 forms the rump of Russia's contribution to the ISS and recent emissions from Roscosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin have suggested that Russia might undock its portion in the future.

A brave move, considering the age of the structures.

The Zvezda Service Module, built for Mir 2 and later pressed into ISS service, was constructed in the 1980s and launched in 2000, meaning it has spent over 20 years in orbit. Mir, on the other hand, managed 15 years.

Its fate is a clue to what lies in wait for the ISS and Russia's contribution.

Mir is well documented online, although we'd recommend David Harland's The Story of Space Station Mir. Brian Harvey's Russia In Space: The Failed Frontier? was also a useful resource.

Read more here:
Russia's Mir space station returned to Earth 21 years ago - The Register

Special to Salisbury Daily Times| Salisbury Daily Times

Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft soars to ISS

Northrop Grumman launched its 17th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station Saturday, carrying 8,300 pounds of supplies. (Feb. 19)

AP

When Salisbury University alumna Kennedy Workman interviews for jobs throughout her graphic design career, she will have a line on her rsum that will set her apart from others: A piece of Workmans work will have traveled into space.

Her mission patch design was chosen as the winner of a competition for Terps in Space, an extension of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program.

The program allows students in the University System of Marylandto design science experiments to potentially be sent to the International Space Station.

My artwork is not out in a lot of places, but I will be able to say that its been to space, which is incredibly exciting, said Workman.

Based out of the University of Maryland, College Park, the program is led by Daniel Enrique Serrano, senior faculty specialist at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and is open to all students.

The project selected to travel to space as part of Mission 16, for which Workmans patch was created, was developed by a collaboration of students from University of Maryland, College Parkand the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

All University System of Maryland students are invited to participate, said Serrano. It means a lot to achieve that collaboration, like the team that won Mission 16, where you have students that are coming from different universities to do research, and for Kennedy to represent our entire mission visually being from a different university. My contribution is small, but it makes me proud to be able to bring these students together.

Workman, from Glenwood, Maryland, and other students in the SU Design Agency, a course led by Allison Seth, were given a brief description of the project and asked to create their version of a representative patch, similar to what one might see an astronaut wear on their spacesuit.

Though no astronaut will wear this patch, it will be sent up with the project expected to travel later this year and then will be returned to Workman with a certificate stating that it traveled to space.

The patch represents the projects basis on microgravity. Researchers will examine the fine details of how planets first began to form by investigating how the smallest particles interact and coalesce to begin forming a larger mass.

I really wanted to utilize an astronaut helmet or an astronaut floating in space to represent the human exploration of space and gravity, said Workman.

I looked at a lot of different pictures of astronauts because I wanted it to feel like they were floating out of the patch design and not too stagnant.

Workman studied spacesuits in images of astronauts and otherillustrations to develop her rendering and received praise from the judges, as her design closely represents what an authentic suit looks like.

More:What changes for Wallops launches to ISS as Russia ends rocket sales to US

One intentional variance was to not have the astronaut in the design wearing gloves, as Workman thought it made it more intimate and human for his bare hands to be holding flowers as he floated in space.

The flowers are part of the designs goal of representing Maryland.

I wanted to incorporate the state flower; thats why the astronaut is holding black-eyed Susans. And they also have the state flag on their astronaut suit, she said.

I tried to keep the color palette with the colors of Maryland and reflect the colors in different areas of the design, like the yellow reflection in the astronauts helmet, and the red stripe on the helmet and the banner around the entire patch design.

Workman was first selected as one of 11 finalists, from 44 designs submitted from across the state, to go to final judging. SU classmate Jennifer Cuevas design was selected as the third-place finisher.

Kennedys patch was one of the most refined and highest quality in terms of visual representation, said Serrano. Her being selected was by a landslide across the board by all the judges as the best design.

The project likely will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Workman would like to be present, if possible, or at least view the launch of her artwork into space remotely.

I think it will be very, very exciting to see it launch, said Workman. I would love to see pictures of the patch on the International Space Station.

More:Rocket Lab chooses Wallops for launch, manufacturing site. Move could create 250 jobs

The SU Design Agency is a 400-level class in which students work in a setting structured like a graphic design firm to complete job assignments for actual clients, including University, community and nonprofit organizations.

The SSEP is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education = in the U.S. and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic partnership with Nanoracks LLC, which is working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the use of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.

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Reaching for the stars: Salisbury University alumna's work will travel to Space Station - Delmarva Now

With the upcoming Athena update on the way, there will be a new PTS event for Dual Universe next week. The event, Fool's Defense, lets you face the Novaquark team at the Novaquark space station. The team is encouraging all comers to try and destroy their space station and test the build.

The event will take place at 1400 UTC/10 AM Eastern time on April 1st and is in fact, not a joke. Join the developers from Novaquark on the PTS server and headto the PVP platform, claimed a ship and ammo and you'll be ready to fight. Once you get equipped and team up, either with your own team or creating public groups, it will be time to coordinate and get ready to take on the dev team. since this is in PvP space, everybody is vulnerable and in the official announcement for the event, the developers also warned that there may be potential sabotage or traitors that might be in the ranks of the community side in order to try and spoil your fun. For those who need it, there will be a resurrection node publicly available at the PVP platform.

The Athena update promises a new system that will let the community engage in war of all kinds, including sieges and defenses. With the development team taking on the community, it may be likely that they'll put in everything they can to test out the systems and stress the servers as well as giving players a rewarding opportunity to get an idea what to expect when the update fully hits.

Speaking of rewarding, anyone that wins will be able to spin a Wheel of Foolish Fortune, where they can get great prizes or intentionally not great prizes. Because an event on April Fool's Day couldnt be all straightforward. For more, see the official announcement over at Dual Universe

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Prepare to Try to Take Down the Novaquark Space Station in This Dual Universe Event - MMORPG.com

In the coming days a Russian Soyuz capsule is scheduled to leave the International Space Station for Earth, bringing home three personnel who have completed months of duties on the facility.

Two of these heading back to Kazakhstan will be Russian cosmonauts but the third will be American astronaut Mark Vande Hei.

In the midst of a war in Ukraine in which Russian bombs and shells are killing Ukrainian civilians and where US-provided weaponry has killed probably several thousand Russians, co-operation is continuing in space, at least for the present.

The war in Ukraine is not only the most serious crisis in Europe in decades, but the tensions it has generated between the US and Russia may ultimately also have an impact 400km above Earth at the International Space Station.

Almost from its inception about 60 years ago, space exploration has had as much to do with politics as with science, maybe more so.

The race to orbit Earth and later to the moon between the US and the former Soviet Union were as much about showing their own people and the broader world which political system was the most advanced.

However, in more recent years space has been one of the main areas of co-operation between the US and Russia.

The International Space Station project stemmed from an initiative to improve US-Russian relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union and to get away from the cold war rivalry between the two powers that marked the race to be first to the moon in the 1960s.

Even though this new co-operation was tested by Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts continued to work side by side on the space station.

After the retirement of the US space shuttle in 2011, and until the private Space X firm came on the scene in 2020, the Americans paid handsomely about $4 billion (3.64 billion) for seats on Russian space craft to bring their astronauts to and from the station.

The Americans, Russians, Japanese and others have their own modules or parts of the space station, but these are largely inter-dependent.

While the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has the potential to cause serious problems for the space station project, the messages from both sides have been mixed.

Restrictions on high tech exports to Russia introduced by the Biden administration were designed to degrade its aerospace industry. The US space agency Nasa argued, on the other hand, that the measures would not impact on ongoing in-orbit and ground-station operations.

However, Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Russian space agency Roscosmos, denounced the restrictions and warned sanctions could destroy teamwork with the US on the International Space Station.

Rogozin has in recent weeks also been involved in a Twitter spat with one of the USs most famous astronauts of recent times and a strong critic of the Russian war in Ukraine, Scott Kelly, who spent a US record of nearly a year in space.

In one instance Rogozin tweeted a video of technicians taping over the flags of the United States, Japan and other nations on the Soyuz rocket that was supposed to launch 36 internet satellites for a UK-based company.

That launch, scheduled for March 4th, did not happen, because OneWeb and the British government, which owns part of the company, declined to meet new demands imposed by Roscosmos on how the satellites would be used.

Kelly responded to that tweet, writing, Dimon, without those flags and the foreign exchange they bring in, your space programme wont be worth a damn. Maybe you can find a job at McDonalds if McDonalds still exists in Russia.

Rogozin replied in a tweet that was subsequently deleted: Get off, you moron! Otherwise the death of the ISS [International Space Station] will be on your conscience!

In response to western sanctions Russia has also said it will no longer sell rocket engines to US companies. It has also halted launches of Russian-built Soyuz rockets from Europes space port in French Guiana.

At the same time, Nasa has said it and the Russians are still working toward a crew exchange deal under which both would routinely share flights to the space station on each others space crafts.

The revival of tensions akin to the cold war comes as Nasa is planning a return to the moon after a 50-year hiatus.

Americans wont be landing on the moon any day soon. It may be 2025 or 2026 before that happens.

However, the first steps are taking place. Last week Nasa rolled out its new mega rocket known as the Space Launch System at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, essentially as a dress rehearsal ahead of an unmanned launch around the moon later this year.

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Tensions over Ukraine could affect space co-operation - The Irish Times

Want to go to space? It could cost you.

This month, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft will make the first fully-private, crewed flight to the International Space Station. The going price for a seat is US$55 million. The ticket comes with an eight-day stay on the space station, including room and board and unrivaled views.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin offer cheaper alternatives, which will fly you to the edge of space for a mere US$250,000-500,000. But the flights only last between ten and 15 minutes, barely enough time to enjoy an in-flight snack.

But if youre happy to keep your feet on the ground, things start to look more affordable. Over the past 20 years, advances in tiny satellite technology have brought Earth orbit within reach for small countries, private companies, university researchers, and even do-it-yourself hobbyists.

We are scientists who study our planet and the universe beyond. Our research stretches to space in search of answers to fundamental questions about how our ocean is changing in a warming world, or to study the supermassive black holes beating in the hearts of distant galaxies.

The cost of all that research can be, well, astronomical. The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December 2021 and will search for the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe, had a final price tag of US$10 billion after many delays and cost overruns.

The price tag for the International Space Station, which has hosted almost 3,000 scientific experiments over 20 years, ran to US$150 billion, with another US$4 billion each year to keep the lights on.

Even weather satellites, which form the backbone of our space-based observing infrastructure and provide essential measurements for weather forecasting and natural disaster monitoring, cost up to US$400 million each to build and launch.

Budgets like these are only available to governments and national space agencies or a very select club of space-loving billionaires.

More affordable options are now democratizing access to space. So-called nanosatellites, with a payload of less than 10kg including fuel, can be launched individually or in swarms.

Since 1998, more than 3,400 nanosatellite missions have been launched and are beaming back data used for disaster response, maritime traffic, crop monitoring, educational applications and more.

A key innovation in the small satellite revolution is the standardization of their shape and size, so they can be launched in large numbers on a single rocket.

CubeSats are a widely used format, 10cm along each side, which can be built with commercial off-the-shelf electronic components. They were developed in 1999 by two professors in California, Jordi Puig-Suari and Bob Twiggs, who wanted graduate students to get experience designing, building, and operating their own spacecraft.

Twiggs says the shape and size were inspired by Beanie Babies, a kind of collectible stuffed toy that came in a 10cm cubic display case.

Commercial launch providers like SpaceX in California and Rocket Lab in New Zealand offer rideshare missions to split the cost of launch across dozens of small satellites. You can now build, test, launch and receive data from your own CubeSat for less than US$200,000.

Small satellites have opened exciting new ways to explore our planet and beyond.

One project we are involved in uses CubeSats and machine learning techniques to monitor Antarctic sea ice from space. Sea ice is a crucial component of the climate system and improved measurements will help us better understand the impact of climate change in Antarctica.

Spire Global operates a fleet of more than 110 nanosatellites. Image: Spire Global

Sponsored by the UK-Australia Space Bridge program, the project is a collaboration between universities and Antarctic research institutes in both countries and a UK-based satellite company called Spire Global. Naturally, we called the project IceCube.

Small satellites are starting to explore beyond our planet, too. In 2018, two nanosatellites accompanied the NASA Insight mission to Mars to provide real-time communication with the lander during its decent. In May 2022, Rocket Lab will launch the first CubeSat to the Moon as a precursor to NASAs Artemis program, which aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon by 2024.

A nanosatellite took this photo of Mars. Image: NASA/JPL

Tiny spacecraft have even been proposed for a voyage to another star. The Breakthough Starshot project wants to launch a fleet of 1,000 spacecraft each centimetre in size to the Alpha Centauri star system, 4.37 light-years away. Propelled by ground-based lasers, the spacecraft would sail across interstellar space for 20 or 30 years and beam back images of the Earth-like exoplanet Proxima Centauri b.

With advances in miniaturization, satellites are getting ever smaller.

Picosatellites, the size of a can of soft drink, and femtosatellites, no bigger than a computer chip, are putting space within reach of keen amateurs. Some can be assembled and launched for as little as a few hundred dollars.

A Finnish company is experimenting with a more sustainably built CubeSat made of wood. And new, smart satellites, carrying computer chips capable of artificial intelligence, can decide what information to beam back to Earth instead of sending everything, which dramatically reduces the cost of phoning home.

Getting to space doesnt have to cost the Earth after all.

This article by Shane Keating, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Oceanography, UNSW Sydney and Clare Kenyon, Astrophysicist and Science Communicator, The University of Melbourneis republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Shane Keating and Clare Kenyon will be discussing CubeSats and the Space Bridge program at Design beyond Earth: The future of Earth observation, an in-person and online event at Scienceworks in Melbourne on Sunday March 27, 12pm-1pm.

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Satellites have become smaller and cheaper so even you can now do science in space - The Next Web