1. Monday, Dec. 23, 2019; 7 pm PST (9 pm CST, 10 pm EST): We welcome back Robert Zimmerman to wrap up the year with news and policy plus a look ahead to 2020 space.
2. Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2019; 7-8:30 pm PST (9-10:30 pm CST, 10-11:30 pm EST): No show today due to this being Christmas Eve.
3. Wednesday, Dec. 25, 2019: Pre-recorded Hotel Mars Program with John Batchelor. See Upcoming Show on The Space Show website for details.
4. Thursday, Dec. 26, 2019; 7-8:30 pm PST (9-10:30 pm CST, 10-11:30 pm EST): No special program today.
5. Friday, Dec. 27, 2019; 9:30-11 am PST (11:30 am-1 pm CST, 12:30-2 pm EST): We welcome Kim Holder of Moonwards for special updates followed by Space Show news and our annual campaign appeal. Callers welcome on all topics, including those related to this program.
6. Sunday, Dec. 29, 2019; 12-1:30 pm PST (3-4:30 pm EST, 2-3:30 pm CST): We welcome back Thomas A. Olson for his annual review of NewSpace, all commercial space and more, plus NewSpace and Commercial space ahead in 2020. Tom has been providing these reviews for our audience since the start of The Space Show.
Your Space Show Gift Now is Critical to our 2020 Success:
The test flight with no astronauts on board was intended to prove the vehicle’s performance and safety before the first crewed flight. Though many of the rocket and spacecraft systems will be tested, including the return for a parachute landing onto hard ground, the key rendezvous and docking capabilities will not be proven.
It’s likely, however, that NASA will not require Boeing do another uncrewed flight test since a crew would not have been endangered during today’s flight and might have even corrected the problem in time to achieve the orbit needed to rendezvous with the ISS. Nevertheless, the Starliner crew flight will be delayed not just to fix this particular problem but to determine what shortcomings in vehicle development, flight preparation, and management allowed it to happen.
** The Brazilian-Chinese remote sensing satellite CBERS-04A and Ethiopia’s first satellite, ETRSS-1, were launched on Thursday aboard a Long March 4B rocket:
Long March 5 rolls to pad for launch at end of December. The rocket will lift off from Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province on Saturday. Credits: Zhang Gaoxiang/Xinhua
Departing at the exact planned liftoff moment of 5:54:20 a.m. local time, the Soyuz ST-A launcher version flew a four-hour-plus profile to release its multi-satellite payload into Sun-synchronous orbit – beginning with primary passenger COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, then CHEOPS (Characterising Exoplanet Satellite) and three auxiliary payloads: EyeSat, OPS-SAT and ANGELS.
In an interview, Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck said the decision to build the second pad was driven by an anticipated increase in its launch rate. The company carried out six launches of its Electron rocket in 2019 but expects to launch once a month in 2020 and eventually increase to weekly launches.
“The additional pad really gives us the capacity to get down to one launch every week, which is what we’ve always been driving to,” he said. The company current spends about four weeks to recycle the pad between launches, which he said can be shortened to two.
At a recent ceremony marking the completion of the Wallops Island facility, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, interviewed Peter Beck:
I got to have an awesome conversation with Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck talking all about their reusability plans for Electron and all the exciting things they’ll be doing next year! I already have a video that dives into their recovery plans and the history of air launches here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIaDW… Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter at Rocket Lab’s beautiful new factory in Auckland, New Zealand! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9Bn…
Rocket Lab posts highlights from 10 Electron launches:
2019 has been one hell of a year for the Virgin Orbit team. We entered this year with a brilliant team and a lot of cool technology — but there were some really big milestones we still had yet to cross. We hadn’t yet fired our main stage. We had mountains of simulations for how to fly, but hadn’t run though a full mission sequence in software, much less done so with a fully integrated rocket on the test stand. And we hadn’t actually taken off with a fully loaded rocket strapped to its wing. As of today, we’ve done all of that and so, so much more.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than Jan. 11, 2020, for a critical In-Flight Abort Test of the Crew Dragon spacecraft from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, pending U.S. Air Force Eastern Range approval.
As part of the test, SpaceX will configure Crew Dragon to trigger a launch escape shortly after liftoff and demonstrate Crew Dragon’s capability to safely separate from the Falcon 9 rocket in the unlikely event of an in-flight emergency. The demonstration also will provide valuable data toward NASA certifying SpaceX’s crew transportation system for carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
The demonstration of Crew Dragon’s launch escape system is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and is one of the final major tests for the company before NASA astronauts will fly aboard the spacecraft.
The next Falcon 9 launch of 60 SpaceX Starlink broadband Internet satellites is set for January 3rd from Cape Canaveral. The subsequent two flights are set for mid and late January. It appears that SpaceX is hoping to average two Starlink launches per month in 2020. This will be in addition to their usual manifest of customer payloads.
****** Initial stacking of stainless steel rings for the Mk.3 Starship – NASASpaceflight.com
The first rings of Starship Mk3 have undergone a stacking test involving the ring with the “portals/portholes”. It looks like they had some fun with the names too.
Meanwhile, the new production facility is taking shape.
Footage and photos from Mary (@bocachicagal) for NSF.
****** SpaceX Boca Chica Ring Stack Progress Time Lapse – LabPadre
12.19.2019 Time lapse as SpaceX moves a ring into staking position for the first attempted ring stack of MK-3. Workers pin together both rings as they prepare for the welding process. 24/7 stream is powered by LabPadre, in cooperation with Sapphire Condominiums and @BocaChicaMaria1 (Twitter) @SpaceXBocaChica (Facebook). All video images explicitly owned by LabPadre Media.
****** SpaceX Boca Chica New Elevated View Of Starship Rocket Shipyard – LabPadre
12.19.2019 Video shot by Maria Pointer with Esquire Magazine MK3 rings in fast production. Onion tent frame being erected. Fencing/walls being raised. Warning: Loud wind. Video Credit: @BocaChicaMaria1
A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest (find previous space policy roundups here):
** 10 Years of Planned Satellites – Spacecast Ep28
Visualization of 57,000 satellites planned for launch in the next 10 years, based on data from Dan Oltrogge and Sal Alfano of AGI’s research arm, the Center for Space Standards and Innovation. Discussion with Dr. T.S. Kelso (CelesTrak), Anthony Colangelo (Main Engine Cut Off Podcast), and Josh (AGI). Data based on radio frequency spectrum applications submitted to the FCC and ITU. The data and visualization are notional and do not contain precise launch dates or tracks. Business and technical issues may reduce the actual number and timing of planned satellites. Learn more: http://celestrak.com, http://centerforspace.com, http://mainenginecutoff.com.
This image shows one of the gas halos newly observed with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope superimposed to an older image of a galaxy merger obtained with ALMA. The large-scale halo of hydrogen gas is shown in blue, while the ALMA data is shown in orange. The halo is bound to the galaxy, which contains a quasar at its centre. The faint, glowing hydrogen gas in the halo provides the perfect food source for the supermassive black hole at the centre of the quasar. The objects in this image are located at redshift 6.2, meaning they are being seen as they were 12.8 billion years ago. While quasars are bright, the gas reservoirs around them are much harder to observe. But MUSE could detect the faint glow of the hydrogen gas in the halos, allowing astronomers to finally reveal the food stashes that power supermassive black holes in the early Universe.
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have observed reservoirs of cool gas around some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. These gas halos are the perfect food for supermassive black holes at the centre of these galaxies, which are now seen as they were over 12.5 billion years ago. This food storage might explain how these cosmic monsters grew so fast during a period in the Universe’s history known as the Cosmic Dawn.
“We are now able to demonstrate, for the first time, that primordial galaxies do have enough food in their environments to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation,”
says Emanuele Paolo Farina, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who led the research published today in The Astrophysical Journal.
“This adds a fundamental piece to the puzzle that astronomers are building to picture how cosmic structures formed more than 12 billion years ago.”
Astronomers have wondered how supermassive black holes were able to grow so large so early on in the history of the Universe.
“The presence of these early monsters, with masses several billion times the mass of our Sun, is a big mystery,”
says Farina, who is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching bei München.
It means that the first black holes, which might have formed from the collapse of the first stars, must have grown very fast. But, until now, astronomers had not spotted ‘black hole food’ — gas and dust — in large enough quantities to explain this rapid growth.
To complicate matters further, previous observations with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, revealed a lot of dust and gas in these early galaxies that fuelled rapid star formation. These ALMA observations suggested that there could be little left over to feed a black hole.
This illustration depicts a gas halo surrounding a quasar in the early Universe. The quasar, in orange, has two powerful jets and a supermassive black hole at its centre, which is surrounded by a dusty disc. The gas halo of glowing hydrogen gas is represented in blue. A team of astronomers surveyed 31 distant quasars, seeing them as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was still an infant, only about 870 million years old. They found that 12 quasars were surrounded by enormous gas reservoirs: halos of cool, dense hydrogen gas extending 100 000 light years from the central black holes and with billions of times the mass of the Sun. These gas stashes provide the perfect food source to sustain the growth of supermassive black holes in the early Universe.
To solve this mystery, Farina and his colleagues used the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert to study quasars — extremely bright objects powered by supermassive black holes which lie at the centre of massive galaxies. The study surveyed 31 quasars that are seen as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was still an infant, only about 870 million years old. This is one of the largest samples of quasars from this early on in the history of the Universe to be surveyed.
The astronomers found that 12 quasars were surrounded by enormous gas reservoirs: halos of cool, dense hydrogen gas extending 100 000 light years from the central black holes and with billions of times the mass of the Sun. The team, from Germany, the US, Italy and Chile, also found that these gas halos were tightly bound to the galaxies, providing the perfect food source to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation.
The research was possible thanks to the superb sensitivity of MUSE, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, on ESO’s VLT, which Farina says was “a game changer” in the study of quasars.
“In a matter of a few hours per target, we were able to delve into the surroundings of the most massive and voracious black holes present in the young Universe,”
he adds. While quasars are bright, the gas reservoirs around them are much harder to observe. But MUSE could detect the faint glow of the hydrogen gas in the halos, allowing astronomers to finally reveal the food stashes that power supermassive black holes in the early Universe.
In the future, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will help scientists reveal even more details about galaxies and supermassive black holes in the first couple of billion years after the Big Bang.
“With the power of the ELT, we will be able to delve even deeper into the early Universe to find many more such gas nebulae,”
Dr. Courtney Dressing of the University of California at Berkeley gives a public lecture on exoplanets:
The NASA Kepler mission revealed that our Galaxy is teeming with planetary systems and that Earth-sized planets are common. However, most of the planets detected by Kepler orbit stars too faint to permit detailed study. The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS,) launched in 2018, is now finding hundreds of small planets orbiting stars that are much closer and brighter. Dr. Dressing discusses how we find exoplanets, describes the TESS mission, and explains how it (and future projects) will help our understanding of what planets are out there and how they form.
The lecture is one in the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures series organized and moderated by Foothill’s astronomy instructor Andrew Fraknoi and jointly sponsored by the Foothill College Astronomy Department, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute, and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
