Monthly Archives: January 2018

Activism, Space Policy, SpaceCasts

The Space Show this week – Jan.22.2018

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The guests and topics of discussion on The Space Show this week:

1. Monday, Jan.22- Jan.26 No shows due to Space Show moving.

2.  Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018: Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details. Hotel Mars is pre-recorded by John Batchelor. It is archived on The Space Show site after John posts it on his website.

3. Sunday, Jan. 28, 2018: 12-1:30 pm PST; 2-4:30 pm EST; 2-3:30 pm CST. Dr. George Sowers, formerly a VP and Chief Scientist at United Launch Alliance, is our guest. Now with The Colorado School of Mines, we will be talking about a variety of timely issues.

See also:
* The Space Show on Vimeo – webinar videos
* The Space Show’s Blog – summaries of interviews.
* The Space Show Classroom Blog – tutorial programs

The Space Show is a project of the One Giant Leap Foundation.

The Space Show - David Livingston
David Livingston
Rockets

Videos: Rocket launches in New Zealand, USA, China and Japan in one week

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Several orbital launches happened in the past week. Here are videos of some of them:

** Rocket Lab, a small company based in the US and New Zealand, had its first successful orbital launch over the weekend with its second Electron rocket.  (liftoff at about 15 minutes into the video):

The Electron, built using carbon composite structures and 3D printing technologies, was developed solely with private investment. The three satellites orbited by the vehicle belonged to two private companies: Planet and Spire Global.

** United Launch Alliance put a US Air Force missile early warning satellite into orbit on Friday:

** Chinese Long March 11 rocket put 9 small satellites into orbit on Friday as well :

This was the fourth orbital launch in China this month.

** Japan’s Epsilon rocket on Jan.17th put a radar earth observation satellite into orbit:

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Living in Space, Space industry and microgravity R&D, SpaceCasts

Videos: “Space to Ground” ISS report – Jan.19.2018

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Here is the latest Space to Ground report from NASA on activities related to the International Space Station:

And a video about a muscle tissue experiment on the ISS:

Plus a couple of Time-Lapse Videos from NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth:

** Atlantic Ocean to Kazakhstan

This video was taken by the Expedition 53 crew on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots were taken on November 5, 2017 from 22:29:56 to 23:03:24 GMT, on a pass from the South Atlantic Ocean to Kazakhstan. The video begins with a calm, dark sky and the moon’s reflection lingering on the tops of clouds and the ocean surface. While travelling over Africa, the ISS passes several lightning storms that flash below like paparazzi. The lightning subsides when the ISS reaches the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Zagros Mountains that curve around off the coastline. The pass continues over Central Asia and Kazakhstan with heavy clouds, ending just before sunrise.

** Spectacular Aurora Borealis over Canada

This video was taken by the Expedition 53 crew on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken on September 28, 2017 from 07:38:56 to 07:55:34 GMT, on a pass from the northern Pacific Ocean, just south of Alaska, to the Gulf of Mexico, south of Florida. The north-facing camera catches the Aurora Borealis over Canada as the ISS travels from northwestern United States southeast. Large cities like Chicago, Nashville, and Atlanta stand out as the ISS flies southeast toward Florida.

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Amateur/Student Satellite, Education

Student satellite projects

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It’s becoming increasingly common for students in colleges as well as in grade schools and high schools to built small satellites and see them go into space before they graduate. Here is a story about one such project in Oregon: Student Satellite …. Radio | OPB

The Oregon Small Satellite Project is an ad hoc group of students and educators working on a nano-satellite or “cubesat” to hand off to NASA to launch into space next year. Andrew Greenberg is the faculty advisor for the Portland State Aerospace Society, the group heading up the project. He joins us to talk about the project and its mission.  

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The basic IU CubeSat is 10 cm to a side:

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Chinese students are also getting involved: China to launch first student satellite for scientific education – Xinhua | English.news.cn

China’s first nano-satellite with primary and middle school students involved in the development and building process will be launched into space Friday.

The satellite, named after late Premier Zhou Enlai, was sent from its production base in Huai’an Youth Comprehensive Development Base in east China’s Jiangsu Province to Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province Monday, where a CZ-11 solid fuel rocket is scheduled to put it into orbit Friday.

Twenty teenagers who participated in the development project accompanied the transport group to the launch center and will witness the lift-off.

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A smallsat built and operated by a student team in Colorado helped solve a mystery of the earth’s radiation belts: How A CU Student Satellite Solved A Major Space Mystery | Boulder, CO Patch

The CubeSat mission, called the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE), houses a small, energetic particle telescope to measure the flux of solar energetic protons and Earth’s radiation belt electrons. Launched in 2012, CSSWE has involved more than 65 CU Boulder students and was operated for more than two years from a ground station they built on the roof of a LASP building on campus.

The instrument on CSSWE, called the Relativistic, Electron and Proton Telescope integrated little experiment (REPTile), is a smaller version of REPT, twin instruments developed by a CU Boulder team led by LASP director and Nature paper co-author Daniel Baker that were launched on NASA’s 2012 Van Allen Probes mission.

“This is really a beautiful result and a big insight derived from a remarkably inexpensive student satellite, illustrating that good things can come in small packages,” said Baker. “It’s a major discovery that has been there all along, a demonstration that Yogi Berra was correct when he remarked ‘You can observe a lot just by looking.'”

“These results reveal, for the first time, how energetic charged particles in the near-Earth space environment are created,” said Irfan Azeem, a program director in the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences.

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While not as challenging or time consuming as building a real satellite, this lesson plan on making a satellite model is nevertheless quite instructive for students: Build a Satellite Activity | NASA/JPL Edu.

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Rockets, Space books, Space business

Space books: “Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight” by Joe Pappalardo

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Joe Pappalardo, an editor at Popular Mechanics who often reports on space topics, has written the book, Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight. He discusse the many NewSpace developments of the past several years and looks especially at the emergence of commercial launch facilities:

Is there a future in orbit? This timely book reveals the state of spaceflight at a crucial juncture in the industry’s history.

It’s the 21st-century and everything about the space industry is changing. Rather than despair over the end of American manned missions and a moribund commercial launch market, private sector companies are now changing the way humanity accesses orbit. Upstarts including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are building a dizzying array of new spacecraft and rockets, not just for government use, but for any paying customer. At the heart of this space revolution are spaceports, the center and literal launching pads of spaceflight. Spaceports cost hundreds of millions of dollars, face extreme competition, and host operations that do not tolerate failures―which can often be fatal.

Aerospace journalist Joe Pappalardo has witnessed space rocket launches around the world, from the jungle of French Guiana to the coastline of California. In his comprehensive work Spaceport Earth, Pappalardo describes the rise of private companies in the United States and how they are reshaping the way the world is using space for industry and science. Spaceport Earth is a travelogue through modern space history as it is being made, offering space enthusiasts, futurists, and technology buffs a close perspective of rockets and launch sites, and chronicling the stories of industrial titans, engineers, government officials, billionaires, schemers, and politicians who are redefining what it means for humans to be a spacefaring species.

Here is a review of the book Review: Spaceport Earth – The Space Review.

And this is an entertaining interview with the author: John Batchelor Show – Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight by Joe Pappalardo. PART 1 of 4: Texas and there billionaire rocketeers. @PappalardoJoe

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