In Today’s Deep Space Extra… Insight into Elon Musk’s plans to settle the red planet. Orbital ATK’s modified Antares launch vehicle successfully lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility last night on a NASA contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station.
Human Deep Space Exploration
Why Elon Musk’s Mars vision needs ‘some real imagination’
Bloomberg.com (10/17): Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who examined the human settlement of Mars in a well known trilogy, assesses SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s plans to settle the red planet. “Mars will never be a single-person or single-company effort. It will be multi-national and take lots of money and lots of years,” notes Robinson. The human desire to explore Mars, however, is genuine, Robinson tells Bloomberg.
Donald Trump to meet with Florida space officials Monday
Orlando Sentinel (10/17): Presidential contender Donald Trump plans to tour NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and meet with Florida space industry leaders on Monday. The invitation was extended to the Trump campaign by the economic development commission of Florida’s space coast and coordinated with Space Florida, the state aerospace economic development agency. The meetings are intended to show the candidate how space contributes to the overall U. S. economy.
Enabling a Mars settlement strategy with the Hercules reusable Mars lander
The Space Review (10/17): A lander concept known as Hercules, a multi-functional, single-stage reusable vehicle, could act as a shuttle to move cargo and humans between Mars orbit and the planet’s surface. By using oxygen and methane propellants produced from Martian resources at a red planet base, Hercules could become part of a strategy to establish a long term human presence on Mars, writes John Strickland, an independent space and energy analyst.
Space Science
Science (10/18): Wednesday marks landing day for Schiaparelli, a European Space Agency lander, that launched to Mars in March as part of a longer running joint mission with Russia to seek evidence for life on the red planet. Schiaparelli, which shared a Russian launch with the Trace Gas Orbiter, will test technologies for a more ambitious rover slated to launch to Mars in four years. Few Martian spacecraft have survived the risky landing phase.
What Are Curiosity and Opportunity Up To?
Sky and Telescope (10/17): ExoMars, a joint European and Russian mission to deliver the Trace Gas Orbiter and Schiaparelli lander to the red planet, is in the final days of the outbound journey from Earth. Among the spacecraft currently at Mars to greet them are NASA’s Curiosity and Opportunity surface rovers. Though slowed by aging, Opportunity continues to function more than 12 years into what was to be a 90-day mission. Curiosity is more than four years into an extended mission. Both seek signs that Mars once had a habitable environment and for how long.
Maven takes this trippy, night glowing photo of Mars in UV
Space.com (10/17): Very thin and mostly CO2, the Martian atmosphere has a signature. NASA’s Maven Orbiter is observing those qualities in ultraviolet wavelengths. Maven’s mission is to help experts understand how the red planet lost a once thicker atmosphere that contributed to a warmer, wetter environment that may have been hospitable to biological activity.
Venus: inhospitable, and perhaps instructional
New York Times (10/17): Though about the same size as the Earth, Venus rotates in the opposite direction and hosts temperatures and wind velocities so high it’s not considered hospitable. Yet there’s much about Earth’s neighbor that could explain life here. The Japanese planetary science mission, Akatsuki, is looking for revelations.
Commercial to Low Earth Orbit
Orbital ATK resumes flight from Wallops Island, Va., in a stunning launch visible for miles
Washington Post (10/17): Orbital ATK’s modified Antares launch vehicle lifted off successfully from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility on Monday at 7:45 p.m. EDT, on a NASA contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station. The mission marks the first for Orbital ATK from Wallops Island since the Oct. 28, 2014 Antares launch vehicle explosion moments after liftoff. The latest flight, Orbital’s sixth under the NASA contract, is to deliver 5,100 pounds of crew supplies, science experiments and technology demonstration hardware to the ISS. A rendezvous with the space station is planned for early Sunday, two days after a Russian Soyuz crew transport delivers three new U.S. and Russian crew members to the orbiting science lab. Antares returns to flight powered by Russian RD-181 rocket engines.
Suborbital
The Space Review (10/18): Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic seem to be the primary survivors of a once thriving contest to develop commercial suborbital space systems. At the turn of the century, the Ansari X-Prize competition, ultimately won in 2004 by Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne, spawned two dozen contestants. Earlier this month during presentations at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, it was evident both companies are making progress in their efforts to develop commercial passenger spaceflight services without racing.