In Today’s Deep Space Extra… The Plant Habitat-04 experiment aboard the International Space Station expands variety of space food. Hubble still in safe mode while NASA works to understand why the observatory stopped operations on October 25.

 

Human Space Exploration

The commercial space station race
Coalition Members in the News – Axiom Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Nanoracks
The Space Review (11/1): With an estimated audience of 5,000, last week’s International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Dubai sparked the sharing of details about plans for commercial space stations prepared to succeed the International Space Station (ISS), which this week marked the 21st anniversary of continuous human occupation. Just ahead of the conference, Nanoracks, Voyager Space Holdings and Lockheed Martin unveiled a freeflyer concept called Starlab. Four days later, Blue Origin, Boeing, Redwire, and Sierra Space unveiled their concept, Orbital Reef. Those join first-out Axiom Space with a private space station strategy. Funding from Congress, it appears, will pace future progress.

NASA, Space Force see growing opportunities to use commercial space services
Coalition Members in the News – Axiom Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Nanoracks
SpaceNews.com (11/2): Core elements of human space exploration will come down in cost thanks to industry competition, said Alex McDonald, NASA’s chief economist, as part of a virtual TechCrunch panel discussion on Tuesday. He cited recent efforts by three private sector partnerships to establish commercial successors to the NASA-led International Space Station (ISS). “It should not be a rivalry between private or government-developed ideas,” according to MacDonald. “It’s about having a multiplicity of cultures and of course, a multiplicity of cultures also means that there’s going to be different approaches to funding, which I think we’re also going to need.” While the Pentagon has not yet embraced the concept in the same way as NASA, the new U.S. Space Force is looking to move in that direction, according to Gen. David Thompson, Space Force vice chief of space operations, told forum participants.

Astronauts harvest green chile peppers and eat ‘best space tacos yet’ in NASA first
USA Today (11/2): Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have added Hatch chiles to the Romaine lettuce and Chinese cabbage fresh foods they’ve been able to grow in space as part of a Plant Habitat-04 experiment to improve their dietary nutrition options. To celebrate they recently added the fresh peppers grown from seeds that arrived in June to some tacos.

 

Space Science

James Webb: Hubble telescope successor faces ‘two weeks of terror’
Coalition Member in the News – Northrop Grumman
BBC (11/2): Scheduled for launch on December 18 atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) faces a dramatic start to a planned five-to-ten-year mission as it unfolds and deploys solar panels, communications antennas, a tennis court-sized sunshield and a large multi segmented primary mirror. The JWST, the most complex space observatory ever developed, is to study the earliest stars and galaxies in infrared light and scan the atmospheres of exoplanets for signs of biomarkers. The observatory is a long- running joint project led by NASA in partnership with the Canadian and European space agencies.

Instruments on Hubble in safe mode; NASA trying to understand why
Arstechnica.com (11/2): The aging Hubble Space Telescope remained in an extended safe mode on Tuesday due to a previous science instrument anomaly. The issue, initially temporarily resolved, tracks back to October 23. After a brief recovery, the difficulties re-surfaced two days later. The instrumentation has been left in safe mode as engineers pursue an explanation and longer term recovery.

How a small, distant space telescope can solve astrophysical mysteries big ones can’t
The Space Review (11/1): Michael Zemcov, a physicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, explains the potential merits of a small space telescope located beyond Saturn. Its observations could help to explain how matter condensed into the first stars and galaxies. It could use the sun as a gravitational lens to map planets in distant solar systems. The small observatory could search for planets that escaped the gravitational forces of their parent stars.

Here comes a Cannibal CME
Spaceweather.com (11/2): On Tuesday the sun launched another Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), one moving out and swallowing up two previous CMEs. Once the CME reaches the Earth, it could spark potentially strong geomagnetic activity on Thursday, according to the forecast.

 

Other News

China launches remote-sensing satellite group
Xinhuanet of China (11/3): China launched a group of remote sensing satellites on Wednesday aboard a Long March-2C rocket. (Editor’s note: Xinhuanet is a Chinese government-owned news source).