Lifeboat Foundation

FP Trending Sep 02, 2020 12:48:13 IST

SpaceX postponed the launch date of its next batch of Starlink satellites to 3 September. The space firm was going to loft the 60 satellites aboard the Falcon 9 rocket yesterday morning.

The official handle of Elon Musk’s company tweeted about the delay, saying the team will be utilising the extra time to review data. Now the launch from Launch Complex 39A has been set at 6.16 pm IST (8.46 am EDT) on 3 September.

Featured Image Source: SpaceX

SpaceX is building Starship in South Texas at Boca Chica Beach. The aerospace company’s founder Chief Engineer Elon Musk envisions developing a fully reusable Starship capable of transporting one hundred passengers to Mars. During the Humans To Mars conference on Monday, he shared SpaceX will have to conduct ‘hundreds of missions’ before launching astronauts aboard. – “We’ve got to first make the thing work. […] Do hundreds of missions with satellites before we put people on board,” he said.

Multiple stainless-steel Starship prototypes are under assembly and undergoing testing at a small village where Musk envisions building the ‘Gateway to Mars’ spaceport. Last month, SpaceX successfully conducted a low-altitude test flight of a scaled-down Starship prototype. The vehicle soared 150-meters off the ground powered by a single Raptor engine. The company aims to make flying stainless-steel vehicles routine in Texas before attempting to launch a Starship prototype to orbit. “We’re making good progress. The thing that we’re really making progress on with Starship is the production system,” Musk told the conference’s host. “The thing that really impedes progress on Starship is the production system … A year ago, there was almost nothing there and now we’ve got quite a lot of production capability. So, we’re rapidly making more and more ships.”

‘Megaconstellations’ of satellites increasingly launching into orbit around Earth will contaminate the data astronomers collect — and profoundly shift humanity’s view of the night skies. That’s the conclusion of the most detailed assessment yet of how these satellite networks, launched by companies including Amazon and SpaceX, might affect astronomical observations from Earth.

Most detailed report yet about the impact of giant satellite clusters says damage to observations is unavoidable — and offers mitigation strategies. Most detailed report yet about the impact of giant satellite clusters says damage to observations is unavoidable.

While SpaceX didn’t pull off a doubleheader Sunday launch like it planned, the company still managed a rare feat. Instead of launching eastward like every other Cape Canaveral rocket, the Falcon 9 headed south toward Cuba, close to populated areas on Florida’s coast (via The Verge). The “SAOCOM 1B” mission marks the first such “polar launch” from Florida since 1969, made possible by a special Air Force exemption for SpaceX.

Satellites bound for polar orbits (where a satellite passes over both the North and South Poles), usually launch from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. That way, they can head due south directly over the ocean without passing over any populated areas. By contrast, flights from Florida always head east over open seas, as southbound flights have been off-limits due to the presence of cities like West Palm Beach below.

Adapting the Intelligence Community

As machines become the primary collectors, analysts, consumers, and targets of intelligence, the entire U.S. intelligence community will need to evolve. This evolution must start with enormous investments in AI and autonomization technology as well as changes to concepts of operations that enable agencies to both process huge volumes of data and channel the resulting intelligence directly to autonomous machines. As practically everything becomes connected via networks that produce some form of electromagnetic signature or data, signals intelligence in particular will need to be a locus of AI evolution. So will geospatial intelligence. As satellites and other sensors proliferate, everything on earth will soon be visible at all times from above, a state that the federal research and development center Aerospace has called the “GEOINT Singularity.” To keep up with all this data, geospatial intelligence, like signals intelligence, will need to radically enhance its AI capabilities.

The U.S. intelligence community is currently split up into different functions that collect and analyze discrete types of intelligence, such as signals or geospatial intelligence. The RIA may force the intelligence community to reassess whether these divisions still make sense. Electromagnetic information is electromagnetic information, whether it comes from a satellite or an Internet of Things device. The distinction in origin matters little if no human ever looks at the raw data, and an AI system can recognize patterns in all of the data at once. The division between civilian and military intelligence will be similarly eroded, since civilian infrastructure, such as telecommunications systems, will be just as valuable to military objectives as military communications systems. Given these realities, separating intelligence functions may impede rather than aid intelligence operations.

Live coverage: Rocket Lab launches Capella’s first commercial radar satellite – Spaceflight Now.

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1 on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand carrying Capella Space’s Sequoia radar remote sensing satellite. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

Continue reading “Rocket Lab returns to service with successful launch for Capella” »

SpaceX launched Argentina’s SAOCOM 1B radar observation satellite from Cape Canaveral at 7:18 p.m. EDT (2318 GMT) Sunday.

A Falcon 9 rocket headed toward the south on a trajectory hugging the Florida East Coast on the first flight into polar orbit from Cape Canaveral since 1969, and the first stage booster returned to the spaceport for an onshore landing minutes after liftoff.

Continuing coverage: https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/2020\/08\/30\/falcon-9-saocom-1b-mission-status-center\/

Up to three launches planned this weekend from Cape Canaveral – Spaceflight Now.

Delays have set up the possibility of up to three rocket launches this weekend from different pads along Florida’s Space Coast, including two SpaceX missions on Sunday that could set a company record for the shortest span between two Falcon 9 rocket launches.

But in the world of ever-changing launch schedules, numerous factors such as weather and technical issues could thwart launch plans this weekend.

Continue reading “Up to three launches planned this weekend from Cape Canaveral” »

A NASA geophysics satellite’s long space odyssey is nearly at an end.

The Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1 spacecraft, or OGO-1, launched in September 1964 to study Earth’s magnetic environment and how our planet interacts with the sun. The satellite gathered data until 1969, was officially decommissioned in 1971 and has been zooming silently around Earth on a highly elliptical two-day orbit ever since.