In 2019, a few weeks after Trump’s order, Bezos applauded it: “I love this,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.” He was publicly unveiling Blue Origin’s lunar lander, Blue Moon. But, like Trump, Bezos was underestimating the technical challenges. And underestimating Musk. //

If all it took to succeed was a massive amount of money thrown at these projects, Bezos would have easily prevailed long before now. He amassed his many billions long before Musk. He set out a clear plan for Blue Origin in 2012, when Musk was still struggling with the trouble-plagued Tesla launch before he could apply himself to SpaceX. //

How has Musk so clearly surpassed Bezos?
It’s not simply about the hardware; it’s also about people. The differences in the two companies reflect the differences in the two men who own them. Recent revelations about a toxic and bureaucratically crippled workplace at Blue Origin offer some clues, but the cultural divide was baked in from the beginning. Blue Origin followed a conventional aerospace corporate model. SpaceX was far more like a Silicon Valley start-up driven by a charismatic leader. //

Some of the critiques were about contrasting technical choices made by the two companies, but the most consequential cultural differences were directly attributable to their leaders.

First, as was already well known, Musk is a tightwad. SpaceX “had a relentless focus on minimizing costs.” All purchase orders above $10,000 had been approved by Musk himself. Blue Origin, in contrast, was “riddled with poor cost estimating.”

Moreover, SpaceX was a relentless 24/7 operation with 80-hour workweeks, while “Blue is kind of lazy, a ghost town on weekends.” That didn’t mean that SpaceX engineers complained of working in a sweatshop. Quite the reverse: they were highly motivated to get results and, although they were generally paid less than they would have been at Blue Origin, they had Silicon Valley-type incentives like stock options that rewarded top performers. Musk annually culled the bottom 10 percent performers to keep standards high.

Masten Space Systems, which is developing a unique technology that could help spacecraft safely land on the lunar surface. //

To reduce the risk of getting pieces of sharp rock flying at such incredible speeds, Masten's in-Flight Alumina Spray Technique (FAST) landing pads will use ceramic particles injected into the rocket's plumes. That will produce a coating over the regolith as the lander descends toward the lunar surface. In turn, the particles collide with the surface and solidify to build up a secure landing pad.

This implies that spacecraft can land safely anywhere on the Moon without the requirement for a prior mission to build a landing pad.

Full-Scale Model of Apollo 11 12 13 14 Command Module Control Panel (CMCP)

All or nothing. This project will only be funded if it reaches its goal by Tue, September 21 2021 2:03 PM EDT.

Measuring a massive 82" wide, 33" tall, and 7" deep, all representing that same vision of teamwork, peaceful exploration, engineering accomplishment, and pioneering spirit.

"You can now take the controls of a historic NASA spacecraft — literally.

A team of Hollywood prop and visual artists are offering replicas of the Apollo command module control panel. The museum-quality reproduction features every switch, knob and indicator that was used on board the first three missions to land astronauts on the moon and to bring the Apollo 13 crew safely back to Earth.

"It is here where the impossible becomes possible," team leader Mark Lasoff, an Academy Award-winning artist whose credits include the 1995 feature film "Apollo 13," wrote about the control panel. "It is here where humans and machines interface. It is here where every vital operation, including navigation, propulsion, communication and life support is calculated, calibrated and controlled intricately."

"It is both an engineering feat and a work of art," Lasoff wrote of the flight deck." //

Measuring an expansive 82 inches wide, 33 inches tall, and 7 inches deep (208 by 84 by 18 cm), the replica control panel was designed using the original blueprints for the NASA spacecraft. Lasoff and his team also used 3D scans of the Apollo 11 command module produced by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum to verify their details.

http://kck.st/36XvTlG

The Kickstarter campaign is offering the full-scale metal replica for $3,900.

America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed bit thanks to...PDFs?

A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files. //

According to Blue Origin, there are "fundamental issues" with NASA's decision. The company also claims that the agency was supposed to provide multiple awards.

However, the process has been delayed due to PDF problems. PDFs are a proprietary file format created by Adobe used primarily for documents. Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice say there have been a myriad of issues related to the PDF format.

According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. //

Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.

Both Blue Origin and SpaceX agreed to the extension. NASA's contact with SpaceX is currently on pause until Nov. 1 due to the lawsuit. This latest development would seemingly extend that for another week.

Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin, is offering to knock up to $2 billion off the cost of developing a lunar lander and to self-fund a pathfinder mission in exchange for a NASA contract. //

The specific contract in question relates to developing a lunar lander for the Human Landing System program, which aims to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo days. NASA announced in April 2020 that Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics were chosen for the initial phase of the contract, and it was thought that the competition would likely be whittled down to two final companies to build lunar landers. //

But a year later, in a move that veered from historical practice, NASA announced it had selected just one company for the contract: SpaceX. That company, headed by Elon Musk, proposed a $2.89 billion plan for its lander – around half of Blue Origin’s $5.99 billion proposal. Bezos is now offering to cut that price tag by $2 billion. //

26 Jul

I think Elon Musk and SpaceX should indicate they would support the competition with Blue Origin if Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin accepts an HLS contract at the same $2.89B fixed price as was accepted by SpaceX. It was Blue Origin's choice to distribute their HLS development across multiple companies. SpaceX should not be short-changed for deciding to take it all on in-house while also exceeding the HLS requirements in many important future-looking ways. This would clearly show that SpaceX is not afraid of competition and is supportive of increasing the world's options in expanding access to space. It would also show that Blue Origin is not afraid of competition on a truly equal basis. //

Ben Wah
26 Jul

Just says alot how much they thought they could get away with taxpayer's money. ULA's playbook.

Edit: This is Bezos gameplan. When his proposal is rejected, get things stalled just like with the DOD’s JEDI program. It eventually got cancelled cause his complaint kept our warfighters in limbo for years to get ahead of our near-peer adversaries.

Blue Origin and Dynetics are still steaming over NASA’s decision to award only one contract — to SpaceX — to build a Human Landing System for the Artemis program. Their protest of the decision was recently rejected, and now the Government Accountability Office’s arguments, which Blue Origin publicly questioned, are available for all to read. Here are a few highlights from the point-by-point takedown of the losing companies’ complaints. //

Even had several of the decisions been successfully challenged, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, the report explains.

SpaceX received the following evaluation totals:

• Technical: 3 significant strengths; 10 strengths; 6 weaknesses; and 1 significant weakness
• Management: 2 significant strengths; 3 strengths; and 2 weaknesses

While Blue Origin received the following:

• Technical: 13 strengths; 14 weaknesses; and 2 significant weaknesses
• Management: 1 significant strength; 2 strengths; and 6 weaknesses //

…Even allowing for the possibility that the protesters could prevail on some small subset of their challenges to NASA’s evaluation, the record reflects that NASA’s evaluation was largely reasonable, and the relative competitive standing of the offerors under the non-price factors would not materially change…

The protests are denied.

Editor's Note: Aug. 3, NASA issued a statement over social media sharing that the space station "was 45° out of attitude when Nauka's thrusters were still firing & loss of control was discussed with the crew. Further analysis showed total attitude change before regaining normal attitude control was ~540°. Station is in good shape & operating normally." //

According to the report, Scoville took over mission control after the docking. It was actually his day off, but he was on site because he'd helped to prepare for the module docking and wanted to see how it went. He ended up taking over from the previous lead, Gregory Whitney, who had a meeting to attend, after docking, thinking it would be smooth sailing from there. But soon, a caution warning lit up.

"We had two messages — just two lines of code — saying that something was wrong," Scoville said.

After initially thinking the message could perhaps be a mistake, he told The New York Times, he soon realized that it was not and that Nauka was not only firing its thrusters, but that it was trying to actually pull away from the space station that it had just docked with. And he was soon told that the module could only receive direct commands from a ground station in Russia, which the space station wouldn't pass over for over an hour.

The crew, working together with ground teams, helped to counteract Nauka's thrusters by counter-firing thrusters on the Russian module Zvezda and Progress cargo ship. Additionally, 15 minutes after starting to fire, Nauka's thrusters stopped, though Scoville said he didn't know why the thrusters did so.

But this combined series of events and counteractive measures allowed the team to get the station to stop moving and return to its correct position.

"After doing that back flip one-and-a-half times around, it stopped and then went back the other way," Scoville told the New York Times.

A Cornell University geneticist posits that life discovered on the red planet might have actually originated on earth in NASA labs, despite thorough on-site cleaning procedures and spacecraft assembly in specialized rooms. //

Amid the latest exploration and search for life on Mars, a Cornell scientist wonders what humans could have accidentally “carried into space and survived the trip to make its new home on Mars”

"Microbes have been on Earth for billions of years, and they are everywhere," Mason wrote.

“They are inside us, on our bodies, and all around us. Some can sneak through even the cleanest of clean rooms.” //

"It turns out that clean rooms might serve as an evolutionary selection process for the hardiest bugs that then may have a greater chance of surviving a journey to Mars," Mason wrote.

Researchers' findings, according to Mason, might cause what is called "forward contamination." Forward contamination is where travelers take something intentionally or unintentionally from one planet to another. Mason adds that new organisms "can wreak havoc" on a new ecosystem.

A senior lawmaker proposed a controversial piece of legislation on Wednesday that directs NASA to pick a second company to build the agency’s next Moon landers — in addition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was awarded a $2.9 billion NASA contract to build a lander earlier this year. The bill hasn’t passed the full Senate yet, but it marks a new front in an ongoing effort to overturn or rejig NASA’s decision. It also sets up the first political challenge for NASA’s new administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson. //

Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin and Dynetics. Those companies lodged formal protests against NASA’s decision, triggering a procedural pause on SpaceX’s new contract. Among other things, the protests maintain that NASA should have picked two firms instead of one.

Amid a lobbying effort from Blue Origin, those calls have found their way into a NASA authorization bill, proposed as an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee overseeing NASA. Cantwell represents Blue Origin’s home state of Washington. Under Cantwell’s language, NASA would be required to reopen the competition within 30 days and allow it to use $10 billion of its budget to pick a second lunar lander provider.

Before choosing SpaceX, NASA had been expected to pick two companies, a strategy that guaranteed a backup in case one lander fell behind. But the agency went only with SpaceX — its bid was half of Blue Origin’s — after funding shortfalls from Congress. “It was in NASA’s best interest, along with the budget that was there, for us to award to one,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders, who led the decision to pick SpaceX, said last month.

Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity. //

The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause—the solar system's border with interstellar space—into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (plasma waves), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.

Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. "It's very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth," Ocker said. "We're detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas."

This work allows scientists to understand how the interstellar medium interacts with the solar wind, Ocker said, and how the protective bubble of the solar system's heliosphere is shaped and modified by the interstellar environment. //

Voyager 1 left Earth carrying a Golden Record created by a committee chaired by the late Cornell professor Carl Sagan, as well as mid-1970s technology. To send a signal to Earth, it took 22 watts, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The craft has almost 70 kilobytes of computer memory and—at the beginning of the mission—a data rate of 21 kilobits per second.

Due to the 14-billion-mile distance, the communication rate has since slowed to 160-bits-per-second, or about half a 300-baud rate.

With Collins' death, only 10 of the 24 humans who have flown into deep space remain alive: Collins' colleague on the Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin, as well as Bill Anders, Frank Borman, Charlie Duke, Fred Haise, Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, Harrison Schmitt, David Scott, and Tom Stafford.

Judith Love Cohen was a tenacious engineer. This fact check is just a tribute.

When NASA astronauts return to the Moon in a few years, they will do so inside a lander that dwarfs that of the Apollo era. SpaceX's Starship vehicle measures 50 meters from its nose cone to landing legs. By contrast, the cramped Lunar Module that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the Moon in 1969 stood just 7 meters tall.

This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024. //

NASA awarded SpaceX $2.89 billion for these two missions. But this contract would balloon in amount should NASA select SpaceX to fly recurring lunar missions later in the 2020s. And it has value to SpaceX and NASA in myriad other ways. Perhaps most significantly, with this contract NASA has bet on a bold future of exploration. Until now, the plans NASA had contemplated for human exploration in deep space all had echoes of the Apollo program. NASA talked about "sustainable" missions and plans in terms of cost, but they were sustainable in name only.

By betting on Starship, which entails a host of development risks, NASA is taking a chance on what would be a much brighter future. One in which not a handful of astronauts go to the Moon or Mars, but dozens and then hundreds. In this sense, Starship represents a radical departure for NASA and human exploration.

"If Starship meets the goals Elon Musk has set for it, Starship getting this contract is like the US government supporting the railroads in the old west here on Earth," said Rick Tumlinson, a proponent of human settlement of the Solar System. "It is transformational to degrees no one today can understand." //

"One of the hardest engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket," SpaceX founder Elon Musk told me about a year ago. "It's stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system."

Because there are so many technological miracles needed to validate the Starship design, I felt that NASA would not fully commit to the SpaceX vehicle as a potential lander until it had flown. Perhaps launching Starship into orbit would be enough of a technology demonstration for NASA. Or maybe SpaceX would have to land one on the Moon. This perceived need to demonstrate the viability of Starship is one reason why Musk and SpaceX have built and launched Starships at such a frenetic pace in South Texas during the last year. Only by doing, the thinking went, would NASA believe in Starship.

Instead, NASA has committed to the ambitious program even before Starship has safely landed after a high-altitude flight test. In this sense, NASA's support for Starship has come ahead of schedule. //

Consider the status quo. The large Space Launch System rocket under development by NASA will be able to launch 95 metric tons into low Earth orbit. NASA and its contractors, led by Boeing, will be able to build one a year. The expendable vehicle will launch one payload, at a cost about $2 billion per mission, and then drop into the ocean.

In terms of lift capacity, the vehicles are similar. Starship and Super Heavy should be able to put about 100 tons into low Earth orbit. However, SpaceX is already capable of building one Starship a month, and the plan is to reuse each booster and spacecraft dozens of times. Imagine the kind of space program NASA could have with the capacity to launch 100 tons into orbit every two weeks—instead of a single annual mission—for $2 billion a year. Seriously, pause a moment and really think about that. //

"In picking the Starship architecture, NASA is helping enable a path toward a super heavy launch vehicle, in-space propellant storage, in-space refueling, and large up and down mass to planetary surfaces," said Tripathi, who has examined these problems from both NASA and SpaceX's perspective.

Put another way: if Starship is successful, NASA no longer needs to pick just one or two big things to do in space. The agency will be able to do many different things at the same time.

In three months, NASA will come upon the 10th anniversary of the final space shuttle flight, a period that was surely melancholy for the space agency.

When the big, white, winged vehicles touched down for the final time in July 2011, NASA surrendered its ability to get humans into space. It had to rely on Russia for access to the International Space Station. And the space agency had to fight the public perception that NASA was somehow a fading force, heading into the sunset.

Now we know that will not be the case, and the future appears bright for the space agency and its international partners. On Friday morning, NASA and SpaceX launched the third mission of Crew Dragon that has carried astronauts into space. After nearly a decade with no human orbital launches from the United States, there have been three in less than 11 months. Another successful mission further confirmed that the combination of Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft is a reliable means of getting crews to the International Space Station. //

The "team" is a collaboration between engineers at NASA and SpaceX that have worked to develop and certify the Crew Dragon system for human spaceflight for a fixed price of about $55 million per seat. Since 2017, NASA had been paying Russia more than $80 million for an astronaut to ride into orbit.

The partnership has also been very good for SpaceX, which has sought to develop rapid, low-cost access to space through reusable vehicles. Thanks to NASA's flexibility, SpaceX launched Monday's mission on a Falcon 9 rocket that flew in November and on a Crew Dragon vehicle, Endeavour, that first went into space last May. //

With the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, SpaceX has gotten mostly there. However, the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage is expended after a launch, and the Dragon capsules undergo significant refurbishment between flights. Musk sees this launch system as an interim stage to full reuse, and SpaceX is still learning lessons. The company has already flown one of its Falcon 9 first stages nine times and will soon fly it a tenth time. The plan is to push the limits of the Falcon 9 with the company's own Starlink missions, Musk said.

"There doesn’t seem to be any obvious limits to the reusability of the vehicle," he said. "We intend to fly the Falcon 9 rocket until we see some kind of failure."

These lessons will be incorporated into SpaceX's next-generation Starship and Super Heavy launch system, which is designed to be fully reusable and able to launch again within days of landing. That's the aspirational goal, at least. NASA seems intrigued, as it recently selected Starship to land its astronauts on the Moon later this decade as part of the Artemis Program.

NASA's Perseverance rover just notched another first on Mars, one that may help pave the way for astronauts to explore the Red Planet someday.

The rover successfully used its MOXIE instrument to generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere for the first time, demonstrating technology that could both help astronauts breathe and help propel the rockets that get them back home to Earth.

The MOXIE milestone occurred on Tuesday (April 20), just one day after Perseverance watched over another epic Martian first — the first Mars flight of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which rode to the Red Planeton the rover's belly.

"This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement today (April 21). "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars." //

The toaster-sized MOXIE (short for "Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment") produces oxygen from carbon dioxide, expelling carbon monoxide as a waste product. The conversion process occurs at temperatures around 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius), so MOXIE is made of heat-tolerant materials and features a thin gold coating to keep potentially damaging heat from radiating outward into Perseverance's body.

The MOXIE team warmed the instrument up for two hours yesterday, then had it crank out oxygen for an hour. MOXIE produced 5.4 grams of oxygen during that span, about enough to keep an astronaut breathing easily for 10 minutes, NASA officials said.

That first effort didn't max MOXIE out; it can generate about 10 grams of oxygen per hour. The instrument may reach such levels eventually, for the team plans to conduct about nine more runs over the course of one Mars year (about 687 Earth days).

Starship SN15 is expected to undergo a Static Fire test as early as Tuesday to clear the path for a test flight no earlier than Wednesday as SpaceX’s rapidly reusable interplanetary launch and landing system gained a massive sign of NASA approval – and a ton of government cash to boot.

SpaceX was the sole winner of NASA’s initial Human Landing System (HLS) award worth in total more than $2.9 billion, meaning the human return to the Moon’s surface will be via Starship.

SpaceX recently inked a deal with NASA to move any of the company's Starlink internet satellites out of the way if they stray too close to the International Space Station or other agency spacecraft.

The Space Act Agreement, which was signed on March 18, will help maintain and improve space safety, NASA officials said.

SpaceX has launched more than 1,400 of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit to date. Following the first operational Starlink launch in 2019, the company has tweaked the satellites' design, providing upgrades intended to reduce their reflectivity, enable them to communicate with each other on orbit and even maneuver out of the way if necessary.

The SUV-sized pallet of old batteries is the most massive object the station has ever jettisoned.

The International Space Station got a little lighter last week.

The orbiting lab discarded a 2.9-ton (2.6 metric tons) pallet of used batteries on Thursday morning (March 11) — the most massive object it has ever jettisoned, NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo.

The space junk is expected to fall back to Earth in two to four years, agency officials wrote in an update last week. That update also stated that the pallet will burn up "harmlessly in the atmosphere," but not everyone is convinced that's the case.

The red planet's red looks different to a robot with hyperspectral cameras for eyes. //

Those colors are a geological infographic. They represent time, laid down in layers, stratum after stratum, epoch after epoch. And they represent chemistry. NASA scientists pointing cameras at them—the right kind of cameras—will be able to tell what minerals they’re looking at and maybe whether wee Martian beasties once called those sediments home. “If there are sedimentary rocks on Mars that preserve evidence of any ancient biosphere, this is where we’re going to find them,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the principal investigator on one of the rover’s sets of eyes. “This is where they should be.” //

That’s what they’re looking for. But that’s not what they’ll see. Because some of the most interesting colors in that real-life, 50-meter infographic are invisible. At least they would be to you and me, on Earth. Colors are what happens when light bounces off or around or through something and then hits an eye. But the light on Mars is a little different than the light on Earth. And Perseverance’s eyes can see light we humans can’t—light made of reflected X-rays or infrared or ultraviolet. The physics are the same; the perception isn’t.