Lifeboat Foundation

Potential for small science missions … “Small satellites will play a crucial role in science and exploration, as well as providing communications and navigation infrastructure to support returning humans to the Moon,” Rocket Lab head honcho Peter Beck said. “They play a vital role as pathfinders to retire risk and lay down infrastructure for future missions. We think this could be useful for CubeSat science around the Moon or possibly communications relay capability on the cheap.” (submitted by 3ch0 and ADU)

Firefly considering AR1 engine for its Beta rocket. Firefly Aerospace has said it is collaborating with engine-maker Aerojet Rocketdyne to increase the performance of its upcoming Alpha launch vehicle, and the company is also considering Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine for a future launch vehicle, SpaceNews reports. In a statement, Firefly CEO Tom Markusic praised the AR1 as an engine well suited for Beta but stopped short of saying the engine’s selection is a done deal.

How far along is AR1 really? … Markusic: “Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine, which incorporates the latest advances in propulsion technology, materials science, and manufacturing techniques, is incredibly well-suited to power Beta given its cost-effective, high-performance capabilities.” It is not at all clear to us how close Aerojet is to completing and qualifying the AR1 engine. It also seems like Firefly should get Alpha up and running before it worries too much about the larger Beta rocket. (submitted by Unrulycow)

X, the private spaceflight company known for reusable rockets and a giant, shiny Starship, will begin offering its own satellite internet service in 2020, according to SpaceNews. In fact, the U.S. Air Force is already testing it in planes.

To build the service, SpaceX will have to launch up to eight Falcon 9 rockets filled with the company’s Starlink satellites, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told SpaceNews and other reporters this week at the 70th International Astronautical Congress in Washington.

“We’ll continue to upgrade the network until mid to late next year,” SpaceNews’ Jeff Foust quoted Shotwell as saying during a media roundtable on Tuesday (Oct. 22). “We’re hoping for 24 launches by the end of the year.”

Smallsat launcher Rocket Lab has announced its ambition to begin missions to the Moon in the near-future, using a new satellite launch platform it has developed called Photon.

Announced today at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington D.C., Rocket Lab – which current flies its Electron rocket from New Zealand and will begin launching from a U.S. site next year – said Photon would enable small spacecraft to reach lunar orbit or conduct lunar flybys.

Photon is an evolution of the company’s existing kick stage that is used to deploy satellites in orbit, including on the company’s ninth launch last week, which saw them deploy a satellite to their highest altitude yet. It fits into the existing Electron rocket and is essentially its own standalone spacecraft, containing its own instruments, propulsion, fuel tanks, and more.

A Rocket Lab spokesperson told Ars that the new service, launching on an Electron rocket, would be capable of sending up to 30kg into lunar orbit and be available as soon as the fourth quarter of 2020. As for pricing, it was not disclosed. “Pricing is tailored to mission requirements, but we’ll be bringing previously impossible missions within reach at attainable prices,” the spokesperson said.

The “Photon” spacecraft is essentially a small third stage for the Electron rocket that provides in-space maneuvering capability for payloads. It combines propulsion, power, attitude determination and control, and radiation-tolerant avionics. These combined capabilities will allow Rocket Lab to deliver small spacecraft on lunar flyby missions, into a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (where NASA intends to build a small space station called the Lunar Gateway), L1/L2 points, or lunar orbit. It will take up to 14 days for the Photon vehicle to deliver a payload to lunar orbit.

The core of what we do at Nanalyze is to tell our readers all they need to know about investing in emerging technologies. Sometimes that story is much, much bigger, and what we’re really talking about is investing in emerging industries. NewSpace is one example, launching about 15 years ago with the emergence of companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. It’s probably only within the last five years that the NewSpace industry has achieved real liftoff, with dozens of startups doing everything from offering launch services to building satellites to developing business analytics from space-based imagery. While we may one day end up living on Mars, we’re more interested in living a long and fruitful life right here on Mother Earth, despite the specter of cancer and dementia. An entire industry is coalescing around human longevity, promising to beat these age-related diseases and extend our lives to biblical proportions.

We’ve been covering the topic of life extension for more than five years, beginning with a profile on an anti-aging company called Human Longevity Inc, whose founders include billionaire serial entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and J. Craig Venter, a leading genomics expert. More recently, we introduced you to nine companies developing products in regenerative medicine, a broad category that refers to restoring the structure and function of damaged tissues or organs. We also tackled the more controversial topic of young blood transfusions earlier this year, as well as covered the 2019 IPO of Precision BioSciences (DTIL), a gene-editing company that wants to fight disease and re-engineer food.

If approved, 12,000 telecommunication satellites could blot out existing stars.

In the coming years, 12,000 or more artificial stars will join the sky.

Scientists have managed to send a record-breaking amount of data in quantum form, using a strange unit of quantum information called a qutrit.

The news: Quantum tech promises to allow data to be sent securely over long distances. Scientists have already shown it’s possible to transmit information both on land and via satellites using quantum bits, or qubits. Now physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China and the University of Vienna in Austria have found a way to ship even more data using something called quantum trits, or qutrits.

Qutrits? Oh, come on, you’ve just made that up: Nope, they’re real. Conventional bits used to encode everything from financial records to YouTube videos are streams of electrical or photonic pulses than can represent either a 1 or a 0. Qubits, which are typically electrons or photons, can carry more information because they can be polarized in two directions at once, so they can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. Qutrits, which can be polarized in three different dimensions simultaneously, can carry even more information. In theory, this can then be transmitted using quantum teleportation.

SpaceX makes preliminary filing with ITU as it considers big Starlink expansion.

Researchers from Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have built a super-sensitive bolometer, a type of thermal radiation detector. The new radiation detector, made of a gold-palladium mixture makes it easier to measure the strength of electromagnetic radiation in real time. Bolometers are used widely in thermal cameras in the construction industry and in satellites to measure cosmic radiation.

The new developments may help bolometers find their way to quantum computers. If the new radiation detector manages to function as well in space as it does in the laboratory, it can also be used to measure cosmic microwave background radiation in space more accurately.

“The new detector is extremely sensitive, and its noise level—how much the signal bounces around the correct value, is only one tenth of the noise of any other bolometer. It is also a hundred times faster than previous low-noise radiation detectors,” says Mikko Möttönen, who works as a joint Professor of Quantum Technology at Aalto University and VTT.