Lifeboat Foundation

Once focused primarily on flying tourists into space, Virgin senses an opportunity as the size and cost of satellites have been greatly reduced.

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Enhancing situational awareness is a vital mission also in space. The US Department of Defense’s Strategic Command Joint Space Operations Center got Sky and Space’s signature on an agreement ahead of the company’s planned launch of 200 nano-satellites into space, as space junk continues to be a big issue.

The agreement provides for Sky and Space to receive “space situational awareness services” from the US Department of Defence so the company’s nano-satellites will be able to avoid objects like space junk and other satellites.

China’s State Council, the country’s chief administrative authority, recently published a White Paper on its space policies. It not only lifted a veil of secrecy that shielded Beijing’s space policies, but also outlined the country’s recent achievements and offered a five-year outlook on future activities.

Since its first satellite launch in 1970, China has become a major player in the space domain. However, it was only in 2003 that China became the third country to independently send people into space.

Beijing has placed significant resources into narrowing the capability gap that has separated it from other leading nations in this area. It took only eight years from its entry into manned spaceflight, in 2003, to the launch of the first prototype component of its space station, the Tiangong-1.

Continue reading “The ‘Celestial Empire’ Looks to Space” »

Electronic circuits are found in almost everything from smartphones to spacecraft and are useful in a variety of computational problems from simple addition to determining the trajectories of interplanetary satellites. At Caltech, a group of researchers led by Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Lulu Qian is working to create circuits using not the usual silicon transistors but strands of DNA.

The Qian group has made the technology of DNA circuits accessible to even novice researchers—including undergraduate students—using a software tool they developed called the Seesaw Compiler. Now, they have experimentally demonstrated that the tool can be used to quickly design DNA circuits that can then be built out of cheap “unpurified” DNA strands, following a systematic wet-lab procedure devised by Qian and colleagues.

A paper describing the work appears in the February 23 issue of Nature Communications.

James Powell has filed a patent outlining how his theoretical StarTram system could work.

Chinese government confirms it has been funding EmDrive research since 2010 and believes in its benefits.

Polish company SatRevolution have announced plans to create a new satellite production plant in Poland and use 3D printing to develop the country’s first satellites. SatRevolution will partner with APWorks to produce a prototype of the Światowid satellite. Airbus subsidiary, APWorks, will provide metal additive manufacturing solutions to the Polish developers.

The Światowid is intended to measure cosmic radiation and electromagnetic interference. To facilitate launching, the design was developed in line with the cube-sat parameters. Measuring 10 × 10 × 20 cm, the satellite will weigh 2 kg.

The project will reportedly require $50 million to complete, with the satellite production facility planned to be built near the Polish city of Wroclaw.

Continue reading “SatRevolution building new satellite plant in Poland with partners APWorks” »

Real estate is a valuable commodity aboard a CubeSat, a compact satellite about the size of a shoebox, so the smaller each component can be made, the better. To that end, scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the University of Miami are developing a thin, solid-state battery, which could not only save space for more important instruments aboard satellites, but also provide power on other planets, in cars or within the walls of a home.

At less than 3 mm (0.1 in) thick, the new batteries could be incorporated into the structure of pint-sized satellites, rather than taking up room in the area designated for research instruments. The batteries are made by sandwiching a solid-state battery layer between two layers of compressed carbon fiber.

“Creating a structural battery material could revolutionize the way NASA operates small payloads,” says senior principal investigator, Luke Roberson. “Rather than placing a battery in the experiment taking up 20 to 35 percent of the available volume, the battery now resides in the payload structure, thereby opening up additional free space for researchers to perform more science.”

Continue reading “Thin, built-in batteries to free up valuable space on CubeSats” »

After three years of developing a brand new rocket, aerospace startup Rocket Lab has finally transported a finished vehicle to the New Zealand launch pad where it will take its first flight. The rocket, called the Electron, has been tested on the ground over the last year but has never been flown to space before. Over the next couple of months, Rocket Lab will conduct a series of test launches of the vehicle to verify that it’s ready to carry payloads into orbit for commercial customers.

Compared to other major commercial rockets like the Falcon 9 or the Atlas V, the Electron is pretty small — only 55 feet tall and and around 4 feet in diameter. That’s because the vehicle is specifically designed to launch small satellites. The vehicle can carry payloads ranging from 330 to 500 pounds into an orbit more than 300 miles up. That’s a relatively light lift contrasted with the Falcon 9, which can carry more than 50,000 pounds into lower Earth orbit.