ADEO being deployed from the ION Satellite Carrier during the December 2022 test.Gif: High Performance Space Structure Systems/Gizmodo
There’s a lot of junk orbiting our planet, from tiny flecks of paint to defunct rocket stages. While solutions to remove pre-existing debris have been developed, a private space company in Germany has successfully tested a method to deorbit satellites at the end of their life to prevent them from becoming space debris in the first place.
The Drag Augmentation Deorbiting System (ADEO) braking sail was developed by High Performance Space Structure Systems as a way to deorbit satellites at the end of their mission. In a space-based test in December 2022 called “Show Me Your Wings,” ADEO was deployed from an ION Satellite Carrier built by private space company D-Orbit. ADEO successfully pushed the satellite carrier out of its orbit, sending it into the atmosphere to burn up.
“Show Me Your Wings” marks the final in-flight qualification test of ADEO as a proof-of-concept after tests began in 2018. The European Space Agency hopes ADEO will help prevent future decommissioned satellites from becoming orbiting space debris, which can pose a threat to space operations.
“We want to establish a zero debris policy, which means if you bring a spacecraft into orbit you have to remove it,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher in a press release.
ADEO – Deorbit Sailing on Angel Wings
ADEO is a 38-square-foot (3.5-square-meter) sail made up of an aluminum-coated polyamide membrane secured to four carbon-fibre reinforced arms that are positioned in an X-shape. The sail increases surface drag when deployed from a satellite, leading to a more rapidly decaying orbit. ADEO can also be scaled up or down depending on the size of the satellite it’s attached to. The largest version could reach 1,076-square-feet (100-square-meter) with the smallest sail being 37-square-foot (3.5-square-meter).
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NASA estimates that 27,000 pieces of space debris are orbiting Earth, most of which are larger than a softball and traveling at speeds around 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour). While ESA has previously announced plans to remove pre-existing space debris in the form of decommissioned satellites, ADEO is an attempt at preventing satellites from ever becoming debris in the first place.
More: Jeff Bezos’s Girlfriend Is Leading an All-Women Blue Origin Spaceflight
Orion captured this breathtaking view of Earth rising behind the Moon shortly after its second close lunar flyby on December 5. Photo: NASA
From long-awaited rocket launches to an unprecedented asteroid encounter, the past 12 months in spaceflight have been a doozy. The events of 2022 will be shaping space exploration and commercialization for years to come.
These striking images will let you relive the biggest moments of the year, like the Artemis 1 lunar mission, the DART asteroid deflection test, and the out-of-control Chinese rockets (yes, plural). Good, bad, or ugly, these developments produced a wealth of memorable imagery.
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
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Renowned explorer Robert Ballard has scoured the deep sea for decades in search ofits mysteries.
Fascinated by Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” as a child, the oceanographer is most associated with discovering the wreck of the RMS Titanic in 1985 — a find that was actually part of a secret US military mission. He and Alvin, a three-person submersible, returned to the site in 1986 to capture imagery revealing artifacts left behind by those who had perished.
Ballard helped develop Alvinin the 1960s at theWoods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Together, he and Alvin have dived into the deep to observe underwater mountain ranges and uncover thermal vents.
And now, 99% of the seafloor is within humanity’s reach, thanks to a familiar name: Alvin.
The ocean’s deepest zones are a vastly unexplored area, but after a serious upgrade Alvin is ready to take people directly to this remote place of wonder.
The submersible reached a record depth of 4 miles (6,453 meters) over the summer when crews visited the Puerto Rico Trench and Mid-Cayman Rise, where tectonic plates create mystifying underwater landscapes and strange marine animals float by.
Researchers collected samples from the ocean floor, including unknown creatures and the chemical belches of hydrothermal vents.
With direct access to the seafloor, scientists expect to find the fundamentals of life.
Astronomers have confirmed that the DART spacecraft successfully changed the motion of the asteroid Dimorphos when it intentionally slammed into the space rock last month, according to NASA.
The deflection test shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around its larger companion asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes — the first time humanity has ever shifted the motion of a celestial object.
Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope spied what happens when two massive stars violently interact with each other. Every eight years, they release a dust plume, creating nested rings that resemble a giant spiderweb.
And astronomers detected an unusual element in the upper atmosphere of two hot exoplanets where liquid iron and gems rain down from the skies.
French soldiers who came across a broken slab of stone covered with inscriptions in 1799 hadno idea it would unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt.
Carved on the dark, granite-like stone were indecipherable hieroglyphics, the simplified Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek. At the time, scholars only understood ancient Greek.
It took Egyptologists two decades to decrypt the meaning of the scripts once they began working on it in 1802. By deciphering the Egyptian texts, they opened up a way to understand the past.
A new exhibit at The British Museum in London explores the race to decode the Rosetta stone and celebrates the 200th anniversary of the breakthrough.
For many, William Shatner will always be Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise. But when the actor ventured intospace in 2021 on a Blue Origin suborbital flight, he had a far different experience than in any scene from “Star Trek.”
Shifting his gaze from Earth to the cosmos, he said, overturned all his preconceived notions of space. “All I saw was death,” he wrote in his new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder.”
Shatner described feeling intense grief as he briefly left his home planet behind. “It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. … And I was leaving her.” No longer earthbound, his thoughts turned to how humans are destroying the planet.
Meanwhile, Artemis I is gearing up for a third launch attempt on a journey around the moon on November 14, with a 69-minute launch window that opens at 12:07 a.m. ET.
Images that capture buzzing bees, battling Alpine ibex and heavenly flamingos are some of the winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022 competition.
The grand title award went to Karine Aigner for “The big buzz,” which shows a ball of male cactus bees fighting to mate with a sole female. The image, shot at “bee level,” depicts a disappearing species threatened by pesticides and habitat loss.
The world’s wildlife populations plummeted by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018 due to Earth’s changing climate and human activity, according to a new report by the World Wide Fund for Nature. While the natural world is nearing a tipping point, immediate conservation efforts could slow and even reverse these losses.
These findings might blow your mind:
— Astronomers have discovered the Milky Way’s massive graveyard of ancient dead stars — and they also found where supernova explosions kicked some of them right out of the galaxy.
— Brain cells in a lab dish could play the video game Pong, and the neurons were able to move the paddle to hit the ball in a goal-oriented way, according to scientists.
— Paleontologists found mummified dinosaur skin, and it still bears the teeth marks of a predator that chomped on it 67 million years ago.
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Astronauts have for decades described their trips to space as “breathtaking” and humbling, a reminder of the Earth’s fragility and humanity’s need to serve as stewards of our home planet.
Actor William Shatner, who joined a suborbital space tourism flight last year, experienced the same phenomenon, but he had a very distinct observation when he turned his gaze from the Earth to black expanse of the cosmos: “All I saw was death,” he wrote in a new book.
Shatner’s biography, called “Boldly Go,” which he co-wrote with TV and film writer Joshua Brandon, is filled with similarly grim anecdotes about Shatner’s experience bolting above the Earth’s atmosphere aboard a real-life rocket after his memorable stint playing a spaceship captain on the 1960s TV show “Star Trek” and several franchise movies in the following decades.
“I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her,” reads an excerpt from “Boldly Go” that was first published by Variety.
“Everything I had thought was wrong,” it reads. “Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”
While he had expected to be awed at the vision of the cosmos, seen without the filter of the Earth’s atmosphere, he instead became overwhelmed by the idea that humans are slowly destroying our home planet. He felt one of the strongest feelings of grief he’s ever encountered, Shatner wrote.
Shatner’s book was released October 4 by publishing house Simon & Schuster. CNN interviewed him in June about the book, his trip to space with the Jeff Bezos-backed space tourism company Blue Origin, and what’s next for the 91-year-old. A transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity, is below.
CNN: We all saw how emotional you were when you stepped out of the Blue Origin spacecraft after landing. How did that experience change you?
William Shatner: Fifty-five or 60 years ago I read a book called “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. She wrote about the environmental issues that are still happening today. I’ve been a verbal ecologist since then. I’ve been aware of the changing Earth and my apprehension for all of us.
It’s like somebody owing money on a mortgage, and they don’t have the payments. And they think, “Oh, well, let’s go to dinner and not think about it.”
But it’s so omnipresent! The possibilities of an apocalypse are so real. It’s hard to convince people — and especially certain political people — that this is not on our doorstep any longer. It’s in the house.
When I got up to space, I wanted to get to the window to see what it was that was out there. I looked at the blackness of space. There were no dazzling lights. It was just palpable blackness. I believed I saw death.
And then I looked back at the Earth. Given my background and having read a lot of things about the evolution of Earth over 5 billion years and how all the beauty of nature has evolved, I thought about how we’re killing everything.
I felt this overwhelming sadness for the Earth.
I didn’t realize it until I got down. When I stepped out of the spacecraft, I started crying. I didn’t know why. It took me hours to understand why I was weeping. I realized I was in grief for the Earth.
I don’t want to ever forget, nor have I forgotten, the momentousness of that occasion.
CNN: What else have you realized about the experience in the months since you took your spaceflight?
Shatner: I had an awareness that human beings may be the only species alive on this planet that is aware of the enormity and the majesty of the universe.
Think about what we’ve discovered in just the last 100 years given the 200,000 years that humans have existed. We’ve discovered how mountains have formed, the Big Bang. And I kept thinking about how mankind is evolving rapidly into a knowledgeable creature at the same time it’s killing itself.
It’s a race.
CNN: Space tourism companies such as Blue Origin have also received a lot of criticism from people who view those efforts as more of a vanity project for wealthy individuals rather than something that can be truly transformational. How do you respond to that criticism?
Shatner: The whole idea here is to get people accustomed to going to space, as if it’s like going to the Riviera. It’s not only a vanity – it’s a business.
But what Jeff Bezos wants to do and what is slowly accruing because of our familiarity with space is get those polluting industries up into orbit and get the earth back to what it was. (Editor’s note: Bezos has routinely talked about moving heavy industries into orbit to help preserve the Earth, and that idea also has its skeptics and critics.)
CNN: What do you think about the ‘astronaut’ title. Are people who pay for brief, suborbital flights to space astronauts?
Shatner: I call them half astronauts.
CNN: What should we be doing in space next?
Shatner: The ability to go to Mars which is lurking in the background, which I think that should take a backseat to going to the moon, setting up the moon as a base and mining whatever the moon has to offer, rather than mining it here.
Those are just my own opinions. What’s-his-name would not agree. He wants to go to Mars. (Editor’s note: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk founded his company with the goal of setting up a colony on Mars.)
CNN: Are you are you anxious to go back to space?
Shatner: If you had a great love affair, could you go back? Or would that demean it?
CNN: You mentioned you got a chance to speak with famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking before he died. What was that experience like?
Shatner: I was never able to ask him about String Theory, which I wanted to. We had to get him all the questions in advance. And he had said when we made the arrangement, ‘I want to ask Shatner a question.’
Finally, I’m leaning in, you know, we’re sitting side by side looking at the cameras.
So he laboriously typed out, ‘What is your favorite Star Trek episode?’ which is the question every fan asks, and I started laughing. He didn’t have the ability to laugh (because of his degenerative disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS).
But his laughter showed in the redness of his face and he got so red. He then invited me to dinner. I had a beautiful moment with him.
CNN: What are you doing next?
Shatner: I should take the opportunity to say I have an album out there called “Bill.” And I kept making songs with my collaborators. The song “So Fragile, So Blue,” is very much about my experience in space. I recently performed with (musician) Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center. That could be a TV show or an album.
I also have a really wonderful show called “The UnXplained” on the on the History Channel.
And then I have my book, called “Boldly Go,” coming out in the fall.
Controllers with the CAPSTONE mission are attempting to regain control of the Moon-bound probe, which is currently tumbling, experiencing temperature issues, and unable to use its solar panels to fully recharge its batteries.
In an update issued on Monday, Advanced Space described it as a “dynamic operational situation.” The company is managing the project for NASA, in which the 55-pound (25-kilogram) cubesat will evaluate a unique halo orbit around the Moon in advance of a lunar space station. CAPSTONE, short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, launched on June 28 and is in the midst of a four-month journey to the Moon.
The problem started either during or after the third trajectory correction maneuver (TCM-3) on September 8. An unknown issue caused CAPSTONE to enter into a tumble—one beyond the ability of the probe’s onboard reaction wheels to counter, according to NASA.
CAPSTONE needs to perform seven course corrections to reach its intended halo orbit around the Moon. The recent anomaly occurred either during or after the third trajectory maneuver on September 8.Graphic: Advanced Space
Multiple course corrections are required to move the probe toward its intended lunar orbit, known as a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), which CAPSTONE is supposed to reach on November 13. CAPSTONE reached apogee—its farthest point from Earth—on August 26, at a distance of 951,908 miles (1.53 million kilometers) from our planet.
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After the latest course correction, ground stations were unable to receive meaningful communications from CAPSTONE, prompting Advanced Space to declare an operational emergency. When contact was finally re-established some 24 hours later, “mission controllers found that the spacecraft was tumbling, the onboard computer systems were periodically resetting, and the spacecraft was using more power than it was generating from its solar panels,” NASA explained.
Mercifully, controllers managed to stabilize the spacecraft by employing NASA’s Deep Space Network, an array of giant radio antennas used to support interplanetary spacecraft missions. “Rapid response enabled by the Deep Space Network support and quick thinking by the team at Terran Orbital allowed mission operators to quickly reconfigure the operational state of the spacecraft to stabilize the situation while recovery plans could be further evaluated,” according to an Advanced Space update. A recovery team made up of experts from NASA, Advanced Space, Terran Orbital (the designer and manufacturer of CAPSTONE), and Stellar Exploration (the provider of CAPSTONE’s propulsion system) is currently evaluating next steps. Without the Deep Space Network, the team “would have little or no information on the status of the spacecraft,” according to Advanced Space. That said, the teams are still being hampered by incomplete information.
The good news is that CAPSTONE has been placed in a stable state. It’s still tumbling and in safe mode, but it’s now generating more power than it’s using. The cubesat is currently spinning in such a way that its solar panels are being partially illuminated, resulting in weak transmissions from its low gain antennas. Importantly, the probe successfully completed its third trajectory correction maneuver, which means it’s still on course to its special halo orbit around the Moon.
The recovery team will make a decision on how to move forward in the coming days. In addition to diagnosing the cause of the anomaly, the team needs to resolve unspecified temperature issues with several subsystems, including the propulsion system. The team is also preparing to detumble the spacecraft in an effort to regain control over its orientation. There’s good reason to believe this procedure will work, as a similar detumbling operation was performed in July after CAPSTONE separated from the Electron rocket’s upper stage.
Assuming CAPSTONE can be taken out of its tumble, controllers will then orient the solar panels to fully recharge the probe’s batteries, thereby allowing the mission to continue as planned. But as Advanced Space grimly noted: “Many details remain unknown as to the cause of the anomaly and significant risks are continuing to be analyzed.” CAPSTONE isn’t out of the woods, but there’s reason for optimism.
CAPSTONE is a precursor mission for the upcoming Artemis program, in which NASA seeks a permanent and sustainable return to the lunar environment. To support Artemis crews, NASA and its international partners are seeking to place a space station, called Gateway, in the gravitationally stable halo orbit. No probe has ever worked in NHRO, hence the importance of the CAPSTONE scouting mission.
More: Blue Origin Booster Suffers Fiery Anomaly During Uncrewed Suborbital Launch.
SLS on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo: NASA
NASA’s Space Launch System is powered by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Together, these elements provide for a compact and extremely powerful rocket propellant, but these same attributes are also what make this fuel a liability.
The second launch attempt of SLS had to be called off on Saturday, September 3, after engineers failed to resolve a hydrogen leak in a quick disconnect—an 8-inch inlet that connects the liquid hydrogen fuel line to the rocket’s core stage. As a result of the setback, SLS probably won’t launch until October at the earliest. The Artemis 1 mission, in which an uncrewed Orion spacecraft will journey to the Moon and back, will have to wait.
Ground teams were able to fix a hydrogen leak during the first failed launch attempt on Monday, August 29, but the launch was eventually called off after a faulty sensor erroneously indicated that an engine hadn’t reached the required ultra-cold temperature. The leak on Saturday proved to be much more difficult to contain, with engineers attempting three fixes, none of which worked. “This was not a manageable leak,” Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, told reporters after the scrub.
NASA is still evaluating its next steps, but the rocket must return to the Vehicle Assembly Building to undergo a mandated safety check related to its flight termination system. The rocket may require some hardware fixes on account of an inadvertent command that briefly raised the pressure within the system. The unintended over-pressurization may have contributed to the leaky seal, and it’s something engineers are currently evaluating as a possibility.
Inheriting the hydrogen problem
Hydrogen leaks are nothing new for NASA. Scrubs of Space Shuttle launches happened with upsetting regularity and were often the result of hydrogen leaks. One of the more infamous episodes was “the summer of hydrogen,” when ground teams spent more than six months trying to locate an elusive hydrogen leak that grounded the Shuttle fleet in 1990. SLS is heavily modeled after the Space Shuttle, including the use of liquid hydrogen propellant, so hydrogen-related scrubs could certainly have been predicted. But SLS is what it is, and NASA has little choice but to manage this limitation of its mega Moon rocket.
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Jordan Bimm, a space historian at the University of Chicago, says NASA continues to use liquid hydrogen for political rather than technical reasons.
“Since the creation of NASA in 1958, the agency has used contractors located around the U.S. as a way to maintain broad political support and funding for space exploration in Congress,” Bimm told me. “The first system to use liquid hydrogen was the Centaur rocket developed in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2010, the U.S. Congress, in their authorization act funding NASA, mandated that the Agency use existing technologies from the Shuttle in their next-generation launch system.” To which he added: “This was a political decision meant to maintain contractor jobs in key political districts and from that funding and support in Congress for NASA.”
The first flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour, May 7, 1992,Photo: NASA
This development meant that the RS-25 engine from the retiring Space Shuttle, along with its reliance on a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen mixture, would have to be carried over to SLS. In total, NASA managed to collect 16 engines from the retired Shuttles, of which four are currently affixed to the SLS rocket standing on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This situation, said Bimm, is a reminder of the catchphrase from the 1983 film The Right Stuff: “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” NASA, he said, “must often prioritize shoring-up political support from Congress to maintain its exploration program.” The ongoing use of RS-25 engines “is another example of how something as mundane as fuel choice can be political and how often the most straightforward and desirable solutions are not politically viable for a large national agency created in the Cold War era of ‘Big Science’,” said Bimm.
Instead of opting for propellants like methane or kerosene, NASA chose to use a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to power its heavy-lift rocket. By comparison, SpaceX’s upcoming Starship uses liquid methane, with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. “With their sights set on Mars, SpaceX selected liquid methane in the hopes of being able to extract this element [when] on Mars as a form of cost-saving resource utilization,” Bimm explained. The U.S. space agency, perpetually cash-strapped and having to please politicians, was working under a different set of principles when designing SLS.
“Based on current information and analysis, the [proposed SLS design] represents the lowest near-term costs, soonest available, and the least overall risk path to the development of the next, domestic heavy lift launch vehicle,” wrote NASA in a 2011 preliminary project report. “Selecting this SLS architecture would mean that a new liquid engine in the near term would not need to be developed, thus shortening the time to first flight as well as likely minimizing the overall…cost of the SLS.”
The irony is that SLS, which was supposed to fly in 2017, has yet to launch, and its total development costs, including the Orion crew capsule, have now exceeded $50 billion. That excludes the estimated $4.1 billion cost pegged for each launch of SLS. And by inheriting Space Shuttle components, NASA has also inherited the hydrogen problem.
A beneficial but pesky molecule
Hydrogen is extremely useful as a rocket fuel. It’s readily available, clean, lightweight, and, when combined with liquid oxygen, burns with extreme intensity. “In combination with an oxidizer such as liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen yields the highest specific impulse, or efficiency in relation to the amount of propellant consumed, of any known rocket propellant,” according to NASA. When chilled to -423 degrees Fahrenheit (-253 degrees Celsius), hydrogen can be crammed into a rocket, offering a tremendous amount of fuel for the buck. “The advantages of liquid hydrogen as a fuel is its efficiency at storing the energy you want to release to propel the rocket, as well as its low weight, which is always a consideration in spaceflight,” said Bimm.
SLS on the pad at Kennedy Space Center. Photo: NASA
NASA’s Apollo-era Saturn rocket second stage used liquid hydrogen, as did the Shuttle’s three main engines. Hydrogen is commonly used for second stages (Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket is a good example), and as the liquid fuel needed for maneuvering spacecraft in orbit. Rockets that currently use liquid hydrogen include Atlas’s Centaur and Boeing’s Delta III and IV, while Blue Origin’s BE-3 and BE-7 engines also rely on hydrogen.
“The disadvantages of hydrogen are that it is very difficult to move around and control due to the small molecular size of hydrogen which leads to leaks and the need to keep it in a liquid state which requires cooling to extremely low temperatures,” said Bimm. What’s more, hydrogen is highly volatile when in a liquid state, and it can burn in large quantities. As the lightest known element, it’s also very leaky. NASA explains the many challenges of using liquid hydrogen as fuel:
To keep it from evaporating or boiling off, rockets fuelled with liquid hydrogen must be carefully insulated from all sources of heat, such as rocket engine exhaust and air friction during flight through the atmosphere. Once the vehicle reaches space, it must be protected from the radiant heat of the Sun. When liquid hydrogen absorbs heat, it expands rapidly; thus, venting is necessary to prevent the tank from exploding. Metals exposed to the extreme cold of liquid hydrogen become brittle. Moreover, liquid hydrogen can leak through minute pores in welded seams.
Despite these challenges, NASA opted for liquid hydrogen when designing SLS, and now it’s paying the price.
New rocket, same old problems
When tanking SLS, the sudden influx of cryogenic hydrogen causes significant changes to the rocket’s physical structure. The 130-foot-tall (40-meter-tall) hydrogen tank shrinks about 6 inches (152 mm) in length and about 1 inch (25.4 mm) in diameter when filled with the ultra-cold liquid, according to NASA. Components attached to the tank, such as ducts, vent lines, and brackets, must compensate for this sudden contraction. To achieve this, NASA uses connectors with accordion-like bellows, slotted joints, telescoping sections, and ball joint hinges.
But hydrogen—the smallest molecule in the universe—often finds its way through even the tiniest of openings. The fuel lines are particularly problematic, as they cannot be hard-bolted to the rocket. As their name suggests, the quick disconnects, while providing a tight seal, are designed to break free from the rocket during launch. This seal must prevent leakage under high pressures and ultra-cold temperatures, but it also needs to let go as the rocket takes flight. On Saturday, a leak in the vicinity of the quick disconnect reached concentrations well beyond the 4% constraint, exceeding NASA’s flammability limits. Unable to resolve the leak, NASA called the scrub.
That NASA has yet to fully fuel the first and second stages and get deep into the countdown is a genuine cause for concern. The space agency has dealt with hydrogen leaks before, so hopefully its engineers will once again devise a solution to move the project forward.
Still, it’s a frustrating start to the Artemis era. NASA needs SLS as it seeks a permanent and sustainable return to the lunar environment, and as it eyes a future human mission to Mars. NASA is going to have to make SLS work, and it might have to do so one aggravating scrub at a time.
SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a host of other private companies helped to make 2021 the year with the most space launches in history, but scientists say this mad dash to space could be causing further damage to our atmosphere.
The number of launch attempts has doubled in the last decade. And after counting all of the planned launches for 2022, it seems the current year is set to blow past last year’s record. But rocket launches come with big emissions, the atmospheric impact of which isn’t fully understood.
Now, two scientists have added to the growing body of knowledge suggesting that the race to leave the Earth could be harming our planet and our health. The researchers referenced a webcast video to model a SpaceX launch in painstaking detail. Their simulation showed that exhaust from the rocket dumped a surprising amount of climate-altering carbon gases, as well as harmful nitrogen oxides, across multiple levels of the atmosphere.
“Pollution from rockets should not be underestimated as frequent future rocket launches could have a significant cumulative effect on climate,” wrote the researchers in their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids. They also mentioned the possibility of rocket launches becoming a future human health hazard.
“At present, the risk is low because a small number of launches take place,” Dimitris Drikakis, a physicist and engineer at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus and co-author of the new study, explained in an email to Gizmodo. “The problem may become significant when frequent launches take place.”
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Drikakis and his University of Nicosia colleague Ioannis Kokkinakis specifically looked at the exhaust emissions from a computer model they built, one meant to closely match the 2016 Thaicom-8 launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which obtained its power from the fuel RP-1, or Rocket Propellant-1, which is similar to jet fuel. The researchers considered the role of heat, pressure, gas mixing, dispersal patterns, and other factors to estimate rocket emissions at various heights and up to a maximum 41.6 miles (67 kilometers) above the surface.
Earth’s atmosphere has multiple levels based on altitude, each exhibiting its own unique set of conditions. Drikakis and Kokkinakis followed their modeled rocket launch from the near-Earth troposphere through to the stratosphere and into the mesosphere.
Based on their models, the researchers estimated that the single Falcon 9 rocket produced around 116 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the first 165 seconds of its journey. “This amount is equivalent to that emitted by about 69 cars over an entire year [in the United Kingdom],” wrote Drikakis to Gizmodo. To repeat: 69 car years of driving versus 165 seconds of rocket flight.
Carbon dioxide accumulates in the lower atmosphere as we burn fossil fuels, and is the greenhouse gas largely responsible for human-caused climate change. But much of the emissions produced in the model study appeared in the higher altitude mesosphere, where the climate impacts of C02 are less well understood than they are closer to Earth. For each kilometer climbed by the rocket at the highest altitudes examined, the simulated Falcon 9 sent out a mass of carbon dioxide equal to 26 times the amount already present in one cubic kilometer of the mesosphere.
At the same time, the rocket also shot out similar amounts of carbon monoxide and water vapor, which are typically only present in the mesosphere in trace amounts. This now adds to the list of poorly understood atmospheric changes that rocket launches could be creating.
And then there are the dreaded nitrogen oxides (NOx) to consider. On top of being bad-to-breathe pollutants that can trigger respiratory diseases, these gases also degrade our atmosphere’s critical ozone layer. In the first 70 seconds of the studied launch, the SpaceX rocket produced an estimated one metric ton of NOx, equivalent to about 1,400-cars-worth of annual emissions, according to Drikakis. Nitrogen oxides form best under high heat, so most of that release happened in the lower atmosphere, specifically at altitudes below 6.2 miles (10 km).
“CO2 and other greenhouse gas species [types] emitted in the mesosphere can affect the climate, if emitted in enough quantity,” said Erik Larson, a geoscientist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new research, in an email to Gizmodo. But he added that this paper doesn’t actually assess the climate impacts of the rocket launch.
Instead, Larson said the study’s value is in its estimates of emission quantities. The study “fills some gaps,” he explained. In particular, Larson thought the most “important contribution” from the new research had to do with nitrogen oxide production and the potential for ozone risk, as opposed to assessments of direct air-quality impacts. “It destroys the beneficial ozone layer,” he said. “I think the important global impacts of rocket NOx emissions are likely to be destruction of stratospheric ozone as opposed to air quality.”
The ozone layer protects our planet’s surface from the most damaging of the Sun’s rays. Without it, much of life on Earth would die. And we nearly lost it once before owing to chemical emissions. After the offending, damaging compounds were banned, the ozone layer recovered, but it has remained a constant concern ever since.
A 2018 UN report concluded that rocket launches have a teeny tiny (sub 0.1%) impact on the ozone. But ozone loss due to rocket launches could be more than 10 times higher than previously assumed due to the a lack of research on the topic, according to the new study. And, again, there are many more rockets going into space now than there were even four years ago.
It’s important to restate that the new study is dependent on estimates and models, which means it has major limitations. “The atmosphere is a very complex system,” said Drikakis. He pointed out that his team had to reckon with a lot of uncertainty when obtaining these results owing to the lack of clear information about the physical and chemical processes happening across higher altitudes of the atmosphere.
In addition to chipping away at those uncertainties, the scientists plan to further explore the link between ozone depletion and space launches in future research. They also hope that more studies examine the impact of mesosphere changes on Earth’s climate.
But for now, even knowing all of the above, Drikakis and Kokkinakis are still pro-space exploration. “We are rocket enthusiasts and believe that the commercial sector has made amazing progress in the field,” Drikakis told me. “We are at the beginning of a fantastic journey” that we should continue, he added.
He hopes their research and studies like it will help the burgeoning space industry “design solutions that will improve the rockets’ design and mitigate the effects of exhaust gases.” For Earth’s sake, lets all hope that innovation comes at rocket-speeds.
The end of the International Space Station is finally approaching, with NASA declaring the retirement of the orbital outpost in 2030 and a dramatic deorbiting early in the following year.
Nothing lasts forever, not even the International Space Station. The writing’s been on the wall for some time now, but NASA made it official earlier this week, announcing that ISS operations will last until 2030 but no further. Upon retirement, the space station will perform a controlled re-entry and crash onto a remote part of the Pacific ocean known as Point Nemo. It’s all part of NASA’s plan to hand over space station responsibilities to the private sector and save a whole lotta cash in the process.
“The private sector is technically and financially capable of developing and operating commercial low-Earth orbit destinations, with NASA’s assistance,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA, said in the statement. “We look forward to sharing our lessons learned and operations experience with the private sector to help them develop safe, reliable, and cost-effective destinations in space.”
In a detailed transition report sent to Congress, NASA said it expects to save $1.3 billion the year after ISS is gone and $1.8 billion per year by 2033. The space agency plans to spend these estimated savings on deep space exploration projects, allowing it to “explore further and faster into deep space,” according to the report. But by extending the mission to 2030, NASA will “continue another productive decade of research advancement and enable a seamless transition of capabilities in low-Earth orbit to one or more commercially owned and operated destinations in the late 2020s.”
In an email, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, cautioned that the new report didn’t include claims that other ISS partners, such as Russia, will agree to sustain ISS until 2030, “so it could be sooner,” he explained. Fair point. Russia, it would appear, has already checked out, as evidenced by threats of leaving and the deteriorating state of its ISS assets.
ISS has been in orbit since 2000, hosting a continuous succession of astronauts throughout its 22-year history. It’s the largest orbital outpost ever built—a stunning collaboration involving 15 different countries. Late last year, the Biden administration quietly extended the station’s lifetime from 2024 to 2030, but as the new report points out, this mission extension represents the last.
In its plan, NASA describes the decommissioning process, including a potential strategy to detach some modules and attach them to other space stations. At some point in 2030, the final crew will have to depart the ISS, in what will be undoubtedly an emotional and historic moment.
In early 2031, and with no one onboard, controllers will use thrusters to lower the station’s altitude to just above Earth’s atmosphere. The ISS will then make its fatal plunge through the atmosphere, followed by bits of debris splashing down onto the South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA) in the vicinity of Point Nemo. This spot carries the nickname “spacecraft cemetery,” as it’s where space agencies have plopped hundreds of space pieces, including Russia’s Mir space station, for the past 50 years. Point Nemo is nowhere near inhabited areas, the closest being 1,670 miles (2,690 km) away.
Sounds simple, but the required degree of precision will require some extra work. The challenge is that ISS isn’t equipped with a big enough engine to allow direct travel from its current position to its required final low orbit in a single burn, as McDowell explained. ISS operators will have to “lower its orbit in stages before the final burn,” he said. “But you can’t lower it too far or the drag (winds) will make you lose attitude control and the station will start to tumble because of the forces.” The station will have to be lowered far enough before making the final burn, requiring the use of two Russian Progress spacecraft to lower the orbit and “then a third one to dump it,” McDowell said.
Indeed, and as NASA explains in its report, the station will “accomplish the de-orbit maneuvers by using the propulsion capabilities of the ISS and its visiting vehicles,” namely Progress and possibly Cygnus spacecraft. Then, “after performing maneuvers to line up the final target ground track and debris footprint” above SPOUA, ISS operators “will perform the ISS re-entry burn, providing the final push to lower ISS as much as possible and ensure safe atmospheric entry,” according to the report.
With the end of the ISS firmly in sight, NASA will be turning to the private sector to maintain a continuous human presence in space. To that end, NASA has already allocated $415.6 million as part of its Commercial Low Earth Destinations program, with the funds being distributed to Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman. There is concern, however, that space stations built by these firms won’t be ready in time and that a gap will exist by the time ISS is retired a mere eight years from now.
This situation could get worse if, as McDowell warned, other ISS partners won’t commit to the 2030 extension. Russia, like China, has plans to build its own space station in the coming years. It seems we’re at the end of an era. Fair to say, an international collaboration like this won’t happen any time soon.
More: Rollout of NASA’s New Megarocket Delayed Until at Least March.
Conceptual image of a Starship launch involving both stages of the reusable system.Image: SpaceX
Humanity’s reach into space has never been greater, with 2022 promising to be one of the most thrilling yet. Here are the space stories we’ll be watching in the coming months.
The inaugural flight of NASA’s Space Launch System
One of the most anticipated events of the year happens next spring, or so we hope. NASA will attempt the inaugural launch of its 332-foot-tall (101 meters) SLS rocket, effectively kickstarting the Artemis era. It’ll be an impressive sight, as the rocket will exert 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff—15% more than NASA’s Saturn V rocket. For this, the Artemis 1 mission, an uncrewed Orion spacecraft will travel 280,000 miles (450,000 km) to lunar orbit and promptly return to Earth.
Conceptual image showing an SLS launch. Image: NASA
Launch windows for Artemis one occur in mid-March and mid-April. A successful launch of SLS will set the stage for Artemis 2 (scheduled for 2023), in which a crewed Orion capsule will travel around the Moon and back (basically a repeat of Artemis 1, but with astronauts), and Artemis 3 (scheduled for no earlier than 2025), in which NASA astronauts will land on the Moon for the first time since 1972.
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The inaugural orbital flight of SpaceX’s Starship
SpaceX will also attempt the launch of an oversized rocket, likely in either January or February. The reusable Starship megarocket will consist of the Super Heavy Booster 4 and Starship prototype SN20, which, at a combined 394 feet (120 meters) in height, will be the tallest rocket ever built. Launching from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, the rocket will enter Earth orbit but complete less than full rotation of the planet. The booster will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the second stage will splash down in the Pacific near Hawaii.
The stacking of a Starship upper stage onto a Super Heavy. Photo: SpaceX
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said there’s “a lot of risk associated with this first launch,” and he’s candidly predicting a failure. That said, he believes a Starship rocket will reach orbit in 2022 and that upwards of 12 Starship launches could take place over the course of the year. Progress will be important, as SpaceX is developing the rocket to serve as the landing craft for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions on the Moon.
Other rockets expected to make their maiden flights in 2022 include Arianespace’s Ariane 6, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, and Mitsubishi’s H3.
The second uncrewed test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner
Artist’s concept of a Boeing CST-100 Starliner in Earth orbit. Image: NASA/Boeing
Speaking of pressure, all eyes will be on Boeing to see if the beleaguered company will finally make progress with its CST-100 Starliner. Boeing is developing the capsule as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, but it’s now years behind schedule. A major setback occurred in October 2021, when Boeing Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) had to be scrubbed after 13 of 24 oxidizer valves in the spacecraft’s propulsion system failed to open. The inaugural test of Starliner in 2019 was a total mess, making this latest incident all the more embarrassing. Boeing is now seeking to launch Starliner in May 2022, “pending spacecraft readiness and space station availability,” according to NASA.
A helicopter will attempt to catch a falling rocket booster
Photo of the rocket retrieval test done in April 2020. Image: Rocket Lab
In 2022, aerospace manufacturer Rocket Lab will attempt to catch a falling Electron rocket booster mid-air and then return it to the mainland for reuse (Rocket Lab performed a successful test of this idea in April 2020). A parachute system will slow the booster during its descent, while a special engagement line on the helicopter will enable it to capture and secure the booster. An auxiliary fuel tank will be added to the helicopter, allowing for an extended journey. Rocket Lab expects to perform this daring catch during the first half of 2022.
To the Moon!!
No humans will reach the Moon in 2022, but the same cannot be said for landers and robots, with the United States, Russia, India, and Japan all preparing for lunar missions in the coming year.
Conceptual image of the Peregrine lander. Image: NASA
Pittsburgh-based Astrobiotic is planning to send its Peregrine Lunar Lander to the Moon at some point in 2022. The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, in which the space agency contracts with commercial partners. The lander, equipped with 14 payloads of various types, will launch atop a United Launch Alliance Centaur rocket.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines, another CLPS partner, is currently planning to send its Nova-C lander to the Moon, which it expects to do during the first half of the year with the lift coming from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Nova-C will deliver 220 pounds (100 kg) worth of goods to the lunar surface.
In July 2019, India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission failed to safely deliver the Vikram lander to the lunar surface. The Indian Space Research Organization will try again during the third quarter of 2022 in what will hopefully be a successful sequel—the Chandrayaan-3 mission. Should India pull it off, it’ll become just the fourth country to successfully land a probe on the Moon (the others being the United States, Russia, and China).
In July 2022, Russia will be sending its Luna 25 lander, also known as the Luna-Glob-Lander, to the southern polar region of the Moon. The purpose of the mission is to analyze the “composition of the polar regolith, and to study the plasma and dust components of the lunar polar exosphere,” according to NASA.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) will be Japan’s first mission to the Moon. The purpose of SLIM is to test precision lunar landing capabilities, such as avoiding craters and selecting optimal locations for touchdown. The probe, developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is expected to launch at some point in 2022 and land near the Marius Hills Hole—a lunar lava tube entrance.
Another rover for the Red Planet
The European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover, along with Russia’s Kazachok lander, is scheduled to launch on September 29. Once at Mars, the Rosalind Franklin will collect surface samples and crush them into a fine powder. Its onboard laboratory will then perform detailed chemical, spectral, and physical analyses. The rover’s navigational capabilities should allow it to travel around 328 feet (100 meters) every Martian day, or sol.
Conceptual image of the Rosalind Franklin rover. Image: ESA
Meanwhile, we can expect new insights from NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers (and perhaps more flights of the Ingenuity helicopter), and also China’s Zhurong rover. NASA’s InSight mission will continue to operate in 2022, but this is likely to be its final year, as the stationary lander is struggling to collect solar power.
Space probes probing space
In August, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will attempt to deliver NASA’s Psyche probe to space. Its destination is 16 Psyche—a metallic asteroid containing copious amounts of nickel-iron. The asteroid “offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets,” according to NASA. The mission could shed new light on the composition and age of Psyche’s surface, and the conditions under which it formed. Data from the probe will also be used to create a detailed map of the asteroid’s surface. The Psyche probe is expected to reach the asteroid in January 2026.
Conceptual image of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. Illustration: NASA
The same launch of the Falcon Heavy will deliver two smallsats for NASA, but they’re headed elsewhere. Known as the Janus project, the dual spacecraft will explore two binary asteroids, (175706) 1996 FG3 and (35107) 1991 VH. Daniel Scheeres, the principal investigator of the project and an astronomer at the University of Colorado, says binary asteroids “are one class of objects for which we don’t have high-resolution scientific data,” as all existing observations come from ground telescopes, “which don’t give you as much detail as being up close.” Janus, in addition to furthering our understanding of the early solar system, could also inform planetary defense measures. It’ll take four years for the probes to reach their destinations.
Conceptual images of the Janus dual-spacecraft. Image: Lockheed Martin
Probes already launched to space will continue to do their work. NASA’s Juno spacecraft will perform a close fly-by of Jupiter’s moon Europa on September 29, after which time its orbital period around the gas giant will be reduced from 43 to 38 days. The Parker Solar Probe, also managed by NASA, will perform four flybys of the Sun in 2022, as it gets increasingly closer to our host star.
In addition, the $10 billion Webb Space Telescope, set to launch on Christmas Day 2021, will travel to its special spot in space—Lagrange Point 2 (an area of space where gravity from the Sun and Earth balance the orbital motion of an object). Once at L2, and after Webb’s instruments are successfully deployed, we’ll finally get to see Webb’s first view of the cosmos.
Astronomical happenings
No total solar eclipse will happen in 2022, but there will be two partial solar eclipses. The first happens on April 30, when the partial eclipse will be visible from the southern portions of South America, and the second will occur on October 25 and be visible to skywatchers in Europe and parts of northern Africa (weather permitting, of course).
A partial lunar eclipse on May 15/16 will be visible in parts of North America and all of South America, while a partial lunar eclipse on November 7/8 will appear primarily over the Pacific Ocean, with western parts of North America and eastern Asia also catching a glimpse.
So buckle up and grab some kool-aid—looks like we’ve got another amazing year in space ahead.
The Inspiration4 crew in space.Image: Inspiration4
In September, astronauts participating in the first all-private mission to space, the Inspiration4 mission, had to keep their cool after an alarm went off, indicating a “significant” but unknown problem. The alarm was eventually traced to “mechanical problems” having to do with Crew Dragon’s waste management system, specifically its fans, which pull human waste away from the body. Mercifully, the Inspiration4 crew, with help from SpaceX ground controllers, were able to bring the toilet back online. Elon Musk tweeted that upgrades to the Crew Dragon toilet would be necessary.
SpaceX provided more information later, saying a tube in the tank got loose, preventing urine from entering the storage tank and causing it to spill beneath the Crew Dragon floor. A similar issue was detected in Endeavour, a Crew Dragon parked outside ISS. SpaceX apparently remedied the problem by October, with Endurance being the first Crew Dragon to feature the upgraded toilets.