Victoria Tarpley solders the device while Tyler Ardrey, at left, looks on.

Space Hardware Club

For the first time in almost a decade, a payload created by a student-led group at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has rocketed to space.

Students are now analyzing the data sent back by the flight monitoring equipment they built as part of the Terminus Spaceflight Research Group (TSRG) operating under the auspices of the Space Hardware Club (SHC) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System.

The payload rocketed to a suborbital flight to space and back aboard a Terrier-Orion rocket out of NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on June 24, with 32 other university student projects in the NASA RockOn and RockSat-C programs. The last UAH student-led project to go to space was the SHCs ChargerSat-1 in 2013.

We were really happy it worked and we had data available the same day it launched, says Ben Campbell, a masters student in aerospace systems engineering who is TSRGs founder and project manager. Campbell, a graduate research assistant who says his career goal is to become an astronaut, used his undergraduate spacecraft development experience and connections to teach the team to produce the device and then to get it into space.

At the moment, we have a large collection of raw data that was recorded by all the sensors, and we are now in the process of correlating everything together to basically produce the big picture, or life story, of what our payload experienced during the mission, Campbell says.

We have things worked out for the initial ascent phase of the launch, where we have clear data indicating events such as the operation of the two stages that were used on the launch vehicle, and our crossing of the Karman line which is the boundary of space thats about 100 kilometers above sea level at around 114 seconds after liftoff.

The team is still going through data to determine activity while in space and when the rocket began to re-enter the atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.The UAH payload has been retrieved by a boat team, brought back to land and is being shipped back to campus.

The payload was essentially a small deck of electronics, about the size of a dinner plate, which hosted a suite of various sensors to monitor flight conditions throughout the mission, Campbell says.

Ben Campbell holds the payload. Hes flanked by, from left, Matthew Bray, Tyler Ardrey, Tristan Carter and David Tutunzhiu.

Space Hardware Club

Sensors onboard included:

The payload was designed so students could use a collection of systems familiar to them from past work, such as common sensors, microcontrollers and other electrical components, and apply them to a spacecraft to be flown in suborbital space with all the design and manufacturing considerations that go into making a payload flight-ready.

Campbell has been working for over a year on TSRG, making use of contacts he made while in three CubeSat programs and two sounding rocket projects as a mechanical engineering undergraduate at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.

I started the group so I could try to use some connections and resources I have from my time prior to coming here to establish routine access to space for UAH to try and getus back to space, he says. Through that, I can use it as a way to give students here the opportunity to interact with NASA personnel and be involved in every step of spacecraft development beyond just building something and giving it to NASA, like what's traditionally done with a lot of CubeSat projects.

The completed flight monitoring payload.

Space Hardware Club

The goal is to have UAH students regularly building spacecraft and going to a NASA launch center to participate in activities like payload integration, sequence testing, vehicle assembly, launch pad prep, recovery and other activities.

The group aims to climb the levels of NASAs student launch programs. NASAs RockOn program is introductory suborbital spaceflight research, RockSat-C is the next level up with a larger payload size and RockSat-X is the third level, where there is maximum freedom of design and purpose. The three programs are a collaboration of the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia and NASAs Wallops Flight Facility.

With each program's increasing intensity, the students get to become more involved with the whole process of working with NASA, up to the point where students have the capability of helping assemble and test the rocket itself, Campbell says. There are tons of great and capable students in theSHC thatwant to send things to space, and this is one way I know to make that happen.

Campbell credits ChrisKoehler, a contact from his past who directs the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, with helping get the first TSRG project off the ground.

He runs the RockOn, RockSat-C, and RockSat-X programs. He's a really awesome guy who knows a lot, has a passion for helping teach students about space, and is really fun totalk with, Campbell says. He was our main point of contact with getting things situated with us joining RockOn 2022 and everything supporting that.

The team is considering future projects that include communications systems, propulsion technology, experimental avionics, geology, biology, heliophysics and atmospheric science.A possible mission to the lunar surface is also being discussed.

One of the great things about the situation we are in right now is that, depending on the nature of different experiments, we can try to combine multiple experiments onto a single flight, and if some concepts don't get flown this coming year, we can try to pursue them a later year, Campbell says.

By working to establish routine access to space at UAH, Terminus will help enable future space missions supporting a wide field of research areas and help grow the technical expertise of UAH students.

Read more:

UAH student-built payload goes to space for the first time in almost a decade - UAH News

After eight years of science work, jet-turned-telescope SOFIA is preparing to take its final flight. But before its end of service on Sept. 30, the flying observatory is taking one last trip abroad.

Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and consists of a modified Boeing 747 aircraft with a special door built into its side that opens mid-flight to reveal observational instruments. Now, SOFIA is spending its final international deployment in Christchurch, New Zealand, where it has spent six previous deployments.

"We are thrilled to be returning to Christchurch to continue to study and discover the infrared universe," Naseem Rangwala, the SOFIA project scientist, said in a statement.

Related: A photo tour of NASA's SOFIA flying observatory

Because SOFIA can fly above 40,000 feet (12,000 meters) in altitude, it can make clearer infrared observations than ground-based telescopes. In particular,the telescope flies above 99% of the atmosphere's water vapor, which can interfere with infrared imaging.

Although SOFIA is usually based in Palmdale, California, at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, where it typically takes four overnight observation flights per week, it travels internationally to observe different parts of the sky. One of its most frequent destinations is Christchurch.

SOFIA's original mission lasted just five years, although its anticipated lifespan was 20 years. But based on the most recent astrophysics decadal survey-- a document published by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that suggests research priorities and crunches budgets for the next decade NASA and DLR decided to end the SOFIA program on Sept. 30. Its high operational costs, to the tune of $85 million a year, simply didn't provide enough return on the investment, the panel behind the report determined.

During its final stint in Christchurch, SOFIA will make an estimated 32 flights with two main science goals. The observatory will use its High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera Plus (HAWC+) instruments to map the Milky Way galaxy's magnetic fields; it will also use the German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies (GREAT) to study stellar feedback, or the interaction of stars with their local environment.

"We are committed to delivering a strong finish for this unique astrophysics mission, from a place of strength and pride, by giving our scientific community as much data as possible from the Southern Hemisphere," Rangwala said.

Data from SOFIA's flights in New Zealand will be made available in NASA's public archives.

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA's flying SOFIA observatory on last New Zealand trip - Space.com

Updated 7:45 a.m. July 8 with comment from ESAs Aschbacher.

WASHINGTON NASA strongly criticized Russia for using the International Space Station to promote its invasion of Ukraine, a break from the agencys approach of emphasizing ongoing cooperation despite the war.

In a statement late July 7, NASA said it strongly rebukes Russia for political activity on the station related to Russias ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The brief statement did not specify what incident prompted the statement.

NASA strongly rebukes Russia using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the stations primary function among the 15 international participating countries to advance science and develop technology for peaceful purposes, the agency said in a statement emailed to reporters.

The statement appears to be in response to images released by the Russian space agency Roscosmos July 4 that showed the three Russian cosmonauts on the station Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev holding flags associated with the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic and Donetsk Peoples Republic. These are regions of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces but whose independence is recognized by only Russia and Syria.

The flags were displayed to mark the Russian occupation of Lysychansk, the last city in Luhansk to fall to Russian forces. In the Roscosmos statement posted on the Telegram social media network, the agency said it and the cosmonauts on the station congratulated the Luhansk Peoples Republic government on the capture of the city.

The NASA statement stands in contrast to its past efforts to publicly minimize the effect of the war on the ISS partnership. NASA leadership had in the past noted a long-running relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union in spaceflight that dated back to the Cold War.

On the station are Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, and they are all very professional. The relationship between the mission control in Houston and in Moscow is very professional, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 during a joint press conference with his European Space Agency counterpart, Josef Aschbacher, when asked about relations with Russia.

Despite the tragedies that are occurring in Ukraine by President Putin, the fact is that the international partnership is solid when it comes to the civilian space program, he said.

Aschbacher offered a comment similar to the NASA statement in a July 8 tweet. It is unacceptable that the ISS becomes a platform to play out the political or humanitarian crises happening on the ground, he wrote. The purpose of the ISS is to conduct research & prepare us for deeper exploration. It must remain a symbol of peace and inspiration.

Its unclear if this incident will have any lasting effect on ISS cooperation. NASA and Roscosmos have yet to finalize a seat barter agreement to allow Russian cosmonauts to fly on commercial crew spacecraft and American astronauts to go on Soyuz spacecraft. In a separate Telegram post July 6, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said he expected a final version of the agreement in one to two weeks.

A European Space Agency astronaut on the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, is scheduled to perform a spacewalk from the stations Russian segment July 21 with Artemyev. The two will work on a European robotic arm on the stations Nauka module.

More here:

NASA criticizes Russia for using space station to promote invasion of Ukraine - SpaceNews

When Apollo astronauts sent back the first pictures of Earth as a disk in space, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote of it as that bright loveliness in the eternal cold. He was not far off. Deep space has a temperature of 2.7 kelvinsjust 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

If the James Webb Space Telescope is to worklooking so far out and therefore so far back in time that it can see the first galaxies forming after the big bangit will have to image objects so faint that they barely stand out from the cold around them. The world will begin finding out how well the observatory works as soon as next week, when JWST is expected to release its first trove of scientific images and spectroscopic data.

So, for arguments sake, lets assume all indications so far do in fact point to a successful kickoff of the (hopefully long and storied) scientific data-gathering phase of Webbs mission. How then did the engineers and designers of this massive telescope ever make it possible to cool the telescope down enoughall at a remove of nearly four times the distance from Earth to the moonto possibly do its job?

After more than 25 years work and technological hurdles beyond counting, the Webb team has launched and stationed its mammoth observatory in solar orbitand brought its instruments below 40 kelvins (-233 C), cold enough to see the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago. Remarkably, most of the cooling has been done passively, by shielding the telescope from the sun and letting physics take care of the rest.

Webb is not just the product of a group of people. Its not the product of some smart astronomersWebb is truly the product of our entire worlds capability, says Keith Parrish, a leader on the Webb team at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Taken as a whole, Webb is truly the result of our entire know-how of how to build complex machines.

Parrish joined the project in 1997, ultimately becoming its commissioning manager through the years of design, assembly, testing, delay and, finally, launch on 25 December 2021. He says almost everything about itits shape and location, the materials from which its madewas dictated by the need to have an observatory that would survive for years at supercold temperatures.

In this photo, the five-layered JWST sunshield is being unfurled and inspected in a clean room. The layers of coated Kapton E never touch, minimizing the transmission of heat from one layer to the next. Alex Evers/Northrop Grumman

The Webb is an infrared observatory for many reasons, not the least of which is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of light from distant objects is lengthened, causing dramatic redshift. Infrared is also good for seeing through cosmic dust and gas, and for imaging cold things such as comets, Kuiper Belt objects, and perhaps planets orbiting other stars.

But infrared radiation is often best measured as heat, which is why its important for the Webb to be so cold. If, like the Hubble Telescope, it were in low Earth orbit, and it had no shielding from the sun, most of its targets would be drowned out by the sun and ground, and by heat in the telescope itself.

If my signal is heatand infrared is heatthen what I cant have is other heat sources that are noise in the system, says Jim Flynn, the sunshield manager at Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the Webb.

So the Webb has been sent to circle a spot in space called L2, 1.5 million kilometers away, opposite the sun, one of the locations known as Lagrange points, where the gravity of Earth and the sun roughly cancel each other out. Its a good compromise: Earth is distant enough that it doesnt interfere with observations, but close enough that communication with the spacecraft can be relatively fast. And since the ship isnt flying from day to night and back on every orbit, its temperature is relatively stable. All it needs is a really, really good sunshade.

Four [layers of sunshield] would have probably done the job. Five gave us a little bit of an insurance policy. Id like to say it was way more sophisticated than that, but thats really not what it was at all.Keith Parrish, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The engineering was pushed above and beyond to meet the scientific goals, says Alexandra Lockwood, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Webb. It is specifically designed the way that it is because they wanted to do intensive infrared science.

It makes for an ungainly-looking ship in many renderings, with the telescope assembly, intentionally open to space to prevent heat buildup, attached to its silvery sunshield, about 14 meters wide and 21 meters long, with five layers of insulating film to keep the telescope in almost total darkness.

From its sunlit side the sunshield roughly resembles a kite. The elongated shape, engineers found, would be the most efficient way to keep the Webbs optics out of the sun. They considered a square or octagon, but the final version covers more area without much more mass.

Its no larger than it needs to be to meet the science field-of-view requirements, and that unique kite shape is the result, says Parrish. Any larger than it is now, it just makes everything more complex.

The shields five layers are made of Kapton E, a plastic film first developed by DuPont in the 1960s and used for spacecraft insulation and printed circuits. The layers are coated in aluminum and silicon. Each is thinner than a human hair. But engineers say they are, together, very effective in blocking the suns heat. The first layer reduces its strength by about an order of magnitude (or 90 percent), the second layer removes another order of magnitude, and so on. The layers never touch, and theyre slightly flared as one gets away from the center of the shield, so that heat will escape out the sides.

The result: Temperatures on the sunny side of the shield approach 360 K (87 C), but on the dark side theyre below that all-important 40 K (-233 C). Or, put another way: More than 200 kilowatts of solar energy fall on the first layer, but only 23 milliwatts make it all the way through the fifth.

STScI/NASA

Why five layers? There was a lot of computer modeling, but it was hard to simulate the shields thermal behavior before flight. Four would have probably done the job. Five gave us a little bit of an insurance policy, says Parrish. Id like to say it was way more sophisticated than that, but thats really not what it was at all.

The ability to cool the telescope naturally, first calculated in the 1980s to be possible, was a major advance. It meant the Webb would not have to rely on a heavy, complex cryogenic apparatus, with refrigerants that could leak and shorten the mission. Of its four main scientific instruments, only one, a midinfrared detector called MIRI, needs to be cooled to 6.7 K. Its chilled by a multistage cryocooler, which pumps cold helium gas through pulse tubes to draw heat away from the instruments sensor. It uses the Joule-Thomson effect, reducing the temperature of the helium by making it expand after its forced through a 1-millimeter valve. Pressure comes from two pistonsthe cryocooler systems only moving partsfacing opposite directions so their movements will cancel each other out and not disturb observations.

Building the telescope proved immensely complicated; it fell years behind while its budget ballooned toward US $10 billion. The sunshield needed lengthy redesign after testing, when Kapton tore and fasteners came loose.

We just bit off way more than we could chew, Parrish says now. Thats exactly what NASA should be doing. It should be pushing the envelope. The problem is that eventually Webb got too big to fail.

But its finally deployed, sending data, and surprising engineers who expected at least some failures as it began to operate. Keith Parrish, his work done, is moving on to other projects at Goddard.

I think Webb, he says, is just a great product of what it means to be an advanced civilization.

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Inside the Universe Machine: The Webb Space Telescopes Chilly Sun Shield - IEEE Spectrum

Photographer Andrew McCarthy recreated NASAs famous Pillars of Creation photograph of the Eagle Nebula using a $500 telescope.

The original iconic image, taken by the Hubble telescope, shows an active star-forming region featuring towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas in the heart of the Eagle Nebula, cataloged as M16.

It was first photographed in 1995 by NASA and has had a huge cultural impact with the image being featured on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs, reports National Geographic.

McCarthy spoke to PetaPixel about how he recreated the Pillars of Creation from his backyard in Arizona with a 12-inch Newtonian telescope and a monochrome camera using narrowband filters to create a vibrant color image.

I shoot the Pillars of Creation a couple times a year. Its a surprisingly accessible target, near the Sagittarius star cloud in the core of the Milky Way, explains McCarthy.

I used special software to remove all the stars in the image, so this unobstructed view really shows off the vast structures of gas and dust within the Eagle Nebula.

The image was shot over several hours across multiple nights, while my telescope was guided along the stars using a sophisticated tracking mount that compensated for the earths rotation.

McCarthy posted the image to Reddit where its received almost 10,000 upvotes. He believes that theres not as big of a gap between very expensive government-sponsored telescopes and amateur star-gazers shooting from their backyard.

However, McCarthy says that the biggest barrier for amateurs is the atmosphere.

The atmosphere completely blocks quite a few photons and distorts the rest. Hubble, James Webb, spitzer, etc, are all at an advantage that they are able to collect photons from targets completely unfettered by the atmosphere.

But with commercial space flight opportunities expanding, amateur-operated space telescopes could soon become a thing, he adds.

McCarthy accepts that a giant budget will still get you far more detailed images the backyard hobbyist, but believes there arent as many limits as people may think.

With smaller telescopes, you can generally just spend more time shooting a target to see deeper into space. I can see objects billions of light-years away with my telescopes. Since Im just using it to take pictures, theres not much of a need for me to go further than that.

More of McCarthys work can be seen on his website and Instagram.

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Pillars of Creation: $16B Space Telescope vs $500 Backyard Photo - PetaPixel

A solar-sailing mission is now marking three years of spaceflight, but is unlikely to celebrate a fourth anniversary.

The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 is a crowdfunded solar sail that launched June 25, 2019. It was expected to last a year in an assessment of how well a spacecraft could perform using only the power of the sun.

Now tripling that expectation, the spacecraft continues to work well but is in a fight with atmospheric drag. Molecules of the Earth's atmosphere are slowly pulling the spacecraft back to our planet, with re-entry expected in perhaps a few months, according to a Planetary Society update (opens in new tab).

"We have continued to work to learn more and sail more efficiently as part of itsextended missionincluding itssecond yearin orbit as well as this last year, its third year," Bruce Betts, the mission's project manager, wrote Friday (June 24) on the Planetary Society's website.

Related: LightSail 2 captures stunning photos of Earth from space

Like any long-running mission, the spacecraft has met a few challenges. Last summer, engineers recalibrated the gyroscopes on the spacecraft to account for drift, but the gyros "began returning data that measured incorrect spin rates," Betts wrote.

"We developed techniques to calibrate the gyros on orbit, and updated the onboard flight software to enable corrections to the gyro bias parameters. The update improved our sail control, thus improving our solar sailing."

The change allowed the altitude to rise by 328 feet (100 meters) per day for a few months, but as of today the average altitude is about 390 miles (627 kilometers). That's compared with 446 miles (718 km) at mission start.

The altitude fell for a few reasons, Betts explained, including communications trouble with the spacecraft due to ground station components breaking (and requiring replacement), ongoing atmospheric drag, and increased activity in the 11-year solar cycle puffing up Earth's atmosphere and moving more molecules higher.

That said, the Mylar sail material remains in good condition and the spacecraft has no major component failures, which Betts said is "an amazing testament to the many tens of people over the years whove worked on it."

He added the team plans to "make the most out of the next several months" before LightSail 2's eventual re-entry, but the data collected will remain useful essentially forever after the mission. The team plans numerous mission analyses, paper publications and conference publications for LightSail, as well as continuing their connections with other space missions planning on using solar sails themselves.

In the meantime, the LightSail team continues to publish updates through technical publications (opens in new tab) and, while the mission is active, you can view key parameters through the mission control dashboard (opens in new tab).

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow uson Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

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LightSail 2 marks 3rd anniversary as end of mission approaches - Space.com

What a former of the U.S. Air Force and defense expert had to say on the X-15:Before the Mercury astronauts broke the threshold of outer space, before John Glenn rode Friendship VII around the globe for three orbits, and well before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set the Eagle lunar module down upon Mare Tranquillity, a question persisted within the aerospace community: which agency would take Americans into space? And within what type of vehicle would they ride?

The Air Force Made a Strong Case to Go Into Space

The U.S. Air Force advocated that they, rather than the newborn NACA (later NASA), should bear the responsibility of taking Americans into space. And the Air Force, experts of controlled flight, believed that their men should actually fly into space, rather than be launched into space aboard a rocket. To prove that Americans could indeed be flown into space, rather than shot spam-in-a-can style, the Air Force would need a unique machine. Something fast. Something high flying. The solution was indeed the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever built: the North American X-15.

The X-15 is essentially a rocket with maneuverable flight surfaces and a cockpit. Initially, the X-15 used an XLR11 rocket engine, which was also used in the Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager used to break the sound barrier for the first time. The XLR11 only lasted eleven flights, however, before being swapped for the XLR99. Developed by Reaction Motors, the XLR99 provided a stunning 57,000 pounds of thrust. Using anhydrous ammonia and oxygen as a propellant, the jet consumed fuel voraciously; the jet could burn 15,000 pounds of propellant in just one minute and twenty seconds. In the process, the X-15 set records, for speed and altitude, that remain intact today, nearly six decades later.

The X-15 Earns its Wings and Breaks a Few Records

In October of 1967, USAF pilot William J. Pete Knight flew an X-15 to 100,000 feet and gunned the throttle. Sliding past Mach 1, sliding past Mach 2, he just kept accelerating. Knight maxed out at Mach 6, an unmatched 4,520 miles per hour; fast enough to cross the continental United States in about forty minutes. No one has ever flown faster. And no one has ever flown higher than the X-15 pilots who, on 13 separate occasions, flew above 50 miles, or 264,000 feet, past the accepted boundary of outer space.

In doing so, these 13 flights qualified as space flights, confirming the USAFs belief that man could be flown into space, rather than shot into space. The pilots who crossed the 50-mile outer space boundary were given astronaut wings, just like NASA darlings Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, and Schmitt. The still-standing record for altitude belongs to Joseph A. Walker, who guided his X-15 to 67 miles above the Earth on August 22nd, 1963.

The X-15 did not use a runway like most planes. Rather, the X-15 was ferried into the air attached to the hardpoint of a B-52 Stratofortress. The eight-engine B-52, the biggest bomber in the USAFs inventory, was so powerful it had no problem hefting the X-15. Once aloft, the B-52 would release the X-15, which would light the candle and fly away under its own power. Before NASAs Mercury capsule was formally chosen as the vehicle to take Americans into space, the Air Force considered launching an X-15 into orbit aboard the SM-64 Navaho missile. The X-15-Navajo configuration forebode the Space Shuttle configuration that would dominate space flight in the 1980s and 90s.

The X-15 was never launched into orbit, and the space race moved on, favoring capsules to planes. However, the X-15 program gleaned information that aided space exploration. Retired in 1968, only three X-15s were ever built. The X-15 is featured prominently in First Man, where Neil Armstrong, depicted by Ryan Gosling, pilots the jet, the fastest ever.

Harrison Kass is the Senior Defense Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison has degrees from Lake Forest College, the University of Oregon, and New York University. He lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken. Follow him on Twitter @harrison_kass.

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X-15: The Mach 6 Space Plane That Broke All the Rules - 19FortyFive

Since Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first human to go into space in 1961, more than 500 people have traveled into the great beyond. Some estimates, including those from the United States Air Force, put the total at 628.

Over the 61-year span, the human pathways into the so-called final frontier have been marked by triumph, milestones, discovery, wonder, and tragedy. And people continue to push the boundaries of human endeavor into space.

To determine the number of individuals who went into space every year since 1961, 24/7 Tempo, referred to data from Worldspaceflight.com, Spacefacts, Space.com, NASA, encyclopedic sources, and various media websites to compile this list. We tallied only those who had gone into space for the first time in a particular year for this list.

The first decade of space travel involved competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, as the two superpowers took their Cold War confrontation beyond the confines of Earth. The first space travelers from both countries were affiliated with the military. Gradually the two programs began including scientists and those from other fields in space travel.

The Soviet Union exploited its early advantage after the launch of the first satellite Sputnik in 1957 with some notable space firsts. Besides Gagarins initial space journey, other Soviet Union triumphs included the first woman in space in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, and the first person to walk in space, Alexei Leonov, in 1965.

The U.S. was playing catch-up and there were tragedies along the way. A major setback occurred in 1967 when Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee died during a routine ground test of the capsule. It would not be the last disaster for the U.S. space program. (These are the most important events in NASAs history.)

The Apollo program vaulted the United States into the technological lead, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. Though other nations have landed space probes on the lunar surface, only the U.S. has actually landed people there. (These are the 12 people who have walked on the moon.)

Click here to see the number of space travelers every year since space travel began

Competition gave way to cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union in the 1970s as the two former space adversaries carried out joint missions starting in July 1975.

Space travel became more or less routine in the 1980s with the start of the space-shuttle program and the launch of the international space station, which became truly international as other nations began providing space travelers for the ISS.

Dennis Zito became the first paying space tourist in 2001, and private companies, led by maverick mogul Elon Musk, are leaping into the realm.

Read more from the original source:

The Number of Space Travelers Every Year Since Space Travel Began - 24/7 Wall St.

Space exploration is feeling the shockwaves from the historic decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to revoke Roe vs. Wade on Friday (June 24).

The decision overturns a constitutional right to abortion in America first established in 1973, and counteracts a United Nations assertion in 2018 (opens in new tab) that abortion should be considered a human right. The loss of Roe v. Wade is so profound that the New York Times termed it (opens in new tab) a "political and social earthquake" on Sunday (June 26).

Space figures are now also weighing in on the verdict.

A former astronaut now serving in the U.S. Senate promised to never back down from fighting for abortion rights, for example.

"This is a giant step back for our country and an all hands on deck moment," wrote Mark Kelly (D-Ariz) on Twitter (opens in new tab). Kelly flew four times in space on space shuttle missions and is married to a former Democratic senator from Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords.

Related: Texas abortion ban could take an unexpected toll on the space industry

Several individuals with connections to space talked about how abortion impacted their careers, or how the lack of it will hurt others.

Kellie Gerardi, a science communicator and researcher expected to launch into space on a future Virgin Galactic flight, wrote on Twitter (opens in new tab) that she "wouldnt have the family or career I've built without access to abortion."

"I wouldn't be able to fly to space, participate in the workforce or reach my full potential without reproductive healthcare. I need every person or company who calls me a role model to remember that," she said Saturday (June 25).

"Of equal consequence, my husband wouldnt have the family and career he's built without this access either," she added, noting in a separate tweet (opens in new tab) that "reproductive healthcare" (for her, meaning egg freezing and birth control) allowed her to be a candidate for a research spaceflight.

"My public vulnerability is for those who can't be," Gerardi said.

Implications for the ruling are vast for women, non-binary genders, transgender individuals and anyone with a uterus; in addition, the decision may ripple out to other issues revolving around privacy.One justice in the majority decision, Clarence Thomas, said in his assenting decision that the court should "overturn protections on access to contraception, same-sex relations and same-sex marriage," the Times added.

Abortions are now regulated at the state level; more than 20 states (out of 50) are set to ban all abortions, including those required to save a pregnant person's life, the Times reported. The ruling will disproportionately affect lower-income individuals and Black and Hispanic individuals, who statistically are less likely to be able to afford out-of-state transportation or other measures to seek safe abortion access, according to the Times.

Former NASA astronaut Terry Virts tweeted that the decision is "the latest and most egregious example of minority rule, and that needs to be fixed to save our democracy."

He outlined several ways to address the situation: "Electoral college, term limits, filibuster, primary system, gerrymandering, etc. We need to fix these folks," he wrote (opens in new tab) Saturday (June 25).

A media report suggests current NASA administrator Bill Nelson (a former astronaut and former Democratic Florida senator) opposes the decision, too.

"I strongly believe this ruling directly and detrimentally impacts the NASA workforce as it delegates an intensely personal decision to lawmakers in states where NASA employees live and work," Nelson wrote in a note to agency employees, according to Reuters reporter Joey Roulette on Twitter (opens in new tab).

The fall of Roe v. Wade will see broader effects similar to those experienced in Texas after a new anti-abortion law went into effect in September 2021.

NASA's Johnson Space Center, the hub for astronaut training, is located in Houston, and the state at large is home to numerous sectors of the space industry. Roughly 144,000 people (opens in new tab)are employed in Texas in aerospace, the state reported in 2020, including big companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and smaller ones like Intuitive Machines and Axiom.

The Texas legislation banned any abortions more than six weeks into a pregnancy, which is before many people are aware they are pregnant. The decision came under criticism from Biden at that time, as well as from people in the space industry.

"I've had a handful of women *just today* seeking advice in my DMs [direct messages] because they have anxiety either deciding to take a space job in Texas or already having accepted a space job in Texas," science communicator Emily Calandrelli, who hosts the Emmy award-winning science series "Emily's Wonder Lab" on Netflix,tweeted (opens in new tab)on Sept. 2, the day after the law took effect. "Space leaders in Texas, please pay attention to this. You're going to lose talent."

And Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, who was the first female engineer to work at NASA's Mission Control during the Apollo program and is now a Texas attorney who fights for access to reproductive healthcare, has also been weighing in on Twitter.

She shared a photo (opens in new tab) of what she said had been the fourth largest abortion provider in the U.S. with a new sign saying it could no longer offer abortions. She also encouraged (opens in new tab) those who oppose the decision to reach out to their elected representatives, among other comments.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow uson Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

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Space tourism could be a big industry in the future -- some analysts think it could grow to an estimated $1.5 billion by 2027, and easily get far bigger over the coming decades.

Virgin Galactic Holdings (SPCE -5.27%) is one of the companies vying to carve out its market share in the sector. It's developing spacecraft for taking civilians on suborbital flights. The business is exciting, and a successful spaceflight program could have enormous long-term potential. However, several red flags make Virgin Galactic a risky investment in today's bear market. Here is what investors should know.

Virgin Galactic made headlines last summer when it successfully conducted a crewed test flight on its flagship spacecraft Unity that included the company's founder, Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic is gearing up for commercial flights, but supply chain problems caused it to push these trips back to next year.

Meanwhile, there is another spacecraft in development, Imagine, which currently has a target-ready date of mid-2023 for commercial use -- but it hasn't yet gone to space, so there is still more testing needed.

A lot of money and work go into preparing these spacecraft for commercial use, and the repeated delays could impact the company's cash burn, a risk in this current market. Meanwhile, rival companies are pushing forward.

Virgin Galactic had $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments as of the company's 2022 Q1, likely alleviating any immediate financial needs. However, investors should consider how the company accumulated some of these funds. It took out a loan for just $425 million in early 2022. Debt is rarely ideal for a young and growing company, especially when the business model is not yet operational.

The chart below shows Virgin Galactic's negative free cash flow, meaning the business loses cash. It's burning between $50 million and $90 million per quarter, totaling about $253 million over the past year. Management guided for a cash burn of up to $90 million for 2022 Q2.

SPCE Free Cash Flow data by YCharts

It's easy to do the math and figure out that there's enough cash to last many quarters, but Virgin Galactic presents unique risks that investors should consider. Commercial flights keep getting delayed, which is discouraging because the commercial flights will take time to ramp up -- the company's Unity spacecraft will conduct just one flight per month to start.

The Unity spacecraft holds just eight people, including two pilots, which means that actual paying passengers will number just six per trip. $450,000 per ticket is about $3 million in monthly revenue. In other words, the company is still far from running commercial trips frequently enough to bring in meaningful revenue.

And what happens if there is a problem? Could a technical failure cause months of lost revenue from the resulting testing and repairs? Could the company face pricing pressure if there's trouble stirring up demand at such lofty ticket prices? Virgin Galactic's cash pile needs to be enormous, because it will likely take a while to start turning a profit, and a lot could go wrong along the way.

This makes the current market all the more treacherous for investors. Interest rates are rising to combat inflation, making debt more expensive.

The current bear market has crushed share prices of stocks across Wall Street, and Virgin Galactic is no different, down almost 90% from its peak. It's hard to issue stock to raise money when prices are low because you can't raise a significant amount without dilution -- adding tons of new shares decreases the value of existing shares.

Virgin Galactic will hopefully see its share price recover before it needs to raise money again; debt isn't healthy for a company with hardly any revenue. The company could be in a tricky spot if the stock languishes until more cash is needed.

This dilemma makes the stock riskier for investors. There isn't a clear path to near-term profitability, and the long-term financials of the company are questionable at best. However, patient investors could benefit -- the stock is worth just $1.6 billion today, leaving room for investors to capture long-term upside once the business proves itself a bit more.

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June 27, 2022

Researchers at Arizona State University have earned 19 National Science Foundation early faculty career awards dating back to June 2021. The new awards total $12 million in funding for ASU researchers in grants that will be used over the next five years.

The work covers subjects that explore a wide variety of science and technology, from advancing AI-based data processing to measuring the cosmological signatures of stars and galaxies to understanding infants development of curiosity to enhancing 3D-printing precision.

The NSFs Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program identifies the nations most promising young faculty members and provides them with funding to pursue outstanding research, excellence in teaching and the integration of education and research. Often, these awards spur the creativity of the faculty member and help set them on an innovative career path. To date, more than 200 ASU faculty members have earned NSF CAREER awards.

The 19 ASU NSF CAREER award recipients exemplify the best of our ASU faculty, said Nancy Gonzales, executive vice president and university provost. Each scholar is committed to research that improves our world, while demonstrating equal dedication to their teaching, guiding and mentoring students to achieve their highest potential.

I am proud that these honorees come from a range of academic disciplines at ASU, including engineering, psychology and the sciences. On behalf of the Academic Enterprise, I congratulate you on this well-deserved award.

Here is a look at the current ASU NSF CAREER award recipients:

Abhinav Acharya, assistant professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Acharya works at the interface of the immune system and engineering. His efforts include the isolation and identification of disease biomarkers and natural therapeutics, as well as biomaterials synthesis and translational technology development. The results of his NSF research could enable the development of vaccines to treat diseases such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. Read more

Kumar Ankit, assistant professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Ankit is leading the first integration of computational, experimental and characterization techniques to better understand how processing methods affect steel microstructures and their properties, such as strength and hardness. This project will add new knowledge to the field and help optimize the future of steel manufacturing. Read more

Christina Birkel, assistant professor, School of Molecular Sciences

Birkel is working to create new materials that can be used for renewable energy, catalysts and permanent magnets. Materials are all around us and are the driving force for new and innovative solid-state technologies centered on batteries, sensors and magnets. Birkels projects focus on solid compounds that contain different metals and either carbon, nitrogen or both, called carbides, nitrides or carbonitrides, respectively. Read more

Katelyn Cooper assistant professor, School of Life Science

Cooper is a biology education researcher whose work seeks to understand the relationship between biology learning environments and undergraduate and graduate student mental health. Her research aims to identify factors of student research experiences that positively and negatively impact mental health, and to develop tools and resources to support students throughout their research experiences. Read more

Deliang Fan, assistant professor, School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering

Fan is conducting electrical and computer engineering research to validate the performance of a new hybrid in-memory computing system. The concept behind his work is to leverage memory device and circuit properties in ways that will advance AI-based big data processing fields such as computer vision, autonomous driving and robotics. Read more

Emma Frow, assistant professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering and School for the Future of Innovation in Society

Frow studies the role of care in responsible innovation for bioengineering. Her work will document the growth and development of a new type of facility for high-throughput design and genetic engineering called "biofoundries. Her research aims to design interventions or tools that can help attune practitioners to the politics of care and responsibility, and shape the governance of these foundries. Read more

Gillian Gile, associate professor, School of Life Sciences

Gile studies the diversity and evolution of microbial eukaryotes, otherwise known as protists. Despite their microscopic size, protists are more closely related to plants and animals than to bacteria, and they play important roles in ecosystems such as soil and marine plankton. Her research examines protists that live in termite hindguts and digest wood to understand the origin and evolutionary dynamics of the termite microbiome.

Christian Hoover, assistant professor, School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment

Hoovers research focuses on further understanding the synergistic effects of composition, porosity and structural rigidity on the mechanics of glassy metal-organic frameworks. These porous materials have the ability to be used for several applications, especially in carbon dioxide capture, separation and storage. Read more

Daniel Jacobs, assistant professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration

Jacobs is an interdisciplinary scientist across the areas of astrophysics, cosmology, experimental physics and aerospace engineering. His primary research focus is measuring cosmological signatures of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe with custom radio arrays. The award will be used for observation with existing radio arrays, to improve radio arrays and to develop new technology to support future experiments. Read more

Kelsey Lucca, assistant professor, Department of Psychology

Luccas research investigates cognitive development during infancy and early childhood, with a focus on the development of curiosity, social cognition, communication and problem-solving. The award will help her explore the psychological processes involved in curiosity starting in infancy.

Yuval Mazor, assistant professor, School of Molecular Sciences

Mazor's research focus is the structural biology of the membrane complexes involved in oxygenic photosynthesis. His research explores new approaches in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) that are revolutionizing the abilities to understand the role of structure for different functions carried out by essential protein supercomplexes. Read more

Troy McDaniel, assistant professor, Polytechnic School

McDaniel is exploring how intelligent wearable technology can enable older adults with memory challenges to live independently. Using visual recognition, this novel hardware, placed strategically on the wrist, deciphers hand movements and identifies objects in the environment through a camera lens, providing insight to a users behaviors to aid cognitive decline. Read more

Anamitra Pal, assistant professor, School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering

Pal conducts fundamental and applied research in the power and energy systems domain. His project employs robust statistics and machine learning to real-time data for better monitoring and control of our national electric power infrastructure, helping to ensure the reliable and resilient operation of the electric power grid. Read more

Kenan Song, assistant professor, Polytechnic School

Song is developing a new additive manufacturing method called Multiphase Direct Ink Writing to enhance 3D printing precision of ordered patterns at nanoscales. This method can be used for rapid prototyping of sensors and for applications in supercapacitors, batteries and regenerative medicine. Read more

Beckett Sterner, assistant professor, School of Life Sciences

Sterner examines issues in the philosophy of biology and medicine. His research studies how and why pluralism advancing multiple approaches to an issue makes a difference to current and historical practices of computational science. He is applying these insights to develop novel, collaborative approaches to making data and models relevant to global societal challenges such as biodiversity.

Xiaojun Tian, assistant professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering

Tian employs quantitative experiments and mathematical modeling to expand the understanding of fundamental problems in systems and synthetic biology. His exploration of molecular and cellular mechanisms could enable the synthesis of new therapeutics, the expansion of sustainable agriculture and the production of renewable resources. Read more

Arul Mozhy Varman, assistant professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy

Varman is developing advanced metabolic engineering computational tools and strategies to harness the capabilities of microbial cell factories for the sustainable production of chemicals, fuels and pharmaceuticals. His work to optimize genetic and metabolic processes can have an impact on the production of bulk chemicals, fuels and pharmaceuticals. Read more

Ruoyu Fish Wang, assistant professor, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Wang is working on research to mitigate the effects of malware and computer viruses by making the vulnerabilities in software easily understandable. His research may enable analysts and researchers to uncover source code in a manner that identifies vulnerabilities to protect them from malware. Read more

Jia Zou, assistant professor, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Zou is designing a new database that seamlessly supports and optimizes the deployment, storage and serving of both traditional machine learning models and deep neural network models. This work significantly decreases latency in databases that rely on real-time results, such as credit card fraud detection and emergency services response.Read more

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NASA & SPACE NEWSThe picturesque Whirlpool galaxy (M51) is a classic spiral 60,000 light-years across and located 30 million light-years away. This view, featured on the June 13, 2022, APOD, digitally combines images taken in different colors by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope. The Whirlpool is interacting with a smaller companion galaxy on the left. (NASA image)

(NASA) On June 16, 1995, when the World Wide Web was young, two gamma-ray astronomers at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, launched a website with a simple aim to post a daily astronomical image along with a brief, easily understood explanation.

Twenty-seven years on, Astronomy Picture of the Day (known affectionately as APOD) is available in 20 languages, seen by millions each day, and is used in classrooms throughout the world.

APOD has now been honored in the International Astronomical Unions first-ever round of outreach prizes. The award will be presented at the IAU General Assembly in Busan, South Korea, in August.

APOD is a gem in the crown of astronomy outreach that continues to raise awareness of astronomy and space science, said Mark Clampin, the director of Goddards Sciences and Exploration Directorate. It is truly a fixture in the daily routines of millions of people.

APOD founders Jerry Bonnell, working at the University of Maryland, College Park and Goddard, and Robert Nemiroff, now at Michigan Technological University, hit on the idea while brainstorming how they might contribute to the growing web.

We realized NASA had an incredible archive of images from astronomy and solar system exploration missions, explained Bonnell.

We started with those but invited basically anyone with a camera to contribute. The individual amateur contributions really took off and are a mainstay of APOD after all these years. Posting one astronomy picture a day and a simple explanation really became a labor of love.

APOD features science ranging from atmospheric phenomena and naked-eye astronomy to cosmology and space exploration, with images taken in light across the spectrum, from radio to gamma rays, along with supercomputer simulations and data visualizations.

Weve always had a very generous idea of what constitutes an astronomical picture, said Nemiroff.

That first image was one I computed showing how Earth and the sky would look if our planet had the density of a neutron star. While APOD features the work of professional astronomers using high-end facilities, including NASA satellites, we frequently highlight the work of non-scientist astrophotographers, who produce incredible work now.

APOD has hosted nearly 9,900 daily images over the last 27 years. As one of NASAs most popular websites, APOD continues to inspire awe, curiosity, and interest in the cosmos. Its creators hope something like it will continue far into the future, long after the web itself is obsolete.

APOD is funded by NASAs Science Activation program, a community-based approach to connect NASA science with learners of all ages, from the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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By Emily Burleigh

American Press

An experiment designed by three students at F.K. White Middle School has been chosen as the winner of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Educations Student Spaceflight Experiments Program.

The team is made up of Edith Evey, Cynthia Caron Chulo and Priscilla Moncada and their experiment, Sunflower Microgravity Growth, seeks to analyze whether or not sunflower seeds exhibit a difference in growth with microgravity exposure.

Sunflower microgravity growth is very simple in its nature, yet the impact of what is to be learned from it could have far-reaching effects, said their teacher, Dana Istre. The project that the girls will execute is to send a few dozen organic sunflower seeds on board the International Space Station for several weeks.

Upon return to Earth the students will plant the seeds that were exposed to microgravity along with a control group of seeds that were not exposed in an effort to learn how or if the microgravity will affect growth.

The experiment, part of Mission 16 for the SSEP, is projected to launch this fall.

The winning experiments are being loaded onto rockets and being transported to the International Space Station as it is in orbit, Istre explained. Therefore, projects may contain no more than three volumes that are no greater than 10 ml altogether.

Istre said the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program website will be frequently updated with countdowns, dates and live links of mission launches.

The students will be notified with details of the launch while coordinating with teacher facilitators and the flight operations manager for the program, Istre said.

After the experiment is conducted, the students will present their findings at the annual SSEP National Conference at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

They will be considered official microgravity researchers, Istre said.

There were 1,234 submissions nationwide, and these students were selected to be a part of the final 21, Istre said. Two other projects were submitted from, F.K. White, including one on the growth of Bacillus Coagulns in microgravity and another on yeast fermentation in microgravity.

Istre said she and colleague Sandra Hayes were honored to guide the students through this process.

To be able to participate in a project that can have such meaningful results in the real world outside of the classroom I believe was eye-opening for the students as they saw that they can be valuable assets to their community, even at such a young age, Istre said. I feel confident that this project could have a lifelong impact for the winning group.

Istre said the three students, two of whom are Spanish-speaking, show that girls in STEM are capable and passionate and will change the world.

It was exciting to see the learning happening as the students did research and mini-experiments and worked so hard to complete their projects, but it was most exciting just to be able to bring an opportunity like this to our students.

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"India is an important International Space partner for Australia," said Mr Enrico Palermo, Head, Australian Space Agency(ASA), while virtually addressing a conference on 'Development of Space Start-up Ecosystem in India'(DeSSEI). Referring to the areas of Indo-Australia cooperation in the space sector, he mentioned India's Gaganyaan Human Spaceflight mission, the $25million (INR 144crore) expansion of the Indian International Space Investment initiative and assured that Australia continues to look at new ways to enhance space collaboration with India.

According to the Australian Government, the country's space economy is projected to triple in size by 2030, to $12bn(INR 65,200crore). With natural features such as clear skies, unique geography and advanced space capabilities, Australia offers international players comparative advantages in earth observation, communication technologies and services, access to space, robotics and automation, it was added.

Speaking at the event, Mr Michael Costa, Australia's Deputy Consul General to South India said that Australia welcomes Indian space start-up partnerships. He also highlighted the pathways for Indian space sector start-ups to access funding, tax incentives, incubation programmes and global networks in Australia. "The planned establishment of an Australian Consulate-general and a join Australia-India Centre of Excellence on Critical and Emerging Technology Policy in Bengaluru ais to further encourage technology linkages between Australia and India from cyberspace to outer space" he added.

Speaking of how there was an increasing appetite for Australian Space firms to set up a physical presence in India, Piyush Dhaundiyal, General Manager, Space Machines Company(SMC) said that his firm performed assembly, integration and testing of hardware in Sydney, while their core R&D, design and prototyping were being conducted in Bengaluru. Notably, Bengaluru is the aerospace hub of India.

Earlier, Mr Anthony Murfett, deputy head, Australian Space Agency(ASA), had said The Australian government is proud to be supporting the Gaganyaan mission, by tracking through Australias territory on the Cocos (Keeling) islands. It shows that Australia can be a trusted partner - we were a partner to NASA during the Apollo missions, we were a partner to Japan during Hayabusa 1&2 and now were working with India on Gaganyaan mission.

ISRO has been working on the ambitious Gaganyaan mission that involves demonstrating the indigenous capability to undertake human space flight missions to low Earth orbit and will lay the foundation for a sustained Indian human space exploration programme in the long run. As part of this programme, two unmanned missions and one manned mission have been approved by the government of India.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a recent collaboration with Axiom Space. Together, they are developing a more efficient way to analyze data from the Axiom Mission 1 (known as the Ax-1, the first all-private mission to the ISS) via Amazons AWS Snowcone SSD. Ax-1 is the first of several private space missions to ISS planned by Axiom Space, with the ultimate goal of building the first commercial space station.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a recent collaboration with Axiom Space. Together, they are developing a more efficient way to analyze data from the Axiom Mission 1 (known as the Ax-1, the first all-private mission to the ISS) via Amazons AWS Snowcone SSD. Ax-1 is the first of several private space missions to ISS planned by Axiom Space, with the ultimate goal of building the first commercial space station.

Bandwidth is seriously contained on space stations due to the limited available infrastructure, which makes sending data and imagery astronauts attain back to the surface for processing arduous. While this only presents a minor inconvenience while orbiting just above the Earth, this will eventually cause serious problems when space expeditions start to venture much further (such as missions to Mars). There will be considerably longer delays due to the vast distance and the massive amount of data that will be transmitted back to Earth and then back to a spacecraft again. Amazon aims to help solve this.

At Amazon re:MARS 2022, AWS announced the joint Axiom Space-AWS team has successfully communicated remotely with the Snowcone on the ISS and also demonstrated the repeatable ability to perform edge processing on space-based datasets. This is a significant accomplishment, as it is the first time AWS has remotely operated a general-purpose edge processing and storage device on the ISS.

One of the main objectives of the Ax-1 mission is scientific research. Axiom private astronauts are working as many as 14 hours a day on 25 different research investigations and technology demonstrations, including the AWS Snowcone. Microgravity experiments (that is, experiments that are not possible within the gravity of Earth), such as modeling tumor organoids for cancer research, are generating a plethora of imagery and data that must be both cataloged and analyzed. In addition, on-board experiment photos must be screened for sensitive information. This research activity results in terabytes of data every day.

The AWS Snowcone SSD is an ideal solution for this, offering edge processing capabilities with multiple layers of encryptionall in a simple, ultra-portable form. During a 7-month process, AWS worked with Axiom and NASA to ensure the Amazon storage device can be safely sent to the ISS. This meant putting the device through NASAs rigorous safety review process, including detailed thermal analysis and a range of laboratory tests that simulated random vibrations of both a rocket during launch and the spacecraft during flight.

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HANNOVER, Germany, June 28, 2022 Scientists from the Laser Zentrum Hannover eV (LZH) and the Technische Universitt Berlin (TU Berlin) are planning a flight to the moon to melt lunar dust with laser radiation. Researchers, on a project calledMOONRISE, are looking to AI-aided lasing for the 3D printing of landing sites, roads, or buildings, using lunar dust.

Pulverized lunar rock, or regolith, is abundant on the moon and could be used as a raw material for 3D printing. Onsite fabrication of infrastructure could save enormous transportation costs. The use and processing of onsite materials, known as in situ resource utilization, or ISRU in spaceflight, could be a crucial factor in advancing the exploration of the moon and space.

Because the far side of the moon is always turned away from Earth, it is considered a prime spot for powerful space telescopes; the European Space Agency, therefore, has plans for a moon village. The lower gravity and lack of an atmosphere make the moon an ideal stopover for setting up missions to more distant destinations in space. However, the problem of launch pads, landing sites, and buildings remains an expensive one.

At a cost of up to a million dollars per kilogram, a complete transport of the material from Earth to the moon would be extremely expensive, said Jrg Neumann, MOONRISE project manager at LZH.

In a predecessor project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the team developed a laser and tested it in the laboratory on the robotic arm of a lunar rover. The scientists also smelted regolith under lunar gravity in the Einstein-Elevator of the Hannover Institute of Technology at Leibniz Universitt Hannover.

The task now is to make the laser fit for lunar flight. The scientists from LZH and TU Berlin want to develop a flight model of the laser that is qualified for use in space. The laser will be supported by trained AI.

To train the AI, the researchers will photograph the regolith under lighting conditions that mimic those on the moon. This will allow a corresponding pool of images to be created.

In addition, a regolith construction kit has been developed over the past few years, which allows the various possible landing sites to be precisely recreated in terms of properties, said Benedict Grefen from the group Exploration and Propulsion at TU Berlin. This is then adapted in the project to the final landing site on the moon, so that in the laboratory the laser and the AI can be aligned with the real lunar mission.

The surface analog model created in this way will also support decision-making during the mission.

Once the technology is deployed on the moon, a camera will take photos of the lunar dust melted by the laser. Researchers will analyze these photos with the help of an intelligent image processing system.

The MOONRISE FM project will run for three years and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action with 4.75 million ($5 million). The mission is scheduled to launch in 2024.

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LZH and TU Berlin Bring 3D Printing to the Moon - Photonics.com

This spring, when the teams submitted their results to IARPA, evaluator teams graded how well each one did. In June, the teams learned who was moving on to Smarts second phase, which will run for 18 months: AFS, BlackSky, Kitware, Systems & Technology Research, Applied Research Associates, and Intelligent Automation, which is now part of the defense company Blue Halo.

This time, the teams will have to make their algorithms applicable across different use cases. After all, Cooper points out, It is too slow and expensive to design new AI solutions from scratch for every activity that we may want to search for. Can an algorithm built to find construction now find crop growth? Thats a big switch because it swaps slow-moving, human-made changes for natural, cyclical, environmental ones, he says. And in the third phase, which will begin around early 2024, the remaining competitors will try to make their work into what Cooper calls a robust capabilitysomething that could detect and monitor both natural and human-made changes.

None of these phrases are strict elimination roundsand there wont necessarily be a single winner. As with similar DARPA programs, IARPAs goal is to transition promising technology over to intelligence agencies that can use it in the real world. IARPA makes phase decisions based on performance against our metrics, diversity of approaches, available funds, and the analysis of our independent test and evaluation, says Cooper. At the end of phase 3, there could be no teams or more than one team remainingthe best solution could even combine parts from multiple teams. Alternatively, there could be no teams that make it to phase 3.

IARPAs investments also often leak beyond the programs themselves, sometimes steering scientific and technological paths, since science goes where the money goes. Whatever problem IARPA chooses to do is going to get a lot of attention from the research community, says Hoogs. The Smart teams are allowed to go on to use the algorithms for civil and civilian purposes, and the datasets IARPA creates for its programs (like those labeled troves of satellite imagery) often become publicly available for other researchers to use.

Satellite technologies are often referred to as dual-use because they have military and civilian applications. In Hoogs mind, lessons from the software Kitware develops for Smart will be applicable to environmental science. His company already does environmental science work for organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; his team has helped its Marine Fisheries Service detect seals and sea lions in satellite imagery, among other projects. He imagines applying Kitwares Smart software to something thats already a primary use of Landsat imagery: flagging deforestation. How much of the rainforest in Brazil has been converted into man-made areas, cultivated areas? Hoogs asks.

Auto-interpretation of landscape change has obvious implications for studying climate change, says Bosch Ruizseeing, for example, where ice is melting, coral is dying, vegetation is shifting, and land is desertifying. Spotting new construction can show where humans are impinging on areas of the natural landscape, forest is turning into farmland, or farmland is giving way to houses.

Those environmental applications, and their spinout into the scientific world, are among the reasons Smart sought the United States Geological Survey as a test and evaluation partner. But IARPAs cohort is also interested in the findings for their own sake. Some environmental issues are of great significance to the intelligence community, particularly with regard to climate change, says Cooper. Its one area where the second application of a dual-use technology is, pretty much, just the same as the first.

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Dave Williams, Chris Hadfield and Robert Thirsk say the ISS offers the world a model for collaboration

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The space station, high above, is a microcosm an international collection of people living in a finite area with finite resources, just like the planet below, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield once wrote. He knows the International Space Station (ISS) well. Hes been up three separate times: 1995, 2001 and 2012, eventually becoming ISS commander on his final mission.

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The stations limited resources coupled with the harsh environment of space create the perfect conditions for innovation.For one, the ISS uses closed-loop heating and water systems so the astronauts dont need to depend on external sources. You flush the toilet, and yesterdays coffee becomes todays water, astronaut Dave Williams said, with a laugh.

The crew members, who all hail from different parts of the world, offering a range of technical and professional expertise, have to work together to maintain and operate the stations habitability systems.

Innovation on Earth tends to follow the drumbeat of space. A website called NASA Spinoff documents the space technologies that have found their way back to Earth, which include memory foam and freeze-dried food. Arguably, the most important space export by far is the strong tradition of collaboration between the international crew members, which transcends cultures and political affiliations.

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Thats exactly what we need to address the Earths most pressing issues, namely, the climate crisis, Williams said. It is the greatest lesson of the International Space Station: the opportunity to learn how effective collaboration actually works.

The growing space economy, now worth US$424 billion, will create an abundance of new jobs linked to climate innovation, he added. Youre developing technologies, many of which are going to help with the greening economy and enable us to have less environmental impact.

Williams went to space in 1998, and again in 2007, setting the record for the most spacewalks completed by a Canadian astronaut. His biomedical tech startup, Leap Biosystems Inc., is just one example of the ways in which space technology can be used on Earth.

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The company is experimenting with holoportation, a technology developed by Microsoft Corp., which allows someone wearing a headset on Earth to appear as a hologram on the ISS. It reminds Williams of Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty! he said.

The technology is still in its infancy, but he hopes it will one day be used to deliver medical care to remote corners of the world.

It is the greatest lesson of the International Space Station: the opportunity to learn how effective collaboration actually works

Dave Williams

Lately, Williams has been considering another terrestrial application for space technology. In his forthcoming book on planetary stewardship, he asks: Can we live as collaboratively and sustainably on Earth as we do on the ISS?

The globe, like the ISS, is a closed loop. It depends on finely tuned connections between the land, oceans, atmosphere, the freshwater cycle, flora and fauna, astronaut Robert Thirsk wrote in his blog.

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He went to the ISS in 1996 and 2009, setting the Canadian record for the most time spent in space, at 204 days and 18 hours. The planet is whole. And its integrated, he said in an interview.

The planet is whole. And its integrated

Robert Thirsk

From the ISS, astronauts can watch as natural events on one side of the world affect the other. Smoke plumes from forest fires in Siberia drift over to North America, lowering the air quality there. A small, unassuming atmospheric depression in the southern Atlantic grows into a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, affecting residents and businesses along the Gulf Coast.

Thirsk said that a mutant virus originating in Asia and wreaking havoc on the world may seem unbelievable to most, but for an astronaut, that is very easy to appreciate.

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The astronauts marvel at natural phenomena. Travelling at 8 km/s, or 25 times the speed of sound, the ISS completes a single orbit of the globe once every 90 minutes, meaning that its occupants witness a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes.

The view out the window takes everyone by surprise, Thirsk said. Theres (something) about seeing the Earth with your naked eyeball and seeing it from above. The privileged position that you have, somehow, it just amplifies the beauty and majesty of it all.

Earthbound astronauts speak about the planet with wonder. Williams called it a beautiful blue oasis cast against the infinite void of space. Describing this image to people back home, he said, is perhaps a lesser-known mission of space travel.

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The view of the Earth from space was personally transformative, Thirsk wrote on his blog. Viewed from afar, our marbled-blue planet is alone for hundreds of millions of kilometres, surrounded by nothing but void.

Hadfield said he was fortunate enough to watch the world change seasons, snow shifting from one hemisphere to the other.

I got to see the world, in effect, take one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths There has been life, uninterrupted, on Earth, for four billion years, he said. Thats really optimism-building. Life isnt going anywhere. The world isnt going anywhere. The question is: How good a quality of life do we want for people, and how sustainable do we want it to be?

Every day, astronauts on the ISS are confronted with the reality of the ecological crisis. Mining cuts jagged strips into the Earth. A smear of pollution obscures major cities. The Amazon rainforest is clear cut and burnt down to create room for agriculture, the smoky pall drifting across the Atlantic to impact the air quality in Africa.

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There is just a thin veil of atmosphere around the planet that is protecting the inhabitants below from the vacuum of space, the ultraviolet and ionizing radiation, the extremes of temperature, Thirsk said.

That, he said, is the only thing that makes the difference between a barren planet and one that teems with life.

Realizing that frail, vulnerable planet down below is our home makes me even more diligent in preserving its existence, he added.

If everyone in the world could see that view, the astronauts said, the question would no longer be if we will solve the climate crisis, but when.

Astronauts are not the only ones keeping an eye on emissions from space. Private satellite companies are jostling for market share in the expanding orbital environmental monitoring industry.

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Montreal-based company GHGSat Inc., which sends satellites into space to track methane emissions, on June 15 said one of its satellites had detected 13 plumes of methane emanating from a coal mine in Russia in January. It was the largest methane leak the company had ever detected.

Compared to carbon dioxide, methane is 25 times as effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

GHGSat has a track record of calling out serious offenders. In 2019, its satellites helped pinpoint methane leaks in Turkmenistan, which were releasing emissions equivalent to 250,000 gas-powered cars. In 2021, the company spotted a methane plume coming from a landfill in Pakistan.

The public sector is getting involved as well. This January, Canada committed $8 million to environmental monitoring via satellites as part of the Canadian Space Agencys smartEarth initiative.

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Its an emerging area. Its really going to change the way we quantify and understand emissions, said atmospheric scientist Ray Nassar, one of the pioneers of environmental observation via satellites. You cant manage what you cant measure.

In 2017, he led the first study to use satellites to quantify carbon emissions, with results precise enough to pinpoint the source of emissions to a single power plant.

Emissions can be tracked from the ground as well, but satellites allow enhanced transparency, Nassar said. Under the Paris Agreement, countries are pledging to reduce their emissions. Theyre not actually obligated to do that. Theyre obligated to report. We want to have the ability to verify emissions reductions.

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Satellites will paint a more cohesive picture than traditional measurement techniques.

There is a network of ground-based measurements for greenhouse gases across the world, Nassar said. But the thing about those measurements is its so unequally distributed if you ever want a global picture, its really lacking. And satellites can do that.

The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) is trying to get the companies that send out these satellites to work together and share data, to create a sort of constellation of satellites in space, he said.

As the green transition progresses, collaboration will be key, both in space and on Earth. The astronauts were divided on the solutions to the climate crisis, but agreed that addressing the issue would require precise political co-operation, similar to what already exists on the ISS. Co-operation on the ISS is next to perfect. It has to be.

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Everyone on the space station, their lives are in each others hands, Hadfield said. If anybody makes a mistake, everyone else dies.

The ISS astronauts are united by a common purpose, he added, and by the ever-present danger of being there.

Everyone on the space station, their lives are in each others hands

Chris Hafield

But even on the ISS, collaboration is not always easy, Williams said. He likened it to disputes among family members. On a planetary scale, however, the disagreements are more complex and involve more people, such that it is difficult to find solutions that work for all governments.

Collaboration on the ISS is helped because political divisions are muted.

Were just a bunch of people up there, Hadfield said.

Thirsk echoed a similar sentiment: All the crews from all the nations, the cultures that are represented, have a single-minded focus on accomplishing the mission objectives.

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To facilitate communication, astronauts aboard the ISS need to speak English and Russian, with English serving as the interstellar lingua franca.

Even so, when youre on board the space station as a crew member, most of us tend to think of ourselves as humans first, he said.

Williams considers himself a Canadian, but also a citizen of the Earth, a resident of a global village. The borders between countries, he pointed out, are invisible from space.

Were just a bunch of people up there

Chris Hadfield

If youre sitting in Montreal, or sitting in Toronto, you have a really skewed view of the world, Hadfield said. Its very local. As a result, a lot of the decisions that we make and some of our elected officials make are parochial in nature.

Citizens tend to focus on their own communities. What they can see, where they can travel. But when you get into space, you see Earth as a planet, he said.

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The astronauts said that, upon returning to Earth, their political perspectives had evolved. For instance, Thirsk said that the daily, local news cycle was of little interest. Thats all noise level to me. His concerns are now more global, chief among them being nuclear annihilation and the climate.

I do worry about the motives of some of these world leaders who have created an unstable geopolitical situation, he said. I dont see the older generation showing enough leadership in making the difficult decisions, today.

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Thirsk expects it will be the younger generation who will ultimately take charge of the climate fight. Williams agreed. Young people, he said, led by activists such as Greta Thunberg, will lead the way.

Its really easy to be critical of the lack of collaboration, he said. There are areas that, quite clearly, we are not collaborating here on Earth and areas that we are.

Either way, Hadfield is optimistic that we will find answers. The same driving, restless intellect that created the problems can minimize and even reverse them, he once wrote.

If ever we doubt our capacity to collaborate, we need only look up, morning and night, and watch the space station fly over, Hadfield said. Its a pretty clear example of what we do together when we do things right.

Email: mcoulton@postmedia.com | Twitter: marisacoulton

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The view through the window: Three Canadian astronauts weigh in on innovation, climate and future of spaceflight - Financial Post

SpaceXs Dragon Endeavour spacecraft splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean Monday to end Axioms Ax-1 mission. Credit: SpaceX

A SpaceX crew capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Georgia Monday with a retired NASA astronaut and three wealthy businessmen, closing out an extended 17-day mission on the first fully commercial, non-government visit to the International Space Station.

Protected by a thermal shield, the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft plunged back into the atmosphere and withstood a scorching hot re-entry over the southeastern United States. Two drogue parachutes opened up, and then four main chutes unfurled to slow the capsule for a relatively gentle splashdown at 1:06 p.m. EDT (1706 GMT) Monday in rolling seas northeast of Jacksonville, Florida.

The splashdown capped 17 days in orbit for the four-man crew, led by commander Michael Lpez-Alegra, a retired NASA astronaut and now an employee of Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that managed the mission.

Lpez-Alegra was joined on the flight by Larry Connor, an investor and accomplished aerobatic pilot from Ohio, Canadian businessman Mark Pathy, and Israeli entrepreneur Eytan Stibbe, who became the second person from Israel to fly in space. Connor, Pathy, and Stibbe paid for their rides to orbit.

Dragon, SpaceX, we see splashdown and mains (parachutes) cut, radioed Sarah Gillis, SpaceXs crew operations resource engineer, from the companys mission control center in Hawthorne, California.

We concur, repliedLpez-Alegra, who returned from his fifth mission to space, totaling 275 days in orbit. He has now launched on three different types of vehicles NASAs space shuttle, Russias Soyuz spacecraft, and SpaceXs Dragon ferry ship.

On behalf of the entire SpaceX team, welcome back to planet Earth, Gillis said. The Axiom 1 mission marks the beginning of a new paradigm for human spaceflight. We hope you enjoyed the extra few days in space and thanks for choosing to fly SpaceX.

Lpez-Alegra said the crew was feeling well as the capsule bobbed in the Atlantic Ocean. After teams on fast boats secured the parachutes and inspected the Dragon capsule, SpaceXs recovery ship Megan, named for NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, pulled alongside the spacecraft and lifted it from the sea.

The recovery team then opened the hatch and helped each crew member from the spacecraft. All four stood and smiled, flashing a thumbs-up and walking albeit wobbly and with assistance to a medical evaluation room on the recovery ship.

While readjusting to gravity, private astronauts were expected to fly by helicopter back to shore, then travel to Orlando for more medical checks and to meet their families.

Axiom contracted with NASA and SpaceX for the all-private crew mission to the space station. NASA charged Axiom a daily rate for access to the stations life support system, communications network, and other equipment. NASA is paying some of that back to Axiom in exchange for the return of government freezers and experiment specimens on the Dragon spacecraft.

Axiom paid SpaceX for the ride to and from the station on the Dragon spacecraft, and the launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center.

The arrangement is the first of its kind. Previous visits by private astronauts, or space tourists, to the space station occurred on government-led missions on Russian Soyuz spaceships. Before Axioms flight, 11 people had traveled to the space station as paying passengers on Soyuz missions, but they all flew with a government cosmonaut commander.

More Axiom missions are planned to the station in the next few years, leading up to delivery of the companys own commercial module to the orbiting complex. That module will eventually detach from the International Space Station and become the centerpiece for Axioms privately-owned multi-element outpost in low Earth orbit.

Without those two partners, none of this would be possible, said Derek Hassmann, Axioms operations director, referring to NASA And SpaceX. So just an amazing first step thats leading up to our launch and activation of the Axiom station with the first module being planned for 2024.

I would say, overall, this has been just an amazing success, Hassmann told reporters Monday afternoon. The crew performed beyond expectations. The ground teams were tremendous.

The re-entry and splashdown Monday came about 16 hours after SpaceXs Dragon Endeavour spacecraft undocked from the space station. The capsule backed away from the complex at 9:10 p.m. EDT Sunday (0110 GMT Monday).

The Axiom mission, known as Ax-1, was supposed to last 10 days, with the crew spending eight days at the space station. The mission was extended one day because of timing conflict between the planned undocking of the Ax-1 mission and a previously-scheduled Russian spacewalk.

Then persistent high winds in all seven SpaceXs splashdown zones near Florida kept the crew aloft through last week and the weekend. Mission managers were finally satisfied that conditions would be favorable for a return Monday, and they cleared Ax-1 to depart the station Sunday night.

During their time on the International Space Station, the Ax-1 astronauts brought the crew complement on the research lab up to 11 people, including five Americans, three Russians, one German, one Canadian, and one Israeli occupant. The Ax-1 crewspent the bonus time in orbit finishing up experiments and participating in more outreach events that didnt fit into the original flight plan, Hassmann said.

Despite nearly doubling their stay at the space staton, the paying passengers didnt rack up any late checkout fees.

The contact between Axiom and NASA included an equitable balance to cover potential delays in the undocking and return of the Ax-1 mission, said Stephanie Schierholz, a NASA spokesperson.

Knowing that International Space Station mission objectives like the recently conducted Russian spacewalk or weather challenges could result in a delayed undock, NASA negotiated the contract with a strategy that does not require reimbursement for additional undock delays, Schierholz said in a written statement.

There were no additional costs for any parties based on the extension of the mission, Hassmann said.

Axiom has not disclosed the price Connor, Pathy, and Stibbe paid for their flight to the space station. But NASAs inspector general has said a seat on a Dragon mission costs roughly $55 million.

The Ax-1 crew members trained for the mission in Houston and at SpaceXs headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

The first private astronaut mission is a harbinger of a transition from government-led spaceflight operations in low Earth orbit to a future generation of commercial space stations. NASA wants to help steer the space industry through the transition by providing the International Space Station as a testbed for markets that must be developed before companies can take launch and operate a revenue-earning destination in orbit.

A major goal for the U.S. space agency is to rely on commercial industry to develop the next orbiting outpost to replace the International Space Station. The Biden administration recently signaled it will support an extension of station operations though 2030, but by then the research labs oldest elements will have been in space 32 years, more than twice their original design lives.

The fraught relationship between the United States and Russia, the two largest ISS partners, in the wake of Russias invasion of Ukraine has also raised concerns about a replacement for the International Space Station.

Aside from Axiom, several other companies have plans to develop commercial space stations. In December, NASA selected Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman to advance their concepts for a commercial habitat and research facility in low Earth orbit.

Those companies are developing concepts for a standalone station, while Axiom will initially focus on a commercial add-on to the ISS.

The Ax-1 mission was a stepping stone toward that goal.

During their time in space, the Ax-1 crew worked with 26 science payloads and technology demonstration experiments, according to Hassmann. They also conducted more than 30 public outreach events in multiple languages.

The experiments on Ax-1 included investigations into self-assembling technology for future satellites and space habitats, the study cancer stem cells, and the test of a new Japanese air purification device. The crew members also served as experiment subjects for scientists to study how spaceflight affects the human body.

Connor partnered with Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic on research looking at heart health and brain and spinal tissue. Pathy worked with the Montreal Childrens Hospital, Canadian research universities, and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society on technology demonstrations, a sleep study and chronic pain experiment, an eye health investigation, and Earth observations.

Stibbe worked with the Israel Space Agency, the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Technology, and the Ramon Foundation, an organization established to honor the memory of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. He alsocarried with him fragments from Ilan Ramons diary that survived the searing heat of re-entry after the fatal breakup of the shuttle Columbia over Texas in 2003.

The end of the Ax-1 mission clears the way for SpaceX to launch the next crew flight to the space station. Three NASA astronauts and a European Space Agency mission specialist are ready for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center at 3:52 a.m. EDT (0752 GMT) Wednesday.

The four-person crew will ride a Falcon 9 rocket and SpaceXs Dragon Freedom spacecraft into orbit to begin NASAs Crew-4 mission. The expedition on the space station is scheduled to last approximately five months.

The launch of the Crew-4 mission was delayed to await the return of the Ax-1 mission. The Dragon Endeavour spaceship was docked to the same port needed for arrival of the Dragon Freedom capsule.

SpaceX engineers will analyze data from the Ax-1 mission to ensure there were no issues that might affect the launch of the Crew-4 flight Wednesday. Managers planned to meet for a launch readiness review early Thursday to formally give the go-ahead for liftoff of the Crew-4 mission.

The Ax-1 mission was SpaceXs sixth launch to carry people since a Dragon test flight took off in May 2020 with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, ending a nearly nine-year gap in launching astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil.

NASA invested billions of dollars in helping SpaceX develop the human-rated Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX put up its own private funding in a cost-sharing arrangement with the federal government.

Benji Reed, senior director of SpaceXs human spaceflight programs, said Monday the companys fleet of four Crew Dragon spaceships could accommodate up to six astronaut missions per year.

Half a dozen crew flights per year would be great, or more, Reed said. AndIthink we can get to a place where we can sustain that. If theres a market for it, we can definitely do that.

Each Dragon capsule has four seats.In the long-term, SpaceX wants to retire the Falcon 9 and Dragon fleets in favor of the next-generation fully reusable Starship rocket, which could carry many more passengers into space. When asked Monday, Reed offered no estimate on when the Starship might be ready to fly people.

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SpaceX capsule returns to Earth with first all-private space station crew Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on NASAs Crew-4 mission. The Crew-4 mission is carrying astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Samantha Cristoforetti, and Jessica Watkins to the International Space Station. Follow us onTwitter.

Four astronauts strapped into their seats on SpaceXs Dragon Freedom spacecraft and rode a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit early Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning a 16-hour chase of the International Space Station. Liftoff from pad 39A occurred at 3:52 a.m. EDT (0752 GMT).

Kjell Lindgren, a veteran of 141 days in orbit on a previous flight, commands the Crew-4 mission to the space station. Pilot Bob Hines and mission specialist Jessica Watkins, both spaceflight rookies, are joining Lindgren on the mission. European Space Agency astronaut rounds out the crew.

With the successful launch Wednesday, the four-person crew began a mission lasting nearly five months at the space station, performing experiments and maintenance, conducting spacewalks, and continuing nearly 22 years of continuous human presence on the orbiting outpost.

The mission marks the seventh launch of astronauts by SpaceX since the first Dragon flight to carry people. It is SpaceXs fourth operational crew rotation flight for NASA under a multibillion-dollar contract.

The astronauts have spent the last week at the Kennedy Space Center undergoing final training and flight preps, and spending time with family before their multi-month expedition off the planet.

I plan to take a very long luxurious shower on that last day before launch, said Cristoforetti, an Italian-born flier poised for her second trip to space.

The Crew-4 astronauts are scheduled to arrive at the station for docking at 8:15 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0015 GMT Thursday).

Lindgren, Hines, Cristoforetti and Watkins will receive briefings from the four astronauts they are replacing on the station.

The flight plan calls for handover of at least five days between the new Crew-4 astronauts and the outgoing Crew-3 astronauts, who are tentatively scheduled to depart the station around May 4, targeting a splashdown off the coast of Florida around May 5, wrapping up their nearly six-month mission.

Commander Raja Chari, pilot Tom Marshburn, and mission specialists Matthias Maurer and Kayla Barron launched on the Crew-3 mission last November. They will ride SpaceXs Dragon Endurance spacecraft back to Earth, leaving the Crew-4 astronauts at the station with three Russian cosmonaut crewmates.

The Dragon Freedom spacecraft is the fourth, and likely last, human-rated vehicle to join SpaceXs fleet of reusable Dragon capsules. It joins Dragon Endeavour, Dragon Resilience, and Dragon Endurance in the companys inventory.

The Crew-4 mission launched on a Falcon 9 booster tail number B0167 flown on three previous missions. The booster stage launched for the first time last June 3 on a cargo mission to the space station, then flew again Nov. 10 with the Crew-3 mission. Most recently, the booster launched Dec. 18 with the Turksat 5B communications satellite.

There was a 90% chance of acceptable weather at the Kennedy Space Center for liftoff Wednesday morning, and a low-to-moderate risk of bad conditions along the Falcon 9s ascent corridor heading northeast over the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX monitors conditions downrange to ensure weather and sea states would be safe for a splashdown of the Dragon spacecraft in the event of an in-flight abort caused by a rocket failure.

The rockets first stage landed on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas parked in the Atlantic Ocean about 340 miles (545 kilometers) downrange from the launch pad.

Read our mission preview story for details on the Crew-4 launch.

ROCKET:Falcon 9 (B1067.4)

PAYLOAD:Crew Dragon Freedom on the Crew-4 mission

LAUNCH SITE:LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida

LAUNCH DATE: April 27, 2022

LAUNCH TIME: 3:52:55a.m. EDT (0752:55 GMT)

LAUNCH WINDOW:Instantaneous

WEATHER FORECAST: 90% probability of acceptable weather

BOOSTER RECOVERY:A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship

LAUNCH AZIMUTH:Northeast

TARGET ORBIT:Approximately 130 miles by 143 miles (210 by 230 kilometers); Inclination of 51.6 degrees to the equator

DOCKING AT ISS:8:15p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 27 (0015 GMT on Thursday, April 28)

LANDING DATE:September 2022

LAUNCH TIMELINE:

MISSION STATS:

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Live coverage: Four astronauts launch from Kennedy Space Center Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now