We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be a recipe for disaster, causing them to trip over themselves. The answer to this very specific issue may well be robotic limbs. They won’t prevent […]
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Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.
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Boeing’s Starliner launch tonight has been postponed “out of an abundance of caution” scarcely two hours before the historic liftoff. The scrub is reportedly due to an issue with the oxygen relief valve on the Atlas V rocket’s upper stage.
There are backup launch opportunities on May 7, 10 and 11. After years of delays and over $1 billion in cost overruns, the mission is set to be Boeing’s first attempt to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
Once the issue is resolved with the upper stage, the United Launch Alliance Atlas V will carry the CST-100 Starliner capsule to orbit along with the two onboard astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams — from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at 10:34 PM local time Monday evening. The mission also marks the first time ULA’s Atlas will carry crew. The rocket boasts a success rate of 100% across 99 missions. (ULA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.)
The astronauts would now dock at the station at the earliest on Thursday, where they would remain for at least eight days. The two astronauts will return to Earth in the capsule no earlier than May 16.
If all goes to plan, Boeing will be able to finally certify its Starliner for human transportation and begin fulfilling the terms of its $4.2 billion NASA astronaut taxi contract. That contract, under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, was awarded in 2014. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was also granted a contract under that program, for its Crew Dragon capsule, and has been transporting astronauts to and from the ISS since 2020.
While SpaceX has soared in its human transportation services, flying over a dozen crewed missions and also racking up private flights with Axiom Space and billionaire Jared Isaacman, Boeing has fallen sharply behind. The aerospace giant originally attempted an uncrewed mission to the ISS in 2019, though that failed due to technical issues; further problems delayed the next attempt, until it was finally accomplished in 2022.
As of last year, Boeing had rung up $1.5 billion in charges due to the long-delayed Starliner program.
But despite the technical snags, both NASA and Boeing have stressed their commitment to the mission, and to the safety of the two astronauts.
“The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake,” NASA’s associate administrator Jim Free said in a press conference late last month. “We don’t take that lightly at all.”
Indeed, for NASA a successful mission bring the agency one step closer to having two operational transportation providers, bringing critical redundancy to the Commercial Crew program. Per Boeing’s contract, it is on the line for six astronaut missions.
Musk took to X, the social media platform he also owns, to comment on the mission, noting that “although Boeing got $4.2 billion to develop an astronaut capsule and SpaceX only got $2.6 billion, SpaceX finished 4 years sooner.”
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is making strides in astronomy with its 122-megapixel primarily infrared photos taken 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth. Impressive stuff. The space agency’s newest sky-peeper takes a different approach, however, performing groundbreaking space science with 36 pixels. It’s not a typo—36 pixels, not 36 megapixels.
The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), pronounced “crism,” is a collaboration between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission’s satellite launched into orbit last September and has been scouring the cosmos for answers to some of science’s most complex questions ever since. The mission’s imaging instrument, Resolve, has a 36-pixel image sensor.
It’s been a hot minute since we could count the individual pixels on an imaging chip, but here we are… The array measures 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) on a side. The device produces a spectrum of X-ray sources between 400 and 12,000 electron volts — up to 5,000 times the energy of visible light — with unprecedented detail. Image credit: NASA/XRISM/Caroline Kilbourne
“Resolve is more than a camera. Its detector takes the temperature of each X-ray that strikes it,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist at Goddard, in a press statement. “We call Resolve a microcalorimeter spectrometer because each of its 36 pixels is measuring tiny amounts of heat delivered by each incoming X-ray, allowing us to see the chemical fingerprints of elements making up the sources in unprecedented detail.”
Equipped with an extraordinary array of pixels, the Resolve instrument can detect “soft” X-rays, which possess an energy approximately 5,000 times greater than visible light wavelengths. Its primary focus is exploring the hottest cosmic regions, the largest structures, and the most massive celestial objects, such as supermassive black holes. Despite its limited pixel count, each pixel in Resolve is remarkable, capable of generating a rich spectrum of visual data encompassing an energy range from 400 to 12,000 electron volts.
The agency says the instrument can perceive the motions of elements within a target, essentially offering a three-dimensional perspective. Gas moving towards us emits slightly higher energies than usual, while gas moving away emits slightly lower energies. This capability opens up new avenues for scientific exploration. For instance, it enables scientists to understand the flow of hot gas in galaxy clusters and to meticulously track the movement of various elements in the remnants of supernova explosions.
NASA is kicking off a formal environmental assessment of its facilities on Wallops Island, Virginia, to increase the number of authorized rocket launches at the site by almost 200%, according to slides and recordings of an April 29 internal meeting viewed by TechCrunch.
The proposed changes could help ease congestion at the country’s other spaceports, which have felt the strain of a rapid increase in launch capacity due primarily to SpaceX. That strain is projected to only worsen as companies including Rocket Lab, Relativity, Blue Origin and others aim to bring new rockets online in the next few years.
Wallops expansion has likely been on the minds of NASA officials for some time. After Rocket Lab conducted its first Electron launch from there in 2022, agency officials told the media that interest from private companies looking to launch from the site was “high.” And while these plans would eventually be made public as part of the EA process, this is the first time the scale of the proposed changes has been published.
The Wallops Island Southern Expansion Environmental Assessment (WISE EA), as the agency calls the undertaking, will study the potential consequences of a massive increase in annual launches from 18 to 52. The study will also consider other critical changes to the site, like water barge landings of rockets’ first stages and on-site storage of liquid methane, a novel rocket fuel. To fully understand the affects of these changes, NASA will be working with contractors who will conduct acoustic analyses, and look at air emissions impacts and impacts to marine and local wildlife.
The analysis will also consider the construction of up to four new launch pads and the installation of a suborbital launcher conducting up to 30 firings per year.
The increase in launches and new fuel mixes allowed are particularly notable. Today, of the 18 annual launches authorized at WFF, only six can involve liquid-fueled rockets, with the other 12 being solid-propellant rockets. The engines that power Electron, Rocket Lab’s launcher that flies out of Wallops, use a combination of liquid oxygen and RP-1, a highly-refined kerosene.
The new analysis would authorize 52 launches per year and allow a fuel mix that also includes methalox, a rocket fuel composed of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Methalox has become the propellant system of choice for next-gen rockets including SpaceX’s Starship, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity Space’s Terran R and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
A slide showing proposed changes. Image Credits:
One driver of the proposed expansion is the increased launch cadence from these companies. (While Relativity has not publicly disclosed any plans to launch from Wallops, the company, along with Rocket Lab, were listed as the two “participating agencies”.)
The Wallops site has become particularly important to Rocket Lab’s plans to bring Neutron to market by the end of this year. In 2022, the company announced it had selected WFF as the future home for Neutron’s first launch pad and production facility, effectively staking a claim in the future of the island. Rocket Lab’s recovery plans for Neutron also include the booster landing on downrange, on a barge at sea.
One of the slides in Miller’s presentation shows a launch forecast for WFF through 2032. It is unclear whether the data on the slide was provided by private companies or whether it’s from NASA’s internal estimates, and NASA did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, but it charts around five annual Neutron flights per year through 2030. It also charts about five launches of Firefly and Northrop’s MLV by that date.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Environmental assessments are essential: they ensure NASA and its commercial partners are following environmental regulations related to air emissions, acoustic impacts, and affects on local wildlife. They also provide a critical venue for input from stakeholders, including the public. Having an environmental assessment in place is vital for companies like Rocket Lab, as well as Firefly Space and Northrop Grumman, which are together developing a medium launch vehicle.
NASA completed a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for the Wallops site in 2019, but as agency official Shari Miller said during the call, the anticipated growth of activity on the island “exceeds the numbers that were analyzed” for that document. Some proposed actions weren’t discussed at all in the 2019 document, like a water barge landing of a rocket. Miller said NASA is simultaneously undertaking what’s known as a “written re-evaluation” of the 2019 assessment to understand if additional environmental assessments is needed to allow for the storage of liquid methane and to authorize static fire tests of methalox engines at WFF. That would authorize those actions for two years, and importantly, act as a sort of temporary measure to facilitate Rocket Lab’s rollout of Neutron. The full WISE EA would extend for a full ten years.
Because of the scope of the various environmental assessments, the full EA process is projected to take around eighteen months, per one slide, with the final document published in December 2025.
Mars exploration has been always been the exclusive purview of national space agencies, but NASA is trying to change that, awarding a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet.
It’s the second time in a month that the agency has shown its desire for commercial support in Mars missions, having more or less scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of a to-be-determined alternative likely by private space companies.
A total of nine companies were selected to perform twelve “concept studies” on how they could provide Mars-related services, from payload delivery to planetary imaging to communications relays. While each award is relatively small — between $200,000 and $300,000 — these studies are an important first step for NASA to better understand the costs, risks, and feasibility of commercial technologies.
The companies selected are: Lockheed Martin, Impulse Space, and Firefly Aerospace for small payload delivery and hosting services; United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic for large payload delivery and hosting services; Albedo, Redwire Space, and Astrobotic for Mars surface-imaging services; and SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin for next-gen relay series.
Nearly all the selected proposals would adapt existing projects focused on the moon and Earth, NASA said in a statement. The twelve-week studies will conclude in August, and there’s no guarantee that they would lead to future requests for proposals or contracts. That said, it’s similarly unlikely that future contracts would appear without a study having previously been done by a company vying for it.
The companies were sourced from a request for proposals put out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier this year. According to that solicitation, the idea is to develop a new paradigm for Mars exploration, one that delivers “more frequent lower cost missions” via partnerships between government and industry.
The plan is similar to the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which provides large contracts to private companies to deliver payloads to the moon. And like CLPS, which helped bankroll the first successful private lunar lander (among others), these latest awards also show that the agency is increasingly comfortable working with smaller, earlier-stage startups working on unproven tech.
Boeing’s Starliner is a go for launch.
Leaders from NASA and Boeing told reporters that the first crewed Starliner mission, which will see the capsule carry two astronauts to the International Space Station, is moving ahead toward its historic May 6 launch date.
NASA and Boeing concluded that the capsule is ready for launch after completing a critical flight test review on Thursday. Barring no issues, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will board Starliner on the evening of May 6 and take their ride on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket to space.
Around 24 hours later, the two astronauts will arrive at the ISS, where they’ll stay for about a week. Starliner will stay docked with the station; the duo will use it to return to Earth. A total of five parachutes will slow Starliner from ultra-fast orbital speeds to enable a soft landing somewhere in the western U.S.
This will mark Starliner’s second flight to the ISS: The first, an uncrewed mission called Orbital Flight Test-2, took place in May 2022. If Boeing and NASA are unable to meet the May 6 date, there are additional launch opportunities on May 7, 10 and 11.
The significance of the mission cannot be understated. NASA established the Commercial Crew Program (CCP) in 2011 to purchase astronaut transportation services from private industry; the agency selected SpaceX and NASA under multi-billion-dollar deal. But as opposed to SpaceX, which has completed all six missions under the original contract plus more, Boeing’s Starliner has been badly delayed by numerous technical issues.
Boeing has been hit by over $1.5 billion in overrun costs due to those delays. The aerospace giant has been affected by a slew of other near-catastrophes as of late, with the company facing regulatory scrutiny due to screwups in its commercial airplane unit. Earlier this year, it was announced that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun would step down at the end of 2024.
For NASA, a new spacecraft means doubling America’s astronaut transportation resources and introducing a much-needed degree of redundancy to the agency’s human spaceflight program. If Boeing nails this test, Starliner will achieve its final certification and can begin regular missions under the CCP contract.
NASA determined that the probability of loss-of-crew with this Starliner mission is 1-in-295, which is above NASA’s required 1-in-270 odds. (A NASA representative did not have equivalent data for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.)
“The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake,” NASA’s associate administrator, Jim Free, said. “We don’t take that lightly at all.”
NASA’s decision to scrap its $11 billion, 15-year mission to Mars to bring back samples could create a startup feeding frenzy, TechCrunch reports. Describing its plans as too slow, and too expensive, NASA is going back to the drawing board, with an eye on getting the space industry to help. Sure, you might worry that NASA can’t manage its own mission on a timeline and budget that it deems acceptable, but the chance for a deluge of dollars to engulf the startups working on making space more accessible could prove a massive boon.
Startups are not all social media apps, enterprise software and NFT-based online games. There are a good number focused on the bits-and-atoms side of the technology fence, even if the idea of building advanced hardware without a software element is all but unthinkable. Ergo, hardware startups are really working both sides of the digital divide at the same time.
But space startups are not worried about it. Looking at recent TechCrunch space headlines, we can see that Dark Space is working on a way to clear space debris; True Anomaly’s working on landing on the moon; Varda Space’s work to manufacture drugs in space and bring them back to Earth seems to work, so it raised $90 million more; Orbital Fab wants to refuel satellites; the list goes on and on.
So, the NASA money might have a bunch of startup-sized buckets to drip into, and I am here for it. Yes, I am a gigantic science-fiction dweeb, but I am still nothing short of dizzy with hype for our future as a species in space. To that end, if any startup that works with NASA on the Mars rock mission needs a human to send up there to check on the dials and such, I’m your guy. Hit play, let’s have some fun!
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Happy Eclipse Day for everyone celebrating! I’m fortunate to be living in a part of the country that’s in the path of totality, so I’ll be away from my desk for much of today, soaking it all in.
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NASA has given three space companies the chance to design the next-generation moon buggy — but only one design will go to space. Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab are developing rugged vehicles intended for astronauts to drive around on the lunar surface, from which NASA may choose as early as next year.
The three teams will now enter into a 12-month “feasibility phase” that will culminate in a preliminary design review. At that point, there will be a subsequent competitive request for proposals, where the trio of companies will compete for a demonstration task order. At that point, a final awardee will be selected. The chosen company will be responsible not only for designing the lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) but also for launching and landing it on the moon prior to the Artemis V mission, which is currently slated for no earlier than 2029.
Image Credits: Intuitive Machines
Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020.
The explosion, which occurred at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex, was simply reported as an “anomaly” at the time, an industry term for pretty much any issue that deviates from the expected outcome.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Blue Origin announced the crew of the next New Shepard launch — and 90-year-old Ed Dwight is among the names listed. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t recognize the name, but this story over at GeekWire helped fill in the missing pieces to his story and its significance to the history of human spaceflight.
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space on April 12, 1961. From NASA: “His vehicle, Vostok 1 circled Earth at a speed of 27,400 kilometers per hour with the flight lasting 108 minutes. Vostok’s reentry was controlled by a computer. Unlike the early U.S. human spaceflight programs, Gagarin did not land inside of capsule. Instead, he ejected from the spacecraft and landed by parachute.”
Gagarin on the way to the launch site of Vostok I, April 12, 1961. Image Credits: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has pronounced the agency’s $11 billion, 15-year mission to collect and return samples from Mars: insufficient. But the strategy shift could be a huge boon to space startups, to which much of that planned funding will almost certainly be redirected.
“The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,” Nelson said at a press conference. “We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe.”
In other words, clear the decks and start over — with commercial providers on board from the get-go.
The Mars Sample Return mission was still in the planning stages, but an independent review of the project last year found that, given budget, technology and other constraints, the mission was unlikely to complete before 2040, and at a cost of $8 billion 11 billion. (And like goldfish, projects like these tend to grow to the maximum budget projected.)
Though NASA proposed a revised plan in the mold of the original, it has now also challenged the space community to go further: “NASA soon will solicit architecture proposals from industry that could return samples in the 2030s, and lowers cost, risk, and mission complexity.”
Considering how heavily both primes and space startups have been investing in interplanetary capability, this announcement arguably amounts to a historic windfall. A company like Intuitive Machines, riding high after accomplishing the first private lunar landing, will almost certainly be firing on all cylinders to take on what could be a multi-billion-dollar contract.
Even if NASA wants to assign only half or even a quarter of the original budget to an endeavor led by a commercial space company, private industry has already shown that it can do more with less when compared to legacy outfits.
It’s also catnip for launch companies, since the time horizon is far enough out that heavy launch vehicles like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and, of course, SpaceX’s Starship may be cleared to fly when the mission is ready to progress. That was no doubt also the plan with the 2040 timeline, but “2030s” (the notional new one) is a lot closer to the present, and a hamburger today is worth 10 in a decade.
Between the lines can be seen the admission that any mission planned before the present bloom of orbital and interplanetary capability is, very simply, no longer feasible. Although NASA’s troubled Space Launch System heavy launch vehicle is perhaps the largest such project, to abandon it now would be to throw away a great deal, while preemptively opting for a leaner Mars program fueled by commercial ambitions seems to have no obvious downside. (There’s plenty of time to save and repurpose the most important concepts and research already done by NASA and its partners.)
No doubt that many of the companies this decision stands to benefit — not just startups and growing space companies but also primes and launch providers — saw the writing on the wall and have been looking forward to this day. But the official announcement, and the implication that it is the new generation of space companies that will accomplish ambitious goals like a there-and-back trip to Mars, must be very validating.
To be clear, there is no money on the table just yet — but the promise has essentially been made that what would have belonged to the Mars Sample Return mission will be repurposed according to whatever new plan the expansive “NASA community” decides on. Whatever that new plan may be, it will almost certainly rely far more than before on commercial services and hardware.
Just as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services accelerated and incentivized the proliferation of vehicles, spacecraft and landers we see today — including some by companies that didn’t exist a few years ago — the newly recast Mars Sample Return mission may have fired the starting gun on commercial ambitions for the red planet.
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