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Category: satellites – Page 102

The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 mission scheduled to launch June 25.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 rideshare mission scheduled to launch June 25.

“There’s nothing in the space business that gets your blood pumping like the idea of a launch, especially if you’ve got multiple satellites,” a senior Space Development Agency (SDA) official told reporters June 22. “We’re really excited about what’s going to happen.”

Transporter-2 is expected to carry as many as 88 small satellites from commercial and government customers to a sun synchronous polar orbit. SDA’s five payloads include two pairs of satellites to demonstrate laser communications links, and one to demonstrate how data can be processed and analyzed autonomously aboard a satellite.

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Fast transport of equipment and personnel using rockets similar to that of SpaceX.

Travelling through space will be far faster than atmospheric flight.

Using Starlink satellites to improve tracking and GPS.

Recently, the U.S Pentagon has been awarding most of its contracts to Elon Musk and his aerospace company, SpaceX! Stay tuned to find out more and subscribe to Futurity.

#spacex #elonMusk #starship.

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Russia is planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to the grand gas giant of the Solar System, Jupiter, in 2030.

Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, announced the plan for the mammoth 50-month journey last week. The journey will take it on a mini tour of the Solar System, taking pit stops around the Moon and Venus, dropping off spacecraft along its way, before heading on to Jupiter.

More specifically, a “space tug” with a nuclear-based transport and energy module dubbed Zeus will head towards the Moon where a spacecraft will separate from it. It will then pass by Venus to perform a gravity assist maneuver and drop off another spacecraft, before venturing towards Jupiter and one of its satellites.

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SYDNEY, June 22 (Reuters) — Starlink, the satellite internet unit of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, expects to be able to provide continuous global coverage by around September but will then need to seek regulatory approvals, its president Gwynne Shotwel said on Tuesday.

“We’ve successfully deployed 1800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe,” she told a Macquarie Group (MQG.AX) technology conference via webcast.

“But then we have regulatory work to go into every country and get approved to provide telecoms services.”

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The Export-Import Bank of the U.S. has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal it has done in six years.

WASHINGTON — The Export-Import Bank of the United States has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal the bank has done in six years.

Ex-Im announced June 21 that it approved $80.7 million in financing for a Falcon 9 launch of a Hispasat satellite, Amazonas Nexus, as well as launch and initial in-orbit insurance. The bank said the financing will be in the form of either a direct loan or a loan guarantee.

The Spanish operator announced in early 2020 it ordered Amazonas Nexus from Thales Alenia Space. The 4500-kilogram satellite will replace Amazonas-2 at 61 degrees west in geostationary orbit. At the time of the contract announcement, Hispasat said it expected to launch the satellite in the second half of 2022. Bpifrance, France’s export credit agency, is financing the construction of the satellite.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory engineers have designed a new kind of laser-driven semiconductor switch that can theoretically achieve higher speeds at higher voltages than existing photoconductive devices. If the device could be realized, it could be miniaturized and incorporated into satellites to enable communication systems beyond 5G, potentially transferring more data at a faster rate and over longer distances, according to researchers. Credit: LLNL

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers have designed a new kind of laser-driven semiconductor switch that can theoretically achieve higher speeds at higher voltages than existing photoconductive devices. The development of such a device could enable next-generation satellite communication systems capable of transferring more data at a faster rate, and over longer distances, according to the research team.

Scientists at LLNL and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) reported on the design and simulation of the novel photoconductive device in a paper published in the IEEE Journal of the Electron Devices Society. The device utilizes a high-powered laser to generate an electron charge cloud in the base material gallium nitride while under extreme electric fields.

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A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time—few people probably even knew it happened—but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple , jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

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It’s SpaceX’s 19th rocket launch (and landing) of the year.

All of this is great news for SpaceX, as the company has been relying heavily on its fleet of veteran rockets, with many Falcon 9 first stages having racked up five or more flights each.

Out of 19 missions so far this year, only one has featured a brand new Falcon 9; the rest were on flight-proven boosters.

It’s also great news for Space Force and taxpayers as flying on reused rockets translates to a savings of nearly $53 million across the two flights (GPS III-SV05 and GPS III-SV06), Space Force officials said.

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In the very last moments of the movie, however, you would also see something unusual: the sprouting of clouds of satellites, and the wrapping of the land and seas with wires made of metal and glass. You would see the sudden appearance of an intricate artificial planetary crust capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation, enabling planetary self-awareness — indeed, planetary sapience.

The emergence of planetary-scale computation thus appears as both a geological and geophilosophical fact. In addition to evolving countless animal, vegetal and microbial species, Earth has also very recently evolved a smart exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer capable of calculating things like: How old is the planet? Is the planet getting warmer? The knowledge of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation.

Over the past few centuries, humans have chaotically and in many cases accidentally transformed Earth’s ecosystems. Now, in response, the emergent intelligence represented by planetary-scale computation makes it possible, and indeed necessary, to conceive an intentional, directed and worthwhile planetary-scale terraforming. The vision for this is not to be found in computing infrastructure itself, but in the purposes to which we put it.

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