TYB
SpaceX BlueBird 1-5 Mission
On Thursday, September 12 at 4:52 a.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 1-5 mission to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
This was the 13th flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-6, O3b mPOWER, USSF-124, and nine Starlink missions.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=bluebird1-5
AST SpaceMobile deploys first production direct-to-smartphone satellites
September 12, 2024
SpaceX launched the first five production satellites for AST SpaceMobile’s direct-to-smartphone broadband constellation Sept. 11.
A Falcon 9 carrying the Block 1 BlueBird spacecraft lifted off 4:52 a.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and finished releasing all five satellites into low Earth orbit about 68 minutes later.
AST SpaceMobile founder, chair and CEO Abel Avellan said the operator established full contact with all five spacecraft post-launch.
Five satellites would only be able to provide intermittent connectivity totaling less than an hour a day in the United States, AST SpaceMobile president and chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski told SpaceNews in an interview, where the company plans initial services for mobile network partners seeking to extend their coverage beyond the reach of cell towers.
Still, Wisniewski said intermittent services would be useful for remote monitoring devices, emergency backups and beta tests with customers interested in full text, voice and data broadband services from space.
U.S. telcos AT&T and Verizon have invested in the Texas-based venture and plan to provide the wireless frequencies the constellation needs to reach standard smartphones already in circulation in the United States.
AST SpaceMobile also announced a revenue-generating government contract early this year using BlueWalker-3, AST SpaceMobile’s prototype satellite that SpaceX launched two years ago.
Wisniewski said two more government contracts are currently being contemplated.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission gave AST SpaceMobile conditional approval last month to operate its first five BlueBirds, but stopped short of allowing them to test services with wireless frequencies from AT&T and Verizon.
AST SpaceMobile also requires permission to provide commercial direct-to-smartphone services.
Wisniewski said the venture needs to resubmit regulatory filings to the FCC about its commercial service, and plans to avoid interfering with other networks, after Verizon joined AT&T as a partner and investor in the company.
He said AST SpaceMobile is in no rush to seek permission to test wireless frequencies from its recently launched BlueBirds as it completes in-orbit health checks and tests other systems on the satellites.
“When we want to start testing the wireless frequencies, which will be within the next three months, we’ll have either the commercial approval or we’ll file for a temporary” test license.
The FCC has many space applications to work through and tends to prioritize those approaching service, he said, adding that AST SpaceMobile has licenses to test wireless frequencies from the five BlueBirds in other countries it plans to deploy services.
The company has also successfully tested cellular frequencies from space with BlueWalker-3, which is roughly the same size as a Block 1 BlueBird with a solar array spanning 64 square meters — the largest commercial antenna deployed to LEO.
According to AST SpaceMobile, BlueWalker-3 has achieved more than 21 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds during tests with standard smartphones.
In May, AST SpaceMobile moved the licensing administration for its constellation from Papua New Guinea to the United States after shifting its initial commercial focus to the country.
“We wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t feel good about approvals in the U.S.,” Wisniewski said.
Around 45-60 satellites would be enough to provide continuous services in the United States, at which point AT&T plans to roll out the capability to mobile customers.
“While testing will continue with each launch, we will only provide services to mobile customers when the full array is complete,” AT&T head of network Chris Sambar said via email.
“It is too early to give a specific date on when this service will become available,” he added, “but the Sept. 12 satellite launch is a major milestone toward making this vision a reality.”
Verizon did not reply to a request for comment.
cont.
https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-deploys-first-production-direct-to-smartphone-satellites/
New record! 19 people are orbiting Earth right now
September 11, 2024
Earth orbit is busier right now than it's ever been.
Three people launched toward the International Space Station (ISS) today (Sept. 11) aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule, pushing the total number of people in Earth orbit to a new high-water mark.
"With the trio now in orbit, there is a record of 19 people currently in orbit," NASA commentator Anna Schneider said during the agency's webcast of the Soyuz liftoff. The old record was 17, set last year.
The Soyuz that launched today is carrying NASA's Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
The trio is expected to arrive at the ISS around 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT), just three hours after launch.
They'll join nine people aboard the orbiting lab: NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Tracy Caldwell-Dyson, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, and cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko.
Wilmore and Williams were supposed to be home already; they launched this past June on Crew Flight Test (CFT), the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner capsule.
CFT was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but Starliner suffered thruster problems in orbit, and NASA kept the capsule docked to the ISS for three months while studying the issue.
Ultimately, the agency decided to return Starliner to Earth uncrewed — which happened over the weekend — and bring Williams and Wilmore home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule next February.
There are also three people living aboard China's Tiangong space station at the moment — Li Cong, Li Guangsu and Ye Guangfu of the nation's Shenzhou 18 mission — and four astronauts inhabiting a free-flying Crew Dragon.
That quartet — Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon —launched Tuesday (Sept. 10) on the five-day Polaris Dawn mission.
Their Crew Dragon, named Resilience, has already gotten farther from Earth than any crewed vehicle since the Apollo era, and Polaris Dawn aims to make more history soon: Isaacman and Gillis plan to conduct the first-ever private spacewalk at around 2:20 a.m. EDT (0620 GMT) on Thursday (Sept. 12).
The record for most people in space overall is 20, set in May 2023 and then tied on Jan. 26 of this year.
On both occasions, 14 orbiting spaceflyers were joined briefly in the final frontier by six space tourists who reached the suborbital realm aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity space plane.
VSS Unity gets more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, which NASA and the U.S. military regard as the beginning of outer space.
But the vehicle doesn't reach the 62-mile-high (100 km) Kármán line, which some other people and organizations recognize as space's boundary.
For Kármán line devotees, the "most people in space" record is 19, set during the NS-19 flight of Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard vehicle on Dec. 11, 2021 — and tied today with the Soyuz launch.
https://www.space.com/new-record-19-people-orbiting-earth-soyuz-iss
The bubbling surface of a distant star was captured on video for the 1st time ever
September 12, 2024
Astronomers have gotten the first-ever detailed views of turbulent activity in a star other than our own sun.
A time-lapse video released Wednesday (Sept. 11) shows enormous gas bubbles roiling on a nearby star called R Doradus, a red giant about 300 times bigger than our sun that lies roughly 180 light-years away, in the southern constellation Dorado.
Like a boiling soup on a stovetop, the star's scorching material erupts on its surface in bubbles, which astronomers estimate swell to a whopping 75 times our sun's size.
"It is spectacular that we can now directly image the details on the surface of stars so far away," Behzad Bojnodi Arbab, a doctoral student at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and a co-author of a new study about the observations, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
Thanks to the latest images, astronomers can now "observe physics that until now was mostly only observable in our sun," Arbab added.
The video is pieced together from the best-ever images of the star's chaotic surface, which were captured by a network of radio telescopes in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA for short.
The images show the plasma bubbles, which are driven by heat rising from the star's core, crashing on its surface so violently that they appear to slightly deform the star.
"We had never expected the data to be of such high quality that we could see so many details of the convection on the stellar surface," study lead author Wouter Vlemmings, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, said in the statement.
From the latest snapshots of R Doradus, which ALMA captured from early July to August of last year, Vlemmings and his colleagues estimate the star's plasma bubbles rise and fall on a one-month cycle, which is faster than the timeline followed by similar convective cells abundant on our sun's surface.
"We don't yet know what is the reason for the difference," said Vlemmings.
Though R Doradus is incredibly bloated, its mass is similar to that of our sun.
So study team members suspect the star reflects how our sun will look in about five billion years, when it will enter its red giant phase by ballooning up to the point of swallowing Mercury and Venus.
"It seems that convection changes as a star gets older in ways that we don't yet understand," said Vlemmings.
Previous ALMA observations showed that R Doradus is spinning at least two orders of magnitude faster than expected for a red giant.
In the new study, Vlemmings and his team ruled out the possibility that the high spin is an illusion created by the star's boiling surface, a hypothesis that was recently put forth by a different team of astronomers studying Betelgeuse, another red giant in the constellation Orion known to spin 100 times faster than expected.
Vlemmings and his colleagues argue that R Doradus' rotation rate is much longer than the one-month cycle they found its convective bubbles to operate in, thus ruling out the odds of telescopes being tricked by such a chance alignment of gas bubbles.
https://www.space.com/alma-red-giant-star-surface-video
https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2412/eso2412a.pdf
FAA defends Starship licensing delays
September 12, 2024
A day after harsh criticism from Congress and industry, the Federal Aviation Administration defended its approach to launch licensing and, specifically, its work with SpaceX.
At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit Sept. 11, the FAA said it has a good relationship with SpaceX but that timelines for launch licenses depend on choices the company makes.
“We work very well with SpaceX. We have a very strong dialogue with them,” said Dan Murray, executive director of operational safety at the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
“They get the majority of our resources because they’re doing the majority of the operations.”
That included, he noted, 80% of the “hundreds” of hours of overtime his office records each month.
“We are doing everything we can to work with them as efficiently as we can.”
The comments came a day after a hearing by the House space subcommittee where members and industry official criticized the FAA’s implementation of a new set of launch licensing regulations known as Part 450.
That coincided with a statement by SpaceX that said it recently learned the FAA had delayed an updated license for its next Starship launch by more than two months, to late November, for what it called a “superfluous environmental analysis.”
“We have a great dialogue with them. We prefer to have our dialogue directly with them,” Murray said when asked at the conference about the SpaceX public statement about the launch licensing delays.
He said the schedule for the next Starship launch, known as Flight 5, “is largely set by the choices that the company makes,” which he added is true for all companies that seek launch licenses.
Those choices include the scope of the license they seek, the timing of the information they provide, the completeness of the application and if the applicant changes information after submitting the application.
The schedule that the FAA provides for assessing a license is based on assumptions that the application is complete and doesn’t change, he said.
The FAA, in a separate statement Sept. 11, noted that the license the FAA issued for Starship’s previous launch in June allowed for multiple flights using the same profile, but SpaceX modified the profile for the next launch and also provided information only in mid-August about “how the environmental impact of Flight 5 will cover a larger area than previously reviewed,” requiring consultation with other agencies.
“The driver on the current schedule is the environmental review, in this case. The safety review is not done yet, either, but it’s on a shorter schedule,” Murray said.
He confirmed the issues in that review outlined in SpaceX’s Sept. 10 statement, including wastewater discharge from the pad’s water deluge system, sonic booms from the Super Heavy booster’s return to the launch pad and changes in the splashdown location of the interstage section.
He said his office has worked well with SpaceX on other regulatory issues.
He cited examples like allowing them to return to flight quickly after incidents that included an upper stage failure in July and unsuccessful landing in August.
The FAA also worked with the company for waivers to increase launch availability.
Murray appeared on a panel with executives of two other launch companies who said they have good relationships with the office.
“We have a longstanding positive relationship with the FAA’s space transportation office,” said Brett Alexander, chief revenue officer at Firefly Aerospace.
“No major concerns about the regulation itself or how it’s being implemented.”
“It’s been a very productive and constructive relationship and dialogue,” said Lars Hoffman, vice president of government sales at Blue Origin, on the work with FAA on getting a launch license for the company’s New Glenn rocket.
The FAA’s Murray said that the agency encourages companies that have gone through the Part 450 licensing process to share lessons learned with each other.
A new aerospace rulemaking committee will also allow industry to provide input on how to improve the licensing process.
“It does not require substantial changes,” he said of the Part 450 rules. “It’s not a perfect rule.
No rules are perfect. We’re very open to input that the industry has. That said, it’s not broken, either.”
https://spacenews.com/faa-defends-starship-licensing-delays/
Space travel: Protection from cosmic radiation with boron nitride nanotube fibers
September 11, 2024
With the success of the Nuri launch last year and the recent launch of the newly established Korea Aerospace Administration, interest in space has increased, and both the public and private sectors are actively investing in space-related industries such as space travel. However, exposure to cosmic radiation is unavoidable when traveling to space.
A research team led by Dr. Dae-Yoon Kim from the Center for Functional Composite Materials at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has developed a new composite fiber that can effectively block neutrons in space radiation.
The work is published in the journal Advanced Fiber Materials.
Neutrons in space radiation negatively affect life activities and cause electronic devices to malfunction, posing a major threat to long-term space missions.
By controlling the interaction between one-dimensional nanomaterials, boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs), and aramid polymers, the team developed a technique to perfectly blend the two difficult-to-mix materials. Based on this stabilized mixed solution, they produced lightweight, flexible, continuous fibers that do not burn at temperatures up to 500°C.
BNNTs have a similar structure to carbon nanotubes (CNTs), but because they contain a large number of boron in the lattice structure, their neutron absorption capacity is about 200,000 times higher than that of CNTs.
Therefore, if the developed BNNT composite fibers are made into fabrics of the desired shape and size, they can be applied as a good material that can effectively block radiation neutron transmission.
This means that BNNT composite fibers can be applied to the clothing we wear every day, effectively protecting flight crews, health care workers, power plant workers, and others who may be easily exposed to radiation.
In addition, the ceramic nature of BNNTs makes them highly heat-resistant, so they can be used in extreme environments.
Therefore, it can be used not only for space applications but also for defense and firefighting.
"By applying the functional textiles we have developed to the clothing we wear every day, we can easily create a minimum safety device for neutron exposure," said Dr. Dae-Yoon Kim of KIST.
"As Korea is developing very rapidly in the space and defense fields, we believe it will have great synergy."
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-space-cosmic-boron-nitride-nanotube.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42765-024-00432-6
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13839003/oldest-known-map-world-Babylon-Iraq-Mesopotamia.html
https://youtu.be/LUxFzh8r384?si=CuhHnltNBkPu9ikO
Archaeologists unlock 3,000-year-old secrets about creation of universe and monsters after deciphering oldest known map of the world
Updated: 16:58 EDT, 11 September 2024
Researchers have finally decoded a Babylonian tablet thought to be the oldest map of the world.
Created between 2,600 and 2,900 years ago, the Imago Mundi provided researchers with a unique glimpse into the beliefs and practices of the ancient civilization.
The Babylonian tablet has a circular map with pieces of text written in cuneiform - an ancient writing system that used wedge-shaped symbols - which describes the early creation of the world.
The map depicted Mesopotamia - or the land 'between the rivers' - a historical area of the Middle East that was thought to be the entire 'known world' at the time.
The tablet's map also confirmed their belief in the mighty God of Creation, Marduk, and mythical creatures and monsters like scorpion-man and Anzu - the lion-headed bird.
The Imago Mundi was made during a time when the Babylonian Empire was a global leader in architecture, culture, math and early scientific achievements.
They were known for creating an advanced number system for mathematics and was the first to create a functional theory of the planets, including using geometry to track Jupiter.
The map was originally discovered in 1882 by renowned archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam in Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city in present-day Iraq.
Although Rassam discovered the tablet nearly 150 years ago, the Imago Mundi remained in a box of his excavation findings until it was rediscovered in Iraq 29 years ago.
It is currently being held at the British Museum in London.
Since the tablet was acquired, researchers at the British Museum said they have been able to glean insight into the Neo-Babylonian Empire's belief in mystical creatures and its dominance over the region.
At the bottom center of the map sits Mesopotamia, but what's particularly unique is the two circles that enclose the city.
'The double ring is very important because it has cuneiform writing in it which says 'bitter river' and this water was deemed to surround the known world,' British Museum expert Dr Irving Finkel said in a YouTube video.
Researchers confirmed the circle on the tablet that surrounded Mesopotamia supported the Babylonians belief that the region was the center of the world, although they did understand that Mesopotamia was part of a larger region of land.
There was an additional river - the Euphrates - that cut through ancient Mesopotamia from North to South, connecting the Bitter River on the tablet.
'This is a very important ring of water,' Finkel said, 'because it meant for the Babylonians, they had an idea of the limits of the world where they lived in about the sixth century.'
Within the map are cuneiform inscriptions that state the name of the city or the tribe who lived there, including Assyria, Der and Urartu.
'So you have, encapsulated in this circular diagram, the whole of the known world in which people lived, flourished and died,' Finkel said.
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But there's more to the map than just the location of Mesopotamian regions - triangles off the right edge corner of the tablet that was a point of magic and mystery for Babylonians.
Some people have speculated that the triangles are islands, but Finkel said in the video that they're 'almost certainly mountains.'
The cuneiform text labels the area as a spot 'where the Sun is not seen,' which made sense considering the mountains world have blocked it from view.
'Their location combined with the cuneiform writing above it further backed up the theory, because the idea is that if you go across the water you see these jutted, pointed things, above the horizon which are remote lands far beyond the limits of the known world.'
Part of the cuneiform text also alludes to the Babylonians' belief that mythical creatures including a winged horse, a sea serpent, a scorpion-man and a bull-man lived in various regions throughout the land.
The British Museum reported that the text on the tablet 'appears to be a description of the inhabitants, divine, human, animal or monstrous, of the areas beyond the earth, whether the eight 'regions' or the 'Bitter River' or maybe the underworld or underworld waters.'
Because the tablet is fragmented in places, the full text couldn't be deciphered, but The British Museum reported that it talks of 'ruined cities … whom Marduk watches.'
According to Mesopotamian mythology, Marduk was the God of Creation and the patron God of Babylon who was also revered as the god of justice, compassion, healing and magic.
Finkel said the ancient Babylonian map has 'given us a tremendous insight into many aspects of Mesopotamian thinking.'
He added that 'it's also a triumphant demonstration of what happens when you have a very small, totally uninformative and useless fragment of dead boring writing that no one can understand and you join it onto something in the collection which is much bigger and a whole new adventure begins all over again!'
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Taylor Swift Is Out-of-This-World Stunning in a 2nd UFO-Inspired Look at 2024 MTV VMAs Afterparty
September 12, 2024
Taylor Swift’s UFO-inspired looks didn’t stop at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards.
Swift, 34, stepped out in a printed look while attending an afterparty in New York City at the Electric Lady Studio on Wednesday, September 11.
Her outfit included a corset crop top featuring a UFO hovering above a forest scene. Swift paired it with a matching pleated miniskirt and jacket, which also featured the same lush print.
The singer, who won seven moon people last night, teamed the look with knee-high leather boots, a silver necklace and diamond thorn-shaped earrings from Rainbow K.
For glam, Swift donned a full beat including smokey silver eyeshadow, black eyeliner in her waterline, a peachy pout and bronzed cheeks.
Her blonde hair was parted down the middle and styled in a blowout with her bangs swept to the left side of her forehead.
Earlier in the evening, Swift rocked another UFO look, seemingly referencing extraterrestrial lyrics from her song “Down Bad” on her Tortured Poets Department album.
Her mini dress, custom designed by Monse, featured leather buckle straps, a UFO on her chest and a person standing in a grassy field.
The sequin look was complete with a ruffled piece of fabric attached to her skirt.
Swift paired the number with thigh-high boots from Stuart Weitzman, dainty jewelry and a black manicure.
Before changing into her glittery getup, Swift slayed in a plaid Christian Dior gown featuring a corset top equipped with a zip-up front and an open bubble skirt that exposed black shorts underneath.
She made the look even edgier with a matching plaid choker and leather gloves featuring a crisscross design.
Swift made headlines at the awards ceremony for thanking boyfriend Travis Kelce while accepting the award for Video of the Year for her song “Fortnight,” featuring Post Malone.
She also surpassed Beyoncé with the most VMAs, totaling at 30.
https://www.usmagazine.com/stylish/news/taylor-swift-wears-2nd-ufo-look-at-the-2024-mtv-vmas-afterparty/
Another UFO Boss to Break Silence in Major Book Deal: “The Process of Disclosure Has Begun”
September 10, 2024 6:33am
Another high-ranking government official who investigated UFOs/UAPs is ready to tell their story.
Jay Stratton, the former director of the U.S. government’s secretive Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, has struck a memoir deal with HarperCollins.
Stratton represents the most senior former U.S government official yet to go public about their direct involvement in the investigation of UAP and non-human intelligence.
For over 16 years, Stratton worked as a senior intelligence official, leading countless U.S. government investigations of UAP and non-human intelligence, including the “Tic Tac” UAP encountered by Navy fighter pilots and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in 2004.
While much of Stratton’s work is classified, the memoir promises to reveal “all that can be lawfully disclosed, providing a first-hand account of the shocking discoveries, challenges and breakthroughs that have marked the U.S. government’s investigation and understanding of UAP and non-human intelligence, as well as the effects on Stratton and his family.”
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Stratton said, “We are at the beginning of a new chapter for humanity. The process of disclosure is complex but it has begun.”
The book was developed with producer Dan Farah of Farah Films (Ready Player One, The Phenomenon), who also has TV and film rights.
Recently, Farah was also behind another memoir, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs by Luis “Lue” Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official.
That title shot to No. 1 on the best-seller list after its release last month.
According to the Stratton’s bio: “It was while serving as the Chief of Air & Space Warfare at the DIA that Stratton and his colleagues learned about the existence of UAP and the related national security concerns.
In response, they created the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP), the first official U.S. government program to investigate UAP since the closure of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book in 1969.
AAWSAP was sponsored by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and grew into AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. … Amongst Stratton’s hand-picked team members was whistleblower David Grusch, who testified under oath to Congress last year about technological and biological evidence of non-human intelligence.
The Secretary of Defense announced the UAP Task Force in 2020, naming Stratton the program’s Director.”
Last year, the U.S. Senate introduced the bipartisan UAP Disclosure Act, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Rounds (R-SD), Sen. Rubio (R-Fl) and Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY).
The act proposes laws that would bring about public disclosure on what the U.S. government knows about UAP and non-human intelligence.
Schumer said at the time, “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence and unexplainable phenomena.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/jay-stratton-ufo-memoir-1235996607/
https://www.secnav.navy.mil/donhr/About/Senior-Executives/Biographies/Stratton,%20J.pdf