In the future, derelict satellites could be grappled and removed from key orbits around Earth with a space tug using magnetic forces. Credit: Philippe Ogaki
After 50 years of sending rockets, satellites, and payloads into orbit, humanity has created something of a “space junk” problem. Recent estimates indicate that there are more than 170 million pieces of debris up there, ranging in size from less than 1 cm (0.4 in) to a few meters in diameter. Not only does this junk threaten spacecraft and the ISS, but collisions between bits of debris can cause more to form, a phenomena known as the Kessler Effect.
And thanks to the growth of the commercial aerospace industry and the development of small satellites, things are not likely to get any less cluttered up there anytime soon. Hence why multiple strategies are being explored to clean up the space lanes, ranging from robotic arms and nets to harpoons. But in what may be the most ambitious plan to date, the ESA has proposed creating space tugs with powerful magnets to yank debris out of orbit.
The concept comes from Emilien Fabacher, a researcher from the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace at the University of Toulouse, France. His concept for a magnetic tug seeks to address one type of space debris in particular – inoperable satellites. These uncontrolled, rapidly spinning objects often weigh up to several tons, and are therefore one of the most significant collision hazards there is.
Illustration showing the problem of space debris. Credit: ESA
When applied to the problem of orbital debris, magnetic attraction is an attractive solutions for the safe deorbiting of spent satellites. For starters, it relies on technology that is standard issue aboard many low-orbiting satellites, which is known as magnetorquers. These electromagnets allow satellites to adjust their orientation using the Earth’s magnetic field. Hence, debris-chasing satellites would not need to be specially equipped in advance.
What’s more, this same magnetic attraction or repulsion technology is being considered as a safe method for allowing multiple satellites to maintain close formations in space. Such satellites – like NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS), the Landsat 7 and the Earth Observing-1 satellites, and the ESA’s upcoming LISA mission – are either operational or soon will be around Earth.
Because of this, this kind of magnetic attraction technology presents a safe and effective alternative for deorbiting space junk. As Fabacher explained in a recent ESA press release:
“With a satellite you want to deorbit, it’s much better if you can stay at a safe distance, without needing to come into direct contact and risking damage to both chaser and target satellites. So the idea I’m investigating is to apply magnetic forces either to attract or repel the target satellite, to shift its orbit or deorbit it entirely.”
Artist’s impression of the ESA’s proposed Darwin mission, six formation-flying satellites that would look for exoplanets. Credit: ESA/Medialab
The concept emerged out of a conversation Fabacher had with experts from the ESA’s technical center in the Netherlands. As part of his PhD research, he was looking into how magnetic guidance, navigation and control techniques would work in practice. This led to a discussion about how similar technology could allow swarms of satellites to attract and remove debris from orbit.
After making some calculations that combined a rendezvous simulator with magnetic interaction models, and also taking account the ever-changing state of Earth’s own magnetosphere, Fabacher and his colleagues realized they had a working concept. “The first surprise was that it was indeed possible, theoretically – initially we couldn’t be sure, but it turns out that the physics works fine,” he said.
To break it down, the chaser satellites would generate a strong magnetic field using superconducting wires that are cooled to cryogenic temperatures. These satellites would also rely on magnetic fields to maintain precise flying formations, thus allowing a swarm of chaser satellites the ability to deal with multiple pieces of debris, or to coordinate and guide debris to a specific location.
According to Finn Ankersen – an ESA expert in rendezvous and docking and formation flight – these magnetic tugs would also be able to remove space debris with a very high level of precision. “This kind of contactless magnetic influence would work from about 10–15 meters out, offering positioning precision within 10 cm with attitude precision [of] 1 – 2º,” he said.
Why Space Debris Mitigation is needed. Click for animation. Credit: ESA
The concept is being developed with support provided by the ESA’s Networking/Partnering Initiative, a program that offers support to universities and research institutes for the sake of developing space-related technologies. And it comes at a time when the issue of space debris is becoming increasingly worrisome.
Left unchecked, space debris is likely to become a very serious hazard in the coming years and decades. Already, it is estimated that the small satellite market will grow by $5.3 billion in the next decade (according to Space Works and Eurostat) and many private companies are looking to provide regular launch services to accommodate that growth.
If we intend to begin making a return to the Moon and mounting missions to Mars, we need to make sure the space lanes are clear! And given the importance of the International Space Station to scientific research and international collaboration, and with companies like Bigelow Aerospace looking to establish space habitats in orbit, something has to be done about this problem before it gets completely out of control!
Who knows? Maybe a small fleet or magnetic tugs is just what we need to clean up this mess!
Artist's impression of two merging black holes. Credit: Bohn, Throwe, Hébert, Henriksson, Bunandar, Taylor, Scheel/SXS
The discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO experiment in 2015 sent ripples through the scientific community. Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the confirmation of these waves (and two subsequent detections) solved a long-standing cosmological mystery. In addition to bending the fabric of space-time, it is now known that gravity can also create perturbations that can be detected billions of light-years away.
Seeking to capitalize on these discoveries and conduct new and exciting research into gravitational waves, the European Space Agency (ESA) recently green-lighted the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. Consisting of three satellites that will measure gravitational waves directly through laser interferometry, this mission will be the first space-based gravitational wave detector.
This decision was announced yesterday (Tuesday, June 20th) during a meeting of ESA’s Science Program Committee (SPC). It’s implementation is part of the ESA’s Cosmic Vision plan – the current cycle of the agency’s long-term planning for space science missions – which began in 2015 and will be running until 2025. It is also in keeping with the ESA’s desire to study the “invisible universe“, a policy that was adopted in 2013.
To accomplish this, the three satellites that make up the LISA constellation will be deployed into orbit around Earth. Once there, they will assume a triangular formation – spaced 2.5 million km (1.55 million mi) apart – and follow Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Here, isolated from all external influences but Earth’s gravity, they will then connect to each other by laser and begin looking for minute perturbations in the fabric of space-time.
Much like how the LIGO experiment and other gravitational wave detectors work, the LISA mission will rely on laser interferometry. This process consists of a beam of electromagnetic energy (in this case, a laser) being split in two and then recombined to look for patterns of interference. In LISA’s case, two satellites play the role of reflectors while the remaining one is the both source of the lasers and the observer of the laser beam.
When a gravitational wave passes through the triangle established by the three satellites, the lengths of the two laser beams will vary due to the space-time distortions caused by the wave. By comparing the laser beam frequency in the return beam to the frequency of the sent beam, LISA will be able to measure the level of distortion.
These measurements will have to be extremely precise, since the distortions they are looking for affect the fabric of space-time on the most minuscule of levels – a few millionths of a millionth of a meter over a distance of a million kilometers. Luckily, the technology to detect these waves has already been tested by the LISA Pathfinder mission, which deployed in 2015 and will conclude its mission at the end of the month.
Artist’s concept of the LISA mission. Credit: AEI/Milde Marketing/Exozet
In the coming weeks and months, the ESA will be looking over the design of the LISA mission and completing a cost assessment. If all goes as planned, the mission will be proposed for “adoption” before construction begins and it is expected to be launched by 2034. In the same meeting, the ESA also adopted another important mission that will be searching for exoplanets in the coming years.
This mission is known as the PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, or PLATO, mission. Like Kepler, this mission will monitor stars within a large sections of the sky to look for small dips in their brightness, which are caused by planets passing between the star and the observer (i.e. the transit method). Originally selected in February of 2014, this mission is now moving from the blueprint phase into construction and will launch in 2026.
It’s an exciting time for the European Space Agency. In recent years, it has committed itself to multiple endeavors in the hope of maintaining Europe’s commitment to and continued presence in space. These include studying the “invisible universe”, mounting missions to the Moon and Mars, maintaining a commitment to the International Space Station, and even building a successor to the ISS on the Moon!
These two images reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet
2007 OR10. NASA/Hubble/ESA/STScI
These two images reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. NASA/Hubble/ESA/STScI
It isn’t every day we get a new moon added to the list of solar system satellites. The combined observational power of three observatories — Kepler, Herschel and Hubble — led an astronomical detective tale to its climatic conclusion: distant Kuiper Belt Object 2007 OR10has a tiny moon.
The dwarf planet itself is an enigma wrapped in a mystery: with a long orbit taking it out to a distant aphelion 101 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, back into the environs of Neptune and Pluto for a perihelion 33 AU from the Sun once every 549 years, 2007 OR10 was discovered by Caltech astronomers Megan Schwamb and Mike Brown in 2007. Nicknamed “Snow White” by Mike Brown for its presumed high albedo, 2007 OR10 was 85 AU distant in the constellation Aquarius at the time of discovery and outbound towards aphelion in 2135. 2007 OR10 is about 1,500 kilometers in diameter, the third largest body known beyond Neptune in our solar system next to Pluto and Eris (nee Xena).
See the moon (circled?) at +21st magnitude, it’s a tough catch! NASA/Hubble/STScI
Enter the Kepler Space Telescope, which imaged 2007 OR10 crossing the constellation Aquarius as part of its extended K2 exoplanet survey along the ecliptic plane. Though Kepler looks for transiting exoplanets — worlds around other stars that betray their presence by tiny dips in the brightness of their host as they pass along our line of sight — it also picks up lots of other things that flicker, including variable stars and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. But the slow 45 hour rotational period of 2007 OR10 noted by Kepler immediately grabbed astronomers interest: could an unseen moon be lurking nearby, dragging on the KBO like a car brake?
“Typical rotation periods for Kuiper Belt Objects are under 24 hours,” says Csaba Kiss (Konkoly Observatory) in a recent press release. “We looked in the Hubble archive because the slower rotation period could have been caused by the gravitational tug of a moon.”
And sure enough, digging back through archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope taken during a survey of KBOs, astronomers turned up two images of the faint moon from 2009 and 2010. Infrared observations of 2007 OR10 and its moon by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Telescope cinched the discovery, and noted an albedo of 19% (similar to wet sand) for 2007 OR10, much darker than expected. The moon is about 200 miles (320 kilometers) in diameter, in a roughly 9,300 mile (15,000 kilometer) orbit.
The discovery was announced at an AAS meeting just last year, and even now, we’re still puzzling out what little we know about these distant worlds. Just what 2007 OR10 and its moon looks like is any guess. New Horizons gave us our first look at Pluto and Charon two short summers ago in 2015, and will give us a fleeting glimpse of 2014 MU69 on New Year’s Day 2019. All of these objects beg for proper names, especially pre-2019 New Horizons flyby.
This also comes on the heels of two new moons for Jupiter, recently announced last month S/2017 J1 and J2.
What would the skies from the tiny moon look like? Well, ancient 2007 OR10 must loom large in its sky, though Sol would only shine as a bright -15th magnitude star, (a little brighter than a Full Moon) its illumination dimmed down to 1/7,000th the brightness enjoyed here on sunny Earth, which would be lost in its glare.
The current position of 2007 OR10 in the night sky. Stellarium
And looking at the strange elliptical orbits of these outer worldlets, we can only surmise that something else must be out there. Will the discovery of Planet 9 be made before the close of the decade?
One thing’s for sure: this isn’t your parent’s tidy solar system with “Excellent Mothers” serving “Nine Pizzas.”
10 years of Astronomy Cast… wow. It’s been a long, fun journey. What are some of our favorite episodes and adventures over the decade we’ve been doing this show.
We usually record Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout on Air every Friday at 1:30 pm Pacific / 4:30 pm Eastern. You can watch here on Universe Today or from the Astronomy Cast Google+ page.
Artist's impression of rocky exoplanets orbiting Gliese 832, a red dwarf star just 16 light-years from Earth. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org).
The Kepler space telescope is surely the gift that keeps on giving. After being deployed in 2009, it went on to detect a total of 2,335 confirmed exoplanets and 582 multi-planet systems. Even after two of its reaction wheels failed, it carried on with its K2 mission, which has discovered an additional 520 candidates, 148 of which have been confirmed. And with yet another extension, which will last beyond 2018, it shows no signs of stopping!
In the most recent catalog to be released by the Kepler mission, an additional 219 new planet candidates have been added to its database. More significantly, 10 of these planets were found to be terrestrial (i.e. rocky), of comparable in size to Earth and orbited within their star’s habitable zone – the distance where surface temperatures would be warm enough to support liquid water.
These findings were presented at a news conference on Monday, June 19th, at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Of all the catalogs of Kepler candidates that have been released to date, this one is the most comprehensive and detailed. The eighth in a series of Kepler exoplanet catalogs, this one is based on data that was obtained from the first four years of the mission and is the final catalog that covers the spacecraft’s observations of the Cygnus constellation.
Credits: NASA/Wendy Stenzel
Since 2014, Kepler has ceased looking at a set starfield in the Cygnus constellation and has been collecting data on its second mission – observing fields on the plane of the ecliptic of the Milky Way Galaxy. With the release of this catalog, there are now 4,034 planet candidates that have been identified by Kepler – of which 2,335 have been verified.
An important aspect of this catalog were the methods that were used for producing it, which were the most sophisticated to date. As with all planets detected by Kepler, the latest finds were all made using the transit method. This consists of monitoring stars for occasional dips in brightness, which is used to confirm the presence of planets transiting between the star and the observer.
To ensure that the detections in this latest catalog were real, the team relied on two approaches to eliminate false positives. This consisted of introducing simulated transits into the dataset to make sure the dips that Kepler detected were consistent with planets. Then, they added false signals to see how often the analysis mistook these for planet transits. From this, they were able to tell which planets were overcounted and which were undercounted.
This led to another exciting find, which was the indication that for all of the smaller exoplanets discovered by Kepler, most fell within one of two distinct groupings. Essentially, half the planets that we know of in the galaxy are either rocky in nature and larger than Earth (i.e. Super-Earth’s), or are gas giants that are comparable in size to Neptune (i.e. smaller gas giants).
This conclusion was reached by a team of researchers who used the W.M. Keck Observatory to measure the sizes of 1,300 stars in the Kepler field of view. From this, they were able to determine the radii of 2,000 Kepler planets with extreme precision, and found that there was a clear division between rocky, Earth-sized planets and gaseous planets smaller than Neptune – with few in between.
As Benjamin Fulton, a doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and the lead author of this study, explained:
“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals. Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree.”
These results are sure to have drastic implications when it comes to knowing the frequency of different types of planets in our galaxy, as well as the study of planet formation. For instance, they noted that most rocky planets discovered by Kepler are up to 75% larger than Earth. And for reasons that are not yet clear, about half of them take on hydrogen and helium, which swells their size to the point that they become almost Neptune-sized.
Histogram shows the number of planets per 100 stars as a function of planet size relative to Earth. Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/CalTech/University of Hawaii/B.J. Fulton
These findings could similarly have significant implications in the search for habitable planets and extra-terrestrial life. As Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during the presentation:
“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth. Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”
From this information, scientists will be able to know with a greater degree of certainty just how many “Earth-like” planets exist within our galaxy. The most recent estimates place the number of planets in the Milky Way at about 100 billion. And based on this data, it would seem that many of these are similar in composition to Earth, albeit larger.
Combined with a statistical models of how many of these can be found within a circumstellar habitable zone, we should have a better idea of just how many potentially-life-bearing worlds are out there. If nothing else, this should simplify some of the math in the Drake Equation!
In the meantime, the Kepler space telescope will continue to make observations of nearby star systems in order to learn more about their exoplanets. This includes the TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven Earth-sized, rocky planets. Its a safe bet that before it is finally retired after 2018, it will have some more surprises in store for us!
The open star clusters of Messier 46 and Messier 47, located in the southern skies in the Puppis constellation. Credit: Wikisky
Welcome back to Messier Monday! In our ongoing tribute to the great Tammy Plotner, we take a look at Orion’s Nebula’s “little brother”, the De Marian’s Nebula!
During the 18th century, famed French astronomer Charles Messier noted the presence of several “nebulous objects” in the night sky. Having originally mistaken them for comets, he began compiling a list of them so that others would not make the same mistake he did. In time, this list (known as the Messier Catalog) would come to include 100 of the most fabulous objects in the night sky.
One of these objects is the open star cluster known as Messier 47 (NGC 2422), which is located in the constellation of Puppis roughly 1,600 light-years from Earth. Located in proximity to Messier 46, this star cluster is estimated to be 78 million years in age. It is also particularly bright, containing about 50 stars and occupying a region that is about the same size as that of the full Moon.
Description:
Spanning across about 12 light years of space, this clump of around 50 stars began their life around 78 million years ago. Now cruising through space some 1600 light years away from Earth, the group continues to distance itself from our solar system at a speed of 9 kilometers per second. For the most part, Messier 47 is a whole lot like the Pleiades star cluster – its brightest member shining just around magnitude 6 and holding a spectral class B2.
But, here you will also find two orange K giants with luminosity of about 200 times that of the Sun. At M47’s center you’ll find binary star, Sigma 1121, with components of magnitude 7.9 both and separated by 7.4 arc seconds. How do we know that M47 is a lot like the Pleiades? Let’s try X-ray sources and the advances of looking at open clusters far more differently than in optical wavelengths. As M. Barbera (et al) said in a 2002 study:
“We present the results of a ROSAT study of NGC 2422, a southern open cluster at a distance of about 470 pc, with an age close to the Pleiades. Source detection was performed on two observations, a 10-ks PSPC and a 40-ks HRI pointing, with a detection algorithm based on wavelet transforms, particularly suited to detecting faint sources in crowded fields. We have detected 78 sources, 13 of which were detected only with the HRI, and 37 detected only with the PSPC. For each source, we have computed the 0.2-2.0 keV X-ray flux. Using optical data from the literature and our own low-dispersion spectroscopic observations, we find candidate optical counterparts for 62 X-ray sources, with more than 80% of these counterparts being late type stars. The number of sources (38 of 62) with high membership probability counterparts is consistent with that expected for Galactic plane observations at our sensitivity. We have computed maximum likelihood X-ray luminosity functions (XLF) for F and early-G type stars with high membership probability. Heavy data censoring due to our limited sensitivity permits determination of only the high-luminosity tails of the XLFs; the distributions are indistinguishable from those of the nearly coeval Pleiades cluster.”
What else might be hiding inside Messier 47? Try new debris disk candidates. As Nadya Gorlova (et al) indicated in a 2004 study:
“Sixty-three members of the 100 Myr old open cluster M47 (NGC 2422) have been detected with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Be star V 378 Pup shows an excess both in the near-infrared, probably due to free-free emission from the gaseous envelope. Seven other early-type stars show smaller excesses. Among late-type stars, two show large excesses. P1121 is the first known main-sequence star showing an excess comparable to that of Beta Pic, which may indicate the presence of an exceptionally massive debris disk. It is possible that a major planetesimal collision has occurred in this system, consistent with the few hundred Myr timescales estimated for the clearing of the solar system.”
Iof the star cluster Messier 47 taken by the Wide Field Imager camera on the 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO
History of Observation:
Messier 47 was originally discovered before 1654 by Hodierna who described it as:
“[A] Nebulosa between the two dogs”… but it was an observation that wasn’t known about until long after Charles Messier independently recovered it on February 19, 1771. “Cluster of stars, little distant from the preceding; the stars are greater; the middle of the cluster was compared with the same star, 2 Navis. The cluster contains no nebulosity.”
However, it was one of those very rare circumstances when Messier actually made a mistake in his position calculations. Despite this error, the cluster was observed by Caroline Herschel and identified as M47 at least twice in early 1783.
As a consequence of Messier’s position mistake, Sir William Herschel also independently rediscovered it on February 4, 1785, and gave it the number H VIII.38. “A cluster of pretty compressed large [bright] and small [faint] stars. Round. Above [more than] 15′ diameter.” It would be John Herschel, on December 16, 1827, who would be the first to resolve Sigma 1121: “The chief star of a large, pretty rich, straggling cluster. It [the star] is double.”
Atlas Image mosaic obtained of Messier 47 as part of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). Credit: UMass/IPAC/Caltech/NASA/NSF
The “Messy” mistake would haunt star catalogs – including both Herschel’s and Dreyer’s for years, until the whole clerical error was cleared up by Owen Gingerich in 1960:
“More explicit reasons for this identification [of M47 with NGC 2422] were given independently in 1959 by T.F. Morris, a member of the Messier Club of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Montreal Centre. Dr. Morris suggested that an error in signs in the difference between M47 and the comparison star could account for the position. Messier determined the declination of a nebula or cluster by measuring the difference between the object and a comparison star of known declination. The right ascension could be found by recording the times at which the object and the star drifted across a central wire in his telescope’s field; the time interval gives the difference in right ascension. The differences between Messier’s 1770 [actually 1771] position for M47 and his stated comparison star, 2 Navis (now 2 Puppis), if applied with opposite signs, leads to NGC 2422. Clearly, Messier made a mistake in computation!”
May you have Caroline Herschel’s luck finding it!
Locating Messier 47:
There is no simple way of finding Messier 47 in the finderscope of a telescope, but it’s not too hard with binoculars. Begin your hunt a little more than a fist width east/northeast of bright Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris)… or about 5 degrees (3 finger widths) south of Alpha Monoceros. (It can sometimes by seen with the unaided eye under good conditions as a dim nebulosity.) There you will find two open clusters that will usually appear in the same average binocular field of view.
Messier 47 location. Image: IAU and Sky & Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott & Rick Fienberg)
M47 is the westernmost of the pair. It will appear slightly brighter and the stars will be more fewer and more clearly visible. In the finderscope it will appear as if it is resolving, while neighboring eastern M46 will just look like a foggy patch. Because M47’s stars are brighter, it is better suited to less than perfect sky conditions, showing as a compression that begins to resolve in binoculars and will resolves almost fully even a small telescope.
And here are the quick facts on this Messier Object to help you get started:
Object Name: Messier 47 Alternative Designations: M47, NGC 2422 Object Type: Open Galactic Star Cluster Constellation: Puppis Right Ascension: 07 : 36.6 (h:m) Declination: -14 : 30 (deg:m) Distance: 1.6 (kly) Visual Brightness: 5.2 (mag) Apparent Dimension: 30.0 (arc min)
Artist's impression of the Demonstrator 3 aerospike test vehicle and the Haas 2CA SSTO rocket. Credit: ARCA
The aerospike engine is a time-honored concept. In the past, NASA tested the concept extensively on the ground and hoped to incorporate it into the Space Shuttle and their next-generation Venture Star program (a Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) vehicle). However, due to budget constraints, the Space Shuttle ended up being equipped with bell-shaped nozzles instead, and the Venture Star never saw the light of day.
But thanks to New Mexico-based aerospace company ARCA, the aerospike engine is getting a new lease on life. This coming August, they will conduct a test flight of the aerospike engine using their Demonstrator 3 rocket, which will constitute the first space flight of the engine. If all goes well, it will be a major step towards the creation of a fleet of Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) rockets.
What makes the aerospike engine appealing is the fact that it offers efficient thrust over a wide range of altitudes, and is also more fuel-efficient than current engines. With traditional bell-shaped nozzles, reliable thrust tends to occur only at sea level. Beyond that, the engine isn’t capable of taking advantage of decreases in atmospheric pressure since the gases are contained by the nozzle.
The test of twin Linear Aerospike XRS-2200 engines, originally built for the X-33 program, was performed on August 6, 2001 at NASA’s Sternis Space Center, Mississippi. Credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
In contrast, the aerospike engine’s exhaust is capable of expanding from sea level all the way up to space, which ensures both fuel-efficiency and a high degree of specific impulse (Isp) at all flight levels. Already, ARCA and NASA have scheduled ground and vacuum tests for the engine. But in the meantime, they also want to gather data on how it performs in flight. This is where the Demonstrator 3 test comes into play.
In addition to testing the engine’s efficiency, it will also test the aerospike’s super-cold fuel storage technology. Basically, the engine relies on a decomposing 70% concentration of hydrogen peroxide at a temperature of only 250 °C to generate thrust. The byproduct of this is oxygen and water, which makes the aerospike the most environmentally-friendly rocket concept to date. As Dumitru Popescu, the CEO of ARCA, said in a recent statement:
“By sending the Demonstrator 3 rocket in space using a super cold engine, with only 250 °C instead of 3500 °C in the reaction chamber, paired with the aerospike technology, we are going to demonstrate the impressive potential of the aerospike.”
Ultimately, the goal here is to demonstrate that SSTO rockets are feasible, which ARCA is exploring with their Haas 2CA concept. The latest in the Haas rocket family, named in honor of Austrian-Romanian rocketry pioneer Conrad Haas, this launch vehicle uses hydrogen peroxide and kerosene for fuel and is capable of generating 22,900 kg (50,500 lbs) of thrust at sea level, and about 33,565 kg (74,000 lbs) in a vacuum.
Compared to multi-stage rockets, SSTOs offer both lower costs and greater flexibility when it comes to launching small payloads into orbit. According to estimates produced by Space Works and Eurostat, this small satellite market will be growing by $5.3 billion in the next decade. As such, aerospace companies that can offer competitive launch rates and flexibility will be able to take advantage of this growth.
The company unveiled the Haas 2CA back in March of 2017 at their company headquarters in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In 2018, ARCA hopes to conduct their first test launch of the Haas 2CA from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. But before that can happen, the company needs to make sure the aerospike engine performs as well as expected. As Popescu explained:
“The Haas 2CA Single Stage to Orbit is just the beginning of a new generation of space vehicle, shaped by innovation that will generate lower cost. We are going to answer one of the industry’s most asked questions: can an aerospike deliver in flight the pressure compensation generated by altitude variation and deliver the expected performance by saving fuel? We want to pick up where NASA left off and prove that this technology is actually the way to go for space flights.”
The test flight, which will take place at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, will consist of a suborbital space flight that will take the Demonstrator 3 up to an altitude of 100 km. If this flight is achieved, ARCA will have demonstrated that the engine technology is flight qualified, that SSTO rockets are feasible, and that super cold engines paired with aerospike technology will allow for environmentally friendly suborbital rockets.
Artist’s impression of the Haas 2C rocket ascending into orbit. Credit: ARCA
The test will also be a milestone for the commercial aerospace industry, which was founded on the desires to make space more accessible and lowering the costs associated with individual launches. And as Popescu was sure to indicate, the best way to do this is not to merely improve upon existing concepts, but leverage cutting-edge and time-tested technologies to create new ones.
“We are confident that the aerospike engine combined with composite material fuel tanks and dense fuels will significantly lower the costs for orbital and suborbital launches,” he said. “We truly believe that the answer for cost reduction of space flight is innovation, not trying to make old technologies a little bit more efficient. This will never generate significant price drop of space launches, but merely small improvements. With this philosophy in mind we expect to increase the registered value of our company from its current $20 million to at least $200 millions by 2019.”
The development of SSTOs are just one way that the commercial aerospace industry is making space exploration more economical. Other examples include SpaceX’s developments of reusable rockets, and Rocketlab‘s use of lightweight materials to create two-stage disposable rockets.
These measures are not only allowing for the commercialization of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), but are opening up possibilities that were previously thought to be impossible for the time being – like space-based solar power and space habitats!
Stay tuned for more on this and other upcoming tests. And be sure to check out this video on how ARCA is preparing for the upcoming aerospike test flight, courtesy of ARCA:
Just a couple of weeks ago, astronomers from Caltech announced their third detection of gravitational waves from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO.
As with the previous two detections, astronomers have determined that the waves were generated when two intermediate-mass black holes slammed into each other, sending out ripples of distorted spacetime.
One black hole had 31.2 times the mass of the Sun, while the other had 19.4 solar masses. The two spiraled inward towards each other, until they merged into a single black hole with 48.7 solar masses. And if you do the math, twice the mass of the Sun was converted into gravitational waves as the black holes merged.
On January 4th, 2017, LIGO detected two black holes merging into one. Courtesy Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory
These gravitational waves traveled outward from the colossal collision at the speed of light, stretching and compressing spacetime like a tsunami wave crossing the ocean until they reached Earth, located about 2.9 billion light-years away.
The waves swept past each of the two LIGO facilities, located in different parts of the United States, stretching the length of carefully calibrated laser measurements. And from this, researchers were able to detect the direction, distance and strength of the original merger.
Seriously, if this isn’t one of the coolest things you’ve ever heard, I’m clearly easily impressed.
Now that the third detection has been made, I think it’s safe to say we’re entering a brand new field of gravitational astronomy. In the coming decades, astronomers will use gravitational waves to peer into regions they could never see before.
Being able to perceive gravitational waves is like getting a whole new sense. It’s like having eyes and then suddenly getting the ability to perceive sound.
This whole new science will take decades to unlock, and we’re just getting started.
As Einstein predicted, any mass moving through space generates ripples in spacetime. When you’re just walking along, you’re actually generating tiny ripples. If you can detect these ripples, you can work backwards to figure out what size of mass made the ripples, what direction it was moving, etc.
Even in places that you couldn’t see in any other way. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Black holes, obviously, are the low hanging fruit. When they’re not actively feeding, they’re completely invisible, only detectable by how they gravitational attract objects or bend light from objects passing behind them.
But seen in gravitational waves, they’re like ships moving across the ocean, leaving ripples of distorted spacetime behind them.
With our current capabilities through LIGO, astronomers can only detect the most massive objects moving at a significant portion of the speed of light. A regular black hole merger doesn’t do the trick – there’s not enough mass. Even a supermassive black hole merger isn’t detectable yet because these mergers seem to happen too slowly.
LIGO has already significantly increased the number of black holes with known masses. The observatory has definitively detected two sets of black hole mergers (bright blue). For each event, LIGO determined the individual masses of the black holes before they merged, as well as the mass of the black hole produced by the merger. The black holes shown with a dotted border represent a LIGO candidate event that was too weak to be conclusively claimed as a detection. Credit: LIGO/Caltech/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
This is why all the detections so far have been intermediate-mass black holes with dozens of times the mass of our Sun. And we can only detect them at the moment that they’re merging together, when they’re generating the most intense gravitational waves.
If we can boost the sensitivity of our gravitational wave detectors, we should be able to spot mergers of less and more massive black holes.
But merging isn’t the only thing they do. Black holes are born when stars with many more times the mass of our Sun collapse in on themselves and explode as supernovae. Some stars, we’ve now learned just implode as black holes, never generating the supernovae, so this process happens entirely hidden from us.
Is there a singularity at the center of a black hole event horizon, or is there something there, some kind of object smaller than a neutron star, but bigger than an infinitely small point? As black holes merge together, we could see beyond the event horizon with gravitational waves, mapping out the invisible region within to get a sense of what’s going on down there.
This illustration shows the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. In reality, the area near the black holes would appear highly warped, and the gravitational waves would be difficult to see directly. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle
We want to know about even less massive objects like neutron stars, which can also form from a supernova explosion. These neutron stars can orbit one another and merge generating some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe: gamma ray bursts. But do neutron stars have surface features? Different densities? Could we detect a wobble in the gravitational waves in the last moments before a merger?
And not everything needs to merge. Sensitive gravitational wave detectors could sense binary objects with a large imbalance, like a black hole or neutron star orbiting around a main sequence star. We could detect future mergers by their gravitational waves.
Are gravitational waves a momentary distortion of spacetime, or do they leave some kind of permanent dent on the Universe that we could trace back? Will we see echoes of gravity from gravitational waves reflecting and refracting through the fabric of the cosmos?
Perhaps the greatest challenge will be using gravitational waves to see beyond the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. This region shows us the Universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when everything was cool enough for light to move freely through the Universe.
But there was mass there, before that moment. Moving, merging mass that would have generated gravitational waves. As we explained in a previous article, astronomers are working to find the imprint of these gravitational waves on the Cosmic Microwave Background, like an echo, or a shadow. Perhaps there’s a deeper Cosmic Gravitational Background Radiation out there, one which will let us see right to the beginning of time, just moments after the Big Bang.
And as always, there will be the surprises. The discoveries in this new field that nobody ever saw coming. The “that’s funny” moments that take researchers down into whole new fields of discovery, and new insights into how the Universe works.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facility in Livingston, Louisiana. The other facility is located in Hanford, Washington. Image: LIGO
The LIGO project was begun back in 1994, and the first iteration operated from 2002 to 2012 without a single gravitational wave detection. It was clear that the facility wasn’t sensitive enough, so researchers went back and made massive improvements.
In 2008, they started improving the facility, and in 2015, Advanced LIGO came online with much more sensitivity. With the increased capabilities, Advanced LIGO made its first discovery in 2016, and now two more discoveries have been added.
LIGO can currently only detect the general hemisphere of the sky where a gravitational wave was emitted. And so, LIGO’s next improvement will be to add another facility in India, called INDIGO. In addition to improving the sensitivity of LIGO, this will give astronomers three observations of each event, to precisely detect the origin of the gravitational waves. Then visual astronomers could do follow up observations, to map the event to anything in other wavelengths.
Current operating facilities in the global network include the twin LIGO detectors—in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana—and GEO600 in Germany. The Virgo detector in Italy and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan are undergoing upgrades and are expected to begin operations in 2016 and 2018, respectively. A sixth observatory is being planned in India. Having more gravitational-wave observatories around the globe helps scientists pin down the locations and sources of gravitational waves coming from space. Image made in February 2016. Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab
A European experiment known as Virgo has been operating for a few years as well, agreeing to collaborate with the LIGO team if any detections are made. So far, the Virgo experiment hasn’t found anything, but it’s being upgraded with 10 times the sensitivity, which should be fully operational by 2018.
A Japanese experiment called the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector, or KAGRA, will come online in 2018 as well, and be able to contribute to the observations. It should be capable of detecting binary neutron star mergers out to nearly a billion light-years away.
Just with visual astronomy, there are a set of next generation supergravitational wave telescopes in the works, which should come online in the next few decades.
The Europeans are building the Einstein Telescope, which will have detection arms 10 km long, compared to 4 km for LIGO. That’s like, 6 more km.
There’s the European Space Agency’s space-based Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, which could launch in 2030. This will consist of a fleet of 3 spacecraft which will maintain a precise distance of 2.5 million km from each other. Compare that to the Earth-based detection distances, and you can see why the future of observations will come from space.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) consists of three spacecraft orbiting the sun in a triangular configuration. Credit: NASA
And that last idea, looking right back to the beginning of time could be a possibility with the Big Bang Observer mission, which will have a fleet of 12 spacecraft flying in formation. This is still all in the proposal stage, so no concrete date for if or when they’ll actually fly.
Gravitational wave astronomy is one of the most exciting fields of astronomy. This entirely new sense is pushing out our understanding of the cosmos in entirely new directions, allowing us to see regions we could never even imagine exploring before. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Artist's impression of the the Interplanetary Spacecraft approaching Mars. Credit: SpaceX
Elon Musk has never been one to keep his long-term plans to himself. Beyond the development of reusable rockets, electric cars, and revolutionizing solar power, he has also been quite vocal about establishing a colony on Mars within his lifetime. The goal here is nothing less than ensuring the survival of the human race by creating a “backup location”, and calls for some serious planning and architecture.
The paper was produced by Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor at Stanford University and the Editor-in-Chief of NewSpace, and includes all the material and slides from Musk’s original presentation. Contained within are Musk’s thoughts on how the colonization of Mars could be accomplished in this century and what issues would need to be addressed.
Elon Musk revealing his Mars Plans at the 67th annual meetings of the IAC. Credit: SpaceX/IAC
These include the costs of sending people and payloads to Mars, the technical details of the rocket and vehicle that would be making the trip, and possible cost breakdowns and timelines. But of course, he also addresses the key philosophical questions – “Why go?” and “Why Mars?”
Addressing this first question is one of the most important aspects of space exploration. Remember John F. Kennedy’s iconic “We Choose to go to the Moon” speech? Far from just being a declaration of intent, this speech was a justification by the Kennedy administration for all the time, energy, and money it was committing to the Apollo program. As such, Kennedy’s speech stressed above all else why the goal was a noble undertaking.
In looking to Mars, Musk struck a similar tone, emphasizing survival and humanity’s need to expand into space. As he stated:
“I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”
As for what makes Mars the natural choice, that was a bit more of a tough sell. Granted, Mars has a lot of similarities with Earth – hence why it is often called “Earth’s Twin” – which makes it a tantalizing target for scientific research. But it also has some rather stark differences that make long-term stays on the surface seem less than appealing. So why would it be the natural choice?
Artist’s rendition of a passenger aboard the ITS looking down on Mars. Credit: SpaceX
As Musk explains, proximity has a lot to do with it. Sure, Venus is closer to Earth, getting as close as 41 million km (25,476,219 mi), compared to 56 million km (3,4796,787 mi) with Mars. But Venus’ hostile environment is well-documented, and include a super-dense atmosphere, temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulfuric acid rain! Mercury is too hot and airless, and the Jovian moons are very far.
This leaves us with just two options for the near-future, as far as Musk is concerned. One is the Moon, which is likely to have a permanent settlement on it in the coming years. In fact, between the ESA, NASA, Roscosmos, and the Chines National Space Administration, there is no shortage of plans to build a lunar outpost, which will serve as a successor to the ISS.
But compared to Mars, it is less resource rich, has no atmosphere, and represents a major transition as far as gravity (0.165 g compared to 0.376 g) and length of day (28 days vs. 24.5 hours) are concerned. Herein lies the greatest reason to go to Mars, which is the fact that our options are limited and Mars is the most Earth-like of all the bodies that are currently accessible to us.
What’s more, Musk makes allowances for the fact that colonists could start kick-starting the terraforming process, to make it even more Earth-like over time. As he states (bold added for emphasis):
“In fact, we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth. In effect, if we could warm Mars up, we would once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. Mars is about half as far again from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere, which, being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.
“It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth. We just need to change the populations because currently we have seven billion people on Earth and none on Mars.”
Naturally, no mission can be expected to happen without the all-important vehicle. To this end, Musk used the annual IAC meeting to unveil his company’s plans for the Interplanetary Transport System. An updated version of the Mars Colonial Transporter (which Musk began talking about in 2012), the ITS will consist of two main components – a reusable rocket booster and the Interplanetary Spaceship.
The process for getting to Mars with these components involves a few steps. First, the rocket booster and spaceship take off together and the spaceship is delivered into orbit. Next, while the spaceship assumes a parking orbit, the booster returns to Earth to be reloaded with the tanker craft. This vehicle is the same design as the spaceship, but contains propellant tanks instead of cargo areas.
The tanker is then launched into orbit with the booster, where it will rendezvous with the spaceship and refuel it for the journey to Mars. Overall, the propellant tanker will go up anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the spacecraft while it is in orbit. Musk estimates that the turnaround time between the spacecraft launch and the booster retrieval could eventually be as low as 20 minutes.
This process (if Musk gets its way) would expand to include multiple spaceships making the journey to and from Mars every 26 months (when Mars and Earth are closest together):
“You would ultimately have upwards of 1,000 or more spaceships waiting in orbit. Hence, the Mars Colonial fleet would depart en masse. It makes sense to load the spaceships into orbit because you have got 2 years to do so, and then you can make frequent use of the booster and the tanker to get really heavy reuse out of those. With the spaceship, you get less reuse because you have to consider how long it is going to last—maybe 30 years, which might be perhaps 12–15 flights of the spaceship at most.”
In terms of the rocket’s structure, it would consist of an advanced carbon fiber exterior surrounding fuel tanks, which would rely on an autogenous pressurization system. This involves the fuel and oxygen being gasified through heat exchanges in the engine, which would then be used to pressurize the tanks. This is a much simpler system than what is currently being used for the Falcon 9 rocket.
The booster would use 42 Raptor engines arranged in concentric rings to generate thrust. With 21 engines in the outer ring, 14 in the inner ring, and seven in a center cluster, the booster would have an estimated lift-off thrust of 11,793 metric tons (13,000 tons) – 128 MegaNewtons – and a vacuum thrust of 12,714 metric tons (14,015 tons), or 138 MN. This would make it the first spacecraft where the rocket performance bar exceeds the physical size of the rocket.
As for the spacecraft, the designs calls for a pressurized section at the top with an unpressurized section beneath. The pressurized section would hold up to 100 passengers (thought Musk hopes to eventually increase that capacity to 200 people per trip), while all the luggage and cargo necessary for building the Martian colony would be kept in the unpressurized section below.
As for the crew compartments themselves, Musk was sure to illustrate how time in them would not be boring, since the transit time is a long. “Therefore, the crew compartment or the occupant compartment is set up so that you can do zero-gravity games – you can float around,” he said. “There will be movies, lecture halls, cabins, and a restaurant. It will be really fun to go. You are going to have a great time!”
The system architecture of the Interplanetary Transport System. Credit: SpaceX
Below both these sections, the liquid oxygen tank, fuel tank and spacecraft engines are located. The engines, which would be directly attached to the thrust cone at the base, would consists of an outer ring of three sea-level engines – which would generate 361 seconds of specific impulse (Isp) – and an inner cluster of six vacuum engines that would generate 382s Isp.
The exterior of the spacecraft will also be fitted with a heatshield, which will be composed of the same material that SpaceX uses on its Dragon spacecraft. This is known as a phenolic-impregnated carbon ablator (PICA), which SpaceX is on their third version of. In total, Musk estimates that the Interplanetary Spaceship will be able to transport 450 tons of cargo to Mars, depending upon how many times the tanker can refill the craft.
And, depending on the Earth-Mars rendezvous, the transit time could be as little as 80 days one-way (figuring for a speed of 6km/s). But with time, Musk hopes to cut that down to just 30 days, which would make it possible to establish a sizable population on Mars in a relatively short amount of time. As Musk indicated, the magic number here in 1 million, meaning the number of people it would take to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
He admitted that this would be a major challenge, and could as long as a century to complete:
“If you can only go every 2 years and if you have 100 people per ship, that is 10,000 trips. Therefore, at least 100 people per trip is the right order of magnitude, and we may end up expanding the crew section and ultimately taking more like 200 or more people per flight in order to reduce the cost per person. However, 10,000 flights is a lot of flights, so ultimately you would really want in the order of 1,000 ships. It would take a while to build up to 1,000 ships. How long it would take to reach that million-person threshold, from the point at which the first ship goes to Mars would probably be somewhere between 20 and 50 total Mars rendezvous—so it would take 40–100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars.”
Cutaway of the Interplanetary Spaceship. Credit: SpaceX
When the ITS is ready to launch, it will do so from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which SpaceX currently uses to conduct Falcon 9 launches from. But of course, the most daunting aspect of any colonization effort is cost. At present, and using current methods, sending upwards of 1 million people to Mars is simply not affordable.
Using Apollo-era methods as a touchstone, Musk indicated that the cost to go to Mars would be around $10 billion per person – which is derived from the fact that the program itself cost between $100 and $200 billion (adjust for inflation) and resulted in 12 astronauts setting foot on the Moon. Naturally, this is far too high for the sake of creating a self-sustaining colony with a population of 1 million.
As a result, Musk claimed that the cost of transporting people to Mars would have to be cut by a whopping 5 million percent! Musk’s desire to lower the costs associated with space launches is well-known, and is the very reason he founded SpaceX and began developing reusable technology. However, costs would need to be lowered to the point where a ticket to Mars would cost about the same as a median house – i.e. $200,000 – before any trips to Mars could happen.
Artist’s impression of the ITS in transit, with its solar arrays deployed. Credit: SpsaceX
As to how this could be done, several strategies are outlined, many of which Musk and space agencies like NASA are already actively pursuing. They include full Reusability, where all stages of a rocket and its cargo module (not just the first stage) would have to be retrievable and reusable. Refueling in Orbit is a second means, which would mean the spacecraft would not have to carry all the fuel they need with them from Earth.
On top of that, there would have to be the option for propellant Production on Mars, where the spaceship will be able to refuel at Mars to make the return trip. This concept has been explored in the past for lunar and Martian missions. And in Mars’ case, the presence of atmospheric and frozen CO², and water in both the soil and the polar ice caps, would mean that methane, oxygen and hydrogen fuel could all be manufactured.
Lastly, there is the question of which propellant would be best. As it stands, there are there basic choices when it comes – kerosene (rocket fuel), hydrogen, and methane. All of these present certain advantages and can be manufactured in-situ on Mars. But based on a cost-benefit breakdown, Musk claims that methane would be the most cost-effective propellant.
As always, Musk also raised the issue of timelines and next steps. This consisted of a rundown of SpaceX’s accomplishments over the past decade and a half, followed by an outline of what he hopes to see his company do in the coming years and decades.
Artist impression of a Mars settlement with cutaway view. Credit: NASA Ames Research Center
These include the development of the first Interplanetary Spaceship in about four years time, which will be followed by suborbital test flights. He even hinted how the spacecraft could have commercial applications, being used for the rapid transportation of cargo around the world. As for the development of the booster, he indicated that this would be a relatively straightforward process since it simply involves scaling up the existing Falcon 9 booster.
Beyond that, he estimated that (assuming all goes well) a ten-year time frame would suffice for putting all the components together so that it would work for bringing people to Mars. Last, but not least, he offered some glimpses of what could be accomplished with ITS beyond Mars. As the name suggests, Musk is hoping to conduct missions to other destination in the Solar System someday.
Given the opportunities for in-situ fuel production (thanks to the abundance of water ice), the moons of both Jupiter and Saturn were mentioned as possible destination. But beyond moons like Europa, Enceladus, and Titan (all of which were mentioned), even destinations in the trans-Neptunian region of the Solar System were indicated as a possibility.
Given that Pluto also has an abundance of water ice on its surface, Musk claimed that a refueling depot could be built here to service missions to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. “I would not recommend this for interstellar journeys,” he admitted, “but this basic system—provided we have filling stations along the way—means full access to the entire greater solar system.”
Artist’s impression of the ITS conducting a flyby of Jupiter. Credit: SpaceX
The publication of this paper, many months after Musk presented the details of his plan to the annual IAC meeting, has naturally generated both approval and skepticism. While there are those who would question Musk’s timelines and his ability to deliver on the proposals contained within, others see it as a crucial step in the fulfillment of Musk’s long-held desire to see the colonization of Mars happen in this century.
To Scott Hubbard, it serves as a valuable contribution to the history of space exploration, something that future generations will be able to access so they can chart the history of Mars exploration – much in the same way NASA archival materials are used to study the history of the Moon landing. As he remarked:
“In my view, publishing this paper provides not only an opportunity for the spacefaring community to read the SpaceX vision in print with all the charts in context, but also serves as a valuable archival reference for future studies and planning. My goal is to make New Space the forum for publication of novel exploration concepts-particularly those that suggest an entrepreneurial path for humans traveling to deep space.”
Elon Musk is no stranger to thinking big and dreaming big. And while many of his proposals in the past did not come about in the time frame he originally specified, no one can doubt that he’s delivered so far. It will be very exciting to see if he can take the company he founded 15 years ago for the sake of fostering the exploration of Mars, and use it instead to lead a colonization effort!
Update: Musk tweeted his thanks to Hubbard for the publication and has indicated that there are some “major changes to the plan coming soon.”
And be sure to check out this video of Musk’s full speech at the 67th annual meeting of the IAC, courtesy of SpaceX:
