As readers know, I'm a space nut, and to some degree an established one, with a lot of articles and papers and the book The First Space Race to my credit (or to shared credit as I often had co-authors). So I try to keep up. The space news these days is flying so thick and fast that it's all I can do to keep a general awareness. But a few things stand out.
The US Air Force has put together its plan to organize the Space Force. Some people are opposed to Space Force, for reasons financial or diplomatic, but the debate should be carried on with the understanding that that the USSF is not doing, at this point, anything the Air Force was not already doing in space. (The bucks may shift, but still no Buck Rogers.) The Air Force and Space Force commanders will be equals under the Department of the Air Force, a structure something like the Marine Corps' role in the Department of the Navy.
Then there are the microsats. I was right about this in the 1990s, but nobody was interested, when I wrote papers and studies about their promise for the future. That caught some flak, especially concerning imagery, where "immutable laws of physics" decreed that mirrors on imagery satellites be huge to get high-resolution photos. The critics reckoned without the ingenuity of engineers and their ability to advance technology. A string of technical tricks like "folded optics" made the mirrors much smaller, and then the power of software an d processing put what used to cost a billion dollars into a shoebox, as the company Planet provides the kind of worldwide coverage militaries never could. A new example consists of two 3-unit CubeSats (about 5 kg), Rogue Alpha and Beta, which, as Jeff Emdee, of The Aerospace Corporation says. “contain both visible and infrared sensing, as well as a laser communications downlink, that will allow us to explore operations in low earth orbit to benefit future system concepts.” In a 5-kilogram satellite. When I started writing about microsatellites, that might have taken a thousand-kilogram spacecraft. Now even organizations like Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), famed for developing exquisite satellites costing hundreds of millions of dollars, has come around.
In-space propulsion is a knotty problem, and the gains come slower, but the tech is advancing nonetheless. Ion engines were a big step forward for craft that did not need rapid changes of orbit or acceleration. One company is taking them further, with tiny thrusters and nontoxic propellants..
Another question is whether the small satellite industry can be as profitable as it hopes, thus attracting more capital to take its capabilities still further. Can the industry handle the debris problem? Can it keep growing as it is now? An interesting Space News report discusses that one,.
All for the moment, more to come!
3 comments:
Hi Matte Bille,
I wonder if you might answer a question about cosmology. On one web page (astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB-DT.html) it states that according to the CMBR anistropy the solar system is moving 368 km/sec in the direction of galactic longitude l=263.85 and lat. 48.25. However, this seems to be the opposite direction from the Sun's orbit around the galactic center. From a very good illustration I have the Sun's orbit is in the direction of 90 degrees longitude. Are these directions really opposite each other and wouldn't they contradict?
Laurence, I'm afraid that's beyond me. Could it be that the solar system movement is just a snapshot of a zillion-year orbit which would sometimes coincide with the Sun's orbit and sometimes not? Again, though, that's a question I've not the education to answer.
It turns out that it is generally thought that the CMBR motion is shared by the whole Milky Way galaxy moving towards perhaps a "Great Attractor."
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