The last twenty years have seen an explosion of interest and activity in space. Thanks to SpaceX’s drastic lowering of the cost to launch, together with huge advancements in the miniaturization of technology, we are more reliant on space for our everyday lives than ever. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 states that all activities, even those by private companies, must be regulated and licensed by the country they hail from. In the US, this has turned into a hodge-podge of regulatory agencies all with their hands in the mix. And some would say these agencies haven’t been able to keep pace with modern demands. Today, I’ll explain what the Federal Communications Commission is planning on doing to meet the demand. This much and everything else happening in the world of space. Welcome to the Undiscovered Country.
Hello and welcome! I am your host Bryant A.M. Baker. Today, I will present the top 5 most important things happening in the world of space. Thank you so much for tuning in and being a part of this space community. We are on the road to our first 100 subscribers and I am so excited to have you on board. Let’s get started.
1.
Breaking Defense just reported that a UN committee recently approved a US resolution calling states to stop testing of destructive, debris-creating anti-satellite missiles. A senior US State Department official said the resolution received strong support from developing nations, despite traditionally not allied politically with the West.
The vote at the UN First Committee, which is responsible for peace and security, was 154 in favor, eight against and 10 abstentions. Not surprisingly, Russia and China, opposed the resolution, as they for decades. The two nations have instead been pushing for a treaty to bar the placement of weapons on orbit, known as the The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT). They have claimed that the US plans on stationing weapons in space and wish to stop it from happening. The problem is, there is no definition of “weapon” in the proposed treaty. This is a huge problem when you are in an environment where everything is traveling at least 17 thousand miles per hour.
The US first put the anti-ASAT resolution on the table in September at a meeting of the UN Open Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats (OEWG). This occurred after Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the US intended to unilaterally impose such a ban on itself in April.
Nine countries have now made similar unilateral pledges: Canada in May, New Zealand in July, Japan and Germany in September, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Australia and Switzerland last month.
While the acceptance of this resolution is not legally binding, many hope that resolutions like this will help establish norms of behavior for military space activities. With enough time and adherence to such norms, they could eventually become legally binding in the future.
2.
Jeff Foust of SpaceNews broke the news that Virgin Galactic will be working with two aerospace manufacturers to provide the major components of its next-generation suborbital spaceplane.
Virgin Galactic announced on Wednesday that it reached agreements with Bell Textron and Qarbon Aerospace to produce major subassemblies of its Delta class of suborbital spaceplanes, which Virgin will assemble. The companies did not disclose the value of the contracts.
Qarbon Aerospace produces composite and metallic aerospace structures. They have contracted with Virgin to provide the fuselage and wings of the new Delta-class vehicles. Meanwhile, Bell Textron will produce the control surfaces as well as the feathering system that raises the tail booms for reentry and lowers them again for landing.
The chief executive of Virgin Galactic Michael Colglazier spoke on the announcement and said that “The Delta class spaceships are an evolution of our distinctive flight system, designed for improved manufacturability, maintenance and flight rate capability.” With the new contracts and the earlier one with Aurora, “we now have the primary suppliers in place to propel the production of our spaceline fleet at scale.”
Virgin Galactic envisions producing up to six Delta-class vehicles a year at the Arizona factory. The vehicles are set to begin revenue-generating payload flights as soon as late 2025 and private astronaut flights in 2026.
While the current SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, can fly no more than once a month, the Delta-class vehicles are designed for weekly flights.
The company said in August that delays in refurbishment of VMS Eve, its WhiteKnightTwo plane, had further pushed back the resumption of commercial flights to the second quarter of 2023.
Interestingly, contracting with these manufacturers is in an attempt to diversify the supply chain for Virgin, a step in the opposite direction of spaceX and its attempts to create so much of what they do in-house. Though, this perhaps shouldn’t be a huge surprise as the company’s and their goals are vastly different.
https://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-picks-suppliers-for-future-spaceplanes/
3.
An international team of researchers using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China, has found that Stephan's Quintet, five closely packed galaxies, is shrouded in an atomic gas cloud 2 million light-years wide. That is a gas cloud about 20 times the size of the Milky Way!
Xu Cong, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author on the new research, said in a statement"This is the largest atomic gas structure ever found around a galaxy group.”
According to the researchers, the discovery presents a mystery and will require astronomers to rethink how gas behaves at the edges of galaxy groups.
The scattered hydrogen in Stephan's Quintet is a time capsule that can tell scientists about such events going back perhaps about a billion years.
The cloud is a particularly surprising find because astronomers would have expected ultraviolet light to change the nature of the hydrogen in the cloud. Ultraviolet light ionizes the atoms in an atomic gas cloud, meaning they will gain or lose electrons and end up charged. But the gas observed in Stephan's Quintet hasn’t done that for some reason.
The lack of ionization suggests that the gas could be left over from the time that galaxies were forming in that region. Far away from any stars, diffuse clouds of atomic hydrogen still exist on their own, which could make a case for them being by-products of interactions that formed a galaxy. It is also possible that the cloud surrounding Stephan's Quintet could have been released by an ancient crash between two of the galaxies.
https://www.space.com/largest-atomic-gas-cloud-stephans-quintet
4.
Good news came out about the health of the International Space Station. Or rather, good news, the ISS doesn’t appear to be making astronauts sick because of disease. In a recent study published in Microbiome, a team of researchers led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory conducted a five-year first-of-its-kind study investigating the environmental profile of the ISS. The purpose of the study was to address “the introduction and proliferation of potentially harmful microorganisms into the microbial communities of piloted spaceflight and how this could affect human health”.
Dr. Crystal Jaing, who is a biologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and a co-author on the study stated that “Although our survey found several opportunistic microbes, we concluded that the ISS is a safe environment for the astronauts. . . We have found that the microbiome of the ISS surfaces is stable and that most of the microbiome is associated with human skin.”
He further explained that “Overall, the ISS surface composition was extremely stable beyond a few small changes during our five-year study. . . . It’s a dynamic process, just like the human body. The ISS antimicrobial resistance gene profiles also were stable over time, with no differences over the span of the MT-1 and MT-2 studies. This means that the ISS microbiome doesn’t have any new antibiotic-resistant genes, which is safer for the astronauts.”
While this study was conducted using samples returned to Earth from the ISS, NASA can observe microbes on the ISS in real time and is also looking into real time microbial monitoring on future spacecraft, as well.
5.
In a speech at a Satellite Industry Association event, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the creation of a new “Space Bureau” within the FCC.
She later told the National Press Club that “this re-imagined bureau will support the United States leadership in the emerging space economy, promote long-term technical capacity to address satellite policies and improve our coordination with other agencies on these issues.”
The FCC has long regulated communication infrastructure, including the radio spectrum, but the agency has recently taken on a much larger role in regulating satellites, including tasks like issuing licenses for new space internet services to companies like SpaceX and OneWeb and writing rules dictating when out-of-service satellites must be removed from orbit.
Current organizational structures, have “not kept pace” with the explosion of interest in commercial space. From low Earth orbit satellite constellations to new ways to manufacture and upgrade platforms, the FCC has been facing an “exponential” explosion in space-related commercial applications. The FCC says it received 64,000 applications for new satellites in the past two years alone, and commercial satellite launches increased by 20 percent in 2021. The FCC regulates the use of radio frequency spectrum, and thus most commercial satellite operators (and all commercial satellite communications operators) must get its approval before launch.
Rosenworcel explained that “You can’t just keep doing things the old way and expect to be in the new. . . The changes I am announcing today are not about taking on new responsibilities at the FCC. They are about performing our existing statutory responsibilities better and freeing up resources to help focus on our mission.”
In a statement, the FCC said that by “separating satellite policy from the ‘International Bureau,’ the agency acknowledges the role of satellite communications in advancing domestic communications policy and achieving U.S. broadband goals.”
The full proposal for a space bureau still needs to be worked out with Congress and the other FCC commissioners, so the office may not open anytime soon. Though Rosenworcel explained the agency isn’t taking on new responsibilities, the new office will also need staff.
Therese Jones, the senior director of policy at the Satellite Industry Association, stated that “One of the biggest challenges that the FCC’s Space Bureau is likely to face is the ability to onboard new staff at a rate that matches the unprecedented pace of growth in the commercial space sector. . . We are hopeful that the creation of the new Bureau will attract additional space talent to its workforce.”
https://spacenews.com/fcc-proposes-new-bureau-for-space-activities/
Thank you for joining me. Links to all the stories are in the description. The world of Space law, policy and business is changing every day. If you missed what happened yesterday, be sure to check out the video I did covering it. I would love to hear your thoughts on everything I talked about here today? I’ll see you again next time.
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