Lifeboat Foundation

The growing interest in deep-space exploration has sparked the need for powerful long-lived rocket systems to drive spacecraft through the cosmos. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have now developed a tiny modified version of a plasma-based propulsion system called a Hall thruster that both increases the lifetime of the rocket and produces high power.

The miniaturized system powered by plasma—the state of matter composed of free-floating electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions—measures little more than an inch in diameter and eliminates the walls around the plasma propellent to create innovative thruster configurations. Among these innovations are the cylindrical Hall thruster, first proposed and studied at PPPL, and a fully wall-less Hall thruster. Both configurations reduce channel erosion caused by plasma-wall interactions that limit the thruster lifetime—a key problem for conventional annular, or ring-shaped, Hall thrusters and especially for miniaturized low-power thrusters for applications on small satellites.

Billionaire Elon Musk is facing criticism in China after the country recently complained that its budding space station, which is still in construction, had two “close encounters” with satellites launched by SpaceX’s Starlink program earlier this year. The Chinese space station was twice forced to take evasive action in order to avoid collision with satellites launched by Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, according to a document submitted by China to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs earlier this month.

Though the claims have not been independently verified and SpaceX is yet to respond, China alleges that its space station had to implement “preventive collision avoidance control” both on July 1 and October 21 when faced with oncoming Starlink satellites.

According to the document, China informed the U.N. Secretary-General that the close encounters with Starlink satellites “constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station.”

Musk and SpaceX faced online backlash in China after a note sent to the UN revealed the company’s satellites almost collided with China’s space station in 2021.

Exactly six years after its first successful recovery, SpaceX has landed a Falcon booster for the 100th time.

On December 21st, 2015, the first Falcon 9 V1.2 Full Thrust (Block 1) rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral LC-40 launch pad on the company’s return-to-flight mission after a catastrophic in-flight failure just six months prior. Unwilling as ever to waste an opportunity, no matter how important the mission, SpaceX – on top of debuting a major Falcon 9 upgrade – chose to take advantage of the return to flight to attempt to land a Falcon booster back on land for the first time ever. Ultimately, on top of successfully deploying multiple Orbcomm OG2 communications satellites in orbit for a paying customer, Falcon 9 booster B1019 sailed through its boostback, reentry, and landing burns without issue. About nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket ultimately touched down on a concrete “landing zone” just a few miles from where it lifted off with uncanny ease relative to SpaceX’s numerous failed attempts in the ~18 months prior.

Exactly six years later, on December 21st, 2021, Falcon 9 booster B1069 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Pad 39A with an upgraded, flight-proven Cargo Dragon in tow for SpaceX’s 24th International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission. CRS-24 also marked the company’s 31st and final launch of 2021, representing more successful Falcon launches completed in a single year than SpaceX had even attempted in its entire nine-year history up to the point of that first successful booster landing.

With a decades-long track record of making space a profitable business, Luxembourg is betting big on everything from space resources, satellites and training the next generation of space entrepreneurs.

The new prototype is part of a program designed to replace the aging Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites on orbit.

For more than 50 years, near space has been viewed as a vast resource to exploit with few limits. In reality, near space is a very scarce resource. While international agreements such as the Outer Space Treaty and the Registration Convention take steps to protect this precious resource, no single global body is responsible for ensuring the long-term sustainability and safety of near space.

The current surge in the exploitation of outer space means that this lack of a global framework for space sustainability must be addressed immediately, or it will be too late; near space will be cluttered and unrecoverable. We are seeing increased use of near space for tourism and other business ventures and the deployment of megaconstellations comprising tens to hundreds of thousands of satellites. And this is just the start. Last month, we witnessed a Russian anti-satellite test that left portions of near space cluttered with orbital debris. Failure to implement a global framework with an enforcement mechanism for space sustainability could severely impact the ability to fully utilize the resource in the near future.

Today near space activities are subject to disparate space sustainability requirements, generally reliant on the requirements of the object’s launching state or conditions imposed by countries in which entities have market access. Some countries have developed well-crafted requirements for at least some space objects, but others have not. In addition, except for the items covered in existing treaties, like launching state liability, there is almost no harmonization on requirements, which further jeopardizes space sustainability.

SEOUL, South Korea — Malaysia is developing a national space blueprint to drive the growth of its space sector, particularly the manufacturing of remote-sensing satellites, satellite components and data-driven downstream services.

During a Dec. 13 parliamentary hearing, a deputy minister shared the latest update on the “Malaysia Space Exploration 2030” blueprint being fleshed out by Malaysia’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

The deputy minister overseeing the effort, Datuk Ahmad Amzad Hashim, said the blueprint outlines a 10-year strategy in line with Malaysia’s National Space Policy 2030. The policy, adopted in 2017, recognizes the importance of space technologies for the country’s economic growth and national security.

WASHINGTON – The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has selected a team of commercial and academic partners to build an artificial intelligence system with synthetic data, which will further help the agency determine how it builds machine learning algorithms moving forward.

Orbital Insight was issued a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract by the NGA, the company announced. Dec. 16. It will collaborate with Rendered.ai and the University of California, Berkeley, to develop a computer vision model.

As the organization charged with analyzing satellite imagery for the intelligence community, NGA has put increased emphasis on using AI for its mission. The agency sees human-machine pairing as critical for its success, with machine learning algorithms taking over the rote task of processing the torrent of satellite data to find potential intelligence and freeing up human operators to do more high level analysis and tasks.