Lifeboat Foundation

SUNDAY 08/22/2021 Welcome to the LabPadre 24/7 Livestream! || Onsite weather provided by INITWeather.com || BOCA CHICA NEWS: NEW Heat tile replacement continues. B3 scrapping on hold. Catch arm fabrication proceeding. New Raptors arrive at shipyard GSE tank lifted into orbital tank farm. || ROAD CLOSURES: Intermittent Aug 23rd 9:30–11:30a CDT (1430−1630 UTC) and Aug 24th 5p-11p CDT (2200−0400 UTC), also Aug 25th, 26th. || LAUNCHES: Starsem, Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat, OneWeb #9 satellite constellation launched and deployed succesfully. Next: Blue Origin/New Shepard-NS 17 Wed Aug 25 2021 at 9:35a EDT, (13:35 UTC) from Launch Site One, West Texas, Texas, USA
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Continue reading “Starbase Live Plex — SpaceX Starship Launch Facility” »

“Stay safe friends,” astronaut Megan McArthur says.

As parts of the U.S. northeast brace for Hurricane Henri to make landfall in New York today (Aug. 22), astronauts and satellites are tracking the historic storm from space.

Continue reading “Astronauts and satellites watch Hurricane Henri from space as US Northeast braces for storm” »

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX is proposing to use Starship to rapidly deploy its second-generation Starlink constellation, providing denser rural coverage without needing more than the 30,000 satellites it previously envisioned for the follow-on network.

The proposal is one of two revised configurations that SpaceX filed Aug. 18 with the Federal Communications Commission for Starlink Gen2, updating a plan submitted in 2020.

The other configuration envisages continuing to use Falcon 9 rockets for launching Starlink satellites, and also does not involve a larger constellation or require more spectrum than what SpaceX outlined last year.

An increase in counterspace weapons is challenging the military’s approach of placing all of its billion-dollar eggs (exquisite satellites) in one basket (far-out geosynchronous orbit).

There are actually two Super Heavy boosters in the shot.

SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket looks big, even from space.

On Aug. 9 Maxar Technologies’ WorldView-3 satellite snapped a great shot of SpaceX’s “Starbase” facility in South Texas, where the company is building and testing its Starship deep-space transportation system.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3zLFLotBFbA

Do you remember the Zuckerland metaverse? (Yes, I know he borrowed the word, but when you are president of a digital country, does anyone dare challenge Zuck the First, Le Roi Numérique?)

Palantir Technologies (the Seeing Stone outfit with the warm up jacket fashion bug) introduced a tasty bit of jargon-market speak in its Q22021earnings call:

Continue reading “Silicon Valley Neologisms: The Palantir Edition” »

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft in low Earth orbit every week. That’s about 50% of all such incidents. As the constellation grows, that proportion is expected to rise up to 90%, experts say.

When SpaceX deploy batches of Starlink satellites they drop them off in lower orbits and expect the satellites themselves to navigate towards their final operational orbits. This is quite a complex process and one that’s worth discussing, the satellites need to be able to reach the target orbital plane, raise the orbit to operational altitude, and then finally maneuver to a specific slot within that plane before they become operational.

Satellite Orbital Maps by Celestrak.
https://celestrak.com/

Continue reading “How Do Starlink Satellites Navigate To Their Final Operational Orbits” »

Deep below the ground, radioactive elements disintegrate water molecules, producing ingredients that can fuel subterranean life. This process, known as radiolysis, has sustained bacteria in isolated, water-filled cracks and rock pores on Earth for millions to billions of years. Now a study published in Astrobiology contends that radiolysis could have powered microbial life in the Martian subsurface.

Dust storms, cosmic rays and solar winds ravage the Red Planet’s surface. But belowground, some life might find refuge. “The environment with the best chance of habitability on Mars is the subsurface,” says Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the new study’s lead author. Examining the Martian underground could help scientists learn whether life could have survived there—and the best subsurface samples available today are Martian meteorites that have crash-landed on Earth.

Tarnas and his colleagues evaluated the grain sizes, mineral makeup and radioactive element abundance in Martian meteorites and estimated the Martian crust’s porosity using satellite and rover data. They plugged these attributes into a computer model that simulated radiolysis to see how efficiently the process would have generated hydrogen gas and sulfates: chemical ingredients that can power the metabolism of underground bacteria. The researchers report that if water was present, radiolysis in the Martian subsurface could have sustained microbial communities for billions of years—and perhaps still could today.