Earlier this month SpaceX received approval from the FCC to launch 4,425 satellites into space to build a low earth orbit network of satellites to sell home Internet a few weeks ago. Yesterday SpaceX successfully launched its first set of 60 satellites for the new internet service. Unlike current satellite Internet, these devices will be in a far lower orbit and offer far faster speeds without the data caps current satellite systems use.
“This next batch of satellites will really be a demonstration for us to see, and start putting our network together. We start launching the satellites for actual service later this year.”
So what is this the goal of this new system? SpaceX hopes this new system of satellites will offer robust high-speed Internet, especially in developing countries and rural parts of developed nations like the United States. While you may not be running out to buy this if you have fiber Internet, it could bring true wireless Internet options to Americans who currently have no real options.
“This approval underscores the FCC’s confidence in SpaceX’s plans to deploy its next-generation satellite constellation and connect people around the world with reliable and affordable broadband service,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.
The system also promises to help relief efforts that currently spend hundreds of dollars a day for 5 Mbps Internet. With this system, relief workers can access high-speed Internet even in areas hit by a major disaster.
Earlier this month SpaceX received approval from the FCC to launch 4,425 satellites into space to build a low earth orbit network of satellites to sell home Internet a few weeks ago. Yesterday SpaceX successfully launched its first set of 60 satellites for the new internet service. Unlike current satellite Internet, these devices will be in a far lower orbit and offer far faster speeds without the data caps current satellite systems use.
“This next batch of satellites will really be a demonstration for us to see, and start putting our network together. We start launching the satellites for actual service later this year.”
So what is this the goal of this new system? SpaceX hopes this new system of satellites will offer robust high-speed Internet, especially in developing countries and rural parts of developed nations like the United States. While you may not be running out to buy this if you have fiber Internet, it could bring true wireless Internet options to Americans who currently have no real options.
“This approval underscores the FCC’s confidence in SpaceX’s plans to deploy its next-generation satellite constellation and connect people around the world with reliable and affordable broadband service,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.
The system also promises to help relief efforts that currently spend hundreds of dollars a day for 5 Mbps Internet. With this system, relief workers can access high-speed Internet even in areas hit by a major disaster.
NASA has awarded space technology company Maxar a $375 million contract to develop the first Lunar Gateway segment that's flying to space. Maxar, which (according to Ars Technica) now has bragging rights for being the initiative's first commercial partner, will work on the lunar orbiting outpost's power and propulsion element. That component will provide the station's power, maneuvering capabilities, altitude control, communications systems and initial docking capabilities.
While Maxar is in charge of the project, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Draper will help the company design and build the spacecraft for demonstration. See, the company will have to prove that the component works by performing a spaceflight demo, and it's targeting a 2022 launch date. The demo period could last up to a year, but once proven that the segment works, it'll officially become Gateway's first element.
In its announcement, Maxar said the element will be based on its 1300 series spacecraft platform. Also, it said a key element of the segment's design is NASA's Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA), which rolls up for launch instead of folding up. The company has announced at a teleconference that it will choose a commercial rocket to launch the power and propulsion segment within the next 12 to 18 months. As Ars noted, Blue Origin's New Glenn could be a frontrunner considering its involvement in the project, though Maxar didn't say that outright.
Bridenstine announced late Thursday that Sirangelo "has opted to pursue other opportunities," according to Reuters.
Sirangelo’s abrupt departure comes amid what Reuters described as a “chilly” Capitol Hill response to the Trump administration’s plans to return Americans to the moon by 2024.
NASA's wants to launch its next rover to Mars next summer, with a planned landing in February 2021. The space agency is giving people the opportunity to have their names put on the rover (etched on microchips). The Mars 2020 rover will lay the groundwork for eventual human exploration of Mars. It will also study Mars' climate and geology, collect samples and search for signs of microbial life.
Names will be really small
In addition to their names being put on the rover, people will receive a souvenir boarding pass and "frequent flyer" points.
"As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a news release. "It's an exciting time for NASA, as we embark on this voyage to answer profound questions about our neighboring planet, and even the origins of life itself."
A lab for microdevices at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will use an electron beam to stencil in the names that the public submits, NASA said. The names will be etched on a silicon chip in teeny-tiny text (smaller than the width of a human hair). So NASA could easily put more than a million names on a single chip that's the size of a dime. One or more chips will sit under a glass cover on the rover.
NASA did something similar when it sent its InSight lander to Mars, which landed on the planet last year. More than two million names are affixed to InSight.
The Mars 2020 rover is all part of NASA's grand plan to send humans back to the moon and then eventually on to the Red Planet.
Click here if you'd like to add your name to the list (must be done by September 30) and get the souvenir boarding pass.
Your own one way ticket to Mars! NASA gives members of the public a boarding pass with their name on it as it takes a list of people to the Red Planet on its 2020 rover
NASA will use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto silicon chip
The lines of text will be smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair
At that size, more than a million names can be written on a single dime-size chip
Published: 11:53 BST, 22 May 2019 | Updated: 12:03 BST, 22 May 2019
Human beings are yet to land on Mars but they'll soon to leave their mark on it after NASA offered the public an opportunity to send their names to the Red Planet.
Names will be delivered, stencilled on chips, via NASA's Mars 2020 rover and people will receive their own souvenir boarding pass and 'frequent flyer' points.
The rover, a robotic scientist weighing more than 2,300 pounds (1,000 kilograms), is scheduled to launch as early as July 2020 and land on Mars in February 2021.
It will search for signs of past microbial life, characterise the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth, and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.
Exploration: NASA's Mars 2020 rover will search for signs of past microbial life, characterise the planet's climate/geology and collect samples for future return to Earth
The gimmick is part of a public engagement campaign to highlight missions involved with NASA's journey from the Moon to Mars.
The Microdevices Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
At that size, more than a million names can be written on a single dime-size chip. The chips will ride on the rover under a glass cover.
The opportunity for people to send their name to Mars comes with a souvenir boarding pass and 'frequent flyer' points.
Miles are awarded for each 'flight', with corresponding digital mission patches available for download.
More than 2 million names flew on NASA's InSight mission to Mars, giving each so-called astronaut about 300 million frequent flyer miles.
Send yourself to space? The opportunity for people to send their name to Mars comes with a souvenir boarding pass and 'frequent flyer' points
HOW CAN I SEND MY NAME TO MARS?
From now until September 30 2019, you can add your name to the list and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars by clicking here
Names will be delivered, stencilled on chips, via NASA's Mars 2020 rover.
The Microdevices Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
People will receive their own souvenir boarding pass and 'frequent flyer' points.
'As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration,' said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
'It's an exciting time for NASA, as we embark on this voyage to answer profound questions about our neighbouring planet, and even the origins of life itself'.
NASA will use Mars 2020 and other missions to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. As another step toward that goal, NASA is returning American astronauts to the Moon in 2024.
Government, industry and international partners will join NASA in a global effort to build and test the systems needed for human missions to Mars and beyond.
The Mars 2020 Project at JPL manages rover development for SMD. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management.
Mars 2020 will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
WHAT ARE NASA'S PLANS FOR A MANNED MISSION TO MARS IN THE 2030s?
Mars has become the next giant leap for mankind's exploration of space.
But before humans get to the red planet, astronauts will take a series of small steps by returning to the moon for a year-long mission.
Details of a the mission in lunar orbit have been unveiled as part of a timeline of events leading to missions to Mars in the 2030s.
Nasa has outlined its four stage plan (pictured) which it hopes will one day allow humans to visit Mars at he Humans to Mars Summit held in Washington DC yesterday. This will entail multiple missions to the moon over coming decades
In May 2017, Greg Williams, deputy associate administrator for policy and plans at Nasa, outlined the space agency's four stage plan that it hopes will one day allow humans to visit Mars, as well as its expected time-frame.
Phase one and two will involve multiple trips to lunar space, to allow for construction of a habitat which will provide a staging area for the journey.
The last piece of delivered hardware would be the actual Deep Space Transport vehicle that would later be used to carry a crew to Mars.
And a year-long simulation of life on Mars will be conducted in 2027.
Phase three and and four will begin after 2030 and will involve sustained crew expeditions to the Martian system and surface of Mars.
How do we grow from a single fertilized egg into a fully grown person with trillions of cells? Our cells divide, of course!
And it's no mean feat. Each time a cell divides, it must duplicate our 23 pairs of chromosomes and make sure each "daughter" cell ends up with a complete set of genes.
Errors are potentially fatal to the cell. Runaway cell division, which is the hallmark of cancer, is also serious business.
No wonder then that biologists have been studying cell division for as long as they've known about cells.
Over the years, scientists have pieced together a coherent story about how the process unfolds. And now the nonprofit Allen Institute in Seattle has taken advantage of that knowledge to produce a visualization of human cell division suitable for professional scientists and curious amateurs alike. (The computerized visualization above shows the anaphase stage of cell division.)
The institute's model follows the fate of 15 distinct parts of the cell, from the chromosomes themselves to the tiny fibers, called microtubules, that help tug the chromosomes apart during cell division. (The model focuses on the type of cell division called mitosis, which is the duplicating of a cell, as opposed to meiosis, which is the split that results in egg and sperm cells).
The images that result are a composite of 75 representative skin cells, says Susanne Rafelski, who works at the Allen Institute for Cell Science.
Each component was flagged with a fluorescent tag so its fate can be followed through the five stages of the cell cycle, starting with cell growth, then DNA synthesis, another phase of growth and two stages during which the cell actually divides and creates two daughter cells.
The parts are color-coded, so you can still keep track of your favorite cell component as the data are merged into a composite cell.
"We're interested in understanding the cell as a whole," Rafelski says. "So the really big picture view is that we want to put the cell back together with all the mechanistic information that we've been gathering over the years now."
Another pioneering effort is the Visible Human Project, launched in 1994 and updated over the years to display a man and a woman, built at first from CT and MRI scans and ultimately based on images taken from thin slices of the donated bodies. A private company created a computer program to enable anatomy enthusiasts to explore the visible people.
You can contact NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.
More than 100 giant stone jars, thought to have been used in burial rituals thousands of years ago, have been rediscovered at ancient sites in forests, ...
The study, which was released Monday, says sea levels may rise much faster than previously estimated due to the accelerating melting of ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica.
The international researchers predict that in the worst case scenario under which global temperatures increase by 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, sea levels could rise by more than two meters (6.6 feet) in the same period -- double the upper limit outlined by the UN climate science panel's last major report.
Such a situation would be "catastrophic," the authors of the study warn.
"It really is pretty grim," lead author Jonathan Bamber, a Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Bristol told CNN. "Two meters is not a good scenario."
He said the mass displacement of people in low-lying coastal areas would likely result in serious social upheaval. It would also pose an "existential threat" to small island nations in the Pacific which would be left pretty much uninhabitable.
The researchers found that under the extreme-case scenario, about 1.79 million square kilometers (691,120 sq miles) -- an area more than three times the size of California -- would be lost to the sea.
Such a rise would place up to 187 million people at risk, which is about 2.5% of the world's total population.
While the authors acknowledge that the chance of a worst-case scenario could be small, around 5%, they say it should not be discounted.
"Our study suggests that there is a real risk, a plausible risk of very substantial sea level rise coming from both ice sheets," Bamber said.
He added that humankind had quite a narrow window of opportunity to avoid some of the worst consequences, such as very high sea level rise.
"What we decide to do collectively as a species politically, globally, over the next decade is going to determine the future of the next generations in terms of the habitability of the planet and what sort of environment they live in."
The United Nations climate panel's last major report in 2013 predicted that sea levels would rise between 52 and 98 cm (20.4 inches and 38.5 inches) by 2100 at the current trajectory. But many experts saw those findings as conservative.
Scientists are worried that the current models used to predict the influence of massive melting ice sheets have flaws, and fail to capture all of the uncertainties.
To try to get a clearer picture, the report's authors asked 22 ice sheet experts to estimate how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets might respond to future climate change, using newly advanced regional- and continental-scale, process-based models.
Scientists say there is still time to avoid the worst if global greenhouse gas emissions are cut sharply in the coming decades.
The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences.
CNN's Julia Hollingsworth contributed to this story.
It's the first time researchers have been able to detect the chemical signature of red pigment in an ancient fossil, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Color is part of how animals have adapted to survive and has played a key part in evolution over millions of years.
The researchers didn't know what they would find when they studied the mouse fossil, but the surprise was worth their efforts.
"What we found is that the mouse is preserved in absolutely stunning detail, nearly all of the skeleton and most of the soft tissue of the body, head, feet, and tail can easily be recognized," Uwe Bergmann, study co-author and distinguished staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, wrote in an email. "The X-ray maps show that not only are structures preserved, but original biochemical information is resolvable. That was a wonderful surprise."
But determining color pigments in species that have long been extinct isn't easy, especially with certain colors.
Ten years ago, the team of researchers was able to isolate the chemical signature of black pigment, like the kind in crow feathers. And now, they have found red pigment, like the color of fox fur. Red pigment becomes less stable over time and is incredibly difficult to detect.
"In mammals and other animals there are two types of melanin, the brownish black eumelanin and the reddish pheomelanin," Bergmann said. "The importance is not so much the fact that this mouse had this reddish pigment, but the fact that we could identify it in a three million year old fossil. This has implications that there is hope of identifying pigments in many other fossils."
Intense X-ray tools, like the SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource and the Diamond Light Source in the UK, provided the brightest sources of light possible to study the fossil.
"The biggest impact to me is the fact that we have now X-ray tools that can recover information about a fossilized organism from tiny traces preserved for millions of years," Bergmann said. "This was not easy and required a team of scientists with different expertise, including paleontology, geochemistry, and of course X-ray spectroscopy and imaging, which is my field. Being part of such a diverse and interesting team is incredible."
The X-rays were able to detect trace metals in the pigments themselves, revealing the red color in the mouse's fur. The metal traces bonded to organic pigments in the tissue, and the researchers compared this with how metals are incorporated in living species. They even translated the findings into sound waves to show that different frequencies are associated with different sounds.
"We understand now what to look for in the future and our hope is that these results will mean that we can become more confident in reconstructing extinct animals and thereby add another dimension to the study of evolution," said Roy Wogelius, study co-author and geochemist at the University of Manchester, in a statement.
This technique could be applied to other well-preserved fossils to unlock their secrets and reveal some of the mysteries of evolution that are missed when species go extinct. It may even reveal how our climate has changed.
"The fossils we have studied have the vast potential to unlock many secrets of the original organism," said Phil Manning, lead study author and palaeontologist at the University of Manchester. "We can reconstruct key facets from life, death and the subsequent events impacting preservation before and after burial. Where once we saw simply minerals, now we gently unpick the 'biochemical ghosts' of long extinct species."
Tong Chen, a Rice PhD student "detwinned" iron selenide crystals by gluing them atop much larger crystals of barium iron arsenide. Using a 2014 method developed at Rice, the larger crystals are placed under pressure and detwinned, causing the smaller iron selenide crystals to also snap into alignment. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
In the pantheon of unconventional superconductors, iron selenide is a rock star. But new experiments by U.S., Chinese and European physicists have found the material's magnetic persona to be unexpectedly mundane.
Rice University physicist Pengcheng Dai, corresponding author of a study of the results published online this week in Nature Materials, offered this bottom-line assessment of iron selenide: "It's a garden-variety iron-based superconductor. The fundamental physics of superconductivity are similar to what we find in all the other iron-based superconductors."
That conclusion is based on data from neutron scattering experiments performed over the past year in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom. The experiments produced the first measurements of the dynamic magnetic properties of iron selenide crystals that had undergone a characteristic structural shift that occurs as the material is cooled but before it is cooled to the point of superconductivity.
"Iron selenide is completely different from all the other iron-based superconductors in several ways," said Dai, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice and a member of Rice's Center for Quantum Materials (RCQM). "It has the simplest structure, being composed of only two elements. All the others have at least three elements and much more complicated structure. Iron selenide is also the only one that has no magnetic order and no parent compound."
Dozens of iron-based superconductors have been discovered since 2008. In each, the iron atoms form a 2-D sheet that's sandwiched between top and bottom sheets made up of other elements. In the case of iron selenide, the top and bottom sheets are pure selenium, but in other materials these sheets are made of two or more elements. In iron selenide and other iron-based superconductors, iron atoms in the central 2-D sheet are spaced in checkerboard fashion, exactly the same distance from one another in both the left-right direction and forward-back directions.
As the materials cool, they undergo a slight structural shift. Instead of exact squares, the iron atoms form oblong rhombuses. These are like baseball diamonds, where the distance between home plate and second base is shorter than the distance between first and third base. And this change between iron atoms causes the iron-based superconductors to exhibit directionally-dependent behavior, like increased electrical resistance or conductivity only in the direction of home-to-second or first-to-third.
Graduate student Tong Chen spent weeks creating samples to test in neutron scattering beams. About 20 to 30 1-millimeter squares of iron selenide had to be aligned and glued in place atop each crystal of barium iron arsenide. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
Physicists refer to this directionally dependent behavior as anisotropy or nematicity, and while structural nematicity is known to occur in iron selenide, Dai said it has been impossible to measure the exact electronic and magnetic order of the material because of a property known as twinning. Twinning occurs when layers of randomly oriented 2-D crystals are stacked. Imagine 100 baseball diamonds stacked one atop the other, with the line between home plate and second base varying randomly for each.
"Even if there is directionally dependent electronic order in a twinned sample, you cannot measure it because those differences average out and you wind up measuring a net effect of zero," Dai said. "We had to detwin samples of iron selenide to see if there was nematic electronic order."
Study lead author Tong Chen, a third-year Ph.D. student in Dai's research group, solved the twinning problem by cleverly piggybacking on a 2014 study in which Dai and colleagues applied pressure to detwin crystals of barium iron arsenide. It was impossible to apply the same method to iron selenide because the crystals were 100 times smaller, so Chen glued the smaller crystals atop the larger ones, reasoning that the pressure needed to align the larger sample would also cause the layers of iron selenide to snap into alignment.
Chen spent weeks creating several samples to test in neutron scattering beams. About 20 to 30 1-millimeter squares of iron selenide had to be aligned and placed atop each crystal of barium iron arsenide. And applying each of the tiny squares was painstaking work that involved a microscope, tweezers and special, hydrogen-free glue that cost almost $1,000 per ounce.
The work paid off when Chen tested the samples and found the iron selenide was detwinned. Those tests with neutron scattering beams at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Technical University of Munich and U.K.'s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory also showed iron selenide's electronic behavior is very similar to that of other iron superconductors.
"The key conclusion is that the magnetic correlations that are associated with superconductivity in iron selenide are highly anisotropic, just as they are in other iron superconductors," Dai said. "That has been a very controversial point, because iron selenide, unlike all other iron-based superconductors, does not have a parent compound that exhibits antiferromagnetic order, which has led some to suggest that superconductivity arose in iron selenide in a completely different way than it arises in these others. Our results suggest that is not the case. You don't need an entirely new method to understand it."
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One of the big revelations from the flyby was the discovery of an ocean beneath the icy shell encapsulating Pluto. The ice shell was thin in a spot near the equator that's about the size of Texas, known as Sputnik Planitia, which helped researchers notice Pluto's odd topography and suggest the ocean's existence.
But this created a conundrum. Given the age of Pluto, estimated to be between 4.4 billion and 4.6 billion years, the ocean should have frozen hundreds of millions of years ago. And rather than forming a bubble, the ice shell should have flattened over the frozen ocean.
But Pluto's ocean isn't frozen, so researchers used New Horizons data and computer simulations to model what might keep the ocean from freezing. Their study was published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The most likely scenario is gas between the ocean and the ice shell that acts like an insulating later. This layer of gas, probably methane that originated in Pluto's rocky core when the dwarf planet was forming, would be thick and have low thermal conductivity.
The researchers believe the layer exists in the form of gas hydrates, in which water molecules create lattice-like cages that trap gas molecules, according to the study.
And this insulating gas layer would have caused the ice shell to take more than 1 billion years to achieve uniform thickness.
Pluto's atmosphere is rich in nitrogen and low on methane. The gas layer between the ice shell and the ocean might explain where the methane is.
The implications extend to other icy ocean worlds in our solar system, like Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, as well as exoplanets. If insulating gas layers can keep subsurface oceans from freezing, there could be a wealth of ocean worlds out there, the researchers said.
"This could mean there are more oceans in the universe than previously thought, making the existence of extraterrestrial life more plausible," said Shunichi Kamata, study author and associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Hokkaido University in Japan, in a statement.
In what may be the bonobo take on a fussy mom giving her son's number to a nice, single woman at the grocery store, female bonobos go to extremes to make sure their sons mate, introducing them to fertile females and even standing guard while the two couple up, according to a new study.
Researchers already knew that mothers of chimpanzees—bonobos’ close evolutionary cousins—help their sons in male-on-male fights for dominance. Yet bonobo females, who get their pick of mates, take things even further. Because a few select, high-ranking males tend to monopolize the mating pool in their matriarchal society, lower-ranking males are essentially forced out.
Not ones to leave their genetic legacies to chance, the mothers of male bonobos bring their sons around to fertile females and introduce them, according to researcher observations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The mothers not only used their own rank to help boost their male children's social standing, but also acted as bodyguards during their sons’ mating attempts—and even tried to break up the mating attempts of other males. Overall, males who had a mom around to help were about three times more likely to produce offspring than males without maternal support, the researchers report today in Current Biology.
Curiously, daughters didn’t appear to get such maternal support, possibly because female offspring often disperse and form or join new communities rather than staying close to home. As to why bonobo moms go to such efforts to help their sons, the researchers conclude it’s a rather straightforward way to continue supporting their genetic line without having more offspring of their own.
Enlarge/ A Blue Moon lander, built by Blue Origin, with an ascent vehicle (built by another company) on top.
Blue Origin
In the nearly two months since Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to return to the Moon by 2024, space agency engineers have been working to put together a plan that leverages existing technology, large projects nearing completion, and commercial rockets to bring this about.
Last week, an updated plan that demonstrated a human landing in 2024, annual sorties to the lunar surface thereafter, and the beginning of a Moon base by 2028, began circulating within the agency. A graphic, shown below, provides information about each of the major launches needed to construct a small Lunar Gateway, stage elements of a lunar lander there, fly crews to the Moon and back, and conduct refueling missions.
This decade-long plan, which entails 37 launches of private and NASA rockets, as well as a mix of robotic and human landers, culminates with a "Lunar Surface Asset Deployment" in 2028, likely the beginning of a surface outpost for long-duration crew stays. Developed by the agency's senior human spaceflight manager, Bill Gerstenmaier, this plan is everything Pence asked for—an urgent human return, a Moon base, a mix of existing and new contractors.
Enlarge/ NASA's "notional" plan for a human return to the Moon by 2024, and an outpost by 2028.
NASA
One thing missing is its cost. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has asked for an additional $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2020 as a down payment to jump-start lander development. But all of the missions in this chart would cost much, much more. Sources continue to tell Ars that the internal projected cost is $6 billion to $8 billion per year on top of NASA's existing budget of about $20 billion.
The plan also misses what is likely another critical element. It's not clear what role there would be on these charts for international partners, as nearly all of the vehicles could—and likely would—come from NASA or US- based companies. An international partnership, as evidenced by the International Space Station program, is likely key to sustaining a lunar program over the long term in the US political landscape.
Three miracles
Although the plan is laudable in that it represents a robust human exploration of deep space, scientific research, and an effort to tap water resources at the Moon, it faces at least three big problems.
The first issue is funding and political vulnerability. One reason Bridenstine has not shared the full cost of the program as envisioned is "sticker shock" that has doomed other previous efforts. However, if NASA is going to attempt a Moon landing with this specific plan—rather than a radical departure that relies on smaller, reusable rockets—the agency will need a lot more money.
So far, the White House has proposed paying for this with a surplus in the Pell Grant Reserve Fund. But this appears to be a non-starter with House Democrats. "The President is proposing to further cut a beneficial needs-based grants program that provides a lifeline to low-income students, namely the Pell Grants program, in order to pay for the first year of this initiative—something that I cannot support," House science committee chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson has said.
Congress is also not going to give NASA an unlimited authority to reprogram funds, with an apparently open-ended time frame, which Bridenstine has sought.
A second problem is that NASA's current plan relies on its contractors to actually deliver hardware. Boeing's work on the core stage of the Space Launch System is emblematic of this problem. The company has been working on the core stage for eight years, and it is unlikely to be ready for flight before another year or two. Boeing's management of the contract has been harshly criticized by NASA's Inspector General. After all this, can Boeing be counted on to deliver an SLS core stage in 2020, then again in 2022, and six more between 2024 and 2028?
The big SLS rocket was supposed to have been fairly straightforward to develop, as it relied on space shuttle components, such as its main engines and solid-rocket boosters. By contrast, the three-stage, reusable lunar lander envisioned by NASA to get humans from the Gateway to the lunar surface will require new engines and systems, including fuel management at very low and high temperatures. Is five years enough time for this if it has taken NASA, Boeing, and the rest of the SLS contractors a decade to deliver the rocket?
Finally, NASA's architecture for a lunar return requires completion of a more powerful version of the Space Launch rocket, known as Block 1B, to be ready by 2024. In the new architecture, the SLS Block 1B booster carries a crewed Orion spacecraft to the Gateway along with "surface logistics"—likely air, water, food, and other consumables needed for a multiday journey down to the surface and back to the Gateway.
The key new technology in the Block 1B rocket is an upper stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, for which Boeing is also the contractor. In recent months, NASA has urged Boeing to complete the initial version of the SLS rocket and halted work on this new upper stage. Given Boeing's performance on the core stage, it is possible NASA may seek an alternative provider, such as Blue Origin with its existing BE-3U upper stage engine, to build the Exploration Upper Stage. This is a big ask for Boeing, Blue Origin, or anyone by 2024.
Three outcomes
So what happens next? NASA took a key technical step Thursday in awarding contracts for two of the three elements of its proposed lunar lander design. The more dicey questions will come in the political arena.
NASA is in danger of becoming a political football. Democrats are unlikely to support Pell Grants as a source of funding, and some space industry sources have speculated that this may have been a "poison pill" from the White House's Office of Management and Budget to undermine a long-term, costly program. If Democrats wanted to push back in a political way, they could tell President Trump they will only support NASA's lunar landing with Department of Defense funds earmarked for the "Space Force." Under such a scenario, the politicization of NASA would be bad for an agency that has mostly flown above the partisan fray.
And what happens if President Trump loses reelection in 2020? By early 2021, when a new administration moves in, it won't see much tangible evidence of a lunar return. The SLS rocket is unlikely to have made its first flight, there will merely be some drawings on lunar landers, and the Lunar Gateway will remain a year or two away from launch. This would make the lunar program very vulnerable from a funding standpoint, especially if the new president is more concerned about climate change and Earth science and wants to pivot toward a lower-cost space program that capitalizes on the launch successes of the new space industry.
Finally, if the Trump administration wins, and truly cares about the 2024 landing—given the anemic $1.6 billion budget supplement and tapping of Pell Grants, it is far from clear it does—there is a path forward for NASA. With a more robust expenditure in fiscal year 2021 and some successes with the SLS rocket, it's possible that the agency could remain on a plausible path back to the Moon with this plan. It probably won't happen in 2024, as two sources told Ars the year 2026 is a more realistic date even given the new sense of urgency.
But at least, finally, there's a plan of record to debate.
Earlier this month SpaceX received approval from the FCC to launch 4,425 satellites into space to build a low earth orbit network of satellites to sell home Internet a few weeks ago. Yesterday SpaceX successfully launched its first set of 60 satellites for the new internet service. Unlike current satellite Internet, these devices will be in a far lower orbit and offer far faster speeds without the data caps current satellite systems use.
