Going Nuclear: How NASA May Adopt Nuclear Power in the Years to Come
And also, some stuff about SpaceX
Hello Celestial Citizens and Continuum readers,
Here we are another two weeks older and perhaps marginally wiser. This week was a complete Martian dust storm of big announcements for the space industry and we are here to help you work your way through all of the headlines. Don’t be like Mark Watney and get left behind!
We have a great edition of the newsletter in store for you this week, including two original stories from our team of writers covering NASA’s stance on nuclear energy and the nature of universal expansion. And while we generally like to cover the depths of space and not just the Musk-verse, we’ll tackle all the big news around SpaceX this week too. The best part? We’ve still got the SLS wet dress rehearsal to look forward to this weekend…AND Lightyear hits theaters.
Enjoying Continuum? Tag us on twitter (@continuum_hq) and let us know how we’re doing! And without further ado, here’s the space beat for the week…
NASA Learns to Love the Power of the Atom
by Rahul Rao
A nuclear rocket, said John F. Kennedy in 1961, “gives promise of some day providing a means…perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.”
This isn’t a fragment from an alternate history; this was from the very same speech that saw Kennedy promise a crewed Moon landing within the 1960s. It was a decade when the world (or, at least America) seemed on the verge of a nuclear-powered space future. An effort called Project Rover tested nuclear-enhanced rockets in the New Mexico desert — not in secret, but with great fanfare. This was the same decade that Project Orion proposed to propel humans to the stars by pushing a spacecraft with controlled nuclear blasts.
Of course, none of this ever got off the ground. “Chemical rockets just took over,” says Nathan Greiner, an aeronautical engineer, who works with propulsion systems, at DARPA. “They were cheaper, they were safer, they could do the job.” The final blow came in 1973, when the Nixon administration shuttered Project Rover for good in favor of projects like the chemical Space Shuttles.
But as a larger idea, nuclear power in space has never really gone away. It's always been around since the 1970s, in one form or another. And now, especially in the US, the idea is experiencing something of a renaissance. Project Rover's vision may yet come to pass.
Understanding the Expansion of the Universe - Part 1
by Jackie Appel
One of the most mind-bending facts about the universe seems like a paradox: the universe is infinite, and it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
Faster and faster every second, galaxies fly apart from each other, continuing the growth of the infinite cosmos. But in theory, a universe propelled into existence exclusively by a Big Bang should be slowing down, not speeding up. It took the collective work of some of the brightest minds in astronomy and physics nearly a century to come to this conclusion, and they still have big questions about how exactly it all works.
In the midst of this miasma of measurements and mathematics, a single number begins to take center stage. This is the Hubble parameter — more often referred to as the Hubble constant — a measurement of the rate of expansion of the universe. Scientists have been trying to nail down the exact value of the Hubble parameter for decades, as understanding it is key to understanding the physics behind expansion.
Top Headlines
On Monday, in a much awaited update, the FAA finally issued the results of their environmental review of SpaceX and its operations at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, where the company hopes to launch its Starship spacecraft. The takeaway is that SpaceX can continue their work in Boca Chica, but under a few conditions — 75 operational adjustments, in fact. They include more forewarning of road closures, arranging transportation for SpaceX employees to avoid traffic congestion, and monitoring of wildlife in the area by a “qualified biologist.” Even when SpaceX has checked everything off the list, it will still need to obtain a launch license from the FAA. Nevertheless, the company seemed to take this report in stride, tweeting that they are, “One step closer to the first orbital flight test of Starship.”
On the same day the FAA decision came out, SpaceX announced it had raised $1.68 billion dollars through equity financing. Although the company had looked to raise $1.75 billion dollars, 1.68 is nothing to scoff at. Unless, it’s your GPA. Then maybe you should try to get that 1.75.
With all this good news, things must be hunky dory at SpaceX, right? Well, apparently not: On Thursday, The Verge obtained a letter from SpaceX employees criticizing the lack of accountability of leadership, especially towards Elon Musk. In their letter, they state: “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks. As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX—every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company.” The letter goes on to suggest changes that the company should implement, including publicly addressing and condemning Elon’s Twitter behavior, holding all leadership at SpaceX accountable to making SpaceX a great place to work, and “define and uniformly respond to all forms of unacceptable behavior.” SpaceX has touted its “No-asshole” policy in the past, but the employees behind the letter feel that it hasn’t been clearly defined or enforced. Gwynne Shotwell weighed in and informed employees that those behind the letter have found themselves out of a job.
Moving on from SpaceX - last week, The James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a micrometeoroid! But don’t worry - $10 billion dollars did not just go to waste. In a press release, NASA assured the public that collisions with these miniscule asteroid fragments—which are usually smaller than a grain of sand—are normal and were anticipated. Although the micrometeoroid in question was larger than scientists planned for, they stated that JWST is still operating at a level that “exceeds all mission requirements despite a marginally detectable effect in the data.” We hope that Webb is still on track to deliver some great pictures, and if so, July 12 can’t come fast enough!
Next, rough weekend for ASTRA. The launch provider for NASA’s tropical storm tracking cube satellites failed to deliver their payload this past Sunday. Launching the first two of six satellites out of Florida, ASTRA did manage to get the satellites off the ground—but due to an upper-stage engine malfunction, the satellites were lost in space. ASTRA’s stock fell 25% the next day.
In some lighter news, Team Ingenuity is on a roll! This past weekend, the team behind the Martian helicopter accepted the National Aeronautic Association’s Collier Trophy, an award given annually to “the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles.” A momentous occasion indeed! Following this acceptance, the Ingenuity copter completed its 29th flight this week— the first since the Martian winter started. Despite battling a dead navigation sensor, it still managed to fly for a little over a minute to get itself closer to the Perseverance rover for better communications signals. As the saying goes, Mars robots of a feather flock together!
What’s a ship without a crew? Boeing has announced its first two astronauts for Starliner’s first crewed spaceflight! Veteran astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore will fly the Crew Flight Test, or CFT mission later this year, with astronaut Mike Fincke serving as the backup. The three have been training together since the uncrewed flight of Starliner last month. CFT will be a two-week mission to the ISS, enough time “to meet all NASA and Boeing test objectives.” It’s great to finally see Starliner chugging along!
And lastly, some astronomy news: We’ve got a case of a hungry hungry black hole. Researchers from Australia have discovered a rapidly growing, and increasingly destructive black hole that, according to Space.com, is “swallowing the mass equivalent of one Earth every second.” The famished system is three billion times the mass of our sun, and is 500 times bigger than the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. All this destruction of mass has even resulted in a quasar that is “blasting out enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light from every star in the Milky Way.” Not only do researchers believe this gourmand is the fastest growing black hole to exist in the last 9 billion years, but the quasar is also “the most luminous of these events for around the past two-thirds of the universe's 13.8 billion-year existence.” What a find! Let’s hope it doesn’t grow so big and develop an appetite for life-bearing blue planets in our corner of the solar system!
Moonshot
If we’re going to get to space, we’re going to need a lot of help. In our Moonshots section, we’ll share highlights from some of the commercial companies that are taking us there:
A few weeks ago, Collins Aerospace was awarded a service contract for NASA’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity or xEVAs program, and it seems like Sidus Space will be coming along for the ride! The critical hardware manufacturing company will aid Collins as it works on projects like new spacesuits, ancillary hardware, and other EVA tools.
Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired four-star Air Force General John Hyten will be joining Blue Origin. Hyten will serve as a strategic advisor as well as the executive director for the company’s “Club of the Future” foundation where he will focus on community outreach and engagement activities to encourage students to become scientists, engineers and explorers.”
Sierra Space has announced it will be launching the “world’s first fully integrated commercial human spaceflight center and astronaut training academy.” The program will be led by Dr. Janet Kavandi, a veteran NASA astronaut. The program will train three categories of astronauts: professional career astronauts, specialist astronauts, and experiential astronauts. Each category has its own parameters and goals - but the three are all centered around getting astronauts to either work, operate, or live on the upcoming commercial space station Orbital Reef.
Ahead of its mid-July launch, Firefly Aerospace’s co-founder Tom Markusic will be stepping down as CEO and will remain with the company as its CTO. Spacenews.com suggests that this may be due to investor AE Industrial Partners wanting new leadership at the company, as they had acquired a “significant stake” in Firefly four months prior.
Space Tweet of the Week
Space Reads!
Can’t get enough stellar content? Here are the pieces of space-adjacent news we’ve been reading this week.
Here at Celestial Citizen we talk a lot about the ever-increasing problem of space debris - and The Financial Times put together a great explainer about how so much stuff gets accumulated in our orbital environment and the dangers of it. It’s an info packed read with some great graphics!
And to expand on this, an op-ed from Spacenews.com on how we can encourage sustainability in space.
Learn about how Japanese researchers are decoding the early days of our solar system via asteroid samples in this New York Times article:
And to cap off this week of SpaceX news - here’s an opinion piece published on June 7, before the FAA decision, before the letter from employees, when Elon Musk was just a guy wanting to send a million people to Mars by 2050. Paul Krugman from the New York Times examines this notion here.
Continuum Podcast
Only have time for the highlights? Check out our companion podcast! Whether you’re a space enthusiast or just starting to look up at the stars, we’ll give you a quick rundown of all the biggest space news headlines every other week.
Things Found on the Internet…
And with that - you’re all caught up on the latest space news! Thanks for joining us on this celestial journey of information and we look forward to seeing you back here in two weeks for our next edition of Continuum.
Big thanks to Evan Yee for writing this week’s edition with me, Helen Floersh for additional writing support and hosting Continuum Podcast, and Victor Figueroa for podcast sound editing.
[insert overused Latin phrase about space here]
Britt
CEO of Celestial Citizen & Creator of Continuum