The Orbital Index

Our star throws its decadal tantrum. Last week, as Sol continues to edge into the most active phase of its 11-year cycle, multiple massive X-class solar flares (the largest an X5.8 flare) erupted from associated active sunspots, along with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directed towards Earth. This sustained activity caused a G5 solar storm last weekend (NOAA’s space weather scales for reference), leading to aurorae visible from middle latitudes as far south as Puerto Rico in the US and all over Europe. This was one of the most powerful solar storms since an estimated X28-45 flare in 2003 contributed to the 2003 Halloween solar storms that damaged or interrupted services from multiple spacecraft, saturated measurement instruments, and made ISS astronauts shelter in the more shielded Russian segment. The 2003 event was the worst solar storm since modern solar monitoring, but the Carrington Event in 1859, as the most significant geomagnetic event in measurable history, puts it to shame. The Carrington Event came from a retrospectively-estimated X45+ class flare with its CME directed squarely at Earth and was preceded by another large CME that likely cleared ambient solar wind plasma, allowing the Carrington CME to arrive at Earth just 17.6 hours after the event (most CMEs take several days to arrive at Earth). This caused globally viewable aurorae, made telegraph pylons arc and spark, and even allowed operators to send messages through lines that were solely powered by the induced current. The impact of high-energy solar events is often under-appreciated, but can particularly negatively affect space systems and the electrical grid—a Carrington-scale event today could trigger a full grid blackout destroying hard-to-replace high-voltage transformers, significantly disrupt RF-based communications, impact the internet backbone, and knock out critical satellite systems like GNSS constellations. (We could prepare our grid in the US for single-digit-billions of dollars, but little seems to be happening.) Last weekend’s event did cause interruptions to RTK position systems used by some industrial-scale agriculture equipment and caused power grid fluctuations around the world. Carrington-scale events happen every ~500 years and are far more likely than a large meteorite impact, but society is currently largely underprepared for the next one. Related: Based on Carbon-14 dating of tree rings (paper), it’s likely that at least nine super solar storms, some an order of magnitude larger than Carrington, known as Miyake Events, have occurred over the last 15,000 years, the last ones in 993 and 774.

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NASA NIAC goes Phase II. NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, known for funding some exciting and weird shit (c.f Issues 160, 205, 219, 253, etc…), has selected six prior NIAC concept studies for additional development. Phase II grants are only up to $600,000 in funding, though, so temper your expectations. NIAC Phase II awards are also a potential gateway to the somewhat more impactful $2 million Phase III awards. The winners were:

• FLUTE, a concept to create fluidic telescopes with massive liquid primary mirrors in space by shaping ionic liquids—swiped wholeheartedly from Dune. (NASA’s Ames Research Center)
• A pulsed plasma rocket that would use “fission-generated packets of plasma” to generate up to 100,000 N of thrust with an Isp of 5,000s… sounds fantastic! (Howe Industries in Scottsdale, Arizona)
• GO-LoW, a megaconstellation of interferometric, autonomous, low-frequency radio telescopes at an Earth-Sun Lagrange point to study exoplanets’ magnetospheres and the cosmic dark ages at frequencies (100 kHz and 15 MHz) that we cannot observe from Earth due to the ionosphere. (MIT)
• A concept for radioisotope thermoradiative power generators for deep space missions with a mass-specific power 4-5x that of NASA’s MMRTG. (RIT)
• Quantum dot sensors on solar sails, allow the sail to also function as an imager for missions to the outer planets. (Goddard Space Flight Center)
• FLOAT, a diamagnetically levitating lunar railway system with no moving parts for payload transport on the Moon. (JPL)

Otter Pup signs off. Last week, Otter Pup, the ambitious and high-drama rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (RPOD) mission from Starfish Space, concluded its mission on a high note. The drama began with an emergency deployment from its Launcher orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) after catching a ride to orbit last year on Transporter 8 (c.f. Issue 234). That emergency deployment imparted a tumble of 330 degrees/second, much more than the few degrees/second that its attitude control system was designed to handle. The Starfish team was able to save the spacecraft by pulsing its magnetorquers opportunistically against the magnetic field of the Earth to detumble the craft. Original plans to meet RPOD goals by working with the Launcher OTV were scrapped and objectives were updated, only to have Otter Pup’s electric propulsion fail soon after the detumbling operation. This left the mission with one remaining objective: in-space rendezvous with another spacecraft. But without propulsion, that would have to be a very specific partner that had delta-v and availability to cooperatively change their orbital parameters. D-Orbit, an Italian orbital logistics company that supplies hosted payload and space tug services, provided one of their existing twelve ION orbital delivery vehicles as the other half of the rendezvous. Starfish orchestrated the rendezvous, with help from space situational awareness company LeoLabs, while D-Orbit executed the maneuver with their ION SVC006 craft, originally launched with Transporter 5. SVC006 approached to within 1 km of Otter Pup over the course of multiple orbital flybys. The latter was able to point and capture an image of the ION vehicle (below), salvaging a meaningful part of the original mission. Starfish plans to launch their next Otter Pup in 2025. (Related: Starfish just won a $37M contract from the DOD “to improve maneuverability on-orbit and enable dynamic space operations, docking, and maneuvering of Department of Defense assets on-orbit by 2026.”)

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• Seattle Space Week is June 8-13, 2024, check it out if you’re in the area!
• The NSF halted CMB-S4, a project that would place telescopes in Chile and Antarctica to study cosmic microwave background, due to aging infrastructure at the South Pole.
• A Cargo Dragon returned Redwire’s bioprinted cardiac tissue from the ISS, a first for in-space manufacturing. The hope is that tissue bioprinted in microgravity will maintain its shape better and offer a path to printing organs. However, it remains to be seen if this is useful and scalable.
• Relatedly, the same return vehicle brought home 8 km of ZBLAN optical fiber which had been pulled on the ISS by startup Flawless Photonics. ZBLAN fiber is more transparent than silica, is useful for industrial and medical lasers, and could potentially allow undersea communications cables to have far fewer expensive and power hungry repeaters. ZBLAN is the oft-mentioned leading candidate for a viable orbital manufacturing market, and while this is not the first ZBLAN manufactured on the ISS, it is the first time production of “commercial lengths” has been demonstrated (…and sold!).
• A summary of Q1 2024 launch attempts. US: 37 (32 of which were SpaceX, up 11 from Q1 2023, 4 Rocket Lab, 3 of which were from NZ, 1 ULA), China: 14, Russia: 5, Japan: 3, India: 2, Iran: 2, Europe: 0. Come on Ariane 6! (And Isar, RFA, Skyrora, Orbex, PLD Space, Avio, MaiaSpace, Latitude, HyImpulse, HyPrSpace, …et al.)
• China has been considering applications by NASA-funded researchers to gain access to Chang’e 5 lunar samples. This is one of the exceptionally few programs where the agencies interact, and a positive development for the science community.
• A lot of those launches went to Starlink, which looks like it has 2.7m current global subscribers and could be cash flow positive this year with $6.6B in revenue (webinar).
• NASA confirms “independent review” of Orion heat shield issue.
• Proton Earth, Electron Moon 💥