The Orbital Index

Optical SBSP round-up. It’s been a busy few weeks in the world of space-based solar power (SBSP) startups. Following on the heels of the public unveiling of Reflect Orbital a few weeks ago (a company that plans to encircle the Earth’s terminator line with mirrors that reflect sunlight onto solar farms and angry astronomers), Aetherflux announced intentions to develop a LEO constellation that appears to store solar power in onboard batteries and then beam it down to (likely, at least initially, defense) customers using infrared lasers. Satellites in the constellation would need to hand off power beaming in a similar way to how Starlink hands off internet customers as satellites pass overhead. Aetherflux hopes to launch its first demonstration in 2026. (SBSP using lasers is conceptually similar, but technically quite different, from the long-discussed traditional vision of SBSP, which uses massive microwave power beaming satellites in GEO.) With an entirely different use case, Montréal-based Volta Space Technologies (not to be confused with this Volta, or this one—not to mention this one that was acquired by Shell) plans to send laser power down to lunar surface craft, helping them work during the lunar night or in permanently shadowed regions. On the space-to-space side, we mentioned Star Catcher a few weeks ago, a MEO (1,500 km) point-to-point power-beaming company that is pitching power delivery to customers as a capex-to-opex exchange, allowing them to fly with smaller/lighter craft and receive additional power as needed from Star Catcher’s network. Other companies working on similar in-space power transmission include Space Power, Pulse, Photonicity, and maybe Aquila. (Disclaimer: This item was written by Ben, but Andrew is co-founder of a startup working on SBSP—more on this soon.)

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Axiom unveils its own lunar suit. Shortly after China unveiled its lunar suit design, Axiom Space unveiled the exterior design of its AxEMU suit that will be worn by Artemis III astronauts (which could still potentially launch in 2026). Axiom, in collaboration with Prada, showed off the suit’s design in Milan at IAC for the first time—previous versions had non-final coverings over the exterior of the suit. Astronauts will don the suit through a hatch in the back, and the suit will support temperatures down to -180 °C for up to two hours during EVAs in Lunar South Pole regions, including permanently shadowed ones. AxEMU builds on NASA’s xEMU design and will feature lights, HD helmet cams, LTE comms, improved flexibility/mobility, and adjustments that accommodate a much wider range of astronaut body types/sizes. 

• ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter detected water frost in the caldera of Olympus Mons, Mars' tallest volcano (and the tallest in the solar system). This discovery, also validated by Mars Express, is the first time water frost has been observed near the Martian equator. The frost forms briefly after sunrise and evaporates quickly, suggesting microclimate effects in the high-altitude caldera (paper).
• Chinese researchers successfully extracted water from lunar regolith delivered by Chang’E-5 by heating it to over 1200 K (paper).
• Gaia data suggests numerous ancient stars in the Milky Way’s disk formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This is 4-5 billion years older than when the disk was thought to have formed (paper).
• Supermassive black holes seem to regulate the rate of star formation in galaxies, generating pressure ripples that prevent them from burning their hydrogen too quickly and extending their lives (paper).
• A recent paper finds, via modeling and simulation, that the observed coastlines of lakes and seas on Titan are likely shaped by erosion from waves (of liquid methane and ethane… because it’s Titan).
• Those previously reported, surprisingly large galaxies seen by JWST may be normal size, just harboring brightly glowing black hole accretion disks whose light makes the galaxies appear larger (paper).
• ESO’s ALMA captured images of gas bubbles on the surface of massive star R Doradus, a first for a star other than our Sun (paper). The hot bubbles are each 75x the width of the Sun. nbd.

• SpaceX’s Dragon capsule can now (after years of development) propulsively land with its SuperDraco thrusters in case of parachute failure (this feature was enabled on Crew-8 and Polaris Dawn but thankfully was not used). This scenario would most likely result in a soft water landing, but potentially could be used on land in the future.
• A visual article about telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and its forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the most powerful optical/near-IR telescope ever built, by a large margin. With an incredible 39 m primary mirror, composed of 798 hexagonal panels (each able to adjust with three pistons to adapt to atmospheric turbulence), the telescope will collect 15x the light of the next largest optical telescope on Earth (and about 40x JWST’s 6.5m mirror).
• A quick look at some of the control systems approaches required for catching the largest rocket ever built with large mechanized arms and 17 cm long catch fittings after it plummeted out of the sky.
• An image of the Sun created by neutrinos passing through the Earth (over 500 days). While photons take 100,000 years or more to work their way through the Sun (and then 8 minutes to reach Earth), neutrinos don’t interact and leave the sun immediately, allowing us to compare the Sun’s output now to thousands of years ago and observe (fortunately) consistent energy output.
• A long form article about JPL.
• Oklo, Gabon is the only known location where self-sustaining natural fission reactions are known to have occurred (off and on again for a few hundred thousand years, around 1.7 billion years ago).