¶Polaris Dawn’s first commercial space walk. Last Thursday, the crew of Polaris Dawn’s Dragon capsule depressurized the entire vehicle, which lacks an airlock, and opened the hatch to the vacuum of LEO at ~750 km. They then live-streamed the first commercial EVA (from multiple angles, including the crew’s EVA suit helmet cameras). Jared Isaacman, followed by SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis, took turns going part-way outside the capsule to perform suit tests and maneuvers while holding on to a support structure christened “the sky walker” and tethered via a reinforced air supply umbilical. Mission Specialist Gillis also recorded a rendition of Star Wars’ Rey’s Theme on violin and was joined by symphonies from around the world, while Anna Menon read a children's book she wrote to kids at St. Jude’s along with her own two children. The crew returned safely to Earth on Sunday. The mission set the record for the highest altitude EVA and the farthest a woman has ventured from our planet. (Related: with Polaris Dawn in orbit and the launch of a Soyuz carrying astronaut Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, there were also a record 19 humans in space.) |
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¶Papers- Measurement of the cosmic optical background (COB), the diffuse light from innumerable stars, galaxies, and other sources too distant to see, is challenging from Earth due to our Sun’s glare (and the resulting zodiacal light). With New Horizons now 8 billion km away and carrying high quality cameras brought along for studying Pluto (now far behind it), it’s an ideal platform to image the COB. The data are consistent with the COB being the result of only stars and galaxies, without requiring other unknown components, something that had previously been an open question (paper).
- JWST imagery of Uranus’ moon Ariel shows significant CO2 deposits, up to 10mm thick, on the moon’s trailing hemisphere, as well as carbon monoxide (paper). Since CO2 and CO sublimate even at the chilly Ariel temperatures, something must be supplying fresh CO2. This might be interactions between the moon’s surface and charged particles in Uranus’ magnetosphere causing radiolysis of water and carbon-rich material, or it might be CO2 emerging from within the moon, possibly from a subsurface liquid water ocean.
- We don’t know what Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOTs) are. These flashes of blue light that last for a few days and only happen about once a year are among the brightest known visible-light events in the Universe. Usually within galaxies, one was spotted by Hubble in the space between galaxies, where we wouldn’t expect supernovae or most other energetic events to occur (pdf). A theory is that a pair of neutron stars spent billions of years spiraling toward each other while drifting in the void, then finally collided (causing a kilonova; kudos to whoever named this one). Another theory is that these are failed supernovae (paper)… but we’re really not sure yet. (Relatedly, kilonovas may be a new way to measure cosmic distances (paper), providing a new independent method of measuring universal expansion and perhaps eventually resolving the Hubble tension.)
- A NASA suborbital rocket launched from Svalbard in May 2022 made the first detection of Earth’s long-hypothesized weak ambipolar electric field (paper), thought to drive the outflow of charged particles into space around Earth’s poles known as the “polar wind.” This field, starting at around 250 km altitude, measured at 0.55 volts. It arises from the differential effect of gravity on heavy ionic nuclei and free electrons in the atmosphere, resulting in net displacement and electric polarization. NASA has a good explanation. The field exerts a force of 10.6 g on light hydrogen ions, “enough to launch them upwards into space at supersonic speeds.”
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 | NASA’s Endurance rocket launching from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, to study the upper atmosphere. Credit: Andøya Space/Leif Jonny Eilertsen |
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¶Landspace completes a 10 km VTOL test and engine relight. The Chinese startup completed its latest VTOL flight, successfully flying the company’s 68-ton test rocket up to 10 km, intentionally shutting down and relighting its single TQ-12 engine, and landing softly 3.2 km from the launch pad (and within 1.7 meters of its nominal target location). This success paves the way for a first launch of the company’s medium/heavy lift ZQ-3 rocket next year if all goes according to plan. Landspace hopes that ZQ-3 will eventually be able to support 20 reuses. Earlier this year, state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CAST) also conducted a VTOL test, flying to 12 km with its own methalox-propelled technology verification rocket. Next up for CAST is a 70-km test planned for next year. |
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 | Landspace VTVL-1 during its test flight. Credit: LandSpace |
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¶Asteroids: a few startups march towards mining. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, a number of small space startups painted bright pictures of their futures mining asteroids for their untold wealth of precious (primarily platinum-group) minerals. That bubble came and went with Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, Shackleton Energy Company, and OffWorld all ceasing operations, being acquired at fire sale prices, or shifting focus to something closer to home. However, a new generation of companies are again pushing asteroid mining forward—Factories in Space has a reasonably current list of entities working in the space. AstroForge, the apparent leader of the small scrappy pack, just raised an additional $40M to get them through their third test mission. The company is currently working as fast as it can to finish testing for its second mission, due to launch with IM-2 around the new year—AstroForge’s original spacecraft supplied by a third-party bus-maker failed vibration testing, forcing them to rebuild the craft in-house in under four months. The new 100 kg vehicle, Odin, which passed vibe-tests last month, will hitch a ride along with the Moon-bound lander and then proceed into deep space, intercepting and photographing a “top secret” metallic, ~400-meter Near Earth Asteroid (NEA). Vestri, the company’s recently-announced third mission, will launch with IM-3 in 2025 and features an in-house built 200 kg craft. This third mission will attempt to magnetically attach to and then extract a sample from the same asteroid. Part of why AstroForge is mum about their target is competitor Origin Space, a Chinese startup that launched their NEO-01 pathfinder mission in 2021 and demonstrated a net-based small asteroid and/or space debris catching system. Meanwhile, Karman+ is focused on carbonaceous asteroids, primarily for their water content—their first mission, High Frontier, is planned for launch in 2026 and will attempt a touch and go (TAG) extraction of a kilogram or more of regolith. The UK’s imaginatively named Asteroid Mining Corp. is taking a different approach; they've designed SCAR-E, a 6-legged robot capable of navigating difficult terrain. Their long term aspiration is asteroid mining, but in the near term their robots will probably be more likely to be navigating and inspecting ship hulls. (Related: while highly metallic asteroids like Psyche make the news due to their headline-friendly numbers, it is still very unclear if returning platinum-group metals is something Earth’s markets could support—demand could be outstripped fairly easily since Earth currently only produces ~250 tons of platinum annually, for instance. Here’s an SPG report that doesn’t look favorably on the market prospects.) |
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 | List of NEAs that have been visited or are scheduled to be visited by governmental spacecraft. Credit: ESA’s NEO Coordination Center |
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| ¶News in brief. The Soyuz M-26 mission, carrying two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut, docked at the ISS ● SpaceX launched the first 5 BlueBird satellites for AST SpaceMobile for their space-based direct-to-cell network competing with SpaceX/T-mobile and others ● Slingshot Aerospace raised $30M to scale their space situational awareness services ● Brunswick-based bluShift Aerospace test-fired their Marvel engine for 60 seconds ● China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft arrived at Sun-Earth L2 on a bonus mission after delivering lunar samples to Earth ● Iran launched a solid-fuel, three-stage rocket and delivered a satellite, sparking fear that this is a gateway to a ballistic missile program ● Chinese commercial on-orbit servicing company Sustain Space raised $1.4M ● United Airlines is switching to Starlink from ViaSat for in-flight WiFi and is the first major airline to do so ● Google invested $13M into the FireSat constellation which hopes to be the first dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires ● The UK Space Agency awarded Astroscale and ClearSpace $3M each to develop a servicer craft capable of removing two spacecraft from low Earth orbit ● The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report titled ‘NASA at a Crossroads’, highlighting the tough choices that NASA will face in deciding future missions with ailing infrastructure without a budget increase ● A US tourist, who happened to be an aerospace engineer, stumbled upon Arianespace rocket debris while snorkeling in Honduras. |
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 | Arianespace rocket debris found by Irmen, an aerospace engineer from Dayton, Ohio, while snorkeling on a remote island off the coast of Honduras. |
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A striking image of Mars taken by Viking 1 in June 1976 shows the tenuous Martian atmosphere and side-lit terrain. |  |
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