The Week in Space and Physics #10
Relying on Russian rockets once seemed a sensible choice. The Soyuz and Proton rockets were - and generally still are - well-regarded and reliable. Despite their sometimes aggressive rhetoric, the Russians usually delivered as promised: putting European and American satellites and astronauts into orbit.
Perhaps no surprise, then, that European organisations had planned a series of launches on Russian vehicles. OneWeb had booked a half dozen flights this year, ESA planned to send their ExoMars rover on a Soyuz rocket in September.
The transition from aggressive rhetoric to all-out war in Ukraine put an abrupt end to these plans. Sanctions placed on Russia by both Europe and America made cooperation and funding hard. Bizarre Russian demands and general distaste at working with such a brutal regime made it impossible.
There has, therefore, been a sudden rush to seek alternatives. SpaceX has done well out of the crisis, signing an emergency deal with OneWeb to finish building out their constellation. But the situation has also drastically reduced the total number of launches available.
With the exception of SpaceX, most rocket companies still need to build a brand new rocket for each launch. That, of course, is normally planned years in advance, making the industry slow to react to changes. Capacity cannot, therefore, increase as quickly as is now needed.
Now Amazon has created another shock. Like SpaceX, the company has plans to launch thousands of satellites to build out a satellite internet constellation. Unlike SpaceX, however, Amazon does not build rockets. The result is a huge order for rocket launches; quite certainly the largest order in history.
In total, Amazon has ordered eighty-three launches to take place over five years. More than half will come from United Launch Alliance (ULA), an established American provider. Eighteen have been placed with the European company ArianeSpace; the rest with Blue Origin.
All will take place on untested launchers: the Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan rockets. While both ArianeSpace and ULA have a long history of building and flying rockets, there are obvious risks involved with such a decision. Blue Origin, indeed, have never reached orbit – though they do have a good track record of suborbital launches.
The massive buy also raises questions about the next few years. With capacity limited by the ban on Russian rockets and Amazon’s order, other companies will struggle to find places for their satellites. SpaceX will be able to take some of them – but they have thousands of Starlink satellites to launch and are already flying rockets roughly once a week.
Instead many companies will have to rely on smaller and untested launch providers. Companies like RocketLab, Astra and Isar Aerospace are developing new rockets of their own. The big question is whether they can succeed and, if they do, whether they will be in ready in time to meet the coming demand.
Human Spaceflight Booms in America
SpaceX now sends astronauts into space so regularly that any single launch attracts little attention. Yet the launch Friday morning was remarkable: for the first time a crew of four private astronauts headed to the International Space Station.
The launch was funded by Axiom, a company that plans to one day build its own space station in orbit. As a first step towards this goal, NASA has agreed to allow Axiom to attach a module to the International Space Station. This flight, however, seems to have little to do with that lofty aim.
Instead the crew is made up of three wealthy men and one former astronaut. Though Axiom say that all four will carry out scientific activities on the space station, it is also clear this is another example of space tourism. That was underscored by Axiom pushing an NFT marketplace to sell mission-related artwork.
The flight was slightly delayed by other activities at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA is finally running a launch rehearsal for the Space Launch System: America’s biggest rocket since the days of the Apollo Programme. Since the two rockets occupied adjacent pads at the launch site, controllers had to coordinate activities with care.
Twice the launch rehearsal was paused and postponed. Each time SpaceX had to shift their launch date in response. Ultimately NASA decided to let the Axiom launch go ahead, and to resume testing of the Space Launch System after the pad was clear. Still, that does not resolve all the schedule conflicts. SpaceX have a second crew of astronauts, this time professionals, scheduled for launch later in April.
Elsewhere, Blue Origin sent another crew of six tourists to the edge of space. The launch in Texas hit an altitude of one hundred and seven kilometres – just beyond the official boundary of space – before falling down to Earth. Blue Origin has now sent four crews on similar sub-orbital flights.
Hubble Spots its Oldest Star
It looks nothing like a galaxy. Astronomers dub it the “sunrise arc”, a long faint filament of light strung out in the lens of a telescope. Yet the sunrise arc is indeed a galaxy – albeit one extraordinarily ancient. Researchers think the light from the arc originated less than a billion years after the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest galaxies ever seen.
That the sunrise arc is visible at all is only thanks to a lucky coincidence. It happens to sit, as seen from Earth, behind a massive cluster of galaxies. The tremendous gravity of that cluster warps and twists space, distorting the light coming from the sunrise arc. The result is to stretch out the galaxy into a long filament, one that, at first glance anyway, looks nothing like a typical galaxy.
Strung along the filament appear occasional bright spots – looking rather like beads on a string necklace. Each, astronomers think, is a cluster of young stars shining brightly in the ancient galaxy. But one bead, new research suggests, is actually an individual star. It happens, by chance, to lie on the line of maximum distortion – blowing up the brightness of the star many times over.
If so, this would be the oldest star ever seen by Hubble, the telescope that spotted it, or by any other observatory. Astronomers hope to soon use Hubble and the James Webb in tandem to observe it. The two telescopes should offer an unprecedented view of the ancient star, giving us a close look at one of the earliest stars in the universe.
Five Thousand Planets
The list of known planets grows ever longer: more than five thousand are now listed in NASA’s catalogue of exoplanets. That represents a significant milestone, though it surely covers only a fraction of the billions of planets out there.
The pace of exoplanet discovery has accelerated in recent years. Dedicated telescopes like Kepler and TESS have uncovered hundreds of planets each. New and planned observatories – like the James Webb, Nancy Grace Roman and Ariel telescopes – will find thousands more. Indeed, the time will soon come when we go beyond just finding distant worlds and begin instead to probe their details.
This new generation of telescopes will let astronomers look directly at exoplanets for the first time. They will study their atmospheres, model their climates and pick out traces of gases and elements. They may even give us the first hints of whether those planets can – or do – support life.