The post Weaponizing Space Now a Reality According to the U.S. Space Force appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The idea of a conflict-free outer space was aspirational. What the treaty did allow were technologies that could be dual-purposed. For example, GPS, first developed for terrestrial armed forces’ navigation needs, was not banned. Today, GPS and its equivalent satellite constellations from the European Space Agency, India and Russia have replaced maps.
Similarly, telecommunications satellites served two purposes: military and commercial. The advancement of the technology has produced telecommunications constellations like Starlink that serve domestic purposes in non-conflict zones, while helping Ukraine coordinate its defences against Russia in that conflict.
Another dual-purpose technology deployed to space is terrestrial observation satellites. Landsat satellites deployed by the United States benefited from similar reconnaissance technology developed for the American Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency.
Under the Outer Space Treaty terms, a nation’s military personnel could serve in space or on the Moon, Mars, asteroids or elsewhere. What they couldn’t do, however, was fire a weapon designed for aggression.
That was then. What follows is the now.
On September 16, 2026, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a keynote address delivered to a conference in Maryland, stated:
“Today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space.”
While not explicitly admitting that the U.S. had deployed weapons to space, his comments appeared to confirm a recent public admission by a U.S. military official that America, through its Space Force, was establishing the means to defend the high ground of space from Earth orbit to the Moon.
Caine’s public admission is the first of its kind for any nation. It is likely, however, that deploying weapons to space has already been done by Russia and China. Both of these countries have demonstrated space defence weapons:
European space programs, including ESA, have never demonstrated similar inclinations.
The distinction between what China and Russia have done is that Caine’s disclosure is about in-orbit space weapons, not Earth-based systems that could target objects in space.
What are we talking about when referring to weapons deployed in orbit or on the Moon?
Although Caine didn’t mention anything specific, the likely systems already in space or to be deployed include:
Of course, Caine may have disclosed capability rather than reality. Although not inevitable, when the US first announced its sixth armed service, the Space Force, orbital weapons would be the likely endgame.
When formed in December of 2019, its announced mission was to train the American military for warfighting in space and to develop military space systems to project the country’s power beyond Earth. At the time, the major initiatives of the Space Force were to develop launch capacity, a successor to GPS, new satellite communication capabilities, and a space-based early warning system capable of detecting incoming missiles.
It appears that the mission of the US Space Force has now expanded and will likely stimulate Russia, China and other nascent military space programs to up their game.
The post Weaponizing Space Now a Reality According to the U.S. Space Force appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post Rogue Planets Outnumber Stars in the Milky Way Galaxy Says NASA appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Ancient Greek observations of wandering pinpoints of light observed in the night sky named them πλανήτης (planḗtēs). The name means wanderers. Except for the Moon, Sun, comets and shooting stars, everything the ancient Greeks observed in the night sky didn’t move. The fixed points of light were called ἀστήρ (astḗr), meaning star. Astḗr gave us the words astronomy, asterisk (star-shaped) and astronaut.
To the Greeks, other than the Moon, planḗtēs were the most obvious visible objects in the night sky. They cyclically changed position throughout the year. From planḗtēs we got the word planet.
Nothing the Greeks described, however, was a wanderer like the rogue planets of Wylie and Balmer’s novel. In fact, planets beyond the Solar System remained unknown until 1992. The first two were observed orbiting a distant star. In 2011, the first untethered rogue planet was found wandering through the Galaxy. A year later, a rogue super-Jupiter was imaged. By 2020, an Earth-sized rogue planet was discovered. Then in 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope discovered the first pair of companion rogues, à la Wylie and Balmer.
A paper appearing in the American Astronomical Society journal in 2023 described a nine-year sky survey that concluded rogue planets were far more abundant than previously thought. The study was conducted at the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand. There, scientists used gravitational microlensing to discover 3,500 events over a short period. The paper they wrote stated that the number of unbound rogue planets was likely far greater than the number of stars populating the Milky Way.
How much greater? The calculated ratio indicated 21 rogue planets to every one orbiting a star. The results showed a range of planetary masses from one-third the size of Earth to more than 6,660 times bigger than our planet.
How does gravitational microlensing work? It is used to indirectly observe celestial objects invisible to the eye by looking at distant stars and noting when an object passes between the observer and the light. When an object crosses between the light source and the observer, it bends space and time. These bends are key to uncloaking formerly invisible objects.
Microlensing is a bit more complicated than just observing light coming from another star. To be effective, it involves viewing a part of the night sky at just the right time, and doing it in fast sequence to catch subtle space-time bends. When the light bends, and no star or other object is observed nearby, the bending of the light is deemed to be caused by a rogue planet.
Not everything microlensing observations yield are rogue planets. A planet orbiting at a far distance from its parent star could be mistaken as a rogue because it passes in front of a distant light source. For example, a remote observer looking at us might mistake the yet-unfound Planet X for a rogue if using microlensing, because, being so far beyond our local Oort Cloud, it might pass in front of a remote star and bend its light without being recognized as a companion to our Sun.
So, how did so many rogue planets come to exist? The paper describes that during the formation of the Solar System and other star systems, planet scattering was very common. Planets regularly were booted from their parent star, explaining the existence of so many rogues today.
At the end of this month, if all goes well, NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Among its many objectives is the study of exoplanets using gravitational microlensing. NASA expects to discover thousands of these rogues as well as orbiting planets. The hope is to image some of these planḗtēs directly.
The post Rogue Planets Outnumber Stars in the Milky Way Galaxy Says NASA appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post Alone In the Universe – Not So Fast: Part 3: UFOs, UAPs, Martians, and Asteroids appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Asteroid sampling missions already completed, two by Japan and one by the United States, are rendering Aristotelian Earth-centric thinking to the dustbin. A fourth one underway by China should produce a similar conclusion.
American and Japanese spacecraft visited Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) in this 21st century and have brought back sample evidence from their surfaces that contain organic matter. The two visited have no atmosphere or magnetic field. Yet, lying on their surfaces are raw materials for life, including nucleic acids and nucleobases found in RNA here on Earth. What got animated by a spark here on Earth and likely on Mars didn’t happen on these jumbles of rocks and space debris. The abundance of organic matter found locally here in the Solar System, however, suggests that life beyond Earth and Mars will be found to not be rare throughout the Milky Way and across the Universe.
Aristotelian thinking dominated our view of the Universe even though an earlier Greek philosopher, Democritus, got it right. He described all material things as consisting of elementary particles that he called atoms. Democritus saw everything in the material world as assemblies of these atoms. Life was just one piece of finished products coming from an assembly line. Death was its disassembly line.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that modern science rediscovered Democritus’ atoms. The existence of the atom and subsequent subatomic particles changed our relationship with the Universe forever. The fundamental building blocks for all material things were slowly revealed. From elementary and subatomic particles to atom bombs, the material Universe tells us that everything is interconnected. Atoms on Earth are no different from atoms elsewhere. So, if atoms can self-organize into base-pair nucleotides to form DNA here, why not anywhere?
In the Solar System, 75% of known asteroids are called C types. This means they are predominantly made of carbon with small percentages of other rocks, minerals, and chemicals. Other types of asteroids include stony (S), metallic (M), and unclassified (U). Sub-categories further differentiate asteroid types. The alphabetical list includes A, D, E, K, P, Q, R and V-asteroids. Some of these are carbonaceous and others stony sub-categories.
Why sample asteroids? These small members of the Solar System date back to before the planets formed. Within them are the elements that eventually populated Earth, the other planets and their moons. They remain relatively unchanged from our beginnings in this part of the Milky Way. Included within them are the materials to create us.
Three sampling missions to NEAs have succeeded. Two originate from Japan and one from the United States. A fourth from China is currently underway. The asteroids in question include:
JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, launched its Hayabusa spacecraft on a mission to this NEA in 2005 and successfully returned samples from its surface in 2011. Itokawa is an S-asteroid mostly made of silicate minerals. If you like granite, Itokawa is your asteroid of choice. Its subcomponent minerals obtained from returned samples include plagioclase, pyroxene, Olivine, troilite, taenite and chromite. When Japan’s Hayabusa visited it, the description given was of a pile of rubble with no solid surfaces.
Back in 2022, I wrote about Hayabusa 2’s sampling mission to this NEA. Hayabusa-2 was Japan’s second asteroid mission, producing exciting results upon its return of samples to Earth. Although the 2022 article was about the theory of panspermia, that life on Earth came from space, it noted the contents of Ryugu samples.
Ryugu turned out to be both carbon- and water-rich, with lots of hydrated minerals, including sulphides, phosphates, and organics, the latter of which included 20 different amino acids and uracil (a nucleobase found in RNA). Uracil’s presence suggests that C-asteroid impacts on early Earth could have delivered similar RNA building blocks to initiate the chain of evolutionary developments that led to life here. Could uracil have been made from non-organic sources? Maybe there is some interstellar chemistry we don’t understand to explain inorganic, abiotic formation of nucleobases, but it is more likely that right from the Solar System’s beginnings, before the planets, the elements for life were already present.
In March of this year, I wrote about OSIRIS-REx, the asteroid sample return mission to Bennu. The surface sample contained amino acids, nucleobases, ammonia, formaldehyde and traces of saltwater brine. The brine contained “thousands of organic compounds, including 14 of the 20 amino acids found in terrestrial organisms, as well as all the nucleotide bases that make up our DNA and RNA,” stated an article published in Scientific American, shortly after scientists released their sample findings.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is not done yet. After visiting Bennu, it is now on its way to a second asteroid, Apophis, with the mission given a new name, OSIRIS-APEX and a rendezvous in 2029.
China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft, launched in 2025, is en route to the aforementioned NEA. It could be a fragment of Earth’s moon or a stray that arrived from the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. The goal is to capture samples from the surface and return them to Earth sometime in 2027. It will be interesting to see if the contents of the samples reinforce what we already know from the three completed asteroid missions.
From Mars and these asteroid missions, there appears to be a striking convergence. Evidence of past Martian life shows up in the ancient sediments and mudstones at the two sites that NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance are still exploring. That’s just two sites with many more to explore in the future.
Meanwhile, asteroid sampling missions show that the nucleobases in DNA and RNA exist in primordial rock piles circling the Sun. The Bennu samples, in particular, contain 14 of the 20 amino acids that life on Earth uses to make proteins.
I’m certain future missions to asteroids, Mars and other Solar System bodies that test for present life, like those onboard the two Viking landers in 1976, will once and for all put the question of our being alone or not in the Universe to rest.
The post Alone In the Universe – Not So Fast: Part 3: UFOs, UAPs, Martians, and Asteroids appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post Alone In the Universe – Not So Fast: Part 2: UFOs, UAPs, Martians, and Asteroids appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Our ideas about life beyond Earth have changed over time. Before telescopes, Greek philosophers represented two schools of thought. Some, like Democritus, believed that the stuff that made us existed everywhere, and therefore life beyond Earth of various shapes and purposes must exist. Others, like Aristotle, saw Earth as the centre of the Universe and uniquely gifted. Life, therefore, would only be found here.
Aristotelian thinking dominated Medieval Western speculations until the telescope began to reveal the nature of our Solar System neighbours.
Venus’ hidden surface, a planet enveloped by thick clouds, was seen as a possible watery, tropical world.
Meanwhile, after canali, meaning channels in Italian, were first observed by the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, this lost-in-translation optical illusion eventually led to an American astronomer, Percival Lowell, being convinced he too was seeing these channels, which he saw as a network of canals drawing water from Mars polar ice caps to support an advanced technical civilization.
Lowell’s imaginary Martians vanished in a trice after images from the American Mariner 9 spacecraft showed a planet scarred by impact craters. The Martians of H.G. Wells or Ray Bradbury, belligerent and intelligent, were relegated to science fantasy forever. No more were there little green men or three-legged, three-eyed monsters as depicted in the movies.
Before Mariner 9, Soviet efforts to reach Mars didn’t yield pictures of what was now being seen as a dead planet. Subsequent missions to Mars, however, have changed our perception. From what we know now, our most recent and future missions are seeking evidence of past and possibly even present life. Democritus’ ancient hypothesis could be proven accurate.
So, how did we get from dead to a potentially living Red Planet?
The USSR was the first nation to attempt to send a spacecraft to Mars. Mars 1 was launched at the dawn of the Space Age in November 1962. Five months into the mission, the Soviets lost contact with the spacecraft. They believed it passed by Mars three months later, tens of thousands of kilometres off course. It took nine more years before Mars 2, a combined lander and orbiter launched in May 1971. The lander crashed on the surface. The orbiter sent back data about surface and atmospheric conditions until August 1972.
Mars 3 represented the Soviets’ third attempt. Launched as well in May 1971, it reached the Red Planet during a period when the surface was obscured by a planetwide dust storm. The attempted soft landing produced only 20 seconds of telemetry while the orbiter survived to complete hundreds of orbits before the mission ended about the same time as Mars 2.
These Russian orbiters contributed to an increasing awareness about Mars that differentiated it from our airless Moon. Future Soviet attempts to reach Mars failed. The last ones happened in the post-Soviet period, with failed launches by the Russian Federation in 1996 and again in 2011.
Russia has since cooperated with the European Space Agency on joint missions. Meanwhile, China has actively pursued Martian scientific discovery on its own using orbiters, landers and rovers.
China’s latest ambitions include landing a rover in 2028 to collect samples from Mars and then launch them back to Earth for analysis.
Since the end of the Soviet era, the U.S. picked up the mantle of Martian discovery. The first success was Mariner 9, which reached Mars in 1971 and orbited the planet for almost a year, taking pictures of the surface. An attempt in 1993 failed. The Mars Global Surveyor that followed proved successful, helping to reveal details of the Martian surface from 1997 to 2006. A 1999 mission failed, but subsequently American successes included the Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and MAVEN. Two of these three are operational to this day. MAVEN recently went silent.
American landers have produced spectacular if not controversial results. These began with the successful landings of the Viking 1 and 2 in 1975, both equipped with experiments geared at finding alien life. The interpretation of the two Viking test results remains controversial to this day, with some scientists convinced that the experiments revealed Mars to be a living planet.
Subsequent American missions, including Pathfinder in 1997, Spirit and Opportunity twin rovers in 2004, Phoenix lander in 2008, and InSight lander in 2018, never included the Viking lander experiments. NASA decided instead to have these and other future missions seek evidence of conditions that could have supported life in the past.
Today, Curiosity and Perseverance are two working rovers operating where ancient lake and water features existed. Neither rover includes Viking-like experiments. Curiosity’s exploration of Gale Crater has revealed interesting chemistry and geology that suggests past life. Perseverance’s exploration of Jezero Crater’s lake and delta features has equally found evidence of an environment that could have supported life.
A recent article appearing in Scientific American poses this question:
“What if life’s fingerprints have been on Mars all along, and we were too cautious to admit that we’d found them?”
Astrobiologists argue that the evidence is piling up to suggest life exists on Mars even though the planet is “marginally habitable at best” today. The Mars of 3.5 to 4 billion years ago that the two rovers are revealing was life-friendly, warmer and wetter.
The latest supporting evidence comes from Perseverance, a mudstone containing chemically altered iron and organics. Here on Earth, sampling of similar mudstone points to the existence of mineral-eating microbes contained within the rocks. So, unless Martian chemistry works in ways totally alien to how chemistry works elsewhere in the Universe and here on Earth, the sole explanation for this discovery is we have found a Rosetta Stone equivalent that proves Mars was once alive.
Curiosity has also revealed chemistry in the sediments at Gale Crater which show lots of carbon-containing long molecular chains with fatty acids. On Earth, we would consider this to be evidence of past cellular life. Non-biological explanations may exist, but Occam’s Razor comes to mind. Curiosity’s combined with Perseverance’s discoveries suggest that the most likely explanation is true: past microbial life. When evidence from two places separated by thousands of kilometres produces results pointing to life, isn’t it time to admit that Aristotle was wrong?
Earth has never been alone in the Universe, certainly in the past, and probably in the present. In seeking further proof that Democritus was right, Part 3 will look at the evidence of alien life’s existence as revealed in recent asteroid sample return missions.
Stay tuned.
The post Alone In the Universe – Not So Fast: Part 2: UFOs, UAPs, Martians, and Asteroids appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post Apollo 11 57 Years Ago Shows Yawning Gap in the Artemis Plans to Return to the Moon appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The Apollo technology was an all-in-one mission and solution. It involved a single launch vehicle, the Saturn V megarocket. Its payload included the command module and lunar lander. Its simplicity was its strength. It also meant there was a single point of failure should there be a failure to achieve a successful launch to orbit.
NASA perfected rendezvous and docking routines through the Gemini missions. The missions to the Moon required the lander, the lunar excursion module (LEM), to separate from the command module and descend to the surface, and then return.
The design for Apollo missions turned out to be the saving grace for Apollo XIII, when the LEM served as a lifeboat to rescue the astronauts when an accident disabled the command module on the way to the Moon.
All Apollo missions, except Apollo XIII, repeated Armstrong’s lunar landing success. Each mission added longer stays, more sophisticated experiments, and additional transportation options that let astronauts explore more of the lunar surface.
The Apollo Program wasn’t a simple solution for getting to the Moon and back. Simple would have been to send a rocket to the Moon, land it, and then take off and return to Earth. Weight and fuel considerations made that impossible.
Comparing Apollo technology to Artemis plans, however, does make the former solution sound dead simple.
The technology for Artemis Program missions?
For Apollo, NASA worked with a short list of private contractors. For Artemis, the door has been opened to many: at least 10 major notable contractors; 4 involved with SLS; 11 and the beginning for landers, now down to 2; 3 for lunar transportation; and many others for elements to support lunar infrastructure.
Without talking about the prolonged waiting period to finally get SLS working, and without talking about the problems first encountered with Artemis I and heat shield damage, lots of other milestones for Artemis have not come to fruition.
The recent Artemis II mission slipped from a 2024 launch to April 2026.
Artemis III has been materially altered. It is described as a “risk reduction” mission. Instead of being a flight involving four astronauts going to the Moon and two landing on it, it will test rendezvous and docking with one or both lunar landers. In other words, it will test all of the hardware, software, and crew procedure elements needed for a successful future lunar landing mission, without leaving Earth orbit. The current launch date is sometime in 2027.
What could further hold all of this back? Delivery of the landers in time is the major issue. Recent setbacks include SpaceX’s inability to show that its latest Starship upgrade will be ready and reliable by 2027. The same can be said about Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which would deliver Blue Moon.
Artemis IV is the return to the Moon surface mission. Originally, it was dedicated to delivering pieces and assembling the lunar space station called Gateway. Gateway is gone now. Instead, this mission will launch four crew members to rendezvous and dock with a lander already in lunar orbit. Two of the astronauts will leave Orion and transfer to the lander. They will then descend to the Moon near its south pole. For nearly a week they will explore, perform experiments, and test navigation and communications technologies for use on the surface. Current timing is sometime late in 2028.
Artemis V was originally to happen in late 2028. That isn’t happening, so I expect the mission will slip to 2029 or 2030. Artemis VI, originally scheduled for 2030, will likely slip to 2031. Artemis VII will then likely slip to 2032.
The post Apollo 11 57 Years Ago Shows Yawning Gap in the Artemis Plans to Return to the Moon appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post NASA Sends Out a Request for Proposals to Replace the ISS appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The presence of a permanent Low-Earth Orbiting (LEO) successor to the ISS cannot be underestimated. The ISS has been both a valued environment where humans have tested our ability to adapt to an off-world existence. It has served as a micro-gravity environment of inestimable value. In addition, it has been a global project involving many partnering countries. Where else can Russian cosmonauts and American and other nations’ astronauts break bread together?
Lately, the ISS is showing its age. One of the Russian modules has experienced leaks, with astronauts and cosmonauts seeking shelter in their attached spacecraft until the problem was resolved. The ISS cannot go on indefinitely even though some at NASA and in the U.S. government keep talking about extensions. The planned end date of 2030 or 2031, however, should be adhered to, considering it is a decade longer than the original ISS best-before date.
An industry briefing today will provide background and answer questions about the new request to industry partners for an ISS replacement. NASA has set July 27, 2026 as a deadline date for industry feedback, with the final RFP to appear near the end of August. The response window is tight: 60 days. NASA expects to award the contract next spring.
NASA cannot help itself when it comes to creating acronyms. The new station is referred to in the RFP as the CLD (Commercial LEO Destination). The RFP draft is looking to have a contractor or contractors cover design, build, operations, crew and cargo parameters and transportation to and from the CLD.
China’s Tiangong, operational since 2022, will still be in orbit when ISS comes to an end in 2030 or 2031. China’s exclusion from the ISS remains a sore point. That doesn’t preclude future collaborations with Russia’s Roscosmos and other national space programs that are not NASA.
Meanwhile, Russian rumblings have suggested separating its modules from the ISS before the end date and refurbishing and adding new capacity to continue a LEO presence.
American and European commercial partners of NASA are also contemplating replacing the ISS. Several projects are already on the go. These include:
The Agency is encouraging vendors to engage NASA personnel and expertise as they write their responses.
Three questions:
The post NASA Sends Out a Request for Proposals to Replace the ISS appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post What Holds Our Future Back? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Tens of thousands of years from now, Voyager 1 will approach one of the stars in the Little Dipper constellation (Ursa Minor). If it had been heading to our closest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, the voyage would require an additional 1,547.6 light-days (4.24 light-years) and take 77,380 Earth years.
As Voyager 1 passed the Heliopause that marks the furthest reach of the Sun’s influence, it has been encountering interstellar space, and it’s not empty. Even in this near vacuum beyond the Solar System, there are atomic particles and whole atoms, plasma, magnetic fields, and gas pockets. Our previous perceptions of space being a vacuum have been proven wrong. Even when there are no stars, planets, moons, asteroids and comets, there is lots of space stuff which we humans may use once we get that far.
The above mathematics illustrates why planet-bound thinking cannot prevail for humanity. We already know of evidence that biological precursors for life exist on Mars and asteroids. That points to life elsewhere, and even intelligent life. How small is our thinking when we see ourselves planet-bound forever?
Our corner of The Universe has plenty of resources to go around. In our Solar System alone, we can harvest the energy and materials to build hundreds of Earths. That’s because space provides us with near-infinite quantities of everything humanity needs: lots of real estate and the energy of the Sun to light and power it are just a beginning. Add all the extractable materials we can harvest, beginning with the Moon and asteroids, and humanity can be off to the interplanetary races.
Elon Musk covets a real estate empire on Mars with a city of a million in the latter part of this century. Is this fanciful thinking? Maybe not if we begin with lunar real estate.
I receive newsletters and meeting notes from NASA’s LSIC group, which meets monthly to coordinate ISRU, an acronym that stands for In-Situ Resource Utilization for future space travel. LSIC scientists and engineers are designing the essential engineering that NASA will deploy to exploit local lunar and Martian resources on planned and future missions. The benefits of the ISRU strategy include:
The Moon’s surface can provide propellants (hydrogen) and life support consumables (water and oxygen). Lunar regolith can be source material for surface infrastructure. Lunar regolith can shield habitations from cosmic and solar rays.
With permanent human presence, we can begin harvesting significant amounts of Helium-3 (He-3), a non-radioactive isotope of Helium found in-situ. Today, He-3 is highly regulated on Earth because it is not naturally occurring here. It is a byproduct of radioactive decay from tritium, which is used in commercial nuclear reactors and bombs. He-3 is worth between US$15 and $19,000 per gram. Current Earth uses include neutron scattering applications in fields like materials science, physics and chemistry. He-3 is used in quantum computing, medical imaging, cryogenics, soil and gas exploration, and phase-transition research on polymers and superconductors.
The promise of commercial nuclear fusion is premised on adequate supplies of He-3. A Gigawatt fusion reactor needs approximately 52.5 kilograms of He-3 per year. He-3 in the first metre of the Moon’s surface is estimated to total 220,000 metric tons. Lunar robotic miners are already under development for extracting He-3 and other high-value materials from the Moon’s surface.
In 2023, NASA launched a mission to the asteroid Psyche (see image above). The spacecraft, also named Psyche, will arrive in 2029 to study its properties.
Psyche lies between Mars and Jupiter. It is thought to be a planetesimal core remnant, part of the metallic centre of a planet that never fully formed during the early history of the Solar System. From Earth observations, we know that Psyche is rich in metals, between 30% and 60% by volume. It likely contains more nickel than has ever been mined on Earth. It also contains iron and other metals, as well as silicates.
An estimate of Psyche’s mineral wealth has produced the following: US$10 quintillion, or $10,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s greater than all the mineral wealth we have extracted to date or will in the future from Earth.
Psyche, by Voyager 1 distance standards, lies right next door to us here on Earth.
Then there are carbonaceous asteroids, containing water (hydrogen and oxygen), hydrated minerals, carbon, other organics and chemicals, and bulk construction and shielding materials.
Recent sample return missions to Bennu and Ryugu, two carbonaceous asteroids, confirmed the presence of fuels and life support resources, other valuable organics and bulk materials for constructing space infrastructure.
Beyond the Moon and before the Asteroid Belt lies Mars. Elon Musk’s forever ambition, it seems, is to make humanity an interplanetary species by colonizing Mars. This would avoid an Earth extinction-level event like the one that ended the dinosaurs.
Colonizing Mars, however, is not necessarily a good fit when considering an infinite resource acquisition strategy. The Moon and asteroids are better, even though Mars could implement an in-situ resources strategy to build local infrastructure. But Mars is harder to get to, has more gravity than either the Moon or asteroids, and is less attractive for establishing a large-scale space economy. The Moon and asteroids can do that. What Mars can be is a good watering hole (it’s got lots of ice), and a potential proving ground for human multi-planetary space ambitions beyond the Solar System.
Elon has talked about harvesting the infinite resources of space. So has Peter Diamandis of XPrize fame. Joining them are people like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin. All of them see humanity’s future in space, where near-infinite quantities of everything we need are available: energy, materials, real estate, and more.
“The Expanse” was a science fiction television series that ran through the COVID-19 pandemic years. I watched it as I recovered from both the virus and knee replacement surgery.
The series was set several hundred years in the future. Humans had colonized much of the Solar System. Mars was independent. Colonies existed on the Moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and Ceres in the Asteroid Belt had become the capital of a new independent nation.
Other than the plot and story lines, is “The Expanse” depiction of humanity’s future more plausible than Star Trek? I think so.
Why can the future look something like “The Expanse?”
Earth, today, has more than 14,000 artificial satellites circling it and thousands more planned for launch. The Moon has a growing inventory, as does Mars.
The NASA Artemis Program and China’s Space Agency are both racing to build a permanent base on the Moon. That will mean more space infrastructure in proximity or orbit around the Moon. If Artemis timelines are kept, a permanent surface lunar presence will begin before 2030. Lunar mining and factories will begin to churn out the materials needed to support space infrastructure beyond the Moon.
Big Tech has entered space to make money. SpaceX recently launched a public offering that turned the company into a multi-trillion-dollar play. Blue Origin, RocketLab and others will likely follow the same path.
Will we see space stations turn into permanent space communities? Will asteroid mining be the business opportunity to justify asteroid mining towns?
Fuel depots like today’s service stations here on Earth will string across interplanetary highways in Solar System space, providing convenient waystations for voyages to Mars, space communities and the Asteroid Belt.
In the making, new propulsion technologies will speed up space travel and shorten the timelines between Earth and lunar space, Mars, the Asteroid Belt and real estate on the Moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager 1 will still have us beat unless the Warp drives of Star Trek become real. We will, however, no longer be bound by our finite planet and will tap into the infinite and limitless resources to power and sustain humanity beyond the 21st century.
The post What Holds Our Future Back? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post NASA’s New Direction – Missions for Glory or Science or Both appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>In the 1960s, the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated that the Soviet Union was spending as much as US$ 10 billion to beat NASA to the Moon. It is estimated that the Soviet program expenditures peaked at approximately $7 billion in 1969, the year Armstrong took that first step on the lunar surface. NASA’s overall spending was much greater than the Soviets’ in the effort to win the race. Peak NASA expenditures occurred in 1966, with the agency spending between $5.2 and $5.9 billion, $3.2 billion in the 1969 landing year, and overall $25.8 billion.
If you think the Apollo numbers are high, adjusted for inflation, in current dollars, they would be between $220 and $280 billion. For Artemis, to date, NASA will have spent over $100 billion by the end of this year.
What are the Chinese spending? The CNSA website and China’s Xinhua news agency are equally circumspect. Industry watchers, however, put China’s annual space budget at approximately $5 billion, and $37 billion in total is the estimate for its human Moon landings program by 2031.
Artemis IV and V, the first two NASA lunar landings, are currently scheduled for 2028. The budget for these two in total is currently $9.9 billion.
Spending this kind of money, whether you are China or the U.S. and its affiliate members in the Artemis Program or the affiliated Artemis Accords, is hardly trivial when you consider how it could be used here on Earth. NASA has 20 countries partnering with it, along with the European Space Agency, Japan’s JAXA and Canada’s CSA. Dozens of companies are developing the technology that Artemis will use.
The CNSA has formed an Artemis Accord equivalent entitled the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), involving domestic state-owned partners such as China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the China Manned Space Agency, and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. More than a dozen countries have signed ILRS agreements, including Russia’s Roscosmos, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Ethiopia, South Africa, and several others.
The Artemis Program and Accords, and China’s ILRS plan for a permanent presence on the lunar surface. Both are looking at the lunar south pole. Why there? Because the south pole has craters where water ice is present, a vital resource for habitation and fuel. Being at the South Pole means sunlight can be captured and harvested from crater rims continuously, avoiding the 14-day, 14-night lunar cycle if landings were elsewhere.
Ice in the South Pole craters measures between 100 million and 1 billion tons. The lunar regolith also contains buried ice lying less than a metre below the surface. This volume of ice will easily support bases established by NASA or the CNSA. It means enough water for drinking, agriculture, hygiene, and other operations. It means oxygen for air and fuel. It means hydrogen for rockets, power, and resource processing and manufacturing.
China wants to beat NASA to the South Pole for bragging rights. NASA wants to get there before China to establish America’s continuing lunar and space power dominance.
NASA has the throw weight to make it back to the lunar surface before China.
NASA can choose from several options, including the Space Launch System, SpaceX’s Starship megarocket or Blue Origin’s Glenn rocket.
China is still developing its heavy lift rocket, the Long March 10. The first flight test will likely be in 2027 or 2028.
NASA has a tested deep space capsule, Orion, to get human crews to lunar orbit.
China has yet to test a deep space successor to its Shenzhou, used today to ferry taikonauts to China’s space station. Called Mengzhou, it may undergo its first flight test in 2027 or 2028.
NASA is counting on two contractors to deliver lunar landers. SpaceX is modifying its Starship to create the Human Landing System (HLS). Blue Origin is building the Blue Moon Mark 2. Both may be ready in time for the Artemis III mission planned for 2026, where they will undergo testing in Earth orbit.
China’s lunar lander, Lanyue, is expected to be ready for its first flight test in 2027 or 2028.
A lot of things can go wrong with all these different moving parts. Timelines may slip. Accidents could cause prolonged delays. Costs could spiral upward. Testing in low-Earth orbit won’t be the same as the real mission in orbit around and landing on the Moon.
NASA has done it before, and other than the agency’s complacency until the arrival of its new Director, Jared Isaacman, seemed to lack the energy, direction and sense of urgency that a race entails.
China has all the motivation in the world to beat NASA back to the Moon.
Let’s hope our return to the lunar surface is not for glory but to learn more about our place in the Universe and what our species can accomplish without war.
So when said and done, other than bragging rights, what will we have gained? If humanity can establish a permanent presence on the Moon, will it be a stepping stone to becoming an interplanetary species?
Whatever the result, we won’t be the only life going along for the ride. Humanity will bring a great deal of life from Earth along with us.
Where to next? NASA and the CNSA both see Mars as their next stop. Wouldn’t it be advantageous if the two, along with their many partners, were to combine forces for such an adventurous endeavour?
The post NASA’s New Direction – Missions for Glory or Science or Both appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post NASA’s SR-1 Freedom is a Nuclear Mission Bound for Mars in 2028 appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>What’s driving NASA to revisit the nuclear option? Likely, it is the renewed space race with Russia recently announcing plans to deploy a nuclear rocket option and China continuing to make progress with its space program. With either of these two space rivals, NASA does not want to be playing from behind. It already did that in the 1960s before the Apollo Program vaulted past the Soviet Union to achieve the Moon landing in 1969.
NASA’s history with nuclear power for spacecraft has involved using RTGs and other thermoelectric nuclear power sources. RTGs use radioactive plutonium-238’s natural decay to generate thermoelectric power. The technology has been perfected over time, and it has proven to be very reliable.
Today, RTGs continue to power the two Voyager spacecraft that have long left the Solar System after touring the Ice Giants of the Outer Solar System. RTGs powered the two Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars in 1976. These systems provided power for Galileo as it circled Jupiter, and Cassini during its multi-year mission to the Saturnian system. New Horizons, the spacecraft that visited Pluto and continues to explore the Kuiper belt, is powered by an RTG. Today, two RTG power plants keep Curiosity and Perseverance going on the Martian surface.
RTG technology, however, is not suitable to power a rocket. For that, NASA has looked to alternative technologies starting in the 1960s, up until now.
The 1960s saw NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission launch a project they called NERVA, a nuclear-thermal-propulsion (NTP) rocket using a solid-core fission reactor to heat hydrogen gas and expel at high speed through a nozzle. The project was cancelled not because it wouldn’t work, but rather because of budgetary concerns.
Its replacement, more recently, has been called DRACO, a demonstration nuclear rocket technology. DRACO also uses a fission reactor and hydrogen fuel. Until recently, it was the technology NASA intended for its first nuclear rocket. Now the project has been mothballed.
The new nuclear-powered rocket is called the SR-1 Freedom, with a mission plan to go to Mars. The SR-1 mission will carry the Skyfall payload to Mars. The Skyfall capsule will descend to the Martian surface by parachute and deploy three helicopters, built as successors to Ingenuity, the helicopter that accompanied the Perseverance rover and flew 72 missions for almost three years before rotor damage grounded it.
NASA describes the SR-1 as a nuclear-powered interplanetary tugboat. To meet a 2028 launch date, NASA intends to use the already-built Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) that was to be used by the now-defunct Lunar Gateway and modify it to integrate a 20+ KiloWatt nuclear fission reactor. Lunar Gateway was to be powered by solar panels. Repurposed for the SR-1, the reactor will generate electricity to power xenon plasma ion thrusters to provide thrust.
Where NERVA and DRACO converted power from their fission reactors to directly superheat hydrogen gas and expel it to achieve thrust, SR-1 will use a more indirect approach with the reactor generating electricity to feed ion thrusters, in other words, a NEP, a nuclear-electric propulsion system.
The timelines are tight. The Mars launch window is to have SR-1 ready for December 2028. Besides assembling the SR-1, which will involve the nuclear reactor, a power conversion system and the ion thrusters, the U.S. Department of Energy will have to provide nuclear certification.
SR-1 will take a year to get to Mars. So, this is not a high-speed option to be used by crewed missions to Mars in the future. Besides the increased mass and the need for shielding to protect the crew from cosmic rays, a variant of the SR-1 could be used. For example, a 100 to 500 KiloWatt fission reactor paired with a larger power conversion system and more ion thrusters could shorten transit times to 3 to 4 months. A successor to the SR-1 could include return propulsion systems to ensure a margin of safety for its crew.
What the SR-1 Freedom mission will do is be a proof of concept that should quickly render chemical rockets for long-duration missions beyond the Moon obsolete.
Is it possible to see fusion-powered rockets in the next 30 years? Controlled fusion here on Earth is still going through birth pains. A commercial fusion reactor will likely be a reality within the next ten years. A direct fusion drive to power a rocket is another matter.
Why go there? Because nuclear fusion in space is far easier than doing it here on Earth, and because nuclear fusion engines would need only tiny amounts of fuel to generate the thrust needed to shorten a mission to Mars to 1 or 2 months, and to Pluto in less than 4 years. Fusion would be the king of propulsion technologies.
The post NASA’s SR-1 Freedom is a Nuclear Mission Bound for Mars in 2028 appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The post Jared Isaacman Has Spoken, Gateway Is Gone And Other Artemis Changes appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>With Artemis II delayed and the next departure date tentatively set for April Fool’s Day, the program desperately needed a success story.
Was Isaacman the person to pull Artemis out of the fire?
Could America’s human space program, except for the ISS, be salvaged from the Congressional pork-barreling and constant political interference from past presidents?
Could NASA continue to exist in the face of a burgeoning commercial space economy led by companies like SpaceX? NASA today has become reliant on SpaceX to ferry its crews to the ISS. Joining SpaceX are other commercial operators, like Blue Origin, Sierra Space and Rocket Lab. All are chomping at the bit to get into the space game. The triumph of the NASA Apollo Program is a distant memory.
Enter Isaacman, a billionaire astronaut who commanded and privately funded two missions to space, the first in 2021, and the second in 2024, using the services and technology from SpaceX. He is a human in space enthusiast and appears well-suited to get NASA’s Artemis Program back on the rails.
Following Isaacman’s reshuffling of upcoming missions beyond Artemis II, Isaacman announced on March 24, 2026, a $20 billion change in plans. No surprise: Lunar Gateway cancelled.
There will be fallout from Gateway’s death. Artemis partners and contractors have been working on components for the project. Some of these are close to completion or already delivered. A partial list follows:
The above suppliers list is far from complete. There are many more subcontractors contributing components to these projects, creating a substantial supply chain.
Gateway was a $5.3 billion project. Is the money gone, or can work be repurposed? In the March 24, 2026 announcement, it states that the Gateway supply chain partners will see their contracts adjusted to repurpose the hardware and software to meet a new objective, the building and support of a permanent lunar base near the South Pole.
Isaacman’s announcement of this new Artemis twist, the Ignition Project. It allocates $20 billion over seven years to construct the lunar base and involves dozens of missions to the Moon.
The Ignition announcement didn’t just discuss the lunar project. I will save the rest for another posting. But for now, what follows describes NASA’s new plan for Artemis.
Ignition is the name Isaacman has chosen to establish the first permanent lunar base by 2030. Ignition includes habitats, lunar transportation, a nuclear power station, communications and other infrastructure. Ignition is to be a testbed for a future mission to Mars and involves three phases:
A recent Politico article labelled the Lunar Gateway a “moondoggle.” I questioned the need from the early stages of the Artemis Program. That, however, doesn’t mean that Gateway has no merit. It could be a model for future waystations between Earth, Mars and other destinations in the Solar System. Future versions of Gateway could become space service centres to support a growing transportation network similar to how gas stations support terrestrial road networks.
Another potential use for a future version of Gateway in cislunar space could serve as an Earth observation platform, providing a bird’s-eye view of the Earth and the satellites that orbit around it.
Gateway could serve to identify any space rocks that might, in future, threaten Earth. And finally, it could provide a template for building future space cities in cislunar space and beyond.
But for now, may Lunar Gateway rest in peace.
The post Jared Isaacman Has Spoken, Gateway Is Gone And Other Artemis Changes appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>