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      The U.S. and other spacefaring nations including Russia are engaged in a new space race to establish manned bases on the Moon and Mars in the near future. Russia is planning to launch a nuclear-powered space tug on a trip to Mars. A nuclear power plant will be sent to Mars to supply power for a manned base that they are planning.
     The Martian reactor was proposed by The Arsenal Design Bureau, an offshoot of Russia’s space agency Roscomos. Arsenal is based in St. Petersburg and specializes in the production of space technology. The Mars’ reactor design would be based on Zeus which is a nuclear-powered space tug that the Russians plan to begin flight-testing in 2030.
      An article in Sputnik, the state-owned Russian news agency, said, “Under Arsenal’s proposal, the reactor would be delivered to Red Planet aboard Zeus and floated down to its surface using a parachute system. After landing, the power plant would be activated to provide energy to a prospective Russian Martian base.”
     The Zeus space tug that delivered the nuclear power plant to the Mars base could then be deployed to an orbit between the Sun and Mars to act as a transmission point between the Mars’ base and mission control on Earth.
      Earlier this year, plans for the Zeus space tug were revealed by Alexander Bloshenko who is the chief of Roscosmos. During a presentation in Moscow, he said that the agency also plans to send the nuclear-powered space tug to Jupiter with stopovers at the Moon and Venus.
      The Zeus’ reactor is designed to generate enough power to carry heavy cargo though space at high speed. The space tug will have the capacity to carry equipment and possibly astronauts hundreds of millions of miles. Several countries are considering similar technology to help them carry out long distance deep space missions.
      Spacecraft currently have to rely on gravity or solar power to carry out long space flights. A manned journey to Mars and back using current technology could take as long as three years. According to NASA, nuclear-powered engines could reduce the time required for the journey by a year or more.
      The U.S. hopes to launch a small nuclear-power plant attached to a lunar-lander to the Moon as early as 2027. It is part of an experiment to test out the fledgling technology. NASA has only sent one nuclear reactor into space which was launched in 1965. Russia has sent dozens of nuclear reactors into space.
     NASA is working on the development of a small nuclear reactor called Kilopower for use on a manned Martian base. Kilopower reactors are planned to come in four sizes which will be able to produce from one to ten kilowatts of electrical power continuously for up to fifteen years. The fission reactor will burn uranium-235 to generate heat that is sent to Sterling converted with passive sodium heat pipes. Positive test results were announced for the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology demonstration reactor in 2018.

     Three companies, including Lunar Outpost, Honeybee Robotics, and Masten Space Systems, are developing a novel system aimed at mining water ice from the moon with rockets. The project was recently announced in a blog post shared on Masten’s official website.
     The polar regions on the Moon are though to contain abundant deposits water ice, especially in the shadowy bottoms of larger craters. According to NASA experts and space exploration enthusiasts, building a permanent settlement on the Moon will depend on astronauts being about to harvest water there. Mining water ice will produce drinking water and oxygen for settlers. In addition to being necessary for astronauts to survive on the Moon, water can also be used to make rocket fuel by breaking it down into oxygen and hydrogen. Water on the Moon could supply a refueling station with fuel for spacecraft on their way to deep space missions.
      NASA has issued the “Break the Ice Lunar Challenge” to stimulate the development of mining technology that can be used on the Moon to produce water. Five hundred thousand dollars will be awarded to the most interesting resource-harvesting concepts in the first phase. The winners will be announced on August 13. One of the first prize-hopefuls is a collaboration of Masten Space Systems, Lunar Outpost, and Honeybee Robotics. Their approach is the Rocket Mining System which utilizes a rocket engine attached to an eighteen-hundred-pound rover. First the rover will move to an area rich in water ice. Then the engine will activate, firing lunar gravel and dirt into a low-pressure device able to sift the ice from the Moon rocks. The Masten blog post said that “This system is projected to mine up to 12 craters per day and produce 220 pound of ice per crater.”  
     All the water ice retrieve from the Moon can also be used to fuel rocket engines. The system should be able to function for up to five years. If this idea can beat the competitors, the Rocket Mining System will probably be carried by a Masten lunar lander. Their first mission to the lunar surface will utilize the Masten XL-1 lander which is scheduled to launch in 2023 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This launch will also lift NASA experiments and several commercial payloads to the south polar region of the Moon.
     Lunar Outpost will design and construct the rover to carry the Rocket Mining System. Honeybee Robotics will employ its PlanetVac technology to extract and move lunar ice. In addition to NASA and related commercial projects, China and Russia plan to jointly build a permanent settlement on the Moon. China also has recently revealed long-term plans to build a permanent settlement on Mars. This is not necessarily a “space race”. There is more to learned from a spirit of friendly collaboration and mutual support than competition in the exploration of space.
     Spacefaring nations are in the process of working out the terms of Lunar treaties to deal with such issues as possession of areas on the lunar surface and resource access and ownership.

Part 2 of 2 Parts
     Gerhard Drolshagen works at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. He has published papers about the effects of meteoroid material on Earth. He said in an interview that reentering satellites usually evaporate at altitudes from fifty-five miles to thirty miles. This is just above the ozone rich stratosphere. However, the particles generated by the burning satellites will eventually sink to the lower layers including the ozone layer.
     Boyey said that as particles of aluminum oxide sink into the stratosphere, they will cause chemical reactions which are likely to trigger ozone destruction. Drolshagen agreed that because “satellites are mostly made of aluminum, the amount of aluminum deposited in the atmosphere will certainly increase.”
     The U.S. telecommunications operator Viasat has expressed concerns about the effects of aluminum oxides on the atmosphere in a request to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to suspend launches of SpaceX Starlink satellites until a proper environmental review of its possible impacts is conducted.
     In the research carried out by Boley and their team, they only reviewed the effects of the first generation of the Starlink mega-constellation of satellites. More than one thousand seven hundred of the planned twelve thousand satellites have been launched so far. Low Earth orbit is the region of space below an altitude of six hundred and twenty miles. As a result of the Starlink launches of SpaceX and other satellite constellations launches, the number of active and inactive satellites in LEO has increased by fifty percent in the last two years.
      Boley said, “The problem is that there are now plans to launch about 55,000 satellites. Starlink second generation could consist of up to 30,000 satellites, then you have Starnet, which is China’s response to Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper, OneWeb. That could lead to unprecedented changes to the Earth’s upper atmosphere.”
      Operators of mega-constellations are inspired by the consumer technology model. They expect fast development of new satellites and frequent replacement of existing satellites. This will result in a high number of satellites burning up in the atmosphere on a daily basis.
      Boley said, “Humans are exceptionally good at underestimating our ability to change the environment. There is this perception that there is no way that we can dump enough plastic into the ocean to make a difference. There is no way we can dump enough carbon into the atmosphere to make a difference. But here we are. We have a plastic pollution problem with the ocean, we have climate change ongoing as a result of our actions and our changing of the composition of the atmosphere and we are poised to make the same type of mistake by our use of space.”
      Mega-constellations cause great concern in the space industry as they also increase the dangers of orbital collisions in the already cluttered orbital environment.
      SpaceX Starlink has also been singled out because of the effects that the visible trains of their satellites have on astronomical observations. SpaceX has pledged to cooperate with the astronomical community and change the design of their satellites to ameliorate the problem. However, earlier this year, the International Astronomical Union asked a specialized committee of the U.N to protect the pristine night sky against light pollution from mega-constellations.
     Stephane Israel is the chief of European launch provider Ariane Space. Last week, he accused SpaceX owner Elon Musk of monopolizing space and squeezing out competitors. SpaceX has not responded to questions about the charges.

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     There are now warnings that if projects for launching tens of thousands of satellites such as SpaceX Starlink proceed as planned, eventually chemicals released as dead satellites plunge back to Earth could cause serious damage to the ozone layer. Scientists also say that poorly understood atmospheric processes can be triggered by satellite reentry. This could lead to unintended geoengineering experiments with unknown consequences.
     Up to the present, the space industry was satisfied that the amount of material that burns in the atmosphere as a result of fall of huge quantities of micrometeorites is far greater that the mass of materials contributed by falling satellites. However, the chemical composition of micrometeorites is very different than the composition of satellites.
      Aaron Boley is an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of a paper just published in the journal of Scientific Reports. In an interview, he said, “We have 60 tons of meteoroid material coming in every day.” Boley, one of the authors of a paper published May 20 in the journal Scientific Reports, said, “With the first generation of Starlink, we can expect about 2.2 tons of dead satellites reentering Earth’s atmosphere daily. But meteoroids are mostly rock, which is made of oxygen, magnesium and silicon. These satellites are mostly aluminum, which the meteoroids contain only in a very small amount, about 1%.”
     The research team realized that the huge concentration of communication satellites in orbit have the potential to modify the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. The burning of aluminum produces aluminum oxide also called alumina which can trigger more unexplored side effects. Boley said, “Alumina reflects light at certain wavelengths and if you dump enough alumina into the atmosphere, you are going to create scattering and eventually change the albedo of the planet.”
     The term albedo refers to the amount of light that a particular material reflects. Injecting specific types of chemicals into the higher levels of the atmosphere has been suggested as a possible geoengineering solution that could reduce global warming. However, Boley said that the scientific community has rejected such experiments because the possible unforeseen consequences. He said, “Now it looks like we are going to run this experiment without any oversight or regulation. We don’t know what the thresholds are, and how that will change the upper atmosphere.”
     The burning aluminum from falling satellites is understood to have the potential to damage the ozone layer. This is a well-known problem which has been successfully treated by bans on the use of chlorofluorocarbons. These chemicals have been utilized in the past in aerosol sprays and refrigerators.
     In the paper published by Boley’s team, they cite research by their counterparts at the Aerospace Corporation, a U.S. non-profit research organization. The AC research identified local damage to the Earth’s ozone layer that was triggered by the passage of polluting launch vehicles as they rose through the atmosphere.
      Boley said, “We know that alumina does deplete ozone just from rocket launches themselves because a lot of solid-fuel rockets use, or have, alumina as a byproduct. That creates these little temporary holes in the stratospheric ozone layer. That’s one of the biggest concerns about compositional changes to the atmosphere that spaceflight can cause.”
     The ozone layer protects life on Earth from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. It is the second lowest layer in the atmosphere. It extends from seven miles above the surface to forty miles. Depletion of the ozone layer leads to an increased risk of cancer and eye damage to people on Earth.
Please read Part 2 next

Part 12 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
16. Solar System Pony Express
Joshua Vander Hook
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
     The Solar System Pony Express is a global, multi-spectral, high-resolution planetary surveyor supported by regular visits from a cycler satellite network to retrieve petabits of data for transmission to Earth. The “courier” satellites will utilize optical communication to receive between one and three petabits of data from the surveyor once a year. The couriers will then return to near Earth orbit where they can download the data quickly. By exploiting cyclers orbits, the couriers will need minimal onboard propulsion. They should be able to operate for decades as an augmentation to the Deep Space Network and a precursor to Human Exploration logistics network.

Part 11 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
15. Light Bender
Charles Taylor
NASA Langley Research Center
Light Bender is a unique concept for the generation and distribution of power on the lunar surface. This idea is part of the context of the Artemis mission and the “Long-Term Human Lunar Surface Presence” that will follow. This innovative concept is based on a heliostat that utilizes Cassegrain telescope optics as the primary way to capture, concentrate, and focus the light of the Sun on the surface of the Moon. A second key innovation is the utilization of a Fresnel lens to collimate this light for distribution to multiple end users at distances of a mile or more away without significant losses. The redirected and concentrated solar energy is then converted to electricity at the end user’s location using small photovoltaic arrays that can be mounted on habitats, cyro-coolers, or mobile assets such as rovers or ISRU elements. This concept is superior to alternatives such as highly inefficient Laser Power Beaming because it only converts light to electricity once. It is also superior to traditional power distribution architectures that rely on mass intensive labels.
      The value proposition of Light Bender is a ~5x mass reduction in mass over traditional technological solutions such as LPB or a distributed network predicated on high voltage power cables. Light Bender will also allow the powering of scientific and ISRU systems in permanently shaded crates on the Moon’s surface in ways that other systems cannot. In the initial design, the primary mirror system captures the equivalent of almost forty-eight kilowatts of Sun light. End user electrical power will be dependent on the distance from the primary collection point. Informal analysis suggests that at least nine kilowatts of continuous power will be available within half a mile of the heliostat. This rivals a Kilowatt small nuclear reactor’s stated output of ten kilowatts. The total system power level is scalable either by changing the size of the primary collection element, the size of the receiver element, the distance that separates nodes, or by increasing the number of collection systems established on the Moon.
     The Phase 1 system feasibility and trade studies will address the “know unknowns” of the system design that will have an impact on performance and operational suitability of the system. There are two primary areas of importance at this point in time. The first one is the optical mirror/lens design and how this design will manifest itself in a mechanical structure meant to deploy autonomously form a small-stowed volume. The first analysis requires the creation of a detailed optics system model and subsequent trade studies of element design, materials, and coatings to achieve a solution that provides acceptable light propagation performance. Once a design is finalized, competing methods of autonomous deployment will be evaluated. The second important task following the design/feasibility study, is an evaluation of architectural alternatives for Light Bender which will be performed in the context of a lunar base located near the Moon’s South Pole during sustained lunar surface operations. The primary figure of merit will be the minimization of landed mass. Comparisons will be made to known power distribution technologies such as LPB and cables.

Part 10 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
14. Making Soil for Space Habitats by Seeding Asteroids with Fungi
Jane Shevtsov
Trans Astronautica Corporation
     Any big, long-term human space habitat will have to grow most of its own food and recycle as many nutrients as possible. For missions that can be easily resupplied, it would make sense to grow crops hydroponically. However, soil-based systems possess important advantages in the context of a large settlement that cannot be affordably resupplied from Earth.
     One proposed habitat design is a cylinder that rotates to create artificial gravity and support up to eight thousand people. Such habitats might be used for asteroid mining, space manufacturing and research. Such a habitat would be self-sustaining with respect to food and also would also have ample green space for the support of crew mental health and to function as part of the life support system.
     Attempting hydroponic crop cultivation at this scale would run into serious problems with the amount of machinery required and the concomitant proliferation of failure points such as pumps and piping. In addition, hydroponic systems require nutrient solutions and do not lend themselves to the recycling of agricultural and human waste. Such recycling is easily accomplished with a soil-based system through composting the waste and the use of thermophilic methods that are effective at killing pathogens.
     The Trans Astronautica team proposes the creation of soil from carbon-rich asteroid material and the use of fungi to physically break down the material and chemically degrade toxic substances. They will use fungi to turn asteroid material into viable soil. The basic concept is to inoculate carbonaceous asteroid material with fungi to initiate soil formation. Fungi are excellent at the decomposition of complex organic molecules, including those that would be toxic to other forms of life. For example, oyster mushrooms have been shown to successfully clean up soil contaminated with petroleum by digesting the hydrocarbons making up the petroleum. Fungi hyphae can penetrate long distances into cracks and exert huge amounts of pressure which physically breaks down rock. Evidence indicates that fungi played a key role in early soil formation on Earth.
      The approach of the Trans Astronautica team will consist of two tasks to be accomplished under Phase 1.
1) Task 1 will be to identify the leading fungal species for experimental use on simulated asteroid material. This will be followed by a sturdy of their solid production rates and the effects of physical parameters such as temperature, humidity and oxygen concentration.
2) Task 2 will be the evaluation of a number of different approaches for performing the breakdown of asteroid regolith by fungi in space. These approaches will be ranked in terms of productivity and estimated costs, as well as sizing them to support a target mission habitat within a reasonable amount of time.

Part 9 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
13. SWIM — Sensing with Independent Micro-swimmers
Ethan Schaler
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
     During the next decades of deep space exploration, there will be a focus on the so-called Ocean Worlds. These include Enceladus, Europa, and Titan which are believed to have liquid water oceans beneath miles of icy crust. These worlds are some of the most probable locations beyond our Earth that may harbor complex aquatic lifeforms beneath their icy crusts. In order to reach these aquatic environments, NASA is developing numerous ocean-access mission concepts.
     One example is the Scientific Exploration Subsurface Access Mechanism for Europa class of thermo-mechanical drilling robots. SESAME supports the formulation and maturation of system concepts and the associated technologies capable of accessing liquid water by penetrating the surface ice of one of the Ocean Worlds.
1) Identify ice penetration systems capable of facilitating the detection of evidence of life by providing access to liquid water located 100s of meters to 10s of kilometers below the surface of the ice.
2) Identify the technology component representing the greatest technical risk to the overall penetration system.
3) Reduce the identified key component technology risks through the proposed development effort.
4) Develop prototype hardware and assess the hardware performance via analysis and complementary experiments.
     The NASA – JPL team proposes the development of Sensing with Independent Micro-swimmers which will dramatically expand the capabilities of SESAME-class ocean access robotic missions and significantly increase the probability of their detection of habitability, biomarkers and life.
     The SWIM system consists of 3D-printed swimming micro-robots equipped with MEMS sensors, propelled by miniature actuators, and wirelessly controlled with ultrasound waves. The micro-swimmers can be deployed either individually or in swarms from a single SESAME robot mothercraft. The mothercraft has limited mobility once it has anchored itself to the ocean-ice interface.
     SWIM allows active sampling of ocean water beyond the reach of the mothercraft. This increases the chance of detecting biomarkers. The micro-swimmers also allow the measurement of desired temporally-and-spatially-distributed ocean properties, habitability metrics and potential biomarkers. This combination of capabilities will allow scientists to make better characterizations and understand the alien ocean’s composition and habitability on NASA’s first ocean-access mission.
      In Phase 1, the NASA-JPL team will establish the fundamental feasibility of operating SWIM robots wirelessly at multiple-yard distances from a robotic mothercraft through two major tasks:
1)  They will build a Science Traceability Matrix focused on science goals for a NASA SESAME-class robotic mission at the ocean-ice interface.
2) They will perform a Micro-Swimmer Design Trade Study to determine the appropriate robot designs/sizes to use available science instruments at the intended exploration ranges and under the expected sub-surface ocean conditions. The study will focus on four key miniaturized subsystems including scientific instruments, actuators, communications and power (batteries, energy harvesters.

Part 8 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
12. FLOAT — Flexible Levitation on a Track
Ethan Schaler
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
     This project is dedicated to the construction of the first lunar railway system which will provide reliable, autonomous, and efficient package transport on the Moon. A durable, long-live robotic transport system will be very important to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030s. Such a base is envisioned in NASA’s Moon to Mars plan and mission concepts like the Robotic Lunar Surface Operations 2 in order to transport regolith mined for in situ resource utilization consumables such as H2O, LOX, and LH2 or for construction and transporting payloads around the lunar base to and from landing zones or other outposts.
     In order to accomplish these goals, the NASA JPL team proposes to develop Flexible Levitation on a Track to meet these transportation needs.
      The FLOAT system utilizes unpowered magnetic robots that levitate above a three-layer flexible film track. A graphite layer enables the robots to passively float over tracks using diamagnetic levitation. A flex-circuit layer generates electromagnetic thrust to controllably propel robots along the tracks. An optional thin-film solar panel layer generates power for the base when it is in sunlight during the two-week lunar day. The FLOAT robots have no moving parts, and they levitate over the track to minimize lunar dust abrasion which are damaging to lunar robots with wheels, legs or tracks.
     FLOAT tracks unroll directly onto the surface of the lunar regolith removing the need for major on-site construction which is required for conventional roads, railways or cableways. Individual FLOAT robots will be able to carry loads of various sizes up to seventy pounds per square yard at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. A big FLOAT system will be able to move up to hundreds of thousands of pounds of regolith or cargo multiple miles per day while consuming less than forty kilowatts of power. FLOAT robots will operate autonomously in the dusty, inhospitable lunar environment with minimal site preparation. Its network of tracks can be rolled up and reconfigured over time to match the changing requirements of lunar base missions.
     In Phase 1, the team will establish the fundamental feasibility of designing a FLOAT system with robots a yard long operating over miles of track to support human exploration activities on the Moon, by accomplishing the following four major tasks:
1) Define mission requirements such as payload mass/size/quantity, transport distance, power requirements and more from NASA lunar base studies.
2) Create simulations of FLOAT systems with robots a yard long operating over miles of track in lunar conditions to refine performance estimates.
3) Perform experiments on existing inch-scale, FLOAT-like robots to study the most pressing questions about FLOAT system feasibility.
4) Select appropriate size for FLOAT system to match mission requirements using predicted lunar performance from simulations and experiments.

Part 7 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
11. FarView – An In Situ Manufactured Lunar Far Side Radio Observator
Ronald Polidan
Lunar Resources, Inc.
     Lunar Resources, Inc. intends to use the NASA NAIC grant to perform an end-to-end system-level study on how to construct a very large low frequency radio observatory they call “FarView” on the side of the Moon that always faces away from the Earth, otherwise known as the far side of the Moon. They will use lunar regolith as the material for the construction. FarView will be a sparse array of about one hundred thousand dipole antennas that will cover as a twelve mile by twelve-mile area. The innovative technology elements enabling FarView will be for the near exclusive use of in situ resource utilization and on-site manufacturing of almost all of the system elements for the radio array. This includes power generation and energy storage systems.
     FarView science is focused on a highly detailed study of the unexplored Cosmic Dark Ages using the highly redshifted hydrogen twenty-centimeter line and identifying the conditions and processes under which the first stars, galaxies and accreting black holes formed. Currently, there is no equivalent observatory.
     This radio telescope will the first such telescope with respect to this scale and degree of sensitivity. It will open a new low frequency radio window into the early universe. These measurements cannot be made from Earth because of Earth generated radio noise and the ionosphere. FarView will have the ability to evolve. It will be sustained using in-situ manufacturing techniques and occasional systems upgrades from Earth. It will be less expensive and longer lived than a complete antenna array launched from Earth.
     The project includes the development of lunar surface infrastructure such as power systems, energy storage systems, in-space manufacturing assets, and space mining assets. This will enable future lunar surface scientific and commercial missions. Extraction and refinement of oxygen and metallic elements from lunar regolith processing activities will be used for future lunar outposts and other in-space manufacturing and human spaceflight activities on the lunar surface and in-space.
     With the NASA Artemis Program to return men to the Moon underway, this study will provide a timely assessment of the value and needs of this important observatory and develop technologies to allow a sustained lunar presence.