NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid 2020s.

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit […]

With OSIRIS-REx, an approximately $1 billion mission including its Atlas V launch vehicle, scientists will be able to control the source of the asteroid material, keep it free of Earth-based contamination, and preserve any organic molecules of interest. And that’s the key—planetary scientists are on the hunt for the organic precursors to life that might have existed in the early solar system. Notably, if key organic chemicals are found on asteroids it means that places like Mars and the Jovian moon of Europa were bombarded with the precursors of life billions of years ago, too.

“This mission is being driven by some of the most fundamental questions we ask ourselves as a species,” Lauretta said. “Where did we come from? How common is this process in the universe? Are we alone? By going back to the dawn of the solar system, and looking at the organic chemistry that occurred on these small bodies, we might find some answers.”

Amateur Radio satellites are a thing, and if you want to work them you have to know where they are.  Frustrated with a swath of outdated and incompatible tracking software, I decided to write my own, except mine runs on hardware that’s exotic, historic, and super-custom.

The orbital algorithms themselves are oldies but goodies:  The Simplified Perturbations Models, first used at the National Space Surveillance Control Center in the 60s.  I’m using the SGP4/SDP4 variants, published in 1988.

The hardware is a mashup of space-race-era computing, display, and interface hardware.  There are no Arduinos here, no Raspberry Pis, just cool old hardware that’s doing useful stuff.

[…]

As I’ve been developing this satellite tracking console, the goal has been to create a really unique piece of hardware that does useful work.  The fact that it’s built up from a very eclectic collection of parts is pretty important to the aesthetic, so when I started thinking about doing a map-based display of satellite location, I had to do some hard thinking on what to use.

When it comes to Cold War-era display hardware, I first considered going purely electromechanical.  This type of map can be seen in the James Bond movie, “The Spy Who Loved Me”.  In the climactic scene, there’s a huge semi-transparent globe with lights underneath that designate the locations of the hijacked submarines and the nukes they launch.  Major retrocool aesthetic to be had there, no doubt.

rad project.

Compared to harvesting antimatter on Earth, space harvesting is five orders of magnitude more cost effective, and Bickford’s report suggests we could be collecting 25 nanograms of antimatter per day near our planet. And here’s a spectacular mission concept that can grow out of this, also drawn from the Bickford report:

The baseline concept of operations calls for a magnetic scoop to be placed in a low-inclination orbit, which cuts through the heart of the inner radiation belt where most antiprotons are trapped. Placing the vehicle in an orbit with an apogee of 3500 km and a perigee of 1500 km will enable it to intersect nearly the entire flux of the Earth’s antiproton belt. The baseline mission calls for a fraction of the total supply to be trapped over a period of days to weeks and then used to propel the vehicle to Saturn or other solar system body where there is a more plentiful supply. The vehicle then fully fills its antiproton trap and propels itself on a mission outside of our solar system.