Federal law enforcement authorities arrested a former NASA contract employee as he attempted to leave the U.S. for his native China on March 16, charging him with lying about electronic media he was attempting to take with him. Bo Jiang, a computer imagery-enhancement expert who has been the target of whistleblower charges that he has taken “volumes” of sensitive NASA data back to China, was arrested at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.
Under pressure from a powerful member of Congress, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin is launching an audit of how the U.S. space agency handles access by foreign nationals to its facilities. Martin told Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) about the new audit after a face-to-face drubbing the day before, in which Wolf — chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA — told Martin he was “disappointed” in the way the Office of the Inspector General has enforced laws and regulations designed to protect sensitive technology.
Australia's startup satellite operator NewSat will launch the Jabiru-1 satellite in early 2015 after spending several months finalizing more than $400 million in export-credit-agency financing.
Companies that market Russian and Ukrainian launch services are banking on their hardware suppliers to get their acts together— and on continued demand for satellite launches—to keep satellite operators returning their telephone calls in the face of ongoing quality-control problems plaguing the once-proud space industry set up by the former Soviet Union.
With no takers among cash-strapped European governments, EADS Astrium is talking to Singapore about partnering on the GO-3S space surveillance system, a geostationary satellite that promises to be the first to transmit real-time video resolving objects as small as 3 meters (10 ft.) across.
This gray powder from inside a Martian “mudstone” contains sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and carbon—all chemical ingredients for life as we know it on Earth and a major target of the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. In a first for planetary science, the mission's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover drilled the hole at left, after a test run to the right, and transferred some of the powder to its internal chemistry labs.
Unwieldy U.S. military procurement continues to hamper the use of hosted payloads as a time- and cost-saving way to put sensors and relays into orbit, even with a hosted UHF link serving troops and sailors in Afghanistan and the rest of the Indian Ocean region. That hosted payload on the Intelsat 22 bird belongs to the Australian Defense Force (ADF) and has worked well since its launch a year ago on a Proton. The ADF paid $167 million for the 18 UHF channels and had them up and running less than three years after it signed the contract.
The deficit-reduction measure that went into effect March 1 cuts 7.9% from discretionary defense spending and 5.3% from non-defense discretionary spending. Surely, Washington's latest manufactured crisis will not do any serious damage, will it? Well, consider this:
With a U.K. commitment to increase its European Space Agency contribution 25%, the space industry is becoming a major economic driver in Britain. The nation's £1.2 billion ($1.8 billion) pledge to ESA programs is part of a larger €10-billion ($13 billion) spending package the agency approved last November, making the U.K. the agency's third-largest funder—after France and Germany—and positioning Astrium U.K. to reap the benefits.
It's been 10 years since the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) began its careful probe into the reasons NASA lost a second space shuttle. The late Sally Ride, a member of both the CAIB and the Rogers Commission set up after the first shuttle disaster, famously commented at the time that she heard an “echo of Challenger” in the loss of Columbia. Now many of the conditions that allowed the U.S.
Civil servants and contractors at NASA will have their wings clipped for the rest of the fiscal year by the automatic sequestration budget cuts that went into effect March 1, with sharp restrictions on travel to conferences and on training not considered essential to doing their jobs.
Cerebrotech Medical Systems Inc. hopes to develop a non-invasive sensor to monitor brain fluid changes believed responsible for vision changes detected in astronauts assigned to long-duration missions aboard the International Space Station.
AIR LAUNCH: A Payerne, Switzerland-based startup has joined with France’s Dassault, the European Space Agency and others to propose an air-launched, reusable, unpiloted space shuttle optimized for launching small satellites at low cost. Swiss Space Systems plans to use a vehicle based on Dassault Aviation’s Vehra airborne reusable hypersonic vehicle concept, and a throwaway upper stage, to orbit satellites weighing as much as 250 kg at altitudes of 600-800 km.
BEIJING — Development of two major derivatives of the DFH-4 satellite bus of Chinese spacecraft builder CAST is running ahead of work on the state manufacturer’s larger DFH-5 product, says a sibling marketing company.
BERLIN — Researchers at more than half a dozen European space institutes are working to build better tools to forecast the space weather patterns produced by the Earth’s Sun. Space weather events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) create streams of energetic particles that can adversely affect astronaut health, satellite operations and terrestrial power grids.
LOS ANGELES — Virgin Galactic says a series of final confirmation hot-fire tests of SpaceShipTwo’s RM2 hybrid rocket are under way at Mojave, Calif., in preparation for the start of powered test flights of its suborbital passenger vehicle.
