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WASHINGTON — If and when a new military branch for space gets off the ground, its ranks would be dominated by airmen. But Army soldiers also would have a role by virtue of much they rely on military satellites in peacetime or in war. More than 70 percent of the Army's major weapons and equipment need satellites to function. About 2,220 active-duty soldiers, reservists and civilians make up the "space forces" under the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command headquartered at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. "We are the biggest users of space," said Brig. Gen. Tim Lawson,...

The announcement that President Donald Trump wanted to create a “Space Force” that would serve as a co-equal branch of the Armed Forces brought a wide range of reactions. Some experts believed we needed it to defend U.S. interests above the clouds, including protecting our satellites and preventing orbital bombardment by China or Russia. Others posited it as a dangerous step toward the irrevocable militarization of space. And some said it didn’t matter, either because the unilateral expansion of the armed forces is beyond the scope of presidential power, or because Trump says he’s going to do a lot of...

A round, basketball-shaped autonomous assistant that is supposed to help astronauts with their space work. Sounds a lot like HAL-9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey," right? CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) won't say, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that," but the first-ever flying, autonomous, artificial intelligence-based robot is slated to head to the International Space Station (ISS) later this week. With any luck, CIMON will stay there for the foreseeable future. ..." "What we're trying to do with Watson AI services is imitate a human," Biniok said, adding that CIMON has a digital "mouth" and can express...

Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft will collect a piece of the asteroid Ryugu and bring it back to Earth. The asteroid Ryugu, recently imaged by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft that will now prepare to collect a sample. JAXA _____________________________________________________________________________________ Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has been traveling through space for almost four years, and it has finally reached its destination. The spacecraft has traveled all this way to a small asteroid, named Ryugu, for a singular purpose: to collect a piece of it and bring it back to Earth. Hayabusa-2 is the successor to Japan’s original Hayabusa spacecraft, which visited the asteroid Itokawa in 2005....

Russia has pledged severe repercussions if President Donald Trump’s order to set up a new, space-oriented military branch violates a treaty banning nuclear weapons in the cosmos. Trump said this week he will establish a sixth branch of the military named the “Space Force,” pending budgetary approval from the U.S. Congress. The idea could require the U.S. to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction but not conventional arms in space. Viktor Bondarev, head of the Committee on Defense and Security of Russia's upper parliamentary house, told the state-run RIA...

The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to travel to the nearest stars. The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a press conference joined by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the current vision is that thousands...

Credit: CC0 Public Domain _____________________________________________________________________________ Dan Hooper, a senior scientist with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has written a paper outlining a way future aliens could keep their civilizations alive in spite of the isolation due to an expanding universe. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, he suggests they might consider collecting and storing stars. A Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure able to house a star. Originally proposed by Freeman Dyson, the sphere was originally envisioned as a group of satellites completely encompassing a star to capture all of its energy. That energy could then be...

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he has ordered the creation of a new military branch, adding the "Space Force" to the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. "It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. Very importantly I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces, that is a big statement," Trump said at a meeting of the National Space Council on Monday. "We are going to...

<p>WASHINGTON — Trump announces he’s directing Pentagon to create ‘space force’ as independent service branch.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</p>

The world’s first trillionaire won’t come from cryptocurrency or some clever new app – he or she will become rich from asteroid mining. _____________________________________________________________________ That’s what bankers Goldman Sachs reckon, anyway – and several companies are now vying to be the first into space. NASA estimates that the total value of asteroids out there could be up to $700 quintillion – equivalent to £75 billion each for us here on Earth. Several companies are now buidling the machines which will take us there – including Deep Space Industries, which is building a steam-powered thruster for spacecraft, the Guardian reports. British...

"A second section deals with commercial remote sensing regulatory reform. “The current regulatory system is woefully out of date and needs significant reform to ensure the United States remains the chosen jurisdiction for these high tech companies,” the fact sheet states. A related section calls on the Secretary of Commerce to provide a plan to create a “one-stop shop” within his department “for administering and regulating commercial space flight activities.” The Commerce Department had previously announced plans to combine the Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs office with the Office of Space Commerce..." http://spacenews.com/new-policy-directive-implements-commercial-space-regulatory-reforms/ This appears to address regulatory issues that...

An Orbital ATK Antares rocket will launch a commercial Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station from Virginia's Eastern Shore before dawn on Monday, and the launch could be visible to potentially millions of spectators along the U.S. East Coast. The Antares rocket is scheduled to launch at 4:39 a.m. EDT (0839 GMT) on Monday (May 21) and should be highly visible across the East Coast of the United States, weather permitting. The mission, called OA-9, will launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to deliver more than 3 tons of supplies to...

On Monday, a cargo delivery to the International Space Station will carry old-fashioned sextants, E. colibacteria and lasers that will create a temperature 10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space. … CAL is sending the space station an experimental physics package that holds an "ice chest"-like compartment filled with lasers and electronics; the interior will be able to reach a temperature10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space, according to a NASA statement. Within this instrument, the researchers will use laser cooling techniques and magnets to slow down atoms until they are almost entirely motionless. By studying...

A bright, supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA ______________________________________________________________________________ Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years. "This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shining thousands of times more brightly than an...

It’s a staple of science fiction.... the idea of sending out spaceships with colonists and transplanting the seed of humanity among the stars. Between discovering new worlds, becoming an interstellar species, and maybe even finding extra-terrestrial civilizations, the dream of spreading beyond the Solar System is one that can’t become reality soon enough! For decades, scientists have contemplated how humanity might one-day reach achieve this lofty goal. And the range of concepts they have come up with present a whole lot of pros and cons. These pros and cons were raised in a recent study by Martin Braddock, a member...

Segment 1 mp3 podcast [13:27 total]; "Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter has released its first image after reaching its planned science orbit...Martian geology from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter... moving-images from the surface of Comet 67P...simulating super-nova explosions--are neutrino's the key?"

Cracks in the universe: the search for cosmic strings Galaxy-sized filaments of raw energy may be threaded through spacetime, according to some theories. Will we ever find traces of them? Cathal O’Connell takes up the hunt. Share Tweet Tatyun / Getty Images Our universe exploded into being, expanded at a fantastic speed and cooled. Perhaps too quickly. Some physicists believe the rapid cooling might have cracked the fabric of the universe.These hairline fractures may still be threaded through space-time. Dubbed cosmic strings, mathematical models see them as invisible threads of pure energy, thinner than an atom but light-years long. The...

"House passes new law to reform space licensing rules, Russians deal with yellow-water on ISS, Moscow contemplates banning rocket-engine sales to USA, Russia agrees to replace lost Angolan communications satellite, Indian Space Agency pulls back on launch over quality-issues, and...is Sierra Nevada still in the Game?"

The House yesterday passed a new law to reform the commercial space licensing rules...Essentially, the bill shifts a majority of commercial space regulation to the Department of Commerce, and matches somewhat closely the recommendations being put forth by the Trump administration. The bill appears to be almost identical to the version I analyzed in great detail in an op-ed for The Federalist last year.

The announcement by NASA that launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be delayed over another year, now May 2020, felt like déjà vu. When the JWST was first proposed in 1997, it was supposed to launch in 2007 and cost half a billion dollars. Now the launch date is 13 years later and the cost is at least $8.8 billion. NASA will have to go back to Congress for more money if the huge space observatory exceeds previous cost caps. In the meantime, NASA is convening an independent review board that will examine the problems that...