DART day (9/26/22)

Good morning, and happy DART day! Read on for more on today's fateful planetary defense test mission. 

In today's newsletter:📡 Starlink & Iran💥 DART details 🗓️ The week ahead

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The latest with Starlink and Iran

Protests in Iran reached their 10th night and 50 cities over the weekend, following the death of Mahsa Amini in custody. 

A digital curtain descends...In response to anti-government protests, Tehran has throttled internet access and mobile networks and blocked WhatsApp and Instagram, popular Western services within the country. 

…sidestepping the curtain? A week ago, Elon Musk tweeted that Starlink would seek an exemption to US sanctions to provide internet services in Iran.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers, led by Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) and Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), petitioned US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to provide Starlink with a license.

• “Treasury should quickly approve any licensing requests it receives from tech and internet companies, including Elon Musk’s Starlink,” Tenney said.

• “It’s our policy to stand with the Iranian people. We must do everything we can in this moment to make sure their voices are heard.”

On Friday, the US State Department said it issued a license authorizing the export “of certain services, software, and hardware related to communications to Iran.” At some point in the intervening days, SpaceX switched on Starlink in Iran.

But the space-based broadband service won’t work without terminals, which Iranians do not have. Moreover, Starlink requires ground stations within hundreds of miles of user terminals. SpaceX has not built any of those stations in Iran. Laser links may help alleviate ground constraints. Starlink V1.5 sats are fitted with inter-satellite links, which let constellations transmit data in-space and skirt the need for as many ground links. 

Let's talk logistics: In a Twitter thread on Sunday, Carnegie Senior Fellow Karim Sadjadpour recounted a conversation he had with Musk. Starlink requires terminals inside the country, “which I suspect the government will not support,” the SpaceX CEO said…“but if anyone can get terminals into Iran, they will work.”

The White House is reportedly receptive to the idea of getting terminals into Iranians’ hands. Still, the logistical barriers are numerous.

• “It will cost many millions of dollars to setup [sic] and sustain thousands of Starlink terminals to Iran,” Sadjadpour noted. 

• Moreover, SpaceX and Washington would need to find overland routes to smuggle in Starlink kits. 

There is modern precedent for such mobilization. The US and SpaceX have shipped 15,000+ Starlink terminals to Ukraine. And Ukrainians have downloaded the Starlink mobile app in droves.

• Comparatively speaking, the Ukrainian Starlink mobilization was less of an uphill struggle.

• Hardware flowed through eastern Europe and made its way throughout Ukraine with the help of a friendly government in Kyiv. 

• Traveling through Poland is an easier proposition than moving overland through Iraq or nearby countries. 

Payload takeaway: Products like Starlink could serve as an antidote to the splinternet. And for decades, satellite phones have helped leaders maintain an open line of communication during war or natural disasters. In theory, Starlink could be a 21st century, space-based version of the Voice of America broadcasts beamed over airwaves into authoritarian countries for decades. 

But getting this hardware into the right hands is no overnight process nor cakewalk. Plus, adversaries can jam satellite communications, or worse, geolocate, target, and take out terminal users. Finally, dual-use or counter-censorship applications of LEO megaconstellations could open commercial space assets up to electromagnetic warfare or kinetic attacks.

DART Ready for Impact

NASA is prepping for the day it may have to defend the Earth against an oncoming threat. Today, it’s taking a sci-fi approach: smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid hurtling through space to try and knock it off its course.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has been on the long journey to its target asteroid since it launched in November last year. Tonight at 7:14pm ET, it’s on track to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos, and livestream the impact for all of us back on Earth to watch.

DART background: NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office contracted the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to build a four-foot-wide, ~1,210-pound craft that could navigate and crash into a nearby asteroid to change the football stadium-sized rock’s trajectory.

The spacecraft came outfitted with its own autonomous navigation system, a set of roll-out solar arrays for power, and a camera for livestreaming the collision at a rate of 1 image per second. There’s also a free-flying auxiliary selfie cam, the Italian-built LICIACube, which successfully deployed last week and is ready to document the impact later this evening.

The target: The asteroid that DART is homed in on, Dimorphos, is not on a collision course with Earth. The ~525 ft-wide rock is a moonlet of the larger asteroid Didymos, making it a logical target for the small spacecraft. Researchers back home will be better able to study the change in the rock’s orbit after the collision.

You can tune into NASA Live beginning at 6pm ET to watch the crash as it happens. 

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In Other News

• ULA launched NROL-91 for the NRO.

• NASA postponed Artemis I due to Tropical Storm Hurricane Ian.

• The UK has funded two debris removal demo missions. 

• SpaceX notched a new pad turnaround record with its latest Starlink launch.

The View from Cali