Astro-trash (7/11/22)

Happy Monday. Internally, the Payload team has murmured fearfully about a possible “summer slump” in space news. That’s definitely not the case this week, so let’s dive right in.

In today's newsletter:🗑️ Bishop Airlock ✈️ X-37B record 📅 The week ahead

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Nanoracks Takes out the Space Station’s Trash

Earlier this month, astronauts disposed of ~172 pounds of trash using a completely new method: sending it out of a commercial airlock. Working with Houston, Nanoracks cycled its Bishop Airlock, ejected a specially designed trash bag, and voila, the ISS crew had less waste to worry about.

“The first full end-to-end cycle was a great opportunity to demonstrate the commercial…interaction and how that can continue to be a positive thing for everyone,” Nanoracks Airlock Program Manager Cooper Read told Payload.

• Trash is typically disposed of via Cygnus cargo vessels. This new airlock method could provide a more sustainable, efficient disposal mechanism.

• Astronauts can fill a special waste container mounted within Bishop with up to 600 lbs of trash.

• In the first test, astronauts packed the trash bag with items ranging from packing materials to dirty clothes.

• For any ESG-inclined readers out there…Nanoracks’ orbital trash bags burn up upon atmospheric reentry. We Earthlings need not worry about astro-trash raining down on our heads.

Bishop Airlock’s backstory

Operation Take Out The Trash (Payload’s unofficial working title) represented the first full open-close cycle of Bishop. According to Nanoracks, Bishop offers 5x the current volume of what can be moved in and out of the ISS. It can support up to 144U of payloads simultaneously (1U = 10cm x 10cm x 10cm).

Bishop is the “first commercially funded element” added to “the ISS stack,” Read noted. The bell jar-shaped airlock launched on a SpaceX resupply mission in Dec. 2020 and was commissioned in February 2021. Since then, “all of the core systems have been operating nominally,” Read said.

Key Bishop Airlock design elements

1. Bishop can support spacewalks, satellite deployments, and payload hosting.

2. It has external hosting capabilities and a “pretty universal mounting capability,” Read said, with six external sites. The same standardization approach extends to Bishop’s racks, lockers, and electrical interfaces.

3. With soft-stowed configurations and pressurized hosting opportunities, the module is also poised to make “payload developers’ lives easier.”

4. Bishop can support experiments in partial pressure environments. Nanoracks can “pump it down to a pressure so it’s not in a vacuum,” potentially allowing users to simulate a lunar or Martian environment for experiments.

5. The airlock opens up commercial use cases and scientific experiments not previously feasible because they might have been a “crew hazard,” Read said.

Start small, then ramp up

Nanoracks and parent Voyager Space Holdings are “in talks with multiple other companies, public and private” to use Bishop, Read said. And next year, NASA will begin SEAQUE, a quantum computing demo hosted on Bishop.

Nanoracks has gained loads of flight heritage by iterating over time. It “started small, then ramped up,” Read said, graduating from cubesat deployers to locker-sized platforms inside the ISS to a “small external platform on the Japanese-exposed facility” to Bishop.

Bishop will eventually detach from the ISS and join Starlab, a free-flying LEO outpost owned and operated by Voyager and Lockheed Martin. “There are lots of things we’ve learned along the way that will help us with Starlab and building up that station,” Read said.

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Super Secret Spaceplane Celebrates New Record Somewhere In Space

With that title, we’re giving the “Sally sells seashells by the seashore” tongue twister a run for its money.

Unpacking the news: The Boeing-made, US Air & Space Force-operated X-37B spaceplane set a new orbital endurance record on Thursday, passing a previous one set by itself. As of this writing, the plane has been in space for 785 days.

Wind back the clock: Back on May 17, 2020, an Atlas V rocket boosted the spaceplane to its orbital destination. The X-37B is an orbital test vehicle, or OTV (not to be confused with the other type of OTV, an orbital transfer vehicle).

• The experimental spaceplane has flown five missions, OTV-1 through OTV-5.

• The first mission lasted 225 days, while the last was the previous endurance record-holder. OTV-6 = the current mission.

Specs: Boeing has two X-37Bs in its fleet. The reusable, robotic vehicle is roughly one-fourth the size of the Space Shuttle. The plane is capable of flying anywhere from 150 to 500 miles above Earth.

Mission goals: The X-37B spaceplane is intended to “demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the US Air Force,” per a USAF fact sheet.

• The test program’s overarching goals are to push the boundaries on 1) reusable spaceflight and 2) long-duration orbital experiments that can be returned to Earth.

• More specifically, X-37B is designed as a tech testbed for advanced navigation; thermal protection; avionics; high-temp structures/seals; electromechanical flight control; advanced propulsion and materials; and autonomous flight, reentry, and landing.

• OTV-6 has two NASA experiments onboard and also deployed FalconSat-8, a 136-kg Air Force Research Lab satellite with five of its own experimental payloads.

• While most of the plane’s military payloads are classified, the US Naval Research Laboratory has revealed one experiment: PRAM, a pizza box-sized prototype testing space-based solar power.

More details: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When is OTV-6 set to touch back down on a runway in Florida or California? Where is it right now? What are the unknown unknowns? Your guess is as good as ours…unless you have a TS/SCI clearance and don a USSF Guardians uniform or work within a certain division of Boeing. In that case, your guess is probably a lot better than ours.

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In Other News

• SpaceX unveiled Starlink Maritime (read our full story online) and last night launched the Starlink Group 3-1 mission from Vandenberg (full story here).

• Dish ($DISH) responded to SpaceX’s recent FCC filing about 5G/Starlink frequency interference. SpaceX’s claims are “scientifically and logically flawed,” Dish writes.

• Related: 70,000+ Starlink users have written to the FCC in support of SpaceX, after it told customers to petition the commission to reject Dish’s 5G proposal.

• NASA said Thursday that it “strongly rebukes” Russia for politicizing the ISS and flying the flag of Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine. The Canadian Space Agency joined NASA in the rebuke.

• Separately, Terry Virts, former NASA astronaut, USAF test pilot, and ISS commander, wrote an op-ed for The Hill saying the US should disengage from its ISS partnership with Russia.

• Rocket Lab’s ($RKLB) Lunar Photon is more than half a million kilometers (~311,000 miles) from Earth, “just hanging out happy and healthy,” per CEO Peter Beck.

It’s Monday, so we’re easing into the week with something lighter that’s bound to give you a laugh. Since the video is making the rounds on Twitter again, enjoy this 2016 clip from Mark Kelly of the astronaut floating around the ISS with a gorilla suit.