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Green light (7/22/22)

Green light (7/22/22)

Andrew Parsonson, Ryan Duffy & Rachael Zisk
July 22, 2022

Happy Friday, and welcome to the 224 of you who joined us this week.

In today's newsletter:🌐 Isar & CNES🧠 Geek out📚 Weekend recs

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Isar gets Green Light to Launch from French Guiana

Image: Isar

Isar Aerospace is the first privately funded operator to gain access to the Guiana Space Centre (GSC) in French Guiana. French space agency CNES announced the news on Thursday.

GSC has been in operation since 1968 and has supported hundreds of missions. CNES responded to several requests from industry to open the site to privately-funded operators by publishing an open call for applications in December 2021.

Isar will operate its 28m, two-stage Spectrum rocket from the facility from 2024 onwards. Spectrum’s maiden flight will still take place from Norway’s Andøya Space next year.

“With adding Kourou, we will further extend our global network of critical infrastructure and gain even more flexibility for our customers,” said Isar COO Josef Fleischmann.

Ready for launch: Isar has a growing launch manifest, with more than five contracts already signed. Most recently, the company inked a launch services deal with D-Orbit to ferry an ION tug to space. CNES’ decision to open its equatorial spaceport to the startup is the latest vote of confidence in its potential to reach orbit.

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In Other News

SpaceX aborted a Falcon 9 launch at T-46 seconds, and will make another attempt today.
Crew-5, SpaceX’s next crewed mission to the ISS, has slipped to September 29 after the booster was damaged in transit.
Elsewhere…Northrop Grumman delayed its next commercial resupply mission, citing supply chain challenges, while the NRO and Rocket Lab pushed back their next launch.
Spire ($SPIR) will boost weather data-gathering and forecasting capabilities by equipping its future fleet with microwave sounders.
Eutelsat’s state-of-the-art, largest-ever satellite is en route to Kourou, French Guiana ahead of an early September 6 trip to space with Ariane 5.
ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and cosmonaut Oleg Artemye completed a spacewalk Thursday to install a European robotic arm on Russia’s Nauka module.

Weekend Reads: Moon Edition

We handpicked Moon-focused content and highlights from recent months.

Stories…CAPSTONE is headed for the Moon as we speak to test out a highly elliptical orbit for NASA’s Gateway station. It’s tough to live on the Moon, so Astrobotic is building wireless charging tech. European startups with deep space dreams are headed for the Moon. And ICYMI, we just released our rundown of the commercial lunar landers and rovers headed to the Moon in the next couple years.

Pathfinder…We sat down with Rob Meyerson, Blue Origin’s former president, in Pathfinder #0008. We touched on the lunar economy, the CLPS landers, and other future Moon-related opportunities that may arise for commercial space players. Check out the convo on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple.

Geek Out: The Search for Life Continues

The "habitable zone" is a region where an Earthlike planet would have a surface temperature between 0-100°C. Our Sun is a G star. Graphic: NASA

Until recently, the driving philosophy in exoplanet research was that liquid water needed fairly specific conditions to exist and that water on planets that orbited too far from a star would necessarily be frozen.

Now, a decade-old theory with a new batch of research behind it is challenging that idea among planetary scientists. A study in the June edition of Nature Astronomy presents data suggesting distant, cold super-Earths with dense primordial atmospheres could have temperate climates for periods of 5–8 billion years, affording plenty of time for life to form. Breaking that down piece by piece:

Super-Earth = a planet made of gas, rock, or a combination of both that’s 2x-10x the mass of our Earth.
Primordial atmosphere = dense, fluffy atmospheres dominated by hydrogen and helium gas. The ideal atmospheric density for a planet of the study’s description would be between 100 and 1000 times as dense as our own atmosphere.

The density of the atmosphere and the hydrogen content are both important factors in whether these planets could remain warm. Since hydrogen is so light, a planet needs a lot of mass (and consequently, gravity) to keep it from escaping into space.

This research examines planets orbiting far from their stars, 1.5x–10x farther than Earth is from our Sun, depending on the size and heat of the star. Radiation from a star would also make hydrogen escape more quickly, hence the need for a wide orbit.

Habitable how? These findings suggest that the frameworks we use to guess whether or not a planet might be habitable could use an update. When searching for worlds that could sustain life, exoplanet researchers use the concept of a “habitable zone.” A habitable zone = the band around a star where the surface temperature of an Earth-ish planet would be 0°C–100°C, and liquid water could exist.

The habitable zone theory really only applies to planets somewhat similar to our own. Based on these findings, astronomers may have reason to search for life on planets far different from the Earth we call home.

Hold your horses: These exciting findings open new avenues in the search for an answer to the age-old question of whether we’re alone. But, before we get all metaphysical and cosmic, mind the caveat that this data is theoretical. Moreover, no exoplanet fitting the parameters laid out in the study has actually been found.

So the search continues…

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The View from Mars

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Seen here: Curiosity enjoying another beautiful day on Mars. This panorama includes a healthy dose of post-processing, with blue, green, and orange added to the stitched-together photo for what JPL calls an “artistic interpretation of the scene.”

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