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“If Apophis impacted Earth, the results would be devastating,” said Franck Marchis, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer at Unistellar. If an asteroid as large as Apophis struck Earth it would be a once-in-80,000 years event—and an epic disaster.

The Mundrabilla Meteorite is one of the largest space rocks ever found on Earth. Weighing in at a massive 22 tonnes Fragments of this meteorite have been studied for over a century, and recently, a team of scientists tested the specimen with magnetic field modulated microwave spectroscopy, by putting tiny samples into a cavity filled with microwaves and an oscillating magnetic field, then cooling it. Simply put, they were scanning the rock to see if conducts electricity…And to their surprise. It did. One of the study’s lead authors, told Gizmodo “The big takeaway is there is superconductivity in the sky, naturally occurring.” If indium-tin-lead alloys are common, asteroids have significant value. Companies are alreadli I y cataloging near Earth objects for potential profit. The top 10 asteroids judged “most cost effective” — that is, the easiest to reach and to mine, subtracting rocket fuel and other operating costs, is around $1.5 trillion So far, only two companies on the planet to have gone public with asteroid-mining business plans – Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. Unfortunately, both have been acquired by companies with a more, Earthly vision. Japan however, has been operating around Ryugu for the last year and a half, with an orbiting craft, tiny rovers and recently bombed the surface to study its contents. Coincidentally, this particular asteroid has a projected value of 30 Billion, according to Asterank, and the #1 most cost effective target. Officially, the mission is looking for data on how the solar system formed. Unofficially, it will help us understand if there are useful…and valuable metals clumped together at the heart of an asteroid, as some theorize. If so, it’s game on for asteroid prospectors.

Starbase is a private rocket production facility, test site, and spaceport constructed by SpaceX, located at Boca Chica approximately 32 km (20 mi) east of Brownsville, Texas, on the US Gulf Coast. When conceptualized, its stated purpose was "to provide SpaceX an exclusive launch site that would allow the company to accommodate its launch manifest and meet tight launch windows." The launch site was originally intended to support launches of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles as well as "a variety of reusable suborbital launch vehicles", but in early 2018, SpaceX announced a change of plans, stating that the launch site would be used exclusively for SpaceX's next-generation launch vehicle, Starship. Between 2018 and 2020, the site added significant rocket production and test capacity. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated in 2014 that he expected "commercial astronauts, private astronauts, to be departing from South Texas," and he foresaw launching spacecraft to Mars from the site.

Spontaneous and performed LIVE on stage at the historic Camille Playhouse. David Becker takes us on a tour of the cosmos on a spaceship made of sound.

It’s been a big year for China. In 2021, it achieved an average of more than one launch per week for the first time in its orbital spaceflight history, making it the busiest year for its space program to date. We watched the country pass many milestones from successfully landing its first rover on Mars and test flying a hypersonic spaceplane to building the core module for its Tiangong space station and launching the first taikonauts onto the said module. Tiangong is scheduled to finish construction this year, but it’s hardly China’s most ambitious project. The real action is happening beyond low Earth orbit — specifically, on the Moon. Say hello to the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS). It’s a complex China hopes to build on and around the Moon consisting of orbiters and relay satellites, transportation vehicles and AI-driven rovers, and surface infrastructure to support research and potentially human life. A primary, nuclear-powered surface base will be serviced by an orbiting space station, which will conduct traffic between the Moon and Earth. The base’s official purpose is to study lunar topography, geomorphology and chemistry, as well as to facilitate Earth and space observation and exploration of the solar system. Much of the scientific activity will be carried out by autonomous mini-rovers and a hopping robot. China and Russia announced the ILRS as a joint project in March. Three months later, at the Global Space Exploration Conference in St Petersberg, they unveiled a roadmap that put completion of the construction phase in 2035, with the first crewed landings to follow after 2036. All of that changed in late December, however, when China’s space agency told state media it would establish a research base on the Moon by around 2027. That’s eight years ahead of schedule. So why the dramatic change? Well, it may have something to do with the United States. So far, 13 countries have signed onto the Artemis Accords, a set of guidelines surrounding the NASA-led mission to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. In principle, the accords are meant to be inclusive, but not all countries see it that way. Russia has declined to join, calling them U.S.-centric, and China can’t participate even if it wanted to. In 2011, Congress passed a law barring NASA from collaborating with China on any scientific activity, citing espionage concerns. The ILRS is Russia and China’s answer. At last year’s conference, they invited international partners to join the effort, stressing that cooperation would be needed to further research and decrease costs. None have yet signed on, though Thailand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are still discussing the possibility, and private partners have not been ruled out. The U.S. believes the ILRS is an aggressive challenge to American dominance in space, and China alleges that the Artemis Accords will carve up the Moon into national territories in contravention of international law. Although the two agreements technically aren’t mutually exclusive, the binary logic of superpower competition is railroading smaller countries onto one side or the other. Many of China’s projects look almost like direct parallels to American ones. The orbiting station that will support the ILRS, for example, mimics NASA’s lunar Gateway, a similar orbiting outpost that will support Artemis. The Chinese Space Station Telescope, planned to launch in 2024, will sport a field of view 300 times larger than that of NASA’s Hubble. And last but not least, the Tiangong space station is unmistakably an alternative to the International Space Station, which is on track to be decommissioned within the next several years. In fact, NASA was so worried that Tiangong would be left the only option for countries and companies wanting to use a station in low Earth orbit that it dished out over $400 million to U.S. corporations for the construction of three private space stations by the end of the decade. As China has rocketed along, developing an impressive private space industry and nailing all the classic landmarks for its space program since putting the first taikonauts in orbit less than 20 years ago, the U.S. is fumbling. A legal catfight between Musk and Bezos over the lunar lander contract, dysfunction following the coronavirus pandemic and other problems stalled the Artemis program, delaying the next crewed landing from 2024 to 2025. A report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General is more pessimistic. Due to numerous difficulties in the timetables for Starship, SLS and the Orion spacecraft, it argues, we won’t see a landing until 2026 at the very earliest. As it currently stands, the U.S. and China appear locked in what can only be described as a new space race. Is competition inevitable, or can both sides find common ground to cooperate? If the Cold War is any guide, national leaders’ attempts to reach detente made valuable progress at times but always broke down. To keep space a peaceful domain open to all of humanity, then, we just may need to break history.

X-wings, TIE fighters, battle cruisers — don’t pretend these images didn’t come to mind when then President Trump announced the idea of a United States Space Force back in 2018. If there’s ever a century for extraterrestrial dogfights between spacecraft to become reality, it’s this one. We’re only thirty years out from the Cold War and military competition in space is heating back up. The addition of a sixth branch to the U.S. military isn’t the only example; look at Russia’s anti-satellite test last November or China’s hypersonic glide vehicle test the summer before that. In VP Mike Pence’s words, space is “a war-fighting domain just like land and air and sea.” But … is it? Popular depictions of space conflict in movies and TV model it after aerial and naval battles here on Earth. The spaceships fly around like fighter jets, and crews organize themselves like sailors, with a captain on the bridge and red shirts manning the battle stations. The only problem is: that’s not how space works. As soon as you enter orbit, all the rules of regular warfare go out the window. As Doctor Rebecca Reesman, senior project engineer and policy analyst at The Aerospace Corporation, put it in an article on the subject, “spacecraft and space weapons cannot defy physics.” For starters, let’s think about gravity. On Earth, airplanes keep from plummeting by using the air around them to gain lift. Boats keep themselves from sinking by using their density to stay buoyant. Spacecraft, however, don’t have air or water to push against, so they use lateral motion to stay in orbit. The way it works is counterintuitive. Although satellites appear to simply fly sideways across the sky when we look at them, gravity is still tugging them Earthward. To prevent themselves from dropping back through the atmosphere, they move in one direction so fast that the force pulling them down can’t keep up with the planet’s curvature. In effect, the Earth falls out beneath them as they fall toward it. Tumbling downward becomes traveling forward. This will impose tight restraints on any future Space Force general. Planes and ships can move in all directions, speed up or slow down, travel in straight lines and operate relatively freely. Even though planes can’t just stop in mid-air, they can circle over one location. Spacecraft don’t have nearly the same maneuverability. They are constantly moving in a circular or elliptical orbit, and the word “moving” doesn’t do justice to what’s happening. Rocketing or hurdling are more appropriate. The ISS, for instance, orbits the Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour, or five miles per second, fast enough to circle the entire planet in 92 minutes. Satellites orbiting at a lower altitude need to travel even faster to match the stronger gravity. Therefore, if one wants to move from one altitude to another, it must accelerate or decelerate depending on the desired destination. As you can imagine, pulling that off takes a heap of energy, which requires fuel, and the satellite’s inertia ensures that the whole process takes time. It’s for this reason that spacecraft traveling beyond Earth orbit often slingshot off the gravity of other planets to tug them along. It’s also why SpaceX’s Starship will need to refuel in orbit before taking off for Mars. Sure, some companies are working on getting gas stations in orbit, but they would have to populate the domain with tons of them to be accessible, and that brings us to another problem: space is unfathomably huge. The volume between low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit is about 50 trillion cubic miles. To put that in perspective, it’s 190 times larger than the volume of Earth. This means that any two enemy satellites would be far apart, and meeting is not as simple as flying at each other. Since it is perpetually orbiting Earth, an attacking satellite must maneuver into the same altitude and plane as its target, then close in on its particular point in orbit. Remember that increasing speed to intercept it would change altitude, messing up the whole operation, and you have some idea of the meticulous planning involved. Attacking another country’s spacecraft would require a level of precision enabled only by complex calculations carried out by engineers on the ground. Satellite operators could spend days or weeks maneuvering into position, only to find out that the conditions have changed, altering the objective of or need for a strike. In reality, the Space Force’s Captain Kirk would be a nerd with glasses putting math to use in a Pentagon office. The implications for strategy are profound. Reesman told us, “Conflict in space, for the most part, will be much slower and deliberate than what you’re otherwise accustomed to thinking. It’s probably much more about long-term planning and positioning and maneuvering as opposed to flashy maneuvers and really quick stuff.” Put simply, a war in space would play out less like a high-speed first-person shooter video game and more like a painfully slow game of chess on a three-dimensional, 50-trillion-cubic-mile board. If you were hoping for a live-streamed battle with the Millennium Falcon sometime this decade, the laws of orbital mechanics say sorry. I’m Jordan Soto with Space Channel News. Coming up in our series on space warfare, we’ll look at the array of weapons countries might use, the options and vulnerabilities in space defense, and the politics of space security between Russia, China, and the United States. Don’t miss it. You can subscribe to our newsletter on Spacechannel.com or download the app on your phone, tablet or connected TV. See you in space.