Dear readers, |
Welcome to Quartz's newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extraterrestrial sphere. Please forward widely, and let me know what you think. This week: A mighty boop, Microspace, and the Cousteau connection. |
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"One of the more fun ways of engineering is thinking about all the things that can go wrong," Olivia Billett says. |
Billett is a Lockheed Martin engineer who led a team that designed and operated the scientific mission of the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx. This week, the vehicle appeared to snatch a geological sample from an asteroid 220 million miles away that it will return to earth, a stunning technical achievement. And one reason it did was that Billett and her colleagues were ready for some deep space surprises. |
Billett and Lockheed have experience with missions to Mars and other planets, but faced new challenges when exploring the asteroid Bennu. "When you are in orbit around a planet, gravity is such dominant force and everything else is noise," Billett explains. "You know exactly where the spacecraft will be relative to the planet weeks into the future." |
Bennu, though roughly the size of the Empire State building, is much smaller than a planet and has a weaker gravitational pull. That means everything from solar radiation to internal motion in the spacecraft can throw it off course. For planetary missions, Billett's team might have weeks to design and test a maneuver. For this effort, they have been downloading info from the spacecraft's sensors, plotting maneuvers, testing them, and sending the instructions back into space—overnight. |
The design of OSIRIS-REx's sample collector is perhaps the most unique aspect of the spacecraft—an 11-foot-long arm that began life as a plastic cup and a compressed air canister in an engineer's garage. Called the TAGSAM, for touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism, it is briefly pressed into Bennu's surface, which it blasts with nitrogen gas, driving dust and small rocks into prepared containers. |
The mission launched in 2016, and when it arrived at Bennu in 2018, scientists were in for a surprise: They had anticipated Bennu's surface would be like a sandy beach. Instead, it was fairly rocky. That meant that the spacecraft couldn't rely on laser rangefinders to guide it to the surface, since they couldn't distinguish between a rock and a patch of sand. Instead, OSIRIS-REx would use onboard cameras and software that could analyze the surface to guide it in for landing. The next two years were spent surveying Bennu and practicing for this week's culminating touch-and-go. |
In the days ahead, we'll find out if OSIRIS-REx has gathered a large enough sample to begin its return journey, or if it needs to make one or two more tries at snatching a sample. If it all went well, the spacecraft will parachute its cargo down to New Mexico in 2024. Scientists—who came up with the idea for this mission more than eight years ago—eagerly await these materials because they could help explain how our solar system grew and changed over time, potentially explaining more about the origins of life on Earth. |
This game of astronomical tag has another motive—Bennu's orbit will pass quite close to earth in the century ahead, with a small chance of a disastrous impact with our planet. The detailed understanding NASA has gained of the asteroid will make it possible to more accurately predict the asteroid's path—and potentially allow us to take defensive action if Bennu comes to tag earth back. |
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IMAGERY INTERLUDE |
Here are two early images shared by NASA of what Osiris Rex " saw" as it descended and after its probe touched down on the surface of Bennu. See the whole sequence here. |
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👀 Read this 👀 |
Space fans know Joe Rogan's podcast thanks to Elon Musk's newsmaking mid-show toke. But Rogan's massive audience is a big business for him—and for Spotify, the streaming music giant that brought him onboard along with big names like Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian West, and Batman, part of a $600 million spree that also acquired three podcast networks, including Bill Simmons's The Ringer. |
Why? Spotify's main business, music, is a lousy cash cow, but with podcasts, Spotify doesn't have to hand over a big chunk of its revenue to record labels. Read more in our field guide to the podcast business. |
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SPACE DEBRIS |
Satellites! Satellites! SATELLITES! Microsoft continues Big Tech's expansion into space, putting its Azure cloud computing business in a new partnership with SES and SpaceX to use their satellite networks to provide connectivity to mobile data centers. Like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft sees opportunity in the convergence of space sensor data, telecommunications, and cloud computing. It's not clear when this mobile data center will come online, especially since SpaceX's Starlink does not have permission to operate outside the US. |
SES, the Luxembourg satellite giant, is perhaps the more important partner here, since its satellites are ready to go and it has been working with the US software giant since last year. SES Networks CEO JP Hemingway says the main motivation behind the partnership is demand from existing customers to plug into a ready-made cloud service. |
SES has also been a key patron of SpaceX and will launch its next eleven satellites on the Falcon 9, but execs aren't worried about Elon Musk's move to compete directly with other satellite operators. SES flies satellites in multiple orbits for multiple markets, which Hemingway sees as a key differentiator with Starlink. |
Compelling stuff. On Lockheed Martin's earnings call this week, CFO Ken Possenriede told investors that the company's rocket-building joint venture with Boeing, United Launch Alliance, now offers "a price point that is compelling to customers that will allow ULA to get its fair share of awards over SpaceX." That's a reference to ULA winning the lion's share of forthcoming US Space Force launches, but the public doesn't have a detailed breakdown of the costs of those contracts. My suspicion is that if the price gap is really closing, that has more to do with SpaceX raising its prices to what the market can bear than ULA cost-cutting. |
Launch rules refreshed. The FAA has announced a comprehensive overhaul of its rocket launch licensing rules, a response to the increasing cadence of launch in the US. Experts are still digging through the 750 pages of legalese, but I appreciated this observation from space consultant James Muncy: "There is absolutely no end to this." |
The Life Aquatic. I hadn't known Jacques Cousteau was a key figure in validating the ability of satellites to measure the depth of the oceans, but when you think about who NASA would call in 1975 to do pioneering ocean research, it makes total sense. |
Your pal, |
Tim |
This was issue 70 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your most compelling rocket prices, spec scripts for a Wes Anderson movie about satellites, tips, and informed opinions to tim@qz.com. |
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