Blue Origin preparing for next New Shepard flight
WASHINGTON — Blue Origin is gearing up for the next test flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle as soon as Jan. 14.
Temporary flight restrictions published by the Federal Aviation Administration Jan. 12 will close airspace above Blue Origin’s West Texas test site from Jan.
NASA and Japan finalize Gateway agreement
WASHINGTON — NASA and the Japanese government have completed an agreement outlining Japan’s contributions to the lunar Gateway as NASA works to wrap up international contributions to the outpost.
NASA announced Jan. 12 it signed an agreement with the Japanese government governing Japan’s contributions to the Gateway.
Image: Underwater astronaut training
Prepping for a spacewalk typically means diving underwater to rehearse and fine-tune operations.
In 2016, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst performed such an underwater rehearsal for the ColKa high speed radio, the brown box imaged above, that will be installed this month on the International Space Station.
NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover will integrate the small fridge-sized device outside the European Columbus module during a spacewalk scheduled this year. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen will be at NASA's mission control directing the spacewalkers as Capcom. The Columbus Ka-band terminal, nicknamed "ColKa," will enable faster communication with Europe.
Orbiting the planet every 90 minutes means the Space Station is constantly making and breaking short links with ground stations on Earth as it passes over them at a height of 400 km.
With Colka, a European telecommunications satellite in geostationary orbit can pick up data sent from the Columbus module. This satellite is part of the European Data Relay System and will be able to directly relay the signals from Columbus to European soil via a ground station in Harwell, in the U.K.
Alabama’s Redstone Arsenal selected as future home of U.S. Space Command
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, was picked as the future location of U.S. Space Command’s headquarters.
Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett announced the decision Jan. 13.
The selection of Redstone Arsenal is a huge win for Huntsville, nicknamed “Rocket City.
A robot made of ice could adapt and repair itself on other worlds
Some of the most tantalizing targets in space exploration are frozen ice worlds. Take Jupiter's moon Europa, for instance. Its warm, salty subsurface ocean is buried under a moon-wide sheet of ice. What's the best way to explore it?
Maybe an ice robot could play a role.
Though the world's space agencies—especially NASA—are getting better and better at building robots to explore places like Mars, those robots have limitations. Perhaps chief among those limitations is the possibility of breakdown. Once a rover on Mars—or somewhere even more distant—breaks down, it's game over. There's no feasible way to repair something like MSL Curiosity if it breaks down while exploring the Martian surface.
But what if the world being explored was a frozen one, and the robot was made of ice? Could icy robots perform self-repair, even in a limited fashion? Could they actually be manufactured and assembled there, even partly?
Director General’s annual press conference 2021
Join our start-of-year press conference with ESA Director General Jan Wörner and future Director General Josef Aschbacher plus other ESA Directors when they meet online on Thursday, 14 January 2021. The event starts at 09:30 GMT / 10:30 CET. Watch live on #ESAwebTV.
SpaceX wins contracts for lunar lander, environmental satellite launches
WASHINGTON — SpaceX secured contracts Jan. 13 for the launches of a commercial lunar lander mission backed by NASA as well as a privately funded satellite to track methane emissions.
Intuitive Machines announced that it selected SpaceX for the launch of its IM-2 lunar lander mission on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 2022.
Astronomers finally measure polarized light from exoplanet
An international team led by Dutch astronomers has, after years of searching and defying the boundaries of a telescope, for the first time directly captured polarized light from an exoplanet. They can deduct from the light that a disk of dust and gas is orbiting around the exoplanet in which moons are possibly forming. The researchers will soon publish their findings in the journal Astronomy and Cultivating plant growth in space
When in space, astronauts typically eat dehydrated, nutrient-dense food, but when it comes to longer space missions, that can become a problem as they'll eventually lack nutrients from fresh vegetables. However, one chemical and biomolecular engineering professor will be researching ways astronauts can grow their own fresh vegetables more efficiently while they are on missions.
Ying Diao w DARPA seeks compact, deployable electron accelerator
Linear accelerators, LINACs for short, are devices that accelerate electrons or other sub-atomic particles along a straight line to generate a beam of high energy. LINACs have a variety of commercial uses such as generating X-rays for cargo inspection, medical diagnostics, food sterilization, and even enabling precise external radiation treatments to destroy cancer cells without damaging surroun 
