After a rigorous three-day demonstration and testing review, the United States Air Force just officially signed off on Lockheed Martin’s revolutionary space debris surveillance system, the Space Fence. Announced Septemeber 28 via a press release, the company’s Critical Design Review victory now allows it to begin construction of the $914 million sensor located just over 2,100 miles southwest of Honolulu on Kwajalein Island (pictured above). Once construction completes, the Space Fence will then allow the Air Force to more accurately detect and track the millions of objects currently orbiting Earth. If you’ve ever taken a gander at what this debris field looks like, it’s absolutely staggering.
The culmination of a contract previously won by Lockheed Martin in June of 2014, the Space Fence surveillance system has been on the Department of Defense’s radar for some time. In light of the increasing amount of orbiting space junk and debris, the DOD has long desired a way to distinguish what exactly exists within the near-Earth space environment. Lockheed’s initial proposal, an S-band phased-array radar system, particularly piqued the interest of the U.S. government due to its estimated ability to track baseball-sized objects nearly 2,000 miles away.
With 21,000 pages of design documents, an extensive eight-day Design Walkthrough, and now a three-day Critical Design Review in the rear view for Lockheed, equipment and facility production should commence soon. Early estimates indicate the Space Fence to be somewhat operational by as soon as 2018, with full-scale operation expected around 2022.
“Completion of CDR marks the end of the design phase and the start of radar production and facility construction of the Space Fence system,” says Steve Bruce, vice president for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems and Training company. “Once complete, Space Fence will deliver revolutionary capability to the U.S. Air Force with a flexible system capable of adapting to future missions requiring new tracking and coverage approaches.”
Despite the U.S. Air Force signing off on the Space Fence, Lockheed faces an uphill battle in successfully getting the system up and running. Not only is Kwajalein Island located in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, the built facilities need to boast an infrastructure capable of tolerating high winds and possible seismic activity, all while remaining accurate during operation.
However, with nearly a billion dollars at its disposal for the project (and likely more, because who has ever completed a job for exactly what they quoted?) there should be little doubt Lockheed possesses the engineering know-how and resources required to get the job done.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.