Carnival of Space 618

2. Universe Today – Uranus’ Rings are Surprisingly Bright in Thermal Emissions

Uranus’ system has a temperature of just 77 K (-196 °C; -320 °F). The observations also confirmed that Uranus’s brightest and densest ring (the Epsilon ring) differs from the other known ring systems in our solar system.

2. Universe Today – NASA Model Shows Greenland’s Ice Sheet Will Disappear Over the Next 1000 Years, Raising Sea Levels by 7 Meters

New data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge program shows that the melting Greenland ice sheet will raise global sea levels more than previously thought. According to a computer model in a new study, only 200 years of melting at the present rate could contribute from .48 to 1.6 meters (19 to 63 inches) to global sea level rise.

3. Universe Today – Hubble is the Ultimate Multitasker: Discovering Asteroids While it’s Doing Other Observations

The curved streaks are the paths of asteroids as they moved through the image’s foreground. They appear as streaks because the image is composed of multiple Hubble images taken over time. There are 20 streaks in the image, from seven different asteroids. Five of them are newly-identified and are too faint to have been spotted before this image.

While observing each cluster with one of the cameras on Hubble, the team also used a different camera, pointing in a slightly different direction, to photograph six so-called ‘parallel fields’. This maximized Hubble’s observational efficiency in doing deep space exposures, imaging a myriad of far away galaxies.”

4. Universe Today – Deep Space Atomic Clocks Will Help Spacecraft Answer, with Incredible Precision, if They’re There Yet

5. Universe Today – Earth To Mars In 100 Days? The Power Of Nuclear Rockets

6. Universe Today – NASA is Going Back to Saturn’s Moon Titan, this Time With a Nuclear Battery-Powered Quadcopter

7. Cosmoquest – Pamela’s Talk: A tale of citizen science, edutainment, and trust

8. Abstract book for: 4th Planetary Data Workshop : June 18-20, 2019, Flagstaff, Arizona

9. Nextbigfuture – Future Elon Musk and SpaceX Domination Will Be Like Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

John D Rockefeller created Standard Oil, which built up the modern oil and refining industry. Standard Oil created massive price advantages and scale beyond its competitors. It grew by increasing sales and through acquisitions. In 1868, the Lake Shore Railroad, a part of the New York Central, gave Rockefeller’s a transportation rate of one cent a gallon or forty-two cents a barrel. This was a 71% discount for a promise to ship at least 60 carloads of oil daily. Smaller companies could not produce enough oil to qualify for discounts.

SpaceX already has a price advantage for rocket launch. They are already about ten times cheaper than ULA and have big cost advantages over Russia and China.

SpaceX and Elon Musk will continue to improve the rockets after the reusability of rockets gets near the tens of thousands of reuses of passenger airplanes. The improvements for the next version of the Super Heavy Starship will be increased safety.

Increased safety by 1000X to 10,000X will get rockets to the safety of passenger planes. Those safe rockets will be able to transport passengers at 20 times the speed of sound. By 2025, the international business, first-class and private jet market will have 100+ million flights per year.

By 2030-2040, Elon Musk could have:
a $10-20 trillion valuation (10 to 20 times the $1 trillion per year market for 2030 premium long-distance travel) SpaceX travel business and an array of satellite services.

a $500 billion to $1 trillion company with Tesla if they are selling 10+ million cars per year and also have a dominant self-driving car taxi service.

Boring company could be remaking city infrastructure with tunnels as cheap as a single lane of traffic and possibly offsetting the cost with bricks made from the tunnel dirt.

There could also be hyperloops, so that Elon would have domination of future planes (rockets), trains and cars.

Elon could make Rockefeller look like a pauper. Elon has over 50% of SpaceX and could have $10 trillion in net worth in 2030-2040. Elon could be like twenty to thirty John D. Rockefellers.

10. Nextbigfuture – Asteroid Day 2019 is Actually Five Days and Already Started Livestreaming

Asteroid Day is a global movement to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.

5 Days of Asteroid TV is streaming now! Tune in 12PM CEST (6AM ET, 9AM PST) on June 28 (tomorrow) to watch the 6-hour broadcast of Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg.

There are events all over the world. Go to this link to look up events. These events are at NASA and other space agency facilities, planetariums, museums, universities and much more.

11. Nextbigfuture – Europe Tentatively Considers Copying SpaceX While China Has Four Companies Racing to Catchup.

Europe has provided 3 million euros in funding for a three year investigation of reusable rockets. This program is not funded to actually build or fly any vehicles. They want to agree on specifics of two designs.

In Reusable rockets we appear to have:
First Mover – SpaceX
Fast Followers – Blue Origin and Chinese Long March and China startups
Late Entrant – Europe

The fast followers hope to be only 6 years behind SpaceX if they get a successful orbital launch and recovery of 20 tons or more by 2021. However, they could easily be ten years behind. The fast followers will likely be getting to partial reusability equal to a Falcon 9 while trying to compete with SpaceX who will be using a fully reusable Super Heavy Starship (SHS). SpaceX will be able to launch 5 times more payload or more in each launch. Many of the fast followers are going for small payloads. SpaceX costs could be ten to one hundred times less per launch. The SHS could have costs of about $3-4 million per launch. SpaceX could be amortizing rockets over 100 reused launches.