The Value, In an MTA Value Capture Plan, Is In The Details.

The MTA May Soon Be Getting Even More of Your Money

A significant portion of New York City property owners may soon find themselves giving the Metropolitan Transit Authority more money to fund new construction. Thanks to a provision in Governor Andrew Cuomo's 2019 budget proposal, the MTA may soon be allowed to tax not only properties that will benefit from new construction going forward but also ones that have financially benefited from any major infrastructure project in the past 37 years.

 From article, (A significant portion of New York City property owners may soon find themselves giving the Metropolitan Transit Authority more money to fund new construction. Thanks to a provision in Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2019 budget proposal, the MTA may soon be allowed to tax not only properties that will benefit from new construction going forward but also ones that have financially benefited from any major infrastructure project in the past 37 years.

The MTA has borrowed more than half of its funding for recent capital projects, according to a New York Times investigation, or about $15 billion in the past six years. Paying off that debt has become a significant line item for the transit authority’s budget, with debt service accounting for $2.6 billion, or 16 percent, of the agency’s budget — more than the Long Island Railroad and MTA buses combined.

To address this massive debt, Cuomo’s office has proposed something that looks an awful lot like value capture, a common funding mechanism that, as the Village Voice has previously written, works under the “If You Build It They Will Come” theory of urban development. When a new subway station gets built, property values around that station rise. Under value capture, the resultant higher property taxes go toward paying off the cost of that subway station.

Traditionally, value capture is not a new tax, but a tool for directing new property tax revenue toward paying off a specific project. The logic is that the tax revenue would not exist if the new project was not built, so it’s only fair for that revenue to pay for the project.

Value capture is widely popular because, when designed well, it funds development without raising taxes and is paid off by the property owners who benefit the most. It plays into the “consumer model of government,” says Lauren Fischer, a doctoral student at Columbia University who has done extensive research on value capture, “whereby people who pay more in taxes deserve more direct benefits from the government.” When it comes to mass transit improvements, value capture provides a palatable alternative to raising fares or increasing taxes.

But Cuomo’s budget proposal is “not what people typically think of when they think of value capture,” according to New York City Independent Budget Office deputy director George Sweeting. The proposal allows the MTA to create “transit improvement subdistricts” of up to one mile in radius around capital projects that cost $100 million or more. The agency would then have the authority to add a surcharge, up to 50 percent of the increased property taxes.

Although the proposal’s broad outline fits the narrative of making those who benefit from infrastructure improvements the most pay for them, it differs from more traditional conceptions of value capture in several key ways:

• It is a new tax, not a reapportionment of existing taxes.
• It is determined and collected by an existing state entity, not a new local government authority, and because of this, the proposal specifically absolves such projects of following local zoning and environmental review laws.
• The revenue is not tied to a specific project, but to MTA capital budget in general. For example, the revenue captured from around the Second Avenue Subway could be used to fund East Side Access.
• The surcharge could continue in perpetuity.
• The MTA could designate transit improvement subdistricts around any project that meets the spending threshold of $100 million, even if it’s already completed, as long as it was finished after 1981, the year the MTA began five-year capital plans. According to Sweeting, this would potentially make eligible any property around Fulton Center, South Ferry, Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue, the 63rd Street extension, and a number of other projects. “The process they would set up calls upon the MTA to do an analysis that somehow (in an unspecified way) identifies how much the market value in the district increased due to an MTA project either already completed or newly constructed,” Sweeting wrote in an email. “The new tax would only be assessed going forward, but in a particular district it would be based on the estimated increment of current value that could be ascribed to now-completed projects (at least back to 1981).”

Unfortunately, the proposal is light on specifics, meaning there are a lot of details still to be revealed. Because it’s so broad, it gives the MTA a lot of power to issue a tax on many property owners in New York, far more than traditional value capture proposals, which tend to be limited to the area surrounding a specific project.)

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The ISS was Built as a Political Space Station. With Russia challenging the U.S. all over the World, the ideal behind the ISS is no longer working. On the one hand they help us, on the other hand they threaten us. This makes no sense!

The ISS was never supposed to end like this

Reagan promised that the station would bring "quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines." It was also supposed to foster collaboration with Europe, Canada, and Japan while preserving America's preeminence in space. Then came the harsh realities of translating Reagan's vision into hardware.

From article, (The origins of the ISS date back to 1984, when President Reagan announced plans to build Space Station Freedom in a Kennedy-esque state of the union speech.

Reagan promised that the station would bring “quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines.” It was also supposed to foster collaboration with Europe, Canada, and Japan while preserving America’s preeminence in space.
Then came the harsh realities of translating Reagan’s vision into hardware. Freedom’s cost was initially estimated at $8 billion. That number quickly doubled, leading to a series of painful design compromises that still failed to stop the budget bloat.

The station might not have been built at all were it not for the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 1993 the U.S. and Russia signed an agreement to work together on a new International Space Station. The merger gained broad U.S. support as a way to keep Russian scientists gainfully employed (rather than, say, building bombs for the Taliban) while rescuing both nations from space station projects that had become embarrassingly unaffordable.

Yet even with the Russian assist, the “$8 billion” space station has wound up costing the U.S. roughly $90 billion in construction and transportation over the 19 years it’s been operating. On top of that, we pay $3 billion to $4 billion a year to operate the station.

Those expenditures have put NASA in a bind: The ISS was designed to be a gateway to new deep-space missions, but the agency cannot afford such missions as long as it continues to fund the ISS. As a result, for nearly two decades, American astronauts and their international partners have had nowhere to go except a canned outpost circling just 240 miles above the ground.

That left the station with a lot of critics in the scientific community. “One unexpected side benefit of the ISS was in producing make-work projects for private industry like SpaceX to develop their rockets, and that would be useful down the road,” says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss. “But they probably don’t need that now, so no tears here if the project is terminated.”

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Me, "The ISS was Built as a Political Space Station. With Russia challenging the U.S. all over the World, the ideal behind the ISS is no longer working. The ISS was supposed to keep Russians Engineers from outsourcing their skills to Rogue Countries. Now that that goal has been achieved, Russia is using these same engineers to create all kinds of new weapons to use on the battlefield and in Space. We kind of kicked the bucket away from Rogue Nations and let Russian Engineers stay in their own country, and, now, they are working against us."

On the one hand, NASA can continue to pay cost overruns on internally designed Rockets, Spacecrafts, and Space Stations. On the other hand, it can turn to New Space Companies who meet contract goals, with their own designs and use the knowledge for their own gain

The ISS was never supposed to end like this

Reagan promised that the station would bring "quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines." It was also supposed to foster collaboration with Europe, Canada, and Japan while preserving America's preeminence in space. Then came the harsh realities of translating Reagan's vision into hardware.

 From article, (The future of the ISS remains murky, so is NASA’s post-ISS strategy. At the unveiling of the 2019 budget proposal, acting administrator Robert Lightfoot declared that freed-up ISS funds would pay for “the return of humans to the moon for long-term exploration.”

That’s a new priority, but not exactly a new plan. Even before Trump came into office, NASA was pushing the Deep Space Gateway (since renamed the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway), a space station to be situated near the moon.

Krauss is more optimistic about this project. “There is, at least in principle, something to do on the moon that would be useful, from learning how to do remote construction projects to science projects on the far side of the moon,” he says.

The problem is money. NASA’s current five-year budget map shows zero growth, and in 2019 there is only a trickle of money for new space infrastructure.

Private companies may yet come to the rescue. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos have both expressed interest in sending astronauts to the moon. Meanwhile, Bigelow Aerospace is seeking NASA support for another, more ambitious space station: an inflatable outpost, part hotel and part office park, located near the moon. Bigelow claims he can build it for $2.3 billion.

China is the wild card. Since the launch of its first astronaut, Yang Liwei, in 2003, the China National Space Administration has followed a slow but methodical strategy, sending up a pair of space stations with a third, larger station set to begin operations in 2023. In a recent interview with Chinese state media, Yang Liwei confirmed that the country is also making tentative “preparations for a manned lunar landing mission” in 2036.

In the long run, the end of NASA’s decades-long ISS project may mark the beginning of a new kind of space race: capitalist entrepreneurs versus the last communist superpower.)


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Wind Power Really Does Not Kill a lot of Birds, if you compare it to the Top Causes of Bird Deaths.

Wind Power Results In Very Few Bird Deaths Overall

Wind power critics sometimes try to say that this form of clean, renewable energy is bogus because a number of bird deaths result each year from collisions with wind turbines and towers. What they fail to mention is the context, so they leave out certain very key facts.

From article, (Wind power critics sometimes try to say that this form of clean, renewable energy is bogus because a number of bird deaths result each year from collisions with wind turbines and towers.

What they fail to mention is the context, so they leave out certain very key facts.

The number of birds killed by wind turbines is relatively tiny. “Collisions with wind turbines account for about one-tenth of a percent of all ‘unnatural’ bird deaths in the United States each year. And of all bird deaths, 30 percent are due to natural causes, like baby birdsfalling from nests,” according to AWEA.

Billions of birds are killed each year by domestic cats. Yes, that’s billions with a b. Collisions with communications towers kill about 6.5 million birds each year; this is about 18 times more than wind power technology. Electrocutions kill about 5.4 million.

Furthermore, nuclear power plants and fossil-fuel plants kill far more birds than wind power. “Within the uncertainties of the data used, the estimate means that wind farm-related avian fatalities equated to approximately 46,000 birds in the United States in 2009, but nuclear power plants killed about 460,000 and fossil-fueled power plants 24 million,” according to a paper published by Benjamin K. Sovacool titled “The Avian and Wildlife Costs of Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power.”

Cooling conventional power plants also kills billions of fish each year, in addition to birds. “The EPA says it also tracks other species of fish, and its overall figure for year-old-equivalent fish lost in power-plant cooling systems is 3.5 billion per year,” according to anAssociated Press article in 2008.

 Back to other sources of bird deaths, in addition to deaths caused by domestic cats, collisions with glass in buildings is a top cause. “Bird mortality from window collisions in the US is estimated to be between 365 million to 988 million birds annually.” If we compare the top end of the researchers’ estimate for wind power bird deaths, which is 328,000 per year, with the peak from the Fish and Wildlife Service for building collisions, which is 988 million, we see that building collisions result in well over 2,000 times more bird deaths.)

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Why has NASA's Budget Remained the Same Year after Year? It may be Because Commercial Space Companies are Stepping Up and NASA will become more like the FAA.

Mike Pence Uses SpaceX Achievements to Knock NASA

Vice President Mike Pence praised the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket during the second meeting of the National Space Council Wednesday, all while knocking government organizations like NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration. "While American industry and technology have leaped towards the future, our government agencies too often have remained stuck in the past," said Pence, who is the head of the council. 

From article, (“While American industry and technology have leaped towards the future, our government agencies too often have remained stuck in the past,” said Pence, who is the head of the council.

Pence’s keynote at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center made it clear that under his leadership the council will prioritize setting up private aerospace industries to succeed, rather than bolstering agencies like NASA with funding.

NASA received a measly increase of 2.6 percent, a figure barely more than the 2017 inflation rate of 2.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.After Wednesday’s National Space Council meeting that became abundantly clear.

These marginal spending increases seemed counterintuitive, especially after President Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, which ordered NASA to help facilitate sending humans back to the Moon an on to Mars. Given the relative lack of investment in NASA itself, the Trump administration’s directive would appear to push the agency toward strengthening its ties with the aerospace private sector, like SpaceX.)

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Increasingly, Car Manufacturers are seeing the benefits of Electric Cars, from Low Maintenance Issues, to Longer Range and Lower Cost, and are Jumping on Board.

Car manufacturers go all in on electric cars, raising specter of peak oil demand

Oil companies have long viewed electric cars as a frightening, if distant threat to the gasoline and diesel sales that account for 70 percent of U.S. demand for crude. But suddenly, that threat is speeding towards Houston's most important industry at rates far faster than once expected.

 From article, (After decades of flirtation, auto manufacturers are embracing electric cars as never before, maneuvering for control of what is expected to be the fastest growing segment of the vehicle market over the next two decades. General Motors, the largest American car manufacturer, says it will have at least 20 electric models on the market by 2025 while the European auto makers Daimler and BMW forecast that 15 to 25 percent of their sales will come from electric models by then.

In China, the government wants one in every five cars sold in the world's largest auto market to be electric in less than a decade. 

India's government aims to have only electric cars sold in the country after 2030. 

France and the United Kingdom, meanwhile, say they will ban petroleum-fueled cars by 2040.

Electric cars have been a buzzword around Detroit's automobile factories for years. But for every executive who talked about electric as the future of the industry, there was an engineer standing in back wondering how to resolve the problems of the vehicles' limited travel range and astronomical prices that made electric cars more wishful thinking than practical.

But improvements in battery technology have driven down costs from six-figures into the $20,000 to $30,000 range, while the range has expanded to the point someone in suburban Katy could travel to and from downtown Houston on a single charge. U.S. sales of electric vehicles climbed to 200,000 last year, a four-fold increase from 2012, according to Inside EV, a trade publication.

"There's always this hype curve and we've been through the hype curve on EVs many times," said Brett Smith, a senior researcher at the University of Michigan's Center for Automotive Research, who has spent more than three decades studying the industry. "But it's starting to look more realistic than it did 10 years ago".)

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Can electric cars make a huge dent in Oil Consumption? And if, so, how fast?

Car manufacturers go all in on electric cars, raising specter of peak oil demand

Oil companies have long viewed electric cars as a frightening, if distant threat to the gasoline and diesel sales that account for 70 percent of U.S. demand for crude. But suddenly, that threat is speeding towards Houston's most important industry at rates far faster than once expected.

 From article, (Oil companies are well aware of the threat from electric cars. The European majors Royal Dutch Shell and BP are predicting that oil demand will peak by 2040 if not earlier, while the world's biggest oil companies are shifting investments to petrochemical operations, and alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, and natural gas, the cleaner-burning fossil fuel of choice for generating electricity.

Electric cars, have a long way to go before they make a significant dent in gasoline demand. They still account for just a tiny share of auto sales -- about 1 percent of the 17 million vehicles sold in the United States last year, and their range of about 150 miles, such as on the Nissan Leaf, means electric cars simply won't make sense for people who don't live in urban areas or like to get away on the weekends.

But if car companies carry through on their promises, battery technology will improve rapidly in the decade ahead, extending ranges and speeding up charge times. IHS, which advises many of the world's largest oil companies, estimates that at the current pace of growth, electric vehicles will make up 38 percent of new car sales worldwide by 2040. Under that scenario, oil demand would peak in the late 2030's at 113 million barrels per day, compared to about 100 million barrels today.

But should automated car technology advance quickly as the Tesla and the ride-hailing service Uber envision, that would multiply the adoption rate of electric vehicles. Oil demand would peak within the next decade and fall to 90 million barrels per day by 2040.

If ride-hailing companies could buy automated electric cars instead of paying drivers, they could offer their services more cheaply, which would attract more and more customers, said Broadbent, the IHS analyst. And since its cheaper for fleet operators to run electric cars, the market for gasoline-powered cars would shrink.)

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South Australia believes that creating Hydrogen from Water and Renewable Power will be Bigger than the LNG Market, because this Carbon free Hydrogen can then be used as Fuel in Power Plants, to produce electricity, in other countries

Bigger than LNG? SA to get first "green hydrogen" plant - InDaily

South Australia's first green hydrogen plant will be built near Port Lincoln, with the hope of opening up an industry that proponents say could eventually surpass the value of Australia's multi-billion-dollar gas exports.

From article, (South Australia's first green hydrogen plant will be built near Port Lincoln, with the hope of opening up an industry that proponents say could eventually surpass the value of Australia's multi-billion-dollar gas exports.

The plant, to be one of the biggest of its kind in the world, will use energy from Eyre Peninsula renewable energy generators – both wind and solar – to create hydrogen, which will, in turn, be used to power a 10MW hydrogen-fired gas turbine and a 5MW hydrogen fuel cell which will both supply power to the grid.

As the same time, the $117.5 million plant will also produce ammonia as a byproduct, which can be sold to agricultural industries as fertiliser.
 “Hydrogen offers an opportunity to create a new industry in South Australia where we can export our sun and wind resources to the world,” he said.

The Government believes hydrogen can be the “third arm” of a strategy to better use excess renewable energy production, alongside battery storage and pumped hydro.

Hydrogen is an emerging green industry. The plentiful element – the most common in the universe – can be ‘produced’ from renewable sources by using excess green energy to power an electrolysis plant. The process of electrolysis ‘splits’ water into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used to generate electricity via fuel cells or turbines.

H2U CEO Dr Attilio Pigneri said the plant would not only provide balancing services to the national grid and fast frequency response for new solar plants under development, but would also be a training ground for professionals in the emerging industry.

“With an initial capacity of 15 MW, the electrolyser plant will be one of the largest green hydrogen production facilities worldwide, and among the first ever commercial facilities to produce distributed ammonia from intermittent renewable resources,” he said.

One of the key issues to be tested at the site is how to get the hydrogen to growing markets in the Asia-Pacific, particularly Japan which is an established user of hydrogen for energy and transport.

“It’s really about market development,” Pigneri told InDaily.

Pigneri believes the industry could be huge – even bigger than Australia’s LNG industry which exported an estimated $23 billion of gas in 2016-17.

He said South Australia was a “very prospective region” for hydrogen because of its high penetration of wind and solar energy and positive policy from the State Government in the form of its “hydrogen road map“.

The export prospects were “huge”.

“It probably, in the long run, will be larger than LNG for export opportunities,” he said.)

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A new Water Splitting Method could produce Hydrogen cheaper than present methods.

New water-splitting method could open path to hydrogen economy | WSU News | Washington State University

PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University researchers have found a way to more efficiently generate hydrogen from water - an important key to making clean energy more viable. Using inexpensive nickel and iron, the researchers developed a very simple, five-minute method to create large amounts of a high-quality catalyst required for the chemical reaction to split water.

 From article, (Washington State University researchers have found a way to more efficiently generate hydrogen from water — an important key to making clean energy more viable.

Using inexpensive nickel and iron, the researchers developed a very simple, five-minute method to create large amounts of a high-quality catalyst required for the chemical reaction to split water.

They describe their method in the February issue of the journal Nano Energy.

Industries have not widely used the water splitting process, however, because of the prohibitive cost of the precious metal catalysts that are required – usually platinum or ruthenium. Many of the methods to split water also require too much energy, or the required catalyst materials break down too quickly.Energy conversion and storage is a key to the clean energy economy. Because solar and wind sources produce power only intermittently, there is a critical need for ways to store and save the electricity they create. One of the most promising ideas for storing renewable energy is to use the excess electricity generated from renewables to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen has myriad uses in industry and could be used to power hydrogen fuel-cell cars.

In their work, the researchers, led by professor Yuehe Lin in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, used two abundantly available and cheap metals to create a porous nanofoam that worked better than most catalysts that currently are used, including those made from the precious metals. The catalyst they created looks like a tiny sponge. With its unique atomic structure and many exposed surfaces throughout the material, the nanofoam can catalyze the important reaction with less energy than other catalysts. The catalyst showed very little loss in activity in a 12-hour stability test.)

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3D Printing, the Best New Tool for Astronauts?

Preparing for that trip to Mars

These scientists are working to make a human mission to Mars a reality.

From article, (Astronauts headed to Mars will have to take along almost everything they’ll need. They might be able to harvest some raw materials from the Red Planet. But afterward they’ll need some way to use them. “We have to be much more Earth-independent” than on missions closer to home, says Niki Werkheiser. Like Emrich, she too works at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Astronauts on the ISS have similar problems. If someone needs a special tool, they might have to wait months or longer for the next resupply mission. Werkheiser hopes to change that. She’s the lead scientist for a program that is bringing 3-D printing to space. With 3-D printing, astronauts could build the tools they need with the push of a button.

A 3-D printer works a bit like a hot-glue gun. Following a pattern on a computer, the printer squirts out a layer of polymer onto a tray. After this hardens into a plastic, the printer will add another layer. Then another. And it will keep this up until it has built a three-dimensional object. “You can do some really complex designs,” Werkheiser says. “You can build things with gears inside and moving parts — all in one print.”

Printing in space doesn’t work exactly as it does on Earth. For instance, fans are needed to circulate air around the object to cool it during printing. But there are some advantages, too. “On the ground, gravity can actually cause some problems with 3-D printing,” Werkheiser says. Since hot plastic is flexible, earthbound printers sometimes need to add support structures to hold an object upright as it cools. I space, a printer can build in any direction.

On the ISS, printing tools could save time and money. But such printers also offer other benefits. Many of the tools and gadgets sent to space on rockets are made from strong materials. To survive the stresses of launch, they also are heavily reinforced. If they were printed in space, they could be made lighter and thinner, with more room in them for electronics, scientific instruments or other pieces. Such make-your-own tools may even be a necessity on a mission to the moon or Mars, where the delivery of spare parts may not be possible.

Werkheiser's team sent its first 3-D printer to the ISS in 2014. It printed paddle-shaped objects as a test. These were then compared to ones printed on Earth. “We really did not see any meaningful difference,” she says.

Next, Werkheiser hopes to launch a printer this coming spring that can recycle plastic wastes into the material for printing new objects. And in the future, NASA hopes to develop a fabrication laboratory (the “Fab Lab,” for short) that will be able to print things — even electronics — out of metal.

So now that the astronauts can print tools on demand, what was their first request? “We designed them a little back scratcher,” Werkheiser says. It turns out, the dry air on the space station causes astronauts skin to get itchy. Sometimes, at least, the problems of space exploration have very simple solutions.)

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Can you really Grow Plants in Space?

Preparing for that trip to Mars

These scientists are working to make a human mission to Mars a reality.

 From article, (There are many reasons NASA wants to learn to grow vegetables in space. Besides providing fresh food for astronauts, plants can provide life support by recycling air and water. “There’s also the psychological benefit that growing plants may have,” says Gioia Massa. She’s a plant scientist and the head of NASA’s Veggie Project at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

As Mark Watney learned on Mars, potatoes might be good survival food. They’ve got decent amounts of protein, some vitamins and other nutrients. They’re also rich in carbohydrates (sugars and starches). You couldn’t survive on potatoes alone. They could, however, help to keep you from starvation.

There are some downsides, though. Potatoes need to be cooked before they can be eaten. And potato plants need a lot of room to grow. So Massa and her colleagues started with something easier: lettuce.

In 2014, they sent ISS astronauts a garden. Lettuce seeds were packed into “plant pillows” with baked clay and fertilizer. Add water, some artificial light and voila! The lettuce grew!

But the astronauts couldn’t eat it.

They had to send every bit back to Earth to be studied. The next year, after NASA scientists confirmed this food was safe, the astronauts grew a second crop. This time they were allowed to chow down.

The astronauts used their lettuce to garnish hamburgers. They also made lettuce wraps with lobster salad inside. “They got really creative,” Massa says.

Not surprisingly, gardening is different in space than it is on Earth. Without gravity, plants don’t know which way is up. But they adapt. They send their shoots toward light and their roots in the opposite direction. Fans must circulate air. Otherwise, oxygen would gather in a ball around the plants, and they wouldn’t have enough carbon dioxide to do photosynthesis.

The scientists also had trouble providing the plants enough water. The fabric plant pillows containing the seeds, clay and fertilizer were designed to draw water from a reservoir. But they didn’t work fast enough. The astronauts ended up needing to water the plants by hand. Massa and her team are now redesigning the watering system.

ISS astronauts also have grown Chinese cabbage as well as flowers. In addition to being pretty, astronaut Scott Kelly’s garden of zinnias helped scientists study whether plants flower in space. They do! That’s important to know, because flowering is how some plants reproduce. It’s also part of how some plants make fruit.

Future crops will include a bitter Asian green called mizuna and cherry tomatoes, which astronauts will have to pollinate by hand using a tiny brush. “We don’t have bees up there,” notes Massa. One day, they might also grow peppers and herbs.

While the veggie garden is small for now, eventually it could someday help feed astronauts on long-distance space missions — or a colony on Mars. “Everything we do is a stepping stone,” Massa explains.)

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Trump Administration has big plans for Space: Commercialization of the ISS and Earth Orbital Space Stations, Using the Moon as a Gas Station, and Basically Encouraging Space Companies by getting Rid of Difficult, Pointless, Regulations

Trump's commerce secretary wants to turn the moon into a 'gas station for outer space'

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said one of the Trump administration's goals is to turn the moon "into a kind of gas station for outer space." The idea has been floated before, with a recent study suggesting a refueling station on the moon could save huge amounts of energy.

From article, (Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Thursday that the Trump administration's goals include using the moon as a way station for expeditions to explore deeper parts of the solar system.

"A lot depends upon how successful we are in turning the moon into a kind of gas station for outer space," Ross said Thursday morning on CNBC.

President Donald Trump appointed Ross, a former private equity investor, as the point person to advance commercial space initiatives and as a member of the reconstituted National Space Council.

In Ross's conception, expeditions would first go from the Earth to the moon — then they would use ice from the moon's craters to refuel on their way to other destinations.

"The plan is to break down the ice into hydrogen and oxygen, use those as the fuel propellant," Ross said.

The idea isn't too far-fetched: The concept of the moon as a pit stop on the way to deeper space has been the subject of various studies that show it could cut down on energy use.

The Trump administration has recently announced initiatives to ramp up the commercial exploration in space, such as a proposal to turn over the operation of the International Space Station and low-orbit operations to private partners.L

Ross also praised SpaceX's Elon Musk for the recent launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket and said the administration wants to cut down on regulations for commercial space travel as a way to encourage more competition.

"It was really quite an amazing thing," Ross said of the SpaceX launch. "At the end of it, you have that little red Tesla hurdling off to an orbit around the sun and the moon.)

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SpaceX: Gone Fishin'

SpaceX tried to catch its rocket's nose cone with a giant net - and just missed

After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket's nose cone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nose cone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.

From article, (After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket’s nose cone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nose cone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.

Also known as the payload fairing, the nose cone is an earplug-shaped casing that sits on the top of the rocket, shielding the vehicle’s payload during launch. Once in space, the fairing breaks apart into two pieces and falls back to Earth. Normally, companies don’t recover the pieces of the fairing after a launch, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been eager to find a way to save the hardware. “Imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it’s going to smash into the ocean,” Musk said during a press conference in March 2017. “Would you try to recover that? Yes. Yes, you would.”

SpaceX has been able to land its fairings in the ocean before, but this was the first time the company deployed Mr. Steven to catch one of the pieces. Musk noted that a fairing half missed the boat by a few hundred meters. However, the company should be able to fix the problem by making the parafoils bigger, he said.

Though the pieces may have landed undamaged in the Pacific, it’s unclear if they can be used again. The possibility seems unlikely, as seawater can cause significant damage to spacecraft without proper shielding. In January, one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets somehow managed to survive intact after falling in the Atlantic Ocean, and Musk said the company would attempt to pull it back to shore. But that never happened. “The stage broke apart before we could complete an unplanned recovery effort for this mission,” SpaceX said in a statement.

Still, SpaceX will keep trying to save more nose cones in the months ahead. “My guess is next six months we’ve got fairing recovery figured out,” Musk said during a press conference for the Falcon Heavy launch. He even added that Mr. Steven could be used to catch more than just the fairing. “I think we can do the same thing with Dragon,” he said, referring to the company’s crew and cargo spacecraft.)

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Two Experimental Starlink Satellites were Lofted into Orbit. If proven successful, Starlink's batches of satellites, should start launching next year.

SpaceX launches broadband pathfinders

SpaceX launched again on Thursday - this time to put a Spanish radar satellite above the Earth. But there was a lot of interest also in the mission's secondary payloads - a couple of spacecraft the Californian rocket company will use to trial the delivery of broadband from orbit.

 From article, (Wednesday's Falcon-9 took up the Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b testbeds (CEO Elon Musk dubbed them Tintin A & B in a tweet).

The pair are identical - with a bus, or chassis, being slightly less than 1 cu metre, and having two 8m-long solar wings; and weighing roughly 400kg.

The Microsats are intended to prove all the different design elements, such as the antenna that will relay the data traffic.

If all proceeds as it should, SpaceX will aim to start deploying Starlink's satellites in batches over the next few years.

The Falcon Heavy, with its enormous lifting capacity, could help accelerate the roll-out.

These spacecraft would be positioned at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km, and transmit in the Ku and Ka portions of the radio spectrum.

The company would like also to put up an additional 7,500 satellites that would sit under the initial set and transmit in the V-band.

SpaceX does not talk much about its broadband plans, but that is true of all the companies that have similar proposals.In 2016, it filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in the US for a licence to operate a "mesh network" in the sky consisting of 4,425 satellites arranged in 83 orbital planes.

Some of these firms have already launched pathfinders. Telesat of Canada, for example, launched its Phase 1 LEO satellite in January. This is a prototype for more than 100 follow-on platforms.

Perhaps the most advanced mega-constellation in this field is OneWeb, which will be launching 10 satellites later this year for a network that will eventually comprise at least 600, but which could eventually encompass more than 2,000 spacecraft.

OneWeb is backed by heavyweights in the space industry, such Airbus, Qualcomm, Intelsat, Hughes, and MDA.)

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