NASA reportedly had contingency plans for Russia’s ISS exit last year

Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed chief of Roscosmos, recently announced that Russia is pulling out of the International Space Station after 2024. NASA and Russia’s space agency work in tandem to keep the station running, and the latter’s exit would change ISS operations tremendously. According to Reuters, though, NASA has actually been preparing for such a possibility way before Borisov made his announcement — and even before the invasion of Ukraine began — in light of the increasing tensions between Russia and the US.

Reuters‘ sources said NASA and the White House drew up contingency plans for the ISS late last year. Those plans include ways to pull astronauts out of the station if Russia leaves abruptly and ways to keep the ISS running without Russian hardware. While the US module keeps the station balanced and provides the electricity it needs to run using its solar arrays, Roscosmos’ module has the thrusters needed to keep the flying lab in orbit. And that is why NASA’s contingency plans also reportedly include examining ways to dispose of the station years earlier than planned. 

Apparently, NASA was working on creating a formal request for contractors to conjure up ways to deorbit the space station over the past few weeks. That said, the agency roped in private space companies into its contingency planning in hopes of keeping the ISS in orbit even without Russia. The sources said Boeing already formed a team of engineers to figure out how to control the ISS without Russia’s thrusters. SpaceX chief Elon Musk also previously expressed interest in helping out when former Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin slammed Western sanctions against his country, asking who would “save the ISS from uncontrolled deorbiting” if the West blocks cooperation with Russia.

Back in June, Northrop Grumman was successfully able to adjust the station’s orbit for future operations using its Cygnus capsule, which was then docked to the ISS. Reuters‘ sources said SpaceX is also looking into the possibility of using its spacecraft to boost the station’s orbit. 

Borisov said Russia hasn’t set a date for its exit yet, but that it would honor its obligations and will give partners a one-year notice before it leaves. Roscosmos and NASA will most likely continue working closely until Russia pulls out of the program — they even recently agreed to swap seats on Crew Dragon and Soyuz flights to the ISS.

NASA develops ingenious solution to fix its troubled ‘Lucy’ asteroid explorer

Last year, NASA launched the Lucy spacecraft designed to explore the Trojan asteroids trapped near Jupiter’s Lagrange points. However, a problem arose just 12 hours after launch — one of the large solar arrays designed to generate power from an increasingly distant Sun had failed to fully deploy and latch. Now, NASA has announced that a team was able to troubleshoot the problem sufficiently for the mission to continue — thanks to several clever tricks. 

Hours after the problem was first discovered, NASA pulled together an anomaly response team with members from the science mission lead Southwest Research Institute, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the spacecraft’s builder, Northrop Grumman. 

Since there’s no camera aimed at the solar arrays, the team had to figure out another way to find the problem. To that end, they fired the spacecraft’s thrusters to measure any anomalous vibrations, and created a detailed model of the array’s motor assembly to determine the array’s rigidness. They finally figured out that a lanyard designed to pull the array open was probably snagged on its spool. 

The team quickly honed in on two potential solutions. One was simply to use the array as it was, because it was still generating 90 percent of expected power. The other was to attempt to pull the lanyard harder by using the back-up deployment motor as well as the primary motor, hopefully allowing it to wind further and engage the latching mechanism. 

Both motors were never designed to work at the same time, so the team modeled it to test out possible outcomes and potential ripple effects. After months of simulations, they decided to proceed with the two-motor option. They ran both the primary and backup solar deployment motors simultaneously seven times, and succeeded in further opening and tensioning the array. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t close enough to latch, but it’s now “under substantially more tension, making it stable enough for the spacecraft to operate as needed for mission operations,” NASA said. It’s now “ready and able” to complete its next deadline, getting a boost from Earth’s gravity in October 2022. It’s scheduled to arrive at its first asteroid target in 2025. 

Virgin Galactic postpones space tourism flights again

Virgin Galactic has announced that its commercial space tourism service has been delayed yet again, from the end of this year until Q2 2023. During its earnings report, the company said that the delay is “due to the extended completion dates [i.e., delays] within the mothership enhancement program.”

The mothership VMS Eve is a crucial part of its launch system, carrying the VSS Unity spacecraft to 50,000 feet before it launches to the edge of space. The enhancement program launched July 7th with the aim of improving flight frequency, along with “reliability, predictability and durability.” 

At the same time it revealed the updates, Virgin Galactic announced that Boeing’s Aurora Flight Sciences will design and manufacture its next-gen motherships, expected to enter service in 2025. The company is also working on a new spaceship, the VSS Imagine, set to make a debut test flight in Q1 2023. 

Virgin Galactic had already delayed its first paid flights from Q3 to Q4 2022 out of an “abundance of caution” due to a possible flight control system issue. The next flight was supposed to launch three Italian Air Force members to the edge of space, to study the effects of transitioning from regular Earth gravity to microgravity on both humans and the environment. Yesterday, the company reported a $111 million quarterly loss and plans a $300 million stock offering.

Elon Musk accuses Twitter of fraud for hiding real number of fake accounts

Elon Musk is accusing Twitter of fraud for hiding the real number of bots on its platform, according to The New York Times. In the latest installment of the Twitter-vs-Musk saga, the Tesla chief’s team claimed in a legal filing that 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users who see ads are inauthentic accounts. If you’ll recall, Twitter has long maintained that bots represent less than five percent of its userbase, and Musk put his planned acquisition of the social network on hold in mid-July to confirm if that’s accurate. 

The Tesla and SpaceX chief, who’s also a prolific Twitter user, launched an aggressive takeover of the social network in April after it became the company’s largest shareholder. While Twitter quickly accepted his offer, they butted heads over the number of fake accounts on the platform shortly after that — he also accused the company of not giving him access to enough information to verify the number of bots on the website. Twitter gave him full access to its internal data in response, but in the end, Musk told the Securities and Exchange Commission that he wanted to terminate the acquisition over “false and misleading representations” made by the social network. 

Twitter sued its largest shareholder for trying to back out of its $44 billion buyout deal, telling the court that Musk is wrongfully breaking their agreement by doing so. The website accused him of backing out because Tesla’s and Twitter’s shares went down due to the economic downturn and the “deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”

In this new filing, Musk’s camp said its analysts found a much higher number of inauthentic accounts than Twitter claimed using Botometer. That’s a machine learning algorithm designed by Indiana University that “checks the activity of Twitter accounts and gives them a score based on how likely they are to be bots.” Musk’s lawyers said the social network concealed its bot problem to get Musk to agree to buy the company “at an inflated price.” They also said:

“Twitter was miscounting the number of false and spam accounts on its platform, as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects. Twitter’s disclosures have slowly unraveled, with Twitter frantically closing the gates on information in a desperate bid to prevent the Musk parties from uncovering its fraud.”

Twitter fired back with its own legal filing, calling his claims “factually inaccurate, legally insufficient and commercially irrelevant.” The company said the Botometer is unreliable and had once given Musk’s own Twitter account a score indicating that it’s “highly likely to be a bot.” Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk is heading to court in October.