Space News & Blog Articles

A team at Purdue University developed a drag sail to attach to satellites to help them de-orbit to combat space debris. Unfortunately, the rocket carrying the test device, launched by Firefly Aerospace, exploded shortly after launch.

Space junk is a growing problem, with tens of thousands of small objects constantly whirling around the Earth. Each one is a potential hazard, capable of ripping apart solar panels and driving holes into spacecraft. One of the biggest sources of space junk is unused satellites, which remain in orbit even after the end of their lifetimes. These satellites cannot be controlled or steered, so they have the occasional bad habit of crashing into other things.

Mitigating this problem is essential to the future of spaceflight. One approach is to ditch unwanted satellites into the Earth’s atmosphere, which generally does a pretty good job of incinerating spacecraft.

A team of students, faculty, and staff at Perdue University’s Space Flight Projects Laboratory developed Spinnaker3, a drag sail that could someday be attached to satellites. The drag sail would slow the orbit of a satellite at the end of its mission until it can plunge into the atmosphere on its own.

Fully deployed, Spinnaker3 – named for the three-meter length of its carbon-fiver booms – was designed to be 194 square feet once fully deployed and was made of CP1, a fluorinated polyimide developed by high-performance materials designer NeXolve.

Scientists are fortunate enough to have detailed, close-up views of the near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu. Both asteroids have a diamond shape, for some reason. Why? Up until now, it’s been a puzzle.

Now a team of scientists has tackled the question and may have come up with the answer.

Asteroids are an ongoing target of study for scientists. They’re remnants from the primordial Solar System, material that wasn’t swept up in planet formation. Most of them are way out in the asteroid belt, where they’re difficult to study.

But some of them have escaped the belt and come close to Earth. These near-Earth asteroids give scientists their best chance to study them. Spacecraft have been sent to both Ryugu and Bennu to collect samples and return them to Earth. While there, both the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2, which visited Ryugu, and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which visited Bennu, studied their asteroid targets intensely, including gathering detailed images.

Both are rubble-pile asteroids, which means that they’re made up of chunks of smaller material bound together by gravity, and both are diamond-shaped. Both also rotate rapidly.

The early solar system was an especially violent place. The terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) likely formed by suffering countless collisions between planetesimals. But the material left over from all those collisions should have remained in orbit around the sun, where it would’ve eventually found itself in the asteroid belt. But the belt contains no such record of that process.

What happened to the missing pieces of the solar system?

Two researchers from Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, former NewSpace Postdoctoral Fellow Travis Gabriel and doctoral student Harrison Allen-Sutter, conducted extensive computer simulations of the early solar system to track what happened to the debris when planetesimals collided.

“Most researchers focus on the direct effects of impacts, but the nature of the debris has been underexplored,” Allen-Sutter said.

Gabriel and Allen-Sutter discovered that the energies released during a massive collision were sufficient to vaporize the debris. So rather than sending big chunks flying wide, the leftovers were atomized. That has could more easily escape the solar system, never to be seen again.

Visualizations can inspire creative new ways of thinking about an object.  But holding that visualization in your hand adds a whole other level of impact to it.  That desire for impact has led Dr. Nia Imara, an astrophysicist and artist at UC Santa Cruz, to create the first-ever 3D printed models of stellar nurseries.

The printed spheres are more than just fancy baseball-sized marbles.  Their strands of different colorations represent the filaments and clumps of material naturally found in star-forming regions in space.  Dr. Imara worked with John Forbes at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics and James Weaver at Harvard to develop a suite of nine different models of the three forces that impact how stellar nurseries forms: turbulence, gravity, and magnetic fields.

Nia Imara – the astrophysicist/artist who developed the idea of 3D printing the spheres.
Credit – Nia Imara

Different patterns in the final marbles represent variations in those three forces. The added benefit of a third dimension of visualization allowed researchers to understand how those forces interact in ways never before considered. Lighter areas correspond to dense clumps of gas and dust, whereas the darker swirls represent the void of space itself.

Those intricate swirls resulted from a type of inkjet-like 3D printing process, which differs from the typical extrusion processes a standard desktop 3D printer uses.  It uses tiny drops of resin precisely deposited at certain locations to create the swirling, whimsical effects seen in the models.

When it landed on Mars in February of 2021, the Perseverance rover joined a small armada of robotic explorers working hard to characterize Mars’ environment and atmosphere and determine if it ever supported life. But unlike its predecessors, one of the key objectives of the rover is to obtain samples of Martian soil and rock, which it will leave in a cache for later retrieval by a joint NASA-ESA mission.

This will be the first sample return from Mars, and the analysis of these samples will provide new insight into the geological and environmental evolution of Mars. The first attempt to obtain a sample didn’t go so well, with the sample crumbling before it was placed in the cache. Undeterred, the science team moved onto the next site and prepared to try again. A few days ago, NASA confirmed that the rover succeeded in its second attempt and has the pictures to prove it!

The mission team was notified about the successful retrieval of the core sample on Sept. 1st, after two days of preparation and weeks of driving. To ensure that the retrieval went as planned, the mission team took additional photos of the drill site and the sample tube before transferring the tube into the rover chassis for assessment and processing. This is not standard procedure, but the team insisted on adding this extra step after the rover’s failed in its first attempt.

The first attempt to procure a drill sample took place on August 5th, where the rover’s Sample Caching System (SCS) employed its three robotic elements to drill and procure a sample of Martian rock. The first is the five-jointed robotic arm that can reach up to 2-meters (7 feet) from the rover and carries a large turret with a rotary percussive drill. The second element is the bit carousel, which provides the drill bits and empty sample tubes to the drill.

This same element is also responsible for transferring sample-filled tubes into the rover’s chassis, where they are assessed and processed. The third is the 0.5-meter (1.6-foot) sample handling arm (aka. the “T-Rex Arm”) that is located in the rover’s underbelly and is responsible for moving sample tubes between storage and documentation stations, as well as the bit carousel.

White dwarfs are supposed to be dead remnants of stars, doomed to simply fade away into the background. But new observations show that some are able to maintain some semblance of life by wrapping themselves in a layer of fusing hydrogen.

White dwarfs are the dense leftover cores of sunlike stars. They are exposed to the universe when stars build up too much carbon and oxygen in their centers. They then tear themselves apart in a slow, agonizing process that eventually creates a planetary nebula. With all the outer layers stripped, the core remains – a white dwarf.

White dwarfs are inert. They don’t have enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion of their carbon and oxygen, and so they just sit there, slowly radiating away their heat for eons upon eons.

But new research is challenging that simple story.

“We have found the first observational evidence that white dwarfs can still undergo stable thermonuclear activity,” explained Jianxing Chen of the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led this research. “This was quite a surprise, as it is at odds with what is commonly believed.”

When a young solar system gets going it’s little more than a young star and a rotating disk of debris. Accepted thinking says that the swirling debris is swept up in planet formation. But a new study says that much of the matter in the disk could face a different fate.

It may not have the honour of becoming part of a nice stable planet, orbiting placidly and reliably around its host star. Instead, it’s simply discarded. It’s ejected out of the young, still-forming solar system to spend its existence as interstellar objects or as rogue planets.

The study comes from Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj, names that may be familiar to Universe Today readers. Loeb and Siraj are both from the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard and have collaborated on research before. Their new study is titled “Preliminary Evidence That Protoplanetary Disks Eject More Mass Than They Retain.” It’s available on the pre-print site arxiv.org and hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.

Loeb and Siraj point to the existence of interstellar objects like Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov to make their case. So far, there’s no conclusive proof for the origin of these objects and their brethren. Researchers have come up with different origins, and have brought evidence to bear, but so far there’s no consensus. Oumuamua could be an interstellar dark hydrogen iceberg, an object similar to Pluto, or even a type of interstellar ‘dust bunny.’ And comet 2l/Borisov is likely a rogue interstellar comet, the first one we’ve observed.

Stellar mass budgets show that neither exo-Oort Clouds nor protoplanetary disks can provide enough mass to explain interstellar objects and the rogue planet population. So maybe our stellar mass budgets are wrong? Maybe the bulk of the material in protoplanetary disks is ejected and becomes interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov, and rogue planets, with some of those planets being many times larger than Earth.

Rocket science is hard.  So far, no commercial rocket launch company has ever successfully gotten to orbit on the first try.  The first flight of Firefly‘s Alpha rocket prototype did not break that streak last week when it exploded two and a half minutes after takeoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base.  

The launch, which took place on September 3rd, was the first flight of the Alpha, which hit some milestones, although it did not “meet all of [their] missions objectives,” according to a company statement.  The milestones it did meet include first stage ignition, liftoff, and hitting supersonic speeds.  And, of course, the company got plenty of data to analyze.

Some of that data pointed to a first-stage engine shut down as the main cause of the failure. According to a statement from the company, one of the four Reaver engines shut down 15 seconds into the flight.  The engine itself didn’t explode, just shut off, with the main propellant valves simply closing and terminating the rocket’s fuel.  That resulted in a much slower climb rate than expected, with the rocket reaching Mach 1 over a minute later than planned.  

It also resulted in a control problem once the vehicle did reach supersonic speeds at 2 minutes 20 seconds after takeoff. Ten seconds later, the rocket exploded over the Pacific Ocean after it appeared to tumble briefly.  There were no injuries, though some eyewitnesses saw debris falling on Orcutt, California, located just to the north of the rocket’s launch pad. This is actually the second time in a few weeks that an engine shutdown caused a failed launch, with Astra, another launch company, failing to get its own payload into orbit at the end of August.

That debris path is a rarity at Vandenberg. The Firefly team decided to take a wider flight corridor to orbit by flying to the west rather than to the south as is traditional for rockets launching from the base.  The alternative path required a trade-off, though – the rocket didn’t have as much payload capacity as it would have if it had taken off on the usual southern flight path.

All hail the occulter: an orbiting starshade for ground-based telescopes.

Ground-based telescopes and orbiting observatories have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. And while the techniques used by those instruments have proven to be incredibly powerful in discovery, they are decidedly less capable in characterization. That’s because most exoplanet-hunting techniques rely on indirect measurements of the existence of an exoplanet – they look for dips in the brightness of a parent star or slight wobbles in its position.

Those techniques only give us extremely limited information about what those exoplanets are really like. We have to make educated guesses as to their compositions. But astronomy is just like anything else: a picture is worth a thousand words. An image of an exoplanet provides extremely rich detail that simply cannot be gained from other techniques. But to take a picture of an exoplanet you have to contend with the overwhelming brightness of its parent star.

The most common method to deal with this interference is through a coronagraph, which is a device inside a telescope that blocks out the light of the star. If the orbiting planet is big enough and bright enough (usually in the infrared due to its own heat emission), we can get a direct picture. But this method has only delivered a handful of direct images.

What would it take to image Earth-like planets around sun-like stars? That is the question pondered in a recent paper appearing on the preprint journal arXiv.

In this decade, multiple space agencies and commercial space entities will be taking us back to the Moon. But unlike the Apollo Era, the goal of these programs is not “footprints and flags,” but to establish the necessary infrastructure to keep going back. In particular, NASA, the ESA, Roscosmos, and China are all planning on establishing outposts that will allow for scientific research and a sustained human presence.

The ESA is currently showcasing what its outpost will look like at the 17th annual Architecture Exhibition at the La Biennale di Venezia museum in Venice. It’s known as the International Moon Village, which was designed by the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) with technical support from the ESA. This same company recently unveiled a prototype of the skeletal metal component that will one day be part of the Village’s lunar habitats.

The component was built by MX3D, an Amersterdam-based 3D printing architecture and design firm specializing in Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM). This process involves fusing metal wires with lasers to create lightweight metal objects with high structural strength. The company is renowned for creating the 3D printed metal bridge that spans the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal in Amsterdam (shown below).

The skeletal, smooth web pattern will be part of the flooring for each habitat that collectively makes up the ESA’s International Lunar Village. The prototype was created using a robotic 3D printer out of 308LSi stainless steel over the course of about 10 days (246 hours), measures 4.5 m (~15 ft) in diameter, and has a total mass of approximately 395 kg (over 870 lbs). As ESA Advanced Manufacturing Engineer Advenit Makaya said in a recent ESA press release:

“This is a remarkable achievement from MX3D, which further highlights the potential of this additive manufacturing technique for an increasing range of space applications. The design flexibility and the possibility to combine the printed structure with embedded monitoring systems – as demonstrated in the 3D-printed bridge in Amsterdam – are worth investigating for applications in space structures. This technique could also be considered for in-situ construction of infrastructure during sustainable exploration missions, for instance by using metallic feedstock derived from the locally available regolith.”

NASA is a sprawling organization that has to talk to everything from politicians in Washington DC to space probes that have left the solar system.  Discussions with the first might be as simple as a written letter for informal conversation, while the second requires a high-power network of ground-based antennas.  Known as the Deep Space Network (DSN) this series of antennas spread over three continents is the backbone of NASA’s communications with its various space probes. Now the DSN is in the process of implementing a well-deserved upgrade.

Part of the reason for that upgrade is the sheer number of spacecraft in deep space NASA has to communicate with.  Everything from Voyager to the Parker Solar Probe requires time on the antenna to relay data and receive instructions.  But with new missions launching at an increasing pace, the network must be beefed up in order to accommodate all the new communication links.

Currently, DSN supports 39 missions, but NASA has 30 additional missions in development, and not all of the existing missions will be phased out in the near future.  To ensure consistent communication no matter where the Earth is on its journey around the sun, the antennas supporting those 30 missions are evenly spread around the globe – in Madrid, Spain, Canberra, Australia, and near Barstow California. When not being used for communication directly, the antennas can serve as data collection platforms for radio science missions as well.

One major component of the upgrade needed to support all this work is the addition of 2 new antennas. The first, a 34-m wide dish named DSS-56 was commissioned in Madrid in January of this year. Also completed this year was an upgrade to DSS-43, a 70-m antenna located in Australia that is the only antenna in the Southern Hemisphere that is capable of sending messages to Voyager, which is currently outside of our solar system.  

DSS-43 won’t be the last 70-m antenna improvement either – its equivalents in Madrid and California are slated to receive upgrades soon as well.  Increasing the power of those antennas isn’t their only purpose.  With so much additional data being sent between handlers and spacecraft, increasing data transfer rates is another focal point of the network upgrades.  Eliminating frequency bands that specific telescopes are limited to will help the network utilize all of its resources to support all of its missions.  

You may have heard this one before, but encouraging news comes from NASA, ESA, and Arianespace today:  they are now targeting December 18, 2021 as the new launch date for the oft-delayed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The latest linchpin in getting JWST off the ground is that the Ariane 5 rocket appears to be ready and approved for launch. The usually reliable Ariane 5 experienced problems during previous launches but officials from Arianespace said the origin of the problem was found and corrective actions have been taken, leading to a successful launch on July 30 of this year, where an Ariane 5 sent two commercial satellites into orbit.

Additionally, major elements of the Ariane 5 rocket have reached Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket’s fairing, upper stage and core stage are now on site, but the telescope itself awaits transport from Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California.

NASA says teams are preparing for shipment operations, during which the observatory will undergo final closeout procedures and packing for its journey to the launch site. The scheduled shipment of Webb to French Guiana will be towards the end of September 2021.

First conceived of in 1989, the JWST project has endured numerous delays, problems, fixes, tests and re-tests — as well as many rescheduled tentative launch dates. The telescope also survived a threatened cancellation in 2011. Previous tentative launch dates have come and gone in (at least) 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2018, and the latest previous date was October 31, 2021.  

New research suggests that the humble asteroid Vesta may have cracked open like an egg.

NASA’s Dawn probe was launched in September 2007 to study the two largest members of the asteroid belt, Ceres and Vesta. But it didn’t have to work hard to get there.

“When we think of asteroid belts, we probably picture Han Solo maneuvering the millennium falcon through a dense set of irregularly shaped gray rocks in space,” according to Christian Klimczak, associate professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of geology. “While most rocks are indeed irregularly shaped and gray, they are far apart and NASA’s Dawn spacecraft did not have to maneuver around any other asteroids to reach and explore Vesta.”

Vesta is particularly intriguing among the asteroids because it’s large enough to have an iron core, a mantle, and a crust, not unlike the Earth. That’s why astronomers consider Vesta to be a planetesimal: an almost-planet. “Vesta was on the way to becoming an Earth-like planet, too, but planet formation stopped along the way there early in the history of our solar system,” Klimczak said. “Therefore, studying Vesta helps us understand the very early days of our planetary neighborhood and how our own planet formed.”

Except things didn’t go as awesomely for Vesta as it did for the Earth. For one, the little asteroid was struck by two other large asteroids that managed to leave impact craters so big that they cover almost its entire southern half. By studying Vesta closely, researchers like Klimczak try to understand the evolution of the planetesimal.

Fall 2021 offers up an all-night parade of challenging telescopic comets.

Ready for the next big one? If you’re like us, the surprise appearance of Comet F3 NEOWISE last summer was a great teaser of what could be. To be sure, we’re still long overdue for the next great naked eye comet, but there’s always a steady stream of fainter fuzzies out there for owners of large light buckets to hunt down. Fall of 2021 sees half a dozen comets knocking on binocular visibility around +10th magnitude, from dusk ‘til dawn. So without further fanfare, here are the best cometary targets for September into October 2021:

-8P/Tuttle

Orbital period: 13.6 years.

Perihelion: August 27th, 2021.

Mars is bombarded with radiation. Without a protective magnetic shield and a thick atmosphere like Earth’s, radiation from space has a nearly unimpeded path to the Martian surface. Our machines can roam around on the surface and face all that radiation with impunity. But not humans. For humans, all that radiation is a deadly hazard.

How can any potential human explorers cope with that?

Well, they’ll need shelter. And they’ll either have to bring it along with them or build it there somehow.

Or maybe not. Maybe they could use natural features as part of their protection.

A new study using data from MSL Curiosity has uncovered how Mars’ natural landscape features can provide some shelter from radiation. Specifically, it shows how Martian buttes provide protection from high-energy particles from space. The study is titled “Directionality of the Martian Surface Radiation and Derivation of the Upward Albedo Radiation” and it’s published in Geophysical Research Letters. The lead author is Guo Jingnan from the University of Science and Technology of China.

What happens when you slam a neutron star (or black hole, take your pick) into a companion star? A supernova, that’s what. And for the first time ever, astronomers think they’ve spotted one.

Back in 2014 the MAXI instrument aboard the International Space Station detected a flare of X-rays from a dwarf, star-forming galaxy sitting 480 million light-years away from us. No big deal; it happens all the time.

Around the same time, a radio survey using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) called the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) didn’t find anything unusual in that patch of the sky. Also no big deal.

But then a follow-up survey, the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) which began observations in 2017, did find something: a bright source of radio emissions coming from the same place. Big deal.

The astronomers behind the survey think they’ve spotted something remarkable. A supernova detonation triggered by a massive case of stellar indigestion; a star consuming a companion black hole or neutron star.

How bad is the drought in the western United States? A stunning depiction of the record dry spell comes in images of Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. NASA satellite images, below, from Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 show the difference in lake levels between August 2000 and August 2021.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the water level in the reservoir — which supplies drinking water to millions of people in California, Arizona, Nevada, and part of northern Mexico — was measured at its lowest level since the lake was created with the damming of the Colorado River in 1935.

Data shows that as of August 22, 2021, Lake Mead was filled to just 35 percent of its capacity. The low water level comes at a time when 95 percent of the land in nine Western states is affected by some level of drought (64 percent is extreme or worse). It continues a 22-year megadrought that may be the region’s worst dry spell in twelve centuries.

The image from 2021 shows tan “fringes” along the shoreline in 2021, which are areas of the lakebed that would be underwater when the reservoir is filled closer to capacity. This phenomenon is often referred to as a “bathtub ring.”

The lake elevation data, shown below, says that at the end of July 2021, the water elevation at the Hoover Dam was 1067.65 feet (325 meters) above sea level, the lowest since April 1937, when the lake was still being filled. The elevation at the end of July 2000—around the time of the Landsat 7 images – was as 1,199.97 feet (341 meters).

New research shows that other sunlike stars in our galaxy aren’t so kind to their planets. Up to a quarter of them may consume planets before they even establish a solar system. That consumption leaves behind a distinct chemical fingerprint in the stars, which can help researchers understand how common planetary systems are…and how often they get destroyed.

Binary sunlike stars should be identical twins. They come from the same protostellar gas cloud. They formed with the same primordial soup of ingredients. They had similar formation histories, even to the point of having nearly the same size. They should look, act, and even smell the same.

But 25% of the time, they don’t. In those cases, one of the binary pair has a higher abundance of heavier elements than its twin. How could these differences arise?

One possibility, as described in a paper recently appearing in the preprint journal arXiv and submitted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy, is that one of those sunlike stars in the binary pair has eaten its children.

It wouldn’t take much. Just a few Earth masses is enough to contaminate a star’s atmosphere to the point that we could detect those differences with our observations. The researchers behind the study examined 107 binary pairs of sunlike stars and found that planet engulfment was a scarily common scenario.

NASA is commonly thought of as America’s space agency, but its name also emphasizes another research area. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is also America’s civilian aerospace research organization.  In that role, it has been instrumental in developing new technologies ranging from rocket engines to aircraft control systems.  Part of that role is running the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) campaign to test autonomous drone technology.  The latest milestone in that campaign was testing an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) helicopter intended for eventual use as an air taxi. 

The testing, which runs through September 10th, utilizes a yet-to-be-named eVTOL craft from a company called Joby, which has been developing the technology with NASA for over 10 years.  The aircraft, which looks like a large version of a 6-rotor drone, will be performing flight tests at Joby’s Electric Flight Base, near Big Sur in California.

This is the first round of testing with this novel type of aircraft.  NASA has a rigorous test plan to perform, including collecting data on the vehicle’s movement, noise, and communications in various forms of flight.  To collect some of the data, researchers had to develop a type of mobile acoustic center that could track the aircraft with 50 different microphones and collect data on the noise it would make.

Noise is an important factor in the adoption of autonomous VTOL flight – people have to accept it.  Noone would be happy with delivery drones taking off in their backyard if they created the same amount of noise at a jet engine.  But public acceptance isn’t the only factor influencing the testing.

Another is regulations.  While not directly responsible for regulating autonomous flight, NASA is a key partner for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is.  Some technology activists have already expressed concerns that the FAA is digging its heels in when dealing with a quickly evolving industry, potentially hindering the development of American companies as competitors in better regulatory regimes literally fly by them.

In ten days, SpaceX and the payment processing company Shift4Payments will be making history as four commercial astronauts board the Crew Dragon Resilience and fly to space. This mission, known as Inspiration4, will be the first all-civilian flight in history, the purpose of which will be to raise awareness, funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and inspire the next generation to seek out education and employment in the STEM fields.

In preparation for this moment in spaceflight history, the four-person crew got a chance to see a key piece of hardware that will make the mission special. This was the Crew Dragon cupola, a domed glass window that replaced the usual docking adapter on the front of the spacecraft. Before it was shipped off to Florida to be integrated with the rest of the spacecraft, the crew got a chance to peer through the dome and imagine what it will be like to do so in space!

This event, shared via Twitter, took place at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, this past Wednesday (Sept. 1st). One by one, the four-member crew got a chance to pose inside the cupola as part of a campaign to raise awareness about the first all-civilian flight. This mission will not only be a milestone in spaceflight. It also illustrates how commercial spaceflight and public-private partnerships are making space more accessible and beneficial.

This mission is named in recognition of the four-person crew that will go to space to raise awareness and funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They include Mission Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Pilot Dr. Sian Proctor, Medical Officer Hayley Arceneaux, and Mission Specialist Chris Sembroski. Each person was carefully selected based on the skills and experience they bring to the mission and represent a specific part of the overall theme.

Once the crew selection process was complete, and the winners announced in March of 2021, the four-member crew began the six-month training process in preparation for spaceflight. This included parabolic flights (aka. zero-g flights) to accustom them to the feeling of being weightless, altitude training (climbing Mount Ranier), centrifuge training, Dragon simulations, observations of other launch operations, and additional classroom, simulation, and medical testing.