A record 2,897 satellites were launched into orbit around the Earth by more than 50 countries last year, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist known for documenting space activity. An even greater number are expected to be launched in 2024.

All of that contributes to a supernova of new space-based communications and Earth-observation sensor capabilities, says Stephen Kitay, a former Pentagon deputy assistant secretary for space policy, now senior director of Azure Space at Microsoft.

“A huge transformation is happening in space — and the technology that was never there before — effectively extending the internet and edge computing into space,” Kitay said in the report, produced by Scoop News Group and underwritten by Microsoft.

What’s been missing until recently, he says, is a reliable and secure way to manage and transmit the explosive growth of satellite data being collected in space and the means to automate and manage satellite activities more efficiently.

That’s changing as a new era of secure, scalable cloud computing centers strategically located around the globe is developing to stay connected to all those satellites — along with a new generation of software platforms to manage the devices, applications, and data on board all of them, according to the report.

How federal agencies stand to benefit

The report highlights the rise of hybrid space architecture, which Microsoft helped pioneer under the Azure Space banner launched in 2020. The concept involves “bringing cloud and space technologies together to foster a partner ecosystem,” explained Kitay. That effort has spawned a variety of components, including:

• Azure Orbital Ground Station – designed to give satellite operators, including government customers, the ability to deliver space data with near-zero latency to Microsoft’s global network of Microsoft and partner ground stations.
• Azure Orbital Cloud Access – enables a seamless cloud experience anywhere on the planet by combining Microsoft Cloud with low latency satellite and 5G communications.
• Microsoft Planetary Computer – a multi-petabyte catalog of global open geospatial data with intuitive APIs aimed at helping researchers, scientists, students, and organizations worldwide gain valuable insights from Earth observation data.

At the same time, Microsoft is “bringing our code and our software into space by empowering developers to build applications on the ground in the cloud and then seamlessly deploy them on board spacecraft,” Kitay said.

The report also highlights examples of how federal agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Defense Department, among others, stand to gain powerful new insights from Earth observation data to better support their missions.

“Removing the barriers to seamless and secure connectivity from ground to orbit creates entirely new opportunities for federal government customers, including those operating in classified environments,” said Zach Kramer, vice president of the Mission Engineering unit at Microsoft.

“Defense and civilian agencies can leverage this ubiquitous connectivity to develop and deploy new applications, gather and transmit data at the speed of relevance, and gain an information advantage to serve the American people.”

Download the full report.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group, for FedScoop and underwritten by Microsoft.

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The confirmed guest list for his Sept. 13 AI insight forum includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Tesla, X and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk; NVIDIA President Jensen Huang; Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; technologist and Google alum Eric Schmidt; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Schumer’s office said earlier this week.

The tech industry leaders, along with representatives from labor and civil rights advocacy groups, will join Schumer and other members of Congress for a closed-door AI “bipartisan forum,” without press.

In June, Schumer, a New York Democrat, said that he would host a forum to “lay down a new foundation for AI policy.”

“We need the best of the best sitting at the table: the top AI developers, executives, scientists, advocates, community leaders, workers, national security experts – all together in one room, doing years of work in a matter of months,” Schumer said, according to the Senate Democrats’ website.

The Senate majority leader has planned nine different forums beginning with next month’s that will focus on potential avenues for regulating the technology. These “insight forums” will focus on issues including national security, privacy, high-risk applications, bias, and the implications of AI for the workforce, gathering both those bullish on AI as well as skeptics and critics of the technology.

Schumer in June also introduced a plan to develop comprehensive legislation in Congress to regulate and advance the development of artificial intelligence in the U.S. Called the “Safe Innovation Framework for AI Policy,” the plan outlines ways to “protect, expand, and harness AI’s potential” as Congress pursues legislation.

The senator’s AI push comes as federal officials, along with Congress, weigh myriad approaches to regulating AI.  There’s growing pressure on the U.S. to catch up to the European Union, which recently passed a draft legislation called the AI Act. At the same time, federal officials are also searching for ways to push U.S. companies to the forefront of global AI technology development — particularly as China continues to invest in the technology, too.

As the quest to regulate the tech ramps up, AI experts, activists, and civil rights groups have continued to highlight the harms that artificial intelligence can create or exacerbate, including misinformation, bias and discrimination, intellectual property issues, and data privacy and cybersecurity risks. 

The Biden administration has also expressed commitment to safeguarding Americans’ rights and safety with a focus on protecting user privacy and addressing bias and misinformation in AI. Biden in June met with tech leaders and academics in the AI space in Silicon Valley.

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“These will aid the Office of the Prosecutor General to document the more than 115,000 instances of destroyed civilian infrastructure, and evidence of human rights abuses on frontline communities and liberated territories,” USAID said in a written statement.

The drones were donated by a U.S. manufacturer Skydio and delivered to Ukraine by USAID to support accountability and documentation of war crimes, the agency said. Each drone is equipped with 4K cameras used to take photos and video. 

The donation is one of several ongoing USAID initiatives to assist Ukraine. 

The agency has been a part of joint war crimes documentation visits with Ukraine’s Office of the Ombudsman for Human Rights and supported two Ukrainian human rights coalitions that “have documented more than 40,000 incidents of Russia’s war crimes since February 24, 2022,” the USAID said.

USAID also previously delivered other donations from U.S. companies to Ukraine, including Starlink data terminals from SpaceX, and laptops and software for schools from HP Inc. and Microsoft. 

While the donated drones will be used for documentation evidence collection, drones have also been important in military operations for the war in Ukraine. 

The country, for example, launched an “Army of Drones” project to procure a fleet of unmanned reconnaissance drones for the Ukrainian military through fundraising and donations. On a webpage for the project, the nonprofit Ukrainian World Congress calls drones “vital equipment that Ukraine’s defenders need in order to fight off the Russian invasion.”

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The worst of the geomagnetic storm affecting Earth likely occurred Wednesday night, with only minor conditions since, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center on Friday.

SWPC is keeping agencies like NASA abreast of the storm, which may affect their satellites and communications over the next 24 hours, but expected moderate conditions at worst as of 10:11 a.m. EST.

Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s facility in Boulder, Colorado continue to analyze solar wind data coming in from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and provide agencies and industry with situational awareness.

“It’s almost like the Sun shoots a magnet out into space,” Bill Murtagh, SWPC program coordinator, told FedScoop.

Part of an eruption began impacting the Earth’s magnetic field Wednesday night, producing geomagnetic storm conditions at the G1, minor, and G2, moderate, levels on a scale that goes up to G5, extreme. The storm was expected to peak at the G3, strong, level but no longer.

Geomagnetic storms heat and expand the atmosphere, changing its density in a way that can throw satellites off their orbit, and they can also cause electrostatic discharge on spacecraft. SpaceX lost 40 Starlink satellites it launched in February due to geomagnetic activity that didn’t even reach the G1 level.

“We have good communication,” Murtagh added. “We get these alerts and warnings out not just to industry but anybody and everybody that owns satellites, so NASA for example, with near-Earth and deep-space satellites, would get this information.”

SWPC is a division of the National Weather Service that’s been keeping an eye on a small cluster of sunspots, three times the size of Earth, that’s been unusually active the last four to five days. Daily eruptions have caused coronal mass ejections, releases of a billion tons of plasmic gas and magnetic field.

It issues alerts to about 70,000 Product Subscription Service subscribers, including almost every major satellite company globally, to help them plan for geomagnetic storms.

While satellite companies don’t really share information on how the storms ultimately affect them, agencies like NASA do — though not immediately. Weeks to months of analysis are required to determine if an anomaly on a spacecraft was due to a geomagnetic storm or something else, and SWPC might not catch wind for six months after an event, Murtagh said.

The last time the Earth experienced a G5-level storm, Oct. 29, 2003, NASA eventually released a report revealing that about 50% to 60% of their satellite fleet had been affected to various degrees.

“When they feel the effects, we will typically hear about it afterward,” Murtagh said.

No agencies had reported being affected by the current geomagnetic storm as of Friday, and G2-level storms don’t typically produce “big” effects, he added. But SWPC can still extend its existing watch or announce a new one and issue alerts as the storm level changes.

Geomagnetic storms can also degrade communications because they cause changes in the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere satellite signals must pass through to reach Earth. That said, cell phones will remain unaffected because line-of-sight communications are resilient due to cell towers.

Airlines aren’t as lucky because planes rely on high-frequency communications when traveling over oceans, and those signals bounce off the ionosphere and are degraded by solar flares. The situation isn’t dangerous because airlines have redundancies built in, namely switching to satellite communications or linking to other aircraft, Murtagh said.

A final way geomagnetic storms affect Earth is with geomagnetically induced currents that can flow through good conductive material like salt water and certain soil. The currents can move through rock formations into power grids, and introducing a direct current into an alternating current network is “not a good thing,” Murtagh said.

In the case of a G3-level storm however, the situation is “mostly” manageable without risk of power outages, he added.

The Sun’s magnetic poles reverse every 11 years, leading to a solar cycle much like a hurricane season where sunspots emerge.

Generally there are one to two G5-level storms every solar cycle, although there were none last cycle. No G5 or even G4s have been seen so far this cycle, but the solar maximum, when the most sunspots appear, isn’t until 2024-25.

“We’re ramping up to the next maximum,” Murtagh said. “So we’re going to see an increase of activity.”

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The agency awarded a now-contested contract to SpaceX in February to launch the initial components of the Gateway lunar outpost, where the rocket and supplies for the Mars mission will eventually be assembled.

NASA expects a decision from the Government Accountability Office in the next few weeks and to launch by the end of 2021, but China announced an ambitious plan to send astronauts to Mars by 2033 in June.

“The Chinese space program is also a military space program,” Nelson said, during a live interview with the Washington Post. “They are very aggressive and very good, and a lot of that success has come in the last few years.”

China was the second country to land a rover on Mars after the U.S. with plans to return samples from the planet to Earth “probably within the same timeframe,” Nelson said.

But the Pentagon has also reported Chinese development of anti-satellite weapons that threaten global communications and space exploration.

“The Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program,” Nelson said. “They are very inflexible; they are not very transparent.”

Nelson contrasted that with Russia, which began cooperating with the U.S. on space missions during the Cold War and launched another “major component” of the International Space Station (ISS) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday.

NASA’s administrator said he’d support cooperation with China on space missions if they’d “open up,” but in the meantime, one of their satellites exploded in low-Earth orbit near the ISS and one of their rockets landed in the Indian Ocean without a controlled reentry.

“Space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country and the free world,” Nelson said.

Nelson said he also supported expanding public-private partnerships in space exploration. Commercial 3D printing of rockets will reduce the cost of space travel and make it more “accessible,” while SpaceX’s fixed-price contract to deliver cargo and crew to the ISS is enabling commercial space efforts, he said.

NASA will require that any space tourists going to the ISS endure the same training and medical and psychological training as its own astronauts so as not to interfere with their research, Nelson said.

“Yes there may be Bezos ideas of colonies out in space; yes there may be colonizing of Mars,” he said. “But we need to have the vision to get there and develop the technologies in order to sustain human life.”

NASA will “aggressively” look for evidence of life in samples returned from Mars and Venus, and a new space telescope will launch at the end of 2021 designed to look at the source of light 13.35 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang, in a search for other planets that might support life, Nelson said.

Closer to home NASA deployed a “phalanx” of satellites measuring climate effects, he said.

“In the next 10 years we’re going to put up five great observatories, and we’re going to look at oceans and land and ice and the atmosphere,” Nelson said. “And we’re going to compile a 3D composite of the minute changes that are occurring so that we can better project what we’ve got to do in order to save our planet by saving our climate.”

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Before the coronavirus pandemic could reach the U.S, NASA tested its security and network operations centers with an enterprisewide telework scenario. Within hours, an employee at Ames Research Center reported the agency’s first COVID-19 infection, said Mike Witt, associate chief information officer for cybersecurity and privacy at NASA.

NASA’s shift to zero-trust will be a multi-year process, but the shift to telework is expediting the process. Many NASA employees were teleworking during SpaceX‘s Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch, and afterward, the agency’s security operations centers did a tabletop exercise with the company.

“We’ve got to get away from the mindset of: You can account for every alert,” Witt said during an ACT-IAC webinar Thursday. “You’ve got to embrace orchestration … artificial intelligence, machine learning.”

NASA is embracing commercial support moving forward that supplements its threat analysts, Witt said.

Phishing and basic credential attacks remain the most prominent infiltration methods agencies face, and criminal markets tend not to invest much in them because the goal is profit, not stealth or long-term intelligence, said Mike Benjamin, senior director of threat research at Black Lotus Labs. The phishing emails tend to be similar and domains the same because it’s not worth the attacker’s energy to craft specialized attacks.

“As an industry, we have to pay attention to how it is we are going to stop those more commodity level attacks or at least monitor for their occurrence and mitigate them quickly after they do,” Benjamin said. “And so simple things like credential reuse, understanding attack surface, training users, and then looking for the behavior of what happens when they do inevitably click those links are the ways to mitigate against those initial, very common infiltration methods that we see from even the most advanced actor groups.”

Companies like Black Lotus Labs focus on those commodity attacks so agencies like NASA can focus on the advanced ones.

NASA has seen some “really incredible” phishing attacks designed by nation-states, but simple ones continue to work, too, Witt said.

Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 is playing into NASA’s move to zero trust.

“The amount of data that we are bringing down from satellites is staggering now, and so we actually ran into …  a problem,” Witt said.

The old TIC model of “boomeranging” data didn’t make sense, so 18 months before TIC 3.0 was released, NASA worked with the Department of Homeland Security and Amazon on a modern solution for bringing data from satellites straight to the cloud for easy sharing with researchers, he said.

NASA has also invested in an enterprise logging capability that not only collects system logs but runs machine learning on them to detect malicious activity. The agency is also red teaming with the Pentagon and intelligence community to identify network vulnerabilities before attackers do and has reduced its “significant” system footprint down to a third of its size three years ago, Witt said.

“We’re probably still not where we need to be,” he said.

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Our red sister in the solar system has long been the object of human fascination, but technological limitations have so far prevented anything but robotic scouts from traversing the 140 million miles of deep space that separate Earth and Mars.

According to the NASA that’s all about to change.

“When I think of the world in which my granddaughters will be raising their own children in, I see a world in which they will view their own kids working on Mars as a fact of life,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in an address at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., last week. “A future where NASA and its partners are using Mars as a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.”

Bolden’s address comes amid a slew of preparations by the U.S. space agency that indicate in no uncertain terms the ambitions of the next great space odyssey: traveling to — and eventually inhabiting — Mars. According to a report released in October, titled “Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration,” we are “closer to sending humans to Mars than at any point in NASA’s history.”

“Mars is the horizon goal for pioneering space; it is the next tangible frontier for expanding human presence,” the report states. “Like the Apollo Program, we embark on this journey for all humanity. Unlike Apollo, we will be going to stay.”

The report lays out a three-phase plan for Mars preparation, each evolving into a deeper space threshold. The first — “Earth Reliant” — will focus on honing technology and preparing astronauts mentally and physically for the trip, which will take a minimum of 150 days and could last up to 300, according to NASA estimates. Phase two will take testing into a “Proving Ground,” launching missions into orbit around the moon and into space between Earth and Mars, including Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos. The final step, “Earth Independent” will be the most iconic — a manned mission to the planet and the first boot to leave a print in its red soil.

An infographic explaining the various elements that will converge into a Mars journey. (NASA)

“As pioneers, we seek to blaze the trail for others, establishing a presence that leads to economic progress and broad societal benefit,” the report says.

NASA’s Earth Reliant phase is well underway; this week, the agency announced it is seeking to recruit a new team of astronauts to “carry out deep-space exploration missions that will advance a future human mission to Mars,” according to a release. Prospective applicants, who must have earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering, biological science, physical science or mathematics, and preferably have clocked in at least 1,000 hours piloting a jet-type aircraft, can apply at USAJobs.gov, and have the chance to join the current corps of 47 active, certified astronauts.

“This is an exciting time to be a part of America’s human space flight program,” said Brian Kelly, director of Flight Operations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a release. “NASA has taken the next step in the evolution of our nation’s human spaceflight program — and our U.S. astronauts will be at the forefront of these new and challenging space flight missions.”

NASA also announced on Wednesday that the first full-size test version of the Orion module, the spacecraft that will eventually carry astronauts to Mars, will arrive from the European Space Agency on Nov. 30. The Orion, along with the SpaceX Crew Dragon, will serve as NASA’s primary vehicle for human space exploration in coming years.

In his address, Bolden emphasized the positive effects of space travel on society as a whole.

“The things we do in space improve our quality of life here on Earth,” he said. “Right now, the astronaut that will take the first human step on Mars and the scientist who will make the next great breakthrough that makes that step possible might very will be sitting in a classroom here in D.C.,” he said.

“Mars matters.”

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SpaceX’s unmanned Dragon craft has already been to and from the International Space Station, but new FAA recommendations indicate that soon those spacecraft could be manned.
Source: Wikimedia

NASA isn’t the only federal player in space travel anymore. As commercial space travel gets closer to reality, the Federal Aviation Administration released a framework of recommended practices for human space flight safety.

The document, called Recommended Practices for Human Space Flight Occupant Safety, was released Sept. 16 by the administration to “serve as a starting point should there be a need for the government to issue regulations at some point in the future.”

Commercial space travel has been gaining traction recently, especially after the end of NASA’s shuttle program in 2011. The agency is currently awarding private sector companies contracts to send the first commercial crew to the International Space Station.

On the same day the FAA released their framework, NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts — worth a combined total of $6.8 billion — to launch astronauts into space. In a news conference in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said by allowing private companies to send humans to the ISS, the space agency can instead focus on sending humans to Mars.

“Turning over low-Earth orbit transportation to private industry will also allow NASA to focus on an even more ambitious mission – sending humans to Mars,” Bolden said. “Today we are one step closer to launching our astronauts from U.S. soil on American spacecraft and ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia by 2017.”

Since the end of the shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have been relying on Russian launches to ferry them to the ISS.

However, by releasing the recommended practices for human space flight safety, the FAA could be ushering in a new era of space travel spearheaded by private companies. Despite NASA’s dominance of the space travel sphere, the FAA has actually been responsible for regulating and licensing any private companies and individuals involved in commercial space transportation.

In fact, according to a fact sheet from the FAA, the agency’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) has licensed more than 220 successful launches, including commercial launches by companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and SpaceX.

The fact sheet says an FAA license is required for any craft’s launch or reentry carried out by U.S. citizens anywhere in the world or by anyone within U.S. airspace. The FAA only covers commercial flight regulations; however, any NASA or Defense Department launches do not require an FAA license.

The license evaluation process includes a public safety review, an environmental review, a national security or foreign policy review and an insurance requirement.

In anticipation of a future commercial space travel industry, the FAA will also issue experimental permits instead of full licenses for launch or reentry of reusable suborbital rockets, those that do not complete one total orbital revolution around the Earth. In addition, the FAA’s document assumes that any vehicle will stay in Earth’s orbit for no more than two weeks and has the ability to return to Earth within 24 hours if necessary.

“Orbital rendezvous and docking, flights longer than two weeks, extravehicular activity and any flights beyond Earth’s orbit are not explicitly addressed,” the document said. “Future versions of this document may cover such additional human space flight operations and missions.”

But although on the way, commercial human spaceflight is not here just yet.

“No person may operate a reusable suborbital rocket under a permit for carrying any property or human being for compensation or hire,” the fact sheet said.

The recommended practices are also solely focused on the safety of potential human occupants and not focused on public safety or mission assurance. The document was compiled through the analysis of 50 years of human space flight, according to the introductory section of the recommendations.

“AST reviewed existing government and private sector requirements and standards, including those from NASA, the European Space Agency and the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety,” the document said. “Our purpose was not to copy NASA’s requirements, but to use them as a means to capture safety practices and judge whether they are, at a general level, appropriate for the commercial human space flight industry.”

The document makes recommendations to commercial spacecraft manufacturers and space travel providers on design, manufacturing and operations.

However, despite being issued as commercial space travel grows in popularity and possibility, the recommended practices document from the FAA actually has no regulatory power.

“The document may serve as a starting point for a future rulemaking project, should there be a need for such an effort at some point in the future,” the document said. “However, this document is not a regulation.”

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Commercial and personal space travel has progressively been gaining traction since the end of NASA’s space shuttle program in 2011. And now NASA’s commercial crew program is one step closer to being a reality.

The agency announced May 30 that three commercial space companies have completed the Certification Products Contracts, which safely ensures that space travel systems are reliable and cost-effective.

As part of NASA’s $30 million Commercial Crew program, the companies — Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation Space Systems and SpaceX — are required to explain how they will meet the criteria necessary to transport crew members from United States soil to the International Space Station.

Throughout the process of filing the CPC, companies had to show safety as a a key element in their plans and were also required to detail how their space travel systems meet the requirements already established by NASA.

“It’s allowed them to mature their plans and gave us additional insight into each company’s approach,” Ed Burns, systems engineering and integration acting manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program said. “It also gave our NASA team and the partners a chance to work together towards certifying their systems.”

With the first phase of certification complete, NASA will kick off the second CPC phase of Commercial Crew Transportation Capability, which is open to any company with the resources to produce designs comparable to those by the three companies in the first stage.

After the second phase is complete, companies awarded will have the chance to conduct at least one crewed flight test. This test will help verify whether or not the spacecraft can successfully dock to the ISS.

“This certification is important to ensuring our crew members have reliable transportation to and from the space station where they are conducting research essential to advancing human exploration farther into the solar system,” Phil McAlister, director of Commercial Spaceflight at NASA’s Washington Headquarters said.

Prior to the CPC phase, NASA held two development phases and awarded Boeing more than $110 million, Sierra Nevada Corporation $100 million and SpaceX $75 million.

“There’s more than one correct way to build a spacecraft, and CPC has been an invaluable learning process for our industry partners and the agency,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager said. “It is extremely exciting to see the unique approach each company brings to the table.”

In early 2010, the Obama administration proposed tasking private companies with the responsibility of  servicing the ISS, with supervision from NASA. The first phase of contracting for the Commercial Crew Development program began later in 2010. The first privately-sponsored and operated shuttles to the ISS are expected to launch in 2017 and remain docked at the station from 12 to 210 days.

However, the ISS Commercial Crew program is not the only commercially-backed initiative to get the private sector into space. According to their website, Bigelow Aerospace is planning to launch craft to build a new, commercial space station. The company also recently landed a $17.8 million NASA commission for a test demonstration for a new ISS module.

Google is also spearheading an international effort to send a private sector lunar lander to the moon. The competition ends in 2015 and could result in $20 million from Google for the winning company.

The private company Mars One is also attempting to establish a human settlement on Mars by 2023, according to the company’s website.

“We’re making great strides toward returning human spaceflight launch capability to U.S. soil,” McAlister said.

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