The new documentary It’s Quieter in the Twilight examines the Voyager missions as they approach their end, tended to by a small group of employees, some of whom have been working on the spacecraft for decades. At this point, the mission is almost forgotten, and when most of the documentary was filmed in 2019 and 2020, the Voyager team was exiled to an office building off the campus from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (see “Reviews: Space films at SXSW”, The Space Review, March 21, 2022).
“A beautifully crafted photography book. That was our simple intention from the start,” the authors write near the end of the book.
The documentary does briefly look back at the history of the missions, including its flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The scenes are just fleeting glimpses of Voyager’s storied past, though, as the film focuses on the current state of the spacecraft and its handful of handlers. To appreciate why those spacecraft are so revered decades later, turn to a book like Voyager: Photographs from Humanity’s Greatest Journey.
The book is not a detailed history of Voyager. As its subtitle suggests, the focus is on imagery from the two spacecraft from their journeys through the solar system. “A beautifully crafted photography book. That was our simple intention from the start,” the authors write near the end of the book. It includes nearly 200 images from the Voyagers, intended to sample that the spacecraft saw of those planets and their moons and rings, printed in a large-format book.
The authors did more than simply raid the archives for previously published photos. They went back to the original images and reprocessed them with new software and “a little bit of AI” to produce new and improved versions. They do not go into much detail about how those images were reprocessed, but the results, seen in a few before-and-after comparisons, are beautiful on the printed page.
The book is not all pictures. The authors provide a history of the Voyager missions and describe the scientific discoveries those spacecraft made at each world, as well as provide some other background on the mission and its famous Golden Record. Those passages don’t provide any new insights but do provide some explanation and context for the images that are the heart of the book.
The book includes an essay by Garry Hunt, one of the members of the Voyager imaging team, discussing the challenges and joys of working on the mission. Challenges from operating a distant spacecraft and figuring out what to observe and how; joys from being among the first to get glimpses of places never before seen by humans. “This acceleration as we were approaching, and the quick accumulation of incoming data, became a thrilling experience,” he writes, likening it to drinking out of a firehose: “you were trying to take a little sip, and this torrent of images is coming out.”
Voyager’s imaging days are long behind it, its cameras inactive for decades as the spacecraft head into interstellar space. But a book like this helps you recall, or learn, why the spacecraft are treated with reverence today as they send back other data in their twilight years, their legacy in solar system exploration as secure as ever.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
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IAF President Pascale Ehrenfreund said that despite the “current tragedy unfolding in Ukraine” she hopes the organization could continue to be a forum for space cooperation. (credit: IAF)
Keep space dialogue going, astronautics federation says
by Philippe Cosyn Monday, April 4, 2022
At the 70th anniversary celebration of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), held in Paris March 26, leaders of the world’s foremost space organizations called for a “continued dialogue” among the world’s space actors in the wake of the “tragic events unfolding in Ukraine.”
The IAF, which held its 72th annual congress in Dubai last October and is due to celebrate this year’s congress in Paris in late September, is a space advocacy organization involving 433 space agencies, industry, research organizations, and learned bodies from 72 countries.
Focusing on the grave situation affecting IAF’s Ukrainian partners, and its inevitable fallout on joint Russian space projects, IAF President Pascale Ehrenfreund voiced her “deepest concerns” about the “current tragedy unfolding in Ukraine.” She was speaking to a select audience of past and present space leaders gathered for the event, authorizing this observer to put her views to a wider audience.
Ehrenfreund said she considered it her “obligation to speak up” on the matter, while nevertheless pleading for a “continuous dialogue” between space partners, and “a commitment to engage and discuss peaceful cooperation in space” for which IAF always served as a “safe forum.”
Following first discussions among space advocates in 1950 but officially founded in 1951 by ten non-government space organizations, the IAF was joined by the Soviet Academy of Sciences five years later, with a Russian “observer delegation” already attending the 1955 space meeting and, in an official capacity, the 1957 International Astronautical Congress (IAC), days after the launching of Sputnik 1. That delegation was led by Soviet Academician Leonid Sedov, a noted aerodynamicist. In the early years, the international exchange of technical information remained extremely restricted, a situation that only started changing in the mid-1980s. Sedov, not intimately involved with the actual space program but acting as a spokesperson for Soviet space activities, was elected as IAF President from 1959 to 1961.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Soviet space engineers and cosmonauts started sharing technical information more fully with their Western counterparts, leading to the announcement of final steps toward the establishment International Space Station during the Graz, Austria, IAC in 1993 by then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.
Moreover, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Russian and Ukrainian space institutions such as the Russian space agency Roscosmos and Ukrainian Design Bureau Yuzhnoye, established close working relationships both among former Soviet space entities and Western counterparts. That included former rivals NASA and ESA, and other governmental and commercial space companies such as Arianespace and Sea Launch. It enabled a remarkable series of joint efforts, including the orbiting of non-Russian satellites by the former Soviet R-7 rocket from the French/European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, and the launching of the Russian-engined, Yuzhnoye-deisgned Antares launch system, supplying the International Space Station from Wallops Island in Virginia, USA. During the same period, even US military satellites were orbited using former Soviet engines.
With the Russian invasion in Ukraine, however, that close cooperation has now hit a major roadblock, endangering even the ISS and the ambitious ESA-Russian ExoMars project. Lamenting the unexpected impasse, IAF President Ehrenfreund said she considered it her “obligation to speak up” on the matter, while nevertheless pleading for a “continuous dialogue” between space partners, and “a commitment to engage and discuss peaceful cooperation in space” for which IAF always served as a “safe forum.”
She said it was nothing but “amazing what the IAF has achieved over the past 70 years,” adding that the Federation has always been at the ready, “in times of conflict and disagreement, to press for a continued dialogue among the worldwide space community.” The IAF, she said, should continue to be the “obligatory meeting point for all the main space sectors.”
“Over the past 70 years,” she said, “the IAF has organized congresses and meetings in 34 countries and 56 cities” the world over, involving thousands of delegates at a time and “ensuring the constant dialogue between space nations and providing also a forum for the exchange of opinions and ideas worldwide.” She added that “as history has shown, none of us can achieve things alone, and nothing stands in the way of what we can achieve together.”
Philippe Cosyn is a Belgian member of IAA space history committee.
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The Ax-1 crew of (from left) Mark Pathy, Larry Connor, Michael López-Alegría, and Eytan Stibbe. Connor says he consideres his crew private astronauts, a distinction separate from suborbital space tourists. (credit: Axiom Space)
Space travelers by any other name
by Jeff Foust Monday, April 4, 2022
The space industry has struggled to come up with a common term for people who fly to space on commercial vehicles who are not part of the flight crew. There’s space tourists, private astronauts, and spaceflight participants, the last option having the advantage of being the term used in federal law and regulations (but the disadvantage that is sounds, well, bureaucratic.)
Some, at least, see differences between those terms. “I think it’s important to address the difference between space tourists and private astronauts,” said Larry Connor, one of the members of Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission, set to launch this Friday on a SpaceX Crew Dragon from the Kennedy Space Center.
Connor, a real estate investor who is also a pilot and race car driver, spoke very seriously about the responsibility he and his crewmates have on the commercial mission to the station, the first by an American spacecraft. “When we started our training over a year ago, Axiom did, in my view, a great job outlining high expectations and standards for this first mission,” he said at a media briefing last Friday. “We understand this first civilian mission is a big honor and a big opportunity. But with that come a big responsibility, and that is to execute the mission correctly and successfully.”
“We understand this first civilian mission is a big honor and a big opportunity. But with that come a big responsibility, and that is to execute the mission correctly and successfully,” Connor said.
He called the Ax-1 crew private astronauts that have undergone extensive training. “In our case, depending on our role, we’ve spent anywhere from 750 to over 1,000 hours training,” said Connor, who will be the pilot of the mission. “Additionally, across all of the astronauts here, we’re going to do some 25 different experiments encompassing 100 hours of research on the eight days we’re on the ISS.”
Space tourists, he said, were a different category. “Our feeling is with space tourists, they’ll spend 10 or 15 hours training, 5 or 10 minutes in space,” he said. “By the way, that’s fine,” he added, before launching into a description of training for the Ax-1 mission.
His comments came a day after a group of space tourists got their 10 minutes of spaceflight on the latest Blue Origin New Shepard flight. The NS-20 mission carried five customers along with Gary Lai, the chief architect for the New Shepard system at Blue Origin. (Lai was a fill-in for Pete Davidson, the “Saturday Night Live” comedian originally named to the flight last month. Davidson dropped out days after the announcement for reasons neither he nor Blue Origin have disclosed.)
In a briefing after their flight, they didn’t discuss the responsibility they had but instead the joy of the flight. “That whole thing was just an out-of-body experience. I don’t know what else to say other than that,” said Jim Kitchen, an entrepreneur and business school professor.
“It was more intense than I thought it would be,” said Lai. “Obviously, I’ve been thinking about what this experience would be like for our astronauts. To experience it myself was a joy. It was ten times more intense than I thought it would be.”
But they, too, touched on the training. George Nield, the former FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, emphasized training in his comments about the flight from the perspective of a customer, after years of overseeing the industry as a regulator. “I just can’t say enough about how important that is and what an outstanding job the Blue Origin team did in terms of making us feel ready and prepared for this amazing experience.”
Lai noted that those flying on New Shepard get more than two and a half days of training. “It’s very repetitive training,” he said. “The whole purpose was to make everything we have to do muscle memory. What we could not simulate in the training was what I was talking about before: the intensity.” That meant the training kicked in despite the intensity of the experience. “I have much deeper appreciation for all the thinking that went through that training program and, in the end, it paid off.”
World View displayed a full-scale replica of the cabin for its stratospheric balloon flights at SXSW last month. (credit: J. Foust)
Trying to democratize spaceflight
The two commercial spaceflight experiences do have something in common: the perception that they are, in the minds of detractors, joyrides for millionaires and billionaires.
“It was more intense than I thought it would be,” said Lai. “It was ten times more intense than I thought it would be.”
Blue Origin has not disclosed ticket prices, but a seat on the first crewed New Shepard flight sold at auction last year for $28 million. (That person, Justin Sun, didn’t go, but does plan to fly a dedicated New Shepard flight later this year.) The auction created a list of qualified customers, some of whom have flown for unspecified amounts.
Axiom Space hasn’t disclosed the price for seats on its missions to the ISS, although $55 million per person is the widely rumored amount. At last Friday’s briefing, Michael Suffredini, president and CEO of Axiom Space, declined to say if that was enough to make the mission profitable.
“We’re a commercial entity. Our objective is to make money over the life of the company, or we’re not much of a company,” he said. “Suffice it to say, this is in line with what our original vision for the mission was.” He said later that, by the fourth mission, the company hopes to replace the professional astronaut accompanying the three customers with a fourth paying customer, which some suggest could make the missions profitable.
Those in the industry, or who represent the industry, recognize the perception problem. “The industry got some bad press for this idea, which I think is really unfortunate, that space is just for billionaires and it’s just a joyride. It’s absolutely not true,” said Karina Drees, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. She was speaking last month during a panel at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, titled “Democratizing Access to Commercial Space Travel.”
That was specifically a problem, she suggested, with the flights last summer of Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Jeff Bezos on New Shepard. “These entrepreneurs have put their own money into producing these vehicles and they were the first ones to ride on them,” she said, providing a demonstration of their safety.
“There has been this perception that space tourism is only reserved for a select few,” said Ryan Hartman, president and CEO of World View, on the panel, a perception he called “concerning.” So how does one democratize access to space when ticket prices are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars?
World View is one of two companies developing alternative approaches to giving people at least some aspects of the space experience through stratospheric balloons. That was the original focus of the company when it was founded about a decade ago, but it later shifted to uncrewed balloons carrying cameras and other payloads. (Two World View co-founders, Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter, have since founded their own company, Space Perspective, to provide similar balloon flights for people.)
“Space is a tool for transformation. We can’t solve the problems we’ve created with the same level of thinking that created them,” said Lyons.
World View pivoted back to flying people last fall and claims it will be ready to start such flights in 2024 for $50,000 per person. At SXSW, the company had a full-sized model of the cabin it plans to use for those flights. People could sit in the cabin and go through a brief simulated flight, as screens representing cabin windows showed the views as the balloon ascended, coasted in the stratosphere, and then descended for a landing. It also announced last week that it named Adrian Grenier, the actor best known for the series “Entourage,” as its “Chief Earth Advocate” to support work on sustainability initiatives and “helping participants understand their individual relationship to the planet as they prepare for and reflect on their trip.”
“We had to be innovative in how we designed a solution that made this as affordable as possible,” Hartman said at the SXSW panel. “It is the most affordable solution in space tourism.” (Except, of course, that the passengers don’t go to space, only see the Earth from an altitude that gives the perception if looking down on it from space.)
If World View can maintain that cost, it would be far less than a suborbital flight, let alone an orbital one. However, $50,000 is still out of the reach of much of the public. The nonprofit group Space For Humanity hopes to bridge that gap by paying for flights for space for people who might benefit from the experience but not afford it on their own.
“Space is a tool for transformation. We can’t solve the problems we’ve created with the same level of thinking that created them,” said Rachel Lyons, executive director of Space For Humanity, at the SXSW panel.
The organization solicited applications from people interested in flying on vehicles like stratospheric balloons and suborbital vehicles and got 7,000 applicants. Lyons said the organization is working through the selection process and plans to pick people to fly on those vehicles in the next six months, starting with World View. The organization will fly sets of people together to create a group experience.
“We’re vehicle agnostic,” she added, with plans also to fly with Space Perspective and discussions underway with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. “We’re looking to fly in the next year and a half, and then after this first flight we want to do this on a year-to-year basis,” reopening applications from time to time.
Hartman, meanwhile, said World View was looking for ways to reduce its ticket prices, such as hedging helium in much the same way airlines hedge fuel. That’s complicated, he added, by the recent surge in inflation, driving up costs while he’s trying to reduce them. “I’m here to tell you that’s nearly impossible to do,” he said. “We’re not going to stop giving up.”
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
Note: we are using a new commenting system, which may require you to create a new account.
IAF President Pascale Ehrenfreund said that despite the “current tragedy unfolding in Ukraine” she hopes the organization could continue to be a forum for space cooperation. (credit: IAF)
The Ax-1 crew of (from left) Mark Pathy, Larry Connor, Michael López-Alegría, and Eytan Stibbe. Connor says he consideres his crew private astronauts, a distinction separate from suborbital space tourists. (credit: Axiom Space)
World View displayed a full-scale replica of the cabin for its stratospheric balloon flights at SXSW last month. (credit: J. Foust)
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