For about as long as engineers have talked about beaming solar power to Earth from space, they’ve had to caution that it was an idea unlikely to become real anytime soon. Elaborate designs for orbiting solar farms have circulated for decades—but since photovoltaic cells were inefficient, any arrays would need to be the size of […]
Three days before astronauts left on Apollo 8, the first-ever flight around the moon, NASA’s safety chief, Jerome Lederer, gave a speech that was at once reassuring and chilling. Yes, he said, America’s moon program was safe and well-planned—but even so, “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and […]
2022, like every year, saw the arrival of countless new telecom technologies. But it’s those technologies that really swing for the fences that capture the imagination. That’s why this year, IEEE Spectrum‘s readers spent their time learning about proposals to bring something like 5G to the moon, to change how the Internet’s very core would […]
Elon Musk, step aside. You may be the richest rich man in the space business, but you’re not first. Musk’s SpaceX corporation is a powerful force, with its weekly launches and visions of colonizing Mars. But if you want a broader view of how wealthy entrepreneurs have shaped space exploration, you might want to look […]
The race to deliver cellular calls from space passes two milestones this month and saw one major announcement last month. First, Apple will offer emergency satellite messaging on two of its latest iPhone models, the company announced on Wednesday. Second, AST SpaceMobile plans a launch on Saturday, 10 September, of an experimental satellite to test […]
Billionaires, satellite links, political chicanery: a present-day, oligopolistic game of jockeying for prime placement in the 12-gigahertz spectrum has at least a few of the ingredients of a thriller. Or—given the outsize personalities involved (including Elon Musk and Michael Dell) and the epic, five-year duration of the dispute to date—maybe more like a space opera. […]
It was a great idea for its time—a network of NASA communications satellites high in geostationary orbit, providing nearly continuous radio contact between controllers on the ground and some of the agency’s highest-profile missions: the space shuttles, the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and dozens of others. The satellites were called TDRS—short for […]
In the popular conception of a technological breakthrough, a flash of genius is followed quickly by commercial or industrial success, public acclaim, and substantial wealth for a small group of inventors and backers. In the real world, it almost never works out that way. Advances that seem to appear suddenly are often backed by decades […]
Inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida—a cavernous structure built in the 1960s for constructing the Apollo program’s Saturn V rockets and, later, for preparing the space shuttle—the agency’s next big rocket is taking shape. Tom Whitmeyer, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration system development, recalled seeing the completed […]
There are many ways people can serve their country without joining the military. One is to develop technologies that can be used to defend their nation against adversaries. That’s what Steve Walker has been doing his entire career. The IEEE senior member worked for more than 30 years in the U.S. civil service, first for […]