Wednesday, October 30, 2024


PhD student discovers lost Maya city with pyramids in Campeche, Mexico jungle

Interesting Engineering
Tue, October 29, 2024 

Archaeologists have uncovered over 6,500 previously unknown Maya structures, including a hidden city with grand pyramids, within southeast Mexico. This major discovery highlights the impressive and populous ancient Maya landscape that had long been hidden beneath dense forests and modern settlements.

Lead author Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student from Northern Arizona University noted the significance of the find, saying, “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements… We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Using LiDAR technology, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, researchers were able to peer beneath the forest canopy in eastern Campeche, a lesser-studied region of the Maya civilization.

This powerful remote-sensing technique, which fires laser pulses to generate highly accurate 3D models of the landscape, revealed intricate details of Maya urbanism in an area that had remained unexplored by archaeologists until now.
A lush, urbanized landscape

The study focused on a roughly 50-square-mile area in east-central Campeche, an “unmapped” zone in Maya archaeology. By analyzing LiDAR data initially gathered in 2013 to monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests, researchers discovered the hidden expanse of Maya settlements.

The Maya civilization thrived during the Classic Period (A.D. 250–900), and areas like the central Maya Lowlands—covering parts of Guatemala, Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo—were hubs of advanced urbanism.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” explained Auld-Thomas. Many of the newly found sites, including the urban area called Valeriana, showcase the diversity and scale of Maya settlements.

A map shows details of the Valeriana site's core in Campeche state, Mexico. Image Credit: Antiquity 2024

This “major urban area” includes two main hubs of monumental structures connected by continuous settlements, along with evidence of sophisticated landscape engineering that supported such a large population.

The Valeriana site contains multiple plazas, grand pyramids, a ball court, and a large reservoir created by damming an arroyo, or dry creek bed—a design common in Maya cities to capture seasonal rainwater for use in arid months.

The findings shed light on the Classic Maya’s ability to transform their natural surroundings into a highly organized, urban landscape. This discovery reshapes our understanding of Maya cities, showing that much of the central Maya Lowlands was as densely populated and urban as other ancient civilizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1TO7-iG8Jw
Unseen depths of the Maya civilization

The study challenges previous assumptions about the Maya civilization by unveiling a picture of a more interconnected and urbanized society than previously known. While archaeologists have long understood that the Maya occupied and engineered vast tracts of land in the region, certain areas like east-central Campeche had largely escaped scientific attention.

By focusing on this “blank spot” in Maya archaeology, Auld-Thomas’s team has opened new doors to understanding the scope and organization of the ancient Maya.

LiDAR technology has become essential in modern archaeology, especially for exploring dense forests like those covering the Maya Lowlands. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using LiDAR surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas added.

However, the technology is uniquely suited to archaeology, as it can reveal hidden structures buried under vegetation, exposing sites that would otherwise remain unknown.

The Valeriana site is a stark example of just how much more there is to uncover. The researchers wrote in the study, “The discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that there are still major gaps in our knowledge of the existence or absence of large sites within as-yet unmapped areas of the Maya Lowlands.”



They concluded that the latest findings, when added to current knowledge, indicate that dense cities and extensive settlements were common across large portions of the central Maya Lowlands.

The findings are detailed in the journal Antiquity.

PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident

Georgina Rannard -BBC  Science reporter
Tue, October 29, 2024

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They uncovered the hidden complex - which they have called Valeriana - using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.

The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland's capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed - a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

There are no pictures of the city but it had pyramid temples similar to this one in nearby Calakmul [Getty Images]

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

How ancient Maya cities have withstood the ravages of time

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.


The ruins were found in eastern Mexico, in Campeche [BBC]

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

"The point is that the landscape is definitely settled - that is, settled in the past - and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’," she says.

The research suggests that when Maya civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

"It's suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn't have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away," says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Maya city states.


Evidence of the ruins were found by a plane using laser remote sensing to map beneath the jungle canopy [Getty Images]


Many more cities could be found

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

"I've got to go to Valeriana at some point. It's so close to the road, how could you not? But I can't say we will do a project there," says Mr Auld-Thomas.



"One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study," he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.


Lost Mayan city discovered under Mexican jungle by accident

Sarah Knapton
Tue, October 29, 2024

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans

A lost Mayan city, complete with pyramids and a ball court, has been discovered buried deep under the Mexican jungle.

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans that had been taken in 2013 as part of a forest monitoring project in the southeastern state of Campeche.

The scans unveiled the outlines of multiple enclosed plazas, temple pyramids, a reservoir and several curved amphitheatre-like patios in the city, which is thought to be the second-largest of its kind in Latin America.



The team said Valeriana had “all the hallmarks of a Classical Maya political capital” and, at its peak, may have been home to up to 50,000 people between AD 750 and 850.

The find was initially made by Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University in New Orleans, who was browsing Google to find out if anyone had carried out a Lidar (light detecting and ranging) survey of the area.




“Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using Lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?”

Lidar works by firing a short laser pulse from a plane or satellite and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back.

Mr Auld-Thomas discovered a laser survey of around 50 square miles of dense Mexican forest which was rarely visited, even by locals.

While there are no pictures of the city, it may have looked similar to ruins in Calakmul

Working with colleagues, he studied the maps and found a dense, vast array of totally unstudied Maya settlements dotted throughout the region, comprising 6,674 undiscovered Mayan structures.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements.

“We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.



“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Scans unveil more sites discovered in the lost Mayan city

Valeriana comprised two major hubs of monumental architecture 1.2 miles apart, which were linked by continuous dense settlement and landscape engineering and watercourses. It also appears to have pyramids like those at the famous sites of Chichén Itzá or Tikal.

A ball court, where the ancient Mayan game of Pitz may have been played, was also found. The game could last two weeks, and its aim was to get the ball to the other side of the court without dropping it using only the hip, knee or elbow.

The team are now planning to conduct fieldwork in the areas identified on the survey.

The findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

Vishwam Sankaran
Wed, October 30, 2024 


Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

An American student analysing publicly available data found a sprawling Mayan city with thousands of undiscovered structures, including pyramids, under a Mexican forest.

The data came from laser scans of the Campeche region and revealed a buried world, since named “Valeriana”, with nearly 6,700 undiscovered structures.

Archeologists have been using laser scanning lidar technology to assess anomalies in landscapes across the Yucatan peninsula in Central America and stumbling upon pyramids, family houses and other Mayan infrastructure.

For a long time, surveys to find ancient structures sampled just a couple of hundred square kilometres. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago,” said Luke Auld-Thomas, PhD candidate at the Northern Arizona University who made the discovery.

In recent years, researchers have been analysing data from lidar scans taken for unrelated purposes to look for evidence of Mayan structures.


Ancient buildings and landscape modifications, including public plazas, agricultural terraces and field walls, discovered under Mexican forest (Auld-Thomas et al, Antiquity)

Mr Auld-Thomas analysed data from one such lidar project from 2013, focused on measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests, to see what lay underneath 50 square miles of Campeche. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC.

Analysing the data using modern archaeological methods revealed a dense and diverse array of Mayan settlements, including one sprawling city dating to between 250 to 900AD.

“The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered,” Mr Auld-Thomas said.

His study was recently published in the journal Antiquity.

The lost city has “all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital”, Mr Auld-Thomas noted. “We did not just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Studying such ancient cities could help solve modern problems facing urban development, researchers said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyperdense,” Mr Auld-Thomas said. “Given the environmental and social challenges we are facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

Laser archeology finds lost Maya cities hidden under forests

Saul Elbein
Tue, October 29, 2024


Laser imaging of the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have turned up thousands of ancient Maya structures — and an entire previously unknown city, a new study has found.

By flying aircraft over jungle in the Mexican state of Campeche and pummeling the trees with laser pulses, scientists have shown that beneath the forest lie the ruins of both a dense city and its crowded suburban hinterlands, according to results published on Tuesday in Antiquity.

The Yucatan is remarkable for being an essentially post-apocalyptic landscape, where over the past millennium forests returned to fill in the parks and boulevards of once-powerful Maya cities like Tikal and El Mirador after their inhabitants left them around 900 CE.

On the east side of the peninsula, for example, the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve sprawls over the ruins of the ancient city of Muyil — where crocodiles swim through straight-line creeks that were once urban canals and howler monkeys swing through the trees above lakes that were once city reservoirs.

That combination of dense forest atop the long-vanished cities of what was once a dense urban region has meant a succession of surprising finds for archeologists. Last year, for example, Slovenian archeologist Ivan Šprajc found a significant regional hub — which he called Ocomtun — in the “black hole” of the Balamku Biosphere Reserve, in the center of Campeche.

As it did for Šprajc, the lack of easy road access forced the Antiquity researchers to turn to a high-tech solution to penetrate the trees: aircraft using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to scan the forest, looking for obstructed and impermeable stone structures.

The new sites described in Antiquity are a combination of rural farming villages, regional market towns and “a large city with pyramids,”coathor Luke Auld-Thomas said in a statement.



LiDAR, he added, “allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge.’”

Those surprising findings — indicating huge populations in places where the conventional historical record suggests they should not have been — represent part of the promise of LiDAR‘s use in archeology. The technology has also been used to find lost cities beneath the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia and Ecuador, upending established narratives that the region lacked a deep history of dense urban life — and suggesting that vast Amazonian metropolises of the present day like Manaus and Iquitos might be less modern innovation than a return to an ancient pattern.

“LiDAR is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” coauthor Marcello Canuto, a professor of anthropology at Tulane, said in a statement.

Some newly discovered areas are Maya fields and farming villages, which offer insight about ancient rural life, Canuto said, while others once sported “dense populations.”

In 2018, Canuto and his team used LiDAR to uncover 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures beneath the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Northern Guatemala, a park that also houses the well-known site of Tikal, according to National Geographic.

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a colleague of Canuto’s at Tulane, told National Geographic at the time. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Whether the settlements discovered are big or small, in all cases, Canuto noted the new sites hidden beneath the forest show how the Maya managed their environment “to support a long-lived complex society” — urban structures that still shape the movement of animals through the forests that covered them.

The sites announced on Tuesday are, at least by the standards of the Yucatan, in plain sight. They were “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” Auld-Thomas said.

But despite that local knowledge, Auld-Thomas said, “the government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it.”

The discovery, he added, “really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

As Musk seeks to launch tens of thousands of Starlink satellites, space researchers urge caution

Noah Haggerty
Tue, October 29, 2024 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 Starlink satellites launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in January. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

More than 100 space researchers signed a letter urging the federal government to perform an environmental review before allowing SpaceX to continue launching thousands of satellites for its internet service, Starlink.

The Federal Communications Commission has licensed Elon Musk's company to launch nearly 12,000 satellites into space — more than double the number of non-SpaceX satellites orbiting Earth. SpaceX is asking the FCC to allow it to launch over 20,000 more.

While the FCC evaluates the potential harms of satellite constellations, it currently exempts almost all telecommunications projects — including satellites — from facing formal environmental reviews. The researchers' letter, released on Thursday, argues that much has changed since the rule was created almost four decades ago.



"This is a new technology," said Lucas Gutterman, the director of the Designed to Last Campaign at Public Interest Research Groups, or PIRG, which organized the letter. "It could have benefits for the public and that's great, but the benefits need to be weighed against the potential harms, and the way you do that is with an environmental review."

Read more: Scientists long urged NASA to search for signs of life near Jupiter. Now it's happening

Gutterman said PIRG has heard back from the FCC and is excited to meet with the agency to discuss the group's concerns.

The Starlink constellation provides internet coverage across the globe, especially to rural communities and countries without reliable cell tower service. The service has provided internet access to Ukrainian soldiers, hurricane victims and commercial flight passengers.



SpaceX's satellites are designed to have a roughly five-year lifespan, after which SpaceX ground controllers will deorbit the satellites, let them burn up in Earth's atmosphere and launch replacements. This injection of metals and other compounds into the upper atmosphere from the incineration of the spent satellites has the potential to disturb the delicate balance of elements and molecules in the air, the letter argues.

"The industry has moved faster than regulators can act and faster than the public has really been aware," Gutterman said. "The results aren't in — we just don't actually have the data on what effects this new technology could have."

In a 2022 report, the Government Accountability Office — a nonpartisan federal agency tasked with saving taxpayer money and increasing government efficiency — recommended the FCC review whether the satellite constellations normally have significant environmental impacts. The FCC agreed with the findings.

The space researchers who signed the letter not only study the effects of satellites and rocket launches on the atmosphere but also rely on clear skies for their observations.



As satellites whiz past the field of view of telescopes, they leave streaks in astronomers' images. To compensate, scientists have had to frequently retake images and develop more sophisticated computer programs to remove the streaks.

"Picture an open book. Then picture a big marker streak across the page," said David Jewitt, a distinguished professor of astronomy at UCLA who signed the letter. "That's what they do."

Read more: A star is about to explode. Here's how to watch it

Jewitt first heard about the letter while dealing with satellite streaks on his observations from a telescope in Spain.



"It was so obvious that the number of satellite trails is just way, way up since I started doing astronomy," he said. "People want to use space for good purposes. Communication is a good purpose. ... So, there has to be some moderation between the effective use of space and its effects on our view of the night sky."

Environmental review of satellite mega-constellations would be a first step along a path of much-needed space policy reform, Gutterman said.

Currently, there is limited international cooperation in regulation of satellite constellations, and within the United States, oversight of different aspects of their life cycles — from launch to orbit to decommissioning — is handled by separate agencies.

Setting clear international standards and streamlining the process in the U.S. would be a win-win for concerned scientists and the space industry, Gutterman said.

It's not the first time Starlink has run into pushback from the public and government officials. After the first few batches of satellites were launched in 2019, astronomers around the world raised concerns about the satellites' reflectivity. In response, SpaceX began applying a coating to the satellites to make them less shiny.

And earlier this month, the California Coastal Commission rejected a SpaceX plan to increase the number of rocket launches from Vandenburg Space Force Base to 50 a year, on the grounds that SpaceX was increasingly using the launches for its Starlink satellites instead of for military missions.

SpaceX subsequently sued.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.



NASA Backs Proposal to Orbit Starlink Satellites Closer to Earth

PC Mag
Tue, October 29, 2024


SpaceX has received support from NASA in its proposal to orbit satellites about 200 kilometers closer to Earth.

SpaceX wants permission to orbit its cellular Starlink satellites 340 to 360 kilometers around Earth, the benefits of reduced latency for an upcoming direct-to-cell Starlink service. The issue is that SpaceX wants to potentially orbit thousands of Starlink satellites below the International Space Station, which circles the Earth between altitudes of 360 to 470 km.



In 2022, NASA the proliferation of Starlink satellites as a potential obstacle to sending missions to the International Space Station. But in a Tuesday letter to the FCC, the space agency said it has been working with SpaceX on a "visiting vehicle study" to assess whether low-orbiting satellites can operate below the space station in 300km orbits.

"Given the progress made and the continued positive collaboration between SpaceX and NASA, NASA supports FCC action that would allow SpaceX to initially operate 400 satellites continuously in the 300 km orbital shells,” the agency added. “This support reflects the ongoing cooperation between both parties to ensure safe and effective satellite operations.”

But for now, it looks like NASA only wants to let SpaceX orbit the satellites closer to Earth on a trial basis. Its letter alludes to granting the company a “Special Temporary Authority” to orbit the cellular Starlink satellites in the 300km orbits for 60 days, which SpaceX requested in May.

“Upon completion of the visiting vehicle study, NASA will coordinate any change on the number of satellites it endorses in the 300 km orbital shells,” the space agency added in the letter.

Still, the NASA letter is a win in SpaceX’s efforts to upgrade the Starlink network by lowering the satellites' orbits, which could raise opposition from rival companies, in addition to . Earlier this month, the company also made a with the FCC to operate nearly 30,000 second-generation Starlink satellites, including in the 340-360km orbit range.


SpaceX launching 20 Starlink internet satellites from California on Oct. 30

Mike Wall
Mon, October 28, 2024 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 22 Starlink satellites to orbit from Florida on June 23, 2024. | Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch another batch of its Starlink internet satellites from California early on Wednesday (Oct. 30).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 20 Starlink spacecraft, including 13 with direct-to-cell (DTC) capability, is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today, during a nearly hour-long window that opens at 7:07 a.m. ET (1207 GMT; 4:07 a.m. local California time).

SpaceX will stream the launch live via X, beginning about five minutes before liftoff.

If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9's first stage will come back to Earth about eight minutes after liftoff. It will touch down on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

It will be the 14th launch and landing for this particular booster and its 11th Starlink mission overall, according to a SpaceX mission description.

The Falcon 9's upper stage will haul the Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), where they'll be deployed about an hour after liftoff.

SpaceX has already launched more than 100 Falcon 9 missions in 2024, about two-thirds of them devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

The company currently operates more than 6,400 Starlink spacecraft in LEO, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. About 250 of them are DTC satellites.

Editor's note: This post was updated on Oct. 29 to reflect the most current launch window provided by SpaceX.


Let There Be Broadband: SpaceX Lights Up Starlink in US National Radio Quiet Zone

PC Mag
Mon, October 28, 2024


SpaceX's Starlink is now rolling out to thousands of residents living in the "National Radio Quiet Zone" in Virginia and West Virginia, where wireless signals are restricted.

The access arrives following a three-year effort between SpaceX and US scientists to prevent Starlink from disrupting local radio telescopes, which is why the quiet zone exists.



"Based on these results, SpaceX will begin a one-year assessment period to offer residential satellite internet service to 99.5% of residents within the NRQZ starting October 25,” the Green Bank Observatory said on Friday.


The radio quiet zone around the observatory restricts cellular and Wi-Fi signals, although many residents do have Wi-Fi and fiber-based broadband.

The quiet zone is needed to help radio telescopes detect the faintest signals from deep space. SpaceX has refrained from beaming Starlink internet to the area because the radio signals from its satellites could disrupt or even damage the “eye” of the radio telescopes.

In August, SpaceX said it was ready to start rolling out Starlink access to users in the radio quiet zones around the Green Bank Observatory and another telescope in New Mexico. To prevent interference, the company developed a system that can quickly steer satellite beams away from the radio telescopes as they pass overhead


As a result, Starlink is now live in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory’s telescopes; previously, the satellite internet access was unavailable across all 46 sites.

“This collaboration will allow residents to access high-quality, high-speed internet, and also expand opportunities for improved communication, like those needed by emergency services and first responders,” says Green Bank Observatory Director Jim Jackson. During the one-year-period, SpaceX and the observatory will monitor and try to resolve any interference issues.

A growing number of counties in the area have called for the dissolution of the National Radio Quiet Zone, citing the danger of people not having access to emergency services.

"This is still keeping a portion of Pendleton and Pocahontas Counties in the dark ages of communications systems,” Pendleton County Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Gillespie told West Virginia's WOWK-TV.

In an email, Gillespie also told PCMag that the Roam version of Starlink had actually been available across 100% of the quiet zone for the past two years. But after SpaceX announced its agreement with the Green Bank Observatory, about 0.5% of the quiet zone has lost the Starlink access, he said.

"This means that a large section of southeastern Pendleton County and an even larger section of northern Pocahontas will NOT be able to utilize Starlink," he added in a statement. "Those areas ARE the 0.5% exclusion zone. In many cases, Starlink was the only Internet provider option residents and emergency responders had. This is unacceptable."

In response, Gillespie has been urging representatives of the National Radio Quiet Zone to loosen the radio restrictions, enabling wireless communications for local public safety services. "Throughout this process, any adjustments to the NRQZ regulations have been made without our involvement. These restrictions continue to escalate without our input, which must cease," he added.

We've reached out to the Green Bank Observatory and SpaceX for comment, and we'll update the story if we hear back.

Florida's Space Coast breaks record for most launches in a year

Matt Trezza
Mon, October 28, 2024 


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With the launch of a SpaceX rocket on Saturday, the Space Coast hit a major milestone, with 73 launches this year.

The Falcon Nine carried 22 Starlink satellites into orbit. At Jetty Park, Mary Harris said her son works for Blue Origin, and she never gets tired of watching the rockets go up.

"I still like to catch the night ones, because they're really nice, I like them."

Saturday’s record-breaking mission capped off a very busy week in space news. NASA’s crew of eight members returned to Earth on Friday, after a nearly eight-month mission. The SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico just before 3:30 a.m., EST. The three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut spent 235 days in space, the longest of any human SpaceX mission.

"It wasn’t that long ago when we were happy to have 20 launches a year. We’re doing four to five times that now. It’s almost surreal now," said Don Platt, Associate Professor of Space Systems at Florida Tech.

On Wednesday, SpaceX launched another Falcon Nine mission that carried 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. KSC officials said that after some infrastructure upgrades, they aimed to host five commercial human space flight companies on-site by next year.

"It is the vision that we laid out back in 2014 with the Kennedy Space Center master plan," said Tom Engler, Center Planning & Development Director for the Kennedy Space Center.

With two more months to go in the year, there are still plenty more launches expected. Launch 74 is set for Wednesday. Jerry Eller, a Merritt Island resident, said the space industry has the potential to bring more people together.

Boeing Might Be Quitting Space With A Potential Division Sale To Jeff Bezos

Ryan Erik King
Mon, October 28, 2024

Photo: Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo (Getty Images)

Despite helping NASA first reach the Moon in 1969, Boeing could be tapping out of NASA’s upcoming return to the lunar surface and space entirely. The aerospace giant is considering selling its space division amid its struggles to get the Starliner certified to fly. The spacecraft’s fault-riddled crewed test flight stranded two astronauts in space into next year and scrapped its use in upcoming missions for the foreseeable future.

Boeing is juggling its space crisis with several others that are impacting its core commercial airliner business. In the aftermath of the 737 Max door plug blowout in January, Boeing’s production quality faced unprecedented scrutiny from federal regulators. The Department of Justice deemed that Boeing violated its 2021 settlement for the 737 Max’s two fatal crashes, forcing the planemaker to pay nearly $700 million. Boeing was also forced to spend $4.7 billion in July to acquire Spirit AeroSystems, a vital 737 Max contractor once part of the manufacturer.

The Boeing Starliner cost the company $250 million last quarter, adding to $1.8 billion in program overruns, according to Simple Flying. These losses are compounded by over 33,000 Boeing machinists going on strike for more reasonable compensation. The ongoing strike began in September and halted production on 737, 767 and 777 planes, costing Boeing billions.

With the catastrophic condition of Boeing, Dave Calhoun stepped down as the company’s CEO in August. Kelly Ortberg is now at the helm with the task of fixing basically everything. He told the Wall Street Journal that he’s willing to sell off as much of Boeing as possible to right the ship:

Ortberg, who took over as Boeing CEO in August, said he was weighing asset sales and looking to jettison problematic programs. Beyond the core commercial and defense businesses, he said, most everything is on the table.

“We’re better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well,” Ortberg said in a call this week with analysts. “What do we want this company to look like five and 10 years from now? And do these things add value to the company or distract us?”

Ortberg also confirmed that Boeing is in discussions with Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ private space company, for a potential sale of its space division. Both companies are NASA contractors for the Artemis program and collaborate with rocket development. The sale would make Blue Origin a more competitive rival to SpaceX overnight. It would also mark the end of Boeing’s legacy in space, from being a vital Apollo program partner to building the American core of the International Space Station.


Boeing Is Losing a Staggering Amount of Money on Its Dismal Starliner Failure

Victor Tangermann
Fri, October 25, 2024 

Imcoster Syndrome

Embattled aerospace giant Boeing is in even bigger trouble after its plagued Starliner spacecraft left two NASA astronauts stranded earlier this year.

The project's costs have continued to spiral over six weeks after the capsule returned to Earth without any astronauts on board. As SpaceNews reports, Boeing took a massive $250 million hit on the Starliner program in its third-quarter earnings, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That's in addition to a $125 million write-off related to Starliner in the company's second fiscal quarter this year.

The total cost of the failed commercial crew program has ballooned to around $1.85 billion, a stunning sum considering the company has been working on the spacecraft for over a decade and has yet to successfully deliver and then return astronauts to the space station.

The project, which is directly competing with SpaceX's far more successful Crew Dragon spacecraft, is on thin ice, and Boeing has remained suspiciously vague about its future.

"We’ve got some tough contracts and there’s no magic bullet for that," Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took over the reins in August, told investors during a recent earnings call, as quoted by SpaceNews. "We’re going to have to work our way through some of those tough contracts."
Contracted

Ortberg, however, appeared defiant that Boeing will continue working on its much-maligned Starliner, saying that walking away from the project isn't a "viable option for us."

"Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we can walk away from these contracts," he told investors, caveating a possible scenario where a given program goes from one phase of a contract to another.

It's far from just Starliner that Boeing has to worry about. The company has plenty of other major fires to put out these days, including a commercial jet business in crisis and a massive industrial worker strike.

Overall, the company's quarterly losses have surged to $6 billion, with Ortberg promising a "fundamental culture change."

"This is a big ship that will take some time to turn, but when it does, it has the capacity to be great again," he told investors, as quoted by Reuters.

Where that leaves the future of Starliner remains unclear at best. Earlier this month, NASA announced it would make use of SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two upcoming crew rotation missions to the space station, the latter of which was originally scheduled to make use of Starliner.

"Clearly, our core of commercial airplanes and defense are going to stay with The Boeing Company in the long run," Ortberg said, "but there’s probably some things on the fringe that we can be more efficient with or that just distract us from our main goals."

More on Starliner: NASA Abandons Boeing's Cursed Starliner for Upcoming Missions to the Space Station




Boeing considers selling its space business, including Starliner: report

Elizabeth Howell
Mon, October 28, 2024 

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is pictured docked to the Harmony module’s forward port at the International Space Station. | Credit: NASA

Boeing may sell off its space business, including its Starliner program, amid large financial losses for the company, a media report suggests.

The discussions are said to be "at an early stage," according to an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal. The reported talks come less than two months after Starliner completed its first astronaut test flight on Sept. 6 by touching down in New Mexico autonomously, without its two crewmembers.

Boeing is known for decades of work with NASA, including being the prime contractor for the International Space Station. (The company continues engineering support services for ISS to this day.) But Boeing is facing mounting financial issues this year, including a protracted strike by its largest labor union and significant deficits in the Starliner program.

The WSJ report emphasizes, however, that discussions about selling the company's space business — spurred by Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s new chief executive officer, who was appointed Aug. 8 — are "at an early stage."

And it's uncertain how much of the business may be sold, if a sale happens at all. For example, Boeing may keep its role in leading the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for NASA's Artemis program of moon exploration, the WSJ report noted. The SLS successfully launched the Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to lunar orbit in 2022 and will launch astronauts around the moon as soon as 2025, with Artemis 2.

Boeing also has a 50% stake, along with Lockheed Martin, in United Launch Alliance, a national security focused-launch provider whose Atlas V rocket launched the Starliner mission on June 5. Lockheed and Boeing have reportedly been looking to sell ULA, as the joint venture moves into launches with a next-generation rocket known as Vulcan Centaur. Vulcan completed its second-ever launch on Oct. 2.

Starliner's development has resulted in financial losses for Boeing. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 23, for example, Boeing reported a $250 million charge in the third quarter of its fiscal year "primarily to reflect schedule delays and higher testing and certification costs" for Starliner. Boeing's second-quarter results showed an additional $125 million loss on the program.

The spacecraft is a small part of Boeing's defense, space and security business, which reported $3.1 billion in losses (against $18.5 billion in revenues) in the first nine months of 2024, according to Boeing's Q3 results. Boeing's head of the division, Ted Colbert, was removed in September, according to multiple media outlets, including the Associated Press.

a rocket blasting off with blue sky behind

Starliner received the lion's share of Boeing coverage in space circles this year, however, following its Starliner astronaut test flight. As a developmental ISS mission, issues were expected, and schedules were not necessarily set in stone.

That said, propulsion problems during the capsule's journey to the ISS surprised the team, given that Starliner's engineers had already addressed thruster issues that cropped up during uncrewed flights in 2019 and 2022. Five out of 28 thrusters in Starliner's reaction control system for in-space maneuvers failed on the recent astronaut mission, which was known as Crew Flight Test (CFT).

Starliner managed to dock successfully to the ISS on June 6 despite the thruster problems. Boeing and NASA examined the thruster issues for nearly two months and repeatedly delayed Starliner's departure from the ISS. But they could not find the root cause and remedy, and NASA ultimately decided that bringing the astronauts back to Earth on Starliner was too much of a risk.

The two astronauts assigned to Starliner, former U.S. Navy test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, saw their expected 10-day mission extended to at least eight months as their spacecraft departed. They are now expected to return home in February 2025 aboard the other commercial craft used by NASA, SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

NASA awarded both SpaceX and Boeing multi-billion dollar contracts in 2014 to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. Crew Dragon was based on the successful cargo Dragon craft that first flew to space in 2012, while Starliner is a completely new spacecraft. Crew Dragon has now launched on nine operational astronaut missions to the ISS for NASA since its 2020 crewed test flight.

Starliner was supposed to fly its first operational mission, known as Starliner-1, in 2025 with three astronauts on board. Recently, however, Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the agency is still determining next steps after the troubled test flight.

"We're just starting that — just trying to understand how to correct and rectify the issues that are on the table," Jones said on Oct. 25. "The schedules associated with how long, and what will be required in that area, [are] in front of us, and we'll be working hard on that to know."