It is with a heavy heart, but realism prompts me to debunk the current timeline of the international institutional space community, to bring a man and a woman to the Moon by the year 2024.

The main reason being politics and bureaucracy, not technical issues.

First of all, the SLS launcher that is pushed by the US Senate, as the only way that humans will be able to travel beyond Earth Orbit. This is a false narrative even endangering lives of future astronauts. With Soyuz, Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX' Crew Dragon coming online in 2021, there is and will be a safe way to get astronauts out of Earth's deep gravity well. We have the ISS now, and this is a much safer place for astronauts to transit to spacecraft that could bring them onwards to the Moon, instead of sitting on top of a new massive rocket.

Cost estimates for SLS, once operational, range from $800M to $2B per launch. This is clearly not sustainable and such launcher will never get a cadence where the proven reliability will enable the opening of the next frontier. SLS is not reusable as Falcon-9 and, for example, it will destroy the 4 very expensive Shuttle derived RS-25 engines, each launch. It will have a massive lift capacity but with in-orbit assembly, that we trained so well for with the construction of the ISS, this capacity can be matched with distribution of the payload to existing and reliable launchers.

The current estimate is that the first test flight of SLS will be in 2021, but more likely it will be 2022. The 2nd flight of SLS should immediately take two astronauts in an orbit around the Moon. I mean, this is not going to happen. At some point in time, some responsible person will stand-up and will be pointing at the risk of killing the astronauts on a government rocket that has only flown once! My guess: a second uncrewed SLS testflight would be needed.

In the current plan, the third flight of SLS will take the astronauts to a Space Station in Lunar Orbit, dubbed Gateway. This version of the SLS supposed to have a to-be-developed Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). My guess is, that before astronauts are put on top of the EUS, there will be at least 1 uncrewed test flight with SLS and EUS. From what I know, the EUS is still on the drawing table. It has been proven many times that it will take significant time to bring rockets from drawing table to launchpads. 

This Lunar Gateway is really needed in the current scenario, to be able to bring astronauts to the Southpole by 2024. This Lunar Gateway should be operational at least a few months before the end of 2024, let's say summer 2024. The Gateway design has been studied by the International partners for a while, but I have still not seen a solid baseline design. I just cannot believe that first elements will be launchable in three years time. Maybe a bad example for many reasons, but the Russian Nauka MLM module, to be launched to the ISS in the next year, if that happens, has been on the launch manifest since the mid nineties... And now we just, launch like a bunch of these modules in 3.5 years time to Lunar Orbit? No.

Some people in the US administration push for a Lunar landing without the Gateway. Of course that can be done, but I just don't see US congress approve the massive funds needed to redo the equatorial Lunar landings by the Apollo programme some 50 years ago, just to make America great again for the Trump administration.

It is very likely, that the next US president, will refocus again on the why and what of Space Exploration. Hopefully, the Lunar Human Programme continues but even then, a Human landing by 2028 will be a challenge.

I think this is a really interesting idea to enhance the atmosphere of mars, and a possible way to deal with one of the major challenges for sending humans to mars.

The issue is that Mars has a very minimal atmosphere.  So when considering habitats such as what @marianomariano proposed here, the lack of atmosphere is a major challenge.

So can we do anything about the atmosphere issue?

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html

The proposal is to place a satellite at the Mars-Sun Lagrange L1 point.  This satellite would produce a magnetic field which deflects the solar wind such that the planet would be shielded.  Once this happens, the atmosphere would become thicker and the partial pressures of the gasses would begin to change.  

So how feasible is this?   

Surprisingly this is very possible to do.  A proposal was made here: https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c but I don't think they considered all the options.  We would need a magnetic field about the order of a single MRI machine.  With superconducting magnets, the total power to produce this is not as much as one would imagine.  I estimate this would require about 50,000 Watts to operate.  A nuclear TRG generator would probably not be enough since they cap out around 2,000 W.  The International space station produces about 75,000 to 90,000 W with solar panels.  So maybe that's the solution.  Keep in mind though that the mars L1 point is further from the sun, so the solar flux would be reduced.

Amazingly, we have parked satellites at an L1 before.  We have 4 satellites right now at the Sun-Earth L1 point.  This was first accomplished in 1978!!

I'm curious about what the atmosphere could look like.  What pressure, what composition?  I will have to do some more research on that.

Astronomers from around the world are trying to get as much information as possible about the planetozymal that came to us from an alien planetary system. 2I / Borysov was recognized as the most fascinating observation facility in 2019.

Scientists from NASA decided to take a closer look at this mysterious comet using the Hubble Space Telescope. The famous observation and research instrument made the best image so far 2I / Borysov. In the end we can see it in all its glory, although not as we would like it to be, but it will be ready by the end of this year.

In the latest photo we can see the characteristic blue comet braid. The nucleus of the object is already reddish in color, and cyan gas is extracted from it. It is a colorless, highly poisonous gas with the smell of bitter almonds. It is commonly found on the nuclei of comets of the Solar System and comes out of them as it approaches the Sun. The heat of our day star causes the evaporation of all gases.

The image was taken from a distance of 416 million kilometers from the subject. The diameter of comet 2I / Borysov is about 1 kilometer, so this is a fairly large cosmic rock that, hitting our planet, could lead to a global disaster. The object travels the Solar System at a speed of about 50 kilometers per second.

NASA astronomers report that the mysterious object is very similar to the cosmic rocks found in our solar system, in particular in the Kuiper Belt. It's amazing because it shows us that alien planetary systems, even a dozen light-years apart, can be similar to each other.



"Given these initial features, this object seems indistinguishable from the native comets of the Solar System," said Piotr Guzik, an astronomer at the Jagiellonian University.

Let us remind you that thanks to Polish astronomers we know that the comet comes from the Kruger 60 system. It is located in the constellation Cepheus. It is a system of two red dwarfs that revolve around each other with a time of about 45 years. They are located about 13 light-years away from Earth and everything seems to indicate that they have their planetary system.

Astronomers emphasize that certainty as to the origin of the object and its structure will appear by the end of the year. Then it will fly through the most important part of the Solar System, including the Sun and Earth, so this will be the best time to gather as much information as possible.

Source: SpaceFlightNow/NASA
Photo: NASA

Well, that's too bad.  I was hoping to see starship fly soon.

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1197265917589303296?s=19

Telescopes:

2X Stellarvue Access 102mm F7 Refractor

1X Steallrvue 102mm Raptor F7 Refractor

Guide Scope/Cam:

Starlight Lodestar X2

ZWO Off Axis Guider

Camera:

3x ZWO 1600mm Pro Mono Cooled

Mount:

Celestron CGX

Thought that the ZapRead platform would be the fitting platform for the announcement of my new start-up: Bitlinq.space.

With the increasing surveillance of networks by nation states, and large tech companies keeping track of your every move on the internet, a niche market pops up for subscriptionless censorship resistant global communication. My new company aims to launch a small cubesat sized satellite with a payload containing a Lightning Node, as a gatekeeper for a user programmable store-forward tranceiver. The Lightning Node in Space enables the service to become subscriptionless without losing a business model. Secondly, users on the ground can build their own user terminal from non-SatCom specific or proprietary components, which employs an unlicensed portion of the Electromagnetic spectrum for communication to and from Space.

Users within certain geofenced areas, enabled by anonymous donors to the Lightning Node in Space, can use the system free of charge. An additional service being contemplated for further implementation on board the bitlinq payload, is a space based node for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) based on Decentralized IDentifiers (DID).

Also a synergy could be created with the Blockstream Satellite API. A combination with Bitlinq could create uncensored internet access anywhere on the globe, within either firewalled regions or non connected regions at all. 

For more up-to-date information on Bitlinq, follow us on twitter.

It is just crazy to realize Elon Musk and his company pull this of. Build up the largest rocket ever in no-time. It dwarfs the majestic Saturn-V that brought men to the Moon. I am just not mentally ready to see it actually fly.

Elon Musk will give a presentation about all this beautiful shiney stuff on saturday evening (September 28). In the meantime, NASA Adminstrator Jim Bridenstine sent out some snarky comments:

For those in the unknown, SpaceX is one of the Commercial Crew suppliers and indeed, they are behind schedule. That nevertheless is dwarfed by the behindness of the Schedule of NASA's own rocket programme: SLS. As such, the Elon Musk fanboy club is now full force on twitter taking the piss at Jim Bridenstine. Popcorn is out!

Update September 7, 2019: unfortunately, the VIKRAM Moonlander crashed. Communication with the lander stopped at an altitude of 2.1 km. It probably lost attitude control in relation with using the main engine.

Below is the live feed from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on the landing attempt of the VIKRAM Moonlander, as part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.

The actual landing is foreseen to happen on Friday September 6, 2019 at 22:20 European Standard Time.