Astronomers can breathe a little easier. NASA has confirmed the James Webb Space Telescope has passed checks and tests verifying its optical performance following a "fine phasing" alignment on March 11th. There also aren't any critical problems or detectable blockages. Optical systems are performing "at, or above, expectations," NASA said.

The fine phasing corrected alignment errors by using optical elements inside the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam science instrument. The mission team gauged the performance by aligning and focusing the telescope on a star. The technology is very sensitive — as you can see above, Webb captured galaxies and stars in the background despite the very bright star in the middle.

NASA expects to finish aligning the observatory across all instruments by early May or sooner. After that, the team will spend two months prepping the instruments for capturing and sharing the first practical images and data in the summer.

The milestones show not just that Webb survived the 930,000-mile journey to its observation point, but that the telescope's novel segmented mirror design works as promised — particularly important given the $10 billion price tag, numerous delays and Hubble's mounting problems. For the most part, scientists can now concentrate on how they'll use Webb to study the early universe and other elusive aspects of the cosmos.

Dr. Eugene Parker, a pioneer in the field of heliophysics, has died at the age of 94. In the 1950s, Parker developed a theory that predicted solar winds. As NASA notes, Parker pushed the field forward throughout his career, "advancing ideas that addressed the fundamental questions about the workings of our Sun and stars throughout the universe."

Heliophysics centers on the physics of the Sun and its impact on the Solar System. In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, the first spacecraft it named after a living person. The probe is tasked with observing the outer corona (or atmosphere) of the Sun to improve our understanding of solar winds and space weather. In December, it became the first spacecraft to enter the Sun's upper atmosphere.

“Anyone who knew Dr. Parker, knew that he was a visionary. I was honored to stand with him at the launch of Parker Solar Probe and have loved getting to share with him all the exciting science results, seeing his face light up with every new image and data plot I showed him," Nicola Fox, director of NASA's heliophysics division, said. "I will sincerely miss his excitement and love for Parker Solar Probe. Even though Dr. Parker is no longer with us, his discoveries and legacy will live forever.”

Blue Origin's next crewed spaceflight is scheduled for March 23rd and, as reports suggested, Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson will be one of the passengers. It will be New Shepard's fourth flight with humans on board and its 20th overall.

The other passengers include SpaceKids Global founder Sharon Hagle and her husband, Marc Hagle, CEO of real estate developer Tricor International. Angel investor and former Party America CEO Marty Allen, University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen and Commercial Space Technologies president Dr. George Nield are also taking the trip.

All of Blue Origin's previous crewed flights had a familiar face or two. Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and aviation pioneer Wally Funk were on the maiden trip last July. William Shatner took the record from Funk as the oldest person to reach space at 90 years old on the second flight. Good Morning America host Michael Strahan was on the third launch.

Following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last week, the West has united over its condemnation of the aggression and has enacted broad economic sanctions against the nation. A financial fallout is already occurring with the ruble losing 20 percent of its value against the dollar nearly overnight, and which could fall even further as sanctions progressively excise Russia from the international monetary system. The pecuniary shockwaves created by these sanctions are likely to impact every strata of Russian society with far reaching consequences for the Roscosmos space program and the continued safe operation of the International Space Station.

These “strong sanctions,” US President Joe Biden stated at a press conference last Thursday, will impose “severe costs on the Russian economy” in an effort to “strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It’ll degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program.”

Economic sanctions are an ancient form of interstate arm twisting and have been used extensively throughout the 20th century by nations in effort to elicit specific behaviors from their neighbors. What sets this round apart is its breadth, which targets some 600 billion dollars worth of Russian assets. Russia has been cut off from the SWIFT international payment system and its central banks’ assets have been frozen in the US, EU, and UK — as have those of Putin’s upper echelon. Airports and seaports across the West are now closed to Russian commercial travel while imports of Korean “strategic items” as well as American computers, semiconductors, lasers, navigation and avionics — all vital components to Russia’s space program — have been banned.

Russia has issued retaliatory sanctions against Western companies of its own. On Wednesday, Roscosmos announced that it will not launch the next round of 36 OneWeb internet satellites that was scheduled for liftoff March 4th from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Those satellites will not get into orbit, Roscosmos officials threatened until the UK-based company meet two demands: that the UK government sell its stake in OneWeb and that the company guarantee that its satellite constellation will not be used in a military capacity. OneWeb has yet to respond publicly to the demands.

"Russia’s actions are an immediate danger to those living in Ukraine, but also pose a real threat to democracy throughout the world," US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement Thursday. "By acting decisively and in close coordination with our allies and partners, we are sending a clear message today that the United States of America will not tolerate Russia's aggression against a democratically-elected government."

Despite the economic curb stomping the Russian people are about to endure on behalf of Putin’s cartographic quarrel, NASA remains optimistic that the sanctions will not adversely impact ongoing collaborative space programs, like the running of the ISS.

The ISS has, from its start, been a joint US-Russian effort. Originally born from a foreign policy plan to improve relations between the Cold War foes after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the conclusion of the Space Race, the International Space Station would not exist if not for Russia’s collaboration. Soyuz rockets helped bring ISS modules into orbit and, following the Space Shuttle’s retirement in 2011, served as the only means of getting astronauts into orbit and back, at least until SpaceX came along. Of the station’s 16 habitable modules, six were provided by Russia and eight by the US (with the rest sent up by Japan and the European Space Agency). Jus last summer , Russia successfully launched its largest ISS component to date, the 813-cubic meter Nauka science module.

Dmitry Rogozin, Director General of Roscosmos, himself still personally under sanctions due to the 2014 Crimea incident, voiced an alternative opinion in response to the news.

“Do you want to manage the ISS yourself,” he pointedly asked in a series of tweets Thursday. “Maybe President Biden is off topic, so explain to him that the correction of the station’s orbit, its avoidance of dangerous rendezvous with space garbage with which your talented businessmen have polluted the near-Earth orbit, is produced exclusively by the engines of the Russian Progress MS cargo ships.“

“If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe,” Rogozin continued. “There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?”

The “uncontrolled deorbit” remark appears to be a direct reference to Russia’s threat to not provide one of its Progress MS cargo ships to assist in the space station’s retirement at the end of the decade. On Saturday, Roscosmos dismissed all 87 Russians working at Europe’s Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana and suspended launches of the Soyuz-ST rocket from there in protest of the sanctions.

“I was not surprised, based on his previous behavior,” former space station commander Terry Virts told Time of Rogozin’s outburst. “This is what I’ve come to expect.”

Rogozin’s comments come more than seven weeks after NASA announced its intent to keep the ISS operational until 2030, though the American space agency and Roscosmos are still negotiating a new "crew exchange" deal, which would see astronauts and cosmonauts sent to the ISS aboard both American and Russian rockets. Russia’s obligations to the ISS officially expire in 2024 and, even prior to the invasion of the Ukraine, Russia was rumbling about pulling out of the project by 2025.

"The Russian segment can't function without the electricity on the American side, and the American side can't function without the propulsion systems that are on the Russian side," former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman noted to CNN. "So you can't do an amicable divorce. You can't do a conscious uncoupling."

As such, “NASA continues working with all our international partners, including the State Space Corporation Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station,” the agency told Reuters following Rogozin’s rant. “The new export control measures will continue to allow US-Russia civil space cooperation. No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in orbit and ground station operations.”

However, Russia’s spacefaring future in the eyes of other ISS stakeholders is less clear. "I've been broadly in favor of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration," UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on the floor of the House of Commons Thursday. "But in the current circumstances, it's hard to see how even those can continue as normal."

More immediately, Roscosmos reported Monday that its public portal was under cyberassault. "A massive DDoS attack from various IP addresses has been carried out on the Roscosmos website for several days now. Its organizers may think that this affects something. I will answer: this only affects the timely awareness of space enthusiasts about Roscosmos news," Rogozin tweeted, while assuring that the safety of the ISS was not immediately at risk.

And since one cannot so much as utter the phrase “public crisis” without Elon Musk busting through a nearby wall like a mini-sub-slinging Kool-Aid man, SpaceX is of course getting shoehorned into this newfound global conflict.

On February 25th, Musk offered to have SpaceX step in and keep the ISS in orbit, should Russia refuse. The space station is currently where it is thanks to regular deliveries of propellant reactant by the Russian space agency but should those shipments stop, the ISS will be unable to counter the planet’s atmospheric drag and eventually slow into a capture orbit where it will fall to Earth. By taking over those delivery flights, SpaceX could keep the ISS aloft without the added hassle of outfitting a Falcon 9 to stand in for Russia’s undelivered deorbiting spacecraft. And even if SpaceX can’t do so, the engine attached to the uncrewed Cygnus supply ship that arrived on February 21st is powerful enough to give the ISS an orbital boost and temporary reprieve.

SpaceX is also bringing its Starlink satellite constellation into play over the contested region. On Saturday, Ukraine digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov took to Twitter requesting help from the satellite internet provider after a suspected cyberattack knocked the Viasat service offline. Less than 48 hours after Musk promised support, SpaceX delivered more than a dozen Starlink receiver dishes to the minister. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine,” Musk tweeted in response. “More terminals en route.”

Starlink has launched more than 2,000 internet-beaming cubesats into orbit to date, a fraction of the more than 40,000 the company plans to eventually launch. CNBC reports that the company has more than 145,000 active subscribers as of January.

It would be imprudent at this point to predict how Russia’s invasion will pan out, whether the imposed economic sanctions will bring a quick resolution to the conflict or slowly strangle a fading world power. We can’t fully foresee the myriad implications emerging from these monetary decisions or how they’ll impact global collaboration and space exploration in coming years. But amidst this uncertainty and chaos we can take solace in knowing that life, aboard the ISS at least, continues unabated.

We most likely won't see the ExoMars mission blast off and start its journey to the Red Planet this year. The European Space Agency has announced that it's fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by its member states following the country's invasion of Ukraine, and it expects the move to affect its joint projects with Roscosmos. One of those joint projects is ExoMars, which is being developed to search for past life on the Red Planet, as well as to assess its water and atmospheric trace gases.

The ESA is working on the rover that will travel across the Martian surface, while the Russian space agency is in charge of its lander and some instruments the rover will use. In the ESA's announcement, it said "the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely." The agency still has to analyze all its options before it can finalize a decision on how to proceed. 

ExoMars was supposed to launch in 2018 before it was rescheduled for 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple technical failures during testing prompted the space agencies to postpone it yet again. To be able to reach Mars from Earth, a spacecraft has to leave our planet within 10-day launch windows that only occur every two years when the two planets are properly lined up. If ExoMars is missing the this year's window, then it will definitely be delayed for another couple of years at the very least.

The ESA has also acknowledged that Roscosmos halting Soyuz launches and withdrawing its workforce from the vehicle's usual launchpad in Kazakhstan will affect some of its projects and payloads. In addition, as The New York Times notes, the war calls the fate of the ISS into question. At the moment, NASA and Roscosmos are working together to maintain the space station. But Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin recently said that US sanctions against his country could degrade its space program and destroy its partnership with NASA.

He said:

"If you block cooperation with us, who will save the International Space Station (ISS) from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or...Europe? There is also the possibility of a 500-ton structure falling on India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, therefore all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?"

While the US side of the ISS provides life support and power, the Russian side provides propulsion to maintain its altitude. NASA's human spaceflight program head Kathy Lueders said operations are going well thus far, but that Northrop Grumman and SpaceX have offered to help look for ways to add capability to the US side of the space laboratory.

It took NASA and its partners nearly four dozen trips between 1998 and 2010 to haul the roughly 900,000 pounds worth of various modules into orbit that make up the $100 billion International Space Station. But come the end of this decade, more than 30 years after the first ISS component broke atmosphere, the ISS will reach the end of its venerable service life and be decommissioned in favor of a new, privately-operated cadre of orbital research stations.

NASA

The problem NASA faces is what to do with the ISS once it’s been officially shuttered, because it’s not like we can just leave it where it is. Without regular shipments of propellant reactant to keep the station on course, the ISS’ orbit would eventually degrade to the point where it’s forward momentum would be insufficient to overcome the effects of atmospheric drag, subsequently plummeting back to Earth. So, rather than wait for the ISS to de-orbit on its own, or leave it in place for the Russians to use as target practice, NASA will instead cast down the station from upon high like Vader did Palpatine.

NASA is no stranger to getting rid of refuse via atmospheric incineration. The space agency has long relied on it in order to dispose of trash, expended launch vehicles, and derelict satellites. Both America’s Skylab and Russia’s Mir space stations were decommissioned in this manner.

Skylab was America’s first space station, for the whole 24 weeks it was in use. When the final 3-astronaut crew departed in early 1974, the station was boosted one last time to 6.8 miles further out in a 289-mile graveyard orbit. It was expected to remain there until the 1980s when increased solar activity from the waxing 11-year solar cycle would eventually drag it down into a fiery reentry. However, astronomers miscalculated the relative strength of that solar event, which pushed up Skylab’s demise to 1979.

In 1978, NASA toyed with the idea of using its soon-to-be-completed Space Shuttle to help boost Skylab into a higher orbit but abandoned the plan when it became clear that the Shuttle wouldn’t be finished in time, given the accelerated reentry timetable. The agency also rejected a proposal to blow the station up with missiles while still in orbit. The station eventually came down on July 11th, 1979, though it didn’t burn up in the atmosphere as quickly as NASA had predicted. This caused some rather large pieces of debris to overshoot the intended Indian Ocean target South-Southeast of South Africa and instead land in Perth, Australia. Despite NASA’s calculations of a 1 in 152 chance that a piece of the lab could hit someone during its de-orbit, no injuries were reported.

Mir's deorbit went much more smoothly. After 15 years of service it was brought down on March 23rd, 2001, in three stages. First, its orbit was allowed to degrade to an altitude of 140 miles. Then, the Progress M1-5 spacecraft — basically an attachable rocket designed specifically to help deorbit the station — docked with the Mir. It subsequently lit its engine for a little over 22 minutes to precisely put the Mir down over a distant expanse of the Pacific Ocean, east of Fiji.

As for the ISS’ oncoming demise, NASA has a plan — or at least a pretty good idea — for what’s going to happen. "We've done a lot of studies," Kirk Shireman, deputy manager of NASA's space station program, told Space.com in 2011. "We have found an orbit and a change in velocity that we believe is achievable, and it creates a debris footprint that’s all in water in an unpopulated area."

According to NASA standards — specifically NASA-STD-8719.14A, Process for Limiting Orbital Debris — the risk of human casualty on the ground is limited to less than 1 in 10,000 (< 0.0001). However, a 1998 study conducted by the ISS Mission Integration Office discovered that an uncontrolled reentry would carry an unacceptable casualty probability of between .024 to .077 (2 in 100 to 8 in 100). A number of controllable decommissioning alternatives have been discussed over the decades, including boosting the ISS farther into orbit in the event of an unexpected evacuation of the station’s crew.

"We've been working on plans and update the plans periodically," Shireman continued. "We don’t want to ever be in a position where we couldn’t safely deorbit the station. It's been a part of the program from the very beginning."

Beginning about a year before the planned decommissioning date, NASA will allow the ISS to begin degrading from its normal 240-mile high orbit and send up an uncrewed space vehicle (USV) to dock with the station and help propel it back Earthward. The ultimate crew from the ISS will evacuate just before the station hits an altitude of 115 miles, at which point the attached USV will fire its rockets in a series of deorbital burns to set the station into a capture trajectory over the Pacific Ocean.

NASA has not yet settled on which USV will be employed. A 2019 plan approved by NASA’s safety council, ASAP, relied on Roscosmos to outfit and send up another Progress spacecraft to do what it did for the Mir. However, that vehicle might not actually be available when the ISS is set to come down because Russia’s commitment to the ISS program terminates in 2024. In April of last year, Russian state media began making noise that the country would abandon the station entirely by 2025, potentially stripping parts from this station to reuse in its upcoming national station and leaving the ISS without a reliable way to break orbit. The ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle or NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, though still in development, are both potential alternatives to the Progress.

“NASA is continuing to work with its international partners to ensure a safe deorbit plan of the station and is considering a number of options," spokeswoman Leah Cheshier told UPI via email in 2021, declining to elaborate on what those options might entail but adding that any deorbiting mission would be "shared by the ISS partnership and is negotiation-sensitive at this time."

The fall of the ISS is sure to be a spectacle on par with the international hubbub surrounding Skylab’s demise, but is still nearly a decade away and there is plenty of science still left to do. According to the January 2022 International Space Station Transition report:

The ISS is now entering its third and most productive decade of utilization, including research advancement, commercial value, and global partnership. The first decade of ISS was dedicated to assembly, and the second was devoted to research and technology development and learning how to conduct these activities most effectively in space. The third decade is one in which NASA aims to verify exploration and human research technologies to support deep space exploration, continue to return medical and environmental benefits to humanity, continue to demonstrate U.S. leadership in LEO through international partnerships, and lay the groundwork for a commercial future in LEO.

More than half of the experiments performed aboard the ISS nowadays are for non-NASA users, according to the report — including nearly two dozen commercial facilities — “hundreds of experiments from other government agencies, academia, and commercial users to return benefits to people and industry on the ground.” This influx of orbital commercial activity is expected — and being actively encouraged — to further increase over the next few years until humanity can collectively realize Jeff Bezos’ dream of building a low Earth orbit mixed-use business park.

Don't expect China to readily accept blame for the rocket debris expected to collide with the Moon on March 4th. SpaceNews and The Verge report Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin denied that the debris came from the 2014 Chang'e-5 T1 Moon mission. The upper stage of that rocket burned up "completely" in Earth's atmosphere, Wang said. He maintained that China's aerospace efforts were always in line with international laws, and that the country was determined to protect the "long-term sustainability" of outer space.

It's not clear China has the right rocket in mind, however. Astronomer Bill Gray, who pinned the expected collision on the Chang'e-5 T1 mission (after initially blaming SpaceX), believes Wang may have confused that with the 2020 Chang'e 5 mission. A US Space Force squadron claimed the T1 upper stage burned up in October 2015, but Gray noted that the squadron offered only one trajectory update for that rocket. The burn-up may have been assumed, not confirmed. NASA's JPL also believes the T1 booster is involved.

Whoever's responsible, the predicted crash will represent an unwanted milestone in spaceflight — a Moon crash from a spacecraft that wasn't meant to be there. The dispute over the debris' origins also reflects the difficulty of tracking space debris. While there are more advanced sensors for spotting debris in Earth orbit, deep space monitoring simply hasn't been a priority. The impending collision might change that focus, particularly with Moon missions like NASA's Artemis program on the horizon.

Astronomers have mapped the atmospheres of exoplanets for a while, but a good look at their night sides has proven elusive — until today. An MIT-led study has provided the first detailed look at a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet's dark side by mapping WASP-121b's altitude-based temperatures and water presence levels. As the distant planet (850 light-years away) is tidally locked to its host star, the differences from the bright side couldn't be starker.

The planet's dark side contributes to an extremely violent water cycle. Where the daytime side tears water apart with temperatures beyond 4,940F, the nighttime is cool enough ('just' 2,780F at most) to recombine them into water. The result flings water atoms around the planet at over 11,000MPH. That dark side is also cool enough to have clouds of iron and corundum (a mineral in rubies and sapphires), and you might see rain made of liquid gems and titanium as vapor from the day side cools down.

The researchers collected the data using spectroscopy from the Hubble Space Telescope for two orbits in 2018 and 2019. Many scientists have used this method to study the bright sides of exoplanets, but the dark side observations required detecting minuscule changes in the spectral line indicating water vapor. That line helped the scientists create temperature maps, and the team sent those maps through models to help identify likely chemicals.

This represents the first detailed study of an exoplanet's global atmosphere, according to MIT. That comprehensive look should help explain where hot Jupiters like WASP-121b can form. And while a jovian world such as this is clearly too dangerous for humans, more thorough examinations of exoplanet atmospheres could help when looking for truly habitable planets.

A recent batch of SpaceX’s Starlink internet-beaming cubesats met with tragedy on February 3rd when a 49-member cohort of the newly-launched satellites encountered a strong geomagnetic storm in orbit.

“These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase. In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches,” SpaceX wrote in a blog update last Wednesday. “The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag.” Unfortunately, 40 of the satellites never came out of safe mode and, as of Wednesday’s announcement, are expected to, if they haven’t already, fall to their doom in Earth’s atmosphere.

While this incident constitutes is only a minor setback for SpaceX and its goal of entombing the planet with more than 42,000 of the signal-bouncing devices, geomagnetic storms pose an ongoing threat to the world’s electrical infrastructure — interrupting broadcast and telecommunications signals, damaging electrical grids, disrupting global navigation systems, while exposing astronauts and airline passengers alike with dangerous doses of solar radiation.

The NOAA defines geomagnetic storms as “a major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.” Solar winds, composed of plasma and high-energy particles, are ejected from the Sun’s outermost coronal layers and carry the same charge as the sun’s magnetic field, oriented either North or South.

When that charged solar wind hits Earth’s magnetosphere — moreso if it is especially energetic or carries a southern polarization — it can cause magnetic reconnection of the dayside magnetopause. This, in turn, accelerates plasma in that region down the atmosphere’s magnetic field lines towards the planet’s poles where the added energy excites nitrogen and oxygen atoms to generate the Northern Lights aurora effect. That extra energy also causes the magnetosphere itself to oscillate, creating electrical currents which further disrupt the region’s magnetic fields — all of which make up magnetic storms.

“Storms also result in intense currents in the magnetosphere, changes in the radiation belts, and changes in the ionosphere, including heating the ionosphere and upper atmosphere region called the thermosphere,” notes the NOAA. “In space, a ring of westward current around Earth produces magnetic disturbances on the ground.”

Basically, when the Sun belches out a massive blast of solar wind, it travels through space and smacks into the Earth’s magnetic shell where all that energy infuses into the planet’s magnetic field, causing electrical chaos while making a bunch of atoms in the upper reaches of the atmosphere jiggle in just the right way to create a light show. Behold, the majesty of our cosmos, the celestial equivalent of waving away a wet burp from the slob next to you at the bar.

Solar flares occur with varying frequency depending on where the Sun is in its 11-year solar cycle with fewer than one happening each week during solar minimums to multiple flares daily during the maximal period. Their intensities oscillate similarly, though if the electromagnetic storm of 1859 — the largest such event on record, dubbed the Carrington Event — were to occur today, its damage to Earth’s satellite and telecom systems is estimated to run in the trillions of US dollars, requiring months if not years of repairs to undo. The event pushed the Northern aurora borealis as far south as the Caribbean and energized telegraph lines to the point of combustion. A similar storm in March of 1989 was only as third as powerful as Carrington but it still managed to straight up melt an electrical transformer in New Jersey as well as knock out Quebec’s power grid in a matter of seconds, stranding 6 million customers in the dark for nine hours until the system’s equipment could be sequentially checked and reset.

European Space Agency

Even when they’re not electrocuting telegraph operators or demolishing power grids, geomagnetic storms can cause all sorts of havoc with our electrical systems. Geomagnetically induced currents can saturate the magnetic cores within power transformers, causing the voltage and currents traveling within their coils to spike leading to overloads. Changes within the structure and density of the Earth’s ionosphere due to solar storms can disrupt and outright block high frequency radio and ultra-high frequency satellite transmissions. GPS navigation systems are similarly susceptible to disruption during these events.

"A worst-case solar storm could have an economic impact similar to a category 5 hurricane or a tsunami," Dr. Sten Odenwald of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in 2017. "There are more than 900 working satellites with an estimated replacement value of $170 billion to $230 billion, supporting a $90 billion-per-year industry. One scenario showed a 'superstorm' costing as much as $70 billion due to a combination of lost satellites, service loss, and profit loss."

Most importantly to SpaceX, solar storms can increase the amount of drag the upper edges of the atmosphere exert upon passing spacecraft. There isn’t much atmosphere in low Earth orbit where the ISS and a majority of satellites reside but there is enough to cause a noticeable amount of drag on passing objects. This drag increases during daylight hours as the Sun’s energy excites atoms in lower regions of the atmosphere pushing them higher into LEO and creating a higher-density layer that satellites have to push through. Geomagnetic storms can exacerbate this effect by producing large short-term increases in the upper atmosphere’s temperature and density.

NOAA

“There are only two natural disasters that could impact the entire US,” University of Michigan researcher, Gabor Toth, said in a press statement last August. “One is a pandemic. And the other is an extreme space weather event.”

"We have all these technological assets that are at risk," he continued. "If an extreme event like the one in 1859 happened again, it would completely destroy the power grid and satellite and communications systems — the stakes are much higher."

Austin Brenner, University of Michigan

In order to extend the time between a solar eruption and its resulting winds slamming into our magnetosphere, Toth and his team have worked to develop the Geospace Model version 2.0 (which is what the NOAA currently employs) using state-of-the-art computer learning systems and statistical analysis schemes. With it, astronomers and power grid operators are afforded a scant 30 minutes of advanced warning before solar winds reach the planet — just enough time to put vital electrical systems into standby mode or otherwise mitigate the storm’s impact.

Toth’s team relies on X-ray and UV data “from a satellite measuring plasma parameters one million miles away from the Earth,” he explained, in order to spot coronal mass ejections as they happen. “From that point, we can run a model and predict the arrival time and impact of magnetic events," Toth said.

NASA has developed and launched a number of missions in recent years to better predict the tumultuous behavior of our local star. In 2006, for example, the space agency launched the STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission in which a pair of observatories measured the “flow of energy and matter” from the Sun to Earth. Currently, NASA is working on two more missions — Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) and HelioSwarm — to more fully understand the Sun-Earth connection.

“MUSE and HelioSwarm will provide new and deeper insight into the solar atmosphere and space weather,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said in a February news release. “These missions not only extend the science of our other heliophysics missions—they also provide a unique perspective and a novel approach to understanding the mysteries of our star.”

MUSE aims to study the forces that heat the corona and drive eruptions in that solar layer. “MUSE will help us fill crucial gaps in knowledge pertaining to the Sun-Earth connection,” Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, added. “It will provide more insight into space weather and complements a host of other missions within the heliophysics mission fleet.”

The HelioSwarm, on the other hand, is actually a collection of nine spacecraft tasked with taking “first multiscale in-space measurements of fluctuations in the magnetic field and motions of the solar wind.”

"The technical innovation of HelioSwarm's small satellites operating together as a constellation provides the unique ability to investigate turbulence and its evolution in the solar wind," Peg Luce, deputy director of the Heliophysics Division, said.

These ongoing research efforts to better comprehend our place in the solar system and how to be neighborly with the massive nuclear fusion reactor down the celestial block are sure to prove vital as humanity’s telecommunications technologies continue to mature. Because, no matter how hardened our systems, we simply cannot afford a repeat of 1859.

SpaceX won't just have launched first all-civilian spaceflight — it should soon be home to a full-fledged private space program. According to The Washington Post, Shift4 founder and Inspiration4 leader Jared Isaacman has unveiled a Polaris Program initiative that will include "up to" three crewed SpaceX flights. The first, Polaris Dawn, is planned for the fourth quarter of 2022 and should include the first commercial spacewalk. The effort will ideally end with the first human-occupied Starship flight. Sorry, Moon tourists.

The Polaris Dawn team will also aim for the highest-ever Earth orbit, conduct health research and test laser-based Starlink communication. Isaacman will return as mission commander, while Inspiration4 mission director and Air Force veteran Scott Poteet will serve as pilot. Two of SpaceX's lead operations engineers will also be aboard, including Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. Menon's role is symbolic of the shift toward private spaceflight — her husband Anil was chosen to become a NASA astronaut, but she'll likely reach space before her spouse does.

The program hinges on SpaceX and partners solving a number of problems. SpaceX is developing spacesuits necessary for the spacewalk, and Isaacman's group hasn't yet decided how many crew members will step outside. Starship also carries some uncertainty. While there's been ample testing and plenty of progress, development of the next-gen rocket system hasn't always gone according to plan. Expect the Polaris Program to have a relatively loose schedule, and possibly a few setbacks.

Even so, this represents a further normalization of private spaceflight. While the Polaris Program continues a recent 'tradition' of civilian flights led by billionaires (Isaacman is no exception), it also promises to commercialize aspects that were still reserved for government astronauts, such as spacewalks and testing new spacecraft (NASA astronauts helmed SpaceX's Demo-2). Don't be shocked if private crews fulfill other roles in the near future.