Latest news with #SierraSpace
Business Insider
17 hours ago
- Science
- Business Insider
I spent 337 days in space working at NASA and left for a desk job. I don't regret giving up astronaut life.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Marshburn, a 64-year-old former NASA astronaut who is now a VP at Sierra Space. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I've spent a total of 337 days in space. During that time, I completed five spacewalks. Stepping out of the hatch, there was just this wide universe ahead of me and Earth 250 miles below. The spacewalks were daunting — some would say terrifying — but I felt privileged to be able to do them. While they were a great experience, I'm more than OK with not doing them anymore. These days, I work a desk job in the private sector instead. Are you someone who made an unconventional career move? If you're comfortable discussing it with a reporter, please fill out this quick form. We want to hear from people who have stepped in or out of corporate life in nontraditional ways. Becoming an astronaut I fell in love with space in high school. I majored in physics at college, and got a graduate degree in engineering. I dreamed of working with NASA building spaceships. After completing a college thesis in biomedical engineering, I realized my strengths were more rooted in the medical world. I trained in emergency medicine and practiced for about 10 years. During that time, NASA was accepting applicants from outside physicians for flight surgeon roles, whose jobs would be to take care of astronauts. The NASA selection process varies depending on the role and the makeup of the corps. In my view, they look for people with technical expertise in something, a wide skill set, and the ability to communicate well on technical and non-technical topics. NASA is also interested in how candidates have pushed themselves outside of work and the calculated risks they've taken. When I applied in 1994, I looked at what accepted astronauts had done, made a list of what resonated, and started checking off the boxes. That's how I did it — but there's not one way to become an astronaut. I joined NASA in 1994. During that time, I spent three months learning Russian before heading to Star City, the cosmonaut training center outside Moscow. There are events in training, particularly in Russia, where there was absolute exhaustion, both physical and mental. I've never been as hyperthermic or hypothermic as I was in Russia for both winter survival and summer water survival training. At one point, during water survival training, I had a core body temperature of 104°F. Another challenge was being away from my family. My wife and I have one daughter. We communicated every day that we could, even if I was exhausted, they were tired, or we just didn't feel like it. We did it anyway, because then you get used to it and it becomes a habit. I spent the next decade as a flight surgeon. I supported one crew, then various crews, before supporting NASA's entire medical program for the International Space Station. I was selected to become an astronaut in 2004 and spent 18 years in the NASA Astronaut Corps. An emergency spacewalk taught me about preparation My first flight was in 2009 — a 15-day space shuttle mission to the International Space Station, or ISS. At the launchpad, there's a huge sense of excitement. At your first launch, there's some trepidation. It's like you're about to take the biggest final exam of your life. Typically, you don't get a lot of sleep, but there's a lot of laughter and anticipation. On that mission, I did three spacewalks. My second flight was in late 2012. I flew to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz. I had no spacewalks planned, but about three days before I was set to come back, in May 2013, there was an emergency — a leak of ammonia coolant. If you lose the coolant, the power system can overheat, and then you have to shut it down, which is a really big deal. Preparing for a spacewalk typically takes nine weeks, and we had a matter of hours. It taught me that preparation matters. Mission control had the plan. We just followed their lead, step by step. It was one of the best examples of teamwork I've ever had the privilege of being a part of. All the years of training and experience meant we were prepared and had the confidence to handle that situation. Transition to the private sector From 2021 to 2022, I was part of the SpaceX Crew-3 mission for about six months. It was my final mission, and the first for my crewmate, Kayla Barron. Once it was over, I knew I was ready to leave the astronaut corps. I was in my sixties. There were a lot of new, good people who needed to fly, and I didn't want to take their spots. In 2022, I entered the private sector when an opportunity at Sierra Space came up. I wanted to do work that would allow others to fly into space. The company has invested a lot of money in transportation to and from space and platforms for living in space. I enjoy the variety in my work days. I'm involved in business development and human-factor requirements, which help ensure that a space vehicle for humans keeps them safe and able to do their job without injury or undue physiological stress. This job is a little more sedate in the sense that I'm usually at a desk. I miss some of the more physical aspects of being an astronaut, but it did take its toll on me. I'm OK with being able to figure out what my body can endure on my own, rather than being told I'm going to spend three nights in freezing conditions in the Russian Siberian Outback. Any regret about no longer being an astronaut is extremely momentary. It's a fleeting feeling when I see my former colleagues and hear what they're up to. I've been able to bring a lot of lessons from NASA to my current role: leadership, team building, and the technical parts of humans in space. A desk job at Sierra Space is the right place at the right time for me.
Business Wire
15-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Sierra Space Awarded Contract by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
LOUISVILLE, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Sierra Space, a leading commercial space company and defense tech prime that is building a platform in space to benefit and protect life on Earth ®, announced today it has been awarded a contract by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to deliver key components for spacecraft docking on the International Space Station (ISS). This includes a Passive Common Berthing Mechanism (PCBM), connection hatch, lighting system, and pressure sensor technology to enable spacecraft to dock at the ISS. The components will ultimately be used by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for space station missions to the ISS. 'By working with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to support JAXA's future missions to the ISS, we're underscoring our commitment to scientific advancement and the growth of the low-Earth orbit economy,' said Dr. Tom Marshburn, Chief Astronaut and VP of Human Factors Engineering at Sierra Space. 'This contract reinforces Sierra Space's reputation for delivering mission-critical, flight-proven systems that our partners can rely on. We're committed to a diverse and reliable Space Tech product portfolio that helps shape the future of space infrastructure.' The PCBM is a critical component that enables secure and reliable docking of pressurized vehicles to the ISS. As one of the industry's trusted suppliers of this flight-proven hardware, Sierra Space's PCBM provides precise alignment and environmental sealing between the ISS and visiting spacecraft. The fully passive assembly, complementing the active system mounted on the ISS, features minimal moving parts, making it a highly dependable choice for international space missions. Sierra Space will also build the hatch system to round out the entry and exit connection. This award further strengthens Sierra Space's position as an industry leader in space infrastructure. The company remains committed to advancing the frontiers of space technology through the development, integration, and testing of Space Tech programs including the creation of environmental systems, subsystems, rocket engines, and propulsion technologies. About Sierra Space Sierra Space is a leading commercial space company and emerging defense tech prime, that is building an end-to-end business and technology platform in space to benefit and protect life on Earth. With more than 30 years and 500 missions of space flight heritage, the company is reinventing both space transportation with Dream Chaser ®, the world's only commercial spaceplane, and the future of space destinations with the company's expandable space station technology. Using commercial business models, the company is also delivering orbital services to commercial, DoD and national security organizations, expanding production capacity to meet the needs of constellation programs. In addition, Sierra Space builds a host of systems and subsystems across solar power, mechanics and motion control, environmental control, life support, propulsion and thermal control, offering myriad space-as-a-service solutions for the new space economy.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Sierra Space's $45M power station can build a solar panel a day and a satellite wing a week
Sierra Space, the company behind the in-development Dream Chaser spaceplane, announced a technology center expansion that will allow it to scale its solar power systems manufacturing. The $45 million power station facility in Broomfield, Colorado, will focus on manufacturing the company's Surface Mount Technology (SMT) solar arrays—compact, resilient, and built with commercial pick-and-place electronics tech. The result: power systems that are scalable from 10 watts to 10 kilowatts, with fast lead times and high durability. Sierra Space's new facility spans 70,000 square feet and features integrated testing capabilities, including a thermal vacuum chamber, air chamber, and dynamics lab. According to the company, the SMT solar cells are attached to Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) and are assembled using "standard commercial electronics pick-and-place technology." "Sierra Space is re-industrializing the space-defense technology sector," Sierra Space Vice President Erik Daehler explained in the press statement. "We have the ability to build a solar panel a day and a wing a week. We plan to deliver 40 satellite wings in the first phase of production and are scaling up to 100 satellite wings per year by our full rate of production." "Additionally, because of our unique architecture, our solar arrays are more resilient," Daehler continued. "The Power Station is a proof point in our dedication to support national security." The solar arrays will play a critical role in Sierra Space Defense, the company's new division focused on supplying technologies to the US government. That includes powering satellites built at its recently announced "Victory Works" facility. Sierra Space says 100 team members are currently working at the Power Station, and it will continue to create new job opportunities as it expands. Space missions require increasingly efficient arrays capable of harvesting more energy with lower-weight solutions. "Using state-of-the art tools and integration equipment, our engineering and production teams have the expertise and experience to define, analyze, build, and test complete solar array systems," explained Brian Anthony, Vice President of Spacecraft Systems at Sierra Space. "Our scalable power systems can be tailored to fit a wide variety of mission options with reduced cycle time and risk by incorporating existing qualified and flight-proven designs." "With this new production facility coming online, Sierra Space is ready to meet the needs of the rapidly emerging satellite constellation market and deliver space power at lightning speed," Anthony continued. Sierra Space is one of a growing list of companies looking to change the way we operate in Earth's orbit. The company is developing the Dream Chaser spaceplane, which will eventually fly astronauts to the International Space Station. The spacecraft will also eventually fly astronauts to Sierra Space and Blue Origin's in-development private space station, Orbital Reef.
Broadcast Pro
04-06-2025
- Business
- Broadcast Pro
Sierra Space wins NASA contract for lunar habitat study
The NextSTEP-2 Appendix R contract positions Sierra Space as a leader in lunar logistics, including transport, storage, tracking, and waste management. Sierra Space has won a significant contract from NASA to study the use of the companys expandable space station technology on the moon. Sierra Space has been awarded a major contract by NASA to study the potential use of its expandable space station technology on the lunar surface. The agreement, part of NASAs NextSTEP-2 Appendix R initiative for Lunar Logistics and Mobility Studies, places the company at the forefront of efforts to develop advanced systems that will support future moon-to-Mars missions. The contract focuses on exploring how Sierra Spaces inflatable LIFE habitat and related technologies can be adapted to meet a range of logistical and habitation needs on the moon. This includes applications such as tunnel systems around lunar bases, storage and tracking of equipment and supplies, waste management, and the integration of comprehensive frameworks for sustained human presence on the lunar surface. Sierra Space brings considerable expertise to the project, with prior experience in design and analysis of lunar landers, rovers, and habitats. The company has also worked closely with teams supporting human landing systems and lunar terrain vehiclescritical components for building a long-term lunar infrastructure. Earlier this year, in April, Sierra Space completed hypervelocity impact tests at NASAs White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. These trials, which used a .50 caliber two-stage light gas gun to simulate micrometeoroid and orbital debris strikes, were aimed at reinforcing the structural integrity of the LIFE habitat. The successful results marked a key milestone in adapting the habitat for potential lunar and orbital deployment. Dr Tom Marshburn, Chief Astronaut and Vice President of Human Factors Engineering at Sierra Space, said: 'We believe our expandable softgoods space station technology can thrive in low-Earth orbit for commercial uses and for deep space exploration with NASA. Sierra Space is able to leverage existing technologies to deliver robust and scalable solutions that support both near-term and long-term mission objectives on the moon. Weve developed a versatile technology with our expandable habitation products that we feel supports NASAs moon to Mars goals.'
WIRED
04-06-2025
- Business
- WIRED
A GPS Blackout Would Shut Down the World
Jun 4, 2025 6:00 AM GPS jamming and spoofing attacks are on the rise. If the global navigation system the US relies on were to go down entirely, it would send the world into unprecedented chaos. Around 12,500 miles above our heads, the satellites that make up the Global Positioning System (GPS) quietly keep the world running. A blackout would result in almost instantaneous chaos. 'You would see traffic jams, a lot more traffic accidents, because transportation is going to see the first most immediate impact,' says Dana Goward, the founder of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a charity which works to strengthen GPS. Thousands of planes in the air, which use GPS among other systems for navigation and precision landing, would face a wave of uncertainty. Then other critical parts of society—from financial transactions to energy production systems—which have come to rely upon the precision positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) provided by the US-owned constellation of 31 GPS satellites may start to stutter. The ripples would be felt around the world. 'If it was a catastrophic moment that happened at a blink of an eye and we lost GPS entirely, you would see this global seizure of everything that moves, every piece of data that moves, every human that moves. All of that would shut down,' says Erik Daehler, the vice president of defense, satellites, and spacecraft systems at Sierra Space. The timing signals included in GPS would be one of the most impactful losses. Cell phone connections would likely collapse. Billions would quickly be wiped from stock markets amid the disruption. A GPS outage could be particularly ruinous to the United States, which has a heavy reliance on its sovereign space system and has dragged its feet in building backups that can provide the required resilience needed to keep the country running. The US has fallen behind, the National Space-based PNT Advisory Board warned last year. In contrast, China has reinforced its own more modern satellite navigation system—BeiDou—with a sprawling network of fiber-optic cables and terrestrial radio signals. The conditions needed to cause the entire GPS network to be entirely knocked out would be extraordinary and likely would come with wider societal ramifications. Such an outage, for instance, could be caused by China or Russia firing anti-satellite weapons against the GPS satellites (the US also has anti-satellite weapons), a powerful geomagnetic storm, or an escalation in the capabilities of electronic warfare. Despite the improbability of a total outage, GPS isn't infallible. It has its demons. 'What really happens is, regionally, GPS gets messed with and jammed and interfered with on a regular basis,' Daehler says. Thousands of planes and ships are having their GPS interfered with each week, and signals are regularly disrupted around war zones. 'America is not well prepared at all,' Goward says. More should be done to build out PNT systems that can act as a backstop to the space-based GPS signals, he says. 'There's not a general overall awareness. We certainly don't have a resilient PNT architecture or a PNT architecture of any kind other than GPS.' The GPS constellation of 31 satellites, which has received several hardware updates over the years, has been in operation for the past 40 years. The system typically broadcasts at 100 percent availability and provides accurate location data to within 7 meters. The GPS satellites are just one of the four so-called global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) in operation. As well as China's BeiDou, there is Russia's GLONASS and Europe's Galileo constellation. Over the past half decade, though, GNSS signals have increasingly been attacked as the technology to disrupt them has become cheaper and more sophisticated. Most commonly, disruption happens around Russia, Israel, Myanmar, the South China sea, areas of the Middle East, and the Baltic countries in Europe. Broadly, there are two main forms of attack against GNSS signals: jamming and spoofing. Jamming involves blocking signals so that positioning isn't available, while spoofing involves creating mock signals that make something appear somewhere else on the map. Ships have been made to appear inland at airports, while planes are made to look like they are flying in tight circles. In one video shared by the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation that appears to show GPS interference, a plane's systems blast out a warning message to 'pull up' when its pilots reported they were flying higher than Mount Everest. 'I'm most concerned about aviation,' says Todd Humphreys, the director of the University of Texas at Austin's radio navigation laboratory. 'At least one fatal aviation accident in Europe can be traced to GNSS interference as a primary cause. A deliberate attack against US aviation, as opposed to the collateral attacks in Europe, would cause astounding economic harm.' The number of spoofing incidents last year was 500 percent higher than in 2023, according to aviation officials. The US Space Force, which is responsible for the GPS satellites, did not respond to a request for comment for this article from WIRED. Across the US, PNT data is crucial to almost all critical infrastructure—from communications and health care monitoring systems to food production and wastewater management—but GPS is often the 'sole' source of this information, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, making the systems more vulnerable. (The military uses a more robust GPS setup than commercial applications). 'There is no one sector that doesn't use GPS, and some are more reliant than others. Users in these sectors are not all acutely aware of the risks associated with their dependency on it and the ways that the system can be disrupted or degraded,' says Caitlin Durkovich, a former national security official and critical infrastructure expert. Building a 'layered' approach could help to make GPS less vulnerable to attack, experts say. Both Europe's Galileo and China's BeiDou are newer than GPS and, in some ways, more resilient. Last year, the National Space–based PNT Advisory Board produced a comparison of GPS and BeiDou that flagged a broader series of backups to Beijing's system. While GPS satellites are located only in middle Earth orbit, BeiDou has satellites in multiple orbits and is further along in deploying them into low Earth orbit. China also has a terrestrial radio broadcast network, called eLoran, and has laid 20,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cables that link up with 295 timing centers to broadcast alternatives. 'In the case of BeiDou, the system's enhanced resiliency and capability should be considered an element of 'soft power' and an element of great power competition,' the advisory board wrote last year. The board, led by Admiral Thad Allen, a former leader of the US Coast Guard, called for a more joined-up approach to managing PNT across the US government and for GPS to be specifically designated as 'critical infrastructure.' On April 26, 2024, the first of two Finnair flights were forced to turn around due to GPS interference likely carried out by Russia. After a second aircraft was diverted the following day, Finnair suspended its daily flights between Helsinki and Tartu, Estonia. Source: AirNav 'I think there has to be a federal role in this, both because the system and signals are operated and provisioned by the federal government. But because of the complexity of the system and the fact that you need a common standard,' Durkovich says. 'We'd like to see a core national PNT architecture,' Goward says. 'Then we would suggest some form of fiber network and a terrestrial broadcast. We think it would be a substantial deterrent and it would actually make space-based systems safer because folks would be less likely to interfere with it.' Across the country, there are various levels of backup systems in place that have been sporadically introduced and multiple ongoing efforts to improve the GPS setup. Financial institutions, for instance, have been deploying atomic clocks to ensure they have backups for the timing element provided by GPS and telecoms networks have some capacity in place. 'It's not to say that the US doesn't have a robust timing infrastructure, actually it's quite robust,' says Jeremy Bennington, the vice president of PNT Assurance at Spirent Communications, adding that much of it is spread across commercial entities, a stark difference to China's national approach. 'I do think that a backup is going to be required so that you end up with that layered approach.' The calls to modernize PNT have increasingly become more urgent. In 2020, a first-term Trump executive order called for making PNT systems more resilient. At the end of March this year, the Federal Communications Commission opened an inquiry to identify GPS alternatives that can provide backups. 'Relying on GPS alone as the primary source of PNT data leaves America exposed to a single point of failure and leaves our PNT system open to disruption or manipulation by adversaries,' the FCC said at the time. There are multiple ways to add more resilience and upgrade the existing GPS system. The military has long been working on upgrades to be used in defense situations. Bennington says that GPS satellites could be added to other orbits and the further rollout of more capable signals. Daehler and colleagues at Sierra Space are working on creating ways to reduce the impact of jamming and spoofing. Lisa Dyer, the executive director of the GPS Innovation Alliance, says the GPS system could build in authentication to confirm its signals are genuine, like Galileo and BeiDou. Dyer says that rolling out the newer L5 signal can also build in more protection for planes and aviation. 'To me that's an important national objective of the United States: that GPS remains the de facto international navigation standard,' Dyer says. There are also hardware updates happening, though some of them are slow and have dragged on for years. The US Space Force has recently been funding multiple companies to develop low Earth orbit satellite GPS constellations and quickly launching systems into space. Elsewhere, quantum technologies are being used to create new navigation systems. SandboxAQ, a Google spinout, is working on magnetic navigation. Ultimately, as well as better government management around GPS, organizations need to spend money to upgrade their systems and protections, Bennington says. That means spending money. 'If GPS jamming or spoofing were to happen at any major airport, whether it's Heathrow, Frankfurt, Munich, New York, the amount of cancellation and delays in the cost incurred by the airlines just in several hours would be more than the cost to upgrade their fleets,' he says.
