“TOUCHDOWN has a new meaning now!!!” he tweeted after landing.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket blasted off from West Texas, sending the capsule on a 10-minute flight with the two VIP guests and four paying customers. Their automated capsule soared to an altitude of 66 miles (106 kilometers), providing a few minutes of weightlessness before parachuting into the desert. The booster also came back to land successfully.

It was five minutes and 50 miles (187 kilometers) shorter than Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on May 5, 1961. His eldest daughter, Laura Shepard Churchley, took along a tiny piece of his Freedom 7 capsule as well as mementos from his Apollo 14 moonshot. She also packed some golf balls; her dad hit a couple on the lunar surface.

A co-host of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Strahan bubbled over with excitement in updates for the show all week. He took along his Super Bowl ring and retired New York Giants jersey No. 92. Bezos stashed a football on board that will go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

As soon as he emerged from the capsule, Strahan said he wanted to go again. But Bezos joked he’d have to buy his own ticket next time.

In a video he posted later, Strahan called the experience surreal and unbelievable: “Wow! That’s all I can say. Wow!”

At the launch complex near Van Horn, Bezos had “Light this candle” painted on the launch tower’s bridge, borrowing from Alan Shepard’s famous gripe from inside Freedom 7 as the delays mounted: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

Shepard Churchley — who volunteered for Blue Origin’s third passenger flight — borrowed her late father’s phrase, yelling “Let’s light this candle!” while awaiting takeoff. Fierce wind held up her flight for two days.

She heads the board of trustees for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

“I thought about Daddy coming down and thought, gosh he didn’t even get to enjoy any of what I’m getting to enjoy,” Shepard Churchley said following touchdown. “He was working. He had to do it himself. I went up for the ride!”

Saturday’s launch marks the last one this year by private U.S. companies as space tourism finally takes off. Virgin Galactic kicked it off in July, sending up its billionaire founder, Richard Branson, followed by Blue Origin and SpaceX. So many are flying that the Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday it will no longer designate who is a commercial astronaut or give out wings.

Bezos, who founded Amazon six years before Blue Origin, was on his company’s debut launch in July. The second, in October, included actor William Shatner — Captain James Kirk of TV’s original “Star Trek.” The late Leonard Nimoy’s daughter sent up a necklace with a “Vulcan Salute” charm on Saturday’s flight, in honor of the show’s original Mr. Spock.

Among the four-space tourists paying unspecified millions, each was the first parent-child combo: financier Lane Bess and his son Cameron. Also flying: Voyager Space chairman and CEO Dylan Taylor and investor Evan Dick.

Blue Origin dedicated Saturday’s launch to Glen de Vries, who launched into space with Shatner, but died one month later in a plane crash.

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The venture will be built in partnership with Sierra Space, the spaceflight wing of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp, and will be backed by Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Arizona State University.

Orbital Reef will be operated as a “mixed-use business park”, and plans to provide the infrastructure needed to scale economic activity and open new markets in space, Blue Origin and Sierra Space said.

“Seasoned space agencies, high-tech consortia, sovereign nations without space programs, media and travel companies, funded entrepreneurs and sponsored inventors, and future-minded investors all have a place on Orbital Reef,” the companies said in a statement.

Sierra April announced plans to offer the first free-flying commercial space station. (https://bit.ly/2ZlJ8g3)

In July, Blue Origin had a successful debut space tourism flight, with Bezos and three others aboard. Earlier this month, 90-year-old U.S. actor William Shatner – Captain James Kirk of “Star Trek” fame – became the oldest person in space aboard a rocketship flown by Blue Origin.

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Having completed its 14th mission last month – successfully carrying a dummy, “Mannequin Skywalker”, into space – Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, believes relatively cheap travel for humans is not far off. That would finally deliver a return on the $1bn (£730m) of Amazon stock Bezos has to sell annually to fund it. Blue Origin was one of four projects flagged by the Amazon boss as likely recipients of his attention now, alongside the Washington Post newspaper, his Day One charitable fund and the environmental Earth Fund.

“I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have,” said Bezos, who is becoming executive chairman at Amazon.

But competition in the stratosphere will be as tough as in retail. Rival billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX is arguably ahead of Blue Origin. Despite an uncrewed test flight last week ending in a fiery crash, SpaceX is already able to reuse its Falcon 9 rockets. Musk (no stranger to making and sometimes breaking bold promises) aims to fly to Mars as soon as 2024.

There had already been a private-sector revolution in the space industry, as the US government’s enthusiasm for huge spending waned. Commercial companies now account for about 80% of the $424bn global space industry, according to Professor Loizos Heracleous of Warwick Business School, who has written extensively on the business of space.

Most of the industry is focused on IT, but experts believe the billionaires’ efforts are about to usher in a new era, with the start of space tourism, manufacturing and more. Google co-founder Larry Page has backed Planetary Resources, a startup hoping to mine asteroids.

It will be overdue in the eyes of many. Sir Richard Branson predicted that Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company he founded, would first fly in space in 2009. Nonetheless, despite false starts and a fatal crash in 2014, analysts at UBS say Virgin Galactic will in 2021 offer “the only way for consumers to gain entry into the [roughly] 560-member astronaut club in the next five years”.

Cheaper technology – such as “CubeSats” the size of a loaf of bread – mean more players can turn their eyes skywards. A global wave of investors looking for returns has loosed a wave of easy money, much of it through special purpose acquisition companies (Spaces) – “blank-cheque” vehicles that raise money on stock exchanges before boldly going to look for investments.

A Blue Origin rocket lifts off from its launchpad in Texas. 
Photograph: AP

Spacs have made some investors nervous about too-easy money, but they are delivering funding. Astra, a California-based rocket company founded by a former Nasa chief technology officer, last week announced it would use a merger with a Spac to list on the Nasdaq exchange, with a valuation of $2.1bn. Momentus, a company aiming for “last-mile” transportation in space, announced last October that it, too, would take the Spac route, for a billion-dollar valuation.

The total space industry could grow by $1tn in the next decade, according to Ron Epstein, aerospace analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He sees a turning point as technology improvements and capital combine, making space tourism and in-space manufacturing – of space stations, or even pharmaceuticals – increasingly viable. Deep-pocketed investors were playing a role similar to that of predecessors who had helped aerospace grow into a global industry, he said.

Heracleous agreed: “Accidents for SpaceX and other commercial players show that space-faring is unpredictable and dangerous. But this is the price for solving challenges and pushing the frontiers of technology and, ultimately, humanity.”

However, it is still an inherently risky business. Alok Sharma, the then business secretary, last year had to override written warnings from his top civil servant that the UK government could lose everything when it invested £400m in OneWeb, a bankrupt but potentially promising satellite company.

Governments are still involved. A mission to land the first woman on the moon by 2024 appears to be one of Donald Trump’s few legacies. Joe Biden’s administration said last week that it would continue the program.

SpaceX and Blue Origin are already working on moon-lander designs under contracts awarded last year by Nasa for almost $1bn, alongside Dynetics, a subsidiary of defense contractor Leidos. Those contracts covered only 10 months of work: Nasa is due to evaluate each company’s efforts this month, before a test mission with just one of them.

Taking people to the moon and beyond is a key part of both Musk’s and Bezos’s visions, which can verge on the apocalyptic. Bezos talked in 2019 of a trillion humans populating the solar system, far beyond the resources of Earth; Musk has made clear his belief that a Mars colony could save humanity. That view is heavily criticized by some environmentalists, who argue we should focus on respecting the bounds of the planet we already inhabit.

Yet the hope for the space industry is that, by lowering the cost of space access, this billionaire race may have as-yet-unknown benefits for the world, even as the existential threat from the climate crisis looms.

Jim Cantrell, who worked with Musk at SpaceX in its early days, sourcing rockets, said the company’s success had made it easier for other space projects to get off the ground. These include his latest company, Phantom Space, which aims to drive down launch costs by mass-producing small rockets.

Cantrell said cheaper access to space had started something like the “New World economy” that followed the discovery of America: “It’s just beyond imagination how big it is.”

Elon Musk says colonising Mars could be humanity’s saviour. 
Photograph: Getty Images

Space cadets

Jeff Bezos
Blue Origin will be one of Bezos’s priorities in life beyond Amazon, alongside the Washington Post newspaper and his charities.

Sir Richard Branson
Virgin Galactic could have paying passengers in space this year. An early focus on space tourism could eventually give way to supersonic travel using similar technology.

Elon Musk
Musk’s shareholding in Tesla meant he overtook Bezos as the world’s richest man this year. His schedule also includes Neuralink, a brain-to-computer interface, alongside SpaceX’s Mars ambitions.

Larry Page
The Google co-founder has backed Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company, although analysts believe successful resource extraction could be decades away.

Marc Benioff
The Salesforce founder was a backer of Astra, a rocket startup that will raise as much as $500m through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.

Mark Zuckerberg
The Facebook founder has expressed ambivalence about space tourism, but he did back Breakthrough Starshot, a project to send out small laser-powered “light sail” spacecraft to collect imagery and scientific data.

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Maritime transport has a direct impact on air quality in many coastal cities. Commercial ships and vessels burn fuel for energy and emit several types of air pollution as a by-product, causing the degradation of air quality. A past study estimated that shipping emissions are globally responsible for around 400 000 premature deaths from lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, and 14 million childhood asthma cases each year.

For this reason, during the past decade, efforts to develop international shipping emission regulations have been underway. Since January 2020, the maximum sulfur dioxide content of ship fuels was globally reduced to 0.5% (down from 3.5%) in an effort to reduce air pollution and to protect health and the environment. It is expected that the nitrogen dioxide emissions from shipping will also become restricted during the coming years.

Monitoring ships to comply with these regulations is still an unresolved issue. The open ocean covers vast areas, with limited or no capacity to perform local checks. This is where satellites, such as the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, come in handy.

Until recently, satellite measurements needed to be aggregated and averaged over months or even years to discover shipping lanes, limiting the use of satellite data for regulation control and enforcement. Only the combined effect of all ships could be seen, and only along the busiest shipping lanes.

In a recent paper, an international team of scientists from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), Wageningen University, the Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, have now discovered patterns in previously unused ‘sun glint’ satellite data over the ocean that strongly resemble ship emission plumes.

Sun glint occurs when sunlight reflects off the surface of the ocean at the same angle that a satellite sensor views it. As water surfaces are irregular and uneven, the sunlight is scattered in different directions, leaving blurry streaks of light in the data.

Satellite algorithms tend to mistake such bright surfaces for cloudiness, which is why, for a long time, sun glint was considered a nuisance in satellite measurements. Differentiating clouds from other bright reflective surfaces such as snow, clouds or even sun glint over the ocean surface has proven difficult—until now.

Sun glint pattern as seen in satellite data from the VIIRS satellite on 2 
July 2018. The dark spots in the middle of the sun glint are locations where 
the sea surface is nearly flat (lack of wind waves) and acts as a true mirror, 
in which case the sun glint effect disappears. Credit: NASA

In a study published last year, scientists were able to differentiate snow and ice from clouds by measuring the height of the cloud and comparing it with the surface elevation. If the height of the cloud is found to be sufficiently close to the surface, it can be considered either snow or ice, rather than cloud coverage.

When applying the same method for sun glint over oceans, the team were able to easily identify and attribute emissions from individual ships in daily Sentinel-5P measurements.

Aris Georgoulias, from the University of Thessaloniki, commented, “By combining these measurements with ship location information, and taking into account the effect of wind blowing emission plumes away from ship smoke stacks, we could show that these structures almost perfectly matched the ship tracks.”

“For now, only the largest ships, or multiple ships traveling in convoy, are visible in the satellite measurements,” added Jos de Laat, from KNMI. “Ship tracks from small ships never aligned with these emission plume structures, unless their tracks crossed the track of larger ships or large shipping lanes, or a small ship traveled in a busy shipping lane.”

Claus Zehner, ESA’s Sentinel-5P Mission Manager, commented, “We think that these new results demonstrate exciting possibilities for the monitoring of ship emissions in support of environmental regulation from space. Future planned satellite missions with improved spatial resolution, for example the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring satellites, should allow for the better characterisation of nitrogen dioxide ship emission plumes and, possibly, detection of smaller ship plumes.”

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A team of astronomers has been able to verify that a newly-detected transient event is actually a cataclysmic variable (CV) star, prone to regular episodes of dramatic brightening and dimming.

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This video shows the success of a December 28 test, which green-lit the asteroid landing.

The team is planning a total of three sampling events over the next few weeks.

Hayabusa 2 will depart Ryugu in December 2019 and return to Earth by the end of 2020 with its precious cargo of samples, which will be analyzed by scientists such as John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester, UK.

The surface of Ryugu is rockier than scientists had expected.

Bridges, who was also involved in the first Hayabusa mission, told CNN via telephone on Thursday that the event was “nail-biting stuff” due to the extreme precision involved in landing on Ryugu.

“This is a significant mission,” said Bridges. “Sample return missions are particularly exciting.”

He told CNN that the Hayabusa 2 mission is interesting because Ryugu is a C-class asteroid which humans haven’t visited before.

“One thing I’m pretty sure of is that it will throw up some unexpected results,” said Bridges, who believes that information from Ryugu samples could make us think again about the early evolution of the solar system.

Beneath their desolate surface, asteroids are believed to contain a rich treasure trove of information about the formation of the solar system billions of years ago.

NASA spacecraft meets with asteroid

C-type asteroids, which are largely composed of carbon, are the most common variety of asteroids, comprising more than 75% of those currently discovered. The other two main types of asteroid are the metallic S- and M-types, according to NASA.

Ryugu is expected to be “rich in water and organic materials,” allowing scientists to “clarify interactions between the building blocks of Earth and the evolution of its oceans and life, thereby developing solar system science,” JAXA said.

If Hayabusa 2 makes it back to Earth on schedule it will be the first mission to bring back samples from a C-class asteroid.

Japan’s Hayabusa asteroid rovers send back first footage

JAXA scientists are currently racing NASA for that historic achievement, with the US agency’s own sample retrieval mission due to arrive back on Earth in 2023.

Even reaching the asteroid is a massive achievement as it is the equivalent of hitting a 6-centimeter (2.4-inch) target from 20,000 kilometers (12,400 miles) away.

“In other words, arriving at Ryugu is the same as aiming at a 6-centimeter target in Brazil from Japan,” said JAXA.

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