Northern lights blazing over lake Thingvellir national park in Iceland are caused by “space … [+]
A startup is forecasting space weather with publicly-available data now, and plans to launch a constellation of 24 weather-checking satellites by 2028. The goal: protect billions if not trillions of dollars worth of ground-based infrastructure, plus the lives of space tourists and astronauts as we increasingly move off-planet.
“Imagine you are traveling in space, and then the sun emits this invisible burst of radiation, energy, charged particles, which can be absolutely destructive,” Alex Pospeckov, CEO of Mission Space, told me in a recent TechFirst podcast. “This is what we call space weather. And when something like this happens, it affects assets in space, on earth, and of course endangers the life of astronauts and space tourists.”
Space tourists have to be one of the newest new things, but 69 private individuals have traveled to space so far: 46 above the Kármán line at 62 miles (100 kilometers) plus another 23 at least above the U.S. Air Force’s threshold at 50 miles (80 kilometers). With SpaceX and Blue Origin in full swing plus additional competitors in the wings, that number is only going to increase: up to 13,000 by 2028, by one rather optimistic estimate.
But right now space weather impacts far more people on earth than it does in space.
The prototype Mission Space satellite
Geomagnetic storms powered by coronal mass ejections from the Sun can damage transformers and lead to widespread power outages. Airplanes can suffer avionics problems, and GPS-guided equipment can malfunction. Also, satellite operations, which increasingly underpin our information, entertainment, and communications industries, can be disrupted or even shut down.
The classic example, the Carrington Event in September 1859, knocked out telegraph systems across Europe and North America, created auroras that were seen as far south as the Caribbean and Hawaii, and lit up the night sky so brightly that people reportedly thought it was dawn.
If we had a similar event today, it would do much more damage to our significantly more electricity-reliant economies.
Even much smaller space weather events have major economic implications, says Pospeckov, especially because existing prediction models are not localized, even though geomagnetic storms are.
“It’s a huge problem because in May one of the power plants on the northern island of New Zealand, they switched off the power grids because it there was an alarm about space weather events,” he said. “They spent four days without full capacity.”
In reality, however, the storm missed us, or at least New Zealand, and it turned out that the partial shutdown was unnecessary.
A constellation of 24 satellites would help Mission Space pinpoint which areas of the earth are at risk, reducing unnecessary disruptions, says Pospeckov. Current accuracy of forecasts is just 7.5%, he adds, making them not useful for day-to-day operations.
“The more precise forecasting you have, the more time in advance you have for planning,” he says. “You either can switch off, use the backup systems, switch off different radio channels or ground stations, and then you have some level of control of the events that are going to happen.”
Space Weather prediction screens
The 24 satellites that Mission Space is building will be deployed in multiple layers at different altitudes to see the difference of data between the layers. At least some of them will be in polar orbits, not equatorial, in order to capture data at the poles, where the earth’s magnetic field channels charged particles from the ongoing solar wind, as well as more energetic events caused by coronal masse ejections or solar flares.
Interestingly, the satellites won’t be hardened against radiation. Instead, Mission Space intends to make them as cheap as possible, making them quickly replaceable if any wear out or get damaged by the very weather they are intended to monitor. This contrasts with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) approach, which recently handed 340 million Euros to Airbus Defence and Space UK to develop the Vigil satellite for space weather forecasting.
“Vigil will be Europe’s first 24/7 operational space weather satellite, providing valuable time to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids or mobile communication networks on Earth as well as valuable satellites in Earth orbit, including the International Space Station ISS,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director General, said in a statement at the time. “Vigil will drastically improve both the lead time of space weather warnings as well as their level of detail from its unique vantage point in deep space.”
Pospeckov isn’t impressed with that approach: one storm or other space event could take out that satellite, he says, whereas he can build a new Mission Space satellite in just a month and launch it cheaply into space via the next SpaceX bus to the sky.
“We use just a totally different approach,” he says. “Let’s do it as cheap as we can.”
Potential customers for space weather notifications include aerospace companies, satellite operators, power grids, airlines, space tourism companies, space stations and farmers relying on GPS-guided equipment.
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