Dec 1 2002
From The Space Library
The U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Space Commercialization (OSC) published a report on potential markets for suborbital reusable launch vehicles (RLVs). The study was a follow-up to earlier OSC efforts concerning commercial space opportunities, efforts that had identified suborbital space transportation as a potentially viable market. The report examined 14 different suborbital RLVs and the existing and emerging markets those systems could create. The authors had determined that the advent of an operational suborbital RLV could create numerous new markets in fields such as military surveillance and commercial Earth-imaging. In addition, the advent of suborbital RLVs with dual-use capabilities could serve multiple emerging markets, offering customers significantly lower costs. Moreover, the expansion of such markets could contribute to lower operating and manufacturing costs for RLVs. The Aerospace Corporation had written the report under contract with the OSC, submitting it in October 2002. (J. C. Martin and G. W. Law, “Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicles and Applicable Markets” (report, Aerospace Corporation for Office of Space Commercialization, U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC, October 2002), http://www.space.commerce.gov/library/reports/2002-10-suborbital-LowRes.pdf (accessed 5 November 2008); NASA, Aeronautics and Space Report of the President: Fiscal Year 2003 Activities (Washington, DC, 2003), p. 51, http://history.nasa.gov/presrep2003.pdf (accessed 5 November 2008).)
Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the European Southern Observatory published research detailing their discovery of a diffuse emission of x-rays from a cluster of forming stars known as RCW 38. The new discovery contrasted with astronomers' conventional understanding of bodies that commonly emit high-energy particles, namely supernovas and exploding stars in the intense magnetic fields surrounding neutron stars and black holes. The astronomers, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, had discovered that neither type of body was evident in the RCW 38 stellar region, which is, instead, an area of active star formation. Although the scientists remained uncertain about the source of the x-rays, as well as the effects of the x-rays on the star cluster, they hypothesized that these x-rays could affect the chemistry of the bodies that would form planets around the stars in the cluster. (NASA, “Young Star Cluster Found Aglow with Mysterious Cloud,” news release 02-251, 18 December 2002; Scott J. Wolk et al., “Discovery of Nonthermal X-ray Emission from the Embedded Massive Star-Forming Region RCW 38,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 580, no. 2 (1 December 2002): L161-L165.)
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