Top Stories

West Virginia is the latest state to offer satellite broadband services like Starlink only a tiny fraction of rural broadband subsidies. SpaceX's Starlink would get just 1% of the $625 million in rural broadband subsidies proposed by West Virginia. Those plans come after Virginia and Louisiana similarly provided Starlink and Amazon's Project Kuiper a tiny fraction of funds through the federal government's Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. A research firm noted SpaceX is slated for $17.4 million of the $1.7 billion in BEAD funding awarded so far, covering around 6% of the 329,000 subsidized locations, while Amazon has netted $4.5 million for just over 2% of locations. Those BEAD plans have favored terrestrial fiber systems that can offer service at lower costs but take longer to roll out. [SpaceNews]

ULA is putting a greater emphasis on incorporating reusability into its Vulcan Centaur rocket. In a podcast this week, as well as a briefing earlier this month, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said the company was pursuing a new initiative related to Vulcan reusability. In addition, the company is considering plans to recover the aft section of the Vulcan booster, but he did not provide details about the new effort. The company is moving ahead with "SMART reuse" of the engine section, with experiments slated to fly as soon as next year. The aft section recovery and reuse is likely to be bundled with performance upgrades to the vehicle to compensate for the additional mass from reusability systems. [SpaceNews]

SpaceX has added employees to work on Starship after the loss of a vehicle in a June test. After a Starship upper stage exploded on a test stand ahead of a static-fire test, about 20% of the Falcon 9 engineering team was reassigned to Starship for six months. The move came after three unsuccessful test flights of Starship this year that raised new doubts about the viability of the heavy-lift reusable launch vehicle. Moving the Falcon 9 engineers to Starship would allow SpaceX to increase testing and reliability of vehicle components and increase production rates, but could result in some Falcon 9 Starlink launches slipping from this year to next. SpaceX is preparing for its next Starship test flight as soon as Sunday. [Bloomberg News]

Other News

Russia launched a life science research mission Wednesday. A Soyuz-2.1b rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 1:13 p.m. Eastern and placed the Bion-M No. 2 spacecraft into orbit. Bion-M carries plant and animal specimens, including 75 mice and 1,500 flies, to study how they respond to space environment conditions such as higher radiation levels from exposure in a polar orbit. The spacecraft will remain in orbit for a month before landing in Russia's Orenburg region. This is the first launch of a Bion-M mission since 2013. [Tass]

NASA will announce its new astronaut class next month. The agency said Wednesday it will reveal the new astronaut class members, selected from more than 8,000 applicants, Sept. 22 at the Johnson Space Center. The event will be tied to briefings there about the Artemis 2 mission, scheduled for early next year. [NASA]

The dwarf planet Ceres may have been habitable early in its history. New analysis of data from the Dawn mission of Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt, shows that the world may have maintained a warm interior for up to two billion years after its formation to allow for a liquid water ocean and mixing of carbon compounds that contained the organic ingredients needed for life. That could have allowed the formation of microbes like those seen in hydrothermal ocean vents on Earth. Similar conditions may have existed on other large icy asteroids and moons. [New Scientist]

A new AI model could help scientists make better predictions of solar storms. Surya, an open source machine learning model developed by NASA and IBM, was trained on years of data from NASA missions such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The model is able to predict some solar flares two hours in advance and scientists said they hope to use it to predict other phenomena, including how solar storms interact with terrestrial weather. [Technology Review]

Holy Wow

"We have a shared folder on board the International Space Station that we named 'Holy Wow' and I was like, 'I've got a Holy Wow picture.' The Axiom-4 crew was there as well so eight of us crowded around a laptop looking at this picture. I knew it was a great picture but I has no idea how phenomenal that picture was."

– NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, discussing at a NASA briefing Wednesday a picture she took while on the station of a transient luminous event, a red jet of electrical discharge in the upper atmosphere.

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