Zac Hall

It’s not yet clear how long it will be until the coronavirus pandemic is contained in the United States and around the world.

The spread of COVID-19 has not yet reached its apex in the U.S., so we cannot know the full effect that the virus will have on America’s space agency or the greater space economy.

We do know how NASA and partner companies are being affected by the health pandemic so far, however, including spaceflight plans and facilities going offline.

SpaceX will attempt to launch its Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center this morning at 8:16 a.m. EDT. SpaceX is sending its next batch of 60 Starlink satellites to space. These satellites will be used for a new global broadband service that will focus on bringing internet connectivity to rural areas.

Wednesday’s launch attempt follows a failed attempt on Sunday caused by an engine failure. Falcon 9’s flight computer correctly prevented the rocket from taking off at T-0.

Falcon 9’s first stage will attempt to land 8 minutes 35 seconds after liftoff. Starlink satellites will be deployed in space 14 minutes 48 seconds after T-0.

Watch the launch, landing, and deployment below.

NASA employees and contractors will now be required to work remotely, Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced on Tuesday night. The requirement is in effect across every NASA facility.

The space agency stress tested its telework capabilities earlier this month before the coronavirus pandemic began to worsen across the United States. NASA Ames Research Center in California was forced to mandate remote work a week later after an employee tested positive for COVID-19.

Here’s the latest statement from NASA Administrator Bridenstine:

Kyle Wiggers at VentureBeat published a story today examining the questionable quality of Amazon’s Alexa Answers service. The piece highlights several answers to questions that were false or misleading, including this:

The third question — “Who was the first black man on the moon?” — contains a false premise. No African American astronaut has walked on the moon to date, although one user offers “Bernard Anthony Harris Jr.” as a potential answer. This is incorrect — while Harris became the first African American to perform a spacewalk in February 1995, he never stepped foot on the moon. Interestingly, Alexa rarely surfaces this answer when asked the question, but instead erroneously responds with the answer “Neil Armstrong.”

I tried this same question with Siri on my Mac. Siri doesn’t offer a blatantly wrong answer like the Alexa Answers response, but it does punt to a list of web results with a misleading first entry.

The first Wikipedia result Siri surfaces tells you about Bernard Harris, the first African-American to complete a spacewalk, but not Guion Bluford who was the first African-American in space.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft will make the journey from Ohio to Florida later this month before ultimately leaving Earth for a test flight around the Moon for the first Artemis mission.

NASA has a media event at Plum Brook Station in Ohio scheduled for this Saturday, March 14, where Orion will be on full display. The viewing event was originally scheduled for Monday, March 9, then rescheduled for the weekend on Wednesday, March 4.

The spacecraft will arrive in Florida by Tuesday, March 24, when NASA will hold a second media event for welcoming the Orion spacecraft to its next testing home.

Donna Oddy’s “Everything to Know About Beach Mice” feature on NASA.gov today is hands-down the best space news of the week. I was very aware of the coastline beaches along Kennedy Space Center, but I have to admit I had no idea it inhabited beach mice.

The lesson of the day is there are 16 subspecies of field mice, four of which are considered beach mice.

The Alabama beach mouse lives in — you guessed it — Alabama. The Pallid beach mouse was found on the east coast, but this variety is believed to be extinct now. The Anastasia Island beach mouse and Southeastern beach mouse are found on the east coast of Florida.

Southeastern beach mice call the beaches of NASA’s rocket ranch home, spanning three federal properties: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Kennedy Space Center/Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, and Canaveral National Seashore.

Lindsey Stirling’s electric violin performances are stunning all on their own, and this collaboration with NASA is just incredible.

Her latest album is called Artemis, although it has no direct association to NASA’s Artemis missions to send the first woman and next moon to the Moon with Space Launch System and Orien — until now, that is.

Apollo 8 Firing Room, Saturn V rocket, Hubble Space telescope, Space Shuttle Atlantis, and more.

Last week NASA conducted a nationwide voluntary telework test run to discover technological and connectivity issues before a theoretical mandate is required.

Over the weekend, a NASA employee at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley tested positive the coronavirus. As a precaution, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has placed the facility on “mandatory telework status with restricted access to the center until further notice.”

Here’s the administrator’s full statement:

Elon Musk is the keynote speaker for the SATELLITE 2020 conference. Expect lots of Starlink satellite constellation hype as SpaceX continues to regularly deploy 60 satellites per launch for a new global internet service.

SpaceX is preparing to launch a Dragon supply capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket tonight at 11:50 p.m. ET. I drove down to Titusville, Florida, from South Mississippi last night to attend the launch from a boat thanks to Star Fleet Tours.

The objective is a resupply and payload return flight to and from the International Space Station. Here’s an idea of some of the payload being delivered.

For me, this will be my first time viewing a nighttime launch; I saw CRS-19 during the day in December. I’ll also be positioned well to see the booster landing if they successfully return.

My interest in SpaceX’s Starship mega rocket has been limited so far because the company is still in the build-it-and-blow-it-up phase of assembly, but I have to admit there’s something alluring about huge rockets from any company.

Eric Berger has an in-depth profile on Ars Technica that looks at what exactly Elon Musk’s rocket company is working on with Starship:

Watch and learn below. Adidas isn’t the only interesting project on board. Space garden hardware testing, plant defenses in space, nanostructure testing, liquid metal experiments, and more.

All aboard the International Space Station! SpaceX and Axiom Space are teaming up to pull off the first instance of private human spaceflight to the ISS as soon as 2021.

The historic journey will follow another major milestone when SpaceX is expected to send NASA astronauts to the space station in May.

Curiosity isn’t the only Martian rover making headlines this week. NASA will soon reveal the name of its next Mars rover at a special event held today at 1:30 p.m. ET.

NASA opened name submissions to K-12 students in U.S. public, private, and home schools last August before choosing nine finalists. The agency then conducted an online poll to let the public vote on their favorite name among the top finishers:

NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe will soon spend 11 months without the ability to receive commands from Earth, according to the agency. That’s because the 48-year-old Australian radio antenna known as DSS43 will undergo much needed hardware upgrades starting this month.

Voyager 2 first launched almost 43 years ago with the task of studying the outer planets in our solar system. While the probe won’t be able to receive instructions from Earth for most of 2020, it will continue to send data to Earth as it enters a quiescent state. DSS43 is the only dish equipped to send data to the space probe in part because it’s only viewable from the southern hemisphere.

NASA’s space probe isn’t the only reason Deep Space Network is upgrading its 20 story office-sized dish either.

NASA isn’t requiring employees work remotely over coronavirus COVID-19 concerns yet, but the administration is conducting a test this week to determine how such an event would work if the federal government mandated such a thing.

Jacqueline Feldscher, reporting for POLITICO:

All NASA employees and a number of Air Force personnel have been asked to work from home on Friday amid federal preparations for a potential coronavirus outbreak, according to a NASA spokesperson and an Air Force memo obtained by POLITICO.

The day will allow employees to test remote work technologies in case federal employees are forced to work from home for an extended period of time due to the virus.

NASA spokesperson Bettina Inclán provided this statement on the upcoming test:

Turns out investment bank Morgan Stanley has a dedicated Space Team, and they’re awfully jazzed about the impact NASA’s Artemis Moon mission is having on public and investor support in the companies like Virgin Galactic.

The Morgan Stanley Space Team advises that “increased news flow around space tourism could catalyze itself in increasing awareness to a larger breadth of investors being interested in Virgin Galactic,” specifically citing the firm for being the only pure-play publicly traded space tourism company.

Virgin Galactic recently shared its first full year of earnings results as a publicly traded company and made steps toward making space tourism possible. SpaceX similarly has ambitions to build a business out of taking private citizens to space for longer durations than Blue Origin.

NASA’s Artemis mission to put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024 is credited for driving public awareness of space activity, and the investment firm believes consumers will associate Virgin Galactic with human spaceflight innovation “as the business shifts from a niche experience catering to high net worth individuals to investing in more applications in space.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology has shared a gigantic new view from Mars, courtesy of NASA’s Curiosity rover.

I visited Space Center Houston, the official visitor center to NASA Johnson Space Center, earlier this year and saw the empty exhibit awaiting the arrival of spaceflight-proven Falcon 9 rocket.

The Level 9 tour (I’ll share photos from the awesome VIP tour soon) took up the only day I had in town so I already need to go back to explore the museum. Now I have another excuse to make the trip.