New Mars Forums

Putin says he wanted Trump to beat Clinton
By Jordan Fabian
The Hill

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he wanted President Trump to win the 2016 election, a comment sure to fuel more scrutiny of Moscow’s meddling efforts.

"Yes, I did, because he was the one who wanted to normalize relations with Russia,” Putin said when asked if he wanted Trump to win.
Trump decided to go ahead with his meeting with Putin despite the U.S. indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers who are accused of hacking Democratic entities in 2016.

The U.S. intelligence community has unanimously concluded that Moscow conducted a coordinated effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential race to boost Trump and hurt Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton

Trump said Monday he has "great confidence" in the intelligence community but said that Putin was "very powerful" in his denials that Russia was not involved.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat … at-clinton

Donald Trump nominated a man with no space experience to be NASA’s second-in-command
Written by Tim Fernholz
July 12, 2018
Quartz

The White House announced today his intent to nominate James Morhard, a long-time senate aide with no experience in space technology, to be the deputy administrator of NASA.

In doing so, Trump is passing over Dr. Janet Kavandi, an astronaut and respected leader of one of the space agency’s research centers. Kavandi was the first choice of NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, who had called for her appointment publicly.

“This Administration is committed to American leadership in space, and I look forward to working with Mr. Morhard upon his confirmation,” Bridenstine said in a statement. Morhard will need to be confirmed by a majority of the senate before he can take up his job.

Quartz first reported that the White House was considering Morhard for the position earlier this week. Several officials familiar with the deliberations were concerned about the message that might be sent by the appointing a man with little experience in space technology after Bridenstine, a former lawmaker, was criticized for his lack of engineering experience.

Morhard, 61, is currently the deputy Senate sergeant at arms, responsible for technology and administration in the offices of 100 senators and 88 committees and subcommittees. Starting off as an accountant at the Pentagon, he began his career as a legislative staffer in 1983, earning an MBA and a law degree along the way. His time in the senate included work on the committee that controlled NASA’s budget.

He rose to become the powerful staff director of the Appropriations Committee under the late senator Ted Stevens, and forged close ties with Republican senators. Morhard was a passenger, along with former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, in a 2010 plane crash that killed Stevens and four others.

Morhard’s background as a Capitol Hill operator, however, doesn’t balance well with Bridenstine’s similar background as a lawmaker. Previous presidents have sought to combine engineering know-how and political savvy by splitting those responsibilities roughly between the administrator and their deputy.

https://qz.com/1327227/donald-trump-app … n-command/

China claims progress in new landing technology for crewed spacecraft, Mars landings
by Andrew Jones — July 6, 2018
Space News

China is claiming progress on a number of reentry and landing technologies for human spaceflight and Mars missions, underlining apparently significant plans for deep space exploration.

The Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electronics (BISME) announced in May that it had performed an airdrop test of a parachute for two new-generation crewed spacecraft, which will be larger successors to the current Shenzhou capsules. The test was reported to have verified the strength and function of the parachute.

An image accompanying a Chinese Academy of Space Technology announcement of a successful airdrop parachute test in April. Credit: CAST

The new-generation crewed spacecraft, according to previous announcements from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, will come in two variations – a 20- metric ton version for lunar missions, and a 14-metric-ton version for potential Mars and deep space exploration.

Zhang Bainan, a chief engineer at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) which is developing the spacecraft and owns BISME, said in March that the crew capsule will be able to hold four to six astronauts. The spacecraft design will be modularized, allowing adaptation to the specifics of a mission profile.

China carried out the test of a scale return capsule for the new crewed spacecraft in 2016 with the test flight of the Long March 7 rocket, successfully returning the spacecraft to a site in Inner Mongolia. The craft had a flat top and sloped sides, unlike the bell-shaped Shenzhou.

In June 2019, the variant of the Long March 5 rocket for low Earth orbit launches, the Long March 5B, will lift off for the first time from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on Hainan island carrying another test spacecraft for the project.

No indication has been given as to what will be tested next year, but a larger version of the 2016 test capsule could fly if progress on the parachute has been significant.

Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, India, says testing parachutes could be for any number of Chinese missions — a crewed space capsule, lunar or Mars missions.

“China has announced its plans for lunar landings, Mars probe and a space shuttle. China plans for multiple Mars missions including to orbit and land in the first instance and a second probe to bring back samples from the red planet. Manned lunar missions are also very much on the Chinese radar,” Rajagopalan says.

Parachute testing is also important in the context of developing reusable rocket technologies, which the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) recently announced it was pursuing, Rajagopalan adds.

Targeting Mars

BISME followed this announcement with two more, claiming a breakthrough with tests of a vented airbag system for soft-landing spacecraft, and Inflatable Reentry and Descent Technology (IRDT), similar to the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator tested by NASA which aims to increase the mass of payloads that can be landed on Mars.

The saucer-shaped IRDT craft aims to integrate the functions thermal protection, deceleration, and landing systems and allow more massive craft to land.

China is claiming progress on a number of reentry and landing technologies for human spaceflight and Mars missions, underlining apparently significant plans for deep space exploration. Credit: CAST
China is claiming progress on a number of reentry and landing technologies for human spaceflight and Mars missions, underlining apparently significant plans for deep space exploration. Credit: CAST

Pang Zhihao, a scientist with CAST, told the Chinese language Science and Technology Daily that IRDT could allow craft with a mass of up to 15 metric tons to soft-land on Mars.

“This looks like China is pumping a lot of effort and money into Mars entry descent and landing systems to land significant payloads, possibly people,” says Alex Ellery, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.

However, some of these developments are in the early stages. From images of the airbag tests, Ellery assesses that it, “looks like they are doing a simple drop test—at early stages of design—of the airbags.”

Commenting on an image released by CAST, Ellery says the IRDT system, “looks rather fragile and tiny in comparison with the bushes – they are designed for large payloads.

“One of the problems the Europeans had in testing this technology over a decade ago was that large IRDT systems can be unstable due to unequal internal pressurization—which is high to impart sufficient rigidity—in a large system.

“It’s a very promising technology if it can be made to work but the picture reveals something tiny which would not tackle the issue,” Ellery continues. While the evidence of progress being made is lacking, the announcements do have some importance.

“I am very skeptical about the pictures – they are staged in such a way that they do not indicate that the Chinese have tackled these technologies seriously yet,” Ellery says. He adds however that the releases indicate that these are technologies that China will be tackling as a matter of priority and could soon lead to see major progress.

The Science article also stated that China plans to launch its first spacecraft using the IRDT technology in 2019.

http://spacenews.com/china-claims-progr … -landings/

Trump Wants a Space Station Orbiting Around the Moon
NASA is quietly asking private companies to bid on the development of a new space station that would orbit the moon starting in 2022. But why?
David Axe
07.02.18 The dailybeast

If someone mentions space station, you probably are thinking of the one floating right above Earth, or perhaps a future one when (if?) we make it to Mars.

But the newest space station might actually circle a familiar celestial orb: the moon.

That’s according to a procurement request from NASA, which is asking private companies to bid on the development of a new space station that would loosely orbit the moon starting in 2022.

In theory, the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway could function as a jumping-off point for manned missions to the moon, including to its relatively unexplored far side. The station could also help prepare astronauts for Mars.

The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway “will give us a strategic presence in the lunar vicinity,” then-NASA acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a press release in February (PDF).

It might seem fairly straightforward to build a station orbiting the moon, but there are hiccups. The station would be too far from Mars to handle lunar missions on its own. It would need support from another, smaller moon-orbiting station and landers that NASA hasn’t even proposed to build. Meanwhile, the red planet is rapidly fading from NASA’s planning, potentially orphaning the Gateway station as far as Mars goes.

For that reason, experts warned that the Gateway station might not be very useful for productive space exploration. “It’s a mixed bag,” Matt Siegler, a former NASA scientist now with the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, told The Daily Beast.

But Siegler said that the moon and Mars aren’t really the point in building another space station.

The point, actually, is much more grounded than one might believe: China.

That’s because the Asian space power could be slinking ahead of the United States in the race back to the lunar surface. “China seems on track to send astronauts to the moon by the late 2020s, if not sooner,” Siegler said.

In that context, Siegler added, America’s new moon station represents a kind of extraterrestrial P.R. stunt—a significant piece of space hardware that NASA could launch before China’s taikonauts step foot on the moon. “The Gateway is basically a way to make a statement that the U.S. has a deeper space presence than other countries,” Siegler said.

Despite this logistical uncertainty, NASA is forging ahead, soliciting proposals from the industry for the initial Gateway components, and has asked Congress for $500 million to begin paying for them in 2019. NASA expects the station to cost $2.7 billion in total.

It’s not a new idea. The space agency first proposed a moon station in 2013 as a lunching pad for missions to intercept and redirect asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The asteroid-defense project ended in 2017, but the idea for the station survived.

NASA spokeswoman Cheryl Warner told The Daily Beast that the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway—in appearance, a sort of miniature version of the International Space Station that orbits Earth—could “be moved between orbits,” allowing it to “support lunar surface missions as well as exploration farther into the solar system, including Mars.”

For NASA, a moon mission is much more urgent. NASA and private companies hope to discover valuable gases and minerals that can be mined and shipped back to Earth, or processed on the moon for use by a Mars mission or some future lunar base.

And then there’s the “dark” side of the moon. Every past manned mission to the lunar surface has explored the moon’s more easily accessible near side. Owing to the difficulty in getting signals past the moon’s bulk, only a few probes have gathered data on its far side. (Sunlight actually does hit the far side, so it’s not really dark.)

Beijing launched the most recent far-side moon probe back in May. A new U.S. station, reliably circling around the entire moon, could make far-side missions more routine for Americans. “If we are going to explore the unexplored, the lunar far-side is our obvious target,” David Kring, a researcher with the Texas-based Lunar and Planetary Institute, wrote in a 2018 paper endorsing the Gateway station (PDF).

But the Gateway station alone can’t return American astronauts to the lunar surface—either the near or far side. That’s because the station would travel along what NASA calls a “rectilinear halo orbit” that would bring it no closer than 1,000 miles to the moon.

That’s too far from the moon for efficient exploration. To support human astronauts or a large number of drones, the moon station would probably need help from a smaller sub-station orbiting just 60 miles from the lunar surface, as well as from a new generation of moon landers that NASA hasn’t even begun to develop, Siegler pointed out.

“I personally would like to see many lunar landers and a new [low] lunar orbiter,” Siegler said. “So if the Gateway lets that be done, I would support it.” But he added that it might be better to simply boost drones and human explorers straight from the Earth to the moon. Stopping over on the gateway station is “not necessarily cheaper.”

As for Mars, William Gerstenmaier, a NASA associate administrator, said the agency’s experience with the Gateway “would ultimately translate” to a manned mission to the red planet.

In 2015 Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin developed a loose concept for Mars landings that involves training astronauts during layovers aboard orbital moon bases. A moon station could also function as a gas station for Mars-bound spaceships.

But NASA has largely walked away from concrete plans to land astronauts on Mars. The agency’s official website vaguely states that a manned Mars mission should happen “sometime in the future.”

But there’s no real schedule. And NASA is no longer developing many of the key technologies for a manned Mars mission. A manned mission is “on total hold,” Chris Impey, a University of Arizona astronomer, told The Daily Beast.

Until NASA gets serious about a Mars mission, the Gateway station’s ability to support that mission is meaningless. “A fuel depot beyond the moon would be useful for further exploration and Mars missions, but that’s not part of the plan,” Impey said.

Too far from the moon to efficiently support lunar exploration and pointless for Mars without firm plans for an actual mission to the red planet, the Gateway has exposed itself for what it really is—a symbol, according to Siegler.

With China sending its own drones and people to the moon in the next few years, NASA and the White House appear to be spooked. They’re looking for a near-term moon station to send a message, even if that station is impractical. “The U.S. is obviously trying to make a political statement that they are the leaders in space,” Siegler said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-wan … d-the-moon

Michael Meyer, NASA Lead Scientist for Mars Exploration, to Address Mars Society Convention
 
The Mars Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Meyer, Lead Scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, will give a plenary talk about the agency’s current and future planning for Mars missions at the 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention, scheduled for August 23-26 at the Pasadena Convention Center.
 
A Senior Scientist at NASA headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Meyer oversees the Mars program’s science operations and planning and also serves as Program Scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity mission currently operating on the surface of the Red Planet. Previously, he was Senior Scientist for astrobiology for the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission.
 
Dr. Meyer earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in marine biology and biological oceanography from Texas A&M University (1985 and 1981) and his B.S. in micro-biology from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1970). His primary area of research includes the study of micro-organisms living in extreme environments, and he also conducted related field research in the Gobi Desert, the Negev Desert, the Canadian Arctic, Siberia and Antarctica.
 
For more information about the 2018 International Mars Society Convention, including registration details and the call for papers, please visit our web site (www.marssociety.org). A list of confirmed speakers and a tentative program itinerary will also be posted online in the near future.

Trump Has Called for Pentagon to Make Beds Available for 20,000 Children at US Military Bases
The Defense Department has also announced it will deploy military lawyers to the southern border to prosecute immigrants
by Julia Conley, staff writer
Common Dreams
June 21, 2018

Responsibility for unaccompanied children and families who arrive in the U.S. via the southern border appeared to shift to the U.S. military on Thursday, as the Trump administration called on the Pentagon to make preparations to house approximately 20,000 children on military bases.

Following President Donald Trump's executive order in which he directed federal agencies to prepare detention facilities to house families together and to end the forcible separation of families, Pentagon officials agreed to determine whether military bases in Arkansas and Texas could house families and unaccompanied minors.

According to the Washington Post, the arrangement would involve housing children on military bases for at least six months, until the end of 2018.

The deal between the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the care and supervision of unaccompanied children who immigrate to the U.S. via the southern border, follows reports that Defense Secretary James Mattis would send more than 20 military attorneys to border states to assist in prosecuting immigrants.

The Trump administration originally examined the possibility of housing children on military bases in May, shortly after Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced his "zero tolerance" policy under which more than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents, and before the practice drew international condemnation and widespread protests which ultimately forced Trump to sign his executive order.

The original reports drew comparisons to World War II-era internment camps from critics.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/ … tary-bases

It also opens up military bases as detention centers and indicates an intention to reopen the Flores settlement.
By Julianne Hing
June 20, 2018
The Nation

President Trump is fond of executive orders. So often does he sign them that the American public is by now familiar with the image of Trump seated in the Oval Office with his felt-tipped markers, forcing his Sharpie signature across a page, then holding the leather-bound document up for the cameras. The act has theatrical value, which appeals to his authoritarian predilections. A president signing an executive order can almost look like a king issuing a fiat.

On Wednesday, Trump signed another such order. He caved to an overwhelming outcry from a widespread group of critics that came to include the pope and former first lady Laura Bush and announced that his administration would end the policy of separating children from parents at the border. “Anybody with a heart feels very strongly about it,” Trump said shortly after signing the executive order. “At the same time, we don’t want people coming in illegally. This takes care of the problem.”

But like so much else in Trumpland, there is how something appears, and how something actually operates in reality. In the hours between the announcement of the order and its actual release, many hailed the change as an about-face—a stunning and rare pivot for a president who has little capacity to admit error. But now that the executive order is out, what is clear is that this document offers no fix at all. The Trump administration intends to trade the practice of separating children while it prosecutes parents for another kind of horror: locking up parents and children together. And, according to the executive order, this new incarceration of families could well be indefinite.

“This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce…criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise,” the executive order lays out. “It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”

What’s missing from the executive order is an acknowledgement that the crisis was one of the Trump administration’s own making. No court order or law from Congress required these prosecutions, and it didn’t take an executive order to stop that practice. But what’s more, this executive order only doubles down on the administration’s cruelty.

The practice of separating children from their parents is a symptom of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “zero-tolerance policy” announced this spring. Under Sessions’s new rules, US attorneys now must criminally prosecute every person apprehended while attempting to enter the country between official ports of entry without proper documentation. But because many people come to the United States as families and because there are restrictions on how long children and parents may be held together, the government separated children from their parents, treating separated children as “unaccompanied minors.” The executive order does not affect that zero-tolerance policy at all; those prosecutions will continue.

Parents and babies are still going to be incarcerated while those prosecutions continue; it just appears that now they will be held together. And under the executive order, any public agency, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Defense—which would mean the federal prison system and military bases—must make its facilities available for the incarceration of these families.

What’s more, the executive order announces that the Trump administration intends to petition a court to revisit the landmark 1997 Flores settlement, which set forth minimum conditions for the treatment and detention of migrant children. The centerpiece of Flores requires that children be released from government custody as quickly as possible. Separately, it requires that those who are held have access to education, health care and recreation, and that they not be kept in confinement. The Trump administration wants to dismantle those minimum child-welfare protections so that it can, in the words of the executive order, “detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.”

But, because Flores is still current law, the Department of Homeland Security is still bound by it, and cannot detain children for longer than is absolutely necessary to find a placement for them outside of detention. Therefore, “this Executive Order is a restatement of current policy, which is to prosecute, detain, and quickly deport Central American asylum seekers,” says Kerri Talbot, legislative director for Immigration Hub, a DC-based, pro-immigration umbrella group.

The last decade of this country’s attempt at running family detention centers has been filled with scandal and litigation. Most recently, a family facility DHS ran in Artesia, New Mexico, was shut down in 2014 after legal groups argued that the appalling conditions and due-process violations were unlawful.

“I remember how I felt sick to my stomach when we walked through the cafeteria, and I saw nothing but a stack of high chairs as far as the eye could see,” Karen Tumlin, director of legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, said of her first visit to the Artesia facility. Tumlin was one of the first attorneys to gain access to the center.

If the Trump administration gets its way, he will trade one form of cruelty for another. This executive order is not the administration backing down, and there is very little in the way of a pivot. It is the Trump administration pursuing the very same strategy that led to this crisis in the first place.

https://www.thenation.com/article/trump … rceration/

The space race is over and SpaceX won
By Robert X. Cringely
2 Months Ago
Beta News

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently gave SpaceX permission to build Starlink -- Elon Musk's version of satellite-based broadband Internet. The FCC specifically approved launching the first 4,425 of what will eventually total 11,925 satellites in orbit. To keep this license SpaceX has to launch at least 2,213 satellites within six years. The implications of this project are mind-boggling with the most important probably being that it will likely result in SpaceX crushing its space launch competitors, companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance (ULA) partnership as well as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Starlink is a hugely ambitious project. It isn't the first proposed Internet-in-the-sky. Back in the 1990s a Bill Gates-backed startup called Teledesic proposed to put 840 satellites in orbit to provide 10 megabit-per-second (mbps) broadband anywhere on Earth. Despite spending hundreds of millions, Teledesic was just ahead of its time, killed by a lack of cost-effective launch services. Twenty years later there are several Teledesic-like proposals, the most significant of which may be OneWeb -- variously 882 or 648 or 1972 satellites, depending who is talking, offering 50 mbps. OneWeb has raised more than $1 billion, found a launch partner in Arianespace and even broken ground on a satellite factory in Orlando, Florida.
 
While OneWeb is ambitious and looks like it will actually happen, Starlink kicks the whole idea up about 20 notches to one gigabit-per-second connectivity (two test satellites are already in orbit). And while OneWeb may thrive offering Internet service where there presently is none (third world countries and rural areas of first world countries) Starlink seems to want to compete head-to-head against the Verizons and Comcasts of the world.

Purely in terms of hardware in orbit, Starlink's minimal system of 2,213 satellites weighing 400 kilograms (kg) each will total 885,200 kg or just under two million pounds while OneWeb’s maximal system of 1972 satellites at 200 kg each will weigh 394,400 kg (867,870 lbs) -- just over a third as much. Clearly these projects are aiming at different customer bases.

IF Starlink is deployed, the most interesting effect will probably be on global satellite launch services rather than Internet. Right now there are just under 1300 operational satellites in orbit, yet Starlink is promising to launch at least 2,213 satellites within six years and more likely 4,425. This means launching 1-2 satellites per day.

In 2017 a total of 90 satellite launches were carried out by seven nations, which is an average of one every four days. So even the minimal Starlink system will require a massive expansion of global launch capacity, with 100 percent of that capacity coming from SpaceX, as Starlink’s owner.

SpaceX was already by far the price and volume leader in global launch services, but Starlink will kick the operation into an entirely new orbit.

Here's the strategic part. Starlink satellites will, for the most part, be secondary payloads on Falcon 9 launches. Usually the secondary customer can't specify the orbit they want, taking whatever the primary customer gives them, but SpaceX has a second stage rocket motor that can be restarted, powering the secondary payload to a new orbit after the primary payload has been dropped. Launching as a secondary payload means SpaceX's launch costs will be mainly covered by the primary client. It will cost them very little to put their Starlink satellites into orbit.

But wait, there's a lot more to this than just a cheap ride to space. SpaceX is currently the only launcher that recovers and reuses its first stage rockets, powering them back to those spectacular automated landings on ocean barges or right back to the launch pad in Florida. This, too, makes SpaceX cheaper and gives them greater total capacity.

And capacity is the real name of the game here, because launching all those Starlink satellites will require SpaceX to dramatically expand the number of launches it will make each year. Extra launches drive down costs through more efficient utilization of ground facilities and economies of scale in building more reusable rockets.

SpaceX, which already costs less than half as much as an otherwise comparable ULA launch, is about to get even cheaper.

There is a side effect, too, of this greater launch frequency: it will change the very nature of the SpaceX business, making it less of a charter service and more like an airline.

Here is the comparison to keep in mind. Using ULA as a example, that company currently launches about one Atlas V rocket per month for a price of $150-200 million per launch. SpaceX presently does about three times as many launches for about half the ULA price, with most of those first rocket stages recovered and reused. Starlink demand should again triple SpaceX's number of launches to something like nine per month. The company will need primary payloads to cover much of that cost, so they will inevitably lower primary payload prices even further, taking business not just from ULA but from the Europeans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Japanese -- you name it.

There will be a substantial change, too, in the terms of service for throwing larger payloads into orbit. Let's use that charter versus airline example again. Under the current system any company or agency that wants to launch a satellite generally starts spending money on launch services two years before they plan to actually have something in space. This is not all bad because it takes a long time just to build a satellite -- or used to. So the current business has customers putting 80 percent down two years before their launch -- a payment that begins construction of the launch vehicle that is used once then destroyed. So it's a one-way charter at best. Against this SpaceX will be launching (and recovering!) three rockets per week no matter what. It becomes a scheduled service, like an airline. And like an airline, it may no longer be necessary to book two years in advance.

It is going to be near impossible to compete with such a SpaceX system if you can’t match SpaceX scale -- a scale that will be driven primarily by Starlink (that is internal) demand.

The FCC is very unlikely to approve another constellation on the scale of Starlink, so for the next six years SpaceX will be protected from big competitors.

ULA will stay in business for national security payloads and some NASA business, but I can’t imagine their commercial business will survive. Blue Origin may get some business launching larger payloads with the huge New Glenn rocket they have in development, but unless Bezos comes up with his own demand generator like Starlink, it's unlikely he can keep pace

ULA will become an afterthought kept around by NASA and DoD mainly to avoid total dependence on SpaceX. How does Blue Origin find a place in this new landscape? SpaceX will need them to avoid anti-trust.

IF it works (and there’s no reason why it shouldn't) this one project turns SpaceX from a charter company into a scheduled carrier -- the ONLY scheduled carrier. With three reusable launches per week they'll undercut everyone else on both price AND service.

Keep this in mind: all Starlink has to do is break-even and maybe not even that because it will also be financing the SpaceX expansion.

This could be the endgame for traditional launch companies and with the FCC's recent action, that endgame may have already begun.

https://betanews.com/2018/04/09/space-race-over-spacex/