Budgetary Concerns Emerge for Fremont High Speed Rail Program
Fremont's official high-speed railway project, passed by Parliament in October of 2017, is still in its planning phase, but is already encountering problems. In the original 2017 bill, a sum of 10 billion dollars was allocated to the development of rail lines connecting San Francisco and Seattle, Sacramento and Omaha, and Salt Lake City and Minneapolis; however, a recent cost analysis suggests that it will need almost double that sum for each line.
A key issue involves the necessity to build the Omaha line through the rocky mountains. Although BNSF and Union Pacific rail lines exist across the Rockies, the requirements for a high-speed line are more stringent, and require avoidance of sharper bends that wouldn't be out of place in existing tracks. As such, potentially extensive tunneling will need to be carried out on significant portions of the path to make the line feasible. Alternatively, the project could share BNSF tracks at a greatly lowered cost, at the expense of the 'high' in 'high-speed.'
In addition, problems are arising in negotiations with state and local governments, as existing stations in major cities are in need of extensive modifications in order to accomodate the new high-speed rail lines. Significantly, project managers are considering moving the terminus of the Seattle from San Francisco to Emeryville (in Alameda County), citing development concerns regarding the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco.
Defunct Argentine Science Satellite Collides with Russian Satellite
On March 2, 2019, Kosmos 2221, an active Russian electronic signals intelligence satellite, collided in-orbit with SAC-D, a defunct Argentine science satellite. The collision occurred at an altitude of 653 kilometers and produced over 423 detectable pieces of new space junk, arranged in two expanding debris clouds traveling along the satellites' former orbits. This is the second on-record collision between orbiting satellites, after the 2009 collision of the Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 satellites. The debris generated by the impact are not expected to affect the ISS or any pending launches, as the station orbits over 200 kilometers below the two satellites. Nevertheless, the massive increase in junk caused by low-orbit collisions in recent years is drawing concern from many space programs around the world, as many other satellites share similar orbits to SAC-D and Kosmos 2221, and will have to spend precious fuel to negotiate a safe path.
SAC-D was launched in 2011 by CONAE (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales), Argentina's national space program, to perform salinity measurements of Earth's oceans; contact was lost in 2015. Although its orbit was well-documented by ground-based instruments after this time, orbital uncertainties resulted in an error of 160 meters in the published positions that proved fatal. The incident has provoked a more dedicated world effort to cataloging and tracking space junk in real time.
