Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - December 19, 2012 and JSC Today

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 19, 2012 8:06:31 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - December 19, 2012 and JSC Today

 

 

 

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

 

JSC TODAY HEADLINES

1.            Gilruth Center Strength/Cardio Center Closed Starting Tomorrow

2.            Latest International Space Station Research

3.            IAAP Helps Administrative Professionals Turn Jobs into Careers

4.            Carlos Dominguez - The TechNowist

5.            Material Handling, Storage, Use and Disposal ViTS: Jan. 18

6.            Aerial Platform ViTS: Jan. 25 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

________________________________________     QUOTE OF THE DAY

" The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. "

 

-- Paul Valery

________________________________________

1.            Gilruth Center Strength/Cardio Center Closed Starting Tomorrow

The Gilruth Center Strength and Cardio Center will be closed due to renovations from Dec. 20 to Jan. 2 and will reopen on Jan. 3. There will be no access to cardio equipment, free weights or weight machines. Group fitness classes and Inner Space classes will take place as scheduled. 

Please note the additional changes to the Gilruth Center schedule for the holidays:

Dec. 22: Open 8 a.m. to noon. Regular group fitness schedule.

Dec. 23 to 25: Closed.

Dec. 26 to 28: Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Modified group fitness schedule.

Dec. 29: Open 8 a.m. to noon. Regular group fitness schedule.

Dec. 30: Open noon to 5 p.m. Regular group fitness schedule.

Dec. 31: Open 8 a.m. to noon. Modified group fitness schedule.

Jan. 1: Closed.

Jan. 2: Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Modified group fitness schedule.

Please check out our website for details and subscribe to the Gilruth Center/Starport Fitness Listserv to receive updated information.

Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

 

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2.            Latest International Space Station Research

Last week on the International Space Station, the SPHERES investigation (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites) demonstrated a number of "firsts" in space.

A smartphone was mounted to a SPHERES satellite as a mobile camera performing a survey inside the station. A flight controller in the Mission Control Center (MCC) commanded the satellite to perform a visual inspection of the interior of the station, as well as search for known targets.

The flight controller received SPHERES position data and real-time video from the smartphone and was able to run scripted plans, as well demonstrate manual control to deviate from the plans.

This was the:

o             First use of a COTS smartphone (Nexus S) as an embedded controller

o             First use of station operations LAN Wi-Fi for robotics

o             First tele-operation of an IVA free-flyer from space station MCC (PLUTO MPSR)

Learn more about SPHERES here.

Liz Warren x35548

 

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3.            IAAP Helps Administrative Professionals Turn Jobs into Careers

For over 70 years, the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) has been helping office professionals reach their career goals through education, community building and leadership development. Our certification programs are recognized as the industry standard of proficiency. Our educational programs, including OPTIONS Training, help admins advance their careers without putting their life on hold. If you've been searching for a community to help you thrive in today's office culture, you've come to the right place!

In celebration of IAAP's 70th anniversary, the IAAP is offering administrative professionals a special price when they join as a new member. Until Dec. 31, new members can join IAAP at the chapter, division and international level--all for $70. For more information on the local Clear Lake NASA Area Chapter, contact Ymelda Calvillo or click here. Join us as we create a better workplace, one admin at a time.

Felicia Saenz x32389

 

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4.            Carlos Dominguez - The TechNowist

The Human Health & Performance Directorate is pleased to welcome Carlos Dominguez, senior vice president at Cisco Systems and a technology evangelist, as our next Innovation Lecture Series speaker! Dominguez speaks to and motivates audiences worldwide about how technology is changing how we communicate, collaborate, and especially, how we work. He gives humorous, highly animated presentations full of deep insight into how technology and the right culture can create winning companies.

When: Jan. 11 at 2 p.m.

Where: Teague Auditorium (NEW LOCATION)

All are welcome! Register now in SATERN at https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_... to receive Human Systems Academy credit.

Event Date: Friday, January 11, 2013   Event Start Time:2:00 PM   Event End Time:3:30 PM

Event Location: Teague Auditorium

 

Add to Calendar

 

Carissa Vidlak 281-212-1409 http://sa.jsc.nasa.gov/

 

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5.            Material Handling, Storage, Use and Disposal ViTS: Jan. 18

SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0063: This three-hour course is based on Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) CFR 1926.250 - General Requirements for Storage; OSHA CFR 1926.251 - Rigging Equipment for Material Handling; and OSHA CFR 1926.252 - Disposal of Waste Materials for the Construction Industry. During the course, the student will receive an overview of these topics, which are needed in handling materials to meet the requirements of the OSHA 200 Construction Safety and Health Standards.

Use this direct link for registration: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...

Event Date: Friday, January 18, 2013   Event Start Time:9:30 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM

Event Location: ViTS Room

 

Add to Calendar

 

Shirley Robinson x41284

 

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6.            Aerial Platform ViTS: Jan. 25 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0030: This three-hour course provides classroom training as required by Occupational Safety and Health Administration 29 CFR 1910.67(C)(2)(ii). Classroom training allows employees to have on-site, hands-on field training and testing that will qualify them for approval to use aerial lifts on a NASA site. Discussions will cover hazard awareness and how to gain from lessons learned.

Target audience: Supervisors of aerial lift operations and aerial lift operators. Use this direct link for registration: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...

Event Date: Friday, January 25, 2013   Event Start Time:9:30 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM

Event Location: ViTS Room

 

Add to Calendar

 

Shriley Robinson x41284

 

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________________________________________

JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. To see an archive of previous JSC Today announcements, go to http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/news/jsctoday/archives.

 

 

 

NASA TV:

·         9 am Central (10 EST) – File of Soyuz TMA-07M pre-launch, launch & post-launch interviews

 

Human Spaceflight News

Wednesday – December 19, 2012

 

Apollo 17 safely home 40 years ago today at 1:24:59 pm CST

 

"As we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind."

- Gene Cernan – Apollo 17 Commander

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

Soyuz blasts off with three-man crew bound for space station

 

William Harwood - CBS News

 

Braving arctic temperatures and a brutal wind chill, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft roared to life and streaked smoothly into orbit Wednesday, carrying a veteran three-man crew on a two-day flight to the International Space Station. With commander Roman Romanenko at the controls, the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft climbed away from its launching stand at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:12:35 a.m. EST (GMT-5; 6:12 p.m. local time), roughly the moment Earth's rotation carried the pad into the plane of the space station's orbit.

 

Rocket with 3 astronauts takes off for ISS

 

Associated Press

 

A Soyuz spacecraft carry three astronauts has taken off atop a towering Russian rocket, headed for the International Space Station. The Soyuz launched from Russia's manned-space facility in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 6:12 p.m. Wednesday (1212 GMT) Wednesday. American Tom Marshburn, Russian Roman Romanenko and Canada's Chris Hadfield will travel for two days in the capsule, before docking with the space station where three other astronauts are already on board. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

 

Three-nation crew blasts off for space station

 

Reuters

 

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying a Russian, an American and a Canadian blasted off on Wednesday to the International Space Station (ISS), where the men are to spend half a year in orbit. The Russian-built Soyuz TMA-07M lifted off on time, at 1212 GMT, from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On the crew's two-day trip to the ISS, Canadian Chris Hadfield is joined by U.S. astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko. They will join U.S. astronaut Kevin Ford and Russians Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin, who have been manning the $100-billion, 15-nation research complex since October.

(NO FURTHER TEXT)

 

Soyuz crew streaks toward International Space Station

 

Todd Halvorson – Florida Today

 

Amid frigid conditions, three explorers blasted off from a central Asian spaceport today on a two-day trip to the International Space Station. Temperatures hovered near degrees Fahrenheit when Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, U.S. astronaut Thomas Marshburn and Canada's Chris Hadfield launched aboard a Soyuz rocket at 7:12 a.m. EST. NASA spokesman Rob Navias likened conditions at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to those at the North Pole.

 

American, Canadian, and Russian Spaceflyers Launch to Space Station

 

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

 

An American astronaut, a Russian cosmonaut, and the man who will become Canada's first space station commander lifted off today (Dec. 19) toward the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome at 7:12 a.m. EST (6:12 p.m. Baikonur time, or 1212 GMT). "Everything is nominal onboard; we're feeling well," Romanenko, commanding the Soyuz, said through a translator just after launch. "We are feeling great."

 

A long-awaited big win for export control reform

 

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

 

After fighting for over a decade to reform an export control regime that they felt was hurting the ability of American companies to compete in an increasingly global market, the space industry got a major victory Tuesday as reform language was included in the final version of the defense authorization bill by House and Senate conferees. From the summary of the conference report by the Democratic caucus of the House Armed Services Committee:

 

Yearlong Space Missions Will Present Physical and Mental Challenges

 

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

 

NASA is getting ready to send astronauts on yearlong missions to the International Space Station, doubling the duration of a typical orbital stay. These long-term missions will be sending spaceflyers into largely uncharted territory, and some of the biggest unknowns are how the human mind and body will react to that much time in space. NASA has long known that weightlessness wreaks havoc on the body, with astronauts losing muscle mass and bone density, and even suffering eyesight degeneration, after spending time in space.

 

Astronaut Research Holds Promise for Aging Treatments on the Ground

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

 

Soft bones. A risk of fainting. Hardened arteries. These conditions are risks for any space traveler, but they're also problems facing many seniors living on Earth. To accelerate scientists'  understanding of how the body ages, Canada's leading space and health agencies are pooling money and researchers, and plan to showcase the results of the research internationally.

 

Outer space – global workplace that can teach multinationals a thing or two

 

STS-88

 

Jackie Snow – Quartz (qz.com)

 

Jerry Ross got his first taste of international collaboration in space. In his 22-year-long career at NASA he worked with the Russians on the International Space Station, conducted nine space walks and witnessed the founding of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), an international group for astronauts and cosmonauts. America and Russia competed in the space race for most of the 1950s and 1960s but in 1975 the former enemies worked together on the Apollo-Soyuz Mission. By 1998, the two countries began constructing the International Space Station. Ross was invited to the Soviet Union in 1990 as a member of the ASE and saw the inner workings of its space program when few Americans were privy to the communist country.

 

Enterprise Space Shuttle Among Nominations For Historic Places Register

 

NY1

 

One of the city's newest tourist attractions could carry a new distinction. The space shuttle prototype Enterprise in Manhattan's Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum is among the 25 nominations from the state parks department for induction into the State and National Registers of Historic Places. The list includes buildings and sites in more than a dozen counties statewide. Six of the nominations are in the city, including the Murray Hill Historic District, the First Battery Armory and Women's National Republican Club in Manhattan. Brooklyn's Storehouse Number 2, the U.S. Navy Fleet Supply Base and the Far Rockaway Beach Bungalow Historic District in Queens are also nominated. Properties on the register are eligible for public preservation programs and services. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

 

Apollo 40 years on: how the moon missions changed the world for ever

 

 

Christopher Riley - London Observer

 

On 19 December 1972, a final sonic boom above the south Pacific signaled the end of the Apollo programme, as a tiny space capsule burst back through the blue sky. On board were the last three astronauts to visit the moon on Apollo 17. Riding home with them was the precious negative of a photograph that would go on to become the most reproduced image in human history. Frame number 22725 in magazine NN was a single shot of the whole Earth – later branded "the Blue Marble". Snapped 12 days earlier by astronaut-geologist Harrison Schmitt as the spacecraft accelerated away from the Earth, the picture was immediately captivating.

 

Moon journey transformed astronaut

 

Gary Ghioto - Pensacola News Journal

 

Forty years ago today, Commander Eugene Cernan was heading home with his crewmates aboard Apollo 17 after spending three days on the lunar surface. His voyage with Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans aboard Apollo 17 marked the end of America's program of manned exploration beyond Earth orbit and the solar system. Cernan and the crew splashed down on Dec. 19, 1972. And as the last man on the moon, Cernan, now 78, tried to explain to an unprecedented reunion of legendary astronauts and NASA flight directors at dinner Saturday night at the National Naval Aviation Museum, how going to the moon changed his life and perhaps what it meant to human history.

 

40 Years Since Man Last Walked on the Moon

 

Ari Schulman - Weekly Standard (Opinion)

 

(Schulman is senior editor at The New Atlantis)

 

In December 1972, Eugene Cernan took a long climb up a short ladder on the lunar surface and became the last human being to set foot on another world. It was forty years ago this week that Apollo 17 completed its quarter million mile journey home, marking the last time to date humans have traveled more than a few hundred miles from earth. Imagine if we were to speak to those fabled ancestors who gazed up at the Moon for thousands of generations: what might shock them more—hearing that we actually went, or that once we did we'd barely caught our breath before losing interest? What pair of facts could better illuminate the two faces of human restlessness?

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

Soyuz blasts off with three-man crew bound for space station

 

William Harwood - CBS News

 

Braving arctic temperatures and a brutal wind chill, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft roared to life and streaked smoothly into orbit Wednesday, carrying a veteran three-man crew on a two-day flight to the International Space Station.

 

With commander Roman Romanenko at the controls, the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft climbed away from its launching stand at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:12:35 a.m. EST (GMT-5; 6:12 p.m. local time), roughly the moment Earth's rotation carried the pad into the plane of the space station's orbit.

 

Trailing a fiery jet of brilliant orange exhaust, the workhorse rocket arced away to the east through a clear evening sky. Spaceport workers, station managers and family members, bundled up against temperatures near zero degrees Fahrenheit and a wind chill of minus 30 degrees, enjoyed a spectacular sky show as the rocket climbed away.

 

Live television views from inside the cramped command module showed Romanenko, strapped into the module's center seat, monitoring cockpit displays as the rocket raced toward orbit, flanked on the left by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, serving as flight engineer, and on the right by Thomas Marsburn, a NASA physician-astronaut .

 

All three space veterans appeared relaxed and in good spirits, occasionally waving and smiling as the rocket accelerated.

 

"I am one lucky dude. I can't imagine a better crew to fly with," Marshburn said before launch.

 

Eight minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, the TMA-07M spacecraft was released from the booster's third stage, its solar arrays deployed and Russian flight controllers radioed congratulations for a successful ascent.

 

"Congratulations on the launch," the flight director radioed. "We're getting the telemetry here, it's all good. So good work. It's all normal."

 

"Thank you very much," Romanenko replied. "We are ready to work, that's why we're here. It's nice to know everything is well telemetry wise."

 

Romanenko, a second-generation cosmonaut, will oversee an automated approach to the International Space Station, docking at the lab's Rassvet module around 9:12 a.m. Friday.

 

Standing by to welcome them aboard will be Expedition 34 commander Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Evgeny Tarelkin and Oleg Novitskiy, who were launched to the lab complex Oct. 23.

 

Marshburn, who visited the station during a 2009 shuttle mission, said the crew was looking forward to celebrating Christmas in space.

 

"I'm going to bring up some classic holiday food in dehydrated and well packaged form," he said. "It's already up there on the station, so we'll have a little Christmas dinner. There are some decorations and ornaments, I believe, that are flown up, some that have been on station for years and some that we've added. So we'll have a little celebration while we're up there."

 

The crew faces an intense post-holiday schedule that includes a full slate of scientific research, routine station maintenance, a Russian spacewalk and the arrival of Russian and European Space Agency cargo ships. Two U.S. supply craft also are expected, making commercial flights under contracts with NASA.

 

"I'm looking forward to getting back into space, experiencing zero G and adapting to it," Marshburn said before launch. "We've been training a long time on these experiments and I'm looking forward very much to getting in there. I'll be a subject for a lot of the life sciences experiments. I'm really looking forward to the physical science experiments.

 

"Before we started doing this stuff in zero G, we didn't really know how fluids worked. We only knew how they worked under the influence of gravity. And now it's literally re-writing the laws of fluid physics."

 

Ford, Tarelkin and Novitskiy have been on their own since Nov. 18 when Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft.

 

As it now stands, Ford and his two Russian crewmates will return to Earth on March 15 aboard their Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft. At that point, Hadfield will become commander of Expedition 35, the first Canadian to serve as leader of a space station expedition.

 

"The fact that a Canadian is going to command what is in reality the world's spaceship (shows) that Canada is now at a trusted level to be at the top of the space exploration game," he said in an interview. "It has a big impact on Canada."

 

Soyuz crew streaks toward International Space Station

 

Todd Halvorson – Florida Today

 

Amid frigid conditions, three explorers blasted off from a central Asian spaceport today on a two-day trip to the International Space Station.

 

Temperatures hovered near degrees Fahrenheit when Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, U.S. astronaut Thomas Marshburn and Canada's Chris Hadfield launched aboard a Soyuz rocket at 7:12 a.m. EST.

 

NASA spokesman Rob Navias likened conditions at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to those at the North Pole.

 

"All that's missing is Santa and his reindeer," he said.

 

A holiday season-hookup is scheduled to take place at 9:12 a.m. Friday – the trio's arrival time at the station, which was flying 254 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean west of Angola at launch time.

 

The new crew will join U.S. astronaut Kevin Ford and two Russian cosmonauts – Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin – aboard the outpost.

 

All three will serve as flight engineers until Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin return to Earth in March. At that time, Hadfield will take the helm of the station, becoming the first Canadian commander of the space station.

 

Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko are scheduled to return to Earth in May.

 

American, Canadian, and Russian Spaceflyers Launch to Space Station

 

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

 

An American astronaut, a Russian cosmonaut, and the man who will become Canada's first space station commander lifted off today (Dec. 19) toward the International Space Station.

 

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome at 7:12 a.m. EST (6:12 p.m. Baikonur time, or 1212 GMT).

 

"Everything is nominal onboard; we're feeling well," Romanenko, commanding the Soyuz, said through a translator just after launch. "We are feeling great."

 

The three spaceflyers will join the three men already on the space station to round out the Expedition 34 crew. Marshburn, Romanenko and Hadfield are due to spend about five months in space, and Hadfield will take over control of the station in March 2013 when the Expedition 35 mission begins.

 

Hadfield has been active on Twitter leading up to his flight, sharing memories from his previous two visits to space and thoughts on what's in store for him and his crewmates.

 

"To deal with pre-flight jitters I focus on what matters, right now, & 1 min from now," he wrote Dec. 18 in response to a follower's question. "The entire event is too big & overwhelming."

 

Marshburn, Romanenko and Hadfield will join current space station commander Kevin Ford of NASA, and Expedition 34 flight engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin, both cosmonauts. From now, it will take two days for the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft to catch up with the space station in orbit. Docking is expected on Friday at 9:12 a.m. EST (1412 GMT).

 

Marshburn, who worked as a NASA flight surgeon before joining the astronaut corps in 2004, has one previous space shuttle flight in 2009 under his belt. Romanenko is also making his second trip to space following a six-month stay on the space station in 2009.

 

All three men have been training for this mission for years. "It's a two-and-a-half-year flow, so you have more time to get into depth in every subject," Marshburn said of his space station training, contrasting it to the shorter training regimen for space shuttle flights.

 

"We have to be plumbers, electricians, construction engineers, or workers, on the space station, but at the same time running a laboratory, being scientists, being the best laboratory assistants we can be," Marshburn told SPACE.com. "It's all in a bundle; it's very exciting, it's a lot of fun."

 

The spaceflyers will be arriving at the station just in time to celebrate an orbital Christmas.

 

"I think it will be a big adventure, a big moment in our space life," Romanenko said in a preflight NASA interview. "And we'll be dressing up, we'll be decorating the station, we'll put up a Christmas tree, maybe we'll have some presents that will arrive on the cargo vehicles, which of course will make us very happy and will support us during this evening, this special time."

 

The space station is also stocked with foods to make a traditional holiday feast, such as turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, and even cherry blueberry cobbler.

 

"I believe there's a little tiny Christmas tree that's been up there for a few years," Marshburn said. "We'll pull it out."

 

While the crew's time will be taken up with some space station maintenance work, and exercises to keep their bodies fit, the bulk of the spaceflyers' work will involve carrying out the 110 science experiments onboard the orbiting laboratory.

 

"The space station is there for a purpose and that is to do science that can't be done on the surface of the Earth," Hadfield said in a NASA interview. "That is the core purpose of the space station, and so our job, as the people on board, is to make sure that that science gets done. Everything else is sort of downstream of that."

 

A long-awaited big win for export control reform

 

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

 

After fighting for over a decade to reform an export control regime that they felt was hurting the ability of American companies to compete in an increasingly global market, the space industry got a major victory Tuesday as reform language was included in the final version of the defense authorization bill by House and Senate conferees. From the summary of the conference report by the Democratic caucus of the House Armed Services Committee:

 

Reforms satellite export control by repealing Section 1513(a) of the Strom Thurmond NDAA for FY99, which essentially restores the authority of the President to move satellites and related items from the United States Munitions List to the Commerce Control List.

 

The provisions would prohibit the export, re-export of such items to certain countries and provides for interagency reviews and reporting requirements in order to ensure accountability with respect to the export of satellites and related items. The provisions would maintain the existing security and monitoring provisions of the Strom Thurmond Act.

 

Note that this doesn't mean that satellites and related components will immediately come off the US Munitions List (USML), and thus be outside the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

 

Instead, there will be a review process by the administration, which will determine what items it will seek to move off the USML, and then go through a Congressional notification process. (There may be other steps required as well, depending on the specific language of the conference report.)

 

However, simply restoring to the president the ability to make those determinations, which had been removed by the 1999 defense authorization act, is a significant victory for advocates of export control reform and the broader domestic space industry.

 

Yearlong Space Missions Will Present Physical and Mental Challenges

 

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

 

NASA is getting ready to send astronauts on yearlong missions to the International Space Station, doubling the duration of a typical orbital stay. These long-term missions will be sending spaceflyers into largely uncharted territory, and some of the biggest unknowns are how the human mind and body will react to that much time in space.

 

NASA has long known that weightlessness wreaks havoc on the body, with astronauts losing muscle mass and bone density, and even suffering eyesight degeneration, after spending time in space.

 

"While it's definitely new territory for NASA, I wouldn't expect the challenges of a yearlong mission to be substantially different from those of a six-month mission," said former space station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "A yearlong mission will be beneficial to Human Research Program scientists as they continue to expand the envelope of human spaceflight so that one day we can undertake the longer missions that we think will be necessary to voyage beyond cis-lunar space," or the region between Earth and the moon.

 

Another health risk associated with spaceflight is radiation: Beyond the protective confines of Earth's atmosphere, astronauts are exposed to potentially dangerous radiation from the sun, and the longer they spend in space, the more radiation they receive.

 

And the health risks are just one side of the challenge. Psychologically, the isolation and confinement of life on the space station can be tough to deal with as well.

 

Though exercise machines installed on the space station can mitigate the body issues, and phone calls and emails home can help the mind, both of these problems should be more severe for crews spending twice the normal mission length in orbit.

 

"For the crew, the biggest challenge would be psycho-social," another former space station commander, Leroy Chiao, wrote in an email. "It is difficult to be away for a long period of time. Fortunately, the ISS features excellent communication tools for crews to keep in touch with friends and loved ones."

 

Though some cosmonauts spent a year or longer on previous space missions to the Russian Mir station, no one has ever lived for a year at the International Space Station. The first ISS yearlong crew will be NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, who are due to launch in 2015.

 

Kelly, a former U.S. Navy test pilot with combat experience, said he thinks he's up to the challenge.

 

"We have a really good group of people here, the behavioral health and performance group, that works with us to try to mitigate the psychological impact of being away from home and isolated for a long time," Kelly told SPACE.com during an interview earlier this month. "I kind of recognize what I need in that regard and what I can do to make it better."

 

And as for the risk to his bodily health, Kelly said he's prepared to take it on.

 

"I'm not a big worrier, but I certainly understand that there is more risk," he said. "But in anything I've done throughout my career — flying aircraft as a test pilot — there's risk and reward, and you have to weigh the risks, and I think it's worth it."

 

Astronaut Research Holds Promise for Aging Treatments on the Ground

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

 

Soft bones. A risk of fainting. Hardened arteries.

 

These conditions are risks for any space traveler, but they're also problems facing many seniors living on Earth.

 

To accelerate scientists'  understanding of how the body ages, Canada's leading space and health agencies are pooling money and researchers, and plan to showcase the results of the research internationally.

 

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will work with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to examine the medical issues associated with spaceflight and connect them to issues facing regular people on the ground. While researchers have investigated these topics for years, this new effort represents the first inter-agency formal step for Canada. The goal is to develop treatment for Earth-bound seniors.

 

First spearheaded by the CSA's Nicole Buckley, chief scientist for life sciences, the partnership produced a national workshop in June. In the next couple of years, the Canadians plan to host an international working group to bring in research from NASA, the Japanese Space Agency and other government space stakeholders.

 

Despite the initiative's youth, Buckley said the CIHR is excited about gaining more access to the station's orbital laboratory, where health research is performed by space residents.

 

"There's increasing interest in the whole process of aging — pretty soon, we're all going to be there — and we have this great resource in space that can complement terrestrial research. Why have it in two separate [research] areas?" said Buckley.

 

New center in the works

 

Thanks to five decades of human spaceflight, there is already a wealth of information available on how humans react to the microgravity environment. Weightlessness produces negative changes in bones, blood vessels and other parts of body that no longer have to work against gravity.

 

Several CIHR-funded scientists already receive money from the Canadian Space Agency, with Richard Hughson of the University of Waterloo among the most experienced in that group.

 

Since the space station's Expedition 15 mission in 2007, astronauts and cosmonauts on station willingly donned sensors and blood cuffs to perform the researcher's experiments. Hughson's latest investigation will take place on Expedition 34, which launched to space Wednesday.

 

"Richard is an example of a crossover scientist — a life scientist that does fabulous space research," Buckley said of Hughson.

 

Hughson's speciality is aging, and his university is pushing hard to gain world-class speciality expertise in that area. Next spring, the University of Waterloo will break ground on a long-term care facility that will host 192 seniors in its first phase.

 

The facility — the first of its type worldwide — will open its doors around 2014. Construction will cost $130 million Canadian (U.S. $132 million) over several phases. The first stage includes a privately funded $3 million (U.S. $3.05 million) research center next door. 

 

"It will allow us to test and monitor individuals more in their normal, natural daily setting," Hughson said. While seniors come into his lab regularly for blood pressure and stand tests, by the time they arrive, they've already been up for several hours and their body has adjusted to walking.

 

"It's not the same as trying to catch someone in their home environment," he said.

 

Experiments in space

 

Expedition 34 astronauts Chris Hadfield(also a Canadian) and Tom Marshburnwill perform an experiment called Blood Pressure Regulation (BPReg), which is supposed to monitor the risk of fainting. The experiment will take place near the end of their five-month flight, when they are the most adapted to space.

 

The astronauts will put large blood pressure cuffs on the top parts of their legs, puff the cuffs up for three minutes, and then rapidly release the pressure. This will produce a large rush of blood to the legs, similar to what occurs when one stands up.

 

Hughson will compare the high-flying results to control experiments that Marshburn and Hadfield do before and after their flight. His aim is to make predictions about what will happen to their blood pressures and heart rates.

 

Additionally, Hughson just published several papers showing how long stays in space affect astronauts' hearts, and the crucial vessels that send blood to the brain.

 

His work, called Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Control on Return from ISS, shows that strenuous exercisein space likely combats changes in the heart rate.

 

Stiff arteries

 

However, Hughson has intriguing findings about arteries in space, showing that they do harden in similar ways to what occurs with the elderly on Earth. The experiment is called Cardiovascular Health Consequences of Long-Duration Space Flight, or Vascular for short.

 

As the blood goes through the stiff vessels, it pushes through and creates large pulses of pressure that radiate into the brain artery. A similar process occurs on Earth when collagen builds up in aging people.

 

"We think — we're still in the thinking stage — what's happening is you damage the brain blood vessels to the extent that you have a reduction in total brain blood flow," Hughson said. 

 

He's now analyzing data from 100 seniors on Earth, collected in the past 2.5 years.

 

"Our CIHR part of the funding has been looking at a fairly large group of elderly [people] to examine arterial stiffness and blood flow, and now to examine cognitive and motor function to see whether there is a relationship," Hughson said. 

 

To monitor for blood changes in astronauts on the station, the spaceflyers will take samples while still in orbit, then ship them back to Earth. The SpaceX unmanned Dragon flight in October included refrigerated blood for Hughson on its return trip to Earth, he said.

 

Hughson emphasized that his research is in the early stages, but added the potential for improving senior health is worth the time the astronauts spend on it in space.

 

"If we can learn something from the astronauts that we can apply back to the population on Earth ... that's really great," he said.

 

Tune into tomorrow for the second installment of ESC Empowers. In it, AmericaSpace will cover the efforts of the ESC to modify the historic Launch Complex 39B to develop the site to launch NASA's new Space Launch System as well as other possible commercial uses.

 

Outer space – global workplace that can teach multinationals a thing or two

 

STS-88

 

Jackie Snow – Quartz (qz.com)

 

Jerry Ross got his first taste of international collaboration in space. In his 22-year-long career at NASA he worked with the Russians on the International Space Station, conducted nine space walks and witnessed the founding of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), an international group for astronauts and cosmonauts.

 

America and Russia competed in the space race for most of the 1950s and 1960s but in 1975 the former enemies worked together on the Apollo-Soyuz Mission. By 1998, the two countries began constructing the International Space Station. Ross was invited to the Soviet Union in 1990 as a member of the ASE and saw the inner workings of its space program when few Americans were privy to the communist country.

 

He's seen the final frontier transform from a time when the US and Russia were preoccupied by simply getting as far as the Moon and building the International Space Station; now astronauts hail from Asia and Europe and missions have expanded to Mars and beyond. Ross, author of the upcoming book Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer, thinks that even down here on Earth there will need to be more international cooperation to overcome dwindling budgets and achieve big goals. Edited excerpts:

 

Quartz: What was it like visiting the Soviet Union so soon after the [Berlin] Wall came down?

 

Jerry Ross: It was a weird sensation to go to someplace that was seen as an enemy. I had a military background so I knew we had missiles targeting the places we were visiting. There was certainly a sense of mistrust, a sense of the unknown. I had heard stories during the Apollo era, when we flew a joint mission with the Russians, that one of our crew members went to visit Russia and they thought their hotel rooms were bugged and there were all these spies around them whenever they were talking about technical details about anything. So it was a very interesting opportunity that I never thought I'd have, a chance to visit and to meet some of their citizens.

 

QZ: What role do you think space exploration played in normalizing relations between the US and Russia?

 

JR: I think it played a very important role. It played a very important role in our competition in the Cold War when we developed the space race and then I think it also helped play an important role behind the scenes trying to learn to trust and work together. I think this was probably one of the most important aspects of the Apollo-Soyuz program and certainly the International Space Station gave us an opportunity to get to know people on a one-on-one basis.

 

QZ: What was the biggest hurdle in working with international astronauts like the Russians?

 

JR: Well other than language, which is a tremendous hurdle when you have to rely on interpreters or wait until you have gained some knowledge of the other language, I think with the Russians it was just mistrust. We had read everything in our newspapers or seen on TV about them being people that you can't trust, building rockets headed our way, sending spies to steal our secrets and all that. It just takes time to trust them and to trust their technologies and get to know them and finally accept them.

 

QZ: What could global companies have to learn from the international space program?

 

JR: I think they should realize there are great opportunities out there to work internationally, but they don't come without risks and they don't come without complications. Things are going to be harder in most cases because you're going to be dealing with time zones, you're going to be dealing with customs, and different politics and all those things.

 

It will take more effort, it will take more diligence, it will take more understanding, it will take patience. But the bottom line we learned is that the space program is very expensive so we don't have all the resources we would like to have. So we have learned to augment what we want to do with other capabilities from around the world. Also, we have learned that we don't always have the right ways to do business, we don't have all the smartest people in the world. Even though other people have done things differently, it doesn't mean it's worse, it means it's different.

 

Just like the International Space Station, you will remember we had a space shuttle accident that killed seven crew members and stopped us flying for a couple years. Had we not had our Russian partners who still had the capabilities to fly to and from the [station] we probably would have lost important research capabilities and all the money and years we spent developing it. We would not have been able to visit the International Space Station and it may have come to a point where it would have been unmannable by the time we got our space shuttle there again.

 

QZ: What comes next for international cooperation in space?

 

JR: It's a little bit unknown now because of what has happened over the last four years. Our next program we were planning to do, which was called Constellation, has been basically canceled or greatly modified. The other thing that's happened with all of the budget problems in our country [is that] NASA was directed to cancel quite a few of our plans for unmanned interplanetary missions. Some of those are being resurrected again as Congress and others get involved in redefining what we are going to do. But the problem is that several of those programs that were canceled were joint international programs with our Japanese, Russians and European partners. Since those have been canceled, we've kind of broken our promises to those countries and they are scrambling trying to figure out how to reorganize and try and carry on some of the programs without us.

 

QZ: None of those partners' economies are doing great, so its must be hard to pick up America's slack.

 

JR: I totally agree. That's why the solid foundation we have established through the International Space Station program hopefully will give us the capability to work even more fully together on future programs. It can't be left up to any one of our countries; there is probably not the national resolve or resources to do these things.

 

Apollo 40 years on: how the moon missions changed the world for ever

Photographs from the Apollo missions reshaped how we see the Earth and ourselves, while the ingenuity that put men on the moon gave birth to technologies we all use today

 

 

Christopher Riley - London Observer

 

On 19 December 1972, a final sonic boom above the south Pacific signaled the end of the Apollo programme, as a tiny space capsule burst back through the blue sky. On board were the last three astronauts to visit the moon on Apollo 17. Riding home with them was the precious negative of a photograph that would go on to become the most reproduced image in human history.

 

Frame number 22725 in magazine NN was a single shot of the whole Earth – later branded "the Blue Marble". Snapped 12 days earlier by astronaut-geologist Harrison Schmitt as the spacecraft accelerated away from the Earth, the picture was immediately captivating.

 

Journeying southwards, towards the moon, Schmitt had seen his home planet upside down, with the continent of Antarctica sprawling over the top. Below it the entire African land mass arced downwards towards the cradle of civilisation in the Middle East, with the edge of southern Europe right at the bottom. On a rare, relatively cloudless day, so many human histories, causes and stories were on show in one view.

 

Subsequently, this single image was embraced by everyone from NGOs working in the developing world to the environmental movements seeking to protect our planet. For 40 years it has been used to change minds, behaviours and political policies.

 

Just four years separated Blue Marble from another profound Apollo picture – Earthrise, captured by Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968. Anders's Apollo 8 portrait of our vibrant-blue planet, juxtaposed against the barren, brown-grey horizon of the moon, drew attention to Earth's apparent fragility.

 

Such images led one commentator to conclude that "on the way to the moon we'd discovered the Earth". They prompted many into thinking differently about our home planet. One such person was Stewart Brand, who self-published his ecologically themed Whole Earth Catalogue the same year, with a colour image of the entire Earth seen from space on the cover.

 

Brand's vision was for his new quarterly magazine to create a "self-sustaining, critical information service", and he soon nurtured it into a forum for the exchange of ideas suggested by the readers themselves. The Whole Earth Catalogue ran into the mid-80s, when Brand's concept for a "self-sustaining, critical information service" would find a new platform in Usenet newsgroups on the internet, and eventually on the world wide web.

 

American poet Archibald MacLeish, also influenced by these visions of the whole Earth from space, penned an essay in the New York Times, as Apollo 8 was heading home in December 1968, pointing out the eternal loveliness of such pictures of Earth from space. For MacLeish these images suddenly revealed us all as "brothers who know now they are truly brothers… riders on the Earth together".

 

Bill Anders's 1968 Earthrise image also captured the attention of peace activist John McConnell, who printed it on flags and handed them out in Central Park, New York, the following summer as Apollo 11 became the first mission to land on the moon. His actions would later lead to the founding of Earth Day – an annual celebration of awareness and appreciation of Earth's natural environment that is still held today in more than 175 countries. Shortly afterwards Friends of the Earth was formed by David Brower and other campaigners who felt that if there was one thing the Earth needed it was friends.

 

Around this time the Lindisfarne Association invited Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart to their annual conference, to speak to them about his Earth orbital flight. Schweickart just stood up and spoke from the heart, recounting the story of his space walk, when he had nothing to do but look down on the Earth from 160 miles above it for five precious minutes after a camera jammed.

 

Schweickart's mind-expanding view and the epiphany that it triggered led him to vividly appreciate the insanity of humans fighting over borders that were invisible to him from up there. "Hundreds of people in the Middle East killing each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that you can't see," he recounted. "And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it's so beautiful," he remembered of his view of Earth. "You wish you could take one in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, 'Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What's important?'"

 

Schweickart's speech, later turned into an essay entitled "No Frames, No Boundaries", was embraced by those at the conference, including Carl Sagan, who borrowed from it to pen his uplifting poem Pale Blue Dot, published in his 1994 book of the same name.

 

The sentiment of Schweickart's sermon was eventually taken as the founding principle of his Association of Space Explorers. The ASE was established in 1985 and today numbers 375 astronauts from 35 nations, who work to foster environmental awareness and planetary stewardship.

 

Forty years after Apollo, the ASE still has its work cut out. Today, thanks to the human impact on the environment over the past four decades, many of these national borders that the early astronauts struggled to resolve are now clearly visible from space.

 

And the "brothers" that Archibald MacLeish saw in those whole-Earth images are still killing each other around the world. The messages of peace and better environmental stewardship from those space flights of the 1960s and 70s sometimes feel forgotten.

 

But, thanks to another gift of Apollo, human unity is stronger now than it's ever been. The technological boost that the space race provided has changed the course of human history in far more profound ways than anyone could have predicted.

 

In 1961, when a new president, just a few months into his term in the White House, challenged America to "land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth", no one in America knew how to make it happen. But that wasn't going to stop them rising to Kennedy's dare.

 

The young minds (the average age of Apollo 11's mission control team was 28) who were put to work on Apollo were all recent graduates who had benefited from former president Eisenhower's National Defence Education Act, a massive capital investment in the US education system, started in the late 50s in response to Sputnik.

 

As progress in human space flight accelerated through the 60s, PhD intake at American universities, particularly in the field of physics, increased almost threefold. Apollo was making America cleverer.

 

Nasa knew that its entire moonshot challenge would rely on one thing above all others – navigation. So, within weeks of Kennedy's speech to Congress, they had appointed some of these bright new PhDs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work out how to make a soft landing on a moving target hurtling through space a quarter of a million miles from Earth.

 

The prototype inertial guidance system they came up with could not be relied on completely and would need to be manually realigned during the flight. To assist the astronauts in this task, and to help them control the fly-by-wire systems in their new Apollo spacecraft, a small, lightweight computer was proposed by MIT. In the early 60s computers still tended to take up entire rooms. If the boffins in Boston were going to miniaturise it enough to pack it into a modestly sized craft, they'd need some new technology, and they turned to an emerging invention called the integrated circuit. Fairchild Semiconductor was one of the few companies experimenting with these new micro-electronic components at the time; keen to help them perfect the performance of these novel miniature circuits, Nasa ordered one million of them.

 

The agency really needed only a few hundred for its Apollo programme, but, aware that they would be betting the lives of their astronauts on them, they were keen to make sure the manufacturers could make them has reliable as possible.

 

Such a financial kickstart to a fledgling industry, coupled with the third great gift of Apollo – inspiration – would prove to be a powerful driver for social change in the decades that followed. In 1969 two employees from Fairchild would go on to found a new company called Intel.

 

Those graduating across the world in the 70s and 80s had watched Apollo's engineers dream the impossible and then build it. As an act of human ingenuity, Apollo made them giddy, intoxicated on admiration and inspiration.

 

As William Bainbridge put it, in his book The Spaceflight Revolution, Apollo was "a grand attempt to reach beyond the world of mundane life and transcend the ordinary limits of human existence through accomplishment of the miraculous – a story of engineers who tried to reach the heavens".

 

And the generation that followed them took this philosophy and ran with it, harnessing the new Apollo-driven technologies of micro-electronics to wire up the modern world and reinvent society.

 

Canadian-born space entrepreneur Bob Richards points out: "It was a great example of what can happen when human beings come focused on a big, bold goal and inspire not only themselves but the generation that comes after them." Richards, who describes himself as "an orphan of Apollo", was one of that new generation, founding the global movement Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, or Seds, in 1980. Caught up in the wonder of it all, Jeff Bezos served for a year as president of this student group. He would eventually go on to change the world in his own Apollo-inspired way, creating the giant e-commerce website Amazon.

 

Bezos is not alone. Many hi-tech entrepreneurs who have built the new tools of the internet and the computing and communications infrastructure that underpins it also cite Apollo as their inspiration.

 

Prof Sir Martin Sweeting founded the world-renowned small satellite company SSTL, which revolutionised the industry. "Apollo started me on this whole pathway of getting involved in space," says Sweeting. "The idea of being able to participate in something as exciting as a lunar landing, it stimulated an ambition, the dream of building my own satellite with my friends." The idea of a private individual launching a satellite was considered pretty crazy at the time, he points out. "After building the first one, I had a lot of advice to go out and get a proper job. I'm sure that without Apollo I would have followed a more conventional career."

 

In the hands of people like Sweeting, the new micro-electronics technologies made affordable by Apollo led to the pocket calculators of the 70s, the simple home computers and the burgeoning internet of the 80s, the emerging world wide web of the 90s, and the video streams and social networks of the 21st century.

 

Former Nasa flight director Glynn Lunney witnessed this technological trickle-down straight from Apollo to the rest of us. "Apollo really did drive our industry. We were asking people to do things that were probably 10 or 20 years faster than they otherwise would have done. And they knew it. They stepped up to it and succeeded. Today's cell phones, wireless equipment, iPads and so on are a result of the fact that the country did this hi-tech thing and created this large portfolio of available technologies."

 

Today's population, over half of whom weren't born when Apollo 17 returned from the moon, use these inventions to connect and communicate with each other freely and without a thought for geographical and cultural differences.

 

Thanks to this final legacy of the lunar landings, the Earth of today has at last become that borderless world the astronauts looked back on during those heady days of the space race. The gifts of Apollo continue to ripple down the decades, and they still have the power to unite and inspire us.

 

Moon journey transformed astronaut

 

Gary Ghioto - Pensacola News Journal

 

Forty years ago today, Commander Eugene Cernan was heading home with his crewmates aboard Apollo 17 after spending three days on the lunar surface.

 

His voyage with Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans aboard Apollo 17 marked the end of America's program of manned exploration beyond Earth orbit and the solar system. Cernan and the crew splashed down on Dec. 19, 1972.

 

And as the last man on the moon, Cernan, now 78, tried to explain to an unprecedented reunion of legendary astronauts and NASA flight directors at dinner Saturday night at the National Naval Aviation Museum, how going to the moon changed his life and perhaps what it meant to human history.

 

A sometimes emotional Cernan spoke candidly about his sadness of being the last to leave the moon on Dec. 14, 1972, never to be followed by another human explorer.

 

"I end up to have been the one who carries the yoke, if you will, of being the last man to have walked on the moon," Cernan said. "I'm honored, I'm proud and I'm disappointed. Because I never thought I would be standing here 40 years later with this yoke of history, if you want to call it that, on my shoulders.

 

"But I do believe there is a young boy, a young girl, with the indomitable will and courage to one day take us back out where we belong, where we've never been before."

 

Cernan, a retired Navy captain, reflected on the program's storied past and the astronauts who are no longer here. He remembered his late friend and Apollo 17 command module pilot, Ron Evans. He fondly recalled Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, who died Aug. 25.

 

"There were probably a lot of us who could have been the first on the moon … But nobody, nobody could have handled what it took to be the first American to step foot on the surface of the moon with more dignity than Neil Armstrong," Cernan said of his Purdue University colleague.

 

Above Cernan in the sprawling museum crowded with unique military flying machines, a large photo of Armstrong in his space suit looked down on the audience.

 

"I miss him not being here," he said.

 

Cernan said the space program was more than just a race to beat the Soviet Union and more than a test of technology. Its power to unite a nation and inspire a strife-torn world to look to the stars made it bigger than that, he said.

 

"It's a legacy. It's the spirit of America," he said of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.

 

In dramatic fashion, the silver-haired veteran of one Gemini and two Apollo missions, said he came back from the moon with questions: "What did it mean? What was it for?"

 

"Like some of my colleagues who had been there, I wondered, what did it mean that we as a nation, as human beings, left our planet and called another body in this universe our home? What difference did it make?" Cernan asked.

 

As he was about to leave the moon, Cernan said he looked down at his footprints on the lunar surface and knew with certainty he would never return. He saw Earth floating above so small you could cover it with a thumb.

 

Cernan said when he saw the Earth in the infinite darkness; he came to a place where "science had met its match."

 

"You know when you go out there and look at the Earth and all its beauty … I came to the conclusion on Apollo 10, and challenged that conclusion on Apollo 17, that it was just too beautiful to have happened by accident, "Cernan said, adding, "there had to be someone bigger than you and bigger than me who put the small part of the universe I was privileged to see all together."

 

Cernan said he experienced a spiritual, not a religious, transformation. He wanted to bring that feeling, that certainty, back home and share it. But he could not adequately express it.

 

But he said he is getting closer to understanding why man went to the moon and why it may be more about destiny than scientific achievement.

 

"I came home without an answer and I don't have an answer today," Cernan said. "I try to sum it up with one phrase … I truly believe that I had an opportunity, a unique opportunity, to sit on God's front porch as I looked back home at the beauty of our planet and His universe."

 

40 Years Since Man Last Walked on the Moon

 

Ari Schulman - Weekly Standard (Opinion)

 

(Schulman is senior editor at The New Atlantis)

 

In December 1972, Eugene Cernan took a long climb up a short ladder on the lunar surface and became the last human being to set foot on another world. It was forty years ago this week that Apollo 17 completed its quarter million mile journey home, marking the last time to date humans have traveled more than a few hundred miles from earth.

 

Imagine if we were to speak to those fabled ancestors who gazed up at the Moon for thousands of generations: what might shock them more—hearing that we actually went, or that once we did we'd barely caught our breath before losing interest? What pair of facts could better illuminate the two faces of human restlessness?

 

Today, the space program is in disarray. The shuttles sit in museums after their recent funereal marches across the country. No further manned missions are planned for many years. A report released last week by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that NASA lacks any clearly defined mission or central justification for its funding. And few within the agency think President Obama's stated goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 makes strategic or scientific sense.

 

In light of these apparent ongoing failures, there is a growing chorus that claims to speak a cold, hard truth: like it or not, sending humans to space is an impractical, vain way to conduct science. They point to the great successes of Voyager, Hubble, and Curiosity, and argue for robots as the primary means of space exploration. Advocates have replied, without much success, that human scientists are more versatile than robots, and a robust space science program requires both.

 

Advocates also commonly highlight the myriad applications that have arisen from space research, from electronics to navigation technology and medical devices. But, as Carl Sagan noted, "you don't need to go to Mars to cure cancer." The belief that, moreover, it is greedy and hubristic to send people far into space while billions here on Earth suffer probably does much to explain the timid leadership by lawmakers that in turn underlies NASA's aimlessness. Forgoing space travel, by this logic, will better focus us on the most crucial problems here on Earth.

 

How has that worked out? As Ross Douthat has noted, where once our geeks were driven to make rockets and our jocks driven to ride them, today the geeks are driven to make the next Facebook, iPhone, or XBox, and the jocks to use them to play the next first-person shooter game. These pursuits have their place, but are they the most powerful draws we can provide for entering technical careers? It's no coincidence that as NASA has taken the same turn—moving its human explorers from outer space to virtual space—the apparent pointlessness of the manned space program has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

That cold, hard truth needs to be turned on its head: like it or not, space travel inspires us in a way that no other pursuit can. Although the impact cannot be quantified, how many young minds were drawn into careers in science and engineering—probably in mostly unrelated fields—when they watched men land on the Moon? Protest that we ought to be most inspired by what is most useful—register your complaints with the departments of human psychology—but inspiration, however intangible, has a material benefit even hard-nosed utilitarians ought to acknowledge.

 

If the space program is to play a role in averting the much-feared decline of American science and technology, robotic exploration cannot be the sole answer. The Mars exploration program, which has sent ships at regular intervals for almost twenty years, is now facing purgatory. The underlying problem facing the manned space program—being driven by finding uses for technology programs, rather than by creating technologies to meet missions—is creeping.

 

The president and Congress should put an end to four decades of dithering and make the case for why bold goals in space, including a central role for human explorers, are feasible and desirable. They could embrace something like the Mars Direct plan, a manned mission with an estimated real cost well below Apollo, the International Space Station, or the shuttle program. And they could implement financial incentives and regulatory structures that would encourage private space development, just as the government once helped settle the West.

 

Space need not be a boondoggle, but neither are concerns over the country's long-term vitality good reason to starve the program even further—on the contrary. The NASA rocket scientist Ernst Stuhlinger, when he received a letter in 1970 inquiring why we should spend money sending people to space when so many suffer here on Earth, wrote in response, "significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions."

 

Stuhlinger was speaking of the "spin-offs" directly created by space research; but his point applies to innovation and economic growth more generally—which are crucial to eradicating poverty. The struggle for prosperity should not be set in opposition to the drives of enterprise and discovery, because each feeds the other. An ambitious space program is a long-term investment in (among many other things) what we might call the inspirational capital required to fuel this innovation. It's a bet against the well-intentioned but stifling notion that our material wants are best met through righteous privation of the spirit.

 

END