Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight (and Mars) News

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: January 15, 2013 7:17:42 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight (and Mars) News - January 15, 2013 and JSC Today

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            JSC's Year-Long Career Exploration Program (CEP) Student Internships
2.            Get Information About Financial Preparedness for Unanticipated Life Changes
3.            Extended TDY FedTraveler Live Lab Tomorrow, Jan. 16
4.            POWER of One Award: Nominate Your Peer Today
5.            This Week at Starport -- Rodeo Tickets, Carnival Packs, Cook-Off and General Admission Tickets
6.            Beginners Ballroom Dance -- Spring 2013 Discount
7.            Starport Boot Camp -- A Few Spots Remaining
8.            Have You Heard the Latest About Orion? Your Chance Happens Tomorrow
9.            Recent JSC Announcement
10.          What is Intracranial Pressure?
11.          Join JSC's Weight Management Program 'Just Lose It'
12.          Certified Pressure Systems Operator and Refresher Training
13.          System Safety Fundamentals Class: March 11 to 15 - Building 20 Room 205/206
14.          Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps: April 23 to 25
________________________________________     QUOTE OF THE DAY
" I am not young enough to know everything. "

-- Oscar Wilde
________________________________________
1.            JSC's Year-Long Career Exploration Program (CEP) Student Internships
CEP is accepting high school and college student applications for the 2013-2014 internship program. Students interested in science, technology, engineering, math or business fields should apply. High school students apply through their school's Cooperative and Technical Education (CTE) teacher. College students apply online. Selected students work 20 hours a week at JSC during their senior year in high school or while enrolled full-time in college. Internship dates are Sept. 3, 2013, through July 31, 2014. The application deadline is March 29. Visit the website for additional program details and eligibility requirements.
CEP is JSC's renowned internship program that seeks to meet NASA's mission by developing the critical pool of talented and diverse individuals who will make up the future leaders of our nation's and NASA's workforce.
The callout for JSC mentors to submit intern requests for year-long interns will go out in March.
Carolyn Snyder x34719 http://www.cep.usra.edu

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2.            Get Information About Financial Preparedness for Unanticipated Life Changes
Would you be able to maintain your quality of life if you or a loved one were suddenly permanently disabled?
Learn about the fundamentals of financial planning for individuals with disAbilities and seeking social security disability insurance benefits.
The class will be held in Building 12, Room 134, on Thursday, Jan. 31. There are two sessions to choose from: 9 to 10 a.m. or 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.
Everyone is welcome. You must register to secure your spot by contacting Teresa Waite at teresa.l.waite@nasa.gov or 281-483-2402.
Accommodations for a specific disability are available upon request by contacting Janelle Holt at x37504 or via email no later than 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 25.
Event Date: Thursday, January 31, 2013   Event Start Time:9:00 AM   Event End Time:10:00 AM
Event Location: Building 12, Room 134

Add to Calendar

Janelle Holt x37504

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3.            Extended TDY FedTraveler Live Lab Tomorrow, Jan. 16
Do you need some hands-on, personal help with FedTraveler.com? Join the Business Systems and Process Improvement Office for an Extended TDY FedTraveler Live Lab tomorrow, Jan. 16, any time between 9 a.m. and noon in Building 12, Room 142. Our help desk representatives will be available to help you work through Extended TDY travel processes and learn more about using FedTraveler during this informal workshop. Bring your current travel documents or specific questions that you have about the system and join us for some hands-on, in-person help with FedTraveler. If you'd like to sign up for this Extended TDY FedTraveler Live Lab, please log into SATERN and register. For additional information, please contact Judy Seier at x32771.
Gina Clenney x39851

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4.            POWER of One Award: Nominate Your Peer Today
The POWER of One Award has been a great success, but we still need your nominations. We're looking for standouts with specific examples of exceptional or superior performance. Our award criteria below will help guide you in writing the short write-up needed for submittal.
o             Single Achievement: Explain how the person truly went above and beyond on a single project or initiative.
o             Affect and Impact: What was the significant impact? How many were impacted? Who was impacted?
o             Standout: What stands out? What extra effort? Did the effort exceed and accomplish the goal?
o             Category: Which category should nominee be in? Gold - agency impact award level; Silver - center impact award level; Bronze - organization impact award level.
If chosen, the recipient can choose from a list of JSC experiences and have their name and recognition shared on InsideJSC. For complete information on the JSC Awards Program, click here.
Jessica Ocampo 281-792-7804 https://powerofone.jsc.nasa.gov

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5.            This Week at Starport -- Rodeo Tickets, Carnival Packs, Cook-Off and General Admission Tickets
Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo concert tickets are still available in the Starport Gift Shop in Building 11 for many performances. Prices are $26, $25 and $22 while supplies last. Carnival packs, Barbecue Cook-off and Reliant Admission tickets have arrived. Payment options are cash, Visa, MasterCard and Discover only. Checks are not accepted for ticket sales. Get your rodeo tickets at Starport!
Sam's Club will in the Buildings 3 and 11 cafés tomorrow from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to discuss membership options for the JSC workforce. Sam's Club will also be out on Jan. 24, Jan. 29 and Feb. 19 in case you can't make it tomorrow. Receive up to a $25 gift card on new memberships or renewals. Cash or check only for membership purchases.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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6.            Beginners Ballroom Dance -- Spring 2013 Discount
Do you feel like you have two left feet? Well, Starport has the perfect spring program for you:
Beginners Ballroom Dance!
This eight-week class introduces you to the various types of ballroom dance. Students will learn the secrets of a good lead and following, as well as the ability to identify the beat of the music. This class is easy, and we have fun as we learn. JSC friends and family are welcome.
Discounted registration:
o             $90 per couple (ends Jan. 18)
Regular registration:
o             $110 per couple (Jan. 19-28)
Two class sessions available:
o             Tuesdays from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. -- Starting Jan. 29
o             Thursdays from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. -- Starting Jan. 31
All classes are taught in the Gilruth Center's dance studio.
To register or for additional information, please contact the Gilruth Center's information desk: 281-483-0304
Steve Schade x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Fitness/RecreationClasses/RecreationProgram...

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7.            Starport Boot Camp -- A Few Spots Remaining
Starport's phenomenal boot camp registration is closing soon. Don't miss a chance to be part of Starport's incredibly popular program. The class WILL fill up, so register now.
Registration ends Jan. 22 and is $110 per person. The workout begins on Wednesday, Jan. 23.
Are you ready for 18 hours of intense workouts with an amazing personal trainer to get you to your fitness goal?
Don't wait!
Sign up today. Register now at the Gilruth Center information desk or call 281-483-0304 for more information.
Steve Schade x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Fitness/RecreationClasses/RecreationProgram...

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8.            Have You Heard the Latest About Orion? Your Chance Happens Tomorrow
Join the Orion team TOMORROW, Jan. 16, to learn more the new partnership from NASA and ESA managers at an all-hands meeting at 9 a.m. in the Teague Auditorium.
If you can't make it to the event, we've got you covered with many other available options. Employees can catch it on RF Channel 2 or by using onsite IPTV on channels 202 and 402.
You can also catch it live via UStream:
HD stream - http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-jsc
Mobile stream - http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-jsc-mobile
If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367.
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111

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9.            Recent JSC Announcement
Please visit the JSC Announcements (JSCA) Web page to view the newly posted announcement:
JSCA 13-001: Communications with Industry Procurement Solicitation for Financial and Business Management Services
Archived announcements are also available on the JSCA Web page.
Linda Turnbough x36246 http://ird.jsc.nasa.gov/DocumentManagement/announcements/default.aspx

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10.          What is Intracranial Pressure?
Please join the Human Systems Academy in a lecture introducing participants to the concepts of Intracranial Pressure. This lecture will provide insight into documented changes in visual acuity and eye anatomy that have been experienced by several astronauts after long-duration missions. Specifically, we will analyze the relationship to intracranial pressure and discuss how this translates into a human long-duration spaceflight risk.
For registration, please go to: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Event Date: Thursday, January 17, 2013   Event Start Time:2:00 PM   Event End Time:4:00 PM
Event Location: B15/267

Add to Calendar

Cynthia Rando 281-461-2620 http://sa.jsc.nasa.gov/

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11.          Join JSC's Weight Management Program 'Just Lose It'
"Just lose it" with the help of the Exploration Wellness 12-week weight management program. JSC's registered dietitian and exercise scientist will help you set a weight-loss goal and empower you to reach it. The professional expertise and group support will keep you on track and help you avoid common pitfalls along your personal weight-loss journey. Weekly meetings will encourage and educate you on various exercise and nutrition topics.
There is a fee for this program of $100 due by close of business Jan. 21. This fee is refunded if you meet these criteria: Meet your weight goal and receive 100 percent refund; or 50 percent is refunded for 100 percent attendance.
Please enroll first, then wait for your confirmation email before going to the Gilruth to pay.
Classes will be held on Wednesdays from 11 to 11:40 a.m. in Building 8, Conference Room 248.
Greta Ayers x30302

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12.          Certified Pressure Systems Operator and Refresher Training
Certified Pressure Systems Operator and Refresher Training covers updated pressure systems requirements, lessons learned and written hazard analysis.
Date: Jan. 31
Location: Safety Learning Center - Building 20, Room 205/206
Use this direct link to SATERN for course times and to register.
Certified Pressure Systems Operator - 9 to 11 a.m.
https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Certified Pressure Systems Operator and Refresher - 11:01 a.m. to 12:01 p.m.
https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Aundrail Hill x36369

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13.          System Safety Fundamentals Class: March 11 to 15 - Building 20 Room 205/206
This course instructs students in fundamentals of system safety management and the hazard analysis of hardware, software and operations. Basic concepts and principles of the analytical process are stressed. Student are introduced to NASA publications that require and guide safety analysis, as well as general reference texts on subject areas covered. Types and techniques of hazard analysis are addressed in enough detail to give the student a working knowledge of their uses and how they're accomplished. Skill in analytical techniques is developed through the use of practical exercises worked by students in class. This course establishes a foundation for the student to pursue more advanced studies of system safety and hazard analysis techniques while allowing students to effectively apply their skills to straightforward analytical assignments. This is a combination of System Safety Workshop and System Safety Special Subjects. Students who've taken those classes shouldn't take this class. SATERN Registration Required. https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Polly Caison x41279

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14.          Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps: April 23 to 25
8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily in Building 20, Room 205/206. This course provides instruction in aviation and flight systems mishap investigation basics and policy. Topics discussed include: NASA NPR 8621.1B - mishap investigation requirements and terminology, investigator qualifications and board composition and field techniques. Evidence identification, recovery and protection, witness interviewing and site mapping, along with individual component systems and material failures, are key areas discussed during sessions on field investigation. The course contains extensive accident investigation information generally applicable to aviation accidents, which can be applied to other areas of flight-systems mishaps, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, rockets, balloons and other spaceflight systems mishaps such as Genesis. To register for this course, you MUST FIRST have completed the required four-part online prerequisite: (SMA-002-07) Overview of Mishap Investigations; (SMA-002-08) Mishap Investigation Roles and Responsibilities; (SMA-002-09) Completing the Investigation and Mishap Report; and (SMA-002-10) Root Cause Analysis. Update Profile First. SATERN Registration Required. https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Polly Caison x41279

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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.

Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday – January 15, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Briefly: HR 6586 signed, budget delays, and petitions

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law HR 6586, one of a number of bills from the end of the last Congress he signed. The bill started out as a simple two-year extension of commercial launch indemnification but was transformed in the Senate into the "Space Exploration Sustainability Act," with a one-year indemnification extension. The additional provisions included extending NASA's waiver to provisions of the Iran North Korea Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA) from mid-2016 to the end of 2020, allowing it to continue buying goods and services from Russia to support ISS operations; and a resolution calling for balanced support for both the SLS/Orion and commercial crew programs.

Obama signs law permitting NASA to pay Russia for delivery of US astronauts to ISS until 2020

Itar-Tass

US President Barack Obama signed the law, which permits NASA to make payments to Russia for the delivery of the US astronauts to the International Space Station until the end of 2020, the White House reported on Monday. In particular, the law extends the NASA powers, which permit the US space agency to make the payments to Russia for the work at the ISS from July 1, 2016 to December 31, 2020. In view of the limited financing of the space program the US authorities abandoned the program of the space shuttles, focusing on the development of the spaceships, which can be brought on a higher orbit, particularly for the flights to the asteroids and the Mars. For the delivery of the US astronauts to the ISS NASA uses the services of the Russian manned spaceships Soyuz. The spaceships, which are built by the private US aerospace companies, are expected to take this role already in the near future. Still each seat in the spaceship costs 60 million dollars to the US government. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

NASA picks 9 universities, including Auburn, to share $2.5 M in Space Launch System research

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA chose nine universities Monday to share $2.5 million in research funding for work on its new heavy lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. Auburn University was the only Alabama school with an advanced development proposal accepted. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville is leading development of the new rocket system, which will evolve from an initial capability of lifting 70 metric tons to the capability to lift 130 metric tons -- enough lifting capacity to carry the fuel and supplies for deep space missions.

NASA begins robotic refueling mission on International Space Station

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

Testing techniques that may lead to robotic tenders that can refuel and repair satellites in orbit, NASA Monday began new manipulations of the International Space Station robotic arm known as Dextre. If Dextre can do it, NASA says even satellites not designed to be refueled may one day be, and that would be a huge cost savings over building and launching new ones. Ground controllers from Houston's Johnson Space Flight Center and the Canadian Space Agency will activate what is formally known as the space station's remotely operated Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (aka Dextre) to snip a cap wire and remove a cap. Other manipulations will follow over the four-day mission.

SLS Block II drives hydrocarbon engine research

Anthony Young - The Space Review

(Young is the author of The Saturn V F-1 Engine – Powering Apollo into History)

At the 63rd International Astronautical Congress (IAC) held in Naples, Italy, last October, Steve Cook presented a paper titled "Enabling an Affordable, Advanced Liquid Booster for NASA's Space Launch System." Cook was the program manager of the Ares 1 crew launch vehicle under NASA's Constellation program. NASA developed that launch vehicle using the Solid Rocket Motor technology developed for the Space Shuttle program. Today, Cook is director of space technologies at Dynetics, based in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is partnering with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR) to revisit the Apollo-era F-1 engine evaluate the feasibility of employing proven elements of that massive hydrocarbon engine design to enable NASA to achieve the payload goal of 130 metric tons for the Block II Space Launch System.

Crazy Far
To the stars, that is. Will we ever get crazy enough to go?

Tim Folger - National Geographic

On the edge of a parking lot at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, stands a relic from a time when our future as a spacefaring species looked all but inevitable, as clear and grand as a rocket ascending over Cape Canaveral. "This is not a model," NASA physicist Les Johnson says as we gaze at the 35-foot-tall assemblage of pipes, nozzles, and shielding. "This is an honest-to-goodness nuclear rocket engine." Once upon a time, NASA proposed to send a dozen astronauts to Mars in two spaceships, each powered by three of these engines. Marshall director Wernher von Braun presented that plan in August 1969, just two weeks after his Saturn V rocket delivered the first astronauts to the moon. He suggested November 12, 1981, as a departure date for Mars. The nuclear engines had already passed every test on the ground. They were ready to fly.

Shoemaker students to attend NASA camp

Todd Martin - Killeen Daily Herald

Four Shoemaker High School students are taking an especially long view of their education experience. They are completing an online course through NASA in advance of spending a week this summer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they will get a peak at the beginning of a mission to Mars. From Shoemaker engineering teacher John Melvin's standpoint, the students are starting a design process heading toward a launch in about 18 years aimed at a surface at least 34 million miles away.

Enterprise exhibit: NYC's Intrepid museum showcasing shuttle's legacy

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

A new museum exhibit that reveals the history of NASA's original space shuttle is opening in New York City this week, just as the prototype orbiter is being put under cover. "Space Shuttle Enterprise: A Pioneer," a new exhibition that explores the history of Enterprise and its role in the development of the space shuttle, will debut to the public on Thursday at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, located at Pier 86 (46th Street and 12th Avenue) in Manhattan.

Mission 61C: The Original 'Mission Impossible'

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org

January 1986 has become entrenched in the popular psyche as one of the darkest months in space history, for on its 28th day the crew of Challenger were lost in the skies above Cape Canaveral. The disaster would bring the Shuttle program to its knees for almost three years, but earlier that month another team of astronauts—the crew of Mission 61C, aboard Columbia—narrowly escaped a meeting with their maker. Their flight had been postponed since before Christmas 1985, and one of the astronauts was the unlucky Steve Hawley, who had endured the first Shuttle pad abort a year earlier. His NASA crewmates were Robert "Hoot" Gibson in command, joined by pilot Charlie Bolden, and mission specialists George "Pinky" Nelson and Franklin Chang-Diaz. They would also be joined by a pair of payload specialists, whose identities remained in flux until shortly before launch.

MEANWHILE ON MARS…

Martian road trip next for Curiosity, but speed is not an option

Todd Halvorson – Florida Today

After a nearly six-month shakedown, NASA's Curiosity rover is getting ready to put some miles on its six wheels. The car-sized mobile laboratory has driven a quarter-mile since it touched down Aug. 6 and is now nestled in a shallow depression within gaping Gale Crater. This spring, Curiosity will embark on a four- to five-mile journey to the towering Mount Sharp — the prime scientific destination of its two-year, $2.5 billion mission.
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Briefly: HR 6586 signed, budget delays, and petitions

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law HR 6586, one of a number of bills from the end of the last Congress he signed. The bill started out as a simple two-year extension of commercial launch indemnification but was transformed in the Senate into the "Space Exploration Sustainability Act," with a one-year indemnification extension.

The additional provisions included extending NASA's waiver to provisions of the Iran North Korea Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA) from mid-2016 to the end of 2020, allowing it to continue buying goods and services from Russia to support ISS operations; and a resolution calling for balanced support for both the SLS/Orion and commercial crew programs.

In a normal budget environment, we would be less than a month away from the release of the fiscal year 2014 budget proposal, which would be released on the first Monday in February. But we're not in a typical budget environment, and Space News reports NASA and other federal agencies have yet to receive "passbacks" from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regarding their FY14 budget proposals. This suggests that the release f the FY14 budget proposal will be delayed, perhaps into March. The White House has since confirmed that they will miss the early February deadline for providing the budget proposal, but offered no revised date other than that they are "working diligently" on it.

Yes, that White House petition demanding the government build a Death Star was pretty goofy, but give the administration credit for a clever response that highlighted some more realistic aspects of space policy.

As noted here before, such petitions are not an effective tool of space advocacy, but it doesn't seem to stop people from starting new ones (or the media from covering them), such as one calling for development of nuclear thermal rockets: it's garnered fewer than 2,000 signatures since its introduction on January 3.

NASA picks 9 universities, including Auburn, to share $2.5 M in Space Launch System research

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA chose nine universities Monday to share $2.5 million in research funding for work on its new heavy lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. Auburn University was the only Alabama school with an advanced development proposal accepted.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville is leading development of the new rocket system, which will evolve from an initial capability of lifting 70 metric tons to the capability to lift 130 metric tons -- enough lifting capacity to carry the fuel and supplies for deep space missions. The new system is being designed to take American astronauts back into deep space, somewhere they haven't been since Apollo missions, and to such destinations as the moon, asteroids and Mars.

NASA sought proposals to help it develop innovations in the areas of concept development, trades and analyses, propulsion, structures, materials, manufacturing, avionics and software. Auburn's proposal was titled "High Electric Density Device for Aerospace Applications." Other universities selected and their proposals included:

"Challenges Towards Improved Friction Stir Welds Using On-line Sensing of Weld Quality," Louisiana State University

"A New Modeling Approach for Rotating Cavitation Instabilities in Rocket Engine Turbopumps," Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Algorithmic Enhancements for High-Resolution Hybrid RANS-LES Using Loci-CHEM," Mississippi State University

"Characterization of Aluminum/Alumina/Carbon Interactions under Simulated Rocket Motor Conditions," Pennsylvania State University

"Development of Subcritical Atomization Models in the Loci Framework for Liquid Rocket Injectors," University of Florida

"Validation of Supersonic Film Cooling Numerical Simulations Using Detailed Measurements and Novel Diagnostics," University of Maryland

"Advanced LES and Laser Diagnostics to Model Transient Combustion-Dynamical Processes in Rocket Engines: Prediction of Flame Stabilization and Combustion-Instabilities," University of Michigan

"Acoustic Emission-Based Health Monitoring of Space Launch System Structures," University of Utah.

"Partnering with academia on SLS advanced concepts brings new ideas and vitality to NASA and expands the SLS team of rocket scientists beyond just the agency," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA begins robotic refueling mission on International Space Station

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

Testing techniques that may lead to robotic tenders that can refuel and repair satellites in orbit, NASA Monday began new manipulations of the International Space Station robotic arm known as Dextre. If Dextre can do it, NASA says even satellites not designed to be refueled may one day be, and that would be a huge cost savings over building and launching new ones.

Ground controllers from Houston's Johnson Space Flight Center and the Canadian Space Agency will activate what is formally known as the space station's remotely operated Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (aka Dextre) to snip a cap wire and remove a cap. Other manipulations will follow over the four-day mission.

"Every satellite has a lifespan and eventual retirement date, determined by the reliability of its components and how much fuel it can carry," Benjamin Reed, deputy project manager of NASA's Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office, or SSCO, said in a NASA news release. Repairing and refueling satellites already in place could save millions, even billions of dollars and many years of work, he said.

If these techniques work, scientists envision robot tenders servicing some of the 400 satellites now orbiting at what is called geosynchronous Earth orbit. That orbit, 22,000 miles above Earth and far above the space station, is a spot that allows a satellite to remain stationary over a particular land location to beam entertainment, weather or communications down to the ground.

The washing machine-sized RRM test platform was built specifically to test robotic work in space and carried to the station on July 8, 2011 on the last space shuttle flight. Read more about it and Dextre here, and watch an earlier test of its capabilities below. Immediately below is a video of controllers explaining how their missions work. In the earlier test, NASA says Dextre "successfully snipped two twisted wires -- each the thickness of two sheets of paper -- with only a few millimeters of clearance: a task essential to the satellite refueling process."

SLS Block II drives hydrocarbon engine research

Anthony Young - The Space Review

(Young is the author of The Saturn V F-1 Engine – Powering Apollo into History)

At the 63rd International Astronautical Congress (IAC) held in Naples, Italy, last October, Steve Cook presented a paper titled "Enabling an Affordable, Advanced Liquid Booster for NASA's Space Launch System." Cook was the program manager of the Ares 1 crew launch vehicle under NASA's Constellation program. NASA developed that launch vehicle using the Solid Rocket Motor technology developed for the Space Shuttle program.

Today, Cook is director of space technologies at Dynetics, based in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is partnering with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR) to revisit the Apollo-era F-1 engine evaluate the feasibility of employing proven elements of that massive hydrocarbon engine design to enable NASA to achieve the payload goal of 130 metric tons for the Block II Space Launch System. However, additional impetus to pursue this development comes from the Air Force and its desire to switch from the Russian RD-180 core booster engine used on the Atlas V.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory Propulsion Directorate has established a new program called the Hydrocarbon Boost Technology Demonstrator. Two companies, Aerojet and PWR, are involved in this program. Dale Thomas, associate director-technical at MSFC, speaking at the Fifth Von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville last October, said, "We have to have higher lift capabilities out of the Space Launch System, and it turns out one of the options we are looking at is RP-based engines, which potentially intersect with the core-stage engine for the Atlas V."

The association of NASA and the US Air Force regarding launch vehicles and propulsion goes back to the space agency's founding. In fact, it was the Air Force that issued the requirement for a rocket engine with a thrust of one million pounds-force (4.4 million newtons) that led to the research and development of the F-1 long before it was taken over by NASA for the Apollo program. The F-1 made it possible for the Saturn V to send Apollo to the Moon. With the demise of Project Constellation and reboot of the Ares 5 into the SLS, some saw the F-1 as a possible option to achieve the final 130-metric-ton goal for the SLS.

A renewed interest in a hydrocarbon engine for SLS boosters

At the IAC, Aerojet unveiled its AJ-1E6 engine design, with the targeted one million pounds of thrust. Julie Van Kleeck, vice president of Aerojet's space and launch systems, announced at that time the company was pursuing a demonstration contract under the NASA SLS program. "We are negotiating for a contract involving technology risk reduction for an engine of one million pounds thrust," she said at the time. This follows awards already given to Dynetics and ATK.

There is a wrench in the works of this effort, though. In July, GenCorp, the parent company of Aerojet, announced plans to purchase Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne for $550 million. The sale is awaiting approval of the Federal Trade Commission, which is expected sometime during the first half of 2013. Some industry analysts believe GenCorp will be in a win-win situation if NASA should decide to go with either the Aerojet AJ-1E6 or a new variant of the F-1. Indeed, GenCorp may decide to permit parallel programs to continue for both engines.

The Aerojet AJ-1E6 is an oxygen-rich staged combustion design having two combustion chambers, much like the RD-180 already on the Atlas V, but this is a new engine entirely of Aerojet's design and manufacture. Its one million pounds of thrust is considerably less than that of an F-1A. A total of four AJ-1E6 engines would be required for each of the two boosters on the Block II SLS.

Dynetics' approach is to use proven legacy hardware from the F-1 and components developed for the F-1A (which did not see serial production) and incorporate a simplified F-1A turbopump and exhaust duct, a new hot-isostatic press-bond main combustion chamber, and a new optimized 12:1 channel-wall nozzle having simplified construction less expensive than the previous F-1 nozzle design. The engine would produce 1.8 million pounds (8 million newtons) of thrust at sea level. Only two such engines would be required for each of the two SLS boosters in Block II configuration.

"The high-cost, non-recurring engineering typical of engine development was accomplished during the Apollo-Saturn program," Cook stated, "eliminating significant risk. This permits the current focus to be on affordability rather than technical feasibility."

Within NASA, the operative phrase in this new engine development is risk reduction. That translates into flight-proven hardware that can eliminate or drastically reduce engine systems development and thus overall cost. "Those risk reductions are focused heavily around affordability," Cook added, "because a big deal on the Space Launch System is affordability, while also giving NASA additional performance margin above their 130-metric-ton requirement, on the order of 20 metric tons."

One thing is certain. There are far more potential engine sales for an Air Force booster with hydrocarbon engine than the SLS, which is projected to fly no more than twice per year, and more likely just one launch a year. Having an American-designed and -manufactured rocket engine on the Atlas V would also allay concerns among some members of Congress and the Air Force itself. So, this, too, is an impetus to develop a new hydrocarbon engine.

Solid Rocket Motors are still a possibility

ATK is very much in the running, proposing an improved performance solid rocket motor for the Block II SLS. The company is supplying the five-segment solid boosters for the Block I SLS and is working on even more powerful motors for the Block II SLS. ATK is exploring a new lightweight composite four-segment motor casing and higher-energy hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene propellant instead of the current polybutadiene-acrylonitile propellant. ATK has received a $51.3 million study contract from NASA to pursue this research development. This engine has a targeted thrust of 4.5 million pounds of thrust (20 million newtons) at sea level.

NASA has shown no propulsion preference on the Block II SLS. It is using much the same approach it has with respect to commercial crew capsule design and launch vehicle selection. Christopher Crumbly, manager of NASA's SLS advanced development office, is noncommittal with respect to the PWR/Dynetic's F-1 design, Aerojet's AJ-1E6, and ATK's proposed design.

"The F-1 has great advantages because it is a gas generator and has a very simple cycle," he told an industry online journal. "The oxygen-rich staged combustion [Aerojet's engine] has great advantages because it has a higher specific impulse. The Russians have been flying ox[ygen]-rich for a long time. Either one can work. The solids can work."

The evolution of the Block II design is years in the future. The SLS core stage successfully passed a preliminary design review in December 2012, with the critical design review set for some time in 2014. First launch of the Block I SLS is currently planned for 2017, and flights of the Block II SLS that will take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit won't occur until the 2020s.

Fortunately, the US will likely have a new hydrocarbon rocket engine that can both power the Block II SLS and help meet the country's military payload needs for many years to come, if necessary. Only time, cost and reliability, will tell the ultimate decision.

Crazy Far
To the stars, that is. Will we ever get crazy enough to go?

Tim Folger - National Geographic

On the edge of a parking lot at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, stands a relic from a time when our future as a spacefaring species looked all but inevitable, as clear and grand as a rocket ascending over Cape Canaveral.

"This is not a model," NASA physicist Les Johnson says as we gaze at the 35-foot-tall assemblage of pipes, nozzles, and shielding. "This is an honest-to-goodness nuclear rocket engine." Once upon a time, NASA proposed to send a dozen astronauts to Mars in two spaceships, each powered by three of these engines. Marshall director Wernher von Braun presented that plan in August 1969, just two weeks after his Saturn V rocket delivered the first astronauts to the moon. He suggested November 12, 1981, as a departure date for Mars. The nuclear engines had already passed every test on the ground. They were ready to fly.

Thirty years after the Mars landing that never was, on a humid June morning, Johnson looks wistfully at the 40,000-pound engine in front of us. He heads a small team that assesses the feasibility of "advanced concepts" in space technology—and NERVA, the old nuclear engine, just might qualify. "If we're going to send people to Mars, this should be considered again," Johnson says. "You would only need half the propellant of a conventional rocket." NASA is now designing a conventional rocket to replace the Saturn V, which was retired in 1973, not long after the last manned moon landing. It hasn't decided where the new rocket will go. The NERVA project ended in 1973 too, without a flight test. Since then, during the space shuttle era, humans haven't ventured more than 400 miles from Earth.

All of which might seem to make the question Johnson and I have spent the morning discussing—will humans ever travel to the stars?—sound a little out of touch.

Why did it seem more reasonable half a century ago? "Of course we were crazy in a way," says physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In the late 1950s Dyson worked on Project Orion, which aimed to build a manned spacecraft that could go to Mars and the moons of Saturn. Instead of using nuclear reactors to spew superheated hydrogen, as NERVA did, the Orion spacecraft would have dropped small nuclear bombs out the back every quarter of a second or so and surfed on the fireballs. "It would have been enormously risky," says Dyson, who planned to go to Saturn himself. "We were prepared for that. The mood then was totally different. The idea of a risk-free adventure just didn't make sense." A few years after Orion ended, Dyson outlined in Physics Today how a bomb-powered spacecraft might travel to a star.

These days it's easier to outline why we'll never go. Stars are too far away; we don't have the money. The reasons why we might go anyway are less obvious—but they're getting stronger. Astronomers have detected planets around many nearby stars; soon they're bound to find one that's Earthlike and in the sweet spot for life, and in that instant they'll create a compelling destination. Our technology too is far more capable than it was in the 1960s; atom bombs aren't cutting-edge anymore. In his office that morning, Les Johnson handed me what looked like a woven swatch of cobwebs. It was actually a carbon-fiber fabric sample for a giant spaceship sail—one that might carry a probe beyond Pluto on rays of sunlight or laser beams. "Be very careful with it," Johnson said. "This is a material that might help us get there."

To get to the stars, we'll need many new materials and engines but also a few of the old intangibles. They haven't vanished. In fact, they almost seem to be bursting forth again in the imaginative space vacated by the space shuttle, which in 2011 joined the Saturn V as a museum exhibit. In the conversation of certain dreamer-nerds, especially outside NASA, you can now hear echoes of the old aspiration and adventurousness—of the old craziness for space.

Last spring, three weeks before I met with Johnson, SpaceX, a private company based near Los Angeles, used one of its own rockets to launch an unmanned capsule that docked with the International Space Station. SpaceX leads several other companies in the race to replace the shuttle as the space station's supply ship. A month before that, a company called Planetary Resources, backed by billionaire investors such as Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, announced plans to use robotic spacecraft to mine asteroids for precious metals. Working with Virgin Galactic, a company whose main business is space tourism, Planetary Resources expects within the next year or two to launch a lightweight telescope into low Earth orbit. "We hope by the end of the decade that we will have identified our initial targets and begun prospecting," says Peter Diamandis, the firm's co-founder.

"We're going to look back at this decade as the dawn of the commercial space age," says Mason Peck, NASA's chief technologist. "It's about companies large and small finding ways to make a market out of space. The energy we see now—the economic motivation to go into space—we haven't seen that before."

Economics has long spurred exploration on Earth. Medieval merchants risked the hazards of the Silk Road to reach the markets of China; Portuguese caravels in the 15th century sailed beyond the bounds of the known world, searching less for knowledge than for gold and spices. "Historically, the driver for opening frontiers has always been the search for resources," says Diamandis. "Science and curiosity are weak drivers compared with wealth generation. The only way to really open up space is to create an economic engine, and that engine is resource extraction."

One resource he and co-founder Eric Anderson have their eyes on is platinum, so rare on Earth that it currently fetches $1,600 an ounce. Sending robots a million miles or more to extract and refine ore on asteroids in near-zero gravity, or to tow an asteroid closer to Earth, will require technology that doesn't yet exist. "There's a significant probability that we may fail," Anderson said at the press conference in April. "But we believe that attempting this and moving the needle for space is important. Of course we hope to make a lot of money."

Elon Musk, the 41-year-old founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, has already made a lot of money, and he is devoting a sizable portion of that fortune to his own space program. The new rocket SpaceX is developing, the Falcon Heavy, will be capable of carrying twice the payload of the space shuttle, he says, for about one-fifth the price. His goal is to reduce launch costs by a further factor of 50 or 100, to $10 to $20 a pound, by developing the first fully reusable rockets. "This is extremely difficult, and most people think it's impossible, but I do not," Musk says. "If airplanes had to be thrown away after every flight, no one would fly."

For Musk, it's all part of a much grander plan: establishing a permanent human colony on Mars. NASA has had enormous success on Mars with unmanned rovers, most recently Curiosity, but has repeatedly pushed back a manned mission. Musk thinks SpaceX could land astronauts on Mars within 20 years—and then keep landing them for decades after that.

"The real thing that's needed is not to send one little mission to Mars," he says. "It's ultimately to take millions of people and millions of tons of equipment to Mars to make it a self-sustaining civilization. It will be the hardest thing humanity has ever done, and it's far from certain that it will occur.

"I should emphasize this is not about escaping Earth. It's about making life multiplanetary. It's about getting out there and exploring the stars."

The fastest spacecraft ever built—the Helios 2 probe, launched in 1976 to monitor the sun—attained a top speed of 157,000 miles an hour. At that rate, a spacecraft headed to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, would take more than 17,000 years to make the 24-trillion-mile journey, a temporal span equal to the one that separates us from Cro-Magnon cave painters. Those inescapable facts lead even some of the staunchest advocates of human spaceflight to conclude that interstellar travel, aside from robotic probes, will remain forever in the realm of science fiction. "It's Mars or nowhere," says Louis Friedman, an astronautics engineer and one of the founders of the Planetary Society, a space-exploration advocacy group.

Some scientists, however, find the prospect of eternal confinement to two small planets in a vast galaxy just too depressing to contemplate. "If we start now, and we have started, I believe we can achieve some form of interstellar exploration within a hundred years," says Andreas Tziolas. A physicist and former NASA researcher, Tziolas is a leader of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit organization that aims, as its mission statement says, "to realize interstellar flight before the year 2100." It is now collaborating with former shuttle astronaut Mae Jemison. In early 2012 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded her $500,000 for something called the 100 Year Starship project. "Our task is not to launch a starship but to make sure the technologies and abilities exist within the next hundred years to do that," Jemison says.

Tziolas thinks we could develop a starship engine that harnesses nuclear fusion, the energy source of stars and hydrogen bombs. When the nuclei of small atoms such as hydrogen fuse, they release enormous energy—much more than is released by the nuclear fission of large atoms such as uranium, the energy source of nuclear power plants and of the old NERVA. While physicists have built fusion reactors, they haven't yet found a way to make one that yields more energy than it consumes. "I have faith in our ingenuity," Tziolas says. Only seven decades elapsed between the discovery of subatomic particles and NERVA, he points out; by 2100, he thinks, we should be able to create a fusion engine that could propel a starship to a top speed of 15 to 20 percent of the speed of light.

That would allow it to reach the nearest star in another few decades—if its machinery could last that long. "Twenty years is getting near the upper limit for how long you can design a spacecraft to reliably operate," says Les Johnson. NASA asked Johnson to look into a 20-year mission, not to a star but to the edge of interstellar space—to the region known as the heliopause, several times as far as Pluto, where the sun's influence is balanced by that of other stars. "The thought was, you don't want to immediately start talking about going to the nearest star," says Johnson. "It's over four light-years away. It's just ... daunting, unfathomable." Johnson's task was to plan a realistic mission with a technology that's at least close to existing—a first small step toward the stars.

Right now, fusion engines aren't close to existing; a nuclear engine like NERVA would be too expensive; chemical rockets might reach the heliopause but could never carry enough fuel to reach a star in a reasonable amount of time. (The Voyager spacecraft, were it headed the right way, would drift by Proxima Centauri in 74,000 years.) In the end Johnson's team settled on the most evocative technology: a solar sail. Sunlight, like all light, consists of particles called photons, which exert pressure on everything they touch. At Earth's distance from the sun, the pressure is only about a tenth of an ounce spread over a football field. But a large, thin sheet of reflective fabric, unfurled in the vacuum of space, will feel this gentle force and will slowly accelerate.

NASA launched a 110-square-foot light sail in 2010 that survived for several months in low Earth orbit. It hopes to launch a sail in 2014 that measures a bit under a third of an acre and weighs just 70 pounds. Movable vanes on the corners will allow ground control to maneuver the Sunjammer, which on its yearlong mission will tack some two million miles upwind toward the sun. A 16-billion-mile mission to the heliopause would require a disk-shaped sail 1,500 feet in diameter. After a year or two of sailing, the spacecraft would exceed 100,000 miles an hour.

Proxima Centauri lies 1,500 times farther still. "To sail to another star," Johnson says, "we'll need a sail the size of Alabama and Mississippi combined. We don't know how to build that yet." What's more, sunlight alone couldn't push the sail to the star within a human lifetime, or even many lifetimes; you'd need powerful space-based lasers. "If you take the total energy output of humanity and put it in a laser on a satellite," says Johnson, "then you could get trip times of a few decades to Proxima Centauri." And that's to send a robot the size of Johnson's desk.

What about humans, with their need for 24/7 life support? Johnson throws up his hands. "When you start thinking about what it takes to supply people," he says, "and how big the spacecraft would have to be and how much energy it would have to have, you enter the realm of science fiction."

To build a starship, you first have to build a future that converts fiction into fact, and that takes a lot more than rocket science. The task isn't figuring out right now how to design a starship; it's continuing to build the civilization that will one day build a starship. Framed like that, more expansively, it begins to seem less impossible. But it's a 100-year project or maybe a 500-year project, depending on your craziness level. Johnson's level is lowish.

"I don't know what the world will be like in 500 years," he says. "If we have fusion power plants, and space-based solar panels beaming energy down, and we're mining the moon and have an industrial base in low Earth orbit—maybe a civilization like that could do it. We'll have to be a civilization that spans the solar system before we can think about taking an interstellar voyage."

Shoemaker students to attend NASA camp

Todd Martin - Killeen Daily Herald

Four Shoemaker High School students are taking an especially long view of their education experience.

They are completing an online course through NASA in advance of spending a week this summer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they will get a peak at the beginning of a mission to Mars.

From Shoemaker engineering teacher John Melvin's standpoint, the students are starting a design process heading toward a launch in about 18 years aimed at a surface at least 34 million miles away.

As High School Aerospace Scholars this summer, the Shoemaker juniors will challenge their math, science, engineering and computer science skills while interacting with NASA engineers.

The students from Killeen completed a competitive selection process and received state legislator endorsement. The students — Jonathan Luna, Adrienne Davis, Wesley Tavares and Shawn Notto — are part of the school's STEM Academy, which focuses on science, technology, engineering and math.

Luna said he was enjoying getting started on the first module of the online NASA preparation course.

While still at the beginning of their experience, the students said it was clearly a great opportunity.

"I want to be an aerospace engineer, so I want to know everything about the atmosphere," Davis said.

Melvin helped one student attend the NASA event last summer and hopes after these four go that he can urge more students to apply and attend in the future.

The space program is promoting plans to send a manned mission to Mars in about 18 years, meaning today's high school students will be in their mid-30s, Melvin said.

"They get to be in on the initial design," the engineering teacher said. "I think this sets them up for success because they will have been thinking about the challenges for a long time."

"It's exciting (NASA) is getting ahead, looking at high school juniors," Melvin said, "that they could be thinking about colonizing a planet."

Other students interested in space who are current sixth- through ninth-graders may apply for a Space Camp scholarship through the Military Child Education Coalition.

For more information and an application, go to www.militarychild.org

Enterprise exhibit: NYC's Intrepid museum showcasing shuttle's legacy

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

A new museum exhibit that reveals the history of NASA's original space shuttle is opening in New York City this week, just as the prototype orbiter is being put under cover.

"Space Shuttle Enterprise: A Pioneer," a new exhibition that explores the history of Enterprise and its role in the development of the space shuttle, will debut to the public on Thursday at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, located at Pier 86 (46th Street and 12th Avenue) in Manhattan.

The temporary display is hosted on the hangar deck of the converted U.S.S. Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier. The exhibit celebrates the people, the pilots and engineers who contributed to the orbiter's story, as well as made the technological innovations that helped to make Enterprise an icon of the space program.

The icon itself, the Enterprise, is mounted on the Intrepid's flight deck. The retired prototype orbiter, which never flew in space but was used for a series of critical approach and landing tests in the 1970s, entered the Intrepid's collection in July 2012. In October, Hurricane Sandy left the shuttle with minor damage and destroyed its display pavilion.

Scaffolding has now been raised around Enterprise and a protective cover will be placed over the orbiter this week. The Intrepid is planning to reopen its shuttle pavilion in the spring.

Until then, the new exhibition has been installed to provide visitors the chance to learn more about the historic winged spacecraft.

"While the shuttle itself is not on display, we really want to give the public what they want and what they appear to want is really interesting stories about the shuttle and new elements as well," Elaine Charnov, the Intrepid museum's vice president for exhibits, told collectSPACE.com.

From the cockpit to the cafeteria

"Space Shuttle Enterprise: A Pioneer" introduces visitors to the Enterprise with artifacts from its era — including wind tunnel test models and examples of where Enterprise crossed into pop culture — as well as archival images and video clips to illustrate the history and significance of the prototype orbiter.

"One of the highlights is the cockpit instrumentation panel, which gives the public a much richer and deeper sense of what the instrumentation looks like and how large that area was [on Enterprise]," Charnov said. "How remarkable it was that these instruments really helped facilitate so many pioneering space efforts."

The display, which is built into a full scale replica of the forward instrument panel from inside the shuttle's flight deck, provides an answer to one of the popular questions visitors have been asking since Enterprise first arrived on display at the Intrepid.

"We get a lot of questions from people, 'How can we see the cockpit?'" explained Eric Boehm, the Intrepid's curator of aviation and aircraft restoration. "Future plans include a much more enhanced version of this but in the short term we are getting these instruments on display as soon as possible."

Enterprise arrived in New York City with its cockpit mostly bare. The instrumentation going on display was obtained by the Intrepid through a government surplus sale.

"They could have flown on Enterprise but they may have been repurposed for a simulator at one time," Boehm said. "There are some tags on them that date them back to that era, but the way that NASA worked, they repurposed stuff all the time."

"We're not going to sell [the display] as actual Enterprise instruments, but boy, it is highly likely that these came off Enterprise," he added.

On the subject of selling, another area of the exhibit picks up where the original pavilion's displays left off: the space shuttle Enterprise's crossover into pop culture.

"Expanding what was presented in the original pavilion, we now have a chance to show some of the actual elements," Charnov said. "It includes a 1977 Enterprise lunchbox and thermos. Who wouldn't want to have that as a collectible?"

Other artifacts on display include model kits, print ads that incorporated imagery of Enterprise, and the White House briefing document that led to the prototype shuttle being renamed after the starship from "Star Trek" rather than the U.S.S. Constitution, as NASA originally planned.

"[The new exhibit] really illustrates how deeply woven the Enterprise and the shuttle's story was into daily life and how it was reflected in so many aspects of our consumer culture," said Charnov.

Intrepid and Enterprise: Truly connected

One other area of the 1,500 square foot exhibition features artifacts from a pilot who shares connections with both the Intrepid and the Enterprise: Richard "Dick" Truly.

"There is a whole case devoted to Dick Truly," Boehm told collectSPACE. "Dick Truly has a very special meaning for us because he was assigned to Intrepid as a young naval aviator in the early 1960s. He has over 100 'traps' here on our flight deck."

One of the four NASA astronauts who flew Enterprise's approach and landing tests in 1977, Truly's initial tour of duty as a naval aviator was flying F-8 Crusaders aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid and the U.S.S. Enterprise. He made over 300 carrier landings, flew the shuttle Enterprise three times (twice in free flight), and then flew twice into space on the shuttles Columbia and Challenger.

"Space Shuttle Enterprise: A Pioneer" displays the helmet and NASA flight jacket from Truly's collection.

"He has been donating stuff to us over the past several years and now it is all coming together," Boehm said.

The exhibition is free, included with the price of admission to the Intrepid. The museum is currently offering a "Gift of Intrepid" buy one, get one free admission ticket promotion to its Facebook and Twitter followers through Feb. 15.

Spaceport Legislation: Take Off or Fizzle?

James Monteleone - Albuquerque Journal

Legislation that some say could make or break the state's $209 million Spaceport America is expected to be one of the sticking points of the 60-day session of the Legislature that takes off today.

State lawmakers pushing to shield manufacturers in New Mexico from space travelers' lawsuits say the legal protection is the last hurdle to recruiting new companies to the spaceport, about 30 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences. The proposal will go before the Legislature this year, for the third time.

Critics say the effort is the latest in a series of demands from commercial space companies threatening to locate their companies in other states that offer a better deal, such as legal protections and millions of dollars in state-funded incentives.

The liability waiver legislation also has faced strong opposition from the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association, which has called the effort an unprecedented rollback in legal protections.
New Mexico law already protects spacecraft operators such as Virgin Galactic, the lone tenant at Spaceport America, from lawsuits filed by space passengers who pay as much as $200,000 per ticket to someday fly into suborbital space.

But officials with Virgin and the New Mexico Spaceport Authority say other states hoping to lure companies to their own spaceports have gone one step further, adding legal protection for manufacturers.

Now backers say New Mexico needs to catch up to win new aerospace companies for New Mexico's spaceport, bringing along a host of high-tech, high-paying jobs.

"I hate to see us not try and be competitive enough to maintain what we've got," said Sen. Mary Kay Papen, D-Las Cruces, a vocal advocate for the expanded liability protections, who is expected to sponsor a Senate version of the bill.

"I think we have invested a lot," she said. "I think we need to do everything we can, within reason, to protect our investment."

A House version of the bill will be sponsored by Rep. James White, R-Albuquerque.

Who can sue

Under both the existing and proposed liability protection, only space travelers are or would be prohibited from filing lawsuits.

Residents on the ground who suffer injury or losses related to the space travel still have the ability to sue under the spaceport liability protections, lawmakers say.

The legal protections for spaceflight are not a new feature for risky activities in New Mexico. The state provides legal liability waivers for businesses such as ski-lift operators and horseback riding stables.

Opponents of the expanded spaceport liability waiver question whether the expanded liability protections truly are the final obstacle to other spacecraft operators and manufacturers moving their businesses to Spaceport America.

Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Albuquerque, who voted to stall the liability bill in committee in 2012, said there's a sense of frustration among lawmakers over recurring requests for state assistance from aerospace companies. The requests date back to the initial push for New Mexico to invest more than $200 million in taxpayer dollars to build a first-of-its-kind spaceport, he said.

"They always said every time they ever asked (the Legislature) for something, 'This is the last time we're ever going to need anything,' " McSorley said.

"If I thought for sure this was the last time they would need something, that might change my mind," McSorley said. "Every time we turn around, there's something else, and something else, and something else."

Ready for departures

Advocates of the expanded liability protections, including Gov. Susana Martinez, suggest that passing the bill this year is more urgent than before, warning that inaction in the Legislature could force the spaceport to shut its doors.

"It is at risk of losing the investment of over $200 million if we don't get smart," Martinez said.

Supporters of the expanded liability protections point to two commercial spaceflight companies — Rocket Crafters Inc. and XCOR Aerospace — that skipped over New Mexico when relocating their companies in 2012.

Rocket Crafters has announced plans to launch spaceflights out of a Colorado spaceport near Denver. XCOR said it would launch from Florida.

Officials from the New Mexico Spaceport Authority and Virgin Galactic say the companies, both looking to start operating spaceflights of their own, passed over New Mexico in part because of the lack of manufacturer legal protections.

"This particular thing is proving to be an impediment to getting businesses in state," Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told the Journal.

An NBC News report on XCOR's decision in August to relocate to Florida said the company chose Florida over other U.S. spaceports because the state offered it a $4 million incentive package.

An XCOR Aerospace spokesman did not return calls for comment.

Stiff competition

Steve Vierck, president of New Mexico Partnership — a nonprofit organization created to recruit new companies to the state — said New Mexico has struggled to keep up with other states that have set aside millions of dollars in incentives to recruit aerospace companies.

"I know that we've had conversations with the (aerospace) companies," Vierck said. "… Those companies have requested closing funds, essentially dollars to help reduce their startup costs, their operations (costs). That's frankly where we're very noncompetitive with Texas and Florida."

Vierck noted New Mexico offers other economic incentives, such as payments for on-the-job training programs, and tax credits for hiring high-wage employees and operations at the spaceport. But he said the market to recruit aerospace companies demands more.

Some New Mexico lawmakers question whether the state will be able to keep up.

"It's just hard to keep going down this slippery slope," McSorley said.

"While we're being told it's not going to cost anything more, and this (liability legislation) is the last thing, people still have questions because it's not altogether clear, yet I think we're all wanting to find a solution," the Albuquerque senator said.

Virgin Galactic's future

The push to expand spacecraft manufacturers' legal protections as an incentive to attract new aerospace companies is also necessary to keep Virgin Galactic's headquarters at New Mexico's spaceport.

Some of the fear of losing Virgin Galactic stems from remarks the company CEO made in November, warning that the company will "look at our future following this next legislative session."

Although Virgin Galactic is expected to make its first lease payment to the spaceport today, the company's contract with Spaceport America — negotiated during the Richardson administration — allows it to back out of its deal with the state without major penalties.

But Whitesides said Virgin Galactic is not threatening to leave New Mexico for another state if the expanded liability bill is not passed.

Rather, he said, the company is concerned it will be asked to foot all utility and other operational expenses — as required under the contract — if the state is unable to attract new commercial spacecraft companies to set up shop at the spaceport and chip in.

"In our opinion, this is a very important issue, (but) I would not phrase it 'make-or-break' in the sense of Virgin Galactic definitely leaves without this bill," Whitesides said.

But Virgin says it likely can't afford to bear the entire spaceport's utility and operational expenses to sustain long-term operations in New Mexico.

"We want Spaceport America to be successful both in the short term and the long term. Our primary concern is if nobody else comes, in the sense of relocating their operation, then that becomes a spaceport that is centered around essentially one tenant, which wasn't really the thing we were signing up for," Whitesides said.

"I think the long-term future for the spaceport is in doubt if no one else moves to the spaceport," he said.

A third try

The expanded liability protection for spacecraft manufacturers fell short in the 2012 legislative session after both a Senate and House draft died in committee.

The Senate Judiciary Committee tabled the bill after an hourslong hearing during which the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association actively lobbied against the legislation. David Stout, then-president of the group, told lawmakers the bill amounted to "essential immunity" for a single industry.

Supporters, including Virgin and the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, argued the protection is necessary to ensure that the fledging commercial spaceflight industry isn't wiped out by a single lawsuit from a passenger who consented to the risks before flight.

In cases of gross negligence, however, passengers or their families retain the right to sue, under the proposed New Mexico law.

Peter Mallery, executive director of the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association, declined to comment on the advocacy group's concerns with the spaceport liability bill. "We're not going to talk about it right now," he said.

The trial lawyers' group is among the state's most influential third-party interests. The group's political action committee, the Committee on Individual Responsibility, contributed at least $178,500 to state legislative candidates in 2012, more than any other political organization that year, according to secretary of state campaign finance records.

The trial lawyers' efforts to kill the legislation during last year's legislative session rallied a new wave of support in advance of this year's effort, including the creation of a "Save Our Spaceport Coalition" comprising tourism and community economic development groups.

The governor, a former Las Cruces prosecutor, has also joined the criticism of the trial lawyers' efforts to derail the spaceport liability bill.

"There isn't going to be anyone to sue anyway, because we're not going to have the spaceport, so what's the point?" Martinez said.

Papen, the Senate sponsor of the bill, said increased awareness of the spaceport issue and some new faces on the Senate and House committees where the legislation previously stalled could mean a different outcome in 2013.

"I think we have a wonderful opportunity," Papen said, "And I hate to see us give it up because we're not willing to be competitive."

Mission 61C: The Original 'Mission Impossible'

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org

January 1986 has become entrenched in the popular psyche as one of the darkest months in space history, for on its 28th day the crew of Challenger were lost in the skies above Cape Canaveral. The disaster would bring the Shuttle program to its knees for almost three years, but earlier that month another team of astronauts—the crew of Mission 61C, aboard Columbia—narrowly escaped a meeting with their maker. Their flight had been postponed since before Christmas 1985, and one of the astronauts was the unlucky Steve Hawley, who had endured the first Shuttle pad abort a year earlier. His NASA crewmates were Robert "Hoot" Gibson in command, joined by pilot Charlie Bolden, and mission specialists George "Pinky" Nelson and Franklin Chang-Diaz. They would also be joined by a pair of payload specialists, whose identities remained in flux until shortly before launch.

Originally scheduled to fly in August 1985, they were meant to deploy two communications satellites—ASC-1 for the American Satellite Company and Syncom 4-4 for the U.S. Navy—and operate a Materials Science Laboratory (MSL-2) in the payload bay. However, by March 1985 their mission slipped into January 1986 and was redesignated 51L. In their "new" incarnation, the crew would deploy a large Tracking and Data Relay Satellite for NASA and the Spartan-203 free-flier to observe Halley's Comet. Then, in July, they received the new designation of 61C, gained two other communications satellites, and picked up payload specialist Bob Cenker from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Cenker was an electrical and aerospace engineer who served as a senior staff engineer with RCA Astro Electronics (bought by General Electric in 1986 to become GE AstroSpace) and had worked extensively on several communications satellite programs. In July 1983, RCA Astro Electronics received a $120 million contract from its sister company, RCA American Communications, to build three high-powered Satcom satellites for TV broadcasts. Two of these were to be launched late in 1985, with the third in 1987. Known as "Satcom-Ks" (or "Satcom-Kus"), each was capable of broadcasting in the 12-14 GHz Ku-band. Since Ku-band frequencies were not shared with terrestrial microwave systems, dishes served by the Satcoms could be located in major metropolitan areas.

For Cenker, who had served as RCA's manager of systems engineering for the Satcom-K, it was "his" satellite and his technical responsibility. RCA paid NASA $14.2 million to launch Satcom K-1 on Mission 61C, and the satellite's 16 transponders were expected to provide coverage of the entire contiguous United States. Confusingly, the second Satcom-K ("K-2″) was launched aboard Mission 61B, before K-1, and physically the satellites differed from many of their predecessors, in that they were cube-shaped, carried wing-like solar arrays, and were also much heavier. In fact, at more than 4,200 pounds, the Satcom-Ks were several times heavier than most other commercial communications satellites previously deployed by the Shuttle. This demanded a more powerful version of the Payload Assist Module (PAM) booster. Enter the new PAM-D2, which could accommodate heavier payloads measuring up to ten feet in diameter, as opposed to just over six feet for its predecessor, the PAM-D.

The second payload specialist on 61C should have been Greg Jarvis, a Hughes engineer, selected by his company in the summer of 1984 and first attached to Dan Brandenstein's Mission 51D. Unfortunately for Jarvis, as the manifest shape-shifted in early 1985, he moved further and further downstream. Since Hughes had built the Navy's Syncom, it seemed likely that he would accompany one of those satellites into orbit, and he was earmarked to fly on Joe Engle's Mission 51I for a while, before inexplicably disappearing from the crew roster and winding up on 61C. Then, in the autumn of 1985, Jarvis was moved again—this time to tragic Mission 51L. His place on 61C would be taken by Congressman Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, and this reassignment—to a mission which did not even have a Hughes payload aboard—reinforced to many the reality that he had been moved simply to make room for a politician to fly.

"Willie Nelson," as chief astronaut John Young called him—"the one who can't sing!"—had practiced law and served as an Army reservist before entering the Florida House of Representatives in 1972. He won re-election in 1974 and 1976 and served in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., from 1978 until 1991. At the time of Mission 61C, Nelson chaired the House's Space Science and Technology Subcommittee. Today a senior senator for Florida, he has proven a staunch supporter of NASA over the years and one of the agency's most vocal political champions.

However, Nelson's assignment brought with it the inevitable question of what he should do in orbit. Photography seemed the most obvious option, although Nelson wanted to be assigned something more important. Principal investigators would spend many years, and in some cases many millions of dollars, preparing their experiments for flight and training the astronauts to operate them, and they were reluctant to have a non-technical politician step in at the last minute and possibly screw them up. Commander Hoot Gibson remained firm: mission specialists would operate the experiments. Some astronauts jokingly wondered if Nelson's "important" experiment was to find a cure for cancer. In all sincerity, Nelson proposed that he take photographs of Africa to aid with the humanitarian effort. He also suggested a communications link between the Shuttle and the cosmonauts aboard the Salyut 7 space station. Hearing of Nelson's three "missions"—curing cancer, ending famine, and fostering better U.S.–Soviet relations—the astronaut office humorists quickly got in on the act, as noted by astronaut Mike Mullane in his memoir, Riding Rockets.

"Do you know how to ruin Nelson's entire mission?" came the joke.

The response: "On launch morning, tell him they've found a cure for cancer, it's raining a flood in Ethiopia, and the Berlin Wall is coming down! He'll be crushed!"

Yet, as a crew member, Nelson proved a model payload specialist. "He worked very hard," admitted Pinky Nelson. "Physically, he was in better shape than we were! He had no experience … in aviation or anything technical. He was a lawyer, but that didn't stop him from trying, and I think he knew where his limitations were." In fact, Pinky and Bill Nelson, though unrelated, became the first two men with the same surname to fly together in space.

Assigned as 61C's pilot, Charlie Bolden—today serving as NASA Administrator—would credit his commander with having taught him a great deal about Shuttle systems and aerodynamics … and, most significantly, Hoot's Law. By his own admission, Bolden struggled through his first few months of mission-specific training. "I really wanted to impress everybody on the crew and the training team," he told the NASA oral historian. One day, in the simulator, the instructors threw an engine failure at the crew and, to distract them, quickly piled on more problems. Bolden followed his procedures, safing the engine, and was quickly presented with a minor glitch in an electrical bus. His attention shifted to the new problem, but he picked the wrong bus and inadvertently shut down the bus for an operating engine. "When I did that," he said, "the engine lost power and it got real quiet! We went from having one engine down in the orbiter, which we could've gotten out of, to having two engines down, and we were in the water, dead." Bolden felt awful. If this ascent simulation had been for real, he would have brought death to them all. Gibson, in his infinite wisdom, reached across the cockpit and patted Bolden on the shoulder.

"Charlie," he said, "let me tell you about Hoot's Law."

"What's Hoot's Law?"

"No matter how bad things get, you can always make them worse!"

On Mission 61C, Space Shuttle Columbia was making her first orbital flight in over two years. Late in January 1984, a month after returning from her STS-9 mission, she was transported from Florida to California for a major program of upgrades at prime contractor Rockwell International's plant in Palmdale. She received heads-up displays for her pilots, lost her original ejection seats in favor of lighter versions, and was equipped with new instruments—including a tail-mounted Shuttle Infrared Leeside Temperature Sensing (SILTS) pod—to monitor her performance during flight. Returned to the Cape in July 1985, she entered formal processing for Mission 61C in September, by which time the flight's payload had changed again. The crew would retain their Materials Science Laboratory (MSL-2) payload and gain the Satcom Ku-2 communications satellite and a "bridge" of Getaway Special experiment canisters, but the remainder of their scheduled five days in orbit would be relatively roomy. To 61C crewman Steve Hawley, this provided every reason for NASA to cancel 61C … but for one thing: the presence of Congressman Bill Nelson.

"Frankly, our payload wasn't very robust," he told the NASA oral historian, "and were it not for [Nelson's] presence on the flight, we might have been cancelled. We had one satellite and some other experiments. It was a clearing-house sale!" Mission 61C finally received a firm launch date of 18 December 1985, and should have been NASA's tenth flight of the year, capping a triumphant run of Shuttle achievements and heralding the dawn of an even brighter 1986. However, it did not happen. Launch on the 18th, scheduled for 7:00 am EST, was postponed by 24 hours to give technicians more time to finish closing out Columbia's aft compartment. The second effort to get the queen of the fleet airborne, on the 19th, ended dramatically just 14 seconds before launch, when flight controllers received an indication that the hydraulic power unit on the right-hand Solid Rocket Booster had exceeded allowable turbine speed limits. "We were happy as clams," Charlie Bolden recalled of the build-up to that attempt. "All of a sudden, everything stopped and the countdown clock went back to T-9 [minutes] and kind of ticked there. We had no idea what had happened. As they started looking at the data, they had an indication that we had a problem with the right-hand booster." The signal turned out to be erroneous, but by then the window had closed and the seven astronauts were obliged to disembark.

Launch was moved to 6 January 1986, and was under considerable pressure to get underway, because the next flight—Mission 51L—was due to fly from the newly-refurbished Pad 39B on the 22nd, carrying New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe as the nation's first private-citizen astronaut. NASA also wanted Columbia back from 61C as quickly as possible, because she was booked for the ASTRO-1 mission to observe Halley's Comet in early March. A launch on 18 or 19 December would have allowed just enough time to refurbish Columbia and install a battery of three ultraviolet telescopes for ASTRO-1. Delaying 61C past Christmas and into the New Year was a headache which the space agency could ill afford, but worse was to come.

For the crew, the festive period was a chance to relax after more than a year of intensive training in the simulators and uncertainty over when they would ever fly. "We stayed in quarantine a lot of the time," remembered Steve Hawley in his NASA oral history. "When you're in a launch mode, down in Florida, the pace is not very hectic. You're not in training … like you would be if you're in Houston and going to the simulators every day. You're reviewing procedures and checklists and having a nice time, because you have the opportunity to sort of sit back without the pressure of having to be in a sim. I've always enjoyed the time in quarantine, although, because of the launch time, we were getting up at two in the morning every day!"

Columbia's launch attempt on 6 January turned out to be one of the most hazardous yet in the Shuttle's five-year operational history. The count was halted at T-31 seconds, following the accidental draining of almost 4,000 pounds of liquid oxygen from the External Tank! The fill and drain valve, it seemed, had not properly closed when commanded to do so. Launch controllers reset the clock to T-20 minutes and efforts were made to reinitiate the liquid oxygen tanking, but it was quickly realized that time was running out and the window would close before the vehicle was ready. Another 24-hour delay was called. The next attempt, on the 7th, was scrubbed due to poor weather at two Transoceanic Abort Landing sites in Spain and Senegal.

Yet another try on the 9th similarly came to nothing when a liquid oxygen sensor on Pad 39A broke off and lodged itself in the prevalve of one of Columbia's main engines. "That would have been a bad day," pilot Charlie Bolden recalled, grimly, years later. "It would have been catastrophic, because the engine would have exploded, had we launched." Heavy rain put paid to the next opportunity on 10 January, but on this occasion the seven-man crew was relieved. "We went down to T-31 seconds," said Bolden, "and they went into a hold for weather and it was the worst thunderstorm I'd ever been in. We were really not happy about being there, because you could hear the lightning! You could hear stuff crackling in your headset. You're sitting out there on the top of two million pounds of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and two [SRBs]. None of us were enamoured with being out there."

The repeated delays took a financial toll, too. Previously, astronauts were responsible for getting their families to Florida, paying their way, finding motel rooms for them, and putting them up. Crewman George "Pinky" Nelson's wife, Susie, spent three weeks in a condo at Cape Canaveral, waiting, and their young children ended up missing the launch because they had missed so much school and went back to Houston. "Had the accident occurred on that flight, instead of the flight afterwards," said Nelson, "it would have been just a nightmare scene, because the families were scattered all over the place."

As for the cause of the delays, there could be only one person to blame: Steve Hawley.

When the astronauts left their quarters in the pre-dawn darkness of 12 January, Hawley had ridden the bus to the launch pad on ten occasions for only two liftoffs. To this day, he is confident that a conversation and agreement he had with commander Robert "Hoot" Gibson may have helped to finally get Columbia into orbit. "I decided that if [Columbia] didn't know it was me, then maybe we'd launch," he said, "and so I taped my name tag with grey tape and had the glasses-nose-moustache disguise and wore that." It worked and 61C roared into space at 6:55 am EST. Yet misfortune was not done with the crew, as recounted dramatically by Bill Nelson in his book about the flight, Mission.

Shortly after leaving the pad, Bolden noticed an ominous indication of a possible helium leak. An alarm sounded in the cockpit. "I looked down at what I could see," Bolden said, "with everything shaking and vibrating, and we had an indication of a helium leak in the right-hand main engine. Had it been true, it was going to be a bad day." The pilots communicated the information to Mission Control and advised them that they would work their procedures. "The ground didn't see anything" on their data, Bolden continued. "It was a glitch in one of the computers." He and Gibson attempted to isolate the first system, but there was no change. It still looked as if there was a leak. Isolating the second system, similarly, had no effect. "Then, I looked down, and it looked like we were making helium." He told Gibson that it looked like a sensor problem, not a genuine leak. Gibson concurred and they reconfigured the system back to normal. It was an inauspicious start, for all this happened within seconds of liftoff.

Other than the malfunctioning helium sensor, Columbia's seventh ascent was normal, although Bolden recalled that his first flight into space "went by really fast." He has since downplayed his role in isolating the problem, but Bill Nelson, sitting on the middeck and listening to the communications through a headset, would later praise the pilot for "saving" the mission. "We had a problem," Bolden admitted, "but it was an instrumentation problem."

As one of the few black astronauts, there was one particular place that Bolden wanted to see after reaching orbit: Africa. Years later, he would describe it as "awe-inspiring" and it brought tears to his eyes. However, his first glimpse of his ancestral homeland from space would closely mirror the reflections of many other astronauts: for there were no lines or boundaries to demarcate the countries or, indeed, the continents, and Bolden found it difficult to orient himself and realise what he was observing.

Deployment of Satcom K-1 was supervised by Pinky Nelson and fellow astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz and took place near the end of the first day in space. After several hours of checking out the payload, the satellite and its booster were released at 4:26:29 pm EST, a little under ten hours into the mission. All went well, and Satcom finally achieved its geostationary "slot" at 85 degrees West longitude, where it remained operational until April 1997. It marked the last "major" commercial satellite to be launched by the Shuttle, and the remainder of Mission 61C, in Hoot Gibson's words, was "the end of innocence" for the reusable spacecraft.

The astronauts settled down to what should have been five days of experiments and observations of Halley's Comet, which was making its closest approach to Earth since 1910. The Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program (CHAMP) required Nelson to bury himself under a black shroud to eliminate cabin light interference and take high-resolution photographs of the celestial wanderer. Much to Nelson's annoyance, the camera failed due to a battery problem and did not even return one decent image of the comet. Although Nelson and his crewmates tried to repair CHAMP, their efforts were in vain, and by 14 January they were told to press on with the rest of their mission. Another attempt was scheduled for Challenger later in the month and then, in March, ASTRO-1 would conduct an ultraviolet analysis of Halley. However, the loss of Challenger and the stalling of the Shuttle program meant that NASA lost its chance to capitalize on viewing the comet from space.

If the factors which conspired to keep Columbia on the ground were maddening, those which hampered her return to Earth proved equally trying. Originally scheduled to touch down in Florida on 17 January—marking a return to operational use of the Shuttle Landing Facility after improvements to brakes and tyres—the attempt was brought forward by a day to provide more time to prepare for ASTRO-1. However, bad weather in Florida forced a 24-hour delay. Another delay was implemented on the 17th, for the same reason. For Hoot Gibson, the time spent in orbital limbo was spent writing a song to the tune of Who Knows Where or When? He and Bolden sang it to Mission Control in a two-part harmony:

It seemed that we have talked like this before
The de-orbit burn that we copied then
But we can't remember where or when

The clothes we're wearing are the clothes we've worn
The food that we're eating is getting hard to find
Since we can't remember where or when

Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again

And so it seems we will de-orbit burn
Return to Earth and land, somewhere,
But who knows where or when?

Houston loved it and responded with a mock "Wanted" poster for all seven astronauts, calling for them to be returned to Earth immediately, if found.

The first opportunity to land in Florida on 18 January was postponed by one orbit, and when NASA finally ran out of time, Columbia had to be diverted to Edwards Air Force Base in California. "Everything worked, except God!" Charlie Bolden joked. "Finally, on our fifth attempted landing, in the middle of the night, we landed at Edwards, which was interesting because with a daytime scheduled landing, you'd have thought we wouldn't be ready for that. Hoot, in his infinite wisdom, had decided that half our landing training was going to be nighttime, because you needed to be prepared for anything."

Columbia touched down on Runway 22 at 5:58:51 am PST (8:58:51 am in Florida), wrapping up a mission of a little more than six days. Subsequent inspections would reveal severe thermal damage to her right-hand main gear inboard brake, and it was decided that major improvements to withstand higher energy wear would be incorporated.

MEANWHILE ON MARS…

Martian road trip next for Curiosity, but speed is not an option

Todd Halvorson – Florida Today

After a nearly six-month shakedown, NASA's Curiosity rover is getting ready to put some miles on its six wheels.

The car-sized mobile laboratory has driven a quarter-mile since it touched down Aug. 6 and is now nestled in a shallow depression within gaping Gale Crater.

This spring, Curiosity will embark on a four- to five-mile journey to the towering Mount Sharp — the prime scientific destination of its two-year, $2.5 billion mission.

"It's kind of 'The Road Trip Year,' " said Michael Watkins, Curiosity mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

But don't expect fast tracks. It will be slow going.

"I think there is a good chance that it easily could take six months or a little longer to get to the final spot that we want to get to there at the foothills of Mount Sharp," he said.

"I think you're looking at something like end-of-summer at the earliest, and a few months later at the latest."

Before heading out, though, more testing tops the agenda. A primary tool in Curiosity's field geology kit will be tested for the first time. A monthlong campaign to commission the rotary percussive drill will follow.

In early March, the trip will get under way. But then the positions of Earth and Mars — relative to the sun — will force a lengthy stop.

So not until late April will Curiosity really hit the road, so to speak.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in November 2011, Curiosity arrived inside the 96-mile-wide crater just south of the equator on the planet's eastern side.

The area separates Martian northern highlands from southern lowlands, a boundary scientists think was once awash with water.

At the center of the crater — which is about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island — is Aeolis Mons, an 18,000-foot mountain that is taller than Mount Rainer near Seattle.

It is informally known as Mount Sharp, a posthumous tribute to pioneering planetary geologist Robert Sharp, who played key roles in earlier robotic Mars exploration missions.

Scientists selected the site for extensive study because of the sedimentary rocks that form the base and the lower reaches of the mountain.

Layer after layer of material is laid down in sequential stacks. Similar strata in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona hold evidence of the geological history of Earth.

"By reading those layers, one after another, we can piece together the history of Mars, or at least of that region," said Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada.

"We're really excited because of the size of the stack of layers. That means it's a bigger book, a bigger history book about Mars than anywhere else we could think of to land this rover."

Here's what to expect over the next several months:

Now until late February:

The rover's rotary-percussive drill will be exercised for the first time during tests similar to those performed to commission its scoop late last year.

"It's the last real significant capability that hasn't been fully checked out yet, and it's also something that is kind of important to the mission," Watkins said.

The Powder Acquisition Drill System simultaneously turns and hammers to bore holes up to two inches deep and a little more than a half-inch in diameter. It penetrates rock and powder samples that subsequently are fed into either of two onboard laboratories.

The powder travels up an auger and then is transferred to the sample-processing labs. The drill will bore at least three holes initially to check out the tool and cleanse the auger and transfer channels of any Earthly contaminants.

"We're checking out the whole drill performance, and when we've done that successfully, we want to do the cleaning activity," Watkins said. "And then finally, we'll give a sample off to the instruments."

In early March, the rover will begin to roll toward Mt. Sharp, but then the trip will come to a temporary stop.

In April, the planets will align in a way that makes communication between Earth and Mars difficult.

The Earth and Mars will be on opposite sides of the sun – an alignment known as "superior conjunction."

Charged particles thrown off by the sun will effectively block radio signals between ground controllers on Earth, the rover, and relay satellites in Martian orbit.

Travel will be suspended and rover operations will be scaled back for at least three or four weeks, Watkins said.

"And then I think we'll probably start pretty hard-core driving right after the conjunction activity is over," Watkins said.

Curiosity at that point will chart its course from day to day. Ground controllers will pick pathways based on terrain and any obstacles encountered.

The rover probably will travel about 100 to 150 meters a day – "a football field and a half" would be "a pretty good day for us," Watkins said.

Scientists also will call for stops along the way.

"We like to let the science team operate the rover on a mission of discovery as opposed to driving it by the calendar. And so, if they want to take an extra three weeks to look at something they've found, then that adds three weeks," Watkins said.

"I'm just saying the fastest we can drive there is probably three months, and if you assume they are going to stop a few times, it could take as long as six months. It's somewhere in there," he said.

"But like I say, it's kind of a science craft now, a science mission, and the scientists will use it as they see fit to get the maximum science return on Mars," Watkins said.

"I think we all know we really do want to get to the base of Mount Sharp. But that doesn't mean to be blind to anything they find along the way."

END

Keep the shuttle flying

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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight (and Mars) News - January 15, 2013 and JSC Today

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