Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: March 28, 2013 6:33:46 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>, "Taylor, William H. (JSC-IS4)[DB Consulting Group, Inc.]" <william.h.taylor@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - March 28, 2013 and JSC Today

Thanks for all the suggestions and help with Bill Taylor's Awards photo from 1966.   Mo Brooks' suggestion that #8 in the photo might be Darwin Crawford/Lockheed paid off.   I asked Darwin's widow, Colleen, to confirm and she got Darwin's brother to verify that #8 was indeed Darwin.

Jim Blucker suggested that #2 maybe Rudy Henson but we have not gotten other folks that worked in the GN&C area to confirm yet Jim's suggestion.

And #7, we have not had any suggestion thus fare of who that might be.    So, if any of you out there like Ken Cox, Paul Sollock, Rudy Saldana or others can give us a clue of who #2 and 7 are ,,,Bill Taylor would appreciate the help.

Mark your calendars early to remind you to join us at our monthly NASA Retirees luncheon at Hibachi Grill next Thursday at 11:30   and remember Family and Friends are welcome too.

Thursday, March 28, 2013.

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
2.            Today: New Space Station Crew Members to Launch and Dock the Same Day
3.            Graduate Student Presentation on Medical Tourism in Space
4.            Kinect Co-lab Meeting
5.            Calling All Coffee Clubs!
6.            Safety NASA Style! Spring Fair Has Something for Everyone
7.            The College Money Guys
8.            Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps: April 23 to 25
9.            NASA@work: Want an Opportunity to Solve Important NASA Problems?
10.          HAS Program Needs Mentors for the Summer
11.          Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v4.0
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" On March 16, the Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft brought home Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford of NASA, Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy and Flight Engineer Evgeny Tarelkin to a landing northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, following a one-day delay due to inclement weather in the area."
________________________________________
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
I was relieved to find that we agree on the definition of sustainability. Nice awareness. Almost 20 percent thought Florida Gulf Coast would upset Georgetown, but I doubt you had them in your sweet sixteen. Go FGC!
This week it's a fairly generic question about our safety culture. Right off the top of your head, do you think we are solid? Need improvement in our culture? As good as we think we are? The second question pays homage to our love of all things exotic and the diversity we get in Houston with the variety of international cultures. What is your favorite foreign thing? I've listed a few of mine. Which one do you like?
Volkswagen your Samsung on over to get this week's poll.
Joel Walker x30541 http://jlt.jsc.nasa.gov/

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2.            Today: New Space Station Crew Members to Launch and Dock the Same Day
Today, three new crew members are set to launch to the International Space Station on a six-hour flight to travel from the launch pad to their destination.

Chris Cassidy of NASA, along with Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos, are scheduled to launch in their Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:43 p.m. CDT Thursday, March 28 (2:43 a.m. March 29 Baikonur time). Live coverage on NASA TV begins at 2:30 p.m.

Cassidy, Vinogradov and Misurkin will become the first station crew members to make an expedited trip to the orbiting laboratory. Instead of taking the standard two days to rendezvous and dock with the station, they will need only four orbits of Earth to reach the station. This flight will employ rendezvous techniques used recently with three unpiloted Russian Progress cargo spacecraft.

Cassidy, Vinogradov and Misurkin will join Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, Tom Marshburn of NASA and Roman Romanenko of Roscosmos, who have been aboard the outpost since December 2012.

Thursday, March 28
2:30 p.m. -- Expedition 35/36 Soyuz TMA-08M launch coverage (launch scheduled at 3:43 p.m.); includes video B-roll of the crew's pre-launch activities
6 p.m. -- Video file of Expedition 35/36 Soyuz TMA-08M pre-launch, launch video B-roll and post-launch interviews
8:30 p.m. -- Expedition 35/36 Soyuz TMA-08M docking coverage (docking scheduled at 9:32)
10:30 p.m. -- Expedition 35/36 Soyuz TMA-08M hatch opening and other activities (hatch opening scheduled at 11:10 p.m.)

JSC employees with wired computer network connections can view NASA TV using onsite IPTV on channels 404 (standard definition) or 4541 (HD). 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 http://www.nasa.gov/station

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3.            Graduate Student Presentation on Medical Tourism in Space
For the fifth consecutive year, NASA is hosting students in the Space Design Studio of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in the city of New York. The studio involves a semester-long design project and includes travel to JSC for students to present draft designs and to engage members of the JSC community. The theme of the studio project this year is Medical Tourism in Space.
You are invited to attend the student presentation, scheduled as follows:
Today, March 28, from 1 to 5 p.m. in Building 15, Room 267
Event Date: Thursday, March 28, 2013   Event Start Time:1:00 PM   Event End Time:5:00 PM
Event Location: Bldg 15, Room 267

Add to Calendar

Pi Philachack x36861

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4.            Kinect Co-lab Meeting
The Kinect co-lab will be holding its monthly meeting tomorrow, March 29, from 11:30 to 1 p.m. in Building 15, Room 267. The co-lab is designed to bring together people from all areas that are interested in Kinect technology. Please check-out our SharePoint site.
Shelby Thompson x48701 https://collaboration.ndc.nasa.gov/CoLab/kinect/SitePages/Home.aspx

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5.            Calling All Coffee Clubs!
Are you part of an on-site coffee club? Help JSC turn your used coffee grounds into liquid gold (for the plants, that is). Bring a can of your used coffee grounds to the spring Safety, Health and Environmental Fair on April 3 at the Gilruth and help expand JSC's Compost Program. Our goal is to collect 30 cans at the event. Find out how composting can benefit you at home and JSC here at work. (Used coffee grounds only, please.)
JSC Environmental Office x40878 http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/ja/ja13/index.cfm

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6.            Safety NASA Style! Spring Fair Has Something for Everyone
Don't miss the April 3 Spring Safety, Health and Environmental Fair. You can take an Attwater Prairie Chickens tour (10:30 and 11:30 a.m. - meet under the portico), participate in Security's IES firearms simulator, taste an MRE, get free health screenings and learn about everything from personal safety and crime prevention to how to wash your hands correctly. The Houston Community College jazz band will once again play their soothing tunes at the Live Oak pavilion. Grab a free hot dog while you're there, and head over to the environmental booth, where you'll learn all about JSC's compost program. Don't forget to pick up a sapling from the Texas Forestry. Before you leave, be sure to visit Buddy and Brit, the Pearland and Pasadena fire arson dogs. This is just a sampling of the many booths available to learn from. Check out the video here.
Event Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2013   Event Start Time:10:00 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: JSC Gilruth Center

Add to Calendar

Rindy Carmichael x45078

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7.            The College Money Guys
The JSC Employee Assistance Program is happy to present Kris Lloyd with The College Money Guys. Lloyd will provide information on paying for college without going broke. If you are the parent of a high school student who plans to attend college, you need to attend this free workshop on Wednesday, April 10, at 12 noon in the Building 30 Auditorium.
Event Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2013   Event Start Time:12:00 PM   Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Building 30 Auditorium

Add to Calendar

Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Clinical Services Branch x36130

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8.            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, 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 and 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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9.            NASA@work: Want an Opportunity to Solve Important NASA Problems?
Help NASA solve real problems by submitting your solutions to NASA@work challenges. Check out our two active challenges right now: Lab Equipment Obsolescence - Cytometer (deadline: April 19) and Reduce Waste in Space - Creating Feedstock for Additive Manufacturing (3-D Printing) (deadline: April 12). Check them out at http://nasa.innocentive.com and submit your solution today!
Are you new to NASA@work? NASA@work is an agencywide, collaborative problem-solving platform that connects the collective knowledge of experts (like YOU) from all centers across NASA. Challenge owners post problems, and members of the NASA@work community participate by responding with their solutions to posted problems. Anyone can participate.
Kathryn Keeton 281-204-1519 http://nasa.innocentive.com

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10.          HAS Program Needs Mentors for the Summer
High School Aerospace Scholars (HAS) is in full swing and looking for mentors for this summer.
Being a mentor includes:
o             Working with outstanding high school students from across Texas
o             The opportunity to represent your division in education outreach without leaving JSC
o             Inspiring the next generation as only NASA can
o             Using your leadership skills to help students build a realistic human mission to Mars
Mentors are needed the following weeks:
o             June 9 to 14
o             June 16 to 21
o             July 14 to 19
o             July 21 to 26
o             July 28 to Aug. 2
The mentor application can be found here.
Stacey Welch 281-792-8100 http://has.aerospacescholars.org/

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11.          Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v4.0
The JSC Chief Knowledge Officer and the Engineering Directorate are pleased to announce the fourth release of SKC. Changes since last release:
o             Added Process Control, Case Studies and Element Hazard Reports page
o             Changed image rotator to use a standard aspect ratio
o             Added 26,000 files to Shuttle Records section and the search index
o             Updated the SSPWeb content from the production SSPWeb site.
o             Modified the SSPWeb Loads Panel page to provide a better historical reference
o             Fixed the SSPWeb MO page to utilize the original custom site navigation
Note: SSPWeb will be taken completely offline on March 29 and will no longer be available! To date, 1.05 TB of Space Shuttle Program (SSP) knowledge has been captured. If you are aware of data that still needs to be captured, contact Howard Wagner or Brent Fontenot. Click the "Submit Feedback" button located on the top of the site navigation and give us your comments and thoughts.
Brent J. Fontenot x36456 https://skc.jsc.nasa.gov/Home.aspx

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

NASA TV:
·         2:30 pm Central (3:30 EDT) – Soyuz TMA-08M launch coverage begins (Expedition 35/36)
·         3:43 pm Central (4:43 EDT) – LAUNCH (includes b-roll of pre-launch activities)
·         6 pm Central (7 EDT) – File of pre-launch & launch as well as post-launch interviews
·         8:30 pm Central (9:30 EDT) – Soyuz docking coverage begins
·         9:32 pm Central (10:32 EDT) – DOCKING
·         10:30 pm Central (11:30 EDT) – Soyuz hatch opening coverage
·         11:10 pm Central (12:10 am Friday EDT) – HATCH OPENING (welcome, etc.)
·         11:45 pm Central (12:45 am Friday EDT) – Playback of Soyuz post-docking news conference
·         1 am Central FRIDAY (2 EDT) – File of Soyuz docking, hatch opening, welcome, etc.

Human Spaceflight News
Thursday, March 28, 2013

Soyuz TMA-08M readied for today's launch from Baikonur (Photo: NASA's Carla Cioffi)

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Navy SEAL headed to International Space Station on Soyuz

Todd Halvorson – Florida Today

A lot of people know Chris Cassidy is only the second Navy SEAL to be selected to the NASA Astronaut Corps and to fly in space. But few know Cassidy led the first platoon of SEALS to be deployed to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Or that Cassidy, who is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station Thursday, led a platoon into mountainous al Qaeda hideaway caves at Zhawar Kili, where Osama bin Laden operated a terrorist training base. Or that Cassidy and his platoon captured the terrorist ship that supplied the explosives used in the deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania – bin Laden-orchestrated attacks that killed 200-plus people and injured 5,000.

New crew to International Space Station approved

Indo-Asian News Service (IANS)

The Russian state commission has approved the makeup of the main and back-up crews of a new expedition to the International Space Station. The mission will be launched Friday. "The chief medical commission ruled that both the main and the backup crew members were fit for performing a space flight," said Sergei Krikalyov, head of Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. The main crew comprises Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and Christopher Cassidy of NASA.

Space station shifts its orbit to make speedy crew rendezvous possible

James Oberg - NBCNews.com

For more than 30 years, Russian spaceships have taken two days to dock with their target — but on Thursday, the travel time for a Soyuz capsule carrying three spacefliers to the International Space Station is being trimmed to six hours. Has the Soyuz suddenly become speedier? Not really. The Soyuz itself won't fly any faster when it's sent into space at 4:43 p.m. ET from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It won't have any fundamentally new or improved guidance and navigation system. "All the systems of the vehicle are the same, but the work is more intense," Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov, the Soyuz's commander, said last week during a news briefing. "There are no new systems or modes in the vehicle, but the coordination work of the crew should be better."

Next space station crew to launch and dock today

Justin Ray - SpaceflightNow.com

Aimed to fly straight to the International Space Station on Thursday, launching and docking in a matter of hours, a three-man crew is making final preparations for blastoff aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. It marks a significant change to standard operating procedures for sending crew members to the orbiting outpost, opting to perform a rapid rendezvous instead of the typical two-day pursuit to catch the station and join the 35th Expedition.

New Space Station Crew to Launch and Dock Today in Cosmic First

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

Three men are poised to make history today when they blast off on a rocket ride today that will reach the International Space faster than any astronauts to fly there before. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Pavel Vinogradov are due to arrive at the orbiting laboratory just six hours after they launch at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT). The liftoff will begin a months-long mission in orbit for the three men. The trio will blast off from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The mission's Soyuz rocket rolled out to the launch pad on Tuesday to prepare for today's liftoff.

Sarah Brightman initially turned down space travel offer

London Daily Express

The classical singer, who was once married to theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, is set to visit the International Space Station in 2015, but the star reveals she almost missed her chance. She tells Seven magazine, "When I first was asked to do it, I thought 'I don't think so'. It's a really important step to take. But the second time I felt ready. "I'm feeling anticipation about the flight, but no apprehension, just how I feel before I go on stage."

After Budgetary Dust Settles, NASA Left with $16.5B for 2013

Dan Leone - Space News (March 25)

NASA will see a $1.3 billion budget cut this year under a stopgap spending bill the U.S. Congress approved March 21. After absorbing across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, NASA stands to receive $16.5 billion for 2013 - an amount 7.3 percent below the $17.8 billion the agency has been held to since 2011 under a series of short-term spending resolutions Congress has been passing in lieu of annual appropriations bills.

Space Launch System Truths and Misconceptions

Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.com

AmericaSpace recently received numerous comments stating that NASA's new Space Launch System, or "SLS," was neither wanted by the space agency nor did it even have a mission. It was also said that, under the current economic uncertainty, NASA could not afford this new heavy-lift booster. These beliefs stem from the perception that Congress forced SLS on the space agency. AmericaSpace has sought to seek out the validity of these assertions and whether or not they have any basis in fact. When we approached NASA, we were referred to the space agency's Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate Dan Dumbacher. Dumbacher spoke with AmericaSpace for close to half an hour regarding the topics of SLS and Orion, as well as the driving forces that were behind how the agency has been managing its newest human-rated launch vehicle and the spacecraft that will ride atop it.

New ATV Launch Date Has Implications for O3b

Peter de Selding - Space News

Europe's fourth ATV cargo carrier has been cleared for a June 5 launch to the international space station, a date that will complicate life for startup satellite broadband provider O3b Networks, whose first launch is scheduled to occur in late May from the same French Guiana spaceport. The 20,000-kilogram ATV-4 missed its original April launch date when a glitch was found in an avionics box during testing at the Guiana Space Center, located on the northeast coast of South America.

NASA inspectors say space agency 'poorly managed' explosives at Stennis, other centers

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA's inspector general said in a report released Wednesday that the Stennis Space Center here stored explosives in an unsafe building during part of 2012 that could have killed center workers in an explosion and did not have approved precautions in place during tests. The situation has since been changed. Stennis is the NASA center where spacecraft engines are tested, and it works closely with Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA's chief propulsion center. Read the full report.

Mars mission doesn't address risks

Grayson Simmons - The Daily Texan (Univ. of Texas)

Multimillionaire space tourist Dennis Tito, one of seven civilians to ever go to space, announced that he would try to undertake a mission to the Red Planet in 2018 using SpaceX's Dragon capsule. The "Inspiration Mars Foundation" wants to put two people in a small capsule for a 501-day Martian flyby. This is a little easier said than done. To understand why this is such an ambitious undertaking, it's important to know how spacecraft move. Einstein's general theory of relativity explains that gravity due to the curvature of space-time causes the orbital motion of the planets. Basically it says that the planets move in ellipses or slightly eccentric circles. This type of movement is pretty efficient, so we emulate it with the movement of our spacecraft.

Petition Asks White House to Reverse NASA Outreach Sequester Cuts

Mike Wall - Space.com

A new online petition asks the White House to repeal budget cuts that have spurred NASA to suspend many of its education and public-outreach efforts. The petition was created on Friday, the same day that NASA issued two internal memos outlining how outreach activities are being scaled back as a result of sequestration, the set of across-the-board federal cuts that took effect March 1. The memos began circulating outside the agency Friday as well.

New bill relates to beach closures

Laura Martinez - Brownsville Herald

A bill pertaining to the temporary closure of Boca Chica beach so SpaceX can conduct rocket launches — if they're launched from Boca Chica beach — is scheduled to be heard Monday before the Texas House Committee on Land and Resource Management in Austin. SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, has yet to select a site for its rocket launches, but state legislators want to get everything in place should rural Cameron County be the selected site for one of its facilities.

How an early launch delay impacted the race to space
NASA's little known unmanned MR-BD mission had a big impact on the early Space Race

Amy Shira Teitel - Al Jazeera

We've just passed one of the seldom recognized but really interesting anniversaries in the history of spaceflight. At 12:30 in the morning on March 24, 1961, an unmanned Redstone rocket launched from NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The eight and a half minute suborbital flight reached a peak of 113.5 miles (183km) before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission was labeled "fully successful", but for Alan Shepard it was a bitter disappointment. He was supposed to be on that rocket.

When the Soviets Sent a Dummy Into Space

Amy Shira Teitel - Discovery News

The March of 1961 might have been the closest point between Soviet Union and America in the first wave of the space race. Both countries were fighting to get a man in space and both took major steps that month. For NASA, it was the final unmanned mission to test the booster that would take its first astronauts aloft. For the Soviets, it was the flights of Ivan Ivanovich that proved the Vostok capsule was ready for a man.

Yuri Gagarin (1934-68): An Enduring Legacy

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com

On 27 March 1968, the first son of humanity ever to break the bonds of Earth and venture into the ethereal blackness of space lost his life in a horrifying aircraft accident. Seven years earlier, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin had been literally transformed from a humble farmboy-turned-aviator into the most famous man in the world, when he circled the Home Planet once in his automatically-controlled Vostok 1 capsule. In a stroke, he cemented the credentials of Communist Russia, wreaked havoc in the political halls of the United States, and created a legend and a legacy which will endure so long as history continues to be written. Forty-five years ago Wednesday night, the world mourned the loss of one of its finest sons … a son who grew up in the desperation of Nazi hegemony over his homeland, who reached the most exalted heights possible, and who died long before his time.
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Navy SEAL headed to International Space Station on Soyuz

Todd Halvorson – Florida Today

A lot of people know Chris Cassidy is only the second Navy SEAL to be selected to the NASA Astronaut Corps and to fly in space.

But few know Cassidy led the first platoon of SEALS to be deployed to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Or that Cassidy, who is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station Thursday, led a platoon into mountainous al Qaeda hideaway caves at Zhawar Kili, where Osama bin Laden operated a terrorist training base.

Or that Cassidy and his platoon captured the terrorist ship that supplied the explosives used in the deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania – bin Laden-orchestrated attacks that killed 200-plus people and injured 5,000.

"Cassidy's a good man," Brandon Webb wrote in the book "The Red Circle. My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen."

"I felt good knowing he was in charge of the crew," Webb added.

NASA Chief Astronaut Bob Behnken concurs. He says Cassidy is ready for a six-month deployment to the space station.

After all, a background check shows the Navy commander is an experienced specialist in long-range and desert reconnaissance patrols, building assaults, non-compliant ship-boardings, combat diving and underwater explosives not to mention launching, navigating, piloting and commanding submersibles for covert and clandestine special operations. A veteran of four, six-month deployments – two to Afghanistan and two to the Mediterranean – Cassidy also is an expert in air operations, including parachuting, fast roping and rappelling.

"For Chris Cassidy, as an active duty Navy SEAL, he's always ready for anything," Behnken said. "Chris is ready, and he's raring to go, just like any Navy SEAL would be."

Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts – Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin – are scheduled to blast off at 4:43 p.m. EDT from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The three men plan to make the first, same-day launch-and-docking at the International Space Station.

After circumnavigating Earth four times on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the space explorers are scheduled to arrive at the outpost at 10:32 p.m. EDT. Considering they board the Soyuz several hours before liftoff, the six-hour flight makes for a long day in launch-and-entry suits. But it also has advantages over the traditional two-day trip in a cramped Soyuz spacecraft.

"The advantage, obviously, is we're getting to the space station faster. And that brings with it a whole lot more comfort than is provided to you in the Soyuz," Cassidy said.

"The Soyuz is a great space vehicle, but it's designed just to get you there and get you back, and the creature comforts are not quite the same as you have on the space station with food, and a bed, and your living quarters, and a better toilet and all these things."

Cassidy, Vinogradov and Misurkin will join Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, the current outpost commander, U.S. astronaut Thomas Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko onboard the orbital laboratory complex.

Their expedition to the station is expected to be busy.

European, Japanese and Russian robotic resupply ships are due to arrive during Cassidy's half-year tour of duty.

A new unmanned U.S. commercial space freighter – dubbed Cygnus and made by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia – also might make an inaugural arrival on a cargo-delivery demonstration mission.

What's more, at least six spacewalks – four by Russian cosmonauts, and two by Cassidy and Parmitano – are on tap. Cassidy performed three spacewalks during a 2009 station assembly flight.

"It's shaping up to be a very dynamic and very busy expedition," Cassidy said.

He and his crewmates are scheduled to return to Earth on Sept. 11.

New crew to International Space Station approved

Indo-Asian News Service (IANS)

The Russian state commission has approved the makeup of the main and back-up crews of a new expedition to the International Space Station. The mission will be launched Friday.

"The chief medical commission ruled that both the main and the backup crew members were fit for performing a space flight," said Sergei Krikalyov, head of Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

The main crew comprises Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and Christopher Cassidy of NASA.

The backup crew lists Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky of Russia and Michael Hopkins.

Vinogradov and Kotov have taken two spaceflights.

For Cassidy, this will be the second spaceflight in total but the first onboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft.

None of the backup crew members have flight experience so far.

The Soyuz-FG rocket, carrying the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft, was rolled out to the launch pad at the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan Tuesday. The launch is set for 12.44 a.m. Moscow time Friday (8.00 p.m. GMT Thursday), with docking to the ISS planned for some six hours later.

This will be the first manned flight to the ISS under the "short" six-hour flight programme earlier tested by the Progress space freighters. All previous manned Soyuz missions were carried out under the two-day scheme.

Space station shifts its orbit to make speedy crew rendezvous possible

James Oberg - NBCNews.com

For more than 30 years, Russian spaceships have taken two days to dock with their target — but on Thursday, the travel time for a Soyuz capsule carrying three spacefliers to the International Space Station is being trimmed to six hours.

Has the Soyuz suddenly become speedier? Not really.

The Soyuz itself won't fly any faster when it's sent into space at 4:43 p.m. ET from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It won't have any fundamentally new or improved guidance and navigation system. "All the systems of the vehicle are the same, but the work is more intense," Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov, the Soyuz's commander, said last week during a news briefing. "There are no new systems or modes in the vehicle, but the coordination work of the crew should be better."

This faster flight plan is possible only because someone else is doing the real work. The space station itself has shifted its position to be nearer to the Soyuz when that spacecraft goes into orbit. It is quite literally moving itself right in front of the speeding Soyuz.

The rapid rendezvous procedure has already been tested twice with robotic supply flights, but this is the first time it's been used with a crewed spacecraft. If it works, the crew should be docking with the station at 10:31 p.m. ET Thursday, taking the fastest ride to an orbital destination since NASA's Skylab missions, 40 years ago.

Hunter and hunted

Chasing down a target in the trackless void of space is not as simple as merely catching sight of it and thrusting towards it. The inflexible rules of orbital mechanics — motion along orbital paths — demand precise timing of critical course changes on the part of the vehicle that's doing the chasing.

For any space rendezvous, the first critical time is the moment when the chaser's launch pad passes below the target's circular orbit. If the chaser is launched during this moment and heads in a direction parallel to the target's orbital course, it winds up more or less in the same orbital plane as the target. That's the "planar window" for a launch.

But there's another critical timing requirement, having to do with how far ahead the target is when the chaser enters orbit. The target could be at any point in the circular path it follows around Earth, but it's important to choose the right point for launching the chaser.

The numbers give you an idea of the scale of the problem: The space station travels in a circular orbit that averages around 224 miles (360 kilometers) in altitude, and the chaser spacecraft are usually launched into initial orbits averaging around 143 miles (230 kilometers). That lower orbit is faster, both because gravity is slightly stronger there, and because the radius is smaller, which makes each circuit shorter.

For that difference in average altitude, a typical chaser spacecraft will catch up with the station at a rate of 560 mph (900 kilometers per hour). So if the chaser starts out 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) behind the station in its orbit, it will take about 10 hours to overtake the station. If it's 16,800 miles (27,000 kilometers) behind, it would take 30 hours. And it might be even farther.

Flexibility is key

If you have a long period of time available for making your rendezvous — say, one or two days — you have more flexibility for launch opportunities, even if your chaser spacecraft starts out lagging far behind the station. Mission designers prefer to pick launch days on which the lag falls within a certain range. If it's relatively far away, the chaser stays lower and faster for a longer period, to make up the lag. If the target is not so far away, the crew flies their ship higher sooner, to slow down the approach rate and arrive at the target at the same desired time.

The fast-rendezvous scenario, in contrast, has very little flexibility. The Soyuz has only a few hours to vary its altitude in order to accommodate a range of possible target distances. The range of acceptable distances between the chaser spacecraft and the space station is known as the "phase window." For a fast rendezvous, the phase window shrinks from what's typically about half of each orbit to as little as 5 percent of each orbit.

There are only a few launch opportunities when the precise time of the planar window also falls within the narrow slot of the phase window. That makes it harder to select an appropriate launch date for a fast rendezvous.

The job was easier back in the '60s, for the early rendezvous missions conducted by NASA and the Soviets. That's because those missions involved launching the target satellite first, and then launching the chaser no more than a few hours later. In such cases, the lag distance for the chaser's launch could be customized to fit the short range for a quick docking.

These days, the only way to approximate that required narrow slot in the sky is to have the International Space Station do an engine burn. This can push the station ahead or behind in its orbit, so that it happens to be at the proper distance at precisely the time when the Soyuz is launched.

That critical orbital maneuver took place a week ago: On March 21, a Progress cargo craft attached to the station fired its thrusters for 11 minutes and 13 seconds, pushing its orbital altitude from 253.5 to 255 miles (408 to 410.5 kilometers). It's just a mile and a half, but it's enough to ensure that the station will be in the right place, assuming that the Soyuz launches at the right time.

For all the virtuosity of the cosmonauts in their steering, the factor that makes the briefer trip at all possible is the target generously maneuvering itself right into the chaser's sights. And for every quick rendezvous in the future, by Russian or American or other orbital vehicles, the same elaborate target line-up will be required.

Next space station crew to launch and dock today

Justin Ray - SpaceflightNow.com

Aimed to fly straight to the International Space Station on Thursday, launching and docking in a matter of hours, a three-man crew is making final preparations for blastoff aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.

It marks a significant change to standard operating procedures for sending crew members to the orbiting outpost, opting to perform a rapid rendezvous instead of the typical two-day pursuit to catch the station and join the 35th Expedition.

The crew of Soyuz TMA-08M won't have to live in the cramped quarters of their craft for a couple of days, but the alternative is a hectic launch-to-docking timeline that lasts a mere six hours.

Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin of the Russian Federal Space Agency and NASA's Chris Cassidy are scheduled for liftoff Thursday at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT).

Their orbital maneuverings to reach the station include a pair of large burns within 90 minutes of liftoff, entering the automated rendezvous phase by 8:26 p.m. EDT, rapidly closing in on the station to perform a flyaround to align with the docking port at 10:11 p.m. EDT and linking up with the Poisk module at 10:32 p.m. EDT (0232 GMT).

The whole process will take five hours and 48 minutes.

The Russians successfully conducted same-day launches and dockings on their last three cargo resupply ships, giving confidence to try the sprint on a crewed vehicle.

Hatches are scheduled to open between the Soyuz and station at 12:10 a.m. Friday, boosting the outpost's resident crew back to six people.

Vinogradov, Misurkin and Cassidy will join Expedition 35 commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, NASA's Tom Marshburn and Russia's Roman Romanenko.

The three-stage Soyuz booster was rolled out to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site on Tuesday morning, moving horizontally by railcar and taking the winding route from the final assembly building to the same historic pad used at the dawn of human spaceflight in 1961 to send Yuri Gagarin off the Earth.

Hydraulic pistons lifted the rocket upright on the pad and gantry swing arms moved into position to enclose the vehicle. Technicians on four levels hooked up electrical and telemetry cables between the rocket and pad.

Cassidy will be the 26th NASA astronaut to launch aboard the Russian Soyuz dating back to Norm Thagard in 1995. Two of those astronauts have gone up twice, making this NASA's 28th "seat" reserved in the capsule flights to both the Mir and the International Space Station. In addition, six Americans have paid to fly on the spacecraft as tourists to the ISS.

NASA crew members have routinely used the Soyuz to access the International Space Station since 2003 in the wake of Columbia, when full Expedition rotations were shifted away from the space shuttle and over to the Russian spacecraft.

And even when Expedition crews used the American space shuttles for launches and landings earlier in the program, the Soyuz vehicles still served as their emergency lifeboats to escape the station.

Since arriving at Baikonur earlier this month, Vinogradov, Misurkin and Cassidy have conducted final training sessions, fulfilled Russian spaceflight traditions, performed inspections of their spacecraft and participated in a full dress rehearsal that included donning Sokol spacesuits and climbing into the capsule.

They also got to see the upcoming Progress cargo ship and the new treadmill packed inside for delivery to the station.

New Space Station Crew to Launch and Dock Today in Cosmic First

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

Three men are poised to make history today when they blast off on a rocket ride today that will reach the International Space faster than any astronauts to fly there before.

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Pavel Vinogradov are due to arrive at the orbiting laboratory just six hours after they launch at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT). The liftoff will begin a months-long mission in orbit for the three men.

The trio will blast off from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The mission's Soyuz rocket rolled out to the launch pad on Tuesday to prepare for today's liftoff.

In the nearly 13 years since crews first began launching to the International Space Station, it has taken Russian Soyuz capsules and U.S. space shuttles about two days to reach the orbiting lab after liftoff. Now, NASA and Russia's Federal Space Agency are testing out a new, accelerated schedule.

The quick journey, which takes just four orbits of Earth, has been carried out by recent unmanned cargo spacecraft visiting the space station, but never by a crew.

"The four-orbit rendezvous has the advantage of a very short period of time from launch to docking," Mike Suffredini, NASA's International Space Station program manager, said of the mission. "It reduces the amount of time the crew has to spend in a small environment before they get to ISS."

Cassidy, Misurkin and Vinogradov are planning to join the station's Expedition 35 mission for a roughly six-month stay. The current residents of the outpost are commander Chris Hadfield of Canada, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn.

"It's shaping up to be a really exciting expedition — we've got a lot going on," Cassidy, 43, said. "We're very excited to join our friends and colleagues Roman, Chris and Tom on the space station."

The crew's time will be filled with science experiments, space station upkeep, and visits from visiting robotic cargo delivery spacecraft. Both the Russian cosmonauts, and possibly the American crew, will conduct six spacewalks during their mission for space station maintenance.

"It's a very fun and very interesting activity for us," Misurkin said of spacewalking. "During these tasks we are doing to install some scientific equipment outside of the station, and also we are going to prepare some special stuff for the Russian module which will come a little bit later."

Misurkin, 35, will be making his first trip to space, while Cassidy and Vinogradov are veterans. Cassidy flew on the STS-127 space shuttle mission in 2009, while Vinogradov served on two long-duration missions, including a stint on the International Space Station in 2006.

"Going back to the International Space Station feels like going back home," Vinogradov, 59, said. "I recognize the station is completely different from what it was when we were there. I think this is my second favorite place besides my home."

Cassidy, too, said he was looking forward to returning to space, and would relish the chance to see his hometown of York, Maine from orbit.

"Flying over my home town — that, I'm really excited about," Cassidy told SPACE.com in a preflight interview. "I come from a small town in Maine and there are a lot of people watching and that brings me a great amount of pride."

Sarah Brightman initially turned down space travel offer

London Daily Express

The classical singer, who was once married to theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, is set to visit the International Space Station in 2015, but the star reveals she almost missed her chance.

She tells Seven magazine, "When I first was asked to do it, I thought 'I don't think so'. It's a really important step to take. But the second time I felt ready.

"I'm feeling anticipation about the flight, but no apprehension, just how I feel before I go on stage."

Brightman has undergone tests to ensure she is fit enough for the mission, and she reveals medics are impressed with her abilities.

She adds, "The doctor, who's worked with a lot of the astronauts who've been up for years, was saying... 'I don't believe this. Even on the brain scans you're coming out perfect.'"

The singer has also embarked on a training program, and is enjoying the challenges in a simulator.

She explains, "It was full on. I didn't know what to expect but it was far more than I expected. But I'd already sort of been trained for it by all my years of touring, in terms of the uncomfortableness, not knowing what to expect, having to create something out of nothing.

"Doing the centrifuge (gravity and acceleration test), I was completely calm, my heart rate hardly went out at all, I didn't have a problem with it. I didn't know how I'd deal with the claustrophobia either being shut into the air compression chamber, but I felt most relaxed, almost sleepy in those confined areas."

After Budgetary Dust Settles, NASA Left with $16.5B for 2013

Dan Leone - Space News (March 25)

NASA will see a $1.3 billion budget cut this year under a stopgap spending bill the U.S. Congress approved March 21.

After absorbing across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, NASA stands to receive $16.5 billion for 2013 - an amount 7.3 percent below the $17.8 billion the agency has been held to since 2011 under a series of short-term spending resolutions Congress has been passing in lieu of annual appropriations bills.

"It would be nice to get a real budget that defines where the agency's going," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said March 20 at the Robert H. Goddard Memorial Symposium in Greenbelt, Md. "Talking to the corporate representatives here, I know it drives you batty to have to plan in six-month increments, or three- month increments, or whatever else we're doing."

The Senate passed an amended version of the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (H.R. 933) on March 20, sending it back to the House of Representatives the next day for final approval. U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the nearly $1 trillion measure, which funds federal agencies through September.

NASA, which is now six months into its 2013 budget year, is still awaiting Obama's proposed budget for 2014. The president's budget proposal is supposed to be delivered to Congress in early February; this year's request is not expected to be made public until the second week of April.

While the spending measure Congress passed March 21 technically includes $17.8 billion for NASA, not all of that money will reach the agency.

That is because the Senate tacked on a 1.877 percent rescission for nonsecurity spending in the Commerce, Justice, Science portion of the bill, which includes NASA. Factoring in a 5 percent sequestration cut, NASA's total funding falls to $16.5 billion for 2013.

H.R. 933 softens sequestration's blow for some NASA programs, however, by boosting their budgets at the expense of others.

NASA's Space Operations and Cross Agency Support accounts, both of which the White House had proposed cutting this year, were used as bill payers for the increases Congress included for the Exploration and Space Technology accounts.

The Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, the biggest piece of NASA's Exploration account, will get $1.99 billion, post sequester. That is slightly more than the $1.88 billion the rocket development effort got in 2012.

Meanwhile, the Commercial Crew Program will get $489 million in 2013, after sequestration. That is substantially less than the $830 million the White House sought for its signature human spaceflight program for 2013, but a boost compared with the 2012 funding level of $406 million.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate, meanwhile, will wind up with a post sequestration budget of about $4.8 billion for 2013, nearly $295 million less than 2012.

Space Launch System Truths and Misconceptions

Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.com

AmericaSpace recently received numerous comments stating that NASA's new Space Launch System, or "SLS," was neither wanted by the space agency nor did it even have a mission. It was also said that, under the current economic uncertainty, NASA could not afford this new heavy-lift booster. These beliefs stem from the perception that Congress forced SLS on the space agency. AmericaSpace has sought to seek out the validity of these assertions and whether or not they have any basis in fact.

When we approached NASA, we were referred to the space agency's Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate Dan Dumbacher. Dumbacher spoke with AmericaSpace for close to half an hour regarding the topics of SLS and Orion, as well as the driving forces that were behind how the agency has been managing its newest human-rated launch vehicle and the spacecraft that will ride atop it. It turns out that one of the most prominent of these forces is something that the nation itself has been struggling with for the past few years—the budget.

AmericaSpace: First, let me thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We have been hearing a lot of things about NASA's new Space Launch System and we were hoping to gain the agency's perspective on them.

Dumbacher: "My pleasure. I hope I can help clarify a few things."

AmericaSpace: Dan, a lot of people are very interested and excited about NASA's Space Launch System. There have been some things that have been stated about SLS that we were hoping you could help us with. The Program of Record before SLS was the Constellation Program, and it had a very clear mandate under the Vision for Space Exploration, "Moon, Mars, and Beyond." SLS doesn't have that. We've heard the president say that he wants NASA to go to an asteroid in the 2020s and to Mars "sometime" in his lifetime. There are some folks who feel that SLS does not have a specific destination. Is this perception valid? Or is it inaccurate?

Dumbacher: "The way we at NASA look at it is, the 'horizon' destination that we are going to is Mars—sending humans to Mars is the goal that we are working toward. There are a number of different ways that we can accomplish this, and we're still looking at the various tradeoffs as to how we conduct that. … That's currently what we are doing right now is to research the various ways that we can send humans to Mars and then bring them safely back home."

AmericaSpace: It sounds like one of these various approaches might be a stepping stone–type approach. This would mean that SLS would have a number of possible closer destinations (the Moon, a LaGrange Point, or an asteroid). Can you pick one out as an example for us?

Dumbacher: "Some of the destinations that we are looking at between here and Mars are, obviously, the Moon, the area around the Moon, and of course some asteroids. This will serve to get us ready to go to Mars and its moons. Now, the one thing that we want to make sure that everybody understands is that there is a fundamental capability that we need to have to get to any of those destinations. We need to get crew beyond Earth orbit, and we need to get crew home from beyond-Earth orbit—and that's the role of Orion. Orion gives us about a 21-day capability; now that is obviously a short time, but what is missing in that is that we will eventually have to develop what we call the habitat module, or 'the habitat.' The astronauts would stay in this for the longer-duration missions, and Orion would be attached to the habitat. It would remain 'quiet' (essentially powered-down) once we got the astronauts to the habitat, and it would be reactivated once we needed to get the astronauts back home."

AmericaSpace: President Obama has directed NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid. You might not have picked out which one, but you do plan to use SLS and Orion to send a crew to an asteroid, correct?

Dumbacher: "That is one of the trade studies that we are looking at. As you mentioned, there has been a presidential directive to travel to an asteroid around 2025, and we are currently looking into which asteroid would be most appropriate for such a mission. We actually have some options there—we can either send the humans to the asteroid or bring the asteroid to the humans. We are currently reviewing all of those options. So we are still trying to define what that mission might look like. This is heavily dependent on the type of asteroid, what its orbit is like, and so on."

AmericaSpace: Any and all of these 'side' destinations, however …

Dumbacher: "Are all aimed at making sure that we learn what we need to learn on the road to Mars.

AmericaSpace: A bit off-topic here, but there have been multiple incidents involving meteors and asteroids lately, and this has garnered a lot of interest in NEOs (Near-Earth-Objects). How do you view the role of Orion and SLS in helping us to avoid having Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck save us using a titanium shuttle? Is this part of what NASA is looking into, or is just traveling to an asteroid, or is there a whole range of things that NASA is looking into?"

Dumbacher: (Laughs) "Let me back you up a little bit. We haven't made any commitments—to any missions. What we are currently doing is, while we are building SLS and Orion, we are also in parallel with that, working through the missions that we are going to conduct first, second, third, and fourth. If we go to an asteroid, depending on how we do it, the whole idea is to learn how to travel beyond Earth orbit. For example, the navigation, how do we get there, how do we work in those orbits? They are different from those that we typically deal with in low-Earth orbit. They are also different than the orbits that the Apollo astronauts conducted around the Moon. We also have to learn about how to conduct communications, command, and control approaches for when we have astronauts so far away. Obviously, as you go further and further towards Mars that round-trip communications time takes longer and longer. We have to learn how to deal with that. We have to learn how to handle the radiation environments and the solar flares that feed into the radiation environment—these kinds of things we have to learn along the way, and we also have to learn how to build reliable spacecraft that can support human life for long-duration missions. This is no small thing to consider when with every minute they travel, home is increasingly further away, and therefore it's harder to get repairs if something should go wrong."

One of the oft-repeated sentiments regarding NASA's new heavy-lift booster, the Space Launch System, is that NASA did not want the booster. This is obviously factually inaccurate, as just a year-or-so earlier NASA was developing the Ares V heavy-lift booster—when compared side-by-side, the two launch vehicles are very similar. Moreover, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has publicly stated that one of his main priorities – is SLS.

We continue our interview with Dan Dumbacher and he emphatically denied that this belief has any basis in fact. To the contrary, the message that Dumbacher relayed was that not only did NASA want SLS, it needed it.

AmericaSpace: One of the things that AmericaSpace has seen posted repeatedly and stated as 'fact' is that NASA does not want SLS—that Congress forced SLS on NASA. NASA Administrator Bolden already addressed this when he testified to Congress that his three priorities—and I believe that they were in this order—were Orion, SLS, and the James Webb Space Telescope (it turns out that SLS and Orion were one priority, JWST another and ISS/Commercial cargo and crew the third). Is NASA excited about this new heavy-lift booster? The agency definitely wants this heavy-lift booster. Is it correct to say this, sir?

Dumbacher: "That is fair to say. NASA needs Orion and the Space Launch System to conduct exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. All of our studies over the years have demonstrated the need for a launch vehicle that can get significant mass to orbit and can help us cut down on trip times, and we need that launch vehicle's capabilities to get us beyond Earth orbit, which we have been operating in for a little over 30 years. It has been over 40 years since we have been outside of Earth's orbit. If we are going to go beyond Earth orbit, then we need Orion and we need the Space Launch System, and that is why you heard NASA Administrator Bolden list Orion and SLS as some of his top priorities."

AmericaSpace: The next point that we want to address is one that has also been brought up repeatedly, and it is one that most Americans are concerned with—the budget. Sequestration is already causing issues with some of NASA's other programs. One of the things that has been stated is that while NASA might not be 'slow-rolling' SLS, it does appear to be taking its time with the program in an effort to kind of ride out the country's current state of economic turbulence. Is there any truth to this belief that NASA is taking its time on Orion and SLS so as to ride out the financial dynamic we see today?

Dumbacher: "I don't think that is another dynamic, but I do think that the characterization that NASA is 'slow-rolling' these programs is unfair. We are actually working as fast as we can within the budget constraints that we have to work within. We recognize as an agency that there are many demands on the federal budget and we are part of that budget, so we do have to recognize that we have to live within budget constraints. We will not see the budget environment that we had back in the '60s. So, it's incumbent upon NASA to live within the budget constraints and that's what we are doing. Would we like to go faster? You bet! However, because of the national budget situation and the national budget environment, we have to recognize that we have to work within those constraints and that is what we are doing."

AmericaSpace: There have been several metric-ton amounts that SLS is required to deliver to orbit. What caused those amounts to be selected? Why 70 and 110? Why does SLS have to have that capability to accomplish its objectives?

Dumbacher: "Seventy metric tons is the version of the launch vehicle that we are currently working on to send Orion to orbit for the 2017 mission. Ultimately, however, we are working toward the 130-metric-ton version that is planned to be used for the Mars missions. We need the 130-metric-ton version for the Mars missions. The 70-metric-ton variant is the vehicle that we could develop and have useful payload abilities within a reasonable timeframe and within the budget constraints. So, the 70-metric-ton version will provide us with the capability of sending Orion with crew to the area around the Moon and allow us to be able to work within that vicinity. We are also working on a plan to upgrade SLS after the first few missions to about 105-metric-ton capability on our way to 130. So, from an SLS perspective you should be hearing numbers of 70, 105, and 130."

AmericaSpace: The one that I think folks are most familiar with is 70.

Dumbacher: "The reason that they have heard that one the most is because that will be our flight-capable version and the one used for our first crewed mission. It's the vehicle that we are designing now. We are designing it in such a way so that we don't have to redesign anything to go to the 105-metric-ton capability, because everything is designed to build toward the 130-metric-ton class. We in the rocket business like to talk about things in terms of mass and volume and those types of considerations—one of the things that we are trying to figure out how to communicate better. When you think about it, a Curiosity lander was about 900 or 1,000 kilograms. So, with all her components, 70 metric tons would deliver to low-Earth orbit about 70 Curiosity landers."

AmericaSpace: That's a lot of rovers.

Dumbacher: (Laughs) "That's the message. A launch vehicle at 70 metric tons provides a lot of lift capability to get hardware to the orbits that we need to get to."

AmericaSpace: I'm not sure if you'll recall, but during your presentation at the Cape regarding the future of Human Space Flight, we asked about what type of spacecraft would be required to go to Mars—that it'd probably need to be about twice the size of the ISS. The ISS is about the size of a football field, so if you think about it, you need to have large up-mass capabilities to send such a spacecraft into orbit. Is that what we are hearing?

Dumbacher: "That's exactly what you are hearing. All of our architecture mission analysis that we've done over the years always has shown us that we need lots of hardware to get to Mars, to get to the surface of Mars, and then back home safely. Depending on the hardware used and how you configure the mission, it takes multiple launches. Even using a 130-metric-ton class SLS, it still requires five or six SLS launches to do a Mars mission. In terms of Mars? Bigger launch vehicles are better."

AmericaSpace: When this discussion broke out on AmericaSpace it became a very heated debate. Before we really got too involved we wanted to get our facts straight, which is why we contacted NASA Headquarters. One of the questions that was asked of us was, 'If NASA saw that they could conduct these missions less expensively using smaller commercial launch vehicles—perhaps with more launches—would NASA be willing to do this?' Would you say, 'Look, SLS is great, but we can do it less expensively using either the Delta IV Heavy or the Falcon Heavy'? If NASA crunched the numbers and discovered it could put the mass it needed up on say six Delta IV Heavy or Falcon Heavy launches instead of one SLS, would you do that?

Dumbacher: "If we could do it for less—that is the key. Our analysis using the best data that we can lay our hands on says that there is a trade off with the amount of payload delivered per launch, launch cost, and also the complexity of on-orbit operations, and this begins to impact crew safety as well. If I start to put it up in smaller pieces, then that means there has to be more on-orbit operations that are necessary to get everything attached. And, by the way, that means that the crew will have to contend with longer exposure time in the space environment, radiation exposure, micro-meteorites, and so forth. All of that starts to play into the equation, so I think that gets lost sometimes in the debates that you've experienced. All of the considerations need to be factored into the analysis. It's not just a cost equation, and, in fact, it takes a dramatic reduction in launch costs for smaller launch vehicles to be competitive from a cost perspective. You have to recognize that it is not just a per-unit cost; you also have to include the infrastructure on the ground to manufacture and assemble all of those extra launch vehicles."

AmericaSpace: It sounds kind of like the K.I.S.S. philosophy—Keep it Simple Stupid.

Dumbacher: "Keeping it simple has its advantages. I'm not going to use the second 'S' (laughs).

AmericaSpace: Well, Dan, that covers the three main comments that we've seen repeatedly raised, and so I would like to talk to you a bit about EFT-1, which is scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy late next year, and then in 2017 we should see the first unmanned test flight of an SLS from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39B. However, it is 2021 which is the big year, because that will be the year that the U.S. will send a crew beyond Earth orbit for the first time since 1972. Would you like to talk a bit about what this mission will mean for NASA?

Dumbacher: "Yes, first though I'd like to talk about Exploration Flight Test One, which will be taking place in 2014. First of all, it is not the full-up Orion; it is the Orion structure, its heat shield—those things that we need to get tested as part of developing the crew vehicle. Because it weighs less we are able to send it to high-Earth orbit with a Delta IV Heavy; a Delta IV Heavy could not get Orion beyond Earth orbit. So the Delta IV Heavy meets our testing needs to get the data we need for the design of Orion. EM-1 and EM-2 (Exploration Mission 1 and Exploration Mission 2) is essentially a full-up Orion minus the systems needed to support a crew. We're flying that on EM-1 because we get the integrated stack; we'll get a better understanding of how SLS and Orion work together in the flight environment; we actually go all the way out to the Moon. With EM-1 all we are doing is looking at what the manned mission, EM-1, will look like and test out much of the procedures on EM-2—EM-1 as a 'practice run.' EM-2 is the crewed flight, and it will go to lunar space."

AmericaSpace: Without getting into the orbital mechanics involved, can you break down for us what this mission will look like? Will it be similar to the Apollo 8 mission (which traveled around the Moon in 1968)?

Dumbacher: "We've drawn it up that way. I think I probably could have done a better job of communicating what this mission will look like. EM-2 will have the capability of going to LaGrangian Points, to retro-grade orbits, to do an Apollo 8-style mission. We're sorting through what type of mission makes the most sense. This goes back to the questions: 'What do we need to learn?' and 'How do we need to learn it—in order to prepare for Mars?' "

AmericaSpace: What we heard today is that not only does NASA want SLS, but the agency feels that it needs SLS to be able to go to Mars. That the agency is doing what it can to not only stay within the budget that it has been allotted, but also to be as safe as possible when doing it. NASA views SLS as the rocket that is finally going to send humans to Mars.

Dumbacher: "Right, and I will add to that a little bit in that to do anything significant or worthwhile beyond Earth orbit, we need a launch vehicle like SLS and a spacecraft like Orion in order to execute those missions. They are fundamental elements to our human exploration beyond Earth orbit. It is kind of like how the National Interstate System is a fundamental capability to service our economy. SLS and Orion are fundamental capabilities to allow us to send humans beyond the orbit of Earth.

AmericaSpace: As you might tell, there is some confusion out in the public regarding this subject, which is why we brought it up. We always like to close with the following question: If there was any one thing that you wanted to make the public aware of in terms of SLS and Orion, what would it be?

Dumbacher: "I think that it is all the stuff that we've talked about, and I'll add one. There is the perception in the general public that, since shuttle, NASA is out of the human exploration and human space flight business—that is the furthest thing from the truth. We might not be moving as fast as some people would like, but that is because of the budget conditions. NASA—through its efforts on Commercial Crew and the International Space Station, as well as SLS and Orion—is heavily working on human space exploration. While it might have taken a different form from the shuttle program, this agency is still exploring space. We have a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station with the testing and the experiments that we run there. We're also working to have commercial companies send crew and cargo to the station—an important and integral component of our exploration activities—and NASA is looking beyond Earth orbit with SLS and Orion. So, I think if anything I would add for the general public that NASA is still in the human spaceflight business, and there's going to be more coming and we're working very hard on it."

To summarize, the three points that have been raised about SLS are as follows:

•1 — NASA does not want SLS and is working on it because it is being forced to do so. This statement, from the very highest levels within NASA, does not appear to have any basis in fact. Quite the contrary, NASA has stridently stated the exact opposite.
•2 — There is no mission for the heavy-lift booster. In the short-term this is somewhat accurate. However, Dumbacher addressed this as well. SLS is going to be used to send humans to Mars. •3 — NASA cannot afford SLS. In actuality, the space agency is monitoring the expense of both SLS and Orion to make sure that they remain within NASA's allotted budget.

We also wanted to address statements regarding the use of commercial rockets to replace the Space Launch System and the metric ton requirements placed on SLS. According to Dumbacher, for the time being it would cost more to conduct multiple launches on smaller rockets, and the metric ton requirements were put in place to ensure the booster could loft the payload required to conduct a crewed mission to Mars.

New ATV Launch Date Has Implications for O3b

Peter de Selding - Space News

Europe's fourth ATV cargo carrier has been cleared for a June 5 launch to the international space station, a date that will complicate life for startup satellite broadband provider O3b Networks, whose first launch is scheduled to occur in late May from the same French Guiana spaceport.

The 20,000-kilogram ATV-4 missed its original April launch date when a glitch was found in an avionics box during testing at the Guiana Space Center, located on the northeast coast of South America.

ATV's planned Ariane 5 launch was moved to an undetermined date.

Meanwhile, O3b, based in Britain's Channel Islands, has been hurrying final testing of the first four of its eight satellites planned for launch this year aboard two Europeanized Soyuz rockets.

Ariane 5 and the European Soyuz, as well as the Vega small-satellite launcher, use the same down-range radars and tracking gear. After the launch of one of them, the tracking radars must be repositioned to prepare for the launch of one of the other two vehicles. The repositioning can take between two and three weeks.

Brian Holz, O3b's chief technical officer, said here March 27 that the company has asked its satellite manufacturer, Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy, to work two-shift days — and occasionally round the clock, seven days a week — to complete the first O3b satellites as soon as possible to ship to the spaceport and secure an early Soyuz flight.

Holz said the first four 700-kilogram O3b satellites are now on track to be shipped by Antonov aircraft to the launch base April 9, arriving April 10. Testing at the site could have all four ready for placement in a Soyuz rocket May 26 or May 27, he said.

But that date is now running up against the ATV timetable. Alberto Novelli, ATV mission manager at the 20-nation European Space Agency (ESA), said in a March 27 interview that the Arianespace launch consortium, which manages the French Guiana manifest, confirmed a June 5 launch date aboard an Ariane 5.

Reconfiguring the down-range radars following an Ariane 5 launch on June 5 would likely push O3b's launch to late June.

Holz said O3b is aware of the complications brought by the ATV mission, which must not only clear a launch date with Arianespace, but also reserve a station docking window with NASA and the other space station partners.

Holz said Thales Alenia Space's O3b engineering teams have sacrificed Christmas holidays and are working through Easter as well — neither are obvious concessions in France and Italy — to position the O3b satellites for as early a launch date as possible.

Whether that same thinking prevails at the Guiana Space Center, which in addition to Easter is coming up on a month of May that is traditionally full of French holidays, is not clear.

Holz said he is holding out some hope that the ATV launch date could be pushed out a few days, leaving O3b time to launch in late May and then give the necessary 15 to 20 days to prepare for a mid-June ATV launch. He said that, as a startup company, O3b has a revenue stream that is directly dependent on the launch date.

European government and industry officials have long said it is not easy juggling the demands of commercial and government launch customers at the Guiana Space Center. Commercial customers have long suspected that not all customers are created equal, especially in the case of major government campaigns such as the ATV.

NASA inspectors say space agency 'poorly managed' explosives at Stennis, other centers

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA's inspector general said in a report released Wednesday that the Stennis Space Center here stored explosives in an unsafe building during part of 2012 that could have killed center workers in an explosion and did not have approved precautions in place during tests. The situation has since been changed.

Stennis is the NASA center where spacecraft engines are tested, and it works closely with Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA's chief propulsion center. Marshall employees and contractors routinely travel to Stennis for tests. Current Marshall Director Patrick Scheuermann came to Huntsville in September of 2012 from the post of Stennis director, where he was director during part of the audit period.

Marshall was not among the sites inspected or agencies copied on the inspector general's report, but Scheuermann as Huntsville center director was copied on the agency's response. Marshall referred requests for comment to NASA Headquarters in Washington. Read the full report.

Inspector General Paul Martin's report said NASA's overall Explosives Safety Program "was poorly managed and exposed personnel and facilities to unnecessary risk." Inspectors identified 155 violations of regulations, policies and procedures.

"For example, we found incompatible explosive materials stored in the same location, unsafe distances between occupied buildings and storage facilities containing energetic materials, inaccurate or incomplete inventories of energetic materials, and improper inspection procedures for vehicles used to transport these materials," said a press release. " In our judgment, a lack of oversight, resources, and training at both the local and Headquarters level contributed to the deficiencies we identified."

Stennis, one of the centers inspected, was cited in the Inspector General's press release, as were the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. "To NASA's credit," the release said, "personnel at each site quickly addressed the issues we uncovered that presented an immediate threat to personnel and facilities."

A NASA spokeswoman said today that the agency appreciated the report and takes the safety issues raised seriously. "Safety is at the top of the list of core values at NASA," spokeswoman Beth Dickey said. "We want the public and our employees to have every confidence in our process and procedures for accounting, storing, handling, and transporting energetic materials. The Office of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA Headquarters appreciates the inspector general's findings and recommendations. Every concern raised in the audit will be addressed, and appropriate measures will be taken to prevent mishaps and ensure the highest level of safety for people who work in or near facilities where energetic materials are stored."

Mars mission doesn't address risks

Grayson Simmons - The Daily Texan (Univ. of Texas)

Multimillionaire space tourist Dennis Tito, one of seven civilians to ever go to space, announced that he would try to undertake a mission to the Red Planet in 2018 using SpaceX's Dragon capsule. The "Inspiration Mars Foundation" wants to put two people in a small capsule for a 501-day Martian flyby. This is a little easier said than done.

To understand why this is such an ambitious undertaking, it's important to know how spacecraft move. Einstein's general theory of relativity explains that gravity due to the curvature of space-time causes the orbital motion of the planets. Basically it says that the planets move in ellipses or slightly eccentric circles. This type of movement is pretty efficient, so we emulate it with the movement of our spacecraft.

To move between planetary bodies, we use what are called transfer orbits. After exiting the Earth's atmosphere, a rocket will execute a burn that will put it on a trajectory that looks pretty similar to a planetary orbit. In terms of fuel, these transfer orbits lead to the most efficient ways of moving between planets. But the downside is that they are very slow.

So our first difficulty lies in the fact that the proposed mission will take close to 17 months to complete and require two people to occupy 350 cubic feet of pressurized living room, carrying all of their food, water, and air with them. The food requirement alone is 3,000 pounds. The spacecraft is just too small.

Wallace Fowler, aerospace engineering professor and director of the Texas Space Grant Consortium, says: "A Dragon capsule would be suitable for several days — maybe a week or two, but not a Mars trip lasting months." And even if those factors are dealt with, more problems of living in space —radiation poisoning, psychological degradation, muscle atrophy and calcium loss in bones —would be even harder to solve.

Because cosmic rays constantly bombard our Solar System, radiation poses a serious threat to any manned mission to Mars. On Earth, our atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from that radiation, but spacecraft are unprotected. Without proper shielding the crew will suffer serious radiation poisoning. Fowler thinks that because this radiation problem has yet to be solved, the whole mission "could be a disaster."

Astronaut training includes a regimen of isolation and confinement, but not on the scale of what this mission proposes. The mission poses serious psychological problems for astronauts. Sensory deprivation, the lack of a proper sleep and wake cycle and social deprivation present issues for those spending lengthy amounts of time in space. Retired Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the record for the longest single spaceflight at 14 months, and this was aboard a larger Mir space station with two other cosmonauts. Although he suffered no long term mental effects, he had severe mood problems after returning to Earth.

And if Polyakov's mental health wasn't a problem, his muscles and bones definitely were. Because humans evolved on Earth, our bodies were molded by its gravity of 9.81 meters per second per second. When introduced to a weightless environment, however, muscles atrophy and waste away. NASA's Johnson Space Center has conducted studies that show that astronauts can lose 20 percent of their muscle mass on spaceflights that last five to 11 days. ISS astronauts combat this by working out for two and a half hours a day on specialized equipment in an ISS module much larger than the entire Dragon capsule. But even with this sophisticated exercise equipment, no proven methods to reverse the effects of bone loss during spaceflight. Studies have shown that bone mineral density can decrease by up to 5 percent a month, and takes much longer to regain after returning to Earth.

I welcome the hype about a Mars mission, but suggest caution. We should have teams in space, out of low-Earth orbit, on the moon even. Dennis Tito and the Inspiration Mars Foundation should be working to fund the correct research and a vehicle that is purpose built, because their current plan is not feasible. We should go to Mars, but we need to go about it the right way.

Petition Asks White House to Reverse NASA Outreach Sequester Cuts

Mike Wall - Space.com

A new online petition asks the White House to repeal budget cuts that have spurred NASA to suspend many of its education and public-outreach efforts.

The petition was created on Friday, the same day that NASA issued two internal memos outlining how outreach activities are being scaled back as a result of sequestration, the set of across-the-board federal cuts that took effect March 1. The memos began circulating outside the agency Friday as well.

"The sequester's recent cuts on NASA's spending in public outreach and its STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] programs must not be allowed," the petition states. "These cuts would end the many programs NASA has for educating the children of our society, as well as many other forms of public outreach held by NASA."

NASA officials have stressed that the agency is suspending rather than terminating many of its outreach programs. And some activities are exempt from the suspension, including websites and social media accounts that are already up and running, such as the Mars rover Curiosity's award-winning Twitter feed.

The petition was submitted through the White House's official "We the People" site, which promises an administration response to any petition that garners at least 100,000 signatures within 30 days. As of Wednesday, the NASA education petition has gotten about 5,800 people to sign on.

Some organizations are already taking steps to help fill the education and public outreach (EPO) gap that NASA's suspension has created.

Space-funding company Uwingu, for example, announced Monday (March 25) that money raised by its public contest to name Alpha Centauri Bb — the closest known exoplanet to our own solar system — will be put toward grants for EPO projects and personnel affected by NASA's cutback.

"At Uwingu, we believe that private and commercial funding of space-based initiatives — including research and EPO — is more important now than ever," company CEO Alan Stern, a former NASA science chief and head of the agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto, said in a statement.

Sequestration is imposing budget cuts across many federal agencies and institutions. NASA's budget is taking nearly a billion-dollar hit, dropping to $16.9 billion from the $17.8 billion that Congress approved last year.

All of the space agency's activities are being cut by the same amount (5 percent), as NBC News' Alan Boyle points out. So we may see other petitions pop up when people learn exactly how the sequester is going to affect NASA's science and exploration plans.

New bill relates to beach closures

Laura Martinez - Brownsville Herald

A bill pertaining to the temporary closure of Boca Chica beach so SpaceX can conduct rocket launches — if they're launched from Boca Chica beach — is scheduled to be heard Monday before the Texas House Committee on Land and Resource Management in Austin.

SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, has yet to select a site for its rocket launches, but state legislators want to get everything in place should rural Cameron County be the selected site for one of its facilities.

"This bill is absolutely critical to keeping Brownsville in the running to attract SpaceX," said state Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, who authored the bill. "If we can't temporarily close the beach, SpaceX can't secure the launch site. If they can't secure the launch site, they can't choose Brownsville. It's about that simple."

The House committee will begin hearing testimony at 2 p.m. Monday on four bills. House Bill 2623, which pertains to the temporary beach closure, is third on the list.

SpaceX founder, billionaire Elon Musk, has repeatedly said Texas is the leading candidate for his rocket launch site. Earlier this month, Musk testified before the House Appropriations Committee about SpaceX's goals.

Texas is one of four sites Musk is considering. Other sites under consideration are in Florida, Georgia and Puerto Rico.

The Texas site is at the eastern end of Texas State Highway 4, about three miles north of the Mexican border. It is about five miles south of Port Isabel and South Padre Island.

According to the Federal Register, SpaceX proposes to build a vertical launch area and a control center to support up to 12 commercial launches per year. They would launch the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and smaller reusable, suborbital launch vehicles. Musk said he hopes to select a site for the launchpad and mission control center this year.

Oliveira said Texas law states public beaches can only be closed if the public's health, safety or welfare is at risk. House Bill 2623 would permit the county and state to close the beaches for rocket launches except on weekends and holidays. The public would have to be notified in advance of the closure.

"From the moment the beach closure issue came up, I have insisted that Memorial Day weekend, the Fourth of July, Labor Day weekend, and all weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day, not be used as a primary launch date," Oliveira said. "The public has a right to use the beach, and planning to launch when the greatest number of people want to use it is an unnecessary restriction. SpaceX is amenable to blocking off those days."

Although the bill does provide an option for closing the beaches on those days, they would only be closed if SpaceX has to delay a launch and can show "it stands to suffer 'significant adverse business consequences' if it doesn't launch," Oliveira said.

How an early launch delay impacted the race to space
NASA's little known unmanned MR-BD mission had a big impact on the early Space Race

Amy Shira Teitel - Al Jazeera

We've just passed one of the seldom recognized but really interesting anniversaries in the history of spaceflight. At 12:30 in the morning on March 24, 1961, an unmanned Redstone rocket launched from NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The eight and a half minute suborbital flight reached a peak of 113.5 miles (183km) before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission was labeled "fully successful", but for Alan Shepard it was a bitter disappointment. He was supposed to be on that rocket.

Men and monkeys

In the early days of the Mercury programme, NASA was still figuring out the details of the dangerous and difficult business of spaceflight. No one was entirely sure men could withstand the increased g-forces during launch or the disorienting effects of weightlessness. So the agency practiced with chimps. If a trained chimp could survive a Mercury launch and perform simple tasks during the flight, so could an astronaut.

NASA's most famous chimp is probably Ham, the first primate to ever ride a man-rated rocket who was named for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Centre where he was trained. Ham's flight was simple, a duplicate of the suborbital flight on which NASA was at the time planning to send all seven of its Mercury astronauts. Nestled inside a specially designed cabin that was loaded into a modified Mercury capsule, Ham's flight plan had him launching on a Redstone rocket to a peak height of about 115 miles (185km) before falling to a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. Trained to pull levers, his in-flight task was to pull the lever that corresponded with a light. The correct lever gave him a banana pellet and a sip of water; the wrong lever gave him a shock to the soles of his feet.

Ham the Chimp takes flight

As Ham lifted off the launch pad on January 31, 1961, everyone was confident in the mission. Everyone except the Redstone rocket's engineers, led by Wernher von Braun. The Redstone was plagued by what they called a hot engine; the Rocketdyne built engine had a nasty tendency to burn through its available fuel very fast. This had a serious impact on the launch abort system, the cluster of rockets designed to pull a capsule away from an exploding rocket. The abort system had to be disarmed by the time the engine shut down or the sudden loss of thrust would trigger the system's rockets to fire, subjecting the capsule's occupant to a painful sudden acceleration for nothing.

For Ham's flight, von Braun timed the launch abort system to shutdown 137 seconds after launch, two seconds before he anticipated the Redstone's engine would run out of fuel. Unfortunately, he'd underestimated his rocket. Ham's Redstone devoured its fuel in just 134.5 seconds, which triggered the abort system and sent the unsuspecting chimp rocketing to an altitude of 157 miles (253km) before splashing down 50 miles (80km) off target. When recovery crews reached the landing point, Ham was was irate, trying to bite every hand that came near him. Not only had the ride been rough, an electrical malfunction meant every level he pulled, right or wrong, gave him a shock to the feet.

But Ham had survived, and that's what mattered. Particularly for Al Shepard, who had been assigned the first flight after a peer vote earlier that month. Reading the data from Ham's flight, what he called the Great Chimp Adventure, Shepard saw that a similar malfunction on his flight would be uncomfortable but survivable. He saw no reason not to ride the next Redstone into history. But von Braun felt differently; specifically, he was uncomfortable sending a man on an imperfect rocket. He ordered a number of engineering changes to fix the hot engine and asked for one more unmanned launch. Unfortunately for Shepard, von Braun won.

The last unmanned flight of a Redstone was the mission that launched on March 24. At the insistence of Flight Director Chris Kraft, it was labelled MR-BD, for Mercury Redstone Booster Development; NASA's official record will forever emphasise the mission as a test of the rocket, and not of the capsule or the man. Responsibility for delaying Shepard's flight by more than a month - he finally flew on May 5, 1961 - rested firmly on von Braun's shoulders.

Consequences

It's hard to call the MR-BD mission decision the point when NASA ceded to the Soviets in the first wave of the Space Race, particularly without being labelled a revisionist historian, but it is an interesting case.

In March of 1961, the Soviets launched two unmanned missions, Korabl-Sputnik 4 on March 9 and Korabl-Sputnik 5 on March 25. Both carried the dummy Ivan Ivanovich and a host of animals including dogs, mice, and guinea pigs into orbit on missions that tested the full Vostok flight system. Particularly important were tests of the communications system and tracking network without which they couldn't hope to have a manned flight.

That Korabl-Sputnik 5 launched the day after MR-BD suggests that the Soviets weren't quite ready to beat their American counterparts to a manned mission in March. But that's not the full story. These Korabl-Sputnik missions were launched without previous all-up testing on the ground, suggesting the engineers were rushing to get a man up before the Americans. It's likely that when NASA announced it would run one more unmanned test after Ham's January flight, pushing the first manned flight to late April or early May, Soviet Chief Designer Sergei Korolev saw a window and exploited it. The brilliant engineer behind the Sputnik and Vostok missions had a long standing rivalry with von Braun and made no secret of his hope to beat the German into orbit. With an American launch delay, Korolev had time not only to launch his manned mission first, but to run necessary unmanned tests without fear of losing ground.

While it may not have been a linchpin mission, the story behind NASA's MR-BD flight is one of the more interesting ones we ignore. The decision to delay Shepard's flight certainly gave the Soviet space engineers the buffer they needed to stick to their own schedule and make Yuri Gagarin history's first man in space.

When the Soviets Sent a Dummy Into Space

Amy Shira Teitel - Discovery News

The March of 1961 might have been the closest point between Soviet Union and America in the first wave of the space race. Both countries were fighting to get a man in space and both took major steps that month. For NASA, it was the final unmanned mission to test the booster that would take its first astronauts aloft. For the Soviets, it was the flights of Ivan Ivanovich that proved the Vostok capsule was ready for a man.

On Jan. 31, 1961, NASA's Mercury-Redstone 2 flight (MR-2) saw Ham the chimp fly 157 miles on a Redstone rocket before splashing down. The test was a moderate success. While the chimp survived, the Redstone was hot, meaning it burned its fuel too fast. The problem with the booster prompted its designer, Wernher von Braun, to order an additional unmanned mission. This pushed the first manned mission back to late April or early May. It also gave the Soviets room to breath, but not much.

With an eye towards beating von Braun, his Soviet counterpart Sergei Korolev set a tentative launch date for the first manned Vostok flight in early April. The Soviet Space program stepped up its efforts to launch on schedule.

In the beginning of March, several engineers and high ranking officials from the Soviet Strategic Missile forces left Moscow for Leninsk, a city near the launch site of Tyura-Tam. They were there to launch two unmanned missions designed to test the man-rated Vostok 3A spacecraft.

Though unmanned, these test flights did have significant biological payloads. The first flight, Korabl-Sputnik 4, carried a small dog named Chernushka — or Blackie — on board. Along with the pup were 40 black mice, 40 white mice, several guinea pigs, reptiles, plant seeds, human blood samples, human cancer cells, micro-organisms, bacteria, and fermentation samples. There was also a human analogue, Ivan Ivanovich, the Russian equivalent to John Doe, whose hollow body was stuffed with more mice, rodents, and biological samples.

Beyond a dry-run for the eventual manned missions, these flights were also vital tests of the communications systems that would let engineers in mission control talk to their orbiting cosmonaut. The simplest way to test the system was to send Ivanovich up with a recording that could be automatically played from the capsules and received in Moscow. But just what that recording could be was a question.

Soviet officials decided a numeric countdown would be a bad thing to play from space; it might lead observers listening in in the West to think they had secretly launched a real cosmonaut into space. A song was similarly rejected. No one wanted the Americans to hear it and think a cosmonaut in orbit had lost his mind to space sickness and broken out into song. A choir, they figured, was the best bet. No one would think the had launched a capsule filled with singers.

And so Ivan Ivanovich, singing like a choir and wearing a white sheath for modesty's sake, was dressed in a fully functioning Sokol space suit and loaded into Korabl-Sputnik 4 along with the menagerie of animals. The mission launched on March 9, 1961.

The mission was a striking success through to landing. Like a real cosmonaut would do, Ivanovich was ejected from the capsule just before landing and descended by a personal parachute. It terrified people nearby who saw a body fall to Earth and land, apparently lifeless, on the cold ground. The Soviet officials had anticipated a shock like this and placed a panel in front of Ivanovich's face inside his helmet identifying him as a Maket — or dummy.

Chernushka landed separately slightly apart from Ivanovich. Protocol dictated that a Soviet official had to be the first on the scene to recover the spacecraft and its occupants since it was armed with an automatic self-destruct system that needed deactivating. But something prevented officials from getting there in time and recovery crews took it on themselves to rescue Chernushka. The field was cold and snowy; no one wanted the little dog to survive the mission only to die of exposure waiting for recovery.

Korabl-Sputnik 5 launched on March 25 and was another success. Both missions helped the Soviets stay on schedule leading up to Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight on April 12, 1961, and Ivan Ivanovich was their singing unsung hero.

Yuri Gagarin (1934-68): An Enduring Legacy

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com

On 27 March 1968, the first son of humanity ever to break the bonds of Earth and venture into the ethereal blackness of space lost his life in a horrifying aircraft accident. Seven years earlier, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin had been literally transformed from a humble farmboy-turned-aviator into the most famous man in the world, when he circled the Home Planet once in his automatically-controlled Vostok 1 capsule. In a stroke, he cemented the credentials of Communist Russia, wreaked havoc in the political halls of the United States, and created a legend and a legacy which will endure so long as history continues to be written. Forty-five years ago Wednesday night, the world mourned the loss of one of its finest sons … a son who grew up in the desperation of Nazi hegemony over his homeland, who reached the most exalted heights possible, and who died long before his time.

Like John Glenn—the first U.S. man in orbit—it seemed unlikely that Gagarin would ever be risked on another space mission; the importance of having him alive as an icon and a symbol of Soviet propaganda was simply too great. Still, in 1966, he trained as the backup pilot to Vladimir Komarov on the ill-fated Soyuz 1 and may have been pointed toward a subsequent mission. This became increasingly untenable in the wake of Komarov's tragic death during his descent to Earth, but Gagarin nevertheless defended his Candidate of Technical Sciences thesis at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy and maintained some hope. On 27 March 1968, joined by instructor pilot Vladimir Seregin, he took off from the Chkalovskaya airfield, near Moscow, in an antiquated MiG-15UTI trainer aircraft. Shortly afterwards, Gagarin requested permission to alter his course.

Then, at 10:31 a.m. Moscow Time, all communications with the men were lost.

"The weather was very bad that day," remembered fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in his memoir, Two Sides of the Moon. At the time, Leonov was overseeing parachute jumps from a helicopter near Kirzach airfield. "The cloud cover was low and it was raining hard. My team had performed just one jump when the weather deteriorated even further. The rain turned to sleet and conditions were so bad that I canceled the session and requested permission to return to base." As he waited to learn if his request had been granted, Leonov heard two loud bangs from the distance—one of them clearly an explosion, the other a sonic boom—with barely a second or so between them. During the return to base, he was puzzled when the control tower kept radioing Gagarin's callsign. Leonov wondered if they were mistakenly calling him instead, but upon landing he was told that contact had been lost with Gagarin and Seregin. When Leonov described the explosions he had heard, a helicopter was hastily despatched to the last known location of Gagarin.

At length, as the late afternoon dimness gave way to a wintry twilight, the helicopter commander reported finding the wreckage of the MiG some 64 km from the airfield. Debris was scattered in a wooded area and the aircraft's engine was buried several metres underground. Search and rescue forces, who arrived shortly thereafter, determined that the MiG-15 had hit the ground at over 700 km/h.

An upper jaw, identified as that of Seregin, was found, but as yet they had no confirmatory evidence that Gagarin had also died. Early the following morning, a piece of cloth hanging from a birch tree offered the first proof: it was from Gagarin's flight jacket. Clearly, neither he nor Seregin had ejected. The men's remains—described as "fingers, toes, pieces of ribcage, and skull" by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony in Starman, their biography of Gagarin—were both interred in the Kremlin Wall. The cause of the accident was hard to find. Theories included a birdstrike, a collision with a hot-air balloon (the remains of which were found close to the crash site), and even more outlandish notions that Gagarin was drunk or Seregin was taking pot-shots at wild deer from the MiG. Still others postulated that after angrily throwing a cognac in General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev's face in the wake of Komarov's death, Gagarin had been imprisoned or confined to a mental asylum.

In December 1968, the official accident report pointed toward pilot error, but when the classified files were reopened two decades later it became more likely that Gagarin and Seregin did not have accurate altitude data and had flown into an area where a supersonic Sukhoi Su-15 jet was operating. Bizony and Doran noted that Seregin was told the cloud base was 10,000 meters, when in fact it was nearer to 450 meters. Witnesses would later confirm seeing both Gagarin's aircraft and the Su-15. "According to the flight schedule of that day," wrote Leonov, "the Sukhoi was prohibited from flying lower than 10,000 meters. I believe now, and believed at the time, that the accident happened when the jet pilot violated the rules and dipped below the cloud cover for orientation … that he passed within 10 or 20 meters of Yuri and Seregin's plane while breaking the sound barrier. The air turbulence overturned their jet and sent it into a fatal flat spin." In such a situation, and thinking they were higher than they actually were, Seregin and Gagarin would have had no time to eject.

It was Leonov who finally identified Gagarin's physical remains … from fragments of flesh removed from the crash site and placed into a metallic bowl. "A few days before," he wrote, "I had accompanied Yuri to the barber to have his hair cut. I had stood behind Yuri talking while the barber worked. When he came to trim the hairs at the base of Yuri's neck, he noticed a large, dark brown mole." Leonov joked that the barber should be careful not to cut the mole, little realising that it would prove pivotal shortly thereafter in identifying the last mortal remains of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.

"Looking down at the fragments of flesh lying in that metal bowl," Leonov wrote, "I saw that one bore the mole." It was comprehensive proof that the man who had achieved so much in his short life had ended his days, ignominiously, in an accident which might easily have been avoided. One of the lasting tragedies is that this promising young man was torn from humanity, in his prime, and at a time when he had so much more to offer us. Gagarin's youth belied a keen engineering and piloting mind and an intellect beyond his peasant-stock roots. His first words upon launching from Baikonur on 12 April 1961 were words of adrenaline-driven excitement, but were also enormously reflective of the road into space upon which humanity had set its feet. They were also illustrative of the challenges which lay ahead, and which today's astronauts and cosmonauts continue to face, but were tinged with a childlike desire to push the envelope further than it had even been pushed before.

"Poyekhali!"

"Let's go!"

Godspeed, Yuri Gagarin.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - March 28, 2013 and JSC Today

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