Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: April 2, 2013 5:58:50 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - April 2, 2013

Please join us this Thursday at Hibachi Grill on Bay Area Blvd. at 11:30 for our monthly NASA Retirees luncheon.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Bus Route for April 3 'Safety, NASA Style!' Fair
2.            Coffee to Compost: Aren't You Curious?
3.            This Week at Starport: Leading The Greening - Earth Day Shirts
4.            Flex Those Ocular Muscles -- Read About Mission X: Train Like an Astronaut
5.            JSC: See the Space Station
6.            Knowledge Capture: Launch, Entry and Abort, Intravehicular Spacesuits
7.            Have Breakfast With an Expert
8.            FedTraveler Live Lab Tomorrow, April 3
9.            Starport April Massage Special -- $55 for 60 -- Monday Through Thursday
10.          Nominate Your Peer for the POWER of One Award
11.          HAS Program Needs Mentors and Student Mentors for the Summer
12.          Russian Phase One Language Course -- For Beginners
13.          RLLS Flight Arrival Departure, Meeting and Interpretation Support Training
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson of NASA was the first female commander of the International Space Station."
________________________________________
1.            Bus Route for April 3 'Safety, NASA Style!' Fair
Attend the fair AND keep your parking space! You can do this by taking a specially dedicated bus or van to the event tomorrow, April 3, at the Gilruth. The bus routes, marked by "bus stop" signs, are:
#1 and #2 buses: Pick-up at Buildings 4/5, 1, 13/15, 16 and 45, and then proceed to Gilruth. This route will be repeated.
#3 van: Pick-up at Buildings 227, 37/31, 29/7, 9/10 and 32, and proceed to Gilruth. Then repeat the route.
#4 van: Pick-up at Building 342A (shed) and 419, and proceed to Gilruth. Then repeat the route.
Buses and vans will start running at 9:45 a.m. and will run continuously until 1 p.m. The fair hours are 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Come out for lots of valuable health and safety information and enjoy free hot dogs and live jazz music while you browse.
Event Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2013   Event Start Time:10:00 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Spring Safety, Health, and Environmental Fair

Add to Calendar

Rindy Carmichael x45078

[top]
2.            Coffee to Compost: Aren't You Curious?
Don't forget! Bring a can of your used coffee grounds from your on-site coffee club to the Spring Safety, Health and Environmental Fair tomorrow at the Gilruth to help expand JSC's Compost Program and find out about how composting can benefit you and JSC. (Used coffee grounds only, please.)
JSC Environmental Office x40878 http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/ja/ja13/index.cfm

[top]
3.            This Week at Starport: Leading The Greening - Earth Day Shirts
Show your support for an eco-friendly planet on Earth Day 2013 (April 22) with a NASA "Leading the Greening" Earth Day shirt from the Starport Gift Shops. Sizes small through 4X are now available in Buildings 3 and 11 for just $16.50. Or, order online. Supplies are limited.
Sam's Club will be in the Starport Cafés Thursday and Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to discuss membership options. Receive a gift card on new memberships or renewals. Cash or check only for membership purchases.
The JSC Federal Credit Union will be in the Starport Cafés tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Stop to chat with representatives about your membership needs.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

[top]
4.            Flex Those Ocular Muscles -- Read About Mission X: Train Like an Astronaut
Mission X: Train Like an Astronaut is an international health and fitness challenge that encourages students to live a healthier lifestyle by using the excitement of space exploration. Recently, NASA's Human Research Program Education and Outreach and the Digital Learning Network supported Mission X virtual closing events on March 21 and 22.
Read more about the program's amazing reach and impact and how you, too, can train like an astronaut!
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/home/mission_x.html

[top]
5.            JSC: See the Space Station
Viewers in the JSC area will be able to see the International Space Station this week.
Wednesday, April 3, 6:20 a.m. (Duration: 6 minutes)
Path: 11 degrees above NNW to 10 degrees above ESE
Maximum elevation: 48 degrees
Friday, April 5, 6:16 a.m. (Duration: 6 minutes)
Path: 10 degrees above WNW to 10 degrees above SSE
Maximum elevation: 41 degrees
The International Space Station Trajectory Operations Group provides updates via JSC Today for visible station passes at least two minutes in duration and 25 degrees in elevation. Other opportunities, including those with shorter durations and lower elevations or from other ground locations, are available at the website below.
Joe Pascucci x31695 http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/view.cgi?country=U...

[top]
6.            Knowledge Capture: Launch, Entry and Abort, Intravehicular Spacesuits
The EC5/Space Suit and Crew Survival Systems Branch is pleased to sponsor another talk for the U.S. Spacesuit Knowledge Capture, and we welcome you to attend!
Kenneth Thomas, senior spacesuit expert, will present information about Launch, Entry and Abort (LEA) spacesuits -- part of an overall vehicle crew escape and survival system. These LEA spacesuits are worn during the launch and reentry to enhance crew survival. The United States has traditionally called these spacesuits Intravehicular Activity (IVA) spacesuits. The Russians refer to this type of spacesuit as "rescue suits." Thomas will discuss the success of the LEA suits and the consequences of eliminating their use or providing inadequate systems.
Seats are available on a first come, first served basis. SATERN registration is available (ID #68335 - or keyword search "spacesuit").
For more information, contact Cinda Chullen at 281-483-8384, Vladenka Oliva at 281-461-5681 or Rose Bitterly.
Event Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2013   Event Start Time:3:30 PM   Event End Time:5:00 PM
Event Location: JSC/Bldg 5-S/R-3102

Add to Calendar

Rose Bitterly 281-461-5795

[top]
7.            Have Breakfast With an Expert
It may be small talk, but it can produce big ideas. The University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) Alumni Association is hosting a morning of fascinating discussions over breakfast with university experts. Select a table to join led by one of the ten conversationalists on a range of thought-provoking topics.
The event is Wednesday, April 10, from 7 to 9 a.m. in the UHCL Bayou Building Garden Room. The cost is $12 for UHCL alumni, students, faculty and staff; or $15 for community members. Click here to meet the experts and see the topics covered.
To reserve your seat in the conversation, call Kris Thompson at 281-283-2040.
Kris Thompson 281-283-2040 http://prtl.uhcl.edu/portal/page/portal/ALR/roundtable

[top]
8.            FedTraveler Live Lab Tomorrow, April 3
Do you need some hands-on, personal help with FedTraveler.com? Join the Business Systems and Process Improvement Office for a FedTraveler Live Lab tomorrow, April 3, any time between 9 a.m. and noon in Building 12, Room 142. Our help desk representatives will be available to help you work through travel processes and learn more about using FedTraveler during this informal workshop. Bring your current travel documents or specific questions that you have about the system and join us for some hands-on, in-person help with the FedTraveler. If you'd like to sign up for this FedTraveler Live Lab, please log into SATERN and register. For additional information, please contact Judy Seier at x32771. If you would like to attend, please use this SATERN Direct Registration Link to register: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Gina Clenney 281-483-9851

[top]
9.            Starport April Massage Special -- $55 for 60 -- Monday Through Thursday
Starport is offering another amazing massage special to the JSC community! Any one-hour massage booked online in April will be $55 when scheduled on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
Starport Massage - $55 for 60 | Monday through Thursday
o             $55 for a 60-minute massage
o             Must be booked between Monday through Thursday
o             Must be booked online in April
o             Massage must be physically scheduled between April 1 and Aug. 30, 2013
Starport's Massage Therapists
Marj Moore, LMT
o             Tuesday and Thursday | 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
o             Every other Saturday | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
o             Click here to book with Marj
Anette Lemon, LMT
o             Monday, Wednesday, Friday | 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
o             Every other Saturday | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
o             Click here to book with Anette
Book your massage today!
Steve Schade x30304 http://www.innerspaceclearlake.com/massage.php

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

[top]
11.          HAS Program Needs Mentors and Student Mentors for the Summer
High School Aerospace Scholars (HAS) is in full swing and looking for mentors and student 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 online.
Stacey Welch 281-792-8100 http://has.aerospacescholars.org/

[top]
12.          Russian Phase One Language Course -- For Beginners
Russian Phase One is an introductory course designed to acquaint the novice student with certain elementary aspects of the Russian language and provide a brief outline of Russian history and culture. Our goal is to introduce students to skills and strategies necessary for successful foreign language study that they can apply immediately in the classroom. The linguistic component of this class consists of learning the Cyrillic alphabet and a very limited number of simple words and phrases, which will serve as a foundation for further language study.
Who: All JSC-badged civil servants and contractors with a work-related justification
Dates: April 29 to May 24
When: Monday through Friday, 9:15 to 10:15 a.m. or 4 to 5 p.m.
Where: Building 12, Room 158A
Please register through SATERN. The registration deadline is April 23.
Natalia Rostova 281-851-3745

[top]
13.          RLLS Flight Arrival Departure, Meeting and Interpretation Support Training
TechTrans International will provide 30-minute WebEx training on April 3, 4 and 5 for RLLS Portal modules. The following is a summary of the training dates:
Flight Arrival Departure - April 3 at 2 p.m. CDT
Meeting Support - April 4 at 10 a.m. CDT
Interpretation Support - April 5 at 10 a.m. CDT
o             Locating desired support request module
o             Quick view summary page for support request
o             Create new support request
o             Submittal requirements
o             Submitting on behalf of another individual
o             Adding attachment (agenda, references)
o             Selecting special requirements (export control)
o             Submitting request
o             Status of request records
o             View request records
o             Contacting RLLS support
Please send an email to James.E.Welty@nasa.gov or call 281-335-8565 to sign up for RLLS Support WebEx training courses. Classes are limited to the first 20 individuals registered.
James Welty 281-335-8565 https://www.tti-portal.com

[top]

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

Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday, April 2, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Path to orbital economy still rocky

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

Ultimately, it still comes down to launching. Rockets defined the Space Age in the past century, and they will continue to shape the course it follows as commercial spaceflight takes over from governments in the new one. The first 100 km (62 mi.) is still the hardest. How that hurdle is jumped will determine how soon, how much—and potentially even whether—private industry can make profits in orbit without a massive input of public money. If the cost of launch comes down, the "new space economy" will grow. And if that orbital marketplace grows, economies of scale should drive down the cost of launch. It is clear that a strong U.S. government push has cracked open the door to a true off-planet economy. NASA's commercial-cargo effort already has delivered, and private companies are making serious progress in following up with, human spaceflight.

SpaceX Planning Falcon 9 First-Stage Fly-Back Test

Mark Carreau - Aerospace Daily

SpaceX envisions an initial test of the upgraded Falcon 9 first stage's "fly back" capabilities later this year as part of the third International Space Station Dragon mission launched under the company's NASA Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) agreement, CEO and chief designer Elon Musk told a March 28 teleconference. The Hawthorne, Calif.-based launch services provider will attempt a propulsively controlled landing in the Atlantic Ocean following the launch of a mission from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., tentatively set for late September. SpaceX is probably a year and several attempts away from returning a nine-engine Falcon 9 first stage to a soft landing at the Florida launch site with deployment of landing legs.

SpaceX's Musk talks preparing to recover Falcon 9 first stage, crewed efforts, and more

Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.org

During a teleconference detailing the return of Space Exploration Technologies' (SpaceX) Dragon spacecraft from its second resupply flight to the International Space Station, the company's chief executive officer, Elon Musk, detailed how SpaceX is working to modify its highly-successful Falcon 9—in ways that could prove revolutionary. These are, however, just a few of many new designs the roughly ten-year-old company is working on that could herald a new age of human space exploration. Musk detailed how SpaceX has been working toward a number of upgrades to both its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and its Dragon spacecraft.

Mass. firm will shield spacecraft from heat

Katie Lannan - Lowell Sun

A new NASA spacecraft will take astronauts to the moon and beyond. First, though, there will be a six-month layover here for one component of the capsule. Textron Defense Systems began months of around-the-clock work last week when the heat shield for the Orion spacecraft was delivered from Hanscom Air Force Base. The shield will protect the capsule and its crew when the spacecraft re-enters Earth's atmosphere after deep-space missions to the moon, asteroids or Mars.

NASA's 'Super Guppy' aircraft lands at Hanscom Air Force Base
Cargo plane carries heat shield for Orion spacecraft

WCVB TV (Boston)

NASA's huge "Super Guppy" aircraft landed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford last Tuesday delivering a heat shield that will be used in NASA's next generation of spacecraft. The plane, which has a has a cargo compartment that is 25 feet tall, 25 feet wide and 111 feet long, is used to carry cargo that would not fit on more conventional aircraft.

NASA Orion spacecraft to send astronauts to the moon, asteroids & Mars
Museum of Flight talk promised new heights

Steve Shay - West Seattle Herald

NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems representatives intrigued the audience of over 100 enthusiasts at the Museum of Flight's William M. Allen Theater for a public program about humans landing on the moon, asteroids, and Mars with the Orion spacecraft. As the Space Shuttle program has winded down, Orion seems poised to boldly go where no man has gone before, four astronauts at a time. The trip to Mars would take 510 days each way. Discussed were habitat modules or dock settlements somewhat like the current International Space Station to relieve astronauts of their relatively tiny environment over the year and a half journey to the "Red Planet." A manned moon mission is scheduled for 2020. The capsule will re-enter Earth's atmosphere at over 20,000 mph and slow to a mere 18 mph for a gentile, three-parachute water landing evocative of the Apollo missions.

Navy, NASA make plans for spaceship recovery

Jacqueline Klimas - Navy Times

Sailors will soon take part in an out-of-this-world mission. NASA is partnering with the Navy to recover the Orion spacecraft, scheduled for its first flight in September 2014, a NASA release said. Orion spacecraft eventually will take crews of up to four people into deep space, on trips to asteroids or even Mars, according to a NASA news release. The astronauts will re-enter Earth's atmosphere in a cone-shaped capsule, similar to the Apollo spacecraft. The capsule will parachute into the ocean, and that's where the Navy comes in.

Warp Factor
A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel: is he for real?

Konstantin Kakaes - Popular Science Magazine

Last September, a few hundred scientists, engineers and space enthusiasts gathered at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Houston for the second public meeting of 100 Year Starship. The group is run by former astronaut Mae Jemison and funded by DARPA. Its mission is to "make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system to another star a reality within the next 100 years." For most of the attendees at the conference, advances in manned space exploration have been frustratingly slow in coming. Despite billions of dollars spent over the last few decades, space agencies aren't capable of much more than they were in the 1960s. They may be capable of less. 100 Year Starship intends to accelerate the process of interstellar travel by identifying and developing promising technologies. Over the course of several days, attendees could join symposia on such exotic topics as organ regeneration and organized religion aboard a starship. One of the most anticipated presentations was titled "Warp Field Mechanics 102," given by Harold "Sonny" White of NASA. A nine-year agency veteran, White runs the advanced propulsion program at Johnson Space Center (JSC), down the road from the Hyatt.

Lack of NASA Outreach Is a Setback to US Science

Laura Woodmansee - Space.com (Opinion)

(Woodmansee is a writer based in Southern California. She holds an M.S. in Journalism from USC's Annenberg School for Journalism and is the author of the books "Women Astronauts," "Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier," and "Sex in Space." She contributed this piece to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.)

By now, I hope you've heard that NASA has put into suspended animation many of its educational and non-media public outreach, including their STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education programs. This is until it can review all of those programs. It sounds like an April Fools' Day joke, doesn't it? Believe me, it's real. If you hadn't heard about all this, it's probably because the various news media haven't covered it much. It seems to me that the American people (and the world) ought to know what's happening.

How do you brush your teeth in space? There's a neat new how-to for that

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA does a lot of serious science on the International Space Station, but there's always time for those questions that keep coming from fans on the ground. You know, the ones about how you do things in zero gravity that are easy to do on the Earth. Such as brushing your teeth. How do you get water to stick to the toothbrush, and where do you spit out the sudsy after-product? Station commander Chris Hadfield explains in this video posted on April 1. It's no April fool, and it isn't the only how-to-brush from space, either. There's at least one more in YouTube's archives along with many on how to brush down here on Earth. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

Astronaut Catches Alien on Space Station in April Fools' Prank

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

When an alien parked a flying saucer at the International Space Station to say hello, astronaut Chris Hadfield turned to Twitter to report the earthshaking news. And if that sounds too good to be true … that's because it is. Hadfield, it turns out, is a prankster. Hadfield had a ball with April Fools' Day in space today (April 1), with the UFO stunt just one of his pranks. Earlier, the Canadian astronaut used his Twitter handle @Cmdr_Hadfield to post a photo of himself with space "grenades" he found on the station. It turns out, there were just harmless air sampling devices. Over the course of seven hours, Hadfield wrote five posts on Twitter slowly revealing his elaborate April Fools' Day joke.

Relics from astronaut's boyhood Ohio home for sale

Associated Press

A toy airplane that belonged to the first man to walk on the moon is going up for sale. An auction house based in Texas says it's organizing the sale of several items that came from Neil Armstrong's boyhood home in Ohio. Heritage Auctions says the items have been held onto for almost the last 50 years by a family that bought the Armstrong home in Wapakoneta (wah-puh-kuh-NEHT'-uh) in the mid-1960s. Among the relics being sold at the auction on April 18 are drawings made by Armstrong when he was a boy and one of his toy planes. There's also a signed photo of Armstrong's home up for sale. Armstrong died last August at age 82.
(NO FURTHER TEXT)
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Path to orbital economy still rocky

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

Ultimately, it still comes down to launching.

Rockets defined the Space Age in the past century, and they will continue to shape the course it follows as commercial spaceflight takes over from governments in the new one.

The first 100 km (62 mi.) is still the hardest. How that hurdle is jumped will determine how soon, how much—and potentially even whether—private industry can make profits in orbit without a massive input of public money. If the cost of launch comes down, the "new space economy" will grow. And if that orbital marketplace grows, economies of scale should drive down the cost of launch.

It is clear that a strong U.S. government push has cracked open the door to a true off-planet economy. NASA's commercial-cargo effort already has delivered, and private companies are making serious progress in following up with, human spaceflight.

In their wake a new startup sector is arising, with innovative ideas for making money in orbit and beyond (see p. 60). Military planners around the world also are conceiving new ways to accomplish their missions by using the "high ground" of space (see p. 59).

But it still takes rockets to get there. Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager, illustrated the problem recently by comparing it to a truly commercial mode of transportation—the Boeing 737.

A shuttle orbiter is about the same size as a 737, Hale says. The airliner's structure is about 40% of its weight, with the remainder divided roughly equally between payload—the crew, passengers and baggage—and fuel. The FAA requires enough fuel to keep the airliner loitering for 45 min., and then to fly to an alternate field if it still can't land because of weather.

"The total shuttle launch weight [is] 4.5 million lb., of which 85% is propellant, about 14% is vehicle structure and about 1.5% is the payload," Hale says. "That's pretty typical for orbital space-launch vehicles. The propellant reserve for managing cutoff of the space shuttle was 0.06% of the total load, or about a third of a second of run time on the main engines. That's the reserve you've got to work with."

Using what he calls "high school physics," Hale says it takes 1,000 times more kinetic energy to reach orbit than to fly a commercial jetliner. That is significant, because that energy must come out of the system if the spacecraft reenters.

Hale was speaking at a symposium commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Columbia disaster, which tragically demonstrated what can happen if the spacecraft can't protect itself and its crew from that kinetic energy.

To date only SpaceX has managed the physics of getting cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) and bringing it back to Earth. Orbital Sciences Corp. is in the running for the up part of the trip, but has passed on the reentry challenge. Four U.S. companies—Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX—are working with NASA to expand commercial capability to deliver astronauts to the space station and bring them home safely.

So far NASA has funded 80-90% of the cost of development across the commercial companies, according to William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations. The space agency figures it saved $1 billion getting the SpaceX Falcon 9 developed for orbital missions. The company is now working through its 12-flight, $1.6 billion commercial resupply services contract to deliver cargo to the ISS and return scientific samples and other "down mass" with its Dragon capsule.

Gerstenmaier's mission directorate is spending another $1.1 billion to help Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX build human-rated commercial spacecraft to deliver crews to the space station on a timetable that is highly dependent on the amount of money Congress appropriates for the task (AW&ST Aug. 6, 2012, p. 22). Blue Origin, endowed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, has stopped taking NASA funds.

That kind of government spending means it remains the largest customer for spacecraft—hardly the truly commercial marketplace NASA is trying to stimulate. But the numbers are going down. Driving the commercial push, Gerstenmaier says, is research on the ISS.

Without NASA's need for commercial cargo and crew transport to cover its share of station support, there is no market. Even with NASA as an anchor tenant, the pace of market growth will not meet the rapid-return-on-investment expectations typical in most corporate boardrooms.

"We've got to be very careful that we don't say tomorrow we're going to find the big eureka in space," Gerstenmaier says. "I don't think it's going to come. [First are] small, slow steps, and then eventually we'll cross some tipping point [and everyone will wonder] why in the heck weren't we doing research in space all along."

Even that won't necessarily generate a dramatic new upsurge in launch demand for SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, the companies supplying it. But it can start moving the government out of the equation, Gerstenmaier says, as more customers appear with station-bound payloads and—eventually—passengers to conduct research there.

"At some point there may be enough of a commercial market generated independent of NASA," Gerstenmaier says. Beyond the ISS end-of-life in 2028, microgravity research probably will be conducted on a commercial orbital facility, he says. His directorate already has an agreement with Bigelow Aerospace to install a small inflatable structure on the station to support that company's plans to build stand-alone inflatable research facilities in orbit.

SpaceX also has plans to use Dragon as the basis for commercial "Dragonlabs," and there are other private proposals as well. "Our job is to use [the ISS] to essentially provide the proof that that market is there," Gerstenmaier says.

Cost-conscious lawmakers are resisting NASA on funding multiple vehicle developments, while agency managers say it is in the government's interest to stimulate competition now because it will hold down costs later.

"We think it's good for everybody, the private sector and the government," says Phil MacAlister, director of NASA's commercial spaceflight development effort. "And not just in terms of cost. It's also good in terms of safety. We see these companies all trying to outdo each other in terms of safety and performance."

SpaceX posted a $54 million "paid-in-full standard launch price" for the Falcon 9 in 2012, and carries 24 flights of the new rocket on its manifest through 2017, not counting the ISS missions with Dragon. So far, most of its revenue has come from NASA for the Dragon flights, and it remains to be seen what will happen to the overall cost of launch-to-orbit on traditional one-flight rockets as the competition does (or does not) develop.

Former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who holds an MBA as well as multiple engineering degrees, calculated for a 2011 International Astronautical Congress paper that "existing market incentives are insufficient to bring about human space development by private enterprise, even under very optimistic assumptions. The ISS logistics market is too small, no single competitor can expect to capture it all, the rate of return is low in relation to other investments having less risk, and in any case that market is temporary."

Griffin's analysis was based on a hypothetical human-rated traditional system able to deliver 9,000 kg to the ISS, developed at a cost of $700 million. Reusable launch vehicles could dramatically change the equation, in theory, and some of the new space entrepreneurs—SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Bezos at Blue Origin and Mark Sirangelo at Sierra Nevada—are working to build launch vehicles that are at least partially reusable without the huge turnaround costs NASA experienced with the space shuttle.

At least two commercial reusable spaceplanes are gearing up to begin suborbital flights with paying passengers in the next year or two. Ultimately the lessons they learn may play into reusable commercial flight to orbit, with all that implies in terms of market growth.

"There has been a technical problem, and there is a market problem," says Jeff Greason, CEO and a founder of XCOR. "The technical problem is how do you do a reusable orbital system where the frequency of flight is high enough, and the maintenance man-hours per flight are low enough that the economics of reusability really work."

Reusable suborbital spacecraft like XCOR's Lynx spaceplane can validate orbital technologies, and Greason says his design team has worked with an eye to orbit from the beginning. The market problem is bigger "in many ways," he says.

"If you're going to make a vehicle that flies 50 or 100 times a year, and you build a couple of them so you don't have just one, you need a few hundred things a year to launch. Some of those things will be satellites or, more likely, components of satellites that you launch and put together for larger on-orbit platforms. Some will be resupply to on-orbit facilities of one kind or another—ISS, Bigelow, satellite assembly nodes. Some of those will be tanks of propellant . . . and some of it will be people."

Greason, a long-time new-space guru, has pushed for orbital fuel depots as a way to enable off-planet business. "Tanks of propellant have the great virtue that with no change in the mission, the consumers of the propellant do not have to care whether it comes up in three large tanks, or 30 medium-size, or 300 small tanks," he says. "It's an open architecture. Once you divorce the launching of the propellant from the launching of the mission, you can change how you launch propellant with the vagaries of what is cheap this year."

Other destinations could underpin a space launch market, regardless of the degree of reusability of the launch vehicle and the function of the destination. In his 2011 paper, Griffin lays out a detailed calculation—based on the same cost assumptions—that a government-backed lunar base, supplied commercially, would be a realistic incentive for a private cargo business. A 15,000-kg/year cargo market on the Moon for a station-sized six-person crew would generate an internal rate of return (IRR) of more than 27%, he estimates. It could begin with pre-positioned cargo as soon as there is a firm decision to build a lunar outpost, and it could be supplemented for more return on investment with cargo missions to the ISS and other destinations. NASA's Gerstenmaier says an outpost at the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point under consideration as a gateway deeper into space also could be supplied commercially to spur the industry. By comparison, the ISS mission alone would generate an IRR of just 13%, Griffin calculates.

There is an old joke, which SpaceX founder Musk has been known to repeat, that the best way to make a small fortune in the space business is to start with a big one. Certainly the commercial route to orbit is as littered with bankruptcy filings as with rocket-failure debris.

In April 1999, Kistler Aerospace submitted an unsolicited proposal to NASA for commercial resupply of the nascent space station, according to Debra Facktor Lepore, a Ball Aerospace executive who was vice president of business development and strategic development at Kistler. Eventually the company joined SpaceX as a NASA-backed competitor in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services seed-money effort Griffin launched to develop private cargo vehicles, but it couldn't meet its milestones and eventually failed.

"I was there in kind of the heyday, when we were starting the LEO [low-Earth observation] telecommunications," says Lepore, who left long before the successors to Kistler filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2010. "The whole motivation then was on the LEO-type communications satellites that needed to have lower-cost access to space to really make its business plan. We were raising money, and we had lots of investors. There were lots of ups and downs in the process—the market crashed, Asian flu, dot-com/dot-bomb. The challenges [involved] really bad financial timing. It never was a technical issue. It was more an idea before its time."

It is still far from clear whether the time has come today, even with the big U.S. government push. Indeed, many investors see that as an obstacle.

"They have absolutely no interest, mostly because they've all done one investment and gotten burned because Congress changed its mind, or there was one big program that they thought was going to go for 10 years and it got canceled," says Hoyt Davidson, founding and managing partner of Near Earth—an investment bank that specializes in commercial satellites, aerospace and wireless telecom. "They just don't like government as a customer."

Congress may have realized that when it set up the commercial space office at the FAA to regulate and promote commercial space travel. The office is moving into the new space era proactively, with programs to accommodate new space-business ventures, and it is seeing a dramatic increase in its activities. In 2012, the office oversaw three licensed or permitted launches, and this year it has already handled 13, says George Nield, associate administrator for commercial space transport.

In general, neither business nor investors like uncertainty, Nield says. "Whether they like the regulations, or not, or they like your policies or they'd rather have different ones, 'just tell me what you want us to do.' You hear that refrain over and over again. I think one of the most important things government can do is be clear on those rules."

One long-time student of the kind of commercial space activities the government is trying to promote today is Charles Miller, president of NexGen Space in Arlington, Va., who was NASA's senior adviser for commercial space from February 2009-January 2012. A strong advocate for private-sector launch, he says a lot of the perceived hurdles are really nothing more than excuses.

"Trillions of dollars are washing around the world, looking for good investments, where there's a real business and a real market," Miller says. "For people who are complaining that there isn't enough investment, there's usually something wrong with the business opportunity, so the investment is going elsewhere."

SpaceX Planning Falcon 9 First-Stage Fly-Back Test

Mark Carreau - Aerospace Daily

SpaceX envisions an initial test of the upgraded Falcon 9 first stage's "fly back" capabilities later this year as part of the third International Space Station Dragon mission launched under the company's NASA Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) agreement, CEO and chief designer Elon Musk told a March 28 teleconference.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based launch services provider will attempt a propulsively controlled landing in the Atlantic Ocean following the launch of a mission from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., tentatively set for late September. SpaceX is probably a year and several attempts away from returning a nine-engine Falcon 9 first stage to a soft landing at the Florida launch site with deployment of landing legs.

"I really want to emphasize that we don't expect success in the first several attempts," said Musk, who joined NASA officials to discuss the positive March 26 conclusion of the company's CRS-2 mission with a Dragon capsule splashdown and recovery in the Pacific off the coast of Baja, California. "Hopefully, next year with a lot more experience and data we would be able to return the first stage to the launch site, deploy landing legs and do a propulsive landing."

The CRS-2 mission, launched March 1, delivered 2,090 lb. of internal and external cargo to the six-person orbiting research lab and returned with 3,256 lb. of frozen medical specimens, a range of other research gear and unneeded equipment, according to the company's final mission accounting.

Musk pointed to a subtle design change and a lapse in qualification testing as the cause of three sticky check valves in the Dragon thruster system that prompted a one-day delay in the supply vessel's scheduled March 2 rendezvous with the space station. All three valves were forced open with the rapid uplink of a software change that increased pressure in the system.

SpaceX was not made aware of the design change by its supplier, and while company's engineers conducted a pre-mission low-pressure functionality test of the hardware, they elected to skip a high-pressure test that might have revealed the problem, he said.

"It was kind of the spacecraft equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver that got the valve unstuck. It was definitely a worrisome time," Musk said. "Now, obviously [we] and the supplier are extremely sensitive to even nuanced changes."

SpaceX has been testing a prototype of its Falcon 9 fly-back booster system called Grasshopper at the company's McGregor, Texas, proving ground. If early testing of the concept works on an upgraded version of the Falcon 9, SpaceX could attempt a first-stage Florida launch site landing in mid-2014, according to Musk.

SpaceX's Musk talks preparing to recover Falcon 9 first stage, crewed efforts, and more

Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.org

During a teleconference detailing the return of Space Exploration Technologies' (SpaceX) Dragon spacecraft from its second resupply flight to the International Space Station, the company's chief executive officer, Elon Musk, detailed how SpaceX is working to modify its highly-successful Falcon 9—in ways that could prove revolutionary. These are, however, just a few of many new designs the roughly ten-year-old company is working on that could herald a new age of human space exploration.

Musk detailed how SpaceX has been working toward a number of upgrades to both its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and its Dragon spacecraft.

For the Falcon 9, these include the addition of the new Merlin 1D engines—which will significantly increase the amount of weight the rocket would be able to send to orbit—recovering the first stage at first out at sea, and then having the first stage return to the landing site under its own power.

"These new upgrades will allow us to pack the Dragon spacecraft essentially full; it could raise the usable payload by several tons … this is also the version of the Falcon 9 where we will attempt to recover the first stage, although, as I've said before, I think it will take us several flights before we're successful in that. I'm not sure it will be this flight where we are successful, but that is one of our aspirations as well as one of the key design goals of the new version of Falcon 9," Musk said.

Musk described the thought process that had guided the company to date.

"We started out with a water landing because that was probably the easiest thing to do, and we didn't really know what we were doing in the beginning. Things are getting better, but we didn't want to take any unnecessary risks. Now, we want to try and push the envelope and take technology to where it hasn't been before," Musk added.

He then went on to detail how the first stage return would be conducted, as well as to reiterate that this was a totally new maneuver using newly-developed technology—one which has not been attempted before and could take some time before the California-based firm gets to work as advertised. Besides expressing caution, Musk said that SpaceX does not currently have a specific mission targeted for when his company will try to fly the first stage back to the landing site, only stating that they plan to attempt it sometime next year.

"The initial recovery attempts will be from a water landing, so the first-stage booster will, after separation, continue in a ballistic arc and execute a velocity reduction burn in the atmosphere to lessen the impact. Then, right before splashdown of the stage, it's going to light the engine again. So there will be two burns after stage separation, if things go well," Musk said. "I want to emphasize that we don't expect success in the first several attempts. Hopefully next year, with a lot more experience and data, we should be able to return the first stage to the launch site, deploy its landing legs, and then do a propulsive landing on land back at the launch site. So this year our efforts will be focused on recovering a first stage at all from an ocean landing, and then next year it will be about the return to launch site with the landing gear deployed."

Throughout the course of the discussion, Musk further cautioned those listening that he felt it would take SpaceX at least a year to " … get that right." Musk predicted that, if everything went according to plan, water landings would become a thing of the past. If successful, this could be a watershed moment in terms of space flight.

Currently, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and other launch services customers use what are known as Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles, or "EELVs." These boosters are disposable, with none of them being retrieved from the ocean, much less from land. The benefits of a booster that could conduct such a maneuver would be enormous. If this process can be mastered, the turnaround time between launches could be decreased. Also, as each new booster would no longer have to be individually built, costs per launch could decrease. SpaceX has already demonstrated that it is testing the techniques involved with returning a rocket's first stage back to dry land.

SpaceX is currently developing its "Grasshopper" Vertical Takeoff and Landing Vehicle (VTVL), which has somewhat similar properties to the McDonnell Douglas DC-X "Delta Clipper" which was tested by Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad in the 1990s. These efforts highlight a company that has its eye on incorporating new concepts and designs into its offerings.

Musk also touched on what progress his company has made in terms of returning the capability of launching U.S. astronauts to orbit from American soil. He went on to convey his thanks to NASA for their support of his company's efforts to accomplish this goal.

"Things seem to be going pretty well; we're making our milestones and making progress. We're hoping to do the pad abort tests fairly soon—perhaps later this year. That's going to be an exciting test, and we'll actually be able to unveil what Dragon version 2 looks like; also, later this year we're working with NASA on that." Musk described the crewed variant of Dragon, with its pop-out legs as resembling an "alien spaceship." "It's coming along really well, as with the cargo program; the partnership with NASA from our perspective is going really well. It's a really great partnership."

Musk and Shotwell both thanked the NASA team at Glenn Research Center for the assistance that they provided to the company's efforts. Musk referred to the space agency's efforts on SpaceX's behalf as: "Epic, super cool."

Mass. firm will shield spacecraft from heat

Katie Lannan - Lowell Sun

A new NASA spacecraft will take astronauts to the moon and beyond. First, though, there will be a six-month layover here for one component of the capsule.

Textron Defense Systems began months of around-the-clock work last week when the heat shield for the Orion spacecraft was delivered from Hanscom Air Force Base.

The shield will protect the capsule and its crew when the spacecraft re-enters Earth's atmosphere after deep-space missions to the moon, asteroids or Mars.

It's a larger version of what was used on the Apollo capsules, said Textron Senior Vice President and General Manager Ian Walsh.

"Just like you remember from the history books, there's just a round saucer, but it's huge," Walsh said. "And there's about an inch-and-a-half-to-two-inch shield that has to be very carefully applied to that metal surface, and that's what we do."

Textron workers will apply an ablative coating, a material that protects the structure from extreme temperatures by lifting hot gas away from the shield's outer wall to create a cooler boundary layer.

It's the same coating that was used on the Apollo spacecraft.

Walsh said Textron has been working on NASA projects of varying sizes for 25 to 30 years.

"This is clearly one of the bigger ones for us,' he said Wednesday, as a crane prepared to hoist away the lid of the box the shield was in while it traveled via flatbed truck to Wilmington.

At 16.5 feet in diameter, the heat shield is the largest ever created, according to NASA. It must protect the eventual Orion crew members from temperatures of nearly 4,000 degrees, generated when the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere at speeds greater than 20,000 mph.

Walsh said the Orion program is an example of NASA's new efforts at building spacecraft through commercial partnerships, rather than a project funded entirely by the agency.

Constructed in Denver by Lockheed Martin, the shield was flown to Hanscom aboard NASA's wide-bodied Super Guppy transport plane.

Textron Defense Systems' facility, about 15 miles north of Boston, will be the structure's last stop before the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will be installed on an Orion spacecraft and used for an unmanned test flight in 2014.

The Exploration Test Flight will allow NASA to collect data for risk reduction before a 2017 launch. The planned two-orbit flight will send crews farther out in space than any human spaceflight vehicle has flown since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

"It's all about testing to make sure it's safe for a manned flight,' Textron Systems spokesman Tom Williams said.

At Textron Defense System, a crew of about 70 people will work three shifts, six days a week, for the next six months on the heat shield.

"It's very labor-intensive, but it's a very proven system,' Walsh said. "Quite frankly, we have the only material that allows space exploration with manned aircraft that allows it to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.'

NASA's 'Super Guppy' aircraft lands at Hanscom Air Force Base
Cargo plane carries heat shield for Orion spacecraft

WCVB TV (Boston)

NASA's huge "Super Guppy" aircraft landed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford last Tuesday delivering a heat shield that will be used in NASA's next generation of spacecraft.

The plane, which has a has a cargo compartment that is 25 feet tall, 25 feet wide and 111 feet long, is used to carry cargo that would not fit on more conventional aircraft.

NASA's Orion spacecraft is scheduled for its first test flight next year. It is designed to carry astronauts beyond the orbit of the earth and is planned to be the furthest travel into space since the Apollo lunar missions ended in 1972.

The heat shield was scheduled to be transported to Textron Systems in Wilmington Wednesday, where a protective coating will be applied to protect astronauts during re-entry through the earth's gravitational field.

NASA Orion spacecraft to send astronauts to the moon, asteroids & Mars
Museum of Flight talk promised new heights

Steve Shay - West Seattle Herald

NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems representatives intrigued the audience of over 100 enthusiasts at the Museum of Flight's William M. Allen Theater for a public program about humans landing on the moon, asteroids, and Mars with the Orion spacecraft. As the Space Shuttle program has winded down, Orion seems poised to boldly go where no man has gone before, four astronauts at a time.

The trip to Mars would take 510 days each way. Discussed were habitat modules or dock settlements somewhat like the current International Space Station to relieve astronauts of their relatively tiny environment over the year and a half journey to the "Red Planet." A manned moon mission is scheduled for 2020. The capsule will re-enter Earth's atmosphere at over 20,000 mph and slow to a mere 18 mph for a gentile, three-parachute water landing evocative of the Apollo missions.

Speaking were Stuart McClung, Functional Area Manager for Landing/Recovery System hardware for the Orion Crew and Service Module Office at NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, and Larry Price, Orion Deputy Program Manager with Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company.

They showed a brief video of the development of the heat shield, the world's largest, took questions, and spoke of the practicalities of twisting the arms of the generally-supportive Congress which has cut their funding resulting in slowing down testing timetables.

"It's not a blue state, red state thing," said McClung. "it's how much money is out there. They've got some big problems they're trying to solve, or hopefully trying to solve."

Added Price, "It's not bipartisan, it's nonpartisan, and NASA has very strong support in Congress."

They, and other representatives at the talk, pointed out that the Orion program has contracts and venders in 40 states, resulting in "direct job creation." They said that as they solve technical problems to get to outer space they discover new solutions to problems other industries can apply on Earth.

One go NASA's mantras is, "We don't spend money in space. We spend money on Earth."

Their critical, unmanned Sept., 2014 Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT 1) will use the Delta 4 Heavy Rocket launch vehicle with two strap-on boosters manufactured by a consortium at Boeing and Lockheed. This will send up the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, or MPCV, which includes the capsule. More than half the systems that will appear in the ultimate finished Orion will be tested.

The Orion spacecraft crew module structure underwent its enormous final friction "stir weld" in June, 2010, and other developments were subsequently made at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans before it was transported to the NASA Kennedy Space Station last June.

Charlie Lundquist, Crew and Service Module Manager for NASA at Johnson Space Center, Houston, on hand at the event, spoke to the West Seattle Herald.

"We have a number of vendors in the Seattle area, subcontractors supporting this program," he said. He mentioned General Dynamics, Aerojet, Janicke Industries and others.

"We thought that while here (in the Seattle area) let's do outreach events and engage the public," Lundquist said. 'We want to let the American public know that, 'Yes, we're still in the space business. We're building launch vehicles. We're not going to be relying on the Russians anymore for access to space. America is back in the space business.'

"I grew up in Houston and there was always the Johnson Space Center there, and I was 7 years old when I saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon,"he said. "A number of the people I work with also found that very inspirational and it shaped our futures, finding jobs in science and technology. We still think we at NASA serve that role, inspiring the young people and getting them engaged in space exploration."

Also from NASA at the Museum of Flight were two UW aero-engineering alumni, including Howard Hu from Shorline, and Nujoud Merancy from Tumwater.

"I've been in Houston since I graduated UW in 2001," said Merancy. "I pretty much always wanted to be an astronaut since I was a kid and never gave up that dream," she said. "Howard and I work in the same office. I'm a systems engineer in the vehicle integration office. We have all these systems, thermal structures, environmental, and I'm making sure all work together and we build it so that someone doesn't put a pipe where the crew is supposed to sit. We have several other Huskies on the Orion program, some at Johnson others with contractor teams (nationwide.)"

While Seattle-area luminaries like Charles Simonyi, who traveled to the International Space Station on a Russian-built Soyuz, donated generously to the Museum of Flight, and to space exploration in other ways, Merancy pointed out that because NASA is a government agency, it cannot accept private funding.

'You can't hold a bake sale," she said.

Also attending the talk, seated front-row, center, was perennial political candidate and astronomy hobbyist, Goodspaceguy, a Boulevard Park resident. He runs a blog, Colonize Orbital Space.

"I never liked the Space Shuttle because it was based on a faulty concept," he told the West Seattle Herald after the talk. Referring to Orion, he said with optimism "Here we have a capsule we can get into orbit with, like the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon."

Find out more about the Orion project on their Facebook page, "NASA's Orion Project." Also, www.nasa.gov and www.lockheedmartin.com and type "Orion" in their search window.

Navy, NASA make plans for spaceship recovery

Jacqueline Klimas - Navy Times

Sailors will soon take part in an out-of-this-world mission.

NASA is partnering with the Navy to recover the Orion spacecraft, scheduled for its first flight in September 2014, a NASA release said.

Orion spacecraft eventually will take crews of up to four people into deep space, on trips to asteroids or even Mars, according to a NASA news release. The astronauts will re-enter Earth's atmosphere in a cone-shaped capsule, similar to the Apollo spacecraft.

The capsule will parachute into the ocean, and that's where the Navy comes in.

Navy dive teams in small boats will approach the spacecraft module and attach a winch line to pull the capsule into the well deck of an amphibious transport dock. These amphibs will be used for this mission because of their low cost and high-quality tracking radar, the release said.

Once the module is inside the well deck, the small boat teams will connect tending lines to the capsule and guide it over the recovery cradle. The water will be drained from the well deck, leaving the spacecraft module resting on the cradle, the release said.

Two tests are scheduled in the next year.

The first in August will be at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., aboard the amphibious transport dock Mesa Verde. The ship will remain in port while recovering the capsule during the two-day test, the release said, to eliminate rough water or other environmental conditions for the first try.

A second test is scheduled for January at Naval Base San Diego aboard the amphibious transport dock San Diego, the release said. The four-day test will take place underway off the West Coast to evaluate the recovery process in a more challenging environment.

While NASA has publicly discussed these details, Navy officials declined to comment on mission specifics.

The partnership is in the early planning stages, a spokeswoman with Fleet Forces Command said.

This isn't the first time the Navy has given astronauts a lift home. The Navy recovered spacecraft from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions dating to 1961, according to Naval History and Heritage Command's website. The last recovery by a Navy ship was in 1975, when the Iwo Jima-class amphibious assault ship New Orleans recovered the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.

Advances in the space program eliminated water recoveries with the creation of the space shuttle, which could land on a runway like a glider.

Orion is based on the design of the Apollo spacecraft, which includes a capsule, because using known technology lowers the risk of the mission, NASA officials have said. However, the Orion capsule will have some upgrades. In addition to being more than double the size of the Apollo capsule, it will have improved computers, life support and heat protection systems.

The space shuttle program was shut down because of high costs and safety concerns.

The last space shuttle mission returned to Earth on July 21, 2011.

Warp Factor
A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel: is he for real?

Konstantin Kakaes - Popular Science Magazine

Last September, a few hundred scientists, engineers and space enthusiasts gathered at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Houston for the second public meeting of 100 Year Starship. The group is run by former astronaut Mae Jemison and funded by DARPA. Its mission is to "make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system to another star a reality within the next 100 years."

For most of the attendees at the conference, advances in manned space exploration have been frustratingly slow in coming. Despite billions of dollars spent over the last few decades, space agencies aren't capable of much more than they were in the 1960s. They may be capable of less. 100 Year Starship intends to accelerate the process of interstellar travel by identifying and developing promising technologies.

Over the course of several days, attendees could join symposia on such exotic topics as organ regeneration and organized religion aboard a starship. One of the most anticipated presentations was titled "Warp Field Mechanics 102," given by Harold "Sonny" White of NASA. A nine-year agency veteran, White runs the advanced propulsion program at Johnson Space Center (JSC), down the road from the Hyatt. Along with five others, he recently co-authored the agency's 16-year "In-Space Propulsion Systems Roadmap," which outlines NASA's goals for the future of space travel. The plan calls for all manner of propulsion projects from improved chemical rockets to far-forward systems like antimatter and nuclear engines. White's particular area of research is perhaps the most far-forward of them all: warp drive.

Put plainly, warp drive would permit faster-than-light travel. It is, most assume, impossible, a clear violation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. White says otherwise. For half an hour at the symposium, he outlined the physics of a potential warp drive—walking attendees through things like Alcubierre bubbles and hyperspace oscillations. He explained how he'd recently computed theoretical results that could pave the way for an actual warp drive and that he was commencing physical tests in his NASA lab, which he calls Eagleworks.

It almost goes without saying that functional warp drive would have tremendous implications for space travel. It would free explorers not only from Earth's orbit, but from the entire solar system. Instead of taking 75,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri, the star system nearest to our own, warp-equipped astronauts, White says, could make the trip in two weeks.

In the wake of the shuttle program's termination and given the increasing role of private industry in low-Earth orbit flights, NASA has said it will refocus on far-flung, audacious exploration, reaching far beyond the rather provincial boundary of the moon. But it can only reach those goals if it develops new propulsion systems—the faster the better. A few days after the 100 Year Starship gathering, the head of NASA, Charles Bolden, echoed White's remarks. "One of these days, we want to get to warp speed," he said. "We want to go faster than the speed of light, and we don't want to stop at Mars."

The first mainstream use of the expression "warp drive" dates to 1966, when Gene Roddenberry launched Star Trek. For the next 30 years, warp existed purely as a construct of one of science fiction's most enduring series. Then, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre found himself watching an episode of the show. At the time, he was doing his graduate work in general relativity, and he asked himself what it would take to make warp drive physically plausible. He published a paper outlining the physics in 1994.

Alcubierre envisioned a bubble in space. At the front of the bubble, space-time would contract, while behind the bubble, space-time would expand (somewhat like in the big bang). The deformations would push the craft along smoothly, as if it were surfing on a wave, despite the tumult around it. In principle, a warp bubble could move along arbitrarily quickly; the speed-of-light limitation of Einstein's theory applies only within space-time, not to distortions of space-time itself. Within the bubble, Alcubierre predicted that space-time would not change, leaving space travelers unharmed.

Einstein's equations of general relativity are very difficult to solve in one direction—figuring out how matter bends space—but going backward is fairly easy. Using them, Alcubierre determined the distribution of matter necessary to create such a warp bubble. The trouble was, the solutions called for an obscure form of matter called negative energy.

In the most basic of definitions, gravity is the attractive force between two objects. Every object, no matter how small, exerts some attractive force on surrounding matter. Einstein's insight was that this force is a curvature in space-time. Negative energy, though, is gravitationally repulsive. Instead of drawing space-time together, negative energy would push it apart. Roughly speaking, for his model to work, Alcubierre needed negative energy to expand the space-time behind a craft.

Though no one has ever measured negative energy, quantum mechanics predicts that it exists, and scientists should be able to create it in a lab. One way to generate it would be through the Casimir effect: Two parallel conducting plates, placed very closely together, should create small amounts of negative energy. Where Alcubierre's model broke down is that it required a vast amount of negative energy, orders of magnitude more than most scientists estimate could be produced.

White says he's found a way around that limitation. In a computer simulation, White varied the strength and geometry of a warp field. He determined that, in theory, he could produce a warp bubble using millions of times less negative energy than Alcubierre predicted and perhaps little enough that a space craft could carry the means of producing it. "The findings," he says, "change it from impractical to plausible."

Johnson Space Center sprawls beside lagoons where Houston gives way to Galveston Bay. It has the feel of a suburban college campus, albeit one geared to the training of astronauts. The day I visit, White meets me in Building 15, the low-rise warren of hallways, offices, and labs that contains Eagleworks. He is wearing a polo shirt embroidered with the Eagleworks emblem, which depicts an eagle, mid-swoop, soaring over a futuristic starship.

White did not start his career in propulsion. He studied mechanical engineering, and he joined the agency in 2004 as part of its robotics group, having worked at JSC as a contractor since 2000. Eventually, he took command of the robot arm on the International Space Station while working on a Ph.D. in plasma physics. It was only in 2009 that he shifted his responsibility to propulsion, which had been a long-standing interest of his and the reason he came to work for NASA in the first place.
"Sonny is a pretty unique person," says his boss John Applewhite, who heads the Propulsion Systems Branch within the JSC engineering directorate. "He's definitely a visionary, but he's also an engineer. He can take his vision and turn it into a useful engineering product." About the time he joined Applewhite's group, White requested permission to open his own lab, dedicated to advanced propulsion. He dreamed up the name Eagleworks—a patriotic riff on the famous Lockheed Martin Skunk Works—and had NASA create a logo to his specifications. Then he got to work.

White leads me to his office, which he shares with a colleague who is looking for water on the moon and then takes me down the hall to Eagleworks. As we walk, he tells me about his quest to open the lab, which he frames as "a long arduous process of trying to find ways for advanced propulsion to help human space exploration." He speaks with a slight drawl, a product of many years spent in the South—first at college in Alabama and then 13 years in Texas.

White shows me into the facility and ushers me past its central feature, something he calls a quantum vacuum plasma thruster (QVPT). The device looks like a large red velvet doughnut with wires tightly wound around a core, and it's one of two initiatives Eagleworks is pursuing, along with warp drive. It's also secret. When I ask about it, White tells me he can't disclose anything other than that the technology is further along than warp drive. A 2011 NASA report he wrote says it uses quantum fluctuations in empty space as a fuel source, so that a spaceship propelled by a QVPT would not require propellant.

White's warp experiment is tucked into the back corner of the room. A helium-neon laser is bolted onto a small table pricked with a lattice of holes, along with a beam splitter and a black-and-white commercial CCD camera. This is a White-Juday warp field interferometer, which White named for himself and Richard Juday, a retired JSC employee who is helping White analyze the data from the CCD. Half of the laser light passes through a ring—White's test device. The other half does not. If the ring has no effect, White would expect one type of signal at the CCD. If it warps space, he says "the interference pattern will be starkly different."

When the device is turned on, White's setup looks cinematically perfect: The laser is bright red, and the two beams cross like light sabers. There are four ceramic capacitors made of barium titanate inside the ring, which White charges to 23,000 volts. White has spent the last year and a half designing the experiment, and he says that the capacitors will "establish a very large potential energy." Yet when I ask how it would create the negative energy necessary to warp space-time he becomes evasive. "That gets into . . . I can tell you what I can tell you. I can't tell you what I can't tell you," he says. He explains that he has signed nondisclosure agreements that prevent him from revealing the particulars. I ask with whom he has the agreements. He says, "People come in and want to talk about some things. I just can't go into any more detail than that."

While the theory of warp travel is intuitive enough—deform space-time to create a moving bubble—it suffers from a few significant obstacles. Even if White can drastically reduce the amount of negative energy that Alcubierre required, it may still be much more than scientists can produce, says Lawrence Ford, a theoretical physicist at Tufts University who has published dozens of journal articles on negative energy over the last 30 years. Ford and other physicists say there are fundamental physical limitations—not just engineering challenges—on the amount of negative energy that can exist in one place for any length of time.

Another challenge is that in order to create a warp bubble that moves faster than light, scientists would need to distribute negative energy around a craft, including ahead of it. White doesn't think this is a problem; when I ask him about it, he says rather vaguely that a warp drive would work because of an "apparatus you have that's creating the conditions that you need." But creating those conditions in front of a ship would mean generating a distribution of negative energy that travels faster than light, a violation of the theory of general relativity.

Finally, warp drive poses a conceptual problem. In general relativity, faster-than-light travel is equivalent to moving about in time. In saying that a warp drive is feasible, White is also saying that he can create a time machine.

Those obstacles raise some significant doubts. "I don't think any normal understanding of physics predicts he's going to see anything in his experiments," says Ken Olum, a physicist at Tufts University, who served on a panel debating exotic propulsion at the 100 Year Starship gathering in 2011. Noah Graham, a physicist at Middlebury College who read two of White's papers at my request, wrote in an e-mail: "I don't see any valid science in either paper beyond the summaries of previous work."

Alcubierre, now a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is also doubtful. "Even if I'm in a spaceship in the middle and I have the negative energy, there's no way I can put it where I need it," he told me by phone from his home in Mexico City. "It's a nice idea. I like it because I wrote it myself. But it has a series of limitations that I've seen through the years, and I don't see how to fix them."

To the left of the main gate at Johnson, a Saturn V rocket lies on its side, its stages disconnected to show some of its guts. It's massive. Just one of its many engines is nearly the size of a small car, and, laid on end, the rocket is a few feet longer than a football field. It is a quiet testament to the difficulty of space travel. It is also four decades old, and the time it represents—when NASA was part of a grand national effort to send a man to the moon—has long passed. Today, JSC feels like a place that once touched greatness but has since fallen from its orbit.

A breakthrough in propulsion could spell a new age at JSC and NASA, and to a degree that age is already upon us. Dawn, a probe launched in 2007, is exploring the asteroid belt using ion thrusters. In 2010, a Japanese team deployed Ikaros, the first interplanetary craft driven by a solar sail, another type of experimental propulsion. And in 2016, scientists plan to test VASIMR, a plasma-based system designed for high-thrust propulsion, on the ISS. While those systems might one day carry astronauts to Mars, they still will not be able to send astronauts beyond the solar system. To do that, White says NASA will need to embrace riskier projects.

Warp drive is perhaps the most far-fetched of all NASA's propulsion efforts. The greater scientific community says White cannot create it. Experts say he's working against the laws of nature and physics. Nonetheless, NASA is behind it. "He's not funded at a very high level in terms of what he's trying to accomplish," Applewhite says. "I think there's very much interest within the directorate to continue growing his work. These are the kinds of theoretical concepts that, if they come to fruition, would be game changers."

In January, White packed up his warp interferometer and moved it to a new facility. Eagleworks had outgrown its first home. The new lab is larger and, he says enthusiastically, "It's seismically isolated," meaning it is shielded from vibrations. But perhaps the best thing about the new lab is also the most telling. NASA assigned White to a facility that was built for the Apollo program, the same one that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

Lack of NASA Outreach Is a Setback to US Science

Laura Woodmansee - Space.com (Opinion)

(Woodmansee is a writer based in Southern California. She holds an M.S. in Journalism from USC's Annenberg School for Journalism and is the author of the books "Women Astronauts," "Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier," and "Sex in Space." She contributed this piece to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.)

By now, I hope you've heard that NASA has put into suspended animation many of its educational and non-media public outreach, including their STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education programs. This is until it can review all of those programs.

It sounds like an April Fools' Day joke, doesn't it? Believe me, it's real. If you hadn't heard about all this, it's probably because the various news media haven't covered it much. It seems to me that the American people (and the world) ought to know what's happening.

I understand that NASA was forced to make some cuts in order to abide by the sequester. But, I'd never have thought our space agency would even consider pausing or deleting so much of something so important to the future of NASA and of the United States as education and outreach.

I hope that these cuts are temporary, a way to force Congress into repealing the sequester for NASA. If it's not, and these cuts are made permanent, the world will lose something special — that NASA magic.

If you think this doesn't affect you, think again. NASA's educational and public outreach programs are the key to letting the public know about space science. What comes out of those programs inspires a whole new generation of scientists and engineers, and even artists and writers like myself. By cutting education and public outreach, NASA is shooting itself in the foot. NASA outreach works hard to let the public know just what the space agency does — without information, what public interest there is in NASA will fade away.

NASA outreach also inspires kids each year via thousands of school events, conferences, tours, robot tournaments and other fun educational activities. By cutting outreach, NASA risks being responsible for millions of kids and adults not being interested in science, technology, engineering and math. What inspired at least two generations of Americans and others worldwide will be gone. Will kids be aware of what is going on in space science? Probably not. There will be no cool space cards handed out at school by a NASA scientist, engineer or astronaut; no science experiment fun sheets courtesy of NASA outreach and STEM programs. In the long term, if fewer people are interested in space science, there may be no space program at all.

Cutting back, or even halting, NASA's educational outreach programs amounts to sacrificing the future for a bit of a financial break today. It is the scourge of our times. In the United States, optimism for the future used to be our defining characteristic. At one time, NASA embodied the future. Now, we are stuck in the present and unable to imagine a future where economics will again seem, well, good.

So the sequester is hitting NASA hard, at its heart. Sure, some education and outreach programs have been added to the "exempted" list, and the situation doesn't look quite as bleak as it did when the memo first came out on March 22. But, many good programs are still in danger.

You may think "what can I do?" I suggest you share this news, or this article, with your friends, family and acquaintances who have any sort of interest in space, engineering or technology. You can also contact your congressional representative. With enough people contacting the NASA director's office and congressional representatives, then perhaps we can change things for the better.

Let's bring back the future! Let's bring back that old NASA magic!

Astronaut Catches Alien on Space Station in April Fools' Prank

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

When an alien parked a flying saucer at the International Space Station to say hello, astronaut Chris Hadfield turned to Twitter to report the earthshaking news. And if that sounds too good to be true … that's because it is. Hadfield, it turns out, is a prankster.

Hadfield had a ball with April Fools' Day in space today (April 1), with the UFO stunt just one of his pranks. Earlier, the Canadian astronaut used his Twitter handle @Cmdr_Hadfield to post a photo of himself with space "grenades" he found on the station. It turns out, there were just harmless air sampling devices.

Over the course of seven hours, Hadfield wrote five posts on Twitter slowly revealing his elaborate April Fools' Day joke.

"The view from where we fly the Canadarm2, with some orbital debris off in the distance," Hadfield wrote.

The picture he posted to accompany that post shows him posing with a flying saucer-like object off in the distance.

His second photo is a little clearer, showing the UFO placed high above the Earth and on its way toward the space station.

"Orbital debris seems to be on a course moving a bit faster than ISS," Hadfield wrote. "I'll try to take more pictures if it swings by."

And "take" more pictures he did. The Canadian astronaut posted a photo of the flying saucer off in the distance with the orbiting laboratory's robotic arm in the foreground four hours after his initial post.

"Wow, what a huge piece of debris! Maybe I can grab it with the Canadarm2…," Hadfield wrote.

Hadfield's grand finale showed the terrified looking commander holding a small green alien away from him with both hands.Quickly after that, Hadfield wrote: "The object appears to be coming closer to the Station. I think it might be trying to board us!"

"I don't know what it is or what it wants, but it keeps repeating 'Sloof Lirpa' over and over," Hadfield wrote. "Alert the press." ("Sloof Lirpa" is actually "April Fools" spelled backwards.)

Hadfield's followers were not so easily fooled. Many of his fans called the astronaut out on his April Fools' Day prank before it was even complete.

"Astronaut humour," Ivor Tossell (@ivortossell) replied.

"I didn't know they had Photoshop in space," Steve McPherson (@steventurous) wrote.

Other followers played along with Hadfield's joke.

"Quick someone give Canadarm2 a baseball bat #homerun," Pat Dunn (AstonPat) wrote.

Chris Hadfield is the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station and has made a point of using social media, photos, videos and even sound to chronicle the experience of life in space. The effort, according to Canadian press accounts, has catapulted him to celebrity status in Canada.

Hadfield leads the six-man Expedition 35 crew on the space station and is due to return to Earth in May. Two American astronauts and five Russian cosmonauts round out the crew.

END

"

Keep the shuttle flying

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - April 2, 2013

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Blog Archive