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 23, 2013 6:10:41 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - April 23, 2013 and JSC Today

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Progress 51 to Launch Wednesday, Docking Friday
2.            Seven JSC Technologies Noted in April 2013 NASA Tech Briefs
3.            Next 'Tech Champs' Meeting on May 10
4.            Today is Your Last Chance to RSVP
5.            This Week at Starport
6.            Recovered Materials
7.            NASA@work: New Date for Training Opportunity
8.            Special Offer -- Signed Gene Cernan Frames Pre-Sale
9.            Link Correction: Sodexo Satisfaction Survey
10.          Diva Design Series
11.          Run in the 35th Annual Honeywell Lunar Rendezvous 5K July
12.          RLLS Flight Arrival Departure, Meeting and Telecon Support WebEx Training
13.          General Industry (CFR 1910) Safety and Health Provisions ViTS: May 31
14.          Confined Space Entry 8:30 a.m. and Lockout/Tagout 1 p.m. -- May 17 -- Building 20, Room 205/206
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" Hubble has been producing ground-breaking science for two decades. During that time, it has benefited from a slew of upgrades from shuttle missions, including the 2009 addition of a new imaging workhorse, the high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3 that recently took a new portrait of the Horsehead Nebula."
________________________________________
1.            Progress 51 to Launch Wednesday, Docking Friday
NASA TV will broadcast the launch and docking of the ISS Progress 51 cargo craft on April 24 and 26. The unpiloted cargo craft, loaded with more than 3 tons of food, fuel, supplies and experiment hardware for the six crew members aboard the orbital laboratory, is scheduled to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:12 a.m. (4:12 p.m. Kazakh time) Wednesday, April 24. NASA TV coverage of the launch will begin at 5 a.m. Progress 51 will take two days to catch up and rendezvous with the space station. It is scheduled to dock at 7:26 a.m. Friday, April 26, with NASA TV coverage to begin at 6:45 a.m.
JSC employees with wired computer network connections can view NASA TV using onsite IPTV on channels 404 (standard definition) or 4541 (HD). IPTV works best using Internet Explorer. If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367.
For NASA TV schedule and video streaming information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
For information on the International Space Station, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/station
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 http://www.nasa.gov/station

[top]
2.            Seven JSC Technologies Noted in April 2013 NASA Tech Briefs
The April 2013 issue of NASA Tech Briefs includes seven innovative technologies from JSC.
The NASA Tech Briefs magazine introduces details about new innovations and technologies that stem from advanced research and technology programs conducted by NASA and its industry partners/contractors.
The April 2013 JSC briefs recognized this month include: Waterless Clothes-Cleaning Machine; Controlled Site-Specific Functionalization of Carbon Nanotubes With Diazonium Salts; Lexan Linear Shaped Charge Holder With Magnets and Backing Plate; Surface Navigation Using Optimized Waypoints and Particle Swarm Optimization; Robotics On-Board Trainer (ROBoT); A Nanostructured Composites Thermal Switch Controls Internal and External Short Circuit in Lithium Ion Batteries; and Spacecraft Crew Cabin Condensation Control.
To read and learn more about these JSC innovations and the inventors, visit the Strategic Opportunities & Partnership Development (SOPD) website.
You can review all of the NASA Tech Briefs here.
Holly Kurth x32951

[top]
3.            Next 'Tech Champs' Meeting on May 10
Learn about business startups that are focused on commercializing innovations and technologies in the energy, life science, Information Technology and aerospace sectors.
Tech Champs meetings are open to the community and enable professionals to be directly involved with emerging technology.
o             Light Breakfast and Networking - 7:15 to 7:45 a.m.
o             Presentations - 7:45 to 9 a.m.
o             Keynote Speaker: Jim Le Duc, Ph.D.
Le Duc is the director of the Galveston National Laboratory, the only full-suit Biological Safety Level 4 laboratory in operation on an academic campus in the United States. He is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, and holds the inaugural Robert E. Shope, MD, and John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Global Health.
Register now.
Event Date: Friday, May 10, 2013   Event Start Time:7:15 AM   Event End Time:9:00 AM
Event Location: Gilruth Center, Alamo Ballroom

Add to Calendar

Pat Kidwell x37156 http://houstontech.org/

[top]
4.            Today is Your Last Chance to RSVP
Have you RSVPed yet for the April JSC National Management Association (NMA) chapter luncheon presentation on April 30? If not, you have hours left to enter your menu choice here.
Don't miss Michael Hess, JSC associate director of Engineering, as he talks about "Engineering and Beyond." In this evolving era of spaceflight, it's a presentation (and lunch!) you'll want to be at.
Catherine Williams x33317 http://www.jscnma.com/Events/

[top]
5.            This Week at Starport
Discount tickets to the Houston Dynamo versus Sporting Kansas City game on May 12 are on sale for $20. Visit our website to order your tickets!
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.
Tickets for the JSC Annual Picnic at SplashTown on Sunday are still on sale now through Friday for $37 in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops and Gilruth Center.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

[top]
6.            Recovered Materials
Accessible ... Findable ... Relevant ... Reusable ... KNOWLEDGE
That old report in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet or quietly musting away in the attic might be just the information needed to fill in the gaps of JSC community knowledge!
The entire body community knowledge is fortified with the knowledge and experiences captured in recovered materials. Current and former employees have contributed videos, org charts, still images and documents of historical interest. Many of the recovered materials are appropriate to publish in whole, while others lead to improved data architecture as they are processed and represented in the JSC Taxonomy. Enhanced user applications include the JSC search, Lessons Learned Database and Shuttle Knowledge Console. Share your center or agency experiences with JSC community. Contact the Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer today.
Brent J. Fontenot x36456

[top]
7.            NASA@work: New Date for Training Opportunity
If you are interested in learning more about NASA@work and how you can participate on this internal, collaborative platform, join us for NASA@work Training 101 on Thursday, May 9 (we will be hosting this training both via Webex and in person for those who want a hands-on experience). Two session times will be available (11 a.m. CDT and 2 p.m. CDT). Sign up today, as space is limited!
Make sure you check out our active challenges and participate today: Group On-Call Notification Alternatives (deadline: May 3); and Peer-to-Peer Coaching and Counseling Program (deadline: May 31). Check them out here and submit your solution today.
Kathryn Keeton 281-204-1519 http://nasa.innocentive.com

[top]
8.            Special Offer -- Signed Gene Cernan Frames Pre-Sale
Starport is proud to offer you this Official NASA Limited Edition Celebrating Apollo XVII and the Golden Age of Space Framed Pin Set, which was commissioned and signed by Captain Gene Cernan. Only 1,972 were made, and each frame is numbered. The set retails at $269, but there's a 10 percent discount for JSC employees at Starport. Reserve yours today in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops.
ShopNASA x35352 http://www.shopnasa.com

[top]
9.            Link Correction: Sodexo Satisfaction Survey
Sodexo Federal Services is committed to exceeding your expectations while working to continually improve your experience.
Our annual survey helps us to understand how we are performing. We value this input and use this feedback to ensure we are bringing the highest level of service to you.
This survey should take no more than seven to 10 minutes to complete. Please complete the questionnaire online by clicking this link: https://www.loyaltysurvey.com/sodexo_aaw/Welcome.aspx
The survey will be available now through May 8. You will receive a confirmation upon completion.
Your feedback is extremely important to us. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Danial Hornbuckle x30240 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

[top]
10.          Diva Design Series
Space Center Houston needs you! Help inspire middle school girls to use innovative applications of science concepts and pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. We are looking for volunteers on Friday, April 26, to volunteer at Space Center Houston's final installation of Diva Design Series. In this installment, creativity will take over as the girls design and produce a fashionable and techno-savvy, e-textile accessory. Volunteers will lead groups of five to 10 middle school girls and assist them in creating an original piece of wearable technology. Volunteers are needed from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. to lead small-group activities, show these middle school girls why we love our STEM careers and, most importantly, have lots of fun! Really want to help, but can't stay all day? No problem! We have shifts from 9 a.m. to noon and noon to 2 p.m. Please contact Annie at x27885 for more information or if you would like to volunteer.
Event Date: Friday, April 26, 2013   Event Start Time:9:00 AM   Event End Time:2:00 PM
Event Location: Space Center Houston

Add to Calendar

Annie Schanock x27885

[top]
11.          Run in the 35th Annual Honeywell Lunar Rendezvous 5K July
Be a part of history -- run or walk in the 35th Annual Lunar Rendezvous 5K, sponsored by Honeywell. The race will begin at 7:30 a.m. on July 20, starting at Space Center Houston and taking runners on-site at JSC. Registration is only $18 before July 13, and $22 after. If you wait until the day of, registration is $25. Entry forms are available online.
Packet pickup will be at the On The Run Running Store on Thursday, July 18, or Friday, July 19, and on race day near the start site. The first male and female open and master runners will be awarded. Awards will also be given to the top three male and female runners in each age group.
Event Date: Saturday, July 20, 2013   Event Start Time:7:30 AM   Event End Time:8:30 AM
Event Location: Space Center Houston and JSC

Add to Calendar

Jennifer Mason x32424 http://www.lunarrendezvous.org

[top]
12.          RLLS Flight Arrival Departure, Meeting and Telecon Support WebEx Training
TechTrans International will provide 30-minute WebEx training on April 24, 25 and 26 for RLLS Portal modules. The following is a summary of the training dates:
Flight Arrival Departure - April 24 at 10 a.m. CDT
Meeting Support - April 25 at 2 p.m. CDT
Telecon Support - April 26 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 a 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]
13.          General Industry (CFR 1910) Safety and Health Provisions ViTS: May 31
SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0066A: This three-hour course is based on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) CFR 1910 course, Requirements for General Safety and Health Provisions. It will provide a general overview of OSHA 1910 safety requirements. During the course, the student will receive an overview of those topics needed to work safely in general industry. There will be a final exam associated with this course, which must be passed with a 70 percent minimum score to receive course credit. Use this direct link for registration:
https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_OFFERING_DETAILS&scheduleID=68108
Event Date: Friday, May 31, 2013   Event Start Time:9:30 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: Bufilding 17 / Room 2026

Add to Calendar

Shirley Robinson x41284

[top]
14.          Confined Space Entry 8:30 a.m. and Lockout/Tagout 1 p.m. -- May 17 -- Building 20, Room 205/206
Confined Space Entry: The purpose of this course is to provide employees with the standards, procedures and requirements necessary for safe entry to and operations in confined spaces. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard 29 CFR 1910.146, "Confined Space," is the basis for this course. The course covers the hazards of working in or around a confined space and the precautions one should take to control these hazards. A comprehensive test will be offered at the end of the class. Use this direct link for registration:
https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Lockout/Tagout: The purpose of this course is to provide employees with the standards, procedures and requirements necessary for the control of hazardous energy through lockout and tagout of energy-isolating devices. OSHA standard 29 CFR 1910.147, "The Control of Hazardous Energy (Lockout/Tagout)," is the basis for this course. A comprehensive test will be offered at the end of the class. Use this direct link for registration:
https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Shirley Robinson x41284

[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.

NASA TV: 5 am Central WEDNESDAY (6 EDT) – Progress 51 launch coverage (Launch at 5:12)

Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday, April 23, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Space experiment sheds light on immune struggles

Agence France Presse

A lab experiment that rode to space two years ago has offered new clues about why astronauts' immune systems struggle to perform in zero gravity, US military researchers said on Monday. Researchers sent cells found on the inside of blood vessels to the International Space Station and let them rest for six days. Then, astronauts introduced the cells to a potent endotoxin lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, that can cause widespread blood infection known as sepsis. After six days of simply being in space, the cells began to show genetic changes that are typical of lowered immunity in zero-gravity, a condition often seen in astronauts.

NASA Administrator says it's 'an essential thing' to solve sequestration

Mark McCarter - Huntsville Times

NASA has never shied away from bold challenges. This time, rather than an exotic mission that breaks gravity, it's taking a different approach to a new force that's seemingly keeping everyone grounded: Sequestration. "The assumption in our budget, to be quite honest, was that the Congress and the President were going to put their heads together and they're going to get us out of sequestration. That's a very huge assumption on the part of everybody," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said Monday morning. If sequestration can't be solved, he acknowledged it could be "a whole new ball game."

Old Dog Orbital Is Ready to Give SpaceX a Fight

Ashlee Vance - Bloomberg Businessweek

The competitive stakes around commercial space travel were raised in barely 18 minutes on Sunday, as Orbital Sciences (ORB) conducted a successful test launch of its Antares rocket. The test showed that Orbital could launch a rocket and some cargo into space without a hitch, improving the company's position as it pursues NASA's resupply contract for the International Space Station. Orbital expects to complete a more complex test in the middle of this year in preparation for what could be a three-year, eight-mission, $1.9 billion deal.

White House, members of Congress respond to Antares launch

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

Sunday afternoon Orbital Sciences Corporation successfully launched its Antares rocket on its inaugural flight, a test mission carrying a demonstration payload and several smallsats. Within a half-hour of liftoff, the White House released a statement from Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren. "The growing potential of America's commercial space industry and NASA's use of public-private partnerships are central to President Obama's strategy to ensure U.S. leadership in space exploration while pushing the bounds of scientific discovery and innovation in the 21st century," Holdren said in the brief statement. "With NASA focusing on the challenging and exciting task of sending humans deeper into space than ever before, private companies will be crucial in taking the baton for American cargo and crew launches into low-Earth orbit."

Antares Test Launch Another Win For COTS Strategy

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

Launch of the Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares liquid-fueled rocket on April 21 gives NASA a second U.S.-owned vehicle to use in resupplying the International Space Station, vindicating a commercial approach that has been in play through two presidential administrations. The 5 p.m. liftoff followed two previous launch attempts last week that had to be scrubbed due to uncooperative weather over the new launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Va. Ten minutes after leaving the pad, the rocket placed an 8,380-lb. (3,800-kg) instrumented dummy version of Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo vehicle into orbit. An operational Cygnus is packed with station supplies and ready to launch to the ISS this summer if the inaugural flight goes as planned.

Grasshopper 250m Test | Ring of Fire

YouTube

SpaceX's Grasshopper flies 820 feet, tripling its March 7th leap. Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle that SpaceX has designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact. While most rockets are designed to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, SpaceX's rockets are being designed to return to the launch pad for a vertical landing. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

NASA proposed asteroid-snaring mission would ride on Glenn ion engines

John Mangels - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Inside cavernous "Tank 5," a vacuum chamber as big as a subway tunnel at Cleveland's NASA Glenn Research Center, a soft sapphire glow spilled from the nozzle of an odd-looking spacecraft engine earlier this month. The turquoise plume was a familiar sight to the engineers running the test. Ion engines, which spout bluish jets of electrically excited atoms rather than chemical flames like a traditional rocket, have been a Glenn specialty for more than 40 years. Their gentle, continuous push produces astounding speeds, using only tiny sips of xenon fuel. Later this decade, a robot spacecraft riding a Glenn engine's cobalt ion stream will aim for an asteroid circling a million or so miles from Earth. It will nuzzle up to the tumbling, dump truck-sized rock, unfurl a fabric grab-bag to snare it like a Venus flytrap, then fire up the ion engines and haul the asteroid into orbit around the moon.

Life on Mars? Finding It May Require Humans on Red Planet

Mike Wall - Space.com

Life may well lurk beneath the Martian surface today, but it'll be tough to detect without sending humans to the Red Planet, some experts say. It could be a long time before robots are able to drill deep into the Martian underground, explore caves and investigate other potentially life-supporting habitats on the Red Planet. So if humanity wants to satisfy its curiosity about potential life on Mars anytime soon, it should work to get boots in the red dirt, advocates say. "We might be lucky and confirm life with robots over the next one to two decades, but it's probably going to take people to do, literally, the heavy labor to be able to do it," said Chris Carberry, co-founder and executive director of Explore Mars, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human exploration of the Red Planet.

Could, and Should, Astronauts Have Babies on Mars?

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

The first Martian colonists may want to think twice about reproducing. Though it may not seem like the most pressing problem facing the future astronauts of the Mars One expedition aiming to launch in 10 years, whether or not to have children could be a major biological and ethical conundrum. Monday, the nonprofit Mars One organization announced its plan to begin selecting astronauts for one-way missions to Mars. These spacefarers would establish the first Martian colony, with subsequent crews arriving every two years. Eventually, those Mars settlers may want to have families — but can they?

Rely on a Smartphone? New NASA Satellites Do

Suzanne Presto - Voice of America

Smartphones. We carry them in our pockets, toss them in our tote bags and have them at the ready whenever we want directions to a destination or to snap a picture or to call a friend. Perhaps we're often guilty of taking the gadgets' microprocessing powers for granted. Not so with NASA, which just sent three smartphones into space as low-cost satellites. When Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on its first test flight Sunday, the privately built booster carried a payload to simulate the cargo craft that will one day dock with the International Space Station.

Chris Hadfield 'wistful' as space mission drawing to an end

Andy Johnson - CTV News

Canadian astronaut Cmdr. Chris Hadfield is excited about the moment when the Soyuz rocket he is travelling aboard bursts through the atmosphere and begins its rough parachute ride back to the Earth's surface. Hadfield, the current commander of the International Space Station, blasted off for the ISS on Dec. 19, and his return is expected around May 13. Hadfield has been to space before, but the return trip a few weeks from now will mark his first journey home aboard one of the Russian rockets used by NASA since the U.S. shuttle program was abandoned.

Earth Day In Space: Astronaut Chris Hadfield Marks Holiday Aboard ISS

Miriam Kramer - Huffington Post

Earth Day is even celebrated in space. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield sent down some well wishes from the International Space Station Monday in honor of Earth Day. "Good Morning, World, and Happy Earth Day from orbit!" the current space station commander wrote from his Twitter account (@Cmdr_Hadfield) earlier today. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Hadfield also spoke to a group of Canadian students and journalists about how life in space has changed his view of the Earth.

Antares rising

Jeff Foust – The Space Review (Commentary)

(Foust is editor and publisher of The Space Review)

Sometimes it's remarkable that any rocket gets off the ground. There's first and foremost the myriad of technical challenges of the rocket itself, a complex array of components that have to be in perfect working order for the rocket to leave the ground and streak towards space. Then there's the need for weather conditions, like clouds and wind, be within the vehicle's constraints. And, on more than one occasion, the rocket and the weather have cooperated, only for a launch to be undone by a glitch with the rocket's payload or, worse, a boat or plane that strayed into a restricted zone downrange from the launch.

Bold Mars Pursuit Truly Inspires

Jerry Ross – Space News (Opinion)

(Ross is a former astronaut and shares the world record for number of space launches — seven — and he ranks third in the number of space walks — nine. His new book is "Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer.")

The recently announced Inspiration Mars mission has been described as "audacious," "extremely challenging" and "ambitious." The announcement has rightfully been met with skepticism. Ironically, I am told that this is exactly how members of the Inspiration Mars team first reacted when presented with the unique opportunity to conduct a human mission around Mars and back to Earth in 501 days within five years. The team's determination, after intensive study, to pursue this bold goal has me cheering them on.
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Space experiment sheds light on immune struggles

Agence France Presse

A lab experiment that rode to space two years ago has offered new clues about why astronauts' immune systems struggle to perform in zero gravity, US military researchers said on Monday.

Researchers sent cells found on the inside of blood vessels to the International Space Station and let them rest for six days.

Then, astronauts introduced the cells to a potent endotoxin lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, that can cause widespread blood infection known as sepsis.

After six days of simply being in space, the cells began to show genetic changes that are typical of lowered immunity in zero-gravity, a condition often seen in astronauts.

"When we added the agonist, they didn't respond very well," said Marti Jett, director of the Integrative Systems Biology Programme at the US Army Medical Command, who presented the research at the Experimental Biology 2013 conference in Boston.

Scientists replicated the experiment on Earth to see how the infections progressed under normal gravity conditions compared to those in space.

The experiment has offered new clues in hunt for treatments for sepsis, which researchers said strikes about 750 000 Americans every year and can be deadly if left untreated. Sepsis is a leading cause of death after surgery.

Previous research has shown how being in space can take a toll on astronauts, ranging from loss of bone density and muscle to raising the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Long-term health

And the military researchers realised, in the course of the study, that they had seen similar effects in Army Rangers who saw their immunity dip while under the stress of an intensive training regimen.

According to Saralyn Mark, a medical consultant to Nasa who was not involved in the study, doctors are keen to learn more about the way space and stress affects the immune system so that they can keep astronauts healthy on long-term missions.

"Space is a wonderful environment for these microbes to flourish, it is almost like they are coming home in a way," she told AFP.

"Then you have got this other issue where your immune system is becoming impaired, and that is a very difficult equation. It can set you up for increased infection," she added.

"Is it the impact of microgravity? Is it the impact of radiation on the immune system? We are looking at all those parameters to see how the body is adapting."

NASA Administrator says it's 'an essential thing' to solve sequestration

Mark McCarter - Huntsville Times

NASA has never shied away from bold challenges. This time, rather than an exotic mission that breaks gravity, it's taking a different approach to a new force that's seemingly keeping everyone grounded: Sequestration.

"The assumption in our budget, to be quite honest, was that the Congress and the President were going to put their heads together and they're going to get us out of sequestration. That's a very huge assumption on the part of everybody," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said Monday morning.

If sequestration can't be solved, he acknowledged it could be "a whole new ball game."

Bolden was addressing a breakfast meeting of the 170-person delegation of business and civic leaders, elected officials and others at the annual visit to Washington sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Huntsville/Madison County and its partners.

With a nod to the area's long history with NASA, Bolden said, "The gateway to space has always gone through Alabama and Marshall (Space Flight Center)."

It is a group understandably concerned about the ripple effect sequestration can have on the north Alabama area as the policy impacts Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal.

"Every single 2014 budget is predicated on Congress and the President -- coming to their senses is not the right word, but it sorta is -- (to end sequestration)," Bolden said. "And that's the President's assumption. That's why he submitted the budget he did, that they're going to find a way to get out of sequestration."

As Bolden reminded the audience, "Sequestration is not a one-year deal. It's 10 years. So we've really got to get out of it. If we have to operate under sequestration, all the (ambitious goals NASA has set for deep space travel) are years from happening.

"We go from being a $17.7 billion agency -- right now we're operating at $16.7-16.8 billion -- we could go down to being a $15 billion agency," he continued. "And then it's a whole new ball game. We look at what that impact will be and our hope is that the Congress and the President will get together and find a way to get out it. That's an essential thing."

Because of existing hiring policies, Bolden said NASA has been able to avoid utilizing furloughs that have already been felt, dramatically so on Monday in the country's airports as TSA began its rounds of furloughs.

The Huntsville-area delegation will meet informally Monday night with Congressional representatives then hold meetings Tuesday morning with Sens. Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions and Reps. Mo Brooks and Robert Aderholt.

Bolden had some suggestions for those meetings.

"Let me give you a couple of hints," Bolden said. "Advice from the Administrator: Preach patience. Tell 'em to believe in the people at Marshall and trust them. They know what they're doing. I know everybody is anxious to get tons of money into Huntsville and Madison County and all the places around, but there is such a thing as having more money than you can spend effectively and wisely."

He related the financial patience to the development of the heavy-launch vehicle being developed for deep-space travel, with more modest power immediately, for a 2017 launch of the unmanned Orion, then a more powerful vehicle later.

"We have what we think is a very, very good plan," Bolden said. "You've got to preach patience and trust in the team at Marshall and around NASA. Because we do know what we're doing. We've got an incredible NASA industry partnership and among all of us we're going to do right by all of you. We're going to spend your money wisely."

Old Dog Orbital Is Ready to Give SpaceX a Fight

Ashlee Vance - Bloomberg Businessweek

The competitive stakes around commercial space travel were raised in barely 18 minutes on Sunday, as Orbital Sciences (ORB) conducted a successful test launch of its Antares rocket. The test showed that Orbital could launch a rocket and some cargo into space without a hitch, improving the company's position as it pursues NASA's resupply contract for the International Space Station. Orbital expects to complete a more complex test in the middle of this year in preparation for what could be a three-year, eight-mission, $1.9 billion deal.

For the last year or so, Elon Musk's SpaceX has been NASA's sole means of getting supplies to the ISS. SpaceX completed its test missions and has since conducted a couple of fully fledged resupply trips, while Orbital suffered delays due to technical and launch-site problems. Those delays embarrassed the 30-year-old Orbital, which found itself outmatched by Musk's upstart company. "Orbital used to be the place where the young, risk-taking guys wanted to work," says Keith Cowing, editor of the website NASA Watch. "That's SpaceX now."

During Orbital's test flight, its rocket demonstrated the ability to carry about 8,400 pounds of supplies to the space station, and the company hopes to carry 14,500 pounds per mission in the future. In addition to performing various health checks, the rocket also propelled some payloads into space, including three miniature NASA satellites and a commercial imaging satellite.

Orbital's return as a contender for space station transport places new pressure on SpaceX, although the younger company still has a number of advantages. It's able to return cargo from the ISS back to earth, while Orbital's crafts burn up on their return flights. In addition, Musk's company has better prepared its craft for future NASA contracts by designing them to transport people, as well, while Orbital has focused solely on supplies. "SpaceX has built a lot of the stuff you will want in the future into its spacecraft already," says Cowing. "Orbital isn't really upgradable."

The final frontier, according to Orbital, may include work for other countries, too. "In addition to supporting cargo missions to the ISS, the new Antares rocket will offer other commercial, civil government, and defense and intelligence customers affordable and reliable medium-class launch services for medium-class satellites that do not require the industry's larger, more expensive launch vehicles," the company said in a statement.

White House, members of Congress respond to Antares launch

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

Sunday afternoon Orbital Sciences Corporation successfully launched its Antares rocket on its inaugural flight, a test mission carrying a demonstration payload and several smallsats. Company officials said the launch, one of the final milestones in the company's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) award from NASA, went well, paying the way for a launch this summer of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft on Antares to the International Space Station.

Within a half-hour of liftoff, the White House released a statement from Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren. "The growing potential of America's commercial space industry and NASA's use of public-private partnerships are central to President Obama's strategy to ensure U.S. leadership in space exploration while pushing the bounds of scientific discovery and innovation in the 21st century," Holdren said in the brief statement. "With NASA focusing on the challenging and exciting task of sending humans deeper into space than ever before, private companies will be crucial in taking the baton for American cargo and crew launches into low-Earth orbit."

Two Democratic members of the House Science Committee also marked the successful flight in a press release (not yet posted on their website.) "Having a safe, reliable, and cost effective cargo resupply capability is critical to the full and productive utilization of the ISS," said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the full committee, in her congratulatory statement. "This new era of launch activities will aid economic growth in the Delmarva region. In the months and years ahead, continued teamwork will be critical to the completion of Orbital's first demonstration flight to the ISS and subsequent operational flights in performance of its Commercial Resupply Services contract (CRS) with NASA," said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), ranking member of the committee's space subcommittee.

And Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), an avid supporter of Wallops Flight Facility, where the launch took place, also congratulated the launch in a stream of tweets Sunday evening:

Way to go #Antares on successful historic launch from Spaceport Wallops!
5:14 PM - 21 Apr 2013

Congratulations to men & women of @OrbitalSciences, Mid-Atlantic Spaceport & @NASA_Wallops on successful #Antares launch!
5:16 PM - 21 Apr 2013

#Antares marks new era for Spaceport Wallops, supporting jobs & innovation thx to partnership between fed & state agencies w private sector
5:17 PM - 21 Apr 2013

Antares Test Launch Another Win For COTS Strategy

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

Launch of the Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares liquid-fueled rocket on April 21 gives NASA a second U.S.-owned vehicle to use in resupplying the International Space Station, vindicating a commercial approach that has been in play through two presidential administrations.

The 5 p.m. liftoff followed two previous launch attempts last week that had to be scrubbed due to uncooperative weather over the new launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Va. Ten minutes after leaving the pad, the rocket placed an 8,380-lb. (3,800-kg) instrumented dummy version of Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo vehicle into orbit. An operational Cygnus is packed with station supplies and ready to launch to the ISS this summer if the inaugural flight goes as planned.

Although President Barack Obama terminated the Constellation program of human exploration vehicles that NASA started developing under his predecessor, he retained the $500 million Commercial Orbital Resupply Services (COTS) effort launched under President George W. Bush.

SpaceX already has completed its COTS development with the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, and is delivering cargo to the station under its follow-on Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract.

If Orbital Sciences can deliver a demonstration load with its Cygnus cargo vehicle later this year, it can draw its final COTS payment and begin resupplying the station under its own eight-flight, $1.9 billion CRS contract. Essentially, NASA will have spent $288 million on developing the Antares/Cygnus stack.

SpaceX designed its Dragon from the beginning to carry crew, and is making the necessary modifications to its cargo variant under a separate NASA commercial crew development program established along the same lines as COTS. Two other companies — Boeing and Sierra Nevada — are developing crew vehicles with NASA seed money, and another — Blue Origin — is paying its own way with NASA technical support. Meanwhile, Orbital Sciences decided to focus on cargo and not enter the crew-vehicle arena, marketing Antares to government and commercial customers as a replacement to the retiring Delta II.

And while Cygnus can't return into the Earth's atmosphere, Orbital already has a NASA contract to use a future Cygnus as a free-flying automatic laboratory for potentially dangerous combustion experiments after it delivers its load to the ISS, and hopes to sell other Cygnus vehicles for similar uses.

NASA proposed asteroid-snaring mission would ride on Glenn ion engines

John Mangels - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Inside cavernous "Tank 5," a vacuum chamber as big as a subway tunnel at Cleveland's NASA Glenn Research Center, a soft sapphire glow spilled from the nozzle of an odd-looking spacecraft engine earlier this month.

The turquoise plume was a familiar sight to the engineers running the test. Ion engines, which spout bluish jets of electrically excited atoms rather than chemical flames like a traditional rocket, have been a Glenn specialty for more than 40 years. Their gentle, continuous push produces astounding speeds, using only tiny sips of xenon fuel.

A Glenn-designed ion engine enabled NASA's Deep Space 1 probe to swoop past a distant comet for a close-up look in 2001. And the Glenn ion-powered Dawn spacecraft is 260 million miles from Earth, streaking toward a flyby of the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015 and breaking Deep Space 1's acceleration record along the way.

But the most audacious assignment for the Cleveland center's ion engines is ahead, as NASA revealed April 10.

Later this decade, a robot spacecraft riding a Glenn engine's cobalt ion stream will aim for an asteroid circling a million or so miles from Earth. It will nuzzle up to the tumbling, dump truck-sized rock, unfurl a fabric grab-bag to snare it like a Venus flytrap, then fire up the ion engines and haul the asteroid into orbit around the moon.

There, as early as 2021, astronauts will dock with the captive space boulder. They'll chip off chunks for study and possibly extract water and valuable minerals.

The White House-backed asteroid-lassoing mission sets a clear near-term space exploration goal for an agency that critics said had been floundering since the retirement of the shuttle fleet and President Barack Obama's 2010 cancellation of NASA's Constellation moon-landing program.

If Congress goes along, the asteroid-capture effort will mark the first time humans try to alter the path of a celestial body – a crucial step, NASA says, in learning how to deflect much bigger "planet-killer" asteroids and comets. The space agency also touts the project as a testbed for technologies needed to reach deeper-space destinations such as Mars, a boost for commercial and international partnerships, and a chance to mine asteroids for rocket fuel ingredients, precious minerals and other hidden resources.

It also raises the fortunes of Cleveland's NASA center within the space agency. "The president wants us to put an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025 and here Glenn is right in the middle of that," said center director James Free. "The work we do is very unique. Glenn has the technology this agency needs to move forward."

NASA plans to pump $38 million into the Cleveland center in 2014 to speed up development of the more powerful ion engines needed for the asteroid-capture mission. The technology is formally called solar-electric propulsion, or SEP, because it uses the sun's energy, collected by solar panels, to generate the electricity required to make and expel ions to push the spacecraft. While chemical rockets are more powerful, ion engines are far more efficient, making them the practical choice for such a long-distance flight.

In December, a small team of Glenn engineers quietly began planning the work the center will undertake as it leads the effort to accelerate SEP for the asteroid-capture mission. Making the necessary improvements will be "very challenging," but achievable, Free said.

The most powerful ion engines currently flying on commercial satellites operate on about 25 kilowatts of electricity, or roughly 250 times the energy needed to make a household light bulb glow. To snag a million-pound asteroid and push it into lunar orbit will take a 50-kilowatt power system, plus large, extremely lightweight solar panels; compact, reliable power-processing equipment to manage the high electrical loads; and thrusters that withstand weeks or months of firing during the multi-year flight.

"It's taking that junior SEP system and cranking it up," Free said.

Working closely with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Glenn team aims to build and test prototype "engineering models" of the propulsion components in 2014.

Finding suitable asteroid will be difficult

But before NASA's robot spacecraft can capture an asteroid, scientists will have to locate the right one. And that may turn out to be the hardest part of the mission.

Asteroids are the also-ran rubble left behind as our solar system's planets clumped into being 4.5 billion years ago. Many of them lurk in a large orbiting cluster called the main asteroid belt, which lies roughly between Mars and Jupiter. Some migrate to the inner solar system. Those whose path is within 28 million miles or less of Earth's orbit around the Sun – close enough to be a potential impact risk – are called near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs.

Scientists think that early in Earth's history, heavy bombardment by asteroids and comets likely delivered much of the water and carbon-based materials that were life's building blocks. But such impacts also can end life; a strike by a huge comet or asteroid 65 million years ago caused global disruption and helped wipe out dinosaurs and other species.

Since asteroids are tiny compared to planets or stars, and because they don't generate their own light, they're not easy to spot. Scientists use telescopes on the ground and a few in space to look for NEAs, relying on position changes to calculate their trajectory and the amount of reflected light to estimate their size.

That size matters. Asteroids smaller than about 100 feet across that intercept Earth typically burn up in the atmosphere, posing no harm. (The asteroid NASA hopes to tow into lunar orbit would be no more than 25 feet in diameter, well below the danger threshold, space agency officials said. Even if did manage to get loose, it would eventually crash into the moon, not Earth.)

Larger NEAs represent bigger threats. The asteroid that exploded high over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, injuring more than 1,000 people and damaging buildings, was an estimated 60 feet in diameter. The notorious 1908 Tonguska blast that flattened almost 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest was likely an asteroid 100 to 164 feet across, a size known as a "city-killer."

Impactors around a half-mile wide would alter global weather patterns and could imperil human civilization. The dinosaur-ending coup de grace in the Cretaceous period was delivered by an object probably 6 miles across. Asteroids 87 miles wide or larger are considered "planet-killers," capable of extinguishing all life.

The good news is that large NEAs are relatively rare, and scientists think they've located most of them. Of the 9,779 close-passing asteroids discovered to date, 861, or about 9 percent, are of the civilization-threatening to planet-killing size. Researchers believe they've identified more than 90 percent of these half-mile-wide or bigger NEAs. None of the known near-Earth asteroids and comets has more than a tiny chance of hitting our planet this century, Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, told a congressional committee this month.

But progress hasn't been nearly as good pinpointing mid-sized "city-killer" NEAs, which are more plentiful than big ones but are fainter and harder to observe. In 2005, Congress directed NASA to find 90 percent of those asteroids within 15 years. But neither the Bush nor Obama administrations sought extra money for the search effort, and Congress hasn't authorized new spending on its own.

Less than 1 percent of the expected 1 million mid-sized NEAs has been located so far. The asteroid that blew up over Chelyabinsk, which was considerably smaller than city-killer-size, approached from the direction of the sun, so ground telescopes didn't identify it in advance. Any hope of spotting most medium NEAs reasonably soon would require a new infrared space telescope orbiting close to the sun, according to a study by the National Research Council.

A non-profit scientific group called the B612 Foundation is raising $450 million to build and launch such a telescope in 2018. That's good for planetary defense, but likely too late to help NASA's asteroid-capture mission, which will soon have to identify prospective space rocks much smaller and even more elusive than city-killer-sized ones.

The space agency is exploring ways to improve its ground-based telescope detection capabilities to find suitable targets, said NASA associate administrator Michael Gazarik. "Can we leverage our ground assets? The answer is we don't know yet," Gazarik said. "We think so." The agency intends to make specific recommendations later this month.

The asteroid-towing flight "may provide the resources to begin throwing that net out there and finding objects that have been whizzing by and we've been ignoring," said planetary scientist and former astronaut Tom Jones, an advisor to the B612 Foundation. "That's probably the hardest proposition in the whole package – to bring up the search network and make it produce the five or so asteroids per year that would be good candidates."

Besides giving a boost to asteroid-spotting measures, the proposed NASA mission should help scientists learn more about the rocks' composition, and how to potentially stop big ones from striking Earth. The three main hypothetical methods are pushing or pulling a killer asteroid or comet out of its collision trajectory, bumping it off-path with massive "kinetic impactor" spacecraft, or splintering it with nuclear explosions as in the 1990s movies "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact."

Relocating a small asteroid to lunar orbit as NASA plans "is a defection mission by definition," said Jones. "That would be exactly the kind of process we would use for diverting a larger, rogue asteroid in the future."

Budget, politics will determine mission's future

Whether Congress will approve a NASA budget that contains enough money for the asteroid mission is unclear. If sequestration cuts remain in effect past 2013, that would almost certainly scuttle the plan. A recent report by the Keck Institute for Space Studies estimated the cost for the robotic capture-and-return-to-lunar-orbit portion of the project – but not the astronauts' flight to recover samples – at $2.6 billion. That's roughly what NASA paid for the Curiosity rover now operating on Mars.

The Keck estimate probably is too high, NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson told reporters last week. The study assumed a longer-distance asteroid flight than may be necessary, and didn't take into account some of the technological groundwork that's already been laid, she said. "For those two reasons, we think that the price is likely to come in . . . below that." NASA, however, has a history of under-estimating the expense of large space endeavors.

Aside from the cost uncertainties, there's the question of whether lawmakers and the public will get behind the idea of bagging an asteroid.

President Obama previously had proposed that astronauts make a deep-space voyage to rendezvous with a large asteroid by 2025, rather than having an unmanned ship haul a smaller rock back to orbit the moon for study. A National Research Council review last year found "little evidence" that the American public or NASA's own workforce considered the asteroid landing a compelling mission.

The asteroid-capture-and-return plan can be done sooner, cheaper, and with less risk than flying astronauts to survey one far from Earth. But some observers aren't persuaded either mission is the right choice.

"I personally remain unconvinced of the need to send people to an asteroid, either one that is six months away or that's been brought here," said Marcia Smith, president of the Space and Technology Policy Group and a member of the NRC panel that examined NASA's strategic direction. "You can bring samples back from an asteroid using a robotic spacecraft. If you want to study how to redirect or deflect an asteroid, again, I think that can be done robotically. I haven't had anybody explain to me the added value of having humans there on site."

Targeting asteroids "does not seem sufficient as a centerpiece for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit," said former NASA associate administrator Scott Pace, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute. The asteroid-recovery mission doesn't court commercial or international participation, and "is only weakly relevant to planetary defense," said Pace, who was an advisor to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and favors a multi-national return to the moon.

Several members of Congress share that view. On April 10, the same day that NASA announced its new asteroid mission, nine House members – most of them Republicans from states with large space flight centers that were heavily involved in the Apollo moon-landing program – introduced legislation that would require the space agency to set up a lunar colony beginning in 2022.

But others believe snaring an asteroid is both practical and inspirational.

"It's almost a restoration of the can-do NASA. It's bold and innovative," said Louis Friedman, co-founder and executive director emeritus of the Planetary Society, a respected space exploration advocacy group. "Moving an asteroid to lunar orbit is a steppingstone. You're building up that capability that will ultimately get you to Mars. Exploration consists of new discoveries and adventure. This [mission] truly is exploration."

"It evokes thoughts of the kind of space-faring future many people have long dreamed of, with humans and robots working together . . . to accomplish exciting and ambitious missions far from Earth," emailed Marc Rayman, chief engineer for NASA's Dawn spacecraft mission. And "it is just plain cool!"

Life on Mars? Finding It May Require Humans on Red Planet

Mike Wall - Space.com

Life may well lurk beneath the Martian surface today, but it'll be tough to detect without sending humans to the Red Planet, some experts say.

It could be a long time before robots are able to drill deep into the Martian underground, explore caves and investigate other potentially life-supporting habitats on the Red Planet. So if humanity wants to satisfy its curiosity about potential life on Mars anytime soon, it should work to get boots in the red dirt, advocates say.

"We might be lucky and confirm life with robots over the next one to two decades, but it's probably going to take people to do, literally, the heavy labor to be able to do it," said Chris Carberry, co-founder and executive director of Explore Mars, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human exploration of the Red Planet.

Subsurface sanctuaries?

Most scientists think the frigid, dry and radiation-bombed Martian surface is unlikely to host life as we know it today. But conditions could be much more benign in underground environments such as caves or lava tubes, providing potential refuges for microbes.

"The subsurface is going to be radically different from the surface," astrobiologist and cave scientist Penny Boston, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, told SPACE.com late last year. "Every indication we have from caves of all different kinds all over this planet [Earth] shows that it doesn't take much separation vertically for a radically different environment."

Indeed, the Martian subsurface is known to harbor water ice, and several recent studies suggest that pockets of liquid water may exist beneath the red dirt as well. Here on Earth, life thrives pretty much anywhere liquid water is found, so the possibility of current Martian aquifers excites astrobiologists.

Adding to the intrigue, Carberry said, is the fact that several different ground-based and space-based instruments have detected small amounts of methane in Mars' air. The gas could be an indicator of Red Planet life, some researchers say, since 90 percent of Earth's methane is biologically derived.

Further, scientists think methane disappears rapidly from the Martian atmosphere, meaning any of the stuff swirling there today was likely produced in the recent past.

"There is a strong, growing body of evidence that there could be subsurface life on Mars," Carberry told SPACE.com. "However, we may not be able to confirm that unless we send people."

Exploring the Martian underground

Carberry lauded the work of Red Planet robots such as the car-size Curiosity rover, whose mission team recently determined that Mars could have supported microbial life billions of years ago.

But he said the search for extant Martian life is really a job for human explorers, at least for the near future. Current robots just aren't capable of drilling several meters beneath the Red Planet's surface, for example, or rappelling down into a lava tube by themselves.

"There are so many different things, so many complicated processes, that a human could do as long as they had a backup, a partner, to help them," Carberry said, "but robots can't — or if they can, it's going to take them an awful long time."

Protecting potential Mars life

Sending people to search for Martian life would raise some ethical concerns, however.

Every astronaut who lands on the Red Planet will bring with him or her a swarming mass of 100 trillion microbes — the diverse "microbiome" that has evolved with humans for eons and provides a number of services, from aiding food digestion to keeping pathogenic bacteria at bay.

Some of these microbes would invariably jump ship on Mars, potentially swamping or destroying the organisms their human hosts were sent to detect.

"When you send humans to the next planet, you will always contaminate that planet, because you cannot sterilize a human like you can sterilize [NASA's 1970s-era] Viking spacecraft," Bas Lansdorp, co-founder and CEO of the Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, said during a news conference Monday (April 22).

Mars One aims to land four humans on the Red Planet in 2023 to jump-start a permanent colony there. The organization does not plan on aggressively seeking out Mars life; rather, it will try to put its settlement in a spot that minimizes the risks to potential indigenous organisms, Lansdorp said.

Scientists and space agencies around the world are well aware of the planetary protection issue. In 2008, the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) drew up a set of guidelines that seeks to safeguard Earth from "back contamination" from Mars, and to protect potential Red Planet life from an interplanetary invasion as well.

The COSPAR guidelines — which NASA and the European Space Agency, among others, are committed to follow — advise steering clear of gullies, possible geothermal sites and other "special regions" on Mars where Earth life might be able to get a foothold.

Such restrictions could make a manned life hunt difficult, since these places are also the most likely to harbor Red Planet life.

Carberry said future manned missions should take strict precautions to minimize their impact on the Red Planet and any potential indigenous lifeforms. But he doesn't think planetary protection concerns should keep humanity away from the Red Planet entirely.

"That's not a good reason not to go," Carberry said. "If we used that rationale for not going to Mars, we pretty much could eliminate all human exploration anywhere from now on."

Could, and Should, Astronauts Have Babies on Mars?

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

The first Martian colonists may want to think twice about reproducing. Though it may not seem like the most pressing problem facing the future astronauts of the Mars One expedition aiming to launch in 10 years, whether or not to have children could be a major biological and ethical conundrum.

Monday, the nonprofit Mars One organization announced its plan to begin selecting astronauts for one-way missions to Mars. These spacefarers would establish the first Martian colony, with subsequent crews arriving every two years. Eventually, those Mars settlers may want to have families — but can they? Doctors say they don't know whether humans would be able to become pregnant and give birth in the lesser gravity on Mars (it's got 38 percent of the gravity on Earth), not to mention how babies would fare under the excess radiation outside of Earth's protective atmosphere.

"We definitely will start out at first with animals and see how the pregnancy works with animals," said Norbert Kraft, Mars One's chief medical officer. "We will go from there after these results and think about human pregnancy." But a truly self-sustaining colony as Mars One envisions can't rely on new recruits from Earth. Eventually, humans will likely have to experiment with pregnancy on Mars. And if that's not hard enough, just wait 'til they try raising teenagers on Mars.

Rely on a Smartphone? New NASA Satellites Do

Suzanne Presto - Voice of America

Smartphones. We carry them in our pockets, toss them in our tote bags and have them at the ready whenever we want directions to a destination or to snap a picture or to call a friend.

Perhaps we're often guilty of taking the gadgets' microprocessing powers for granted. Not so with NASA, which just sent three smartphones into space as low-cost satellites.

PhoneSats

When Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on its first test flight Sunday, the privately built booster carried a payload to simulate the cargo craft that will one day dock with the International Space Station.

But Antares also placed into orbit several new mini-satellites built mainly with smartphone components, which the U.S. space agency is calling their PhoneSats.
The three so-called PhoneSats are named 'Alexander,' 'Graham,' and 'Bell,' after the inventor of the telephone.

The PhoneSats are small cubes, each about the size of a beverage mug and weighing a little more than a kilogram. At the core of each is a Google-HTC Nexus One phone, whose zippy little microprocessor -- running the Android operating system -- serves as the onboard computer.

Operating in Orbit

Jim Cockrell, the PhoneSat Project Manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, described the project in a video broadcast on NASA TV ahead of the Antares launch.

"Someone here asked the question, 'Can we fly a cell phone as the avionics for a satellite and have something that's very capable but really, really inexpensive?' So PhoneSat was launched to try to answer that question," he said.

NASA says the three PhoneSats are operating in orbit, and transmissions from the trio have been received at various ground stations here on Earth.

Low-Cost Satellites

Engineers spent between $3,500 and $7,000 for the PhoneSat components. They did add a larger, external lithium-ion battery bank and a more powerful radio to send messages.

The space agency says smartphones have more than 100 times the computing power of an average satellite. Researchers note that smartphones come equipped with fast processors, high-resolution cameras, global positioning system receivers, radios and sensors.

"The smartphone vendors have put a lot of R&D [research and development] money into making very, very capable microprocessors that have a lot of processing power and speed in a package that's very rugged," said NASA's Cockrell.

Monitoring PhoneSat Transmissions

Researchers continue to monitor the satellites, which could remain in orbit for about two weeks. NASA adds that amateur radio operators can monitor the transmissions themselves. Each satellite will broadcast a signal every 30 seconds on the amateur UHF band 437.425 MHz.

The PhoneSats will attempt to take pictures of our planet as well as send information via radio back to Earth.

Think about that next time you pull your phone from your pocket. But don't think about texting 'Alexander' 'Graham' or 'Bell.' NASA says it has disabled their ability to send and receive calls and texts.

Chris Hadfield 'wistful' as space mission drawing to an end

Andy Johnson - CTV News

Canadian astronaut Cmdr. Chris Hadfield is excited about the moment when the Soyuz rocket he is travelling aboard bursts through the atmosphere and begins its rough parachute ride back to the Earth's surface.

Hadfield, the current commander of the International Space Station, blasted off for the ISS on Dec. 19, and his return is expected around May 13.

Hadfield has been to space before, but the return trip a few weeks from now will mark his first journey home aboard one of the Russian rockets used by NASA since the U.S. shuttle program was abandoned.

Hadfield will pilot the Soyuz as it comes home.

"I'm excited about the landing, I've flown twice in space before, but on a shuttle. The shuttle kind of flies its way into the atmosphere and picks up on wings and lands," he told a school group Monday from the ISS.

"The Soyuz comes in a little more meteorite-like and opens a parachute and we come down and we let the Earth know we're back, the Soyuz hits with definite force when we land... It's something I've trained for for years including learning to speak Russian. So that part, I'm really excited for."

Hadfield took over command of the ISS on March 13, becoming the first Canadian to run the massive orbiting research station.

During his mission Hadfield has conducted experiments, repairs and installations and taken hundreds of stunning photographs of the Earth, posting them to Twitter where he now has close to 700,000 followers.

As the end of his mission draws near, Hadfield said he is becoming "wistful" as he conducts various tasks aboard the ISS -- some for the last time. And as the days tick down he said he is spending more and more of his limited free time gazing out the window at Earth "because of the magnificent rarity of it and my desire to absorb as much of it as I possibly can."

Hadfield said he is excited about some aspects of returning home. In addition to seeing family and friends, he's looking forward to eating food that has smell and texture and doesn't come served in a bag.

"I'm looking forward to fresh food and the crunch and the snap of food of all different varieties and the smell of rich coffee and the smell of fresh bread baking -- that type of thing, a more full assault of the senses when I get home," Hadfield said.

Hadfield said his emotions swing between feelings of great responsibility and great honour to have been asked to command the space station, and he wants to "do it right," making the most of his experience and communicating to as many people as possible on Earth.

"Yes, it's a feeling of responsibility, but at the same time it's a real feeling of honour that you've gotten to a point in life where you're trusted to do this," he said.

"You do feel the responsibility of it to try and do it right, to try and have one perfect day on the station where I don't make even one little mistake in any of the procedures, and I haven't done it yet. I've been here 130 days and I have yet to have day where I haven't made at least one little small mistake."

Earth Day In Space: Astronaut Chris Hadfield Marks Holiday Aboard ISS

Miriam Kramer - Huffington Post

Earth Day is even celebrated in space.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield sent down some well wishes from the International Space Station Monday in honor of Earth Day.

"Good Morning, World, and Happy Earth Day from orbit!" the current space station commander wrote from his Twitter account (@Cmdr_Hadfield) earlier today. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

Hadfield also spoke to a group of Canadian students and journalists about how life in space has changed his view of the Earth.

"If anything my respect and my concern and my love for the Earth has only been deepened by [having this] new perspective on the planet," Hadfield said.

Hadfield thinks that a "vital" part of his job is to show the world what it is like to live in orbit, he said during the Canadian event.

The first Canadian commander of the station is known for beaming down beautiful pictures of the Earth from the space station's perspective as well as creating videos detailing everything from cooking on the station to cutting his nails in microgravity.

Hadfield also reflected on the significance of the Earth through Twitter later in the day.

"One quick look at our planet reminds me of the importance of Earth Day," Hadfield wrote.

NASA had scheduled its own set of Earth Day activities. The space agency released photos and hosted social media events in honor of the Earth celebration. These events are the culmination of a month-long campaign by the agency to help engage the public with Earth science from space.

Hadfield and two other residents of the International Space Station — Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and NASA's Tom Marshburn — are scheduled to fly back to Earth in May after a six-month stint on board the orbiting outpost.

The $100 billion space station has been permanently staffed by astronauts from around the world since 2000. The station was built by five different space agencies representing 15 countries with construction beginning in 1998.

Antares rising

Jeff Foust – The Space Review (Commentary)

(Foust is editor and publisher of The Space Review)

Sometimes it's remarkable that any rocket gets off the ground. There's first and foremost the myriad of technical challenges of the rocket itself, a complex array of components that have to be in perfect working order for the rocket to leave the ground and streak towards space. Then there's the need for weather conditions, like clouds and wind, be within the vehicle's constraints. And, on more than one occasion, the rocket and the weather have cooperated, only for a launch to be undone by a glitch with the rocket's payload or, worse, a boat or plane that strayed into a restricted zone downrange from the launch.

All those issues are magnified with the first launch of a new rocket. For all the testing of the rocket's various components done on the ground, the first truly complete test of the rocket is on that maiden flight: history has shown that conditions unforeseen or untestable on the ground can doom a rocket that, on paper and in previous tests, looked to be just fine.

Those concerns had to be on the minds of those intensely watching, in person or via the web, the first launch of Orbital Sciences Corporation's Antares rocket last week. The mission, designed A-ONE by Orbital, was clearly described by Orbital and NASA alike as a test flight, to see how the vehicle performed before Orbital flew the first of its Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station on it. Nonetheless, a lot was riding on the launch for the company and the space agency.

First, though, the rocket had to get off the ground. On Wednesday, the first launch attempt from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia, all was looking good: the countdown was proceeding normally and the weather was cooperating. Then, with about 12 minutes left until the scheduled 5 pm EDT (2100 GMT) launch, one of those unforeseen and perhaps untestable issues cropped up on the pad: an umbilical between the rocket's second stage and the Transporter Erector Launcher (TEL) that acts as the rocket's gantry disconnected, severing a data link. Launch controllers had no choice but to pull the plug, so to speak, on the launch.

Orbital explained after the scrub the problem was a combination of two factors: limited slack in the umbilical and a "slight hydraulic movement" in the TEL, the combination of which caused the cable to disconnect. The company said it would make slight adjustments to both the umbilical and TEL to prevent the problem from happening again.

Orbital officials emphasized that, other than this glitch, the countdown was proceeding well, particularly for a first launch. "Given that this is a first run for the rocket and the first time use of a new launch facility, the fact that all systems were performing as planned while the team proceeded through the pre-launch checklists is very encouraging. It speaks volumes about the quality of the work done by this team and our partners," said Frank Culbertson, executive vice president of Orbital and mission director for the launch, in a statement after the scrub.

Orbital rescheduled the launch first for Friday, but then shifted it to Saturday because of poor weather forecast as a cold front passed through the region late Friday. Saturday dawned with high clouds that were gradually clearing and prospects of good weather: a 90-percent chance of acceptable weather at launch time, according to initial forecasts. Yet it was weather that posed the next obstacle to the launch.

The problem was not with the clouds or with ground conditions, where winds were light, but with much stronger winds at higher altitudes. The passage of the front brought with it high winds at higher altitudes, and models showed that if there was a launch failure, debris could be blown beyond established limits. Under those conditions, the launch could not take place.

Orbital delayed fueling of the rocket by over an hour, hoping that updated wind data from weather balloons would show improving conditions, but by 4:30 pm EDT Saturday it was clear the winds wouldn't improve in time before the launch window closed at 7 pm. "It was still red, and the trend towards green was not nearly strong enough, so we made the decision to go and scrub at this point," Culbertson told reporters late Saturday afternoon. Making the decision to postpone the launch before fueling the vehicle preserved the opportunity for another launch attempt on Sunday. And, as many pointed out, the third time's the charm, right?

On Sunday, the upper-level winds had subsided, and conditions on the ground, while a bit breezy, were still within acceptable limits. The weather was now cooperating, and so was the range (although one boat had to be "chased out," in the words of launch controllers, by the Coast Guard when it strayed into the restricted zone within an hour of launch.) Success was in the hands of a promising, but still untried, rocket.

Prior to the launch, Orbital warned that unlike the company's smaller, solid-fueled rockets, Antares would take off more slowly. Two seconds after the first stage's twin AJ26 engines ignited, the rocket would lift off the pad. Eight seconds later, the rocket would still be traveling at 65 km/h and be just 70 meters of the pad; it would take over a minute after that for the rocket to exceed Mach 1.

That ponderous flight, not uncommon for larger liquid-fueled rockets, added another dimension to the drama. But as the countdown reached zero, the engines ignited on cue, and two seconds later the rocket began its slow but certain ascent. The glitches in the earlier launch attempts were forgotten as controllers repeatedly noted conditions were nominal as the rocket soared into the late afternoon sky. The first stage worked as planned and then jettisoned; after a brief coast period the rocket's payload fairing and interstage adaptor also were released and the Antares second stage, a Castor 30 solid motor from ATK, ignited. Ten minutes after that slow-motion liftoff, the rocket released its payload, a simulated Cygnus spacecraft and several smallsats, into low Earth orbit, ending a successful mission.

"Today did go extremely smoothly, and it's a real testament to the team that it did," Culbertson said in a post-launch press conference Sunday. "But if you watched our progress over the last few years, you know that this is not easy. Making it look easy takes a lot of hard work."

Culbertson said that all initial indications were that Antares performed just as planned, with every mission milestone taking place within a second of the plan. He said engineers would spend several days performing a preliminary analysis of the data collected during the launch, but would continue to analyze it in greater detail as the company prepares for the next Antares launch in the summer.

Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program, indicated he was ready to declare the launch a success even before that preliminary analysis of data was complete. "As soon as we saw separation of the payload, that was really the end of the primary mission objectives we established," he said, referring to NASA's Space Act Agreement with Orbital, part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, that is supporting development of Antares and Cygnus. "It's certainly not going to take days for us to conclude that the primary objectives were met."

One minor issue with the launch was not with the rocket itself but the launch site. As the rocket disappeared from view, those at the launch turned back to the launch pad at MARS and saw clouds of black smoke billowing from the vicinity. The launch apparently set of some brush fires nearby, but nothing that damaged the launch pad. "It doesn't appear that anything around the pad was burning," Culbertson said.

The launch was a major success for both Orbital and NASA. For Orbital, Antares represented not only the largest rocket the company had ever built, but also a major bet on the company's future. Orbital hopes Antares can launch not just Cygnus cargo missions, but other satellites, for the US government in particular, that previously flew on the Delta II, a medium-class rocket that will be retired in the next few years. Antares will provide "right-size and right-price" launch services, as the company terms it, for such payloads, a subtle reference to the fact that such satellites now have to use the larger, and more expensive, EELV-class Atlas V and Delta IV.

For NASA, the launch was another vindication of its approach to turn to the commercial sector to launch cargo and, eventually, crews to the ISS. "It was a great day for NASA, and another historic day for commercial spaceflight in America," said Lindenmoyer. Assuming Orbital can also successfully demonstrate its Cygnus spacecraft later this year, NASA notes that this provides true competition for ISS cargo services going forward (although unlike SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, Cygnus will not be able to return cargo to Earth.)

"Today's successful test flight of Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket from the spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, demonstrates an additional private space launch capability for the United States and lays the groundwork for the first Antares cargo mission to the International Space Station later this year," John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a statement issued immediately after the launch. "The growing potential of America's commercial space industry and NASA's use of public-private partnerships are central to President Obama's strategy to ensure US leadership in space exploration while pushing the bounds of scientific discovery and innovation in the 21st century."

A third, and often overlooked, winner in the successful Antares launch is the local community. The state of Virginia and other government agencies, along with Orbital, invested about $140 million to develop the Antares launch site at MARS, hoping to attract high-tech economic development to a largely agricultural region. "That's a pretty good investment in the Eastern Shore, and I think it's paid off," Culbertson said. Orbital people have moved to the region to work on Antares, he said. Local officials, he added, "seem really happy that we're here and that we're bringing more business to the Eastern Shore."

Now attention turns to the next Antares launch this summer to fly the first Cygnus spacecraft. "I'm not going to hold my breath any less on the next one than I did on this one. Every launch is a challenge," Culbertson said. "Rockets are hard. Spaceflight is difficult. And getting off the ground is a real challenge." It is, though, as Orbital demonstrated Sunday and others have in the past, an achievable challenge.

Bold Mars Pursuit Truly Inspires

Jerry Ross – Space News (Opinion)

(Ross is a former astronaut and shares the world record for number of space launches — seven — and he ranks third in the number of space walks — nine. His new book is "Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer.")

The recently announced Inspiration Mars mission has been described as "audacious," "extremely challenging" and "ambitious." The announcement has rightfully been met with skepticism. Ironically, I am told that this is exactly how members of the Inspiration Mars team first reacted when presented with the unique opportunity to conduct a human mission around Mars and back to Earth in 501 days within five years. The team's determination, after intensive study, to pursue this bold goal has me cheering them on.

On March 3 in Big Sky, Mont., this group of respected experts presented a collaborative feasibility study at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Aerospace Conference, outlining how a mission might be accomplished when the planets align in 2018 affording a "fast, free return" fly-by of Mars and return to Earth.

Dennis Tito, the leader of this group and the founder of the Inspiration Mars Foundation, has dubbed it "A Mission for America." The project is designed to return America to the bold thinking, innovation and daring can-do attitude that many of us grew up with in the 1950s and '60s. Inspiration Mars plans to send a man and a woman, representing all of humanity, around Mars, and hopes to inspire a new generation of explorers to pursue educations and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

In my book, "Spacewalker," and other recent writings, I have advocated the need for America to once again dream big dreams, work toward difficult goals and consequently reap the benefits in education, technology and our economy just as benefits were realized when we first journeyed to the Moon. The Inspiration Mars mission presents exactly that kind of endeavor. While the team is optimistic that the mission will launch in 2018, independent of that outcome, the bold plans and efforts undertaken will excite the nation, will challenge engineers and scientists in pursuing its goals, and will ultimately assist in future human travel to the red planet.

For those who remain skeptical, history is our guide. Apollo 8 took seven years from the start of the Apollo program to orbiting the Moon with a much more challenging scenario. NASA rushed to build a launch vehicle and a crew vehicle, establish launch control and mission control centers, build launch pads, design space suits and life-support systems, and develop mission planning, training and operations teams — an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive and perhaps equally as audacious as Inspiration Mars.

To me, this all looks quite feasible. Investments in human space exploration technologies and operations by NASA and by the commercial space industry are converging at a time and in a way to make such a mission achievable. Much work will need to be done and the challenges will be many, but that is what makes this proposed mission exciting and worthwhile.

However, the crew will literally be boldly going where no man, or woman, has gone before — and therein lie the most significant challenges. This is not a mission to low Earth orbit. The vehicle technology available for the Inspiration Mars flight poses significant gaps in addressing the health, safety and productivity of a human crew traveling outside the Earth's protective magnetic fields for an extended period of time. Flying both closer to and farther from the sun than ever before, the vehicle and crew will be exposed to significant radiation levels. The speed of the vehicle's re-entry upon return to Earth will be unprecedented. These are only two of the critical issues that must be successfully resolved in the next couple of years to make the January 2018 launch window. Yet there are already positive signs of the progress being made to address these challenges.

Inspiration Mars has signed a reimbursable Space Act Agreement with NASA Ames Research Center to study and design the re-entry profile and the vehicle thermal protection system. NASA is embracing its can-do heritage in a new way — in the role of a facilitator. This is very good news. I expect there will be more Space Act Agreements to come for other NASA spaceflight centers to support development efforts in areas such as life support and crew health management. NASA's expertise will be critical to the safety and success of the mission.

"This is going to be the Apollo 8 moment for our next generation," said Jonathan Clark, associate professor of neurology and space medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, who is the chief medical officer for Inspiration Mars. This is a moving and meaningful statement coming from a friend of mine, a man who lost his wife, Laurel, in the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy.

I think most of us who have accepted the risk of flying to and from space will agree that this is the kind of mission that America should take on. That's what great nations do.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - April 23, 2013 and JSC Today

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Blog Archive