Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: April 4, 2013 5:56:34 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - April 4, 2013 and JSC Today

Hope you can join us at Hibachi Grill at 11:30 today for our monthly NASA Retirees luncheon.   As always, we have the left rear party room reserved for our use.    Just tell them up front you are with the NASA Retirees groups and walk on back to join us.

Just to clear up any further confusion ---   James J. Shannon who passed away recently is NOT John Shannon's father, James D. Shannon, who worked in MOD.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
2.            Follow Chamber A Activities on Social Media Today
3.            Monthly Test of the JSC Emergency Warning System
4.            NASA@work: Training Opportunity, Impact of Sequestration, Active Challenges
5.            Sustainable Development
6.            Whole-listic Sustainability -- April 10
7.            The College Money Guys
8.            Starport Summer Camp -- Registering Now
9.            Zumbatomic Kids Fitness at Starport -- Try the First Class for Free
10.          Superhero Flight Day
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson of NASA was the first female commander of the International Space Station."
________________________________________
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
Most of us feel like our safety program is in pretty good shape, but could always use a little improvement. That's comforting. German chocolate cake is also comforting, and you listed that as your favorite foreign thing. Personally, I'm partial to Canadian geese. I just honkin' love them. This week we have the spring fair, and it got me thinking about how spring cleaning and home maintenance relates to safety. Question one will ask if you really do home maintenance. Change filters? Major repairs? Call somebody? Question two came to me last night as I was channel surfing at home and happened upon a celebrity high-dive reality show. I watched a few minutes, then felt a little trashy. Do you have trashy pleasures that you indulge in? TV? Web? Books? Weekly your World News on over to get this week's poll.
Joel Walker x30541 http://jlt.jsc.nasa.gov/

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2.            Follow Chamber A Activities on Social Media Today
Follow along during a special social media access event in the Building 32 Vacuum Chamber A facility today from 8 a.m. to noon. Nine of your fellow employees are attending a unique preview event while tweeting and posting as they visit the high bay floor, Chamber A level one, the pump room and Chamber A level 5.
Here are the links to follow their sites and keep up with the action:
Roger H. Weiss: www.twitter.com/rogerhw
Liz Warren: https://twitter.com/ISS_Research
Michael Interbartolo: https://plus.google.com/116992234810067730471/posts
Wendy Watkins: https://twitter.com/DESERT_RATS, https://twitter.com/NASA_NEEMO, https://www.facebook.com/NASA.DRATS, https://www.facebook.com/NASANEEMO?fref=ts
Sarah Ruiz: https://twitter.com/saroy
Lauren McMahon: https://www.facebook.com/OutAndAllied?fref=ts
Aaron Herridge: https://twitter.com/AaronDHerridge
Molly White: https://twitter.com/molly_white
Joyce Abbey: https://twitter.com/spacediva
Megan Sumner 281-792-7520

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3.            Monthly Test of the JSC Emergency Warning System
The Emergency Dispatch Center and Office of Emergency Management will conduct the monthly test of the JSC Emergency Warning System (EWS) today, April 4, at noon.
The EWS test will consist of a verbal "This is a test" message, followed by a short tone and a second verbal "This is a test" message. The warning tone will be the "Wavering tone," which is associated with an "Attack Warning" message. Please visit the JSC Emergency Awareness website for EWS tones and definitions. During an actual emergency situation, the particular tone and verbal message will provide you with protective information.
Dennis G. Perrin x34232 http://jea.jsc.nasa.gov

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4.            NASA@work: Training Opportunity, Impact of Sequestration, Active Challenges
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 2. Two session times will be available (11 a.m. CDT and 2 p.m. CDT). Sign up today, as space is limited.
Due to NASA's budget challenges under sequestration, all monetary awards are currently on hold. NASA@work challenges are still running, however, and we are seeking some new and innovative ways to incentivize and recognize awardees. NASA@work challenges will continue to be posted, and "winners" will continue to receive Certificates of Excellence for their participation. If you have an idea for alternative awards, stay tuned as challenge owner Lynn Buquo will ask the NASA@work community to come up with ways to revise our current award system for the NASA@work platform. (Challenge will launch May 2.)
Kathryn Keeton 281-204-1519 http://nasa.innocentive.com

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5.            Sustainable Development
Join Engineers without Borders-JSC as we participate in a national, virtual conference this Saturday to learn more about sustainable international development. We will gather at Building 348 (a.k.a. "the Sandbox") from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to hear some great speakers. The Global Innovations Forum: Pathways to Sustainable Development will explore the challenges, successes and important lessons learned on the road to sustainable international development. The agenda can be found here. If you have any questions, contact Mike Ewert at x39134. No RSVP is required.
Event Date: Saturday, April 6, 2013   Event Start Time:11:00 AM   Event End Time:1:30 PM
Event Location: Building 348

Add to Calendar

Mike Ewert x39134 http://www.ewb-jsc.org

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6.            Whole-listic Sustainability -- April 10
You are invited to JSC's SAIC/Safety and Mission Assurance Speaker Forum featuring Laurie Peterson, JSC sustainability champion.
Subject: Whole-listic Sustainability
Date/Time: Wednesday, April 10, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Location: Building 1, Room 966
Peterson will highlight our JSC Sustainability Program as it relates to a concept she refers to as "whole-listic" sustainability. She will engage you in assessing your own level of satisfaction, personally and professionally. Thought-provoking techniques for full engagement will be offered to ultimately enable sustainability at JSC and, most importantly, within yourself. Peterson is a bioprocess engineer, professional speaker, executive coach and process improvement and strategic planning facilitator. She believes that the hardest and most important thing we have to do in our lives is be honest to ourselves, and that every experience is a learning experience.
Event Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2013   Event Start Time:11:30 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: Building 1, room 966

Add to Calendar

Della Cardona/Juan Traslavina 281-335-2074/281-335-2272

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

Add to Calendar

Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Clinical Services Branch x36130

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8.            Starport Summer Camp -- Registering Now
Summer is fast approaching, and Starport will again be offering summer camp for youth at the Gilruth Center all summer long. We have tons of fun planned, and we expect each session to fill up, so get your registrations in early! Weekly themes are listed on our website, as well as information regarding registration and all the necessary forms.
Ages: 6 to 12
Times: 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Dates: June 10 to Aug. 16 in one-week sessions
Registration: March 18 for NASA dependents | May 6 for non-dependents
Fee per session: $140 per child for dependents | $160 per child for non-dependents
Ask about out sibling discounts and discounts for registering for all sessions.
PLUS, receive a coupon for 25 percent off a four-, six- or 12-week membership package to our Inner Space Yoga and Pilates Studio when you register for camp by April 30.
Shericka Phillips x35563 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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9.            Zumbatomic Kids Fitness at Starport -- Try the First Class for Free
Designed exclusively for kids, Zumbatomic classes are rockin', high-energy fitness parties packed with specially choreographed, kid-friendly routines. This dance-fitness workout for kids ages 4 to 12 will be set to hip-hop, salsa, reggaeton and more. We will have a demo class on April 12 that you can try for free to kick off our new session! Sign up at the Gilruth front desk for the free class.
Session: April 19 to May 17
Class meeting day: Friday
Time: 5:30 to 6:15 p.m.
Location: Gilruth Center Studio 1
Fee: $55/child
Register at the Gilruth Center.
Shericka Phillips x35563 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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10.          Superhero Flight Day
They fly into the night, they test equipment in the early light and they're our heroes of human spaceflight! Are you one of these amazing ambassadors for human spaceflight? Help us celebrate our space he-roes/she-roes on International Human Space Flight Day. Space Center Houston is planning an out-of-this-world event on April 12 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., which will include presentations, demonstrations, celebrations and international dance performances. We are looking for volunteers to help lead activities and assist with presentations and demonstrations. Really want to help but can't stay the whole time? No problem! We will have shifts from 10 a.m. to noon and noon to 3 p.m. so that you can get back to your regularly schedule heroics. For more information or to volunteer, call Annie at 281-792-7885.
Event Date: Friday, April 12, 2013   Event Start Time:10:00 AM   Event End Time:3:00 PM
Event Location: Space Center Houston

Add to Calendar

Annie Schanock 281-792-7885

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

NASA TV:
·         11:50 am Central (12:50 pm EDT) – E35's Chris Hadfield with Discovery Canada's "Daily Planet" program

Human Spaceflight News
Thursday, April 4, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Orbital ready to roll Antares to launch pad for maiden flight

Dan Leone - Space News

Orbital Sciences will roll Antares out to the pad early April 6 in preparation for the rocket's debut launch less than two weeks later, the Dulles, Va.-based company announced April 3. Orbital was planning to roll out the first Antares to fly in space April 5, but forecasts of lightning near the launchpad forced a delay, Orbital spokesman Barron Beneski said in an email. Antares will roll out of its Horizontal Integration Facility at 4:45 EDT on April 6. The rocket will be vertical on the pad later that morning, an Orbital press release said. Antares is slated to launch April 17-19. Orbital plans to set an exact day once Antares is installed at its launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va. The launch window opens at 5 p.m. EDT all four days. Orbital aims to launch Antares to the same low Earth orbit it will target when it starts launching the unmanned Cygnus spacecraft on cargo delivery missions to the international space station under an eight-flight, $1.9 billion NASA contract awarded in 2008.

Antares rocket rollout scheduled for Saturday

Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com

Orbital Sciences plans to move its first full-up two-stage Antares booster to the launch pad Saturday ahead of a planned demonstration flight from Virginia no sooner than April 17. The commercial launcher will begin the one-mile journey from its horizontal integration facility to launch pad 0A at about 4:45 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT) Saturday, Orbital Sciences posted in an update on its website. By late morning, the 133-foot-tall booster will be raised vertical on the launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Va., Orbital Sciences said.

How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom

Ken Kremer - Universe Today

Well the picture perfect docking of the SpaceX Dragon capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) on March 3 and the triumphant ocean splashdown last week on March 26 nearly weren't to be – and it all goes back to a microscopic manufacturing mistake in the oxidizer tank check valves that no one noticed long before the vessel ever took flight. Barely 11 minutes after I witnessed the spectacular March 1 blastoff of the Dragon atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, everyone's glee suddenly turned to disbelief and gloom with the alarming news from SpaceX Mission Control that contact had been lost. I asked SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk to explain what caused the failure and how they saved the drifting, uncontrolled Dragon capsule from doom – just in the nick of time. Applying the space version of the Heimlich maneuver turned out to be the key. But if you can't talk to the patient – all is lost.

Hunt for dark matter heats up

William Harwood - CBS News

A $2 billion cosmic ray detector attached to the International Space Station has confirmed a steady flow of antimatter positrons streaming through the solar system from all directions, possibly the tell-tale fingerprints of collisions between particles of as-yet-unseen dark matter, scientists said Wednesday. But researchers do not yet have enough raw data to reach a statistically reliable conclusion. As such, they cannot rule out the possibility that the positrons detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, were generated by rapidly spinning pulsars, the collapsed remnants of massive suns destroyed in supernova explosions.

Sensor on Space Station may have seen hints of elusive dark matter

Geoffrey Brumfiel - National Public Radio

An international team of researchers announced in Switzerland on Wednesday that an experiment on the International Space Station may have seen hints of something called dark matter. The finding could be a milestone in the decades-long search for the universe's missing material. Only a tiny sliver of stuff in the universe is visible to scientists; the rest is dark matter. Researchers don't know what it is, but they know it's there. Its gravity pulls on the things we can see.

Scientists find hint of dark matter from cosmos

John Heilprin & Seth Borenstein - Associated Press

A $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found the footprint of something that could be dark matter, the mysterious substance that is believed to hold the cosmos together but has never been directly observed, scientists say. But the first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, known by its acronym AMS, are almost as enigmatic as dark matter itself. They show evidence of new physics phenomena that could be the strange and unknown dark matter or could be energy that originates from pulsars, scientists at the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva announced Wednesday.

Scientists home in on mysterious dark matter

Robert Evans - Reuters

Scientists said on Wednesday they may be close to tracking down the mysterious "dark matter" which makes up more than a quarter of the universe but has never been seen. A final identification of what makes up the enigmatic material would solve one of the biggest mysteries in physics and open up new investigations into the possibility of multiple universes and other areas, said researchers. Members of an international team had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on the International Space Station, said the head of the Europe- and U.S.-based research project Samuel Ting.

New Clues to the Mystery of Dark Matter

Dennis Overbye - New York Times

We still don't know what's happening on the dark side of the cosmos, but astronomers said Wednesday that they might be on the verge of finally finding out what makes up the mysterious dark matter that gives shape to the visible structures of the universe. Saying the results represented evidence of "new physical phenomena," scientists said Wednesday that a $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the International Space Station had confirmed previous reports that local interstellar space is crackling with an unexplained abundance of high energy particles, especially positrons, the antimatter version of the familiar electrons that constitute electricity and chemistry.

Hint of Dark Matter Found

Gautam Naik - Wall Street Journal

A space experiment may have identified a new particle that is the building block of dark matter, the mysterious stuff said to pervade a quarter of the universe that neither emits nor absorbs light. The results are based on a small amount of data and are far from definitive, scientists said Wednesday. Yet, they provide a provocative hint that the puzzle of dark matter—a cosmic prize as eagerly sought as the now-discovered Higgs boson—may also be on its way to being solved. The results are the first obtained by a $2 billion particle detector, known as Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, that is mounted on the exterior of the international space station. It collects and identifies charged cosmic rays arriving from the far reaches of space.

First hint of dark matter detected by space station

Dan Vergano - USA Today

A $2 billion cosmic ray detector aboard the International Space Station has detected tantalizing signs of the elusive "dark matter" particles that scientists say fill space, an international astrophysics team reports. At a briefing Wednesday at Europe's CERN laboratory, experiment chief Samuel Ting of MIT, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, reported that first measurements made by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) detector aboard the space station indicate that cosmic rays, which fill the universe as the fallout from exploding stars, have left evidence of collisions with dark matter particles in deep space. "The data agrees very well with the simplest model," Ting said. He cautioned "more statistics" are needed to be certain of the result.

ISS instrument zeroes in on mysterious dark matter

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

A $2 billion instrument on the International Space Station might have made the first direct detection of mysterious dark matter, scientists said Wednesday. Nobel laureate Samuel Ting said scientists analyzing data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer still could not rule out the possibility that the source of the matter detected was a pulsar. But he is sure the highly precise spectrometer will enable scientists to sort out the true nature of the elusive stuff, which, theoretically, makes up most of the cosmos.

$2 billion cosmic ray detector confirms possible signs of dark matter

Adrian Cho - Science Magazine

The first results from a huge—and hugely controversial—cosmic ray detector aboard the International Space Station confirm a previously reported excess of antiparticles from space. Readings from the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) could be signs of particles of mysterious dark matter annihilating one another in the inky void. Or they could be merely subatomic exhaust from a pulsar or some other run-of-the-mill astronomical object. The results were reported Wednesday during a seminar at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, by Samuel C. C. Ting, a 77-year-old Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist and the force behind AMS. They settle the question of whether the tantalizing excess exists. "This is what has convinced me that this is real," says Stéphane Coutu, a cosmic ray physicist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who does not work on AMS. However, Coutu cautions, "what it means is not going to be clear for some time."

Dark Matter Found? Orbital Experiment Detects Hints

Ian O'Neill - Discovery News

A $2 billion particle detector attached to the International Space Station has detected the potential signature of dark matter annihilation in the Cosmos, scientists have announced Wednesday. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was attached to the space station in May 2011 by space shuttle Endeavour — the second-to last shuttle mission to the orbital outpost. Since then, the AMS has been detecting electrons and positrons (the electron's anti-particle) originating from deep space and assessing their energies. By doing a tally of electrons and positrons, physicists hope the AMS will help to answer one of the most enduring mysteries in science: Does dark matter exist? The details of the research have been revealed by a CERN announcement ahead of the study being published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment

Tia Ghose - Space.com

A massive particle detector mounted on the International Space Station may have detected elusive dark matter at last, scientists announced Wednesday. The detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), measures cosmic-ray particles in space. After detecting billions of these particles over a year and a half, the experiment recorded a signal that may be the result of dark matter, the hidden substance that makes up more than 80 percent of all matter in the universe.

International Space Station collects clues on universe's unseen dark matter

Thomas Mulier - Bloomberg News

The European Organization for Nuclear Research said it has data that could signal the presence of dark matter, an elusive unseen target that physicists believe makes up as much as a quarter of the universe. Dark matter is mass that scientists can't detect directly, but whose existence is inferred through its gravitational pull on visible matter, such as planets. Using a collector mounted on the International Space Station for more than a year, scientists at the CERN research institute gathered data on particles, called positrons, they believe may be expelled when dark matter collides in a burst of energy and is destroyed.

Space-station experiment deepens antimatter enigma
First results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer fall short of evidence for dark matter

Eugenie Samuel Reich - Nature

Some of the International Space Station's most anticipated science results are in, but their interpretation — which hints at a dark-matter detection — is likely to be debated by physicists for years to come. Principle investigator Samuel Ting presented the first data today from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a US$1.5-billion cosmic-ray detector fixed to the outside of the station. In a talk at CERN, the particle-physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, Ting told physicists that the mission has confirmed data from the European satellite Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) and NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showing that something in the Galaxy is spewing out many more positrons — the antimatter counterparts of electrons — than can be accounted for from known astrophysical sources.

Have scientists found dark matter?
£1.3 billion space station experiment finds 'first hint' of mysterious universe building blocks

Mark Prigg - London Daily Mail

A £1.3 billion ($2bn) experiment on the International Space Station is on the verge of explaining one of the more mysterious building blocks of the universe: The dark matter that helps hold the cosmos together. An international team of scientists says the cosmic ray detector has found the first hint of dark matter, which has never yet been directly observed. The team said its first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, flown into space two years ago, show evidence of a new physics phenomena that could be the strange and unknown matter.

There is a future for Stennis, in spite of uncertain budgets

Jeremy Pittari - Picayune Item

Heads of several major agencies and departments at John C. Stennis Space Center met with local leaders and media to discuss the future of the rocket engine testing facility. Stennis Director Rick Gilbrech spoke about the center as a whole and the future of rocket engine testing. While he admits the budget year is not par for the course, NASA has been given $17.7 billion in funding for this fiscal year. However the next fiscal year is still uncertain. With the uncertainty comes a lack of information on any potential personnel or budget cuts for the next fiscal year. Gilbrech, when asked if personnel cuts were expected as a result of the recent sequestration, said information is unknown at present.

This Architect Was Aboard the Space Station 45 Years Ago

David Dunlap - New York Times

As the International Space Station flew over New York on March 23, it's safe to say that crew members were not thinking about Danforth W. Toan. But 45 years earlier, before some of the crew members were even born, he was thinking about them. Mr. Toan, who died on Jan. 16 at 94, was among the first architects to wrestle seriously with the challenges of creating long-term living quarters in space. He is better known in his profession as the designer of academic buildings, especially libraries, and better known among his neighbors in Tappan, N.Y., as a leader of the 1990s "Vinyl Wars," which pitted traditionalists who favored the historic look of clapboard — he was one of them — against homeowners who wanted the freedom to reclad their homes in vinyl siding. What captivated me, however, were Mr. Toan's explorations of how to make a space station habitable, as well as the simple tools he brought to his task: sketchpads, color slides, videotape and scale models that were almost literally built of bubble gum and baling wire.

Space, Exploring the Frontier

Stephen Brown - Palm Beach Illustrated

The South Florida Science Museum annual gala has taken on an interstellar theme in preparation for the new expansion, slated for a June opening. Last year, SFSM explored the depths of the earth's oceans with famed deep-sea explorer Dr. Robert Ballard. This year, SFSM has turned its gaze to the stars, inviting five explorers who dedicated their lives to the mysteries of space. The gala, dubbed "Out of this World: An Evening Honoring America's Space Pioneers," American astronauts Scott Carpenter, David Scott, Edgar Mitchell, Charles Duke and Robert Crippen will convene at The Breakers on April 5 for an evening of truly astronomical proportions. A panel discussion, led by CNN space correspondent John Zarrella, will touch on these men's extraordinary careers and the importance of space exploration for humanity at large. Here, palmbeachillustrated.com caught up with Zarrella, a veteran reporter who has covered the space industry for more than 30 years…

Is Mars One's one-way mission to the Red Planet just science fantasy?

Stephanie Dube Wilson - FoxNews.com

Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp has sky-high plans for a solar system-sized reality show: a worldwide media event for "several billion online spectators" that would hand four ordinary people a one-way ticket to Mars -- all filmed for a TV event set to launch in 2023. But there's less "reality" in this concept than in reality TV shows, some experts told FoxNews.com. Nearly one year after its high-profile launch, the organization has barely taken a step toward its goal, with only one supplier on board to make a conceptual design. "We expect to have the first results from most of our suppliers before the end of the year, but all of them will require additional contracts," Lansdorp told FoxNews.com. That's scarcely a beginning, said Dani Eder, who was in the space systems division of Boeing from 1981 to 2005 and worked on manned Mars mission studies. "All they have are some words and pictures," Eder told FoxNews.com. "Mars One needs to explain how they get to Mars, and not just show pictures of the surface habitat, before engineers like me will take them seriously."

Space ship completes 24th test flight in Mojave

Steven Mayer - Bakersfield Californian

How many test flights did the Starship Enterprise undergo before it was cleared to boldly go where no one has gone before? Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo completed its 24th unpowered test flight above Mojave Air & Space Port in eastern Kern County on Wednesday morning. It appeared to go off without a hitch. The flight, witnessed by a small group of onlookers and employees, brings the space tourism company another step closer to powered test flights -- the final step before passengers are allowed on-board.

Council to hear spaceport plan Thursday

Andrew Gant - Daytona Beach News-Journal

The news out of Brownsville, Texas, suggests that's the site leading the race to land SpaceX. But Florida isn't dropping out now, and neither is Volusia County. So Space Florida, the public-private state agency trying to recruit private space industry, will come to the Volusia County Council on Thursday morning to talk about what Volusia — specifically one site in Southeast Volusia — can offer SpaceX or future private aerospace ventures. "I want to know really what our chances are," County Councilman Josh Wagner said Wednesday — the day after several Texas leaders testified in favor of a bill that would close some of its beaches during SpaceX launches. "When it really comes down to it, what do we need to do to get this done?"

Space fate turns on this land
Expert: Winning on price means launching outside KSC

Matt Reed - Florida Today

Our future as the Space Coast could hinge on 150 acres at the northern tip of Kennedy Space Center near the Brevard-Volusia county border. Once a citrus community called Shiloh, private rocket companies such as SpaceX want to build a launch facility there, beyond the space agency's strict security and regulations. That would require NASA to turn over the Shiloh land to the state of Florida. The agency has said "no" so far. And SpaceX has turned to Texas for a commercial-launch site, although it would continue to service the International Space Station from KSC. For a deeper explanation, I talked with Dale Ketcham, director of strategic alliances for Space Florida…
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COMPLETE STORIES

Orbital ready to roll Antares to launch pad for maiden flight

Dan Leone - Space News

Orbital Sciences will roll Antares out to the pad early April 6 in preparation for the rocket's debut launch less than two weeks later, the Dulles, Va.-based company announced April 3.

Orbital was planning to roll out the first Antares to fly in space April 5, but forecasts of lightning near the launchpad forced a delay, Orbital spokesman Barron Beneski said in an email.

Antares will roll out of its Horizontal Integration Facility at 4:45 EDT on April 6. The rocket will be vertical on the pad later that morning, an Orbital press release said.

Antares is slated to launch April 17-19. Orbital plans to set an exact day once Antares is installed at its launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va. The launch window opens at 5 p.m. EDT all four days. Orbital aims to launch Antares to the same low Earth orbit it will target when it starts launching the unmanned Cygnus spacecraft on cargo delivery missions to the international space station under an eight-flight, $1.9 billion NASA contract awarded in 2008. Before the company can begin regular service under that contract, it must prove that Antares and Cygnus can safely deliver supplies to the orbiting outpost.

In its mid-April debut, Antares will carry a dummy payload that weighs the same as Cygnus. This mass simulator will carry sensors to monitor Antares' performance throughout the flight.

If the upcoming flight is successful, a full-up demonstration cargo run to the space station will follow this summer. That would clear the way for routine cargo deliveries to begin late this year or early next.

Orbital is one of two companies NASA contracted with in December 2008 to deliver cargo to the space station. The other, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), on March 26 completed the second of 12 cargo runs it is expected to make under its $1.6 billion contract.

Antares was supposed to have launched Cygnus on a demonstration flight to the space station by December 2010 under the schedule Orbital and NASA agreed upon in 2008. Three years later, NASA added several milestones to Orbital's demonstration effort, including the upcoming Antares test launch, which was supposed to have happened by October 2011.

Orbital has blamed the holdup on the state of Virginia, which built and operates Pad-0A — the only launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport capable of supporting liquid-fueled rockets. Antares is Orbital's first liquid-fueled rocket.

SpaceX, which got started on its NASA-subsidized Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule two years earlier than NASA tapped Orbital to begin work on its rival system, completed its first demonstration mission to the space station last May — 32 months later than originally planned.

Meanwhile, a NASA-chartered safety panel on April 3 gave Orbital and Wallops high marks for making progress toward a safe launch.

"We've been to Orbital … and note with pleasure and excitement the progress that they're making [toward] their not-too-distant launch, and their progress at Wallops," retired Navy Vice Admiral Joe Dyer said at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., during a meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which he chairs.

Dyer called Wallops "a remarkably and impressively different place" than it was two years ago when the panel last visited the facility. "We were impressed with the cooperation and work between the NASA and contractor team," he said.

Antares rocket rollout scheduled for Saturday

Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com

Orbital Sciences plans to move its first full-up two-stage Antares booster to the launch pad Saturday ahead of a planned demonstration flight from Virginia no sooner than April 17.

The commercial launcher will begin the one-mile journey from its horizontal integration facility to launch pad 0A at about 4:45 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT) Saturday, Orbital Sciences posted in an update on its website.

By late morning, the 133-foot-tall booster will be raised vertical on the launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Va., Orbital Sciences said.

Engineers will connect the Antares rocket the launch pad ahead of a couple of weeks of preflight checks, countdown rehearsals and testing. The launch period for the test launch extends from April 17 to April 19.

The launch window each day opens at about 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) and extends several hours.

Powered by a kerosene-fueled first stage and a solid-propelled upper stage, the Antares rocket's demo flight will verify the booster's performance before it begins launching robotic cargo ships to resupply the International Space Station.

NASA is paying Orbital Sciences up to $288 million to develop and demonstrate the Antares rocket and the Cygnus logistics spacecraft, which will be tested on the second flight of the Antares launcher this summer.

How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom

Ken Kremer - Universe Today

Well the picture perfect docking of the SpaceX Dragon capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) on March 3 and the triumphant ocean splashdown last week on March 26 nearly weren't to be – and it all goes back to a microscopic manufacturing mistake in the oxidizer tank check valves that no one noticed long before the vessel ever took flight.

Barely 11 minutes after I witnessed the spectacular March 1 blastoff of the Dragon atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, everyone's glee suddenly turned to disbelief and gloom with the alarming news from SpaceX Mission Control that contact had been lost.

I asked SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk to explain what caused the failure and how they saved the drifting, uncontrolled Dragon capsule from doom – just in the nick of time.

Applying the space version of the Heimlich maneuver turned out to be the key. But if you can't talk to the patient – all is lost.

Right after spacecraft separation in low Earth orbit , a sudden and unexpected failure of the Dragon's critical thrust pods had prevented three out of four from initializing and firing. The oxidizer pressure was low in three tanks. And the propulsion system is required to orient the craft for two way communication and to propel the Dragon to the orbiting lab complex.

So at first the outlook for the $133 million Dragon CRS-2 cargo resupply mission to the ISS appeared dire.

Then, SpaceX engineers and the U.S Air Force sprang into action and staged an amazing turnaround.

"The problem was a very tiny change to the check valves that serve the oxidizer tanks on Dragon." Musk told Universe Today

"Three of the check valves were actually different from the prior check valves that had flown – in a very tiny way. Because of the tiny change they got stuck."

SpaceX engineers worked frantically to troubleshoot the thruster issues in an urgent bid to overcome the serious glitch and bring the crucial propulsion systems back on line.

"What we did was we were able to write some new software in real time and upload that to Dragon to build pressure upstream of the check valves and then released that pressure- to give it a kind of a kick," Musk told me at a NASA media briefing.

"For the spacecraft you could call it kind of a Heimlich maneuver. Basically that got the valves unstuck and then they worked well"

"But we had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was in free drift in orbit."

"So we worked closely with the Air Force to get higher intensity, more powerful dishes to communicate with the spacecraft and upload the software to do the Heimlich pressure maneuver."

Just how concerned was Musk?

"Yes, definitely it was a worrying time," Musk elaborated.

"It was a little frightening," Musk had said right after the March 1 launch.

Later in the briefing Musk explained that there had been a small design change to the check valves by the supplier.

"The supplier had made mistakes that we didn't catch," said Musk. "You would need a magnifying glass to see the difference."

SpaceX had run the new check valves through a series of low pressurization systems tests and they worked well and didn't get stuck. But SpaceX had failed to run the functional tests at higher pressures.

"We'll make sure we don't repeat that error in the future," Musk stated.

Musk added that SpaceX will revert to the old check valves and run tests to make sure this failure doesn't happen again.

SpaceX, along with Orbital Sciences Corp, are both partnered with NASA's Commercial Resupply Services program to replace the cargo up mass capability the US lost following the retirement of NASA's space shuttle orbiters in 2011.

Orbital's Antares rocket could blast off on its first test mission as early as April 17.

Of course the Dragon CRS-2 flight isn't the first inflight space emergency, and surely won't be the last either.

So, for some additional perspective on the history of reacting to unexpected emergencies in space on both human spaceflight and robotic science probes, Universe Today contacted noted space historian Roger Launius, of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum (NASM).

Roger provided these insights to Universe Today editor Nancy Atkinson – included here:

"There are many instances in the history of spaceflight in which the mission had difficulties that were overcome and it proved successful," said Launius.

"Let's start with Hubble Space Telescope which had a spherical aberration on its mirror and the first reports in 1990 were that it would be a total loss, but the engineers found workarounds that allowed it to be successful even before the December 1993 servicing mission by a shuttle crew that really turned it into a superb scientific instrument."

"Then what about Galileo, the Jupiter probe, which had a problem with its high gain antenna. It never did fully deploy but the engineers found ways to overcome that problem with the communication system and the spacecraft turned into a stunning success."

"If you want to feature human spaceflight let's start with the 1999 shuttle flight with Eileen Collins as commander that had a shutdown of the SSMEs prematurely and it failed to reach its optimum orbit. It still completed virtually all of the mission requirements."

"That says nothing about Apollo 13,… I could go on and on. In virtually every mission there has been something potentially damaging to the mission that has happened. Mostly the folks working the mission have planned for contingencies and implement them and the public rarely hears about it as it looks from the outside like a flawless operation."

"Bottom line, the recovery of the Dragon capsule was not all that amazing. It was engineers in the space business doing what they do best," said Launius.

Hunt for dark matter heats up

William Harwood - CBS News

A $2 billion cosmic ray detector attached to the International Space Station has confirmed a steady flow of antimatter positrons streaming through the solar system from all directions, possibly the tell-tale fingerprints of collisions between particles of as-yet-unseen dark matter, scientists said Wednesday.

But researchers do not yet have enough raw data to reach a statistically reliable conclusion. As such, they cannot rule out the possibility that the positrons detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, were generated by rapidly spinning pulsars, the collapsed remnants of massive suns destroyed in supernova explosions.

Based on theoretical issues, the energy carried away by positrons from dark matter interactions should have a sharply defined upper limit. Samuel Ting, the AMS principal investigator, told reporters the instrument is working flawlessly and additional observations should resolve the question once and for all.

"With more data, we will soon know where (the energy spectrum) drops off, how quickly it drops off," Ting told reporters in a NASA news conference. "And then we will know if what we see is from dark matter collisions or from pulsars."

The 7.5-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is an international project with more than 600 researchers representing more than a dozen countries. It was assembled at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, and launched aboard the shuttle Endeavour on May 16, 2011. It is mounted on the right side of the International Space Station's solar power truss.

Using a massive magnet to bend the trajectories of high-energy cosmic rays -- electrically charged particles generated by supernovas, neutron stars, black holes and other energetic phenomena -- the AMS was built to look for evidence of antimatter and as-yet-undetected dark matter, believed to make up a quarter of mass-energy of the universe.

The AMS "really probes the foundations of modern physics," Ting said before launch. "But to my collaborators and I, the most exciting objective of AMS is to probe the unknown, to search for phenomena which exist in nature but yet we have not the tools or the imagination to find."

AMS operates autonomously, beaming down a continuous stream of data. Over its first year and a half of operations, the machine detected some 25 billion "events," including 6,800,000 negatively charged electrons and more than 400,000 positively charged positrons.

The excess positrons "show no significant variation over time, or any preferred incoming direction," according to a statement from CERN.

"These results are consistent with the positrons originating from the annihilation of dark matter particles in space, but not yet sufficiently conclusive to rule out other explanations."

The AMS data confirm earlier observations made by balloon-borne instruments and satellites. But the massive AMS provides much more precision and could operate for as long as the International Space Station remains in orbit.

"These other experiments have, in fact, observed this type of increase that one would expect from dark matter annihilation," said Michael Salamon, AMS science program manager at the Department of Energy.

"It's very important to say there may be a very common, prosaic explanation for this excess. It could be due to pulsars. We don't know. The fact is, AMS has made a high-precision measurement and in the future, with more statistics, we're going to learn more about the nature of this excess and, if nature is kind, we might have a very exciting discovery in the future."

Dark matter is believed to provide the gravitational glue that holds galaxies and clusters of galaxies together. While it has not been directly detected, its gravitational influence can be seen in spectroscopic measurements showing how fast galaxies rotate.

Based on their visual appearance alone, galaxies would be expected to rotate faster near their massive cores and slower in their far-flung extremities. But spectroscopic studies show no such difference, implying an unseen mass.

"We know we live in a sea of dark matter, our galaxy is embedded in a huge, roughly spherical halo of dark matter particles," Salamon said. "We know that dark matter interacts gravitationally, that's how it was first detected, but we also know it doesn't interact with light, hence the term 'dark matter,' and it doesn't experience the strong or nuclear interaction."

While AMS cannot directly detect dark matter, it can detect the positrons that would be expected from dark matter collisions. The energy carried away by such positrons should have an upper limit, resulting in a sharp drop off in the energy spectrum.

If such a drop off is eventually observed, scientists will have strong evidence for the direct detection of dark matter interactions. If higher energy particles are observed, the pulsar explanation would be more credible.

Asked how long it might take to resolve the question, Ting said "we do not know, because it really doesn't depend on us. It depends on nature."

"If there's a sudden quick drop off of the spectrum, this means we will have found dark matter," he said. "If the excess comes from pulsars, then it's going to drop off very slowly. I think in the next year or two we'll know much better. We have some information now, of course, but not enough statistics."

Sensor on Space Station may have seen hints of elusive dark matter

Geoffrey Brumfiel - National Public Radio

An international team of researchers announced in Switzerland on Wednesday that an experiment on the International Space Station may have seen hints of something called dark matter. The finding could be a milestone in the decades-long search for the universe's missing material.

Only a tiny sliver of stuff in the universe is visible to scientists; the rest is dark matter. Researchers don't know what it is, but they know it's there. Its gravity pulls on the things we can see.

"We live in a sea of dark matter. Our galaxy is embedded in a huge roughly spherical halo of dark matter particles," says Michael Salamon, who is with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Salamon, who was part of the team behind Wednesday's announcement, says that dark matter is beyond anything predicted by current scientific theories.

"What that means is, if we detect dark matter and learn something about its nature, we will have made a major impact to our understanding of physics and nature itself," he says.

That's a big part of why scientists from 16 countries spent $2 billion building a detector designed to pick up any hint of this mystery material. Their Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was carried into space two years ago and bolted onto the side of the International Space Station.

Researchers announced Wednesday the AMS has detected a large number of high-energy particles, which could be coming from collisions of dark matter. Theories suggest that when dark matter particles smash together, they annihilate one another. The enormous energy released creates visible particles, and it's these particles that might be showing up in the detector.

Sam Ting, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is responsible for the AMS, says this is only the beginning. As the AMS collects more particles, it should be able to tell whether they are coming from dark matter collisions.

"I think with AMS there is no question, we are going to solve this problem," he says from Geneva.

But other scientists have doubts about whether the project really is seeing dark matter.

"I would bet against dark matter being the origin of these particles at this time," says Dan Hooper, a scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois.

It's possible the particles they have seen could have come from somewhere else. Gregory Tarle, a physicist at the University of Michigan, saw similar particles in an experiment he ran years ago.

Tarle says that the remains of certain dead stars can hurl the same kinds of particles into space. A nearby star like this could be the source of the particles the AMS has seen.

"The problem with all these type of measurements is that they are not definitive for the discovery of dark matter annihilation," he says.

Ting says more data should help, and the experiment does have time on its side. It is expected to continue recording particles as long as the International Space Station is operating — currently until 2020.

Scientists find hint of dark matter from cosmos

John Heilprin & Seth Borenstein - Associated Press

A $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found the footprint of something that could be dark matter, the mysterious substance that is believed to hold the cosmos together but has never been directly observed, scientists say.

But the first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, known by its acronym AMS, are almost as enigmatic as dark matter itself. They show evidence of new physics phenomena that could be the strange and unknown dark matter or could be energy that originates from pulsars, scientists at the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva announced Wednesday.

The results from the detector are significant, because dark matter is thought to make up about a quarter of all the matter in the universe. Unraveling the mystery of dark matter could help scientists better understand the composition of our universe and, more particularly, what holds galaxies together.

Nobel-winning physicist Samuel Ting, who leads the team, told colleagues at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, that he expects a more conclusive answer within months about this "unexpected new phenomena."

The 7-ton detector, which was sent into space two years ago and has a 3-foot (0.91-meter) magnet ring at its core, is transmitting the data to CERN on the Swiss-French border, where it is being analyzed.

The instrument will search for antimatter and dark matter for the rest of the life of the space station — at least until 2020 — transmitting data to an international team of 600 scientists based in Geneva that is led by Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The findings Wednesday are based on seeing an excess of positrons — positively charged subatomic particles.

Since the highly accurate AMS magnetic detector began studying cosmic ray particles in space, it has found about 400,000 positrons whose surging energies indicate they might have been created when particles of dark matter collided and destroyed each other.

"It is this level of precision that will allow us to tell whether our current positron observation has a dark matter or pulsar origin," Ting said.

Other scientists praised the results and looked forward to more.

"This is an 80-year-old detective story and we are getting close to the end," said University of Chicago physicist Michael Turner, one of the giants in the field of dark matter. "This is a tantalizing clue and further results from AMS could finish the story."

Scientists home in on mysterious dark matter

Robert Evans - Reuters

Scientists said on Wednesday they may be close to tracking down the mysterious "dark matter" which makes up more than a quarter of the universe but has never been seen.

A final identification of what makes up the enigmatic material would solve one of the biggest mysteries in physics and open up new investigations into the possibility of multiple universes and other areas, said researchers.

Members of an international team had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on the International Space Station, said the head of the Europe- and U.S.-based research project Samuel Ting.

He told a packed seminar at the CERN research center, near Geneva, the team had found a surge of positron particles that might have come from dark matter.

In the coming months, he said, the CERN-built AMS particle detector on the space station "will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter or if they have some other origin".

Dark matter, once the stuff of science fiction, "is one of the most important mysteries of physics today," Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 1976 Nobel physics prize winner, has written.

Sometimes called the sculptor of the universe's millions of galaxies because of the way its gravity shapes their formation, its existence has long been recognized because of the way it pushes visible stars and planets around.

But efforts in laboratories on earth and in deep underground caverns to find concrete evidence that it is there, and to establish what it is, have so far proven fruitless.

Ting said it was also possible the surges came from pulsars - rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation.

But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon told Reuters after hearing Ting that the precision of the AMS could make it possible "to get a first hold on dark matter really soon".

"That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent. It would really open the door to a whole new world," said Gagnon, a Canadian physicist on ATLAS, one of the two CERN teams that believe they found evidence of the elusive Higgs particle in the centre's Large Hadron Collider.

New physics

John Conway, a physics professor from the University of California, Davis, working at CERN, said a confirmed discovery would push scientists into uncharted realms of research.

He said fresh insights could be gained into super-symmetry, a theory that says the current known 17 elementary particles have heavier but invisible counterparts, and dimensions beyond the currently known length, breadth and height, and time.

Other scientists, especially cosmologists now trying to peer back beyond the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, suggest identification of dark matter could give new clues to whether the universe itself is alone or one of many.

New research could start at CERN's Large Hadron Collider when the vast machine resumes operations in early 2015.

The huge subterranean complex running under the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains was shut down in February to double its power and multiply the millions of "mini-Big Bang" particle collisions it can stage daily.

Until last week, dark matter was thought to make up around 24 percent of the universe, with normal matter - galaxies, stars and planets - accounting for about 4.5 percent.

But then the European Space Agency's Planck satellite team reported that mapping of echoes of the early cosmos showed dark matter made up 26.8 percent and ordinary matter 4.9 percent - together the total of the material of the universe.

The dominant constituent is the non-material "dark energy", as mysterious as dark matter and believed to be the driver of cosmic expansion.

New Clues to the Mystery of Dark Matter

Dennis Overbye - New York Times

We still don't know what's happening on the dark side of the cosmos, but astronomers said Wednesday that they might be on the verge of finally finding out what makes up the mysterious dark matter that gives shape to the visible structures of the universe.

Saying the results represented evidence of "new physical phenomena," scientists said Wednesday that a $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the International Space Station had confirmed previous reports that local interstellar space is crackling with an unexplained abundance of high energy particles, especially positrons, the antimatter version of the familiar electrons that constitute electricity and chemistry.

Cosmologists have suggested that colliding dark matter particles would produce such a signal, but so could pulsars, the spinning remnants of dead stars that throw off wild winds of radiation. The disappointing news is that even with the new data, physicists can't tell yet which is the right answer. "I don't think it makes you believe it must be dark matter, nor do I think it makes you believe it cannot be," said Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University.

The good news is that the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, as the instrument is called, is only two years into what could be a 10-year voyage on the space station, and is working brilliantly. Samuel Ting, the leader of the spectrometer team, which included scientists from 16 countries, said in a statement released from CERN, "Over the coming months, A.M.S. will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin."

Scientists had been sitting on the edges of their seats since Dr. Ting announced in February that he would be making a report on the space station experiment soon. He reported the first results from his experiment in a lecture at CERN on Wednesday and in a news teleconference hosted by NASA. The group submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters. Astronomers and others from outside the collaboration responded enthusiastically.

"A.M.S. has confirmed with exquisite precision and to high energy one of the most exciting mysteries in astrophysics and particle physics," said Justin Vandenbroucke, of the University of Wisconsin and Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Maria Spiropulu, a Caltech particle physicist, said, "They have exquisitely small errors and they stop the plot at the cliff hanger so we will be asking for more."

Hint of Dark Matter Found

Gautam Naik - Wall Street Journal

A space experiment may have identified a new particle that is the building block of dark matter, the mysterious stuff said to pervade a quarter of the universe that neither emits nor absorbs light.

The results are based on a small amount of data and are far from definitive, scientists said Wednesday. Yet, they provide a provocative hint that the puzzle of dark matter—a cosmic prize as eagerly sought as the now-discovered Higgs boson—may also be on its way to being solved.

The results are the first obtained by a $2 billion particle detector, known as Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, that is mounted on the exterior of the international space station. It collects and identifies charged cosmic rays arriving from the far reaches of space.

The experiment is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. It is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and involves hundreds of scientists from all over the world. The latest data will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The AMS findings are consistent with particles that could be formed "from the annihilation of dark matter particles in space, but not yet sufficiently conclusive to rule out other explanations," according to a statement by the European particle-physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, which assembled the particle detector.

Figuring out what makes up dark matter is a big prize because it is the key to understanding the shape, size and even the fate of the universe.

Knowing how much dark matter there is will tell us whether the universe will keep expanding; expand to a point and then collapse; or get bigger and bigger and then stop. It also can help predict how Earth's neighborhood, the Milky Way galaxy, formed and how it might evolve.

Dark matter is invisible, yet its presence is felt by the immense gravitational tug it exerts on stars, galaxies and other cosmic bodies. What could this mysterious substance be made of? One of the leading candidates is a WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle.

WIMPs are elusive. They rarely interact with normal matter such as atoms; indeed, billions of WIMPs may be darting right through the Earth every second without hitting anything.

About 25% of the universe is believed to be dark matter, about 70% is the little-understood dark energy, and about 5% is ordinary matter made of atoms. Scientists have been looking for WIMPs in deep mines; in particle smash-ups in colliders; and, now, with detectors in space.

"This is the decade of the WIMP," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "All of these experiments are zeroing in on the outrageous idea that most of the matter in the universe is" made up of WIMPs, a new form of matter.

In 1990, Dr. Turner and a colleague suggested a way in which WIMPs might be discovered in galaxies, which provided the theoretical underpinning for the AMS experiment. The idea is that when WIMPs crash into each other, they annihilate and produce two particles—electrons and positrons—which are much easier to detect than the WIMPs themselves.

The theory predicts two outcomes: that the annihilations should produce a large number of positrons; and that after the excess, there should be a sudden decline in positron production.

In its first 18 months, AMS analyzed 25 billion primary cosmic ray events. It identified more than 400,000 positrons. The positron numbers then start to flatten out—a possible sign that the hoped-for plunge in positron numbers could come next.

So far, though, there isn't enough data to confirm that expected plunge. Physicists also need to ensure that the positrons they are seeing don't emanate from a pulsar, a type of star; that wouldn't be a finding about dark matter.

"What's tantalizing is that the positrons are leveling-off," said Dr. Turner, who wasn't involved in the AMS experiment. "But we're not there yet" because not enough data have been crunched.

First hint of dark matter detected by space station

Dan Vergano - USA Today

A $2 billion cosmic ray detector aboard the International Space Station has detected tantalizing signs of the elusive "dark matter" particles that scientists say fill space, an international astrophysics team reports.

At a briefing Wednesday at Europe's CERN laboratory, experiment chief Samuel Ting of MIT, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, reported that first measurements made by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) detector aboard the space station indicate that cosmic rays, which fill the universe as the fallout from exploding stars, have left evidence of collisions with dark matter particles in deep space.

"The data agrees very well with the simplest model," Ting said. He cautioned "more statistics" are needed to be certain of the result.

Dark matter, as the name suggests, is a form of matter that appears invisible. Astronomers say they think it must fill space because of observations of its gravitational tugs on galaxies. Dark matter may be mostly undiscovered exotic physics particles (amusingly called "WIMPS" for "weakly interacting massive particles"), and scientists say dark matter outweighs normal matter — the stuff of stars, planets and people — by more than five times throughout the universe, based on observations of stars' gravitational pull on one another.

But they don't know for certain that it's real. To detect more direct signs of this elusive stuff and determine if it really exists, astronauts installed the AMS detector aboard the space station two years ago. In space, the detector can record cosmic rays, outbursts of charged particles delivered from deep space, otherwise absorbed by Earth's atmosphere. Over the past 18 months, the detector has recorded 25 billion cosmic ray signals, Ting says.

Scientists say that when dark matter particles collide, the result can throws off antimatter particles called positrons — a positively charged mirror image of an electron. The spectrometer can record these positrons as cosmic rays. Cosmic rays have different energy levels, depending on where they originate in the cosmos. When the highest-energy versions result from collisions of dark matter, scientists say, they no longer generate as many positrons, but rather cast off other particles more often. The detection of positrons in that case would drop off sharply. If dark matter doesn't exist, those positron readings would drop off slowly instead.

The numbers do point to dark matter existing as physicists predict, Ting says, but they do not rule out a competing explanation for the antimatter particles. Alternately, they could result from cosmic rays originating instead from distant compact stars called "pulsars" ringing the Milky Way galaxy.

"Beautiful results, but we are not there yet in terms of identifying the dark matter," says astrophysicist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. Turner first described the antimatter drop-off effect tested by the AMS experiment with Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek of MIT in 1990. "(T)he instrument is working beautifully, and the results that will come in the future should be able to test the WIMP hypothesis," Turner says by e-mail.

Ting agrees that over the next two decades aboard the space station, the experiment's smooth operation indicates it should produce enough data to settle the dark matter mystery. "We have a feeling what is happening, but it probably is too early to discuss," he says.

ISS instrument zeroes in on mysterious dark matter

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

A $2 billion instrument on the International Space Station might have made the first direct detection of mysterious dark matter, scientists said Wednesday.

Nobel laureate Samuel Ting said scientists analyzing data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer still could not rule out the possibility that the source of the matter detected was a pulsar.

But he is sure the highly precise spectrometer will enable scientists to sort out the true nature of the elusive stuff, which, theoretically, makes up most of the cosmos.

"I'm confident with enough time – and we will be on the space station for the lifetime of the space station -- we should be able to solve this problem," said Ting, AMS principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Hopefully, quickly."

Launched aboard shuttle Endeavour in May 2011, the AMS is the collaborative product of 16 nations and 56 scientific institutes. Mounted to the station's central truss, it is outfitted with the most accurate cosmic ray detectors ever flown in orbit. Some 300,000 channels beam collected data back to Earth. More than 25 billion cosmic ray signals have been detected to date.

The first AMS findings were published Wednesday in the American Physical Society journal Physical Review Letters.

Dark matter, in theory, is an invisible substance that cannot be detected by optical telescopes and does not shed or absorb light. In fact, it is only detectable by its gravitational influence on "normal" visual matter or electromagnetic radiation.

The current cosmological thinking is that dark matter makes up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe, or about six times more than visible matter. Its existence was first postulated in the 1930s when scientists determined the mass of normal matter could not account for the calculated mass of stars, galaxies and other celestial objects in the universe.

Scientists think dark matter and its cosmological cousin dark energy make up what is termed "the missing matter."

The boxy 15,000-pound spectrometer detects cosmic rays as well as evidence of dark matter: positrons produced from cosmic rays colliding with dark matter.

The spectrometer records positrons, which are positively charged opposites of electrons. Scientists say cosmic ray collisions with dark matter would create outbursts of positrons that dissipate quickly. Data from the spectrometer mirror the theory.

Still to be determined, though, is whether the source of the positrons detected might be pulsars, Ting said. Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate and appear to emit pulses of high-energy radiation.

Positrons from pulsars would be recorded by the spectrometer as spikes that dropped off more gradually.

Ting said more data and analyses would be required to make a definitive call. Cautious AMS scientists want to make certain the data they've collected to date is not producing a deceptive statistical aberration.

"I think in the next year or two we will know much better," Ting said, adding, "There is no question we are going to solve this problem."

$2 billion cosmic ray detector confirms possible signs of dark matter

Adrian Cho - Science Magazine

The first results from a huge—and hugely controversial—cosmic ray detector aboard the International Space Station confirm a previously reported excess of antiparticles from space. Readings from the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) could be signs of particles of mysterious dark matter annihilating one another in the inky void. Or they could be merely subatomic exhaust from a pulsar or some other run-of-the-mill astronomical object.

The results were reported Wednesday during a seminar at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, by Samuel C. C. Ting, a 77-year-old Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist and the force behind AMS. They settle the question of whether the tantalizing excess exists. "This is what has convinced me that this is real," says Stéphane Coutu, a cosmic ray physicist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who does not work on AMS. However, Coutu cautions, "what it means is not going to be clear for some time."

Bolted to the exterior of the space station on 19 May 2011, AMS has detected 30 billion cosmic rays and measured the ratio of antielectrons, or positrons, to the total number of electrons and positrons. According to standard astrophysics, that "positron fraction" should be small and should fall as energy increases. That's because sources such as exploding stars can pump out plenty of high-energy electrons, whereas high-energy positrons typically arise less frequently, through the collisions of cosmic rays. Instead, AMS scientists find that the positron fraction increases from roughly 5% at an energy of 10 giga-electron volts (GeV) to more than 15% at an energy 35 times as high.

Such an excess had been seen before. In April 2009, researchers with an Italian satellite experiment called Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) reported similar results. Their counterparts with NASA's orbiting Fermi Gammaray Space Telescope reported much the same thing in January 2012. But neither measurement clinched the case. PAMELA lacked systems to nail down the type of particle, so some researchers worried that it was mistaking protons for positrons. Fermi was designed to measure uncharged particles, so to distinguish between positrons and electrons, researchers had to rely on Earth's magnetic field to bend the particle's paths, a technique with a checkered history.

AMS measured the positron fraction to higher energies and with a precision unmatched by any previous experiment. "I'm happy that AMS confirms there's a positron excess," says Gregory Tarlè, a cosmic ray physicist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who worked on the High Energy Antimatter Telescope, a balloon-borne experiment that spotted an excess of positrons in the lower end of the energy range in 2001.

But what produced the excess? The most exciting possibility is that the positrons arise from dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity binds the galaxies. According to popular theories, dark matter could consist of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. When two WIMPs collide, they could annihilate each other to produce an electron-positron pair, with the energy of those particles limited by the mass of the WIMP. In that case, the positron fraction should increase and then fall again beyond a certain "cutoff" energy. AMS researchers see tantalizing signs that the positron fraction levels off at 250 GeV, suggesting a cutoff lurks over the energy horizon.

However, excess positrons can emerge from other, more mundane astrophysical mechanisms, Coutu says. For example, a nearby radiation-spewing neutron star called a pulsar could crank out energetic positrons. So even though the positron excess appears to be real, it is not a smoking gun for dark matter, he says.

Ting and his 600 AMS colleagues acknowledge the point. In fact, in a carefully worded paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, they do not mention dark matter, referring instead to "new physical phenomena." But they also argue in a press release that with more data, AMS will be able to measure the exact shape of the spectrum to higher energies and determine whether the excess comes from dark-matter collisions or an astrophysical source. Cosmic ray physicists doubt that's possible, even if AMS sees a clear cutoff. "It's very easy to put a cutoff into an astrophysical model," Tarlè says. "All you have to do is limit the size of the particle-accelerating region."

Despite the uncertainty, the results mark a triumph for Ting, who all but willed AMS into orbit. Proposed in 1994, the detector made a test flight on NASA's space shuttle in 1998. But it appeared permanently grounded after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, and NASA rethought the shuttle program. Ting worked tirelessly and in 2008 secured a congressional mandate that NASA launch AMS to the space station. (The AMS paper acknowledges nine current and former senators and representatives for their help.) By launch time, AMS's cost had ballooned from tens of millions of dollars to billions—although some observers say that Ting makes AMS sound as expensive as possible to accentuate how much countries such as China, South Korea, and Taiwan have contributed to it.

Those monumental costs still have some cosmic ray researchers shaking their heads in dismay. Tarlè says he's happy that AMS has confirmed the earlier results. But, he says, "I'm not happy it cost the world $2 billion, not to mention the cost of the extra shuttle flight." The controversy around AMS seems sure to continue.

Dark Matter Found? Orbital Experiment Detects Hints

Ian O'Neill - Discovery News

A $2 billion particle detector attached to the International Space Station has detected the potential signature of dark matter annihilation in the Cosmos, scientists have announced Wednesday.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was attached to the space station in May 2011 by space shuttle Endeavour — the second-to last shuttle mission to the orbital outpost. Since then, the AMS has been detecting electrons and positrons (the electron's anti-particle) originating from deep space and assessing their energies. By doing a tally of electrons and positrons, physicists hope the AMS will help to answer one of the most enduring mysteries in science: Does dark matter exist?

The details of the research have been revealed by a CERN announcement ahead of the study being published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Around 400,000 positron detections have been confirmed in this first batch of data — positrons that are of energies consistent with the signature of dark matter annihilation.

Dark matter is thought to make up 80 percent of all matter in the Universe, the rest is "baryonic matter" — i.e. the stuff we're made of. But the vast majority of matter is locked in an invisible component of matter. As the moniker suggests, dark matter is dark; it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation. However, dark matter still carries mass that has a gravitational effect on space-time and through indirect means we can detect its gravitational presence.

Theory suggests that Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) may be a part of non-baryonic matter, bulking up the mass of the Universe. WIMPs are their own anti-particles; when two WIMPs collide, they annihilate and produce positrons and electrons (and energy). But for physicists to confirm WIMP annihilation does occur, the positrons need to have a specific energy signature.

Positrons with energies of 0.5 GeV to 250 GeV have been recorded by the AMS — the largest collection of antimatter particles recorded in space. "The positron fraction increases from 10 GeV to 250 GeV, with the data showing the slope of the increase reducing by an order of magnitude over the range 20-250 GeV," writes the CERN release. This is consistent with the theory that WIMPs are out there, annihilating. And, apparently, these positrons are originating from all directions, bolstering the theory that dark matter permeates the whole Universe.

Other space-based experiments have seen clues of this dark matter signature, such as the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) instrument. But their measurements of the particle energy spectra have been too "coarse"; the AMS can produce a very refined spectrum of positron energies, allowing scientists an unprecedented high-resolution view of positron energies.

But this is by no means proof of WIMPs and a positive identification of dark matter annihilation. Pulsars — rapidly-spinning neutron stars — could also be generating this positron signal, so further work needs to be done.

"As the most precise measurement of the cosmic ray positron flux to date, these results show clearly the power and capabilities of the AMS detector," said Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who leads the international AMS team, in the CERN announcement. "Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin."

The AMS will remain attached to the space station for the rest of its operational life, so there are many more years of results to be taken and analyzed.

The orbiting particle detector isn't only hunting for dark matter. Another quandary facing modern physics is why the Universe is composed mainly of matter (and not antimatter). Through the careful analysis of electron/positron ratios, it is hoped that some idea as to why the processes immediately after the Big Bang favored matter over antimatter will be gleaned.

While today's AMS dark matter announcement is exciting, it is only the beginning of a long road of scientific discovery as to the origins of the Universe.

Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment

Tia Ghose - Space.com

A massive particle detector mounted on the International Space Station may have detected elusive dark matter at last, scientists announced Wednesday.

The detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), measures cosmic-ray particles in space. After detecting billions of these particles over a year and a half, the experiment recorded a signal that may be the result of dark matter, the hidden substance that makes up more than 80 percent of all matter in the universe.

AMS found about 400,000 positrons, the antimatter partner particles of electrons. The energies of these positrons suggest they might have been created when particles of dark matter collided and destroyed each other.

Elusive matter

Dark matter emits no light and can't be detected with telescopes, and it seems to dwarf the ordinary matter in the universe.

Physicists have suggested that dark matter is made of WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, which almost never interact with normal matter particles. WIMPs are thought to be their own antimatter partner particles, so when two WIMPS meet, they would annihilate each other, as matter and antimatter partners destroy each other on contact. The result of such a violent collision between WIMPs would be a positron and an electron, said study co-author Roald Sagdeev, a physicist at the University of Maryland.

The characteristics of the positrons detected by AMS match predictions for the products of dark-matter collisions. For example, based on an overabundance of positrons measured by a satellite-based detector called the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA), scientists expected that positrons from dark matter would be found at energy levels higher than 10 gigaelectron volts (GeV), said study co-author Veronica Bindi, a physicist at the University of Hawaii.

And the positrons found by AMS increase in abundance from 10 GeV to 250 GeV, with the slope of the increase reducing by an order of magnitude over the range from 20 GeV to 250 GeV — just what scientists expect from positrons created by dark-matter annihilations.

Furthermore, the positrons appear to come from all directions in space, and not a single source in the sky. This finding is also what researchers expected from the products of dark matter, which is thought to permeate the universe.

Intriguing signal

The $2 billion AMS instrument was delivered to the International Space Station in May 2011 by the space shuttle Endeavour, and installed by spacewalking astronauts on the orbiting laboratory's exterior backbone.

In just its first year and half, the AMS detector has measured 6.8 million positrons and electrons. As the instrument continues to collect data, scientists will be better able to tell whether the positron signal really does come from dark matter.

If the positrons aren't created by annihilating WIMPs, there are other possible explanations. For example, spinning stars called pulsars spread out around the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.

But even with more AMS data, "we will still not be completely able to figure out if it's really a dark-matter source or a pulsar," Bindi told SPACE.com. To understand dark matter thoroughly, scientists hope to detect WIMPs directly via underground experiments on Earth, such as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and XENON Dark Matter projects.

International Space Station collects clues on universe's unseen dark matter

Thomas Mulier - Bloomberg News

The European Organization for Nuclear Research said it has data that could signal the presence of dark matter, an elusive unseen target that physicists believe makes up as much as a quarter of the universe.

Dark matter is mass that scientists can't detect directly, but whose existence is inferred through its gravitational pull on visible matter, such as planets. Using a collector mounted on the International Space Station for more than a year, scientists at the CERN research institute gathered data on particles, called positrons, they believe may be expelled when dark matter collides in a burst of energy and is destroyed.

The collector gathered data on 400,000 positrons, the antimatter form of electrons, creating the largest collection of such particles recorded in space, according to a statement today. The data are consistent with theories on dark matter and the experiment will confirm in coming months whether the positrons are a signal for dark matter, Geneva-based CERN said.

"Dark matter is one of the most important mysteries of physics today," CERN said, adding it will take several years to refine its studies.

The search for dark matter is moving ahead on two fronts. Last month, scientists at CERN announced they have more certainty a particle they observed last year is a Higgs Boson, a missing link in physics that would help them explain the makeup of universal phenomena, such as dark matter, that telescopes can't detect.

In that case, the data was gained using the $10.5 billion Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circumference particle accelerator buried on the border of France and Switzerland. CERN has had 10,000 scientists working on the research, in which billions of subatomic particles are hurled at each other at velocities approaching the speed of light.

Space-station experiment deepens antimatter enigma
First results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer fall short of evidence for dark matter

Eugenie Samuel Reich - Nature

Some of the International Space Station's most anticipated science results are in, but their interpretation — which hints at a dark-matter detection — is likely to be debated by physicists for years to come.

Principle investigator Samuel Ting presented the first data today from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a US$1.5-billion cosmic-ray detector fixed to the outside of the station. In a talk at CERN, the particle-physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, Ting told physicists that the mission has confirmed data from the European satellite Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) and NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showing that something in the Galaxy is spewing out many more positrons — the antimatter counterparts of electrons — than can be accounted for from known astrophysical sources.

Yet the spectrum of this antimatter excess is far from a smoking gun for models in which the extra positrons are generated through the annihilation of dark-matter particles colliding with each other. "The detailed interpretation of our data probably will have many theories," says Ting.

No definitive picture

Comprising a giant magnet and eight particle trackers, the AMS was launched in 2011 after a 17-year campaign by Ting, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, to place an antimatter detector in space. Now, in a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters, Ting and his team say that over the mission's first 18 months of operations, they observed some 6.8 million positrons and electrons, at energies up to 350 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). These are higher-energy events than PAMELA and Fermi were able to see, but still less than half the energy that AMS will be sensitive to over its 15-year lifetime. The detection accuracy of the AMS falls with increasing energy, and Ting and his team have chosen not to release data at energies above 350 GeV because the results do not yet have enough statistical significance to give a definitive picture.

Still, the spectrum looks promising. It shows a rise of positrons with energy that begins to flatten off at energies above 250 GeV. If the signal is caused by dark matter, the number of positrons should rise and then drop again around the mass of the dark-matter particle, which cannot produce positrons more energetic than itself. The data provide "a tantalizing hint of something exciting", says Michael Turner, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

An alternative theory is that the antimatter could be emanating from pulsars, rotating superdense stars in the Galaxy whose properties are not perfectly understood. "I personally think the pulsar explanation is more viable now," says Dan Hooper, a theorist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. He is struck by the absence, so far, of a sharp decrease in antimatter at higher energies.

But Ting says that the AMS collects antimatter uniformly from all over the sky, which does not seem to indicate that specific astrophysical point sources, such as pulsars, are the cause.

One problem, raised by Peter Fisher, an AMS collaborator at MIT, is that there is still no consensus about what the expected background rate of antimatter in the Galaxy should be — and, therefore, about how much of an excess the AMS is seeing. "It's like playing blind-man's bluff," he says. Despite the anticipation that has built around this announcement, he and Ting now say that physicists will have to wait another couple of years for the AMS to release its higher-energy data to know whether the excess is due to dark matter, pulsars or something else.

Have scientists found dark matter?
£1.3 billion space station experiment finds 'first hint' of mysterious universe building blocks

Mark Prigg - London Daily Mail

A £1.3 billion ($2bn) experiment on the International Space Station is on the verge of explaining one of the more mysterious building blocks of the universe: The dark matter that helps hold the cosmos together.

An international team of scientists says the cosmic ray detector has found the first hint of dark matter, which has never yet been directly observed.

The team said its first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, flown into space two years ago, show evidence of a new physics phenomena that could be the strange and unknown matter.

Nobel-winning physicist Samuel Ting, who leads the team at the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, says he expects a more conclusive answer within months.

The findings are based on an excess of positrons- positively charged subatomic particles.

'This is an 80-year-old detective story and we are getting close to the end,' said University of Chicago physicist Michael Turner, one of the giants in the field of dark matter.

'This is a tantalizing clue and further results from AMS could finish the story.'

A final identification of what makes up the enigmatic material would open up whole new areas of research including the possibility of multiple universes and other dimensions, said physicists.

An international team at Geneva's CERN research centre said it had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on board the International Space Station over the past 18 months.

They had found a surge of positron particles which may have been created by decaying dark matter - a substance so central to the universe it sets the position of planets and stars.

Samuel Ting, chief of the project that built CERN's giant AMS particle detector, told a crowded seminar at the centre more data was needed to be sure that dark matter had been sighted.

'Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or if they have some other origin,' he said.

Ting said it was also possible the surges came from pulsars - rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation.

But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon told Reuters after hearing Ting that the precision of the AMS could make it possible 'to get a first hold on dark matter really soon'.

'That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent. It would really open the door to a whole new world,' said Gagnon.

Dark matter, which surrounds galaxies across the universe, is invisible because it does not reflect light. Its presence has been established by the gravitational pull it exerts on planets and stars.

Last week, the European Space Agency's Planck telescope revealed data from just after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago showing the mysterious substance made up 26.8 percent of the density of the universe, more than previously thought.

Normal matter, the galaxies and planets that can be seen by astronomers with ever-increasing powerful telescopes, makes up only 4.9 per cent.

The rest is an even more enigmatic 'dark energy' believed to be driving the expansion of the universe.

Ting has described dark matter as 'one of the most important mysteries of physics today'.

Its traces are being sought not only through the AMS, or Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but in laboratories on earth and deep below ground.

How to search for dark matter

AMS-02, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, consists of seven instruments that monitor cosmic rays from space.

Unprotected by Earth's atmosphere the instruments receive a constant barrage of high-energy particles.

As these particles pass through AMS-02, the instruments record their speed, energy and direction.

The project is one of the largest scientific collaborations of all time involving 56 institutes from 16 countries.

The instrument was tested at ESA's technical facility ESTEC in the Netherlands before being shipped to the US for launch on Space Shuttle Endeavour.

As part of his DAMA mission, ESA astronaut Roberto Vittori controlled the Shuttle's robotic arm that transferred the 6918 kg instrument to the International Space Station in 2011.

Scientists have collected data on over 400 000 electrons together with their antimatter twins, the positrons.

Data released today show how the ratio of positrons compared to electrons passing through AMS-02 changes depending on their energy, confirming data from previous instruments.

The findings hint at a new phenomenon but it is unknown whether the positron ratio comes from dark energy particles colliding with each other or from pulsating stars in our galaxy that produce antimatter.

There is a future for Stennis, in spite of uncertain budgets

Jeremy Pittari - Picayune Item

Heads of several major agencies and departments at John C. Stennis Space Center met with local leaders and media to discuss the future of the rocket engine testing facility.

Stennis Director Rick Gilbrech spoke about the center as a whole and the future of rocket engine testing. While he admits the budget year is not par for the course, NASA has been given $17.7 billion in funding for this fiscal year. However the next fiscal year is still uncertain.

With the uncertainty comes a lack of information on any potential personnel or budget cuts for the next fiscal year. Gilbrech, when asked if personnel cuts were expected as a result of the recent sequestration, said information is unknown at present.

"I don't want to get ahead of the president," Gilbrech said.

Closing of the tower at Stennis Airport will not have an affect on Stennis or the other agencies that occupy the federal city, Gilbrech said. Special Boat Team 22 Commanding Officer Tristan Rizzi said if his unit needs the airport, it can bring in personnel to man the tower. Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School Executive Officer Michael Yohnke said most of the air transport is provided commercially, so the closure will not impact his school either.

Gilbrech said plenty of work is ahead for the center. Testing of commercial application engines is continuing, such as for Orbital Science's engine that helps bring payloads to the International Space Station, and there are plans to test the rockets that will be integral to the Space Launch System, which is the replacement for the Space Shuttle Program. Gilbrech also is comfortable in saying that the SLS program will see continued funding.

Unmanned test flights of the system are planned in the next year or two and the tests will use the historic Orion capsule. In 2017 Gilbrech said NASA plans to conduct initial exploration missions to the moon, and by 2021 put men back in orbit around the celestial body.

Gilbrech said there are plans to begin to use commercial space vehicles to transport not only cargo, but also astronauts to the ISS and back, though a time frame was not provided.

Still on the agenda are flights to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. While a trip to the moon takes only three days, a trip to Mars will be much more difficult and time consuming. Gilbrech said not only will a trip to Mars involve extensive knowledge of planet conditions, which are being investigated by the rovers on the surface, but a round trip takes more than two years.

Gilbrech said it takes six months to travel to the red planet, and once there astronauts will have to reside on the surface for 18 months until Earth and Mars are close enough for a return trip. That puts the entire mission at 30 months.

"You better know what you're doing on your way to Mars," Gilbrech said.

Until then, testing is set for the SLS engine at Stennis beginning in 2017, and tests of the upper stage J2X engine will continue until 2014, Gilbrech said. He said the SLS engine will be the largest ever tested at Stennis.

Other agencies at Stennis also gave brief information on their future work at the center.

Bill Burnett, Deputy Commander of Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, said work to create weather and ocean models will continue at Stennis. The agency currently has six ships traveling the world to gather data used to generate those models. The collected data is fed to a super computer capable of performing 866 teraflops of computations per second. A series of unmanned vehicles are used to help gather the data, Burnett said.

Rizzi said his boat unit's work at the site involves combating piracy on the ocean and responding to global events using unique water craft capable of taking an IED attack and returning to service after some repairs. He said the operators of those machines suffer G forces so severe that most lose between a half inch to an inch in height.

Yohnke said his school trains personnel from other countries in the use of small water craft, operations, communications, weapons maintenance and instructor development in addition to showing those students the true nature of American culture. Students pay for their training, and when training is complete, Yohnke hopes they head home with a different perspective of this country.

"We want the world to know there's more to America than Bay Watch," Yohnke said.

As for the new NASA visitor center called INFINITY, Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise said there is a large marketing campaign underway to help visitation and use of the center grow. Those efforts will include more outdoor advertising, website advertising and exterior signs for the building.

Efforts also will be made to cater to the younger crowd with games and a playground, Haise said. Rolls Royce plans to install a display at the center of its T-1000 engine sometime this year. A seven-mile trail in the wilderness surrounding the center is also planned. Haise said the trail will take hikers to the nearby Pearl River and allow them to enjoy native wildlife.

This Architect Was Aboard the Space Station 45 Years Ago

David Dunlap - New York Times

As the International Space Station flew over New York on March 23, it's safe to say that crew members were not thinking about Danforth W. Toan. But 45 years earlier, before some of the crew members were even born, he was thinking about them.

Mr. Toan, who died on Jan. 16 at 94, was among the first architects to wrestle seriously with the challenges of creating long-term living quarters in space. He is better known in his profession as the designer of academic buildings, especially libraries, and better known among his neighbors in Tappan, N.Y., as a leader of the 1990s "Vinyl Wars," which pitted traditionalists who favored the historic look of clapboard — he was one of them — against homeowners who wanted the freedom to reclad their homes in vinyl siding.

What captivated me, however, were Mr. Toan's explorations of how to make a space station habitable, as well as the simple tools he brought to his task: sketchpads, color slides, videotape and scale models that were almost literally built of bubble gum and baling wire.

In 1967, his architectural firm, Warner Burns Toan Lunde of 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, won a contract to advise the Grumman Corporation of Bethpage, N.Y., for what would eventually be Grumman's bid to construct an orbiting space station. Mr. Toan worked on the project for the next 20 years, until Grumman was bypassed as a prime contractor by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"We have to find some compromise between the cockpit environment of present spacecraft and the luxury of a hotel," he told John Noble Wilford of The New York Times early in 1969.

On Nov. 1 that year, a few months after Apollo 11 had successfully landed on the moon, The New Yorker published an interview with Mr. Toan that considered the challenge of a prolonged stay in space. "The problem cannot be solved by reference to the Apollo spacecraft," the magazine said, "for the difference between building a craft in which three men spend eight days to make a round trip to the moon and one in which groups of a dozen men will be spending six-month hitches in space is the difference between designing a car and designing a house."

Mr. Toan was quick to grasp that a space station, though extraordinarily confined, would offer advantages available in no other environment: zero gravity, for starters.

"Space expands in proportion to how much of it you can use, almost as if you had increased its size," he said. "A cell seven feet square is very constricting, but if the cell were seven feet high, making a volume of 343 cubic feet, and if the man inside it could float around, reorienting himself however he wanted — curling up on the ceiling if he got tired of the floor — the space would seem much bigger."

The New Yorker noted, "Mr. Toan has anticipated the need for a certain amount of privacy, and, accordingly, on each deck there are four private rooms, each of them a cubicle seven feet on a side." It added that the architect had "solved the problem of keeping an astronaut down in his bunk by providing a strap to go across his waist, but he said he wasn't sure this was the best solution, because the head and feet would be left floating. He was now thinking of putting the astronaut into a sort of lightly restraining sleeping bag."

Flash forward to an amateur video made in the mid-1980s in a Grumman hangar at Bethpage, starring Mr. Toan's young architectural colleagues as blue-suited astronauts in their space station home. An astronaut played by Rick Bell (now executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects) is shown, with bedtime reading, cosseted in a lightly restraining sleeping bag on one wall.

Flash forward another 20 years to Capt. Sunita L. Williams, commander of the 33rd expedition to the space station in 2012, as she gave a guided video tour of the crew's quarters: four private spaces arrayed around the central passageway. And what's on one wall of her room? "I've got a sleeping bag right here that we sleep in," she said, "so we don't — sort of like a little bit of a cover — we don't fly all over the place."

Mr. Bell said that Mr. Toan, whom he considered a mentor, was "always thinking outside the box," which had made him an ideal choice as a subcontractor for Grumman. "They wanted someone who could think about habitability in the abstract," Mr. Bell said.

For inspiration, Mr. Toan would watch "Star Trek" with his son, Braden. He also made a point of seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"He just couldn't believe the whole thing was happening," the younger Mr. Toan recalled. "Dad normally got up at 9. When this started, he'd wake up at 5 because he was so excited."

Space, Exploring the Frontier

Stephen Brown - Palm Beach Illustrated

Space. The word evokes a response from just about every person. For most, the immediate thought heads the great expanse just beyond Earth's atmosphere, where possibilities are literally infinite. The outer depths have long held sway over humanity, whose desire to understand, explain and explore the stars seems almost intrinsic in our DNA.

Only 530 people have achieved spaceflight farther than 62 miles, and only 12 have walked the surface of the moon. The resolute push to discover what lies beyond the sky has led to glory, breakthrough and tragedy, and yet the understanding is just beginning. The American pioneer spirit, a Manifest Destiny that stretches far beyond the Pacific, has taken shape in NASA's Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle Programs, rocketing people beyond the grasp of Earth's pull.

The more we discover, the more we explored, the tighter the global community seems to become. The Hubble Space Telescope continues to peer deep into the universe, opening the door not just to scientific study but also the imagination. The Curiosity Mars Rover, toiling along the red planet, has been piping back information confirming long-thought theories about the deserted planet. And the International Space Station, careening around low Earth orbit at a speed of about 17,200 miles per hour, has become a symbol of international cooperation as well as the home of potential medical and scientific breakthroughs. But in terms of vastness, if space truly is the final frontier, we as a species have not even left the driveway on this journey.

Spurred by this desire to know more, the South Florida Science Museum, a product to the Space Race itself, looks to capitalize on the wonderment of space to encourage the next generation of explorers. Through the Dekelboum Planetarium (the county's only public planetarium), the new Science on a Sphere exhibit and the Out of this World exhibit—which contains space artifacts, including a 232 meteorite and a slice of a Mars rock—SFSM has made it its mission to "excite curiosity and further the understanding and appreciation of science and technology."

In line with is, the museum's annual gala has taken on an interstellar theme in preparation for the new expansion, slated for a June opening. Last year, SFSM explored the depths of the earth's oceans with famed deep-sea explorer Dr. Robert Ballard. This year, SFSM has turned its gaze to the stars, inviting five explorers who dedicated their lives to the mysteries of space. The gala, dubbed "Out of this World: An Evening Honoring America's Space Pioneers," American astronauts Scott Carpenter, David Scott, Edgar Mitchell, Charles Duke and Robert Crippen will convene at The Breakers on April 5 for an evening of truly astronomical proportions. A panel discussion, led by CNN space correspondent John Zarrella, will touch on these men's extraordinary careers and the importance of space exploration for humanity at large. And these five astronauts will have a lot to share: Their exploits begin with the first manned space missions (Carpenter with Project Mercury), travel to the surface of the moon (Scott—Gemini 8, Apollo 9 and 15; Mitchell—Apollo 14; and Duke—Apollo 16), and tap into pioneering the Space Shuttle Program (Crippen, who captained STS-1, STS-7, STS-41-C and STS-41-G for a total of 23 days, 13 hours and 46 minutes in space).

Here, palmbeachillustrated.com caught up with Zarrella, a veteran reporter who has covered the space industry for more than 30 years.

PBI.COM: What are you interested in hearing from the panel April 5?

ZARRELLA: I think the most important thing that they can get across is to try and relate why space exploration is important, why pushing outward is important—not only to the nation but civilization in and of itself. Why do we need to go out there? That's one of the things I am certainly interested in having them express to everyone.

I think they all believed that we would be further along in space exploration than we are now. Certainly when you talk to the Apollo astronauts, they were quite convinced the next step was going to be Mars after the moon, but then suddenly it all stopped and NASA decided to build a space shuttle instead. Most of the Apollo astronauts that I have spoken to over the years have always expressed regret that we didn't push the envelope further outward as opposed to strictly going to near orbit with the space shuttle.

Then you will hear from people like Bob Crippen and the disappointment that the shuttle program ended. But the realization in this day and age, with the limited financial resources that are out there, the reality is if NASA were to move outward in space exploration, the shuttle program had to stop, there wasn't enough money to do both.

How has the evolution of the space industry changed over your career?

Oh my gosh, well the most obvious of course is that the Shuttle Program is no more and NASA is in the process of launching the new heavy-lift rocket Space Launch System (SLS). People tend to think of it as a negative that we are not flying right now, that we rely on the Russians to get to the International Space Station, but on the positive, there are all these private companies lobbying, competing, trying to deliver astronauts and cargo to the station. Many people over the years have said that ultimately, space has to become like the airline industry, where private companies take over in order for it to expand and thrive.

The industry is now a collaboration between private and public, but lets face it, NASA I still the biggest customer for all these companies. The vast majority of the money people like Elon Musk [SpaceX] and Sierra Nevada get, privately held companies that are trying to build spacecraft to got to the International Space Station, is coming from NASA.

What's next for NASA?

The whole idea [of ending the Shuttle Program] was to let NASA get out of the business of doing low orbit stuff and concentrate on what they do best, which is moving outward, return to the moon, go to an asteroid, Mars eventually. When will all this happen? Who knows, those projects are going to cost billions and billions of dollars, especially Mars. It is such an astronomical fee that I don't think anyone can give a realistic price tag on what it would cost.

As for the next big moon shot, the first test of the Orion Space Craft with a timetable of 2014 will be the next big event. They will be using an existing rocket, launch it about 5,000 miles and then have it do a highspeed reentry. This is fairly ambitious because for the last 30 years, NASA has only been flying a couple hundred miles up to the International Space Station, and besides other unmanned missions, that's about it.

There are three main pillars that the majority of NASA's $19 plus billion per year goes to: the International Space Station, which has funding through 2020; the new heavy-lift rocket SLS, which has a 2019-20 timetable; and the Webb Telescope, the next great observatory, which has had many problems over the years from design to development but is back on track and should launch around 2017. There are a lot of smaller projects like the Curiosity Mars Rover and other unmanned exploration vehicles, but that is where the bulk of the money is going.

What are your thoughts on scuttling the Shuttle Program?

I think everyone wishes we had continued outward, but a lot of the astronauts I have talked to, and again, these are shuttle astronauts, always believed that the shuttle program had tremendous value. Without the shuttle, the space station would never have been built; the first American woman to fly in space flew on the shuttle; I can't count the number of nations that were able to have astronauts fly into space because of the space shuttle. So in many respects it brought the world much closer together in a very small way. I think there is a lot of value in that, whether it was European astronauts, Japanese, Canadian, you name it, they were given that opportunity because of the space shuttle and its ability to carry seven people. I think that has been a great benefit to society.

One astronaut, Alvin Drew, who flew on several space shuttle missions and the last flight of Discovery said, and I'm paraphrasing: Some day, down the road, we are going to look back and people are going to say my goodness, how audacious were we to build this vehicle to go into space, go to a space station, service the Hubble Space Telescope, put satellites into orbit, then return to earth and land on a runway in a reusable vehicle.

We may never see anything to the scale of the shuttle program in our lifetime, those kinds of capabilities that it provided and offered. So there is a lot of value in what the Space Shuttle Program did for society, did for the nation, and quite frankly afforded for a lot of nations around the world.

Astronauts Scott Carpenter, David Scott, Edgar Mitchell, Charles Duke and Robert Crippen along with CNN correspondent John Zarrella will be the keynote speakers at "Out of this World: An Evening Honoring America's Space Pioneers," the South Florida Science Museum's annual gala at The Breakers on April 5. For ticket information, contact Marcy Hoffman at 561-370-7738 or mhoffman@sfsm.org

Is Mars One's one-way mission to the Red Planet just science fantasy?

Stephanie Dube Wilson - FoxNews.com

Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp has sky-high plans for a solar system-sized reality show: a worldwide media event for "several billion online spectators" that would hand four ordinary people a one-way ticket to Mars -- all filmed for a TV event set to launch in 2023.

But there's less "reality" in this concept than in reality TV shows, some experts told FoxNews.com.

Nearly one year after its high-profile launch, the organization has barely taken a step toward its goal, with only one supplier on board to make a conceptual design.

"We expect to have the first results from most of our suppliers before the end of the year, but all of them will require additional contracts," Lansdorp told FoxNews.com.

That's scarcely a beginning, said Dani Eder, who was in the space systems division of Boeing from 1981 to 2005 and worked on manned Mars mission studies.

"All they have are some words and pictures," Eder told FoxNews.com. "Mars One needs to explain how they get to Mars, and not just show pictures of the surface habitat, before engineers like me will take them seriously."

Paying for a 'Suicide Mission'

The idea behind Mars One is certainly entertaining. The company wants to use a number of high-tech suppliers to send four people to the Red Planet for an estimated $6 billion. It plans to have its first supply launch to Mars in 2016, with human settlers landing in 2023, followed by four more every two years.

The astronauts won't come back to Earth; they will live and die on Mars.

"The technology to get to Mars, land on Mars, keep humans alive in forbidden environments and prepare a settlement with robotics -- all of that exists," Lansdorp told FoxNews.com "Of course there's still a lot of engineering to be done and many hurdles to overcome..."

The reality show will help fund the bulk of the journey by filming astronaut training and letting viewers vote for who will go to Mars, along with broadcasting the takeoff and landing on Mars. Lansdorp believes the show will be bigger than the Olympics.

"[The] International Olympic Committee has revenues of over $1 billion per week," he told FoxNews.com. "Mars One will do the same to finance the mission to Mars."

Not everyone believes a TV show can fund such an undertaking. When Eder worked for Boeing, one of his studies involved a TV network asking if a manned mission to Mars could be supported by advertising revenues. It couldn't.

"The potential revenue from a reality show just isn't in the same league with mission cost for going to Mars," he said.

Some scientists are excited about the project nevertheless. Dr. Gerard 't Hooft, a Dutch theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner, is an official ambassador. He published a letter on the Mars One website to endorse the project.

"All confronted with it will, like I did, respond with skepticism... But look and listen to this proposal properly! Problems are to be solved... It will certainly be a spectacle worth watching."

Mars One, a Netherlands-based nonprofit, owns about 90 percent of the for-profit company that will run the reality show, Interplanetary Media Group. Although the bulk of the mission will be funded by the show, Mars One will also receive funds from investors, donations from private individuals, and the astronaut selection process itself.

In January, Mars One announced its first investors, although it did not disclose the size of the investments: Trifork BV, a Dutch company that builds custom software, and Now&Partners, a creative agency in South Africa. Trifork did not respond to FoxNews.com questions about the size of its investment.

"Most of the revenues will come in 2023 and after, [but] most of the expenses will be made before 2020," Lansdorp told FoxNews.com. "Indeed we will have revenues from various sources before 2023 ... but most likely not enough to keep up with the expenses."

Is Existing Technology Enough?

Mars One says modifying existing tech will speed the project, something Hooft described as "genius."

"The mission is kept as simple as possible," he said. "All the fantastical technical concepts that have not been sufficiently and satisfactorily tested, will not be employed."

Mars One proposes the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and a slightly larger variation of the SpaceX Dragon capsule could make the flight. Some experts doubt this plan. Robert Harwood is the aerospace and defense industry director of ANSYS, Inc., a software company that simulates rocket launches to the moon and other planets.

"It's unlikely that these two systems would be directly involved in a journey to Mars," he told FoxNews.com. "They are probably not big enough, powerful enough or use the right type of engine technology to sustain such a journey and carry all the things required."

Mars One may also have overstated its ability to set up a colony, according to Harry Keller, who has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry and runs Smart Science, an organization that advocates science education.

"Mars One, in its passion, has overlooked some things," he said. "The Mars One people suggest their landing location will be where water is available but don't give details. This omission is just the sort that makes me suspicious."

Keller listed more problems that aren't adequately addressed.

"[They] glibly talk about using local resources for building and maintaining facilities," he said. "Just to make iron would require mining ... and huge amounts of energy. Plastics require an organic source, but all organics would have to be food until the base expanded quite a bit, but expansion requires building materials. You see the vicious cycle here."

According to Mars One, drinking water will be produced by heating ice in Martian soil. But current technology hasn't yet proven up to the task in the field, experts told FoxNews.com.

"Digging up soil on Mars, with embedded ice or hydrated minerals, getting the water out, and having an electrolysis unit that is reliable enough for your life to depend on it is a whole different matter," Eder said. "We might have the technology in a laboratory, but not as functional hardware we can use on Mars."

When Lansdorp did a Q&A on social bookmarking site Reddit, participants questioned if the plan was a publicity stunt. He asked for patience: "It takes time for an idea to grow."

Space ship completes 24th test flight in Mojave

Steven Mayer - Bakersfield Californian

How many test flights did the Starship Enterprise undergo before it was cleared to boldly go where no one has gone before?

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo completed its 24th unpowered test flight above Mojave Air & Space Port in eastern Kern County on Wednesday morning.

It appeared to go off without a hitch.

The flight, witnessed by a small group of onlookers and employees, brings the space tourism company another step closer to powered test flights -- the final step before passengers are allowed on-board.

It was only the second time the spaceship, christened VSS Enterprise, has flown with rocket motor components installed -- although the rocket has not yet been fired in flight.

"It appeared to be a textbook flight," said Mojave resident Bill Deaver, a former editor and publisher of the Mojave Desert News who watched the test Wednesday morning.

"It was nominal," he said, "which means nothing bad happened."

A spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said the company likely would not release a statement about the test on Wednesday, although some information about it may be divulged within a few days.

Wednesday's flight followed another glide test flight in December that the company said met all its objectives.

Virgin has indicated that at least one more glide flight is needed before Enterprise takes that huge next step: its first powered flight.

SpaceShipTwo, designed to carry six paying passengers and two crewmembers into suborbital space, is carried aloft by its larger mothership, WhiteKnightTwo.

During these glide flights, the spaceship is typically released tens of thousands of feet above the earth and, guided by its test pilot, slowly circles downward for an unpowered, but otherwise conventional runway landing.

Once powered flights begin, things will change dramatically.

WhiteKnightTwo will carry SpaceShipTwo to around 50,000 feet, where the mothership will release the smaller spaceplane. The latter's rocket motor will light like a giant blowtorch and crew and passengers will be thrust within a matter of seconds to the blackness and near weightlessness at the edge of space, about 62 miles above the earth.

It's an experience a limited number of humans have experienced.

Virgin plans to manufacture and assemble a fleet of the commercial space vehicles at its sprawling complex in Mojave. The ships will carry the more than 500 passengers who have already made deposits on the $200,000 thrill rides. Film and television actor Ashton Kutcher reportedly purchased the 500th ticket.

Virgin Galactic's billionaire founder Sir Richard Branson, who visited and toured the Mojave facility in November, predicts commercial flights will begin in 2014.

He has said he will be on the first flight.

Council to hear spaceport plan Thursday

Andrew Gant - Daytona Beach News-Journal

The news out of Brownsville, Texas, suggests that's the site leading the race to land SpaceX. But Florida isn't dropping out now, and neither is Volusia County.

So Space Florida, the public-private state agency trying to recruit private space industry, will come to the Volusia County Council on Thursday morning to talk about what Volusia — specifically one site in Southeast Volusia — can offer SpaceX or future private aerospace ventures.

"I want to know really what our chances are," County Councilman Josh Wagner said Wednesday — the day after several Texas leaders testified in favor of a bill that would close some of its beaches during SpaceX launches. "When it really comes down to it, what do we need to do to get this done?"

Space Florida considers NASA's Shiloh site in Southeast Volusia a "prime location" for a 150-acre commercial launch pad, spokeswoman Tina Lange said Wednesday. But NASA would have to release the land for private use, and there are environmental concerns about impacts on the surrounding Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and Canaveral National Seashore.

"The main point of this (presentation Thursday) is that we want to get in front of as many audiences as possible," Lange said. "Just to answer questions and educate people on the potential for a commercial spaceport, and also to address any environmental concerns, because all of these things have been taken into account."

Space Florida President and CEO Frank DiBello will be presenting to the council.

Wagner said he supports all the efforts to bring aerospace here, but he hears the concerns about the environment.

"The question I have is: Is there another suitable site in Volusia County?" Wagner said. "It would not be my first choice to have it in this location because of the sensitive environmental issues. That said, if there isn't another choice, I support having it in that area."

He also said he believes in balancing the environmental concerns with economic ones. "I don't believe 150 acres out of that area is going to cross over what I believe is that balance," Wagner said. "I'm balancing our residents' lives. If we don't start doing things, we will continue to be a declining community."

Advocates for conservation and the nearby wildlife refuge have argued a launch site should go on vacant land near NASA facilities on Cape Canaveral instead. The push in Texas to authorize some temporary closures of beaches is the kind of move some people fear will affect the refuge, seashore and Mosquito Lagoon.

The discussion isn't only about SpaceX, though; Councilwoman Deb Denys, who represents Southeast Volusia, has stressed more private companies will be looking for launch pads. And Lange said a facility on Shiloh could accommodate multiple launches from multiple companies.

"While SpaceX is certainly the leader right now on the commercial side, the potential for commercial spaceport goes beyond SpaceX," she said.

Space Florida's presentation is the first issue on the council's agenda Thursday morning, and it's scheduled to begin at 9:05 a.m. The meeting is in the Thomas C. Kelly Administration Center at 123 W. Indiana Ave. in DeLand, or people can listen online at volusia.org.

Space fate turns on this land
Expert: Winning on price means launching outside KSC

Matt Reed - Florida Today

Our future as the Space Coast could hinge on 150 acres at the northern tip of Kennedy Space Center near the Brevard-Volusia county border.

Once a citrus community called Shiloh, private rocket companies such as SpaceX want to build a launch facility there, beyond the space agency's strict security and regulations. That would require NASA to turn over the Shiloh land to the state of Florida. The agency has said "no" so far. And SpaceX has turned to Texas for a commercial-launch site, although it would continue to service the International Space Station from KSC.

For a deeper explanation, I talked with Dale Ketcham, director of strategic alliances for Space Florida.

Question: Why is this deal so urgent?

Ketcham: SpaceX is not the only company involved, but clearly they're the industry leader — the company we are most eager to attract first.

They are the company most out there and eager to identify a purely commercial spaceport. As CEO Elon Musk articulated before the Texas Legislature this month, Texas is in the lead. He said it's very exciting that Texas is likely to be the home of the "world's first commercial Cape Canaveral." That hurt.

Q: Why does he need land outside KSC?

Ketcham: It's not that Elon Musk wants it, it's that their customers want it — the people who build and provide the big commercial satellites.

In the 1980s, 100 percent of the commercial satellite market in the world launched from Florida. We're now down to zero. That market voted with its feet and left. It's being launched by the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese, and now the Brazilians and Indians are getting into the market.

We're attempting to recapture that as a nation through Elon Musk with SpaceX, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, Paul Allen with Stratolaunch. They think they have the technology.

In terms of "price to launch" — what it costs to put your payload in orbit — you can go to Elon's web page. It's right there. No one else does that. He'll personally guarantee that price.

He's now got 56 launches manifested. And the head of the Chinese space agency said, "We don't know how he does it, because we can't beat that price."

His government launches will stay here. But what he's looking for is a clean sheet of paper, a green field, to establish a launch operation that has nothing more than what is absolutely required. That will allow him to offer those cut-rate prices. And he can't get that in the middle of the federal reservation, whether it's Canaveral Air Force Station or Kennedy Space Center.

Even if (NASA Administrator) Charlie Boldin and (KSC Director) Bob Cabana promised him he could do what he wants, he would be a fool to believe that. Not because they're disingenuous people, but because there will be other center directors, Congress will assign the agency new missions, and their job is not to take care of you, it's to get their missions done.

Q: What, physically or organizationally, gets in the way at the Space Center?

Ketcham: Well, you could conceivably put a bare-bones-minimum launch site there somewhere.

But there are four big satellite manufacturers and three of them are not American. If they're launching a satellite, they send their people with their payload to hold its hand until it launches. If you're not an American, you have to go through all sorts of security requirements to get on-site that you don't have in Texas, Georgia or Puerto Rico.

Space Florida is trying to provide them with what they can get elsewhere.

Q: The possibility of a prolonged security lockdown, like we had after 9/11, must be daunting.

Ketcham: We're dealing with a commercial market. Those satellites generate so much money that the difference between having to wait a week or not can mean millions and millions of dollars.

From a market perspective, NASA may have a good reason for posing a problem, the Air Force may have its reasons — and they ARE working their tails off to mitigate those.

But at the end of the day, the market doesn't care. Nor should it.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - April 4, 2013 and JSC Today

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