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: May 30, 2013 3:48:04 PM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - May 30, 2013 and JSC Today

Sorry for the late news folks   I have been in a all day training class and just now got access to a computer….

Thursday, May 30, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
2.            Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Town Hall Meeting Today
3.            Destination Station Visits Atlanta and Shares Wonders of the Space Station
4.            Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) Meet-and-Greet
5.            Today: Houston Fire Department Training at JSC
6.            Chat With the Strategic Opportunities and Partnership Development Team June 5
7.            Stay in Touch With the NESC Academy
8.            Spaceflight-Induced Bone Loss and Human Health and Performance Lecture
9.            Space Available - APPEL - Project Planning Analysis and Control
10.          Have You Checked Out Our Active NASA@work Challenges?
11.          Starport Summer Camp -- Camp Starts Soon
12.          Final Presentation of 'A User's Guide to the Universe' on June 13
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles, or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon."
________________________________________
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
The latest version of Flex Friday turned out to be a long vacation for some, a little more time to clean house for others and just another weekend for the rest. This week we are launching another trio up to the space station. Can you pick out the false statement about Expedition 36 in question one? "Scotty" was the Star Trek character you'd most likely have been if you were cast in the TV show. Spock and Kirk were close seconds. This week I'd like you to select the TV show that most closely resembles your home life. A soap opera is too easy an answer, so I've given you a little more challenging selection to pick from.
Andy your Mayberry on over to get this week's poll.
Joel Walker x30541 http://jlt.jsc.nasa.gov/

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2.            Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Town Hall Meeting Today
The Space Technology Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Mike Gazarik will host a directorate Town Hall Meeting originating from NASA Headquarters on May 30. The Town Hall is scheduled from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. CDT. It will be carried live over internal NASA TV channels at Headquarters and the NASA centers.
During the meeting, Gazarik will give an overview of the new mission directorate and discuss plans for the upcoming year. He also will answer questions from Headquarters and participating NASA center employees. Participants may also may email questions to HQ-SpaceTech@mail.nasa.gov before or during the Town Hall.
JSC team members may come to Building 2N, Briefing Room 101, to view the event and ask questions live. Those unable to attend in person can watch the event on RF Channel 2 or Omni 3 (45). JSC, Ellington Field, Sonny Carter Training Facility and White Sands Test Facility employees with wired computer network connections can view the Town Hall using the JSC EZTV IP Network TV System on channel 402 (standard definition). Please note: EZTV currently requires using Internet Explorer on a Windows PC connected to the JSC computer network with a wired connection. Mobile devices, Wi-Fi connections and newer MAC computers are currently not supported by EZTV. If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367.
Dave Steitz, Office of Communications, NASA Headquarters 202-358-1730

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3.            Destination Station Visits Atlanta and Shares Wonders of the Space Station
Destination Station was recently in Atlanta from April 15 through April 21. During the week, NASA visited schools, hospitals, museums and the city's well-known Atlanta Science Tavern Meet-Up group. Check out the video and see some of the cool things we did and the impact we made on the Peach State!
Ciandra Jackson x32924

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4.            Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) Meet-and-Greet
Are you new to JSC? Would you like to connect with other JSC employees outside your home organization? Then, we would like to invite you to an ERG Meet-and-Greet session today, May 30, at 10 a.m. in the Building 3 Collaboration Center. Leaders and members from each of the five ERGs (African-American, Hispanic, Human Systems Integration, ASIA, and Out and Allied), as well as representatives from JSC's Education Office, will be there to share information about their groups and to welcome you to the center. Summer Pathways students and education interns have been invited as well.
So, if you're a new employee, please come join them to learn how you can get more involved at JSC, support the center's mission and goals, and how becoming a member of any ERG can enhance your work experience.
Event Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013   Event Start Time:10:00 AM   Event End Time:11:00 AM
Event Location: Building 3 Collaboration Center

Add to Calendar

Sylvia Stottlemyer, I&I Office, HR Office x39757 https://inclusionandinnovation.jsc.nasa.gov/index.cfm

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5.            Today: Houston Fire Department Training at JSC
The Houston Fire Department will be conducting a training exercise at JSC today, May 30, in the afternoon. The exercise will run along Avenue B, near Linkage Road. One eastbound lane will be closed off to traffic. The other lane will be open for traffic.
Ronald Lee 832-646-4761

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6.            Chat With the Strategic Opportunities and Partnership Development Team June 5
You are invited to JSC's SAIC/Safety and Mission Assurance Speaker Forum featuring Yolanda Marshall, Doug Terrier and Steven González, the Strategic Opportunities and Partnership Development (SOPD) Team.
Date/Time: Wednesday, June 5, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Location: Building 1, Room 360
SOPD wants your inputs! Click here and provide your inputs by May 30 to start the conversation.
Marshall, González and Terrier will be sharing SOPD initiatives and listening to you. They will also be sharing about JSC/SOPDs:
o             Partnerships with industry
o             Collaborations with consortiums
o             Innovation initiatives and facilities
Event Date: Wednesday, June 5, 2013   Event Start Time:11:30 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: Building 1, room 360

Add to Calendar

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

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7.            Stay in Touch With the NESC Academy
Would you like to be informed about upcoming NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC)/NASA Engineering Network (NEN) live webcasts, or when new lessons are released to the NESC Academy website? Now you can by joining the NESC Academy email list, or by going to http://nescacademy.nasa.gov and clicking on the link in the top-right green area titled "Subscribe to NESC Academy."
The NESC Academy online contains self-paced courses conducted by discipline experts and provides a unique opportunity to share critical knowledge with a broad audience. Check out our most recent releases here, which include "An Overview of Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Estimation;" "Fundamentals of Kalman Filtering and Estimation;" and "Experiences and Lessons Learned in Development and Implementation of Aerodynamic Uncertainty: Ares/MLAS/Orion."
Hope Rachel Venus 757-864-9530

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8.            Spaceflight-Induced Bone Loss and Human Health and Performance Lecture
Please join us on June 4 from 9 to 10 a.m. in Building 1, Room 720, for a lecture on "Spaceflight-induced Bone Loss and Human Health and Performance." This Human Systems Academy course will highlight the challenges to translating astronaut biomedical data to evidence for human skeletal health risks and performance. Space is limited, so please register in SATERN: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Cynthia Rando x41815 https://sashare.jsc.nasa.gov/hsa/default.aspx

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9.            Space Available - APPEL - Project Planning Analysis and Control
This five-day course offers a foundation in program planning, analysis and control, and provides intensive instruction in project management fundamentals across the entire project life cycle. Course content covers the areas of technical integration of project elements, design and discipline functions and their associated interactions to balance performance, cost, schedule, reliability and operability. Proven strategies and practical tools for planning, executing and controlling a variety of projects are presented.
This course is designed for NASA's new engineers or early-career hires.
This course is available for self-registration in SATERN until Tuesday, June 11. Attendance is open to civil servants and contractors.
Dates: Monday through Friday, July 29 to Aug. 2
Location: Building 12, Room 152
Zeeaa Quadri x39723 https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHED...

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10.          Have You Checked Out Our Active NASA@work Challenges?
Be sure to join in the discussion and submit your solutions to the Peer-to-Peer Coaching and Counseling Program Challenge, as it ends this Friday, May 30. Other active challenges include Seeking Solutions on the Use of Thorium Instead of Uranium (deadline: Aug. 9); and As Good as Dollars: Incentives for NASA@work that Count! (deadline: June 14). The challenge owners for these challenges are responding and actively engaging in the discussion, so be sure to check their responses so you can add to the discussion or update your submissions.
Are you new to NASA@work? NASA@work is an agencywide, collaborative problem-solving platform that connects the collective knowledge of experts (like YOU) from all centers across NASA. Challenge owners post problems, and members of the NASA@work community participate by responding with their solutions to posted problems. Anyone can participate!
Kathryn Keeton 281-204-1519 http://nasa.innocentive.com

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11.          Starport Summer Camp -- Camp Starts Soon
Summer is a little over a week away, and Starport's Summer Camp is filling up fast! We have tons of fun activities planned, so register now before it's too late. 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
Fee per session: $140 per child for dependents | $160 per child for non-dependents
NEW for this summer! Ask about our sibling discounts and discounts for registering for all sessions.
Registration is now open to dependents and non-dependents (family and friends) of the JSC workforce.
PLUS, check out our sports camps now being offered.
Shericka Phillips x35563 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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12.          Final Presentation of 'A User's Guide to the Universe' on June 13
Inquisitive adults are invited to attend the presentation Black Holes Inside and Out by Dr. Andrew Hamilton of the University of Colorado at Boulder. This free public presentation on June 13 is part of the Cosmic Explorations Speaker Series at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI). Hamilton's presentation is the final presentation in this year's series, "A User's Guide to the Universe: You Live Here. Here's What You Need to Know."
LPI's Cosmic Explorations presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a light reception. No reservation is necessary. LPI is located in the USRA building at 3600 Bay Area Blvd. The entrance is located on Middlebrook Drive. For more information, please click here.
Andrew Shaner 281-486-2163

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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: 12:30 pm Central (1:30 EDT) – NASA Preview of the Approach of Asteroid 1998 QE2

Human Spaceflight News
Thursday, May 30, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

NASA Builds Mock Moon 'Roverscape' for Robot Driving Tests

Leonard David - Space.com

A unique "roverscape" has been created to help assess the blending of human and robotic skills in deploying a low-radio frequency array on the moon's farside. The series of tests will tap the talents of astronauts on the International Space Station to command an Earth-based robot to conduct simulated lunar tasks. The football field-size roverscape, and an adjacent control center, is located at the NASA Ames Research Center, near Silicon Valley in California. The tests are focused on the feasibility of telerobotic deployment of science gear and hardware, be it on the moon, at asteroids or on Mars. An operational readiness test is scheduled for the end of this month, followed by tentative sessions involving space station crewmembers in June, July and August.

NASA Banking on Bigelow Study To Break Big Contractor Bias

Dan Leone - Space News

Bigelow Aerospace has produced a report for NASA that shows how the agency could use privately operated space systems beyond low Earth orbit. A draft of the report, essentially a catalog of space systems and technologies that companies like Bigelow have proposed flying in space, was delivered to NASA's top human spaceflight official during a May 23 press conference at NASA headquarters here. The report is the first deliverable due to the agency under a nonexclusive, unfunded Space Act Agreement the North Las Vegas, Nev.-based developer of inflatable space habitats signed with NASA in March.

Healthy Hubble raises hopes of even longer life in orbit

William Harwood - CBS News

Four years after a final shuttle servicing mission, the Hubble Space Telescope is operating like a fine watch, with no major technical problems that would prevent it from continuing its trail-blazing observations through the end of the decade -- 30 years after launch -- project officials say. The 2009 space shuttle servicing mission was intended to extend Hubble's life by five years and while engineers and astronomers were hopeful the venerable observatory would remain scientifically viable beyond that target, there were no guarantees. But other than a handful of relatively minor glitches over the past four years, along with expected degradation in some of its detectors -- degradation that can be offset by operational changes -- Hubble's scientific instruments and complex subsystems are working at near-maximum efficiency.

Space, the fiscal frontier: government looks to the skies for rebalancing
The UK's space industry is low-key, but a major player in satellite manufacturing – and some companies export 95% of their output

Jennifer Rankin - The Observer (UK)

When Major Timothy Peake boards a Russian Soyuz rocket in late 2015 to become the first British astronaut on the International Space Station, he will carry the expectations of one of Britain's least-known industries. The government hopes the voyage will be not only a small step for Major Tim, but a giant leap for the UK space industry, which is worth £9.2bn and employs almost 30,000 people. Just as the Apollo moon landings of the 60s and 70s fired the imagination of a generation, science minister David Willetts hopes we will see a renewed surge of enthusiasm for science and technology in British schools. The public will be able to follow Peake's tweets from space, just as TV viewers were once spellbound by grainy black and white images of Neil Armstrong planting the stars and stripes on the moon.

Stellar Awards presented to honor space achievements

Bay Area Citizen

Each year, the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement solicits nominations for Stellar Awards for individual and team achievements from the government, military and industry to honor outstanding accomplishments of those in the aerospace industry. In order to ensure recognition of individuals at all stages of their careers, nominations are solicited in four categories: early career, mid-career, late-career, and teams. The nominations are reviewed by a Stellar Awards Evaluation Panel of distinguished scientists, engineers, managers, and academicians who select the winners based on who's accomplishments hold the greatest promise for furthering future activities in space.

Asteroid mining company wants to put your face in space

Irene Klotz - Reuters

A privately owned asteroid mining firm, backed in part by Google Inc's founders, launched a crowd-funding project on Wednesday to gauge public interest in a small space telescope that could serve as a backdrop for personal photographs, officials said. Planetary Resources, based in Bellevue, Washington, plans to build and operate telescopes to hunt for asteroids orbiting near Earth and robotic spacecraft to mine them for precious metals, water and other materials. It also plans an educational and outreach program to let students, museums, armchair astronomers and virtual travelers share use of a telescope through an initiative on Kickstarter, a website used to raise funds for creative projects.

Asteroid miners seeking your help
For $25 donation, a 'space selfie' is offered

James Dean - Florida Today

Say cheese!

A crowdfunding campaign launched Wednesday aims to place a citizen-controlled satellite in orbit that could snap your picture against the backdrop of Earth. A digital "Space Selfie" image could be yours for a $25 contribution to Planetary Resources' "Space Telescope for Everyone" campaign on Kickstarter, which hopes to raise $1 million by June 30. Larger pledges from $99 up to $10,000 would offer opportunities to use the company's Arkyd Space Telescope for science observations, to take pictures of celestial objects or to provide access to schools, universities and science centers to promote education initiatives.

Kickstarting the Future of Space Exploration

Peter Diamandis - Huffington Post (Commentary)

(Diamandis is Chairman & CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation)

When the Hubble space telescope was launched, many people said it was a waste of money and resources. Requiring two space shuttle missions to get it right (first to put into orbit and then a second mission to fix the mirror) and a massive $2.5 billion expense, many proclaimed that it was a giant boondoggle and a drain on the taxpayers. But over the past 23 years, the Hubble telescope has returned awe-inspiring images and scientific data that have transformed our understanding of the universe. Over 9,000 papers based on Hubble data have been published in peer-reviewed journals. At Planetary Resources, we wanted a way to put the excitement of space and the thrill of discovery in the hands of as many people as possible -- as many kids as possible. That's why we're launching a new mission of exploration, and putting you at the controls of the world's first space telescope that will be operated by supporters, students, researchers, and educators. As we just announced on Kickstarter, the ARKYD space telescope will give students access to cutting edge space technology, support important research and discovery, and continue to build excitement about space and all of its potential.

The private road to Mars

Jeff Foust - The Space Review (Commentary)

(Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site and the Space Politics and NewSpace Journal weblogs.)

Mars is hard. That's the message that NASA and others in the space community have hammered into the public for years. It is, they argue, difficult enough to send a spacecraft to Mars, and even harder to land one there, a message clearly communicated by the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video released by NASA before the (successful) landing of the rover Curiosity last summer. Try to do the same with people—a task requiring larger spacecraft with life support systems, among other challenges—and the difficultly multiplies exponentially. That extreme level of difficulty, and corresponding implied extreme expense, has led to the conclusion that only a government, or a coalition of governments, can send humans to Mars. It's also been a long-term goal: President George W. Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration featured human missions to Mars at an unspecified date after a 2020 return to the Moon, while President Barack Obama in 2010 called for a human mission to orbit Mars in the mid-2030s and a landing to follow presumably shortly thereafter.

Consider Mars

Frank Stratford - The Space Review (Commentary)

(Stratford is CEO and founder of MarsDrive. His writing is focused on finding solutions to commercial space development with a special focus on how Mars can fit within this context.)

Humanitarian causes are those efforts designed to lift people out of the chains of poverty, injustice, disease, and exploitation. Over the centuries, men and women from many walks of life have valiantly engaged in these areas to improve our standard of living. Sadly, we are aware that even in the early 21st century much work remains to be done here. Billions of people live below the poverty line, diseases from the 19th century still run rampant in third world nations, and problems like war, corruption, and starvation abound. Lack of education also keeps billions imprisoned in a life of poverty and oppression, where many people never have the opportunity to achieve their true potential.

Space, Man: From a New Cosmos to Galaxy-Print Leggings, the Heavens Are Having a Moment
"Everybody, when they're a kid, wants to be an astronaut"

Kelly Faircloth - The Observer (UK)

Every week, weather permitting, a crew of starstruck earthlings sets up camp on that agora of Bloomberg New York, the High Line, parking their telescopes just south of the Chelsea Market. "People like looking up," said David Kauffman, one of the event's organizers, sporting a blue windbreaker from a Long Island astronomical society at a recent gathering. "I think that's a natural human thing." Even passersby slowed down to investigate. The Observer watched three college-age women creep up to the telescopes. "That's so cool," one gushed as a stargazer explained that, if it weren't so cloudy, she'd be able to see Jupiter. One of her companions rattled off "My Very Educated Mother" and tried to puzzle out why she couldn't see Mars, prompting an explanation of planetary orbits.
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COMPLETE STORIES

NASA Builds Mock Moon 'Roverscape' for Robot Driving Tests

Leonard David - Space.com

A unique "roverscape" has been created to help assess the blending of human and robotic skills in deploying a low-radio frequency array on the moon's farside. The series of tests will tap the talents of astronauts on the International Space Station to command an Earth-based robot to conduct simulated lunar tasks.

The football field-size roverscape, and an adjacent control center, is located at the NASA Ames Research Center, near Silicon Valley in California. The tests are focused on the feasibility of telerobotic deployment of science gear and hardware, be it on the moon, at asteroids or on Mars.

An operational readiness test is scheduled for the end of this month, followed by tentative sessions involving space station crewmembers in June, July and August.

Designated driver

The K10 robot is ready for action, as is software to be used by ISS astronauts to interface with the wheeled rover, said Terry Fong, director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames. End-to-end testing on the ground has gone well, he said, as has communications checks to and from the space station.

"The only part of the puzzle we really haven't tried is doing this live with an astronaut," Fong told SPACE.com. As yet there is not a "designated driver" of the K10 among the ISS astronauts, with tests perhaps involving multiple crewmembers, he said.

"We've constructed a good outdoor robot test area. It has craters, a hill, a variety of boulders and covered in crushed rock," Fong said. "This test bed is a stepping stone being indoors in the lab and being outside in the completely natural world."

Breaking new ground

Fong said that the space station/rover experiments will break a bit of new ground.

In contrast with much of what goes on involving the station, there has been no ground training of astronauts ahead of time, Fong said.

"We're doing what the astronaut crew office refers to as 'just-in-time' training," Fong said, with software crafted to assist an astronaut to run the K10 rover in stepwise fashion.

"For us, that's interesting. We're guinea pigs from that perspective, trying to provide feedback to others of how well this kind of on-orbit, real-time training will work," Fong said.

Telerobotics era

One early outcome of the forthcoming tests is to mimic teleoperating a rover on the moon's farside from NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle parked at the lunar L2 Lagrange Point.

That's a spot where the combined gravity of the Earth and moon allows a spacecraft to be synchronized with the moon in its orbit around the Earth, so that the spacecraft is relatively stationary over the farside of the moon.

"What I think is exciting about all of this is the telerobotics era we're getting into," said Jack Burns, director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute's Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research, a NASA-funded center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"This is a very serious effort," Burns told SPACE.com. "Anytime you are going to be working with real astronauts, it has to be a pretty serious effort."

Uncovering the gotchas

Burns is a key player behind a proposed L2 lunar farside piloted mission that uses astronauts to remotely unfurl on the moon a low-radio frequency antenna comprised of polyimide film. That array could track down the "cosmic dawn" of the universe shortly after the Big Bang.

To make such a mission more realistic, Burns said a university vacuum chamber is in use to imitate the day/night thermal cycles on the moon. A mini-rover has been built that is controlled from inside the chamber to help scope out deployment issues.

Each stage of the tests — be it at the Ames roverscape or at the university — build toward more realism, Burns said, enabling team members to uncover, ahead of time, some of the gotchas.

"Humans and machines working together," Burns told SPACE.com. "This is really the way exploration is going to be done in the future…be it on the surface of the moon or on Mars."[

Doing more at a distance

Laura Kruger, a University of Colorado, Boulder, grad student on the project, is a "synthetic astronaut" helping to design the training module that space station crew members will use in tasking the K10 rover.

"We had to figure out the cognitive workload, the step-by-step procedures for different people that have different backgrounds," Kruger said, including how much help is required from computers contrasted with how much astronauts can handle.

Kruger said that the space station crew sessions are divided up into a K10 survey of the Ames roverscape, then having the rover deploy the thin-film telescope arrays, followed by inspection and documentation of the achieved work at the roverscape.

Fong at Ames said the upcoming test results are meant to be applied to a variety of future space ventures.

"The whole overall approach here is independent of any particular, single mission. Whether it's an L2 lunar farside mission, at Mars orbit, or even in proximity to an asteroid … it's all the same thing...to extend the human reach and enable astronauts to do more at a distance."

NASA Banking on Bigelow Study To Break Big Contractor Bias

Dan Leone - Space News

Bigelow Aerospace has produced a report for NASA that shows how the agency could use privately operated space systems beyond low Earth orbit.

A draft of the report, essentially a catalog of space systems and technologies that companies like Bigelow have proposed flying in space, was delivered to NASA's top human spaceflight official during a May 23 press conference at NASA headquarters here. The report is the first deliverable due to the agency under a nonexclusive, unfunded Space Act Agreement the North Las Vegas, Nev.-based developer of inflatable space habitats signed with NASA in March.

"Instead of being the typical approach where we put together all the plans and we ask for participation [from industry], we wanted to look at it the other way and see what's available," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations.

But since 2007, the agency has been experimenting with a different procurement model, embodied by the Commercial Crew and Cargo programs, where companies propose hardware and plans for fulfilling some NASA objective — cargo deliveries to the international space station, for example — and NASA funds those it thinks likeliest to succeed.

In May 2012, NASA and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) proved the model can work when the Hawthorne, Calif., company successfully delivered cargo to the space station with its Dragon space capsule and Falcon 9 rocket. The company has since flown two more cargo missions and is on tap for another 10 through 2016, under the Commercial Resupply Services contract it signed with NASA in 2008. NASA's tab, including technology development aid and the 12 cargo deliveries, will be about $2 billion. SpaceX, meanwhile, remains free to sell both Dragon and its companion Falcon 9 rocket to customers besides NASA. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., the other company NASA is funding under the Commercial Cargo Program, launched its first Antares rocket in April and is on track to deliver supplies to the space station this summer in a demo mission similar to the one SpaceX flew last year.

To replicate these results for missions beyond Earth orbit, Gerstenmaier said an entity other than NASA needed to explore the industrial landscape for ideas. Leaving NASA out of the process, at least in the beginning, could help avoid the bias that sometimes colors studies undertaken by the agency and the big aerospace contractors it has relied on for nearly every mission in its history.

"They're used to a relationship between themselves and the government, and I think that biases some of the discussion, biases some of the information that we receive, and the data we get," Gerstenmaier said.

Another Bigelow report, due to NASA by Oct. 31, will go a step further than the first, presenting industry-developed mission proposals, and not just the technologies that could be used to carry out these missions.

Neither NASA nor Bigelow have publicly released the report, but Gerstenmaier said NASA might do so in a few weeks

The founder and namesake of Bigelow Aerospace, Robert Bigelow, said his company surveyed about 20 well-known aerospace companies for the study. He identified only three of these, besides his own: Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Space Systems and SpaceX. These are the three companies developing astronaut transportation systems with $1.1 billion in NASA funding awarded last August in the third round of its Commercial Crew Program.

Bigelow concepts that appeared in the report include the company's BA330 inflatable space module and a new series of solar-powered space tugs the company has proposed developing in partnership with, among others, Aerojet of Sacramento, Calif., and Huntsville, Ala.-based Dynetics Inc., both of which are already working with Bigelow on propulsion systems for inflatable habitats.

Bigelow said his company plans to have two BA330 modules ready to launch by 2016, although he stopped short of saying when the modules — which along with crucial subsystems such as life support are still in development — might actually fly in space.

Bigelow also said tests on another module, a test article called Guide that will inform design and development of the inflatable habitat around which Bigelow wants to build a turnkey Moon base, would begin in January or February of 2014.

Those tests will take place "in one of the dry lakes" near Las Vegas, Bigelow said.

In an interview with SpaceNews after the press conference, Bigelow said he was confident that the first BA330 module, for which Bigelow is developing many subsystems needed for future models, would be ready to launch in 2016. Bigelow has not identified a launch vehicle for the mission, although in the past he has said either SpaceX or United Launch Alliance might provide the ride. When Guide might be tested in space is unclear.

Bigelow has said his company will not start launching modules until there is a commercially available, people-carrying spacecraft to take visitors there. The lack of such a system drove the company to lay off nearly two-thirds of its employees in 2011.

Back then, "my biggest concern was about transportation," Bigelow said. "It really hasn't changed."

In 2011, Bigelow Aerospace went from about 150 employees to about 50. Today, it has about 100 employees, and "we have a green light on hiring," Bigelow said. "We started hiring back toward the end of last year ... and before Christmas, I think we'll be around 125."

The crewed spacecraft likely to be ready soonest are those being developed under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Although the companies NASA decided to fund would retain the intellectual property rights to the systems they are developing with taxpayer assistance, actually completing these systems hinges on the availability of public funding, which Congress has been unwilling to mete out at the levels NASA has sought for the program.

NASA wants at least one of the spacecraft it is funding under the Commercial Crew Program to be operational by the end of 2017, but has warned that the date could slip if funding is not available.

Healthy Hubble raises hopes of even longer life in orbit

William Harwood - CBS News

Four years after a final shuttle servicing mission, the Hubble Space Telescope is operating like a fine watch, with no major technical problems that would prevent it from continuing its trail-blazing observations through the end of the decade -- 30 years after launch -- project officials say.

The 2009 space shuttle servicing mission was intended to extend Hubble's life by five years and while engineers and astronomers were hopeful the venerable observatory would remain scientifically viable beyond that target, there were no guarantees.

But other than a handful of relatively minor glitches over the past four years, along with expected degradation in some of its detectors -- degradation that can be offset by operational changes -- Hubble's scientific instruments and complex subsystems are working at near-maximum efficiency.

"I can happily tell you that Hubble has been performing wonderfully since the servicing mission," James Jeletic, deputy project manager of Hubble operations at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told CBS News.

"The astronauts did an incredible job as well as the teams on the ground that built all the replacement hardware. We have really had hardly any interruptions to date in the last four years. So we've been very, very pleased."

Assuming no major breakdowns between now and the end of the decade, engineers believe Hubble could remain operational well past the launch of its successor, the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. That would allow joint observations and possibly shed new light on the early evolution of stars and galaxies in the wake of the big bang.

"Our requirements were to be able to survive for five years, to do great science for five years following the servicing mission in 2009," Jeletic said. "There's no reason we can't meet that five years. We don't think there's any reason why we're not going to get to do at least a one-year overlap with James Webb."

While engineers don't know what problems might crop up down the road, "Hubble is performing exceptionally well, especially for a 23-year-old spacecraft," he added. "There's lots of things on there that were built before it was launched, obviously, so you're talking 25, 30 years old. ... But as of right now, everything seems to be operating well."

Launched from the shuttle Atlantis in April 1990 with a famously flawed primary mirror, Hubble was equipped with corrective optics during a make-or-break 1993 shuttle repair mission.

Since then, the Lockheed Martin-built observatory has generated a steady stream of discoveries, ranging from a more precise determination of the age of the universe -- 13.7 billion years -- to confirmation of the existence of super-massive black holes.

In recent years, Hubble's razor-sharp vision has played a key role in the ongoing effort to probe the nature of dark energy, capturing the light from ancient supernovas to chart the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.

But keeping Hubble healthy in the unforgiving environment of space is no small challenge.

During a second servicing mission in February 1997, shuttle astronauts installed two new instruments -- the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and an infrared camera known as NICMOS -- replaced a fine guidance sensor, a gyroscope assembly and installed a solid-state data recorder.

Because of multiple gyro failures in the late 1990s, a third servicing mission was broken up into two shuttle flights that were launched in December 1999 and March 2002. During Serving Mission 3A, spacewalking astronauts installed a new flight computer, a second solid-state recorder, another fine guidance sensor and a full set of six new gyroscopes.

Servicing mission 3B included installation of two new solar arrays, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, an experimental cooling system to revive Hubble's infrared camera and a replacement power control unit.

NASA was well into planning Servicing Mission 4, the fifth shuttle visit to Hubble, when Columbia was destroyed during re-entry on February 1, 2003, by a breach in its heat shield. A year later, then NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, siting safety concerns, canceled the final Hubble visit.

Engineers studied possible techniques for overhauling the observatory robotically, but the cost and technical complexity of the proposed mission were daunting at best.

As it turned out, a robotic mission was not necessary. After shuttle crews demonstrated heat shield repair techniques, O'Keefe's successor, Michael Griffin, reinstated the fifth servicing mission.

Finally, on May 11, 2009, the shuttle Atlantis blasted off and four astronauts, working in two-man teams, carried out five back-to-back spacewalks to install six new stabilizing gyroscopes, a full set of six nickel-hydrogen battery packs, a new data computer and two new instruments, the $126 million Wide Field Camera 3 and the $81 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

The astronauts also repaired two other instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which suffered a power supply failure in 2004, and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which broke down in 2007. The instruments were not designed to be repaired in space, but engineers came up with tools and techniques that allowed the spacewalkers to bypass failed electrical components.

The repair crew also installed an upgraded fine guidance sensor, new insulation blankets and a grapple fixture that will permit attachment of a rocket motor at some point down the road to enable a controlled re-entry when Hubble's orbit decays to the point of no return.

In the four years since Hubble was released from Atlantis' robot arm, the space telescope has chalked up a near-flawless performance, operating around the clock with only an occasional hiccup.

Three gyros are required for normal operations with three kept on standby. One of those has shown a slight tendency to drift, but software is on board to compensate and Jeletic said it could be used if necessary. And because of earlier gyro problems, engineers have developed techniques that would enable Hubble to continue doing science using a single gyro if worse came to worse.

All six new batteries are operating flawlessly, as are Hubble's three fine guidance sensors, which help the observatory lock onto its targets. Bearings in the oldest sensor, part of Hubble's original equipment, are showing signs of wear and tear, but Jeletic said flight controllers use it less frequently, with no impact to operations.

The NICMOS infrared camera is off line because of problems with the system used to cool the instrument. While engineers believe they could restart the cooling system and restore the camera to service if necessary, mission managers polled the science community and decided it was not worth the effort.

As it turns out, the infrared channel in the new Wide Field Camera 3 can accommodate most of the observations that otherwise would be carried out by NICMOS "so we decided not to do that," Jeletic said. "Because that would cost us well over a hundred orbits of time to bring it back on line, calibrate it, etc., and we'd rather spend that time taking observations with a different instrument."

The Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph both remain in operation, albeit without full redundancy following their repair during the 2009 servicing mission. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3 both are operating normally.

Jeletic said most of the instruments suffer from expected but minor degradation in their detectors, ranging from so-called "hot pixels" to a loss of sensitivity. But in each case, engineers have devised ways to work around the problems with little or no loss of science.

Discussing various subsystems, Jeletic said computer processors "freeze" from time to time, requiring ground-commanded re-boots, and cosmic ray particles can trigger so-called single-event upsets in computer circuitry. Such events are believed to be responsible for recorder shutdowns and even "runaway" solar array slews. But in all cases, flight controllers have been able to reset the various systems within a few hours.

"Can we get to 2020 with the current suite of instruments and detectors? The answer, I would say, is yes," Jeletic said. In a subsequent email, he added: "I would be remiss if I don't state that any positive predictions of future success with HST hardware are always stated while we are knocking on wood -- we are a superstitious bunch!"

But Hubble's days are numbered, regardless of its overall health. Based on the latest projections, the space telescope is expected to fall back to Earth sometime between 2030 and 2040, depending on solar activity and its effects on how much altitude-reducing "atmospheric drag" the telescope experiences.

But that is a concern for the future. For now, Jeletic and the team at Goddard are content monitoring Hubble's health, developing contingency plans and making sure the telescope remains operational as long as possible.

"As a kid who grew up in the Apollo days, my goal in life, my dream, was to be able to be part of NASA and make discoveries across the universe, however that was, whether that was with spacecraft, whether that was with manned missions, or whatever," Jeletic said.

"So right now, I'm living my dream. I tell my kids every day, how many people wish they had the opportunities that I have right now to work on Hubble? There's only so many of us who get to do so. We're very blessed."

Space, the fiscal frontier: government looks to the skies for rebalancing
The UK's space industry is low-key, but a major player in satellite manufacturing – and some companies export 95% of their output

Jennifer Rankin - The Observer (UK)

When Major Timothy Peake boards a Russian Soyuz rocket in late 2015 to become the first British astronaut on the International Space Station, he will carry the expectations of one of Britain's least-known industries.

The government hopes the voyage will be not only a small step for Major Tim, but a giant leap for the UK space industry, which is worth £9.2bn and employs almost 30,000 people.

Just as the Apollo moon landings of the 60s and 70s fired the imagination of a generation, science minister David Willetts hopes we will see a renewed surge of enthusiasm for science and technology in British schools. The public will be able to follow Peake's tweets from space, just as TV viewers were once spellbound by grainy black and white images of Neil Armstrong planting the stars and stripes on the moon.

Enthusiasm is not enough. Willetts has identified space as one of "eight great technologies" that will propel the UK to growth, and rebalance the economy away from such earthly business as bricks and mortar. The government is so captivated by space that Willetts even managed to persuade the chancellor to make a one-off payment of £16m last year to the European Space Agency (ESA) – funding that made Peake eligible for travel on the ESA craft.

The government is already giving £240m to the ESA each year, but thinks this payout will generate up to £1bn of orders for UK companies. The business department says the UK can grab a 10% share of the global space industry by 2030, tripling employment to 100,000.

Craig Clark, founder of nanosatellite company Clyde Space, is upbeat about his prospects for growth. Since setting up his business in 2005 with £50,000 of his own money, the Scottish entrepreneur has won 40% of the global market for nanosatellites known as CubeSats. Smaller than a shoebox and retailing at £3,500, the CubeSat can be used for dozens of things from astrophysics research to tracking ships or taking high-resolution photographs.

A CubeSat uses the same components as a computer or mobile phone, but has to be much more resilient. "It has to survive the launch. It has to survive operating in space … It has to survive radiation as well. It is being constantly bombarded with high-energy particles that can cause upsets in the system," Clark says.

Glasgow, which in its heyday made one quarter of the world's shipping, is the ideal base for this kind of precision manufacturing, he says. "If something is Clyde-built, then it will last, and that is because of the engineering heritage we have here."

Clyde Space's business model would sound like science fiction if it applied to the rest of the economy: the company exports 95% of its products, mostly to customers outside Europe. The contribution of the UK space sector to the economy is "a very well kept secret" says Mike Kapur, chair of the National Space Centre, who also leads the Confederation of British Industry's enterprise forum.

The UK is well-placed to profit from growing interest in space exploration, especially from Brazil, India and China, which are rapidly developing their own space programmes, he says.

With the exception of publicity-hungry British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who wants to make holidays in space a reality, the UK space industry has a low profile. But the business of the cosmos is much more than Branson's Virgin Galactic, which, although it is taking bookings, has yet to announce a date for its first flight.

For example, around 40% of the world's small satellites ("small" meaning the size of a washing machine) come from Guildford, pioneered by Surrey Satellite Technology.

British companies are also playing a part in the European-Russian mission to send a robot to Mars. Leicester-based firm Magna Parva is developing an interplanetary duster – a robotic arm that can remove dust from the solar panels of the Mars rover due to land on the red planet in 2018. "Space has challenges which are entirely unique from an engineering perspective – that is good fun for engineers and technologists like us," says Magna Parva co-founder Andrew Bowyer.

Magna Parva is also designing spaceship windows. It is highly technical modelling work that has to ensure a craft has the lightest possible windows that won't crack in the extreme conditions of outer space. Magna Parva's customer is the ESA – the first time the agency has awarded this contract to a European company, rather than import the knowhow from the US.

The space industry relies a lot on government contracts, says Bowyer, but the payback is worth it. If governments have to choose between spending on space versus defence, they should always choose space, because it generates the most innovation, he says. "If you are constantly having to innovate at a very high level, that will have spin-off applications."

As well as the 29,000 people employed in the industry as software developers, engineers, research scientists and salespeople, a further 60,000 work in businesses supported by space, from Sky TV to satnav manufacturers.

Government spending on space pays for itself, says Alex Connor of the Institute of Physics, who wants to see the science budget protected. "There has to be investment in space, but it is not a given this will continue." When the government cuts the cake at the next spending review in 2015, the Institute of Physics will bid for "a real-terms increase allied to a long-term spending plan" for science.

"If the aim is to rebalance the economy then investment in science and technology has been proven to grow the economy," Connor says.

Not everyone is convinced that sending money into outer space is rocket fuel for the economy. Professor Karel Williams, professor of accounting and political economy at Manchester Business School, says that the government's hi-tech "infatuation" leads to exaggerated claims at the expense of more humdrum parts of the economy. "They constantly emphasise the multiplier effects, the impact of new technology, whereas I would see it as being state-funded R&D just like defence equipment. We put money in and we get money back."

Space policy is ritual modernisation, he says. "The claim is that it employs 30,000 people. Compare that with the food processing industry, [which employs] 400,000. There is a fantasy that [space] is somehow or other connected with our future … It would be much better to sort out sausage processing."

Sending Peake into space is a way of symbolising the future, he says, that is not so different to the way the much-mocked Spanish regions built "international" airports in the middle of nowhere.

Unsurprisingly, this view does not win friends in the space industry. Kapur says: "It is perhaps a limited argument that is put against the space sector that it employs a small number of people. I think the knock-on effects of the skill set it will engender will be felt a lot further afield than that."

From his office near the river Clyde, Clark is looking forward to putting Scotland's first-ever large satellite into orbit later this year, using the same launch pad in Kazakhstan from which Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made his journey into the unknown. "The market that we are operating is a high-growth area. People are thinking of more ways they can use space," he says.

Space apprentices

The announcement of Peake's mission got special attention at Loughborough College, where 11 students are studying for the UK's first post-16 qualification in space engineering. "Everyone has been talking about it. It is brilliant," says Jessica Bains, 17, one of only two girls taking the course.

Her interest in space was kindled by TV documentaries and the 1995 Hollywood blockbuster film about the near disaster of the Apollo 13 lunar mission.

"I saw a few documentaries about the solar system and space in general and I kept thinking that the Earth is so small and there is so much out there that is waiting to be explored," she says. "I don't understand why more girls don't go into the space industry. It is so extraordinary."

Bains and her fellow students study A-level maths, physics and a BTec in engineering.

When she graduates from the two-year course in 2014, she could go to university or stay at Loughborough, which is launching the UK's first post-18 apprenticeship in space engineering this autumn. This work-based qualification will allow students to work in research and development for companies such as Qinetiq or Magna Parva.

"Space is a fantastic gateway to science and engineering," says Chas Bishop, chief executive of the National Space Centre, who helped set up the courses. "We have got evidence that those with a strong space context in their GCSE and A-level teaching do better in their exams and go on to university to do science subjects as well."

Bains plans to be an experimental physicist, but would not turn down a space mission. "I think the best thing would be looking back on Earth to see how incredible it is."

Stellar Awards presented to honor space achievements

Bay Area Citizen

Each year, the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement solicits nominations for Stellar Awards for individual and team achievements from the government, military and industry to honor outstanding accomplishments of those in the aerospace industry.

In order to ensure recognition of individuals at all stages of their careers, nominations are solicited in four categories: early career, mid-career, late-career, and teams. The nominations are reviewed by a Stellar Awards Evaluation Panel of distinguished scientists, engineers, managers, and academicians who select the winners based on who's accomplishments hold the greatest promise for furthering future activities in space.

The winners in each category are announced at the Rotary Space Gala, held this year at the Downtown Houston Hyatt Regency Hotel and presented by astronauts Michael Foreman and Nicole Stott. During the evening former astronaut Gene Cernan presented former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison with the National Space Trophy for her long years of work on behalf of the NASA and the space industry.

All Stellar Awards nominees are invited for a special day of activities at Johnson Space Center including a behind-the-scenes guided tour of center facilities and a luncheon presentation by a well-known person from the space community. The 2013 Stellar Awards luncheon speaker was former NASA astronaut Dr. Sandra H. Magnus.

Nominations for Stellar Awards are solicited each fall. Contact Stellar Awards Committee Chairman Jenny Devolites, stellar@rnasa.org, for information on how to participate.

Stellar Award winners are selected based on which accomplishments hold the greatest promise for furthering future activities in space, the extent to which the nominee played a key role in the accomplishment, and the extent to which the nominee meets the goal of recognizing "unsung heroes." In addition, nominees in the early career category are evaluated based on the extent to which the nominee's past accomplishments demonstrates the potential for future contributions. Winners in each of four categories are announced at the banquet.

Stellar Awards were first presented in 1989. Four awards to individuals were presented in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1993. No awards were given in 1992 or 1994. Two team awards were presented in 1995, and two individual awards were presented in 1996. Awards by categories to multiple individuals began in 1997.

The 35 government and 100 corporate 2013 nominations were evaluated by former National Associate Administrator for Space Systems Development, Arnold D. Aldrich, and former National Space Trophy winners, Drs. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., Dr. Glynn S. Lunney, and Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, USAF (Ret.).

2013 Early Career Stellar Award Winners
Eight awards were presented in the 2013 Early Career Category.

Maj. Joseph G. Clemmer of U. S. Air Force - Exceptional early career contributions supporting United States' involvement in space as intercontinental ballistic missile combat crewmember, Global Positioning System mission commander, instructor, evaluator, flight commander, and operational tester culminating as assistant operations officer at the 17th Test Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base.

Ryan T. Gill of Boeing - Exceptional hardware delivery record, daily project management mentor and lessons learned/tool improvement advocate.

Mary Ann Grant of UTC Aerospace Systems - Exceptional leadership in implementing innovative designs to make the extravehicular mobility unit functional on the International Space Station well beyond the retirement of the Space Shuttle.

Dr. Lucie B. Johannes of Johnson Space Center - Exceptional metallurgical engineering leadership, contributions to agency programs and projects and advancements in state-of-the-art welding.

Aaron S. Leichner of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - Technical excellence and exceptional leadership in advancing small liquid rocket engines.

Dr. William M. Marshall of NASA's Glenn Research Center - Exceptional leadership and technical expertise in rocket combustion research and testing that has enhanced numerous NASA programs and significantly aided the technical community.

Jeffrey M. Megivern of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - Outstanding support to the development and testing of the J-2X upper stage engine.

Anthony N. Vareha of United Space Alliance - Exceptional contributions leading every major failure resolution effort for the International Space Station electrical power system.

2013 Middle Career Stellar Award Winners
Eight awards were presented in the 2013 Middle Career Category.

John C. Curran of Boeing - Outstanding contributions to innovative and safe structural designs for the space industry.

Frederick E. Dodd of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - Exceptional technical excellence and leadership towards the advancement of liquid rocket engine combustion devices.

James M. Engle of Boeing - Outstanding leadership in the design, development, test, and delivery of a critical component of the international docking adapter and the Energia IDA primary structure.

Ven C. Feng of Johnson Space Center - Exemplary performance, outstanding leadership, and creation of a model of teamwork, mutual respect, and collaborative solution-finding for the ISS and future international spaceflight endeavors.

Sammy Garcia of Jacobs - Exceptional project management and systems engineering contributions to space simulation and testing during the design, installation, and commissioning of the JSC Chamber A high-vacuum and liquid nitrogen thermo-siphon systems supporting chamber upgrades.

Maria C. Keilich of UTC Aerospace Systems - Exceptional technical and skills leadership in systems engineering to support the development of the ISS life support system water processor, oxygen generator system, and Sabatier system.

Lisa M. Lane of Boeing - Exemplary performance in launch vehicle development through sustained structural analysis excellence.

Charles M. Lundquist of Johnson Space Center - Extraordinary leadership and personal dedication in the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Program Office.

2013 Late Career Stellar Award Winners
Seven awards were presented in the 2013 Late Career Category.

Steven W. Bragado of U. S. Air Force - Exceptional career contributions supporting United States involvement in space as Systems Threat Assessment analyst, Missile Warning operator, Space Satellite operator, crucial roles for MILSATCOM, GPS, and the Space Battlelab culminating as technical director.

John R. Christensen of Boeing - Outstanding achievements in advancing human spaceflight through excellence in leadership of mechanical systems design.

John A. Halchak of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - Dedicated service to spaceflight for 51 years as an industry resource in materials applications, engineering, and processes.

Robert K. Levy of Boeing - Recognized technical expertise and knowledge of the International Space Station electrical power system architecture and system safety.

Richard Nygren of SGT - Exemplary leadership and contributions to human spaceflight programs spanning from Apollo to the Constellation Program.

Charles Seaback of UTC Aerospace Systems - Distinguished career in space life support spanning Shuttle, ISS, and Orion, including extensive systems engineering and project management knowledge that has driven program successes.

Brian H. Shinguchi of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - Outstanding leadership in the development, production, and flight of critical rocket propulsion systems spanning a successful career of over 35 years.

2013 Team Stellar Award Winners
Seven awards were presented in the 2013 Team Category.

ATK Value Stream Mapping Improvement Team - Innovative application of lean management principles to dramatically improve affordability of space transportation hardware and services. Fred Witesman accepted for the team.

Boeing Software Toolkit for Ethernet Lab-Like Architecture Team - Innovative software application making space station payload integration easier, simpler, more familiar, and less costly. Kevin Pierce accepted for the team.

Lockheed Martin Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Integration Test Lab Team - Outstanding efforts to plan, design, develop, assemble, integrate and execute the initial testing of the integrated avionics and software for the Exploration Flight Test 1 mission. Paul Sannes accepted for the team.

Lockheed Martin Orion Heatshield Team - Exempary contributions to the development of the heatshield for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. Brian Hinde accepted for the team.

Johnson Space Center Capsule Parachute Assembly System (CPAS) Test Team - Exemplary contributions to the design, analysis, integration, safety evaluation, and implementation of the full scale CPAS airdrop test capabilities. Carol Evans accepted for the team.

Johnson Space Center James Webb Space Telescope Chamber A Modification Team - Exceptional accomplishments in the modification of JSC's Chamber A to provide deep space environmental testing of the James Webb Space Telescope. Mary Cerimele accepted for the team.

SAIC Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload Third Generation Infrared System Team - Successfully designing, building and flying in space the first wide field of view overhead persistent infraRed sensor, on the first commercially hosted DoD mission. Joseph Sauvageau accepted for the team.

Asteroid mining company wants to put your face in space

Irene Klotz - Reuters

A privately owned asteroid mining firm, backed in part by Google Inc's founders, launched a crowd-funding project on Wednesday to gauge public interest in a small space telescope that could serve as a backdrop for personal photographs, officials said.

Planetary Resources, based in Bellevue, Washington, plans to build and operate telescopes to hunt for asteroids orbiting near Earth and robotic spacecraft to mine them for precious metals, water and other materials.

It also plans an educational and outreach program to let students, museums, armchair astronomers and virtual travelers share use of a telescope through an initiative on Kickstarter, a website used to raise funds for creative projects.

Planetary Resources aims to raise $1 million by June 30 to assess public appetite for participating in a space project. It expects to launch its first telescope in 2015.

For a pledge of $25, participants can make use of a "space photo booth" by sending a picture to be displayed like a billboard on the side of the telescope with Earth in the background. Its image would then be snapped by a remote camera and transmitted back.

Starting at $200, participants can use the telescope to look at an astronomical object.

The Kickstarter campaign complements the company's ongoing efforts to design and build its first telescope, called ARKYD. Investors include Google Chief Executive Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt, as well as Ross Perot Jr., chairman of the real estate development firm Hillwood and The Perot Group.

"All we are asking is for the public to tell us that they want something," company co-founder Eric Anderson told reporters during a webcast press conference on Wednesday.

"We're not going to spend our time and resources to do something if people don't want it and really the only way to prove that it's something people want is to ask them for money," he said.

Planetary Resources is not the first space startup to turn to crowd-funding. Colorado-based Golden Spike, which plans commercial human expeditions to the moon, has launched two initiatives on Indiegogo, another Internet-based funding platform.

Golden Spike exceeded a $75,000 goal to start a sister firm, called Uwingu, designed to funnel profits into space projects, but fell far short of a $240,000 target for spacesuits for Golden Spike's first moon run.

Hyper-V Technologies of Virginia turned to Kickstarter to raise nearly $73,000 to help develop a plasma jet electric thruster. STAR Systems in Phoenix, Arizona, raised $20,000 for work on a hybrid rocket motor for its suborbital Hermes spaceplane.

Last year, Washington-based LiftPort ended an $8,000 Kickstarter campaign with more than $100,000 to demonstrate how robots could climb a 1.2-mile long tether held aloft by a large helium balloon.

The company is working on an alternative space transportation system called a "space elevator" that uses tethers or cables instead of rockets.

"I think crowd-funding is a new kind of bike and people are trying and willing to ride it, some successfully, some not as successfully, but I think it's here to stay," said Golden Spike founder and planetary scientist Alan Stern.

"These companies like Kickstarter and Indiegogo and RocketHub, they seem to be some kind of marketing distribution system that lets people with an idea put it out there. Previously people didn't know how to do that except run an ad in a newspaper. It's a capability we just didn't have five years ago," Stern said.

Asteroid miners seeking your help
For $25 donation, a 'space selfie' is offered

James Dean - Florida Today

Say cheese!

A crowdfunding campaign launched Wednesday aims to place a citizen-controlled satellite in orbit that could snap your picture against the backdrop of Earth.

A digital "Space Selfie" image could be yours for a $25 contribution to Planetary Resources' "Space Telescope for Everyone" campaign on Kickstarter, which hopes to raise $1 million by June 30.

Larger pledges from $99 up to $10,000 would offer opportunities to use the company's Arkyd Space Telescope for science observations, to take pictures of celestial objects or to provide access to schools, universities and science centers to promote education initiatives.

"We're developing the most advanced space technology ever made available to the public," Peter Diamandis, Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman, said in a statement. "Let's explore the cosmos together!"

Started a year ago with billionaire backers, Planetary Resources plans to launch a fleet of low-cost Arkyd 100 spacecraft to identify and study asteroids for commercial mining.

The crowdfunding effort serves a broader goal to generate excitement about space and make it more accessible to the public, the company said.

The $1 million would pay for the launch into low Earth orbit of an Arkyd intended for public use, "very different from those that we intend to launch for the purposes of locating asteroids," and for program development and staffing to support it.

The small spacecraft, weighing 33 pounds with a two-foot wingspan in orbit, would be equipped with an external screen to show a contributor's uploaded image and a camera to take the "selfie."

By 6 p.m. Wednesday, five hours after the project was announced in Seattle, pledges had topped $163,000 from more than 1,480 contributors.

Kickstarting the Future of Space Exploration

Peter Diamandis - Huffington Post (Commentary)

(Diamandis is Chairman & CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation)

When the Hubble space telescope was launched, many people said it was a waste of money and resources.

Requiring two space shuttle missions to get it right (first to put into orbit and then a second mission to fix the mirror) and a massive $2.5 billion expense, many proclaimed that it was a giant boondoggle and a drain on the taxpayers.

But over the past 23 years, the Hubble telescope has returned awe-inspiring images and scientific data that have transformed our understanding of the universe. Over 9,000 papers based on Hubble data have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Today, most can agree that the Hubble mission was a resounding success and one of the crowning achievements of science and engineering. The project has inspired students, educators, and researchers from around the world, and given everyone a new perspective on the universe around us.

At Planetary Resources, we wanted a way to put the excitement of space and the thrill of discovery in the hands of as many people as possible -- as many kids as possible.

That's why we're launching a new mission of exploration, and putting you at the controls of the world's first space telescope that will be operated by supporters, students, researchers, and educators.

As we just announced on Kickstarter, the ARKYD space telescope will give students access to cutting edge space technology, support important research and discovery, and continue to build excitement about space and all of its potential.

We want to make space accessible to people from all walks of life, all ages, across the globe, and let them get involved in the process from every stage.

Unlike most space missions, the ARKYD telescope will give you the opportunity to help decide which science centers, museums and schools are the beneficiaries of ARKYD telescope time, what photos to take, and more. We're putting YOU in control.

By pledging toward this mission (via Kickstarter), you'll receive access to our website and mobile apps allowing you to follow along with the progress of the satellite, sneak peaks at photos and videos, and get voting access to make your voice heard in the future direction of the satellite! You can also send up your favorite picture, and get that image captured as a #SpaceSelfie with the Earth in the background, use the main optic to take a picture of distant galaxies or donate telescope time to education.

We want to show people from around the world that space is accessible and inspire a new generation about space and all of its potential.

Join us! Pledge now and help us invent the future!

http://kck.st/13YObfU

Best wishes,

Peter

The private road to Mars

Jeff Foust - The Space Review (Commentary)

(Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site and the Space Politics and NewSpace Journal weblogs.)

Mars is hard.

That's the message that NASA and others in the space community have hammered into the public for years. It is, they argue, difficult enough to send a spacecraft to Mars, and even harder to land one there, a message clearly communicated by the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video released by NASA before the (successful) landing of the rover Curiosity last summer. Try to do the same with people—a task requiring larger spacecraft with life support systems, among other challenges—and the difficultly multiplies exponentially.

That extreme level of difficulty, and corresponding implied extreme expense, has led to the conclusion that only a government, or a coalition of governments, can send humans to Mars. It's also been a long-term goal: President George W. Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration featured human missions to Mars at an unspecified date after a 2020 return to the Moon, while President Barack Obama in 2010 called for a human mission to orbit Mars in the mid-2030s and a landing to follow presumably shortly thereafter.

Yet, recently private ventures believe they can beat NASA and other government agencies in this hardest and costliest of human spaceflight ventures. Inspiration Mars is proceeding with plans to mount a 2018 crewed flyby mission, while MarsOne has plans to land humans on Mars—to stay—as early as 2023. What do they know that the experts in the space agencies don't?

Inspiration Mars: building credibility

The private venture that has captured the most interest in recent months has been Inspiration Mars. Backed by multimillionaire Dennis Tito, the first space tourist to visit the International Space Station back in 2001, Inspiration Mars rolled out plans in February to send a man and a woman—a married couple, most likely—on a 501-day mission to swing by Mars and return to Earth. Making this mission even harder was the timing: the preferred trajectory required a launch in January 2018, less than five years away (see "A Martian adventure for inspiration, not commercialization", The Space Review, March 4, 2013).

More than two months after unveiling those plans, tied to a paper Tito presented at an aerospace conference in early March, he and others involved with Inspiration Mars show no signs of wavering. "The paper was very well received, and it was the beginning of giving us some credibility," Tito said in a panel session about Inspiration Mars at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington on May 8. "But we have a lot of work to do from an engineering standpoint to make sure all of these issues close."

Those issues include how to launch that crewed spacecraft. One option, said John Carrico of Applied Defense Solutions, part of the Inspiration Mars team, is to use a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, as proposed in that conference paper. The data in the paper was based on publicly available information on the SpaceX website; since the paper's publication, he said, they talked with some people there and confirmed the data.

Another option, he said, is to use two launches of an Atlas V 552, an as-yet-unflown variant of rocket that uses a dual-engine Centaur upper stage. One launch would place propellant needed for the trans-Mars injection maneuver into low Earth orbit, while the second would carry the spacecraft and crew, who would the rendezvous with the propellant and transfer it to the spacecraft.

Carrico confirmed some rumors that Inspiration Mars is looking at use of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. "Their first launch is planned right now for December 2017, so they would actually be just right on time for us," he said. Like the Falcon Heavy, SLS could carry out the Inspiration Mars mission with a single launch, and with performance to spare. That additional capability, he said, could be used to refine the trajectory to reduce the reentry velocity when the spacecraft returns to Earth.

That reentry is another major technical challenge for Inspiration Mars: the spacecraft would reenter Earth's atmosphere at a peak velocity of 14.2 kilometers per second, significantly faster than reentries from Earth orbit or even the Moon. Carrico said Inspiration Mars has been working with NASA's Ames Research Center under a Space Act Agreement to study reentry issues and the required technologies. Analysis performed since the paper's publication showed that peak heating isn't as high as previously thought, which could allow the use of "densified" versions of existing heat shield materials. In addition, instead of doing a direct reentry, he said they're looking at aerocapture approaches to bleed off some velocity in an initial pass through the upper atmosphere.

Another area of study is the health of the crew. "Obviously, the radiation environment is something that we're concerned about," said Taber MacCallum of Paragon Space Development Corporation, another member of the Inspiration Mars team. "The consensus is that the risk is manageable." In an earlier panel at the conference, MacCallum said they estimated a 3–6% increased risk of death from cancer contracted from the radiation exposure accumulated during the mission.

Tito is bankrolling these studies through the end of next year while he works to figure out how to raise the funding—perhaps on the order of $1 billion, although the project hasn't disclosed specific cost estimates—needed to carry out the mission. "My children are being very generous with their inheritance," he joked. He reiterated that Inspiration Mars is a philanthropic, not a commercial, venture, and that the Inspiration Mars Foundation is registered with the IRS as a nonprofit organization to accept donations. "We want to open the awareness of this mission to millions of people and get them to participate at relatively modest levels," he said.

Mars One: "the most exciting moment in the history of humankind"

A separate private endeavor, meanwhile, has goals that make Inspiration Mars's technical and financial challenges look insignificant in comparison. Mars One actually predates Inspiration Mars, with its initial announcement nearly one year ago, but has gained attention in the last few months. The organization, also a nonprofit, seeks to send humans to land on Mars—as permanent settlers—as early as 2023, funded primarily by selling the media rights to those missions.

What has helped trigger this surge in interest in Mars One has been its public call for astronaut candidates. At a media event in New York last month, Mars One officially opened its application process to effectively any adult with access to the Internet. "Round One is where we open the doors to Mars for everyone on Earth," said Bas Lansdorp, president of Mars One. "This is an international mission and it is very important for the project that anyone anywhere can ask themselves: 'Do I want this? Am I ready for this?' If the answer is yes, then we want to hear from you."

In this initial round, applicants pay a registration fee pegged to their nation's GDP (between $5 and $73; $38 for those in the US), fill out an application form, and provide a brief video explaining their interest in a one-way Mars mission. After a couple rounds of screening by Mars One committees, the selection process will take on a reality television flavor, with national competitions "which could be broadcasted on TV and internet," according to Mars One, followed by a final international round, including placing teams in simulated habitats on Earth. This concludes with the selection six teams of four people (two men and two women, representing four different continents) from which the initial group would be picked.

Earlier this month, in a release coinciding with the Humans to Mars Summit, Mars One reported that they had already received 78,000 applications, including more than 17,000 from the US and 10,000 from China. "With seventy-eight thousand applications in two weeks, this is turning out to be the most desired job in history," Lansdorp said in a release. "These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants."

That 78,000 figure, though, requires a caveat. In an interview during the Humans to Mars Summit, Lansdorp said that figure did not mean all the applicants had completed every stage of the application process. "People register, they pay, they start filling out their information, they have the movie to make, the movie to upload," he said. That 78,000 figure represents "people who have at least done the first step," which is to fill out a short form that asks only for an email address, password, date of birth, and country of residence.

Lansdorp did not disclose how many had completed the application process, but on the Mars One site, which displays the videos of people who have applied, less than 800 such videos are listed as of the publication of this article. (There may be additional applicants who elect not to have their videos made public, although that would be an odd choice for a process that has such a public application and, later, selection process.) Lansdorp said last week after a talk at the Space Tech Expo in Long Beach, California, that Mars One wouldn't release updated application numbers until they hit a "nice round number."

Mars One has attracted scrutiny because of its technical and financial approach. The organization claims that it can place that initial group of four settlers on Mars within a decade for $6 billion. By comparison, another commercial human spaceflight venture, Golden Spike, estimates the cost of developing systems for sending two-person missions to the Moon for brief, Apollo-like stays at just over $7 billion.

Lansdorp has declined to itemize that mission cost for competitive reasons: if they quote a price for a particular component from one supplier, he said in an interview, they're unlikely to get a much lower price from a competing supplier. "For that reason, we cannot give the cost breakdown of each individual component," he said. The $6 billion figure has been vetted by an independent group, he said, and includes a "large margin."

That cost includes precursor robotic missions that will launch starting in 2016. However, Mars One has not let any contracts for those precursor missions (it does have one contract with Paragon to work on life support technology), which suggests to many that they will be unable to stay on schedule given the usual timelines for developing missions. Lansdorp said they're talking with SpaceX about launching the 2016 mission, as well as trying to acquire duplicates of previous Mars missions. Those schedules, including that of landing people on Mars in 2023, could slip, he admitted. "We cannot guarantee there will be humans on Mars in 2023."

Mars One seeks to fund that mission largely through the sale of media rights. "This will be the most exciting moment in the history of humankind, more exciting, I think, than the Apollo moment," he said in his Space Tech Expo talk. "There will be more people watching than during the Olympic Games." The latest Olympics, in London last year, generated more than $4 billion in revenue, he said.

The Olympics, or other sporting events like the World Cup and Super Bowl that have multibillion-dollar media rights, provide plenty of drama and competition in a concentrated period of a few weeks or even one night. A human mission to Mars won't provide the same level of drama during the mission, save for the landing and other milestone events. Moreover, the Apollo legacy suggests that public interest would drop off rapidly after the initial landing, jeopardizing the media rights and thus the revenue needed to maintain a lifeline for those people who are living on Mars.

"The media financing will be used primarily for the first two missions," Lansdorp said in an interview. He said future missions would be supplemented by revenues associated with the intellectual property of the systems used for the missions. He added that his media advisors believe public interest in Mars One missions can be sustained far longer than for Apollo. "We will be sending people that the audience will have selected. They will be their TV friends. It is this human approach that will keep it interesting for a very long time."

Humans to Mars in one congressman's lifetime

Mars One's ambitious schedule, low estimated costs, and revenue models have generated significant skepticism in the space community. "I think it's a good PR program, probably a good fundraising program, but I don't think there's much technical basis behind it," said Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who has been advocating a more conventional, stepping-stone approach to human Mars exploration and settlement, at the Humans to Mars Summit.

"Mars One would be extremely exciting if they could pull it off, but it's extremely ambitious," said Robert Zubrin, founder and president of The Mars Society. "The amount of resources required to do it are, so far, not apparent among the group that is pushing it."

Zubrin, speaking at the National Space Society's International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in San Diego on May 25, was far more sanguine about Inspiration Mars, calling it "quite a doable thing." He added that he had proposed a similar Mars flyby mission to Dan Goldin, then the NASA administrator, back in 1995, at a proposed cost of $2 billion. Tito will attend the Mars Society's annual conference in Colorado in August, Zubrin said, and a half-day workshop there will bring together working groups to study technical and other aspects of the Inspiration Mars mission.

While The Mars Society has no plans to mount a human Mars mission of its own, it plans to help support them with its own terrestrial mission. Last week, the organization said it planned to conduct a year-long mission at its Arctic Mars analog base, the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS), in 2014. FMARS has hosted crews for shorter missions, but none longer than four months in 2007; the last time the station was staffed was in 2009.

At ISDC, Zubrin said the year-long mission would provide a more realistic environment for studying how crews interact than previous simulations, like the Mars500 experiment where six men were confined to a set of modules in a Moscow laboratory. "You'll deal with the isolation there, and the danger that goes with isolation, not by being in a room in Moscow but by being out there, and simultaneously being tasked to do sustained programs of field exploration," he said.

The Mars Society has already raised, though cash and in-kind contributions, $80,000 of the $130,000 needed for phase one of the project, which involves an expedition to FMARS this summer to outfit the habitat for the year-long mission. That mission will go forward while the organization raises the remaining $50,000 and also works on funding phase two, the year-long mission. The society estimates that phase to cost $1 million, but Zubrin said after his ISDC presentation that they're looking at ways to lower that cost, such as having the organizations who provide the crewmembers cover their salaries, that could reduce that total cost by up to half.

"We think that this mission will put the vision of humans exploring on Mars before the entire world in a way that simply hasn't been done yet," Zubrin said. "We think this will gather worldwide attention and draw people to the vision of human explorers on Mars."

Zubrin also believed that, if Inspiration Mars was successful in its Mars flyby mission, it could generate further interest in privately-funded Mars missions. "If the Tito group is successful with Inspiration Mars, they would gain a lot of credibility, so much so that they could probably mobilize the much larger amounts of funds and resources needed to fly people actually to Mars. And if we could so that, then we could raise the resources to do one-way missions to Mars."

Those additional resources could come from people like Elon Musk, who has previously indicated an interest in creating a human settlement on Mars and even retiring there, although he and his company, SpaceX, have revealed few details of such an effort beyond that long-term aspiration.

And while debates in Congress continue on the best way for NASA to send humans to Mars, one member thinks the private sector has a better chance of getting there. "We will, in my lifetime, if we don't get in their way and tax all their money and control all of their creative behavior, we will have at least a landing of humankind on Mars, but perhaps even a settlement," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) in a speech at the ISDC on May 24.

That statement sounds something like President Obama's belief that he expected to be around to see a human landing on Mars. However, while Obama will be 52 years old in August, Rohrabacher turns 66 next month. Can private ventures really deliver on such fast-paced schedules, at least when compared to government programs? That remains to be seen, given the significant technical and fiscal obstacles such efforts face. After all, Mars is hard.

Consider Mars

Frank Stratford - The Space Review (Commentary)

(Stratford is CEO and founder of MarsDrive. His writing is focused on finding solutions to commercial space development with a special focus on how Mars can fit within this context.)

Humanitarian causes are those efforts designed to lift people out of the chains of poverty, injustice, disease, and exploitation. Over the centuries, men and women from many walks of life have valiantly engaged in these areas to improve our standard of living. Sadly, we are aware that even in the early 21st century much work remains to be done here. Billions of people live below the poverty line, diseases from the 19th century still run rampant in third world nations, and problems like war, corruption, and starvation abound. Lack of education also keeps billions imprisoned in a life of poverty and oppression, where many people never have the opportunity to achieve their true potential.

One of the main approaches to dealing with such issues is to create local "projects" that can serve to advance or improve certain areas directly, but often these projects are more experimental in nature and only affect a small teardrop of humanity while an ocean still suffers. Global initiatives are rare and costly. Governments sometimes participate in funding, but many times these efforts rely upon donations from other sectors.

What few people may not have realized, though, is that through our drive into space and exploration of that dark and boundless frontier, we have improved our way of life on Earth in many ways, from improvements in communications to weather observations that have saved millions of lives to resource management, climate monitoring, and more. By understanding our solar system we have learned about our Earth and the forces that shaped us. This knowledge has helped free us from centuries of ignorance, a fact which many people may overlook. Our Earth is now understood as a fragile blue dot in the vast cosmos of space, a place rare and beautiful that we have been entrusted to look after.

Space science, exploration, and industry have always pushed the frontiers of our knowledge forward, and as a humanitarian cause, have continued to enlighten a humanity that is often bound in ignorant darkness. From computer chips to medical technologies, improved materials and machines, space exploration by humans and robots continues to advance our world.

Surely this ranks as one of the most important humanitarian causes of our age? When hundreds of millions watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon in 1969, it gave us pause, inspired millions of people to better educations, gave us hope for a better future, and made us look up. No single event or project in humanitarian history has had this kind of impact. It gave birth to the modern era where improved technologies have literally saved millions of lives and improved millions more.

On every front—improving our knowledge, inspiring our children to pursue science and engineering education, pushing the boundaries of medical science, and developing new "green" forms of energy production—space exploration offers opportunities like nothing else can. Yes, we can and will continue to directly fund many important humanitarian causes to improve our lives on Earth, but what we must not ignore is the incredible popularity and inspirational power of space exploration, along with the advances in technology it gives us as a cause we need most desperately in the world of 2013.

Enter the case for Mars. A human expedition to explore or settle this planet beckons. It is a true megaproject with vast implications for humanitarian causes we have yet to experience. While I have heard some say that if we go to Mars, such-and-such benefits will come, there is often the counterargument where people ask, "Why do we need a Mars mission to benefit people on Earth? Can't we just spend the money here directly and solve it here?"

What many of these people don't understand, of course, is that all money spent on sending humans to Mars is spent on Earth. All technologies developed, all the knowledge we gain, all of it will benefit us on Earth directly. I am not arguing for wasteful government spending here either. Rather, I am appealing to the wealthy of this world to "Consider Mars." Consider Mars as one of the greatest history-making megaprojects that will inspire the world's children to better their live. Such a project could advance so many areas of technology, including medical treatments, food production, water management, transportation, and communications. These are all areas that can improve the lives of people across the world like no smaller localized projects ever could.

With a multinational private-public partnership, we could easily afford to send humans to Mars and back or to settle Mars, while involving millions of people around the world. We would go for the knowledge to gain that will enlighten a world in desperate need of light. We would go to push the frontiers of our technology for a world that needs smarter solutions. We would go so that children everywhere will be inspired to push themselves to a higher level of education and for our society to try new ways to sustain ourselves with clear applications for Earth.

Sending humans to Mars is one of the most humanitarian projects we can imagine. It is global in its sweep, it will be watched by billions, and will make us smarter and better able to meet many technological challenges here on Earth. Landing humans on Mars will make history, but more important it could mark a new age of enlightenment, and for humans everywhere this is why we need Mars. Yes, we can keep pushing to cure cancer and AIDS and educating those in poverty to better their lives, but going to Mars can only improve those efforts. Maybe, out there, are answers to some of these medical, social, and technological challenges that blight our age?

It comes down to this. If you are a humanitarian, you should have the attitude of doing whatever it takes to better our cause. Yet by ignoring megaprojects like humans to Mars, we must recognize that indeed we are robbing ourselves, and our children, of a powerful accelerator for solving our problems on Earth. We are ignoring the potential of Mars by limiting ourselves to Earth. Sure, in time, I have no doubt many areas that a Mars project covers may be solved by local projects on Earth, slowly plodding along. But in those many decades of lost time and lost lives waiting for things to "slowly" catch up, we will have sacrificed not the lives of a few crew to Mars, but millions of lives on Earth that could have benefitted from this project.

So if you are wealthy, or even if you are not, consider Mars as a humanitarian cause of the highest order. Consider donating to such causes and taking them seriously. Right now, on the vanguard of such causes are groups like MarsDrive, The Mars Society, Explore Mars, The Mars Initiative, Mars One, and The Mars Foundation, all pushing towards that great goal.

While we may be all about Mars, the reality is that all of us Mars advocates are in fact all about Earth. We have a vision for a better world, and we see humans to Mars as a project that can greatly advance humanitarian causes like few others could. Of course, it's not the only project to consider, but don't for a second think that this project is irrelevant to humanitarian ideals. So, as a humanitarian Mars advocate, I challenge you today to "Consider Mars."

Space, Man: From a New Cosmos to Galaxy-Print Leggings, the Heavens Are Having a Moment
"Everybody, when they're a kid, wants to be an astronaut"

Kelly Faircloth - The Observer (UK)

Every week, weather permitting, a crew of starstruck earthlings sets up camp on that agora of Bloomberg New York, the High Line, parking their telescopes just south of the Chelsea Market. "People like looking up," said David Kauffman, one of the event's organizers, sporting a blue windbreaker from a Long Island astronomical society at a recent gathering. "I think that's a natural human thing."

Even passersby slowed down to investigate.

The Observer watched three college-age women creep up to the telescopes. "That's so cool," one gushed as a stargazer explained that, if it weren't so cloudy, she'd be able to see Jupiter. One of her companions rattled off "My Very Educated Mother" and tried to puzzle out why she couldn't see Mars, prompting an explanation of planetary orbits.

"You're here every Tuesday?" asked the ringleader. "Okay, we'll be back."

Space, if you haven't heard, is having a moment. Both The New York Post and New York magazine have tackled the topic in the last month (with an NYC stargazing guide and a space tourism deep dive, respectively). It wasn't long ago that shuttle launches were buried deep in the science section—unless something went wrong—but these days, when astronaut Chris Hadfield records a version of "Space Oddity" on the International Space Station, it warrants a Today mention and a bit of armchair philosophizing from Matt Lauer: "Kids these day don't care about space exploration like we did. Maybe this will light a fire under these kids."

Mr. Lauer is mistaken.

"There has been an incredible resurgence of interest in space exploration," said Bert Ulrich, NASA's Multimedia Liaison. The Mars Curiosity rover is a viral sensation, and NASA has amassed 1.3 million followers for the little tweeting robot. Hollywood, meanwhile, can't sweep science fiction epics into theaters fast enough. This year alone has brought, or will bring, Oblivion, another Star Trek, After Earth, Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity and Ender's Game. The Big Bang Theory chugs profitably along on CBS, and there's talk of a drama about Space Race journalists by the creators of Mad Men.

Even apparel makers are cashing in. In 2011, designer Christopher Kane debuted a line of expensive galaxy-print items. Since then, the trend has filtered down to the most mass-market price points. In the past two weeks, this reporter has spotted galaxy-print leggings in the plus-size section of Forever 21 and in the window of a fast-fashion store on Steinway Street, in Queens.

It's not an isolated cultural current, either. The superhero of the moment is Iron Man, a.k.a. Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist inventor often compared to Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Futurism and science journalism are flourishing in outlets like io9, Quartz and Digg, and the World Science Festival is due to take over Manhattan this week.

"Everybody, when they're a kid, wants to be an astronaut," said Jason Townsend, who works on NASA's social media team. "When [people] see our content, they look at it and they go, 'Oh, yeah.' It clicks, and it re-emphasizes that connection people have with their childhood wonderment and everything."

But it's got a particular flavor, this cultural moment. Don't worry if you don't know a lick about trigonometry. In the New Space Age, you can wrap yourself in a Martian-surface-patterned scarf, reminisce about third-grade trips to the planetarium, retweet some photos sent straight from a tiny robot on the Red Planet—and then on to the next click.

* * *

Helping to drive this new burst of cosmic enthusiasm is the emergence of a number of serious private aerospace companies, as several of the biggest names in the tech world are taking their Internet millions and plowing them into outer-orbit gambles.

Elon Musk, of course, has SpaceX, which is already ferrying cargo to the International Space Station. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has the rocket company Blue Origin. Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google have invested in an asteroid-mining venture called Planetary Resources.

"They're all going into space," said Mike Caprio, a community leader for StartupBus New York. "Like, that's what you do if you're a billionaire now."

And for the first time in a long while, we Earth-bound normals have reason to believe we might find our way off this rock one day. People on the waiting list for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic have already paid $200,000 for a ticket and are just waiting patiently for the company to actually commence flights.

Meanwhile, even as NASA has shut down its shuttle program, it's encouraging more public participation than ever. Witness the fanfare around the recent Space Apps hackathon, a weekend-long international competition organized by NASA. Globally, something like 9,000 people participated, at 83 different sites. Mr. Caprio organized a local site that had 80 signups and 40 attendees last year; this year, more than 350 people signed up and about 200 turned out.

"We filled their entire space. We had people in every office, in all the co-working spaces. It wasn't wall to wall," as it was for a recent Fashion Week hackathon, "but it was close," he said.

If there's a Sputnik moment for this pop-culture boom, it's probably the demotion of Pluto from planet to icy space rock. A New York Times reporter noticed in 2001 that the American Museum of Natural History had quietly booted "pies" from the old mnemonic, but it wasn't until 2006 that the International Astronomical Union voted to make it official. This kicked up an outrage on the social web, inspiring Facebook groups like "When I Was Your Age, Pluto Was a Planet" (which peaked at a million-plus members) and T-shirts with slogans like "Pluto: Never Forget."

The man who took much of the heat for the move was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the head of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium. As the furor grew, he turned up on The Colbert Report wearing one of the space-patterned ties that would become his trademark.

"There are, like, five moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto," Dr. Tyson bantered with the host, good-naturedly acting out the scientific straight man, endearing himself to a generation that had loved Bill Nye the Science Guy. The controversy set him on a path to wider pop-cultural stardom: here was a Carl Sagan for the Twitter age.

As the fascination with his field grew, his star rose. In 2007 he published Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, which reached the New York Times best-seller list, and he appeared regularly on The History Channel series The Universe. In, 2009 he got his own radio show, StarTalk. For several years, he hosted NOVA scienceNOW.

Dr. Tyson remains a bona-fide star, the rare scientist on speed dial for TV hosts. His books get blurbed by Jon Stewart. He's got 1.2 million Twitter followers. He's appeared in an issue of Action Comics, helping Superman find the location of Krypton. He recently admitted to the Columbia Journalism Review that he no longer spends as much time ambling through the museum because he's just too recognizable.

The museum, by the way, is faring very well: "We were very concerned, like everybody else, when the recession hit," admitted Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, the museum's astrophysics curator. But visitation has increased steadily, and he says that for the first time, it's competitive with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next year, Dr. Tyson will host a follow-up to Cosmos, the popular science series beloved by nerds for decades. Joining Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, as executive producer? Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. And forget relegating the show to PBS; episodes will premiere on Fox, in prime time. That's the sort of placement usually reserved for So You Think You Can Get Famous Off a Sex Tape?

* * *

Of course, this particular cultural moment lacks the pocket-protector earnestness and military-grade seriousness of the Apollo era, and it doesn't really channel the awestruck wonder of Carl Sagan's "billions and billions of stars," either. The mood could best be described as childlike enthusiasm, the product of our boundless optimism about technology's promise crossed with our Internet-fostered ability to engage without actually engaging.

As a testament to the renewed popularity of space, Mr. Ulrich offered the example of the Times Square viewing of the Mars Curiosity rover's landing. "We expected maybe a couple hundred to watch the landing, and what happened instead is there were thousands, and they were chanting 'NASA.'"

On the one hand, it's reminiscent of neighborhoods gathering around primitive televisions to watch the moon landing. On the other, it sounds like Monday Night Football.

And there are limits to what this enthusiasm can actually accomplish. For one thing, it doesn't necessarily translate to capital: one (very, very) long-shot spaceflight startup, Golden Spike, tried using Indiegogo to raise $240,000 but only scraped up $19,450. Private aerospace companies will succeed or fail based on some combination of technical progress, business savvy and plain old luck. Advancing technology to the point that it's cheaper to fund truly aggressive space exploration is no simple matter, either.

"It might take a century," said Mr. Mac Low. "How long was it between Columbus, who after all was still a government-funded expedition, and more or less private explorers going out and founding colonies in the Americas?"

Not to say enthusiasm isn't welcome. Mr. Mac Low pointed out that the Mars Rover enthusiasts are more likely to support federal funding for science, for example.

"There's a lot of competition for people's attention and interest. You can go for everything from entertainment to religion to social gaming, you know, so if science is getting some mind share, that's a very important statement."

Still, NASA faces an uphill battle in Washington. In 2010, the Obama administration canceled a plan to return to the moon, prompting an angry letter from the reclusive Neil Armstrong and several fellow astronauts. Without the training provided by regular spaceflights, they argued, "the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity." Few are optimistic that NASA will again be flush with government funds—short a Newt Gingrich presidency—and space-mad 20-somethings aren't likely to move the needle on budgetary gridlock.

Even from his perch on the High Line, Mr. Kauffman occasionally sees people disappointed with the reality of what the telescope has to offer. "When they see these Hubble pictures, that's what they expect to see," he explained. Besides, the science itself isn't exactly a walk in the park. "When you actually get to the nuts and bolts of it, it's hard."

Then again, pondered Mr. Kauffman: "People, in general, I think, like looking. And I guess that's a good start."

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - May 30, 2013 and JSC Today

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