Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: June 19, 2013 6:20:04 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - June 19, 2013 and JSC Today

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            African-American Employee Resource Group (AAERG) Juneteenth Event TODAY
2.            Blood Drive June 19 and 20 -- Location Cancelled
3.            ISS EDMS Changes
4.            Become an Ally in the Workplace
5.            Reminder! INCOSE Local Chapter Monthly Event on June 20
6.            Youth Sports Camps - Basketball, Baseball and Ultimate Frisbee
7.            Machinery and Machine Guarding - July 16 - Building 20, Room 205/206
8.            Summer Water-Bots Camp: Intermediate Camp Registration Deadline June 28
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" Detailed analysis and review have borne out researchers' initial interpretation of pebble-containing slabs that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity investigated last year: They are part of an ancient streambed."
________________________________________
1.            African-American Employee Resource Group (AAERG) Juneteenth Event TODAY
The JSC AAERG invites the civil servant and contractor community to the 2013 Juneteenth Celebration today, June 19, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Building 30 Auditorium. The program will feature Dr. Thomas Franklin Freeman, lead debate coach/professor at Texas Southern University. Come spend your lunch hour with this inspirational and motivational speaker.
Carla Burnett x41044

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2.            Blood Drive June 19 and 20 -- Location Cancelled
The hours of operation for the Teague building have changed due to energy conservation measures. The start time for the blood drive in the Teague Auditorium lobby will change to 9 a.m. and, to be consistent, the donor coach at Building 11 will also start at 9 a.m.
Due to the Neil Armstrong Memorial being held in the Teague on June 20, the blood drive in the Teague will be cancelled on that day.
The blood drive locations and times for the June blood drive are:
o             Wednesday, June 19
Teague Auditorium Lobby - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Building 11 Starport Café Donor Coach - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
o             Thursday, June 20
Building 11 Starport Café Donor Coach - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Gilruth Center Donor Coach - Noon to 4 p.m.
Teresa Gomez x39588 http://jscpeople.jsc.nasa.gov/blooddrv/blooddrv.htm

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3.            ISS EDMS Changes
On Friday, June 21, the International Space Station (ISS) Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) home page will be updated to make the ISS EDMS search interface the primary entrance to ISS EDMS. The "Enter EDMS" button will be changed to "Search EDMS" and will take you to the ISS EDMS search interface.
You may still enter ISS EDMS classic interface to upload documents, participate in workflows and use the advanced search by clicking on the "Enter EDMS" tab now relocated at the top of the page.
For questions, the EDMS team will be conducting several WebEx demonstration sessions before and after the change. The demonstrations are scheduled: June 25 and 27. We will also have our regularly scheduled monthly User Forum on June 21 at 9:30 a.m. CDT, which will also include a demonstration.
Click here for more information.
For assistance with ISS EDMS, contact MAPI ISS IT Customer Service via email or at 281-244-8999, option 2.
Event Date: Friday, June 21, 2013   Event Start Time:5:00 PM   Event End Time:6:00 PM
Event Location: ISS EDMS Interface Change

Add to Calendar

MAPI ISS IT Customer Service x48999, Option 2 https://iss-www.jsc.nasa.gov/nwo/apps/edms/web/

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4.            Become an Ally in the Workplace
As part of Pride Month activities, the Out & Allied Employee Resource Group (ERG) invites you to an informative and empowering half-day seminar exploring the unique needs and concerns LGBT people face in the workplace. You will also build your own knowledge, skills and abilities for creating a more inclusive and affirming community. Participants will develop an understanding of LGBT terminology and symbols, history, concepts of privilege and identity development and maintaining a work environment that doesn't tolerate oppression based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Sign up in SATERN using ID 69094 (8:30 to 11:30 a.m.) or 69101 (1:30 to 4:30 p.m.): https://satern.nasa.gov/customcontent/splash_page/
Jennifer Mason x32424 https://collaboration.ndc.nasa.gov/iierg/LGBTA/SitePages/Home.aspx

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5.            Reminder! INCOSE Local Chapter Monthly Event on June 20
"The Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report - What Happened to the STS-107 Columbia Crew and What Can Be Learned From it" is the topic for this Thursday's INCOSE local chapter presentation by Dr. Nigel Packham. Packham is the associate director, technical, of JSC's Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate. He was project manager for the effort that culminated in the release of the Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report.
The presentation will be held at the Lockheed Martin Orion Conference Room, first floor, at 2625 Bay Area Blvd., Suite 160 (OCC) Houston, 77058. Attendance is free for INCOSE members and $10 for non-members. Networking and refreshments start at 5:30 p.m., and the program begins at 6 p.m. See our local Texas Gulf Coast Chapter website for more information. Please RSVP to Larry Spratlin 281-461-5218 or via email by COB Wednesday, June 19.
Larry Spratlin 281-461-5218

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6.            Youth Sports Camps - Basketball, Baseball and Ultimate Frisbee
Summer is here and Starport's Sports Camps are just around the corner! Sports Camps at the Gilruth Center are a great way to provide added instruction for all levels of players and prepare participants for competitive play. Let our knowledgeable and experienced coaches give your child the confidence they need to learn and excel in their chosen sport.
Baseball Camp: Focuses on the development of hitting, catching, base running, throwing, pitching and drills.
Dates: July 8 to 12 and July 15 to 19
Times: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Ages: 6 to 12
Price: $200/per session
Basketball Camp: Focuses on the development of shooting, passing, dribbling, guarding and drills.
Dates: Aug. 5 to 9
Times: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Ages: 9 to 14
Price: $200
Ultimate Frisbee: Focuses on development of throwing, catching, offense, defense, zones and drills.
Dates: July 1 to 3
Times: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Ages: 9 to 14
Price: $140
Before and after care is available. Register your child at the Gilruth Center. Visit our website for information and registration forms.
Shericka Phillips x35563 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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7.            Machinery and Machine Guarding - July 16 - Building 20, Room 205/206
This three-day course provides the student with an in-depth understanding of NASA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requirements for machinery and machine guarding. It is based on the OSHA Training Institute Machinery and Machine Guarding course and provides the foundation for meeting our goal of contributing to improving the overall safety of NASA operations. The course also includes an overview of various types of common machinery used at NASA and the safety standards relating to those types of machines. There will be a final exam associated with this course, which must be passed with a 70 percent minimum score to receive course credit.
Target audience: Safety, Reliability, Quality and Maintainability professionals; maintenance repair supervisors; fabrication shop personnel; and anyone working around or with machinery.
Use this direct link for registration: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Event Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2013   Event Start Time:8:00 AM   Event End Time:4:00 PM
Event Location: Building 20, Room 205/206

Add to Calendar

Shirley Robinson x41284

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8.            Summer Water-Bots Camp: Intermediate Camp Registration Deadline June 28
Join us for Water-Bots 2013! The San Jacinto College Aerospace Academy is offering an outstanding opportunity for students to experience the excitement of underwater robotics.
Intermediate Camps: July 15 to 18 and July 22 to 25. Requires campers with previous robotic experience. The camp experience will include constructing algorithms in scripting languages such as Python/Matlab/Scilab; working with Arduino boards, sensors and shields; methods of making underwater robotics using a tether system; and much more.
Ages: 12 to 16 years old
Cost: $250
Email for more information.
Sara Malloy x46803 http://www.aerospace-academy.org

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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:
·         7 am Central (8 EDT) – Replay of NASA Asteroid Initiative Industry and Partner Event
·         9:40 am Central (10:40 EDT) – E36's Cassidy & Nyberg w/students at Kansas Cosmosphere

WEBCAST:
·         9 am Central (10 EDT) - NASA Authorization Act of 2013 (House Committee on Science, Space & Technology, Subcommittee on Space)

Witnesses
·         Steven W. Squyres - Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, Cornell University
·         Thomas Young - Former Executive Vice President, Lockheed Martin Corporation

Human Spaceflight News
Wednesday, June 19, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Mars base added to moon plan

Darius Dixon - Politico

Republicans in Congress are pushing for major cuts across the federal budget, but so far, they're not willing to sacrifice a plan to build a moon colony. In fact, Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee are eyeing an even more ambitious goal: building a base on Mars, too. Those calls will be part of new legislation to be released Wednesday reauthorizing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for two more years, and though the bill doesn't use the term "moon base," the goal is clear.

White House, NASA want help hunting asteroids

Joel Achenbach - Washington Post

The White House and NASA on Tuesday will ask the public for help finding asteroids that potentially could slam into the Earth with catastrophic consequences. Citing planetary defense, the administration has decided that the search for killer rocks in space should be the latest in a series of "Grand Challenges," in which the government sets an ambitious goal, helps create public-private partnerships and sometimes offers prize money for innovative ideas.

NASA wants you to help save Earth from a deadly asteroid

Deborah Netburn - Los Angeles Times

NASA is getting serious about protecting the Earth from asteroids, and the space agency wants your help. If you have thoughts on how NASA can efficiently identify potentially hazardous asteroids, or ideas for improving the agency's preliminary plans for capturing an asteroid and dragging it into lunar orbit in 2017, NASA officials want to hear from you. "Too often, by the time we present a mission to the public, it has already been baked, and there's not much we can change" said Robert Lightfoot, associate director of NASA, at an event outlining the agency's Asteroid Initiative on Tuesday. "This is your chance to present your ideas to us before the mission is baked."

NASA wants to better track asteroids that threaten Earth

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

Add this to your worry list: Orbiting somewhere near Earth are an estimated 13,000 asteroids big enough to obliterate Orlando and a good chunk of Central Florida — and NASA has no clue as to when, where or whether they might strike. Worse, astronomers think their sky maps might still be missing an additional 50 to 100 asteroids so massive — roughly 0.6 mile across or larger — that they could end civilization if they hit Earth. With those cosmic threats in mind, the Obama administration on Tuesday unveiled a "Grand Challenge" that would redouble efforts by NASA — and challenge amateur astronomers — to catalog every asteroid near Earth that's large enough to cause significant damage. NASA also is being asked to lead a new campaign to figure out how to defend Earth from doomsday rocks.

Asteroid proposal may get burned
Lawmakers look to ax plan; NASA says it's crucial to future treks

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

NASA promoted its plan for a proposed human expedition to an asteroid Tuesday as congressional lawmakers aimed to kill the project in its infancy. Outlined in the Obama Administration's proposed 2014 budget, the mission would involve capturing an asteroid with a robotic spacecraft, hauling it back to a lunar orbit, and then sending astronauts on a sample return mission. But today, a House subcommittee that draws up NASA's budget will review a draft authorization bill that reportedly prohibits the asteroid mission and instead steers NASA back to the moon. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said the early House version of the agency's 2013 spending plan, which projects budgets for a five-year period, is a letdown.

NASA: Humans Could Visit Asteroid in 2021

Susan Presto - Voice of America News

The U.S. space agency says its proposed asteroid capture mission takes several of NASA's ongoing initiatives and aligns them for one major mission. These chunks of ancient space rocks hold clues about the formation of the universe, pose threats to our planet, and present new territory for explorers. NASA's proposed asteroid mission is a logical next leap for the space agency, says associate administrator for human exploration and operations Bill Gerstenmaier.

NASA enlists public in hunt for major asteroids

Agence France Presse

NASA announced a Grand Challenge on Tuesday to enlist government agencies, industry, academics and citizen astronomers in the hunt for asteroids that could cause massive destruction. The US space agency said the challenge would complement another recently announced project to use a robot to redirect an asteroid into the Moon's orbit so astronauts could visit the object and study it. "NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said in a statement.

NASA's Grand Challenge: Stop Asteroids from Destroying Earth

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

There may be killer asteroids headed for Earth, and NASA has decided to do something about it. The space agency announced a new "Grand Challenge" Tuesday to find all dangerous space rocks and figure out how to stop them from destroying Earth. The new mission builds on projects already underway at NASA, including a plan to capture an asteroid, pull it in toward the moon and send astronauts to visit it. As part of the Grand Challenge, the agency issued a "request for information" today aiming to solicit ideas from industry, academia and the public on how to improve the asteroid mission plan.

NASA wants you ... to join Grand Challenge to hunt down asteroids

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

NASA's latest "Grand Challenge" is a biggie: Can you think of better ways to find potentially threatening near-Earth asteroids and do something about those threats? Your ideas could become part of the space agency's vision for the next decade. The Asteroid Grand Challenge was announced on Tuesday at NASA Headquarters in Washington, but a lot of the details still have to be filled in. For instance, what are the specific tasks to be covered by the challenge? How much money will it take to stimulate the required innovations? Over the next month, NASA is gathering ideas under the terms of a request for information, with the aim of setting up a game plan for the years ahead.

NASA Wants Help Preventing Asteroids From Destroying Earth

Jon Chang - ABC News

NASA is looking for asteroids and wants you to join the hunt. But don't expect to be starring in a real-life version of "Armageddon" any time soon. NASA unveiled some of its plans for the Asteroid Initiative at a news conference Tuesday. While the engineers are working on the exact details of exploring and redirecting asteroids that travel a little too close to the Earth, others sent a call out to amateur scientists everywhere in what they're calling a "Grand Challenge." The challenge's statement was seen in bright red letters throughout their presentation: "Find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them."

NASA Courts Industry to Put 500-Ton Asteroid in Moon's Orbit

Jonathan Tirone - Bloomberg News

The U.S. space agency is counting on private investors to help invent and manufacture new technologies to protect the Earth from stray asteroids. Industry executives will be briefed today in Washington about the planned 2025 mission to drag a giant space rock into orbit around the moon, in a test of whether asteroids can be steered clear of earth, National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Charles Bolden told reporters today in Vienna during a visit to the United Nations space agency. "The technology isn't developed yet," Bolden said. "The things we're trying to do are global issues bigger than any one nation can or should undertake."

NASA wants backyard astronomers to help track asteroids

Deborah Zabarenko - Reuters

NASA called on backyard astronomers and other citizen-scientists on Tuesday to help track asteroids that could create havoc on Earth. The U.S. space agency has already identified 95 percent of the potentially planet-killing NEOs - near Earth objects - with a diameter of .62 miles or more, a size comparable to the space rock many scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Targets Scarce for NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission

Mike Wall - Space.com

NASA's audacious plan to grab an asteroid and park it near the moon is short on candidate space rocks at the moment, one researcher says. It's possible that not a single known object meets the current criteria of NASA's asteroid redirect mission (ARM), astrodynamical consultant Dan Adamo said during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group on Wednesday (June 12). To pull the mission off in a timely fashion, Adamo added, it may be necessary to mount a dedicated, space-based asteroid survey in the near future or consider snagging a chunk of a larger asteroid rather than returning an entire (relatively small) space rock.

ESA's Orion Service Module Overweight, Delaying PDR

Amy Svitak - Aviation Week

The European Space Agency (ESA) and its industrial partners need to reduce the weight of a service module they are developing to fly on NASA's Orion multipurpose crew exploration vehicle in 2017, a hurdle that will delay preliminary design review of the project by a little more than three months. Based on Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the service module is to be led by Astrium Space Transportation, the prime contractor on the ATV. Astrium has been working on the effort since shortly before ESA's 20 member states approved a first tranche of around €250 million ($330 million) in funding for the service module at a ministerial budget meeting last November.

Space Station Astronaut Commands NASA Rover in California

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

International Space Station astronaut Chris Cassidy broke new ground this week by controlling a robotic rover at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. The first of three monthly sessions between an ISS crew member and the K10 rover is intended to demonstrate that an astronaut in orbit or approaching a planetary body such as an asteroid, moon or a planet could effectively control a distant robot with remote commanding. In the case of the Surface Telerobotics experiment, Cassidy is interacting with K10 for the simulated assembly of a radio telescope on the moon's far side. It's something than an astronaut posted on an outpost at the Earth/moon's L-2 point might attempt. Cassidy's job is to oversee K10 as the rover scouts the construction zone…

Cool Flames: Playing With Balls of Space Fire

Ian O'Neill - Discovery News

Making fire was a fundamental evolutionary step for our civilization, so you'd think that we'd totally understand the phenomenon inside and out by now. But, as experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) are proving, fire is a very different and mysterious creature when it burns in a microgravity environment. Usually, flames in the presence of gravity (i.e. on Earth) form under complex chemical reactions. But gravity ensures that the flame on a candle, say, forms a 'droplet' shape — hot air rises, pulling in cool air behind it, shaping the flame. But in the absence a strong gravitational field — like the microgravity environment in the ISS — fire transforms into a very alien configuration.

Cold balls of flame light up International Space Station
Keep Calm: Bright sparks, not aliens, set this fire

Simon Sharwood - The Register (UK)

At first glance, lighting a fire on the International Space Station (ISS) seems like a good way to earn a Darwin Award and the opprobrium of all humanity. Yet boffins have been doing it for some time in an effort to learn more about how flames behave. Interestingly, is the answer from NASA, which today offered a look at some ISS fire experiments that have found fires lit in microgravity don't form the familiar forked tongues we see on earth, but instead dimly-glowing spheres that aren't nearly as hot to the touch as earthly flames.

Space station crew opens Europe's Einstein cargo ship after fungus flap

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

It doesn't take an Einstein to see that international differences can still crop up on the final frontier: Take the case of the European Space Agency's Einstein cargo craft, for example. Russian concerns about some potentially moldy cargo bags caused a holdup in the schedule for unloading seven tons of supplies. The Albert Einstein Automated Transfer Vehicle linked up with the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering a payload that included scientific experiments, clothing, spare parts and an assortment of European-style goodies such as tiramisu and lasagne.

Aerojet, Kuznetsov To Restart NK-33 Rocket Motor Production

Amy Butler - Aviation Week

The newly formed Aerojet Rocketdyne is crafting a plan with the Russian Kuznetsov Design Bureau to restart production of the NK-33 rocket engine to assuage concerns from NASA that enough propulsion systems will be available for missions planned to resupply the International Space Station. NK-33s overhauled by Aerojet, designated the AJ-26, are used to power Orbital Sciences' new Antares medium-lift rocket for upcoming NASA Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) missions; Orbital also is trying to re-ignite a market for smaller military satellites by offering the Antares as an alternative to building large satellites for use exclusively on the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles managed by the United Launch Alliance. NASA is requiring that Orbital use an engine in production to power the Antares, and the NK-33 has long been out of production. Aerojet previously purchased 43 of the NK-33 engines from Kuznetsov to overhaul into AJ-26s as needed for missions. Under its CRS-1 contract with NASA, Aerojet is overhauling 20 NK-33s for use on Antares. The motors have experienced stress and corrosion, which are addressed through the overhaul process.

Russian Space Center in Kazakhstan Counts Down Its Days of Glory

Andrew Kramer – New York Times

On a sultry desert evening, as bats fluttered about this town's riverfront park, a man emerged from a reedy marsh carrying a bundle of grass tied with twine. Setting it down to brush himself off, he explained that he was keeping a calf in the courtyard of an apartment building across town, where he had settled in recently after the previous occupants, engineers with the Russian space program, moved out. Baikonur, in remote western Kazakhstan, was once the pride of the Soviet Union, the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launching site of Sputnik, the dog Laika and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. But today, nomadic herders from the nearby steppe are moving into abandoned buildings.

NASA's New Class of Astronauts Gives Parity to Men and Women

Katie Hiler - New York Times

One flies a fighter jet for the Marines. Another is an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. A third is a helicopter pilot for the Army. And the fourth leads the station in American Samoa of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. They are the four women in NASA's latest class of astronaut trainees, which also includes four men. The eight recruits — the first NASA has named in four years, and the first group to include equal numbers of men and women — were selected from 6,300 applicants and will start training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in August, the space agency said Monday. If all goes well after a few years of training, one or more might be selected for a stint at the International Space Station, or — eventually — for a trip to an asteroid or Mars, places that NASA eventually hopes to visit.

Astronaut trainee takes life to extremes in her research
Harvard biologist has studied how animals adapt to harsh environments

Alyssa Botelho - Boston Globe

Biologist Jessica U. Meir has devoted her life to studying animals that thrive in Earth's most extreme environments, hoping to unlock the secrets of high-flying geese that soar over Mount Everest and emperor penguins that dive thousands of feet under the Antarctic ice. But all the while, the 35-year-old Meir has hoped, too, that she would have a chance to explore the most extreme environment of them all: outer space. This week, Meir, an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, has at last found her chance to travel to the final frontier as she joins the ranks of NASA's newest class of potential astronauts. She was one of eight astronaut trainees selected by NASA from more than 6,000 applicants, the second-largest pool ever.

Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong: Space icons get new round of remembrance

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

Almost a year after their deaths, NASA is paying renewed tribute this week to Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, as well as to Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon. Ride's day in the spotlight came on Tuesday, for a simple reason: It's been 30 years since her history-making flight on June 18, 1983. Thousands thronged to the shuttle Challenger's launch, wearing T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with the slogan "Ride, Sally, Ride." Thursday is this week's big day for Neil Armstrong: The most famous of NASA's moonwalkers passed away last August at the age of 82, after suffering heart problems.

The U.S. Government Wants Your Input on Human Spaceflight

Jeffrey Marlow - Wired.com

What good is human spaceflight? This is the question being posed by the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) on behalf of The National Academies, and they want your answers. For the last 45 years, ASEB has tackled significant issues affecting space policy, taking the public's temperature and compiling stakeholders' testimonies. These various viewpoints are distilled into an official document, which is circulated among policymakers and often taken as the authoritative guide on the issue at hand.

Asteroid redirect mission: impossible?

Joel Achenbach - Washington Post (Viewpoint)

Here's my story, posted at midnight last night, about NASA's new Grand Challenge, which is to find all the dangerous asteroids out there and figure out what to do about them. Basically the government wants help in finding near-Earth space rocks, and is turning to the global space community, including academics, backyard astronomers and other "citizen scientists." A bunch of the top NASA officials took the stage in the auditorium at HQ Tuesday morning to discuss this new Grand Challenge and the much-hyped Asteroid Redirect Mission. NASA wants to capture a small asteroid and put it in a high orbit around the moon, then visit it with astronauts in the early 2020s. The problem is that, although there are untold thousands of near-Earth asteroids out there, few are astrodynamically attractive.

Curiosity's Radiation Results

Robert Zubrin - Space News (Opinion)

(Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics and the Mars Society and the author of "The Case for Mars." His latest work, "Mars Direct: Space Exploration, The Red Planet, and the Human Future," was recently published by Penguin.)

Last month, the investigators on the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument aboard NASA's Curiosity rover announced some of their findings. According to the scientists, the RAD measurements indicate that the crew of a human Mars expedition using present-day propulsion technology (six-month transits each way, 18 months on the surface) would receive a round-trip radiation dose of about 0.6 Sievert (Sv), or 60 rem (1 Sv = 100 rem.) This result was not surprising. In fact it was entirely consistent with the data reported by many of the same scientists using the Mars Radiation Environment Experiment, or Marie, onboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft during its outbound cruise to Mars in 2001, or estimates published by me in "The Case for Mars" in 1996, based on models developed still earlier by Viking scientist Ben Clark.
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Mars base added to moon plan

Darius Dixon - Politico

Republicans in Congress are pushing for major cuts across the federal budget, but so far, they're not willing to sacrifice a plan to build a moon colony.

In fact, Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee are eyeing an even more ambitious goal: building a base on Mars, too.

Those calls will be part of new legislation to be released Wednesday reauthorizing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for two more years, and though the bill doesn't use the term "moon base," the goal is clear.

"The [NASA] Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon and the surface of Mars," states a recent discussion draft obtained by POLITICO.

New language in the bill also says that while the NASA chief is authorized to develop international partnerships to establish a "sustained presence" on the two celestial bodies, "the absence of an international partner may not be justification for failure to pursue such program in a timely manner."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich famously said during last year's presidential campaign that the U.S. would have a permanent base on the moon by the end of his second term, drawing mockery from Mitt Romney, who said he'd fire someone for proposing to spend billions on such a project.

But the new NASA authorization isn't quite as ambitious as Gingrich's plan.

Although it calls for bases on the moon and Mars, the bill doesn't set a specific timetable for any of this and opts for a "go-as-we-can-afford-to-pay" strategy.

The language in the new bill is a "reaffirmation" of earlier authorizations and existing law, a Republican committee aide said—although it does add the Mars plan. The Science panel's space subcommittee will hold a hearing Wednesday morning to discuss the bill, which will be released around the same time.

With the end of NASA's space shuttle program in 2011 and the International Space Station's retirement at the end of the decade, the aide said, the question is, "what comes next?"

"While the Chinese are dumping money into their space program, American astronauts are hitching rides to the International Space Station on Russian rockets," Space subcommittee Chairman Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) said in a statement.

"NASA no longer even has the capability of sending our astronauts into space. We must ensure every single dollar appropriated to NASA is spent effectively and efficiently—that is why we are prohibiting further work on costly distractions like the Obama Administration's Asteroid Retrieval Mission," he added.

Closer to home, the new authorization rolls back NASA's spending on climate change research to 2008 levels in an effort to restore "proper balance to NASA's science portfolio," a bill summary states. The push is justified, the committee says, because several different government agencies spend money on climate science research, but only NASA focuses on space exploration.

Democrats on the committee preferred not to comment on the bill but said the GOP draft was presented to them late last week, a committee aide said.

So, how much would a moon colony cost?

George Washington University's John Logsdon, founder of the school's Space Policy Institute, was cited by CNN last year saying the project could cost somewhere between $250 billion to $500 billion.

White House, NASA want help hunting asteroids

Joel Achenbach - Washington Post

The White House and NASA on Tuesday will ask the public for help finding asteroids that potentially could slam into the Earth with catastrophic consequences.

Citing planetary defense, the administration has decided that the search for killer rocks in space should be the latest in a series of "Grand Challenges," in which the government sets an ambitious goal, helps create public-private partnerships and sometimes offers prize money for innovative ideas.

"This is really a call to action to find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said Monday. She said the asteroid hunt would help prove that "we're smarter than the dinosaurs."

There is a second, overlapping agenda at work here: The NASA human spaceflight program needs to find a target rock for what is now being called the Asteroid Redirect Mission (formerly the Asteroid Retrieval Mission), or ARM.

The proposed mission, which is early in the planning stages, would send astronauts to visit an asteroid that had been redirected into a high lunar orbit. But first a robotic spacecraft would have to rendezvous with the asteroid and capture it. And even before that, scientists would have to find the right asteroid.

The target rock has to be moving at a leisurely pace relative to the Earth, and ideally would come close to the Earth-moon system sometime in the early 2020s. At present, NASA has a short list of possible targets, but all need further scrutiny to see if they have the size, shape, spin rate and composition that the asteroid mission would require.

Two recent feasibility studies used as their reference a rock discovered in 2009, but NASA scientists aren't sure that it will meet the mission requirements. For one thing, it might turn out to be too small. They plan to study it this fall with the Spitzer Space Telescope.

But NASA scientists are clearly eager to speed up the rate of discovery of small asteroids, and thus expand the pool of candidate rocks for the ARM mission.

The Earth coexists with a swarm of asteroids of varying sizes. Thanks to a number of asteroid searches in the past 15 years, some funded by NASA, about 95 percent of the near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than 1 kilometer (about three-fifths of a mile) in diameter have already been detected, and their trajectories calculated. None poses a significant threat of striking the Earth in the foreseeable future.

The science is clear: Catastrophic impacts, such as the one implicated in the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, are very rare, and no one needs to panic about killer rocks.

But as one goes down the size scale, these objects become more numerous and harder to detect. Congress in 2005 charged NASA with finding all the asteroids greater than 140 meters (459 feet) in diameter. Asteroids that size are generally regarded as large enough to take out a city.

According to NASA, there are also probably about 25,000 near-Earth asteroids that are 100 meters (328 feet) or larger. Only 25 percent of those have been detected, many through NASA's Near Earth Object Program. The administration is asking Congress to double the budget for asteroid detection, to $40 million, Garver said.

But the Grand Challenge would elicit help from academics, international partners and backyard astronomers. The search for NEOs took on greater urgency on Feb. 15, when, on the very day that a previously detected asteroid was about to make a close pass of the Earth, an unknown 50-foot-diameter rock came out of the glare of the sun and fireballed through the atmosphere above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

The asteroid's disintegration caused a shock wave that shattered windows and caused hundreds of injuries and major property damage. It was the first recorded instance of an asteroid causing human casualties. (In 1908 an asteroid exploded over Siberia and flattened trees in a vast, unpopulated area.)

"Even though these smaller asteroids don't pose a threat to human civilization, they can still cause major damages and casualties on a regional level," said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The administration's Grand Challenges include efforts to understand the human brain and cure brain disorders, make solar energy cost-competitive by the decade's end, and make electric cars as affordable as gasoline-powered vehicles.

NASA wants you to help save Earth from a deadly asteroid

Deborah Netburn - Los Angeles Times

NASA is getting serious about protecting the Earth from asteroids, and the space agency wants your help.

If you have thoughts on how NASA can efficiently identify potentially hazardous asteroids, or ideas for improving the agency's preliminary plans for capturing an asteroid and dragging it into lunar orbit in 2017, NASA officials want to hear from you.

"Too often, by the time we present a mission to the public, it has already been baked, and there's not much we can change" said Robert Lightfoot, associate director of NASA, at an event outlining the agency's Asteroid Initiative on Tuesday. "This is your chance to present your ideas to us before the mission is baked."

On Tuesday, the agency released an Asteroid Initiative Request for Information inviting academics, scientists, engineers and regular civilians from around the world to weigh in on NASA's two-part Asteroid Initiative to identify all potentially dangerous asteroids and figure out what to do about them, and to capture an asteroid, put it in lunar orbit and then send an astronaut to its surface.

The agency wants to hear your thoughts on the the best way to detect asteroids, how to use a spacecraft to alter a dangerous asteroid's orbit, the best way to bag an asteroid, the types of gear an astronaut would need to land on an asteroid, and how to get the public excited and invested in this mission.

But you'll have to think fast: NASA is giving you just 30 days to send your ideas via email to the agency. NASA will host an online forum on July 27 at 11 a.m. (Pacific) to answer questions about the Asteroid Initiative, and final thoughts can come in no later than July 18.

NASA will discuss the responses at an industry workshop in September. And if the agency likes your ideas, you may be invited to present them. Alas, you won't be paid for them, NASA notes.

NASA wants to better track asteroids that threaten Earth

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

Add this to your worry list: Orbiting somewhere near Earth are an estimated 13,000 asteroids big enough to obliterate Orlando and a good chunk of Central Florida — and NASA has no clue as to when, where or whether they might strike.

Worse, astronomers think their sky maps might still be missing an additional 50 to 100 asteroids so massive — roughly 0.6 mile across or larger — that they could end civilization if they hit Earth.

With those cosmic threats in mind, the Obama administration on Tuesday unveiled a "Grand Challenge" that would redouble efforts by NASA — and challenge amateur astronomers — to catalog every asteroid near Earth that's large enough to cause significant damage. NASA also is being asked to lead a new campaign to figure out how to defend Earth from doomsday rocks.

"We want to prove that we are, in fact, smarter than the dinosaurs," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, referring to the massive asteroid or comet that scientists think killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

Though her example was dramatic, Garver didn't have to reach that far back to show what a space rock can do to Earth. Just this past February, an asteroid 55 feet in diameter exploded over Russia, injuring more than 1,000 people. And car-sized asteroids enter — and burn up — in the atmosphere almost weekly.

As it stands, NASA has located about 95 percent of the asteroids big enough to annihilate everyone on Earth —and none poses any immediate danger of hitting the planet. But they are a lot less certain about where to find the smaller ones.

NASA scientists estimate that about 13,000 asteroids larger than 460 feet — which have the potential to level a country — remain undiscovered. And there could be millions more that are close in size to the Russian asteroid.

"We have done a very good job on the big ones. It's the smaller ones that could be a potential threat and where we have a lot of work to do," said Jason Kessler, of NASA's chief technologist office.

Still, the money for this program has been minuscule compared with NASA's proposed 2014 budget of $17.7 billion. And even a White House decision to double the amount — from $20 million in 2013 to $40 million in its 2014 budget — isn't much by NASA standards.

That's why the administration's plan also directs NASA to partner with amateur astronomers and space activists. A NASA document released Tuesday also asks the space community to submit ideas on how to detect asteroids and deflect them.

The added budget money would be spent on wringing more observations from radar and telescopes on Earth, including the Pan-STARRS facility in Hawaii that can monitor wide swaths of the cosmos.

NASA officials also hope to use some of the money to revive an orbiting telescope known as WISE — for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer — that can detect as many as 100 new asteroids a year.

"Our plan is to turn it back on," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary-science division.

NASA put WISE into hibernation in 2011 after it had completed its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared light; it found a host of new cosmic objects, including millions of black holes. And even though WISE has exhausted its supply of coolant needed to chill its sensitive telescope, Green said NASA hoped it would still be useful for asteroid detection.

"We'll start using it in two wavelength bands that don't require cooling" but still can help find nearby asteroids, he said.

Though the asteroid-detection program has no firm deadline, Garver said the aim was to find all nearby — and dangerous — space rocks by 2033, about 20 years from now.

NASA's own plan to defend the Earth from asteroids still is in its infancy. As part of its 2014 budget, the administration is proposing a mission to "lasso" a small asteroid with a space probe and drag it near the moon. Agency officials said the mission could help them practice how it might redirect a dangerous asteroid.

An open question is how Congress will react to the new initiative. Though lawmakers generally have supported asteroid-detection efforts, a U.S. House blueprint for NASA up for debate today includes no funding for the asteroid-capture mission.

Asteroid proposal may get burned
Lawmakers look to ax plan; NASA says it's crucial to future treks

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

NASA promoted its plan for a proposed human expedition to an asteroid Tuesday as congressional lawmakers aimed to kill the project in its infancy.

Outlined in the Obama Administration's proposed 2014 budget, the mission would involve capturing an asteroid with a robotic spacecraft, hauling it back to a lunar orbit, and then sending astronauts on a sample return mission.

But today, a House subcommittee that draws up NASA's budget will review a draft authorization bill that reportedly prohibits the asteroid mission and instead steers NASA back to the moon.

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said the early House version of the agency's 2013 spending plan, which projects budgets for a five-year period, is a letdown.

"It was certainly a disappointment to have — as we've seen in the draft authorization bill from the House leadership — a lack of a recognition yet, I will say, of the importance and value of this mission," Garver said at an industry briefing on the asteroid initiative.

NASA and White House officials say the initiative would:

·      Help identify asteroids that threaten Earth and develop means to protect the planet from them.
·      Shed light on the formation of the solar system.
·      Drive development of technologies required for human expeditions to Mars. NASA's Astronaut Office also would gain operational experience for deep space exploration.

Garver seemed confident that NASA would win over opponents on the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.

"This is the beginning of the debate," she said. "I think that we really, truly are going to be able to show the value of this mission."

The industry trade publication SpaceNews this month reported that the draft authorization bill would nix NASA's plans for starting up the asteroid initiative, which was sanctioned by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

NASA in 2014 is requesting $105 million to start up the project. Twenty percent of the money would go toward doubling current efforts to identify near-Earth asteroids. NASA has not yet estimated the full cost of an asteroid retrieval mission.

Republican lawmakers are outwardly opposed to the initiative.

Lamar Smith, R-Texas and the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said NASA "haphazardly" created the asteroid initiative despite a National Research Council report that "found little support for the proposal."

"Congress has a long history of support for lunar landings and exploration. To me, there is no better way for our astronauts to learn how to live and work on another planet than to use the moon as a training ground," Smith said.

U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, reintroduced legislation this year that would direct NASA to send astronauts to the moon within 10 years.

Garver claimed "bipartisan support" for the asteroid initiative and quoted U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando: "It really is a clever concept. Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back."

NASA issued a request Tuesday for industry, academia, national research and development labs and the general public to provide ideas for its asteroid initiative.

Specifically, NASA is focusing on six areas: asteroid observation; asteroid redirection systems; asteroid deflection demonstrations; asteroid capture systems; crew systems for asteroid exploration; and partnerships and participatory engagement.

NASA sees the asteroid expedition as a steppingstone to subsequent missions to the moon, Mars, or other deep space destinations.

"This is one mission, but it's really that first step that's going to allow us to get humans beyond Earth orbit, to push further out into the universe," said William Gerstenmaier, chief of NASA's human exploration and operations office.

"And we look to you to help figure out ways to connect those dots and make effective use of this mission so it feeds forward to those other bigger destinations."

NASA: Humans Could Visit Asteroid in 2021

Susan Presto - Voice of America News

The U.S. space agency says its proposed asteroid capture mission takes several of NASA's ongoing initiatives and aligns them for one major mission.

These chunks of ancient space rocks hold clues about the formation of the universe, pose threats to our planet, and present new territory for explorers.

NASA's proposed asteroid mission is a logical next leap for the space agency, says associate administrator for human exploration and operations Bill Gerstenmaier.

"It essentially fits right with what we were doing already. This whole mission activity captures a lot of what we were doing before. It captures the observation things. It captures the electric propulsion, and it captures and utilizes our Orion [capsule] and SLS [rocket] just as it was envisioned," said Gerstenmaier.

Astronomers already are identifying and tracking near-Earth asteroids in an attempt to find potential threats, which will help as NASA chooses a target.

And the space agency's engineers are working on propulsion technologies that use sunlight to efficiently produce low thrust, reducing the amount of propellant needed for such a mission.

"We're going to capture and redirect a 7-10 meter, approximately 500-ton near-Earth asteroid to a stable orbit in translunar space, probably a deep retrograde orbit around the moon, and this will enable an astronaut mission to the asteroid as early as 2021," said Gerstenmaier.

A successful mission would show that humans can alter an asteroid's path, and be useful if one is found to be a danger to Earth.

NASA says there is no threat to our planet if something goes wrong during this capture mission, because an asteroid this size would disintegrate before it struck the planet.

Gerstenmaier says lunar orbit is stable enough that the asteroid possibly could stay in place for a century.

"So once we get the spacecraft and the object in this orbit, it's there for us to go visit multiple times in the future," he said.

Astronauts could use the Space Launch System and Orion space capsule that are being developed. Space explorers could spend about five days near the asteroid and venture out of the Orion capsule to collect samples that would be returned to Earth.

Gerstenmaier says this will give astronauts and mission control experience working in deep space, far from Earth and the International Space Station.
"In this case, we're going to have to make sure we have the right abort scenarios, the right redundancy in place, that we can tolerate being in this situation for up to five days. So that helps us take a step toward the bigger missions that we want to do going forward," he said.

Bigger missions such as a manned voyage to Mars in the 2030s.

NASA enlists public in hunt for major asteroids

Agence France Presse

NASA announced a Grand Challenge on Tuesday to enlist government agencies, industry, academics and citizen astronomers in the hunt for asteroids that could cause massive destruction.

The US space agency said the challenge would complement another recently announced project to use a robot to redirect an asteroid into the Moon's orbit so astronauts could visit the object and study it.

"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said in a statement.

The challenge "is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats," she added.

"We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."

Grand Challenges are part of a White House strategy to set ambitious goals and mobilize scientists and the general public behind them.

"Finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort," said Tom Kalil, deputy director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

"The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities."

The challenge also includes a request for information from private industry on how to locate, redirect and explore an asteroid, as well as planning for potential asteroid threats.

In line with a goal set by Congress in 1998, NASA has already discovered and recorded around 95 percent of the asteroids whose diameter is at least 0.6 mile (a kilometer) and that can cause massive destruction.

NASA insists such collisions are quite rare and says it has detected no threats in the foreseeable future.

NASA's Grand Challenge: Stop Asteroids from Destroying Earth

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

There may be killer asteroids headed for Earth, and NASA has decided to do something about it. The space agency announced a new "Grand Challenge" Tuesday to find all dangerous space rocks and figure out how to stop them from destroying Earth.

The new mission builds on projects already underway at NASA, including a plan to capture an asteroid, pull it in toward the moon and send astronauts to visit it. As part of the Grand Challenge, the agency issued a "request for information" today aiming to solicit ideas from industry, academia and the public on how to improve the asteroid mission plan.

"We're asking for you to think about concepts and different approaches for what we've described here," William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human explorations and operations, said today during a NASA event announcing the initiative. "We want you to think about other ways of enhancing this to get the most out of it."

Responses to the request for information, which also seeks ideas for detecting and mitigating asteroid threats, are due July 18.

The asteroid-retrieval mission, designed to provide the first deep-space mission for astronauts flying on NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion space capsule under development, has come under fire from lawmakers who would prefer that NASA return to the moon.

A draft NASA authorization bill from the House space subcommittee being debated right now would cancel the mission and steer the agency toward other projects. That bill will be discussed during a hearing Wednesday (June 19) at 10 a.m. EDT.

But NASA officials defended the asteroid mission today and said they were confident they'd win Congress' support once they explained its benefits further.

"I think that we really, truly are going to be able to show the value of the mission," NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver said today. "To me, this is something that what we do in this country — we debate how we spend the public's money. This is the beginning of the debate."

Garver also maintained that sending astronauts to an asteroid would not diminish NASA's other science and exploration goals, including another lunar landing.

"This initiative takes nothing from the other valuable work," she said. "This is only a small piece of our overall strategy, but it is an integral piece. It takes nothing from the moon."

Part of NASA's plan to win support for the flight is to link it more closely with the larger goal of protecting Earth from asteroid threats.

If, some day, humanity discovers an asteroid headed for Earth and manages to alter its course, "it will be one of the most important accomplishments in human history," said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The topic of asteroid threats is more timely than ever, after a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15, the same day that the football-field-size asteroid 2012 DA14 passed within the moon's orbit of Earth.

NASA wants you ... to join Grand Challenge to hunt down asteroids

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

NASA's latest "Grand Challenge" is a biggie: Can you think of better ways to find potentially threatening near-Earth asteroids and do something about those threats? Your ideas could become part of the space agency's vision for the next decade.

The Asteroid Grand Challenge was announced on Tuesday at NASA Headquarters in Washington, but a lot of the details still have to be filled in. For instance, what are the specific tasks to be covered by the challenge? How much money will it take to stimulate the required innovations? Over the next month, NASA is gathering ideas under the terms of a request for information, with the aim of setting up a game plan for the years ahead.

"The purpose of the Grand Challenge is a call to action to continue the awareness around the issue of asteroid threats," Jason Kessler, NASA's program executive for the Asteroid Grand Challenge, told NBC News.

The program complements NASA's initiative to identify and bring back an asteroid so that astronauts can study it in the vicinity of the moon. It also meshes with NASA's long-running program to identify near-Earth asteroids.

"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said in an agency news release. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."

All this interest in asteroids got an extra jolt in February when a meteor blast sent a shock wave sweeping over Siberia, injuring more than 1,000 people. The 55-foot-wide (17-meter-wide) space rock behind that flare-up was relatively small, as space threats go, but even somewhat larger rocks are difficult to detect in advance using current tools. The Grand Challenge is meant to stimulate the development of new tools and techniques, Kessler said.

For instance, the program might encourage the development of nanosatellites equipped with expandable pop-out mirrors that could do a better job of detecting dim asteroids. It could offer prizes for improving the software that models an asteroid's shape. Or it could establish school observation networks to bring the power of crowdsourcing to asteroid detection.

"I guarantee you there's a number of great ideas out there that I'd never come up with," Kessler said. "We're being very deliberate in not saying 'this is the way it's going to be,' except to say this is how it's going to be to promote, engage and solicit ideas from the myriad number of great thinkers."

The program is being supported with funds that are being set aside for asteroid detection, but it's too early to estimate how much money the Grand Challenge would get, Kessler said.

The Obama administration has proposed spending $47 million over the next fiscal year on the entire asteroid detection effort, with $7 million of that to be used specifically to prepare for the asteroid-grabbing mission and the Asteroid Grand Challenge. The current plan calls for a robotic probe to be sent out toward an asteroid in 2017, so that it can be brought back for study by astronauts around 2021. Although the target asteroid hasn't yet been identified, NASA has said it would be in the range of 7 to 10 meters wide. There's a chance that the probe might break off a piece of a bigger asteroid and bring it back as an alternative.

The B612 Foundation has been working for years to raise awareness on the asteroid threat, and is also trying to raise money for an asteroid-hunting space telescope. Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the foundation's CEO, issued this statement relating to NASA's Grand Challenge:

"This morning, the White House and NASA announced an Asteroid Grand Challenge, 'focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do with them.' This directly mirrors the mission of the non-profit private B612 Foundation and our Sentinel Mission, and we strongly applaud NASA and the Obama administration for their leadership in raising the visibility of this critical issue and for establishing detection of asteroids as a national priority. The administration has called for a team 'of the best and brightest' working on this together, and we look forward to increased collaboration and partnership.

"There are one million asteroids with the potential to impact Earth with energy large enough to obliterate any major city. We believe that the goal must be to find these one million asteroids — anything less, in our opinion, would not meet the intent of this Grand Challenge."

NASA Wants Help Preventing Asteroids From Destroying Earth

Jon Chang - ABC News

NASA is looking for asteroids and wants you to join the hunt. But don't expect to be starring in a real-life version of "Armageddon" any time soon.

NASA unveiled some of its plans for the Asteroid Initiative at a news conference Tuesday.

While the engineers are working on the exact details of exploring and redirecting asteroids that travel a little too close to the Earth, others sent a call out to amateur scientists everywhere in what they're calling a "Grand Challenge." The challenge's statement was seen in bright red letters throughout their presentation: "Find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them."

Jason Kessler, the program executive leading the Grand Challenge, said at today's conference that the project isn't in response to any specific asteroid hurtling towards Earth.

"This is a recognition of the world that we now live in," he said. "We are more connected and better educated, and this is an opportunity to take advantage of all those aspects."

Kessler sees the public being involved primarily through two different channels. The first is by getting people more involved in the act of spotting asteroids. He looks to GalaxyZoo, a project where users quickly categorize galaxies based on their shape and lighting, for inspiration.

"We have a large data set already associated with asteroids," he said. "Are there ways that we can creatively bring people in to help with this problem?"

The other channel Kessler sees may appeal to the more tech-savvy amateur scientists -- a Request for Information document, or RFI. In the document, NASA encourages all types of organizations to submit ideas on what they would like to see the Asteroid Initiative do.

Robert Lightfoot, the associate administrator for NASA, admitted that this is very different direction than what the organization has done in the past.

"We want to hear from you," he said during today's conference.

When an audience participant asked if individuals, not just organizations, could submit ideas, he replied, "Absolutely."

The White House also supports the initiative.

"I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort," Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a statement.

Last month the White House assured members of the media that Asteroid 1998 QE2, which was set to pass by Earth on May 31, wasn't a threat to the planet.

NASA also hosted a Google+ hangout at 2 p.m. ET today during which experts directly answered questions regarding the initiative.

Kessler added that there were also plans to have digital brainstorming sessions throughout the summer, as well as a workshop for later in the fall.

However, much of the Grand Challenge is a work in progress, according to Kessler.

"We don't have it all nailed down yet," he said in response to a question about how NASA plans on collaborating and coordinating their activity with thousands of individuals eager to help. "In a year, I'll have a better answer."

NASA Courts Industry to Put 500-Ton Asteroid in Moon's Orbit

Jonathan Tirone - Bloomberg News

The U.S. space agency is counting on private investors to help invent and manufacture new technologies to protect the Earth from stray asteroids.

Industry executives will be briefed today in Washington about the planned 2025 mission to drag a giant space rock into orbit around the moon, in a test of whether asteroids can be steered clear of earth, National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Charles Bolden told reporters today in Vienna during a visit to the United Nations space agency.

"The technology isn't developed yet," Bolden said. "The things we're trying to do are global issues bigger than any one nation can or should undertake."

While most large asteroids that could trigger a global catastrophe have been found and tracked, smaller space objects remain a threat. A Feb. 15 meteor blast over Russia blew out windows and injured 1,200 people in Chelyabinsk. The unforeseen event reignited debate over defending again space threats.

"The average person is oblivious to the threat," Bolden said. "Unlike other natural disasters, we can avert this. It allows us to avoid becoming like the dinosaurs."

A 10-kilometer-wide asteroid is said to have caused the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago when it struck off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

NASA has already identified three potential asteroids measuring as much as 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter that could be targeted by the mission, Bolden said. Astronauts could need as long as 18 months to drag the object into the moon's orbit. Its 500 metric-ton weight would compare to the 560 metric-ton maximum takeoff weight of an Airbus A380 superjumbo.

An asteroid on a collision course could possibly be deflected with a spacecraft, redirected with a "gravity tractor" hovering nearby or, as a last resort, targeted with a nuclear explosion. Bolden declined to speculate which redirection technologies would be used on the mission.

Placing an asteroid in orbit around the moon will also create legal and diplomatic challenges here on Earth, Bolden said. NASA is consulting with the UN and allies to discuss asteroid rights of use and ownership when it reaches orbit.

NASA wants backyard astronomers to help track asteroids

Deborah Zabarenko - Reuters

NASA called on backyard astronomers and other citizen-scientists on Tuesday to help track asteroids that could create havoc on Earth.

The U.S. space agency has already identified 95 percent of the potentially planet-killing NEOs - near Earth objects - with a diameter of .62 miles or more, a size comparable to the space rock many scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Now NASA wants to work with individuals, government agencies, international partners and academia to "find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them." More information is available online here .

Between 50 and 100 amateur astronomers are doing what is called light-curve analysis on space rocks, making repeated images of the astronomical bodies to help determine their characteristics, said Jason Kessler, program executive for what NASA calls Astroid Grand Challenge.

"We're certainly going to need more help with that as our detection rate goes up," Kessler said by telephone. He acknowledged that what NASA aims to do, at least in part, is to crowd-source asteroid detection.

Even smaller space rocks can be dangerous, whether or not they hit the Earth. In February, a meteorite about 19 yards in diameter exploded over central Russia, shattering windows, damaging buildings and injuring 1,200 people.

Earlier this month, an asteroid the size of a small truck zoomed past the Earth four times closer than the moon, crossing within about 65,000 miles over the Southern Ocean south of Tasmania, Australia.

Estimates suggest less than 10 percent of NEOs smaller than 328 yards across have been detected, and less than 1 percent of objects smaller than 109 yards in diameter have been detected, NASA said in a statement.

The initiative aims to detect all NEOs of 33 yards or larger, Kessler said.

The space agency has also announced plans for a mission to capture a small asteroid, redirect it into a stable orbit and send humans to study it as early as 2021.

U.S. lawmakers have also become interested in NEO. In March the House of Representatives' science committee held a hearing on "Threats from Space" that reviewed efforts to track and mitigate asteroids and meteors.

Targets Scarce for NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission

Mike Wall - Space.com

NASA's audacious plan to grab an asteroid and park it near the moon is short on candidate space rocks at the moment, one researcher says.

It's possible that not a single known object meets the current criteria of NASA's asteroid redirect mission (ARM), astrodynamical consultant Dan Adamo said during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group on Wednesday (June 12).

To pull the mission off in a timely fashion, Adamo added, it may be necessary to mount a dedicated, space-based asteroid survey in the near future or consider snagging a chunk of a larger asteroid rather than returning an entire (relatively small) space rock.

Capturing an asteroid

NASA unveiled the asteroid-retrieval mission in April. The current plan is to drag a roughly 500-ton, 23-foot-wide (7 meters) asteroid to a stable orbit near the moon using an unmanned probe.

Astronauts would then visit the object using NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket, which are slated to fly together for the first time in 2021.

The ARM concept fits within President Barack Obama's vision for NASA's manned exploration program, which calls for the agency to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

ARM is similar to an idea proposed last year by scientists based at Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies in Pasadena, Calif. The Keck study estimated that a robotic spacecraft could drag a 23-foot NEA into a high lunar orbit for $2.6 billion.

Such a mission would help develop asteroid-mining technology and advance scientists' understanding of the early solar system, advocates say. Capturing an asteroid could also have big returns in the manned exploration arena.

"Experience gained via human expeditions to the small, returned NEA would transfer directly to follow-on international expeditions beyond the Earth-moon system — to other near-Earth asteroids, [the Mars moons] Phobos and Deimos, Mars and potentially, someday to the main asteroid belt," the Keck team wrote in a feasibility study of their plan. [NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission in Pictures]

Scarce targets

Scientists think at least 1 million asteroids zip through Earth's neighborhood, but only 10,000 or so of these close-flying space rocks have been identified and catalogued to date.

Adamo scrutinized the known objects, looking for potential ARM targets. He first zeroed in on bodies with "sufficiently Earthlike" orbits — nearly circular paths in much the same plane as Earth, with an average separation from the sun within 20 percent of the Earth-sun distance (which is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers, and is known as an astronomical unit, or AU).

Adamo then excluded any asteroids in this group that would zoom past Earth at too great a speed — more than 4,475 mph (7,200 km/h) relative to Earth — and came up with a list of 18 "highly accessible" space rocks.

But some of these 18 are definitely too big for ARM as it's currently envisioned, and many others may not fit the size criterion (estimates of the space rocks' diameters are generally imprecise).

Further, most of these rocks won't approach Earth closely enough in the near future to be viable targets. In fact, just seven of the 18 asteroids will fly within 0.1 AU of Earth before 2030, and only four will do so before 2021, Adamo said. (This 0.1 AU threshold provides a good rule of thumb to help narrow down the candidate field, he explained.)

In short, the cupboard is looking pretty bare at the moment, with no slam-dunk asteroid targets just begging to be captured.

What to do about it

Two strategies could help give ARM the best chance to succeed in the near future, Adamo said.

The first is to find more potential targets, by launching an asteroid-hunting space telescope as soon as possible. The second idea involves modifying ARM to retrieve a chunk of a big asteroid — a 100-ton piece of a 330-foot (100 m) object, perhaps — rather than an intact small space rock.

There are several advantages to targeting larger near-Earth objects (NEOs), Adamo said. They're easier to find and track, for example, and are more likely to exhibit stable and slow rotation.

"Larger NEOs are just going to be easier to approach and get close to," Adamo said.

Bigger asteroids are also more likely to be compositionally diverse, offering a probe several different sampling targets, he added.

"You're like a kid in a candy store instead of just out there with one object, as the current concept would advocate," Adamo said.

However NASA decides to proceed with ARM, the agency will need to work quickly if it hopes to execute the bold mission in the next decade or so, Adamo said. That's especially true if NASA aims to launch a precursor mission to verify the suitability of an intended target.

"This is a compressed schedule any way you slice it, particularly if you want some kind of mission assurance," Adamo said.

ESA's Orion Service Module Overweight, Delaying PDR

Amy Svitak - Aviation Week

The European Space Agency (ESA) and its industrial partners need to reduce the weight of a service module they are developing to fly on NASA's Orion multipurpose crew exploration vehicle in 2017, a hurdle that will delay preliminary design review of the project by a little more than three months.

Based on Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the service module is to be led by Astrium Space Transportation, the prime contractor on the ATV. Astrium has been working on the effort since shortly before ESA's 20 member states approved a first tranche of around €250 million ($330 million) in funding for the service module at a ministerial budget meeting last November.

Thomas Reiter, ESA director of human spaceflight, says the service module is roughly 0.5 metric tons overweight, but that the agency is working closely with NASA and Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin to reduce mass ahead of a preliminary design review now slated for October or November.

ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain says program funding is being released to Astrium in slices, but that project development is currently covered through this summer. At that point, he expects to award a contract to Astrium to continue work into 2014, when the agency's member states will again meet to approve a second tranche of about €200 million for the €455 million development.

"It's not the service module itself that is the bottleneck of the mass problems," Dordain said during a press conference at the 50th international Paris air show here today. "This is something we need to do with NASA; we can't do it on our own."

Space Station Astronaut Commands NASA Rover in California

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

International Space Station astronaut Chris Cassidy broke new ground this week by controlling a robotic rover at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

The first of three monthly sessions between an ISS crew member and the K10 rover is intended to demonstrate that an astronaut in orbit or approaching a planetary body such as an asteroid, moon or a planet could effectively control a distant robot with remote commanding.

In the case of the Surface Telerobotics experiment, Cassidy is interacting with K10 for the simulated assembly of a radio telescope on the moon's far side. It's something than an astronaut posted on an outpost at the Earth/moon's L-2 point might attempt.

Cassidy's job is to oversee K10 as the rover scouts the construction zone, according to Maria Baulat, the project lead for the evaluation from Ames.

"This operation will obtain baseline engineering data, validate and correlate prior ground simulations, and reduce the risk that architecture and mission planning is based on inaccurate assumptions," said Baulat in a NASA video interview. "One of the hardest parts of any planetary mission is to safely land on the surface. A robot on the surface controlled by crew in an orbiting or approaching vehicle can get a lot of the precursor exploration work done. A robot can be used, for example, to prepare a landing site, or it could scout for a clear area, make sure the ground is firm."

What Cassidy sees on his ISS video display is telemetry indicating the status of the rover's subsystems, position and heading and imagery of its surroundings. Stereo cameras on the rover and lidar/laser sensors are used to display the robot in a 3-D virtual setting for the astronaut operator.

The challenge for K-10's ISS teammate is a communications delay of a few seconds, which requires concentration by the astronaut and the use of a supervisory control function that commands the rover to carry out pre-programmed tasks and avoid surface hazards. A distant astronaut -- the role Cassidy is playing -- would be poised to take over control, for instance, if the rover has difficulty moving around an obstacle or fails to gather the assigned data.

"We want to see how a person in weightlessness reacts to this system. We have done a lot of work with it on the ground, but we have never done any kind of testing in space," explained Baulat. "We are going to analyze the data to see how well our system works, where we can improve -- where are the gaps in current technology? In other words, what new technologies do we need?"

Cool Flames: Playing With Balls of Space Fire

Ian O'Neill - Discovery News

Making fire was a fundamental evolutionary step for our civilization, so you'd think that we'd totally understand the phenomenon inside and out by now. But, as experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) are proving, fire is a very different and mysterious creature when it burns in a microgravity environment.

Usually, flames in the presence of gravity (i.e. on Earth) form under complex chemical reactions. But gravity ensures that the flame on a candle, say, forms a 'droplet' shape — hot air rises, pulling in cool air behind it, shaping the flame. But in the absence a strong gravitational field — like the microgravity environment in the ISS — fire transforms into a very alien configuration.

"In microgravity, flames burn differently — they form little spheres," said Forman A. Williams, a professor of physics at UC San Diego, in a fascinating NASA Science article published today (June 18).

During experiments on the orbiting outpost, these small burning spheres were created inside the Flame Extinguishment-2 (FLEX-2) instrument using the highly flammable liquid hydrocarbon heptane. When ignited, a hot flame surrounded the droplet, burning at a temperature of between 1,500K and 2,000K.

On Earth, a flame will burn in the presence of oxygen, growing rapidly to "suck up" as much oxygen as possible. But the microgravity environment inside FLEX-2 promotes an entirely different kind of flame behavior. After ignition, the oxygen and heptane fuel combine in a narrow zone at the surface of the sphere where it burns. Rather than hungrily expanding to pull in oxygen like its terrestrial counterpart, the microgravity flame stays put, burning as oxygen flows toward it.

As explained by NASA: "Flaming spheres on the ISS turn out to be wonderful mini-labs for combustion research."

But a surprise was in store for the FLEX-2 scientists.

During a recent experiment inside FLEX-2, the flame of the burning heptane was extinguished, but to the team's surprise, the droplet of fuel continued to burn. It was burning without a visible flame.

"That's right—they seemed to be burning without flames," says Williams. "At first we didn't believe it ourselves."

Actually, as it turns out, there was a flame, but it was a very cool flame — a totally unexpected regime of burning never before realized in space. "Cool flames burn at the relatively low temperature of 500K to 800K," says Williams. "And their chemistry is completely different. Normal flames produce soot, CO2 and water. Cool flames produce carbon monoxide and formaldehyde."

Attempts to create cool flames on Earth have failed; they flicker and go out before they have a chance to take hold. Cool flames have also been researched by the automobile industry in the hope of developing a cleaner auto ignition, for example. These ISS experiments could help the industry with their quest for non-polluting ignition technologies.

Fire still holds a primeval fascination over the human psyche, but watching the balls of fire burn in space adds a very alien twist to what should be a familiar phenomenon.

Cold balls of flame light up International Space Station
Keep Calm: Bright sparks, not aliens, set this fire

Simon Sharwood - The Register (UK)

At first glance, lighting a fire on the International Space Station (ISS) seems like a good way to earn a Darwin Award and the opprobrium of all humanity. Yet boffins have been doing it for some time in an effort to learn more about how flames behave.

Interestingly, is the answer from NASA, which today offered a look at some ISS fire experiments that have found fires lit in microgravity don't form the familiar forked tongues we see on earth, but instead dimly-glowing spheres that aren't nearly as hot to the touch as earthly flames.

These cool fires can also burn fuel without producing visible flames. The chemical reactions involved are "completely different," Dr Forman A Williams, a professor of physics at UC San Diego and one of the boffins involved in the FLEX experiment that studies flames on the ISS, told NASA. "Normal flames produce soot, CO2 and water. Cool flames produce carbon monoxide and formaldehyde."

It's possible to figure this stuff out because, the FLEX project says "In the absence of gravity, small droplets of fuel burn 'one-dimensionally', which … allows the science team to easily measure and understand important features of the burning fuel that would otherwise be impossible to obtain on the ground."

"This particular type of flame configuration allows measurement and observation of very complex interactions in a spherically one-dimensional system, providing insights into the behavior of combustion phenomena that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in multi-dimensional systems that are typically found in most 1-g fires."

The results described above have boffins excited that if we make terrestrial fires behave like fires in space, it could make for more efficient internal combustion engines. Gaining knowledge to improve spacecraft safety is another hoped-for outcome.

The rather saccharine video below offers more detail on the experiment and includes footage of the flames.

Space station crew opens Europe's Einstein cargo ship after fungus flap

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

It doesn't take an Einstein to see that international differences can still crop up on the final frontier: Take the case of the European Space Agency's Einstein cargo craft, for example. Russian concerns about some potentially moldy cargo bags caused a holdup in the schedule for unloading seven tons of supplies.

The Albert Einstein Automated Transfer Vehicle linked up with the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering a payload that included scientific experiments, clothing, spare parts and an assortment of European-style goodies such as tiramisu and lasagne.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano couldn't wait to get at the cargo. "There is nothing like the promise of an Italian dinner that I will offer from my personal supply to entice my colleagues to work quickly and well!" he wrote on his blog.

It took longer than expected to start the job, however. A source at ESA told NBC News that the Russians were dissatisfied with the decontamination procedures as they applied to some bags of NASA gear in the shipment. That report was confirmed in NASA's daily status report for the space station, which said that "Russian management expressed concerns with suspected microbial growth on some of the cargo bags in the vehicle."

As a result, the hatch opening was delayed for a day while NASA and the Russians worked out the logistics for wiping down the bags with fungicide. Mission managers agreed to have the crew disinfect 21 cargo bags for possible mold, and Parmitano was finally given the go-ahead to open the hatch early Tuesday.

Fungi and other microbes are a real gross-out in orbit: All sorts of "microbeasties," including several dozen species of bacteria and fungi, were found on Russia's Mir space station in its latter years. The International Space Station hasn't been immune from mold, either: Here's a particularly yucky picture of a panel where space station astronauts hung their exercise clothes to dry.

NBC News space analyst James Oberg, who has been following the fungus ruckus over the past couple of days, says the tiff may have had more to do with how the original decontamination procedures were documented — but in any case, the snag reinforces a bigger lesson about the space effort's safety culture.

"It's a well-established principle of spaceflight safety that, under uncertainty, you don't 'assume the best,' you make sure the worst cannot be true," Oberg said. "And if you're not sure you decontaminated these items to rigorous standards, then you do it again, to make sure."

Buon appetito, Luca!

Aerojet, Kuznetsov To Restart NK-33 Rocket Motor Production

Amy Butler - Aviation Week

The newly formed Aerojet Rocketdyne is crafting a plan with the Russian Kuznetsov Design Bureau to restart production of the NK-33 rocket engine to assuage concerns from NASA that enough propulsion systems will be available for missions planned to resupply the International Space Station.

NK-33s overhauled by Aerojet, designated the AJ-26, are used to power Orbital Sciences' new Antares medium-lift rocket for upcoming NASA Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) missions; Orbital also is trying to re-ignite a market for smaller military satellites by offering the Antares as an alternative to building large satellites for use exclusively on the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles managed by the United Launch Alliance. NASA is requiring that Orbital use an engine in production to power the Antares, and the NK-33 has long been out of production. Aerojet previously purchased 43 of the NK-33 engines from Kuznetsov to overhaul into AJ-26s as needed for missions.

Under its CRS-1 contract with NASA, Aerojet is overhauling 20 NK-33s for use on Antares. The motors have experienced stress and corrosion, which are addressed through the overhaul process.

At issue is concern from NASA that there may not be enough suitable engines to support CRS-2, which would require 20 more.

NASA, however, has requested that Orbital seek a production source for its Antares propulsion system. Aerojet Rocketdyne President Warren Boley is in talks with Kuznetsov to begin delivering new NK-33s in late 2016, he told reporters during a June 17 roundtable at the Paris air show. The total production rate depends on the demand for Antares, but Boley says it is likely to be at least 4-6 engines annually.

The strategy is to use the new engines for deliveries to Antares and use the remaining 23 engines requiring overhaul as a "buffer" if problems arise in restarting the production process, Boley says.

A signed deal with Orbital is needed in the fall to begin deliveries in late 2016.

Meanwhile, Orbital Sciences could use the Russian RD-180 engine, but it is currently sold exclusively in the American market to the United Launch Alliance for use on the Atlas V Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle.

Sparked by Orbital's complaints, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether ULA's exclusive arrangement with the Russian RD Amross, a U.S.-Russian joint venture crafted for sale of the RD-180, violates U.S. antitrust laws.

Boley says another option for Orbital would be to purchase another product made by RD-180 maker NPO Energomash, such as the RD-191. The RD-191 is the propulsion system used by Russia's Angara rocket.

In a conference call with reporters June 18, Boley said the Russian government has not cleared the new U.S. company for the joint venture with Energomash, calling government approval the "long pole in the tent." He expects approval in the coming months as part of a "second phase of this acquisition."

Kuznetsov is willing to restart the NK-33 line to give Orbital a production source of existing engines for the Antares, he says, so the antitrust issue with ULA on the RD-180 could go away.

Russian Space Center in Kazakhstan Counts Down Its Days of Glory

Andrew Kramer – New York Times

On a sultry desert evening, as bats fluttered about this town's riverfront park, a man emerged from a reedy marsh carrying a bundle of grass tied with twine.

Setting it down to brush himself off, he explained that he was keeping a calf in the courtyard of an apartment building across town, where he had settled in recently after the previous occupants, engineers with the Russian space program, moved out.

Baikonur, in remote western Kazakhstan, was once the pride of the Soviet Union, the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launching site of Sputnik, the dog Laika and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. But today, nomadic herders from the nearby steppe are moving into abandoned buildings.

That is just one of the signs of the city's long fade into the sunset of post-Soviet social and economic problems, which are all the more remarkable given that much of the world, including the United States, still relies on Baikonur for manned space launchings. The only other site for such liftoffs is in Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert in China.

"It's painful for me to think of my town," Anna Khodakovskaya, the editor of the local newspaper, said of its glum state. The first cellphones appeared here in 2004; the first M.R.I. machine in 2011. "We are not ahead of the planet in anything but space," she said.

Today 70 percent of Baikonur's residents are Kazakh citizens, but the town remains a Russian enclave rented from the Kazakh government and administered under Russian jurisdiction. At the time of the Soviet breakup, the ratios were reversed: it was only about one-third Kazakh.

Along with the squatting herders, day laborers and market traders stroll the streets, with only the occasional aging Russian engineer visible.

It is a dusty town, where many sidewalks are sandy tracks but nearly every building is decorated with a mosaic of a rocket, a spacewalking cosmonaut or stars and fanciful renderings of planets. In fountains, water bubbles from spouts shaped like rockets, and signed portraits of astronauts adorn the walls of cafes, where coffee is served in the Turkish style with grounds in the cup.

It is a loose end from the breakup of the Soviet Union that has, strangely, become extraordinarily important for every manned space program except China's.

NASA last month extended the contract for astronaut launchings for a year, until mid-2017, for an additional $424 million. For now, every American astronaut blasts off from this town, the stand-in for Cape Canaveral during a gap in funding for manned missions in the United States.

Because of this dependency, NASA now requires all its astronauts in training to achieve proficiency in Russian before graduating to the astronaut corps.

The space agencies of the European Union, Japan and Canada also launch from here on Russian rockets, under an agreement with NASA to repurchase about half of the six seats NASA buys annually from the Russians.

From all this, Baikonur may sound like a prosperous hub of space activity. But the state of affairs is only temporary — every nation including Russia, which is building a replacement launchpad on its own territory in the Far East, called Vostochny, views this state of affairs as temporary. As a result, the city of Baikonur has been ignored, and it is falling apart.

"Russia will not be able to roll up the roads and take them away when it leaves," Ms. Khodakovskaya said.

Social problems typical of Central Asia today, like abuse of heroin smuggled from Afghanistan, labor migration and growing Islamic fundamentalism, are creeping into the city. A few years back, the police arrested men in Tura-Tam, a Kazakh village just outside Baikonur's guarded fence, for distributing leaflets for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist Islamic group.

The town is a low boil of ethnic tension, too, as Russians hold nearly all the high-paying space jobs. In 2011, young Kazakh men ran in a mass down a central street yelling, "The head is a dog," a reference to the Russian mayor.

At the outdoor market, behind heaps of apricots and tomatoes, traders flash gold-toothed smiles and hawk Central Asian pottery glazed with crudely drawn rockets, or the smiling face of Yuri Gagarin in a helmet. Flies sampled the savory pies of mutton and pumpkin on display.

Before space missions, NASA astronauts and administrators stay at an upscale hotel on the edge of town, where the cheapest room is about $340 a night, rarely venturing into the town.

NASA's interlude here is surreal, to be sure, though the United States has had gaps in its ability to reach space before: from the end of the Apollo program in 1975 until the first shuttle mission in 1981, and after both shuttle disasters.

"We have always been treated with tremendous hospitality under difficult logistical circumstances," Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, said in an interview here before the launching of an American astronaut, Karen L. Nyberg, last month. "We are in a transition period right now, and we are hoping the transition is a short one."

American astronauts ride a bus to the Russian rockets over a rutted, bumpy road where camels graze on the shoulders; nobody bothers to fill the potholes.

Even President Vladimir V. Putin, in a speech on Cosmonaut Day on April 12, referred to Baikonur as "physically aged."

"These people are putting up rockets, but the town itself is like a third-world country," said Jene Ragan, a software engineer from Bethesda, Md., who came as a tourist to watch a liftoff in May, swatting at flying ants out on the steppe while watching the rollout of a rocket.

Alarmed at the state of Baikonur, the head of Kazakhstan's space agency, Talgat Musabayev, in December suggested canceling the rental agreement with Russia; Kazakhstan charges Russia $115 million a year for the town. "The agreement has run its course," Mr. Musabayev said.

The Kazakhs bristle at Russia's efforts to keep Kazakh squatters out of abandoned buildings, which are formally Kazakh property, noting the housing shortage in the region. They complain of debris falling on their territory from jettisoned rocket stages.

In response, the Russians threatened to simply pull out entirely in 2018 when Vostochny is ready for manned launchings, Izvestia reported.

NASA's New Class of Astronauts Gives Parity to Men and Women

Katie Hiler - New York Times

One flies a fighter jet for the Marines. Another is an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. A third is a helicopter pilot for the Army. And the fourth leads the station in American Samoa of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

They are the four women in NASA's latest class of astronaut trainees, which also includes four men. The eight recruits — the first NASA has named in four years, and the first group to include equal numbers of men and women — were selected from 6,300 applicants and will start training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in August, the space agency said Monday.

If all goes well after a few years of training, one or more might be selected for a stint at the International Space Station, or — eventually — for a trip to an asteroid or Mars, places that NASA eventually hopes to visit.

"It's just so surreal that this moment has arrived," said Anne C. McClain, 34, the helicopter pilot, who is from Spokane, Wash., and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. "I truly don't remember ever wanting to be something else."

She and the other recruits spoke in prerecorded video introductions that NASA shared as part of an online video conference. The agency did not make the trainees available for interviews.

NASA said that the new class, the agency's 21st, was the smallest group to date, chosen after a year-and-a-half search from the largest applicant pool since 1978. Only 120 applicants were invited to come to the Johnson Space Center, where they underwent initial medical evaluations and an hour interview with the selection board. Forty-nine candidates were invited back for a second round of interviews as well as language aptitude tests, psychological evaluations and mechanical skills assessments.

Of the eight who were finally selected, five come from branches of the military and many of them hold multiple advanced degrees in physics, engineering, biology and medicine. Those who make it through two years of intense training will join NASA's existing corps of 49 astronauts, down from a peak of 149 in 2000. And the newcomers may then have to wait up to 10 years before their first spaceflight.

"With a smaller astronaut corps, fewer people in the office now, each person needs to have as diverse a background as possible," Janet Kavandi, director of flight crew operations at Johnson Space Center, said during the online video hosted on Google+ Hangout. "So we tried to work hard to make sure that the eight people we got had a broad spectrum of experiences."

The new class also has the highest percentage of female candidates, which NASA said was not intentional.

"I think it's actually just a reflection of how many really talented women are in science and engineering these days," said Kathleen Rubins, a NASA astronaut from the class of 2009, in a telephone interview. "They're folks that have technical expertise in their chosen field, but they also bring a whole lot to the table" in their determination and ability to thrive under pressure.

The number of astronauts has dwindled along with the number of human space missions. NASA retired its space shuttle program two years ago, and has been booking space for American astronauts on Russian Soyuz capsules since then. But commercial spaceflight companies are now preparing to resume piloted American rocket launchings, ideally in 2017, according to the goal date by NASA, which has supported the private efforts.

The eight new astronaut candidates will compete to be among "the first to launch from U.S. soil on commercial American spacecraft since the retirement of the space shuttle," NASA said in its announcement.

In addition to Ms. McClain, the women of the class of 2013 include Christina M. Hammock, 34, the NOAA station chief, of Jacksonville, N.C.; Nicole Aunapu Mann, 35, the fighter pilot and a Marine Corps major, of Penngrove, Calif.; and Jessica U. Meir, 35, of Caribou, Me., and Harvard Medical School.

The four men are: Josh A. Cassada, 39, a physicist and former naval aviator from White Bear Lake, Minn.; Victor J. Glover, 37, a pilot and lieutenant commander in the Navy from Pomona, Calif., and Prosper, Tex.; Tyler N. Hague, 37, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, of Hoxie, Kan.; and Andrew R. Morgan, 37, a physician and an Army major, of New Castle, Pa.

Astronaut trainee takes life to extremes in her research
Harvard biologist has studied how animals adapt to harsh environments

Alyssa Botelho - Boston Globe

Biologist Jessica U. Meir has devoted her life to studying animals that thrive in Earth's most extreme environments, hoping to unlock the secrets of high-flying geese that soar over Mount Everest and emperor penguins that dive thousands of feet under the Antarctic ice.

But all the while, the 35-year-old Meir has hoped, too, that she would have a chance to explore the most extreme environment of them all: outer space.

This week, Meir, an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, has at last found her chance to travel to the final frontier as she joins the ranks of NASA's newest class of potential astronauts. She was one of eight astronaut trainees selected by NASA from more than 6,000 applicants, the second-largest pool ever.

"This has been my dream since I was 5 years old," said Meir, a native of Caribou, Maine, who attended space camp as an adolescent. The first time she applied to be an astronaut, in 2009, she made it to the final round before being cut. Three years later, she decided to try again.

"In the back of my mind, I thought this might be the very last time I applied," Meir said. "It feels incredibly surreal that this happened. I'm in shock."

If Meir and her colleagues successfully complete their two-year training program, they will become official US astronauts and may have the chance to fly in the first human missions to an asteroid in the 2020s and to Mars in the following decade.

They could also be among the first to launch from US soil on commercial American spacecraft, because of the retirement of the Columbia space shuttle in 2011.

"These new space explorers asked to join NASA because they know we're doing big, bold things here, developing missions to go farther into space than ever before," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a prepared statement.

Meir is a comparative physiologist, a scientist who studies how different species are exquisitely adapted to survive in their environments. At the Anesthesia Center for Critical Care Research at MGH, she studies how Weddell seals and bar-headed geese thrive in oxygen-depleted habitats such as the sea and the upper atmosphere.

"This kind of research is also valuable in understanding the effect of long-duration space travel on the human body," Meir said. Astronauts living in space undergo tests to check for bone loss, muscle atrophy, and changes in heart and breathing activity, all potential effects of living in a zero-gravity environment.

"Traveling to an asteroid or to Mars, how will that affect human physiology? Answering that question will be a critical part of making our next missions successful," she said.

Meir, like her colleagues, will have to leave behind her current career to pursue space flight, with no guarantee that she will ever clamber aboard a spacecraft.

But she says that being an astronaut will combine intellectual and physical challenge in the same way that her work as a biologist does.

For example, she has gone scuba diving far under the Antarctic ice to collect data on the diving behavior of the penguins and seals.

"These are the kinds of challenges that make me happiest, and they are the same for an astronaut," she said.

Meir added that her parents are accustomed to her "out of the ordinary" interests.

"They're used to me being the one who does crazy things like jumping out of airplanes, skydiving," she said.

Meir studied biology at Brown University and received her doctorate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was at Scripps where her work was noted by Harvard Medical School anesthesiology professor Warren Zapol.

"Jessica found ways of solving incredibly interesting and difficult questions about spectacular creatures on our Earth," Zapol wrote in an e-mail from Uganda, where he is working on a clinical trial.

While she pursued biology, Meir was also preparing for life as a space explorer. She received an advanced degree in space studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and worked toward her pilot's license.

"I can't imagine a better job for Jessica than making space voyages safe for human interplanetary travelers," Zapol wrote.

The announcement of the eight 2013 appointees came on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the launch of the first US woman in space, Sally Ride, who died last summer. Meir is one of four women, the highest proportion of female trainees in a class ever selected by NASA.

The other women are a helicopter pilot, a major in the US Marine Corps, and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. All four men have military backgrounds.

Meir will report for duty in August at Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, she and her colleagues will begin a two-year program that includes learning how to operate robots, military flight instruction, and survival training.

If they successfully complete the program, the eight candidates will join the ranks of 49 current NASA astronauts, and perhaps have a chance to fly.

"You have to be patient, because now we have fewer flight opportunities." Meir said. "But as everyone says, it's incredibly worth it."

Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong: Space icons get new round of remembrance

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

Almost a year after their deaths, NASA is paying renewed tribute this week to Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, as well as to Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon.

Ride's day in the spotlight came on Tuesday, for a simple reason: It's been 30 years since her history-making flight on June 18, 1983. Thousands thronged to the shuttle Challenger's launch, wearing T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with the slogan "Ride, Sally, Ride."

"I didn't really think about it that much at the time ... but I came to appreciate what an honor it was to be selected to be the first to get a chance to go to space," she said during an interview timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the flight in 2008.

If she were alive today, she'd probably appreciate the honor even more: Sunday marked 50 years since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. And on Monday, NASA named a new class of astronauts that included as many women as men — which is a first for the space agency.

After her celebrated ride on the STS-7 mission, Ride went on to a successful career as a physicist and educator. She passed away in July at the age of 61, after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer — but the educational organization she founded, Sally Ride Science, keeps her legacy alive to this day.

To mark the 30th anniversary of Ride's launch, NASA TV aired two tributes on Tuesday night: A look back at STS-7, titled "Sally Ride: A Ride to Remember," and "Sally Ride: How Her Mission Opened Doors," a program that was recorded at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

Thursday is this week's big day for Neil Armstrong: The most famous of NASA's moonwalkers passed away last August at the age of 82, after suffering heart problems. He made history on July 20, 1969, when he left those first footprints on the moon's surface during the Apollo 11 mission. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong declared.

Since his death, Armstrong has been memorialized in his native Ohio, at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and at Washington Cathedral. Thursday's ceremony is set in a different locale: Johnson Space Center in Texas, where Armstrong spent years practicing for his date with history.

Among those paying tribute will be Armstrong's Apollo 11 crewmates, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins; Ellen Ochoa, director of Johnson Space Center; family members and longtime associates.

The memorial service begins at 11 a.m. ET (10 a.m. CT), with a tree dedication ceremony at the center's Memorial Tree Grove following the service. Live video will be streamed via NASA TV.

The stream of honors won't end this week, for Armstrong or for Ride: President Barack Obama is awarding Ride the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, in honor of her achievements in space as well as in education. Meanwhile, Congress is considering a plan to put Armstrong's name on Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

This weekend's supermoon provides a prime opportunity to pay tribute to Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong. When you look at that big full moon, just remember there's a "little corner" of the lunar surface that's named after Ride. As for Armstrong, here's what the moonwalker's family said last year: "For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down on you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink."

The U.S. Government Wants Your Input on Human Spaceflight

Jeffrey Marlow - Wired.com

What good is human spaceflight?

This is the question being posed by the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) on behalf of The National Academies, and they want your answers.

For the last 45 years, ASEB has tackled significant issues affecting space policy, taking the public's temperature and compiling stakeholders' testimonies. These various viewpoints are distilled into an official document, which is circulated among policymakers and often taken as the authoritative guide on the issue at hand.

Now, ASEB is considering the fate of human spaceflight in the run-up to a report that could significantly impact NASA's strategic mission. According to the official call for input, "this study will review the long-term goals, core capabilities, and direction of the U.S. human spaceflight program and make recommendations to enable a sustainable U.S. human spaceflight program."

Submissions, which have a four-page limit, should answer three guiding questions:

What are the important benefits provided to the United States and other countries by human spaceflight endeavors?
What are the greatest challenges to sustaining a U.S. government program in human spaceflight?
What are the ramifications and what would the nation and world lose if the United States terminated NASA's human spaceflight program?

Given the rapid rise of private spaceflight capabilities in recent years, the shifting roles and long-term prognosis of government and corporate participants will likely be a central component of the ASEB's final report.

The pro and con sides of the human spaceflight debate have traditionally been separated by a substantial passion gap. Those in favor are often strongly in favor, with vociferous and often lengthy arguments invoking galactic-scale journeys, new trillion-dollar industries, and the very notion of what it means to be human. Those opposed tend to shrug their shoulders while pointing out potential alternative uses for the funds.

Already, 22 submissions have been uploaded and are available for view. Harrison Schmitt, the last man to walk on the Moon and a former Senator, encourages a return to the Bush-era Constellation program and the commercialization of Helium-3. Renowned Lunar scientist Paul Spudis makes the case, unsurprisingly, for a return to the Moon, emphasizing the effectiveness of human-robot interaction. A submission from one "Aguilar Alfredo A Jr" offers only a grainy, blue-tinted image; the summary claims, "No this is not a joke" – one of those phrases that always seems to suggest the exact opposite.

But on balance, the submissions are thoughtful and well-reasoned. Spudis sums up the challenge of sustaining a human spaceflight program succinctly:

"Although it is tempting to ascribe the cause of our current space malaise to a lack of funding, in fact the problem is more fundamental – it is a failure of to fully understand exactly what we are trying to accomplish and why."

So give it your best shot, and share your own revelations about human spaceflight by July 9th. With any luck, you might find yourself getting a follow-up call from a Senator.

Asteroid redirect mission: impossible?

Joel Achenbach - Washington Post (Viewpoint)

Here's my story, posted at midnight last night, about NASA's new Grand Challenge, which is to find all the dangerous asteroids out there and figure out what to do about them. Basically the government wants help in finding near-Earth space rocks, and is turning to the global space community, including academics, backyard astronomers and other "citizen scientists."

A bunch of the top NASA officials took the stage in the auditorium at HQ Tuesday morning to discuss this new Grand Challenge and the much-hyped Asteroid Redirect Mission. NASA wants to capture a small asteroid and put it in a high orbit around the moon, then visit it with astronauts in the early 2020s. The problem is that, although there are untold thousands of near-Earth asteroids out there, few are astrodynamically attractive.

Gosh I love saying that, so let me say it again: Few are astrodynamically attractive.

Their orbits are too eccentric, or too hard to pin down, or they're just going too dang fast relative to the Earth. This mission needs a rock that's going less than 2km per second relative to the Earth. And it can't be spinning too fast. And ideally it wouldn't be a pile of rubble, but would be carbonaceous, a primordial rock from the birth of the solar system, and full of interesting clues about how the Earth formed and became habitable.

The small rocks needed for this mission (under 10 meters in diameter) are the hardest ones to see. You might get a glimpse of one, but at first glance it's hard to know much about it, such as the spin rate and the composition and even the size (for that you need to know the albedo).

So as NASA asks for help in finding killer rocks it is also hoping to get some help in understanding the small-asteroid population out there as it continues to look for the perfect target for the redirect mission.

What we heard today is that there's a potential variation on the redirect mission that would eliminate the problem of finding a small rock in the perfect orbit and with the perfect characteristics. Instead, a robotic craft could go to a known, big, well-understood asteroid, and break off a chunk. In fact, NASA already has a sample-return mission planned, called OSIRIS-REx, in which a spacecraft will obtain a small amount of material from the asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth. Presumably obtaining a sample from a well-characterized, easy-to-study, big asteroid would be easier than trying to latch onto a small, spinning rock of largely unknown characteristics. The robotic craft could then take the sample — which might be only a few feet across — back to lunar orbit to be visited by astronauts.

Of course, one might ask, gently, whether any of this will actually happen.

Stay tuned and I'll try to answer that in the weeks ahead.

Curiosity's Radiation Results

Robert Zubrin - Space News (Opinion)

(Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics and the Mars Society and the author of "The Case for Mars." His latest work, "Mars Direct: Space Exploration, The Red Planet, and the Human Future," was recently published by Penguin.)

Last month, the investigators on the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument aboard NASA's Curiosity rover announced some of their findings. According to the scientists, the RAD measurements indicate that the crew of a human Mars expedition using present-day propulsion technology (six-month transits each way, 18 months on the surface) would receive a round-trip radiation dose of about 0.6 Sievert (Sv), or 60 rem (1 Sv = 100 rem.)

This result was not surprising. In fact it was entirely consistent with the data reported by many of the same scientists using the Mars Radiation Environment Experiment, or Marie, onboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft during its outbound cruise to Mars in 2001, or estimates published by me in "The Case for Mars" in 1996, based on models developed still earlier by Viking scientist Ben Clark.

What was new, however, was that NASA headquarters chose to represent these predictable results as dramatic findings presenting a show-stopper for human Mars exploration. "The findings, which are published in the May 31 edition of the journal Science, indicate radiation exposure for human explorers could exceed NASA's career limit for astronauts if current propulsion systems are used," the official release stated. "Exposure to a dose of 1 Sv, accumulated over time, is associated with a 5 percent increase in risk for developing fatal cancer. NASA has established a 3 percent increased risk of fatal cancer as an acceptable career limit for its astronauts currently operating in low-Earth orbit."

Thus, with an estimated mission dose of 0.6 Sieverts, the risk would be 3 percent, right up against the limit that NASA has devised for itself. Therefore, in compliance with its own regulations, the agency's leadership is allegedly justified in avoiding the challenge of human Mars exploration, at least until such time as radical advanced propulsion systems capable of much faster interplanetary transits become available. They will let us know just as soon as that happens. In the meantime, we should all be content with a human spaceflight program that continues to spend billions of dollars every year for the foreseeable future in order to go nowhere.

This argument is irrational for several reasons.

In the first place, the 3 percent risk estimated for the 60 rem dose is overstated. The most comprehensive and authoritative study of radiation risk to humans is "The Effects on Populations of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation," published by the Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (and therefore known as the BEIR report) of the National Academy of Sciences in 1972. According to its Summary and Conclusions, "Cancer induction is considered to be the only source of somatic risk that needs to be taken into account in setting radiation protection standards for the general population. ... In these populations, the excess mortality from all forms of cancer corresponds to roughly 50-165 deaths per million persons per rem during the first 25-27 years after irradiation."

That is, if we take the extreme high end of the BEIR vulnerability estimate, 165 deaths per million person-rem, a dose of 60 rem would represent a 1 percent probability of contracting a fatal cancer sometime in the following quarter-century.

Furthermore, it must also be noted (as the BEIR report itself does) that the BEIR risk estimates themselves are extremely conservative and undoubtedly overstated, because they are based on the "linear hypothesis" that posits equal risk to small doses accumulated over time to large doses taken all at once. This is clearly false. For example, a person can drink a glass of wine every night for a year without harmful effect, but drinking 100 glasses (let alone 365) in one night would be fatal. Yet, based on the linear hypothesis, one would falsely predict a 1 percent chance of death from a single glass. The linear hypothesis makes the same wild error in purposely overestimating radiation risk. Yet even so, using that method, the upper end of the BEIR report places Mars mission radiation induced cancer risk at 1 percent.

In the second place, even if one were to stipulate to a much greater degree of risk associated with a given radiation dose, the NASA leaders' argument for remaining parked in low Earth orbit makes no sense because they are already exposing astronauts to cosmic radiation there. That is, the interplanetary radiation dose rates measured by RAD and Marie are a factor of two higher than those astronauts currently receive on the international space station (ISS). But the ISS is manned constantly, while a Mars mission would spend only about 40 percent of its time in transit, with the other 60 percent being spent on Mars where plenty of shielding material is available. So assuming crews of equal size, the crews of the ISS over the next 10 years would collectively receive the same cumulative total radiation dose, and thus incur the same risk of a cancer fatality, as would the crews of five human Mars missions launched at every biennial opportunity over the same period.

As a third point, we note that the strategy of delaying human Mars exploration until faster space transportation becomes available is disingenuous, because none is on the way. The claims made by the Ad Astra Rocket Co. that its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) could enable 39-day Mars transits are nonsensical, because they are based on the hypothetical availability of impossible space nuclear electric power systems simultaneously 10,000 times as large and 100 times lighter than any that have ever been built, and NASA has no program to build space nuclear electric power reactors of any type, regardless. Nuclear thermal rockets could enable four-month Mars transits, but NASA is not working on them either. Four-month transits could also be achieved with chemical propulsion simply by adding on more stages, but in that case overall mission safety would be much better served by using the increased propulsive capability to add more payload while keeping the transit time to six months. In fact, regardless of the propulsion system the six-month outbound transit is best for safety because it is the trajectory that uniquely provides a two-year free return to Earth without any need to loop into the hot inner solar system. If you try to fly to Mars faster, that critical mission safety feature is lost.

Finally, it must be said that the notion that stalling the human spaceflight program in low Earth orbit to avoid crew risk on meaningful exploration missions is a responsible humanitarian position is fundamentally flawed. This is so not only because it immorally degrades astronauts from explorers to guinea pigs, imposing risks on them as research subjects for others while preventing them from achieving purposes worthy of their courage. It is also so because the human spaceflight program costs a lot of money. If the goal is not space exploration but lifesaving, that money could be much better spent elsewhere.

For example, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration saves a life for every $3 million it spends on its repair operations. At funding levels on the order of $6 billion per year, the human spaceflight program is consuming funds that could otherwise save 2,000 lives per year. That is the cost of the enterprise we are engaged in. Conducted at such staggering cost, the human spaceflight program really needs to deliver. Only by opening of the solar system to humanity can the program stand worthy of such a price. For the space agency to continue to demand such sacrifice on the part of the public while refusing to do what is necessary to achieve its mission is morally indefensible.

If we are to have a human spaceflight program, it needs to go somewhere. NASA's leaders should not be seeking excuses not to.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - June 19, 2013 and JSC Today

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