Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: July 30, 2013 6:38:54 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - July 30, 2013

Main difference is an update on the EVA suit leak. Hope to see you Thursday at Hibachi Grill for the retirees luncheon.

Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday – July 30, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

NASA suspects life-support pack in spacewalk emergency

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

NASA engineers are narrowing in on the cause of the dangerous spacesuit water leak that could have drowned Italy's first spacewalker, officials said Monday. Meanwhile, Luca Parmitano and crewmates aboard the International Space Station started unpacking a Russian space freighter that hauled up three tons of supplies and a spacesuit repair kit over the weekend. Engineers "are looking at what steps to take next, this week," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "They actually have isolated the failure to the spacesuit's Primary Life Support System, which is essentially the backpack of the suit."

Astronaut Drives Rover from Space Station

Mike Wall - Space.com

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station successfully operated a rover on Earth's surface Friday, helping lay the foundation for future human-robot partnerships that could push the boundaries of planetary exploration. While zipping around Earth several hundred miles above the planet's surface, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano drove a 220-pound (100 kilograms) rover across a moon-mimicking landscape here at NASA's Ames Research Center, even ordering the robot to deploy a simulated film-based radio telescope antenna. Friday's test was the second in a three-part series designed to help engineers and mission planners understand how the activities of humans and robots can be coordinated to maximize the reach and efficiency of planetary exploration missions.

NASA defends Space Launch System against charge it 'is draining the lifeblood' of space program

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA is defending its Space Launch System against a new analysis arguing that SLS is too expensive to fly and is "draining away the lifeblood - funding - of the space program." "I understand the premise of the article," NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Dan Dumbacher told al.com and The Huntsville Times in a July 23 interview, "but I think we need to realize there's a broader set of trades that really form up the decision process." Dumbacher referred to "Revisiting SLS/Orion launch costs" by John Strickland published July 15 on the website The Space Review.

Plan to Capture an Asteroid Runs Into Politics

Kenneth Chang – New York Times

It is known, informally, as the asteroid-lasso plan: NASA wants to launch an unmanned spacecraft in 2018 that would capture a small asteroid — maybe 7 to 10 yards wide — haul it closer to Earth, then send astronauts up to examine it, in 2021 or beyond. But the space agency has encountered a stubborn technical problem: Congressional Republicans. Normally, there is bipartisan support (or disapproval) in Congress for NASA's bolder plans, particularly when they involve human spaceflight. What squabbling does take place tends to pit lawmakers from states with big NASA presences, like Florida and Texas, against those with fewer vested interests. This month, however, the science committee in the Republican-controlled House voted to bar NASA from pursuing that faraway rock. In a straight party vote — 22 Republicans for, 17 Democrats against — the committee laid out a road map for NASA for the next three years that brushed aside the asteroid capture plan, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's agenda for space exploration.

NASA asks for help lassoing an asteroid, gets flooded with replies

Elizabeth Barber - Christian Science Monitor

NASA has received more than 400 responses to its Asteroid Grand Challenge, issued last month as part of the agency's ramped-up effort to build its asteroid-wrangling know-how before an Earth-bound asteroid is spotted. The response comes after NASA announced last month that it has identified about ten thousand Near Earth Objects, that is, asteroids and comets that come within 28 million miles of Earth's orbit. Just ten percent of those objects are large enough to causes substantial global damage to Earth – bigger than about 100 feet wide – and none of them are on an impact trajectory toward our planet.

Wanted: Space Tech Innovations for NASA's Future

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

Technological innovation isn't necessarily one size fits all for NASA.

NASA is working with private industry to craft new technological innovations that will help spacecraft travel to space more efficiently than ever before, but different missions have different needs, NASA chief Charles Bolden said Tuesday (July 23). "As the NASA administrator, I'm looking at everything," Bolden said of technology development at the space agency. "I'm greedy … but it depends on what we're talking about." For a future mission to an asteroid, Bolden is focused on creating a propulsion system that can get a NASA spacecraft to a space rock that could then be delivered into orbit around Earth.

S. Korea, NASA discuss space partnership

Lee Chi-dong - Yonhap News Agency

South Korea and the United States on Monday discussed ways to boost cooperation in aeronautics research and space exploration, the U.S. space agency said. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said its administrator, Charles Bolden, and Kim Seung-jo, president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, met at NASA's headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was their first meeting.

NASA, Korean space agency discuss cooperation

India Blooms News Service (IBNS)

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and the president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), Seung Jo Kim, met in Washington Monday to discuss collaboration in aeronautics research and space exploration, including KARI's robotic lunar mission and NASA's asteroid initiative. "Our two agencies share a mutual interest in aeronautics research, and have identified opportunities for collaboration," said Bolden. "We also have partnered for several years in the International Space Exploration Coordination Group and are looking forward to continued discussions on potential cooperation in space exploration." Bolden and Kim also discussed NASA's plans for a new asteroid initiative, previously announced in President Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. Kim welcomed the chance to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

US Lawmaker Seeks to Partner with Russia to Clean Up Space

RIA Novosti

A prominent US lawmaker and advocate of the United States' role in space told a conference on the commercialization of space that the US and Russia should team up for extraterrestrial projects -- and suggested they start by cleaning up the hundreds of thousands of pieces of manmade space litter and capturing and deflecting asteroids hurtling toward Earth. "Now that Russia is no longer a communist dictatorship and has been evolving in the right direction, we should reach out to them even more than we did in the past, along with our European allies, to have joint missions in space," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said by Skype to attendees at the New Space 2013 conference in San Jose, California this past weekend.

Alumna Karen Nyberg to deliver UND commencement speech from space

Tu-Uyen Tran - Grand Forks Herald

Astronaut and UND alumna Karen Nyberg, who's still orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station, will be the speaker at UND's summer commencement Friday, Aug. 2, the university announced Thursday. Her message will be recorded and delivered by NASA to UND.

Astronaut to deliver commencement speech at UND

KFGO Radio (Fargo)

The University of North Dakota says the keynote speaker at Friday's summer commencement will be astronaut and UND alum Karen Nyberg. Nyberg has been orbiting the earth in the International Space Station since May on a mission that will conclude this November. Nyberg's message will be recorded and delivered by NASA to UND. Even though Nyberg is 240 miles in space, she's following UND.

Richland man to travel to International Space Station

Selynn Barbour - Rolla Daily News (Missouri)

What does the lake area and NASA have in common? More than most might think. The next American astronaut in space is slated to be Mike Hopkins from Richland. His training, he said, began here and will soon propel him further than most humans have ever traveled. "There are a lot of benefits of growing up in a small community in Missouri. I think that sense of community, that sharing with each other, helping each other out are all important," Hopkins explained at a recent press conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. On Sept. 25, Hopkins will launch with two other cosmonauts — Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy — aboard a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Astronaut plans to bring leadership--and Japanese food--to space station

Akira Hatano - Asahi Shimbun

An astronaut who will become Japan's first commander aboard the International Space Station next year said he plans to spread a bit of Japanese culture in outer space. "I hope to exert my leadership in making the most of the high potential of our crew members," Koichi Wakata, 49, told a news conference on July 29 at the Tsukuba Space Center of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in this city northeast of Tokyo. He also said he wants to bring to the ISS such dishes as mackerel cooked with "miso" fermented soybean paste, which has already won the favor of the crew members.

Chris Hadfield On Going Viral In Space

Linda Wertheimer - National Public Radio

Chris Hadfield became a star as commander of the International Space Station, reaching out via social media to offer the public entertaining glimpses into life in orbit. Shortly after his return from the ISS, Hadfield announced his retirement from the Canadian Space Agency. Linda Wertheimer talks with Hadfield about his efforts to keep the public interested in space travel.

With the shuttle done, a co-founder of Microsoft sees an opening in space

Guy Gugliotta - Washington Post

Start with the largest aircraft ever built, with a wingspan longer than a football field and a split fuselage fitted with six Boeing 747 jet engines — enough thrust to get 1.3 million pounds off the ground, about 425,000 pounds more than a fully loaded 747. Sling a 120-foot, three-stage rocket below the aircraft, and when the plane reaches 30,000 feet, fire the rocket into space. Then the plane flies back to Earth. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen calls his newest venture Stratolaunch, a system designed to lift 13,500-pound payloads — satellites, science experiments, cargo and, eventually, humans — into low-Earth orbit, where the space shuttle used to fly and where the international space station still dwells. Construction of the aircraft is underway in California, with test flights planned for the end of 2016 and the first mission to occur in late 2017 or early 2018.

From outer space to the Olympics:
Russia to orbit torch, award meteor medals

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

Russia is injecting outer space into the 2014 Olympics — both literally and figuratively. The host nation for the next Winter Games will launch an Olympic torch on a spacewalk and embed meteorite fragments into a special set of gold medals. Scheduled for Feb. 7 through 23, 2014, in Sochi, Russia, the 22nd Winter Olympics will be preceded by a traditional torch relay to begin on Oct. 7. A total of 14,000 people will carry the torch from Moscow to Sochi, including Valentina Tereshkova, who 50 years ago became the first woman in space. On Nov. 7, a month into the torch relay with the flame still being run across Russia, an unlit Olympic torch will lift off with three new crew members for the International Space Station. Flying on Soyuz TMA-11M with Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, NASA astronaut Richard Mastracchio and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, the Olympic torch will be handed off to Expedition 38 commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazansky to be taken outside the orbiting laboratory during a spacewalk on Nov. 9.

DC Astronauts

Jim Handly - WRC TV (Washington)

News4's Jim Handly has the stories of three District men who were recently selected to NASA's newest class of astronauts. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

How do I become … an astronaut

Anna Tims - The Guardian (UK)

It is stressful orbiting space, so astronauts have to seize any opportunity for fun – and for Richard Searfoss, veteran of three space missions, that came from watching novices getting to grips with their weightlessness. "They tended to move around too quickly so they would float into walls and hit their heads," he says. "It was always fun to play jokes on them." A taste for teasing is one of the lesser known necessities for a stable space trip. "My philosophy when I became commander was that we have to take our work very seriously but not ourselves," says Searfoss, 57. "If you build a culture of fear of ever making a mistake, it is no good so you need a measure of humility."

NFL adopts new comprehensive concussion policy

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

The NFL is putting in place new protocol for real-time assessment and treatment of concussions, rules to protect players from repetitive, traumatic head injuries and long-term risk of neurological disorders, a player's association attorney said Thursday. The new rules cover all aspects of concussion assessment and treatment from initial diagnosis to protocols to be followed before a player returns to the field. The venue for the disclosure was an interesting one. Sansiveri was briefing a committee from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. The committee is examining ethics principles and guidelines for astronaut health and safety during human expeditions to the asteroids, the moon and Mars.

UTEP to become Commercial Space Exploration hub

Maria Cortes Gonzales - El Paso Times

The University of Texas at El Paso is partnering with Japan's Kyushu Institute of Technology (KyuTech), for collaborative research on advancing aerospace technologies. University officials signed the international agreement Monday which also will allow for faculty and student exchange programs. KyuTech has been historically funded by JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and plans to collaborate with the NASA University Research Center and Center for Space Exploration Technology Research at UTEP. The university plans to work with two nearby entities: Blue Origin and Spaceport America. Blue Origin, LLC, which has a launch and test facility in Van Horn, is an aerospace company that plans to develop technology to transport people to space using reusable launch vehicles.

The NASA approach to keeping employees engaged

Tom Fox – Washington Post

The end of the space shuttle program has created much uncertainty among workers at NASA as the organization charts new directions. Jeri Buchholz, NASA's chief human capital officer and assistant administrator for human capital management, has played a key role in communicating with the employees, developing the agency's workforce strategy and assessing its needs. Buchholz spoke about the NASA workforce and leadership issues with Tom Fox, a guest writer for On Leadership and vice president for leadership and innovation at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.

Belaboring the Obvious

Roger G. Harrison - Space News (Opinion)

(Harrison is publisher of the journal Space and Defense and a former director of the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies at the Air Force Academy)

Platinum miners in South Africa struck last year over job cuts and wage reductions. The strike turned violent, and 34 strikers and police were killed before tentative order was restored. While this was going on, two companies in the United States announced plans to mine for minerals, on asteroids. Popular Mechanics officially blessed the idea in its August issue. Along with these announcements came a graphic artist's conception of a monstrous device, all coiled girders and pipes, fastened like an intestinal fluke to some unidentified hunk of cosmic rock. It is a truism, of course, that graphic artists can put anything in space (not to mention in Popular Mechanics). But supposing it became reality, what could this wonderful machine suck through its umbilical that would amortize the cost of putting it there, with perhaps a little profit into the bargain? Platinum was mentioned, but would platinum pay? The experience of those South African miners has something to tell us about that.

The Inevitability of Extraterrestrial Mining

Dennis Wingo - Space News (Opinion)

(Wingo is chief executive of Skycorp Inc., a company focused on advanced technologies and systems for space exploration and commercial markets)

Let's begin with his ending: "The conclusion is inescapable, though liable to be escaped, i.e., that raw materials will never be mined in space and sold profitably within the atmosphere or anywhere else. ... Asteroids will continue unvexed in their obits, and the Moon too." I bring a different quote, from the book "Empire Express," the story of the intercontinental railroad, from U.S. Army Lt. Zebulon Pike, for whom Pike's Peak is named: "In various places there were tracts of many leagues, where the wind had thrown up sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean's rolling wave, and on which not a spear of vegetable matter existed." Pike's visions of sand dunes, pathless wastes and sterile soils were reported, widely read and faithfully believed by geographers.
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COMPLETE STORIES

NASA suspects life-support pack in spacewalk emergency

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

NASA engineers are narrowing in on the cause of the dangerous spacesuit water leak that could have drowned Italy's first spacewalker, officials said Monday.

Meanwhile, Luca Parmitano and crewmates aboard the International Space Station started unpacking a Russian space freighter that hauled up three tons of supplies and a spacesuit repair kit over the weekend.

Engineers "are looking at what steps to take next, this week," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "They actually have isolated the failure to the spacesuit's Primary Life Support System, which is essentially the backpack of the suit."

NASA last week launched a formal investigation into the July 16 close call outside the International Space Station.

About an hour into the planned six-hour, 15-minute spacewalk, Parmitano reported water leaking into his helmet, at the back of his head. The leak was not initially considered an emergency. But when flowing water clogged his ears, and covered his eyes and mouth, Mission Control aborted the spacewalk.

Parmitano and American astronaut Chris Cassidy were told to return to the relative safety of the station's U.S. Quest airlock. Parmitano made his way there by memory.

NASA Spacewalk Flight Director David Korth called it "grace under pressure."

Engineers initially thought the leak — which dumped 1- to 1.5 liters of water into Parmitano's bubble-like helmet — must have come from an in-suit drinking water bag.
Then, the tubing that routes cooling water through his form-fitting undergarment was thought to be the culprit.

Investigators now are focusing on parts inside the spacewalker's backpack, which houses its primary life support system. Of interest: a sublimator that radiates heat from the suit, and a gas trap cartridge that filters oxygen running through the system.

The close call has indefinitely delayed any U.S. spacewalking maintenance work outside the outpost.

NASA hurried to ship a spacesuit repair kit to Kazakhstan last week so it could be launched to the station aboard a robotic Russian space freighter.

The Progress 52 cargo carrier arrived at the outpost late Saturday after launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome that same day. Parmitano and his crewmates opened the spacecraft Sunday and began unloading it on Monday.

Still unclear: exactly when the U.S. spacesuit investigation will conclude, and when maintenance work outside the U.S. segment of the international space station might resume.

In the meantime, cosmonauts wearing Russian Orlan spacesuits will set out on spacewalks twice in August. The dates: Aug. 16 and Aug. 22.

Astronaut Drives Rover from Space Station

Mike Wall - Space.com

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station successfully operated a rover on Earth's surface Friday, helping lay the foundation for future human-robot partnerships that could push the boundaries of planetary exploration.

While zipping around Earth several hundred miles above the planet's surface, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano drove a 220-pound (100 kilograms) rover across a moon-mimicking landscape here at NASA's Ames Research Center, even ordering the robot to deploy a simulated film-based radio telescope antenna.

Friday's test was the second in a three-part series designed to help engineers and mission planners understand how the activities of humans and robots can be coordinated to maximize the reach and efficiency of planetary exploration missions. (The first run took place June 17 here at Ames, and the third is slated to occur next month.)

"I think that the future of exploration is such that you'll have to have both humans and robots working together," said Terry Fong, human exploration telerobotics project manager and director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames, which designed and manages the tests.

"It doesn't necessarily mean humans and robots always closely coupled in space or even time; you could have robots working ahead of humans, robots working in parallel, robots following up," Fong told SPACE.com. "But part of that is really trying to understand, well, if you're going to build these systems, what do you need? How do you build them?"

The tests at Ames simulate a mission in which astronauts parked at Earth-moon Lagrange point 2 — a gravitationally stable spot located about 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) above the moon's surface — operate a rover on the lunar farside.

Such a mission would have many benefits, advocates say. For example, the rover could deploy a radio telescope antenna, which would return great data to astronomers thanks to the "quiet zone" found on the moon's farside. The teleoperated rover could also collect ancient farside rocks for delivery back to labs on Earth.

"The twofer that you would get out of this for science is pretty exciting," said Jack Burns, director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which developed the mission concept.

Burns hopes such a mission will launch in 2021, on the first manned flight of NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket. The tests at Ames — which use the four-wheel, 4.5-foot-tall (1.4 meters) K10 rover — are steps toward making that dream come true, he said.

"We have demonstrated for the first time that an astronaut can operate a rover and do some relatively sophisticated commands," Burns told SPACE.com. "It's baby steps, but it's a good set of baby steps."

NASA defends Space Launch System against charge it 'is draining the lifeblood' of space program

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

NASA is defending its Space Launch System against a new analysis arguing that SLS is too expensive to fly and is "draining away the lifeblood - funding - of the space program."

"I understand the premise of the article," NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Dan Dumbacher told al.com and The Huntsville Times in a July 23 interview, "but I think we need to realize there's a broader set of trades that really form up the decision process."

Dumbacher referred to "Revisiting SLS/Orion launch costs" by John Strickland published July 15 on the website The Space Review. Strickland is a member of the board of directors of the National Space Society, but wrote the article independently.

Strickland says in the article that he wrote about SLS in 2011 and revisited the program this year to see if anything is different. "Little in the situation has changed," he writes. Strickland believes America does need a heavy-lift rocket for certain payloads, "but we cannot afford to launch such payloads on an expendable booster." Instead, he suggests a bidding process to allow commercial companies to build a reusable booster.

Strickland estimates each SLS launch could cost between $5 billion and $14 billion depending on the launch rate. He includes in the estimates the annual operating costs of the system and a per-launch share of its development costs. Strickland argues that the cost of developing SLS, which he puts at about $3 billion a year, is "draining away the lifeblood - funding - of the space program, which should, by all rights, be used to speed up the development of private rockets and end payments to the Russians for space station crew launches as soon as possible." SLS is also squeezing out any budget for developing payloads to fly on it, he says.

SLS is being developed at Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center and constructed at other NASA and contractor facilities. Orion, the multipurpose crew vehicle that will fly on top of SLS, is being developed by Houston's Johnson Space Center.

Strickland estimates the cost of each Orion at $1 billion and each SLS booster at $1 billion. He says it is not clear whether Orion will be reusable.

"We are designing if for a 10-mission life," Dumbacher said. "Now, obviously that's primarily for the pressure shield. Heat shields will have to be reworked after each flight, because first of all it goes through the heat and deals with the water impact."

Dumbacher said NASA hopes to reuse "some of the subsets off Orion, but it remains to be seen how well that works out after the first test flight" in 2014.

Why did NASA make SLS expendable rather than reusable? Dumbacher said it's because of where the booster has to go.

"From a core stage perspective, I've got to go expendable anyway, similar to an external tank off of a shuttle flight," Dumbacher said. "It's got to go so near to orbit (that) to get it home is a rather complicated and costly activity."

The space shuttle's solid rocket boosters were retrievable and reusuable, but Dumbacher said eliminating those features on SLS allows NASA to "eliminate the cost associated with the recovery of the boosters, the cost of getting the hardware back to (Kennedy Space Center) to look at, the cost of looking at the hardware, and the cost of cleaning out the hardware and reusing it.

"It turned out to be more efficient for us to just make them expendable and just use what we have and let it go," Dumbacher said.

The shuttle main engines that will power the first SLS core stages are similar, Dumbacher said. "Plucking those things out of the ocean after they've been exposed to salt water an that re-entry environment, it just wasn't worth the investment we were going to have to make in terms of design, technical workforce, etc. to make those reusable. That cost trade would not play out right."

Strickland estimates per-launch costs in his article, because he said official NASA launch estimates aren't available. Asked if NASA has such estimates, Dumbacher agreed.

"We do not, and I'll tell you why," he said. "It think that's a fair question. We go through a very rigorous process of developing cost estimates and cost commitments, and we are frankly coming up on the first one later this year, where the agency has to commit to Congress to develop the launch vehicle and to execute that first flight in 2017.

"We have not developed a cost per flight estimate for the launch vehicle for a couple of reasons. No. 1, that's very dependent on flight rate, and flight rate is very dependent on budget and mission planning. So those variables are out there, and small variations in those numbers can lead to large variations in per flight cost.

"In addition to that," Dumbacher said, "we need to get through a large part of development and get into testing before we know how this hardware fully operates and how to best treat the hardware and how much it costs to build the hardware, and we won't know that until we get farther into the program. And we don't want to put a number out unless we can substantiate it with good sound rationale, and that rationale requires some test data and some design work ahead of us, along with some understanding on the variables of flight rate, budget and missions, and that's all ahead."

The flight rate - how many missions over how many years - makes a big difference in the cost per launch, even if development costs and operations costs are included. A rocket that costs $30 billion to develop and flies once could be said to have a $30 billion cost per flight. But Dumbacher said any launch vehicle developed by NASA or a private contractor will have development costs leading to its first launch and operating costs from then on. "Going to space and going from zero to 17 and a half thousand miles per hour in the space of 8 minutes or so is an expensive proposition," he said, no matter who does it.

"We are doing everything we can to minimize the operating cost," Dumbacher said. "We are making design decisions purposely to reduce the operating cost, but how that's all going to stack up and play out for any given flight rate remains to be determined."

Why SLS and not any of the alternatives out there? Dumbacher said, "The bottom line is that from a human exploration perspective, all of our analyses that we've done over the years have consistently shown that we need a large launch vehicle on the order of SLS and its future evolution in order to do the exploration missions out beyond Earth orbit to the moon, asteroids and eventually to Mars."

NASA has "always looked at all the various available launch vehicles," Dumbacher said. "What you find is that there's a tradeoff between size of launch vehicle (and) cost, and that cost starts to take several forms. With the smaller launch vehicles, you have to launch more often and you have to do more on-orbit assembly with it. There's a risk to the astronauts in on-orbit assembly, there's a risk when you increase the number of launches."

When NASA goes through the trade-offs, Dumbacher said, it comes back to a large vehicle like SLS.

Asked about the criticism that SLS is sucking up so much money NASA can't develop anything to fly on it, Dumbacher blamed "reality." If there was more money, he said, NASA would do things differently, develop more things at one time. But there isn't more money.

"Recognizing that we are in a restrained fiscal environment, we have a tight budget to work with, that budget allows us to build the space launch system and Orion, and Orion will fly on SLS," Dumbacher said.

"Once we get SLS and Orion built, we have the foundational capabilities, two of the key elements that we need for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. Once we get those into operations phase, the budget wedge, so to speak, opens up, and that's when we start to develop the next elements we need for exploration, be it habitats, landers, whatever's needed for exploration. But because of the budget constraints, we have to do that step by step. The first step is SLS and Orion."

Plan to Capture an Asteroid Runs Into Politics

Kenneth Chang – New York Times

It is known, informally, as the asteroid-lasso plan: NASA wants to launch an unmanned spacecraft in 2018 that would capture a small asteroid — maybe 7 to 10 yards wide — haul it closer to Earth, then send astronauts up to examine it, in 2021 or beyond.

But the space agency has encountered a stubborn technical problem: Congressional Republicans.

Normally, there is bipartisan support (or disapproval) in Congress for NASA's bolder plans, particularly when they involve human spaceflight. What squabbling does take place tends to pit lawmakers from states with big NASA presences, like Florida and Texas, against those with fewer vested interests.

This month, however, the science committee in the Republican-controlled House voted to bar NASA from pursuing that faraway rock. In a straight party vote — 22 Republicans for, 17 Democrats against — the committee laid out a road map for NASA for the next three years that brushed aside the asteroid capture plan, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's agenda for space exploration. The plan, instead, included new marching orders, telling NASA to send astronauts back to the Moon, set up a base there and then aim for Mars (and to do so with less money than requested).

"A costly and complex distraction," is how one Republican critic, Representative Steven Palazzo of Mississippi, described the asteroid mission. Other legislators complained that the project seemed far-fetched and poorly articulated, and that it would not advance America's bragging rights in space the way a return to the Moon could. The bill awaits a vote by the full House.

NASA and its rocket scientists are trying to figure out how to proceed.

President Obama had asked them to find a way to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. They presented their plan in April, describing it, perhaps immodestly, as a way to "protect our planet" from dangerous asteroids in addition to making strides in human spaceflight.

A non-NASA study had estimated the total cost of capturing and redirecting an asteroid at $2.6 billion. New analysis by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is in charge of the robotic part of the mission, put the cost at perhaps half that — $1 billion plus the cost of the rocket, said Charles Elachi, the laboratory's director.

"It allows us to get to an asteroid four years ahead of time," said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, a former astronaut and a proponent of the asteroid plan.

Mr. Nelson, like NASA officials, ticked off other possible benefits: The agency would learn how to push around heavy objects in space, which could help if a large asteroid were on a collision course with Earth; and NASA would develop technologies like thinner, lighter solar panels that would be useful for a human mission to Mars in the 2030s.

"And the fourth thing it does is, if it ends up an interesting asteroid, then we've got the possibility of the science of mining an asteroid," Mr. Nelson said.

The proposal, unveiled in April as part of Mr. Obama's budget, is far from dead. On Tuesday, a committee in the Democrat-controlled Senate is scheduled to work on its version of the bill, one that makes no mention of capturing asteroids but gives leeway to NASA to do whatever it thinks best for getting to Mars. On the same day, experts will convene at NASA headquarters in Washington to review work on the asteroid mission so far.

As yet, those experts have not pinpointed an asteroid to kidnap, but the idea is this: First, build a robotic spacecraft with a novel inflatable cone-shaped structure that could envelop the asteroid (which will be tricky to catch, because it will probably be spinning). Next, meet the space rock as it swings by the vicinity of the Earth and the Moon. Then, after essentially wrapping the asteroid in a bag (no lassos are actually involved), the spacecraft would lug it into orbit above the Moon, a slow do-si-do of mechanics that could take a few years.

"Over all, I think this is a very doable mission," said Brian Muirhead, the chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

After that, astronauts would travel aboard a giant new rocket that NASA is designing, to meet the asteroid for a closer look. Their trip would give NASA the opportunity to test its deep-space spacecraft, the Orion capsule, as well as its procedures for helping astronauts work with asteroids, which have almost no gravity.

Asteroids have been having their moment in the news, in part because of the terrifying asteroid explosion over Russia in February, which injured about 1,500 people. Last month, NASA announced an Asteroid Grand Challenge, inviting people and organizations to collaborate in finding asteroids that threaten Earth and proposing solutions. On Friday, the agency said it had received more than 400 responses to the challenge and suggestions to help with the asteroid capture mission.

Separately, at least two private companies have announced intentions to mine asteroids for rare metals, arguing that supplies on Earth are dwindling.

There is near unanimity in Congress and NASA that the ultimate goal is to send people to Mars, but the logistical challenges and costs are too big to conquer right away. NASA officials depict the asteroid capture plan as an elegant interim step, one that would send humans deeper into space than before and break new ground in rocket technology.

But Republicans on the House science committee complained this month that the proposal came "out of the blue," lacking much explanation from NASA officials, support from scientists or cost analysis. Some Democrats on the committee were also skeptical, but most were willing to hear NASA out.

"I was never very excited about it," said Representative Donna F. Edwards of Maryland, a Democrat on the committee. However, she was much more critical of the Republican alternative that passed.

To some Democrats, the Republican objections came across as part of a larger strategy to block Mr. Obama on all fronts.

"I really thought that was really a direct insult to the president," said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

Historically, NASA's bipartisan support in Congress dates to its founding in 1958 in the aftermath of Russia's launching of Sputnik. And it is far too soon to say whether the House Republicans' objections will ultimately scuttle the asteroid plan. But some longtime NASA observers wonder if the differing views can coalesce to give NASA clear marching orders.

"As long as the Republicans control the House and Mr. Obama is president, I don't think that agreement will happen, and we'll just muddle through," said John M. Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

Meanwhile, Democrats say that the current House bill, the NASA Authorization Act of 2013, would give the agency an impossible mission, reviving expensive ambitions to send astronauts back to the Moon while proposing to cut NASA's budget to $16.6 billion for the next fiscal year, down from $17.8 billion appropriated this year. Republicans have taken the position that spending plans should take into account the current budget sequester. The Senate authorization bill, being taken up this week, proposes $18.1 billion for NASA.

Given the fiscal climate, the Republicans' Moon ambitions are just not possible, according to Louis D. Friedman, a former executive director of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group that promotes space exploration.

"Frankly, it comes down to this or nothing," Dr. Friedman said, referring to the asteroid plan. "This at least does everything we need in the American space program at a price we can afford while we debate when we are going to make those bigger commitments."

NASA asks for help lassoing an asteroid, gets flooded with replies

Elizabeth Barber - Christian Science Monitor

NASA has received more than 400 responses to its Asteroid Grand Challenge, issued last month as part of the agency's ramped-up effort to build its asteroid-wrangling know-how before an Earth-bound asteroid is spotted.

The response comes after NASA announced last month that it has identified about ten thousand Near Earth Objects, that is, asteroids and comets that come within 28 million miles of Earth's orbit. Just ten percent of those objects are large enough to causes substantial global damage to Earth – bigger than about 100 feet wide – and none of them are on an impact trajectory toward our planet.

Still, precedent suggests that we should be prepared: Most research still indicates that it was an errant asteroid that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, clearing the world of its million-of-years-in-the-making ecosystem packed with Brobdingnagian animals. That asteroid was about 9 miles wide.

And in the latest harbinger of what a massive asteroid impact could do to the Earth, a meteor exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February, injuring about 1,500 people. NASA telescopes had not seen that meteor coming; the agency's programs are largely focused on monitoring larger objects.

So NASA's asteroid-mastering timeline is ambitious: NASA plans to have identified an asteroid target for snatching at the latest in 2016. That asteroid will then be lassoed in 2019 and flung into a trans-lunar orbit in 2021. The agency also hopes to ferry humans to an asteroid as early as 2025, about five years before the projected date that astronauts are to land on Mars.

The expensive plan – NASA had asked for $17.7 billion for the fiscal year 2014, $105 million of which would go to the Asteroid Initiative – has been the subject of major discord between the House and the Senate. Earlier this month, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology passed a NASA authorization bill that would prohibit NASA from pursuing the Asteroid Redirect Mission without further clarifying its vague points. At the same time, the Senate has proposed legislation that would authorize giving NASA $18.1 billion and a full go-ahead on the project.

Meanwhile, though, the asteroid plan is slowly rolling forward, and NASA wants – needs, perhaps – the public's help. Last month, the agency announced a Grand Challenge, an open call for proposals tackling some of the most vexing questions in astroengineering, for its Asteroid Initiative.

And the response has been enthusiastic. About a month into the challenge, NASA has received some 400 submissions proposing possible asteroid targets and means of nabbing them. The applications are now under review for possible incorporation into the agency's plans.

Earth has some built-in asteroid deflection techniques of its own, but our atmosphere protects us from asteroids smaller than about 130 feet in diameter, roughly the length of the long-necked dinosaur, Argentinosaurus huinculensis.

Wanted: Space Tech Innovations for NASA's Future

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

Technological innovation isn't necessarily one size fits all for NASA.

NASA is working with private industry to craft new technological innovations that will help spacecraft travel to space more efficiently than ever before, but different missions have different needs, NASA chief Charles Bolden said Tuesday (July 23).

"As the NASA administrator, I'm looking at everything," Bolden said of technology development at the space agency. "I'm greedy … but it depends on what we're talking about."

For a future mission to an asteroid, Bolden is focused on creating a propulsion system that can get a NASA spacecraft to a space rock that could then be delivered into orbit around Earth.

Although ion engines are reliable and could propel a spaceship to the proper distance, the craft would still need solar cells that could create electricity to power the engines into the far reaches of space. Solar cells that powerful aren't flight-ready yet, Bolden said.

"If you're talking about the asteroid initiative, we're talking about launching in 2017 or 2018 because it's probably two or three or more years to get there, to meet up with this thing and then another couple of years or so to get it, if it works, steered toward lunar orbit in order to have it there in 2023," Bolden told SPACE.com here at "NASA Tech Day on the Hill."

NASA's tech day showcased a number of new tools, from 3D printers that work in microgravity to innovative fuel cell designs. The day also highlighted some of the complexities created by space travel.

A human mission to Mars presents its own unique technological barriers to overcome.

"The biggest thing if you're talking about a human mission is radiation mitigation, radiation protection. We know shielding, but that's weight, so we've got to come up with something that's much less weight than anything we've ever seen before. Things that work great like water are weight. I've heard a lot of different ideas people have had."

The added weight of shielding water and other materials would be too much of a burden for a spacecraft trying to make it into deep space.

Instead, scientists are trying to develop either lightweight shielding or another technological innovation that would help protect astronauts from radiation exposure on long-duration missions.

Some of those technologies could also have biotech components, Bolden said.

"Medical people are looking at prophylactic things that you would ingest that would enable the body to heal itself. You just say, 'OK, we're going to let the high-energy particles beat us up, and we're going to heal.' Computers do it all the time."

Some computers can diagnose themselves to repair problems in the system, and Bolden hopes that new technology will enable scientists to do the same with the human body. That dream is still far in the future, however.

"Most people tell me that's way further off than some really high-tech shielding that's much lower weight, but they're all racing to get to the finish line at the same time."

S. Korea, NASA discuss space partnership

Lee Chi-dong - Yonhap News Agency

South Korea and the United States on Monday discussed ways to boost cooperation in aeronautics research and space exploration, the U.S. space agency said.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said its administrator, Charles Bolden, and Kim Seung-jo, president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, met at NASA's headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was their first meeting.

"Our two agencies share a mutual interest in aeronautics research, and have identified opportunities for collaboration," said Bolden. "We also have partnered for several years in the International Space Exploration Coordination Group and are looking forward to continued discussions on potential cooperation in space exploration."

They also discussed NASA's plans for a new asteroid initiative, announced in President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal, it said in a press release.

NASA's asteroid initiative involves robotically capturing a small near-Earth asteroid and redirecting it safely to a stable lunar orbit where astronauts can explore it, according to the agency.

In January, South Korea joined the global space club with a successful launch of a satellite into orbit.

NASA, Korean space agency discuss cooperation

India Blooms News Service (IBNS)

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and the president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), Seung Jo Kim, met in Washington Monday to discuss collaboration in aeronautics research and space exploration, including KARI's robotic lunar mission and NASA's asteroid initiative.

This was the first meeting between Bolden and Kim.

"Our two agencies share a mutual interest in aeronautics research, and have identified opportunities for collaboration," said Bolden. "We also have partnered for several years in the International Space Exploration Coordination Group and are looking forward to continued discussions on potential cooperation in space exploration."

Bolden and Kim also discussed NASA's plans for a new asteroid initiative, previously announced in President Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. Kim welcomed the chance to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

NASA's asteroid initiative involves robotically capturing a small near-Earth asteroid and redirecting it safely to a stable lunar orbit where astronauts can explore it.

Capturing and redirecting an asteroid integrates the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration capabilities and draws on the innovation of America's brightest scientists and engineers.

"The knowledge gained from the initiative will help us protect our planet, advance exploration capabilities and technologies for human spaceflight, and help us better utilize our space resources," said a NASA release.

US Lawmaker Seeks to Partner with Russia to Clean Up Space

RIA Novosti

A prominent US lawmaker and advocate of the United States' role in space told a conference on the commercialization of space that the US and Russia should team up for extraterrestrial projects -- and suggested they start by cleaning up the hundreds of thousands of pieces of manmade space litter and capturing and deflecting asteroids hurtling toward Earth.

"Now that Russia is no longer a communist dictatorship and has been evolving in the right direction, we should reach out to them even more than we did in the past, along with our European allies, to have joint missions in space," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said by Skype to attendees at the New Space 2013 conference in San Jose, California this past weekend.

"Even when it was the Soviet Union, even when they were our enemies, we were able to cooperate" in space, the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee noted.

The international space team could "clear the space debris that threatens to limit our use of space" and work to "identify and deflect near-Earth objects from hitting Earth," the California lawmaker said.

But Rohrabacher's vision of nations working together excluded rising space power China, a country that the US congressman said should be sidelined from a team effort in space because of its poor human rights record and technology theft.

"As long as there isn't more reform -- any reform -- in China, I don't think it's wise for us to be doing joint efforts and have working cooperation on technology projects with the world's worst human rights abuser who has a history of stealing technology," he said.

"But the other folks, we should and we have to, if we want to have a vibrant space program."

Rohrabacher was speaking on the final day of New Space 2013, a three-day event focused on the "potential and challenges of the emerging commercial space industry."

He suggested increasing private industry's role in NASA projects, such as the one to capture an asteroid, saying it would be a good way to "minimize bureaucracy and maximize entrepreneurship," an oft-repeated chorus at the conference.

Estimates for the NASA project to capture an asteroid, which includes building a new rocket to carry astronauts there, are in the billions of dollars.

Bob Richards, the CEO of Moon Express Inc., a privately funded company created to "establish new avenues for commercial space activities benefitting life on Earth," told the conference his company is developing a spacecraft for less than $50 million.

Rohrabacher also said deflecting near-Earth objects should be "a multinational effort" and cited the massive meteor that exploded in February over Chelyabinsk, shattering windows, damaging buildings and injuring more than 1,500 people. Had it been on a slightly different path, he said, it could have slammed into Earth and killed thousands.

Russia's Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov said in June that his ministry and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will work together to "develop systems to protect people and territory from cosmic impacts."

And in May, Natan Eismont of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences said it is possible to defend the planet by moving near-Earth asteroids into the path of incoming space threats and deflecting them.

The New Space 2013 conference also looked at thornier aspects of the commercialization of space, including whether private companies should be allowed to use the resources they extract in space for private gain and which earthly laws should be used to resolve business disputes in space.

Alumna Karen Nyberg to deliver UND commencement speech from space

Tu-Uyen Tran - Grand Forks Herald

Astronaut and UND alumna Karen Nyberg, who's still orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station, will be the speaker at UND's summer commencement Friday, Aug. 2, the university announced Thursday.

Her message will be recorded and delivered by NASA to UND.

David Dodds, a university spokesman, said UND wanted to ensure there wouldn't be any technical glitches on the big day, which will see 520 students graduating at 3 p.m. at the Chester Fritz Auditorium on campus.

Nyberg, who graduated summa cum laude from UND in 1994, first went into space in 2008 on the space shuttle Discovery, which was adding a new component to the ISS. Her second trip to space began May 28, and she's expected to stay at the ISS until November.

She's been keeping an eye on UND from space. On Wednesday, she wrote on her Twitter account: "CONGRATS to my alma mater @myUND being recognized today w/ JSC Certificate of Appreciation. UND Dept of Space Studies, 25 yrs strong!" That's a reference to the distinguished service award NASA's Johnson Space Center gave to UND's Space Studies Department Tuesday.

The space center is where Nyberg got her start, working as a student while earning her master's degree at the University of Texas, Austin.

Nyberg, who hails from Vining, Minn., is the first UND alumna to launch into space, according to the university. She's also the 50th woman in space.

Astronaut to deliver commencement speech at UND

KFGO Radio (Fargo)

The University of North Dakota says the keynote speaker at Friday's summer commencement will be astronaut and UND alum Karen Nyberg.

Nyberg has been orbiting the earth in the International Space Station since May on a mission that will conclude this November.

Nyberg's message will be recorded and delivered by NASA to UND.

Even though Nyberg is 240 miles in space, she's following UND.

She congratulated the university's Department of Space Studies for an award it received this week from NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Nyberg is a 1994 graduate of UND and a native of Vining, Minnesota.

Richland man to travel to International Space Station

Selynn Barbour - Rolla Daily News (Missouri)

What does the lake area and NASA have in common? More than most might think. The next American astronaut in space is slated to be Mike Hopkins from Richland. His training, he said, began here and will soon propel him further than most humans have ever traveled.

"There are a lot of benefits of growing up in a small community in Missouri. I think that sense of community, that sharing with each other, helping each other out are all important," Hopkins explained at a recent press conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

On Sept. 25, Hopkins will launch with two other cosmonauts — Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy — aboard a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Hopkins and his crew mates will live aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for six months, returning to Earth in late March 2014.

He will enable numerous physical and scientific experiments, maintain the facility, work out to remain fit and supposedly lift the fire of the Olympic torch to new heights.

His life here on Earth has been focused on training — training that began in his youth. Since the age of 16 he thoughtfully planned his path to sail among the stars. He focused on academics. He was valedictorian of his School of the Osage class of 1987. He graduated from the University of Illinois with honors and a degree in Aerospace Engineering. His master's in the same field is from Stanford University.

Balancing his academic strengths, Hopkins focused on physical achievements ranging from attaining first in the state in pole vaulting for the Indians, excelling at Osage's high school football team, to becoming the Illinois football team captain that competed in repeated bowl games.

He focused next on his decades of distinctive service in the United States Air Force as a test pilot, then in administration with his appointed work at the Pentagon. He received numerous military medals and commendations that helped make attaining his dream a reality. In 2012, he was selected for the NASA astronaut program.

Hopkins' 41 years of training has prepared him well for the rigors of training with NASA.
During these recent years, Hopkins has learned and tested in America at all eight NASA sites and abroad. He focused on the functions and upkeep needed aboard the ISS. In Canada he trained on the robotic arm. In Russia he, as flight engineer, mastered the capsules that ferry them up and back.

His intense training necessitated being gone from his family, wife Julie and two sons for many weeks at a time. Yet they are supportive of his dream and NASA's vision of space exploration and scientific development.

"We're very excited," Julie said after the press conference. Hopkins' mother, Barbara Duffy, also is supportive of her son. Duffy will be following her son's history making trip from her home in Camdenton.

"Naturally, I have some motherly concerns as the launch draws nearer, but, after being at the NASA facility and seeing some of the highly qualified training staff and the extensive safety procedures they use, I am confident that Mike is in wonderful hands," she said. "I am really proud of his work and preparation for the mission and look forward to following his experience on the Space Station."

It will be easy to follow Mike as he launches, lives and works in space. NASA TV will show the launch live. They will share his daily life on their website as well. He also will be tweeting from space @TrainAstronaut and @AstroIllini.

It is this social media tool where he has invited all the world to "Train Like Mike." He will post short videos of his training that typically is 2 1/2 hours each day. There are three, specially designed apparatus aboard the ISS.

There's the familiar treadmill equipped with harnesses. The cycle ergometer is similar to a stationary bike. The ARED (Advanced Resistance Exercise Device) exercises muscles much like lifting weights. Fitness tips will also be shared by the Train Like an Astronaut team. Through its Mission X component found on Facebook, young, future astronaut can join in on the fun.

"Fit kids turn into fit adults," Hopkins points out during a recent Google hangout that included a White House senior advisor, Olympians, current Cross Fit champion, an NFL player, and the editor of "Men's Health" magazine.

The above experts in their respective fields engaged in an interchange that highlighted hard work, determination and drive to achieve success. Success that is launching lake-raised Mike Hopkins to soon fly 240 miles over head at the speed of 17,500 miles per hour achieving his dream of being an astronaut.

Astronaut plans to bring leadership--and Japanese food--to space station

Akira Hatano - Asahi Shimbun

An astronaut who will become Japan's first commander aboard the International Space Station next year said he plans to spread a bit of Japanese culture in outer space.

"I hope to exert my leadership in making the most of the high potential of our crew members," Koichi Wakata, 49, told a news conference on July 29 at the Tsukuba Space Center of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in this city northeast of Tokyo.

He also said he wants to bring to the ISS such dishes as mackerel cooked with "miso" fermented soybean paste, which has already won the favor of the crew members.

"Meals are essential for a team," he said. "While nobody will have a lot of time to spare, I hope to have all six crew members share a dinner of Japanese food and thereby calm their emotions."

Wakata is scheduled to take off aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as early as November. He is expected to take command of the space station during the last two months of his six-month mission.

All but two of the 38 individuals who have served as ISS commander have been from the United States or Russia. Japan is the last of all operators of the ISS--the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan--to provide a commander.

"Trust has been placed on Japanese technologies," Wakata said. "Manned space development is a technology for defending the human species from crises on Earth. As a country that aims to live by its science and technology capabilities, Japan has the duty to make its own contributions."

It was Wakata's last scheduled news conference in Japan ahead of the rocket launch.

Chris Hadfield On Going Viral In Space

Linda Wertheimer - National Public Radio

Chris Hadfield became a star as commander of the International Space Station, reaching out via social media to offer the public entertaining glimpses into life in orbit. Shortly after his return from the ISS, Hadfield announced his retirement from the Canadian Space Agency. Linda Wertheimer talks with Hadfield about his efforts to keep the public interested in space travel.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: By the time the last three shuttle mission returned to Earth two years ago, the image of a crew blasting off through the clouds and then landing again was still fascinating, if a touch routine. As for what the astronauts did up there, most did not really have a clear idea.

COMMANDER CHRIS HADFIELD: (Singing) Ground control to Major Tom - seven, six. Commencing countdown, engines on.

WERTHEIMER: Enter Chris Hadfield. The veteran Canadian astronaut retired earlier this year, after returning from a tour as the commander of the International Space Station. This is Hadfield performing a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" from space.

HADFIELD: (Singing) This is ground control to Major Tom. You've really made the grade.
WERTHEIMER: That video has been viewed more than 16 million times, a total viral hit. There were dozens of videos posted on YouTube from Hadfield's final mission. Often, Hadfield would show mundane tasks that are kind of tricky without gravity. Here is cooking dried spinach in a packet.

HADFIELD: To prepare the spinach, you just attach it to the water distributor, choose the right quantity, and push the button.

WERTHEIMER: Of course, after you eat the spinach, you need to brush your teeth. But spitting out toothpaste in space can be messy.

HADFIELD: OK. So now, what I'm going to do, I've got a mouth-load of toothpaste stuff, I've got a dirty toothbrush. So what I do is I just swallow the toothpaste.

WERTHEIMER: Hadfield also made a big impact on Twitter, constantly posting photos from his unique perch of the beauty and destruction around the globe.

When we sat down with Commander Hadfield recently at the Canadian Embassy here in Washington, he explained that the technology that allowed him to share his experiences with folks back home was unheard of when he first left the planet in 1995.

HADFIELD: My first flight, the way that I talked to the ground was through ham radio, you know, it was very limited communication. And I'd take a photograph up there, it was on film. I had to wait till I landed, get it processed and then do a big film review and look through, see if I saw a nice picture. And if I found a nice picture of the outback, well, there I am six weeks after landing, now what do I do with it? I can't, like, mail it to everybody in Australia. Now, with the Internet and with digital photography and with social media, I could take a beautiful picture or a scary picture of the fires in the outback, and within minutes, I could let the people that that was affecting see it directly and talk about it, and open up a dialogue. And so it allowed me to do what I'd always wanted to do, and that was share the ride.

WERTHEIMER: And that was the combination that made it work the way it did?

HADFIELD: Yeah, the fact that if I didn't get it right on this pass, I could try again tomorrow. It was sort of like being an art hunter. You know, I'm waiting for this beautiful doe to walk into the clearing, just so that I can try and capture it, and it was just a wonderful privilege. We were busy up there doing all the work and all the science and fixing problems as they arose, but at the same time, just a straight, wondrous, human opportunity of being there and seeing the world that way and sharing with everybody became an absolute imperative, also.

WERTHEIMER: I think a lot of us wondered, you know, you were having way too much fun.

WERTHEIMER: But you also have to work.

HADFIELD: Yeah.

WERTHEIMER: What was the work that you were doing?

HADFIELD: We - the Space Station is typically running about 130 different experiments, everything from looking with special cameras at changes to the surface of the Earth - so we're watching for disasters, as well as climate change; looking out to the universe, we're collecting dark matter and dark energy from the universe on a Noble Prize-level type experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. And then all sorts of experiments inside that you can't do on Earth, because up there, basically, we're freed from gravity, so studying how the flames propagate, how fluid behaves.

There's all sorts of applications when you could see how capillary flow happens. The human body, studying the rapid aging, the osteoporosis that I experienced, why we get it, and then when I get back to Earth, why does it reverse, trying to understand the body's control mechanisms. And also using the Space Station to help design spaceships. When we leave Earth, which we're going to do, go further, we need the stuff that works. We need materials that you can count on, toilets you can count on. You know, what food do you need? How do you keep the crew from going nuts? All those things, we're inventing how to do all that on the Space Station.

WERTHEIMER: Do you think that's important for the future of the program, to try to make a big extra effort to engage people, when we're all so concerned about how much it all costs?

HADFIELD: You know, you can't support the Space Station if you don't know it exists. People have to know it exists, and see that it serves us at a lot of different levels, everything from understanding how to extinguish flame inside a wall, to the fact that you can record a David Bowie video in weightlessness and thrill, you know, tens of millions of people. All of that is possible up there. You need to make an effort to engage people in it and show them that this is, of all the things that we're choosing to do with our tax dollars, this is one of the really cool, interesting things. And then they can make their own decision as to whether we should support it or not.

WERTHEIMER: The science has always been interesting, of course, but the thing that I think most people on Earth think about is not going to the Space Station, but going past the Space Station, traveling in space.

HADFIELD: For thousands of years, people sailed in rivers and up and down the coast. And only after they had invented so many things - navigation, food supply, really good sails, ships they could count on - did they turn away from shore and go over the horizon. They had to invent a lot of things first. There may have been people that went over the horizon, but they probably didn't come back, because they didn't know enough stuff yet.

And we are, right now, sailing within the sight of shore. We're trying to figure out all those things as we go around the world, so that when you do fire your engines and go 40 percent faster and leave the Earth, and it's been really hard to turn around and come back, that you can count on your sailing ship, that it's going to keep you alive and get you where you want to go. And that's what the Space Station is. It is the crucible where we're learning and testing and figuring out all those things so that we can go further, which is inevitably what we're going to do.

WERTHEIMER: So are you the ambassador from space now? Is that your new job?

HADFIELD: Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we're doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting. And so I've been that space ambassador since my 10th birthday, and I've just been lucky enough to command a spaceship and now I have even more things to talk about.

With the shuttle done, a co-founder of Microsoft sees an opening in space

Guy Gugliotta - Washington Post

Start with the largest aircraft ever built, with a wingspan longer than a football field and a split fuselage fitted with six Boeing 747 jet engines — enough thrust to get 1.3 million pounds off the ground, about 425,000 pounds more than a fully loaded 747. Sling a 120-foot, three-stage rocket below the aircraft, and when the plane reaches 30,000 feet, fire the rocket into space. Then the plane flies back to Earth.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen calls his newest venture Stratolaunch, a system designed to lift 13,500-pound payloads — satellites, science experiments, cargo and, eventually, humans — into low-Earth orbit, where the space shuttle used to fly and where the international space station still dwells. Construction of the aircraft is underway in California, with test flights planned for the end of 2016 and the first mission to occur in late 2017 or early 2018.

"You have a certain number of dreams in your life that you want to fulfill, and this is a dream I am very excited about seeing come to fruition," Allen said at a news conference in late 2011 to announce Stratolaunch. He said he sought to take advantage of "a much-expanded opportunity" for private enterprise now that NASA is focusing on deep space missions. This could lead to "a radical change in the space launch industry."

Paul Ghaffari, chief investment officer for Vulcan Capital, an arm of Allen's Seattle-based firm, said Stratolaunch is a medium-size system that has no real competitors now but even in the future should have "unique advantages" over ground-based rivals, including the ability to launch in inclement weather, to fly without worrying about the availability of launch pads and to operate from different locations. Ghaffari said Stratolaunch hopes ultimately to host six to 10 missions per year.

Low-orbit moneymaker?

Allen, like PayPal founder Elon Musk, whose Dragon spacecraft has already docked with the international space station, and real estate developer Robert Bigelow, whose two inflatable Genesis spacecraft have been orbiting the Earth for six and seven years respectively, is hoping to turn low-Earth orbit into a commercial moneymaker, now that NASA is focusing on longer-distance exploration missions.

But will Stratolaunch really take off?

Space is expensive, and all aspiring entrepreneurs must eventually decide whether there will be enough demand for launches to enable them to recoup their investment. Allen, Stratolaunch's sole funder, has not discussed his expenditures.

"The first reaction is skepticism, because this is an immense airplane and a medium-sized rocket, and there will be competitors," said John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "But then I think, 'These are awfully smart people, and they're technically sound, and they must see something.'?"

The design and engineering of Stratolaunch relies heavily on two firms — Dulles-based Orbital Sciences and Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif. — that have outstanding credentials as aerospace innovators.

Ghaffari said Allen nursed the idea for Stratolaunch for nearly two decades and began studying it in earnest in conversations with Scaled Composites founder Burt Rutan around 2000. With Allen as financial backer, Rutan's SpaceShipOne was launched from an aircraft in 2004 to become the first piloted civilian spaceship to make a suborbital flight above Earth's atmosphere.

SpaceShipOne was regarded then primarily as proof-of-concept for the viability of space tourism at relatively affordable prices, and Scaled Composites is building a passenger spacecraft with funding from Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. Ghaffari, however, said Stratolaunch was always foremost in Allen's thoughts: "SpaceShipOne was definitely a predecessor," he said. Rutan has retired from Scaled Composites, but he is a Stratolaunch board member, as is former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.

Orbital Sciences had been consulting for Stratolaunch since last year and formally joined the project in May. Orbital is the developer of Pegasus, the first air-launched civilian spacecraft able to put small payloads into low-Earth orbit. Orbital Sciences spokesman Barron Beneski said proven expertise in air launch was one of the "connecting fibers" that linked the company to Stratolaunch.

Stratolaunch has only two employees — Chief Executive Officer Gary L. Wentz Jr. and Chief Operating Officer Susan G. Turner — but Wentz estimated that close to 200 contractors are working on design and construction.

Wentz said project engineers are "looking at a multitude of potential challenges." The host aircraft, with a 385-foot wingspan, will be made of composite materials, and the spacecraft will have three stages. The plane will drop the spacecraft at 30,000 feet and initiate a banked turn. Rocket ignition will come four to seven seconds later to give the aircraft enough time to get out of the way of the back blast. As for the rocket, the first stage, which is to be reusable, drops into the ocean; the second burns up in the atmosphere; the third puts the satellite into orbit, and eventually that third stage, too, burns up in the atmosphere.

A two-mile runway

Wentz, speaking from Stratolaunch's headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., said the team has not yet decided whether the spacecraft will use liquid or solid fuel, and planners are still scouting airports for a likely base. Stratolaunch needs about two miles of runway to take off — about 50 percent more than any other commercial aircraft.

Wentz said the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility is the leading candidate, in part because infrastructure for both solid and liquid fuel is already in place. Planners are also looking at the Vandenberg and Edwards air force bases in California and at NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. The aircraft must also have access to other large airports in case of an emergency landing, and the company will need to obtain a commercial launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Stratolaunch's logistics are fairly simple and should offer considerable advantages over ground-launched competitors. Missions need not be automatically scrubbed because of bad weather, and the aircraftwould be able to launch its rocket above the clouds from almost any location. Also, clients would not have to wait in line to fly from oversubscribed terrestrial launch pads.

The physics of airborne space launches, by contrast, are elaborate, with many variables that affect the cost, frequency and reliability of flights. Wentz said the Stratolaunch team has not made all the calculations but expects the company will realize significant savings by "tweaking" the variables. Ground-based launches are just as complicated as air launches, but the science is much better understood.

One of Cape Canaveral's attractions is that it is on the East Coast, next to the Atlantic Ocean. It is always desirable to launch to the east to capitalize on the direction of the Earth's spin. The Earth travels about 1,000 mph west to east at the equator; you need to reach a speed of 17,000 mph to get to low-Earth orbit, so there's no point in penalizing yourself 1,000 mph by heading in the wrong direction. Wentz said the team has also considered alternative sites closer to the equator, where this effect is more pronounced.

Also, a Stratolaunch flight would climb out of the first 30,000 feet of the Earth's gravity well on jet fuel instead of much more expensive rocket fuel, and the spacecraft would be released in rarefied atmosphere with high tail winds to kick it forward.

Finally, Wentz said, the aircraft would be traveling nearly 300 mph when it launches the spacecraft, and "the goal is to maintain as much of the forward velocity as possible." Traveling downrange, the rocket would ignite and rise at an angle of 12 to 15 degrees. The aggregate effect of all these forces is similar to the acceleration a javelin thrower gets by sprinting down the runway before throwing his spear. While the savings in energy over a ground launch is only 5 to 10 percent, Rutan said at the 2011 news conference, "this is huge" for space travel.

From outer space to the Olympics:
Russia to orbit torch, award meteor medals

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

Russia is injecting outer space into the 2014 Olympics — both literally and figuratively. The host nation for the next Winter Games will launch an Olympic torch on a spacewalk and embed meteorite fragments into a special set of gold medals.

Scheduled for Feb. 7 through 23, 2014, in Sochi, Russia, the 22nd Winter Olympics will be preceded by a traditional torch relay to begin on Oct. 7. A total of 14,000 people will carry the torch from Moscow to Sochi, including Valentina Tereshkova, who 50 years ago became the first woman in space.

On Nov. 7, a month into the torch relay with the flame still being run across Russia, an unlit Olympic torch will lift off with three new crew members for the International Space Station.

Flying on Soyuz TMA-11M with Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, NASA astronaut Richard Mastracchio and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, the Olympic torch will be handed off to Expedition 38 commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazansky to be taken outside the orbiting laboratory during a spacewalk on Nov. 9.

"The story of the Olympic torch is part of our mission," Kotov told reporters during a press briefing held earlier this month. "We are going to take... the Olympic torch out with us on our first EVA [extravehicular activity] and we'll take a few pictures and video and downlink them to the ground. And maybe we will have some activity [inside] the station with the Olympic torch."

Olympic torches previously flew twice on board the space shuttle, even entering the International Space Station, but have never ventured outside until now.

"Nobody has done this before," Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee, said in a statement. "The spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts with the [Olympic torch] will be a historic moment in the history of the Olympic Torch Relay."

"Conducting a spacewalk with the torch is unprecedented in the history of the Olympic movement and the world of astronautics," added Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin. "Its in-orbit delivery and the spacewalk by cosmonauts will be a bright new page in space history."

The aluminum and red colored torch — red being the color of Russian sports — will return to Earth two days later on Nov. 11, landing aboard the Soyuz TMA-09M capsule with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA's Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Three months (and four days) later, on the ninth day of the Olympics, it will be something that fell from space, rather than landed, that will take the Winter Games' center stage.

The athletes who earn gold on Feb. 15, 2014 will receive a special medal featuring a chip of the meteor that exploded over Russia a year earlier. The meteor strike, the largest recorded fall in more than a century, resulted in buildings being damaged and more than 1,000 people being injured.

"We will hand out our medals to all the athletes who will win gold on that day, because both the meteorite strike and the Olympic Games are global events," said Alexei Betekhtin, culture minister for the Chelyabinsk region, in a statement.

Pieces of the recovered space rocks will be inserted into the medals for presentation.

Seven of the meteorite-embedded awards will be given to the gold medal athletes competing in speedskating (men's 1,500 meter), short-track speedskating (women's 1,000 m and men's 1,500), cross-country skiing (women's relay), ski jumping (men's K-125), Alpine skiing (women's super giant slalom) and skeleton (men's).

How do I become … an astronaut
Richard Searfoss, a veteran of three space missions, says the job is about science and technology rather than being a hero

Anna Tims - The Guardian (UK)

It is stressful orbiting space, so astronauts have to seize any opportunity for fun – and for Richard Searfoss, veteran of three space missions, that came from watching novices getting to grips with their weightlessness. "They tended to move around too quickly so they would float into walls and hit their heads," he says. "It was always fun to play jokes on them."

A taste for teasing is one of the lesser known necessities for a stable space trip. "My philosophy when I became commander was that we have to take our work very seriously but not ourselves," says Searfoss, 57. "If you build a culture of fear of ever making a mistake, it is no good so you need a measure of humility."

He demonstrated this philosophy on one new colleague during a pre-flight food tasting session, when the astronauts choose their menus for an expedition. "This guy was really picky and rejected every third dish that he tasted, so I took note of what he disliked the most and had the lab change his choices to those. I then had my menu replaced by his. When we were in orbit we all enjoyed watching his horror when he opened his colour-coded meals, then, before it became too heated, I swapped mine with his."

The son of a US air force pilot, Searfoss grew up during the US push for the moon and set his heart on space exploration as a child. He graduated from the US air force academy in Colorado with a degree in aeronautical engineering and completed a master's in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. After 10 years as a fighter and test pilot in the air force, he was one of 23 would-be astronauts selected by Nasa from 2,500 applicants.

It's a rigorous technical, physical and mental selection procedure which includes some unexpected medical taboos. A previous history of kidney stones immediately disqualifies a hopeful, for instance, because of the buildup of minerals in the body during a flight. And personality traits can be almost as crucial as technical expertise. "The sort of stuff you learn in preschool is what counts," Searfoss says. "Team work, getting along with other people, a willingness to subvert your ego – it's a fine line between personal ambition and recognising that you can't do any of it without team support."

When Searfoss first commanded an expedition, he was warned to be aware of the "matrix".

"I was told that this was the relationships between everyone in the crew," he says. "They will take care of the technical side if you keep their morale well oiled. If I could go back 30 years I would definitely be more people oriented. At the time I was technically oriented and saw everything in black and white, but being shut in a space ship with a team of others certainly teaches you about human nature."

Surprisingly, it was wonder rather than fright that Searfoss felt on his first mission in 1993. "Once you're in orbit you've already finished the most dangerous part of the job, which is the launch," he says. "For the first 45 minutes I couldn't see anything because I was strapped in and we were nose high, but when I got out of my seat the shuttle was upside down and I saw a panorama of some desert part of the world and it was so spectacular that I wondered how I was ever going to get my work done because I just wanted to stay glued to the window."

Searfoss retired from Nasa in 2003 and is currently test piloting commercial space flights. He also designed the spacecraft cockpit for the Tom Cruise film Oblivion and advised the Hollywood star and his fellow actors on realistic dialogue and movements while in orbit.

Only those with an unwavering passion – as well as a degree in engineering, natural sciences or medicine and at least three years of related professional experience – should consider space travel beyond the big screen, he says, for quite apart from the intensity of the work, both training and missions involve prolonged absences from family. "The most challenging emotional aspect was saying goodbye to my kids when I went into quarantine a week before a flight," he says.

Nasa only selects 20 candidates from about 4,000 applicants every two years, and the European Space Agency has only recruited three times since its foundation in 1975, although it urges anyone interested to start gaining qualifying experience now in time for the next unspecified round. Those motivated by the perceived glamour of space travel will swiftly be weeded out. "You don't do it to be a hero," Searfoss says, "but because you love the technology and the science."'

It is this commitment to the practical aspects that enable astronauts to keep a level head in the face of their own mortality.

"I experienced an emergency on the launch of my second mission when the hydraulics failed and the alarms sounded," Searfoss says. "But my philosophy is that if anything goes wrong it will either be one part of the system and there are very clear procedures to fix it, or else it will be like Challenger [the space shuttle that disintegrated on launching in 1986] and there'll be nothing you can do.

"It's always in the back of your mind that you might die, but fear is a good thing – it keeps you sharp."

NFL adopts new comprehensive concussion policy

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

The NFL is putting in place new protocol for real-time assessment and treatment of concussions, rules to protect players from repetitive, traumatic head injuries and long-term risk of neurological disorders, a player's association attorney said Thursday.

The new rules cover all aspects of concussion assessment and treatment from initial diagnosis to protocols to be followed before a player returns to the field.

Sideline evaluations with a standardized assessment tool will be mandatory, and medical evaluations will be overseen -- or even performed by-- independent neurotrauma specialists rather than a team's medical staff.

"As a result of a year-long negotiation, the NFL has agreed to implement for the 2013 season, for the first time in its history, a comprehensive concussion evaluation and management protocol," said Sean Sansiveri, in-house legal counsel for the NFL Player's Association.

"The new protocol also includes a big change. We (will) have an unaffiliated neurotrauma expert on the sideline of every single game starting in 2013. And by unaffiliated neurotrauma expert, I mean a neurologist, a neurosurgeon, or an emergency room physician with documented experience in the treatment of acute head injury," he said.

The independent neurotrauma specialist would "solely focus on identifying symptoms or signs of concussions" and what Sansiveri called "the mechanism for injury," meaning "big hit."

Then the specialist will be the responsible authority "overseeing or performing every sideline concussion assessment exam to ensure that they're done by the physician most qualified to do that," Sansiveri said.

The venue for the disclosure was an interesting one. Sansiveri was briefing a committee from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. The committee is examining ethics principles and guidelines for astronaut health and safety during human expeditions to the asteroids, the moon and Mars.

With the nation's space shuttle fleet now retired, NASA is investing in the development of commercial spacecraft to ferry astronauts on round trips to the International Space Station, rather than paying the Russian Federal Space Agency for taxi services.

That Obama Administration Policy shift is enabling NASA to focus on developing a new heavy-lift rocket and a large crew capsule for missions beyond Earth orbit.

Concussions have been a serious subject for the NFL and the NFL Players Association. Congress held hearings in 2008 and both the NFL and the NFL Players Association have been introducing safeguards. Since 2009, standards have been put in place that call for players to be removed from a game if they suffer concussions, and they are not supposed to return to the field that same day.

However, Sansiveri played video that showed an offensive lineman taking a huge hit, struggling to his feet, wobbling back to the line of scrimmage before a referee stopped the game and sent the injured lineman to the sidelines.

A full assessment of that player with sideline diagnostic tools would have taken eight minutes.

"He was back in the game in 45 seconds," Sansiveri said. "So we know that the team doctor, for whatever reason, decided not to perform the evaluation and that's a position we just absolutely cannot be in."

Sansiveri also said data is starting to show that a troubling number of retired football players are suffering from chronic neurodegenerative disorders.

"Recently there was a study of retired NFL Players that showed that 1.9 percent of NFL retirees are diagnosed with dementia between the ages of 30 and 49," Sansiveri said.

Only 0.1 percent of the general population between those ages is so diagnosed, he said.

The data and other studies show the importance of comprehensive concussion assessment and treatment protocols, he said.

"I think having this protocol document is important for many reasons, not least of which is the NFL will now articulate for the team's medical staff and the players and the broader medical community, the standards actually being applied to protect players from uncertain long-term risks associated with traumatic brain injury," Sansiveri said.

"It also goes a long way towards mandating redundant communications and ultimately eliminating human error."

UTEP to become Commercial Space Exploration hub

Maria Cortes Gonzales - El Paso Times

The University of Texas at El Paso is partnering with Japan's Kyushu Institute of Technology (KyuTech), for collaborative research on advancing aerospace technologies.

University officials signed the international agreement Monday which also will allow for faculty and student exchange programs.

KyuTech has been historically funded by JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and plans to collaborate with the NASA University Research Center and Center for Space Exploration Technology Research at UTEP.

"This is more than just a signing ceremony," said Ahsan Choudhuri, chair and professor of mechanical engineering at UTEP. "This is a long-term strategy to build this region into a commercial aerospace hub."

He added, "There is already an interest to utilize this region for aerospace purposes, so we are going to capitalize on this dawn of commercial space exploration by placing ourselves as the strategic lead of capabilities in the area."

The university plans to work with two nearby entities: Blue Origin and Spaceport America. Blue Origin, LLC, which has a launch and test facility in Van Horn, is an aerospace company that plans to develop technology to transport people to space using reusable launch vehicles.

Spaceport America, located in Sierra, N.M., is a launch site dedicated solely to commercial space flight to take customers into space.

Expanding off a winged rocket platform developed by Kyutech, the UTEP collaboration will result in a reusable, suborbital vehicle to validate emerging space technologies. UTEP will provide the propulsion systems and assembly of the vehicle that will utilize avionics and structural components from the Japanese.

"Our goal is to show that our capability goes beyond the lab and training students for aerospace careers," Choudhuri said.

Richard Schoephoerster, dean of the College of Engineering, said, "this ceremony is an indicator of the capacity building UTEP aims for in creating unique opportunities for our region while making international impacts. It also stands as an example of the many exceptional ways we find to educate, train and prepare a more advanced workforce."

The NASA approach to keeping employees engaged

Tom Fox – Washington Post

The end of the space shuttle program has created much uncertainty among workers at NASA as the organization charts new directions. Jeri Buchholz, NASA's chief human capital officer and assistant administrator for human capital management, has played a key role in communicating with the employees, developing the agency's workforce strategy and assessing its needs.

Buchholz spoke about the NASA workforce and leadership issues with Tom Fox, a guest writer for On Leadership and vice president for leadership and innovation at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. Fox also heads up their Center for Government Leadership. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q. How has NASA been able to manage leadership and program transitions while maintaining high levels of employee engagement?

A. The number one thing is to focus on the mission. Many employees who come to work for us tell us, "I've wanted to work at NASA since I was a little kid." We are one of the preeminent exploration entities in the world, and we do work that nobody else can or will do, so that draws a particular kind of person. Those people are often very engaged and can maintain that engagement for many years. We also work hard to maintain a great work environment. We try to remove administrative barriers so that people can be as innovative as they possibly can. We also work to promote a good work/life balance and make sure employees have the opportunity to connect with and work with other people who share their same vision.

NASA was the top-ranked large agency in the 2012 "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government" rankings. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of workforce?

We encourage employees to fill out the employee viewpoint survey, and we promote it as each individual employee's opportunity to tell the NASA administrator how things are going. Our administrator takes the survey very seriously, and we make sure that our employees know that their individual voice matters in that respect. This year we had employees suggest additional questions for the survey. Then we allowed the NASA workforce to vote on which questions they would like to see included. That was a good way to get feedback from the workforce about what they think is important and what agency leadership should focus on. We're really trying to create more virtual collaboration and virtual interaction between agency leadership and the workforce.

How have pay freezes, furloughs and sequestration affected employee morale at NASA?

We certainly made adjustments to NASA programs. I was concerned for our workforce, but our employees understand that we are part of a larger federal government that is experiencing some challenges at the moment, so I don't think that they view pay freezes and furloughs as personal. We've also done a pretty good job of keeping them informed, giving them all the information that we can so they can make good choices. I think the key to keeping the workforce engaged through these tough times is keeping them informed about what's going on.

What are some obstacles to attracting science, technology and engineering talent into public service?

The call to serve is a very personal calling. I think that really smart people understand that the current environment, while not ideal, won't last forever. And I think that if you're someone who has wanted to work for NASA since you were a little kid, the fact that the budget situation is uncertain won't keep you from your calling. In science and engineering fields, there is a symbiotic relationship between the federal government, academia and the private sector, so you can work for different communities at different points in your career.

I always encourage people in technical fields to consider spending a portion of their career with the federal government, because there are opportunities to work on really interesting and challenging work, and to meet and work with fascinating people. There is certainly a lot of personal reward in public service.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I would describe my leadership style as social. For me, it's about building personal relationships with people, really understanding their needs and responding to those in a way that is meaningful to them. We spend a lot of time at work, so it's really important for me, as a leader, to try to create an environment that's enjoyable, creative, innovative, forward leaning and social so that it's a place that people choose to come to.

How did you develop this leadership style?

I've worked with some great leaders who showed me qualities I wanted to highlight in myself, and I've met others who served as horrible warnings. I've also spent time going to leadership development courses and I have been introduced to different leadership models, but the true measure of leadership development is if you can take all that information and integrate it so that it's uniquely yours.

Belaboring the Obvious

Roger G. Harrison - Space News (Opinion)

(Harrison is publisher of the journal Space and Defense and a former director of the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies at the Air Force Academy)

Platinum miners in South Africa struck last year over job cuts and wage reductions. The strike turned violent, and 34 strikers and police were killed before tentative order was restored. While this was going on, two companies in the United States announced plans to mine for minerals, on asteroids. Popular Mechanics officially blessed the idea in its August issue. Along with these announcements came a graphic artist's conception of a monstrous device, all coiled girders and pipes, fastened like an intestinal fluke to some unidentified hunk of cosmic rock. It is a truism, of course, that graphic artists can put anything in space (not to mention in Popular Mechanics). But supposing it became reality, what could this wonderful machine suck through its umbilical that would amortize the cost of putting it there, with perhaps a little profit into the bargain? Platinum was mentioned, but would platinum pay? The experience of those South African miners has something to tell us about that.

On Earth, minerals are available to anyone able to dig or bore a hole in the ground. There's an old Roman copper mine in an isolated wadi leading down to the Dead Sea where you can see a hole like that, and pick up a piece of slag a Roman slave dropped 2,000 years ago. Things are a little more complex now, but the rules of profitable mining remain the same: Keep costs low and variable, refine as closely as you can to the source, sell when prices are high, and shut down when prices are low.

All this is necessary because raw materials like copper, nickel, platinum or tin — the sorts of things you might find on asteroids — are commodities. Commodities trade on markets; prices vary, sometimes wildly. It was a drop in platinum prices that brought the job and salary cuts that caused those South African miners to strike, but even with Dickensian labor practices, platinum mining on Earth is not a hugely profitable business. This is true though terrestrial mine owners operate in the most favorable circumstances imaginable: air to breathe, cheap labor to exploit, markets close by and an ozone layer to protect humans and machines alike against destructive radiation.

Miners of asteroids would have none of these advantages. Their infrastructure would be staggeringly expensive, their costs fixed, their machines of necessity built to work at zero gravity in extremes of radiation and temperature that can't even be simulated on Earth. Before the first ounce of platinum, chromium or tin issued forth from their extraterrestrial refinery (for they, like those Roman copper miners, would have to refine on the spot), they would have spent many hundreds of billions of dollars, with many billions more on tap to operate and maintain their machines in the toxic sea that is space.

Then there are shipping costs. Like the fairy tale Jack with his cow, miners of asteroids would have to get their product to market, and that means back to Earth. NASA plans an asteroid sample-return mission to bring 60 grams of material back from an asteroid. Cost per gram: more than $13 million. Imagine an operation 1,000 times more efficient. Now your cost would be $13,000 per gram — and that's just to get your product to where you can sell it.

Director James Cameron had his little joke about that kind of cost structure in the movie "Avatar." What paid for that heavy-metal, mechanized invasion to dispossess the gentle tree people? Why, "unobtainium," of course, the stuff dreams are made of.

How about the scarcity argument? Aren't we running out of things? In 1980, Paul Erhlich bet Julian Simon that we were, and that the price of copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten would be higher in 10 years. He lost. All trended down; tin continued to fall for another 10 years. Nickel went up after 1990, then dropped off a cliff, falling from $52,000 per metric ton to $10,000 from 2007 to 2009. Platinum, chiefly used for the prosaic purpose of cleaning automotive exhaust, was as high as $2,000 per troy ounce in the last decade, but went to half that before recovering to $1,500. There are abundant supplies of all of these things in Earth's crust, and great amounts would become economical to mine (or reuse) at prices far below those you would have to get to make your asteroid-sourced materials profitable.

Remember the energy crisis? If you do, the scarcity argument should give you pause.

Perhaps abundant new supplies of whatever you harvest from space would increase the demand for whatever it is. That worked for the British in the opium trade with China. It worked for aluminum too, but only because aluminum is extremely versatile, and technology reduced its price many fold. The business plan for asteroid mining, by contrast, depends on the price of its products skyrocketing astronomically. If that happened, demand would fall and substitutes would appear. In the technical jargon of the dismal science, the miner would "lose his shirt."

Yes, but how about helium-3? There is some, but not much, on Earth. More is supposed to exist in strata on the Moon. It would be very useful in commercial-size thermonuclear reactors, and the latter would create power — as the old nuclear industry slogan goes — too cheap to meter. But there are problems. First, there are no thermonuclear reactors, and none appear to be on the horizon; the technology is beyond us, and getting no closer. Second, most research into thermonuclear reactors assumes deuterium as fuel, and there is a lot of deuterium within the atmosphere. That leaves helium-3 to fuel what it is best at fueling, which are fantasies about mining operations on the Moon.

Mining in space for use in space is a final possibility. In theory, that might be cheaper than bringing the same things from Earth. But that's only in theory, since no one really knows, or will find out for many generations to come. In any case, it isn't a way to make money, only to spend less of it.

The conclusion is inescapable, though liable to be escaped, i.e., that raw materials will never be mined in space and sold profitably within the atmosphere or anywhere else. There are plenty of things of interest in space beyond geostationary orbit, but nothing of economic value. Thus, asteroids will continue unvexed in their obits, and the Moon too, if we're lucky. Generations now unimagined will be able to look at our celestial partner in wonder, without seeing a strip mine. That is a very good thing. As for our species, we will be confined for our sustenance to those things already present on this wonderful planet we've been given, trusting in human ingenuity to supply our wants — and perhaps spiritual wisdom to moderate them. But there is a group that will profit. There will always be a dime to be made in space by graphic artists.

The Inevitability of Extraterrestrial Mining

Dennis Wingo - Space News (Opinion)

(Wingo is chief executive of Skycorp Inc., a company focused on advanced technologies and systems for space exploration and commercial markets)

I am honored to provide the counterpoint to my esteemed colleague Ambassador Roger Harrison's negative contention concerning the mining of extraterrestrial materials off of planet Earth.

Let's begin with his ending:

"The conclusion is inescapable, though liable to be escaped, i.e., that raw materials will never be mined in space and sold profitably within the atmosphere or anywhere else. ... Asteroids will continue unvexed in their obits, and the Moon too."

I bring a different quote, from the book "Empire Express," the story of the intercontinental railroad, from U.S. Army Lt. Zebulon Pike, for whom Pike's Peak is named: "In various places there were tracts of many leagues, where the wind had thrown up sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean's rolling wave, and on which not a spear of vegetable matter existed." Pike's visions of sand dunes, pathless wastes and sterile soils were reported, widely read and faithfully believed by geographers.

The myth became innocently embellished by subsequent visitors, especially those in the party of Maj. Stephen H. Long, who traversed the whole area in 1820. It was reported to be "an unfit residence for any but a nomad population ... forever to remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, and the jackal."

The delicious irony is that Mr. Harrison today lives in the shadow of Pike's Peak, and the U.S. Air Force Academy where he teaches is in the middle of the confidently prophesied unmolested haunt.

When Long's report was written, the Erie Canal across New York was five years from completion and it was another 31 years before the first railroad was completed across the state.

Mr. Harrison's technical objections are for the most part valid today for his scenario, just as objections to a railroad across the North American continent were valid in the 1820s. However, technology is being developed today that will enable extraterrestrial mining, manufacturing and development just as technology was developed that would enable the creation of the national railroad.

Mr. Harrison says it is an illusion that we are running out of resources. He is correct. That is not our claim. The claim is that extraction costs of economically viable terrestrial resources are rising dramatically and may soon exceed the cost of extraction from much more plentiful extraterrestrial sources. Today rapidly advancing costs and diminishing returns are rapidly redefining mining due to diminishing ore grades. This fact is developed in a 2012 distinguished lecture by Dan Wood before the Society of Environmental Geologists, "Crucial Challenges to Discovery and Mining — Tomorrow's Deeper Ore Bodies." This is a vitally important issue to solve as resource conflict has been the impetus for most wars in human history.

We live in a global civilization of over 7 billion people, which will expand to over 9 billion before plateauing in mid-century. While American politicians are not paying attention to what this means, the rest of the world is noticing. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth and increasing global resource demand are addressed in "Iron Ore Outlook 2050," a report commissioned for the Indian government. The GDP of the major powers (the United States, Europe, China, India and Japan) is forecast to rise from $48 trillion in 2010 to $149 trillion by 2050. The report's substance is that with this massive increase in global GDP, an intensifying scramble for metal resources is inevitable.

If the trend of resource consumption demand increase continues unabated, there are three likely potential outcomes. The first is collapse, forecast by the "Limits to Growth" school of thought. The second and more likely scenario is fierce national economic competition leading to wars over diminishing resources. The third, and most desirable, is to increase the global resource base by the economic and industrial development of the inner solar system.

Mr. Harrison uses cost as the primary reason that extraterrestrial mining will never happen by focusing on a straw man argument related to mining asteroids in orbits far from Earth. Just as the U.S. railroad infrastructure began on shorter routes with lower capital requirements and shorter payback periods, asteroid mining can begin with our nearest neighbor, the Moon, where telepresence robotics, high-bandwidth communications and a short three-day trip for humans negate his premise. We know from the Apollo samples that plentiful metallic asteroidal materials exist in the lunar highlands. We also know from several missions that extensive water, titanium, thorium, uranium, aluminum and native iron all exist on the Moon, in easily separable oxide form. Improvements in remote sensing data from current missions and computer modeling continue to increase the amount of potential asteroidal material on the Moon, increasing confidence in the Moon first premise.

The extensive resources of the Moon become the catalyst for an inner solar system-wide economy providing fuel, vehicles and the all-important experience in developing an industrial infrastructure off planet. The asteroids then become the force multiplier of inner solar system development with billions of tons of water, metals and free space energy from solar power. Mars figures in here as well as the second home of humanity, creating further demand for asteroidal resources, and providing something else that is becoming increasingly scarce on the Earth: hope for the future.

The technical barriers that Mr. Harrison points to are being overcome just as those of the 19th century were. New technology developments in 3-D printing, additive manufacturing and advanced robotics are breaking down the final barriers to exploiting off-planet resources and indeed the industrial development of the inner solar system. It is not a question if, it is a question of when, and by whom.

Just as the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 was a primary catalyst for a century of American economic growth, it should be the role of government to develop policies and concrete legislation to support this development for the continued health of the American economy and the future of all mankind.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - July 30, 2013

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