Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - August 12, 2013 and JSC Today

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: August 12, 2013 6:06:25 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - August 12, 2013 and JSC Today

 

 

 

 

Monday, August 12, 2013

Read JSC Today in your browser

View Archives

 

JSC 2.0 JSC External Homepage Inside JSC JSC Events Submit JSC Today JSC Roundup Reader's Room NASA News Connect Category Definitions

JSC TODAY CATEGORIES Headlines -  Recent JSC Announcements -  JSC Remote Access VPN/R2S Upgrade Tonight -  Super-Flex Organizations/Social -  Lunarfins Scuba Club Meeting -  Starport Summer Camp Has Been Extended -  Beginners Ballroom Dance - Register Now -  Starport Massage August Special $55 for 60 (M-Th) Jobs and Training -  August Sustainability Opportunities -  250 MOD Online Training Lessons and Still Growing -  Final Retirement & Taxes Classes On-site This Week -  Job Opportunities

Robotics Workstation in the International Space Station's Cupola

 

Headlines Recent JSC Announcements Please visit the JSC Announcements (JSCA) Web page to view the newly posted announcements: 13-026: Key Personnel Assignment - Daniel Hartman 13-027: Key Personnel Assignment - Chad Rowe 13-028: Key Personnel Assignment - Gregory Dorth 13-029: Key Personnel Assignment - Melissa Gard 13-030: Key Personnel Assignment - Catherine Koerner Archived announcements are also available on the JSCA Web page. Linda Turnbough x36246 http://ird.jsc.nasa.gov/DocumentManagement/announcements/default.aspx [top] JSC Remote Access VPN/R2S Upgrade Tonight The JSC Remote Access Virtual Private Network (VPN) systems will be upgraded tonight, Aug. 12, from 8 p.m. to midnight CDT. This outage will affect JSC VPN and JSC R2S. During this activity, access to these network resources will be unavailable or intermittently down while the Information Resources Directorate performs upgrades to remove VPN NDC password login requirements, add a PIV (smartcard) authentication VPN option and replace the Juniper Network Connect client with Junos Pulse. White Sands Test Facility (WSTF) remote access systems can be used during this time as a backup at WSTF VPN and WSTF R2S. For information on Remote Network Access VPN services and assistance: On-site - Remote Access Information Off-site - What is "Remote Network Access"? We apologize for the inconvenience and are working diligently to improve your VPN experience. For questions regarding outage/update activity, please contact Michael Patterson. JSC-IRD-Outreach x41334 [top] Super-Flex Since May 10, JSC has been in Phase 1 of Super-Flex. Data collected so far indicates the overall numbers of cars coming on-site are about a third less on Flex Fridays, and about a third of our civil servants are not logging hours on those days. As we consider Phase 2, we'd like to get your inputs on how Phase 1 has been for you, and any concerns you might have for going to Phase 2 (where we would put buildings into weekend mode). You will be receiving a reminder from the JSC Survey System, we appreciate your time and your input. The survey will close on Monday, Aug. 19, at 5 p.m. CDT. Lisa Pesak x30476 [top]    Organizations/Social Lunarfins Scuba Club Meeting The Lunarfins Scuba Club is a non-profit club that promotes the sport of scuba diving. It has been operating at JSC for 50 years (1963-2013) and is open to JSC employees and friends. This month's meeting will feature Kelly Drennan of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She will be presenting the Flower Gardens National Marine Sanctuary and the mass coral spawning that occurs seven to 10 days after the August full moon. The meeting is held at Clear Lake Park (5001 NASA Parkway, on the south lake side of NASA Parkway) at 7 p.m. Come early (6:30 p.m.) to get to know your fellow JSC dive community. You can also plan on joining us afterward at Mario's in Seabrook for food, drink and camaraderie. Event Date: Wednesday, August 14, 2013   Event Start Time:7:00 PM   Event End Time:8:30 PM Event Location: Clear Lake Park; 5001 NASA Road 1 Add to Calendar Barbara Corbin x36215 http://www.Lunarfins.com [top] Starport Summer Camp Has Been Extended Starport Summer Camp has been extended by one session. We will have the final session of camp (Session 11) during the week of Aug. 19 to 23. There will be a limit of 30 kids in this session, so register now to get your spot! Don't miss out on all the fun activities before summer is over. Ages: 6 to 12 Times: 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Dates: Now through Aug. 23 in one-week sessions Fee per session: $140 per child for dependents | $160 per child for non-dependents NEW for this summer -- ask about our sibling discounts. Shericka Phillips x35563 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/ [top] Beginners Ballroom Dance - Register Now Do you feel like you have two left feet? Well, Starport has the perfect spring program for you: Beginners Ballroom Dance! This eight-week class introduces you to the various types of ballroom dance. Students will learn the secrets of a good lead and following, as well as the ability to identify the beat of the music. This class is easy, and we have fun as we learn. JSC friends and family are welcome. Regular registration: $110 per couple (Aug. 10 to 20) Two class sessions available: Tuesdays from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. -- Starting Aug. 20 Thursdays from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. -- Starting Aug. 22 All classes are taught in the Gilruth Center's dance studio. Steve Schade x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Fitness/RecreationClasses/RecreationProgram... [top] Starport Massage August Special $55 for 60 (M-Th) Starport is offering another amazing massage special to the JSC community! Any one-hour massage booked online in August will be $55 when scheduled on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Starport Massage - $55 for 60 | Monday through Thursday $55 for a 60-minute massage Must be booked Monday through Thursday Must be booked online in August Massage must be physically scheduled between Aug. 1 and Nov. 30 Starport's Massage Therapists -- Marj Moore, LMT Tuesdays and Thursdays | 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Every other Saturday | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Click here to book with Marj -- Anette Lemon, LMT Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays | 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Every other Saturday | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Click here to book with Anette Book your massage today! Steve Schade x30304 http://www.innerspaceclearlake.com/massage.php [top]    Jobs and Training August Sustainability Opportunities Broaden your horizons by investigating what sustainability means and what you can do to be more green. If you don't really understand what that means, you are not alone! Your JSC sustainability champions can present an overview anytime. A description of our JSC Sustainability initiatives and August opportunities can be found on the JSC Sustainability home page. Check it out and contact us to schedule a presentation at your next meeting. Laurie Peterson x39845 http://jsc-web-www6.jsc.nasa.gov/ja/ja13/capp.cfm [top] 250 MOD Online Training Lessons and Still Growing Interested in learning more about spaceflight mission operations in a convenient, self-paced online format? The Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) Online Training Lessons library hosts our continually growing catalog of crew and flight controller training videos, interactive activities and classroom-based lessons. From the Apollo program's lessons learned to emergency operations on the International Space Station, these lessons cover a wide variety of engaging and educational content. Visit the MOD online lessons website to access the library of more than 250 lessons. Since 2011 we have had more than 45,000 viewers, and new lessons are added on a regular basis, so be sure to visit our website often to view a new spotlight lesson developed using the latest training techniques. To learn more about what we do, watch our online training showcase video that highlights the formats and templates used to create our lessons Les Court x47131 https://mod2.jsc.nasa.gov/da7/OnLineLessons/lessons.aspx [top] Final Retirement & Taxes Classes On-site This Week Tuesday: Retire with Confidence What does retirement mean to you? Having more choices and living a balanced lifestyle? What if it also included having the time to work toward meaningful endeavors we believe in instead of just working for a living? While planning for retirement is important, so few of us plan early. Class topics include retirement goals, income needs and sources, asset risks, strategic tax approaches, Required Minimum Distributions (RMD), preventing retirement blind spots and more. Thursday: Taxes - Dancing with Uncle Sam As we approach retirement, tax management becomes critical. Healthy portfolio preparation is the best prevention, and the most reliable protection, against paying unnecessary taxes. Class topics include taxes: past, present and future, strategies to help you think about paying taxes now or later; tax-free, tax-advantaged and fully taxable monies; Social Security benefits; reducing RMD impacts; and more. Details at this link. Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/ [top] Job Opportunities Where do I find job opportunities? Both internal Competitive Placement Plan (CPP) and external JSC job announcements are posted on the Human Resources (HR) Portal and USAJOBS website. Through the HR portal, civil servants can view summaries of all the agency jobs that are currently open:  https://hr.nasa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/employees_home/239/job_opportu... To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop-down menu and select "JSC HR." The "Jobs" link will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies, please call your HR representative. Lisa Pesak x30476 [top]

 

JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.

 

 

 

 

Human Spaceflight News

Monday – August 12, 2013

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

Bolden: asteroid redirect mission not going to "save the planet"

 

Jeff Foust - SpacePolitics.com

 

In the last couple of months, NASA has appeared to put a greater emphasis on the role its overall asteroid initiative, including the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), could play in planetary defense. However, in a meeting last week, NASA administrator Charles Bolden appears to play down the role the mission could play in planetary defense or science. "I don't like saying we're going to save the planet, for example," Bolden said in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) on July 31 in Washington. "At some point, that may be done, but that's not—we're not in a position that we should be saying, 'Fund the asteroid initiative and we're going to save the planet.'"

 

NASA Station Managers Want Decision on Mission Extension

 

Dan Leone - Space News

 

NASA space station managers hope to receive word this year on whether the orbiting outpost's mission will be stretched beyond 2020 because an extension would require supporting investments starting as soon as 2015, a senior agency official said. "We would like to get a policy decision this year," Sam Scimemi, international space station (ISS) program director at NASA headquarters, told members of the NASA Advisory Council's Human Exploration and Operations Committee. "In other words, during the [2015] budget process." If the decision is made this year, it could be factored into NASA's 2015 budget request, which will be submitted to Congress as early as February.

 

Laser test depends on good aim to communicate

Space communication may be sped 100 times

 

James Dean – Florida Today

 

Imagine keeping a laser pointer fixed on a spot the diameter of a human hair, from 30 feet away, while you're walking. That's roughly equivalent to the challenge ahead for an instrument that will demonstrate a laser's ability to beam information to the ground from the International Space Station. If it works, laser communication promises to transmit data from spacecraft across the solar system 10 to 100 times faster than crowded radio waves. That could help a Mars rover unload science results to an orbiter flying overhead, or directly back to Earth.

 

Station crew captures Japanese cargo ship

 

William Harwood - CBS News

 

A Japanese cargo ship loaded with nearly four tons of science gear, supplies and spare parts pulled to within about 30 feet of the International Space Station (ISS) Friday and stood by while astronaut Karen Nyberg, operating the station's robot arm, locked onto a grapple fixture to complete a smooth automated rendezvous. Launched last Saturday from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, the HTV-4 cargo ship, known as "Kounotori," or "white stork," was captured by the robot arm at 7:22 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) as the two spacecraft passed just south of South Africa.

 

Space Station Crew Captures Japanese Supply Ship

 

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

 

The crew of the International Space Station successfully grappled Japan's HTV-4 resupply capsule early Friday, six days after the freighter lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center. NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg captured the 33-foot-long spacecraft with its 3.6 tons of cargo at 7:22 a.m., EDT, using the ISS Canadian robot arm. The fourth in the series of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency supply ships was to be maneuvered to a berthing port on the station's U.S. segment Harmony module within three hours.

 

Japan's cargo craft makes in-orbit delivery to space station

 

Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com

 

The International Space Station's robotic arm, under the control of astronaut Karen Nyberg, reached out and snared a Japanese resupply ship Friday after the unmanned cargo carrier completed a smooth laser-guided rendezvous with the 450-ton orbiting complex. Loaded with 3.6 tons of gear to bolster scientific research and keep the space station running, the H-2 Transfer Vehicle is the fourth logistics craft Japan has sent to the space station since 2009. Nyberg, in her third month aboard the space station, locked on to the HTV cargo craft with the lab's Canadian-built robotic arm at 1129 GMT (7:29 a.m. EDT) as the vehicles flew 260 miles over above Earth south of Africa.

 

NASA's deep space rocket completes initial design phase

 

Charles Black - SEN.com (Space Exploration Network)

 

NASA has completed the preliminary design review of its deep space rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS). The SLS is being designed to lift cargo and the Orion crewship beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations such as an asteroid and Mars. The SLS moved from concept to design last year after completing a combined system requirements review and system definition review. The preliminary design review, which began in June, concluded that the rocket's design was capable of fulfilling the objectives for the SLS.

 

Central students' algae experiment headed for International Space Station

 

Rob Rogers - Billings Gazette (MT)

 

They're going to space. Well, their algae is going to space. A group of Billings Central Catholic High School students have designed and built an experiment to test how well algae grows — and how much carbon dioxide it consumes — in a zero-gravity environment. "Doing this stuff has certainly made biology more interesting," said Stuart Dilts, who will be a senior at Central when the school year starts. The rest of the group graduated in May and will be headed to Montana State University in Bozeman.

 

Space is big business

 

Keith Johnson - South Jersey Newspapers (NJ.com)

 

So who do you think should lead the way in space exploration: Big Government or Big Business? Before the dawning of the Space Age in the late 1950s, many science-fiction authors envisioned a future in which human expansion into outer space was dominated by commercial interests. Robert Heinlein, dean of the craft, wrote about space-obsessed businessman D. D. Harriman in his famous short-story collection, The Man Who Sold the Moon. Harriman's megacorporation finagled and bulled its way onto the Moon, earning sizable profits on the way. Things started changing after we won the race. In 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act was passed, allowing private companies to get into the act. Six years later, the Launch Services Purchase Act actually required NASA to seek commercial providers to launch spacecraft. This was a complete reversal of the earlier policy. Now there are several companies developing their own rocket programs to take us into space. This is a good thing: our country has been unable to put humans into space for more than two years. With modern technology, private companies can now do so.

 

Astronaut Michael Foale retires from Nasa

 

Jonathan Amos - BBC News

 

Michael Foale, the most experienced British-born astronaut in the history of human spaceflight, has retired from Nasa. Holding dual US-UK citizenship, Dr Foale accumulated a total of 375 days in orbit. In his 26-year career in Nasa's astronaut corps, he flew on numerous shuttle and Soyuz missions. He serviced the Hubble telescope, and had tours on both the Mir platform and the International Space Station. The latter he commanded in 2003.

 

British astronaut Michael Foale retires to build electric aircraft

 

Duncan Geere - Wired.com

 

Michael Foale, Britain's most experienced space traveller, has retired from Nasa with plans to help develop an electric aircraft. The dual UK-US citizen, astrophysicist and general all-round badasstronaut has spent more than a year in total in orbit, clocking up 375 days outside our atmosphere. Over 26 years he visited both Mir and the International Space Station, as well as servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1997, he was on the Mir station when it was accidentally rammed by a cargo ship. He later told the BBC: "I felt the fall of the air pressure in my ears and realised it was fairly severe but not so severe that we wouldn't have time to evacuate. It all started to fit together and a plan even started to form in all our minds that we would be ok -- or we could be ok."

 

Astronaut Mike Foale: A Legend for Britain and the US Leaves NASA

 

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com

 

Last week's announcement by NASA of the retirement of astronaut Mike Foale leaves just one representative—Tim Peake—on active status to carry the baton into space for Britain. Although Foale carried dual U.S. and British citizenship, with an American mother and an English father, and although he wore the Stars and Stripes on his flight suit, he was for many years held in high esteem by Britons as "one of our own." During a 26-year career with NASA, he flew six space missions and accrued more than 373 days in orbit. His achievement was recognized with a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) award in the Queen's New Year's Honours List in December 2004.

 

With Garver's Departure, NASA Loses Strong Change Advocate

 

Brian Berger - Space News

 

When NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver leaves her post in September to begin a new career as a labor leader, the Obama administration and its commercial space allies will have lost a passionate champion for leaving Apollo in the past and transforming the U.S. space agency into a model of 21st century innovation. Whether her departure is viewed as good or bad for NASA depends on whether one thinks the politically savvy Garver has helped chart a sustainable new course for a U.S. space program that had been bent on returning to the Moon, or cast it adrift. Commercial space advocates are among those who will be sorriest when she steps down Sept. 6 from the agency that has been central to her career for the past 30 years to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, a labor union representing more than 50,000 commercial pilots in the United States and Canada.

 

Inventor Musk to share plans for high-speed travel

 

Martha Mendoza - Associated Press

 

Twice as fast as an airplane, cheaper than a bullet train and completely self-powered: that's the mysterious transportation system that inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk is promising to reveal design plans for Monday. Musk has been dropping hints about his "Hyperloop" system for more than a year during public events, mentioning that it could never crash, would be immune to weather and would move people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour.

 

Interview with former NASA ISS director on Elysium space station tech & UFOs

 

Alejandro Rojas.- Huffington Post

 

(Rojas is editor at Open Minds Magazine)

 

Elysium, a new sci-fi adventure movie starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, opens this weekend. It is about a gigantic fancy space station that is reserved for the rich, while the poor are left to struggle for survival on a trashed-out Earth. Max (Matt Damon) may be Earth's last hope to bring equality to humanity; that is, if Elysium's Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her henchmen don't stop him first. To get some insight into space station technology, space tourism, and what it takes to live in space, I was able to interview Mark Uhran, who worked for NASA in the International Space Station division for 28 years, the last seven as the division director. Of course, I also had to ask him about the alleged UFO videos taken from the ISS…

 

NASA needs its swagger back

 

John Kelly - Florida Today (Commentary)

 

NASA needs some of what Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson bring to the table: gutsy, all-in leadership. Don't get me wrong. I like Charlie Bolden, the former Marine turned astronaut who heads the agency. He's a good man who served his country with honor. He can tell you what's special about NASA and sell the virtues of exploration. But Bolden, and some of his senior leaders, seem stuck telling yesterday's version of the NASA story rather than tomorrow's. They're not breaking out of a mold constructed in the Cold War, slightly modified through the shuttle and space station eras, and now terribly outdated.

 

NASA, aerospace industry depend on scale models to get message across

 

Muhammed El-Hasan - Torrance Daily Breeze (CA)

 

In the lobbies at Southern California's aerospace companies, satellite, space telescope and rocket scale models boast of the region's technological ingenuity. Regularly commissioned by large and small companies, the models serve as an educational tool and form of public outreach that helps explain and sometimes justify government programs that cost millions or even billions of dollars. At Hawthorne's Scale Model Co., Isao Hirai's workshop is filled miniatures versions of the fruits of major aerospace programs stretching back decades. Hirai began crafting these models in 1967 -- first as an employee and later as the owner of the small business. His customers are not so small. They include Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and NASA, including JPL in Pasadena.

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

Bolden: asteroid redirect mission not going to "save the planet"

 

Jeff Foust - SpacePolitics.com

 

In the last couple of months, NASA has appeared to put a greater emphasis on the role its overall asteroid initiative, including the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), could play in planetary defense. However, in a meeting last week, NASA administrator Charles Bolden appears to play down the role the mission could play in planetary defense or science.

 

"I don't like saying we're going to save the planet, for example," Bolden said in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) on July 31 in Washington. "At some point, that may be done, but that's not—we're not in a position that we should be saying, 'Fund the asteroid initiative and we're going to save the planet.'"

 

He also deemphasized the role of science in the proposed mission to redirect an asteroid into a "distant retrograde" lunar orbit to then be visited by a crewed Orion spacecraft. "We should not be saying that this is going to benefit science. It is not a science mission," he said. He said that the mission would accomplish some science, including by astronauts bringing back samples of the asteroid, "but it should not be characterized, or we should not try to characterize it, as a major science initiative." What the asteroid mission will do for planetary science, he concluded, was "peanuts."

 

Instead, the asteroid initiative was designed to advance long-term human space exploration in a time when the budget doesn't exist for human missions to the Moon. "When I weigh the cost benefit of going back to the lunar surface in a limited budget environment, and going to Mars, I would rather take what little money I have upfront and advance the technologies we're going to need" to do Mars missions, he said. He cited as one example the development of solar electric propulsion, something he said isn't needed for a human return to the Moon but is useful for Mars and other deep space missions.

 

That downplaying of the role of the ARM for science or planetary defense aligns with the findings from last month's meeting of NASA's Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) in Washington. Referring to the ARM as the ARRM (Asteroid Redirect and Return Mission), the SBAG found it wanting both in science and planetary defense.

 

"ARRM has been defined as not being a science mission, nor is it a cost effective way to address science goals achievable through sample return," the SBAG found. "Robotic sample return missions can return higher science value samples by selecting from a larger population of asteroids, and can be accomplished at significantly less cost… Support of ARRM with planetary science resources is not appropriate."

 

The SBAG also noted that since the mission would focus on redirecting an object no more than 10 meters across (although there is some discussion of visiting a larger asteroid and plucking a smaller boulder off it), "ARRM has limited relevance to planetary defense." In addition, the group cited concerns about technical, cost and schedule risks, as well as poorly defined mission objectives.

 

With regards to schedule, one interesting item came up during the NAC meeting. Previously, NASA had talked about redirecting an asteroid to provide a destination for the first crewed SLS/Orion mission, designated Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2), planned for launch in 2021. One challenge has been, though, finding a target that, even in the most optimistic scenarios for the development of the robotic ARM spacecraft, could be put into te designed distant retrograde orbit by 2021. In a briefing about the initiative at the NAC meeting, NASA's Michele Gates said "our current concepts are looking at either EM-3 or EM-4? for the Orion mission to the asteroid. That would likely push out the mission into the mid-2020s, given the expected cadence of at least two years between SLS/Orion flights.

 

NASA Station Managers Want Decision on Mission Extension

 

Dan Leone - Space News

 

NASA space station managers hope to receive word this year on whether the orbiting outpost's mission will be stretched beyond 2020 because an extension would require supporting investments starting as soon as 2015, a senior agency official said.

 

"We would like to get a policy decision this year," Sam Scimemi, international space station (ISS) program director at NASA headquarters, told members of the NASA Advisory Council's Human Exploration and Operations Committee. "In other words, during the [2015] budget process."

 

If the decision is made this year, it could be factored into NASA's 2015 budget request, which will be submitted to Congress as early as February.

 

"Within a couple of years, we have to start making contract decisions about what to buy, what not to buy," Scimemi said. "We're having discussions now [within NASA]."

 

Scimemi was not specific, but William Gerstenmaier, NASA's top human spaceflight official, said one example is the photovoltaic panels that provide power to the orbital outpost. These panels have absorbed many hits from space debris and micrometeoroids, and would definitely need to be replaced for an extended mission, he said.

 

"Yeah, there's quite a few hits to the solar panels," Gerstenmaier told the committee. "They look like a west Texas stop sign."

 

Generally speaking, NASA's rationale for an extended ISS mission is scientific and technical research. Now that construction is complete, the U.S. agency wants to focus on making discoveries in low Earth orbit, and on using the ISS to test technology developed for crewed exploration of deep space.

 

But time is precious on the ISS, and crews currently use most of theirs just to maintain the facility, Scimemi said. That means NASA and its international partners will have to come up with clear research priorities for any extended mission.

 

As it grapples with the challenge of having the space station's caregivers moonlight as lab techs, NASA is also hashing out the conditions for extending Boeing Co.'s massive space station support contract, which expires in October 2015. So far, NASA has paid Boeing about $17 billion under the International Space Station Vehicle Sustaining Engineering Contract, which dates back to 1993, NASA spokesman Joshua Buck said.

 

NASA plans to extend the contract with Houston-based Boeing Space Exploration until at least 2020, according to a July 23 notice the agency posted online.

 

Under the proposed extension, Boeing would continue to provide engineering and management support for the station's U.S. segment, which includes both American modules and modules furnished by the European and Japanese space agencies. The company would be responsible for upkeep of most major ISS subsystems, and for providing international partners with common ISS hardware and software.

 

According to White House budget projections, the U.S. contribution to station and supporting activities will be about $4 billion a year through 2018.

 

Any plan NASA comes up with to operate ISS for most of the next decade will have to take into account the wishes of the agency's international partners, especially Russia. Russia, which built the station's core propulsion module and has more experience with long-duration, crewed space stations than any other nation, will "probably want to go beyond 2020," Scimemi speculated at the meeting.

 

For Europe and Japan, the future is less certain. Japan is struggling with its own fiscal problems, and its space budget, like those of other Japanese government agencies, has been tapped to pay for ongoing cleanup efforts related to nuclear contamination caused when a tsunami struck a power plant back in 2011, Scimemi said.

 

Europe, meanwhile, is weighing its options.

 

The 20-member European Space Agency built the station's Columbus laboratory module, and has kept ISS supplied with cargo using the Automated Transfer Vehicle. That spacecraft has made four flights since 2008 and is scheduled to make a fifth, and final, delivery to ISS in 2014. Compared with pure science missions, such as the ExoMars sample collection project the agency is conducting with Russia, ISS utilization is a low priority within the European Space Agency. However, like Japan, Europe has conducted its share of space-based research aboard ISS.

 

Discounting the space shuttle missions that made ISS construction possible, NASA has spent about $54.5 billion through 2012 on the program, Buck wrote in an Aug. 6 email. Tacking on shuttle costs brings the tab up to around $100 billion.

 

Laser test depends on good aim to communicate

Space communication may be sped 100 times

 

James Dean – Florida Today

 

Imagine keeping a laser pointer fixed on a spot the diameter of a human hair, from 30 feet away, while you're walking.

 

That's roughly equivalent to the challenge ahead for an instrument that will demonstrate a laser's ability to beam information to the ground from the International Space Station.

 

If it works, laser communication promises to transmit data from spacecraft across the solar system 10 to 100 times faster than crowded radio waves. That could help a Mars rover unload science results to an orbiter flying overhead, or directly back to Earth.

 

Sitting in a Kennedy Space Center lab last week, the instrument called OPALS was put through a last series of ground tests before it is installed in a spacecraft for a December launch to the station.

 

Commands sent from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California were routed through the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to the payload at Kennedy, where the station's power and data connections can be precisely simulated.

 

"When we're in space, you substitute the ISS for KSC and it's the same deal," said Bogdan Oaida, the mission's project systems engineer at JPL. "It's as close to flight as we're going to get before we're actually up on the station, so it's very exciting."

 

Spacecraft typically communicate with each other and the ground through radio waves.

 

It's reliable, but there isn't enough spectrum available to quickly return the huge quantities of information being collected by everything from Earth-observing satellites to interplanetary probes and Mars rovers, creating a backlog.

 

OPALS, short for "Optical PAyload for Lasercomm Science," will use light in the form of an infrared laser to send data.

 

The mission's goal is not the speedy data rates hoped for in the future, but first to show the laser can find and hold its target.

 

Perched outside the space station orbiting at five miles per second, OPALS will attempt to lock its narrow beam on a ground station beacon 250 miles below in California — like the laser pointer challenge.

 

"That's the most difficult part about this from a technical standpoint, is getting the pointing right," Oaida said.

 

The results will be measured by how well OPALS delivers a short, DVD-quality video clip (content to be determined) during the longest station passes of two to three minutes.

 

The planned 90-day demonstration will also study how much the atmosphere and weather garble transmissions.

 

Clouds could block the laser. Hot temperatures could generate turbulence that causes more errors, seen as pixilation in the video, than a cool day.

 

Since its arrival last month, Kennedy personnel have played an important role getting OPALS ready for launch, like other station-bound payloads.

 

"We want to do everything we can to help them be successful on orbit," said Jennifer Wahlberg of Titusville, NASA's ISS integration lead for utilization payloads at KSC.

 

Behind the scenes, it's a brisk line of work at the post-shuttle space center, where payloads have shifted from girders and modules that built the station to the science instruments and experiments it was built for.

 

Instead of on shuttles, they launch on two commercial U.S. spacecraft and several international vehicles.

 

"We're almost as busy as were prior to shuttle," said Wahlberg.

 

"The volume of traffic has slowed down a little bit, but we still have quite a bit of payloads in the queue ready to go to station."

 

After this week's tests, which were proceeding smoothly, OPALS will enter "dwell" mode until a planned mid-October move to a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

 

A colleague has joked that laser communication has been the next big thing for 30 years, but Oiada believes technology advances have made it nearly ready for prime time.

 

"I think we've reached that 'knee in the curve' where we're imminently close to making this operational," he said.

 

Station crew captures Japanese cargo ship

 

William Harwood - CBS News

 

A Japanese cargo ship loaded with nearly four tons of science gear, supplies and spare parts pulled to within about 30 feet of the International Space Station (ISS) Friday and stood by while astronaut Karen Nyberg, operating the station's robot arm, locked onto a grapple fixture to complete a smooth automated rendezvous.

 

Launched last Saturday from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, the HTV-4 cargo ship, known as "Kounotori," or "white stork," was captured by the robot arm at 7:22 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) as the two spacecraft passed just south of South Africa.

 

"Houston, station, capture's complete," Nyberg called. "We'd like to say congratulations to the entire Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) team and everybody else around the world who has successfully gotten the fourth HTV to the International Space Station."

 

"And Karen and the rest of the Expedition 36 crew, congratulations," astronaut Mike Fincke replied from mission control. "Down here, we show a successful grapple and capture of the Kounotori cargo vehicle. Good work."

 

With the visiting spacecraft safely in hand, Nyberg, working at a robotics work station in the multi-window cupola compartment, handed off control of the robot arm to flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center.

 

The ground team then maneuvered the cargo ship to the Earth-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module. After getting the common berthing mechanisms properly aligned, motorized bolts were driven home in two stages to lock the craft in place. The work was completed at 11:38 a.m.

 

Developed by JAXA as a contribution to the space station program, the HTV is designed to carry both pressurized and unpressurized cargo, including equipment too big to pass through the space station's hatches.

 

For its fourth flight to the ISS, the pressurized section of HTV-4 was carrying an experiment sample freezer, spacesuit oxygen tanks, batteries, a spare spacewalk jet backpack and a variety of crew supplies, including food, clothing and fresh water.

 

The pressurized section also carried a high-resolution camera that will be used to image Comet ISON and four small Cubesat satellites that will be deployed from the Japanese Kibo laboratory's airlock.

 

The HTV's unpressurized section carried a main bus switching unit, part of the station's electrical power distribution system, a spare solar array power and data interface unit and a NASA experiment pallet housing eight research projects in a variety of disciplines.

 

The astronauts plan to open hatches between Harmony and the HTV on Saturday to being the process of unloading the supplies and hardware stowed in the supply ship's pressurized section. The station's robot arm will swing into action Sunday to begin the job of extracting and moving the unpressurized components to external storage platforms.

 

If all goes well, the HTV-4 spacecraft, reloaded with trash and no-longer-needed equipment, will be detached from the station Sept. 4, burning up in the atmosphere a few days later.

 

Space Station Crew Captures Japanese Supply Ship

 

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

 

The crew of the International Space Station successfully grappled Japan's HTV-4 resupply capsule early Friday, six days after the freighter lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center.

 

NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg captured the 33-foot-long spacecraft with its 3.6 tons of cargo at 7:22 a.m., EDT, using the ISS Canadian robot arm.

 

The fourth in the series of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency supply ships was to be maneuvered to a berthing port on the station's U.S. segment Harmony module within three hours.

 

Nyberg was posted at a control console in the ISS Cupola observation deck for the capture with Canada's 58-foot-long robot arm. She was assisted by NASA colleague Chris Cassidy and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano for the robot arm capture as the two spacecraft sailed 260 miles just south of South Africa.

 

"Good work," offered NASA's Mission Control.

 

Internal cargo off loading of food, water, clothing and research gear is scheduled to begin Saturday. Robotic operations to remove nearly one ton of external research equipment and spare parts is scheduled for late Sunday.

 

Ground control teams from NASA and at JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center will handle the external off loading with Canada's robot arm and Japan's 33-foot-long robotic manipulator. An external pallet securing all of the external hardware aboard the HTV-4 will be placed on an exposed platform attached to the Japanese Kibo research module.

 

Japan's cargo craft makes in-orbit delivery to space station

 

Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com

 

The International Space Station's robotic arm, under the control of astronaut Karen Nyberg, reached out and snared a Japanese resupply ship Friday after the unmanned cargo carrier completed a smooth laser-guided rendezvous with the 450-ton orbiting complex.

 

Loaded with 3.6 tons of gear to bolster scientific research and keep the space station running, the H-2 Transfer Vehicle is the fourth logistics craft Japan has sent to the space station since 2009.

 

Nyberg, in her third month aboard the space station, locked on to the HTV cargo craft with the lab's Canadian-built robotic arm at 1129 GMT (7:29 a.m. EDT) as the vehicles flew 260 miles over above Earth south of Africa.

 

"Houston, station," Nyberg radioed mission control. "Capture is complete. I'd like to say congratulations to the entire JAXA team and everybody else around the world who has successfully gotten the fourth HTV to the International Space Station."

 

"Karen, and the rest of the Expedition 36 crew, congratulations," replied veteran astronaut Mike Fincke inside mission control in Houston. "Tsukuba (mission control in Japan) sends their thanks and congratulations. Down here, we see a successful grapple and capture of the Kounotori cargo vehicle. Good work."

 

The HTV is nicknamed Kounotori, or white stork in Japanese.

 

Over the next several hours, ground controllers maneuver the 58-foot-long robot arm to position the HTV cargo craft on the Earth-facing port on the space station's Harmony module.

 

Final berthing to the Harmony module was complete at 1538 GMT (11:38 a.m. EDT), when 16 bolts drove into place to create a firm attachment between the automated cargo carrier and the space station.

 

The astronauts plan to open hatches between the HTV and Harmony on Saturday, before floating through the 50-inch-diameter pathway into the cargo craft's pressurized compartment to begin unloading supplies.

 

The HTV's cabin is filled with 1,257 pounds of water bags, food supplied by Japan and NASA, clothing, shampoo and other treats for the space station's six-person crew. Other payloads with more technical purposes include a freezer to house sensitive experiment samples in Japan's Kibo laboratory module, oxygen tanks for spacesuits, rechargeable batteries, and a system to monitor the environment inside Kibo.

 

The cargo ship also delivered life science experiments studying plant growth and freeze-dried sperm from a mouse to look at the effects of spaceflight on animal reproduction, according to a JAXA press kit.

 

Four small satellites known as CubeSats are also inside the Japanese cargo craft. The CubeSats, which were built by institutions in Japan and the United States, will be deployed from a specially-designed apparatus on the end of a Japanese robot arm outside the space station.

 

A talking humanoid robot named Kirobo is packed inside the HTV. And an ultra-high definition video camera was delivered to record imagery of comet ISON as it flies through the inner solar system late this year.

 

NASA also shipped new equipment for the space station's satellite refueling testbed aboard the HTV.

 

The dry cargo inside the HTV totals 4,094 pounds, according to NASA.

 

Japan builds cargo delivery vehicles to pay for its share of the space station's operating costs. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, plans to fly at least seven HTVs through 2016. The first three HTV flights were successful.

 

"We have gained trust to the point NASA has requested us to transport indispensable supplies for operating ISS with Kounotori," said Dai Asoh, an HTV flight director at JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center.

 

The Kounotori 4 mission delivered 3.6 tons of cargo - mostly inside the ship's pressurized cabin.

 

On Sunday night, U.S. time, ground controllers will begin a choreographed maneuver using Canadian and Japanese robot arms to extract a cargo pallet from the HTV's unpressurized payload bay.

 

The pallet will be temporarily positioned on the Japanese lab module's exposed porch, where the robot arms and Canada's Dextre robotic handyman will move three boxes from the HTV pallet to new homes on the space station.

 

The HTV's external bay holds a main bus switching unit - a device used to distribute electrical power on the space station - and a utility transfer assembly designed to route cables between the outpost's four solar array truss segments and pressurized modules.

 

The switching unit and transfer assembly will be stored outside the space station to serve as spares in the event of failures with either system.

 

The HTV's exposed pallet also carries a U.S. military payload housing eight experiments in atmospheric observation, thermal control, radiation measurement, data processing and lightning research. The instruments, sponsored by the Defense Department and NASA, will be installed outside the space station for several years.

 

Later this month, the robotic arms will put an old experiment package on the HTV's pallet before placing the cargo-carrying cradle back inside the supply freighter for disposal. Astronauts will also stow trash inside the HTV's pressurized compartment.

 

Departure of the Kounotori 4 spacecraft is scheduled for Sept. 4, with re-entry set for three days later over the Pacific Ocean. The HTV is designed to burn up in the atmosphere at the end of its mission.

 

NASA's deep space rocket completes initial design phase

 

Charles Black - SEN.com (Space Exploration Network)

 

NASA has completed the preliminary design review of its deep space rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS).

 

The SLS is being designed to lift cargo and the Orion crewship beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations such as an asteroid and Mars.

 

The SLS moved from concept to design last year after completing a combined system requirements review and system definition review. The preliminary design review, which began in June, concluded that the rocket's design was capable of fulfilling the objectives for the SLS.

 

Todd May, manager of the SLS Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center explained: "The review had to be incredibly detailed, so our plans for vehicle integration, flight software, test, verification and operations will result in a safe, affordable and sustainable vehicle design."

 

The completion of the initial design phase means the next stage is what NASA calls "Key Decision Point-C" when officials decide whether to move the project to the next stage of development.

 

LeRoy Cain, head of the independent standing review board for the SLS, explained: "There are several external NASA stakeholders and organizations -- including Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, and the public -- who require a thorough, truly independent look at these programs as they transition through their lifecycle."

 

If the SLS gets the official go ahead, its first test flight would take place in 2017. The 2017 mission, designated Exploration Mission 1, would see the SLS -- in its 70 metric ton configuration -- lift an unmanned Orion crew vehicle into space.

 

Orion meanwhile is scheduled to have an unmanned flight in 2014, to be launched by a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket rather than the SLS. Exploration Mission 1 would be the first pairing of the SLS and Orion.

 

The first manned flight of Orion and the SLS could come in 2021 when Exploration Mission-2 would see the SLS lift Orion carrying four astronauts into space.

 

The SLS, which will be certified for human spaceflight, is being designed with two configurations, one that can lift 70 metric tons and a larger configuration with a second stage that will be capable of lifting 130 metric tons.

 

In its larger format the SLS will stand 384 feet tall. Its height and lift capability will exceed those of the Saturn V moon rocket which stood 363 feet tall (110 metres) and could lift 120 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

 

Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 NASA has been without the capability to put cargo or crew into orbit, and relies on Russian Soyuz vehicles to ferry crew to and from the International Space Station.

 

NASA's strategy for low-Earth orbit missions is to outsource crew transportation to companies including SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Boeing who are each developing a space vehicle designed to taxi astronauts to and from the space station. However, NASA hopes the SLS and its Orion spacecraft will provide the capability to explore space beyond low-Earth orbit.

 

Central students' algae experiment headed for International Space Station

 

Rob Rogers - Billings Gazette (MT)

 

They're going to space. Well, their algae is going to space.

 

A group of Billings Central Catholic High School students have designed and built an experiment to test how well algae grows — and how much carbon dioxide it consumes — in a zero-gravity environment.

 

"Doing this stuff has certainly made biology more interesting," said Stuart Dilts, who will be a senior at Central when the school year starts.

 

The rest of the group graduated in May and will be headed to Montana State University in Bozeman.

 

The project began as part of the NASA HUNCH program, a science experiment competition aimed at motivating high school students to design, test and create hardware for space exploration.

 

The group from Central — James Dilts, Kylee Hrban, Nathan Heldt and Laura Westwood — decided they'd tackle the problem of oxygen. So far, the best way to have breathable oxygen in space is to bring it in big canisters.

 

That's expensive and labor-intensive.

 

The students figured, if they could find a way to produce oxygen in space, that might mitigate the problem. So they focused on algae.

 

"It's a single-cell organism," said James Dilts, Stuart's older brother. "It's not a plant."

 

Still, like big plants, algae uses photosynthesis to produce food and, in turn, expels a lot of oxygen. And as a single-celled organism, it could grow small in a petri dish, which is where the group started.

 

Eventually, they designed small plastic boxes filled with the nutrient-rich gel found in petri dishes and grew the algae suspended inside the gel. That solved the watering problem.

 

Water is tricky in zero gravity and doesn't always work like it should when placed in pumps and other devices.

 

Rather than try to solve the problem of how to water the algae, they decided to bypass it altogether and use the gel, Westwood said.

 

The students' experiment will join dozens of others on the International Space Station. However, it will be just one of two high school-designed experiments on board.

 

The students have been working on the project for nearly a year. The first goal was simply to have it qualify to fly aboard NASA's aircraft that simulates a zero-gravity environment.

 

It made the cut and spent an afternoon on the plane. The data they got from running the experiment there was real and noteworthy.

 

The students were required to present their findings to a panel of 20 scientists. The reaction from the panel was nearly as exciting as learning they had earned their ticket to the International Space Station.

 

The scientists told the students they had designed an experiment with "legitimate scientific value." With that came the clearance to go to space, but the students would have to pay for it.

 

They successfully earned a grant from CASIS, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which governs the International Space Station.

 

It costs about $10,000 a pound to send something to space and CASIS awarded the Central students $30,000 — just enough to cover their 3-pound boxed experiment.

 

Once in space, the experiment has to be totally autonomous. It has to run itself. So the students had to build the electronics to run the experiment and write the computer code that would govern it and beam the data back to earth.

 

That's one of the reasons the experiment focuses on carbon dioxide consumption. CO2 sensors are considerably smaller and less complex than oxygen sensors. So rather than measure the oxygen the algae produces in zero gravity, they'll track the carbon dioxide it absorbs.

 

"This is the first time this has ever been done," James Dilts said.

 

To build the experiment and to get it to work, the group had to learn mechanical and electrical engineering, computer programming and laboratory biology.

 

It was the computer programming that connected the students with Andy Wildenberg, an associate professor of computer science at Rocky Mountain College.

 

He's been working with the group of students all summer. And he's impressed.

 

"They can figure out what needs to be done and then they do it," he said.

 

Most importantly, he said, they've learned how to fail. Each piece of the experiment has gone through a number of iterations as they've worked through flaws and setbacks.

 

"We've taken away a lot of experience," James Dilts said.

 

Space is big business

 

Keith Johnson - South Jersey Newspapers (NJ.com)

 

So who do you think should lead the way in space exploration: Big Government or Big Business?

 

Before the dawning of the Space Age in the late 1950s, many science-fiction authors envisioned a future in which human expansion into outer space was dominated by commercial interests. Robert Heinlein, dean of the craft, wrote about space-obsessed businessman D. D. Harriman in his famous short-story collection, The Man Who Sold the Moon. Harriman's megacorporation finagled and bulled its way onto the Moon, earning sizable profits on the way.

 

But we all know the real Space Race was powered by Cold War political competition between the USSR and the USA, not between rival companies. Only large governments could afford such giant projects at the time. Early in the Space Race our country even passed laws limiting space exploration to a government agency, NASA.

 

Things started changing after we won the race. In 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act was passed, allowing private companies to get into the act. Six years later, the Launch Services Purchase Act actually required NASA to seek commercial providers to launch spacecraft. This was a complete reversal of the earlier policy.

 

Now there are several companies developing their own rocket programs to take us into space. This is a good thing: our country has been unable to put humans into space for more than two years. With modern technology, private companies can now do so.

 

There is one company that seems to hold a comfortable lead in this competition.

 

The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, is the only one that has performed actual orbital missions. Created in 2002 by a co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk, SpaceX was the first (and so far only) private company to carry cargo to the International Space Station, more than a year ago.

 

Their Dragon spacecraft is the only cargo carrier with a refrigerator, and the only one that can return experiments from orbit. A Dragon has visited the ISS three times. Next year, SpaceX hopes to use it to carry humans between Earth and the Space Station.

 

The company is moving in some exciting directions. In the past, some of the hardware used to launch a rocket into orbit was always lost. Rocket motors sank beneath the waves, or were left to drift in space.

 

Even the Space Shuttle (R.I.P.), advertised as a "reusable space vehicle," was not totally so. The great external fuel tank, that gigantic orange bullet to which everything else was fastened, was dropped into the ocean depths after it ran empty. Even the reusable solid rocket boosters parachuted into the ocean, and had to be laboriously plucked out of the water. They were again available for use only after many hours of cleaning and refurbishing.

 

SpaceX has a different plan. Their main thrusters, called Falcons, will eventually be able to land softly on rocket power after they've done their job. Test flights by smaller rockets called Grasshoppers have flown to altitudes of over a thousand feet, then come back down to land gently and accurately on their launch pads. Reusing these large pieces of machinery greatly reduces the cost of a mission.

 

The turnaround time for the Falcons is surprisingly short. The thrusters can, in principle, be reused in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months. Even now, SpaceX can do up to three launches to the Space Station per year, which is more than the Russian and Japanese space agencies can accomplish. Eventually the company wants to do up to 15 major launches a year, from standard launch sites such as Cape Canaveral and from their own sites, currently in planning.

 

The Falcons are relatively cheap. The cost to put a pound of payload into orbit with the largest thruster assembly, the Falcon Heavy, is expected to be one-fifth to one-tenth of what the best large rockets can do now. Moreover, that version will be able to lift more weight into orbit than anything since the Space Shuttle.

 

Musk wants to go much farther than low-Earth orbit, though. He's already laid out plans for going to Mars in 10 to 20 years. That noise you hear is Robert Heinlein jumping up and down and applauding in his grave.

 

SpaceX is certainly not the only company heading into space, but it appears to be in the lead. Its story, including how they are able to perform so reliably and cheaply, can be read at www.spacex.com.

 

Astronaut Michael Foale retires from Nasa

 

Jonathan Amos - BBC News

 

Michael Foale, the most experienced British-born astronaut in the history of human spaceflight, has retired from Nasa.

 

Holding dual US-UK citizenship, Dr Foale accumulated a total of 375 days in orbit.

 

In his 26-year career in Nasa's astronaut corps, he flew on numerous shuttle and Soyuz missions.

 

He serviced the Hubble telescope, and had tours on both the Mir platform and the International Space Station.

 

The latter he commanded in 2003.

 

Dr Foale is leaving the agency to work on advancing green aviation technology, by helping to develop an electric aircraft.

 

Born in Louth, Lincolnshire, Michael Foale went to school in Canterbury, Kent, and received his astrophysics PhD from Cambridge. He then departed the UK shortly afterwards to pursue his dream of going into orbit by joining the US space agency. This required he become a US citizen.

 

The Nasa administrator, and former fellow astronaut, Charlie Bolden, paid tribute to Dr Foale.

 

"We salute Mike and his contributions to Nasa as an accomplished member of the astronaut corps," General Bolden said in a statement.

 

"Starting with his first flight, shuttle mission STS-45, when we flew together in 1992, Mike has worked tirelessly to support Nasa's quest to explore the unknown. I know Mike will go on to do more great things as he continues to support the aerospace industry in his new endeavour."

 

One of the most dramatic events in Dr Foale's career occurred on Mir in 1997 when the Russian space station was rammed by a visiting cargo ship.

 

He later recalled to the BBC: "It weighed about seven tonnes so the impact was very noticeable. We heard a big thud and I remember having a severe adrenalin rush and thinking about how much longer do we have.

 

"I felt the fall of the air pressure in my ears and realised it was fairly severe but not so severe that we wouldn't have time to evacuate. It all started to fit together and a plan even started to form in all our minds that we would be ok - or we could be ok."

 

Dr Foale made a total of six trips into space and at one point held the record for the most cumulative time in orbit for a US astronaut.

 

Like most of the British-born individuals who have flown in space, Michael Foale had to take the Nasa route to achieve his goals. For years, successive UK governments deemed human spaceflight to be a waste of money and refused to fund programmes involving astronauts.

 

Dr Foale was sometimes critical of this attitude, and was delighted when the European Space Agency went ahead and selected British Army Air Corps pilot Major Tim Peake as an astronaut candidate, even though the UK government had no direct involvement in the Paris-based organisation's human spaceflight programme.

 

"Britain's exploration history is huge. It stops somewhere in the middle of the last century and I would like to see it pick up again; and I think Tim represents that," he told the BBC in 2009.

 

The UK government's position on space has changed markedly since then, with ministers pumping money into the home industry and even funding activities on the space station.

 

In addition, the Chancellor George Osborne took the step in June of putting substantial investment behind a design for an air-breathing rocket engine that could one day power a space plane.

 

British astronaut Michael Foale retires to build electric aircraft

 

Duncan Geere - Wired.com

 

Michael Foale, Britain's most experienced space traveller, has retired from Nasa with plans to help develop an electric aircraft.

 

The dual UK-US citizen, astrophysicist and general all-round badasstronaut has spent more than a year in total in orbit, clocking up 375 days outside our atmosphere. Over 26 years he visited both Mir and the International Space Station, as well as servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

In 1997, he was on the Mir station when it was accidentally rammed by a cargo ship. He later told the BBC: "I felt the fall of the air pressure in my ears and realised it was fairly severe but not so severe that we wouldn't have time to evacuate. It all started to fit together and a plan even started to form in all our minds that we would be ok -- or we could be ok."

 

Foale was born in Lincolnshire and received a PhD in Astrophysics from Cambridge University, but was forced to move to the US and obtain American citizenship to pursue his ambitions of spaceflight.

 

In a statement, Nasa administrator Charles Bolden said: "Starting with his first flight, shuttle mission STS-45, when we flew together in 1992, Mike has worked tirelessly to support NASA's quest to explore the unknown. I know Mike will go on to do more great things as he continues to support the aerospace industry in his new endeavour."

 

The details of that endeavour are vague for the time being, but Foale will be working on advancing green aviation technology by helping to develop an electric aircraft.

 

Astronaut Mike Foale: A Legend for Britain and the US Leaves NASA

 

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com

 

Last week's announcement by NASA of the retirement of astronaut Mike Foale leaves just one representative—Tim Peake—on active status to carry the baton into space for Britain. Although Foale carried dual U.S. and British citizenship, with an American mother and an English father, and although he wore the Stars and Stripes on his flight suit, he was for many years held in high esteem by Britons as "one of our own." During a 26-year career with NASA, he flew six space missions and accrued more than 373 days in orbit. His achievement was recognized with a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) award in the Queen's New Year's Honours List in December 2004.

 

Colin Michael Foale came from Louth in Lincolnshire, England, where he was born on 6 January 1957, the son of a Royal Air Force pilot father and U.S. mother. "I grew up with the sound of jets," Foale later told the NASA oral historian, "and I lived in exotic places and I developed a taste for not so much adventure, but new vistas, new places, new things. I quickly decided that I wanted to fly." Frequent visits to his mother's family in Minnesota introduced him to the space program as a child, when he saw John Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule in the state fair. "My father didn't discourage in any means my interest in being a pilot or an astronaut," he reflected. "I'm not sure he credited very realistic my dreams and aspirations there, especially since Britain did not have—and still does not have—a human spaceflight program. However, there was quiet support."

 

A test piloting and military aviation career beckoned, but in his mid-teens Foale was misdiagnosed with a vision issue and it was this turning point which altered his focus toward the sciences. He entered Queen's College, Cambridge, and would earn a first-class degree in physics in 1978. By the time the misdiagnosis was uncovered and he realised that his vision was perfectly fine for military aviation, NASA's astronaut requirements had changed. Test piloting credentials were no longer mandatory and he could apply as a scientist. After his degree, he completed a PhD in laboratory astrophysics in 1982 and made his first move to NASA the following year.

 

In June 1983, Foale entered the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as a payload officer in Mission Control. He unsuccessfully applied for admission into the astronaut corps in 1984 and 1985, but in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster he altered the focus of his application essay from describing his own dreams to considering the managerial realities faced by NASA. On his third attempt, he was accepted as an astronaut candidate in June 1987. Two years later, he was one of the first members of his class to be selected for a spaceflight, and in March 1992—only days before the launch of his first mission, STS-45/ATLAS-1—Foale was named as payload commander of ATLAS-2, scheduled for the early 1993. It was the start of an illustrious, six-flight career which would see him become the first person of British nationality to perform an EVA, complete a long-duration flight, service the Hubble Space Telescope, and command the International Space Station.

 

Foale's six missions were:

 

·         STS-45: This nine-day flight in March 1992 carried the first Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science (ATLAS-1) payload, dedicated to studies of the Earth's atmosphere and climate and the interaction of the Sun. Foale served as a mission specialist on the flight.

 

·         STS-56: A little over a year later, in April 1993, Foale served as payload commander for the ATLAS-2 mission, which also featured the successful deployment and retrieval of a Spartan solar physics satellite.

 

·         STS-63: In February 1995, as flight engineer aboard STS-63, Foale became the first person of British nationality to perform an EVA when he spent four hours and 39 minutes working with crewmate Bernard Harris. The mission carried the Spacehab science module, deployed and retrieved a Spartan solar science satellite, and performed a close rendezvous with Russia's Mir space station.

 

·         STS-84/86: In May 1997, Foale was launched aboard STS-84 as the fifth U.S. astronaut to spend a period of several months aboard Russia's Mir space station. He endured the collision of a Progress cargo craft, which partially depressurized the station's Spektr module, and participated in a six-hour EVA with cosmonaut Anatoli Solovyov to inspect the damage. Returned to Earth aboard STS-86 in October 1997, Foale accrued 144 days in orbit.

 

·         STS-103: In December 1999, Foale served as one of four EVA specialists aboard STS-103, the third dedicated mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. He participated in one of the spacewalks to install new equipment aboard the iconic telescope.

 

·         ISS Expedition 8: In October 2003, Foale launched alongside Russia's Aleksandr Kaleri aboard Soyuz TMA-3 for a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station. As commander of Expedition 8, Foale guided efforts to ensure that the multi-national outpost remained operational during the lengthy period of down time after the loss of Columbia. Foale and Kaleri performed a four-hour EVA in February 2004 and returned to Earth in April, after 194 days in space.

 

In flying his final mission, Foale became one of only a handful of astronauts or cosmonauts to record six or more space voyages. Even today, only seven other human beings have recorded six or more spaceflights: John Young, Story Musgrave, Franklin Chang-Diaz, Jerry Ross, Curt Brown, Jim Wetherbee, and Russia's Sergei Krikalev. At the close of Expedition 8—with a cumulative 373 days in space—Foale became the most flight-experienced U.S. astronaut to date. His achievement remained unbroken for almost four years, until it was finally exceeded in April 2008 by Peggy Whitson and most recently by Mike Fincke in May 2011. At the time of writing, Foale remains the third most flight-experienced U.S. astronaut, and he spent over 22 hours outside spacecraft during his four career EVAs.

 

Since his return from Expedition 8, Foale was until last week consistently listed as an "Active" astronaut, although the sheer number of astronauts-in-waiting made it unlikely that he would draw a seventh mission. He served as chief of the astronaut office's Expedition Corps and deputy associate administrator for Exploration Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Additionally, Foale worked to support Soyuz and ISS operations, together with EVA activity and ongoing space suit development.

 

Foale's next steps are reported to encompass green aviation technology. NASA Administrator—and former astronaut—Charlie Bolden was in command of STS-45 on Foale's first flight. "We salute Mike and his contributions to NASA as an accomplished member of the astronaut corps," Bolden said last week. "Starting with his first flight … when we flew together in 1992, Mike has worked tirelessly to support NASA's quest to explore the unknown. I know Mike will go on to do more great things as he continues to support the aerospace industry in his new endeavor."

 

With Garver's Departure, NASA Loses Strong Change Advocate

 

Brian Berger - Space News

 

When NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver leaves her post in September to begin a new career as a labor leader, the Obama administration and its commercial space allies will have lost a passionate champion for leaving Apollo in the past and transforming the U.S. space agency into a model of 21st century innovation.

 

Whether her departure is viewed as good or bad for NASA depends on whether one thinks the politically savvy Garver has helped chart a sustainable new course for a U.S. space program that had been bent on returning to the Moon, or cast it adrift.

 

Commercial space advocates are among those who will be sorriest when she steps down Sept. 6 from the agency that has been central to her career for the past 30 years to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, a labor union representing more than 50,000 commercial pilots in the United States and Canada.

 

"Lori made a real difference to the future of spaceflight," Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), told SpaceNews. "Most people put their career first, so they play politics and pander to the vested interests. But there are some who truly care about humanity's future in space and will do the right thing in the face of immense opposition. We are fortunate to have several such people in NASA senior leadership and Lori was one of them."

 

Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, builder and operator of the Falcon line of commercial rockets, is a central player in NASA's Garver-championed effort to outsource crew and cargo transportation to and from the international space station.

 

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, in a message sent to the agency's 18,000 employees Aug. 6 — the day after Garver announced her impending departure — said that while he is "sorry to be losing such a talented and passionate co-pilot, I am happy that Lori is continuing to pursue her dreams and make her mark in the aerospace industry."

 

Garver told SpaceNews in an Aug. 6 interview that the causes she has championed  for space policy will continue after she has left the NASA headquarters building at 300 E St. SW in Washington.

 

"I actually do feel like so much of what I set out to do is being accomplished," said Garver, NASA's highest-profile No. 2 in recent memory. "These jobs do tend to take their toll and I just couldn't imagine being able to accomplish so much of what we set out to do four years ago."

 

Garver, who assumed the post in July 2009, has spent most of her career working on space policy. She came to Washington in 1983 to work for then-U.S. Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. After Glenn's failed 1984 presidential bid, Garver went to work for the National Space Society, rising to executive director, a job she held until joining NASA in 1996 as a policy adviser to then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin.

 

After President George W. Bush took office in 2001, Garver left NASA for the private sector, advising Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and the Planetary Society, among others, as a vice president at the Washington-based consulting firm DFI International, which has since been renamed Avascent Group.

 

Garver served as lead space adviser to Democrat John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign as well as Hillary Clinton's 2008 run. When Barack Obama defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary, Garver switched camps and went on to lead Obama's Presidential Transition Agency Review Team for NASA.

 

The White House tapped Garver for the deputy administrator post well before it settled on its nominee for the top job. After members of Congress balked at the administration's first choice, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, Obama ultimately picked Bolden, a former space shuttle commander and retired Marine Corps major general. Bolden and Garver were formally nominated as package in May 2009, confirmed by the Senate two months later, and sworn in July 18, 2009, in a low-key ceremony at NASA headquarters.

 

The past four years have raised plenty of questions about who is truly calling the shots at NASA.

 

"Lori Garver has been the most influential deputy administrator in the history of the agency," said Mike Gold, director of Washington operations for Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas company building an inflatable storage module for the space station under a commercial agreement brokered by Garver. "In many ways she redefined the power and possibilities of the position."

 

Even those on the opposite side of space policy debates with Garver readily acknowledged her outsize influence. Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive director of the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush and advised Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, called Garver "the clear administration leader for creating and sustaining commercial green shoots in space enterprise. ... She has been a loyal and effective advocate for Obama administration space policies and clearly had significant influence in administration space policy development."

 

Obama's space policy came into sharp relief in 2010 when he canceled his predecessor's Moon-bound Constellation program, which relied heavily on NASA's heritage rocket hardware and traditional contractor base. Obama proposed refocusing NASA on developing "game-changing" technologies for deep-space exploration — starting with an asteroid visit by 2025 — while relying on entrepreneurial space ventures like SpaceX to slash the cost of sending cargo and crew to the space station.

 

Obama's proposal received a cool reception from U.S. lawmakers, especially those heavily vested in the status quo. Lawmakers from Alabama, Florida and Texas — home to NASA's traditional manned spaceflight centers — banded together on legislation directing NASA to build the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket and an Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle optimized for deep-space missions. Both systems were envisioned under the Constellation program.

 

Scott Pace, a Romney adviser who left a senior NASA post in 2008 to become director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University here, said Garver — as the most visible face of Obama's space policy — is not only blamed for canceling Constellation but for "creating a sharp and ongoing conflict" with a Congress that feels it has been repeatedly blindsided by NASA.

 

"That's not totally her fault," Pace said. "But certainly she's a visible face and associated with that."

 

"She planted seeds of change at an agency that badly needed to change, and in the process was very controversial," said John Logsdon, the former Space Policy Institute director who has known Garver since she earned her master's degree in science, technology and public policy under his tutelage. "One litmus test of how strongly the Obama White House is committed to the kind of change Lori was trying to put in place is whether they replace her with a deputy who shares those views."

 

While there is no guarantee the White House will nominate a replacement — Goldin ran NASA for nearly a decade without a deputy — Garver said one of the reasons she is leaving now is to give the president time to put a successor in place.

 

"It does involve being able to leave at a time where there really can be a second deputy in the Obama administration," Garver said. "There's every indication that will happen."

 

Whoever that happens to be will face the challenge of defending a commercial crew transportation initiative that has struggled to win full funding since its inception and convincing the public that sending astronauts to an asteroid — one that NASA, since April, has been planning to capture and relocate to lunar space — is a worthwhile goal for a world-class space program.

 

"I do hope that people recognize that I truly do care about those things I championed," Garver said. "It's true that ... it doesn't make you popular, but it's something that's worth doing. I've never shied away from stepping up and being able to defend those things that the administration and NASA set out to do."

 

Inventor Musk to share plans for high-speed travel

 

Martha Mendoza - Associated Press

 

Twice as fast as an airplane, cheaper than a bullet train and completely self-powered: that's the mysterious transportation system that inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk is promising to reveal design plans for Monday.

 

Musk has been dropping hints about his "Hyperloop" system for more than a year during public events, mentioning that it could never crash, would be immune to weather and would move people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour.

 

Coming from almost anyone else, the hyperbole would be hard to take seriously. But billionaire Musk - who sold his first computer program, a $500 space game called Blastar, at age 12 - has earned his reputation as an inventor and entrepreneur, co-founding online payment firm PayPal, electric luxury carmaker Tesla Motors Inc. and rocket-building company SpaceX.

 

During a Tesla earnings call Thursday, Musk said he would reveal plans for the Hyperloop on Monday. But he said he is too focused on other projects to consider actually building it.

 

"I think I kind of shot myself by ever mentioning the Hyperloop," he said. "I don't have any plans to execute, because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla."

 

He said he would fulfill his commitment to publishing a design, and he said he invites critical feedback after its release Monday to "see if the people can find ways to improve it." It will be an open-source design, meaning anyone can use it and modify it.

 

Also Thursday, Musk said during a Google Hangout with Sir Richard Branson about entrepreneurship, "It does involve a tube, but not a vacuum tube."

 

His hints and promises have prompted a flurry of online speculation.

 

Canadian John Gardi, a self-described "tinkerer," posted online and tweeted his conjecture a few weeks ago to Musk.

 

"I believe that Hyperloop is merely a modern day version of the pneumatic tubes used in banks, stores, and industry to move money and small items over long distances or to other floors of a building," he said.

 

Musk responded, "Your guess is the closest I've seen anyone guess so far."

 

Interview with former NASA ISS director on Elysium space station tech & UFOs

 

Alejandro Rojas.- Huffington Post

 

(Rojas is editor at Open Minds Magazine)

 

Elysium, a new sci-fi adventure movie starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, opens this weekend. It is about a gigantic fancy space station that is reserved for the rich, while the poor are left to struggle for survival on a trashed-out Earth. Max (Matt Damon) may be Earth's last hope to bring equality to humanity; that is, if Elysium's Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her henchmen don't stop him first.

 

To get some insight into space station technology, space tourism, and what it takes to live in space, I was able to interview Mark Uhran, who worked for NASA in the International Space Station division for 28 years, the last seven as the division director. Of course, I also had to ask him about the alleged UFO videos taken from the ISS.

 

Rojas: Are you excited to see the movie?

 

Uhran: Oh yeah it is a wonderful movie. The premise is terrific. I think both the social premise and the technological premise are plausible premises, you know, hundreds of years in the future.

 

R: Have you seen the movie yet?

 

U: No. I have watched the trailers on it, so I am familiar with the movie. I am familiar with the Elysium space station that they have included in the movie. It is incredibly large, so in order to someday in the future actually be able to achieve a space station that large, there are two breakthroughs that would be necessary. One is in propulsion. All of our rockets today are chemical rockets, and Elysium is so large and so much mass would have to be lifted from Earth to space or gathered from asteroids and moons to create a spacecraft that big, that you would need a next generation propulsion system, probably a nuclear system. So that is one breakthrough that would definitely be necessary.

 

The second breakthrough is not that big of a breakthrough. You would need to recycle your air and water and grow food and so on, and I think NASA is already demonstrating today with the International Space Station that all of that is technically feasible in space.

 

So it is a matter in time. I think Elysium is set about 150 years in the future, which is a little bit aggressive, but I certainly believe that within this millennium these technologies will be available to us, as long as we don't toast the planet to a cinder beforehand.

 

R: How realistic do you think it would be that humans would create an environment off-planet to live in?

 

U: Does humankind have a future in space? I think it is a human destiny to explore and go further. In fact, at the very beginning of the space age the founders of the space age were all pursuing interplanetary space flight. If you go all the way back to the 1950s and look at the concepts that were being promoted at the time, it is all about human evolution and a destiny in space, and I do believe that with enough time those things are possible.

 

One aspect of the space station that people really don't know about is the robotics systems that were provided by Canada are just incredible robots. Nothing like anything we have on Earth, and they were used to assemble the space station in orbit and they worked very well. I think that is one of the most impressive technological advances to me, the remotely manipulated robotics that Canada contributed.

 

R: Which is another aspect of the movie, these robot suits they are wearing.

 

U: Yes, well that is certainly a technology that will be available at some point in the future. Movies, of course, as fiction, always push the outer limits of what is possible, and fifty to one hundred years later it can amaze us that those technologies become real.

 

The other thing about the International Space Station that is so unique is that it is a partnership of five different areas of the world, and what it showed us is how much we can accomplish when we work through international partnerships in science and technology.

 

R: How do you feel about the move to the commercialization of the space industry?

 

U: Well, the best thing NASA can do is to set its sights on the horizon and turn low earth orbit over to the development of the private sector. I think that is the path they are on, so I encourage it.

 

R: When it comes to the scenario in the movie Elysium, when you look at some of the private space efforts out there like Virgin Galactic, it is pretty expensive. Do you think space may become something just for the rich?

 

U: It could go either way, but if we look back in history we see that commodities that started out only available to the rich, as the standard of living went up in industrialized countries, they became available to more and more people at large. I think the same thing applies to space. Initially it is going to be very expensive and only accessible to the rich, but I would hope over the longer term it will be accessible to everyone.

 

R: When Russia began taking space tourists to the space station, what was your position on that?

 

U: Well, they started out with the first non-professional space traveler. It broke the ice, and we learned how to develop approaches that allowed us to train those people and prepare them for space flight. I think the Russians brought up maybe, Russians and an American company working together, brought up maybe half a dozen people to the space station. I think it broadens the human experience. In fact, the president of Cirque Du Soleil, [Guy Laliberté], he was up on the space station and it was a wonderful experience for him and the public.

 

R: Are there things that the space industry needs to be careful of as they develop space tourism?

 

U: You have to put a lot of time and effort, as I understand they do, into preparing people for space flight. It is not like the aviation industry where you just show up at the gate with your ticket in hand and take your first flight. Micro-gravity is a very unique experience and not all people adapt well to it because it can affect your sense of balance and orientation, but most people can adapt and they just need to be prepared ahead of time for the experience so they enjoy it.

 

R: Extended stays in space can be pretty traumatic to the human body. Is this a concern when it comes to allowing just anybody to go out there and spend time in space?

 

U: Well the crews on the ISS typically do a six month rotation, and we have found over the entire history of space flight that you do see bone decalcification from loss in strength in the bones and you can see muscular atrophy from extended periods of space flight, so what we do is require our professional crews to train for a minimum of two hours a day on exercise equipment.

 

Your neuro-vestibular system, you know your sense of balance, is a little bit more tricky. Some people adapt very well and some people don't and of course you don't want to spend a long time in space with if you are going to suffer from motion sickness.

 

R: It appears in the movie that on the Elysium space station they developed a false gravity technology that might help mitigate some of these issues.

 

U: Right, it has long been an option to develop spaceships that rotate, and by rotating, a circular space station, as is the case with the Elysium station in the movie, you induce gravity, a false gravity. Then it is very similar to being on the ground.

 

R: How long does it take for the astronauts to recover from these effects?

 

U: Well, the ones that adapt quickly to the environment are really quite healthy immediately upon their return. The only part that is a little bit tricky is the neuro-vestibular system and the sense of balance. Some people are affected in terms of their spatial orientation. In fact, we find that the people who have a highly developed sense of balance, like an acrobat or a ballerina, those are the people that are most susceptible to space sickness, whereas those of us who do not have a highly developed sense of balance, we tend to adapt very quickly.

 

R: That is very interesting.

 

U: Yes, it is counter intuitive.

 

R: And it varies from person to person?

 

U: Definitely.

 

R: Does the space industry need more regulation than other industries?

 

U: No. I am not a proponent of heavy government regulation. Now there is a certain danger that goes with the kinds of opportunities that those folks are offering. They need to be responsible and that is why I say they need to train people. They need to have the highest level of quality assurance in their systems that they use. I don't think the government is going to do anything to really improve that situation. Those folks in that industry know that if there is an accident, that industry will suffer very quickly, and I think they are very conscientious about trying to prevent an accident.

 

Now on the other hand, just like mountain climbing, how many people have died trying to scale Mount Everest? It is not a risk-free environment, and I think they are careful to let people know that there are risks.

 

R: Along those lines, there has been decent success with Space X, safety thus far for commercial space projects have a good record.

 

U: Yeah, safety is in their own best interest, so they are going to do everything they can to keep it safe.

 

R: With the space station there are a lot of technological advancements that can be made. Some of them may be unexpected. Has there been advancement in a field that has been particularly unexpected to you?

 

U: I think that over the coming decade we are definitely going to see that happen, and I will give you a specific example. Retrospectively, the last ten years, during the construction phase, you really didn't expect to see any major scientific discoveries because the laboratories were under construction. But now that the laboratories are complete, and the transportation is in place, and the research is starting to ramp up, I think there will be unexpected discoveries.

 

If I were to tell people a particular payload to watch, it would be the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is an international partnership led by a physicist from MIT and CERN, Sam Ting. He is searching for the presence of anti-matter and dark-matter, and I believe he will begin publishing some of his early results, possibly before the year is out, and I think that could become pretty exciting.

 

R: Wow, so you think this may be a better way to search for dark-matter or some of these other particles than the supercollider?

 

U: Oh, by putting the platform outside the Earth's atmosphere, it definitely provides advantages for detecting the types of particles he is looking for.

 

R: Wow. That is exciting.

 

U: Yeah, stay tuned to that one.

 

R: One of the things we hear a lot about are anomalous videos or sightings from the space station. Do you put any credence into any of these, or have you heard of any weird sightings that any astronauts have had on the space station?

 

U: (Chuckle) You know that's probably the most common question people ask me, and honest to God, absolutely the truth is no. Not a single thing that was not explainable.

 

R: What are people misinterpreting? Why do you think people believe these videos are more strange than they actually are?

 

U: I think it is a human desire. We all, or many of us, would like to believe that we are not alone in the universe, and we are all looking for clues, even NASA. But the fact of the matter is most of the objects that you see are either reflection of light off of perfectly innocent objects, or they are aberrations in lenses or they are particle events, which are quite common, that have different phenomenological ways in which they manifest themselves. In terms of UFOs, we have seen no evidence whatsoever of a UFO.

 

R: What is a particle event?

 

U: When you take a very high energy particle, a galactic ray, and it hits the atmosphere. That particle hits all the particles that are in the atmosphere. It is like throwing a baseball into a bucket of paint, the paint splashes up everywhere, and that is all the result of that particle hitting the atmosphere. It can create unusual colors, unusual displays, traces; I mean there are all kinds of visual effects. There is a lot of stuff running around in our universe and every once in awhile some of it comes whizzin' by.

 

R: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

 

U: Sure enough, I hope you enjoy the movie.

 

NASA needs its swagger back

 

John Kelly - Florida Today (Commentary)

 

NASA needs some of what Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson bring to the table: gutsy, all-in leadership.

 

Don't get me wrong. I like Charlie Bolden, the former Marine turned astronaut who heads the agency. He's a good man who served his country with honor. He can tell you what's special about NASA and sell the virtues of exploration. But Bolden, and some of his senior leaders, seem stuck telling yesterday's version of the NASA story rather than tomorrow's. They're not breaking out of a mold constructed in the Cold War, slightly modified through the shuttle and space station eras, and now terribly outdated.

 

NASA got big. The innovative, beat-the-odds space agency got bogged down by two forces: the politically charged bureaucracy of Washington and its commitments to big legacy contractors of the military-industrial complex.

 

Perhaps NASA could cut loose those anchors, but that's not going to happen with the kind of appointees typically put in charge. Sean O'Keefe and Mike Griffin, the two men to hold the job before Bolden, were strong personalities. They couldn't break the cycle, either.

 

NASA needs a leader who will say what he or she thinks, do what is right, and not worry about squishing toes.

 

Musk of SpaceX, Bezos of Blue Origin, and Branson of Virgin Galactic, all have developed new space transportation systems while outside critics guffawed. Musk's company fielded a new rocket and a spaceship in less time, with less money, than NASA invested over several failed attempts to replace the shuttles with a new space transport. Bezos, of Amazon.com fame, is introducing an up-and-coming space vehicle of his own. Branson's just about to start carrying tourists on quarter-million-dollar a pop rides to space on SpaceShipTwo.

 

In each case, for years, many in the "old" space industry laughed them off, saying they couldn't do it, they'd fritter away their considerable fortunes, and look like fools in the process. Given the developments at each company over these last three years or so, I'd say I'd be a great deal more comfortable giving any of the three control over NASA's multi-billion dollar budget than I am with any recent agency chief.

 

The field-level troops within NASA, up through middle and in some cases senior management, are well-intentioned, super-talented people aiming to do big things in space exploration. They want to go places. They're capable of greatness.

 

They are our friends and neighbors here on Florida's Space Coast. They need inspired, can-do leadership — the brash, bold kind that put a man on the moon in the 1960s or (nowadays) built from scratch a wildly-successful online retailer capable of selling just about anything and putting it on your doorstep in two days. They need someone with a big enough personality to stand eye to eye with the President of the United States and speak with authority on what needs to be done, how and when.

 

They need a bigger-than-life, bold and courageous thinker who is willing to stop trying to "get by" with stagnant budgets and keeping a bunch of outmoded legacy programs on life support.

 

NASA needs someone who starts the game over. It needs someone who can take the billions the space agency gets, set audacious goals and priorities, and build a team of leaders to get after it.

 

The departure of Lori Garver this week from the space agency is disappointing because she was one of the people trying to break NASA's mold, change it from within, and champion innovative projects such as the commercial cargo and crew ventures.

 

But it is not a one person job. It's a complete reprogramming of the agency's leadership.

 

NASA needs its swagger back and soon.

 

NASA, aerospace industry depend on scale models to get message across

 

Muhammed El-Hasan - Torrance Daily Breeze (CA)

 

In the lobbies at Southern California's aerospace companies, satellite, space telescope and rocket scale models boast of the region's technological ingenuity.

 

Regularly commissioned by large and small companies, the models serve as an educational tool and form of public outreach that helps explain and sometimes justify government programs that cost millions or even billions of dollars.

 

At Hawthorne's Scale Model Co., Isao Hirai's workshop is filled miniatures versions of the fruits of major aerospace programs stretching back decades.

 

Hirai began crafting these models in 1967 -- first as an employee and later as the owner of the small business.

 

His customers are not so small. They include Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and NASA, including JPL in Pasadena.

 

His handiwork includes a scale model of the Mars Curiosity Rover that JPL used to demonstrate to the media how the robotic vehicle descended onto the red planet last year.

 

He also made scale models of Northrop's James Webb Space Telescope, which the company is building in Redondo Beach to allow NASA to peer back in time to a period soon after the Big Bang.

 

Hirai said he wants his models to outlive the real thing.

 

"My goal is 20 years from now for my models to still look the same because a lot of them go into museums," Hirai, 79, said.

 

The educational value of such models is significant, said Blake Bullock, director of business development for civil air and space at Northrop.

 

"There's so much value in being able to have a model of some of the systems we build," Bullock said. "The kind of missions that Northrop Grumman conducts for our customers are incredibly complex, highly technical systems that do incredible things. ... When you're talking about such concepts that can feel very out of reach to people and feel very esoteric, it can be very valuable to be able to walk up to the model and walk around it."

 

Because Northrop's James Webb has been threatened with government budget cuts and funding delays, the company has responded with intense lobbying of government officials bolstered by a campaign to educate the public on the system's advanced design and potential scientific benefits.

 

Northrop has commissioned smaller versions of the telescope from Scale Model Co., but a full-size version was built by Penwal Models in Rancho Cucamonga.

 

The full-scale model has been shown around the world, including at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

 

"Once you get up close and really understand just how sophisticated these things are, whether that's decision-makers, members of the Administration and Congress, the science community ... you can really get an appreciation of the exquisite talent of the workforce to build something so complex and so advanced," Bullock said.

 

Such models represent an "old-fashioned marketing tool," aerospace analyst Loren Thompson said.

 

"I understand that there's all sorts of manipulations with software or the Internet that you can't do with these models, but (the models) are tangible, they're concrete and that gives them this special quality," said Thompson, of the Lexington Institute think tank in Virginia.

 

Isao says he prefers making models of space systems rather than buildings, which is how he started his career. He described the allure.

 

"It's unlimited," he said of space and related technologies. "If you talk about architecture, you have a house with the living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and that's it. If you look at space, it seems like it's just beginning. There's still lots to go. They always come up with new ideas."

 

END