Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - August 14, 2013 and JSC Today

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: August 14, 2013 6:12:44 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - August 14, 2013 and JSC Today

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

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JSC TODAY CATEGORIES Headlines -  Latest International Space Station Research -  POWER of One Award: Nominate Your Peer Today -  Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v6.0 Organizations/Social -  IT Labs' Heroes Showcase Today -  Lunch Available: NexGen Flight Control System -  Out & Allied @ JSC ERG Monthly Meeting -  Intimate Partner Violence -  Parent's Night Out at Starport - Aug. 23 -  Starport Basketball Camp - Back By Popular Demand -  Reminder! INCOSE Aug. 15 Program -  Lunarfins Scuba Club 288 Lake Dive Jobs and Training -  Budget Basics for Technical: What You Need to Know Community -  Save the Date: Aug. 15 - Voyage Back to School -  Blood Drive - Aug. 21 and 22

Suborbital Rocket Launches From NASA's Wallops Flight Facility

 

Headlines Latest International Space Station Research Did you know that the International Space Station crew is working on an experiment that investigates the burning characteristics of biologically derived fuels to help develop the use of environmentally friendly fuels on Earth? The Italian Combustion Experiment for Green Air (ICE-GA) has another run today. Currently there is a strong effort in the study of renewable fuels, but it is not clear what the fuel of the future will be. The generation of a database relative to the evaporation and combustion of selected fuels permits the development, or the tuning, of complex thermo-chemical models. Microgravity reduces the phenomenology to one dimension, thus allowing the careful observation and determination of the fundamental combustion data. These data represent the base for the utilization and verification of complex models that can help in the decision for the selection of next-generation fuels. Read more here. Liz Warren x35548 [top] POWER of One Award: Nominate Your Peer Today The POWER of One award has been a great success, but we still need your nominations. We're looking for standout achievements with specific examples of exceptional and superior performance. Make sure to check out our award criteria to help guide you in writing the short write-up needed for submittal. If chosen, the recipient can choose from a list of JSC experiences and have their name and recognition shared in JSC Today. Nominations for this quarter close tomorrow at noon, so nominate someone deserving today! Click here for complete information on the JSC Awards Program. Jessica Ocampo 281-792-7804 https://powerofone.jsc.nasa.gov [top] Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v6.0 The JSC Chief Knowledge Officer is pleased to announce the sixth release of SKC. This release includes: SFOC closeout lessons learned file New KBR data - including Columbia update USA Engineering Knowledge Base data archive Georgia Tech Shuttle Symposium videos New shuttle documents scanned in Search - We have updated the search to be more precise. If you perform a search from a particular area of the site or from a particular folder, the search will only include content from that part of the site. If would like to search the whole site, repeat the search by clearing the search box and re-typing your keywords on the search page. To date, 2.38TB of information with 5.48 million documents of Space Shuttle Program knowledge has been captured. Click the "Submit Feedback" button located on the top of the site navigation and give us your comments and thoughts. Brent J. Fontenot x36456 https://skc.jsc.nasa.gov/Home.aspx [top]    Organizations/Social IT Labs' Heroes Showcase Today You have seen the new JSC 2.0 home page, but have you seen how to navigate it like an IT hero? Come to the IT Heroes Showcase to see this cross-directorate collaboration between the Information Resources Directorate and the Human Health and Performance Directorate in person, or view it over UStream. We plan to keep the presentation to 30 minutes or less, with time for questions afterward. HD UStream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-jsc Mobile UStream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-jsc-mobile Event Date: Wednesday, August 14, 2013   Event Start Time:11:30 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM Event Location: B15 / 267 and UStream Add to Calendar Kevin Rosenquist 281-204-1688 https://labs.nasa.gov/Blog [top] Lunch Available: NexGen Flight Control System The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace and Electronic Systems Chapter presents Ron T. Ogan speaking on the NexGen flight control system. The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized transformation of the U.S. Air Traffic Control System from a radar-based technology to a system using Global Positioning System technology over the time period of 2013 to 2020. Aircraft transponders will be upgraded from Mode-C to Mode-S, which will provide precise position, altitude, velocity and flight direction. Aircraft equipped with ADS-B receivers and multi-function displays will provide current weather and aircraft traffic for increased safety. The presentation will run from noon to 12:45 p.m. on Aug. 16 in the Gilruth Center Discovery Room. We offer lunch at 11:30 a.m. for $8; 10 still available. Please RSVP to Stew O'Dell and specify whether you are ordering lunch. Event Date: Friday, August 16, 2013   Event Start Time:11:30 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Gilruth Center, Discovery Room Add to Calendar Stew O'Dell x31855 http://ewh.ieee.org/r5/galveston_bay/events/events.html [top] Out & Allied @ JSC ERG Monthly Meeting All JSC team members (government, contractor, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender [LGBT], and non-LGBT allies) are invited to the Out & Allied @ JSC Employee Resource Group (ERG) monthly meeting TODAY from noon to 1 p.m. in Building 4S, Room 1200. The Out & Allied @ JSC team consists of LGBT employees and their allies (supporters). This month, we are having a working meeting focused on the ERG re-chartering, and will also hear about V-CORPS. Please join us, meet others and network! For more information about our group, including how to become involved, contact any listed Out & Allied member on our SharePoint site. Event Date: Wednesday, August 14, 2013   Event Start Time:12:00 PM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Building 4S, room 1200 Add to Calendar Steve Riley x37019 https://collaboration.ndc.nasa.gov/iierg/LGBTA/SitePages/Home.aspx [top] Intimate Partner Violence Intimate Partner Violence, also referred to as domestic violence, impacts people from all walks of life regardless of socio-economic status, education, age, religion, race, or gender. Incidents can occur as soon as a first dating relationship in high school or as late as the senior years of a person's life. The impact to the workplace is enormous both in terms of stress and danger to the employee and co-workers, and cost of lost work days and productivity. Co-workers often feel helpless about how to help. The reality is that there is much you can do to assist victims of this crime. Please join Takis Bogdanos, MA, LPC-S, CGP with the JSC Employee Assistance Program on Wednesday Aug. 14 at 12 noon in Building 30 Auditorium as he presents a workshop that addresses the common misconceptions about Intimate Partner violence and offers strategies to assist a co-worker or loved one. Event Date: Wednesday, August 14, 2013   Event Start Time:12:00 PM   Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Building 30 Auditorim Add to Calendar Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Occupational Health Branch x36130 [top] Parent's Night Out at Starport - Aug. 23 Enjoy a night out on the town while your kids enjoy a night with Starport! We will entertain your children with a night of games, crafts, a bounce house, pizza, movie, dessert, and loads of fun! When: Friday, Aug. 23 from 6 to 10 p.m. Where: Gilruth Center Ages: 5 to 12 Cost: $20/first child and $10/each additional sibling if registered by the Wednesday prior to event. If registered after Wednesday, the fee is $25/first child and $15/additional sibling. Register at the Gilruth Center front desk. Visit the website for more information. Event Date: Friday, August 23, 2013   Event Start Time:6:00 PM   Event End Time:10:00 PM Event Location: Gilruth Center Add to Calendar Shericka Phillips x35563 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/ [top] Starport Basketball Camp - Back By Popular Demand Due to popular demand, Starport will be offering a second basketball camp next week! Starport's Summer Sports Camps are a great way to provide added instruction for all levels of players and prepare participants for competitive play. Let our knowledgeable and experienced coaches give your child the confidence they need to learn and excel in their chosen sport. Registration will remain open until Sunday, Aug. 18. Basketball Camp: Focuses on the development of shooting, passing, dribbling, guarding and drills Dates: Aug. 19  to 22 (Monday through Thursday) Times: 9 a.m. to noon Ages: 8 to 14 Price: $200 Before/after care available. Register your child at the Gilruth Center. Visit our website for more information. Shericka Phillips x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Youth/ [top] Reminder! INCOSE Aug. 15 Program "My Experience with System Engineering Beyond NASA - a Recent Perspective." Philip Augustine, a former systems engineer with Jacobs Engineering, will discuss exploring and identifying systems engineering concepts in applications outside of NASA. Mr. Augustine will discuss systems engineering technical issues and commonalities and share his insight on how non-aerospace related companies perceive the practice of Systems Engineering. The INCOSE Texas Gulf Coast Chapter Program for August is at the Lockheed-Martin Orion Conference Center, 2625 Bay Area Blvd., in Clear Lake. Networking and refreshments start at 5:30 p.m. Please check our local chapter website for more details and on how to attend remotely using GlobalMeet.com. The program is open to all. Refreshments are free for INCOSE members and $10 for non-members. To RSVP for refreshments, email Larry Spratlin or leave a message at 281-461-5218. Larry Spratlin 281-461-5218 [top] Lunarfins Scuba Club 288 Lake Dive Join the Lunarfins on Aug. 17 at 288 Lake. Facilities include five docks, one shore entry, three training platforms, six sunken boats, two submerged school buses, a non-confined sim cave diving line and lots of fish (including some estimated at 40 pounds). The lake is used for scuba, kayak and triathlon. It's $17 divers/$7 spectators, and air fills are $10 (pay when you arrive). Remember your C card, plenty of water and drinks to stay hydrated, chairs, sunscreen, hat, sunglasses, bug repellant, camera and a dish to share/or your own food (as you prefer, gas grill is available). We have requested a palapa to have shade, so we are planning to arrive early (7:30 to 8 a.m.). Reservation is under the name of the Lunarfins. We will tie the Lunarfins club flag onto the palapa. See the Lunarfins website for details and directions. Event Date: Saturday, August 17, 2013   Event Start Time:8:00 AM   Event End Time:12:00 PM Event Location: Lake 288, 4800 Schurmier, Houston, TX 77048 Add to Calendar Barbara Corbin x36215 http://www.lunarfins.com [top]    Jobs and Training Budget Basics for Technical: What You Need to Know Break through the common communication barriers between technical and budget-speak with helpful translations of common budget terminology and a straightforward discussion of basic budget concepts. Understand the overall structure and flow of funding within the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) and get tips for improving communication with your budget analyst. Your participation in this session will deliver the insight you need to plan and manage NASA financial resources. This session is recommended for anyone responsible for a project budget who would like to learn how government financial management differs from managing a personal bank account. As part of the OCFO subject-matter expert course series, Kim Steele and Erica Ternes will lead this two-hour session on Thursday, Oct. 24, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in Building 45, Room 251. Please register in SATERN via the link below or by searching the catalog for the course title. Donna Blackshear-Reynolds x32814 https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHED... [top]    Community Save the Date: Aug. 15 - Voyage Back to School JSC and Space Center Houston invite the JSC Community and their families to attend NASA's Summer of Innovation (SoI) 2013 Voyage Back to School community event at Space Center Houston on Aug. 15, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. NASA's SoI program partners with school districts and non-profit organizations in the JSC region to provide summer STEM camps for middle school students. Come celebrate all our children's summer successes and enjoy an evening of hands-on activities, speakers, and educational shows to inspire and excite your children, as they prepare to return to school. The event is free to the JSC community and their families. For more information about Summer of Innovation please visit our website. Bring Our Children to Work (BOCTW) participants are invited to remain at SCH to attend NASA's Summer of Innovation Voyage Back to School community event from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Event Date: Thursday, August 15, 2013   Event Start Time:4:00 PM   Event End Time:7:00 PM Event Location: Space Center Houston Add to Calendar Linda Smith x37836 [top] Blood Drive - Aug. 21 and 22 There is no substitute for blood. It has to come from one person in order to give it to another. Will there be blood available when you or your family needs it? A regular number of voluntary donations are needed every day to meet the needs for blood. Make the "Commitment to Life" by taking one hour of your time to donate blood. Your blood donation can help up to three patients. You can donate at one of the following locations (note start time change): Teague Auditorium Lobby - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Building 11 Starport Café - Donor Coach - 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Gilruth Center donor coach - Noon to 4 p.m. (Thursdays only) Criteria for donating can be found at the St. Luke's link on our website. T-shirts, snacks, and drinks for all donors. Teresa Gomez 281-483-9588 http://jscpeople.jsc.nasa.gov/blooddrv/blooddrv.htm [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.

 

 

 

 

 

HAPPY 50^th BIRTHDAY VEHICLE ASSEMBLY BUILDING

 

This month the VAB turns 50. The following is edited for length from the KSC Ground Processing Integrated Processing & Operations Report:

 

The VAB originally was constructed to enable simultaneous processing of four Saturn Vs. 65,000 cubic yards of concrete, 45,000 steel I-beams and more than 1 million steel bolts were required. When completed it was the largest building in the world by volume, capable of holding 3.5 Empire State buildings. Currently it is 6^th. Each of the two 325-ton cranes can lift 47 fully grown African Elephants. The four High Bay doors are the tallest in the world reaching 456 feet and take 45 minutes to completely open/close. Fourteen Saturn V rockets were processed for Apollo and the Skylab Space Station and 135 Space Shuttles missions were prepared in the VAB, which covers 8 acres and measures 525 ft tall, 716 ft long and 518 ft wide. It encloses 129.4 million cubic feet. The American flag is 209 x 110 ft. Each stripe is 9 ft wide and the stars are 6 ft across. A Bicentennial emblem added in 1976 was replaced by the NASA logo in 1998. The logo covers 12,300 square feet.

 

 

Human Spaceflight News

Wednesday – August 14, 2013

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

NASA, Navy to test recovery of Orion capsule by the USS Mesa Verde

 

Matt Knight - WTKR-TV (Hampton Roads)

 

On Thursday NASA and the Navy will test recovering a mockup of the new Orion space capsule from the ocean using the USS Mesa Verde. The test will determine the feasibility of NASA's plan to winch the capsules aboard an Amphibious Transport Dock ship instead of using helicopters to hoist it aboard an aircraft carrier as was done with Apollo-era space capsules.

 

Dynetics reports 'outstanding' progress toward next generation of NASA's Space Launch System

 

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

 

Dynetics Inc. said Tuesday it has made "outstanding" progress on its contract with NASA to test new systems for the second generation of the Space Launch System. The company reported on its progress during the 2013 Space & Missile Defense Symposium being held this week in Huntsville. Dynetics and Aerojet Rocketdyne are testing advanced booster systems for the bigger version of the heavy-lift rocket that NASA plans to build in the coming decade. The company's projects involve designing and building a full-scale cryogenic fuel tank and retooling an Apollo era F-1 engine using modern manufacturing techniques for a cheaper high-powered engine. The company's engine is called the F-1B.

 

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser completes NASA tow test, another milestone for the commercial crew vehicle

 

Kristen Painter - Denver Post

 

 

Louisville-based Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems completed the tow test, one of NASA's mandated milestones, on its Dream Chaser space vehicle at Dryden Flight Research Center in California. The Dream Chaser Space System is one of three NASA-funded programs remaining in the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) Program, which is designed to help U.S. companies develop spacecraft and rocket combinations capable of launching from U.S. soil. The ground tow tests were done as preparation for the flight vehicle's upcoming approach and landing test that is slated to occur sometime in the third quarter. The Dream Chaser completed four sets of a test sequence — 10 mph, 20 mph, 40 mph and 60 mph — to verify that the vehicle would work properly upon landing.

 

North Texas Company Helping Launch NASA Space Lander

 

Andrea Lucia - KTVT-TV (Dallas/Ft Worth)

 

NASA is working on the next generation of space lander and a company from right here in North Texas is helping. Dozens of tests are putting the Morpheus Lander through the paces at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. While the autonomous planetary lander is able to lift off with the power of green fuel, NASA isn't spending a lot of 'green' to test it.

 

Engineers identify 12 asteroids we could capture with existing rocket tech

 

Adam Mann - Wired.com

 

By looking through the catalog of known asteroids, aerospace engineers have identified 12 candidates that we could reach out and capture using existing rocket technology. Long overlooked as mere rocky chunks leftover from the formation of the solar system, asteroids have recently gotten a lot more scrutiny. A couple years ago, researchers outlined a seemingly daring plan to lasso and bring an asteroid back to Earth. NASA doesn't seem to think this is too crazy, and is moving forward with plans to capture, tow, and place a small asteroid somewhere near our planet.

 

Virgin Galactic CEO Counts 625 Customers For Suborbital Trips

 

Michael Bruno - Aviation Week

 

Virgin Galactic has signed up 625 individuals for its planned suborbital spaceflights, lining up revenue of at least $125 million, in what CEO George Whitesides asserts is a strong sign of the excitement and potential of commercial space ventures. Virgin's commercial human spaceflights could begin next year, he added. "That will be a fundamental shift," Whitesides stressed. "It's sort of like we've been working on this for so long in the space community that it always seems like it's in the future. But we're really almost there, where people will be able to buy a ticket and go down to Spaceport America, get their week of training, and … have your 'Right Stuff' moment."

 

A lot of people are game for one-way ticket to Mars – more than 100,000

 

Emi Kolawole - Washington Post

 

Mars One, the Dutch nonprofit that's offering one-way tickets to the red planet, appears to have hit a milestone. Back in April, when the project first began accepting applications from the general public, we asked whether anyone would be willing to take them up on the offer. Apparently, more than 100,000 people would. That's right, more than 100,000 people have applied to take a one-way trip to Mars.

 

No Liftoff for These Space Flights of Fancy

 

Robert Zimmerman - Wall Street Journal (Opinion)

 

(Zimmerman writes about space history and science at his website, Behind the Black. His 1999 book "Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8" has just been released in an e-book edition.)

 

On July 18, the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became all too clear. Forget journeys to the stars. Space exploration is now clearly tethered to the earthly desires of politicians. The result is that America's incoherent space program is unable to accomplish anything except spend money the federal government doesn't have.

 

Why Bill Gates is wrong to disparage private investment in rockets

 

Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle's SciGuy

 

As I have previously noted, lots of billionaires are investing money in space exploration ventures — at least 10 by last count. They're putting their money behind everything from rockets to spaceships to asteroid mining to space hotels. But the king of American billionaires and the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, is having none of it.

 

On the trail of "The Curse of Slick-6"

 

Dwayne Day - The Space Review (Commentary)

 

My first introduction to the story of the "Curse of Slick-6" came from Roger Guillemette in the mid-1990s. Guillemette occasionally wrote about space launches and soon would become a regular contributor to and eventual editor for Florida Today's Space Online. Roger had heard from locals near Vandenberg Air Force Base that there had been a rumor that the local Chumash Indians had "cursed" the large Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg. According to Guillemette, at some point, presumably during the early 1980s construction problems, people on the base had started to claim that the Chumash had placed a curse on the facility because it was "built on an Indian burial ground." SLC-6, or "Slick-6" as it was known, was initially started in the 1960s as the launch site for the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program's Titan IIIM rocket. When MOL was canceled in 1969, construction on SLC-6 was halted. When the Air Force decided to launch space shuttles from Vandenberg, it designated SLC-6 as the launch site and began overhauling it in the early 1980s.

 

Would the Nazis Have Gone to the Moon?

 

Ray Villard - Discovery News

 

A celestial object that at first looks like a moving star enters the inky black sky above the far northern edge of the moon's Ocean of Storms. The descending vehicle resembles an enormous flying water tower. A blinding dust storm kicks up under the spidery legs of the 160-foot tall Erector-set of girder work and fuel tanks nestled beneath a giant sphere with portholes. Several space-suited figures climb down a long ladder. They erect a flag bearing a black swastika on a blood-red background.  The German Third Reich claims ownership of the moon. The year is 1976. The United States would have been celebrating its bicentennial except that what's left of our nation has been reduced to those states east of the Rockies. They have united with several former Canadian provinces to form the North American Confederation. Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire have split ownership of most of the rest of the planet. The world map looks like a tumultuous Risk board game.  This describes a "Twilight Zone"-ish parallel universe of what might have happened if the Nazis won World War II.

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

NASA, Navy to test recovery of Orion capsule by the USS Mesa Verde

 

Matt Knight - WTKR-TV (Hampton Roads)

 

On Thursday NASA and the Navy will test recovering a mockup of the new Orion space capsule from the ocean using the USS Mesa Verde.

 

The test will determine the feasibility of NASA's plan to winch the capsules aboard an Amphibious Transport Dock ship instead of using helicopters to hoist it aboard an aircraft carrier as was done with Apollo-era space capsules.

 

The stationary recovery test will allow the teams to demonstrate and evaluate the recovery processes, procedures, hardware and personnel in a controlled environment. A second test will be conducted next year in open waters off of San Diego.

 

On Monday support equipment and the test capsule were transferred by a floating dock system to the Mesa Verde.

 

Sailors from the ship will travel to the landed Orion in rigid hull inflatable boats while divers check the capsule for hazards.  Then lines from a winch in the ship will bring the capsule into the flooded well deck. The capsule will be guided toward a cradle in the flooded well deck. When the capsule is secure, the deck will be drained, according to USNI.com.

 

Orion is the exploration spacecraft designed to carry astronauts to destinations not yet explored by humans, including an asteroid and Mars.

 

The first unpiloted test flight of the Orion is scheduled to launch in 2014 atop a Delta IV rocket.

 

A San-Antonio-class ship is likely to recover the capsule after that test flight.

 

Dynetics reports 'outstanding' progress toward next generation of NASA's Space Launch System

 

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

 

Dynetics Inc. said Tuesday it has made "outstanding" progress on its contract with NASA to test new systems for the second generation of the Space Launch System. The company reported on its progress during the 2013 Space & Missile Defense Symposium being held this week in Huntsville.

 

Dynetics and Aerojet Rocketdyne are testing advanced booster systems for the bigger version of the heavy-lift rocket that NASA plans to build in the coming decade. The company's projects involve designing and building a full-scale cryogenic fuel tank and retooling an Apollo era F-1 engine using modern manufacturing techniques for a cheaper high-powered engine. The company's engine is called the F-1B.

 

"We've successfully manufactured our first two full-scale, 18-foot diameter cryotank barrels, including friction stir welding them on Marshall Space Flight Center tools," Dynetics program manager Kim Doering said. "Taking the flight-weight tank barrels all the way from design through successful manufacturing in less than 10 months demonstrates that Dynetics' affordable booster structures approach is credible."

 

Andy Crocker, deputy program manager, said Dynetics, Aerojet Rocketdyne and NASA have hot-fired an F-1 gas generator at F-1B conditions. "We completed all 10 tests and 235 seconds of hot-fire time even faster than expected," Crocker said, "and all test objectives and success criteria were met."

 

"We're proud to be playing a role in our nation's human space exploration program," said Steve Cook, Dynetics director of Space Technologies, in a statement. "Completing these risk reduction activities will give NASA the confidence it needs to proceed with a near-term Advanced Booster competition. We look forward to that opportunity."

 

NASA calls these projects "risk reduction activities" because they involve testing new rocket ideas to see if the risks associated with those ideas can be minimized to the point they can move forward toward implementation. There are several other risk-reduction activities under way involving other companies and other aspects of the next-generation Space Launch System.

 

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser completes NASA tow test, another milestone for the commercial crew vehicle

 

Kristen Painter - Denver Post

 

 

Louisville-based Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems completed the tow test, one of NASA's mandated milestones, on its Dream Chaser space vehicle at Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

 

The Dream Chaser Space System is one of three NASA-funded programs remaining in the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) Program, which is designed to help U.S. companies develop spacecraft and rocket combinations capable of launching from U.S. soil.

 

The ground tow tests were done as preparation for the flight vehicle's upcoming approach and landing test that is slated to occur sometime in the third quarter. The Dream Chaser completed four sets of a test sequence — 10 mph, 20 mph, 40 mph and 60 mph — to verify that the vehicle would work properly upon landing.

 

While the vehicle was being towed on the runway, officials were monitoring the flight computer and flight software, instrumentation, guidance, navigation, and control, braking and steering performance, flight control surface actuation, mission control and remote commanding capability and landing gear dynamics.

 

"We are very excited to complete this series of tests and achieve another critical milestone for our Dream Chaser flight test program," said Steve Lindsey, SNC's Space Systems senior director of programs and former NASA astronaut in a news release. "Watching Dream Chaser undergo tow testing on the same runway where we landed several space shuttle orbiters brings a great amount of pride to our Dream Chaser team. We are another step closer to restoring America's capability to return U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station."

 

NASA'S CCiCap sets out pre-negotiated, paid-for-performance milestones for each of its funded participants.

 

The Dream Chaser will next conduct its captive carry test, and its approach and landing free flight test sometime this fall.

 

The Dream Chaser program has several other Colorado aerospace connections. Centennial-based United Launch Alliance is the company's rocket provider of choice should Sierra Nevada continue receiving NASA's funding for development, while Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County recently partnered with Sierra Nevada on the program.

 

North Texas Company Helping Launch NASA Space Lander

 

Andrea Lucia - KTVT-TV (Dallas/Ft Worth)

 

NASA is working on the next generation of space lander and a company from right here in North Texas is helping.

 

Dozens of tests are putting the Morpheus Lander through the paces at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

 

While the autonomous planetary lander is able to lift off with the power of green fuel, NASA isn't spending a lot of 'green' to test it.

 

"It is a vertical flying test bed that enables us to test the technology here on earth," Project Morpheus Manager Jon Olanson explained, adding that as the lander evolves it would, "…then be available for flights to other planetary surfaces, whether that be the moon or mars or an asteroid."

 

The green fuel that Morpheus uses is methane and liquid oxygen. Since the unit is autonomous no pilot is needed to navigate its 1,100-pound carrying load. And by NASA standards the lander was put together on a shoestring budget.

 

The Texas connection tracks all the way back to Mesquite. Armadillo Aerospace is once again onboard with NASA. The company also helped create the first model, which unfortunately met an untimely end. The 2012 test model planetary lander crashed and burned just seconds after liftoff.

 

But that was last summer and since then the team has made all kinds of upgrades. "Sometimes at this stage, things are not going to go perfect, so you learn from those and you make adjustments and then you move forward," Olanson said. "We have made 70 adjustments from the last vehicle."

 

Since the big setback, Morpheus has been going gangbusters. The team will soon head back to the Kennedy Space Center to try the test what tripped them up last year.

 

Olanson said, "What we are doing we think will benefit human exploration in the future."

 

The enthusiasm of the Morpheus team is apparently contagious. "It was really cool!" witness Hilary Yip said after watching a test.

 

"You know it's exciting and it goes off," said Brian Butcher, who works on Morpheus. "You know it's not everyday you get to see a rocket powered lander launching on site."

 

Matthew Osfeld also watched one of the tests. He said, "It's going into a new era of technology and hopefully in the future we can have more technology that can free fly and go further than we have ever gone before."

 

Engineers identify 12 asteroids we could capture with existing rocket tech

 

Adam Mann - Wired.com

 

By looking through the catalog of known asteroids, aerospace engineers have identified 12 candidates that we could reach out and capture using existing rocket technology.

 

Long overlooked as mere rocky chunks leftover from the formation of the solar system, asteroids have recently gotten a lot more scrutiny. A couple years ago, researchers outlined a seemingly daring plan to lasso and bring an asteroid back to Earth. NASA doesn't seem to think this is too crazy, and is moving forward with plans to capture, tow, and place a small asteroid somewhere near our planet. There are also two different private space companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, with plans to seek out and mine precious metals and water from near-Earth asteroids. And finally, the widely filmed Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia in February, has focused international attention on the fact that we may one day want to deflect a potentially catastrophic Earth-asteroid crash.

 

The question is how best to go about moving one of these flying space rocks. After all, most are too far away or traveling too fast to be of any use. Changing their orbits would require massive amounts of fuel or a gravity tug that would take decades or centuries to work. So three engineers from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland took a look at the current catalog of known asteroids — which recently surpassed 10,000 objects — and identified a new category: Easily Retrievable Objects or EROs.

 

These EROs are all fairly small asteroids, ranging in size from approximately 2 meters to 60 meters in diameter. They already come (cosmically) close to our planet, and it would take a relatively small push to put them in orbits around Lagrange points near Earth. Lagrange points are positions around a million kilometers from our planet where the gravitational influence of Earth and the sun are minimal, and an object can circle without expending too much energy. There are several fancy orbits that these EROs could be placed in, including the bean-shaped Lyapunov orbits pictured at top or the more circular halo orbits seen at left.

 

Moving one of these EROs would be a "logical stepping stone towards more ambitious scenarios of asteroid exploration and exploitation, and possibly the easiest feasible attempt for humans to modify the Solar System environment outside of Earth," the authors write in a paper in the August issue of Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.

 

Their number one most easily moved space rock is named 2006 RH120. A single rocket burn in 2021 would be enough to place this roughly 4-meter-wide asteroid into orbit around a Lagrange point by 2026. NASA could then launch people to study this object (which would barely be bigger than the astronauts themselves) and learn about its history.

 

Little is known about the composition of the 12 EROs in this study. Because of their small size, astronomers have speculated that they might be fragments ejected from the moon after an impact or could possibly even be spent rocket stages from a Space Age mission. Perhaps a dedicated telescope, such as the one Planetary Resources wants to launch next year, could perform reconnaissance to learn what sorts of objects these EROs are. If they turned out to be asteroids and any of them contained a useful amount of precious metals or water, they could be exploited for mining.

 

The authors acknowledge there are uncertainties regarding the orbits of many of these EROs and the possibility that some miscalculation could send one slamming into Earth. But with active control systems, the asteroids could be herded fairly easily. Even if one did go rogue, most of the objects are small and anything under 5 meters in diameter would burn up in the atmosphere before causing any damage.

 

Virgin Galactic CEO Counts 625 Customers For Suborbital Trips

 

Michael Bruno - Aviation Week

 

Virgin Galactic has signed up 625 individuals for its planned suborbital spaceflights, lining up revenue of at least $125 million, in what CEO George Whitesides asserts is a strong sign of the excitement and potential of commercial space ventures.

 

Virgin's commercial human spaceflights could begin next year, he added. "That will be a fundamental shift," Whitesides stressed. "It's sort of like we've been working on this for so long in the space community that it always seems like it's in the future. But we're really almost there, where people will be able to buy a ticket and go down to Spaceport America, get their week of training, and … have your 'Right Stuff' moment."

 

Speaking to the Aero Club of Washington on Aug. 13, Whitesides confirmed ticket prices are now up to $250,000 apiece – although he did not say how many customers agreed to that price. Before the first rocket-powered flight of the company's SpaceShipTwo in April, Virgin was charging $200,000, and as of mid-May had signed up 590 potential private astronauts. Regardless, all customers are paying and there are no "comps."

 

Interestingly, the customer base has shifted to become 60% foreign, according to Whitesides. Previously half were Americans. But that shift underscores one the company's goals, as well as a key reason for Whitesides to speak to a Washington audience: Virgin and the rest of the nascent commercial space industry would like human-rated spacecraft to be kept off the strict U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) as part of the Obama administration's reform of export controls.

 

In a move long sought by industry, the administration in May, with Congress's recent approval, acted to shift commercial satellites from the State Department's U.S. Munitions List (USML) to the Commerce Department's less restrictive Commerce Control List for export licenses. At the same time, officials proposed adding crewed space vehicles to the USML under ITAR control.

 

Whitesides has said previously that Virgin Galactic is considering expanding its operations to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, home of its strategic partner Aabar Investments, and maybe a planned high-latitude spaceport at Kiruna, Sweden. "Those are two interesting places," he said before the Paris air show. "Abu Dhabi is our priority, given the substantial commitment made in our company."

 

Whitesides also took the opportunity of his Washington speech to call for "appropriate regulation" of the commercial space industry, and praised FAA oversight to date as reaching the right balance. And he proffered a personal call for elected leaders and officials to increase consideration of the effect that federal assistance can have in boosting U.S. competitiveness, citing Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) as an example. NASA's support of SpaceX not only helped meet its own mission requirements, but has spawned a U.S. company on the path toward international competition.

 

"Where there is a commercial application," he told Aviation Week, "we should think about that."

 

A lot of people are game for one-way ticket to Mars – more than 100,000

 

Emi Kolawole - Washington Post

 

Mars One, the Dutch nonprofit that's offering one-way tickets to the red planet, appears to have hit a milestone. Back in April, when the project first began accepting applications from the general public, we asked whether anyone would be willing to take them up on the offer. Apparently, more than 100,000 people would. That's right, more than 100,000 people have applied to take a one-way trip to Mars.

 

Before you dismiss this as little more than people entering names on a Web form, consider that applications cost roughly $38. The organization plans to choose a group of 40 from the 100,000 -plus pool and then winnow that down to a team of four who would leave Earth in 2022 and arrive on Mars in 2023.

 

But the mission has significant technological hurdles. As The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach wrote in May of the potential for NASA's manned Mars mission: "humans-to-Mars is aspirational, with the tough logistical and political issues yet to be resolved." And that's an assessment of the agency that sent the first human beings to land on moon.

 

That said, the Mars One mission, which is expected to cost roughly $6 billion and include a reality show-type live broadcast as part of its revenue model, has more than 20 "contributors" and a list of "potential supplier[s]," including Elon Musk's SpaceX. Note the use of the word "potential."

 

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2013/04/22/w1-mission-to-mars-willett.cnn.html

 

No Liftoff for These Space Flights of Fancy

Both parties excel at feigning interest in space exploration for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts

 

Robert Zimmerman - Wall Street Journal (Opinion)

 

(Zimmerman writes about space history and science at his website, Behind the Black. His 1999 book "Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8" has just been released in an e-book edition.)

 

On July 18, the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became all too clear. Forget journeys to the stars. Space exploration is now clearly tethered to the earthly desires of politicians. The result is that America's incoherent space program is unable to accomplish anything except spend money the federal government doesn't have.

 

We saw the process at work in budget negotiations in the House, where politicians divided along partisan lines in the vote over NASA's budget. The Democrats and NASA were pushing to fund a proposed asteroid mission, whereby an unmanned spacecraft in 2018 would capture an asteroid, and bring it closer to Earth so that astronauts could visit it in 2021. This mission was created by NASA to fulfill President Obama's 2010 commitment that the U.S. send humans to an asteroid by 2025.

 

Not surprisingly, all 17 Democrats on the House Science committee voted for this budget plan.

 

But the Republicans in Congress don't want NASA to capture an asteroid. They want to reactivate George W. Bush's proposal from 2004 that was canceled by Mr. Obama in 2010. President Bush wanted humans go back to the moon and use that as a springboard for going to Mars. All 22 Republicans on the committee voted against the asteroid mission.

 

Each party claims that its proposal is the best way for the U.S. to lead the way in exploring the solar system. Neither of these plans will ever get off the launch pad.

 

The pattern has repeated itself over the past four decades. A president, whether it is Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, makes a Kennedy-like declaration about America's next major goal in space. Sometimes it is building a space station by the end of the decade. Sometimes it is going to the moon by some set date. Sometimes it is going to an asteroid.

 

Congress and the president use the announcement as a justification for sending pork to their districts, and steer a little money to the project to get it going. When the really big funding is needed to actually build it, however, these politicians chicken out. The way NASA has been designed—by these same politicians, and with numerous facilities in as many congressional districts as possible—makes building anything by NASA ungodly expensive, far more expensive than even our most spendthrift politicians can stomach.

 

So they cancel it. A new president makes a new declaration and new goal, and the cycle begins anew. The pork rolls out, a new project begins, some money gets spent, and nothing gets built.

 

That's what happened with President Reagan's space station, Freedom, in the 1980s. After a decade of spending billions on blueprints, the project was unceremoniously canceled by Bill Clinton. Similarly, we spent about $9 billion on President Bush's moon-bound Constellation program, only to have President Obama cancel it. Now we have Mr. Obama's asteroid mission, opposed by Republicans who still want to send Americans to the moon.

 

Both parties, however, are in agreement about one thing. When President Obama canceled Constellation, Congress stepped forward to demand that NASA continue to build some variation of Constellation's rockets and Orion capsule. Thus we now have the Space Launch System, or SLS, a heavy-lift rocket for launching the Orion capsule and tons of other material beyond Earth orbit, supposedly capable of sending astronauts either to the moon or the asteroids.

 

Both parties in Congress want SLS because that is the pork for all their space dreams. SLS, costing a minimum of $3 billion per year, also uses as much of the leftover infrastructure of the space shuttle as possible, which means the thousands of NASA employees and contractors who operated the shuttle will continue to have jobs.

 

This is why Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, both of Utah, were so happy when they helped force Space Launch System approval through Congress back in 2010. The SLS was required to use some version of the space shuttle's solid-rocket boosters—whether this made engineering sense or not—and those boosters were built in Utah. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) and Bill Nelson (D., Fla.) also celebrated SLS's passage, as the project would maintain otherwise no-longer-needed shuttle jobs at the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

 

When it is finished, the Space Launch System is expected to launch only once every four years, with a total cost per launch of about $14 billion. This is only the launch cost—including the annual operating expenses as well as the amortized cost of designing and building the rocket and capsule—and does not include the cost for any missions. Again, that's $14 billion per launch, almost equal to NASA's entire annual budget. And the launches will only happen once every four years.

 

The good news is that the SLS will never fly. When it comes time to actually finance the actual missions, Congress will once again balk. SLS will get canceled, the next president will step forward and make a new proposal, and the whole pork-laden process of waste will begin anew.

 

In other words, what both parties are really doing is faking a goal for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts.

 

If these politicians really cared about our country, they could focus instead on doing things that would actually foster the creation of a healthy and robust aerospace industry.

 

They would go back to the model that Congress used back in the 1920s and 1930s in trying to jump-start the aviation business. Congress didn't dictate what airplanes to build or missions to fly. Congress needed the U.S. mail delivered, and hired airplane companies to deliver it. These companies were then able to use the profits earned from those government contracts to upgrade their airplanes and sell those improved products to others besides the federal government. The result was a robust aviation industry serving millions of private customers, with the needs of the federal government quite trivial in comparison.

 

Similarly, the federal government needs to get cargo and humans to the international space station. It should buy those services from companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada and Orbital Sciences ORB +0.79%. These companies have already been developing space ships and rockets for one-tenth of the cost of the Space Launch System. For example, the entire cost to develop, build and launch SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket was about the same as NASA spends every year trying to design the Space Launch System. Similarly, Orbital Sciences developed the Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule for as little.

 

So get the politicians and the bureaucrats out of space exploration. Leave it to these private companies and the citizenry. Not only would we get our rockets and spaceships for a price we can afford, we would end up having a potent private industry in space, competing for business and taking Americans where they want to go, efficiently and freely.

 

Why Bill Gates is wrong to disparage private investment in rockets

 

Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle's SciGuy

 

As I have previously noted, lots of billionaires are investing money in space exploration ventures — at least 10 by last count. They're putting their money behind everything from rockets to spaceships to asteroid mining to space hotels.

 

But the king of American billionaires and the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, is having none of it.

 

Check out what Gates told Bloomberg Businessweek about tech billionaires spending on space:

 

"Everybody's got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don't see the direct connection. I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into."

 

Now Gates is a brilliant man. And his various foundations are doing wonderful things for humanity. But with that being said, I think he's wrong here.

 

Space exploration benefits humanity in multiple ways. Foremost, it's the natural extension of our innate curiosity. Humans have always explored. To further this exploration benefits the species. Secondly, there are finite resources on planet Earth. If we can obtain precious metals from asteroids rather than strip mining them here, all the better.

 

And finally, the future of humanity is not guaranteed. To ensure the long-term survival of our species we need more than a single spaceship (Earth) upon which to live. If we're going to live beyond our own world, it's going to take interest and investments from wealthy individuals to help catalyze those efforts.

 

So the tech billionaires aren't just shooting off rockets. They're doing good work for humanity, too.

 

On the trail of "The Curse of Slick-6"

 

Dwayne Day - The Space Review (Commentary)

 

My first introduction to the story of the "Curse of Slick-6" came from Roger Guillemette in the mid-1990s. Guillemette occasionally wrote about space launches and soon would become a regular contributor to and eventual editor for Florida Today's Space Online. Roger had heard from locals near Vandenberg Air Force Base that there had been a rumor that the local Chumash Indians had "cursed" the large Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg.

 

According to Guillemette, at some point, presumably during the early 1980s construction problems, people on the base had started to claim that the Chumash had placed a curse on the facility because it was "built on an Indian burial ground."

 

SLC-6, or "Slick-6" as it was known, was initially started in the 1960s as the launch site for the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program's Titan IIIM rocket. When MOL was canceled in 1969, construction on SLC-6 was halted. When the Air Force decided to launch space shuttles from Vandenberg, it designated SLC-6 as the launch site and began overhauling it in the early 1980s. Construction problems at SLC-6 became notorious, especially by summer 1984, when they touched off an Air Force investigation that found no major problems that could not be corrected. In December 1985, a worker fell to his death at SLC-6. After the Challenger accident came the revelation that during a shuttle launch, hydrogen could build up inside SLC-6's flame trench and result in an explosion. The construction teams were developing a solution to that problem when the Air Force abruptly canceled all West Coast shuttle launches and shut down SLC-6. The Air Force had spent billions of dollars on the facility and never launched anything for over two and a half decades.

 

According to Guillemette, at some point, presumably during the early 1980s construction problems, people on the base had started to claim that the Chumash had placed a curse on the facility because it was "built on an Indian burial ground." This was, of course, a rather convenient way for people to blame the Air Force's problems on the Indians. Guillemette casually mentioned this in a couple of articles that he wrote for Spaceflight magazine in the 1990s and then in a lighthearted 1998 article for Space Online that attracted a lot of attention. Guillemette had tried to contact Chumash representatives, but had gotten nowhere.

 

In the early 2000s, I started doing some research on Vandenberg. I had started work on a book on the history of satellite reconnaissance during the Cold War and my goal was to write an engaging story that focused on the people as much as the technology. Vandenberg has been the primary site for launching American reconnaissance satellites and I wanted to make the place come alive in the same way that other historians and writers such as Tom Wolfe had made Cape Canaveral come alive when writing about the Mercury and Apollo astronauts. I knew somebody at Vandenberg and had visited there several times, essentially playing "space archeologist" by touring old launch sites. But during a visit in the early 2000s I arranged to speak to some base personnel in a more formal capacity.

 

The base public affairs officer was very accommodating and arranged for me to speak to a few of the operations people. They provided some unique insights, such as how some Vandenberg launches require the evacuation of the oil platforms off the coast, or how launch personnel adjust the trajectory of rockets to deal with wind, actually "flying" them on different trajectories to minimize wind drag pushing them off course. Someone else explained how the range safety people referred to "tracking and cracking" rockets if they went off course, and how they had to consider not only where rocket debris would fall, but also how toxic clouds would disperse in the wind. All of this was the kind of useful background information that I planned to weave into the book, along with details like just how much explosive was carried on an early Thor rocket to blow it to smithereens when something went wrong (a detail that I have not yet found.)

 

One of the people that I also met was Larry Spanne, who was then Vandenberg's "cultural resources officer" responsible for dealing with the cultural sites on the base, which included things like ancient archeological ruins, gravesites, and cliff drawings. One of the oldest known archeological sites in North America, dating back over 10,000 years, is located on the base. Spanne's job included overseeing archeological site surveys whenever somebody wanted to start construction on base, as well as protecting various sites, like Chumash cliff drawings, from vandals.

 

I asked Spanne about "the curse of Slick-6." He provided some great background information. There was no "Indian burial ground" on the SLC-6 location. The entire area had been carefully surveyed numerous times prior to construction, and the government had a good sense of the locations of all the culturally significant sites on the base. That area of the coast, however, was known as the "Western Gate" to the Chumash, and it was essentially the pathway to the afterlife in their religion. He also said that there had Chumash protests about construction on the base during the late 1970s or early 1980s. These protests took the form of picketers outside of the Vandenberg main gate as well as Chumash leaders visiting the base commander. But the protests were essentially echoes of earlier protests the Chumash had staged in 1978 farther to the south over plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal north of Santa Barbara at Point Conception. (One of the other groups to protest the terminal plans was called "Citizens Against Government Dumbness." The Point Conception construction plans were quietly canceled in early 1986). Spanne also said that the protests were a long time ago, and that he believed that the Air Force and the local Chumash had a good relationship now, in part because he had helped the Chumash gain hunting and fishing rights on the base.

 

This was good information, but it was only the beginning. Whenever I got out to the West Coast, which happened about once a year back then, I tried to gather more information on the "curse" story if I had time. This was not easy for logistical reasons alone—my business took me either to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, and Vandenberg was not near to either of them, meaning that I often had to plan time simply to drive to the town of Lompoc, near Vandenberg, and spend the night in order to do a day of research in the area. During one visit I spent half a day at the Lompoc public library going through old copies of the Lompoc Record newspaper looking for any info on the problems at SLC-6, to no avail. A call to the newspaper itself was fruitless. The library also did not have a local history file like some libraries maintain, and I could not find out anything about a Lompoc historical society. My efforts to find press accounts on the Chumash protests at the construction site for the liquid natural gas facility also turned up almost nothing—a brief mention of a May 1978 protest, but no names or other details that would enable me to follow-up on the story.

 

Prior to one visit I contacted somebody who had written about the local Chumash Indians and asked if he could put me in touch with anybody I could talk to. He was wary and said that his own relations with the Chumash were tenuous. He also said that there were essentially three different Chumash groups and they didn't get along with each other. Only one of the three groups, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, was federally recognized. I kept pushing and finally he said that the people he knew did not want to talk to me because they thought that I worked for the Air Force. Roger Guillemette also mentioned to me that one of the Chumash groups had a casino. I contacted a person at the casino—it may have been their public affairs representative—and that person told me that I could come by. That was the first potential opening that I had, although I was wary of walking in blind and saying something culturally insensitive. But this happened just before I was scheduled to fly back to the East Coast and I could not do it.

 

At one point, probably in 2005 or so, I was visiting the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington when I noticed that they had a research library and it was open. So I went in and talked to a researcher and asked if they had any good resources on the Chumash Indians. In particular, I was interested in their religious customs, because I didn't know if they even included such things as curses or bad luck. He did a quick catalog search and did not come up with anything useful. I then told him about my research and said that I had been told that there were three Chumash groups in the central California coast area and I had heard that "they didn't get along with each other." He said that was common, that our concept of an Indian "tribe" was in many ways misleading, and often what white people—or the American government—consider a tribe is really a collection of family groups who have their own definitions. In addition, it is not uncommon for one group to get government recognition and open a casino and other groups then resent this fact.

 

One of the big problems with dealing with culture and rumors is that it is difficult to place events in time without contemporary news accounts or other documents. After decades of launching nothing from SLC-6, in 1995 and 1997 Lockheed—later Lockheed Martin—launched Athena rockets from the facility. The first one failed to reach orbit, and the Lewis satellite carried into orbit on the second launch died after a few days.

 

Lockheed Martin employees were aware of the curse rumors. Prior to the launch of an Ikonos satellite in 1999, they began circulating a joke image of an Indian supposedly "blessing" the launch. The image combined a photo of the launch shroud and an Indian chief taken from Microsoft Clip Art.

 

At some point, an aerospace contractor paid a Chumash religious leader to come out to the site and "remove the curse" and this had apparently created some controversy and hard feelings. It's not hard to understand why, since the unofficial ceremony only fed the long-standing rumors that the problems at Slick-6 were not due to Air Force or contractor mismanagement and incompetence, but due to the Chumash Indians.

 

I received this information third-hand, but during a visit to Vandenberg in 2006 (during one of my space archeology tours) I asked a colleague there about this. He confirmed that it had actually happened and then said "I have pictures." Unfortunately, he would not show them to me. Without any further data, I assumed that it was Lockheed Martin employees who had done this sometime after the April 1999 launch failure of the first Ikonos satellite. But a Lockheed Martin employee who worked on Athena said that he and his colleagues were unaware of any ceremony, and suggested that it may have been Boeing employees, who took over SLC-6 several years later to prepare it for Delta IV launches.

 

To be honest, I was working in these research trips when I could, and on my own dime, and couldn't afford to devote a lot of time and attention to them. If I had a grant to research the subject and a lot of spare time I might have put more effort into it. But spending a few hundred dollars (rental car, hotel, food) and a day digging through microfilm records and gathering no leads was aggravating and disappointing.

 

In 2007 I was asked to speak at a symposium on "western aerospace history" that was being held near Pasadena. (See: "Blue skies on the West Coast: A history of the aerospace industry in Southern California", The Space Review, August 20, 2007.) The symposium was led by Peter Westwick, who had a grant to support the project and was then writing a history of JPL. Anybody could submit a paper proposal and those that were accepted would receive travel money and an honorarium to present a paper at the symposium. At Westwick's suggestion I proposed a paper on "the curse of Slick-6" and it was accepted. One of my goals was to try and stir up some information on this subject. I hoped that after my talk, somebody would come up to me and say they had information on the relationship between the local Chumash and the surrounding communities. (See: "The Chumash Indians and the Air Force", The Space Review, September 4, 2007.)

 

The turnout for my talk was very good and I got the impression that at least several people had come to the symposium specifically to hear my talk—which turned out to be true, but not in the way that I really wanted. A number of people came up to talk to me afterwards. One elderly gentleman came up to me and gently shook his finger at me and said "Chumash curses are real." At first I thought he was joking, but after a few seconds I realized he was totally serious. He told me about some park project that had suffered a lot of problems because the Indians had cursed it. I politely told the man that I didn't believe in superstition, and then excused myself. But this was a lesson in itself: to some people curses were jokes, but to others they were real.

 

After my talk failed to turn up any new leads, I contacted Larry Spanne, who by this time had retired. Spanne shared some additional information with me in email correspondence. According to Spanne, in 1974 the Air Force conducted a survey of a stretch of land on the base that was going to be converted for shuttle use. The survey included test excavations at numerous sites in order to determine if any archeological sites were in the way of the construction. Although several Chumash cemeteries were discovered, none of these was near the Slick-6 facility. Later, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Spanne was part of a contractor team that included Santa Ynez Chumash representatives that monitored construction of space shuttle roads and facilities. According to Spanne, "no human remains or cemeteries were discovered during that multi-year project."

 

But soon after a construction accident at the pad, when a large structure was blown off the rails in a high wind, one of the Chumash Elders assigned to the monitoring project, and aware of numerous problems that construction crews had encountered, remarked, "Larry, that place must be cursed." Spanne interpreted this as an offhand comment, and said "at no time did I hear any Chumash person say that their people had cursed the facility."

 

Stories of Indian curses have long been a part of American folklore. After all, to white settlers, Indians had strange and difficult to decipher customs, and it was common to attribute a white man's bad luck to a mysterious force created by a member of a different culture or race (witness the alternative example of "the magical negro" in numerous Hollywood movies like The Green Mile). Of course, in the case of SLC-6, such a rumor was also an insulting way of blaming the Chumash for the white man's foibles—not only had the federal government occupied sacred Chumash land, now whites had a convenient excuse for all their failures.

 

In his email to me in 2007, Spanne recounted how "over the years I spent many hours attempting to dispel or debunk the rumors, but they persist." The "curse of Slick-6" rumor apparently existed for a long time before Roger Guillemette ever wrote about it.

 

Last year, The University of California Press published Blue Sky Metropolis, a collection of essays on California aerospace history that resulted from the 2007 symposium. The book was edited by Peter Westwick and covered a wide array of topics on California aerospace.

 

What prompted this long-winded explanation of my only partially-successful research effort on "the curse of Slick-6" was a new review of the book Blue Sky Metropolis by Roger Eardley-Pryor that appeared last month on H Net, the Humanities and Social Sciences Online resource. Eardley-Pryor referred to my essay as "overly reliant upon military sources," which is a fair criticism. But it is also something that I acknowledged in the essay itself when I stated that doing research that crosses such major divides is challenging: a military historian is going to have a hard time finding cultural sources, and a cultural historian is going to have a hard time finding military sources.

 

At no point was this a major research project on my part; it was simply a story that I kept revisiting when I had an opportunity. One of the things that constantly nagged me was the belief that the resources might exist but that I was unaware of them, perhaps because I'm not familiar with doing research on cultural studies or anthropology or American Indian history. Maybe there is a good academic paper on the Chumash and their recent history. It is possible that Santa Maria, another town near Vandenberg, has a local history file with relevant information. Or perhaps UC Santa Barbara has a local history collection, or a professor or archivist who knows some relevant information. Perhaps one of the Chumash groups has recorded something on this topic. My hope was that by being public about the subject, somebody with useful information would contact me. But that never happened.

 

Or perhaps this is simply as far as this story is going to go. Some historical subjects are not amenable to research. They will forever remain unknowable. I would love to talk to a Chumash who was involved in the protests at Vandenberg in the early 1980s, or even at the Point Conception natural gas terminal site. At the least I'd like to talk to a Chumash representative who could explain their religion and the significance of the Western Gate in their culture. My goal is to be as accurate and respectful as possible and to make sure that I'm not simply writing about this subject from a single (ignorant) perspective but am including all sides. But I don't expect to be successful at this. Perhaps the best I can hope for is that somebody with better educational training and knowledge—perhaps an anthropologist or cultural historian in California—is able to pick up the subject and research the story better than I have been able to do.

 

Would the Nazis Have Gone to the Moon?

 

Ray Villard - Discovery News

 

A celestial object that at first looks like a moving star enters the inky black sky above the far northern edge of the moon's Ocean of Storms. The descending vehicle resembles an enormous flying water tower. A blinding dust storm kicks up under the spidery legs of the 160-foot tall Erector-set of girder work and fuel tanks nestled beneath a giant sphere with portholes.

 

Several space-suited figures climb down a long ladder. They erect a flag bearing a black swastika on a blood-red background.  The German Third Reich claims ownership of the moon.

 

The year is 1976. The United States would have been celebrating its bicentennial except that what's left of our nation has been reduced to those states east of the Rockies. They have united with several former Canadian provinces to form the North American Confederation. Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire have split ownership of most of the rest of the planet. The world map looks like a tumultuous Risk board game.

 

This describes a "Twilight Zone"-ish parallel universe of what might have happened if the Nazis won World War II. There have been many alternative history scenarios written that explore just such a tragic ending to the deadliest war in human history.  The possibility of a Nazi victory is not too farfetched.

 

In my time-warped universe, President Franklin Roosevelt does not run for a third term in 1940. Republican Senator Robert Taft wins the White House. Because Taft is a staunch isolationist, the Japanese decide against doing a reckless, preemptive attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.

 

America is finally forced to enter the war following the fall of Great Britain. But it's too late. The Nazis have had time to perfect rocket-propelled intercontinental bombers among other super-weapons.

 

Though the alternative future that would have followed a Nazi victory is pure conjecture, the German road to space is much clearer. In the late 1940s and early 50s the writings of German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun (shown above), who first developed liquid fueled rockets as military weapons, spelled out the strategy he would have used to go beyond Earth.

 

In reality von Braun and much of his rocket team surrendered to the Allies at the end of WWII.  He went on to build the Saturn V moon rocket for the Apollo missions.

 

If a victorious German empire instead emerged from WWII, von Braun might have been able to convince his Nazi overlords to devote exorbitant resources to fulfilling his childhood dream of space conquest. At the least he could have piggybacked on Nazi space militarization.

 

During WWII German engineers saw a clear advantage to putting weapons into space. They conceived of a gigantic space mirror, affixed to a space station, which could focus sunlight to incinerate targets as easily as frying an ant under a magnifying glass. No doubt Earth surveillance from the "high ground" would be developed too.

 

Free of the messy political seesaw that takes place in democracies, Nazi Germany may have made a long-term commitment to manned expeditions to other planets. This might have been revered as manifest destiny for the planned "1,000-year Reich."

 

There would be no U.S.-Soviet style space race because Germany would have knocked out any adversarial emerging superpowers. The Germans therefore could have methodically taken their time to build up a robust and well-supported space transportation infrastructure.

 

The first step would have been to develop heavy lift cargo vehicles (which NASA is revisiting now, 40 years after President Richard Nixon killed the Saturn V program). Super-rockets might be a spinoff from a Nazi military goal of quickly dispatching troops anywhere on the globe via giant suborbital transports. Just several flights of the mega-boosters would have been needed to construct a huge bicycle-wheel shaped space station. The 150-foot diameter spinning torus would provide artificial gravity to a crew of 80 astronauts, as imagined by von Braun.

 

Von Braun saw the station as the staging area for constructing large interplanetary spacecraft that could be massive and not restricted by aerodynamic design needed to ascend from Earth. Germany would have eventually used nuclear power to achieve beefy space energy resources and propulsion systems (though not predicted by von Braun).

 

In his writings von Braun envisioned a major sortie to the moon that would land 50 astronauts for an initial six-week stay. They would live inside a five-floor sphere atop a cluster of fuel tanks. This was simply enormous by Apollo standards – no man in a can!

 

A huge remote controlled cargo vessel would accompany the manned vehicle to a landing site near the moon's north pole. It would carry rovers with a 250-mile range capability.  There would be construction supplies to build an Antarctic-style scientific outpost.

           

Von Braun though big. Like Heman Cortez's fleet of 11 ships and 500 men sent to the New World in the 16th century, Von Braun envisioned a flotilla of 11 manned vessels carrying 70 astronauts to Mars. It would require the equivalent of nearly 300 Saturn V launches to carry all the parts into low Earth orbit for assembly. The fleet concept provided a lot of redundancy and carried along plenty of contingency supplies for the three-year mission. Unlike the Cortez expedition, this would not be a one-way trip.

 

German engineering prowess and the political stability of a dictatorship could have realized such an ambitious program. Humans might have made it to Mars before 2001, and begun interplanetary colonization before 2100.

 

But the thought of swastika-emblazoned spacecraft plying the solar system is downright chilling. And it leaves us with an equally chilling thought that the first interstellar species we encounter may be descended from an aggressive and warlike super-technological civilization that started out by enslaving their entire home planet.

 

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