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Monday, August 19, 2013

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



Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: August 19, 2013 6:14:12 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - August 19, 2013 and JSC Today

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Headlines

  1. Safety and Health Day 2.0.13 - Coming Soon

You won't want to miss Safety and Health Day 2.0.13 on Oct. 10!

It's going to be bold, innovative and informative.

The event officially kicks off at 9 a.m. in the Teague Auditorium with JSC Director Dr. Ellen Ochoa and a special guest speaker.

Then, head to the exhibits from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. for important and useful information to help you, your colleagues and your loved ones stay safe and healthy.

Distracted driving is a focus this year. According to the National Safety Council, 23 percent of all crashes each year involve cell phone use, resulting in 1.3 million crashes nationally. In 2010, cell phone use was a contributing factor in 3,387 Texas crashes. Drivers talking on cell phones miss half of the information in their driving environment.

This is one event you can't afford to miss!

Safety and Health Day 2.0.13 - Oct. 10.

Event Date: Thursday, October 10, 2013   Event Start Time:9:00 AM   Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: JSC Campus

Add to Calendar

Joyce Abbey 281-335-2041

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  1. 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, have been captured. Click the "Submit Feedback" button located on the top of the site navigation to give us your comments and thoughts.

Brent J. Fontenot x36456 https://skc.jsc.nasa.gov/Home.aspx

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   Organizations/Social

  1. JSC Contractor Safety & Health Forum - Sept. 10

Mark your calendars!

Our next JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum will be Tuesday, Sept. 10, in the Gilruth Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 11 a.m. The guest speaker for this event is Dr. Richard Bunch, Ph.D., P.T., C.B.E.S., CEO, Industrial Safety and Rehabilitation Institute, Inc., and adjunct professor at Tulane University, School of Public Health. Bunch's presentation, "Advanced Concepts in Office Ergonomics and Wellness," will cover how integrating key ergonomic principles with behavioral modification and wellness interventions have proven to be highly effective for injury prevention and wellness. Robert Martel, health system specialist with JSC's Occupational Health Branch (SD), will provide an overview of the JSC Occupational Health Branch services. David Loyd, chief, Safety and Test Operations Division (NS), will be discussing the "Results of the JSC NASA Safety Culture Survey."

If you have any questions, please contact Pat Farrell at 281-335-2012 or via email.

Event Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2013   Event Start Time:9:00 AM   Event End Time:11:00 AM
Event Location: Gilruth Alamo Ballroom

Add to Calendar

Patricia A. Farrell 281-335-2012

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  1. JSC Child Care Openings

Space Family Education, Inc. (SFEI)/JSC Child Care Center has openings available to dependents of JSC civil servants and contractors.

Immediate openings available for the fall school year starting Aug. 26 for children that will be:

    • One for a child 15 to 23 months old
    • Two children 3 years old
    • Two children 4 year old

Program details:

    1. Open 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday (closed federal holidays).
    2. Competitive pricing with other comparable child cares, but SFEI includes more amenities.
    3. Additional security. Badges required to get on-site, and an additional security code to get in the school's front door.
    4. Accelerated curriculum in all classes, with additional enrichment and extracurricular programs.
    5. Convenience. Nearby and easy access for parents working on-site at JSC.
    6. Breakfast, morning snack, lunch and afternoon snack are all included.
    7. Video monitoring available from computers, androids and iPhones.

Brooke Stephens x26031

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  1. James Avery Astronaut Charm - Exclusive to NASA

The James Avery astronaut charm is now available, only in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops, for just $90. This will be the last order received before Christmas, and a limited supply is available. Stop by and pick yours up today, or order online. No discounts apply for special purchase items. http://shopnasa.com/store/product/7782/J-Avery-Astronaut-Charm/

Cyndi Kibby x35352 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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  1. You, Your Estate and Wise Investment Decisions

Financial Wellness Classes - Final Week On-site

This week's classes focus on investing, protecting your assets and estate planning. Join us on-site this week and learn how to improve your financial wellness!

Investing and Protecting Your Assets:

Investing in your future and protecting your estate isn't just about stocks and bonds. Creating a broad, versatile financial approach can protect and prepare you for a variety of upsets and upsides. Often people know something about creating an investment portfolio, but many may be unfamiliar with using insurance to their advantage.

Estate Planning and Being an Executor:

Many of us have assets that constitute an estate. Being an executor is a big step. It means more than reading wills and doling out property. The executor is the legal representative for the deceased and takes care of many arrangements. Learn the keys to a good estate plan, executor responsibilities and more.

Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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   Jobs and Training

  1. Small Sample Size Research Lecture

Please join us for a Human Systems Academy lecture on Aug. 23 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Dr. Ploutz-Snyder's talk will discusses pitfalls of the traditional power approach, particularly as it impacts NASA research, and engages a discussion of some alternative strategies that PIs and NASA should consider when determining a minimum sample size necessary for valuable information gain.

The class is almost full, with only a few spots remaining. Register today, as it is first come, first served!

https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...

Cynthia Rando x41815 https://sashare.jsc.nasa.gov/hsa/default.aspx

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   Community

  1. LPI Cosmic Exploration Speaker Series

The Lunar and Planetary Institutes invites all inquisitive adults to attend Solar Storm: Space Weather's Impacts on Society and the Economy, a presentation by Dr. Daniel Baker from the University of Colorado on Sept. 12 at 7:30 p.m. This free presentation is the first in the Lunar and Planetary Institute's (LPI's) 2013-2104 Cosmic Exploration Speaker Series: "The Universe is Out to Get Us and What We Can (or Can't) Do About It."

LPI's Cosmic Explorations presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a light reception. No reservation is necessary. LPI is located in the USRA building (3600 Bay Area Blvd. in Clear Lake - the entrance is located on Middlebrook Drive) and is part of the Universities Space Research Association. For more information, please click here or contact Andrew Shaner at 281-486-2163 or via email.

Event Date: Thursday, September 12, 2013   Event Start Time:7:30 PM   Event End Time:9:00 PM
Event Location: LPI (3600 Bay Area Blvd., Clear Lake)

Add to Calendar

Andrew Shaner 281-486-2163

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JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles.

Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Human Spaceflight News

Monday – August 19, 2013

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

NASA's mission improbable

A space agency with a proud past faces a rocky road ahead

 

Joel Achenbach - Washington Post

 

NASA is looking for a rock. It's got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can't be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can't be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can't be a speed demon. And it shouldn't be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile. The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA's human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people. The mission, which could cost upward of $2 billion, would use a robotic spacecraft to snag the small rock and haul it into a stable orbit around the moon. Then, according to NASA's plan, astronauts would blast off in a new space capsule atop a new jumbo rocket, fly toward the moon, go into lunar orbit, and rendezvous with the robotic spacecraft and the captured rock. They'd put on spacewalking suits, clamber out of the capsule and examine the rock in its bag, taking samples. This would ideally happen, NASA has said, in 2021. Plans, goals, dreams and technological realities are difficult to sort through these days at NASA. The space agency has what might be called middle-age problems.

 

Destinations, spending threaten future of NASA

Obama team at NASA wants to intercept asteroid, some in GOP favor returning to moon

 

Stewart Powell - Houston Chronicle

 

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned from a fluid leak into his helmet during a 92-minute space walk before American astronaut Chris Cassidy maneuvered his imperiled colleague back inside the International Space Station. The life-threatening emergency last month barely got attention back on Earth — the latest sign that manned space flight and the accompanying dangers just don't command the attention they once did. The threats that focus concern nowadays quietly unfold in the corridors of power, where the future of the nation's legendary manned space program appears to be up for grabs once again.

 

Sending Robotic Repairmen to Space

A plan to send fully automated robots to survey, fix and refuel satellites could prove revolutionary to space science

 

Michael Lemonick - Discover Magazine

 

Earlier this year, as astronauts busied themselves inside the International Space Station, engineers on the ground conducted their own experiment just outside the craft. Operating from a control room in Houston, they directed a nearly 60-foot-long, Canadian-built robotic arm to grab a smaller, two-armed robot called Dextre, before moving it into position in front of a washing machine-size module attached to the station. Then, Dextre reached into the module, grabbed one of four toaster-size, custom-made, high-tech tools there, and proceeded to snip two safety wires, unscrew two filler caps on the outside of the module and pump a few liters of ethanol into a small holding tank. The Jan. 25 exercise wasn't especially dramatic — it made no headlines. But the maneuvers, formally known as the Robotic Refueling Mission, represent what could be a revolutionary step in space science and commerce.

 

Musk, Bezos fight to win lease of iconic NASA launchpad

 

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

 

Two of the nation's best-known Internet entrepreneurs are waging a behind-the scenes fight to win the rights to one of Kennedy Space Center's most-iconic facilities: Launch Complex 39A, the pad that launched 82 space-shuttle missions, including the last one two years ago. Elon Musk, who made his fortune co-founding PayPal, and Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon.com, are both avid fans of space travel. And the rocket companies they founded are each seeking a NASA contract to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.

 

NASA's Twin Astronauts Volunteer as Guinea Pigs for Space Science

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

 

NASA's only set of identical twin astronauts will have scientists seeing double in 2015 ... literally. As Scott Kelly flies in space on a year-long mission aboard the International Space Station, his twin brother Mark will remain on Earth and act as a sort of experimental control. The investigations will compare any genetic changes that take place while Scott is in space and Mark, who retired from the astronaut corps in 2011, carries out his daily life in Arizona. Now, NASA is asking researchers to propose experiments to take advantage of this unique opportunity.

 

Russian spacewalk ends; all objectives accomplished

 

William Harwood - CBS News

 

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin returned to the safety of the International Space Station's Pirs airlock compartment Friday after a trouble-free spacewalk, setting a new Russian endurance record with a seven-hour 29-minute excursion. The cosmonauts ran ahead of schedule most of the day, successfully unreeling and routing two long power lines and an ethernet cable along the outside of the Zarya storage module that will be connected to the new Nauka laboratory after its arrival next year. Misurkin also mounted a space exposure experiment pallet on a handrail outside the upper Poisk module.

 

2 Russians turn cable guys in record spacewalk

 

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

 

In a record-long spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts rigged cable outside the International Space Station on Friday for a new lab that's due to arrive in a few months. Fyodor Yurchikhin and Aleksandr Misurkin spent almost the entire seven-hour-plus spacewalk routing 120 feet of power and Ethernet cable. The cable had to be unreeled, then meticulously secured to handrails and hooks. "Today we are the cable people," one of the spacewalkers commented in Russian as the work drew to a close.

 

Cosmonauts prepare for new lab in record Russian spacewalk

 

Irene Klotz - Reuters

 

Two Russian cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station on Friday to set up power and ethernet cables for a new research laboratory scheduled to arrive in December. Flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin opened the hatch on the station's Pirs airlock at 10:36 a.m. EDT (1436 GMT) to kick off a 7-hour, 29-minute spacewalk, the longest ever by Russian cosmonauts. The spacewalk eclipsed by 13 minutes the Russians' previous record set in July 2000 outside the Mir space station. The longest spacewalk overall was an 8-hour, 56-minute outing in 2001 by two NASA astronauts working outside the International Space Station.

 

Space Station Cosmonauts Set Record for Spacewalk Duration

 

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

 

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin established a new Russian endurance record for spacewalks on Friday as they extended solar power and Ethernet cables outside the International Space Station to prepare the six person orbiting lab for the arrival of the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory module. Their 7 hour, 29 minute excursion concluded at 6:05, EDT. Their work day outside the ISS eclipsed a Soviet era spacewalk mark of 7 hours, 16 minutes set by cosmonauts Alexander Balandin and Anatoly Solvovyev on July 17, 1990 while they worked outside the former Mir space station.

 

Cosmonauts Break Record for Longest Russian Spacewalk

 

Tariq Malik - Space.com

 

Two cosmonauts set a new record for the longest Russian spacewalk on Friday (Aug. 16), spending more than seven hours working outside the International Space Station to prepare it for the addition of a new Russian-built orbital lab. Veteran cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Alexander Misurkin spent a total of seven hours and 29 minutes — a new Russian record — on a spacewalk to install power and data cables for a new Russian laboratory module expected to launch to the space station in upcoming months. NASA cameras beamed images of the record-setting spacewalk to Earth during the orbital excursion.

 

Russian Cosmonauts Complete Spacewalk

 

RIA Novosti

 

Two Russian cosmonauts completed their spacewalk about an hour later than scheduled, a spokesman for the Russian mission control center said on Saturday. Two crew members, cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin, successfully coped with all their tasks, which included putting equipment in place for the arrival of a new Russian laboratory later this year and preparing for an installation of an optical telescope. They also installed a panel of experiments designed to collect data on the effects of the microgravity environment in low-Earth orbit.

 

Expedition 36 Cosmonauts Break EVA Record

 

Emily Carney - AmericaSpace.com

 

It was a record that hadn't been challenged since the days of Mir in 1990, but on Friday, Aug. 16, it was smashed by Expedition 36's Russian flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Aleksandr Misurkin: longest Russian extravehicular activity (EVA). The cosmonauts broke the 23-year-old record with their International Space Station (ISS) EVA, which stood at seven hours and 16 minutes, by 13 minutes. This time stands at stark contrast to the early days of the agency's EVAs; cosmonaut Alexei Leonov's historic 1965 spacewalk on Voskhod 2 lasted merely 12 minutes.

 

Dickinson students trade summertime to work on experiments for International Space Station

 

Galveston County Daily News (from Dickinson Independent School District)

 

Two Dickinson school district students will have their experiments tested on the International Space Station. Brothers Nicholas Hall, a 13-year old eighth grader at McAdams Junior High, and Thomas Hall, a 15-year old sophomore at Dickinson High School, developed toothpaste and cheese that can be used in space. "I don't think there is anybody our age that has ever had the chance to do what we are doing," Thomas Hall said. "This is a chance that we can be a part of history in the making." The brothers were given the opportunity to test their experiments in space due, in part, to the Foundation for International Space Education and the DreamUP program.

 

SpaceX's private spaceship milestone caps big week for billionaire Elon Musk

 

Mike Wall - Space.com

 

The private spaceflight firm SpaceX has notched a key milestone in its quest to launch humans to orbit, adding to an already eventful week for company founder and CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX has completed a preliminary design review of the systems necessary to support astronauts in orbit and return them safely to Earth aboard the company's Dragon spacecraft, NASA officials announced Thursday. The news came just two days after SpaceX's reusable rocket prototype, known as Grasshopper, leaped sideways in an unprecedented test flight, and three days after Musk unveiled his idea for the potentially revolutionary "Hyperloop" transportation system.

 

10 of Time's Most Influential People in Space

 

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

 

People around the world are pushing the boundaries of space exploration and science every day. A new book called "New Frontiers of Space: From Mars to the Edge of the Universe" released by Time Books names 25 of the most influential people involved in all aspects of spaceflight and space science today.

 

Space shuttle simulators in Dayton test pride of 'pilots'

 

Steve Stephens - Dayton Daily News

 

I didn't have much luck the last time I tried to land a space shuttle orbiter. Neither did my crew members — who, as I did, arrived upside down on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center after crashing through the enormous Vertical Assembly Building. (Seriously, who decided to build that colossal structure — the largest single-story building in the world — right there?) Fortunately, our misfortune was merely virtual. I was piloting a shuttle simulator during a "mission" at Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. I even took a couple of mulligans but still couldn't get the thing safely on the ground.

 

How NASA has furthered innovation

U.S. space agency has identified 1,800 technologies it has spun off

 

James Temple - San Francisco Chronicle

 

Ask most people about the everyday things NASA has developed and the answers will likely include Velcro and Tang. But while both were used by the aeronautics and space agency, neither was invented in house. Similarly, memory foam and certain power tools popularly associated with NASA were developed for the organization, not by it. But as of last year, NASA had identified 1,800 technologies it did spin off, including breakthroughs that enabled or improved low-power heart pumps, Lasik vision correction surgery and video image stabilization. In other words, there is a long history of technology transfer and exchange between NASA and private industry.

 

U.S. Workers Are Grounded by Deep Cuts

 

Michael Shear & Ron Nixon - New York Times

 

Geological visits to monitor volcanoes in Alaska have been scaled back. The defense secretary is traveling to Afghanistan two times a year instead of the usual four. For the first time in nearly three decades, NASA pulled out of the National Space Symposium, in Colorado Springs, even though representatives from France, Germany and China all made the trip. Five months after gridlock in Washington triggered the deep spending cuts known as sequestration, much of the United States government is grounded. Most government travel budgets have been cut this year by 30 percent, the result of an administration directive forcing managers to make difficult policy decisions about whom to send, where to send them and for how long. The result, agency officials say, is a government that cannot conduct essential business and is embarrassing itself abroad.

 

20 Years Ago: Novel DC-X Reusable Rocket Launched Into History

 

Megan Gannon - Space.com

 

Nearly 20 years ago to the date, a pioneering reusable spacecraft called the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, made its first test flight — a low, 59-second hop over New Mexico's White Sands Space Harbor. This weekend, the novel rocket experiment finds itself in the spotlight once again. Veterans of that experimental program and space industry leaders are gathering at at Spaceport America in New Mexico today (Aug. 16) for DC-X SpaceQuest, a celebration and conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the DC-X's first amazing flight and to discuss the future of reusable rockets.

 

My Ticket Into Space Looks Cheap, Price Soars to $250,000

 

James Clash - Bloomberg News

 

Three years ago I bought a $200,000 ticket to fly into space aboard Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. I chose the "poor man's" option, which requires only a 10 percent deposit. Three months before I fly, I will raid my 401(k) for the remaining $180,000 balance. So I won't be among the first bunch of 500 fliers including Justin Bieber and Formula One legend Michael Schumacher who, according to reports, paid for their tickets up front. Virgin Group chairman Branson and his family will board the very first commercial flight. He has suggested that could happen as early as Christmas. As passenger number 610, I'll probably get my turn in 2015.

 

Ed Buckbee remembers Wernher von Braun, U.S. Space & Rocket Center creation on eve of state honor

 

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

 

Alabama will honor Ed Buckbee in Huntsville Monday night for building the state's largest tourist attraction at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and starting Space Camp, the science education program that has brought 600,000 young people to Alabama from all over the world. But the Alabama Tourism Department could just as easily honor Buckbee, the first director of the museum and space camp, as one of the state's great story-tellers. His memories of life as a young associate of Wernher von Braun and ambassador for Huntsville are by turns thrilling and hilarious.

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

NASA's mission improbable

A space agency with a proud past faces a rocky road ahead

 

Joel Achenbach - Washington Post

 

NASA is looking for a rock. It's got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can't be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can't be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can't be a speed demon. And it shouldn't be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.

 

The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA's human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.

 

The mission, which could cost upward of $2 billion, would use a robotic spacecraft to snag the small rock and haul it into a stable orbit around the moon. Then, according to NASA's plan, astronauts would blast off in a new space capsule atop a new jumbo rocket, fly toward the moon, go into lunar orbit, and rendezvous with the robotic spacecraft and the captured rock. They'd put on spacewalking suits, clamber out of the capsule and examine the rock in its bag, taking samples. This would ideally happen, NASA has said, in 2021.

 

"That's our plan," said Michael Gazarik, NASA's top official for space technology. "We have to merge it with reality."

 

Plans, goals, dreams and technological realities are difficult to sort through these days at NASA. The space agency has what might be called middle-age problems.

 

Founded 55 years ago, NASA had its greatest glory in its youth, with the moon shots, and it retains much engineering talent and lofty aspirations. But even as the agency talks of expanding civilization throughout the solar system, it has been forced to recognize its limitations. Flat budgets have become declining budgets. The joke among agency officials is that, when it comes to budgets, flat is the new up.

 

NASA currently lacks the money and the technology to do what it has long dreamed of doing, which is to send astronauts to Mars and bring them safely back to Earth. It has resorted to fallback plans, and to fallbacks to the fallbacks.

 

Thus was born this improbable Asteroid Redirect Mission.

 

The human spaceflight program has long been searching for a mission beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). That's where NASA has been sending astronauts since the 1970s, and where the underappreciated international space station circles the planet, currently occupied by two Americans, three Russians and an Italian.

 

The asteroid mission not only goes beyond LEO, it scratches many other itches at the agency. NASA has marketed this as planetary defense — a way to get the upper hand on asteroids that could potentially smash into Earth. The agency also has said this could boost the commercial mining of asteroids for their minerals, thus expanding humanity's economic zone. And the robotic part of the proposal involves new propulsion technology that NASA thinks could be crucial for an eventual human mission to Mars.

 

There are also political factors. President Obama vowed in 2010 to send humans to an asteroid. NASA officials have said this mission meets that goal.

 

Most important, the ensnared asteroid would provide a destination beyond LEO for new, expensive hardware that NASA is already building: the big rocket called the Space Launch System, and the Orion crew capsule. The mission could deflect accusations that the government is building rocket ships to nowhere.

 

"It is really an elegant bringing together of our exciting human spaceflight plan, scientific interest, being able to protect our planet, and utilizing the technology we had invested in and were already investing in," said Lori Garver, NASA deputy administrator.

 

But the mission is viewed skeptically by many in the space community. At a July gathering of engineers and scientists at the National Academy of Sciences, veteran engineer Gentry Lee expressed doubt that the complicated elements of the mission could come together by 2021, and said the many uncertainties would boost the costs.

 

"I'm trying very, very hard to look at the positive side of this, or what I would call the possible positive side," he said.

 

"It's basically wishful thinking in a lot of ways – that there's a suitable target, that you can find it in time, that you can actually catch it if you go there and bring it back," said Al Harris, a retired NASA planetary scientist who specializes in asteroids.

 

"Of course there's always luck. But how much money do you want to spend on a chance discovery that might have a very low probability?" said Mark Sykes, a planetary scientist who chairs a NASA advisory group on asteroids.

 

If the target rock isn't scoped out well in advance, it could even turn out, on close inspection, to be something other than a small asteroid — say, a spent Russian rocket casing that's footloose around the sun.

 

NASA officials understand this and have recently been floating a different scenario, a Plan B. Instead of the robotic spacecraft trying to nab a small, little-understood and potentially unruly rock, the spacecraft could travel to a much larger, already-discovered asteroid and break off a chunk to bring back to lunar orbit, where astronauts would visit it.

 

That would eliminate a lot of unknowns. In space missions, unknowns ratchet up costs and create delays. But under Plan B, the target might be an underwhelming boulder the size of, say, a washing machine. Presumably that's not what Obama meant in 2010 when he vowed to send humans to an asteroid.

 

NASA is in a tricky position, trying to improvise a coherent strategy for human spaceflight even as political winds have shifted dramatically. If NASA is lurching along these days, that's in part because the agency has been jerked around.

 

NASA has been in difficult transitions before. Doug Cooke, who spent 37 years at the agency before retiring in 2011, remembers the post-Apollo 1970s: "It was scary. You realize that you're not really flying. And it's a vulnerable time."

 

With the shuttle retired, NASA can no longer launch American astronauts on American rockets, but rather must buy seats at $71 million a pop on Russian spaceships. American taxpayers are sending more than $400 million a year to Russia to launch American astronauts.

 

The last space shuttle flew in 2011. NASA wants to see American astronauts ride to orbit on commercial spacecraft by 2017, though tight budgets could make that schedule slip by a year or more. Three companies — Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada — are competing for the "commercial crew" contract.

 

NASA's turmoil dates to the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing the seven astronauts on board. The grieving space community decided to rethink the enterprise of human spaceflight, from the architecture of rockets to the fundamental purpose of launching people off the planet. Many people inside and outside of NASA wanted to get back to exploration, which would mean sending humans beyond Low Earth Orbit for the first time since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

President George W. Bush proposed a plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 as part of a sustained lunar presence. The new NASA program, Constellation, included plans for two rockets, a crew capsule called Orion and a lunar lander.

 

But at NASA there's a saying: "Budget is mission-critical." Constellation's funding fell short of what the top NASA officials expected. The program fell behind schedule. A new rocket, the Ares I, had some delays and technical problems (then-NASA administrator Michael Griffin would point out that only the PowerPoint rockets always work perfectly).

 

Barack Obama won the presidency, and Griffin was soon gone, along with Bush's Constellation program. Obama's pick to run his NASA transition team, Lori Garver, never liked the back-to-the-moon strategy.

 

"If your goal is Mars, that is certainly a detour," she said recently.

 

Obama appointed Gen. Charles Bolden Jr., a four-time shuttle astronaut, to the administrator position, with Garver as his deputy. The president also tapped retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine to lead an advisory review of the NASA human spaceflight program.

 

The Augustine committee skewered Constellation, saying that without an infusion of money it wouldn't get astronauts back to the moon until the late 2020s, and even then there wouldn't be any money for a lander, much less a moon base.

 

In killing Constellation, Obama and his team adopted what the Augustine Committee dubbed the "flexible path" strategy. The concept is arguably a sign of institutional maturity: NASA would focus less on destinations, and more on creating new technologies. The idea was to advance spaceflight capabilities, with the long-term goal of sending people to Mars. Commercial companies could take over the routine taxi rides to orbit, and NASA would tackle harder missions.

 

But there's a problem with the harder stuff: Often it's just too hard.

 

Quest for the Red Planet

 

Just about everyone in the space community wants to go to Mars. Rovers are great, but they're sluggish, and scientists fantasize about a human geologist being able to decide where to dig into the Martian soil for clues about the planet's history and possible signs of life.

It takes a village to raise a rocket

 

Many people feel strongly that societies that don't explore the frontier will invariably go into decline. The fourth rock from the sun haunts the imagination of people from the third rock. Mars has as much land area as the Earth. Someone like Elon Musk, the visionary founder of SpaceX, isn't necessarily going to wait for a NASA mission; he talks of establishing a Mars colony, and says he wants to die there — just not while attempting to land.

 

A private venture called Inspiration Mars hopes to send two astronauts on a fly-by mission of Mars in 2018. And a Dutch reality show, "Mars One," is lining up thousands of volunteers for a Mars colony that supposedly — and implausibly — will begin with landings in 2023.

 

NASA, however, is not an entrepreneurial outfit. Its plans have to pass multiple layers of technical, political and budgetary review. A fundamental presumption of NASA missions is that the astronauts will come back alive.

 

A journey to Mars would take about two years and expose astronauts to extremely high levels of radiation. The Martian atmosphere is a nightmare, just thick enough to cause problems but too thin to be of much use in braking a speeding spacecraft. NASA last year landed a one-ton rover on Mars, but to put humans there, engineers think they would need to land a 40-ton payload, including a habitat, fuel and food. To scale up by a factor of 40 is not as simple as, for example, making a parachute 40 times as big, because the physics and aerodynamics don't work that way.

 

More doable is a human mission that orbits Mars. Astronauts could essentially telecommute to work, operating rovers and other instruments from orbit. Indeed, a Mars orbit in the 2030s is an official NASA goal, direct from Obama. On April 15, 2010, in a closely watched speech at the Kennedy Space Center, the president said that by 2025, NASA will begin missions to "deep space," starting by "sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history." Then would come a Mars orbital mission in the mid-2030s, he said.

 

"And a landing on Mars will follow," he said, without giving a certain date.

 

He added: "I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We've been there before."

 

Mission to an asteroid

 

Months after Obama's big speech, powerful senators from states with NASA centers and contractors took steps to salvage major chunks of the Constellation program. Congress directed NASA to continue building a heavy-lift rocket that could take payloads beyond LEO. Orion would also go forward.

 

The new rocket is called the Space Launch System, although the less reverential name for it in the space community is the Senate Launch System. It's being designed in Alabama and built in Louisiana, and will be tested in Mississippi before being launched in Florida and supervised by Mission Control in Texas. It has many supporters.

 

What the jumbo rocket and the Orion capsule can't do, without adding a lot of costly hardware, is fly to a distant asteroid that's orbiting the sun.

 

It's natural to envision spaceflight as a journey from point A to point B. But it's a lot more complicated than that, because points A and B are both moving, and at different speeds. Thus engineers rarely talk about distance, and instead talk about "delta V." That's the change in velocity.

 

Just about any mission to an asteroid, even a "near-Earth" asteroid (one that's in an orbit that comes close to Earth, as opposed to the asteroids beyond the orbit of Mars, in the Asteroid Belt) would take hundreds of days. But the new Orion capsule can support astronauts for only about three weeks.

 

NASA, therefore, needed a fallback to the Obama-style asteroid mission. Hence the Asteroid Redirect Mission.

 

"He said humans to an asteroid," Bolden told The Washington Post. "There are a lot of different ways to do that. There are probably thousands of ways. I think we have come up with the most practical way, given budgetary constraints today. We're bringing the asteroid to us."

 

Humans have never moved an object out of its natural orbit. Two years ago, engineers and scientists at the Keck Institute for Space Studies in Pasadena, Calif., proposed doing just that with a small asteroid, citing potential scientific interest. The idea caught on in the corridors at NASA.

 

"It's not as crazy as it seemed at the beginning," said Charles Elachi, the longtime director of NASA's fabled Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated in Pasadena by Caltech. Elachi's people honed the mission and declared it feasible. These are engineers who know what they're doing: Elachi's office is sprinkled with models of spacecraft that landed on Mars, circled Jupiter and Saturn, probed distant moons and zoomed to the edge of interstellar space.

 

What the laboratory doesn't have is a firm target for the asteroid mission. These objects are small, and appear fleetingly in telescopes, leaving behind minimal information about their size and composition. Without knowing the albedo — the shininess — of the object, it's impossible to know how big it is when that streak of light appears in the telescope.

 

NASA has an advisory committee of scientists who specialize in small objects in the solar system, and, after a meeting in July, the group produced a blistering draft report saying that NASA needed to do a lot more homework. For example, the report said, "Such small objects may be rapidly rotating rubble piles, which could be hazardous to spacecraft during interactions with the target object."

 

NASA used a small asteroid, dubbed 2009DB, as the hypothetical target in two feasibility studies, but that particular rock needs further scrutiny before anyone can say for sure that it would meet the requirements of the mission. It could be too small, a pipsqueak. It might not even be a natural object. The worst-case scenario would be the capture of something with Russian writing on the side.

 

So where does this leave the asteroid mission, and NASA? Back in a familiar place: with a plan that doesn't seem rock-solid.

 

NASA missions historically have received bipartisan support. Not this time. House Republicans have treated the asteroid initiative — which would cost $105 million in 2014 under the president's budget request — as though it were an effigy of the Obama administration. In July, House Republicans on the Science Committee passed a bill that would take the unusual step of prohibiting NASA from proceeding with the asteroid mission without first supplying Congress with more information about it.

 

Senate Democrats are protecting the initiative for now.

 

Many times in recent months, NASA officials have cited planetary defense as a reason for the mission. But the target rock would not be nearly big enough to pose a threat to human civilization should it hit the Earth, and the methods used in the mission would not be applicable to the deflection of a large asteroid. In recent days, Bolden has backed off the save-the-Earth rhetoric.

 

Meanwhile, Garver, the NASA deputy administrator who has been a driving force behind the mission, is headed for the door. She announced this month that she's leaving the agency for a position with the Air Line Pilots Association.

 

Although NASA has publicly talked of an asteroid rendezvous in 2021, the idea has a fundamental problem. That is the first scheduled mission with a crew in the new Orion capsule. Officials in charge of getting astronauts home safely do not sound eager to conduct a shake-down cruise that involves complicated spacewalking and an interaction with a bagged asteroid in orbit around the moon.

 

Mark Geyer, the Orion program manager, said, "I think it's clear that there's more risk in doing the asteroid mission on the first flight with people. In general you'd rather activate the systems and test them first."

 

He added, "We don't set policy here on Orion. Our job is to meet the mission."

 

In recent days, NASA officials have suggested that they could delay the asteroid mission until later flights of the Orion capsule.

 

NASA has certain things going for it, including a track record of doing hard things very well.

 

"There have been 12 humans to walk on the surface of the moon. Guess what? Every single one of them was an American," Bolden said recently. "Only one nation has successfully put something that operates on the surface of Mars. Guess what? That's the United States."

 

NASA employees tend to be intensely loyal to the agency, and many are lifers. The average age of NASA civil servants is 47.6. Most of the people working on NASA projects are contractors; thousands have seen their jobs disappear with the retirement of the shuttle.

 

The transition to the post-shuttle era is nowhere more obvious and more poignant than at the Kennedy Space Center. Officials at Cape Canaveral say they're optimistic and talk about creating a 21st-century spaceport. They point to the fact that the Orion capsule is under construction on the space center grounds.

 

But the space center is looking rough around the edges, like a historical site. The cafeteria draws a sparse crowd at lunchtime. The media center is quiet. Two launch pads, 39A and 39B, await the arrival, someday, of the SLS, or some other rocket needing to go somewhere. One pad still has a massive space shuttle gantry, as if hoping a shuttle will materialize.

 

The dominant structure on the Cape, soaring 526 feet, is the Vehicle Assembly Building. It's a mega-hangar built in the grandiose, aspirational 1960s, when NASA had a blank check and needed a structure large enough to hold a vertical Saturn V moon rocket.

 

There's not much left inside. Up top, vultures perch on the edge of the roof, and then jump — soaring on the updrafts as the Florida wind slams into the great, empty building.

 

Destinations, spending threaten future of NASA

Obama team at NASA wants to intercept asteroid, some in GOP favor returning to moon

 

Stewart Powell - Houston Chronicle

 

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned from a fluid leak into his helmet during a 92-minute space walk before American astronaut Chris Cassidy maneuvered his imperiled colleague back inside the International Space Station.

 

The life-threatening emergency last month barely got attention back on Earth — the latest sign that manned space flight and the accompanying dangers just don't command the attention they once did.

 

The threats that focus concern nowadays quietly unfold in the corridors of power, where the future of the nation's legendary manned space program appears to be up for grabs once again.

 

There's disagreement over the destination for the next manned exploratory mission en route to planned Mars orbit in 2035 — an asteroid, favored by President Barack Obama's team at NASA, or the moon, favored by some House Republicans.

 

Added to that, key House and Senate committees are at odds over the amount of taxpayers' money to be awarded an agency that once dazzled the nation with manned missions to the moon and shuttle launches into orbit before riveting attention with robotic missions such as the year-old Curiosity rover on Mars.

 

The disagreements threaten a bipartisan consensus forged three years ago by then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida. Their deal helped the Obama administration smooth the transition from retirement of the shuttle fleet to simultaneously subsidizing development of fee-for-flight commercial spacecraft to service the orbiting space station and building a government-owned monster rocket and state-of-the-art crew capsule for deep space exploration for the next generation.

 

"The struggle over destination and spending reflect a view by some on Capitol Hill that Obama's new direction for the space program was wrong-headed and mistaken," says John Logsdon, a historian and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University who served on the Shuttle Columbia accident investigation. "Some of this stems from an attitude that if Obama is for it, we're against it."

 

The House and Senate face budget deadlines after Labor Day to reach agreed instructions for NASA for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

 

The GOP-led House faces votes on two committee-approved proposals — one instructing NASA "to develop a sustained human presence on the moon and the surface of Mars" without a cost estimate or timetable, and a second to limit NASA spending to $16.6 billion — the smallest amount since 2007.

 

Competing proposals await action by the Democratic-led Senate — a measure to hand NASA $18 billion next year and another to skip the moon in favor of NASA's proposal to steer a nearby asteroid into lunar orbit and then land astronauts on its surface.

 

"It's never too late to work together," says Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House panel with jurisdiction over NASA. "I am hopeful that once we come to an agreement on the Budget Control Act, we can once again see eye-to-eye on NASA's long-term priorities."

 

The Budget Control Act of 2011 imposes indiscriminate, across-the-board budget cuts unless the House and Senate agree on targeted spending reductions to ease federal borrowing.

 

"Everyone agrees on the need to get to Mars," says a Smith staffer speaking on condition of anonymity. "We think preserving the option of going to the moon is the best way to get to Mars."

 

House Republicans' bid to return astronauts to the moon enjoys support in Houston, where sequential manned NASA missions would be handled once again by mission control at the Johnson Space Center.

 

House Republicans would ban spending $100 million on the Obama administration's proposal to capture an asteroid. But the Obama administration, led by NASA administrator Charles Bolton, sees the asteroid retrieval mission beginning as early as 2021 as the best way to test drive the deep-space rocket and Boeing-managed Orion crew capsule needed for an eventual mission to Mars. Bolton, a former astronaut, sees no reason to return to the moon for the first time since 1972.

 

"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 up front and advance the technologies we're going to need," Bolden told the NASA Advisory Council on July 31.

 

The disputes over destination and spending arise as NASA faces changes at the top. Bolden's deputy, Lori Garver, leaves the agency Sept. 6 after more than four years orchestrating Obama's shift from the shuttle to commercial spacecraft to service the space station. The White House could fill the vacancy with another high-profile, Senate-confirmed appointee or hand the assignment to the third-ranking official, NASA associate administrator Robert Lightfoot Jr., a career rocket engineer.

 

As Hutchison sees it, the Hutchison-Nelson compromise will continue to guide NASA's pursuit of "step-wise progression deeper into space" without specifying intermediate destinations such as the moon or an asteroid.

 

"The only real threat will be if members of Congress lose focus on the big picture and allow disagreements over where we set the destination in the short run to obscure and overwhelm the balanced and reasoned framework we adopted," Hutchison told Hearst Newspapers.

 

With commercial spacecraft not scheduled to win certification to carry astronauts to the space station until 2017, NASA sealed a new $424 million contract with the Russian Space Agency in May to ferry six astronauts to and from the space station over an 18-month period ending in mid-2017. The repair kit for Parmitano's leaking space suit was sent aloft last month aboard a contracted Russian cargo craft.

 

The fresh jockeying over NASA's destination and spending could play out again in electorally crucial Florida in 2016. Obama narrowly carried Florida a second time in his re-election bid in 2012, thanks in part to NASA's hefty support for commercial spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral.

 

But along Florida's NASA-reliant "Space Coast," home of the Kennedy Space Center, Obama still trailed GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney by 13 percentage points.

 

Smith's proposal could help position the GOP as the party favoring a return to the moon, a popular job-creating goal in Florida's Brevard County, where unemployment stands at 7.8 percent compared with 7.1 percent statewide.

 

"NASA can always be escalated into a big issue in Florida," says Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. "These are high-turnout voters in an area where everything is tied back to jobs."

 

Hutchison welcomes the inevitable political friction as a way to keep space front and center in the 2016 campaign.

 

"Fewer and fewer of our congressmen and none of our presidential candidates ever focus on the long-term vision," laments the retired senator. "If they don't have a state that's involved, they don't care."

 

Sending Robotic Repairmen to Space

A plan to send fully automated robots to survey, fix and refuel satellites could prove revolutionary to space science

 

Michael Lemonick - Discover Magazine

 

Earlier this year, as astronauts busied themselves inside the International Space Station, engineers on the ground conducted their own experiment just outside the craft. Operating from a control room in Houston, they directed a nearly 60-foot-long, Canadian-built robotic arm to grab a smaller, two-armed robot called Dextre, before moving it into position in front of a washing machine-size module attached to the station.

 

Then, Dextre reached into the module, grabbed one of four toaster-size, custom-made, high-tech tools there, and proceeded to snip two safety wires, unscrew two filler caps on the outside of the module and pump a few liters of ethanol into a small holding tank.

 

The Jan. 25 exercise wasn't especially dramatic — it made no headlines. But the maneuvers, formally known as the Robotic Refueling Mission, represent what could be a revolutionary step in space science and commerce. It's part of the larger Notional Robotic Servicing Mission (that's Notional, not National, because so far it's only an idea) that would send fully automated repair robots to survey, fix and refuel aging orbiters.

 

If it works, the project, run out of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., could save federal and commercial satellite owners billions of dollars. A single communications satellite can generate tens of millions in revenue every year, so keeping even a few of them operating a few years longer could make a huge difference.

 

Initial Costs

 

The decision to explore the idea is a no-brainer, says Benjamin Reed, deputy project manager of NASA's Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO). "Right now, there are about a thousand satellites operating in space. Of those, just two were designed to be serviced in orbit: the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station," he says. "So we began thinking about the other 998. What could be done for them?"

 

The "we" in this case was the team that masterminded the multiple servicing missions that refurbished and upgraded Hubble — designing the tools shuttle astronauts would use, training the spacewalkers how to use them and offering real-time guidance during the missions themselves.

 

Reed's team also consulted on other satellite repair operations, including a Challenger flight in 1984 that fixed the ailing Solar Max satellite. When the shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003, killing all seven astronauts, Reed recalls an all-hands meeting a couple of days later where team leader Frank Cepollina said, "We're going robotic, right?"

 

"The agency hadn't decided this yet," says Reed, "but Frank knew we would still be servicing Hubble, so by God, let's do it with robots instead of risking the lives of astronauts." For the next 15 months, the team worked on the design for a robotic servicing vehicle, only to have NASA decide in the end to let astronauts carry out the fifth and final Hubble repair after all, in 2009.

 

Having put in the work already, Reed says the team figured, "Heck, we know how to do things robotically." So they began thinking about those other 998 satellites. " 'Do they have servicing needs?' we asked. Well, obviously they do." Just to begin with, he says, most of the satellites carry fuel for the small rockets that nudge them back into the proper orbit when they begin to drift.

 

"When they run out of fuel," says Reed, "they're replaced." And whether it's the private communications satellite that carries your phone calls or a government satellite that tracks the weather, we all end up footing the bill for that replacement one way or another. With costs running into hundreds of millions of dollars for replacement satellites, and with replacements needed every 12 to 15 years, extending a satellite's life beyond the average could result in billions in savings. Simply topping off the rocket fuel would keep many otherwise dead satellites operating for years. That's what the January test was all about.

 

Going Farther

 

It wouldn't be practical to refuel satellites in low-Earth orbit. "There are lots of them," admits Reed, "but they're all going in different directions. It's tough to create a servicing mission that's dedicated to more than one satellite."

 

So the engineers at Goddard began focusing on servicing satellites in geosynchronous orbits, in the band about 22,500 miles above the planet's surface where one orbit around Earth lasts exactly one day. About 400 satellites are in geosynchronous orbit today, says Reed, "and the vast majority of satellites are on the same highway. They're on the same belt. They're all going in the same direction."

 

That makes it relatively simple for a servicing robot to flit from one satellite to the next, pumping in fuel here, replacing a battery there, pulling a stuck solar panel out to full extension, even dragging the satellite to a different spot on the orbiting belt or into a safe "graveyard" orbit if it's beyond repair.

 

Unlike Hubble, however, none of the geosynchronous satellites was designed for mid-orbit maintenance, so they have no special tabs or knobs for a repair robot to grab onto. And since nobody ever expected to refuel the satellites, the fueling ports aren't standardized. That's why the practice module used in the January Robotic Refueling Mission test has an array of different filler caps studded along its surface.

 

It's also why the SSCO has outfitted a warehouse-like structure at the edge of the Goddard campus with robot arms and mock-up satellite parts. Here, the engineers can develop the tools, techniques and software that robotic repair/refueling missions could someday use in space. The tools wielded by the Dextre robot in January came from here.

 

The New Reality

 

Someday, Reed, Cepollina and the other team members hope manufacturers will agree to build their satellites with orbital servicing in mind, but that clearly won't happen until robotic repair satellites are much further developed. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, but that doesn't mean the manufacturers aren't interested. The aerospace industry has already looked into what small changes it might make to future satellites.

 

"They don't want something that costs a million dollars," says Reed. "But they might be willing to use a Velcro-like closure, instead of tape, for attaching insulation around their fill-and-drain valve. That way, when a robot goes to push it back, it's a simple peel job, it's not a cut — and you can reattach it afterward." Or they might slap a small patterned decal on the satellite, so that when the robot sidles up, it can tell instantly if everything's lining up properly. "It's a teensy bit of extra work for the manufacturer — teensy compared with the building of a $100 million satellite."

 

For now, the main task is to keep practicing with the International Space Station's module, using the various filler caps they have to work with. Then, a couple of years from now, the plate holding those caps will be taken off and replaced with two more "busy boards," as Reed calls them, that will help develop other kinds of repair functions. Naturally, the change-out will be done robotically.

 

Musk, Bezos fight to win lease of iconic NASA launchpad

 

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

 

Two of the nation's best-known Internet entrepreneurs are waging a behind-the scenes fight to win the rights to one of Kennedy Space Center's most-iconic facilities: Launch Complex 39A, the pad that launched 82 space-shuttle missions, including the last one two years ago.

 

Elon Musk, who made his fortune co-founding PayPal, and Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon.com, are both avid fans of space travel. And the rocket companies they founded are each seeking a NASA contract to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.

 

Each wants to blast off from Launch Complex 39A, which has been idle since shuttle Atlantis lifted off to the station July 8, 2011. With KSC not scheduled to launch another NASA-built rocket until at least 2017, what was once known as "America's Spaceport" is now a ghost town, and NASA is aggressively trying to lease out its unused facilities.

 

And that's become the subject of a behind-the scenes fight between two space companies — Musk's SpaceX and Bezos' Blue Origin — with two members of Congress and an old-guard rocketeer also throwing their weight around.

 

"This [confrontation] is probably something you are going to see a lot more of in the future," said Jeff Foust, editor of The Space Review, an online magazine. "As NASA seeks to do more with the private sector, you are going to see a lot more of these complex interactions."

 

At the center of the fight is California-based SpaceX, a rising power in the space world led by Musk, a brash, South African-born executive who created the company 11 years ago. SpaceX has already sent two supply capsules to the International Space Station — the first private company to do so — and is an odds-on favorite to win a contract to fly astronauts there as well.

 

The company already has two U.S. launchpads — one is next door at the Cape Canaveral launch range — and it's angling for more. Musk envisions Complex 39A as the launch site for his astronaut-taxi service.

 

With the shuttle retired, NASA is paying Russia about $1.5 billion during five years to ferry astronauts to the station until a U.S. rocket company is ready to take over.

 

"Should SpaceX have the privilege of serving NASA's need to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station, LC 39A will be an integral part of ending our nation's expensive dependency on the Russians for their services," said Christina Ra, a SpaceX spokeswoman.

 

But SpaceX doesn't want to share the pad. Company officials said they want exclusive rights because they anticipate a busy launch schedule, and they argue that modifying the facility to accommodate multiple users would be too expensive.

 

Enter Bezos, the Amazon founder with a $25 billion net worth that he's willing to spend in areas that interest him. Two weeks ago, he announced he was buying The Washington Post for $250 million. In March, he funded a three-week expedition that recovered Apollo-era rocket engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; he's now paying to restore them.

 

In 2000, Bezos founded a Washington-based space company, Blue Origin, that is developing its own line of reusable launch vehicles and capsules, though it has yet to put one in orbit. In October, it successfully tested an escape system for a crew capsule.

 

Blue Origin has staked a claim to Launch Complex 39A with the idea of turning the facility into a "multiuser" pad that several companies could use.

 

"If you design [the launchpad] to interface with multiple vehicles, you can share that cost over the long term," said Rob Meyerson, president of Blue Origin.

 

One potential partner is United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing that remains one of the heavy hitters in the satellite-launch business. Its steady line of customers includes the Pentagon and National Reconnaissance Office.

 

Pursuing a deal with Blue Origin has several advantages — not the least of which is impeding SpaceX's plans to claim Launch Complex 39A.

 

"NASA's LC-39 is a great national asset and should be utilized effectively," said Jessica Rye, a ULA spokeswoman.

 

Sources on Capitol Hill and within NASA said Blue Origin's protests forced the space agency to announce a competition for the pad in May. The dispute also has drawn the attention of two members of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

 

In a July 22 letter to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, U.S. Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., said "NASA appears to be racing to lease LC-39A" and urged a closer review.

 

"Given that taxpayers have invested hundreds of millions, if not a billion dollars, to develop this launch complex, there are serious questions of fiscal responsibility and transparency," they wrote.

 

Agency officials have put no timeline on a decision, although it's widely thought NASA wants to select a winner by Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year.

 

The agency spends at least $1 million a year maintaining Launch Complex 39A at a time when Congress is slashing budgets. In listing the property, NASA noted that "commercial use will protect LC-39A from deterioration resulting from non-use."

 

Another old shuttle pad at KSC — Launch Complex 39B — likely will be used by the Space Launch System, NASA's next big rocket, which one day could blast astronauts to a nearby asteroid.

 

NASA's Twin Astronauts Volunteer as Guinea Pigs for Space Science

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

 

NASA's only set of identical twin astronauts will have scientists seeing double in 2015 ... literally.

 

As Scott Kelly flies in space on a year-long mission aboard the International Space Station, his twin brother Mark will remain on Earth and act as a sort of experimental control. The investigations will compare any genetic changes that take place while Scott is in space and Mark, who retired from the astronaut corps in 2011, carries out his daily life in Arizona.

 

Now, NASA is asking researchers to propose experiments to take advantage of this unique opportunity.

 

"These pilot demonstration projects, the first of their kind, will be unique investigations into the genetic aspects of spaceflight," NASA officials explained in a statement on Aug. 8. "They will provide insight into future genetic investigations that can build on this study, but with a larger study population of unrelated astronauts."

 

Veterans of spaceflight

 

The Kelly brothers are the world's only identical twin astronauts and were both Navy test pilots before joining NASA, were both selected as astronauts in 1996. Between the two of them, they've flown seven space missions to date.

 

Mark flew four space shuttle missions, including commanding the penultimate space shuttle flight (STS-134) just months after a failed assassination attempt on his wife, then-Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in 2011.

 

Scott flew three missions, including commanding Expedition 26 during a 159-day stay aboard the International Space Station in 2010 and 2011. His next mission is an unprecedented one-year mission aboard the station, along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko.

 

Only a handful of humans have stayed in space for a year or longer, all of them Russians aboard the space station Mir. (A typical International Space Station mission is about six months long.) NASA has said the longer mission will be an opportunity to more fully investigate how weightlessness affects the human body.

 

Because Mark will not be living in a controlled environment, NASA said the genetic studies will be "observational in nature."

 

"There are no defined outcomes for the investigations; instead, this is a chance to compare data collected from genetically similar astronauts to observe the human effects of spaceflight," officials said.

 

Aiming for Mars

 

While the exact procedures are still being worked out, NASA officials said that the tentative plan is to take blood samples from the brothers before, during and after the year-long mission. NASA is also considering "limited" experiments using saliva, cheek swabs or stool samples as long as they don't interfere with other work on the space station.

 

The agency aims to better understand the "physical, physiological and environmental stressors associated with human spaceflight," which could involve investigations such as how the space environment changes DNA.

 

NASA officials  — who said the agency's newest astronaut class will train for deep-space missions — added that the investigations will help with learning more about long-duration spaceflight.

 

"These investigations could have lasting implications for protecting astronauts on deep space exploration missions, including travel to asteroids and Mars," NASA officials said..

 

Research proposals are due Sept. 17. Selected investigations will be announced in January.

 

Russian spacewalk ends; all objectives accomplished

 

William Harwood - CBS News

 

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin returned to the safety of the International Space Station's Pirs airlock compartment Friday after a trouble-free spacewalk, setting a new Russian endurance record with a seven-hour 29-minute excursion.

 

The cosmonauts ran ahead of schedule most of the day, successfully unreeling and routing two long power lines and an ethernet cable along the outside of the Zarya storage module that will be connected to the new Nauka laboratory after its arrival next year.

 

Misurkin also mounted a space exposure experiment pallet on a handrail outside the upper Poisk module.

 

The cosmonauts extended a telescoping space crane early on to help move large cable reels from Pirs to Zarya. They originally planned to leave the Strela 1 boom extended, but flight controllers opted to lengthen the spacewalk to give the cosmonauts time to retract it.

 

The spacewalk began at 10:36 a.m. (GMT-4; time revised by Russian mission control) and ended at 6:05 p.m. when the Pirs airlock hatch was closed.

 

The seven-hour 29-minute duration set a new Russian spacewalk record, eclipsing the old mark of seven hours and 16 minutes set by two cosmonauts outside the Mir space station in July 1990. Two NASA astronauts hold the record for longest spacewalk ever conducted, a marathon eight-hour 56-minute excursion in 2001.

 

Today's EVA was the 172nd devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began in 1998, the sixth so far this year, the seventh for Yurchikhin and the second for Misurkin. Today's EVA pushed Yurchikhin's total time outside to 45 hours and 55 minutes, moving him up to 12th on the list of most experienced spacewalkers.

 

As it now stands, 112 astronauts and cosmonauts representing nine nations have logged 1,082 hours and 51 minutes of ISS EVA time -- 45.1 days -- building and servicing the space station.

 

The next major assembly task will be attachment of the Nauka -- "science" -- multi-purpose laboratory module.

 

The Russians originally planned to launch the MLM aboard a Proton rocket at the end of the year, but officials say the flight is expected to slip several months into the spring of 2014.

 

During the past several spacewalks, astronauts and cosmonauts have been installing cables and attachment fittings needed to route power and data to and from the new module, which will replace the Pirs airlock and docking compartment.

 

The Russians eventually plan to launch a multi-hatch node that will be attached to Nauka's Earth-facing end, providing additional ports and the attachment point for a Russian solar power module that will extend to the right side of the space station.

 

Yurchikhin and Misurkin plan to venture back outside next Thursday to install a telescope mounting platform and to remove docking components from Pirs.

 

2 Russians turn cable guys in record spacewalk

 

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

 

In a record-long spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts rigged cable outside the International Space Station on Friday for a new lab that's due to arrive in a few months.

 

Fyodor Yurchikhin and Aleksandr Misurkin spent almost the entire seven-hour-plus spacewalk routing 120 feet of power and Ethernet cable. The cable had to be unreeled, then meticulously secured to handrails and hooks.

 

"Today we are the cable people," one of the spacewalkers commented in Russian as the work drew to a close.

 

The spacewalk lasted seven hours and 29 minutes, a full hour longer than originally planned in order for the two to get a jump on work awaiting them in yet another outing next Thursday.

 

It was the longest spacewalk ever by a pair of Russians, surpassing the former record of seven hours and 16 minutes set at the old Mir space station in 1990.

 

Americans hold the overall record: a nearly nine-hour spacewalk in 2001.

 

Friday's spacewalk occurred exactly one month after an Italian astronaut almost drowned when leaking water flooded his helmet during a spacewalk.

 

Luca Parmitano's spacesuit was provided by NASA. Friday's spacewalkers wore Russian-made suits that differ from the U.S. version.

 

NASA is still investigating last month's close call. The problem appears to be in the life-support backpack. The spacesuit will be sent back for analysis early next year. Until the trouble is identified and resolved, U.S. spacewalks are on hold.

 

To reach the cable work site on Friday, Yurchikhin hitched a ride on the end of a 46-foot boom operated by Misurkin.

 

When Yurchikhin asked if he was positioned properly on the boom, Misurkin assured him, "You look great. You look perfect."

 

"Thank you," Yurchikhin replied. "I don't want to blush."

 

"It just looks like you're in space," Misurkin said. "Everything is black around you."

 

The Russian Space Agency plans to launch a new science lab by year's end. It's the last major piece due at the orbiting outpost, active since 1998, and will replace a 12-year-old Russian docking compartment that doubles as an air lock.

 

Friday's excursion was the third of six Russian spacewalks planned for this year.

 

The four other space station residents - two Americans, another Russian and Italy's Parmitano - monitored Friday's spacewalk from inside. Russian Mission Control outside Moscow directed the operation.

 

Cosmonauts prepare for new lab in record Russian spacewalk

 

Irene Klotz - Reuters

 

Two Russian cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station on Friday to set up power and ethernet cables for a new research laboratory scheduled to arrive in December.

 

Flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin opened the hatch on the station's Pirs airlock at 10:36 a.m. EDT (1436 GMT) to kick off a 7-hour, 29-minute spacewalk, the longest ever by Russian cosmonauts.

 

The spacewalk eclipsed by 13 minutes the Russians' previous record set in July 2000 outside the Mir space station. The longest spacewalk overall was an 8-hour, 56-minute outing in 2001 by two NASA astronauts working outside the International Space Station.

 

Yurchikhin, who was making his seventh spacewalk, and Misurkin, on his second, spent most of their time routing two power cables and an ethernet line for a new Russian multipurpose laboratory called Nauka.

 

"There's a lot of intricate and delicate stringing (of the cables) through handrails and hook points," NASA mission commentator Rob Navias said during a televised broadcast of the spacewalk.

 

The outing is the third of six spacewalks Russia plans to conduct this year.

 

NASA meanwhile is still investigating the cause of a spacesuit helmet leak that forced two other crew members at the space station to abort a spacewalk on July 16.

 

Russia's Orlan spacesuits are different from NASA's but "due diligence was paid in preparation for this spacewalk," Navias said.

 

"Everything was in good shape," he added.

 

In addition to rigging cables between the Russian Zarya and Poisk modules, Yurchikhin and Misurkin attached a panel of experiments on a handrail on Poisk that will remain outside to expose sample materials to the space environment.

 

The cosmonauts are scheduled for another spacewalk on August 22 to install a swiveling platform for a telescope.

 

Russia's Nauka module, which will serve as research lab, docking port and airlock, will replace the Pirs docking compartment, which will be detached from the space station and flown into the atmosphere, where it will be incinerated.

 

The station, a $100 billion project of 15 nations, flies about 250 miles above Earth. It has been permanently staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since November 2000.

 

Space Station Cosmonauts Set Record for Spacewalk Duration

 

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

 

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin established a new Russian endurance record for spacewalks on Friday as they extended solar power and Ethernet cables outside the International Space Station to prepare the six person orbiting lab for the arrival of the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory module.

 

Their 7 hour, 29 minute excursion concluded at 6:05, EDT.

 

Their work day outside the ISS eclipsed a Soviet era spacewalk mark of 7 hours, 16 minutes set by cosmonauts Alexander Balandin and Anatoly Solvovyev on July 17, 1990 while they worked outside the former Mir space station.

 

Yurchikhin and Misurkin interrupted their primary task Friday only long enough to install a materials science experiment.

 

Their utility extensions across the Poisk and Zarya modules will permit the 22 ton MLM to draw solar power and data connectivity from the station's U. S. segment.

 

On Friday, the cosmonauts essentially re-traced their steps from a June 24 spacewalk in which they installed clamps for the new cables.

 

The MLM, which will also provide a docking port and airlock, is expected to launch at the end of this year, at the earliest. It will be launched atop a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the site of a July 2 launch mishap involving a similar rocket. The Proton crash was recently attributed to a ground handling error.

 

The MLM will replace the Russian segment's 12-year-old Pirs airlock and docking compartment, which will be propelled destructively away from the station a few days before the Nauka launch.

 

Yurchikhin and Misurkin are to walk again on Aug. 22, this time to replace a laser communications experiment with a rotating mount for a future optical telescope and to salvage a docking target from Pirs.

 

The longest spacewalk of all time, 8 hours, 56 minutes, was carried out by U. S. astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms on March 11, 2001 as part of a space shuttle ISS assembly mission, according to NASA records.

 

Cosmonauts Break Record for Longest Russian Spacewalk

 

Tariq Malik - Space.com

 

Two cosmonauts set a new record for the longest Russian spacewalk on Friday (Aug. 16), spending more than seven hours working outside the International Space Station to prepare it for the addition of a new Russian-built orbital lab.

 

Veteran cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Alexander Misurkin spent a total of seven hours and 29 minutes — a new Russian record — on a spacewalk to install power and data cables for a new Russian laboratory module expected to launch to the space station in upcoming months. NASA cameras beamed images of the record-setting spacewalk to Earth during the orbital excursion.

 

NASA spokesman Rob Navias said the cosmonauts broke a Russian spacewalking record that had stood for 23 years. Before Friday, the longest spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts was seven hours and 16 minutes. It occurred on July, 17 1990 and was performed by cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Alekandr Balandin to repair thermal protection gear on Russia's Mir Space Station.

 

"Today, that mark eclipsed by Yurchikhin and Misurkin," Navias said. 

 

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin works outside the International Space Station, with the Earth far below, in this still from a NASA broadcast on Aug. 16, 2013.

Credit: NASA TV Friday's spacewalk was originally supposed to last 6.5 hours, but Russian flight controllers opted to extend it to allow time to retract a hand-operated extendable crane, called Strela, back into place. The cosmonauts initially planned to leave the crane extended for another spacewalk set for Aug. 22. 

 

Yurchikhin and Misurkin spent most of their time Friday installing two long power cables and a data cable on an Earth-facing Pirs docking compartment, which faces the Earth and will ultimately replaced with the new, and larger, Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory. Nauka means "Science" in Russian.

 

The cable installation was hard on the cosmonauts' hands, since they had to tackle the stiff cables with bulky spacesuit-clad gloves.

 

"Alright guys, take a break … relax your hands," Russian Mission Control radioed the pair.

 

But the work appeared to go smoothly, with Yurchikhin and Misurkin also installing a materials science experiment on the station's exterior and a guide line that can be used by future spacewalkers. At one point, one of the cosmonauts was heard humming to himself as they wrapped up their work.

 

Friday's spacewalk was the fourth of five spacewalks planned for the Expedition 36 crew on the International Space Station, and the first of two spacewalks scheduled in August. Yurchikhin and Misurkin will venture outside the station on Aug. 22 to install equipment for new science experiments.

 

The Russian spacewalk was the first excursion by space station crewmembers since NASA aborted a spacewalk in U.S.-built spacesuits on July 16. That spacewalk, which included Expedition 36 crewmembers Chris Cassidy of NASA and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, was cut short when Parmitano reported a water leak inside his spacesuit that flooded his helmet with a substantial amount of water. An investigation into the cause of the leak is underway.

 

The space station's Expedition 36 crew consists of Yurchikhin, Misurkin, Cassidy, Parmitano, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov.

 

Russian Cosmonauts Complete Spacewalk

 

RIA Novosti

 

Two Russian cosmonauts completed their spacewalk about an hour later than scheduled, a spokesman for the Russian mission control center said on Saturday.

 

Two crew members, cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin, successfully coped with all their tasks, which included putting equipment in place for the arrival of a new Russian laboratory later this year and preparing for an installation of an optical telescope.

 

They also installed a panel of experiments designed to collect data on the effects of the microgravity environment in low-Earth orbit.

 

The spacewalk was due to last about six hours and end at 1:19 Moscow time on Saturday (9.19 p.m. GMT on Friday), but routing power cables for the future arrival of the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) took longer than scheduled.

 

The MLM will be launched aboard a Proton rocket from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan in late 2013.

 

The journey marks the 172nd spacewalk in support of assembly and maintenance performed on the International Space Station (ISS), the $100-billion orbiting laboratory built by 15 countries. It is the seventh spacewalk for Yurchikhin and second for Misurkin.

 

Expedition 36 Cosmonauts Break EVA Record

 

Emily Carney - AmericaSpace.com

 

It was a record that hadn't been challenged since the days of Mir in 1990, but on Friday, Aug. 16, it was smashed by Expedition 36's Russian flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Aleksandr Misurkin: longest Russian extravehicular activity (EVA).

 

The cosmonauts broke the 23-year-old record with their International Space Station (ISS) EVA, which stood at seven hours and 16 minutes, by 13 minutes. This time stands at stark contrast to the early days of the agency's EVAs; cosmonaut Alexei Leonov's historic 1965 spacewalk on Voskhod 2 lasted merely 12 minutes.

 

Yurchikhin and Misurkin spent these hours rigging cables for a multipurpose laboratory module, "Nauka" (Science), which is scheduled to launch aboard a Russian Proton rocket in December. The spacewalk began at 10:36 a.m. EDT after Russian Orlan suits were donned. After the cosmonauts installed the Strela cargo boom on the Poisk module, Misurkin used the boom to send Yurchikhin and equipment to the Zarya module. Yurchikhin rerouted connectors and installed cable crucial to the installation of the future module, which will replace Pirs.

 

In the meantime, Misurkin worked on installing an experiment panel on Posik, "Vinoslivost." This panel will expose different materials to space in order to gauge changes in their properties. Following Misurkin's activities (he also installed two connector patch panels and gap spanners), he joined his colleague at Zarya, where the two worked together to install lengths of Ethernet cable. The cosmonauts ended their spacewalks at 6:05 p.m. EDT with the closing of the Pirs module's docking compartment hatch.

 

This EVA marked the seventh spacewalk for Yurchikhin and the second for Misurkin. The cosmonauts will have a chance to add more EVA time to their careers, as they are both scheduled to venture outside of Pirs on August 22 to mount a telescope platform.

 

This EVA comes exactly a month after a harrowing spacewalk for Italian ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano. While he ventured outside of the ISS with NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, he realized his helmet was beginning to fill with water. The EVA was aborted at one hour, 32 minutes. Parmitano's entry back into the ISS was expedited, and while he ultimately was fine, the scare prompted an investigation by NASA that is still ongoing. Thankfully, today's EVA seemed to go off without a hitch.

 

Dickinson students trade summertime to work on experiments for International Space Station

 

Galveston County Daily News (from Dickinson Independent School District)

 

Two Dickinson school district students will have their experiments tested on the International Space Station.

 

Brothers Nicholas Hall, a 13-year old eighth grader at McAdams Junior High, and Thomas Hall, a 15-year old sophomore at Dickinson High School, developed toothpaste and cheese that can be used in space.

 

"I don't think there is anybody our age that has ever had the chance to do what we are doing," Thomas Hall said. "This is a chance that we can be a part of history in the making."

 

The brothers were given the opportunity to test their experiments in space due, in part, to the Foundation for International Space Education and the DreamUP program.

 

The microgravity research firm NanoRacks is involved with both the foundation and the DreamUP program. The company has negotiated with NASA to have a certain amount of space on the space station where experiments can be sent up for astronauts to perform and send results back to Earth.

 

The two brothers have an uncle, Rob Alexander, who works for NanoRacks.

 

"This is the first of its kind for space travel so it's very exciting for these guys," Alexander said. "To have some students from DISD to be doing this is very exciting for us and them."

 

The Hall brothers have been working since March on their products and developing the way they will send them into space.

 

"Once the formulas are completed, we have to put them in these tubes," which are sealed," Thomas Hall said. "Then it goes into the cubes or boxes, as we like to call them. That is how they will go up to the space station."

 

Nicholas Hall said: "There is a lot more to it than I originally thought. We have been working on this for what seems like a year."

 

The products are scheduled for the Sept. 6 launch on NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer.

 

"We should have the results back down to us in about a month after the launch," Alexander said. "We are hoping to get even more students from Dickinson involved in our projects."

 

SpaceX's private spaceship milestone caps big week for billionaire Elon Musk

 

Mike Wall - Space.com

 

The private spaceflight firm SpaceX has notched a key milestone in its quest to launch humans to orbit, adding to an already eventful week for company founder and CEO Elon Musk.

 

SpaceX has completed a preliminary design review of the systems necessary to support astronauts in orbit and return them safely to Earth aboard the company's Dragon spacecraft, NASA officials announced Thursday.

 

The news came just two days after SpaceX's reusable rocket prototype, known as Grasshopper, leaped sideways in an unprecedented test flight, and three days after Musk unveiled his idea for the potentially revolutionary "Hyperloop" transportation system.

 

Taking steps toward manned flight

 

SpaceX is one of three companies — along with Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp. — to receive funding in the latest round of awards from NASA's Commercial Crew Program. NASA hopes at least one privately developed American spaceship can begin flying astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017.

 

During the recent design review, which took place at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., company engineers explained to NASA and industry experts how Dragon would keep up to seven astronauts safe on orbit and during re-entry and landing.

 

The review also discussed how onboard crews and ground controllers would operate Dragon, and it covered the software that would help guide crews to the orbiting lab for rendezvous and docking, NASA officials said.

 

The newly completed review follows a similar procedure performed in December for ground systems and the ascent phase of a potential manned mission. SpaceX is now cleared to proceed with detailed designs for its entire manned transportation system, consisting of Dragon, the company's Falcon 9 rocket and associated ground infrastructure.

 

While the manned version of Dragon is under development, its robotic counterpart is already a spaceflight veteran. Dragon has made three unmanned trips to the space station, two of them bona fide cargo runs under a $1.6 billion contract SpaceX holds with NASA to make 12 such flights.

 

Grasshopper and Hyperloop, too

 

SpaceX has other irons in the fire apart from Dragon and the Falcon 9. For example, the company is developing Grasshopper in the hopes of achieving a long-held dream — fully and rapidly reusable rockets, which Musk says could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100.

 

Over the past few months, Grasshopper has been flying higher and higher on a series of increasingly ambitious test flights. But on Tuesday (Aug. 13), the rocket performed a new maneuver, rising 820 feet (250 meters) into the air and then moving 328 feet (100 m) sideways before returning back to the center of its launch pad.

 

"Diverts like this are an important part of the trajectory in order to land the rocket precisely back at the launch site after re-entering from space at hypersonic velocity," SpaceX officials said in a statement about the flight.

 

The test was part of an early-week whirlwind for Musk. On Monday (Aug. 12), after teasing the world for a year about the Hyperloop, the billionaire entrepreneur finally revealed his design for the futuristic concept, which Musk envisions as a fifth form of terrestrial transportation alongside cars, boats, planes and trains.

 

The solar-powered Hyperloop, Musk said, would blast passenger-packed pods through long tubes at 760 mph (1,220 km/h) or so, potentially cutting travel time between Los Angeles and San Francisco to 30 minutes.

 

Elon Musk also said Monday that he may wish to build a prototype of the Hyperloop to help get the concept off the ground, if his demanding schedule — in addition to SpaceX, Musk also runs the electric-car firm Tesla Motors — allows it.

 

"I'd like to see something like this happen," Musk told reporters Monday. "I don't really care much one way or the other if I have any economic outcome here. But it would be cool to see a new form of transport happen."

 

10 of Time's Most Influential People in Space

 

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

 

People around the world are pushing the boundaries of space exploration and science every day.

 

A new book called "New Frontiers of Space: From Mars to the Edge of the Universe" released by Time Books names 25 of the most influential people involved in all aspects of spaceflight and space science today.

 

10 Elon Musk, SpaceX

The founder of the private spaceflight firm SpaceX made Time's list. The company's robotic Dragon capsule made its second contracted cargo run to the International Space Station earlier this year.

 

9 Sara Seager, Planetary Scientist

Seager wants to find Earth's twin. She combs through exoplanet data in search of Earth-like alien planets that could possibly host life.

 

8 K. Radhakrishnan, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization

In 2008, Radhakrishnan was integral to the mission that made India the fourth country to put its flag on the moon. The Indian space agency plans to send an orbiter to Mars during a launch in late October this year.

 

7 Carolyn Porco, Saturn Imager

Porco leads the imaging science team for NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Recently, she asked people around the world to smile at Saturn as Cassini took a photo of Earth from its position around the ringed wonder.

 

6 Jill Tarter, SETI Scientist

Until 2012, Tarter served as the director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., but today she is focusing on fund raising for the Allen Telescope Array — a set of 42 radio dishes that search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

 

5 Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium

From searching for Superman's home planet to writing irreverent Twitter posts about astrophysics, Tyson tries to bring space science to the masses from his post at the American Museum of Natural History.

 

4 Liu Yang, Chinese Astronaut

Liu became the first Chinese woman to fly to space in 2012 when she launched aboard the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft.

 

3 Steve Squyres, Spirit and Opportunity Rovers

Squyres serves as the principal investigator for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, which has been active on the Red Planet since 2004. He helps to command the Opportunity rover, which is still roaming nearly 10 years after touching down. (Opportunity's twin, Spirit, was pronounced dead in 2011.)

 

2 Louis Allamandola, Space Chemist

The founder of NASA's Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif., Allamandola is searching for the chemical origins of life.

 

1 David Spergel, Astrophysicist

Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, uses data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

 

Space shuttle simulators in Dayton test pride of 'pilots'

 

Steve Stephens - Dayton Daily News

 

I didn't have much luck the last time I tried to land a space shuttle orbiter.

 

Neither did my crew members — who, as I did, arrived upside down on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center after crashing through the enormous Vertical Assembly Building. (Seriously, who decided to build that colossal structure — the largest single-story building in the world — right there?)

 

Fortunately, our misfortune was merely virtual.

 

I was piloting a shuttle simulator during a "mission" at Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. I even took a couple of mulligans but still couldn't get the thing safely on the ground.

 

Now, though, I might have a chance for redemption.

 

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton is the home of two new interactive space shuttle orbiter landing simulators.

 

At the free exhibit, visitors can try to land the most advanced spacecraft ever built.

 

The two simulators allow as many as four "pilots" at a time to attempt a landing, said Doug Lantry, a curator in the museum's research division.

 

"Each of the units is the size and shape of the space shuttle cockpit," Lantry said.

 

Plans call for the exhibit to eventually include a simulated shuttle payload bay, access ramps, an engine and a tail section — additions expected to be completed in the fall.

 

Already, simulator pilots view an image of the same scene they would see if landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida or at the shuttles' backup landing site, Edwards Air Force Base in California.

 

"You get the view out the front window, plus the 'heads-up' electronic display that shows you the same kind of landing aids that a shuttle pilot would see," Lantry said.

 

"Your job is to follow the computer and keep the spacecraft on the landing path with the joystick."

 

(Yeah. It sounds easy.)

 

Pilots can choose from three levels of difficulty, ranging from novice to expert.

 

And, if you run into trouble, the simulator offers feedback as to why you crashed, Lantry said. (I sure could have used that feature.)

 

"It's pretty cool interactive exhibit," Lantry said. "You get to experience what space really was like flying in the space shuttle."

 

And, should you happen fly into a launch tower, you also get to walk away with injuries only to your pride.

 

How NASA has furthered innovation

U.S. space agency has identified 1,800 technologies it has spun off

 

James Temple - San Francisco Chronicle

 

Ask most people about the everyday things NASA has developed and the answers will likely include Velcro and Tang. But while both were used by the aeronautics and space agency, neither was invented in house.

 

Similarly, memory foam and certain power tools popularly associated with NASA were developed for the organization, not by it.

 

But as of last year, NASA had identified 1,800 technologies it did spin off, including breakthroughs that enabled or improved low-power heart pumps, Lasik vision correction surgery and video image stabilization.

 

In other words, there is a long history of technology transfer and exchange between NASA and private industry. And it goes on to this day, as became increasingly evident during a tour of NASA's Ames Research Center near Mountain View on Thursday, organized by Littelfuse, the Chicago company that probably built the fuses in your car, phone and computer.

 

"We're the friendly front door to Silicon Valley," said David Morse, chief of the technology partnerships division at NASA Ames, our host for the day. "It's a big advantage to have the startups and venture capitalists right outside of our door."

 

Stunning PhoneSats

 

One of my most eye-catching initiatives in this vein was PhoneSats, an effort to build cheap, tiny satellites driven by smartphones. The basic brain, camera and sensors in the first generation was the software and hardware in the Nexus One, an Android handset developed by Google and HTC.

 

NASA engineer Jim Cockrell and his team of researchers (average age 23) pursued the project after realizing that the average smartphone has more processing power than many satellites in orbit. By taking advantage of off-the-shelf technology, instead of inventing their own operating system, miniature sensors and more, they were able to build prototypes with components that cost less than $7,000. The cube-shaped satellites, which can be held in one hand, feature antennas from an even more common household item: a tape measure.

 

They believe the devices, three of which were lofted into the atmosphere aboard Orbital Science's Antares rocket in April, could be the cheapest satellites ever flown in space.

 

"We like to think of it as crowdsourced science," said Jasper Wolfe, an engineer on the project.

 

In a nearby building on the 1,500-acre campus, where NASA and its predecessor organization have operated since 1939, scientists are working with businesses in a reciprocal fashion on what's known as forward osmosis technology. It's an effort to improve the ability to recycle water in space.

 

Mimicking intestines

 

As any backpacker knows, water is incredibly heavy and bulky. Sending enough to keep humans alive on a years-long mission, say to Mars, is simply unfeasible. What they have to do instead is recycle as close to 100 percent of the water used as possible. And that means - warning, ickiness coming in 3, 2, 1 - filtering urine.

 

This is easy enough to do on Earth, but a machine assigned this task on the International Space Station quickly broke down. A similar failure on the way to Mars would mean, quite simply, "You're going to die," said Michael Flynn, head of the water technology development lab.

 

Instead of machinery that will eventually break and require carrying along extra components, they're attempted to mimic our small intestines. In a design perfected by evolution, our bodies can filter water through a membrane that never gets clogged because the cells are continually shedding and replacing themselves, Flynn explained.

 

U.S. Workers Are Grounded by Deep Cuts

 

Michael Shear & Ron Nixon - New York Times

 

Geological visits to monitor volcanoes in Alaska have been scaled back. The defense secretary is traveling to Afghanistan two times a year instead of the usual four. For the first time in nearly three decades, NASA pulled out of the National Space Symposium, in Colorado Springs, even though representatives from France, Germany and China all made the trip.

 

Five months after gridlock in Washington triggered the deep spending cuts known as sequestration, much of the United States government is grounded.

 

Most government travel budgets have been cut this year by 30 percent, the result of an administration directive forcing managers to make difficult policy decisions about whom to send, where to send them and for how long. The result, agency officials say, is a government that cannot conduct essential business and is embarrassing itself abroad.

 

"We talk about being a leader in space exploration," said Elliot H. Pulham, the chief executive of the Space Foundation, which sponsored the NASA-free symposium in Colorado. "But it's hard to be a leader if you don't show up."

 

Not necessarily, say budget hawks like Senator Tom Coburn, Republican from Oklahoma. "Hopefully what you will have is more sound judgment at these agencies about what is critical travel and what isn't," Mr. Coburn said. "There is no question that federal employees should have some travel and go to some conferences, but most of it has nothing to do with their jobs. It's a perk."

 

Either way, the grounding of so many federal officials is one of the more tangible examples of the failure by Congress and President Obama to reach an accommodation on how to reduce the nation's debt. Many workers are already experiencing furloughs because of the impasse. It may soon get worse, as Mr. Obama and lawmakers brace for another standoff in the coming months over how to cut spending.

 

For now, thousands of employees at scores of agencies are staying put, deskbound by the shrunken travel budgets. Many workers are under orders to trade in plane reservations for car rentals and even bus tickets. The reductions are hitting all pockets of the bureaucracy, including those where travel is considered essential.

 

In the office of the United States Trade Representative, for example, there is money to send a negotiator to only one of 41 countries — Ukraine — accused of violating American intellectual property rights.

 

One measure of the decline is the airline industry in Washington, where travel representatives report a steep falloff in the number of people flying on discounted government rates. Intercity bus services like Megabus have meanwhile seen a jump in ridership between Washington and New York.

 

The impact goes far beyond the elimination of embarrassing junkets like the more than $800,000 the General Services Administration spent on a clown, a comic, a mind reader and airfare for 300 government workers for a retreat near Las Vegas in 2010. Officials have urged agencies to cut travel budgets "in a way that protects mission to the extent practicable and continues to support critical government functions such as national security, safety inspections, and law enforcement," said Steve Posner, the associate director for strategic planning and communications at the Office of Management and Budget.

 

But Mr. Posner added: "The depth and breadth of the cuts required by sequestration mean that is not possible in all cases, and cuts are having an impact on agencies' ability to carry out their mission."

 

A July report by the United States Travel Association, made up of companies in the travel industry, found that government participation in meetings and conferences was vital to making it efficient and effective. The report found that canceling participation in these events carried significant costs and undermined important functions of government.

 

Among those hit hardest by the cuts to travel budgets are scientists, who often travel to academic conferences as part of their jobs. In some cases, they are now turning to video conference calls or online Webinars to replace the in-person visits.

 

In February, the Defense Department canceled a health systems conference where thousands of military medical professionals would gather to share research and learn the latest treatment techniques.

 

In March, the National Space Symposium went on as scheduled — just without NASA. The agency has also canceled one trip abroad by Charles F. Bolden Jr., the administrator.

 

Last year, the United States Geological Survey sent 75 scientists to the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America to give lectures and trade information. This year, the survey withdrew all but 14, nearly shutting down the Salt Lake City conference in the process.

 

The conference's organizer lost more than $15,000 in canceled hotel rooms, food and beverage fees, and printing costs for new programs. Seventeen research papers were withdrawn because their authors could not be there to present them.

 

The scientists at the survey have also stopped maintenance of their equipment at several active Alaskan volcanoes, in part because of the cost of traveling there. For the same reason, the agency is no longer trying to obtain permits to install monitoring equipment on volcanoes at Mount Hood in Oregon and Glacier Peak in Washington State.

 

At the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Barbara Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the agency and a psychologist, said the agency has significantly reduced the travel of its 15,000 employees. Ms. Reynolds said she once traveled around the country training local and state officials in crisis and emergency communications.

 

"But I'm not doing any of that anymore," she said. Instead, Ms. Reynolds said she conducts the training online. "There is some level of concern about doing it that way," she said. "But we are trying to be frugal."

 

Other agencies have eliminated nonessential travel in an effort to ensure that a core mission can continue.

 

Managers at the Food and Drug Administration have made it all but impossible for employees to receive approval for travel to conferences. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, in an effort to help supplement reduced travel budgets for field inspectors, cut back on a program aimed at drowning prevention. At the Pentagon, defense officials skipped meetings with the international Afghanistan coalition in London and Rome this year, and without secure conference equipment, they could not participate virtually, officials said.

 

Even when travel is approved, it is often done with an eye on cost. Take the case of an Air Force officer at the Pentagon who has been ordered to continue traveling to a military base in Tennessee to provide training there. Twice this year, he drove to Dulles International Airport, where he picked up a rental car and drove ten hours to a Tennessee airport. The total bill, about $350, is less than the $1,600 he used to spend for a round-trip flight.

 

The officer, who requested anonymity because he is not cleared to talk about such issues publicly, cited "the irony of driving to an airport to pick up a rental car to drive to another airport 500 miles away."

 

As he put it, "It is kind of baffling."

 

20 Years Ago: Novel DC-X Reusable Rocket Launched Into History

 

Megan Gannon - Space.com

 

Nearly 20 years ago to the date, a pioneering reusable spacecraft called the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, made its first test flight — a low, 59-second hop over New Mexico's White Sands Space Harbor. This weekend, the novel rocket experiment finds itself in the spotlight once again.

 

Veterans of that experimental program and space industry leaders are gathering at at Spaceport America in New Mexico today (Aug. 16) for DC-X SpaceQuest, a celebration and conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the DC-X's first amazing flight and to discuss the future of reusable rockets.

 

The reusable DC-X rocket stood 39 feet (12 meters) tall and resembled a towering white traffic cone, but was never intended to reach space. It was built by McDonnell Douglas (a company that later merged with Boeing) as part of a technology demonstration program initially spurred by the Department of Defense. After the unmanned rocket made its first successful vertical takeoff and landing on Aug. 18, 1993 — which flew 150 feet (45 m) above the ground — the DC-X flew 11 more times through 1996, demonstrating that a scaled-up version of the single stage to orbit craft could potentially be used to launch routine payloads into low-Earth orbit.

 

Though the program was eventually abandoned by NASA and the U.S. military, DC-X still stands out a model for efforts to build cheap, reusable spacecraft. The total amount of money spent on the program's efforts has been estimated at less than $100 million. The DC-X SpaceQuest kicks off on Friday (Aug. 16) at Spaceport America followed by more events Saturday and Sunday at the New Mexico Museum of Space History and the New Mexico State University in Alamogordo.

 

As part of this weekend's celebrations, the members of the original DC-X Team will be inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame, joining the ranks of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Nicolaus Copernicus and Valentina Tereshkova. The induction, to take place Saturday, will mark the first time an entire group of people will be honored as such.

 

"Every member of the DC-X team displayed the qualities required to be an inductee: imagination, achievement, and the dedication to further advance man's knowledge of the universe, and his ability to explore and develop space for the benefit of all mankind," read a statement from the New Mexico Museum of Space History. "Many obstacles confronted the DC-X team as they worked towards making the dream of aircraft-like safety for affordable space travel a reality."

 

Commercial space entrepreneurs are still contending with those obstacles today. The conference will feature speakers from several private spaceflight companies — including Virgin Galactic, Masten Space Systems, XCOR Aerospace and Orbital Sciences — who will discuss some of those technical challenges to the future of space travel.

 

My Ticket Into Space Looks Cheap, Price Soars to $250,000

 

James Clash - Bloomberg News

 

Three years ago I bought a $200,000 ticket to fly into space aboard Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

 

I chose the "poor man's" option, which requires only a 10 percent deposit. Three months before I fly, I will raid my 401(k) for the remaining $180,000 balance.

 

So I won't be among the first bunch of 500 fliers including Justin Bieber and Formula One legend Michael Schumacher who, according to reports, paid for their tickets up front.

 

Virgin Group chairman Branson and his family will board the very first commercial flight. He has suggested that could happen as early as Christmas. As passenger number 610, I'll probably get my turn in 2015.

 

A milestone was reached in April when for the first time in flight, Virgin Galactic lit the rocket motor on SpaceShipTwo, sending the craft supersonic.

 

Capitalizing quickly, Branson raised the price of a suborbital space ticket by $50,000 to $250,000 (we early purchasers still get the original price).

 

The new development has potential space tourists' hearts ticking faster. It's been a long wait -- nearly nine years -- since the smaller craft, SpaceShipOne, went on its history-making voyages. Yet rockets are unpredictable. In 2007, three workers were killed by an explosion on the ground while testing an early version of the SS2 engine.

 

Mid-Air Jettison

 

Whereas SS1 could carry three people, SS2 can manage eight: two pilots and six passengers. Like SS1, it will fly aloft on the underside of a mother-ship, WhiteKnightTwo. At 50,000 feet the craft will be jettisoned, then fire its rocket engine.

 

Boarding SS2 doesn't require special training. All you need are money and guts. That said, to get the most out of the flight you might want to familiarize yourself with the disorienting effects of high altitude beforehand, especially when your time in space is costing thousands of dollars per minute.

 

"You're riding a rocket motor," cautions astronaut Brian Binnie, who piloted SS1 to win the Ansari X Prize in 2004. "There's a lot of noise, vibration, G-forces -- and you are saturated by that."

 

VG doesn't have its own official space prep program but does recommend a flight simulator/centrifuge experience at the National AeroSpace Training and Research or NASTAR center, in Southampton, Pennsylvania.

 

I wanted real space-flight experience, too -- or at least something as close as I could get to the real deal.

 

Cold War

 

First up was a MiG flight. Since Concorde's operations ceased in 2003, the highest folks can fly commercially is in old fighter jets. I headed to a Cold War-era air base near Moscow for my adventure.

 

Once I was strapped in, the MiG-25 quickly took my pilot and me to 30,000 feet. As we accelerated through the speed of sound (about 650 mph) there was a slight disturbance, then the ride became spookily smooth. I began to feel the G-forces. A tiny tape recorder I was holding felt like it weighed 10 pounds.

 

At 84,000 feet, the sky overhead was black, and a diffused blue hue covered the Earth's curvature. The world stopped as we hung in the heavens. Just as suddenly, we were in a disorienting dive, stabilizing again at 30,000 feet for aerobatic maneuvers.

 

Back on terra firma, the ground crew said we'd climbed 16 miles and hit Mach 2.6 -- all in a half an hour. In SS2, I will go even faster -- exceeding Mach 3 and travel four times as high.

 

Zero Gravity

 

As intense as the MiG flight was, I did not experience weightlessness. For that, I needed a separate venue.

 

Russia uses cargo planes to simulate the experience. An Ilyushin Il-76 climbs to 35,000 feet, then goes into a controlled dive for 30 seconds. In that half-minute, fliers are weightless. The plane pulls up at 25,000 feet and climbs again. Passengers alternate between the weightlessness and ascent phases.

 

Convinced I had to use force, I pushed off as we went into our first dive. A few moments later my head banged the ceiling. When weightless, one learns immediately that brute strength is not needed -- and there's no way to correct mid-air.

 

I pulled a bottle from my pocket and opened it. The water dispersed in ball-bearing-sized blobs. It was good fun, but by the last of a dozen parabolas everyone was feeling nauseous.

 

Centrifugal Force

 

Having done my training, I'm nearly ready for the rigors of SS2. I still plan to experience the NASTAR centrifuge before the year is out.

 

Could an early accident derail later excursions like mine? In discussions with Branson and SS2 builder Burt Rutan, the feeling was that if it's something identifiable and can be prevented with a logical fix, it won't have a big impact. But if the problem is more systemic, it could be much more challenging.

 

An analogy is the early airline industry where mishaps were part of progress. Look at the business today. In fact, many say VG's ultimate suborbital space model is a Concorde on steroids where a flight between, say Sydney and Los Angeles, would take just a few hours compared with current 18-hour commercial flights.

 

On Sept. 25, VG has a ticket-holder event scheduled at Mojave Airport. The company is cagey about what's planned, though this writer is hoping for a test flight of SS2 all the way to space. If that occurs, you can be sure the line of would-be astronauts will suddenly grow. Glad I have my ticket.

 

To purchase a VG ticket: virgingalactic.com. Zero Gravity Corp. (gozerog.com) runs weightlessness flights ($5,000). MiG flights ($20,000-up) are offered via Incredible Adventures (incredible-adventures.com). For centrifuge/flight simulation ($3,000), try NASTAR (nastarcenter.com).

 

(James M. Clash is the author of "The Right Stuff: Interviews with Icons of the 1960s" (AskMen, 2012). He writes on adventure for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

 

Muse highlights include Manuela Hoelterhoff on arts, Catherine Hickley on German art, James Clash on adventure, James Russell on architecture and John Mariani on wine.

 

Ed Buckbee remembers Wernher von Braun, U.S. Space & Rocket Center creation on eve of state honor

 

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

 

Alabama will honor Ed Buckbee in Huntsville Monday night for building the state's largest tourist attraction at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and starting Space Camp, the science education program that has brought 600,000 young people to Alabama from all over the world.

 

But the Alabama Tourism Department could just as easily honor Buckbee, the first director of the museum and space camp, as one of the state's great story-tellers. His memories of life as a young associate of Wernher von Braun and ambassador for Huntsville are by turns thrilling and hilarious.

 

·         Buckbee traveled the country in the 1970s with Miss Baker, the infamously bad-tempered monkeynaut, whose star power got him on national TV regularly to talk about the space program. Miss Baker flew first-class with her own doctor; Buckbee flew coach.

 

·         Buckbee was there in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy asked von Braun in Huntsville if NASA could really land a man on the moon in that decade. Kennedy came to Huntsville to tour NASA and also because he couldn't get a straight answer in Washington, Buckbee said. "Yes sir," von Braun replied, "and we're going to do it in the time frame you set."

 

·         Buckbee brought his daughter Jackie and her friends for a sleepover when he was trying to develop Space Camp. The kids had a ball climbing in and out of capsules and onto equipment, Buckbee said, adding, "If NASA only knew."

 

Buckbee was a young second lieutenant from West Virginia when the Army sent him to Huntsville in 1959. Trained in public relations with a college degree in journalism, he was put to work in Redstone Arsenal's protocol office. He worked there for two years until he noticed his friends leaving for the new agency called NASA. Buckbee resigned his own commission - he was a first lieutenant by then - and went along. He was 25 years old.

 

Buckbee's first job was arranging tours for dignitaries who wanted to see a Saturn engine test and to meet von Braun. He knew Kennedy's Secret Service code name (Lancer) and von Braun's (Rocket Man) and he shuttled generals, politicians and celebrities like Walt Disney through the city.

 

"Walt, you need a futuristic tram system," von Braun told Disney when he came to brainstorm a new Florida theme park to be called Epcot. Disney agreed and set his team to work on what became the Disney monorail. Von Braun drove it while on a trip to Florida for a launch, Buckbee said, "and he loved it."

 

Buckbee helped make the space center a reality, including raiding other NASA centers for parts to assemble the massive Saturn V rocket that is still the museum's star attraction. Von Braun had promised the center would have a Saturn V, but he didn't have Washington's permission to move it off Redstone. Von Braun did it anyway, becoming the first person to tell Buckbee that it's "better to ask forgiveness than permission."

 

Buckbee also credits the Army with "stepping up" with historic military rockets now on display. On a visit last week, he pointed to an Army Redstone rocket like the one that launched Explorer, America's first satellite. Standing beside it is a Redstone Mercury rocket like the one Alan Shepard flew into space in 1961 to become America's first astronaut.

 

Buckbee also heard von Braun's comment that America needed a science camp for kids, just like the band camps and sports camps that dotted the landscape. Space Camp was a modest success with 700-800 campers per summer, he said, until the 1986 movie "Space Camp" with its story of kids launched from camp on a space shuttle. "We went from hundreds to thousands," Buckbee said. "It was the game-changer. It introduced us to the world."

 

Working with Buckbee was a young employee named Deborah Barnhart, who is now Dr. Deborah Barnhart, the current CEO of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

 

"She was the one who came along at the right time," Buckbee said. "She was the mastermind behind creating other levels of camp - Aviation Challenge and Space Academy - so the kids could come back, and she came up with the curriculum."

 

Buckbee also credits the "Space Camp Recipe." "Kids want to hang out with other kids (like them)," he said, "they want to team up, they want to be challenged, and they want to compete."

 

Barnhart said Friday that no one could have expected "when Von Braun charged Ed Buckbee with creating a showcase for Apollo in Huntsville" what Buckbee would accomplish: a Smithsonian institution, Alabama's leading tourist attraction and a major source of science education that has produced leaders of government and commercial space efforts. "Ed Buckbee lit a fire that's still propelling us," Barnhart said.

 

Buckbee, now 77, left the center in 1994 for retirement, and he jokes that he "hasn't had a real job since." He travels the world giving talks about von Braun and the space program, teaching classes, speaking to teachers' groups and writing articles for space publications. He stays in touch with the astronauts he met over the years and often appears with them on panels.

 

"We have to convince the younger generation to sharpen their skills in science and math," he said last week standing in the space center's rocket park. There is still a space program, he said, and there are other challenging fields of technology young people can pursue.

 

"Come here," Buckbee said, "and we'll give you a glimpse of your future. You'll learn how the older generation sharpened their skills in space. You can actually fly to the moon. My generation did that."

 

"It was a fun job," Buckbee said later. "I can't believe they paid me."

 

The dinner honoring Buckbee with the tourism department's Lifetime Achievement Award begins Monday night at 7 at the Westin Hotel.

 

END

 

 

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