Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - August 30, 2013

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: August 30, 2013 6:31:12 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - August 30, 2013

Happy Flex Friday everyone.   Have a great and safe Labor Day weekend. 

 

NASA TV:

Ø  2 pm Central (3 EDT) – Video File of E37/38 news conf. at Star City & Red Square visit

Ø  6 am Central MONDAY (7 EDT) – Live Interviews with E37/38's Michael Hopkins fm Star City

Ø  1:25 pm Central MONDAY (2:25 EDT) – E36/37 Change of Command ceremony

Ø  Pavel Vinogradov to Fyodor Yurchikhin

 

Human Spaceflight News

Friday – August 30, 2013

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

Station astronauts to troubleshoot space suit leak over Labor Day weekend

 

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

 

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will team with NASA ground controllers over the U. S. Labor Day weekend to replace water relief and gas trap valves in the space suit worn by European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano during a July 16 excursion that was cut short when his helmet began to fill with water. Investigators are hopeful the swap out will point to a "smoking gun" behind the alarming incident that allowed 1 to 1 1/2 liters of water to flow into Parmitano's helmet and collect over his ears, eyes and nose. NASA spacewalks were suspended in the aftermath, and the U.S.-led, ISS mission management team is eager to restore the capability.

 

Experts: 'Drift' is plaguing NASA

Human spaceflight not a foregone conclusion in future, prof says

 

James Dean – Florida Today

 

NASA's human spaceflight program is destined to limp forward or even fizzle out unless political leaders can finally agree on a long-term plan for where and how humans should explore space, two policy experts said Thursday. "What you're seeing in the current debate over priorities really is the residual of 40 years of failure to reach consensus on what the U.S. should be doing on space, and particularly in human spaceflight," said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University. "We're currently in a very, very fragile situation, particularly as it regards human spaceflight," added Scott Pace, a professor and director of the same university's Space Policy Institute. "It is not at all inevitable that human spaceflight will continue as we look in the years ahead."

 

Logsdon and Pace Criticize Lack of White House Leadership on NASA

Say Agency is Adrift

 

Marcia Smith - SpacePolicyOnline.com

 

George Washington University (GWU) space policy experts John Logsdon and Scott Pace agree NASA is adrift today, particularly with regard to the human spaceflight program, and blame the White House for a lack of leadership. Speaking in a teleconference Thursday, the two veteran observers of and participants in U.S. space policy offered their views on NASA's past, present and future.   Pace has a long career in and out of government, including high ranking positions at NASA and the White House under Republican Administrations and was a top NASA official under the George W. Bush administration.  Today he is Director of GWU's Space Policy Institute.

 

Two Astronauts Who Beat The Odds To Get Into Space

 

Elizabeth Howell - Universe Today

 

Getting into space is never a guarantee for an astronaut. Heck, getting into an astronaut program can be tough, as Koichi Wakata and Rick Mastracchio told Universe Today. The crewmates on Expedition 38/39 are supposed to head to the International Space Station in November. But they beat incredible odds to be selected in the first place. Wakata, who is with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), didn't even have an astronaut program to join when he was a kid. Mastracchio (from NASA) did, but it took him nine years' worth of applications to get in. "When I was five years old, I saw the Apollo [11] lunar landing," Wakata said. "This was before I was going to school, kindergarten timeframe. But there was no astronaut program in Japan, so I thought it was physically beyond my reach. It was something I longed for."

 

Is NASA's Plan to Lasso an Asteroid Really Legal?

 

Leonard David - Space.com

 

NASA's ambitious asteroid-capture mission is seemingly being blueprinted with little dialogue about whether or not it is actually legal. NASA intends to grab an asteroid and drag it to a stable orbit near the moon, where it can be visited by astronauts, perhaps as early as 2021. But does this bold plan run afoul of 1967's Outer Space Treaty (OST), which provides the basic framework of international space law, or 1972's Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects? SPACE.com asked several lawyers with space specialties to offer views about the legality of tagging, bagging and shoving an asteroid around…

 

The Scoop on Space Poop: How Astronauts Go Potty

 

Megan Gannon - Space.com

 

On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard was locked into his capsule Freedom 7, ready to become the first American and second person ever in space. But before his 15-minute historic flight, Shepard would sit through five hours of delays — and he really had to go to the bathroom. "Man, I got to pee," he radioed launch control. NASA officials weren't prepared for this situation. They thought the mission would be short enough to avoid it, and letting Alan Shepard urinate in his shiny silver spacesuit was not something they were ready to do; the astronaut was wired with medical sensors that might get wrecked if wet. But eventually, launch control had no choice but to let him to go. Today, going to the bathroom in space is much less tedious, but it still requires careful attention — and even space toilet training. The reusable space planes of NASA's retired shuttle program had toilets using airflow to draw waste away from the body in place of Earth's gravity. The International Space Station has commodes with a similar design.

 

Space launch has her flying high

 

Reid Creager - Charlotte Observer

 

Kim Alix won't be able to take her young students with her to an upcoming NASA space launch. But she'll take along their childlike enthusiasm and wonder. The Providence Day Lower School science teacher recently responded to a tweet on NASA social media and was amazed to be notified she's one of just 50 people selected to view the LADEE launch Sept. 6 at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. A lifelong follower of space exploration, Alix said she follows the International Space Station, NASA Social, even different astronauts who post pictures and other information to the people who follow them.

 

'Space tourism' added to Oxford dictionary

 

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

 

"Space tourism" is now "buzzworthy," at least according to one prominent dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO) added "space tourism" (and "buzzworthy") to the more than 350,000 entries that it defines, the Oxford University Press released Wednesday. The newly-added entry describes "space tourism" as "the practice of travelling into space for recreational purposes." Oxford Dictionaries Online also includes with the entry an example of the "mass noun" used in a sentence: "Space tourism could be a $10 billion-per-year industry within two decades." "Space tourist" is listed as a derivative of "space tourism" in the free online dictionary.

 

Johnson Space Center STILL won't get a shuttle but we get a consolation prize

 

Dianna Wray - Houston Press

 

If you've been around Houston for a while, you may have noticed that NASA is kind of our thing. We love being "Space City" almost as much as we hate Dallas. So when we didn't get a space shuttle -- even though Florida, New York, California and Washington D.C. did -- we were kind of miffed. Well, we're still not getting a space shuttle, but it was announced that NASA will be providing Johnson Space Center with its very own space shuttle carrier.

 

The Cold War Returns to Space

 

Greg Autry - Huffington Post

 

(Autry is as an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship with The Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California)

 

While trouble brews with Moscow over Snowden and Syria, a curious aspect of domestic space policy threatens to undermine America's tough stance and makes supporting American entrepreneurship in space a national security priority. On Tuesday, Russian media reported that Moscow is "reconsidering the role of Russia's space industry in the American space exploration program." This is no idle threat. Russian cooperation is a very critical factor in America's space operations.

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

Station astronauts to troubleshoot space suit leak over Labor Day weekend

 

Mark Carreau - Aviation Week

 

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will team with NASA ground controllers over the U. S. Labor Day weekend to replace water relief and gas trap valves in the space suit worn by European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano during a July 16 excursion that was cut short when his helmet began to fill with water.

 

Investigators are hopeful the swap out will point to a "smoking gun" behind the alarming incident that allowed 1 to 1 1/2 liters of water to flow into Parmitano's helmet and collect over his ears, eyes and nose. NASA spacewalks were suspended in the aftermath, and the U.S.-led, ISS mission management team is eager to restore the capability.

 

His shuttle-era space suit, or Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), was re-activated in the ISS U.S. segment airlock on Tuesday as part of the troubleshooting to verify the leak that released water from an air flow vent at the back of Parmitano's helmet was still present. The 36-year-old Italian Air Force test pilot was not in the protective garb during the test.

 

The same protocol will be followed this weekend as Parmitano joins NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Karen Nyberg for the latest round of troubleshooting, according to NASA spokesman Josh Byerly.

 

The strategy calls for the astronauts to replace the suit's water relief value and reactivate the suit, then replace the gas trap components and reactivate the suit. Both are part of the suit's Primary Life Support System, or backpack, which was identified early on as the likely source of the difficulties.

 

On July 16, Cassidy and Parmitano embarked on what was to be a six- to seven- hour multi-mission spacewalk. The excursion was stopped about an hour into the outing after Parmitano felt water at the back of his head. His return to the safety of the airlock quickly grew more challenging as water continued to move along an airflow guide just outside his communications cap. Working largely by feel, Parmitano made his way hand over hand to the airlock, where Nyberg and the station's Russian cosmonauts waited to help him out of the suit.

 

Though wearing a long safety tether, Parmitano at one point prepared for the possibility he might have to activate a pressure relief value in his suit to expel the water. Had he choked, Parmitano might have drowned, flight controllers said after the incident.

 

The spacewalk came to an end after 92 minutes.

 

Cassidy and Parmitano teamed for a July 9 spacewalk in the same suits without similar difficulties.

 

In addition to the troubleshooting under way in Mission Control, NASA formed a five member Mishap Investigation Board after the incident. The board is responsible for identifying contributing factors as well as a root cause and making recommendations where appropriate for changes in procedures and operations.

 

Experts: 'Drift' is plaguing NASA

Human spaceflight not a foregone conclusion in future, prof says

 

James Dean – Florida Today

 

NASA's human spaceflight program is destined to limp forward or even fizzle out unless political leaders can finally agree on a long-term plan for where and how humans should explore space, two policy experts said Thursday.

 

"What you're seeing in the current debate over priorities really is the residual of 40 years of failure to reach consensus on what the U.S. should be doing on space, and particularly in human spaceflight," said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University.

 

"We're currently in a very, very fragile situation, particularly as it regards human spaceflight," added Scott Pace, a professor and director of the same university's Space Policy Institute. "It is not at all inevitable that human spaceflight will continue as we look in the years ahead."

 

In a teleconference with reporters about the direction of U.S. space policy, both described NASA as suffering from "drift" in direction.

 

House and Senate committees have passed competing versions of NASA authorization bills, with proposed funding for next year ranging from about $16.8 billion to $18.1 billion.

 

The lower House total factors in automatic budget cuts called sequestration, while the higher Senate total assumes those cuts won't happen.

 

The House would prevent NASA from pursuing a mission to capture an asteroid for astronauts to visit in 2021, while the Senate only directs the agency to take steps toward an eventual Mars mission.

 

The key human spaceflight differences center on where exploration missions should go, and whether NASA should help develop multiple commercial systems for rides to the International Space Station or choose one.

 

"On the human spaceflight side, the sense of drift, or the sense of lack of consensus, still is fairly serious," Pace said.

 

Pace advocates for international partnerships on missions to or near the moon, rather than the proposed "one-off" missions to an asteroid or Mars that offer few opportunities for collaboration anytime soon.

 

Such a "geopolitical" approach, he said, would align emerging nations' interests with our own and provide a strategic rationale, not just that of a space enthusiast.

 

Logsdon said the current stated goal of going to Mars "takes us in a particular direction that's been there for half a century or more without really much debate of whether it's the right direction."

 

He criticized President Barack Obama for failing to invite international leaders to work together to define a new future for the space program.

 

The Obama administration tried to offer a new direction for NASA in 2010, but bungled its rollout and failed to overcome congressional backlash, resulting in unsatisfactory compromises, they said.

 

"What's missing is a sense of strategy, of strategic purpose for this organization," said Logsdon. "What should it be doing?"

 

If no coherent long-term plan is formed and exploration by default centers on the International Space Station, Pace said that when the station is deorbited "there will be an end to U.S. human spaceflight, and an end to a near-term government market for the commercial sectors."

 

But given strong industrial and regional interests in the programs, Logsdon said he anticipates "some form of limping through human spaceflight effort that is more similar than different than what we've done for the past four decades."

 

Logsdon and Pace Criticize Lack of White House Leadership on NASA

Say Agency is Adrift

 

Marcia Smith - SpacePolicyOnline.com

 

George Washington University (GWU) space policy experts John Logsdon and Scott Pace agree NASA is adrift today, particularly with regard to the human spaceflight program, and blame the White House for a lack of leadership.

 

Speaking in a teleconference Thursday, the two veteran observers of and participants in U.S. space policy offered their views on NASA's past, present and future.   Pace has a long career in and out of government, including high ranking positions at NASA and the White House under Republican Administrations and was a top NASA official under the George W. Bush administration.  Today he is Director of GWU's Space Policy Institute.

 

Logsdon is considered the "dean" of space policy and published his first book on President John F. Kennedy's decision to go the Moon in 1970.   A GWU professor since that era, he founded the Space Policy Institute and is now a professor emeritus there.  He recently authored a new book about Kennedy's role in the Apollo program and is now writing one on President Richard Nixon's post-Apollo decisions.

 

Both believe NASA is adrift today and criticized the Obama Administration for its lack of leadership.  Logsdon stressed that when he talks about a lack of leadership he is referring more to the White House than to NASA itself.

 

Pace said the "sense of drift, or the sense of a lack of consensus is fairly serious" and shows up particularly in terms of relationships with the international community.    He believes returning humans to the Moon – the program he was implementing when he worked at NASA – should be the next step for human spaceflight because it responds to today's geopolitical environment since many other countries want to participate in such a mission.   The Obama Administration's goals of sending people to an asteroid and then to Mars are beyond the capabilities of those countries right now, he explains, so they would be left out of such plans.

 

Logsdon views the ongoing debate as a continuation of four decades of "failure to reach consensus" on NASA's future, especially for human spaceflight.   Articulating a rationale for human spaceflight is extremely difficult and he anticipates that the National Research Council committee currently tasked with that assignment will not succeed either.  "I don't think there is an answer," he said; instead it is a matter of "personal choice" by individuals and leaders and the "lack of leadership of this administration" has "put us in a situation which is unfortunate."

 

The Obama Administration's long term goal of sending people to Mars reflects a long-standing paradigm that began with a vision advanced by Wernher von Braun decades ago.  In response to a question about whether that should, in fact, be the goal, Logsdon agreed that it is rarely challenged, but there are alternatives such as construction of space solar power satellites or free-flying space colonies.  The "fixation" on sending humans to Mars "takes us in a particular direction that's been there for half a century or more" without debate on whether that's the right direction, he added.

 

Asked to speculate about how the departure of NASA Deputy Administrator and Obama Administration insider Lori Garver may affect NASA in the coming years, Logsdon said it depends on whether she will be replaced and, if so, by someone who shares her commitment to "revitalization and innovation."   If not, he worries there could be "backsliding" on some of the changes she championed, such as the commercial crew effort and NASA's commitment to ensuring competition between at least two companies.

 

Pace hopes that a replacement for Garver might be able to fix the process by which Administration decisions are made and announced.  He and Logsdon both criticized how the Obama Administration handled the roll out of its decision to terminate the Constellation program to return humans to the Moon and instead focus on sending people to an asteroid.  The announcement came as a surprise to both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and pitted Congress and the White House against each other in a bruising debate over NASA's future.  The resulting compromise in the 2010 NASA authorization act left NASA with direction to do both what the White House wanted and what Congress wanted, but without the requisite resources to succeed.

 

Logsdon's disenchantment with the Obama Administration's treatment of NASA is much broader.   By this time President Obama should have invited international partners to work together to define the future of the space program and should have given NASA "a relatively crisp sense of what it's role should be," he insisted, but Obama "hasn't done that" and "that's been very disappointing to me."

 

Two Astronauts Who Beat The Odds To Get Into Space

 

Elizabeth Howell - Universe Today

 

Getting into space is never a guarantee for an astronaut. Heck, getting into an astronaut program can be tough, as Koichi Wakata and Rick Mastracchio told Universe Today.

 

The crewmates on Expedition 38/39 are supposed to head to the International Space Station in November. But they beat incredible odds to be selected in the first place. Wakata, who is with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), didn't even have an astronaut program to join when he was a kid. Mastracchio (from NASA) did, but it took him nine years' worth of applications to get in.

 

"When I was five years old, I saw the Apollo [11] lunar landing," Wakata said. "This was before I was going to school, kindergarten timeframe. But there was no astronaut program in Japan, so I thought it was physically beyond my reach. It was something I longed for."

 

With no Japanese astronauts to look up to, Wakata put himself in a related career: airplane engineering. Between 1989 and 1992, he worked as an aircraft structural engineer for Japan Airlines. It was while he was in this career that he saw a newspaper advertisement recruiting the first Japanese astronauts. He applied and was let in, first try.

 

"I was lucky to get into this program," Wakata said. And now he has a new milestone in his sights: becoming the first Japanese commander of the International Space Station during Expedition 39. Wakata's space experience includes operating every piece of robotics hardware currently on orbit, from the Canadarm to the Japanese Kibo robotic arm.

 

He also has extensive leadership training behind him, which helped him prepare for command. He was in charge of an underwater lab (called NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO) in 2006. Wakata also received National Outdoor Leadership training, which puts people in wilderness situations to test their skills.

 

Finally, Wakata also watched closely what his own spaceflight commanders did. He is a big admirer of Brian Duffy, who flew four times in space — including two of Wakata's missions. "I learned a lot from him and I try to imitate what he did," Wakata said.

 

Unlike Wakata, his crewmate Mastracchio was born in a country with a well-established astronaut program. That also meant, however, a lot of competition. Mastracchio made applications practically every year between 1987 and 1996. Every time he was turned down, he would look for a way to make himself better for the next round.

 

"I tried not to do things to become an astronaut. I tried to do things that I thought would be interesting," Mastracchio said. At the same time, those interesting things happened to be items that astronauts would find useful.

 

Hired in 1987 for Rockwell Shuttle Operations Company in Houston, Mastracchio then moved to NASA in 1990 as an engineer in the flight crew operations directorate. He earned a masters degree in physical science at the nearby University of Houston-Clear Lake in 1991. Mastracchio also got a pilot's license.

 

Around the same time of another unsuccessful selection in 1994, Mastracchio switched jobs and became a flight controller in the front room of Mission Control. It's hard to say if that made the difference, he acknowledged, but for what it's worth he was selected in 1996. "I just gained more experience, over time, in different jobs," he said.

 

Mastracchio has since flown three times into space, performing six spacewalks in that time. There are no further "outside" activities planned for him during Expedition 38/39, but he has trained as a backup just in case.

 

Is NASA's Plan to Lasso an Asteroid Really Legal?

 

Leonard David - Space.com

 

NASA's ambitious asteroid-capture mission is seemingly being blueprinted with little dialogue about whether or not it is actually legal.

 

NASA intends to grab an asteroid and drag it to a stable orbit near the moon, where it can be visited by astronauts, perhaps as early as 2021. But does this bold plan run afoul of 1967's Outer Space Treaty (OST), which provides the basic framework of international space law, or 1972's Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects?

 

SPACE.com asked several lawyers with space specialties to offer views about the legality of tagging, bagging and shoving an asteroid around.

 

Certain to be lawful

 

"Retrieving an asteroid and placing it in a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system for additional exploration is nearly certain to be lawful under the Outer Space Treaty at this stage of space exploration," said law professor Matthew Schaefer, director of the Space, Cyber and Telecommunications Law Program at the University of Nebraska College of Law in Lincoln.

 

As enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty, Schaefer said, countries have freedom of exploration and use of celestial bodies. Critics of such a conclusion, he said, may point to language in Article I of the OST requiring "free access to all areas of celestial bodies" and the nonsovereignty language in Article II.

 

"However, as a practical matter, any claims based on free access or nonsovereignty obligations will not even arise unless two nations are both targeting the same asteroid or same area of a celestial body for exploration," Schaefer said.

 

Given the large number of asteroids and the limited number of nations with the requisite capabilities to execute such a challenging mission, Schaefer said that it is unlikely at this stage of space exploration that two nations would target the same asteroid at the same time.

 

Free access

 

Schaefer added that if one nation is seeking to move or mine the very same asteroid another country is already moving or mining, then the latecomer must show "due regard" for the interests of the party conducting the initial asteroid retrieval and mining mission.

 

In fact, if the second nation's activities "would cause potentially harmful interference" with the first nation's activities, the second nation is required to consult in advance with the other country, Schaefer said.

 

Furthermore, if an asteroid is so small that it allows only one mining or exploration operation, Schaefer said it would be hard to argue that a nation that does so first is somehow infringing on others' "free access" because "such an interpretation would strip away the guaranteed freedom of the first nation to explore and use."

 

In sum, Schaefer said that there are "no definitive, significant legal barriers" to an asteroid-capture mission at this stage of space exploration.

 

Oops factor

 

But what happens if an asteroid-retrieval effort goes wrong and ends up threatening the Earth?

 

"If such retrieval accidentally put the asteroid in an uncontrolled orbit and it caused damage to space objects in orbit, itself a highly unlikely event, the question can be raised whether the party moving the asteroid is now liable for damages caused to the space objects by the asteroid," Schaefer said.

 

Schaefer said that the Liability Convention establishes a "fault-based standard" for damage in space, and that a variety of factors would likely affect liability, including any advance warnings given.

 

"Additionally, the space treaties liability provisions refer to 'space objects' and 'launching of a space object' and an asteroid that has been moved does not fit comfortably within those terms," Schaefer said. Thus, the specific liability rules of the space treaty might not apply at all, he added, so general international law may come into play.

 

Playing catch-up

 

"Space law is a relatively new area of law. It is still playing catch-up with the new space activities on the horizon," said Michael Listner, the founder and principal of the firm Space Law and Policy Solutions, based in New Hampshire. "NASA's proposed retrieval mission is no exception."

 

Listner told SPACE.com that while there are no specific laws that address moving an asteroid, the current body of space law would have some relevance. For example, the United States is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, and some of the provisions may thus apply, he said.

 

Article VI of the OST stipulates that as a signatory, the United States bears international responsibility for its national activities in outer space, including operations on or around the moon and other celestial bodies, Listner said, "whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by nongovernmental entities."

 

NASA is an agency of the United States, and moving an asteroid would be considered a space activity, Listner said, so the United States would bear international responsibility to ensure that NASA's activities conform to the OST.

 

National appropriation?

 

"There might also be a question of whether snagging an asteroid and relocating it could be considered national appropriation in violation of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty," Listner said. "If a target asteroid has some tangible value in terms of mineral resources, some of the signatories to the OST could raise concern that capturing and relocating an asteroid equates to national appropriation."

 

"However, on the flip side, if NASA were to capture a small asteroid and relocate it without raising international objections, it could create a foundation for an international customary norm in terms of space property rights," he added.

 

As far as the "oops" factor goes, Listner said that the maxim of expecting the unexpected should be heeded. The possibility exists that attempting to place an asteroid into an orbit close to Earth or around the moon could lead to some unforeseen consequences, he said. For example, the space rock could be jostled out of orbit and interfere with satellites in the geosynchronous belt, or, even worse, head toward Earth and cause damage on the planet's surface.

 

Normally, in either situation, the Liability Convention would apply, but this activity is outside the norm and the question is whether an errant asteroid could be considered a "space object" under the definition Article 1(d) of that Convention, Listner said. Also, it is questionable whether the United States could be viewed as the "launching state" under Article 1(c), he said, considering that the asteroid technically was not launched from the United States.

 

It should also be pointed out, however, that NASA is currently planning to grab a roughly 25-foot-wide (7.6 meters) asteroid that weighs about 500 tons. Such a small space rock would almost certainly burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere if it somehow ended up coming toward Earth.

 

Rule of thumb

 

One other pertinent consideration, Listner said, is whether the United States should invoke Article IX of the OST to brief other spacefaring nations on the proposed activity, since it could potentially contaminate the outer space environment.

 

"Article IX has only been invoked once and that was after the fact by Japan when China performed its notorious anti-satellite test in 2007," Listner said. Article IX has never been invoked pre-emptively by any signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, he added.

 

"The general rule of thumb when it comes to this proposed mission is to assume the worst from a legal perspective and be prepared to deal with it if the worst actually comes to pass," Listner said.

 

Simple and complex

 

George Robinson, a space law practitioner and retired Associate General Counsel for the Smithsonian Institution, said the law regarding NASA's current agenda to undertake an asteroid retrieval initiative is both simple and complex.

 

Most practicing and academically oriented space lawyers, Robinson told SPACE.com, believe the related issues are complicated and that potentially applicable laws are anything but clear, "if at all existent beyond the provisions in the seriously outdated 'mother treaty for space,' the 1967 Outer Space Treaty."

 

A more realistic assessment of potentially applicable space-related laws is that treaties, conventions and relevant public and private international laws tend to emphasize everything being for the benefit of all nations and all humankind, Robinson said.

 

"The moribund nature of the [1972] Seabed Treaty reflects the unlikelihood of private, and even governmental, investment in necessary research and extrapolation/conversion to useful/profitable products that must be shared by noninvesting, nonparticipating nations," Robinson said.

 

Agreements are intended — indeed, designed — to be broken or ignored in whole or in part at some point, either by signatories or nonsignatories, Robinson suggested.

 

"Paper tiger with no teeth"

 

Reference to the 1967 OST "offers no real help in answering questions of law related to asteroid retrieval and/or mining," Robinson added. "In this context, a variety of academicians and practitioners of space law have an equal variety of opinions regarding asteroid mining and ownership of exploited space resources, whether by governments or the private sector."

 

Robinson believes that the OST, now more than 45 years old, is in dire need of "extensive re-evaluation and amending, or trashing altogether and starting over again" to meet current and projected realities of space research, migration, habitation and resource exploitation capabilities.

 

"The OST at present is a paper tiger with no teeth and little interest in dental implants that would allow substantive answers to pressing legal questions and answers, such as those presented by plans for asteroid mining and potential retrieval for a near-Earth trajectory," Robinson said.

 

For readers interested in more information regarding space law, go to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

 

The Scoop on Space Poop: How Astronauts Go Potty

 

Megan Gannon - Space.com

 

On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard was locked into his capsule Freedom 7, ready to become the first American and second person ever in space. But before his 15-minute historic flight, Shepard would sit through five hours of delays — and he really had to go to the bathroom.

 

"Man, I got to pee," he radioed launch control.

 

NASA officials weren't prepared for this situation. They thought the mission would be short enough to avoid it, and letting Alan Shepard urinate in his shiny silver spacesuit was not something they were ready to do; the astronaut was wired with medical sensors that might get wrecked if wet. But eventually, launch control had no choice but to let him to go.

 

"You think it's glamorous being an astronaut? It's a lot of hard work and a lot of indignity as well," Mark Roberts, a tour guide at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, said during the museum's recent summer SpaceFest last month.

 

After Shepard's debacle, NASA devised better ways to take care of basic bodily functions. But space waste continued the plague the agency.

 

By the time astronaut Gordon Cooper launched on the last Project Mercury flight in 1963, NASA had created a urine collection device that astronauts could wear inside the one-person spacecraft. Cooper's flight was not an easy one. Near the end of his 22-orbit 34-hour mission, system after system in his capsule mysteriously started failing. He had to take over manual control and pilot the craft through a risky re-entry into the atmosphere.

 

What went wrong? An investigation showed that his urine bag leaked and droplets got into the electronics, hobbling his automatic systems, Roberts said.

 

Everybody poops

 

If rogue urine sounds problematic, think about the agony floating feces could inflict inside a cramped space capsule. When NASA started planning longer missions, they had to take astronauts' bowels into consideration.

 

The space agency's next project, Gemini, put two astronauts side-by-side in a spacecraft, testing out the crucial maneuvers that would bring the Apollo spaceflyers to the moon. To show that humans could survive in space for two weeks, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman spent 14 days flying in Gemini 7, the longest manned mission at the time.

 

"They had no toilet in there," Roberts said. "What they had was basically a plastic bag every time they had to do a No. 2."

 

Space toilets didn't become much more sophisticated by the time the first Apollo missions launched. Astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had fecal collection bags that stuck to their bottoms with adhesive when they had to go. And microgravity could make things messy.

 

"There's a problem of separation," Roberts said. "Whatever comes out of you doesn't know it's supposed to come away from you." Each fecal collection bag came with a "finger cot" to allow the astronauts to manually move things along. Then they had to knead a germicide into their waste so that gas-expelling bacteria wouldn't flourish inside the sealed bag and cause it to explode.

 

The entire ordeal often took 45 minutes to an hour to complete in the Apollo spacecraft, Roberts said. To minimize their bowel movements, astronauts had a high-protein, low-residue diet — think steak and eggs and other foods that are don't make a lot of waste after they are absorbed by the body.

 

Urinating wasn't much easier for the Apollo crews. Their urine collection device was basically a condom-like pouch attached to a hose that vented out into the vacuum of space at the turn of a valve. By the astronauts' own accounts, it was more than a little unsettling to use the device, Roberts said.

 

Astronaut potty training

 

Today, going to the bathroom in space is much less tedious, but it still requires careful attention — and even space toilet training. The reusable space planes of NASA's retired shuttle program had toilets using airflow to draw waste away from the body in place of Earth's gravity. The International Space Station has commodes with a similar design.

 

"For No. 2, it's kind of like a camp potty, where you use that to contain the solid waste and that gets burned up in the atmosphere eventually on a spacecraft," NASA astronaut Nicole Stott told elementary students today (Aug. 29) during a video chat from NASA's International Space Station Mission Control in Houston. "For No. 1, it's basically a hose, we call it a urine hose, that has a vacuum on it."

 

Astronauts go through "positional training" on Earth to make sure solid waste goes directly into the narrow opening of these space toilets, Roberts explained. The mock toilet has a camera at the bottom. Astronauts don't actually go to the bathroom during training, but by watching a video screen in front of them, they can check that their alignment is spot on.

 

"If you get stuff around these air vents that are providing the suction in there, things can get really clogged up and you can damage a multimillion-dollar toilet fairly easily," Roberts said.

 

Breaking a toilet is indeed expensive and inconvenient — not to mention unhealthy. After the sole toilet on the International Space Station had been plagued by a series of problems and breakdowns, NASA bought a second, $19 million Russian commode that was installed in the orbiting outpost's U.S. segment in 2008.

 

As for peeing, each astronaut is given his or her own funnel — made in different shapes for men and women — which attaches to a hose on the toilet. But as gravity diminishes in space, ego apparently doesn't.

 

"They had three different sizes of funnels and the guys were always choosing the largest size," Roberts said of the astronauts in the shuttle program.

 

Waste not, want not

 

In 1986, the Soviet Union built the Mir space station, which had a bathroom with a toilet that vented the waste out into space. By the time space officials were retiring Mir in 2001, the space station's solar panels had lost about 40 percent of their effectiveness, Roberts said.

 

"They realized that a large part of the damage to these solar panels was frozen urine floating in space at very high speeds," Roberts told his audience.

 

Today on the International Space Station, a $100 billion orbiting outpost that has been staffed with rotating crews since 2000, urine gets recycled into drinking water through a filtration system.

 

Fecal matter, meanwhile, often gets packed up and cast off from the space station with other trash in capsules that burn up in the atmosphere, Roberts said. But with longer missions, like flights to Mars, some researchers are thinking about how to recycle feces, too. For example, some scientists propose that human waste could line the walls of future spacecraft to act like a radiation shield, protecting astronauts from the harmful effects of cosmic rays.

 

Space launch has her flying high

 

Reid Creager - Charlotte Observer

 

Kim Alix won't be able to take her young students with her to an upcoming NASA space launch.

 

But she'll take along their childlike enthusiasm and wonder.

 

The Providence Day Lower School science teacher recently responded to a tweet on NASA social media and was amazed to be notified she's one of just 50 people selected to view the LADEE launch Sept. 6 at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.

 

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer robotic mission, set to launch at 11:27 p.m., will attempt to "answer prevailing questions about the moon," NASA says.

 

"I am pumped," said Alix, who teaches students ranging from transitional kindergarten through fifth grade. The first Virginia coast launch to the moon is "my first NASA launch ever. I've only seen them on television."

 

A lifelong follower of space exploration, Alix said she follows the International Space Station, NASA Social, even different astronauts who post pictures and other information to the people who follow them.

 

Her passion reaped an unexpected dividend in July.

 

"I saw this tweet asking if you wanted to be a part of a rocket launch. That was this LADEE launch," she said. "I thought, 'Wow, that sounds cool, I'm going to send them my info.' Then I got an email saying that they had received my info but there were no spots, that they would wait-list me.

 

"Then about 10 days later I got another email saying I was, in fact, invited to the launch. When I saw the invitation, I was just, like, totally blown away. It was tremendously shocking that I was going to attend an actual rocket launch, to see a spaceship leave our planet and that I would be there, up close and personal, watching it."

 

Quick to share the news with her students once school started, Alix invited them to ask questions about the launch and see if she could get them answered.

 

She was impressed by what they were most curious about: "things like how they decide the angle of the launch, why they're starting at 11:27 instead of 11:30, things like that."

 

"Providence Day School is covering my expenses to the launch," she said. "Without that generous gift, I wouldn't be able to attend at all."

 

Alix said she doesn't know exactly where on Wallops Island the launch will take place but will be advised of the itinerary soon.

 

"Even NASA employees are not allowed to experience this," she said.

 

Those who will experience the Sept. 6 launch all share a love of space. Though she didn't want to name names, Alix said they represent diverse walks of life: a music agent, astronomer, retired Navy chief, kindergarten teacher, Air Force pilot, bartender.

 

Her tweeting habit may take a vacation on the big day.

 

"People at NASA Social said that if this is your first launch, what you really should do is experience the launch and not worry about videoing it or tweeting it. They're going to have their own videographers and media people there."

 

NASA is "more than just sending rockets into outer space," Alix said.

 

"I'm not sure everybody really realizes how much they actually contribute with spin-off technology, how a lot of their research helps the medical community."

 

Alix hopes her excited curiosity rubs off on her students, but she says that's a two-way street.

 

"I teach the young kids," she said. "They keep me effervescent."

 

'Space tourism' added to Oxford dictionary

 

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

 

"Space tourism" is now "buzzworthy," at least according to one prominent dictionary.

 

Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO) added "space tourism" (and "buzzworthy") to the more than 350,000 entries that it defines, the Oxford University Press released Wednesday.

 

The newly-added entry describes "space tourism" as "the practice of travelling into space for recreational purposes."

 

Oxford Dictionaries Online also includes with the entry an example of the "mass noun" used in a sentence: "Space tourism could be a $10 billion-per-year industry within two decades."

 

"Space tourist" is listed as a derivative of "space tourism" in the free online dictionary.

 

The addition of "space tourism" was a part of the ODO's quarterly update, which also included the aforementioned "buzzworthy" (meaning "likely to arouse the interest and attention of the public, either by media coverage or word of mouth"); "selfie" ("a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website"); and "twerk" ("dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance").

 

The new entries reflect that the words and phrases have become accepted within the English language, as spoken and used today.

 

"New words, senses, and phrases are added... when we have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English," Angus Stevenson with the Oxford Dictionaries Online explained in a statement. "On average, we add approximately 1,000 new entries to [the] Oxford Dictionaries Online every year, and this quarter's update highlights some fascinating developments in the English language."

 

The term "space tourism" may have a longer history, but its propagation into the modern lexicon began in the 1990s as private rocket companies and adventure tourism firms started marketing suborbital and orbital opportunities for the public to travel into space.

 

"Space tourism is a movement that has existed since the dawn of private spaceflight," Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, co-author of the 2011 book "Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight" (University of Nebraska Press) said in an e-mail to collectSPACE, responding to "space tourism" being added to the ODO. "It's a realization that access to space is a catalyst that will open the next frontier for the trillion dollar tourism industry."

 

Since 2001, Virginia-based Space Adventures has offered seats on board Russian Soyuz spacecraft that are bound for the International Space Station (ISS). To date, seven millionaires and billionaires have embarked on self-funded spaceflights through the firm, with an eighth slated for a mission in 2015.

 

Space Adventures' "space tourists" include businessman Dennis Tito, South African computer software developer Mark Shuttleworth, engineer Greg Olsen, Iranian American engineer Anousheh Ansari, Hungarian software developer Charles Simonyi (who visited the ISS twice), video game pioneer and second-generation astronaut Richard Garriott, and Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté.

 

Space Adventures announced in 2012 that famed-soprano Sarah Brightman would train for a flight to the International Space Station in 2015.

 

Virgin Galactic, a company within business magnate Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, has signed up more than 600 customers for suborbital flights on its SpaceShipTwo, a rocketplane based on the design of the 2004 Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne. The company is planning to begin flying paying clients in 2014.

 

Other companies including XCOR Aerospace and its Lynx rocketplane, Boeing with its CST-100 capsule, Excalibur Almaz using upgraded Soviet-era spacecraft and Bigelow Aerospace with plans for inflatable space stations, have put forth plans to fly space tourists as well.

 

The Oxford Dictionaries Online is among the dictionaries compiled by Oxford University Press, which also includes the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Whereas the content in the ODO focuses on current English, including modern meanings, the OED is a historical dictionary, which serves as a record of all the core words and meanings in English spanning the past 1,000 years.

 

The OED added "space tourism" in 2004 as a subordinate to the word "space."

 

Johnson Space Center STILL won't get a shuttle but we get a consolation prize

 

Dianna Wray - Houston Press

 

If you've been around Houston for a while, you may have noticed that NASA is kind of our thing. We love being "Space City" almost as much as we hate Dallas.

 

So when we didn't get a space shuttle -- even though Florida, New York, California and Washington D.C. did -- we were kind of miffed.

 

Well, we're still not getting a space shuttle, but it was announced that NASA will be providing Johnson Space Center with its very own space shuttle carrier. (This is the equivalent of asking for a pony and being given a horse trailer.) Once the carrier has been delivered to JSC it will be put on display with a fake shuttle on top of it.

 

Meanwhile, NASA's budget is once again on the chopping block, and NASA head Charles Bolden didn't mince words when he swung through town earlier this summer, warning that some of those budget cuts would come down on the JSC if those folks in Washington can't figure out how to play nice.

 

The shuttle carrier aircraft is slated to be transported to Houston sometime next year, according to KUHF. Once it gets here, the powers that be will pop that shuttle replica already on display on top of the Boeing 747 and the whole structure will be turned into a six-story walk-through exhibit. There's no telling what will be left of NASA in general or the JSC in specific, once Congress has worked over the program's budget, and we still won't have a real shuttle, but it will totally look like we do. And that's all that really matters, right?

 

The Cold War Returns to Space

 

Greg Autry - Huffington Post

 

(Autry is as an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship with The Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California)

 

While trouble brews with Moscow over Snowden and Syria, a curious aspect of domestic space policy threatens to undermine America's tough stance and makes supporting American entrepreneurship in space a national security priority. On Tuesday, Russian media reported that Moscow is "reconsidering the role of Russia's space industry in the American space exploration program." This is no idle threat. Russian cooperation is a very critical factor in America's space operations.

 

Firstly, a Russian state-dominated firm, NPO Energomash, produces the RD-180 engines for America's Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V, operated by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, is the workhorse launch vehicle for NASA robotic missions and for U.S. military satellites. It is the only U.S. vehicle rated for the launch of nuclear powered spacecraft and has been a promising option for future U.S. manned spaceflights.

 

Secondly, America's National Space Agency has been paying the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to ferry American astronauts to and from the International Space Station in its Soyuz capsules for years. With the demise of the space shuttle program, NASA has become dependent on Roscosmos and has made a further $424 million commitment to the Russians This ill-considered agreement extends our dependence on Putin's kleptocracy until at least 2017.

 

Seeing America in such shabby circumstances should serve to remind both liberal and conservative free-trade advocates that there are strategic national capabilities that must never be outsourced to potential adversaries, even for the sake of capturing global market efficiencies. America needs a viable, multivendor commercial space launch industry with a diversified domestic supply chain and we need it now.

 

This ongoing affront to our national honor is developing into a clear and present threat to our national security. Sadly, the cause of this problem is not a technical one; America has the technology to best the Russians or anyone in space. This problem has been created by old-fashioned, pork barrel politics.

 

Following the recommendations of the Augustine Commission the White House wisely supported NASA's Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap formerly CCDev) program. CCiCap is the current version of the competitive, "funded Space Act Agreements." These agreements are designed to spur "New Space" firms, like Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), with payments tied to capability demonstrations. They've been hugely successful in restoring America's ability to resupply the International Space Station with cargo. Both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation have demonstrated private orbital launch systems. California based SpaceX now has a regular manifest of deliveries to and from the station.

 

Oddly, while the White House has been a strong advocate for privatization in space, some Republican Senators and Members of Congress still envision America's future in space as looking more like the Postal Service or Amtrak. They've subverted CCiCap and its predecessors by diverting funding to an old school, nationalized space program known as the Space Launch System (SLS), designed to eventually carry astronauts to Mars or the asteroids. This giant launch vehicle is not well suited for primary the job at hand - delivering Americans to the ISS and satellites to Low Earth Orbit. More recently the Capitol Hill opponents of New Space have moved to force these entrepreneurial firms into the same Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) model that has corrupted big government aerospace projects for years. All of this delays America's return to space in a blatant effort to protect socialized space jobs in Alabama and Texas.

 

Despite the ironic protestation of those who advocate continuation of government run space access, CCiCap is not "corporate welfare for Elon Musk." This funded Space Act Agreement is simply the latest incarnation of a successful string of federal initiatives that have established American national competitive advantage in strategic infrastructure over the last two centuries. The transcontinental railroad, the national air traffic control system, the national highway system and the Internet were all made possible by enlightened industrial policy. Such policies take into account what the private sector does well and what the appropriate role of government is in accelerating our national capabilities. Supporting the establishment of a competitive, commercial industry is always a better investment than building another government-operated boondoggle.

 

To make matters worse, New Space firms are required to demonstrate capabilities far beyond those of their competitors or predecessors. For instance, under the requirements of the Human Certification Plan Review, SpaceX must prove its ability to use a Launch Escape System (LES) to safely separate the Dragon Capsule from the launch vehicle while inflight at "Max Q", the point at which the atmospheric stresses on the craft are at a peak. While Soyuz has survived a pad abort and a higher altitude abort, the Space Shuttle flew 135 operational missions without ever conducting a real test of that vehicle's dubious abort plan, unless you count the failure of the Challenger disaster. However, you can be sure that if next year's SpaceX abort test is in anyway less than perfect, the forces of socialized space will divert even more CCiCap money into their untested nationalized solution.

 

If this were 1960s America, we would not be held hostage to the Russian threats. We'd bolt some seats into a SpaceX dragon capsule -- something SpaceX has done -- and show them our space program is not a bargaining chip. Tuning down our risk aversion and fully funding CCiCap is the very least that Congress and NASA should do.

 

END