Happy Friday everyone and have a wonderful and safe weekend!
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Watch the Next ISS Crew Launch in Teague!
- Today: Replay of 'LIVE FROM SPACE'
- Physics in the Movie 'Gravity' Part VII - Organizations/Social
- Human Systems Integration ERG Meeting
- Tour Habitat and View Endangered Prairie Chickens
- Kinect Co-Lab Video Conference with Leap Motion |  |
| Headlines - Watch the Next ISS Crew Launch in Teague!
JSC team members are invited to watch the next station crew launch to the International Space Station in the Teague Auditorium Tuesday, March 25. Doors open at 3:15 p.m. NASA TV will broadcast prelaunch activities for the next three crew members flying to the International Space Station, followed by extensive live coverage of their launch and docking to the orbital laboratory Tuesday, March 25. Expedition 39/40 Flight Engineer Steven Swanson of NASA and Soyuz Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will launch to the space station in a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:17 p.m. CDT (3:17 a.m. March 26 in Baikonur). NASA TV coverage will begin at 3:15 p.m. The crew will dock to the station's Poisk module less than six hours later at 10:04 p.m. NASA TV docking coverage begins at 9:30 p.m. When the hatches open, they will be greeted by Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the first Japanese astronaut to lead an expedition, and Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio of NASA and Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos. Coverage of the hatch opening begins on NASA TV at 11:15 p.m. Swanson, Skvortsov and Artemyev will remain aboard the station until mid-September. Wakata, Mastracchio and Tyurin have been aboard the orbital outpost since November 2013 and will return to Earth May 14, leaving Swanson as the Expedition 40 Commander. JSC, Ellington Field, Sonny Carter Training Facility and White Sands Test Facility employees who cannot make the Teague Auditorium viewing opportunity, but who have hard-wired computer network connections, can view the event using the JSC EZTV IP Network TV System on channel 404 (standard definition) or channel 4541 (HD). Please note: EZTV currently requires using Internet Explorer on a Windows PC or Safari on a Mac. Mobile devices, Wi-Fi, VPN or connections from other centers are currently not supported by EZTV. First-time users will need to install the EZTV Monitor and Player client applications: o For those WITH admin rights (Elevated Privileges), you'll be prompted to download and install the clients when you first visit the IPTV website If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367 or visit the FAQ site. Event Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 Event Start Time:3:15 PM Event End Time:4:30 PM
Event Location: Teague Auditorium
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JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 http://www.nasa.gov/station
[top] - Today: Replay of 'LIVE FROM SPACE'
Did you miss your chance to see "LIVE FROM SPACE" … when it was live? The two-hour special program that was originally broadcast last Friday evening from the viewing room overlooking the International Space Station (ISS) Flight Control Room in Mission Control Center (MCC) at JSC will be rebroadcast today, March 21, at 3 p.m. and again at 7 and 10 p.m. on the National Geographic channel. This informative program, hosted by former MSNBC and CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien and co-hosted by astronaut Mike Massimino, features stories about the mission and science being conducted aboard the ISS and includes interviews with astronauts Mike Hopkins, Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata. JSC personnel will have the opportunity to watch this program from on-site on channel 20 or channel 55-1 of the JSC Cable TV System. The replay will not be available for viewing on EZTV. - Physics in the Movie 'Gravity' Part VII
The answer to yesterday's trivia question: Israel. Space debris is indeed a real concern for the International Space Station. Is a satellite catastrophe as depicted in the movie "Gravity" possible? Chain-reaction collisions, known as the Kessler effect, are possible. However, in the movie, the satellites involved are all at different altitudes! More on that next week. Organizations/Social - Human Systems Integration ERG Meeting
Join the Human Systems Integration (HSI) Employee Resource Group (ERG) in a discussion of how HSI principles and practices might be integrated into the JSC culture. The HSI ERG has formed a new "HSI Implementation Committee" that will focus on how HSI concepts might be formally or informally integrated into the JSC culture. The committee is led by former HSI ERG chairs David Fitts and Jen Rochlis, and will facilitate conversations on what HSI at JSC might look like in the future. This general HSI ERG meeting will jumpstart the discussion and is a great way to get involved in the new committee. - Tour Habitat and View Endangered Prairie Chickens
Have you heard rumors that JSC has prairie chickens on-site? Did you know that the Attwater's Prairie chicken is an endangered species and is only found in Texas? Have you ever wondered how and why JSC got involved in saving this endangered species? These birds have a quirky call and an even more fascinating breeding dance. If you're interested in seeing these amazing birds up close and learning more about how JSC is enhancing our local Texas prairie ecosystem, come to Building 424 at 3 p.m. on April 10. The Coastal Prairie Partnership will provide tours of JSC's prairie habitat, and the Houston Zoo will provide tours of the prairie chicken pens. Please let us know if you plan to attend. Event Date: Thursday, April 10, 2014 Event Start Time:3:00 PM Event End Time:5:00 PM
Event Location: B424
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Kim Reppa x28322
[top] - Kinect Co-Lab Video Conference with Leap Motion
Please join us Monday, March 24, for an exciting video conference with Leap Motion (leapmotion.com). Leap Motion is one of the most sophisticated gesture-input devices on the market today. Frank Ignazzitto and Alan Davis from Leap Motion will be sharing some of the possibilities that the device can bring to advanced human computer interaction. The Leap Motion controller senses how you naturally move your hands and allows you to use your computer in a whole new way. Point, wave, reach, grab and pick something up and move it. Do things you never dreamed possible. The presentation will cover system operation, performance specifications, technology roadmap and a technical Q&A. The meeting will be held in Building 35, Room 107, from 1 to 2 p.m. | |
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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. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Friday – March 21, 2014
International Space Station:
- 1 p.m.(CT) - Video File of the ISS Expedition 39/40 Crew Activities in Baikonur, Kazakhstan - JSC via Baikonur, Kazakhstan
HEADLINES AND LEADS
NASA Assessing SpaceX 'Payload Contamination'
Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week
The third SpaceX commercial cargo mission to the International Space Station has been delayed until no earlier than March 30 because of payload contamination that may require some new parts to be installed.
Everything You Need to Know About Dream Chaser, America's Next Space Plane
Joe Pappalardo - Popular Mechanics
Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president and head of SNC's Space Systems, has a better than front-row seat for America's historic private space movement—he's a player on the main stage. Sirangelo heads one of three companies that is designing spacecraft to bring humans into orbit for NASA.
The Final Frontier of Marketing Stunts
Joshua Hunt - The New Yorker
On October 21, 2001, a pair of Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soyuz TM-33 rocket for the International Space Station, which orbits Earth two hundred and thirty miles above its surface. They were on a mission to film the first high-definition television commercial in outer space. Later, millions of Japanese television viewers saw the astronauts—one floating in the cable-strewn guts of the space station, the other calmly gazing at Earth through a small hatch window—sipping from bottles of Pocari Sweat, a popular, if curiously named, Japanese sports drink.
How America could once again put men on the moon
It's time to return to the moon, former NASA division chief says
(Grush is the former propulsion and power division chief at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston)
Close your eyes. You see that shimmering, veiny darkness that most people see, right? Not me. I see the moon.
Ames' flying robot and airline traffic projects in spotlight
NASA chief's visit to Mountain View draws attention to innovations
Daniel DeBolt – Mountain View Voice
In a tour of NASA Ames on Monday, NASA chief Charles Bolden stopped to listen to engineers discuss several projects that apparently needed some attention: a flying smart-phone based robot to do inspections on the International Space Station and NASA's work on a new satellite-based flight control system for U.S. airports, to replace World War II-era radar technology.
Orbital Drops Antitrust Lawsuit Against ULA
Dan Leone – Space News
Orbital Sciences Corp. is dropping an antitrust lawsuit filed in June against United Launch Alliance alleging that the Denver-based rocket maker illegally prevented Orbital from buying the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine, according to a statement filed March 20 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 search tests limits of satellites
Joel Achenbach – The Washington Post
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has exposed the technological limits of satellites, which can see a license plate from space — if not necessarily read it — but struggle to find a missing jetliner.
Dayton's Air Force museum creates a compelling shuttle exhibit (with no shuttle)
Susan Glaser – Cleveland Plain Dealer
This is not a place for the claustrophobic. You think of the space shuttle as a mammoth, high-flying hauling machine. And, at 122 feet long by 57 feet high, it is.
COMPLETE STORIES
NASA Assessing SpaceX 'Payload Contamination'
Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week
The third SpaceX commercial cargo mission to the International Space Station has been delayed until no earlier than March 30 because of payload contamination that may require some new parts to be installed.
Originally set for March 16, the Falcon 9 launch was delayed on March 14 to "ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance and allow additional time to resolve remaining open items," according to a NASA update that quoted SpaceX and referred additional questions to the Hawthorne, Calif., commercial-cargo launch service provider.
Sam Scimemi, the ISS director in the Human Exploration and Operations mission directorate at NASA headquarters, elaborated later that day during a panel discussion on the ISS sponsored by the Space Transportation Association.
"We've had some issues with payload contamination that we will be addressing," he said. "We're going to have to assess that and replace some parts and get the rocket ready for launch again. Our current launch date right now I believe is March 30."
SpaceX and NASA did not answer questions about the exact source and nature of the contamination on March 17, or about what payloads may be contaminated. A NASA ISS status blog posted on March 13 said the launch would be delayed because of unspecified "contamination found on the beta cloth shields in the SpaceX-3 unpressurized external trunk," and noted that "[s]pecialists are reviewing options for addressing the contamination on the beta cloth shields."
Beta cloth is a special fabric typically used in multi-layer insulation for thermal protection in space and to shield orbiting spacecraft against the corrosive effects of atomic oxygen. One of the payloads in the SpaceX Dragon's unpressurized "trunk" is the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (Opals), a communications testbed developed and built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that is designed to study high-data-rate communications between space and the ground using laser light.
The experiment is mounted on a standard ISS flight releasable attachment mechanism (FRAM), and includes a laser, off-the-shelf avionics and a custom power board in a container pressurized with air at 1 atmosphere. Mounted on the Fram outside the protective container is a gimbaled optical device that includes an uplink camera and a laser collimator to narrow the laser beam on the downlink. Both would be susceptible to contamination.
Also in the unpressurized trunk, and susceptible to contamination, are four off-the-shelf, high-definition cameras that will be mounted outside the station as the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment. HDEV is protected against space temperatures but not the radiation that affects its cameras' detectors, which will allow engineers to determine which commercial cameras work best in space for live online video streaming.
Everything You Need to Know About Dream Chaser, America's Next Space Plane
Joe Pappalardo - Popular Mechanics
Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president and head of SNC's Space Systems, has a better than front-row seat for America's historic private space movement—he's a player on the main stage. Sirangelo heads one of three companies that is designing spacecraft to bring humans into orbit for NASA.
You submitted a proposal to NASA in late January for the next phase of the commercial crew program—taking astronauts to the International Space Station. What will the contract look like if you win?
Two things that happen in the contract. One is that we, working together with NASA, would produce and certify a vehicle that's ready for flight. So if it was an airplane, for example, it would be the FAA certifying a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The second part was to bid on up to six flights ... taking crew and critical cargo back and forth to the space station. We expect the service to last probably at least a decade or so.
Will this contract be structured much differently than your earlier ones?
The new contract is a typical government federal acquisition contract. However, it varies in a couple of key ways. The companies continue to own the vehicle. So we are the owner of Dream Chaser, we provide a service to NASA. NASA isn't buying the vehicle. In the past, NASA paid companies to develop the space shuttle for it but then NASA owned the space shuttle. This is the opposite of that. NASA is paying a portion of price, we're paying a significant portion as well, to develop the vehicle.
So you could use this contract with other customers as a foundation of a new industry?
That gives us the opportunity to sell the capacity to do more launches, and bring more jobs and more resources to the United States. Right now NASA is buying that service from Russia at approximately $70 million a seat. The intent here, with this program, is really to bring that development, those jobs, and that effort back into the United States so that the U.S. would launch its astronauts on a space system built and designed in the United States and launched from the United States.
The contract is set at a fixed price. What happens if NASA says, "Hey, listen, we need to test this component or system." Do you have to pay for that extra cost?
Embedded in the proposal is a smaller amount of money, I think $150 million, to be set aside as a contingency fund in the event that NASA wanted to ask for more testing. That's a really good thing because frankly, none of us really knows what the future's going to look like. I mean, we're another human spaceflight vehicle for God's sake. I'm in the center of it; I've been here since the very beginning and I still can't do that. So I think we all have to realize that there's going to be a lot of learning still to come. I think they've gone about this in a very smart and very proactive way.
So how's the vehicle?
Our first vehicle was our version of the Enterprise, if you know the space shuttle program. Enterprise was built never to go to orbit, but to do all the atmospheric tests. We built our version of that, and that was the vehicle that flew a few months ago. It's going to fly continuously this year. But that vehicle's never going to go to orbit. The biggest thing it was going to do was to create a database [describing] how does this fly.
So we started our flight-test program. [In March], we'll be releasing a press release that confirms that all the data that we were seeking to take from the flight. We actually got more data than we expected. NASA had certified all the flight characteristics of the vehicle already from the flights that we've done. Basically, the vehicle flies like it's supposed to fly. And for someone who's an engineer and an aircraft designer, that's probably the best news.
The drop-test flight was a success, even though the landing gear broke at the end of it?
The incident with the landing gear was regrettable, no doubt. But it was fairly isolated. One of the compromises in building a vehicle that wasn't going to go to orbit was that we said, we're not going to waste the time to design a full-on landing-gear system right now. That's being designed for the orbital vehicle. For the purpose of what we need, we can borrow an aircraft landing gear, which is what we did from a plane called the F-5, which has tens of thousands of landings around the world. So we actually used existing landing gear ... and one of the two landing gears didn't deploy properly, and when it didn't deploy, the vehicle wound up skidding off the runway. It sustained no permanent damage, and the same vehicle is now being outfitted for the next level of flight tests, which will be higher, faster, and with people. The cause of the problem was ... some contamination in the hydraulic fluid, [small pieces of metal] that was pumped into the vehicle. That hung the gear up just long enough so that it didn't deploy fast enough, the one side. [But] we got perfection from the flight, which was really the more important.
Dream Chaser is described as a mini-shuttle, but does that description make sense?
Interestingly enough, even though we're a fraction of the size of the shuttle, we have more pressurized space inside our vehicle than the shuttle did. And that means more room for people.
The way I characterize it is the shuttle is sort of like the big moving truck that takes you from New York to Florida. It has a cab up front and a huge back to take all the big pieces and all your furniture and things. And that's what was needed to build the space station and get up into space. Once you're in Florida, you don't want to be around town in that thing, so you have an SUV. We're sort of the SUV for space. We can put the seats down and take all cargo. We can actually fly without a pilot.
Because Dream Chaser is smaller than the shuttle, does that mean it doesn't need those long runways to come back down?
We're planning to bring the vehicle back to different places around the country. Because we have no hazardous material on board, our engines and our systems are nontoxic, we can actually land in any airport that can take a 737. And we can fly home inside a cargo plane. Unlike the shuttle, we don't need a special carrier. It's actually movable by truck if we wanted it to.
The idea here—and obviously we have to work through a lot of different permissions—is, wouldn't it be terrific if we brought America's space program to America? And instead of having people come to see the shuttle land in Florida or California, we could plan landings on our return trips to different places around the country where those states or the universities or the high schools could bring the students out and get to see the space program. And wouldn't that be a terrific thing to spark the next generation and education, if people could actually experience firsthand what space is like?
How is the integration with the launch vehicle, the Atlas V, coming along?
Yeah, it's a good question. We made a decision now, almost six and a half years ago, to use the Atlas V for our human spaceflights. That's based on the fact that the Atlas is the most successful and prolific U.S. rocket. There have been more than 36, I think, flights of the Atlas V and more than 100 flights of the Atlas family. And every one of the Atlas V's has performed perfectly. If we're going to bring humans to space, and we're going to develop a certification plan, one of the best ways to start that is to start with something that's pretty solid underneath you. That's why we worked out a relationship with ULA (United Launch Alliance).
How do we mate the Dream Chaser to the Atlas? The main body is a device we call the Elvis, LVIS, which is the launch-vehicle interface system. Basically, it's the connector point between Dream Chaser and the Atlas V.
We're flying on top. We learned from the shuttle not to go on the sides. That eliminates all or many of the issues that the shuttle had. [Editor's note: This includes debris coming off the launch vehicle and damaging the spacecraft, which doomed one shuttle during reentry.] But it also allows us to fly off of the rocket and abort. Our abort system is internal to the vehicle, so that if there's a problem, we detach, we fly off of the rocket, and we land on the shuttle landing strip a few miles away. And if we don't abort, we actually carry all that power to space. That allows us to fly around and do things in space.
We use our own rocket motors inside Dream Chaser—what we call the hybrid rocket motors. These are the motors that won the X Prize for Spaceship One. It's the motor system that's being used by Virgin Galactic, and it's the motor system we'll use on Dream Chaser. The motors are made of rubber, and the gas that we use is nitrous oxide, so it's effectively recycled tires and laughing gas is the system. That sounds silly, but it's actually a damn good motor and does what it's supposed to do. It's stable, it's neutral, it can't explode. And it's nontoxic, so we can bring it home and fly it into an airport anywhere in the country without any issues.
How does the Dream Chaser's NASA heritage help you?
NASA started this idea with something called the HL 20, which was going to be the crew rescue vehicle for the space station. And they worked on this design for a number of years. And then the space station went down to a small crew, and they put this vehicle aside. We licensed it out of NASA and took it on.
So, ULA brings the rocket. We're bringing the vehicle, which has now been under development with us for 10 years. And NASA actually developed for it for 10 years before us. So we have a vehicle that now has over 20 years of design work on it. And we have a rocket that has over 36, 37 flights already, will have over 40 by the time we use it. For space that's a pretty good heritage—about as good as you can get.
How does the rocket fly differently if it doesn't have a shroud, meaning the spacecraft is exposed on the tip?
One of the very first things we asked was, what happens if we put this vehicle with this shape on top of a rocket? It turns out the shroud isn't needed at all. The lifting body produces no lift in the normal flight of the rocket until it needs to produce lift, which is much later. The stresses of the launch actually get transferred through the vehicle into the adaptor and into the rocket. So in some ways [it] makes the rocket more stable because it focuses the energy right where it's supposed to be ... Our vehicle is intended to fly through and return to home, so the forces we have to go through to reenter are far greater than the forces of going out of orbit on the top of a rocket. So the vehicle's actually designed for the very difficult, challenging, and heat-inducing problems of return, which means the launch actually is not a significant issue.
The NASA private space program has been underfunded over the years, and some people wonder how many of the three entrants [Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada] will get money, and how much. What does that mean for the development of Dream Chaser?
A lot of people say, "Well, it seems like you got less than what they asked for." The truth of the matter is that this was the most successful funding year that we've ever had. And just to put it into perspective, the House of Representatives four years ago provided zero as their recommendation for the commercial crew. This year they agreed with the Senate to provide a number that was in excess of $600 million. It was one of only a handful of programs that actually has, over the last four years, consistently gotten more money each year.
[Some people think] the president requests a budget and we didn't get the what the president requested. Well, the truth of the matter is that virtually nothing gets what the president requests. What you want to look at is the growth from year to year, and the cohesiveness this year of the Senate and the House and the president all becoming pretty ingrained around the program. And the program got almost 25 percent more money this year than it did last year.
Everybody realizes we don't want to be putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the Russian space program forever. And I think that's what's driving us more than anything.
That may be true, but NASA's Space Launch System and James Webb Telescope got full funding.
Of course. SLS and Orion and the James Webb are all marquee programs and have a lot of political strength behind them. They got good money, and we're actually supportive of that. One of the unique parts of Dream Chaser is, it is not competitive with NASA's long-distance rocket or human spaceflight program. We're not going beyond earth with Dream Chaser. And therefore, we're complementary in many ways. That's why Lockheed has joined our team. Lockheed does the Orion program [now part of SLS]. And we're actually sharing lessons learned between Dream Chaser and Orion, which helps the government and might save some money for everybody in the future and makes us more seamless. Lockheed set up a second production line for Dream Chaser in its Louisiana operation, in the Michaud facility outside New Orleans. We're talking to them in terms of doing processing in the same building that Orion gets processed in.
There's no reason these programs can't coexist. They should coexist. And why not save the government money if we can? And why not use facilities that have already been qualified? Why would I want to go build my own facility in Texas or California if I've got one in Florida that already does the job?
Do you think more than one company will be funded? NASA's inspector general warned only one company could be funded.
Nobody knows the future. But we are committed to the program and we believe that NASA sees a good reason to have more than one type of vehicle in space. We don't have one kind of aircraft in the Air Force. We don't have one ship in the Navy. Having a lifting body, a piloted space plane alongside of other types of programs that do other things better than we could, I think that's what really drives this. And we're the only ones really doing that, from a human spaceflight point of view or from a science point of view.
I don't know what NASA's going to do. Personally, I think it will be more than one company. And I don't think it's going to be the half-award kind of thing. [Editor's note: This means funding one company fully, and another at half that amount, as some NASA officials have suggested.] I think it might be that the companies get staged differently on their schedule so that maybe the first couple of years Company A gets a little bit more money, and then it tapers off. And then Company B gets more money in the subsequent years.
I think we're probably the furthest ahead on the human spaceflight vehicle of the three companies. But none of us are really at the point where we can say, yeah, we're all ready to go. We're all still a couple of years away from that. So the idea that by August we're going to make a final down-select to one design when we're the only ones actually flying? It doesn't sound logical to me. But who knows? Sometimes illogical things happen.
What happens if you don't win?
We're going to be continuing our flight-test program this year. We announced that our first launch is November 2016. We bought the rocket to do that. That's going to happen regardless of what goes on with NASA. But the longer we stay in the program, the more mature the vehicle gets, the more likely we can use it for other types of programs. And that's really our goal, and that's why we're investing as much money and time as we are.
Looking at potential customers beyond NASA: Which comes first, the ability to reach orbit affordably, or the demand to go there? Or do they need to grow concurrently?
It's not just Congress that sees the concrete examples, right? It's the other potential markets, and there are three or four that we have been working on hard. And they're seeing the fact that we're real, too. And they know the rocket. Now they see the vehicle being built. By the end of this year, we'll have gone through a whole bunch more flight tests and advancement of the technology. We're in critical design review now with the program. So that certainly gives people a lot more confidence.
What markets are you were focusing on?
One is what we call the servicing market: the ability to repair, replace, refuel satellites that are already in existence in lower orbit. In this age where we don't have a lot of money, the idea of restoring something and repairing it to keep it flying for a number of years, as opposed to letting it burn up, might be something that could be really useful. And we're particularly suited for that because of the design. We can fly around and we can do EVAs [extra vehicular activities] out of the vehicle. And we can have robotics on it. [Then] there are satellites that didn't make it to their proper orbit. We might be able to help put them in the right orbit, or start to eliminate debris in the future, which is a big deal. There's a lot of space debris. If you saw the movie Gravity you saw a lot of that stuff going on. We can't fix all the stuff that's happening, but we can stop it from growing, much like we did with our environment around the world. By moving, by getting satellites out of orbit and accelerating their passing through the atmosphere, we could hopefully eliminate more potential satellites colliding with each other in the future. So that's one market.
The second market is the potential construction market. If the space station is going to continue, and NASA's talking about expanding and extending it, then there need to be upgrades and repairs to the station, maybe additional construction on the station. And we can certainly help.
The third market that we look at is the science market. Dream Chaser can conduct extended science in space with people for many weeks, or without people for potentially more than a year. While that work is being done on the space station, there's a fairly limited amount of space on the space station. But the inside of the Dream Chaser is about the same volume of one of the science modules on the space station. So we can do that kind of work.
And the really fascinating part is that we fly it home. So it's a self-contained laboratory. For the first time in history, you can bring your entire laboratory and your experiment back home and look at it in a matter of hours—and then re-outfit it and send it back up again.
We also think, as time goes on, there could be transportation to other destinations. You know, Bigelow is doing private space stations. We can certainly provide transportation to other places if there is an interest in doing that, or even as a free flyer for scientists or potential tourists who want to go to space and come home.
The Final Frontier of Marketing Stunts
Joshua Hunt - The New Yorker
On October 21, 2001, a pair of Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soyuz TM-33 rocket for the International Space Station, which orbits Earth two hundred and thirty miles above its surface. They were on a mission to film the first high-definition television commercial in outer space. Later, millions of Japanese television viewers saw the astronauts—one floating in the cable-strewn guts of the space station, the other calmly gazing at Earth through a small hatch window—sipping from bottles of Pocari Sweat, a popular, if curiously named, Japanese sports drink.
Last month, the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company, the manufacturer of Pocari Sweat, announced that it would once more send its flagship beverage into space. In October, 2015, the company plans to deposit a time capsule containing Pocari Sweat in a deep impression on the northeastern part of the moon. The capsule would have the distinction of being the first delivery of a commercial product on the moon.
The history of advertising is full of spectacular public-relations stunts. In 1903, a French sports magazine called L'Auto organized the first Tour de France to boost its circulation. On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in the Times, claiming to have purchased the Liberty Bell to reduce the national debt. (It hadn't; the ad was an April Fool's Day joke.) Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, is well known for his antics, which have included crossing the Atlantic Ocean by hot-air balloon, in 1987.
But space remained a largely unexplored frontier for commercial endeavors—until recently, when space exploration began to be entangled with private enterprise at an increasingly rapid pace. The global financial crisis devastated funding for national space programs. NASA ended its shuttle program in 2011, and, since then, American astronauts have been hitching rides to the International Space Station with the Russians, on the same Soyuz rockets that have, since 2001, occasionally carried tourists into outer space.
To send Pocari Sweat into space, Otsuka will rely on a rocket called the Falcon 9, which is manufactured by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, in 2002. (Tad Friend has written about Musk for the magazine.) Otsuka will also be working with two startups: Astrobotic Technology, based in Pittsburgh, and Astroscale, of Singapore. The two companies, founded in 2008 and 2013, respectively, are among the first to invest heavily in technological innovations whose success will depend on the private-market potential of space travel, rather than on government contracts meant to promote scientific progress and national prestige.
Astrobotic, a robotics company that focusses on developing technologies for commercial lunar deliveries and exploration, will provide a lander for the Pocari Sweat delivery, known as the Griffin. (In doing so, the company hopes to win the Google Lunar X Prize, a twenty-million-dollar award for the first privately funded mission that lands a robot on the moon and sends it across five hundred metres of the lunar surface while transmitting high-definition video and images.)
The Griffin lander will carry a time capsule called the Lunar Dream, built by Astroscale, which will contain the beverage and will be left on the moon. It's an ironic task for the company, which develops technologies to clean up the space debris circulating near Earth. None of the companies involved in the Otsuka mission have disclosed the cost of the project, but Astrobotic's advertised rates for commercial lunar delivery are more than half a million dollars per pound.
People have been hurling similar messages in bottles into outer space for a long time. In 1972, NASA sent the Pioneer 10 space probe on the first course outside the solar system, and a year later the Pioneer 11 became the first to reach Saturn; each carried a six-by-nine-inch gold-anodized aluminum plaque depicting a map of the solar system, with Earth's location marked, and illustrations of nude male and female figures. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, sent to space by NASA in 1977, each transported gold-plated copper phonograph records, complete with a stylus and etchings indicating playback instructions, along with the inscription "to the makers of music—all worlds, all times." Recorded on each disk were works by Beethoven, Mozart, the Chinese zither master Guan Pinghu, the Indian classical vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, and the rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry, among others, as well as greetings in fifty-five languages.
More recently, in 2011, NASA's Juno spacecraft carried, on its five-year journey to Jupiter, specially made Lego figurines of the Roman god Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, each cast in aluminum, to endure the extreme conditions of space travel. There is a Chinese story, believed to be more than five hundred years old, about a bureaucrat named Wan Hu, who vanished in a cloud of smoke and fire after stepping aboard a spacecraft made from a chair, kites, and forty-seven bamboo stems packed with dynamite; since then, it seems, space has become a curio shelf.
The U.S. fascination with projecting its culture into space nearly reached grotesque proportions in 1993, when an American company called Space Marketing, Inc., attempted to raise funds for an illuminated billboard, roughly the size of the moon, in low orbit. It would be made from Mylar and would be visible from Earth. The venture failed, and led to legislation banning U.S. companies from advertising in space; this was later amended to permit "unobtrusive" sponsorships and product placement. That allowed Pizza Hut, in 2001, to pay a million dollars to deliver a vacuum-sealed pizza to astronauts aboard the International Space Station; a few years earlier, in 1997, Tnuva, a dairy company based in Israel, had filmed a commercial for milk aboard the Russian space station Mir.
These enterprises have often relied heavily on government programs and equipment, like the special high-definition television cameras that Japan's National Space Development Agency loaned Otsuka for the shooting of the 2001 Pocari Sweat commercial. The latest Pocari Sweat project marks a shift toward all-private business ventures in outer space, and while this may seem, at first, to be prohibitively expensive for advertisers, the cost of putting a bottle of Pocari Sweat on the moon will be significantly less than the four million dollars that companies paid to run a thirty-second advertisement during this year's Super Bowl.
A spokesman for Otsuka said that the company hopes not only to make Pocari Sweat the first sports drink landed on a celestial body but also to convince people that "life on the moon could become a reality sometime soon." As far that goes, Otsuka and its collaborators might have chosen a destination with a more appropriate name. Astrobotic's Griffin lander will deposit its payload in a sunken plain called Lacus Mortis, which, in Latin, means "lake of death."
Part 1 of 5
How America could once again put men on the moon
It's time to return to the moon, former NASA division chief says
(Grush is the former propulsion and power division chief at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston)
Close your eyes. You see that shimmering, veiny darkness that most people see, right? Not me. I see the moon.
It's the closest otherworldly body to us, making it the least challenging to explore of all the planets, moons and asteroids in our solar system.
It's an opportunity for humans to establish a permanent presence off Earth -- a moon base for scientists or a colony for all of humanity.
It could facilitate planet-wide cooperation among Earth's nations in the pursuit of an answer to life's biggest question: "Why are we here?"
Why go back to the moon? I say, all of the above.
The prospect of establishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a game-changer for the human race. If we can make it there, we could start to understand what it really takes -- from both the design and human survival perspective -- to live on a foreign body.
The challenges will be difficult, yet inspiring. A permanent presence will enable us to accelerate our research into the origin of the moon, and eventually to build a launchpad for most of our scientific exploration of the solar system and galaxy. And beyond.
I spent my whole career working for NASA, and I had the privilege of leading the propulsion and power group at the Johnson Space Center for a short period.
But I chose not to continue.
The gap between the end of the space shuttle program and the next major U.S. space endeavor seemed as wide as the Grand Canyon. We shut down the program with only a third of the shuttles' design capabilities being utilized. This move started a brain drain, causing many employees from both our space industrial complex and NASA to retire or find jobs elsewhere.
The initial decision to cancel the shuttle program was meant to create funding for our return to the moon. It was a noble goal, but then we made another decision: to terminate the nascent moon program and replace it with a mission to an asteroid.
An asteroid mission would be a good show, but it would do nothing to further exploration and expansion into our solar system.
Still, there is hope.
Even with the cancellation of the new moon program, NASA continued developing the Orion, a new lunar capsule, along with a heavy lift vehicle to carry it into space.
But there is no mission of substance currently planned for these assets.
In addition, there is a commercial vehicle initiative that is doing some good for the country, and increased competition between companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance will help enable lunar transportation infrastructure.
We can utilize these initiatives and quickly structure a program to go back to the moon -- this time for good. With recent events in the Ukraine and our dependency on the Russians for transportation to the space station, it's even more important to re-ignite our space program.
I'll present a series of articles this week that will expand a vision for the moon, explaining the physics of what it takes to get there and the economics of whether the nations of Earth can afford a permanent presence. I'll touch on why the moon, not Mars, should be our next destination, and I'll give my thoughts on how to rework the space industry and NASA after terminating the shuttle program.
Now try it again. Close your eyes and look at the sparkling darkness in your mind. Imagine looking at our moon and seeing our permanent base on another worldly body. It would be truly amazing, and a huge milestone in human history.
And we can do it.
Part 2 of 5
China's moon rover a wake-up call, former NASA division chief says
The telephone. The light bulb. The automobile, airplane, commercial airliner and television. Interstate highways, modern weapon systems, computers. The cellphone.
The U.S. has led in major technological advances in the 19th and 20th centuries, inventing, enhancing or perfecting many small steps and giant leaps. So why shouldn't we continue to lead in space exploration -- including establishing a permanent human presence beyond our Earth?
Recently, China landed an unmanned rover on the moon, although the country appears to have lost contact with the vehicle and the outcome is hazy. I applaud any country that wants to explore space and further our understanding of our solar system. China has come a long way since the Mao Zedong era. It has embraced capitalism -- though it still needs to embrace democracy and increase individual freedom.
But I don't want to cede the moon to China.
American achievements have made our lives better and safer and have helped to strengthen our children's advancements in technological excellence. Americans are the greatest competitors in history. We want to be first -- we don't like to lose. And, I contend, we and the world's populations are better for it. Put simply, we make the rest of the world rise to our level if they want to compete.
Without our leadership, China's ambitious moon initiative may establish it as the "go-to" nation for space exploration. Many nations of the world privately say they want the moon to be the next step in space exploration -- but they can't get there on their own. They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead. China and the U.S. are likely the only nations on earth that can do so. Russia seems to have lost its passion for human space flight; to my knowledge, the country hasn't designed any major new human spacecraft hardware in over a decade.
If the U.S. is unwilling to step into the leadership role, these nations will turn to China.
But what is China's objective for its moon missions? What is its vision? Is it only for national pride? Do the Chinese want to establish themselves as the world's leader in space? Do they plan to bring in other nations? Some reports have even suggested their intentions are to militarize the moon.
If such a thing were possible, could U.S. missiles protect the country with a three- or four-day notice of a missile strike off the moon, which would mean a far higher velocity attack than missiles launched from Earth -- with no initial heat signature to launch an intercept missile at?
Today, Congress has directed NASA to develop the Apollo-like Orion capsule and to work on a heavy lift launch system, both worthy goals and elements critical to a return to the moon. NASA also is working on test vehicles such as Johnson Space Center's Morpheus, which are training the future space engineers needed for a Lunar Lander design and developing autonomous landing technology to land safely on the Moon's surface. But even with all these projects, NASA and the U.S. are focused on asteroid missions that will take decades to achieve limited return. The Chinese challenge should force a reconsideration of near-term objectives in order to maintain our leadership in space exploration.
If we choose not to reach toward the moon, we will lose that position.
Part 3 of 5
How to return to the moon in just four years
What if I told you there was a relatively easy way to get Americans back on the moon?
To build a program to take humans back to the moon takes infrastructure and effort -- but a combination of NASA know-how and private enterprise could make it possible in the next few years.
NASA has made significant progress on Orion, a capsule like the Apollo-era ones that carried men to the moon in the '60s and '70s. It still has a ways to go, but with proper funding a flight in the next three or four years is doable.
The biggest obstacle is the lack of a rocket, called a super heavy launch vehicle, to lift it off the planet. NASA is working on one, called the Space Launch System, but the agency is constrained by its budget and the likelihood of it flying in that time frame is slim.
But there's an interim solution: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which will have its maiden flight this year and can supposedly launch up to 53 metric tons into orbit. This is a huge increase over current vehicles such as the Delta heavy, which can carry 23 tons, and Ariane 5, which can haul 21. Plus the Falcon Heavy's advertised cost is $150 million or less, which is extremely cheap as space-going vehicles go.
The scientists and engineers in the '60s and '70s who sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and 12 others to the moon had no one to copy or learn from when performing this amazing feat. They used a massive, single-launch rocket called Saturn to carry the Apollo capsule and then speed it to the moon. The Falcon Heavy can't launch humans in a single mission to the moon as NASA did in the Apollo days, but it can easily carry the astronauts, lunar landers and thrusters in fewer than five missions.
This would require a third stage, or "moon injection stage," to propel the vehicles and astronauts to the moon.
Bear with me: Since chemical propulsion is limited in its ability to propel us to orbit and other worldly bodies, rockets have multiple stages to get rid of tank weight as they progress toward their targets. Propellant and tankage dominate the weight of these vehicles -- at least in current designs. How many stages there are and how they burn is defined by the maker.
The Falcon Heavy's third stage would be similar to but bigger than the Centaur upper stage from United Launch Alliance (ULA), which is currently used on the Atlas launch vehicle. Centaur weighs less dry as a percentage of total fully loaded weight than any other upper stage -- and weight is king.
Centaur optimizes it's weight better than any other upper stage. Its hardware mass -- dry, that is, meaning without any fuel -- is a lower percentage of a fully loaded vehicle than any other current vehicle that uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
ULA is jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed and has been the major launch provider for the military for many years. SpaceX and ULA are major competitors -- but they could come together for this stage, since ULA is an expert in lightweight tank design.
In a four-launch scenario, the lander would precede the crew to the moon. The first two launches would be a moon injection stage followed by a lunar lander. These two vehicles would rendezvous in Earth's orbit before the moon injection stage would send the lander ahead to the moon. The next two Falcon launches would carry a second moon injection stage and then the crew in their capsule/service module. After a similar boost in a moon-injection stage, they would meet up with the lander in lunar orbit.
The rest of the mission would be like the Apollo mission -- Americans on the moon, once again taking giant leaps for mankind.
Based on SpaceX estimates, the cost for these four launches would be $600 million. And that's for a human mission; a cargo-only mission would take just two launches and could deliver 8 metric tons to the lunar surface for $300 million.
To get astronauts to the moon would require the Apollo-like service module and lander. NASA's Orion program has worked on a service module, and the lander has made significant progress over the last few years within NASA. These programs could share many of the same propulsion components if jointly developed together.
The crew habitat of the lander would be the biggest challenge. But NASA's knowledge of long-term human support systems should give this part of the project a jump-start. The need would be to keep the lander and service module weights within the moon injection stages' boost capability. Studies suggest this is entirely doable.
The service module and lander vehicles should cost less than the launch vehicle's cost of $600 million. Add in management, operations, astronaut training and so on and the total operational cost per mission could fall under $1.5 billion -- with an eventual target of an even $1 billion per mission. This is less than half the cost of an Apollo mission, which you would expect with the vast increase in technology since the '60s.
There are options for lowering cost further. SpaceX's heavy lift vehicle uses a less than optimum fuel for its second stage, to share components across stages and lower costs. But the moon injection stage would have to use oxygen and hydrogen for fuel to maximize performance. NASA and SpaceX could evaluate a joint moon injection stage and Falcon second stage design that share many components. This might boost the current lift capability and drop the number of fights needed, saving even more money.
This approach has a chance of sending humans to the moon in this decade. If not, definitely early in the next. Our satellite is easily within our reach -- and for far less than you might think.
Part 4 of 5
Shoot for the moon: How America can lead the world back
The International Space Station is the most complex technological marvel the world has ever built. A floating space base that orbits 240 miles above the planet -- at 17,500 miles per hour -- it shows what humanity can accomplish when we work together.
Simply put, it's remarkable.
The ISS can define a path for humanity to return to the moon. China can choose either to compete or join us. But regardless, the U.S. can lead the initiative.
The U.S. should strategically position itself to own the transportation system that takes humans back to the moon. He who owns this segment has the most leverage for how a lunar base is built ... and how it is used. The fact that we cannot currently launch our own astronauts to the ISS should be fact enough to make this case -- and current events in the Ukraine only amplify this concern.
A system comprising NASA's Orion capsule, SpaceX heavy lift rockets and a special third stage are the planet's best bet for getting back to the moon -- and it's a U.S. system through and through.
The international science community will contribute heavily to an initial mobile base or a permanent settlement for both design and manufacture. The U.S. would build some surface systems on the moon as well, but most of our expenses would be tied up in the transportation system, one that countless veterans and upstarts – new kids on the block – continue to refine and improve.
Boeing, Lockheed, United Launch Alliance and others have established highly reliable hardware with proven track records. Newcomers like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, along with smaller companies like Masten, Armadillo Aerospace, Orbital and Ecor, bring passion and fresh insights to the table.
The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries in the world with this level of drive and innovation in space propulsion.
Are travel to the ISS and a moon base (at some point) the only reasons humans go to space? In my opinion, there currently is no business case for sending humans to space for anything else. Virgin Galactic may be selling seats, but it doesn't go into orbit; it goes just above the outer atmosphere. Besides, tourism will be practical only with a lower launch cost. SpaceX seems to be committed to reducing costs, and a moon program will only help it accomplish this goal.
We the people -- the United States government -- are currently the only customers for space flight. NASA, as our agent, must figure a way to balance those companies that help it, striving for the right mixture of veterans versus new kids. They have already made major strides with their commercial procurement initiatives.
But if NASA makes lowering launch costs its highest priority, escaping the bonds that hold us to Earth will be financially feasible. We don't do this by controlling the design so much as the frequency -- we are the customer, after all. Two human and two cargo missions a year to the moon would put 12 additional heavy vehicles into the yearly launch manifest -- four rocket launches each for the human mission, two for each cargo mission. This should continue to drive the price down.
The biggest obstacle to returning to the moon is we the people and our government. Congress and the administration worry annually about the cost of a lunar program and agency. They like to have consistent year-over-year funding with small, predictable increases for inflation. But life doesn't work that way. With a new project, costs start off slowly and ramp up to a peak year before trailing off at the end of design. The government must be willing to ramp up funding in the peak design years or risk carrying a standing army of design engineers in the early years. This is the main reason many large government projects escalate in cost.
Contractors should be given very strong incentives to minimize the cost of a lunar mission, even if this drives up budgets in the early years. This will ultimately drive down the total program cost, because the cost of flying your missions will be at the lowest possible level.
To some degree this was done with the ISS commercial launch service procurements, but those were much lower-scale procurements.
If Congress budgets accordingly, it can be done.
In addition, Congress would need to resist the urge to force pet parts of the program to a particular state or NASA center. This also can be a huge cost escalator. Just give NASA the goal to spread the wealth.
Part 5 of 5
Making a moon base: Why now is the time
The United States has ended two World Wars, pioneered a computer revolution and embarked on the greatest adventure to date by having humans walk on the moon. I want to see us continue in this great leadership role. We as a nation and the world as a whole are better for it.
The next great challenge is a familiar one: The U.S. must lead the world in allowing humans to break the bonds that hold us to our Earth.
If we don't rise to this challenge, this century may be known as the Chinese Century rather than the second century of America. I have no problem with other countries being major contributors; I just want us to lead.
The development of a lunar base could be a catalyst for lowering our launch cost to space and accelerating the development of automation and robotics. And there are probably countless spinoffs that I did not capture.
If America doesn't step up to the plate, China's ambitions for the moon may establish it as the "go-to" nation for space exploration. Many nations of the world privately say they want the moon to be the next step in space exploration -- but they can't get there on their own. They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead.
SpaceX's heavy launch vehicle could be an interim launch solution to make this vision happen -- and it happens to be at the right price point. NASA spends about $7-8 billion on human space flight today. $2 or 3 billion goes to the International Space Station. NASA's infrastructure also takes a large chunk, including deep space communication, but that leaves around $3 billion for a lunar initiative. It's on the low side, but good enough.
This money is currently being spent on infrastructure development that could support a variety of missions, such as the asteroid mission that the administration is currently evaluating. It could also support a lunar initiative if we re-target the moon.
I'd love to go to Mars as well, but as a designer of space vehicles, I know that a lunar initiative is much more feasible from a cost and time standpoint. And offshoots could have profound benefits for more distant forays into space.
Development cost is probably the biggest hurdle. Congress and the administration must be willing to ramp up NASA's budget by $1 or $2 billion during the development years to make this initiative feasible. Remember that a large chunk of NASA's annual budget of around $17 billion is to open the doors and do major scientific exploration. A marginal increase of $2 billion would have huge productivity gains.
And NASA would continue to be less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total U.S. budget.
With the help of the other nations of the world, a much more comprehensive lunar initiative could be planned. But America's strategic interest should be in the transportation system.
This doesn't preclude other nations from supplying redundant transportation vehicles.
I ask the president and Congress to re-visit our direction and vision for human space missions to maintain U.S. leadership in space, with all the education and technological advantages that entails. This seems especially pertinent in light of the recent Chinese landing on the moon.
The world of prosperity and freedom shown in many science fiction stories is just around the corner. Let's unite the countries of the world in this initiative. Let's make it a reality.
Ames' flying robot and airline traffic projects in spotlight
NASA chief's visit to Mountain View draws attention to innovations
Daniel DeBolt – Mountain View Voice
In a tour of NASA Ames on Monday, NASA chief Charles Bolden stopped to listen to engineers discuss several projects that apparently needed some attention: a flying smart-phone based robot to do inspections on the International Space Station and NASA's work on a new satellite-based flight control system for U.S. airports, to replace World War II-era radar technology.
Bolden suggested that such a system would have kept Malaysia airlines flight 370 from disappearing over the Pacific Ocean on March 8.
"Everybody is wondering, 'What if?'" Bolden said. "'What if?' won't help Malaysia airlines but we may not have another case like this. Satellites, without a doubt, will help. The system we have now is ground-based. There are no ground-based systems over the ocean."
Engineers said that the new system could save airlines at 35 major airports $100 million to $200 million in fuel costs because the more efficient computer-based system would mean airplanes would not have to push back from the terminal and wait for takeoff with engines idling.
"It really is an unprecedented contribution of NASA technology," said John Robinson, lead engineer for the project, known as ATD-1. He asked Bolden to spread awareness about the work with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Robinson said that when he tells people he works for NASA in aeronautics, no one knows NASA does aeronautics. That sentiment wasn't lost on Bolden, who remarked, "The big A in NASA is for aeronautics, not administration."
Flying robots to aid astronauts
Bolden made a stop in the Ames Intelligent Robotics department to check in on the "Spheres" program, which is developing a free-flying robot to be used to monitor, and maybe even someday repair, spacecraft. It's one of many projects at NASA that are making use of smart phones, such as the PhoneSat program which turns them into satellites. It has many elements needed for a free-flying robot, including its camera.
"The smart phone is a really powerful platform -- just add propulsion to it and you're good," said one NASA researcher before Bolden arrived. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a flight processor that actually has the power of this cell phone," said another NASA engineer.
"Spheres is just a testbed to help us figure out what do we need to do to build a robot that can fly anywhere in the space station," said lead engineer Chris Provencher.
A prototype was shown floating over a large precision granite table, pushing itself around with computer controlled air jets on its spherical body.
Provencher told Bolden that the prototype uses a typical Android phone and operating system (Apple was said to be uninterested in helping NASA) with the SIM card removed for 'ultimate airplane mode" to prevent electronic interference. Other modifications include a coating over its glass to prevent shattering and alkaline batteries that won't catch fire on the space station.
"If there is a radiator leak or some type of damage you want to inspect you could have a free-flyer go out and inspect it," Provencher said. Or even further into the future: "Have a robot doing the repairs for you."
Google and Moffett
In a press conference, Bolden was asked how NASA benefits from its partnerships with Google at Ames.
"I think the city of Mountain View, hopefully, and the surrounding communities are going to be really happy," he said about the pending lease with a Google subsidiary for Moffett Field's airfield and hangars, including restoring Hangar One. "We're not giving over the federal land, but what people here will find, I hope, is they won't know the handover has been made because the operations that currently go on here at Moffett Field will continue. I'm sure there are great advantages for the Google family, which the company that won is a member of."
When asked by the Voice how NASA itself would benefit from the sort of research Google plans to do in hangars on the airfield, he rebuffed the question: "You would have to address that with Google." Bolden mentioned that he hoped that NASA funding that had been used to operate the airfield -- estimated at $7 million a year for Ames -- could go toward other Ames projects.
Orbital Drops Antitrust Lawsuit Against ULA
Dan Leone – Space News
Orbital Sciences Corp. is dropping an antitrust lawsuit filed in June against United Launch Alliance alleging that the Denver-based rocket maker illegally prevented Orbital from buying the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine, according to a statement filed March 20 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
"The parties will now undertake to negotiate a business resolution for Orbital's access to the RD-180 rocket engine, subject to all necessary approvals from the U.S. and Russian governments," Orbital said in the filing. "If a mutually agreeable resolution is not reached, Orbital will have the option to refile its lawsuit."
ULA, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, launches most U.S. government space missions, and virtually all U.S. national security payloads, aboard its Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets. The Atlas 5's main engine is the RD-180, which was developed by Russia's NPO Energomash under contract to Lockheed Martin and is sold exclusively to ULA by RD-Amross, a joint venture of Energomash and United Technologies Corp.
That exclusivity arrangement was at the heart of Orbital's antitrust complaint and is also the subject of a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Orbital is considering the RD-180 as a replacement for the AJ-26 engines that power the main stage of the company's Antares medium-lift rocket. Each Antares rocket uses two AJ-26 engines, which are actually Soviet-vintage NK-33 engines refurbished by Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, Calif.
Orbital has secured only enough AJ-26 engines for the eight cargo-delivery missions to the international space station the company owes NASA through 2016 under a $1.89 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract signed in 2008.
In a March 3 presentation to a conference organized by Raymond James investment advisers, Orbital Chief Financial Officer Garrett Pierce said the company was considering two or three alternatives to the AJ-26, all built in Russia.
In a quarterly earnings call in February, Orbital Chief Executive David W. Thompson said he expected the Antares engine dilemma to be resolved by the middle of this year.
That would help Orbital eliminate uncertainty about its engine situation in any response it provides to NASA's planned solicitation for follow-on cargo delivery services to the space station. NASA notionally plans for four to five such flights per year from 2017-2024.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 search tests limits of satellites
Joel Achenbach – The Washington Post
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has exposed the technological limits of satellites, which can see a license plate from space — if not necessarily read it — but struggle to find a missing jetliner.
These limits are shaped by physics, money and practicality. Military and commercial satellites are not closely observing and amassing data about the blank places on the map in lightly traveled seas — such as remote areas of the Indian Ocean thousands of miles from where Flight MH370 vanished from radar.
There's also a trade-off when scrutinizing the surface from space: You can go wide or you can go deep, but you can't do both. The most sophisticated spy satellites are essentially looking down straws, trying to resolve small details in a narrow field of view.
"Imagine driving down the street at 70 miles an hour with a pair of binoculars and trying to look at every single mailbox," said Brian Weeden, technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to space policy. "You can't slew your binoculars around fast enough."
The satellites may yet prove triumphant in this baffling case. There is tantalizing imagery of possible debris from the missing plane that has been made public by Australian officials, taken by WorldView-2, a high-resolution commercial satellite circling the planet at an altitude of 470 miles.
It's unclear what's in the images. The primary object, if it is an object and not some trick of light, was seen on March 16 — eight days after Flight MH370 disappeared — in the southern Indian Ocean about 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia.
Nothing has been spotted by aircraft or satellites in that location in the days since, officials have said. If the mystery object is part of the plane, it means the Boeing 777 flew from the Equator almost halfway to the South Pole.
"It looks to me like possibly just an exceptionally large patch of sun glint," said John Amos, president of SkyTruth, which uses satellite imagery to raise awareness of environmental issues. "We're down in the subtle and ambiguous weeds of human image analysis, where we desperately are trying to find patterns in what we're seeing."
The company that owns WorldView-2, Colorado-based DigitalGlobe, said the lengthy period of analysis between the day the satellite obtained the image and when the Australians released it to the public is a reflection of the daunting nature of combing through so much data.
"Our constellation of five high-resolution imaging satellites captures more than 3 million square kilometers of earth imagery each day, and this volume of imagery is far too vast to search through in real time without an idea of where to look," the company said in a statement.
DigitalGlobe has also used a subsidiary company, Tomnod, to crowdsource the search for the plane among volunteers around the world who have looked over the company's imagery.
"The efforts of millions of online volunteers around the world allowed us to rule out broad swaths of ocean with some certainty," DigitalGlobe said.
WorldView-2 was launched in 2009 on a polar orbit. As the satellite goes around the planet, pole to pole, every 100 minutes, the planet turns beneath it. Over the course of a day, the spacecraft will pass over most of the surface, including the southern Indian Ocean.
DigitalGlobe calls WorldView-2 "the first high-resolution 8-band multispectral commercial satellite." The satellite can see something as small as 20 inches across.
A satellite has also proved crucial to understanding what might have happened to the plane after it vanished from radar.
About three hours after Flight MH370 went missing, Inmarsat, a British-based satellite company, began tracking the Boeing 777 through an on-board data system called Aero Classic. Every hour, Inmarsat's satellites would try to communicate with the aircraft, pinging it with a computerized question asking, in effect, "Are you there?"
For several hours, Flight MH370 responded "Yes, I am," notifying engineers on the ground with a so-called handshake that the plane was still powered up.
Using that series of pings, Inmarsat engineers and other analysts were able to piece together two broad, arcing regions where the plane could have been located when it last communicated with the satellite.
"Our engineers looked at the time between the handshakes, and they realized that the object wasn't stationary under a satellite but moving away from it," Christopher McLaughlin, senior vice president of Inmarsat, said Thursday. "Over time, the engineers here recognized that there were a number of data points and that it had flown for several hours. We didn't know if it was on the northern or southern corridor."
An official close to the investigation, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, said American and British intelligence services checked with the governments of India, Russia and China, as well as U.S. military officials at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, to determine if any objects the size of a Boeing 777 had crossed into their airspace and if any jets had been scrambled to intercept an aircraft.
With no reports of an aircraft crossing into that airspace, investigators ruled out the northern route and turned their attention to the southern axis, pointing toward the Indian Ocean west of Australia.
Many nations have tasked their satellites to help in the search. NASA is contributing data from multiple scientific satellites as well as from a camera on the International Space Station. Patrick Ventrell, a National Security Council spokesman, said Thursday, "We have put every necessary resource that we have available at the disposal of the search process."
There are satellites in geostationary orbits that can see huge swaths of the planet, but they're 22,000 miles above the surface, and lack the resolution of the satellites in low Earth orbit.
"Weather satellites can see the whole world, but can't see anything much smaller than a hurricane," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who also runs a Web site tracking all the satellites currently in orbit.
Confounding the search is that no one is sure what, exactly, to look for.
"It's very hard to find something in the middle of the ocean," Weeden said. "We don't know the size and shape of the object we're looking for and there's lots of stuff in the ocean. There's debris from shipping — containers and other stuff blown overboard. There's natural stuff like trees and everything else."
And there's a lot of ocean out there.
"The Earth is big," said Weeden. "The Earth is really big."
Dayton's Air Force museum creates a compelling shuttle exhibit (with no shuttle)
Susan Glaser – Cleveland Plain Dealer
This is not a place for the claustrophobic.
You think of the space shuttle as a mammoth, high-flying hauling machine. And, at 122 feet long by 57 feet high, it is.
But peering into the flight deck of the new space shuttle exhibit at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, you see the living area for its human inhabitants — onboard for as many as 16 days — is a tiny part of the vehicle.
It's a perspective you won't get anywhere else.
For 30 years, the space shuttles relayed cargo — both human and man-made — to and from outer space. After the program was discontinued in 2011, NASA awarded its three soon-to-be mothballed shuttles to museums in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Shut out of the shuttle sweepstakes was Dayton's Air Force museum. But as a consolation prize, it received a crew compartment trainer, where hundreds of astronauts over three decades drilled before strapping into the real thing.
Inside, they simulated take-offs, practiced using controls, even learned how to use the escape hatch in case of an emergency.
The training compartment was transported to Dayton from the Johnson Space Center in Houston in the summer of 2012. Since then, Ohio-based Display Dynamics worked to create to-scale center and rear sections of the shuttle, including the payload bay and main engines. The entire display opened to the public late last month, inside the museum's massive Cold War Gallery.
The trainer offers a nearly identical reproduction of the shuttle's flight and mid decks, located within the "nose" of the orbiter, which housed the living quarters of the astronauts. Inside, you'll see 2,000 controls and instruments – plus hundreds of 2-inch squares of blue Velcro, which helped counter the effects of a loss of gravity.
The benefit of the reproduction: Visitors can get much closer to this "shuttle" than they can to the real ones, which are all elevated off the ground or otherwise off limits to museumgoers.
"What you get here is a chance to look inside," said museum curator Doug Lantry. "I think we've turned a disadvantage into an advantage here."
Visitors can walk up a ramp into the payload area, then peer into the flight deck, where commander and pilot manned the controls. The mid deck, just below the flight deck, is where the crew slept, exercised, ate – and went to the bathroom.
"Everyone's always interested in the bathroom," said the volunteer guide, as a crowd peered through a circular window and studied a contraption that functioned as a toilet, with handles, tubes and foot straps.
Among those inspecting the living space: Trevor and Linda Weir, along with 12-year-old Emilee, of nearby Kettering.
"We were kind of heartbroken when they didn't get Atlantis here," said Trevor. But the three agreed that Dayton's exhibit has something for visitors that other shuttle displays don't have: better access.
The three last summer visited Florida's Kennedy Space Center, where Atlantis is located. And though it's impressive, you can't get close to it, they said.
"It would have been nice to have the real thing, but this gives you a better appreciation for what it's like inside," said Linda.
Inside the payload area sits another new exhibit. Teal Ruby is a recently declassified Ronald Reagan-era satellite built in the early 1980s to detect hostile missile launches during the Cold War.
The satellite – it looks like a 6-foot-long foil-wrapped elaborate high school science project -- was supposed to be launched into space via the shuttle, but was delayed after the Challenger disaster in 1986. It was never used.
Also part of the new exhibit: a 60-seat amphitheater, or "learning node," where educational programs focusing on science, technology, engineering and math are already taking place. It's also where an introductory video is shown.
Four shuttle landing flight simulators are nearby, where would-be pilots use a joystick to bring the vehicle in for a safe landing (or, in my case, two spectacular crashes).
Eventually, there will be more displays here – space suits, tiles and other shuttle-related equipment, as well as more explanatory text that provides context for the Air Force's key role in the shuttle and other space-related achievements.
There's also a need for some mention of the two shuttle disasters, in 1986, when Challenger exploded during lift-off; and in 2003, when Columbia broke apart reentering the Earth's atmosphere. It would be helpful, too, to learn something about what's replacing the shuttles in the U.S. space program.
In 2016, the entire exhibit will be moved to the Air Force museum's new building, a 224,000-square-foot addition that will be located just south of the massive Cold War Gallery.
In addition to an expanded Space Gallery, the new building also will house planes and other aircraft currently located in the museum's presidential and research and development galleries, which are located apart from the main museum campus and require special access to visit.
Ground will be broken on the $35.4 million addition early this summer, said museum spokeswoman Sarah Swan.
But you don't need to wait until 2016 – or travel to Florida or Washington – to recall the accomplishments of the shuttle program. True, the vehicle on display in Dayton didn't travel into space. But it was an essential part of the program. For proof, just take a look inside the cramped cockpit.
END
You submitted a proposal to NASA in late January for the next phase of the commercial crew program—taking astronauts to the International Space Station. What will the contract look like if you win?Two things that happen in the contract. One is that we, working together with NASA, would produce and certify a vehicle that's ready for flight. So if it was an airplane, for example, it would be the FAA certifying a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The second part was to bid on up to six flights ... taking crew and critical cargo back and forth to the space station. We expect the service to last probably at least a decade or so.Will this contract be structured much differently than your earlier ones?The new contract is a typical government federal acquisition contract. However, it varies in a couple of key ways. The companies continue to own the vehicle. So we are the owner of Dream Chaser, we provide a service to NASA. NASA isn't buying the vehicle. In the past, NASA paid companies to develop the space shuttle for it but then NASA owned the space shuttle. This is the opposite of that. NASA is paying a portion of price, we're paying a significant portion as well, to develop the vehicle.So you could use this contract with other customers as a foundation of a new industry?That gives us the opportunity to sell the capacity to do more launches, and bring more jobs and more resources to the United States. Right now NASA is buying that service from Russia at approximately $70 million a seat. The intent here, with this program, is really to bring that development, those jobs, and that effort back into the United States so that the U.S. would launch its astronauts on a space system built and designed in the United States and launched from the United States.The contract is set at a fixed price. What happens if NASA says, "Hey, listen, we need to test this component or system." Do you have to pay for that extra cost?Embedded in the proposal is a smaller amount of money, I think $150 million, to be set aside as a contingency fund in the event that NASA wanted to ask for more testing. That's a really good thing because frankly, none of us really knows what the future's going to look like. I mean, we're another human spaceflight vehicle for God's sake. I'm in the center of it; I've been here since the very beginning and I still can't do that. So I think we all have to realize that there's going to be a lot of learning still to come. I think they've gone about this in a very smart and very proactive way.So how's the vehicle?Our first vehicle was our version of the Enterprise, if you know the space shuttle program. Enterprise was built never to go to orbit, but to do all the atmospheric tests. We built our version of that, and that was the vehicle that flew a few months ago. It's going to fly continuously this year. But that vehicle's never going to go to orbit. The biggest thing it was going to do was to create a database [describing] how does this fly.So we started our flight-test program. [In March], we'll be releasing a press release that confirms that all the data that we were seeking to take from the flight. We actually got more data than we expected. NASA had certified all the flight characteristics of the vehicle already from the flights that we've done. Basically, the vehicle flies like it's supposed to fly. And for someone who's an engineer and an aircraft designer, that's probably the best news.The drop-test flight was a success, even though the landing gear broke at the end of it?The incident with the landing gear was regrettable, no doubt. But it was fairly isolated. One of the compromises in building a vehicle that wasn't going to go to orbit was that we said, we're not going to waste the time to design a full-on landing-gear system right now. That's being designed for the orbital vehicle. For the purpose of what we need, we can borrow an aircraft landing gear, which is what we did from a plane called the F-5, which has tens of thousands of landings around the world. So we actually used existing landing gear ... and one of the two landing gears didn't deploy properly, and when it didn't deploy, the vehicle wound up skidding off the runway. It sustained no permanent damage, and the same vehicle is now being outfitted for the next level of flight tests, which will be higher, faster, and with people. The cause of the problem was ... some contamination in the hydraulic fluid, [small pieces of metal] that was pumped into the vehicle. That hung the gear up just long enough so that it didn't deploy fast enough, the one side. [But] we got perfection from the flight, which was really the more important.Dream Chaser is described as a mini-shuttle, but does that description make sense?Interestingly enough, even though we're a fraction of the size of the shuttle, we have more pressurized space inside our vehicle than the shuttle did. And that means more room for people.The way I characterize it is the shuttle is sort of like the big moving truck that takes you from New York to Florida. It has a cab up front and a huge back to take all the big pieces and all your furniture and things. And that's what was needed to build the space station and get up into space. Once you're in Florida, you don't want to be around town in that thing, so you have an SUV. We're sort of the SUV for space. We can put the seats down and take all cargo. We can actually fly without a pilot.Because Dream Chaser is smaller than the shuttle, does that mean it doesn't need those long runways to come back down?We're planning to bring the vehicle back to different places around the country. Because we have no hazardous material on board, our engines and our systems are nontoxic, we can actually land in any airport that can take a 737. And we can fly home inside a cargo plane. Unlike the shuttle, we don't need a special carrier. It's actually movable by truck if we wanted it to.The idea here—and obviously we have to work through a lot of different permissions—is, wouldn't it be terrific if we brought America's space program to America? And instead of having people come to see the shuttle land in Florida or California, we could plan landings on our return trips to different places around the country where those states or the universities or the high schools could bring the students out and get to see the space program. And wouldn't that be a terrific thing to spark the next generation and education, if people could actually experience firsthand what space is like?How is the integration with the launch vehicle, the Atlas V, coming along?Yeah, it's a good question. We made a decision now, almost six and a half years ago, to use the Atlas V for our human spaceflights. That's based on the fact that the Atlas is the most successful and prolific U.S. rocket. There have been more than 36, I think, flights of the Atlas V and more than 100 flights of the Atlas family. And every one of the Atlas V's has performed perfectly. If we're going to bring humans to space, and we're going to develop a certification plan, one of the best ways to start that is to start with something that's pretty solid underneath you. That's why we worked out a relationship with ULA (United Launch Alliance).How do we mate the Dream Chaser to the Atlas? The main body is a device we call the Elvis, LVIS, which is the launch-vehicle interface system. Basically, it's the connector point between Dream Chaser and the Atlas V.We're flying on top. We learned from the shuttle not to go on the sides. That eliminates all or many of the issues that the shuttle had. [Editor's note: This includes debris coming off the launch vehicle and damaging the spacecraft, which doomed one shuttle during reentry.] But it also allows us to fly off of the rocket and abort. Our abort system is internal to the vehicle, so that if there's a problem, we detach, we fly off of the rocket, and we land on the shuttle landing strip a few miles away. And if we don't abort, we actually carry all that power to space. That allows us to fly around and do things in space.We use our own rocket motors inside Dream Chaser—what we call the hybrid rocket motors. These are the motors that won the X Prize for Spaceship One. It's the motor system that's being used by Virgin Galactic, and it's the motor system we'll use on Dream Chaser. The motors are made of rubber, and the gas that we use is nitrous oxide, so it's effectively recycled tires and laughing gas is the system. That sounds silly, but it's actually a damn good motor and does what it's supposed to do. It's stable, it's neutral, it can't explode. And it's nontoxic, so we can bring it home and fly it into an airport anywhere in the country without any issues.How does the Dream Chaser's NASA heritage help you?NASA started this idea with something called the HL 20, which was going to be the crew rescue vehicle for the space station. And they worked on this design for a number of years. And then the space station went down to a small crew, and they put this vehicle aside. We licensed it out of NASA and took it on.So, ULA brings the rocket. We're bringing the vehicle, which has now been under development with us for 10 years. And NASA actually developed for it for 10 years before us. So we have a vehicle that now has over 20 years of design work on it. And we have a rocket that has over 36, 37 flights already, will have over 40 by the time we use it. For space that's a pretty good heritage—about as good as you can get.How does the rocket fly differently if it doesn't have a shroud, meaning the spacecraft is exposed on the tip?One of the very first things we asked was, what happens if we put this vehicle with this shape on top of a rocket? It turns out the shroud isn't needed at all. The lifting body produces no lift in the normal flight of the rocket until it needs to produce lift, which is much later. The stresses of the launch actually get transferred through the vehicle into the adaptor and into the rocket. So in some ways [it] makes the rocket more stable because it focuses the energy right where it's supposed to be ... Our vehicle is intended to fly through and return to home, so the forces we have to go through to reenter are far greater than the forces of going out of orbit on the top of a rocket. So the vehicle's actually designed for the very difficult, challenging, and heat-inducing problems of return, which means the launch actually is not a significant issue.The NASA private space program has been underfunded over the years, and some people wonder how many of the three entrants [Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada] will get money, and how much. What does that mean for the development of Dream Chaser?A lot of people say, "Well, it seems like you got less than what they asked for." The truth of the matter is that this was the most successful funding year that we've ever had. And just to put it into perspective, the House of Representatives four years ago provided zero as their recommendation for the commercial crew. This year they agreed with the Senate to provide a number that was in excess of $600 million. It was one of only a handful of programs that actually has, over the last four years, consistently gotten more money each year.[Some people think] the president requests a budget and we didn't get the what the president requested. Well, the truth of the matter is that virtually nothing gets what the president requests. What you want to look at is the growth from year to year, and the cohesiveness this year of the Senate and the House and the president all becoming pretty ingrained around the program. And the program got almost 25 percent more money this year than it did last year.Everybody realizes we don't want to be putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the Russian space program forever. And I think that's what's driving us more than anything.That may be true, but NASA's Space Launch System and James Webb Telescope got full funding.Of course. SLS and Orion and the James Webb are all marquee programs and have a lot of political strength behind them. They got good money, and we're actually supportive of that. One of the unique parts of Dream Chaser is, it is not competitive with NASA's long-distance rocket or human spaceflight program. We're not going beyond earth with Dream Chaser. And therefore, we're complementary in many ways. That's why Lockheed has joined our team. Lockheed does the Orion program [now part of SLS]. And we're actually sharing lessons learned between Dream Chaser and Orion, which helps the government and might save some money for everybody in the future and makes us more seamless. Lockheed set up a second production line for Dream Chaser in its Louisiana operation, in the Michaud facility outside New Orleans. We're talking to them in terms of doing processing in the same building that Orion gets processed in.There's no reason these programs can't coexist. They should coexist. And why not save the government money if we can? And why not use facilities that have already been qualified? Why would I want to go build my own facility in Texas or California if I've got one in Florida that already does the job?Do you think more than one company will be funded? NASA's inspector general warned only one company could be funded.Nobody knows the future. But we are committed to the program and we believe that NASA sees a good reason to have more than one type of vehicle in space. We don't have one kind of aircraft in the Air Force. We don't have one ship in the Navy. Having a lifting body, a piloted space plane alongside of other types of programs that do other things better than we could, I think that's what really drives this. And we're the only ones really doing that, from a human spaceflight point of view or from a science point of view.I don't know what NASA's going to do. Personally, I think it will be more than one company. And I don't think it's going to be the half-award kind of thing. [Editor's note: This means funding one company fully, and another at half that amount, as some NASA officials have suggested.] I think it might be that the companies get staged differently on their schedule so that maybe the first couple of years Company A gets a little bit more money, and then it tapers off. And then Company B gets more money in the subsequent years.I think we're probably the furthest ahead on the human spaceflight vehicle of the three companies. But none of us are really at the point where we can say, yeah, we're all ready to go. We're all still a couple of years away from that. So the idea that by August we're going to make a final down-select to one design when we're the only ones actually flying? It doesn't sound logical to me. But who knows? Sometimes illogical things happen.What happens if you don't win?We're going to be continuing our flight-test program this year. We announced that our first launch is November 2016. We bought the rocket to do that. That's going to happen regardless of what goes on with NASA. But the longer we stay in the program, the more mature the vehicle gets, the more likely we can use it for other types of programs. And that's really our goal, and that's why we're investing as much money and time as we are.Looking at potential customers beyond NASA: Which comes first, the ability to reach orbit affordably, or the demand to go there? Or do they need to grow concurrently?It's not just Congress that sees the concrete examples, right? It's the other potential markets, and there are three or four that we have been working on hard. And they're seeing the fact that we're real, too. And they know the rocket. Now they see the vehicle being built. By the end of this year, we'll have gone through a whole bunch more flight tests and advancement of the technology. We're in critical design review now with the program. So that certainly gives people a lot more confidence.What markets are you were focusing on?One is what we call the servicing market: the ability to repair, replace, refuel satellites that are already in existence in lower orbit. In this age where we don't have a lot of money, the idea of restoring something and repairing it to keep it flying for a number of years, as opposed to letting it burn up, might be something that could be really useful. And we're particularly suited for that because of the design. We can fly around and we can do EVAs [extra vehicular activities] out of the vehicle. And we can have robotics on it. [Then] there are satellites that didn't make it to their proper orbit. We might be able to help put them in the right orbit, or start to eliminate debris in the future, which is a big deal. There's a lot of space debris. If you saw the movie Gravity you saw a lot of that stuff going on. We can't fix all the stuff that's happening, but we can stop it from growing, much like we did with our environment around the world. By moving, by getting satellites out of orbit and accelerating their passing through the atmosphere, we could hopefully eliminate more potential satellites colliding with each other in the future. So that's one market.The second market is the potential construction market. If the space station is going to continue, and NASA's talking about expanding and extending it, then there need to be upgrades and repairs to the station, maybe additional construction on the station. And we can certainly help.The third market that we look at is the science market. Dream Chaser can conduct extended science in space with people for many weeks, or without people for potentially more than a year. While that work is being done on the space station, there's a fairly limited amount of space on the space station. But the inside of the Dream Chaser is about the same volume of one of the science modules on the space station. So we can do that kind of work.And the really fascinating part is that we fly it home. So it's a self-contained laboratory. For the first time in history, you can bring your entire laboratory and your experiment back home and look at it in a matter of hours—and then re-outfit it and send it back up again.We also think, as time goes on, there could be transportation to other destinations. You know, Bigelow is doing private space stations. We can certainly provide transportation to other places if there is an interest in doing that, or even as a free flyer for scientists or potential tourists who want to go to space and come home.The Final Frontier of Marketing StuntsJoshua Hunt - The New YorkerOn October 21, 2001, a pair of Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soyuz TM-33 rocket for the International Space Station, which orbits Earth two hundred and thirty miles above its surface. They were on a mission to film the first high-definition television commercial in outer space. Later, millions of Japanese television viewers saw the astronauts—one floating in the cable-strewn guts of the space station, the other calmly gazing at Earth through a small hatch window—sipping from bottles of Pocari Sweat, a popular, if curiously named, Japanese sports drink.Last month, the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company, the manufacturer of Pocari Sweat, announced that it would once more send its flagship beverage into space. In October, 2015, the company plans to deposit a time capsule containing Pocari Sweat in a deep impression on the northeastern part of the moon. The capsule would have the distinction of being the first delivery of a commercial product on the moon.The history of advertising is full of spectacular public-relations stunts. In 1903, a French sports magazine called L'Auto organized the first Tour de France to boost its circulation. On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in the Times, claiming to have purchased the Liberty Bell to reduce the national debt. (It hadn't; the ad was an April Fool's Day joke.) Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, is well known for his antics, which have included crossing the Atlantic Ocean by hot-air balloon, in 1987.But space remained a largely unexplored frontier for commercial endeavors—until recently, when space exploration began to be entangled with private enterprise at an increasingly rapid pace. The global financial crisis devastated funding for national space programs. NASA ended its shuttle program in 2011, and, since then, American astronauts have been hitching rides to the International Space Station with the Russians, on the same Soyuz rockets that have, since 2001, occasionally carried tourists into outer space.To send Pocari Sweat into space, Otsuka will rely on a rocket called the Falcon 9, which is manufactured by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, in 2002. (Tad Friend has written about Musk for the magazine.) Otsuka will also be working with two startups: Astrobotic Technology, based in Pittsburgh, and Astroscale, of Singapore. The two companies, founded in 2008 and 2013, respectively, are among the first to invest heavily in technological innovations whose success will depend on the private-market potential of space travel, rather than on government contracts meant to promote scientific progress and national prestige.Astrobotic, a robotics company that focusses on developing technologies for commercial lunar deliveries and exploration, will provide a lander for the Pocari Sweat delivery, known as the Griffin. (In doing so, the company hopes to win the Google Lunar X Prize, a twenty-million-dollar award for the first privately funded mission that lands a robot on the moon and sends it across five hundred metres of the lunar surface while transmitting high-definition video and images.)The Griffin lander will carry a time capsule called the Lunar Dream, built by Astroscale, which will contain the beverage and will be left on the moon. It's an ironic task for the company, which develops technologies to clean up the space debris circulating near Earth. None of the companies involved in the Otsuka mission have disclosed the cost of the project, but Astrobotic's advertised rates for commercial lunar delivery are more than half a million dollars per pound.People have been hurling similar messages in bottles into outer space for a long time. In 1972, NASA sent the Pioneer 10 space probe on the first course outside the solar system, and a year later the Pioneer 11 became the first to reach Saturn; each carried a six-by-nine-inch gold-anodized aluminum plaque depicting a map of the solar system, with Earth's location marked, and illustrations of nude male and female figures. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, sent to space by NASA in 1977, each transported gold-plated copper phonograph records, complete with a stylus and etchings indicating playback instructions, along with the inscription "to the makers of music—all worlds, all times." Recorded on each disk were works by Beethoven, Mozart, the Chinese zither master Guan Pinghu, the Indian classical vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, and the rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry, among others, as well as greetings in fifty-five languages.More recently, in 2011, NASA's Juno spacecraft carried, on its five-year journey to Jupiter, specially made Lego figurines of the Roman god Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, each cast in aluminum, to endure the extreme conditions of space travel. There is a Chinese story, believed to be more than five hundred years old, about a bureaucrat named Wan Hu, who vanished in a cloud of smoke and fire after stepping aboard a spacecraft made from a chair, kites, and forty-seven bamboo stems packed with dynamite; since then, it seems, space has become a curio shelf.The U.S. fascination with projecting its culture into space nearly reached grotesque proportions in 1993, when an American company called Space Marketing, Inc., attempted to raise funds for an illuminated billboard, roughly the size of the moon, in low orbit. It would be made from Mylar and would be visible from Earth. The venture failed, and led to legislation banning U.S. companies from advertising in space; this was later amended to permit "unobtrusive" sponsorships and product placement. That allowed Pizza Hut, in 2001, to pay a million dollars to deliver a vacuum-sealed pizza to astronauts aboard the International Space Station; a few years earlier, in 1997, Tnuva, a dairy company based in Israel, had filmed a commercial for milk aboard the Russian space station Mir.These enterprises have often relied heavily on government programs and equipment, like the special high-definition television cameras that Japan's National Space Development Agency loaned Otsuka for the shooting of the 2001 Pocari Sweat commercial. The latest Pocari Sweat project marks a shift toward all-private business ventures in outer space, and while this may seem, at first, to be prohibitively expensive for advertisers, the cost of putting a bottle of Pocari Sweat on the moon will be significantly less than the four million dollars that companies paid to run a thirty-second advertisement during this year's Super Bowl.A spokesman for Otsuka said that the company hopes not only to make Pocari Sweat the first sports drink landed on a celestial body but also to convince people that "life on the moon could become a reality sometime soon." As far that goes, Otsuka and its collaborators might have chosen a destination with a more appropriate name. Astrobotic's Griffin lander will deposit its payload in a sunken plain called Lacus Mortis, which, in Latin, means "lake of death."Part 1 of 5How America could once again put men on the moonIt's time to return to the moon, former NASA division chief saysGene Grush - FoxNews.com (Viewpoint)(Grush is the former propulsion and power division chief at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston)Close your eyes. You see that shimmering, veiny darkness that most people see, right? Not me. I see the moon.It's the closest otherworldly body to us, making it the least challenging to explore of all the planets, moons and asteroids in our solar system.It's an opportunity for humans to establish a permanent presence off Earth -- a moon base for scientists or a colony for all of humanity.It could facilitate planet-wide cooperation among Earth's nations in the pursuit of an answer to life's biggest question: "Why are we here?"Why go back to the moon? I say, all of the above.The prospect of establishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a game-changer for the human race. If we can make it there, we could start to understand what it really takes -- from both the design and human survival perspective -- to live on a foreign body.The challenges will be difficult, yet inspiring. A permanent presence will enable us to accelerate our research into the origin of the moon, and eventually to build a launchpad for most of our scientific exploration of the solar system and galaxy. And beyond.I spent my whole career working for NASA, and I had the privilege of leading the propulsion and power group at the Johnson Space Center for a short period.But I chose not to continue.The gap between the end of the space shuttle program and the next major U.S. space endeavor seemed as wide as the Grand Canyon. We shut down the program with only a third of the shuttles' design capabilities being utilized. This move started a brain drain, causing many employees from both our space industrial complex and NASA to retire or find jobs elsewhere.The initial decision to cancel the shuttle program was meant to create funding for our return to the moon. It was a noble goal, but then we made another decision: to terminate the nascent moon program and replace it with a mission to an asteroid.An asteroid mission would be a good show, but it would do nothing to further exploration and expansion into our solar system.Still, there is hope.Even with the cancellation of the new moon program, NASA continued developing the Orion, a new lunar capsule, along with a heavy lift vehicle to carry it into space.But there is no mission of substance currently planned for these assets.In addition, there is a commercial vehicle initiative that is doing some good for the country, and increased competition between companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance will help enable lunar transportation infrastructure.We can utilize these initiatives and quickly structure a program to go back to the moon -- this time for good. With recent events in the Ukraine and our dependency on the Russians for transportation to the space station, it's even more important to re-ignite our space program.I'll present a series of articles this week that will expand a vision for the moon, explaining the physics of what it takes to get there and the economics of whether the nations of Earth can afford a permanent presence. I'll touch on why the moon, not Mars, should be our next destination, and I'll give my thoughts on how to rework the space industry and NASA after terminating the shuttle program.Now try it again. Close your eyes and look at the sparkling darkness in your mind. Imagine looking at our moon and seeing our permanent base on another worldly body. It would be truly amazing, and a huge milestone in human history.And we can do it.Part 2 of 5China's moon rover a wake-up call, former NASA division chief saysThe telephone. The light bulb. The automobile, airplane, commercial airliner and television. Interstate highways, modern weapon systems, computers. The cellphone.The U.S. has led in major technological advances in the 19th and 20th centuries, inventing, enhancing or perfecting many small steps and giant leaps. So why shouldn't we continue to lead in space exploration -- including establishing a permanent human presence beyond our Earth?Recently, China landed an unmanned rover on the moon, although the country appears to have lost contact with the vehicle and the outcome is hazy. I applaud any country that wants to explore space and further our understanding of our solar system. China has come a long way since the Mao Zedong era. It has embraced capitalism -- though it still needs to embrace democracy and increase individual freedom.But I don't want to cede the moon to China.American achievements have made our lives better and safer and have helped to strengthen our children's advancements in technological excellence. Americans are the greatest competitors in history. We want to be first -- we don't like to lose. And, I contend, we and the world's populations are better for it. Put simply, we make the rest of the world rise to our level if they want to compete.Without our leadership, China's ambitious moon initiative may establish it as the "go-to" nation for space exploration. Many nations of the world privately say they want the moon to be the next step in space exploration -- but they can't get there on their own. They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead. China and the U.S. are likely the only nations on earth that can do so. Russia seems to have lost its passion for human space flight; to my knowledge, the country hasn't designed any major new human spacecraft hardware in over a decade.If the U.S. is unwilling to step into the leadership role, these nations will turn to China.But what is China's objective for its moon missions? What is its vision? Is it only for national pride? Do the Chinese want to establish themselves as the world's leader in space? Do they plan to bring in other nations? Some reports have even suggested their intentions are to militarize the moon.If such a thing were possible, could U.S. missiles protect the country with a three- or four-day notice of a missile strike off the moon, which would mean a far higher velocity attack than missiles launched from Earth -- with no initial heat signature to launch an intercept missile at?Today, Congress has directed NASA to develop the Apollo-like Orion capsule and to work on a heavy lift launch system, both worthy goals and elements critical to a return to the moon. NASA also is working on test vehicles such as Johnson Space Center's Morpheus, which are training the future space engineers needed for a Lunar Lander design and developing autonomous landing technology to land safely on the Moon's surface. But even with all these projects, NASA and the U.S. are focused on asteroid missions that will take decades to achieve limited return. The Chinese challenge should force a reconsideration of near-term objectives in order to maintain our leadership in space exploration.If we choose not to reach toward the moon, we will lose that position.Part 3 of 5How to return to the moon in just four yearsWhat if I told you there was a relatively easy way to get Americans back on the moon?To build a program to take humans back to the moon takes infrastructure and effort -- but a combination of NASA know-how and private enterprise could make it possible in the next few years.NASA has made significant progress on Orion, a capsule like the Apollo-era ones that carried men to the moon in the '60s and '70s. It still has a ways to go, but with proper funding a flight in the next three or four years is doable.The biggest obstacle is the lack of a rocket, called a super heavy launch vehicle, to lift it off the planet. NASA is working on one, called the Space Launch System, but the agency is constrained by its budget and the likelihood of it flying in that time frame is slim.But there's an interim solution: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which will have its maiden flight this year and can supposedly launch up to 53 metric tons into orbit. This is a huge increase over current vehicles such as the Delta heavy, which can carry 23 tons, and Ariane 5, which can haul 21. Plus the Falcon Heavy's advertised cost is $150 million or less, which is extremely cheap as space-going vehicles go.The scientists and engineers in the '60s and '70s who sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and 12 others to the moon had no one to copy or learn from when performing this amazing feat. They used a massive, single-launch rocket called Saturn to carry the Apollo capsule and then speed it to the moon. The Falcon Heavy can't launch humans in a single mission to the moon as NASA did in the Apollo days, but it can easily carry the astronauts, lunar landers and thrusters in fewer than five missions.This would require a third stage, or "moon injection stage," to propel the vehicles and astronauts to the moon.Bear with me: Since chemical propulsion is limited in its ability to propel us to orbit and other worldly bodies, rockets have multiple stages to get rid of tank weight as they progress toward their targets. Propellant and tankage dominate the weight of these vehicles -- at least in current designs. How many stages there are and how they burn is defined by the maker.The Falcon Heavy's third stage would be similar to but bigger than the Centaur upper stage from United Launch Alliance (ULA), which is currently used on the Atlas launch vehicle. Centaur weighs less dry as a percentage of total fully loaded weight than any other upper stage -- and weight is king.Centaur optimizes it's weight better than any other upper stage. Its hardware mass -- dry, that is, meaning without any fuel -- is a lower percentage of a fully loaded vehicle than any other current vehicle that uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.ULA is jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed and has been the major launch provider for the military for many years. SpaceX and ULA are major competitors -- but they could come together for this stage, since ULA is an expert in lightweight tank design.In a four-launch scenario, the lander would precede the crew to the moon. The first two launches would be a moon injection stage followed by a lunar lander. These two vehicles would rendezvous in Earth's orbit before the moon injection stage would send the lander ahead to the moon. The next two Falcon launches would carry a second moon injection stage and then the crew in their capsule/service module. After a similar boost in a moon-injection stage, they would meet up with the lander in lunar orbit.The rest of the mission would be like the Apollo mission -- Americans on the moon, once again taking giant leaps for mankind.Based on SpaceX estimates, the cost for these four launches would be $600 million. And that's for a human mission; a cargo-only mission would take just two launches and could deliver 8 metric tons to the lunar surface for $300 million.To get astronauts to the moon would require the Apollo-like service module and lander. NASA's Orion program has worked on a service module, and the lander has made significant progress over the last few years within NASA. These programs could share many of the same propulsion components if jointly developed together.The crew habitat of the lander would be the biggest challenge. But NASA's knowledge of long-term human support systems should give this part of the project a jump-start. The need would be to keep the lander and service module weights within the moon injection stages' boost capability. Studies suggest this is entirely doable.The service module and lander vehicles should cost less than the launch vehicle's cost of $600 million. Add in management, operations, astronaut training and so on and the total operational cost per mission could fall under $1.5 billion -- with an eventual target of an even $1 billion per mission. This is less than half the cost of an Apollo mission, which you would expect with the vast increase in technology since the '60s.There are options for lowering cost further. SpaceX's heavy lift vehicle uses a less than optimum fuel for its second stage, to share components across stages and lower costs. But the moon injection stage would have to use oxygen and hydrogen for fuel to maximize performance. NASA and SpaceX could evaluate a joint moon injection stage and Falcon second stage design that share many components. This might boost the current lift capability and drop the number of fights needed, saving even more money.This approach has a chance of sending humans to the moon in this decade. If not, definitely early in the next. Our satellite is easily within our reach -- and for far less than you might think.Part 4 of 5Shoot for the moon: How America can lead the world backThe International Space Station is the most complex technological marvel the world has ever built. A floating space base that orbits 240 miles above the planet -- at 17,500 miles per hour -- it shows what humanity can accomplish when we work together.Simply put, it's remarkable.The ISS can define a path for humanity to return to the moon. China can choose either to compete or join us. But regardless, the U.S. can lead the initiative.The U.S. should strategically position itself to own the transportation system that takes humans back to the moon. He who owns this segment has the most leverage for how a lunar base is built ... and how it is used. The fact that we cannot currently launch our own astronauts to the ISS should be fact enough to make this case -- and current events in the Ukraine only amplify this concern.A system comprising NASA's Orion capsule, SpaceX heavy lift rockets and a special third stage are the planet's best bet for getting back to the moon -- and it's a U.S. system through and through.The international science community will contribute heavily to an initial mobile base or a permanent settlement for both design and manufacture. The U.S. would build some surface systems on the moon as well, but most of our expenses would be tied up in the transportation system, one that countless veterans and upstarts – new kids on the block – continue to refine and improve.Boeing, Lockheed, United Launch Alliance and others have established highly reliable hardware with proven track records. Newcomers like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, along with smaller companies like Masten, Armadillo Aerospace, Orbital and Ecor, bring passion and fresh insights to the table.The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries in the world with this level of drive and innovation in space propulsion.Are travel to the ISS and a moon base (at some point) the only reasons humans go to space? In my opinion, there currently is no business case for sending humans to space for anything else. Virgin Galactic may be selling seats, but it doesn't go into orbit; it goes just above the outer atmosphere. Besides, tourism will be practical only with a lower launch cost. SpaceX seems to be committed to reducing costs, and a moon program will only help it accomplish this goal.We the people -- the United States government -- are currently the only customers for space flight. NASA, as our agent, must figure a way to balance those companies that help it, striving for the right mixture of veterans versus new kids. They have already made major strides with their commercial procurement initiatives.But if NASA makes lowering launch costs its highest priority, escaping the bonds that hold us to Earth will be financially feasible. We don't do this by controlling the design so much as the frequency -- we are the customer, after all. Two human and two cargo missions a year to the moon would put 12 additional heavy vehicles into the yearly launch manifest -- four rocket launches each for the human mission, two for each cargo mission. This should continue to drive the price down.The biggest obstacle to returning to the moon is we the people and our government. Congress and the administration worry annually about the cost of a lunar program and agency. They like to have consistent year-over-year funding with small, predictable increases for inflation. But life doesn't work that way. With a new project, costs start off slowly and ramp up to a peak year before trailing off at the end of design. The government must be willing to ramp up funding in the peak design years or risk carrying a standing army of design engineers in the early years. This is the main reason many large government projects escalate in cost.Contractors should be given very strong incentives to minimize the cost of a lunar mission, even if this drives up budgets in the early years. This will ultimately drive down the total program cost, because the cost of flying your missions will be at the lowest possible level.To some degree this was done with the ISS commercial launch service procurements, but those were much lower-scale procurements.If Congress budgets accordingly, it can be done.In addition, Congress would need to resist the urge to force pet parts of the program to a particular state or NASA center. This also can be a huge cost escalator. Just give NASA the goal to spread the wealth.Part 5 of 5Making a moon base: Why now is the timeThe United States has ended two World Wars, pioneered a computer revolution and embarked on the greatest adventure to date by having humans walk on the moon. I want to see us continue in this great leadership role. We as a nation and the world as a whole are better for it.The next great challenge is a familiar one: The U.S. must lead the world in allowing humans to break the bonds that hold us to our Earth.If we don't rise to this challenge, this century may be known as the Chinese Century rather than the second century of America. I have no problem with other countries being major contributors; I just want us to lead.The development of a lunar base could be a catalyst for lowering our launch cost to space and accelerating the development of automation and robotics. And there are probably countless spinoffs that I did not capture.If America doesn't step up to the plate, China's ambitions for the moon may establish it as the "go-to" nation for space exploration. Many nations of the world privately say they want the moon to be the next step in space exploration -- but they can't get there on their own. They need a technically savvy and resourceful country to lead.SpaceX's heavy launch vehicle could be an interim launch solution to make this vision happen -- and it happens to be at the right price point. NASA spends about $7-8 billion on human space flight today. $2 or 3 billion goes to the International Space Station. NASA's infrastructure also takes a large chunk, including deep space communication, but that leaves around $3 billion for a lunar initiative. It's on the low side, but good enough.This money is currently being spent on infrastructure development that could support a variety of missions, such as the asteroid mission that the administration is currently evaluating. It could also support a lunar initiative if we re-target the moon.I'd love to go to Mars as well, but as a designer of space vehicles, I know that a lunar initiative is much more feasible from a cost and time standpoint. And offshoots could have profound benefits for more distant forays into space.Development cost is probably the biggest hurdle. Congress and the administration must be willing to ramp up NASA's budget by $1 or $2 billion during the development years to make this initiative feasible. Remember that a large chunk of NASA's annual budget of around $17 billion is to open the doors and do major scientific exploration. A marginal increase of $2 billion would have huge productivity gains.And NASA would continue to be less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total U.S. budget.With the help of the other nations of the world, a much more comprehensive lunar initiative could be planned. But America's strategic interest should be in the transportation system.This doesn't preclude other nations from supplying redundant transportation vehicles.I ask the president and Congress to re-visit our direction and vision for human space missions to maintain U.S. leadership in space, with all the education and technological advantages that entails. This seems especially pertinent in light of the recent Chinese landing on the moon.The world of prosperity and freedom shown in many science fiction stories is just around the corner. Let's unite the countries of the world in this initiative. Let's make it a reality.Ames' flying robot and airline traffic projects in spotlightNASA chief's visit to Mountain View draws attention to innovationsDaniel DeBolt – Mountain View VoiceIn a tour of NASA Ames on Monday, NASA chief Charles Bolden stopped to listen to engineers discuss several projects that apparently needed some attention: a flying smart-phone based robot to do inspections on the International Space Station and NASA's work on a new satellite-based flight control system for U.S. airports, to replace World War II-era radar technology.Bolden suggested that such a system would have kept Malaysia airlines flight 370 from disappearing over the Pacific Ocean on March 8."Everybody is wondering, 'What if?'" Bolden said. "'What if?' won't help Malaysia airlines but we may not have another case like this. Satellites, without a doubt, will help. The system we have now is ground-based. There are no ground-based systems over the ocean."Engineers said that the new system could save airlines at 35 major airports $100 million to $200 million in fuel costs because the more efficient computer-based system would mean airplanes would not have to push back from the terminal and wait for takeoff with engines idling."It really is an unprecedented contribution of NASA technology," said John Robinson, lead engineer for the project, known as ATD-1. He asked Bolden to spread awareness about the work with the Federal Aviation Administration.Robinson said that when he tells people he works for NASA in aeronautics, no one knows NASA does aeronautics. That sentiment wasn't lost on Bolden, who remarked, "The big A in NASA is for aeronautics, not administration."Flying robots to aid astronautsBolden made a stop in the Ames Intelligent Robotics department to check in on the "Spheres" program, which is developing a free-flying robot to be used to monitor, and maybe even someday repair, spacecraft. It's one of many projects at NASA that are making use of smart phones, such as the PhoneSat program which turns them into satellites. It has many elements needed for a free-flying robot, including its camera."The smart phone is a really powerful platform -- just add propulsion to it and you're good," said one NASA researcher before Bolden arrived. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a flight processor that actually has the power of this cell phone," said another NASA engineer."Spheres is just a testbed to help us figure out what do we need to do to build a robot that can fly anywhere in the space station," said lead engineer Chris Provencher.A prototype was shown floating over a large precision granite table, pushing itself around with computer controlled air jets on its spherical body.Provencher told Bolden that the prototype uses a typical Android phone and operating system (Apple was said to be uninterested in helping NASA) with the SIM card removed for 'ultimate airplane mode" to prevent electronic interference. Other modifications include a coating over its glass to prevent shattering and alkaline batteries that won't catch fire on the space station."If there is a radiator leak or some type of damage you want to inspect you could have a free-flyer go out and inspect it," Provencher said. Or even further into the future: "Have a robot doing the repairs for you."Google and MoffettIn a press conference, Bolden was asked how NASA benefits from its partnerships with Google at Ames."I think the city of Mountain View, hopefully, and the surrounding communities are going to be really happy," he said about the pending lease with a Google subsidiary for Moffett Field's airfield and hangars, including restoring Hangar One. "We're not giving over the federal land, but what people here will find, I hope, is they won't know the handover has been made because the operations that currently go on here at Moffett Field will continue. I'm sure there are great advantages for the Google family, which the company that won is a member of."When asked by the Voice how NASA itself would benefit from the sort of research Google plans to do in hangars on the airfield, he rebuffed the question: "You would have to address that with Google." Bolden mentioned that he hoped that NASA funding that had been used to operate the airfield -- estimated at $7 million a year for Ames -- could go toward other Ames projects.Orbital Drops Antitrust Lawsuit Against ULADan Leone – Space NewsOrbital Sciences Corp. is dropping an antitrust lawsuit filed in June against United Launch Alliance alleging that the Denver-based rocket maker illegally prevented Orbital from buying the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine, according to a statement filed March 20 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."The parties will now undertake to negotiate a business resolution for Orbital's access to the RD-180 rocket engine, subject to all necessary approvals from the U.S. and Russian governments," Orbital said in the filing. "If a mutually agreeable resolution is not reached, Orbital will have the option to refile its lawsuit."ULA, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, launches most U.S. government space missions, and virtually all U.S. national security payloads, aboard its Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets. The Atlas 5's main engine is the RD-180, which was developed by Russia's NPO Energomash under contract to Lockheed Martin and is sold exclusively to ULA by RD-Amross, a joint venture of Energomash and United Technologies Corp.That exclusivity arrangement was at the heart of Orbital's antitrust complaint and is also the subject of a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.Orbital is considering the RD-180 as a replacement for the AJ-26 engines that power the main stage of the company's Antares medium-lift rocket. Each Antares rocket uses two AJ-26 engines, which are actually Soviet-vintage NK-33 engines refurbished by Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, Calif.Orbital has secured only enough AJ-26 engines for the eight cargo-delivery missions to the international space station the company owes NASA through 2016 under a $1.89 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract signed in 2008.In a March 3 presentation to a conference organized by Raymond James investment advisers, Orbital Chief Financial Officer Garrett Pierce said the company was considering two or three alternatives to the AJ-26, all built in Russia.In a quarterly earnings call in February, Orbital Chief Executive David W. Thompson said he expected the Antares engine dilemma to be resolved by the middle of this year.That would help Orbital eliminate uncertainty about its engine situation in any response it provides to NASA's planned solicitation for follow-on cargo delivery services to the space station. NASA notionally plans for four to five such flights per year from 2017-2024.Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 search tests limits of satellitesJoel Achenbach – The Washington PostThe disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has exposed the technological limits of satellites, which can see a license plate from space — if not necessarily read it — but struggle to find a missing jetliner.These limits are shaped by physics, money and practicality. Military and commercial satellites are not closely observing and amassing data about the blank places on the map in lightly traveled seas — such as remote areas of the Indian Ocean thousands of miles from where Flight MH370 vanished from radar.There's also a trade-off when scrutinizing the surface from space: You can go wide or you can go deep, but you can't do both. The most sophisticated spy satellites are essentially looking down straws, trying to resolve small details in a narrow field of view."Imagine driving down the street at 70 miles an hour with a pair of binoculars and trying to look at every single mailbox," said Brian Weeden, technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to space policy. "You can't slew your binoculars around fast enough."The satellites may yet prove triumphant in this baffling case. There is tantalizing imagery of possible debris from the missing plane that has been made public by Australian officials, taken by WorldView-2, a high-resolution commercial satellite circling the planet at an altitude of 470 miles.It's unclear what's in the images. The primary object, if it is an object and not some trick of light, was seen on March 16 — eight days after Flight MH370 disappeared — in the southern Indian Ocean about 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia.Nothing has been spotted by aircraft or satellites in that location in the days since, officials have said. If the mystery object is part of the plane, it means the Boeing 777 flew from the Equator almost halfway to the South Pole."It looks to me like possibly just an exceptionally large patch of sun glint," said John Amos, president of SkyTruth, which uses satellite imagery to raise awareness of environmental issues. "We're down in the subtle and ambiguous weeds of human image analysis, where we desperately are trying to find patterns in what we're seeing."The company that owns WorldView-2, Colorado-based DigitalGlobe, said the lengthy period of analysis between the day the satellite obtained the image and when the Australians released it to the public is a reflection of the daunting nature of combing through so much data."Our constellation of five high-resolution imaging satellites captures more than 3 million square kilometers of earth imagery each day, and this volume of imagery is far too vast to search through in real time without an idea of where to look," the company said in a statement.DigitalGlobe has also used a subsidiary company, Tomnod, to crowdsource the search for the plane among volunteers around the world who have looked over the company's imagery."The efforts of millions of online volunteers around the world allowed us to rule out broad swaths of ocean with some certainty," DigitalGlobe said.WorldView-2 was launched in 2009 on a polar orbit. As the satellite goes around the planet, pole to pole, every 100 minutes, the planet turns beneath it. Over the course of a day, the spacecraft will pass over most of the surface, including the southern Indian Ocean.DigitalGlobe calls WorldView-2 "the first high-resolution 8-band multispectral commercial satellite." The satellite can see something as small as 20 inches across.A satellite has also proved crucial to understanding what might have happened to the plane after it vanished from radar.About three hours after Flight MH370 went missing, Inmarsat, a British-based satellite company, began tracking the Boeing 777 through an on-board data system called Aero Classic. Every hour, Inmarsat's satellites would try to communicate with the aircraft, pinging it with a computerized question asking, in effect, "Are you there?"For several hours, Flight MH370 responded "Yes, I am," notifying engineers on the ground with a so-called handshake that the plane was still powered up.Using that series of pings, Inmarsat engineers and other analysts were able to piece together two broad, arcing regions where the plane could have been located when it last communicated with the satellite."Our engineers looked at the time between the handshakes, and they realized that the object wasn't stationary under a satellite but moving away from it," Christopher McLaughlin, senior vice president of Inmarsat, said Thursday. "Over time, the engineers here recognized that there were a number of data points and that it had flown for several hours. We didn't know if it was on the northern or southern corridor."An official close to the investigation, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, said American and British intelligence services checked with the governments of India, Russia and China, as well as U.S. military officials at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, to determine if any objects the size of a Boeing 777 had crossed into their airspace and if any jets had been scrambled to intercept an aircraft.With no reports of an aircraft crossing into that airspace, investigators ruled out the northern route and turned their attention to the southern axis, pointing toward the Indian Ocean west of Australia.Many nations have tasked their satellites to help in the search. NASA is contributing data from multiple scientific satellites as well as from a camera on the International Space Station. Patrick Ventrell, a National Security Council spokesman, said Thursday, "We have put every necessary resource that we have available at the disposal of the search process."There are satellites in geostationary orbits that can see huge swaths of the planet, but they're 22,000 miles above the surface, and lack the resolution of the satellites in low Earth orbit."Weather satellites can see the whole world, but can't see anything much smaller than a hurricane," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who also runs a Web site tracking all the satellites currently in orbit.Confounding the search is that no one is sure what, exactly, to look for."It's very hard to find something in the middle of the ocean," Weeden said. "We don't know the size and shape of the object we're looking for and there's lots of stuff in the ocean. There's debris from shipping — containers and other stuff blown overboard. There's natural stuff like trees and everything else."And there's a lot of ocean out there."The Earth is big," said Weeden. "The Earth is really big."Dayton's Air Force museum creates a compelling shuttle exhibit (with no shuttle)Susan Glaser – Cleveland Plain DealerThis is not a place for the claustrophobic.You think of the space shuttle as a mammoth, high-flying hauling machine. And, at 122 feet long by 57 feet high, it is.But peering into the flight deck of the new space shuttle exhibit at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, you see the living area for its human inhabitants — onboard for as many as 16 days — is a tiny part of the vehicle.It's a perspective you won't get anywhere else.For 30 years, the space shuttles relayed cargo — both human and man-made — to and from outer space. After the program was discontinued in 2011, NASA awarded its three soon-to-be mothballed shuttles to museums in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Cape Canaveral, Fla.Shut out of the shuttle sweepstakes was Dayton's Air Force museum. But as a consolation prize, it received a crew compartment trainer, where hundreds of astronauts over three decades drilled before strapping into the real thing.Inside, they simulated take-offs, practiced using controls, even learned how to use the escape hatch in case of an emergency.The training compartment was transported to Dayton from the Johnson Space Center in Houston in the summer of 2012. Since then, Ohio-based Display Dynamics worked to create to-scale center and rear sections of the shuttle, including the payload bay and main engines. The entire display opened to the public late last month, inside the museum's massive Cold War Gallery.The trainer offers a nearly identical reproduction of the shuttle's flight and mid decks, located within the "nose" of the orbiter, which housed the living quarters of the astronauts. Inside, you'll see 2,000 controls and instruments – plus hundreds of 2-inch squares of blue Velcro, which helped counter the effects of a loss of gravity.The benefit of the reproduction: Visitors can get much closer to this "shuttle" than they can to the real ones, which are all elevated off the ground or otherwise off limits to museumgoers."What you get here is a chance to look inside," said museum curator Doug Lantry. "I think we've turned a disadvantage into an advantage here."Visitors can walk up a ramp into the payload area, then peer into the flight deck, where commander and pilot manned the controls. The mid deck, just below the flight deck, is where the crew slept, exercised, ate – and went to the bathroom."Everyone's always interested in the bathroom," said the volunteer guide, as a crowd peered through a circular window and studied a contraption that functioned as a toilet, with handles, tubes and foot straps.Among those inspecting the living space: Trevor and Linda Weir, along with 12-year-old Emilee, of nearby Kettering."We were kind of heartbroken when they didn't get Atlantis here," said Trevor. But the three agreed that Dayton's exhibit has something for visitors that other shuttle displays don't have: better access.The three last summer visited Florida's Kennedy Space Center, where Atlantis is located. And though it's impressive, you can't get close to it, they said."It would have been nice to have the real thing, but this gives you a better appreciation for what it's like inside," said Linda.Inside the payload area sits another new exhibit. Teal Ruby is a recently declassified Ronald Reagan-era satellite built in the early 1980s to detect hostile missile launches during the Cold War.The satellite – it looks like a 6-foot-long foil-wrapped elaborate high school science project -- was supposed to be launched into space via the shuttle, but was delayed after the Challenger disaster in 1986. It was never used.Also part of the new exhibit: a 60-seat amphitheater, or "learning node," where educational programs focusing on science, technology, engineering and math are already taking place. It's also where an introductory video is shown.Four shuttle landing flight simulators are nearby, where would-be pilots use a joystick to bring the vehicle in for a safe landing (or, in my case, two spectacular crashes).Eventually, there will be more displays here – space suits, tiles and other shuttle-related equipment, as well as more explanatory text that provides context for the Air Force's key role in the shuttle and other space-related achievements.There's also a need for some mention of the two shuttle disasters, in 1986, when Challenger exploded during lift-off; and in 2003, when Columbia broke apart reentering the Earth's atmosphere. It would be helpful, too, to learn something about what's replacing the shuttles in the U.S. space program.In 2016, the entire exhibit will be moved to the Air Force museum's new building, a 224,000-square-foot addition that will be located just south of the massive Cold War Gallery.In addition to an expanded Space Gallery, the new building also will house planes and other aircraft currently located in the museum's presidential and research and development galleries, which are located apart from the main museum campus and require special access to visit.Ground will be broken on the $35.4 million addition early this summer, said museum spokeswoman Sarah Swan.But you don't need to wait until 2016 – or travel to Florida or Washington – to recall the accomplishments of the shuttle program. True, the vehicle on display in Dayton didn't travel into space. But it was an essential part of the program. For proof, just take a look inside the cramped cockpit.END
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