Happy Monday all, don't forget to join the NASA retirees at our monthly luncheon this Thursday, June 5th, at Hibachi Grill on Bay Area Blvd.—at 11:30 am. We gather in the back party room on the left hand side.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Where is JSC on the Path to Mars? Find Out!
- ISS is a Star in the News at World Science Fest - Organizations/Social
- JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum
- The JSC Safety and Health Action Team (JSAT) Says
- Sally Ride Biography
- Clearance Sale at Starport
- JSC Weight Watchers at Work
- Starport Youth Sports Camps - Jobs and Training
- Increasing Inclusion and Engagement
- Training for Transgender Inclusion
- System Safety Fundamentals: June 9 - Building 20
- Fall Protection Refresher for Authorized User
- Fire Extinguisher Training
- Job Opportunities - Community
- June Sustainability Opportunities
- Interns Needed for Simulated Mars Missions
- The Blood Drive Needs You! June 18 and 19 |  |
| Headlines - Where is JSC on the Path to Mars? Find Out!
Save the date! Join Center Director Ellen Ochoa on Thursday, June 5, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in the Teague Auditorium as we welcome NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Bill Gerstenmaier to JSC to lead an exciting panel discussion on "Pioneering Space: The Next Steps on the Path to Mars." Gerstenmaier and the panelists will speak to JSC's role in the path to the Red Planet during this special discussion. If you would like to submit a question for consideration in advance of the event, please email it to: JSC-Ask-The-Director@mail.nasa.gov Questions will also be taken via email during the event. Before you attend, be sure to read the new paper from our Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate that explains NASA's roadmap to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s. Brush up on the "Pioneering Space" document. Those unable to attend in person can watch the panel discussion on RF Channel 2 or Omni 3 (45). JSC team members with wired computer network connections can view the All Hands using the JSC EZTV IP Network TV System on Channel 402. Please note: EZTV currently requires using Internet Explorer 32bit on a Windows PC connected to the JSC computer network with a wired connection. Mobile devices, Wi-Fi connections and newer MAC computers are currently not supported by EZTV. First-time users will need to install the EZTV Monitor and Player client applications: - For those WITH admin rights (Elevated Privileges), you'll be prompted to download and install the clients when you first visit the IPTV website
- For those WITHOUT admin rights (Elevated Privileges), you can download the EZTV client applications from the ACES Software Refresh Portal (SRP)
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. The event will also be recorded for playback the following Tuesday, June 10, and Thursday, June 12, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Event Date: Thursday, June 5, 2014 Event Start Time:1:00 PM Event End Time:2:30 PM
Event Location: Teague Auditorium
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JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
[top] - ISS is a Star in the News at World Science Fest
JSC's own International Space Station (ISS) Scientist Tara Ruttley spoke with Weather Channel reporter Raegan Medgie about our exhibit at the World Science Festival. The segment also aired live on May 28 during Sam Champion's morning show. If you missed it, watch it here. JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
[top] Organizations/Social - JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum
Our next JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum will be held Tuesday, June 17, from 9 to 11 a.m. in the Gilruth Alamo Ballroom. Our guest speaker for this event is Jonathan Puleio, director of Consulting at Humanscale Consulting. Puleio is a board-certified professional ergonomist, and his presentation will be about "Designing Healthy Work Environments." Our second guest speaker from the Houston/Galveston National Weather Service Office will be presenting the 2014 Hurricane Season Forecast. Our third presenter, David Loyd, chief of the Safety and Test Operations Division, will be discussing the "Results of the Contractor Safety Program Affirmation." This will be a very informative meeting that you will not want to miss. Hope to see everyone there. If you have any questions, please contact Pat Farrell at 281-335-2012 or via email. Event Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:11:00 AM
Event Location: Gilruth Alamo Ballroom
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Patricia Farrell 281-335-2012
[top] - The JSC Safety and Health Action Team (JSAT) Says
"A spill. A slip. A hospital trip." Congratulations to the Eagle Eye Safety Committee of L&M Technologies, Inc., for submitting the winning slogan for June 2014. Any JSAT member (all JSC contractor and civil servant employees) may submit a slogan for consideration to JSAT Secretary Reese Squires. Submissions for July are due by Monday, June 9. Keep those great submissions coming! You may be the next JSAT Says winner. - Sally Ride Biography
Starport is proud to host a book signing for Lynn Sherr, award-winning journalist and author of "Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space," in cooperation with an LGBT Pride Month speech featuring Sally Ride's sister, Bear Ride; her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy; and Sherr. The release of this rich biography is about a fascinating woman whose life intersected with revolutionary social and scientific changes in America, and it comes just in time to celebrate the anniversary of Sally Ride's first spaceflight, STS-7, on June 18. Pre-order your book today in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops and mark your calendar to hear Sherr, Ride and O'Shaughnessy speak on June 27 in the Teague Auditorium. Watch JSC Today for more details. - Clearance Sale at Starport
It's summer clearance time! Save 40 percent on clearance T- shirts, picture frames, umbrellas, books and more. And, get a free umbrella with a purchase of $40 now through June 30. Stop by Buildings 3 and 11 to see what's on clearance all week long. - JSC Weight Watchers at Work
If you wanted to learn more about Weight Watchers at Work, but had to miss the open house, it's not too late! JSC Weight Watchers at Work will have a meeting TODAY from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. This meeting will provide information and registration for the next 17-week session, which begins later this month and runs through September. Meetings will be Mondays during lunchtime. We will have our meetings in Building 12, a more central location that is close to the cafés. We need at least 15 active participants to continue having at-work meetings here on-site, so if you've been thinking about joining, now is a great time! Event Date: Monday, June 2, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: Bldg. 12, Rooms 148/150
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Jason Morrow x42234
[top] - Starport Youth Sports Camps
Starport is now offering youth sports camps. We are offering three different sports camps: baseball, basketball and a multi-sport camp. All camps are a week long. Sign up early online, as spots are going fast! Ages: 6 to 12 Times: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dates: - July 14 to 19 (Basketball)
- July 21 to 25 (Baseball)
- Aug. 4 to 8 (Multi-sport)
Fee per session: $150 per child | $50 per week Extended care is available. Register online or at the Gilruth Center information desk. Jobs and Training - Increasing Inclusion and Engagement
This class focuses on creating inclusive environments where team members are encouraged and allowed to bring their whole self to work and fully engage in carrying out the mission of the department/agency. - Clearly see the connection between inclusion, innovation and how it relates to attracting and retaining talent in the workforce and workplace
- Better understand the bottom line impact of employee engagement on the organization
Choose one session (Supervisors) Aug. 6, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Individual contributors) Aug. 7 (either morning or afternoon) - AM session: 8 a.m. to noon
- PM session: 1 to 5 p.m.
Open to all JSC civil service employees and contractors. - Training for Transgender Inclusion
Do you find yourself watching in silence, not sure what to do, when an employee, co-worker or friend is being harassed, ridiculed or isolated because they are different? As JSC works toward creating a more inclusive workplace, it is important to increase our awareness of the issues faced by employees whose gender identity and/or expression do not match their assigned gender. In observance of PRIDE month, the JSC Out & Allied Employee Resource Group is hosting Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Keisling will address the myths and provide facts surrounding gender identity and expression, outline the workplace challenges faced by transgender employees and provide recommendations for steps to increase inclusion and support our transgender employees. Registration via SATERN (optional): Please note the time change - 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. - System Safety Fundamentals: June 9 - Building 20
This course instructs the student in the fundamentals of system safety management and hazard analysis of hardware, software and operations. Types and techniques of hazard analysis are addressed in enough detail to give the student a working knowledge of their uses and how they are accomplished. Skills in analytical techniques are developed through the use of in-class practical exercises. This course establishes a foundation for the student to pursue more advanced studies of system safety and hazard analysis techniques while allowing students to effectively apply their skills to straightforward analytical assignments. Note: This course is a combination of SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0008 (System Safety Workshop) and SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0015 (System Safety Special Subjects). Students who have taken either of these classes should discuss taking this class with the NASA Safety Learning Center management staff. Target Audience: Supervisors and technical/non-technical personnel who perform safety analysis and/or manage system safety programs. - Fall Protection Refresher for Authorized User
This course provides all the information necessary to properly use, inspect and maintain fall protection equipment on the jobsite. Also, NASA policy, OSHA and ANSI all require the users of fall-protection equipment to have documented training adequate to qualify them as an authorized user of such equipment. This course will cover all stages of the fall-protection hierarchy, including the four parts of a fall-arrest system; fall protection equipment inspection; and the proper care and maintenance of fall-protection equipment. This class is geared toward training authorized users who are the end users of the fall-protection equipment, and ensures their understanding of the proper methods for using fall-protection equipment at heights. Note: This class is only applicable to those who have taken SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0311-AU within the last three years, or where there is a requirement as stipulated above for retraining. Event Date: Thursday, June 5, 2014 Event Start Time:8:00 AM Event End Time:11:00 AM
Event Location: Bldg. 20 Room 304
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Shirley Robinson x41284
[top] - Fire Extinguisher Training
Fire safety, at its most basic, is based on the principle of keeping fuel sources and ignition sources separate. The Safety Learning Center invites you to attend a one-hour Fire Extinguisher Course that provides instructor-led training on the proper way to safely use fire extinguishers. Students will learn: - Five classes of fires
- Types of fire extinguishers and how to match the right extinguisher to different types of fires
- How to inspect an extinguisher
- How to use a fire extinguisher - P.A.S.S.
- Understand the importance of knowing where extinguishers are at your location
- Rules for fighting fires and the steps to take if a fire occurs
- Hands-on (weather permitting)
Date/Time: June 17 from 9 to 10 a.m. Where: Safety Learning Center - Building 20, Room 205-206 Registration via SATERN required: - Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities? To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop-down menu and select "JSC HR." The "Jobs" link will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. Lateral reassignment and rotation opportunities are posted in the Workforce Transition Tool. To access: HR Portal > Employees > Workforce Transition > Workforce Transition Tool. These opportunities do not possess known promotion potential; therefore, employees can only see positions at or below their current grade level. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies or reassignment opportunities, please call your HR representative. Community - June Sustainability Opportunities
You've been seeing a lot about sustainability initiatives, and you may be wondering if this is something we'll be working on the rest of our lives. Yes! That's the point. In this month's sustainability opportunities, see pictures from Coca-Cola's presentation on how they're inspiring sustainable change in the world, and join us for events like the Armand Bayou Nature Center hikes on June 19 or 25 or the Electric Vehicle and Photovoltaic presentation at the IEEE luncheon on June 19. As always, if you have a sustainability opportunity you'd like added, contact us. Click on the link for June Sustainability Opportunities and scroll down to "What's new in sustainability." - Interns Needed for Simulated Mars Missions
JSC interns can gain valuable leadership skills and experience during this summer's High School Aerospace Scholars, or HAS. 1. Mentor students in engineering design challenges. 2. Share YOUR NASA experience and YOUR college advice. 3. Encourage students about NASA internships and co-ops. 4. Participate in facility visits, activities and events with NASA experts, VIP guests, Apollo astronauts and more. Choose a week to volunteer (a couple hours each day) and enjoy our fun, educational program. - Week 5: July 20 to 25
- Week 6: July 27 to Aug. 1
1. Complete the HAS mentor application here. - The Blood Drive Needs You! June 18 and 19
Summertime typically brings a decrease in blood donations as donors become busy with activities and vacations. But the need for blood can increase due to these summer activities and the three major holidays: Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor Day. Please take an hour of your time to donate at our next blood drive, and bring a friend! You can donate at one of the following locations: - Teague Auditorium lobby - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Building 11 Starport Café donor coach - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Gilruth Center donor coach - Noon to 4 p.m. (Thursday only)
T-shirts, snacks and drinks are given to all donors. The criteria for donating can be found at the St. Luke's link on our website. | |
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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
Monday – June 2, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Cover: Bruce McCall's "Free Delivery"
New Yorker Magazine (June 2, 2014)
"I've been trying forever to find a way to honor the food-delivery guys," Bruce McCall, the artist who painted this week's cover, says. "I wanted to show what heroes they are; they're intrepid, pedaling along at any time of night to deliver food to New Yorkers. We usually rely on my wife Polly's cooking — she's marvelous at it — but when she comes home late after a long day of work, then we'll take the easy way out. Well, easy for us, at least."
(NO FURTHER TEXT)
World Largest Heat Shield Attached to NASA's Orion Crew Capsule for Crucial Fall 2014 Test Flight
Ken Kremer - Universe Today
In a key milestone, technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world's largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA's Orion crew capsule edging ever closer to its inaugural unmanned test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1).
Why Commercial Crew is Critical for Future Exploration: One-on-One Interview with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
Ken Kremer - Universe Today
Why is NASA's Commercial Crew Program to develop private human transport ships to low Earth orbit important?
Part 1
Boeing CST-100 Space Taxi Maiden Test Flight to ISS Expected Early 2017
One on One Interview with Chris Ferguson, Last Shuttle Commander
Ken Kremer - Universe Today
Boeing expects to launch the first unmanned test flight of their commercial CST-100 manned 'space taxi' in "early 2017," said Chris Ferguson, commander of NASA's final shuttle flight in an exclusive one-on-one interview with Universe Today for an inside look at Boeing's space efforts. Ferguson is now spearheading Boeing's human spaceflight capsule project as director of Crew and Mission Operations.
House spending bill includes modest increase for NASA
Ledyard King - Florida Today
The House passed a spending bill Friday that would modestly increase NASA's budget next year but would not fully fund a program to replace the space shuttle with a new vehicle to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.
5 takeaways from Friday's House vote on NASA's new budget
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
NASA's budget for fiscal year 2015 cleared the House of Representatives early Friday morning and is headed for the Senate. Here are five takeaways from that House vote.
SpaceX's Manned Capsule Merges High-Tech and Safety
CEO Elon Musk Seeks to Improve Reliability and Ability to 'Just Reload' and Fly Again
Andy Pasztor - Wall Street Journal
The manned spacecraft introduced last week by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. was an unusual combination of pioneering technology and common-sense adaptations of more-conventional hardware.
Elon Musk unveils new astronaut-ready spaceship at SpaceX headquarters
W.J. Hennigan - Los Angeles Times
With much fanfare, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk on Thursday unveiled a cone-shaped spaceship that he hopes will one day ferry NASA astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station.
Elon Musk uses Tesla tech in SpaceX 'space taxi'
Chris Woodyard - USA TODAY
Many wonder how Elon Musk can simultaneously be CEO of two high flying, but highly dissimilar, tech companies: Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, and Tesla Motors.
NASA to test giant Mars parachute on Earth
Alicia Chang - Associated Press
The skies off the Hawaiian island of Kauai will be a stand-in for Mars as NASA prepares to launch a saucer-shaped vehicle in an experimental flight designed to land heavy loads on the red planet.
Retro Report: Challenger, Columbia and the Nature of Calamity
Clyde Haberman - New York Times' Retro Report
They died as they slipped the surly bonds of Earth. The last words of that sentence, haunting words, were written by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American airman and poet who enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, before the United States entered World War II. He was killed the following year in a midair collision over England. He was all of 19.
Russia preparing to launch Okno space surveillance system at full capacity
The Voice of Russia
State tests of the Okno (Window) complex for tracking and monitoring man-made space objects in Tajikistan will take place during the summer months in the interests of the Russian aerospace defence troops. After that the facility will be put on duty, representative of the aerospace defence troops Colonel Alexey Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti.
COMPLETE STORIES
World Largest Heat Shield Attached to NASA's Orion Crew Capsule for Crucial Fall 2014 Test Flight
Ken Kremer - Universe Today
In a key milestone, technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world's largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA's Orion crew capsule edging ever closer to its inaugural unmanned test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1).
One of the primary goals of NASA's eagerly anticipated Orion EFT-1 uncrewed test flight is to test the efficacy of the heat shield in protecting the vehicle - and future human astronauts- from excruciating temperatures reaching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit during scorching re-entry heating.
A trio of parachutes will then unfurl to slow Orion down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
Orion is NASA's next generation human rated vehicle now under development to replace the now retired space shuttle. The state-of-the-art spacecraft will carry America's astronauts on voyages venturing farther into deep space than ever before - past the Moon to Asteroids, Mars and Beyond!
"The Orion heat shield is the largest of its kind ever built. Its wider than the Apollo and Mars Science Lab heat shields," Todd Sullivan told Universe Today. Sullivan is the heat shield senior manager at Lockheed Martin, Orion's prime contractor.
The heat shield measures 16.5 feet in diameter.
Lockheed Martin and NASA technicians mated the heat shield to the bottom of the capsule during assembly work inside the Operations and Checkout High Bay facility at KSC.
It is constructed from a single seamless piece of Avcoat ablator, that was applied by engineers at Textron Defense System near Boston, Mass.
"They applied the Avcoat ablater material to the outside. That's what protects the spacecraft from the heat of reentry."
The ablative material will wear away as it heats up during the capsules atmospheric re-entry thereby preventing the 4000 degree F heat from being transferred to the rest of the capsule and saving it and the human crew from utter destruction.
Orion EFT-1 is slated to launch in December 2014 atop the mammoth, triple barreled United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful booster in America's fleet.
The Delta IV Heavy is the only rocket with sufficient thrust to launch the Orion EFT-1 capsule and its attached upper stage to its intended orbit of 3600 miles altitude above Earth - about 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 years.
At the conclusion of the two-orbit, four- hour EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and re-enters the Earth's atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour).
"That's about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions," Scott Wilson, NASA's Orion Manager of Production Operations at KSC, told me during an interview at KSC.
"The big reason to get to those high speeds during EFT-1 is to be able to test out the thermal protection system, and the heat shield is the biggest part of that."
"Numerous sensors and instrumentation have been specially installed on the EFT-1 heat shield and the back shell tiles to collect measurements of things like temperatures, pressures and stresses during the extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry," Wilson explained.
The heat shield arrived at KSC in December 2013 loaded inside NASA's Super Guppy aircraft while I was onsite. Read my story - here.
The data gathered during the unmanned EFT-1 flight will aid in confirming. or refuting, design decisions and computer models as the program moves forward to the first flight atop NASA's mammoth SLS booster in late 2017 on the EM-1 mission and more human crewed missions thereafter.
Recently, the EFT-1 launch was postponed three months from its long planned slot in mid-September to December 2014 when NASA was ordered to make way for the accelerated launch of recently declassified US Air Force Space Surveillance satellites that were given a higher priority.
The covert Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP, satellites were only unveiled in Feb. 2014 during a speech by General William Shelton, commander of the US Air Force Space Command.
Despite the EFT-1 launch postponement, Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said technicians are pressing forward and continue to work around the clock at KSC in order to still be ready in time to launch by the original launch window that opens in mid- September 2014.
"The contractor teams are working to get the Orion spacecraft done on time for the December 2017 launch," said Cabana.
"They are working seven days a week in the Operations and Checkout High Bay facility to get the vehicle ready to roll out for the EFT-1 mission and be mounted on top of the Delta IV Heavy."
"I can assure you the Orion will be ready to go on time, as soon as we get our opportunity to launch that vehicle on its first flight test and that is pretty darn amazing."
"Our plan is to have the Orion spacecraft ready because we want to get EFT-1 out so we can start getting the hardware in for Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) and start processing for that vehicle that will launch on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in 2017," Cabana told me
Concurrently, new American-made private crewed spaceships are under development by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada - with funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP) - to restore US capability to ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and back to Earth by late 2017.
Why Commercial Crew is Critical for Future Exploration: One-on-One Interview with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
Ken Kremer - Universe Today
Why is NASA's Commercial Crew Program to develop private human transport ships to low Earth orbit important?
That's the question I posed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden when we met for an exclusive interview at NASA Goddard.
The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) is the critical enabler "for establishing a viable orbital infrastructure" in the 2020s, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Universe Today in an exclusive one-one-one interview at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Bolden says NASA wants one of the new American-made private crewed spaceships under development by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada – with NASA funding – to be ready to ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and back to Earth by late 2017. Flights for other commercial orbital space ventures would follow later and into the next decade.
Since the shutdown of NASA's space shuttle program following the final flight by STS-135 in 2011 (commanded by Chris Ferguson), America has been 100% dependent on the Russians to fly our astronauts to the space station and back.
"Commercial crew is critical. We need to have our own capability to get our crews to space," Bolden told me, during a visit to the NASA Goddard cleanroom with the agency's groundbreaking Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) science probes.
Administrator Bolden foresees a huge shift in how the US will conduct space operations in low earth orbit (LEO) just a decade from now. The future LEO architecture will be dominated not by NASA and the ISS but rather by commercial entrepreneurs and endeavors in the 2020s.
"There are going to be other commercial stations or other laboratories," Bolden excitedly told me.
And the cash strapped Commercial Crew effort to build new astronaut transporters is the absolutely essential enabler to get that exploration task done, he says.
"Commercial Crew is critical to establishing the low Earth orbit infrastructure that is required for exploration."
"We have got to have a way to get our crews to space."
"You know people try to separate stuff that NASA does into nice little neat packages. But it's not that way anymore."
Bolden and NASA are already looking beyond the ISS in planning how to use the new commercial crew spaceships being developed by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada in a public- partnership with NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
"Everything we do [at NASA] is integrated. We have to have commercial crew [for] a viable low Earth orbit infrastructure – a place where we can do testing – for example with what's going on at the ISS today."
"And in the out years you are going to be doing the same type of work."
"But it's not going to be on the ISS."
"After 2024 or maybe 2028, if we extend it again, you are going to see the people on commercial vehicles. There are going to be other stations or other laboratories."
"But there won't be NASA operated laboratories. They will be commercially viable and operating laboratories."
Private NewSpace ventures represent a revolutionary departure from current space exploration thinking. But none of these revolutionary commercial operations will happen if we don't have reliable and cost effective human access to orbit from American soil with American rockets on American spaceships.
"We need to have our own capability to get our crews to space – first of all. That's why commercial crew is really, really, really important," Bolden emphasized.
The ongoing crises in Ukraine makes development of a new US crew transporter to end our total reliance on Russian spaceships even more urgent.
"Right now we use the Russian Soyuz. It is a very reliable way to get our crews to space. Our partnership with Roscosmos is as strong as it's ever been."
"So we just keep watching what's going on in other places in the world, but we continue to work with Roscosmos the way we always have," Bolden stated.
The latest example is this week's successful launch of the new three man Russian-US- German Expedition 40 crew to the ISS on a Soyuz.
Of course, the speed at which the US develops the private human spaceships is totally dependent on the funding level for the Commercial Crew program.
Unfortunately, progress in getting the space taxis actually built and flying has been significantly slowed because the Obama Administration CCP funding requests for the past few years of roughly about $800 million have been cut in half by a reluctant US Congress. Thus forcing NASA to delay the first manned orbital test flights by at least 18 months from 2015 to 2017.
And every forced postponement to CCP costs US taxpayers another $70 million payment per crew seat to the Russians. As a result of the congressional CCP cuts more than 1 Billion US Dollars have been shipped to Russia instead of on building our own US crew transports – leaving American aerospace workers unemployed and American manufacturing facilities shuttered.
I asked Bolden to assess NASA's new funding request for the coming fiscal year currently working its way through Congress.
"It's looking better. It's never good. But now it's looking much better," Bolden replied.
"If you look at the House markup that's a very positive indication that the budget for commercial crew is going to be pretty good."
The pace of progress in getting our crews back to orbit basically can be summed up in a nutshell.
"No Bucks, No Buck Rogers," Chris Ferguson, who now leads Boeing's crew effort, told me in a separate exclusive interview for Universe Today.
The BoeingCST-100, Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser and SpaceX Dragon 'space taxis' are all vying for funding in the next round of contracts to be awarded by NASA around late summer 2014 known as Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap).
All three company's have been making excellent progress in meeting their NASA mandated milestones in the current contract period known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability initiative (CCiCAP) under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
Altogether they have received more than $1 Billion in NASA funding under the current CCiCAP initiative. Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts worth $460 million and $440 million, respectively. Sierra Nevada was given what amounts to half an award worth $212.5 million.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk just publicly unveiled his manned Dragon V2 spaceship on May 29.
Boeing's Chris Ferguson told me that assembly of the CST-100 test article starts soon at the Kennedy Space Center.
NASA officials have told me that one or more of the three competitors will be chosen later this year in the next phase under CCtCAP to build the next generation spaceship to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS by 2017.
In order to certify the fitness and safety of the new crew transporters, the CCtCAP contracts will specify that "each awardee conduct at least one crewed flight test to verify their spacecraft can dock to the space station and all its systems perform as expected."
Concurrently, NASA is developing the manned Orion crew vehicle for deep space exploration. The state-of-the-art capsule will carry astronauts back to the Moon and beyond on journeys to Asteroids and one day to Mars.
"We need to have our own capability to get our crews to space. Commercial Crew is critical to establishing the low Earth orbit infrastructure that is required for exploration," that's the bottom line message from my interview with NASA Administrator Bolden.
Part 1
Boeing CST-100 Space Taxi Maiden Test Flight to ISS Expected Early 2017
One on One Interview with Chris Ferguson, Last Shuttle Commander
Ken Kremer - Universe Today
Boeing expects to launch the first unmanned test flight of their commercial CST-100 manned 'space taxi' in "early 2017," said Chris Ferguson, commander of NASA's final shuttle flight in an exclusive one-on-one interview with Universe Today for an inside look at Boeing's space efforts. Ferguson is now spearheading Boeing's human spaceflight capsule project as director of Crew and Mission Operations.
"The first unmanned orbital test flight is planned in January 2017 … and may go to the station," Ferguson told me during a wide ranging, in depth discussion about a variety of human spaceflight topics and Boeing's ambitious plans for their privately developed CST-100 human rated spaceship – with a little help from NASA.
Boeing has reserved a launch slot at Cape Canaveral with United Launch Alliance (ULA), but the details are not yet public.
If all goes well, the maiden CST-100 orbital test flight with humans would follow around mid-2017.
"The first manned test could happen by the end of summer 2017 with a two person crew," he said.
"And we may go all the way to the space station."
Boeing is among a trio of American aerospace firms, including SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp, vying to restore America's capability to fly humans to Earth orbit and the space station by late 2017, using seed money from NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP) in a public/private partnership. The next round of contracts will be awarded by NASA about late summer 2014.
That's a feat that America hasn't accomplished in nearly three years.
"It's been over 1000 days and counting since we landed [on STS-135]," Ferguson noted with some sadness as he checked the daily counter on his watch. He is a veteran of three space flights.
Since the shuttles retirement in July 2011 following touchdown of Space Shuttle Atlantis on the last shuttle flight (STS-135) with Ferguson in command, no American astronauts have launched to space from American soil on American rockets and spaceships.
The only ticket to the ISS and back has been aboard the Russian Soyuz capsule.
Chris and the Boeing team hope to change the situation soon. They are chomping at the bits to get Americas back into space from US soil and provide reliable and cost-effective US access to destinations in low Earth orbit like the ISS and the proposed private Bigelow space station.
Boeing wants to send its new private spaceship all the way to the space station starting on the very first unmanned and manned test flights currently slated for 2017, according to Ferguson.
"NASA wants us to provide [crew flight] services by November 2017," said Ferguson, according to the terms of the CCP contact award."
The CST-100 will launch atop a man rated Atlas V rocket and carry a mix of cargo and up to seven crew members to the ISS.
"So both the first unmanned and manned test flight will be in 2017. The first unmanned orbital flight test is currently set for January 2017. The first manned test could be end of summer 2017," he stated.
I asked Chris to outline the mission plans for both flights.
"Our first flight, the CST-100 Orbital Flight Test – is scheduled to be unmanned."
"Originally it was just going to be an on orbital test of the systems, with perhaps a close approach to the space station. But we haven't precluded our ability to dock.
"So if our systems mature as we anticipate then we may go all the way and actually dock at station. We're not sure yet," he said.
So I asked whether he thinks the CST-100 will also go dock at the ISS on the first manned test flight?
"Yes. Absolutely. We want go to all the way to the space station," Ferguson emphatically told me.
"For the 1st manned test flight, we want to dock at the space station and maybe spend a couple weeks there."
"SpaceX did it [docking]. So we think we can too."
"The question is can we make the owners of the space station comfortable with what we are doing. That's what it really comes down to."
"As the next year progresses and the design matures and it becomes more refined and we understand our own capability, and NASA understands our capabilities as the space station program gets more involved – then I'm sure they will put the same rigor into our plan as they did into the SpaceX and Orbital Sciences plans."
"When SpaceX and Orbital [wanted to] come up for the grapple [rather than just rendezvous], NASA asked 'Are these guys ready?' That's what NASA will ask us."
"And if we [Boeing] are ready, then we'll go dock at the station with our CST-100."
"And if we're not ready, then we'll wait another flight and go to the station the next time. It's just that simple."
"We looked at it and this is something we can do."
"There are a lot of ways we have to make NASA and ourselves happy. But as a company we feel we can go do it," Ferguson stated.
So the future looks promising.
But the schedule depends entirely on NASA funding levels approved by Congress. And that vital funding has been rather short on supply. It has already caused significant delays to the start of the space taxi missions for all three companies contending for NASA's commercial crew contracts because of the significant slashes to the agency's CCP budget request, year after year.
In fact the schedule has slipped already 18 months to the right compared to barely a few years ago.
So I asked Chris to discuss the CCP funding cuts and resulting postponements – which significantly affected schedules for Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada.
Here it is in a nutshell.
"No Bucks, No Buck Rogers," explained Ferguson.
"The original plan was to conduct both the unmanned and manned CST-100 test flights in 2015."
"Originally, we would have flown the unmanned orbital test in the summer of 2015. The crewed test would have been at the end of 2015."
"So both flights are now a full year and a half later." Ferguson confirmed.
"For the presidents [CCP] funding requests for the past few years of roughly about $800 million, they [Congress] only approved about half. It was significantly less than the request."
Now at this very moment Congress is deliberating NASA's Fiscal 2015 budget.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has said he will beg Congress to approve full funding for the commercial crew program this year – on his hands and knees if necessary.
Otherwise there will be further delays to the start of the space taxi missions. And the direct consequence is NASA would be forced to continue buying US astronaut rides from the Russians at $70 Million per seat. All against the backdrop of Russian actions in the Ukraine where deadly clashes potentially threaten US access to the ISS in a worst case scenario if the ongoing events spin even further out of control and the West ratchets up economic sanctions against Russia.
The CST-100 is designed to be a "simple ride up to and back from space," Ferguson emphasized to me.
It is being designed at Boeing's Houston Product Support Center in Texas.
In Part 2 of my interview, Chris Ferguson will discuss the details about the design, how and where the CST-100 capsule will be manufactured at a newly renovated, former space shuttle facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Stay tuned here for Ken's continuing Boeing, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, Orion, Curiosity, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more planetary and human spaceflight news.
Part 2
Assembling and Launching Boeing's CST-100 Private Space Taxi
Boeing expects to begin "assembly operations of our commercial CST-100 manned capsule soon at the Kennedy Space Center," Chris Ferguson, commander of NASA's final shuttle flight and now director of Boeing's Crew and Mission Operations told Universe Today in an exclusive one-on-one interview about Boeing's space efforts.
In part 2, we focus our discussion on Boeings' strategy for building and launching the CST-100 'space taxi' as a truly commercial space endeavor.
To begin I asked; Where will Boeing build the CST-100?
"The CST-100 will be manufactured at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida inside a former shuttle hanger known as Orbiter Processing Facility 3, or OPF-3, which is now [transformed into] a Boeing processing facility," Ferguson told me. "Over 300 people will be employed."
During the shuttle era, all three of NASA's Orbiter Processing Facilities (OPFs) were a constant beehive of activity for thousands of shuttle workers busily refurbishing the majestic orbiters for their next missions to space. But following Ferguson's final flight on the STS-135 mission to the ISS in 2011, NASA sought new uses for the now dormant facilities.
So Boeing signed a lease for OPF-3 with Space Florida, a state agency that spent some $20 million modernizing the approximately 64,000 square foot hanger for manufacturing by ripping out all the no longer needed shuttle era scaffolding, hardware and equipment previously used to process the orbiters between orbital missions.
Boeing takes over the OPF-3 lease in late June 2014 following an official handover ceremony from Space Florida. Assembly begins soon thereafter.
When will CST-100 spacecraft manufacturing begin?
"The pieces are coming one by one from all over the country," Ferguson explained. "Parts from our vendors are already starting to show up for our test article.
"Assembly of the test article in Florida starts soon."
The CST-100 is being designed at Boeing's Houston Product Support Center in Texas.
It is a reusable capsule comprised of a crew and service module that can carry a mix of cargo and up to seven crew members to the International Space Station (ISS) and must meet stringent safety and reliability standards.
How will the pressure vessel be manufactured? Will it involve friction stir welding as is the case for NASA's Orion deep space manned capsule?
"There are no welds," he informed.
"The pressure vessel is coming from Spincraft, an aerospace manufacturing company in Massachusetts."
Spincraft has extensive space vehicle experience building tanks and assorted critical components for the shuttle and other rockets.
"The capsule is produced by Spincraft using a weld-free process. It's made as a single piece by a proprietary spun form process and machined out from a big piece of metal."
The capsule measures approximately 4.56 meters (175 inches) in diameter.
"The service module will be fabricated in Florida."
The combined crew and service modules are about 5.03 meters (16.5 feet) in length.
"In two years in 2016, our CST-100 will look like the Orion EFT-1 capsule does now at KSC, nearly complete [and ready for the maiden test flight]. Orion is really coming along," Ferguson beamed while contemplating a bright future for US manned spaceflight.
He is saddened that it's been over 1000 days since his crew's landing inside shuttle Atlantis in July 2011.
With Boeing's long history in aircraft and aerospace manufacturing, the CST-100 is being designed and built as a truly commercial endeavor.
Therefore the spacecraft team is able to reach across Boeing's different divisions and diverse engineering spectrum and draw on a vast wealth of in-house expertise, potentially giving them a leg up on commercial crew competitors like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp.
Nevertheless, designing and building a completely new manned spaceship is a daunting task for anyone. And no country or company has done it in decades.
How hard has this effort been to create the CST-100? – And do it with very slim funding from NASA and Boeing.
"Well any preconceived notion I had on building a human rated spacecraft has been completely erased. This is really hard work to build a human rated spacecraft!" Ferguson emphasized.
"And the budget is very small – without a lucrative government contract as used in the past to build these kind of spacecraft."
"Our budget now is an order of magnitude less than to build the shuttle – which was about $35 to $42 Billion in 2011 dollars. The budget is a lot less now."
Read more about the travails of NASA's commercial crew funding situation in Part 1.
The team size now is just a fraction of what it was for past US crewed spaceships.
"So to support this we have a pretty small team."
"The CST-100 team of a couple hundred folks works very hard!"
"For comparison, the space shuttle had 30,000 people working on it at the peak. By early 2011 there were 11,000. We flew on STS-135 with only 4,000 people in July 2011."
Boeing's design philosophy is straightforward; "It's a simple ride up to and back from space," Ferguson emphasized to me.
Next we turned to the venerable Atlas V rocket that will launch Boeing's proposed space taxi. But before it can launch people it must first be human rated, certified as safe and outfitted with an Emergency Detection System (EDS) to save astronauts lives in a split second in case of a sudden and catastrophic in-flight anomaly.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) builds the two stage Atlas V and is responsible for human rating the vehicle which has a virtually unblemished launch record of boosting a wide array of advanced US military satellites and NASA's precious one-of-a-kind robotic science explorers like Curiosity, JUNO, MAVEN and MMS on far flung interplanetary voyages of discovery.
What modifications are required to man rate the Atlas V to launch humans on Boeing's CST-100?
"We will launch on an Atlas V that's being retrofitted to meet NASA's NPR human rating standards for redundancy and the required levels of fault tolerance," Ferguson explained.
"So the rocket will have all the safety NASA wants when it flies humans."
"Now with the CST-100 you can do all that in a smaller package [compared to shuttle]."
"The Atlas V will also be modified by ULA to include an Emergency Detection System (EDS). It's a system not unlike what Apollo and Gemini had, which was much more rudimentary but quite evolved for its day."
"Their EDS would monitor critical parameters like pitch, roll, yaw rates, critical engine parameters. It measures the time to criticality. You know the time to criticality for certain failures is so short that they didn't think humans could react to it in time. So it was essentially automated."
"So if it [EDS] sensed large pitch or yaw excursions, it would self jettison. And the escape system would kick in automatically."
The Atlas V is already highly reliable. The EDS is one of the few systems that had to be added for human flights?
"Yes."
"We also wanted a better abort system performance to go with the two engine Centaur upper stage we elected to use instead of the single engine Centaur."
The purpose is to shut down the Centaur engine firing [in an emergency]."
"The two engine Centaur has flown many times. But it has never flown on an Atlas V. So there is a little bit of recertification and qualification to be done by ULA to go along with that also."
Does that require a lot of work?
"ULA doesn't seem to think the work to be done is all that significant. There is some work to be done."
So it's not a showstopper. Can ULA meet your 2017 launch schedule?
"Yes."
"Before an engine fails it vibrates. So when you talk about automated 'Red Lines' you have to be careful that first you "Do No Harm" – and not make the situation even worse."
"So we'll see how ULA does building this," Ferguson stated.
The future of the CST-100 project hinges on whether NASA awards Boeing a contract to continue development and assembly work in the next round of funding (dubbed CCtCAP) from the agency's Commercial Crew Program (CCP). The CCP seed money fosters development of a safe, reliable and new US commercial human spaceship to low Earth orbit as a public/private partnership.
NASA's announcement of the CCP contract winners is expected around late summer 2014.
Based on my discussions with NASA officials, it seems likely that the agency could select at least two winners to move on – to spur competition and thereby innovation – from among the trio of American aerospace firms competing.
Besides Boeing's CST-100, the SpaceX Dragon and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser vehicles are also in the running for the contract to restore America's capability to fly humans to Earth orbit and the International Space Station (ISS) by 2017.
House spending bill includes modest increase for NASA
Ledyard King - Florida Today
The House passed a spending bill Friday that would modestly increase NASA's budget next year but would not fully fund a program to replace the space shuttle with a new vehicle to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.
The measure, adopted 321-87, would provide $17.9 billion for the civilian space program in fiscal 2015, about $250 million more than NASA received this fiscal year and roughly $400 million more than President Barack Obama has requested.
But the House bill would give NASA less than it wants for the shuttle replacement program, called Commercial Crew. Agency officials have warned Congress that any amount smaller than the $848 million NASA is seeking will delay a launch from U.S. soil, now forecast for 2017, to at least 2018.
The bill includes $785 million for the Commercial Crew Program, which is more than the House has ever approved for the venture. The Senate Appropriations Committee, which has traditionally approved more for the program than the House, is expected to reveal its spending proposal for NASA next week.
Commercial Crew has received renewed interest in the wake of simmering tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.
Since the retirement of the space shuttle program, NASA has paid Russia about $70 million each time a U.S. astronaut hitches a ride to the space station on a Soyuz rocket. But lawmakers and administration officials are wary about relying on a country that has vaguely threatened to stop providing rides unless the White House removes sanctions against key Russian officials.
That's why lawmakers, led by GOP Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, rebuffed attempts by Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan to take millions from NASA's space exploration budget for other purposes, including an anti-violence program and an administration effort to go after unfair trade barriers put up by foreign countries.
Wolf, who heads the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA, recalled that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Twitter last month, in response to U.S. sanctions, "I propose that the United States delivers its astronauts to the ISS with the help of a trampoline."
"Funds for this program are critical... to end our reliance on the Russians so we can get up there," Wolf said.
The House plan also would continue financing NASA's top priorities, notably a deep-space mission to take astronauts to Mars within 20 years and the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, set for launch in 2018.It also approves $5.2 billion for NASA science programs -- more than the agency requested -- to keep robotic missions to Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa on target.The House bill also would provide slightly more money than Obama requested for aeronautics and security. Lax security at NASA centers has undermined the agency's sensitive technology network, according to a recent report from an independent group led by former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh.
5 takeaways from Friday's House vote on NASA's new budget
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
NASA's budget for fiscal year 2015 cleared the House of Representatives early Friday morning and is headed for the Senate. Here are five takeaways from that House vote.
- The $17.9 billion OK'd for NASA was $250 million more than it got this year and $435 million more than the White House requested. The budget, which included other federal agencies as well as NASA, passed the House on a 321-87 vote, showing the space agency still enjoys strong support in Congress.
- The House has voted funds for the Space Launch System, NASA's new deep-space rocket being developed in Huntsville, for five straight fiscal years. If the Senate follows suit, SLS looks increasingly likely to survive its critics to become reality, at least in its first version.
- The vote sets the stage for a good year for NASA and stable employment for its employees and contractors. Construction will begin on two new SLS component test stands at Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center, and Boeing will begin building core segments for SLS at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The Orion capsule will have its first space flight late this year.
- For all that, there is still tension between the White House and Congress over space policy. And when it comes to the nation's space program, nothing's certain until the final vote. The House wants NASA to "down select" its commercial crew partners from three to one - something NASA and the White House don't want to do - and the House wants the White House to request more funding for NASA in general than the president wants. Meanwhile, the House moved $7 million from NASA's Space Operations budget to its Space Technology budget late Thursday night on a simple voice vote.
- For all their partisan national political activity, Alabama's congressional representatives seek positions in Congress where they can support NASA, and then they do it. To mention three, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville) is vice chair of the subcommittee that authorizes NASA spending, U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Haleyville) is on the House Appropriations Committee and its science subcommittee, and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Tuscaloosa) is vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Brooks helped draft language in the House bill just passed that protects SLS development, Aderholt is a NASA authority on the appropriations committee, and Shelby will have a key role on NASA's budget in the Senate.
SpaceX's Manned Capsule Merges High-Tech and Safety
CEO Elon Musk Seeks to Improve Reliability and Ability to 'Just Reload' and Fly Again
Andy Pasztor - Wall Street Journal
The manned spacecraft introduced last week by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. was an unusual combination of pioneering technology and common-sense adaptations of more-conventional hardware.
Elon Musk, SpaceX's chief executive and top designer, also sought to incorporate extra redundancies and safety margins intended to allow the next-generation Dragon capsule to complete its mission even if some engines fail—either on the ascent or descent.
Above all, Mr. Musk said during the vehicle's splashy unveiling Thursday night, the company was intent on achieving a "big leap forward in technology," including reusability that will allow technicians to "just reload propellant and fly again."
To slash the number of parts and improve reliability, the Dragon V2's thrusters are the first space engines to be manufactured entirely using 3-D printing technology. "Initially, we thought of it as somewhat of a Hail Mary" attempt, Mr. Musk said
But after testing revealed the advantages, "being able to print very high-strength alloys was crucial" to the development process, he said.
"We've designed it to be super robust."
The capsule's heat shield, essential to protecting the vehicle and its occupants during fiery descents, represents another major step forward. Originally developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the latest version is made of a lightweight but extremely rugged carbon-based compound, able to withstand temperatures roughly three times as hot as molten lava.
It is capable of handling "more heat than any other material that anyone knows about," Mr. Musk said.
Equipped with a suite of sophisticated onboard sensors and flight controls, the seven-passenger spacecraft can use totally automated systems to approach and dock with the international space station. The crew can also manually direct the linkup in orbit.
But inside the silver walls of the latest Dragon capsule—taller and sleeker than the original cargo capsule—there also are updated versions of more down-to-earth equipment.
Four 17-inch, fold-up touch screens, capable of accessing and commanding virtually all spacecraft systems, have a novel pedigree: They are much larger, more rugged modifications of touch screens already installed on dashboards of Tesla S model electric cars.
"There's a bit of technology sharing there," said Mr. Musk, who also runs Tesla Motors Inc., the company that manufacturers those vehicles.
For space applications, the result is an "overall aesthetic that's very clear, very simple," he said. To prepare for any emergency, however, Mr. Musk emphasized that "critical functions can all be deployed with manual buttons," including release of emergency oxygen and deployment of parachutes.
In the past, Mr. Musk and his team have stressed the importance of SpaceX to maintaining "a steady cadence of launches"—at least one every four to five weeks. Today's goals, though, are more ambitious. The manned Dragon capsule "should be able to arrive and depart on the same day," Mr. Musk said during Thursday's event.
Less than five years ago, SpaceX appeared to be on the ropes following a series of failed launches. The usually shy, restrained SpaceX chief stepped somewhat out of character Thursday, contrasting those tough times with the adrenaline rush of the high-profile festivities.
Acknowledging to reporters "a super low point" in his career, Mr. Musk quipped: "I find this to be a very unexpected circumstance.…I certainly didn't expect to be unveiling Dragon Version 2."
Elon Musk unveils new astronaut-ready spaceship at SpaceX headquarters
W.J. Hennigan - Los Angeles Times
With much fanfare, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk on Thursday unveiled a cone-shaped spaceship that he hopes will one day ferry NASA astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station.
Standing before a crowd of journalists and SpaceX employees at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Musk revealed the white capsule that's designed to fit seven astronauts at a time.
In a short animated video that played at the event, the spaceship is seen blasting into orbit on a rocket, zooming to the space station and docking with it before returning to Earth and gently touching down on the tarmac under rocket power.
"That's how a 21st century spaceship should land," Musk said to a cheering crowd. It will have the landing "accuracy of a helicopter."
The capsule, dubbed Dragon V2, will be completely reusable after it returns from space, he said. The company expects to make its first manned test flight by the end of 2016.
With NASA's fleet of space shuttles retired since 2011, the space agency has no way to get its astronauts to the space station other than paying the Russian government $71 million per seat.
That's been an issue since Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin suggested this month that his nation might no longer allow U.S. astronauts access to its launch vehicles and may use the International Space Station without American participation.
From the beginning of this arrangement, NASA aimed to end the outsourcing of this work to foreign governments and turn it over to American industry. To accomplish this, the space agency has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in seed money to companies to privately develop rockets and spacecraft that can launch astronauts into outer space.
NASA's contracts are part of the space agency's Commercial Crew Development program, which lays the groundwork for the potentially multibillion-dollar job of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Several companies are now embroiled in a new private space race. Of the various contenders to do the job, SpaceX is the only company to have its craft spaceflight-proven.
In 2011, SpaceX became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and have it return intact. The company sent up its Dragon space capsule aboard its Falcon 9 rocket.
The Dragon capsule was empty at the time, but it was a technological and financial feat that had been accomplished before only by government entities. The Apollo-like capsule has since delivered cargo to the space station three times.
SpaceX, which is short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has $1.6-billion contract with NASA for a total of 12 deliveries.
The company won additional contracts worth more than $500 million from NASA to develop its hardware to be astronaut-ready.
Other awards winners are Boeing Co., which has built nearly every manned spacecraft in U.S. history, and Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev., which is building a space plane that closely resembles a mini-space shuttle.
SpaceX builds its Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules in a vast complex in Hawthorne where fuselage sections for Boeing's 747 jumbo jets were once built.
Elon Musk uses Tesla tech in SpaceX 'space taxi'
Chris Woodyard - USA TODAY
Many wonder how Elon Musk can simultaneously be CEO of two high flying, but highly dissimilar, tech companies: Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, and Tesla Motors.
But it turns out that spacecraft and rocket launching concern and the electric car maker are finding ways of working together.
Musk just rolled out SpaceX's new Dragon V2 capsule, meant for up to seven passengers and up to four tons of cargo, Bloomberg News reporter Alan Ohnsman noted that the interior is both sleek and practical. One reason: It has a control console with four flat touchscreens that are adapted for use from the oversize infotainment system screen in Tesla's Model S electric car.
It shows that the two companies are looking for ways to work together, especially when it comes to development of SpaceX's "space taxi." Musk says the Dragon V2 capsule should begin manned tests by 2016.
SpaceX has already shown it can deliver supplies to the International Space Station with its unmanned spaceship under contract to NASA, which has spent $2.5 billion with the firm since 2008. Now it is looking to take passengers there on a regular basis. The firm, based in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, can go up to 10 missions before its protective heatshield needs to be refurbished, Musk tells Bloomberg.
With all of its space shuttles retired, NASA is paying Russia up to $70 million per astronaut for flights to the space station. Musk says he can cut the cost to about $20 million. And the new capsule will be more advanced. He says it will return to earth and gently land using its own rocket power, not glide to a runway like the shuttles or parachute to earth like past capsules.
NASA to test giant Mars parachute on Earth
Alicia Chang - Associated Press
The skies off the Hawaiian island of Kauai will be a stand-in for Mars as NASA prepares to launch a saucer-shaped vehicle in an experimental flight designed to land heavy loads on the red planet.
For decades, robotic landers and rovers have hitched a ride to Earth's planetary neighbor using the same parachute design. But NASA needs a bigger and stronger parachute if it wants to send astronauts there.
Weather permitting, the space agency will conduct a test flight Tuesday high in Earth's atmosphere that's supposed to simulate the thin Martian air.
Cameras rigged aboard the vehicle will capture the action as it accelerates to four times the speed of sound and falls back to Earth. Viewers with an Internet connection can follow along live.
Engineers cautioned that they may not succeed on the first try.
"As long as I get data, I'll be very happy," said project manager Mark Adler of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The search for a way to land massive payloads on Mars predates the existence of NASA. Back then, engineers toyed with sending a winged spacecraft that would land like an airplane, but the idea was not feasible, space historians say.
Landing has always been "one of the big technology challenges for a human Mars mission," American University space policy professor Howard McCurdy said in an email.
When the twin Viking landers became the first spacecraft to set down on Mars in 1976, they relied on parachutes to slow down after punching through the Martian atmosphere. The basic design has been used since including during the Curiosity rover's hair-raising landing in 2012.
With plans to land heavier spacecraft and eventually humans, NASA needed a heftier solution. So it designed a supersonic parachute that's 110 feet in diameter — twice as big as the one that carried the 1-ton Curiosity. It's so gigantic that it can't fit into the wind tunnels that NASA typically uses to test parachutes.
Since it's impractical to test unproven technology on Mars, NASA looked to Earth as a substitute.
During the flight, a high-flying balloon will loft the disc-shaped vehicle from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai to 23 miles over the Pacific where it will be dropped. Then it will fire its rocket motor to climb to 34 miles, accelerating to Mach 4. The environment at this altitude is similar to Mars' thin atmosphere.
As it descends to Earth, a tube around the vehicle should inflate, slowing it down. Then the parachute should pop out, guiding the vehicle to a gentle splashdown in the Pacific.
Robert Braun, space technology professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, called the project a "high-risk, high-reward effort."
The latest test program "is advancing capabilities and creating the engineering knowledge needed for the next generation of Mars landers," Braun, who served as NASA's technology chief, said in an email.
NASA plans more test flights next year before deciding whether to use the new parachute on a future Mars mission.
Retro Report: Challenger, Columbia and the Nature of Calamity
Clyde Haberman - New York Times' Retro Report
They died as they slipped the surly bonds of Earth. The last words of that sentence, haunting words, were written by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American airman and poet who enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, before the United States entered World War II. He was killed the following year in a midair collision over England. He was all of 19.
Poets can achieve immortality; Magee did with a sonnet called "High Flight." Its opening and closing lines became embedded in the American consciousness when President Ronald Reagan invoked them in paying tribute to the seven Americans who died in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986. Those men and women, the president said in an address to a stunned and grieving nation, had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God."
In this finale of its current series of documentary videos, Retro Report remains true to its mission of re-examining past news stories by summoning the heartache of that day in 1986 and also of another, 17 years later: the disaster that killed the seven crew members of the space shuttle Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003. Time can be the enemy of memory. But it is not too late, with Memorial Day behind us by mere days, to recall those who soared so high, only to fall back to Earth. On the Challenger, they were Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, Gregory B. Jarvis and, best-known of all, the schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. The Columbia crew members were Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel S. Clark and Ilan Ramon.
Space shuttling under the aegis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration belongs to the past, at least for now. Atlantis flew the last mission, three years ago. These days, Americans headed to the International Space Station have to hitch a ride on a Russian craft — with the United States government paying handsomely for the privilege.
No one can be sure if this arrangement will endure. Tensions over events in Ukraine have strained relations between Washington and Moscow to the point that a Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitri O. Rogozin, said recently that American astronauts might be denied access to Russian launch vehicles. Americans want to go to the space station? Let them do it "using a trampoline," Mr. Rogozin said.
Over 30 years, there were 135 American shuttle launches and returns, and 133 were successes. Perhaps inevitably, it is the other two that people remember best.
Those missions turned into catastrophes for different reasons. On Challenger, an O-ring seal failed on a rocket booster, causing a breach that let loose a stream of hot gas, which ignited an external fuel tank; 73 seconds after liftoff, the shuttle broke apart over the Atlantic. With Columbia, a piece of insulating foam broke off from an external tank during the launch, and struck the left wing. The damage proved severe enough that when the craft re-entered the Earth's atmosphere after two weeks in space, hot atmospheric gases were able to penetrate the wing structure. The shuttle became unstable. It broke apart over Texas and Louisiana.
The two disasters led to investigations, to the removal of senior officials, to promises of institutional change, to undying expressions of sorrow. Among the remorseful were engineers who had warned that headaches like eroded O rings and missing foam created risks, but who could not persuade their immediate superiors to act. One former NASA engineer, Rodney Rocha, lamented to Retro Report that he wished he had been more aggressive in making his concerns known to those at the very top. Observing the chain of command looms large in the world of engineering, Mr. Rocha said, adding, "I will regret, always, why I didn't break down the door by myself."
In theorizing about what went wrong in these two disasters and in others, some social scientists have observed that certain circumstances may well be beyond anyone's control. Even before Challenger, in 1984, a sociologist named Charles Perrow put forth the concept of "normal accidents," by which he meant that in a technologically complex operation something is bound to go wrong at some point. These systems are made up of so many tightly linked parts, Mr. Perrow said, that even a seemingly minor glitch could lead to a cascade of woes that make cosmic failure almost unavoidable. An example for him was the near-meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
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Another sociologist, Diane Vaughan, has written extensively about Challenger and served on the commission that investigated the Columbia horror. She has advanced the theory of "normalization of deviance," meaning that in many organizations — NASA certainly being no exception — some problems and risks are understood to be acceptable — part of doing business, if you will. Take those problematic O rings on Challenger. Their erosion had been evident on earlier launchings, but flying with them became routine. To Ms. Vaughan, NASA's decision to forge ahead on that fateful January day in 1986, despite new concerns about the O rings that were raised, did not reflect cold, bottom-line thinking or an amoral bending of rules. "They applied all the usual rules," she told Retro Report. Regrettably, they did so "in a situation where the usual rules didn't apply."
Theories of this sort can conceivably touch on other calamities. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico might be one example. Another could be the recent South Korean ferry disaster in which several hundred people died, most of them high school students. Setting aside possibly criminal conduct by senior officers who abandoned ship, reports out of South Korea suggest that safety failings had long been accepted as routine: normalized deviance, which included excessive overloading of cargo onto the ferry.
Even when a system is not technologically complex, a tiny defect can lead to calamity. This is not a new thought. Perhaps the tragedies of Challenger and Columbia, seemingly rooted in relatively minor problems, were ordained by a concept that has been around for centuries. It has something to do with what can happen for want of a nail.
Russia preparing to launch Okno space surveillance system at full capacity
The Voice of Russia
State tests of the Okno (Window) complex for tracking and monitoring man-made space objects in Tajikistan will take place during the summer months in the interests of the Russian aerospace defence troops. After that the facility will be put on duty, representative of the aerospace defence troops Colonel Alexey Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti.
According to open sources, the facility is part of the Russian space control system and consists of ten substations. The smaller part of them took up duty in March 2004. All the Okno component parts will start working only now. This will allow to expand the orbital range and track objects, including reconnaissance ones, at lower altitudes.
"During the summer training period, between 1 June and the end of autumn, it is planned to carry out state tests of the entire Tajikistan-located Okno optoelectronic facility for tracking space objects and to put it on duty," Zolotukhin said. In addition, new radio-technical and optoelectronic complexes of the Okno space control system will start to be built on Russian territory.
The Okno facility is located in Tajikistan at an altitude of 2.2km above sea level in the Sanglok Mountains in Pamir. The facility is meant for operative provision of information about the situation in space, classification of man-made space objects and determining their class, purpose and current condition. It allows to discover any kind of space objects at altitudes between 2,000 and 40,000km, that is up to the geostationary Earth orbit.
Okno discovers space objects at night by the sunlight that they reflect. It traces both familiar and newly-tracked space objects. The space control system was created to monitor Earth satellites and other space objects and it keeps the Main Catalogue of Space Objects. It is the main element of an integral Russian information system of global monitoring of the situation in space. The joint system also comprises the missile attack warning system and ballistic missile defence and anti-aircraft defence forces and facilities.
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"I've been trying forever to find a way to honor the food-delivery guys," Bruce McCall, the artist who painted this week's cover, says. "I wanted to show what heroes they are; they're intrepid, pedaling along at any time of night to deliver food to New Yorkers. We usually rely on my wife Polly's cooking — she's marvelous at it — but when she comes home late after a long day of work, then we'll take the easy way out. Well, easy for us, at least."(NO FURTHER TEXT)World Largest Heat Shield Attached to NASA's Orion Crew Capsule for Crucial Fall 2014 Test FlightKen Kremer - Universe TodayIn a key milestone, technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world's largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA's Orion crew capsule edging ever closer to its inaugural unmanned test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1).Why Commercial Crew is Critical for Future Exploration: One-on-One Interview with NASA Administrator Charles BoldenKen Kremer - Universe TodayWhy is NASA's Commercial Crew Program to develop private human transport ships to low Earth orbit important?Part 1Boeing CST-100 Space Taxi Maiden Test Flight to ISS Expected Early 2017One on One Interview with Chris Ferguson, Last Shuttle CommanderKen Kremer - Universe TodayBoeing expects to launch the first unmanned test flight of their commercial CST-100 manned 'space taxi' in "early 2017," said Chris Ferguson, commander of NASA's final shuttle flight in an exclusive one-on-one interview with Universe Today for an inside look at Boeing's space efforts. Ferguson is now spearheading Boeing's human spaceflight capsule project as director of Crew and Mission Operations.House spending bill includes modest increase for NASALedyard King - Florida TodayThe House passed a spending bill Friday that would modestly increase NASA's budget next year but would not fully fund a program to replace the space shuttle with a new vehicle to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.5 takeaways from Friday's House vote on NASA's new budgetLee Roop - Huntsville TimesNASA's budget for fiscal year 2015 cleared the House of Representatives early Friday morning and is headed for the Senate. Here are five takeaways from that House vote.SpaceX's Manned Capsule Merges High-Tech and SafetyCEO Elon Musk Seeks to Improve Reliability and Ability to 'Just Reload' and Fly AgainAndy Pasztor - Wall Street JournalThe manned spacecraft introduced last week by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. was an unusual combination of pioneering technology and common-sense adaptations of more-conventional hardware.Elon Musk unveils new astronaut-ready spaceship at SpaceX headquartersW.J. Hennigan - Los Angeles TimesWith much fanfare, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk on Thursday unveiled a cone-shaped spaceship that he hopes will one day ferry NASA astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station.Elon Musk uses Tesla tech in SpaceX 'space taxi'Chris Woodyard - USA TODAYMany wonder how Elon Musk can simultaneously be CEO of two high flying, but highly dissimilar, tech companies: Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, and Tesla Motors.NASA to test giant Mars parachute on EarthAlicia Chang - Associated PressThe skies off the Hawaiian island of Kauai will be a stand-in for Mars as NASA prepares to launch a saucer-shaped vehicle in an experimental flight designed to land heavy loads on the red planet.Retro Report: Challenger, Columbia and the Nature of CalamityClyde Haberman - New York Times' Retro ReportThey died as they slipped the surly bonds of Earth. The last words of that sentence, haunting words, were written by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American airman and poet who enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, before the United States entered World War II. He was killed the following year in a midair collision over England. He was all of 19.Russia preparing to launch Okno space surveillance system at full capacity
In a key milestone, technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world's largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA's Orion crew capsule edging ever closer to its inaugural unmanned test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1).One of the primary goals of NASA's eagerly anticipated Orion EFT-1 uncrewed test flight is to test the efficacy of the heat shield in protecting the vehicle - and future human astronauts- from excruciating temperatures reaching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit during scorching re-entry heating.A trio of parachutes will then unfurl to slow Orion down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.Orion is NASA's next generation human rated vehicle now under development to replace the now retired space shuttle. The state-of-the-art spacecraft will carry America's astronauts on voyages venturing farther into deep space than ever before - past the Moon to Asteroids, Mars and Beyond!"The Orion heat shield is the largest of its kind ever built. Its wider than the Apollo and Mars Science Lab heat shields," Todd Sullivan told Universe Today. Sullivan is the heat shield senior manager at Lockheed Martin, Orion's prime contractor.The heat shield measures 16.5 feet in diameter.Lockheed Martin and NASA technicians mated the heat shield to the bottom of the capsule during assembly work inside the Operations and Checkout High Bay facility at KSC.It is constructed from a single seamless piece of Avcoat ablator, that was applied by engineers at Textron Defense System near Boston, Mass."They applied the Avcoat ablater material to the outside. That's what protects the spacecraft from the heat of reentry."The ablative material will wear away as it heats up during the capsules atmospheric re-entry thereby preventing the 4000 degree F heat from being transferred to the rest of the capsule and saving it and the human crew from utter destruction.Orion EFT-1 is slated to launch in December 2014 atop the mammoth, triple barreled United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket, currently the most powerful booster in America's fleet.The Delta IV Heavy is the only rocket with sufficient thrust to launch the Orion EFT-1 capsule and its attached upper stage to its intended orbit of 3600 miles altitude above Earth - about 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 years.At the conclusion of the two-orbit, four- hour EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and re-enters the Earth's atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour)."That's about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions," Scott Wilson, NASA's Orion Manager of Production Operations at KSC, told me during an interview at KSC."The big reason to get to those high speeds during EFT-1 is to be able to test out the thermal protection system, and the heat shield is the biggest part of that.""Numerous sensors and instrumentation have been specially installed on the EFT-1 heat shield and the back shell tiles to collect measurements of things like temperatures, pressures and stresses during the extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry," Wilson explained.The heat shield arrived at KSC in December 2013 loaded inside NASA's Super Guppy aircraft while I was onsite. Read my story - here.The data gathered during the unmanned EFT-1 flight will aid in confirming. or refuting, design decisions and computer models as the program moves forward to the first flight atop NASA's mammoth SLS booster in late 2017 on the EM-1 mission and more human crewed missions thereafter.Recently, the EFT-1 launch was postponed three months from its long planned slot in mid-September to December 2014 when NASA was ordered to make way for the accelerated launch of recently declassified US Air Force Space Surveillance satellites that were given a higher priority.The covert Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP, satellites were only unveiled in Feb. 2014 during a speech by General William Shelton, commander of the US Air Force Space Command.Despite the EFT-1 launch postponement, Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said technicians are pressing forward and continue to work around the clock at KSC in order to still be ready in time to launch by the original launch window that opens in mid- September 2014."The contractor teams are working to get the Orion spacecraft done on time for the December 2017 launch," said Cabana."They are working seven days a week in the Operations and Checkout High Bay facility to get the vehicle ready to roll out for the EFT-1 mission and be mounted on top of the Delta IV Heavy.""I can assure you the Orion will be ready to go on time, as soon as we get our opportunity to launch that vehicle on its first flight test and that is pretty darn amazing.""Our plan is to have the Orion spacecraft ready because we want to get EFT-1 out so we can start getting the hardware in for Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) and start processing for that vehicle that will launch on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in 2017," Cabana told meConcurrently, new American-made private crewed spaceships are under development by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada - with funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP) - to restore US capability to ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and back to Earth by late 2017.Why Commercial Crew is Critical for Future Exploration: One-on-One Interview with NASA Administrator Charles BoldenKen Kremer - Universe TodayWhy is NASA's Commercial Crew Program to develop private human transport ships to low Earth orbit important?That's the question I posed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden when we met for an exclusive interview at NASA Goddard.The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) is the critical enabler "for establishing a viable orbital infrastructure" in the 2020s, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Universe Today in an exclusive one-one-one interview at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.Bolden says NASA wants one of the new American-made private crewed spaceships under development by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada – with NASA funding – to be ready to ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and back to Earth by late 2017. Flights for other commercial orbital space ventures would follow later and into the next decade.Since the shutdown of NASA's space shuttle program following the final flight by STS-135 in 2011 (commanded by Chris Ferguson), America has been 100% dependent on the Russians to fly our astronauts to the space station and back."Commercial crew is critical. We need to have our own capability to get our crews to space," Bolden told me, during a visit to the NASA Goddard cleanroom with the agency's groundbreaking Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) science probes.Administrator Bolden foresees a huge shift in how the US will conduct space operations in low earth orbit (LEO) just a decade from now. The future LEO architecture will be dominated not by NASA and the ISS but rather by commercial entrepreneurs and endeavors in the 2020s."There are going to be other commercial stations or other laboratories," Bolden excitedly told me.And the cash strapped Commercial Crew effort to build new astronaut transporters is the absolutely essential enabler to get that exploration task done, he says."Commercial Crew is critical to establishing the low Earth orbit infrastructure that is required for exploration.""We have got to have a way to get our crews to space.""You know people try to separate stuff that NASA does into nice little neat packages. But it's not that way anymore."Bolden and NASA are already looking beyond the ISS in planning how to use the new commercial crew spaceships being developed by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada in a public- partnership with NASA's Commercial Crew Program."Everything we do [at NASA] is integrated. We have to have commercial crew [for] a viable low Earth orbit infrastructure – a place where we can do testing – for example with what's going on at the ISS today.""And in the out years you are going to be doing the same type of work.""But it's not going to be on the ISS.""After 2024 or maybe 2028, if we extend it again, you are going to see the people on commercial vehicles. There are going to be other stations or other laboratories.""But there won't be NASA operated laboratories. They will be commercially viable and operating laboratories."Private NewSpace ventures represent a revolutionary departure from current space exploration thinking. But none of these revolutionary commercial operations will happen if we don't have reliable and cost effective human access to orbit from American soil with American rockets on American spaceships."We need to have our own capability to get our crews to space – first of all. That's why commercial crew is really, really, really important," Bolden emphasized.The ongoing crises in Ukraine makes development of a new US crew transporter to end our total reliance on Russian spaceships even more urgent."Right now we use the Russian Soyuz. It is a very reliable way to get our crews to space. Our partnership with Roscosmos is as strong as it's ever been.""So we just keep watching what's going on in other places in the world, but we continue to work with Roscosmos the way we always have," Bolden stated.The latest example is this week's successful launch of the new three man Russian-US- German Expedition 40 crew to the ISS on a Soyuz.Of course, the speed at which the US develops the private human spaceships is totally dependent on the funding level for the Commercial Crew program.Unfortunately, progress in getting the space taxis actually built and flying has been significantly slowed because the Obama Administration CCP funding requests for the past few years of roughly about $800 million have been cut in half by a reluctant US Congress. Thus forcing NASA to delay the first manned orbital test flights by at least 18 months from 2015 to 2017.And every forced postponement to CCP costs US taxpayers another $70 million payment per crew seat to the Russians. As a result of the congressional CCP cuts more than 1 Billion US Dollars have been shipped to Russia instead of on building our own US crew transports – leaving American aerospace workers unemployed and American manufacturing facilities shuttered.I asked Bolden to assess NASA's new funding request for the coming fiscal year currently working its way through Congress."It's looking better. It's never good. But now it's looking much better," Bolden replied."If you look at the House markup that's a very positive indication that the budget for commercial crew is going to be pretty good."The pace of progress in getting our crews back to orbit basically can be summed up in a nutshell."No Bucks, No Buck Rogers," Chris Ferguson, who now leads Boeing's crew effort, told me in a separate exclusive interview for Universe Today.The BoeingCST-100, Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser and SpaceX Dragon 'space taxis' are all vying for funding in the next round of contracts to be awarded by NASA around late summer 2014 known as Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap).All three company's have been making excellent progress in meeting their NASA mandated milestones in the current contract period known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability initiative (CCiCAP) under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.Altogether they have received more than $1 Billion in NASA funding under the current CCiCAP initiative. Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts worth $460 million and $440 million, respectively. Sierra Nevada was given what amounts to half an award worth $212.5 million.SpaceX CEO Elon Musk just publicly unveiled his manned Dragon V2 spaceship on May 29.Boeing's Chris Ferguson told me that assembly of the CST-100 test article starts soon at the Kennedy Space Center.NASA officials have told me that one or more of the three competitors will be chosen later this year in the next phase under CCtCAP to build the next generation spaceship to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS by 2017.In order to certify the fitness and safety of the new crew transporters, the CCtCAP contracts will specify that "each awardee conduct at least one crewed flight test to verify their spacecraft can dock to the space station and all its systems perform as expected."Concurrently, NASA is developing the manned Orion crew vehicle for deep space exploration. The state-of-the-art capsule will carry astronauts back to the Moon and beyond on journeys to Asteroids and one day to Mars."We need to have our own capability to get our crews to space. Commercial Crew is critical to establishing the low Earth orbit infrastructure that is required for exploration," that's the bottom line message from my interview with NASA Administrator Bolden.Part 1Boeing CST-100 Space Taxi Maiden Test Flight to ISS Expected Early 2017One on One Interview with Chris Ferguson, Last Shuttle CommanderKen Kremer - Universe Today
Boeing expects to launch the first unmanned test flight of their commercial CST-100 manned 'space taxi' in "early 2017," said Chris Ferguson, commander of NASA's final shuttle flight in an exclusive one-on-one interview with Universe Today for an inside look at Boeing's space efforts. Ferguson is now spearheading Boeing's human spaceflight capsule project as director of Crew and Mission Operations."The first unmanned orbital test flight is planned in January 2017 … and may go to the station," Ferguson told me during a wide ranging, in depth discussion about a variety of human spaceflight topics and Boeing's ambitious plans for their privately developed CST-100 human rated spaceship – with a little help from NASA.Boeing has reserved a launch slot at Cape Canaveral with United Launch Alliance (ULA), but the details are not yet public.If all goes well, the maiden CST-100 orbital test flight with humans would follow around mid-2017."The first manned test could happen by the end of summer 2017 with a two person crew," he said."And we may go all the way to the space station."Boeing is among a trio of American aerospace firms, including SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp, vying to restore America's capability to fly humans to Earth orbit and the space station by late 2017, using seed money from NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP) in a public/private partnership. The next round of contracts will be awarded by NASA about late summer 2014.That's a feat that America hasn't accomplished in nearly three years."It's been over 1000 days and counting since we landed [on STS-135]," Ferguson noted with some sadness as he checked the daily counter on his watch. He is a veteran of three space flights.Since the shuttles retirement in July 2011 following touchdown of Space Shuttle Atlantis on the last shuttle flight (STS-135) with Ferguson in command, no American astronauts have launched to space from American soil on American rockets and spaceships.The only ticket to the ISS and back has been aboard the Russian Soyuz capsule.Chris and the Boeing team hope to change the situation soon. They are chomping at the bits to get Americas back into space from US soil and provide reliable and cost-effective US access to destinations in low Earth orbit like the ISS and the proposed private Bigelow space station.Boeing wants to send its new private spaceship all the way to the space station starting on the very first unmanned and manned test flights currently slated for 2017, according to Ferguson."NASA wants us to provide [crew flight] services by November 2017," said Ferguson, according to the terms of the CCP contact award."The CST-100 will launch atop a man rated Atlas V rocket and carry a mix of cargo and up to seven crew members to the ISS."So both the first unmanned and manned test flight will be in 2017. The first unmanned orbital flight test is currently set for January 2017. The first manned test could be end of summer 2017," he stated.I asked Chris to outline the mission plans for both flights."Our first flight, the CST-100 Orbital Flight Test – is scheduled to be unmanned.""Originally it was just going to be an on orbital test of the systems, with perhaps a close approach to the space station. But we haven't precluded our ability to dock."So if our systems mature as we anticipate then we may go all the way and actually dock at station. We're not sure yet," he said.So I asked whether he thinks the CST-100 will also go dock at the ISS on the first manned test flight?"Yes. Absolutely. We want go to all the way to the space station," Ferguson emphatically told me."For the 1st manned test flight, we want to dock at the space station and maybe spend a couple weeks there.""SpaceX did it [docking]. So we think we can too.""The question is can we make the owners of the space station comfortable with what we are doing. That's what it really comes down to.""As the next year progresses and the design matures and it becomes more refined and we understand our own capability, and NASA understands our capabilities as the space station program gets more involved – then I'm sure they will put the same rigor into our plan as they did into the SpaceX and Orbital Sciences plans.""When SpaceX and Orbital [wanted to] come up for the grapple [rather than just rendezvous], NASA asked 'Are these guys ready?' That's what NASA will ask us.""And if we [Boeing] are ready, then we'll go dock at the station with our CST-100.""And if we're not ready, then we'll wait another flight and go to the station the next time. It's just that simple.""We looked at it and this is something we can do.""There are a lot of ways we have to make NASA and ourselves happy. But as a company we feel we can go do it," Ferguson stated.So the future looks promising.But the schedule depends entirely on NASA funding levels approved by Congress. And that vital funding has been rather short on supply. It has already caused significant delays to the start of the space taxi missions for all three companies contending for NASA's commercial crew contracts because of the significant slashes to the agency's CCP budget request, year after year.In fact the schedule has slipped already 18 months to the right compared to barely a few years ago.So I asked Chris to discuss the CCP funding cuts and resulting postponements – which significantly affected schedules for Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada.Here it is in a nutshell."No Bucks, No Buck Rogers," explained Ferguson."The original plan was to conduct both the unmanned and manned CST-100 test flights in 2015.""Originally, we would have flown the unmanned orbital test in the summer of 2015. The crewed test would have been at the end of 2015.""So both flights are now a full year and a half later." Ferguson confirmed."For the presidents [CCP] funding requests for the past few years of roughly about $800 million, they [Congress] only approved about half. It was significantly less than the request."Now at this very moment Congress is deliberating NASA's Fiscal 2015 budget.NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has said he will beg Congress to approve full funding for the commercial crew program this year – on his hands and knees if necessary.Otherwise there will be further delays to the start of the space taxi missions. And the direct consequence is NASA would be forced to continue buying US astronaut rides from the Russians at $70 Million per seat. All against the backdrop of Russian actions in the Ukraine where deadly clashes potentially threaten US access to the ISS in a worst case scenario if the ongoing events spin even further out of control and the West ratchets up economic sanctions against Russia.The CST-100 is designed to be a "simple ride up to and back from space," Ferguson emphasized to me.It is being designed at Boeing's Houston Product Support Center in Texas.In Part 2 of my interview, Chris Ferguson will discuss the details about the design, how and where the CST-100 capsule will be manufactured at a newly renovated, former space shuttle facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Stay tuned here for Ken's continuing Boeing, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, Orion, Curiosity, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more planetary and human spaceflight news.Part 2Assembling and Launching Boeing's CST-100 Private Space TaxiBoeing expects to begin "assembly operations of our commercial CST-100 manned capsule soon at the Kennedy Space Center," Chris Ferguson, commander of NASA's final shuttle flight and now director of Boeing's Crew and Mission Operations told Universe Today in an exclusive one-on-one interview about Boeing's space efforts.In part 2, we focus our discussion on Boeings' strategy for building and launching the CST-100 'space taxi' as a truly commercial space endeavor.To begin I asked; Where will Boeing build the CST-100?"The CST-100 will be manufactured at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida inside a former shuttle hanger known as Orbiter Processing Facility 3, or OPF-3, which is now [transformed into] a Boeing processing facility," Ferguson told me. "Over 300 people will be employed."During the shuttle era, all three of NASA's Orbiter Processing Facilities (OPFs) were a constant beehive of activity for thousands of shuttle workers busily refurbishing the majestic orbiters for their next missions to space. But following Ferguson's final flight on the STS-135 mission to the ISS in 2011, NASA sought new uses for the now dormant facilities.So Boeing signed a lease for OPF-3 with Space Florida, a state agency that spent some $20 million modernizing the approximately 64,000 square foot hanger for manufacturing by ripping out all the no longer needed shuttle era scaffolding, hardware and equipment previously used to process the orbiters between orbital missions.Boeing takes over the OPF-3 lease in late June 2014 following an official handover ceremony from Space Florida. Assembly begins soon thereafter.When will CST-100 spacecraft manufacturing begin?"The pieces are coming one by one from all over the country," Ferguson explained. "Parts from our vendors are already starting to show up for our test article."Assembly of the test article in Florida starts soon."The CST-100 is being designed at Boeing's Houston Product Support Center in Texas.It is a reusable capsule comprised of a crew and service module that can carry a mix of cargo and up to seven crew members to the International Space Station (ISS) and must meet stringent safety and reliability standards.How will the pressure vessel be manufactured? Will it involve friction stir welding as is the case for NASA's Orion deep space manned capsule?"There are no welds," he informed."The pressure vessel is coming from Spincraft, an aerospace manufacturing company in Massachusetts."Spincraft has extensive space vehicle experience building tanks and assorted critical components for the shuttle and other rockets."The capsule is produced by Spincraft using a weld-free process. It's made as a single piece by a proprietary spun form process and machined out from a big piece of metal."The capsule measures approximately 4.56 meters (175 inches) in diameter."The service module will be fabricated in Florida."The combined crew and service modules are about 5.03 meters (16.5 feet) in length."In two years in 2016, our CST-100 will look like the Orion EFT-1 capsule does now at KSC, nearly complete [and ready for the maiden test flight]. Orion is really coming along," Ferguson beamed while contemplating a bright future for US manned spaceflight.He is saddened that it's been over 1000 days since his crew's landing inside shuttle Atlantis in July 2011.With Boeing's long history in aircraft and aerospace manufacturing, the CST-100 is being designed and built as a truly commercial endeavor.Therefore the spacecraft team is able to reach across Boeing's different divisions and diverse engineering spectrum and draw on a vast wealth of in-house expertise, potentially giving them a leg up on commercial crew competitors like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp.Nevertheless, designing and building a completely new manned spaceship is a daunting task for anyone. And no country or company has done it in decades.How hard has this effort been to create the CST-100? – And do it with very slim funding from NASA and Boeing."Well any preconceived notion I had on building a human rated spacecraft has been completely erased. This is really hard work to build a human rated spacecraft!" Ferguson emphasized."And the budget is very small – without a lucrative government contract as used in the past to build these kind of spacecraft.""Our budget now is an order of magnitude less than to build the shuttle – which was about $35 to $42 Billion in 2011 dollars. The budget is a lot less now."Read more about the travails of NASA's commercial crew funding situation in Part 1.The team size now is just a fraction of what it was for past US crewed spaceships."So to support this we have a pretty small team.""The CST-100 team of a couple hundred folks works very hard!""For comparison, the space shuttle had 30,000 people working on it at the peak. By early 2011 there were 11,000. We flew on STS-135 with only 4,000 people in July 2011."Boeing's design philosophy is straightforward; "It's a simple ride up to and back from space," Ferguson emphasized to me.Next we turned to the venerable Atlas V rocket that will launch Boeing's proposed space taxi. But before it can launch people it must first be human rated, certified as safe and outfitted with an Emergency Detection System (EDS) to save astronauts lives in a split second in case of a sudden and catastrophic in-flight anomaly.United Launch Alliance (ULA) builds the two stage Atlas V and is responsible for human rating the vehicle which has a virtually unblemished launch record of boosting a wide array of advanced US military satellites and NASA's precious one-of-a-kind robotic science explorers like Curiosity, JUNO, MAVEN and MMS on far flung interplanetary voyages of discovery.What modifications are required to man rate the Atlas V to launch humans on Boeing's CST-100?"We will launch on an Atlas V that's being retrofitted to meet NASA's NPR human rating standards for redundancy and the required levels of fault tolerance," Ferguson explained."So the rocket will have all the safety NASA wants when it flies humans.""Now with the CST-100 you can do all that in a smaller package [compared to shuttle].""The Atlas V will also be modified by ULA to include an Emergency Detection System (EDS). It's a system not unlike what Apollo and Gemini had, which was much more rudimentary but quite evolved for its day.""Their EDS would monitor critical parameters like pitch, roll, yaw rates, critical engine parameters. It measures the time to criticality. You know the time to criticality for certain failures is so short that they didn't think humans could react to it in time. So it was essentially automated.""So if it [EDS] sensed large pitch or yaw excursions, it would self jettison. And the escape system would kick in automatically."The Atlas V is already highly reliable. The EDS is one of the few systems that had to be added for human flights?"Yes.""We also wanted a better abort system performance to go with the two engine Centaur upper stage we elected to use instead of the single engine Centaur."The purpose is to shut down the Centaur engine firing [in an emergency].""The two engine Centaur has flown many times. But it has never flown on an Atlas V. So there is a little bit of recertification and qualification to be done by ULA to go along with that also."Does that require a lot of work?"ULA doesn't seem to think the work to be done is all that significant. There is some work to be done."So it's not a showstopper. Can ULA meet your 2017 launch schedule?"Yes.""Before an engine fails it vibrates. So when you talk about automated 'Red Lines' you have to be careful that first you "Do No Harm" – and not make the situation even worse.""So we'll see how ULA does building this," Ferguson stated.The future of the CST-100 project hinges on whether NASA awards Boeing a contract to continue development and assembly work in the next round of funding (dubbed CCtCAP) from the agency's Commercial Crew Program (CCP). The CCP seed money fosters development of a safe, reliable and new US commercial human spaceship to low Earth orbit as a public/private partnership.NASA's announcement of the CCP contract winners is expected around late summer 2014.Based on my discussions with NASA officials, it seems likely that the agency could select at least two winners to move on – to spur competition and thereby innovation – from among the trio of American aerospace firms competing.Besides Boeing's CST-100, the SpaceX Dragon and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser vehicles are also in the running for the contract to restore America's capability to fly humans to Earth orbit and the International Space Station (ISS) by 2017.House spending bill includes modest increase for NASALedyard King - Florida TodayThe House passed a spending bill Friday that would modestly increase NASA's budget next year but would not fully fund a program to replace the space shuttle with a new vehicle to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.The measure, adopted 321-87, would provide $17.9 billion for the civilian space program in fiscal 2015, about $250 million more than NASA received this fiscal year and roughly $400 million more than President Barack Obama has requested.But the House bill would give NASA less than it wants for the shuttle replacement program, called Commercial Crew. Agency officials have warned Congress that any amount smaller than the $848 million NASA is seeking will delay a launch from U.S. soil, now forecast for 2017, to at least 2018.The bill includes $785 million for the Commercial Crew Program, which is more than the House has ever approved for the venture. The Senate Appropriations Committee, which has traditionally approved more for the program than the House, is expected to reveal its spending proposal for NASA next week.Commercial Crew has received renewed interest in the wake of simmering tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.Since the retirement of the space shuttle program, NASA has paid Russia about $70 million each time a U.S. astronaut hitches a ride to the space station on a Soyuz rocket. But lawmakers and administration officials are wary about relying on a country that has vaguely threatened to stop providing rides unless the White House removes sanctions against key Russian officials.That's why lawmakers, led by GOP Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, rebuffed attempts by Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan to take millions from NASA's space exploration budget for other purposes, including an anti-violence program and an administration effort to go after unfair trade barriers put up by foreign countries.Wolf, who heads the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA, recalled that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Twitter last month, in response to U.S. sanctions, "I propose that the United States delivers its astronauts to the ISS with the help of a trampoline.""Funds for this program are critical... to end our reliance on the Russians so we can get up there," Wolf said.The House plan also would continue financing NASA's top priorities, notably a deep-space mission to take astronauts to Mars within 20 years and the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, set for launch in 2018.It also approves $5.2 billion for NASA science programs -- more than the agency requested -- to keep robotic missions to Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa on target.The House bill also would provide slightly more money than Obama requested for aeronautics and security. Lax security at NASA centers has undermined the agency's sensitive technology network, according to a recent report from an independent group led by former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh.5 takeaways from Friday's House vote on NASA's new budgetLee Roop - Huntsville TimesNASA's budget for fiscal year 2015 cleared the House of Representatives early Friday morning and is headed for the Senate. Here are five takeaways from that House vote.
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