Don't forget you all ---- our next monthly NASA Retirees Luncheon at Hibachi Grill is not until next Thursday, July 10th.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- TCAT Information Now Online
- Are You a Cake Boss?
- Managed Elevated Privileges Continues
- Mandatory: IT Security Training Due July 15
- Celebrate the 3 Rs This Independence Day - Organizations/Social
- The JSC Safety and Health Action Team (JSAT) Says
- Space Serenity Al-Anon Meeting July 8
- JSC Showtime! Interest Meeting
- Massage Discount - Starport's July Special
- AIAA Houston - May/June 'Horizons' Available - Community
- July Monthly Sustainability Opportunities
- 17th Annual International Mars Society Convention
- Special Place in Your Heart for Community College? |  |
| Headlines - TCAT Information Now Online
A link to NASA's Technical Capability Assessment Team (TCAT) website has been added to the JSC 2.0 Web page on the Director's Corner lane. The new NASA internal website responds to requests for TCAT updates related to status and forthcoming decisions, following the field center visits by NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot and NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Lesa Roe. JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
[top] - Are You a Cake Boss?
Compete in the Orion cake-decorating contest! The contest will be held July 15 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Building 3 Collaboration Area. Teams of one to four people will be judged on creativity, taste, presentation and your teams' best depiction of Orion or the Exploration Flight Test-1 test flight. Your team will have the opportunity to win the overall competition or the people's choice award, where JSC team members will cast their vote on their favorite cake. Participants can bring their cake for setup at 11 a.m. that morning. - Managed Elevated Privileges Continues
Today, July 1, Managed Elevated Privileges (MEP) continues with the EV-EV7 org codes. MEP controls admin rights (Elevated Privileges, or EP) on NASA computers and allows users to request EP when needed. Users must complete SATERN training before submitting any requests for EP. All users, especially those scheduled for MEP deployment, are strongly urged to complete the SATERN training for "Basic Users" (Elevated Privileges on NASA Information System - ITS-002- 09). Users can coordinate with their supervisor, OCSO or organization IT point of contact to determine the level of EP they may need beyond "Basic User" and any additional training required. The next scheduled deployment date is July 8, which will cover the K org code. For more information, go to the MEP website or contact Heather Thomas at x30901. - Mandatory: IT Security Training Due July 15
All personnel with access to NASA Information Technology (IT) systems must complete the annual Information Security Training Course titled: ITS-014-001 ANNUAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECURITY AND PRIVACY AWARENESS TRAINING. This training is mandatory and available in your SATERN Learning Plan. If the course is not on your Learning Plan and you are unable to locate it under the Learning History section as being completed, contact the SATERN Help Desk at 1-877-677-2123. Email JSC-ITSEC-TRAINING for further information. - Celebrate the 3 Rs This Independence Day
Reduce, reuse and recycle this Independence Day, and every day, at home and work. JSC has programs designed to help you with each of these strategies. Reduce impacts by purchasing sustainably, which saves resources and money. Reuse items to give them a second chance by coordinating with the Redistribution and Utilization Branch. Participate in JSC's many recycling programs as much as possible, which prevent items from ending up in landfills. For more information on JSC recycling programs and how you can help conserve resources by using the three Rs in your work area, check out the Environmental Office website. Organizations/Social - The JSC Safety and Health Action Team (JSAT) Says
"When the sun is in motion, use lotion!" Congratulations to the joint Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory/Space Vehicle Mockup Facility team for submitting the winning slogan for July 2014. Any JSAT member (all JSC contractor and civil servant employees) may submit a slogan for consideration to JSAT Secretary Reese Squires. Submissions for August are due by Tuesday, July 8. Keep those great submissions coming—you may be the next JSAT Says winner! - Space Serenity Al-Anon Meeting July 8
"Easy does it" are words to live by during these hot days of summer. The Al-Anon Family Groups meeting is for co-workers, families and friends of those who work or live with the disease of alcoholism. We will meet Tuesday, July 8, in Building 32, Room 146, from 12 noon to 12:45 p.m. Visitors are welcome. - JSC Showtime! Interest Meeting
JSC Showtime! will be hosting its first interest meeting Tuesday, July 8, at 11:30 a.m. in the Einstein Collaboration Room in Building 30. This meeting will focus on brainstorming ideas about the group JSC Showtime! Bring any ideas that you have, and we can collaborate on which direction we want to take JSC Showtime! Event Date: Tuesday, July 8, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: Einstein Room Building 30 Collaboration Center
Add to Calendar
Ryan Hancock 281-792-8314
[top] - Massage Discount - Starport's July Special
Buy one, get $20 off another! Starport is excited to announce a great promotion going on this July. When you schedule a message this month, you will receive a coupon for $20 off a second massage in July! Never had a Starport massage? Well, don't miss out. Sign up for yours today! - AIAA Houston - May/June 'Horizons' Available
The May/June 2014 issue of Horizons is now online (46 pages in a 9 MB PDF file). Horizons is the newsletter of the Houston Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). This issue's cover story is "Morpheus, the Ups and Downs of an Autonomous Lander" by Jon Olansen of NASA/JSC. This issue also contains climate change science and public policy articles, a book review by Bill West on the novel "The Martian" by Andy Weir, a report on the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Larry Jay Friesen and articles and schedules from the JSC Astronomical Society (JSCAS), including "Building an Astronomer's Chair" by Jim Wessel and a summary of a presentation to JSCAS members by NASA astronaut Dr. Stanley G. Love about the "Challenges of Traveling to Mars." Community - July Monthly Sustainability Opportunities
Celebrate our freedom and our precious resources by attending one of our July sustainability opportunities. World Population Day is July 11, which seeks to raise awareness of global population issues. The event was established by the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989. It was inspired by the public interest in Five Billion Day on July 11, 1987, approximately the date on which the world's population reached 5 billion people. Wonder where we are now? Click on the link and scroll down to "What's New in Sustainability" for the answer. - 17th Annual International Mars Society Convention
The International Mars Society Convention presents a unique opportunity from Aug. 7 to 10 at the South Shore Harbour Resort in League City for those interested in exploring Mars and planning a humans-to-Mars mission. Come together and discuss the science, technology, social implications, philosophy, politics, public policy, economics and a multitude of other aspects of Mars exploration. Highlights will include updates about the Curiosity, Opportunity, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN missions, as well as the latest surface simulations at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and plans for future missions at the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in the Canadian arctic. Additional activities are planned, including an evening banquet with a keynote speaker and plenty of entertainment. For more details, including online registration instructions, click here. Rooms at the South Shore Harbour Resort are available at a specially discounted rate of $100/night (the special group code is MARS2014). - Special Place in Your Heart for Community College?
What do Eileen Collins, Fred Haise, George Lucas and Nolan Ryan have in common? They all began their great success at a community college! If community college played a role in your success, the Office of Education would like to hear your story. Your unique story can help shape NASA Education's National Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) project. Sign up to hear more about NCAS on July 10 from noon to 1 p.m. in Building 12, Room 134. Bring your lunch and share your community college story! We will provide dessert. Sign up in V-CORPs. | |
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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
Tuesday – July 1, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Aerojet Rocketdyne working with NASA on deflecting asteroids ... and a mission to Mars
Mark Anderson - The Sacramento (CA) Business Journal
Humans are smart enough not to "die like the dinosaurs" in the wake of an asteroid impact on the planet, said NASA administrator Charles Bolden, who toured Aerojet Rocketdyne's headquarters in Rancho Cordova Monday morning.
NRC's "Pathway to Exploration" should start with the Asteroid Redirect Mission
Louis Friedman and Thomas D. Jones – The Space Review
The National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Human Spaceflight released earlier this month its two-year study titled "Pathways to Exploration." It found that "NASA can sustain a human space exploration program… but only when that program has elements that are built in a logical sequence, and when it can fund a frequency of flights sufficiently high to ensure the maintenance of proficiency…" (italics ours). Despite its rejection by the report, we argue that the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is an affordable and logical first step in such a sequence. ARM is not only consistent with the committee's own principles, but is also the only near-term initiative that can shape their recommendations into a sustainable human space exploration program. ARM would launch US explorers into deep space beyond the Moon, and fits logically into an exploration program aimed at Mars.
NASA Explores A New World: Crowdsourcing Ideas
Michel Martin, Host – NPR
I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We'd like to turn now to a new initiative from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA. NASA wants to know how their technologies can best be applied commercially and they are asking you for ideas. Daniel Lockney is here to tell us more about this. He is NASA's technology transfer program executive and he was nice enough to stop by our Washington, D.C., studios. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.
U.S. Needs To Get Real about Russia
Robbin Laird | Space News
The response to Russia's seizure of Crimea has been disbelief, denial or condemnation. The reality is that the Russians are a nationalistic power whose leader sees the post-Soviet order as illegitimate, much as many Germans saw the Treaty of Versailles settlement. Clearly, Russian President Vladimir Putin understands that both cooperation and competition are essential in the 21st century, but he is focused on maximizing Russian resources — natural and technological — to shape a more powerful position for Russia in the period ahead.
Red tortoise, blue turtle
Dwayne A. Day – The Space Review
It wasn't that long ago that English-language news articles were stating that China was planning on landing humans on the Moon by 2017. In fact, as late as 2007 some articles were claiming that this would happen by 2010. Of course, they were wrong, and even the 2017 claims have faded. Conducting a post-mortem on those articles, it was obvious even at the time that many of them were the result of translation errors. Chinese officials announced plans for unmanned lunar orbital missions by 2010 and lunar sample return missions by 2017 and somebody dropped the "un" part of "unmanned" and jumped to conclusions that the Chinese were going to send humans to the Moon in the very near future. (See, for instance, "The phony space race", The Space Review, June 9, 2003—yes, 2003.) Other articles making these claims were less error than malice—people selectively quoting sources in order to try and justify a US human lunar return by claiming that we were in a race with China. They can consider themselves lucky that the noise of the Internet frequently drowns out mistakes and malice in its maelstrom.
Focusing on Priorities in Human Access to LEO
Eric R. Sterner | Space News
Interest groups are coming out of the woodwork in the never-ending struggle over NASA's commercial crew programs. While the battles are usually over funding and debates about the balance between commercial crew program and the Space Launch System, this time the fight concerns the government's role and responsibilities when it comes to NASA's stewardship of taxpayer resources.
Airbus, Safran Surprise ESA with Last-minute Ariane 6 Design
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
A European Space Agency bid-evaluation team is expected to deliver its judgment by July 5 on two different designs for a next-generation Ariane 6 rocket — one it has been examining for about a year, and another it only discovered June 18.
For United Launch Alliance Employee, Readying Delta 2 Rocket Like 'Riding a Bicycle'
NASA mission declared ready for blastoff early Tuesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base
Janene Scully - The Santa Barbara (CA) Noozhawk
Despite a two-year lull since the last Delta 2 blastoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base, one United Launch Alliance employee says doing the tasks to ready the rocket for its newest mission is "like riding a bicycle."
NASA scrubs rocket launch from Wallops
Associated Press
A rocket launch from Virginia's Eastern Shore has been scrubbed again.
Cassini Probe Celebrates 10 Years at Saturn Today
A NASA spacecraft marks a big milestone today (June 30) — a decade exploring Saturn and its many moons.
Astronauts in space will get a full health checkup with a single drop of blood
Ryan Whitwam - Geek
The European Space Agency (ESA) is working on a prototype device that will be able to screen astronauts on the International Space Station for multiple diseases and medical conditions with just a single drop of blood. The instrument is being developed in partnership with the Irish company Radisens Diagnostic, which already produces a version of the proposed device for use here on Earth.
A Solar Show With Mixed Reviews
Kenneth Chang – The New York Times
Solar maximum is now.
COMPLETE STORIES
Aerojet Rocketdyne working with NASA on deflecting asteroids ... and a mission to Mars
Mark Anderson - The Sacramento (CA) Business Journal
Humans are smart enough not to "die like the dinosaurs" in the wake of an asteroid impact on the planet, said NASA administrator Charles Bolden, who toured Aerojet Rocketdyne's headquarters in Rancho Cordova Monday morning.
The space agency is working closely on many projects with Aerojet Rocketdyne, including deep space missions, a manned Mars mission and a project called Asteroid Redirect that is exactly what the name implies, changing the course of an asteroid before it collides with Earth.
It is something Congress always asks Bolden about, he said, but he has always said that there is nothing NASA can do about it. But the agency is working on it.
For 20 years the agency has been surveying asteroids that might eventually collide with Earth, he said. The agency is now working on technology to get to an asteroid, and the agency will eventually either send people or robotic craft to land on an asteroid.
In the case of an asteroid that might be on a collision course, the idea would be nudge the asteroid off to the side from far enough away from Earth that it would completely miss Earth. For non-threatening asteroids, NASA is also working on mining or doing research on asteroids.
In either a redirect or a science mission, NASA would be using Aerojet Rocketdyne propulsion to get to the heavenly body and it would be using Aerojet Rocketdyne propulsion to move it, he said.
"Aerojet Rocketdyne has been one of our most reliable partners for over 50 years," Bolden said.
The agency is also working with Aerojet Rocketdyne on deep space and a manned Mars missions. Testing for those missions continues, but they are long-term projects.
Aerojet Rocketdyne motors were on all the manned space programs, including Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, as well as the space shuttle program, which flew 135 missions.
Bolden was a space shuttle pilot and was aboard for four missions into space. Bolden lauded Aerojet for its efforts to get children interested in science, technology, engineering and math curriculum. He called those efforts steps to "keep the pipeline open," with the pipeline being people who can be pioneers and innovators in science.
It takes the dramatic effect of something like a moon landing, a Mars landing or the International Space Station to capture the imagination of the next generation of scientists.
"If we can't catch kids by the time they get to middle school," they will not be prepared for a career in science-related research and work.
As for the manned mission to Mars, Bolden said NASA can do with with the current technology, but he would rather see "the next great leap in propulsion," so that the mission wouldn't have to take so long.
NRC's "Pathway to Exploration" should start with the Asteroid Redirect Mission
Louis Friedman and Thomas D. Jones – The Space Review
The National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Human Spaceflight released earlier this month its two-year study titled "Pathways to Exploration." It found that "NASA can sustain a human space exploration program… but only when that program has elements that are built in a logical sequence, and when it can fund a frequency of flights sufficiently high to ensure the maintenance of proficiency…" (italics ours). Despite its rejection by the report, we argue that the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is an affordable and logical first step in such a sequence. ARM is not only consistent with the committee's own principles, but is also the only near-term initiative that can shape their recommendations into a sustainable human space exploration program. ARM would launch US explorers into deep space beyond the Moon, and fits logically into an exploration program aimed at Mars.
To human exploration advocates like us, the NRC panel report at first seems welcome: an endorsement of NASA's long-discussed humans-to-Mars goal. The committee calls sending humans to Mars a "horizon goal," one that US efforts should continuously point to and advance toward. The committee also provided some valuable guidelines on how to organize and conduct the human space program, but the practical implementation of those guidelines depends on today's political, technical, and funding realities.
Grappling with those space exploration realities is, unfortunately, an area where the report falls short. It advises that NASA not embark on a deep space initiative until consensus on the specific exploration sequence has been reached and funding is in hand to deliver the necessary technology. In our view, waiting to venture into deep space until the nation reaches a consensus on when and how to go to Mars—and until all required funds are deposited securely in a Mars "lockbox"—will ensure the nation remains stalled in low Earth orbit. Coupled with other "real Earth" realities, such as ISS retirement in the mid-2020s, more delay could quite possibly end US human space exploration altogether.
The last high-level review panel to review human space flight plans, the Obama Administration's Augustine Committee in 2009, attempted to deal with budgetary and policy realities by introducing a "flexible path" toward Mars. That path recommended engaging, challenging milestones to be met as budget and real politics permit. Early, modest milestones would lead eventually to achieving a human presence on Mars.
The new report rejected the flexible path approach, restricting NASA's efforts to technical objectives they felt were directly related to the Mars goal. However, the NRC's objectives are not always linked so directly to Mars. Worse, their pursuit is unlikely to garner enough public interest to sustain a decades-long push toward the horizon goal.
The key element of a successful deep space initiative must be sustainability: the ability to withstand the competing forces of Washington politics, competing space industry interests, and the rapidly shifting whims of public opinion. Sustaining a goal as grand and as far-reaching as Mars is impossible without an overriding geopolitical rationale. Without a strong and long-lived rationale, government support over many decades will not materialize.
In the Space Age, we have seen just two successful examples of government support for human space exploration initiatives. Apollo was formulated and sustained as a Cold War initiative to demonstrate the superiority of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The International Space Station was saved from cancellation only because it was recast as a program to engage and partially fund the post-Soviet Russian aerospace complex, precluding weapons technology transfer to terrorist states.
Other attempts to win government support for human space exploration initiatives, though, failed. Nixon approved the Space Shuttle to avoid committing to any new space exploration goal; it later suffered from chronic funding shortfalls that reduced its capability. Space Station Freedom was initiated by Reagan to retain US space leadership, but didn't build momentum until it found its post-Soviet rationale under the Clinton Administration. George H.W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative, to return to the Moon and go on to Mars, was dismissed by a skeptical Congress. The Moon-oriented Constellation program, proposed by the second President Bush, never received adequate funding. Its schedule slipped approximately two years annually until it was found to be "unsustainable" and cancelled by the Obama team. These failed programs had a common flaw: they all lacked a strong geopolitical rationale.
Similarly, there is today is no compelling geopolitical rationale for a human deep space push toward Mars. Lacking this essential ingredient, should the US give up on its human space program? The answer is "No": an existing geopolitical barrier fortunately prevents that sad choice. No sane American politician would announce today that, "It's time for our nation to abandon human spaceflight. Let other countries assume that mantle of technological excellence and carry that enterprise forward." However, that assurance is not permanent. NASA and its supporters should push to energize public interest for long-term human exploration of deep space. ARM is an attractive vehicle to start building that sustainable momentum.
The committee thoughtfully provided guidance on how to construct a successful human spaceflight program: "NASA should:
I. Commit to design, maintain, and pursue the execution of an exploration pathway beyond low Earth orbit toward a clear horizon goal…
II. Engage international space agencies early in design and development…
III. Define steps on the pathway that foster sustainability and maintain progress…
IV. Seek continuously to engage new partners that can solve technical and/or programmatic impediments…
V. Create a risk mitigation plan to sustain the selected pathway when unforeseen technical or budgetary problems arise.
VI. Establish exploration pathway characteristics that maximize the overall scientific, cultural, economic, political, and inspirational benefits without sacrificing progress toward the long-term goal:
a. The horizon and intermediate destinations have profound scientific, cultural, economic, inspirational, or geopolitical benefits that justify public investment;
b. The sequence of missions and destinations permits stakeholders, including taxpayers, to see progress and develop confidence in NASA being able to execute the pathway;
c. The pathway is characterized by logical feed-forward of technical capabilities;
d. The pathway minimizes the use of dead-end mission elements that do not contribute to later destinations on the pathway;
e. The pathway is affordable without incurring unacceptable development risk; and
f. The pathway supports, in the context of available budget, an operational tempo that ensures retention of critical technical capability, proficiency of operators, and effective utilization of infrastructure."
The Committee called these recommendations "pathway principles." To win political and public support, proposed space initiatives should strive to incorporate as many of them as possible.
Indeed, we argue that the ARM is actually a timely implementation of several of the NRC's 2014 recommendations. When the expedient Obama goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) by 2025 proved too ambitious to achieve in light of projected budgets, launch system performance, and deep space systems, NASA in essence adopted NRC recommendation V. The agency reduced risk by taking a smaller step, targeting the Orion and its SLS booster toward cislunar space rather than a solar-orbiting NEA.
NASA also anticipated NRC recommendation VI (a and b) by identifying an intermediate destination that has "profound scientific, cultural, economic, inspirational, or geopolitical benefits." A small NEA, nudged into the Earth-Moon system by a low-cost, low-risk robotic mission, offers an early anchor for human activity beyond the Moon, providing opportunities for scientific exploration and astronaut operations in a deep-space environment. Detailed sampling and exploration of the asteroid can also demonstrate the commercial potential of asteroid resources, and accumulate some of the technical knowledge needed for deflecting NEAs. These latter elements alone go far toward building public interest and investment in human deep space exploration.
We were disappointed in the committee's failure to see the merits of the ARM. The panel apparently prefers that astronauts first repeat Apollo 8's journey to an empty lunar orbit, or perhaps navigate to an Earth-Moon Lagrange point that lacks any infrastructure or physical presence. (We doubt the committee advocates delaying another decade before astronauts venture beyond the International Space Station.)
In dismissing the ARM concept, the panel argued that "the ARM robotic asteroid redirect vehicle is considered a dead-end mission element, as its SEP [solar electric propulsion] capabilities are not leveraged in future missions as currently envisioned." The committee favors nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) over SEP as the preferred Mars propulsion scheme. Here the NRC ignores both history and political reality. Since the last NERVA test firing on Jackass Flats in 1972, Mars planners have hoped for the return of NTP, but no NASA administration has ever come close to resurrecting the technology. Environmental and political obstacles to testing will probably preclude its development for the foreseeable future.
As promising as NTP technology is, NASA has shown no appetite to campaign for its development. Postponing deep-space ventures until NTP is space-ready ensures we'll be waiting another fifty years. By contrast, powerful solar electric systems like those to be demonstrated by ARM can support human expeditions to Mars, carrying pre-positioned cargo, habitats, landers, and propellant stores while chemical systems enable high-speed astronaut sorties. Far from being a dead-end, SEP may be the key to enabling at least the first few Mars expeditions.
It is true that the ARM need not be on the human pathway to Mars. NASA has proposed it to gain early operations experience in deep space, beyond the Moon. We could certainly just fly Orion to an empty lunar orbit, waiting until larger boosters, propellant depots, and more capable crew habitats are built before reaching for the asteroids, or any other celestial body. We could also choose to repeat Apollo-style sorties to the lunar surface, necessitating an extensive, expensive, and lunar-specific infrastructure. We are excited by human lunar exploration, to be sure, but that path alone is unlikely to accelerate progress toward Mars.
By comparison, ARM achieves deep space operations experience much sooner, and at much lower cost. ARM would move US astronauts beyond the Moon, creating opportunities to proceed farther into interplanetary space, toward Mars. First, ARM would extend human space flight to a lunar distant retrograde orbit. Sorties into true interplanetary space to a near-Earth asteroid would follow, preparing for journeys to the Mars system (perhaps landing on Phobos or Deimos.) The Martian surface—the horizon goal—would then be clearly visible, and clearly achievable.
In parallel with ARM, we could pursue an affordable lunar exploration program. Using our proven robotic capabilities, we can support international partner efforts at the Moon, focusing on specific demonstrations that move us along the Mars pathway. Embrace the Moon, but don't detour there, either.
NASA has in practice already adopted the best of the NRC recommendations and laid out a credible pathway to Mars. ARM's near-term objectives should, because of their tighter focus and lower costs, prove more sustainable over the coming decade, building momentum for deep space sorties along the Mars path. ARM's challenging and innovative operations around a small NEA or retrieved boulder, coupled with astronaut examinations of an ancient and potentially valuable object, may do much to restore near-term public interest in human space exploration. We won't be repeating Apollo, but trying something new and different while keeping our vision trained on Mars.
To summarize, the NRC report promulgated many sound principles and recommendations for progress in human space exploration, but in the end failed to propose a realistic, sustainable program. By the committee's own criteria, the NASA ARM concept is an attractive first step toward a long-range Mars program, and is the only NASA deep space venture that can be achieved within the decade. While other nations strive for a repeat of Apollo, we can in the same time frame send explorers thousands of kilometers beyond the Moon, poised for expeditions to NEAs and the Mars system.
Sustaining a decades-long effort to reach Mars will be an unprecedented challenge, requiring political leadership and the cultivation of long-term public support. ARM is an innovative means to develop support from policy makers and the public. It ensures continued US leadership in space, and starts us visibly and quickly down the long road to Mars.
Louis Friedman, PhD, is a veteran planetary exploration engineer and Executive Director-Emeritus of the Planetary Society. He is co-leader of the Keck Institute for Space Studies Asteroid Redirect Mission Study.
Thomas D. Jones, PhD, is a planetary scientist and NASA shuttle astronaut. He is a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and participated in the Keck Institute for Space Studies ARM workshops.
NASA Explores A New World: Crowdsourcing Ideas
Michel Martin, Host – NPR
I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We'd like to turn now to a new initiative from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA. NASA wants to know how their technologies can best be applied commercially and they are asking you for ideas. Daniel Lockney is here to tell us more about this. He is NASA's technology transfer program executive and he was nice enough to stop by our Washington, D.C., studios. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.
DANIEL LOCKNEY: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: I wonder if people remember how much NASA technology we actually use as consumers. Can you give us a couple of examples?
LOCKNEY: Sure. The camera in your cell phone was developed by our researchers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Caltech. Infant formula - 95 percent of the baby food sold in the world has an additive that we discovered - the omega-3-omega-6 combination - believed to be important in the development of the brain and the eyes, fatty tissues. We're the first to synthesize it - long-duration space flight experiments.
MARTIN: And you were telling me that the shape of the modern truck or the modern semi is a result of some NASA aerodynamics - you were telling me that. But you were also telling me that I was wrong about Tang. NASA actually doesn't get credit for Tang or Velcro.
LOCKNEY: Yeah, or Teflon.
MARTIN: Or Teflon?
LOCKNEY: All of these things were popularized by the space program but invented elsewhere. And we're not opposed to getting ideas from elsewhere.
MARTIN: Well, that's the idea here. So now you're teaming up with a company called Edison Nation. What kinds of things are you looking for?
LOCKNEY: So this is one of our open innovation projects where we're crowdsourcing. We develop something - perhaps it's a sensor, an optics configuration or new metal. In this instance, with Edison Nation, it's actually a device that monitors brain waves and provides feedback to a machine. So we develop technologies. And we know what we're going to use them for but we often don't know how else they can be used. So we're asking the public through this Edison Nation work and then also through a company called Marblar. And the idea is to tap into the untapped cognitive surplus - that people are online, you know, drawing pictures, captioning cat photographs and doing all of these otherwise creative things - perhaps we can get them to work for us, too.
MARTIN: What exactly are you asking of people? What are you asking them to do?
LOCKNEY: So it's almost like we've given them a blank sheet of paper and we said what can you make of this? And they would say I can make an airplane, I can make a hat, I can make a boat. But instead of a blank sheet of paper, we're actually handing them a technology. We're saying here's a device that has the following characteristics - what else can be done with it? Here's a foam that will get to a specific temperature, will rigidize at a specific rate, and it will get this hard and is this lightweight - what can you use it for?
MARTIN: So I think a lot of people are familiar now with crowdsourcing and like Kickstarter - and for that matter an NPR fundraising campaign, right? And so you are looking to the public to fund something that they like. In this instance, the thing already exists so you're looking for - what - ideas on how it could be used?
LOCKNEY: That's right. We're not asking for dollars. We're asking for clever ideas. And then the options spiral out from there. If someone who proposes an idea is interested in actually pursuing it for commercialization, they're more than welcome to and we'll work with them to do that. If they have an idea but the technology needs further RND - further development - we can help with that. If they just want to give the idea and say hey, somebody should do this then we can also pursue that as well.
MARTIN: So this sounds so crass but what's in it for me? If I participate in this, what's in it for me? I understand that there is an answer to that question. There is something other than the pleasure of seeing your ideas come to life, that there's actually potentially royalties involved, right?
LOCKNEY: Perhaps. So there's a way that this could be structured. There's so many different possibilities with it. First, if you just propose an idea you get the same gratification as if, you know, you captioned one of those funny cat photos and a bunch of people liked it. You get a bunch of thumbs-up on the Internet for it. So that's one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, you could license technology, create your company around it and go off and you would actually receive dollars from sales. The royalty income is slightly different. That's dollars that come back to the government and we are the most generous agency in terms of what we give the inventors. So a large chunk - most of what first comes in from a licensing arrangement goes to the actual government inventor. The rest goes toward kind of routine patent maintenance fees and such.
MARTIN: But you're saying that there is the opportunity for the sharing of commercial benefit...
LOCKNEY: Absolutely.
MARTIN: ...As a consequence of this. This is not - I mean, getting a like is nice but you're talking about possibilities for kind of commercial remuneration as a consequence of - with participation in this - which was logical, right? Which - yeah.
LOCKNEY: Absolutely. So we did a survey very recently - it went back over 10 years of companies that had taken our technologies and commercialized them - and found some pretty impressive results. Several, you know, tens of billions of dollars in increased revenue from companies that use our technology. Several hundred thousand lives saved as a result of incorporation of our technologies and consumer products. Jobs created - tens of thousands.
MARTIN: Before we let you go, I wanted to ask about a couple of things - things that I think people do know that NASA does which is still space exploration. I wanted to ask you about NASA's Orion test fight scheduled for later this year. I understand that there's a new computer system involved. It's 25 times faster than the International Space Station computers and 4,000 times faster than its predecessors in the Apollo program. Tell me about that. I mean, is there any chance that this technology will make it into consumer projects? And of course, you know, I have to ask you about the flying saucer. I'm going to ask you to tell me about that.
LOCKNEY: Sure, absolutely. So computers and software are an increasingly large portion of the technical work that we do. There's still a lot of hardware. There's still a lot of traditional RND. But we're finding software's increasingly important. As a matter of fact, just this year we released, for the first time, a complete NASA software catalog that we had talked about getting some of these ideas out to the public. With over 1,000 codes, all free, for secondary application. And these are business tools, design software - a whole line of everything we've ever done work in is now available for the public.
MARTIN: And tell me about the flying saucer. And I'm using that term colloquially, of course. But NASA launched an experimental - I think - vehicle this weekend. Tell us about it - over Hawaii. So I guess the - I guess what a lot of people are seeing is if you thought you saw a flying saucer over Hawaii Saturday, you weren't crazy. So tell us what it was.
LOCKNEY: It's the LDSD - the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. And the idea behind it is you produce enough drag for re-entering the atmosphere. In this instance, we're talking about the Martian atmosphere. You need to slow down the spacecraft before you can gently land it onto the surface. You know, you don't want to go careening into the surface of Mars after spending all that time to get there. Typically, we've been using the technology - a parachute technology that we developed during Viking Lander era. And it's the same thing that we used to get curiosity to slow down in 2012 for that landing. And the idea is that we would have larger, heavier spacecraft that need newer technologies - more advanced technologies to help slow them down. So instead of a parachute, it's kind of a long - almost like a blob - that's a flying saucer that will slow down the spacecraft before it reaches the atmosphere.
MARTIN: And what will this allow? Why is this important?
LOCKNEY: We'll have larger, heavier spacecraft from Mars. And the typical parachutes that we've been using in the past won't be able to sustain that landing.
MARTIN: So it's an important milestone.
LOCKNEY: The idea is to land humans on Mars in the next couple of decades. And this is an important next step.
MARTIN: Daniel Lockney is NASA's technology transfer program executive. He was nice enough to stop by our Washington, D.C., studios. Daniel Lockney, thanks so much for joining us.
LOCKNEY: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
U.S. Needs To Get Real about Russia
Robbin Laird | Space News
The response to Russia's seizure of Crimea has been disbelief, denial or condemnation. The reality is that the Russians are a nationalistic power whose leader sees the post-Soviet order as illegitimate, much as many Germans saw the Treaty of Versailles settlement. Clearly, Russian President Vladimir Putin understands that both cooperation and competition are essential in the 21st century, but he is focused on maximizing Russian resources — natural and technological — to shape a more powerful position for Russia in the period ahead.
Sanctions as a response are so late-20th century and do not recognize that the interest groups in the West that benefit most from working with the Russians will work hard to deflect the impact of such sanctions. No greater example of this could be a former chancellor of Germany who is a beneficiary of the Russian energy complex traveling to Russia in the height of the first phase of the Ukrainian crisis.
Gerhard Schroeder celebrated his 70th birthday with Putin at the end of April. The Russian president welcomed his friend at a reception organized by Nord Stream AG, a pipeline operator controlled by Russian gas giant Gazprom OAO. Mr. Schroeder is chairman of Nord Stream's shareholder committee.
A seminal Latvian report on the Russians' rethink and reshaping of their approach to military power as an integral element of augmenting their "soft" power underscored how the West needs to get realistic with regards to Putin and the nationalistic Russians, but feared that the growing stake the West has in Russia will simply blunt the West's ability to understand its own interests.
As the author of the report on Russia's "New Generation Warfare," Janis Berzins, noted, "Economic interests are more important to some politicians than moral issues. One example is a document from the United Kingdom's government stating that there should not be trade and financial sanctions against Russia so as not to harm the City of London."
One of the greatest failures of Western strategic thinking and of the strategic class is to assume progress for the inevitability of globalization when history does not operate that way. There is no inevitability of progress; there is the certainty of conflict, entropy, collapse and development.
As Putin rewrites the map and inserts his interpretation of Russian interests into the Western calculus, Western states need to rethink and rework a number of core agenda items to ensure that Putin and like-minded Russians understand that aggression has a significant cost. Simply generating sanctions as a substitute for more fundamental shifts in policy will be seen as a short-term and short-sighted solution that will go away as vested interests in the West succeed in their rollback.
To be effective, key Western states need to make hard decisions and to shape new strategic realities, which the Russians will need to adjust to in order not be marginalized in the global competition.
One example of a hard decision would be for the French to reverse their sale of their Mistral amphibious ships to the Russians. The Russians are in the throes of buying two to four ships from the French. These ships are sold as basic entities, which the Russians will arm and equip.
But these amphibious ships will include ice-hardened versions, and certainly the Nordics and the Baltics understand where they will be used. As these countries focus on deepening their joint defense, adding new capabilities to the Russians who are precisely the threat makes little sense.
The level of anger in the Nordics is very high. While the Northern Europeans, and the Baltic states in NATO, are focusing on dealing with the direct threat of Russia to the north of Europe, it makes little sense for France to simply provide new warships for the Russians to be used precisely in this region.
In many ways, U.S. space policy and its dependence on the Russians is the functional equivalent of the Mistral. Dependency is significant in terms of the engines used by one of the two key rockets that launch Pentagon missions, and indeed, in the views of many experts, the better of the two rockets.
Also, with the retirement of the space shuttle, only the Soyuz is available currently for moving humans to the international space station. And with the Russians in a central place in space station policy, they can play havoc with the U.S. equity in the space station. This was not a Russian trick but deliberate U.S. policy.
Reversing course is doable but costly. However, in the presence of Russian map-making, it is essential. And past decisions such as not building a domestic variant of the RD-180 engine, not pursuing an effective alternative to the space shuttle, and not working with the Europeans on the Automated Transfer Vehicle as a player in an alternative space station policy are all parts of taking a relaxed view of Russian involvement in a number of strategic areas for U.S. space policy.
Such a relaxed view, which really was done because of the absence of U.S. effort and investment, will only aid and abet further Russian map-making. And the current U.S. administration, which clearly committed itself to a "reset" of policy toward Russia as opposed to making tough decisions about building real space capabilities, needs to stop the rhetoric and get on with policies to build real capabilities.
One can hope that a sidebar debate about the role of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in the nation's launch future is not used as a diversion from getting on with central decisions about whether the United States intends to become a 21st century space power, rather than operating as a custodian for what we did in the 20th century.
The 21st century is not the 20th, and this is not a replay of the Cold War. It is something profoundly different from what the U.S. policy community is focused upon. The Russians are not accepting the nice divide between soft and hard power that folks who believe in the inevitability of globalization eliminating military conflict continue to push.
Rather, the Russians under Putin understand that carrots and sticks and pressures combined with tactical flexibility can advance a national agenda. Particularly when your competitors unilaterally eliminate core capabilities in key sectors, like the United States has done in space, you can use their weaknesses to your advantage. This is about power, in which military power used as a leverage tool can be very effective.
Robbin Laird is co-founder of Second Line of Defense and an analyst of defense, space and security issues, based in Paris and Washington.
Red tortoise, blue turtle
Dwayne A. Day – The Space Review
It wasn't that long ago that English-language news articles were stating that China was planning on landing humans on the Moon by 2017. In fact, as late as 2007 some articles were claiming that this would happen by 2010. Of course, they were wrong, and even the 2017 claims have faded. Conducting a post-mortem on those articles, it was obvious even at the time that many of them were the result of translation errors. Chinese officials announced plans for unmanned lunar orbital missions by 2010 and lunar sample return missions by 2017 and somebody dropped the "un" part of "unmanned" and jumped to conclusions that the Chinese were going to send humans to the Moon in the very near future. (See, for instance, "The phony space race", The Space Review, June 9, 2003—yes, 2003.) Other articles making these claims were less error than malice—people selectively quoting sources in order to try and justify a US human lunar return by claiming that we were in a race with China. They can consider themselves lucky that the noise of the Internet frequently drowns out mistakes and malice in its maelstrom.
In fact, once you start looking back at this subject over the past decade, it becomes quite apparent that the Chinese government was both open and accurate about its human spaceflight and lunar exploration plans, even while concealing virtually everything about their military space program. As early as 2007 Chinese officials were discussing their plans for human spaceflight, indicating that the country would launch a series of increasingly ambitious human orbital spacecraft with the goal of developing a multi-component space station by 2020. Human lunar missions were not in their portfolio. However, they also indicated that they had a three-phase robotic lunar exploration plan. Phase I was to orbit the Moon with robotic spacecraft. Phase II was to land a rover on the Moon. And Phase III was to eventually conduct a robotic lunar sample return mission by 2017. (See "History doesn't echo, it reverbs", The Space Review, February 10, 2010.) The Chinese did not provide all of the details of their plans, but over time they revealed more information, and so far they have accomplished the first two phases.
What various Chinese officials have also repeatedly stated is that human lunar missions may eventually be in their future, but that the government will likely not make any decisions about that until after the multi-segment space station is operational, meaning sometime in the 2020s. Recently, Chen Lan wrote a detailed article for his web magazine "Go Taikonauts!" detailing China's lunar studies. To date, Lan explained, these have primarily consisted of studies of large launch vehicle variants, rocket engines, and mission modes. But they've not committed to anything more. Lan should know, because he has consistently had some of the best and most prescient articles about China's space plans.
Whereas in the past it was common for people to misinterpret Chinese comments about their robotic lunar plans as somehow related to human lunar plans, it is now starting to seem as if the two efforts may indeed be related. Simply put, China's robotic lunar program is starting to look like a stalking horse for an eventual human lunar effort.
The most recent bit of evidence was the release of a photo showing the reentry vehicle for China's robotic lunar sample return mission. The spacecraft, which is actually a test vehicle that should fly in 2015 prior to the 2017 sample return mission, looks remarkably like a scale model of the reentry capsule for China's manned Shenzhou spacecraft. It also looks far larger than necessary to carry a few kilos of lunar dust and rocks.
In December 2013, China landed the Chang'e-3 spacecraft on the Moon's Mare Imbrium. The lander carried a small rover named Yutu, which unfortunately suffered a malfunction rendering it unable to move on the surface, although it still has the ability to transmit data back to Earth over six months later.
Independent observers noted that the lander was far larger than necessary to carry the smallish Yutu. But China also indicated that Chang'e-3 was the first of a series of landers. CE-4 was likely to be similar to the CE-3 mission, also equipped with a rover. But CE-5, and possibly CE-6, would conduct sample return missions, meaning that they would require some kind of sampling mechanism, such as a scoop, as well as an ascent vehicle. Thus, Chang'e-3 was larger than needed for Yutu, but probably sized for the later sample return mission—a logical and methodical way to conduct robotic lunar missions.
The Chinese have released some details of their Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission profile. (A detailed article, in Chinese, can be downloaded here.) Rather than launching the samples straight from the Moon back to Earth, the plan is to put a large craft into lunar orbit and send the lander down. The samples would then be launched back into lunar orbit on an ascent spacecraft that would rendezvous with the mother craft. The samples would be transferred to the Earth reentry vehicle, which would be boosted out of lunar orbit and back to Earth. This will require a new, more powerful rocket currently under development. The mission model is similar to that used for Apollo. The advantage of this approach compared to launching the lunar samples directly from the Moon back to Earth is that it allows the lander to set down practically anywhere on the Moon, including the poles.
The Soviet Union conducted lunar sample return missions in the early 1970s. Their Earth reentry craft was relatively small. NASA has conducted both the Stardust and Genesis sample return missions, using reentry vehicles a little bigger than a car tire. The Goddard Space Flight Center is developing the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission with a reentry vehicle similar in size to that used for Stardust. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has proposed a lunar sample return mission that would have an Earth reentry vehicle probably a little smaller than the others.
In contrast, the Chinese reentry vehicle is rather large. A human could actually climb inside it, although it is obviously not intended for that purpose. A schematic of the lunar sample return mission shows this reentry vehicle nestled inside the orbital craft underneath the lander. The Chinese plan a separate test of their reentry capsule, putting it into a high orbit and then sending it back into the atmosphere at lunar return speed. They are nothing if not methodical.
Considering that CE-3 was a pathfinder for CE-5, it is not hard to imagine that the CE-5 reentry vehicle is intended to provide data for an eventual human spacecraft to return from lunar orbit. None of this indicates that the Chinese actually have a human lunar program. But if they can successfully complete a lunar sample return mission in 2017, it would position them to make a decision for a human lunar program in the 2020s. Chinese space officials could go to their country's leadership and truthfully declare that they have proven they can land on the Moon, take off, rendezvous with a return vehicle in orbit, and then safely bring pieces of the Moon all the way back to Earth. From an engineering standpoint all they would need to do is scale up the systems and develop reliable life support, which should not be challenging considering the human spaceflight experience that they will also acquire during the remainder of this decade. A human lunar mission would not be cheap, but the robotic program will erase most of the technical barriers. It is an excellent risk reduction strategy.
One of the things that has taken the wind out of the sails of those who previously warned of China's impending human lunar landings is that China's human spaceflight program has moved very slowly, with an average of two years between human launches. It is hard to whip up concern about an impending threat when the Chinese aren't exactly sprinting along. They have a slow and deliberate pace.
Of course, the same is true for NASA—at least the slowness part, anyway. NASA had a lunar return mission and then canceled it, and seems to get new human spaceflight goals every time the occupant of the White House changes. NASA is not racing anybody to the Moon. The turtle is still wandering around behind the start line.
But if two tortoises are in a race, no matter how slow they're moving, you should put your money on the one that is at least moving in a straight line.
Focusing on Priorities in Human Access to LEO
Eric R. Sterner | Space News
Interest groups are coming out of the woodwork in the never-ending struggle over NASA's commercial crew programs. While the battles are usually over funding and debates about the balance between commercial crew program and the Space Launch System, this time the fight concerns the government's role and responsibilities when it comes to NASA's stewardship of taxpayer resources.
The Senate Appropriations Committee recently recommended passage of its version of the fiscal year 2015 Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill. At issue is a particular provision that would impose all the rules, regulations and bureaucracy associated with government-compliant cost-accounting systems on NASA's commercial crew program.
These procedures are a subset of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), which are extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive. They add cost to everything the government does, but government created them over the years in order to reduce the likelihood contractors and government employees would exploit the taxpayers' purse or perform inadequate diligence in spending those resources. For every past abuse, there is a new rule or regulation. Large government contractors maintain a significant bureaucracy and standardized procedures to comply with the FAR. From a product standpoint, the FAR cost and pricing data requirements do not add much value, just cost and time. From a stewardship standpoint, such data are a significant way of holding government agencies and contractors accountable for their use of tax dollars.
For large development contracts, particularly in markets for which the government is a monopsonistic consumer — meaning it is the only meaningful purchaser of goods and services such that its decisions determine the shape and size of the market — the government routinely uses the more intrusive cost and pricing components of the FAR. The supply and demand signals that usually set prices and the competitive function that improves quality over time in a commercial market are missing. Cost and pricing data are the principal means of setting a reasonable price and protecting taxpayer interests.
Normally, human spaceflight would fall into this category. The only meaningful customer is the government and it has rather unique requirements. A truly healthy free market does not exist. Moreover, the taxpayers are contributing significant resources to the development of these capabilities, which they then will not own. Despite constant rhetoric to the contrary, there is nothing "commercial" about the commercial crew program. Without government demand, funding and support, the private companies working with NASA likely would not be in this business. Investors and shareholders would not stand for the expenditure of such resources, preferring to chase higher returns in a more profitable sector. This may be changing, but not in a time frame useful for government needs. From that standpoint, the Senate Appropriations Committee's move to apply the FAR's cost and pricing data to NASA's efforts to acquire crewed access to low Earth orbit (LEO) makes perfect sense.
However — and there is always a "however" in public policy — it is also a mistake in this case. The United States does not apply the cost and pricing provisions of the FAR (among others) to its procurement of human launch services from Russia. There were compelling reasons of national interest, having much to do with foreign policy and then our dependence upon Russia, not to. All this means is that the need for FAR-compliant cost and pricing data is not absolute, required above all other things. There are such interests at stake in the development of crewed services to LEO now.
First, the added layers of bureaucracy and oversight associated with the additional bookkeeping requirements could delay the development of a useful vehicle, reducing its utility in two areas, but not its necessity. U.S. dependence on Russia for human spaceflight services is a critical vulnerability in the U.S. space program; it gives Moscow leverage over one of the crown jewels of American soft power at a time of poor relations, to put it mildly.
Second, the government requires human access to LEO in the near- to mid-term to exploit the international space station, which is scheduled to end in 2024. NASA's LEO programs, in cooperation with several private companies, may produce a useful capability by 2017. Delaying the availability of these services would narrow that period of utility, minimizing the near- to mid-term benefits the taxpayers expect from having spent money on the commercial crew program in the first place.
Third, NASA's relationship with the companies involved in both its cargo and crew programs represents a different approach to developing technology in service of the American taxpayer. Rather than following a typical procurement process under the FAR, NASA and these companies employed Space Act Agreements to move the technology forward more quickly. The authority to conduct such Agreements was created specifically to reintroduce the kind of flexibility and burden-sharing that the government needs if it intends to exploit the emerging private space companies for the public interest: flexibility that the FAR slowly stifled as it added layers of red tape. NASA already plans to move in that direction as development activities mature; additional layers of approved cost paperwork will not accelerate the provision of human spaceflight services.
Finally, declining to adopt the FAR cost and pricing data requirements would not preclude the government from meeting its obligations to assure that taxpayer resources are used wisely. NASA was deeply involved in developing the cargo capabilities to ensure they would not pose a threat to the space station. In the case of human spaceflight, NASA has been quite close to the development of new, privately owned capabilities due to its need to ensure that they are safe and reliable enough for people. While that insight may not focus on cost and pricing data, it helps reduce the likelihood that any contractor would be able to hoodwink the taxpayers. The resources used on paperwork would be better spent understanding design and hardware decisions and how they relate to safety.
When it comes to human spaceflight in the United States, NASA cannot pursue "business as usual" approaches. It lacks funding and time for a traditional procurement or development program. Without Russia, the United States is stranded on the surface of Earth, which ought to be an intolerable situation. The need for new capabilities is urgent.
At some point after the commercial crew program has produced a working, safe vehicle, completed a technical shakeout period and established procedures strongly enough to make the purchases of human spaceflight services routine, it may be appropriate and necessary to introduce the more burdensome aspects of the FAR into the government-contractor relationship. Until then, Congress, NASA and the spaceflight suppliers need to focus on getting the needed vehicles built and in service as quickly as possible.
Eric R. Sterner is a fellow at the George C. Marshall Institute. He is a former NASA associate deputy administrator and also was staff director of the U.S. House Science space and aeronautics subcommittee.
Airbus, Safran Surprise ESA with Last-minute Ariane 6 Design
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
A European Space Agency bid-evaluation team is expected to deliver its judgment by July 5 on two different designs for a next-generation Ariane 6 rocket — one it has been examining for about a year, and another it only discovered June 18.
The ESA Tender Evaluation Board's recommendation will weigh heavily in a debate among a half-dozen European governments most concerned with launch vehicle production. Ministers from France, Germany and Italy are scheduled to meet July 8 in Geneva, at the invitation of the Swiss government, to solidify their own views of which way to go on Ariane 6.
An Ariane 6 depending mainly on identical solid-rocket boosters was the design these ministers decided in November 2012. It is this design that has been the object of multiple cost and production reviews at the 20-nation ESA since then.
But when it came time for industry to deliver its final assessments of that vehicle's development cost, operating cost and in-service schedule, Europe's two largest rocket-component builders, Airbus and Safran, provided a completely different alternative.
The Airbus-Safran rocket uses more liquid propulsion, can lift heavier payloads and comes in two models — one for smaller satellites of the type built for governments for science and Earth observation, and a larger version for the commercial telecommunications satellite market.
Airbus and Safran caught ESA by surprise with their proposal, which was announced in the presence of French President Francois Hollande at the same time as the two companies disclosed their intentions to form a joint venture to build the vehicle.
Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the French space agency, CNES, said here June 30 that he is withholding judgment of the Airbus-Safran proposal until the ESA board comes up with an initial cost estimate.
Briefing reporters here during the Toulouse Space Show, Le Gall said ESA government ministers' requirements for the new rocket have not changed since they were first announced in November 2012.
The main requirements are that Ariane 6 be much less costly to build and operate than the current heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket, that European governments agree to use the vehicle to guarantee a minimum market for it, and that the current government-industry mix of Ariane oversight be reviewed with an eye toward simplicity.
The Airbus-Safran proposal, if carried to its logical end, would mean a single company building Ariane vehicles, with fewer subcontractors and much less government oversight. It would likely mean the end of the CNES launcher division as industry takes more control of Ariane design and operations.
Le Gall declined to speculate on the future of CNES's launcher division and on whether CNES, as Airbus and Safran have proposed, would be willing to sell its 35 percent equity stake in the Arianespace launch consortium as Arianespace is merged into the new joint venture.
Airbus Group Chief Executive Thomas Enders defended the Airbus-Safran proposal, saying the new Ariane 6 design "can do this for less money than was previously foreseen." In an address here June 30, Enders did not detail the cost of his company's Ariane 6. The previous design was estimated at about 3.25 billion euros ($4.4 billion).
Similarly, CNES and ESA had set a goal of 70 million euros as the per-launch cost of Ariane 6, saying that while that was higher than today's cost for a SpaceX Falcon 9 commercial flight, it was close enough. Whether the Airbus-Safran proposal can meet that recurring production cost target is unknown.
Enders said Europe's launcher sector needed to be restructured, and fast. He said Ariane's current position in the commercial launch market resembles Airbus' commercial aircraft business at the time of the merger of competitors Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
The move of the two U.S. aircraft builders forced Airbus to consolidate from a loose federation into a single corporation with streamlined operations.
Enders said it is not the merger of competitors that is now forcing Europe to change the way it conducts space business, but the emergence of extremely wealthy individuals, mainly coming from Silicon Valley, as financiers of space projects.
Compared to European companies' cautiousness with shareholders' capital, these Internet billionaires can lose a few hundred million dollars without much concern, Enders said. They are used to making decisions quickly.
Enders did not mention SpaceX founder Elon Musk, but Musk was clearly on his mind.
"It's an entirely different game," Enders said of competing with companies whose wealthy founders can make big investments without having to go through multiple committees. "We had gotten used to thinking of launcher competition in terms of geographic region — China and India. Now we have the competition coming from America, from SpaceX."
Enders said Airbus, now prime contractor for Ariane 5; and Safran, a rocket-motor builder, came up with their Ariane 6 design and joint-venture proposal "in record time." To those who are unhappy with what these two companies have done — springing a new design on ESA governments at the last minute — he said: "If you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less."
The debate about Ariane 6 has obscured the fact that ESA governments in December are also scheduled to decide whether ESA will remain a partner in the international space station beyond 2020. ESA officials have said they will not ask for a formal financial commitment, but rather an indication of the appetite — particularly of Germany, France and Italy, the three largest space station backers in Europe — for continuing station operations to 2024, as NASA has proposed.
Le Gall said the station's future has been complicated by the tensions between Russia and both Europe and the United States concerning Ukraine. While the two nations continue to manage the orbital outpost together, Le Gall said it remains unclear whether the current stresses to the U.S.-Russian relationship will have an effect on station use after 2020.
For United Launch Alliance Employee, Readying Delta 2 Rocket Like 'Riding a Bicycle'
NASA mission declared ready for blastoff early Tuesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base
Janene Scully - The Santa Barbara (CA) Noozhawk
Despite a two-year lull since the last Delta 2 blastoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base, one United Launch Alliance employee says doing the tasks to ready the rocket for its newest mission is "like riding a bicycle."
The Delta 2 team members began reassembling late last year as equipment began arriving and the focus turned toward prepping the rocket for Tuesday morning's liftoff with NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 at Space Launch Complex-2.
"It was coming home for everybody," said Doug Adams, who is the leader at the Delta 2 solid rocket motor processing facility but working on ULA's Atlas 5 and Delta 4 programs at Vandenberg during the lull.
Liftoff of the Delta 2 rocket is planned for 2:56 a.m. Tuesday. The mission to study atmospheric carbon dioxide and its link to global climate change has a 30-second window each day to get off the ground. Weather will accommodate the launch, but the fog in the forecast threatens to foil spectators' view.
Mission managers gathered for a launch readiness review Sunday and gave permission for the final preparations and the countdown to begin.
"In summary, the rocket is ready and the launch team is prepared and excited to be back in business with Delta 2 and poised to launch this important spacecraft for our nation," said Tim Dunn, NASA launch manager.
To prepare for launch day, Adams' team accepted delivery of the solid motors just before Christmas. From the time the solid motors arrive on base, "they're my babies," he said.
He and his colleagues process and attach the Delta 2's solid rocket motors — each approximately 40 inches in diameter and 42 feet in length — to the side of nearly 13-story-tall Delta 2 rocket. The Delta 2 rockets can sport up to nine solid rocket motors depending on the size of the payload. For this mission, Delta 2 is equipped with three solid rocket motors, which will each provide 111,000 pounds of thrust.
Despite the fact the ULA hasn't erected a Delta 2 rocket since 2011, processing for this mission has been smooth, he said.
"I think on everything that we've done as far as building the rocket has met or beat the timeline," said Adams, who lives in Vandenberg Village.
He and colleagues build the systems required for the solid motors' eventual jettison from Delta during flight, and, in case of a problem, their possible destruction.
Weeks before launch, the team took the solid motors to the launch pad to lift into place on the rocket.
"Anytime you hoist thirty thousand pounds of explosives it can be a little nerve-wracking," Adams said. "You really don't think about that stuff when you're doing it. You have to be aware of it, but you don't really think about it."
Adams, 53, arrived at Vandenberg 12 years ago but started at the company when it was McDonnell Douglas Corp. and remained through the mergers and acquisitions that saw the firm become Boeing and United Launch Alliance.
He originally came to California from Connecticut to attend school to earn his airframe and powerplant license to become an airplane mechanic. A family connection led to applying for a job with McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach.
The job interview consisted of three questions: Do you like to work? Do you like to work overtime? Can you start Monday? He did.
In Huntington Beach, he began working on DC-9 aircraft and later moved to the Titan 4 fairing program which was ramping up after the Challenger shuttle explosion led to a national policy change that military satellites couldn't fly on the manned orbiter.
"They were really needing people," he said, estimating he spent 15 years on the Titan 4 fairing program.
He later worked about two years on space station program, a time that stands out in his career as he met astronauts and worked with the Russians on their docking mechanism.
"Somebody's living in something you built. We built the payload. It wasn't something that was manufactured and brought to us. We built what's flying up there right now," Adams said.
When layoffs loomed in Huntington Beach, Adams ended up at Vandenberg.
His first gig at Vandenberg took Adams at Space Launch Complex-6, the humongous former space shuttle facility repurposed for Delta 4 missions. He eventually transferred to Delta 2.
"When I came to Delta 2, it kind of felt like home," he said. "It was a smaller place. It just kind of felt right. And I hate every time I have to leave and go to another pad. Everything's real familiar (at SLC-2)."
While fond of his time on the space station program, he noted that launching rockets "is kind of special, too."
"They always tell us there's only a handful of people in the world that who can do this job so it's good to be part of that and to carry on," Adams said. "Delta's been launching forever. It's kind of prestigious to carry on what started back in the Fifties and unfortunately will end in a couple of years."
This is one of only five remaining Delta 2 rockets. With customers not building medium-sized satellites, Delta 2 no longer seemed economically feasible so production stopped with enough parts remaining for five final missions. Four of those rockets have since been purchased, extending the life of the workhorse space boosters a few more years after what appeared to be the final purchased Delta 2 rocket departure in 2011.
ULA officials note that this is the 152nd Delta 2 launch, 51st NASA mission on a Delta 2 and 42nd Delta 2 from SLC-2 at Vandenberg.
While Delta 2 carries out a variety of missions, including for NASA and commercial customers, Adams said he enjoys his work on the rocket.
"It doesn't matter if we're launching something that's extremely expensive or something that's inexpensive, everybody gets the same treatment and it's just assured access to space. … The history speaks for itself," he said. "Keeping up with that history and making sure everything's done right and works the way it's supposed to that's the only thing that matters."
Work on the next Delta 2 mission already began for Adams and his team with some equipment arriving in the past month.
But early Tuesday morning they will pause from those tasks and await confirmation of a job done well — seeing the solid rocket motors light, burn and fall away as planned, typically looking like a blinking red light falling back to Earth during a nighttime liftoff. They should be jettisoned some 99 seconds into flight.
"Once everything works right, that's the reward," Adams said.
NASA scrubs rocket launch from Wallops
Associated Press
A rocket launch from Virginia's Eastern Shore has been scrubbed again.
NASA says it postponed the scheduled launch of the SubTec-6 on Monday morning because of boats in the hazard area and poor science conditions.
The launch from NASA's Wallops Island Facility also was scrubbed over the weekend. It has been rescheduled for 4:35 a.m. Tuesday.
NASA plans to test a deployment system for forming vapor clouds and other new suborbital rocket technologies.
Cassini Probe Celebrates 10 Years at Saturn Today
A NASA spacecraft marks a big milestone today (June 30) — a decade exploring Saturn and its many moons.
Since arriving in orbit around Saturn 10 years ago today, the Cassini probe has made a number of unprecedented observations and discoveries. Although the spacecraft was originally approved for a four-year mission, it has been granted three mission extensions, allowing it to continue roaming the gas giant's system.
"Having a healthy, long-lived spacecraft at Saturn has afforded us a precious opportunity," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "By having a decade there with Cassini, we have been privileged to witness never-before-seen events that are changing our understanding of how planetary systems form and what conditions might lead to habitats for life." [See amazing images taken by Cassini] For example, Cassini has helped scientists learn more about what kinds of molecules populate our solar system. The spacecraft discovered plumes containing water-ice shooting out into space from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
The Enceladus discovery is one of Cassini's most remarkable findings because it marked an extension of the search for life in the solar system, NASA officials said. Researchers know that life as we understand it relies on water, so finding the substance on a moon or planet could be a sign that life might be able to exist there.
Scientists now think that Enceldus harbors an underground ocean.
Enceladus wasn't the only mysterious moon Cassini helped reveal. Saturn's huge satellite Titan has also been studied by the long-lasting orbiter. Cassini's measurements have shown that Titan has rain, lakes, seas and rivers like Earth, NASA officials said. Unlike Earth, however, Titan is a cold world with seas of liquid methane rather than water.
The Titan-exploring Huygens probe also launched to the Saturn system with Cassini in October 1997. The European Space Agency's Huygens robot landed on Titan in 2005 and became the first manmade craft to land on a moon in the outer solar system. It measured the atmosphere and beamed images of the moon back to Earth.
"The probe's 2 hour and 27 minute descent revealed Titan to be remarkably like Earth before life evolved, with methane rain, erosion and drainage channels and dry lake beds," NASA officials said. "A soup of complex hydrocarbons, including benzene, was found in Titan's atmosphere."
Cassini has also unveiled how Saturn's rings change over time, and because of its long tenure in the planetary system, the probe has observed seasonal changes taking place on the planet and its moons, according to NASA.
Cassini will continue to beam back data to Earth for a few more years, until 2017 when it is scheduled to intentionally plunge into Saturn's atmosphere, ending its mission.
Astronauts in space will get a full health checkup with a single drop of blood
Ryan Whitwam - Geek
The European Space Agency (ESA) is working on a prototype device that will be able to screen astronauts on the International Space Station for multiple diseases and medical conditions with just a single drop of blood. The instrument is being developed in partnership with the Irish company Radisens Diagnostic, which already produces a version of the proposed device for use here on Earth.
Astronauts stationed on the International Space Station (ISS) can't exactly swing by the doctor's office to have tests done, and sending blood samples back to Earth isn't really feasible. So any in-depth health monitoring on these extended postings has to be done on-site, but the ISS doesn't have room for a full medical laboratory. The device from Radisens Diagnostic uses a small disc that spins to separate the solid and liquid components of blood — it's basically a tiny centrifuge. The liquid plasma diffuses into various testing chambers on the disc, which are then used to run tests.
The Earth-bound version of Radisens Diagnostic's technology has small cartridges for the instrument that can be used to test the drop of blood for markers in heart disease, liver function, cancers, diabetes, and more. The company says it shouldn't be any problem to adapt the technology to a weightless environment. Centrifugation of the blood sample should work just as well without the constant pull of gravity. That's a lot more useful than a fancy coffee maker. Astronauts on long-term space missions contend with a variety of health risks that require close medical monitoring. At the same time, the remote telemetry being fed back to controllers on the ground only allows for the most basic level of medical oversight. A device like the one being developed by Radisens Diagnostic could run a suite of tests specific to the issues affecting astronauts and offer results almost immediately. There is no firm timeline for deployment of the device to the ISS just yet. A Solar Show With Mixed Reviews
Kenneth Chang – The New York Times
Solar maximum is now.
Indeed, the maximum — the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle, when the sun erupts with solar flares and energetic bursts of electrons and protons — may have already passed.
As solar maximums go, this has been a tepid one, particularly when measured against some predictions that it would be ferocious; it has been called a "minimax."
But neither does it rival a quiet period in the second half of the 1600s that coincided with the onset of the Little Ice Age, a prolonged chill in Europe.
"This cycle is not abnormally small," said W. Dean Pesnell, the project scientist for NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory. Of the 24 solar cycles since the mid-1750s when people began keeping detailed counts of sunspots, "it looks like fifth smallest," he continued. "It might be the fourth. It might be the sixth. It's not going to be at the bottom."
The sun erupted with several giant solar flares last month but has been mostly quiet the past two weeks.
"I think the general consensus is that we've passed the peak," said C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
But he added that some of the biggest solar storms in history occurred on the downward side of the solar cycle, and even a weak cycle can generate ferocious outbursts.
"I think the expectation right now is we might see another burst of this activity five or six months from now," Dr. Young said. "We might still have some big events."
Perhaps more than anything else, the current maximum has taught solar scientists that they have a lot more to learn about the sun.
In 2006, at the end of the previous solar cycle, Mausumi Dikpati, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., undertook an ambitious endeavor — a computer model using the basic physics of the sun to forecast what would happen next. Her model made two main predictions: The cycle would start slowly, and it would be a big one, one-third to one-half stronger than the last one.
Her first prediction came to pass. The lull stretched for four more years, leading to some speculation that the sun was on the cusp of another Maunder Minimum, the sunspotless era of the 1600s.
(Although the Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age, it is not known whether the intensity of a sunspot cycle could influence the earth's climate. The difference in the amount of the earth-warming radiation coming from the sun between solar minimum and solar maximum is minuscule.)
But her second prediction was wrong.
In part, that was because the model did not capture the sun's split personality this time around. The sunspots peaked first in the sun's northern hemisphere, in 2011, and then faded away, leading to an intermission when the sun was almost blank at what was supposed to be maximum. Solar physicists expected that the southern hemisphere would belatedly perk up, and last fall it did, producing a second peak that was larger than the first.
"This was very unusual," Dr. Dikpati said. "If they would have overlapped, it would have been a strong cycle."
Dr. Dikpati and Dr. Pesnell were members of a panel that was to come up with a consensus prediction in 2007 but could not. The panel instead split, some agreeing with Dr. Dikpati on a strong maximum. Others, including Dr. Pesnell, expected a weak maximum, based on other indicators like the strength of the magnetic fields near the poles at solar minimum.
"That one worked pretty well," Dr. Pesnell said. "But now we'll get in a room and harrumph for a while."
They will have more data to think about. Convection within the sun moves gases from the equator toward the poles, and many solar scientists think the speed of that flow helps determine the strength of the sunspot cycle.
Some argue that a faster flow induces stronger magnetic fields and more sunspots. Others argue the reverse, that a faster flow inhibits sunspots. Not only do the scientists disagree on the theory, but at present they do not even agree how fast the flow is moving, with different techniques measuring different speeds, Dr. Pesnell said.
"We're getting better, and we argue," he said. "That's how we do science."
END
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