| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- 2014 JSC Honor Awards Ceremony Today
- Deadline Extended to Enter Deck the Door for Orion
- Seasonal Influenza Activity is Increasing
- SpaceX-4 Returns Science Samples to Earth
- Flight Controllers AND Flight Instructors WANTED
- Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v9.0 Release - Organizations/Social
- America Recycles Day Events
- Red Ribbon Week: Combating Substance Abuse
- Face 2 Face (F2F) With Sumara Thompson-King
- Starport Boot Camp: Registration Now Open - Jobs and Training
- Engineer to Entrepreneur - Community
- Astronomy Day |  |
| Headlines - 2014 JSC Honor Awards Ceremony Today
The JSC community is invited to attend the 2014 JSC Honor Awards Ceremony. Awards will be presented in a ceremony at the Teague Auditorium today. This year the JSC Honor Awards Ceremony will be held in two sessions. The first session begins at 1:30 p.m. and will be a presentation of the JSC Director's Commendation Awards. The Director's Commendation Award recognizes JSC employees who have provided significant contributions to the center throughout the year. The second session begins at 2:30 p.m. and will include a presentation of the JSC Director's Innovation Individual and Team Awards, Power of One Awards and Secretarial Excellence. Event Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 Event Start Time:1:30 PM Event End Time:4:00 PM
Event Location: Teague Auditorium
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Samantha Nehls x27804
[top] - Deadline Extended to Enter Deck the Door for Orion
Sign up for Deck the Door for Orion contest today! Pick a door in your organization's building, decorate it with an Orion-related theme and show your support for Exploration Flight-Test-1. What's in it for you? A chance to join in the celebration of Orion's first flight and the following: - First place: V.I.P. tickets to view the launch
- Second place: Flown items directly from flight
- Third place: Taking your selfie inside the Orion medium-fidelity mock-up to share with all your friends and followers
Enter the contest by sending an email with the name of your team, participants, organization and location of your decorated door by close of business Oct. 30. **Note deadline extension** We will only judge the doors of the first 15 teams to enter. Please limit teams to four people per team. All JSC team members are encouraged to participate! Door judging will take place Nov. 13, and winning teams will be announced in JSC Today Nov. 14. - Seasonal Influenza Activity is Increasing
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reporting that there are early signs that influenza activity is increasing, including local activity in Texas, Florida and several other states. Locally, the majority of Texas' health service regions are reporting an increased level of flu activity. Seasonal influenza activity usually peaks between December and February; however, outbreaks can occur as early as October. The CDC recommends an annual flu vaccine for everyone 6 months of age or older. It takes two weeks for your body to develop antibodies against the flu after the vaccination, so now is the time to act! Our next (and probably last) flu shot outreach session is scheduled for this Thursday, Oct. 30, in the Teague lobby from 8:30 a.m. until noon. Please visit the website below for additional information. - SpaceX-4 Returns Science Samples to Earth
Over the weekend, scientists eagerly awaited the return of important science samples from the SpaceX-4 Dragon capsule. Read about it here. - Flight Controllers AND Flight Instructors WANTED
Test Subject Screening seeks flight controllers AND flight instructors (including those in training flow) to evaluate a self-guided, multimedia stress management and resilience training computer program called SMART-OP, in comparison to watching videos and reading information on stress management. Volunteers will: - Complete one information/consent session (via telephone - 10 minutes)
- Attend two assessments (pre and post, 60 to 90 minutes each) involving questionnaires, neuropsychological tasks, physiological data and stress biomarker samples in 4N
- Attend six weekly computer-based stress management training sessions (30 to 60 minutes) in 4N
- Complete a three-month follow-up questionnaire (15 minutes)
- Total of 10 session contacts
Volunteers must be healthy non-smokers taking no medications and have a current Category I physical. Volunteers will be compensated. (Restrictions apply to NASA civil servants and some contractors. Individuals should contact their Human Resources department.) Please contact both Linda Byrd, RN, x37284, and Rori Yager, RN, x37240. - Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v9.0 Release
The JSC Chief Knowledge Officer is pleased to announce the ninth release of SKC. This release will contain a new sitemap to identify the major content repositories and better facilitate searching through them; a set of 22 Aircraft System Engineering course videos from MIT; and 6,000 new documents totaling 7.3GB. This release will also be the first round of content reorganization, placing 86,000 series documents into named folders. To date, we have captured nearly 6 million documents totaling 2.7 terabytes. Click the "Submit Feedback" button located on the top of the site navigation and give us your comments and thoughts. Organizations/Social - America Recycles Day Events
JSC will be celebrating its recycling capabilities Nov. 10 to 13. Art Contest: Show off your creative side AND environmental side by participating in the Recycled Art Contest. Team up or individually create art using recycled materials. Drop off artwork in the Teague lobby on Nov. 6 from 9 a.m. to noon. Contact Alexandra Moore-VanDyke for more information and submission details if you are interested in participating. All artwork will be displayed in the Teague lobby from Nov. 10 to 13. Book Swap Event: The Environmental team will be collecting books and magazines for the swap. There will be a book drop box in the Building 11 café and a collection table at the Building 3 café's west entrance from Nov. 10 to 12 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Bring new and used books and magazines for all ages and categories to the drop-off locations. On Nov. 13, come to the Teague lobby to pick up new reads! - Red Ribbon Week: Combating Substance Abuse
Red Ribbon Week is an ideal way for people and communities to unite and take a visible stand against substance abuse. Learn about addiction intervention and show your personal commitment to a drug-free lifestyle through the symbol of the red ribbon from Oct. 20 to 28. The JSC Employee Assistance Program will be in the Building 11 café today, Oct. 28, from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. Please stop by and show your support. - Face 2 Face (F2F) With Sumara Thompson-King
Do you know what it takes to assume senior-level responsibilities within NASA? If not, don't worry! An F2F with Sumara Thompson-King, NASA general counsel, will be held at JSC on Thursday, Nov. 6. Thompson-King is the first woman to serve as general counsel of NASA. As a functional office associate administrator, Thompson-King serves in an advisory capacity to the administrator and works with enterprise associate administrators and center directors to ensure agency activities are conducted in accordance with all statutory and regulatory requirements. She will talk about her personal experience in becoming a female NASA executive. Seating is limited to the first 50 people. Civil servants and contractors are encouraged to attend. Light refreshments will be provided. Click HERE to RSVP no later than Oct. 31. Please submit your questions on the "Question" tab with your RSVP. Event Date: Thursday, November 6, 2014 Event Start Time:5:00 PM Event End Time:6:30 PM
Event Location: Gilruth/Lone Star Room
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Stacy G. Houston x39649
[top] - Starport Boot Camp: Registration Now Open
Starport's boot camp is back, and registration is open and filling fast. Don't miss a chance to be part of Starport's incredibly popular program. The class is filling up, so register now! Regular Registration (Oct. 25 to Nov. 3): - $110 per person
The workout begins on Monday, Nov. 3 Are you ready for 18 hours of intense workouts with an amazing personal trainer to get you to your fitness goal? Don't wait—sign up today! Register now online or at the Gilruth Center information desk. Jobs and Training - Engineer to Entrepreneur
The Houston Technology Center is pleased to host a 10-week lunch-and-learn course series entitled "Engineer to Entrepreneur." If you've ever thought about launching your own business, this is the program for you. You will learn how to establish a corporate entity, develop a business strategy, pitch your strategy and market your products. Join us for a fun-filled program instructed by some of Houston's most accomplished business executives. Classes will be held for 10 consecutive Thursdays from Aug. 21 through Oct. 30 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Building 45, Room 451. For enrollment information, contact Evelyn Boatman at 281-244-8271. Community - Astronomy Day
Astronomy Day is Nov. 8 at the George Observatory inside Brazos Bend State Park. Daytime activities for the kids include face painting and learning the phases of the moon by eating Oreo cookies. There are also outdoor and indoor speakers on various astronomy-related topics, a how-to-make-a-comet demo and telescopes set up to safely observe the sun. Once nighttime arrives, out come all the telescopes! Up to 35 telescopes will be set up for observing the moon, star clusters and nebulae, and there's an opportunity to go inside the observatory's three telescope domes. The Astronomy Day event starts at 3 p.m. and goes (clouds or shine) until 10:30 p.m., but telescope viewing may be impacted by weather. Come have a fun-filled day/night and learn a little astronomy in the process. It's a great time for the whole family. Normal park entry fees apply, but Astronomy Day is FREE! | |
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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 – October 28, 2014
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: Orbital Sciences is set for a second attempt later today to launch its Antares rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, and to send the Cygnus resupply craft on a five-day journey to reach the station. A boat in the range safety zone southeast of Launch Pad 0A at Wallops last night forced a scrub of the launch. Today's liftoff is scheduled at 5:22pm Central time. That equates to 15 minutes after local sunset. At the time of launch, the station will be traveling 260 miles in altitude over the South Atlantic Ocean off the northeast coast of Brazil. Watch the launch live on NASA TV on the web or the NASA app, and follow along on Twitter. HEADLINES AND LEADS
Lessons from Apollo for Mars One
James C. McLane III - The Space Review
Mars One is promoting the challenging goal of establishing the first colonists on the Red Planet only 11 years from now. NASA's Apollo program had an even shorter time horizon (eight years from John F. Kennedy's public national commitment to place a human on the Moon to the Apollo 11 mission) so it's inevitable that these two very ambitious space projects will be compared.
The Space Pioneer Act
Wayne White - The Space Review
Recently, two companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have begun work to develop asteroid mining capabilities. This summer, US Representatives Bill Posey (R-FL) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA) introduced HR 5063, the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act. This bill would protect mining companies' personal property rights in extracted resources. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Antares rocket launch from Wallops Island canceled due to boat downrange in hazard area
Tamara Dietrich - Daily Press, of Virginia
NASA Wallops canceled tonight's launch attempt of Antares rocket due to a boat downrange in the hazard area, according to a NASA tweet. Launch has been rescheduled for 6:19 p.m. on Tuesday.
Wayward Boat Scrubs Antares Launch
Jeff Foust – Space News
A boat that entered restricted waters forced Orbital Sciences Corp. to postpone the launch of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft Oct. 27.
Antares rocket's enhanced upper stage debuts Tuesday
An upgraded Castor 30XL upper stage motor will provide the Antares rocket with an extra boost during launch Tuesday with supplies and experiments for the International Space Station, a critical upgrade Orbital Sciences says will ensure it meets contractual cargo delivery requirements.
Film Review: 'Interstellar'
Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.
Scott Foundas - Variety
To infinity and beyond goes "Interstellar," an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director's ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director's best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, "Interstellar" reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside "The Wizard of Oz," "2001," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Gravity" in the canon of Hollywood's visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Could Be Ticket to Mars
Product Design and Development
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion technologies are the subject of a new test series at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Finding the Right Rocks
Jim Howe – Space News
The NASA inspector general (IG) recently excoriated the agency's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program, finding that the effort to locate potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets was poorly resourced and far behind its mandated detection goals. In 2005 Congress tasked NASA with locating 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters in size and larger, but currently only 10 percent of this population has been found. The IG concluded that program management and funding for the planetary defense effort were insufficient for the task at hand.
Aerojet Rocketdyne's Mars 2020 Contracts Worth a Combined $14.5M
Dan Leone – Space News
Aerojet Rocketdyne will build landing system thrusters for NASA's Mars 2020 rover and install the craft's nuclear power source under separate sole-source contracts from the space agency and U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) worth roughly $14.5 million combined.
COMPLETE STORIES
Lessons from Apollo for Mars One
James C. McLane III - The Space Review
Mars One is promoting the challenging goal of establishing the first colonists on the Red Planet only 11 years from now. NASA's Apollo program had an even shorter time horizon (eight years from John F. Kennedy's public national commitment to place a human on the Moon to the Apollo 11 mission) so it's inevitable that these two very ambitious space projects will be compared.
Mission risk and safety
A general impression is that the crew risk for the Mars One mission and for Apollo expeditions may be of a similar order of magnitude. However, some aspects of safety are not comparable. For example, in all segments of an Apollo mission there was a way to terminate the trip and bring the crew back to Earth. The lack of a return-to-Earth option is the key feature that makes Mars One's goal feasible, but it also makes the risk harder to quantify.
Equipment failures are inevitable on an open-ended Mars colonization effort. This was not a big concern on the one- to two-week Apollo lunar expeditions. Machine technology has advanced tremendously in the last 50 years, so mechanical and electrical failures are less frequent, better understood, and more predictable that ever before. Techniques to detect impending failure can drastically reduce the risk of adverse consequences from that hazard.
Apollo's early preliminary design concepts, though feasible, were soon obsolete as more efficient and safer ways to accomplish the mission were developed. In similar manner, Mars One's plans may change a lot before they freeze the concept and progress on to detailed design. Flaws that appear as major risks in the current preliminary scheme should not be viewed with undue alarm.
Critical emerging technologies
In the early 1960s, the Apollo program gambled that it would be able to take advantage of several newly emerging technologies. NASA judged these developments to be so very desirable as to warrant the risk that they might not be perfected in time. These technologies included high power transistorized electronics, miniature on-board guidance computers, and the liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engine. If there had been problems that slowed development of any of these, the lunar landing would not have occurred in the '60s.
Problems with major new hardware did come very close to delaying the lunar landing program. Two examples were the catastrophic failure of bearings on the giant crawler transporters that moved the Saturn rocket out to the launch pad, and the structural failure of a huge space simulation vacuum chamber built to qualify the Apollo Command and Service Modules for space.
Mars One will also have to gamble that new, enabling technologies (such as advanced spacesuits) will be perfected in time for use on the planet.
Human resources
From the earliest years of the human space program, NASA and its contractors faced unprecedented technical problems. For solutions they needed the best talent they could find. Many of the country's most motivated engineers were attracted to the program because they wanted to be part of something exciting. And it wasn't just engineers. Other people, from nurses to machinists, wanted to make history so they migrated to the NASA centers. The working environment was especially stimulating because the Space Race with the Soviet Union to land humans on the Moon was a real competition. Employees felt like they were on a team participating in a sporting event.
NASA's efforts to obtain outstanding talent included personal visits by managers to college campuses, where engineering school deans had been asked to look for exceptional students. When such individuals were identified, the agency would encourage them to come work for the government after graduation. That's how legendary engineer Max Faget (whose name is on the patent for the Mercury capsule) and Guy Thibodaux (designer of the Scout solid fuel satellite launcher) were recruited. NASA's talent search was not restricted to just the US. In the early 1960s, Canada cancelled its AVRO Arrow supersonic interceptor aircraft project, and suddenly scores of top engineers and designers didn't have a job. NASA was able to scoop up these Canadians and relocate them to Texas to take critical roles in the Apollo program.
An obvious lesson from Apollo is that Mars One needs to acquire the best staff possible. Today that would mean recruiting folks who have actual hands-on human spaceflight experience. While there is plenty of public knowledge that shows what worked, the old hands know what was tried, but didn't work, and that information is seldom found in books or on the Internet. For example, many of the unsuccessful X Prize teams included enthusiastic, highly motivated people, but the teams lacked actual spaceflight experience and that is important for success.
Promoting the idea
During the Apollo era, there were some who believed the goal of landing humans on the Moon by the end of the decade was too audacious and virtually impossible. But, the dynamic personalities and public persuasiveness of prominent individuals like Kennedy, rocket genius Wernher von Braun, and the leaders of that era's magnificent aerospace industry provided enough momentum to carry the program forward. Politicians got on board once they realized the fantastic economic potential that Apollo would bring to their constituents. The general public understood that the Moon landing would be a unique event in the history of humanity and was proud to support such an effort. It helped that hundreds of thousands of Americans worked directly or indirectly on the project.
It will be hard for Mars One to gather similar support. A major public relations effort might help. It should be easier to persuade the public that settlement of our neighboring planet is a worthy goal, especially if they do not have to pay for it with their taxes. This Mars program must be endorsed by prominent national leaders and business personalities. Naturally the support of space heroes, like former astronauts and cosmonauts, is important, but for success the entire scientific community must get behind this endeavor. This will be a challenge.
During Apollo, scientists across a broad spectrum of fields supported NASA, in part because the Space Agency financed numerous research projects. Other federal agencies, for example the US Geological Service were heavily involved. A steady flow of scientific papers appeared in the technical literature reflecting studies done to support the program. Magazines ran articles, for example regular features by Wernher von Braun in Popular Mechanics magazine kept the general public informed and excited. It will not be so easy for Mars One to attract that level of attention.
In the early Apollo days some naysayers predicted failure. For example, one scientist incorrectly warned that any Moon landing was doomed since radar reflections proved the surface was covered with dust dozens of meters deep. Similarly, Mars One has no shortage of critics who are ready to point out flaws in its mission plan, no matter how preliminary the proposals.
Mars One faces especially daunting funding challenges, but so did Apollo. I remember passing by the front entrance at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston during a Moon mission. A group of demonstrators stood near the gate holding signs that stated, "We Are Hungry!" These protestors were a reminder that some people view taxpayer funds spent on space exploration as money that should instead go to social welfare.
Apart from successfully capturing the public's imagination, the best thing about Mars One is that it seems to be addressing important questions about the hardware needed for Mars settlement. Recent criticisms of Mars One's plans questioned whether regenerative life support systems can allow indefinite stays on the planet. As design progresses, will Mars One conclude that current or near future technology simply can't provide a relatively autonomous, self-supporting colony?
A more feasible scheme
If Mars One comes to that conclusion, it could embrace a more feasible scheme: Send only one astronaut to the Red Planet and periodically resupply that single individual with all required provisions and consumables from Earth. This is the simplest and cheapest way to begin to colonize the planet.
Will Mars One have the audacity to propose a one-person, one-way mission? The concept is far too bold for NASA, but with the hope of the world as inspiration, Mars One has a chance to capture the legacy of Apollo and plant the seeds of humanity on the Red Planet.
James C. McLane III is an Associate Fellow in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has personal exposure to the human space program extending back to the Apollo era.
The Space Pioneer Act
Wayne White - The Space Review
Recently, two companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have begun work to develop asteroid mining capabilities. This summer, US Representatives Bill Posey (R-FL) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA) introduced HR 5063, the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act. This bill would protect mining companies' personal property rights in extracted resources. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Bigelow Aerospace is a company that has successfully orbited two inflatable space habitats. Based upon these prototype demonstrations, NASA has awarded Bigelow a contract to install and test an inflatable module on the International Space Station. Bigelow eventually plans to land its inflatable modules on the Moon. The company recently asked the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) for a lunar "payload review" to recognize ownership of extracted resources by Bigelow and other US firms.
These efforts seek to clarify the law that applies to commercial space activities. A number of intriguing legal questions have remained unanswered since the Outer Space Treaty entered into force in 1967. Can a company mine celestial bodies, and own the resources that it extracts? Are real property rights legal under international space law? What law applies to satellite servicing and removal of space debris? Companies are unsure of their rights, investors aren't sure that their investments will be protected, and lawsuits are inevitable if these issues must be resolved in court.
Legally, outer space is an international area that is treated in much the same way as international waters in the Earth's oceans. International treaties govern national activities, and nations are free to enact national laws and regulations that do not violate the treaties that they have agreed to.
There are five United Nations treaties that govern space activities. The 1979 "Moon Treaty" is the only one that directly addresses resource appropriation and real property rights. It prohibits real property rights, and it would establish an international organization to govern resource appropriation. Only 16 nations have ratified or acceded to the treaty, and none of the spacefaring nations are party to the treaty.
The Moon Treaty has no practical effect at present, but two of the nations that are party to the treaty acceded recently, so you can't quite argue that the Moon Treaty is "dead." That's cause for concern. Prohibition of property rights is contrary to western nations' laws and institutions. And the international resource organization, if ever established, could impose additional costs and regulatory uncertainty upon a nascent industry. The International Seabed Authority, an organization established by the Law of the Sea Treaty, is an example. The Seabed Authority has proposed to the United Nations that it tax deep sea mining activities, an action that they refer to as "innovative financing." This is hardly an incentive for pioneering work in a difficult environment.
The most broadly accepted treaty, the 1967 "Outer Space Treaty," is more benign. One hundred nations are party to this treaty, including the United States and all other spacefaring nations. The Outer Space Treaty does not specifically refer to resources or real property rights. However, Article I says that "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States." Space lawyers generally agree that this freedom of use includes the right to appropriate resources, in much the same way that nations are free to remove fish from the ocean.
There is also some history of resource ownership. The United States appropriated 382 kilograms of lunar rocks during six Apollo missions, and the USSR returned 320 grams to Earth during three Luna spacecraft missions. President Richard Nixon ordered the distribution of fragments of a Moon rock collected during the Apollo 17 mission to 135 foreign heads of state, the 50 US states, and US territories. Each of the fragments were encased in an acrylic sphere, and mounted on a plaque which included the recipient's flag. No nations objected to the US and the USSR taking possession of lunar rocks and returning them to Earth, and no nations objected to, or qualified their acceptance of the gifts of Moon rocks.
The United States has adjudicated a court case, the "One Lucite Ball" case, to determine ownership of the moon rock and plaque that President Nixon presented to Honduras. A private party attempted to sell the plaque on the black market, and the US seized it in a sting operation. In a subsequent letter to the US government, the government of Honduras asserted its ownership of the lunar rock pursuant to Honduran law. The United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Miami Division, held that Honduras did indeed own the rock, and ordered its return to Honduras (unpublished Case No. 01-0116-CIV-JORDAN).
The Lucite Ball case included in its findings of fact two reports of sales of lunar rock samples, one a slide with specks of lunar dust that sold at Sotheby's auction for $500,000, and the second the lunar sample and plaque given by the US to Nicaragua, which a Middle Eastern buyer reportedly bought along with some pre-Columbian artifacts for an amount between $5 and $10 million. A more recent Associated Press story ("Moon Chips from Vegas Casino Mogul sent to NASA," May 23, 2012) reports a different chain of ownership for the Nicaraguan lunar sample and plaque that does not include a Middle Eastern buyer. The article quotes a NASA attorney's promise that if the lunar sample is authentic, "NASA will return the rock to the people of Nicaragua."
Because the US District Court did not select the Lucite Ball case for publication, it is not a precedent for subsequent cases in the District of Florida or in any other United States federal courts. However, this court ruling, Honduras's assertion of ownership, other nations' failure to object to gifts of Moon rocks, and nations' failure to object to private sales of Moon rocks, do support an interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty that permits ownership of extracted resources.
What about commercial mining of space resources, i.e., the systematic extraction and sale of resources for the purpose of making a profit? Is that legal? The Moon Treaty does not explicitly say that commercial resource appropriation is legal; this implies that treaty negotiators considered commercial appropriation legal under the Outer Space Treaty. That would be consistent with the rule of international law that says any activity is legal unless it is expressly prohibited. The Moon Treaty does say that "States Parties may in the course of scientific investigations… use mineral and other substances… in quantities appropriate for the support of their missions." Other clauses in the Treaty say that commercial appropriation is not permitted until the international resource organization is established, and only after that organization approves commercial ventures on a case-by-case basis.
I believe that the resource provisions in the Moon Treaty are bad policy. Limiting resource appropriation to the amount necessary to support an individual mission means that each mission must purchase and transport its own equipment if it wishes to mine and process materials. Allowing unfettered commercial appropriation, on the other hand, would allow all sorts of specialized activities to take place without the necessity of each individual mission having to mine and process its own resources. Mining ice and processing it into hydrogen and oxygen could supply fuel depots, and enable service companies to boost dead satellites to parking orbits, refuel active satellites, recharge life support systems, clear orbits of debris, and fuel transportation in the Earth-Moon system.
The resource provisions in the Moon Treaty are based on a terrestrial frame of reference—an assumption that resources are limited. But space resources are not limited; they exist in vast quantities throughout the universe. The Moon Treaty is also based on an assumption that countries with large, expensive space programs are the only nations that will benefit from space resources. That view implicitly assumes that technology will remain static, that launch costs will not change, and that nations that don't have space programs will not have access to space.
I don't agree with that view. SpaceX has demonstrated that significantly lower launch costs are possible, and it is selling its launch services to a wide variety of international customers. Other companies are developing launch vehicles, and there are already two space mining companies. This competition should bring the cost of acquiring space resources within the reach of even the poorest nations.
As we consider a new frontier with abundant resources, we must change our frame of reference. As resources on Earth become increasingly difficult and expensive to mine, and as the need for orbital debris removal becomes increasingly critical, it is clear that our laws and policies must encourage appropriation of space resources. Enacting a mining law which addresses all aspects of resource extraction is one way to encourage commercial activity. The General Mining Act of 1872 is a good model, as it does not include mineral leasing or royalties, which would violate the Outer Space Treaty.
Real property rights is another way to encourage commercial activity. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty says that "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." Sovereignty is a bundle of national rights that includes, among other things, authority over territory, jurisdiction to enact and enforce laws, jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes, authority to exclude foreign nationals from areas where they might interfere with activities or threaten safety, and the authority to defend citizens and property.
All of these rights are granted by the Outer Space Treaty, except for authority over territory. Article II of the Treaty prohibits territorial sovereignty. Article VIII confers jurisdiction to enact and enforce laws, and to adjudicate disputes. Article III says that "States… shall carry on activities… in accordance with international law, including the Charter of the United Nations." The right to exclude foreign nationals to prevent interference and ensure safety is an inherent attribute of national sovereignty as it is defined in international law, so this right is incorporated by Article III. The right of national defense is set forth in Article 51 of the UN Charter, and the right to defend citizens and property is a sovereign right in international law, so this right is also incorporated by Article III.
The right to exclude people and vehicles to prevent interference, and to defend people and facilities against safety threats is in part expressed through the concept of a "safety zone." Safety zones are areas where the operator of a facility exercises control over navigation of vehicles in the vicinity of the facility, and in which it may exclude vehicles, equipment, and people to ensure the safety of the facility and its occupants. Examples of this concept are the safety zones around oil rigs on the continental shelf, and the International Space Station's control zone. Space lawyers of various nationalities have written in favor of formalizing safety zones (or in the case of Russian authors, "keep out zones"), and I am not aware of any space lawyers who have argued against the concept.
In the years since the Outer Space Treaty entered into force, several proposals for space property rights have been publicized. All of these proposals would confer permanent titles to territory without requiring the actual presence of people or facilities in areas where some or all of the title is conferred. These proposals violate the Outer Space Treaty because parties to the Outer Space Treaty only have jurisdiction over space objects, personnel, and safety zones. Parties have no jurisdiction to grant or recognize permanent titles to territory.
In 2000, Gregory Nemitz registered a claim to Asteroid 433 Eros. Mr. Nemitz did not claim private ownership of extracted resources; he claimed real property rights over the asteroid as whole. Mr. Nemitz registered his claim on a website maintained by the Archimedes Institute, an organization that takes no position regarding the validity of such claims.
After Mr. Nemitz registered his claim, NASA landed the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on Eros, and Nemitz submitted an invoice to NASA for parking and storage fees. NASA and the State Department denied Nemitz' claim. In NASA's final agency decision, a former General Counsel of NASA said Nemitz's "individual claim of appropriation of a celestial body (the asteroid 433 Eros) appears to have no foundation in law. It is unlike an individual's claim for seabed minerals, which was considered and debated by the U.S. Congress that subsequently enacted a statute, The Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act… expressly authorizing such claims. There is no similar statute related in outer space. Accordingly, your request for a 'parking/storage fee' is denied."
Nemitz then filed a lawsuit, arguing that the United States had occupied his property without just compensation. The Federal District Court for the District of Nevada granted the US Government's Motion to Dismiss, and said that Nemitz did not prove that he had any property rights, so there was no basis for compensation. The Court also ruled that "neither the failure [of] the United States to ratify the… Moon Treaty, nor the United States' ratification in 1967 of the… Outer Space Treaty, created any rights in Nemitz to appropriate private property rights on asteroids." Nemitz appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and that court affirmed the lower court's dismissal of the case "for the reasons stated by the district court."
These courts did not certify their opinions for publication, so these cases do not establish a binding legal precedent. However, in the opinion of the former General Counsel of NASA, some form of property rights may be permissible in outer space, perhaps similar to the rights granted by the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act (30 USC § 1401 et seq.)
Because the Outer Space Treaty does not permit full-fledged territorial property rights, some people say that the spacefaring nations should withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and make claims of territorial sovereignty. I believe, however, that there are many reasons why spacefaring nations should not take this course of action:
- The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, where the Outer Space Treaty was negotiated, operates on the basis of consensus. In light of the Committee's past experience, I expect it will be very difficult to achieve consensus in support of any other comprehensive treaty that might replace the Outer Space Treaty.
- Withdrawal from the Outer Space Treaty, followed by territorial claims, would almost certainly lead to strong political opposition, and I would not expect any other nations to recognize such claims.
- The modern standard for establishing territorial sovereignty, "effective occupation," requires national defense of territorial borders, which would be very expensive.
- History shows that competition for territorial claims often leads to war.
- The Outer Space Treaty has no provisions for taxation, technology transfer, and expensive governing bodies (unlike the Moon Treaty).
- There is little in the Outer Space Treaty that is really objectionable. For the most part the treaty lets nations govern their own activities, subject to general principles that they already subscribe to.
A realistic approach to property rights, and the path of least political resistance, is to adopt a system consistent with the terms of the Outer Space Treaty. I have proposed that the United States and like-minded nations enact national legislation establishing systems of property rights that do not assert jurisdiction over territory. These laws would only grant title to entities that actually occupy outer space and celestial bodies, and would grant to private entities no more rights than those rights conferred upon nations that are party to the Outer Space Treaty. The property rights would only encompass the area actually used, plus a safety zone, and they would only be valid for as long as the area is occupied by people and/or facilities. In all other ways, these rights would be identical to real property rights on Earth—properties could be sold, inherited, and serve as collateral for financing.
Participating nations would honor other nations' property rights pursuant to reciprocity provisions in their property statutes. This approach follows the example of the United States' Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Resources Act, and similar laws enacted by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in 1981 through 1983. Each of these laws have reciprocity provisions that say they will honor the claims of other nations that enact similar laws. In the same manner, the US and other nations could collaborate and coordinate the establishment of an international system for reciprocal recognition of space property rights, including jurisdiction over safety zones.
A third way to encourage commercial activity is through space salvage law. The space community has grown increasingly concerned about orbital debris in recent years, but the prospect of capturing, and de-orbiting or recycling satellites, and destroying smaller debris, raises many legal questions, particularly when the parties and space objects are of different nationalities. Satellite and space-vehicle refueling, repair, and upgrade activities could also benefit from greater legal certainty.
The risks posed by space debris provide considerable incentive for its removal, but the cost of such operations may be prohibitive. Such costs might be offset, however, if the entity removing the debris received some or all of the economic benefit derived from that debris.
Ocean salvage operations are analogous to space salvage operations, so ocean salvage laws provide a convenient model for outer space. US law defines salvage as "the compensation allowed to persons by whose assistance a ship or her cargo has been saved, in whole or in part, from impending peril on the sea or in recovering said property from actual loss as in cases of shipwreck, derelict or recapture." The only instance in which the salvor would become the owner of salvaged property would be in those cases where the property has been abandoned, or when it is unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam. In those instances the property is deemed to have returned to a state of nature, and the first person to find it and reduce it to actual or constructive possession becomes its owner. This is known as the law of finds. In the absence of express abandonment by the property's owner, United States courts have only found abandonment when adjudicating salvage of long lost wrecks.
Like the space mining and real property laws that I've proposed above, space salvage laws would be based upon the jurisdiction conferred by the Outer Space Treaty. Only identifiable objects can be the subject of national jurisdiction. Unidentifiable debris would be considered abandoned, returned to a state of nature and subject to appropriation or destruction by the first to find it. Inoperative, identifiable space objects, however, should never be classified as abandoned, to ensure that nations remain responsible for liability under the Outer Space Treaty.
Space salvage laws can permit salvage of government-owned and private space objects, while still addressing concerns regarding national security and technology transfer. Nations can specifically allow contract salvage of space objects on a case-by-case basis. Activity within safety zones would only be permissible pursuant to the terms of a salvage contract, and any unauthorized foreign activity within safety zones would be a violation of national sovereignty. National export control laws would address issues of technology transfer.
Nations can add a column to their registries of space objects, wherein they identify objects that are available for contract salvage, and objects that are subject to related mining and property-rights claims. I anticipate that the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs would cooperate and add an identical column to their international registry of space objects.
There is historical precedent for the laws that I'm proposing. Homesteading acts were a principal factor in the settlement of the western United States. Among the most successful laws in US history, these laws remained in effect for over a century, until the last homesteading act for Alaska left the United States Code in 1986. The General Mining Act of 1872 is still in effect. Basing space laws on analogous terrestrial laws will make the outcome of legal disputes more predictable, as courts can look to terrestrial law for precedents. Also, nations can implement these laws at no cost to taxpayers, because the only costs are administrative, and these costs can be recovered through filing and processing fees.
I therefore propose that the United States enact a "Space Pioneer Act" that would include real property rights, mining law, salvage law, safety-zones, and reciprocity provisions. I encourage like-minded nations to collaborate with the US and enact similar laws. The Space Pioneer Act is something we can do right now, to provide for our future.
Wayne White is President and CEO of SpaceBooster LLC, an aerospace technology company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a longtime member of the International Institute of Space Law, and represented the United States as a member of the State Department Delegation to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Legal Subcommittee in 2003. Copies of Wayne White's published articles, and a slide presentation of the Space Pioneer Act, are available for download at https://independent.academia.edu/WhiteWayne. Antares rocket launch from Wallops Island canceled due to boat downrange in hazard area
Tamara Dietrich - Daily Press, of Virginia
NASA Wallops canceled tonight's launch attempt of Antares rocket due to a boat downrange in the hazard area, according to a NASA tweet. Launch has been rescheduled for 6:19 p.m. on Tuesday.
An unmanned Antares rocket is scheduled to launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on the Eastern Shore about 6:45 p.m. today, boosting a Cygnus cargo freighter to rendezvous with the International Space Station.
The launch of the Antares — a medium-lift rocket — should be visible throughout Hampton Roads and the mid-Atlantic. It's carrying a Cygnus spacecraft packed with about 5,000 pounds of cargo — the heaviest payload to date for rocket-maker Orbital Sciences Corp.
The Cygnus is expected to remain in orbit for several days before berthing with the space station in the early hours of Nov. 2, when station crew are set to use a robotic arm to grapple the spacecraft into port. Station astronauts will unpack provisions, hardware and science experiments, then begin to reload the craft with trash — or disposable cargo — that will eventually burn up in the atmosphere upon re-entry.
Cargo spacecraft typically remain at the space station for about 30 days before making their return flight.
Wayward Boat Scrubs Antares Launch
Jeff Foust – Space News
A boat that entered restricted waters forced Orbital Sciences Corp. to postpone the launch of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft Oct. 27.
The launch of the Antares rocket, scheduled for 6:45 pm EDT, was scrubbed when a sailboat entered a restricted zone off the coast from the launch site at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia. The boat was not able to leave the zone before the ten-minute launch window closed.
There were no technical issues reported with the Antares rocket or the Cygnus spacecraft prior to the scrub, and weather conditions were favorable. Orbital Sciences and NASA announced the next launch attempt would be Oct. 28 at 6:22 pm EDT. Forecasts call for a 95 percent chance of acceptable weather at the new launch time.
The mission, designated Orb-3 by NASA, is the third of eight Commercial Resupply Services missions that Orbital Sciences is under contract to perform for the space agency. The Cygnus, named by Orbital the "SS Deke Slayton" after the late astronaut, is carrying 2,290 kilograms of cargo for the station.
That cargo includes a number of small satellites that will later be released from international space station. Those satellites include 26 from Earth imaging company Planet Labs and a technology demonstration satellite developed by asteroid mining company Planetary Resources.
The launch is also the first Antares mission to use the Castor 30XL motor for the upper stage. The motor, an extended version of the Castor 30B solid-propellant motor previously used by the Antares, will allow the vehicle to carry additional cargo on future Cygnus missions.
Despite the launch delay, the Cygnus is still scheduled to arrive at the ISS early Nov. 2.
Antares rocket's enhanced upper stage debuts Tuesday
An upgraded Castor 30XL upper stage motor will provide the Antares rocket with an extra boost during launch Tuesday with supplies and experiments for the International Space Station, a critical upgrade Orbital Sciences says will ensure it meets contractual cargo delivery requirements.
Packed with additional propellant and fitted with a modified exhaust nozzle, the upper stage will give the Antares rocket power to lift about 800 more kilograms — about 1,760 pounds — more mass into the space station's orbit, officials said.
Less powerful Castor 30 motors built by ATK have flown on the Antares rocket's previous four missions. The Castor 30XL upper stage on Tuesday's launch of the Orb-3 resupply flight is longer than the earlier motors.
"The Castor 30XL is an extended-length version of the Castor family of motors that we've flown on all of the first four missions," said Mike Pinkston, the Antares rocket's program manager at Orbital Sciences Corp. "In specific terms, it's about double the total impulse compared to the original Castor 30B on Orb-1 and Orb-2 — a little higher thrust and burns about 30 seconds longer than the Castor 30B — so overall it has a much higher performance."
Orbital Sciences' $1.9 billion cargo resupply contract with NASA requires delivery of 20 metric tons, or about 44,000 pounds, of supplies to the space station over eight missions with the Antares rocket and Cygnus supply ship.
Frank Culbertson, executive vice president of Orbital's advanced programs group, said Sunday that the Orb-3 mission — the third of the eight-mission slate — will take up about 5,000 pounds.
Including a demonstration flight last year, Orbital will have delivered more than 13,000 pounds of cargo to the space station with a successful Orb-3 mission, Culbertson said.
The Cygnus spacecraft has removed about 10,000 pounds of trash and disposal cargo from the space station so far. That number will increase to about 15,000 pounds after Orb-3's departure in December.
Orbital plans to introduce an enlarged Cygnus cargo module on the next mission set for launch in April to provide more volume for supplies.
"When we won the contract, we already had plans for an performance enhancement program partway through the program to make sure we could in fact carry our contracted amount of 20 metric tons to ISS," Culbertson said. "We started with lower delivery numbers to begin with, and then have gradually increased it as we work off our contingencies and our margins. But we needed this part of it — the enhanced cargo-carrying module, which is a meter longer, and the increased performance of the upper stage — to really meet our goals."
The Antares rocket launching Tuesday — known as the 130 version — is about 8 feet taller than the launcher's earlier configuration. Engineers added a spacer ring below the 12.8-foot-diameter nose cone — which is unchanged on this flight — to make more room for the larger Castor 30XL motor and the longer Cygnus cargo module on the next mission.
"I think it's going to be a great enhancement to our cargo service, and we need it," Pinkston said.
ATK finished development of the Castor 30XL in 2013, according to Jason Meredith, director of business development for ATK Aerospace Group's defense and commercial division.
The upper stage is about 8 feet longer than the motors flown on the Antares rocket's first four flights.
It weighs about 58,000 pounds with a load of pre-packed solid propellant and is about twice the size of the older Castor 30 motor, Meredith said.
"That's mainly the the way it provdes the additional capability to the Antares — with the much larger mass of propellant," Meredith said Monday. "It also has some design changes to the nozzle to provide more ISP, or impulse, to the system. Those are the main changes between the Castor 30XL and the other two versions.
"There's more thrust and it burns a little bit longer, but to a large extent, it's just more impulse — more total energy that it is able to impart to the launch vehicle and provide the additional performance," Meredith said.
Film Review: 'Interstellar'
Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.
Scott Foundas - Variety
To infinity and beyond goes "Interstellar," an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director's ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director's best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, "Interstellar" reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside "The Wizard of Oz," "2001," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Gravity" in the canon of Hollywood's visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.
We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world's armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.
"We're a caretaker generation," notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot who hasn't stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. "We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars," Cooper muses. "Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt."
And oh, what dirt! As "Interstellar" opens, the world — or at least Cooper's Steinbeckian corner of it — sits on the cusp of a second Dust Bowl, ravaged by an epidemic of crop blight, a silt-like haze hanging permanently in the air. (Some of this scene-setting is accomplished via pseudo-documentary interviews with the elderly residents of some more distant future reflecting on their hardscrabble childhoods, which Nolan films like the "witness" segments from Warren Beatty's "Reds.") And as the crops die, so the Earth's atmosphere becomes richer in nitrogen and poorer in oxygen, until the time when global starvation will give way to global asphyxiation.
But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it's gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan's films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth's current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand's ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth's gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium.")
Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of "2001," by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey's laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard's as Yeager in "The Right Stuff" (another obvious "Interstellar" touchstone).
Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth's surface — "Interstellar" (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience's ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn't glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It's hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth's ingenious 2004 Sundance winner "Primer" — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)
The mission itself is a relatively intimate affair, comprised of Cooper, Brand's own scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other researchers (Wes Bentley and the excellent David Gyasi) and a chatty, sarcastic, ex-military security robot called TARS (brilliantly voiced by Bill Irwin in a sly nod to Douglas Rain's iconic HAL 9000), which looks like a walking easel but proves surprisingly agile when the going gets tough. And from there, "Interstellar" has so many wonderful surprises in store — from casting choices to narrative twists and reversals — that the less said about it the better. (Indeed, if you really don't want to know anything more, read no further.)
It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of "The Prestige" and "Batman Begins," or the multi-tiered memory maze of "Inception." The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like "Space Station" and "Hubble 3D," suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn's great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole's shimmering plasmic vortex.
With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber's playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet's surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)
This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades' worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent "Zero Dark Thirty" mode). It's a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.
That moment signals a shift in "Interstellar" itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.
On the one hand, the movie marvels at the brave men and women throughout history who have dedicated themselves, often at great peril, to the greater good of mankind. On the other, because Nolan is a psychological realist, he's acutely aware of the toil such lives may take on those who choose to lead them, and that even "the best of us" (as one character is repeatedly described) might not be immune from cowardice and moral compromise. Some people lie to themselves and to their closest confidants in "Interstellar," and Nolan understands that everyone has his reasons. Others compensate by making the most selfless of sacrifices. Perhaps the only thing trickier than quantum physics, the movie argues, is the nature of human emotion.
Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie's ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. "Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light," harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance's journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet "Interstellar" is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child's twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.
It's hardly surprising that "Interstellar" reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film's lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie's interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on "Inception") again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film's effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), "Interstellar" begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Could Be Ticket to Mars
Product Design and Development
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion technologies are the subject of a new test series at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Researchers there are using an innovative test facility to study the properties of highly promising nuclear fuels - without the risk of radiation exposure associated with handling these potent power sources.
The current test series focused on analysis of a variety of fuel elements in a simulated thermal environment kicked off in early October with completion targeted in June 2015.
Michael Houts, NTP manager at the Marshall Center, said the safety factor is good news for scientists and technologists developing the technology - and the advances enabled by the study will yield even better news for flight engineers and NASA mission planners.
Nuclear thermal rockets "may be ideal to enable delivery of very large, automated cargo payloads to Mars, paving the way for human explorers," he said.
The same nuclear thermal propulsion technology, reconfigured for speed rather than mass, then could potentially transport human crews to the Red Planet as well, which would get them there more quickly and efficiently than conventional rockets while reducing astronauts' solar radiation exposure during the voyage.
In short, Houts said, "Nuclear thermal propulsion could be the ticket to Mars. The results from this study will give us a better idea of whether that is the case by experimentally measuring key factors related to engine performance and lifetime."
Housed in the Marshall Center's Propulsion Research and Development Laboratory, the test facility used for these innovative studies is dubbed "NTREES," short for the Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator.
Licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the facility is certified to test prototypical nuclear rocket fuel elements.
These are identical to the fuel elements used in a nuclear thermal rocket, but because the test facility uses non-nuclear heating instead of nuclear fission, the fuel does not become radioactive during the test and can be easily handled and examined once the test is complete.
NTREES safely tests these stand-in, prototypical fuel elements in hot flowing hydrogen at power levels and temperatures comparable to those found in a working nuclear thermal rocket engine.
Induction heating is used to mimic the fission process, with pressures reaching 1,000 pounds per square inch and temperatures approaching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"The cost savings is remarkable," said Marshall researcher Bill Emrich, who manages the NTREES facility at Marshall. "Whereas it costs tens of millions of dollars to perform full-scale testing of nuclear rocket fuel elements in specially designed nuclear reactors, our research costs just tens of thousands - and no radiation protection is required!"
Houts concurred. "By using this non-nuclear induction heating process for testing, we avoid the environmental, legal and security issues associated with performing full-powered nuclear tests - and advance this research far more quickly than we could do otherwise," he said. "And when, in time, we conduct actual nuclear testing, we will have very high confidence that those tests will be successful, thanks to these initial, non-nuclear studies."
The focus on safety extends beyond the laboratory to the launch pad, Houts noted. A chemically powered launch vehicle, such as NASA's next flagship, the Space Launch System, could safely carry a nuclear-thermal-powered upper stage to orbit.
During ascent to orbit, the nuclear system would remain "cold," with no fission products generated and radiation below significant levels.
Once safe orbit was achieved, the upper stage would deploy, and its nuclear reactor would be activated, heating hydrogen to extremely high temperatures. The hydrogen then would expand through a nozzle, generating thrust.
Such an engine is expected to operate twice as efficiently as a standard chemical engine, Houts said. The Space Shuttle Main Engine, which powered space shuttle missions to Earth orbit for 30 years and is generally considered one of the best, most efficient chemical engines ever built, delivered a specific impulse (ISP) of 450 seconds.
A nuclear thermal rocket, in comparison, would deliver an ISP of 900 seconds. That dramatic increase in efficiency could enable reliable delivery of high-mass automated payloads into the deep solar system, or help high-velocity, human-rated vehicles speed to and from Mars and other destinations in as little as half the time required by today's rockets.
Right now, though, NTREES research is driven by one critical goal: enabling a human mission to Mars. The current round of testing lays the groundwork for large-scale ground tests and eventual full-scale testing in flight.
After that? "Mars, here we come," Houts said.
Nuclear thermal research at the Marshall Center is part of NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Division, managed by the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and including participation by the U.S. Department of Energy.
AES focuses on crew safety and mission operations in deep space, seeks to pioneer new approaches for rapidly developing prototype systems, demonstrating key capabilities and validating operational concepts for future vehicle development and human missions beyond Earth orbit.
Marshall researchers are partnering on the research with NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio; NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls; Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Finding the Right Rocks
Jim Howe – Space News
The NASA inspector general (IG) recently excoriated the agency's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program, finding that the effort to locate potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets was poorly resourced and far behind its mandated detection goals. In 2005 Congress tasked NASA with locating 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters in size and larger, but currently only 10 percent of this population has been found. The IG concluded that program management and funding for the planetary defense effort were insufficient for the task at hand.
Unfortunately, the IG's audit missed a much broader and far more important point: NASA is not looking for the right rocks.
Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets that pass within 1.3 astronomical units — about 200 million kilometers — of the sun, displaced from the main asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud by gravitational perturbations or collisions with other objects. Over time, some of these objects strike Earth, as evidenced by the hundreds of impact craters that dot our planet. The Barringer crater in Arizona highlights the destructive forces in play: The 50-meter asteroid that struck there 50,000 years ago gouged a hole 1.2 kilometers in diameter and released the same amount of energy as a large thermonuclear bomb.
The size of asteroids is inversely proportional to the frequency in which they appear in nature. In our solar system there are fewer than a thousand NEOs greater than 1 kilometer in diameter, but more than 500,000 greater than 30 meters. While not civilization-killers, the smaller asteroids can wreak enormous regional devastation, as witnessed in the 1908 Tunguska air burst, which leveled more than 2,000 square kilometers of desolate Russian forest — all from the explosion of a body estimated between 30-70 meters in diameter. How many of the half-million Tunguska sized NEOs have been discovered? Half of 1 percent.
This is incredibly relevant since it is the smaller objects that hit Earth much more frequently than their larger cousins. Collisions from monster asteroids are exceedingly rare, with the average time between impacts measured in millions of years. However, a 10-meter-wide asteroid strikes Earth about once per decade and a 30-meter object every few hundred years. The probability that a Tunguska-sized asteroid will collide with Earth on any given day is five or six orders of magnitude more likely than the impact of a kilometer-wide space rock, and roughly 100 times that of a 140-meter object, which strike our planet about once every 30,000 years.
A strategy to search for the larger, "high consequence" NEOs would make sense if we could accept the damage caused by objects smaller than 140 meters. We can't. In the century since the 10-megaton Tunguska blast, the world's population has more than tripled, cities have spread into previously uninhabited areas, and coastal communities — vulnerable to tsunamis created by an ocean impact — have grown incessantly.
More troubling, mankind has assembled a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, some of which are in the hands of unpredictable regimes. It is easy to see how a surprise air burst from a 20- or 30-meter asteroid could be mistaken for hostile military action, and horrifying to consider the consequences if such a natural event led to a retaliatory nuclear attack. The hair-trigger world of the 21st century is no place for an unexpected asteroid strike.
To reduce this risk, planetary defense activities should focus on finding all space objects that present a reasonable hazard, notionally anything larger than the 17-20-meter asteroid that exploded in 2013 over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The U.S. National Research Council and other advisory bodies have recommended enhanced efforts to find these smaller objects but neither Congress nor the Obama administration has adopted such a policy.
Policymakers need to set the bar high, with high meaning small. The good news is that searching for the smaller NEOs will yield discoveries of the bigger ones. The reverse is not true.
Today's NEO search efforts are conducted primarily by terrestrial observatories, which are less effective in finding asteroids than telescopes stationed in space. The ideal is to orbit an infrared telescope around the sun, inside the trajectory of Earth and looking outward, to find the smaller space rocks that ground-based or Earth-orbiting telescopes will miss.
The B612 Foundation's proposed Sentinel space telescope would be, in its Venus-like orbit, the most effective asteroid hunter ever employed. NASA's developmental NEOCam telescope could be a close second, operating from the L1 Lagrange point. Unfortunately, neither spacecraft is fully funded and it remains to be seen if either will find its way into active service. We should hope they do.
It must be noted that NASA's NEO Program has done commendable work with the extremely limited resources at its disposal. Through years of dedicated effort, it has located more than 11,000 NEOs, including 95 percent of the kilometer-sized asteroids that pass through the inner solar system. None of these mammoth rocks is expected to pose any threat to Earth over the next 200 years. It is reassuring to know that humanity will not be snuffed out anytime soon by a gargantuan asteroid like the one that eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
What is deeply troubling, however, is the possibility that a smaller, undiscovered NEO could plow into our atmosphere tomorrow and rain destruction on an unsuspecting populace — and today there is little we are doing about it.
NASA leadership is culpable for not deeming the planetary defense mission a top priority: Placing responsibility over the entire effort in a niche component within the Science Mission Directorate — managed by a single program executive — dooms it to second-tier status, unable to harness all of the agency's resources. Further, funding for asteroid detection, while having grown to $40 million per year, clearly is insufficient for the task at hand. Even more striking is the tiny amount of money allocated to the study of mitigation techniques for threatening asteroids, currently limited to only $1 million annually.
It's been 106 years since Tunguska and the law of averages dictates that a similar-sized object will collide with Earth in the near future, perhaps in our lifetime. We have the technology to find these smaller objects and just need the political and policy wherewithal to make their detection and mitigation a priority.
An asteroid strike is a wholly preventable natural disaster, but only if we locate the full population of hazardous space bodies before one of them streaks unexpectedly from the depths of space and devastates part of our planet.
Now is the right time to find the right rocks.
Aerojet Rocketdyne's Mars 2020 Contracts Worth a Combined $14.5M
Dan Leone – Space News
Aerojet Rocketdyne will build landing system thrusters for NASA's Mars 2020 rover and install the craft's nuclear power source under separate sole-source contracts from the space agency and U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) worth roughly $14.5 million combined.
The hardware Aerojet Rocketdyne will provide is substantially the same as what it contributed to the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover, which landed on the red planet in 2012 and was cleared this year to continue traversing the martian surface through 2016. Mars 2020 will be based on Curiosity's design, but modified to cache Mars surface samples.
Like Curiosity, Mars 2020 will use the skycrane system to land on the martian surface. The system lowers the rover by cable to the martian surface from a mothership that hovers above using thrusters.
Sacramento, California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne will again provide the skycrane's thrusters, this time under a contract worth roughly $7 million, NASA spokesman Guy Webster wrote in an Oct. 21 email. The company is slated to deliver the hardware by Aug. 1, 2015, to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which is leading the mission, Webster wrote.
Aerojet Rocketdyne will provide eight hydrazine-fueled MR-80B thrusters, which can be throttled from 7 to 700 pounds of thrust, and eight MR-107U 68-pound-thrust motors. Some of these thrusters will also help steer Mars 2020 during its roughly seven-month interplanetary cruise to Mars.
Meanwhile, the company is also being paid to install Mars 2020's power source, a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), under a DoE contract worth roughly $7.5 million, a department official wrote in an Oct. 23 email. The MMRTG is one of three such units built under a DoE contract awarded in 2003 to Boeing, which at the time owned the Rocketdyne propulsion and energy business.
One of those MMRTGs is powering Curiosity on Mars now. Mars 2020 will use one of the other two, which are mostly complete and currently in storage in an undisclosed DoE facility. Besides installation, Aerojet Rocketdyne's contract also calls for the company to complete some final manufacturing tasks on the hardware, including "completing installation of the cooling tubes and emissive coating on the second and third units," DoE said in an emailed statement.
An MMRTG converts heat generated by the decay of radioactive plutonium-238 into electricity. Heat not converted to electricity is used to keep the rover's instruments warm in the frigid martian environment.
Plutonium-238, which must be artificially refined, is in short supply in the United States. The material is kept in iridium-coated capsules known as clads, of which DoE currently has 24 set aside for NASA missions. The department plans to start production of another eight clads in the U.S. government's 2015 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That will give DoE enough to fully fuel the Mars 2020 MMRTG, plus a few spares. The plutonium-238 will be produced at DoE's Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. NASA is paying for the plutonium refinement.
The MMRTG will be one of the last critical subsystems integrated with the rover before launch, according to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars 2020 Mission released in June by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
According to that document, Mars 2020 will be built at the Jet Propulsion Lab and then shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the MMRTG will be installed before the spacecraft is placed atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket — the only U.S. launcher certified to carry nuclear material. Mars 2020 will launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, next-door to Kennedy.
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