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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: November 7, 2014 12:04:01 PM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Friday – November 7, 2014
Have a great weekend everyone—enjoy the weather.Next Tuesday is Veteran's Day, a time to honor our Veterans for their sacrifices in service to our Nation.Please keep our brave Veteran's in your prayers and pray for our brave and patriotic active military as they protect the Libertys and Freedoms we enjoy!NASA and Human Spaceflight NewsFriday – November 7, 2014International Space Station:November 9, Sunday2:45 p.m. - ISS Expedition 41 Farewells and Hatch Closure Coverage (Includes replay of Nov. 8 Change of Command Ceremony in which Suraev hands over ISS command to Wilmore; hatch closure scheduled at 3:10 p.m. ET) - JSC (All Channels)6:15 p.m. - ISS Expedition 41/Soyuz TMA-13M Undocking Coverage (Undocking scheduled at 6:30 p.m. ET) - JSC (All Channels)8:45 p.m. - ISS Expedition 41/Soyuz TMA-13M Deorbit Burn and Landing Coverage (Deorbit burn scheduled at 9:05 p.m. ET; landing near Arkalyk, Kazakhstan scheduled at 9:58 p.m. ET) - JSC via Kazakhstan (All Channels)November 10, Monday12 a.m. - Video File of the ISS Expedition 41/Soyuz TMA-13M Landing and Post-Landing Activities - HQ (All Channels)11 a.m. - Video File of the ISS Expedition 41/Soyuz TMA-13M Landing and Post-Landing Activities; scheduled to include post-landing interviews with Expedition 41 Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman of NASA and Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency and the return of Expedition 41 Commander Max Suraev to Chkalovsky Airfield near Star City, Russia - JSC (All Channels)HEADLINES AND LEADSOrbital says turbopump likely triggered Antares failureWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsFailure of a modified Russian-built rocket engine left over from the Soviet moon program apparently triggered the destruction of an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket and a space station-bound Cygnus cargo ship last week seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island, Va., company officials said Tuesday.Past Transit Tragedies Point to a Way Forward for Virgin GalacticFrom a fatal Apollo fire to the sinking of the Titanic, history has a few lessons following last week's spaceflight disastersKer Than - Smithsonian Magazine (Smithsonian.com)Private spaceflight hit a large bump in the road to orbit last week, with Orbital Sciences' rocket explosion followed days later by Virgin Galactic's fatal spaceplane crash. But if early aviation and aerospace efforts can teach us anything, it's that the key to surviving such tragedies is transparency and learning from any mistakes. And in a counterintuitive twist, the disasters may even increase public support for spaceflight and space tourism.NASA test flight still on track despite accidentsMarcia Dunn – Associated PressNASA's biggest test flight in years remains on track for next month, despite last week's space-related accidents.Orion on target for test flightLedyard King – USA TodayThe herculean task of sending humans to Mars begins in earnest next month.NASA readies Orion for 'first step to Mars'Scott Powers - Orlando (FL) SentinelNASA is preparing to launch its next-generation, deep-space capsule Orion next month on its first spaceflight, a mission that a NASA administrator Thursday called "our first step in our journey to Mars."A Small Step Towards a Trip to MarsPolly Mosendz - NewsweekNASA has unveiled details about a test flight for Orion, a spacecraft the organization built "to take humans farther than they've ever gone before." On December 4, Orion will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida for a two-orbit, four-hour, 3,600-mile flight meant to test the craft for safety systems, particularly high-speed re-entry systems, as the craft will return to Earth traveling at 20,000 miles per hour at a temperature over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Nobody will be on board for the test.Leery of risk, NASA prepares for capsule's debut flight in DecemberIrene Klotz - ReutersMindful of two U.S. space accidents last week, NASA unveiled plans on Thursday for the first test flight of its Orion capsule, designed to eventually fly astronauts to Mars.Delta 4 passes countdown rehearsal before Orion launchJustin Ray – Spaceflight NowA countdown dress rehearsal and rocket fueling exercise was completed Wednesday at Cape Canaveral for next month's launch of NASA's Orion crew module atop a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy booster.Half of all stars may lie outside galaxiesAssociated PressThe universe may be full of reclusive stars — not washed-up Hollywood stars, but the kind lurking deep in the cosmos.As many as half of all stars reside outside of galaxies, study findsAmina Khan – Los Angeles TimesEven stars can get lost in space.Commercial space accidents not expected to slow NASASharon Gaudin - ComputerWorldThe two recent explosions involving commercial spacecraft are unlikely to daunt NASA's used of private companies for future space exploration.Manned commercial space flight: The final unregulated frontierAndrea Peterson – The Washington PostSpace is the final frontier, but under current law manned commercial space flight is a largely unregulated frontier in the U.S.Subcontractor Sued by Orbital Sciences Offers To Turn Over HardwareDan Leone – Space NewsThe owner of a company accused of delaying ground-support upgrades at the Virginia spaceport Orbital Sciences uses for launching its Cygnus cargo tug to the international space station offered to turn over some of the components Orbital claims are being held hostage.Sir Walter Raleigh and the Uncertain Future of Space TravelTheo Emery – The New YorkerLong before last Friday's crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave Desert, the economist Brent Lane had been thinking about failed missions and Sir Richard Branson, Virgin's adventurous founder. Lane, a professor of heritage economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of the school's Carolina Center for Competitive Economies, isn't an expert on space travel—far from it. He is, instead, a scholar of the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and of entrepreneurial finance, and, for several months before Friday's crash, which claimed the life of a test pilot, Lane had been pondering parallels between Raleigh's sixteenth-century sea voyages and twenty-first-century space exploration.Final countdownRussia is thinking of moving its space operations out of KazakhstanTHE manned Soyuz mission thundering into space sends tremors through the observers, except for the impassive camels munching in the surrounding grasslands. Almost as stirring is the history of Russia's main spaceport. From Baikonur—now in central Kazakhstan, then in the Soviet Union—Sputnik and Laika the dog blasted off in the 1950s, and Yuri Gagarin shot into orbit and fame in 1961.NASA Astronauts Talk Space Travel with 'Interstellar' CastMike Wall - Space.comA couple of real-life astronauts gave the stars of the sci-fi epic "Interstellar" the skinny on spaceflight Wednesday (Nov. 5).COMPLETE STORIESOrbital says turbopump likely triggered Antares failureWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsFailure of a modified Russian-built rocket engine left over from the Soviet moon program apparently triggered the destruction of an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket and a space station-bound Cygnus cargo ship last week seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island, Va., company officials said Tuesday.Orbital President and CEO David Thompson said the company is accelerating plans to replace the AJ26 rocket engines used in the first five Antares flights with more powerful, and presumably more reliable, motors from an as-yet-unspecified vendor. The upgraded rocket's first flight is expected in 2016, a year earlier than previously planned.In the near term, Orbital plans to launch one or possibly two Cygnus cargo ships atop rockets built by one or more other companies starting as early as the second quarter of 2015. The "gap-filler" missions and the eventual use of a more powerful version of the Antares will allow Orbital to deliver the cargo originally planned for five missions in just four.As a result, Thompson said, the company will be able to meet the requirements of its $1.9 billion contract with NASA to deliver some 20 tons of cargo to the International Space Station. And it will do so, he said, at no additional cost to the U.S. space agency."By consolidating the cargo of five previously planned (resupply) missions into four more capable ones, we believe we can maintain a similar, or perhaps even a somewhat better, delivery schedule than we were on before last week's launch failure, completing all current (contracted station) cargo deliveries by the end of 2016," he said.Orbital Sciences is one of two U.S. companies with commercially structured NASA contracts to deliver supplies and equipment to the space station in the wake of the shuttle's retirement. The other is SpaceX, which holds a $1.6 billion contract to launch 12 resupply missions using its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo craft. SpaceX has launched four operational resupply flights with a fifth set for launch Dec. 9 from Cape Canaveral, Fl.Last Tuesday, Orbital launched its fifth Antares rocket and the third of eight planned space station resupply missions from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Island flight facility. Just 15 seconds after liftoff, the rocket exploded and crashed back to Earth in a spectacular fireball.Orbital engineers and a team of outside experts on a failure review board have spent the past several days reviewing video and telemetry from the rocket, along with recovered wreckage. While that work is far from complete, Thompson said an initial look indicates an engine failure."A very rich set of telemetry and video data has been initially analyzed and a large amount of debris from Antares and Cygnus has been collected and examined," Thompson said. "While still preliminary and subject to change, current evidence strongly suggests that one of the two AJ26 main engines that powered the Antares first stage failed about 15 seconds after ignition."At this time, we believe the failure likely originated in or directly affected the turbopump machinery of this engine. I want to stress that more analysis will be required to confirm that this finding is correct."The Antares first stage engines originally were built for the Soviet Union's ill-fated N-1 moon rocket, a Saturn 5-class booster that never made it to space. When that project was canceled in the early 1970s, left over NK-33 engines were mothballed and later purchased by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The renamed AJ26 engines were refurbished, equipped with modern avionics and extensively tested before their use in the Antares rocket.But during a test firing last May, an AJ26 suffered a catastrophic failure. After an investigation, Orbital pressed ahead with a July Antares flight, the second operational station resupply mission, after implementing new inspection techniques and analysis. That mission was successful.But the explosion last week has prompted the company to accelerate plans already in place to re-engine the Antares with a more powerful rocket motor. It has been rumored that Orbital plans to use a Russian engine powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene that is currently in production, but Thompson said he was not yet ready to announce details or identify potential vendors."We will accelerate the introduction of Antares upgraded propulsion system, advancing its initial launch date from the previously planned 2017 into 2016," he said. "Consequently, we will likely discontinue the use of the AJ26 rocket engines that have been used on the first five Antares vehicles unless and until those engines can be conclusively shown to be flight worthy."He did not provide any details about Orbital's contract with Aerojet Rocketdyne or what the engine switch might cost other than to say he did not expect any major, long-term financial impact.As for the gap-filler missions, Thompson said Orbital was in discussions with three rocket builders, one based in Europe and two in the United States. Again, he declined to identify the potential vendors but said he hoped to finalize plans by the end of the month.The only two American rocket builders with boosters powerful enough to launch heavier Cygnus cargo ships are SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that builds Delta and Atlas rockets.While not identifying potential launchers, Thompson said "indications at this point are favorable that these launch operators do have available capacity that is suitable for Cygnus launches as early as the second quarter of 2015 and extending all the way through mid to late 2016. There are variations among the operators in terms of their specific schedule availability and the payload performance and pricing of their vehicles."We believe all the most favorable scenarios not only accomplish our principle objectives with respect to meeting our commitments under the CRS program, but also generally limit the financial impacts to the company. We expect to work with NASA to determine the most favorable combination for one or two gap-filler missions using third party launch vehicles and are aiming to make final decisions on the best way forward over the course of the coming month."Using the current version of the Antares, the Cygnus cargo ship can carry about 6,000 pounds of equipment and supplies to the space station. The upgraded Antares, and the gap-filler missions, will be able to lift an additional 1,200 pounds or so of cargo per flight.Past Transit Tragedies Point to a Way Forward for Virgin GalacticFrom a fatal Apollo fire to the sinking of the Titanic, history has a few lessons following last week's spaceflight disastersKer Than - Smithsonian Magazine (Smithsonian.com)Private spaceflight hit a large bump in the road to orbit last week, with Orbital Sciences' rocket explosion followed days later by Virgin Galactic's fatal spaceplane crash. But if early aviation and aerospace efforts can teach us anything, it's that the key to surviving such tragedies is transparency and learning from any mistakes. And in a counterintuitive twist, the disasters may even increase public support for spaceflight and space tourism."People tend to take [spaceflight] for granted on a day-to-day basis, so when something terrible happens, many are reminded that it is something important that the country should continue trying to do," says Valerie Neal, the space shuttle curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Robert Pearlman, editor of the space history and artifacts website collectSPACE.com, also thinks the industry can recover, and that Virgin Galactic could see an increase in the number of people interested in purchasing suborbital flights: "In theory, they could actually gain customers, people who want to see this activity continue and who are now motivated to put their money where their mouth is and say, 'Hey, I want to fly. You should continue to do this. Don't fold.'"On October 28, an unmanned Antares rocket launched by NASA contractor Orbital Sciences Corporation exploded seconds after liftoff in Virginia. The rocket was carrying supplies for the International Space Station, among other cargo items. Just three days later, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane crashed during a powered test flight over California's Mojave Desert. The accident seriously injured pilot Peter Siebold and killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury.Despite being private companies that, unlike NASA, are not obligated to disclose information about their investigations, the companies involved with the Antares and SpaceShipTwo accidents have so far been reasonably open. Orbital Sciences allowed the public to listen in via the Internet on its post-accident conference call with investors. And Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, the company that built and tested SpaceShipTwo, are sharing information from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the crash.The importance of keeping the public informed after an accident was a lesson that NASA learned the hard way, says Neal. The space agency was widely criticized for appearing to hold back information after a flash fire swept through the Apollo 1 command module during a launch rehearsal in 1967. That incident, which killed three crew members, resulted in an 18-month delay in the Apollo program and extensive redesigns of the spacecraft. NASA came under fire again in 1986 following the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, which led to the deaths of seven astronauts. That event resulted in a hiatus in the shuttle program lasting almost three years."With both the Apollo 1 fire and the Challenger shuttle accident, NASA wanted to do internal investigations only and did not want to release much information out until they could tell the whole story," says Neal. "With fast-paced news and social media, you just don't have the luxury of doing that, because it appears that you're hiding something or stonewalling to keep information from the public."NASA's approach was different in 2003, when the Columbia space shuttle broke apart on re-entry, killing seven astronauts. The space agency not only conducted its own internal inquiry, it also readily accepted that an external group, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, would look into the incident to ensure there was no appearance of bias or cover-up. The shuttles were still grounded for two years, but the report, released six months after the incident, helped identify missteps within NASA beyond just the physical cause of the crash.In a similar vein, Virgin Galactic worked with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) following a 2007 rocket motor malfunction that killed three employees from Scaled Composites. And both companies are now working closely with the NTSB. The final accident report will likely be months in the making, but just days after the event, the group has already disclosed that the accident may be linked to an action called feathering, which lifts parts of the plane's tail to slow its descent and create drag."I think that in this case, the SpaceShipTwo accident will have a sobering effect on the public and remind them that some of the problems haven't been figured out yet," says Neal. "But it will also be a reminder that progress is happening, and that there are people who are working to make commercial spaceflight possible."However, spaceflight historian Roger Launius thinks that past NASA tragedies are not useful predictors of how the SpaceShipTwo crash will impact space tourism. "The two are apple and oranges in my mind," says Launius, who is also at the Air and Space Museum. "This was a private sector activity. It had no federal dollars associated with it whatsoever." The Virgin Group is not a publicly traded company, and it is unclear how the disaster will affect its investor base. The crash clearly hurts Virgin Galactic's bottom line, because SpaceShipTwo was the only craft of its kind. Branson's team will have to build a new spaceplane and put it through even more rigorous tests, further delaying the first flights for paying tourists.Better historical precedent for last week's tragedies can be found by looking at other commercial ventures that ended disastrously, Launius argues, such as the sinking of the Titanic or accidents suffered by the commercial aviation industry, especially in its early days."Airplane crashes had a devastating effect on the industry, to the extent that people wouldn't fly because they didn't think it was safe," Launius says. "The industry had to spend a lot of time trying to convince people that flying was so safe that grandma could come visit you for Christmas. There were all these ads showing that sort of thing—grandma getting out of a taxi after having just flown on TWA." In the case of the Titanic, public outrage after the disaster led to dramatic new safety regulations for the entire maritime industry—in particular the rules regarding lifeboat availability.Launius predicts that the space tourism industry will focus heavily on promoting the safety of its vehicles in the future. "That's going to be their fundamental advertising campaign. It's got to be," he says. "People vote with their pocketbooks when it's too risky. That may be irrational, but who said people are rational?"The public will hold companies like Virgin Galactic to very high safety standards, Neal agrees. "Because spaceflight has been happening now for more than 50 years, I think there will be a very high bar for commercial spaceflight," she adds. "Realistic or not, people are going to expect it to be as safe as airline flight from the beginning."Perhaps the broader lesson is that test flights like the one SpaceShipTwo was undertaking are necessary to ensure that commercial space travel comes as close as possible to those expectations. "This is exactly the reason that rigorous flight test programs precede operational service—to find all the flaws and bugs and failure modes and resolve them," Neal says. "Any aircraft, rocket or spacecraft has setbacks along the way; that is how problems are discovered and systems are improved … whether in the airline industry, the military, NASA or this growing commercial space tourism industry. Flight is tough and spaceflight is even tougher. There are countless things that can go wrong, and testing, testing, testing is how they get resolved."NASA test flight still on track despite accidentsMarcia Dunn – Associated PressNASA's biggest test flight in years remains on track for next month, despite last week's space-related accidents.Officials said Thursday everything looks good for the Dec. 4 launch of NASA's new Orion capsule. This one will not carry a crew. Future Orions are meant to carry astronauts on missions of deep-space exploration, including, one day, trips to Mars.The spacecraft will blast off atop a Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The four-hour flight will send it on two laps around Earth — and as far as 3,600 miles into space — before parachuting into the Pacific, Apollo style.William Hill, who helps run exploration systems development for NASA, said the test flight systems have nothing in common with either the Orbital Sciences rocket that blew up at liftoff on Oct. 28 or the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two destroyed in flight last Friday. So no reviews were needed, and no plans have been changed."Space operations is hard, and they proved that last week," Hill told reporters. "It was a tough week. It's a tough business we're in."Mark Geyer, Orion's program manager for NASA, said even before the back-to-back accidents, everyone involved with the upcoming test flight recognized just how difficult it is to send up spacecraft, especially those designed for humans. The two events serve as an important reminder more than anything, he said.The whole idea of the test flight, Geyer said, is "to learn about where the challenges are so we can minimize the risk when we actually put people on board." The capsule will be equipped with 1,200 sensors to measure vibration, heat and noise, among other things.The flight test readiness review a couple weeks ago already was "very thorough," Geyer noted, and the NASA-Lockheed Martin Corp. team is going into it with "our eyes wide open and making sure that we all understand the risks."NASA is paying Lockheed Martin to carry out this mission, which is valued at $370 million, excluding the Orion capsule itself. The space agency plans to reuse the capsule in a practice launch abort around 2019, a year after the second Orion flight. That second unmanned flight will be with NASA's new megarocket that's still under development, called SLS for Space Launch System.Astronauts are expected to start flying on Orion in 2021. The capsules are built for four passengers, one more than the old Apollo spacecraft.Orion is intended for true outer-space exploration; the crew capsules under development by two U.S. companies for NASA are intended solely for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station.Orion on target for test flightLedyard King – USA TodayThe herculean task of sending humans to Mars begins in earnest next month.NASA officials said at a press conference Thursday that plans remain on track to launch an unmanned Orion capsule 3,600 miles above Earth on Dec. 4 then bring it hurtling back through the atmosphere at 20,000 mph, close to the velocity it would reach returning from the moon.The $375 million test flight from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station will use a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy Rocket for the two-orbit, four-and-a-half-hour flight."This is really our first step in our journey to Mars," William Hill, NASA's deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development, said during a televised news conference from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The flight will test a number of components from liftoff to splash down, including stage separation, radiation exposure and parachute deployment.But none might be more important than the performance of Orion's heat shield. The world's largest at 16.5 feet in diameter, it's built to withstand re-entry temperatures reaching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit.NASA readies Orion for 'first step to Mars'Scott Powers - Orlando (FL) SentinelNASA is preparing to launch its next-generation, deep-space capsule Orion next month on its first spaceflight, a mission that a NASA administrator Thursday called "our first step in our journey to Mars."At a briefing, Deputy Associate Administrator William Hill and other NASA and industry officials outlined hopes and expectations for a mission Dec. 4 that will blast an unmanned Orion capsule from Kennedy Space Center, sending it 3,600 miles into space and back for a splashdown off Baja California, Mexico.The flight, which will involve two Earth orbits and last less than five hours, will give NASA and its Orion business partner, Lockheed Martin, their first space test of the capsule envisioned as a critical part of any NASA trips to the moon, an asteroid, Mars or beyond.Those missions are not envisioned until the 2020s and 2030s, and even the first manned flight of Orion is not expected before 2021.For the Dec. 4 test, Orion will be staged on top the most powerful rocket available in the world today, a three-booster Delta IV Heavy, provided by United Launch Alliance. As launched, the capsule will be fully configured to carry four crew members although it will be unoccupied.All the tests and research NASA will be conducting on the flight will be with the assumption that there are astronauts on board.The launch is set for 7:05 a.m., with Dec. 5 and 6 available as backup launch days.The mission will test Orion's capabilities ranging from the 17 separations that will occur as various parts of the rocket and capsule system fall away, to the computers' ability to withstand space radiation, to the heat shield's and parachutes' operations for re-entry and splashdown. The test flight will cost about $370 million including the rocket, but not including the capsule, which NASA and Lockheed Martin intend to recover and reuse.Orion will go 3,600 miles into space — by comparison, the International Space Station orbits the Earth just 260 miles away — so that it can built up to a top speed of 20,000 mph on its return. That's almost as fast as it would have to go for a journey to the moon.NASA's Orion Flight Director Mike Sarafin called the mission Orion's "trial by fire.""This mission is significant in that it enables human spaceflight to deep space and to destinations that we have yet to imagine," Sarafin said. "We intend to test ourselves on this mission, and we intend to test our spacecraft."The launch will be a public-private partnership. Lockheed Martin is responsible for the whole mission. United Launch Alliance will be in control of the launch, as the rocket's builder. NASA will be in charge while Orion is in orbit. NASA, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy will be in charge of recovery."We've contracted this particular launch as a service," said NASA Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer.For the next flight, now planned for 2018, after being recently delayed a year by budget restraints, Orion will ride into space on a new rocket, one NASA calls its "space launch system" or SLS. Under development by Boeing, it will be nearly 360 feet tall with Orion on top, and about as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that carried Apollo to the moon a generation ago.That 2018 test flight will include an orbit of the moon. So too, NASA hopes, will the first manned flight.After that, however, NASA's plans for Orion and the SLS are unclear. NASA announced intentions to retrieve an asteroid, possibly placing it in orbit around the moon. Moon and Mars trips are projected. But they are far enough into the future to not yet be certain.After the 2021 flight, NASA hopes to find reasons to send Orion to space about once a year, Geyer said.For deep-space journeys, including to an asteroid or Mars, NASA will need still other pieces, notably a deep-space crew-habitat module not yet designed.Orion essentially is like the old Apollo spacecraft, though bigger. There will be a little room inside for astronauts to move around, but not much. For any journey taking many days, weeks or months, they would have to transfer into a habitat module.A Small Step Towards a Trip to MarsPolly Mosendz - NewsweekNASA has unveiled details about a test flight for Orion, a spacecraft the organization built "to take humans farther than they've ever gone before." On December 4, Orion will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida for a two-orbit, four-hour, 3,600-mile flight meant to test the craft for safety systems, particularly high-speed re-entry systems, as the craft will return to Earth traveling at 20,000 miles per hour at a temperature over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Nobody will be on board for the test.The flight has been dubbed "Exploration Flight Test-1" and will mark the farthest distance from the Earth that a spacecraft designed to carry a crew has traveled in over 40 years, NASA said. By comparison, the International Space Station is only about 240 miles up from the ground. It will cost $375 million (not including the cost of the capsule, which can be reused.)For future flights, Orion will lift off using an entirely new heavy-lift rocket system, Space Launch System (SLS), which was designed to send humans into deep space. The first SLS test is set for 2018 and will include an orbit around the moon, which may become a manned flight. SLS is designed to allow the first visit by humans to an asteroid and, eventually, to Mars.During a media event at the Kennedy Center, NASA referred to Exploration Flight Test-1 as "our first step in our journey to Mars.""This is just the first of what will be a long line of exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit, and in a few years we will be sending our astronauts to destinations humans have never experienced," said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development, in a statement. "It's thrilling to be a part of the journey now, at the beginning."While NASA has big plans for Orion, manned missions are not planned till after 2020, so a Mars excursion may not be possible until the later 2020s or 2030s. Though 3,600 miles is the longest trip in quite some time, Mars is an average 140 million miles away, and much work is needed to ensure the craft can be safe and comfortable enough for a crew to make that extremely long space journey.Though, with the crash of both Antares and SpaceShipTwo, the past several weeks have been difficult for the space industry, NASA's officials are determined to make it to Mars. "This mission is significant in that it enables human spaceflight to deep space and to destinations that we have yet to imagine," NASA's Orion Flight Director Mike Sarafin told the Orlando Sentinel, "We intend to test ourselves on this mission, and we intend to test our spacecraft."Leery of risk, NASA prepares for capsule's debut flight in DecemberIrene Klotz - ReutersMindful of two U.S. space accidents last week, NASA unveiled plans on Thursday for the first test flight of its Orion capsule, designed to eventually fly astronauts to Mars.The capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, will fly without a crew on its debut test run scheduled for Dec. 4, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.Orion will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket, built by a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.The test flight follows unrelated accidents last week involving two commercial space companies. On Oct. 28, an unmanned Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station for NASA.On Friday, a pilot with Mojave, California-based Scaled Composites, a unit of Northrop Grumman, died, and another was injured during a test flight of SpaceShipTwo. The suborbital space plane, owned by Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Richard Branson's London-based Virgin Group, was destroyed in the crash."Space operations is hard and they proved that last week ... It's a tough business we're in," NASA Deputy Associate Administrator William Hill said during a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida."We have not changed any of our plans," added Orion program manager Mark Geyer. "It just reminds us of the risk."For its test flight, Orion will fly as far as 3,600 miles (5,794 km) from Earth so that it can slam back into the atmosphere at a speed of about 20,000 mph (32,187 kph). The planned 4.5-hour flight will end with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.The mission is intended to test Orion's heat shield, parachutes, computers and other equipment prior to the first crewed mission around 2021."This is really our first step in our journey to Mars," Hill said.NASA is spending about $375 million on the test flight, not including the cost of the capsule. Total spending on Orion, including more than $8 billion under the canceled Constellation moon program, is expected to reach about $15 billion.NASA plans to use Orion capsules and its Space Launch System rocket, currently under development in a separate $15 billion effort to fly astronauts to an asteroid, the moon, and eventually, Mars.Delta 4 passes countdown rehearsal before Orion launchJustin Ray – Spaceflight NowA countdown dress rehearsal and rocket fueling exercise was completed Wednesday at Cape Canaveral for next month's launch of NASA's Orion crew module atop a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy booster.Known as a Wet Dress Rehearsal, the WDR rolled back the mobile gantry early in the morning and performed a full countdown to a simulated liftoff time later in the day."We just successfully completed our Wet Dress Rehearsal yesterday. We basically took the vehicle through a launch countdown. We fully tanked it, operated all of our systems. It was a good exercise and everything is working great," said Ron Fortson, United Launch Alliance director of mission management.The real liftoff day is coming Dec. 4.Powered by three RS-68 main engines, the Heavy rocket will be launched from the Cape's pad 37B for Exploration Flight Test No. 1, or EFT 1.The mission will send Orion on a two-orbit mission around Earth to check out its systems in an uncrewed test.The next major milestone in the launch campaign is planned for Monday night, when the 73-foot-tall, 48,000-pound Orion spacecraft is hauled to the pad for mating with the Delta 4-Heavy.Half of all stars may lie outside galaxiesAssociated PressThe universe may be full of reclusive stars — not washed-up Hollywood stars, but the kind lurking deep in the cosmos.Scientists reported Thursday that as many as half of all stars may lie outside galaxies.Individually, these lonesome stars are too faint to detect. But together, they create a hazy background of fluctuating near-infrared light. A team of astronomers from the U.S., Japan and Korea say the diffuse glow appears to be from stars booted out of their galaxies by mergers and collisions.The measurements by Michael Zemcov of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues were made on two suborbital rocket flights, launched in 2010 and 2012 from New Mexico, and validated by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.NASA program scientist Michael Garcia said this diffuse glow between galaxies is as bright as all the known galaxies combined, and is redefining galaxies. Instead of having sharp edges, galaxies may spread out like a starry web, connecting all the galaxies together."Traditionally, we've talked about galaxies as disks or sometimes spheroids that have a finite extent. They run out of stars and gas at a certain radius," Zemcov told reporters. While scientists previously have known about these halos around galaxies, "these halos seem to be extending farther out than we thought and is responsible for more light than we thought."Details of this Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment — CIBER for short — appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.More CIBER flights are planned for better measurements; there have been four to date.As many as half of all stars reside outside of galaxies, study findsAmina Khan – Los Angeles TimesEven stars can get lost in space.Scientists who shot a rocket up beyond Earth's atmosphere for a matter of minutes have made a remarkable discovery about the diffuse background light that permeates the universe: As many as half of all stars may have been stripped from their home galaxies and flung into the darkness of the cosmos.Astronomers were aware that some stars were intergalactic orphans. But the extent of the dim diaspora, reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science, came as something of a shock."I did not expect it to be half the stars — I thought that most stars would be in galaxies," said Harvey Moseley, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the research. "It's almost like they're hiding."The new information could compel scientists to reevaluate their theories of how the universe formed the galaxies we see today."If you want to understand what's happening in the formation of galaxies, you can't just look at the galaxies," said study coauthor James Bock, an experimental cosmologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. "You're missing about half the light if you do that."When astronomers study the light coming from Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor, stripped stars seem to contribute less than 5% of the galaxy's total light, said Karoline Gilbert, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who wasn't involved in the research. As a result, scientists haven't paid much attention to them.Now it's clear they can't ignore them anymore. "There is still a large number of stars we aren't accounting for," she said. "We can't ignore orphan stars."Scientists will also need to reevaluate the true boundaries of the fuzzy halos surrounding galaxies, said Michael Zemcov, an astronomer at Caltech in Pasadena and the study's lead author.Astronomers have long wondered about the origins of the diffuse light permeating the heavens, which they call extragalactic background light. Earlier work with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope had revealed a strange, splotchy background in infrared light, and scientists struggled to find a source.One theory held that the faint radiation might be coming from the first primordial galaxies in the early universe during a critical epoch known as reionization, when the cosmos was only a few hundred million years old. Though not as ancient as the cosmic microwave background radiation that originated moments after the universe's birth, these galaxies are still old enough to elude detection by astronomers' telescopes.Another theory proposed that the extragalactic background light might be coming from closer, more contemporary stars that were ripped from their homes when two galaxies smashed together.To find out whether either theory might be correct, scientists with NASA's Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment sent a small telescope beyond the edge of the atmosphere to take clear shots of the sky in wavelengths of near-infrared light. From the resulting images, the CIBER team subtracted all the near-infrared light coming from the known stars and galaxies. What remained were the fluctuations in the background — which the researchers confirmed using data from the Spitzer telescope.But in the long wavelengths of infrared light that Spitzer observes, it's difficult to distinguish primordial light from more recent light. So the CIBER scientists looked at much shorter wavelengths of infrared light, just below the visible range.If the background light was primordial, they would only find it at longer wavelengths, because the light would have been stretched out over time. But if the background light was coming from more recent sources, it would show up at shorter wavelengths too.Sure enough, the background lightwas detectable even at the shortest infrared wavelengths they studied,Bocksaid. In fact, it seemed to gleam even more brightly at these shorter wavelengths.That's a sign that the light was coming from more nearby stars in the universe — stars that hadn't been accounted for among the known galaxies.These stars are so distant and faint that there's no way to pick them out individually, Bock said. They could only be detected by looking for this collective glow.In fact, there's just as much background starlight coming from these dim rogue stars as is produced by all of the galaxies put together, the scientists calculated.Exactly how many rogue stars there are remains unclear, and the answer depends on what types of stars are out there, Bock said. So although they produce half of the background light in the universe, their population could potentially be markedly smaller than that of galactic stars.But now that astronomers know what to look for, Moseley said, there could be hints of these hidden stars buried in the data already gathered by current telescopes, just waiting to be found.Commercial space accidents not expected to slow NASASharon Gaudin - ComputerWorldThe two recent explosions involving commercial spacecraft are unlikely to daunt NASA's used of private companies for future space exploration.The fiery explosion of an Orbital Sciences rocket and the spacecraft it was carrying was followed days later by the deadly crash of a Virgin Galactic rocket ship late last week. The accidents raised questions about the readiness of the fledgling commercial space industry.But those following the space industry say the accidents, which were unrelated, shouldn't put an added burden on NASA, which is contracting with commercial space flight companies. However, it may open an opportunity for other commercial players."I think this is going to raise fears about commercial space flight, but I think they are unjustified," said Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University who specializes in space policy and history."There's a reason NASA has more than one commercial partner. I think there's a lot of redundancy or slack in the system. It's set up to handle these kinds of issues. You want everything to be perfect but it never is. Since it never is, the goal is to set up a system that can recover. That's what NASA has done."On Oct. 29, an Orbital Sciences Cygnus spacecraft, riding aboard an Antares rocket, exploded moments after liftoff. The unmanned spacecraft had earlier been successfully used for two cargo resupply mission launches to the International Space Station.No one was injured in the accident. The rocket and spacecraft cost more than $200 million. The Cygnus was carrying more than 5,000 pounds of supplies and scientific equipment. NASA had contracted with Orbital Sciences for eight missions.Then on Oct. 31, the Virgin Galactic rocket ship, designed for space tourism, broke apart miles above the ground. One pilot was killed and a second was seriously injured.The space agency is not without a means of ferrying supplies to the orbiting station, since it also has contracted with SpaceX to fly 12 resupply missions. The company has flown four successful missions and its next one is scheduled for December.The two high-profile accidents raised speculation that commercial space flight was moving too fast and possibly too recklessly.Scott Hubbard, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at Stanford University and former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, said the two accidents need to be looked at separately and can't be held against NASA."There is a commercial space community made up of many different industries, and NASA's commercial cargo and crew program has nothing to do with the commercial tourism industry," Hubbard said. "I view these two things happening as pure coincidence. I didn't attach any significance other than synchronicity to that… You need to disentangle or reduce the perception that the commercial space [industry] is all one monolith and going to hell in a hand basket."Hubbard and McCurdy both noted that the Orbital Sciences accident, which is the only one to affect NASA, only hurts the company itself since NASA contracted with a second commercial partner, SpaceX.McCurdy, who wrote the book Space and the American Imagination, said it may take Orbital Sciences as much as a year to piece together what caused the rocket failure. In that time, the company may not be able to fly any new missions.That would be a big opportunity for SpaceX to step up and possibly increase the number of its contracted missions with NASA. It's also possible that if Orbital Sciences falls too far behind, NASA may look for a third commercial partner for resupply missions.The space agency may wait a year for Orbital Sciences, though likely not much longer, according to McCurdy."The Antares accident will raise questions over whether more government oversight might have lessened the risk, but there is no question that privately provided services to NASA for carrying out government missions will continue," said John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "By contrast, the debate over the ethics of space tourism -- is it worth the risk -- will intensify. But people who try to climb Everest sometimes die and that does not stop the attempts."Both Hubbard and Logsdon served on the board that investigated the deadly Columbia space shuttle accident in 2003.The experts said the Orbital Sciences accident is not expected to slow NASA's use of commercial spacecraft to ferry supplies to the space station. It's also unlikely that it will delay NASA's goal of launching spacecraft carrying astronauts from U.S. soil by 2017.NASA partnered with SpaceX and Boeing Co. to build spacecraft to carry astronauts to the space station, freeing the U.S. from depending on Russia to carry its astronauts. The space agency has not launched astronauts since the space shuttles were retired in 2011.Manned commercial space flight: The final unregulated frontierAndrea Peterson – The Washington PostSpace is the final frontier, but under current law manned commercial space flight is a largely unregulated frontier in the U.S.The destruction of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo during a test flight last week, which killed one pilot and injured another, is a reminder that even as we rush towards commercial space tourism and travel, the industry is fraught with dangers -- dangers some experts say the current regulatory framework is not yet prepared to handle.While decades of NASA's space program resulted in a framework for dealing with the aftermath of accidents involving publicly funded missions that involved major commissions and the input from multiple agencies, the SpaceShipTwo accident serves as the trial run for investigating manned commercial space accidents.The Federal Aviation Administration does have the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, also known as AST. However the office does not certify the safety of spacecrafts the same way the FAA certifies the safety of passenger airliners. Instead, it licenses launches, but that licensing is all about the safety of people on the ground or making sure the spacecrafts do not hit other crafts in the air."What AST does is protect third parties and property from damage by activities in space -- they do not regulate the actual space flight and payloads except to require enough insurance of safety that third parties will not be injured," said John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University."The FAA is prohibited from regulating launch or reentry vehicle occupant safety until late in 2015, barring a death, serious injury, of or close call that can be attributed to a design feature or operating practice, under Commercial Space Launch Act," said FAA spokesperson Hank Price in a statement. "The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 extended this prohibition on occupant safety regulations to October 1, 2015."Until the SpaceShipTwo accident, no activity that AST licensed or permitted had resulted in serious injury or a crew fatality, he said.Licensing does include insurance requirements for the "maximum probable loss" of covered claims from third parties, which is calculated by the FAA after operators provide them with information about pre-, post-, and in-flight processes.The investigation into the SpaceShipTwo accident is being handled by the National Transportation Safety Board. The roughly 400 NTSB employees split between its headquarters in Washington and four regional field offices investigate every civil aviation accident in the U.S., along with major accidents in other modes of transportation such as railways or even natural gas pipelines.But the agency has no formal authority to regulate the transportation industry -- instead, it is charged with conducting independent investigations and making safety recommendations. The agency did its first investigation into a commercial rocket launch in the early 90s and assisted the investigation of the Challenger and Columbia disasters, but the crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is the first time it is leading an investigation into a manned spacecraft accident."Up until last weekend it was something we knew was coming and had been working to ensure we were ready for -- and now it is upon us," said John DeLisi, the Director of NTSB's Office of Aviation Safety.While this is a new arena for the agency, DeLisi is confident that their work providing support for the investigations into the previous manned space travel disasters and commercial rocket anomalies has prepared the agency to provide a thorough investigation into the SpaceShipTwo crash."Performing a reconstruction of the wreckage is really something we're very familiar with," he said, adding that the agency is already familiar with Virgin Galactic's program. As Virgin Galactic began to get going, NTSB got to know the company, he explained. "They've sent people to our training facility out in Ashburn, and we'd already made visits out to Mojave to understand where they were in their program."There's also vast amounts of data about the accident, he said, including telemetry data about hundreds if not thousands of parameters and real-time video from the cockpit as well as video of the the vehicle breaking up in flight. "It has given us an insight that we never have had before in an aircraft accident," he said.Tragic as the SpaceShipTwo accident was, DeLisi notes that such accidents are the exact reason that there is real world testing of experimental transportation methods. "The crew on board were experienced, and the test pilot who died knowingly was a pioneer in commercial space."The first space tourists, too, might be considered pioneers. Under the current regulatory scheme, they would not be considered passengers, but "participants" who agree to the risk of space flight via informed consent. "Informed consent regulations require crew and spaceflight participants to be informed, in writing, of mission hazards and risks, vehicle safety record, and the overall safety record of all launch and reentry vehicles," said Price.DeLisi does think that the manned commercial space industry will eventually face similar regulatory structures to that of the commercial airline industry. "We've come such a far way in a hundred years getting used to aviation travel and having it be so safe that it's by far the safest way to travel -- and we got there because of regulations that didn't exist when the Wright Brothers started, but grew over time in response to accidents," he said.In fact, DeLisi sees the NTSB expanding more and more into investigating manned space travel accidents as technology progresses. "Perhaps in our lifetime we will travel from New York to LA in some sort of rocket powered aircraft that gets us there within an hour," he speculated."It's going to be a sea change, it's going to revolutionizes how we regulate -- but certainly at this point as far as this industry goes, those standards don't exist yet," he said.But Logsdon thinks that the SpaceShipTwo accident may spur along the development of a more robust framework. "AST has been in dialogue with the private space flight industry and the industry has reacted saying we don't need regulation -- I think it's going to be very hard to make that argument after this accident," he said.Subcontractor Sued by Orbital Sciences Offers To Turn Over HardwareDan Leone – Space NewsThe owner of a company accused of delaying ground-support upgrades at the Virginia spaceport Orbital Sciences uses for launching its Cygnus cargo tug to the international space station offered to turn over some of the components Orbital claims are being held hostage.In an interview three days after Orbital's Antares rocket exploded while attempting to launch a supply-laden Cygnus on its third paid cargo run, Kevin Huber, managing director of Integrated Systems and Machinery, said the firm is "willing to release a partial shipment which would allow [Orbital] to get going" on the upgrades.How soon Orbital needs to get going on the upgrades, and even whether the upgrades can proceed as planned, is an open question.The components Huber's firm has been withholding were ordered by Orbital in 2012 as part of a long-planned upgrade for the Transporter Erector Launcher that Orbital uses to haul Antares out to the pad and hold it upright for liftoff. But the mobile launch platform was among the equipment damaged Oct. 28 when Antares failed 15 seconds after liftoff and came crashing back down.What is more, Orbital Sciences will not launch from Virginia's Wallops Island again until at least 2016, when a redesigned Antares with a new core stage is expected to debut, Orbital CEO David W. Thompson said in a Nov. 5 conference call with analysts and investors.Orbital sued Huber and Integrated Systems and Machinery in federal court Oct. 21, accusing the New York-based contractor of refusing to ship equipment including gimbal boxes and cylinder assemblies needed to upgrade the hydraulic systems the Transporter Erector Launcher plugs into once it reaches the pad so it has the leverage it needs to raise Antares vertical for fueling and liftoff.Orbital said in its complaint that equipment Huber was withholding was needed immediately because Orbital's next cargo run — then scheduled for April 1 — would feature an enhanced Cygnus too heavy for existing hydraulic equipment to handle safely. The upgrades would take four months to complete, Orbital said.Huber told SpaceNews Oct. 31 that his company is willing to "release one of the cylinder assemblies immediately." In an email later the same day, Huber said Orbital "tentatively accepted" the offer, but that there was "nothing in writing yet."Orbital spokesman Barron Beneski declined comment about the dispute. As of Nov. 4, neither side had filed new court documents.Huber said Integrated Systems and Machinery refused to ship the cylinder and other hardware because its contract with Orbital calls not only for delivery of the equipment, but for testing and other support services that have not yet been performed.That means "we can't release it unless they [Orbital] release us from liability for shipping a line-item incomplete," Huber said.Huber, meanwhile, is fighting a separate lawsuit, filed in 2013 with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, that alleges he stole trade secrets from his former employer, Advanced Fluid Systems of York, Pennsylvania. Advanced Fluid Systems claims Huber used this proprietary information to win the roughly $2 million contract Orbital awarded Integrated Systems and Machinery in 2012 to build the hardware at the center of Orbital's lawsuit.Orbital was once a defendant in the Advanced Fluid Systems suit, but the two companies settled out of court in May. Advanced Fluid Systems designed and built some of the hydraulic systems used to support the four Antares launches from Wallops Island that preceded last month's failure and, according to court papers, expected the follow-on business eventually awarded to Integrated Systems and Machinery.Sir Walter Raleigh and the Uncertain Future of Space TravelTheo Emery – The New YorkerLong before last Friday's crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave Desert, the economist Brent Lane had been thinking about failed missions and Sir Richard Branson, Virgin's adventurous founder. Lane, a professor of heritage economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of the school's Carolina Center for Competitive Economies, isn't an expert on space travel—far from it. He is, instead, a scholar of the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and of entrepreneurial finance, and, for several months before Friday's crash, which claimed the life of a test pilot, Lane had been pondering parallels between Raleigh's sixteenth-century sea voyages and twenty-first-century space exploration.The crash of the SpaceShipTwo was the second catastrophe in a gloomy week for the commercial space industry. On Tuesday, an unmanned Antares rocket, bound for the International Space Station, exploded over Wallops Island, in Virginia. To Lane, last week's accidents were "eerily reminiscent" of the kinds of travails that befell explorers like Raleigh who funded their voyages almost exclusively through private financing.Last February, Lane was sitting at a hotel bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when he decided to conduct an impromptu research experiment. As a board member of the First Colony Foundation, which researches Raleigh and his most spectacular failure, the lost colony at Roanoke, Lane became particularly interested in small archives and libraries in England that had recently put their holdings online. He thought that there might be new documents that would be able to shed some light on what Raleigh had been thinking. But there was a problem. Much of the information was written in Elizabethan English, making searches challenging. He thought that sixteenth-century terms might prove more fruitful than twenty-first-century ones. Between sips of beer, Lane typed the word "Wingacie"—shorthand for an Algonquin word that Raleigh's men had learned on a voyage—into his phone's Google search box.He got a hit. The term appeared in an archive in Maidstone, England. Lane was pleased that his hypothesis had proved correct, but he didn't know exactly what the search had found. After the two months it took to wrangle a digital copy of the document out of Maidstone, and then to translate it, Lane was startled to discover what appeared to be an investment prospectus for Raleigh's later voyages—perhaps the world's oldest pitch to venture capitalists."I felt I was sitting right there with Walter Raleigh putting this pitch together," Lane told me. "Raleigh is sitting around with his team, and they're trying to structure a pitch for these very skeptical merchants of England, trying to convince them to do something audacious."Lane has been studying the four-page document since, and has reached a few conclusions. One is that the paper explains much of Raleigh's investment strategy, revealing his plan for convincing wealthy financiers such as the splendidly named Merchant Adventurers of Exeter to help pay for his risky expeditions across the Atlantic. But Lane found something else hidden in the letter's curling Elizabethan script: a cautionary tale for commercial space companies, particularly private space travel.The Wingacie letter—which possibly predates the ill-fated Roanoke-colony expedition by a few years—dispels the conventional assessment that Raleigh's expeditions were blindly focussed on precious metals and quick rewards. Rather, Raleigh tried to woo financiers with promises of long-term profits made off of New World commodities, hinting at plentiful goods that more closely resemble grist for pharmaceuticals than snappy speculative profits. The play didn't pay off long-term; a few years later, the Roanoke colony, poorly outfitted for a permanent outpost, forced its governor, John White, to return to Britain. In the three years that White was gone, the colony disappeared. To Lane, this illustrated a failure of the private market to sustain an enterprise as ambitious and as expensive as a New World colony—a sophisticated venture-capital strategy wasn't enough."We're facing a similar situation right now with space exploration. Will we succeed in our space ambitions or will we lose another colony, metaphorically or maybe literally, because we haven't got that right balance between public and private support?" Lane asked me a few weeks ago, before the two accidents.In Lane's view, NASA, by depending on the private sector for exploration, has done what Queen Elizabeth did in Raleigh's day. Since the end of the shuttle program, in 2011, the agency has turned to commercial companies like Orbital Sciences Corp, the company that launched the Antares rocket, and SpaceX, the aerospace venture launched by the entrepreneur Elon Musk, for resupplying the International Space Station. And, of course, NASA abandoned manned space travel altogether, ceding that delicate task to private companies such as Boeing and SpaceX, which already has contracts to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station, in 2017. Virgin Galactic's short-term goal is more akin to space tourism, with wealthy passengers paying two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for short trips above the earth. Its funding comes from Branson and Aabar Investments, in Abu Dhabi. Virgin Galactic wants to offer suborbital commercial travel around the globe and, eventually, launch satellites and provide travel into the earth's orbit.Some industry analysts that I contacted didn't buy Lane's analogy. Before last week's crash, I asked Marco A. Caceres, a senior analyst and the director of space studies at the Teal Group, an aerospace-market research company, about Raleigh and Branson."The idea of private companies developing capsules, rockets, spacecraft in general, where they would operate them and lease out the services to someone like NASA—this is a whole new area that has never really been tried, so there really isn't any model to compare it to," Caceres told me. NASA itself has studied historical precedents and concluded that the transcontinental railroad, with its bundled land grants, government payments, service contracts, and endorsements, is one of the closest analogues to private space travel.The two have one undeniable thing in common: a spectacular price tag. "I think we should think of colonization as comparable to the space program in terms of the investment required," the New York University history professor Karen Kupperman told me. Kupperman, who learned of the Wingacie document from Lane, agrees that the prospectus shows the amount of effort Raleigh had to exert to scrape together the funds for his voyages. There had been other, more predictable investment opportunities for financiers back then, she said; moreover, an ill-begotten voyage several years earlier had ended up a fiasco and a financial disaster. In that environment, the goal of colonization was hardly a foregone conclusion, much like how skeptics of space travel today question its relevance, given its expense, peril, and ambiguous returns. "Most Americans think of colonization as obvious, Of course you'd go and colonize in America. Obviously! But a point of view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was, Why would you? It's incredibly expensive."Not only were sea-faring adventures expensive, success was hardly guaranteed. James Horn, the vice-president of research and historical interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in Virginia, said that there was a staggering failure rate among all of the colonizing nations of Europe. "It would not be surprising if that happens again in the future with space travel, and particularly if there are private companies, there will be a huge risk and a huge failure rate, which means there's massive profitability for the company that does make it and is successful."When I first started talking with Lane about Raleigh and space travel several weeks ago, the notion of a catastrophic failure in commercial space travel was hypothetical. After I contacted Virgin about speaking with the famously media-accessible Branson, a spokeswoman responded that Branson's travel schedule precluded an interview, but that he might be able to answer questions in writing. On Thursday, two days after the Antares rocket explosion, the spokeswoman invited me to send questions in a late-night e-mail. Just before noon on Friday, I sent a list of questions. About twenty minutes later, the Virgin Galactic shuttle crashed in the desert.Branson held a press conference on Saturday during which he was in turns mournful and optimistic. "In testing the boundaries of human capabilities and technologies, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday, we fell short," he said. "We do understand the risks involved, and we're not going to push on blindly. To do so would be an insult to all those affected by this tragedy. We're going to learn from what went wrong, discover how we can improve safety and performance, and then move forward together. I truly believe that humanity's greatest achievements come out of our greatest pain."The biggest question now is what lies ahead for the private space industry. There may be another lesson to be gleaned from Raleigh's time: the failure of the Lost Colony set back New World colonization attempts almost twenty years. It wasn't until 1606, when King James I granted the Virginia Company's charter for what would become Jamestown, that a fresh attempt at colonization was made—this time, successfully. In 1609, the Virginia Company became a joint-stock company, selling shares to smaller investors in a move somewhat like an I.P.O. Jamestown struggled but persevered. As for Raleigh, his personal fortunes waxed and waned—he lost favor with Queen Elizabeth, then spent twelve years in the Tower of London, accused of betraying King James I, but kept on adventuring after his release, setting off on an expedition to find El Dorado. After he displeased the king, Raleigh was beheaded in 1618.After the Antares rocket exploded, Lane wondered whether the accident would test the private market's tolerance for risk as the Lost Colony did in Raleigh's time. Two days later, he was on a long drive home when I sent him a text about the Virgin Galactic crash. When we spoke again afterward, he was circumspect. Up until two weeks ago, his comparisons of the risks of sixteenth-century exploration and twenty-first-century exploration were, at best, a loose analogy. Now, in the wake of disaster, in Lane's mind, the corollaries have become much clearer."When Raleigh stepped in, this untested optimism had been sorely tested by disaster and fiasco and death," Lane said. "That's when he stepped up, and, even though he encountered difficulties along the way, he persisted. I actually think we're closer to that. Branson and everyone else, like Elon Musk—are they going to step in or step back up in the wake of these kinds of problems? Everything that's happened to date has been less illuminating than what happens now."Final countdownRussia is thinking of moving its space operations out of KazakhstanTHE manned Soyuz mission thundering into space sends tremors through the observers, except for the impassive camels munching in the surrounding grasslands. Almost as stirring is the history of Russia's main spaceport. From Baikonur—now in central Kazakhstan, then in the Soviet Union—Sputnik and Laika the dog blasted off in the 1950s, and Yuri Gagarin shot into orbit and fame in 1961.These days the land is littered with rusty metal. Russia pays about $115m a year to lease the remote chunk of steppe. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, launches most of its rockets from Baikonur: between 22 and 25 each year. Until America develops a new space taxi, the Soyuz is the only way to get people to the 15-nation International Space Station.But Kazakhstan and its tenant are bickering. The chief of the Kazakh space agency, Kazcosmos, has threatened to tear up the lease. And Russia is building a new spaceport on its own territory, threatening to make the cosmodrome redundant.Some Kazakhs would be happy to see the Russians leave. In July 2013 a Proton rocket carrying navigation satellites exploded after lift-off—the fourth Proton disaster at Baikonur in 14 years, say Kazcosmos officials. Kazakhstan tried to limit Proton launches because the rocket uses an especially toxic fuel. But Russia needs its workhorse. Thanks to the Proton, which launches only from Baikonur, Russia has held a third of the commercial space-launch market over the past decade, says Rachel Villain of Euroconsult, a space-industry consultancy.Russia is speeding up construction of its Vostochny ("Eastern") Cosmodrome near the Chinese border. In September Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, said the project would guarantee that Russia remains an "independent" space power. He promised the first launch by 2015.If Russia were to leave, Kazcosmos hopes to use Baikonur to develop its own space industry. Russia is supposed to train Kazakh scientists, says the agency's deputy head, Erkin Shaimagambetov. But joint undertakings have failed before. In 2004 the two sides announced plans for a new generation of cleaner rockets, the Angara. Mr Shaimagambetov says arguments over money have derailed the project. Russia is scheduled to test its first Angara in December—but from a facility near the Arctic.Back at the cosmodrome, Russia's secret police control access to the nearby town of Baikonur, where the engineers live. The population shrank by a third after the Soviets left. Faded murals celebrate Soviet triumphs. Residents fear a Russian departure. "It will be a mess," says a resident. "We won't even have water."The Russians are unlikely to disappear overnight. An American engineer thinks Soyuz manned missions will not work at Vostochny because the capsules will not be able to make emergency landings there.Meanwhile, Baikonur and Vostochny have a competitor: the European Space Agency's spaceport in French Guiana, where Russia began launching Soyuzes three years ago. Because Guiana is close to the equator, rockets can blast off from there with twice the payload.Russia's Baikonur lease runs until 2050. But it can be broken with a year's notice—a blink in space-industry time.NASA Astronauts Talk Space Travel with 'Interstellar' CastMike Wall - Space.comA couple of real-life astronauts gave the stars of the sci-fi epic "Interstellar" the skinny on spaceflight Wednesday (Nov. 5).NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Marsha Ivins discussed their off-Earth experiences with "Interstellar" actors Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain during a Google+ Hangout hosted by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (The actors were onsite, while the astronauts patched in from other locations around the country.)The event celebrated the Wednesday release of "Interstellar" in select IMAX theaters, including the one at the museum. The movie will be released throughout the United States on Friday (Nov. 7).McConaughey asked Fincke, who has spent an American-record 382 days in space on three different missions, what he missed most while orbiting the planet."You can see Earth is so beautiful, and you know your family, everyone you love, is down there, and you just wish you could go down for the weekends and spend time with them," Fincke said. "So, I missed my family the most, and I even had a daughter born while I was in space, so it was even more important to come back home safely."McConaughey later asked Ivins — who flew on five space shuttle missions from 1990 to 2001 and helped prepare Hathaway for her role in "Interstellar" — how spaceflight changed her perspective."I think every astronaut who's flown has come back and said similar things," Ivins said. "You notice that there are no borders, and no boundaries that separate the countries. It's just water and dirt and clouds. And when you look out into space and you see this absolute blackness of space with more stars than you can see through the atmosphere here on the ground, you realize the true insignificance of all the things that worry you."Natalie Batalha, mission scientist for NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission, also gave the actors a crash course in exoplanet science, explaining how she and other researchers are hunting for alien worlds that may be capable of hosting life as we know it."We're looking for what we call Goldilocks planets," Batalha said. "So, planets that have about the right size, so we think that they're rocky, and they are in an orbit where they receive just the right amount of energy that would not preclude, at least, the existence of liquid water to pool on the surface."In its own way, "Interstellar" is also about the search for a Goldilocks planet. In the film, crop failures threaten humanity with extinction on Earth, so the characters played by McConaughey and Hathaway head out, along with a few other pioneers, to find an alien world that may be able to support our species.The film is directed by Christopher Nolan, who also helmed "Memento," "Inception," and the "Batman" Dark Knight trilogy, among other movies.ENDMore at www.spacetoday.net
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