NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Wednesday – Jan. 28, 2015
HEADLINES AND LEADS
'Fire in the Cockpit': Remembering the Sacrifice of Apollo 1
Ben Evans – AmericaSpace
Almost five decades have now passed since one of the worst tragedies in the history of U.S. human space exploration. Alongside the loss of Challenger during ascent and the demise of Columbia during re-entry, the fire which tore through the command module of Apollo 1, during a "plugs-out" systems test on the evening of 27 January 1967, killing astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, played a pivotal role in refocusing awareness of the inherent hazards of launching humans away from the Home Planet and fundamentally reshaped America's future goals in space. Forty-eight years later, it still remains remarkable that from the ashes of tragedy, the NASA family was able to recover, rebuild, and—fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's pledge—land a man on the Moon by the decade's end.
The Challenger disaster, Jan. 28, 1986
Andrew Glass – Politico
On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. All seven of the Challenger astronauts, who had blasted off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center, perished. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, had won a nationwide NASA competition to be the first schoolteacher to go to space.
House SS&T Committee Starts Off 114th Congress on Partisan Footing
The House Science, Space and Technology (SS&T) Committee held its organizational meeting for the 114th Congress this morning. The typically routine meeting held at the beginning of each new Congress had a strong partisan flavor to it this year, however. The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), issued a sharply worded news release detailing changes Republicans made to committee rules on party-line votes, calling it the "single greatest attack" on the rights of the minority party in the history of the committee.
Boeing expected to win first operational space taxi order
Stephen Clark – Spaceflight Now
Boeing is poised to win NASA's first order for operational commercial missions to send up astronauts to the International Space Station, a NASA official said Monday.
NASA expects mixed crews aboard Soyuz, U.S. ferry ships
William Harwood – CBS News
NASA hopes to begin launching U.S. and partner astronauts to the space station aboard Boeing and SpaceX ferry craft in the 2017 timeframe, but agency managers expect to continue sending crew members up aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft -- and Russian cosmonauts aloft aboard U.S. vehicles -- as a hedge against problems, like crew illness, that could force some station crew members to make an emergency return to Earth.
Orbital Sciences Corp.'s stockholders approve Feb. 9 merger with ATK
Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider
Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation's stockholders have approved a merger with the Aerospace and Defense Groups of Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK), based out of Utah. The newly-formed Orbital-ATK will officially begin operations on Feb. 10 – the day after the merger is officially closed. The announcement comes after a special meeting held on Jan. 27.
NASA Probe Gets Best Ever View of Dwarf Planet Ceres
A NASA spacecraft en-route to the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter returned its sharpest images yet of its target, the dwarf planet Ceres.
Found! 5 Ancient Alien Planets Nearly As Old As the Universe
Five rocky alien worlds that are 80 percent as old as the universe itself have been discovered, suggesting that Earth-size planets have been a feature of the Milky Way galaxy almost since its beginning.
Telescope detects galaxy's oldest known solar system
Sid Perkins – Science
Astronomers have spotted the oldest known set of planets in the Milky Way, a quintet of hot and presumably rocky worlds that is more than twice as old as our solar system. Further study of the ancient system may shed light on the early days of planetary formation in the galaxy.
Surprise! Water Once Flowed on Huge Asteroid Vesta
Liquid water apparently flowed on the surface of the huge asteroid Vesta briefly in the relatively recent past, a surprising new study suggests.
Why We're Looking for Alien Life on Moons, Not Just Planets
Marcus Woo – Wired
Think "moon" and you probably envision a desolate, cratered landscape, maybe with an American flag and some old astronaut footprints. Earth's moon is no place for living things. But that isn't necessarily true for every moon. Whirling around Saturn, Enceladus spits out geysers of water from an underground ocean. Around Jupiter, Europa has a salty, subsurface sea and Titan has lakes of ethane and methane. A handful of the roughly 150 moons in the solar system have atmospheres, organic compounds, ice, and maybe even liquid water. They all seem like places where something could live—albeit something weird.
Students' pink robot could save space industry millions
Jim Waymer – Florida Today
Each rocket launch unnecessarily scrubbed can cost upward of $1 million.
COMPLETE STORIES
'Fire in the Cockpit': Remembering the Sacrifice of Apollo 1
Ben Evans – AmericaSpace
Almost five decades have now passed since one of the worst tragedies in the history of U.S. human space exploration. Alongside the loss of Challenger during ascent and the demise of Columbia during re-entry, the fire which tore through the command module of Apollo 1, during a "plugs-out" systems test on the evening of 27 January 1967, killing astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, played a pivotal role in refocusing awareness of the inherent hazards of launching humans away from the Home Planet and fundamentally reshaped America's future goals in space. Forty-eight years later, it still remains remarkable that from the ashes of tragedy, the NASA family was able to recover, rebuild, and—fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's pledge—land a man on the Moon by the decade's end.
Today, Pad 34 stands as a gaunt concrete and steel hulk. Overgrown by bushes, weeds and a few wild pepper trees, it steadily decays in the salty Atlantic air. A faded "Abandon in Place" sign adorns one of its legs, whilst close to its base are a pair of plaques, memorializing one of the darkest days in NASA's history. The first reads simply "Launch Complex 34, Friday 27 January 1967, 1831 Hours" and dedicates itself to the first three astronauts of Project Apollo. The second pays tribute to their "ultimate sacrifice" that January day, long ago. Close by are a trio of granite benches, one to honor Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
Each year—and today will likely be no exception—NASA invites the families of the three men to visit the spot and reflect upon the tragedy which engulfed them with horrifying suddenness that Friday. To pause at Pad 34 and consider its significance is to consider the astonishing ability of Project Apollo to rebound from such a tragedy and plant human bootprints in lunar dust, just 30 months later.
Yet the "Block 1" version of the Apollo spacecraft, in the mind of both Grissom and his backup, Wally Schirra, was a sloppy and unsafe machine. Both men had spent months overseeing poor performance and low standards on the part of prime contractor North American, and, by the fall of 1966, just months before the launch of Apollo 1, hundreds of technical problems remained unresolved: a faulty glycol pump in the environmental control system, leaky thrusters, coolant glitches, bad wiring, and inadequate software, to name but a few. Grissom's crew was so angry that they prepared a mocking photograph of themselves, heads bowed in prayer over a model of their spacecraft. "It's not that we don't trust you," Grissom scornfully explained, "but this time, we've decided to go over your head!" On 22 January 1967, shortly before flying to the Cape for a launch pad test, he plucked a lemon from a tree in his Houston backyard, flew it to Florida in his luggage, and hung it over the Block 1 spacecraft's hatch.
To be fair, North American had faced their own technical challenges. NASA had mandated that the Apollo command module should operate a pure oxygen atmosphere—an extreme fire hazard, admittedly, but infinitely less complex than trying to implement an oxygen-nitrogen mix, which, if misjudged, could suffocate the men before they even knew about it. In space, the cabin would be kept at a pressure of about a fifth of an atmosphere, but from ground tests would be pressurized to slightly above one atmosphere. This would eliminate the risk of the spacecraft imploding, but at such high pressures there remained the danger that anything which caught fire would burn almost explosively. At an early stage, North American objected to the use of pure oxygen, but NASA, which had employed it without incident on Mercury and Gemini, overruled them.
The choice of pure oxygen had not been made lightly. NASA knew that a two-gas system, providing an Earth-like mixture of 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, pressurized to one bar, would reduce the risk of fire. Moreover, a mixture of this type avoided many other troubles associated with pure oxygen—eye irritation, hearing loss, and a clogging of the chest, for example—but the complexities of building such a system threatened to make it prohibitively heavy. The astronauts' space suits complicated the issue yet further. "To walk on the Moon," wrote Deke Slayton, then-head of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate (FCOD), in his autobiography, Deke, "you needed to get out of the spacecraft … and with a mixed-gas system you'd have to pre-breathe for hours, lowering the pressure and getting the nitrogen out of your system so you didn't get the bends. Of course, if there was a real emergency and you had to use the suit, you'd really have been in trouble."
Other worries surrounded Apollo's hatch: a complex device which actually came in two cumbersome pieces: an inner section, which opened into the command module's cabin, overlaid by an outer section. North American wanted to build a single-piece hatch, fitted with explosive bolts, but NASA felt that this might increase the risk of it misfiring on the way to the Moon. By adopting an inward-opening hatch, cabin pressure would keep it tightly sealed in flight … but notoriously difficult to open on the ground. As the hands of fate turned on Apollo 1, pure oxygen and an immovable hatch, coupled with a mysterious ignition source, would spell death for Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
With a pessimistic air of foreboding, the three astronauts crossed the gantry at Pad 34 on the afternoon of 27 January 1967. According to their secretary, Lola Morrow, all three men were unusually subdued and in no mood for the so-called "plugs-out" test. (Morrow herself scornfully referred to Project Apollo as "Project Appalling.") The previous evening, their backup crew—Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham—had sat aboard the spacecraft for a "plugs-in" test, with Apollo dependent upon electrical power from ground support equipment and the hatch left open. After emerging from the test, Schirra took Grissom to one side. He hated the Block 1 design. "If you get the slightest glitch," Schirra told his friend, "get outta there. I don't like it."
Communications with the nearby blockhouse, manned by astronaut Stu Roosa, caused difficulties from the start. Grissom was so frustrated that he even asked Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) manager Joe Shea, at breakfast, to sit in the cabin with them and gain a manager's perspective of the problems. Shea weighed up the pros and cons of rigging up an extra headset and squeezing himself, in shirtsleeves, into Apollo's lower equipment bay, but decided against it. Even Deke Slayton considered sitting in the cabin with them, but elected to remain in the blockhouse to monitor the progress of the test.
Grissom took the commander's seat on the left side of the cabin and quickly became aware of a foul odor—it smelled like sour buttermilk, he said—and technicians scrambled to the spacecraft to take air samples. Nothing was found to be amiss. Roger Chaffee climbed aboard, taking the right-side seat, and Ed White entered last, plopping into the center seat. The command module's hatch was closed, the Saturn IB boost cover was sealed and pure oxygen was steadily pumped into the cabin.
As the afternoon wore on, niggling problems hindered the test. A high oxygen flow indicator triggered the master alarm, time and time again, and communications with Roosa were so bad that at one point Grissom exploded: "How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" At 4:25 p.m. EST, a problem arose with a live microphone, which could not be switched off. NASA Test Conductor Clarence "Skip" Chauvin later recalled that communications were so bad that he could hardly hear the astronauts' voices. Eventually, the test was put on hold at 5:40 p.m. Forty minutes later, after more communications headaches, controllers prepared to transfer Apollo 1 to its internal fuel cells … whereupon the countdown was halted, yet again.
Suddenly, and without warning, controllers noticed the crew's biomedical readings jump. This was a tell-tale indicator of increased oxygen flow in their space suits. At the same time, around 6:30:54 p.m., other sensors registered a brief power surge aboard Apollo 1. Ten seconds later came the first cry from the spacecraft.
It was Roger Chaffee's voice.
It was just one word.
"Fire!"
In the windowless blockhouse at Pad 34, Deke Slayton heard Chaffee's call and glanced over to a monitor which showed the Apollo 1 command module's hatch window. What normally looked like a dark circle was now lit up, almost white. Frantic calls were now emanating from the spacecraft: "We've got a fire in the cockpit," yelled Chaffee. "Let's get out. We're burning up!" Finally, there came a blood-curdling scream.
On the first floor of Pad 34, technician Gary Propst could clearly see Ed White on his monitor. The astronaut's arms were raised over his head, fiddling to open the heavy two-piece hatch. Propst could not understand why the men did not simply blow the hatch, little realizing that its inherent design made it impossible for them to do this. Instead, White had to use a ratchet to laboriously release six bolts spanning the circumference of the inner section of the hatch. Years later, astronaut Dave Scott wrote in his autobiography, Two Sides of the Moon, that during training, he and White weightlifted the hatch over their heads whilst lying supine in their Apollo couches. Now, in the few seconds he had available before being overcome by smoke, White barely had chance to begin loosening the first bolt.
Tragically, it made little difference. In normal conditions, it would require 90 seconds at best, and even the super-fit White had been unable to do it in less than two minutes during training. However, fire was gorging Apollo 1 and the accumulation of hot gases sealed the hatch shut with tremendous force. No man on Earth could possibly have opened the hatch under such circumstances.
Investigators would later discover that the fire began somewhere under Gus Grissom's seat, on the left side of the cabin, perhaps in the vicinity of some chafed and unprotected wiring. Once sparked in Apollo 1's pure oxygen atmosphere, it fed hungrily and quickly exploded into an inferno. Other combustible objects—including Velcro pads, nylon nets, polyurethane pads, and paperwork—fanned the flames. The astronauts themselves had taken a Styrofoam block into the cabin to relieve the pressure against their backs, but this exploded like a bomb in the pure oxygen. "At such pressure, and bathed by pure oxygen," wrote Grissom's biographer, Ray Boomhower, in Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut, "a cigarette could be reduced to ashes in seconds and even metal could burn."
At length, pressures exceeded Apollo 1's design limits and the capsule ruptured at 6:31:19 p.m., filling the Pad 34 white room with thick smoke. By now, the poisonous fumes had asphyxiated the three astronauts to death. A few meters away, pad leader Don Babbitt sprang from his desk and barked at lead technician Jim Greaves to get the men out of the command module. But it was hopeless. The waves of heat and pressure were so intense that the would-be rescuers were repeatedly driven back. "The smoke was extremely heavy," Babbitt later recalled. "It appeared to me to be a heavy thick grey smoke, very billowing, but very thick." None of the pad crew could see far beyond the end of their noses, and they had to run their hands over the outside of the boost cover to find holes into which they could insert tools to open the hatch.
No less than 27 technicians were treated that evening by the Cape's dispensary for the effects of inhalation. Don Babbitt had to order Jim Greaves outside at one point, lest he pass out. Firefighters eventually opened the hatch and the would-be saviors beheld a hellish scene of destruction: by the flickering glimmer of a flashlight, they could see little but burnt wiring and an incinerated interior. According to firefighter Jim Burch, it took a few seconds before the ethereal calmness convinced them that Grissom, White, and Chaffee were gone. It was 6:37 p.m., five and a half minutes since Chaffee's initial shout. America's dream of landing on the Moon was in tatters. Choking over the phone to Deke Slayton, Babbitt could not find the words to describe what he saw.
Slayton and flight surgeon Fred Kelly arrived at the base of Pad 34 minutes later. They realized that it would take hours to remove the dead men from Apollo 1, because the heat had caused everything to melt and fuse together. Moreover, there remained a very real risk that the heat could accidentally trigger the Saturn IB's escape tower and the pad was cleared of all personnel. Not until the early hours of the 28th were the bodies removed. None of them had suffered life-threatening burns and all had died from asphyxia when their oxygen hoses burned and their suits rapidly filled with poisonous smoke.
In his autobiography, Slayton described it the "worst day" of his career, and even the normally teetotal astronaut Frank Borman admitted that he went out and got drunk after the accident. "I'm not proud to admit it," Borman once said, "but … we ended up throwing glasses, like a scene out of an old World War One movie." The wives of the three dead men—Betty Grissom, Pat White, and Martha Chaffee—later sued North American for its shoddy spacecraft. Each received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation in 1972.
This is part of a series of articles over the coming days to commemorate the losses of America's human space program in Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. Tomorrow, Wednesday, 28 January, AmericaSpace will reflect upon the 29th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy.
The Challenger disaster, Jan. 28, 1986
Andrew Glass – Politico
On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. All seven of the Challenger astronauts, who had blasted off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center, perished. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, had won a nationwide NASA competition to be the first schoolteacher to go to space.
In the wake of the accident, out of respect to the Challenger crew and their bereaved families, the House of Representatives adjourned for two hours. Before adjourning, the lawmakers passed a unanimous resolution expressing sorrow for the loss and remembering the dead astronauts.
"Now their names become history," Rep. Lynn Martin (R-Ill.) said. "But their drive and the dream of the human spirit will not die. In the flash and fire, the dream was reborn again in other young men and young women who will read, learn and fly. To the crew of the Challenger we say goodbye, but we will not forget you and your dream."
President Ronald Reagan postponed his annual State of the Union address, which he had been scheduled to deliver that evening, until Feb. 4. Speaking from the Oval Office that evening, Reagan said: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God."
The space shuttle program was grounded for nearly three years, during which several new safety measures, including a redesign of solid rocket booster and revised policies on management decision making were implemented.
An oil portrait of the seven Challenger astronauts hangs in the Brumidi Corridors on the first floor of the Capitol's Senate wing. The picture, painted by Charles Schmidt, was unveiled on March 3, 1987.
House SS&T Committee Starts Off 114th Congress on Partisan Footing
The House Science, Space and Technology (SS&T) Committee held its organizational meeting for the 114th Congress this morning. The typically routine meeting held at the beginning of each new Congress had a strong partisan flavor to it this year, however. The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), issued a sharply worded news release detailing changes Republicans made to committee rules on party-line votes, calling it the "single greatest attack" on the rights of the minority party in the history of the committee.
Johnson is the "ranking minority member" of the committee, meaning the highest ranking member of the party that is not in power. In the 114th Congress, Republicans are the Majority Party and Democrats are the Minority Party in both the House and Senate.
Historically, the House SS&T committee and many other congressional committees have trumpeted the fact that they work in a bipartisan manner, but party-line votes undermine such claims.
In fact, in his opening statement, committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) heralded the fact that in the last Congress the committee approved 20 bills (of which six became law), 18 of them on a bipartisan basis, and said he hoped "we can build on this bipartisan success and do more in this Congress." Despite that sanguine note, Republicans then voted down all the Democratic amendments to modify the proposed rules (on one of the eight votes today, one Democrat voted with the Republicans). Smith said in a statement after the meeting that what the committee adopted "preserves the legitimate rights of the Minority." He said during the meeting that the goal was to eliminate duplication and align the committee's rules with those of the House (which also have been amended in this Congress). Johnson, who has served on the committee for 23 years under both Democratic and Republican leadership, clearly disagrees. She listed the following changes that she believes diminishes the Minority's rights:
- shortened notice requirements for markups and allowing the Majority to waive notice requirements entirely;
- eliminating review periods for Members to review legislative reports prior to filing;
- requiring more Members to support a request for a recorded vote;
- allowing the Majority to hold a hearing without a single Minority member present;
- providing the committee chair with unilateral subpoena authority;
- eliminating requirements for consultation with the Minority; and
- the Committee receiving blanket deposition authority in House Rules "for the first time in the half century history of the committee."
Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) contrasted this committee's stance with that of another committee on which she serves, House Transportation and Infrastructure, where the entire organizational meeting, including adoption of rules, took "five minutes" rather than beginning "a new Congress and a new year fighting about the rules."
A webcast of the contentious meeting is on the committee's website.
The rules may seem arcane (read our "What's a Markup" fact sheet to learn what some of them mean), but they give the Majority power to hold hearings, subpoena witnesses and documents, and to more easily pass legislation out of committee and to the floor of the House on a partisan basis. Of all the changes, giving the chairman unilateral authority to issue subpoenas could have the greatest impact. In the last Congress, only the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA) had such power. House SS&T is one of several committees planning to give their chairs such authority in this Congress. Smith said repeatedly that the authority is necessary because of the Obama Administration's "dilatory tactics in responding to letters from this committee" and its "lack of transparency." How that will play out in the space policy arena remains to be seen, but the sharp differences between the parties on NASA were evident in 2013 when, under the previous rules, the committee approved on party-line votes a new NASA authorization bill that would have prohibited NASA from proceeding with the Asteroid Redirect Mission, dramatically cut funding for NASA overall and especially for Earth Sciences, and established the position of NASA Administrator as an appointed 6-year term. That bill was never voted on by the House and a bipartisan version was crafted the next year after budget caps were raised, promoting greater agreement. That bill did pass the House, but was not considered by the Senate and died at the end of the last Congress, so this Congress will be starting over again. Smith did say today that he hopes a new NASA authorization bill can clear the committee in a bipartisan manner as it did last year.
The number of committee members from each party is roughly proportional to the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the full House. For the 114th Congress, Republicans have 22 slots on the House SS&T committee and the Democrats have 17.
The Republicans announced their membership, including all their subcommittee assignments today. Democrats are still awaiting appointment of four of their 17 full committee members by the House Democratic leadership and have not announced subcommittee assignments. The 13 Democrats currently assigned to the full committee are Johnson, Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Daniel Lipinski (D-IL), Donna Edwards (D-MD), Frederica Wilson (D-FL), Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Alan Grayson (D-FL), Ami Bera (D-CA), Elizabeth Esty (D-CT), Marc Veasey (D-TX), Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Don Beyer (D-VA).
The Space Subcommittee, which oversees NASA and the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, will have nine Republicans and six Democrats. Rep. Steve Palazzo (R-MS) will continue to chair the subcommittee. The Subcommittee on Environment, which oversees NOAA's weather forecasting activities, will also have nine Republicans and six Democrats and Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) will serve as chairman. The Subcommittee on Oversight, which has broad jurisdiction, including NOAA's Satellite Modernization activities, was very active in the last Congress under the chairmanship of Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), who lost his Republican primary last year. This year the subcommittee will have six Republicans and four Democrats and be chaired by another Georgian, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA).
The committee also adopted its oversight plan for the 114th Congress today. With regard to NASA, NOAA satellite programs, and the FAA's commercial space activities, the language is virtually identical to the 113th Congress plan. The only notable difference is that oversight of NASA's earth science program is now under the Space Subcommittee's purview; last time it was listed with the Environment Subcommittee.
Boeing expected to win first operational space taxi order
Stephen Clark – Spaceflight Now
Boeing is poised to win NASA's first order for operational commercial missions to send up astronauts to the International Space Station, a NASA official said Monday.
The aerospace giant is one of two companies NASA selected to build commercial space taxis to transport crews to and from the space station. SpaceX, a newcomer to human spaceflight, cinched a separate contract with NASA.
NASA announced Boeing and SpaceX as the winners of deals worth a maximum combined value of $6.8 billion. The contracts guarantee each company at least two full-up crew rotation missions to the space station — plus options for up to six flights — through 2019.
The operational missions will launch after Boeing's CST-100 capsule and SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft are certified by NASA to carry human passengers. Each craft will fly on unpiloted and crewed test flights to the space station before NASA approves normal missions for takeoff.
The contracts allow NASA to submit task orders as needed for each operator to fly crew transport missions.
Kathy Lueders, head of NASA's commercial crew program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said Monday that Boeing is likely to receive the space agency's first order for a commercially-operated operational human-rated spacecraft. Officials said Boeing could be asked for two flights, meeting the company's minimum contractual quota.
She said a decision to award Boeing NASA's first order for human spaceflight services is a function of giving the company time to get in line on the United Launch Alliance mission manifest. Boeing's CST-100 capsule will blast off on ULA's Atlas 5 rocket, which is nearly fully booked with a mix of U.S. military payloads, NASA science missions, and a few commercial satellites over the next few years.
"We need to give them enough lead time to be able to get the rocket from ULA, and then be able to support processing," Lueders told reporters Monday at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Although Boeing is expected to get the first task order — a milestone called authority to proceed by NASA — it is not guaranteed to be the first to fly astronauts to the space station.
"The first mission that we will be looking at 'ATPing' is actually — right now — a Boeing mission, just because of the differences in lead time, and the need to start having services in the late 2017 or 2018 timeframe," Lueders said. "We know that we are going to have to begin the process to ATP our missions."
Boeing and SpaceX say they will be certified for regular astronaut transportation by December 2017, when NASA's agreement with Russia for crew launches expires. The latest deal with Russia, finalized in April 2014, ensures U.S. astronauts have a ride to the space station through the end of 2017, with provisions for landings into 2018.
Boeing plans a crewed demonstration mission with two astronauts to the International Space Station in July 2017.
John Elbon, vice president and general manager of Boeing's space exploration division, said the CST-100 is already reserved for slots in ULA's manifest for an unmanned test flight in April 2017 and the piloted mission in July 2017.
SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said the Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled for its first unmanned flight in late 2016, followed by shakedown mission with a crew in early 2017. The Dragon capsule will launch on SpaceX's own Falcon 9 booster.
"If you listen to their schedule … SpaceX is saying they're going to fly first, but we'll see," Lueders said. "We'll work with them, and we both know that they still have a ways to go working through their certification schedule.
"We don't want to be pushing on just the schedule because the most important thing is for them to develop their systems in a careful (way), and we need to give them enough time to deliver their system as safely as possible," Lueders said.
NASA expects mixed crews aboard Soyuz, U.S. ferry ships
William Harwood – CBS News
NASA hopes to begin launching U.S. and partner astronauts to the space station aboard Boeing and SpaceX ferry craft in the 2017 timeframe, but agency managers expect to continue sending crew members up aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft -- and Russian cosmonauts aloft aboard U.S. vehicles -- as a hedge against problems, like crew illness, that could force some station crew members to make an emergency return to Earth.
Without mixed crews, an illness could force everyone who came up with the sick crew member to depart aboard the vehicle that brought them to the station. If it was a U.S. or partner crew member, everyone who launched with that astronaut aboard a Boeing or SpaceX ferry craft would have to return to Earth, leaving the station in the hands of Russian cosmonauts who launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft and who are not trained to operate NASA systems.
And vice versa.
As a result, NASA managers believe it makes long-range sense to launch one U.S. or partner astronaut aboard every Soyuz and one cosmonaut aboard every NASA commercial ferry ship. Nothing has been finalized, officials say, but the U.S. space agency does not expect either side to pay for seats on each other's spacecraft after Boeing and SpaceX begin operational flights.
"I wouldn't call it a barter for seats, it would be more of an operational understanding," Mike Suffredini, the space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told CBS News in an email early Tuesday. "We would not be buying seats from each other."
He said the concept of one Russian cosmonaut flying on every U.S. crew rotation flight and one U.S. crew member flying on each Russian flight "is in response to a technical challenge associated with one crew rescue vehicle departing when the other may be allowed to stay."
"An example would be if a crew member became incapacitated on orbit," Suffredini said. "In this scenario, the entire crew that flew up with the incapacitated crew member has to go home with that crew member to care for the (ill astronaut), fly the vehicle and because if someone stayed on ISS they would be without a rescue vehicle.
"If we do not mix the crew members across vehicles then when a rescue vehicle left, either the Russian segment or the U.S. segment would be without any crew that are experts on those systems. In other words, if the incapacitated crew member was a USOS (U.S. Orbital Segment) crew member and we did not mix crews, then the entire USOS crew would be leaving the station."
That would leave the laboratory in the hands of Russian crew members "who are not trained to operate and maintain the USOS," Suffredini said. "So mixing crew members eliminates this threat."
USOS astronauts include NASA personnel and representatives of the European Space Agency, the Japanese and Canadian space agencies.
NASA has been paying the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos for Soyuz seats since before the space shuttle's retirement in 2011. NASA expects to spend some $5 billion underwriting the development of commercial spacecraft from Boeing and SpaceX to end the agency's reliance on the Soyuz, to restore U.S. access to low-Earth orbit and to save money.
Under the most recent contract with with the Russians, NASA pays about $70 million a seat for rides on the Soyuz. During a news briefing Monday at the Johnson Space Center, Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said she expects the cost per seat aboard U.S. spacecraft to average around $58 million when SpaceX and Boeing are both operational.
If all goes well, both SpaceX and Boeing will complete planned test flights in 2017, earning NASA certification and clearing the way for operational crew rotation flights to begin late that year or in early 2018.
At the Monday news briefing, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made it clear he does not want to buy seats from the Russians if he doesn't have to.
"I don't ever want to have to write another check to Roscosmos after 2017, hopefully," he said.
But NASA's current contract for Soyuz seats does not cover 2018 and Suffredini said in a Jan. 15 interview that seats aboard the Russian spacecraft must be reserved three years in advance. Given uncertainty in the commercial crew schedule, NASA may be forced to buy more seats despite Bolden's vow to stop writing checks.
"Right now, our big challenge is with the uncertainty in the schedule, how do you make sure you're ready for whatever's going to happen?" Suffredini said. "And then in all that mix is making sure we have enough seats purchased from our Russian colleagues in time. So I have to tell them, which is reasonable, three years in advance whether I want seats."
He said via email, "we have some time before we have to formally contract for seats. ... We will wait as long as we can before making a formal decision on any future Soyuz seats to get a better understanding of the schedule risk associated with the two commercial providers."
Orbital Sciences Corp.'s stockholders approve Feb. 9 merger with ATK
Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider
Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation's stockholders have approved a merger with the Aerospace and Defense Groups of Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK), based out of Utah. The newly-formed Orbital-ATK will officially begin operations on Feb. 10 – the day after the merger is officially closed. The announcement comes after a special meeting held on Jan. 27.
According to a news release issued by Orbital, stockholders "overwhelmingly" supported the merger. The definitive transaction date is Apr. 28, 2014. About 99 percent of the votes cast were in favor of the merger with 85 percent of the total number of outstanding shares of Orbital's common stock as of the Dec. 16, 2014 record date for the special meeting. This is according to Orbital's release.
"Today, Orbital's stockholders endorsed the proposed merger with ATK's Aerospace and Defense Groups by voting strongly in favor of the transaction, as did ATK shareholders at a separate special meeting also held earlier today," said Mr. David W. Thompson, Orbital's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "We are now on a clear path to completing the merger and beginning operations of Orbital ATK two weeks from today."
There is still a waiver which might alter the exact closing date of the merger. The waiver concerns the conditions which still remain to be finalized. If everything goes according to plan Orbital's common stock will be delisted at the close of trading on Feb. 9. The merger will cause the stock to be converted into the right to receive 0.449 shares of common stock of ATK, with cash paid in lieu of fractional shares.
After Feb. 10, a new company, Orbital ATK will begin trading on the market as "OA" on the New York Stock Exchange.
ATK provides the CASTOR solid rocket motors that are used on Orbital's Antares line of launch vehicles that is contracted to ferry experiments, cargo and crew supplies to the International Space Station under the $1.9 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract that Orbital has signed with NASA.
Mergers are very common in the aerospace industry with Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta merging in 1995 and Aerojet and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne combining in 2013.
NASA Probe Gets Best Ever View of Dwarf Planet Ceres
A NASA spacecraft en-route to the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter returned its sharpest images yet of its target, the dwarf planet Ceres.
The Dawn spacecraft, which previously spent 14 months exploring Vesta, a protoplanet and second-largest body in the main asteroid belt, is due to put itself into orbit around Ceres on March 6.
On Tuesday, with less than 150 million miles to go, NASA released new images of Ceres taken by Dawn, which now has a sharper view of its target than the Hubble Space Telescope.
The pictures, taken on Sunday, show several dark areas in Ceres' southern hemisphere that may be craters, said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the mission.
"Ceres is showing us tantalizing features that are whetting our appetite for the detailed exploration to come," Raymond said in a NASA press release accompanying the images.
With a diameter of about 590 miles, Ceres is the largest body in the main asteroid belt. Scientists suspect it had an underground ocean at some point in its past and may still have liquid water beneath its icy surface.
Analysis of early images also suggest Ceres might have at least one large extended structure.
"If it is tectonic, it should provide insight into the interior processes of this small planet," Mark Sykes, with the Planetary Science Institute and a mission co-investigator, said in a statement.
Discovered in 1801, Ceres was once known as a planet, then reclassified as an asteroid. It was recast as a dwarf planet, like Pluto, in 2006.
Found! 5 Ancient Alien Planets Nearly As Old As the Universe
Five rocky alien worlds that are 80 percent as old as the universe itself have been discovered, suggesting that Earth-size planets have been a feature of the Milky Way galaxy almost since its beginning.
The newfound exoplanets circle Kepler-444, an 11.2-billion-year-old star about 25 percent smaller than the sun that lies 117 light-years from Earth. All of the worlds are Venus-size or smaller and are therefore rocky, though scientists know nothing else about their composition.
All five alien planets complete an orbit in less than 10 days, meaning they're almost certainly too hot to support life as we know it. But Kepler-444 hints at the existence of other ancient planetary systems that may be more hospitable, researchers said. [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life] "We now know that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the universe's 13.8-billion-year history, which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy," lead study author Tiago Campante, of the University of Birmingham in England, said in a statement. For perspective, Earth and everything else in our own solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago.
Campante and his colleagues discovered Kepler-444 and its five known planets after analyzing data gathered by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Kepler hunts for planets by noting the tiny brightness dips caused when they cross their host star's face from the spacecraft's perspective. Kepler can also pick up brightness changes caused by sound waves within the star that affect its temperature and thus its luminosity. Studying these natural oscillations — a strategy known as asteroseismology — can help scientists determine a star's size, mass and age.
"When asteroseismology emerged about two decades ago, we could only use it on the sun and a few bright stars, but thanks to Kepler, we can now apply the technique to literally thousands of stars," said co-author Daniel Huber, of the University of Sydney in Australia.
"Asteroseismology allows us to precisely measure the radius of Kepler-444 and hence the sizes of its planets," he added. "For the smallest planet in the Kepler-444 system, which is slightly larger than Mercury, we measured its size with an uncertainty of only 100 kilometers [62 miles]."
The $600 million Kepler mission launched in March 2009, tasked with helping scientists determine how commonly Earth-like planets occur throughout the Milky Way. The spacecraft has discovered more than 1,000 explanets to date, with more than 3,000 additional "candidates" awaiting confirmation by follow-up analysis or observations.
Kepler's original planet hunt ended in May 2013, when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed. But scientists are still combing through the instrument's huge data set, as the new study shows. And Kepler has embarked upon a new mission called K2, which is continuing the exoplanet search but also includes observations of other cosmic objects and phenomena.
The new study was published today (Jan. 27) in The Astrophysical Journal.
Telescope detects galaxy's oldest known solar system
Sid Perkins – Science
Astronomers have spotted the oldest known set of planets in the Milky Way, a quintet of hot and presumably rocky worlds that is more than twice as old as our solar system. Further study of the ancient system may shed light on the early days of planetary formation in the galaxy.
The parent star of the planetary system is Kepler-444, a sunlike star about 117 light-years from Earth, says Bill Chaplin, an astrophysicist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Chaplin and his colleagues analyzed several years' worth of data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission, a space telescope that surveys a region of the galaxy for signs of Earth-size and smaller worlds. In Kepler-444, they seem to have struck a jackpot. In all, five planets pass in front of the star, creating minieclipses that betray the presence and size of the planets as well as how quickly they orbit their parent star. All the planets lie within 12 million kilometers of Kepler-444 and circle it in 10 days or less. (Mercury, at its closest, swings about 46 million km from the sun.)
That's too close to the star to be in the "Goldilocks zone" of habitability, Chaplin says, so the planets likely don't host life. Indeed, the orbs have surface temperatures much hotter than Mercury, so any atmospheres or oceans probably have long since been boiled away, leaving nothing but a scorched, rocky surface. The closest planet of the five to Kepler-444 is about the size of Mercury, and the farthest is slightly smaller than Venus or Earth. The other three are about the size of Mars, Chaplin says. "Finding five planets all smaller than Earth in the same distant system, that's pretty incredible," says Andrew Vanderburg, an astrophysicist at Harvard University who was not involved with the work.
Kepler has previously found multiplanet systems around other stars, Chaplin says. What's unusual about this new find is Kepler-444's great age: The star is about 11.2 billion years old, the team reports online today in The Astrophysical Journal. (By comparison, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and our own solar system clocks in at about 4.6 billion years of age.)
To assess Kepler-444's age, the team analyzed subtle variations in the star's brightness, as revealed in data samples taken as often as once every minute for a year. Those variations allow astrophysicists to calculate the speed of sound inside the star, which in turn enables the researchers to infer the ratio of hydrogen and helium inside the star—the key to determining how far along the star is in its evolution. The astronomers assume that, as in our solar system, the planets formed quickly after the star did. "By the time the Earth formed, the planets in this system were already older than our planet is today," Chaplin says.
The immense age of the Kepler-444 system suggests that Earth-class planets could have formed very early in the life of the universe. Spectroscopy of Kepler-444 reveals that the star is iron-poor, so presumably the planets are as well. The planets, Chaplin says, are likely predominantly made of lighter than iron elements such as carbon, nitrogen, silicon, and sulfur.
Further analyses of this ancient system, and others like it, will help scientists better model how and when planets formed in our galaxy and throughout the universe, says Natalie Batalha, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
Surprise! Water Once Flowed on Huge Asteroid Vesta
Liquid water apparently flowed on the surface of the huge asteroid Vesta briefly in the relatively recent past, a surprising new study suggests.
"Nobody expected to find evidence of water on Vesta. The surface is very cold and there is no atmosphere, so any water on the surface evaporates," study lead author Jennifer Scully, a postgraduate researcher at UCLA, said in a NASA statement. "However, Vesta is proving to be a very interesting and complex planetary body."
Scully and her colleagues analyzed images of Vesta — the second-largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which orbited the 318-mile-wide (512 kilometers) protoplanet from July 2011 through September 2012. [Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA's Dawn Spacecraft] The researchers noticed curved gullies and fan-shaped deposits within eight different Vesta impact craters. These craters are young compared to the 4.56-billion-year-old Vesta; all of them are thought to have formed within the last few hundred million years.
On average, the gullies are about 3,000 feet (900 meters) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide, researchers said. They bear a striking resemblance to channels carved by "debris flows" here on Earth, which occur when a small amount of water gets dirt and small rocks moving.
"They form kind of complex networks, similar to what we see in [Arizona's] Meteor Crater," Scully told Space.com last month at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where she presented the results. (The study is also being published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.) Indeed, Scully and her team think something akin to debris flows — as opposed to pure-water rivers or streams — created the Vesta gullies. They propose that meteorite strikes melted subsurface ice deposits, sending liquid water and small rocky particles down the walls of the newly formed craters.
Laboratory experiments suggest that the debris would slow the water's evaporation rate enough to allow the gullies to form, researchers said.
This scenario, of course, implies the existence of buried ice on Vesta, which has not been proven. But Dawn did observe signs of hydrated minerals on the huge asteroid.
"If present today, the ice would be buried too deeply to be detected by any of Dawn's instruments," Scully said in the NASA statement. "However, the craters with curved gullies are associated with pitted terrain, which has been independently suggested as evidence for loss of volatile gases from Vesta." When Dawn left Vesta in September 2012, it began a long trek toward the dwarf planet Ceres, the asteroid belt's largest denizen. That journey is almost over; Dawn is scheduled to arrive in Ceres orbit on March 6.
"We look forward to uncovering even more insights and mysteries when Dawn studies Ceres," said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell, also of UCLA.
Why We're Looking for Alien Life on Moons, Not Just Planets
Marcus Woo – Wired
Think "moon" and you probably envision a desolate, cratered landscape, maybe with an American flag and some old astronaut footprints. Earth's moon is no place for living things. But that isn't necessarily true for every moon. Whirling around Saturn, Enceladus spits out geysers of water from an underground ocean. Around Jupiter, Europa has a salty, subsurface sea and Titan has lakes of ethane and methane. A handful of the roughly 150 moons in the solar system have atmospheres, organic compounds, ice, and maybe even liquid water. They all seem like places where something could live—albeit something weird.
So now that the Kepler space telescope has found more than 1,000 planets—data that suggest the Milky Way galaxy could contain a hundred billion worlds—it makes sense to some alien-hunters to concentrate not on them but on their moons. The odds for life on these so-called exoplanets look a lot better—multiply that hundred billion by 150 and you get a lot of places to look for ET. "Because there are so many more moons than planets, if life can get started on moons, then that's going to be a lot of lively moons," says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute.
Even better, more of those moons might be in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist. That's one reason Harvard astronomer David Kipping got interested in exomoons. He says about 1.7 percent of all stars similar to the sun have a rocky planet in their habitable zones. But if you're talking about planets made out of gas, like Saturn and Jupiter, that number goes up to 9.2 percent. Gaseous planets don't have the solid surfaces that astronomers think life needs, but their moons might.
So far, no one has found a moon outside the solar system yet. But people like Kipping are looking hard. He leads a project called the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler, the only survey project dedicated to finding moons in other planetary systems. The team has looked at 55 systems, and this year they plan to add 300 more. "It's going to be a very big year for us," Kipper says.
Finding moons isn't easy. Kepler was designed to find planets—the telescope watches for dips in starlight when a planet passes in front of its star. But if a moon accompanies that planet, it could further lessen that starlight, called a light curve. A moon's gravitational tug also causes the planet to wobble, a subtle motion that scientists can measure.
In their search, Kipping's team sifts through more than 4,000 potential planets in Kepler's database, identifying 400 that have the best chances of hosting a detectable moon. They then use a supercomputer to simulate how a hypothetical moon of every possible size and orientation would orbit each of the 400 planets. The computer simulations produce hypothetical light curves that the astronomers can then compare to the real Kepler data. The real question, Kipping says, isn't whether moons exist—he's pretty sure they do—but how big they are. If the galaxy is filled with big moons about the same size as Earth or larger, then the researchers might find a dozen such moons in the Kepler data. But if it turns out that the universe doesn't make moons that big, and they're as small as the moons in our solar system, then the chances of detecting a moon drop.
According to astronomer Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the latter case may be more likely. "My gut feeling is that because the moon formation process seems so robust in our solar system, I would expect a similar thing is going on in an exoplanetary system," he says. Which means it'll be tough for Kipping's team to find anything, even though they're getting better at detecting the teeny ones—in one case, down to slightly less than twice the mass of the solar system's largest moon, Ganymede.
Whether anything can live on those moons is a whole other story. Even if astronomers eventually detect a moon, determining whether it's habitable (with an atmosphere, water, and organic compounds)—let alone actually inhabited—would be extremely difficult. The starlight reflected off the planet would be overwhelming. Current and near-future telescopes won't be able to discern much of anything in detail at all—which is why some researchers aren't optimistic about Kipping's ideas. "I just don't see any great path to characterize the moons," says Jonathan Fortney, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz.
Even Kipping acknowledges that it's impossible to place any odds on whether he'll actually find an exomoon. Still, thanks to improvements in detecting smaller moons and the 300 additional planets to analyze, Kipping says he's optimistic. "It would be kind of surprising if we don't find anything at all," he says.
Students' pink robot could save space industry millions
Jim Waymer – Florida Today
Each rocket launch unnecessarily scrubbed can cost upward of $1 million.
So NASA needs as much real-time weather data as possible.
But lightning makes launching weather balloons a bit dicey.
For decades, specialists at the Air Force station's weather balloon facility would brave blustery or otherwise bad conditions to release large white weather balloons by hand. But when lightning was too close, no balloons got launched.
Now, a hot-pink robot built by local high school students is rolling to the rescue.
"Even if you save one launch, it's worth it," Nick McAleenan, 16, told media members crowded outside the Air Force station's weather balloon facility to see the robot in action.
"PINK Team," a robotics team of students from Rockledge, Cocoa Beach, Viera and Space Coast high schools, fashioned a clever way to release weather balloons without risking human life.
After visiting the base's balloon facility and interviewing those who release the balloons and process the data they capture, the students and their mentors designed and built Weatherbot.
The 90-pound robot sports six all-terrain wheels, over a mile of travel range, headlights for nighttime launches and two 330-watt motors.
At Tuesday's demonstration, several students on the robotics team — donning black uniforms with bright pink socks — showed off their creation.
Weatherbot squealed a high-pitched hum as Stephanie Dawson, 17, of Rockledge High, steered the pink robot to the center of a grassy field, parked it, then released a bobbling white weather balloon into a cloudless sky.
Central Florida is considered the lightning capital of North America. Almost all of the lightning happens from mid-June to mid-September.
This past June through September, there were 10 launches and 16 launch countdowns. Two launches had to be scrubbed because of lightning that prevented weather balloon releases.
"When we launch rockets, we have to understand upper atmospheric winds," said Brig. Gen. Nina M. Armagno. "Over the last few years, we've actually had lightning conditions that have impeded countdowns and have actually contributed to launch scrubs. Well, no more will that be the case, because we have an automated weather balloon system now."
The idea of using a robot to release the balloons arose from correspondence between 45th Space Wing Weather Squadron: Kyle Clements, flight mission lead, and Mike McAleenan, a launch weather officer.
McAleenan thought of the complex tasks his son Nick's robotics team could perform with their robots.
"These guys can do that in their sleep," Mike McAleenan said.
The students built the robot for about $2,000, with donations, and some spare parts from a previous robot.
"It's about 400 cars washed," said Andy Bradley, the NASA senior control systems engineer who helped the students build the robot.
The girls on the team won out on the choice of team name and color. Bradley says the boys had skipped out on that team meeting.
"The guys were out surfing that day," Bradley said. "Out of spite, the girls picked pink."
END
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Feb. 2 JSC All-Hands Events in Teague
- CORRECTION: Renew Your Gilruth Membership Now
- Coming Soon! 2015 JSC Formal Mentoring Program
- "N-PROP" Is Changing To "Equipment"
- SWAT Training Today
- POWER of One - Nominate Your Peer Today - Organizations/Social
- 2015 Rodeo BBQ, Park Admission, & Carnival Tickets
- Latin Dance Introduction: Feb. 20, 5:30 to 6:00
- Photography Techniques: Hurry and Sign up Today!
- New Flex Friday Offerings at the Gilruth! - Jobs and Training
- APPEL - Quiet Project Management - Mar. 6
- Communication CORE
- Russian Phase One Language Course for Beginners
- JSC Risk Management Overview - Feb. 12
- Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps
- JSC Academic Fellowship Program - Community
- 2015 Center Level IR&D Awardees Announcement |  |
| Headlines - Feb. 2 JSC All-Hands Events in Teague
Administrator Bolden's Address to Air at Noon; Director Ochoa All-Hands to Follow at 1 p.m. Teague Auditorium will open at 11:30 a.m. Monday, Feb. 2, for a noon broadcast of Administrator Charlie Bolden as he talks about NASA's vision and speaks to the Agency's FY16 budget proposal. Bolden's speech also will be broadcast live on NASA TV. Following at 1 p.m., JSC Director Ellen Ochoa will hold an All-Hands to discuss JSC's role in the Agency's vision in Teague Auditorium. Employees are encouraged to attend if possible. Due to time constraints, Dr. Ochoa asks employees who have questions to submit those through her JSC Ask-The-Director email. She will respond to the questions received, and the answers will also be posted on Inside JSC. Those unable to attend in person can watch on RF Channel 2 or Omni 3 (45). JSC team members with wired computer network connections can view the All Hands using the JSC EZTV IP Network TV System on Channel 402. Please note: EZTV currently requires using Internet Explorer 32bit on a Windows PC connected to the JSC computer network with a wired connection. Mobile devices, Wi-Fi connections and newer MAC computers are currently not supported by EZTV. First-time users will need to install the EZTV Monitor and Player client applications: For those WITH admin rights (Elevated Privileges), you'll be prompted to download and install the clients when you first visit the IPTV website If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367, or visit the FAQ site. The event will also be recorded for playback the following Thursday, Feb 5, and Tuesday, Feb. 10, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Point of contact: JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs, x35111
[top]
- CORRECTION: Renew Your Gilruth Membership Now
Have you renewed your Starport Gilruth Center membership for 2015? If you had a membership in 2014 but have not yet renewed, your membership will be expiring on Saturday, Jan. 31.
Don't worry, you can renew right now! Follow the steps below. - If you are a JSC Civil Servant or Starport Partner Employee, you receive a free membership to the Gilruth Center!
- If you already have a membership, you can renew online or renew in person by printing out the Gilruth Member Application.
- If you do not yet have a Gilruth Membership, please follow the instructions here to activate your membership.
We cannot wait to see you out at the Gilruth Center. Thank you for being a part of Starport! - Coming Soon! 2015 JSC Formal Mentoring Program
JSC's Formal Mentoring Program (FMP) - the program formally known as YODA - will be kicking off its 2015 cycle soon. We are excited to bring you several new things this year, including reverse mentoring, interactive events, a new website and revamped application process! Check out the new website starting Feb. 2! And be ready to apply on Feb. 9! If you have any questions feel free to contact your friendly mentoring POCs at jsc-jfmp@mail.nasa.gov. - "N-PROP" Is Changing To "Equipment"
- SWAT Training Today
The JSC SWAT Team will be conducting training today in Building 35 from 6 - 10 p.m. - POWER of One - Nominate Your Peer Today
The POWER of One award has been a great success, but we still need your nominations. We're looking for standout achievements with specific examples of exceptional and superior performance. Make sure to check out our award criteria to help guide you in writing the short write-up needed for submittal. If chosen, the recipient can choose from a list of JSC experiences and have their name and recognition shared in JSC Today. Click here for complete information on the JSC Awards Program. Organizations/Social - 2015 Rodeo BBQ, Park Admission, & Carnival Tickets
Don't forget that you can purchase tickets for the following 2015 Houston Live Stock Show and Rodeo activities at the Building 3 and Building 11 ShapNASA Stores, as well as the Gilruth Front Desk: - World Championship BBQ Cook-off Feb. 26-28: Adult - $15
- General Rodeo NRG Park Admission Adult - $10 (does not include Rodeo Concert Admission to NRG Stadium)
- General Rodeo NRG Park Admission Child - $5 (also valid for BBQ Cook-off, but does not include Rodeo Concert Admission to NRG Stadium)
- Half Price Carnival Packs - available in $10 and $50 packs
- Latin Dance Introduction: Feb. 20, 5:30 to 6:00
This class is mostly an introduction to Salsa, but it also touches on other popular Latin dances found in social settings: Merengue, Bachata and even a little bit of Cha-Cha-Cha. Emphasis is on Salsa and then Bachata. - Discounted registration: $48 per person (ends Feb. 6)
- Regular registration: $60 per person (Feb. 7 to 19)
For the first-time student or those who want a refresher course. You will go over basic steps with variations and build them into sequences. - Classes begin Feb. 20
- Intro to Latin Dance: 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Salsa Intermediate class continues teaching salsa beyond that taught in the Introduction class. You should be comfortable and confident with the material from the introduction class before moving on to the intermediate class. This is a multi-level class where students may be broken up into groups based on class experience. - Classes begin Feb. 20
- Salsa Intermediate: 6:45 to 7:45 p.m.
- Photography Techniques: Hurry and Sign up Today!
Would you like to learn how to take professional looking pictures with your digital camera? Starport has the perfect Photography Techniques class for you! This five-week class introduces you to the proper techniques needed to take great digital photos. In this class, you will learn the art of focus, composition, exposure and basic lighting techniques. Following the techniques you'll learn in these easy and fun classes, you will be on your way to taking better pictures in no time! Classes start- Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. Discounted registration: - $90 (ends Feb. 6)
Regular registration: - $110 (Feb. 7-17)
All classes are held in the Gilruth Center's Long Star Room. - New Flex Friday Offerings at the Gilruth!
New to the Gilruth? Want to try out some new program offerings? Contemplating a membership? Eager to bring a friend in to see what it's all about? All/some of the above? Then get ready for the Flex Friday offerings this Friday, Jan. 30. From Beginner Yoga to Beginner SPINNING® …Pilates to Country Dance USA…to free 30 minute fitness consultations with a Personal Trainer - the Gilruth is here to help you take your first/next step into continuing to expand your health and wellness. These classes are free and open to the whole JSC community and family. So, even if someone doesn't have a membership (yet), this would be his/her chance to sample some of our offerings. There is no sign-up necessary - just come on in and enjoy your experience. First time participants will simply need to sign a one-time waiver. What a great way to kick start your weekend! Jobs and Training - APPEL - Quiet Project Management - Mar. 6
The goal of this one day course is to give leaders concrete tools for creating a work environment and management culture that supports and nurtures the natural strengths of introverts. This course is designed for NASA project managers who lead mixed teams of introverts, ambiverts and extroverts. This course is available for self-registration in SATERN until Monday, Feb. 2 and is open to civil-servants and contractors. Dates: Friday, Mar. 6 Location: Building 12, Room 152 - Communication CORE
JSC will accept applications for the Communication CORE Program Jan. 26 through Feb. 20. The purpose of this nine month cohort program is to provide GS-13 employees with enrichment and growth opportunities in communication dynamics, tailored to the needs of NASA and JSC. Applicants must be JSC full time/permanent GS-13 civil service employees. Applications must be worked through your management and submitted through your directorate-level training coordinator by the organization's due date. Application will be evaluated through a competitive selection process. The Directorate-level training coordinator should email a PDF copy of the signed application package to Aaron Blevins with "Communication CORE" in the subject line. Application submission deadline is Friday, Feb. 20 by COB. - Russian Phase One Language Course for Beginners
Russian Phase One is an introductory course designed to acquaint the novice student with certain elementary aspects of the Russian language and provide a brief outline of Russian history and culture. Our goal is to introduce students to skills and strategies necessary for successful foreign language study that they can apply immediately in the classroom. The linguistic component of this class consists of learning the Cyrillic alphabet and a very limited number of simple words and phrases, which will serve as a foundation for further language study. Dates: Feb. 23 - Mar. 26 When: Monday through Thursday, noon - 1:00 p.m. Where: Building 12, Room 158 Please register through SATERN - JSC Risk Management Overview - Feb. 12
JSC Risk Management Overview (JSC-NA-SAIC-RISK) is a 2.5 hour class that includes risk management concepts, topics regarding the application of risk management at JSC and a demonstration of the risk database. Class participants include personnel interested in understanding the basics of risk management. Event Date: Thursday, February 12, 2015 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:11:30 AM
Event Location: Bldg. 12/Room 134
Add to Calendar
Russell Hartlieb 281-335-2443
[top] - Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps
This course provides instruction in aviation and flight systems mishap investigation basics and policy. Topics discussed include: NASA NPR 8621.1 mishap investigation requirements and terminology, investigator qualifications, board composition and field techniques. Evidence identification, recovery and protection, witness interviewing and site mapping along with individual component systems and material failures. Extensive accident investigation information generally applicable to aviation accidents, which can be applied to other areas of flight systems mishaps, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, rockets, balloons and other space flight systems mishaps such as Genesis. Prerequisites: 1.SATERN Web-based training on Mishap Investigation. Target Audience: Mishap Investigation Team Members and Mishap Investigation Board Members. Engineers and safety staff in positions to be assigned to aircraft and flight system mishap investigations. Ground Operations Management personnel. Rapid Response personnel. Use this direct link for registration. https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_... - (SMA-002-07) Overview of Mishap Investigations
- (SMA-002-08) Mishap Investigation Roles and Responsibilities
- (SMA-002-09) Completing the Investigation and Mishap Report
- (SMA-002-10) Root Cause Analysis
Event Date: Tuesday, March 24, 2015 Event Start Time:8:00 AM Event End Time:4:00 PM
Event Location: Bldg. 20 Room 205/206
Add to Calendar
Shirley Robinson x41284
[top] - JSC Academic Fellowship Program
JSC will accept applications for the JSC Academic Fellowship Program from Feb. 2 -26. The JSC Academic Fellowship Program provides civil servant employees the opportunity to attend graduate school at an accredited university for one continuous year. For select skill competencies the JSC Academic Fellowship will be reviewing multiple year awards. A list of these the skill competencies is available at the Fellowship Programs page on the Training and Development website. Applicants must be JSC civil servant employees with at least 3 years of continuous civil service employment, which may include co-op time. Applications must be worked through your management and submitted through your directorate-level training coordinator by the organization's due date. Applications will be evaluated through a competitive selection process. The Directorate-level training coordinator should email a PDF copy of the signed application package to Aaron Blevins with "JSC Academic Fellowship" in the subject line. Application submission deadline is Thursday, Feb. 26 at 5:00pm. Community - 2015 Center Level IR&D Awardees Announcement
The JSC Chief Technologist's Office (CTO) and the JSC Technology Working Group (JTWG) are pleased to announce the twelve principal investigator awardees for the 2015 Center Level Independent Research and Development project awards. They are; Wahab Alshahin (EG), Brian Banker (EP), Diane Byerly (SK), Aaron Burton (XI), Cinda Chullen (EC), Jeff George (EP), Andrea Hanson (SK ), Charles Nichols (RF ), Stu Pensinger (EC), Shane Robinson (EG), Michelle Rucker (XM), and Erica Worthy (ES). Over 100 project proposals were submitted from across JSC/WST Directorates for consideration including a thorough portfolio review and discussion between the CTO and the NASA Headquarters Space Technology Mission Directorate and Center Innovation Fund representatives before the JTWG selected a portfolio reflecting JSC and JTWG priorities. Congratulations to all of these finalists. The CTO anticipates that the FY16 Center level IRD Call for Proposals will be issued in late June this year. | |
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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. |
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