Panel touts sole craftmaker
Move could cut costs; space officials say that's too risky
James Dean - Florida Today
Key House lawmakers say NASA should pick one company to fly astronauts to the International Space Station instead of prolonging a competition to provide the service, a proposal a local official said would be bad for the Space Coast. Quickly selecting “the most promising contender” could accelerate flights and save money for other programs, according to a House Appropriations Committee report explaining its recommendation of $17.6 billion for NASA in 2013, including $500 million for the Commercial Crew Program based at Kennedy Space Center.
House appropriators seek changes to commercial crew
SpacePolitics.com
On the eve of the full House Appropriations Committee’s markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations bill, the committee released its draft report accompanying the bill, which includes additional details and policy direction for the agencies funded by the legislation. While the bill itself included no specifics about NASA’s commercial crew program, the report does call for significant changes for the program. “The Committee supports the goal of achieving independent and redundant access to the International Space Station (ISS) but remains concerned about many aspects of NASA’s approach to the commercial crew development program,” the report states.
Private spaceflight company SpaceX has lofty goal: Help save humanity
Mike Wall - Space.com
SpaceX plans to launch a historic demonstration mission to the International Space Station next week, but the company's ambitions extend far beyond low-Earth orbit. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule will blast into space on April 30, lifting off the pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Once aloft, Dragon will berth with the orbiting lab — a first for a private spaceship — offload supplies and take some different items on for the trip back to Earth. The mission is a test to see if the Falcon 9/Dragon combo is ready to start making contracted cargo runs to the station for NASA.
Boeing's Private Space Taxi to Take Flight by 2016
Denise Chow - Space.com
With NASA's space shuttle fleet now permanently grounded, aerospace giant Boeing is aiming to fly astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a new private spaceship as early as 2015 or 2016, company officials say. Boeing's CST-100 capsule (short for Commercial Space Transportation-100) is being designed to ferry astronauts to and from the space station and other destinations in low-Earth orbit. The spacecraft will initially launch from Florida atop United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rocket, but the company is not ruling out other booster options in the future, officials have said. The capsule is being designed as part of a NASA program that supports the development of a new fleet of commercially built spaceships to fill the gap made by the retirement of the shuttle program.
New Private Space Plane Aims to Pick Up Where NASA's Shuttles Left Off
Denise Chow - Space.com
The new spaceship being built by private aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corp. may look like a miniature space shuttle, but while the design takes cues from the past, company officials are hoping this vehicle shepherds in a new era of commercial human spaceflight. Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane is being developed to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit. The company is aiming to begin full orbital flights in 2016. But the Dream Chaser design, which is reminiscent of NASA's space shuttle, is actually based on a concept vehicle, called HL-20, which was first looked at by the agency in the early 1980s.
Secretive Blue Origin Project Pins Spaceflight Hopes on Reusable Rockets
Mike Wall - Space.com
Blue Origin wants to fly under the radar all the way into space. The secretive private spaceflight firm, which was established in 2000 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is developing systems to launch astronauts to both suborbital and orbital space. While Blue Origin releases details about its plans and progress sparingly, the company's basic business model has come out. It all revolves around reusable rockets and spacecraft, developed in incremental steps. "It's really about developing and using vertical powered landing to drive reusable systems that can increase reliability and lower cost," Rob Meyerson, the company's president and program manager, said in a rare public presentation last September at a conference in Long Beach, Calif.
ULA Developing Human Space Flight Organization
Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.org
United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that it will form a new organization within the company dedicated solely to NASA’s human space flight programs. This new group will serve to support not just NASA – but the space agency’s partners as they work to regain the ability to send U.S. astronauts to orbit. Dr. George Sowers will be the head of ULA’s Human Launch Services Organization. Previously Sowers was in charge of company’s Business Development and Advanced Programs team.
Space-station rendezvous set to spur research push
Upcoming docking of commercial supply craft heralds easier access to orbiting laboratory
Eric Hand - Nature.com
When it comes to doing science on the International Space Station (ISS), the laws of gravity have been flipped: what goes up mostly stays up. A case in point are two freezers packed with more than 2,000 Arabidopsis seedlings awaiting return to Earth, where they can be analyzed for changes in gene expression. The samples cannot fly home aboard the unmanned European, Japanese and Russian cargo capsules that regularly deliver equipment and experiments to the station, because these capsules burn up on re-entry. Even the Russian Soyuz capsules that are the only route back to Earth since the space shuttle was retired last year are not ideal, because they lack freezers to store the seedlings during the plunge home, says the experiment’s lead investigator Imara Perera, a plant biologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “If they thaw out, then the RNA will be degraded.” Now science is about to get a new way home from the ISS. It marks a first step in what NASA hopes will be the space station’s transformation from an orbiting construction site into a thriving research laboratory.
Utah-made rocket motors to power new launch system
Matt Canham - Salt Lake Tribune
The head of the nation’s space program told Utah’s elected leaders Wednesday that test flights of the new Space Launch System featuring ATK rocket motors remain on schedule and will take place in 2017. The solid rocket motors that will propel the new launch system will be made in northern Utah by defense and aerospace contractor Alliant Techsystems, or ATK as it is known. The move is a welcome sign for a company that has been laying off hundreds of Utahns in recent years as it wrapped up other government space and defense contracts, including the rocket motors for the now-retired space shuttle program.
Smokey Bear becomes next space crew's mascot
Associated Press
An American astronaut heading to the International Space Station has chosen Smokey Bear as his crew's mascot. NASA astronaut Joseph Acaba said Wednesday that he hopes Smokey, the mascot of the United States Forest Service, would help raise public awareness about the dangers posed by forest fires. He added that Smokey "makes people aware of human-caused fires and how important the natural environment is."
Worker found dead at KSC died of natural causes
Stacey Barchenger - Florida Today
A man found dead at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday appears to have died of natural causes, according to the man’s employer. The unidentified custodial worker, described as a man in his 50s, was found about 2:15 p.m. in a support building near the liquid oxygen storage tank at launch pad 39A, KSC officials said. The man worked for Brevard Achievement Center of Rockledge. “Regarding the cause of death, while we are still waiting on the medical examiner’s office to confirm, all indications are that he died of natural causes,” reads a statement on Brevard Achievement Center’s website.
An overview of Stennis Space Center
David Tortorano - Sun-Herald (Biloxi)
With some 5,000 employees, SSC has hundreds of scientists and technicians working in fields as varied as propulsion, geospatial technologies and underwater research. It has university operations from two states and has one of the world’s largest supercomputers. The largest tenant is the Navy and its oceanographic research community. It’s also the location of the National Data Buoy Center, the 500-employee NASA Shared Services Center, large data centers, geospatial and earth sciences activities and several university cooperatives.
In the Age of Obama, the Eagle Has Fallen
Ken Blackwell & Bob Morrison - Huffington Post (Commentary)
Columnist Charles Krauthammer calls the ceremonial interment of the space shuttle Discovery an act of "willed American decline." He's certainly right about that. It is an historic retreat for America. It was under John F. Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, that America was summoned to greatness. Frustrated by a series of Soviet "firsts" in space -- first earth satellite (Sputnik), first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) -- the young President Kennedy knew that his talk of "getting America moving again" would ring hollow if the Soviets bested us in space.
__________
No comments:
Post a Comment