Happy Friday everyone,,,have a great weekend. Thanks to Alex Pope for sharing the below tip about tomorrows Shred it Event. Busy Saturday with the Space X launch around 3:55am in the morning.
From the Office of
Council Member Mike Sullivan
Upcoming Shred-It Event
Council Member Sullivan would like to inform you that the Harris County Sheriff's Office is teaming up with Shred-It for an event. Shred-It is an onsite paper shredding service available to help citizens permanently destroy old or unwanted personal documents. Council Member Sullivan encourages Houstonians to participate in this secure shredding opportunity.
Saturday, May 19th
9 a.m. to noon
Harris County Court House Annex,
10851 Scarsdale
For more information, call 713-759-9454
###
Friday, May 18, 2012
JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1. Innovation Charge Account to Fund 30 Innovative Projects
2. System Safety Seminar ViTS: July 13, noon to 3 p.m., Buildiing 17, Room 2026
3. System Safety Fundamentals Class: July 16 to 20 - Building 226N, Room 174
4. Overcoming Weight Loss Barriers
5. Stress Relief Strategies to Ease Allergy Symptoms
6. Summer Camp Starts in Two Weeks
7. Forklift Safety ViTS on May 25 at 8 .m. and Hand & Power Tools ViTS, May 25, Noon
8. Security Special Operations Training
9. HSI ERG Meeting Featuring Human Reliability Analysis
________________________________________ QUOTE OF THE DAY
“ How very little can be done under the spirit of fear. ”
-- Florence Nightingale
________________________________________
1. Innovation Charge Account to Fund 30 Innovative Projects
This Spring, civil servants and contractors submitted a record number of ideas during the 2012 Innovation Charge Account (ICA) Open Call for Innovative Ideas. Thirty of the original 84 idea submittals made it to the second round of judging in the Spring Call. During Innovation Day, project investigators gave 60-second "elevator pitches" to promote their ideas in the Technological Advancement, Process Improvement or "Other" categories. Due to unexpected additional funding available this year, all 30 ideas (investigating topics such as nano-antennas, outdoor creative spaces, energy saving lighting concepts, and virtual windows to name a few) are authorized to proceed. Congratulations!
To learn more about the innovative ICA projects, please visit the ICA website at http://ica.jsc.nasa.gov/ and click on the "Discover" tab.
Holly Kurth x32951
[top]
2. System Safety Seminar ViTS: July 13, noon to 3 p.m., Buildiing 17, Room 2026
This seminar provides an overview of system safety origins, definitions, principles and practices. It includes a discussion of NASA requirements for both the engineering and management aspects of system safety and answers the questions - Why do we do system safety? What is system safety? How do we do system safety? And what does it mean to me? Engineering aspects will include a brief discussion of three typically used analytical techniques -- Failure Modes and Effects Analysis; Fault Tree Analysis; and Probabilistic Risk Assessment. This course will not prepare attendees to manage or perform system safety, only to introduce them to the concepts. Students who have taken NSTC courses System Safety Fundamentals or System Safety Special Subjects should not take this course. Contractors note: Update your SATERN profile with current email, phone, supervisor and NASA organization code your contract supports before registering. SATERN registration required. https://satern.nasa.gov/plateau/user/deeplink.do?linkId=SCHEDULED_OFFERING_DE...
Polly Caison x41279
[top]
3. System Safety Fundamentals Class: July 16 to 20 - Building 226N, Room 174
This course instructs students in fundamentals of system safety management, hazard analysis of hardware, software and operations. Basic concepts and principles of the analytical process are stressed. Students are introduced to NASA publications that require and guide safety analysis, as well as general reference texts on subject areas covered. Types and techniques of hazard analysis are addressed in enough detail to give the student a working knowledge of their uses and how they're accomplished. Skill in analytical techniques is developed through the use of practical exercises worked by students in class. This course establishes a foundation for the student to pursue more advanced studies of system safety and hazard analysis techniques while allowing students to effectively apply their skills to straightforward analytical assignments. This is a combination of System Safety Workshop and System Safety Special Subjects. Students who've taken those classes shouldn't take this class. SATERN registration required. https://satern.nasa.gov/plateau/user/deeplink.do?linkId=SCHEDULED_OFFERING_DE...
Polly Caison x41279
[top]
4. Overcoming Weight Loss Barriers
Good nutrition plays a very big role in weight loss. If you have tried to lose weight, but have been unsuccessful - don't fret! Dropping those extra pounds is not easy and usually requires a lot of hard work. Just because you were not successful in the past doesn't mean you can't do it! This class will address some of the common barriers to weight loss and nutrition strategies for overcoming them. Class will be held May 22 at 5 p.m. in the Gilruth Center.
Glenda Blaskey x41503 http://www.explorationwellness.com/Web/scripts/Nutrition.aspx
[top]
5. Stress Relief Strategies to Ease Allergy Symptoms
AAAACHOOO! Do you have itchy eyes or skin? If you suffer with allergy symptoms, you know all about the stress of having a chronic condition. Did you know that stress and anxiety have been shown to make allergic reactions worse? Join Gay Yarbrough, LCSW, of the JSC Employee Assistance Program for "Stress Relief Strategies to Ease Allergy Symptoms" on Tuesday, May 22, at 4 p.m. in the Building 32 Conference Room 142.
Gay Yarbrough x36130
[top]
6. Summer Camp Starts in Two Weeks
There are a few spots left in the Starport Summer Camp! If you are still trying to find fun and exciting activities to keep your children active and entertained for the summer, Starport Summer Camp is a great option for the JSC workforce and their dependents! Plus, registration is now open to friends and other family members of the NASA workforce. Register at the Gilruth Center during normal operating hours. Visit http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/camp/index.cfm for more details on the session themes and planned activities.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/
[top]
7. Forklift Safety ViTS on May 25 at 8 .m. and Hand & Power Tools ViTS, May 25, Noon
Forklift Safety:The basis for the course is OSHA 29 CFR 1910.178(L). Discussions include the awareness of hazards and how to gain from lessons learned. Other topics include the mechanics of a fork truck, inspections and maintenance, safe driving, pedestrian and traffic rules, special operating rules, stacking and tiering, and emergency procedures and refueling. This course provides training to support either an initial certification (three hours duration) or a recertification (two hour duration). https://satern.nasa.gov/plateau/user/deeplink.do?linkId=SCHEDULED_OFFERING_DE...
Hand and Power Tools:This two-hour course is based on OSHA CFR 1910.28 and 1926.451, requirements for working with hand tools safely in the general and construction industries. During the course, the student will receive an overview of those topics needed to work safely with hand and power tools including: standards, terminology, inspection of hand and power tool components and proper usage. https://satern.nasa.gov/plateau/user/deeplink.do?linkId=SCHEDULED_OFFERING_DE...
Registration cutoff is today at 2 p.m.
Shirley Robinson x41284
[top]
8. Security Special Operations Training
For the remainder of the month of May 2012, Security Special Operations will be utilizing Building T-585 at various times for training. Training is subject to take place during both daytime and evening time hours. Specific training will take place on Monday, May 21, between 4 to 8 p.m. and again on Wednesday, May 30, between 4 to 8 p.m.
David Lover x36690
[top]
9. HSI ERG Meeting Featuring Human Reliability Analysis
Please bring your lunch and join the Human Systems Integration Employee Resource group as we hear Roger Boyer discuss "How Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) was used in the Shuttle PRA." HRA is a key technique used in human systems integration.
The meeting will be held Tuesday, May 22, in Building 1, Room 360, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Deb Neubek x39416 http://collaboration.jsc.nasa.gov/iierg/HSI/SitePages/Home.aspx
[top]
________________________________________
JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. To see an archive of previous JSC Today announcements, go to http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/news/jsctoday/archives.
NASA TV:
· Noon Central (1 pm EDT) - SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon Pre-Launch Briefing
· 2:30 am Central SATURDAY (3:30 EDT) - Falcon 9 launch coverage (Launch at 3:55 CDT)
· 6:30 am Central SATURDAY (7:30 EDT) - SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon post-launch news conf
Human Spaceflight News
Thursday, May 17, 2012
HEADLINES AND LEADS
NASA Ponders Transporting Tourists to International Space Station
Andy Pasztor - Wall Street Journal
NASA is figuring out how to let space tourists do something they have never been allowed to do before: hitch a ride on U.S. spacecraft intended to take astronauts to the international space station. Moscow's space agency years ago started allowing a few handpicked, wealthy passengers to travel to and from the space station on Russian-operated vehicles. Some thrill-seekers have been charged as much as $35 million a visit, according to industry officials. Industry experts believe the result has been an important source of extra revenue for Russia's cash-strapped human space exploration programs.
Rocket Launch Saturday Is One Giant Leap for Commercial Spaceflight
Denise Chow - Space.com
With the launch of the first privately built spacecraft to the International Space Station just days away, the commercial spaceflight industry is on the verge of a defining moment. Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX is slated to launch its unmanned Dragon capsule to the space station on Saturday (May 19) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The demonstration flight will test the spacecraft's ability to haul cargo to and from the orbiting outpost. If successful, SpaceX will become the first company to rendezvous and dock a privately built vehicle to the space station. "It is, by all accounts, an important step, bordering on a giant leap for commercial spaceflight," Michael Lopez-Alegria, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told reporters in a news briefing Thursday.
NASA says competition is key to private space race
Kerry Sheridan - Agence France Presse
Competition is vital to the race among private companies to replace the space shuttle, NASA said Thursday, after Congress called for the US space agency to fund a single company. "We believe that competition is key to accelerating this program," said NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver in a conference call with reporters. "We are ushering in a new era that embraces the innovation of the private sector along with the importance of what we do here in the government." The renewed debate over how to quickly restore US access to the International Space Station following the shuttle's retirement comes as California-based SpaceX is preparing for its first cargo test flight to the orbiting lab on Saturday.
Commercial rocket will fly to the space station
Marcia Dunn - Associated Press
For the first time, a private company will launch a rocket to the International Space Station, sending it on a grocery run this weekend that could be the shape of things to come for America's space program. If this unmanned flight and others like it succeed, commercial spacecraft could be ferrying astronauts to the orbiting outpost within five years. It's a transition that has been in the works since the middle of the last decade, when President George W. Bush decided to retire the space shuttle and devote more of NASA's energies to venturing deeper into space.
NASA Stresses New Mission
Emphasis on Private Flights as a Jobs Engine Leads to Scientific, Safety Worries
Andy Pasztor - Wall Street Journal
Putting U.S. astronauts aboard private spacecraft originally was intended to accelerate the pace and slash the cost of manned exploration. But now, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are debating whether the plan's main goal should be fostering jobs to stimulate the economy. Tension between boosting science or the economy erupted during a meeting earlier this year at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters. Addressing a group of high-level outside advisers, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver emphasized that the primary aim of outsourcing cargo and crew transportation to private industry is to promote thousands of high-tech jobs. Alarmed, aerospace experts on NASA's safety panel shot back that the program's direction should remain focused on long-standing engineering and performance criteria: building rockets and capsules able to reliably reach Earth's orbit. Critics of the agency say moves to play down short-term transportation goals in favor of broader economic stimulus are clouding the future of U.S. human spaceflight and raising questions about safety.
SpaceX faces a tricky test
Clearance for robo-capsule to dock at ISS comes only after key maneuvers made
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
This is no routine supply run.
Set to rocket off early Saturday, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft faces a daunting series of systems tests and complicated maneuvers — something similar to an ultraserious shakedown cruise for a new-generation nuclear-powered submarine — before it will be given the green light to berth at the International Space Station. The bar is raised sky-high, and for SpaceX, the idea is to show the U.S. and its 15 international partners that the Dragon poses no threat to the station or the six people living and working aboard it. SpaceX must prove the Dragon won’t crash into the complex, destroying the outpost and killing all aboard. Then, and only then, will the Dragon be given a “go” to enter the “Keep Out Sphere,” a 220-yard safety zone that surrounds the sprawling, million-pound outpost.
SpaceX: Are Commercial Launches the Future in Space?
Gina Sunseri - ABC News
SpaceX. The next frontier? Perhaps, but not quite yet. This relatively old-school rocket with a capsule reminiscent of NASA's early manned flights is historically significant because it marks the first time a private company is launching to the International Space Station. While the SpaceX Falcon booster looks much like your grandfather's '60s rocket on the outside, the technology on the inside is very different. SpaceX is the brainchild of the visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk. His Falcon rockets are built in America, and so are the Dragon capsules they launch into space. Musk founded PayPal in the 1990s and has since turned his energy to spacecraft and Tesla electric cars. "It's more like the dawn of a new era in space exploration and it's one which is driven by commercial companies," said Musk. To him, this is the future -- private business taking over for government.
Private rocket launch Saturday may herald new commercial spaceflight era
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
A turning point for private spaceflight looks to be on the horizon. The commercial rocket builder SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif.) is preparing to launch the first privately built vehicle to the International Space Station this week. If it succeeds, it will be a milestone event in the history of space exploration. However, the firm and NASA warn against placing too much importance on one test flight. SpaceX's Dragon capsule is due to lift off unmanned atop the company's Falcon 9 booster Saturday from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If all goes well, it will rendezvous with the government-built space lab in orbit, and be berthed there to deliver a haul of food, supplies and science equipment.
SpaceX Dragon blasting off to Space Station
Link up will represent a milestone for commercial space craft
Matthew Shaer - Christian Science Monitor
On Saturday, SpaceX will send its Dragon capsule spiraling all the way up to the International Space Station, approximately 230 miles above the surface of the earth – the first time a commercially-built, private spacecraft has linked up with the orbiter. In a press release, representatives for SpaceX called the mission a "milestone," which could help yield "rapid advances" in space transport. "This is a demonstration mission, a test flight primarily designed to provide NASA and SpaceX with valuable insight to ensure successful future missions," the SpaceX team wrote.
SpaceX readies historic mission
Jonathan Amos - BBC News
California's SpaceX company will look to establish a piece of history on Saturday when it launches its Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The vehicle will lift the Dragon cargo capsule into orbit on a mission to resupply the space station. It will be the first time a commercial company has provided such a service. Although billed as a demonstration, the mission has major significance because it marks a big change in the way the US wants to conduct its space operations. Both SpaceX and another private firm, Orbital Sciences Corp, have been given billion-dollar contracts to keep the space station stocked with food and equipment. Orbital hopes to make its first visit to the manned outpost with its Antares/Cygnus system in the coming year.
Testing Private Ship to the Space Station, and Wine, Too
Kenneth Chang - New York Times
In space, how quickly does grape juice turn to wine? Two California high school students hope to find out soon. Their experiment is one of 11 aboard a rocket scheduled to blast off early Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to the International Space Station. “We think it’s going to ferment faster,” said Max Holden, a ninth grader at Chaminade College Preparatory in West Hills, Calif. But there is no guarantee that the seven-inch tube of yeast and grape juice will ever reach its destination. The launching is a test flight of a spacecraft built by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif. The event is slightly historic: if all goes well, the ship will be the first operated by a private company, rather than the government, to supply the space station.
Weather unlikely to be an issue for Dragon departure
SpaceX launch set for Saturday's wee hours
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
SpaceX aims to roll out a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft today, and meteorologists say the weather looks good for a planned launch early Saturday. Standing 157 feet tall, the Falcon 9 and Dragon are slated to blast off at 4:55 a.m. Saturday at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Liftoff is precisely timed to put the Dragon on course for a rendezvous and berthing at the International Space Station. SpaceX will have a back-up launch opportunity early next Tuesday. Meteorologists at the Air Force 45th Space Wing Weather Squadron say there is a 70 percent chance conditions will be acceptable for launch.
SpaceX launching student experiments & emblems on 1st station flight
Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com
Students' science experiments are about to make history, launching to space on the first attempt by a U.S. commercial company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). And like many other historic space projects, the students' payloads packed on board SpaceX's Dragon capsule have their own specially-designed mission emblems, which are also flying to the orbiting laboratory.
Elon Musk's Countdown: What's At Stake For Him And SpaceX?
Lori Kozlowski - Forbes
If there was a chance to take a trip to Mars in your lifetime, would you go? Elon Musk, CEO and founder of Space Exploration Technologies (better known as SpaceX), has this dream. Listen to Musk for a few minutes and he talks of sending thousands, and eventually millions, of people to Mars. Founded in 2002, California-based SpaceX makes building rockets and spaceflight a private endeavor. Watching the company develop and attempt its first missions seems similar to what it might have been like watching Howard Hughes get planes off the ground. This weekend’s unmanned flight of SpaceX’s “Dragon” will mark the first time a private spaceship has docked at the International Space Station.
NASA's economic impact in Alabama last year put at $2.8 billion
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
NASA's economic impact in Alabama last year was $2.8 billion, Marshall Space Flight Center Acting Director Gene Goldman said Thursday. Goldman told an annual community briefing that the center awarded $817 million in contracts to state companies, and 26 percent of the companies were small businesses.
SpaceX Readies for Historic Launch
Jenny Marder - PBS News
On Saturday, if all goes as planned, the privately owned spaceflight company SpaceX will launch its Dragon capsule into low-Earth orbit and three days later dock with the International Space Station. It would be the first such flight for a private company. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reported on the mission earlier this month. We recently talked with him about the launch, the engineering challenges and the other private spaceflight companies vying for a chance to deliver cargo and people to low-Earth orbit. Bonus: Watch Miles and Hari battle it out for a seat on the Dragon capsule. (NO FURTHER TEXT)
Several companies vying to fly to space station
Associated Press
Several companies are working on rockets and spacecraft that could ferry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, now that the shuttle program is over. A brief look at each…
What will commercial spaceflight cost?
Fox News
NASA has given SpaceX $381 million to develop a private rocket to replace the space shuttle -- and that’s just the tip of the money iceberg. The space agency spent $50 million in 2009 to help foster a commercial space industry in America, essentially a down payment on the country’s post shuttle future, and it handed out another $270 million in April of 2011. NASA plans multiple future grants ranging up to half a billion in the next year and a half -- an investment that will result in the creation of the U.S. space industry and will save NASA hundreds of millions on future space flights. But is the estimated $4.9 billion the program will cost worth it? A May 10 report by the House Appropriations Committee cited a litany of concerns with the Commercial Crew Program, concluding that the that the overall $4.9 billion in estimated development costs with which the government is seeding private space firms is simply too much money.
House endorses plan to let Pentagon work with space firms
Ledyard King - Florida Today
State agencies and private contractors would be able to partner with the Pentagon on space-related projects under a provision adopted by the House Thursday as part of a broad bill authorizing Defense Department programs for next year. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, who sponsored the proposal, said the change should help Cape Canaveral as it transitions from the government-run space shuttle program under NASA to one where private aerospace firms will launch crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
Birthday aboard ISS will be hard one to beat
Ex-Mel High teacher Acaba, 2 cosmonauts arrive
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
What a way to celebrate your birthday. Flying aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, U.S. astronaut and former Melbourne High science teacher Joe Acaba arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday — his 45th birthday — along with Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin. “Some people get cake and candles, and he gets the whole space station,” quipped Kirk Shireman, deputy manager of NASA’s International Space Station program office. “This is the perfect gift,” Acaba said after hatches between the craft opened, and the new crew boarded the outpost. “Dreams are coming true every day up here.”
Q&A: Space Historian on Historic SpaceX Launch
Dave Mosher - Wired.com
We may be at the dawn of a new, private era in space. On May 19, if all goes well, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will liftoff the launchpad, bringing the Dragon spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. Until now, only the U.S., Russia, Japan, and the European Union have accomplished such a goal. If SpaceX succeeds, it will become the first private company to do so. We have David Portree, a historian of space exploration who runs Beyond Apollo on the Wired Science Blogs. He has authored books about spaceflight, including Humans to Mars: 50 Years of Mission Planning, Walking to Olympus: an EVA Chronology, NASA’s Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age and Mir Hardware Heritage…
From astronaut-hero to space-trucker: Human spin on space commercialization
Bruce Dorminey - Forbes
The cast of “Alien” in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi blockbuster may actually be more akin to future space-farers than our citizen heroes from NASA’s Apollo era. After all, the film presents a view of space travel that is based as much on economics as wanderlust and this is arguably as it should be. How can anyone forget the hangdog eyes of Harry Dean Stanton, who so clearly is out that far in space solely for the cash? The crew of the Nostromo, the film’s ore-carrying cargo vessel under threat from a ravenous extraterrestrial, inherently understands that sometimes great profit only comes with great risk. We all hope that there are more glory moments in our future, with a manned trip to Mars and scientific colonies on the moon. But the recent announcement by Bellevue, Wa.-based Planetary Resources, Inc. that it plans to mine Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) could also be a step in the right direction.
How Space-Age Nostalgia Hobbles Our Future
Contrary to popular belief, public support for space exploration in 60s far from universal
Matt Novak - Slate.com
The future used to be so much better. At least that’s what everyone under the age of 65 keeps telling me. In the 1950s and ‘60s, people dreamed of—nay, expected—jetpacks and flying cars and colonies on Mars. On Mars! Legend has it that after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite to ever orbit the Earth, in 1957, Americans rallied behind the idea of a better, more technologically advanced future for all. This nationwide enthusiasm buoyed NASA’s Apollo program and, as much as rocket fuel, propelled us to the moon. During his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama invoked the popular idea of the “Sputnik moment” as he implored Congress to invest more in scientific research and education. So what percentage of Americans in the 1960s do you suppose believed that the Apollo program was worth the time and resources devoted to it? Seventy percent? Eighty percent? In reality, it was less than 50 percent.
Two Shuttles, Two Launches, One Planet…and a Five-Day Goal
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
When Challenger exploded on 28 January 1986, it crushed many dreams of America’s space programme. The Shuttle was expected to open new frontiers and deliver people into orbit with unrivalled frequency and reliability…but herein was one of its fatal flaws. Fifteen missions were planned in 1986, followed by 24 in 1987, and it was long feared that this monstrous launch rate would push the Shuttle’s workforce beyond its limits and drive the fleet to its knees. The Rogers Commission would harshly criticise not only the technical causes of Challenger, but also the managerial cancers that enabled it to happen. Schedule pressure was one such cancer and in few other areas was its oppressive breath more acutely felt than in NASA’s plan to launch two Shuttles, within five days, in May 1986. Twenty-six years ago, this week, Challenger and her sister Atlantis should have been on Pads 39B and 39A, primed and ready to send a pair of spacecraft to Jupiter. One of them, Ulysses, would employ the giant planet’s gravity to slingshot it out of the ecliptic plane and explore the Sun’s polar regions, whilst the second, Galileo, was destined to enter orbit around Jupiter itself.
__________
COMPLETE STORIES
NASA Ponders Transporting Tourists to International Space Station
Andy Pasztor - Wall Street Journal
NASA is figuring out how to let space tourists do something they have never been allowed to do before: hitch a ride on U.S. spacecraft intended to take astronauts to the international space station.
Moscow's space agency years ago started allowing a few handpicked, wealthy passengers to travel to and from the space station on Russian-operated vehicles. Some thrill-seekers have been charged as much as $35 million a visit, according to industry officials.
Industry experts believe the result has been an important source of extra revenue for Russia's cash-strapped human space exploration programs.
But for the first time, a senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration official on Thursday publicly talked about ways the U.S. eventually could offer the same service and reap similar benefits. The trips could begin later this decade, when a new generation of private, U.S.-built space taxis is expected to begin transporting American crews into orbit.
"We are very, very open" to the possibility and intend to "work on details with the company or companies" that end up winning contracts to take American astronauts back and forth from the station, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver told reporters during a teleconference.
Ms. Garver declined to go into specifics but said "we have work ahead to determine the exact policies."
Years ago, NASA balked at Russia's concept of allocating a limited number of seats to non-astronauts. Animosity over the issue has since disappeared.
In addition to promoting good public relations and sparking excitement among space aficionados, NASA has more-mundane goals. It hopes to spread the overall cost of launches across more passengers, thereby reducing the drain on U.S. taxpayers
NASA officials see a potential influx of tourist dollars as a way to ease congressional sticker shock from what may end up as a roughly $60 million price tag to transport each working astronaut. Ms. Garver said "undoubtedly, we would benefit" from tourist jaunts, which could see visitors paying top dollar to spend a few weeks or months circling the earth at an altitude of 240 miles.
Thorny issues that still must be resolved, however, include questions about who will make the final decision to clear would-be passengers for launch and how much private companies operating the vehicles will be allowed to charge.
Reserving space for tourists is possible because certain commercial rockets and spacecraft still under development are expected to be able to blast more weight into low-earth orbit than NASA will need—or be able to use—on some missions.
Some members of the fledgling industry stress that individual companies might be able to take passengers to the space station even if NASA doesn't come up with a plan quickly.
Jeff Greason, chief executive of space transportation start-up XCOR Aerospace, suggested the Russian portion of the space station may be more hospitable to big-spending, short-term residents if the U.S. drags its feet. NASA, he said at Thursday's briefing, figures to be just one potential customer for private space companies.
"The companies will be free to find other customers," Mr. Greason said, emphasizing the private vehicles will be under corporate control.
Rocket Launch Saturday Is One Giant Leap for Commercial Spaceflight
Denise Chow - Space.com
With the launch of the first privately built spacecraft to the International Space Station just days away, the commercial spaceflight industry is on the verge of a defining moment.
Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX is slated to launch its unmanned Dragon capsule to the space station on Saturday (May 19) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The demonstration flight will test the spacecraft's ability to haul cargo to and from the orbiting outpost. If successful, SpaceX will become the first company to rendezvous and dock a privately built vehicle to the space station.
"It is, by all accounts, an important step, bordering on a giant leap for commercial spaceflight," Michael Lopez-Alegria, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told reporters in a news briefing Thursday.
Lopez-Alegria was joined by NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace, which is developing a suborbital space plane for researchers and other paying passengers, to discuss SpaceX's upcoming flight and the future of commercial spaceflight.
"This is a very exciting time to be involved with the U.S. space program," Garver said. "We're starting to write the next chapter. We are at a brink of a milestone moment in our space history with the upcoming SpaceX launch."
The flight is part of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which aims to nurture the development of a new fleet of private spaceships to carry cargo to the space station. But these efforts are essentially stepping stones for commercial vehicles that will eventually take astronauts to the orbiting complex.
SpaceX intends to use a version of the robotic Dragon capsule for crewed flights to low-Earth orbit. The company is one of several who have submitted proposals for a separate NASA program to receive funding to develop spacecraft to taxi astronauts to and from the space station. NASA plans to announce the companies selected to receive funds in August.
"Although SpaceX's efforts are in today's spotlight, they are but one player engaged in reducing the cost of access to space," Lopez-Alegria said.
But while the upcoming flight of the Dragon capsule is an important milestone, it is important for the industry and members of the public to remember that it is still a test.
"If they get even half of their mission objectives done successfully, that will still be a historic first," Greason said. "Test flights are called test flights for a reason. They very rarely go perfectly."
Successes and failures are both valuable during the testing stage of a vehicle or launch system, Greason said, because they all provide data and lessons to help improve the finished product. He applauded SpaceX for embarking on the ambitious mission and said that he would be tuning to watch the launch.
"I wish them all the success in the world," Greason said. "If they get even halfway there, that's still one for the books."
NASA says competition is key to private space race
Kerry Sheridan - Agence France Presse
Competition is vital to the race among private companies to replace the space shuttle, NASA said Thursday, after Congress called for the US space agency to fund a single company.
"We believe that competition is key to accelerating this program," said NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver in a conference call with reporters.
"We are ushering in a new era that embraces the innovation of the private sector along with the importance of what we do here in the government."
The renewed debate over how to quickly restore US access to the International Space Station following the shuttle's retirement comes as California-based SpaceX is preparing for its first cargo test flight to the orbiting lab on Saturday.
But with plans for a crew-capable spacecraft not expected before the 2015-2017 timeframe, and NASA pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in seed money into four private companies, some lawmakers have urged a narrower process.
The House of Representatives last week passed a bill that calls on NASA to make an immediate choice of one company for the commercial crew funding it plans to distribute later this year, expected to be around $500 million.
Last year, NASA's Commercial Crew Development program gave nearly $270 million to four companies: Blue Origin ($22 million), Boeing ($92.3 million), SpaceX ($75 million), and Sierra Nevada ($80 million).
Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia and chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA's budget, said last week the current approach "runs a high risk of failure" by funding numerous companies.
The scheme makes it likely to leave the "taxpayer with no tangible benefits in exchange for a substantial investment," he added.
The Senate would have to approve the bill for it to take effect, but NASA bristled at the suggestion that less competition would be more cost-effective.
"Obviously, while we believe in competition, we recognize that we are to the point now where we want to have the most realistic and the best chance of success at meeting our goals to be transporting astronauts to the International Space Station as soon as possible," Garver said.
When awards are decided on this year, NASA hoped the selection would allow that "to happen in the very soonest timeframe while keeping some competition," she added.
SpaceX is clearly in the lead among its competitors. Its upcoming cargo test flight uses the Dragon space capsule that is also built to carry up to seven crew.
Sierra Nevada is also poised to start localized tests of its Dream Chaser vehicle this month. And Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has a separate contract with NASA for cargo missions to the ISS, is expected to do a test launch later this year.
"The first to market doesn't always win either so there are a lot of interesting times ahead," said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace and an executive committee member of the Commercial SpaceFlight Federation.
Greason lamented the high cost of paying Russia $63 million dollars a seat so US astronauts can hitch a ride to the ISS, a cost that the United States began paying once the 30-year space shuttle program ended in 2011.
"Relying on the Soyuz or any sole system as the only means of transport to the ISS isn't wise. The Soyuz has been a great spacecraft but the Russians are not immune to hardware problems," he said.
Former NASA astronaut and president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation Michael Lopez-Alegria said that reducing competition now would raise prices, not lower them.
"Once you get out of the competition phase, you start getting into monopoly pricing and not only is it going to cost more but it is going to take longer," he told reporters.
"So we need to resist the temptation of saying, 'If we want to have it sooner we should just throw money at less companies because they'll have more money to go faster.' That is not the path to success."
In the meantime, Lopez-Alegria said he and many others will be closely watching SpaceX's cargo attempt, scheduled to lift off Saturday at 4:55 am (0855 GMT).
"It is by all accounts an important step, bordering on a giant leap for commercial spaceflight," he said.
"Although SpaceX's efforts are in today's spotlight, they are but one player on a team that is fully engaged in reducing the cost of access to space for people and payloads."
Commercial rocket will fly to the space station
Marcia Dunn - Associated Press
For the first time, a private company will launch a rocket to the International Space Station, sending it on a grocery run this weekend that could be the shape of things to come for America's space program.
If this unmanned flight and others like it succeed, commercial spacecraft could be ferrying astronauts to the orbiting outpost within five years.
It's a transition that has been in the works since the middle of the last decade, when President George W. Bush decided to retire the space shuttle and devote more of NASA's energies to venturing deeper into space.
Saturday's flight by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is "a thoroughly exciting moment in the history of spaceflight, but is just the beginning of a new way of doing business for NASA," said President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren.
By handing off space station launches to private business, "NASA is freeing itself up to focus on exploring beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years."
California-based Space Exploration, or SpaceX, is the first of several companies hoping to take over the space station delivery business for the U.S. The company's billionaire mastermind, Elon Musk, puts the odds of success in his favor while acknowledging the chance for mishaps.
NASA likewise cautions: This is only a test.
"We need to be careful not to assume that the success or failure of commercial spaceflight is going to hang in the balance of this single flight," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager. "Demo flights don't always go as planned."
Once it nears the space station after a two-day flight, the SpaceX capsule, called Dragon, will spend a day of practice maneuvers before NASA signals it to move in for a linkup. Then its cargo - a half-ton of food and other pantry items, all nonessential, in case the flight goes awry - will be unloaded.
Up to now, flights to the space station have always been a government-only affair.
Until their retirement last summer, shuttles carried most of the gear and many of the astronauts to the orbiting outpost. Since then, American astronauts have had to rely on Russian capsules for rides. European, Japanese and Russian supply ships have been delivering cargo.
It will be at least four to five years before SpaceX or any other private operator is capable of flying astronauts. That gap infuriates many. Some members of Congress want to cut government funding to the private space venture and reduce the number of rival companies to save money and speed things up.
The shift to private enterprise, while revolutionary in space, has a long history in the U.S. The Internet, for example, evolved from government work. Space station astronaut Donald Pettit points to the settling of the American West: The government ran the forts, and private enterprise built the railroads.
In this instance, NASA employees are still working closely with the commercial contenders, giving advice and attending company meetings.
"I see this whole story repeating itself again and again as we move from low-Earth orbit," Pettit said. "And it will probably repeat itself when we go to the moon and elsewhere."
No one is rooting more for SpaceX than NASA. The space agency has poured $381 million into the SpaceX effort, while the company has spent $1 billion over its 10-year lifetime, said Musk, the high-tech pioneer who co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric car company.
NASA also gave $266 million to a second company it hired to make supply runs. Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. hopes to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule from Wallops Island, Va., by year's end.
"This is the start of a real new era," said Dutch spaceman Andre Kuipers, who will help Pettit snare the Dragon and pull it to the space station with a robotic arm.
Pettit agreed the upcoming Dragon flight is a "big deal," but added: "I hope this becomes so routine that people won't even pay attention to it anymore."
SpaceX will have only a split second, at 4:55 a.m. Saturday, to shoot its Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule skyward. (All spacecraft bound for the space station these days have instantaneous launch windows in order to sync up efficiently with the orbiting outpost.)
SpaceX already has achieved what no other commercial entity has done: It launched a spacecraft into orbit and brought it back intact in a 2010 test flight that ended with the capsule splashing down in the Pacific.
But getting to the space station is twice as hard, said Musk, who is not only CEO but chief designer. A Dragon capsule has never before attempted a rendezvous and docking in orbit - an exquisitely delicate operation, with the risk of a collision that could prove ruinous for the space station, which has six men on board.
If something goes wrong, "we'll fix the problem and be back at it," Musk said. Two more SpaceX delivery trips are planned for this year.
The bell-shaped Dragon capsule is 19 feet tall and 12 feet across. What sets it apart from other capsules is that it can bring back space station experiments and old equipment, as the shuttles did. None of the Russian, European and Japanese supply ships do that - they burn up when they return to Earth. The Russian Soyuz vehicles that ferry astronauts have little room to spare.
The Dragon will be cut loose from the space station about two weeks after arriving and aim for a Pacific splashdown off the California coast.
Other U.S. companies vying for a shot at launching space station astronauts - like Sierra Nevada Corp., which is designing the mini-shuttle Dream Chaser - are cheering on SpaceX since it is the first one out of NASA's post-shuttle, commercial gate.
Former space shuttle commander Steven Lindsey, director of flight operations for Sierra Nevada in Colorado, said: "It's a new way of doing business, and there's a lot of debate back and forth on whether it's going to be successful - or whether it can be successful."
NASA Stresses New Mission
Emphasis on Private Flights as a Jobs Engine Leads to Scientific, Safety Worries
Andy Pasztor - Wall Street Journal
Putting U.S. astronauts aboard private spacecraft originally was intended to accelerate the pace and slash the cost of manned exploration. But now, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are debating whether the plan's main goal should be fostering jobs to stimulate the economy.
Tension between boosting science or the economy erupted during a meeting earlier this year at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters. Addressing a group of high-level outside advisers, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver emphasized that the primary aim of outsourcing cargo and crew transportation to private industry is to promote thousands of high-tech jobs.
Alarmed, aerospace experts on NASA's safety panel shot back that the program's direction should remain focused on long-standing engineering and performance criteria: building rockets and capsules able to reliably reach Earth's orbit. Critics of the agency say moves to play down short-term transportation goals in favor of broader economic stimulus are clouding the future of U.S. human spaceflight and raising questions about safety.
The disputes are heating up as closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, prepares to launch on Saturday the first privately developed cargo capsule designed to dock with the international space station. The White House hopes to capitalize on such commercial initiatives—and NASA's projections of resulting job growth—as another high-profile bid to boost the economy.
Emphasizing job creation is hardly novel for NASA, which during the Cold War began spreading facilities and payrolls across many states partly as a strategy to lock in congressional support for big-ticket items. Contractors working on space shuttles, unmanned rovers and other projects routinely trumpeted the employment such contracts meant for specific states or regions.
The administration of former President George W. Bush promoted outsourcing cargo deliveries to privately built and operated vehicles. Under President Barack Obama, NASA also has championed using commercial spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit. But the agency now emphasizes the employment benefits of privatizing space flight after initially stressing that those vehicles would be developed faster and at lower cost than traditional programs.
Thursday, during a conference call, Ms. Garver said proposed private vehicles would "truly open up space to more people and activities" and "create high-quality jobs…in America."
Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and chief executive, compares today's budding commercial-space initiatives to the early days of the Internet, which he says "originally was regarded as a government entity" until entrepreneurs revved up growth with myriad applications. NASA's latest emphasis on fostering jobs "clearly has been led from the top," he says, "and the American public is waking up to the shift."
In an interview, Ms. Garver called the exchange at the January meeting "worthwhile" and not acrimonious. Others familiar with the session, however, say it was tense and underscored the White House's altered approach to promoting private manned spacecraft and cargo vehicles. "The momentum clearly is swinging in favor of nurturing the industry taking shape on the ground," according to former NASA official and industry consultant Charles Miller.
Lawmakers and congressional staffers "have been shocked" by NASA's sudden "public emphasis on national economic benefits" derived from space spending, according to former Delta Air Lines executive John Marshall, whose term on the advisory group expired after he attended the session with Ms. Garver and her boss, NASA chief Charles Bolden, both Obama administration appointees.
The panel warned in a report that less control over the program could lead to reduced attention to specific safety considerations. Other critics say the evolving rhetoric is an attempt to recast NASA in the context of the presidential campaign. The change "has everything to do with jobs and public relations," according to James Muncy, a former Republican House staffer who consults for space start-ups. "But it has little to do with concrete achievements in space."
NASA is pushing commercial solutions in the wake of last year's retirement of the space-shuttle fleet.Since 2006, it has invested well over $1 billion to help private companies develop manned and unmanned commercial boosters and spacecraft. It has committed a further $3.5 billion to pay for in-orbit cargo deliveries later in this decade. The agency also has proposed spending $800 million annually as seed money for private manned projects, but Congress is balking at that figure.
"I have yet to be convinced that a viable commercial market will develop" for privately built spacecraft, Rep. Ralph Hall (R., Texas), who heads the House Science Committee, said at a hearing this year.
A White House spokesman had no comment. In a statement released in Florida Wednesday, Mr. Obama's campaign said the president "has laid out a bold new vision for NASA" that seeks a "sustainable program of human space flight" and promises jobs for the state.
The Obama administration has stepped up its support for manned spacecraft known as space taxis despite rising doubts that private companies can deliver them much before 2020, the nominal retirement date for the space station. As the program has fallen behind schedule—with manned missions likely slipping to 2017 at the earliest from late 2015—supporters have changed the way they describe the ultimate benefits.
"We are going to develop a commercial capability for the benefit of the American economy," Mr. Bolden told lawmakers in March. Rather than dwelling on engineering advances during a February budget briefing, he echoed one of the president's themes from his latest State of the Union Address, saying the space-taxi program was creating jobs and "helping support an economy that's built to last."
NASA's focus on employment is evident in other ways. Despite shrinking overall resources, the agency seems adamant about retaining all of its major facilities and more than 18,000 employees. "We have no intention to slim down our civil-service workforce," according to Ms. Garver.
SpaceX faces a tricky test
Clearance for robo-capsule to dock at ISS comes only after key maneuvers made
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
This is no routine supply run.
Set to rocket off early Saturday, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft faces a daunting series of systems tests and complicated maneuvers — something similar to an ultraserious shakedown cruise for a new-generation nuclear-powered submarine — before it will be given the green light to berth at the International Space Station.
The bar is raised sky-high, and for SpaceX, the idea is to show the U.S. and its 15 international partners that the Dragon poses no threat to the station or the six people living and working aboard it. SpaceX must prove the Dragon won’t crash into the complex, destroying the outpost and killing all aboard.
Then, and only then, will the Dragon be given a “go” to enter the “Keep Out Sphere,” a 220-yard safety zone that surrounds the sprawling, million-pound outpost.
After that, SpaceX will be allowed to attempt a feat only federal space agencies in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Japan have accomplished: an orbital rendezvous with the station.
“This is pretty tricky. And also, for the public out there, they may not realize that the space station is zooming around Earth every 90 minutes, and it’s going 17,000 mph,” said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “This is something that is going 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle. So it’s hard.”
The most ambitious mission ever launched in the history of commercial spaceflight is scheduled to get under way at 4:55 a.m. Saturday from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The launch window is instantaneous. That means that 4:55 a.m. is the only time Saturday that the Falcon 9 rocket can put the cargo-carrying Dragon on course for the station while reserving enough propellant for all the required maneuvers on the crucial test flight.
Musk, a billionaire Internet entrepreneur who also heads electric car and solar power companies, normally is buoyed by high confidence. But his outlook in this case is tempered by the difficulty of the mission at hand.
The flight involves a challenging series of spacecraft maneuvers around the space station, an equally daunting berthing at the outpost, and something no other robotic space freighter can do: survive atmospheric re-entry with a return cargo, and then splashdown in the Pacific Ocean for recovery, refurbishment and re-flight.
“I think we’ve got a pretty good shot,” Musk said. “But it’s worth emphasizing that there’s a lot that can go wrong on a mission like this. So if we don’t succeed in berthing on this mission, then we’ve got a couple of missions later this year, and I think we’ll succeed on one of those.”
The plan calls for the SpaceX Dragon to fly within about 30 feet of the space station.
Then, working at a control console inside the outpost’s Cupola observation deck, U.S. astronaut Don Pettit will grapple the cone-shaped spacecraft with the station’s 57.5-foot Canadian robotic arm.
Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency will take the controls at that point. He’ll use the arm to maneuver Dragon to a berthing port on the Earth-facing side of the U.S. Harmony module. Pettit will then securely latch the spacecraft to the port.
But the orbital arrival won’t happen unless the Dragon successfully passes an extensive series of tests to prove its guidance and navigation, communications and other critical systems are operating properly.
The tests are similar to those European and Japanese cargo carriers had to fly before their inaugural arrivals.
“These are the requirements that must be achieved before the ‘go’ is given to do the final approach,” said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program.
First, the Dragon must demonstrate it can:
· Abort an approach to the station
· Retreat from an approach — stop and back away
· Stop and float freely, as it will have to when it’s grappled
· Hold: Stop and maintain its position
· Navigate: Confirm that guidance and navigation systems accurately show Dragon’s position, velocity and distance from the station
· Communicate: Establish radio contact. Receive and execute commands issued by station astronauts. Maintain contact with the outpost and the ground through NASA communications satellites.
All of this will start about 10 minutes after launch, when the Dragon spreads its solar power wings and begins a carefully choreographed series of engine firings to reach the station.
Then the Dragon is supposed to do a “fly-under” of the space station early Monday, followed by a complicated loop around the outpost — first cruising 125 miles out in front of the complex before soaring an identical distance back behind it.
If all goes well, the final approach and berthing operations would begin early Tuesday. Hatches between Dragon and the station would open the next day.
Astronauts over the following two weeks will unload about 1,150 pounds of noncritical supplies, such as crew clothing. Noncritical in case the Dragon never makes it there.
Then around June 6, the plan calls for the Dragon to depart the station, re-enter the atmosphere and splash down off the coast of southern California.
SpaceX hopes to recover the craft and return it to their Hawthorne, Calif., manufacturing facility near Los Angeles International Airport.
The mission is crucial for International Space Station operations. Assuming all goes well, SpaceX intends to launch its first, fully loaded cargo resupply mission to the station in mid-August. SpaceX holds a $1.6 billion contract to launch 12 cargo missions.
Another company — Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va. — holds a $1.9 billion contract to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft on eight cargo missions.
Orbital plans to launch a test flight of its Antares rocket in July. Then in September, an Antares rocket is scheduled to launch a Cygnus cargo carrier on a demonstration mission to the ISS. The Virginia firm hopes to launch its first cargo resupply mission to the station in early 2013.
With the U.S. shuttle fleet retired, the Dragon is the only means to return scientific experiments and equipment from the station. All other robotic cargo carriers servicing the station double as garbage trucks and burn up in the atmosphere.
“Since we no longer fly shuttles, we can’t take anything sizeable back down from the space station,” Pettit said. “SpaceX will be our route to getting all these scientific samples and broken pieces of hardware that need to be refurbished (back) to the ground.”
“This is absolutely critical to space station,” Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, added. “We really need this cargo capability to get to station, and the return capability that Dragon provides is truly unique.”
NASA, SpaceX aim to launch private era in orbit
Nell Greenfieldboyce - National Public Radio
A private spaceship owned by a company called SpaceX is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral in Florida early Saturday morning.
If all goes well, the unmanned capsule will rocket up on a mission to deliver food and other supplies to the International Space Station, becoming the first commercial spacecraft to visit the outpost.
The highly-anticipated mission could mark the beginning of what some say could be a new era in spaceflight, with private companies operating taxi services that could start taking people to orbit in just a few years.
SpaceX and NASA have been working hard to make this launch happen — and that has meant navigating the cultural differences between this small, young start-up and the huge veteran space agency.
"I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA," says Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 after making a fortune with the internet firm PayPal.
Musk says he runs his rocket company like a Silicon Valley tech firm. "That's the operating system that I have in my head of how to run an organization. And that's how I've created SpaceX," says Musk. "NASA is obviously coming from a different heritage."
For five decades, NASA was American spaceflight. Now, the space shuttles are going to museums — Discovery is already in the Smithsonian. And the government wants NASA to focus on deep space exploration, while relying on private space taxis to take cargo and people back and forth to the nearby space station.
NASA has been working with companies to make sure that vision of the future will happen. It has a cargo delivery contract with SpaceX worth $1.6 billion. And the space agency has also been handing out plenty of advice.
Musk says so far, their collaboration has worked well: "No relationship is perfect, certainly. But on balance, it's really good."
The relationship involves daily calls and emails between people who live in two different worlds.
For example, the workforce at NASA is generally older. Many top managers cherish their childhood memories of watching the Apollo astronauts on TV.
Not so at SpaceX, where Musk says the average age is around 30. "At age 40, I'm relatively old," says Musk, who notes that he was born after the moon landing.
Like other tech companies, SpaceX tries to have a flat organizational structure, says Musk. The idea is that everyone can talk to everyone else, without having to go through chains of command.
"We really try to minimize any unnecessary paperwork or any bureaucratic elements," says Musk. "I think it's also easier if you are a smaller organization than if you're a larger organization to be more nimble."
SpaceX and NASA also have deeper cultural differences as well. People at NASA feel the weight of the space agency's long history, which includes heart-breaking tragedies.
Wayne Hale, a former space shuttle program manager who recently retired from NASA after working there for more than 30 years, notes that "you go through life and you have experiences and bad things happen and from those experiences you learn perhaps to be more contemplative when you have to make choices."
For engineers, that contemplation means running more tests and doing more analysis. To a certain extent, that's a good thing, says Hale, but it costs both time and money.
"And to build a lower cost system, you need to perhaps draw the line back and not do so much," says Hale. "And that's what we're seeing with the commercial space people."
Michael Horkachuck, a NASA official who has been managing work with SpaceX, has noticed cultural differences.
"They're a little bit different in that they like to build the hardware and test it and, if it doesn't work and breaks then they'll build another piece with a little change and test it again, and not do quite as much documentation and detailed analysis as necessarily NASA would typically do," says Horkachuck, who notes that it reminds him a bit of how the Russians approach space technology.
But he says sometimes SpaceX sees the wisdom of NASA's ways.
"SpaceX is learning how we do things and why we do things," says Horkachuck, "and I think they are pulling some of the best ideas and methods that NASA has had and applying those to their program."
One thing that makes this give-and-take go a bit more smoothly is the fact that a fair number of the approximately 1,700 people working for SpaceX used to be employed by NASA — Musk estimates that's true of about 10 to 15 percent.
Jon Cowart, a NASA manager assigned to partner with SpaceX as it develops a vehicle that can carry astronauts, says that having former NASA colleagues at meetings can really help when agency officials and SpaceX are trying to relate to each other.
"It makes it a lot easier to find that common ground as we struggle to find the right answer on a way they plan do to something that we may or may not be comfortable with," Cowart says.
Despite their differences, NASA and SpaceX share a set of core convictions. They both have an almost religious belief in the need for humans to venture forth into space, a geeky love for rockets, technical know-how — plus, they both need each other to succeed.
Some people even say SpaceX reminds them of NASA, back in the good old days.
"I would characterize them as almost being like back during Mercury, and Gemini and Apollo," says Cowart. "That kind of youthful, you know, young enthusiasm that you have when you're first starting something."
SpaceX: Are Commercial Launches the Future in Space?
Gina Sunseri - ABC News
SpaceX. The next frontier?
Perhaps, but not quite yet. This relatively old-school rocket with a capsule reminiscent of NASA's early manned flights is historically significant because it marks the first time a private company is launching to the International Space Station. While the SpaceX Falcon booster looks much like your grandfather's '60s rocket on the outside, the technology on the inside is very different.
SpaceX is the brainchild of the visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk. His Falcon rockets are built in America, and so are the Dragon capsules they launch into space. Musk founded PayPal in the 1990s and has since turned his energy to spacecraft and Tesla electric cars.
"It's more like the dawn of a new era in space exploration and it's one which is driven by commercial companies," said Musk. To him, this is the future -- private business taking over for government. "There are some similarities to the commercial awakening of the Internet around 1994, when the Internet went from being almost an entirely government and academic institution to getting commercialized and accessible to the general public."
Today Dragon counted down to a scheduled launch on Saturday morning at 4:55 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It sits on a launch pad NASA and the Air Force have used since the 1960s. If the launch does not happen precisely on time, it will wait for a launch window on another day.
Musk is just one of a group of multimillionaires who are bored with earthly pursuits and have their eyes on the stars;
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is designing a reusable capsule to carry astronauts to and from orbit. His firm is called Blue Origin, and it's been testing its rockets in west Texas.
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is going for the well-heeled tourist market -- people willing to spend $200,000 for a low-Earth-orbit flight to spend a few minutes in zero gravity.
Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen has teamed up with veteran space designers for Stratolaunch, a custom-built carrier aircraft that looks like two Boeing 747s joined at the wing. They would launch a new SpaceX rocket from high altitude, saving thousands of gallons of fuel.
Extended-stay hotel magnate Robert Bigelow envisions inflatable space stations on orbit. His vision makes sense to Boeing, which has signed on to support his design.
SpaceX is furthest along the development path -- and if it succeeds, it could be a game-changer in space exploration.
Elon Musk's mantra is "faster, cheaper, better," a slogan NASA briefly used in the 1990s, but one which Musk says works for SpaceX because it isn't burdened with NASA's bureaucracy.
It does require NASA funding, though. The space agency has spent just under $300 million to fund SpaceX under a program called COTS, the Commercial Orbital Transportation System.
SpaceX picked up the early development costs for its Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule, hoping eventually to score a $1.6 billion dollar contract for regular cargo runs to the space station, and one day, perhaps carrying astronauts.
Sounds like a bargain when you consider NASA spent $8 billion to design and build the first space shuttles back in the '70s.
The International Space Station is the first destination for SpaceX -- but the shiny object in the distance that beckons explorers like Musk is Mars. The space station, Musk says, it only a way station: "It's not going to affect the course of human history in a really important way as would the establishment of a self-sustaining civilization on Mars."
What's NASA doing while all these billionaires race to get their concepts from the drawing board to space?
Administrator Charles Bolden says NASA is happy to turn over the low-Earth-orbit cargo business to private entrepreneurs -- once they prove themselves. He has his sights set higher.
"This it will let NASA do what we do best -- go explore the universe," he said in an interview with ABC News. "We want to land on an asteroid, we want to eventually go to Mars. To have the resources to do that we need to hand over the cargo runs to the space station to private business. "
If SpaceX safely launches its Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon capsule Saturday morning, its two-week test will just be starting. When it gets close to the International Space Station on its third day in orbit, it will practice approaching, then backing off.
If it passes that test, astronauts on the space station will use their robotic arm to grab the Dragon capsule and pull it in to dock. The capsule is carrying 1,014 pounds of food and supplies for the crew.
When Falcon returns, after about two weeks in space, it will splash down in the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles off the coast of California near San Diego.
Elon Musk will monitor the launch and mission from the SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, California. He says he won't breathe a sigh of relief until Dragon splashes down.
"If there is any divine being that can influence the outcome of this event," he said, "I will ask for favor from that divine being."
Private rocket launch Saturday may herald new commercial spaceflight era
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
A turning point for private spaceflight looks to be on the horizon.
The commercial rocket builder SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif.) is preparing to launch the first privately built vehicle to the International Space Station this week. If it succeeds, it will be a milestone event in the history of space exploration. However, the firm and NASA warn against placing too much importance on one test flight.
SpaceX's Dragon capsule is due to lift off unmanned atop the company's Falcon 9 booster Saturday from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If all goes well, it will rendezvous with the government-built space lab in orbit, and be berthed there to deliver a haul of food, supplies and science equipment.
The flight is part of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program, and if successful, would represent a major validation for the endeavor. The program is aimed at spurring the development of private spacecraft to replace the cargo-carrying capacity of the retired space shuttles.
"This will be one of those historic launches with the first commercial vehicle coming to the ISS to provide supplies," NASA's International Space Station program manager Mike Suffredini said last month during a briefing on the flight. "This is the beginning of a long term effort to have the commercial vehicles supply the ISS, which is a critical need for the program."
NASA is paying SpaceX $1.6 billion to fly 12 cargo ferry flights to the station. Before the company can begin making those deliveries, it must demonstrate Dragon's capabilities in the upcoming test flight.
Commercial spaceflight rising
SpaceX isn't the only company benefiting from NASA's need for services. The Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp. has also won a lucrative contract worth $1.9 billion to fly eight robotic delivery missions.
Orbital's Cygnus spacecraft, to fly atop its Antares rocket, is due to make its own inaugural test flight later this year.
"They started a year and a half later than our agreement with SpaceX, and they're also making very good progress," said Alan Lindenmoyer, program manager for COTS.
If Orbital and SpaceX can accomplish what they aim to, they could herald a new era of government-commercial cooperation in space. The COTS program is a departure from NASA's usual way of doing business by designing and building all of its spacecraft in-house.
"We wanted to become a consumer of services rather than a customer of requirements — that would be our more traditional approach," Lindenmoyer said. "We believe that these capabilities are within the grasp of U.S. commercial industry."
Coming soon: private space taxis
Ultimately, COTS itself is in some ways a dress rehearsal for NASA's larger goal of using private spacecraft to carry people, not just cargo, to low-Earth orbit.
Dragon is designed to need only relatively minor modifications to house humans, and Orbital has stated it could upgrade the Cygnus for manned spaceflight as well. And NASA has contracts with additional companies such as Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada and United Launch Alliance to develop man-rated vehicles to transport astronauts to the space station.
"I think we're going to see dramatic advancements in spaceflight for the first time in a long time," SpaceX founder Elon Musk told SPACE.com. "Now I think we're seeing the upward trajectory of a new movement, which is commercial spaceflight. And I think that will result in quite rapid improvements in technology, and we've seen some of that already. I think what we're doing is showing that there's a steady march of progress."
These initiatives within NASA come at a time of burgeoning prospects in the field of suborbital space travel. Suborbital spacecraft make short dives up to the edge of space without completing a full orbit around our planet. They are quicker and less expensive, and offer a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth from space.
Another suite of commercial companies are the main players in this new arena. Leading the pack is Virgin Galactic, a company founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson to take paying passengers on space joy rides. Virgin is currently testing its SpaceShipTwo space plane, and aims to fly tourists and scientists within the next few years.
Other companies such as Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR Aerospace, and Blue Origin are also developing suborbital spacecraft.
SpaceX Dragon blasting off to Space Station
Link up will represent a milestone for commercial space craft
Matthew Shaer - Christian Science Monitor
On Saturday, SpaceX will send its Dragon capsule spiraling all the way up to the International Space Station, approximately 230 miles above the surface of the earth – the first time a commercially-built, private spacecraft has linked up with the orbiter. In a press release, representatives for SpaceX called the mission a "milestone," which could help yield "rapid advances" in space transport.
"This is a demonstration mission, a test flight primarily designed to provide NASA and SpaceX with valuable insight to ensure successful future missions," the SpaceX team wrote.
The Dragon was originally slated to blast off in late April, but unspecified problems with the docking software hampered the launch, and the event was rescheduled for 4:55 am on Saturday morning.
According to a schedule provided by SpaceX, three days after launch, the Dragon, which is unmanned, will draw close to the International Space Station. On the fourth day, NASA will decide if the Dragon "is allowed to attempt to berth with the station. If so, [the capsule] approaches; it is captured by station’s robotic arm and attached to the station. This requires extreme precision even as both Dragon and station orbit the earth every 90 minutes."
In other words, these things are going to be moving very fast indeed. And SpaceX is prepared for the possibility of failure: "If any aspect of the mission is not successful, SpaceX will learn from the experience and try again," the company said. But if the Dragon is successful, SpaceX will move forward on a NASA contract to ferry supplies, over a series of 12 flights, to and from the ISS.
SpaceX readies historic mission
Jonathan Amos - BBC News
California's SpaceX company will look to establish a piece of history on Saturday when it launches its Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.
The vehicle will lift the Dragon cargo capsule into orbit on a mission to resupply the space station.
It will be the first time a commercial company has provided such a service.
Although billed as a demonstration, the mission has major significance because it marks a big change in the way the US wants to conduct its space operations.
Both SpaceX and another private firm, Orbital Sciences Corp, have been given billion-dollar contracts to keep the space station stocked with food and equipment. Orbital hopes to make its first visit to the manned outpost with its Antares/Cygnus system in the coming year.
Lift-off for the Falcon is timed for 04:55 EDT (08:55 GMT; 09:55 BST). It is going up from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
“The ascent phase should last a little under 10 minutes, with the Dragon capsule being ejected just over 300km (185 miles) above the Earth.
The conical spaceship will then deploy its solar panels and check out its guidance and navigation systems before firing its thrusters to chase down the station.
A practice rendezvous is planned for Monday when Dragon will move to within 2.5km (1.5 miles) of the station.
If Nasa and SpaceX are satisfied that the vehicle is performing well, it will be commanded to fly up and over the outpost in preparation for close-in manoeuvres on Tuesday.
Unlike the Russian and European robotic freighters that drive all the way into docking ports on the International Space Station (ISS), Dragon will move itself to a position just 10m (32ft) under the platform where it will be grabbed by a robotic arm operated by astronauts inside the orbiting laboratory.
The arm will berth Dragon to the "Harmony" connecting module on the ISS. The crew are then expected to start unloading the ship's supplies of food and other consumables on Wednesday.
"There's no question that some people are putting too much weight on this flight because it is explicitly a test flight; and, indeed, we may not succeed in getting all the way to the space station," cautions Elon Musk, the CEO and chief designer at SpaceX.
"There are, hopefully, going to be two more flights to the space station later this year with almost identical configuration, so if this one doesn't succeed I'm confident one of the other two will. There should be no doubt about our resolve."
This mission is part of Nasa's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (Cots) programme which was established to help shift some of the agency's traditional roles and activities into the private sector.
Nasa is provided seed funding of approximately $800m to SpaceX and Orbital to enable them to develop their rocket and capsule systems. Once they have reached the milestones laid out under Cots, the full ISS re-supply contracts will kick in.
For SpaceX, this is valued at $1.6bn (£1bn) and calls for a minimum of 12 Dragon missions to the ISS.
But the significance of the upcoming mission goes far beyond the delivery of astronaut dinners and replacement parts for the station.
Nasa is attempting to offload routine human spaceflight operations in low-Earth orbit to commercial industry in a way similar to how large organisations might contract out their IT or payroll.
The agency will now set performance targets; it will be up to the individual companies to work out how best to meet those targets.
At the centre of this philosophy is the use of "fixed-price" contracts, rather than the "cost-plus" model that has featured so prominently in space programmes of the past.
The intention is to free Nasa to concentrate more of its effort and funds on planning exploration missions far beyond Earth, to asteroids and Mars.
This means privateers picking up not just the unmanned cargo runs to the ISS, but the delivery and return of crew as well.
Testing Private Ship to the Space Station, and Wine, Too
Kenneth Chang - New York Times
In space, how quickly does grape juice turn to wine?
Two California high school students hope to find out soon. Their experiment is one of 11 aboard a rocket scheduled to blast off early Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to the International Space Station. “We think it’s going to ferment faster,” said Max Holden, a ninth grader at Chaminade College Preparatory in West Hills, Calif.
But there is no guarantee that the seven-inch tube of yeast and grape juice will ever reach its destination.
The launching is a test flight of a spacecraft built by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif. The event is slightly historic: if all goes well, the ship will be the first operated by a private company, rather than the government, to supply the space station.
Erring on the side of caution, officials at NASA and SpaceX have stressed that the purpose of the mission is to shake out glitches. “I think there’s a significant chance the mission does not succeed,” said Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX.
The craft, a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon capsule on top of it, will carry more than 1,000 pounds of cargo, mostly food and clothing — items that NASA regards as no big loss should the launching fail.
The only scientific experiments on the mission are those devised by students as part of a program run by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. They will explore the effects of zero gravity, including whether medicines can slow bone loss and whether certain bacteria that eat plastic would thrive and eat greater amounts of plastic in space.
The liftoff, set for 4:55 Saturday morning, is timed to take place at the moment the launching pad lines up with the space station’s orbit. If weather or a technical problem keeps the rocket on the ground, SpaceX will have to wait until 3:44 a.m. Tuesday for the pad and orbit to line up again.
After reaching orbit, the Dragon capsule is to perform a series of test maneuvers. On the third day, it is scheduled to fly 1.5 miles under the space station to demonstrate its navigation and communication systems. If it passes the tests, NASA will give the go-ahead for the final approach on Tuesday, when Donald R. Pettit, a NASA astronaut, will use the space station’s robotic arm to grab the Dragon and pull it to a docking port.
If successful, the Dragon would be the first commercial spacecraft to visit the space station, and SpaceX would collect the remaining payments on a $396 million agreement with NASA to develop the cargo ship. SpaceX would then enter a $1.6 billion contract for a dozen cargo flights to the station.
If the flight fails, SpaceX would have to repeat the demonstration flight until it succeeds.
SpaceX has so far avoided the early failures that typically accompany a new rocket like the Falcon 9. The maiden flight, in June 2010, was almost flawless. The second flight — the first under the NASA agreement — was in December 2010, putting into orbit a Dragon capsule that successfully parachuted back to Earth.
The successes have, however, taken longer than anticipated. SpaceX originally predicted its first visit to the space station would be in 2009. The delays were not a big surprise, Mr. Musk said, given the complexities.
“Certainly, we would have hoped to have been further ahead,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have expected that with great confidence.”
For the students at Chaminade Preparatory looking forward to the winemaking experiment, the launching will be particularly exciting. If the capsule makes it to the space station, one of the astronauts there will mix the grape juice and yeast and let it ferment for five days.
Max Holden and his lab partner, Paige D’Andrea, a 10th grader, will perform the same experiment, and when the space wine is returned to Earth about a month later, they will compare the two.
“When we get it back, we’re going to get one of the priests to bless it,” said Nancy McIntyre, the director of the project for Chaminade, a Catholic school.
To figure out which one is more alcoholic, the students will not taste any of the fermented grape juice, but instead will measure the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the yeast.
Weather unlikely to be an issue for Dragon departure
SpaceX launch set for Saturday's wee hours
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
SpaceX aims to roll out a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft today, and meteorologists say the weather looks good for a planned launch early Saturday.
Standing 157 feet tall, the Falcon 9 and Dragon are slated to blast off at 4:55 a.m. Saturday at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Liftoff is precisely timed to put the Dragon on course for a rendezvous and berthing at the International Space Station. SpaceX will have a back-up launch opportunity early next Tuesday.
Meteorologists at the Air Force 45th Space Wing Weather Squadron say there is a 70 percent chance conditions will be acceptable for launch.
The only concern is a possibility of thick, electrically charged clouds that could cause the rocket to trigger destructive bolts of lightning in flight.
Widespread thunderstorms are expected in the area today. But winds probably will flow to the north and east, reducing the threat of rain and lightning in the launch area.
The Dragon is being launched on a mission to demonstrate it can safely and reliably deliver cargo to the International Space Station. If successful, Dragon will be the first commercial spacecraft to link up with the outpost.
Dragon is carrying a light load of about 1,000 pounds of food, clothing, supplies and science experiments to the station.
The spacecraft is the only vehicle that can return to Earth with a significant amount of cargo. It will be packed up with about 1,300 pounds of experiment samples and surplus equipment before it re-enters the atmosphere and splashes down in Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California about 18 days after launch.
This mission could clear the way for SpaceX to begin launching cargo resupply missions to the station. The company holds a $1.6 billion NASA contract to launch 12 cargo delivery missions to the outpost.
SpaceX launching student experiments & emblems on 1st station flight
Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com
Students' science experiments are about to make history, launching to space on the first attempt by a U.S. commercial company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).
And like many other historic space projects, the students' payloads packed on board SpaceX's Dragon capsule have their own specially-designed mission emblems, which are also flying to the orbiting laboratory.
Set to launch before dawn on Saturday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the students' experiments, along with other cargo, will fly with SpaceX's Dragon unmanned cargo craft as it tries to do what only government-owned vehicles have accomplished to date: approach and link-up with the space station. If successful, the mission will symbolize a sea change in the way the United States approaches space travel, with SpaceX and other companies vying to take cargo and crew members to orbiting complex.
If the Dragon reaches orbit atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and passes a series of approach and maneuvering tests in the vicinity of the station, then NASA will give the go for the outpost's crew to use the ISS's robotic arm to capture the capsule and berth it on the station.
Should that happen, then the 15 experiments comprising "Aquarius" — the name given to the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education's Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Mission 1 to ISS — will be among the first payloads delivered to the station on a commercial cargo craft.
The competition among students to fly experiments was stiff, as was the contest to design their mission patches. A total of 779 student teams submitted proposals for the 15 science slots and nearly 5,000 students offered 2,299 insignia ideas from which just 22 were chosen.
There be (no) Dragons
Ironically, none of the almost two dozen student mission patches that were selected to fly depict the vehicle that their experiments are riding on.
Aquarius, which utilizes liquid mixing tube assemblies that function similar to commercial glow sticks, follows two similar student flight opportunities arranged by NanoRacks LLC on NASA's final two space shuttle missions. Further, Aquarius was first slated to fly on a Soyuz spacecraft.
When the students' experiments were re-manifested, they went from launching on the Russian rocket to the SpaceX Dragon.
The Soyuz and space shuttle appear on quite a few of the patch designs, as do more rudimentary rockets, but the Dragon's gumdrop shape is nowhere to be found. Many of the emblems do however, feature the International Space Station as their destination.
The designs, which range from crayon-colored creations to computer-assisted drawings, also include representations of the Earth, moon and Mars and the American flag.
One of the emblems does include a falcon, but rather than represent the rocket that is launching the Dragon capsule, the Falcon 9, the depiction of the bird is borrowed from the school's mascot.
Like the experiments they represent, the patches hail from student teams spread across the U.S.. Selected patches symbolize schools in California, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio and Texas.
Two tickets, round trip
The students' experiments range in focus from the effects of microgravity on bacteria to the speed of wine making — fermentation — in space. Other experiments examine the growth of fish and spiders in weightlessness and the use of cacti excretions to purify water.
The Aquarius package will stay in space for just under six weeks before coming back to Earth on Soyuz TMA-03M, the same spacecraft returning three ISS crew members on July 1.
The students' patches will also make the round trip, and will be embossed with a certification stating that they flew in space.
Each school community was invited to design and fly two mission patches. The emblems had to measure 4-inches by 4-inches and could only be produced on paper.
The Dragon that is bringing the experiments and patches to space will make its own return to Earth about a month earlier. Assuming a May 22 berthing with the station, its re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean is expected on May 31.
Elon Musk's Countdown: What's At Stake For Him And SpaceX?
Lori Kozlowski - Forbes
If there was a chance to take a trip to Mars in your lifetime, would you go?
Elon Musk, CEO and founder of Space Exploration Technologies (better known as SpaceX), has this dream. Listen to Musk for a few minutes and he talks of sending thousands, and eventually millions, of people to Mars.
Founded in 2002, California-based SpaceX makes building rockets and spaceflight a private endeavor. Watching the company develop and attempt its first missions seems similar to what it might have been like watching Howard Hughes get planes off the ground.
This weekend’s unmanned flight of SpaceX’s “Dragon” will mark the first time a private spaceship has docked at the International Space Station.
The private spaceflight company is preparing to launch the capsule into space on Saturday, May 19 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The flight of the capsule is meant to assess the spacecraft’s ability to carry cargo to the International Space Station. Dragon will carry 1,200 pounds of supplies. The supplies are for the six astronauts and cosmonauts, who are currently working at the International Space Station.
Musk, an internet entrepreneur who made his fortune co-founding PayPal, also co-founded Tesla Motors. He contributed $100 million of his own wealth to start the spaceflight company, in pursuit of his goal to make space flight and space access more common and cheaper.
He believes that human beings are meant to be a multi-planet species — that Earth is not the only place we should live.
With NASA’s space shuttle program being over, private rocket-building and privatizing the spaceflight industry seems like the next step, and where America will find opportunities to continue the dream of traveling to space.
SpaceX already builds rockets for NASA. In fact, the company has a $1.6 billion contract, as part of the agency’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.
NASA would like private industry to deliver cargo to the International Space Station on a regular basis.
If SpaceX is successful in this weekend’s effort, they will begin to fulfill a 2008 contract they signed with NASA for a minimum of 12 flights carrying supplies to and from the the space station.
The SpaceX story is one of a little, private company competing with entire nations that have similar goals. Can a little company conquer space?
Watch more on Musk and his idea to make space another home for humans, in “SpaceX: Entrepreneur’s Race To Space:”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwg8FvfuuU
NASA's economic impact in Alabama last year put at $2.8 billion
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
NASA's economic impact in Alabama last year was $2.8 billion, Marshall Space Flight Center Acting Director Gene Goldman said Thursday. Goldman told an annual community briefing that the center awarded $817 million in contracts to state companies, and 26 percent of the companies were small businesses.
Goldman spoke to several hundred industry and government leaders at the annual Marshall Center Director's Breakfast. He discussed center accomplishments, goals and challenges. Awards for top contractors included SAIC, IT services; Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, top product provider; and HMI, contractor for Marshall's occupational health services.
Goldman stressed NASA's effort to form more partnerships with industry and academia. Marshall alone has more than 250 Space Act Agreements with business and academia, he said, and it has cut the average time of negotiating such agreements from 285 days to 30 days. The main challenge remains making sure that the center isn't competing with private industry, he said.
NASA is "hoping for success" of this Saturday's launch attempt by SpaceX of a supply satellite to the International Space Station, Goldman said. NASA's ability to explore deep space depends on the success of commercial space companies providing lower-cost access to low-Earth orbit.
Marshall is working on the new heavy-lift rocket for the Space Launch System that will take humans into deep space, Goldman said. "We have a design that we think is the right one for the country and the times we're in," Goldman said. The center is currently building a new office building to house that effort, he said.
Several companies vying to fly to space station
Associated Press
Several companies are working on rockets and spacecraft that could ferry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, now that the shuttle program is over.
A brief look at each:
· Alliant Techsystems Inc., or ATK, headquartered in Arlington, Va., with aerospace division in Magna, Utah. Developing Liberty launch system including rocket and passenger spacecraft. Test flights to begin in 2014, with possible first manned launch in 2015.
· Blue Origin in Kent, Wash. Run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Developing rocket and space vehicle to transport astronauts. Also planning suborbital flights for experiments and tourists. This latter launch system is called New Shepard, after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard.
· Boeing, headquartered in Chicago, with spacecraft development in Houston. Space capsule, called CST-100, undergoing parachute drop tests in the Nevada desert. Designed to carry astronauts as well as cargo. Initial test flights to be launched by United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rockets.
· Excalibur Almaz Inc. in Houston. Spacecraft planned for tourism would also serve space station crews.
· Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va. Building Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft. First test flight for cargo scheduled by year's end from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
· Sierra Nevada Corp., headquartered in Sparks, Nev. Space systems group in Louisville, Colo. Building Dream Chaser, a mini shuttle for crews. To be launched aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. First flight with crew targeted for 2016.
· Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in Hawthorne, Calif. Run by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. Building Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft. First private launch of space station supplies scheduled for Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
· United Launch Alliance in Centennial, Colo. Joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp., builders of Delta and Atlas rockets, currently used for unmanned flights. Studies under way on manned flights.
What will commercial spaceflight cost?
Fox News
NASA has given SpaceX $381 million to develop a private rocket to replace the space shuttle -- and that’s just the tip of the money iceberg.
The space agency spent $50 million in 2009 to help foster a commercial space industry in America, essentially a down payment on the country’s post shuttle future, and it handed out another $270 million in April of 2011. NASA plans multiple future grants ranging up to half a billion in the next year and a half -- an investment that will result in the creation of the U.S. space industry and will save NASA hundreds of millions on future space flights.
But is the estimated $4.9 billion the program will cost worth it?
A May 10 report by the House Appropriations Committee cited a litany of concerns with the Commercial Crew Program, concluding that the that the overall $4.9 billion in estimated development costs with which the government is seeding private space firms is simply too much money.
As the House report noted, “there is a risk of repeating the government’s experience from last year’s bankruptcy of the solar energy firm Solyndra, in which the failure of a high risk, government subsidized development venture left taxpayers with no tangible benefit.”
On the other hand, if the company succeeds, the government won’t own a piece of the resulting business, as it did after the bailout of Chrysler or GM. The money is essentially a payment to do a job -- in this case, build rockets and spaceships capable of taking crew and cargo off-planet.
“The government needs technology, and they are paying companies to develop that tech,” explained Kirstin Brost Grantham, a spokeswoman for SpaceX.
The main payoff for Americans: dramatic savings on future trips into space.
NASA currently pays Russia more than $60 million per seat to send astronauts into space. Companies like SpaceX offer a far cheaper (and home-grown) alternative.
"The next American-flagged vehicle to carry our astronauts into space is going to be a U.S. commercial provider," said Ed Mango, NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager. "The partnerships NASA is forming with industry will support the development of multiple American systems capable of providing future access to low-Earth orbit."
Following the 2009 investments, NASA poured money in earnest into the program. Much of it was pledged in round 2 of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDEV2) program, announced in April 2011:
SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., has alone received $381 million to date, though it could receive an addition $15 million for meeting key milestones in the race to build a replacement spacecraft. In round 2, the company received $75 million for a variety of programs, including the Dragon capsule that could someday carry men into space and the Falcon rockets that can carry cargo or the capsule.
Blue Origin, of Kent, Wash., received $22 million in 2011 for its work on spaceflight vehicle design. The secretive company, backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos only recently revealed details of its plans to build a conical spaceship to transport cargo and crew.
Sierra Nevada Corp. of Louisville, Col., received $80 million towards the Dream Chaser -- which looks like a miniature space shuttle. It's a design is based on a NASA concept vehicle first drawn up in the early 1980s.
And Boeing of Houston, Tex. -- whose team includes space hotel builder Bigelow Aerospace -- received $92.3 million for a variety of items. Bigelow plans a space tourism industry around its modular orbiting hotels; Boeing has a lengthy history building rockets.
Other companies received funding in the 2009 round of financing.
Paragon Space Development Corp. of Tucson, Ariz., was awarded up to $1.4 million to develop an environmental control and life support unit.
And United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Col., was awarded up to $6.7 million to develop a monitoring system for its Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, to provide the earliest warning of impending catastrophic rocket failures.
The next round of funding includes hundreds of millions under the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability program, in which NASA anticipates multiple companies receiving funding ranging from $300 million to as much as half a billion.
Congress recommended $1.2 billion towards the program in fiscal year 2012 and $1 billion in fiscal year 2013.
SpaceX has won support from NASA and a wide variety of commercial customers because we are providing the best proposals, because we have a demonstrated track record of success,” Grantham told FoxNews.com.
“I think our success speaks for itself."
House endorses plan to let Pentagon work with space firms
Ledyard King - Florida Today
State agencies and private contractors would be able to partner with the Pentagon on space-related projects under a provision adopted by the House Thursday as part of a broad bill authorizing Defense Department programs for next year.
Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, who sponsored the proposal, said the change should help Cape Canaveral as it transitions from the government-run space shuttle program under NASA to one where private aerospace firms will launch crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
"Rolling back the red tape and enabling Defense Department, Space Florida, and the commercial sector to collaborate and work together is just a common-sense way to make America more competitive," Posey said in a statement that noted advances in commercial space by China and Russia.
Current law bars the Pentagon from accepting funds from commercial entities for non-military related purposes that are not related to a specific Defense Department mission. Posey's provision would allow the Pentagon to accept funding from non-federal entities to invest together in space-related infrastructure, such as launch sites and launch support facilities.
It's the latest development on Capitol Hill as Congress and the Obama administration try to chart a course for the next phase of the nation's space agenda.
A central part of that is the Commercial Crew program that's providing millions in seed money to four aerospace firms as part of a competition to find a safe and reliable replacement for the space shuttle, which flew its last mission in July.
One of those companies - SpaceX - is scheduled Saturday to conduct a demonstration launch of its Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral.
House and Senate members appear poised to agree on about $500 million for the commercial program in next year's budget. That would be about $300 million less than the Obama administration is asking for but $100 million more than Congress approved in the current year.
"We believe we can advance (on $500 million) and that's what we will do if it is the ultimate outcome," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver told reporters Thursday.
Garver said it's unclear whether that lower-than-requested amount would delay beyond 2017 NASA's attempts to resume launches of American rockets from U.S. soil to the space station.
Much of that, she said, will depend on the pace of progress by the companies involved and how much money Congress approves in coming years for the program.
Until then, NASA is paying Russia about $60 million every time a U.S. astronaut needs a ride to the space station.
Garver and aerospace executives are very concerned, however, with one aspect of the House version: a directive that NASA abruptly cancel the competition and pick a single contractor to move forward. Without competition, costs are only certain to rise over the long term, they said.
"Single sourcing space transportation capability will just result in a new monopoly that involves the same cost structure as the old one," said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace and an executive committee member for the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "Really only competition is the only tool to keep that from happening."
Birthday aboard ISS will be hard one to beat
Ex-Mel High teacher Acaba, 2 cosmonauts arrive
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
What a way to celebrate your birthday.
Flying aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, U.S. astronaut and former Melbourne High science teacher Joe Acaba arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday — his 45th birthday — along with Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin.
“Some people get cake and candles, and he gets the whole space station,” quipped Kirk Shireman, deputy manager of NASA’s International Space Station program office.
“This is the perfect gift,” Acaba said after hatches between the craft opened, and the new crew boarded the outpost. “Dreams are coming true every day up here.”
His father and mother, Ralph and Elsie Acaba of Anaheim, Calif., and his sister, Cindy, radioed greetings and best wishes from the Russian Mission Control Center outside Moscow. His sister sang “Happy Birthday” to him in Spanish.
Acaba, who taught at Melbourne High during the 1999-2000 school year, became the first person of Puerto Rican heritage to fly in space during a March 2009 shuttle mission.
Launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan late Monday, Acaba and his crewmates are starting a four-month tour of duty on the international outpost.
Acaba, Padalka and Revin are scheduled to return to Earth on Sept. 17.
Q&A: Space Historian on Historic SpaceX Launch
Dave Mosher - Wired.com
We may be at the dawn of a new, private era in space.
On May 19, if all goes well, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will liftoff the launchpad, bringing the Dragon spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. Until now, only the U.S., Russia, Japan, and the European Union have accomplished such a goal. If SpaceX succeeds, it will become the first private company to do so.
We have David Portree, a historian of space exploration who runs Beyond Apollo on the Wired Science Blogs. He has authored books about spaceflight, including Humans to Mars: 50 Years of Mission Planning, Walking to Olympus: an EVA Chronology, NASA’s Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age and Mir Hardware Heritage.
Wired: Will this launch be a big game changer for how spaceflight is done?
Portree: Personally, I don’t see this test launch signifying a huge change. This is a test launch, so calling it a game changer is being premature. It’s more a small part of an evolutionary process where private companies become more involved in space travel.
Everyone should remember that any new spaceflight system needs to prove itself first. You need to get these things out into space and get them working safely before making big plans. NASA made big plans for the space shuttle, and they didn’t pan out the way anyone hoped. They wanted dozens of flights a year. If that was true we’d have people on Mars right now.
So we need more realistic expectations. It’s way too soon to be making big claims for this launch or spaceflight system.
Wired: How do you think this will this impact NASA?
Portree: I’ve been fairly critical about this, but I think this is a service NASA doesn’t really need. It’s a service that has been mandated by Congress and the President and public opinion. As far as I’m aware, COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems) is something NASA never demanded. It’s described as an ideological thing to replace the space shuttle, then allow NASA to do exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. I’m kind of suspicious of this.
Congress seems to be pulling back from that and wanting to declare a winner as soon as possible, then shut down funding for the other companies. From what I’ve heard and read, Boeing may be chosen. I actually don’t think that’s a bad idea to limit to one contractor that’s already used to working with NASA, has access to proven systems and experience, and is big enough to absorb failures.
SpaceX supporters tend not to like the big aerospace companies very much, I think because they feel they are tainted by NASA’s alleged bloated incompetence. SpaceX supporters like to portray them as lining up at the government feed trough. Never mind that that is what SpaceX is doing. SpaceX supporters like to portray their relationship with NASA as different, but it really isn’t. There’s an element of truth there as far as the feed trough is concerned, but if what we’re after is reliable space transportation, then the folks with a track record should win.
Plus, I don’t think we need multiple cargo ships heading up to the space station. We’ve already got three or four ways. Once you add in Orion-based derivatives, that’s five or six different ways. Do we really need all of these others?
Wired: How much closer does this bring us to a future where manned spaceflight is cheap and quick?
Portree: I’m not sure this launch has that much to do with it. But further out, assuming that this system can actually be used for things other than cargo delivery, then it possibly could have some effect on making spaceflight cheaper.
Then again, I’m not sure it matters because there’s already Soyuz. It’s already pretty cheap and has been flying for a long time. If you add something similar to Soyuz in the same cost range, I’m not sure how much it would advance things. We’ve already got cheap ways to get people into space. Russia has had guest cosmonauts on Soyuz since the 1970s. Tourists like Richard Garriott are now filling those guest seats.
If you introduce a new vehicle, assuming it already works, it’s basically providing service that already exists. I doubt it would push anything forward drastically, in terms of cost or access. And new vehicles are risky. Losing one can dampen the entire market.
I suppose it really depends on how long you’re willing to wait. I don’t think it’s ever going to get cheap enough in my lifetime for me to buy a ticket and take a spaceflight. Even if I could, I’m not sure it’s worth a million dollars to look out of a tiny window while throwing up from motion sickness.
The arrangement now is that SpaceX is a NASA contractor. They can’t survive without NASA, as I understand it. They can talk about being cheap, but is there really a robust market? I think it’s premature to talk about the new commercial space age.
Wired: What happens if it doesn’t work?
Portree: The much-touted SpaceX business model, the thing that so many people say makes SpaceX different, doesn’t really matter when you’re talking about testing the hardware. There will be more tests and there will be failures.
The May 19 test could conceivably end with a launch pad explosion, which is just about the worst kind of failure in terms of cost, in terms of putting a program back. I’m not saying that it will fail — it might succeed spectacularly — but this is the space hardware test business, and tests do fail regardless of [the] business model. We’ve seen that over and over again from the beginning. The Soviet business model was different from the U.S. business model and both suffered failures.
If a political decision is made that we don’t need these companies, it won’t matter if it succeeds or fails unless they figure out a way to fund themselves. Congress would be justified to say, “Yes, this is great, but we’re going with this company over here.”
SpaceX is bound to have failures. It’s a new system, and failure can scare off customers. They need to be careful about approaching the next few years and finding a sustainable niche and provide a service that’s reliable. We haven’t seen this system performed as advertised yet.
Can SpaceX absorb failures? Will the government stick with SpaceX if it fails? Those are the big questions now, I think.
From astronaut-hero to space-trucker: Human spin on space commercialization
Bruce Dorminey - Forbes
The cast of “Alien” in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi blockbuster may actually be more akin to future space-farers than our citizen heroes from NASA’s Apollo era. After all, the film presents a view of space travel that is based as much on economics as wanderlust and this is arguably as it should be.
How can anyone forget the hangdog eyes of Harry Dean Stanton, who so clearly is out that far in space solely for the cash? The crew of the Nostromo, the film’s ore-carrying cargo vessel under threat from a ravenous extraterrestrial, inherently understands that sometimes great profit only comes with great risk.
We all hope that there are more glory moments in our future, with a manned trip to Mars and scientific colonies on the moon. But the recent announcement by Bellevue, Wa.-based Planetary Resources, Inc. that it plans to mine Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) could also be a step in the right direction. As the startup company, backed in part by Google billionaires Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, notes, a solitary 500-meter asteroid could potentially reap the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals ever mined here on earth.
“After this [Planetary Resources] announcement, space travel is no longer rocket science,” said Chuck Black, the Toronto-based treasurer of the Canadian Space Commerce Association (CSCA). “It’s simply an adjunct of the mining industry with high upfront costs, long lead times before return on investment, and the strong possibility that any single venture will fail.” But Black notes, such ventures are also rife with great potential for profit.
The global space community could stand a healthy injection of profit, since life doesn’t run on “Mr. Wizard” alone. If the best practices of commercial exploration can be married with pure science, then we might soon be on our way towards creating the space-faring diversity necessary to sustain a permanent move back beyond low earth orbit. Otherwise, costs for manned space exploration may never see tenable levels.
Even so, some argue that today’s drumbeat for space commercialization is beginning to sound an all too familiar refrain.
“Space advocates have been talking about mining asteroids and the moon for a long time,” said Roger Launius, a space historian and senior curator at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “But costs are so high that the critical component in any mining operation will be finding economical, reliable transportation.”
Such transport may not always resemble the bright and shiny space vehicles from the days of the U.S. space shuttle as “Alien” reminds us. Although the film was shot in its entirety on soundstages at London’s Shepperton Studios, parts of the film’s set had more of the feel of a filthy industrial warehouse than an interstellar transport.
“Ridley [Scott] was worried about getting that dirty, gritty real space-truck look,” said Toronto-based film director Roger Christian, who won an Academy award for best set decoration on the original “Star Wars” film and received an Academy nomination for best art direction on “Alien.” “I broke down jet engines, pieces [discarded] from bombers, and bought truckloads of scrap to build into the set. I sprayed it army green, dressed and aged it, and that was the look.”
Christian says the idea was to create the claustrophobic, cluttered work environment of a long haul cargo transport. Given likely commercial concerns over efficiency and profit, such spacecraft designs of the future may be more on target than the grand schematics of Star Trek’s vaunted starship Enterprise which was on a “five-year” mission of exploration and discovery.
And aside from the threat of being devoured, unlike today’s astronauts who are highly motivated and dedicated to their missions, the characters in “Alien” really didn’t seem to want to be there. The job was a job, even though it happened to take place on a corporate-owned starship.
“Ridley constantly said that these are “space truckers,” said Christian. “They weren’t heroes; just ordinary people pushed into extraordinary circumstances.”
An attitude of such nonchalance in space is still likely to be decades away. Until space commerce becomes as commonplace in real life as in science fiction, however, it will also probably involve some sort of public-private cooperation. At least that’s the view of Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut and International Space Station (ISS) commander, who is now an advisor to the Colorado-based Space Foundation.
“Once spaceflight becomes “common” for commercial purposes, there will be a differentiation between “workers” flying on commercial spacecraft as passengers commuting to work, and professional “pilots” transporting them,” said Chiao. “The first “commercial” flights to mine asteroids, or other ventures, will break new ground and won’t be “routine.”
But when business goes to space, to ensure that the venture can make a profit the owners are going to want to send only the best people, says spacecraft engineer Peter Swan of the Arizona-based Southwest Analytic Network, Inc., who led two recent “space and society” studies for the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA).
Swan says that commercial astronauts will probably not be subjected to the rigors of the Apollo era whose crews trained for years on any given mission. He says commercial astronaut training is likely be done within a few months at most.
Does this mean that the public will be any less enamored of space voyagers of the future than those of the past? Probably not, says Swan, who notes that leaving earth’s “gravity well” is still going to be seen as a remarkable privilege.
Even entry level jobs in space will have a certain cachet. “The perceived hierarchy of jobs that exist on earth will be replicated in space,” said Launius. “Working at McDonalds is working at McDonalds, but doing it on the moon would give it a certain patina of coolness.”
How Space-Age Nostalgia Hobbles Our Future
Contrary to popular belief, public support for space exploration in 60s far from universal
Matt Novak - Slate.com
The future used to be so much better. At least that’s what everyone under the age of 65 keeps telling me. In the 1950s and ‘60s, people dreamed of—nay, expected—jetpacks and flying cars and colonies on Mars. On Mars!
Legend has it that after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite to ever orbit the Earth, in 1957, Americans rallied behind the idea of a better, more technologically advanced future for all. This nationwide enthusiasm buoyed NASA’s Apollo program and, as much as rocket fuel, propelled us to the moon. During his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama invoked the popular idea of the “Sputnik moment” as he implored Congress to invest more in scientific research and education.
So what percentage of Americans in the 1960s do you suppose believed that the Apollo program was worth the time and resources devoted to it? Seventy percent? Eighty percent?
In reality, it was less than 50 percent.
Erik Conway, historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explains: “The Apollo program only had a majority public support—over 51 percent—for the few months around the 1969 moon landing. That’s it. Otherwise, it was less than 50 percent.” In a 1969 opinion poll taken after the lunar landing, just 53 percent of American adults believed that the moon excursion was worth the expense. In fact, during the nine years of the Apollo program, American support pretty much fluctuated between 35 percent and 45 percent. In a 2005 paper, Roger Launius, chief historian at NASA, wrote, “While there may be many myths about Apollo and spaceflight, the principal one is the story of a resolute nation moving outward into the unknown beyond Earth.” Nostalgia for the Space Age is rooted more in The Jetsons than in reality.
But try telling that to the baby boomers, who insist that they grew up in the most wondrous period of scientific adventure in U.S. history—a time when Americans supposedly united behind a single goal and achieved it. Raised by parents who spoke wistfully of watching the moon landing, Generation X and the Millennials have bought into the narrative, too. This romanticization of the past has real-world consequences because it breeds a certain kind of futility, a belief that we’re simply not able to accomplish things without every American behind the idea. The myth of the “Sputnik moment” means that we spend time hand-wringing over a lack of shared ambition, rather than actually working toward game-changing goals. Time is wasted as we act like petulant children, whining that no one wants to go to Mars anymore, rather than making the case for a manned Red Planet mission.
So where did this myth of national unity around the space race come from? There are two explanations. 1) The people currently telling the story of the Space Age were young in the 1960s. The world is a much simpler (and often much rosier) place through the eyes of a child. 2) Just as history is written by the victors, space history is written by space enthusiasts.
Unfortunately, we don’t have public opinion polls of children from this time. What we do have are toy sales figures.
Immediately post-WWII, cowboys were all the rage. Stanley Breslow of the Carnell Manufacturing Co. explained to The New Yorker in 1950: “Last year there were enough [cowboy gun] holster sets manufactured to supply every male child in the United States three times over. I don’t know where they all go.”
By 1958, the year following the Soviet launch of Sputnik, a full 50 percent of the $1.3 billion U.S. toy market was sci-fi-related. Kids traded in their six-shooters for ray guns. That’s significant to the narrative we see today about Americans’ shared Space Age ambitions. Conway explains:
There’s a tendency to assume that everyone knew all along that [the Apollo program] would be successful and that everybody enjoyed it and so forth and so on. And of course it’s looked back on fondly by the generation who grew up then, not necessarily their parents. And who is it now that are the main spokesmen of … well, everything in the United States, right? It’s folks … who were kids during the Apollo program and who loved it even if their parents didn’t.
In 1989 Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott at the University of Michigan published a paper on generations and collective memories. They quantified what seems like common sense: The events that happen around us when we’re children create the strongest memories. Or, to put it in academic speak: “[T]he events and changes that have maximum impact in terms of memorableness occur during a cohort’s adolescence and young adulthood, often referred to as ‘youth.’ ”
The study asked people in 1985 about the past 50 years, a period that included the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, the threat of nuclear war, the civil rights movement—the list goes on. The third most-mentioned important “event” from 1935-85 was space exploration, just behind World War II and the Vietnam War.
The study only measured attitudes toward the space program for those who mentioned it as a momentous achievement, but it still found a distinct difference between generations. While those of the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation simply expressed awe at the achievement, often using words like “amazing” and “fantastic,” the baby boomers were the ones who talked about national pride and the inevitability of space in their future.
A 24-year-old woman in the study said, “Our world will change in the next 50 years because of what’s going on the space industry. We may make moves to live elsewhere.” That woman was 8 when humans first set foot on the moon and, if she’s still alive, is now about 51. Similarly, a 27-year-old woman remarked, “Well, we might even have space stations and so if we destroy our world, we will have a place to go.” She was 11 during the lunar landing of 1969 and would be 54 today.
You almost have to feel bad for the baby boomers for not getting the future they were promised. When they were kids, there was a deliberate effort to get children excited about, and emotionally invested in, scientific and technological progress. Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, the dean of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology, started one of at least two Sunday newspaper comic strips borne out of concern that American kids were falling behind the Russians intellectually and weren’t sufficiently interested in science and technology. The comic explained scientific principles, often with a futuristic flair, and by 1959, Dr. Spilhaus’ “Our New Age” appeared in more than 100 U.S. newspapers.
Dr. Spilhaus sat down with Louise O’Connor, who recorded oral histories over three years with him in the late 1980s. Spilhaus recalled, “I decided to [start writing Our New Age] right after Sputnik, when I was disturbed about kids knowing very little about science. Rather than fight my own kids reading the funnies, which is a stupid thing to do, I decided to put something good into the comics, something that was more fun and that might give a little subliminal education.”
But even as parents were buying up space toys for their kids and encouraging them to read the more educational Sunday funnies, they were skeptical, even surly, about the funds spent on Apollo and NASA. Those people with reservations about the space program seemed to be primarily concerned that the money spent on space could be better invested in more earthly problems.
Shortly after the Apollo 11 crew was launched, destined for the historic first landing on the moon, a reporter from the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania went to the local mall to ask how people felt about the imminent moon landing. Many thought that the money should be spent elsewhere.
Sheila Larkin of Brookhaven told the reporter that there were “better uses for much of the money that goes into the space program. It’s great that they can do it, but there is so much poverty in the country that the money could go other places.” George Conaway, a retired machinist, said that the trip was “foolish and a waste of money—money that should be spent on the poor people in this country.” Giles Jones said that it was important the U.S. would land there first, but offered reservations: “We’re supposed to be the greatest country and we can show that this way. But there are other good uses for much of the space program money.”
The day after the moon landing, a number of Associated Press articles reflected the mixed public opinion about the historic event. One of the articles focused on the feelings of New Englanders and was generally positive, quoting people who called the achievement “amazing” and “unbelievable” but the piece also quoted people like Barbara C. Sauer from Portland, Maine, who said, “It’s really a good accomplishment, but the money should be spent here on earth.” The article also quotes Frederick W. Varney, a 50-year-old service station operator from Bangor, Maine, who said that he hope it does some good but, “I think it’s a waste of money.”
That widespread ambivalence plays into another part of the “Sputnik moment” myth: that NASA’s coffers were bursting during the ‘60s. Erik Conway, the historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me, “The basic facts are that every year after 1964 Congress cut the NASA budget. Why did they do that? Well, the reality simply was that the public support wasn’t there.”
Personally, I’d like to see NASA well-funded. Space exploration is an important part of our future, and I firmly believe that we can push the boundaries of science while still addressing important domestic issues of poverty, racism, and health care—just as we did to certain degrees of success in the 1960s and ‘70s. But if we continue to perpetuate the inaccurate myth, we’re essentially declaring that America’s best days are behind us, instilling a certain futility. How might we live up to the greatness of an era when everyone got along and the nation stood united in a single goal? By approaching the future and the challenges ahead with a better understanding of history—stripping away the fictions of our retro-futures—our greatest obstacles may start to seem surmountable. With any luck, our children’s children might romanticize the 2010s as a time when people used to get things done.
Two Shuttles, Two Launches, One Planet…and a Five-Day Goal
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
When Challenger exploded on 28 January 1986, it crushed many dreams of America’s space programme. The Shuttle was expected to open new frontiers and deliver people into orbit with unrivalled frequency and reliability…but herein was one of its fatal flaws. Fifteen missions were planned in 1986, followed by 24 in 1987, and it was long feared that this monstrous launch rate would push the Shuttle’s workforce beyond its limits and drive the fleet to its knees.
The Rogers Commission would harshly criticise not only the technical causes of Challenger, but also the managerial cancers that enabled it to happen. Schedule pressure was one such cancer and in few other areas was its oppressive breath more acutely felt than in NASA’s plan to launch two Shuttles, within five days, in May 1986.
Twenty-six years ago, this week, Challenger and her sister Atlantis should have been on Pads 39B and 39A, primed and ready to send a pair of spacecraft to Jupiter. One of them, Ulysses, would employ the giant planet’s gravity to slingshot it out of the ecliptic plane and explore the Sun’s polar regions, whilst the second, Galileo, was destined to enter orbit around Jupiter itself.
With only a few days available in the ‘launch window’, the Ulysses flight (Mission 61F) would fly on 15 May and the Galileo flight (Mission 61G) would follow on the 20th. Both would last four days, meaning that one would blast off less than 24 hours after the other had landed…and both would highlight an appalling game of Russian roulette that NASA played with its astronauts and a pair of multi-billion-dollar national assets.
“As with any flight,” said 61F commander Rick Hauck in a NASA oral history, “if everything goes well, it’s not risky. It’s when things start to go wrong that you wonder how close you are to the edge.” The two missions became known as the ‘Death Star’ flights, because their risk encompassed far more than the obvious dangers associated with a Shuttle launch. Ulysses and Galileo both carried plutonium-fed nuclear generators and both would be propelled from Earth orbit by a liquid-fuelled rocket, the Centaur-G Prime, built by General Dynamics. Nine metres long and four wide, the Centaur was a thin-skinned ‘balloon’ tank; it depended upon full pressurisation to support its weight. “If it were not pressurised,” explained Hauck, “but suspended, and you pushed on it with your finger, the tank walls would give and you’d be flexing the metal!” Notwithstanding the hazards, the Centaur provided more oomph to push payloads toward interplanetary targets than solid rockets could accomplish.
Historically, NASA’s safety rule of thumb dictated that no single failure should endanger the vehicle or its crew…but much of the Centaur’s pressure regulation hardware, worryingly, was non-redundant, with no backup capability. That was not all. The booster carried so much propellant – more than 16,500 kg of volatile liquid oxygen and hydrogen – that engineers and astronauts feared it might ‘slosh’ around in the tanks and impair the Shuttle’s controllability. If an emergency occurred, minutes after liftoff, necessitating a launch abort, the astronauts would have to dump the Centaur’s propellants whilst flying to a contingency landing site, either at Cape Canaveral or in Africa. To do that in a safe manner, the Shuttle would be fitted with redundant parallel dump valves, helium systems to control them and software to execute the abort. The valves were located on opposite sides of the orbiter’s aft fuselage and could remove the Centaur’s entire load within 250 seconds…but their close proximity to the main engines and orbital manoeuvring pods raised the spectre of possible fuel leaks or explosions.
In support of the Centaur, both Challenger and Atlantis would have undergone extensive modifications. As well as the dump valves and associated plumbing, they would have carried S-band data transmitters and flight deck control panels to monitor the booster’s status. A Centaur Integrated Support Structure at the rear of the payload bay would have held the booster and primed it for deployment. In mid-February 1986, Atlantis was to be rolled out to Pad 39B, carrying a ‘real’ Centaur and a mockup of Galileo, for several weeks of fuelling tests. She would then have returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building for the ‘real’ Galileo to be loaded and then rolled to Pad 39A in early April. By the middle of the month, Challenger would join her on adjacent Pad 39B with Ulysses.
As NASA’s newest orbiter, Atlantis had received many Centaur modifications during her construction and, ironically, Challenger would have undergone her own modifications in the aftermath of her tragic Mission 51L. Atlantis’ cargo – the Galileo spacecraft – was several times heavier than Ulysses and in January 1986, NASA accepted a recommendation to fly with her ‘Phase II’ main engines running at an untried 109-percent rated thrust.
The crews for the two missions were named in May 1985. Rick Hauck had already served as the astronaut office’s Centaur representative and it was thus unsurprising that he would command the first mission. He was joined on Mission 61F by Roy Bridges, Mike Lounge and Dave Hilmers. The 61G crew, meanwhile, comprised Dave Walker, Ron Grabe, John Fabian and James ‘Ox’ van Hoften. By September, Fabian had resigned and was replaced by fellow astronaut Norm Thagard. One of the reasons for Fabian’s departure was his conviction that NASA prized commercial respectability above operational flight safety. He spent enough time with the 61G crew to see a technician clambering onto the Centaur with an untethered wrench in his back pocket and another smoothing out a weld, then accidentally scarring the booster’s thin skin with a tool. In Fabian’s mind, it was bad enough that the Shuttle was carrying a volatile booster with limited redundancy, without adding new worries about poor quality control oversight and a lax attitude towards safety.
In fact, the Centaur dictated virtually every detail of the two missions. According to the 61F crew activity plan, released by NASA on 14 January 1986, Hauck’s men would launch at 4:10 pm EST on 15 May, with everything aboard Challenger kept to a minimum: from the number of crew members to the number of crew provisions…to the orbital altitude itself. Both flights would enter relatively low orbits of 170 km, simply because they needed the main engine performance simply to get the heavy Centaur into space. Additional weight savings were achieved by the absence of secondary experiments, an otherwise empty payload bay and even the food-preparation galley in the middeck was removed.
The presence of the Centaur also decreed the amount of time the astronauts had to deploy their precious cargo. Periodically, it was required to dump its boiled-off gaseous hydrogen in order to keep tank pressures within mandated limits. After too much time, it would have ‘bled’ so much hydrogen that the remainder would have been insufficient to perform the necessary engine firing to begin the voyage to Jupiter. Consequently, for both 61F and 61G mission planners scheduled three deployment opportunities, with the first occurring just seven hours after launch.
As the commanders of the two missions, Rick Hauck and Dave Walker spent much of 1985 questioning their own judgement about how many failure modes and problems they could live with. A few days before the loss of Challenger, they were working an issue pertaining to the redundancy of the helium actuators for the Centaur dump valves. “It was clear,” said Hauck, “that the [senior managers] were willing to compromise on the margins in the propulsive force being provided by the pressurised helium. We were very concerned about it. We went to a review board to argue this was not a good idea to compromise on this feature. The board turned down the request.” Severely defeated, and doubtless angry, Hauck returned to the astronaut office and gathered his crew together. Safety had been compromised, he told them, and if they wanted to resign from the mission, he would support them.
Of course, none of them did so. Years later, Mike Lounge rationalised their thinking. In the days before Challenger, NASA was still riding on the coattails of past glories, including Project Apollo, and the astronauts considered the Shuttle bulletproof. “We assumed we could solve all these problems,” Lounge told the NASA oral historian. As if to underline the point, the 61F crew were in a flight procedures meeting on the very morning that Challenger exploded, reviewing the techniques they might need to vent the Centaur’s propellants in an abort. “Until Challenger, we just thought the things would always work.”
Assuming an on-time start to Mission 61F, Challenger would have landed on the afternoon of 19 May and Atlantis would have blasted off 23 hours later, at 4:21 pm on the 20th. It would have marked the most rapid turnaround between launches ever seen in the Shuttle programme. Could it have been done? It is a question which brings positive and negative replies. Some experts told the Rogers Commission that a lack of spare parts would have brought the Shuttle to its knees by this point, whilst others were adamant that launching two Shuttles within a week of each other was achievable. “I’m convinced to this day we would have made the launch window,” said Marty Winkler of General Dynamics, “but it was a sprint to the finish. It was like the racehorse that overtakes you at the end.”
Yet the achievability of the twin missions reveals a great deal about prevailing attitudes of the time (“bulletproof,” to borrow from Mike Lounge’s words) and an incessant pressure to get Ulysses and Galileo away on time. Any delay beyond May 1986 would ground both missions until the next Jupiter launch window opened in June 1987…and this would have incurred a cost penalty in excess of $50 million. As early as January 1984, Centaur technicians at General Dynamics had been given free 28-month calendars…which ended in May 1986. Clearly, the company’s deadline to be ready for launch was as immovable and inflexible as a rock.
The Challenger disaster marked the end of the road for the Shuttle-Centaur partnership. In early February 1986, the Kennedy Space Center’s safety office refused to approve the booster’s advanced processing, citing “insufficient verification of hazard controls”. Cost overruns to the tune of $100 million also conspired against the Centaur and in June 1986 the project was cancelled by NASA Administrator Jim Fletcher. When Galileo and Ulysses eventually flew, in separate Jupiter launch windows, in October 1989 and October 1990, they did so atop less powerful, but safer Inertial Upper Stage boosters. One other part of the story endured beyond Challenger…for several of the astronauts remained together to fly two of the most historic missions of the late 1980s. Hauck, Lounge and Hilmers formed part of the STS-26 crew, which returned the Shuttle to normal flight operations, whilst Walker, Grabe and Thagard flew STS-30, which launched the Magellan Venus orbiter…another spacecraft originally baselined for the unlucky Centaur.
END
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 5/17/2012
Tested on: 5/18/2012 6:59:04 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2012 AVAST Software.
No comments:
Post a Comment