Tuesday, June 26, 2012
6/26/12 news
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1. JSC: See the Space Station
2. Lightning Safety Awareness Week - June 24 to 30
3. Blood Drive Thank You
4. Win a Prize: JSC Features and 'Roundup' Readership Contest
5. Grab and Go Hurricane Tools
6. This Week at Starport
7. Project Asset and Lifecycle Management System (PALMS) Training Available
8. How to Be Happy Without Being Perfect
________________________________________ QUOTE OF THE DAY
“ One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love and to long life. ”
-- Alexander A. Bogomoletz
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1. JSC: See the Space Station
Viewers in the JSC area will be able to see the International Space Station this week.
Tuesday, June 26, 9:29 p.m. (Duration: three minutes)
Path: 17 degrees above NNW to 22 degrees above E
Maximum elevation: 33 degrees
Wednesday, June 27, 10:11 p.m. (Duration: two minutes)
Path: 16 degrees above WNW to 28 degrees above WSW
Maximum elevation: 28 degrees
Thursday, June 28, 9:18 p.m. (Duration: 3 minutes)
Path: 39 degrees above NW to 21 degrees above SE
Maximum elevation: 78 degrees
The International Space Station Trajectory Operations Group provides updates via JSC Today for visible station passes at least two minutes in duration and 25 degrees in elevation. Other opportunities, including those with shorter durations and lower elevations or from other ground locations are available at the website below.
Joe Pascucci x31695 http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/view.cgi?country=U...
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2. Lightning Safety Awareness Week - June 24 to 30
Summer is the peak season for lightning, with most lightning casualties in June, July and August. Lightning is the second leading cause of weather-related fatalities in the United States behind floods. Lightning-strike survivors often report a variety of permanent disabilities, including memory loss, sleep disorders, fatigue and depression. Remember the National Weather Service slogan, "When thunder roars, go indoors!"
To learn how to reduce your risk, visit http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/
A graphic of cloud-to-ground lightning strike density is here http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/stats/97-11Flash_Density_miles.png and shows southeast Texas is a "hot spot" for lightning.
Lightning Facts and Myths are here: http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/myths.htm
Frank Brody x35639
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3. Blood Drive Thank You
Thank you to all those who took the time to donate at last week's blood drive. St. Luke's collected a total of 216 units of blood. Your donation will help up to three people, that is 648 lives.
Mark your calendar for the next blood drive on June 12 to 14. For additional information, check our website: http://jscpeople.jsc.nasa.gov/blooddrv/blooddrv.htm or contact Teresa Gomez at 281-483-9588.
Teresa Gomez x39588
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4. Win a Prize: JSC Features and 'Roundup' Readership Contest
The following questions are based on the most recent editions of JSC Features and "Roundup." Answer correctly, and you are automatically entered into each drawing. Prize winners will be announced Friday, June 29. Content writers and Office of Communications and Public Affairs team members are not eligible. Email your answers to Neesha Hosein at: fareena.n.hosein@nasa.gov
JSC Features:
What happened on June 3, 1965?
"Roundup," June edition:
What device "could have a major impact on human health, particularly in developing countries and other hard-to-reach regions" and "would also be a convenience for recreational uses in campgrounds, cabins or on boats?"
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/roundup/online/
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/jscfeatures/
Neesha Hosein x27516
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5. Grab and Go Hurricane Tools
Time to be prepared for hurricane season. People with medical concerns and their caregivers have additional considerations when planning for a storm. Come get the tools to get ready so you know you are prepared. "Grab and Go Hurricane Tools" will be presented on Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at 4:00 in Building 32, Conference Room 142.
JSC Employee Assistance Program x36130
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6. This Week at Starport
Celebrate America! All items that are Red, White and Blue are 15 percent off at Starport Gift Shops. New Made In America T-shirts and caps are included!
Stop by the Cafes for a barbecue lunch! Today only we will be featuring barbecue brisket and smoked pork sausage.
Kick off Feds Feeds food drive with a food bag purchased from Starport Gift Shops. Make your purchase, and drop it in the donation box all in the same location.
Parent's Night Out is this Friday ... enjoy a night on the town and let Starport entertain your children! Register at the Gilruth Center by Wednesday to receive discounted price.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/
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7. Project Asset and Lifecycle Management System (PALMS) Training Available
PALMS training registration is now available in SATERN for EA employees.
PALMS is the Engineering Directorate's new Project Management tool for online project planning, scheduling and tracking. Closely integrated with Oasis, PALMS enables Web-based project collaboration, management and publishing of project schedules, resources and associated data products. To register for one of the monthly PALMS classroom training sessions, simply access SATERN and select one of these available courses:
PALMS Project Server Training for Team Members
SATERN Course ID: PALMS-02
PALMS Project Server Training for Project Managers
SATERN Course ID: PALMS-01
The courses are also listed under the Featured Items section of SATERN; https://satern.nasa.gov
Stacey Zapatka x34749
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8. How to Be Happy Without Being Perfect
We are a community of high achievers who strive to attain "realistic" standards that generally adds to well being and satisfaction. What happens when our self expectations become perfectionistic? How do you manage when fears of failure and disappointing others take over? Join Gay Yarbrough, LCSW, of the JSC Employee Assistance Program for a presentation on "How to Be Happy without Being Perfect" on Tuesday, June 26, in the Building 30 Auditorium at noon.
Employee Assistance Program x36130
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JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. To see an archive of previous JSC Today announcements, go to http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/news/jsctoday/archives.
NASA TV: 9:35 am Central (10:35 EDT) – Expedition 31 with “Destination Imagination” in Philadelphia
Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Space: The new frontier for medical breakthroughs
Scientists taking microbes into orbit & using their behavior as way to fight disease on Earth
Jason Koebler - US News & World Report
Deadly bacteria that have spent time in space are already on Earth—but instead of killing humans, they might just save lives. Scientists are using bacteria cultivated on the International Space Station to help develop vaccines that experts say could revolutionize the medical field. In 1998, researchers began studying how microbes such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and yeast behaved in space because NASA wanted to be able to keep astronauts safe in the closed space station environment. What they found, specifically with certain types of bacteria, was surprising, says Tara Ruttley, NASA's associate program scientist for the International Space Station.
Duane Ratliff, Director of Operations, Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS)
Irene Klotz - Space News
The way Duane Ratliff sees it, NASA and the nonprofit agency it hired to manage the U.S. National Laboratory portion of the international space station (ISS) have just a few years to prove the value of the taxpayers’ $100 billion investment in the orbital outpost for funding to be continued beyond 2020. “The ISS really does have a tremendous amount of capability and it really needs to be utilized,” said Ratliff, director of operations for the Florida-based Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS). Ratliff currently has 35 projects in the pipeline from a mix of traditional aerospace companies, newcomers from biotechnology and other industries, and research institutes that want to fly experiments and technology demonstrations aboard the station.
SLS Pad may be made reconfigurable for other launch vehicles
David Todd - FlightInternational.com
As NASA plots the future of the Space Launch System (SLS) programme and fends off accusations that it is starving the funding of the commercial crew development (CCDev) programme, the administration is keen to point out that it is concentrating on limiting both development and, most importantly, the future operating costs of the SLS. NASA's Dr. Michael Watson, Discipline Lead Engineer of SLS operations noted at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SpaceOps conference held in Stockholm, Sweden, that the SLS development team have got wise to the fact that their current and future political masters are most interested in "costs now rather than costs past" and are concentrating on developing a heavy lift launch vehicle whose costs to operate will be lower than past heavy lift launch vehicles.
Astrium Will Study ATV, Columbus Follow-Ons
Aerospace Daily
Astrium will study ways to use the technology it helped develop for Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) and Columbus laboratory module under two €6.5 million ($8 million) contracts from the European Space Agency (ESA). Results of the work, set to run until the end of 2012, will support decisions on the development of future European space vehicles at the ESA ministerial meeting in November.
Modified Merlin engine completes full duration firing
Stephen Clark – SpaceflightNow.com
An upgraded Merlin engine designed to boost the lift capacity of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has completed a full mission duration test firing in Texas, the company announced Monday. The Merlin 1D engine completed 185-second firing with 147,000 pounds of thrust, SpaceX announced. Future Falcon 9 rockets will be powered by nine Merlin 1D first stage engines. SpaceX calls the evolved booster the Falcon 9 v1.1.
SpaceX's 3 minutes of heavenly hell
Alan Boyle - MsNBC.com's Cosmic Log
SpaceX is basking in the glow of last month's successful cargo mission to the International Space Station, but it's also celebrating the glow of its next-generation Merlin 1D rocket engine, which has now gone through a full mission duration firing of 185 seconds. Also Monday, Aerojet's AJ26 rocket engine was test-fired at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, according to a Twitter update from the space agency's rocket test complex. The AJ26 is to be used on Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket.
SpaceX Unleashes Raw Merlin Engine Power
Ian O'Neill - Discovery News
Can you think of a better way to start the week than to watch a test firing of an awesome new rocket engine? No, I can't either. Monday's dose of rocket thrust comes courtesy of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, from the company's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas. Building on the technology behind SpaceX's Merlin 1C engines that blasted the Falcon 9 into orbit on the last three occasions, this is the new and upgraded Merlin 1D that successfully passed this most recent test firing with flying colors.
Sunita Williams to return to ISS as commander of Expedition 33
Lawrence LeBlond - redOrbit.com
Indian-American female astronaut, Sunita Williams, who spent a record 6 months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2006, will be making a triumphant return to the orbiting outpost, when she, along with two others, launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14, reports the Press Trust of India. Williams, 46, will catch a ride on a Soyuz spacecraft with Flight Engineers Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, NASA said in a statement.
Mixed feelings on spaceport plans
Tony Freemantl - Houston Chronicle
Schemes, dreams and sheer folly are buried beneath the shifting sands of Boca Chica Beach. For more than 100 years, people have tried to coax a fortune from this desolate, wildly beautiful stretch of South Texas coast that begins at the Brownsville Ship Channel and ends at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Some saw golf courses and resorts, marinas and cabins on the beach; some saw mineral wealth, ports and military power. None who were lured into Boca Chica's seductive web, however, has succeeded. The beach swallowed their roads and parking lots, their plans and their dreams. Hurricanes blew away their buildings. All that remains are a few hardy settlers warily eying the next one to try his luck.
Suborbital Space Ready to Take Flight, Experts Say
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
Suborbital space travel is on the verge of a renaissance, experts say, with short jaunts to the edge of space becoming more popular for research and soon to be available to tourists. Though suborbital vehicles don't make a full orbit around the Earth, they do fly high enough to offer a view of the blackness of space and Earth below, as well as about five to 10 minutes of weightlessness. Several firms are racing to send the first paying passengers aboard these suborbital spaceships.
Extraterrestrial Mining Could Reap Riches & Spur Exploration
Leonard David - Space.com
Mining the plentiful resources of the moon and near-Earth asteroids could alter the course of human history, adding trillions of dollars to the world economy and spurring our species' spread out into the solar system, a new breed of space entrepreneur says. A number of private companies — such as the billionaire-backed asteroid-mining firm Planetary Resources — aim to start making all of this happen. But it won't be easy, as hitting extraterrestrial paydirt requires melding the know-how of the space and mining communities. A Space Resources Roundtable meeting was held here June 4-7 to talk about the future of extraterrestrial resource extraction — its promise as well as the challenges involved. The conference was convened by the Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium, in collaboration with Colorado School of Mines and the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
The Last Manned Mars Plan (1971)
David Portree - Wired.com
As early as 1961, some within NASA proposed that a Mars expedition be made the space agency’s next goal after Apollo. NASA Administrator James Webb was loath to promote such a goal until after Apollo had achieved its politically motivated purpose of placing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. In Oct. 1968, Webb retired, leaving his inexperienced deputy Thomas Paine in charge. In Jan. 1969, as Apollo neared culmination, Richard Nixon entered the Oval Office. Nixon appointed the Space Task Group (STG), but otherwise placed a low priority on setting NASA’s future course. In Oct. 1969, Mars supporters within NASA found comfort when the STG endorsed – with reservations – NASA’s own proposed blueprint for its future. The NASA plan was based on the Integrated Program Plan (IPP) developed by the NASA Headquarters Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF). NASA’s plan culminated in a Mars expedition in 1981, 1983, or 1986, while the STG report only called for a Mars expedition by the end of the 20th century.
A Bumper Crop: The Cape’s First Roar of Rocket Engines
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
Until the arrival of the rockets and the rocketeers, Cape Canaveral was a sleepy place. Even its name – derived from the Spanish Cañaveral or Cañareal, meaning ‘Canebrake’ – was reflective of its dense thickets of cane vegetation and as recently as six decades ago it was home to barely a handful of scattered farming and fishing communities. Other than that, the Cape’s primary inhabitants were rattlesnakes and alligators, raccoons and scorpions and, of course, the ubiquitous, merciless swarms of mosquitoes. When the first military personnel arrived here to set up the Army’s Long Range Proving Ground in the spring of 1950, a joke very quickly made the rounds that the security detail would go to sleep in their tents at night…and awaken the following morning to the most unlikely of bedfellows: a bunch of fearsome rattlesnakes!
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COMPLETE STORIES
Space: The new frontier for medical breakthroughs
Scientists taking microbes into orbit & using their behavior as way to fight disease on Earth
Jason Koebler - US News & World Report
Deadly bacteria that have spent time in space are already on Earth—but instead of killing humans, they might just save lives. Scientists are using bacteria cultivated on the International Space Station to help develop vaccines that experts say could revolutionize the medical field.
In 1998, researchers began studying how microbes such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and yeast behaved in space because NASA wanted to be able to keep astronauts safe in the closed space station environment. What they found, specifically with certain types of bacteria, was surprising, says Tara Ruttley, NASA's associate program scientist for the International Space Station.
"Bacteria can either respond in microgravity by sitting there and doing nothing, or they can become more aggressive and virulent," meaning they reproduce and evolve to cause disease more readily, she says. But that property of bacteria allows scientists to study exactly why certain bacteria, such as salmonella and MRSA, make people sick.
Scientists aren't exactly sure why certain bacteria become more virulent in space, but Ruttley says they believe it might be a stress response to being put into a low-gravity environment. But whatever the reason, studying bacteria that have spent time in space can make it easier for scientists to develop defenses.
"If you know the gene that makes bacteria more aggressive, you can build a defense against it," she says.
Last week, William Gerstenmaier, NASA's head of human explorations and operations, told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that medical discoveries and vaccines developed on the International Space Station could help the United States "create a new economy based on space-based research."
"It's like when we went to Africa to look for new plant species to use for drugs," he said. "We can create a new industry with this."
Cheryl Nickerson and Roy Curtiss, professors at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, are leading the charge. They are studying salmonella that has spent time in space, in an attempt to "turn it from foe to friend" by crippling the disease-causing genes and replacing them with ones that protect against Streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacteria that causes meningitis, pneumonia, and many other diseases.
In space, "we can unveil many of [salmonella's] responses that are happening here on earth but are masked by gravity," Nickerson says. "We've been able to identify missing info and use the new information to understand how [salmonella] causes disease … what you have now is a discovery platform that … can be used to create new vaccine technologies."
Nickerson and Curtiss also believe that a vaccine developed on Earth, when flown to space, could become more potent if it spends time in orbit. ASU's institute recently finished an experiment in which they kept a strain of their salmonella-based vaccine in space for six weeks and compared it with the same vaccine strain developed on Earth.
"It's too early to give any updates, but we have a lot of data we're very excitedly digging into as we speak," she says.
Although her initial experiments have been promising, Nickerson says people need to be wary of getting too far ahead of themselves—she says it'll likely be 8-10 years before her vaccine or any others developed using bacteria that spent time in space are ready for commercial sale.
"I've heard people promise a translational product, and that's not what a responsible scientist will do. I can't guarantee a whole lot of things," she says. "I believe, but cannot guarantee that we're going to have next-generation breakthroughs. I think it'll happen in infectious disease, cancer, aging, and visual disorders … but we have to be careful about making claims."
But many companies are already banking on the promise of developing medical breakthroughs on the International Space Station. Ruttley says NASA's research on the human body has already led to greater understanding about bone, muscle, and heart atrophy, vision impairments, and more.
Mike Gold, director of D.C. operations and business growth at Bigelow Aerospace, a company developing commercial spaceflight solutions, says that private industry's ability to go to space will speed up research.
"We're underestimating the impact of [microgravity research and development] on our economy," he told the Senate panel last week, adding that researchers at Johns Hopkins University are interested in developing cancer drugs in space and other companies are studying treatments for muscular dystrophy and osteoporosis based on space research.
"The companies and countries that have an expertise in microgravity manufacturing will be the economic giants of the future, and the first place we're going to see that is in pharmaceuticals," he told U.S. News in a separate interview. But he says researchers need to be able to send experiments to space more often before any treatments become a reality.
"Scientists need to be able to repeat an experiment a number of times," he says. "We can't fly an experiment once and then wait five years to fly it again. To become a reality, we need to allow researchers to fly their experiments numerous times to get results."
Duane Ratliff, Director of Operations, Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS)
Irene Klotz - Space News
The way Duane Ratliff sees it, NASA and the nonprofit agency it hired to manage the U.S. National Laboratory portion of the international space station (ISS) have just a few years to prove the value of the taxpayers’ $100 billion investment in the orbital outpost for funding to be continued beyond 2020.
“The ISS really does have a tremendous amount of capability and it really needs to be utilized,” said Ratliff, director of operations for the Florida-based Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS).
Ratliff currently has 35 projects in the pipeline from a mix of traditional aerospace companies, newcomers from biotechnology and other industries, and research institutes that want to fly experiments and technology demonstrations aboard the station. CASIS also is vetting a few proposals from firms that want to fly products primarily for advertising and marketing purposes, a gray area yet to be vetted by NASA.
CASIS had a rough start after being selected by NASA last summer, losing its executive director over a public spat involving a consultancy. CASIS is operating under an interim executive director and a temporary board of directors, a situation that Ratliff expects to be resolved this month. Also on the horizon: the first solicitation for CASIS-sponsored station research experiments.
Ratliff made the case for CASIS during an informal briefing in Cocoa Beach, Fla., in June at a meeting of the Florida Space Coast chapter of the National Space Society. He later spoke with Space News correspondent Irene Klotz.
What do you see as the role of CASIS?
Our charter is to utilize the ISS to the maximum extent. CASIS has a 10-year cooperative agreement with NASA. Each year, NASA provides $15 million in seed money. We’re required to use $3 million toward formal grant opportunities and the rest is allocated however necessary, and does cover operational costs.
As a private company we can generate funds outside of what NASA sets aside for us. We can create memberships and receive philanthropic donations, commercial sponsorships, marketing and advertising. CASIS’s mission is to take the money that we generate and put it toward research and ISS utilization.
How is CASIS organized and how does it operate?
We started last year, but it wasn’t until about Jan. 1 that we had many boots on the ground. We were eight to 12 employees through the end of 2011; now we’re up to 30, with an additional dozen consultants.
Operations is what I’m in charge of, but we don’t turn bolts or build things. We outsource to commercial companies that have the expertise. NASA still manages the transportation and they still manage the ISS, so at some point we interface with them and we still have to meet their requirements. We can get our science to the door but we have to follow NASA’s rules and meet all the certification requirements to be allowed inside.
What areas of research have the most promise to pay off commercially?
There are some promising areas within life sciences. A very short exposure in low Earth orbit can exacerbate symptoms that are similar to osteoporosis, muscle wasting diseases — things that typically take years of chronic exposure here on Earth to occur. That in itself provides a wonderful model for the pharmaceutical industry, which may be working at creating drugs, vaccines or mitigations for these aging diseases.
Studies that can take years on the ground can be shortened to a matter of days on orbit with an in vivo mouse model. It’s a research pathway that’s incredibly valuable to a multibillion-dollar industry.
Another area is protein crystallization, which is very important to the medical, biotech and pharmaceutical industries. We want to focus on companies like Novartis and Merck, find out their protein of interest and start to provide a mechanism to fly experiments on a regular basis. The idea is not to mass produce crystals on orbit. It’s to understand the three-dimensional characteristics so you can develop the right drugs on the ground.
How are you going to facilitate this?
First, by sponsoring research. Our first formal solicitation goes out this month. It’s going to be focused on protein crystallization. A second one that will come out shortly will focus on material science. Our third solicitation will be within the area of life sciences.
The second major effort is our ability to network, market and receive opportunities in an unsolicited fashion. A company can come to us and say, “We’re interested in doing this. What would it take to get there?”
How much of the ISS does CASIS have access to?
Under law, 50 percent of the U.S. allocation of the ISS is ours to use for our clients. We negotiate what’s available with respect to total power, total data, capture and delivery and mass, and we basically make sure that we can fit within our allocation. There are really no constraints on any one project.
One of our challenges is the launch vehicles and what they are capable of providing. The success of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was a big relief for us because it is the only vehicle at this point that can provide a powered upmass capability. Yet we’re competing with NASA for that powered slot because they fly a lot of refrigeration and they need that.
What about non-U.S. companies flying on the station?
Right now, we don’t have the ability to support them as the U.S. National Lab manager, but foreign entities still have an opportunity through the international partners to be able to utilize their pathways to station. What’s been interesting is that there are foreign companies with U.S. ties, subsidiaries or relationships and so we have done litmus tests to see if we can support the U.S.-side of the company. We’re discussing with NASA what would be acceptable.
Is CASIS looking ahead to when a company wants to fly its own researchers to ISS?
We’re not currently developing a program that would provide for that. I think there would need to be a huge congressional push to make NASA go that route.
If someone were to come forward with a plan for conducting science on the ISS with their own scientist, that would be NASA’s decision to make.
So CASIS would not be involved in that?
This is just my opinion, but we could be involved in that. I would have every interest in supporting that effort, but at the end of the day NASA is still the governmental manager of the ISS and they would have to make that decision.
You could understand why someone would have a significant reason for wanting to fly their own people to protect the intellectual property they may generate as a result of flying their experiments. It’s an interesting challenge and I’m waiting for someone to step up and say, “This is what I want to do.”
We are working agreements with Virgin Galactic to utilize their vehicles to do suborbital testing of experiments as a steppingstone to ISS flights. We also have a partnership with a high-altitude balloon firm in Oregon called NearSpace.
There has been some talk in Congress about taking away management of the station from CASIS. What do you think about that?
ISS is really only guaranteed through 2020. But anyone you talk to at NASA who has to justify to Congress why they need to continue to fly station will tell you that you need a success within the next few years or it’s gone. To stop the progress that has been made and have someone start from scratch would eat up that much more time against that very small window of opportunity.
Obviously I have some bias, but what we have done in a very short amount of time, against tremendous political constraint, is extraordinary. We already have our first funded project that will fly in December and we have some that could go up with the next crew so we’re already flying research. Is it high throughput right now? No, but this is really the test and the demonstration of the ability because while we have our own challenges with respect to funding, capability, etc., we also internally had challenges with NASA to allow us to start flying our projects. It’s been met with some resistance.
Why is that?
This is a culture shock — not to everyone, but to a lot of people within NASA. A few years ago, if someone were to ask me, I would have thought there’s no way a nongovernment agency could take on this role. There are a lot of folks who believe that by putting national laboratory management in place outside of NASA, NASA really lost a lot of power. But they publicly stated that they didn’t have use for the entire station.
We have the flexibility to generate opportunities that NASA and any other government agency would never have. Our ability to raise private capital is something that they could never do, and that’s what is going to be necessary in order to get that high throughput. In any industry, the more throughput you have, the more you’re driving the costs down.
Whether or not we find a cure for cancer as a result of flying ISS, I don’t know, but I hope that that’s not the metric that everyone uses to make their decision about whether it was a success or not.
SLS Pad may be made reconfigurable for other launch vehicles
David Todd - FlightInternational.com
As NASA plots the future of the Space Launch System (SLS) programme and fends off accusations that it is starving the funding of the commercial crew development (CCDev) programme, the administration is keen to point out that it is concentrating on limiting both development and, most importantly, the future operating costs of the SLS.
NASA's Dr. Michael Watson, Discipline Lead Engineer of SLS operations noted at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SpaceOps conference held in Stockholm, Sweden, that the SLS development team have got wise to the fact that their current and future political masters are most interested in "costs now rather than costs past" and are concentrating on developing a heavy lift launch vehicle whose costs to operate will be lower than past heavy lift launch vehicles.
It is not only operational costs that are making NASA engineers concentrate. NASA admits that flat spending levels on the SLS launch vehicle development have given the design team limitations, but that they were making the best of it.
NASA is now becoming adept at using what they have rather than building all new infrastructure and hardware. Apart from using past rocket engines and tank systems from the Space Shuttle, Hector Delgado, Chief Engineer of Design and Developments at the Kennedy Space Centre described how the main structure of the launch tower came from the now cancelled Project Constellation Ares launcher programme, while the pad's water suppression tanks are from the Shuttle programme. The flame trenches originated from the Saturn V Apollo era.
Delgado notes that one idea for reducing operational costs would be to increase the utilisation of the SLS launch pad by making it reconfigurable for different versions of SLS and even other launch vehicles (the SLS is projected to fly at most three times a year) even if SLS operations have priority.
This reconfiguration would include having propellant umbilical arms mounted on rails which would be moveable up and down the launch tower which would allow rockets of different heights to be serviced. "Having moveable umbilicals on the tower is the key" said Delgado has he noted that Atlas and Delta IV launch vehicles might also be able use the facilities.
Delgado noted that this would not be NASA's first experience of using the same pad for different launch vehicles. For the Apollo and Skylab low Earth orbit (LEO) flights, the Saturn IB launch vehicle (the smaller sibling to the Saturn V) was launched raised platform dubbed the "milk stool" to allow it to reach its crew entry bridge and umbilical services.
While NASA's engineering team, in conjunction with its contractors, are designing to the legally required brief, would these restrictions and limitations affect future development of the SLS? Fitting the tall rocket through the undersized door of the Vehicle Assembly Building is one obvious limitation on the SLS but there are others.
In its largest configuration with two Block 2 boosters (using either advanced solids or liquid fuel boosters) SLS is currently projected to have a LEO payload in the 130-160 tonne region. NASA executives admit that this could be stretched to 200 tonnes in a four booster configuration but that this could be expensive, and in any case is not imminently required.
Jerry Cook, Associate Programme Manager for SLS noted, "we could go to four boosters at a later stage but for the time being this is restricted by pad infrastructure." This was confirmed by Delgado, who admitted that while the mobile launch pad was being modified with a rectangular slot to accept the main core and boosters of SLS, it would be difficult to get first stage refueling lines in and keep the structure stable if the exhaust "hole" configuration in the mobile pad was changed to a four booster one.
Delgado warned that with only 15m (50ft) of clearance, a safe launch of a vehicle using four boosters would be hard to achieve. Delgado also reminded that the umbilical arms have to be got out of the way as fast as possible, especially if inextinguishable/unthrottleable solid rocket boosters are used. "Once those are fired there is no stopping them," he said.
Astrium Will Study ATV, Columbus Follow-Ons
Aerospace Daily
Astrium will study ways to use the technology it helped develop for Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) and Columbus laboratory module under two €6.5 million ($8 million) contracts from the European Space Agency (ESA).
Results of the work, set to run until the end of 2012, will support decisions on the development of future European space vehicles at the ESA ministerial meeting in November.
One study will examine ways the technology from the two spacecraft — one a pressurized module on the International Space Station (ISS) and the other the largest supply vehicle now serving the orbiting laboratory — can lead to a follow-on European autonomous spacecraft with “intrinsic versatility,” Astrium says. Among possible directions are transportation to low Earth orbit infrastructure, in-orbit servicing of other spacecraft and removal of orbital debris, and missions to support an autonomous, free-flying habitat.
The other will examine how ATV and Columbus technology can be applied to the service module of NASA’s planned Orion multipurpose crew vehicle, a deep-space human exploration spacecraft under development by prime contractor Lockheed Martin.
The latter idea already has run into political snags in Europe, where ESA needs hardware to barter with NASA for time on the ISS. Building a relatively simple component to handle propulsion and perhaps avionics for a NASA human capsule has been termed a “negative application” of ESA’s technical skills by Enrico Saggese, head of the Italian Space Agency ASI. This is a view echoed by Yannick d’Escatha, who leads the French space agency CNES.
Johann-Dietrich Woerner, head of the German Aerospace Center DLR, has said one solution could be development of “a multifunctional barter element that can work in the different areas”
Modified Merlin engine completes full duration firing
Stephen Clark – SpaceflightNow.com
An upgraded Merlin engine designed to boost the lift capacity of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has completed a full mission duration test firing in Texas, the company announced Monday.
The Merlin 1D engine completed 185-second firing with 147,000 pounds of thrust, SpaceX announced.
Future Falcon 9 rockets will be powered by nine Merlin 1D first stage engines. SpaceX calls the evolved booster the Falcon 9 v1.1.
The first flight of the Falcon 9 v1.1 launcher is expected in 2013 on SpaceX's first mission to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The primary payload for the launch is the Canadian Space Agency's Cassiope communications and research satellite.
The Falcon Heavy rocket, comprised of three Falcon 9 first stage cores, will use 27 Merlin 1D engines collectively generating 3.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.
"This is another important milestone in our efforts to push the boundaries of space technology," said Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO and chief designer. "With the Merlin 1D powering the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, SpaceX will be capable of carrying a full range of payloads to orbit."
SpaceX also said it completed multiple restarts of the Merlin 1D engine at its test facility in McGregor, Texas. A modified version of the engine for vacuum firings will be used on Falcon 9 upper stages.
"An enhanced design makes the Merlin 1D the most efficient booster engine ever built, with a vacuum thrust-to-weight ratio exceeding 150, while still maintaining the structural and thermal safety margins needed to carry astronauts," SpaceX said in a statement.
The company says the engine is also tailored for high rates of production utilizing fewer parts and robotic construction methods.
SpaceX's 3 minutes of heavenly hell
Alan Boyle - MsNBC.com's Cosmic Log
SpaceX is basking in the glow of last month's successful cargo mission to the International Space Station, but it's also celebrating the glow of its next-generation Merlin 1D rocket engine, which has now gone through a full mission duration firing of 185 seconds.
The California-based company said Monday that the engine firing took place at its rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, on a test stand near the building where the recently returned Dragon cargo capsule is being kept. The test reached 147,000 pounds of thrust, satisfying the duration and power requirements for a Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX also tested the Merlin 1D's capability for multiple restarts.
"This is another important milestone in our efforts to push the boundaries of space technology," SpaceX CEO and chief designer Elon Musk said in today's announcement. "With the Merlin 1D powering the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, SpaceX will be capable of carrying a full range of payloads to orbit."
The Merlin 1D represents an enhancement of the Merlin 1C engines that are being used on the Falcon 9's first flights. SpaceX said the 1D should open the way for "improved manufacturability by using higher-efficiency processes, increased robotic construction and reduced parts count." The new engine's structural and thermal safety margins play a key part in SpaceX's plans to start launching astronauts into space as early as 2015.
SpaceX says the Merlin 1D's should see their first flight on Falcon 9 Flight 6, due for liftoff next year.
Also Monday, Aerojet's AJ26 rocket engine was test-fired at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, according to a Twitter update from the space agency's rocket test complex. The AJ26 is to be used on Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket. Like SpaceX, Orbital has been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA to support the development of a launch system capable of resupplying the space station. Orbital says the first Antares test flight will be launched later this summer.
SpaceX Unleashes Raw Merlin Engine Power
Ian O'Neill - Discovery News
Can you think of a better way to start the week than to watch a test firing of an awesome new rocket engine? No, I can't either.
Monday's dose of rocket thrust comes courtesy of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, from the company's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.
Building on the technology behind SpaceX's Merlin 1C engines that blasted the Falcon 9 into orbit on the last three occasions, this is the new and upgraded Merlin 1D that successfully passed this most recent test firing with flying colors.
According to the SpaceX press release, the Merlin 1D firing lasted 185 seconds, delivering 147,000 pounds of thrust -- the full duration and power required for a Falcon 9 rocket launch.
During the previous three launches -- including the historic SpaceX Dragon capsule mission to the International Space Station (ISS) that blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on May 22 -- nine Merlin 1C's got the Falcon 9 into space. The engines performed flawlessly.
The Merlin 1D upgrade makes it the most efficient booster engine ever built, and the nine upgraded Merlins will deliver nearly 1.5 million pounds of thrust during launch.
"This is another important milestone in our efforts to push the boundaries of space technology," said SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk. "With the Merlin 1D powering the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, SpaceX will be capable of carrying a full range of payloads to orbit."
It looks like Musk's dream of pushing mankind beyond orbit remains on course.
Sunita Williams to return to ISS as commander of Expedition 33
Lawrence LeBlond - redOrbit.com
Indian-American female astronaut, Sunita Williams, who spent a record 6 months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2006, will be making a triumphant return to the orbiting outpost, when she, along with two others, launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14, reports the Press Trust of India.
Williams, 46, will catch a ride on a Soyuz spacecraft with Flight Engineers Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, NASA said in a statement.
The team will join Expedition 32 crew already stationed on the ISS, and then Williams will take over as Commander of Expedition 33 once her crew boards the station.
Williams, daughter of an Indian father from Gujarat and a Slovenian mother, is currently making final preparations for the July 14 launch, according to NASA.
Williams, who received a master’s degree from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995, holds three records for females in space: she spent a record 195 days in space during Expedition 14/15; she has also partook in four space walks, spending a record total of 29 hours and 17 minutes on those walks.
“I’m just looking forward to seeing the full capability of the space station, it’s an experiment, not only the things that we’re doing inside but also all the engineering that has gone into allowing us to dock new vehicles, do space walks, Russian and US,” Williams told reporters at a news conference.
Williams and her colleagues will be privy to a number of activities and experiments during their time on the ISS, including a planned space walks and a planned orbital sporting event to kick off the Summer Olympics in London.
Among the experiments will be an exercise protocol called “Sprint” which aims to help the ISS crew understand if intense exercise is better than long exercise in space. “It’s a pretty complicated experiment, and from the name you can understand it’s trying to understand what is happening with your heart on board,” said Williams.
Williams is the second woman of Indian heritage to have been selected by NASA for a space mission after Kalpana Chawla.
Mixed feelings on spaceport plans
Tony Freemantl - Houston Chronicle
Schemes, dreams and sheer folly are buried beneath the shifting sands of Boca Chica Beach.
For more than 100 years, people have tried to coax a fortune from this desolate, wildly beautiful stretch of South Texas coast that begins at the Brownsville Ship Channel and ends at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Some saw golf courses and resorts, marinas and cabins on the beach; some saw mineral wealth, ports and military power.
None who were lured into Boca Chica's seductive web, however, has succeeded. The beach swallowed their roads and parking lots, their plans and their dreams. Hurricanes blew away their buildings. All that remains are a few hardy settlers warily eying the next one to try his luck.
That would be Elon Musk, a pioneer of online commerce, a builder of super-expensive electric sports cars, an audacious dot.com billionaire and the verifiable leader in the race to commercialize space travel who thinks the splendid isolation of Boca Chica is a good place to build a spaceport.
But that isolation — as well as the fishing — is precisely why Terry Heaton, a retiree from Wisconsin, chose to live here, and the main reason why he doesn't want it disturbed by the roar of rockets heading for the stars, the rumble of trucks helping them do it, or the “gawkers” who turn out to see it happen.
Heaton, his wife Bonnie, and four other families are the permanent residents of Kopernik Shores (which they call Boca Chica Village), a subdivision of small 1960s ranch houses two miles away from where Musk's company, Space X, plans to launch its rockets if everything falls into place.
If it does, and Musk chooses Boca Chica Beach over sites in Florida and Puerto Rico for his spaceport, Heaton thinks he actually might be able to succeed where others have failed.
“Everybody else has relied on people to come out here and support their developments,” Heaton said. “Rocket man is not relying on anybody except for his own business and the U.S. government.”
There is not much opposition to be found to a spaceport rising from the dunes and marshes at Boca Chica Beach. At a public meeting called by the Federal Aviation Administration in Brownsville last month, more than 500 citizens turned out, virtually all of whom supported the proposal.
The Brownsville Economic Development Council has a fact sheet touting the project's economic effect on the area — $80 million in capital investment by Space X; at least 600 jobs created; as many as 12,000 visitors per launch; Brownsville becomes Space City; local educational institutions benefit from increased awareness of science and technology.
In fact, the Space X launch facility has risen to the top of the Brownsville area's wish list of capital investment projects.
“This is our opportunity to take a page out of Houston's book and become the next Space City, U.S.A.,” said Gilbert Salinas, executive vice president of the Brownsville Economic Development Council. “We badly want this project and need this project. Just the prestige of possibly having the most successful start-up in the commercial aerospace industry launching rockets from Brownsville ... that in itself will just change the perception of our community and our region.”
Space X, which last month became the first private space company to successfully dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station and return it safely to Earth, has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to fly at least 12 resupply missions to the station. The company hopes to eventually launch astronauts in its Dragon capsule.
Following his company's mission to the space station, Musk declared that the Cameron County site was the preferred location for the construction of its spaceport, despite somewhat tepid initial support from the state, which has since begun developing a multimillion-dollar incentive package for Space X.
Florida is aggressively promoting itself to the commercial space industry through a state-sponsored office with a $10 million budget, and Salinas clearly sees it as Texas' chief competitor.
“There's pros and cons with each of the three sites, and Florida being Florida, they're not going to let this one go easily, especially to Texas,” he said. “But I think what we have going for us in my opinion is we have the best site to offer for this particular project. There's a whole lot of nothing out there.”
Other than the few residents close to the proposed launch site, the only other opposition so far has come from environmental organizations concerned about the effect on nearby public parks and a wildlife refuge.
Kopernik Shores, or what remains of it, is arguably the one success story in the long history of efforts to develop Boca Chica.
It was developed in the late 1960s by a Chicago businessman and marketed as a retirement village to Polish immigrants who were lured to South Texas with the promise of a lush tropical paradise.
There was a motel, a restaurant with a huge swimming pool, a sand-filtered water treatment plant and a massive concrete cistern to supply water.
Today, only 32 houses remain. Only five couples are permanent residents. The cistern is abandoned, and water is trucked in by Cameron County. There is no store or school. The houses are worth between $20,000 and $30,000.
Hundreds of roseate spoonbills feed in the nearby marshes. Bobcats, ocelots and jaguarundis often are seen. Coyotes roam the broad main street of the neighborhood.
The last thing the people who live here want is a spaceport in their backyards.
“This is a little, quiet, tightly knit community,” said Judy Stanley, who moved to Kopernik Shores from Missouri to be close to her elderly mother in Brownsville. “If they build that thing, we're going to have people here out the ying-yang. They're going to screw it up.”
Suborbital Space Ready to Take Flight, Experts Say
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
Suborbital space travel is on the verge of a renaissance, experts say, with short jaunts to the edge of space becoming more popular for research and soon to be available to tourists.
Though suborbital vehicles don't make a full orbit around the Earth, they do fly high enough to offer a view of the blackness of space and Earth below, as well as about five to 10 minutes of weightlessness.
Several firms are racing to send the first paying passengers aboard these suborbital spaceships.
A frontrunner in the movement is Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, which is building a space plane called SpaceShipTwo and a mothership to launch it out of Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Virgin officials have said they plan powered rocket tests of the vehicle by year's end.
Another suborbital hopeful is XCOR Aerospace, whose Lynx suborbital spacecraft is designed to carry two people to space and back, taking off and landing via a conventional airport runway. Additionally, a company called Armadillo Aerospace is developing a reusable suborbital rocket, Stig, that lifts off vertically like a conventional orbital booster.
The secretive Blue Origin company, started by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, also has a suborbital vehicle in the works.
The ticket price for a ride aboard one of these spaceships will range between $100,000 and $200,000 — a steep price for sure, but a bargain compared to orbital space travel.
"I know the interest is growing," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who runs the annual Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, a gathering for scientists interested in flying experiments aboard suborbital craft. "I think once the vehicles are flying it's going to take off."
While the companies have been conducting test flights, none have yet flown a commercial mission. Scientists like Stern, who has booked suborbital flights for Southwest Research Institute scientists, are eagerly waiting for their turn. So is NASA, which contracted seven companies to fly unmanned suborbital research payloads for the agency through its Flight Opportunities Program.
Scientists say even those few minutes of microgravity aboard suborbital flights provide promising opportunities for studies of human health, upper atmospheric research, materials science, and more.
"We've bought six flights on XCOR and three flights on Virgin," Stern told SPACE.com. "In both cases we're waiting for them to go operational."
Also waiting anxiously are the numerous non-scientists who have reserved tickets for the joyride of a lifetime. Already, more than 500 people have bought tickets on Virgin Galactic (actor Ashton Kutcher was the 500th to sign up).
"I think they’ll fly when they're ready and there's nothing I can do about it," Stern said of the wait. "They want to make these vehicles safe and reliable, and we want them to be safe and reliable because we're flying on them. It's to everyone's advantage if they get it right from the start."
Though exact timelines aren't set, the first suborbital passengers are likely to fly by the end of 2013, experts say.
Extraterrestrial Mining Could Reap Riches & Spur Exploration
Leonard David - Space.com
Mining the plentiful resources of the moon and near-Earth asteroids could alter the course of human history, adding trillions of dollars to the world economy and spurring our species' spread out into the solar system, a new breed of space entrepreneur says.
A number of private companies — such as the billionaire-backed asteroid-mining firm Planetary Resources — aim to start making all of this happen. But it won't be easy, as hitting extraterrestrial paydirt requires melding the know-how of the space and mining communities.
A Space Resources Roundtable meeting was held here June 4-7 to talk about the future of extraterrestrial resource extraction — its promise as well as the challenges involved.
The conference was convened by the Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium, in collaboration with Colorado School of Mines and the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Testing in the field
Establishing a "cis-lunar highway" is on the agenda of Shackleton Energy Co.
By 2020, Shackleton hopes to become the world’s foremost space-based energy company, providing rocket propellant, life support, consumables and services in low Earth-orbit and on the moon to spacefarers. The firm's plan calls for using a mix of astronauts and advanced robotic systems to provide an ongoing and reliable supply of rocket fuel to customers in space.
Shackleton wants to establish off-Earth fuel depots, which would allow spaceships to refill their tanks on the go. The company hopes to stock these depots by mining the water ice in permanently shadowed lunar craters. (Water can be broken down into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel.)
"The meeting provided a comprehensive review of the state of the art of space resources analysis and extraction," said Jim Keravala, Shackleton's chief operating officer. "The opportunity for the community to come together, exchange ideas and establish partnerships proved valuable as the time draws near when all these techniques will be tested in the field."
Asteroid mining
The April launch of Planetary Resources was beyond the wildest dreams of those who created the group, said Chris Lewicki, the company's president and chief engineer. Public and investment interest in the firm has been overwhelming since its official unveiling, he said.
The company counts several billionaires among its backers, including Google moguls Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. Filmmaker and adventurer James Cameron is one of a number of high-profile Planetary Resources advisers.
The technology now exists to access resources from near-Earth asteroids, and Planetary Resources' mission is to make that happen, Lewicki said.
"It’s a shooting gallery out there…and there’s a lot out there in our favor," Lewicki told roundtable attendees. "Yes, we’re the asteroid mining company, but it’s a lot more than that."
Planetary Resources hopes its mining activities help spur a broader space economy, one in which many different companies are involved in space tourism, space-based solar power and off-planet resource extraction, Lewicki said.
The central, long-term aim of Planetary Resources, Lewicki said, is "taking the economic sphere of influence of all of us and moving it beyond the geostationary belt…which is where it currently, abruptly stops."
Tipping point?
All of this could happen sooner than many people think.
"We may be teetering on the brink of a tipping point," said Leslie Gertsch, deputy director of the Rock Mechanics & Explosives Research Center at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
"Whether it’s truly a speedup, after decades of frustrated dreaming, or just a bump in the upward climb, the next five to 10 years will tell," she told SPACE.com.
Gertsch said that companies like Shackleton and Planetary Resources will "either grow to become actual resource producers…or fade into wannabe oblivion."
She noted that such groups appear to be planning more carefully than many have done previously, with much of the hand-waving replaced by viable business plans and systematic prospecting ideas.
Still, there’s more work to do. For instance, what’s the true value of a hefty asteroid — say, one 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide? At the moment, it's tough to say. It depends on the asteroid’s composition throughout, not just on its surface, Gertsch said.
"That sort of detail isn’t mundane … it’s utterly crucial," Gertsch added. No mining company can succeed unless it understands what is available. That is, where are the deposits, and which ones are extractable? What can they sell and what are the markets?
"At last serious groups of smart people are focusing on getting down to business for real," Gertsch said.
Investor-friendly environment
The roundtable produced a number of take-home messages, said Rob Mueller, a senior technologist in the Surface Systems Office at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
One of these is the need for a clarified legal situation, so there's no question about who owns resources extracted from asteroids or other celestial bodies.
"There is a shift in the space resources community towards more private industry involvement with a heavy emphasis on profit incentives," Mueller said. "The private companies need a legal framework that allows them to operate in an investor-friendly environment to minimize the legislative risk."
In this regard, Mueller said, a good analogy would be the early days of Alaskan mining when the legal framework was not clear, since Alaska had just been purchased from Russia and was not a state as yet. California had the same problem, he said.
Another message is the need to send out some bona fide prospecting probes to get things going.
"The next logical step is to land on the moon with a prospecting mission to confirm the presence of water, locate it and characterize its physical state," Mueller told SPACE.com.
Mueller mentioned the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction, or RESOLVE, hardware, built to prospect for water and other volatiles on the moon’s surface. RESOLVE is a joint project of NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.
"It is looking for a ride, and a prototype is being tested on Mauna Kea in Hawaii this July," Mueller said.
NASA can’t afford not to invest in in-situ resource utilization, Mueller emphasized, since its goal is to land humans on Mars and the space agency’s Design Reference Architecture relies on in-situ resource utilization to make it feasible.
"ISRU could also open up a new economic sphere of influence, which could be strategically important in the future," Mueller concluded.
Control-Alt-Delete
Kurt Sacksteder, chief of the Space Environment and Experiments Branch at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, asked an intriguing question at the roundtable: Inserting space resources into the future of space exploration — do we need Control-Alt-Delete?
"It seems increasingly likely that the resources for fully implementing exploration visions will never be provided at a rate sufficient to make progress," Sacksteder said. "Existing NASA exploration architectures may never be funded for realization as envisioned."
Another key question is whether — and how — the emergence of serious private investment changes the role of government in space, Sacksteder said.
"Aggressive, well-financed private investment may be enabled by re-directed government attention to high-risk technology development and carefully designed space infrastructure," Sacksteder said. "Such a paradigm shift will need a lot of work to teach its value."
'A whole different game'
The Space Resources Roundtable has been meeting for more than a decade, but this year's gathering was different, attendees said.
"This is the first time that we see a larger contingency of the private sector coming here," said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines here in Golden.
"It used to be that we would get all the NASA people discussing what the plans are and how we can contribute to that. But now it’s a whole different game….now it’s how can we get the private sector involved in all of this that we’ve been talking about for so long," Abbud-Madrid said.
Also, getting the government to appreciate the role that the private sector can play is key, Abbud-Madrid said. "I think that more and more, they are going to be taken more seriously…and that helps both sides."
The Last Manned Mars Plan (1971)
David Portree - Wired.com
As early as 1961, some within NASA proposed that a Mars expedition be made the space agency’s next goal after Apollo. NASA Administrator James Webb was loath to promote such a goal until after Apollo had achieved its politically motivated purpose of placing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. In Oct. 1968, Webb retired, leaving his inexperienced deputy Thomas Paine in charge. In Jan. 1969, as Apollo neared culmination, Richard Nixon entered the Oval Office. Nixon appointed the Space Task Group (STG), but otherwise placed a low priority on setting NASA’s future course.
In Oct. 1969, Mars supporters within NASA found comfort when the STG endorsed – with reservations – NASA’s own proposed blueprint for its future. The NASA plan was based on the Integrated Program Plan (IPP) developed by the NASA Headquarters Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF). NASA’s plan culminated in a Mars expedition in 1981, 1983, or 1986, while the STG report only called for a Mars expedition by the end of the 20th century.
Nevertheless, many hoped that Nixon would follow the STG’s advice and declare a Mars expedition to be NASA’s next major goal. This optimism led OMSF to establish the Manned Planetary Missions Requirements Group (PMRG), which included representatives from NASA Headquarters and several NASA field centers. The PMRG can be seen as the successor to the Planetary Joint Action Group, which studied Mars landings and piloted Mars/Venus flybys between 1965 and 1967.
The PMRG first met formally in Dec. 1969. Not insignificantly, that same month OMSF chief George Mueller, the driving force behind the IPP, left NASA for private industry. Hoped-for White House support for Mars exploration never materialized, though the Nixon Administration paid lip service to a piloted Mars expedition by the end of the 20th century. At the same time, it slashed NASA’s budget, leading Paine to cut three manned lunar landings from the Apollo Program and cancel the Saturn V, the largest and most powerful rocket ever launched. By the end of 1970, Paine also departed NASA, which subsequently shifted most of its efforts to reusable winged spacecraft development. Nixon made the Earth-orbital Space Shuttle NASA’s post-Apollo piloted program in Jan. 1972.
NASA’s Mars aspirations died with a whimper – a call to NASA centers participating in the PMRG for reports summing up their Mars study activities. PMRG work at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas, resided in the Advanced Studies Office, Engineering and Development Directorate, under leadership of Morris Jenkins. The chief guiding principle of MSC PMRG work was “austerity.” According to Jenkins,
to improve the probability of a future [Mars] program. . .an austere version should be considered. . .[S]uch a concept would be consistent with an initial expedition. . .[E]verything has been done to make [this study] a useful point of departure when national priorities and economic considerations encourage the mounting of a manned Mars expedition.
MSC called for an 11-year development and test period leading to a 570-day initial Mars expedition in 1987-1988. It assumed the existence by that time of a reusable Earth Orbit Shuttle (EOS) consisting of a winged piloted Booster and winged piloted Orbiter with a cylindrical payload bay 15 feet in diameter. The study rejected the notion of launching Mars spacecraft components in the EOS Orbiter payload bay because as many as 30 modules would have to be launched separately and brought together in orbit, yielding a “complex and lengthy assembly and checkout process.”
MSC proposed instead to launch 24-foot-diameter Mars ship modules on the back of the EOS Booster with help from a Chemical Propulsion System (CPS) upper stage. The CPS, which would have a mass of 60,000 pounds empty, would hold up to 540,000 pounds of liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen propellants, and would use the same rocket engine and propellant tank designs as the EOS Booster and Orbiter. The EOS Booster would carry the CPS and Mars ship module partway to orbit, then would separate to return to its launch site. The CPS would then ignite to place itself and its payload into assembly orbit. The CPS stages would be refueled in orbit by EOS Orbiters acting as tankers and reused as the Mars ship’s propulsion stages.
Mars ship assembly would require 71 EOS launches. Launch 1 would place CPS #5 and the 110,000-pound Mission Module (MM) into Earth orbit. The MM, the Mars crew’s living quarters, would also serve as the Earth-orbital construction base during Mars ship assembly. Launch 2 would place in orbit CPS #6 and the 33,000-pound Electrical Power System (EPS) module, and launch 3 would place into orbit CPS #4 and the 12,000-pound payload hangar. Launches 4, 5, and 6 would place into orbit CPS modules #3, #2, and #1, respectively. Launches 7 through 71 would see EOS Orbiters pump three million pounds of liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen propellants into the six CPS modules from tanks in their payload bays.
The assembled Mars ship would include at its front end the payload hangar bearing the mission’s 110,000-pound Mars Excursion Module (MEM) lander and 31,000 pounds of automated Mars/Venus probes. Next would come the four-deck MM. Decks 1 and 2 would constitute the MM’s primary pressurized volume, while decks 3 and 4 would serve as the backup pressurized volume. Either volume could be sealed off if it lost pressure, became contaminated, or was otherwise rendered uninhabitable. Deck four would also serve as the spacecraft’s thick-walled solar flare radiation shelter.
The 65-foot-long EPS module would carry pressurized gas storage tanks and two wing-like solar arrays. The arrays, which together would have a mass of 15,000 pounds, would be of relatively flimsy construction and could be degraded by hard radiation, so would be designed to be retracted during propulsive maneuvers and solar flares.
A tunnel doubling as an airlock would run between an extravehicular activity hatch in the forward payload hangar through the MM to a hatch leading aft into the EPS module. The airlock tunnel would also provide access to docking ports on MM decks 1 and 3.
The front end of CPS #6 would attach to the aft end of the EPS module. The front end of CPS #5 would attach to the aft end of CPS #6, the front end of CPS #4 would attach to the aft end of CPS #5, and the front end of CPS #3 would attach to the aft end of CPS #4. CPS stages #1 and #2 would be mounted on either side of CPS #3, with CPS #1 in starboard position and CPS #2 in port position.
For Earth-orbit departure, the twin solar arrays would be retracted, then a series of propulsive maneuvers would take place over several orbits. Maneuver 1 would see CPSs #1 and #2 ignite and burn to depletion to place the Mars ship into an elliptical “intermediate orbit” with its perigee at assembly orbit altitude. The spent CPSs would then separate. Maneuver 2 would occur at next perigee, when CPS #3 would ignite to boost the Mars ship’s apogee, placing it in an elliptical “waiting orbit.” For maneuver 3, CPS #3 would ignite at apogee to adjust the plane of the Mars ship’s departure path. CPS #3 would then separate. Space tugs would later recover CPS stages #1, #2, and #3 for re-use.
Maneuver 4 would see CPS #4 ignite at next perigee, placing MSC’s Mars ship on course for Mars. CPS #4 would then separate and not be recovered. The crew would extend the solar arrays, then would spin the Mars ship end over end about twice per minute to produce artificial gravity in the MM equal to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity (that is, one lunar gravity). The spin axis would remain located in the forward third of CPS #6 (the CPS stage nearest the EPS module) throughout the expedition.
CPS #5 would perform any necessary course correction maneuvers during the six-month flight to Mars, then would ignite to slow the Mars ship so that the planet’s gravity could capture it into a 200-by-10,000-mile orbit. A spacecraft entering an elliptical Mars orbit would need less arrival and departure propellant than one entering a circular Mars orbit, MSC found. CPS #5 would then separate.
The five-person crew would spend the next 15 days in orbit studying Mars and preparing the MEM for landing. The MSC PMRG report proposed a two-stage conical MEM similar to a 1967 North American Rockwell design. The MEM Pilot/Geologist (who would also serve as backup Systems Engineer), Physician (backup Bioscientist), and Bioscientist (backup Med tech/Deputy MEM pilot) would then separate from the payload hangar in the MEM, leaving behind the Commander/Primary Spacecraft Pilot (backup Med tech/Systems Engineer) and Systems Engineer (Deputy Commander/backup Primary Spacecraft Pilot) to mind the mother ship in orbit.
The MEM crew would spend 45 days exploring Mars using a pair of small unpressurized rovers resembling the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle. The electric rovers would have a maximum speed of 10 miles per hour. During surface excursions, one crewmember would remain in the MEM at all times while the other two drove one rover each. This “tandem convoy” arrangement would circumvent the onerous “walk back” limitation imposed by single rover use. If both astronauts rode a single rover and it broke down, they would have to walk back to the MEM. Maximum walk-back distance would be limited less by astronaut stamina than by the amount of water and air the Mars suit backpacks could hold. The tandem convoy approach meant that, if one Mars rover failed, the functional rover could return both crewmembers safely to the MEM. The rovers would each include a tow hook for returning the failed rover to the MEM for repairs.
The area available to two mutually supportive rovers would total 8000 square miles, compared to only 80 square miles for a single rover, MSC determined. Maximum rover range would be 100 miles, but this could be extended by carrying extra batteries. A one-day rover traverse (10 hours outside the MEM) could cover up to 84 mile. Once every 15 days, a 36-hour traverse of up to 152 miles could occur, with the astronauts sleeping overnight on the parked rovers in their hard-shelled aluminum Mars suits.
The astronauts would collect samples of martian rock and soil with emphasis on gathering possible life forms. According to MSC, the “potential for even elementary life to exist on another planet in the solar system may. . .be the keystone to the implementation of a manned planetary exploration program. . .[M]an’s unique capabilities in exploration could. . .have a direct qualitative impact on life science yield.” The report assumed that equipment and procedures could be developed to prevent the astronauts from contaminating the samples during collection.
After 45 days of exploration, the crew would blast off from Mars in the MEM ascent stage and dock with one of the docking ports (ideally the deck 3 port) on the side of the MM. The MEM crew would use the Backup Pressurized Volume as a quarantine facility until the danger of spreading martian contagion to the other two crewmembers was judged to be past. Any living organisms the astronauts collected would be transferred to a Mars environment simulator in the MM. The spent MEM ascent stage would then be cast off.
CPS #6 would ignite at periapsis to begin the 330-day voyage from Mars to Earth. The astronauts, meanwhile, would begin preliminary studies of the Mars samples to record data on life forms that might not survive the trip to Earth laboratories.
During return to Earth, the Mars spacecraft would fly past Venus. MSC’s study favored a Venus swingby-type expedition over an opposition-class short-stay expedition with less than 15 days at Mars and a total duration of less than 450 days. It also rejected a conjunction-class long-stay expedition with a 360-to-560-day stay at Mars and a total duration of 900 to 1100 days.
The opposition-class expedition would have an Earth-return speed of from 50,000 to 70,000 feet per second. This would mean that, if it used no form of aerobraking, it would need to carry up to 30 million pounds of propellants to slow itself enough to achieve an elliptical Earth orbit. Earth return would add nothing to the Mars ship’s propellant load if, just prior to Earth arrival, the crew abandoned the Mars ship in a small Earth-return capsule capable of withstanding high atmosphere-reentry speeds. The report pegged the cost of developing and testing such a capsule at more than $2 billion, a pricetag it judged was “certainly not consistent with austerity.”
By contrast, propellant needed for the conjunction-class mission, with its long Mars stay, would total only 1.4 million pounds. MSC judged, however, that
to fully utilize the year or more of surface activity, the scientific plan would be extremely complex. Even with the aid of precursor automated programs it is probable that the correct emphasis [for scientific studies] could not be predicted. . .The tendency would be to supply experimental equipment to take advantage of possible discoveries of interest. The cost of covering the scientific equipment, and maintaining monitoring support from earth scientists, would more than offset the economy in propellant. . .it is too expansive for an initial mission.
MSC found that the mission’s detour past Venus would permit an expedition with a short stay at Mars and propulsive Earth-orbit capture with the same total propellant load as the opposition-class expedition with high-speed capsule reentry. CPS #6 would slow the Mars ship so that Earth’s gravity could capture it into an elliptical orbit. The MM would then separate, and a space tug would be dispatched to dock with it and circularize its orbit at an altitude accessible to an EOS. The EOS would then dock with the MM to retrieve the Mars expedition crew and Mars samples. Upon landing on Earth, crew and samples would be transferred to “appropriate surface quarantine facilities.”
MSC’s PMRG report received only limited distribution within NASA and virtually no attention outside the agency. Formal studies within NASA aimed at sending humans to Mars would not occur again until the 1980s.
1970s NASA was, however, not through with Mars. Even as MSC completed its report, the robotic Mariner 8 and Mariner 9 Mars orbiters were entering the final stages of preparation for launch. Mariner 8 lifted off on May 9, 1971, and fell into the Atlantic after its Centaur upper stage tumbled out of control. Mission planners activated plans for a one-spacecraft Mars orbiter mission put in place more than a year earlier and launched Mariner 9 on May 30, 1971. The spacecraft took advantage of the extremely favorable 1971 Earth-Mars transfer opportunity, and arrived in Mars orbit on Nov. 14, 1971.
The first Mars orbiter, Mariner 9 waited out a planet-enveloping dust storm that hid nearly all the planet’s features; then, as the dust settled in Dec. 1971 and Jan. 1972, it began to map the entire planet in detail for the first time. Scientists viewing Mariner 9 images discovered the great volcanoes of Mars, including Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the Solar System, and Mars’s great equatorial canyon system, which they named Valles Marineris to honor Mariner 9. They also found signs of flowing water in Mars’s past: enormous flood channels and smaller branching features. By the time it ran out of compressed nitrogen steering gas and was turned off on Oct. 27, 1972, the robotic spacecraft had exceeded both its own pre-launch mission objectives and those of Mariner 8.
A Bumper Crop: The Cape’s First Roar of Rocket Engines
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
Until the arrival of the rockets and the rocketeers, Cape Canaveral was a sleepy place. Even its name – derived from the Spanish Cañaveral or Cañareal, meaning ‘Canebrake’ – was reflective of its dense thickets of cane vegetation and as recently as six decades ago it was home to barely a handful of scattered farming and fishing communities. Other than that, the Cape’s primary inhabitants were rattlesnakes and alligators, raccoons and scorpions and, of course, the ubiquitous, merciless swarms of mosquitoes. When the first military personnel arrived here to set up the Army’s Long Range Proving Ground in the spring of 1950, a joke very quickly made the rounds that the security detail would go to sleep in their tents at night…and awaken the following morning to the most unlikely of bedfellows: a bunch of fearsome rattlesnakes!
It was a touch of spirited banter, of course, but the Cape in the first few years after the end of the Second World War was quite different from the bustling spaceport that we know today. When Army master sergeant Dick Jones arrived in the small town of Cocoa Beach, he asked somebody where Cape Canaveral was and the directions he received were as follows: go across a wooden bridge and when you reach the ocean, take a left. The place upon which America’s next generation of missiles were to be tested showed few outward signs of being a place of human destiny: it was a deserted wilderness, with only a dirt track tracing a route from Patrick Air Force Base to the 19th-century brick-built lighthouse at the Cape itself. When the first four concrete launch pads were assembled, it seemed that they were the only artificial objects in this remote corner of the world.
Yet that world was about to change. In all fairness, the Cape had changed, ever since the 1920s, when the Homestead Act opened the area up to settlement, but it was with the arrival of the military that the real metamorphosis began. In the years after the Second World War, old empires crumbled and the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves as the planet’s new powerbrokers, each mutually distrustful of the other. The development of intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver conventional and nuclear warheads accelerated on both sides and one incident, in May 1947, tipped the scales of fate in Cape Canaveral’s direction. A V-2 missile – one of more than a dozen seized from Nazi Germany – launched north from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, but inexplicably veered out of control to the south. Terrifyingly, it passed over El Paso, Texas, before it crashed into the Tepeyac Cemetery in Juarez, Mexico, creating a 50-foot-wide crater.
Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the incident left the administration of President Harry Truman severely embarrassed. It underlined the need for a new missile testing site, far from population centres and sufficiently expansive to accommodate several downrange tracking stations. White Sands was only 135 miles long and perilously close to inhabited areas and as early as October 1946 the Joint Research and Development Board, under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, established a committee to analyse possible locations for a new long-range missile proving ground. Options included northern Washington state, with a range in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, or El Centro, California, with a range along the Mexican coast of Baja. A third was Cape Canaveral itself, with a range over the Atlantic Ocean. Washington’s isolation and poor weather quickly eliminated it from consideration and in September 1947 El Centro was selected, with Cape Canaveral as backup. However, Mexico’s refusal to allow US missiles to overfly Baja ultimately scuppered El Centro’s chances and Britain’s agreement to lease its territory in the Bahamas for tracking stations led to the selection of the Cape.
In May 1949, Truman formally established the Joint Long Range Proving Ground at Cape Canaveral and within a year work had begun to construct permanent roads and launch sites there. The area’s close proximity to the equator meant that missiles could take advantage of the Earth’s rotation and its accessibility by road, rail and shipping carried their own benefits. Construction was a laborious process, as heavy trucks became bogged down in the sand and cement often had to be prematurely dumped. (In fact, large underground piles of cement are still present, close to the earliest launch pads.) The rocket which flew first from this desolate place was a strange hybrid of a US research rocket, known as the WAC-Corporal, mated to a captured German V-2. It was called ‘Bumper’.
“The concept of mating the two evolved and this resulted in the launchings first at White Sands and eventually down here at the Cape,” said Dr William Pickering, a one-time head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in a July 2000 NASA oral history. “The significance of it was the first real application of a stage rocket with high altitude and high velocity. Staging, of course, has been very important to the whole science of rocketry ever since.” And ‘staging’ was to be one of the fundamental aims of the Bumper: the V-2 would power the first minute of the flight, after which it would provide a high-altitude ‘bump’ to the WAC-Corporal, pushing it away and enabling it to fire its own engine for 45 seconds to complete the second stage of the flight.
Bumper originated as an unlikely marriage between Nazi Germany’s fearsome weapon of war, which had rained death and destruction upon London and Antwerp, and an American research rocket, designed and built by Douglas Aircraft, the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and JPL. It was formally inaugurated in June 1947, with its objectives listed as evaluating the capabilities of a two-stage missile at high velocities and investigating atmospheric phenomena at greater altitudes and more extreme speeds than had ever previously been attempted. The rocket stood more than six stories tall, with the stubby, 45-foot-long V-2 capped by the slender, 15-foot-long WAC-Corporal.
Six Bumpers flew from White Sands between May 1948 and April 1949, with mixed blessings. The first suffered an earlier-than-planned shutdown of its second stage engine, but still achieved an altitude of 80 miles and a maximum speed of 2,740 mph. The second launch failed when the V-2 fell victim to an interrupted propellant flow, whilst the third suffered a failure in its WAC-Corporal, the fourth experienced an explosion in the tail of the V-2 and the sixth encountered problems with both stages. Only Bumper 5, in February 1949, accomplished the maximum success, reaching an altitude of 244 miles and attaining a speed of around 5,150 mph.
The last two planned Bumpers required more range – an additional 75 miles – than was available at White Sands, precipitating the decision to launch them from Cape Canaveral. By the early summer of 1950, the first four launch pads had been completed and Pad 3 was selected for the Bumpers, apparently because it was located on somewhat drier and firmer ground. Over the years, myths have arisen that the Bumpers ascended from little more than temporary concrete slabs, but the readiness and sophistication of Pad 3 was impressive. It comprised a series of underground tunnels and equipment rooms, over which was poured a reinforced concrete pad, measuring 98 x 96.5 feet. It had an elaborate water deluge system, built into kerbs which bordered the pad, and a catch basin to trap any spillages of volatile fuel or oxidiser.
And that fuel and oxidiser represented some of the most hazardous chemicals available at the time. Liquid oxygen for the V-2 was trucked into the Cape from Tampa and in those days tankers did not hold such cryogens particularly well; often they would begin to evaporate…and only half a truckload would actually reach the launch site. Giant aluminium drums, each filled with 32 gallons of either red fuming nitric acid or aniline for the WAC-Corporal, were also delivered in their dozens. Both of these substances were ‘hypergolic’, readily burning on contact, without the need for an igniter. At White Sands, engineer Bob Droz fuelled the Bumper personally, using flexible hoses; on one occasion, a pinhole leak had developed and the escaping substance burned the top of his head. “We were pretty casual,” Droz told the NASA oral historian in July 2000. “We took the precautions, but mostly it was just face masks and rubber gloves.” All around the launch pad, sticks were festooned with ribbons, which fluttered to tell engineers the direction of the prevailing wind. “Everybody had orders that if anything happened, get upwind,” recalled Norris Gray, then-chief of fire safety at the Cape. “Red fuming nitric and aniline…is a hypergol. If you inhaled a good whiff of it, I don’t think you would last too long. It would just melt your lungs. It would cure a good cold, real quick!”
The impending launches of the two Bumper rockets had other implications, too. Since 1949, the US government had begun condemning derelict property and purchasing private property and residents found themselves removed from the Cape by bus and housed in the Brevard Hotel in Cocoa Beach. Eventually, all of the remaining families who refused to depart were removed by the courts. Norris Gray remembered the antics of one particular woman, whom he called Mona Martin, who pulled out a shotgun when the federal judge approached her to move out of her home. “She wanted to fuss, no matter what it was,” Gray told the NASA oral historian. “Nobody else to talk to, I guess.”
By the beginning of June 1950, the construction of Port Canaveral for the berthing of range instrumentation and cargo ships had gotten underway and a few weeks later, on 19 July, Bumper 7 was raised to a vertical position on Pad 3 in anticipation of the Cape’s first-ever rocket launch.
It was not to be.
The attempt was scrubbed when the V-2 first stage failed to achieve its required thrust for liftoff. Subsequent investigation revealed that a stuck fuel valve had corroded in the Cape’s salty air and moisture. Unlike modern launches, in which safing of the vehicle is conducted from within the control centre, in the case of Bumper the technicians were obliged to manually tend to the rocket. An improperly capped hose had also caused red fuming nitric acid to spill onto the pad, but this was cleaned up so quickly that it did not even scar the concrete. Norris Gray, who later received a commendation for his exemplary performance in this critical period, modestly played down his role. “We had to safe it, get it all down, drain it, dry it out, take it back to Patrick, redo it and re-valve it and brought [Bumper] 8 up,” he said. “But a lot of us stayed on the launch pad, around that area, for two weeks straight, not going home, so our families really caught it back then.”
With Bumper 7 thus exchanged for Bumper 8, the next attempt to launch came on the morning of 24 July. At the stroke of 9:28 am EDT, fifty-five thousand pounds of thrust pummelled the concrete of Pad 3 as the V-2’s engine ignited. “It rose pretty fast,” remembered Dick Jones, “as compared to an Atlas or Titan or even a Redstone, because it didn’t have all that weight to lift that those other rockets do. The roar wasn’t all that great, nothing like a Saturn V taking off, where you can feel the impact against your face.” Still, the ascent into the Florida sky was picture perfect, the WAC-Corporal ‘bumping’ off the V-2 on schedule and igniting its own rocket motor. The mission lasted two minutes, reaching a peak altitude of about ten miles and a downrange distance of 160 miles.
Five days later, on the 29th, Bumper 7 finally flew. It matched its predecessor in terms of altitude and distance and closed out a remarkable chapter of high-altitude rocketry in spectacular style.
More than six decades have passed since the growl of rocket engines first echoed across the marshy landscape of Cape Canaveral. Since then, other vehicles have far surpassed the accomplishments of the Bumpers: multi-stage rockets have delivered men to the Moon and rovers to Mars and robotic explorers to the outer planets and the edge of the Solar System. Before the hundredth anniversary of the Bumpers, it can be hoped that still more audacious advances will have been taken and that, perhaps, a rocket from Cape Canaveral will have enabled humanity’s first footsteps on the Red Planet itself.
The first four launch complexes at the Cape saw their own successes and calamities and all had been effectively retired from service before the first American astronaut rose into space in May 1961. Pads 1 and 2 operated between 1954 and 1960, primarily to test the Air Force’s Lockheed-built Snark cruise missile. This nuclear deterrent was designed to fly away from its launch point for up to 11 hours, then return to land on metal skid-like plates on the ‘Skid Strip’ at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Multiple launch failures prompted some observers to nickname the Atlantic Ocean, off Cape Canaveral, as “Snark-infested waters”, because so many of the missiles ended up there. (One Snark flew too far, failed to respond to commands and ended up crashing in Brazil. A farmer found its remains in 1982.) Pad 4, which actually consisted of two launch complexes, supported missions from 1952 to 1960, lofting the Bomarc, Matador and Redstone missiles.
As for Pad 3, little visible trace remains today of the site from which the Bumpers made history. The small wooden blockhouse, used by the firing crew and their support personnel, was dismantled in 1951 and all that now survives is a 20 x 20-foot concrete slab, about 500 feet from the pad. Over the decades, it became overgrown as the land reasserted its authority and it was not rediscovered until 1998. Its mobile service tower – famously built from painters’ scaffolding poles, purchased from Orlando – is long gone. So too is the pine telegraph post which once served the Bumpers as an impromptu umbilical tower. The impressive warren of underground tunnels and equipment rooms still survive. The surface of the pad, unbelievably, still bears the outline of Bumper’s firing table: a small grey stain on the concrete, testament to the achievement of a true pathfinder from a bygone era.
END
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