Thursday, July 19, 2012
7/19/12 news
Thursday, July 19, 2012
JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1. Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
2. Orion Put to the Test Yesterday - Watch it Now
3. Building 1 Cafe
4. Today: Opening up your Organization to Innovative Tools
5. Construction (CFR 1926) Safety & Health Provisions: ViTS - Aug. 31
6. OSHA 30-Hour Construction Safety & Health: Sept. 24 to 28, Building 226N, Room 174
7. General Industry Safety & Health: Aug.13 to 17, Gilruth Longhorn Room
8. Parent's Night Out -- Registering Now for July
9. Get Fit 80's Style
10. 25 Percent Off Level 1-5 Tickets for 'Orbit - An HD Odyssey'
11. Breaking Free of Self-Limiting Male Roles
12. Need To Lose Weight? Join Just Lose It
13. New Classes: Choosing Athletic Footwear and More
14. Check out the 'July History Milestone' on the JSC Home Page
15. Space Family Eduction, Inc. Picnic & Family Reunion
16. Who's the Better Captain -- Kirk or Picard?
17. ISS Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) User Forum
18. AIAA-Houston Section Annual Awards Dinner
19. Reminder: Turning Diversity Into Strengths
20. Senior Drug Interactions
________________________________________ QUOTE OF THE DAY
“ No leader can be too far ahead of his followers. ”
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
________________________________________
1. Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
The answer to last week's first question was a little obvious. More drivers are driving impaired at night than during the day. Don't let that be you. Dolly Parton is your most favorite small person, and I bet she'd be a blast to hang out with. This week we saw a new crew link up with the space station. Do you know who is up there? Pick out the name that doesn't belong in question one. We also saw J. Lo and Steven Tyler bail on American Idol, so we need two new judges. I'm giving you some great tandems to pick from. Who is your choice? Ozzy and Kim? Alice and Nicki?
Randy your Jackson on over to get this week's poll.
Joel Walker x30541 http://jlt.jsc.nasa.gov/
[top]
2. Orion Put to the Test Yesterday - Watch it Now
Yesterday, a C-17 plane dropped a test version of Orion from an altitude of 25,000 feet above the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona. This test was the second to use an Orion craft that mimics the full size and shape of the spacecraft. See it happen at:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=148695651
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
[top]
3. Building 1 Cafe
Building 1 Cafe on the first floor of Building 1 and is now having daily food specials throughout the week, Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The specials will be written on the white board just outside the cafe on the first floor wall.
Janet 281-487-9378
[top]
4. Today: Opening up your Organization to Innovative Tools
The Human Systems Academy is pleased to offer "Opening up your Organization to Innovative Tools." This will be the first course in the series "Collaborative and Open Innovation: Techniques to increase your productivity." This first course focuses on the philosophy that spurs innovation and self-assessment activities to help participants understand how to define where they are in the continuum and identify areas of improvement, as well as tools for support. The goal is to ignite individual responsibility and contribution through self awareness on the topic. This course will be held today, July 19, at 3 p.m. in Building 9E, Room 113.
For registration, please go to http://sa.jsc.nasa.gov/#topicHeader-human-systems-academy-2012-07-19
Cynthia Rando 281-461-2620 sa.jsc.nasa.gov
[top]
5. Construction (CFR 1926) Safety & Health Provisions: ViTS - Aug. 31
SMA-SAFE-NSTC-0066: This three-hour course is based on OSHA CFR 1926, Subpart C- 1926.20 - Requirements for General Safety and Health Provisions, OSHA CFR 1926.21 - Safety Training and Education, and OSHA CFR - 1926.25 Housekeeping. During the course, the student will receive an overview of those topics needed to work safely on a construction site. There will be a final exam associated with this course that must be passed with a 70 percent minimum score to receive course credit.
Registration in SATERN is required.
Shirley Robinson x41284
[top]
6. OSHA 30-Hour Construction Safety & Health: Sept. 24 to 28, Building 226N, Room 174
This four-and-a-half day course assists the student in effectively conducting construction inspections and oversight. Participants are provided with basic information about construction standards, construction hazards and control, health hazards, trenching and excavation operations, cranes, electrical hazards in construction, steel erection, ladders, scaffolds, concrete and heavy construction equipment. This course is based on the OSHA Training Institute Construction Safety course and is approved for award of the OSHA course completion card. Course may include a field exercise at a construction site if feasible. A 30-hour Construction OSHA card will be issued. There will be a final exam associated with this course that must be passed with a 70 percent minimum score to receive course credit.
Registration in SATERN is required.
Shirley Robinson x41284
[top]
7. General Industry Safety & Health: Aug.13 to 17, Gilruth Longhorn Room
SMA-SAFE-NSTC-501: This course is intended to provide instruction on general industry safety and health topics at the introductory level. Examples of topics include an introduction to OSHA standards, lockout/tagout, confined space electrical safety and hazard communications. CFR 1910, Occupational Safety and Health Standards, is the primary source document for this course. NASA Headquarters level safety documentation and NASA mishap examples and experience have been integrated into the OSHA-provided course material. A 30-hour General OSHA card will be issued. There will be a final exam associated with this course that must be passed with a 70 percent minimum score to receive course credit.
Registration in SATERN is required.
Shirley Robinson x41284
[top]
8. Parent's Night Out -- Registering Now for July
Enjoy a night out on the town while your kids enjoy a night with Starport! We will entertain your children at the Gilruth Center with a night of games, crafts, a bounce house, pizza, movie and dessert.
When: July 27, 6 to 10 p.m.
Where: Gilruth Center
Ages: 5 to 12
Cost: $20/first child and $10/each additional sibling, if registered by the Wednesday prior to event. If registered after Wednesday, the fee is $25/first child and $15/ additional sibling.
Register at the Gilruth Center front desk. Visit http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Youth/PNO.cfm for more information.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/
[top]
9. Get Fit 80's Style
Break out those leg warmers and leotards and join in on the fun with Heather and her totally rad aerobics class reminiscent of the 80's era of exercise. Tonight, 5:30-6:30 in Studio 1, Gilruth Center. Visit http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Events/ for more information.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/
[top]
10. 25 Percent Off Level 1-5 Tickets for 'Orbit - An HD Odyssey'
Join us for a special encore performance of the second film in our HD Odyssey series. With striking images taken from NASA missions to Earth's orbit and accompanied by J. Adams "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" and Strauss' epic tone poem "Also sprach Zarathustra," this must-see multimedia event combines the latest HD images of the Earth projected on a giant screen. Plus, enjoy the music from Star Wars and more! Use promo code 10711 when ordering online.
Susan H. Anderson x38630 http://www.houstonsymphony.org
[top]
11. Breaking Free of Self-Limiting Male Roles
This is a meeting for the male population at JSC to discuss ideas and suggestions on issues related to male stereotypes. Today at noon in Building 32, Room 132, Takis Bogdanos, LPC-S, of the JSC Employee Assistance Program, will facilitate the meeting. Through conversation and feedback we can expand our view of the male role on how to manage life more resourcefully. Some of the "men's issues" we discuss include work and responsibility, relationships and parenting.
Takis Bogdanos x36130
[top]
12. Need To Lose Weight? Join Just Lose It
Battling weight problems? JUST LOSE IT with the help of the Exploration Wellness 12-week weight management program. JSC's Registered Dietitian and Exercise Scientist will help you set a weight loss goal and empower you to reach it! The professional expertise and group support will keep you on track and help you avoid common pitfalls along your personal weight loss journey. Weekly meetings will encourage and educate you on various exercise and nutrition topics.
Enrollment Details:
- There is a fee for this program of $100, due by close-of-business on July 30.
- This fee is refunded if you meet these criteria: meet your weight goal and receive 100 percent refund, or 50 percent is refunded for 100 percent attendance.
- Please enroll first then wait for your confirmation email before going to the Gilruth to pay.
- Classes will be held on Wednesdays from 11 to 11:40 a.m., Building 8, Conference Room 248.
Greta Ayers x30302 http://www.explorationwellness.com/Web/docs/JLI.pdf
[top]
13. New Classes: Choosing Athletic Footwear and More
Join Exploration Wellness next week as we take you on a journey of healthy choices with several new wellness classes. Amp up your athletic footwear and your personal finance all in one week!
NEW: Choosing Athletic Footwear, Greta Ayers, JSC Exercise Scientist
Running and walking appears simple enough, after all , you have been doing these activities since you were a toddler. With innovations like rocker bottoms, pump-up tongues and eva midsoles, knowing which pair to buy can seem like an advanced degree may be in order. Choose the wrong shoes, and you could end up with a bad case of shin splints or a case of plantar fasciitis. Join us to learn some tips on purchasing the right footwear for your feet.
- Choosing Financial Fitness - Intro & -- Advanced Topics
- Retire with Confidence, Levels I & II (NEW)
- Estate Planning, Insurance
- Maximize Investments
See link for details.
Jessica Vos x41383 http://www.explorationwellness.com/rd/AE107.aspx?July_Signup.pdf
[top]
14. Check out the 'July History Milestone' on the JSC Home Page
Thirty years ago this month, on America's 206th birthday, astronauts T.K. Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield returned from Earth orbit, landing safely on Runway 22, a concrete strip at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Among the dignitaries waiting for the crew were President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan. Years later Mattingly remembered that NASA had marketed the mission so heavily that the crew had "to land on the Fourth of July, no matter what day we took off. Even if it was the fifth, we were going to land on the Fourth," he joked. "That meant, if you didn't do any of your test mission, that's okay, as long as you just land on the Fourth, because the president is going to be there."
For the full story, visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/home/sts4_anniversary.html
Neesha Hosein x27516 http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/home/sts4_anniversary.html
[top]
15. Space Family Eduction, Inc. Picnic & Family Reunion
Save the Date!
Picnic & Family Reunion is a time for SFEI alumni students to get together and visit with friends and teachers.
Saturday, Aug. 11
3 to 5 p.m. at The JSC Childcare Center Playground
Current or previous families planning on attending should please bring a side dish or dessert to share.
SFEI will be providing the main dishes and entrees.
Children will be using the NEW Splash Pad. Children will need a bathing suit, towel and sunscreen.
Brooke Stephens x26031
[top]
16. Who's the Better Captain -- Kirk or Picard?
Watch Professor Anthony Rotolo's presentation from Innovation Day 2012 as he talks about Star Trek in the Information Age.
You can also view Richard Garriott's perspective on the future of NASA amidst changing political climates and budgetary constraints and the role that commercial spaceflight can play in the future. If that's not enough, hear the General Manager of the Houston Symphony discuss the common challenge of remaining relevant to the general public, and see footage from the most recent collaboration between NASA and the Houston Symphony, Orbit: An HD Odyssey. And, if you missed the first speaker on May 2, you can still discover the thrill of Top Fuel dragster racing and learn about the innovation and teamwork required to get those vehicles ready to race.
All videos can be found here: https://innovation2012.jsc.nasa.gov/FeaturedSpeakers.cfm
Enjoy!
Valerie Meyers x34989
[top]
17. ISS Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) User Forum
The ISS EDMS team will hold the monthly EDMS General User Forum this Friday, July 20th at 9:30 a.m. in Building 4S, CR 5315.
If you use EDMS to locate station documents, join us to learn about basic navigation and searching. Bring your questions, concerns, suggestions and meet the station EDMS Application Support Center team. The agenda can be found at:
http://iss-www.jsc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/act/showAgenda.cfm?AGEN_id=43345&RequestT...
LaNell Cobarruvias 713-933-6854 http://iss-www.jsc.nasa.gov/nwo/apps/edms/web/UserForums.shtml
[top]
18. AIAA-Houston Section Annual Awards Dinner
Please join us in honoring fellow AIAA Houston Section members that are celebrating their 25th, 40th, 50th and even 60th anniversary as AIAA members! We will also be recognizing outstanding members who have gone above and beyond to enrich our section's programs and technical endeavors.
Date: Tuesday, July 31
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: NASA JSC, Gilruth Center, Alamo Ballroom
$15 - Members; $20 Non-members
Public is welcomed.
Come meet the 2012-2013 AIAA Houston Section Council while you're there!
Please visit www.aiaahouston.org for details on how to RSVP. Deadline for meal reservation is July 25, by 10 a.m. Hope to see you there!
Eryn Beisner x40212
[top]
19. Reminder: Turning Diversity Into Strengths
Please join the ASIA ERG and LA Diversity and Inclusion Team along with sponsors from Procurement and IRD as we welcome Dr. Kameda as a special speaker on "Turning Diversity into Strengths". Build collaboration by learning how to communicate and work across different cultures to achieve the greatest success.
Friday, July 20, 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. in the Teague Auditorium.
This event is open to all JSC team members.
We have listed this session in SATERN for open registration. The link below can be used to register for this forum in SATERN. https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
We look forward to your participation as we strive to achieve excellence through diversity and inclusion.
Note: If you require special accommodation for a specific disability, please contact T.Q. Bui at x40266. (An Interpreter has been arranged for this event.)
Letha Meyers x49555
[top]
20. Senior Drug Interactions
Senior citizens have increased risk for potentially dangerous drug interactions due to physiological changes, poor coordination of services and the sheer volume of medications that are taken. The Employee Assistance Program Caregivers Resource Group is happy to present Simone Willingham, M.D., of the JSC Clinic on Tuesday, July 31, noon in the Building 30 Auditorium. Willingham will answer questions and provide information on common medications, drug interactions and side effects.
Lorrie Bennett x36130
[top]
________________________________________
JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. To see an archive of previous JSC Today announcements, go to http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/news/jsctoday/archives.
NASA TV: 7:20 am Central (8:20 EDT) - E32’s Aki Hoshide with Tanegashima Educ. Board & Minami-nihon Broadcasting
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
Orion Parachute Drop Test Wednesday
A C-17 dropped a test version of Orion from 25,000 feet above the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona yesterday.
Human Spaceflight News
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Astronaut Fred Haise & Enterprise – back together again after 35 years
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Choices Will Be Needed As ISS Fills Up
Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week
Here is a scenario that might keep International Space Station managers up at night. A pharmaceutical researcher in Birmingham, Ala., needs some ISS crew time to extract and prepare some large protein crystals grown in microgravity for a return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The capsule is filling up, and the crew is busy loading it with valuable “downmass” that is eagerly awaited on the ground. Among the other space-generated samples ready to go are some coupons of advanced composite material that belong to a sporting goods company in Carlsbad, Calif. The company needs the composites to open a new production line in its golf club factory. But the protein crystals may contain the key to developing a new molecule that inhibits the progression of Parkinson's Disease. There's only time and space for one more payload in the Earth-return capsule, so who sets the priority and how do they decide?
Orion parachute test at YPG deemed successful
James Gilbert – Yuma Sun
NASA engineers conducted another successful airdrop test of the Orion space capsule's descent and landing parachutes at Yuma Proving Ground early Wednesday morning. “From our visual — and it is a quick look from what we saw out here today — everything appeared to work perfectly,” said Jim McMichael, engineer and integration manager for NASA's capsule parachute assembly system (CPAS). “All the parachutes we were expecting worked, and the sequence looked right, so it looks like a good successful test for us.”
Orion's drop test in the desert was a success Wednesday
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
NASA says its second drop test of an Orion capsule was successful Wednesday, which means the parachute system worked. A C-17 transport dropped a mockup Orion built to the full size and shape of the capsule that will ultimately ferry astronauts to asteroids and Mars. This Orion was 25,000 feet above the desert when it was released. Orion's drogue chutes deployed between 15,000 feet and 20,000 feet, NASA said, followed by its pilot parachutes, which deployed the main landing parachutes. Orion parachutes have what NASA calls "reefing lines." They are cut by pyrotechnic devices to allow the parachutes to open gradually to manage the initial drag and force on the chute. Wednesday’s test was to see how the system would respond if a reefing line was cut too soon and the three main parachutes inflated too quickly.
Orion's parachute system tested in Arizona desert
SpaceflightNow.com
Ejected from a C-17 plane 25,000 feet above the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona Wednesday, engineers successfully tested the parachutes on a full-sized Orion spacecraft. It was the second such test using a craft simulating the intended size and shape of the capsule that will ferry humans on deep space exploration missions. "Today's parachute test in Yuma is an important reminder of the progress being made on Orion and its ultimate mission -- enabling NASA to meet the goal of sending humans to an asteroid and Mars," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Director who led KSC after Challenger disaster dies at 81
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
The man who led the Kennedy Space Center work force through a difficult recovery from the devastating 1986 Challenger accident died Tuesday after a short illness. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, 81, passed away at a hospice with his family at his side, NASA officials said. McCartney was the fourth director of KSC. He served in that post from October 1986 through 1991.
McCartney crucial in healing a heartbroken KSC
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
Friends and family on Wednesday remembered Forrest McCartney as an American patriot who led a devastated Kennedy Space Center work force through the difficult recovery from the 1986 Challenger disaster. McCartney, 81, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and the fourth director of KSC, died late Tuesday after a short illness. Family surrounded him when he passed away at a hospice in Palm Bay. His wife, “Miss Ruth,” the former Ruth Griffis of Memphis, Tenn., two daughters, Margaret and Worthy, and three granddaughters survive him.
Exclusive: United Tech in talks to sell Rocketdyne to GenCorp - sources
Andrea Shalal-Esa - Reuters
United Technologies Corp (UTX) is in final discussions to sell its Rocketdyne business to GenCorp Inc (GY), a maker of aerospace propulsion systems, two people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. The deal, which may come late this week or early next week according to one of the sources, represents part of the diversified U.S. conglomerate's efforts to divest non-core units and focus on closing its $16.5 billion acquisition of aircraft component maker Goodrich Corp (GR).
Space shuttle Enterprise set to open to public
Alex Katz - Associated Press
The last time some New Yorkers saw the space shuttle Enterprise, it was zipping around the city, riding piggyback on top of a modified jumbo jet past the Statue of Liberty and other local landmarks. Others got to lay eyes on it as it sailed up the Hudson River on a barge. Today, following its April and June sojourns, the piece of NASA history is on the move no more. The Enterprise, a 150,000-pound mammoth of a flying machine, goes on public display Thursday at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's new Space Shuttle Pavilion. Encased in the center of an accommodating inflatable dome, the shuttle will be available for visitors to admire up close from just feet away.
Shuttle Enterprise: Flashback to an Icon of ‘70s Design
As the now-retired spaceship opens in Manhattan, it’s a striking reminder of the anti-aesthetic aesthetic that dominated everything that came out of the era of pure functionalism.
Blake Gopnik - Newsweek's The Daily Beast
The space shuttle Enterprise was about moving people through space, but I’d say it is also a time machine. On July 19, crowds will gather to see the shuttle’s unveiling in its new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, on an old aircraft carrier moored off Manhattan. Sitting in a custom-made bubble on Intrepid’s decks, the Enterprise won’t be going anywhere soon, but that won’t stop it carrying fans back to the era it came from. Enterprise was the first shuttle to take to the air, on February 18, 1977, and for me it’s an icon of what the ’70s looked like. It’s also a reminder of how far we’ve come from the aesthetic behind it.
In the rain, stewards of the Enterprise can keep it dry, but can’t catch a cab
Patrick McGeehan - New York Times
Not even space agency bosses can catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan during a torrential thunderstorm and a cabbie shift change. Several officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration learned that lesson on Wednesday afternoon when they tried to leave the new space shuttle exhibit at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on the West Side. Just as a press preview of the temporary home for Enterprise, the prototype for NASA’s space shuttles, was wrapping up, thunder boomed overhead and winds whipped the giant tent inflated on the Intrepid’s flight deck. Rainwater seeped under the tent as camera crews from television networks around the world filmed the Enterprise from all angles. The exhibit, which opens to the public on Thursday, lets visitors walk under the shuttle and climb a staircase for a nose-to-nose view. The museum is charging an additional $6 to buy passes, on top of the museum entry for adults of $24.
NASA tests moon exploration techniques in Hawaii
Associated Press
NASA is conducting a nine-day field study in Hawaii to evaluate new techniques for exploring the moon. The research is being done at a site near Hilo with lava-covered mountain soil similar to the volcanic plains on the moon. The project will test a device designed to map the distribution of water ice on the moon and drill into the lunar surface. NASA said Tuesday the lessons it learns will become increasingly important as it embarks on deep-space missions.
NASA safety panel to meet Friday
Florida Today
NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel will hold a public meeting from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday July 20, 2012 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Debus Center conference facility. An agenda published in the Federal Register includes updates on the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (Orion); the Commercial Crew Program; KSC Safety Program Overview; and NASA responses to ASAP recommendations.
NASA tours resume in Huntsville Friday after 11 years
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
It's one small step off a bus for men, women and children and one giant leap for space history in Huntsville. Forty-three years after men stepped foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, visitors to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center will be able to walk on the ground at the Marshall Space Flight Center beginning Friday. Bus tours of Marshall, where Wernher von Braun built the rockets that carried man into space and to the moon, were routine until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2011. That's when commanders at Redstone Arsenal, where Marshall is located, stopped tours to secure the base.
Private Space Exploration a Long and Thriving Tradition
Michael Burgan - Bloomberg News (Opinion)
(Burgan is a freelance writer and the editor of “The Biographer’s Craft,” the official publication of Biographers International Organization)
With the U.S. space-shuttle program over, companies and governments are rushing to privatize travel into the cosmos. This spring, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, launched a capsule that docked with the International Space Station -- the first commercial space vehicle to do so. In the desert of New Mexico, Virgin Galactic is preparing for the first suborbital space flights for paying customers, with actor Ashton Kutcher one of the latest to sign up for the privilege. In Huntsville, Alabama, Stratolaunch Systems Inc. is busy dismantling Boeing 747s, hoping to use their engines and other systems to build the world’s largest plane, which will help propel a new spacecraft into flight.
Handicapping NASA's commercial space race
Part 3: Three rockets are at the front of the pack ... here's why Liberty should lead
Jay Barbree - NBC News (Commentary)
(In a five-part series, Barbree lays out a vision of spaceflight in the 20-teens for the 2012 presidential candidates.)
If astronauts are launched from American soil once again during the next presidential term, they'll almost certainly be riding a rocket called Liberty, Atlas or Falcon. Those are the rockets being offered as the main contenders in a new commercial space race to carry NASA's spacefliers to the International Space Station. So which one is the most ready to go? SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule have taken up most of the spotlight to date, thanks to May's successful cargo-carrying mission to the International Space Station. But this old curmudgeon sees the situation differently, as do some other longtime observers of the space program. The way it looks from here, Liberty is the best bet, with United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 a close second, and SpaceX third.
Declassified 'UFO' Documents Don't Prove Alien Life
Mike Wall - Space.com
Alien spacecraft and little green men remain elusive figures in the latest trove of official UFO files released July 12 by the United Kingdom government. There's no smoking gun anywhere in the 6,700 pages, which represent the ninth collection of government UFO files made public by the U.K.'s National Archives in Kew. But the new batch, which contains documents dating from 1965 to 2008, are full of interesting tidbits nonetheless. For example, the files recount the story of a hotel owner on the Welsh coast who said she spotted a UFO in 1977. She claimed to see an object the size of a minibus fall from the sky and land in a field at the back of her property.
__________
COMPLETE STORIES
Choices Will Be Needed As ISS Fills Up
Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week
Here is a scenario that might keep International Space Station managers up at night. A pharmaceutical researcher in Birmingham, Ala., needs some ISS crew time to extract and prepare some large protein crystals grown in microgravity for a return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The capsule is filling up, and the crew is busy loading it with valuable “downmass” that is eagerly awaited on the ground.
Among the other space-generated samples ready to go are some coupons of advanced composite material that belong to a sporting goods company in Carlsbad, Calif. The company needs the composites to open a new production line in its golf club factory. But the protein crystals may contain the key to developing a new molecule that inhibits the progression of Parkinson's Disease. There's only time and space for one more payload in the Earth-return capsule, so who sets the priority and how do they decide?
The question isn't as far-fetched as it might seem. Larry DeLucas, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham who flew protein-crystal growth experiments as a payload specialist on the STS-50 space shuttle mission aboard Columbia in June 1992, is already preparing to grow more protein crystals on the ISS. And the Center for the Advancement of Science In Space (Casis), which runs the U.S. National Laboratory portion of the station, has just signed an agreement with Cobra Puma Golf to conduct materials research on the ISS.
Right now, there should be enough space and crew time to accommodate both research projects, and many more.
But in anticipation of more demand on station resources, NASA is already angling for a fourth U.S.-side crew member and planning upgrades to improve research efficiency (see p. 50). Questions of priority are sure to arise, and it isn't necessarily clear how NASA and its partners will resolve them.
DeLucas is eagerly awaiting long-term access to microgravity for his experiments, in the well-informed belief that it will produce large enough protein crystals for the high-resolution X-ray crystallography he needs to pinpoint molecular inhibitors for diseases like Parkinson's and cystic fibrosis. And Casis, a non-profit struggling to get started on its mandate to bring private capital and commercial research together on the ISS, is building a “space is in it” marketing scheme around products like the high-tech golf clubs Cobra Puma Golf produces in Carlsbad.
Some products may even be drugs produced using protein crystals. The first Casis request for proposals, issued last month, seeks ideas for “advancing protein crystallization using microgravity.” Will NASA and Casis set priorities based on commercial potential, and if they do, will golf clubs outscore life-saving drugs? It may not come to that, because research already underway on the space station is demonstrating that teleoperated robots in space can stretch crew time significantly.
Joint U.S./Canadian tests are demonstrating that the state-of-the-art in space-based robotics is up to the job of servicing a variety of satellites in orbit. Not only does that raise the possibility that expensive spacecraft can be refueled and repaired to extend their service lives for commercial, scientific and military purposes. It also shows how researchers on the ground can manipulate their own experiments on the orbiting lab, without much help from the flight crew.
Using the Canadian-built ISS robotic arm and special-purpose dexterous manipulator dubbed Dextre, controllers in Houston and St. Hubert, Canada, have started work with a NASA-developed testbed and toolkit to validate satellite-servicing techniques. Early tasks on the Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) have gone well, according to Jill McGuire of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the RRM project manager, paving the way for an end-to-end refueling test in late August or early September. That, in turn, will set up more difficult tests by the end of the year, McGuire says.
So far controllers have used the RRM tools to cut wires, remove caps and pull plugs. The testbed is equipped with four tools, two of them able to handle different types of hardware, and a series of task plates designed to test their ability to perform delicate tasks like removing standard No. 10 fasteners and capturing small parts, lest they become space debris. The mission also has collected images of a variety of satellite fittings and other hardware on the testbed under different lighting conditions to generate a machine-vision database for future servicing applications (photo). Ultimately, the two space agencies hope to build a free-flying satellite servicer using the vision and other data collected with the space station tests.
“We're able to buy down this risk by using the International Space Station,” McGuire says. In addition to increasing ISS crew efficiency, the work could spur a potentially lucrative satellite-servicing industry, easing the pressure to set priorities.
Orion parachute test at YPG deemed successful
James Gilbert – Yuma Sun
NASA engineers conducted another successful airdrop test of the Orion space capsule's descent and landing parachutes at Yuma Proving Ground early Wednesday morning.
“From our visual — and it is a quick look from what we saw out here today — everything appeared to work perfectly,” said Jim McMichael, engineer and integration manager for NASA's capsule parachute assembly system (CPAS). “All the parachutes we were expecting worked, and the sequence looked right, so it looks like a good successful test for us.”
A U.S. Air Force C-17 dropped the capsule-shaped parachute test vehicle from an altitude of 25,000 feet over the base's Robby/Lapoza drop zone at about 7:30 a.m. The purpose of the test was to determine what would happen if one of those three main parachutes prematurely opened and inflated too quickly, and what effect it would have on the other two chutes.
Chris Johnson, project manager for CPAS, explained that data from the parachute test will be added to the project's mathematical model in order to form a more accurate representation of what the impact was on each of the chutes.
The parachute system, which consists of a series of parachutes that work in tandem to slow the capsule's decent after re-entry, will be used to recover the Orion crew capsule, allowing it to land softly in the ocean to be recovered.
The C-17 flew over the drop zone three times, dropping the capsule-shaped test vehicle on its second pass. Moments after the test began, two 28-foot extraction parachutes pulled the pallet and test object out the back of the plane.
The capsule then fell for a few seconds while still on the pallet before it separated. A short time later, two programmer chutes deployed, stabilizing the capsule. That was followed by three pilot chutes, which then deployed the three main landing parachutes at an altitude of approximately 8,400 feet, or 73 seconds into the decent.
Of the 17 parachutes needed to conduct the test, only eight were the actual Orion spacecraft's parachutes. The other nine were used in various other aspects of the test, such as lowering the pallet to the ground.
Once on the capsule landed, NASA engineers and CPAS team members began recovery operations by gathering up the parachutes and organizing the cords so they could be folded and taken back to YPG's air delivery complex, where they would be cleaned and repaired for future use.
Orion is NASA's next-generation spacecraft and is being designed to carry astronauts deeper into space than ever before, eventually even to the planet Mars. Its first flight, which will be unmanned, is scheduled to take place in about two years. The spacecraft will be sent into space 15 times farther away than where the International Space Station is currently orbiting.
Orion's drop test in the desert was a success Wednesday
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
NASA says its second drop test of an Orion capsule was successful Wednesday, which means the parachute system worked. A C-17 transport dropped a mockup Orion built to the full size and shape of the capsule that will ultimately ferry astronauts to asteroids and Mars. This Orion was 25,000 feet above the desert when it was released.
Orion's drogue chutes deployed between 15,000 feet and 20,000 feet, NASA said, followed by its pilot parachutes, which deployed the main landing parachutes.
Orion parachutes have what NASA calls "reefing lines." They are cut by pyrotechnic devices to allow the parachutes to open gradually to manage the initial drag and force on the chute. Wednesday’s test was to see how the system would respond if a reefing line was cut too soon and the three main parachutes inflated too quickly.
The critical takeaway number today was Orion's descent rate. It was about 25 feet per second when Orion landed on the desert floor, NASA said, well below the maximum the craft can withstand.
Unlike the space shuttle, which landed on a runway like an airplane, Orion will represent a return to earlier days when NASA capsules parachuted to earth and then were recovered.
NASA said this test was one more step for its new Space Launch System.
"Across the country, NASA and industry are ... conducting drop and splashdown tests, preparing ground systems, designing software and computers and paving the way for the future of exploration," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington in a statement. "(Wednesday's) parachute test in Yuma is an important reminder of the progress being made on Orion and its ultimate mission -- enabling NASA to meet the goal of sending humans to an asteroid and Mars."
In 2014, NASA will launch an uncrewed Orion 3,600 miles into space, farther from Earth than any human spacecraft has traveled in 40 years. It will return through the atmosphere allowing NASA to test Orion's heat shield.
In 2017, it will fly on top of the new heavy-lift rocket being developed at Marshall Space Flight Center. A crewed flight atop the new rocket will come several years after that.
Orion's parachute system tested in Arizona desert
SpaceflightNow.com
Ejected from a C-17 plane 25,000 feet above the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona Wednesday, engineers successfully tested the parachutes on a full-sized Orion spacecraft.
It was the second such test using a craft simulating the intended size and shape of the capsule that will ferry humans on deep space exploration missions.
"Today's parachute test in Yuma is an important reminder of the progress being made on Orion and its ultimate mission -- enabling NASA to meet the goal of sending humans to an asteroid and Mars," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Orion's first adventure into space is planned for 2014 when a United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket hurls the vehicle on a two-orbit shakedown cruise before making a high-speed re-entry into Earth's atmosphere for a parachute-slowed splashdown.
In today's test, Orion's drogue chutes were deployed between 20,000 feet and 15,000 feet, followed by the pilot parachutes that extracted the main landing parachutes. The descended at about 17 miles per hours, well below its maximum designed touchdown speed, for touchdown on the desert floor.
"Across the country, NASA and industry are moving forward on the most advanced spacecraft ever designed, conducting drop and splashdown tests, preparing ground systems, designing software and computers and paving the way for the future of exploration," Gerstenmaier said.
The primary goal of today's was determining how the entire parachute system would respond if one of the reefing lines was cut prematurely, causing the three main parachutes to inflate too quickly. The reefing lines, which when cut by a pyrotechnic device, allow the parachute to open gradually, managing the initial amount of drag and force on the parachute.
Director who led KSC after Challenger disaster dies at 81
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
The man who led the Kennedy Space Center work force through a difficult recovery from the devastating 1986 Challenger accident died Tuesday after a short illness.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, 81, passed away at a hospice with his family at his side, NASA officials said.
“It is with great sadness that I inform you of the passing of former KSC Director, Forrest McCartney, Lt. Gen., USAF, Ret.,” current KSC Director Robert Cabana told the KSC work force in an e-mail Wednesday.
No services are being planned, that at the request of McCartney, NASA officials indicated.
McCartney was the fourth director of KSC. He served in that post from October 1986 through 1991.
A three-star general, McCartney took the post after 33-and-a-half years in the U.S. Air Force. His assignment: lead a demoralized KSC work force through a painful recovery from the Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger disaster.
“That had been a long time between the accident and October, and the work force had been laid off – a lot of layoffs – so the work force was very discouraged,” McCartney, a resident of Indian Harbour Beach, told FLORIDA TODAY in a recent interview. “And so it was, I’ll say, not a very happy bunch of campers. The return-to-flight efforts were very slow, and the work force was in need of picking up. It was not a very good situation at all.”
McCartney said he immediately noted the work force was very professional, dedicated, and loyal. Nothing was really broken. There was no need for a major reorganization and the attending upheaval. He found a work force that clearly was the best in the world when it came to processing spacecraft for launch.
What the men and women of the shuttle launch team really needed were simple things – practical tools that would enable them to be successful, McCartney said.
An example: the ability to get to and from work without severe traffic delays, and road rage. So McCartney lobbied successfully for the expansion to four lanes of narrow State Road 3, the southern entrance to the center.
Coming in from the west, an American flag flew. But one shop floor technician noted that no U.S. flag rippled in the winds at the southern entrance. Old Glory was flapping there the next day.
“The country wanted to get back flying, and we wanted to get back flying, and so we started hiring, and getting the people back doing what they do best. And there’s no better in the world at what they do – processing spaceflight hardware,” McCartney said.
“I just needed to get them what they needed to do their jobs,” he said. “You know, they were such a competent team. If you get them what they need, and let them do what they do best, things will go right. And they sure did.”
Discovery and five astronauts blasted off Sept. 29, 1988, and NASA’s shuttle fleet was back in business.
McCartney crucial in healing a heartbroken KSC
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
Friends and family on Wednesday remembered Forrest McCartney as an American patriot who led a devastated Kennedy Space Center work force through the difficult recovery from the 1986 Challenger disaster.
McCartney, 81, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and the fourth director of KSC, died late Tuesday after a short illness. Family surrounded him when he passed away at a hospice in Palm Bay. His wife, “Miss Ruth,” the former Ruth Griffis of Memphis, Tenn., two daughters, Margaret and Worthy, and three granddaughters survive him.
At McCartney’s request, no services are planned.
“Forrest was a good man. He was a good husband, a good father, a good grandfather, a good friend and a great patriot,” said George English, the former director of KSC’s Executive Management Office and a close friend. “He was a good man.”
A strong, personable leader, McCartney, a longtime resident of Indian Harbour Beach, played a huge role in rebuilding the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster. His leadership paved the way to the successful launches of critical national security satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Magellan Venus radar mapper, the Galileo Jupiter probe, the Ulysses solar explorer and, ultimately, the International Space Station.
“Everyone here at Kennedy will miss him greatly,” said KSC spokeswoman Lisa Malone. “He came into Kennedy at a critical time. It was a time when the workforce needed healing, and he knew that and took that to heart. He got the center through a difficult transition time — through the return to flight after Challenger.”
Born March 23, 1931, in Fort Payne, Ala., McCartney graduated from Gulf Coast Military Academy in 1949. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Alabama Polytechnic Institute — now known as Auburn University — in 1952. He earned his master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1955. By 1959, he was a key player in the National Reconnaissance Office’s classified Corona program. Now declassified, the program launched the world’s first spy satellites.
McCartney was at the Satellite Test Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., for the nation’s first successful Corona mission in 1960, responsible for controlling a photo reconnaissance spacecraft once deployed in orbit.
“He was there from the beginning,” daughter Margaret said.
In a 33-year Air Force career, McCartney played key roles in a number of military space programs. McCartney was competitive. An avid racquetball player, he was trouncing opponents just a month ago.
He’ll best be remembered for being loved not only on the fourth floor of KSC’s headquarters building, but on shop floors, too.
“I’ve always felt that the real work gets done on the floor, and not up in the front office,” McCartney told Florida Today in a recent interview.
So after Challenger, McCartney spent at least half of his time visiting work sites around the center.
“He did all sorts of things. He wanted to do everything the guys out there did. He drove the crawler. He rappelled down the side of the Fire Tower with the SWAT team one time,” English said.
He climbed into SCAPE suits, the Self-Contained Atmospheric Pressure Ensembles, used by technicians working with hazardous shuttle propellant.
“I never realized it would be such a wonderful adventure. Not in my wildest imagination did I believe that I would have as much satisfaction, and just plain fun, as being the center director at Kennedy Space Center,” McCartney said.
Even in mourning, and recovery, the KSC work force accepted the military guy, and McCartney was grateful.
“They sort of adopted me, and I just loved every minute of it.”
Exclusive: United Tech in talks to sell Rocketdyne to GenCorp - sources
Andrea Shalal-Esa - Reuters
United Technologies Corp (UTX) is in final discussions to sell its Rocketdyne business to GenCorp Inc (GY), a maker of aerospace propulsion systems, two people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
The deal, which may come late this week or early next week according to one of the sources, represents part of the diversified U.S. conglomerate's efforts to divest non-core units and focus on closing its $16.5 billion acquisition of aircraft component maker Goodrich Corp (GR).
The companies are still working out final details of the transaction and the talks could still fall apart, the people cautioned, asking not to be identified because the matter is not public.
United Tech declined to comment, while GenCorp was not immediately available for comment.
Rocketdyne, the world's largest manufacturer of liquid-fueled rocket propulsion systems, has been facing an uncertain outlook following the end of the U.S. space shuttle program last year, and industry executives have said consolidation is needed for the space industry to survive a tough environment.
The sale would come more than seven years after United Tech bought Rocketdyne from Boeing Co (BA) for $700 million in cash.
Rocketdyne makes liquid rocket motors to launch satellites into space but has also begun to diversify into solar and gasified coal energy technologies. GenCorp's Aerojet subsidiary and Alliant Techsystems (ATK.N) produce solid rocket motors.
Several people familiar with the process told Reuters previously that United Tech had received multiple bids for the Rocketdyne business in late March, with GenCorp and private equity firms among interested parties.
Space shuttle Enterprise set to open to public
Alex Katz - Associated Press
The last time some New Yorkers saw the space shuttle Enterprise, it was zipping around the city, riding piggyback on top of a modified jumbo jet past the Statue of Liberty and other local landmarks.
Others got to lay eyes on it as it sailed up the Hudson River on a barge.
Today, following its April and June sojourns, the piece of NASA history is on the move no more.
The Enterprise, a 150,000-pound mammoth of a flying machine, goes on public display Thursday at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's new Space Shuttle Pavilion. Encased in the center of an accommodating inflatable dome, the shuttle will be available for visitors to admire up close from just feet away.
At 57 feet wide and 137 feet long — with a 78 foot wingspan to boot — the Enterprise is an imposing figure with quite a presence in its new home.
The space shuttle, which was completed in 1976, was NASA's first. Though it never actually flew a mission into outer space, it performed critical tests around the Earth's atmosphere and is widely credited with paving the way for five future shuttles.
Of the six shuttles NASA built, only four remain. The other two experienced disasters during their missions, killing their crews: The Challenger exploded in 1986 and the Columbia disintegrated in 2003.
President Richard Nixon first announced NASA's intention to construct the Enterprise in 1972 amid heightened tensions during the Cold War. With U.S. officials fearing the Soviet Union would dominate the novel realm of space travel, the Enterprise was designed to be a reusable spacecraft that could also land safely — allowing NASA to conduct launches more frequently and with greater efficiency.
Previous spacecrafts could neither land nor be reused for future missions.
When tests including the Enterprise began in 1977, the shuttle would sit atop a 747 carrier aircraft that helped get it off the ground. Once it reached an altitude hundreds of thousands of feet in the sky, the Enterprise would separate from the flight and two pilots would glide the shuttle for several minutes before making a smooth landing. This was thanks in part to an aerodynamically designed tail cone.
Fred Haise, an Apollo 13 astronaut who piloted the Enterprise on five flights, said flying the shuttle was "nearly perfect."
"It's something exciting, especially when you put five years of development into getting it ready," said Haise, 78.
Of the moment right after his first takeoff in the Enterprise, Haise said: "I was immediately happy and grateful."
Shuttle Enterprise: Flashback to an Icon of ‘70s Design
As the now-retired spaceship opens in Manhattan, it’s a striking reminder of the anti-aesthetic aesthetic that dominated everything that came out of the era of pure functionalism.
Blake Gopnik - Newsweek's The Daily Beast
The space shuttle Enterprise was about moving people through space, but I’d say it is also a time machine. On July 19, crowds will gather to see the shuttle’s unveiling in its new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, on an old aircraft carrier moored off Manhattan. Sitting in a custom-made bubble on Intrepid’s decks, the Enterprise won’t be going anywhere soon, but that won’t stop it carrying fans back to the era it came from. Enterprise was the first shuttle to take to the air, on February 18, 1977, and for me it’s an icon of what the ’70s looked like. It’s also a reminder of how far we’ve come from the aesthetic behind it.
With its bulbous nose, stubby wings, and boxy body, the Enterprise seems of a piece with the boxy bulbousness of other designs of its era. Think of the first Honda Civic, from 1973, which comes closer to a hacked-at child’s block than to an elegant Packard or Corvette. Remember the first Walkman, introduced in 1979, with its tubby buttons and workmanlike profile. Visualize the wide-hipped Dustbuster (1979), splay-legged Workmate (1973) and the Apple II computer (1977), whose disk drives could almost be cargo bays. None of these objects are obvious beauties. Not one is in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, which set the good-design standard for most of last century. But that, I think, is just the point: Alone among decades, the ’70s had an anti-aesthetic aesthetic. That’s why today’s beauty-trained eyes, used to MacBooks and iPhones, can barely recognize it.
The shuttle may be iconic of this unstylish style because it was not, in fact, ever designed, in the normal sense of the word. No one ever made a choice about what it should look like, says Steven Sullivan, once a chief engineer on NASA’s shuttle program. (He’s still involved in coordinating the shuttle’s private-sector successor.) “Everything is functional, and not so much aesthetic,” he says, explaining that the machine’s specific forms and volumes came out of a compromise between what the Air Force wanted from a shuttle and what NASA was looking for, since it took that dual sponsorship to make the project fly in the halls of the Capitol. (Enterprise was used as a test vehicle, but never made it out into space. It was on view at the Smithsonian until curators got their hands on Discovery, one of the fully operational shuttles, and bundled the test model off to New York.) “The shapes are all done by aeroscience …. It was strictly a physics-based and a science-based design—but it does look very 1970s,” says Sullivan. If the shuttle seems iconic of its era, it’s because pure, unlovely function was the hallmark of that decade’s most successful designs.
1970s Design: The Space Shuttle
The bestselling Walkman, for instance, came out of a design culture in postwar Japan that was built around the unglossed functionalism of American army surplus, according to an essay by Raymond Guidot, a pioneering design curator who has worked at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Walkman has stronger roots in a U.S. Army field radio than in any Bauhaus artwork, and that was part of the market appeal of the first Japanese exports to America. Guidot, like others, also cites the Apollo program’s spindly, spidery Lunar Excursion Module, the lander that touched down on the moon, as having “dethroned an aerodynamic style that had, until then, been the model for high-performance technology…. It called into question all of design’s sculptural values.” A ’50s toaster had been streamlined because that told its users its functions were up to date; 20 years later, a Walkman made the same point by looking as though it had come together by engineering accident—like some weird compromise between government agencies.
Carroll M. Gantz is an 81-year-old design historian who also happens to have designed Black & Decker’s Dustbuster portable vacuum, one of history’s most successful consumer products—the first, as Gantz points out, to sell more than a million units in its first year. Speaking by phone from his home in Florida, Gantz gives an account of the Dustbuster’s origins that is all about teamwork with engineers and solving practical challenges: fitting four batteries and a motor into the new vacuum’s handle; allowing it to sit flat on the wall as it charged. “Many designers were looking at function, not MoMA’s design ideas…. Functionalism was sort of a built-in requirement to everything we designed.” He points out that many viewers “confuse functionality with simplicity of design”; his Dustbuster, with its chunky space-shuttle-ish corners, actually works better than many of the sleeker objects from Braun. Rather than evoking some sculpture by Brancusi, the Dustbuster’s angular profile, Gantz says, was meant to evoke “a Rubbermaid dustpan on the wall.”
Anne Bony, a French design expert, writes that in 1970s design, “after centuries of the ‘tyranny of the object’ and its apotheosis in consumer society, the world began to entertain doubts about its coherence.” Incoherent design—bits and bobs of pure function, cobbled together just well enough so they’d work—had an all new appeal, whether in the separate modules of the inelegant Apple II computer or in the first Cuisinarts, whose square bases and cylindrical bowls look as though they could come from two different machines. “The market favored conveying social and functional messages,” Bony writes, and encouraged design that pushed back against “all those beautifully finished, self-contained products typical of the bourgeois interior.” Especially after the oil crisis, “the watchword was reasonableness.”
That’s why one of the original reviews of the 1975 AMC Pacer, voted the ugliest car of all time in several 21st-century polls, could praise its design as “fresh, bold and functional-looking”—as though that last adjective were somehow of a piece with the other two, which now seems hard to fathom. Today, as Gantz points out, “we’re sort of drifting back in the direction of the old MoMA aesthetic.” Our leading designs, after all, are all about hiding the real mess of electronics that’s inside a laptop, say, behind the sleekness of water-etched metal. It’s almost the difference between Bill Gates’s MS-DOS, with its command line right there out front for everyone to see, and the sleek, aestheticized interface that Steve Jobs replaced it with.
Thomas Hines is the author of a book about ’70s design called “The Great Funk,” and he once compared the classic objects of the space-shuttle era to the collapsed, chaotic narratives in Robert Altman’s Nashville or Steven Bochco’s Hill Street Blues. Reached by phone in Philadelphia, he describes archetypal ’70s design as “authentic, salvaged, not unduly ambitious. It’s participatory, and if it’s a little clunky, that’s OK, because that makes it real.” And what could be more real than the clunky, chunky Enterprise? After the showy glories of the Apollo program, Hines says, the shuttle was a classic 1970s compromise, “something to be done until something better could be done.”
In the rain, stewards of the Enterprise can keep it dry, but can’t catch a cab
Patrick McGeehan - New York Times
Not even space agency bosses can catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan during a torrential thunderstorm and a cabbie shift change.
Several officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration learned that lesson on Wednesday afternoon when they tried to leave the new space shuttle exhibit at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on the West Side. Just as a press preview of the temporary home for Enterprise, the prototype for NASA’s space shuttles, was wrapping up, thunder boomed overhead and winds whipped the giant tent inflated on the Intrepid’s flight deck.
Rainwater seeped under the tent as camera crews from television networks around the world filmed the Enterprise from all angles. The exhibit, which opens to the public on Thursday, lets visitors walk under the shuttle and climb a staircase for a nose-to-nose view. The museum is charging an additional $6 to buy passes, on top of the museum entry for adults of $24.
Charles Bolden, the administrator of NASA, who awarded the Enterprise to the Intrepid, is expected to attend the opening ceremony on Thursday, along with several former astronauts and city officials. Mr. Bolden’s deputy, Lori Garver, said Wednesday that she was pleased to see how the Enterprise was displayed in the enclosure, which was proving to be weatherproof as she spoke.
“It’s very important to NASA that it be special and Intrepid has helped make it that way,” Ms. Garver said. “So we’re very pleased.”
Before she arrived, one of the Enterprise’s test pilots, Fred W. Haise, recounted what it was like to steer back to earth a space shuttle that had no engine. “As a pilot, it was a great flying machine,” said Mr. Haise, who was at the helm of Enterprise for five test flights in 1977. “It had what we call good handling qualities.”
As for whether it belonged on a retired aircraft carrier tied up near the theater district and a block from a strip club, he said he had no objection. “Maybe it’ll educate some of those people into leading a better life,” Mr. Haise said with a grin.
Museum officials expect to use the exhibit as a launching pad for a fund-raising campaign to pay for a permanent home for the Enterprise, either on the pier next to the carrier or across the West Side Highway. Susan Marenoff-Zausner, the museum’s president, said she did not yet know how much money the museum’s foundation would need to raise.
For now, she said, “We feel very proud that we have excited the astronauts. That’s not easy to do.”
Nor is catching cab at 5 p.m. in Midtown in a downpour. So Ms. Garver and her associates from NASA donned plastic ponchos and puddle-jumped along 46th Street toward their hotel.
NASA tests moon exploration techniques in Hawaii
Associated Press
NASA is conducting a nine-day field study in Hawaii to evaluate new techniques for exploring the moon.
The research is being done at a site near Hilo with lava-covered mountain soil similar to the volcanic plains on the moon.
The project will test a device designed to map the distribution of water ice on the moon and drill into the lunar surface.
NASA said Tuesday the lessons it learns will become increasingly important as it embarks on deep-space missions.
The agency says a human crew won't have to launch into space with all the supplies it needs but could instead go knowing natural resources are waiting for them.
NASA is working with the Canadian Space Agency on the project. Hawaii's Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems is assisting.
NASA safety panel to meet Friday
Florida Today
NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel will hold a public meeting from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday July 20, 2012 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Debus Center conference facility.
The panel’s third quarterly meeting of 2012 is open to the public. Guests are asked to arrive at least 15 minutes in advance.
An agenda published in the Federal Register includes updates on the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (Orion); the Commercial Crew Program; KSC Safety Program Overview; and NASA responses to ASAP recommendations.
Established by Congress in 1968, ASAP evaluates NASA’s safety performance and advises the agency on ways to improve that performance.
NASA tours resume in Huntsville Friday after 11 years
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
It's one small step off a bus for men, women and children and one giant leap for space history in Huntsville. Forty-three years after men stepped foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, visitors to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center will be able to walk on the ground at the Marshall Space Flight Center beginning Friday.
Bus tours of Marshall, where Wernher von Braun built the rockets that carried man into space and to the moon, were routine until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2011. That's when commanders at Redstone Arsenal, where Marshall is located, stopped tours to secure the base.
Marshall and the space center museum have wanted to bring the tours back ever since. Marshall is home to several National Historic Landmarks and a key NASA center of today.
The most historic site - and a tour stop - is the Redstone test stand, a primitive structure and underground bunker where von Braun turned the German V-2 rocket into an American spaceship. The tour will also pass the giant Dynamic Test Stand where the Saturn V was shaken to test its strength.
The modern stop is NASA's International Space Station Payload Operations Center, which manages the science experiments aboard the space station.
Passengers will leave the bus here and walk into a viewing room where they can see Marshall technicians in the Ops Center monitoring state-of-the-art computers and talking to the astronauts. Giant wall screens show the station's interior at all times.
"We want to showcase the work that Marshall is doing," Deborah Barnhart, the space center's CEO and executive director, said when the tours were announced.
The Army gets some of the tour spotlight, too. On the drive-by portion are the Sparkman Center and the Von Braun Center, two of the giant post-BRAC complexes that have earned Redstone the nickname "Pentagon of the South."
The tours take about an hour and cost $12 per person. Cameras and cell phones are allowed, but no large bags can be brought on the buses.
The tour is open to U.S. citizens, and a photo ID for those 16 years and older is required to buy a ticket. The ID will be checked before a bus pulls away from the center, and during the tour there may be spontaneous ID checks and inspections.
Tour hours for the first weekend are 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday and Monday. Call the center's guest services number, 256-721-7114, for times next week and beyond.
Private Space Exploration a Long and Thriving Tradition
Michael Burgan - Bloomberg News (Opinion)
(Burgan is a freelance writer and the editor of “The Biographer’s Craft,” the official publication of Biographers International Organization)
With the U.S. space-shuttle program over, companies and governments are rushing to privatize travel into the cosmos. This spring, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, launched a capsule that docked with the International Space Station -- the first commercial space vehicle to do so.
In the desert of New Mexico, Virgin Galactic is preparing for the first suborbital space flights for paying customers, with actor Ashton Kutcher one of the latest to sign up for the privilege. In Huntsville, Alabama, Stratolaunch Systems Inc. is busy dismantling Boeing 747s, hoping to use their engines and other systems to build the world’s largest plane, which will help propel a new spacecraft into flight.
All three projects have wealthy entrepreneurs backing them: PayPal Inc. co-founder Elon Musk is the head of SpaceX, U.K. billionaire Richard Branson is the founder and chairman of Virgin Group Ltd., and Paul G. Allen, the co- founder of Microsoft Corp., started Stratolaunch last year.
The three men might not know it, but they’re following in a grand tradition of private wealth furthering advances in rocketry and space exploration.
Baron’s Bounty
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, private citizens raised money to promote Earth-based exploration of the stars. Charles Tyson Yerkes, a robber baron who transformed urban transportation, gave $300,000 to University of Chicago to establish an observatory. James Lick, California’s richest man, left much of his considerable fortune to the University of California in 1876 to build an observatory with the world’s most powerful telescope. Philanthropists from Andrew Carnegie to John D. Rockefeller helped fund ever more elaborate technology for scanning the cosmos.
But when it came to actually putting a vehicle into space, Daniel Guggenheim stood alone. He and his family earned their millions in copper mining and other extractive endeavors. Taking over from their father, Guggenheim and his brothers expanded the family business, sometimes seeking new technologies to reduce costs.
In 1924, Guggenheim and his wife, Florence, started a foundation, hoping to use their fortune to promote “the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”
Seeing the effects of engineering breakthroughs and experimentation in business, Guggenheim also wanted to support science -- in particular, heavier-than-air flight. In 1925, he donated $250,000 to New York University to start the first U.S. school of aeronautics. The next year, he spent $2.5 million to start the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics.
Guggenheim’s son Harry, a former Navy pilot, became the fund’s first president. Harry had previously tried to get President Calvin Coolidge interested in supporting his father’s efforts. Coolidge, not uncharacteristically, replied, “What’s the use of getting there quicker if you haven’t got something better to say when you’ve arrived?”
But Harry had a breakthrough when he met Charles Lindbergh. The fund had provided support to Lindbergh, and the two men became good friends. Lindbergh knew of pioneering work being done by the physicist Robert Goddard at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Rocket Man
In 1926, Goddard had tested the world’s first liquid- fueled rocket. Using his aunt’s farm as a launch site, Goddard sent the rocket to a less-than-dizzying altitude of 41 feet. Goddard was sure he could do better and was soon talking publicly about the potential for space travel with rockets. By 1929, his work had caught Lindbergh’s attention.
The next year, Harry introduced Lindbergh to his father and the pilot stirred the elder Guggenheim’s interest in funding Goddard’s work. In 1930, Daniel told the New York Times (NYT), “I am convinced the experiments deserve support.” He backed that up with $100,000, and over the years more than double that amount followed.
With Guggenheim’s money (and some from other sources, including the Smithsonian Institution), Goddard carried out extensive research in Roswell, New Mexico -- about 200 miles, as the rocket flies, from where Virgin Galactic will launch its spacecraft. Through the 1930s, in a series of successful launches, he broke the sound barrier and increased the rockets’ altitude to almost two miles. Goddard also earned dozens of patents for his work.
There were failures too, of course, including rockets that exploded on the launch pad. Still, with private money backing him, Goddard helped start the Rocket Age. As Goddard biographer David A. Clary noted, the Guggenheim family’s contribution continued even after the scientist’s death, as it helped his wife, Esther, transcribe his research notes and diaries.
Daniel and Harry Guggenheim were philanthropists who saw the potential value in speeding the mail, or people, around the world on rockets. Yet years after Goddard died, their support of rocketry also led to a financial payback. In 1960, the U.S. government agreed to pay the Guggenheim Foundation $1 million for infringing on patents Goddard had won years before.
Today, Musk, Allen, Branson and others spending their way into space see their ventures as potential moneymakers -- why else do it? But at some level, they must share what Guggenheim family biographer John H. Davis wrote Daniel (and surely Harry) had as well: “faith in the wonders of technology.”
Handicapping NASA's commercial space race
Part 3: Three rockets are at the front of the pack ... here's why Liberty should lead
Jay Barbree - NBC News (Commentary)
(In a five-part series, Barbree lays out a vision of spaceflight in the 20-teens for the 2012 presidential candidates.)
If astronauts are launched from American soil once again during the next presidential term, they'll almost certainly be riding a rocket called Liberty, Atlas or Falcon.
Those are the rockets being offered as the main contenders in a new commercial space race to carry NASA's spacefliers to the International Space Station. So which one is the most ready to go?
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule have taken up most of the spotlight to date, thanks to May's successful cargo-carrying mission to the International Space Station. But this old curmudgeon sees the situation differently, as do some other longtime observers of the space program.
The way it looks from here, Liberty is the best bet, with United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 a close second, and SpaceX third.
Why?
Because Liberty draws upon three decades of tested technology: The rocket's first stage is a space shuttle solid rocket booster with five segments instead of four. The booster has had 221 successful launches in a row — the most ever. A version of Liberty was tested under the name Ares 1-X in 2009. Everything the launch system needs remains standing. Even the 600 high-tech workers whose jobs were outsourced to Russia since last year's retirement of the shuttle fleet are still in the neighborhood.
The launch vehicle, incorporating the solid-fuel first stage and an upper stage based on the tried-and-true Ariane 5 rocket, would be assembled here at Kennedy Space Center's massive Vehicle Assembly Building. Its service tower is here, too, paid for but never used. There's a crawler-transporter ready to carry it, a launch control center ready to monitor the countdown — and the same seaside launch pad used to launch Liberty's first version, the Ares 1-X.
Liberty is designed to lift 44,500 pounds, the most weight carried by any of America's single rockets. It would be outfitted with the Max Launch Abort System, an advanced crew-escape system that was built and tested by NASA itself. Liberty's lightweight composite spacecraft is also a built-and-tested NASA product — and the good news is that its working parts and systems would be put together by Lockheed Martin, the same people building NASA's Orion deep-space ship.
Despite all these pluses, the commercial Liberty project hasn’t received a single dollar from NASA. Its team includes ATK, Astrium, Lockheed Martin, and 12 other subcontractors that fly history’s safest space hardware, sustaining thousands of jobs across 10 states. If Liberty is eventually selected to fly America’s goods, the team plans about 600 rehires from the space shuttle launch team.
Liberty could carry to seven astronauts into Earth orbit, not only aboard its own lightweight taxi, but aboard virtually all commercial spacecraft being offered, including the big one itself, the Orion.
The two other favorites
Simply put, the Liberty launch system can do more than Russia's Soyuz for less money. The same can be said, of course, for the two other entrants in the rocket race, United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 and SpaceX's Falcon 9.
The Atlas 5 has been launched successfully 31 times in a row from its Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch pad, just south of the Kennedy Space Center. The pad is in direct view of NASA's launch control center. It can carry Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft, or Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser, or even Blue Origin's Orbital Space Vehicle — all of which have been receiving development funds from NASA.
If NASA is smart enough to fly both Liberty and Atlas, American astronauts should never be without a rocket again. The two rockets could serve as backups for each other. If not, NASA's $6.6 billion Kennedy Space Center could be without a launch for five years or more. Its remaining 8,500 employees will have little to do except watch the grass grow.
How about SpaceX?
The company's cargo flight in May was a great success, and in time it could be just as successful launching astronauts into orbit. SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, has said the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule could put astronauts into orbit in three years. That's possible — but based on past delays in SpaceX's launch schedule, that doesn't seem likely to me.
SpaceX is going to have to execute a $1.6 billion NASA contract to fly 12 unmanned cargo flights to and from the space station over the next four years. It has other contracts to fulfill as well. In order to get the cargo-carrying Dragon cleared for carrying humans, the company will have to prove out upgrades in the Falcon's engines, develop a launch escape system, enhance environmental controls and install seats as well as control panels for astronauts.
The launch escape system is SpaceX's longest lead item. The company has already tested the SuperDraco engines that will be used by the escape system, but its launch facilities will have to be "human-rated," and then all the hardware and systems will have to pass NASA's safety muster. It's a Herculean effort that calls for 20 flights before launching humans.
SpaceX's impressive Dragon flight in May confounded many of the doubters, but experience is experience: SpaceX has launched rockets from its Cape Canaveral complex only three times, while the companies behind the Liberty and Atlas rockets have had dozens of successful liftoffs.
NASA team faces tough choices
The United States needs its own rocket and spacecraft, and the thousands of high-tech workers who lost their jobs when the space effort was outsourced to Russia need work. NASA has suffered serious setbacks, but I have to say it right here: In spite of it all, no one has done a better job managing the space agency than its current administrator and his deputy.
It’s been an unfair road for NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who started out as a young black man from the segregated South. Despite the odds, he made it through the halls of the U.S. Naval Academy, then served as a fighter pilot, a test pilot and a four-time space shuttle astronaut and commander. On top of all that, he's a retired two-star Marine Corps general. But even more important, he's a gentle man, warm and approachable with good humor and good will — an all-around affable person.
By his side is another sturdy hand — another all-around pleasant person, his deputy, Lori Garver. She cut her teeth in the space business as an intern in John Glenn's presidential campaign, and she's been on the rise ever since.
I've witnessed every day of NASA’s history. I sit here looking across launch pads with clear memories of the first flights by Alan Shepard and John Glenn. I remember standing there and shouting into a microphone when each Apollo flights left for the moon, and manning the microphone for three decades more as hundreds of astronauts were launched on 135 space shuttle missions.
I doubt seriously if anyone is seeking the advice of this old curmudgeon. But for what it's worth, I’m going to give it. Charlie and Lori, the companies involved in this commercial space race are taking no prisoners. The competition is fierce. This is the time you must make your best judgment for your country. Choose the most experienced partners. Choose the least costly path. Support the Liberty team, as well as the team behind Boeing's CST-100 and ULA's Atlas 5, as well as SpaceX. America’s space family needs work. They need to get their jobs back from Russia, and America’s astronauts need the feel of their own launch pads under them.
Safety first
All of the teams in the race are devoted to flying astronauts safely. There's no sign that anything about any of the spacecraft being developed for this space race is even potentially unsafe. But over the long run, experience is experience.
I remember meeting with astronaut Gus Grissom a few days before the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire in 1967. NASA had recently made a switch from McDonnell Aircraft, the prime contractor for Project Mercury and Gemini, to a new contractor named North American Aviation. Grissom begged me to reason with Apollo management. "Nothing really works on that spacecraft, Jay," he said. "We can’t even talk to the blockhouse."
After that talk, Apollo launch manager Rocco Petrone reassured me all was well. But even today, 45 years later, it still haunts me that I should have done more. I should have tried harder to save the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
A similar lack of experience, mixed with overconfidence, played a role in the near-catastrophe of Apollo 13 in 1970, the loss of the shuttle Challenger in 1986, and the failure to see a hole in Columbia's wing in 2003.
Charlie and Lori, as you move ahead with plans for spaceflight in the 20-teens, turn to the experienced space workers who have suffered so much in the past year. Give America proven flight hardware. Don't gamble with this country's space effort.
Caution is the better part of spaceflight.
More about spaceflight in the 20-teens:
· Part 1: Space deserves a place on presidential to-do list
· Part 2: It's decision time for spaceflight at NASA
· Next: Neil Armstrong's vision for future spaceflight
Declassified 'UFO' Documents Don't Prove Alien Life
Mike Wall - Space.com
Alien spacecraft and little green men remain elusive figures in the latest trove of official UFO files released July 12 by the United Kingdom government.
There's no smoking gun anywhere in the 6,700 pages, which represent the ninth collection of government UFO files made public by the U.K.'s National Archives in Kew. But the new batch, which contains documents dating from 1965 to 2008, are full of interesting tidbits nonetheless.
For example, the files recount the story of a hotel owner on the Welsh coast who said she spotted a UFO in 1977. She claimed to see an object the size of a minibus fall from the sky and land in a field at the back of her property.
As she watched, two "faceless humanoids" clad in silver suits emerged from the mysterious craft, unnerving her so much that she asked the local authorities to investigate.
Somewhat surprisingly, they did. An officer from a nearby Royal Air Force base checked out the field, and other military personnel made some inquiries locally to get to the bottom of the mystery.
While the investigation didn't produce any definitive results, it did zero in on one likely explanation, said David Clarke, senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the book "The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings" (The National Archives, 2009).
"It turned out that they suspected, as a result of this investigation, that someone had been involved in a practical joke, and that they'd borrowed a firefighting suit that had been on display in a local shop," Clarke said in a video produced by The National Archives to accompany the new release of UFO files.
"It was sort of white with a big black visor over the face," Clarke added. "This person had been walking around in this suit late at night, and maybe this had been what caused some of these weird sightings."
The new batch of documents also reveals what it was like to work at the U.K.'s UFO Desk, a Defence Ministry organization that assessed UFO reports for intelligence value before it shut down in late 2009.
The job wasn't quite as exciting as it perhaps sounds, according to a document written by a UFO Desk officer.
The idea of investigating unidentified flying objects "tends to suggest to the public that there are top secret teams of specialist scientists scurrying around the country in a real life version of 'The X-Files' …. [but] this is total fiction," the officer writes.
In reality, much of the work consisted of performing Internet searches, the officer added, according to National Archives officials.
The files also reveal a healthy dose of skepticism among governmental UFO investigators in the U.K. For example, in a 1978 briefing, one officer throws cold water on the thought that aliens may have visited our planet many times in the recent past.
"One is driven to the conclusion that a visit to an insignificant planet, such as the Earth, of an uninteresting star (the sun) would probably not occur more than once in 1,000 years or so, even if one assumes that every intelligent community makes, say, 10 launches a year," Clarke said in the video, reading the officer's report and paraphrasing his reasoning.
"He basically says that, therefore, claims of thousands of visits in the last decade by alien spacecraft to planet Earth is just too large a number to be credible," Clarke added.
END
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 7/19/2012
Tested on: 7/19/2012 6:56:53 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2012 AVAST Software.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment