Hope you can join us this Thursday at Hibachi Grill, on Bay Area Blvd. between Highway 3 and I45 for our monthly NASA retirees luncheon at 11:30.
JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1. NASA Mission Videos are Now Available in Imagery Online
2. International Space Station All Hands
3. Win a Prize: JSC Features and 'Roundup' Readership Contest
4. Active Challenge on NASA@work -- Submit Your Solution Today
5. JSC Weight Watchers at Work Open House TODAY
6. FRIDAY: Foldit and Games for Scientific Discovery
7. Job Opportunities
8. Dog Days of Summer at the Starport Gift Shops
9. Starport Presents: Footloose -- Learn the Dance
10. Lean Six Sigma -- Overview Training
11. OCFO Employee Time and Attendance Charging Course
12. Making Your Favorite Recipes Healthier
13. New Wellness Classes in August -- Sign Up Online
________________________________________ QUOTE OF THE DAY
“ It is easy to sit up and take notice. What is difficult is getting up and taking action. ”
-- Al Batt
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1. NASA Mission Videos are Now Available in Imagery Online
Imagery Online (IO) is now the source for all on-orbit mission video from all International Space Station (ISS) Expeditions and ISS assembly shuttle missions. IO is replacing the old Convera Screening Room site, also known as the Video Asset Management System (VAMS).
JSC team employees can browse or search for video, play video selections, download low-resolution video, add expert descriptions using the Wiki function, create Edit Decision Lists (EDLs) for requests and submit requests for video products. IO is now your one-stop shop for current mission imagery. Check it out today! Ground-based video in IO is coming soon.
For more, go to: http://io.jsc.nasa.gov/app/index.cfm
Or contact Leslie Richards at leslie.k.richards@nasa.gov and 281-483-3417; or Maura White atmaura.white-1@nasa.gov and 281-244-0322.
IO is a service of the Information Resources Directorate: http://ird.jsc.nasa.gov
JSC-IRD-Outreach x34245
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2. International Space Station All Hands
The International Space Station Program will hold an All Hands for all space station civil servants, contractors and International Partners. It will be held on Aug. 3 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom.
Jennifer McCarter x47885
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3. 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 Thursday, Aug. 2. 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:
It is climate controlled and has a large inventory of hydraulic actuators, load cells, servo-valves, manifolds, flex hoses and test fixtures. What is it, and where is it?
"Roundup," July edition:
What occurred on May 31 at 10:42 a.m. CDT, and why is it important?
Neesha Hosein x27516
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4. Active Challenge on NASA@work -- Submit Your Solution Today
Time is running out to submit your solution for our current challenge on NASA@work, "Made in Orbit: Satellite Assembly Demonstration Concepts." To participate, jump on our site athttp://nasa.innocentive.com and submit your solution today! New to NASA@work? NASA@work is a collaborative, problem-solving platform that connects the collective knowledge of experts from all centers across NASA. If you have any questions or have a challenge you would like to post on the NASA@work platform, please feel free to contact Kathryn Keeton atkathryn.keeton@nasa.gov or 281-204-1519.
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5. JSC Weight Watchers at Work Open House TODAY
In an effort to keep our Monthly Pass attendance above the required minimums, we will be hosting an Open House at today's meeting. This is a free information meeting to reach out to any potential new members who might like to join our at-work meeting. It's an opportunity to learn more about how the Weight Watchers at Work program can benefit your life. Refreshments will be served.
What: JSC Weight Watchers at Work Open House
Date: Today, July 30
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Location: Building 45, Room 551
Ongoing weekly meetings are held every Monday, with weigh-in from 11:30 a.m. to noon and the meeting from noon to 12:30 p.m. Sign up and purchase your Monthly Pass at the link below. JSC Company ID 24156, Passcode WW24156.
Don't wait, join today!
Julie Kliesing x31540 https://wellness.weightwatchers.com
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6. FRIDAY: Foldit and Games for Scientific Discovery
Jeff Flatten, researcher at the University of Washington, will present "Foldit and Games for Scientific Discovery" on Friday, Aug. 3, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in the Building 30 Auditorium.
Foldit is an online multiplayer video game that enables anyone to contribute to real scientific discoveries in biochemistry. By combining the natural problem-solving skills of humans with the raw number-crunching power of computers, Foldit aims to accomplish what neither could do alone. Foldit has already made significant contributions to scientific problems, and the lessons learned from Foldit have the potential to be applied to a wide variety of scientific fields.
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7. Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities?
Both internal Competitive Placement Plans (CPPs) and external JSC job announcements are posted on both the Human Resources (HR) portal and the USAJOBS website at:http://www.usajobs.gov
Through the HR portal, civil servants can view summaries of all the agency jobs that are currently open at: https://hr.nasa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/employees_home/239/job_opportu...
To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop down menu and select JSC HR. The "Jobs link" will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies, please call your HR representative.
Lisa Pesak x30476
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8. Dog Days of Summer at the Starport Gift Shops
The "dog days of summer" are being celebrated at Starport Gift Shops. Bring in a picture of your canine companion wearing his/her NASA apparel for our photo contest. Simply complete the contest release form and attach a picture. All photos will be displayed and voted on, and the one with the most votes at each store will win a prize! See details at the stores. Contest ends Aug. 10.
Lorie Shewell x30308 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/
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9. Starport Presents: Footloose -- Learn the Dance
Footloose Dance Class/Event:
- Gilruth Center Gymnasium
Are you ready to cut loose?! Starport and Heather Paul are ready to teach you the Footloose dance routine in one amazing night. All family, friends and community members are welcome (12 years and older). Sign up for this great class today.
Early Registration: OPEN NOW through Aug. 1
- $10 per person
Regular Registration: Aug. 2 to 10
- $15 per person
Register at the Gilruth information desk. Don't miss out on this fantastic experience. Sign up now!
Steve Schade x30304http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Fitness/RecreationClasses/RecreationProgram...
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10. Lean Six Sigma -- Overview Training
The principles of Lean Six Sigma have become an industry standard practice in continual improvement over the last couple of decades. They are frequently combined using complementary approaches to both improve efficiency and reduce variation and defects. NASA began its Lean Six Sigma program in early 2000 by benchmarking the training and implementation methods of its contractors and industry partners, resulting in a NASA Lean Six Sigma approach of rapid process improvement. JSC began training civil servants as process improvement facilitators in 2009, and offers periodic training provided by the agency's Master Black Belt.
Civil servants and contractors are invited to attend a one-hour overview training session provided by the agency's expert in an informal question-and-answer format. This one-hour overview also serves as a prerequisite for the NASA Green Belt training class (offered in SATERN).
Cheryl Andrews x35979
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11. OCFO Employee Time and Attendance Charging Course
As part of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) Subject-Matter Expert course series, Bridget Broussard-Guidry and Joan Johnson will lead an Employee Time and Attendance Charging course, focusing on all of the leave requirements and special hour types in WebTADS. The course will cover how to charge time under different circumstances and the rules pertaining to each type so that all learners will be in full compliance with agency and JSC policy. An example of a Leave and Earnings Statement, from Employee Express, will be reviewed and explained in detail as well. The course is scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 9. There are two offerings:9 to 10 a.m. and 1 to 2 p.m. -- both in Building 45, Room 251. WebEx for each offering is available also. Please register in SATERN via one of the links below or by searching the catalog for the course title.
Aug. 9, 9 to a.m. class SATERN direct link:https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Aug. 9, 9 to 10 a.m. WebEx SATERN direct link:https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Aug. 9, 1 to 2 p.m. class SATERN direct link:https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Aug. 9, 1 to 2 p.m. WebEx SATERN direct link:https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Bridget Broussard-Guidry x34718
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12. Making Your Favorite Recipes Healthier
This nutrition class will help you give your recipes a healthy makeover! In this class we will cover how to make your favorite dishes a little better for you with a few easy modifications. We will discuss how to decrease the overall calorie and fat content of recipes without taking away the taste. Participants are encouraged to bring their own recipes to share. The presentation will be held Tuesday, Aug. 7, at 4:30 p.m. in Building 8, Room 248.
You can sign up for this class and other upcoming nutrition classes online at:http://www.explorationwellness.com/WellnessCSS/CourseCatalogSelection/
If you're working on improving your approach to healthy nutrition but can't attend a class, we offer free one-on-one consultations with Glenda Blaskey, the JSC Registered Dietitian.
Glenda Blaskey x41503 http://www.explorationwellness.com/Web/scripts/Nutrition.aspx
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13. New Wellness Classes in August -- Sign Up Online
The Exploration Wellness summer class program is entering its last month. Several new classes are being offered. Whether you're interested to know more about Metabolic Syndrome or getting fit from anywhere, healthy dining out, fiber facts, happiness and resiliency, or need to tune up for personal finance, there's plenty to choose from!
Fitness:
Metabolic Syndrome and the Role of Physical Fitness
Fitness from Anywhere - What's New This Year
Nutrition:
Dining Out - Can it Be Part of a Healthy Lifestyle?
The Scoop on Fiber and Whole Grains
Stress Management:
Managing Stress and Resiliency
The Science of Happiness
Financial Wellness Foundation - Are You Ready to Get Financially Fit?
Introductory: Personal Financial Assessments, Budgets, Debt, Insurance, Long-Term Care
Advanced: Investing, Taxes, Retirement, Insurance, Estate Planning
Online Webinar: Debt Free for Life!
See link below for class schedule and additional details.
jessica vos x41383 http://www.explorationwellness.com/rd/AE108.aspx?Aug_Signup.pdf
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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:
NEWS NOTE: Dist. may be delayed through Thursday as I will be on West Coast time
Human Spaceflight News
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Japanese cargo ship berthed at space station
William Harwood – CBS News
Operating the International Space Station's robot arm, astronaut Joseph Acaba captured a Japanese cargo ship early Friday, one week after launch from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. With the HTV-3 spacecraft firmly locked to the end of the arm, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide took over, maneuvering it to an Earth-facing port on the station's forward Harmony module for berthing.
Japanese Unmanned Spacecraft Arrives at Space Station
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
The third in a series of robotic Japanese spaceships has safely arrived at the International Space Station Friday, bearing a delivery of food, equipment and student science experiments for the orbital outpost. The unmanned, school bus-size H-2 Transfer Vehicle-3 (HTV-3), also called Kounotori 3 ("White Stork" in Japanese), flew to about 40 feet (12 meters) away from the ISS, where it was grabbed at 8:23 a.m. ET (1223 GMT) by the space station's 58-foot long (18 m) robotic arm, which was controlled from inside by astronauts Joe Acaba of NASA and Aki Hoshide of JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency). Using the Canadarm2 robotic arm, Acaba and Hoshide maneuvered Kounotori 3 to the Earth-facing docking port on the space station's Harmony node at 10:34 a.m. ET (1434 GMT).
Unmanned cargo carrier docks with space station
Japan Times
The Konotori unmanned cargo transporter docked early Saturday with the International Space Station carrying 4.6 tons of supplies, including food, clothing and experiment-related equipment, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said. Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, 43, was set to open the hatch and crawl into the Konotori later in the day to transfer the packages to the space station. This is the third cargo vehicle sent into space by JAXA. It was placed into orbit by an H-IIB rocket that blasted off July 21 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, and made its way to the ISS while orbiting at an altitude of 400 km under the control of the agency's Tsukuba center in Ibaraki Prefecture.
Russian cargo ship successfully re-docks with station
William Harwood - CBS News
An unmanned Russian Progress supply ship successfully re-docked with the International Space Station Saturday after an aborted approach last week during tests of a new rendezvous antenna. After examining telemetry, Russian engineers concluded the glitch was caused by low temperatures in electronic gear associated with the new antenna. Tests showed that activating the components earlier than usual and allowing them to warm up longer would fix the problem and after station keeping while a Japanese cargo ship was captured by the station crew Friday, the Progress approach was re-initiated.
Progress 47 Returns to ISS with Successful KURS-NA Performance
Mark Carreau - Aviation Week
Russia's unpiloted Progress 47 supply ship re-docked with the International Space Station late Saturday, successfully completing a test of the new KURS-NA automated docking system on the second attempt. The two spacecraft linked at 9:01 p.m., EDT. The M-15M freighter aborted its first attempt to re-dock late July 23, when the prototype avionics upgrade failed an activation self-test at a separation of 161 kilometers, or about 100 miles, from the station.
Russian cargo spacecraft docks with space station on 2nd try
An unmanned Russian cargo ship parked itself at the International Space Station Saturday, in a second attempt to test an updated space docking system, NASA says. The robotic Russian Progress 47 spacecraft re-docked to the space station to test the new Kurs-NA docking system. The cargo ship safely approached the station and automatically attached itself to the Pirs docking compartment on the Russian segment of the massive orbiting laboratory at 9:01 p.m. EDT (0101 GMT July 29). Russia intends to use the Kurs-NA docking system on future unmanned Progress spacecraft and manned Soyuz vehicles.
Russian cargo ship redocks with space station
Associated Press
An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft has redocked with the International Space Station after an aborted attempt five days earlier. The Progress cargo ship had separated from the station a week ago to perform engineering tests and try out a new docking system and had been due to reconnect with the station on Tuesday. But problems developed with the avionics in the docking system.
Russian unmanned spacecraft docks on second try
Alissa de Carbonnel- Reuters
An upgraded Russian unmanned spacecraft successfully linked up with the International Space Station on Sunday on its second attempt to test a new docking system, Russia's space agency said. The docking set aside doubts over the new Kurs-NA rendezvous system that will deliver astronauts and future cargoes to the orbital station after a botched first test when the equipment malfunctioned due to low temperatures earlier this week. The operating system functioned properly after it was allowed to warm up, according to a statement from the U.S. space agency NASA.
For NASA, there's no liftoff from politics
Dan Vergano - USA Today
Always reaching for the stars, NASA often finds itself mired in earthbound politics. Born in the Cold War, beset by tragedies and buoyed by triumphs, the $17.7 billion space agency once more faces debate in the post-space shuttle era. Once again, an administration's plans for NASA face congressional criticism, scrutiny from a blue-ribbon panel and demands for more funds that set parts of the agency against one another.
NASA still not worried about sequestration
A top NASA official said Thursday that the agency remained confident that budget sequestration could be avoided, even though they were starting to think about the potential effects should those automatic budget cuts take effect. “If you talk to the leadership in the administration or Congress, most people believe it’s not going to happen,” said NASA chief of staff David Radzanowski in response to a question on the subject after his keynote address at the NewSpace 2012 Conference in Santa Clara, California, Thursday morning. “They’re confident because the alternative is not good policy.”
Private partnerships pave NASA's path back to space flight
Jennifer Woldt - The Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI)
Partnerships with private space-flight companies are expected to pave the way for NASA’s future space exploration and space station development plans. The United States has not had a way to transport crews into space other than relying on other countries to provide seats in spacecraft since the final flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis in July 2011. The Commercial Crew program is a partnership between NASA and private companies to develop innovative designs to take NASA astronauts to space in the future. Showcasing those partnerships is a centerpiece of NASA’s participation this year in the Experimental Aircraft Associations’ AirVenture 2012.
NASA may go back to the future and use Saturn V engines on Mars rocket
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
A Huntsville company competing to power NASA's new heavy-lift rocket to Mars says the best engines for the job may be the same massive F-1 engines that lifted the Saturn V Apollo rockets nearly 50 years ago. "We know you need a lot of thrust," Dynetics Inc. Vice President Steve Cook said last week, "and if you want to do it affordably, we think you need a liquid (fueled motor). So, now you say, 'What engines do I have?'" "Well, we've already done this before," Cook said to answer his own question. "You had 13 fully successful Apollo flights with never an in-flight failure of, guess what, the F-1 engine."
John Couwels – CNN’s Light Years
As John Bundy loads his red commercial lawn mower into a flatbed trailer, it's hard to believe he used to manage a team of NASA shuttle workers. Bundy, who sports a scruffy beard and speaks with a thick, Southern drawl, worked at the Kennedy Space Center for 31 years, the last six years as a manager in the Orbiter Processing Facility, a shuttle hangar. Bundy is one of 8,000 shuttle workers laid off or facing termination from Florida's Kennedy Space Center after the end of NASA’s shuttle program. This month marks one year since the program ended with the launch and landing of Shuttle Atlantis. The shock of no longer working at Kennedy Space Center took months for Bundy to process.
United Space Alliance to lay off 148 in September
Richard Bilbao - Orlando Business Journal
United Space Alliance in Titusville announced it will lay off 148 people this September, according to a Workers' Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state of Florida. The layoffs include aerospace technicians, engineers, computer science experts and other positions. The positions will primarily come from workers at the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Base.
Antimatter universe sought by space-station-based detector
Robert Evans - Reuters
A seven-tonne particle detector parked for over a year on the International Space Station aims to establish whether there is an unseen "dark universe" woven into the cosmos, the scientist leading the project said this week. And the detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer or AMS, has already broken all records in registering 17 billion cosmic rays and storing data on them for analysis, Nobel physics laureate Samuel Ting told a news conference. "The question is: Where is the universe made from antimatter?" said Ting. "It could be out there somewhere far away producing particles that we could detect with the AMS."
Private Space Transportation Reaching New Heights
Tom Coughlin - Forbes
Every once and a while it is important to write about your hidden passions and dreams. Thus this blog talks about exciting developments in private space transportation, a semi-secret interest of mine for decades. I spent a day at a conference called NewSpace 2012 in Santa Clara, CA to find out just how real the development of inexpensive space transportations was and how close we might be to achieving my youthful dreams of going into space. There were a number of private launch companies as well as NASA officials that participated in the event. It was also interesting to note a growing wave of amateur space enthusiasts who are
Apollo Moon Landing Flags Still Standing, Photos Reveal
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
An enduring question ever since the manned moon landings of the 1960s has been: Are the flags planted by the astronauts still standing? Now, lunar scientists say the verdict is in from the latest photos of the moon taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC): Most do, in fact, still stand. "From the LROC images it is now certain that the American flags are still standing and casting shadows at all of the sites, except Apollo 11," LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson wrote in a blog post Friday. "Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine during liftoff of Apollo 11, and it looks like he was correct!"
Super rocket review positive, but let's not celebrate early
John Kelly - Florida Today (Opinion)
NASA’s new super rocket is moving forward, passing two important review milestones this week and progressing into preliminary design. Space agency leaders talked up the progress this week and credited the streamlined nature of its internal reviews of the rocket’s development. That’s good, given the the United States’ need to field a rocket for the nation’s future human exploration missions as soon as possible. It’s a cause for concern, however, if the review did not thoroughly answer questions about the program’s development.
My friend Sally Ride’s final mission: Making science cool
Susan Okie - Washington Post (Opinion)
(Okie is a physician, a former medical reporter for The Washington Post and a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Georgetown University)
Sally Ride seized the chance to go to space because she wanted to find out what it would feel like. Sally loved testing the limits of her brain and body — solving the puzzles in Scientific American as a teenager, running five miles a day while doing research in physics at Stanford University, winning tournament tennis matches, learning to fly a NASA T-38 jet. After she blasted off to become America’s first woman in space, the support crew at Mission Control asked Sally how she’d enjoyed being launched on a rocket. She gave it Disneyland’s top rating: “Definitely an E ticket.” Looking back at her first spaceflight years later, she called it “the most fun I’ll ever have in my life.”
There's still hope for NASA
Houston Chronicle (Editorial)
To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of NASA's death are greatly exaggerated. The space agency and the Johnson Space Center are very much alive, if not as visible as they were in the days when Mission Control was doing its regular televised turns during manned space missions. That is the reality-grounded message being delivered by Mike Coats, the JSC's director, as reported by Eric Berger in July 19's Chronicle ("We're not going out of business," Page B1). It was one we heard along with Berger during an hour-plus conversation the director had with the editorial board.
“Mr. Galileo Was Correct”: The Legacy of Apollo 15
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
As July burned into August 1971, three sons of Planet Earth were midway through their exploration of the Moon. Aboard the command and service module Endeavour, astronaut Al Worden operated a sophisticated array of scientific equipment from orbit, whilst his crewmates Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the surface at a place called Hadley – a mountainous region, four hundred miles north of the lunar equator, characterized by spectacular peaks, football-field-sized craters and a 25-mile-long gorge, known as Hadley Rille. The discoveries made by Apollo 15 revealed more about the history and evolution of the lunar highlands than ever before…and their effects continue to resonate to this day.
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COMPLETE STORIES
Japanese cargo ship berthed at space station
William Harwood – CBS News
Operating the International Space Station's robot arm, astronaut Joseph Acaba captured a Japanese cargo ship early Friday, one week after launch from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.
With the HTV-3 spacecraft firmly locked to the end of the arm, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide took over, maneuvering it to an Earth-facing port on the station's forward Harmony module for berthing.
"HTV capture is complete," Hoshide called down after the spacecraft was grappled at 8:23 a.m. EDT (GMT-4). "Congratulations to all the teams in Houston and (Japan)."
Spectacular video from the station showed the bus-size HTV suspended against the black backdrop of space as the two spacecraft sailed 253 miles above the southern Indian Ocean.
"Congratulations on a great capture. We'd like to welcome Kounotori aboard," astronaut Catherine Coleman replied from Houston, referring to the cargo craft's Japanese nickname -- "white stork."
After carefully aligning the HTV's forward hatch with Harmony's Earth-facing port, a gang of motorized bolts were driven home to lock the spacecraft in place by 10:34 a.m. Hatches were scheduled to be opened Saturday, but the astronauts were running ahead of schedule and they had the option of entering the craft earlier if time allowed.
Developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, as a contribution to the space station program, the HTV is designed to carry both pressurized and unpressurized cargo, including equipment too big to pass through the space station's hatches.
Making the program's third flight, the HTV is loaded with 3.9 tons of pressurized cargo, including a research aquarium, five small "CubeSat" satellites and their launcher, a catalytic reactor for the station's water processing system and a water pump. Also on board: Japanese food, beverages and crew clothing.
The HTV is carrying another 1.2 tons of gear in its unpressurized section, including experimental NASA communications hardware and instruments and sensors that will be mounted outside the Japanese Kibo lab module.
The flight plan calls for the cargo ship to remain in place until Sept. 6.
Japanese Unmanned Spacecraft Arrives at Space Station
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
The third in a series of robotic Japanese spaceships has safely arrived at the International Space Station Friday, bearing a delivery of food, equipment and student science experiments for the orbital outpost.
The unmanned, school bus-size H-2 Transfer Vehicle-3 (HTV-3), also called Kounotori 3 ("White Stork" in Japanese), flew to about 40 feet (12 meters) away from the ISS, where it was grabbedat 8:23 a.m. ET (1223 GMT) by the space station's 58-foot long (18 m) robotic arm, which was controlled from inside by astronauts Joe Acaba of NASA and Aki Hoshide of JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency).
Using the Canadarm2 robotic arm, Acaba and Hoshide maneuvered Kounotori 3 to the Earth-facing docking port on the space station's Harmony node at 10:34 a.m. ET (1434 GMT).
"I think we couldn’t have had a better day and we're looking forward to a great HTV mission," Capcom Cady Coleman told the astronauts from Mission Control in Houston.
"You guys were great, thanks a lot for helping us out," Acaba replied. "Thanks a lot for all the food."
Today's arrival follows the failed docking attempt on Monday (July 23) of an unmanned Russian Progress spacecraft. The Progress 47 craft was testing a new rendezvous system, which apparently failed to work as planned. The vehicle, which had already been at the space station, had undocked in order to test the new system in a re-docking. Russia plans to try again on Sunday (July 29) to dock the Progress 47.
Kounotori launched atop a Japanese H-2B rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan on July 20. It is the third such vehicle launched from Japan, following the flights of HTVs 1 and 2 in September 2009 and January 2011, respectively.
The spaceship is loaded with 4 tons (3,600 kg) of cargo, including care packages with food, clothing and other items for the space station's crew. The vehicle, which is 33 feet (10 m) long and 13 feet (4 m) wide, is also carrying a camera called the ISERV (International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System).
The camera is to be installed on the station, for use by ground-based scientists who can manipulate it via remote control. The system is intended for studies of natural disaster sites and environmental issues on Earth.
Two student-designed experiments are also packed aboard Kounotori 3. These projects won the YouTube Space Lab competition, which allowed students between the ages of 14 and 18 to envision space station experiments and describe them in videos submitted to YouTube. The winners were chosen by public voting.
Amr Mohamed, 18, of Alexandria, Egypt, and Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma, both 16, of Troy, Mich., came out on top, with experiments investigating how microgravity affects the hunting strategy of zebra spiders, and how different nutrients and compounds affect the growth and virulence of bacteria grown in space, respectively.
While Mohamed elected to experience cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia, for his prize, Chen and Ma chose to watch their projects launch aboard Kounotori 3 July 20 from the Tanegashima Space Center.
Six astronauts currently live aboard the $100 billion, football field-size space laboratory. They hail from the United States, Russia and Japan.
Kounotori 3 is just one of a fleet of unmanned cargo delivery spacecraft that carry supplies to the space station. Russia and Europe have each built and launched similar robotic vehicles, and a commercial U.S. spacecraft, Dragon from California company SpaceX, has recently entered the field with its first visit to the station in May.
Unmanned cargo carrier docks with space station
Japan Times
The Konotori unmanned cargo transporter docked early Saturday with the International Space Station carrying 4.6 tons of supplies, including food, clothing and experiment-related equipment, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.
Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, 43, was set to open the hatch and crawl into the Konotori later in the day to transfer the packages to the space station.
This is the third cargo vehicle sent into space by JAXA. It was placed into orbit by an H-IIB rocket that blasted off July 21 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, and made its way to the ISS while orbiting at an altitude of 400 km under the control of the agency's Tsukuba center in Ibaraki Prefecture.
"The docking went quite smoothly," JAXA project manager Yukio Koyari told a news conference in Tsukuba. "We were nervous because (the Kotonori) was made of domestically manufactured equipment, but we were glad Hoshide and other crew members managed to maneuver it into place and will continue operations."
"I was impressed and proud of the Kotonori, as it is a demonstration of Japanese technology," Hoshide, who arrived at the space station earlier this month aboard a Russian craft, said on Twitter.
The Konotori carried five small satellites that will be sent into orbit from Japan's Kibo lab. It is also equipped with a device that will record images of the cargo transporter's re-entry into the atmosphere and collect data on how it burns up, for use in future manned spacecraft programs and other purposes.
The Konotori is scheduled to separate from the space station on Sept. 7.
Russian cargo ship successfully re-docks with station
William Harwood - CBS News
An unmanned Russian Progress supply ship successfully re-docked with the International Space Station Saturday after an aborted approach last week during tests of a new rendezvous antenna.
After examining telemetry, Russian engineers concluded the glitch was caused by low temperatures in electronic gear associated with the new antenna. Tests showed that activating the components earlier than usual and allowing them to warm up longer would fix the problem and after station keeping while a Japanese cargo ship was captured by the station crew Friday, the Progress approach was re-initiated.
Veteran station commander Gennady Padalka and Yuri Malenchenko, two of the world's most experienced cosmonauts, were standing by in the station's Zvezda command module, ready to remotely take over manual control if any problems developed during final approach.
But this time around, there was no trouble and the KURS-NA antenna worked properly, locking on to navigation beacons that helped guide the Progress M-15M spacecraft to the Pirs docking compartment for a linkup at 9:01 p.m. EDT (GMT-4).
Starting in 2014, the Russians plan to implement the new KURS-NA system on operational spacecraft, using the new antenna in place of four in the current system.
With the re-docking test complete, the station crew plans to jettison the Progress M-15M spacecraft for good on Monday, clearing the way for launch of another Progress, the M-16M spacecraft, at 3:35 p.m. EDT Wednesday.
In yet another test, the Russians plan to implement an abbreviated four-orbit rendezvous, shortening the normal two-day approach to less than one day, setting up a docking at the Pirs module around 9:24 p.m., five hours and 49 minutes after launch.
The goal of the test is to check the feasibility of shortening manned Soyuz rendezvous procedures to minimize the amount of time crews have to spend cooped up in the cramped ferry craft.
Progress 47 Returns to ISS with Successful KURS-NA Performance
Mark Carreau - Aviation Week
Russia's unpiloted Progress 47 supply ship re-docked with the International Space Station late Saturday, successfully completing a test of the new KURS-NA automated docking system on the second attempt.
The two spacecraft linked at 9:01 p.m., EDT.
The M-15M freighter aborted its first attempt to re-dock late July 23, when the prototype avionics upgrade failed an activation self-test at a separation of 161 kilometers, or about 100 miles, from the station.
In between the two attempts, Russian experts traced a potential cause of the abort to low temperatures within the freighter. Internal heaters were commanded by Russian flight control teams to warm the avionics to 22 degrees C for Saturday's link up. At 7:01 p.m., EDT, the KURS-NA aboard the capsule activated as intended at the point it failed the July 23 self test.
As the capsule closed within 15 kilometers, the passive and active rendezvous systems on the station and the Progress 47 exchanged comparable range and closing rate data, generating additional confidence for a successful outcome.
The flight test is part of a plan by the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, and contractor RSC Energia to equip Soyuz crew transport as well as unpiloted Progress re-supply craft with the upgraded rendezvous system, potentially by 2014. The new system features four fewer antennas, upgraded electronics and a lower power requirement than the current avionics. The new antenna configuration removes a potential docking obstruction as well.
The Progress 47 re-docked to the staton's Russian segment Pirs module for what will be a brief final stay.
The freighter reached the station initially on April 22, and all of its nearly three tons of supplies were off-loaded before it undocked on July 22 for what was intended to be an overnight flight test of the new rendezvous system.
Progress 47, now filled with trash, is scheduled to depart the station for the final time late July 30and eventually make a destructure re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Prior to the final undocking, the station's three cosmonauts will remove the KURS-NA hardware so that it can be returned to Earth on a future spacecraft misson to undergo an engineering analysis.
The July 30 undocking will set the stage for an ISS first.
Russia plans to launch the Progress 48 supply craft on Aug. 1 on a four orbit, six hour rendezvous and docking profile. The typical Progress launch to docking timeline spans 34 orbits, or a little over two days. That remains an option for the Progress 48 mission as well.
Russian cargo spacecraft docks with space station on 2nd try
An unmanned Russian cargo ship parked itself at the International Space Station Saturday, in a second attempt to test an updated space docking system, NASA says.
The robotic Russian Progress 47 spacecraft re-docked to the space station to test the new Kurs-NA docking system. The cargo ship safely approached the station and automatically attached itself to the Pirs docking compartment on the Russian segment of the massive orbiting laboratoryat 9:01 p.m. EDT (0101 GMT July 29). Russia intends to use the Kurs-NA docking system on future unmanned Progress spacecraft and manned Soyuz vehicles.
The Progress' safe docking followed a failed first attempt four days ago, on July 23, which was aborted after a technical glitch prevented the spacecraft from reaching the orbiting outpost. After that attempt, the Progress 47's onboard computers kept the craft a safe distance away from the station while Russian engineers analyzed the failure.
The successful maneuver was a key demonstration of the new Kurs-NA docking system, which is an updated version of the Kurs system that has been integrated into Russian spacecraft for years. Engineers made several upgrades to the newer version, including better electronics that are expected to use less power and improve safety.
As part of the test, the robotic Progress 47 spacecraft approached the station to within about 29 miles (46 kilometers). At this range, the Kurs-NA system was activated, and the cargo ship carefully attached itself to the space station. [Infographic: How Russia's Progress Spaceships Work]
The Progress 47 docking test occurred a day after a different unmanned cargo freighter arrived at the space station. The Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle-3, or HTV-3, was safely attached to the orbiting outpost Friday morning (July 27). The spacecraft is packed with fresh supplies, food and science experiments for the station.
The Progress 47 arrived at the space station in April to deliver clothing, food and other supplies to the astronauts living aboard the space lab. The cargo ship had been attached to the Pirs docking compartment since it first reached the station and completed its prime mission, but was purposefully undocked on July 22 to prepare for the Kurs-NA trial run.
After unloading all the cargo inside the Progress 47, the station crew re-loaded the spacecraft with trash and other unwanted items. Russia's disposable Progress vehicles are intentionally sent to burn up during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere at the end of their missions.
The Progress 47 cargo ship is scheduled to make its final departure from the space station on July 30 at 2:11 p.m. EDT (1811 GMT).
The space station's Expedition 32 crew, led by Russian cosmonaut and station commander Gennady Padalka,monitored today's docking test. There are currently six astronauts living at the orbiting complex, including Padalka, Russian cosmonauts Sergei Revin and Yuri Malenchenko, NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Joe Acaba, and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide.
The next Russian cargo ship, Progress 48, is slated to launch on Aug. 1 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Russian cargo ship redocks with space station
Associated Press
An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft has redocked with the International Space Station after an aborted attempt five days earlier.
The Progress cargo ship had separated from the station a week ago to perform engineering tests and try out a new docking system and had been due to reconnect with the station on Tuesday. But problems developed with the avionics in the docking system.
The second attempt early Sunday was successful. Video streamed from Russian mission control reported no problems.
The Progress already had delivered its cargo, and was being kept at the station to load garbage. When full, it will be released and burn up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
The docking system is to be removed from the Progress and sent to Earth for examination and refinement.
Russian unmanned spacecraft docks on second try
Alissa de Carbonnel- Reuters
An upgraded Russian unmanned spacecraft successfully linked up with the International Space Station on Sunday on its second attempt to test a new docking system, Russia's space agency said.
The docking set aside doubts over the new Kurs-NA rendezvous system that will deliver astronauts and future cargoes to the orbital station after a botched first test when the equipment malfunctioned due to low temperatures earlier this week.
The operating system functioned properly after it was allowed to warm up, according to a statement from the U.S. space agency NASA.
Kurs-NA is an upgrade of the Kurs docking gear used for years on Russia's manned Soyuz and robotic Progress spacecrafts.
The system consolidates five antennas into one, has updated electronics and is designed to improve safety and use less power, according to NASA.
The Progress ship re-docked with the Pirs module at 0100 GMT (9 p.m. EDT on Saturday), the Russian space agency Roscomos said in a statement, for a brief final stay before the single-use craft, laden with space station trash, is due to burn up on re-entry over the Pacific Ocean on July 30.
Since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttles last year, the United States has been dependent on Russia and is paying $60 million per person to fly astronauts to the ISS, a $100 billion research complex orbiting 240 miles above Earth.
Moscow is struggling to restore the prestige of its once-pioneering space program after a string of launch mishaps last year, including the failure of a mission to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos.
Six astronauts are currently aboard the orbital outpost: American Sunita Williams, Japan's Akihiko Hoshide and Russian Yury Malenchenko joined cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and US astronaut Joseph Acaba earlier this month.
For NASA, there's no liftoff from politics
Dan Vergano - USA Today
Always reaching for the stars, NASA often finds itself mired in earthbound politics.
Born in the Cold War, beset by tragedies and buoyed by triumphs, the $17.7 billion space agency once more faces debate in the post-space shuttle era. Once again, an administration's plans for NASA face congressional criticism, scrutiny from a blue-ribbon panel and demands for more funds that set parts of the agency against one another.
"You cannot have a public space agency without politics playing a role. That's only right when the taxpayers are paying the bills," says planetary scientist Daniel Britt of the University of Central Florida. This month in Washington, Britt and his colleagues visited congressional staffers to voice support for more missions to explore nearby planets, projects cut by NASA. "We tell them that space exploration is an area where the U.S. leads the world, and we'd like to see it stay that way," Britt says.
Such calls are not so unusual. Even as NASA's largest Mars mission, the Curiosity rover, headed for the Red Planet this summer, standard space agency politics took place on Earth. Astronaut Donald Pettit testified to the Senate about International Space Station research, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, spoke to a National Research Council panel assessing the "strategic direction" of the space agency.
Some in Congress, such as Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R.-Texas, want more manned missions to the moon. Some, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., want more robot missions to Mars. Then there are those such as Rep. Ron Paul, R.-Texas, who said NASA "is dead, and the corpse must be buried as soon as possible" at a Florida debate.
In his tenure, Bolden has often defended the 2010 Obama administration space policy, which would send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars around the mid-2030s. Big-ticket priorities of the space agency are:
· A large rocket and capsule to get to such places, known as the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multipurpose Crew Vehicle.
· Commercial rocket company missions, such as the May SpaceX "Dragon" trip, to the International Space Station at least through 2020.
· A 2018 launch of the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the highly productive Hubble Space Telescope, whose cost overruns along with Curiosity's have drained funding from planetary science missions.
Each one comes with political fighting attached. In June, Bolden and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., of the House Appropriations committee settled a dispute over NASA using commercial companies, such as SpaceX or Boeing, to send astronauts to the space station. NASA wanted four providers and Wolf wanted one-and-a-half to keep costs down. They settled on two-and-a-half.
Such scraps mix into the yearly haggling over NASA's budget. In February, the administration requested $17.7 billion for NASA in 2013, a $59 million cut from last year. The House has appropriated $17.6 billion while the Senate has slotted $19.4 billion, which sounds like more but includes transfer of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs to NASA. The 2013 budget awaits a final vote.
"The glass is either half-full or half-empty at NASA," says space policy expert John Logsdon, author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. The agency won approval to proceed with building the SLS last year but faces doubts in Congress over the lack of a long-term vision. "NASA's budget only supports a program that is fragile and doesn't make long-term sense," Logsdon says. As an example, he points to the SLS, which will launch in 2017 and carry astronauts only in 2021, with a less-defined schedule thereafter.
Squabbling may be just what Congress wants, suggests University of Houston political scientist Alan Steinberg. In a 2011 Space Policyjournal study, he noted that although the monetary value of the NASA budget has marched steadily upward since 1973, in reality it has declined as a percentage of the federal budget, from 1.35% to 0.6%. "I think this has allowed congressmen to have it both ways," Steinberg says, as supporters note increased budgets and detractors are pleased that, factoring inflation, the space agency doesn't take a bigger bite out of the federal budget.
The reality is NASA's budget peaked in 1965, in the midst of the moon race. When the moon race was over in 1969, President Richard Nixon decreed NASA would have to fight for its budget with other agencies. "The program has never really adjusted to that change," Logsdon says. "We give NASA a special place in our national life, one that is outsized compared to its actual budget. It is remarkable what they do accomplish with the resources available."
NASA still not worried about sequestration
A top NASA official said Thursday that the agency remained confident that budget sequestration could be avoided, even though they were starting to think about the potential effects should those automatic budget cuts take effect.
“If you talk to the leadership in the administration or Congress, most people believe it’s not going to happen,” said NASA chief of staff David Radzanowski in response to a question on the subject after his keynote address at the NewSpace 2012 Conference in Santa Clara, California, Thursday morning. “They’re confident because the alternative is not good policy.”
He did say, though, that the agency was starting to examine what might happen if those across-the-board cuts did take effect in January. “We’ve started thinking about what it woud mean, in general,” he said, adding that he expected at some point there would be some guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on planning for sequestration.
“A lot of the significant planning is going to be happening in maybe September or October.”
On one other NASA hot topic, the impending awards for the agency’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) program, Radzanowski said that announcement would come “real soon” but didn’t offer more specifics.
“I’m not going to make any news by saying when,” he said. The announcement is widely expected for any time between now and the end of August.
Private partnerships pave NASA's path back to space flight
Jennifer Woldt - The Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI)
Partnerships with private space-flight companies are expected to pave the way for NASA’s future space exploration and space station development plans.
The United States has not had a way to transport crews into space other than relying on other countries to provide seats in spacecraft since the final flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis in July 2011.
The Commercial Crew program is a partnership between NASA and private companies to develop innovative designs to take NASA astronauts to space in the future. Showcasing those partnerships is a centerpiece of NASA’s participation this year in the Experimental Aircraft Associations’ AirVenture 2012.
"NASA lead the building of a cathedral we call the International Space Station. Now we are looking to the commercial industry for innovative ways to transport cargo and crew to our cathedral in the stars," Ed Mango, the program director for NASA's Commercial Crew program said Thursday.
Four companies working with NASA through the program - Space Exploration Technologies, Sierra Nevada, Boeing and Blue Origin - are working on space-flight projects with a mix of private funds contributed by the company and federal funds from NASA. The partnerships with NASA also allows the companies to draw on the federal space agency’s 50 years worth of space-flight knowledge to develop their projects. Three additional companies - ATK, Excalibur and ULA - are working on projects without funding from NASA.
Hawthorne, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, is working with the Commercial Crew program to develop its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to transport people to space.
In May the company used the rocket and spacecraft to transport cargo to the International Space Station, making it the first commercial vehicle to successfully dock with the space station.
SpaceX will now begin working on making modifications to transport a crew of seven to the station, said Dr. Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who is now a senior engineer at SpaceX.
"We are very proud of the success of this mission," Reisman said during an appearance at AirVenture. "But we're not stopping here. The company was not founded to deliver T-shirts and underwear to space. The company was founded to deliver human beings to space."
SpaceX plans to fly the Dragon spacecraft with the Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station with a non-NASA crew in 2015, Reisman said.
That's ahead of the schedule NASA has set for the Commercial Crew program. NASA hopes to have several of the Commercial Crew programs flying missions to the space station between 2015 and 2017, but those dates depend on how much money the government and private companies invest, how fast the companies want to advance and how much help is needed, Mango said.
Encouraging innovation In the past NASA has given companies rigid requirements for designing and building vehicles for space travel. The commercial crew program is different.
While NASA still has a set of important requirements that must be met before authorizing its astronauts to travel into space on privately-developed vehicles, the Commercial Crew program gives private companies the ability to pursue innovative designs and technologies, said Karen Scott, of NASA's Commercial Crew program.
"It's up to them," Scott said. "But in the end, we're the ones that will put that NASA stamp on their rockets."
The partnership with NASA is a great benefit for space companies, said Jim Voss, a former NASA astronaut who now is the head of development for Sierra Nevada Corp., which is working on the Dream Chaser spacecraft. Dream Chaser is a small shuttle-like vehicle that launches on an Atlas V rocket and is flown back to a runway landing.
Voss said the commercial crew program is a cost-effective and cost-efficient way for private companies and NASA to work on developing a way to replace the space shuttle program to take Americans into space. He said it has also been helpful to be able to draw on the experience NASA has accumulated during its years of space exploration.
"Our nation doe have a path forward to have a way for Americans into space without having to rely on other nations," Voss said.
The Dream Chaser, which looks like a small space shuttle, is being designed to carry seven crew members to and from the space station as well as serve as an emergency vehicle that can be left at the space station to serve as a "lifeboat" in case crew members need to come back to earth quickly, Voss said.
The spacecraft is in a testing phase now, but Voss sai Sierra Nevada Corp. hopes to use the spacecraft to take astronauts to the space station in 2016.
NASA will soon be decidng which companies will continue to participate in the next phase of the program, Scott said. At the end of that 22-month phase, companies will need to have developed a spacecraft, launch vehicle, ground and missions operations systems in order to have whole transport capabilities, Scott said.
"It's a big package they'll have to have," she said. "We really want them to be able to get to a test flight."
Whether companies that don’t make the cut continue with their designs without NASA funding and assistance will be up to each individual company, but Reisman said answer is clear for SpaceX.
"We're in it for the long haul," Reisman said. "We're going to do this regardless."
NASA may go back to the future and use Saturn V engines on Mars rocket
Lee Roop - Huntsville Times
A Huntsville company competing to power NASA's new heavy-lift rocket to Mars says the best engines for the job may be the same massive F-1 engines that lifted the Saturn V Apollo rockets nearly 50 years ago.
"We know you need a lot of thrust," Dynetics Inc. Vice President Steve Cook said last week, "and if you want to do it affordably, we think you need a liquid (fueled motor). So, now you say, 'What engines do I have?'"
"Well, we've already done this before," Cook said to answer his own question. "You had 13 fully successful Apollo flights with never an in-flight failure of, guess what, the F-1 engine."
Dynetics is negotiating a contract with NASA to find out if a modernized version of the F-1 really makes sense. If NASA awards Dynetics the contract as expected, it will also lead to construction of the biggest piece of rocket hardware in Huntsville since Apollo. "The point here is keeping the rocket in the Rocket City and taking it to a whole other level," Cook said.
NASA plans to use solid rocket boosters for the first flights of its 70-metric-ton rocket called the Space Launch System. But it is letting the aerospace industry compete over which boosters will be used on the later 130-metric-ton version.
Companies will first spend 30 months on what NASA calls "risk-reduction" tasks. That means building test hardware and doing engineering demonstrations to show NASA they've accounted for the foreseeable risks in their ideas.
The agency is funding six such risk-reduction projects at a total of $200 million, and Dynetics has been selected and is negotiating a contract for three of them.
"History will tell you that where your costs go up dramatically in development is if there's a big risk out there that you haven't been able to mitigate down to where you can say, 'I understand that,'" Cook said.
With NASA's mantra for the new rocket being "performance, reliability and affordability," risk-reduction now is key. Hitting an expensive snag later could prove fatal to the program, given the mood in Congress about government spending.
The first of Dynetics' demonstrations involves the F-1 engine. The company's basic idea for the new booster is putting two modern versions of a liquid-fueled F-1 engine on tanks and strapping two of the tank sets to the heavy-lift rocket. That's two boosters, four F-1 engines and more than 7 million pounds of thrust.
"The F-1 was not designed to be a low-cost engine," Cook said. "It was designed to get you to the moon. Whatever it took to get you to the moon." But with modern methods and technologies, Cook said Dynetics believes it can build cheaper, but powerful and reliable F-1s.
Team partner Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne has three modified F-1 turbopumps in storage, Cook said. Those massive pumps are what fed the kerosene and oxygen fuel mixture to "feed the beast," as Cook called the F-1. "We're going to fire that turbopump," he said.
The turbopump is fed, in turn, by a gas generator. "Think of it as a 20,000 pound rocket engine strapped to the side of the F-1 that gets those turbopumps going," Cook said.
Dynetics will test a lower-cost version of a gas generator and add it to the turbopump to create what's called a power pack. Add a combustion chamber and a nozzle later and you basically have a rocket engine, Cook said.
Dynetics won't actually assemble and fire an F-1 unless NASA lets it go forward into the booster development phase. That's not a given. Other companies are pursuing other booster options, and NASA will have to choose. "But in the development phase, we could fire an F-1 in a few months," Cook said.
Risk-reduction task No. 2 is building the 17-inch diameter fuel and oxygen lines to feed the F-1 engine. Valves and lines like those and the systems to run them haven't been built in America since Apollo, Cook said, but Dynetics will build all three in Huntsville in the next 30 months, if it gets the NASA contract as expected.
Risk-reduction task No. 3 is building tanks to hold the propellants. Dynetics plans to do that in Huntsville using its new high-bay development facility and $90 million in modern welding tools at Marshall Space Flight Center. Those tools were added for the now-canceled Constellation rocket program.
"The tooling was set up for something 18 feet in diameter," Cook said. "It turns out that the physics and the requirements of the Vehicle Assembly Building (at Kennedy Space Center in Florida) mean you'd really like to have a booster that's 18 feet in diameter."
It also takes a tank that big to hold the nearly 2 million pounds of propellant each booster system requires.
Dynetics plans to build a test tank in Huntsville 18 feet wide and 60 feet long (shorter than the final version) and take it by barge to the company's test facility in Iuka, Miss. for deep-freeze testing.
The tank "will be the biggest structure built for a launch vehicle in Huntsville since Saturn Apollo," Cook said. "We are going to prove that we can build a very robust stage out of aluminum using the facilities at Marshall and in research park."
Will Huntsville again feel the rumble and hear the thunder of an F-1 test as it did in Apollo's glory days? It won't happen. NASA tests its rocket engines at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi these days.
But if NASA does choose to go back to the future and use new F-1s, expect a lot of traffic from Huntsville to Stennis. Fire an F-1 rocket engine, and anyone who can get past the gate won't miss that.
John Couwels – CNN’s Light Years
As John Bundy loads his red commercial lawn mower into a flatbed trailer, it's hard to believe he used to manage a team of NASA shuttle workers.
Bundy, who sports a scruffy beard and speaks with a thick, Southern drawl, worked at the Kennedy Space Center for 31 years, the last six years as a manager in the Orbiter Processing Facility, a shuttle hangar.
Bundy is one of 8,000 shuttle workers laid off or facing termination from Florida's Kennedy Space Center after the end of NASA’s shuttle program. This month marks one year since the program ended with the launch and landing of Shuttle Atlantis.
After his layoff in October 2010, Bundy searched for work for months before starting his own lawn business.
“I’ve tried a painting company, I’ve tried a couple of landscape companies, I’ve tried with the county as far as working outside with the parks and recs (recreations),” he said.
The shock of no longer working at Kennedy Space Center took months for Bundy to process.
Shuttle layoffs leave some workers adrift
“There is life after KSC, I promise you it will go on. You just got to get up and go to work,” he said.
Brevard County, home of Kennedy Space Center, saw unemployment spike to more than 11% after the shuttle layoffs, according to Judy Blanchard with Brevard Workforce. In addition to the 7,400 shuttle workers already laid off, another 600 will be terminated by December, she said.
Today, most of Florida's former shuttle workers have found work, according to a recent survey conducted by Brevard Workforce, which receives state and federal funding to help these highly skilled workers find jobs.
Of the 5,690 former shuttle workers who responded to the survey, 57% said they are working, while the remaining 43% are either retired or unemployed. Of the 3,234 who said they have found employment, most of them, 72%, say they are working in Florida.
Florida authorities say they've made steps toward transforming the Space Coast into more than just a launch site for shuttles. That, according to the state's Space Coast Economic Development Commission, has helped "put a serious dent" in Brevard County's unemployment rate, which is 9%.
For years, the Space Coast Economic Development Commission in connection with Space Florida, the state's economic development agency, has worked to attract a more diverse aerospace industry that includes design and manufacturing.
In the past, rockets launched from Kennedy Space Center were designed, tested and built outside Florida.
“We were a launch site - which was important and that was a great legacy - but now we could be more," said Dina Reider-Hicks, a director with the Space Coast Economic Development Commission. "In maybe three years, you’ll see this place stronger because it’ll be diversified."
Today, several companies have committed to expand or begin operations in Brevard County, including Rocket Crafters, which is relocating its headquarters from Utah to Titusville, electronics systems provider Sierra Nevada Corporation and aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Embraer.
But hundreds of former Kennedy Space Center shuttle workers still looking for jobs can't wait for these companies to set up shop in Brevard. Their severances and unemployment benefits are coming to an end.
Many former Kennedy Space Center employees still looking for work can be found Friday mornings at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Titusville. There, they share news about the latest companies hiring or good news about fellow members who found jobs. Several sport T-shirts commemorating the last shuttle, Atlantis, STS-135.
The Space Coast Technical Network started as a way to share the difficulties of being laid off, but today it has grown into a nonprofit corporation.
“Our job is to go out of business, essentially," said Kevin Harrington, a former shuttle manager and the group's acting spokesman. He said the network hopes "to find everyone employment or entrepreneurial opportunities.”
Although he has a thriving lawn business, John Bundy stops by the network's Friday morningmeetings to catch up with his former co-workers and find out if any companies are hiring.
Bundy says he's hopeful he can return to the aerospace industry one day.
He believes another human space program will once again launch from Florida's Space Coast. He says the United States has the technical know-how to lead a human space program, but right now there's no political will to make it happen.
On Fridays, Bundy cuts grass at property across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center where the large Vehicle Assembly Building can be seen on the horizon, next door to his former office.
Bundy has no regrets and is thankful he is one of those who has a job and can pay his bills.
“Any time you're going to do a job that you're going to get paid for, it’s honorable,” he said. “You do the best job that you can … it can be anything from washing dishes to processing space ships.”
United Space Alliance to lay off 148 in September
Richard Bilbao - Orlando Business Journal
United Space Alliance in Titusville announced it will lay off 148 people this September, according to a Workers' Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state of Florida.
The layoffs include aerospace technicians, engineers, computer science experts and other positions. The positions will primarily come from workers at the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Base.
Periodically, the company performs layoff as contracts end, but since the closure of the space shuttle program last year, the firm has mass layoffs in the region.
Since January 1, United Space Alliance has laid off a total of 356 Central Florida workers.
The layoffs are expected to be permanent.
Antimatter universe sought by space-station-based detector
Robert Evans - Reuters
A seven-tonne particle detector parked for over a year on the International Space Station aims to establish whether there is an unseen "dark universe" woven into the cosmos, the scientist leading the project said this week.
And the detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer or AMS, has already broken all records in registering 17 billion cosmic rays and storing data on them for analysis, Nobel physics laureate Samuel Ting told a news conference.
"The question is: Where is the universe made from antimatter?" said Ting. "It could be out there somewhere far away producing particles that we could detect with the AMS."
Physicists say that the event 13.7 billion years ago that brought the known universe into existence and has been dubbed the Big Bang must have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But then antimatter largely disappeared.
Why that happened is one of the great mysteries of the cosmos that are being investigated through the AMS and scientific analysts back on the ground at CERN, the European particle-physics research centre.
The purpose of the AMS program, he said, "is to search for phenomena that so far we have not had the imagination or the technology to discover."
Some researchers have suggested that the invisible "dark matter" estimated to make up about 25 per cent of the known universe could be linked to antimatter, but others say that is highly unlikely.
These scientists argue that antimatter could not survive in the close proximity to parts of the visible cosmos that latest observations suggest dark matter occupies - sometimes like a wafting veil between planets and stars.
Ting was speaking at a news conference with a team of U.S. astronauts who took the detector, which was developed and built at CERN, up to the ISS in May last year on the last mission of the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour.
He said that so far the $2-billion detector, with its powerful magnets that bend particles with positive and negative charges in different directions, had functioned perfectly and not one of its multiple backup systems had been needed.
Private Space Transportation Reaching New Heights
Tom Coughlin - Forbes
Every once and a while it is important to write about your hidden passions and dreams. Thus this blog talks about exciting developments in private space transportation, a semi-secret interest of mine for decades. I spent a day at a conference called NewSpace 2012 in Santa Clara, CA to find out just how real the development of inexpensive space transportations was and how close we might be to achieving my youthful dreams of going into space.
There were a number of private launch companies as well as NASA officials that participated in the event. It was also interesting to note a growing wave of amateur space enthusiasts who are creating open source satellite and guidance plans and software and even making their own back-yard rockets! Well, they probably can’t launch them from their back yard, but they can build parts in their back yards and garages.
SpaceX from Southern California, successfully launched and recovered the first private supply rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) in May of this year. They showed video of that launch an well as discussed their plans for creating human rated vehicles to create an alternative to Russian Soyuz spacecraft for human flights to the ISS. The United Launch Alliance has had 62 successful satellite launches since 2006 and it is working on a human-rated Atlas rocket launch by 2015-2016. Sierra Nevada Space Systems showed video of a successful flight of their Dream Catcher orbital space vehicle this year.
Armadillo Aerospace announced that they have a license to launch their STIG B-1 rocket on August 25 or 26, 2012 at the SpacePort American in New Mexico. This rocket will launch a 5 kg experimental payload to as high as 100 km (62 miles). The vehicle will experience about 3 minutes of a micro-gravity environment. The company plans monthly launches of this vehicle which can eventually take 5 kg to 150 km elevation and 50 kg to 100 km. A number of other space and space component and software companies either exhibited or spoke at the conference, which featured a business plan competition for space-oriented companies.
Steve Jurveetson from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a VC investor in SpaceX spoke about the need to come up not only with great ideas, but great opportunities. He spoke about why the company invested in private space transportation and explored the growth of transistors, qubits and human opportunities. As he stated most new ideas are a combination of older ideas in new ways and the SpaceX concept is an example of this—a modular reusable rocket.
The idea of personally exploring outer space appeals to many but the closest most folks can get now is to create an inexpensive satellite that can go out into space on the growing number of private launch vehicles. Robert Twiggs, formerly from Stanford but now at Morehead State University in Kentucky is one of the fathers of the small cheap satellite. Over a decade ago he helped pioneer the idea of the cube-sat satellite that is a small self contained box that could ride with other such boxes in the payload of a rocket where it could conduct low gravity experiments, biological experiments of do other interesting activities when released into space.
At the Newspace conference he showed some even more compact satellite platforms including an idea of matchbook sized satellites called moonbeams which could be launched for far less than conventional satellites and allow almost anybody to design and send an experiment or other package into space. Several outfits at the show offered products enabling construction of cubesat and even smaller satellite products including Celestial Circuits, JP Aerospace and Kentucky Space. In addition, NASA Ames was offering a open source software for mission control.
I met at least one person at the show who signed up to go on one of the Virgin Galactic space tourist flights. The Space Tourism Society and Moonandback Travel can help you book your space tourism itinerary. If you need a crew for your future space missions, Atronauts4Hire are ready to serve you and the International Space University offers space studies and space management degrees.
After decades of expensive and infrequent space travel we seem to be at the cusp of a new generation of much less expensive and faster growing commercial space transportation options. This is opening new opportunities for even high school students and hobbyists to launch satellites into low earth orbit and dream of going there themselves. Now what will I put into my little satellite?
Apollo Moon Landing Flags Still Standing, Photos Reveal
Clara Moskowitz - Space.com
An enduring question ever since the manned moon landings of the 1960s has been: Are the flags planted by the astronauts still standing?
Now, lunar scientists say the verdict is in from the latest photos of the moon taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC): Most do, in fact, still stand.
"From the LROC images it is now certain that the American flags are still standing and casting shadows at all of the sites, except Apollo 11," LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson wrote in a blog post Friday. "Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine during liftoff of Apollo 11, and it looks like he was correct!"
Each of the six manned Apollo missions that landed on the moon planted an American flag in the lunar dirt.
Scientists have examined images of the Apollo landing sites before for signs of the flags, and seen hints of what might be shadows cast by the flags. However, this wasn't considered strong evidence that the flags were still standing. Now, researchers have examined photos taken of the same spots at various points in the day, and observed shadows circling the point where the flag is thought to be.
Robinson calls these photos "convincing."
"Personally I was a bit surprised that the flags survived the harsh ultraviolet light and temperatures of the lunar surface, but they did," Robinson wrote. "What they look like is another question (badly faded?)."
Most scientists had assumed the flags hadn't survived more than four decades of harsh conditions on the moon.
"Intuitively, experts mostly think it highly unlikely the Apollo flags could have endured the 42 years of exposure to vacuum, about 500 temperature swings from 242 F during the day to -280 F during the night, micrometeorites, radiation and ultraviolet light, some thinking the flags have all but disintegrated under such an assault of the environment," scientist James Fincannon, of the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, wrote in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
In recent years, photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have also shown other unprecedented details of the Apollo landing sites, such as views of the lunar landers, rovers, scientific instruments left behind on the surface, and even the astronauts' boot prints. These details are visible in photos snapped by the probe while it was skimming just 15 miles (24 kilometers) above the moon's surface.
LRO launched in June 2009, and first captured close-up images of the Apollo landing sites in July of that year. The $504 million car-size spacecraft is currently on an extended mission through at least September 2012.
Super rocket review positive, but let's not celebrate early
John Kelly - Florida Today (Opinion)
NASA’s new super rocket is moving forward, passing two important review milestones this week and progressing into preliminary design.
Space agency leaders talked up the progress this week and credited the streamlined nature of its internal reviews of the rocket’s development. That’s good, given the the United States’ need to field a rocket for the nation’s future human exploration missions as soon as possible. It’s a cause for concern, however, if the review did not thoroughly answer questions about the program’s development.
Here’s why. NASA historically has been criticized by outside investigators and auditors for clearing big, multi-billion dollar projects like the Space Launch System without fully understanding the potential technical risks and without fully acknowledging possible cost-growth issues.
The result? Expensive, super-difficult projects get green-lighted based on overly optimistic assumptions. That tends to lead to gigantic schedule delays and eye-popping cost overruns.
NASA’s track record on those kinds of problems is consistent, and not in a good way. The vast majority of NASA projects of this magnitude, during a period of decades, have come in years late and hundreds of millions of dollars — often billions of dollars — over budget.
The reason that auditors have most often cited is a review process that often gives an OK to unreasonably optimistic assumptions, including projections of the project leaping every technological hurdle in its path on the low side of each estimated schedule range. The result is often that if even one or two pieces of the plan go awry there is neither time nor money built into the plan to deal with the issues. As such, the projects blow their budget and their schedule.
The dilemma is not all NASA’s fault. The flaws are built in from the start, in a budget environment where the agency is asked to do an unrealistic amount of work for the money provided. However, the agency makes matters worse by regularly low-balling cost and schedule estimates, assuming the best during the review stages of projects, and not acknowledging real problems on a project until the impacts are so big that they’re destined to generate frustration by political leaders in the White House and Congress.
So, it’s good that the reviews appear to be showing progress on the Space Launch System. The new super rocket is needed to launch the Orion exploration vehicle on missions to asteroids and later Mars. The development needs to be accelerated for the good of the space program and Florida’s Space Coast. The gap in American-made space transportation systems warrants priority attention.
Here’s hoping that this time, the streamlining of the NASA’s reviews on this important project means faster, but not less thorough or less responsible. Let’s hope that we’re not soon writing about why the project is five years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The future of the space program depends on NASA moving beyond that old, repeated mistake.
My friend Sally Ride’s final mission: Making science cool
Susan Okie - Washington Post (Opinion)
(Okie is a physician, a former medical reporter for The Washington Post and a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Georgetown University)
Sally Ride seized the chance to go to space because she wanted to find out what it would feel like. Sally loved testing the limits of her brain and body — solving the puzzles in Scientific American as a teenager, running five miles a day while doing research in physics at Stanford University, winning tournament tennis matches, learning to fly a NASA T-38 jet.
After she blasted off to become America’s first woman in space, the support crew at Mission Control asked Sally how she’d enjoyed being launched on a rocket. She gave it Disneyland’s top rating: “Definitely an E ticket.” Looking back at her first spaceflight years later, she called it “the most fun I’ll ever have in my life.”
When we were best friends and high school classmates in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Sally told me that she wanted to be famous, but she wanted to achieve that goal by winning a Nobel Prize. A ninth-grade science teacher had introduced her to physics and astronomy, and she intended to study the stars. After her retirement from NASA and academia, Sally, who died this past week at 61, turned her focus back to teachers — like the one she always credited with planting the seed that eventually got her to space. She hoped to motivate a new generation of teachers who might impart a love of science to their students.
It wasn’t until 1977, when she was completing her graduate work in physics at Stanford, that Sally spotted a notice in the university’s student newspaper announcing that NASA was recruiting young scientists — for the first time including women — to become astronauts. She knew instantly that this was what she wanted to do. I was thrilled, but not surprised, when she called early one morning in 1978 to tell me that she was one of six women selected.
Sally easily fitted into the mostly male, can-do engineering culture of NASA. It was a culture that valued level-headedness and good judgment; the operative slogan was “don’t screw up.”
Assigned to the team helping to design the space shuttle’s computer-operated mechanical arm, which would be used to deploy and recover satellites, Sally threw herself into the job and proved adept at manipulating the arm. That skill, as well as her coolness under pressure while assigned to a key job at Mission Control, impressed veteran astronaut Robert Crippen, who was to command the shuttle’s seventh flight, scheduled for the first half of 1983.
Before offering Sally a spot on Crippen’s crew, Christopher Kraft, director of Houston’s Johnson Space Center, warned her that she would become a historic figure and the focus of worldwide attention. “I think he wanted to give me a chance to back out,” she later recalled.
When I visited the space center several months before the flight, I watched her go from demanding sessions in a shuttle simulator — practicing for every possible mishap— to a photo shoot for the cover of Ms. magazine. Wearing a crisp blue flight suit, Sally rolled her eyes when a makeup artist applied blush and the photographer requested “a restless, smug half-smile.”
Still, she refused to worry about the pressures of becoming a national hero. “I have great confidence in my ability not to go nuts,” she told me.
Those pressures proved greater than she expected. Sally’s historic flight was front-page news all over the world. For almost half a year, her days were a succession of public appearances, goodwill trips, speeches and interviews. She couldn’t go to the grocery store without being asked for an autograph. She told me that the only time she felt she could be alone was when she was standing at a lectern, preparing to deliver a speech.
When talking about science or the space shuttle, Sally was a natural teacher — enthusiastic, engaging and clear — but she detested personal questions. Married then to fellow astronaut Steven Hawley, she was determined to keep her private life to herself. Eventually, public excitement waned, and she returned to the relatively anonymous routine of an astronaut. “Fortunately, I have an extremely forgettable face,” she quipped.
But she always enjoyed speaking with children. Kids asked questions that adults were embarrassed to ask — how the space shuttle’s toilet worked, how to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich while weightless. Sally realized that elementary and middle-school students were endlessly curious about space travel and that sharing her experience was a way to get them excited about science and engineering.
When she proposed writing a book about a shuttle flight, half a dozen publishers were enthusiastic — until they learned that what Sally had in mind was a children’s book, not her life story. “To Space and Back” (which I co-authored), published in 1986, was the first of seven science books that Ride wrote for children. The others were written with her longtime partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. It’s characteristic of Sally’s love of privacy that their 27-year relationship did not become publicly known until the announcement of her death.
When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, the disaster stunned the nation — and put an end to NASA’s prospects of sending more teachers into space. Ride served as a member of the presidential commission investigating the accident. A few days after the disaster, she called me in a fury because, as one of the reporters helping to cover the disaster for The Washington Post, I had called space center employees whom I had met through her. It took years for our friendship to recover from what she saw as a betrayal.
In the years after Sally left NASA in 1987 and became a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego, she seemed to grow comfortable with her place as a hero — particularly as a role model for girls. In 2001, she started her own company, Sally Ride Science, to create books for students on key scientific concepts and careers, and to sponsor science festivals for girls in elementary and middle school. The media-shy former astronaut now regularly donned her NASA flight suit to speak at day-long festivals on university campuses that still attract hundreds of girls in the fifth through eighth grades.
At one such festival in Northern Virginia, I watched her spend more than an hour sitting at a card table in the hot sun, signing autographs and answering questions from a long line of excited girls, many of whom hoped to grow up to be astronauts.
I last saw her about 18 months ago. We met for breakfast at her favorite seaside inn in San Diego. She was enthusiastic about the recent direction of her company, which had shifted its focus from engaging middle school students to engaging their teachers. She believed that students’ natural interest in science was too often snuffed out by stereotypes about what scientists do and by subtle messages from teachers, parents and peers. She said that teachers too often offer students a heavy diet of facts instead of a chance to experiment and have fun.
“When I was growing up,” she recalled in a 2009 speech, “science and engineering were really cool.” Kids dreamed of becoming rocket designers or studying moon rocks. “That’s generally not the case today,” she said. “And that’s a problem.”
With funding from industry, her company creates research-based professional-development curricula and brings elementary and middle school teachers from across the country to attend four-day trainings. The sessions have been shown to be effective in changing teacher practices and student attitudes.
Sally had a new mission: She was determined to reach as many science teachers as she could — and through them, the girls and boys they teach — to help make the study of science interesting and meaningful to kids. Her own science teachers did that for her. Sally is gone, but let’s hope that the countless teachers and students she inspired will carry on with the task.
There's still hope for NASA
Houston Chronicle (Editorial)
To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of NASA's death are greatly exaggerated.
The space agency and the Johnson Space Center are very much alive, if not as visible as they were in the days when Mission Control was doing its regular televised turns during manned space missions.
That is the reality-grounded message being delivered by Mike Coats, the JSC's director, as reported by Eric Berger in July 19's Chronicle ("We're not going out of business," Page B1). It was one we heard along with Berger during an hour-plus conversation the director had with the editorial board.
Despite budget and personnel cuts, JSC is handling the formidable task of running the International Space Station and managing development of the Orion spacecraft (first flight in 2014) while wrestling with the even more formidable task of keeping public support for space exploration from lagging. It has been a while since NASA has had a "Wow!" moment.
Even so, Coats' enthusiasm is catching. The former astronaut has an all-American-boy manner and look even in middle age. Part John Glenn and part Neil Armstrong, if we had to draw a comparison. And like both of those space heroes, he's very disciplined and focused on the mission at hand.
At the top of that mission list is welcoming the role of private firms into space, rather than resisting those efforts or berating them. That's going well enough, Coats says, as private operators gain the respect of NASA employees and vice versa. The recent success of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft's mission to the space station helped that cause.
But the going gets tougher in the political arena, where NASA and JSC have taken some serious hits in their budgets and faced even more serious questioning of their mission over the past few years. The results are obvious and troubling.
It galls Mike Coats that "we're not a space-faring nation right now" because of the retirement of the space shuttle.
Instead, he laments, "we're paying the Russians a lot of money to fly our people up there."
He's galled because we're paying a lot of Russian engineers when he'd like to be hiring American engineers.
That bothers us, too. Part of the problem, we conclude after hearing Coats, is that the NASA budget too often gets caught up in the tangle of pork-barrel and partisan politics. That shows in his many anecdotes about visiting with members of Congress and U.S. senators over the years as an astronaut and an administrator and hearing that so many express little interest in space - until they learn that there are jobs in their district or state that come from the space program.
More's the pity. That kind of support is an inch deep when what is required is commitment based not on the pork NASA produces, but on the long-term value it adds to our economy. That is well-established. Until the break-up of the former Soviet Union, 11 percent of this country's federal budget was devoted to research and development, Coats notes. As part of the so-called "peace dividend," that amount was cut to 3 percent. Now, it's fallen below even that amount, he says.
In light of the budget deficit and the federal debt above $16 trillion, it is difficult to make the case for expanding spending in any area. But if there were one, this would be it. The cost-benefit ratio is clear and inarguable.
Short of that, the best budget medicine for NASA would be removing its budget from the whims and uncertainties of politics by making it a multi-year budget. Doing so would match its missions, which are almost all long-term in nature.
Coats says Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, has expressed keen interest in making this change. We encourage the congressman to continue his work. It would wring some of the politics from the budget process and stabilize the space agency.
“Mr. Galileo Was Correct”: The Legacy of Apollo 15
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
As July burned into August 1971, three sons of Planet Earth were midway through their exploration of the Moon. Aboard the command and service module Endeavour, astronaut Al Worden operated a sophisticated array of scientific equipment from orbit, whilst his crewmates Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the surface at a place called Hadley – a mountainous region, four hundred miles north of the lunar equator, characterised by spectacular peaks, football-field-sized craters and a 25-mile-long gorge, known as Hadley Rille. The discoveries made by Apollo 15 revealed more about the history and evolution of the lunar highlands than ever before…and their effects continue to resonate to this day.
Early on 1 August, Capcom Gordon Fullerton woke Scott and Irwin with some unwelcome news. Two days earlier, the lunar module Falcon had touched down at a slight angle – one of its legs had set down in a crater – and this had caused it to lose a sizeable amount of water. Fullerton asked the men to check behind the ascent engine cover. He was right and the astronauts quickly scooped it into a spent lithium hydroxide canister.
Scott and Irwin’s second Moonwalk was slightly shorter than their first, in order to provide more exploration and less travelling time between geological stops. One relatively low-priority activity had been eliminated and a greater measure of freedom was given to the efforts of the astronauts themselves; Mission Control and the geologists in Houston would depend heavily upon their descriptions and observations and it would be Scott and Irwin’s choice on exactly where they chose for their major sampling. “We’re looking now, primarily, for a wide variety of rock samples from the [Apennine] Front,” Capcom Joe Allen told them. “You’ve seen the breccias already. We think there may very well be some large crystal[line] igneous [rocks] and we’d like samples of those and whatever variety of rocks which you’re able to find for us – but primarily a large number of documented samples and fragment samples.” Scott was in full agreement; Allen was talking their language and after two years of geological training he felt ready and confident to explore.
A few minutes before 9:00 am EST on 1 August, safely buckled aboard the lunar rover, the astronauts set off due south, heading for Mount Hadley Delta, upon whose slopes they would concentrate their energies. It was a scenic trip, Irwin recalled in his memoir, To Rule the Night. Ahead of them, and all around them, the terrain was literally splattered with craters, right up the slopes of Hadley Delta, and the height of the mountain rivalled the tallest peaks of the Rockies. After passing the vast cavity of Dune Crater, whose rim was littered with large blocks, they started up the mountain.
On the plain the going had been rough, but on the slope the surface smoothed out markedly. Near Spur Crater, they swung left and drove across-slope. Looking downslope, they were astonished to realise how far they had come. The lander was a tiny speck on the undulating plain and the astronauts were now at an elevation of about 350 feet. The view, completely unhindered by atmosphere or haze, almost knocked Dave Scott’s socks off.
Their first task was to find a small ‘drill hole’ crater that could have excavated material from the mountain, but the flank was remarkably clean. Scott curtailed the planned drive and they sampled a small crater and then an isolated boulder which was coated in greenish material. The green hue captivated Jim Irwin, whose Irish descent and birthday on St Patrick’s Day – and the fact that he had stowed some shamrocks in the lunar module – made this a special find. At first, the two men wondered if their eyes or Sun visors were playing tricks on them, but when it was unpacked a few weeks later in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, their initial impressions would be confirmed: it was green, made entirely of minuscule spheres of glass, tiny droplets of magma spewed from a fissure by a ‘fire fountain’. In time, it and other samples would contribute to making Apollo 15 one of the greatest voyages of discovery ever undertaken in human history.
Finally, they headed for Spur Crater. “As soon as we got there,” Irwin described, “we could look over and see some of this white rock. Immediately, I saw white, I saw light green and I saw brown. But there was one piece of white rock that looked different from any of the others. We didn’t rush over to it; we went about our job the usual way. First I took down-Sun shots and a locator shot about 45 degrees from the Sun-line and Dave took a couple of cross-Sun shots.” Scott and Irwin slowly threaded their way between the craters to the strange white rock. “It was lifted up on a pedestal,” Irwin wrote. “The base was a dirty old rock covered with lots of dust that sat there by itself, almost like an outstretched hand. Sitting on top of it was a white rock almost free of dust. From four feet away I could see unique long crystals with parallel lines, forming striations.” Scott used tongs to pick it up and held it close to his visor to inspect it. The rock was about the same size as his fist and even as he lifted it, some of its dusty coating crumbled away…and he saw large, white crystals.
“Aaaahh!” he exulted.
“Oh, man!” added Irwin.
The rock was almost entirely ‘plagioclase’ – an important tectosilicate feldspar mineral used by petrologists on Earth to help determine the composition, origin and evolution of igneous rocks – and from their expeditions into the hills of the San Gabriels, Scott recognised it as ‘anorthosite’, which is the purest form of plagioclase. For some time, lunar geologists had suspected that anorthosite formed the Moon’s original, primordial crust; indeed, data from the unmanned Surveyor 7 lander had suggested its presence in the ejecta of the crater Tycho and tiny fragments of it had actually been found in samples from both Tranquillity Base and the Ocean of Storms.
“Explaining why most of the Moon’s crust should be composed of anorthosite,” wrote Andrew Chaikin in A Man on the Moon, “led some geologists to an extraordinary scenario. Within the infant satellite, they proposed, there was so much heat that the entire outer shell became an ocean of molten rock. As this ‘magma ocean’ cooled, minerals crystallised. The heavier species, including the iron- and magnesium-rich crystals, sank to the bottom. The lighter crystals, specifically, the mineral [aluminium-rich] plagioclase floated to the top.”
Recognising the find as probably a piece of the Moon’s primordial crust, Scott could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “Guess what we just found!” he radioed. “I think we just found what we came for!”
“Crystalline rock, huh?” said Irwin.
“Yessir,” replied Scott. After briefly describing the rock’s appearance, Scott placed it into a sample bag by itself. It would be labelled as sample number 15415, but a keen journalist, inspired by the term ‘petrogenesis’, the study of the origin of igneous rocks, would later offer it a far more lofty title: ‘The Genesis Rock’, a sample of the original lunar crust, coming from one of the earliest epochs of the Moon’s history, some 4.1 billion years ago. This date was reached by geologists at the University of New York at Stony Brook and proved to be almost a billion and a half years older than the oldest rocks found on Earth. If the Moon was any older than that, noted Andrew Chaikin, it wasn’t much older; the Solar System itself was thought to have formed only a few hundred million years earlier.
Back in the vicinity of Falcon, shortly before 2:00 pm EST and five hours into their second Moonwalk, Scott and Irwin had other chores to finish; first, there was the need to complete drilling the heat-flow hole which had hit resistant soil the previous day. Scott had already noticed inside the lander that his injured fingers were starting to turn black and so had to summon as much strength as he could muster – bringing his hands right up close to his chest just to squeeze the drill’s trigger – to complete the task. He could physically stand only about a minute of the pressure on his fingernails, before breaking off for a breather. At length, both sensor packages were in place to a depth of about one and a half metres. However, when Scott attempted to extract the core sample which, at about eight feet long was the deepest such sample yet attempted on the Moon, he managed to lift it slightly, but it refused to budge any further. Joe Allen told him to leave it until tomorrow’s final excursion.
Meanwhile, Irwin dug a trench and used a penetrometer to test the bearing strength of its walls and floor. “If you think digging a ditch is dog’s work on Earth,” he wrote, “try digging a ditch on the Moon. The big limitation is the suit and the fact that you are clumsy at one-sixth-G. I had practiced on Earth and come up with a technique that most dogs use. You spread your legs and push the dirt between them. I solved a dog’s job with a dog’s technique. This method worked perfectly on the Moon.” He easily dug through a fine grey material which he likened to talcum powder, and then a coarser, darker soil, but had to give up on reaching a very resistant layer which, although it looked moist, had all the consistency of hardpan.
They wrapped up the second Moonwalk by planting the American flag and loading that day’s rock box aboard Falcon. Not only had most of the equipment operated flawlessly, but the live – and colour – images provided by the Earth-operated television camera on the rover was a far cry from the crude black-and-white pictures of Apollo 11. Furthermore, Scott and Irwin had truly done their mentor, Lee Silver, proud through their geological descriptions. “I’m told,” Joe Allen radioed, “that we checked off the 100-percent science completion square time during EVA-1 or maybe even shortly into EVA-2. From here on out, it’s gravy all the way!”
The gravy of the third excursion would be tempered by the fact that it would also be the shortest, scheduled to last barely four and a half hours. It started with the recovery of a core sample from EVA-1. For a few moments, their efforts to extract the core tube from the ground were fruitless and Scott was almost ready to give up. However, with Irwin’s persuasion, both men hooked an arm under each handle of the drill and after several firm tugs the tube sprang from the ground. Precious minutes were wasted, though when the vice carried on the rover to dismantle the tube into storable sections proved to have been fitted backwards; Irwin broke out a wrench and used that, but Scott’s frustration was evident. He knew that for every minute wasted before the drive started, they would lose at least another two minutes of geological exploration.
Some of the senior NASA managers in Mission Control wanted to abandon the core entirely. However, the astronauts and Joe Allen had an ally in Flight Director Gerry Griffin, who had shared several of their geological trips in the California mountains and knew how important the science was…and how important the deep core sample was to the success of this mission. It was he who persuaded the managers not to abandon the core tube work. After they had partially disassembled the tube, it was decided that they should leave the remainder of the task to later. When the core was finally opened on Earth, it proved to contain several dozen layers which documented some 400 million years’ worth of lunar history.
At length, Scott and Irwin buckled into the rover and headed west-northwest for a good look at Hadley Rille. After the rille, if time permitted, they hoped to grab an opportunity to inspect the mysterious North Complex of craters, which some geologists thought might be a cluster of small, ancient volcanoes. Their arrival at Hadley Rille was truly breathtaking. Its far wall, bathed in the harsh, direct sunlight of the late lunar morning, showed distinct layers of rock pushing through a mantle of dust, lending credence to theories that Mare Imbrium had been built up as a succession of ancient lava flows.
One theory was that the rille was a fracture where the mare surface ‘opened’ like a cooling joint. “But since the scientists have studied the pictures,” Irwin wrote, “the most popular theory is that Hadley Rille was probably a lava tube that collapsed.” All around the two men were enormous slabs of basalt and the geologists in the back room in Houston quickly began pressing for them to move further downslope, though Joe Allen was becoming nervous. Looking at televised pictures, it seemed to him as though they were right on the edge of a precipice. In fact, the rille had no dramatic ‘drop’; rather, it resembled the gentle shoulder of a hill, and they were able to walk several metres downslope without difficulty. “In fact,” Scott wrote, “the slope down which we descended was only about 5-10 degrees and the maximum slope of the rille was only 25 degrees – not steep for such a canyon-like formation.” It was steep enough, however, that from their vantage point they were unable to see the floor.
Time was escaping them (it was “relentless”, Apollo 15 backup commander Dick Gordon once said), and any chance to explore the North Complex very quickly disappeared; that would have to await another generation. Both astronauts found this bitterly disappointing: in Irwin’s mind, it left their excursion only half-complete, whilst Scott would wonder for years afterward if the unique data from the deep core was really worth abandoning the chance to visit the North Complex. At the same time, they appreciated the urgent need to get back to Falcon with enough time to prepare for liftoff later that day.
Back at the lander, with the minutes of the final Moonwalk rapidly winding down, Scott had one last opportunity to give a scientific demonstration to an audience of millions back home. It came from a suggestion by Joe Allen, who was inspired by the experimental work of Galileo Galilei. More than three centuries earlier, Galileo had stood atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two weights of different sizes, proving that gravity acted equally on them, regardless of mass. Now, in front of his own Leaning Tower – the slightly-tilted Falcon – Scott performed his own version of the experiment.
“In my left hand, I have a feather,” he told his audience, “in my right hand, a hammer. I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. The feather happens to be, appropriately, a falcon’s feather, for our Falcon, and I’ll drop the two of them here and hopefully they’ll hit the ground at the same time.”
They did…and applause echoed throughout Mission Control.
“How about that?” Scott concluded triumphantly. “Mr Galileo was correct in his findings!” He originally planned to try it first, to check that it would work, but was worried that it might get stuck to his glove. He decided to ‘wing it’ and, thankfully, it worked. In his autobiography, Irwin would relate that Scott had actually carried two feathers on Apollo 15, one from the falcon mascot at the Air Force Academy. Unfortunately – and much to Scott’s irritation – Irwin accidentally stepped on it! They searched for the feather, but could only find his big bootprints. “I’m wondering,” wrote Irwin, “if hundreds of years from now somebody will find a falcon’s feather under a layer of dust on the surface of the Moon and speculate on what strange creature blew it there.”
Shortly after 9:00 am EST on 2 August, a little more than four hours since setting foot on the surface for EVA-3, Scott drove the rover, alone, to a spot a few hundred feet east of the lander. From this place, Mission Control would be able to remotely operate its television camera to record the liftoff of Falcon’s ascent stage. Scott pulled out a small red Bible and placed it atop the control panel of the rover, in order to show those who followed in their footsteps why they had come.
Next, he climbed off the machine and strode toward a small crater. He dug a small hollow and dropped a small aluminium figurine of a fallen astronaut onto the lunar soil. The tiny figurine had been arranged by Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden. Meanwhile, Jim Irwin had organised a small plaque, planted alongside listing the names of 14 astronauts and cosmonauts known to have died doing their duty. The list included Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, together with Vladimir Komarov and the crews of Apollo 1 and Soyuz 11. As he gazed on the plaque, Scott knew he would never come here again. “I had come to feel a great affection for this distant and strangely beautiful celestial body,” he later wrote in Two Sides of the Moon. “It had provided me with a peaceful, if temporary, home. But it was time to return to my own home back on Earth.”
Within the confines of Falcon, they had little time to gaze out at the spectacular site of Hadley; only a few hours remained before their 1:11 pm EST liftoff, bound for a rendezvous with Al Worden in the command module Endeavour. It marked the first occasion on which a crew would complete a Moonwalk and perform the liftoff and rendezvous without a rest period in between the two. Having been outside for less than five hours on EVA-3, Irwin wished that Mission Control could have postponed the inevitable by several hours to have enabled them to drive home by way of the North Complex and gather a few samples. Sadly, it was not to be.
Precisely on time, Scott punched the Abort Stage button and a television audience back on Earth had the chance to actually see an Apollo crew leave the Moon. Falcon’s ascent stage literally ‘popped’ away from the descent stage and shot directly upwards with all the speed and accuracy of an express elevator, spraying a shower of fragments of insulation radially outwards. One journalist would later compare it to something left over from a Fourth of July celebration. Watching from Mission Control, Chris Kraft would gape at the speed of the departure. “I had no idea it went so fast,” he wrote. “We’d been told it was like that by the other Moon crews, but seeing it for real was a thrilling shock.”
Ten seconds later, a strangely familiar sound came into Scott and Irwin’s earpieces: The Air Force Song, courtesy of Worden, which they had intended to play to Houston only, but which somehow ended up being routed to Falcon, as well. “This was kind of surprising,” wrote Irwin, “because Dave had briefed Al to turn on that music at one minute after liftoff (that first minute is rather critical) but here it came at ten seconds. It really caused some consternation in Houston. First, they thought somebody was playing a trick in Mission Control, so they conducted a big search. They asked for radio silence – it was a tense situation. Finally, they realised that probably we had turned it on.”
Several days later, on 7 August, Endeavour splashed down safely in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, bringing the lunar explorers safely back to Mother Earth. The months which followed would be challenging for them all. Initially assigned as the backup crew for Apollo 17 – the final lunar landing mission – they were abruptly removed from flight status in April-May 1972 and replaced by John Young, Stu Roosa and Charlie Duke. The reason stemmed from their carriage of four hundred unauthorised first-day covers, the proceeds of which were to be invested into trust funds for their children.
Although the agreement with a German stamp dealer went awry within weeks of splashdown and none of the Apollo 15 astronauts accepted any money, they were harshly criticised by NASA and some members of Congress, who demanded an investigation into “improper conduct”. Although none of them had done anything wrong or illegal, they were stripped of flight status and Scott fumed that NASA did nothing to dispel (untrue) rumours that they had been fired. Forty-one years after the remarkable scientific extravaganza of Apollo 15 – a mission which unveiled more of the Moon’s mysteries than ever before – it is saddening that this incident continues to resonate. However, the exploration of Dave Scott, Al Worden and Jim Irwin serves one other purpose: to whet the appetites of future lunar explorers, who may be in college right now, awaiting their chance to visit the mountains of the Moon once again.
END
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