Happy Friday everyone! Have a great and safe weekend.
Friday, July 6, 2012
JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1. It Does Take a Rocket Scientist! Stan Love Explains Why Mars is Hard
2. Check Out the Latest Profile of the Orion Team
3. Celebrate 50 Years of JSC Co-ops -- Buy Your Ticket Today
4. Family Space Day at the George Observatory
________________________________________ QUOTE OF THE DAY
“ Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame. ”
-- Pearl S. Buck
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1. It Does Take a Rocket Scientist! Stan Love Explains Why Mars is Hard
Astronaut, physicist and, well, rocket scientist Stan Love will present his powerful and very entertaining presentation on "Why It's SOOOOOO Hard to Get to Mars." Like Stan says, it does take a rocket scientist. Lots of rocket scientists. And other really cool stuff that we are working on. Join Love in the Building 30 Auditorium Monday, July 9, at 8:30 a.m. for his 40-minute presentation. Stay to ask questions -- really tough questions.
If you require special accommodation for a specific disability please contact TQ Bui at x40266.
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
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2. Check Out the Latest Profile of the Orion Team
The first space-bound Orion vehicle recently arrived to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for Exploration Flight Test-1, planned for 2014. Get to know the JSC team behind Orion. This week, read about Dave Petri, Orion Avionics & Software Test Systems Manager, at:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/home/orion_petri_profile.html
The profile continues a series to introduce the people behind the development of the spacecraft.
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
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3. Celebrate 50 Years of JSC Co-ops -- Buy Your Ticket Today
Are you a current or former NASA co-op? Please join us for the 50th Anniversary Celebration for the NASA/JSC Co-op Program in the Gilruth Alamo Ballroom on July 25 from 4:30 to 7 p.m. There will be speakers, refreshments, heavy hors d'oeuvres, fun activities and nostalgia. Tickets are $15 and are NOW ON SALE in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops, as well as the Gilruth Center front desk. Tell your NASA civil servant (former or current) co-op friends! The event is limited to 250 guests, so buy your tickets today. Please visit http://tinyurl.com/coop50th for a questionnaire about your time as a co-op.
Randy Eckman x48230
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4. Family Space Day at the George Observatory
The Challenger Learning Center at the George Observatory is holding a Family Space Day, open to the public, on Saturday, July 14, from about 3 to 8 p.m.
There will be various types of rockets and robots available to play with, along with other activities.
For purchase are tickets to see "We Choose Space" in the Discovery Dome and a Challenger Center Mission to the Moon!
Challenger Center mission tickets may be purchased for $10 a person online at: http://www.hmns.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=404&Itemid=427
Discovery Dome tickets are available at the gift shops for $3 a person.
After enjoying the day in space, stay for the evening and look at the night sky through our telescopes!
George Observatory is located in the heart of Brazos Bend State Park. Admission to the park is $7 for adults. Kids under 12 are free.
Megan Hashier 281-226-4179 http://www.hmns.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=404&Ite...
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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.
Human Spaceflight News
Friday, July 6, 2012
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Executive promotes role for Orion capsule
Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week
Human spaceflight is likely to remain in low Earth orbit (LEO) for the foreseeable future. The International Space Station and China's Tiangong-1 are the only destinations within reach, and a lot of effort will go into finding better ways to get there and meaningful research to conduct upon arrival. But Mars is the ultimate destination for this generation of humanity. After a sometimes-brutal struggle over space-exploration resources following the global financial debacle of 2008, work continues at a reduced pace on at least some of the hardware that will be needed to get there. The first stage of NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) has just passed a significant milestone review of system requirements and design and production concepts. The J-2X engine that may someday power its upper stage is moving through ground testing at Stennis Space Center, where the engine's powerpack ran continuously for 19 min. 10 sec. in a June 8 test.
Working Group Backs European Prop Module for Orion
Peter de Selding - Space News
A French-German working group established to coordinate the policies of Europe’s two biggest space program backers has concluded that the European Space Agency (ESA) should provide a propulsion module for NASA’s Orion crew-transport capsule to pay ESA’s space station operating costs between 2017 and 2020, government and industry officials said. A second bilateral working group assessing the costs and benefits of an entirely new heavy-lift rocket has not yet delivered its conclusions despite a June 30 deadline, the head of the German Aerospace Center, DLR, said.
Space trek may help worms live long
Nematodes that orbited Earth had reduced signs of aging
Tina Hesman Saey - Science News Magazine
In space they can barely see you age, at least if you’re a worm.
Tiny, transparent nematodes that spent 11 days on the International Space Station — the equivalent of about 16 years for a person — appeared to age much more slowly than earthbound worms, Yoko Honda of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and colleagues report online July 5 in Scientific Reports. The result is the opposite of what some scientists expected, based on experience with human spaceflight and studies of other animals. Mammals, including people, in the microgravity of space are under physiological stress, says D. Marshall Porterfield, director of NASA’s Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications Division in Greenbelt, Md. In low gravity, muscles atrophy and aging accelerates. While the space station worms, from the species Caenorhabditis elegans, may have been under stress, they didn’t have those side effects. Their muscles did not degrade, and clumps of aging-related proteins known as Q35 aggregates did not build up in them as much as in worms on the ground, indicating that worms don’t age as fast in space as on Earth.
Latino astronaut inspires local students
Jeremy Slayton - Richmond Times-Dispatch
It was an out-of-this-world experience Thursday morning at the Science Museum of Virginia — in fact, it took place at an altitude of 240 miles where the International Space Station orbits the Earth. More than 170 students from across the state took part in a 20-minute, bilingual Q&A session with NASA astronaut Joseph Acaba, who in May began a half-year stay in the space station. Acaba, who is the first Puerto Rican astronaut, encouraged the students to pursue their dreams. "Don't be afraid to dream big; don't let people bring you down and tell you 'You can't do it,' " Acaba said. "Dreams can come true. They are hard and you do have to work hard … but when you have an opportunity, take that and go after what you want."
Hybrid Solid Rocket Motor Has Successful Test Firing
Mark Carreau - Aviation Week
The Space Propulsion Group Inc. carried out a successful 11-sec. test firing of a developmental, 22-in. flight-class hybrid solid rocket motor fueled by paraffin and liquid oxygen on June 29 at its Butte, Mont., Aerotech test facility. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, which was formed 13 years ago to develop low-cost, lightweight, environmentally friendly sources of space propulsion and power generation, carried out what was the fifth and longest in a series of test firings. The effort started in 2005 to develop hybrid propulsion scaling tools for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab at Edwards AFB, Calif.
Space Propulsion Group’s New Motor Roars to Life
Amy Teitel - AmericaSpace.org
Last Friday June 29, the California-based Space Propulsion Group tested a new motor that promises to be a game changer. It’s for a hybrid propulsion system – half liquid fuel and half solid fuel – that’s safer, more environmentally benign, and more economically viable than other rocket propellants. It’s an alternative the motor’s builders think could significantly reduce the price of space accessibility. Developing the technologies to reduce cost, lower environmental impact, and increase safety of propulsion and power generation systems has been SPG’s mission since its inception in 1999. Their method is to replace toxic and expensive materials with safer and abundant green alternatives.
Space docking procedures are far from routine
Alan Hale - Alamogordo Daily News
Probably the biggest item in recent space news has been the flight of the Shenzhou 9 mission, the fourth manned mission of the Chinese Shenzhou program. Launched on June 16 and carrying two astronauts (including China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang), Shenzhou 9 rendezvoused two days later with the unmanned Tiangong 1 space station (that had been launched last September) and performed an automatic docking that was remotely controlled from a ground station. Six days later Shenzhou 9 undocked from Tiangong 1, and then redocked, this time under the manual control of Liu. Together these constituted the first manned dockings by the Chinese space program. Such dockings in space have a fairly long history, however, extending almost back to the origins of human spaceflight.
Where last we landed: New plaque marks where space shuttle 'stopped'
Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com
"Mission complete, Houston. After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle has earned its place in history. It's come to a final stop." With those words, astronaut Christopher Ferguson signaled the end of the 135th and final shuttle mission on July 21, 2011. Almost a year later, the spot where STS-135 commander Ferguson brought space shuttle Atlantis to its "wheels stop" has been marked with a permanent plaque.
America's Nerdiest Destination: Virginia's Emerging Space Coast
Paul Brady - Huffington Post
A summer ago, as NASA astronauts prepped for the final mission of the 30-year Shuttle program, Florida's Space Coast cashed in for the last time on gawkers arriving to witness lift off: the smoke, the noise, the flames. An era of space tourism had come to an end. Though the next era of space tourism will likely be dominated by Virgin Galactic, Space X and other companies hoping to sell tickets to the great beyond, those dreams have yet to be realized. In the meantime, a generation of Carl Sagan readers, Trekkies and star watchers had been loosed from Cape Canaveral's orbit. Nerd tourists could head to the spaceport in the New Mexican desert, Area 51 or Wright Brother National Memorial, but they no longer had a definitive vector.
NASA Preparing To Ship Shuttle Trainer To Ohio
Mark Bruce - WHIO-TV (Dayton)
NASA is working to move a space shuttle trainer from the Johnson Space Center to the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Astronaut Mike Foreman and crew compartment trainer (CCT) instructor David Pogue spoke to reporter Mark Bruce. Foreman said, "For the public to be able to come in and see and be able to touch some of the stuff we got to use, that is really cool." Pogue added, "It is a privilege to get inside this trainer because of what it represents. It represents many, many hours of a whole lot of dedicated people." (NO FURTHER TEXT)
City announces date of shuttle mock-up move
Ben Baeder - The Downey Beat
The city on Thursday announced that it will take the space shuttle mock-up out of storage on July 12. The 122-by-78-foot model will be moved from a warehouse on the Downey Studios lot to a temporary storage tent just north of the Columbia Memorial Space Center. The city is throwing a party to celebrate the move with entertainment and activities for children. The mock-up, built in 1972, is the ancestor for all the flight-worthy shuttles that were the mainstay of the country’s space program for three decades. The shuttles were built in Downey.
Pad 14: A Place of History and Destiny
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
Fifteen years ago, the 45th Space Wing, based at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, began the laborious process of restoring one of the most important landmarks in America’s early space programme. Led by Lieutenant-Colonel Dennis Hilley, then-commander of the wing’s Operations Support Squadron, the work involved countless military and civilian volunteers from NASA, the Department of Defense and various aerospace contractors, including Boeing. Within months, the original ‘blockhouse’ of Pad 14 – the site from which America launched its first four men into orbit around the Earth – had been revitalized and in the early summer of 1998 two former astronauts came here for its official dedication. Today, the Pad 14 entrance road is marked by several memorials to commemorate those first steps into space; none more dramatic, arguably, than a large titanium sculpture of the Project Mercury symbol, beneath whose bulk is buried a time capsule which will remain unopened until the year 2464 – the 500th anniversary of the official conclusion of the program. As we look back on Project Mercury and the launch pad which made those pioneering orbital journeys possible, it is impossible not to take a step back, awestruck, at its sheer audacity.
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COMPLETE STORIES
Executive promotes role for Orion capsule
Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week
Human spaceflight is likely to remain in low Earth orbit (LEO) for the foreseeable future. The International Space Station and China's Tiangong-1 are the only destinations within reach, and a lot of effort will go into finding better ways to get there and meaningful research to conduct upon arrival.
But Mars is the ultimate destination for this generation of humanity. After a sometimes-brutal struggle over space-exploration resources following the global financial debacle of 2008, work continues at a reduced pace on at least some of the hardware that will be needed to get there. The first stage of NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) has just passed a significant milestone review of system requirements and design and production concepts. The J-2X engine that may someday power its upper stage is moving through ground testing at Stennis Space Center, where the engine's powerpack ran continuously for 19 min. 10 sec. in a June 8 test.
And the first flight version of the Orion multipurpose crew exploration vehicle has reached Kennedy Space Center, where Lockheed Martin workers will prepare it for a test in 2014 designed to bring it back into the atmosphere at speeds roughly 80% of those it would see on a return from the Moon. That unpiloted mission will take Orion well beyond the 220-mi. ISS altitude before it plunges home, into the cislunar space that may very well be the next area of operation for human explorers.
Mindful of the constrained funding they are likely to face for the foreseeable future, NASA managers are considering using a recycled ISS module as the basis for a way station at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, or perhaps in lunar orbit, to press exploration beyond LEO. While there are problems with the orbital mechanics of the idea, the basic concept of cislunar operations is attractive.
John Karas, vice president and general manager of human spaceflight at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, is one advocate. An aggressive and articulate spokesman for his product, Karas sees Orion as the centerpiece for an “affordable” stepwise push to Mars that will start in cislunar space. The trick is in not trying to land.
Landers are big, heavy and expensive, but there are places near Mars—the two tiny moons—where a human crew could set up shop to explore the planet's surface using teleoperated robots without actually touching down there. And the L2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point over the lunar far side is a good place to practice for that, says Karas.
“Think of cislunar space as an analogy of what Gemini was to Apollo,” he says. “Gemini learned rendezvous/prox ops and this and that. Well, we're going to learn about closed-loop life support, low-g, how to navigate in low gravity fields, those kind of things.”
Some of that work—particularly low-gravity operations—can be done at a near-Earth object (NEO), which is President Barack Obama's stated human exploration goal in the 2020s. Astronomers have spotted NEO “targets of opportunity” that pass close enough to Earth's orbit in 2019, 2021 and 2024, Karas says, with more likely to be found as they draw more attention. A NEO mission using an SLS would take 180 days, with an Orion and a small habitat that could be made from two of the cylindrical sections that go into the Orion pressure vessel.
That same Orion/habitat stack could float in a halo orbit at L2 over the lunar far side while its crew operated robotic rovers on the unexplored surface below to gain experience for Mars (see illustration). Karas says Demos, the smaller of the Martian moons, could be a good choice for a human-exploration base because there is a spot on it that is always in view of Earth and Mars for communications, and the Sun for power. A larger hab could essentially be docked with the low-gravity surface for the 1.5-year stay while the two planets line up again for the return trip, and the crew could use the Orion to move around Demos in the low-gravity environment. The whole process would take six or seven 130-metric-ton SLSs to predeploy the habitat and return stage, and transport the crew there and back.
Karas argues the mission would be affordable, based on NASA funding history. Over the 30-year shuttle era, the U.S. averaged 4.5 missions a year. NASA already has spent more than $5 billion to develop Orion, and the SLS should be cheaper than a shuttle because it uses shuttle-heritage hardware in a simpler configuration.
“Do you think you could afford one or two heavies a year for a couple of years?” Karas asks. “I'm not talking lots and lots of elements like station, so even Mars is less aggressive than station in certain budgetary aspects, as long as you don't land.”
Working Group Backs European Prop Module for Orion
Peter de Selding - Space News
A French-German working group established to coordinate the policies of Europe’s two biggest space program backers has concluded that the European Space Agency (ESA) should provide a propulsion module for NASA’s Orion crew-transport capsule to pay ESA’s space station operating costs between 2017 and 2020, government and industry officials said.
A second bilateral working group assessing the costs and benefits of an entirely new heavy-lift rocket has not yet delivered its conclusions despite a June 30 deadline, the head of the German Aerospace Center, DLR, said.
Both groups were created by the French and German ministries responsible for space. DLR and the French space agency, CNES, coordinated the effort to harmonize French and German space policy goals in advance of a November meeting of ESA ministers to set multiyear budget and program goals.
The 19-nation ESA depends on France and Germany for about 50 percent of the annual contributions it receives from its member governments. A clash between the two raises the risk of stalling ESA investments across the board, especially at a time when many ESA governments — including France — are under enormous pressure to reduce their debt.
The working groups were established to defuse potentially contentious issues at the heart of November’s ministerial conference.
The first group studied how ESA should pay NASA for Europe’s share of the operating costs of the space station between 2017 and 2020. That bill, estimated at about 450 million Euros ($585 million) over three years, up to now has been paid by cargo deliveries to the station by ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which is launched by Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket to provide fuel, food and other supplies to the station.
ESA has decided to cease ATV production after the fifth vehicle, scheduled for launch in 2014, reasoning that it should focus on new technology instead of building recurrent copies of hardware.
NASA proposed that ESA use technologies developed for ATV to provide the propulsion module for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, an investment that has been estimated to roughly cover the 450 million Euros needed.
But several ESA governments, notably France and Italy, protested that a subcontractor’s role for Europe on Orion would not generate public enthusiasm. CNES proposed an alternative, called the Versatile Autonomous Concept. This vehicle would perform multiple tasks in low Earth orbit, eventually including the removal of large pieces of space debris.
Whether NASA would accept this vehicle as ESA’s “barter element” was never clear. What was clear was that the vehicle would cost much more than 450 million Euros.
DLR Chairman Johann-Dietrich Woerner said Germany could accept the CNES-proposed vehicle, but that “an independent spacecraft cannot be realized for the amount of money which is available. The module for Orion is, so far, the only one which can be realized within the 450 million.”
The versatile vehicle’s costs are not yet fully defined but have been estimated at about 1 billion Euros — “and 1 billion Euros does not fit within 450 million Euros as I understand it,” Woerner said.
In a July 4 interview, Woerner said that he would nonetheless support initial studies on a versatile, independent vehicle using ATV technologies so that the Orion module barter element “is not a single shot for the United States, but also a basis for future independent European activities.”
Woerner stressed that the working group was not given the power to decide anything. Instead, it was charged with assembling factual elements about costs and risks, and presenting a suite of options to governments. CNES President Yannick d’Escatha, briefing journalists on June 25, made the same point about both working groups.
The second working group — the one reviewing future heavy-lift launcher options — is taking longer than scheduled to produce its report, Woerner said. By sometime in July it should be completed, a date that fits with d’Escatha’s forecast that France’s new government, in office since May, will not have settled on a space policy before midsummer.
As described by Woerner and d’Escatha, this second working group is reviewing four options. A key component is a demand by ESA governments that whatever vehicle is build should be able to live without the approximately 120 million Euros in annual support payments that the current Ariane 5 vehicle needs despite its commercial and technical maturity.
The first option would be to pursue the already started investment in an Ariane 5 Midlife Evolution (Ariane 5 ME) upgrade to enable the vehicle to carry 20 percent more satellite payload with a new, cryogenic upper stage. The cost of completing this upgrade is estimated at around 1.5 billion euros. Operating this vehicle, industry officials say, will be no more expensive than the current Ariane 5.
A second option would be to scrap the upgrade — while keeping its key Vinci engine — and proceed with development of an Ariane 6 rocket designed to carry one commercial satellite at a time into geostationary-transfer orbit. The current and upgraded Ariane 5 versions are designed to lift two satellites at a time.
A third option would continue work on Ariane 5 ME while funding initial designs of Ariane 6. The fourth option, likely the least costly in the short term, would fund Ariane 5 ME and wait a few years before starting Ariane 6.
Woerner said an early assessment of Ariane 6 is that it would cost between 3 billion and 4 billion Euros over 10 years.
Ariane 5 ME would cost 1.5 billion over six years and would be accompanied by a guarantee from prime contractor Astrium Space Transportation that, absent a dramatic event — in currency exchange rates, or a decision by a government to flood the market with subsidized rockets — the 120 million in annual support costs would reduce to zero over a specific period.
Space trek may help worms live long
Nematodes that orbited Earth had reduced signs of aging
Tina Hesman Saey - Science News Magazine
In space they can barely see you age, at least if you’re a worm.
Tiny, transparent nematodes that spent 11 days on the International Space Station — the equivalent of about 16 years for a person — appeared to age much more slowly than earthbound worms, Yoko Honda of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and colleagues report online July 5 in Scientific Reports.
The result is the opposite of what some scientists expected, based on experience with human spaceflight and studies of other animals. Mammals, including people, in the microgravity of space are under physiological stress, says D. Marshall Porterfield, director of NASA’s Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications Division in Greenbelt, Md. In low gravity, muscles atrophy and aging accelerates.
While the space station worms, from the species Caenorhabditis elegans, may have been under stress, they didn’t have those side effects. Their muscles did not degrade, and clumps of aging-related proteins known as Q35 aggregates did not build up in them as much as in worms on the ground, indicating that worms don’t age as fast in space as on Earth. Worms that visited the space station were frozen immediately after returning to Earth, so the researchers weren’t able to test whether time in space enabled the critters to live longer.
The researchers also discovered that relative to ground-based nematodes, the space-faring worms had lower activity of 199 genes, including 11 genes involved in transmitting information through the nervous or endocrine systems. For seven of the 11 genes, mutations that lowered the genes’ activity also caused ground-based worms in a separate experiment to live longer.
Reduced activity of three of the life-extending genes — called gar-3, cha-1 and shk-1 — also lowered the number of Q35 clumps that built up in aging worms. Those genes encode proteins that are produced in the nervous system, and two of them also encode proteins that are made in muscles.
Lowering the levels of those proteins during spaceflight might affect how worms perceive their environment, leading the nematodes to reduce their metabolism and extend their life spans, says Catharine Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer. Conley helped develop the substance that worms grow in while in space.
Studying worms in space may help scientists learn more about how low gravity affects organisms, regardless of the impact on life span, Porterfield says. “It doesn’t really matter what the outcome is if we learn about the biophysical environment,” he says. That knowledge may help engineers design ways of better protecting the health of astronauts.
Latino astronaut inspires local students
Jeremy Slayton - Richmond Times-Dispatch
It was an out-of-this-world experience Thursday morning at the Science Museum of Virginia — in fact, it took place at an altitude of 240 miles where the International Space Station orbits the Earth.
More than 170 students from across the state took part in a 20-minute, bilingual Q&A session with NASA astronaut Joseph Acaba, who in May began a half-year stay in the space station.
Acaba, who is the first Puerto Rican astronaut, encouraged the students to pursue their dreams.
"Don't be afraid to dream big; don't let people bring you down and tell you 'You can't do it,' " Acaba said. "Dreams can come true. They are hard and you do have to work hard … but when you have an opportunity, take that and go after what you want."
This in-flight conversation was one in a series with educational organizations in the United States and abroad to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics teaching and learning. It was brought here through a partnership involving NASA, the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Science Museum of Virginia, Univision and the National Institute of Aerospace.
Many of the students who attended Thursday's session are participating in other NASA programs, including camps associated with the agency's Summer of Innovation project.
A group of Hispanic students with the Latino Education Advancement Program at The Steward School in western Henrico County filled several rows of the Science Museum's IMAX Dome awaiting the conversation with Acaba.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience to speak to a Latino in space … and have a bilingual conversation with him," said Melanie Rodriguez, LEAP program director. "It really enriches their heritage and makes them feel unique."
Others represented during Thursday's program include Lucille Brown Middle School in Richmond, the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Passport to Education program and teen volunteers from the Virginia Summer Residential Governor's School of Engineering.
Michael Cevallos, a rising junior at The Steward School, was one of a handful of students to ask Acaba questions. Michael, who is participating in LEAP this summer, said the main message he took away from the conversation with Acaba was one of perseverance.
"He said a lot of neat and compelling words to motivate us to work hard and not give up," Michael said.
Acaba arrived at the space station, which is about the length of a football field, with Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin on May 17.
Each day in the space station is different, Acaba told the students. For example, on Thursday morning, he replaced parts to the toilet, then later in the day took part in safety simulations. Spacewalks are planned soon.
"It was an honor; not a lot of people get to do that," said Jose Reynoso, a rising junior at L.C. Bird High School and LEAP program attendee, of the conversation with Acaba. "It means everything; it makes me want to dream big."
Hybrid Solid Rocket Motor Has Successful Test Firing
Mark Carreau - Aviation Week
The Space Propulsion Group Inc. carried out a successful 11-sec. test firing of a developmental, 22-in. flight-class hybrid solid rocket motor fueled by paraffin and liquid oxygen on June 29 at its Butte, Mont., Aerotech test facility.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, which was formed 13 years ago to develop low-cost, lightweight, environmentally friendly sources of space propulsion and power generation, carried out what was the fifth and longest in a series of test firings. The effort started in 2005 to develop hybrid propulsion scaling tools for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab at Edwards AFB, Calif.
“At this point, I think we are at the stage where we can transition this technology to a product,” Arif Karabeyoglu, SPG’s president and chief technology officer, told a post-test news briefing. “We are at a point where we can actually start to build hybrid rocket motors that deliver the thrust forces needed with the required amount of performance.”
The 22-in. composite case hybrid will undergo additional testing to verify a predicted 5,000-lb. thrust capability at vacuum, with a cumulative 100 sec. of operating time. Thrusting can be stopped and restarted.
The company envisions 22-in. and previously tested 10-in. versions of the paraffin/LOX hybrid as suitable for the second stage of at least one existing launch vehicle, the Pegasus, and sounding rockets.
A 40-in. version for more ambitious propulsion assignments appears attainable, Karabeyoglu says.
Testing of the 22-in. version is scheduled to resume in Butte in July.
SPG counts FAA, NASA, Scaled Composites, the U.S. Air Force and Navy and Virgin Galactic among its customers.
Space Propulsion Group’s New Motor Roars to Life
Amy Teitel - AmericaSpace.org
Last Friday June 29, the California-based Space Propulsion Group tested a new motor that promises to be a game changer. It’s for a hybrid propulsion system – half liquid fuel and half solid fuel – that’s safer, more environmentally benign, and more economically viable than other rocket propellants. It’s an alternative the motor’s builders think could significantly reduce the price of space accessibility.
Developing the technologies to reduce cost, lower environmental impact, and increase safety of propulsion and power generation systems has been SPG’s mission since its inception in 1999. Their method is to replace toxic and expensive materials with safer and abundant green alternatives.
This latest test was of a paraffin/liquid oxygen hybrid rocket stage. The 22-inch diameter fired for about 20 seconds at the company’s testing facility in Butte, Montana. The roar accompanied by a blindingly bright flame was the fifth test of this particular motor and it demonstrated a flight-weight version of the design. It also gave its designers a wealth on information about the design, useful since it will eventually be scaled up.
Proponents of hybrid rockets praise the designs for bringing together the best of both solid and liquid propellants. Hybrids are simple like solids that burn through once they’re lit but add the safety associated with liquid fuel; combining paraffin and liquid oxygen won’t cause an explosion without a spark. Hybrids are also cheaper. Not only is paraffin much more readily available than traditional rocket fuels, SPG says future propulsion systems using the motor’s hybrid technology have the potential to be five to 10 times cheaper than existing rockets.
Those aren’t the only benefits. SPG’s hybrid is a powerful one that’s on track to compete with more traditional solid and liquid propulsion systems in terms of performance. It could be a match for ATK’s Orion 38 upper stage, for example.
“We believe propulsion drives the cost of access to space and that complexity generally drives propulsion system cost,” said Arif Karabeyoglu, president and chief technical officer of SPG. “By using a commercially available paraffin-based fuel, we have created an economically viable alternative that could significantly reduce the price of space accessibility, as well as help preserve the environment.”
This isn’t the first time engineers have explored the benefits of hybrid propellants. Sergei Korolev, the famed Chief Designer behind the Soviet Union’s early success in space, experimented with hybrid rockets in the 1930s. He used jellied gasoline suspended on a metal mesh and liquid oxygen under its own pressure to launch hybrid rockets of varying size and sophistication. Herman Oberth, Wernher von Braun’s mentor who eventually joined NASA after the Second World War, use tar-wood-saltpeter and liquid oxygen as rocket fuel around the same time.
As for modern hybrids, SPG isn’t the only game in town. Virgin Galactic’s suborbital SpaceShipTwo uses hybrid motors, as does Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser.
Later this month, SPG is planning an extended test fire of the same motor. Eventually on a mission, this hybrid will burn between 80 and 100 seconds in a vacuum to propel payload with 5,000 pounds of thrust. In its finished form, SPG’s hybrids will have orbital and suborbital applications. Hopefully the “fraction of the cost of traditional rocketry” factor pans out.
Space docking procedures are far from routine
Alan Hale - Alamogordo Daily News
Probably the biggest item in recent space news has been the flight of the Shenzhou 9 mission, the fourth manned mission of the Chinese Shenzhou program.
Launched on June 16 and carrying two astronauts (including China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang), Shenzhou 9 rendezvoused two days later with the unmanned Tiangong 1 space station (that had been launched last September) and performed an automatic docking that was remotely controlled from a ground station.
Six days later Shenzhou 9 undocked from Tiangong 1, and then redocked, this time under the manual control of Liu. Together these constituted the first manned dockings by the Chinese space program.
Such dockings in space have a fairly long history, however, extending almost back to the origins of human spaceflight. While this was not an actual "docking," the first rendezvous in space between manned spacecraft took place in August 1962 when the Soviet missions Vostok 3 and 4 came to within about four miles of each other, close enough that they could be seen by each other (and ship-to-ship radio communications established).
A similar feat was performed eight months later by Vostok 5 and 6, this latter spacecraft containing cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the world's first female astronaut.
This concept was carried to a much further extent in December 1965 by the Gemini 6 and 7 missions. On Dec. 15, 1965, the two spacecraft remained within 300 feet of each other for over five hours, at one point approaching each other to within one foot.
The entire rationale of the Gemini program was the testing of techniques and procedures that would be utilized in the forthcoming Apollo missions to the moon. These would involve actual spacecraft dockings, and in the Gemini program this was to be accomplished between the manned Gemini capsules and unmanned Agena target vehicles.
The first planned docking mission was actually Gemini 6, which had been scheduled for launch in October 1965; however, a failure shortly after the launch of the Agena vehicle caused this to be postponed. The first successful docking came with the Gemini 8 mission in March 1966, although the mission itself had to be aborted shortly thereafter due to a thruster malfunction that began causing dangerous rolls.
Several additional successful docking missions were conducted throughout the remainder of the Gemini program.
These docking procedures played a very important role during the Apollo missions, specifically between the command/service module and the lunar module. The lunar mission profile would include a docking with the lunar module (still embedded within the upper stage of the Saturn launch rocket) after the spacecraft had left Earth orbit, undocking in lunar orbit as the lunar module descended to the lunar surface, and then a redocking once the lunar module had returned from the surface.
These procedures were tested in Earth orbit by the Apollo 9 mission in March 1969 and in lunar orbit by the Apollo 10 mission two months later, and were utilized by all the subsequent landing missions.
Docking maneuvers have, of necessity, had to be performed with each manned mission involving an orbiting space station, beginning with the Soviet Union's Soyuz missions to the various Salyut space stations throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, and the American missions to the Skylab space station during the mid-1970s.
The first successful docking between two manned spacecraft from different countries was performed during the course of the joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission in July 1975, and this became routine during the various space shuttle missions to the Russian space station Mir during the mid-to-late 1990s.
These same activities have been a rather routine way of life ever since the International Space Station began to be permanently occupied in 2000. Docking procedures need to be performed every time crew members arrive or depart (be this via the space shuttle vehicles that flew up until last year, or the Soyuz spacecraft that continue to operate), as well as during cargo resupply missions (be these via the Progress spacecraft or, as was demonstrated just a little over a month ago, by commercial vehicles like the SpaceX Dragon capsule).
Future space endeavors, be they additional space stations like ISS or manned missions beyond low Earth orbit, will continue to require procedures like these for as long as we can imagine.
In a sense, this is merely a continuation of the way we have always carried out our exploration and travel. Ships have always had docks from which they were launched and to which they returned, and airplanes have gates and hangars. Even our cars can have "docks" of a sort; i.e., garages.
It may be rather obvious, and perhaps mundane, in such cases, but even our space travel -- which is still far from routine -- requires some of the same basic techniques that have been used for as long as humans have ventured from one place to another.
The only thing that is truly different is the external environment.
Where last we landed: New plaque marks where space shuttle 'stopped'
Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com
"Mission complete, Houston. After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle has earned its place in history. It's come to a final stop."
With those words, astronaut Christopher Ferguson signaled the end of the 135th and final shuttle mission on July 21, 2011. Almost a year later, the spot where STS-135 commander Ferguson brought space shuttle Atlantis to its "wheels stop" has been marked with a permanent plaque.
The 16 by 28 inch (41 by 71 centimeters) black granite marker was installed late last month alongside Runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) in Florida. It was the third similarly-designed plaque added to mark where NASA's three retired winged orbiters had come to their final resting stops after each of their last spaceflights.
Atlantis' plaque is positioned 11,361 feet (3,463 meters) down the length of the 15,000 foot (4,572 meter) concrete landing strip. The SLF has one of the longest runways in the world. And at 300 feet (91.4 m.) wide, the runway spans from edge to edge about the length of a football field.
Like the granite tablets that were earlier installed for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour, Atlantis' marker features an engraved depiction of the space shuttle landing, along with the date of its final touchdown and how far it traveled down the runway. The plaque also notes the number of missions Atlantis flew (33), its total days in space (307) and miles flown while orbiting the Earth (126 million).
When Atlantis landed in July 2011, the locations where its nose and main landing gear came to a halt were marked on the runway using spray paint. Last month, that freehand notation was removed and replaced with a smaller, stenciled note. Atlantis' plaque was positioned parallel to the painted notation at the edge of the runway so as not to interfere with the strip's continued and future use by air and spacecraft.
The plaques were created and installed for NASA by C Spray Glass Blasting of Cocoa Beach, Fla. The project to install the markers began last year under former space shuttle launch integration manager Michael Moses working with Kennedy employees Mike Ciannilli, Melissa Jones, Dean Schaaf and Malcolm Glenn.
Atlantis' final, final stop will come this November when it will be rolled over to the nearby Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex for display. The orbiter's new $100 million, 65,000-square-foot exhibit is set to open to the public in summer 2013
America's Nerdiest Destination: Virginia's Emerging Space Coast
Paul Brady - Huffington Post
A summer ago, as NASA astronauts prepped for the final mission of the 30-year Shuttle program, Florida's Space Coast cashed in for the last time on gawkers arriving to witness lift off: the smoke, the noise, the flames. An era of space tourism had come to an end.
Though the next era of space tourism will likely be dominated by Virgin Galactic, Space X and other companies hoping to sell tickets to the great beyond, those dreams have yet to be realized. In the meantime, a generation of Carl Sagan readers, Trekkies and star watchers had been loosed from Cape Canaveral's orbit. Nerd tourists could head to the spaceport in the New Mexican desert, Area 51 or Wright Brother National Memorial, but they no longer had a definitive vector.
Then, in April, the retired shuttle Discovery arrived in Washington and highlighted the host of other space-centric attractions coming into their own. Nerd tourists can now access a diversity of museums, launch facilities and geek-friendly attractions without driving farther than a few hours from Dulles International.
Eager to join the mid-Atlantic's new science club, I set out for coastal Virginia on a voyage of terrestrial exploration.
My trip to the area started out in the least nerdy way possible, watching the NBA finals at a restaurant in the "drive till you qualify" exurb of Ashburn, VA. It didn't take long though before the names Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX were being bandied about at the bar. At a table behind me, a guy was telling a story about Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
In the morning, I drove a few miles to The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a fantastic extension of the National Air and Space Museum right next to Dulles International. The arrival of Discovery has been a boon for the museum, which was opened in 2003 but still lives in the shadow of its sister facility on the Mall despite housing the Enola Gay, one of the few remaining SR-71 Blackbirds and one of the 20 Concordes ever built. The Discovery is now the banner attraction.
"It's the biggest thing that's happened here," says Jack Dailey, the retired four-star general who serves as director of the museum. He notes that Udvar-Hazy has "the largest and most diverse collection of its kind in the world," including a significant number of aircraft that are the last surviving examples of their kind.
One reason Udvar-Hazy has struggled to attract visitors may well be the delay in building a Metro link to Dulles and by extension the museum. There is still no public transportation to Udvar-Hazy from the District, save a grueling hour-long bus ride from L'Enfant Plaza that most visitors avoid. I drove a rental car, but there is a shuttle bus from Dulles, which brings in about 2,000 visitors a month, including many international visitors who arrive early for evening flights and then trickle over.
"Everyone has heard of the Smithsonian, but they don't really know what it is," Dailey says. "We want to inspire learning."
To that end, docents lead tours of the collection, including some who have flown the actual aircraft on display. The cavernous hangar that houses most of the museum collection -- Space Shuttle, military jets, civilian aircraft, helicopters, memorabilia -- also houses a number of simulators for visitors, displays on the origins of powered human flight and a mock-up of an air traffic control center with explainers on live ATC audio. The center also hosts a series of educational programs and an annual "Become a Pilot Day," with static displays of aircraft not seen in the regular collection.
After a quick refueling stop, I drove south on I-95 to I-64, headed for the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia. A current show about shipwrecks -- and the survival thereof -- is a chilling reminder of all that can (and has) gone wrong on the high seas. A life jacket from the Costa Concordia is a particularly poignant sight; other stories including those of Titanic survivors and Steven Callahan are also fascinating.
Newport News is also home to Jefferson Lab, one of the country’s 17 national laboratories. But tours of the facility and its particle accelerator are few and far between: Jefferson holds one open house day every two years and scheduling visits outside that time is such an onerous process that I didn’t bother.
Nerds would be better off trying one of the Norfolk itineraries on SCVNGR, the geo-social game for smartphones. I had just begun to explore the area's hidden spots with the app when a summer thunderstorm dropped more than two inches of rain and left the streets flooded. I braved the storm for a bit, but after seing a car almost completely submerged in a flooded underpass on Colley Avenue, I bailed on my smartphone guide and retired to Mermaid Winery to ride out the storm with a glass of wine in hand. I watched wet give way to dark.
In the morning, I took the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, itself a 20-mile-long engineering marvel worth seeing, north toward Wallops Flight Facility, a launch base that predates the creation of NASA and is, due to the end of the Shuttle program, one of the agency’s premier research installations. A sprawling, coastal site near Chincoteague Island, Wallops is primarily focused on the launch of sounding rockets and high-altitude balloons, two platforms for suborbital scientific missions. Two days before my visit, an Orion rocket had been launched carrying 17 different experiments to an altitude of 73 miles, barely breaking the 62-mile-high Karman Line that defines the start of space.
Since I missed the launch, I had to settle for the underwhelming visitor’s center, which is predictably less impressive than the facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. More interesting but less visible is behind-the-scenes work happening at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, a public-private partnership that’s looking to bring orbital flights to Wallops.
Orbital Sciences Corporation, one of many aerospace companies capitalizing on NASA’s newly expanded reliance on private contractors, has developed the Antares, which is scheduled to fly from Virginia’s Space Coast soon, though an announced August launch date is now under review, NASA says. After that test flight, another mission could launch before the end of 2012, with semi-annual International Space Station resupply runs to follow. That would give fans of space flight a more exciting reason to visit than to watch rockets that just barely leave the atmosphere.
The future could look like the recent history of Cape Canaveral, a carnival atmosphere in the days leading up to launch, families camped out on the coast, cameras trained on launch pads, miniature American flags waving in the breeze. Hotels and attractions would pop up to cater to space tourists; fishing trips and kayak rentals would add diversity for families looking to plan summer vacations around launch schedules. The nearby Assateague Island National Seashore would see more visitors as this quiet part of the country is re-discovered.
But that hasn't happened yet.
Driving back to Washington, I considered the paradox of a having Space Coast so defined by the promise of the future and so comfortable resting on suborbital laurels. Here’s hoping the sight of Discovery, now parked and scuffed from the trials of 148 million miles traveled over 39 successful missions, will inspire the next generation of space-farers who will, one day, be lifting off from the nerdiest stretch of coastline in the nation. But the question remains: When will we being coming to watch?
City announces date of shuttle mock-up move
Ben Baeder - The Downey Beat
The city on Thursday announced that it will take the space shuttle mock-up out of storage on July 12.
The 122-by-78-foot model will be moved from a warehouse on the Downey Studios lot to a temporary storage tent just north of the Columbia Memorial Space Center.
The city is throwing a party to celebrate the move with entertainment and activities for children.
The public is invited to see the move. The first section should arrive in the tent area around 11 a.m., and the city is holding a special ceremony at noon.
The mock-up, built in 1972, is the ancestor for all the flight-worthy shuttles that were the mainstay of the country’s space program for three decades. The shuttles were built in Downey.
The mock-up was used as a way to design the shuttles and as a marketing tool for Rockwell before the firm won the contract to build the spacecraft.
The city over the next few years plans to work with the Aerospace Legacy Foundation to build an annex structure behind the Space Center, which would serve as a permanent home for the shuttle.
Aerospace Legacy Foundation and city officials hope to eventually repair the shuttle so children can climb around inside.
City officials say an annex structure could cost $2-$3 million, but those familiar with the project said the final cost will likely be substantially more than the city’s estimate.
Pad 14: A Place of History and Destiny
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
Fifteen years ago, the 45th Space Wing, based at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, began the laborious process of restoring one of the most important landmarks in America’s early space programme. Led by Lieutenant-Colonel Dennis Hilley, then-commander of the wing’s Operations Support Squadron, the work involved countless military and civilian volunteers from NASA, the Department of Defense and various aerospace contractors, including Boeing. Within months, the original ‘blockhouse’ of Pad 14 – the site from which America launched its first four men into orbit around the Earth – had been revitalized and in the early summer of 1998 two former astronauts came here for its official dedication.
It was a poignant moment at a place whose glorious and dynamic past was now sharply juxtaposed with its silent lifelessness in more modern times. Scott Carpenter and Gordon Cooper had ridden their Atlas boosters into space from this very launch pad; a pad which had last reverberated to the roar of rocket engines more than three decades earlier. As other astronauts reached for the Moon, Pad 14 was allowed to rust and corrode, as the salty Atlantic air steadily reclaimed its own. As with the Bumper pad, discussed in last week’s History article, there can be few other places in the world in which the intrinsic relationship between nature and technology is more visibly acute than at Cape Canaveral, whose relics of our species’ first steps into the cosmos – for all the technological genius which made them possible – eventually counted for little against the remorseless march of time.
Today, the Pad 14 entrance road is marked by several memorials to commemorate those first steps into space; none more dramatic, arguably, than a large titanium sculpture of the Project Mercury symbol, beneath whose bulk is buried a time capsule which will remain unopened until the year 2464 – the 500th anniversary of the official conclusion of the programme. Within the time capsule are documents pertaining to one of the most remarkable adventures ever undertaken in human history; an adventure which sent four men – Carpenter and Cooper, together with Wally Schirra and John Glenn – beyond the atmosphere to view the Earth from a perspective previously available only to God himself. As we look back on Project Mercury and the launch pad which made those pioneering orbital journeys possible, it is impossible not to take a step back, awestruck, at its sheer audacity.
Yet Pad 14’s involvement in the space programme encompassed more than just Project Mercury…and more than just men, for on 29 November 1961 it ferried the chimpanzee Enos aloft, ahead of the first American in orbit. NASA Administrator Jim Webb’s office had questioned the need for the mission and, indeed, Washington newspapers suggested that it would invite ridicule from the Soviet Union. However, the decision was taken for a “necessary preliminary checkout” of the hardware before committing a human pilot. Enos, one of four chimps shortlisted for the flight, owed his name to the Hebrew word for ‘man’, hopefully indicative that the next Mercury-Atlas would be flown by a somewhat less hairy hominid. President John F. Kennedy drew laughs from the Senate when he announced that the just-launched Enos “reports that everything is perfect and working well”.
Three months later, a somewhat less hairy hominid was bound for Pad 14. John Glenn’s flight, Friendship 7, was eagerly awaited by the United States, although it proved a long time coming. The choice of name, Glenn recalled in his 1999 memoir, had been made by his children, Dave and Lyn. “They pored over a thesaurus and wrote dozens of names in a notebook,” he wrote. “Then they worked them down to several possibilities, names and words, including Columbia, Endeavour, America, Magellan, We, Hope, Harmony and Kindness. At the top of their list was their first choice: Friendship.” Although the name would be kept quiet until the morning of launch, Glenn had privately asked artist Cecelia ‘Cece’ Bibby to inscribe the name on his capsule in script-like characters, adding more individuality than the block lettering employed to stencil Freedom and Liberty Bell onto Al Shepard and Gus Grissom’s spacecraft.
“From what John Glenn told me later, [he] had decided that he wanted the name of his spacecraft applied in script and applied by hand,” Bibby once recalled, “because Al Shepard’s and Gus Grissom’s names had been applied by some mechanic who went into town, got a can of spray paint, a stencil-cut of the names and then spray-painted them onto the capsule.” Apparently, added Bibby, Glenn felt that men had such poor handwriting that a female artist would be preferable. When she painted the name on the capsule, Bibby, clad in white clean-room garb, became the only woman to ascend the gantry to Pad 14 and was even told by the pad leader, Guenter Wendt, that she did not belong there. So pleased was Glenn with the design, though, that Gus Grissom dared Bibby to paint naked women on the outside of the spacecraft instead.
She rose to the challenge, not by painting on the exterior of Friendship 7, but by drawing a naked woman on the inside of a cap used to cover the periscope. Although the cap would be jettisoned before launch, it would be seen by Glenn as he boarded the capsule and hopefully might give him a laugh. Reading It’s just you and me against the world, John Baby, the drawing was placed on the periscope by Bibby’s friend, engineer Sam Beddingfield. The launch itself was scrubbed, but Bibby got into work the following morning to find a note from Glenn, “telling me he had gotten a big kick out of the drawing”. Bibby was almost fired for her practical joke, although fortunately both Grissom and Glenn intervened on her behalf and saved her. Later in the launch preparations, she sent Glenn another gift: this time a drawing of a frumpy old woman in a house dress, bearing mop and bucket and the legend You were expecting maybe someone else, John Baby? Not long afterwards, Glenn’s backup, Scott Carpenter, requested a naked woman for his own capsule, Aurora 7, which would fly the second American orbital mission from Pad 14 in May 1962…
Sadly, the news at the beginning of that year was nowhere near as lighthearted: a launch attempt on 16 January was postponed by at least a week, due to technical problems with the Atlas rocket’s fuel tanks. With each successive delay, more criticism was voiced from journalists and congressmen, who questioned whether Project Mercury – already a year behind the Soviets – would ever succeed in placing a man into orbit. Even President Kennedy, at a news conference on 14 February, expressed his disappointment in the delays, although he felt that the final decision on when to launch should be left to the Mercury team. Others, however, commended NASA’s frankness in conveying the reasons for each delay. It was stressed that the orbital mission had been planned for over three years and a few more weeks’ delay was of little consequence, a sentiment shared by Glenn himself, who described being not “particularly shook-up” by the postponements.
Following the 23 January postponement, caused by poor weather, another attempt was scheduled for the cloudy morning of the 27th. Glenn rose early for his low-residue breakfast of filet mignon, scrambled eggs, orange juice and toast with jelly, before undergoing the laborious process of having biosensors glued onto his body and his pressure suit fitted. That day, he lay inside Friendship 7 for more than five hours, hoping for a break in the overcast skies. It never came and, at T-20 minutes, Walt Williams scrubbed the launch. “It was one of those days,” Williams remembered later, “when nothing was wrong, but nothing was just right either.”
After the 27 January postponement, Glenn’s launch was initially targeted for 1 February and this required the emptying, purging and refilling of the Atlas’ propellant tanks. Then, two days before the launch, on the 30th, as the ground support team began the refuelling process, a mechanic discovered, by routinely opening a drain plug, that there was fuel in the cavity between the structural bulkhead and an insulation bulkhead which separated the fuel and oxidiser tanks. Initial estimates suggested at least a ten-day delay to correct the problem and recheck the rocket’s systems. The 600 accredited members of the media at the Cape could do little but groan as John Glenn’s launch was postponed yet again, this time until no earlier than 13 February.
On that day, although weather conditions remained foul, NASA personnel began to move back into position to again attempt a launch. The media’s pessimism was reflected in their turnout: by that evening, only 200 had checked in at the nearby Cocoa Beach motels. Their doubt was well-placed and the launch gradually slipped towards the end of the month. By the 19th, with liftoff rescheduled for the following morning, the Weather Bureau predicted only a 50 percent chance of success: conditions in the recovery zones were fine, but the Cape was poor. A frontal system had been observed moving across central Florida, which, it was surmised, could cause broken cloud over the Cape in the early hours of the next day.
Out at Pad 14, clouds rolled overhead by the time the astronaut arrived outside the capsule at 6:00 am EST. However, forecasters were predicting possible breaks in the cloud by mid-morning, producing a different atmosphere on the gantry, with less casual chatter, as if everyone sensed, said Glenn, “that we were going for real this time”. Weather caused the original launch time to be missed and a broken microphone bracket inside Glenn’s helmet required repair before Friendship 7’s hatch could be finally closed and bolted at 7:10 am. Forty minutes later, the countdown resumed. By the time the launch pad crew moved clear of the Atlas, Glenn – whose pulse varied between 60-80 beats per minute – was granted his first view of blue skies as the realisation that 20 February might be ‘The Day’ took hold.
He was also assailed by the peculiar, eerie sense of being atop the silvery rocket. “I could hear the sound of pipes whining below me as the liquid oxygen flowed into the tanks and heard a vibrant hissing noise,” he said later. “The Atlas is so tall that it sways slightly in heavy gusts of wind and, in fact, I could set the whole structure to rocking a bit by moving back and forth in the couch!” Thirty-five minutes before launch, the rocket’s liquid oxygen supply was topped off and, despite another brief hold caused by a stuck fuel pump outlet valve and a last-minute electrical power failure at the Bermuda tracking station, the clock resumed ticking.
With 18 seconds to go, the countdown reverted to automatic and, four seconds before launch, Glenn “felt, rather than heard” the engines roaring to life far below. At 9:47:39 am, with a thunder that overwhelmed Scott Carpenter’s ‘Godspeed, John Glenn’ sendoff, the Atlas’ hold-down posts separated and the enormous rocket began to climb. America’s first man to orbit the Earth was on its way…and Pad 14 had secured its place in history.
Fifty years ago, America launched its first man into orbit around the Earth. John Glenn spent five hours aloft, completed three circuits of the globe and earned worldwide renown both for his own time and undoubtedly in the decades and centuries to come. Today, with star-studded careers as a Marine Corps aviator, United States Senator and astronaut behind him, Glenn remains a figure who commands enormous – and well-deserved – respect and this was acknowledged in May 2012 when President Barack Obama honoured him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At Cape Canaveral, the place from which Glenn struck his indelible mark on the history of American space exploration is today a silent place. It throbbed to its last roar of rocket engines more than four decades ago and today a haunting monument – an enormous titanium symbol of the Mercury Seven – harkens back to an era in which humanity departed the cradle of its civilisation and took its first faltering steps into the fathomless black beyond.
Three months after Glenn’s mission, in May 1962, his backup, Scott Carpenter, steeled himself for his own journey into orbit. The flight had been postponed since April, due to problems checking out its Atlas booster and Carpenter’s Aurora 7 capsule. An initial launch attempt on 19 May was foiled when irregularities were detected in a temperature control device in the rocket’s flight control system heater. Five days later, the astronaut was aboard his craft by 5:00 am EST and enjoyed one of the smoothest countdowns ever experienced in Project Mercury, with only persistent ground fog, cloud and camera-coverage issues complicating affairs. During a 45-minute delay past the original 7:00 am launch time, he sipped cold tea from his squeeze bottle and chatted to his family over the radio.
In fact, Carpenter’s wife, Rene, and their four children, represented the first astronaut family to travel to the Cape to watch the launch in person. To avoid media attention, a neighbour had provided a private flight to Florida and a non-descript car, which Rene drove to the astronauts’ hideaway, nicknamed ‘The Life House’, near Pad 14, wearing huge sunglasses, a kerchief over her conspicuous blonde coif and her two daughters hidden under a blanket. The media, anticipating the arrival of a blonde mother of four, instead saw only a well-disguised mother of two…
Sixteen seconds after 7:45 am, the Atlas’ engines ignited, prompting all four Carpenter children to abandon the television set and rush out onto the beach to watch their father hurtle spaceward from Pad 14. Elsewhere, at the Cape and across the nation, an estimated 40 million viewers watched as America launched its second man into orbit. Carpenter himself would later describe “surprisingly little vibration, although the engines made a big racket” and the swaying of the rocket during the early stages of ascent was definitely noticeable. In his autobiography, For Spacious Skies, he would express surprise, after so many years of flying aircraft and ‘levelling-out’ after an initial climb, to see the capsule’s altimeter climbing continuously as the Atlas shot straight up.
As Carpenter made history, so too did Pad 14. In the wake of Aurora 7, two more astronauts would also ride their Atlas boosters into orbit from the same complex. Wally Schirra’s mission, which he nicknamed ‘Sigma 7’, was postponed from late September 1962, due to complications surrounding a fuel leak, but in the small hours of 3 October he was awakened and sat down to breakfast with Deke Slayton, newly-appointed Co-ordinator of Astronaut Activities. Steak and eggs – a traditional, low-residue breakfast fare – was on the menu…together with an unexpected addition: bluefish.
The previous evening, Schirra and Slayton had gone fishing. The Cape had been long renowned for its excellent surf fishing, especially in the spring and autumn, and the two men hooked several bluefish. They were “in the five-pound range,” wrote Schirra in his autobiography, Schirra’s Space, “but they fought free by severing our leaders with their razor-sharp teeth. I managed to land one by slinging it on the beach and pouncing on it before it could wriggle back to the surf”. The bluefish, it seemed, was not the only individual with a shock in store. The two astronauts were aware of a Thor-Delta rocket on the nearby Pad 17A…but they did not know how close it was to launch.
“It wasn’t until we heard a roar that we realised the Thor-Delta was lifting off,” wrote Schirra. “We were looking right up the tailpipe of its monster engine and we knew right away that we were in the danger zone. Had there been an abort, it would have been a bad day for Mercury, with the chief astronaut and the pilot of MA-8 incinerated like the legendary rattlesnakes.” Fortunately, he added, the rocket rose perfectly, delivering NASA’s Explorer 14 scientific satellite into orbit. Equally perfectly, the bluefish for breakfast on the following morning, 3 October, was delicious.
Schirra’s drive to Pad 14 and his waiting Atlas rocket was uneventful, with the exception that the astronaut fell asleep. Several months later, Gordon Cooper would actually doze off whilst atop the Atlas itself, waiting out a hold in the countdown. It was testament, Schirra explained, “to our training, and it shows the confidence we had in the people who supported us, both from NASA and the contractors. We could ask questions of technicians at the pad or construction guys and we’d get straight answers. We could call the executives, like Mr Mac of McDonnell, and they too would level with us. That’s one reason we completed Mercury with seven healthy astronauts”.
By 4:40 am, Schirra, assisted by Cooper and Pad 14 leader Guenter Wendt, was aboard Sigma 7. The countdown proceeded with exceptional smoothness, the only minor problem being a radar malfunction at the Canary Islands tracking station, and the United States’ third orbital mission set off at 7:15:11 am. In his post-flight debriefing, later that day, aboard the destroyer USS Kearsarge, Schirra would describe the ascent as “disappointingly short”, with all of his training to handle unexpected emergencies rewarded with a perfectly nominal climb into orbit. “I still believe that the amount of practice we had prior to [orbital] insertion is important,” he debriefed, “in that you must be prepared for reaction to an emergency, rather than thinking one cut.”
Sigma 7’s rise was not, however, entirely nominal. Ten seconds after liftoff, it became clear that the clockwise roll rate of the Atlas was greater than planned, giving flight controllers cause for concern. “My course was being plotted against an overlay grid called a ‘harp’, since it’s shaped like the musical instrument,” Schirra recalled in his autobiography. “Green lines in the middle of the grid designate the ‘safe’ zone and on the outer limits the lines go from yellow to red. I was headed into the yellow area. If I had reached the red, there was a likelihood that the Atlas would impact on land, possibly in a populated area.” Such a dire eventuality would have forced the Cape’s range safety officer to abort the mission, ejecting Sigma 7 and destroying the rocket. Indeed, the primary and secondary sensors within the Atlas had registered a ‘rifling’ roll only 20 percent short of an abort condition. Pad 14 had seen its third manned launch and had revealed that the dividing line between success and failure was a decidedly thin one.
Seven months after Schirra’s nine-hour, six-orbit voyage, the final space explorer of Project Mercury was ready for his own mission into space. Gordon Cooper would spend a full day in orbit aboard the vehicle he had named ‘Faith 7’. Originally scheduled for launch on 14 May, he entered his capsule, to be greeted by a ‘gift’ from his backup, Al Shepard. It was a small suction-cup pump on the seat, labeled with the legend ‘Remove before launch’, in honour of the new urine-collection device aboard the spacecraft. Cooper would become the first Mercury astronaut who would be able to urinate in a manner other than ‘in his suit’.
Bad weather clouded the chances of an on-time launch, but a malfunctioning radar at the secondary control station in Bermuda cast a serious shadow of threat. Shortly after this had been rectified, at 8:00 am, with an hour remaining before the scheduled launch, a simple 275-horsepower diesel engine, responsible for moving the gantry away from the Atlas, stubbornly refused to work. More than two hours were wasted in efforts to repair a fouled fuel injection pump on the engine and the count resumed around noon. The gantry was successfully retracted, but the failure of a computer convertor in Bermuda – crucial for a ‘Go/No-Go’ launch decision to be made – caused the attempt to be scrubbed.
Cooper, after six hours on his back inside Faith 7, remained upbeat and summoned a forced grin. “I was just getting to the real fun part,” he said. “It was a very real simulation.” He spent part of the afternoon fishing, while checkout crews prepared the Atlas for launch the following morning. Arriving at Pad 14 for the second time, he greeted Guenter Wendt, with mock formality, reporting as “Private Fifth Class Cooper”, to which the pad fuehrer responded in kind. The roots of their joke came two years earlier, when Cooper had stood in for Al Shepard in a launch-day practice run prior to Freedom 7. Upon arriving at the pad, Cooper had expressed mock terror, begging Wendt not to make him go. Some of the assembled media were amused, but NASA’s public affairs people were not and one even suggested that Cooper be “busted to Private Fifth Class”. Ironically, the astronaut and Wendt liked the idea and ran with it.
This time, his wait inside the spacecraft lasted barely two and a half hours. The countdown ran smoothly until T-11 minutes and 30 seconds, when a problem developed in the rocket’s guidance equipment and a brief hold was called. In fact, so smooth was the countdown that flight surgeons were astonished to note that Cooper’s heart rate and breathing had fallen to just 12 beats per minute and he had dozed off. It took Wally Schirra, the capcom at Cape Canaveral that day, to bellow his name over the communications link to awaken him. Agonizingly, another halt came just 19 seconds before liftoff to allow launch controllers to ascertain that the Atlas’ systems had assumed their automatic sequence as planned. Thirteen seconds after 8:00 am on the morning of 15 May, the Atlas rumbled off its launch pad in what Cooper would later recall as a smooth but definite push.
That push served not only to insert Cooper into orbit for a 34-hour, 22-orbit mission, but also pushed America’s space aspirations forward. Already, NASA was planning an ambitious series of flights to perform orbital rendezvous, spacewalking and eventually expeditions to plant human bootprints on the Moon before the decade’s end. Gordon Cooper’s launch was the final manned mission to originate from Pad 14…but the complex’s involvement in NASA’s unfolding dream was not yet over. During 1965 and 1966, it served as the launching place for the Atlas-Agena – a combination of an Atlas booster, mated to a slender, pencil-like rendezvous target for Project Gemini – and in doing so Pad 14 played an enormously important role in making America’s first footprints on the Moon possible. The Atlas-Agena launches from Pad 14 will form part of a subsequent History article.
Today, five decades since Glenn’s pioneering mission into orbit, Pad 14 is long-silent, but far from forgotten. Beneath the titanium bulk of its Mercury Seven symbol is buried a time capsule – not to be opened until the year 2464, a full five centuries since Project Mercury officially ended – which contains much technical and other documentation pertaining to those handful of dramatic missions. From Pad 14, John Glenn rose to orbit in a rocket which had been scornfully described as “built by the lowest bidder”. Wernher von Braun believed that Glenn deserved a medal simply for his bravery in climbing aboard the rocket, let alone launching into space on it. As for the others, Carpenter’s nonchalant sipping of tea whilst aboard Aurora 7 and Schirra’s nap during the journey to the launch site and Cooper’s doze whilst lying on hundreds of gallons of volatile propellants underline one fundamental truth: that Pad 14 itself, and the four astronauts who flew from it, were all endowed with the Right Stuff.
END
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