10/5/12 news

Happy Friday everyone.     It was great seeing so many of you at our monthly Retirees luncheon yesterday at the H. Grill.  Especially pleased to welcome Wayne Hale and Steve Andrich for joining us and so many of your spouses for joining us this time----spouses or friends are always welcome.   Have a great weekend and enjoy the weather.     Friday, October 5, 2012   JSC TODAY HEADLINES 1.            October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month 2.            Starport's Columbus Day Special 3.            The Thriller Dance Performance and Spooky Spin are Back 4.            Beginners Ballroom Dance -- Last Chance for Fall Classes 5.            Badging Offices Closed in Observance of Columbus Day 6.            New to You on JSC Features 7.            Here's What's Happening Oct. 11 8.            Recent JSC Announcement 9.            Russian Phase One Language Course -- For Beginners 10.          An Introduction Engineers Without Borders - JSC 11.          Need Help Sprucing Up Your Presentation? ________________________________________     QUOTE OF THE DAY “ Work as if you own the company and soon you just might. ”   -- Mike Dolan ________________________________________ 1.            October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month Please join the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (OEOD) in recognizing October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month. In the 22 years since the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act, we have made significant progress in giving all Americans the freedom to make of our lives what we will. National Disability Employment Awareness Month provides an opportunity to recognize the indispensable contributions people with disabilities make in our economy and recommit to building a country where each of us can realize the full extent of our dreams.   Participate in the activities that JSC's DisAbility Advisory Group and OEOD have planned in observance of the month:   - disAbility Walking Tours: Thursday, Oct. 11, Teague Auditorium breezeway, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. - Information About Community Resources for Individuals with Disabilities Panel: Wednesday, Oct. 24, Building 1, Room 966, from 10 to 11:30 a.m.   For more information about the OEOD, please visit: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oeod/   Janelle Holt x37504 http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oeod/   [top] 2.            Starport's Columbus Day Special Come discover what Starport has to offer this Monday, Oct. 8, with two special classes!   Spinning With Steve - 9 to 9:50 a.m. - Studio 2   Cardio Pump - 10 to 11 a.m. - Studio 1   Both classes are free of charge to all Gilruth Center members, Studio Pass holders and Mind/Body Studio members.   Early registration will not be available for either class, so make sure you are at the Gilruth Center prior to class time to ensure you get a spot.   Gilruth Center hours of operation on Monday, Oct. 8: 8 a.m. to noon   Steve Schade x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/   [top] 3.            The Thriller Dance Performance and Spooky Spin are Back Join in on the Halloween fun at the Gilruth Center on Oct. 26 with a Thriller dance performance and Spooky Spin ride! You'll have a blast learning the Thriller dance routine, and then performing it in your best zombie attire. Learn the dance on Oct. 19 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The big performance is Oct. 26 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The fee is $20 if registered by Oct. 12 ($25 after), or $15 just to attend one night. Or, take a Spooky Spin ride in our specialty spin class with a Halloween theme! Come dressed in costume for this fun and frightful workout on Oct. 26 from 6 to 7 p.m. The fee is $10 if registered by Oct. 20, or $15 if registered after. Register for both classes at the Gilruth Center front desk.   Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/   [top] 4.            Beginners Ballroom Dance -- Last Chance for Fall Classes Do you feel like you have two left feet? Well, Starport has the perfect fall program for you: Beginners Ballroom Dance   This eight-week class introduces you to the various types of ballroom dance. Students will learn the secrets of a good lead and following, as well as the ability to identify the beat of the music. This class is easy, and participants have fun as they learn.   JSC friends and family are welcome!   Registration Cost: $110 per couple (ends Monday, Oct. 8)   Two class sessions available: - Tuesdays, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. -- starting Oct. 9 - Thursdays, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. -- starting Oct. 11   All classes are taught in the Gilruth Center's dance studio.   To register or for additional information, please contact the Gilruth Center's information desk: 281-483-0304   Steve Schade x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Fitness/RecreationClasses/RecreationProgram...   [top] 5.            Badging Offices Closed in Observance of Columbus Day All badging offices will be closed Monday, Oct. 8, in observance of Columbus Day. Normal working operations will resume Tuesday, Oct. 9, as listed below.   Building 110: 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Building 419: 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Ellington Field: 7 to 11 a.m. Sonny Carter Training Facility: 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.   Tifanny Sowell x37447   [top] 6.            New to You on JSC Features See photos from the electric (though maybe that had something to do with the lightning?) 19th Annual Ballunar Liftoff Festival and JSC Open House. Despite the weather we still had a great showing, with thousands coming out to see our "wares" and experience NASA.   Also new to the page is a story on how the NASA family honored Dr. Sally Ride with a ceremonial tree planting in JSC's Astronaut Memorial Grove, including how fellow female astronauts came out remember the trailblazing first American woman in space.   All is just a click away: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/jscfeatures/   JSC External Relations, Communications and Public Affairs x33317   [top] 7.            Here's What's Happening Oct. 11 It's Safety and Health Day for everyone! In addition to your own directorate's activities, here's what's planned:   - 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., 12:30 to 3 p.m.: Flu shots - Teague Auditorium lobby   - 9 to 10 a.m.: Keynote speaker, Eric Alva, "Working Creatively and Productively with Disabilities"   - 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: Booths - JSC pond area and Building 4S breezeway   - 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: Walking tours - experience how an employee with a disability navigates our campus   - Noon: VPP flag ceremony - front of Building 1   - 12:30 p.m.: Side-by-side live burn demo demonstrates the dramatic difference sprinkler protection can make - parking lot between Building 2 Teague and Astronaut Grove   - 4 p.m.: Health walk/run - Gilruth Center   Plus, FREE massages and FREE popcorn!   And, don't forget to take part in the Safety Culture Survey during booth hours at the Building 4 pond area. Your opinion counts!   Art Knell, Co-Chair, Safety & Health Day Commitee x41280   [top] 8.            Recent JSC Announcement Please visit the JSC Announcements (JSCA) Web page to view the newly posted announcement:   JSCA 12-031: Communications With Industry for the Engineering Product Integration Contract   Archived announcements are also available on the JSCA Web page.   Linda Turnbough x36246 http://ird.jsc.nasa.gov/DocumentManagement/announcements/default.aspx   [top] 9.            Russian Phase One Language Course -- For Beginners Russian Phase One is an introductory course designed to acquaint the novice student with certain elementary aspects of the Russian language and provide a brief outline of Russian history and culture. Our goal is to introduce students to skills and strategies necessary for successful foreign language study that they can apply immediately in the classroom. The linguistic component of this class consists of learning the Cyrillic alphabet and a very limited number of simple words and phrases, which will serve as a foundation for further language study.   Who: All JSC-badged civil servants and contractors with a work-related justification Dates: Oct. 29 to Nov. 21 When: Monday through Friday, 9:15 to 10:15 a.m. or 4 to 5 p.m. Where: Building 12, Room 158A   Please register through SATERN. The registration deadline is Oct. 23.   Natalia Rostova 281-851-3745   [top] 10.          An Introduction Engineers Without Borders - JSC Did you ever wonder what the volunteer group Engineers Without Borders (EWB) is and what they do? Then come by Building 4N, Room 2025, on Wednesday, Oct. 10, from noon to 1 p.m. to find out. EWB-JSC will provide a background of the organization and what projects EWB-JSC has worked on in Rwanda and Mexico. The presentation will also include information about the results of the chapter's recent trip to Rwanda and how you can get involved. No RSVP required.   Angela Cason x40903 http://ewb-jsc.org/index.html   [top] 11.          Need Help Sprucing Up Your Presentation? Toastmasters offers practical suggestions for organizing your main points, choosing effective words and capturing the attention of your audience. Come visit us anytime, and bring a friend! The Space Explorers Toastmasters Club meets every Friday from 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. in Building 30A, Conference Room 1010.   Carolyn Jarrett x37594   [top]   ________________________________________ JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. To see an archive of previous JSC Today announcements, go to http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/news/jsctoday/archives.       NASA TV: ·         2 pm Central SATURDAY (3 EDT) – NASA Science Briefing ·         5 pm Central SATURDAY (6 EDT) – SpaceX CRS-1/Dragon Pre-Launch Briefing ·         6 pm Central SUNDAY (7 EDT) –SpaceX Falcon9/Dragon CRS-1 ISS Launch Coverage ·         7:35 pm Central SUNDAY (8:35 EDT) – LAUNCH of SPACEX FALCON9/DRAGON CRS-1 ·         9 pm Central SUNDAY (10 EDT) – Post-Launch Briefing   Human Spaceflight News Friday – October 5, 2012   HEADLINES AND LEADS   Favorable forecast for Sunday SpaceX launch   James Dean - Florida Today   The first official forecast shows a 60 percent chance of favorable weather for SpaceX’s planned 8:35 p.m. Sunday launch of a Dragon capsule bound for the International Space Station. There’s a chance heavy clouds and scattered rain could keep the mission grounded when its instantaneous launch window arrives. If there’s no launch Sunday for weather or technical reasons, conditions are expected to improve Monday and Tuesday, with 70 percent and 80 percent chances of good weather, respectively.   SpaceX encore: 2nd private space station shipment   Marcia Dunn - Associated Press   A private company is headed back to the International Space Station. On Sunday night, SpaceX will attempt to launch another Dragon capsule full of food, clothes and science experiments for the astronauts at the space station. The company hopes to repeat the success of its test flight in May.   SpaceX Dragon has schedule advantage   Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week   NASA believes its previous and upcoming commercial cargo missions to the International Space Station give Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) the best chance of transporting a human crew to the space station first, but the brash startup is not a sure bet to win the commercial crew race. While company founder Elon Musk says he will fly a crew to the station before the end of 2015—earlier than any of his competitors—his main NASA customer is a little more cautious. “There are some systems that are acceptable in cargo that may not be acceptable in crew,” says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations. “There's obviously a lot of stuff that needs to be added in terms of life support; there's some cooling that needs to be there, humidity control, atmosphere monitors. There are a lot of other little subtle things that have to be there. So they've got the good basic capsule design, but I think there's still a little bit of work for them to do in those other areas.” Still, in his formal source-selection document, Gerstenmaier found that the SpaceX proposal for the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) program “provides the earliest crewed demonstration flight under a credible schedule at the lowest development cost.”   Boeing gets most money with smallest investment   Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week   Boeing got high marks in the competition for an integrated commercial crew launch system with its CST-100 capsule, a bare-bones vehicle designed to reach the International Space Station on battery power after launch with an Atlas V. In the just-completed Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) selection, NASA gave the aerospace giant the largest share of the $1.1 billion in seed money available. But the $460 million award came with a warning that Boeing's corporate commitment to the project is weak, leaving “an increased risk of insufficient funding” over the life of the Space Act agreement. Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier, who heads NASA's human spaceflight mission directorate, discounted Boeing's low investment in his selection of the CST-100 for CCiCap funding.   NASA, Russia eye yearlong space station assignments   Irene Klotz - Reuters   NASA is considering doubling the amount of time an astronaut spends at the International Space Station to a year, laying the groundwork for future missions deeper into space, officials said Thursday. If approved, a mission likely would begin in 2015, said NASA spokesman Rob Navias. Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported this week that the experimental yearlong endurance mission would include a Russian cosmonaut and a NASA astronaut. "If the mission proves to be effective, we will discuss sending yearlong missions ... on a permanent basis," Alexei Krasnov, head of human spaceflight with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said in the RIA Novostia report.   No astronauts were ‘bumped’ in the making of this space tourist   Fox News   The seats cost $51 million -- and we’re keeping them. An ABC News report by producer Gina Sunseri claimed opera singer Sarah Brightman outbid NASA for a seat aboard a Soyuz rocket -- and an astronaut was consequently bumped from the rocket ride. Nonsense, the space agency said. “Crews for International Space Station expeditions have been assigned through 2013,” NASA spokesman Joshua Buck told FoxNews.com. “None of those astronauts has been 'booted' from his or her respective mission.”   Japan mini-satellite to flash code from space   Miwa Suzuki – Agence France Presse   A palm-sized Japanese satellite in orbit around Earth will flash a Morse code message that will be visible around the world from next month, the mission commander said on Friday. Researchers hope the satellite, measuring 10 centimetres (four inches) cubed and launched from the International Space Station on Friday, will become the first orbiter to transmit an LED message across the night sky. The message was originally intended to be seen just in Japan, but people around the world have asked for the satellite to communicate when it overflies them, said Takushi Tanaka, professor at The Fukuoka Institute of Technology. Specific timings and locations will be announced later on the institute's website -- http://www.fit.ac.jp/kenkyu/fitsat1/ -- in Japanese and English.   Elon Musk on SpaceX, Tesla, and Why Space Solar Power Must Die   Kathryn Doyle - Popular Mechanics   "We need to be a multiplanetary species,"—that’s the ambitious way Elon Musk begins his talks. And it’s the kind of attitude that won Musk the 2012 PM Breakthrough Leadership Award. Today he came by PM’s home base to talk about his twin ventures, SpaceX and Tesla Motors. In May, his company SpaceX successfully launched a 227-foot tall rocket from Cape Canaveral and berthed its Dragon capsule with the International Space Station.   Upgraded Canadarm could be vital for future exploration   Stephen Clark – SpaceflightNow.com   A next-generation robotic arm with finer dexterity and lighter materials will be required for planned exploration missions to deep space, asteroids and Mars, according to Canadian officials who unveiled new robotics concepts last week. Made of lightweight composite materials, the next-generation Canadarm will be able to fit inside a minivan, according to Canadian space officials. The Canadian Space Agency showed off prototypes of future robotic arms Sept. 27. The concepts were developed over three years with $53 million in funding from a 2009 economic stimulus package passed by the Canadian government.   Endeavour: Limited public access as shuttle moves through L.A.   Los Angeles Times   A week before space shuttle Endeavour begins its 12-mile crawl through Los Angeles, officials said the public will have limited access during the two-day trek to the California Science Center in Exposition Park. They said access would be limited for safety reasons. The shuttle has been sitting in a hangar at Los Angeles International Airport since Sept. 21, when it arrived on the back of a modified Boeing 747. Now positioned on specialized, computerized transporters, Endeavour is scheduled to roll out of the United Airlines hangar at midnight Friday and begin creeping toward its permanent home at the science center.   South L.A. shuttle boosters are feeling jettisoned Residents' excitement turns to anger as officials clamp down on security and significantly reduce public access to the route Endeavour will take from LAX to the California Science Center   Angel Jennings & Kate Mather - Los Angeles Times   Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa touted it as "the mother of all parades" — a historic celebration in a part of Los Angeles that doesn't get much fanfare. Over two days, on the major thoroughfares of Westchester, Inglewood and South Los Angeles, space shuttle Endeavour would slowly make its way from LAX to its new home at the California Science Center. Community activists planned events, residents said they would line the streets and local businesses organized viewing parties. But that excitement has turned to anger as officials clamped down on security and significantly reduced public access to the shuttle route. The Los Angeles Police Department announced this week it would close off most sidewalks along the way, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the public to see the shuttle go by.   JFK to NASA in 1962: "I'm not that interested in space"   Lee Roop - Huntsville Times   President John F. Kennedy's challenge for America to be first on the moon is the stuff of American and NASA legend, but a new release of secret recordings Kennedy made in the Oval Office makes clear what he thought of the moon race. "I'm not that interested in space," Kennedy tells NASA's boss at one point. Kennedy was motivated instead by beating the Soviet Union to the moon to prove the superiority of the America system. That much is well-known to historians. But to hear Kennedy's voice in an Oval Office debate with then-NASA Administrator James Webb is still extraordinary. That's even easier now thanks to the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which just released annotated highlights from 260 hours of secret recordings Kennedy made in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. Not even Kennedy's aides knew about the tapes.   He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother   Harvey Rosenfield - Huffington Post (Opinion)   Loss. That's what I felt when I watched the space shuttle land at LAX, carried to our City of Angels on the back of a close relative, the mighty Boeing 747 -- 12 years older than the shuttle and, though aging, nearly as inspiring when you happen to see one. I recalled where I was when Challenger exploded -- studying in a library for the California bar exam -- and when Columbia burned up on re-entry -- at a cottage in Idyllwild with my family. But I'm talking about a different kind of loss.   MEANWHILE ON MARS…   Curiosity pauses to test soil scoop, sample delivery system   William Harwood – CBS News   After creeping about five football fields across the rocky floor of Gale Crater on the way to an intriguing intersection of different terrain types, the Mars Curiosity rover is pausing for a few weeks near fine-grained sand dunes to scoop up soil and run it through the vehicle's sample acquisition system to clean out any lingering traces of Earth's environment. After three such "rinse and repeat" cycles, a scoop on the end of the rover's robot arm will deposit small samples into a pair of sophisticated laboratory instruments, the Chemistry and Mineralogy experiment, or CheMin, and the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, known as SAM. CheMin will use X-ray diffraction to identify the minerals in a sample while SAM will employ two spectrometers and a gas chromatograph to look for signs of organic compounds.   Mars Curiosity about to really shake things up   Seth Borenstein - Associated Press   Mars Curiosity is about to take its first sip of the red planet's sand. But only after NASA's rover plays bartender to make sure the dry dust is shaken, not stirred. The rover's scoop will dig into the sand Saturday. Then the action starts. The end of the rover's 220-pound arm will shake "at a nice tooth-rattling vibration level" for eight hours, like a Martian martini mixer gone mad, said mission sampling chief Daniel Limonadi said. "It kind of looks and feels like if you open the hood of your car with the engine running," Limonadi said, making engine noises in a Thursday NASA telephone press conference.   Curiosity Rover to Scoop Up 1st Mars Samples This Weekend   Mike Wall - Space.com   NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will scoop up its first batch of Martian soil samples this weekend, scientists announced Thursday. The 1-ton Curiosity rover arrived at a sandy patch called "Rocknest" on Wednesday. Mission scientists have deemed it a good spot for the robot's maiden scooping activities, which should begin Saturday, if all goes according to plan. Curiosity's scoop system, which sits at the end of its 7-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, is designed to deliver samples into two analytical instruments on the rover's body — SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy). But Martian sand from the first few scoops won't make it that far; rather, it'll be used to clean out the handling system, researchers said.   Why a clean Mars rover is a happy Mars rover   Pete Spotts - Christian Science Monitor   Two months and a just over half a mile into its mission, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is taking time out for tests of key tools for sampling the Martian soil – and, it turns out, for some badly needed scrubbing. Over the next two to three weeks, engineers will direct Curiosity to scoop sand from a stone-dotted mini-dune the team has dubbed Rocknest and to run it through sample-processing hardware dubbed CHIMRA. It's a cleaning approach akin to a camper scouring the last meal's cookware with sand. After the scrubbing, NASA controllers plan to test CHIMRA's ability to feed samples collected by the scoop, and later Curiosity's drill, into two key instrument packages inside the rover’s chassis. __________   COMPLETE STORIES   Favorable forecast for Sunday SpaceX launch   James Dean - Florida Today   The first official forecast shows a 60 percent chance of favorable weather for SpaceX’s planned 8:35 p.m. Sunday launch of a Dragon capsule bound for the International Space Station.   There’s a chance heavy clouds and scattered rain could keep the mission grounded when its instantaneous launch window arrives.   If there’s no launch Sunday for weather or technical reasons, conditions are expected to improve Monday and Tuesday, with 70 percent and 80 percent chances of good weather, respectively.   The launch times would move up a bit each day, to 8:12 p.m. Monday and 7:46 p.m. Tuesday.   Read the Air Force 45th Space Wing’s official forecast here:   http://www.patrick.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-070716-028.pdf   SpaceX is launching the first of 12 ISS commercial resupply missions under a $1.6 billion NASA contract. The Dragon is packed with nearly 900 pounds of cargo, and plans to return nearly 1,700 pounds to Earth a few weeks after launching.   The launch also plans to deploy a prototype communications satellite as a secondary payload for New Jersey-based Orbcomm.   SpaceX encore: 2nd private space station shipment   Marcia Dunn - Associated Press   A private company is headed back to the International Space Station.   On Sunday night, SpaceX will attempt to launch another Dragon capsule full of food, clothes and science experiments for the astronauts at the space station. The company hopes to repeat the success of its test flight in May.   Rainy weather could keep the company's Falcon rocket grounded. Forecasters said Thursday there's a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions for the 8:35 p.m. launch from Cape Canaveral.   This is the California company's first official launch under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The contract calls for 12 deliveries.   The Dragon will spend a few weeks at the space station before being cut loose at the end of October with a full load of science experiments and old equipment. It will parachute into the Pacific.   Among the items going up and coming back on the Dragon are a dozen student experiments that flew aboard the SpaceX capsule in May, but were not properly activated by the station crew. NASA offered this second chance.   NASA is counting on private business to help keep the space station stocked, now that the shuttles are retired. The governments of Russia, Japan and Europe also provide periodic supply runs.   A second company, the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., hopes to launch its Antares rocket with a mockup capsule by the end of this year, out of Wallops Island. The first test flight to the space station, by Orbital Sciences, is targeted for early 2013.   SpaceX — or Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — is run by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who's also the chief executive officer of the electric car-maker, Tesla Motors. He is working to modify the Dragon capsule in order to carry astronauts back and forth to the space station, within three to five years. Americans currently hitch rides on Russian rockets.   SpaceX Dragon has schedule advantage   Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week   NASA believes its previous and upcoming commercial cargo missions to the International Space Station give Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) the best chance of transporting a human crew to the space station first, but the brash startup is not a sure bet to win the commercial crew race.   While company founder Elon Musk says he will fly a crew to the station before the end of 2015—earlier than any of his competitors—his main NASA customer is a little more cautious.   “There are some systems that are acceptable in cargo that may not be acceptable in crew,” says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations. “There's obviously a lot of stuff that needs to be added in terms of life support; there's some cooling that needs to be there, humidity control, atmosphere monitors. There are a lot of other little subtle things that have to be there. So they've got the good basic capsule design, but I think there's still a little bit of work for them to do in those other areas.”   Still, in his formal source-selection document, Gerstenmaier found that the SpaceX proposal for the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) program “provides the earliest crewed demonstration flight under a credible schedule at the lowest development cost.” On that basis, NASA awarded the Hawthorne, Calif., company $440 million in federal seed money to continue work on the crew version of the Dragon capsule that reached the ISS in May, and is scheduled for at least one more return trip before the end of this year.   “I think there are advantages of having flown cargo, but then there's a statement in the document where I caution that we need to know how they're going to transition from cargo to crew,” says Gerstenmaier.   That will not be too big a problem, Musk says with typical bravado. A lot of the work has been done, he says, and the rest can be completed within the time constraints laid out in the company proposal.   “We actually already have much of the [environmental control and life support] system working, even for cargo missions, because we are required to take biological cargo to and from the space station,” Musk says of the $1.6 billion commercial resupply services NASA contract his company entered after demonstrating Dragon's ability to dock with the ISS. “And some of the experiments actually have very tight temperature requirements, so we have very good thermal control of the Dragon interior. It's accurate to within about 1C.”   Still to come are lithium hydroxide (LiOH) canisters to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, along with humidity control and high-pressure air to maintain pressure in case of a leak.   The primary external difference between the cargo version of the Dragon and the crew version will be a pusher-type launch-abort system mounted in four pod-like bulges around the circumference of the capsule. They will be powered by four redundant pairs of SpaceX-designed SuperDraco hypergolic engines that have been test-fired to full thrust and duration, says Musk.   A mockup of the crewed Dragon has the abort-system pods mounted at 90-deg. intervals around the capsule, but Musk says that is being redesigned with an asymmetric configuration to address heating concerns.   Crew seats are “pretty close to the flight design,” he says, with individually molded liners able to accommodate astronauts as tall as 6 ft. 6 in. While docking will be autonomous using the NASA system in development at Johnson Space Center, pilots in the seven-member crews will be able to take control in emergencies or for special-purpose maneuvers such as inspection flyarounds, says Musk.   Although some of the companies building the next generation of crew vehicles are experiencing difficulty obtaining components from a dwindling aerospace supply base in the small lots they require, Musk says his company's philosophy of building as much as possible in-house mitigates the problem. Workers are currently reconfiguring the factory floor for efficiency and to keep activities requiring cleanliness away from heavy machining and other dirty areas.   “As far as engines and primary structure go, raw metal comes in and engines and rockets come out,” Musk says. “We do have suppliers of smaller components, but all major subsystems are made at SpaceX. It's harder and more painful in the beginning, but it pays off long term.”   Boeing gets most money with smallest investment   Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week   Boeing got high marks in the competition for an integrated commercial crew launch system with its CST-100 capsule, a bare-bones vehicle designed to reach the International Space Station on battery power after launch with an Atlas V.   In the just-completed Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) selection, NASA gave the aerospace giant the largest share of the $1.1 billion in seed money available. But the $460 million award came with a warning that Boeing's corporate commitment to the project is weak, leaving “an increased risk of insufficient funding” over the life of the Space Act agreement.   Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier, who heads NASA's human spaceflight mission directorate, discounted Boeing's low investment in his selection of the CST-100 for CCiCap funding.   “While this was only one of 13 goals, I did consider it,” he writes in his formal source-selection document. “However, Boeing met all of the other goals and had a strong technical design; therefore, I did not find the lack of significant corporate financial commitment to be a major discriminator in my assessment.”   Across the three companies selected—Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX—Gerstenmaier says he picked the CST-100 because it scored highest in “level of effectiveness” and “confidence” on its technical approach. “The Boeing [vehicle] is clearly what we would see in more of a traditional program, the kind of layout and the structure and the way things flow,” he tells Aviation Week.   The company passed the first of its 19 CCiCap milestones—integrated systems review (ISR)—at a three-day meeting in August. Covering the seven-seat capsule, Atlas V and mission operations on the ground and in space, the review closed some issues left open at preliminary design review (PDR) during the second round of NASA's Commercial Crew Development effort that preceded CCiCap.   “We still had some open trades that we had to go work,” says John Mulholland, Boeing vice president and commercial crew program manager. “We had some water landing modes that we were attacking because of its threat on weight, some power-system decisions that we needed to make. We took that time between PDR and the kickoff of CCiCap to go pound those issues flat, so when we got into CCiCap we could really go full force on final design release.”   Also included in the first milestone were the results of abort-engine hot-fire tests, wind-tunnel tests, parachute drops and tests of the air-bag system designed to cushion the capsule's nominal touchdown on dry land. With the ISR milestone complete, Mulholland says, the outer mold line of the capsule is frozen, and the program is on track to deliver its first flight-design hardware—the one-piece lower section of the capsule's aluminum pressure vessel—in “less than 20 months.” Boeing has rented the former space shuttle orbiter processing facility at Kennedy Space Center as the assembly facility for the CST-100. First flight is scheduled by the end of 2016, and the company is looking for ways to advance that, Mulholland says.   As for the finding that the Boeing home office has not committed sufficient resources to the CST-100, Mulholland argues that “conservative” corporate accounting obscures the in-kind role played by engineers from other Boeing units, including commercial aircraft and those building military fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft.   “Across the company, our business is delivering transportation platforms,” he says. “We bring a rigorous and robust process, because our company is not going to let these programs fail. One of the things that we always focus on is the old approach of 'test like you fly, and fly like you test,' so when we lay out a design and development program, it will look the same across all the portfolios.”   While proprietary financial information is redacted from the published versions of NASA's source-selection documents, Mulholland says his program's business case continues to close with the two flights per year to the ISS that NASA anticipated. Like other commercial-crew contenders, Boeing is also looking to stoke new markets in space tourism and alternate destinations such as the inflatable space habitats under development by Bigelow Aerospace.   “We'll close on two NASA flights alone, but we are also in a position of trying to make sure that we're doing everything we can to help the market emerge,” Mulholland says.   NASA, Russia eye yearlong space station assignments   Irene Klotz - Reuters   NASA is considering doubling the amount of time an astronaut spends at the International Space Station to a year, laying the groundwork for future missions deeper into space, officials said Thursday.   If approved, a mission likely would begin in 2015, said NASA spokesman Rob Navias.   Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported this week that the experimental yearlong endurance mission would include a Russian cosmonaut and a NASA astronaut.   "If the mission proves to be effective, we will discuss sending yearlong missions ... on a permanent basis," Alexei Krasnov, head of human spaceflight with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said in the RIA Novostia report.   Navias said an agreement had not yet been signed.   "NASA has been exploring the idea of a one-year increment on the space station," Navias said. "That would be a natural progression as part of preparations for missions beyond low-Earth orbit." The agency had previously planned missions at no more than six months.   Medical and biological studies are key areas of research aboard the station, a $100 billion, permanently staffed laboratory a partnership of 15 countries, that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.   Doctors are particularly concerned about the effect of long stays in the weightless environment of space has on bone loss, vision changes and impacts to an astronaut's cardiovascular system.   Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest spaceflight, a 438-day mission aboard Russia's Mir space station in 1994 and 1995.   "Only four people - all Russians - have ever spent a year or more in orbit," Navias said. "Getting contemporary data with modern equipment would be helpful."   The longest flight by an American is a 215-day mission by astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria aboard the International Space Station in 2006-2007.   "I think a year is do-able," Lopez-Alegria told Reuters. "The countermeasures, particularly for bone-density loss, are so much better now."   Lopez-Alegria said it's not being in space that takes its toll on the body, it's coming back.   "You don't really notice it until you come back and begin recovery. Then you decide whether you've pushed it too far or not," he said.   Yearlong flights also could open seats on Russian Soyuz capsules, now the only vehicles flying people to the space station, for paying tourists or researchers.   The U.S. firm Space Adventures, which has brokered trips to the space station for seven people so far, plans an announcement next week in Russia with opera singer Sarah Brightman, a space enthusiast who already has booked a ride on Virgin Galactic's planned suborbital SpaceShipTwo vehicle.   The company, an offshoot of Richard Branson's Virgin Group, is selling tickets for $200,000. Commercial service is expected to begin in late 2013 or 2014.   Since the United States retired its fleet of space shuttles, Soyuz capsules have been fully booked ferrying crews to and from the space station. The last paying passenger to visit the orbital outpost was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, who flew in October 2009.   No astronauts were ‘bumped’ in the making of this space tourist   Fox News   The seats cost $51 million -- and we’re keeping them.   An ABC News report by producer Gina Sunseri claimed opera singer Sarah Brightman outbid NASA for a seat aboard a Soyuz rocket -- and an astronaut was consequently bumped from the rocket ride.   Nonsense, the space agency said.   “Crews for International Space Station expeditions have been assigned through 2013,” NASA spokesman Joshua Buck told FoxNews.com. “None of those astronauts has been 'booted' from his or her respective mission.”   Brightman was widely reported to be the next customer of Space Adventures, which first started flying tourists into space on Soyuz rockets in 2001. The company’s first traveler, American investor Dennis Tito, flew in 2001 and paid just $20 million. The most recent space case was Canadian circus-founder Guy Laliberte, who paid $35 million in 2009, according to Space.com.   ABC News said Brightman would be next, paying an unnamed astronomical sum that was north of the $51 million NASA pays for its seats. Consequently, NASA wouldn’t get one, the news agency said.   “If you want to fly in space, seats are harder to find than a flight out of Chicago's O'Hare airport during a blizzard. So your only option is to bump an astronaut from a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft going to the International Space Station,” Sunseri wrote.   Clever, but not quite.   “Crews have been assigned through 2013. All of them will be flying during their assigned increment,” Buck said.   Space Adventures did not immediately return calls seeking clarification.   Japan mini-satellite to flash code from space   Miwa Suzuki – Agence France Presse   A palm-sized Japanese satellite in orbit around Earth will flash a Morse code message that will be visible around the world from next month, the mission commander said on Friday.   Researchers hope the satellite, measuring 10 centimetres (four inches) cubed and launched from the International Space Station on Friday, will become the first orbiter to transmit an LED message across the night sky.   The message was originally intended to be seen just in Japan, but people around the world have asked for the satellite to communicate when it overflies them, said Takushi Tanaka, professor at The Fukuoka Institute of Technology.   "Requests came from far more people than I expected -- a man in Silicon Valley wanted to see it while another man wanted us to flash it over Central Park in New York," Tanaka told AFP by telephone.   He said he has also received requests from residents of cities in Italy, Germany, Brazil, Britain and Hungary.   "There is no practical aim to this, but it is a fun experiment that everybody can join," he said.   Observers, ideally with binoculars, will be able to see flashes of light -- green in the northern hemisphere, where people will see the "front" of the satellite, and red in the southern hemisphere, where the "back" will be visible.   Morse code uses a series of dots and dashes to represent letters of the alphabet and is commonly understood across the world as a way of transmitting pieces of text.   "A man in Slovakia who has laser beam said he would flash back if he sees the message from space. He wants the satellite to take pictures of his beam and send them to Earth," Tanaka said.   The professor said his team would try their best to accommodate requests but warned being able to see the Morse code message would be largely dependent on the weather.   The message it will send is "Hi this is Niwaka Japan". Niwaka is the satellite's nickname and reflects a play on words in the local dialect of southwestern Japan.   Besides transmitting its LED message, the camera-equipped satellite will also take images of Earth and send them to a base station in an experiment on high-speed data transmissions.   The solar-powered device was released from the International Space Station 390 kilometres (242 miles) above Earth and is now in a regular orbit.   Specific timings and locations will be announced later on the institute's website -- http://www.fit.ac.jp/kenkyu/fitsat1/ -- in Japanese and English.   Elon Musk on SpaceX, Tesla, and Why Space Solar Power Must Die   Kathryn Doyle - Popular Mechanics   "We need to be a multiplanetary species,"—that’s the ambitious way Elon Musk begins his talks. And it’s the kind of attitude that won Musk the 2012 PM Breakthrough Leadership Award. Today he came by PM’s home base to talk about his twin ventures, SpaceX and Tesla Motors.   In May, his company SpaceX successfully launched a 227-foot tall rocket from Cape Canaveral and berthed its Dragon capsule with the International Space Station.   Testing beforehand was extensive. "Something terrible could happen to the Space Station, people inside could be hurt, so we ran a million simulations, so did NASA." In the end the historic docking went off with only a small hitch. The onboard computer wasn’t sure the lock was secure, so Musk and the SpaceX team on the ground ran diagnostics and fixed the glitch.   How would the Dragon capsules translate to manned space flight? "It’s an autonomous vehicle," Musk says. "It pauses at intervals to ask permission to continue, but it’s doing everything itself." If the Dragon were adapted to carry astronauts, little would need to change, other than the increased payload and an added emergency escape system with higher safety margins.   He’s also planned upgrades to the landing system. Version 1, which is on the Dragon capsules now, uses parachutes to achieve a water landing. Version 1.5, which he hopes to achieve by next year, would use parachutes to bring down the Dragon for a soft touchdown on land. Version 2 will use the escape thrusters to decelerate towards the earth, like a moon landing.   While SpaceX gets plenty of publicity for its attempt to take over the mission of carrying NASA astronauts, Musk was quick to emphasize the company’s business beyond those governments contracts. Of the 46 missions SpaceX has contracted, only 12 are for NASA. The rest are commercial. "I don’t think people realize that," Musk says.   However, he says, SpaceX isn’t just in it to make money on those contracts. Ultimately, Musk envisions a self-sustaining civilization on Mars—thus his remark about becoming an interplanetary species. That way, in case the worst happens and Earth is obliterated or used up, "the light of consciousness is not extinguished." But his vision requires tens of thousands or even millions of people on the red planet. "We’d need really big rockets launching a lot," he says   Musk’s other big current venture, Tesla Motors, isn’t quite making money yet. But Musk said today that its newest vehicle, the Model S sedan, will be making money within a month or so. PM already awarded the first model of Tesla, the Roadster, a Breakthrough award. Musk brought a Model S sedan and one of the new Model X SUV prototypes to the awards today.   Why did he start Tesla? "People were operating under the illusion that an electric car needs to be aesthetically challenged, low performance, low range, but these things don’t have to be true," Musk says. When people still didn’t believe him, he went ahead and did it himself. "So we decided to just make a car—that’s harder to ignore."   Musk’s newest innovation on the car front is the supercharger—he wants to build a nationwide network of ultra-fast chargers. The supercharger is free when you buy a Model S. "You can charge your car with the same level of convenience as putting gas in it. Charge for an hour, drive for 6 hours," he says. "The tagline is: Drive anywhere for free on pure sunlight forever."   One thing we learned today: While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there’s one thing he hates: space solar power. "You’d have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What’s the conversion rate?" he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. "Stab that bloody thing in the heart!"   He doesn’t react well to bad ideas. Hey, everyone’s got a pet peeve.   Upgraded Canadarm could be vital for future exploration   Stephen Clark – SpaceflightNow.com   A next-generation robotic arm with finer dexterity and lighter materials will be required for planned exploration missions to deep space, asteroids and Mars, according to Canadian officials who unveiled new robotics concepts last week.   Made of lightweight composite materials, the next-generation Canadarm will be able to fit inside a minivan, according to Canadian space officials.   The Canadian Space Agency showed off prototypes of future robotic arms Sept. 27. The concepts were developed over three years with $53 million in funding from a 2009 economic stimulus package passed by the Canadian government.   MDA Corp. built a 49-foot prototype telescoping arm for use in human spaceflight and a smaller 8.4-foot arm with the ability to refuel satellites and repair components in space.   The large, telescoping arm can be stowed to fit on commercial spaceships and NASA's Orion crew capsule, according to Gilles Leclerc, the Canadian Space Agency's director-general for space exploration.   According to Leclerc, the arm could be used to assemble habitats in deep space or help astronauts exploring destinations such as asteroids.   The smaller arm would build on technology on Canada's Dextre robot, a two-armed device used to install experiments, work on electronics, and demonstrate satellite refueling procedures outside the International Space Station.   NASA and CSA have not agreed on what role Canadian robotics will have on future exploration missions, but top officials in both agencies have discussed collaboration, Leclerc said in an interview with Spaceflight Now.   "Regardless of future space destinations, space robotics will be required for a variety of missions, from rovers that act as robotic planetary explorers to robots that will repair and refuel satellites and space telescopes," Leclerc said. "No matter the mission, Canada will be ready."   Canada provided robot arms - or Canadarms - to fly on the space shuttle, and a 58-foot manipulator named Canadarm 2 is on the space station with the Dextre robot.   "Like all Canadians, I am proud of the iconic Canadarm, that served the space shuttle program for three decades, as well as the next-generation Canadarm, which will further Canada's legacy of excellence in space robotics," said Gary Goodyear, Canada's minister of state for science and technology.   The Canadian government also earmarked 2009 stimulus funds to develop rover technology to be used on the moon and Mars, according to Leclerc.   Endeavour: Limited public access as shuttle moves through L.A.   Los Angeles Times   A week before space shuttle Endeavour begins its 12-mile crawl through Los Angeles, officials said the public will have limited access during the two-day trek to the California Science Center in Exposition Park.   They said access would be limited for safety reasons. The shuttle has been sitting in a hangar at Los Angeles International Airport since Sept. 21, when it arrived on the back of a modified Boeing 747.   Now positioned on specialized, computerized transporters, Endeavour is scheduled to roll out of the United Airlines hangar at midnight Friday and begin creeping toward its permanent home at the science center.   Although the shuttle embarked on an elaborate aerial tour of the southern United States, California and Los Angeles en route to LAX, officials said they are trying to keep the last leg of Endeavour's journey much more low-key.   Unlike L.A.'s other parades—such as the Kings' celebration through downtown Los Angeles this summer — the sheer size of the 78-foot-wide, 170,000 pound shuttle causes concern. Streets and sidewalks will be closed about a mile ahead of the shuttle as it lumbers along the route.   "For the safety of the public, we can't have them in a certain area of the wingspan just in case something does happen," Lopez said. "That is the big difference. For parades that we publicize, we set up for sidewalk viewing. In this case, we just cannot accommodate that."   Details of the route are still being worked out, but Los Angeles police Sgt. Rudy Lopez said Endeavour should leave airport property and hit Westchester Boulevard about 2 a.m. Friday. From there, the shuttle will roll toward Sepulveda Boulevard, where it will sit in a parking lot for about nine hours beginning at 4 a.m. as crews de-energize and raise transformer lines ahead on the route. By 2 p.m. Friday, the shuttle will depart down Manchester Boulevard toward the City of Inglewood. LAPD will hand security over to Inglewood police when Endeavour crosses city limits about 4:15 p.m, Lopez said.   The shuttle will make another six-hour stop in Inglewood as crews work on another transformer and should cross the 405 Freeway Friday night.   The orbiter will pass Inglewood City Hall about 8 a.m. Saturday, Lopez said. Inglewood officials said that although Endeavour will not stop at City Hall as originally planned — the public celebration has instead been moved to the Forum — those hoping to see the shuttle could anticipate ample parking and plenty of space at City Hall.   An hour later, Endeavour will make a 30-minute stop at the Forum, where crowds of 10,000 to 14,000 people are anticipated. Officials said more details about the stop would be revealed in the coming days.   Endeavour will cross back into Los Angeles city limits about 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Lopez said, and at about 2 p.m. will stop at the intersection of Crenshaw and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards for another planned public viewing. Actress and choreographer Debbie Allen organized an event for the intersection, but Lopez said there would be room for only about 1,500 spectators.   The best chance to get a view of Endeavour outside of the Forum, Lopez said, would be as it arrived at the California Science Center. The shuttle is expected to complete the move and reach its Exposition Park home on Saturday night.   South L.A. shuttle boosters are feeling jettisoned Residents' excitement turns to anger as officials clamp down on security and significantly reduce public access to the route Endeavour will take from LAX to the California Science Center   Angel Jennings & Kate Mather - Los Angeles Times   Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa touted it as "the mother of all parades" — a historic celebration in a part of Los Angeles that doesn't get much fanfare.   Over two days, on the major thoroughfares of Westchester, Inglewood and South Los Angeles, space shuttle Endeavour would slowly make its way from LAX to its new home at the California Science Center. Community activists planned events, residents said they would line the streets and local businesses organized viewing parties.   But that excitement has turned to anger as officials clamped down on security and significantly reduced public access to the shuttle route. The Los Angeles Police Department announced this week it would close off most sidewalks along the way, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the public to see the shuttle go by.   Though big crowds are still expected, the celebration is being drastically scaled back.   "If it was up to the people moving the Endeavour, they would have the streets absolutely empty," LAPD Lt. Andy Neiman said. "Because of the safety and security and just logistically, it would be much easier to move this without having to worry about crowd movement, crowd management."   Instead, the cities are urging residents to attend two shuttle "celebrations" that are taking place along the route. One event at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood can accommodate up to 14,000 spectators, a fraction of the number of people expected to come out to see the shuttle.   Another, near Baldwin Hills Crenshaw shopping mall, includes a performance choreographed by actor-dancer Debbie Allen. But because the venue can hold a maximum of 3,000 people, organizers are already cutting back on publicity for the event because of fears of overcrowding.   Some South L.A. residents feel double-crossed. To make way for the shuttle, hundreds of old-growth trees were cut down, some more than 60 years old, radically changing the look of some streets. Residents are also going to have to deal with serious traffic delays during the move, which is set for Oct. 12 and 13, as major streets such as Manchester, Crenshaw and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards are periodically shut down.   "It's disgusting that they won't allow the kids to line up along the street and they are cutting down 400 trees," said James Fugate, president of the Leimert Park Merchant Assn. and co-owner of Esowon Bookstore. "They have no respect for the neighborhood they are going through."   That sentiment was shared by others at the bookstore, including Torrence Brannon-Reese, a Leimert Park resident.   "They already put it out there that it is going to be a parade and then they retracted that. Why?" he asked.   Interest in the shuttle has heightened since last month's flyover of California and other states. Just last year, thousands came out when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art moved a giant boulder from the Inland Empire to the Wilshire Boulevard museum, stopping in communities along the way. Many more viewers are expected for the shuttle.   Officials have been trying to reduce expectations for the parade for several weeks.   The shuttle poses many more logistical and safety challenges than the LACMA rock. Los Angeles Police Sgt. Rudy Lopez said the massive spacecraft, which measures 78 feet wide and weighs 170,000 pounds, needs the entire width of the roadways to squeeze through. At some places along the route, the shuttle will be right at the curb, leaving little room for spectators. The shuttle's route requires numerous turns, raising concerns that people on the streets could be hurt with even a minor miscalculation.   There are also worries about the shuttle sustaining damage during the move.   The sidewalks and streets will be closed about a mile ahead of and behind Endeavour as it crawls along the 12-mile route at no more than 2 mph to its new home in Exposition Park.   Residents will be able to watch from their private lawns, inside businesses and along side streets, but it will by no means be a conventional parade. Much of the move, including the beginning, will take place overnight.   And police will be out enforcing the rules. LAPD officials said officers on motorcycles and bicycles would accompany the shuttle and barricade public sidewalks, and helicopters would hover overhead.   "We don't want to tell people to stay away," Neiman said. "But what we want to do is encourage them to go to one of these viewing areas or wait until the shuttle is at the Science Center."   Science Center President Jeffrey Rudolph said Thursday that he expects big crowds despite the restrictions.   "I don't think you can possibly tell people, 'Don't come see it,'" he said. "Well, you could, but it's not going to work."   Bringing the behemoth to the city has been a disruption for the residents in the working-class communities. Not only did they lose their trees, but some local businesses will be inconvenienced.   "They are closing streets on the busiest day of the week," Fugate said. "To shut down access to businesses for any period of time will affect business. And they are cutting down our trees!"   Officials promised to replant twice as many trees as were removed — and, in some cases, four times as many. But to some residents, the biggest consolation for all the inconvenience was to host what the mayor and others billed as a two-day parade.   "They are the only ones not calling it a parade," said Johnnie Raines, 66, a South L.A. resident. "It's been described as a parade from the beginning. The people are going to determine what it is. You can't write a rule down and say it's not a parade."   JFK to NASA in 1962: "I'm not that interested in space"   Lee Roop - Huntsville Times   President John F. Kennedy's challenge for America to be first on the moon is the stuff of American and NASA legend, but a new release of secret recordings Kennedy made in the Oval Office makes clear what he thought of the moon race. "I'm not that interested in space," Kennedy tells NASA's boss at one point.   Kennedy was motivated instead by beating the Soviet Union to the moon to prove the superiority of the America system. That much is well-known to historians. But to hear Kennedy's voice in an Oval Office debate with then-NASA Administrator James Webb is still extraordinary. That's even easier now thanks to the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which just released annotated highlights from 260 hours of secret recordings Kennedy made in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. Not even Kennedy's aides knew about the tapes.   Kennedy first made the moon race challenge in a speech to Congress in 1961. In September of 1962, he made a speech at Rice University saying America chose to go to the moon and "do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Only a hard goal, Kennedy said, "will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win ..." That goal of doing "the hard things" is NASA's bedrock identity, the agency reaffirmed last month on the 50th anniversary of the speech.   Two months later in November of 1962, Kennedy met with Webb and others in the Oval Office. On the agenda: getting NASA's priorities straight. Webb was a big-picture science guy who wanted to learn more about space. Kennedy had other ideas.   "Do you think this program is the top priority of the agency?" Kennedy asks Webb on the tape.   "No sir, I do not," Webb replies. "I think it is one of the top priorities." Webb tells the president scientists are getting excited about "what you could do with the rocket" NASA is developing.   "I think it is the top priority," Kennedy replies. "Some of these other programs can slip six months and nothing's going to happen. This is important for political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, a race."   Webb continues to argue for a more research-based space program, saying research will lead to better rockets and a safe lunar landing.   Kennedy says the administration "ought to be clear. Because otherwise, we wouldn't be spending this kind of money, because I'm not that interested in space," Kennedy replies. "I think it's good. I think we ought to know about it; we're ready to spend reasonable amounts of money"   Kennedy says the government has "wrecked our budget and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this pell-mell fashion, is to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God we passed them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us."   Webb's persistence in pushing space science perhaps suggests why NASA has named its next great space telescope after him. Webb tried hard to change Kennedy's mind, pointing out the political risk of gambling the prestige of his administration and the entire country on a landing that might not work.   Kennedy installed the secret recording system in both the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room in July of 1962. The decision was "an effort to preserve an accurate record of Presidential decision-making in a highly charged atmosphere of conflicting viewpoints, strategies and tactics, " the Kennedy library says. The new CD collection and accompanying book is called "Listening In," and it is available from the library for $40.   He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother   Harvey Rosenfield - Huffington Post (Opinion)   Loss. That's what I felt when I watched the space shuttle land at LAX, carried to our City of Angels on the back of a close relative, the mighty Boeing 747 -- 12 years older than the shuttle and, though aging, nearly as inspiring when you happen to see one. I recalled where I was when Challenger exploded -- studying in a library for the California bar exam -- and when Columbia burned up on re-entry -- at a cottage in Idyllwild with my family. But I'm talking about a different kind of loss.   When I was a kid, growing up in the Sixties, America seemed to be the land of limitless possibilities. President Kennedy launched the space program in 1961, promising we would reach the Moon by the end of the decade and though incredible, no one doubted the USA would do it. In the more distant future described by Gene Roddenberry, a "replicator" would eliminate want of food or material possessions and humans would be freed to explore any part of the universe they chose.   Sure, there were serious problems right here on Earth, and in this country, but the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement and a bipartisan roster of widely respected -- even revered -- public officials seemed determined to get these matters in hand. We were working on them, and nothing seemed intractable. The cynical snicker about the Sixties now. But such was the energy and enthusiasm of the economic prosperity of post World War II United States, an era that is already gauzy like our refracted impressions of ancient Rome.   Just after three in the afternoon on July 20, 1969, my friends and I gathered around the clunky RCA television in our den, understanding that the rest of the planet was doing the same. I was seventeen. Like all kids who grew up in the era before cable TV, video games and the Internet, we had spent many late nights outdoors contemplating the Moon, which seemed to us as distant as adulthood. Now we could barely discern the astronauts in the grainy black and white images as they walked on the lunar surface, but there was no mistaking the achievement of that day. And though it was America's achievement, the whole world celebrated.   A few days from now, shuttle Endeavor will be drawn through the streets of Los Angeles -- like a funeral caisson for a fallen soldier -- by a magnificent technological beast. That journey, at 2 mph, will end at a museum 24 hours later. There it will rest much like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, monuments to human will and imagination left to puzzle future generations. No ambitious program to explore the universe will succeed the shuttle.   That's because there's no money left to pay for our aspirations. The last decade began with a speculation-induced economic recession in 2001. In California, once the home of aerospace, the collapse of the tech-bubble was compounded by the disastrous results of the deregulation of electricity by local lawmakers, which included a bailout for over-priced nuclear power plants that cost consumer ratepayers $28 billion. Then Enron and other Wall Street firms that bought the power plants covertly manipulated the supply of electricity to jack up prices, bankrupting utility companies and forcing the state to buy long term contracts for electricity from the manipulators -- at the grossly inflated prices -- to keep the lights on and businesses going. The deregulation debacle cost California $71 billion -- and the local economy has never been the same.   Many Americans had not recovered from the 2001 recession when the Wall Street derivatives frenzy collapsed in the Fall of 2008. Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. With incomes disappearing, Americans stopped spending. That hurt businesses, especially small businesses that could not borrow. And tax revenues declined. To pay Social Security and jobless benefits, and restart the economy, the federal government spent more than it took in in recent years.   This ignited the raging political debate over the federal government's stimulus and deficit spending, though few Americans can claim to have been bailed out the way Wall Street was. After taxpayer cash infusions, subsidies, tax breaks and other favors estimated at between $9.7 trillion and $29 trillion, the Money Industry has emerged not merely intact but more profitable than ever.   Add $1.3 trillion for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and you can see why there won't be a manned mission to Mars anytime soon, much less hyperdrive tours of the galaxy.   Our country paid a heavy price to save Wall Street. Consider that the cost of the getting to the Moon in today's dollars would be about $26 billion less than taxpayers spent bailing out the insurance giant AIG -- about $182 billion. And the Moon program was a massive stimulus program for America in the Sixties, and not just the defense industry. Its benefits included the research and development of a raft of technologies that led to enormous advance in computer, medicine and other industries -- not to mention Velcro. Steve Jobs and his colleagues in Silicon Valley didn't build the modern personal computer industry by themselves: you, the American taxpayer, helped.   Measuring the cost of government assistance to Wall Street versus to business innovators versus to Americans in need compartmentalizes the debate. What does it say about the country -- and its future -- that the average life expectancy of white Americans who did not graduate high school has dropped by four years, to where it was in the 1950s to Sixties?   Yet a majority of Americans -- 54% -- believe that the government should do less to solve our country's problems... though there is a sharp partisan divide on the question, with 82% of Republicans saying less and 67% of Democrats saying more, according to Gallup.   There will be Americans in space in the near future, however. Using the technology and facilities taxpayers built, a number of private companies are developing plans to commercialize orbital space flight, the New York Times reports. And every American who wants to hitch a ride can do so -- for somewhere between $50 million and $150 million a ticket, depending on your destination.   As the 747 and the shuttle swung low over Los Angeles, one of my favorite oldies from the Sixties came to mind:   The road is long, with many a winding turn, That leads us to who knows where, who knows where. So on we go. His welfare is of my concern. No burden is he to bear -- we'll get there. For I know: he would not encumber me. He ain't heavy: he's my brother.   I thought back to that humid afternoon in July, 1969, when Kennedy's charge was fulfilled by Apollo 11. JFK was gone; along with his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, struck down by hate, fear, madness. At the time, they seemed to us pioneers in the still young and uncertain cause of Democracy, and had given their lives to better their fellow Americans and the Nation. The sense of purpose, destiny, determination and sacrifice -- shared by the nation -- was inspiring. At least to a young guy from a Boston suburb.   MEANWHILE ON MARS…   Curiosity pauses to test soil scoop, sample delivery system   William Harwood – CBS News   After creeping about five football fields across the rocky floor of Gale Crater on the way to an intriguing intersection of different terrain types, the Mars Curiosity rover is pausing for a few weeks near fine-grained sand dunes to scoop up soil and run it through the vehicle's sample acquisition system to clean out any lingering traces of Earth's environment.   After three such "rinse and repeat" cycles, a scoop on the end of the rover's robot arm will deposit small samples into a pair of sophisticated laboratory instruments, the Chemistry and Mineralogy experiment, or CheMin, and the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, known as SAM. CheMin will use X-ray diffraction to identify the minerals in a sample while SAM will employ two spectrometers and a gas chromatograph to look for signs of organic compounds.   But first, all traces of Earth's environment must be cleaned away to eliminate any chance of contaminating a Mars sample.   "Even though we make this hardware super squeaky clean when it's delivered and assembled at the Jet Propulsion (Laboratory) ...  by virtue of its just being on Earth you get a kind of residual oily film that is impossible to avoid," said Daniel Limonadi, a sampling system engineer at JPL. "And the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument is so sensitive we really have to scrub away this layer of oils that accumulates on Earth."   Curiosity has rolled about 1,600 feet since landing Aug. 6, heading toward an area known as Glenelg, where orbital photographs show three different types of terrain converging. Along the way, engineers have been testing and calibrating the rover's instruments and subsystems, snapping pictures and collecting data.   Among the last items to be tested are a scoop on the end of the rover's robot arm and an impact drill. Both devices are designed to deliver soil samples to inlets on the top of the rover's body leading to the SAM and CheMin instruments.   Engineers have been looking for fine-grained sand to test the scoop system and to clean out its internal components. And they found what they were looking for in a site dubbed Rocknest, a football field shy of Glenelg. Rocknest measures about eight feet by 16 feet and features dune-like deposits of sand as well as a variety of exposed rocks.   "What we're doing at the site is we take the sand sample, this fine-grained material and we effectively use it to rinse our mouth three times and then kind of spit out," Limonadi said. "We will take a scoop, we will vibrate that sand on all the different surfaces to effectively sand-blast those surfaces, then we dump that material out and we rinse and repeat three times to finish cleaning everything out. ... Our Earth-based testing has found that to be super effective at cleaning."   The first scoop will be collected Saturday and if all goes well,the cleaning process will be finished in the next week and a half with part of the third sample being delivered to the CheMin instrument. A fourth sample then will be shared by both CheMin and SAM.   With the scoop tests complete, Curiosity will continue on to Glenelg where its impact drill will be put to the test for the first time, probably sometime in November. While the scoop can collect soil samples from the surface, the drill will produce debris from the interior of targeted rocks, using the same delivery system employed by the scoop to reach the laboratory instruments.   "Getting these samples is kind of the keystone of the rover mission," said Mike Watkins, a mission manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We're being deliberately, incredibly careful. So not just taking (samples) but every time we take one, stop, open it up, take a look at it, make a video of us dropping it off. We're taking a lot of extra steps here to make sure we understand exactly what's going on, that we won't have to do every time we do a scoop in the future."   Mars Curiosity about to really shake things up   Seth Borenstein - Associated Press   Mars Curiosity is about to take its first sip of the red planet's sand. But only after NASA's rover plays bartender to make sure the dry dust is shaken, not stirred.   The rover's scoop will dig into the sand Saturday. Then the action starts. The end of the rover's 220-pound arm will shake "at a nice tooth-rattling vibration level" for eight hours, like a Martian martini mixer gone mad, said mission sampling chief Daniel Limonadi said.   "It kind of looks and feels like if you open the hood of your car with the engine running," Limonadi said, making engine noises in a Thursday NASA telephone press conference.   That heavy shaking will vibrate the fine dust grains through the rover chemical testing system to cleanse it of unwanted residual Earth grease. That's important for the sensitive scientific instruments that are the keystone to the $2.5 billion mission that launched last year.   The rover landed in August and has traveled three-tenths of a mile, taking pictures and analyzing the Martian air.   For the next week or two, Curiosity will scoop, shake and dump sand out three times, like a robotic version of cleaning its mouth out with mouthwash, Limonadi said. The fourth time, the rover will slowly pour "a half a baby aspirin pill of material" into the mobile lab to start a complex chemical analysis, he said.   There's nothing that seems special about the sand that will be tested and that's why NASA picked it out. It's good to start with "boring safe Martian sand dune," Limonadi said.   The car-sized rover has a complex chemical lab, a scoop and a drill to look for the basic ingredients of life, including carbon-based compounds, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and oxygen. This will be the first time the chemistry lab will be used. In about a month, after going to a newer more interesting location, the rover will start drilling into the ground for samples.   Curiosity Rover to Scoop Up 1st Mars Samples This Weekend   Mike Wall - Space.com   NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will scoop up its first batch of Martian soil samples this weekend, scientists announced Thursday.   The 1-ton Curiosity rover arrived at a sandy patch called "Rocknest" on Wednesday. Mission scientists have deemed it a good spot for the robot's maiden scooping activities, which should begin Saturday, if all goes according to plan.   Curiosity's scoop system, which sits at the end of its 7-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, is designed to deliver samples into two analytical instruments on the rover's body — SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy). But Martian sand from the first few scoops won't make it that far; rather, it'll be used to clean out the handling system, researchers said.   "We want to be sure the first sample we analyze is unambiguously Martian, so we take these steps to remove any residual material from Earth that might be on the walls of our sample handling system," Curiosity sampling system scientist Joel Hurowitz, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.   The cleaning method is basically sandblasting, with Curiosity vibrating the sampling system vigorously for several hours. [See Curiosity's Mars Sample Scoop in Action (Video)]   "We effectively use [the sand] to rinse our mouth, right, three times, and then kind of spit up," JPL's Daniel Limonadi, Curiosity surface sampling phase lead, told reporters.   SAM and CheMin are the core science instruments aboard Curiosity, and are crucial to its quest to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. The rover team therefore wants to make sure that the sampling system feeding the two instruments is working properly, so they plan to take their time testing things out.   Indeed, Curiosity will likely remain at Rocknest for the next two to three weeks, with the first bits of soil only dropping into SAM and CheMin for analysis toward the end of that stretch, team members said.   "This is the most complicated thing. It's an EDL-like challenge, you know, to get these samples through the system," said Curiosity mission manager Mike Watkins of JPL, referring to the rover's harrowing entry, descent and landing inside Mars' Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5.   "Bear with us as we go through the next couple of weeks here," he added   Curiosity is on its way to a site called Glenelg, where three different types of Martian terrain come together. Glenelg lies about 330 feet (100 m) east of Rocknest, researchers said, and Curiosity will hit the road again when its scooping trial is done.   Once at Glenelg, the rover team will likely begin looking for suitable rocks to test out Curiosity's drill for the first time. The drill check-out will be complicated as well, taking at least as long as the rover's first scooping activity, Watkins said.   While Curiosity is rumbling toward Glenelg, the rover's main science target is the base of Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) high from Gale Crater's center. The mountain's foothills show signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water.   Mount Sharp's interesting mineral deposits lie about 6 miles (10 km) away from Curiosity's landing site. The rover could be ready to begin the long trek by the end of the year, scientists have said.   Curiosity is nearly two months into a planned two-year mission on the surface of Mars. It has put 1,588 feet (484 m) on its odometer to date, researchers said.   Why a clean Mars rover is a happy Mars rover   Pete Spotts - Christian Science Monitor   Two months and a just over half a mile into its mission, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is taking time out for tests of key tools for sampling the Martian soil – and, it turns out, for some badly needed scrubbing.   Over the next two to three weeks, engineers will direct Curiosity to scoop sand from a stone-dotted mini-dune the team has dubbed Rocknest and to run it through sample-processing hardware dubbed CHIMRA.   It's a cleaning approach akin to a camper scouring the last meal's cookware with sand. After the scrubbing, NASA controllers plan to test CHIMRA's ability to feed samples collected by the scoop, and later Curiosity's drill, into two key instrument packages inside the rover’s chassis.   The clean-out is in preparation for the rover's main mission: analyzing rocks and soils to see if Gale Crater and its central summit, Mt. Sharp, once hosted an environment that could have supported life.   Curiosity's science team already has started to build a strong case for the presence of significant quantities of water flowing – at least periodically – through the crater billions of years ago. Water is a key ingredient for organic life.   Images released last week of rock outcroppings showed clear evidence they were formed from solidified silt and water-tumbled stones. The team's consensus interpretation: The feature represents the remains of a stream bed, perhaps uplifted and exposed by a small meteor that could have struck the spot.   The outcroppings appeared to be associated with the leading edge of a broad fan of sediment that on Earth forms as water carries soil and rock down mountainsides to lower elevations, where it spreads in what geologists call alluvial fans. In this case, the fan would have built as water flowed down now-eroded hills that form part of Gale Crater's rim.   After capturing such suggestive images, cleaning and more testing may seem a bit mundane. But it's necessary, says Daniel Limonadi, the lead systems engineer for the rover's sampling and science systems.   "Even though we make this hardware super-squeaky clean, just by virtue of being on Earth you get this residual, oily film that is impossible to avoid," he says.   It's also impossible for the rover's internal chemistry labs to avoid picking up on that residue in any samples CHIMRA delivers – contaminating the results. "So we're taking the sand samples and effectively using it to rinse out mouths three times and then kind of spit out."   The approach has all the subtlety of maracas. Once the scoop – a bit larger than a tablespoon – lifts the sand into CHIMRA, the device will vibrate by design to make sure the abrasive hits all the device's nooks and crannies. In normal operations, the strong vibrations are designed to move samples through sieves – with a final sample for analysis containing a tiny fraction of its original material.   The cleaning itself is expected to take about a week and a half, and when it's over, the scoop will deliver a fourth sample to the rover's internal instruments. One device, called CheMin, uses X-rays to analyze the mineral content of samples, while another, called SAM, uses ovens and solvents to analyze the detailed chemical make-up of the rock, including the presence of compounds containing carbon, one of the key chemical building blocks of life.   But Curiosity's longer stay at Rocknest speaks to the importance the science and engineering teams are placing on what mission manager Michael Watkins describes as "keystone" instruments.   "We're being deliberately, incredibly careful," he says. Every time CHIMRA, located on a turret at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm, takes a scoop, the team will be taking videos before, during and after each step of each gargle to ensure "we understand exactly what's going on." The goal is to take the time now to get to know how the instruments, tested on Earth, operate on Mars so these extra steps can be eliminated later in the mission.   "We're being extremely slow and prudent here," Mr. Watkins says.   Once the teams finish up at Rocknest, it's on to Glenelg, a confluence of three intriguing geological formations where the teams expect to use Curiosity's sampling drill for the first time.   END