11/16//12 news

Hi everyone!   Thanks to electrons and photons zipping back and forth across the Pacific Ocean, Larry Moon sent me his current NASA Retiree email distribution list last night (it took a while for us to figure out the Microsoft “feature” to do this).    I’ll be sending these emails daily M-F until he returns back to Houston (Nov 20-ish).   Best, Stacey   ========================================================================   JSC TODAY HEADLINES 1.    Telework Day on Nov. 23 Cancelled 2.    Don't Miss the All Hands With JSC Director Mike Coats This Morning 3.    Get Inside Scoop on Curiosity Landing at Noon in Teague 4.    TODAY: Become a Star in 3, 2 ... and Show Off Your 'NASA Johnson Style' 5.    Women in Aerospace Recognizes Susan H. Anderson 6.    ISS Update: Station Crew Departure Preparations 7.    2012 Toys for Tots Campaign 8.    The Inner Space Yoga and Pilates Studio -- Starport's Soothing Sanctuary 9.    Reduce Before You Recycle 10.  Spring 2013 Internship Deadline Approaching     1.       Telework Day on Nov. 23 Cancelled Phase 2 of the Telework Pilot Program, which would have occurred on Friday, Nov. 23,  has been cancelled because of recent security breaches involving laptops. Given the serious nature of the most recent incident and the frequency of lost laptops, the NASA Administrator has issued immediate direction stating that no unencrypted laptops or data (including data on unencrypted thumb drives) be removed from a NASA facility until whole disk encryption software is enabled or the sensitive files individually encrypted. You will receive further direction from the Information Resources Directorate on how to get your laptop protected for future teleworking options. Whether Phase 3 of the Telework Pilot Program, scheduled from Dec. 26 to 31, will proceed as normal will be determined at a later date by management. Please stay tuned to the Telework Program website for future updates and instructions. And remember: You are not authorized to remove a laptop from site unless it has data at rest (DAR) encryption protection installed and operational. JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 [top] 2.       Don't Miss the All Hands With JSC Director Mike Coats This Morning Get to the Building 2S Teague Auditorium early and save your seat! JSC Director Mike Coats, together with JSC Deputy Director Ellen Ochoa, will hold an all-hands event for JSC team members from 10 to 11 a.m. today, Nov. 16.  Those unable to attend are encouraged to view the broadcast live on RF Channel 2 or Omni Channel 45. JSC team members with wired computer network connections can view using onsite IPTV on General Channel 402.  The event will also be recorded for playback the following Tuesdays, Nov. 20 and 27, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. All JSC team members are invited to attend.  JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 [top] 3.       Get Inside Scoop on Curiosity Landing at Noon in Teague Hang around after the All-Hands to get a behind the scenes account of how a four-center team perfected Curiosity's 'Seven Minutes of Terror' landing.  An Inside Perspective on the "Seven Minutes of Terror will be presented from noon to 1 in the Teague Auditorium.   MSL experts from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Langley Research Center and Ames Research Center are visiting JSC this week for a Technical Interchange Meeting, and some team members will give an informal presentation on this unique mission.  To learn more about MSL and its current activities on Mars, click here.   Members of JPL's Entry/Descent/Landing (EDL) team, including Richard Kornfeld, Miguel San Martin, Devin Kipp and Steven Sell, lead for the MSL "sky crane," will join JSC's Gavin Mendeck for the panel discussion about the landing. The session will be moderated by John Connolly from JSC's Exploration Mission and Systems Office. Questions will also be taken from the audience during the event.   Stick around, because the presentation will be followed by an informal meet-and-greet session with the MSL EDL team in the Teague lobby. JSC's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate will have a Mars meteorite on display and staff available to answer questions about JSC's participation in the MSL JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs X35111 [top] 4.       TODAY: Become a Star in 3, 2 ... and Show Off Your 'NASA Johnson Style' Come be a part of the next co-op hit video! The co-op spoof titled "NASA Johnson Style" is a parody of the hit dance music video Gangnam style. The rewritten lyrics and outrageous video will take education and outreach about JSC's mission to a wider audience. This video is going to be HUGE! Why do we need you? For the last scene of the video, we would like to gather a huge group of diverse individuals to show the world the amazing (and fun) people who make up JSC. We will all be performing the Gangnam style dance from the hit video.  Not a dancer? No worries -- you will receive a brief, five-minute training session upon arrival. The dance is easy and anyone can do it! So, please join us for just 30 minutes in the Teague Auditorium today, Nov. 16, at 1:30 p.m., and help take JSC's publicity to a new level. Bring a friend ... or your whole group. Adam Naids x32547 [top] 5.       Women in Aerospace Recognizes Susan H. Anderson Women in Aerospace, an organization dedicated to expanding women's opportunities for leadership and increasing their visibility in the aerospace community, recognized JSC communicator Susan H. Anderson with the prestigious Aerospace Awareness Award. Anderson received her award at a gala in Washington, D.C., from NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. Read more about what motivates Anderson to share the NASA story with the public and how you, too, can spread awareness about the space agency through your own experiences. Get the scoop on JSC's home page, as well as JSC Features. Or, go straight to the article. Be inspired! JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x33317 [top] 6.       ISS Update: Station Crew Departure Preparations As three Expedition 33 crew members spend their final week aboard the International Space Station preparing for their return to Earth, NASA astronaut Dan Burbank joined ISS Update at the PAO console in the Mission Control Center to explain the process. It's a topic near and dear to Burbank, as he made that same journey April 27 after spending more than five months aboard the orbiting complex as an Expedition 29 flight engineer and commander of Expedition 30. Expedition 33 Commander Suni Williams and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malenchenko are scheduled to undock from the station at 4:26 p.m. CST Sunday  aboard their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft and land in the steppe of Kazakhstan a little over three hours later. However before that happens, they will need to complete packing their gear, readying the vehicle and preparing themselves mentally for the return home.  Watch more about these special preparations for departure. JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 [top] 7.       2012 Toys for Tots Campaign As is our holiday tradition, the JSC Chapter of National Management Association will facilitate the Marine Corps Toys for Tots drive by collecting toys in the two JSC cafés from Dec. 3 to 7. The Logistics team in Building 419 is collecting toys in their lobby as well through Dec. 5. Please consider donating a new, unwrapped toy to this wonderful holiday effort! Vickie Kloeris x33634 [top] 8.       The Inner Space Yoga and Pilates Studio -- Starport's Soothing Sanctuary Memberships are still available to our new soothing sanctuary at the Gilruth Center, The Inner Space. Purchase a membership to The Inner Space for yourself or a friend or family member -- it makes a great Christmas gift! Anyone can purchase a membership to The Inner Space, where we offer many Yoga and Pilates classes, morning and evening. Any level is welcome, from beginner to advanced. Whether you purchase a pass to a single class or a four-, six- or 12-week membership, we have the option that's right for you. Attend as many Yoga and Pilates classes as you like with your membership; there are no restrictions. Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/ [top] 9.       Reduce Before You Recycle JSC has active recycling programs for paper, cardboard, ink and toner cartridges, beverage containers, scrap metal and more. However, our ultimate goal is to reduce the overall impact on our available resources, and our most powerful tool is source reduction. Start printing and photocopying on both sides of paper. Most JSC copiers can be accessed through the network and set up for double-sided printing. Think twice before printing an email or document. Can you make changes on your computer instead? Source reduction is about more than just paper. Bring your own hot/cold drink container to work. If you have a water cooler, use a glass or mug instead of disposable Styrofoam or paper cups. Have a litter-less lunch; bring reusable containers only. Buy bulk milk, sugar, coffee and condiments for your work area. Every effort makes a difference. The possibilities are endless, and the future you save is your own. JSC Environmental Office x36207 http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/ja/ja13/index.cfm [top] 10.   Spring 2013 Internship Deadline Approaching JSC mentors may guarantee placement of undergraduate or graduate interns that meet the internship program eligibility requirements by providing the required funding. Costs vary based on academic classification. The transfer of funds, project request and student application must be completed by the Nov. 30 deadline in order to secure intern placement for the spring 2013 semester. For additional details, please contact Carolyn Snyder or Missy Matthias at x27844. Carolyn Snyder x34719 http://www.cep.usra.edu [top]   ========================================================================   NASA TV (this weekend):   Saturday ·         1:15 pm Central (2:15 EST) – E33/34 Change of Command (Suni Williams to Kevin Ford)   Sunday ·         12:45 pm Central (1:45 EST) – Expedition 33 Farewell/Hatch Closure (closes ~1:10 pm CST) ·         4 pm Central (5 EST) – Soyuz TMA-05M Undocking Coverage (undocks at 4:26 pm CST) ·         6:30 pm Central (7:30 EST) – Soyuz TMA-05M Deorbit Burn & Landing Coverage ·         6:58:58 pm Central (7:58:58 EST) – Deorbit Burn (4 min, 43 sec duration; 288 mph delta V) ·         7:53:30 pm Central (8:53:30 EST) – LANDING northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan ·         9 pm Central (10 EST) – Video File of Soyuz Landing & Crew Post-Landing Activities   Human Spaceflight News Friday – November 16, 2012   HEADLINES AND LEADS   NASA Replacing Two Field Center Directors   Brian Berger - Space News   Astronaut Ellen Ochoa will replace Michael Coats as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston early next year, according to U.S. government and industry sources. NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland will also be getting a new director next year. Glenn’s current director, Ramon Lugo, is stepping down, these sources said. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden announced the changes at a meeting of field center directors Nov. 14. NASA will hold all-hands meetings Nov. 16 at Johnson and Glenn to disclose the changes. Ochoa, a four-flight veteran of the space shuttle program, is currently Johnson’s deputy director. Coats, a former space shuttle commander and Lockheed Martin Space Systems executive, returned to NASA in 2005 to run Johnson. Lugo, a 37-year NASA veteran, served as Glenn’s deputy director from 2007 to 2010. (NO FURTHER TEXT)   NASA, JPL budgets have plenty at stake under 2nd Obama administration   James Figueroa - San Gabriel Valley News (SGVN)   Questions remain about the fiscal future of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory following the re-election of President Barack Obama, and the course of space exploration could depend on what happens in the next few months. NASA's planetary science division, buoyed this year by the popular Curiosity rover, lost about $300 million in Obama's proposed 2013 budget, though a competing House and Senate proposal would restore some money specifically for Mars exploration. NASA may also be planning a manned outpost just beyond the far side of the moon, in an area of space called Earth- moon L2, and was waiting until after the election to announce it, according to a Space.com report. The outpost would serve as a training ground for astronauts to eventually travel to other destinations, such as an asteroid or Mars.   How space shuttles can make chopping vegetables easier   Asian News International (ANI)   A metal used in Space Shuttle fuel pumps may help make vegetable chopping a lot easier. Cronidur 30 is an extremely tough steel alloy developed for use in Space Shuttle fuel pumps. These babies deliver thousands of litres of liquid oxygen and hydrogen - aka rocket fuel - each second to the Shuttle's ravenous main engines. Today, this metal's space-hardy corrosion resistance (100 times better than before) makes it ideal for chopping knives that will neither rust nor dull. (NO FURTHER TEXT)   Shuttle Atlantis wrapped in protective covering   SpaceflightNow.com   http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts135/121115wrap/     The space shuttle Atlantis has been encased in a protective plastic, a wrap that will keep the spacecraft dust-free while construction crews finish building the exhibit hall to showcase her to the public. Atlantis arrived at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Nov. 2, rolling into the $100 million attraction that will be finished and opened to the world next July.   Astronaut Brings a Bit of NASA to Twin Falls   Julie Wootton - New Falls Times-News (Idaho)   If you do well in school, “you get to pick what you do next,” NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen told Twin Falls High School students Thursday. Bowen, who has been on three missions to the International Space Station, told students they’ll be happier if they get to choose their own path. He said his background is in science and engineering, but those aren’t the only fields where students can find fulfilling careers. “Really, there are opportunities for everyone out there,” he said.   Triumph of His Will For his entire life, Elon Musk has bent people to his insatiable will. Most recently, he's co-opted NASA. And now we'll see whether he's a) the visionary who forces Americans to become explorers again, or b) a man so distracted by vision that his life's work is a series of brilliant disappointments.   Tom Junod - Esquire (December Issue)   "There will probably be a lot of people that die," says Elon Musk. He is sitting at his desk, at the headquarters of his company — of one of his companies — SpaceX. He is eating. He is eating a plate of food that his personal assistant gave him. It is late, and he is eating to stay on schedule. He is a man of scrupulously developed politesse, and he worries that eating his scheduled dinner while completing his scheduled interview might give offense. It does not, because although he eats hungrily, he never succeeds in making his food look appetizing. On his white plate is a turkey leg, a sad bouquet of broccoli, a mound of black beans, and he eats them like an astronaut might eat his rations, with an air of hurried functionality, while talking about going to Mars.   Spaceport supporters push for legislation to protect manufacturers   Associated Press   Republican Gov. Susana Martinez and spaceport backers have pushed unsuccessfully for two years for legislation to protect spacecraft manufacturers from legal liability. And now Spaceport America's major tenant, Virgin Galactic, is hinting it could pull out, if the bill fails to pass in January, according to KRQE News.   I Say "Space Shuttle," You Say "Space Clipper"   Rebecca Onion - Slate.com’s The Vault   In this memo from aide Peter Flanigan to President Nixon, dated January 4, 1972, Flanigan made a last-ditch effort to convince the president to stop using the term space shuttle when referring to NASA’s new space exploration vessel. “The word shuttle has a connotation of second class travel and lacks excitement,” Flanigan wrote. Flanigan offered a list of classier alternatives: “Space Clipper”, “Pegasus”, and “Starlighter…”   MEANWHILE ON MARS…   Curiosity wraps up initial soil collection; set to resume roving   William Harwood – CBS News   Buffeted by ethereal whirlwinds and twisters, the Curiosity Mars rover is wrapping up initial soil analysis operations at a sandy drift where it's been parked for more than a month, project scientists said Thursday. The rover is now being prepared to move on in search of suitable targets for a compact rock drill, the final major sample acquisition system to be tested. Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters that Curiosity's robot arm had completed five scoops of martian soil, using the sandy material to clean and scour the sampling system and to deposit samples into both of the rover's main internal instrument suites.   Mars rover Curiosity set to hit the road again   Alicia Chang - Associated Press   After playing in the sand, the Curiosity rover is poised to trek across the Martian landscape in search of a rock to drill into, scientists reported Thursday. The six-wheel rover has been parked for more than a month at a sand dune where it has been busy scooping up soil, sniffing the atmosphere and measuring radiation levels on the surface. Its next task is to zero in on a rock and that requires driving to a new location. Mission deputy scientist Ashwin Vasavada expected Curiosity to be on the move in the "next few days."   NASA Mars Curiosity rover may have caught dust devils in action   Amina Khan - Los Angeles Times   NASA’s Curiosity rover has felt what appear to be dust devils pass by as it samples the Martian atmosphere, mission scientists said Thursday. Though the Mars Science Laboratory rover has yet to catch the whirlwinds on camera, its Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) has recorded pressure dips and wind shifts that often signal a vortex’s presence, said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Manuel de la Torre Juarez, the instrument’s investigation scientist.   Winds on Mars swirl over Curiosity   Dan Vergano - USA Today   Dust devils have twice whirled over NASA's Curiosity rover, mission scientists said Thursday in a first weather report from Mars. The $2.5 billion rover, which landed Aug. 5 on Mars inside Gale Crater, has tracked the Martian weather for the past 90 days. "Gale Crater is a very interesting place for winds," says mission scientist Claire Newman of Ashima Research in Pasadena, Calif. After examining wind speed and direction, the team found that wind swirls in a "moat" around the mountain in the center of the crater, informally designated as Mount Sharp.   Curiosity's unsung skill: scouting Mars for a human mission   Pete Spotts - Christian Science Monitor   Hey, Curiosity! Are you sure you're not in Kansas? Earlier this month, two tiny twisters buffeted NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in the space of 11 minutes. They were two of 21 whirlwinds the rover has detected from its home in Gale Crater so far – with more expected as Mars' southern hemisphere enters its spring and summer. In one sense, this seems like a ho-hum observation. Whirlwinds and dust devils are common on Mars, although no evidence of them had been found in images of Gale Crater taken from orbit. __________   COMPLETE STORIES   NASA, JPL budgets have plenty at stake under 2nd Obama administration   James Figueroa - San Gabriel Valley News (SGVN)   Questions remain about the fiscal future of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory following the re-election of President Barack Obama, and the course of space exploration could depend on what happens in the next few months.   In the short term, NASA's 2013 and 2014 budgets are still undecided, with much depending on automatic sequestration cuts that could kick in next year, the "fiscal cliff" that Congress hopes to avoid.   NASA's planetary science division, buoyed this year by the popular Curiosity rover, lost about $300 million in Obama's proposed 2013 budget, though a competing House and Senate proposal would restore some money specifically for Mars exploration.   The budget proposal is still awaiting action, with a few hundred jobs at JPL possibly depending on what happens.   Planetary exploration advocates are concentrating on 2014, because that represents a deadline for setting up 2018 missions to send a probe to Europa - one of Jupiter's moons - and bring rock samples back from Mars.   "We're just trying to convince the administration this is important," said Casey Dreier of Pasadena's Planetary Society, which has pushed for restoring funds through YouTube videos by its CEO, Bill Nye.   NASA may also be planning a manned outpost just beyond the far side of the moon, in an area of space called Earth- moon L2, and was waiting until after the election to announce it, according to a Space.com report.   The outpost would serve as a training ground for astronauts to eventually travel to other destinations, such as an asteroid or Mars.   Funding for the L2 outpost and Mars sample return mission could depend on preventing sequestration, automatic trigger cuts to all U.S. discretionary spending. The cuts are set to begin in 2013 and last for nine years, after a Congressional committee couldn't reach an agreement to reduce the federal deficit in 2011.   "We have to avoid sequestration, and I think we will," said Congressman Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, who has JPL within his district. "We're not going to go over the fiscal cliff, that would be irresponsible."   Schiff said he was encouraged by JPL's selection for a deep-drilling Mars mission under NASA's low-cost Discovery program, and expects Curiosity's success to help sway Congress to keep planetary exploration funding intact.   "I can promise it's going to be a very time-intensive focus of mine," he said.   Obama's re-election does make things easier because few people knew how the budget might have changed under Mitt Romney.   "I personally think it's easier because we don't have a transition to muddle through," Dreier said.   Shuttle Atlantis wrapped in protective covering   SpaceflightNow.com   http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts135/121115wrap/     The space shuttle Atlantis has been encased in a protective plastic, a wrap that will keep the spacecraft dust-free while construction crews finish building the exhibit hall to showcase her to the public.   Atlantis arrived at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Nov. 2, rolling into the $100 million attraction that will be finished and opened to the world next July.   Since reaching the retirement home, Atlantis was offloaded from the 76-wheel motorized transporter and secured to beams that will be used for lifting the 152,700-pound craft into its display configuration.   Workers this week covered the shuttle with the same type of wrapping you might see around boats being shipped down the highway. It will keep the dust and debris from coming in contact with the priceless artifact in the construction zone.   The final wall of the building, left unassembled in order to get the massive orbiter inside, will be finished in the coming weeks. The facility should have the air conditioning system established in early December.   In the next few days, the crane and rigging company hired by KSCVC will finish the delicate job of raising Atlantis 36 feet off the ground and tilting the orbiter 43.21 degrees to the port side, the final display orientation to mimic the shuttle still flying in space.   Next spring, the plastic will be removed in preparation for opening Atlantis' payload bay doors.   Astronaut Brings a Bit of NASA to Twin Falls   Julie Wootton - New Falls Times-News   If you do well in school, “you get to pick what you do next,” NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen told Twin Falls High School students Thursday.   Bowen, who has been on three missions to the International Space Station, told students they’ll be happier if they get to choose their own path.   He said his background is in science and engineering, but those aren’t the only fields where students can find fulfilling careers.   “Really, there are opportunities for everyone out there,” he said.   On Thursday, Bowen spoke to students at Twin Falls and Canyon Ridge high schools. That night, he gave a free presentation for community members.   Today, he’ll visit two more schools — Vera C. O’Leary Middle School and Oregon Trail Elementary School.   Bowen told the Times-News he’d never met an astronaut before he became one.   He said the presentations will “hopefully give someone that extra push” and excite them.   Bowen is in Twin Falls this week thanks to science teacher Jo Dodds.   The Twin Falls High teacher asked nearly a year ago to have a NASA astronaut come to Twin Falls.   Bowen began his presentation with a video showing life in space during one mission, from takeoff to landing.   Students laughed as they watched the astronauts floating around, doing somersaults and eating food out of a can.   Even though the video was an entertaining look at life in zero gravity, Bowen told students that astronauts “don’t spend a third of time in space goofing around.”   One student asked Bowen about the best and worst parts about being away from civilization.   The best part? “The perspective,” Bowen said.   And “floating is actually the part that never gets old,” he said.   The worst part? Missing his family.   When it comes to daily life in space, Bowen said astronauts don’t change clothes every day and rely on sponge baths.   “It’s a different sort of living,” he said, comparing it to camping.   Twin Falls High Principal Ben Allen told the Times-News there’s a push for more science, technology, engineering and math education. Bowen’s presentation meshed well with that.   “I think it was a good opportunity (for students),” he said.   The Astronaut’s Path   After graduating from high school, Bowen earned a bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy and then a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   Then, he served as a U.S. Navy submariner.   When he applied to become an astronaut, the chances of being selected were slim.   Bowen said only about 0.7 percent of applicants were selected. He told student it’s even more competitive now.   He said when he entered training in 2000, his class was told they may never go to space.   “The flight opportunities are limited for astronauts,” he said.   But he eventually made it. Bowen’s first mission — STS-126 Endeavour — was in 2008.   He told students that it included bringing 10,000 pounds of equipment to expand the International Space Station to accomodate six people, up from three.   The second mission in 2010 — STS-132 Atlantis — was the first time in more than a decade that all crew members had been in space before.   For his third mission — STS-133 Discovery — he was scheduled to leave in 2010. But problems were discovered with the external tank and the mission was delayed.   Finally, the launch happened in 2011. It was the final mission for space shuttle Discovery.   The Future   When astronauts aren’t flying or training, they’re working other jobs, Bowen told students.   He heads NASA’s Astronaut Office Extravehicular Activity (EVA) branch.   Bowen told the Times-News that he anticipates re-entering the astronaut training pool and relearning Russian language skills.   As for NASA, Bowen talked with students about the Commercial Crew Program. It involves partnerships with companies working to develop the United States’ next space transportation systems.   Bowen said the program will hopefully provide the U.S. with access to space again. NASA ended its 30-year space shuttle program in 2011, but Bowen is optimistic about the future of space exploration.   “The opportunities will be fabulous,” he said.   Triumph of His Will For his entire life, Elon Musk has bent people to his insatiable will. Most recently, he's co-opted NASA. And now we'll see whether he's a) the visionary who forces Americans to become explorers again, or b) a man so distracted by vision that his life's work is a series of brilliant disappointments.   Tom Junod - Esquire (December Issue)   "There will probably be a lot of people that die," says Elon Musk.   He is sitting at his desk, at the headquarters of his company — of one of his companies — SpaceX. He is eating. He is eating a plate of food that his personal assistant gave him. It is late, and he is eating to stay on schedule. He is a man of scrupulously developed politesse, and he worries that eating his scheduled dinner while completing his scheduled interview might give offense. It does not, because although he eats hungrily, he never succeeds in making his food look appetizing. On his white plate is a turkey leg, a sad bouquet of broccoli, a mound of black beans, and he eats them like an astronaut might eat his rations, with an air of hurried functionality, while talking about going to Mars.   Of course Elon Musk talks about going to Mars. He is famous for it. He has been talking about going to Mars for eleven years, and his desire to go to Mars preceded his desire to mass-produce electric cars at the other company he runs, Tesla. In 2012, SpaceX succeeded in twice sending a rocket of its own manufacture into orbit and twice linking a capsule of its own manufacture to the International Space Station, and Elon Musk succeeded in convincing some of those who have regarded him as a con man dependent on government largesse that he may yet become what one of his admirers calls the "Steve Jobs of heavy industry," if not the "Henry Ford of rockets."   Certainly, he has some of Jobs's instincts for both controlling every aspect of the companies he runs and for subjecting even his own need for control to the discipline of taste. It is impossible to sit behind the wheel of his Tesla Model S alongside one of the company's representatives without hearing that Musk designed the car's ingotlike rearview mirror himself and insisted that its dashboard have no buttons and an audio system with a volume control that "goes to 11." It is impossible to visit SpaceX's earbud-white headquarters in the featureless aerospace-dominated outskirts of Los Angeles without hearing that Musk also designed it — that he picked the colors and the furniture, including the trash cans suggestive of rocket ships. He is even wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans as he eats dinner, and has just concluded a meeting in which all his engineers were wearing the same. What separates Jobs from Musk, however, is a matter of scale and stakes:   Steve Jobs made gadgets; Elon Musk is making cars and rockets. And though Jobs might have relished inspiring people to wait on long lines to avail themselves of his vision, he never dared speak of inspiring them to die.   Musk does. He has to; Mars is far away. Mars is tens of millions of miles away from Earth at its closest orbit and hundreds of millions of miles away at its most distant. It exists to the human eye not as a sphere but as a colored star, as part of the endless outnumbering firmament, as the nightly whispered message that we may not reach what awe inspires us to grasp. And so although Musk, as he eats, repeats the mantra that has won him not only investors and employees but followers — he says that his goal is to "make humanity interplanetary" as a way of increasing the odds that human consciousness survives in the universe — he has to admit the possibility that just as a lot of people had to die in order to settle the New World, a lot would have to die in order to settle the red one.   It is neither a decree nor a warning; it is, instead, a kind of invitation, stated with cool certainty. Musk is forty-one years old, with the face of a schoolboy and the manners — the scrubbed affect — of a surgeon. He has brown hair, reddish lips, and nearly hairless arms. He talks about working eighty to a hundred hours a week as often as he talks about going to Mars, but he is thick-legged and broad-shouldered and exudes physical health and power. He is often referred to as a "rock star" but maintains a studied sanity. If he is a rock star, he is one of the reasonable ones, like, say, Coldplay's Chris Martin. He laughs readily at his own most obscure jokes, smiles faintly in equal parts amusement and disappointment, and indeed acts as though only he can see the membrane that separates him from the rest of the world. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that there is something alien about him, it would be no surprise if he lifted his shirt and revealed that he had no navel.   Ever since he made his first fortune developing and then selling the Internet businesses Zip2 and PayPal, he has been capturing people's imaginations by presenting himself as a mythic figure — by saying things like "The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur." But he wants more than wonder. He is a man grounded not in fancy but in a sense of his own strength, and his unlikely dream of going to Mars has allowed him to realize practical ambitions much closer to home.   "It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost," he says. "Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly." It is, in his words, entirely manageable — "if America has the will."   And that is the key to Elon Musk. He has the will. "Elon is not afraid of breaking things — he will break himself if he has to," says Justine Musk, his first wife and the mother of his five children.   He was not born in America, and yet when he was a very young man, he gave up everything to become an American. Now he wants Americans to be willing to give up everything in order to reclaim the one essential thing we've lost. He wants to make us once again "a nation of explorers" — but first he has to find out what price we're willing to pay.   He grew up in South Africa without ever really considering himself South African. Like the rest of his family, he was just passing through. The Musks were a race nearly as much as they were a family, with a specialized awareness of themselves as wanderers and adventurers. Every Musk is able to tell the story of forebears whose accomplishments serve as an inspiration and whose energy endures as an inheritance — a grandfather who won a race from Cape Town to Algiers; a great-grandmother who was the first female chiropractor in Canada; grandparents who were the first to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane. "Without sounding patronizing, it does seem that our family is different from other people," says Elon's sister, Tosca Musk. "We risk more."   If the Musks had arisen from literature, they would come off as an unlikely combination of Salinger's Glasses and Faulkner's Snopeses — a combination of insular giftedness and rude commercial energy.   "I have two brilliant children, but Elon's a genius," says his mother, Maye Musk. "I can explain Tosca and [Elon's brother] Kimbal pretty well. I can't explain Elon."   She was a dietitian and a fashion model; her husband, Errol, was an engineer and what a family member described as a "serial entrepreneur." According to Maye, they knew their oldest child was "advanced from the very beginning." He read continually, read not simply to amuse himself but to acquire knowledge, so they sent him to school early in Pretoria. "Elon was the youngest and smallest guy in his school," Maye says, and soon he found himself in conflict not just with other children but with what seemed like South Africa itself.   "It's pretty rough in South Africa," Kimbal Musk says. "It's a rough culture. Imagine rough — well, it's rougher than that. Kids gave Elon a very hard time, and it had a huge impact on his life." Huge, Tosca says, "because there was no recourse. In South Africa, if you're getting bullied, you still have to go to school. You just have to get up in the morning and go. He hated it so much."   It turned out he had two recourses. The first was his family — and his ability to think of himself as a Musk, and therefore as a kind of transcendent citizen rather than as a South African. The second was the advent of the personal computer. "He was on computers as soon as they were available to us," Tosca says. What distinguished him from the legions of other brainy put-upon children who found refuge in the digital universe, however, was his ability to put his digital identity at the service of his familial one. He had not only seen his father start businesses, after all; he had accompanied his father to Zambia, where Errol Musk had an interest in an emerald mine. "They'd go in a plane stocked with chocolate bars, because that's what the customs agents wanted," Kimbal Musk says. "You basically would give them chocolate bars, and they'd allow you to do business."   When he was sixteen, he tried opening a video arcade near his high school with Kimbal, who was a year younger. "We had a lease, we had suppliers, but we were actually stopped," Kimbal says. "We got stopped by the city. We couldn't get a variance. Our parents had no idea. They flipped out when they found out, especially my father."   Errol Musk was South African. He left his wife and his children when Elon was eight — or they fled him — and Elon to this day has what his brother says is "not the greatest relationship" with him. But he'd given them the curious gift of other places, taking them on annual trips intended to give them perspective on where they lived, and then the most curious gift of all: "My father was very strict," Tosca remembers. "So while everybody in South Africa had maids and servants, he'd have us play this game. It was called America, America, and when we played it, we'd have to do everything an American child would do. We'd have to clean the house, mow the lawn, do all sorts of American chores...."   Elon made his move after he graduated high school. Though he already felt like an American, he'd done research and concluded that it would be easier to obtain American citizenship as a Canadian immigrant rather than as a South African one. His mother was from Canada. Most of her family still lived there. "Elon went to visit my family and he never came back," Maye says. Kimbal and Tosca remained in high school in Pretoria, where they were not like their brother — they were popular. But Elon used to practice hypnosis on them when he was a boy, Tosca says. "He wasn't very good at it. I'd be like, 'No, Elon, I'm not going to eat raw bacon.' But he kept on trying."   Now his beckoning — the exercise of his will — worked. One by one they followed him, first Tosca (who was then fifteen) and Maye, then Kimbal, then even his cousins on his mother's side. He robbed South Africa of all his family members with the exception of his father; as his cousin Lyndon Rive puts it, "They stayed in South Africa one generation, and then they left."   He handled getting them their citizenship between attending university in Ontario and sleeping on the pullout couch at Maye and Tosca's sublet apartment in Toronto. Then he moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania, and they followed him across that border as well. Ten years ago — ten years after his arrival in the New World — Elon Musk took the oath of American citizenship with thirty-five hundred other immigrants at the Pomona Fairplex, in a ceremony he calls "actually very moving." Tosca is the last of the family still an alien, and as she studies to become an American citizen, she has come to believe in Elon's ability to make her a Martian citizen, too. They all have. They are a family that has formed an unshakable consensus around one of its members. Tosca says, "Elon has already gone to the future and come back to tell us what he's found."   And what's most important is that before he had his fortune, before he even had many friends, he had — he was born with — his first followers.   In 2001, Elon Musk was discussing his fortune with a friend he'd met back at Penn, Adeo Ressi. Well, they were both discussing their fortunes, because they had both made them in the tech boom and were now wondering what to do with them. Ressi had recently sold his Internet company, Methodfive, and Musk was just about to take PayPal public. It was the weekend before Memorial Day, and they were driving back to New York City from the Hamptons. It was late, it was dark, and there were people asleep in the backseat. They started talking about outer space.   "It was almost a joke at first," Ressi says. "We were both interested in space, but we dismissed it as soon as it came up. 'Oh, that's too expensive and complicated.' Then two miles would go by. 'Well, how expensive and complicated could it be?' Two more miles. 'It can't be that expensive and complicated.' It kept going on like this, and by the time we made it through the Midtown Tunnel into New York City, we'd basically decided to travel the world to see if something could be done in space."   They'd mentioned Mars in the car — "the obvious destination," Ressi says — and so when Musk got to his computer, he went to the NASA Web site and searched for information on NASA's Mars mission. He found nothing. "I thought there was some kind of mistake," Musk says. "I expected to find that they were well on their way and that we'd have to figure out something else to do. But there was nothing at all."   A month later, an aerospace consultant named Jim Cantrell was driving home after work in Utah when his cell phone rang. "I had the top down on my car, so all I could make out was that some guy named Ian Musk was saying that he was an Internet billionaire and needed to talk to me. I'm pretty sure he used that phrase, 'Internet billionaire.' I told him I'd call him back when I got home, but when I called, I got a fax machine. I said, 'Sure, Internet billionaire.' Then my phone rang. I asked him what was with the fax machine. He said, 'I don't want you to know my cell number.' Then he launched right into the same pitch he has now. 'I want to change mankind's outlook on being a multiplanetary species.' I listened, and he said, 'Can we meet this weekend? I have a private jet, I'll fly to your house.' Well, that rang my alarm bells, and I said, 'No, I'll meet you at the airport in Salt Lake.' Tell you the truth, I wanted to meet him in a place where he couldn't bring a weapon, so we met in the Delta Crown Room. Adeo came, and I finally thought, Holy crap, this is interesting. I said, 'Okay, Elon, let's put a team together and see how much this is going to cost.'"   They weren't starting a rocket company. The idea at the start was, in Ressi's words, "to influence public opinion by launching a high-profile mission to Mars." That was it, and that was all — they planned to buy a rocket and then send it to Mars with something in it, something alive that had a chance of staying alive. At first, they were going to send a mouse; then they thought of sending a plant, maybe a food crop in its own biosphere. "We created a company called Life to Mars, because that was the objective," Ressi says. "We were going to show the world that two guys with money and vision could reach Mars, and that it wasn't that bad a place."   They began shopping for the rocket, or, in aerospace-industry parlance, the "launch vehicle." Cantrell had arranged for them to meet with Arianespace, the European consortium that sends a significant portion of the world's satellites into space, and Musk and Ressi arranged for them to stay in Paris. "We rented the penthouse suite of one of the major hotels in Paris, across from the Louvre," Ressi says. "We had the whole top floor, usually rented by the sultan of Brunei or something. Elon and I invited all our friends. It was basically about sixty hours of meetings and thirty hours of partying, and by the time we got to Russia, we were destroyed...."   They went to Russia because Arianespace's rockets were too expensive, and they'd been told that Russia was selling what Cantrell calls "repurposed ICBMs" for $7 million apiece. A superpower had collapsed, and Musk and Ressi thought they could cash in by buying three of its rockets. "This was when it was still the Wild West over there," Ressi says. "I mean, there were like dead people on the side of the road. We got pulled over multiple times, at gunpoint, and had to bribe the police. No reason. Just 'Give us money.' 'Okay....'   "Then we started having meetings with the Russian space program, which is basically fueled by vodka. We'd all go in this little room and every single person had his own bottle in front of him. They'd toast every two minutes, which means twenty or thirty toasts an hour. 'To space!' 'To America!' 'To America in space!' I finally looked over at Elon and Jim and they were passed out on the table. Then I passed out myself."   It was no different when the Russians visited Musk and Ressi in Los Angeles. "They came to L.A. to ask us for cash," Ressi says. "'We can't continue unless you give us $5,000 in cash.' We heard this on a Saturday, because they wanted party money for the weekend. How do you come up with five grand in L. A. on a Saturday? You don't. So we went to the Mondrian, where I knew the manager. 'I need all the cash you have... .' We cleaned the Mondrian out to give the Russians their fee. The final bits of cash were ones... ."   They had two more trips scheduled to Russia; now Ressi decided, as he says, "I didn't like dealing with Russians," and told Musk he wasn't going back. Musk went anyway. On the second trip, Musk brought his wife, Justine — "I think that's the trip when the lead Russian designer started spitting at us," Cantrell says — and on the third and final trip he brought his money. He was ready to buy three Russian ICBMs for $21 million when the Russians told him that no, they meant $21 million for one. "They taunted him," Cantrell says. "They said, 'Oh, little boy, you don't have the money?' I said, 'Well, that's that.' I was sitting behind him on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, 'I think we can build a rocket ourselves.'"   He showed Cantrell the spreadsheet he'd been working on. "I looked at it and said, I'll be damned — that's why he's been borrowing all my books. He'd been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true. He devoured those books. He knew everything. He's the smartest guy I've ever met, and he'd been planning to build a rocket all along."   He'd even contacted someone who could build it for him — at least the engine. On a dry lake bed at the outer edge of the Mojave Desert, a propulsion engineer named Tom Mueller was doing what he calls "amateur rocketry" with a group of enthusiasts who called themselves the Reaction Research Society. Except that Mueller wasn't an amateur; he worked for an aerospace company that was about to become part of Northrop Grumman, and he went out to the desert to "do the crazy stuff I wasn't allowed to do at work." He'd built a rocket engine in his garage, and one day he got a call from an associate who said that "an Internet millionaire" named Elon Musk wanted to see it. Musk wound up visiting him at a warehouse where he was assembling his engine, and seeing it was, in Cantrell's words, "apparently a religious experience for Elon."   "He was very focused," Mueller says. "He asked if I could build it, and I said, 'Yes, if I had the right people.' Then he said, 'How much will it cost?'"   And so when he returned to the United States from Russia, Elon Musk spoke to Adeo Ressi about turning the company Life to Mars into what would become SpaceX — about building rockets. "He pretty much said, 'I don't need these Russians,'" Ressi says. "I was like, 'Whoa, dude. Let's use the Socratic method. I got screwed by the Russians doesn't equal Create launch company.' We wound up literally having an Alcoholics Anonymous — style intervention where I flew in people to Los Angeles and we all sat around a room and said, 'Elon, you cannot start a launch company. This is stupid.'   "Elon just said, 'I'm going to do it. Thanks.'"   As soon as he started SpaceX, he started talking about going to Mars. He talked with family members, magazine writers, movie stars, and other rich people of entrepreneurial inclination. He announced that he would be the first private citizen to pioneer outer space, and, in so doing, he turned himself into a public figure. When his mother asked why he wanted to pursue celebrity, he said, "Nobody will sell me any parts if they don't know who I am."   There has always been a practical purpose to the narrative he has advanced, but the narrative has ended in the myth of a man beyond practical considerations. The mythical Elon Musk has led a charmed life. He starts companies. He is a billionaire. He has seen the future and predicates everything he does in the present on the totality of his vision. His genius is ineffable, without precedent or explanation, and yet suffices to explain him. If he succeeds, humanity succeeds; in his striving for himself, he strives for us all.   All of this is partially true, but it does him the disservice of ignoring what makes him interesting: He is a devourer as well as a creator. He is opportunistic and improvisatory. He is something of a takeover artist; he built Tesla after investing in it and ridding himself of its founders. He shares his superpower not with Tony Stark but rather with Donald Trump — the ability to carry debt. He can be slippery. He is more than occasionally desperate. He has a genius for engineering but perhaps a more powerful one for salesmanship, which is why he always felt himself to be, in his heart of hearts, an American.   His life is not charmed. What he pursues he usually gets, but what he gets he sometimes loses. He met the woman who became his first wife shortly after he came to Canada. He met her — saw her — while attending Queen's University in Ontario, and, as his brother, Kimbal, said at their wedding, went after her as relentlessly as he went after his parents back in South Africa to buy him a motorbike and a computer. And yet Justine Musk did not see him as a man who got what he wanted so much as a man who didn't have some very basic things:   "I don't think people understand how tough he had it growing up," she says. "I was a really lonely kid and he was a really lonely kid and that's one of the things that attracted me to him. I thought he had this understanding of loneliness — of how to create yourself in that. A lot of the things that come naturally to people he had to think about. It's more deliberate with him. The lessons he had to learn were different from most of us."   That was the missing dimension. The extra dimension, for Justine, was "the body he was born into." He could endure almost anything, impose his will on almost anyone. "He's a big man, he's strong-willed and powerful, he's like a bear. He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end you're still dealing with a bear."   They were married in 2000. They had their first child, Nevada Alexander, two years later. At ten weeks old, he stopped breathing in his crib; after being taken off life support, he died in Justine's arms. Elon Musk could figure out how to build a rocket from reading books, but loss — the place he had to make in his life for its invisible enormity — baffled him. "He was very much in the mode of stiff-upper-lip, the-show-must-go-on, let's-get-it-over-with," Justine says. "He doesn't do well in the dark places. He's forward moving, and I think it's a survival thing with him."   Six weeks after the death of her son, Justine Musk went to the office of a fertility specialist and began the process of in vitro fertilization. They had twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006. The children were all boys, and two of them were diagnosed autistic. (One, according to Justine, is no longer on the spectrum.) She wrote and published three novels, but the bearlike presence of her husband had inevitably become what it had become to his partners at PayPal and Tesla: an obliterating one. "Elon does what he wants," she says. "If you want what he wants, life can be very exciting — that's how he seduces people, I think: He taps into a shared dream. But he rules through strength of will. What he has comes at a price, sometimes to Elon, sometimes to people close to him. But someone always pays."   In the spring of 2008, Justine told him how unhappy she was. They went to counseling for a month, and Elon delivered an ultimatum: accept the marriage as is. When she said she couldn't, he filed for divorce the next day, and six weeks later he announced his engagement to the British actress Talulah Riley. In 2002, he had started a rocket company without bothering to tell his wife that he was starting a rocket company — he left that to Adeo Ressi. Now, though, his life was more complicated. During the intervening six years, he had turned himself into a public figure and, in so doing, risked public humiliation. He was divorcing one woman and announcing his betrothal to another while at the same time struggling to save Tesla and wagering everything he had on something he had already failed at:   Putting a rocket into orbit.   He'd used his own moneyfor the first one. He started SpaceX with $100 million of the money he made from PayPal. He used that money to build the Merlin engine designed by Tom Mueller and the single-engine Falcon 1 rocket. SpaceX was, at the time, in 2002, just what Elon Musk said it was. It was a private company, a "commercial space" company. Musk was going around and trying to drum up business.   "We were in an office in Bethesda, Maryland, and one day I got a call," says Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium, a satellite-communications provider. "'Hey, Matt, this is Elon Musk. I could be at the hotel next door in a couple of hours — is there any chance that you could come for a beer?'"   Desch had his own ambitious plan; he was planning to put a "constellation" of satellites into orbit, and "a lot of the more traditional launch companies looked down their nose at us. They thought we should be thrilled if they allowed us to use their rocket ships." He met Musk and characterizes him this way: "He was not nearly as cool as he is now. He was a formerly-famous-and-trying-to-be-famous-again entrepreneur. He didn't have an entourage, and we had an incredibly content-rich conversation about the whole process. He wasn't just pitching rockets. But he didn't talk about Mars, either. That probably would have scared me at that point. For all his grand plans, he's a pretty pragmatic businessman who knows how to build a company."   By March 24, 2006, Musk had orders to put satellites into orbit in his order book and was about to get a $278 million agreement with NASA intended to help him develop his company. He had to do one thing: prove that he could fly. He used the launch pad at the testing ground on the Pacific coral atoll of Kwajalein to launch his first rocket, and he went to the launch with, among others, his engine designer, Tom Mueller.   "Everyone was cheering," Mueller says. "But my engine went on fire. It burned through the wires, and the data was terrible. Thirty-three seconds in, it flamed out and Falcon fell a mile back onto the reef. We lost everything, all data, everything. There was the jubilation of it lifting off and the agony of it crashing. It was a pretty unpleasant time to be hanging with Elon. We flew back on the jet and there was an intense session to figure out what went wrong."   One year later, there was another failure. And when the third Falcon 1 fell into the sea in August 2008 — along with a payload contracted by NASA and the Department of Defense, along with the ashes of the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek — Musk faced disaster.   At the same time, he was at a crisis point with his other business, Tesla. He had begun production of Tesla's first car, the high-performance Roadster, but he couldn't produce enough of them. He hadn't yet begun receiving the proceeds of a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, and the financial system was commencing its collapse. He was searching for money and laying off people, and he wound up closing an R&D center and taking over for the CEO he'd hired to replace another CEO he'd fired earlier in the year.   "This wasn't Elon facing adversity," Kimbal says. "This was, 'Holy shit.' Personal bankruptcy was a daily conversation. Tesla was on the limb to deliver cars that people already paid for. Bankruptcy would have been easier than what he did. He threw everything he had into keeping Tesla alive."   He threw more than that into the Falcon 1's fourth launch on September 28, 2008. When Musk had decided to go into the rocket business, Adeo Ressi had counseled against it for two simple reasons: Outcomes are binary. "Rockets explode."   "Everything hinged on that launch," Ressi says. "Elon had lost all his money, but this was more than his fortune at stake — it was his credibility. He'd sold all these launches and would have to give the money back. And [if that had happened] right now we'd be having a conversation about his epic failure. If it works, epic success. If it fails — if one thing goes differently and it fails — epic failure. No in between. No partial credit. He'd had three failures already. It would have been over. We're talking Harvard Business School case study — rich guy who goes into the rocket business and loses it all...."   The rocket didn't explode. It rose into the sky and disappeared into orbit, Elon Musk's burden lifted as if for all humankind.   The problem with the Americans is that they were like Russians. No, they weren't gangsters, and they didn't make a business model of drinking you into a stupor. But the guys in American aerospace acted like they had you, and when you showed up with the money, they asked for more. Musk didn't like that. He didn't like getting screwed. He particularly didn't like getting screwed by people who also laughed at him. One time, for instance, he needed a valve—"The one we had was too small, and we needed a bigger one," Tom Mueller says. "We called a vendor and they said it would cost a quarter million dollars and it would take a year to make. We said, 'We need it this summer.' They laughed and told us to go away. So we decided to make it ourselves. They called us back in the summer. They were like, 'Hey, how is it going with that valve?' We said, 'We made it, we finished it, we qualified it, and we're going to fly it.'"   Another time, Musk had an issue with a vendor that makes the big aluminum domes that top off the fuel tanks. The issue was that they were going Russian on him. "We got a big increase from the vendor after the first units were delivered," says Mark Juncosa, SpaceX's lead structural engineer. "It was like a painter who paints half your house for one price, then wants three times that for the rest. That didn't make Elon too enthusiastic. He was like, 'All right, we're not going to get screwed by these guys....'"   SpaceX now makes its own domes — as Juncosa puts it, "We have our own dome-manufacturing facility in the back of the factory." This is a big deal: Elon Musk is not just assembling rockets in Hawthorne, California; he's manufacturing 70 percent of them, piece by piece. It doesn't mean that vendors have stopped trying to screw him, though, and on the evening that Musk sits eating his medieval turkey leg at his desk, Juncosa walks in to tell him that Alcoa is going Russian on him. The problem is that the domes are made of aluminum, and Alcoa has a special machine for making the aluminum SpaceX needs. They're the only ones who have it, they spent a lot of money on it, and now they want to make SpaceX pay for it....   This conversation takes place in the second week of September. SpaceX has a launch scheduled for October, less than a month away. But what Juncosa is discussing with Musk has nothing to do with the upcoming launch. It has nothing to do with any launch on the SpaceX flight manifest or any rocket that SpaceX currently manufactures. The current SpaceX rocket is the Falcon 9 1.0. It uses nine of Mueller's Merlin engines, and it's been to space four times. But Musk doesn't have engineers like Juncosa and Mueller working on it. Instead, he has them working on the future. He has them working on the Falcon 9 1.1 and the Falcon Heavy, which is meant for deep space. More important, he has them working on making rockets reusable.   "SpaceX has the most advanced rockets in the world," Musk says, but so far the advances have been "evolutionary" because the rockets are expendable — they end up in the ocean. "The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable."   This is a compelling idea. But when Musk gets into trouble, it's not because of the unifying intensity of his vision. He gets into trouble because of his divisions — because he builds great products he can't deliver. Tesla is in trouble again, is running short on money again, because it is having difficulty building enough of its amazing Model S sedans for people who've already paid for them. And SpaceX does not currently face the challenge of reusability or of going to Mars. It faces the challenge of living up to the faith of guys like Iridium's Matt Desch, who's counting on SpaceX to put nearly seventy satellites into orbit over the next five years.   "Elon's got to make SpaceX a company that will deliver tens of rockets a year and get his costs down much further than they are now," Desch says. "The technical challenge isn't getting to space — it's getting to space twenty times in a row. That's the really big technical challenge over the next two years. SpaceX knows that we get nervous every time we hear they have a big idea."   "Nobody understands what's driving this," Jim Cantrell says. "Right now, he's producing rockets at an industry average, and yet his flight manifest is much higher than industry average. It's exactly like Tesla. He has a rocket that works. But before he even finishes with that, he's building the next one."   And yet he can't help himself: He wants to build the next one. He has big ideas. He sells SpaceX with the reality of expendability and himself with the dream of reusability. He sells SpaceX with its launch manifest — its order book — and himself with Mars. His PR person describes him as "an unconventional man with conventional customers," not to mention vendors who act like Russians. So now as he finishes his turkey leg, he listens to Juncosa tell him that he's found a way to go around Alcoa, involving smaller pieces of aluminum. "Maybe," Musk says. "But they seem to be operating on the principle of 'What is the degree to which we can screw the customer, and that is the actual limit on the price.' They're giving the shaft to Tesla as well, and it really pisses me off."   The real problem, Musk tells Juncosa, is that "they make a shitload of aluminum."   "They're definitely not easy to push around," Juncosa says.   Musk smiles. He has a funny smile, boyish and playful but also private and a little rueful — he tends to laugh at the world's absurdity, and smile at his own.   "It makes me want to start an aluminum company," Musk says. "There has to be some serious gravy in that."   He knows what to do when he enters into a new partnership. He takes over. When he married Justine, he told her as they danced at the reception, "I'm the alpha in this relationship." And when he invested in Tesla in 2004, he quickly took control of its board of directors and deposed founder Martin Eberhard in 2007.   And so he knew what to do when, in 2006, NASA began changing from an agency that explores space into an agency that invests in space. When its essential charter was changed, NASA didn't know what to do: "It was a whole new way of doing business for us," says Alan Lindenmoyer, the head of NASA's commercial crew and cargo program. It even hired a consultant to teach it how to do venture capitalism and develop what Lindenmoyer calls "true partnerships" with "commercial space" companies like SpaceX. Musk knew what to do, though. He'd made his money in Silicon Valley, and some of his best friends were venture capitalists. He knew what worlds await those who can make themselves indispensable to their partners.   And he was indispensable to NASA from the start. An agency emblematic of national unity in the twentieth century spent the first years of the twenty-first responding to shrinking budgets and straitened circumstance. It had been shaken to the core by the death of seven astronauts in the space shuttle Columbia's return from space in 2003. It was debating whether it had the ability to muster another attempt at manned space exploration with a new generation of rockets called Ares. It needed a visionary face to show the world that a space program carried out on the cheap could still be inspirational and expressive of national purpose. It needed Elon Musk.   "Elon came along and said, 'If you give us the money, we can do things for a tenth of what you do, but you have to leave us alone,'" says Scott Horowitz, a former space-shuttle astronaut who was in charge of NASA's exploration programs from 2005 to 2007.   And Musk got the money. In 2006, he entered into the $278 million agreement to demonstrate — with three launches — his ability to put his Falcon 9 rocket into space. In 2008, he won a $1.6 billion contract to bring cargo to the International Space Station. In 2010, he received another $118 million to help him complete his original demonstration agreement. Then the Obama administration killed the Ares program at the same time the shuttle was being retired, and the United States turned to private companies to restore its ability to bring its astronauts to the space station — to bring any of its citizens to space. And Musk found himself in a position of simultaneous partnership and power:   "NASA has married itself to Elon," Jim Cantrell says. "There's no way that NASA can survive without him, and they're stuck."   NASA has always presented this as a healthy relationship. In return for what Lindenmoyer calls a "modest investment," NASA has developed a whole new industry, and the industry has had a chance to demonstrate that private companies can go to space more efficiently, more cheaply, and more quickly than old-line government contractors working under direct NASA supervision ever could. Although SpaceX didn't complete its three demonstration launches by its 2009 deadline, it managed to launch its first Falcon 9 and to deliver its first Dragon spacecraft into orbit in 2010. In May of 2012, the Dragon docked for the first time at the International Space Station, and in October it completed the first resupply run on its $1.6 billion NASA contract. These launches were considered historic, historic enough to warrant a personal call to Musk from President Obama. More historic still was the $440 million that NASA awarded SpaceX to compete with Boeing and Sierra Nevada for a contract to shuttle American astronauts into orbit.   Elon Musk, of course, has no doubts about who is going to win. "Sierra Nevada is just a placeholder," he says. "Boeing will never get its hardware off the ground. You know the joke about Boeing: It puts the zero in being."   He, then, appears to be on his inexorable way to his final impossible goal. And yet his marriage to NASA has not unfolded so differently from any of his others. In congressional hearings in September, Democratic congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson — the ranking member of the Committee on Space, Science, and Technology — asked how "commercial" commercial space companies like SpaceX really are. She questioned the wisdom of NASA's using taxpayer money to help companies develop capacities that they would then sell back to NASA once they were developed. And she pointed out that while NASA spoke of investing in fifty-fifty partnerships with commercial space companies, it was actually spending nine times what the commercial space companies were spending — that the partnerships were actually ninety-ten.   Musk doesn't dispute the proportions. He points out, however, that the congresswoman was speaking strictly of SpaceX's program to put men in space — a program for which NASA is the only customer. He says that NASA has paid only for the development of the Dragon spacecraft, and that SpaceX developed both the Merlin engine and the Falcon rocket completely on its own, with its original $100 million in capital. But in fact NASA has spent nearly a billion dollars on SpaceX, with barely any congressional oversight. "It seems that [Musk] has convinced a lot of people who can influence Congress to go along with his plan," Representative Johnson says. "There is a stronger message than the message of Congress coming from NASA now."   She is referring to the Obama administration. She is referring, specifically, to Musk's connections to the Obama administration. Musk has not only spent almost $1.5 million on Washington lobbyists over the last two years; he maintains what an official with close ties to NASA calls a "symbiotic" relationship with Lori Garver, a former commercial-space advocate who advised the Obama campaign and who now, as NASA's deputy administrator, has insisted that she reports to the president himself. And "commercial space" has come to resemble the old system of government contractors — the Boeings, the Lockheeds — it was intended to supplant, right down to the bloat: In August, SpaceX was scheduled to receive $60 million for its first two milestones under its $440 million agreement with NASA. The milestones: holding its first meeting and revealing its financials.   "The whole commercial space moniker is a farce," says Scott Horowitz. "It's 'We don't like those contractors, let's replace them with these contractors.'"   Musk says that "it is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor." He says that he has been given the freedom to innovate that no government contractor ever had, and that, besides, his goal is "to go far beyond the space business." His goal is... well, everybody knows his goal. But that's the problem. NASA doesn't want to go to Mars any more than Iridium does. NASA abandoned its goal of going to Mars when it abandoned the Ares rocket, and now it is looking for a private company that can bring astronauts to the low orbit of the space station as safely as possible. NASA has developed a culture of caution, and it's being challenged by — it comes into conflict with — SpaceX's culture of entrepreneurial risk.   Last year, John Marshall, a member of NASA's independent review board, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, went to SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to perform a status review. He was shocked when he was asked "to sign a nondisclosure agreement before we had any dialogue." He refused, and received access to the information he needed. But he was shocked again when he met an engineer in charge of SpaceX's software: "I thought, Oh, my gosh, you gotta be kidding me. This is a babe in the woods. This is a guy who developed games for PlayStations and has no idea of the complexities out there."   "Elon's a brilliant entrepreneur on one hand, and on the other hand he's a brat," says an official who's worked with him on the safety issues regarding manned flights. "He says he's ready now to put humans in space. No, he's not. His confidence in flying people into space is inversely proportional to his experience in doing it."   He has launched four unmanned Falcon 9 rockets into space. After the second launch, a veteran safety expert e-mailed NASA's chief safety officer and asked him about reports that the first stage of the rocket had exploded. Musk sued the man for $1 million and settled the suit on condition of his retraction and silence. This year, on October 7, he succeeded in delivering cargo to the space station. But an engine failed a minute and nineteen seconds into launch. The rocket had to adjust its trajectory to make its orbit, and dumped a satellite from a communications company called Orbcomm that burned up in the atmosphere. Musk responded to questions about the incident in the following e-mail:   "I am quite chagrined that an effort to do a small good deed for a customer is being treated in some quarters as mission failure. That was not the mission!"   But of course it was. For Orbcomm it was, and what Adeo Ressi warned Musk about when he first started his rocket company still holds true: Space is a place of binary outcomes. Rockets can explode. And the ultimate binary outcome is not success or failure; it is life and death. Elon Musk says that he wants to extend human consciousness throughout the universe. But the presence of a single human consciousness on any launch changes everything about it. He has used both his genius and his genius for salesmanship to convince NASA to marry him. But ultimately NASA doesn't care about what he cares about. It doesn't care about Mars. It cares that the man it has married knows the difference between a rocket and a rocket with a man on top — and that an entire universe lies between them.   He brings his wife to lunch. In the morning, an admiring column in The New York Times portrayed him as a man who has endured the loss of two marriages, and quoted him as saying that he "would like to allocate more time to dating." But he brings Talulah Riley to lunch in Manhattan, where he has flown to celebrate the birthday of his brother, Kimbal. Talulah Riley acquired a presence in the gossip pages when she accepted a $4.2 million divorce settlement from Musk in August. Now she tousles his hair and talks about making him eat and making him get enough sleep. And then she announces her real job: keeping him from going "king-crazy."   "You've never heard that term?" she asks. "I guess no one uses it outside of England. It means that people become king, and then they go crazy."   Musk smiles, boyishly and ruefully. He is relaxing, drinking a cocktail — a Rob Roy — and eating with his usual urgent functionality, with hunger and speed but without relish. Those who love him worry about him — about his health — and they are pleased that he has accepted Talulah back into his life.   "Elon is finding that he has to have a double standard," says Adeo Ressi. "He's always had one standard for himself that he's applied to the rest of the world. But it's hard for him to be in a relationship with people who don't measure up to himself. Coming back to Talulah, he's realizing he's not going to be able to find a woman who's up there with himself. He's a billionaire, he runs two companies, so he's always been like, 'This is what I did, why can't you?' Because she's human, dude? And the single thing that has made Elon happier most recently is sort of an appreciation of how unique he is and an acceptance that not everyone needs to be equal to him to be in a relationship with him."   The central dilemma of his life with Talulah Riley — his singularity, and how it applies to the rest of humanity — is also the central dilemma of his life as a serial self-mythologizer, and now the conversation turns to it. He is a rich man trying to inspire a change in national consciousness. It is not enough for him to inspire Americans; he needs somehow to stand for them — to stand for more than himself — if he wants to restore this country's explorer's heart, its willingness to endure risk. He is, after all, talking about people dying in pursuit of his dream, and so he has to find a way to make his dream their own... but suddenly, as his plate is cleared, he appears very alone at the table, as if stuck with the check.   "It would be a terrible thing, if someone died," he says softly and matter-of-factly. "A terrible, terrible thing." He looks like a man who has said what has just dawned on him, and so he seems newly cognizant of the possibility of loss. Maybe he even looks like a man in love.   But you should know something about him. In twenty years, he plans to ask you to sell everything you own, and to give him the $500,000 he figures will be the price of a trip to Mars. Whether such a price is possible or laughable is immaterial: He will ask you to leave everything you own and everything you know. He will ask you to start a colony on a planet that exists as a red star in the night sky. He doesn't want you to come back. But he doesn't want you to die, either. For a long time he thought you would have to risk death to accomplish his dream, but now he's decided he doesn't want you to. You don't have to die for Elon Musk. For you to be willing is more than enough.   Spaceport supporters push for legislation to protect manufacturers   Associated Press   Republican Gov. Susana Martinez and spaceport backers have pushed unsuccessfully for two years for legislation to protect spacecraft manufacturers from legal liability.   And now Spaceport America's major tenant, Virgin Galactic, is hinting it could pull out, if the bill fails to pass in January, according to KRQE News.   "We are going to look hard at what happens this session in terms of our future stance with the spaceport," Virgin Galactic President and CEO George Whitesides said, according to KRQE News.   Martinez will now have help promoting the bill from the Save Our Spaceport Coalition, a group of aerospace-related companies and business associations.   The group held a news conference Thursday in Albuquerque to tout the benefits of New Mexico's Spaceport America and the need for the legislation.   Among those in attendance was Whitesides. Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant at Spaceport America.   The legislation would exempt spacecraft parts suppliers from most civil lawsuits. It has been blocked by trial lawyers, but Spaceport America says the exemption is needed to attract more business to the taxpayer-financed spaceport.   The coalition says new laws in other states have put Spaceport America at a disadvantage.   I Say "Space Shuttle," You Say "Space Clipper"   Rebecca Onion - Slate.com’s The Vault   In this memo from aide Peter Flanigan to President Nixon, dated January 4, 1972, Flanigan made a last-ditch effort to convince the president to stop using the term space shuttle when referring to NASA’s new space exploration vessel. “The word shuttle has a connotation of second class travel and lacks excitement,” Flanigan wrote. Flanigan offered a list of classier alternatives: “Space Clipper”, “Pegasus”, and “Starlighter.”   In a memo he sent to Flanigan on the same day, Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire argued for “Space Clipper,” pointing to the “patriotic and historic associations” with the super-fast mid-19th-century Yankee Clipper ships. “The name would be criticized as nationalistic,” he said, “but I think that heat would be good.” Safire voted against “Pegasus,” which Flanigan told the President was “preferred by the classicists,” because he anticipated that the shuttle would “soon be named Peggy and parodied with the old song title ‘Peg of My Heart.’”   As we know, none of these suggestions gained traction; the day after these memos were sent, Nixon issued a statement announcing his decision to proceed with the space shuttle program, emphasizing the program’s goals of “transforming the space frontier…into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor.”   Here's Nixon's official memo:   Statement Announcing Decision To Proceed With Development of the Space Shuttle   http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3574&st=&st1   January 5, 1972   I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970's into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980's and 1990's.   This system will center on a space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from earth to orbit and back. It will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. In short, it will go a long way toward delivering the rich benefits of practical space utilization and the valuable spin-offs from space efforts into the daily lives of Americans and all people.   The new year 1972 is a year of conclusion for America's current series of manned flights to the moon. Much is expected from the two remaining Apollo missions--in fact, their scientific results should exceed the return from all the earlier flights together. Thus they will place a fitting capstone on this vastly successful undertaking. But they also bring us to an important decision point--a point of assessing what our space horizons are as Apollo ends, and of determining where we go from here.   In the scientific arena, the past decade of experience has taught us that spacecraft are an irreplaceable tool for learning about our near-earth space environment, the moon, and the planets, besides being an important aid to our studies of the sun and stars. In utilizing space to meet needs on earth, we have seen the tremendous potential of satellites for intercontinental communications and worldwide weather forecasting. We are gaining the capability to use satellites as tools in global monitoring and management of natural resources, in agricultural applications, and in pollution control. We can foresee their use in guiding airliners across the oceans and in bringing televised education to wide areas of the world.   However, all these possibilities, and countless others with direct and dramatic bearing on human betterment, can never be more than fractionally realized so long as every single trip from earth to orbit remains a matter of special effort and staggering expense. This is why commitment to the space shuttle program is the right next step for America to take, in moving out from our present beachhead in the sky to achieve a real working presence in space--because the space shuttle will give us routine access to space by sharply reducing costs in dollars and preparation time.   The new system will differ radically from all existing booster systems, in that most of this new system will be recovered and used again and again--up to 100 times. The resulting economies may bring operating costs down as low as one-tenth of those for present launch vehicles.   The resulting changes in modes of flight and reentry will make the ride safer and less demanding for the passengers, so that men and women with work to do in space can "commute" aloft, without having to spend years in training for the skills and rigors of old-style space flight. As scientists and technicians are actually able to accompany their instruments into space, limiting boundaries between our manned and unmanned space programs will disappear. Development of new space applications will be able to proceed much faster. Repair or servicing of satellites in space will become possible, as will delivery of valuable payloads from orbit back to earth.   The general reliability and versatility which the shuttle system offers seems likely to establish it quickly as the workhorse of our whole space effort, taking the place of all present launch vehicles except the very smallest and very largest.   NASA and many aerospace companies have carried out extensive design studies for the shuttle. Congress has reviewed and approved this effort. Preparation is now sufficient for us to commence the actual work of construction with full confidence of success. In order to minimize technical and economic risks, the space agency will continue to take a cautious evolutionary approach in the development of this new system. Even so, by moving ahead at this time, we can have the shuttle in manned flight by 1978, and operational a short time later.   It is also significant that this major new national enterprise will engage the best efforts of thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of contractor firms over the next several years. The amazing "technology explosion" that has swept this country in the years since we ventured into space should remind us that robust activity in the aerospace industry is healthy for everyone--not just in jobs and income, but in the extension of our capabilities in every direction. The continued preeminence of America and American industry in the aerospace field will be an important part of the shuttle's "payload."   Views of the earth from space have shown us how small and fragile our home planet truly is. We are learning the imperatives of universal brotherhood and global ecology--learning to think and act as guardians of one tiny blue and green island in the trackless oceans of the universe. This new program will give more people more access to the liberating perspectives of space, even as it extends our ability to cope with physical challenges of earth and broadens our opportunities for international cooperation in low-cost, multi-purpose space missions.   "We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor." So with man's epic voyage into space--a voyage the United States of America has led and still shall lead. _____   Note: The statement was released at San Clemente, Calif. On the same day, the White House released a fact sheet and the transcript of a news briefing on the space shuttle. Participants in the news briefing were James C. Fletcher, Administrator, and George M. Low, Deputy Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.   MEANWHILE ON MARS…   Curiosity wraps up initial soil collection; set to resume roving   William Harwood – CBS News   Buffeted by ethereal whirlwinds and twisters, the Curiosity Mars rover is wrapping up initial soil analysis operations at a sandy drift where it's been parked for more than a month, project scientists said Thursday. The rover is now being prepared to move on in search of suitable targets for a compact rock drill, the final major sample acquisition system to be tested.   Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters that Curiosity's robot arm had completed five scoops of martian soil, using the sandy material to clean and scour the sampling system and to deposit samples into both of the rover's main internal instrument suites.   The Chemistry and Mineralogy package, or CheMin, uses X-ray diffraction to identify and analyze the minerals in samples collected by Curiosity's robot arm. The Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, package, uses a suite of three laser spectrometers to look for signs of organic compounds, a key element in the rover's search for signs of past or present habitability.   CheMin analyzed its first soil sample earlier while SAM initially was used to analyze samples of the martian atmosphere, in part to look for signs of methane. While earlier Earth- and space-based observations indicated methane might be present, Curiosity's initial results found no clearly measurable amounts at the Gale Crater landing site.   Vasavada said Thursday SAM now is processing its first soil samples and "based on a very brief look at that data, the team decided to run a couple of more SAM experiments, which are customized to this particular soil and we're currently in the midst of getting those results back."   "The rover really is doing incredibly well," he summarized. "We've had very, very few glitches to speak of ... as we run this very complex piece of technological machinery. There's also the human side of it. The team also has been working very well. We have a lot of different protocols to make sure we don't make mistakes. We have to learn a lot as we operate this thing."   Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on Aug. 6 and after initial tests and checkout, flight controllers directed it to an area known as Glenelg, where orbital photographs show three different rock and terrain types coming together.   For the past 40 or so martian days, Curiosity has been parked by a sand dune, collecting soil samples and giving the flight control team a chance to learn the intricacies of remotely operating the complex sample acquisition system.   Vasavada said engineers now are making plans to resume driving in a bid to find a suitable rock for initial drilling tests. That process is expected to take a month or more to complete.   "We're pretty excited," Vasavada said. "After more than 40 sols (martian days) being parked in front of this sand drift, we're actually going to start moving again. Frankly, the team is pretty excited about that even though it's been a wonderful campaign to analyze the soil."   In the next few days, he said, "I think you'll see us head on to our next site. We still would like to get a little further into this Glenelg region where we see this diversity of rocks and layered rocks and other really interesting terrain. And then we still have a goal in the next month or two of doing the big U-turn and heading up to Mount Sharp."   Mount Sharp is a 3-mile-high mound of layered terrain in the center of Gale Crater where Curiosity is expected to spend the bulk of its planned two-year mission.   In the meantime, the science team is having a field day with Curiosity's initial observations, including an on-going analysis of the martian weather.   "Most of what we've talked about on this mission is the ancient habitability of Mars," Vasavada said. "But we also have some pretty important goals on this mission of studying the modern environment. And it's a pretty dynamic environment.   "If you were standing next to Curiosity, you'd realize you were on a planet with an atmosphere, an atmosphere that's thick enough that when the sun heats the ground every day, gusty winds rush up and down the slopes of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp and spawn whirlwinds that sweep across the landscape. But the atmosphere isn't thick enough to shield you from the harsh ultraviolet light and the natural high energy radiation coming in from space."   Manuel de la Torre Juarez, a co-investigator with the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, or REMS, aboard Curiosity, said wind data indicates nearly two-dozen twisters, or dust devils, have nearby or directly over Curiosity.   But that's based on wind speed and direction data alone. The rover's cameras have not yet spotted any such twisters.   "Dust devils on Mars have been seen in missions before," he said. "We have images from previous rovers. Although we've been trying to find them here, we haven't gotten any imagery yet. But we have been able to measure all the environmental variables associated with dust devil activity."   The data show sudden changes in pressure and wind direction that are indicative of twisters. But Juarez said the whirlwinds would pose no threat to astronauts.   "The martian atmosphere is a very low-density atmosphere, the pressures (are what) you would have if you were flying at twice or three times the usual airplane height," he said. "So it would have almost no push on you. It might obscure your vision if it lifts dust, and that's what we're looking for. We're seeing all the signatures, but we're not seeing dust being lifted yet.   "These events are starting to occur more and more often. We have measured 21 thus far, but we are still out of the season where they occur. We expect to see more in the future."   Along with keeping tabs on the weather, another instrument aboard Curiosity is monitoring the radiation environment, a critical factor for engineers contemplating future manned missions.   Don Hassler, principal investigator for the Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, said radiation levels at the surface vary daily, rising when atmospheric pressure drops and decreasing with the pressure goes up.   "Basically, we're finding that the Mars atmosphere is acting as a shield for the radiation on the surface and as the atmosphere gets thicker, that provides more of a shield and therefore we see a dip in our radiation dose," he said. "This dip is on the order of 3 to 5 percent and it's very reliable, we see it every day."   But he said it's too early to draw any conclusions about what sort of shielding future astronauts might need, in large part because the effects of major solar storms are not yet known. While Earth's magnetic field acts as a protective shield during solar storms, Mars has no such protection.   "The astronauts can live in this environment," Hassler said. But the big question is how much radiation will an astronaut receive during an eight- to nine-month voyage to Mars, a six-month stay on the surface and then the long flight back to Earth.   "When you add up all those different contributions, you need to stay within your career limits," he said. "So over time, we're going to get those numbers. Since we've been on the surface, we have not yet seen a large solar flare or solar particle event like we saw during cruise (to Mars). When we do see one, that will be very interesting and very important."   Mars rover Curiosity set to hit the road again   Alicia Chang - Associated Press   After playing in the sand, the Curiosity rover is poised to trek across the Martian landscape in search of a rock to drill into, scientists reported Thursday.   The six-wheel rover has been parked for more than a month at a sand dune where it has been busy scooping up soil, sniffing the atmosphere and measuring radiation levels on the surface. Its next task is to zero in on a rock and that requires driving to a new location.   Mission deputy scientist Ashwin Vasavada expected Curiosity to be on the move in the "next few days."   "It's the bedrock which really gives you the story of ancient Mars," said Vasavada of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $2.5 billion mission. "The soil is a little harder to interpret because we don't know how old it is or where it came from."   The car-size rover touched down in Gale Crater, an ancient depression near the Martian equator, in August on a two-year mission to probe whether the landing site once had conditions capable of supporting microbial life. Armed with a high-tech suite of instruments, it's the most sophisticated spacecraft to ever land on the red planet.   During the first three months, a weather station aboard Curiosity detected brief drops in air pressure, a sign of whirlwinds in the region.   "These events are starting to occur more and more often," said Manuel de la Torre Juarez of NASA JPL. "We expect to see more in the future."   Previous rovers have spotted and even recorded dust devils dancing across the Martian terrain, but scientists said Curiosity has not yet seen evidence that the swirling winds have lifted dust.   Curiosity's ultimate destination is a 3-mile-high mountain rising from the center of the crater floor that's rich in mineral deposits. Scientists had hoped to drive to the base of the mountain before the end of the year, but that doesn't look likely after the extended stay at its current spot.   NASA Mars Curiosity rover may have caught dust devils in action   Amina Khan - Los Angeles Times   NASA’s Curiosity rover has felt what appear to be dust devils pass by as it samples the Martian atmosphere, mission scientists said Thursday.   Though the Mars Science Laboratory rover has yet to catch the whirlwinds on camera, its Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) has recorded pressure dips and wind shifts that often signal a vortex’s presence, said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Manuel de la Torre Juarez, the instrument’s investigation scientist.   Curiosity has been photographing, laser-zapping and even eating rocks since its Aug. 5 landing in Gale Crater. It has spent some 40 Martian days in the Rocknest dune, where it scooped, sieved and sampled its first bits of soil on the Red Planet. Now its sensors are providing new information about how the air above those rocks behaves.   At roughly one-hundredth the density of Earth’s atmosphere, Mars’ envelope of air is too thin to protect against radiation from space, but it’s just thick enough to have wind and massive sandstorms, the scientists said. It’s also highly reactive to the sun's heat, expanding during the day (lowering pressure) and shrinking at night (raising pressure), thus creating daily atmospheric tides. The pressure also rises as winter gives way to summer, when the polar ice caps begin to melt, releasing the once-frozen carbon dioxide into the air.   Curiosity’s landing spot wasn’t as flat as previous rover landing sites; the spacecraft’s innovative landing technology allowed scientists to choose a more challenging spot. All those ups and downs of terrain make it interesting to study how wind behaves in such terrain rather than on a plain, said Claire Newman of Ashima Research in Pasadena, a REMS instrument collaborator.   And the wind isn't behaving quite as expected: Rather than seeing air flow up slopes during the day and down slopes during the night, the rover is picking up a strong current running through the ring made between the crater rim and the upward slope to Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high mound in the middle of it. Understanding the winds may provide a clue as to how the strangely shaped Gale Crater formed.   Curiosity continues on its two-year mission toward Mount Sharp, where it will study whether the planet was ever hospitable to life. As Mars heads into springtime, the rover will chart how the atmosphere changes through the seasons. In the meantime, Curiosity will keep busy by using the other tools in its arsenal. It's just about ready to break out its drill, said deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, and set off for the next pit stop on Mars.   Winds on Mars swirl over Curiosity   Dan Vergano - USA Today   Dust devils have twice whirled over NASA's Curiosity rover, mission scientists said Thursday in a first weather report from Mars.   The $2.5 billion rover, which landed Aug. 5 on Mars inside Gale Crater, has tracked the Martian weather for the past 90 days.   "Gale Crater is a very interesting place for winds," says mission scientist Claire Newman of Ashima Research in Pasadena, Calif. After examining wind speed and direction, the team found that wind swirls in a "moat" around the mountain in the center of the crater, informally designated as Mount Sharp.   Dust devils seem to occur in mornings, though rarely, as the Martian air, less than 1% as thick as Earth's atmosphere, grows warmer. Sudden pressure drops and wind direction shifts accompany the dust devils. Manuel de la Torre Juarez of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena says two dust devils have passed over the rover.   "It's sort of mid-October on Mars," JPL's Ashwin Vasavada says. Temperatures range from -130 F at night to above 0 during the day, he says. Because the rover rests on the southern hemisphere of Mars, temperatures have grown warmer and the atmosphere thicker, as carbon dioxide frozen as ice melts on the planet's South Pole with spring's approach.   Radiation on Mars fluctuates, less during the day and is about half what the rover experienced while it was in space on its way to Mars. Although far more intense than radiation on Earth's surface, "absolutely, astronauts can live in these conditions," says mission scientist Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Space station astronauts see similar radiation doses, for example, Hassler says. "It's never been a question of 'can we go to Mars'. It is a question of how can we best protect our astronauts when we get there."   Curiosity's unsung skill: scouting Mars for a human mission   Pete Spotts - Christian Science Monitor   Hey, Curiosity! Are you sure you're not in Kansas?   Earlier this month, two tiny twisters buffeted NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in the space of 11 minutes. They were two of 21 whirlwinds the rover has detected from its home in Gale Crater so far – with more expected as Mars' southern hemisphere enters its spring and summer.   In one sense, this seems like a ho-hum observation. Whirlwinds and dust devils are common on Mars, although no evidence of them had been found in images of Gale Crater taken from orbit.   But they represent a very important element of the planet's dust cycle, which is a key driver of Mars' climate, says Manuel de la Torre Juarez, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Their presence inside the crater, combined with the most sophisticated atmospheric monitoring station humans have landed on the planet, give scientists an unprecedented opportunity to unravel the role these mini-twisters play in Mars' current climate.   The opportunity highlights a little-heralded role for Curiosity, whose primary mission is to analyze rocks and soil to determine if the crater might have once been a suitable habitat for microbial life. The rover and its weather station and radiation monitor are monitoring today's environment, both with an eye toward understanding the evolution of the planet's atmosphere over billions of years, but also as a gauge of the hazards astronauts might face during a potential mission.   One story that is unfolding involves the changing thickness of the atmosphere with each Martian day, called a sol, and even with seasonal changes. Those changes impact the amount of radiation – cosmic rays and charged particles from the sun – reaching the surface.   For instance, sensors on the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) have detected an unexpected and large day-night shift in atmospheric pressure, corresponding to changes the sun brings to the atmosphere. During the day, the atmosphere heats, expands, and grows less dense as it does so. This reduces the amount of pressure the atmosphere exerts on pressure sensors. At night, when temperatures drop to about minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the pressure increases as the atmosphere contracts and grows more dense.   At the same time, the rover's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) has found that cosmic and other forms of radiation peak during the day and drop at night as changes to the atmosphere thicken or thin this tenuous shield.   REMS's pressure sensors also are picking up a longer-term shift in pressure as the southern hemisphere moves into spring and summer, notes Claire Newman, a scientist with the Ashima Institute in Pasadena and a member of the REMS science team.   "The entire Martian atmosphere is growing in size," she says, as the south pole ices vaporize. "Each year, the Martian atmosphere shrinks and grows by about 30 percent because a portion of the atmosphere is freezing out to the poles in fall, then vaporizing again in spring. That, of course, is unlike anything we see on Earth."   Teasing out these cycles and their effect on the levels of radiation reaching the surface are important because "radiation is a life-limiting factor for habitability," says Don Hassler, a scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and the lead investigator for RAD. The information also is important in designing a safe mission for astronauts.   Indeed, RAD represents the first time humans have measured surface-radiation levels on any planet other than Earth.   But for that Dorothy and Toto kind of feel, nothing beats the dust devils. These features tend to form when warm air at the ground quickly rises into a patch of cooler air. If conditions are right, the narrow column of warm air begins to rotate, thinning as it rises, which increases its spin. Additional warm air near the surface can get drawn into the vortex, perpetuating the mini-twister as it pirouettes across the Martian surface.   As twisters go, these are among the the solar system's 98-pound weaklings. If an astronaut happened to be standing by the rover when one passed, dust might have obscured her view briefly, but she wouldn't have felt a thing because the Martian atmosphere is so thin.   Still, collectively, dust devils join dust storms in kicking up silt that warms the Martian atmosphere, says Dr. de la Torre Juarez, the investigation scientist for REMS.   In addition to their effect on climate, they can give new life to dust-covered solar panels by sweeping the panels free of accumulated silt. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity experienced the cleaning power of dust devils.   But dust devils also can threaten technology on the surface. On Mars, they can grow up to 100 times bigger than Earth's dust devils. As they spin, collisions among the dust particles can build up charges of static electricity that can affect sensitive instruments.   "That's an active area of study," de la Torre Juarez says.   And as for the Curiosity-Kansas connection, there actually is one. The rover's name was submitted in 2009 by Clara Ma, then a sixth-grader who hailed from Lenexa, Kan.   END