Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 14, 2012 6:49:12 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - December 14, 2012 and JSC Today

Happy Friday everyone. Have a safe and good weekend.

Friday, December 14, 2012

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Space Station Crew Expands to Six on Dec. 19
2.            Read All About it! CubeSats in Orbit After Historic Station Deployment
3.            Houston Technology Center is Bringing Tech Champs to the JSC Community
4.            Weight Watchers at JSC Holiday Schedule
5.            What Do Blood Vessels and Oil Wells Have in Common? More Than You Think
________________________________________     QUOTE OF THE DAY
" Nothing reduces the odds against you like ignoring them."

-- Robert Brault
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1.            Space Station Crew Expands to Six on Dec. 19
Expedition 34/35 NASA Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn, Soyuz Commander Roman Romanenko and Canadian Space Agency Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield are scheduled to launch at 6:12 a.m. CST on Dec. 19 (6:12 p.m. Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They are set to dock to the station's Rassvet module at approximately 8:12 a.m. on Dec. 21.
The trio will be greeted by Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford of NASA and Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin of Roscosmos, who have been aboard the station since late October.
Today at 1 p.m., NASA TV will air a video file of the Expedition 34/35 crew's activities in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. For NASA TV coverage of the launch, click here.
JSC employees with wired computer network connections can view NASA TV using onsite IPTV on channels 404 (standard definition) or 4541 (HD).
If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367.
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 http://www.nasa.gov/station

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2.            Read All About it! CubeSats in Orbit After Historic Station Deployment
Typically satellites launch from Earth, requiring dedicated launch vehicles to propel them into the proper orbit. The cost for this launch scenario could be reduced considerably if there was another way to get the satellites into their optimal orbit. The Japan Aerospace and Exploration Agency found a way to cut the costs of this activity by designing a small satellite launcher, installed recently on the International Space Station.

The Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (J-SSOD) is capable of launching small satellites from the station, using the JEM Remote Manipulator System, which is like a small robotic arm. Read more about J-SSOD and how it adds yet another great capability to the space station.
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111

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3.            Houston Technology Center is Bringing Tech Champs to the JSC Community
Save the date! The Houston Technology Center (HTC) will start presenting Tech Champs in the JSC community beginning Jan. 11.
Open to the public, this forum offers some of Houston's best networking opportunities for the technology community, as well as updates from three of HTC's client companies. Don't miss your opportunity to learn about them and their plans for 2013.
Light breakfast and networking - 7:15 to 7:45 a.m.
Presentations - 7:45 to 9 a.m.
To register, click here.
Event Date: Friday, January 11, 2013   Event Start Time:7:15 AM   Event End Time:9:00 AM
Event Location: Aerospace Transition Center, 16921 El Camino Real

Add to Calendar

Pat Kidwell x37156 http://www.houstontech.org/events/1079/

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4.            Weight Watchers at JSC Holiday Schedule
Monday, Dec. 17, is the last JSC Weight Watchers at Work meeting for 2012. Due to the Christmas and New Year's holiday weeks, we will not hold meetings on-site Dec. 24 or 31. The next on-site meeting will be held Jan. 7.
As always, during this holiday period, members can attend any other Weight Watchers meeting by presenting their Monthly Pass. And, all Monthly Pass members are welcome to join the on-site Monday meetings held in Building 45, Room 551, with weigh-in beginning at 11:30 a.m. and the meeting from noon to 12:30 p.m.
Join now using the link below to avoid the new year rush to get rid of the extra holiday pounds! Weight Watchers has just introduced the new WW 360 Program to help make healthy living become second nature. Come to one of our meetings to learn more.
Use JSC Company ID 24156, pass code WW24156 to join.
Julie Kliesing x31540 https://wellness.weightwatchers.com

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5.            What Do Blood Vessels and Oil Wells Have in Common? More Than You Think
JSC's Strategic Opportunities and Partnership Development Office made an impressive debut on Dec. 3 as it joined with Houston's globally recognized oil and gas and medical communities for Pumps & Pipes 6, a growing collaboration started by some of the region's brightest engineers and scientists to exchange strategies for solving tough technical problems that could improve the lives of everyone. JSC brought some of its own exciting technological innovations to share, and some future alliances with businesses and the medical community may result from this collaborative effort. Read more about it on the JSC home page.
JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111

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________________________________________
JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. To see an archive of previous JSC Today announcements, go to http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/news/jsctoday/archives.

NASA TV: 1 pm Central (2 EST) – Video file of the Expedition 34/35 crew activities in Baikonur

Human Spaceflight News
Friday – December 14, 2012

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Study: Thousands would lose jobs from NASA, NOAA budget cuts

Eric Katz - Government Executive

Federal scientific agencies stand to lose thousands of jobs from sequestration, an industry report predicted Thursday. The Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group for government contractors, found in its study that the automatic cuts set to take effect on Jan. 2, 2013, unless there is a deficit reduction deal would cost 20,500 NASA contractors their jobs in 2013, while the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration could shed more than 2,500, largely in satellite building and operation. AIA based its estimates on the Office of Management and Budget's guidelines that sequestration would slash both agencies' budgets by 8.2 percent.

1,300 aerospace jobs said at risk in Huntsville if nation goes over fiscal cliff

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

More than 1,300 aerospace jobs will be at risk in Huntsville in 2013 if the national budget goes over the so-called "fiscal cliff," according to an aerospace industry study released Thursday. None of those jobs would be NASA civil servants, who are protected by federal law from layoffs in 2013, the study's sponsors said. Civil servants might, however, face furloughs. Instead, the job losses would be borne by contractors, sub-contractors and businesses providing goods and services to the Marshall Space Flight Center and its employees, according to the study released by the Aerospace Industries Association in Washington, D.C.. It was conducted by Dr. Stephen S. Fuller, a professor and analyst at George Mason University.

Will NASA fall off the fiscal cliff? Budget cuts to cost Houston more than 5,000 NASA jobs, study says

Molly Ryan - Houston Business Journal

Houston should prepare to brace itself for a large round of NASA job cuts come Jan. 2 if new federal tax hikes and spending cuts — commonly referred to as the fiscal cliff — go into effect. A report from the Aerospace Industries Association found that if the 8.2 percent cut to NASA's budget goes through, 5,610 jobs would be lost at Houston's Johnson Space Center next year. This would have a direct impact of more than $320 million. According to the report, Houston would be the hardest city hit from NASA cuts, and all lost jobs would be from the private sector. All other cities and states would experience fewer job cuts.

Researchers hope the secret to aging gracefully is in outer space

Tom Blackwell - National Post

It seems astronauts hovering in weightless environments and earthlings reclining in front of the TV share a surprising trait: both avoid the effects of gravity — and both age rapidly as a result. Now a unique joint venture between Canada's health-research and space agencies is investigating the parallels between space flight and terrestrial aging, hoping to find ways to prevent the ill effects of each. Astronauts and inactive older people suffer similar bone loss, muscle atrophy, blood-vessel changes and even fainting spells, say scientists, and their respective conditions can provide lessons for both domains.

Space tourism poses challenges on health

Erin Allday - San Francisco Chronicle

The world may be on the brink of a vast new frontier of tourism - and that could raise a few odd, and at this point unanswerable, questions for doctors. Such as, "What is the maximum time my patient with osteoporosis can spend on a vacation at a space hotel?" That is exactly a question posed in a paper released Friday, proposing that the medical community needs to start thinking now about how to treat and advise the space tourists of the future.

How To Decide If Space Tourists Are Fit To Fly

Sarah Zielinski - National Public Radio

Childhood dreams of being an astronaut are easy. Actually blasting off is a little harder. But now people who have longed to go into space can buy a ticket, if they've got the cash. Are they healthy enough to make the voyage, though? That's becoming a pressing question as the options for leaving Earth multiply.

West Shore students' experiment to be performed in space

Mackenzie Ryan - Florida Today

West Shore Jr./Sr. High Students will soon have the chance many scientists have dreamed of: Their experiment will be conducted in space. Selected in the Teacher in Space competition, their science experiment will journey to the International Space Station in April and be conducted by astronauts there. About 20 students and science teacher Amy McCormick devised the winning study, titled: A Study of How Microgravity Affects the Activity of Enzymes in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Using the Model of Papain and Gelatin. "It's pretty phenomenal," Principal Rick Fleming said. "We're excited about it." The study was chosen from about 2,500 applications.
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Canadian Astronaut Will Strum Christmas Carols in Space

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

After years of leading his fellow astronauts in Christmas carols on the ground, Chris Hadfield will be playing holiday tunes this year on the International Space Station. The Canadian astronaut will blast off toward the station Dec. 19 to join the Expedition 34 and 35 missions. He will spend the next five months, including the festive season, in space, separated from his family. Hadfield will also be away from Max Q and Bandella, the two astronaut bands he belongs to that occasionally do gigs in Houston.

York native outer-space bound
Chris Cassidy to blast off around mid-March

Sandell Morse - York County Coast Star

Hometown astronaut Chris Cassidy is about to find out what life is like for six months in zero gravity. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration flight engineer and Navy SEAL Commander will be living on the International Space Station from the end of March until the middle of September 2013, Cassidy said from NASA in Houston, Texas. While there, he will take part in York's Four on the Fourth road race July 4, via treadmill and a DVD of the 4-mile course sent by race organizer Robin Cogger. He and Cogger attended York High School together. Cassidy graduated in 1988.

The Last Shuttle Flight
On board Atlantis, the closing of an era

Tony Reichhardt - Air & Space Smithsonian Magazine (January 2013)

Inside the space station's U.S. lab module, the four Atlantis astronauts should have been starting to assemble, but they weren't. Space shuttle commander Chris Ferguson kept eyeing his watch. "Everybody get in here! We've gotta be ready!" he yelled. It was the eighth day of the 135th and final space shuttle mission, and President Obama was scheduled for a televised call in just five minutes. The shuttle astronauts and the six members of the station crew should have been milling in front of the camera, tucking in their shirts and straightening their hair. Instead, they were all still rushing around trying to finish their tasks…

PBS to air Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope, 1/31

BroadwayWorld.com

Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope is the untold inspirational story of Colonel Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot and son of Holocaust survivors who became the first and only astronaut from Israel, embarking on a mission with the most diverse shuttle crew ever to explore space. Ramon realized the significance of "being the first" and his journey of self-discovery turned into a mission to tell the world a powerful story about the resilience of the human spirit. Although the seven astronauts of the Columbia perished on February 1, 2003, a remarkable story of hope, friendship across cultures, and an enduring faith emerged.

What will it take to refire our space dreams?

Scott Tilley - Florida Today (Viewpoint)

(Tilley is a Professor of software engineering in the Department of Computer Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology)

Last week marked the 40th anniversary of Apollo 17. It was the final manned mission to the moon. It launched on Dec. 7, 1972. It was the only nighttime launch of the Apollo program. I've seen numerous space shuttles and rocket launches at night, but I can only imagine what it must have been like to see the massive Saturn V rocket blast off, it's five huge F1 engines burning brightly against the dark sky. The three-person crew of Apollo 17 returned safely to Earth on Dec. 19. Subsequent Apollo moon missions were planned, but they never took place. We haven't put our feet on the moon since.

NASA, Got Space Exploration? Get Goals, Get Funding and Get Uhura.

Michael Venables - Forbes (Viewpoint)

There is a summary lack of confidence in NASA's ability to explore outer space these days. The press is full of recent accounts that are critical of NASA's ability to advance American goals for space exploration, create a Mars colony, not to mention expanding a program of planetary exploration and the colonization of the outer planets of our solar system. The decreased allocation of funds to NASA programs was reported in the press as early as Feb. 13, lowering available funds for planetary science programs that support Mars exploration and missions to outer planets in the Solar System. There are three main challenges at this time in NASA's history. The first challenge is to clearly voice a renewed commitment to the broader mission and goals of U.S. cooperative space exploration, not just deploy technical capabilities and, somewhere along the way, rekindle taxpayer support.
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COMPLETE STORIES

Study: Thousands would lose jobs from NASA, NOAA budget cuts

Eric Katz - Government Executive

Federal scientific agencies stand to lose thousands of jobs from sequestration, an industry report predicted Thursday.

The Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group for government contractors, found in its study that the automatic cuts set to take effect on Jan. 2, 2013, unless there is a deficit reduction deal would cost 20,500 NASA contractors their jobs in 2013, while the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration could shed more than 2,500, largely in satellite building and operation. AIA based its estimates on the Office of Management and Budget's guidelines that sequestration would slash both agencies' budgets by 8.2 percent.

"Such a deep and reckless cut to these agencies would senselessly jeopardize U.S. space leadership and stifle exactly the kind of investment in innovation that our economy needs," the group wrote in its report.

AIA speculated that because the 2010 NASA Authorization Act prohibits any cuts to its federal workforce through fiscal year 2013, all the jobs the agency losses would come from the private sector contractors.

The report, conducted by George Mason University economist Stephen Fuller, also found that "industry clusters" -- areas with high concentrations of aerospace activity -- would feel the effects of NASA and NOAA budget cuts.

Fuller also conducted an AIA study in July, which predicted 2.14 million job losses from both the public and private sector, should the cuts be implemented. Some experts, however, have said industry claims of mass layoffs as a result of sequestration are deeply exaggerated.

NASA did not rule out the potential for non-civil servant job loss, saying that while it has begun preliminary discussions to plan for sequestration, it does not believe the cuts will ultimately take place.

"We do expect that all sides will reach an agreement," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel told Government Executive. "That being said, we're still assessing what impact that it will have if it actually goes through in a couple weeks."

An official at the Commerce Department, NOAA's parent agency, referred Government Executive to OMB's sequestration report."

1,300 aerospace jobs said at risk in Huntsville if nation goes over fiscal cliff

Lee Roop - Huntsville Times

More than 1,300 aerospace jobs will be at risk in Huntsville in 2013 if the national budget goes over the so-called "fiscal cliff," according to an aerospace industry study released Thursday.

None of those jobs would be NASA civil servants, who are protected by federal law from layoffs in 2013, the study's sponsors said. Civil servants might, however, face furloughs.

Instead, the job losses would be borne by contractors, sub-contractors and businesses providing goods and services to the Marshall Space Flight Center and its employees, according to the study released by the Aerospace Industries Association in Washington, D.C.. It was conducted by Dr. Stephen S. Fuller, a professor and analyst at George Mason University.

Cuts of that magnitude would chop Marshall's contractor workforce by more than a third as the center tries to build a new heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts to Mars. Marshall, with a $2.5 billion annual budget, employs about 6,000 people broken into 2,400 civil service employees and 3,600 contractor employees. According to the study, the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 exempted NASA civil servants from any job losses through fiscal year 2013.

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, said Thursday night that the job losses forecast "are consistent with (predictions) we saw on the defense side." Brooks said, "I'm not happy about it," but there is little Congress can do until President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner reach an agreement to stop it. He predicted that nothing will happen until "right before the new year."

Brooks describes sequestration as "a Barack Obama policy initiative" that Congress accepted, although he voted against it. "Sequestration originated in the White House," he said, citing a recent book by Washington Post reporter and editor Bob Woodward. "It was their idea." However, Brooks said he holds out some optimism because the president promised in a debate "that it would not occur."

The Huntsville center is just getting back up to speed after losing hundreds of jobs when President Obama decided to end the Constellation rocket program in 2010. Constellation was supposed to follow the space shuttle as America's next ride into space, but the president turned to commercial companies like SpaceX after the program went over budget and behind schedule. Congress later ordered a new NASA rocket, the White House agreed, and that rocket is what Huntsville is building now.

NASA and all of the federal government face mandatory budget cuts -- known as sequestration -- if Congress and the White House can't agree on a new package of spending cuts and revenue increases by Jan. 1. That deadline, which is federal law, was set by Congress itself as a way to force a deal to cut the nation's budget deficit. It is widely referred to as the "fiscal cliff" because the spending cuts and tax increases that will automatically kick in without a deal could start a new economic recession. Some recent reports from Washington have downplayed the "cliff" analogy, however, saying that any impact from sequestration would be more gradual than going over a cliff.

Cuts to NASA would be clustered where it operates field centers, including Huntsville. Without a budget deal, NASA and all federal agencies would face at least an 8.2 percent budget cut for fiscal year 2013 and more cuts over the next eight years. The defense department would face more. Total job losses across the space agency could top 20,000 jobs, Fuller's study says.

Fuller said in an interview Thursday afternoon that the study should be seen as "a better measure of vulnerability than actual impact." The job loss predictions themselves should be taken with a grain of salt, he said.

There are many uncertainties as the sequestration threat approaches. NASA hasn't said how it plans to make the cuts, and it has certain programs - the International Space Station, for example - that can't be cut. Several hundred people in Huntsville directly support the station's science experiments.

The agency could also exempt certain priority programs, Fuller said, and the sequestration procedure itself could protect programs that are already funded for this year, contracts that are already in place, and employees working on those programs.

But if NASA is ordered to make substantial cuts, Fuller said, there are only a limited number of places it can do that. Huntsville, home of one of its centers, is one of those places.

The organization that sponsored the study, the Aerospace Industries Association, said Thursday that the biggest threat to America's space program now is America's own government. "This report demonstrates that the biggest single threat to our space programs' continued success are arbitrary and capricious budget cuts," said AIA President and CEO Marion C. Blakey.

Will NASA fall off the fiscal cliff? Budget cuts to cost Houston more than 5,000 NASA jobs, study says

Molly Ryan - Houston Business Journal

Houston should prepare to brace itself for a large round of NASA job cuts come Jan. 2 if new federal tax hikes and spending cuts — commonly referred to as the fiscal cliff — go into effect.

A report from the Aerospace Industries Association found that if the 8.2 percent cut to NASA's budget goes through, 5,610 jobs would be lost at Houston's Johnson Space Center next year. This would have a direct impact of more than $320 million.

According to the report, Houston would be the hardest city hit from NASA cuts, and all lost jobs would be from the private sector. All other cities and states would experience fewer job cuts.

After Texas, California would see the second-largest impact — 4,586 jobs and an economic impact of more than $293 million. A total of more than 20,500 jobs are expected to be lost across the nation, a direct impact of more than $1 trillion.

Houston businesses expressed concern about NASA funding before this year's presidential election.

Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, told the Houston Business Journal that he believed the current administration does not support space endeavors.

"(President Obama) has done as much as he can to eliminate the space program — human space flight is what drives the very best in new technology and innovation," Mitchell said.

AIA further argues in its report that if NASA cuts go through, there would not only be fewer scientific discoveries, but also the U.S. would lose high-skilled jobs, which could result in fewer young students looking to train for high-tech careers.

Researchers hope the secret to aging gracefully is in outer space

Tom Blackwell - National Post

It seems astronauts hovering in weightless environments and earthlings reclining in front of the TV share a surprising trait: both avoid the effects of gravity — and both age rapidly as a result.

Now a unique joint venture between Canada's health-research and space agencies is investigating the parallels between space flight and terrestrial aging, hoping to find ways to prevent the ill effects of each.

Astronauts and inactive older people suffer similar bone loss, muscle atrophy, blood-vessel changes and even fainting spells, say scientists, and their respective conditions can provide lessons for both domains.

"To me, there really are a lot of overlaps," said Richard Hughson, a University of Waterloo expert on vascular aging and brain health. "Space flight is the ultimate in sedentary lifestyle. When you're up in space, you're floating around, when you want to move a heavy object, you just give it a little push and away it goes."

Billed as the first formal collaboration of its kind in the world, the project of the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research hosted a workshop for domestics scientists, doctors and business people in Ottawa earlier this year, and plans a broader international conference in 2013.

Typically in top physical shape, astronauts would seem on the surface to have little in common with seniors, especially those with particularly inactive lifestyles. Yet development of human bodies depends greatly on mechanical forces at play when people walk, lift things and otherwise move the weight of their own bodies or other objects against the ubiquitous pull of gravity.

In space, the forces of gravity are absent; on Earth, people in industrialized societies increasingly lead sedentary lifestyles that similarly decondition their bodies, even as drugs and surgery keep them alive longer, scientists say. Astronauts experience "gravity deprivation," while their earthly counterparts suffer "gravity withdrawal," notes a 2009 journal article co-authored by Joan Vernikos, a former NASA life-sciences director.

Dr. Vernikos is already applying some of the findings on space travellers' health to worldly concerns, publishing a book — Sitting Kills, Movement Heals — this year that advises readers "how to use gravity to achieve lifelong health."

The head of the CIHR's institute of aging initially did a double take when the space agency approached him about working together, admitted Nicole Buckley, an agency chief scientist who spearheaded the initiative. But long sojourns in orbit provide a unique laboratory, she said.

"All life as we know it evolved with gravity," noted Ms. Buckley. "As a scientist, if you want to know what something does, you take it away and see what happens…. If you take gravity away, you can see the other forces that maybe we can do something about."

It appears the muscle atrophy, bone loss and degradation to the cardiovascular system brought on by the weightlessness of space are mostly reversible after the space travellers return to earth.

To counteract such effects, though, astronauts on the space station are now encouraged to spend up to 2-1/2 hours a day exercising with special equipment, which ends up being about an hour of actual workout given the time to set up and stow away the gear, said Prof. Hughson.

His focus is on the cardiovascular effects of space flight and aging, including the fact that the volume of blood flowing through astronauts bodies actually shrinks by about 10% with the reduced demands of weightlessness.

The result is that many suffer fainting spells after they return to earth, said the CIHR-funded Prof. Hughson, who sees a strong link to the falls that older people sometimes take when they get out of bed quickly at night and faint, their blood pressure lower than normal.

Other work he and colleagues have done shows that astronauts also end up with blood vessels that are less flexible, which in turn seems to restrict blood flow to the brain. Senior citizens' arteries similarly "stiffen" and studies are investigating whether the curbed brain blood flow may be affecting their cognitive abilities, said Prof. Hughson.

Space tourism poses challenges on health

Erin Allday - San Francisco Chronicle

The world may be on the brink of a vast new frontier of tourism - and that could raise a few odd, and at this point unanswerable, questions for doctors.

Such as, "What is the maximum time my patient with osteoporosis can spend on a vacation at a space hotel?"

That is exactly a question posed in a paper released Friday, proposing that the medical community needs to start thinking now about how to treat and advise the space tourists of the future.

"If someone's dream is to fly, we want them to fly," said Dr. Marlene Grenon, a UCSF vascular surgeon and co-author of the paper published in the British Medical Journal. "This field of space tourism is being created as we speak. It's going to be important to discuss the medical challenges now."

So maybe it'll be a few years - or decades, if we're talking about hotels - before space tourism takes off in the United States. As of now, only seven non-astronaut travelers have made it to space, all of them on board Russian rockets that carried them to the International Space Station for tens of millions of dollars each.

But the American space tourism industry is blooming, with half a dozen aerospace companies building aircraft to take regular folk into space - be it on two-hour suborbital adventures or multiday cruises around the planet.

500 ready to go

Virgin Galactic, the best known of the space tourism companies, has more than 500 reservations - at $200,000 a ticket - for its first suborbital jaunt, which could take place in the next year or two. Just last week, a California state senator introduced legislation to give tax breaks to companies that build spaceports for launching spaceships.

With space tourism on the cusp of becoming a real possibility for people who don't have the health and fitness of a NASA astronaut, now is the time to think about medical guidelines, said aerospace medicine experts.

There's a wealth of information about the effects of space travel on career astronauts - from the symptoms of space sickness to the long-term repercussions of lengthy stays at the International Space Station. But the effects on the average person with imperfect health are unknown.

"If you're going into space for minutes, or even for a day or two, I would think the impact would be relatively small for the average somewhat healthy person," said Dr. Peter Lee, a Stanford heart researcher who has conducted experiments on muscle atrophy in space.

"The question is if you get into patients with mild heart disease or pulmonary disease," Lee said. "No one with those diseases has ever been allowed to fly. So some of it will be a little bit of trial and error, and initially (the space tourism companies) will probably be conservative."

Vague FAA guidelines

In June, the Federal Aviation Administration's Commercial Space Transportation office issued a report with medical guidelines for pilots, crew members and passengers on spaceships. But those guidelines are vague and hardly definitive, mostly proposing questions to ask or exams to give to patients, and offering few restrictions.

The report suggests, for example, that patients be screened for asthma, diabetes, cancer or heart problems, although it doesn't say passengers should be excluded for these conditions. It also states that potential space tourists be asked whether they suffer from claustrophobia or a fear of flying, or if they have a cigarette or alcohol addiction that could make them unpredictable, if not flat-out dangerous, in a spacecraft orbiting the planet.

Ultimately, though, the decision on who's healthy enough to travel will be up to the tourism operators. On the Virgin Galactic website, suborbital flights - 2 1/2-hour trips that leave Earth's atmosphere and let passengers experience about five minutes of zero gravity - are compared to "adventure sports," and the company states that it doesn't anticipate any medical restrictions on who may travel.

What to expect

Most aerospace medicine experts agree that space sickness - which can include nausea, vertigo and headaches - will be pretty common among space tourists, as it is among astronauts now. More severe effects like bone loss, immune suppression and fluid redistribution only occur in people who stay in space for many days or weeks and may not apply to space tourists - at least until the hotels are built.

What's not clear is what effect even short trips to space may have on common conditions like diabetes and heart disease. People with those can't become astronauts, but they shouldn't necessarily be discouraged from ever leaving Earth's atmosphere, doctors say.

"The government astronauts, they're very healthy and they pass tons of medical screening. But we don't want to only fly the healthiest people," said Grenon, UCSF's vascular surgeon. "The normals, the everyday civilians that want to fly, they should fly."

How To Decide If Space Tourists Are Fit To Fly

Sarah Zielinski - National Public Radio

Childhood dreams of being an astronaut are easy. Actually blasting off is a little harder.

But now people who have longed to go into space can buy a ticket, if they've got the cash. Are they healthy enough to make the voyage, though?

That's becoming a pressing question as the options for leaving Earth multiply.

A company called Space Adventures has been sending tourists to the International Space Station since 2001. Virgin Galactic has already signed up more than 500 people to take trips to the edge of space. They'll start blasting off next year. And startup Golden Spike said earlier this month it plans to start sending people to the moon, perhaps as soon as 2020.

"If space tourism starts, everyone who can afford to will be able to fly," says S. Marlene Grenon, a vascular surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. "That raises the question of how we can make it possible for anyone to fly into space if that's their dream."

With costs ranging from $200,000 to $750 million per flyer, space isn't likely to rival Disneyland for tourists anytime soon. But thousands of people could soon be headed up into space.

NASA's corps of astronauts are pretty fit to begin with. They're put through rigorous medical testing and can be disqualified for conditions ranging from kidney stones to cardiovascular problems. Space tourists and workers could be a less healthy lot.

"All that's required by the FAA is informed consent," Grenon says. "It's up to the operators to decide" who's fit to fly.

Depending on the rules that those operators institute, physicians could be faced with clearing their patients for flight. So Grenon gathered a group of aerospace medical professionals, including astronaut Millie Hughes-Fulford, to provide some advice. Their paper appears in the British Medical Journal.

Space travel, Grenon notes, is very different from life on earth. "Your body doesn't feel gravity," she says, and "the blood volume goes more towards the chest and the face. That's why astronauts have bird legs and puffy faces." Within a few days, space travelers could be experiencing motion sickness, nausea, sinus congestion or dizziness.

Back on the ground, they may suffer bone and muscle loss or kidney stones. They may have a weakened immune system and have a greater risk of infection.

Those risks are all known from extensive studies of the 500 or so people who have gone into space since Russian Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet in 1961. But people with all sorts of pre-existing conditions could soon be following Gagarin's path.

That doesn't mean, however, that any old medical condition should bar someone from space, Grenon and her colleagues say. Instead, a physician might help a patient with coronary artery disease to stabilize his blood pressure and heart rhythm . A pregnant woman would be advised to postpone her trip until after she gives birth.

Grenon recommends that doctors "optimize their medical treatment and make sure the risks are discussed and document those discussions."

Canadian Astronaut Will Strum Christmas Carols in Space

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

After years of leading his fellow astronauts in Christmas carols on the ground, Chris Hadfield will be playing holiday tunes this year on the International Space Station.

The Canadian astronaut will blast off toward the station Dec. 19 to join the Expedition 34 and 35 missions.

He will spend the next five months, including the festive season, in space, separated from his family. Hadfield will also be away from Max Q and Bandella, the two astronaut bands he belongs to that occasionally do gigs in Houston.

Luckily for Hadfield, he doesn't have to leave music on the ground completely. There is at least one musical souvenir from his country already onboard the orbiting laboratory: a Larrivée Parlor acoustic guitar, which was shipped to NASA years ago from its company's headquarters in Vancouver, Canada. Hadfield, a veteran of two space shuttle flights, plans to play the guitar during his down time on the station.

Christmas in orbit

At Christmastime, Hadfield and his crewmates will enjoy a festive dinner in space, likely with turkey and gravy for the main course and peach ambrosia for dessert.

"We will do the best to host a traditional Christmas kind of dinner," he said during a preflight press conference Tuesday (Dec. 11), telephoning from his quarantined room at Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, where a Russian Soyuz rocket is being prepared to launch Hadfield and two crewmates next week.

He added that the diversity of nations represented on the space station never guarantees a holiday will be celebrated by all, due to the workload that needs to be accomplished.

But Christmas is recognized by most of the space station residents this time around; the Russian cosmonauts, who celebrate Orthodox Christmas in January, have agreed to join in on Dec. 25 as well.

Music psychology

While music will have a festive use around Christmas time, Hadfield expects to use tunes as a tool to boost crew morale throughout his five months in space.

Hadfield will assume command of the space station during Expedition 35, becoming the first Canadian to do so. He's spent brief times on space stations before, having visited Mir and the ISS during his shuttle missions. This time, when he takes the helm, Hadfield said the health of the crew will be his primary focus.

Music, he pointed out, is a way to celebrate the good times and to mark the bad times. "Music is just an expression and the extension of life itself," he said.

Hadfield talked with his crewmates about how they will proceed if a loved one dies on Earth — "my worst fear." He previously served as part of the support team for American astronaut Dan Tani, whose mother died in a car crash in 2007 while Tani was in space.

Hadfield wanted to ensure a procedure is in place if tragedy befalls one of his crewmates during the upcoming mission.

"That would be extremely hard to deal with psychologically, for the whole crew," Hadfield acknowledged. But with the procedures set, he's hoping the worst doesn't happen, "touch wood."

Possible spacewalk

Much of Hadfield's time will be taken up in work while he's on the orbiting lab. There will be an estimated 130 scientific experiments being performed on board, each with a set of tasks and goals that require astronaut assistance. Among them is a Canadian experiment called Microflow, an Iron Man-like device that does near-instantaneous blood work on the astronaut guinea pigs.

One of Hadfield's notable achievements in spaceflight is extra-vehicular activity — in 2001, he was the first Canadian to do a spacewalk. For the occasion, NASA played Canada's national anthem in space (also a first) and dubbed Hadfield's spacewalking partner, Scott Parazynski, an "honorary Canadian."

NASA has no immediate plans to do a spacewalk during Hadfield's upcoming flight — yet. However, Hadfield acknowledged some "pretty intense conversations" are ongoing because of the breakdown of one minor system on station.

In the meantime, Hadfield said he's aiming to stay in the best shape possible in case there's a need to go outside. In any case, physical conditioning will be paramount for when the crew comes home and re-adapts to Earth's gravity.

And when that happens, Hadfield has one main hope for his crewmates: "When they land on Earth they are inspired to get to the front of the line, and get on that ride again."

York native outer-space bound
Chris Cassidy to blast off around mid-March

Sandell Morse - York County Coast Star

Hometown astronaut Chris Cassidy is about to find out what life is like for six months in zero gravity.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration flight engineer and Navy SEAL Commander will be living on the International Space Station from the end of March until the middle of September 2013, Cassidy said from NASA in Houston, Texas.

While there, he will take part in York's Four on the Fourth road race July 4, via treadmill and a DVD of the 4-mile course sent by race organizer Robin Cogger.

He and Cogger attended York High School together. Cassidy graduated in 1988.

Earlier this year, Cassidy contacted her about a way to connect York to his space station mission. Together they came up with the idea of Cassidy running a simulated course of the road race he once ran on the ground.

In the weightlessness of space, however, "if you run on a treadmill, you bounce off," Cassidy said.

To stay on, astronauts wear a backpack that's clipped by bungee cords to the base of the treadmill, he said. The exercise is necessary to maintain strength and conditioning in zero gravity.

Astronauts have described feeling wobbly, as though they're walking on a trampoline, when they return to Earth, and they're not allowed to drive a vehicle for three days, according to Cassidy, who previously spent two weeks at the space station in 2009.

"This will be more of a home kind of feel," Cassidy said of his six-month stay.

He and two cosmonauts will blast off in the Russian Soyuz, similar to the U.S. space shuttle, for the nine-minute powered flight to the International Space Station, located 200 miles above the Earth. When he went in 2009, Cassidy traveled in the space shuttle Endeavour.

"That's what a lot of people in this nation don't realize, we (the United States) can't get people to space anymore," he said. "Hopefully soon that's going to change. A commercial cargo vehicle already flies to the space station."

The space program needs a long-term, federal financial commitment, he said.

"Eventually we're going to get to a robust space program again," he said.

Cassidy will live on the space station with five other specialists from Russia, Canada and the U.S., including one woman during the second half of the mission.

Clocks are set to Greenwich Mean Time, which is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, but there's no earthly feeling of day and night.

"We circle around the earth every 90 minutes," Cassidy said. "Every 45 minutes there is a sunrise and sunset."

The space station is made up of modules for different uses, such as a lab, crew quarters, exercise and hygiene, Cassidy said. His day starts at about 6 or 6:30 a.m., when he has a couple of hours to prepare for the work day before floating down the cross hatchway into the lab.

His day is planned down to five-minute increments, he said.

"What I'll do is fix broken stuff, do experiments, draw blood, take bodily samples of myself and crew mates," he said. "Any emergency happens, fire or depressurization, we're the ones (responsible)."

No such emergency has ever taken place on the International Space Station, he said.

His being there is "not just for me to look out the window and conduct experiments," Cassidy said. "It's to look at living long-term in space, (for a time when we'll) have a lunar outpost on Mars. It might be 15 to 30 years from now. Eventually we'll have humans from all countries living on the moon or Mars."

His spending six months in space will test how it affects the human body and other living organisms, such as plants, he said.

Each night at about 7 p.m., an evening planning conference will be held in conjunction with NASA officials on the ground, Cassidy said.

"After that is our time — 7 to 10 p.m.," he said.

His own crew quarters is "about the size of a large refrigerator," he said. His sleeping bag is tethered to the wall.

"It feels pretty comfortable," Cassidy said. "We put up pictures, have computers to watch movies, we get books electronically."

There is no television on which he can "flip channels at will," Cassidy said, but he can request football games and other sports programs and movies he wants to see.

And the food is good, he said. There are dried blocks of dehydrated food — such as meals taken camping — that are made in a lab in Houston, along with military pouch meals and canned food.

Astronauts also are allowed to take some "bonus" food.

"Because Stonewall Kitchen is in my hometown," he said, he's requested a package from the specialty food store be blasted into space.

"It will be fun to open it up," he said.

There's no standard uniform in the relatively warm station. Attire is shorts or long pants and a golf shirt.

No one wears shoes, Cassidy said.

He and his crew members can bring a small bag about the size of a lunch box of personal belongings. Cassidy will take charms from his daughter, photos and pieces of jewelry, such as one recently given to him by his mother, Jan Cassidy, of York.

"I was just home for Thanksgiving," he said. "Mom gave me the hospital bracelet from when I was born."

Cassidy was born in Salem, Mass., and moved to York with his family while he was in grade school. He and his wife and three children make their home in Houston.

Cassidy made an official appearance in York after his last return from the space station and expects to come back again after this flight. During his last visit, he spent time with students in the schools.

"I applied to be an astronaut because I was curious about going to space," he said.

"As a human, I'm privileged to go up there. I never dreamed I would be doing this when I was a little guy. Somewhere in the state of Maine (there's a kid) who has no idea what's in store for him in the future."

The Last Shuttle Flight
On board Atlantis, the closing of an era

Tony Reichhardt - Air & Space Smithsonian Magazine (January 2013)

Inside the space station's U.S. lab module, the four Atlantis astronauts should have been starting to assemble, but they weren't. Space shuttle commander Chris Ferguson kept eyeing his watch. "Everybody get in here! We've gotta be ready!" he yelled. It was the eighth day of the 135th and final space shuttle mission, and President Obama was scheduled for a televised call in just five minutes.

The shuttle astronauts and the six members of the station crew should have been milling in front of the camera, tucking in their shirts and straightening their hair. Instead, they were all still rushing around trying to finish their tasks.

At the last minute, the final person slipped into place—by now they were pros at this floating press conference formation—and the call went through. The president opened with a joke, then told the astronauts how proud he was of them and the shuttle workforce, asked about a robotics experiment, and said: "I also understand that Atlantis brought a unique American flag up to the station?"

Ferguson gave a little start and his eyes widened. You can actually see it on the video. The flag! There were thousands of tiny American flags tucked into every crevice of the shuttle, souvenirs to be given out later, but the one the president referred to was special. The Atlantis crew had brought it up to the station to leave behind, so that some day, years from now, the next American spacecraft to dock there would be able to retrieve it. The symbolism was important to Ferguson, and he had planned to hold up the flag during the presidential phone call. But in all the commotion he forgot, and he had to settle for describing it instead.

Hardly a big deal, and only a few insiders would even have noticed. Besides, everything had gone pretty much perfectly on this flight so far. With only five days left—five days in the entire 30-year history of the shuttle program—he was finally starting to relax. He was lucky to be here. They all were.

When the last shuttle astronauts began training in the summer of 2010, there was no guarantee they'd get a chance to fly. The mission had originally been STS-335, a "launch on need" flight that would wait on the ground to rescue the crew of STS-134—the last scheduled flight—in case that vehicle was unable to return from the station. Since the 2003 Columbia accident, NASA had required this safeguard for every launch; there was little likelihood that a rescue flight would be needed.

Behind the scenes, though, agency planners had long considered turning STS-335 into a real mission. With the shuttle retiring, new commercial companies like SpaceX were supposed to take over the job of supplying the station, but their launch schedules had been slipping badly, and NASA faced the possibility of a critical break in the logistics chain. One more shuttle flight—loaded with five tons of supplies—would buy some insurance.

In September 2009, Ferguson, as the new deputy chief of the astronaut office, had been asked to look at what it would take to pull off the additional supply mission from the perspective of crew training and safety. There were several concerns. First, this crew would have no rescue shuttle—NASA didn't have the money and had no more usable external tanks. In the unlikely case that their orbiter, Atlantis, was disabled, the crew would have to stay on the station until smaller Russian Soyuz capsules could bring them home, one by one. The last person wouldn't get back for more than a year.

After much study and an outside safety review, shuttle managers were satisfied that four people could pull off a last supply mission. Their training would have to be compressed, and their timeline would be packed. But it was doable. And the four astronauts could begin training before a final decision was made, because a rescue mission to the station had a lot in common with a supply mission; one big difference was the number of astronauts riding the shuttle home.

Before he started working on the plan that would turn into STS-135, says Ferguson, "I thought the last flight had come and gone." Now, by good fortune, another mission had materialized. His boss, chief astronaut Peggy Whitson, decided that Ferguson, a former Navy test pilot, was the logical person to command the crew of STS-335/STS-135. The pilot chosen was Doug Hurley, a Marine aviator who had returned from his first spaceflight in July 2009, and so had been through training recently. Like Ferguson, Hurley had expected to be on one of the last shuttles; both had been disappointed to be bypassed.

The two mission specialist slots went to a couple of veterans: Rex Walheim, a former Air Force flight test engineer and head of the astronaut office's spacewalking branch, and aerospace engineer Sandy Magnus, who in the summer of 2010 was detailed to NASA headquarters, working on future mission studies and hoping for another tour on the space station, having lived there for four months—and loved it—in 2008 and 2009. Training for the contingency mission meant giving up her place in line for another station assignment. But she told Whitson, "Use me where you need to use me."

***

Less than a year later, on the morning of July 8, 2011, the four STS-135 astronauts lay on their backs on the flight deck of Atlantis, awaiting the launch. For the first time in 28 years, there were no astronauts sitting downstairs in the mid-deck.

At T-31 seconds, a voice came over the intercom talking about a failure, and a hold. The clock hadn't stopped this late in the countdown for years. Ferguson turned to Hurley, in the seat to his right. "Did she say failure?" They looked at each other, and Ferguson grabbed his checklist. The launch controllers on the loop were using their own jargon, slinging acronyms the astronauts didn't immediately recognize. "Even though the world thinks [the astronauts] know exactly what's going on at all times with this vehicle, we don't," says Hurley. "So it took us a few seconds to figure out, Oh, they're talking about the beanie cap," a hood that sits atop the shuttle's fuel tank and retracts just before launch.

The problem was minor, and in a minute or so, the count resumed. Recalling the incident now, Ferguson notes how efficiently the launch team assessed the situation, made their decision, and moved on, with only minutes left in a tight launch window. "That's what 30 years of launching the same vehicle does for you," he says. "You really understand a lot of little chinks in the armor."

Even among the astronaut crews, there was institutional memory that helped them handle problems quickly. Shortly after liftoff, during the thunderous climb to orbit, a loud klaxon alarm sounded inside Atlantis, a warning that the cabin was leaking air. This particular scenario had never come up in training, and the astronauts began to make the mental switch from routine to emergency. Ferguson, though, had seen this happen before, on his first launch. As Atlantis ascended, its metal structure expanded—they called it "cabin stretch"—and the air inside the pressure vessel expanded too. To the sensors, it seemed like the air was getting thinner—a sign of a leak. From personal experience, Ferguson could assure the others it was harmless, an assessment the ground quickly confirmed. Two weeks later, during the landing, it would be Rex Walheim's turn to calm his crewmates, when they heard a loud bang on the mid-deck below them. "Oh, that happened on my first flight too," he told them. It was the toilet door slamming open as the shuttle hit atmospheric turbulence.

Once in orbit, the astronauts stowed their heavy orange launch suits, configured computers, and prepared Atlantis for orbital operations. This had always been a hectic time for shuttle crews, and on past flights, if a couple of the astronauts got space-sick, it was hard for even seven people to keep up with scheduled tasks. That was another benefit of flying only veterans. "Knowing full well that we didn't have anybody who was going to be throwing up for the first three hours after we got to orbit was huge," says Hurley.

After two days of playing orbital catch-up with the station, day 3 was docking day. Ferguson had steered a shuttle to the station before—patiently firing little thruster bursts with his hand controller, while keeping watch out the orbiter's overhead and aft windows. It was slow work, and stressful. Rendezvous was "one of the times that the pucker factor is a little bit higher," he says, "because you have to be in just the right spot, doing just the right things, or it will cost you an enormous amount of fuel, and embarrassment, to get back to where you really belong. There's a lot of pressure to put the orbiter in just the right spot." As Atlantis approached, the view out the window was even more beautiful than he'd remembered. The station, he says, is "the ultimate visual stimulation….an incredible, silvery-gold, living thing." Atlantis docked as the two vehicles orbited 220 miles over the Pacific.

Waiting at the other end of the docking tunnel to greet the arrivals were Americans Mike Fossum and Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa of Japan, and Russians Andrei Borisenko, Aleksandr Samokutyayev, and Sergei Volkov. All had been living on the station for more than a month, and all would help—to varying degrees—unload the tons of supplies Atlantis brought.

Most of the cargo was packed inside a room-size cylindrical module—named Raffaello—that rested in the cargo bay of Atlantis. It held a year's worth of food, clothes, water, spare parts, and supplies for future station astronauts, all carefully number-coded and packed in pallets or boxy, white fabric bags. Hurley and Magnus lifted the module with the station's robot arm and attached it to a station docking port. Magnus, the loadmaster, was in charge of the move, which would go on for days.

First, though, came a spacewalk on day 5 to remove a failed pump from the outside of the station and place it in Atlantis' cargo bay to be brought home. There was also a refueling experiment to install, and other maintenance tasks. Normally a spacewalk during docked operations would fall to the shuttle mission specialists, Walheim and Magnus. But there hadn't been time to fit a spacewalk in the training, so the NASA planners had come up with something new: The station astronauts—Garan and Fossum—would go outside, and Walheim would help direct them from inside the shuttle.

That had made for an unusual, hybrid style of training. In the months leading up to their mission, Walheim, Garan, and Fossum practiced together underwater, working out each foothold and turn of the wrench that would be needed in orbit. Then, the two station astronauts had to launch, so Walheim continued training after they left. Now, reunited in orbit, the three stayed up late the night before the spacewalk to go over the updated procedures.

When the spacewalkers stepped outside, Walheim, inside Atlantis, felt like he was right alongside them, following every move for six and a half hours. "I sat there with all my cameras set up and my procedures where they needed to be," he says. "I was ready to go." When he couldn't see the spacewalkers out the windows, he watched on the monitors, looking vicariously through their helmet cameras.

With the spacewalk finished, the astronauts turned their full attention to the cargo transfer. For the next three days they unpacked the moving van, each person carrying a container to its designated spot on the station, then returning with something else—a bag of trash, a piece of equipment from an earlier expedition—to be packed in Raffaello for the trip home. It was like two lines of ants, one coming, one going, all day for three days. "We were a machine, man," says Magnus. Fossum set up a couple of speakers and put on his favorite band—ZZ Top—so they'd have something to listen to as they floated past one another.

As loadmaster, Magnus held the checklist, and the others would come to her if they couldn't figure out from the codes where something went. Having lived on the space station herself, she knew the system. "The station guys have to go find it later," she says, "so the ground has to know that food container number 17 went to the JLP, rack number two, station C on that rack."

She delegated to Hurley the job of unloading and loading Atlantis' mid-deck. That included the monotonous task of filling bags of water (a byproduct of the shuttle's fuel cells) to leave behind on the station. "Doug, bless his heart, got stuck on the mid-deck doing that—for days," Magnus says. "He would start a [water] fill, then wander off into the station to bring something from the shuttle."

Often, says Ferguson, on past shuttle flights, the commander had assumed a "passive oversight role, and generally didn't work that hard. I probably was in that category on my first flight as commander." But on STS-135, he had to pitch in too. At one point, he volunteered for unwrapping duty. For years, the astronauts had argued that the people who packed the cargo on the ground used way too much packing material. They even wrapped towels in foam. The leftover packaging created a major trash problem on the space station, but the packers had their reasons, and the astronaut office never could persuade them to stop.

So Ferguson spent a good part of the space shuttle's historic final mission unwrapping a load of Russian-made urine receptacles, one by one, so the station crew wouldn't have to. "They had bubble-wrapped them," Magnus sighs. "Individually. Fergie spent an hour or two un-bubble-wrapping them, saying, 'We are not leaving that bubble wrap behind.' "

For the busiest part of the move, NASA had arranged with the Russian Space Agency to get help from the three cosmonauts on the station. Normally, the Russian crew members would have stayed on their side of the station during the work day, running their own experiments and following a separate timeline. Now they joined the moving crew. "We had all three of them at one point, coming and going," says Magnus.

As usual during a shuttle visit to the station, the two crews tried to have dinner together when the schedule allowed. One night it was in the station's U.S. lab, another night they ate in the Russian module, and on day 7 they crowded into Atlantis' mid-deck for an "All-American meal" of chicken, baked beans, and apple pie, in honor of the shuttle's retirement.

"Sasha [Samokutyayev] just loved the space shuttle," says Ferguson. "He and Andrei [Borisenko] were over there all the time. It was kind of this pilot-to-pilot thing—they just had so many questions: What does this do, what does that do? Everybody's very proud about the airplane or spaceship they fly, and we really did enjoy showing it off." The cosmonauts presented the astronauts with a patch commemorating the shuttle's last visit to the station. "Knowing how difficult it was for them to bring things up in the Soyuz, I was really impressed," says Ferguson.

As Atlantis' time at the station wound down, and the crew started to relax about getting the cargo transferred on schedule, the ceremonial moments became more frequent, the mood a bit more reflective. The STS-135 astronauts understood all along that theirs would be a high-profile mission, with lots of time devoted to press interviews. These live public affairs "events" were done from the station, which was better set up for video than the shuttle mid-deck. To all the local drive-time radio personalities asking Ferguson about his favorite baseball team (the Phillies), or Magnus about her zero-G hairdo, or Hurley whether he would miss the shuttle, their answers were considered, even thoughtful, as if they hadn't just heard another reporter ask the exact same questions five minutes earlier. They all thought it was important to share this last flight with the public.

An even stronger desire was to honor the NASA workers who had trained them, or had built the shuttles or serviced them—an entire culture that after 30 years was about to disappear. This had been powerfully apparent during training. More than once, after a busy day of simulations or meetings at one NASA center or another, people had stopped them to say how proud they were to have worked on the vehicles. Many were about to lose their jobs. "I talked to one guy who had been with Atlantis since it was built in Palmdale [California, in the early 1980s]," says Hurley. "There were a hundred stories like that. We talked to people who said 'I started working here at Kennedy when I was 18, and worked on every flight', people who had emotionally, mentally, and personally devoted their lives to the space shuttle program."

Each night of the mission as they were signing off, Ferguson and his crewmates made an effort to thank the people in mission control—by name if possible. They recorded messages to be played later at retirement parties. One night a request came up to record something for the family of a long-time shuttle engineer who had just passed away. They found the time.

During the busy days on the station, there hadn't been much chance for reflection, but now that the end was near, the shuttle crew felt it in different ways, and at different times. For Walheim, it happened while they were undocking. As the shuttle pulled away from the station, Ron Garan's voice came over the radio: "Space shuttle Atlantis, departing for the last time." At that point, says Walheim, "I was back from the window, toward the floor, kind of by myself, with nothing to do for a couple of seconds. It just kind of got me choked up."

Now, with just the four of them back in the shuttle, there was one last major task to check off before coming home. NASA engineers wanted documentary pictures of the station taken from a vantage point never seen by other shuttles. So with Atlantis backed off to a safe distance, the station was commanded to turn 90 degrees. It rotated slowly; to the shuttle astronauts the motion was like watching the hour hand of a clock. Then Hurley flew a half lap around the station, up and over the solar arrays, so they could take pictures and video. The maneuver, said NASA flight directors, went "absolutely perfectly, by the numbers." That's what the press was told.

Inside Atlantis, "to be honest, it was a little chaotic," says Walheim. Once the station turned from its normal orientation, the shuttle's autopilot system lost its lock on reflectors attached to the station's exterior, which were needed to get range data. Hurley, who was piloting, and Ferguson, who was assisting him, couldn't tell exactly how far they were from the station. They were supposed to maintain a strict 600-foot distance to prevent the orbiter's thruster plume from hitting the solar arrays. Walheim grabbed a handheld laser rangefinder, like a highway cop's radar gun. He couldn't hit the reflectors either. Each time he failed to get a lock, there was a "nasty buzzing tone. Everybody can hear it, and you're thinking, Oh crap!"

Ferguson started to worry they might drift inside the 600-foot bubble. He laughs about it now. "I think my voice raised up an octave or two: Rex, I need a mark now! He was like Scotty from Star Trek: The dilithium crystals, Captain—I'm doing my best! And he was!" Finally, the rangefinder got a lock, and they managed the flyaround without penetrating the bubble. But they never did get video—they couldn't get the camera set up properly.

***

The Night before landing, Ferguson was alone on the flight deck. He had just signed off with mission control for the evening, the last such sign-off in space shuttle history. It was July 20, which happened to be the anniversary of the first lunar landing, and Ferguson, knowing the world might be listening, had said to the ground controllers: "Forty-two years ago today, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I consider myself fortunate that I was [alive] to actually remember the event. I think there are probably a lot of folks in that room who didn't have that privilege. And I can only hope that day will come for them, too, someday."

Like many astronauts, Ferguson is frustrated that since 1969, space exploration has proceeded so slowly. During STS-135, he and his crewmates tried to explain, in practically every interview they did, that no, just because the shuttle was retiring, the space program wasn't ending. But, he admits, "I don't think the [political] waters have ever been muddier than they are now. And I think it's going to take a couple of years for people to understand what we're trying to do."

What NASA is doing, in fact—in partnership with private companies—is building new spaceships, even though it's uncertain where they'll be sent. The crew of STS-135 is playing no small part in this new enterprise. Ferguson works for Boeing now, as the head of crew operations for the company's commercial spacecraft program. Walheim is the astronaut office's point person for the Orion capsule, which will be the first NASA vehicle to leave Earth orbit in more than 40 years. Hurley is the astronaut office liaison with other new commercial spaceship projects. Magnus left NASA in October to become executive director of an aerospace professional society.

But on the night of July 20, 2011, they were still a space shuttle crew, with just a few hours left in orbit. After Ferguson signed off with mission control, the other three joined him on the flight deck. Everything was packed away for reentry, and for the first time in 12 days, there was nothing left to do. For more than an hour, nearly a full orbit, they sat together with the lights off, talking quietly, basking in the moment, with Earth sparkling outside the windows. They saw thunderstorms flashing in the clouds below, the aurora shimmering as they passed over southern latitudes. "There's so much your senses take in, the vividness of seeing the Earth, hearing the reaction jets fire," says Hurley. "I remember feeling all was right with the world. You kind of want to bottle that up. Because if you felt like that every day, you'd be doing all right."

The next morning, things happened fast. Shortly before 5 a.m. Florida time, Atlantis' engines fired in the direction of its orbital motion to slow the vehicle and begin the descent to Earth. As often happens, the crew scrambled to get in their seats, and Walheim, the last to strap in, was still putting on his helmet as the fiery plasma light show started outside the windows. Sixty-eight minutes after initiating their de-orbit burn, they touched down in darkness at Cape Canaveral. A plaque now marks the spot on the runway where Atlantis's wheels stopped.

While Ferguson, Hurley, and Walheim were busy shutting down the orbiter systems, they could hear the ground crews outside, starting to safe the vehicle, just as they'd done many times before. Magnus sat there in her lumpy orange suit, rolling her head from side to side, trying to get her neurovestibular system accustomed to gravity again. "I don't think anyone heard me," she recalls, "but I said something like, 'Wow, it's over.' "

Then they all stood up, piled into the Astrovan, and headed out to greet the crowd.

PBS to air Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope, 1/31

BroadwayWorld.com

Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope is the untold inspirational story of Colonel Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot and son of Holocaust survivors who became the first and only astronaut from Israel, embarking on a mission with the most diverse shuttle crew ever to explore space. Ramon realized the significance of "being the first" and his journey of self-discovery turned into a mission to tell the world a powerful story about the resilience of the human spirit. Although the seven astronauts of the Columbia perished on February 1, 2003, a remarkable story of hope, friendship across cultures, and an enduring faith emerged.

Directed by Daniel Cohen and produced by Christopher G. Cowen with Executive Producers Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog, Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope is produced by Emmy Award-winning Herzog & Company/HCO and West Street Productions, and presented by Playtone. The film premieres on Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the disaster and NASA's annual Day of Remembrance. The film will be followed by an encore broadcast of NOVA "Space Shuttle Disaster" at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings), which examines the causes of the tragedy.

"Moving tributes like this film remind us all that spaceflight always carries great risk," NASA Administrator and four-time space shuttle astronaut Charles Bolden said. "But fallen heroes like Ilan were willing to risk the ultimate sacrifice to make important science discoveries and push the envelope of human achievement."

Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope goes behind the scenes to explore the "mission within the mission" for Ramon, who carried into space a miniature Torah scroll that had survived the horrors of the Holocaust, given to a boy in a secret bar mitzvah observed in the pre-dawn hours in the notorious Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. The bar mitzvah boy grew up to become Israel's lead scientist for the mission, Joachim "Yoya" Joseph. The film follows the scroll's path into Ramon's hands, and the dramatic moment when he tells its story live to the world from the flight deck of Columbia. From the depths of hell to the heights of space, his simple gesture would serve to honor the hope of a nation and to fulfill a promise made to generations past and future.

Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope took more than seven years to complete, and includes rare drawings from the concentration camp made in secret by a camp inmate, and archival NASA footage of the astronauts as they prepared for their mission. Interviewees include Ilan Ramon's widow, Rona Ramon, and other Columbia crew family members; astronaut Garrett Reisman and other members of NASA's space program; Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean; former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and many others. The film was shot on location throughout the world, from Jerusalem to the Kennedy Space Center to Washington, D.C.

Also included is personal video shot by Dave Brown, one of the Columbia's remarkable crew of men and women who, although from different backgrounds, became a true family, warmly embracing each other and Ramon and his mission. "The story takes you on a journey of the human spirit," says director Daniel Cohen. "It is an extraordinary tale of hope for the future, in the face of tragedy."

For more information about the film, visit www.pbs.org

I first learned the story of Ramon and the scroll shortly after the shuttle Columbia's disintegration on re-entry. I was struck by the incredible power and symbolism of Ramon's profound gesture, carrying an artifact from the Holocaust into space. I thought that this was a hero's story, and at the same time, a universal story. It is a story of survival, triumph, faith, and, as Col. Ramon said himself, a story of "what a person can do when they go from the depths of hell, to the heights of space." The crew of the shuttle was the most diverse ever to fly together into space. They represented a shining example of what can be done when people work together with a mission. This is in stark contrast to the place the story began, in a Nazi concentration camp.

My first instinct was to reach out to the person who owned the scroll, Dr. Joachim "Yoya" Joseph, the Israeli scientist working with Col. Ramon for the Columbia mission. Right away Yoya asked, "What can I do to help you tell this story?" It would be a question I would hear again and again from everyone who became involved with the project. I did not realize that my phone conversation with Yoya would lead me down a seven-year path to make the documentary.

Yoya told me how his family was ripped apart by the Holocaust, and how he came to possess the tiny Torah scroll during his time in the concentration camp. It was an amazing twist of fate that he should become a scientist working on a space mission and become friends with Israel's first astronaut.

Soon, I found myself at the Israeli embassy in Washington where General Rani Falk told me that, during the mission, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres had promised the Columbia crew a V.I.P. visit to Israel, and that Ramon's widow, Rona, was about to host the Columbia families on the trip the crew was never able to make. General Falk introduced me to Rona, and she agreed to allow us to go along. She thought that of all the stories about her husband, this was the one he really would want told.

The Israeli trip launched us on our way, and every path took us in a new direction of an unraveling story. I learned why Ramon was chosen for this mission, and what it meant in Israel.

As I talked with the astronauts' families, I learned what a long time they had spent together and how their relationships bloomed. I discovered that crewmember Dave Brown was an aspiring filmmaker and that he was actually making his own documentary about his mission aboard the Columbia. His brother Doug agreed to share the tapes and provided us with unique and intimate moments of the crew to tell their story.

Throughout the development and production of Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope, the challenge was how to portray the story as uplifting. Critics kept telling me it was a tragic story — the Columbia accident, the Holocaust. Astronaut Steve MacLean solved the dilemma for me when he carried with him into space a sister scroll in tribute to his friend Ilan Ramon. The scroll rises again. Hope lifts from the depths to the heights.

Yoya did not survive to see the documentary completed. But through Col. Ramon, and now our film, the promise made by a small boy to a dying Rabbi trapped in the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp will always be kept. The story of Bergen-Belsen will always be told. And just as important, the film shows the possibilities that unfold when we work together as the Columbia crew did. This "mission of hope" can carry us into the future.

What will it take to refire our space dreams?

Scott Tilley - Florida Today (Viewpoint)

(Tilley is a Professor of software engineering in the Department of Computer Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology)

Last week marked the 40th anniversary of Apollo 17. It was the final manned mission to the moon. It launched on Dec. 7, 1972. It was the only nighttime launch of the Apollo program. I've seen numerous space shuttles and rocket launches at night, but I can only imagine what it must have been like to see the massive Saturn V rocket blast off, it's five huge F1 engines burning brightly against the dark sky.

The three-person crew of Apollo 17 returned safely to Earth on Dec. 19. Subsequent Apollo moon missions were planned, but they never took place. We haven't put our feet on the moon since.

The Apollo program was a technical marvel. It was also a political statement aimed primarily at the Soviet Union. And it was a social phenomenon that brought together our nation like few other events have done.

This week, the secretive X-37B mini-shuttle launched into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. It's the third launch of this Air Force program in three years and the second for this particular vehicle. It too is technically interesting, but the differences between the X-37B program and the Apollo program couldn't be more pronounced.

Apollo was a public effort. It was grand in aspiration and huge in scale. The Saturn V rocket stood 363 feet high and was 33 feet wide. By comparison, the X-37B mission is classified; no one is really saying publicly what it's for or what its capabilities are. In many ways it acknowledges the militarization of space. And at 29 feet long it's a small vehicle – barely more than a drone.

We rely on foreign countries to ferry our astronauts to the space station. Our next heavy-lift rockets are years away from trials. The next country likely to put a man on the moon is China.

How can we get the sprit of Apollo back? Maybe by picking up where Apollo left off, with voyages of exciting scientific discovery. It's hard to get kids interested in remote-controlled ships clouded in secrecy (whatever their intrinsic value). But kids do get engaged when they see exciting research being done – research they can aspire to be part of.

It's particularly ironic that the Apollo program was canceled just as the real science was starting. Astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the lunar surface as part of Apollo 17, was a geologist. The BBC dubbed him, "the last man and first scientist" on the moon. It feels like we had just got started when we stopped. When will we get started again?

NASA, Got Space Exploration? Get Goals, Get Funding and Get Uhura.

Michael Venables - Forbes (Viewpoint)

There is a summary lack of confidence in NASA's ability to explore outer space these days. The press is full of recent accounts that are critical of NASA's ability to advance American goals for space exploration, create a Mars colony, not to mention expanding a program of planetary exploration and the colonization of the outer planets of our solar system.

The decreased allocation of funds to NASA programs was reported in the press as early as Feb. 13, lowering available funds for planetary science programs that support Mars exploration and missions to outer planets in the Solar System. There are three main challenges at this time in NASA's history. The first challenge is to clearly voice a renewed commitment to the broader mission and goals of U.S. cooperative space exploration, not just deploy technical capabilities and, somewhere along the way, rekindle taxpayer support.

The first task then, (in agreement with a recent NRC report's conclusion) is to refocus on the greater mission of space exploration and how to achieve this goal, instead of deploying projects with short-term capabilities such as the Space Shuttle (the functionality of low-cost transport to low Earth orbit) and the International Space Station (the functionality of a space laboratory).

The second challenge is to secure adequate funding to set this fresh commitment to space exploration in motion. The third challenge is to recruit more (wo)men to do the required work on the ground and in missions.

Then NASA will need a major change of perspective in its goals, the funds to secure the longevity of the U.S. space exploration program and much more (wo)man power to fill the suits of future astronauts. In these faithless times, NASA, perhaps most important of all, needs a star spangle on its red, white and blue banner to evangelize its purpose to the world with gusto.

The troubled agency needs a new voice for the country and the world. President Obama, appoint Nichelle Nichols as Ambassador-at-Large for Space Exploration. Hey NASA, Got space exploration? Get goals, get funding and get Uhura!

The Bush administration's goals for NASA had included a lunar landing by 2020, setting up a lunar base and building the groundwork for another Mars mission. However, a blue-ribbon panel led by Norman Augustine in 2009 concluded NASA's Moon-Mars program was underfunded and behind schedule. The panel recommended that NASA defer its goal of returning to the lunar surface and rather build a solid commercial space industry that can handle more immediate, manageable goals of NASA's space program,, like ferrying cargo and crew to the international space station.

A new report from the National Research Council has pointed out that NASA's core mission in the 2011 Strategic Plan is vague and doesn't identify priorities. The crux of the problem, according to the NRC report is:

"While there are clear linkages between current NASA programs and the goals, there is no explicit prioritization among the goals in the 2011 strategic plan. For instance, there is no clear linkage between the details in the plan and the space exploration goals and priorities established by the administration in terms of sending astronauts to an asteroid as an interim destination before sending humans to orbit and eventually to land on Mars. In turn, the definition of these goals also contributes to the lack of clarity in strategic direction.

The report details the lack of clarity set forth by NASA for the goals for earth and space sciences, new space technologies, programs to support NASA aeronautic and space activities and the "share NASA with the public" goal.

Perhaps the most damaging conclusion in the report was that both NASA's vision statement and mission statements have failed to "articulate a national vision that is unique to the nation's space and aeronautics agency" and

"Both the NASA vision and mission statements are generic statements that could apply to almost any government research and development (R&D) agency, omitting even the words "aeronautics" or "space." NASA's current vision and mission statements do not explain NASA's unique role in the government and why it is worthy of taxpayer investment. The non-specificity of the vision and mission statements is a contributing factor to the confusion about NASA's overall strategic direction.

To hear from the source about the "state of NASA's exploratory mission", I sent one question for comment via email to the Office of Communications, Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters to Charles Bolden, current NASA Administrator. The gist of it, is, "What is the status of space for the U.S. and how do we fix it?"

Venables: Please comment on the state of U.S. space exploration after the cancellation of the Constellation program. Does the current $17.7 billion in the FY 2013 budget request adequately fund what NASA's current goals are for space exploration?

Bolden: NASA is executing an ambitious space exploration vision laid out by the President and approved and funded by Members of Congress in both parties. This plan extended the space shuttle program, put in place a robust commercial space initiative and has put us on track to send American astronauts further into space than ever before. With the funding President Obama and Congress have provided, we are focused on bringing space launches back to the U.S., in-sourcing American jobs and keeping the nation on the cutting edge of technology development and innovation.

Houston, we have a[nother] problem. Much of the American public, the National Research Council, the Space Foundation and the media do not have Bolden's rose-colored perspective on the currently established goals and prospective future of U.S. space exploration. So, the issue at hand is an urgent one. Lighting a fire under NASA's large glutei maximi. Again, NASA needs a renewed commitment to its exploratory mission of the solar system and ultimately, the taxpayer popular support to back it up. Two, more money to fund its space exploration programs. About 3 billion more per program it turns out, but details, details. Three, to bring in more people to do the job — more wo(man) power. To encourage women, period, to enter STEM fields of research and practice. To recruit more women to STEM fields so they can do NASA's work on Earth and in space: aerospace engineering, oceanography, biology, space physics, engineering management, mechanical engineering, polymer science and engineering, chemistry and medicine.

The answer to NASA's lack of direction must come from refocused goals for the organization. Bring back an updated version of the Vision for Space Exploration for the 21st century. It was goal-based, not simply capability-based. Take the Space Foundation's suggestion and solidify "pioneering" the agency's holistic goal in the law (and eliminate other ancillary goals that do not support this end). Both the NRC and Space Foundation reports make it saliently evident that the agency has lost it's mission to reach out, touch the stars, and colonize them in the projected future. Moreover, technological partnerships with other countries are the future. Let's expand NASA's core identity from being a civil space agency to an international space partner with more cooperative technology sharing and development projects with other nations. And the NASA administrator must sound the trumpet and lead the charge of change.

Refocusing goals will mean changing how to implement the strategy to achieve these ends. If the U.S. is to pioneer, it must do so with the full support of the private sector. Make NASA a permanent government-private sector organization. Privatize the production of space hardware that the private sector does best, the rockets. In the long run, this could only alleviate the burden on NASA's space hardware operation.

Find the money to fund the impossible goals the government has historically asked NASA to do. The President should recommend that the U.S. Armed Forces scrap a third from the $396 billion Joint Strike Fighter program, one that has been plagued by safety concerns, cost overruns, delays, contractor-government infighting, etc. Why does the military need planes whose hardware components and software system work poorly in the first place? That cost is almost four times as much as any other U.S. weapons system and two-thirds of the $589 billion of the cost of the war in Afghanistan (the long-term costs of operating the planes is projected at $1.1 trillion). Since, technically, it's a cooperative, international program, perhaps other nations should help pick up the financial slack. Let's do the math on our one-third budget cut: that one third would give NASA $132 billion. A solid foundation to fully fund planetary science, space exploration, and lots of cutting-edge robotic exploration projects.

Second, find the person who will galvanize public support behind a new NASA mission in space. Bring in Uhura! Nichelle Nichols, known the world over as Lieutenant Commander Nyota Urura, Chief Communications Officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Now that was a great era of American space exploration. Oh wait, that was in the future, what am I thinking? In fact, there are those, high up in NASA's administration who might support Nichols's appointment as Ambassador-at-Large for Space Exploration. I'm thinking of Leland Melvin, Associate Administrator for Education at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. He is also a former two-time space shuttle astronaut, having flown in 2008 and 2009.

I submitted some questions to Melvin via email about the work Nichols has done for NASA, and his remembrances of working with her in the Space Shuttle program to promote space exploration and the recruitment of minority and women astronauts. Below is the Q&A.

Venables: Can you tell me about Nichols's support of STEM education and what that means for NASA's future?

Melvin: Nichelle is a champion for NASA and its STEM education efforts. She knows that pursuing STEM studies is a win-win situation: students prepare themselves for exciting future careers and NASA helps shape the scientists, engineers and explorers of tomorrow.

Venables: What are your thoughts on the importance of Nichelle Nichols' work with the Space Shuttle recruitment program and her accomplishments there?

Melvin: For many years now, Nichelle has used her star power as Lt. Uhura to bring attention to NASA and its programs. Her advocacy and commitment to helping minorities and women see their role in America's space program has been valuable, especially back when there wasn't much diversity in our astronaut corps. She worked with the senior leadership of NASA to ensure that the astronaut corps would be inclusive and more appropriately represent our American population.

Venables: Do you have any favorite personal anecdotes you'd like to share from your time working at NASA's Space Shuttle program, working with a living science fiction icon such as Lt. Uhura?

Melvin: Nichelle was the guest keynote speaker at an Education Forum that we held in Florida prior to the final shuttle mission in July 2011. She addressed a group of 250 students and eloquently stated the need for and benefit of having great role models to inspire our young people. We at NASA are so appreciative of her ongoing commitment to space exploration and STEM education.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Friday, December 14, 2012

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - December 14, 2012 and JSC Today

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