Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - December 27, 2012

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 27, 2012 7:15:03 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - December 27, 2012

 

 

 

 

Human Spaceflight News

Thursday, December 27, 2012

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

Russia to start tests of manned spacecraft traveling to Moon in 2017

 

Itar-Tass

 

Flight tests of Russia's new manned spacecraft capable of flying to the Moon will start in 2017, the president of Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Vitaly Lopota, told reporters on Wednesday. He recalled that in the middle of this year the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos corrected technical specifications for the spaceship. "Now we are building a spaceship that will fly to the Moon," he said. "We've already completed the technical project." "If we get normal financing, we will start flight tests of the spaceship in 2017," Lopota said.

(NO FURTHER TEXT)

 

Russia Designs New Spaceship

 

RIA Novosti

 

Russian space rocket corporation Energia has completed the technical design of a new manned spacecraft whose flight tests are due to begin in 2017, Energia President Vitaly Lopota said on Wednesday. "We have completed the technical design project taking into account the fact that the new spaceship is to fly to the Moon, among other places," he said. Energia won the spaceship design tender in April 2009.

 

Russia upgrading booster rocket for NASA manned missions

 

Xinhua News Service

 

Russia was modernizing a booster which U.S. space agency NASA would use for manned flights, a Russian rocket engine manufacturer said Wednesday. "We are adjusting the RD-180 engine for manned missions," Executive Director of NPO Energomash company Vladimir Solntsev told reporters, adding the adaptation work started in early 2012.

 

Will Humans Keep Evolving on Ultra-Long Space Missions?

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

 

In the Disney film "Wall-E," a colony of humans becomes an obese population after hundreds of years locked inside a spaceship. A lack of activity and an abundance of food left the starship denizens with little desire to stay in shape. But while "Wall-E" was science fiction, but at least one anthropologist believes the human race will change when it embarks on multigenerational space missions to Alpha Centauri or other nearby stars. To the thinking of Cameron Smith at Portland State University, evolution will continue on starships despite the best attempts to limit it.

 

"Jewel in the Night:"

Original music & pictures from a space station Christmas

 

Nancy Atkinson - Universe Today

 

If you celebrate Christmas here on Earth, you may have a tree, stockings, and music. The crew on the International Space Station had those as well. Now in space as a member of the Expedition 34/35 crew, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield continues to share his experiences via social media, as he did during all of his training. Before his flight, Hadfield said he would be recording music on the ISS, and this is his first recording from the ISS, a song he wrote titled "Jewel in the Night." Listen closely, and you can hear the slight buzz of the station's fans in the background. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

 

A Brief History of Musical Firsts in Space

 

Rebecca Rosen - The Atlantic

 

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has a new song out, a sweet Christmas melody laid over some solid guitar strumming. But if you listen carefully, you'll hear something else: a soft whir of fans in the background. Why? Because this song wasn't recorded in the constructed silence of a recording studio, but on the International Space Station as it orbited Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour, some 260 miles overhead. It seems that this is the first song written specifically for the International Space Station to be recorded there. But that's a pretty specific accomplishment -- and that's because humans have been playing music in space for about five decades.

 

Paul Allen's Stratolaunch moves toward 2017 test launch from KSC

 

James Dean - Florida Today

 

A billionaire-backed commercial space venture unveiled with fanfare a year ago has undergone a major change but continues to eye Kennedy Space Center as its eventual base of operations as it moves toward a 2017 test launch. Stratolaunch Systems, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is developing the world's largest aircraft – boasting a wingspan longer than a football field – to carry rockets that would launch satellites from the sky, and possibly someday people.

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COMPLETE STORIES

 

Russia Designs New Spaceship

 

RIA Novosti

 

Russian space rocket corporation Energia has completed the technical design of a new manned spacecraft whose flight tests are due to begin in 2017, Energia President Vitaly Lopota said on Wednesday.

 

"We have completed the technical design project taking into account the fact that the new spaceship is to fly to the Moon, among other places," he said.

 

Energia won the spaceship design tender in April 2009.

 

Federal Space Agency Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin earlier said the new spaceship will be created by 2018 and will be able to fly not only to the International Space Station (ISS) but also to the Moon.

 

There will be several spacecraft modifications depending on whether the flight will use a terrestrial or lunar orbit, or carry out in-flight repair and maintenance of other spacecraft and the deorbiting of malfunctioning satellites and large fragments of space debris.

 

Earlier on Wednesday Lopota rejected as a "non-market" measure the idea of establishing an engine holding company in the domestic space industry.

 

Popovkin previously said Russia planned to create a single holding company for booster rocket production to integrate the country's leading space vehicle producers Khrunichev and TsSKB Progress, and also an engine-building sub-holding company to include engine makers Energomash, the Khimavtomatiki design bureau, the Voronezh mechanical works, Proton PM and other firms.

 

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered the government in summer to work out a plan to improve Russia's space industry organizations, after a string of mishaps that he said have compromised Russia's image as a leading space power.

 

In the most recent failure on August 7 Russia's Proton carrier rocket launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan failed to deliver two satellites onto their designated orbit because of a suspected mishap in the engines of its Briz-M booster.

 

Russia upgrading booster rocket for NASA manned missions

 

Xinhua News Service

 

Russia was modernizing a booster which U.S. space agency NASA would use for manned flights, a Russian rocket engine manufacturer said Wednesday.

 

"We are adjusting the RD-180 engine for manned missions," Executive Director of NPO Energomash company Vladimir Solntsev told reporters, adding the adaptation work started in early 2012.

 

The RD-180 engine, which was supplied to the United States in 1999, was an upgraded version of the RD-170 booster used in Ukrainian Zenit rockets and Russian "Energy" carrier rockets, he said.

 

The upgraded RD-180 could put into orbit a workload of 400 tons, the company said.

 

Solntsev also revealed his company had been designing even more powerful space boosters with a 500-ton capacity.

 

"We are going to market it for our western partners," he said.

 

NPO Energomash is the leading Russian developer of liquid propellant rocket engines.

 

Will Humans Keep Evolving on Ultra-Long Space Missions?

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space.com

 

In the Disney film "Wall-E," a colony of humans becomes an obese population after hundreds of years locked inside a spaceship. A lack of activity and an abundance of food left the starship denizens with little desire to stay in shape.

 

But while "Wall-E" was science fiction, but at least one anthropologist believes the human race will change when it embarks on multigenerational space missions to Alpha Centauri or other nearby stars.

 

To the thinking of Cameron Smith at Portland State University, evolution will continue on starships despite the best attempts to limit it.

 

"I believe that new pressure, breathing-gas compositions, gravity and radiation environments will act on the early stages of embryo and fetus development; this will be natural selection of new selective agents on the genome," Smith told SPACE.com in an email after stating his views in a recent Scientific American podcast.

 

"Precisely what new characteristics will be selected for or against, and spread or be deleted from the population, is very hard to predict, however."

 

Genetic screening

 

To keep evolution on a favorable track, the early space colonists should be screened as much as possible for genetic problems, Smith said.

 

"Small populations are particularly vulnerable to the 'founder effect' in which the genetic composition of the founding population sets the stage for future generations, so the founding population's genetic composition must be carefully considered," he wrote.

 

But we are not completely sure yet what genes cause health problems, he cautioned.

 

"The old paradigm of assigning health issues to single genes is melting away as we discover that many maladies are polygenic — controlled by multiple genes — and can be activated by currently unknown environmental 'cues,' " he said.

 

He stressed that he doesn't mean breeding a "super-race" of humans, which would open moral issues.

 

Genetic diversity is important to the health of a population, he said. However, the colony should have the minimum number of people for promoting genetic diversity, Smith said.

 

An accompanying article he wrote in Scientific American pointed to a study of Swedish, Amish, Indian and Utah populations. The study showed that twice as many infants died when born to first cousins than when born to unrelated people.

 

Several anthropologists have suggested a minimum of 500 people would be needed to avoid genetic problems brought on by interbreeding, but Smith upped the safety factor to 2,000 residents to avoid a population collapse. That's about half the population of a typical aircraft carrier, he added.

 

A new culture

 

Besides genetic changes, Smith foresees that the colonists will experience changes in their culture and technology. The art will change according to where the colonists live. (Certain astronauts already use music, poetry and artto talk about their experiences in space.)

 

The colonists will give birth to stories that talk about their shared experience in space, giving rise to differences that are already seen on Earth between, say, Australians and Americans.

 

"Colonists of Mars, for example, will retain some Earth culture but invent new artistic traditions according to new materials available," Smith wrote to SPACE.com.

 

One major factor, he added, could be the lighting conditions on Mars: The ruddy light outside and the artificial light in the pressurized habitat will be very different from what people experience on Earth.

 

Smith's day job is teaching human evolution, with a focus on modeling population genetics and demographics of small colonies. He also maintains a keen interest in spaceflight.

 

Among his hobbies, Smith communicates with Icarus Interstellar, an international group of scientists who are gradually working on designs for starships that could take flight to exoplanetslate in this century. Smith also is building a pressure suit that would function up to 50,000 feet in a balloon; he dubs the suit Project Alpha.

 

"I am inspired by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky... who devised basics of spaceflight almost entirely by mind, with few resources, almost a century ago," Smith wrote.

 

"He also did not expect a rapid leap to space colonization (which he wrote about extensively), but expected that it would occur sometime in the future, and proceeded in his thinking and designs ... So, my work will be a small piece of a very large puzzle."

 

A Brief History of Musical Firsts in Space

Colonel Chris Hadfield recently recorded the first original song written for and performed on the International Space Station. He joins a long and venerable tradition of astromusicians

 

Rebecca Rosen - The Atlantic

 

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has a new song out, a sweet Christmas melody laid over some solid guitar strumming. But if you listen carefully, you'll hear something else: a soft whir of fans in the background. Why? Because this song wasn't recorded in the constructed silence of a recording studio, but on the International Space Station as it orbited Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour, some 260 miles overhead.

 

It seems that this is the first song written specifically for the International Space Station to be recorded there. But that's a pretty specific accomplishment -- and that's because humans have been playing music in space for about five decades. The first song we have a recording of from space was also a Christmas tune, this one a bit better known: Jingle Bells. Astronauts Walter M. Schirra Jr. and Thomas P. Stafford snuck some bells and a harmonica (now housed at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum) onto Gemini 6 in 1965. As they prepared to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on December 16, they played a little joke on those listening down below.

 

The prank is a little hard to make out verbatim, but Schirra's later recollections give the joke's flavor. He wrote: "We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit.... Looks like he might be going to re-enter soon.... You just might let me pick up that thing.... I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit." And then they began to play:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqfIEQKnkJU&feature=player_embedded

 

Stafford told Smithsonian Magazine in 2005 that it was Schirra who originally came up with the idea. "He could play the harmonica, and we practiced two or three times before we took off, but of course we didn't tell the guys on the ground....We never considered singing, since I couldn't carry a tune in a bushelbasket."

 

It seems that no one heard the recording of that moment -- the first musical instruments played in space, according to Margaret A. Weitekamp, a curator at the Air and Space Museum -- for decades, but last year a YouTube user by the name buzzlab, and identified by Boing Boing as "Patrick," ferreted it out of NASA's Media Resource Center in Houston, Texas, which provided him with 33 hours of audio files from the mission with a note that promised, "It's in there somewhere."

 

On the International Space Station and Mir, where astronauts have lived for long periods and therefore have had more leisure time, instruments have been fixtures of space-station living. On a space station, NASA explains, the instruments don't sound any different, but they are all thoroughly checked to make sure they will not threaten the safety of the astronauts (if they were to, say, emit some noxious gases, or perhaps combust). Astronauts have to adapt to playing without gravity, figuring out clever ways of holding themselves in place while they strum or tap the keys.

 

Over the years of space-station living, there have been many firsts: Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko wrote 20 songs while living on Mir in the late '80s, though it seems he did not record them there. Hadfield brought a modified, foldable electric guitar to Mir in the '90s, and he and astro-guitarist Thomas Reiter used it to play Russian folk ballads and Beatles songs. Several astronauts have schlepped keyboards with them; Don Petit turned a vacuum tube into a workable didgeridoo; and two astronauts, Cady Coleman and Ellen Ochoa, have both brought flutes with them into space. In 2011, a recording of Coleman playing Bach's Bouree was merged with another from Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull, for the first ever Earth-space duet.

 

But there is one first that was planned and never happened, and that story is a reminder of the tough path that space exploration has sometimes been. And that is the story of Ron McNair, who was the first person to bring an instrument into space (not counting the bells and harmonica of the Gemini pranksters). In 1984 he brought his saxophone with him on a shuttle mission. The tape of that music was sadly recorded over.

 

Following that trip, composer Jean Michel Jarre wrote a piece for McNair to debut on his next flight -- the 1986 Challenger mission. It would have been the first piece ever composed for and debuted in space, and McNair's solo would have been fed to an Earth concert over a live feed.

 

After the loss of the Challenger's crew, saxophonist Kirk Whalun recorded the work, renamed Ron's Piece. Here is that song, the first that never was.

 

Paul Allen's Stratolaunch moves toward 2017 test launch from KSC

 

James Dean - Florida Today

 

A billionaire-backed commercial space venture unveiled with fanfare a year ago has undergone a major change but continues to eye Kennedy Space Center as its eventual base of operations as it moves toward a 2017 test launch.

 

Stratolaunch Systems, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is developing the world's largest aircraft – boasting a wingspan longer than a football field – to carry rockets that would launch satellites from the sky, and possibly someday people.

 

The company and SpaceX recently ended their partnership after SpaceX, which was to contribute a smaller version of its Falcon 9 rocket to the project, determined changes to its production lines would be too disruptive.

 

Stratolaunch is now studying rocket designs with Orbital Sciences Corp., and CEO Gary Wentz said the company is targeting a 2017 test launch from KSC, where a hangar and

 

"That is our current thinking, yes, that we intend to come there," said Wentz, a University of Central Florida graduate who began his engineering career at KSC before moving to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where Stratolaunch is headquartered.

 

"We'd like to conduct a demo mission from the Cape, so all the planning that we're doing right now would focus that effort there at Kennedy," he said.

 

Kennedy's wide, three-mile runway and distance from population centers are good fits for Stratolaunch's early flight operations, though other locations may be considered, Wentz said.

 

Stratolaunch, which was publicly introduced in December 2011, hopes to provide lower-cost launches by freeing itself from ground-based range infrastructure and weather restrictions and enabling quicker flight turnarounds.

 

"They have an opportunity to change the paradigm for the launch industry," said Frank DiBello, CEO of Space Florida, the state's aerospace development agency. "If they can put a significant lift capability in place at the price points they're thinking about, they'll have a significant mark on the marketplace."

 

Wentz has discussed Stratolaunch's future plans and facility needs with DiBello and KSC officials, but any formal commitment is likely still a year or two away.

 

"It is not firmed up, but it is inherently intuitive and logical, and we're doing everything that we can to keep it that way and to make Florida the launch and operations site of choice," said DiBello.

 

Those operations would employ just 50 to 100 people, Wentz estimated, "to keep things as lean as we can and keep the cost down."

 

But DiBello said Stratolaunch presented "multifaceted" opportunities for the Space Coast.

 

"It's not just the thing that's flying, even though that's impressive in itself," he said. "It's the customers that it brings with it, it's the payloads that need to be supported and processed for launch, it's the launch vehicle itself, it's the facilities associated with support of that vehicle."

 

In addition to Orbital, of Dulles, Va., the company is partnered with Scaled Composites, of Mojave, Calif., to design the twin-fuselage carrier aircraft weighing over 1.2 million pounds.

 

The aircraft will be a much larger version of the one Scaled designed with Allen's backing to fly the suborbital SpaceShipOne, the winner in 2004 of the $10 million Ansari X Prize to fly the first privately developed spaceship.

 

Dynetics, of Huntsville, will provide a mating and integration system and other support.

In Mojave, Stratolaunch is assembling a prototype aircraft wing in a new production facility and has nearly completed construction of a hangar. Test flights of the carrier aircraft are planned there in 2015.

 

The company bought two 747-400 jets and has fully disassembled one to make use of its engines, landing and nose gear and other components.

 

The SpaceX partnership broke down after engineers concluded the rocket would need large, tapered fins to provide the necessary lift and control. SpaceX decided that would require unacceptable modifications to its manufacturing processes as it tries to ramp up production of Falcon 9 rocket stages and engines.

 

Wentz expects to settle on a rocket design with Orbital early next year. He said the change would not limit Stratolaunch's capacity to carry medium-class payloads or significantly change its costs.

 

Orbital's air-launched Pegasus rocket has launched more than 80 satellites on 41 missions since 1990, but has flown rarely in recent years. It has failed three times.

 

"Orbital brings a lot of lessons learned from Pegasus that we can leverage and has demonstrated air launch before on a smaller scale, and so we look to use their past experiences to help minimize any impact as a result of the change," said Wentz. "We're making good progress."

 

END