Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: March 21, 2013 6:01:23 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - March 21, 2013 and JSC Today

Thursday, March 21, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
2.            Mission X Train Like an Astronaut 2013, Team USA Virtual Closing Events
3.            Hurry! You Have Until NOON to RSVP for the March JSC NMA Chapter Luncheon
4.            Meet Team Everest -- Film Producers and Crew Visit JSC
5.            Join Us for JSC's Monthly Disability Advisory Group Meeting
6.            Youth Violence
7.            JSC Praise and Worship Club
8.            Nomination Deadline Extended -- Space Camp Hall of Fame
9.            JSC Annual Picnic at Splashtown on April 28 -- Tickets on Sale March 26
10.          Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps: April 23 to 25
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet."
________________________________________
1.            Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
Most of our workforce worked during spring break, while an unlucky few of us went to a beach packed with college kids. Nocturnal college kids, I might add. This week's question is about the term "sustainability" and what it means in relation to "green stuff." What does it really mean? Composting? Recycling?
Your primary worries these days are focused on meteor strikes during sequestration. Since March Madness is upon us, let's hope a meteor strike doesn't upset the tournament. Who is your best pick to be a #15 seed that upsets a #2 seed? It's happened before. Will it be Iona this time? Florida Gulf Coast? Pacific?
Dicky your Vitale on over to get this week's poll.
Joel Walker x30541 http://jlt.jsc.nasa.gov/

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2.            Mission X Train Like an Astronaut 2013, Team USA Virtual Closing Events
Help celebrate Mission X Train Like an Astronaut 2013 with Team USA as they participate in virtual Closing Events hosted from the Digital Learning Network! Two separate but identical events will take place this week with teams participating live from Jamestown, N.Y.; Sharon, Mass.; Naperville, Ill.; Houston; Puerto Rico; and astronaut Mike Barratt. You can help them celebrate and watch live here. The events take place today, March 21, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. CDT, and Friday, March 22, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. CDT.
Laurie Abadie x31985

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3.            Hurry! You Have Until NOON to RSVP for the March JSC NMA Chapter Luncheon
Are you an aspiring leader or current manager who could use some handy advice from someone who currently serves more than 40,000 customers and has 27 years of experience? Wait no longer--because you have hours left to RSVP for the JSC National Management Association (NMA) March luncheon featuring Dr. Greg Smith, Clear Creek Independent School District (CCISD) superintendent. Smith was recently awarded Texas Superintendent of the Year for 2012 despite facing many daunting challenges, some of them very familiar to us here at JSC (ahem, like budget shortfalls).
The luncheon is Thursday, March 28, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Gilruth Alamo Ballroom. Members can go for free (cost for non-members - $20).
Quick! RSVP with you menu option (Cheese Manicotti OR London Broil OR Flounder Piccata) here by NOON today. For RSVP technical assistance, please contact Amy Kitchen via email or at x35569.
Catherine Williams x33317 http://www.jscnma.com/Events/

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4.            Meet Team Everest -- Film Producers and Crew Visit JSC
The "Team Everest: A Himalayan Journey" film chronicles the 21-day trek of five men in wheelchairs and their teammates--representing a range of disabilities--on a journey to reach Mount Everest Base Camp at an altitude of 17,500 feet. As their 10-year anniversary nears, the Team Everest crew and producer will visit JSC to share film highlights and reflections--an exclusive you don't want to miss!
Date: Friday, April 5
Location: Teague Auditorium
Time: 11 a.m. to noon
Hosted by Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity and JSC's disABILITY Advisory Group (DAG).
Accommodations for a specific disability are available upon request by contacting Janelle Holt at 281-483-7504 or via email no later than Friday, March 29.
Event Date: Friday, April 5, 2013   Event Start Time:11:00 AM   Event End Time:12:00 PM
Event Location: Teague Auditorium

Add to Calendar

Janelle Holt x37504 http://www.teameverestthemovie.com/

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5.            Join Us for JSC's Monthly Disability Advisory Group Meeting
Our next Disability Advisory Group Meeting will be held Thursday, March 28, in Building 1, Room 106G, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Whether you are an expert in a specific area or merely interested in learning more about disabilities, please join us. The JSC Disability Advisory Group was established to facilitate the creation of a working environment that is accessible to and inclusive of all abilities, which in turn makes our campus a safer and better place to work for the entire JSC workforce. Accommodations are available upon request. If you require special accommodation for a specific disability, please notify Janelle Holt at extension x37504 no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, March 25.
Event Date: Thursday, March 28, 2013   Event Start Time:9:30 AM   Event End Time:10:30 AM
Event Location: Building 1, Room 106G

Add to Calendar

Janelle Holt x37504

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6.            Youth Violence
In observance of the National Youth Violence Prevention Week, please join Takis Bogdanos, LPC-S, CGP, with the JSC Employee Assistance Program, today, March 21, at 12 noon in the Building 30 Auditorium for a presentation discussing the effects of youth violence in our children and our community, how to recognize the signs and the types of interventions available.
Event Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013   Event Start Time:12:00 PM   Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Building 30 Auditorium

Add to Calendar

Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Clinical Services Branch x36130

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7.            JSC Praise and Worship Club
It's been a while since we've met! The JSC Praise and Worship Club will meet on Wednesday, March 27, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in Building 29, Room 237 (Creative Space) to play and sing hymns and contemporary worship songs. Prayer partners will be available to anyone who wants it. Everyone is welcome!
Event Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2013   Event Start Time:11:30 AM   Event End Time:12:15 PM
Event Location: B. 29 Room 237

Add to Calendar

Mike FitzPatrick x30758

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8.            Nomination Deadline Extended -- Space Camp Hall of Fame
Did you go to Space Camp, or know someone who did? Nominations are now open for the Space Camp Hall of Fame!
The Space Camp Hall of Fame was established to honor the outstanding members of the Space Camp family, including graduates and former employees who have distinguished themselves in their respective careers, or friends who have made considerable contributions of personal time, effort or resources to further the goals of the Space Camp programs.
Last year, two additional members of the JSC community were inducted, bringing the total to six. Let's keep showing them the great talent JSC has to offer. Nominations close April 15. Learn more and nominate someone today!
Valerie Meyers x34989

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9.            JSC Annual Picnic at Splashtown on April 28 -- Tickets on Sale March 26
SplashTown is closed to the public to allow NASA family and friends to attend a private day at the water park!
Tickets will be on sale from March 26 through April 19 in the Buildings 3 and 11 Starport Gift Shops. Tickets will be $33 each for ages 3 and up. After April 19, tickets will be $37.
A ticket includes: private-day admission at SplashTown from noon to 6 p.m., a barbecue lunch, beverages, snow cones, kids' games, Bingo, face-painting, a moon bounce, balloon artist, DJ, horseshoes, volleyball, basketball and plenty of thrills!
Event Date: Sunday, April 28, 2013   Event Start Time:12:00 AM   Event End Time:6:00 PM
Event Location: Splashtown

Add to Calendar

Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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10.          Investigating Aircraft and Flight System Mishaps: April 23 to 25
8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily in Building 20, Room 205/206. This course provides instruction in aviation and flight systems mishap investigation basics and policy. Topics discussed include: NASA NPR 8621.1B - mishap investigation requirements and terminology; investigator qualifications; board composition; and field techniques. Evidence identification; recovery and protection; witness interviewing; and site mapping, along with individual component systems and material failures, are key areas discussed during sessions on field investigation. The course contains extensive accident investigation information generally applicable to aviation accidents, which can be applied to other areas of flight systems mishaps such as unmanned aerial vehicles, rockets and balloons, and other spaceflight systems mishaps such as Genesis. To register for this course, you MUST FIRST have completed the required four-part online prerequisite: (SMA-002-07) Overview of Mishap Investigations; (SMA-002-08) Mishap Investigation Roles and Responsibilities; (SMA-002-09) Completing the Investigation and Mishap Report; and (SMA-002-10) Root Cause Analysis. Update Profile First. SATERN Registration Required. https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
Polly Caison x41279

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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 EDT) – Video File of Exp 35/36 crew activities in Baikonur

Human Spaceflight News
Thursday, March 21, 2013

First day of spring taken at 6:45 am Central (7:45 EDT) Wednesday by NOAA's GOES-13 weather satellite

HEADLINES AND LEADS

NASA Passed on Mars Flyby Mission in 1990s
Space agency has become too risk-averse, critics say

Jason Koebler - US News & World Report

Millionaire entrepreneur Dennis Tito got space enthusiasts excited last month when he announced a project to fly a married couple around Mars in 2018—but NASA may have passed on a similar mission when it was proposed in the late 1990s by a prominent aerospace engineer. According to Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and a prominent advocate for exploration of the red planet, he had meetings with former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the late 1990s to pitch him a nearly identical mission to Tito's that would have launched in 2001 and cost the agency about $2 billion. Dubbed Athena, the mission would have used technology that existed in 1996 on a two-year Mars flyby mission. Two astronauts would have orbited the planet for about a year, remotely-controlling rovers on the Martian surface with about 100 times less lag time than rovers controlled from Earth. The spaceship would never land on Mars, which Zubrin contends was Goldin's problem with the mission.

Then & Now: Jeff Bezos' expedition team finds/recovers Saturn V F-1 engine components

Amazon CEO recovers Apollo engines from Atlantic

Alicia Chang - Associated Press

Rusted pieces of two Apollo-era rocket engines that helped boost astronauts to the moon have been fished out of the murky depths of the Atlantic, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and NASA said Wednesday. A privately funded expedition led by Bezos raised the main engine parts during three weeks at sea and was headed back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., the launch pad for the manned lunar missions. "We've seen an underwater wonderland - an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end," Bezos wrote in an online posting.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos hails recovery of some Apollo F-1 engines

Andrea Chang - Los Angeles Times

Jeff Bezos: founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and now, bona fide ocean explorer. A year after vowing to send a team into the ocean to find F-1 engines from the historic Apollo 11 moon launch, Bezos announced Wednesday that the team had recovered F-1 engine parts. Because many original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, it was unclear if they actually came from the Apollo 11 mission. Calling it an "incredible adventure," the billionaire said the team had just finished three weeks at sea, working nearly three miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Apollo moon rocket engines raised from Atlantic

Michael Winter - USA Today

Two giant rocket engines that launched U.S. astronauts to the moon four decades ago have been recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral by an expedition paid for by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The F-1 engines, which powered the first-stage Saturn V boosters that fell back to Earth after their fuel was depleted, were found at a depth of 14,000 feet, Bezos' expedition announced Wednesday.

Apollo program's rocket engines raised from ocean depths

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

A team of underwater treasure hunters announced Wednesday that it has found — and recovered — major pieces of rocket engines from the Apollo moon program that were lost for decades in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The team, funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has spent the past three weeks at sea searching for the F-1 engines, which powered the Saturn V rockets that blasted the Apollo capsules to the moon in the 1960s and '70s. The engine pieces were discovered about 360 miles east of Cape Canaveral in waters up to 14,000 feet deep. The engines, along with the rest of the Saturn V rockets' first stage, were designed to splash into the Atlantic after liftoff. NASA never intended to recover them.

Saturn V rocket engines lifted from sea floor
Team due in Port Canaveral today; mangled parts to be fixed, displayed

James Dean – Florida Today

For decades they lay in darkness nearly three miles below the Atlantic Ocean's surface. Now, the rusted and mangled remains of Saturn V rocket engines that may have launched the first men to the moon sit aboard a salvage ship expected to arrive this morning in Port Canaveral, their first stop en route to museums. A three-week expedition funded by Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos successfully recovered enough components to restore and display two of the F-1 engines that helped Apollo missions blast off from Kennedy Space Center, Bezos said Wednesday.

Apollo Moon Rocket Engines Raised from Seafloor by Amazon CEO

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

Long thought to be lost forever on the ocean floor, massive engines that launched astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago have been recovered by a private expedition led by the founder of Amazon.com. "We found so much," said Jeff Bezos, the online retailer's CEO, in an update posted Wednesday on the Bezos Expeditions website. "We have seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

Amazon CEO and his Expeditions team recover Apollo 11's F-1 engines from ocean floor

Trevor Mogg - DigitalTrends.com

It's probably not the kind of thing you'd find on most people's to-do list, but for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, diving to the ocean floor to recover the engines of the space rocket that helped take humans to the moon for the very first time was an adventure he couldn't resist. Of course, Bezos himself didn't don a wet suit and single-handedly pull the Apollo 11 engines to the surface, though he may well have looked into the possibility. Instead, the feat was accomplished by the Bezos Expeditions team, a ship called Seabed Worker and several rather boringly named Remotely Operated Vehicles (aka ROVs). "We've seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," billionaire Bezos wrote on his Expeditions blog Wednesday.

New SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to debut in June

Amy Svitak - Aerospace Daily

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) will launch the first flight of its new Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket in June from the company's new launch pad at Vandenberg AFB, Calif. The upgraded Falcon 9 launcher will feature more powerful Merlin 1D engines, extended fuel tanks and a wider payload fairing. The June mission will loft a small Canadian solar-weather satellite, Cassiope, to a polar low Earth orbit, a demonstration flight that could pave the way for the company's first mission to geostationary orbit in early July with the launch of the SES-8 commercial communications satellite for Luxembourg-based fleet operator SES. By the end of the year, Matsumori says SpaceX expects to conduct its third cargo resupply mission to the ISS.

SpaceX tests new engine; rival finds old engine

Joseph Abbott - Waco Tribune

Rocket engines (and Internet moguls in the space business) in the news Wednesday: As SpaceX — founded by Elon Musk largely with proceeds from the sale of PayPal — announced that the new, more powerful version of its Merlin rocket engine had completed qualification testing at its McGregor development site, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos — mounting his own private spaceflight effort at Blue Origin — was posting images from his team's recovery from the ocean floor of massive F-1 engines from Saturn V launches.

Astronauts Celebrate Adventure at Explorers Club Dinner

Clara Moskowitz – Space.com

Some of the world's most pioneering explorers, including two Mercury astronauts, celebrated the thrill of exploration and the lure of the unknown at the annual Explorers Club dinner here on Saturday. Honoree John Glenn, a former senator and the first American to orbit Earth, summed up the mood while accepting his Legendary Explorer Medal. "Exploring is another way of saying curiosity in action," he said. And one explorer who was still partway through his expedition — Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield — managed to call into the festivities from his temporary home on the International Space Station. Hadfield thanked the explorers, especially the legendary astronauts, for paving the way for his own explorations. "Thank you for your vision, for your dedication, for your inspiration," he said while floating in his spacecraft, via video message. "We absolutely stand on your shoulders."

NASA steps up security after arrest of former contractor

Irene Klotz - Reuters

NASA has shut down access to an online database and banned new requests from Chinese and some other foreign nationals seeking access to its facilities amid mounting concerns about espionage and export control violations, the U.S. space agency's administrator said on Wednesday. The security measures include a complete ban on remote computer access by Chinese and some other non-U.S. contractors already working at NASA centers, agency chief Charles Bolden said at a congressional oversight hearing in Washington.

NASA blocks access to China, 7 suspect nations

Ledyard King – Florida Today

Visitors from China and several other suspect countries will be denied access to NASA facilities until the agency finishes investigating its cybersecurity measures involving foreign nationals, NASA's administrator told congressional lawmakers Tuesday. Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. announced the ban after the arrest Saturday of a Chinese researcher who once worked at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and may have tried to provide sensitive information to Beijing.

NASA locks out foreigners, orders security review following concerns of Chinese spying

FoxNews.com

NASA has locked its facilities to foreigners, disabled online research databases and ordered a complete review of access by foreign nationals to its facilities, as allegations swirled of foreign spies within the space agency. The reports came to a head this weekend with the arrest of former consultant Bo Jiang as he was leaving the country with a one-way ticket to China -- carrying several data storage devices, including hard drives, flash drives and computers that likely contained sensitive information.

Congressman: NASA intentionally skirted rules
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf asserts that NASA Langley and other NASA centers circumvented rules on hiring foreign nationals

Peter Dujardin - Hampton Roads Daily Press

A Northern Virginia congressman contends that NASA Langley Research Center and other NASA facilities around the country have intentionally circumvented federal law restricting the foreign nationals they can hire. U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-McLean, says NASA is required to abide by long-standing federal restrictions on which foreign nationals they can bring in to do research. But he said NASA farms out much of its work to contractors — and then proceeds to dictate to those contractors about which employees they want on board.

NASA probes security lapses after arrest of ex-contractor

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

The head of NASA pledged Wednesday to carry out a full review of space agency security procedures after the arrest this month of a former contractor suspected of attempting to take sensitive technology back to his native China. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made the pledge to the House Committee on Appropriations Wednesday during a hearing to answer lawmakers' questions about potential security lapses at space agency centers.

Sequestration whacks National Space Symposium:
NASA Drops Out, Some Air Force Cancel

Colin Clark - AOL News

For those who aren't part of the insular space community, you need to know that the National Space Symposium is the most important conference on space issues in the world. Everyone goes: the intelligence community; the Air Force; Army; Navy; industry; allies; even senior Chinese officials show up fairly regularly these days. Some 9,000 people attend in a good year. But this year no one from NASA -- that's right, those people who gave us the Moon landings, Mars Rover, Voyager and are sort of synonymous with space -- will attend NSS at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs next month. Here is the remarkably prickly and hurt message sent out by the Space Foundation, organizer of NSS, when it learned of NASA's decision: "On March 13, NASA announced its intent to withdraw from the global space community by not participating in the 29th National Space Symposium. This marks the first time in 29 years that NASA has so isolated itself."…

The Coming Age of Space Colonization
In the next generation, will humans be mining on the moon and living on Mars?

James Fallows - The Atlantic

Our new issue contains a two-page Q&A I conducted with Eric C. Anderson. He has had a variety of tech and entrepreneurial identities, but I was speaking to him in his role as chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures, which has made a business of sending customers into space. The subject of our discussion was the future of space travel. Below is an extended-play version of the interview, with extra questions and themes…
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

NASA Passed on Mars Flyby Mission in 1990s
Space agency has become too risk-averse, critics say

Jason Koebler - US News & World Report

Millionaire entrepreneur Dennis Tito got space enthusiasts excited last month when he announced a project to fly a married couple around Mars in 2018—but NASA may have passed on a similar mission when it was proposed in the late 1990s by a prominent aerospace engineer.

According to Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and a prominent advocate for exploration of the red planet, he had meetings with former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the late 1990s to pitch him a nearly identical mission to Tito's that would have launched in 2001 and cost the agency about $2 billion.

Dubbed Athena, the mission would have used technology that existed in 1996 on a two-year Mars flyby mission. Two astronauts would have orbited the planet for about a year, remotely-controlling rovers on the Martian surface with about 100 times less lag time than rovers controlled from Earth. The spaceship would never land on Mars, which Zubrin contends was Goldin's problem with the mission.

"He passed on it—he said if we go to Mars, we want to land, we want to explore," he says. "I contend that this is a lot better than nothing. This would have been an icebreaker mission. It would have killed the dragons that suggest we can't go to Mars."

Zubrin and other commercial space advocates have grown fed up with NASA's timeline for getting back into the manned spaceflight game. Tito said as much in a press conference announcing his plan, which he estimates will cost between $1 and $2 million and is scheduled to happen in 2018.

"We have not sent humans beyond the moon in more than 40 years," he said. "I've been waiting, and a lot of people my age, have been waiting. And I think it's time to put an end to that lapse."

In a proposal paper published by Zubrin in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1996, he admits that a flyby mission is "not an optimal mission plan for human exploration of Mars," but "is a way to get started," an opinion he still holds.

With several rovers already exploring Mars, astronomers would get little new scientific data from a human flyby of the planet—the next great leap is considered to be a Mars sample return mission aboard an unmanned vessel. Ideally, of course, Zubrin and others would like to land humans on the Martian surface.

A representative for Goldin says he met with Zubrin in the 1990s but the former administrator, who served between 1992 and 2001, has remained largely silent on his time at NASA. Goldin declined to speak with U.S. News for this story and a representative for the Intellisis Corporation, a neuroscience firm where he is now CEO, said he "has maintained his longstanding policy of not commenting on NASA activities."

During his tenure, Goldin was famous for abandoning expensive, multi-decade missions in favor of launching many relatively cheap, robotic missions.

Roger Wiens, a principal investigator on the $2.5 billion Mars Curiosity rover project and designer of one of those missions in the 1990s, says a mission like Tito's or Goldin's doesn't make sense for the agency.

"It's totally a budget question and that gets to our national priorities. If our country wanted to send people to Mars badly enough, we would do it. But NASA isn't going to do it in a highly risky way," he says. "We want to bring people back alive and healthy, but if other people want to do it in a different way, that's their prerogative."

Zubrin says that the threats deep space poses to humans has not changed since the mid-1990s, but that they might be overstated.

According to some estimates, a person who spends two consecutive years in space increases their chances of getting cancer during their lifetimes by about 2 percent. Other studies have suggested that spending long periods in zero gravity can cause other health problems—in Zubrin's Athena mission, he proposed that by spinning the capsule, artificial gravity could be created.

NASA says it will "continue discussions with Inspiration Mars to see how the agency might collaborate on mutually-beneficial activities that could complement NASA's human spaceflight, space technology and Mars exploration plans," but has no plans to do a Mars flyby mission of its own anytime soon.

In 2010, President Obama said he hopes that "by the mid 2030s," NASA will "send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth."

A representative with NASA said he could not confirm whether or not Zubrin had met with Goldin to discuss Athena, but that Zubrin is "a highly respected scientist."

Wiens says NASA "would not get anything from a simple human flyby mission except to prove we can go there," to which Zubrin says, "exactly."

"Conceivably, a person can say 'What's the point of a flyby mission,' and the point is to say 'Follow me, this can be done,'" Zubrin says. "It's fear holding NASA back. These are risky missions. If you want to be safe, stay on the ground."

Amazon CEO recovers Apollo engines from Atlantic

Alicia Chang - Associated Press

Rusted pieces of two Apollo-era rocket engines that helped boost astronauts to the moon have been fished out of the murky depths of the Atlantic, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and NASA said Wednesday.

A privately funded expedition led by Bezos raised the main engine parts during three weeks at sea and was headed back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., the launch pad for the manned lunar missions.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland - an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end," Bezos wrote in an online posting.

Last year, the Bezos team used sonar to spot the sunken engines resting nearly 3 miles deep in the Atlantic and 360 miles from Cape Canaveral. At the time, the Internet mogul said the artifacts were part of the Apollo 11 mission that gave the world "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Bezos now says it's unclear which Apollo mission the recovered engines belonged to because the serial numbers were missing or hard to read on the corroded pieces. NASA is helping trace the hardware's origin.

Apollo astronauts were launched aboard the mighty Saturn V rocket during the 1960s and 1970s. Each rocket had a cluster of five engines, which produced about 7 1/2 million pounds of thrust. After liftoff, the engines - each weighing 18,000 pounds - fell to the ocean as designed, with no plans to retrieve them.

Bezos and his team sent underwater robots to hoist the engines, which are NASA property. In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called the recovery "a historic find."

Bezos plans to restore the engine parts, which included a nozzle, turbine, thrust chamber and heat exchanger. Amazon.com Inc. spokesman Drew Herdener declined Wednesday to reveal the cost of the recovery or restoration.

NASA has previously said an engine would head for the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. If a second was recovered, it would be displayed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where Amazon.com is based.

The ocean floor off Cape Canaveral is strewn with jettisoned rockets and flight parts from missions since the beginning of the Space Age. What survived after plunging into the ocean is unknown.

In one of the more famous recoveries, a private company in 1999 hoisted Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule that accidentally sank in the Atlantic after splashdown in 1961. The capsule is now featured at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

Besides running the online retailer, Bezos founded Blue Origins, one of the companies with a NASA contract to develop a spaceship to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

In a previous posting, Bezos said he was inspired by NASA as a child, and by recovering the engines "maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore."

Amazon's Jeff Bezos hails recovery of some Apollo F-1 engines

Andrea Chang - Los Angeles Times

Jeff Bezos: founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and now, bona fide ocean explorer.

A year after vowing to send a team into the ocean to find F-1 engines from the historic Apollo 11 moon launch, Bezos announced Wednesday that the team had recovered F-1 engine parts. Because many original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, it was unclear if they actually came from the Apollo 11 mission.

Calling it an "incredible adventure," the billionaire said the team had just finished three weeks at sea, working nearly three miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland — an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," Bezos said in a post on his Bezos Expeditions blog.

"We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible."

Bezos said remotely operated vehicles worked at a depth of more than 14,000 feet, tethered to a ship with fiber optics for data and electric cables transmitting power at more than 4,000 volts.

The team, he said, is bringing back enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines, which were developed by Rocketdyne engineers in Canoga Park. Upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion.

Of the pieces that were recovered, Bezos noted that precise mission identification would be difficult.

"We want this hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000-mile-per-hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," Bezos said. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

"We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous," he said.

Quick history lesson: On July 16, 1969, five F-1 engines fired, burned for a few minutes and plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean as planned. A few days later, Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.

Since then, the exact whereabouts of the F-1 engines were unknown. For most people, this would remain an unsolved mystery. For Bezos, who was 5 years old during the historic Apollo 11 mission, it became a lingering question that he thought he could solve.

After Bezos' blog was posted, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden released a statement congratulating Bezos and the team on the successful recovery.

"We share the excitement expressed by Jeff and his team in announcing the recovery of two of the powerful Saturn V first-stage engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean," Bolden said. "This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display."

Bolden noted that Bezos and his colleagues were helping to usher in a new commercial era of space exploration. "We are confident our continued collaboration will soon result in private human access to space," he said.

This is just the latest unusual endeavor from Bezos, who has an eclectic range of interests besides running the world's largest online retailer. Among them: The 10,000 Year Clock, which he describes as a "special clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking" that is to be built inside a mountain in West Texas.

"The vision was, and still is, to build a clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years," Bezos said, noting that the clock will tick once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years "and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium."

Apollo moon rocket engines raised from Atlantic

Michael Winter - USA Today

Two giant rocket engines that launched U.S. astronauts to the moon four decades ago have been recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral by an expedition paid for by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The F-1 engines, which powered the first-stage Saturn V boosters that fell back to Earth after their fuel was depleted, were found at a depth of 14,000 feet, Bezos' expedition announced Wednesday.

The recovery, after three weeks at sea, came almost a year after his team used state-of-the-art sonar to locate a debris field of battered, rusted F-1 engines and parts that Bezos described as "gorgeous."

"We have seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," he wrote.

NASA calls the F-1 "the most powerful single-nozzle, liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed."

Five F-1 engines were used in the 138-foot-tall S-IC, or first stage, of each Saturn V, which depended on the five-engine cluster for the 7.5 million pounds of thrust needed to lift it from the launch pad. Each mighty engine stands 19 feet tall by 12 feet wide and weigh over 18,000 pounds. The F-1 was developed by engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and its industry team.

The cluster of five F-1 engines burned a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel at more than 15 metric tons per second during its two-and-one-half-minutes of operation. Each F-1 engine had more thrust than three space shuttle main engines combined to lift the vehicle to a height of about 36 miles and to a speed of about 6,000 mph.

Last March, Bezos announced that his expedition had located the five engines used to launch the historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, which landed the first humans on the moon. But making a positive identification may be difficult, he wrote Wednesday, because many serial numbers are missing or partial.

Next up, restoration.

We're bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion. We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000-mile-per-hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface. We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing.Although Bezos is funding the entire cost of recovery and restoration, the engines remain the property of NASA.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," said the space agency's administrator, Charles Bolden.

Exactly where the restored engines will be displayed has not been decided.

Bezos has said he would like one for the Museum of Flight in Seattle, near where Amazon and Bezos' commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, have their headquarters.

NASA has indicated it would offer one to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Apollo program's rocket engines raised from ocean depths

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

A team of underwater treasure hunters announced Wednesday that it has found — and recovered — major pieces of rocket engines from the Apollo moon program that were lost for decades in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral.

The team, funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has spent the past three weeks at sea searching for the F-1 engines, which powered the Saturn V rockets that blasted the Apollo capsules to the moon in the 1960s and '70s. The engine pieces were discovered about 360 miles east of Cape Canaveral in waters up to 14,000 feet deep.

The engines, along with the rest of the Saturn V rockets' first stage, were designed to splash into the Atlantic after liftoff. NASA never intended to recover them.

But about a year ago, Bezos said he would do just that. And he revealed the success Wednesday in a posting made to the website of his project, Bezos Expeditions.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland — an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves as testament to the Apollo program," Bezos wrote.

He said the team recovered enough material to "fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines," though it would be difficult to know which missions they flew because many of the serial numbers were missing.

"We might see more during restoration," he said. "The objects themselves are gorgeous."

Pictures released from the recovery effort show crew members cleaning off several pieces, including a turbine, thrust chamber and manifold. An intact F-1 engine measured about 19 feet tall and weighed more than 18,000 pounds.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said researchers in NASA's history office were working with the Bezos team to identify the pieces and which missions they came from.

The Apollo missions stand as the highlight of the U.S. space program — culminating with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 that put the first astronauts on the moon. There were a total of 11 manned Apollo flights from Kennedy Space Center from 1968 to 1972, when the lunar program was canceled.

The moon missions were powered by the massive Saturn V rocket, the tallest, heaviest and most powerful U.S. rocket ever built. Fully fueled, it weighed more than 6 million pounds; at about 360 feet tall, it was roughly six stories taller than the Statue of Liberty.

To get this beast off the ground, NASA engineers used five liquid-fueled F-1 engines, each generating 1.5 million pounds of thrust — or about three times the thrust of a space-shuttle main engine.

In response to the recovery, NASA chief Charlie Bolden had nothing but praise.

"This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit," Bolden said in a statement.

A year ago, when the hunt for the engines first started, Bolden reminded Bezos that NASA retained ownership of any salvaged artifacts, and that the agency likely would offer the first recovered engine to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

But, he added, if the Smithsonian declined or if a second engine were recovered — as it was — then NASA would "work to ensure an engine or other artifacts are available for display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, as Jeff [Bezos] requested."

Saturn V rocket engines lifted from sea floor
Team due in Port Canaveral today; mangled parts to be fixed, displayed

James Dean – Florida Today

For decades they lay in darkness nearly three miles below the Atlantic Ocean's surface.

Now, the rusted and mangled remains of Saturn V rocket engines that may have launched the first men to the moon sit aboard a salvage ship expected to arrive this morning in Port Canaveral, their first stop en route to museums.

A three-week expedition funded by Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos successfully recovered enough components to restore and display two of the F-1 engines that helped Apollo missions blast off from Kennedy Space Center, Bezos said Wednesday.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland — an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," Bezos wrote in an update posted online.

"Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible."

Bezos, who also started the private space firm Blue Origin, announced a year ago that his team had located the five engines that blasted the first moon landing mission off its pad in 1969.

However, it's not yet known on which missions the recovered engines flew.

The parts' serial numbers were all or partly missing, erased by the engines' high-speed ocean impacts or corrosion from sitting more than 40 years in salt water on the ocean floor.

Still NASA property, the engines, once restored, are expected to be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

"This is a historic find, and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display."

NASA blessed the recovery project and is now assisting efforts to research the flight hardware's history, but otherwise was not involved in the privately funded expedition.

State-of-the-art deep sea sonar found the engine parts on the ocean floor.

Then the crew aboard the 290-foot vessel Seabed Worker dispatched tethered, remotely operated vehicles more than 14,000 feet down to inspect the pieces.

"The objects themselves are gorgeous," said Bezos.

Robotic arm operators threaded slings around the misshapen and partially buried parts and deposited them in giant baskets hoisted to the surface. Cranes delicately lifted them onto the ship's deck.

Working in pitch darkness, floating as if in microgravity, the deep sea vehicles conjured echoes of the Apollo missions.

"The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion," Bezos said.

Bezos himself took part in an expedition crew that numbered nearly 60, according to a photo posted online.

The team included a diver who discovered the main ship's wheel of Titanic and an underwater archeologist who oversaw recovery expeditions to the Civil War ironclad warship USS Monitor near Cape Hatteras, N.C.

Bezos says the F-1, the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed, "is still a modern wonder."

A cluster of five powered the first stage of Saturn V rockets with a combined 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Intact, each engine measured 19 feet tall by 12 feet wide and weighed over 18,000 pounds.

Watching the Apollo 11 moon landing as a 5-year-old fueled Bezos' enthusiasm for science, engineering and exploration, and he said he hoped recovering the historic engines would encourage more young people to invent and explore.

"We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing," he said.

Apollo Moon Rocket Engines Raised from Seafloor by Amazon CEO

Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com

Long thought to be lost forever on the ocean floor, massive engines that launched astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago have been recovered by a private expedition led by the founder of Amazon.com.

"We found so much," said Jeff Bezos, the online retailer's CEO, in an update posted Wednesday on the Bezos Expeditions website. "We have seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

When NASA's mighty Saturn V rockets were launched on missions to Earth orbit and the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the five F-1 engines that powered each of the boosters' first stages dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and sank to the seafloor. There they were expected to remain, discarded forever.

Then, almost exactly one year ago, Bezos announced his private — and until then, secret — expedition had located what they believed to be theengines from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that began the journey to land the first humans on the moon.

"Nearly one year ago, Jeff Bezos shared with us his plans to recover F-1 engines," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a statement that was released Wednesday. "We share the excitement expressed by Jeff and his team in announcing the recovery of two of the powerful Saturn V first-stage engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

Poetic echoes of lunar missions

When Bezos first revealed that his team had discovered the engines using state-of-the-art deep-sea sonar, he said he wasn't sure what condition they were in.

"They hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they are made of tough stuff, so we'll see," Bezos wrote in 2012.

What they saw, using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV), was a tangled pile of F-1 engine parts strewn across the ocean floor at a depth of more than 14,000 feet (4,270 meters).

"We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces," Bezos wrote in the update Wednesday. "Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible."

The scene also evoked the Apollo moon missions themselves.

"We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions," Bezos wrote. "The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion."

Bezos and his team are now heading back to port in Cape Canaveral, Fla., after working for three weeks at sea on the Seabed Worker, a multi-purpose support vessel.

Recovery, restoration and display

The Bezos expedition returned enough major components to rebuild two Saturn V F-1 engines— out of the 65 that were launched between 1967 and 1973 — for display. Despite claims last year that the engines were specifically from Apollo 11, Bezos now says the history of the engine parts he recovered may not be known.

Inspecting the raised pieces, Bezos reported that many of the parts' original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which may make mission identification difficult.

"We might see more during restoration," Bezos wrote.

Once the engine parts are back on land, they will undergo a restoration to stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion from their decades-long exposure to the ocean's salt water. But Bezos hinted the restoration may not return the engines to like-new condition.

"We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," Bezos stated. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Where the recovered F-1 engines will go on exhibit is still to be decided. Last year, Bezos expressed a desire that if two or more of the engines were successfully raised, one would go on display at The Museum of Flight in Seattle, near where Amazon and Bezos' commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, are headquarted.

NASA, which retains ownership of the engines and all of its parts, said it would likely offer one to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," Bolden said.

Amazon CEO and his Expeditions team recover Apollo 11's F-1 engines from ocean floor

Trevor Mogg - DigitalTrends.com

It's probably not the kind of thing you'd find on most people's to-do list, but for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, diving to the ocean floor to recover the engines of the space rocket that helped take humans to the moon for the very first time was an adventure he couldn't resist.

Of course, Bezos himself didn't don a wet suit and single-handedly pull the Apollo 11 engines to the surface, though he may well have looked into the possibility. Instead, the feat was accomplished by the Bezos Expeditions team, a ship called Seabed Worker and several rather boringly named Remotely Operated Vehicles (aka ROVs).

"We've seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," billionaire Bezos wrote on his Expeditions blog Wednesday. "We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible."

Bezos and his team located the engines – part of the Apollo 11 rocket that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in July 1969 – on the seabed 14,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, about 360 miles from the rocket's launch site in Cape Canaveral.

Writing about the technology that helped bring the engines to the surface, Bezos, who was just five when the first manned moon mission took place, said the ROVs were tethered to the Seabed Worker "with fiber optics for data and electric cables transmitting power at more than 4,000 volts." He added, "We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions. The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion."

The recovered engines, which Bezos described as "gorgeous", will be restored to stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion.

"We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," the Amazon founder said. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Commenting on Bezos's efforts to recover the engines, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, "This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit."

New SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to debut in June

Amy Svitak - Aerospace Daily

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) will launch the first flight of its new Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket in June from the company's new launch pad at Vandenberg AFB, Calif.

The upgraded Falcon 9 launcher will feature more powerful Merlin 1D engines, extended fuel tanks and a wider payload fairing.

The June mission will loft a small Canadian solar-weather satellite, Cassiope, to a polar low Earth orbit, a demonstration flight that could pave the way for the company's first mission to geostationary orbit in early July with the launch of the SES-8 commercial communications satellite for Luxembourg-based fleet operator SES.

Barry Matsumori, SpaceX vice president of commercial sales and business development, says the SES mission will be followed in late July by the launch of the Orbital Sciences Corp.-built Thaicom 6 satellite.

In the fall, SpaceX plans to launch eight second-generation OG2 satellites for fleet operator Orbcomm, a dedicated launch that follows the loss of a prototype OG2 satellite that flew as a secondary payload on NASA's Oct. 7 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), but which was placed into the wrong orbit following the loss of one of the Falcon 9's nine Merlin 1C engines.

By the end of the year, Matsumori says SpaceX expects to conduct its third cargo resupply mission to the ISS.

SpaceX tests new engine; rival finds old engine

Joseph Abbott - Waco Tribune

Rocket engines (and Internet moguls in the space business) in the news Wednesday: As SpaceX — founded by Elon Musk largely with proceeds from the sale of PayPal — announced that the new, more powerful version of its Merlin rocket engine had completed qualification testing at its McGregor development site, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos — mounting his own private spaceflight effort at Blue Origin — was posting images from his team's recovery from the ocean floor of massive F-1 engines from Saturn V launches.

The old first: Bezos' team used remotely operated vehicles to pull pieces of the Apollo-era hardware from the Atlantic Ocean floor, where the Saturn V first stages fell after finishing their part of the flight and separating from the later stages.

"We're bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines," Bezos wrote as the team headed back to Cape Canaveral, Fla. "The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion. We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface. We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

The Saturn V used five of the giant F-1 engines to start the Apollo spacecraft on their journeys to the moon. SpaceX's Falcon 9 needs nine of the much smaller Merlin engines on its first stage to get into orbit — but those engines, and the Falcon 9 itself, are getting a major upgrade.

Up until now Falcon 9 flights, including launches sending the Dragon cargo ship to the International Space Station, have used the Merlin 1C engine, with 95,000 pounds of thrust and a thrust-to-weight ratio of 92. The 1D boosts that to 147,000 pounds of thrust and a ratio of more than 150 — "the best of any liquid rocket engine in history," according to Wednesday's release by SpaceX communications director Christina Ra.

Through a sequence of 28 qualification tests at the McGregor site totaling more than 30 minutes of engine firing, the 1D earned its stripes for upcoming launches, the release said, exceeding expected needs for firing duration and restart capacity by 4 to 1.

The new Falcon 9 v1.1 that uses those engines will be taller, and will arrange the engines a little differently (eight engines in a circle around a central engine, rather than a 3-by-3 grid).

The 1Ds are also planned for use on the 27-engine Falcon Heavy, set to begin testing soon at the McGregor site.

The Merlins and even the Falcon Heavy are lightweights compared to the F-1 and Saturn V: The F-1 had 10 times the Merlin 1C's thrust, and the Saturn V could carry 260,000 pounds to low Earth orbit where the Falcon Heavy is expected to carry 120,000 pounds. That doesn't mean glory days of truly huge rockets are necessarily in the past: NASA engineers are looking at reviving the F-1 for the agency's Space Launch System, and SpaceX has talked of a next-generation Merlin 2 that would exceed the F-1, powering future rockets that would exceed the Saturn V.

Astronauts Celebrate Adventure at Explorers Club Dinner

Clara Moskowitz – Space.com

Some of the world's most pioneering explorers, including two Mercury astronauts, celebrated the thrill of exploration and the lure of the unknown at the annual Explorers Club dinner here on Saturday.

Honoree John Glenn, a former senator and the first American to orbit Earth, summed up the mood while accepting his Legendary Explorer Medal. "Exploring is another way of saying curiosity in action," he said. "If you think about it, there haven't been any advances made in civilization without someone being curious about what's out there, what's around the next bend in the road or over the next hill or beyond that forest over there. This kind of curiosity is far more than just wanting to go and look at some new scenery someplace — it's an attitude, and something that I think has been key toward lifting this country into its leadership position in the world."

Fittingly for a gathering of such intrepid explorers, the food at the gala, held at Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria hotel, was far from pedestrian. The appetizer spread included roasted camel, tarantula fritters, and a carving station of muskrat, goat and beaver. Deserts featured cakes topped with crickets and mealworms.

Attendees drank a re-creation of the malt whiskey taken to Antarctica by explorer Ernest Shackleton during his 1907 "Nimrod" expedition. A piece of the moon brought back by Apollo astronauts was also on display, as was a chunk of glacier shipped from Iceland.

Glenn spoke alongside his fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter, who became the second American to orbit Earth when he flew on the Aurora 7 spacecraft in 1962. Both men were among NASA's first seven astronauts, chosen to fly the Mercury program that laid the groundwork for the Gemini and Apollo missions to follow. Carpenter accepted a Legendary Explorer Medal as well.

"We were all serving our curiosity, but we were serving our country and we were serving our belief, which is justifiable today, that preeminence in space was a condition of this nation's freedom, and that is what drove us, along with our curiosity, to do what we did in those early important days," Carpenter said.

Space pioneers weren't the only explorers on hand that night. Other award winners include Chhiring Dorje Sherpa, who has summited Mount Everest 11 times, and was honored for performing a daring rescue that saved a man's life on the Pakistani mountain K2 in 2008.

And film director James Cameron, who traveled to the deepest spot in the ocean — the Mariana Trench 7 miles down — inside a robotic submersible in March 2012, was awarded the Explorer's Club Medal.

"Curiosity acted upon is what exploration is," Cameron said. "I think there is a moment for all of us explorers where we have to get up and do something about it; we're not content to be observers. There's a moment where we realize, we came here to play."

Though the feats accomplished by the explorers present varied from expeditions to land, sea, air, and space, the central motivations they cited were strikingly similar.

"Humankind is curious," Jim Whittaker, the first American to climb to the summit of Mount Everest, told SPACE.com. "They want to know what the hell is over the horizon or what is on the other side of the mountain, and also where the hell do we come from, what's our makeup? If there's an ocean, we cross it, if there's a disease, we cure it, if there's a wrong, we right it, if there's a record, we break it, if there's a mountain, we climb it."

And one explorer who was still partway through his expedition — Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield — managed to call into the festivities from his temporary home on the International Space Station. Hadfield thanked the explorers, especially the legendary astronauts, for paving the way for his own explorations.

"Thank you for your vision, for your dedication, for your inspiration," he said while floating in his spacecraft, via video message. "We absolutely stand on your shoulders."

NASA steps up security after arrest of former contractor

Irene Klotz - Reuters

NASA has shut down access to an online database and banned new requests from Chinese and some other foreign nationals seeking access to its facilities amid mounting concerns about espionage and export control violations, the U.S. space agency's administrator said on Wednesday.

The security measures include a complete ban on remote computer access by Chinese and some other non-U.S. contractors already working at NASA centers, agency chief Charles Bolden said at a congressional oversight hearing in Washington.

The tightening of security follows the arrest on Saturday of Chinese national Bo Jiang, a former NASA contractor. He was attempting to return to China with "a large amount of information technology that he may not have been entitled to possess," said Representative Frank Wolf, a Republican whose Virginia district includes the NASA Langley Research Center, where Jiang worked.

The FBI arrested Jiang at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, where he had boarded a flight to Beijing, court papers provided by Wolf's office show.

Jiang was arraigned on Monday in U.S. district court in Norfolk, Virginia. A detention hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

He is charged with lying to federal law enforcement agents about computer hardware he planned to take with him to China, the court documents show.

Wolf, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice and science, identified Jiang last week during another hearing on possible security lapses at NASA field centers.

"We know that China is an active, aggressive espionage threat," Wolf, a longtime China critic, said during Wednesday's hearing.

"A recent White House report said that the technologies NASA works on - aerospace and aeronautics - are those that the Chinese have most heavily targeted," Wolf added.

NASA is cooperating with federal investigators, in addition to conducting two internal reviews, Bolden said.

The reviews are expected to be completed within a week, likely to be followed by an external investigation, Bolden added.

In the interim, NASA closed its Technical Reports database "while we review whether there is a risk of export control documents being made available on this website," Bolden said.

Other security upgrades include a moratorium on granting any new access to NASA facilities for individuals from China, Myanmar, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Uzbekistan.

In addition, 281 foreign nationals, including 192 from China, who currently have access to NASA facilities have had their remote computer access shut down, Bolden said.

"This is about national security, not about NASA security, and I take that personally. I'm responsible and I will hold myself accountable once those reviews are completed," Bolden said.

NASA blocks access to China, 7 suspect nations

Ledyard King – Florida Today

Visitors from China and several other suspect countries will be denied access to NASA facilities until the agency finishes investigating its cybersecurity measures involving foreign nationals, NASA's administrator told congressional lawmakers Tuesday.

Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. announced the ban after the arrest Saturday of a Chinese researcher who once worked at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and may have tried to provide sensitive information to Beijing.

Bo Jiang is under investigation for possible violations of the Arms Control Export Act, according to an FBI arrest warrant released earlier this week by Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. The warrant accuses Jiang of taking a NASA laptop computer containing sensitive information to China.

Access to NASA facilities will be denied to all visitors, including researchers and scientists, from China, Burma, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan.

Those "designated countries" are drawn from State Department and Commerce Department lists of nations the U.S. considers suspect because they have no diplomatic relations with this country, they are under sanction or embargo, they are considered state sponsors of terrorism, or they are a source of concerns about missile proliferation, NASA spokesman David Weaver said.

The restrictions do not apply to the 281 foreign nationals "including 192 from China'' already working at NASA facilities, he said.

Bolden said the cybersecurity investigation is being handled by "security and counterintelligence professionals in cooperation with the NASA inspector general" and other law enforcement officials.

"NASA takes all allegations of security violations very seriously and follows long-established procedures to investigate them quickly and thoroughly," Bolden told members of the House Appropriations subcommittee. "The agency is focused and committed to preventing and prosecuting all security violations."

Bolden said NASA also will take other steps, including:

·         Shutting down the agency's database on technical reports while the review examines whether there's a security risk.
·         Denying remote computer access to those workers from the eight designated countries while the review is ongoing.
·         Re-emphasizing security protocols to NASA employees and assessing whether new training is needed.

Wolf, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that held Wednesday's hearing, described China as "an active, aggressive, espionage threat."

Last month, he and House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Tex., wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller about their concerns regarding the possible leak of sensitive technological information to China from the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

Earlier this month, Wolf accused NASA of breaking an anti-espionage law he wrote by failing to notify Congress about two visits Chinese officials made to the Kennedy Space Center last year.

On Tuesday, Wolf seemed mostly satisfied with Bolden's latest response. The congressman encouraged NASA to conduct an external investigation as well.

"It is critically important for us to have confidence in NASA's ability to protect sensitive technology and information from exploitation by entities that are looking to gain an advantage over the United States economically or militarily," Wolf told Bolden at Tuesday's hearing.

NASA locks out foreigners, orders security review following concerns of Chinese spying

FoxNews.com

NASA has locked its facilities to foreigners, disabled online research databases and ordered a complete review of access by foreign nationals to its facilities, as allegations swirled of foreign spies within the space agency.

The reports came to a head this weekend with the arrest of former consultant Bo Jiang as he was leaving the country with a one-way ticket to China -- carrying several data storage devices, including hard drives, flash drives and computers that likely contained sensitive information.

In testimony Wednesday before Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the space agency, NASA chief Charles Bolden said associate administrator Robert Lightfoot would head a complete investigation into the issue. External investigations would likely follow.

"We don't anticipate having a Chinese visitor to a NASA facility any time soon," he said.

"I've ordered a complete review of the access that foreign nationals are granted at NASA facilities," Bolden said. "Within a week we probably will ask [the National Academy of Public Administration] to do an external review," he added.

Jiang was far from the only foreign national working in NASA facilities around the country. There are 281 foreign nationals with physical access to the agency's facilities including 192 Chinese nationals, he said.

The number of U.S. citizens working in Chinese facilities?

"To my knowledge, we have no NASA personnel … who are working in the People's Republic of China," Bolden said.

In addition to the security review, Bolden announced that he had closed down a publicly available NASA technical reports database due to the risk of confidential information leaking out. A message on the site indicates that "until further notice, the NTRS system will be unavailable for public access. We ... anticipate that this site will return to service in the near future."

NASA also instigated a moratorium on access to NASA facilities and data from several foreign countries, including China, Burma, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Remote computer access from those countries will be terminated as well, he added.

"This is about national security, not NASA security. And I take that seriously. I will hold myself accountable once the review is completed," Bolden said.

Prior to Bolden's testimony, Rep. Chaka Fattah -- the co-chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee -- praised Bolden and NASA for the agency's many accomplishments, notably the 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA is well positioned in terms of the president's goal of seeing a human flight to Mars in the not too distant future, he said.

"Late President John Kennedy would have been proud," Fattah said.

NASA has great big plans, despite the security issues. Bolden said the first test flight of the planned Orion space capsule would come in 2014, a first-ever, year-long stay on the International Space Station was in the works, and the landmark James Webb space telescope would be launched in 2018.

"NASA remains the world's premier space science organization," he said.

Perhaps it's the ambitions of the space agency that make it such a target for espionage. Wolf told Discovery News earlier this week that "the Chinese have the most comprehensive spying program in Washington that has ever been. They make the KGB look like they were the junior varsity or freshman team."

Citing Robert S. Mueller, the director of the FBI, Wolf said NASA centers are significant targets for this espionage -- a risk that is more substantial today than it was a decade ago.

"NASA and the Congress have to work together to heed his words," he said.

Congressman: NASA intentionally skirted rules
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf asserts that NASA Langley and other NASA centers circumvented rules on hiring foreign nationals

Peter Dujardin - Hampton Roads Daily Press

A Northern Virginia congressman contends that NASA Langley Research Center and other NASA facilities around the country have intentionally circumvented federal law restricting the foreign nationals they can hire.

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-McLean, says NASA is required to abide by long-standing federal restrictions on which foreign nationals they can bring in to do research. But he said NASA farms out much of its work to contractors — and then proceeds to dictate to those contractors about which employees they want on board.

The problem, Wolf said, is highlighted by the case of Bo Jiang.

Jiang, 32, a Chinese national who lives in Norfolk, was an employee of the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), a Hampton-based nonprofit and a major contractor with NASA Langley Research Center.

Last week, the FBI opened an investigation into Jiang for possible violations of an export control law, including that he might have taken a NASA laptop with sensitive information on a previous trip to China.

On Saturday, after being removed from a flight bound for Beijing, he was arrested after allegedly lying to federal investigators about what computer storage equipment he was carrying.

"I remain concerned that Mr. Jiang was employed by NIA, allegedly at the direction of NASA officials, in an apparent attempt to circumvent appropriations restrictions the Congress has in place to prevent the hiring of certain foreign nationals of concern," Wolf asserted at a press conference in Washington, D.C., this week.

It's not clear, however, what evidence Wolf has that NASA Langley Research Center intentionally circumvented congressional rules on foreign nationals — either for Jiang or other cases — and exactly what rules those are.

Also, it's not clear if Jiang had any sensitive NASA technology with him on the plane.

Robert D. Wyman, a spokesman for NASA Langley, did not return phone calls this week seeking comment on Wolf's assertion that Langley officials intentionally circumvented the rules.

Calls to NASA headquarters in Washington were routed to Allard Beutel, the chief of the NASA communications office there. Beutel did not return a phone call seeking comment Tuesday.

Timothy Allen, a spokesman with the National Institute of Aerospace, declined to comment on Wolf's assertions that Langley conspired with NIA to get around the rules. "I can't comment on an ongoing investigation," he said.

In a prepared statement, Allen added: "We continually work hand-in-hand with NASA and other partners to ensure compliance with all U.S. Export Control, immigration laws and regulations. We take export control security very seriously and are cooperating fully with investigators to ensure that any and all allegations related to export control compliance are investigated quickly and thoroughly."

Allen said Tuesday that Jiang worked for NIA for two years, from January 2011 until January 2013. Allen declined to give a reason for Jiang's departure. Jiang's LinkedIn account says he's been in the country since 2007 and worked for more than three years as a researcher at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

Wolf, the chairman of the Commerce, Justice and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, has said he was tipped off to the Jiang case by whistle blowers. Earlier this year, his committee looked into security breaches at NASA Ames Research Center, in California.

Wolf maintained that several provisions of the security agreement between NASA and the NIA were violated during the past several years in regard to Bo Jiang: that the "visitor be escorted at all times"; that access to classified, sensitive and "export-controlled" information is prohibited; that the release of NASA software source-code is not allowed; and that NIA "is responsible for compliance with U.S. export control laws and regulations."

Wolf released passages from an email exchange in which an unidentified NASA Langley Research Center official "pleaded" to keep Jiang working on Langley projects.

"I think there are times when rules do definitely apply ... and I think there are times for exceptions," the NASA official wrote. "I am asking for an exception in this case. ... I think it would be in the government's best interests to be able to continue our work with him and the best use of taxpayers' money."

Wolf shot back: "I couldn't disagree more. And I think most Americans would similarly be concerned."

The incident, Wolf said, raises the question: "How many Chinese nationals currently work at NASA? How many other foreign nationals from designated countries work at NASA?"

Wolf asked that question at a congressional hearing last week — and is still awaiting a response.

"This case has raised important issues that NASA and the Congress must consider, including whether contractors and universities working with NASA are unwittingly contributing to this problem," Wolf said.

"I believe this merits a complete audit of each of NASA's contractors that employ foreign nationals from designated countries to work at NASA centers," he said. "We have to know whether these contractors, who are receiving sizable contracts at taxpayer expense, are fully complying with the law and NASA security regulations."

Wolf said NASA's administrator should now appoint an outside panel to "comprehensively review and audit security protocols and enforcement, including foreign national access and export controls, at every NASA center and headquarters."

The panel, he said, "should have unrestricted access to center personnel and records," and report its findings within six months.

He said NASA should take down publicly available technical data sources until all documents that have not been subjected to review, and should provide the Department of Defense and other agencies a report on any documents inappropriately made available.

Further, he said, NASA should review all foreign nationals with credentials, to "identify and remove" individuals with ties to certain organizations and some foreign governments, as well as place a moratorium on granting any new credentials to "foreign nationals of designated countries of concern" until new rules are implemented.

Wolf said: "NASA security, working with outside law enforcement counterparts, should impose criminal sanctions against anyone who has knowingly violated security-related laws and regulations, and impose administrative sanctions against those who unintentionally violate such laws and regulations."

NASA probes security lapses after arrest of ex-contractor

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

The head of NASA pledged Wednesday to carry out a full review of space agency security procedures after the arrest this month of a former contractor suspected of attempting to take sensitive technology back to his native China.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made the pledge to the House Committee on Appropriations Wednesday during a hearing to answer lawmakers' questions about potential security lapses at space agency centers.

"It is critically important for us to have confidence in NASA's ability to protect sensitive assets from exploitation," said U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who originally announced the arrest of the former NASA contractor during a press conference on Monday.

Chinese spy at NASA?

At the center of the controversy is Bo Jiang, a Chinese national who worked as a contractor for the National Institute of Aerospace at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. He was arrested by FBI agents on March 16 onboard a plane bound for China departing from Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Officials say Jiang lied to law enforcement authorities about the electronics equipment he was carrying, and Wolf has accused him of being a spy for China.

"We know that China is an active, aggressive espionage threat," Wolf said today. "The technologies that NASA works on are those that the Chinese most heavily target."

The congressman even suggested that some of China's recent space advancements, which include launching astronauts to space on Chinese-built rockets and docking spacecraft in orbit, were enabled through Chinese theft of space technology.

Bolden assured the lawmakers that he took their concerns seriously, and said he's taken several steps already to find security failures within the space agency.

"NASA takes all your allegations of security violations, and those from anyone else, very seriously," Bolden said. "This is about national security, not about NASA security, and I take that personally. I'm responsible and I will hold myself accountable once our reviews are completed."

New measures

In addition to initiating an internal security review, Bolden said he's also contemplating asking an independent panel to undertake an investigation. In addition, he ordered a moratorium on granting any new access to NASA facilities to people from countries considered to be espionage threats, including China, Burma, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. Existing NASA workers from those countries have also had their ability to access NASA facilities via remote computers temporarily suspended.

The issue is particularly sensitive because NASA has been forbidden by Congress from cooperating with China in space. Wolf himself was the author of a clause included in a U.S. spending bill passed in April 2011 that banned NASA from working with China or Chinese-owned companies on any bilateral projects.

"I don't deal with China by direction of this Congress," Bolden said during a separate House hearing with the Science, Space and Technology Committee held yesterday (March 19). He called the prohibition "the elephant in the room" and said, "We're the only agency of the federal government that does not have bilateral relations with China."

The rule has caused some tension, and Wolf suggested that security lapses related to the Bo Jiang case may have occurred because NASA employees were trying to use contractors to get around the legal restrictions on working with China.

"I respectful disagree with the implications of what you just said," Bolden countered. "As a matter of fact, we really feel that we have been fully complying with the law … As any organization of our size, we may have some gaps in compliance with those processes, but we were not attempting to work around the law."

Sequestration whacks National Space Symposium:
NASA Drops Out, Some Air Force Cancel

Colin Clark - AOL News

For those who aren't part of the insular space community, you need to know that the National Space Symposium is the most important conference on space issues in the world. Everyone goes: the intelligence community; the Air Force; Army; Navy; industry; allies; even senior Chinese officials show up fairly regularly these days. Some 9,000 people attend in a good year.

But this year no one from NASA -- that's right, those people who gave us the Moon landings, Mars Rover, Voyager and are sort of synonymous with space -- will attend NSS at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs next month.

Here is the remarkably prickly and hurt message sent out by the Space Foundation, organizer of NSS, when it learned of NASA's decision:

"On March 13, NASA announced its intent to withdraw from the global space community by not participating in the 29th National Space Symposium. This marks the first time in 29 years that NASA has so isolated itself."

In a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Space Foundation CEO Elliot Pulham wrote, "While we all appreciate the extreme pressures that NASA and other federal agencies are operating under at the moment, we were shocked with disbelief to find the 29th National Space Symposium named specifically as not meeting your new criteria for agency participation in conferences. The Space Symposium is the largest annual gathering of the global space community anywhere in the world, and meets your criteria more strongly than any other event. If the Space Symposium does not meet your criteria, then neither does any other conference in the world."

"Further," Pulham wrote to Bolden, 'The Space Foundation builds more value into the Space Symposium than any other event in the world. NASA should be holding us up as the standard toward which all other conference organizers should aspire. The Space Foundation, which was not consulted by NASA on this decision, is protesting this decision in the strongest possible terms."

That protest isn't likely to make much difference, as this email to employees from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden makes clear:

"Program managers, project managers, and contracting officers should apply this guidance to all NASA direct-funded contractor travel.

"You should know that Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and I have already begun to adjust our activities in line with these guidelines. We have both canceled travel and participation in the April National Space Symposium in Colorado and I have also canceled a planned overseas trip," Bodlen write after receiving new guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last Wednesday. "NASA will continue to review the guidance as our budgetary situation evolves, but expectations are that this guidance will need to remain in place for the rest of the fiscal year, if not beyond."

One big difference between NASA and the Defense Department as they face sequestration: NASA does not plan to furlough anyone and they are still hiring for jobs already funded.

Air Force officials have said they are curtailing their appearances at conferences, as have the other services. I contacted the Space Foundation, who run the conference, to see who had canceled and how things compare to previous years. The answer was carefully crafted.

"We have had some cancellations (Bolden, Garver, [Lt. Gen. Susan] Helms [head of the 14th Air Force at Vanderberg Air Force Base], to name a few), but we've been finding plenty of creative ways to fill those gaps. And, we still have Shelton, (Gen. Bob) Kehler (head of Strategic Command in Omaha) Hyten (vice commander at Air Force Space Command) and Nield, to name a few, strong government speakers," the foundation's Janet Stevens said in an email. She pointed to the attendance of Reps. Dutch Ruppersberger, ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Patrick Meehan, chairman of the Homeland Security cybersecurity, infrastructure protection and security technologies subcommittee are speaking at the cyber event, which precedes the space conference.

One of the most telling bits of information she shared is this: "Ironically, participation by other space agencies from around the world is at a record high. Participation by international and commercial companies continues to increase," she wrote.

On a purely business level, she also said things ain't too bad. Registrations "are running only slightly behind last year" at the crucial cut off of early bird signups.

The Coming Age of Space Colonization
In the next generation, will humans be mining on the moon and living on Mars?

James Fallows - The Atlantic

Our new issue contains a two-page Q&A I conducted with Eric C. Anderson. He has had a variety of tech and entrepreneurial identities, but I was speaking to him in his role as chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures, which has made a business of sending customers into space.

The subject of our discussion was the future of space travel. Below is an extended-play version of the interview, with extra questions and themes.

James Fallows: Space exploration seems to have lost its hold on the public imagination, compared with a generation ago.

Eric Anderson: I think absolutely they are right to feel a little bit disappointed. On April 12, 1961, the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, goes to space. Then, July 29, 1969: We're on the moon. If you and I were doing this interview on July 30, 1969 and you had asked me what space exploration would be like in the year 2013, I would've told you it would be far more advanced than it is now.

So I think the reality is that space was unnaturally accelerated by this Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Then, in the early part of the '70s, that sort of slowed down. The latter half of the '70s brought terrible economic trouble in the U.S., which really set the space program way back. In the '80s, it was the reverse. The Soviets basically ran out of money and then the Soviet Union collapsed. Then in the '90s we were sort of figuring out how to re-set ourselves in a post-Soviet world. It was in the mid-'90s that commercial revenues in space started to eclipse government revenues—that was mainly for communication satellites and things like that.

So that part of the industry has gone pretty well. Every day we use GPS and DirecTV and get the weather , and that sort of stuff. But human flight has just been totally crimped. The number of people going to space, and the missions they were doing, went down. The Space Shuttle was so much over budget that it just was impossible for us to really do any real exploration. That's a long-winded answer, but yes: There's every reason for people to be disappointed with where we are now, particularly with regard to human space flight.

JF: Why should people be excited about what lies ahead?

EA: In the next generation or two—say the next 30 to 60 years—there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony. Some people will tell you that this new colony will be on the moon, or an asteroid—in my opinion asteroids are a great place to go, but mostly for mining. I think the location is likely to be Mars. This Mars colony will start off with a few thousand people, and then it may grow over 100 years to a few million people, but it will be there permanently. That should be really exciting, to be alive during that stage of humanity's history.

JF: I have to ask—really? This will really happen?

EA: I really do believe it will. First of all, the key to making it happen is to reduce the cost of transportation into space. My colleague Elon Musk is aiming to get the cost of a flight to Mars down to half a million dollars a person. I think that even if it costs maybe a few million dollars a person to launch to Mars, a colony could be feasible. To me the question is, does it happen in the next 30 years, or does it happen in the next 60 to 70 years? There's no question it's going to happen in this century, and that's a pretty exciting thing.

JF: Apart from the cost of transport, what are the challenges in making that a reality? Are they cost and engineering challenges, or are they basic science problems?

EA: I think it's all about the economics. There is no technological or engineering challenge.

One key to making all this happen is that we need to use the resources of space to help us colonize space. It would have been pretty tough for the settlers who went to California if they'd had to bring every supply they would ever need along with them from the East Coast.

That's why Planetary Resources exists. The near-Earth asteroids, which are very, very close to the Earth, are filled with resources that would be useful for people wanting to go to Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system. They contain precious resources like water, rocket fuel, strategic metals. So first there needs to be a reduction in the cost of getting off the Earth's surface, and then there needs to be the ability to "live off the land" by using the resources in space.

JF: Again—really? To the general public, asteroid mining just has a fantastic-slash-wacky connotation. How practical is this?

EA: When [co-founder] Peter Diamandis and I conceived of the company, we knew it would be a multi-decade effort. From history, we knew that frontiers are opened by access to resources. We would like to see a future where humans are expanding the sphere of influence of humanity into space.

To make asteroid mining viable, we need spacecraft that can launch and operate in space considerably less expensively than has traditionally been the case. If we are able to do that, then asteroid mining can be profitable—very much so. When you ask "Is it viable?," I'll be the first one to tell you how risky this proposition is, and how there is a significant possibility that we could fail in a particular mission or technology, or fall short of our goals.

But we have found ways to reduce the cost of space exploration already. For example, our prospecting mission to a set of targeted asteroids will use the Arkyd line of spacecraft. The first of that series, the Arkyd-100, would have cost $100 million, minimum, in the traditional aerospace way of business and operation. But with the engineering talent we have, and by using commercially available parts and allowing ourselves to take appropriate risks, we've been able to bring that cost down to $4 or $5 million dollars.

In 10 years or so, what we'd really like to do is get robotic exploration of space in line with Moore's Law [the tech-world maxim that the price for computing power falls by half every 18 months]. Remember, asteroid mining doesn't involve people. We want to transition space exploration from a linear technology into an exponential one, and create an industry that can flourish off of exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Our first missions, for asteroid reconnaissance, will be launching in the next two to three years. For these missions, we're going to launch small swarms of spacecraft. When I say small, I mean we'll send three or four spacecraft, and each one of those spacecraft may weigh only 30 pounds. But they will have optical sensors that are better than any camera available today. They will send back imagery, they'll map the gravity field, they'll use telescopic remote sensing and spectroscopy to tell us exactly what materials are in the asteroid. It will be possible to know more about an ore body that's 10 million miles away from us in space than it would be to know about an ore body 10 miles below the Earth's surface.

We're really not talking about if; we're talking about when.

JF: Apart from the practicalities of asteroid mining, what is it going to mean in spiritual and philosophical ways for people to leave the Earth? I guess this is taking us back to the science fiction of the '50s and '60s, but what do you think?

EA: I've thought a lot about that. The interesting thing will be to see why the people who go to Mars, or to a colony on the moon, or to an asteroid, decide to go there. Will they go there because they're escaping something? Will they go there because they're curious? Will they go to make money?

Throughout history, most of the frontiers that we have had on the Earth have been opened up because people were seeking land—new hunting grounds, or fertile locations for cattle—or mining for gold or precious metals. But occasionally they would go somewhere new because they were seeking religious freedom or some other kind of freedom.

So I don't actually know why people will go. Will the Earth be so ravaged by war, or catastrophic climate change, or whatever else, that people will want to leave?

JF: In addition to the forces you mentioned, over the last half millennium or more, the search for new territory has been powerfully driven by national rivalries. The French, the English, the Spanish and others were seeking new territory in which to spread their influence. Do you imagine the national rivalries on Earth being soothed by space exploration? Or rather being aggravated by space exploration, the way the exploration of the New World was?

EA: I think it's an excellent question, and I think it's inevitable. The Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967, basically says that no nation can claim a celestial body for its own sovereignty. And it also says that anything that is launched from a particular nation, that nation is responsible for, if it crashes into another nation or something like that. But I don't see the Outer Space Treaty living another 100 years.

I think that history repeats itself, and all the same things that happened in our history over the last thousand years will happen in one form or another in the next thousand years. Nowadays things are accelerated, it won't take as long for those cycles of history to happen—because we have faster means of communication, faster democracies, faster governments. The consequences of action, of economic and political and social drivers, can be felt and reacted to faster than they have been in the past.

But those same things will happen. If the first colonists going to Mars are all American, what kind of system do you think they're going to want to set up on Mars? And how are other countries going to feel about that? And at what point will the Americans just pull out of the Outer Space Treaty? Or maybe it'll be the Chinese—the Chinese could get to Mars long before us. Who knows? But being there is 99 percent of it and I think that when the dam breaks and it's possible to travel at a reasonable cost in space outside the Earth's very-near vicinity, all sorts of things are going to change.

And one of the other tenets of the Outer Space Treaty is that space will not be weaponized. I hope that lasts for a long, long, long time, but I mean, who knows, it seems like a pipe dream to think that would last forever.

JF: About the environment: Are you thinking space could be not just an escape from a ravaged Earth but a way to save the Earth?

EA: There's a huge environmental cost to mining on Earth. But there are lots of strategic materials and metals that we can get in space and that will be necessary for us if we want to create abundance and prosperity generations from now on Earth. We sort of had a freebie over the past couple hundred years—we figured out that you can burn coal and fossil fuels and give all the economies of the world a big boost. But that's about to end. Not only do we have to transition to a new form of energy, we also have to transition to a new form of resources. And the resources of the nearest asteroids make the resources on Earth pale by comparison. There are enough resources in the nearest asteroids to support human society and civilization for thousands of years.

I'm not suggesting that we're going to start using resources from space next year. But over the next 20 years, resources in space will most likely be used to explore our solar system. And eventually we'll start bringing them back to Earth. Wouldn't it be great if one day, all of the heavy industries of the Earth—mining and energy production and manufacturing—were done somewhere else, and the Earth could be used for living, keeping it as it should be, which is a bright-blue planet with lots of green?

JF: Here's my last question. When I was a kid in the Baby Boom era, there was a genuine national excitement about space. Do you think that mood in the United States needs to be recreated for the populace as a whole? With an overall national excitement or sense of mission about space exploration, like in the 1960s? Or, on the contrary, is this something that should and can be left to people who see a business or scientific opportunity?

EA: If you look at polls, about half the population says that if it were at a price they could afford, and it were safe, they would go to space themselves. They would love to see the Earth from space. I don't know what that means in terms of gauging support. But clearly the more people are interested in and supportive of space exploration, the faster the industry will grow.

I think spending a half a percent of GDP on space, on space exploration, would be a very wise investment, whether that investment comes from the government itself or from just private industry. There are few things that inspire human engineering, human ingenuity, and the human spirit more than space exploration. Kids love space, and they love dinosaurs, and they love all those fantastical things that can happen when you push the boundaries. It's the same reason that, when my little one crawls out of her crib at night, she peeks around the corner to see what's there. This is curiosity.

We have enough perspective on ourselves and the universe to know that we just inhabit this tiny little corner of the universe. Humans are curious; so to say that we're not interested in space would put us [at odds with] the very core of our being as humans, in a world where we've defined a limit that we can never go beyond.

We obviously have huge problems on Earth, and nobody's saying that we should try to go develop space in lieu of solving our problems on Earth. But the fact of the matter is that we should always be doing things that inspire our youth and ourselves, and try to bring out the best parts of human nature.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - March 21, 2013 and JSC Today

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