Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Human Spaceflight News

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: May 20, 2013 6:20:51 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - May 20, 2013 and JSC Today

Thanks to Dianne for sharing the below update last week on Ralph Sawyer.   Continue to pray for him in his recovery.

From: Milner, Dianne (JSC-EA111)
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 8:47 AM
To: Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)
Subject: Checked on Ralph Sawyer

Larry,
I talked to Helen Sawyer yesterday and she said that Ralph was home from the hospital and much better. He is getting strength back in his legs and beginning to walk and exercise. I'll keep you posted. Ralph is going to call me.

Thanks,
Dianne

Dianne Milner

Monday, May 20, 2013

JSC TODAY HEADLINES
1.            JSC Career Exploration Program -- 19th Annual and Final Awards Ceremony
2.            More Activities This Week for Health and Fitness Month
3.            Financial Wellness Classes and New Webinars Start in June
4.            SPACE 'Live Labs' for Civil Servant Managers/Supervisors -- Two Remaining Ops
5.            JSC Career Path Development Course -- Register Today
6.            Job Opportunities
________________________________________     NASA FACT
" During an average six-month period on the station, as many as 200 investigations operate, with between 70 and 100 of them being new studies."
________________________________________
1.            JSC Career Exploration Program -- 19th Annual and Final Awards Ceremony
Please join us for the 19th annual and final Awards and Recognition Ceremony for JSC's year-long Career Exploration Program (CEP) interns. There will be a meet-and-greet at 1:30 p.m., and the program will begin promptly at 1:50 p.m. with guest speaker Dr. Ellen Ochoa. Interns and mentors will be recognized for their outstanding achievements. For 19 years, the CEP has strived to meet NASA's mission by developing a critical pool of talented and diverse individuals who will make up the future leaders of the nation's and NASA's workforce. By providing students with invaluable work experience and projects in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and business (STEM-B), CEP has served as a mechanism for students to complete their education and embark on a successful career in STEM-B fields. Current CEP student interns, CEP alumni, mentors, co-workers, teachers, family and friends are invited to attend this awards ceremony.
Event Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2013   Event Start Time:1:30 PM   Event End Time:3:00 PM
Event Location: Gilruth Alamo Ballroom

Add to Calendar

Carolyn Snyder x34719 http://www.cep.usra.edu

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2.            More Activities This Week for Health and Fitness Month
It's Week 3 of Health and Fitness Month. Don't miss the fun events planned!
o             Challenge yourself with our indoor triathlon and earn multiple tickets and a giveaways! Complete 30 minutes on each "leg" of the triathlon (treadmill, bike, elliptical) in the fitness center throughout the week.
o             Stop by Building 11 from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday and check out our mini fitness expo! Get your body fat, blood pressure and BMI measured and earn a ticket. Plus, chat with a personal trainer, SPINNING instructor and our fitness director.
o             Attend a free week of classes in the Inner Space Mind/Body Studio and get a ticket for each class you attend. Register to ensure your spot.
Plus, earn tickets for biking to work, attending Starport group exercise or Inner Space classes, personal training sessions, liking us on Facebook, and if you are enrolled in boot camp, ballroom dancing or league sports. Additional details are here.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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3.            Financial Wellness Classes and New Webinars Start in June
The Financial Wellness Program continues this summer with an enhanced series of classes, webinars and counseling. So, while we can't begin to answer every question, we can get you started on a reliable financial path. Learn about goal-setting, budgeting, debt elimination, insurance and long-term care, investing, retirement, estate planning and taxes.
A few details:
o             Lunchtime classes will be offered in on-site conference rooms and are open to anyone badged to come on-site.
o             Webinars will be offered at lunch and in the evening and are open to all employees and family.
o             New remote online counseling is also available for all employees, whether you're able to attend classes or not.
If you are not sure what financial wellness is all about, this is a great place to start.
Enrollment will open in late May. Preliminary details are available at this link.
If you have any questions, send an email.
Shelly Haralson x39168 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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4.            SPACE 'Live Labs' for Civil Servant Managers/Supervisors -- Two Remaining Ops
Only two remaining opportunities!
NASA's Standard Performance Appraisal Communication Environment (SPACE) system went live May 6. To help ensure a smooth transition to the SPACE system, we've scheduled several "live lab" sessions for civil servant (CS) managers/supervisors. Attendees will be able to work on employee performance plans (can bring copies of plans and drop into the "live labs" as schedules allow), and Human Resources (HR) support will be available to answer any system-related questions. Registration is not required. For additional questions, please talk with your HR representative.
The remaining session dates/times are:
Wednesday, May 22
o             Intended Audience: CS managers/supervisors
o             Building 12, Room 144, from 8 a.m. to noon
Thursday, May 23
o             Intended Audience: CS managers/supervisors
o             Building 12, Room 144, from 1 to 5 p.m.
Lisa Pesak x30476

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5.            JSC Career Path Development Course -- Register Today
The JSC Career Path Development Course is designed to instill a sense of initiative and empowerment. The course connects you to resources NASA has to offer and highlights your role in the iterative career development process.
Objectives:
o             To emphasize the value of career path development
o             To provide an understanding of the key players and the individual roles they play in an employee's career planning efforts
o             To discuss the essentials of the career path development process
o             To highlight and provide an overview of the career development tools and resources available
o             To boost employee interest in career planning and enable one to make greater contributions to NASA
Course Details:
Civil servants only
Date: Thursday, May 23
Time: 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Location: Building 12, Room 152
Use this direct link to register in SATERN. https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=REGISTRATI...
Nicole Hernandez x37894

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6.            Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities?
Both internal Competitive Placement Plan (CPP) and external JSC job announcements are posted on the Human Resources (HR) portal and USAJOBS website. Through the HR portal, civil servants can view summaries of all the agency jobs that are currently open: https://hr.nasa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/employees_home/239/job_opportu...
To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop-down menu and select "JSC HR." The "Jobs" link will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies, please call your HR representative.
Lisa Pesak x30476

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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.

Human Spaceflight News
Monday, May 20, 2013

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Human Mars Lander Must Break New Ground

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

For all the attention focused on how hard it will be to keep astronauts alive while they fly from Earth to Mars, the challenge of setting them safely down on the Martian surface will be just as difficult. Entry-descent-and-landing (EDL) experts who spoke at a Humans To Mars symposium here say the "sky crane" that landed the robotic Curiosity rover on Mars last year will not scale to the huge sizes need for humans. And even if it did, the "seven minutes of terror" controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory experienced at a distance during the first sky-crane landing may be a little too tame for a human mission. "While the Curiosity rover has been described as a small nuclear-powered car on the surface of Mars, what we're really talking about here today is landing a two-story house, and perhaps landing that two-story house right next to another two-story house that has been autonomously prepositioned and has fuel for the astronauts when they get there," says Robert Braun, a Georgia Tech space-engineering professor who was NASA's chief technologist.

Chief: NASA's goals are clear

Alex Macon - Galveston County Daily News

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden met with employees and reporters Thursday, outlining the agency's plans for the future and emphasizing the center's vital role in furthering human space exploration. President Barack Obama's 2014 budget proposal, unveiled last month, allocates about $17.7 billion for NASA, but the budget has yet to be approved by Congress. The looming threat of ongoing sequester cuts could knock at least $1 billion from the proposed funds. Although NASA's financial outlook for 2014 remains unclear, the agency's objectives are anything but, Bolden said. "Mars is the ultimate destination for humanity, and no one can go there if we don't," he said.

US Spaceflight Ambitions Must Face Budget Reality, NASA Chief Says

Robert Pearlman - Space.com

Charles Bolden, NASA's chief and a self-described dreamer, says there is a line between dreams and reality when it comes to what the space agency can do, especially in light of current budget constraints. "I am the eternal optimist, but I am also a realist," the NASA administrator told reporters during a visit to the Johnson Space Center here on Thursday. "Every single thing that we have on our plate right now, an asteroid mission, Mars, those are all very realistic. We know conceptually how to do that. We don't have all the technological capability to do it yet." Bolden, who was in Houston to address employees and briefly visit with Chris Hadfield and Tom Marshburn, who returned from the International Space Station (ISS) May 13, spoke about the priorities set out for NASA in President Barack Obama's budget proposal for next year.

Commercial space advocates want bigger role in exploration as NASA budget shrinks

Dan Leone - Space News

Commercial space advocates here said the private sector should have a larger role in U.S. space exploration plans, even as a legislative aide warned that NASA — still the critical anchor customer for such companies — is in line for yet another difficult budget year. "As we look toward the future, commercial space does not stop at low Earth orbit," Mike Gold, director of Washington operations for Bigelow Aerospace and chairman of the Federal Aviation Administration's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), said at that group's annual spring meeting May 15. Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nev., has a pair of Space Act Agreements with NASA, including a nearly $20 million pact awarded in December to fly one of the company's inflatable space modules aboard the international space station in 2015.

Differing perspectives on commercial crew

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

Speaking at the meeting Wednesday of the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington, NASA administrator Charles Bolden made another pitch—this time to a rather sympathetic audience—for the agency's commercial crew program. "If NASA had received the president's requested funding for this program then," Bolden said, referring to the rollout of the program three years ago, "we would not have been forced to recently sign a new contract with the Russians for Soyuz transportation." Those earlier cuts, he said, have pushed back commercial crew to 2017, "and even this delayed availability is in question if Congress does not fully support the president's 2014 request for our commercial crew program."

Private Space Plane Arrives in California for Key Flight Tests

Mike Wall - Space.com

A private space plane has arrived at a NASA facility in California to undergo tests that will help vet its ability to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. A test version of the Dream Chaser space plane arrived at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California on Wednesday aboard a flatbed truck, wrapped in a protective white caul for the overland journey from Colorado. Engineers will put the Dream Chaser through its paces at Dryden, testing out its flight and runway landing systems, NASA officials said. The vehicle will be towed down a runway by a truck, for example, to validate the Dream Chaser's brakes and tires. NASA chief Charles Bolden will be at Dryden next Wednesday (May 22) to get an up-close look at the Dream Chaser, space agency officials said.

Exploring NASA's Orion

Lisa Kalis - Wall Street Journal

As it sped toward Earth from a height of 25,000 feet earlier this month, one of its parachutes failed and another malfunctioned. Thankfully, three additional chutes worked fine, and the model of NASA's Orion spacecraft landed safely in the Arizona desert. The mishaps were planned, and there are many more tests to come. Orion's big trial arrives next year, when it will fly unmanned 3,600 miles into space and then turn around and come back to Earth. A key challenge is protecting the craft (and, eventually, the crew inside) during re-entry, when it will reach speeds of 20,000 miles per hour and endure temperatures of up to 4,000 degrees. The ultimate goal: to send people to deep space in 2021, including near-Earth asteroids and eventually Mars. Follow its progress at www.nasa.gov/orion. (NO FURTHER TEXT)

NASA to lease old KSC shuttle pad for commercial launches

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

An old space shuttle launch pad at Kennedy Space Center soon could be home to commercial rockets under a plan announced Friday by NASA. The agency plans to lease what's known as Pad 39A to prospective tenants. Possible candidates include SpaceX of California and United Launch Alliance of Colorado. Interested applicants are asked to submit a "non-binding" letter of intent by May 24. The leasing of 39A is the latest effort by KSC to convert its unused shuttle facilities to sites that could appeal to the growing commercial market, including an announcement in late 2011 that Boeing would assemble space capsules in one of KSC's empty shuttle garages.

For rent: NASA launch pad with nice oceanfront view
NASA wants to lease Apollo-era launch complex for commercial use

James Dean - Florida Today

NASA is seeking companies to take over one of Kennedy Space Center's former shuttle launch pads, the agency said Friday. The center has mothballed pad 39A and will stop paying to maintain it by September. NASA would like a "commercial company or consortium, or other U.S. domestic entity, including state agencies," to lease the pad for at least five years.

Launch Complex 39A for Lease?

Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.com

NASA is moving ahead with the space agency's efforts to cede control of key structures and facilities as Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Through a synopsis released May 17, 2013, the agency plans to seek proposals for use of the historic location. NASA has said that it will be issued sometime next week. Similar to how NASA has worked to empower private industry to handle delivering cargo and crew to the International Space Station, the agency has already attempted to lease use of Orbiter Processing Facility 3 (OPF-3). It was announced in 2011 that Boeing would take control of the structure and use it to process the company's CST-100 spacecraft. As reported earlier, Boeing has yet to officially sign the lease.

UK astronaut Tim Peake to go to International Space Station

BBC News

The UK astronaut Tim Peake has been given a date to fly to the International Space Station (ISS). The date of the mission is yet to be made public but it will not be before 2015. The European Space Agency (Esa) is to release the details on Monday. Peake, who was a major and a helicopter pilot in the British Army Air Corps, has been in training for an expedition to the ISS since 2009. To get there, he will ride a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

Britain's first official astronaut to blast off for space station

Victoria Ward - London Telegraph

Major Tim Peake, 41, has been chosen to complete the lengthy stay in orbit in 2015, when he will be blasted into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket and take part in spacewalks and other complex scientific research. Major Peake, a former army helicopter pilot, graduated as a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut more than two years ago but it was feared he might only be given a short mission because the UK makes relatively modest contributions to the agency's manned space programme. The married father-of-two is considered Britain's first official spaceman because previous UK citizens have either secured private funding or have taken out American citizenship to make it into orbit.

How Space Tourism Could Help Save Planet Earth

Mike Wall - Space.com

Opening spaceflight up to the masses could help spark a global conservation ethic that stems the tide of environmental destruction on Earth, NASA's science chief says. Seeing our fragile Earth hanging alone in the blackness of space tends to be a life-altering, or at least perspective-changing, experience. If more people around the world are treated to that unforgettable sight, humanity might handle the planet with a bit more care, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Ultimately, my vision is that lots of people get to go to space," Grunsfeld said here Saturday at Maker Faire Bay Area, a two-day celebration of DIY science, technology and engineering.

How Electric Spacecraft Could Fly NASA to Mars

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

Electric vehicles aren't just popular on the ground — it turns out they're all the rage in space these days, too. While still not as common as traditional chemical spacecraft engines, electric engines are growing in popularity for both Earth-orbiting satellites and scientific spacecraft on missions to deep space. And electric engines could turn out to be a key element in NASA's goal of sending people to Mars, experts say. "The maturity of the various technologies that make up electric propulsion is getting there," said Vlad Hruby, president of the Busek spacecraft engine company. Hruby said he's been waiting for a renaissance in electric spacecraft for about 20 years. "Now it's finally coming to fruition." In 2012, Boeing introduced an all-electric communications satellite design called the 702SP, which officials say has been popular with commercial clients. In April of this year, satellite builder Orbital Sciences said it's developing its own all-electric model to compete.

Why sign up for a one-way Mars trip? Three applicants explain the appeal

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

A one-way trip to Mars sounds like something you'd wish on your worst enemy — so why would more than 78,000 people from around the world pay up to $75 for a chance to die on another planet? "I can say I have an ulterior motive," said David Brin, who has written more than a dozen science-fiction novels — including "The Postman," which was turned into a Kevin Costner movie in 1997. "I'd get a lot of writing done, and it might be memorable." As a master of hard science fiction, the 62-year-old Brin knows better than most applicants what the first Red Planet settlers would face if they're sent off in 2022, as the Dutch-based Mars One venture has proposed.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Most Excellent Adventure

Scott Simon - National Public Radio's Weekend Edition

Chris Hadfield went from feeling truly sublime to faintly ridiculous this week. He landed after spending 146 days in space, most as commander of the International Space Station. But, he says, as soon as his Soyuz plonked down on the soil of Kazakhstan, "I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking. I didn't realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue." Chris Hadfield said that after nearly five months of floating, his feet had lost all cushioning and calluses, so on these, his first days back, "I was walking around like I was walking on hot coals." Mr. Hadfield is 53, a slender and mustachioed former Royal Canadian Air Force colonel, and the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. He may never be mentioned in the same sentence as Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong. But Chris Hadfield has become one of the best-known astronauts of contemporary times.

Chris Hadfield's toughest task could be accomplishing new mission

Allan Woods - Toronto Star

When man touches space, he becomes an instant celebrity. When space touches the man, anything can happen. The history of space exploration is littered with post-mission divorces, religious conversions and addictions among the straight-arrow scientists and test pilots who set their sights on the stars. At one time it was the isolation and incredible risk of space travel that posed the greatest psychological threat to astronauts. Now it is the emotional fall of returning to Earth. Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969 along with Neil Armstrong. His next step, after leaving NASA, was selling Cadillacs in Texas while battling depression and alcoholism. With the words of a poet, he described his post-mission meltdown as "the melancholy of things done." There was no higher mountain left to climb.

Chris Hadfield on coffee, guitars, and trying to shake hands without missing

Tom Spears - Ottawa Citizen

They haven't given Chris Hadfield a day off yet. As a space guinea pig, he's being examined by doctors daily, and Saturday he went through a few hours of followup on a medical experiment. But he also took time to phone the Citizen. We asked how he's doing back on Earth. Here are excerpts of his answers…

Is NASA about jobs, or actually accomplishing something?

Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle's SciGuy

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden had a rare (and welcome) availability with Houston area media on Thursday, and while he generally stuck to talking points, citing the space agency's rosy future, moments of frustration slipped through the cracks. These slips are illuminating as they point out a central weakness and strength of NASA — its 10 centers spread across eight states. The diversity of these centers, including sites in populous states like Texas, California, Florida and Ohio, ensures political clout for the agency in both houses of Congress. At the same time, NASA has to continually spread work around all of these centers and keep senators and representatives from the homes of each of the 10 happy.

U.S. must stay committed to racing towards space
What our nation fails to do today will be done by others tomorrow

Kay Bailey Hutchison & Eugene A. Cernan - USA Today (Opinion)

(Hutchinson is a former senator from Texas. Cernan is a former NASA astronaut)

Space scientists are buzzing. Capturing billions of cosmic ray "hits" on the International Space Station and the landing the Curiosity rover perfectly on Mars are just the latest achievements space exploration has produced. But to be successful, America must fully utilize the ISS and prepare to explore new regions of the universe. This balance is essential to maximize our investment dollars. The last major equipment attached to the space station in 2011 records timing and intensity from cosmic rays for an experiment, led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting. What is learned could rewrite the basic theories of the origins, composition and forces of the universe.

Hale tells senators public-private union is the way

John Kelly - Florida Today (Commentary)

Wayne Hale's passion for exploration, his knowledge and his ability to talk straight make him a potent weapon for space advocacy. Last week, the former NASA leader went before the U.S. Senate and pointedly summed up the state of America's space program. After working decades in the government-run space shuttle and space station projects, the now private consultant told senators Thursday that NASA's seeding of commercial programs are the start of a solution to the biggest obstacle to space exploration.

Buzz Aldrin on His Lunar Home, the Eagle
For 21½ hours, two astronauts lived aboard a cold, cramped lunar module with a balky circuit breaker

Buzz Aldrin - Wall Street Journal (Commentary)

I can't see the moon from my bedroom window. But I do like to go onto my patio to watch it rise majestically over Los Angeles. When I see the moon up there, I don't say to myself, "Hey, I walked on your face," or "Thanks for disrupting my life." I just feel grateful it let us land safely in 1969 and let us take off. Believe it or not, my mother's maiden name was Moon. Her family came from Britain, and she suffered terribly from depression. Like my grandfather and cousins on her side of the family, she took her own life. It happened in 1968—a year before the Apollo 11 launch. It was tough, but I blocked it out by focusing on all the years she supported me—as did my father, who was an aviation pioneer and had known Orville Wright.

Lessons from the singing spaceman:
What Governments Can Learn From Chris Hadfield

Jeffrey Kluger - Time (Viewpoint)

The manned space program was once like Green Bay Packers tickets — the thing just sold itself. You've got the spacemen, we've got the eyeballs. Workplaces came to a stop and TVs were rolled into classrooms not just for an Al Shepard or a John Glenn, but also for Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon going up aboard Gemini 11. Know about that one? Of course, you don't. But everyone did back then. Things are a little different now. Quick: How many people are currently aboard the International Space Station? Anybody? How many people even knew there was an International Space Station? Well, there is one, it's an awfully cool machine and thanks to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, a lot more people now know just how cool.
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Human Mars Lander Must Break New Ground

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

For all the attention focused on how hard it will be to keep astronauts alive while they fly from Earth to Mars, the challenge of setting them safely down on the Martian surface will be just as difficult.

Entry-descent-and-landing (EDL) experts who spoke at a Humans To Mars symposium here say the "sky crane" that landed the robotic Curiosity rover on Mars last year will not scale to the huge sizes need for humans. And even if it did, the "seven minutes of terror" controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory experienced at a distance during the first sky-crane landing may be a little too tame for a human mission.

"While the Curiosity rover has been described as a small nuclear-powered car on the surface of Mars, what we're really talking about here today is landing a two-story house, and perhaps landing that two-story house right next to another two-story house that has been autonomously prepositioned and has fuel for the astronauts when they get there," says Robert Braun, a Georgia Tech space-engineering professor who was NASA's chief technologist.

At a little less than 1 ton, Curiosity and its sky crane hardware required four distinct phases to get to the surface: atmospheric entry using a heat shield to shed hypersonic kinetic energy; parachutes for aerodynamic deceleration to speeds slow enough for propulsive deceleration of the sky-crane platform; and the final touchdown on the rover's wheels via cables lowered from that platform.

"When we got to thinking about very big objects, the size of houses, things like parachutes don't come along for the ride," says Adam Steltzner, who headed the Curiosity EDL team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory that developed the sky crane approach. "They don't scale. A parachute the size of the Rose Bowl, which is what it would need to be for human exploration, is something that we already know from our experience on Earth, is not practically manageable."

To land a house-sized cargo carrier or human habitat on Mars, Steltzner says, it probably will be necessary to go directly from hypersonic speeds to propulsive deceleration—essentially firing some kind of rocket to slow down enough to land. And that, the experts say, will be as difficult to accomplish as developing efficient radiation protection, the traditional long pole in the tent for a human trip to Mars.

Kendall Brown, an EDL expert in the Exploration and Mission Systems Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, said a cross-agency study using then-current design reference missions (DRMs) took parachutes entirely out of the landing sequence for a human expedition. Instead, either a rigid or inflatable aerodynamic decelerator would slow the entry vehicles from hypersonic speeds to supersonic speed in the Mach 2.5-3 range. At that point, the EDL system would shift to rocket propulsion for the remainder of the landing. It will not be easy to ignite a set of downward-facing rocket engines as they fly through the Martian atmosphere at three times the speed of sound.

"The rocket engine nozzles are going into a flow field that's supersonic, so you're going to set up shock fields, pressures behind the shock that the engine has to start against," says Brown. "Those don't look like they're going to be insurmountable, but it's going to be a highly dynamic event."

Charles Campbell, an expert in computational fluid dynamics at Johnson Space Center, is developing a sounding-rocket flight test for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) to gauge just how difficult that ignition will be. At Mars multiple engines will be required, says Brown, and the flow fields of supersonic retropropulsion are likely to require some thermal protection on the body of the spacecraft, which will add more mass. There is also the question of using the system to land precisely and, in the case of the crew-habitat vehicle, ideally within walking distance of the pre-positioned cargo carrier.

The Curiosity EDL system achieved unprecedented precision in landing by jettisoning ballast as it entered the atmosphere to create enough lift to "fly" the entry vehicle toward its target, and then dropping more ballast to stabilize itself under the parachute. That technique got it down in an ellipse measuring 20 X 7 km (12 X 4 mi.), and it used all of the atmosphere to achieve it.

For human-sized landers, says Brown, "the most efficient trajectory is one that waits until almost the last minute, fires a very high thrust, and then you touch down. But you . . . have very little ability to throttle the engines to provide precision landing. And we want to start working the precision landing problem as soon as we enter the atmosphere."

Engineers have some tricks up their sleeves as they work the precision-landing problem for human landings, according to Jim Masciarelli, a guidance, navigation and control expert at Ball Aerospace. Most of the generic hardware and software necessary for the needed level of landing accuracy is in the works and "almost ready to go," he says. Hazard avoidance with flash lidar, radar and other sensors probably will be needed for the final few hundred meters of descent, which presents a challenge as well. Under current estimates there will only be 90 sec. from entry to landing, which will make the 7 min. of terror look like a data-processing luxury.

"You have gobs and gobs of data from these sensors to process," Masciarelli says. "You probably have redundant sensors for reliability in case something fails, so how you process all that data is probably the biggest challenge, and get it in a package that is radiation tolerant, that can survive the trip to Mars, and is a small, lightweight package as well."

Work on hazard avoidance under NASA's Science Mission Directorate has been halted because of budget constraints, says Doug McCuistion, until recently the head of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. Other EDL technology for human landings on Mars is just getting underway, says Mike Gazarik, the STMD associate administrator.

Campbell's supersonic retropropulsion concept will be briefed at agency headquarters this week, he says. Last year the agency ran a subscale inflatable-decelerator flight test called the Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) on a sounding rocket from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

"We're pushing on all the tools here from an entry, descent and landing viewpoint for that future mission," Gazarik says.

One other advanced EDL technology under study by STMD is a 33.5-meter-dia. supersonic parachute with a ring sail configuration instead of the disk band gap approach used as part of Curiosity's landing. It is the largest supersonic parachute ever designed, Gazarik says, and is being considered for the Curiosity 2.0 mission under development for a 2020 launch.

While the sky crane will not scale up to the payload size that will be needed for human landings, it will remain the state of the art for landing robotic explorers for the foreseeable future. A science definition team already is at work on the instrument suite for the follow-on version of Curiosity NASA plans to launch in 2020, and the list is likely to include hardware for collecting and storing samples for eventual return to Earth (AW&ST Dec. 10, 2012, p. 32).

"I think we will see, after the science definition team comes back from their consideration on the 2020 mission, an absolutely fabulous array of measurements that need to be made on samples, decision processes on whether we keep those or not, how we keep those," says James Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Div. and acting director of the Mars program. "And then, of course, how we would return those is an element [in that] next decade."

One concept just gaining public attention is using the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle NASA is developing to bring the samples back to Earth, after picking them up in the deep retrograde lunar orbit under study for Orion's first deep space mission to a captured asteroid (AW&ST April 29, p. 36). But beyond the $100 million NASA is seeking as a down payment on the asteroid-capture mission, the agency has very little to say about its actual plans to send humans to Mars. Overall, the latest DRMs estimate a human Mars mission will require launching about 800 tons of payload with the heavy-lift Space Launch System. But estimates of just how much of that mass actually will touch down on Mars range from 20-60 tons, and the most recent DRMs NASA has developed are being held so closely that the National Academies of Science panel studying the future of human spaceflight cannot access them.

"Bottom line, as I understand it, is that the design reference missions are internal, pre-decisional studies that help inform our decision-making process," says David S. Weaver, the agency's associate administrator for communications.

Chief: NASA's goals are clear

Alex Macon - Galveston County Daily News

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden met with employees and reporters Thursday, outlining the agency's plans for the future and emphasizing the center's vital role in furthering human space exploration.

President Barack Obama's 2014 budget proposal, unveiled last month, allocates about $17.7 billion for NASA, but the budget has yet to be approved by Congress. The looming threat of ongoing sequester cuts could knock at least $1 billion from the proposed funds.

Although NASA's financial outlook for 2014 remains unclear, the agency's objectives are anything but, Bolden said.

"Mars is the ultimate destination for humanity, and no one can go there if we don't," he said.

To reach that goal, NASA will continue its programs in low-orbit, while handing off an increasing number of cargo and eventually crew transport duties to commercial organizations such as SpaceX and Orbital, Bolden said.

In October, SpaceX delivered the first commercial cargo flight to the International Space Station. Bolden called that mission a "springboard for our next great step in human exploration."

Missions and activities on the station are directed from Johnson Space Center.

Bolden expressed a desire to continue developing the agency's commercial crew flight program or space taxis.

Last month, NASA paid about $424 million to the Russian Space Agency to extend a crew flight contract to the space station through the first half of 2017. Russia now provides the only way to move people to and from the station.

"That's the last check I want to write to somebody outside the United States," Bolden said.

The next significant step on NASA's way to Mars is a plan to essentially lasso a small asteroid and hold it near the moon for human exploration by 2025.

The 2014 budget proposal sets aside about $105 million to jump-start the mission, which calls for NASA to capture the asteroid with robotic spacecraft and bring it close to Earth for a manned mission.

Bolden said the manned mission would be made possible with the new Space Launch System and the Orion capsule, both being developed at Johnson Space Center.

The Orion module's first test flight is scheduled for next year, and on Thursday, NASA released a statement announcing that its first mission to sample an asteroid is moving into development and plans to launch in 2016.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with an asteroid in 2018 before returning to Earth with a sample, an early milestone for the agency's project to capture an asteroid.

The agency doesn't have the funds for yearly flagship missions, such as last year's Mars Curiosity Rover mission, but is pursuing practical, efficient ways to advance human space exploration, Bolden said.

"There is dreaming — I'm a dreamer just as much as anybody — and then there's reality," he said.

Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa said the Orion project and ongoing work at the International Space Station all contributed to NASA's future goals.

"We need to be able to demonstrate capabilities that, as you add them up, allow you to get to Mars," Ochoa said.

Earlier in the day, Bolden met with astronauts Chris Hadfield and Thomas Marshburn, who recently returned from a five-month mission onboard the space station.

US Spaceflight Ambitions Must Face Budget Reality, NASA Chief Says

Robert Pearlman - Space.com

Charles Bolden, NASA's chief and a self-described dreamer, says there is a line between dreams and reality when it comes to what the space agency can do, especially in light of current budget constraints.

"I am the eternal optimist, but I am also a realist," the NASA administrator told reporters during a visit to the Johnson Space Center here on Thursday. "Every single thing that we have on our plate right now, an asteroid mission, Mars, those are all very realistic. We know conceptually how to do that. We don't have all the technological capability to do it yet."

Bolden, who was in Houston to address employees and briefly visit with Chris Hadfield and Tom Marshburn, who returned from the International Space Station (ISS) May 13, spoke about the priorities set out for NASA in President Barack Obama's budget proposal for next year.

"[We have] three destinations: low Earth orbit — the International Space Station right now — we're handing that off to commercial entities; an asteroid by 2025; and Mars is the ultimate destination for humanity," said Bolden. "And nobody can go there if we don't go. If NASA does not lead, humanity is not going there and we're going to go there by the 2030s."

But budget constraints, specifically the sequester currently affecting all federal agencies, may put some of those priorities into jeopardy of being delayed or canceled.

"If the President and the Congress are not able to solve the sequester issue, which is a 10 year problem, we're in trouble," Bolden said. "If we have to operate under sequester, in 2014, NASA's budget goes from the present $16.8 billion — it will not go up to $17.7 [billion] — it will go down another $800 million to about $16.1 [billion]. That's significantly below the level of spending that we have right now."

Bolden said that if NASA doesn't get out from under the sequester, he may have no other choice but to remove some of the priorities from the space agency's very full plate.

"If it goes down to that point... you could see us go to the White House, go to the Congress and say 'Okay, you all didn't solve the problem, we now have some of our priorities that are going to come off the plate,'" he said. "The only solution without destroying the agency will be to say, 'Okay, we're not going to do that priority.' That will upset a lot of people, but that's reality."

Finding another way

For now, Bolden has committed to working within the space agency's means.

"I promised that it would be affordable, which means whatever the budget is, we're going to fit our portfolio into that budget," he said. [NASA's 2014 Space Goals Explained in Pictures]

That applies to NASA's newest proposed mission, robotically capturing and moving a small asteroid to the vicinity of the moon, where astronauts will then explore it and collect samples to bring back to Earth. Originally, when challenged by Obama in 2010 to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, the plan did not include retrieving the space rock first.

"I am a typical person, I think," Bolden told SPACE.com. "When the president said we're going to send humans to an asteroid, the first thing that came to my mind was that we were going to send a big rocket somewhere between Mars and Jupiter to the primary asteroid belt and go rendezvous with an asteroid. We were going to take years to go do that, I mean literally years and years."

"[But] when we looked at our budget and we looked at the technological capabilities that we have, we said that is not likely to happen, not only not by 2025, but maybe not in our lifetime, so let's find another way to put humans with an asteroid," he said.

Finding that other way will get underway in earnest over the next couple of months.

"We have a mission formulation activity that is going to start this summer where all of our NASA centers, academia, industry and our foreign partners will come together to try to hone in on what that mission will really look like," Bolden said.

What Charlie Bolden would do

Even if NASA had an unlimited budget, Bolden said he would stay the current course.

"If you look at NASA's budget today, the budget request, that is where Charlie Bolden would be if I didn't have to worry about budgets, if I had an unlimited budget," the NASA Administrator told reporters. "What I would do, I would not add another program to NASA's portfolio. I would buy down risk on the programs that we have underway right now."

That applies to both manned exploration and robotic planetary missions.

"Everybody needs to understand that the days of NASA doing a flagship mission a year are long gone," Bolden said, referring to the billion dollar or more robotic flagship missions such as NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars and the Cassini probe at Saturn.

"We don't have the budget to support flagship missions right now. The Congress has not put any money in NASA's budget for a flagship mission in this budget cycle," Bolden added. "They could do it. I would hope not because we have a pretty good plan as it is."

Commercial space advocates want bigger role in exploration as NASA budget shrinks

Dan Leone - Space News

Commercial space advocates here said the private sector should have a larger role in U.S. space exploration plans, even as a legislative aide warned that NASA — still the critical anchor customer for such companies — is in line for yet another difficult budget year.

"As we look toward the future, commercial space does not stop at low Earth orbit," Mike Gold, director of Washington operations for Bigelow Aerospace and chairman of the Federal Aviation Administration's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), said at that group's annual spring meeting May 15.

Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nev., has a pair of Space Act Agreements with NASA, including a nearly $20 million pact awarded in December to fly one of the company's inflatable space modules aboard the international space station in 2015.

"I find it a bit of a false debate that occurs in this town the whole notion that somehow it's commercial space versus NASA leading our exploration effort," Steve Isakowitz, vice president and chief technology officer for New Mexico-based Virgin Galactic, said at the COMSTAC meeting. Virgin Galactic, which just tested its hybrid rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo, is preparing to send paying tourists to the edge of space beginning in 2014.

NASA's stance, which Administrator Charles Bolden repeated at the COMSTAC meeting, is that using privately owned spacecraft such as those being developed by Boeing, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Sierra Nevada under NASA's Commercial Crew Program, can free up agency resources for exploration beyond Earth.

"NASA does not belong ... in access to low Earth orbit," Bolden said. "There are still things to be learned there, but those things can be learned by industry as well as they can by NASA."

NASA is spending $1.1 billion to finance development of three competing spacecraft with the hope that at least one of them will be ready to launch astronauts to the international space station by 2017. Meanwhile, the agency is also developing the heavy-lift Space Launch System and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle for deep-space missions.

The White House has consistently asked for hundreds of millions of dollars more for the Commercial Crew Program than Congress has been willing to give. In the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (H.R. 933), which was signed March 26, Commercial Crew received about $489 million. The White House was seeking $830 million. For 2014, the Obama administration has requested $821 million for Commercial Crew

Meeting that request will be all but impossible, a House GOP aide told COMSTAC members.

"Say overnight there was 100 percent consensus that we wanted to fund [the Commercial Crew Program] at the president's level. I'm not sure the resources are there," said Thomas Culligan, legislative director for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee that writes NASA's annual appropriations bill.

Bolden warned May 15, as he has many times before, that unless Congress meets the White House's request, NASA will have to purchase even more spaceflight services from Russia. In April, NASA announced it would pay $424 million, or about $70 million a seat, to send six astronauts to and from the international space station aboard Russian Soyuz space capsules. The date for the final return flight under that deal is July 2017.

Another Soyuz deal, Culligan said, would be unacceptable.

"You've got a recognition on the Hill that you do need a [low Earth orbit] capability ... you don't want to see that date slip again," Culligan said.

Bolden has acknowledged in congressional testimony, most recently in an April 25 hearing of the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, that without a fully funded Commercial Crew Program, the agency may have to pick only one aspiring provider to fund.

That could happen as soon as next summer, when NASA plans to award the next round of Commercial Crew funding.

A draft request for proposals for that funding — which will be meted out under a traditional government contract rather than the Space Act Agreements used in the Commercial Crew Program since 2009 — is due this summer. The final solicitation is expected in the fall, Ed Mango, manager of the Commercial Crew Program, said in a May15 phone interview.

"That will be what we call Phase 2, and that's really the activities it takes to get certified," Mango said. "It's the testing, the analysis, the model verification activity. That's all got to happen."

To win the next round of funding, Mango said, companies will have to propose at least one crewed mission to the international space station. The demo mission, Mango said, might even carry a NASA astronaut.

"We're still open to discussions on that," Mango said.

Differing perspectives on commercial crew

Jeff Foust – SpacePolitics.com

Speaking at the meeting Wednesday of the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington, NASA administrator Charles Bolden made another pitch—this time to a rather sympathetic audience—for the agency's commercial crew program.

"If NASA had received the president's requested funding for this program then," Bolden said, referring to the rollout of the program three years ago, "we would not have been forced to recently sign a new contract with the Russians for Soyuz transportation." Those earlier cuts, he said, have pushed back commercial crew to 2017, "and even this delayed availability is in question if Congress does not fully support the president's 2014 request for our commercial crew program."

"Further delays in our commercial crew program and the impact on our human spaceflight program are unacceptable," he said. "That's why we need the full $821 million the president has requested in next year's budget to keep us on track for our 2017 deadline."

The commercial crew program has frequently been seen as being in conflict with the agency's Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket and Orion spacecraft for limited funding, particularly in the eyes of some members of Congress who think NASA is favoring commercial crew in favor of SLS and Orion. "The either-or debate exists one place that I know of, and that's in the Congress," he said. "And it is a a false debate that is built on my inability to convince critical members of Congress" that both commercial crew and SLS/Orion are essential aspects of NASA's long-term plans. "The argument that it's either heavy lift or commercial crew is a fallacious one."

After Bolden completed his talk and left, COMSTAC heard a different take on commercial crew from Capitol Hill. "I think there's been some frustration on the Hill at how the commercial crew program over the last few years has unfolded," said Tom Culligan, legislative director for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA. "There wasn't a clear vision and path and strategy laid out from day one, with buy-in from the Hill and with the stakeholders in the community, about how we were going to proceed on this program."

That frustration, Culligan suggested, is because NASA hasn't moved fast enough to select a company to develop a crew transportation system. "I think the decision early on to try and spread resources for crew to low Earth orbit to as many people as possible maybe wasn't the best decision," he said. "The Congress did not buy off on a program to provide development subsidies to a large number of entities out there. They bought off on a program to get American astronauts to low Earth orbit and Station as quickly as possible and as affordably as possible. And I think there was a disconnect there, maybe, between what people at NASA's priorities were and Congress's understanding of priorities were."

"I don't think today you find people on Capitol Hill who say we shouldn't have this program, the way you did a few years ago," he continued, but that there was "bipartisan concern" about how it's being run. "I think you've got some people who are upset, maybe, at how the program was run, particularly the first couple of years. But now we're all in it, we need to resolve it, we need to have that ability as quickly as possible."

As for Bolden's call for funding commercial crew at the requested level in 2014, Culligan did not sound optimistic. "Say, overnight, there was 100-percent consensus that we wanted to fund this at the President's level. I'm not sure the resources are there. I don't know where you find $300 million and change in this environment," he said, referring to the approximate difference between the program's 2013 funding ($525 million before rescission and sequestration) and the $821 million requested for 2014. At the same time, though, he said, Congress would not be happy with any delays beyond 2017 in bringing commercial crew into service. "NASA is going to have find a way to make it work with the allocation that we have and what we're able to devote to it."

Private Space Plane Arrives in California for Key Flight Tests

Mike Wall - Space.com

A private space plane has arrived at a NASA facility in California to undergo tests that will help vet its ability to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

A test version of the Dream Chaser space plane arrived at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California on Wednesday (May 15) aboard a flatbed truck, wrapped in a protective white caul for the overland journey from Colorado.

Engineers will put the Dream Chaser through its paces at Dryden, testing out its flight and runway landing systems, NASA officials said. The vehicle will be towed down a runway by a truck, for example, to validate the Dream Chaser's brakes and tires.

A heavy-lift helicopter will also carry the vehicle aloft, allowing engineers to examine the loads the space plane will experience during flight. Such "captive-carry" tests will lead up to a free-flight trial planned for later this year, in which the Dream Chaser will return to Earth on its own after being released by the chopper.

"This will be the first full-scale flight test of the Dream Chaser lifting body and will demonstrate the unique capability of our spacecraft to land on a runway," Jim Voss, vice president of space exploration systems at the Sierra Nevada Corp., which built Dream Chaser, said in a statement.

"Other flight tests will follow to validate the aerodynamic data used to control the vehicle in the atmosphere when it returns from space," Voss added. "This is a huge step forward for the SNC and NASA teams towards providing our nation with safe and reliable transportation to the International Space Station."

Colorado-based Sierra Nevada is one of a handful of companies that hope to fly astronauts to and from the orbiting lab for NASA, which wants private American vehicles to fill the void left by the retirement of its iconic space shuttle program in 2011.

SpaceX and Boeing are also in the running. Each is developing a capsule — in SpaceX's case, a manned version of its Dragon spacecraft, which has already completed two contracted robotic cargo runs to the station for NASA. Boeing calls its capsule design the CST-100.

NASA hopes at least one of these commercial vehicles is up and running by 2017. Until this happens, the space agency will remain dependent on Russian Soyuz vehicles to fly its astronauts.

The seven-passenger Dream Chaser looks a bit like a miniature space shuttle. It's about 29.5 feet (9 meters) long and has a wingspan of 22.9 feet (7 m). For comparison, NASA's space shuttle was 122 feet (37 m) long, with a wingspan of 78 feet (24 m).

NASA chief Charles Bolden will be at Dryden next Wednesday (May 22) to get an up-close look at the Dream Chaser, space agency officials said.

NASA to lease old KSC shuttle pad for commercial launches

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

An old space shuttle launch pad at Kennedy Space Center soon could be home to commercial rockets under a plan announced Friday by NASA.

The agency plans to lease what's known as Pad 39A to prospective tenants. Possible candidates include SpaceX of California and United Launch Alliance of Colorado. Interested applicants are asked to submit a "non-binding" letter of intent by May 24.

The leasing of 39A is the latest effort by KSC to convert its unused shuttle facilities to sites that could appeal to the growing commercial market, including an announcement in late 2011 that Boeing would assemble space capsules in one of KSC's empty shuttle garages.

"We remain committed to right-sizing our portfolio by reducing the number of facilities that are underused, duplicative, or not required to support the Space Launch System and Orion," said Kennedy Center Director Bob Cabana, referring to NASA's new system to send astronauts to an asteroid, and maybe beyond, in the 2020s.

No timeline or cost estimates were immediately available for lease of the pad.

The leasing of 39A is the latest effort by KSC to convert its unused shuttle facilities to sites that could appeal to the growing commercial market, including an announcement in late 2011 that Boeing would assemble space capsules in one of KSC's empty shuttle garages.

"We remain committed to right-sizing our portfolio by reducing the number of facilities that are underused, duplicative, or not required to support the Space Launch System and Orion," said Kennedy Center Director Bob Cabana, referring to NASA's new system to send astronauts to an asteroid, and maybe beyond, in the 2020s.

No timeline or cost estimates were immediately available for lease of the pad.

For rent: NASA launch pad with nice oceanfront view
NASA wants to lease Apollo-era launch complex for commercial use

James Dean - Florida Today

NASA is seeking companies to take over one of Kennedy Space Center's former shuttle launch pads, the agency said Friday.

The center has mothballed pad 39A and will stop paying to maintain it by September.

NASA would like a "commercial company or consortium, or other U.S. domestic entity, including state agencies," to lease the pad for at least five years.

"Launch Complex 39A is not required to support our asteroid retrieval mission or our eventual missions to Mars," KSC Director Bob Cabana said in a statement. "But it's in the agency's and our nation's best interest in meeting our commitment and direction to enable commercial space operations and allow the aerospace industry to operate and maintain the pad and related facilities."

Expressions of interest, requested by next Friday, should explain whether that interest is in exclusive or shared use of the pad or in operating the site. A formal announcement is expected to be released next week, with responses due 30 days later.

United Launch Alliance and SpaceX are considered potential users of the pad, along with ATK if its proposed Liberty rocket progresses.

New users would be responsible for any necessary pad renovations.

NASA is preparing Kennedy's other launch pad, 39B, for launches of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule on exploration missions. The first crewed launch is targeted for 2021.
Pad 39A was built in 1966 for the Apollo program and was last used for the final shuttle launch in 2011.

NASA spent more than $21 million to operate and maintain it in 2011, and about $1.2 million last year.

Launch Complex 39A for Lease?

Jason Rhian - AmericaSpace.com

NASA is moving ahead with the space agency's efforts to cede control of key structures and facilities as Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Through a synopsis released May 17, 2013, the agency plans to seek proposals for use of the historic location. NASA has said that it will be issued sometime next week.

Similar to how NASA has worked to empower private industry to handle delivering cargo and crew to the International Space Station, the agency has already attempted to lease use of Orbiter Processing Facility 3 (OPF-3). It was announced in 2011 that Boeing would take control of the structure and use it to process the company's CST-100 spacecraft. As reported earlier, Boeing has yet to officially sign the lease.

NASA hopes that commercial companies will step up and utilize LC-39A to launch their spacecraft from.

LC-39A was the site where Apollo 11 thundered into the history books. Numerous other manned missions have had their start at LC-39A.

"We remain committed to right-sizing our portfolio by reducing the number of facilities that are underused, duplicative, or not required to support the Space Launch System and Orion," said Kennedy Center Director and three-time shuttle veteran Bob Cabana. "Launch Complex 39A is not required to support our asteroid retrieval mission or our eventual missions to Mars. But it's in the agency's and our nation's best interest in meeting our commitment and direction to enable commercial space operations and allow the aerospace industry to operate and maintain the pad and related facilities."

To date, commercial companies have not launched any astronauts. Under the current time table, due primarily to budgetary issues, the first flight of commercial craft under NASA's commercial crew program is not slated to begin until 2017.

Moreover, two of the companies vying to launch crews on their spacecraft, Sierra Nevada Corporation with its Dream Chaser space plane as well as Boeing, have stated that they plan to use United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket to send their commercial spacecraft aloft. This would likely mean that CST-100 and Dream Chaser would launch from Space Launch Complex 41 located at the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Given that the last participant under NASA's Commercial Crew integrated Capability, or "CCiCap," is SpaceX and would doubtlessly use Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 40 to launch their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft from, it is not clear who would be interested in using LC-39A.

What might occur is that all of some of the firms involved with NASA's commercial crew efforts could use LC-39A for this purpose (leaving SLC-40 and 41 for non human-rated launches). LC-39A could be used by companies not planning to launch crew or some mix of the two. The adjacent Launch Complex 39B has been renovated under the clean pad concept. This means that a variety of launch vehicles can use LC-39B as the launch structure, in most cases, travels with the rocket to the pad.

LC-39B is currently tasked as the launch site of NASA's new heavy-lift booster, the Space Launch System (SLS), as well as the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle that will be powered aloft by SLS.

This concept is nothing new as, during the Apollo era, the powerful Saturn V rocket used a somewhat similar design philosophy. Once the shuttle era began, both LC-39A and B underwent renovations that incorporated emplaced launch structures. Those on LC-39B have since been torn down; currently those on LC-39A are still intact.

To acquire LC-39A for launch activities, potential clients would need to assume financial and technical responsibility of the complex's operations and management. NASA views a possible commercial customer as further strengthening the space agency's efforts to encourage the commercial use of resources that the agency is not currently using.

UK astronaut Tim Peake to go to International Space Station

BBC News

The UK astronaut Tim Peake has been given a date to fly to the International Space Station (ISS).

The date of the mission is yet to be made public but it will not be before 2015. The European Space Agency (Esa) is to release the details on Monday.

Peake, who was a major and a helicopter pilot in the British Army Air Corps, has been in training for an expedition to the ISS since 2009.

To get there, he will ride a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

Tasks once in orbit will include helping to maintain the 27,000km/h platform and carrying out science experiments in Esa's Columbus laboratory module, which is attached to the front of the 400-tonne complex.

Forty-one-year-old Peake hails from Chichester, and is so far the only Briton ever to be accepted into the European Astronaut Corps.

His mission will make him the first UK national to live and work in space, and to fly the Union flag, on a British-government-funded programme (the UK is Esa's third largest contributor).

All previous UK-born astronauts that have gone into orbit have done so either through the US space agency (Nasa) as American citizens or on private ventures organised with the assistance of the Russian space agency.

"Major Tim" Peake has a degree in flight dynamics and is a qualified test pilot.

When he was selected for astronaut training he was working with the Anglo-Italian helicopter company AgustaWestland.

Helen Sharman was the first Briton to go into space in 1991 on Project Juno, a cooperative project between a number of UK companies and the Soviet government. She spent a week at the Mir space station.

The most experienced British-born astronaut is Nasa's Michael Foale. He has accumulated 374 days in orbit, completing long-duration missions to both the ISS and Mir.

Major Tim's assignment is made as British space activity is experiencing a big renaissance.

The space industry in the UK is growing fast, employing tens of thousands of workers and contributing some £9bn in value to the national economy.

The government has also lifted substantially its subscription to Esa, and the agency has responded by opening its first technical base in the country.

Ecsat (European Centre for Space Applications and Telecoms) is sited on the Harwell science campus in Oxfordshire.

There is sure to be huge interest in Major Tim's adventure.

The recently returned ISS commander, Canadian Chris Hadfield, attracted a big following for his tweets, videos and songs from the platform. His rendition of David Bowie's A Space Oddity has become a YouTube hit.

It would be hoped that Major Tim could achieve something of the same impact.

Britain's first official astronaut to blast off for space station
The British space industry will receive a major boost by the selection of the UK's first official astronaut to take part in a five-month mission on the International Space Station, experts have said

Victoria Ward - London Telegraph

Major Tim Peake, 41, has been chosen to complete the lengthy stay in orbit in 2015, when he will be blasted into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket and take part in spacewalks and other complex scientific research.

Major Peake, a former army helicopter pilot, graduated as a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut more than two years ago but it was feared he might only be given a short mission because the UK makes relatively modest contributions to the agency's manned space programme.

The married father-of-two is considered Britain's first official spaceman because previous UK citizens have either secured private funding or have taken out American citizenship to make it into orbit.

Nick Spall of the British Interplanetary Society, which has been campaigning for years for a change to government policy in order to allow the UK to have official astronauts, welcomed the news.

"Following initiatives put in place several years ago, at last this has come about with a flight slot to the International Space Station (ISS) for Tim Peake," he said.

"The UK can now take its rightful place and join in with important microgravity research work on the ISS, win industrial contracts for future human space flight projects and forge new links via ESA with NASA, Russia and hopefully China and one-day perhaps India in space.

"With exciting potential mission opportunities coming up for exploration across the Solar System to asteroids, the Moon, Mars and beyond for the future , many young people will be inspired by Tim and his achievement. This will really help boost the UK's technical employment potential for jobs and industry. Human space flight is a win-win initiative for the UK."

Major Peake, who served for 18 years in the British Army including terms in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan, beat more than 8,000 other hopefuls to be selected for ESA in 2009 along with five other colleagues from across Europe.

The appointment marked a change in British government policy as the cost of putting a man into space – about £18 million – had previously been considered too expensive.

Since then, he has undergone a rigorous 14-month training programme that has included visits to Nasa's astronaut base in Houston, the Russian astronaut training centre in Star City outside Moscow, Tsukuba Space Centre in Japan, and a two week survival course in Sardinia.

To see how they coped with stress, mock emergencies were created such as an astronaut falling unconscious during a spacewalk.

To improve their Russian language skills, the astronauts spent a month lodging with families in St Petersburg.

Major Peake completed his training in November 2010 and has since been waiting to be assigned a space flight.

He recently insisted that the long wait had all been part of the journey. "It doesn't get frustrating at all," he told the BBC.

"There's just so much going on, so much diversity, and there's brilliant training all along the way."

He has expressed a desire to become the first Briton to walk on the moon.

It emerged last year that he was one of a team of astronauts who were being trained to land on an asteroid to explore its surface, search for minerals and even learn how they might be able to destroy it should one pose a threat to the Earth.

Major Peake, who graduated from Sandhurst, received a commission with the Army Air Corps in 1992 and served as a platoon commander with the Royal Green Jackets in Northern Ireland.

He gained his wings in 1994 after completing the army pilots' course.

He taught trainees fly Apache helicopters before graduating from the Empire Test Pilot School at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire and conducting special forces operations.

He retired from the army in 2009 and joined Augusta Westland as a senior helicopter test pilot.

The first Briton in space was Sheffield-born chemist Helen Sharman. She had to secure private funding to fly to the Mir space station on a Russian Soyuz craft in 1991.

Three British-born astronauts have flown into space under an American flag: Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick.

How Space Tourism Could Help Save Planet Earth

Mike Wall - Space.com

Opening spaceflight up to the masses could help spark a global conservation ethic that stems the tide of environmental destruction on Earth, NASA's science chief says.

Seeing our fragile Earth hanging alone in the blackness of space tends to be a life-altering, or at least perspective-changing, experience. If more people around the world are treated to that unforgettable sight, humanity might handle the planet with a bit more care, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

"Ultimately, my vision is that lots of people get to go to space," Grunsfeld said here Saturday at Maker Faire Bay Area, a two-day celebration of DIY science, technology and engineering. "If we get more people, we'll have folks who can articulate a view of the Earth that leads to more people who want to keep the Earth a nice place to live."

Our changing planet

Grunsfeld is a former NASA astronaut who flew on five space shuttle missions from 1995 to 2009, including three that serviced the space agency's iconic Hubble Space Telescope. He said the view looking down changed dramatically from his first flight to his last.

"The Earth looks totally different now," Grunsfeld said. "We are very visibly and significantly modifying the surface of the Earth, modifying the atmosphere. You can see that easily from space."

Back in the 1960s, Apollo astronauts noted that national borders aren't visible from space. But this inspiring observation, which lent some much-appreciated perspective at the height of the Cold War, is no longer true, Grunsfeld said.

"It looks like a Rand McNally map. You can see where there's rich countries and poor countries," he said. "You can see where people have agriculture and irrigation and where people don't. It's very clear."

The planet's shrinking pockets of wilderness are also clearly visible, Grunsfeld said.

"You can see the boundaries of national parks," he said. "They look like somebody's drawn a dark line around them, with trees inside and nothing outside. It's really very striking."

Spaceflight opening up soon?

To date, about 530 people have flown in space, most of them NASA astronauts or Soviet/Russian cosmonauts. But the list could soon start getting much longer.

Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo made its first rocket-powered test flight last month, and the six-passenger vehicle may start flying paying customers later this year or in 2014, company officials have said. About 580 people have put deposits down for a seat, signing on to pay a total of $200,000.

And SpaceShipTwo isn't the only game in town. Another suborbital craft, XCOR Aerospace's Lynx rocket plane, could be operational by about the same time as Virgin's vehicle. XCOR is charging $95,000 per seat for a ride on the two-seat Lynx.

The suborbital flights envisioned by SpaceShipTwo and Lynx will be much different, and much briefer, than an orbital mission aboard the International Space Station or NASA's now-retired space shuttle. But suborbital space travelers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see a black sky and the curvature of the Earth, officials with Virgin Galactic and XCOR say.

Orbital space tourism is already a reality, but the list of spaceflyers is very short. Since 2001, seven different paying customers have flown to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz capsules, plunking down tens of millions of dollars for the privilege.

How Electric Spacecraft Could Fly NASA to Mars

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

Electric vehicles aren't just popular on the ground — it turns out they're all the rage in space these days, too. While still not as common as traditional chemical spacecraft engines, electric engines are growing in popularity for both Earth-orbiting satellites and scientific spacecraft on missions to deep space. And electric engines could turn out to be a key element in NASA's goal of sending people to Mars, experts say.

"The maturity of the various technologies that make up electric propulsion is getting there," said Vlad Hruby, president of the Busek spacecraft engine company. Hruby said he's been waiting for a renaissance in electric spacecraft for about 20 years. "Now it's finally coming to fruition."

In 2012, Boeing introduced an all-electric communications satellite design called the 702SP, which officials say has been popular with commercial clients. In April of this year, satellite builder Orbital Sciences said it's developing its own all-electric model to compete.

Electric engines

There are two main ways to power an electric spacecraft engine: via solar energy absorbed from the sun, or via nuclear fission. Both have been tested successfully, though solar electric propulsion is the most commonly used.

"The solar array power is getting cheaper per watt, getting more efficient," Hruby told SPACE.com. "A bunch of factors are converging to finally make it the preferred method."

Electric spacecraft engines have been flying in various forms for decades. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union pioneered Hall thruster technology, which remains the most common type of electric spacecraft engine. Hall thrusters use electric and magnetic fields to convert neutral atoms in a propellant into charged atoms, called ions, and then accelerate the ions to produce thrust.

"You have an electrical grid held at a certain voltage," explained Nathaniel Fisch, head of the Hall Thruster Experiment project at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. "You form a plasma and accelerate the ions in the plasma. Then the ions would be ejected at the voltage you put between the grid and the plasma."

Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft, which launched in 2003 to rendezvous with the asteroid Itokawa, used electric propulsion, as did NASA's asteroid-visiting Dawn spacecraft, which lifted off in 2007.

This type of engine tends to be much more fuel-efficient than a typical chemical rocket engine, which uses the energy created by chemical reactions between two chemicals — a fuel and an oxidizer — to create thrust.

"Electric propulsion is the most efficient propulsion approach that we know about right now," said Christian Carpenter, a space architect in the Exploration Systems department of the rocket engine company Aerojet. "It generally has two or more times savings in propellant — that's demonstrated."

Saving all that propellant means that electric spacecraft can weigh a lot less than chemical spacecraft. That mass savings means the same satellite can be launched on a smaller, cheaper rocket, or that the extra mass could be used to add more instruments to the spacecraft, such as adding extra transponders to communications satellites.

The downside is that this fuel efficiency comes often comes at the expense of thrust power, so electrically propelled spacecraft accelerate slower and take longer to reach the same destination. (They could be designed to produce the same thrust as chemical engines, but would then require more power than current solar arrays are able to provide.)

"The way we think about it is that your fuel efficiency works on getting your vehicle mass down at the expense of your thrust dropping, which means longer trip times," Carpenter said. "There's a balance between reducing the mass and increasing the trip time. It's up to the architect of the system to figure out the right balance."

Missions to Mars

This balance is one of the key questions NASA is facing in contemplating sending people to an asteroid and then on to Mars by the mid 2030s — a goal laid out by President Barack Obama.

Carpenter and others recently advocated a combination of chemical and electric propulsion for a manned Mars mission at the Humans 2 Mars Summit May 7 in Washington, D.C. Chemical engines could be used to propel a crew to the Red Planet in about six months, Carpenter said, but the habitat, supplies and equipment they need could be sent on an electric cargo craft ahead of time, in a trip that would probably take about two and a half years.

"People need to be able to get to their destination in a reasonable amount of time," he said. "They want to be out doing their mission, not riding to it. Chemical engines provide high thrusts, but it's not the most fuel-efficient way to do it."

In contrast, solar electric propulsion, for instance, might be perfect for the unmanned cargo mission. "For cargo, you can take your time and you can do things efficiently," Carpenter said. "We're interested in all the options. There's really not one silver bullet technology for going to Mars — it's a portfolio."

In the long run, he said, nuclear-powered electric engines may prove among the best options for getting to Mars, but that technology isn't ready yet. Currently, the equipment to conduct nuclear fission is too massive, and requires hydrogen fuel, which is difficult to store for long periods, Carpenter said. A viable nuclear-powered spacecraft has not yet been flown.

"Longer term, the nuclear rockets provide about twice the fuel economy of a chemical engine but the same or higher thrust," Carpenter said. "You can still get there fast, but use half as much fuel. We think out on the horizon, nuclear will ultimately be the best crew delivery system."

Why sign up for a one-way Mars trip? Three applicants explain the appeal

Alan Boyle - NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log

A one-way trip to Mars sounds like something you'd wish on your worst enemy — so why would more than 78,000 people from around the world pay up to $75 for a chance to die on another planet?

"I can say I have an ulterior motive," said David Brin, who has written more than a dozen science-fiction novels — including "The Postman," which was turned into a Kevin Costner movie in 1997. "I'd get a lot of writing done, and it might be memorable."

As a master of hard science fiction, the 62-year-old Brin knows better than most applicants what the first Red Planet settlers would face if they're sent off in 2022, as the Dutch-based Mars One venture has proposed.

The settlers would have to be sealed up in habitats, protected from harsh radiation, supplied with machine-made air and water, and nourished by whatever food can be grown on a cold, barren planet. They'd have to keep their sanity, millions of miles away from their families and Mission Control. Worst of all, they'd have to face the fact that there's no guarantee of ever going back.

Will this scheme actually work? "I give it a low probability of happening," Brin said, "and I don't consider it to be the most responsible thing I've ever seen."

Nevertheless, the venture has an attraction for Brin and tens of thousands of others, The ages of those listed in Mars One's database range from 18 to 71. All those applicants are facing a long road even before the first four-person crew gets off the planet. Mars One is accepting applicants through Aug. 31. The field of applicants would first be whittled down by panels of experts. Then they'd undergo trial by reality TV, followed by years of training.

"This may sound crazy, but it kind of reminds me of 'The Hunger Games,'" said Kayli McArthur, an 18-year-old student who's one of the youngest Mars One applicants. "It's cool that it would be televised, but that's not my whole thing."

On the other end of the age spectrum, 71-year-old psychiatrist Sanford Pomerantz is a little surprised that it's taking this long to get something like Mars One off the ground. "I thought by now we would have colonized Mars," said Pomerantz, who's currently the oldest applicant on Mars One's list.

So what's the appeal of Mars One? It's too early for Brin, McArthur and Pomerantz to give a lot of thought to their adventure on Mars, let alone their death on Mars. Instead, they're focusing on the adventure here on Earth. Here's what's behind their thinking:

David Brin: 'My main purpose is the conversation'

Brin sees Mars One as just one of a number of ventures aimed at expanding humanity's frontier, ranging from Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tours to Golden Spike's moon missions. "It's emblematic of the new era that we're about to enter at long last — what I call the barnstorming era," he said.

Like the daring airplane fliers of the 1920s, these 21st-century space barnstormers are willing to take bigger risks in hopes of providing bigger thrills — and eventually, earning bigger payoffs. The Mars One project is "a great way to get the discussion going," Brin said.

"You have to assume that it may not work, and that there will be a statue of you on Mars someday," he said. "I'm aware of the tradeoffs, and I'm willing to explore it further, but largely my main purpose is the conversation. We've got to be talking about how we can be a more exploratory people — a more interesting people, if you like."

Brin doesn't doubt that Mars One will find plenty of qualified (and interesting) people willing to take the risk.

"People who cannot imagine any sane person making that choice simply aren't envisioning the wide range of human diversity," said Brin, who has three children in school. "Consider what I told my family. By the very earliest date that Mars One might launch, I expect to be a spry 75-year-old whose kids are already successfully launched, and who might spend a few years doing something truly remarkable."

Even if it means dying on alien soil? Brin isn't completely sure he'd go that far, but he's willing to bet that others would.

"I think you'll find tens of thousands of people who, under those circumstances, will at least ponder it seriously," Brin said.

Kayli McArthur: 'I'm trying to strive for something more'

McArthur, a freshman at the University of Arizona, is one of more than three dozen 18-year-olds on Mars One's list of applicants. Ever since she applied, she's been hearing that she has her whole life ahead of her, so why would she want to leave it all behind for Mars?

"Being young doesn't make me want to do it any less because I have my whole life ahead of me," she said. "It makes it more exciting. ... I love all my friends, my guy friends, my family. It's not that I'm trying to get away. It's like I'm trying to strive for something more."

She has long dreamed of going into outer space, and she figures that her future degree in materials science would come in handy for creating the first interplanetary settlement. "Going to Mars, there are so many opportunities for that," she said.

So far, her family hasn't stood in her way. "My family jokes, like, 'Oh, Kayli, have your fun with it,'" she said. If the selection process gets more serious, she suspects she might face more resistance from her parents. But not from her grandfather.

"My grandpa is a retired three-star [general] in the Air Force," she said. "We were talking about it. I get really worked up and excited, and he was talking about it, too, and being realistic about it. He said, 'That would be so cool if you were able to do it.' ... I know my grandpa would totally support me."

Sanford Pomerantz: 'Grandpa is going to Mars!'

Pomerantz is old enough to remember when the idea of sending people into outer space seemed as far out as the idea of sending people on a one-way trip to Mars seems now. One of the books that made an impression on him in grade school was Robert Heinlein's "Red Planet: A Colonial Boy on Mars," which was published in 1949.

"I started as a physics major in the university, but then I got accepted into med school and changed directions," he said. At the age of 71, he's still a practicing psychiatrist in Topeka, Kan. But he's also still holding onto that boyhood dream of spaceflight.

"The Mars thing is exciting, because I hope it'll stimulate people to get interested in space. ... And I hope it has the secondary effect of stimulating science education, especially in the U.S.," he said.

Just as McArthur believes that Mars will need a materials scientist, Pomerantz believes the crew will need a psychiatrist. "Psychologically, it's going to be an interesting challenge, but human beings are very adaptable," he said. "It'll be exciting to go to a whole new world. It'll be a major step in human evolution."

If Pomerantz ends up being selected for the first Mars crew, he's likely to become not only the oldest human to head for the Red Planet, but the oldest human to go on any space mission. (The current record-holder is John Glenn, who flew on the shuttle Discovery when he was 77 years old.) For now at least, that prospect doesn't faze Pomerantz's three children and two grandchildren. "The grandchildren are excited," he said. "It's like, 'Grandpa is going to Mars!'"

Pomerantz became a certified scuba diver just two years ago, and he still expects to be in good physical and mental shape for liftoff in 2022. "Remember, age is a state of mind," he said. "Chronologlcally, I may be 71. ... But psychologically and physically, I'm definitely in my 20s. I look in the mirror and say, 'Who's that old guy?'"

Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Most Excellent Adventure

Scott Simon - National Public Radio's Weekend Edition

Chris Hadfield went from feeling truly sublime to faintly ridiculous this week.

He landed after spending 146 days in space, most as commander of the International Space Station. But, he says, as soon as his Soyuz plonked down on the soil of Kazakhstan, "I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking. I didn't realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue."

Chris Hadfield said that after nearly five months of floating, his feet had lost all cushioning and calluses, so on these, his first days back, "I was walking around like I was walking on hot coals."

Mr. Hadfield is 53, a slender and mustachioed former Royal Canadian Air Force colonel, and the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. He may never be mentioned in the same sentence as Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong. But Chris Hadfield has become one of the best-known astronauts of contemporary times because he's shared what he's seen and felt with a Twitter following that's grown to almost a million, and he's used the bay of the International Space Station as a kind of celestial garage to put on a show.

He performed an electronic concert from orbit, playing his guitar and singing with the group Barenaked Ladies and thousands of school students to encourage young people to love music. He laid down his own rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" — "Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do" — with the earth rolling by in a window behind — or is that below? — him.

And he snapped a lot of photographs, orbit after orbit: thunderstorms boiling over the Amazon, soft pearly swirls of ocean around Cape Town, vast mining pits gashed into the red soil of China, and North America's Great Lakes framed in a single shot, tweeting pictures the way a man on vacation might send back shots of both the Lincoln Memorial and a diner with a huge inflatable doughnut on its roof.

To see his photographs every day, almost every hour, was to be reminded that sunrise and sunset are part of the same master plan.

"It's part of our humanity to be in space," he wrote in Russian, and just before plunging back into Earth's atmosphere, he said, in French and English, "I came here on behalf of so many people — thank you." Which is why, said Chris Hadfield, it was important for him to send back messages: "It's just too good an experience to keep to yourself."

Chris Hadfield's Most Excellent Space Mission reminded us, in a way, of something human beings can do in space that, so far, machines can't: be amazed.

Chris Hadfield's toughest task could be accomplishing new mission
Gained fame and acclaim during trip to space station, but finding another meaningful challenge could be tough for Canadian astronaut

Allan Woods - Toronto Star

When man touches space, he becomes an instant celebrity. When space touches the man, anything can happen.

The history of space exploration is littered with post-mission divorces, religious conversions and addictions among the straight-arrow scientists and test pilots who set their sights on the stars. At one time it was the isolation and incredible risk of space travel that posed the greatest psychological threat to astronauts. Now it is the emotional fall of returning to Earth.

Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969 along with Neil Armstrong. His next step, after leaving NASA, was selling Cadillacs in Texas while battling depression and alcoholism. With the words of a poet, he described his post-mission meltdown as "the melancholy of things done." There was no higher mountain left to climb.

After summiting the International Space Station with nearly a million rapt Twitter followers and legions more around the world who could now pick his bushy moustache out of a crowd, the question poses itself for Chris Hadfield — what next?

After beaming back photographs, strumming his guitar, recording a haunting rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and hamming it up to show earthlings how to brush one's teeth, cry, shave and cook while orbiting Earth, what could he possibly do for an encore?

Will anyone be demanding one a few months down the road?

The hard truth is that the fame, much like the feeling of weightlessness, is fleeting. Astronauts can try to hold onto it as do professional athletes and politicians. Most end up mourning its loss.

"I've been told that it's very difficult to regain that feeling that you have when you're in zero gravity," said Dr. Gary Beven, NASA's chief psychiatrist.

Hadfield, 53, has a six-month buffer of medical tests, mission debriefs, official celebrations and a world tour to share war stories and slide shows. But the path ends there for Canada's space superstar, just as it does for all astronauts of his vintage. Waiting five, 10 years for another crack at the launch pad isn't an option. The next generation of astronauts is already knocking on his door.

"For him and all of the other astronauts the challenge is finding something else in your life that is meaningful," Beven said. "Chasing that and moving forward is obviously a challenge for everybody."

Hadfield is a trained engineer and a Cold War fighter pilot. He became an astronaut in 1992, completing three space flights and two underwater dives as an aquanaut. Whether above the clouds, below the sea or perched atop the earth, his entire adult life has been a series of missions. If he even knows yet what his next endeavour will be, it remains top secret for now.

The presidency of the Canadian Space Agency has been a tried-and-true landing pad for previous Canadian astronauts transitioning out of the space program like Marc Garneau and Steve Maclean. More fanciful suggestions, like governor general, have also emerged, though life in Rideau Hall would seem a bit sleepy after space. Recording an album of space songs would be more a novelty than a commercial endeavour and he wouldn't make much of a social media guru — son Evan was the brains behind the operation.

The man himself says he hasn't decided and he has learned enough from watching his predecessors to know that he must take his time.

"It was an incredible challenge to be commander of the space station. I have been working on this for five years," he said. "To come back from space now is like a car accident. We hit the ground and both physically and psychologically it was a new direction. I need time to adapt to and think about that."

Some retired astronauts have described their visit to the stars as a sort of dazzling trauma — a transformative audience with the mystical forces of the universe.

American Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon in 1971, "flipped out" upon returning to Earth, to use his words.

"As a result of that experience virtually all of the philosophies, ideas, scientific truth and so forth that were dear to me and were a part of my scientific paradigm got tossed right up into the air and fell into a big heap like a bundle of pickup sticks," he is quoted as saying in a 1985 U.S. air force study on psychological issues when selecting astronauts. "Since that time I have been very carefully and slowly picking up those sticks and trying to put them into some sort of order again."

Order, for Mitchell, meant quitting the space program and founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a non-profit group engaged in the search for higher consciousness. James Irwin founded the evangelical High Flight Foundation one year after walking on the moon on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. His claim that "Jesus walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon" may have struck American officials as a sign of post-mission malaise, but it didn't stop two other spacemen — Alfred Worden and William Pogue — from joining his mission.

The handful of Canadians to have travelled to space and then moved on to more terrestrial affairs have come off pretty well. After three space flights and his stint running the Canadian space program, Garneau was elected as a Liberal to the House of Commons in 2006. Roberta Bondar, a neurologist, became NASA's director of space medicine and Trent University's chancellor from 2003 to 2009, and now does public speaking. Dave Williams, who spent nearly a month in space over the course of two missions, took on a senior role with NASA before returning to practise medicine and later run a hospital in Canada.

"There is no question. (Space exploration) changes your perspective in many different ways," Williams said in an interview.

"For me, flying in space was the most incredible thing I have done from a career perspective, but in terms of the most meaningful thing I've done from a career perspective, that's not flying in space. It's working as a physician."

Rarely, though, has anyone on Parliament Hill seen the fire in Garneau's eyes or heard the excitement that was in his voice Monday night as he provided television commentary on Hadfield's return to Earth, perhaps vicariously reliving his own adventures as the Soyuz capsule hurtled down from the sky.

Hadfield, like all astronauts these days, was supported by an entire team of doctors who monitored his psychological health. He had a weekly video conference with his wife, Helene. He also spoke to her on a special Internet Protocol telephone each day and talked once a week with each of his three children, Kyle, who is in China, Evan, who is in Germany, and Kristin, who is studying at Dublin's Trinity College. There were also regular sessions with Ottawa psychiatrist Dr. Marvin Lange, who is in charge of Canadian astronauts' emotional health.

"We've talked all about how this is going to fit into life and how we can make the most of this step," Hadfield said.

He has also seen his predecessors' transition to terrestrial life over 21 years in the space program, three of them as president of the Association of Space Explorers, the professional organization representing astronauts and cosmonauts.

"I know these people and I've picked their brains about what went right and what went wrong," he said.

It is also not in the smiling astronaut's nature to dwell on past victories, blind to the opportunities that stand before him.

"I don't spend my life going, 'I went to (Russian space station) Mir in 1995 and now everything else is boring,' " he said.

"I take just as much pride in the great big dock that my neighbour, Bob, and I built at our cottage as I do in building Canadarm 2 on the space station. Those were both very complex projects, required a lot of physical effort, planning, real-time decision-making and the product is out there for everybody to see. I feel really good about them both. I am not a person who looks backwards and wishes that my past was my present. I don't think I'm going to feel the way that Buzz did."

Chris Hadfield on coffee, guitars, and trying to shake hands without missing

Tom Spears - Ottawa Citizen

They haven't given Chris Hadfield a day off yet.

As a space guinea pig, he's being examined by doctors daily, and Saturday he went through a few hours of followup on a medical experiment. But he also took time to phone the Citizen.

We asked how he's doing back on Earth. Here are excerpts of his answers:

Q: What food tastes best back on Earth?

A: "Food tastes very good on the Space Station. But the textures aren't so good." He compares it to baby food. "So I have a lot of fresh meat-and-vegetable-type sandwiches, fresh fruit, apples, oranges. Berries. Berries are great! They have all that burst of flavour and texture." He felt sick for a few days after returning but says his appetite is returning.

Q: What smells best on Earth?

A: "Coffee. You never smell coffee in space because it's always inside of a bag." (Space coffee is instant; they run hot water into its pouch and drink through a straw.)

Q: What's it like sleeping on a mattress again?

A: "I was surprised. When I came back from my shuttle flights I actually had the sensation I was floating above my bed, weightless." That didn't happen this time.

Years ago he realized that top-level hotels have top-quality mattresses, and he bought one too. "It's very nice to be back."

Q: What's the clumsiest thing you've done?

A: "My reach is all off. When I reach for a handrail or shake someone's hand I keep reaching to the wrong place. I under-shoot or over-shoot. And I walk like I'm failing a breathalyzer ... I stagger." (Doctors won't let him drive a car yet.) "Just when I stand up I watch my pulse climb, climb, climb as my blood pressure drops."

Q: Where did you learn to take those pictures?

A: "We have excellent photographic trainers at the Johnson Space Center. Those guys teach us the theory, and we take cameras just outside the building and we take pictures of birds, airplanes flying over, trees ... and take pictures inside and analyze pictures and talk about composition." As well, he says the space station is "a wonderful place to take pictures. If you're just a little bit patient, wonderful things can just show themselves to you."

Q: Do you want to go on another flight?

A:" Sure, I'd love to!" But he says it won't happen. Next in line are two younger Canadians, Jeremy Hansen and David St-Jacques.

Q: When does your album come out?

A: It doesn't. "To me, it was just the same as keeping a diary." He's thrilled, though, that so many people saw his music videos.

Q: Where is the guitar now?

A: "Oh, it's been up here for a long time. It's gone around the world 65,000 times. It's the space station guitar." (It's a Canadian guitar.) "It's a small guitar so it doesn't have a great big sound but it's a wonderful sound."

Q: Do your wife and kids get a medal for going through all this?

A: "My daughter gets the Lord Mayor's medal in Dublin next week on my behalf so she sort of gets a medal ... It's a different kind of life and it's been a very unusual kind of life for the last couple of years, training, and the five months away and now the long debriefing ... But it's the life we expected and that we signed up for together and discussed how it's going to be. And for my kids it's just what their Dad does for a living."

Q: Ever want to change your name to Smith for a week and hide away?

A: "Ha! No, it's work that I'm very passionate about and I'm happy to tell people about it and for people to be interested in it."

Is NASA about jobs, or actually accomplishing something?

Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle's SciGuy

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden had a rare (and welcome) availability with Houston area media on Thursday, and while he generally stuck to talking points, citing the space agency's rosy future, moments of frustration slipped through the cracks.

These slips are illuminating as they point out a central weakness and strength of NASA — its 10 centers spread across eight states.

The diversity of these centers, including sites in populous states like Texas, California, Florida and Ohio, ensures political clout for the agency in both houses of Congress. At the same time, NASA has to continually spread work around all of these centers and keep senators and representatives from the homes of each of the 10 happy.

Which is to say, first and foremost, saving jobs.

During his availability on Thursday, I asked Bolden about the dearth of planetary science flagship missions in the wake of Curiosity's success on Mars. He talked about some upcoming missions and then, in the midst of that discussion, started talking about jobs.

Here's what he said:

I always have to caution people, if your concern is jobs, which it is for all of us, and so you want to make sure that every center has something going that's going to guarantee that every year we can do a new program or project that assures jobs, that's nice. But we've also got to be accomplishing something that we can tell the American taxpayer "this is worth the money we're spending." The strategy that we have right now, the programs we have in science, aeronautics, technology development, human exploration, we feel is a balanced portfolio that provides support across the agency for all 10 centers, keeps our workforce vibrant and viable working on things they really know and the nation needs, so that's where our focus is.

I believe when he's talking about "people" in the first sentence, he's talking about Congress. And he alludes to the inherent tension in all of this, namely that NASA has to keep work farmed out to each center, but still has to be seen accomplishing something.

This inherent tension between appeasing Congress and actually doing something also arose earlier during the news conference. During his opening remarks, Bolden urged Congress to agree to the president's budget request for $821 million for commercial crew flights, saying a failure to do so would further delay development of private, American rockets and spacecraft to launch astronauts to the International Space Station.

He said:

I had to authorize writing a check for 450 million-some-odd dollars to Russia to extend the Soyuz contract to support the International Space Station for 2016 into 2017. That's 450-million some-odd dollars that we could have been writing to American industry if we had an American capability to get our astronauts there right now. And that's the last check I want to write to somebody outside the United States. You need to know when you talk to Congressional representatives, they need to understand how critically important it is to approve the President's request for $821 million to develop commercial crew.

Why is Congress unlikely to do so, and why haven't they fully funded the president's budget requests for commercial crew in the past? It's not because Congress is populated by Russophiles. It's because congressional members from Texas and Alabama and elsewhere are protecting their centers, which might see slight budget cuts if commercial crew is fully funded. So part of the money needed to help develop commercial rockets and space capsules in past budgets has been siphoned off for programs at various NASA centers.

As a result, a few parochial interests win, but I'm not sure that's best for America overall.

Anyway, in case anyone was disillusioned, let's be clear that political support for NASA is largely about jobs. Same as it was back in 1977, if you believe Jimmy Carter. Most of the time, if a politician from a particular state supports a NASA program, it's because that program provides a lot of jobs at the center in his or her state. There are some exceptions, of course. I'm a big fan of John Culberson's desire to send a robotic probe to Europa, and that would have almost no benefit for Johnson Space Center.

The good news is that NASA still accomplishes stuff, just not as much as it could be doing if it weren't mostly about jobs.

U.S. must stay committed to racing towards space
What our nation fails to do today will be done by others tomorrow

Kay Bailey Hutchison & Eugene A. Cernan - USA Today (Opinion)

(Hutchinson is a former senator from Texas. Cernan is a former NASA astronaut)

Space scientists are buzzing. Capturing billions of cosmic ray "hits" on the International Space Station and the landing the Curiosity rover perfectly on Mars are just the latest achievements space exploration has produced. But to be successful, America must fully utilize the ISS and prepare to explore new regions of the universe. This balance is essential to maximize our investment dollars.

The last major equipment attached to the space station in 2011 records timing and intensity from cosmic rays for an experiment, led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting. What is learned could rewrite the basic theories of the origins, composition and forces of the universe.

Benefits on Earth

Additional research aboard the ISS is focused on the effects of long duration spaceflight and combating muscle and bone loss, results of which will be essential to continued human exploration of deep space. The unique microgravity environment present in space has allowed us to make advances in cancer treatment delivery, air purification systems and vaccine development, among other things. This utilization of low Earth orbit must remain a core focus, but it is also necessary to broaden our ambitions. Our true heritage is as a nation of pioneers and explorers.

From the beginning, the focus of the U.S. space program has been discovery. In fact, as Ting reminds us, the fundamental fact of research is that we cannot anticipate in advance what will be found and to what use it will be put. Most of the major particle physics experiments in our history resulted in findings completely different — and often more meaningful — than what was originally sought. Pursuing space exploration was itself a bold experiment. Continuing to go where no human has gone before should be a given.

Poor planning

Four years ago, as plans to retire the space shuttle moved forward, uncertainty about America's space program grew. In 2010, the Obama administration's budget plan put development of a next-generation deep space exploration vehicle on hold for five years. Congress addressed the uncertainty with a plan to ensure full utilization of the ISS without delaying production of a deep space vehicle. We learned a painful lesson when the space shuttle retired without a follow-on capability to take U.S. astronaut researchers to the space station. The result is that we will pay $55 million to $70 million per seat on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In all, the flight will cost $1.5 billion before a U.S. vehicle is operational.

Congress' 2010 law will avoid that gap from ever happening again. By ensuring coverage for present priorities and future planning, development of the new heavy launch vehicle has begun. If we maintain the 2010 plan, when the space station is decommissioned in 2020, we will be ready to pursue further exploitation of the moon, possibly Mars and beyond. Even in a time of tight budgets, policymakers recognized the need for planting seed corn. Fully utilizing the space station while allocating resources for the next deeper space pursuit are not opposing options.

For America to realize the benefits of its investment in space exploration, Congress must stay on the balanced course it set in 2010. Or what our nation fails to do today will be done by others tomorrow.

Hale tells senators public-private union is the way

John Kelly - Florida Today (Commentary)

Wayne Hale's passion for exploration, his knowledge and his ability to talk straight make him a potent weapon for space advocacy. Last week, the former NASA leader went before the U.S. Senate and pointedly summed up the state of America's space program.

After working decades in the government-run space shuttle and space station projects, the now private consultant told senators Thursday that NASA's seeding of commercial programs are the start of a solution to the biggest obstacle to space exploration.

"The most singularly vexing problem with spaceflight is the high cost of getting to low-Earth orbit," Hale told the committee, noting that the problem dogged the industry since its start. "In my home, I have an entire shelf of books populated by volumes of studies and proposals from a multitude of thinkers spread over decades on that subject: how to provide reliable, safe space transportation on the cheap."

Getting over that, Hale said, is done the same way that other major technological problems were solved: public-private partnership.

"So we are in a 'chicken or the egg' paradox," Hale testified. "Space business needs low-cost transportation to become profitable, while potential private transportation services need established business to justify the cost of construction. This is not the first time that America has been in this situation. Both the early railroads and fledgling air transportation industries found themselves becalmed in similar straits. In both these cases, and others, the federal taxpayers stepped in to provide critical resources to help new industries develop. Those investments have been paid back myriad-fold in tax revenues when the new industries caught fire and provided transportation systems that were the envy of the world."

He noted the space shuttle, which he spent most of his career working on, was to lower the cost of that first leg of the trip to deeper space. But, he said, a "risk-adverse government apparatus" resulted in a system only slightly cheaper.

"In the last decade, the United States embarked on a bold new experiment to turn over the creative reins of spacecraft development to entrepreneurial, nimble, flexible, creative private commercial teams. Bolstered with a modicum of taxpayer resources, these businesses have leveraged private investment to create the critical mass to develop new, much cheaper transportation systems."

Proof, he said, is a series of flights to the space station by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and the ongoing development of private crew ships.

But, Hale warned: "Poised on the cusp of these new systems, we run the risk of being penny-wise and pound-foolish as we make the same mistake that doomed the space shuttle to much higher cost operations: starving a spacecraft development program in the name of saving a few pennies for today's budget bottom line, resulting in the compromised systems that, if they fly at all, will not be cheap enough to enable business in space."

He praised government programs to develop a super rocket and exploration craft, but those must pair with incentives for private companies to cut the cost of getting to low Earth orbit.

"Currently, the commercial space effort stands uncomfortably close to the brink of financial starvation. Deep space transportation development is being stretched out by similar restrictions. Business is looking to see if the government is serious about providing the critical support or whether this effort will be wasted as so many earlier government programs which withered away on the very cusp of success: National Launch System, Orbital Space Plane, and others."

Hale concluded with the senators by nailing the reason why this has to be done right.

"When the historians of the future look back on our era, they will recognize the movement of humanity from planet Earth into the solar system as the pivotal event of our times. There is no project that is so important for the long-term success of humankind. I would hope that those historians record that at this crossroad of history that a creative, enterprising, farsighted nation called America led the way.

"The prizes both economic and historic are too great to bypass. If America does not lead in these enterprises, somebody else will. And the leader will reap the greatest rewards both in the near-term and in the longer term."

Buzz Aldrin on His Lunar Home, the Eagle
For 21½ hours, two astronauts lived aboard a cold, cramped lunar module with a balky circuit breaker

Buzz Aldrin - Wall Street Journal (Commentary)

I can't see the moon from my bedroom window. But I do like to go onto my patio to watch it rise majestically over Los Angeles. When I see the moon up there, I don't say to myself, "Hey, I walked on your face," or "Thanks for disrupting my life." I just feel grateful it let us land safely in 1969 and let us take off.

Believe it or not, my mother's maiden name was Moon. Her family came from Britain, and she suffered terribly from depression. Like my grandfather and cousins on her side of the family, she took her own life. It happened in 1968—a year before the Apollo 11 launch. It was tough, but I blocked it out by focusing on all the years she supported me—as did my father, who was an aviation pioneer and had known Orville Wright.

After Apollo 11 lifted off in Florida [on July 16, 1969], the three of us—me, Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins—traveled in space for three days to reach the moon's orbit.

The next day, Neil and I climbed into the lunar module and detached from [command module] Columbia to begin our descent to the moon. We had to stand in the craft—the design didn't allow for seats. Our feet were held down on the floor by elastic cords to keep us from floating around.

Landing on the moon—with all of the risks—sounds scary. But our training prepared us by concentrating on failures and solving big problems under extreme pressure.

Once we touched down at the Sea of Tranquillity [on July 20], the Eagle was our home for the next 21½ hours. When I was a kid, my first airplane ride was in a propeller aircraft painted to look like an eagle and piloted by my father. The lunar module was named Eagle—and an eagle insignia was on our arm patch—so I felt safe.

On the moon, we had one-sixth of Earth's gravity, allowing Neil and me to move around easily in the Eagle to put on equipment for our walk. The module's color scheme wasn't much—the interior was gray and industrial, and there were lots of labels with white and black text. Some handles were yellow, and there was a yellow guard around our telescope.

We ate freeze-dried packaged food and had a mix that became an orange-grapefruit drink when water was added. There was no coffee. The Columbia orbiting above had hot water, but not the Eagle.

Four hours after we touched down, Neil went out of the craft first to set up a TV camera pointed at Earth and take photos. I followed 20 minutes later. When I stepped onto the moon's surface, it felt cushiony, not gravelly—thanks to all the dust. There was no crunchy sound under my boot.

The strangest feeling was standing on the surface and looking back home at Earth—where every other human being was except the three of us. One of the most famous pictures from the mission was taken by Neil of my gold helmet visor—with Neil and the Eagle reflected in it. If you look carefully, you'll see smudges on both legs of my spacesuit.

When Neil had come down the ladder, he had to jump a little to drop to the next rung. His boots left moon dust on the last rung. So when I jumped a little coming down to the pad, I underestimated the leap and my shins brushed the last rung, picking up the dust.

Returning to the Eagle about two hours later, we had a problem. I noticed the engine arm's circuit breaker on my side had detached. It had to be engaged somehow if the ascent engine was to fire and lift us off the surface.

Houston wanted us to sleep while they learned as much as possible about the breaker problem. But the module was freezing cold, so Neil and I put on our helmets, and I turned the heat full-up. I curled up on the floor, and Neil tried to sleep sitting on top of the asset engine cover. But he told me later that Earth's bright blue light was shining through the Eagle's telescope and into his eyes, keeping him awake. Not very homey—but we managed.

When Houston woke us several hours later, they told me what to do to fix the circuit breaker. I engaged it with a felt-tip pen. Since the pen was made of plastic, there wasn't a risk of encountering electrical voltage when I pushed in the remainder of the disengaged breaker.

Once Houston concluded the problem was fixed, relief replaced concern. I felt we might make it home instead of perishing there. A short time later, Houston gave us the go-ahead: "Apollo 11 at Tranquillity Base, you're cleared for liftoff." I responded, "Roger, Houston. We're No. 1 on the runway." Those were two absurdities, of course. There was no runway and no one else was behind us. A little space humor.

The Eagle was like home on the moon—only we didn't have two wives telling us to clean up. We were the chief cooks and bottle-washers. So before we left, we put out the trash, just as we did back home. It's all still sitting there on the lunar surface waiting for the trash collector.

Lessons from the singing spaceman:
What Governments Can Learn From Chris Hadfield

Jeffrey Kluger - Time (Viewpoint)

The manned space program was once like Green Bay Packers tickets — the thing just sold itself. You've got the spacemen, we've got the eyeballs. Workplaces came to a stop and TVs were rolled into classrooms not just for an Al Shepard or a John Glenn, but also for Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon going up aboard Gemini 11. Know about that one? Of course, you don't. But everyone did back then.

Things are a little different now. Quick: How many people are currently aboard the International Space Station? Anybody? How many people even knew there was an International Space Station? Well, there is one, it's an awfully cool machine and thanks to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, a lot more people now know just how cool.

On May 13, Hadfield thumped down in Kazakhstan after a five-month stint aboard the ISS, and made a contribution to the space program that went well beyond the experiments he oversaw in orbit and the simple business of helping to keep the whole football-field-sized vehicle flying. Before turning over the conn, he recorded his now-viral onboard performance of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," which totaled 6.6 million views in the first 24 hours after he posted it on his dedicated channel, helped earn Hadfield nearly 1 million Twitter followers, and won the most important thumbs-up of all, from Bowie himself: "It's possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created," applauded the original Major Tom on his Facebook page.

Hadfield had been up to much of the same brilliantly creative stuff throughout his time in space, performing this live duet with Barenaked Ladies' band member Ed Robertson, this irresistible demonstration of what happens when you wring out a wet washcloth in a zero-g environment, and no shortage of stunning images of the earth from space. In the process, he and the Canadian Space Agency, which produced the video, also gave the American space program — and every other branch of any government — a good lesson in how to sell the work you're doing to a public that's too often completely uninterested in it.

One of the things that made the original space program such a self-marketer was that it was a series of firsts — first person in space, first spacewalk, first rendezvous, first docking, first lunar orbit. This, of course, was all pointing clearly and rationally to one goal: the first lunar landing — which would have been impossible without initially checking all of the other boxes. The thrill would inevitably fade a bit after the Apollo 11 landing, but nobody expected it to fade to black — which it effectively has.

Part of the problem has been the sales pitch. The Apollo program was followed by Skylab — the first American space station — and NASA chose the dreariest possible metaphor to describe it: no longer were we embarking on voyages of discovery like Magellan's or Columbus', this time we were going to establish a little colony — like Jamestown! O.K., apart from the fact that the Jamestown settlers ate their dead, much of the rest of what they did was the simple business of staying alive: planting crops, dodging bears, trying to get through the winter without freezing to death. It does not detract from the Skylab crews to say that a lot of the time they spent in space was devoted to simple proof-of-concept stuff like that. There's heroism in such work, sure. But excitement? Not exactly.

The shuttle program was even more of a promotional stinker. This time the sales metaphor for the new spacecraft was, simply: a truck. America would now be able to make milk runs to and from low-earth orbit, delivering satellites and doing repair work on them when necessary. Why, the thing would be so reliable, we could even pop off flights every few weeks or so, slashing the cost-per-pound of payload dramatically. Not surprisingly, this UPS-on-a-budget campaign did not attract much interest, and after the first two or three shuttles flew, America tuned out entirely. That had consequences comic, poignant and tragic.

In the hope of making the program more kid-friendly, NASA launched an aggressive p.r. campaign touting its outreach to schools and classrooms, some of which was not half-bad. Student-recommended experiments flew on the shuttle, for example, which was no small thing. But on more than one occasion, a crew would be asked to do less dignified work, like carrying aloft a cardboard Flat Stanley — a spacefaring version of a famous children's-book character, named Stanley, whose defining feature is that he's, well, flat. The astronauts gamely performed this ignominious little chore, but not without a fair bit of grumbling about just how wisely their time and efforts were being used.

John Glenn's return to space in 1998, a full 36 years after he became the first American to orbit the earth, was extraordinary — both elegiac and well earned, since a man who loved to fly had been firmly but unofficially grounded by NASA after he returned to earth in 1962, so as not to risk the neck of national icon. But no matter the protestations from NASA when the then 77-year-old Glenn went back to space that this was really a science mission, to investigate the effects of weightlessness on the body since they are so similar to the effects of aging, the flight was always seen as much more of a p.r. grab.

It was the loss of life, of course, that ultimately made the shuttle program the tragedy it was — and one life in particular. While 13 of the 14 crew members who died aboard the final missions of Columbia and Challenger were professional astronauts whose very careers were defined by a willingness to take risks, the 14th was Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who was chosen to help prove that the shuttle was so reliable that even civilians could safely fly — a nice claim except that it wasn't and they couldn't.

NASA hasn't even tried to get much public-relations mileage out of the current space station, though it's a breathtaking if not terribly useful machine. Over the past nine years, the rest of the manned space program has drifted from a return to the moon and a trip to Mars, to a return to the moon alone, to a visit to an asteroid or a gravity-neutral Lagrange point, to the latest head-scratcher: capturing an asteroid and towing it to the vicinity of the moon so we can visit it. It all feels like throwing darts at a board, with the next spot hit becoming the next never-to-be-reached destination. And that brings us back to Hadfield and why he inspired so.

What Hadfield did — what any smart advertiser does — was sweep away any ancillary clutter and get straight to the point he wanted to make. At its emotional center, space isn't about student outreach or commercial potential or industrial spinoffs — though every one of those things is important and valuable. It's about transcendence, it's about experience, it's about going to a place where otherworldly is a literal term, where you see things that are otherwise utterly impossible to see, where the simple rules of physics don't even apply the same way. That place is both excruciatingly close — just beyond an onionskin of atmosphere — and unreachably distant. All of Hadfield's videos capture that idea in one way or another, but the last one, which combines the alien nature of the place he was living at the time with the deeply personal power of a song that has private associations for anyone who's familiar with it, was a masterstroke. It mainlined meaning directly into our emotional centers. Whether you care about space or not, once you watch Hadfield's video, you're very glad that humanity as a whole — and Hadfield in particular — can go there.

Certainly, NASA has a potential public appeal that other government agencies can't match. An Interior Department rock video? An IRS fan following? Not going to happen. But Interior has assets — national parks for one thing — and getting people to care about them and treasure them can be done with a kind of appeal that goes beyond the usual purple-mountains-majesty treacle. The IRS may be loathed, but some attempt at online irony or self-effacing wit could at least buy it a bit of forgiveness. Good government and a well-informed public should not require selling ideas the way you sell video games or phone subscriptions — but they do, and the sooner policymakers accept that, the sooner they'll engage us all more.

It's too cynical to say that Hadfield's video was all about salesmanship. It wasn't. But it's naive to think that he and NASA and the Canadian space program didn't know that anything so real, moving and just plain fun couldn't help but boost their cause at least a little. So kudos to Hadfield for being so brilliant — and kudos to the bureaucrats for not getting in the way.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Monday, May 20, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - May 20, 2013 and JSC Today

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