Be safe,,,its wet and cold out all day.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- NASA TV Airs Launch, Docking of ISS Cargo Ship
- Submit Announcements Before Hiatus
- NASA Chief Scientist Visit to JSC and Town Hall
- JSC Intern Poster Session
- Children's Calendar Contest Deadline Rescheduled
- Wildlife Alert
- Recent JSC Announcement - Organizations/Social
- JSC Contractor Safety & Health Forum: Dec. 3
- Learn About Life Without Limits - Dec. 4
- NASA Night with the Houston Rockets This Friday
- Breakfast with Santa - Register This Week - Jobs and Training
- Admin Rights on NASA Computers
- HTC Orientation at the Gilruth Center - Dec. 4
- Job Opportunities |  |
| Headlines - NASA TV Airs Launch, Docking of ISS Cargo Ship
NASA TV will broadcast today's launch and Friday's docking of an unpiloted Russian resupply spacecraft, loaded with almost three tons of food, fuel and supplies for the six Expedition 38 crew members aboard the International Space Station. The ISS Progress 53 cargo ship is scheduled to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:53 p.m. CST today (2:53 a.m. Baikonur time Nov. 26). Live coverage of the launch on NASA TV will begin at 2:30 p.m. The Progress vehicle will pass within a mile of the station Nov. 27 to test an upgraded automated rendezvous system, then return for docking Nov. 29. The Progress 53 craft is scheduled to complete its automated docking to the aft port of the space station's Zvezda service module at 4:28 p.m. CST Nov. 29. NASA TV coverage will begin at 3:45 p.m. JSC, Ellington Field, Sonny Carter Training Facility and White Sands Test Facility team members with wired computer network connections can also view NASA TV using the JSC EZTV IP Network TV System on channels 404 (standard definition) or 4541 (HD). Please note: EZTV currently requires using Internet Explorer 32bit on a Windows PC connected to the JSC computer network with a wired connection. Mobile devices, Wi-Fi connections and newer MAC computers are currently not supported by EZTV. If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367. - Submit Announcements Before Hiatus
JSC Today is taking a brief hiatus to enjoy turkey and all the other things we are thankful for on Nov. 28 and Nov. 29. JSC Today will still run throughout Thanksgiving week from Nov. 25 to 27, so be sure to schedule your announcement within that timeframe. Visit our submission page to schedule your announcement. - NASA Chief Scientist Visit to JSC and Town Hall
NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan will be visiting JSC and meet with employees at a Town Hall at 10:45 a.m. tomorrow, Nov. 26, in the Building 30 Auditorium. Stofan will give a presentation followed by discussion and Q&A. All are encouraged to attend and meet our Chief Scientist. - JSC Intern Poster Session
Come and join us as our fall 2013 interns showcase their accomplishments during their time at JSC. We have students across many organizations helping NASA advance in human space exploration. Don't miss out on this opportunity to see the work of very talented students at JSC. Have you been interested in having an intern in your organization? This is your chance to learn more about providing meaningful experiences to high school, college and post-graduate students while getting the help your program needs. Event Date: Monday, December 2, 2013 Event Start Time:10:00 AM Event End Time:12:00 PM
Event Location: Teague Lobby- Building 2N
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Carmen Vides x34573
[top] - Children's Calendar Contest Deadline Rescheduled
Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and many employees taking leave on the following day, Nov. 29, the deadline for the Children's Safety and Health Calendar Contest has been rescheduled for Friday, Dec. 6. - Wildlife Alert
This fall, take extra care to avoid deer-vehicle collisions. The risk of these types of accidents at JSC increases more than five times during November and December. During these months, deer are naturally more active, especially shortly after sunrise and before sunset. This period is the mating season for the 150 white-tailed deer that reside at JSC. Once daylight savings time ends, more cars will be arriving on and leaving JSC during this annual peak of deer activity. Waning daylight, active deer and heavier traffic all increase the risk of collisions during the fall. See the link for deer safety tips! - Recent JSC Announcement
Please visit the JSC Announcements (JSCA) Web page to view the newly posted announcement: JSCA 13-040: Communications with Industry Regarding the Procurement Solicitation for the Simulation & Software Technology (SST II) Contract Archived announcements are also available on the JSCA Web page. Organizations/Social - JSC Contractor Safety & Health Forum: Dec. 3
Our next JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 3, in the Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Our guest speaker for this event will be Dr. Robert Emery, vice president for Safety, Health, Environment and Risk Management at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. His presentation topic will be "Communicating Risk and Correcting Misinformation in a New Era." In addition, David Loyd, chief, Safety and Test Operations Division (JSC-NS), will be presenting "JSC Safety Metrics Snapshot for 2013." Hope to see everyone there. For questions, please contact Pat Farrell at 281-335-2012 or via email. Event Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2013 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:10:30 AM
Event Location: Gilruth Alamo Ballroom
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Patricia Farrell 281-335-2012
[top] - Learn About Life Without Limits - Dec. 4
Transforming the World from a Wheelchair; Life Without Limits - Dec. 4 Attend JSC's SAIC/Safety & Mission Assurance speaker forum featuring Sue Austin, Multimedia, Performance and Installation artist. Wednesday, Dec. 4, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Location: Teague Auditorium Austin will discuss: - Rethinking and representing the "power"chair
- "Dis"ability becoming a tool to inspire, excite and enrich
- Wheelchairs in space, the final frontier
Hear her story and get inspired to reshape how you and others think of yourself! Austin is the founder and artistic director of Freewheeling, an initiative aiming to further the genre of Disability Arts. In 2012, she was asked to be a part of the Cultural Olympiad in Britain, a celebration of the arts leading up to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. - NASA Night with the Houston Rockets This Friday
Order your tickets for NASA Night with the Houston Rockets for this Friday's games against the Brooklyn Nets. The game starts at 7 p.m. at the Toyota Center. Tickets are $35 for upper level and $79 for lower level. More information can be found here. - Breakfast with Santa - Register This Week
Santa Claus is coming to town and making a stop at the Gilruth Center! Enjoy breakfast with Santa in the Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 11 a.m. on Dec. 7. Your child will have the opportunity to sit on Santa's lap to give him their wish list, have their picture taken and receive a special gift! Fees are $10/child and $15/adult if purchased on or before Nov. 30. Register for this event at the Gilruth Center or online. Tickets will not be sold at the door. Don't miss out on this special event. More information can be found here. Jobs and Training - Admin Rights on NASA Computers
Previously, users at JSC had admin rights on their government-provided computers. This allowed users to install software and gave considerable control over Information Technology (IT) devices. To improve security and reduce risk to IT devices, NASA is implementing Managed Elevated Privileges (MEP). This means admin rights (elevated privileges) will be removed until they are needed. MEP will be deployed using a phased approach, with organizations receiving advanced notice. MEP deployment begins January 2013. What to do? Complete the SATERN training required for short-term elevated privileges. This training is REQUIRED should you ever need to request short-term elevated privileges. Additional training is required for long-term or special elevated privileges (see link below). SATERN course: Elevated Privileges on NASA Information System For more information about MEP, training requirements and exceptions, click here. - HTC Orientation at the Gilruth Center - Dec. 4
Interested in learning how the Houston Technology Center (HTC) can help to turn your ideas and expertise into a company? Learn how by attending the HTC Orientation at the Gilruth Center on Wednesday, Dec. 4, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. This one-hour introduction will focus on how the HTC can guide you through the minefields of starting a business. You will leave HTC Orientation with a better understanding of the areas of expertise HTC offers. Event Date: Wednesday, December 4, 2013 Event Start Time:4:30 PM Event End Time:5:30 PM
Event Location: Gilruth Center Coronado Room
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Evelyn Boatman x48271
[top] - Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities? 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. | |
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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. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters. |
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NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Monday – November 25, 2013
Progress Launch:
November 25, Monday
3:30 p.m. - Coverage of the launch of the ISS Progress 53 cargo craft (launch scheduled at 3:53 p.m. ET) - JSC via Baikonur, Kazakhstan (All Channels)
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Today's Falcon 9 rocket launch is a Florida first
Liftoff set for 5:37 p.m. is a potential game-changer for SpaceX
James Dean – Florida Today
A new SpaceX rocket will attempt its "toughest" mission today with a twilight launch of a type of satellite rarely seen around here anymore — one not owned by the U.S. government.
SpaceX poised for high-stakes comsat launch
William Harwood – CBS News
SpaceX, the upstart rocket company owned by tech maverick Elon Musk, faces what might be its biggest challenge Monday with the launch of a costly communications satellite aboard an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket, the company's first commercial flight requiring a make-or-break second-stage restart in space to put the payload onto the proper trajectory.
Big launch this afternoon for cheaper access to space
SpaceX, the California-based rocket company that may build a spaceport in South Texas, faces a big test today.
Sizing up America's place in the global launch industry
Stephen Clark – Spaceflight Now
The launch of a high-definition television broadcasting satellite by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket Monday will mark the first commercial communications craft to take off from the United States in four years, a gap representative of America's diminished place in the commercial launch market as more affordable Russian and European boosters gobbled up contracts.
3, 2, 1, contract: NASA will soon select commercial builders
James Dean – Florida Today
NASA has opened the final phase of a competition that will determine which U.S.-built commercial spaceship will fly astronauts to the International Space Station — and there is a chance it could be more than one.
New US Space Transportation Policy Stresses Private Spacecraft, Heavy-Lift Rocket
The Obama administration has outlined its strategy for maintaining what it describes as the United States' global leadership role in spaceflight and exploration. The White House's new national space transportation policy, released Thursday (Nov. 21), reinforces several previously stated administration priorities. It calls on federal agencies to continue supporting the development of private American spato carry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, for example, and directs NASA to keep working on a heavy-lift rocket to send people much farther afield.
Maven Heralds Humans On Mars
Frank Morring, Jr. – Aviation Week
NASA's Maven mission to Mars is symptomatic of the global effort to put humans there—ambitious, but constrained by tight funding that demands international collaboration to cover costs. Increasingly, former competitors in the space arena are accepting cooperation as the only way humans will ever reach Mars, and are willing to drop short-term gain for long-term success.
U.S. Space Exploration, Once Championed By JFK, Faces Diminished Priority In Washington
Mark Mills – Forbes
"We choose to go to the moon" President Kennedy said on September 12, 1962 at Rice University. It was a simple, telegraphic phrase in one of the greatest speeches in Presidential history. Those seven words encompassed not just an idea or a program but an underlying philosophy. Those seven words are now locked into history for how they changed the world.
The air is so clear the mountains in the distance look almost fake, as if added digitally. The desert floor is runway-flat, with a few Joshua trees popping up randomly, like lost cowboys. The dominant feature is the sky, preposterously vast, beckoning test pilots, rocketeers and would-be space travelers.
Private space companies are really taking off
Mark Matthews – Orlando Sentinel
Never before has the final frontier looked more like the Wild West. With NASA in a down period, private space companies have stepped in with plans that range from the boldly innovative to the potentially absurd.
JFK space race myth: Column
Rand Simberg – USA Today
It's been half a century since a young president was cut down by a deranged communist assassin, and a little longer than that since humans first flew into space. The two events are indelibly linked in the minds of most, because the assassinated president, John F. Kennedy, is properly credited with setting the U.S. on the course that would, a little over half a decade after his untimely death, end in Americans walking on the moon.
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COMPLETE STORIES
Today's Falcon 9 rocket launch is a Florida first
Liftoff set for 5:37 p.m. is a potential game-changer for SpaceX
James Dean – Florida Today
A new SpaceX rocket will attempt its "toughest" mission today with a twilight launch of a type of satellite rarely seen around here anymore — one not owned by the U.S. government.
The planned 5:37 p.m. liftoff would be the company's first of an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, after a test launch in California, and the first launch of a commercial communications satellite from Cape Canaveral in four years.
The Falcon 9 has sent several spacecraft to the International Space Station about 250 miles up, but never placed a communications satellite in the orbit where they operate more than 22,000 miles above the equator.
Today's launch for Luxembourg-based SES, one of the world's largest operators of communications satellites with 54 already in orbit, could establish SpaceX as a lower-cost player able to recapture commercial launches all but lost to overseas competitors.
"Let me put this very clearly and maybe not too dramatically: The entry of SpaceX into the commercial market is a game-changer," said Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer for SES. "It's going to really shake the industry to its roots."
SpaceX, for its part, is grateful SES took a chance on being the Falcon 9's first customer to a geostationary orbit, where satellites match the speed of Earth's rotation and so appear from the ground to stay in a fixed location.
"This launch is obviously very important to the future of SpaceX," CEO Elon Musk told reporters at a pre-launch reception Sunday at Marlins Good Times Bar & Grill on the Cocoa Beach Pier, before taking his kids to Disney World. "We're very appreciative that SES would place a bet on SpaceX here."
Earlier on Twitter, Musk said the upcoming flight "will be toughest mission to date."
The launch of the SES-8 satellite will be the second flight of the upgraded Falcon 9, known as "version 1.1," which stands 224 feet tall and fires Merlin engines that generate 1.3 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, among other changes.
A Sept. 29 test flight in California completed its mission, but an optional restart of the rocket's upper stage engine — a maneuver necessary for this mission — failed.
SpaceX determined that an igniter line froze, and believes added insulation will prevent a repeat.
Musk and Halliwell both expressed strong confidence that the problem has been resolved.
"There's no stone that hasn't been turned over at least twice to maximize the possibility of success," said Musk, noting there is still risk given the rocket is launching for just the second time. "The rest will be up to fate."
Unlike the flight in California, SpaceX will not attempt to recover the Falcon 9 booster. With the help of a ship in the Atlantic, data on the booster's atmospheric re-entry will be collected to support future recovery attempts, possibly as soon as the next launch from Cape Canaveral, planned before Christmas.
SES would not disclose the cost of this launch, but said it is receiving a discount as the first to go with Falcon 9 for this type of mission, which SpaceX advertises online for $56.5 million.
SES last launched from the Cape in 2007 on an Atlas V, and Halliwell said it was the cost of available rockets, not the Cape nor its facilities, that had led the company to choose European or Russian launch vehicles instead.
He said SpaceX's lower costs were enabling SES to pursue emerging markets that require complex satellites to provide a variety of services, including TV channels and broadband Internet, but generate lower revenues than more developed markets.
"If you then put that complex, expensive satellite on top of a very expensive launch vehicle, than the entire business case starts to become unraveled," he said.
The roughly 7,000-pound SES-8 satellite, built by Orbital Sciences Corp., is expected to serve Southeast Asia for at least 15 years, beaming TV channels directly to homes in India, Vietnam and other countries.
It will fly close to another SES-owned satellite, and serve as a bridge to a larger one planned to serve the same region.
"It's an extremely important satellite for us," Halliwell said. "This is a big, big growth market for us."
SES already has three more launches under contract with SpaceX.
Said Halliwell: "I think this is (the) first of many, many successful launches that we're going to have out of the Cape here, and I think it's going to be very good for the entire district."
SpaceX poised for high-stakes comsat launch
William Harwood – CBS News
SpaceX, the upstart rocket company owned by tech maverick Elon Musk, faces what might be its biggest challenge Monday with the launch of a costly communications satellite aboard an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket, the company's first commercial flight requiring a make-or-break second-stage restart in space to put the payload onto the proper trajectory.
Tens of millions of dollars cheaper than major competing launchers, the redesigned Falcon 9, making its first operational launch after a test flight in September, represents a potentially attractive alternative in an industry dominated by larger, more traditional companies fielding more expensive rockets.
Those rockets have long flight histories and, despite the occasional failure, a demonstrated reliability and well understood performance. With Monday's launching and subsequent flights, SpaceX hopes to show skeptics its lower-cost rockets not only can compete on the high frontier, but eventually capture a significant share of the commercial launch market.
"Let me put this very clearly," said Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer of SES, the Luxembourg-based company that decided to risk its SES-8 satellite on the first operational flight of the upgraded Falcon 9. "The entry of SpaceX into the commercial market is a game changer. It's going to really shake the industry to its roots. We're very excited to be a part of this."
SpaceX already made a name from itself winning a $1.6 billion NASA contract to launch supplies to the International Space Station, following up with a series of successful test flights and two operational cargo delivery missions. A third is on tap in February. SpaceX also is competing for a NASA contract to build a manned version of its Dragon cargo ship.
To muscle in on the commercial launch market, Musk needed to upgrade his Falcon 9 rocket to meet the needs of civilian communications satellites. And he needed a satellite owner willing to take a risk on a new booster from a company with a short track record and a non-traditional approach to rocket building.
SpaceX took care of the first requirement itself, equipping its Falcon 9 rocket with lighter, more efficient engines, longer propellant tanks, a new nose cone fairing, a triply redundant computer system and other upgrades that also will be needed for eventual manned flights.
As for the second, SpaceX found an enthusiastic partner in SES, one of the largest satellite operators in the world with a fleet of 54 relay stations.
"This is our 55th launch, so we know a little bit about launching satellites," Halliwell said. "We see these guys as a very key player. I think all the other launch vehicle providers are looking with great interest to the success, or not, of this launch, and I think they will be ... rather worried for their future and how they organize themselves, they're industrial processes, to be competitive in the commercial launch market of the future."
Speaking with reporters Sunday at a pre-launch gathering in Cocoa Beach, Musk warned that rocket flights are inherently risky, but "whether or not this launch is successful, I'm confident we will certainly make it on some subsequent launch."
"I don't want to tempt fate ... but I think it's going to have a pretty significant impact on the world launch market and on the launch industry because our prices are the most competitive of any in the world," he said.
If SpaceX can deliver, the company's competitors "will have to improve their designs and really strive to have next-generation rocket technology," Musk said. "So I think SpaceX could be a powerful forcing function for the improvement of rocket technology. Not just the stuff we do ourselves, but in that we will force other rocket companies to either develop new technology that's a lot better or they have to exit the launch market."
Or, Halliwell added, "they have to improve their industrial process very, very significantly, and that's really where SpaceX has rocked the show."
The 224-foot-tall Falcon 9 is scheduled for liftoff from complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 5:37 p.m. EST (GMT-5) Monday. Forecasters are predicting an 80 percent chance of acceptable weather.
Mounted inside a protective nose cone is a 24-transponder GEOStar 2 relay station built by Orbital Sciences Corp., a state-of-the-art communications satellite that will join another SES comsat already in orbit to provide direct-to-home television, broadband internet and other services to India and southeast Asia.
The satellite is valued at around $100 million. The exact cost of the upgraded Falcon 9 rocket is not known, but the company website advertises prices between $56.5 million and $77.1 million.
For comparison, a Russian-built Proton rocket, marketed by International Launch Services, a U.S. subsidiary of Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, is believed to sell for around $100 million. A heavy-lift Ariane 5, marketed by the European consortium Arianespace and typically used to launch two satellites at a time, is believed to run around $200 million to $225 million per rocket.
This is only the second launch of an upgraded Falcon 9, known as version 1.1, following a test flight in late September. That mission successfully delivered a Canadian research satellite to low-Earth orbit, but a test to restart the second stage engine -- a requirement for launching large communications satellites -- failed.
Musk told reporters Sunday the problem turned out to be relatively easy to fix. He said a fluid feed line to the engine's igniter froze up, the result of low temperatures in space and the effects of a nearby liquid oxygen line. The problem was corrected by adding insulation and ensuring the cold oxygen could not impinge on the feed line.
Halliwell said his company had no second thoughts about putting its latest satellite on board the Falcon 9 v1.1 for the rocket's first commercial flight.
"There was a lot of criticism when we went with this rocket, yeah, it's never done this, it's never been to geo, it's never launched commercial, etc., etc.," he told CBS News. "But you'll remember back in 1996, we had a very similar situation when we were the first people to fly the Proton. You know how that story panned out, and I think we're going to have the same situation with SpaceX. We look behind us and we've got a queue of people lining up to sign with SpaceX."
To launch heavy communications satellites into the elliptical transfer orbits they require to reach a "geostationary" perch 22,300 miles above the equator, upper stages must fire at least twice: once to complete the climb out of the dense lower atmosphere and then again to raise the high point of the orbit to the operational altitude or, depending on the satellite, much higher.
For the SES-8 launch, the SpaceX booster must place the 3.2-ton satellite into an elliptical "super-synchronous" orbit with a low point, or perigee, of 183 miles and a high point, or apogee, of around 53,748 miles.
Assuming a successful launch, the satellite's own propulsion system will be fired five times between Wednesday and Dec. 6 to lower the apogee, raise the perigee and fine-tune the orbital plane to reach the desired target 22,300 miles above the equator at 95 degrees east longitude.
Once on station, SES-8, like all geostationary relay stations, will take 24 hours to complete one orbit and thus appear to hang motionless in the sky as viewed by fixed antennas on the ground. The satellite is expected to enter service in early January.
"We want to have as many launch vehicles in the marketplace as possible," Halliwell told CBS News Friday. "At the moment, from a commercial point of view, there are only two. You either have the ILS Proton or you have the Ariane 5. Ostensibly you also have (the United Launch Alliance) Atlas 5, but of course it's just so expensive it's not terribly viable from a commercial point of view.
"So really, we were looking for something that would give us the opportunity to be extremely cost effective to orbit."
As for the anomaly that marred the upgraded rocket's September test flight, Halliwell said SpaceX explained the fix to SES engineers, who inspected the rocket's engines. He said insurers also were briefed and "they're comfortable and we're moving forward. We have 100 percent insurance on this one."
The Falcon 9 v1.1 features a variety of upgrades and improvements over the original design.
At the base of the first stage, nine Merlin 1D engines are arranged in a circular "octaweb" pattern with eight powerplants surrounding a central engine. The original version had the engines arranged in a square 3-by-3 arrangement, requiring aerodynamic panels around the base of the rocket.
In the new version, protective panels are positioned to prevent a malfunctioning engine from damaging a neighbor. The first stage also features longer propellant tanks a heat shield, part of an ongoing program to test techniques for eventually recovering spent first stages.
The v1.1 version of the Falcon 9 is the company's first to incorporate a large payload fairing that can encapsulate big satellites. Another major upgrade was a triply redundant flight computer running new software. Before the first test flight, Musk said "you could put a bullet hole in any one of the avionics boxes and it would just keep flying."
Other improvements include a simpler, more reliable mechanisms to connect the rocket's stages, using three connectors in place of nine.
The new Merlin 1D engines feature more efficient fuel injectors and weigh in at under 1,000 pounds each. The company said improvements in robotic manufacturing techniques, along with fewer parts, make the engines easier to build and improve reliability.
Big launch this afternoon for cheaper access to space
SpaceX, the California-based rocket company that may build a spaceport in South Texas, faces a big test today.
For the first time the company is attempting to launch a payload to a "geostationary" location some 50,000 miles above the Earth, requiring the firing of upper stages to climb from low-Earth orbit to the higher altitude. The launch window from Cape Canaveral, opens at 4:37 p.m. CT.
This is a big deal for SpaceX because it's offering the launches to geostationary space at a cost of $50 million to $70 million, which undercuts a Russian ($100 million) and European ($200 million) alternative. This is the first attempt by SpaceX to fly its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket, with a payload, to geostationary orbit.
A Luxembourg company, SES, is risking its 3.2-ton, $100 million SES-8 satellite on the flight.
If the flight is successful it will further bolster the credibility of SpaceX as it seeks to develop the technology to carry humans into space, by 2017, and it will further reduce the price of launching satellites into space.
These achievements benefit both consumers as well as those interested in the exploration of space.
So I'll be watching this afternoon's launch closely.
Sizing up America's place in the global launch industry
Stephen Clark – Spaceflight Now
The launch of a high-definition television broadcasting satellite by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket Monday will mark the first commercial communications craft to take off from the United States in four years, a gap representative of America's diminished place in the commercial launch market as more affordable Russian and European boosters gobbled up contracts.
It's not because of reliability. The Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets operated by United Launch Alliance have accumulated a near-flawless track record over 65 flights since 2002, earning the vehicles a place at the top of the industry.
It's a question of cost, according to Martin Halliwell, chief technical officer of SES, the world's second-largest commercial geostationary satellite operator.
"At the moment, from a commercial point of view, there are only two [launch providers]," Halliwell told CBS News in an interview Friday. "You either have the ILS Proton or you have the Ariane 5. Ostensibly you also have Atlas 5, but of course it's just so expensive it's not terribly viable from a commercial point of view on a nominal basis."
SES hopes SpaceX brings the launches back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., beginning Monday with the liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with the SES 8 broadcasting satellite.
Before knowing the outcome of Monday's launch, SES has already inked deals for three more missions with SpaceX, including one option for a launch on the company's Falcon Heavy mega-rocket.
Once at the top of the world's handful of launch service companies, U.S. rockets have been hamstrung by rising costs but have stayed busy with a manifest of missions for the U.S. military, NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal government's spy satellite agency.
That is currently a captive market for United Launch Alliance, the company formed in 2006 after the merger of the Lockheed Martin and Boeing rocket fleets, but SpaceX is eyeing a slice of the business.
The Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets were developed more than a decade ago to give military payloads reliable, assured access to space. The thinking was, if one rocket is grounded by a failure, the other launcher would still be available to loft the government's most critical national security missions.
As part of the business case presented by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., the developers of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4, the rockets would also be used by NASA and commercial satellites, ensuring the companies could recoup their capital expenditures.
But the commercial satellite business eroded, startup telecom companies failed to transform ideas into reality, and market forecasts from the late 1990s fell short when the 2000s came around.
Since early 2005, when commercial Atlas 5 launches began to drop off, four commercial telecom satellites have launched from Cape Canaveral. From 1997 until the end of 2004, 34 commercial satellites launched from Florida bound for geostationary orbit, a location 22,300 miles above Earth favored by communications satellites.
Related to the reduced flight rate, rising rocket costs in the United States also stymied the Atlas 5 and Delta 4's potential, with the launchers selling for more than $160 million in the last two years to government customers like the Air Force and NASA.
The commercial business has fled the United States, going primarily to Europe's Ariane 5 rocket and the Russian Proton booster. China's Long March rocket, the Sea Launch program and the Atlas 5 have played bit roles in the market to launch communications satellites.
Industry sources say purchasing a mission on a Proton rocket, which is sold by U.S.-based International Launch Services, costs about $100 million.
Europe's Ariane 5 rocket, run by the French launch company Arianespace, is more expensive, but it is also the most capable of the bunch and has won the lion's share of recent commercial contracts.
The Ariane 5's price tag of more than $200 million can be split among two customers because the heavy-duty launcher has enough oomph to boost a pair of communications payloads in one go into geostationary transfer orbit, the standard drop-off point for large telecom satellites.
SpaceX says its commercial Falcon 9 launches go for as little as $56 million, according to its website. The new Falcon 9 configuration, known as version 1.1, can haul satellites up to 4.85 metric tons into an elliptical geostationary transfer orbit.
The untested Falcon Heavy, which SpaceX hopes to launch within a year, sells for $135 million and can loft up to 21.2 metric tons into the same orbit, according to SpaceX's website.
Europe's institutional and industrial rocket teams have begun work on the Ariane 6 rocket, a smaller, simplified Ariane launcher borrowing technology already developed for the Ariane 5 and the Italian-led lightweight Vega booster.
The Ariane 6's design is expected to launch satellites up to 6.5 metric tons into geostationary transfer orbit, less than the Ariane 5's capacity in excess of 10 metric tons. In another change from the Ariane 5, it will loft one spacecraft at a time and should cost less than 70 million euros, or about $95 million, according to the European Space Agency.
The Russian Proton rocket and its Breeze M upper stage can deploy satellites greater than 6 metric tons into geostationary transfer orbit, with plans for modest performance improvements over the next few years.
Unlike all its would-be commercial competitors, the Atlas 5 rocket marketed by Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services has a modular design. Managers can add solid rocket boosters or a larger nose fairing to match the needs of a specific satellite, giving the Atlas 5 access to a range of payloads from 3.78 metric tons to 8.9 metric tons heading for geostationary transfer orbit.
"I think those organizations make good rockets, but I think with the advent of Falcon 9 we're going to make a forcing function for increased competitiveness in the launch industry," said Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO and chief designer.
"If the other rockets don't improve their technology rapidly, they will lose significant market share to the Falcon 9," Musk said Sunday. "I actually think it's a good thing to have multiple providers of launch, [but] they are going to need to prove their rocket technology in order to compete and I think that's going to be a good thing for the future of space."
3, 2, 1, contract: NASA will soon select commercial builders
James Dean – Florida Today
NASA has opened the final phase of a competition that will determine which U.S.-built commercial spaceship will fly astronauts to the International Space Station — and there is a chance it could be more than one.
The space agency this week invited companies to submit proposals for contracts that will lead to the first crewed commercial flights to the ISS, which are expected to launch from Florida by the end of 2017.
"We are going to have in 2017 a U.S. capability to fly our crews to the International Space Station," said Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana. "It will happen."
Based at KSC, NASA's Commercial Crew Program is now helping three companies complete designs of their spacecraft: capsules by Boeing and SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.
That design work will wrap up next summer.
The next step is to begin building and testing systems to certify that the spacecraft is safe for astronauts, culminating in a crewed test flight to the station.
"Our American industry partners have already proven they can safely and reliably launch supplies to the space station, and now we're working with them to get our crews there as well," NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement. "However, we will require that these companies provide spacecraft that meet the same rigorous safety standards we had for the space shuttle program, while providing good value to the American taxpayer."
Companies must submit proposals by Jan. 22 for the contracts known as the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability Contract, or CCtCap for short.
The competition is open, but only the three existing competitors are expected to qualify based on the development work they have completed.
Depending on funding, NASA plans to award at least one fixed-price contract by September.
In addition to the certification efforts, the contracts will include at least two — and as many as six — operational flights to the station.
The first crewed flight will end a gap in human launches to orbit from U.S. soil that began with the space shuttle's retirement in 2011.
KSC will host a conference Dec. 4 to discuss the new competition's goals and answer industry questions.
New US Space Transportation Policy Stresses Private Spacecraft, Heavy-Lift Rocket
The Obama administration has outlined its strategy for maintaining what it describes as the United States' global leadership role in spaceflight and exploration.
The White House's new national space transportation policy, released Thursday (Nov. 21), reinforces several previously stated administration priorities. It calls on federal agencies to continue supporting the development of private American spato carry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, for example, and directs NASA to keep working on a heavy-lift rocket to send people much farther afield.
This plan makes a lot of sense for NASA, allowing the agency to put its limited financial
resources to the best possible use, NASA chief Charles Bolden said. "The development of a commercial space sector for low-Earth orbit transportation is freeing NASA to develop a heavy-lift launch capability to travel further into space than ever before," Bolden wrote in a blog post about the new policy Thursday.
"NASA has already made steady progress on the development of the next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle
, the Space Launch System (SLS)," he added. "NASA is also well on its way to developing the Orion crew capsule, which will take astronauts further into deep space than humans have ever explored." The maiden Orion test flight is slated for next year, while the SLS is scheduled to get off the ground for the first time in late 2017. NASA wants the duo to be flying astronauts together by 2021.
That would allow the space agency to meet two objectives President Barack Obama laid out for NASA in his 2010 National Space Policy — to get astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.
While it works on this deep-space transportation system, NASA is also encouraging the growth of an emerging private spaceflight industry. Through its commercial crew program, the agency has most recently funded the development of three private manned spaceships — those being built by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp. — and hopes at least one of them is up and running by 2017.
Leaders in the commercial spaceflight industry were pleased to see continued support for this effort in the new policy.
"We appreciate this clear delineation of policy in favor of supporting American industry, creating the most effective and efficient
space program possible and ensuring the nation retains its leadership and competitiveness in space," Michael Lopez-Alegria, president of Commercial Spaceflight Federation and a former NASA astronaut, said in a statement. "We are grateful for the Obama Administration's support for the commercial space sector and look forward to many joint successes to come." The newly released space transportation policy, which replaces a version announced in 2004, is a wide-ranging document touching on many different aspects of American space infrastructure.
Maven Heralds Humans On Mars
Frank Morring, Jr. – Aviation Week
NASA's Maven mission to Mars is symptomatic of the global effort to put humans there—ambitious, but constrained by tight funding that demands international collaboration to cover costs.
Increasingly, former competitors in the space arena are accepting cooperation as the only way humans will ever reach Mars, and are willing to drop short-term gain for long-term success.
"We should take the best stuff available on the Earth," says Vitaly Lopota, president and general designer of Russia's RSC Energia, which builds all of Russia's human-spaceflight hardware. "Beyond Earth, in deep space, we will be on the same route, and we should jointly implement it."
Maven—the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe—used a Russian-powered Atlas V 401 to begin its 10-month trip to the red planet. As it lifted off into a cloudy Florida sky Nov. 18, on its way to analyze where the water went on Mars, clean-room technicians a few miles away worked to prepare NASA's first Orion flight-test vehicle for a major European contribution.
Cleon Lacefield, Lockheed Martin's Orion program manager, said shortly after the Maven launch that the first load-bearing fairings designed to protect the vehicle's European propulsion system during ascent were due to arrive two days later. That hardware is to fly on a dummy Orion service module next September, launched on a Delta IV Heavy to test the capsule at reentry speeds near those it will experience returning from the Moon or Mars. The next Orion to fly after that will include the European hardware.
That unmanned mission, the first for the SLS/Orion stack, is currently scheduled for the end of 2017, and will mark the beginning of a "stepping stone" approach through cislunar space designed to take humans to Mars in the 2030s. Lockheed Martin had originally planned to build the Orion service module itself. It yielded to NASA's need to save money by bringing in the European Space Agency and EADS Astrium, its industrial supplier, as partners (AW&ST Jan. 21, p. 30).
"We really look forward to working with other industrial partners," says Jim Crocker, Lockheed Martin vice president and general manager for civil space, listing meetings with industry partners in Japan, Russia and several European nations "in the last few months."
Crocker, Lopota and others participated in a symposium on human Mars exploration organized by Lockheed Martin to coincide with the Maven launch. They described a growing international network of space-industry companies working in tandem with their space-agency customers to devise the steps it will take to get humans to Mars, and to figure out who is best suited to do particular jobs.
Lopota described a pressurized way-station to deeper space at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points that could be built using International Space Station techniques, with small Russian modules tended by crews arriving in Orion.
Ed Crawley, a member of the advisory panel chaired by retired Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine set up at the beginning of the Obama administration to chart the future of human spaceflight, says the panel was discouraged from advocating international cooperation as the only solution to funding deep-space exploration. Now that "chapter of the Augustine report that didn't get written" has become administration policy, largely to hold down costs.
"There is a way that technology moves around internationally when the companies are allowed to do the bidding that is more natural than when the governments do the bidding," Crawley said, citing the Russian RD-180 engine on the Atlas V built by United Launch Alliance as an example.
Lockheed Martin's investment in its own version of the Orion service module moved into the loss column when NASA brought in ESA to do the work. Crawley, a former head of the aeronautics and astronautics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who now heads the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, says he and a few like-minded academics are pulling together an international working group to analyze the exploration roadmaps devised by government space agencies and their industrial counterparts, to help rationalize the division of labor. Although U.S. and Japanese concerns have so far blocked China from membership in the emerging international exploration partnership (see page 50), Crawley said "in the long run it's inevitable that this would be an inclusive partnership, certainly inclusive of the major human spaceflight nations, which at this point you would have to say would include China."
Developing and launching the Maven mission that brought the symposium panelists together came in under budget, to the delight of the NASA managers who oversee it. Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics says among factors contributing to that accomplishment are stable funding from NASA and his insistence that the mission remain focused on its primary objectives, avoiding expensive "science creep."
That stands in stark contrast to the situation faced by NASA's human spaceflight managers with the prospect of further cuts through "across-the-board" sequestration. Dan Dumbacher, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems, says launching the first SLS/Orion mission in 2017 will depend on keeping the funding levels represented by the present continuing resolution, which expires in January. Managing the development is a matter of "trying to make as much progress as we can, based on what we know on any given day," he says.
Overall, the Maven mission is budgeted at $671 million. With its on-time launch, the spacecraft will deliver nine atmospheric sensors into an elliptical orbit around Mars on Sept. 14, 2014. They were chosen to measure the processes scientists believe may have caused the transformation from a wet planet with a relatively thick atmosphere to the cold dry planet we see today. Data generated by Maven may also help engineers design a way to land the estimated 20-ton vehicles needed for human missions to the surface through that thin atmosphere.
Maven's sensors will study the processes that researchers believe stripped away the Martian atmosphere as its upper reaches were blasted by the solar wind, a process that also happens on Earth but with the protection of the planet's magnetic field (AW&ST Aug. 26, p. 40). The spacecraft will make "deep dives" into the upper and middle Martian atmosphere for in-situ measurements that can be correlated with broader data it generates.
Those dives—not deep enough to damage Maven —will provide information that may one day aid a human landing, according to Michael Gazarik, associate administrator for space technology at NASA headquarters, whose organization is working toward that end on inflatable hypersonic decelerators, more capable supersonic parachutes and supersonic retropropulsion.
"We have limited data," Gazarik says. "Curiosity was the first time we measured comprehensively how do we fly through that atmosphere, what was the heat rate through the atmosphere, did we fly that vehicle like we predicted? Maven will also add to our ability to understand the Martian atmosphere."
U.S. Space Exploration, Once Championed By JFK, Faces Diminished Priority In Washington
Mark Mills – Forbes
"We choose to go to the moon" President Kennedy said on September 12, 1962 at Rice University. It was a simple, telegraphic phrase in one of the greatest speeches in Presidential history. Those seven words encompassed not just an idea or a program but an underlying philosophy. Those seven words are now locked into history for how they changed the world.
On this somber anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy I offer my thoughts on America's space program. So much about the why and how America reached the moon epitomizes what was, and still is great about this nation.
Space: The Only Frontier
Growing up as a young Canadian, I can credit an American president in large measure for my pursuit of things scientific and technical. I braved mosquito hordes in summer and bitter winter nights to gaze at the moon and stars through a telescope, then pursued physics in university. This was fairly typical of a generation inspired by the Apollo program. Though never remotely a direct part of it, I started my career in companion fields, from microprocessors to fiber optics and missile guidance. Many of my space-inspired generation invented and accomplished much. President Kennedy launched a four-decade era of technology revolutions.
Now with the Obama administration's decision to cancel funding for putting humans in space, America abandons a half-century of baby steps toward mankind's only frontier. We have big problems on Earth to be sure, like health care and energy, but the pursuit of space is both bigger than our Earthly tribulations and important for addressing them.
It was just two months after issuing an executive order to create the grounded and successful Peace Corps that President Kennedy delivered his epochal man-on-the-moon-within-the-decade speech on May 25, 1961. Kennedy surely had no idea how engineers would achieve his simply stated if seemingly impossible goal. Although man had already been in space many times, the moon was 2,500 times further away than distances achieved by 1961.
Space travel was, and remains, fundamentally an energy problem of both the political and physical variety. Getting to the moon required a quantum leap in technology, not the least of which was building a rocket some 20 times more powerful than existed. Perhaps more challenging, to achieve the goal the president had to energize Congress and the citizenry to take on a budget twenty-fold bigger than America's already aggressive funding of the space program. That was, even by today's standards, serious political heavy lifting.
The technology challenge of outer space is easily illuminated. It's not so easy to build machines to get humans beyond our planetary shore. For every pound of astronaut, the astronauts' moon vehicle carried over 50,000 pounds of fuel that was consumed in about 15 minutes, exhausting enough energy to power a town of 5,000 for a month. At this ratio, your Prius would require a fuel tank weighing as much as 1,500 SUVs.
Importantly, landing on the moon was not rationalized on the basis of its practical economic benefits. Kennedy stated simply that it was "time to take longer strides–time for a great new American enterprise–time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key our future as a nation." And it did.
The moon program's effect was profound and far-reaching, inspiring an entire generation of engineers and entrepreneurs. No, they didn't all get government jobs with NASA or in private-sector companies supporting NASA to build the Saturn V rocket, the space capsule, its electronics or the moon rover and all the other related hardware. Most just found the whole idea–the pursuit itself–inspirational and pursued careers in everything from microprocessors and software to nuclear power and photovoltaics.
The dots are not so hard to connect. The U.S. economy was in liftoff mode for most of the second half of the twentieth century. While there were several contributing factors, at the core the accelerant for growth was technocentric innovation. Not space technology per se but that generation of scientists and engineers who brought an unprecedented intellectual energy and excitement to peacetime pursuits. The inventions and new companies created in the shadow of Apollo were manifold, as were the stimulating effects on established but still fast-growing companies like Boeing , Rockwell Collins and Hewlett-Packard , as well as companies that saw their birth or rapid expansion around the moon program like Texas Instruments and Intel .
In the run-up to the ultimate reality TV show live from the moon on July 20, 1969, when a human took the first "small step" for mankind, America churned out more engineers and scientists than at any time in its history. (A similar, lesser bump-up occurred during the early years of the Strategic Defense Initiative, pejoratively labeled by its opponents but then eagerly embraced by its adherents as "Star Wars.") Today we enjoy the fruits of all that technology talent in everything from the Internet and GPS to more efficient and useful tools across the entire commercial and industrial landscape.
The cumulative $150 billion spent on the Apollo program was an integral part of spurring the economic miracle that yielded an economy $8 trillion per year bigger in 2001 than 1961. For every dollar spent on the moon program, society reaped tens of dollars of benefits. Growth from the technology-productivity boom was a direct outcome of a massive influx of engineers. If just 10 percent of those engineers and scientists were sons and daughters of Apollo, their pro rata share of that economic growth would be counted in trillions of dollars. Put another way, to pay back the investment the engineering inspiration of the Apollo program only had to contribute to a fraction of a percent of America's innovation.
There's a risk in walking too far down the accountant's investment-payback path. If NASA and subsequent presidents have made mistakes in justifying an exploration budget, it has been in attempts to count immediate and obvious benefits. (I'm ignoring here the entire panoply of vital national security benefits.) No pedestrian toting up of economic "spinoffs" from, to put it unkindly, space pens and Teflon to desiccated space ice cream, can justify the costs and risks of human exploration of outer space.
Sure, we can point to tens of billions of dollars a year now in direct benefits from such things as better weather forecasting, communications and resource exploration satellites, to the ubiquity of Google Earth epitomizing GPS-based systems from farming and construction to container tracking. These are important, and increasingly so, but these are now conventional, utilitarian uses of near-Earth orbits, the nearby shallows of deep space.
The debate now underway over whether to privatize the utilitarian aspects of putting stuff in low-Earth orbit is beside the point. Reaching the Moon was as much about the utility of space as Vasco de Gama reaching India in 1498 was about ensuring the existence of the $60-billion-a-year Maersk Company today with its global fleet of container ships.
The maturation, whether today or soon, of the utilitarian uses of near-Earth orbit is really a debate about whether the necessary vehicles are more akin to aircraft carriers or container ships. The former remains properly the purview of governments, the latter the private sector. I'm not so sure the transition is ready, and while it will come, it is beside the point. Building up the utility function of low-orbit missions, whether privatized or not, is about as exciting as building earthly utility power plants. It's important, not inspirational, and not really, in the grand scheme, all that hard.
Speaking to the students of Rice University in 1962, Kennedy said that the moon shot's engineering challenges had to be taken on "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." And it did.
None of the specific economic fallout from Apollo was anticipated by Kennedy or NASA nor was that the program's zeitgeist. The moon was the frontier that followed Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepherd setting "foot" in near-Earth orbit.
Mars is the next step into the limitless frontier, but Mars is 200 times further away than our Moon. It would require a rocket at least 10 times better than we have today. It would be hard, and it would cost a lot. Sound familiar?
Mars is another planet for goodness sake. Our moon is merely the dead clone of Earth from a long-ago cosmic collision. Going to Mars might even inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists.
We want a practical rationalization for reaching Mars, so how about our need to inspire the next great wave of innovation-driven economic growth? Man cannot anticipate most radically new technology, and he cannot ham-handedly micromanage it, but it can be fostered and inspired. It will in turn drive productivity and economic growth. It is an obvious truth that the only way we'll emerge from this Great Recession is to grow our way out of it.
Last year President Obama directed the Augustine Commission to look at the U.S. space program. Nothing in that largely media-ignored October 2009 Final Report sounded like Jules Verne pie-in-the-sky with regard to a Mars mission. No new physics is needed to get there. Sure there were lots of appropriate committee-like caveats and caution noting we couldn't do it with "current technology." I suppose Kennedy was told that, too, but at least we have visibility on how to do it. Indeed, the rocket needed may be the prototype of the so-called plasma Chang Drive that could get a spaceship to Mars in two months, instead of a year. Sounds like something from Star Trek, but it's not. (Google it.)
Then there's the money. The daunting estimate is a cost over the coming several decades some threefold more than the combined costs of the Apollo and Shuttle programs. Again, that's familiar territory. Perhaps in this age a president would form a multinational alliance, a much more inspiring coalition than those forged to fight wars. The U.S. could shoulder a third (resulting in a total cost, in GDP-equivalent terms, less than the moon shot) and our Chinese, Indian, Russian, German partners the rest. Early-stage costs would be relatively modest. Of course, costs would ramp up. It could be a hard sell.
We should go to Mars precisely because it is hard, because it is Mars, and because getting there is visionary.
Call me sentimental, but solving the human-on-Mars problem is a lot more exciting than solving the challenge of scrubbing carbon from smokestacks–or fixing health care. We'll do the others if we need too, but I'm betting Mars will inspire creativity in Michigan, Mumbai and HangZhou. You can bet it will inspire more people like astronaut Ron McNair.
I never knew Ron McNair, the only physicist on the Space Shuttle Challenger's Jan. 28, 1986 flight. I do remember vividly the day of his tragic death, watching with millions of others the live broadcast of the horrific explosion 73 seconds after launch. I suspect I know what compelled fellow physicist McNair to pursue the risky astronaut corps. While he grew up in South Carolina, picking cotton for summer work, the fact that he was the world's first orbital cinematographer tells you everything. He was the chief cameraman for the award-winning film The Space Shuttle: An American Odyssey, which premiered 25 years ago last month.
Movies, like astronauts and presidents, can be inspirational. Clearly that's what Ron McNair wanted to do, too, and that is what we need now more than any single economic elixir.
The air is so clear the mountains in the distance look almost fake, as if added digitally. The desert floor is runway-flat, with a few Joshua trees popping up randomly, like lost cowboys. The dominant feature is the sky, preposterously vast, beckoning test pilots, rocketeers and would-be space travelers.
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier near here in 1947. Neil Armstrong flew rocket planes. Tom Wolfe immortalized the Antelope Valley's hard-drinking, sky-shattering aviation pioneers in his book "The Right Stuf." The place is chockablock with history — and yet it's the future that everyone's buzzing about.
To hear the dreamers tell it, this is the next Silicon Valley. The Mojave Air and Space Port is the spiritual heart of the industry that people call "New Space."
Old Space (and this is still the dreamers talking) is slow, bureaucratic, government-directed, completely top-down. Old Space is NASA, cautious and halting, supervising every project down to the last thousand-dollar widget. Old Space is Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman. Old Space coasts on the glory of the Apollo era and isn't entirely sure what to do next.
New Space is the opposite of all that. It's wild. It's commercial, bootstrapping, imaginative, right up to the point of being (and this is no longer the dreamers talking) delusional.
Many of the New Space enterprises are still in the PowerPoint stage, with business models built around spaceships that haven't yet gone to space. A bold attitude and good marketing aren't enough to put a vehicle into orbit. The skeptics among the Old Space people will say to the upstarts: Where's your rocket? How many times have you launched? Can you deliver reliably? Repeatedly? Safely? We put a man on the moon — what have you done?
If there's one thing that New Space has going for it, it's that Old Space is in trouble. Old Space and New Space turn out to be symbiotic. New Space companies need NASA contracts, and NASA needs New Space companies to pick up the agency's slack.
The true believers imagine that, someday soon, robotic vehicles will mine asteroids for precious metals, including gold and platinum. Moon dirt will be transformed into rocket fuel for missions to Mars. Closer to home, FedEx will send a package from New York to Tokyo, via space, in half an hour.
Space tourism will be common, the believers insist. Maybe you will fly above the Arctic and see the aurora borealis from space. Tourism will eventually go lunar. "Tourists Walk on Moon" will blow up on Twitter one morning.
You can already buy a ticket on a spaceship. Mojave-based Virgin Galactic says that it will begin carrying passengers into space (the price recently jumped to $250,000 a seat) on suborbital flights in just a matter of months, with its flamboyant founder, Sir RichardBranson, and members of his family along for the ride. The company's vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, is kept out of sight in a hangar.
Next door, a company called XCOR Aerospace is assembling what it says will be a suborbital space vehicle, the Lynx.
"My life goal is to go to space," said Jeremy Voigt, 26, an engineer. "I'm going to take care of that here at XCOR. Everybody in the company gets to fly."
Earthlings vs. gravity is an enduring David vs. Goliath story. Human beings on the surface of the Earth are at the bottom of a gravity well. To get anything out of that well and into even a Low Earth Orbit still costs upward of $5,000 per pound. It's hard to come up with a reasonable business plan as long as launch costs are that high, which is why the government still dominates the space industry.
Another problem is that space flight has to work. The margin of error, between success and catastrophe, is minuscule. It's not like the computer business, where you can deliver a product and work out the bugs later. As Jeff Greason, the chief executive of XCOR, puts it, "We're not an industry that can ship the beta."
This is why Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, said in a recent telephone interview that he's "sweating" the launch, scheduled for Monday, of his Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla. It's supposed to put a communications satellite into a high Earth orbit, but a lot of things have to go perfectly.
"The thing with the rocket is, the passing grade is 100 percent. You can't issue a recall or do a patch," Musk said. "You either get it all right or you're screwed."
An unclear future
The glory days of Apollo were the direct result of an astonishing, but temporary, infusion of national resources driven by the Cold War and the desire to beat the Soviets to the moon. In the mid-1960s, NASA consumed nearly 5 percent of the federal budget. The agency commands just a 10th of that today. That's about $17 billion, with the largest chunk still going to human space flight, including the international space station.
With the shuttle now retired, NASA is moving to a new set of hardware, including a jumbo rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), and a capsule, Orion. Both projects are still in process. Orion won't fly until next year at the earliest. The SLS won't fly until 2017. The first flight of both with a crew aboard won't be until 2021.
Where these things will go and what exactly they'll do remains unclear.
Both the rocket and capsule are overbuilt for routine missions to the space station. The new rocket could launch Orion to the moon, but without a lunar lander, the capsule could only go into lunar orbit and then come home. NASA recently announced a controversial plan fraught with technical uncertainties, to send astronauts in 2021 to rendezvous with an asteroid that would be redirected to lunar orbit.
Haphazard though some of this seems, there's a deeper strategy at work. NASA retired the space shuttle so that it could devote resources to bold, deep-space missions — true exploration. There was always going to be an awkward transitional era.
Right now, American astronauts can get to the international space station only by traveling to a spaceport in Kazakhstan and catching a ride on a Russian rocket. That costs about $71 million per ticket. The U.S. Treasury is sending more than $400 million a year to Russia for launch services.
NASA hopes New Space will come to the rescue.
A huge strategic shift came when President Obama canceled the Bush-approved Constellation program, which would have sent American astronauts back to the moon. That decision killed a new NASA rocket, the Ares I, and roiled the Old Space community. The administration extended the life of the space station and decided to count on commercial companies to put astronauts in orbit.
Video: Dream Chaser space taxi debuts
The space plane aces its debut test flight in California but runs into landing problems on the runway. (Reuters)
In the space business, "commercial" is a debatable term. For the better part of a decade, NASA has been boosting the entrepreneurial space sector through a series of agreements that have funneled $1.8 billion to companies developing private spacecraft and other hardware. The government still writes a lot of the checks in the commercial industry. The biggest change is in the nature of the contracts.
Traditional "cost-plus" contracts limited the incentives to keep costs down. The government owned the spaceships and rockets. With the new, commercial contracts, the private companies assume more risk and put more of their own money into the projects. They design and build their spaceships and rockets, with NASA hovering in the background as a customer, not as a supervisor.
SpaceX and the Dulles-based launch company Orbital Sciences Corp. have already succeeded in hauling cargo in unpiloted vehicles to the space station under one NASA program. Next comes a competition for the contract to launch astronauts. Three companies appear to be in the running: SpaceX, Sierra Nevada and Boeing. That's two New Space companies plus an Old Space stalwart.
SpaceX and Boeing have developed capsules that will launch on top of rockets. Sierra Nevada has a winged vehicle, a kind of miniature space shuttle, called the Dream Chaser.
In a recent test flight near Mojave, the unmanned Dream Chaser was dropped from a helicopter at 12,500 feet, and, flying autonomously by its on-board navigation system, glided back to Earth admirably — falling with style, one might say. It touched down on the center line of the runway.
Unfortunately, the landing gear hadn't deployed properly. The Dream Chaser flopped on its side and skidded off the runway, into the desert.
It was the latest reminder that this spaceship stuff is never easy.
The start of SpaceX
Any discussion of New Space has to orbit around SpaceX. Musk, a South African, is an all-purpose inventor of the future. After making a fortune as an Internet entrepreneur with PayPal, he started SpaceX and began telling people about his dream of going to Mars.
He seemed a bit out-there — a visionary who talked a good game but didn't actually have a rocket that could fly. The first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket was a failure. So was the second. So was the third.
And then the technology started to work. The Falcon 9 — "Falcon" from the Millennium Falcon spaceship in "Star Wars" and "9" from the number of engines on the first stage — managed to send the unmanned Dragon spacecraft to the space station three times, carrying supplies and experiments. SpaceX is in the process of fulfilling a $1.6 billion cargo-hauling contract with NASA that will entail a dozen flights over several years.
SpaceX may have its own astronauts in the near future. Chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said that the first crewed test flight of the Dragon, which is still several years away, might involve not only NASA astronauts but also one SpaceX "technician" riding along as a troubleshooter.
Long-term, Musk would like to colonize Mars.
"We're either going to be on Earth forever until some extinction event claims us, or we're going to be a multi-planet species, out there exploring the stars," Musk said in the interview. "The evidence is pretty clear that breakthrough space flight technologies are not going to come from Boeing and Lockheed."
In a hallway at the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, Calif., there are two images of Mars. The one on the left is an actual photograph of the Red Planet. In the photograph on the right, Mars is green. This is Mars as it would be if the dreamers could make it Earth-like.
In the meantime, Musk is running SpaceX part-time. He's the founder and chief executive of Tesla, the electric-car company. In a typical work week, he commutes between Tesla, in Northern California, and SpaceX, in Southern California — and somehow manages to squeeze in being the father of five boys.
Musk's car company has been in the news recently because of three car fires, and Tesla's soaring stock price has started to return to Earth. Although he's rich and glamorous and the subject of cover stories in glossy magazines, he does not sound as if being an inventor of the future is much fun right now.
"I'm under a huge amount of strain," Musk said. "There's no two ways about it. I'm trying to do a whole lot of things simultaneously. It's tough when things are going smoothly, and it's really tough when things are not."
Competition for space travel
As part of its expansionary strategy, SpaceX wants a storied slice of Old Space architecture. The company has put in a bid for a five-year lease at Launch Complex 39A, formerly a space shuttle launch pad, at the NASA Kennedy Space Center. But other players have been eyeing the same launch pad, including Blue Origin, a New Space company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos's private investment company, Nash Holdings, bought The Washington Post on Oct. 1.) Blue Origin wants the pad to be a multi-user complex. United Launch Alliance (ULA), a 50-50 joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed, has echoed that sentiment. Musk, rankled, said he sees no chance that Blue Origin will have an orbital vehicle anytime soon. In a September email to SpaceNews, Musk wrote that if Blue Origin does come up with a vehicle that could launch from Pad 39A and safely reach the space station, "we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
Rob Meyerson, president of Blue Origin, e-mailed SpaceNews in response: "We have committed significant funds to enable launches by other users beginning as early as 2015 and have garnered interest and support from nearly all U.S. commercial launch providers. We look forward to working with NASA and the launch community to make fullest commercial use of LC 39A."
Blue Origin and Bezos declined to grant an interview for this story.
At a recent New Space conference in New Mexico, a Blue Origin executive, Bretton Alexander, showed video clips of a few hardware tests. Blue Origin is interested in both sub-orbital and orbital flight, including human spaceflight.
"What's king is low cost, reusability and safety," Alexander said. The company's overall goal, he said, is "more people flying in space to do more things."
A smattering of Old Space folks from Boeing and ULA showed up at the conference, held at a farm and ranch museum in Las Cruces. Andrew Aldrin, a ULA executive whose father, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, walked on the moon, participated in a panel discussion in which he suggested, in effect, that NASA is rolling the dice if it doesn't stick with the Old Space companies, who charge more for their services but have a longer track record.
"If we have a failure early on in this program, it's going to be very difficult. We'll be down for a long time. You can't overstate mission safety," Aldrin said. "You can't really calculate the value of losing astronauts."
He spoke as a representative of a company, ULA, that has enjoyed a near-monopoly on U.S. military and national security launches. SpaceX wants a piece of that multibillion-dollar action.
"We're going to take a tremendous amount of market share away from them," vows Shotwell of SpaceX.
Maybe.
"It's important that the next few launches go well," Musk said.
Big dreams
The New Space sector ranges from the highly pragmatic to the utterly fantastic. In the pragmatic category would be NanoRacks, a company that is selling simple, plug-and-play hardware that can be used by scientists or students to conduct experiments on the space station.
American billionaire Dennis Tito, 60, gives a thumbs-up shortly after his stint as the first space tourist and landing on the steppes, 50 miles northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan on May 6, 2001.
But then there's Mars One, an organization based in the Netherlands that claims that it will put teams of astronauts on Mars beginning in 2023. Mars One is not a space company so much as it's a reality TV show. People will compete, in four-person teams, for the prize of a journey to Mars. More than 200,000 people from around the world have applied, according to the Mars One Web site.
Mars is also the target of billionaire Dennis Tito, a former engineer who made his money as an investment manager and in 2001 paid his way to space on a Russian rocket, becoming the first space tourist. Tito now wants to send two volunteer astronauts on a 501-day fly-by mission of Mars. The spacecraft wouldn't land, but it would pass about 100 miles from the Martian surface.
"Inspiration Mars," as Tito named the mission, would have to launch in late 2017 or early 2018 to take advantage of a brief, and rare, alignment of Mars and Earth that would minimize the travel time and fuel requirements.
Originally, Tito wanted to do the whole thing with private money and private rockets. On Wednesday, he testified in Congress that Inspiration Mars really needs NASA help. Specifically, the mission requires that big NASA rocket under development, the SLS. Also, NASA would have to kick in about $700 million, in addition to what the agency is already spending on rocket development.
Later on Wednesday, the agency provided an official reaction. NASA spokesman David Weaver, citing the many technical challenges of the mission, said the agency "is willing to share technical and programmatic expertise with Inspiration Mars but is unable to commit to sharing expenses with them."
That would be a no-go.
A changing viewpoint
New Space is a sub-culture, which is why the community can boast that it has its own anthropologist, a University of Minnesota professor, David Valentine, who has spent five years studying these people as part of a book project.
Traditionally, academics have had a dim view of the space program, Valentine said. There is much talk in academia about the "psychic injury" to "white American masculinity" from the failure of the space program to deliver on the grandiose visions of the Apollo era.
But he's become less skeptical of the New Space people.
"Because a dream is culturally implanted, because a dream comes out of your experiences and hopes in childhood and infancy, doesn't mean that it isn't real," Valentine said.
One person who has turned his childhood fascination with space into a growing business is Robert Bigelow. He made his fortune with Budget Suites of America, a hotel chain. His Las Vegas-based company, Bigelow Aerospace, makes inflatable space habitats — orbital motels, in effect.
NASA plans to attach a Bigelow inflatable to the space station, and it may someday put a Bigelow inflatable habitat at a point beyond the moon. Astronauts could visit. A Bigelow habitat would be more comfortable than one of NASA's Orion capsules.
Bigelow's current focus is the moon and property rights. Under a 1967 international agreement, the moon can't be claimed by any country, nor can a person own a piece of it. But Bigelow wants the government to issue a ruling that would give entrepreneurs property rights to protect their investments as they develop lunar resources.
"Property rights provide order and reduce tribal warfare," Bigelow said at a news conference this month at a Capitol Hill hotel.
When a CNBC reporter asked if anyone should be allowed to own parts of the moon, Bigelow answered, "No. No one anything should own the moon. But yes, multiple entities, groups, individuals, yes, they should own" the moon.
If we don't seize the initiative, he said, China will. And then everyone on Earth will look up at the moon, he said, and know that "it belongs to China."
Cautionary tales
New Space is efflorescing in multiple locations, including west Texas; southern New Mexico; Huntsville, Ala.; and near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But there's nowhere in America quite like Mojave. This is where the legendary engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites built SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 won the Ansari X Prize as the first private manned vehicle to reach space.
There are 17 space-related companies in Mojave and up to 3,000 employees on any given day. Could one of these companies be the next Google or Facebook? As with the computer industry, there are many players and many clever ideas (or otherwise — a classic industry line is, "I don't care about your stupid idea; I've got a stupid idea of my own."). Unlike the computer industry, the customer base is small for now, and the products are pricey.
Life in the New Space universe isn't a breeze. Projects get delayed. Spaceships remain in their hangars, not ready for space. Wall Street investors may drop in to visit, but the big institutional money isn't ready to gamble on New Space.
"They still face very, very long odds. The vast majority of these ventures will fail. That's just the way new ventures are," said Scott Pace, director of the George Washington University Space Policy Institute. The only space businesses that turn a profit are information-based and don't involve people blasting off the surface, he said. "Given the cost of launch, the things that make money are things that don't weigh anything — photons, communications, GPS, remote sensing."
There are cautionary tales in every direction. Consider the Roton, the invention of a Mojave company called Rotary Rocket that in the 1990s tried to create a single-stage, reusable orbital rocket, something no one had done before.
"There were a lot of dreamers in previous years," said Doug Jones, a former Rotary Rocket engineer who is now with XCOR. "They tried to bite off too big a task."
The Roton was strangely conical and looks like something from a cartoon. Before the company went bust, the Roton had a few short, slightly wobbly test flights in which it never got very far off the ground. The shell of the rocket is now a landmark at the spaceport, rising from a small park in the center of the complex.
People will say "Go right at the rocket," or "Go left at the rocket."
It was a daring idea in its day, pushing the edge of the envelope, but now it's the world's largest traffic cone.
Private space companies are really taking off
Mark Matthews – Orlando Sentinel
Never before has the final frontier looked more like the Wild West.
With NASA in a down period, private space companies have stepped in with plans that range from the boldly innovative to the potentially absurd.
Take multimillionaire Dennis Tito, the world's first space tourist. Tito, who visited the International Space Station in 2001, wants to blast two astronauts to Mars in early 2018 for a 501-day mission that would fly within 100 miles of the Red Planet. The idea is to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that would allow a relatively short round trip.
Although skepticism is high — NASA, for example, isn't even thinking about a crewed Mars attempt before the 2030s — Tito's ambition was sufficient for lawmakers to ask him to testify before a U.S. House science panel last week.
"The endeavor is not motivated by business desires but to inspire Americans in a bold adventure in space that reinvigorates U.S. space exploration," Tito told House committee members.
Tito has plenty of company. Other space entrepreneurs
are proposing, and even pursuing, missions once seen as improbable for the private sector — and they're having some success. Most notably, two U.S. space companies — SpaceX of California and Orbital Sciences of Virginia — have delivered cargo
to the space station. In another sign of growth, a SpaceX rocket carrying a communications satellite is scheduled to launch Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. And two space-tourism companies, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, aim to begin flights to suborbital space for wealthy adventurers as soon as next year. Tickets cost $95,000 to $250,000. In each case, aspiring astronauts would ride a futuristic plane to the edge of space for a few minutes of weightlessness.
But for all the promise, there's worry, too.
Money is a constant concern for space companies. Not only is it tough to make a profit in space because of high costs, but government funding for private ventures is looking less stable because of Washington's own financial problems. Space entrepreneurs also worry about government regulation, from oversight of rocket safety to property rights in space.
To focus only on these issues, however, would be to lose sight of the rapid transformation in the space business, said one industry expert.
"I have never seen a time when you have so many players" going into space ventures, said Kate Maliga, a commercial space analyst for the Tauri Group, which tracks the space, technology and defense sectors. "If nothing else, the law of averages suggests that some of them have to be successful."
NASA is a critical part of this second space race, even though for now it doesn't have the capability to launch astronauts into space.
Tito's group, for example, said it would require hundreds of millions of dollars in federal assistance. And a program intended to enable U.S. companies to ferry astronauts to the space station by 2018 also relies on federal funding. With the space-shuttle fleet retired, NASA is using Russia to get its astronauts to the station, a service costing the agency about $1.7 billion through 2017.
NASA's plan to hire companies to take over that function is aimed at bringing those dollars back to the U.S., but the so-called "commercial crew" program is facing financial problems. A $1.1 billion funding shortfall during the past three years, combined with pessimism about future budgets, could "delay the first crewed launch beyond 2017 and closer to 2020," NASA's Inspector General's Office wrote in a recent report.
With government funding in doubt, other commercial space advocates are pushing for alternative methods of spurring innovation — and potential profits.
Officials with Bigelow Aerospace, a North Las Vegas company that builds space modules, recently called on federal officials to allow space-exploring companies to claim parcels of the lunar surface for mining or scientific study.
Mike Gold, director of the company's Washington office, said granting property rights could give the space industry a much-needed jolt. How it would work is still unclear, though. Long-standing international treaties prohibit countries — though not necessarily corporations — from laying claim to lunar land.
But Gold said there's a universal benefit in pursuing the concept.
"Throughout history, property rights have driven human exploration, and this is an incentive that's been sorely missing in the space arena."
JFK space race myth: Column
Rand Simberg – USA Today
It's been half a century since a young president was cut down by a deranged communist assassin, and a little longer than that since humans first flew into space. The two events are indelibly linked in the minds of most, because the assassinated president, John F. Kennedy, is properly credited with setting the U.S. on the course that would, a little over half a decade after his untimely death, end in Americans walking on the moon.
There is a lot of mythology and alternate-history speculation on the course of history had he served out two terms. Would he have gotten as embroiled in Vietnam as his successor? Would the "Great Society" programs have been created? Would there have been follow on to Apollo that resulted in lunar bases and Mars missions in the seventies and eighties?
It was always assumed that the president had a deep and abiding interest in space, on the basis of the lofty words of his speech at Rice University in 1962 defending the moon initiative:
Man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.
But ironically, his ostensible vision of sending men to the moon and back within a decade likely only survived because he himself did not. He was in reality quite ambivalent, and even apathetic about space. In the late fifties, he and his brother Robert ridiculed the vision of MIT professor and aerospace pioneer Charles Stark Draper at dinner with him.
His own science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, according to The Atlantic, said that it was the area that the president understood the least. The announcement of the lunar goal in May of 1961 was not a result of a desire to see humanity conquer the heavens so much as a political response to the Soviets being first to send a man into space, and to distract from the recent Bay of Pigs fiasco, a failed CIA operation to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba that had been planned during the Eisenhower administration. In a meeting with his advisors in 1962 a couple of months after the Rice speech, he bluntly told them, including NASA administrator James Webb, that he "wasn't that interested in space." In fact, before his death in November of 1963, he had been giving serious consideration to ending the race, and negotiating with the Soviets to do a joint mission, to reduce its horrific costs (at its peak in the mid-sixties, Apollo was consuming 4% of the federal budget).
So it is quite possible, and even likely, that had Kennedy lived, what many view as one of his signature achievements, if not indeed the one — sending America to the moon — would not have happened. After his assassination, the program survived partly as a jobs program in politically important states and districts, and partly as a tribute to the fallen president. Amidst the race riots burning many cities and the rising costs of Vietnam his successor, Lyndon Johnson, actually started to end production on the program, many months before the first moon landing. Kennedy himself might have done so sooner. Apollo continued for another five years, with six moon landings, purely on the momentum of such a momentous project.
Kennedy's legacy in space is a NASA human-spaceflight program that has been rudderless for half a century, because its purpose was never articulated in terms that would justify the massive amounts of money expended on it. Had the goal actually been to open up the high frontier to humanity, an America operating on its traditional values of individualism and entrepreneurship would have gone to work on it much sooner, and much more effectively, than the centralized state-socialist bureaucracy that we established to beat the Soviets' state-socialist bureaucracy to the moon. With the recent success of SpaceX and others, we are in fact starting to see this happen, half a century late.
But for NASA, that drift continues, as the myths laid down so long ago continue to prevail in the Congressional committees responsible for funding NASA (unsurprisingly, such committees are largely run by people with NASA centers and contractors in their states and districts). Stuck in the Apollo mindset, they think that NASA's job is not to open a frontier, but to build big rockets, while starving the agency of funding for the technologies and hardware needed to actually send humans beyond low earth orbit. And perhaps unironically, it's probably not an outcome that would have upset the late president at all.
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