PAO was a bit busy today,,,,sorry for the late news!
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
- SpaceX Launch Set for Friday
- JSC Today Submissions for April 21 Due by Noon
- JSC Earth Day Events: Tuesday, April 22 - Organizations/Social
- Learn Spanish and Have Fun with the HERG Today
- Thank You, Chili Lovers
- Last Chance for Admin Day Offer
- Starport Jewelry Fair - B3 Starport Café
- Starport's Sunrise Spinning - April 20
- Parent's Night Out at Starport - April 25 - Jobs and Training
- Performance Closeout Sessions/Labs-CS Supervisors
- Project Management Forum - Community
- UHCL to Host Live Downlink with Rick Mastracchio
- Make an Impact ... |  |
| Headlines - Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
The majority of folks at JSC are shooting for a 35-year career with NASA. That's pretty impressive. Your favorite king was Stephen, with Elvis getting a number of write-in votes via my email. Earth Day officially happens next week, so this week's question is a little Earth friendly. We use a lot of paper around here, so I'd like you to guess how much we use each year. Is it 16 tons? Six tons? One hundred and twenty tons? On question two, pretend I have a free ticket to give you to one of these sporting events. It's not the Super Bowl or the seventh game of the World Series, but it's pretty good. Which event would you choose? The Masters? Kentucky Derby? Scalp your Ticketmaster on over to get this week's poll. - SpaceX Launch Set for Friday
SpaceX is targeting a 2:25 p.m. CDT launch on Friday, April 18, of its third cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. NASA TV coverage will begin at 1:15 p.m. The company's April 14 launch attempt to send the Dragon cargo craft to the orbiting laboratory was scrubbed due to a helium leak in the Falcon 9 rocket used to launch Dragon to the station. Dragon is carrying to the space station almost 5,000 pounds of science and research, crew supplies, vehicle hardware and spacewalk tools -- all to support the crew and more than 150 scientific investigations planned for Expeditions 39 and 40. If needed, a backup launch attempt is available at 2:02 p.m. Saturday, April 19. If Dragon launches on Friday, NASA TV coverage of Dragon's arrival at the space station on Sunday, April 20 will begin at 4:45 a.m. Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will use the space station's robotic arm to capture the spacecraft at 6:14 a.m. assisted by NASA's Rick Mastracchio. NASA TV coverage will resume at 8:30 a.m. as the Dragon is attached to the Earth-facing port of the space station's Harmony module. First-time users will need to install the EZTV Monitor and Player client applications: - For those WITH admin rights (Elevated Privileges), you'll be prompted to download and install the clients when you first visit the IPTV website
- For those WITHOUT admin rights (Elevated Privileges), you can download the EZTV client applications from the ACES Software Refresh Portal (SRP)
If you are having problems viewing the video using these systems, contact the Information Resources Directorate Customer Support Center at x46367 or visit the FAQ site. Event Date: Friday, April 18, 2014 Event Start Time:1:15 PM Event End Time:3:00 PM
Event Location: NASA TV
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JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 http://www.nasa.gov/spacex
[top] - JSC Today Submissions for April 21 Due by Noon
Reminder! If you have a JSC Today announcement you'd like to submit for Monday, April 21, please submit it by noon TODAY, April 17, to ensure it makes it into Monday's edition. Submit your announcement here. - JSC Earth Day Events: Tuesday, April 22
Music on the Mall is back! Take your normal lunch break outside and enjoy JSC Earth Day activities near one of the three ponds in the JSC mall area. Bring your blanket (or lawn chair). For our musically inclined JSC employees, please consider bringing your instruments and playing a tribute to complement the natural beauty our Earth provides. Join a group already playing their chords or start your own. Bring your own cup for some green tea from the JSC Green Team at Sputnik. Take a wellness/conservation walk-n-talk at 11 a.m. or noon (meet in front of Building 3). Go on a natural resources scavenger hunt. Check out the Sustainability Partnership Team's solar-powered Cupola prototype (between Buildings 3 and 4). See a beautiful time-lapse video of Earth from the International Space Station in the Teague Auditorium, and preview posters of the awesome work from our spring 2014 interns in the Teague lobby (12:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.). Organizations/Social - Learn Spanish and Have Fun with the HERG Today
The Hispanic Employee Resource Group (HERG) is hosting a lunch social called "Learn Spanish with Loteria!" Loteria is similar to bingo, except instead of calling letters and numbers, Spanish vocabulary words are called. The game originated in Italy in the 15th century and was brought to Mexico in 1769, where it eventually became a tradition at Mexican fairs. "La escalera," "el pajaro," "el mundo," "la araña" ... if you don't know what these words mean in English, then you should make plans to attend the upcoming HERG "Learn Spanish with Loteria!" lunch social. Come and network with other employees, take part in a popular Hispanic game and brush up on some basic Spanish. Prizes will be given to the employees with the most Loteria wins! Event Date: Thursday, April 17, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM
Event Location: B3 Collaboration Center
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Libby Moreno x38608
[top] - Thank You, Chili Lovers
The 36th annual JSC FOD Chili Cook-off was a smashing success! Many thanks to JSC, chili cooks, patrons and volunteers for delivering an outstanding time this past weekend. If you participated in any fashion or just want your opinion heard, please take a moment to complete a brief survey (five minutes) to let us know how we did. You can find it here. - Last Chance for Admin Day Offer
This is your last chance to place your order. The Starport Gift Shops will be making on-site deliveries of floral arrangements, plants, balloons and other gift items purchased at Starport for Administrative Professional's Day on Wednesday, April 23. Let your administrative assistant know that he/she is appreciated with a beautiful flower arrangement, balloons or other unique gift delivered right to his/her desk. The last day to order is Friday, April 18. - Starport Jewelry Fair – B3 Starport Café
Jewelry is Fun will be out on April 29 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Building 3 Starport Café selling $5.99 jewelry. Enjoy great savings on jewelry and accessories! Click here for more information. - Starport's Sunrise Spinning – April 20
Renew your senses and invigorate your mind and body with a 60-minute outdoor Spinning class that will conclude as the sun rises. This motivational endurance ride is great for all levels. Light refreshments will be provided after class. Reserve your spot now and register at the Gilruth Center information desk or online. Starport's Sunrise Spinning - April 20
- 6 to 7 a.m.
Registration: - $15/person (April 12 to 19)
For more information about this Spinning class, or for those interested in biking or running in to the Gilruth that morning, please contact Kerri Knotts. - Parent's Night Out at Starport – April 25
Enjoy a night out on the town while your kids enjoy a night with Starport. We will entertain your children with a night of games, crafts, a bounce house, pizza, a movie, dessert and loads of fun! When: Friday, April 25, from 6 to 10 p.m. Where: Gilruth Center Ages: 5 to 12 Cost: $20/first child and $10/each additional sibling if registered by the Wednesday prior to event. If registered after Wednesday, the fee is $25/first child and $15/additional sibling. Jobs and Training - Performance Closeout Sessions/Labs-CS Supervisors
Performance closeout season is here! To help guide supervisors through the closeout process in SPACE, we've scheduled several info sessions and live labs. During info sessions, supervisors will receive an overview of the performance management system and discuss performance closeout tips and best practices. During the live labs, supervisors will be able to work on employee appraisals, and Human Resources support will be available to answer any system-related questions. No registration is required. The session dates/times are: Supervisor Info Sessions: - April 21 - 1 to 2:30 p.m. (Building 12, Room 146)
- April 23 - 3 to 4:30 p.m. (Building 12, Room 136)
- April 30 - 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (Building 12, Room 134)
Supervisor Live Labs (all in Building 12, Room 144): - May 7 - 11 a.m. to noon
- May 15 - 9 to 10 a.m.
- May 22 - Noon to 1 p.m.
- May 28 - Noon to 1 p.m.
- June 5 - 9 to 10 a.m.
- Project Management Forum
The Project Management (PM) Forum will be held today, April 17, in Building 1, Room 966, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. At this forum, Kevin Cullen of Leadera Consulting Group will speak about "Having a Powerful Relationship with Change." Cullen is the president of Leadera Consulting Group, which specializes in the training and development of business leaders worldwide. He is an exceptional speaker and was last year's keynote speaker at the Project Management Institute Conference. Don't miss this PM Forum! All civil servant and contractor project managers are invited to attend. The purpose of the PM Forum is to provide an opportunity for our project managers to freely discuss issues, best practices, lessons learned, tools and opportunities, as well as to collaborate with other project managers. Community - UHCL to Host Live Downlink with Rick Mastracchio
Astronaut Rick Mastracchio will speak with students from his alma mater, University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL), in a live downlink from the International Space Station tomorrow, April 18, between 11:45 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. This marks the first time that an astronaut UHCL alumnus will connect with the campus live from space. The event is FREE and open to the public. Mastracchio earned a master of science degree in physical science from UHCL in 1991. Students will speak with Mastracchio about how his educational experience relates to his work and what his day-to-day life aboard station is like. During the 20-minute downlink, Mastracchio will also speak with his other alma maters, University of Connecticut and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The event will take place in the lecture hall of UHCL's Student Services and Classroom Building (2700 Bay Area Blvd., Houston, 77058). Guest parking will be in student parking lot D. Raphael Grau, deputy manager with the International Space Station, will speak and take questions before and after the downlink. For more information, call UHCL's Office of University Advancement at 281-283-2021. Event Date: Friday, April 18, 2014 Event Start Time:11:45 AM Event End Time:12:05 PM
Event Location: UHCL Student Services and Classroom Bldg
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JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs 281-283-2021
[top] - Make an Impact ...
… in the life of a budding scientist or engineer! How? By volunteering to be a science fair judge for elementary school students; or a career panel discussion member for community college students; or by evaluating innovative projects developed by upper-level college students! All of these opportunities (and more!) are waiting for YOU in V-CORPs. April 24: Science fair judges needed for elementary school district-wide science fair. You will be judging a field of 120 projects that WON from their respective elementary schools. Judges are needed from 8 a.m. until noon. The location is St. Mary of the Purification Montessori School (3002 Rosedale, Houston). April 25: San Jacinto College North Campus (5800 Uvalde, Houston) is hosting a career panel discussion from 1 to 3 p.m. This is EASY! Just talk about your STEM career, your education, how you got where you are and answer questions from these students. April 28: Texas Space Grant Engineering Design Challenge. Do you want to see what innovative ideas the next generation of space explorers have developed? Do you have a strong background in science or engineering? Then we need YOU to help judge the projects and posters presented by these upper-level engineering students from colleges and universities around Texas. The location is the South Shore Harbor Conference Center, and judges are needed from 7:30 a.m. until noon. | |
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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. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Thursday – April 17, 2014
"How We're Finding Asteroids Before They Find Us"
By James Vlahos – Popular Science
HEADLINES AND LEADS
SpaceX will try again Fri. to launch station cargo
Marcia Dunn - AP
SpaceX is shooting for another launch attempt Friday to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
SpaceX set for Friday launch to ISS
James Dean – Florida Today
SpaceX will try again Friday to launch an International Space Station resupply mission from Cape Canaveral, while station astronauts prepare for a spacewalk soon to replace a failed component.
GAO Details Issues with ICESat-2 Sensor
Dan Leone – Space News
The science instrument for a troubled NASA ice-monitoring satellite will be delivered at least nine months late and continues to face development challenges, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Danish cancer cells headed to space
Researchers studying the effect of weightlessness on cancer
Ray Weaver – The Copenhagen Post
A rocket destined for the International Space Station (ISS), scheduled for launch on Friday from Cape Canaveral in Florida, will be carrying a tiny but important payload from Danish scientists: cancer cells.
Up and down and up again
SpaceX's latest launch could change the economics of going into orbit
The Economist
EVERYTHING about space flight is superlative. Even relatively modest rockets are hundreds of feet high. The biggest (the Saturn V, which launched astronauts to the Moon) remains the most powerful vehicle ever built. But space flight is superlatively expensive, too. One reason is that, for all their technological sophistication, rockets are one-shot wonders. After they have fired their engines for a few minutes they are left to fall back to Earth, usually splashing ignominiously into the ocean.
GAO report offers good news, but also warnings, about performance of NASA programs
Jeff Foust – Space Politics
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Tuesday its annual assessment of "large-scale" NASA projects. The good news of the report was that NASA, by and large, is doing well in terms of cost and schedule performance of its major programs: an average cost growth of 3% and launch delay of 2.8 months for 14 selected programs in their implementation phase, compared to average cost growth of 3.9% and launch delay of 4.0 months in 2013. Those figures exclude the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); when included, the average cost growth in the 2014 report rises to 37.8% and the average launch delay to 6.6 months given that large program's major overruns. However, the averages with JWST included are still an improvement over 2013.
The Time for a New, All-American Advanced Liquid Rocket Engine Is Now | Commentary
Mark Albrecht and Don Kerr – Roll Call
In 1972, President Richard Nixon committed the United States to a space shuttle to meet all launch needs for America's space program — for national security, civil space, human spaceflight and the commercial marketplace. Now, the consequences of this decision and others emphasizing globalization fundamentally threaten America's vital access to space.
Mini satellites prove their scientific power
Proliferation of 'CubeSats' offers fresh and fast way to gather space data.
Nicola Jones – Nature
A tiny box orbiting Earth is sending home big data. Built mostly by undergraduate students for less than US$1.5 million, the 10 centimetre × 10 cm × 30 cm satellite, called Firefly, is now beaming back information on terrestrial γ-ray flashes — energetic bursts that are triggered by lightning and fired out into space.
Sierra Nevada Plans Additional Dream Chaser Flight Tests in Fall
Douglas Messier – Parabolic Arc
Sierra Nevada Corporation will conduct additional drop tests of its Dream Chaser space shuttle at Edwards Air Force Base in the fall, Co-program Director John Curry said during the recent Space Tech Expo in Long Beach, Calif.
NASA Wants Ideas to Recycle Precious Oxygen on Deep-Space Voyages
When humans leave Earth to explore planets like Mars and other hostile environments in outer space, they'll need to supply their own breathable oxygen.
COMPLETE STORIES
SpaceX will try again Fri. to launch station cargo
Marcia Dunn - AP
SpaceX is shooting for another launch attempt Friday to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
NASA confirmed the launch date Wednesday, two days after a last-minute rocket leak delayed the mission. Stormy weather, however, is forecast for Friday. Saturday is the backup launch date.
Mission Control has rescheduled urgent spacewalking repairs because of the new launch time. Two U.S. astronauts, Rick Mastracchio and Steven Swanson, had been aiming for a Tuesday spacewalk to replace a backup computer that failed late last week.
The prime computer has been working fine, but NASA wants to get a new backup installed outside the station as soon as possible. These computers control the pointing of the radiators and solar wings, among other things.
The spacewalk will be either Easter Sunday or next Wednesday, depending on when — or if — the cargo ship flies.
The Dragon contains more than 2 tons of supplies, including material that would prove useful for the repair, but is not essential.
Former space station astronaut Christopher Cassidy, who's helping from Houston, said the spacewalk job should be "pretty straightforward" and involve the manual turning of just three bolts on the computer box.
"We anticipate it to go quickly, but as with anything in space ... you never know what's going to be thrown at you," said Cassidy, who served on the space station last year.
A bad valve resulted in Monday's helium leak in the unmanned Falcon rocket, SpaceX reported Wednesday. The valve is in the system used to separate the rocket's first stage.
Although a backup valve was working properly and could have supported the flight, SpaceX followed its own policy of canceling a launch in the event of equipment problems such as this.
The faulty valve is being replaced, the private company said in a statement, and inspections are underway to see if anything else might be wrong.
NASA is eager to get these supplies to the orbiting lab as soon as possible. The flight has been on hold since mid-March for various reasons. Much of the cargo is considered critical, including food, a new spacesuit and replacement parts for existing spacesuits.
The SpaceX Dragon and Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus cargo ship, which launches from Virginia, are NASA's prime means of shipment. Russia, Japan and Europe also make periodic deliveries.
NASA's space shuttles carried most of the resupply load until their retirement in 2011; that's when the space agency turned to private industry to fill the gap. NASA is hoping private companies will do the same for launching astronauts in another few years. SpaceX is among the U.S. companies vying for that job. Until then, Americans will be forced to continue riding Russian rockets to and from the space station at steep cost.
If SpaceX isn't flying by Saturday, then Orbital Sciences will move to the front of the launch line, with a shipment in early May, officials said. That would push SpaceX into June.
SpaceX set for Friday launch to ISS
James Dean – Florida Today
SpaceX will try again Friday to launch an International Space Station resupply mission from Cape Canaveral, while station astronauts prepare for a spacewalk soon to replace a failed component.
Hoping weather cooperates, a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are targeting a 3:25 p.m. Friday liftoff from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Air Force meteorologists expect thick clouds, rain showers and thunderstorms to combine for only a 40 percent chance of conditions acceptable for launch when the instantaneous window arrives.
There's another opportunity at 3:02 p.m. Saturday, if necessary, when the forecast is better.
But if the mission can't get off the ground by then, it will be put on hold until June.
Other events scheduled on the station and a period when it can't welcome new vehicles because of temperature and power limits mean the next launch opportunity would slip to early May, when Orbital Sciences is readying a cargo flight from Virginia.
"I'm kind of double-booking two launches at once here for a little while until we see what actually occurs," Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA's human spaceflight programs, told an advisory panel Wednesday. "We're getting low enough on supplies on board station, we've got to get something to station in the next couple of months."
The timing of SpaceX's launch also will determine when Expedition 39 astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson venture outside the orbiting research complex to replace a backup computer box that failed last week.
A Friday launch would put the Dragon on course to reach the station Sunday morning, and their planned two-and-a-half hour spacewalk would follow next Wednesday.
If there's no launch Friday, the spacewalk would move up to Sunday. The Dragon would arrive Tuesday if launched on Saturday.
Mastracchio and Swanson will swap out a 51-pound metal box housing computer cards that give ground teams a backup ability to command various external systems, including coolant loops and joints that rotate eight solar array wings.
Control of those systems would be lost if the primary computer failed without a backupavailable.
"It's pretty straightforward in terms of (spacewalking) jobs," astronaut Chris Cassidy told told NASA TV on Wednesday.
Cassidy is helping to plan the spacewalk from the ground, and will perform a practice run Friday in the giant swimming pool at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
SpaceX, meanwhile, reported Wednesday that a helium valve in the Falcon 9 rocket's pneumatic stage separation system was to blame for Monday's scrubbed first launch attempt. The valve was not holding the right pressure.
The valve will be replaced and the entire system inspected before Friday's countdown.
GAO Details Issues with ICESat-2 Sensor
Dan Leone – Space News
The science instrument for a troubled NASA ice-monitoring satellite will be delivered at least nine months late and continues to face development challenges, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The April 15 report comes as NASA prepares new cost and schedule estimates for the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat)-2, a high-priority program whose difficulties surfaced in October. The new estimates are expected in May, but NASA recently indicated that it expects the launch to slip to from 2016 to at least 2018.
NASA in December 2012 said the mission, identified as a top priority in a 10-year roadmap released in 2007 by the Earth science community, would cost $559 million and launch in 2016. The mission's main instrument, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, was designed and developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., with help from contractor Fibertek Inc. of Herndon, Va.
"The instrument's performance began to degrade in January 2013, one month after its plan was baselined at confirmation," the GAO wrote in its annual assessment of large-scale NASA projects. Citing ICESat-2 project officials, the GAO said the photon-counting laser's 20 subsystems were well understood, but that the instrument team had difficulty putting them all together.
As required by law for projects that overrun their budgets by at least 15 percent, NASA notified Congress about problems with ICESat-2 in January.
That preliminary breach report has not been released to the public, but the GAO said "recent estimates indicate that [the laser] has used all of its schedule reserve and is now planned for delivery in March 2016 — nine months later than originally needed for integration onto the spacecraft."
The fix Fibertek and NASA are working will be part of the ICESat-2 replan the mission team will submit to the agency's Program Management Council in May, according to slides presented April 9 to the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee by Peg Luce, the agency's deputy director for Earth Science.
According to Luce, the mission will launch no earlier than 2018.
NASA spokesman Stephen Cole, reached by email April 15, declined to comment further on the timing the replan.
Fibertek has two contracts related to the ICESat-2 laser: a $35 million engineering services agreement awarded in 2009, and a $26 million cost-plus deal awarded in 2011 to provide four spaceflight lasers and a test laser.
Those contracts keep about 33 full-time employees at work on ICESat-2's main instrument Mark Storm, Fibertek's space systems manager, said in an April 15 phone interview.
"The work at Fibertek is proceeding smoothly," Storm said. "We're scheduled to deliver all of our stuff. It works, we're happy with it all."
Storm said there have been "bumps in the road," but declined to elaborate, deferring to NASA.
The GAO said ICESat project officials are "currently monitoring multiple risks related to the ... instrument including delivery delays of some of [its] 20 subsystems and development problems.
"[A]ccording to project officials, the instrument's most challenging subsystem is the optics subsystem, due to its very strict requirements," the report said. "The project recently reported identifying several areas where requirements could be relaxed, which benefited multiple subsystems."
NASA has shaken up its management team for the sensor, Luce said April 9. The new instrument project manager is Cathy Richardson, who managed the Thermal Infrared Sensor that was launched to space in 2013 aboard the Landsat-8 land mapping satellite.
Luce did not say how much ICESat-2's price tag is expected to rise, but another NASA official said it would be by "a lot."
"There's going to be a lot of noise about that," Craig Tupper, director of resource management in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during the advisory council meeting.
According to Luce's slides from the meeting, NASA will tap into the Earth Science Division's Other Missions and Data Analysis budget to fund the ICESat-2 replan. The account funds the division's 17 operating observatories, data analysis, and development of some other missions. NASA requested about $520 million for this account as part of a 2015 budget request that was released in March and did not account for the cost of an ICESat-2 replan.
Word of trouble with ICESat-2's primary instrument first surfaced publicly in October. At that time, Michael Freilich, NASA's Earth Science Division director, said the launch likely would slip from late 2016 to the middle of 2017.
When the first IceSat's seven-year mission ended in 2010, NASA thought it could build and launch ICESat-2 as soon as 2015.
ICESat-2's three-year primary mission is designed to measure changes in the elevation of global ice sheets, sea-ice and the height of vegetation canopies from a 495-kilometer polar orbit. Orbital Sciences Corp. is building the ICESat-2 satellite bus at its facility in Gilbert, Ariz., under a contract that was worth $135 million when it was awarded in 2011 and is now valued at just more than $145 million, according to the GAO report.
Orbital also is responsible for integrating the laser altimeter, and for on-orbit checkout and operation of ICESat-2, which will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket.
Danish cancer cells headed to space
Researchers studying the effect of weightlessness on cancer
Ray Weaver – The Copenhagen Post
A rocket destined for the International Space Station (ISS), scheduled for launch on Friday from Cape Canaveral in Florida, will be carrying a tiny but important payload from Danish scientists: cancer cells.
Matchbox-sized packages containing six million cells from a thyroid cancer patient will be sent into space to continue research on the effects of weightlessness on the cells.
"We have found that exposing cancer cells to simulated weightlessness in our underground laboratories causes the cancer cells to become fragile and destroy themselves," researcher Thomas Juhl Corydon, from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University, told Politiken newspaper. "We want to analyse what happens when cancer cells reside in a weightless environment for several days."
Space-inspired treatment
The cells will be kept alive on the ISS for ten days, after which astronauts on the mission will kill them with chemicals.
"This will give us a snapshot of the condition of the cells after ten days of weightlessness," said Corydon.
Researchers hope the experiment will reveal weaknesses in the cells that could lead to the development of new cancer treatments.
"The goal of our research is not that cancer patients should be sent into space for cancer treatment, but to find what makes the cells vulnerable when they are weightless so that we can develop treatments that work here on earth," said Croydon.
Up and down and up again
SpaceX's latest launch could change the economics of going into orbit
The Economist
EVERYTHING about space flight is superlative. Even relatively modest rockets are hundreds of feet high. The biggest (the Saturn V, which launched astronauts to the Moon) remains the most powerful vehicle ever built. But space flight is superlatively expensive, too. One reason is that, for all their technological sophistication, rockets are one-shot wonders. After they have fired their engines for a few minutes they are left to fall back to Earth, usually splashing ignominiously into the ocean.
Rocket scientists have therefore long dreamed of making something able to fly more than once. Such a reusable machine, they hope, would slash the cost of getting into space. The only one built so far, America's space shuttle, proved a dangerous and costly disappointment, killing two of its crews and never coming close to the cost savings its designers had intended. But hope springs eternal, and several of America's privately run "New Space" firms are planning to try again.
The furthest advanced is SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, an internet mogul. On April 18th it is due to launch one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a cargo-carrying trip to the International Space Station (ISS), something it has done twice before. This time, though, the main story is not the ISS mission, but the modifications the firm has made to the rocket itself.
The most notable are the four landing legs folded up along the side of its first stage. If everything goes to plan, once that stage has finished its job and detached itself from the rest of the rocket, it will fire its engines again. Instead of crashing into the sea, it will make a controlled descent, deploy its legs, slow almost to a stop off the coast of Cape Canaveral, and then drop itself delicately into the drink. Mr Musk gives himself a slightly-less-than-even chance of pulling this off.
Will you walk with me, Grasshopper?
If it does work, though, it will be the most dramatic demonstration yet of technology that the firm has been working on for several years. In 2012 SpaceX began flying an unwieldy-looking legged test rocket called Grasshopper. This was able to hover, manoeuvre around in mid-air, and land itself back on the pad that launched it.
Then, last September, it attempted to organise the controlled descent of a legless first stage. In what the firm's engineers call a useful failure, the rocket's engines restarted as planned, but as the stage descended it began spinning, flinging its remaining fuel against the walls of its tanks and starving its motors, causing it to crash.
This week's test is intended to end up with the rocket in the ocean, chiefly for safety reasons in case something does go wrong. But SpaceX's ultimate goal is to have the first stage fly all the way back to the pad it was launched from, and to land itself facing upwards. It will then be taken away, serviced, refilled with rocket fuel and readied to fly again. The firm wants, one day, to recover the Falcon's second stage, too—though the greater altitude and speed the second stage reaches makes this a far tougher proposition.
Still, being the biggest, the first stage is the most expensive part, so retrieving it should make a huge difference to launch costs. SpaceX already offers some of the lowest prices in the business. Its launch costs of $56m are around half those of its competitors. Mr Musk has said in the past that a reusable rocket could cut those costs by at least half again.
If SpaceX can make its technology work, that will be the biggest advance in rocketry for decades. Whether it will translate into higher demand for space flight is less clear. Jeff Foust, who edits the Space Review, an industry newsletter, argues that even dramatically lower launch costs will do little to change the economics of the industry, at least for the governments and firms that make up almost all of its current customers. Launch costs, as Mr Foust points out, are but a small part of the total cost of developing, building and running a satellite network.
Mike Gold, an executive at Bigelow Aerospace, a firm that makes inflatable space stations—and which has an agreement with SpaceX to launch its products—thinks that most of the interest will come from people and organisations so far denied access to space. "Putting a big rocket like the Falcon in range of mid-size companies, research institutions and even wealthy private individuals, that's a game-changer," he says. "When the laser was first invented, no one had any idea what it might be used for. Today they're everywhere. We're still at that early stage with cheap rockets."
Perhaps. But although SpaceX is a commercial firm, simple profitability is not its only goal. Mr Musk has been perfectly frank about his long-term aim: "to die on Mars, preferably not on impact." After the Falcon 9, the firm plans a beefier version called the Falcon Heavy. That, in turn, would be a dress rehearsal for something called the Mars Colonial Transporter.
Mr Musk wants to build a machine that would let him offer prospective colonists a (one-way) trip to the Martian surface for about $500,000—or, as he puts it, roughly the cost of a nice house in California. Perfecting reusability is essential for achieving that dream.
If you build it, will they come?
Hard-headed commentators may roll their eyes at such ambition. And history suggests reusability is difficult to do properly. The shuttle itself, for instance, was intended to fly every week. In the end, it made only 135 trips over the course of 30 years. There is a credible case that it proved more expensive, in the long run, than old-fashioned throwaway rockets would have done. Yet SpaceX has already shaken up an industry once mired in stifling conservatism. A successful fully reusable rocket would just be the latest example in a long tradition of it confounding its critics.
GAO report offers good news, but also warnings, about performance of NASA programs
Jeff Foust – Space Politics
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Tuesday its annual assessment of "large-scale" NASA projects. The good news of the report was that NASA, by and large, is doing well in terms of cost and schedule performance of its major programs: an average cost growth of 3% and launch delay of 2.8 months for 14 selected programs in their implementation phase, compared to average cost growth of 3.9% and launch delay of 4.0 months in 2013. Those figures exclude the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); when included, the average cost growth in the 2014 report rises to 37.8% and the average launch delay to 6.6 months given that large program's major overruns. However, the averages with JWST included are still an improvement over 2013.
Prior to the report's release, NASA officials had been emphasizing the good performance they were seeing on most of their missions. "More and more the last few years, our missions are coming in on schedule and on budget," said Craig Tupper, director of the resources management division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), in a briefing to the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) science committee last week. "That certainly helps us to maintain stability in the program."
There are, though, a few problems with the portfolio of NASA programs. The GAO report flagged the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission, whose cost has increased by at least 15 percent. That's triggered a review and replan of the mission, which will likely miss its planned May 2017 launch date. "That 556 number is going to go up a lot," Tupper warned at the NAC meeting, referring to the original estimated development cost of the spacecraft of $556 million.
The problem with ICESat-2 is due to a "very challenging instrument development," said Peg Luce, deputy director of the earth science division of NASA SMD, later at the same meeting. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, which is developing the spacecraft's sole instrument is putting the "cream of the crop in in-house instrument development" on the program to get the laser altimeter instrument on track. The revised plan for the mission will be presented to NASA's Program Management Council at the end of May, she said.
Potentially bigger issues than the overrun on ICESat-2, though, are uncertainties about much larger programs. The GAO report notes that nearly three quarters of the overall budget for major programs currently belongs to only four programs: JWST, the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion, and Commercial Crew. "Any cost or schedule overrun on NASA's largest, most complex projects could have a ripple effect on the portfolio and has the potential to postpone or even cancel altogether projects in earlier development stages," the report warns.
The GAO is particularly concerned that, based on where these largest programs currently are, the risk for overruns is high. "JWST will soon enter integration and testing—the point at which cost growth and schedule delays are most likely," the report states. "Additionally, there are questions about the realism of the SLS and Orion cost estimates." SLS and Orion aren't included in the cost and schedule figures above because the programs are still in their formulation phase, although NASA officials have stated that—at least for now—those programs remain on track.
The Time for a New, All-American Advanced Liquid Rocket Engine Is Now | Commentary
Mark Albrecht and Don Kerr – Roll Call
In 1972, President Richard Nixon committed the United States to a space shuttle to meet all launch needs for America's space program — for national security, civil space, human spaceflight and the commercial marketplace. Now, the consequences of this decision and others emphasizing globalization fundamentally threaten America's vital access to space.
Because we put all our launch eggs in one basket with the shuttle, the United States delayed by two decades any development of new launch capability. When we restarted a program in new launch technologies, our emphasis on globalization left our space launch infrastructure without a critical element, namely a large, advanced-hydrocarbon-fueled rocket engine. Russia has had this capability for decades, China will soon have it, and the United States lags well behind. To protect vital U.S. national security and economic interests in the 21st century, America needs to develop an advanced-hydrocarbon-fueled rocket engine.
Recently, Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson wrote about returning to realpolitik. "Globalization," he said, "could never swamp everything else. Economics is not omnipotent. Markets promote prosperity and deliver benefits, but they also stir instability and impose costs." The geopolitical reality of 2014 in Syria, Iran, Crimea and Ukraine is that certain elements of vital American national security infrastructure can no longer be "outsourced" in pursuit of benefits from globalization.
Today American space access is largely dependent on Russia. Crew transport to the International Space Station is provided entirely by Russia. Our national security launch infrastructure depends on propulsion hardware that is imported from Russia.
America and Russia have a positive history of space cooperation. From Apollo-Soyuz to ISS in orbit, Russian and U.S. leaders have seen the benefits of cooperation in space exploration and commerce. In the 1990s those policies led America's aerospace companies to form joint ventures with Russian aerospace companies. These ventures were created and, on net, paid dividends to Russian and American interests.
In the heady post-Cold War '90s, these relationships reached their zenith when Lockheed Martin offered the U.S. Air Force an Atlas V launch vehicle powered by the Russian RD-180 liquid oxygen/kerosene engine for affordable, reliable access to space. This proposal was accepted and today is a workhorse of U.S. national security space access.
But as Samuelson concludes, after 20 years of globalization, we are "left today (with a) messy mix of old and new. Countries pursue their interests in ways that involve, but are not limited to their economic interests." It is time for the United States to step back from decisions on our space program that clearly tilted too heavily towards globalization and post-Cold War rapprochement with Russia.
We do not suggest that space cooperation with Russia is bad or that it should be totally curtailed or discouraged, but simply that there are elements of U.S. infrastructure that cannot be outsourced indefinitely. We must revitalize America's space infrastructure, and the right place to start is with an advanced-hydrocarbon-fueled booster engine — an engine critical to U.S. leadership in rocket propulsion for access to space.
America has not been idle in rocket engine development over the past 20 years. Today we produce several advanced engines — the RS-68 engine for the Delta IV rocket; the RL-10 upper stage engine for Atlas and Delta IV; and refurbished RS-25s for Space Launch System. The Merlin engine for Falcon launch vehicles is a relatively small hydrocarbon engine derived from an older U.S. technology that is not as efficient as current-generation oxidizer-rich staged combustion (ORSC) engines like the 30-year-old RD-180. ORSC engines offer performance advantages significantly affecting launch vehicle design, operations and safety, and provide spacecraft designers with a better launch environment.
These advantages can be maintained by developing a new advanced liquid oxygen/kerosene rocket engine produced in the United States. This new engine could be the replacement engine for updated Atlas, Delta, Antares and Falcon launch vehicles, power strap-on boosters for SLS, and enable future low cost reusable launch systems. By utilizing the engine across launch vehicles, efficient rate production can assure affordability for all. Such an advanced engine can be developed and in production in under four years.
The first building block of a national space program is the powerful, affordable, efficient and safe first-stage liquid-fueled rocket engine that sits under it. An advanced large OSRC hydrocarbon-fueled engine — all-American designed and built — is easily within our reach. We should build it now to assure the continued availability of economic and national security benefits derived from access to space.
Mark Albrecht served as executive secretary of the White House National Space Council and president of Lockheed Martin International Launch Services. Don Kerr served as the principal deputy director of National Intelligence and director of the National Reconnaissance Office.
Mini satellites prove their scientific power
Proliferation of 'CubeSats' offers fresh and fast way to gather space data.
Nicola Jones – Nature
A tiny box orbiting Earth is sending home big data. Built mostly by undergraduate students for less than US$1.5 million, the 10 centimetre × 10 cm × 30 cm satellite, called Firefly, is now beaming back information on terrestrial γ-ray flashes — energetic bursts that are triggered by lightning and fired out into space.
Firefly, which launched in November, is the first satellite devoted to studying the flashes, and scientists are eagerly awaiting the results. "I think this will be really amazing," says Therese Moretto Jorgensen, a programme director in the geospace sciences division of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia.
Firefly is part of a growing band of mini satellites known as CubeSats that are now coming into their scientific own. Thanks to cheap parts and free launches, CubeSat launches are booming. As scientists and engineers prepare to meet next week for their annual CubeSat Developers' Workshop in San Luis Obispo, California, they are celebrating a record 63 deployments last year, nearly half the total of about 130 since launches began in 2003 (see 'Good things in small packages'). Experts say that the machines are at last starting to tackle valuable science questions. "After ten years, they're finally doing something more than just saying, 'Hi, I'm alive'," says space historian Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. CubeSats have been deployed for everything from detecting the electromagnetic signals that might accompany earthquakes to monitoring the production of bacterial proteins in space. One mission is even planning to be the first to leave Earth's orbit: INSPIRE, a pair of CubeSats that could launch as early as the end of this year. It will trek 1.5 million kilometres — 1% of the distance to the Sun — and, from there, map the charged particles of the solar wind that shoot out from the Sun.
CubeSats were invented in 1999 as an educational tool. They were designed to be small and simple enough for graduate students to build, and they had a standard size, to make it easy for rockets to accommodate them. Robert Twiggs, an aerospace engineer at Stanford University in California, and the satellite department at the California Polytechnic State Institute in San Luis Obispo designed a 10-cm-a-side box: just big enough for a communications unit, solar panels, a battery and a few extras. The total package weighs in at about 1 kilogram. The first CubeSats launched in 2003, when six projects hitched a ride on a Russian Eurockot launch vehicle for about $40,000 per cube.
The format took off. In 2010, NASA started a CubeSat Launch Initiative, which each year offers a free ride to a dozen or more successful applicants as hitchhikers on primary loads. The initiative has awarded launch spots to more than 100 projects, although only 24 have been successfully shot into orbit so far (the rest are on a waiting list). Sierra Nevada Plans Additional Dream Chaser Flight Tests in Fall
Douglas Messier – Parabolic Arc
Sierra Nevada Corporation will conduct additional drop tests of its Dream Chaser space shuttle at Edwards Air Force Base in the fall, Co-program Director John Curry said during the recent Space Tech Expo in Long Beach, Calif.
The approach and landing tests will be conducted using an upgraded engineering test vehicle that glided to a landing at Edwards last October. The upgrades will include the avionics, software, and guidance, navigation and control systems designed for use on the orbital Dream Chaser spacecraft, Curry said.
The schedule puts completion of Dream Chaser's drop test milestone at least 17 months behind the original schedule, which called for free flights to be complete in April 2013. The tests could also be conducted after NASA has already decided on which of three competitors to continue funding in the next round of it Commercial Crew Program.
In the competition to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, Sierra Nevada is facing strong competition from Boeing and SpaceX. Faced with limited funding, NASA is expected to eliminate at least one competitor for the next round, which will see the winner or winners build and flight test vehicle(s).
NASA has said it hopes to award the next round of contracts in August. Each of the companies has submitted proposals for the next round that NASA officials are now reviewing.
Both Boeing and SpaceX have experienced some slippage in their schedules. And NASA amended the agreements with all three competitors, extending the current round from the April-May time frame to August while funding additional milestones for each company.
However, the slips in the Boeing and SpaceX schedules have been typically measured from one to several months, depending upon the individual milestones involved. Both companies say they are on track to complete all their milestones by August when the current funding round ends.
Sierra Nevada completed a single free flight of its Dream Chaser engineering model in Oct. 26 for which it received a $7 million milestone payment from NASA. The vehicle was dropped from a helicopter and successfully maneuvered to a touchdown on the runway at Edwards Air Force Base.
The vehicle crashed upon touchdown when one of its landing gears failed to properly deploy, causing the Dream Chaser to skid off the runway. Despite the failure, NASA declared the test successful in meeting the objectives of the milestone. The landing gear is different from what will be used on spaceflights.
The successful flight test was a milestone from the previous round of commercial crew funding. It was to be followed by at least one and as many as five additional drop tests "to reduce risk due to aerodynamic uncertainties in the subsonic approach and landing phase of flight and to mature the Dream Chaser aerodynamic database." Completion of the milestone is worth $8 million.
NASA Wants Ideas to Recycle Precious Oxygen on Deep-Space Voyages
When humans leave Earth to explore planets like Mars and other hostile environments in outer space, they'll need to supply their own breathable oxygen.
But as Michael Gazarik, associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, says, "You just can't bring all the air with you."
In a call with reporters Wednesday (April 16), Gazarik said the ability to recycle oxygen will be critical for future manned missions. His office is now seeking proposals for systems to safely and efficiently regenerate air on those long voyages.
NASA already has systems in place on the International Space Station to recycle around 40 percent of the astronauts' air supply, Gazarik said, but NASA is looking for new technology that can increase the oxygen recovery rate to at least 75 percent.
NASA doesn't just want to improve its oxygen recovery rate. The new technology must also be lighter or take up less space and reduce power consumption, compared with the current air-making system, space agency officials said.
Through the Game Changing Development Program, the space agency is taking proposals from NASA centers, other government agencies, federally funded research groups, academic institutions, commercial companies and nonprofit organizations.
NASA officials say they expect to give out about six Phase I awards — up to $750,000 each — for teams who submit winning proposals for the design, development and testing of a technology that's capable of an oxygen recovery rate of at least 75 percent. Then under a two-year Phase II contract, the selected teams then will build an actual prototype.
NASA is also exploring the possibility of creating oxygen from other substances through a process called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). The space agency's next Mars rover is slated to launch in 2020. That spacecraft will be carrying a technology experiment that will turn carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere into breathable oxygen, Gazarik noted. He said his office sees this experiment as "the first step" in testing whether space resource utilization schemes will work on a remote planetary surface.
Advanced life support is just one of eight key areas the Space Technology Mission Directorate is investing in over the next 18 months, Gazarik said. Other fields of focus include high-power solar electric propulsion; advanced materials to make lighter fuel tanks and rocket structures; and deep-space communications systems that use lasers to beam messages across astronomical distances.
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