| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Mandatory: IT Security Training Due July 15
- Automated External Defibrillator Program Changes - Organizations/Social
- Lunch n' Cheer: U.S. vs. Germany World Cup Match
- Out & Allied's Proud Person of the Week
- JSC Showtime!
- Every Leader Must Know These & Digital Trends
- Sam's Club in Building 3 Café This Week - Community
- Have a Special Place in Your Heart for Comm?
- Blood Drive Thank You |  |
| Headlines - Mandatory: IT Security Training Due July 15
All personnel with access to NASA Information Technology (IT) systems must complete the annual Information Security Training Course titled: ITS-014-001 ANNUAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECURITY AND PRIVACY AWARENESS TRAINING. This training is mandatory and available in your SATERN Learning Plan. If the course is not on your Learning Plan and you are unable to locate it under the Learning History section as being completed, contact the SATERN Help Desk at 1-877-677-2123. Email JSC-ITSEC-TRAINING for further information. - Automated External Defibrillator Program Changes
Join the Occupational Health Branch today, June 24, at 1 p.m. in the Building 30A Auditorium as we outline and explain upcoming changes to JSC's AED Program. We will discuss the history of JSC'S AED program, upcoming location changes and deletions, the difference between a heart attack and sudden cardiac arrest, when AEDs should be used and JSC's Emergency Medical System. Also learn how everyone can help in the "chain of survival" by knowing the steps in the chain and how to sign up for free CPR and AED training. Event Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2014 Event Start Time:1:00 PM Event End Time:2:00 PM
Event Location: Building 30A Auditorium
Add to Calendar
Bob Martel x38581
[top] Organizations/Social - Lunch n' Cheer: U.S. vs. Germany World Cup Match
Support the homeland while you break for lunch on Thursday, June 26, when the USA takes on Germany in the 2014 FIFA World Cup match. The match will be broadcast for employee lunchtime enjoyment beginning at 11 a.m. in both café locations: Buildings 3 and 11. Also enjoy the menu competition as you choose between hot dogs and potato salad vs. brats and German potato salad. The Starport Gift Shops will be giving out a FREE U.S. flag (one per employee while supplies last), and employees wearing red, white and blue for the USA will receive 10 percent off store merchandise in the Starport Gift Shops. (The discount is also applicable for international employee customers wearing red, black and gold in support of Germany.) Standard exclusions applicable. - Out & Allied's Proud Person of the Week
Dr. Tam O'Shaughnessy is Chief Executive Officer of Sally Ride Science. O'Shaughnessy earned bachelor's and master's of science degrees in biology from Georgia State University. While teaching high school and college biology, she earned a doctorate in school psychology. O'Shaughnessy has extensive experience cultivating girls' and boys' interest in reading, math and science, and she is an award-winning children's science writer. She has written 12 children's science books, including six with Dr. Sally Ride. In 2001, Ride, O'Shaughnessy and three like-minded friends started Sally Ride Science with the goal of narrowing the gender gap in science. Today the company strives to spark the interest of all students in science, technology, engineering and math education and careers. To learn more about O'Shaughnessy and Sally Ride Science, visit this link. O'Shaughnessy will be speaking at JSC this Friday with Bear Ride (Sally's sister) and Lynn Sherr (Sally's biographer). Event Date: Friday, June 27, 2014 Event Start Time:11:00 AM Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Teague Auditorium
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Robert Blake x42525
[top] - JSC Showtime!
Emerge is looking to help JSC launch an effort called JSC Showtime! This would be a special-interest club at JSC devoted to the performing arts. The club will focus on JSC civil servants and contractors showcasing their artistic talents. Those who are interested will be able to participate in a variety of ways, such as acting, singing, production and technical support, choruses and orchestra. The focus of the club is to serve as an employee morale and welfare development opportunity. For any questions about this effort, please contact Ryan Hancock. - Every Leader Must Know These & Digital Trends
The JSC External Relations Office and SAIC/S&MA invite host Shama Kabani, CEO of the Marketing Zen Group, to speak on "The Seven Digital Trends Every Leader Must Know to Grow Your Organization." Date/Time CORRECTION: Thursday, June 26, from 11 a.m. to noon Location: Teague Auditorium Kabani will discuss/answer questions such as: - We hear a lot about social media, but how important is it?
- How is social media changing the way we communicate?
- Can NASA's "brand" be strengthened using social media?
- How important are current digital trends to NASA's future?
Kabani is author of the bestselling book, "The Zen of Social Marketing," and is an oft-quoted social media expert. Kabani has been featured by Business Week, Dallas Morning News, Entrepreneur, Fast company, Inc. Magazine, The New York Times, The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal. - Sam's Club in Building 3 Café This Week
Sam's Club representatives will be in the Building 3 Café Thursday, June 26, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to assist you with a new membership or annual renewal. Stop by the Sam's Club table this Thursday to see their current offers. Community - Have a Special Place in Your Heart for Comm?
What do Eileen Collins, Fred Haise, George Lucas and Nolan Ryan all have in common? They all began their great success at a community college! If community college played a role in your success, the Office of Education would like to hear your story. Your unique story can help shape the NASA Education National Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) project. Sign up to hear more about NCAS on July 10 from noon to 1 p.m. in Building 12, Room 134. Bring your lunch and share your community college story! We will provide dessert. Sign up in V-CORPs. - Blood Drive Thank You
Thank you to all those who took the time to donate at last week's blood drive. St. Luke's collected a total of 195 units of blood. Retirees are always welcome to return and donate. Send your e-mail address to teresa.gomez@nasa.gov if you would like to be added to the mailing list for notification. Mark your calendar for the next blood drive on Aug. 20 and 21. | |
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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
Tuesday – June 24, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
It's time for NASA to abandon the Apollo mission model
John K. Strickland – Space Review
While the writers of both NASA's new "Pioneering Space" report and the large new National Research Council (NRC) report on human space exploration (see "A new pathway to Mars", The Space Review, June 9, 2014) are dedicated and well-meaning—the NRC report (is extensive, detailed, and thorough—they seem to have ducked some of the critical decisions and issues that need to be made or resolved for a NASA-led Mars program, or any effective program beyond low Earth orbit (BLEO) to be realized. NASA itself has the ability to see these problems but it is still not facing them head-on. It is still headed down an antique, dead-end pathway.
Gerstenmaier Praises NRC Human Space Exploration Report
Marcia S. Smith – Space Policy Online
The head of NASA's human exploration program, Bill Gerstenmaier, had good words to say today about the new National Research Council (NRC) report on the future of human space exploration. Until today, the only public NASA reaction was a brief press release the day the report was released.
How to Innovate Like NASA
Matteo Emanuelli – Space Safety Magazine
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is, without argument, the most famous space agency in the world. NASA is the Apollo program, the Space Shuttle, the planetary probes at the boundary of the solar system, the rovers riding on Mars, and much, much more. We usually see just the amazing results: Curiosity gently landing on the surface of the Red Planet, astronauts floating outside the International Space Station (ISS), the images from the Hubble space telescope – but where did these achievements come from?
Newcomers gain traction in race for NASA's new spacecraft deal
Richard Burnett - Orlando Sentinel
An established aerospace giant and two newcomers are in the final stretch of a competition to build the next "taxi service" to the International Space Station, and experts say the upstarts are gaining traction.
Russian rocket blasts wildlife tracker into orbit
Xochitl Rojas-Rocha - Science Magazine's Science Insider
Last week, from the Yasny launch base in eastern Russia, a rocket soared into space carrying several dozen satellites, many of them dedicated to scientific endeavors. An instrument designed to track massive dust storms, for example, represents Iraq's first spacecraft. But another of the modest-sized orbiters, dubbed cube satellites, marks an important step toward an orbiting system dedicated to tracking large-scale movements of animals small enough to hold in an adult hand. "For this satellite, it's a lot about solving the mysteries of migrations," says zoologist Kasper Thorup of the University of Copenhagen, who is in charge of the wildlife tracker and attended the Russian launch.
Unmanned Probes Blaze Trail For Humans
Fleet of planetary probes is paving the way for humans to Mars, and pushing deeper
Frank Morring, Jr. | Aviation Week & Space Technology
The first men and women to set foot on Mars will not be the first to peer closely at the planet—only the first to visit in person.
May 2014 was Earth's warmest May on record
Doyle Rice – USA Today
Last month was the warmest May for the Earth on record, according to a climate report released Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Best Places spotlight: Independence reigns at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
An agile approach to projects lets IT pros take on multiple roles and learn new skills.
Robert L. Mitchell - ComputerWorld
There's the cool factor of sitting in on lunchtime seminars about astrophysics or finding new planets, the chance to develop educational mobile apps such as Spacecraft 3D, the opportunity to work with emerging technologies like Google Glass and the thrill of working side-by-side with scientists and engineers on flight projects.
Greetings from Earth! NASA Spacecraft to Carry Message for Aliens
A NASA probe that's expected to leave the solar system after it finishes its mission at Pluto and beyond will carry a message intended for any alien life-form that comes across it in the far future.
SpaceX puts Falcon 9 rocket launch on hold until July
Irene Klotz – Reuters
Bedeviled by a spate of technical problems, Space Exploration Technologies on Monday said it will suspend launch attempts of its next Falcon 9 rocket until early July.
What Happens If You Have A Heart Attack In Space?
I flew in zero-G with a team of college students testing a device that could save astronauts' lives.
Rose Pastore – Popular Science
We're weightless, about 34,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, trying not to vomit from motion sickness while wiggling an ultrasound probe into the esophagus of a $26,000 mannequin. In a moment, the hollowed-out Boeing 727 will reach the top of its parabola and plunge 10,000 feet, nose down—there's just enough time before the dive for the three college students conducting this microgravity experiment to snap a few grainy ultrasound images of the mannequin's lifeless heart.
NASA, Rockwell Collins to Test UAS Communications
Woodrow Bellamy III – Avionics Today
Rockwell Collins and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have announced a new project to test communications capabilities for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The project will feature a NASA-operated S-3 Viking aircraft and the University of Iowa Operator Performance Laboratory's Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft serving as surrogates for UAS during two phases of testing.
Roscosmos Disavows Plan to Send Space Tourists to Moon
Anna Dolgov, Matthew Bodner – The Moscow Times
Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, will not be involved in a plan to send two space tourists on a flight around the Moon and was not consulted about the project, the federal space agency said.
COMPLETE STORIES
It's time for NASA to abandon the Apollo mission model
John K. Strickland – Space Review
While the writers of both NASA's new "Pioneering Space" report and the large new National Research Council (NRC) report on human space exploration (see "A new pathway to Mars", The Space Review, June 9, 2014) are dedicated and well-meaning—the NRC report (is extensive, detailed, and thorough—they seem to have ducked some of the critical decisions and issues that need to be made or resolved for a NASA-led Mars program, or any effective program beyond low Earth orbit (BLEO) to be realized. NASA itself has the ability to see these problems but it is still not facing them head-on. It is still headed down an antique, dead-end pathway.
The new 285-page report on our future in space from the National Academies, titled "Pathways to Exploration" and issued on June 4, has correctly identified some of the technical issues that remain to be fully solved before humans can safely land on Mars. The three issues the report deemed most critical are entry, descent and landing (EDL) for Mars; advanced in-space power and propulsion; and the hearth-related issues of radiation exposure. However, they have ignored several other critical ones, such as cryogenic propellant storage and transfer, use of local materials to support expeditions, and the development of reusable in-space vehicles and robotic in-space construction capabilities. The primary focus on 50-year-old style expendable space transport, and ignorance of logistics, is a flagrant symptom of a continuing reliance on the "Apollo Mission" model in the way that the report's authors and NASA management think about human space missions. As long as they continue to think about missions this way, the door to the future for, at least the NASA-led space program, will effectively be blocked.
The "Pioneering Space" report issued by NASA in late May has been thoroughly analyzed by Dr. Paul Spudis. His article discusses exactly, and bluntly, what needs to be said about the report, covering a set of characteristics that exemplify the Apollo Mission model. In summary, Spudis says: "this new 'pathway' [to Mars, as described in the report] is the very antithesis of space permanence and Earth-independence." I fully agree with him that the report writers are willing to "talk the talk", but NASA itself is not willing to "walk the walk": they use the right buzzwords but propose no matching actions. A quick look through this report reveals a number of such unsupported buzzwords, such as "permanent presence," "Pioneering," "Earth Independent," "sustainability," and even "infrastructure." Spudis has continued his analysis with a review of the NRC report. Both articles are well worth reading.
In a nutshell, the Apollo Mission model relies on a fully expendable system consisting of a giant expendable rocket, one or two expendable types of crew vehicles, and a focus primarily on science and exploration. There would be no base construction at any destination, no unmanned cargo vehicles to provide robust material support, no integration to support multiple goals, and no or little involvement with, or support from, the private sector. This is the essence of the "flags and footprints" type of space mission, justly lauded 40 years ago when it was really necessary, but now a major obstacle to progress. Yet in its approach to human Mars and other BLEO missions, NASA seems to support another set of such missions, each to a different destination and none providing support for subsequent missions. As an example, all the officially sanctioned Mars mission models to date have assumed that humans would land on Mars using expendable landers, instead of reusable ferries.
What, then, is the opposite of the Apollo Mission model? It is the concept of a set of continuing missions designed to operate with a set of reusable space vehicles (both for crew and cargo), allowing the creation (and construction) of enduring infrastructure in specific locations in space and at surface destinations beyond low Earth orbit, using local materials, and making each subsequent mission easier, safer, and cheaper. One very critical aspect of this concept is the use of fully reusable spacecraft in an integrated cislunar transport system. Despite its name, such a cislunar system is not focused exclusively on access to the Moon, but to multiple cislunar and other inner solar system destinations. While at least one booster is about one year away from being operationally reusable, almost all spacecraft and other boosters are not, and according to some are in fact prohibited from being reused by NASA.
A transportation system, whether it is on Manhattan or in space, consists of both transport vehicles and transport infrastructure. What good is a subway if there are no subway stations? By creating a series of space logistics bases—in LEO, at L1 or L2, and another in low Mars orbit—you create not only a set of refuges for crews in case of problems, but you also greatly increase the reliability of mission success by breaking a trip into smaller segments, each of which can be traversed as a round trip by a single stage (reusable) rocket vehicle. (The only trip segment where this cannot be easily done is from the surface to LEO.) The best example of such a round trip is from L1 or L2 to the lunar surface and back again. Using liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen propellants, a ferry of almost any size can deliver a payload equal to its own dry mass to the lunar surface over and over again. An L1 or L2 base is especially important as a safe place to accumulate vehicles, cargo, and propellant, safe from the high space debris impact levels in LEO. The set of bases creates a logistics pyramid, similar to the system of a chain of camps used for decades by Mt. Everest expeditions.
Some experts, including the NRC report writers, think that space infrastructure, such as the existing space station, creates a financial drain on the space exploration budget instead of advancing the program, and that to progress to a new program, old ones such as the station must be abandoned. This dangerous mindset merely continues the thinking of impermanence. Maintaining the station currently costs the US over $2 billion a year. However, if we are to use reusable spacecraft, they must be based, refueled, and maintained at stations or bases of some kind. Logistics capabilities need to be added to the station, or a new LEO logistics base must be built. The further we go away from Earth, the more stations and bases we will need to maintain. Some of these bases can be human-tended and need to be partly self-maintaining.
The NRC report does recognize the need for continued microgravity research, but ignores the need for testing the vehicles and equipment for use beyond LEO. Some kind of a station is also needed to do this. What is also critically needed is research, development, and testing to reduce the amount of money and crew time it takes to operate and maintain habitats and exploration vehicles. Why not use the station we already have for this work? At the moment, funding for such work is not forthcoming due to the same misplaced priorities in Congress and at NASA that have prevented the development of propellant depots. However, in spite of the continuing Congressional disbelief in what amounts to an impending "reusable rocket revolution," the costs of travel to, and resupply of, space stations and bases of any kind should drop significantly as privately developed reusable boosters come into wider use. This should free up funds for the research work, and will later make building and supporting multiple stations and bases at the same time practical.
Another major aspect of privatization is the increasing reliance on private industry for launch vehicles and, now, spacecraft. The development of the reusable Dragon V2 capsule is a good example. The smaller, more integrated teams working for business, with a focus on reducing costs, can often create a better, cheaper, and more reliable design and get it built faster than a government-led team. Design commonality of components and design integration are hallmarks of many successful industry projects, while a total lack of integration is a common condition of many government programs. The asteroid retrieval proposal is a good example of no integration, where there are no plans to use materials from the retrieved asteroid for crew radiation shielding or asteroid mining tests.
Another sign of up-to-date thinking is the use of robotic cargo spacecraft to carry supplies and cargo for crews on missions. With Apollo-style missions, the only supplies are what the crew has in their capsule. The resupply of the space station by the Dragon, Cygnus, and other vehicles is an embryonic form of this, but only one of the current spacecraft could possibly be reused, and "missions" to the space station are not exploration missions. For real missions to the surface of the Moon or Mars, hundreds to thousands of tons of equipment are needed.
To make delivery of such robust levels of equipment and supplies practical, reusable in-space vehicles are a must. Unfortunately, the absence of references to reusable vehicles is apparent in both of the current reports. The NASA report refers to reusable systems, and storage of cryogenic propellants, but nowhere does it refer to reusable spacecraft or cryogenic propellant depots, along with the critical requirement to be able to transfer the cryogenic propellants from delivery tankers to the depots and from the depots to the vehicles that need fuel. Without perfecting this technology, we will not be able to use cryogenic propellants in any reusable space vehicle. This would force an increase in fuel mass and a decrease in payload mass. Logically, the vast bulk of any Moon or Mars base and its equipment should be delivered by separate robot spacecraft, and not as part of a crew vehicle. Virtually no funding is currently available to advance these technologies.
As Spudis points out, the ability to construct things in space is critical to space development. The use of large external robot arms to do construction and then logistics work in space, such as at logistics bases, is a key component. Some needed structures, like trusses, are "balloon cargo," too large and bulky to be practically launched from the ground. Concepts for deploying trusses in space were developed decades ago and then abandoned. Exploiting the rapidly developing robotics capabilities will allow us to bypass this balloon cargo problem. Truss construction in space could provide critically needed docking space at the space station. The existing combination of the Canadarm2, Dextre, and the Mobile Transporter on rails is an embryonic form of what is needed, and also what is being underutilized. Up to now, the construction of large structures in space has been very limited due to the enormous launch costs. It took over a decade to build the space station, which has a mass of only about 500 tons. Again, with the advent of reusable boosters, we will soon be able to launch thousands of tons into orbit in a single year. We will want to be able to take advantage of this ability.
NASA's "Pathways to Exploration" report places some of the blame for current problems on the spending levels available, which have seen NASA's spending power decline gradually with a flat budget, and with no annual increases to match inflation. Unfortunately, even though any infusion of money would help some, the current level of political control by Congress over how NASA spends its budget would virtually guarantee that most of any additional money would be wasted on pork such as the SLS.
What is more critical is that any money that NASA does get be directed into the right areas.
Many of the recommendations in both reports seem more oriented to staying within the budget, rather than innovations that would make much more efficient use of whatever budget existed. With its focus on the budget limits, and the prevailing Apollo-style mindset, a major failing of the NRC report is that the writers assume the same high launch and operational costs as for the space station and shuttle, pegging the cost of a manned Mars program between 300 and 600 billion dollars and taking until 2060 to even reach Mars once. They conclude that without some very unlikely budget increases, such a program is fiscally impossible. The upfront discussion of the huge cost of the entire 40-year-long program, instead of the annual cost, is what killed the original Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) back in 1990. (Some still believe that this tactic was deliberate). Based on the high launch rates and high launch masses that will be possible by the end of this decade, coupled with privatized, semi-mass production of space vehicles, much more capable expeditions, including related lunar operations, should be possible for well under $100 billion.
There is some other questionable thinking in the reports themselves. The NRC report groups the motive to provide a backup copy of humanity and its culture via off-Earth colonies as an "aspirational" rationale and at the same time, groups inspiring students with pragmatic rationales. Most of you know that backing up your computer data is pretty pragmatic, but can we make the mental leap to the concept of backing up humanity itself? The pragmatic, business-oriented people at SpaceX have.
The same report also points out that "it is not possible to say whether off-Earth settlements could eventually be developed that would outlast human presence on Earth", without adding similar provisos to the other rationales. At the same time, they assume that comparatively boring trips to the space station will inspire students to study math and science. As is well known, to inspire you must do something that is inspiring. The human survival goal summary makes no mention of planetary defense from asteroid impacts enhancing human survival. Adding human survival (including planetary defense) as a pragmatic goal for NASA would legitimize real space development efforts and tip thinking away from pure Apollo-style (science-only) exploration. The NRC report also focuses on the exploratory "ultimate" goal of Mars, without mentioning the development goals of space materials and energy utilization.
Development goals are complementary to exploratory goals, since both need a transportation system to reach the object or location that is to be explored or exploited.
Finally, and most shocking, is this statement from the NRC report: "Any defensible calculation of tangible, quantifiable benefits—spinoff technologies, attraction of talent to scientific careers, scientific knowledge, and so on—is unlikely to ever demonstrate a positive return on the massive investments required by human spaceflight." This seems to indicate that the report writers have either never heard of the massive benefits of space solar power with its ability to end global warming, and the risks and benefits posed by asteroids, or they have chosen to ignore them.
To succeed with a practical and affordable space exploration and development program, we need clear thinking and carefully chosen goals and methods. We need to free ourselves from the cobwebs of past mindsets such as the Apollo Mission model. Let's try the cislunar transport model instead. As Paul Spudis points out, "A cislunar transportation system can take us to the planets – to Mars."
John Strickland is a member of the board of directors of the National Space Society and an Advocate with the Space Frontier Foundation, but he does not speak for any organization: his views are his own.
Gerstenmaier Praises NRC Human Space Exploration Report
Marcia S. Smith – Space Policy Online
The head of NASA's human exploration program, Bill Gerstenmaier, had good words to say today about the new National Research Council (NRC) report on the future of human space exploration. Until today, the only public NASA reaction was a brief press release the day the report was released.
"I think there are a lot of good things in the report that are noteworthy," he said, adding that "there may be some actionable items" in the report that the committee might want to take back to NAC. He also said that it would be interesting to see how the report is received by Congress at the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing on Wednesday.
Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD), and his team have been diligently endeavoring to articulate how the Obama Administration's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) fits into a long term goal of sending humans to Mars. ARM has received little support in Congress or the space community broadly.
In a number of presentations this year, he has laid out NASA's view of the steps to Mars, including ARM, and makes a point of distinguishing between "exploration" and "pioneering." Exploration is an out-and-back paradigm while pioneering implies going to stay. He believes NASA should focus on pioneering.
Earlier in the day, Jason Crusan, HEOMD's Director of Advanced Exploration Systems, followed that theme in providing an update on NASA's strategy for sending humans to Mars, now referred to as the "Evolvable Mars Campaign" or EMC. Instead of Apollo-style trips, Crusan articulated a plan that builds up capabilities that enable regular trips to Mars, with staging areas in lunar orbit, at the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, or other "low delta-V" locations where fuel requirements are minimized. The staging areas would be used to "aggregate" Mars "mission vehicle stacks" that would make the trip to and from Mars. Some elements of the stacks – like the crew module -- will make a direct return to Earth while others will return to the staging areas for refurbishment.
The key message was that it will be an evolutionary effort with one step building upon the next. The initial step is ongoing work on the International Space Station, the next step is ARM, and NASA is continuing to do trade studies on what comes next.
Whether ARM should be pursued or not is one area where NASA and the NRC disagree. The NRC concluded that it "has failed to engender substantial enthusiasm either in Congress or the scientific community." Still, the two do agree on a number of issues: that Mars is the long term goal for human space exploration, that international and commercial partnerships are essential to achieving that goal, and that the U.S. Government will have to increase NASA's human exploration budget above the rate of inflation if the goal is to be realized.
How to Innovate Like NASA
Matteo Emanuelli – Space Safety Magazine
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is, without argument, the most famous space agency in the world. NASA is the Apollo program, the Space Shuttle, the planetary probes at the boundary of the solar system, the rovers riding on Mars, and much, much more. We usually see just the amazing results: Curiosity gently landing on the surface of the Red Planet, astronauts floating outside the International Space Station (ISS), the images from the Hubble space telescope – but where did these achievements come from?
"Like many of my generation, I was enthralled by the flights of Mercury, Gemini, and especially Apollo," writes Pyle. "As I grew older and matured into a career and family life, fond memories of NASA's 'Golden Years stayed with me."
Pyle, who is also producer, writer, and director of documentary programming for The History Channel and Discovery Communications, has authored many publications about NASA. In writing the book, Pyle interviewed many dozens of NASA people, not only astronauts, but also the "ordinary" personnel, from the space age forward, who contributed their experiences with great enthusiasm
"The men and women who worked on Apollo, the shuttle, ISS and the myriad robotic explorations of the solar system have a great passion for what they do, and it shows," said Pyle in an interview with Space Safety Magazine. "Their enthusiasm extends beyond their individual areas of interest, and blossoms into a contagious desire to share what they do with the public."
A Bold Journey
The book presents the solutions developed by NASA for its most important missions, translated into general suggestions applicable to anyone, from the engineer working on a new planetary rover to the entrepreneur facing hard challenges and difficult-to-reach objectives.
"Think boldly, be daring, exhibit confidence, and, above all, test everything. Ducking the potential for failure can lead to disaster," writes Pyle when describing how Rob Manning, Flight System Chief Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his team managed to convince NASA management of the feasibility of the Sky Crane solution to land Curiosity on Mars.
Pyle takes the readers into well-known events from the point of view of the true actors who made history: engineers, scientists, astronauts, depicting their battles against bureaucrats and sometimes the "old way of doing things." You will learn that innovation is not always welcomed: although Werner von Braun was initially allowed to work only with ballistic missiles and not with satellites, he conducted flight experiments disguised as "nose cone reentry tests" which he had later to give away to the US Navy. The military did not make good use of his research and in a hurry to fill the gap after the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957, they translated von Braun's research into the failure of the Vanguard program. This failure however, opened the way for von Braun and his team to start working on satellites and eventually develop the Saturn V. An example of the right people for the right job.
Particular attention is given to the achievements of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Programs tend to run more quickly at JPL due to the nature of robotic exploration and human lives not being directly at stake," says Pyle. "While the Lab receives just a fraction of NASA's overall funding, they are able to do much with limited resources. All these factors contribute to rapid innovation."
What Future for NASA?
The last chapters of the book deal with the new waves of space entrepreneurs and how NASA adapted to the 21st century and to the decommissioning of the Space Shuttle. Budget restrictions and shifted priorities could have delivered NASA to a path of slow decline. NASA found instead another way to express its innovation: through the private sector and visionary entrepreneurs like Elon Musk.
"The work companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are doing is 'sexier' and gets more press coverage," explains Pyle who also emphasized that NASA has provided much of the technology, research, and safety protocols that private industry is able to capitalize upon. NASA will probably spend more time on exploration beyond Earth orbit while the private sector companies handle flights to and from Earth orbit, the space station, and other nearby destinations.
"Moving beyond Earth orbit is a much more difficult agenda, and one that is arguably best suited to government agencies at this point in time," Pyle told us. "Private industry should supply and support routine orbital access, leaving NASA with more flexibility to innovate and explore. Innovation and exploration are NASA's strongest abilities."
Invisibile Innovation
"The agency has also changed in some ways that are less desirable. While more demographically liberal, it is a more operationally conservative operation than it was in the past," writes Pyle. Needs and budget changed from the 60s and NASA adapted. However, according to Pyle, there is something that did not change: NASA is still striving to encourage innovation. "The techniques vary among field centers and departments. One common theme is freedom—most departments that are engaged in planning future activities are given something akin to a 'blue-sky' mandate."
"Think big, and don't just think outside the box, start beyond the box. Think beyond three dimensions, if you will."
Pyle points out also that much of NASA's innovation is somewhat invisible to the public. "You have to be proactive to find material (which is, in fact, easily available on the web) about the vast returns from Earth-focused spacecraft to measure climate change, global weather patterns, and agricultural data, for example," says Pyle.
"Innovation, The NASA Way" invites readers to embrace and pursue the constant search for novel ideas, despite challenges and low budget. Always keep in mind, it admonishes, the three commandments that helped NASA in all its most innovative achievement: be bold, be daring, be passionate.
Newcomers gain traction in race for NASA's new spacecraft deal
Richard Burnett - Orlando Sentinel
An established aerospace giant and two newcomers are in the final stretch of a competition to build the next "taxi service" to the International Space Station, and experts say the upstarts are gaining traction.
Boeing Co., SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp. are pushing rival designs for NASA's next manned spacecraft, which by 2017 would start taking American astronauts to the space station. It is a race with potentially billions of dollars and hundreds of Space Coast jobs at stake. NASA is expected to pick one or possibly two companies by September.
The space agency already has spent almost $1.5 billion on developing the spacecraft, with 40 percent of that amount going to Boeing. Despite that investment, Boeing is getting pressure from the newer players amid a flurry of media blitzes to establish their spaceflight credibility.
"Right now, I'd say the leader is SpaceX," said Roger Handberg, a space-policy expert and professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. "They are successfully launching a [cargo] capsule to the ISS, and the others aren't." Meanwhile, Elon Musk, SpaceX's billionaire founder, "is dominating the airwaves, trying to create the perception that SpaceX is the only option for this new deal," Handberg said.
The job of ferrying American astronauts to the space station has been done by Russia under contract with the U.S. since the end of the space-shuttle program in 2011. Mounting tensions between the two countries after Russia's invasion of Ukraine have given the spacecraft choice a sense of urgency. NASA hopes that will lead Congress to fund two winners — the agency's preferred approach because it would ensure having a backup plan.
Although Boeing may hold the edge in experience because it has worked on NASA missions for decades, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada have come up with edgier technology that could capture the imagination of the American public in this new space race, said Eddie Ellegood, director of aerospace development at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. Boeing and SpaceX are offering capsules; Sierra Nevada has a "mini-shuttle" called Dream Chaser.
"NASA tends to be conservative, especially with something so new like this," he said. "But I somehow think they'll opt for the SpaceX vehicle and Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser. It's just a gut feeling, but it might be time for something new now."
Experts say the factor least likely to influence the agency's decision is how many jobs the winner will create along the Space Coast or anywhere else. Cost should rule the day, they say, as NASA comes to grips with the tight federal budgets of the deficit-reduction era. Congress has allocated $800 million for the program in NASA's 2015 budget, though the agency doubts that is enough for development of the new craft.
"I really can't imagine NASA sitting around figuring out how it can create the most jobs with this contract," said John Pike, founder of Globalsecurity.org, an aerospace-research firm in Washington. "If they wanted to maximize employment in the aerospace industry, they could choose two winners and dual-source this work with duplicate production lines. But you have to know that's going to be just too expensive."
That may put a damper on Boeing, which has become a hometown choice in Brevard County. If it wins the contract, it plans to headquarter the program in Brevard, build its CST-100 capsule at Kennedy Space Center and bring 500 to 600 jobs from across the country.
Boeing would add nearly three times the number of jobs that rival Sierra Nevada, based near Reno, would bring to KSC. Sierra said it would add more than 200 jobs to its work force of 375 employees in Florida.
SpaceX would not comment on the capsule deal. "SpaceX has a longstanding commitment to the Space Coast that will only increase given the company's lease of Launch Pad 39A," SpaceX said in a statement. "That commitment is in place regardless of the decision made on the [crew capsule] contract."
Earlier this year, NASA awarded the Los Angeles-area company a long-term lease to manage KSC's Launch Complex 39A for commercial space launches.
Still, it appears that Boeing's KSC expansion would be far more substantial than its rivals', said Handberg, the UCF professor.
"That's what their argument has been, and that's why Florida likes it," he said. "If SpaceX wins with the Dragon, it will fly here, but it probably won't have that much of a presence here. They would build it elsewhere and fly in a ground crew to handle the launches."
Still, whoever wins the new spacecraft contract, people should tamp down their expectations about how many jobs the new manned-spaceflight industry will create, Handberg said.
"Boeing is not going to return the Space Coast to happy-days-are-here-again shuttle days," he said. "It will be much smaller, leaner activity."
Russian rocket blasts wildlife tracker into orbit
Xochitl Rojas-Rocha - Science Magazine's Science Insider
Last week, from the Yasny launch base in eastern Russia, a rocket soared into space carrying several dozen satellites, many of them dedicated to scientific endeavors. An instrument designed to track massive dust storms, for example, represents Iraq's first spacecraft. But another of the modest-sized orbiters, dubbed cube satellites, marks an important step toward an orbiting system dedicated to tracking large-scale movements of animals small enough to hold in an adult hand. "For this satellite, it's a lot about solving the mysteries of migrations," says zoologist Kasper Thorup of the University of Copenhagen, who is in charge of the wildlife tracker and attended the Russian launch.
Funded by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, the instrument, called DTUsat, will record data from 4.6-gram tags that researchers plan to place on animals such as the common cuckoo, a parasitic bird that lays its eggs in another species's nest. Affixed among the cuckoo's feathers, each tiny tag will relay the bird's position to the satellite circling thousands of meters above. DTUsat will then collect the tag's information and pass it on to a base station at DTU. Two of the tags have already been made, and the researchers hope to soon test whether they can connect to the now orbiting DTUsat.
Though an independent mission, DTUsat is a forerunner for the ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) project, an ambitious plan to equip birds and other small mammals with tags that transmit their location directly to the International Space Station, rather than via a satellite relay. The ICARUS project reflects growing interest in how small animal migration patterns are influenced by global issues such as climate change. Thorup and Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, the lead researcher for ICARUS, hope that the DTUsat's launch provides incentive to build location-transmitting tags that have the power to send signals to the ISS. The researchers speculate that the tags will be ready by the end of 2015. Now, the tags are still in the developmental stage and are about 5 grams, but Thorup and Wikelski hope that the tags will weigh as little as 1 gram in the future.
The ICARUS team hasn't finalized a list of animals they want to tag, but cuckoos could near the top of its list. The parents of the parasitic species abandon their eggs in the nest of other species, yet cuckoo chicks somehow know to migrate from Europe to Africa. "It's a crazy behavior that we don't really understand," says Margaret Crofoot, a member of the ICARUS team. "How do they know where to go? This is a bird that is too small to track using existing tags."
For ICARUS, each tag would be solar rechargeable. For the sake of efficiency, the tags would collect data constantly but only send it to the ISS when the space station passes overhead. Both of these tactics can help prolong battery life as the tags become smaller, eliminating the need for heavier batteries with longer lives.
But even as the tags shrink, the ICARUS team plans to tag animals large and small in the interest of conservation. One of the project's long-term goals is to attach tags to reintroduced or relocated Bornean orangutans displaced by deforestation. "We don't know where these animals go, we don't know what their fate is," Crofoot says.
However, DTUsat and ICARUS still have a long way to go before they can help researchers pursue any large-scale problems. DTUsat will track only six tags simultaneously, whereas ICARUS may track thousands. For ICARUS, the team will have to attach a large antenna to the ISS to compensate for the transmitters' small size. With funding from the German, Russian, and European space ggencies, they plan to mount such an antenna in 2015.
In the meantime, Thorup is hopeful the DTUsat will help answer questions about the cuckoo's oddball lifestyle. Does the cuckoo have a particular habitat that it must live in? he wonders. Will the cuckoo find a different habitat when global climate change inevitably affects its home? Soon the answers may be streaming into space and back to Earth.
Unmanned Probes Blaze Trail For Humans
Fleet of planetary probes is paving the way for humans to Mars, and pushing deeper
Frank Morring, Jr. | Aviation Week & Space Technology
The first men and women to set foot on Mars will not be the first to peer closely at the planet—only the first to visit in person.
Long before the first boot steps on it, the red dirt there will have been baked in teleoperated rover ovens, dissolved in remote-control chemical labs and probably examined with electron microscopes in Earthbound laboratories.
The inhabitants of the first Mars base will have detailed maps to guide them as they explore their surroundings, and they may even be under orders to avoid certain areas because life—or the conditions that would support it—may be present.
"The planning of human missions, including the base site location and mission objectives, must be based on detailed local site information from precursor robotic evaluation and sample return missions," a NASA workshop on planetary protection recommended a decade ago.
No one wants to discover life on Mars only to find out that it dies when exposed to Earthly microbes, or that it is descended from something that arrived on one of the Viking landers or even on those first boots on the ground.
NASA already is building two of the vehicles that may someday deliver the first human explorers to the surface of Mars (see page 41), robots have been making the trip for decades and they will continue to do so to pave the way for that human landing in the 2030s or later. Human space exploration with today's technology is simply impossible without robotic scouting, but just as explorers in the age of sail used hand-held telescopes to survey newfound landfalls, the hand that drives the robot is human.
"There is no such thing as a pure robotic mission," says John Grunsfeld, associate NASA administrator for science. "Robots do not discover anything. Humans do. The Hubble Space Telescope does not discover anything. We are getting the results on the ground, so it is very much a partnership."
Grunsfeld is an astronomer who gained plenty of hands-on experience in space as a shuttle mission specialist servicing the Hubble on three separate visits. In his desk job at NASA headquarters, he oversees the fleet of probes the agency has dispersed across the Solar System to learn as much as possible without actually sending human scientists to do the job.
On Mars now, two rovers—Curiosity and Opportunity—are operating on the surface, and three orbiters—Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey and Europe's Mars Express—circle the planet. India's first Mars orbiter—Mangalyaan, with a suite of atmospheric and surface-observation instruments—is due to arrive in September, as is a new NASA orbiter. Called Maven, for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, the latest U.S. spacecraft is designed to study the planet's upper atmosphere to learn what happened to the water that once flowed on the surface (AW&ST Aug. 26, 2013, p. 40). Maven may be able to work with the Indian spacecraft to make complementary measurements.
Curiosity already has achieved one of its primary missions—finding evidence that Mars was once habitable. Its radioisotope thermoelectric generator could keep it operating for years as it climbs through the sedimentary layers of the mountain at the center of Gale Crater, using its onboard chemistry lab and other sophisticated instruments to pry more data out of the dusty, dry stones it encounters.
Bringing home some of those stones—or at least material ground out of them—remains the top priority of planetary scientists, as gauged by the U.S. National Research Council in its decadal survey of the undertaking. The European Space Agency's ExoMars rover, set for launch in 2018, is scheduled to collect samples to cache for eventual return to Earth, and the reprise of the Curiosity rover that NASA is developing for a 2020 launch probably will do that task, too. The agencies initially collaborated on the project, but NASA dropped out for budget reasons (AW&ST May 14, 2012, p. 27).
Planetary scientists want to outfit both rovers with drills that can reach about 2 meters (6.5 ft.) below the surface to collect sample material unaffected by the solar radiation that bathes the surface of Mars and unimpeded by the magnetic fields that protect Earth. While Curiosity and other surface missions have found the chemical building blocks of life in the material they examined, life itself probably cannot survive the radiation.
"The ExoMars 18 mission is actually that leap to the subsurface we've all been waiting for, to get below the depth where the ionizing radiation, the galactic cosmic radiation, will modify the chemistry," says Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Neither Europe's ExoMars 18, nor NASA's Mars 2020 rover, will be equipped to deliver the cached samples they collect all the way back to Earth. That task will fall to undefined follow-on missions that probably will use another rover to pick up the samples and a solid-propellant ascent vehicle to deliver them to Mars orbit or send them on an Earthward trajectory.
Just how the samples will reach Earth's surface remains an open question, given planetary-protection concerns about "back contamination" of the home planet with Martian microbes. One concept under consideration is using the Orion crew vehicle to collect specimins, perhaps in lunar orbit, and return them in an external "vault" designed to isolate them from the Orion crew and the Earth environment (see concept on cover). That would also allow use of the Orion thermal protection system to shield samples (Martian, lunar or other) from the heat of reentry, instead of requiring development of a special sample-entry vehicle, in keeping with the concept of reusing modular "extensible" technology to hold down costs (see page 44).
"You would still have to have multiple layers of encapsulation and protection for it, but you would not have to have a heat shield necessarily," says Josh Hopkins, the space exploration architect at Lockheed Martin, which is building Orion for NASA.
Scientists are eager to examine pristine Martian particles on Earth because the laboratory equipment that is available, or presumably will be in the future, far surpasses anything that can be stuffed into a rover and teleoperated. While the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life is a prime motivation for bringing back samples, so is the hunt for resources that human explorers can exploit to survive on Mars or perhaps even convert into propellant for the trip home.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover will include an in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) experiment that will allow engineers to begin working on ISRU processes in the Martian environment. Close analysis of samples on the ground could raise interesting ISRU possibilities, so the next U.S. robot on Mars will be a prospector as well as a scientist, looking for samples to take back to the
21st-century equivalent of the gold-field assay office for analysis.
"Space exploration is risky; it isn't like Star Trek," James L. Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Div., likes to emphasize. "We won't 'boldly go where no man has gone before.' Before humans are sent out into the Solar System, we have to know every aspect of the environment that we possibly can to reduce the risk. And it is our robotic explorers that are going there first."
May 2014 was Earth's warmest May on record
Doyle Rice – USA Today
Last month was the warmest May for the Earth on record, according to a climate report released Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The heat was fueled by unusual warmth in the oceans, which make up more than 70% of the Earth's surface.
"The majority of the world experienced warmer-than-average monthly temperatures, with record warmth across eastern Kazakhstan, parts of Indonesia and central and northwestern Australia," the report from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center noted. "Scattered sections across every major ocean basin were also record warm."
The combined average temperature over the entire globe in May 2014 was 59.93 degrees Fahrenheit, which was 1.33 degrees above the 20th-century average, NOAA said.
The USA was warm in May, but far from a record. A report last week noted that May 2014 was the nation's 32nd warmest May on record.
Global temperature records go back to 1880.
It also marked the 351st consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th-century average.
Last week, separate climate data sets from NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency also found that May was the warmest on record.
For the spring 2014 season, defined as the months of March, April and May, it was the second warmest spring on record. For the year to date, it's been the fifth warmest on record, so far, the climate center reported.
El Niño, a warming of tropical Pacific Ocean water that affects climate and weather patterns around the world, was not present yet in May, the NCDC reported. However, the Climate Prediction Center estimates that there is about a 70% chance that El Niño conditions will develop during the summer of 2014 and an 80% chance it will develop during the fall and winter.
The two warmest years on record, 1998 and 2010, occurred during El Niños.
Best Places spotlight: Independence reigns at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
An agile approach to projects lets IT pros take on multiple roles and learn new skills.
Robert L. Mitchell - ComputerWorld
There's the cool factor of sitting in on lunchtime seminars about astrophysics or finding new planets, the chance to develop educational mobile apps such as Spacecraft 3D, the opportunity to work with emerging technologies like Google Glass and the thrill of working side-by-side with scientists and engineers on flight projects.
All that makes for a work environment that's energetic and optimistic, says technology infusion specialist Gabriel Rangel. "Innovating with the missions and science -- that's what makes it interesting. We're changing history, and IT is part of that."
Pasadena, Calif.-based JPL also offers notable career path flexibility, says Luke Dahl, section manager for application consulting, development and engineering. If you're a business analyst and want to learn about mobile development, you can take classes -- and contribute. In addition, JPL is moving to an "agile scrum" process that allows people to change roles as teams form and disband for the organization's many concurrent projects. "You can be a business analyst on one project and a lead developer on another," Dahl says.
Greetings from Earth! NASA Spacecraft to Carry Message for Aliens
A NASA probe that's expected to leave the solar system after it finishes its mission at Pluto and beyond will carry a message intended for any alien life-form that comes across it in the far future.
When NASA's New Horizons mission completes its study of Pluto in the summer of 2015, data from Earth will stream to the spacecraft to create a digital record that it will carry with it beyond the solar system. The record echoes the Golden Record carried by NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft in the 1970s and the plaques onboard the Pioneer spacecraft.
Jon Lomberg, who served as design director for NASA's Voyager Golden Record, worked with late astronomer Carl Sagan and four others to select a series of sounds and images that were combined on a gramophone record as representative of Earth. When Lomberg realized that New Horizons would become the next object to leave the solar system, he launched an online petition to include a similar message for New Horizons, called the One Earth Message
The only problem was that New Horizons launched several years earlier, in 2006.
Instead of creating a physical artifact, Lomberg suggested creating a digital one: streaming data to the spacecraft once it had completed its study of Pluto and its moon Charon. He referred to it as a "digital Voyager record 2.0."
"In a way, the history of long-term space message artifacts recapitulates the history of communications technology," Lomberg said.
The plaques onboard Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in March 1972 and April 1973, respectively, engraved images on metal and stone. Voyager's record was an analog recording on a record that few young people would know how to operate today. NASA's Phoenix mission to Mars carried digital recordings of literature and art about the Red Planet in 2007.
By Feb. 18, 2014, Lomberg had gathered 10,000 signatures from 140 different countries. In May, at Smithsonian magazine's "The Future is Here" Festival in Washington, D.C., he announced that NASA had given his team the go-ahead for the project.
"I think you could hear us cheering all the way out to Pluto," he said at the festival.
An official announcement will be made Aug. 25, and will include information about the submission process and deadline.
The voice of the crowd
The One Earth message contains another significant difference from the earlier Voyager project: While a team of six created the iconic Golden Record over the course of six weeks, the New Horizons craft will carry messages assembled by people from around the world.
"Anyone who participates has a chance of having a photo they took sent out beyond Pluto, heading for the stars," Lomberg said.
To accomplish the task, Lomberg and Albert Yu-Min Lin, a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego, plan to crowdsource the project by seeking ideas and services from large groups of people.
Lin has experience in combining citizen science with scientific explanation, including for his Valley of the Khans project, where people around the world combed satellite imagery in search of the tomb of Genghis Khan. A more recent project involved bringing 8 million people together to search for the missing Malaysian airline flight in a single weekend.
People from around the world will be able to submit their images and vote on those that should be included in the final message. Lomberg and others will exercise editorial control to ensure that no inappropriate materials make the cut, and NASA will make the final call.
Inspiring a new generation
When the spacecraft completes its mission and sends all of its data back to Earth, its computer memory will have room for a record from home. The One Earth Message will then be sent to the probe — a process that will likely take several days.
Unlike previous records, the information on board New Horizons will not have to remain static. As long as the craft remains in communication with Earth, the message has the potential to be upgraded as the status of the planet changes.
Although the spacecraft may never be found by extraterrestrials and its message may never be deciphered, Lomberg emphasized that the process itself has the potential to bring people together and reflect on what it means to be part of a global community.
"For almost 40 years, people have been inspired by the Voyager record, a portrait of the Earth in 1977," Lomberg said. "The world is very different now, and this new message will reflect the hopes and dreams of the second decade in the 21st century. It will inspire young people's interest in science and ignite the imagination of all ages. We hope it will be an example of global creativity and cooperation, something that the entire planet can share as a cooperative venture, made possible by the new science of crowdsourcing."
SpaceX puts Falcon 9 rocket launch on hold until July
Irene Klotz – Reuters
Bedeviled by a spate of technical problems, Space Exploration Technologies on Monday said it will suspend launch attempts of its next Falcon 9 rocket until early July.
The privately owned company, also known as SpaceX, has been trying since Friday to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a satellite-delivery mission for Orbcomm Inc, which provides machine-to-machine data and messaging services worldwide.
SpaceX had slated its fourth launch attempt for Tuesday.
"SpaceX is taking a closer look at a potential issue identified while conducting pre-flight checkouts during (Sunday's) countdown," the company said in statement posted on its website on Monday.
"SpaceX will stand down Tuesday while our engineering teams evaluate further," it said.
Taking into account a previously scheduled maintenance period for the Eastern Test Range, which supports launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the earliest SpaceX expects to be able to fly is the first week of July.
"We ... will work with the Range to confirm the next available launch opportunities," the company, which is owned by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, said.
A launch attempt on Friday was called off by a potential technical problem with the rocket's upper-stage engine. No other information about the issue was provided by SpaceX, though the glitch apparently was cleared in time for a second launch attempt on Saturday. That attempt was nixed by poor weather at the launch site.
SpaceX rescheduled launch for Sunday, but encountered another technical issue.
The rocket is due to deliver six small communication satellites into orbits about 500 miles (800 km) above Earth. SpaceX has flown its Falcon 9 rocket nine times so far, all successfully.
What Happens If You Have A Heart Attack In Space?
I flew in zero-G with a team of college students testing a device that could save astronauts' lives.
Rose Pastore – Popular Science
We're weightless, about 34,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, trying not to vomit from motion sickness while wiggling an ultrasound probe into the esophagus of a $26,000 mannequin. In a moment, the hollowed-out Boeing 727 will reach the top of its parabola and plunge 10,000 feet, nose down—there's just enough time before the dive for the three college students conducting this microgravity experiment to snap a few grainy ultrasound images of the mannequin's lifeless heart.
Behind us, a black backpack drifts toward the ceiling. The airplane's seat belts bob up and down, up and down, as though they were underwater. A NASA photographer lets go of his camera, and it hovers in front of his face.
I'm floating a couple of inches above the floor in a seated position (and feeling very much like a genie) when a crew member shouts over the engine noise that we're about to go from weightlessness to two times the force of gravity. The warning is crucial, because you don't want to be upside down when gravity kicks back in. This is also the part of a parabolic flight when most people barf.
Seconds later, I'm flat on my back on the padded floor of the plane as it barrels down to 24,000 feet. The Stanford University students trade seats around the limbless mannequin and strap down their legs, so that when the plane enters its next zero-G parabola, no one floats away from the bolted-down experiment setup. At the front of the plane, a student from another team vomits into a bag.
This flight is part of NASA's competitive Microgravity University program. High school and college students submit proposals for reduced-gravity experiments; the winning teams come to Houston's Ellington Field for a week that culminates in a parabolic flight.
I'm on the plane to cover Stanford's experiment, which will test whether a portable ultrasound machine takes useful images of the heart in microgravity. The bigger picture concerns the future of human spaceflight: Will our medical devices keep us alive when we're millions of miles from Earth?
The Stanford team leader is 18-year-old Paul Warren, a freshman computer science student who, as a 16-year-old, designed a biology experiment that flew to the International Space Station. When I first spoke with Warren by phone, his enthusiasm for the future of manned space travel overrode some of my terror at the prospect of the flight. "I believe humans will never be satisfied until we've explored everything and learned everything," he said. "But before we make long-duration spaceflight a reality, we need to have the type of medical equipment in emergency rooms on Earth available in space." The morning I meet him at NASA's Hangar 990 in Houston, he's wearing a SpaceX t-shirt and confidently directing the five other members of the team, most of whom are older than him.
Currently, humans in space have limited options when it comes to medical monitoring and treatments—surgery, for example, is not yet possible. But if there is a medical emergency aboard the International Space Station, the astronauts are only hours away from hospitals on Earth. A manned mission to Mars, however, would put humans in deep space for months or years at a time, which means crew members would need to be prepared to deal with emergencies on their own.
The ultrasound machine the students are testing would be well suited for space missions. It is light and compact, requires very little medical training to use, and the probe can stay in the body for 72 hours at a time. But the technology has only ever been used on Earth, and no one knows whether it would function correctly in zero gravity. The most significant concern is that microgravity will cause the probe to drift out of position.
The team's mentor, cardiac surgeon and space medicine specialist Peter Lee, tells me that an ultrasound probe that sits in the esophagus is an ideal diagnostic tool for extended spaceflights. "If an astronaut far from Earth were to have a cardiovascular event, or for some reason became incapacitated and had to be on a ventilator, there's no imaging currently available [in space] that provides continuous images of the heart," he says. "You can use [external] ultrasound, but the technician has to be there the whole time to hold it on the chest."
The day before our flight, the students are practicing using the ultrasound probe on the mannequin, which is covered in lifelike skin and contains anatomically correct models of internal organs. They snake the flexible probe through the mouth and down the esophagus, where it can capture clearer images of the heart than an external ultrasound could. The probe connects to a black-and-white monitor that displays real-time ultrasound views of the heart. The images reveal if the heart is beating; whether the valves are working properly; where there is fluid around the heart; and if too much blood is flowing in and out.
***
The NASA program directors warned us to get plenty of sleep the night before the flight. "Don't drink any alcohol. And try not to eat heavy food." Still, we're all a bit loopy from the scopolamine* injections we received before takeoff. The anti-nausea drug has made my mouth and eyes painfully dry, and my sense of hearing feels dulled.
You'd think the first thing you notice when gravity disappears is that you're floating toward the ceiling. Actually, the first thing you notice is that your brain, struggling with new and strange signals from your inner ear, stops registering the ceiling as being above you. My first thought is that I have somehow flipped upside down. In fact, I've hardly moved at all from a few moments before, back when my body had weight. As I begin to lift off the floor, I panic and grab a nearby seat. In front of me, Warren is somersaulting in midair.
Of course, gravity hasn't really switched off; we're still very much in Earth's pull. In the 1950s, aviation scientists discovered they could simulate zero gravity by flying in parabolic arcs. When a plane flies upward at an angle of 45 degrees, its passengers experience hypergravity—commonly about 2 G's—as the force of the climb combines with the pull of Earth's gravity. When the plane starts to bring its nose down, everyone and everything not bolted down inside continues moving up, floating to the middle of the cabin.
Weightlessness lasts about 20 seconds, and then it's back to double gravity as the plane completes the arc and begins speeding toward Earth, nose first. I feared that this portion of the flight would feel like a two-mile roller coaster drop. Instead, lying on the floor, I feel mostly that I have become very heavy. In hypergravity, even lifting your arms is difficult.
To get the data they need for their experiment, Warren and teammates Sam Beder, 23, and Andy Vu, 18, must take six images of the heart per weightless parabola. At first, they struggle to keep still long enough to operate the probe; in microgravity, Newton's law of equal and opposite reactions is especially salient. The smallest movement of your right hand will propel your whole body to the left. At one point, I shifted my feet and found myself doing a backflip.
Thirty-two parabolas and a little over an hour later, the 727 is headed back toward Ellington Field, and we're buckling into the seats at the back of the cabin. A NASA crew member told us that many flyers fall asleep during the brief return flight; scopolamine is a sedative. By the time we land, though, we're all still awake, grinning, and comparing stories. The barf bags in our pockets are mercifully empty.
The next day, the rest of the team—Diniana Piekutowski, 19, David Gerson, 22, and Lisa Lee, 21—take the mannequin up for another parabolic flight. Piekutowski, unluckily, is the only team member to get sick. "I threw up four times," she says. "They just kept handing me bags." (I hear there is GoPro footage of this, but repeated requests for the video are denied with much hand-waving and laughter.)
After the flight, Warren sends the sets of ultrasound images—ones taken on the ground as well as those captured in microgravity—to a cardiac anesthesiologist, who will rate the quality of each picture. If the doctor judges both sets similarly, it will be a first step toward determining whether the ultrasound probe could someday monitor astronauts in space.
***
In early June, two months after the flight, Warren has results to report: The cardiac anesthesiologist saw no significant differences between the images of the heart taken on the ground and those taken in zero-G. Warren plans to send the images to more doctors for review. The team hopes eventually to publish their results.
"One day in the future, someone is going to need surgery in zero gravity," Warren told me before the flight. "How are we going to do it?"
NASA, Rockwell Collins to Test UAS Communications
Woodrow Bellamy III – Avionics Today
Rockwell Collins and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have announced a new project to test communications capabilities for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The project will feature a NASA-operated S-3 Viking aircraft and the University of Iowa Operator Performance Laboratory's Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft serving as surrogates for UAS during two phases of testing.
During the first phase, the ability of UAS to transfer communications from one tower to another will be tested. The second phase will focus on the ability of a single tower to communicate with multiple aircraft. According to Rockwell Collins, the project will develop a non-proprietary data link waveform to be released as a public resource.
"Routine integration of sizeable numbers of UAS into the national airspace system is a challenging task," said Troy Brunk, vice president and general manager of Airborne Solutions for Rockwell Collins. "This technology will provide the critical communications link for UAS pilots on the ground to safely and securely operate their remotely piloted vehicles in flight even though they are many miles apart."
Roscosmos Disavows Plan to Send Space Tourists to Moon
Anna Dolgov, Matthew Bodner – The Moscow Times
Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, will not be involved in a plan to send two space tourists on a flight around the Moon and was not consulted about the project, the federal space agency said.
The mission, hatched by U.S.-based space tourism firm Space Adventures and a major Russian spacecraft manufacturer, Energia Rocket and Space Corporation, would see two space tourists travel to the Moon aboard a modified Russian Soyuz spacecraft by 2017. However, Roscosmos was kept out of the loop on the plan.
The organizers "could have consulted with us before making such loud announcements," said Denis Lyskov, Roscosmos's deputy chief in charge of piloted flights, Izvestia reported Monday.
"We are not participating in the moon project, we are not planning to modernize the Soyuz," Lyskov was quoted as saying.
Despite the government owning a 38-percent stake in Energia, the company has a history of asserting its independence from the space agency, which purchases its hardware from the company for use in the government's space agenda.
During the 1990s, Energia at one point attempted to position itself as the rightful heir to the Soviet space program and negotiate directly with NASA for using the space station Mir before the government began to reconsolidate the space industry under its control.
Roscosmos's exclusion from the moon project suggests that Energia may once again be looking to expand its own commercial niche. Already, the spacecraft builder sells launches of some of its spacecraft on the international market.
Conceivably, Energia could unilaterally pursue a commercial Lunar if its customers are willing to stump up the funds.
Space Adventures chief Tom Shelley said in May that his company had already found two people who are willing to splurge on the $150 million tickets, according to MIT Technology Review.
In early June, Energia CEO Vitaly Lopoto told Interfax that the company was working closely with Space Adventures to make the mission a reality, expressing his confidence that "we can do this — circle the Moon in 2017 to 2018 on Soyuz … technically it is possible."
Shelley later reiterated Energia's commitment to providing Space Adventures with the necessary hardware to pursue a Lunar fly-by mission.
"We are basically taking the same Soyuz that flies to the space station, making a few modifications to allow it to go around the far side of the Moon, and adding an extra habitation module to make it more comfortable for passengers," Shelley said, Spaceflight Now reported.
Energia and Space Adventures have taken several tourists into Earth's orbit and to the International Space Station, lending credibility to their promise to deliver a Moon flight.
But research director of the Institute for Space Policy at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ivan Moiseyev, said that the moon project would cost "no less than $1 billion," Izvestia reported.
"Essentially, a new spaceship would need to be built," he said. "But for us, even the simplest modernization takes years and takes up a lot of money. And everything needs to be tested first, you cannot send out a tourist right away."
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