| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- ISS Cargo Ship Activities to Air on NASA TV
- And the Winner is ...
- Demolition Going on Today - Organizations/Social
- Ellington Starport
- HSI ERG Meeting: MicroG Effects and Glove Sensors
- All Things Apollo on Sale at Starport - Jobs and Training
- Final Week for Financial Wellness Classes On-site
- 7/23 Webinar: My Mind - Productivity & Possibility
- What Would You Do in a Medical Emergency on TDY?
- Facility Manager Training
- Job Opportunities |  |
| Headlines - ISS Cargo Ship Activities to Air on NASA TV
NASA TV will broadcast live the departure of an unpiloted Russian cargo spacecraft from the International Space Station (ISS) today, July 21, and the launch and docking of its replacement Wednesday, July 23. ISS Progress 55 arrived at the orbiting laboratory in April and will undock from the space station's Pirs docking compartment at 4:41 p.m. CDT today. NASA TV coverage of the undocking will begin at 4:30 p.m. The cargo ship will undergo several days of engineering tests in orbit before being commanded to reenter Earth's atmosphere, during which it will burn up over the Pacific Ocean. On July 23, the ISS Progress 56 resupply ship will launch at 4:44 p.m. from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (3:44 a.m. local time on July 24), with about 5,700 pounds of food, fuel and supplies for the station's Expedition 40 crew. Launch coverage begins at 4:30 p.m. Progress 56 will make its four-orbit, six-hour trip to the space station and dock at 10:28 p.m. Docking coverage will begin at 10 p.m. 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. - And the Winner is ...
Congratulations to Team Splashdown for winning the People's Choice award for the Orion Cake-Decorating Contest! Holly Dlouhy, Eden Fields, Sharon Jackson and Sara Zwart have won a behind-the-scenes tour of the Orion mock-up in the Exploration Development Laboratory at Lockheed Martin. Ten amazing and delicious cakes were entered into the contest on Tuesday! Judges were overwhelmed with the level of creativity and taste of all the submissions. Team KM2—Katharine Harder and Kara Pohlkamp—won the overall contest and two V.I.P tickets to view the Exploration Flight Test- 1 launch. The runners up—Team Mission Out of Control: Ginger Kerrick, Dana Weigel, Holly Ridings and Peggy Whitson. They will be able to the view the launch in JSC's Mission Control Center. Many thanks also go to: The Impinging Bakernauts, Martian Maidens, Team Pie in the Sky, Cakes on Cakes on Cakes, Eloquent Cakes, Ladies Orion Orbital Planning Society (L.O.O.P.S.) and Cakesploration Flight Test 1, as well as our judges for their participation in the contest. You all were amazing! If you missed the event and the chance to satisfy your sweet tooth, photos can be viewed on Imagery Online. - Demolition Going on Today
Today, July 21, demolition is scheduled for Buildings 225 and 226 at 11 a.m. JSC team members may come out to observe, but please take necessary safety precautions if doing so. Those who wish to view the demolition may park in lots near Buildings 232 and 259. Building 225 was built in December 1968 as an Administrative Support Facility. Throughout the years, the building has seen use as a lunar data bank, a safety learning center, source selection board facility and more. Building 226 was constructed on-site in December 1962 as an Administrative Support Facility, and was originally designed to support the U.S. Corps of Engineers' efforts to inspect and supervise the primary construction phases of the Manned Spacecraft Center, now known as JSC. The facility transitioned in time to support various incarnations of Institutional Safety Contract operations, as well as Performance Evaluation Profile survey functions. After demolition, the area will become a green space. Organizations/Social - Ellington Starport
The JSC National Management Association (NMA) invites you to a luncheon featuring Arturo Machuca, manager of Business Development Houston Airport Systems, who will speak on the "Ellington Spaceport at JSC" on July 30 at 11:30 a.m. in the Gilruth Alamo Ballroom. Cost for members: FREE Cost for non-members: $20 - HSI ERG Meeting: MicroG Effects and Glove Sensors
The Human Systems Integration (HSI) Employee Resource Group (ERG) invites you to our July meeting, where we will host two NASA presenters from the recent Southwest Regional Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Symposium. We hope you can join us for the discussion on these fascinating human factors topics! Feel free to bring your lunch. - Effects of long-duration microgravity on fine motor control skills (Holden, Thompson, Sandor)
- The potential of wearable sensor technology for Extravehicular Activity glove ergonomic evaluation (Reid, McFarland, Norcross, Rajulu)
- All Things Apollo on Sale at Starport
Starport is celebrating the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11 all week long! All Apollo merchandise is on sale through July 31. Flown metal Apollo 11 through 17 medallions are now just $10. And, all Apollo models and collectibles are 10 percent off while supplies last. Stop by Buildings 3 or 11 to see the First Day Apollo 11 and Apollo 8 stamps, the First Day Cache, as well as collectible lapel pin sets: Celebrate Apollo Program framed, Celebrate Apollo 11 framed set and the Skylab lapel pin set. Happy Anniversary to the Apollo 11 crew and NASA team that made history on July 20, 1969—with one small step! Jobs and Training - Final Week for Financial Wellness Classes On-site
Simply having money does not end financial concerns. Reducing financial stress starts with learning how to properly manage the money you have. Join us for a Financial Wellness class, or sign up for counseling. Tuesday: Retirement - Plan and Save: Goals; income needs and sources; asset risks; strategic approaches; RMD; preventing retirement blind spots and more. Retirement and Taxes: Past, present and future taxes; strategies regarding paying taxes now or later; tax-free, tax-advantaged and fully taxable monies; Social Security benefits; preventing unnecessary taxes and more. Thursday: Investing: Asset options and allocations; diversification; personal risk tolerance; and several key investing considerations are discussed. Financial Transitions: Empowers employees prior, during and after major financial transitions. Covers planning, budgets, benefits, 401(k) options/loans, avoiding taxes and more. Private financial wellness counseling is available to all employees, even if you don't have time to attend a class. - 7/23 Webinar: My Mind - Productivity & Possibility
It is well known that exercise reduces the negative effects of chronic conditions such as aches and pains, insomnia, anxiety, depression and more. But did you know that physical activity is also a strong tool in helping our brain improve memory, learning and mental performance? Studies show that as little as 15 minutes of physical activity can create healthy changes in the brain. Exercise increases the level of brain "growth factors" that help make new brain cells and connections between existing cells. These positive changes help us learn complicated activities and complete complex tasks. Alzheimer's research is also showing some signs that exercise may be one of the best weapons against the disease. Please join us and learn about the positive impact physical activity can have on your cognitive function toward improved performance and productivity. - What Would You Do in a Medical Emergency on TDY?
This question-and-answer session is for JSC civil servants to learn about the Global Rescue emergency medical services available on international TDY. Please bring your supervisor and co-workers. Event Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Event Start Time:1:00 PM Event End Time:2:00 PM
Event Location: Bldg 30 Aud
Add to Calendar
Sabrina Gilmore x32773
[top] - Facility Manager Training
The Safety Learning Center invites you to attend an eight-hour Facility Manager Training course. This course provides JSC facility managers with insight into the requirements for accomplishing their functions. - Includes training on facility management, safety, hazard identification and mitigation, legal, security, energy conservation, health and environmental aspects.
- Attendees of this course must also register in SATERN for a half-day Fire Warden Training. Others that need Fire Warden Training can register through the normal process.
Date/Time: Sept. 4 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Where: Safety Learning Center - Building 20, Room 205/206 Registration via SATERN required: - Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities? To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop-down menu and select "JSC HR." The "Jobs" link will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. Lateral reassignment and rotation opportunities are posted in the Workforce Transition Tool. To access: HR Portal > Employees > Workforce Transition > Workforce Transition Tool. These opportunities do not possess known promotion potential; therefore, employees can only see positions at or below their current grade level. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies or reassignment opportunities, please call your HR representative. | |
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| JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Monday – July 21, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Astronauts will become aquanauts in unusual space training
James Dean – Florida Today
With an eye to exploring outer space, a multi-national crew of four astronauts today will submerge into "inner space," diving to an undersea habitat off the Florida Keys.
Forty-five years after Apollo landing, U.S. debates next lunar step
Irene Klotz – Reuters
Forty-five years after the first Apollo lunar landing, the United States remains divided about the moon's role in future human space exploration.
45 Years Ago, Humans Took One Small Step On The Moon
Alex Knapp – Forbes
Ninety-four years ago, in an editorial about Robert Goddard's rocket experiments, the New York Times stated that using rockets to travel into space would be impossible.
45 years after Tranquility: One small step to a bright future
Chris Gebhardt – NASA Space Flight
Forty-five years ago, people across the world held their breaths as a hair-raising, heart-pounded descent occurred a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. At the Sea of Tranquility, on 20 July 1969, two humans succeeded in what many had considered impossible: landing and walking on the surface of another world.
Apollo 11 Moon Landing Carried Big Risks for Astronauts, NASA
The moon is a tough place to explore. It is several days away from Earth. Solar radiation sears the moon's surface. Its gravity is lumpy, and there is no atmosphere to protect astronauts from the elements.
Pondering Apollo's legacy 45 years after the lunar landing
Richard Jurek, Guest Columnist – Orlando Sentinel
July is an important month in U.S. space history: It marks the final flight of the space-shuttle program; the historic Apollo/Soyuz joint space mission; and the 45th anniversary Sunday of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Yet, we have to buy a ride on a Soyuz to launch humans into space. My, how times have changed.
Fowler: Without the moon race as a target, NASA needs a new mission
Wallace Fowler – Houston Chronicle
Today marks 45 years since the United States put the first two astronauts safely on the moon. The cost for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs was more than $25 billion at the time - more like $110 billion in today's world. The ensuing U.S. space efforts have cost an additional $196 billion for the shuttle and $50 billion for the space station. NASA's total inflation-adjusted costs have been more than $900 billion since its creation in 1958 through 2014 (more than $16 billion per year). Looking back, have we gotten our money's worth from the investment? I say, yes.
Apollo 11 anniversary: We need a better vision for our next giant steps into space: opinion
Mark McCarter – Huntsville (AL) Times
Did you see that "supermoon" last weekend? So close, you could just reach out and touch it. That it's always been there for us, dressed up differently every night, but so reachable, is why this nation did what it did 45 years ago.
Moscow: Continue U.S. cooperation in space
NASA memo had cut 'contact with Russian entities'
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro — Special to The Washington Times
Moscow wants to work with Washington to further space exploration despite a recent NASA memo noting the crisis in Ukraine has nearly severed prospects for partnership, Russian officials say.
Palazzo Hopes To Update Commercial Launch Law this Year
Jeff Foust – Space News
The chairman of the U.S. House Science space subcommittee said July 17 he is still hopeful that an update to commercial launch law can make it through Congress before the end of the year, but he warned time may run out on another space-related bill.
Adrift Part 3
While NASA fixates on Mars, space rivals shoot for the moon
Eric Berger – Houston Chronicle
President Barack Obama delivered his lone space policy speech inside the historic Kennedy Space Center building where astronauts stay before launching.
NanoRacks Aims To Offer Research Accommodations on ISS Exterior by Year's End
Dan Leone | Space News
By the end of 2014, Houston-based space services company NanoRacks plans to expand its payload accommodation services with the installation of an external platform at the international space station that can be booked by researchers on a commercial basis.
Where next? Q&A with NASA astronaut, scientist
U-T San Diego
It's been 45 years since the first moonwalk, when astronauts were household names. Today, some people think NASA is no longer in business. Many Americans may not know Chris Cassidy's name, but he is among the elite group of astronauts who have traveled to space. A former Navy SEAL who lived in San Diego for a few years, he has made two trips to the International Space Station. He and Liz Warren, Space Station program specialist, met with the U-T Editorial Board and U-T science reporter Gary Robbins recently to discuss space issues. Here is an edited transcript of the interview.
How Do Astronauts Stay in Shape?
Advances have halted space's bone-sapping effects—but a trip to Mars looms as a challenge
Bob Drury – Men's Health
There are certain Moments. December 7, 1941. November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001. We all have them, where we remember exactly where we were. Not personal milestones such as births, deaths, marriages. Culture-altering and community-bonding events.
COMPLETE STORIES
Astronauts will become aquanauts in unusual space training
James Dean – Florida Today
With an eye to exploring outer space, a multi-national crew of four astronauts today will submerge into "inner space," diving to an undersea habitat off the Florida Keys.
Over nine days, aquanauts from the U.S., France and Japan will experiment with tools and techniques that could be applied to International Space Station expeditions or farther-off destinations like an asteroid or Mars.
"It's very mission-like," said Bill Todd, manager of the 18th NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission, of the underwater experience. "Many astronauts come back and say this is the closest thing to flying in space there is."
That includes a busy schedule that gives the crew little time to even look out the window of the Aquarius Reef Base, operated by Florida International University, that will serve as their home on the ocean floor, 62 feet under and 5.4 nautical miles off the coast of Key Largo.
And since the divers will need 15 hours of decompression time to return to the surface safely, there's no easy exit.
"You have a true, realistic situation where you just can't open the door and swim to the surface and say, 'I'm done,' " Todd said.
Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is the NEEMO 18 crew's commander and only space-flown member, with a 2008 shuttle mission and 2012 ISS expedition to his credit.
He'll be joined by NASA's Jeanette Epps and Mark Vande Hei and the European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet, who were selected as astronauts in 2009 and will get a taste of what life on the ISS might be like. Pesquet is assigned to launch to the orbiting research complex in 2016.
Inside the 400 square-foot habitat and during 10 "splashes" outside it — officially called extra-vehicular activities, just like in space — the crew will test communication delays, last-minute training for new tasks, and drilling techniques, among other activity.
"The ocean floor here is a great analog to drilling into some of the bodies we would want to drill into," said NASA's Jesse Buffington of Johnson Space Center. "Nobody's ever taken a drill sample in microgravity."
JSC developed an adjustable boom up to 12 feet long with a three-foot drill at the end. The aquanauts will help figure out if a drilling operation would be best tackled by one or two people and in one or more spacewalks, with or without robotic support.
A land-based mission control team will oversee the submerged crew, which will be assisted by two FIU technicians at the Aquarius base near a coral reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
Another crew is scheduled to follow with a seven-day NEEMO 19 mission in September, led by NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik.
Todd, 55, forged a passion for space and the water as a boy in Cocoa Beach, where he attended Freedom 7 Elementary before the family moved to Houston. He enjoyed life on the Banana River and watching Apollo moon shots that his father worked on.
He followed his dad into a career as an astronaut trainer, working with more than 20 shuttle crews and helping to start the NEEMO program in 2001.
"Aquarius is kind of the launching point for inner space exploration," he said. "It's actually quite impressive that the East Coast of Florida has both of these launching points for these extreme explorations."
Forty-five years after Apollo landing, U.S. debates next lunar step
Irene Klotz – Reuters
Forty-five years after the first Apollo lunar landing, the United States remains divided about the moon's role in future human space exploration.
Ten more U.S. astronauts followed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's July 20, 1969, visit to the moon before the Apollo program was canceled in 1972. No one has been back since.
The most recent effort to return astronauts to the moon ended in 2010 when the Obama White House axed an underfunded program of the previous administration called Constellation. Instead, NASA was directed to begin planning for a human expedition to an asteroid.
That initiative, slated for 2025, also includes a robotic precursor mission to redirect a small asteroid or piece of a larger asteroid into a high lunar orbit.
Astronauts would then rendezvous with the relocated asteroid and pick up samples for return to Earth. The missions are intended as steppingstones for eventual human expeditions to Mars.
This path, however, is fraught with technological cul-de-sacs that do not directly contribute to radiation protection, landing systems, habitats and other projects needed to build the road to Mars, a National Research Council panel concluded in June.
After a three-year study of different options for human space exploration, the panel said a more viable and sustainable path would be to return to the moon.
"The moon, and in particular its surface, (has) significant advantages over other targets as an intermediate step on the road to the horizon goal of Mars," the council's Committee on Human Spaceflight wrote in a report.
"Although some have dismissed the moon as no longer interesting because humans have visited it before, this is similar to considering the New World to have been adequately explored after the first four voyages of Columbus."
NASA considers the moon "the purview of other nations' space programs," and "not of interest to the U.S. human space exploration program," the report said.
"This argument is made despite the barely touched scientific record of the earliest solar system that lies hidden in the lunar crust, despite its importance as a place to develop the capabilities required to go to Mars, and despite the fact that the technical capabilities and operational expertise of Apollo belong to our grandparent's generation," the report added.
Under current plans, it will be another 11 years before U.S. astronauts travel beyond the International Space Station, a permanently staffed research laboratory that flies about 260 miles (420 km) above Earth. A mission to Mars is at least a decade or more beyond that – if it happens at all.
"It is clear to me that we will not be able to build a long-term research base on Mars if we don't first do it on the moon," planetary scientist Chris McKay wrote in a paper entitled "The Case for a NASA Research Base on the Moon" that was published last year in the journal New Space.
"New technologies and approaches … and increased international interest in the moon make the time right to consider pushing for a base that is 10 times less expensive than previous base designs," McKay added in an email.
Development of the Orion space capsule, Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket and launch pad renovations at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida currently cost NASA more than $3 billion a year.
Ultimately, the hurdles on the path to Mars are political, not technical, in nature, the National Research Council report concludes.
"Probably the most significant single factor in allowing progress beyond low Earth orbit is the development of a strong national (and international) consensus about the pathway to be undertaken and sustained discipline in not tampering with that plan over many administrations and Congresses," the panel said.
45 Years Ago, Humans Took One Small Step On The Moon
Alex Knapp – Forbes
Ninety-four years ago, in an editorial about Robert Goddard's rocket experiments, the New York Times stated that using rockets to travel into space would be impossible.
Thirty-seven years later, the Soviet Union proved the New York Times wrong by launching the first artificial satellites, Sputnik, into orbit, kicking off the "space race" between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
It was only four years later, in 1961, that Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into space and also the first person to orbit the Earth. In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to do so.
In 1965, Alexey Leonov became the first person to leave his spacecraft and having nothing but a spacesuit between his skin and the desolate vacuum of space.
In the background of this, the United States was actively working to go to the stars, too, but often were behind the Soviet milestones. Alan Shepard went into space less than a month after Gagarin to be the first American, but it wasn't until nearly a year later, in February of 1962, that John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
In September of 1962, President Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in which he promised that the United States would send a person to the Moon, in words that still echo today:
"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
In 1967, NASA developed the Saturn V rocket with aims to send an Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. The Saturn V was the most powerful rocket ever built – and still is. Today, the most powerful rocket currently in development is SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. Powerful as it is, when its development is complete, it still won't be as powerful as the Saturn V.
In 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders became the first people to leave Earth's orbit. The Apollo 8 spacecraft left the bonds of Earth, orbited the Moon, and then returned to Earth.
Then, on July 17, 1969, a Saturn V rocket took off from Cape Canaveral with Apollo 11 on top and three astronauts: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Over the next three days, the Apollo spacecraft made its way to the Moon. Armstrong and Aldrin entered the Lunar Module, separated from the Command Module, and began the descent to the Lunar surface.
The landing overwhelmed the computers of the Lunar module – too much was happening at once for them to manage – so Neil Armstrong personally guided the Lunar module to a safe landing on the Sea of Tranquility. He landed without much margin for error – the ship had less than 30 seconds worth of fuel left when the "Eagle" landed.
A few hours later, Armstrong, with nearly half a billion people on Earth watching, became the first human being to set foot on another world.
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," he said.
Aldrin joined him shortly thereafter. The two astronauts spent their time on the Lunar surface collecting rock and soil samples. They left behind an American flag, a plaque commemorating the journey, and a patch that honored Virgil Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee, the three NASA astronauts who had lost their lives in the Apollo 1 accident.
The two then returned to the Lunar module and lifted off the surface of the Moon, and docked with the Command module in Lunar orbit. The spacecraft then fired its rockets and made the three day journey back to Earth. The three astronauts safely splashed down in the ocean on July 24, 1969.
After Apollo 11, NASA sent six more missions to the Moon and five of them made it safely. (Apollo 13, as you probably know, had a spacecraft malfunction and returned to Earth without landing on the Moon.) The last people to set foot on the Moon were Apollo 17′s Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in December of 1972. No person has been there since.
Things are looking up for a return trip to the Moon. Although NASA is currently focused on manned missions to an asteroid and a manned mission to Mars, the Chinese government is actively working on a manned moon mission. They've already landed a robotic rover on the Moon and are currently on track with their goal to put a human being on the Moon by the mid-2020s. Other countries considering a manned moon mission include Japan, India, and the European Space Agency.
There are also commercial space companies that are setting their sights on the Moon. Space Adventures, the space tourist company that helped get Dennis Tito, Anousheh Ansari, and others into orbit, has booked two passengers for a Lunar mission aimed to launch in 2017 or 2018. The tickets for the trip are $150 million apiece.
Another company looking to return people to the Moon is Golden Spike Company, which is aiming to send passengers to the Moon starting in 2020. Flights on Golden Spike will cost $750 million per person. The company is staffed with several folks who used to work on NASA missions and has a plan built around current technological capabilities. But will a private company really beat China or Europe to the Moon?
It seems we'll have to wait a few years to find out.
45 years after Tranquility: One small step to a bright future
Chris Gebhardt – NASA Space Flight
Forty-five years ago, people across the world held their breaths as a hair-raising, heart-pounded descent occurred a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. At the Sea of Tranquility, on 20 July 1969, two humans succeeded in what many had considered impossible: landing and walking on the surface of another world.
Cruise to the moon:
After a successful launch from the Kennedy Space Center and Trans-Lunar Injection burn, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, aboard Apollo 11, were on their way to the moon.
After leaving Low Earth Orbit, the Apollo 11 crew separated the Command/Service Module (CSM) from the third Stage of what was left of the mighty Saturn V rocket.
CSM separation occurred at MET (Mission Elapsed Time) 3hrs 15mins 23secs.
Following a series of engine burns, known as separation maneuvers, the CSM was flipped around so that its nose was pointed toward the third stage of the Saturn V – inside of which was the Lunar Module (LM).
Under careful control by Michael Collins, the CSM eased toward the LM, connecting at MET 2hrs 24mins 3.7secs, or 12:56:03 EDT 16 July 1969.
Over the next 53mins, connections between the CSM and the LM were confirmed and the joint vehicle's health was examined.
At MET 4hrs 17mins 3secs, Collins fired the CSM's thrusters and backed the CSM/LM duo out of the third stage.
Once clear, the crew performed the CSM/LM evasive maneuver burn to clear the spacecraft from the flight trajectory of the third stage.
Once the CSM/LM was clear, vent valves on the LH2 and LOX tanks of the third stage opened in sequence to place the stage into a lunar slingshot trajectory – a course that would send the stage close enough to the moon's surface for a gravity-assist maneuver to fling it clear of lunar orbit and into a heliocentric (solar) orbit.
Over the course of the following 70hrs, in between sleep periods, the Apollo 11 crew conducted four (4) TV transmissions and performed a mid-course correction burn at MET 1day 2hrs 44mins 58sec (3sec burn duration).
On day three of the mission, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM to perform initial inspections and checkouts of the LM systems.
At MET 61hrs 39mins 55secs, Apollo 11 crossed the equigravisphere – the moment when the Earth's and the moon's gravity sphere's were of equal strength relative to the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
At that point, Apollo 11 was more influenced by the moon's gravity than the Earth's.
Lunar arrival:
After a sleep period, the crew awoke and prepared for one of the most mission-important parts of the flight: the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn.
A successful burn would place Apollo 11 at a velocity slow enough to be captured by the moon's gravity.
At MET 75hrs 49mins 50.37secs, the SM engine fired for 5mins 57.53secs.
The hair-raising burn was perfect, slowing the CSM/LM by just enough to be captured by the moon's gravity into a non-circular lunar orbit.
The lunar orbit circularization burn followed at 17:43:36 EDT and lasted for 16.88secs.
Aldrin then entered the LM to perform initial system power-up and checkouts for the following day's scheduled lunar landing.
Once initial system preparations in the LM were complete, Aldrin reentered the CM, and the Apollo 11 crew entered a sleep period – the final sleep for Armstrong and Aldrin as non-moon walking men.
The biggest day:
After waking up on Flight Day 5, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM for final preparations for descent.
Final LM system checks began at 11:17 EDT, 20 July.
LM systems checks wrapped with a clean bill of health at MET 100hrs.
With the hatches between the LM and the CSM closed, Armstrong and Aldrin undocked from the CSM at 13:44 EDT, staying in close proximity to the CSM for the following 27mins 52secs.
With everything in order, and with Mission Control's approval, the CSM/LM separation maneuver began at 14:11:52 EDT and concluded nine (9) seconds later.
The maneuver placed enough distance between the two spacecraft to allow for separate, safe operations of the CSM by Collins and the LM by Armstrong and Aldrin.
For the next 56mins 13secs, the two spacecraft orbited the moon, waiting for the LM's orbit to bring it to the point where it was to begin its descent to the surface.
Armstrong and Aldrin fired the LM's engine to begin the LM Descent Orbit Insertion burn.
The burn lasted 30secs and placed the LM into an orbit with perigee close enough to the lunar surface to allow for a landing attempt.
Armstrong and Aldrin activated the LM's radar system. LM abort guidance was aligned to primary guidance to provide accurate information in the event that the landing had to be aborted.
A communication improvement yaw maneuver was performed before the LM reached a lunar altitude of 50,000ft.
Armstrong and Aldrin performed an LM propellant settling engine burn before executing the start of LM powered descent.
The LM engine reached fixed throttle, before Armstrong and Aldrin rotated the LM to the "face-up" position.
An unexpected landing alarm sounded in the LM cabin, a 1202 alarm alerting the crew and Mission Control of "excessive overflow."
Mission Controller Jack Garman, looking at the data streaming in from the LM, quickly ascertained that it was safe to proceed with the landing – a decision that was quickly relayed to Armstrong and Aldrin.
The alarm, and those that followed, were the LM's response to an overflow of incoming data that overwhelmed the computers and caused them to be unable to complete all tasks in real time.
(The issue was traced to an error in the checklist manual that caused the rendezvous radar switch to be placed in the wrong position.
As stated by Margaret Hamilton, lead Apollo flight software designer, in her 1971 Letter to Datamation, "The computer was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant É I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing.")
As the descent continued, landing radar updates came online, and the LM reached a lunar altitude of less than 30,000ft (and a landing radar indicated velocity of 2,000 ft/s).
Lunar surface approach phase began with LM landing radar antenna taken to position 2.
Armstrong and Aldrin then initiated the LM attitude hold to check the LM's handling qualities before committing to the final descent.
Automatic guidance initiated and LM landing radar was switched to low scale at 16:14:19 EDT.
At this point, with the lunar surface in clear view, and a much rockier terrain than expected, Armstrong made the decision to take semi-automatic control of the LM and manually fly until a smoother area was found.
As Aldrin called out altitude and navigation, Armstrong initiated an altitude hold command and flew the LM horizontal above the lunar surface searching for a suitable area to land.
Mission Control back in Houston watched as fuel consumption rose and fuel levels dropped.
After several seconds, Armstrong finally spotted a site smooth enough for landing. LM descent landing phase began at 16:15:22 EDT.
Radar data for landing became unusable at 16:16:11 EDT, returning to usable status at 16:16:21 EDT.
The low-level fuel light activated at 16:16:28 EDT, causing great angst in Mission Control.
As the LM slowly descended, low on fuel, the landing radar glitched again at 16:16:59 EDT, returning four seconds later at 16:17:03 EDT.
Out the LM windows, as Armstrong and Aldrin neared the surface, lunar dust – for the first time in millions of years – kicked up from the surface as the LM's engine interacted with the fine particulate.
Only 25 seconds of fuel remained.
And then, calm.
The engine shut down. The dust settled away from the LM.
The time was 16:17:39 EDT on 20 July 1969.
As cheers erupted around the world, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
With engine shutdown and lunar contact confirmed, Mission Control called to Armstrong, "We copy you down, Eagle."
What came back was not the rehearsed call, but rather a changed confirmation on Armstrong's part to make clear to the hundreds of millions of people watching on TV that landing had occurred.
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
The first small step:
The official mission timeline called for Armstrong and Aldrin to enter a 5-hr sleep period following the successful landing.
But that wasn't going to happen.
In consultation with Mission Control, the decision was made to skip the sleep period and begin preparations for the moonwalk.
After planning where to place the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package (EASEP) and the U.S. flag by observing the lunar terrain outside the LM windows, Armstrong and Aldrin suited up.
At 22:39:33 EDT, Armstrong opened the LM hatch.
The first surprise that awaited him was not stepping out of the LM, but rather the difficulty of getting through the LM hatch.
The LM hatch had been redesigned to be smaller, but the EVA suits and Portable Life Support System packs for the EVA suits were not subsequently redesigned to be smaller.
This resulted in some tension and a higher-than-expected heart rate as Armstrong tried to squeeze through the slightly-too-small opening.
By 22:51:16 EDT, Armstrong was completely outside the LM, standing on the porch of the lander.
Armstrong deployed the modular equipment stowage assembly at 22:53:18 EDT. Deployment of the equipment activated the TV camera attached to the side of the LM.
The first clear TV pictures were received through Goldstone in the United States and (with better signal quality) at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in Australia – later switched to Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.
The camera on the lunar lander, though, was not a traditional TV camera. It was a slow-scan television camera that was incompatible with global commercial TV.
As such, the images received were displayed on a special monitor, and a traditional TV camera was pointed at that to broadcast the event worldwide.
The result was a significantly degraded image, but one that was still discernible.
After descending the ladder on the leg of the LM, Armstrong stood on the foot of the LM's landing leg.
Looking down, Armstrong described the lunar surface as "very fine-grained" and "almost like a powder."
At this point, there was only one thing left to do.
On 20 July 1969, 02:56:15 GMT, Neil Armstrong stepped off the foot of the LM and became the first human to set foot on the surface of the moon.
The moment and historic step, broadcast live around the world, was watched by a global audience of 530 million (14 percent of the world's population at the time) despite occurring in the middle of the night for Europe and Africa and not being broadcast, save in Romania, in the Soviet eastern bloc.
At the time, Armstrong's historic step was the most-watched event in history, a record it held for 39 years until the 2008 opening ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympics (as verified independently by researchers, not based on network and/or organization viewership claims).
To this day, the first steps of humanity on the moon stands as the third most-watched event in human history – with, through verifiable means, only the 2008 Summer Olympic game's closing and opening ceremonies surpassing Apollo 11.
The first moonwalk:
With Neil Armstrong's foot on the moon, the first moonwalk in history began.
As Armstrong stood on the surface, he stated, with great humility, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
And with that statement, controversy was born.
Armstrong always maintained that he said "a man." But what was broadcast to the world sounded like "that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" – a syntactic error creating the semantically contradictory statement: "a small step for mankind and a giant leap for mankind."
It was not until the digital age, and 2006, that digital analysis of the audio files of Apollo 11 revealed the "a" (though there is still some question about it).
It is currently held that Armstrong did say "a man," but that the "a" was obscured during transmission due to storms near the Parkes Observatory in Australia.
Regardless, the statement by Armstrong instantly became one of history's most famous quotations and once again highlighted the nature of the mission as viewed by the Apollo 11 crew: a mission for everyone.
Following his statement, Armstrong began examination of mobility on the lunar surface (one-sixth the gravity of Earth) and description of the lunar surface.
After this, at 20:58:54 EDT, Aldrin sent down a camera to Armstrong, who set up the camera on the LM landing gear to take photos of the lunar surface.
Armstrong then collected a lunar contingency soil sample, ensuring that a lunar sample would be returned in the event that the EVA had to be terminated early.
Aldrin then emerged from the LM and descended to the lunar surface, where he remarked that the landscape was one of "magnificent desolation."
During Aldrin's descent, Armstrong took photos to document the process for analysis after the mission returned to Earth.
Aldrin became the second person on the moon at 23:15:16 EDT.
With both Armstrong and Aldrin on the surface, the pair began an engineering examination (with photography) of the landing effects on the lunar surface and on the LM itself.
After the examination, Armstrong adjusted the TV camera, unveiled the landing dedication plaque, and read it aloud to Earth.
"Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."
The plaque, depicting the entirety of planet Earth, carried the names and signatures of three people: Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin, and President Richard Nixon.
Armstrong then realigned the camera and switched it to panoramic view while Aldrin deployed the Solar Wind Composition experiment.
At 23:41:43 EDT, Armstrong and Aldrin deployed the specially designed American flag on the lunar surface.
Six minutes later, President Richard Nixon performed the first-ever between-worlds telephone call to Neil Armstrong in what was called "the most historic phone call ever made from the White House."
The conversation was brief, a suggestion made to President Nixon by Frank Borman, Apollo 11 White House-NASA liaison, in order to maintain respect for the lunar landing as the late-President Kennedy's legacy.
Over the next 1h 19mins, Armstrong and Aldrin evaluated lunar soil trajectory (after being kicked), visibility in lunar sunlight, thermal effects of sun and shadow regions inside their EVA suits, and surface shadows and colors.
The duo also inspected the landing gear of the LM and took more engineering photos before deploying the passive seismometer experiment and collecting bulk surface samples (e.g., rocks).
At 00:35:57 EDT on 21 July 1969, Armstrong deployed the Lunar Ranging Retroreflector (which continues to provide definitive proof against those who doubt the authenticity of the human lunar landing).
At 00:52 EDT, Aldrin retrieved the Solar Wind Composition experiment, and at 01:01:30 EDT, ascended the ladder of the LM and ended his only lunar EVA.
Armstrong then passed up additional sample containers to Aldrin, before he left the lunar surface.
The first moonwalk ended with LM hatch closure at 01:11:13 EDT 21 July 1969.
In total, the EVA lasted 2hrs 31mins 40secs.
Of all the photos taken during the brief, first moonwalk, only one (good one) is of Armstrong.
While the TV camera captured his first step and other activities on video, the moonwalk timeline called for Armstrong to have the mission's only lunar surface camera for a majority of the EVA.
The iconic photos of an astronaut saluting the American flag and staring straight into the camera are photos of Aldrin, not Armstrong.
While Armstrong is seen in the helmet visor reflection of Aldrin's suit in the staged photo of Aldrin staring into the camera, the only actual photo taken of Armstrong on the surface of the moon is one in which his back is to camera.
The iconic photo of Armstrong, helmet off, smiling, exhausted, was taken in the LM after the completion of the historic moonwalk.
Lunar ascent and return to Earth:
After spending the night safely tucked inside the LM on the surface of the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the CSM on 21 July.
At 13:54 EDT, Armstrong and Aldrin fired the LM's ascent engine, burning the engine for 7mins 15secs.
At 14:01:35 EDT, the Coelliptic Sequence Initiation burn began, lasting 4secs.
This was followed by the Constant Differential Height Maneuver burn (40secs) and the Terminal Phase Initiation burn (23secs) to place the LM ascent stage onto the proper course to rendezvous with the CSM.
After two midcourse correction burns, braking, and a Terminal Phase Finalization burn, the LM ascent stage arrived at stationkeeping with the CSM at 17:24:05 EDT in lunar orbit.
CSM/LM ascent stage docking occurred at 17:35 EDT.
After transferring all samples, experiments, and the camera from the LM to the CSM, the LM ascent stage was jettisoned from the CSM at 19:41:31 EDT, and Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin prepared the CSM for the Trans-Earth Injection (TEI) burn to begin their journey back to the Earth.
The TEI burn began at 00:55:42 EDT on 22 July and ended after 2mins 31secs. One midcourse correction burn was required at 16:01:57 EDT on 22 July.
As the CSM approached Earth, the crew prepared the CM for separation from the SM and entry into Earth's atmosphere.CM/SM separation occurred on 24 July at 12:21:12 EDT.
The Apollo 11 CM entered Earth's atmosphere at 12:35:05 EDT, its ablative heat shield taking the full-force of atmospheric aero-braking heating.
After nine-minutes of entry, the CM's drogue parachutes deployed, orienting the CM into a stable position for final velocity reduction and splashdown.
Visual contact by recovery forces occurred at 12:39 EDT (by aircraft) and 12:40 EDT by the recovery ship the USS Hornet.
VHF radio and recovery beacon contact were made at 12:46 EDT.
After 6mins 29secs on the chutes, and despite predicted CM orientation, the Apollo 11 CM splashed down and quickly rolled nose first (opposite orientation of normal) under the water.
Apollo 11 splashed down at 12:50:35 EDT on 24 July 1969 in the Pacific Ocean, 2,660 km (1,440 nmi) east of Wake Island and 380 km (210 nmi) south of Johnston Atoll at 13 degrees 19 minutes North 169 degrees 9minutes West.
After 8mins in an upside down configuration, the crew deployed airbags to right the capsule.
The final official words spoken during Apollo 11 were by Armstrong, telling Mission Control, "Everything's okay. Our checklist is complete. Awaiting swimmers."
As recovery forces converged on Apollo 11, President Kennedy's goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth" before the end of the decade was realized.
The mission of Apollo 11 was complete.
45 years later: With peace and hope for all mankind
The decision to make the most significant human spaceflight one of peace, not victory, set the theme of all the attempted and successful Apollo lunar landings.
Three and a half years after the significant day of 20 July 1969, Eugene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17, the final human lunar landing in history, remarked just before he became the final person to leave the lunar surface, "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind."
The spark of peace ignited by Apollo 11 carried forward beyond the lunar landings.
From 15 July to 24 July 1975, spanning the six year anniversary of the Apollo 11 flight, the final crew of Apollo lifted off on a mission that was, when Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon, beyond fantasy.
On 17 July 1975, for the first time in history, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics met in space. In peace.
As the Apollo CM linked with the Soviet Soyuz, a significant moment of detente occurred. Seemingly unstoppable enemies of the Cold War, fighting for radically different political ideologies on the ground, were finally together in space, working together.
It was the end of the space race.
And that spark of peace carried forward into the 1990s as Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour became the first spacecraft to visit another country's space station; and Russia's space station Mir became the first nation's space station to undergo construction and outfitting, in part, by another country's space vehicle fleet.
And Mir was just the precursor.
In November and December 1998, the peace sought by Apollo 11, forged in Apollo-Soyuz, and carried forward by Shuttle-Mir became permanent when Russia (in November) and NASA (in December) began the greatest joint operation in space history: the construction, outfitting, and permanent habitation and operation of the International Space Station.
With Station, the European, Canadian, and Japanese cultures have permanently joined the endeavor, providing modules, experiments, payloads, robotic arms, robots, and resupply craft for continued operations of the ISS.
And in the opening years of the current decade, private space companies from the United States have joined those government agencies.
In the 45 years since Apollo 11 proved that what many thought was impossible was in fact possible, the world's space faring nations have firmed their footing in space.
We've suffered immeasurable loss, and we've achieved immeasurable scientific research success. We've bettered our quality of life.
But above all, we have never stopped looking to the future.
While it's easier at times to focus on what we haven't done yet and what we may no longer have, the world's space programs have not diminished. They have thrived in the years since Apollo 11.
And they continue to grow. The next giant leap for humanity in space is on the horizon. And we know what those destinations will be.
As we look forward, as we make our move to mount human missions to another planet, the spirit of Apollo 11 becomes an ever-present necessity.
The goal is not victory over another. The goal is collective success, one for everyone, achieved through desire, inspiration, persistence, and peaceful cooperation.
Only through that can we take that next small step for ourselves and giant leap for humanity.
Apollo 11 Moon Landing Carried Big Risks for Astronauts, NASA
The moon is a tough place to explore. It is several days away from Earth. Solar radiation sears the moon's surface. Its gravity is lumpy, and there is no atmosphere to protect astronauts from the elements.
Yet, for a few historic years in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA made the moon its goal for human exploration. On July 20, 1969, NASA's Apollo 11 mission landed the first men on the moon. By the time Apollo 17 concluded in 1972, 12 men had walked on the lunar surface and several others had participated in orbital and flyaround missions.
"Apollo was kind of nested levels of risk," Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon" (Penguin Books, 1994), told Space.com. "You get on top of a Saturn V rocket with enough chemical energy to be the equivalent of a small atomic bomb. Then you throw away levels of safety by going into Earth orbit, then going to the moon, orbiting around the moon. And then, on the landing missions, two of the guys going down to the surface and being at an absolute dead stop on the moon."
Chain links to the moon
The "links in a chain" (as Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan called it) or "fragile daisy chain of events" (a phrase from Apollo 11's Mike Collins) didn't end there, Chaikin added. Walking on the moon required utter confidence in the engineers at ILC Dover who created the spacesuit, and even the women who sewed it. The last three Apollo missions took an additional risk by driving away from the lunar module in a rover.
So mission managers worked to remove as much risk as possible from the system. For example, the service propulsion system — the main engine on the mother ship that brought astronauts into and out of lunar orbit — had no ignition system. The fuel was self-combusting, and it was pressure-fed, removing the need for fuel pumps, Chaikin said.
Every component had "the living daylights" tested out of it, which helped NASA prevail over the Russians, who were also aiming for the moon at the time. According to Chaikin, Russia's massive N1 moon rocket was never put on a test stand to see how its engines reacted together when firing. This led to a devastating explosion during a test launch.
The process did have blind spots, Chaikin acknowledged. The Apollo 1 fatal fire on the pad happened because nobody thought through what might happen in a spacecraft with a pure oxygen atmosphere, pressurized at 16.7 pounds per square inch. (A spark in the spacecraft, from a source that was never uncovered, quickly ignited flames in the oxygen atmosphere.)
But on the whole, Chaikin says, NASA engaged in enough "what-if thinking" to make even the onboard explosion of an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 survivable. For example, the docking mechanism that linked the crippled command module and healthy lunar module was strong enough to allow the lunar module to propel the combined spacecraft onto the proper course for home, Chaikin said. The astronauts lived in their lunar module "lifeboat" for several days before successfully transferring back to the command module and splashing down on Earth.
Lunar lessons learned
Participants in the Apollo program also made sure to carry on lessons from one mission to the next, Jared Woodfill told Space.com. Woodfill was the project engineer for the switches and gauges on both vehicles, as well as the "alarm guy" for the command module. After the Apollo 1 pad fire killed three astronauts in 1967, Woodfill went over the alarm system and recommended several changes. Among them was lowering the threshold for when a "DC Power Bus" alarm came on, referring to a voltage drop in the command module's electrical system. This ended up being one of the main indicators of problems early after the Apollo 13 explosion.
"It was a very expensive change," said Woodfill, who still works at NASA. "It was not like the digital age. You had to dig into the actual hardware. You had to dig out the little resistor that would set that threshold. And you had to change all the [technical] drawings and everything."
Another example was making the switch panels moisture-resistant after Apollo 1, Woodfill said. This helped save the Apollo 13 spacecraft, because they had to turn off the command module's electrical system to save power. Although humidity caused moisture to build up on the command module switch panel, nothing shorted out when the spacecraft was turned on again.
Woodfill also identified several things that saved Apollo 11 from possible problems, ranging from how well Commander Neil Armstrong was trained for the landing, to designing the mission to fly a "free return trajectory" around the moon if the engine failed, meaning it could arrive back at Earth without the need of course corrections.
He added that it's important to keep these stories of success alive for others to learn the lessons as they design new types of spacecraft. "These stories I'm telling are good to recount. It encourages the younger generation," he said.
Pondering Apollo's legacy 45 years after the lunar landing
Richard Jurek, Guest Columnist – Orlando Sentinel
July is an important month in U.S. space history: It marks the final flight of the space-shuttle program; the historic Apollo/Soyuz joint space mission; and the 45th anniversary Sunday of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Yet, we have to buy a ride on a Soyuz to launch humans into space. My, how times have changed.
At its peak in 1966, the space program employed more than 411,000 people, and roughly 4.5 percent of our national budget was invested in the effort. NASA, with its laser-focused mission, and a national supply chain of private contractors committed to a common goal, represented the largest and boldest public-private partnership the world has ever known. And it worked.
With Apollo, government actually got the formula right for success — economically, as well as strategically. The vast majority of the jobs were in the private sector. Apollo may have been a government program, but it was also a private-industry accomplishment.
In 1966, NASA employed 10 percent of the 411,000, and private contractors employed the rest. Today, NASA consumes less than half of 1 percent of the federal budget, and employs 17,800 government workers, and 40,000 private contractors.
While the agency has shrunk to a mere one-seventh of its size during Apollo, when we could actually launch people into space, its percentage of government-sector jobs over private-sector jobs has more than tripled.
And NASA's goals? Adrift. Ask anyone in 1966, and you would get a singular answer: Send a man to the moon and bring him home safely. Today? Ask 100 people; you will get 110 different answers.
So, what is Apollo's true legacy on this 45th anniversary? Before you answer that question, pull out your smartphone. That amazing device (and everything it is connected to) would most likely not exist in its current form without the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s. It is no coincidence that Intel was formed in 1965 — in part, to serve a nascent space industry consuming more than 60 percent of all the computer chips.
And companies such as Apple and Microsoft were formed in the 1970s by the very kids who were not only inspired by, but also were direct beneficiaries of, the technological revolution spurred by Apollo.
These investments created our global-communication infrastructure; funded basic research and projects that continue to shrink computer and electronic components; and, perhaps more important, focused an entire generation on scientific and engineering pursuits that created the economic engine of today's global economy.
The cost? In 1973, NASA estimated Apollo's cost at $25.4 billion, or roughly $136.1 billion in today's dollars. For context, we will spend $223 billion on interest payments for our national debt in 2014. Meanwhile, NASA continues to shrink and suffer, plagued by the hot-potato/cold-potato politics of a Washington with neither the political will nor the boldness of generations past to harness its full potential for the dollars spent.
As the nation that owns Apollo's legacy, we must ask ourselves: now what? Are we going to simply squander that legacy in platitudes of nostalgia, playing Candy Crush and Angry Birds all day on our smartphones, or are we going to truly honor Apollo's legacy by re-engaging our heritage of innovation, exploration and achievement?
NASA does a great job within its mandate, but it is not structured or funded to succeed. As a nation, we need to be brave enough to dream big, but also to structure and fund NASA properly.
When President Johnson was asked by Congress about the expense to fund Apollo, he famously replied: "Now, would you rather have us be a second-rate nation, or should we spend a little money?" As a life-long supporter of NASA and NASA's amazing achievements, I hope we'd answer Johnson in the same way today: Let's spend a little money.
But let's also focus the effort. It is time to get bold, to create government-private partnerships that bolster (rather than bloat) the national economy and our budgets. We should start where it all began, with NASA. And we should start by giving the agency a unifying mission again.
Richard Jurek of Dyer, Ind., is president of Inland Marketing & Communications, co-author of "Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program" (MIT Press, 2014) and a collector of items that have flown on space missions.
Fowler: Without the moon race as a target, NASA needs a new mission
Wallace Fowler – Houston Chronicle
Today marks 45 years since the United States put the first two astronauts safely on the moon. The cost for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs was more than $25 billion at the time - more like $110 billion in today's world. The ensuing U.S. space efforts have cost an additional $196 billion for the shuttle and $50 billion for the space station. NASA's total inflation-adjusted costs have been more than $900 billion since its creation in 1958 through 2014 (more than $16 billion per year). Looking back, have we gotten our money's worth from the investment? I say, yes.
Some argue that spending money on space is not a good investment, or that it is a luxury that we cannot afford. I believe that space exploration is a very sound investment. NASA's 2015 budget is $17.5 billion. It is estimated that the total economic benefit of each dollar spent on the space program has been between $8 and $10. Compare that to Americans spending more than $35 billion a year on pizza or the national total annual economic cost of tobacco exceeding $250 billion and you can see that our return on our NASA investment is rather high.
The space race was a technological focus that accelerated advances in multiple areas of science, technology and medicine without a shooting war. This is almost without precedent in history. We have recently created a unique international research facility, the International Space Station. It's hard to put a monetary value on international cooperation, but the space station has recently been the focus of a nomination campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Technologies have been driven by space exploration as well. For space equipment, mass is paramount. Putting a kilogram of payload (instruments, astronauts, supplies) in Earth orbit is costly, and sending it beyond Earth's orbit is even more expensive. In the 1960s, there were two options, miniaturize or create huge boosters. The U.S. chose to miniaturize wherever possible while the Russians focused on huge boosters. The Apollo guidance computer was the great grandfather of the microcomputer. It weighed 70 pounds, required 55 watts of power and had less than 40 KB of memory in a day when most computers weighed tons, filled rooms and needed their own air-conditioning systems. It had less capability than many of today's electronic wristwatches, but it took us to the moon and back. Its descendants are today's laptops, tablets, GPS receivers and cellphones. Today, the trend for such devices is to make them ever smaller, ever more capable - a trend driven by the space program.
Almost every area of technology has benefitted from space research. Clothes and vehicle interiors are more fire-resistant because of research after the Apollo fire. Weather forecasting is much more accurate because of satellite monitoring. Monitoring from space can detect forest fires, oil spills, aquifer depletion, downed aircraft, etc. We have recently watched the World Cup matches from Brazil in near real-time via satellite feed. We can surf the Internet with a laptop or tablet while flying in an airplane almost anywhere in the world. We are more connected than ever, both in our everyday activities and in emergency situations.
Medicine has been revolutionized by the space program, too. We learned to monitor orbiting astronauts - pioneering telemedicine and leading to unprecedented improvements in patient monitoring, in and out of hospitals. Research into astronaut bone calcium loss has led to better understanding and treatment of osteoporosis. Digital mammography is a direct application of space data reduction processes. Baby foods are more healthful because of astronaut food research.
There are few other public activities with such a sustained level of performance and impact. Why? Because the space race was a unique event in history.
However, in order to remain relevant, NASA needs to have a driving focus - a mission. The space around Earth contains a huge number of asteroids. We are very much overdue, at least statistically, for a large asteroid to strike the planet. The last large asteroid killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Would protecting Earth and saving civilization be a sufficiently important mission?
Fowler is the director of the Texas Space Grant Consortium and a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Apollo 11 anniversary: We need a better vision for our next giant steps into space: opinion
Mark McCarter – Huntsville (AL) Times
Did you see that "supermoon" last weekend? So close, you could just reach out and touch it. That it's always been there for us, dressed up differently every night, but so reachable, is why this nation did what it did 45 years ago.
It has been a constant beacon hovering above our lives. It made perfect sense that we wanted to touch it, to go there. It was especially so for the generations steeped in science fiction, raised to imagine fantastic machinery and gadgets and gee-gaws that we now take for granted.
We can't see the future of United States space travel. Literally ... and, it often seems, figuratively.
The next logical step is Mars. It takes membership in the Von Braun Astronomical Society to pick it out of the nighttime sky with the naked eye.
And we can't see how we'll ever get there.
We'd be hard-pressed to have a consensus in this country on whether we should even try to go to Mars or with a similarly ambitious space project.
Buzz Aldrin, who was on the Apollo 11 mission 45 years ago this week, certainly has his mind made up on what to do. During a recent online chat, he said, "I have heard Frank Sinatra sing "Fly me to the Moon" almost too many times. So I'm interested in composing a new song, entitled "Get your --- to Mars!'"
Aldrin has long been a champion for accelerated space exploration. But when he dares to suggest that a mission to Mars would be a one-way ticket for the astronauts, it's unsettling to our sensibilities, as if it's little more than a suicide mission, and it tamps down the enthusiasm.
Certainly our own local self-interest should support a larger budget and more wide-spread support for NASA and some tangible missions. Space travel is the reality and romance of Huntsville's past and it's the hope to which we have pinned much of our future.
But this isn't the 1960s.
We aren't in a paranoia-fueled space race with the Soviets. We don't have a President Kennedy boldly proclaiming our goal to land on the moon. We don't have a Dr. Wernher von Braun with his charismatic leadership and imagination to make it happen.
The responsibility – and blame -- belongs to us all. As our space program blossomed in the 1960s, we were all along for the ride. Nowadays, we can unite in a week-long, flag-waving orgy of excitement over a national soccer team, but little else.
It often seems we're chasing our own tail in rocket development. We can't design a blueprint to effectively and efficiently collaborate with other nations or private entities.
NASA's bureaucracy, which even managed to erode Dr. von Braun's soul, has gone through much leadership transition that hampered progress.
Each administration in the White House has had a different space agenda and prevailing winds have never seemed to blow Congress in the direction of robust support for space travel.
As a public, we've lost interest in pioneering. We have taken for granted the things that now enhance our lives that were invented and perfected by space engineers.
The cold facts we have to accept: There's no President Kennedy coming around to promote a "space race" against an enemy nation. There's no Wernher von Braun on the horizon.
Aside from the cheerleading of geriatric ex-astronauts, there is no true, consistent leadership toward deep space, at least nothing like what propelled us a half-century ago. NASA needs a better PR effort to rebuild the national unity for space travel.
Maybe we don't need to get our --- to Mars. But we do need more visionaries. We need to see more clearly and be more consistent in where we're headed.
Moscow: Continue U.S. cooperation in space
NASA memo had cut 'contact with Russian entities'
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro — Special to The Washington Times
Moscow wants to work with Washington to further space exploration despite a recent NASA memo noting the crisis in Ukraine has nearly severed prospects for partnership, Russian officials say.
In an April 2 memo, NASA suspended "contact with Russian entities" as a result of "the ongoing violation of Ukraine sovereignty." A follow-up statement stressed that "NASA and Roscosmos will, however, continue to work together to maintain safe and continuous operation of the International Space Station." But it added that "NASA is laser focused on a plan to end our reliance on Russia to get into space."
"The memo was unexpected. We did not expect what was happening politically between Russia and the United States to affect what happens in space," Russian Federation spokesman Yevgeniv Khorishko told The Washington Times. "Politics should not overshadow this partnership when there are this many years of cooperation. We have good assets and experience to do this job together. It is natural for us to continue."
Since its space shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA has relied on Russia to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) via Soyuz rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, others, such as the European Space Agency, have been developing their own means for putting people into orbit.
Washington's already-strained relations with Moscow reached the breaking point earlier this year when pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine sought to break away from Kiev's government. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and has massed troops on the border with its smaller neighbor. Western nations have accused Moscow of fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine and supporting rebels battling Ukrainian forces — charges that Russian officials deny.
In response to NASA's memo, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin publicly accused Washington of sending mixed messages, tweeting, "Yet, apart from the ISS, we didn't cooperate with NASA anyway."
Russia also boosted its space agency's budget by $52 billion and announced it was declining a NASA proposal to extend the ISS beyond 2020. According to The Moscow Times, Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, would "be looking to other projects and partners."
But Russian officials told The Times that NASA's memo has not hurt "long-standing cooperative efforts" between the two countries and that they believe the U.S. and Russia need one another to conquer the final frontier.
"I have noticed some changes in who is participating at conferences, but for the most part it has not really affected any of the ongoing joint programs," said Alexander Trofimov, who specializes in scientific and military affairs at the Russian Embassy in Washington.
Mr. Trofimov said "many technologies developed by both Russia and the U.S. are used by one another," such as space-based satellite navigation systems and rocket building. He also noted the unprecedented cooperation that allowed 1975's Apollo-Soyuz project, the first joint U.S.-Soviet space flight and the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.
"If it were not for that joint effort, we may not have the Soyuz rockets that are taking both Russian and American astronauts to the ISS today," Mr. Khorishko said.
Washington and Moscow have cooperated on space exploration since 1993, when they merged the Russian space station Mir and the U.S. station Freedom to create the International Space Station.
U.S.-based satellite launch companies who spoke to The Times only on the condition of anonymity said that the continued use of Russian cosmodromes is vital.
NASA declined to comment and referred to a statement it released in May: "Space cooperation has been a hallmark of U.S.-Russia relations. We have not received any official notification from the Government of Russia on any changes in our space cooperation at this point.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a legal analyst for The Washington Times.
Palazzo Hopes To Update Commercial Launch Law this Year
Jeff Foust – Space News
The chairman of the U.S. House Science space subcommittee said July 17 he is still hopeful that an update to commercial launch law can make it through Congress before the end of the year, but he warned time may run out on another space-related bill.
"It is my hope, before this Congress is finished, that we will be able to get some updates to the CSLA [Commercial Space Launch Act] passed," Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) said in a keynote address at the Future Space 2014 conference in Washington.
Palazzo did not discuss what specific changes he would like to see passed, and no formal legislation has been introduced yet in the House or Senate. Past discussions about an update to the CSLA have focused on several issues, including an extension of third-party launch indemnification, an extension of current restrictions on the Federal Aviation Administration regarding regulation of safety of spaceflight
participants, and allowing suborbital vehicle developers to retain an experimental permit after they receive an FAA launch license.
Palazzo was less optimistic, though, about the prospects for a bill introduced earlier this month by Reps. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) and Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) that would grant companies property rights to resources extracted from asteroids. "We have a limited amount of legislative days this year," he said. "Our committee is reviewing it as we speak."
In his speech, Palazzo emphasized the passage of a NASA authorization bill his committee authored. The full House passed the bill June 9 on a 401-2 vote, but the Senate has yet to take up that bill or pass its own version. Palazzo said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), the ranking member of the space subcommittee, has been in discussions with members of the Senate on the bill. "She does feel like they're going to move something so we can at least go to conference and work it out," he said. "I believe the Senate understands how important this is, just as we do in the House."
Palazzo also offered a qualified endorsement of the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which has supported commercial satellite and launch deals in recent years. "I do believe it's something we should probably continue, but it needs to have some necessary reforms," he said.
Adrift Part 3
While NASA fixates on Mars, space rivals shoot for the moon
Eric Berger – Houston Chronicle
President Barack Obama delivered his lone space policy speech inside the historic Kennedy Space Center building where astronauts stay before launching.
Among those looking on was Buzz Aldrin, the second human to walk on the moon, as Obama glibly dismissed returning there.
"I just have to say pretty bluntly here, we've been there before," the President said, raising his right hand for emphasis. "Buzz has been there before."
With this single line from his 2010 speech Obama reinforced the modern zeitgeist of the moon as a dead end on humanity's path to the stars.
Yet much of the spaceflight community, many planetary scientists and all other space-faring nations do not share that view. The President, they say, had it all wrong. The moon, rather, offers an essential base camp for human exploration deeper into the solar system. From an outpost there explorers could fuel rockets, take on supplies and venture deeper into the solar system.
Whether Americans go or not, others will soon expand their borders and cultures to Earth's nearest neighbor.
"Every space-faring country in the world, except for the United States, is interested in going to the moon," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology rocket scientist Jeffrey Hoffman, a five-time astronaut.
"We could have led the world on a program of international lunar exploration. Everyone else was interested. We squandered that opportunity."
Obama was right about one thing: NASA has been to the moon before. This Sunday marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and during the six, short Apollo missions astronauts like David Scott returned lunar rocks to Earth. Those samples, and subsequent robotic surveys, revealed a world teeming with resources that could extend NASA's reach into the solar system.
"I don't think many people realize it, but there is so much to learn, and so much to do there," Scott says.
In space, water is life. And in the dark, cold regions of the poles large deposits of ice are mixed in the lunar soil. Astronauts can drink it, of course. It also could shield their habitats from radiation. Broken apart, water provides breathable oxygen and hydrogen for fuel cells. But above all else for nations seeking to explore far from home, the water is a tempting cache of fuel. Oxygen and hydrogen are the most powerful rocket fuels known to man.
The moon also possesses one other singular quality: it is close. It can be reached, explored and developed without fancy new rockets, and doing so would nurture a burgeoning private rocket industry that is bringing American ingenuity to spaceflight and slashing costs.
NASA dreams of human missions to Mars, but report after report has said absent a doubling or tripling of NASA's budget such dreams will eventually turn into nightmares. Moreover, by shooting for Mars, NASA is falling behind other countries reaching for the moon in the 21st century replay of the original space race.
But now the race isn't for bragging rights, it's to tap the moon's resources.
In April Russia disclosed plans to construct a lunar base by 2040 to obtain water, minerals and other resources. The country's chief space official, Dmitry Rogozin, said, "We are coming to the moon forever." China landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon in December. Part of the Yutu rover's mission was to seek out natural resources and scout for eventual human landing sites. Space policy experts say China's military run space program also has geostrategic intentions, such as demonstrating technological superiority to the United States. European countries are interested in the moon as well, and have said they are ready to go with China or Russia should the United States focus on Mars.
America got to the moon first, but the countries or corporations that go there to stay will determine how the world closest to the Earth is developed.
"It's the next frontier," said Paul Spudis, a Houston-based scientist who has devoted his life to studying the moon. "Whoever gets to the frontier first will establish what kind of political and social paradigm will be followed."
During the original Apollo missions astronauts did as much science as they could, sometimes creatively.
Scott, who as commander of Apollo 15 ventured farther than previous expeditions because he had the first lunar rover, said he always felt pressed for time. While making the first drive on the moon Scott recalled suddenly spying a curious, softball-sized rock.
"Oh man!" he radioed to mission control. "Hey, how about it, let's-" he added, but then stopped.
It was near the end of the foray, and Scott's oxygen supplies were running low. He and Jim Irwin had strict instructions to return directly to their lunar outpost.
But, in the zone, Scott couldn't resist. He feigned an issue with his seatbelt, hopped off the rover, and went to pick up the rock.
More than four decades later Scott cracks a wide smile, laughs and says, "One minute and 47 seconds, and I had this jewel."
As an undergraduate at Arizona State in 1971 Spudis was watching on television. He had been interested in space during the first Apollo landings, but this was mesmerizing. Here were two test pilots, guys who weren't scientists, doing geology on the moon and having the times of their lives. Right then Spudis switched his major from engineering to geology. He's never looked back.
A few years ago Spudis got a chance to meet Scott. "I told him," Spudis recalls, "You're the guy who changed my life."
Limited though it may have been, geology done during the Apollo missions taught humans about not only the moon, but also the Earth and sun.
By studying rocks brought back to Earth, scientists found they were similar to those here, leading to the "Giant Impact Hypothesis." This idea suggests that, during the early years of the solar system, the moon formed from debris created when a Mars-sized object collided with Earth.
As fascinating as this is, however, Americans aren't going back to the moon to gratify scientists. We'd go back for the water.
Over the eons comets striking the moon have deposited more than 10 billion tons of water at the poles, roughly the volume of Utah's Great Salt Lake. That's enough fuel to launch the equivalent of a space shuttle, every day, for more than 2,000 years.
But could rocket fuel really be produced on the moon?
It might work like this. Small robots would go first to the gray and dusty surface, prospecting for water and mineral deposits buried there. During the second phase more sophisticated robots would collect the water and begin converting it into rocket fuel by splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then still more robots would arrive to set up a lunar habitat, build solar power arrays and establish communication systems. Finally humans would land and, in the first test of sustainability, attempt to grow crops in lunar greenhouses.
There are challenges in making rocket fuel, especially liquid hydrogen. To turn hydrogen gas into a liquid it must be cooled to near absolute zero, an energy intensive process. But shaded areas of the moon are already cold, which helps. Also, special tanks are necessary so this fuel doesn't boil off, like steam from a boiling pot of water. Liquid oxygen is easier to handle. Both are doable.
"There's all the fuel we'll ever need for exploration, and it's just sitting there," Spudis said.
To explore beyond low-Earth orbit NASA will need a lot of fuel. When a rocket blasts off Earth just a few percent of what actually reaches orbit is payload. The rest is the weight of the rocket itself, and the fuel burnt from now empty tanks to escape the tug of Earth's gravity. Long duration missions to Mars or elsewhere would require a lot of expensive launches from Earth, each delivering a little of the fuel needed.
But what if the fuel were already there?
Once mined from lunar soil it's easy to get fuel from the moon, which has far less gravity than Earth, to a rocket nearby in space. For every ton of rocket fuel launched from Earth into space, more than 10 tons could be delivered from the lunar surface with the same amount of thrust.
This is the vision of Spudis and others. Fly robots and then astronauts to the moon, have them live off the land and eventually produce rocket fuel using sunlight and lunar water. This fuel could be stockpiled in space, near the moon. Then more astronauts, launching from Earth, could pick up these fuel supplies, refill their tanks, and march further outward into the solar system, to Mars or wherever.
It's akin to the transcontinental railroad that opened the American West, only with smaller, cheaper, private rockets and the resources of the moon opening the space frontier. This represents a very different kind of space program. Instead of firing expensive one-off missions to plant flags on distant worlds, it develops a robust and reusable space program that leads humanity beyond Earth.
So why isn't NASA going?
A decade ago NASA was divided into camps. There were those who favored a sustainable moon presence, and others who sought a daring, Apollo-like dash to Mars. The Mars people won and NASA devised an ambitious rocket plan named Constellation to go briefly to the moon, and then onto Mars.
Then came mounting war debts and recession. NASA's plan was untenable. The question became: What next?
A senior advisor to NASA administrator Charles Bolden named Charles Miller thought he had found the answer.
Working with engineers at Johnson Space Center, as well as five other field centers, and using same tools NASA uses to estimate costs, Miller says, "We found we could put astronauts on the moon within a decade, inside the existing budget."
The plan used the commercially available Delta IV Heavy rocket to conduct a steady stream of missions to the lunar surface, allowing humans to begin tapping into the moon's resources.
"We briefed it to all the key NASA human spaceflight centers, giving them a chance to challenge the conclusion," Miller said. "I thought it was a tremendous result for human spaceflight. We could have a plan that flies early and flies often."
NASA never published the study and Miller's contract wasn't renewed.
Congress didn't want radical change and instructed NASA to build a big rocket, the Space Launch System or SLS. Bolden, by then a Mars guy, reinstituted a plan to send humans to the red planet in the 2030s. This time NASA wouldn't even stop at the moon.
But in June the National Research Council released a blunt assessment of the new plan to reach Mars in the 2030s: Not viable. Instead, NASA should reconsider the moon as a stepping stone to Mars.
"What we're saying is that you need to take another look at this," said Mary Lynne Dittmar, a Houston space consultant who co-authored the report.
So far, NASA, the White House and Congress haven't budged.
They have, in fact, backed off developing a technology critical to enabling the Miller plan to open up cislunar space. These are essentially gas stations in space. A blue-ribbon panel in 2009, led by Norm Augustine, rated these "propellant depots" as NASA's top space technology priority. NASA agreed at the time.
A depot might look a lot like a daisy, with a central docking station, and large tanks of fuel radiating outward. There are a handful of locations near the moon that are stable due to the gravitational balance between Earth and the moon. These points offer a natural location to position fuel depots that could be supplied by the moon, and used to refill spacecraft for voyages to Mars or elsewhere in the solar system.
As on the moon, there are significant challenges to storing very cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen in space. One is heating from the sun, so various depot concepts include large, umbrella-like features to shade them as well as thermos-bottle like tanks in which to store the fuel. There are also questions about how to transfer fuel from a depot to a spacecraft.
To solve these technical challenges NASA put together a $400 million depot development plan in 2011, said James Reuther, a deputy associate administrator for space technology at NASA. But so far the agency, told by Congress to prioritize rocket building, has spent just $60 million on depots.
Miller noted that NASA also opted not to fund private tests of depots to prove their viability.
In 2011 United Launch Alliance proposed such a test for less than $100 million. Reuther said NASA considered the proposal carefully, but that it didn't go far enough to prove depots would work.
An industry official familiar with the proposal said this was an excuse.
"Reuther is admitting that perfect is the enemy of the good enough," the official said. "Rather than flying now and proving that propellant depots can work, they have chosen to fly nothing. NASA has been doing ground tests on propellant storage for 50 years. They need to fly stuff, but it will never fly under NASA's existing management."
The White House did not oppose depots. It, in fact, sought more funding for space technology and private rockets.
So why disparage the moon?
One reason is Miller's study hadn't come out yet, and using traditional means Obama didn't think NASA could afford to go. Could it have been political? Obama was no fan of President George W. Bush's policies, of course, but advisers say his opposition was to the expensive Constellation program, not the moon.
Nevertheless Obama said it and, in fact, ad-libbed it. The line wasn't in the original speech. Some have blamed Buzz Aldrin, who rode on the same plane to Florida. But Aldrin didn't speak to Obama on the way. So the mystery remains.
Ever a gifted speaker, Obama received boisterous applause from the Florida crowd. At times the response was more muted, but still polite. But after the "we've been there before" line the crowd's reaction is notable for its nearly total silence.
The line flopped. And then it became national policy.
NanoRacks Aims To Offer Research Accommodations on ISS Exterior by Year's End
Dan Leone | Space News
By the end of 2014, Houston-based space services company NanoRacks plans to expand its payload accommodation services with the installation of an external platform at the international space station that can be booked by researchers on a commercial basis.
"We finished manufacturing about a month ago ... and it's undergoing testing at the Johnson Space Center [in Houston] right now," Jeffrey Manber, managing director of NanoRacks, said in a July 10 phone interview.
The NanoRacks External Research Platform, which is about twice the size of a microwave oven, was made for NanoRacks by Astrium North America for about $10 million, Manber said. It will be launched to station aboard Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus space freighter during a cargo delivery mission slated to lift off Oct. 21, Manber said.
After that, "give it about a month and we should be open for business by the end of the year," Manber said. The platform will be able to handle "about four to six customer payloads, depending on the size, at any one time."
Once the platform is operational, payloads could be delivered by Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s Dragon, Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus, Japan's H-2 Transfer Vehicle, or Russia's two space vehicles, the Progress freighter and Soyuz crew capsule. NanoRacks is free to book deliveries on any of these vehicles, Manber said.
Payloads bound for NanoRacks' external platform will be subject to NASA safety and technical reviews, but Nanoracks will handle all interactions with the agency on the payload owner's behalf, Manber said. The arrangement is similar to one the company already has with NASA under a nonreimbursable Space Act Agreement dating back to 2009, which allows the company to act as a full-service broker for experiments bound for the station's interior.
The new external platform will be useful for testing, among other things, sensors, optics and materials, Manber said. Most payloads will have to be 10 centimeters in width and height and up to 40 centimeters deep, although adapters for nonstandard sizes will eventually be available, he said.
The NanoRacks platform will provide power and communications for any payload that requires it. Researchers will even have the option to get their experiments back — a luxury they would not have if they used a small satellite as a testbed.
"We had one Air Force colonel telling us for 10 years he's been sending small satellites up and a certain percentage of them fail," Manber said. "He's never been able to find out why they fail, so it would be huge for him to get something back."
A typical payload could be returned to its owner about a year after launch using Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s Dragon space capsule, Manber said. SpaceX is NASA's only option for returning substantial amounts of cargo from station, since Orbital's Cygnus spacecraft — not to mention the unmanned cargo tugs operated by Russia, Europe and Japan — disintegrate during atmospheric re-entry.
NanoRacks' external platform, like the station-based cubesat deployment services the company offers, will be based at the Japanese Experiment Module, Manber said. Experiments will be pushed out of the airlock by astronauts, then fitted to the module's exterior either by the Remote Manipulator System, the Japanese-built robotic arm, or by the twin-armed, rail-mounted, Canadian-made Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator.
A key financier for the NanoRacks External Platform, in a roundabout way, is NASA.
The Florida-based nonprofit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which by law gets $15 million a year from NASA to manage nonagency research aboard station, became NanoRacks' first external platform customer in 2012, pledging $1.5 million to the effort and soliciting proposals for payloads.
On June 18, CASIS announced it had found its first payload for the NanoRacks testbed: an experimental digital-imaging sensor for Earth and space imaging designed by Daniel Batcheldor from the Florida Institute of Technology. The CASIS-sponsored sensor will be exposed to the space environment for 90 days, according to a press release from the group.
Other CASIS-sponsored payloads will follow, under the 2012 agreement that provided some of the cash NanoRacks needed to build the external platform, but Manber declined to identify other possible customers.
Where next? Q&A with NASA astronaut, scientist
U-T San Diego
It's been 45 years since the first moonwalk, when astronauts were household names. Today, some people think NASA is no longer in business. Many Americans may not know Chris Cassidy's name, but he is among the elite group of astronauts who have traveled to space. A former Navy SEAL who lived in San Diego for a few years, he has made two trips to the International Space Station. He and Liz Warren, Space Station program specialist, met with the U-T Editorial Board and U-T science reporter Gary Robbins recently to discuss space issues. Here is an edited transcript of the interview.
Q: Tell us about life on a space station.
CASSIDY: It's a very comfortable place to live. I'm often asked, do you feel claustrophobic? Is it hard to be in that small environment for six months? And I didn't find that to be the case at all. In fact, sometimes you're looking for your crewmates and you can't find them. They're off in some other module. So there's plenty of space and even the refrigerator size cubicle that we sleep in, is plenty of space for putting your pictures of your family, a computer to do all the normal stuff.
Q: Give us a picture of the size of the entire station.
CASSIDY: Roughly maybe a four- or five-bedroom house is what we often say. It feels about like that on the inside too. But it's like a cluttered, a hoarder's four- to five-bedroom house. Because there's bags and cabling and experiments and all kind of things deployed, out in the hallway if you will. It's easy to float around, I mean it's not any big deal but if you're a neat, organized control freak you might have some issues with it. It's all very organized.
I'm often asked what time do we live by? We set Greenwich Mean Time on our watch. And get up about 6, 6:30. Generally start work with a conference call to the ground around 7:30 in the morning. And then a close out the day conference call with them around 7:30 or 8. That's about a 12-hour day. But that includes an hour break for lunch. And a couple hours down time for exercise. Which is a nice break from the routine of the day. Sundays are completely unscheduled and a really nice time to just relax and look out the window and what's fascinating is to sit in the cupola, which is this six-sided window and one seventh window right in the middle, kind of like a tank turret at the bottom of the space station. And you can just immerse yourself in the universe.
Q: What is the sensation of speed? Because you're going 17,500 mph.
CASSIDY: If you did not look out the window, you couldn't tell at all. Even on a spacewalk, when you go outside, there's not like there's wind direction past you or anything. You're just very still. But when you look down and see the relative motion of the clouds and we all know how far it is from San Diego to the Great Lakes. It's a long way. But when you're coming up on a south to north trajectory, come over San Diego and not too long, maybe a handful of minutes you're right over the Great Lakes and that's when it puts it in perspective of how fast you're moving.
Q: We've been in space now for 50 years, the space station has been up there for quite a few years now. Scientifically has it been worth it?
WARREN: The International Space Station is a world-class laboratory, in orbit. It's an engineering feat, it's an example of international cooperation. But from the science perspective, we have really just begun full utilization as a scientific laboratory. It took several years to build the space station. Again that's the engineering feat and the international cooperation. We've really hit our stride (in the past few years). We're getting a lot of science done. We're up to almost 1,600 different experiments that have started, are ongoing, or have been completed on the space station. And the variety of disciplines, our biology, biotechnology, we have physical sciences, the human research. Earth and space science I mentioned also, it's a great platform for studying our planet and studying space. Technology demonstration, technology development and some educational activities as well. I think it's absolutely worth it. We're learning things that helps us here on earth. And we have a little bit of a phrase, we're doing science off the planet, for the planet.
Q: What is the future of the American space program? It seems like the program, from a laymen's perspective, lacks mission. lacks focus. Certainly lacks funding.
CASSIDY: So any program that lacks direction, funding and vision is going to have a challenge, right? I don't think that's necessarily the box we're in. There's been a few years post-shuttle and up until about now where we have been a little bit lacking of a vision. And funding has been a challenge. But by the same token the whole nation has had financial troubles so you know certainly every industry had to take a step to tighten the belt a little bit during those periods of time. However, I think right now we've kind of turned the corner on that. And have our sights pretty well set on Mars in the 2030 time frame, and we're building a launch architecture that will get us there. The unmanned test of that capsule is later this year around Christmastime.
Q: It was three years ago this month that the shuttle flew for the last time. At the time NASA said it was going to chart out this compelling path for future land exploration. We're three years down the line, there's no plan to go back to the moon. There's vague discussion about going to the asteroid and the numbers on Mars are way out there. How do you build public interest for anything like this when there's no hard, concrete plans to do anything?
CASSIDY: That is a challenge. And when you have a very expensive, long lead time event that you're planning for at the early stages it's really hard to pull in everybody's interest because we all care more about who's going to be starting for the Chargers in the fall, than we do what's going to happen in 2030. So how do you pull that interest in? Well, there's engineering steps that are happening along the way. So there's a certain timeline with a certain budget. You have more money, the timeline shrinks. We have a timeline that can get us to Mars we think in the 2030s given the budget that we have. That's our plan. And to pull people in and create that interest that you're talking about, is making people aware of all these milestones, that we have like the unmanned test of the (Orion) vehicle. The very same vehicle that I might be riding in, in a handful of years. I won't be going to Mars but taking it to and from the space station, make sure everything good. And then a couple years later maybe after, go ahead.
Q: The message doesn't seem to be resonating. It was 45 years ago when Aldrin and Armstrong walked on the moon. At the time almost everybody in this country knew who they were. During the shuttle programs some people knew who some of the shuttle astronauts were. But here in 2014 if we went to the mall behind us and asked 100 people who are the astronauts on the space station, I'm not sure any would know. How do you make it resonate? How is that NASA is having so much trouble connecting with the broad American public on what it's doing?
CASSIDY: Well, maybe you could help in the media. That's a small part of it. Just getting awareness out there by any means we can. And that's why we have events like this week we're here in San Diego for what we're calling Destination Station. To let the public know just exactly what's happening at NASA. I go to a lot of communities around the country and a lot of people think that NASA doesn't even exist anymore because the space shuttle was retired a couple years ago.
Q: There's a difference between space travel and manned space travel obviously. Is it necessary for human beings to go to Mars scientifically?
WARREN: Scientifically. we can learn a lot from a rover. And we can learn a lot from robotics. But there's this tangible benefit of having people there. It's this serendipitous discovery. A robot is going to do its thing and it may roll right over something that a human eye can say, that is different. Hang on, let me stop and look at this. That's one of the real benefits of having a human there.
I mentioned earlier we've really just begun this scientific endeavor on the space station. We're really hitting our stride with the science. Science takes time. And if you look at what we're publishing now, we do have thousands of publications that are coming out about space station research and there are a variety of journals, some of the top 20 journals, scientific journals. But if you look at the dates on when some of that science was done it's a couple of years ago. Science takes time. And it seems like society right now is a real instant gratification. If it's not on Twitter right now…
Q: I wanted to ask you to reflect on kind of the extremes in human nature, you were in Afghanistan very shortly after 9/11. So you deployed to Afghanistan twice. You went into caves. You saw some horrible things. But you also went 250 miles above the earth and just seeing this kind of majesty. How do you square those different images?
CASSIDY: That's actually part of the whole experience that's been one of my most cherished memories. And that is flying over the planet, there's no yellow line drawn between Canada and the U.S. or Mexico and the U.S. You don't see any borders, you just see the changing colors of the browns and greens and the white clouds and mountain tops and stuff. But you know that there is congestion on the 5 and the 8. And you know that there's bad stuff happening in places like Afghanistan. And other hot spots around the world, and in our own country. But you can't see any of that. You just see nice peaceful earth. And having had the opportunity to trudge through some really less than desirable places in Afghanistan and see all of that with my own eyes. And then take it from this different perspective looking down, to me it just made me realize that earth is kind of just a space ship for all seven billion of us. We, all of us. really need to take care of our planet because it's what is keeping us alive.
How Do Astronauts Stay in Shape?
Advances have halted space's bone-sapping effects—but a trip to Mars looms as a challenge
Bob Drury – Men's Health
There are certain Moments. December 7, 1941. November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001. We all have them, where we remember exactly where we were. Not personal milestones such as births, deaths, marriages. Culture-altering and community-bonding events.
One of mine occurred 45 years ago this Sunday, July 20, 1969. That was a Sunday also. It was late at night, closing on 11, a chilly night for July. Our tribe was gathered around a tiny black-and-white television—a Philco?—in a rented, blue-collar bungalow on the Jersey Shore. My parents, me, and my sisters and brother, allowed to stay up past our bedtime; uncles and aunts and cousins; my only living grandparent. To witness Neil Armstrong drop from that ladder and imprint man's first footprint on the lunar surface. To declare, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
"Wow," Walter Cronkite said, and wiped away a tear.
The there-and-back-again journey of that Apollo 11 crew of Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin lasted eight days, three hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds from liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Long time, then. Nail-biting long time. Now? Doesn't seem like so much in the subsequent eras of two-week Space Shuttle missions and six-month rotations on Space Stations or even NASA's planned 12- to 14-month manned, round-trip mission to Mars.
Which got me to thinking. How do the astronauts stay in shape up there?
Stay in shape? Hell, I grew up adoring the first generation of astronauts portrayed in Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," where exercising apparently meant lifting longneck bottles of what was most definitely not Tang at Pancho Barnes' Mojave Desert watering hole, The Happy Bottom Rising Club. Even Buzz Aldrin was known to drop by the joint.
But that was then. And this, the astronaut Commander Chris Cassidy tells me when I track him down in Houston, is now.
"Before we had the equipment we do up there now, people were coming back in just horrid shape—way less cardiovascular shape, way weaker muscularly, and with way weaker bone density," says Cassidy, a former Navy SEAL who served two deployments to Afghanistan before he was selected as an astronaut candidate 10 years ago.
"So NASA realized, 'We gotta fix this.' And they did. To the point where some of us are even coming back stronger now."
In 2009 Cassidy was part of the Space Shuttle crew that delivered equipment and performed experiments on the International Space Station. And last year he spent 166 days aboard the Station. All told, he has performed six spacewalks. He recalls how far NASA has come since his early days in the service, "when on the shuttle all we had was an ergometer where you could work your legs and arms with pedals. It didn't help much with bone-density loss.
"The most significant effect of Zero-G on our bodies is not so much muscle-mass loss or atrophy—you can prevent that pretty easily—as bone-density decay."
Put simply (as it must be for me, or else I wouldn't have a clue), humans have physiologically evolved to adapt to earth's gravitational field. Once in zero-gravity space, however, the effects of weightlessness are felt most keenly in our bones. Astronauts have been known to lose an average of between 1 and 2 percent of their bone mass for every month spent in space. By comparison, elderly men and women lose less than that per year.
"So," says Cassidy, "we want to minimize that as best we can, and the best way to do that is with weighted, loaded-up exercise on what we call our ARED, our Advanced Resistance Exercise Device, which is a big, fancy acronym for a weight machine." As Cassidy describes it, for one hour each day every astronaut is required to work out on this "clamshell-like device" which allows them to work their entire musculature system, but most especially their lower bodies—"Your hips, your butt, your back, your legs," he says. "That's really where you gain the most positive effect towards delaying, if not totally eliminating, bone-density loss."
And though there is also a sort of treadmill aboard the Space Station that allows the astronauts to strap in with bungee cords in order to maintain their cardiovascular equilibrium—"I think my VO-max was exactly the same when I returned last time," Cassidy says—it is the ARED that makes up for the loss of everyday exercise we earth-bound humans get merely by walking up and down steps or gadding about our offices. The machine can even be set to differentiate between regular deadlifts and the more esoteric Romanian deadlifts.
"The racking of the weight is actually the most challenging part of it when you're doing heavy lifts," he says. "For instance, while on earth you just pick it up off the squat rack, back away a foot or two, squat, and when you're done you walk forward and replace the bar; in space you kind of have to push away with your feet and fold your upper body forward. It's not a natural movement. Nonetheless, we're working out pretty hard up there."
Cassidy tells me that NASA is currently trying to solve the problem of exercise in space on the much smaller space vehicle scheduled to blast off for Mars sometime in the next 20 years. "It's a serious issue," he says. "It's not like there will be a gigantic, Space Station-like vehicle going there; that's too expensive for fuel to push all that mass. So it needs to be a small capsule, and inside a small capsule you really can't do much exercise.
"That's six, seven months to get there, and the same thing coming back, and you want to have the strength once you're there to pick up rocks when you're walking on the surface. So they're trying to figure out unique ways to get workouts in, maybe some modified version of the ARED, or even with just simple resistance, rubber band-type equipment."
And when I asked the 44-year-old Cassidy if he plans to be around for that journey, I could envision the smile on his face on the other end of the telephone line.
"One of the Russian Cosmonauts on the Space Station turned 60 when I was up there," he says. "Let's just say that as long as I keep passing the annual flight physical, I plan on staying here and doing this job."
Commander Cassidy had yet to be born when Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong flew Apollo 11 to the moon. As a young boy I remember watching what happened 45 years ago this Sunday like it was yesterday. And I hope I'm still around when someone leaves a footprint on Mars. It will be a certain Moment. Perhaps it will even be Chris Cassidy. I'm guessing he'll manage to stay in shape.
END
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