Hope you can join us Thursday at Hibachi Grill.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- JSC Knowledge Management Office Case Study - Organizations/Social
- See Orion EFT-1 Launch - Accepting Reservations
- Nominees Wanted: Native American Heritage Month
- Join the ERGs for a Unique Generational Experience
- Breakfast With Santa - Registration Now Open - Jobs and Training
- CGE Travel System Live Lab - Nov. 5
- RLLS Portal Training for November - Via WebEx - Community
- CFC Kickoff: Give for Good
- It's Great to Be Popular!
- Be Energy Aware This Fall |  |
| Headlines - JSC Knowledge Management Office Case Study
Starsky had Hutch, Cagney had Lacey and Riggs had Murtaugh. These detectives worked in partnership when something unexpected and negative occurred and the cause needed to be determined. Similarly, when working a failure or mishap investigation, the chair/lead and safety representative work in partnership to lead the overall team to determine cause. Much like detectives, they too need specialized skills to succeed: flexibility; an understanding of group dynamics; listening skills; leadership skills; objectivity; and discernment. More than technical competency, these types of roles require nuanced and intuitive dispositions that allow investigation leaders to be successful facilitators. Just how does this partnership work, and what skills are needed for success? Find out in the latest JSC Knowledge Management Office case study: "The Fine Art of Getting to Root Cause: A Partnership for Success" Organizations/Social - See Orion EFT-1 Launch - Accepting Reservations
Starport is now accepting reservations for the bus trip to see the Orion Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) launch on Dec. 4 at Kars Park in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Join us to experience this historic moment in NASA history with your co-workers and other members of the NASA family. Charges include transportation, hotel accommodations and park admission, as well as snacks and beverages while traveling. Participants will be responsible for their own meal expenses. Reduced rates are available for double, triple and quadruple occupancy. Additional charges will apply if the launch is pushed back with a one-day weather waive-off schedule. There are a limited number of seats available, and all reservations are first come, first serve—so don't hesitate. Make your reservations today! Click here for more information and online registration, or visit the Gilruth Center information desk to register in person. - Nominees Wanted: Native American Heritage Month
The November 2014 National Native American Heritage Month theme is "Native Pride and Spirit: Yesterday, Today and Forever." The theme demonstrates the importance of having high expectations for all Native American individuals, offering work environments open to the talents of all qualified individuals and encouraging people to be empowered. We would like to highlight one JSC/White Sands Test Facility employee whose story serves as an inspiration to others. Please submit your nomination, or self-nomination, for consideration to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity via email by Monday, Nov. 10. Please include the nominee's name, organization, job title and why you nominate the individual (or yourself) in 300 words or less. A selected individual will be highlighted in JSC Features during November! - Join the ERGs for a Unique Generational Experience
The Emerge Employee Resource Group (ERG) is sponsoring "Our Innovations Through Generations," an interactive event to share knowledge across the four generations in our workforce and encourage collaboration and innovation. The event will be hosted tomorrow, Nov. 5, in the Teague Auditorium lobby, and you can come any time between noon and 1:30 p.m. In 20 minutes you will experience six interactive booths (examples include Jeopardy, Communication Styles and Unconscious Bias). Come for fun, food and friends across generations! Event Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Event Start Time:12:00 PM Event End Time:1:30 PM Event Location: Teague Lobby Add to Calendar Rachael Copeland x46962 [top] - Breakfast With Santa - Registration Now Open
Santa Claus is coming to town and making a stop at the Gilruth Center. Enjoy breakfast with Santa in the Gilruth Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 11 a.m. on Dec. 6. Your child will have the opportunity to sit on Santa's lap to give him their wish list, have their picture taken and receive a special gift! Fees are $10/child and $15/adult if purchased on or before Dec. 1. Register for this event at the Gilruth Center or online. Tickets will not be sold at the door. Don't miss out on this special event. Jobs and Training - CGE Travel System Live Lab - Nov. 5
Do you need some hands-on, personal help with the Concur Government Edition (CGE) Travel System? Join the Business Systems and Process Improvement Office for a CGE Travel System Live Lab tomorrow, Nov. 5, any time between 9 a.m. and noon in Building 12, Room 142. Our help desk representatives will be available to help you work through your travel processes and learn more about using the CGE Travel System during this informal workshop. Please feel free to bring any travel documents to be worked. This is real-time help, not a training class. Please click on the direct SATERN link below to register and receive SATERN credit. For additional information, please contact Judy Seier at x32771. - RLLS Portal Training for November - Via WebEx
The November Monthly RLLS Portal Education Series - via WebEx sessions: - Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. CST, Transportation Support Module Training
- Nov. 13 at 2 p.m. CST, Interpretation Support Module Training
- Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. CST, International Space Station Russia Travel Module Training
- Nov. 20 at 2 p.m. CST, International Shipping Module Training
These 30-minute training sessions are computer-based WebEx sessions, offering individuals the convenience to join from their own workstation. The training will cover the following: - System login
- Locating support modules
- Locating downloadable instructions
- Creating support requests
- Submittal requirements
- Submitting on behalf of another
- Adding attachments
- Selecting special requirements
- Submitting a request
- Status of a request
Ending each session is an opportunity for Q&A. Please remember that TTI will no longer accept requests for U.S.-performed services unless they are submitted through the RLLS Portal. Email or call 281-335-8565 to sign up. Community - CFC Kickoff: Give for Good
The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), the world's largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign, kicked off yesterday, Nov. 3, and will run until Dec. 15. Our JSC campaign goal is $640,000—and we, the "NASA family," have the opportunity to help those in our community and our country who are less fortunate than we are. Starting with the 2014 campaign, donors can designate to any CFC-approved charity—not just the charities listed in the local agency guide. We need YOUR HELP to reach our goal! Every dollar makes a difference. Your donation of just $5 a week buys: - Two months of meals for a homebound person
- Five wigs for children with cancer undergoing chemotherapy
To contribute, visit Employee Express. With the option of payroll deduction, you can choose which charities you would like to support and give generously and with ease. - It's Great to Be Popular!
We have an urgent need to find volunteers for the following outreach events: Nov. 6: South Houston Branch Library International Space Station (ISS) Event. Talk to young people about the ISS and engage them in a fun activity. Nov. 8: Astronomy Day at George Observatory. Staff a NASA exhibit, talk to the public about NASA, your job, etc. Nov. 8: Freeman Library Orion Outreach. The library is celebrating its 50th birthday, and we are there to tell them all about Orion and our new missions. Nov. 10: South Houston Library ISS Teen Event. Talk to teens about ISS, answer their questions and have fun. We get scores of requests for JSC team members to participate in a variety of outreach activities—certainly there are a few right up your alley! Check it all out on the V-CORPs calendar, or contact the V-CORPs administrator. - Be Energy Aware This Fall
We should all be aware of our energy usage every day, but with cooler weather approaching, this is a great time to take steps to reduce your energy usage. As a federal agency, JSC is required to reduce energy usage. One way you help JSC is by purchasing Energy Star-rated electronic equipment. Not only are you meeting federal purchasing requirements, you are helping JSC meet federal requirements for energy reduction. For a list of designated items that require the purchase of an Energy Star-rated product, please visit the Energy Star website. | |
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| JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday – November 4, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Station astronaut has faith in Virgin Galactic, calls private spaceflight 'next breakthrough'
William Harwood - CBS News
Space station astronaut Reid Wiseman, preparing to return to Earth this weekend after 165 days in orbit, said Monday commercial spaceflight represents the "next breakthrough" in aerospace technology, and that he hopes Virgin Galactic can ultimately turn that dream into reality despite the fatal crash of the company's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane Friday.
NTSB provides timeline of SpaceShipTwo mishap
William Harwood - CBS News
Just 13 seconds after Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo began a rocket-powered test flight last Friday -- and just five seconds after its innovative aero-braking system was inadvertently deployed at supersonic speeds -- the spaceplane apparently broke up, killing one pilot and injuring another, according to a National Transportation Safety Board timeline released Monday.
Knox native and grad of UT earns top award for NASA work
News Sentinel Staff – Knoxville News Sentinel
A University of Tennessee graduate and Knoxville native has won a top presidential award for his work to make NASA's Johnson Space Center more environmentally friendly.
The importance for commercial spaceflight to recover and respond
Jeff Foust - The Space Review
Every mode of transportation suffers failures. Planes crash, cars collide, trains derail, ships capsize. We even trip over our own two feet when walking. While we can, and should, take measures to reduce the chances of such accidents, and make them more survivable, no system is perfect. How we respond to, and recover from, an accident is critical.
Virgin Galactic Crash Investigators to Study SpaceShipTwo's Pilot Interface
Investigators have formed a new working group to take a close look at the pilot interface systems on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo and released a detailed new timeline of the vehicle's tragic accident.
NTSB Not Sure Which Pilot Moved Feather System from Lock to Unlock
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) acting chairman Christopher Hart said tonight (November 3) that he was mistaken yesterday in stating that it was the co-pilot of SpaceShipTwo (SS2) who prematurely moved the feather system's lever from lock to unlock. That action appears to have been a major contributor to the SS2 crash on October 31. NTSB knows it was the person in the right seat, but not which of the two pilots was sitting there. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury died in the crash. The pilot, Peter Siebold, remains hospitalized.
Orbital Names AIB Members, Focuses on Event Timeline
Orbital Sciences Corporation today named the individuals serving on the Accident Investigation Board (AIB) it is leading to determine the cause of the launch failure of its Antares rocket last week. The Board's first focus is creating a timeline of events that led to the loss of the Cygnus spacecraft and the 5,050 pounds of cargo it was transporting to the International Space Station (ISS).
Not a Flight of Fancy
Space Tourism Isn't Frivolous, or Impossible
Sam Howe Verhovek - New York Times
ONE clear winter day in 1909, in Hampshire, England, a young man named Geoffrey de Havilland took off in a twin-propeller motorized flying machine of his own design, built of wood, piano wire and stiff linen hand-stitched by his wife. The launch was flawless, and soon he had an exhilarating sensation of climbing almost straight upward toward the brilliant blue sky. But he soon realized he was in terrible trouble.
Is Private Spaceflight Safe? What Virgin Galactic's Fatal Crash Means
British billionaire Sir Richard Branson had hoped to ride SpaceShipTwo with his two adult children as early as next year, kicking off Virgin Galactic's first commercial flights to suborbital space.
Destination Deimos (part 1)
James S. Logan and Daniel R. Adamo - The Space Review
Without precursors to "warp drive," "shields up," and "beam me up" technologies, boldly going where no one has gone before will present formidable challenges. Round-trip crewed missions into orbit about Mars are beyond the reach of current capabilities—but just barely. Sufficient attention to new, and as yet untested, concepts of operations, robust mission architectures, vehicle designs, and redundancies, mixed with some old-fashioned "Right Stuff" could bring Mars-orbiting missions into the realm of practical human spaceflight.
How close is NASA to going 'Interstellar' like McConaughey?
Craig Hlavaty – Houston Chronicle
NASA has weighed in on the upcoming Matthew McConaughey and Christopher Nolan collaboration "Interstellar" which opens on Friday in theaters.
COMPLETE STORIES
Station astronaut has faith in Virgin Galactic, calls private spaceflight 'next breakthrough'
William Harwood - CBS News
Space station astronaut Reid Wiseman, preparing to return to Earth this weekend after 165 days in orbit, said Monday commercial spaceflight represents the "next breakthrough" in aerospace technology, and that he hopes Virgin Galactic can ultimately turn that dream into reality despite the fatal crash of the company's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane Friday.
In an interview with CBS News, Wiseman reflected on the SpaceShipTwo mishap and the loss of a space station cargo ship three days earlier, saying "it's tough to watch anything like that."
"I have friends at both of those companies that are working on this, and that touches me pretty closely," he said. "A couple of them are test pilots that I've worked with in the past and I've gotten to know pretty well. So for us personally, it's always tough to see that sort of thing.
"The great part about this industry is, it will be better at the end for both of these mistakes, or mishaps, and we'll pull through. ... We'll figure out what happened, and if it's the correct time we'll fly again, both of these vehicles, and if they determine that they can't, then we'll look for other options down the road. This is a setback that happens in this industry, and there will be recovery, there will be healing, and then there will be success down the road."
But Wiseman said space travel will never be completely safe, "especially not in the launch and landing industry."
"But every time you get in your car and drive down the highway there is always a chance, or get in an airplane or even just a thunderstorm passes by and knocks a tree over," he said. "That's part of life, and there's always risk with everything we do. And to me, sometimes the risk is definitely worth the reward. And up here, the reward, at least to me, is huge. So it's worth it."
Virgin Galactic had hoped to begin commercial flights with SpaceShipTwo starting next spring. Designed to carry a crew of two and up to six passengers at a time, the spaceplane is dropped from a carrier jet and then uses a hybrid rocket motor to climb out of the dense lower atmosphere, providing a few minutes of weightlessness -- and an out-of-this-world view -- before gliding back to Earth. Hundreds of would-be astronauts have signed up to fly, paying up to $250,000 a ticket.
But during a test flight Friday, SpaceShipTwo was destroyed a few seconds after its rocket motor ignited high above the Mojave Desert. Pilot Peter Siebold managed to get out of the disintegrating aircraft for a parachute descent to Earth. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed.
The National Transportation Safety Board says preliminary analysis of cockpit video and telemetry indicates the rocket motor fired normally. But the co-pilot unlocked the space plane's aerodynamic braking, or "feather," system earlier than usual and while the system was never activated by the pilots, it somehow deployed anyway, possibly triggering the craft's breakup.
The unusual aero-braking system was the brainchild of legendary designer Burt Rutan whose smaller SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded spacecraft to carry crew members higher than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles -- the generally agreed on boundary of space -- in 2004. Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, also built SpaceShipTwo, although the company now is part of Northrup Grumman.
The NTSB investigation is far from complete, but Wiseman said he was "100 percent" confident that the private sector has the technology to make commercial spaceflight possible.
"You've got to dare to do crazy things, and that's what my friends out at Scaled Composites did a number of years back," he said. "And I was there the first time they flew a totally civilian crew above 300,000 feet. And the joy I had watching that event was amazing. ... I'm proud of those guys, and everything they've accomplished, it's amazing. And the technology is there. There (are) going to be speed bumps along the way, but this is the next breakthrough, and I think we're ready for it."
Wiseman, Soyuz TMA-13M commander Maxim Suraev and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst are scheduled to return to Earth next Sunday evening (U.S. time) to wrap up a 165-day stay in space. Asked what he was going to miss the most about life in orbit, Wiseman did a zero-gravity flip and said "that's exactly what I'm going to miss the most, I'm going to miss the whole experience of flying on station."
"I'm going to miss my crewmates," he said. "Right now, I'm up here with five other amazing folks, and certainly I'm going to miss the floating. There is just nothing better as a human being than to experience something so foreign as weightlessness. And then I'm going to miss the view. It's just incredible to go look outside and see that Earth down there with the blue horizon. It's so beautiful, I will miss that absolutely."
Wiseman has been particularly active in social media, posting spectacular Earth views on Twitter and short Vine videos capturing life in orbit. The feedback has been "super," he said.
"This is my first spaceflight, and I just wanted to share some of the newness, some of the uniqueness of this environment," he added. "And I think we've been successful with that. I think the Vines, putting this imagery in motion, has really captured the imagination of a good number of folks. And that was my goal, was to use that imagery, put it in motion, and let people try to experience this, let them try to live this with me. For that, I think it was great."
Asked what he is looking forward to the most back on Earth, Wiseman said "hugging my wife and kids, that's number one."
"And then just being able to select the food that I want to eat," he said. "The food up here is actually pretty good, but (after) six months it'll be nice to be able to just get in the car, drive to the store and grab whatever I want and then having my kitchen at my disposal to make some good food."
He's also looking forward to simply sitting down on a couch.
"I haven't sat down in 160 days and just that feeling of sitting down and having gravity pull me down onto a chair, I'm really looking forward to that," he said.
If all goes well, Wiseman, Suraev and Gerst will board their Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft next Sunday evening and return to Earth, landing near Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, around 10:58 p.m. EST Sunday (GMT-5, 9:58 a.m. Monday local time).
"I'm looking forward to experiencing it," Wiseman, a veteran Navy test pilot, said of re-entry aboard the Soyuz. "Everyone I've talked to says it's the world's greatest roller coaster ride, and I think nothing can mentally prepare me for this except going through it. So let's just go through it and then I'm sure I'll have some great stories on the other side to share with you."
Left behind in orbit, Expedition 42 commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova will have the space station to themselves until Nov. 23 when three fresh crew members -- Soyuz TMA-15M commander Anton Shkaplerov, NASA flight engineer Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti -- show up six hours after launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
NTSB provides timeline of SpaceShipTwo mishap
William Harwood - CBS News
Just 13 seconds after Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo began a rocket-powered test flight last Friday -- and just five seconds after its innovative aero-braking system was inadvertently deployed at supersonic speeds -- the spaceplane apparently broke up, killing one pilot and injuring another, according to a National Transportation Safety Board timeline released Monday.
NTSB Acting Chairman Christopher Hart said SpaceShipTwo was dropped from its carrier jet at 10:07:19 a.m. PDT. At the controls in the commercial rocket plane's left seat was pilot Peter Siebold. Michael Alsbury, the co-pilot, was in the right seat.
Two seconds after release, the pilots fired the ship's hybrid rocket motor, burning solid propellant with nitrous oxide to begin the powered portion of the test flight. Then, just eight seconds later, between 10:07:29 a.m. and 10:07:31 a.m., SpaceShipTwo's aero-braking system was unlocked by Alsbury while the spaceplane was traveling at 1.02 times the speed of sound.
Three seconds after that, video and telemetry suddenly stopped as the spacecraft apparently began breaking apart. Alsbury was killed in the crash. Siebold somehow escaped the wreckage and parachuted to the desert far below. Hart said Siebold, recovering from injuries in a local hospital, had not yet been interviewed and investigators do not know how he got out of the spacecraft, or even whether he was conscious, as SpaceShipTwo began breaking up.
SpaceShipTwo is the centerpiece of Virgin Galactic's plans to launch a new commercial space industry. The idea is to carry private citizen-astronauts out of the lower atmosphere and into space during short, sub-orbital flights providing a few minutes of weightlessness and a spectacular view before the vehicle arcs back into the atmosphere for a long glide back to Earth.
Virgin Galactic officials say hundreds of would-be astronauts have signed up, paying up to $250,000 a ticket. Company founder Richard Branson had hoped to begin commercial flights next spring, but those plans are now on indefinite hold in the wake of the mishap Friday.
SpaceShipTwo, built by Scaled Composites, featured an innovative design to increase atmospheric drag and reduce velocity as it fell back into the atmosphere. Distinctive twin tail booms with fins on the ends extend straight behind the spaceplane during normal flight, but for re-entry, the booms swing up to a steep angle relative to the fuselage. The transition is knows as feathering.
To initiate the feather, the pilots must first unlock the mechanism. Then, after motor burnout, a second control must be activated to drive the tail booms upward with respect to the fuselage.
SpaceShipTwo was not attempting a sub-orbital spaceflight Friday and it's not known how long the rocket motor was intended to fire. But Hart said the feather system was not supposed to be unlocked below a velocity of Mach 1.4 and that the mechanism extended without either pilot activating the deploy control.
A major question in the investigation is what prompted the co-pilot to unlock the mechanism earlier than expected and how that might have contributed to the accident. It was not immediately known whether aerodynamic forces alone could have forced the feather to extend at the lower velocity or whether some other factor might have played a role.
But Hart said NTSB investigators have formed a new "human factors" committee to investigate cockpit displays and controls and how pilots interact with the high-tech control systems. Investigators also will look into the data displayed during the test flight to determine whether velocity readings, and other measurements, were accurate.
In the meantime, investigators will continue to study and catalogue the wreckage while data analysis will move to NTSB facilities in Washington. Hart said a final report could take a year or more to complete.
Knox native and grad of UT earns top award for NASA work
News Sentinel Staff – Knoxville News Sentinel
A University of Tennessee graduate and Knoxville native has won a top presidential award for his work to make NASA's Johnson Space Center more environmentally friendly.
Joel B. Walker, director of center operations at the Houston facility, learned early last week he was a finalist for a "sustainability hero" recognition, part of the GreenGov Presidential Awards. He received the award at a ceremony Friday at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House.
During his tenure at the Space Center, Walker oversaw the construction of NASA's first building to be certified platinum by the U.S. Green Building Council and another with a completely vegetative roof. Most of the buildings on site were built quickly and cheaply during the Apollo race in the 1960s, Walker said. Now, NASA's facilities on Earth are starting to look and function more like the agency's facility in space.
"The International Space Station is as off-the-grid as you can get — it's about 250 miles into space," Walker said. There, astronauts run the station off solar energy and have to recycle urine and wastewater for drinking water.
With a rotation, complete with a sunrise and sunset, every 90 minutes, astronauts also have to balance energy usage, strategically turning things on and off to conserve power.
"We take those lessons and see how we can make them apply here on Earth," Walker said.
The GreenGov Awards honor federal civilian and military employees, teams, agencies, facilities or programs that reduce energy usage, cut pollution and save taxpayer money. Oak Ridge National Lab won a GreenGov award in 2013 for its effort to install electric vehicle charging stations.
The importance for commercial spaceflight to recover and respond
Jeff Foust - The Space Review
Every mode of transportation suffers failures. Planes crash, cars collide, trains derail, ships capsize. We even trip over our own two feet when walking. While we can, and should, take measures to reduce the chances of such accidents, and make them more survivable, no system is perfect. How we respond to, and recover from, an accident is critical.
Commercial space transportation is no exception to this. Every year, there are a handful of launch failures worldwide, both government and commercial. Many of them are relatively obscure and not photogenic: an upper stage misfiring, for example, stranding a satellite in a useless or unstable orbit.
Others are not, like a rocket exploding on the launch pad. Still others are even worse, involving injuries and even death. The commercial space industry suffered that double whammy this past week, perhaps one of the worst weeks in recent memory for commercial space endeavors. The failure of an Antares rocket, carrying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, on October 28 was still making headlines three days later when Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring the other.
The two accidents are linked by proximity in time, but in reality little else. Yet, there's the danger that they will be tied together by the public, and by policymakers, by the fact that they were commercial, despite the otherwise vast differences. Already some people have raised questions about the capabilities of commercial space in general, for example, from these accidents. How the industry responds to and recovers from these accidents will shape those public and policy reactions in the months to come.
Antares
On the evening of October 27, many space enthusiasts were mad. Some had tuned in to NASA TV to watch the launch of an Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft. Others had gone outside to watch the launch directly: the twilight launch promised to be visible over much of the Eastern US. However, the launch never happened, for reasons having nothing to do with the rocket, its payload, or the weather. Instead, a sailboat had wandered into a restricted zone about 70 kilometers offshore, and did not leave before the ten-minute launch window closed.
Twenty-four hours later, though, that collective animus towards that anonymous wayward boat was forgotten. Once again, people tuned in to watch the launch, again without any rocket, payload, or weather issues, and this time without any range issues as well. At 6:22 pm EDT, the Antares rocket ignited its main engines and lifted off the pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, the commercial launch site located at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
About ten seconds after liftoff, though, things went horribly wrong. Video of the launch showed the rocket's plume appeared to brighten, followed by an explosion at the base of the vehicle. The rocket fell back to earth, creating an even larger explosion.
The accident destroyed the Cygnus spacecraft, which was carrying 2,290 kilograms of cargo for the station: a mix of food and other supplies for the crew, hardware for the ISS itself, and experiments and other payloads, including 29 small satellites—26 from Earth imaging company Planet Labs—that were to be deployed from the station.
At a briefing immediately after the accident, NASA played down the effect the loss of the vehicle would have on ISS operations. "We're in good shape from a consumables and supplies standpoint," William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said. "There was no cargo that was absolutely critical to us that was lost on this flight. The crew is in no danger."
The station, NASA officials said, has four to six months of supplies on hand at the time of the launch failure. A Progress spacecraft carrying supplies for the Russian segment of the station launched as scheduled within hours of the failure. The next US cargo supply mission is a Dragon cargo flight scheduled for launch no earlier than December 9.
With the ISS not in immediate danger from the loss of the Cygnus, attention turned instead on the cause of the accident. Speculation focused on the AJ26 engines that power the Antares first stage. Those engines were originally built decades ago in the former Soviet Union for the N-1—the Soviet rival to the Saturn V—and designated NK-33. Aerojet Rocketdyne acquired some of those engines, refurbished them, and now offers them as the AJ26.
The AJ26 has not been without problems, though. One engine failed in a 2011 test firing at NASA's Stennis Space Center, a problem traced to a fuel leak in that engine. In May, another AJ26 engine failed on the test stand at Stennis. Neither Aerojet Rocketdyne nor Orbital Sciences have disclosed what caused that most recent test failure.
"We have come up with probably two potential root causes, both of which we can screen for," Orbital executive vice president Frank Culbertson said in a September 30 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto. He did not disclose what those root causes were.
The AJ26 engines flown on this Antares had passed a series of tests leading up to the failed launch. "We didn't see any anomalies or anything that would indicate there were problems with the engine," Culbertson said at the briefing immediately after the launch failure.
As this mission was being prepared for launch, Orbital Sciences was making plans to change the engine. In a quarterly conference call with financial analysts on October 16, Orbital CEO Dave Thompson said the company had selected a new engine, but declined to name it. Prior to the launch failure, company officials had suggested they would make an announcement after the company submitted a proposal to NASA in mid-November for a new contract to delivery cargo to the ISS. Speculation has ranged from a solid motor from ATK, with whom Orbital is merging, to a derivative of the RD-180 engine from Russian manufacturer NPO Energomash.
The day after the accident, with Orbital's stock price declining by more than 15 percent, Thompson again talked with financial analysts. "It is possible that we may decide to accelerate this change if the AJ26 turns out to be implicated in the failure," he said. Prior to the accident, he said the company expected to have a "second-generation" Antares, with that new engine, ready for its first launch in two years. Thompson said it may be possible to accelerate that schedule, but declined to say by how much.
One bit of good news from the accident was that the Antares launch pad at MARS appeared to escape major damage. "The overall findings indicate the major elements of the launch complex infrastructure, such as the pad and fuel tanks, avoided serious damage, although some repairs will be necessary," Orbital said in an October 29 statement.
There was damage, the company said, to the transporter erector that cradles the rocket in the horizontal position when moved to the pad, then erects it vertically. Photos showed that some of the lightning rods around the pad had fallen. The company said there was damage to pipes that run from fuel tanks near the pad to the launch mount, although the tanks themselves appeared to be unharmed.
As this article was being prepared for publication Monday, Orbital announced the members of its Accident Investigation Board for the Antares failure, led by David Steffy, chief engineer of the company's advanced programs group. The board consists of Orbital and NASA officials, as well as former Space Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale. The FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation has oversight of that investigation.
Last week, Thompson said he hoped it would be "days, not weeks" until the company narrowed down the most likely causes of the failure, although the full investigation would take longer. Orbital had planned to launch Antares again on another resupply mission next April, but Thompson said that launch would be delayed by at least three months. "It certainly could be considerably longer than that, depending on what we find in the review," he said. "I hope it would be not more than a year."
SpaceShipTwo
While Orbital's plans to launch Antares were known far in advance, Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites did not broadcast in advance their plans to perform the next test flight of SpaceShipTwo. It was only Friday morning, as the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, with SpaceShipTwo attached between its twin fuselages, taxied out at the Mojave Air and Space Port did Virgin announce it was conducting another test.
Many in the industry expected the next SpaceShipTwo test flight to be the first powered flight since early January. In early October, company officials said they were performing the final qualification test firings on the ground of a revised hybrid rocket motor, after Virgin announced in May it was switching from a rubber-based fuel to a plastic-based one. In mid-October, company CEO George Whitesides said at the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, New Mexico, that those final tests had been completed.
After what the company said was a weather-based delay, SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo were finally airborne and, shortly after 10 am PDT, SpaceShipTwo was released and ignited its rocket motor. Then came this ominous statement from the company, via Twitter:
"SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly. Additional info and statement forthcoming."
While it was almost instantly clear what happened to Antares, SpaceShipTwo's failure played out in slow motion over the next several hours, as reports—often conflicting, as is the case in breaking news events—came in of debris falling in the desert north of Mojave, and parachutes spotted. Had the two pilots managed to bail out of the vehicle? And just what happened?
By late in the day, officials said one of the two pilots had died in the accident, while the other had been transported to the hospital with "major" injuries. On Saturday, Scaled Composites announced that Michael Alsbury, the 39-year-old co-pilot of SpaceShipTwo, had died in the accident. Peter Siebold, the 43-year-old director of flight operations for the company and the vehicle's pilot, was hospitalized, the extent of his injuries unknown.
Immediately after the accident, speculation focused on the vehicle's rocket motor. It had, after all, been the subject of lengthy development delays, including the decision earlier this year to change the fuel it uses. (Sierra Nevada Corporation, which developed the earlier hybrid motor with the rubber-based fuel, made it clear in a statement issued late Friday that it had no involvement with this flight.) In 2007, three Scaled employees died, and three others were injured, in a ground test of a hybrid motor.
However, even in the hours after the accident, it was clear that there had not been a massive explosion in the engine. "I detected nothing that appeared abnormal," said Stu Witt, chief executive of the Mojave Air and Space Port, at a Friday afternoon press conference. What alarmed him, he said, was not seeing and hearing what should have been taking place on a normal flight. "It wasn't because something did happen, it was what I was not hearing and not seeing. If there was a huge explosion, I didn't see it."
Without hours of the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced it was sending investigators to Mojave to study the accident. The NTSB would take the lead in the investigation under an agreement with the FAA, marking the first time the NTSB, best known for investigating airplane crashes and other transportation accidents, was leading the investigation of a human spaceflight accident.
That investigation started Saturday, with investigators examining debris that stretched for about eight kilometers, telemetry from the flight, and performing interviews of various people. (Those interviews have not included, as of late Monday, Siebold, who NTSB officials said was not yet medically able to participate in an interview.) NTSB's acting chairman, Christopher Hart, said that since this was a heavily-instrumented test flight, they had access to more data than usual for a crash investigation.
That additional data helped NTSB quickly rewrite the narrative of the accident. In a press briefing Sunday night, Hart said investigators were turning their attention to SpaceShipTwo's feathering system. That system raises the vehicle's twin tail booms during reentry in order to increase drag and improve stability. To engage that system, pilots must first turn one handle to unlock the booms, then turn another to raise them.
Hart indicated Sunday night that the co-pilot, Alsbury, may have prematurely unlocked the feathering system. "About nine seconds after the engine ignited, telemetry data told us, showed us, that the feather parameters changed from 'lock' to 'unlock,'" he said. There was no indication in the data that the pilots deliberately engaged the feather.
A camera in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo confirmed the telemetry. "Review of that camera is consistent with that telemetry data, and shows that the feather lock-unlock lever was moved, by the co-pilot, from the lock position to the unlock position," he said. (In a briefing Monday night, Hart appeared to indicate that they could not confirm that it was indeed co-pilot Alsbury who unlocked the feathering system, but NTSB stated shortly after the briefing that it was the co-pilot who did so.)
Unlocking the feather at that point in time was at least several seconds premature. Hart said normal protocol was to unlock the feather at Mach 1.4, but SpaceShipTwo was travelling at about Mach 1.0 at the time the feather was unlocked.
Once the feather was unlocked, the booms extended even without actions by the crew. "Approximately two seconds after the feathering parameters indicated that the lock-unlock lever was moved from 'lock' to 'unlock,' the feathers moved towards the extended position, the deployed position, even though the feather handle itself had not been moved," Hart said.
Hart declined to speculate on whether that caused the loss of the vehicle, saying he was giving "a statement of fact, not a statement of cause." Many observers, though, noted that extending the booms as the vehicle was accelerating through Mach 1 could create aerodynamic forces strong enough to break the vehicle apart.
As for the much-maligned engine, it appears to be exonerated, at least for now. Hart said that investigators had recovered the engine and propellant tanks, which showed no signs of problems. "All were intact, showed no signs of burn-through, no signs of being breached," he said. "The engine burn was normal up until the extension of the feathers."
Respond and recover
In the hours and days since the SpaceShipTwo accident, various individuals and organizations offered a common message of condolences to the families of the pilots, and hopes that Virgin Galactic will be able to recover from the accident.
While an entirely commercial mission, even NASA administrator Charles Bolden weighed in. "While not a NASA mission, the pain of this tragedy will be felt by all the men and women who have devoted their lives to exploration," he said in a statement issued late Friday. "Space flight is incredibly difficult, and we commend the passion of all in the space community who take on risk to push the boundaries of human achievement."
There were a number of rapid reactions in the media, in the form of op-eds and interviews, immediately after the accident that spanned the spectrum of thought, from those who argued that Virgin Galactic should proceed full speed ahead to those who concluded the company, and even space tourism in general, was doomed. However, such instant commentaries rarely have any lasting value: those that, for example, blamed the accident on the company's troubled engine development effort have been forced to backtrack once the NTSB said there appeared to be no issued with the vehicle's engine on this flight.
The same applies to the commentaries that attempted to link the two accidents, and thus conclude the commercial space transportation was therefore inherently unsafe or otherwise not viable. While that temptation to link the two is understandable, given that the two accidents took place less than 72 hours apart, there's little else the two events have in common.
Antares was an orbital rocket; SpaceShipTwo a suborbital spaceplane. Antares used refurbished liquid-propellant engines originally manufactured decades ago in the former Soviet Union; SpaceShipTwo used a hybrid rocket engine developed internally. Orbital Sciences has been in business for three decades, with extensive experience in launch vehicles and satellites; Virgin Galactic has been around a decade, with SpaceShipTwo its first project, although its partner Scaled Composites does have its experience with SpaceShipOne a decade ago. The Antares failure appears to be closely linked to its main engine; SpaceShipTwo's failure no longer appears closely linked to its main engine. And so on.
What the two accidents do demonstrate is that any company or organization in space field—government and commercial—can suffer an accident. Whether it's an inherent design flaw or an oversight in operations, space systems often have little tolerance for failure. That makes the track records of organizations (including commercial space ventures) with long track records of success, like Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, all the more remarkable.
In the weeks to come, there will be more scrutiny placed on commercial space ventures, including by politicians, who will ask if companies and government regulators are doing enough to prevent accidents like these, and if commercial space ventures can be trusted to carry out key missions for agencies like NASA, or carry people for the sake of experiencing spaceflight. How the industry responds to such scrutiny—how it recovers and responds—may make all the difference in how politicians and regulators react to these accidents.
"The thing to do is to acknowledge the challenges we're facing and make sure we're doing everything possible to mitigate those challenges using the best technologies, the best systems, the best approaches," said Rick Tumlinson, a long-time space advocate who has been involved in a number of commercial space ventures, most recently space resources company Deep Space Industries, in an interview Saturday.
"Let's not make the same mistakes that led to things like Challenger," he added. "We need to assume that things can't work until we can prove they can, especially when humans are in the loop."
It may be that Orbital Science and Virgin Galactic bounce back quickly, resuming flights of Antares and SpaceShipTwo as fast as the technology permits. Or, these vehicles may never fly again. If the latter, it's not the end of commercial spaceflight, of course, with other ventures, both suborbital and orbital, also developing or operating similar vehicles.
However, if it's the former, remember: last week will not be the last time that a commercial space vehicle has an accident, with or without people on board. Just as with cars, planes, ships, and other modes of transportation, there will be launch failures and spaceship accidents in the future. And, once again, how the companies involved, and the industry in general, recovers and responds will be critical.
Virgin Galactic Crash Investigators to Study SpaceShipTwo's Pilot Interface
Investigators have formed a new working group to take a close look at the pilot interface systems on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo and released a detailed new timeline of the vehicle's tragic accident.
SpaceShipTwo crashed on Friday (Oct. 31) during a test flight, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury and injuring pilot Peter Siebold. A team from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined Sunday (Nov. 2) that SpaceShipTwo's re-entry "feathering" system deployed too early, and on Monday (Nov. 3) the investigators created a "human performance group" whose work could shed light on why this happened.
The group will "look at issues such as displays, checklist design [and] other issues relating to the interface between the flight crew and the vehicle," NTSB Acting Chairman Christopher Hart said during a news conference Monday night.
SpaceShipTwo's twin rudders can be rotated up, or "feathered," to increase drag and stability during the vehicle's descent. Pilots command this maneuver by doing two things: moving a lever to the "unlock" position, and then moving a handle to the "feather" position.
Friday's feathering was unusual for two reasons, Hart has said. First, it occurred after just one of the two above actions was performed (the handle was never switched to "feather" mode). And second, the lever was moved to "unlock" too early — when SpaceShipTwo was traveling at about Mach 1.0 (the speed of sound) rather than the prescribed Mach 1.4.
On Monday night, Hart also laid out the timeline of SpaceShipTwo's final moments in the air near California's Mojave Air and Space Port.
At 10:07 and 19 seconds (10:07:19) a.m. local Pacific time on Friday, Hart said, SpaceShipTwo separated from its mothership WhiteKnightTwo, which carries the six-passenger space plane up to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters). At 10:07:21, SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine kicked on.
The spacecraft was traveling at Mach 0.94 by 10:07:29 and at Mach 1.02 by 10:07:31, Hart said.
"And in that period of time, the telemetry data shows that the feather went from 'locked' to 'unlocked,'" Hart said. "Soon after that, the feather itself began to deploy."
By 10:07:34 — just 15 seconds after SpaceShipTwo was released to fly freely — all telemetry and video data were lost, he added.
The main debris field generated by the crash spans about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from end to end, Hart has said. But on Monday, he announced that small pieces of SpaceShipTwo have been found as much as 30 to 35 miles (48 to 56 km) northeast of the primary field.
"We don't know to what extent those parts originally went there, or to what extent the prevailing southwest winds blew them there after they came to the ground," Hart said.
The NTSB "Go-Team" arrived in the town of Mojave early Saturday morning (Nov. 1) to begin its on-scene investigation, which should last a few more days. But it may take the investigators up to 12 months to complete their analysis after they return to Washington, D.C., Hart said.
Both Alsbury and Siebold worked for Scaled Composites, the Mojave-based firm that built and tests SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. Alsbury's co-workers have set up a memorial fund at the crowdfunding site gofundme.com to help support Alsbury's wife and two children. As of late Monday night, the effort had raised nearly $80,000. SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry passengers up to an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers), giving them a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth against the blackness of space. About 700 people have signed up to ride the spaceship; tickets currently sell for $250,000 each.
SpaceShipTwo remains in the test phase. Friday's mission was the vehicle's fourth rocket-powered test flight and its 55th flight test of any kind.
NTSB Not Sure Which Pilot Moved Feather System from Lock to Unlock
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) acting chairman Christopher Hart said tonight (November 3) that he was mistaken yesterday in stating that it was the co-pilot of SpaceShipTwo (SS2) who prematurely moved the feather system's lever from lock to unlock. That action appears to have been a major contributor to the SS2 crash on October 31. NTSB knows it was the person in the right seat, but not which of the two pilots was sitting there. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury died in the crash. The pilot, Peter Siebold, remains hospitalized.
Hart provided a timeline of events for the test flight in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT):
10:07:19 -- SS2 released from the WhiteKnightTwo mothership
10:07:21 -- SS2 engine start
10:07:29 -- Mach 0.94
10:07:31 -- Mach 1.02. In that 2 second period, telemetry shows lock/unlock lever moved to unlock position. Soon after, feather system began to deploy.
10:07:34 -- telemetry and video lost
SS2 is a spaceplane that is carried aloft by an aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo. At about 45,000 feet, it releases from the aircraft and then fires a rocket engine to take it higher. The goal is to reach at least 100 kilometers altitude, an internationally recognized (but not legally defined) boundary between air and space. After a few minutes, the spaceplane returns to Earth. SS2 is owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which offers rides into space for anyone who can afford the $250,000 ticket price. Passenger flights were expected to commence in 2015, but it is not clear now when that will happen.
The feather system is a unique method of slowing the spaceplane as it descends from the top of its arc (apogee). The tail booms pivot upwards to create drag to slow it down. Then, as the spaceplane reaches denser layers of the atmosphere, the tail booms are returned to their normal position and the vehicle glides back to Earth.
It takes two steps to engage the feathering system. First, a lock/unlock lever must be moved from the locked to the unlocked position. Then, a separate feathering handle must be moved to the feather position. The first step is not supposed to take place until the spaceplane has reached Mach 1.4.
Telemetry and video from the cockpit show that one of the two SS2 crewmembers moved the lock/unlock lever to the unlock position at only Mach 1.02, however. The second step, moving the feathering handle to the feather position, never occurred, but the feathering system deployed on its own. Investigators have not determined why the first lever was moved to the unlock position prematurely or why the feathering system deployed without the second step.
The NTSB has not interviewed the surviving pilot, Siebold. Hart said they were working with his medical team and family to determine when that should take place. Although Hart said definitively yesterday that it was the co-pilot (Alsbury) who moved the lever to the unlock position, he said today he was mistaken. All they know is that it was the person in the right seat. They cannot state for certain who was sitting there. (Ordinarily, that is where the co-pilot would sit.)
Hart said on Saturday that debris was scattered over a 5 mile area, but today increased that significantly. He said lightweight parts have been found as far as 35 miles northeast of the main area, though they do not know if they fell there initially or were carried there by the wind. The NTSB is collecting all the debris and moving it to hangars for further study. The largest piece is part of the fuselage wing and he said they would have to carefully cut it into pieces to move it.
The investigation team, headed by NTSB's Lorenda Ward, is broken into groups and a new one was created today, the Human Performance Group, to look at the interfaces between the flight crew and the vehicle, including displays and checklists.
Hart reiterated that the investigation will take about 12 months to complete, but work on-site at Mojave, CA is nearly done and the focus will shift to the NTSB's laboratory in Washington, DC. In the end, the Board will issue a report with the probable cause and recommendations to prevent it from happening again. He said this is the last on-scene NTSB press conference from Mojave.
Orbital Names AIB Members, Focuses on Event Timeline
Orbital Sciences Corporation today named the individuals serving on the Accident Investigation Board (AIB) it is leading to determine the cause of the launch failure of its Antares rocket last week. The Board's first focus is creating a timeline of events that led to the loss of the Cygnus spacecraft and the 5,050 pounds of cargo it was transporting to the International Space Station (ISS).
Antares lifted off from its launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, VA last Tuesday (October 28) at 6:22 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). Everything seemed fine for the first 15 seconds, but then the first stage failed. The rocket was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer moments later. Suspicion centers on the two AJ26 first stage engines, which are refurbished Russian NK33 engines built more than 40 years ago, but as Orbital President and CEO David Thompson cautioned last week, first impressions are not always correct.
The launch was Orbital's third operational ISS cargo resupply mission for NASA under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract. The members of the AIB are all from Orbital and NASA, except for Wayne Hale, an independent consultant, although he is retired from NASA.
- David Steffy, Chief Engineer, Orbital's Advanced Programs Group (chairman)
- David Swanson, Senior Director of Safety and Mission Assurance, Orbital's Technical Operations organization
- Wayne Hale, Independent Consultant and former NASA Space Shuttle Program Manager
- David Cooper, Independent Readiness Review Team, Orbital's Launch Systems Group
- Eric Wood, Director of Propulsion Engineering, Orbital's Launch Systems Group
- Tom Costello, Launch Vehicle Assessment Manager, ISS Program, NASA Johnson Space Center
- Matt Lacey, Senior Vehicle Systems Engineer, NASA Launch Services Program
The AIB is overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), specifically by:
- Michael Kelly, Chief Engineer, FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST)
- Marcus Ward, Mishap Response Coordinator, FAA/AST
This launch did not carry any crew, one of the many differences between it and the crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (SS2) on October 31. That crash investigation is headed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). One of the two SS2 pilots died in that incident.
Orbital and NASA officials have said that the Antares launch site was not badly damaged in the October 28 launch failure. Orbital's Wallops-based personnel spent the weekend cataloging debris and moving it to a NASA facility on Wallops Island for secure and weather resistant storage. The AIB is busy developing a fault-tree and timeline of key events during the launch and reconciling data from multiple sources.
Thompson said last week that he expects a likely cause to be determined within "days not weeks," though it will take longer to identify the root cause. He could not estimate when Antares launches would resume other than to say that the next launch, originally scheduled for April 2015, would be delayed between three months in a best case scenario or, he hopes, not more than a year.
This third cargo launch to ISS, Orb-3, was part of a $1.9 billion contract with NASA to send 20 tons of supplies to the ISS through 2016. It was the fifth launch of Antares; the first four were successful. This launch was delayed by one day because a sailboat 40 miles off the Virginia coast was in a restricted zone that had to be clear of vessels due to range safety considerations.
Orbital said on Friday that it has begun developing a "comprehensive plan to maintain the cargo supply line between Earth" and the ISS.
SpaceX is the other U.S. company that delivers cargo to ISS for NASA. One of its Dragon spacecraft just returned from the ISS and the next is scheduled for launch on December 9. Russian and Japanese cargo spacecraft also resupply ISS crews. A Russian Progress cargo spacecraft arrived at the ISS last Wednesday on a regularly scheduled flight.
NASA has not been able to take cargo or people to the ISS itself since the space shuttle program was terminated in 2011.
Not a Flight of Fancy
Space Tourism Isn't Frivolous, or Impossible
Sam Howe Verhovek - New York Times
ONE clear winter day in 1909, in Hampshire, England, a young man named Geoffrey de Havilland took off in a twin-propeller motorized flying machine of his own design, built of wood, piano wire and stiff linen hand-stitched by his wife. The launch was flawless, and soon he had an exhilarating sensation of climbing almost straight upward toward the brilliant blue sky. But he soon realized he was in terrible trouble.
The angle of ascent was unsustainable, and moments later de Havilland's experimental plane crashed, breaking apart into a tangled mass of shards, splinters and torn fabric, lethal detritus that could easily have killed him even if the impact of smashing into the ground did not. Somehow, he survived and Sir Geoffrey — he was ultimately knighted as one of the world's great aviation pioneers — went on to build an astonishing array of military and civilian aircraft, including the world's first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet.
I thought immediately of de Havilland on Friday when I heard that Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, a rocket-powered vehicle designed to take well-heeled tourists to the edge of space, had crashed on a flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring the other. The in-air "anomaly," as it was first described in a company Twitter posting, comes on top of an explosion in 2007 during a rocket-fuel test that killed three employees on the ground at the Mojave Air and Space Port.
These sacrifices were not just tragic; to many people there was something needless or even obscene about them. Brave men are dead in service of a for-profit venture in which a bunch of thrill-seeking billionaires and Hollywood A-listers have plunked down deposits up to the full $250,000 cost for a ticket to slip the surly bonds for several minutes of floating weightlessness and trophy photography 62 miles above the Earth, at the very edge of our atmosphere. For some whose job it was to make that happen, this has truly been a view to die for.
But whether or not Friday's crash was preventable, it was far from pointless. It is worth considering that to a striking degree, the criticism of "space tourism" today echoes the scoffing of a century ago that greeted the arrival of powered flight.
Certainly the Wright brothers and others like de Havilland were involved in what we now view as an epic quest, but many experts of the day were certain that flight, however interesting, was destined to be not much more than a rich man's hobby with no practical value.
"The public has greatly over-estimated the possibilities of the aeroplane, imagining that in another generation they will be able to fly over to London in a day," said a Harvard expert in 1908. "This is manifestly impossible." Two other professors patiently explained that while laymen might think that "because a machine will carry two people another may be constructed that will carry a dozen," in fact "those who make this contention do not understand the theory of weight sustentation in the air."
In recent years I have interviewed a wide array of people involved in the private space industry, including both pilots involved in the crash on Friday. Almost universally, they viewed themselves as pioneers at the dawn of an era of exploration whose apogee is beyond our generation's imagination. Just as the Wright brothers did not have a precise image in mind of jumbo jetliners ferrying people around the world so routinely and so safely at more than 500 miles per hour that we have long since stopped considering it a miracle, we can't really know where we're headed in space.
But, they insist, we certainly need to go there. "I think it is actually very important that we start making progress in extending life beyond Earth and we start making our own existence a multi-planetary one," Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX (its goal: "enabling people to live on other planets") once told me. He called the venture a "giant insurance policy" for the survival of our species. Seen in this light, the first round of space tourism is simply seed capital for something much grander. It's possible that tomorrow's budget-minded space travelers will thank today's 1-percenters, just as you can credit early adopters of expensive, behemoth mainframe computers for your $250 desktop.
One could argue, of course, that space tourism is more grandiose than grand. After all, one of the enduring ironies of the initial space age is that we spent all those billions of dollars to produce, among other things, magnificent and iconic remote photographs of Earth that fired the environmental movement to focus on protecting our lonely, beautiful, fragile blue island of a planet.
And as a general matter, we are less excited about the possibilities of space exploration than we were a half-century ago. But if we are ever to reach Mars, or colonize an asteroid or find new minerals in outer space, today's work will prove to have been a vital link in the chain.
There will be tragedies like the crash of SpaceShipTwo and nonlethal setbacks such as the fiery explosion, also last week, of a remote-controlled rocket intended for a resupply mission to the International Space Station. There will be debates about how to improve regulation without stifling innovation. Some will say private industry can't do the job — though it's not as if the NASA-sponsored Apollo or space shuttle missions went off without a hitch (far from it, sadly).
But at the heart of the enterprise there will always be obsessives like Sir Geoffrey, who forged ahead with his life's work of building airplanes despite his own crash and, incredibly, the deaths of two of his three sons while piloting de Havilland aircraft, one in an attempt to break the sound barrier. Getting to routine safety aloft claimed many lives along the way, and a hundred years from now people will agree that in that regard, at least, spaceships are no different from airplanes.
Is Private Spaceflight Safe? What Virgin Galactic's Fatal Crash Means
British billionaire Sir Richard Branson had hoped to ride SpaceShipTwo with his two adult children as early as next year, kicking off Virgin Galactic's first commercial flights to suborbital space.
But last Friday (Oct. 31), during a rocket-powered test flight from California's Mojave Air and Space Port, SpaceShipTwo broke apart in midair, leaving one pilot dead and another seriously injured. Industry experts are adamant that the fatal accident doesn't spell doom for space tourism, though it is a major setback for Virgin Galactic, and the 10-year-old company will likely have to answer key safety questions in the months and years ahead.
Private spaceflight's hard week
Virgin Galactic's accident capped a brutal week for the commercial space industry.
Three days earlier, another commercial spaceflight company, Orbital Sciences Corp., lost its Antares rocket as it launched from the coast of Virginia. The rocket exploded moments after liftoff on Tuesday night (Oct. 28), destroying Orbital's unmanned Cygnus spacecraft, which was bound for the International Space Station to deliver cargo for NASA.
The causes of both accidents remain unclear.
"Space is hard, and today was a tough day," Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told reporters during a news conference Friday. "We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what happened today, and we're going to get through it."
Industry leaders echoed Whitesides' sentiments.
"The precious life that was lost cannot be replaced and will never be forgotten," Commercial Spaceflight Federation President Eric Stallmer said in a statement. "The courage of both pilots will serve as inspiration for us all to continue to meet the challenges of spaceflight with clear focus and determination in order to make it as safe and reliable as possible."
Stallmer's predecessor, former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now an independent consultant, said in an email: "I'm confident that the commercial spaceflight industry can and will survive this and the obviously unrelated but tragically coincidental Antares launch failure."
The future of commercial space
Other experts said it would be unwise to try to predict the future of the commercial spaceflight industry from the twin disasters.
"I think the only thing they have in common is the word 'private,'" said John Logsdon, a space-policy expert and professor emeritus at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "The two accidents have virtually nothing to do with one another, and drawing broad conclusions from them is a red herring."
Orbital Sciences signed a $1.9 billion contract with NASA in 2008 to fly eight unmanned cargo missions to the space station using Antares and Cygnus. The Dulles, Virginia-based company, which was founded in 1982, successfully completed its first two official missions this year.
Virgin Galactic's business is in the fledgling field of space tourism. The company has a list of more than 700 customers who have paid up to $250,000 each for a brief ride to suborbital space aboard the six-passenger, two-pilot SpaceShipTwo.
Virgin Galactic had planned to have a fleet of five of those spacecraft, made by the Mojave-based company Scaled Composites.
Both of the pilots aboard SpaceShipTwo Friday,Michael Alsbury and Peter Siebold, were Scaled Composites employees; Alsbury was killed and Siebold remains in the hospital.
Friday's tragic crash was not the first fatal accident during the development of SpaceShipTwo. In 2007, three Scaled employees were killed during a tank explosion on the ground.
Virgin Galactic's path to space
Virgin Galactic has repeatedly pushed back its estimated start date for commercial flights, and the company never announced when SpaceShipTwo would reach its maximum altitude.
SpaceShipTwo is designed to be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) underneath its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo. After the space plane is released, it is supposed to blast off to 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the planet.
During the last rocket-powered flight, in January, SpaceShipTwo soared to its highest-yet altitude of 71,000 feet (21,641 m). Friday marked the 55th test flight and fourth powered flight of SpaceShipTwo. Experts say these types of experimental flights are inherently risky.
"The nature of test flights is that failure is one of the possibilities," Logsdon said. "If you look at the history of test flights of high-performance airplanes, there have been a lot of accidents. It's unfortunate but not totally unexpected."
But Virgin Galactic's goal to begin commercial flights in 2015 seemed to imply a relatively low number of planned test flights, Logsdon added. Once Virgin Galactic has another aircraft to work with, they'll likely have to conduct an extensive set of test flights to convince people that they're safe, he said.
Federal oversight needed?
Thus far, the private space industry has resisted oversight from federal regulators, but that could change in the wake of the accident.
"I suspect there will be pressure for tighter regulations," Logsdon said.
In 2012, Congress passed a bill that extended the "learning period" for the commercial spaceflight industry. The measure was championed by Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, whose district covers the Mojave spaceport.
The provision essentially prohibited the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, dubbed AST, from issuing regulations designed only for the protection of passengers until October 2015. The idea behind this hands-off approach was to allow the spaceflight industry to gain real-world data from their first licensed commercial launches; the FAA would, in turn, use this information to eventually craft regulations.
In the wake of the accident, Virgin Galactic and the National Transportation Safety Board — the federal agency leading the investigation — have warned against speculation until the ongoing investigation is complete. But critics have made strong claims about risks the company took.
Tom Bower, a biographer of Branson, told BBC Radio 4 that the accident was "predictable and inevitable." Joel Glenn Brenner, a former Washington Post reporter who has been following Virgin Galactic's progress, made similar charges shortly after the accident in an appearance on CNN, adding: "I don't see them at least being able to carry anybody into space in the next 10 years."
Andrea Gini, of the Netherlands-based International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, criticized Virgin Galactic for a lack of transparency about its safety procedures.
"We don't know how Scaled Composites approached this particular test," Gini told Space.com in an email. "Virgin Galactic has always refused to participate to the public discussion inside the space safety community, and has never sought the support of independent reviewers."
Gini said there are elements of Virgin Galactic's flight design that experts consider hazardous. The decision to fly passengers and even crew without pressurized space suits, for example, could expose them to risk of decompression, he said.
"Space is, and will always be, a risky industry," Gini said. "But it is not a new one. I believe that commercial operators should approach it with transparency and humility, or their business, and not just their vehicles, will be doomed to failure."
A nascent space industry
Still, commercial space industry advocates worry that regulations could put stifling restrictions on the suborbital flight industry before it ever gets off the ground.
Charles Lurio, a space industry analyst who publishes The Lurio Report, said, if anything, Virgin Galactic's accident illustrates the need for more players in the commercial space industry to make technologies like suborbital flights practical and safe.
"We just have two companies that are realistically in the game for suborbital human spaceflight, and what they're fighting against is the momentum of people thinking it's so impossibly hard that only a massive agency can try it," Lurio told Space.com.
Besides Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace is currently developing a suborbital system; tickets for a ride on XCOR's one-passenger Lynx space plane, which is also designed to fly to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 kilometers), are selling for $100,000.
"The wrong lesson would be to conclude it's too dangerous to try these new paths," Lurio said. "We should have not two companies but 10 companies trying out suborbital systems."
It could be months, or even a year, before investigators know what went wrong during Friday's fatal flight. Officials with the NTSB said they would likely spend up to a week examining the crash site, then another 12 months interpreting their findings.
Destination Deimos (part 1)
James S. Logan and Daniel R. Adamo - The Space Review
Without precursors to "warp drive," "shields up," and "beam me up" technologies, boldly going where no one has gone before will present formidable challenges. Round-trip crewed missions into orbit about Mars are beyond the reach of current capabilities—but just barely. Sufficient attention to new, and as yet untested, concepts of operations, robust mission architectures, vehicle designs, and redundancies, mixed with some old-fashioned "Right Stuff" could bring Mars-orbiting missions into the realm of practical human spaceflight.
Déjà vu
Sailing ships routinely plied the Mediterranean Sea for several thousand years before the Golden Age of Exploration began in the 15th century. However, once transoceanic voyages were attempted it didn't take crew, captains, or their respective patrons long to realize long-duration voyages across vast expanses of open ocean were a whole new ball game. Ferdinand Magellan left Spain in August of 1519 with five ships and a crew of 265 men. Three years later only one stricken ship and 18 men, half-dead from starvation and disease, limped into Seville harbor after circumnavigating the globe. The great navigator lost fully 80 percent of his crew to scurvy, a known but heretofore rare disease, crossing the Pacific. Even so, he and his voyage changed the course of history.
Fast forward to the 21st century. After being mired in low Earth orbit (LEO) since 1972, long-duration crewed voyages across interplanetary distances are being seriously contemplated. If successful, history will undoubtedly change course once more. But the warning analogy is clear: in extending human space travel from LEO to interplanetary destinations, we face difficulties no less formidable than did Magellan.
Magellan's voyage was undertaken with primitive 16th century technology. Likewise, the first forays into interplanetary space will be accomplished with rather primitive legacy technologies, many of which date from the 1960s. Propulsion and re-entry techniques for human spaceflight haven't fundamentally changed since the dawn of the space age.
Since the first cosmonaut rocketed into space in 1961, more than 500 people on more than 270 missions have accumulated in excess of 100 person-years of spaceflight experience. But the vast majority of that experience has been in LEO. The average time on the lunar surface for the twelve Apollo astronauts was only 2.08 days; the average lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) time only 13.5 hours. Humanity's total experience on another celestial body is less than seven percent of a single person-year. Not only are we not experienced interplanetary travelers—at least, not yet—but despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent, no human being has been farther from the Earth's surface than San Francisco is from Los Angeles in over forty years.
Return to the Moon fizzles
Project Constellation, NASA's return to the Moon program, was canceled in 2010 for reasons much more complicated than "been there, done that." Although scientific justifications for going back to the Moon persist, programmatic limitations conspired to reduce the effort to little more than an expensive redo of the same sortie-style missions that were accomplished 45 years ago. The lack of enthusiasm in the general public, Congress, and even the halls of NASA itself (where the authors were at the time) was due, in part, to the uneasy feeling it just wasn't bold enough. There was little to excite those passionately desiring human footprints on Mars or those advocating human missions to near Earth asteroids. If science was the ultimate justification for going back to the Moon, detractors argued that could be accomplished just as efficiently and vastly cheaper by robots directed from Earth.
Mars remains the beacon for human exploration. Generations of science fiction writers and multiple successful space probes and rovers have established Mars in the core of our collective consciousness. More than any other place, Mars beckons humanity. Although an eventual human landing on Mars is inevitable, most experts agree it is currently a bridge too far. However, there is an alternate path to Mars, one that not only has intrinsic value itself, but also one that would enable the first wave of human visitors to the Mars system to conduct extensive "humans-in-the-loop" real-time telerobotic exploration of the Martian surface from a natural staging area: the Red Planet's outer moon Deimos.
Why Deimos?
Deimos has many virtues that make it the logical gateway to the Mars system. It is a full 15 by 12.2 by 10.4 kilometers in size, making it much bigger than near Earth asteroids NASA is considering visiting in the near term. Unlike the vast majority of such asteroids, a launch window to Deimos opens up consistently every 2.14 years. Many experts believe Deimos actually is an asteroid, perhaps a carbonaceous chondrite, captured eons ago by Mars' gravitational field.
Only 20,000 kilometers above the Martian surface, Deimos is less than five percent the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The round trip light time, very important for line-of-sight telerobotics, is only a little over a tenth of a second, almost 18 times less than from Earth to the Moon and back.
Surprisingly, Deimos is easier to get to energetically from LEO than the lunar surface. Escape velocity from the surface of Deimos is a paltry 20 kilometers per hour. Unlike our Moon, no dedicated lander is required. You don't "land" on a small celestial body with no gravity well; you "berth" with it. Phobos, the inner and larger Martian moon, resides much deeper in the Red Planet's gravity well and therefore requires 6.5 percent more round-trip propellant, a seemingly small yet significant penalty when considering multiple trips and the distances involved.
Like our Moon, the same side of Deimos faces Mars at all times. Because its orbit is just above Mars synchronous orbit (MSO), Deimos would appear to move very slowly east to west as seen from the surface of Mars. From the perspective of Deimos, Mars would appear to slowly rotate eastward at only 2.7 degrees per hour. A Mars surface feature would undergo two sunrises and two sunsets, remaining continuously visible, before rotating out of view. If several surface assets were positioned at regularly-spaced longitudes, Deimos-based human teleoperators could circulate westward from one to the next and explore 24/7. Over a period of nearly five and a half days, the entire planet is seen except for extreme polar regions. This "short-range" human telepresence would meet all Mars surface exploration objectives currently documented in NASA Mars Design Reference Architecture (DRA) 5.0, Section 3 ("Goals and Objectives"). Phobos is so close to Mars it unfortunately has a much narrower view of the planet. Because Phobos rises and sets four times a day, acquiring and operating surface assets from the inner moon would be much more challenging than from Deimos.
Those opposed to tele-exploration of Mars from its moons often lament this concept sends humans 99.99 percent of the distance between Earth and Mars and then stops. Our answer is the majority of funding and consumables expenditures, complexities, and risks accrue in traversing the last one hundredth of one percent. Likewise, the base camp at Mount Everest is 99.96 percent the distance between Houston, Texas, and the summit. Yet it is obvious the majority of challenges are in that final fraction of a percent. Successful ascents to the summit of Mt. Everest occur only after significant resources and supporting infrastructures are deployed at various base camps, and the majority of these resources never reach the summit.
Depending on the resources discovered, Deimos could be utilized as a staging area for the entire Mars system, including the surface. Deimos may hold valuable resources within its interior, and transportable main belt asteroid resources may lie just outside the orbit of Mars. In situ resource utilization (ISRU) at Deimos could be a game-changer for Mars exploration. If water ice deposits are found beneath the surface, a Deimos "gas station" could facilitate Earth return transits and even human missions to the Martian surface far sooner than anticipated.
Mission architecture is key
A mission architecture encompasses not only hardware but also the operational aspects: the way a mission is flown to optimize efficiency, flexibility, safety, and success. The architecture also serves as a technology driver by identifying crucial aspects or elements in need of advancement or further definition through research and development. The chief feature of elegant mission architecture is synergy, the process of bringing together various elements so the whole is more than the sum total of the parts. A truly innovative mission architecture makes feasible what otherwise wouldn't be possible. Human missions to the Mars system remain beyond the cusp of the standard approach, a combination of chemical propellant, minimal radiation shielding, frequent EVAs and no ISRU (other than sunlight.) Not only is the standard approach insufficient for human interplanetary spaceflight, it is dangerous.
We propose, therefore, a bold and daring yet essential departure from the standard approach: a program-level architecture for human tele-exploration of Mars from Deimos resulting in humanity's first viable toehold in interplanetary space as a precursor to permanent human presence on Mars itself.
Any innovative mission architecture derives from challenges. The two biggest for human interplanetary spaceflight are flight dynamics, always constrained by the cold, hard physics of the rocket equation; and bioastronautics, the psycho-physiological realities of human adaptation, or lack thereof, to the deep space environment.
Once in orbit about a planetary body such as Earth or Mars, distance to an interplanetary destination generally depends on change in velocity (so-called delta-V) and transit time. The higher the delta-V and the more massive the spacecraft, the greater the amount of propellant required. Cargo can tolerate long transit times to minimize delta-V but humans cannot.
A draconian example of the rocket equation's tyranny is Apollo 17. The Apollo moonships were self-contained exploration systems. Everything needed to get to the lunar surface and back (crew, supplies, lander, structures, entry vehicle, and propellant) was included in a single launch package that stood as high as a sixteen-story building weighing 2,961,860 kilograms on the launch pad. Just twelve minutes after liftoff, 86 percent of the launch mass had been shed as either spent propellant or jettisoned stages. At mission end less than two-tenths of one percent of the original liftoff mass (the Command Module with the crew) returned to Earth.
For trips to the Mars system and back including required stay times, self-contained exploration systems are simply not possible.
Precursor robotic pre-emplacement missions
To reduce the total mass of any human Deimos Transit Vehicle (DTV) to feasible levels, consumables, return propellant, and other resources required for extended stay times and Earth return must be pre-emplaced at Deimos. This aspect of our mission architecture should not be surprising. Since its inception in 1927, transatlantic air transport has essentially been a one-way proposition. Even today, round trips across transoceanic distances are possible only because pre-emplaced return consumables are available for transport resupply at the destination. Interplanetary transport will share the same dependency.
Establishing a human foothold at Deimos will require a series of increasingly sophisticated robotic precursor missions with probes capable of everything from detailed mapping and remote sensing of the moon to multiple sample analyses of surface and subsurface strata, excavation and preparation of a radiation-protected subsurface habitat (see below) and storage facilities for pre-emplaced crew consumables, and Earth return propellant for visiting crew. Support infrastructure (e.g. power, communications, thermal control, refrigeration, environmental control, and life support) must be transported, deployed, and proven operational prior to human visitation. With round-trip light times from Earth ranging from 7 to 41 minutes, preparation of Deimos Base will present worthy challenges to robotics, automation and artificial intelligence experts.
The sheer amount of consumables required to support a crew of three for a 933-day Deimos mission, plus the standard five percent safety margin, is formidable. Utilizing standard NASA open loop life support numbers extrapolated for interplanetary flight, a total of 96,658 kilograms of water, oxygen, food, crew supplies, gasses lost to space, and systems maintenance equipment is required. However, a DTV would only take 25 percent of the total amount on the outbound leg. The remaining 75 percent, (for Deimos loiter and Earth return phases) would be pre-emplaced prior to any human visitation.
The "Open Loop" approach is essential, especially for the first several crewed missions. Complex recycling technology with limited person-years of continuous operation could break down, essentially dooming the crew. It therefore requires the adequate spare parts be pre-emplaced before crew use. Open Loop may be simple, but it works. At Deimos, especially if ISRU resources are available, the risks of implementing closed-loop technologies earlier may be acceptable.
Enhanced radiation protection
Space radiation is the chief biomedical show-stopper for human interplanetary spaceflight. Space is a seething cauldron of ionizing radiation with energies sufficient to destroy molecular bonds and strip electrons off atoms, creating free radicals and generally wreaking havoc on biological systems. Damage results in genome instability, increased mutation rates leading to cancer, and accelerated changes usually associated with aging, including deterioration of the central nervous system.
Although the Earth's magnetic field deflects lower energy particles toward the poles, for high-energy space radiation it's the mass shielding effect of Earth's atmosphere that protects the biosphere from harm. All creatures on Earth benefit from a natural, passive and constant 1,030 grams per square centimeter radiation shield. We have devised a simple radiation protection scale pegged to the shielding equivalent provided by Earth's atmosphere. A shielding equivalent of 1,030 grams per square centimeter provides 100 percent of Earth radiation protection, called RP100. At 5,500 meters above sea level, half of the atmosphere is above and half is below, the equivalent of RP50. By contrast, the most protected areas of the International Space Station provide RP2 and the spacesuit provides less than RP0.1.
NASA career space radiation exposure limits are based on the concept of Risk of Exposure Induced Death, or REID. This is a statistical metric pegged to a single radiation effect: death from cancer directly attributable to the exposure. NASA's astronaut career dose limits accept a lifetime increase of cancer mortality of three percent.
The average daily dose rate, measured inside the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft on its 253-day, 560-million kilometer journey to Mars, was a whopping 1.8 millisieverts (mSv) per day, 180 times the average daily radiation dose at sea level. This is equivalent to getting a whole-body CT scan once every five to six days.
A typical round trip to Deimos consists of an outbound leg of 203 days, a Deimos stay time of 497 days until the next Earth return window opens, followed by a 233-day Earth return. Assuming the average radiation dose rate at Deimos is half the interplanetary dose rate (a reasonable assumption considering the Mars surface dose is roughly one-third the interplanetary dose—Mars does have an ultra-thin atmosphere and it is much more massive than Deimos), a rough estimate of the total mission radiation dose without additional shielding can be calculated. That figure is approximately 1.232 sieverts (Sv), a number that exceeds the current LEO career radiation dose limits for all astronauts except males aged 55 years or older. It also equates to more radiation than one would receive in 342 lifetimes on Earth.
Long-duration exposures to microgravity result in deleterious effects in multiple organ systems and subsystems including loss and alteration of skeletal and cardiac muscle, irreversible trabecular bone demineralization, decreased immune function, and permanent changes in vision. Evidence suggests the combination of radiation and microgravity is worse than either alone. Remembering Magellan's experience, attempting interplanetary flight without adequately addressing these issues risks inadvertently ushering in a dangerous, prolonged and ultimately preventable "Scurvy Phase" of space exploration.
Although pharmaceuticals and even genetic modification may play a role in the long term, for the foreseeable future mass shielding, however disdainful, appears to be the only viable option for enhanced crew radiation protection. As a general rule some shielding is better than none, and more shielding is better than less.
By invoking a single operational requirement, providing RP100 at Deimos (the equivalent protection of Earth's atmosphere at sea level), accomplished by pre-emplacing the Deimos habitat inside the moon rather than on the surface, total mission radiation dose is reduced by almost 40 percent compared to surface exposures without enhanced radiation protection. The total number of exposed days is also reduced by 53 percent. Provided the equivalent of about seven meters of Deimos regolith separates the crew from interplanetary space, the RP100 requirement will be met. This same level of protection can be provided on the Moon and Mars by burying habitats 4.12 and 2.65 meters below the surface, respectively.
During interplanetary transit radiation protection is more problematic. Severe weight and volume constraints make mass shielding seem impractical for long-duration missions. NASA adheres to the ALARA principle (as low as reasonably achievable) regarding radiation exposure. As our understanding of basic mechanisms of radiobiology expands and supporting technology improves, the level of radiation protection considered 'reasonably achievable' continues to evolve.
RP5 (51.5 grams per square centimeter shielding equivalent) is a particularly attractive compromise level of protection for the entire crew compartment in transit. Not only will it protect the crew from acute radiation sickness for all but the most intense solar storms, it is an inflection point beyond which additional shielding doesn't decrease the dose equivalent significantly until much higher levels of shielding are attained. In other words, RP5 provides the most reduction in radiation dose for the least mass. Considering other attributes of our proposed mission architecture (see below), RP5 (2.5 times the protection provided by any spacecraft to date, over 10 times the protection of the Apollo lunar lander and 50–100 times the protection of the spacesuit) can now be considered within the realm of reasonably achievable.
Jim Logan is a medical doctor with 22 years experience as a NASA Flight Surgeon at Johnson Space Center where he served as Chief, Flight Medicine and Chief, Medical Operations. A recipient of NASA's Distinguished Speakers Award, he is a founding board member of the American Telemedicine Association and co-founder of the Space Enterprise Institute.
Dan Adamo had a 29-year career at NASA's Johnson Space Center, supporting 60 space shuttle flights as FiDO, Flight Dynamics Officer, in the Mission Control Center. Recently retired, he is now an independent astrodynamics consultant and co-founder of the Space Enterprise Institute.
How close is NASA to going 'Interstellar' like McConaughey?
Craig Hlavaty – Houston Chronicle
NASA has weighed in on the upcoming Matthew McConaughey and Christopher Nolan collaboration "Interstellar" which opens on Friday in theaters.
Nolan, who previously directed "Memento," "Insomnia," "Inception" and the latest Batman trilogy, is known for eloquent plot twists and turns so you can expect his first foray into the space travel genre to be just as engrossing as the other films in his canon.
In the film a crew of astronauts must travel into space to search for and explore a new planet for mankind to populate due to the global warming crisis in the film. The film was written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan.
The trailer, released in the late summer, had Nolan fan boys geeking out over the visuals alone. In a statement on Friday, NASA took advantage of the film's upcoming release to remind the public that the space agency is currently working on projects that aren't too terribly far removed from what Nolan deals with in "Interstellar."
The work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, with the California Institute of Technology, is credited with helping propel the film's plot. In interviews leading up to the film's release, Nolan has said he visited NASA locations and Elon Musk's SpaceX to get a feel for how his film should look.
According to one science blog the warp drive used in the film looks something like what could be in the cards from future explorers.
The last big space travel flick to catch NASA's collective eye was 2013's "Gravity," which starred Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. NASA reminded the public that the thrilling, fantastical chain of events in the film was just that – fantasy – but the agency commended the film for its seven Academy Awards wins in March. They even sent a video message from real-life astronauts Richard A. Mastracchio, Michael S. Hopkins and Koichi Wakata, aboard the International Space Station with Expedition 38.
Obviously NASA is not sending any crews into deep space to find us a new planet to populate, like in "Interstellar," but NASA is surely working towards sending men and women further than ever before.
"As of now, the distance between stars is too great for spacecraft to traverse using existing propulsion," NASA writes in its release. "Only one spacecraft is poised to leave the solar system in the near future. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, made the historic entry into interstellar space in August of 2012, reaching the region between stars."
"The near-term future of exploration should be cause for much excitement, though, as humans and robotic spacecraft pioneer the path Voyager traveled, deeper into our solar system, where extra-terrestrial life may exist, and where humans could one day thrive," NASA adds.
NASA mentions the first flight test of the Orion Spacecraft coming up in December, a new rover heading to Mars, and a planned mission in the next decade where astronauts will explore an asteroid orbiting around the moon as work going on in the spirit of Interstellar.
"Those astronauts will travel farther into the solar system than anyone has ever been," NASA says of the lunar trip.
Just not "Interstellar" far.
Even though the film takes Hollywood liberties with the technology currently in our grasp, it will no doubt motivate and inspire countless explorers to one day make the next giant leap for mankind into the universe.
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