Fwd: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Tuesday – December 16, 2014

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 16, 2014 at 12:52:33 PM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Tuesday – December 16, 2014

 

 

 

 

NASA and Human Spaceflight News

Tuesday – December 16, 2014

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Of budgets past and future

Jeff Foust - The Space Review

Another year's worth of battles over the budget is finally over. On Saturday night, the Senate passed an omnibus spending bill that funds most of the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2015, two days after the House narrowly approved the bill. (The bill funds the Department of Homeland Security only through February, making it a combination of a continuing resolution, or CR, and omnibus: a "cromnibus.")

 

Editorial | Saving the Best for Last

SpaceNews Editor

 

ESA Ministerial, Orion Debut Close 2014 with a Flourish

 

The European Space Agency's ministerial meeting and the maiden flight of NASA's Orion deep-space capsule capped a topsy-turvy 2014 — a year marked by controversy and failures — on a positive note.

 

NASA evaluating modified Shuttle ACES for Asteroid EVA

Philip Sloss - NASAspaceflight.com

NASA experts are evaluating the use of a modified version of the famous Space Shuttle launch and entry suit – or Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES) – for use not only during launch and re-entry for crews riding in Orion, but also for use on spacewalks (EVAs), such as during the proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in the middle of the next decade.

NASA's Morpheus completes final test at KSC

James Dean – Florida Today

An experimental NASA lander took flight today for the last time at Kennedy Space Center, successfully completing a quarter-mile hop testing technologies that future exploration missions might incorporate.

 

Lockheed Martin, Boeing to explore deep space together with Russia

ITAR TASS, of Russia

 

Russian Space Corporation Energiya and Lockheed Martin plan adapting the newest US manned spaceship Orion for dockings with Russian spaceships, Vladimir Solntsev, the president of the corporation said in an interview published by Izvestia daily.

 

SyFy's 'Ascension' Takes 1960s Nuclear Spaceship Idea to the Stars

Tariq Malik - Space.com

A spaceship powered by nuclear bombs secretly launched in the 1960s. A colony ship on 100-year journey to spread humanity to the stars. These central themes of the SyFy Channel's epic "Ascension" miniseries this week sound like pure science fiction, U.S. scientists actually worked to build such a spaceship in the 1960s.

NASA's $349 million monument to its drift

Construction of a test tower in Miss. continued long after the rocket project was scrubbed

David Fahrenthold - Washington Post

GULFPORT, Miss. — In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction project here in Mississippi: a $349 million laboratory tower, designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space.

From Michigan to the Moon

Shane Hannon – The Space Review

Renowned 18th century British explorer and navigator Captain James Cook wrote in his journals that "Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go." One cannot deny that Cook's first voyage to the South Pacific and Australia was historic, and almost exactly 200 years later, the crew of Apollo 15 set off on a momentous mission of their own to the Moon.

 

First results from NASA's MAVEN may offer clues to how Mars lost its water

MAVEN, which arrived at Mars in September, has returned data highlighting two key processes that may have played a role in Mars's missing water, which scientists believe was lost to space.

Pete Spotts – The Christian Science Monitor

 

NASA's MAVEN orbiter is beginning to help planetary scientists unravel the mystery of Mars' missing water – once abundant on the red planet early in its history, but now long gone, mainly lost to space over billions of years.

 

Assessing the asteroid impact threat: Are we in danger?

Tomasz Nowakowski - Spaceflight Insider

"Watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour," could be still an actual description of our ability to predict asteroid threats to Earth. This sentence, pulled from the Bible (Matthew 25:13), provides a reminder of a vast number of the more than 1,500 potentially hazardous objects, floating in space, that meander throughout the solar system.

Russia considers building its own space station: RIA

Gabriela Baczynska – Reuters

 

Russian state space agency Roscosmos is considering building its own space station, RIA news agency quoted its chief as saying on Monday, underlining how international tensions are affecting space cooperation.

 

3D printed rocket propulsion system for satellites successfully test-fired

Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider

The MPS-120 CubeSat High-Impulse Adaptable Modular Propulsion System (CHAMPS ) was put through its paces via a hot-fire test carried out by California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne. This particular engine design is a hydrazine-integrated propulsion system for use on small CubeSats and could open up missions that were previously unavailable to the tiny spacecraft. Funded by the NASA Office of Chief Technologist's Game Changing Opportunities in Technology Development and awarded out of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center also in California. The test itself was carried out in Redmond, Washington.

COMPLETE STORIES

Of budgets past and future

Jeff Foust - The Space Review

Another year's worth of battles over the budget is finally over. On Saturday night, the Senate passed an omnibus spending bill that funds most of the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2015, two days after the House narrowly approved the bill. (The bill funds the Department of Homeland Security only through February, making it a combination of a continuing resolution, or CR, and omnibus: a "cromnibus.")

 

NASA, in the end, did relatively well. The omnibus bill gives the agency $18 billion for 2015, up from the $17.65 billion it received in 2014 and also the original 2015 request of $17.46 billion. Several major agency programs received substantial increases over the original request, from exploration to planetary science.

 

On the whole, that looks like good news for NASA. But that increase may mask other issues for the space agency, including delays with one of its major programs that no amount of additional money can address in the near term. And the agency's success in winning additional funding in 2015 is no guarantee of success in 2016 and beyond.

 

Funding SLS and Orion

Two of the programs that won significant increases over the agency's original budget proposal are two major elements of NASA's exploration plans: the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. Orion will receive $1.194 billion in the bill, an increase of more than $140 million over the request, and SLS will receive $1.7 billion, an increase of nearly $320 million.

 

The bill also includes language about future budget submissions. NASA, the bill states, "shall provide to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate, concurrent with the annual budget submission, a 5 year budget profile and funding projection that adheres to a 70 percent Joint Confidence Level (JCL) and is consistent with the Key Decision Point C (KDP–C) for the Space Launch System and with the future KDP–C for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle."

 

That's a reference to cost and schedule estimates NASA completed in August for the SLS, predicting, with 70-percent confidence, that the SLS will be ready for its first flight no later than November 2018 at a total development cost of no more than about $7 billion. Orion's KDP-C review is scheduled to be done in the spring of 2015 (see "The beginning of a new era—but which one?", The Space Review, December 8, 2014).

 

The bill language goes further. "That in complying with the preceding proviso NASA shall include budget profiles and funding projections that conform to the KDP–C management agreement for development completion of the Space Launch System by December 2017."

 

However, at a hearing December 10 by the House Science Committee's space subcommittee, a top NASA official indicated no amount of funding would allow the SLS to be ready by the end of 2017, as previously planned. "We were holding December of 2017. I would say we've now moved off of that date," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations. "That's just based on the reality of problems that have come along in the program, and some uncertainty in funding."

 

The subcommittee's ranking member, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), asked Gerstenmaier what it would take to move SLS back to that December 2017 date. "In terms of the technical work, I think we've really probably moved off of December 2017," he responded, "so I don't think funding will pull us back to that date."

 

Gerstenmaier said that NASA was now planning to have SLS ready in June or July of 2015. Ground systems would be ready at around the same time, as currently planned, although a launch readiness date for Orion for that first SLS launch won't be known until after its KDP-C review.

 

He noted that all three systems—SLS, Orion, and ground systems—didn't need to all be ready at the same time. "They don't need to sync up at exactly the same time," he said, noting that, for example, SLS could press ahead with work on the second vehicle if the first one is done before other elements are ready. "If we put that extra constraint in where I have to sync these programs up and match all these schedules, I think that puts another burden in that can make inefficiencies."

 

Some members of the committee, though, were critical of what they believed were schedule slips caused by the administration's unwillingness to seek sufficient funding for SLS and Orion.

 

"The administration has consistently requested large reductions for these programs, despite the insistence of Congress that they be priorities," said subcommittee chairman Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) in his opening statement. "Congress has once again demonstrated support for the SLS and Orion by providing funding well above the President's budget request in the omnibus for fiscal year 2015."

 

Palazzo asked Gerstenmaier about a $400-million shortfall in the SLS program reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a July report that argued that a schedule slip for SLS—from the December 2017 date—was likely given the program's budget. Gerstenmaier said that specific risk about the $400-million shortfall has largely been retired with the additional funding the program received for both fiscal years 2014 and 2015.

 

"If you had come to us for additional funding a year or two years ago, would you have been able to mitigate the risk, or buy down the technical risk, or would we be having the same conversation that the test is going to slip to the right regardless of the amount of funding that we may have been able to appropriate to the program?" asked Palazzo.

 

"That's a very difficult question to answer," Gerstenmaier responded, saying that he took a broad view of all of NASA's human spaceflight activities, including not just SLS and Orion but also the International Space Station and commercial crew and cargo programs. "I have to look at a balancing across those programs. I can't optimally fund any one of those programs."

 

A GAO official at the hearing concurred with Gerstenmaier's assessment about the ability to accelerate SLS's development. "Just putting in money now won't help you get there any quicker," said Cristina Chaplain, director of acquisition and sourcing management.

 

Those explanations did not mollify some members of the committee. Palazzo expressed frustration that a third invited witness, NASA chief financial officer David Radzanowski, declined to attend the hearing or send another person from his office to discuss NASA budgets and policy. "The administration refused to make him available," Palazzo said at the hearing.

 

Other budget issues

SLS and Orion were not the only programs at NASA to win budget increases. NASA's planetary science program received nearly $1.438 billion in the omnibus bill, up from $1.28 billion in the administration's request. That increase includes $100 million for early development work on a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, compared to $15 million in the administration's request.

 

The Planetary Society, which had advocated for increasing the agency's planetary science budget, celebrated the omnibus bill. "For three years in a row, the White House has requested cuts to NASA's Planetary Science Division," said the society's CEO, Bill Nye, in a statement. "And for three years in a row now, Congress has soundly rejected those cuts."

 

NASA's astrophysics program, which requested $607 million in the original request, received nearly $685 million in the omnibus bill. That amount includes $70 million to continue operations of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne observatory that was all but cancelled in the administration's request (see "Aborted takeoff", The Space Review, March 17, 2014).

 

NASA's commercial crew program fell short of its requested budget, but the $805 million it did receive (versus the $848 million requested) was still more than the program had received in previous years. Advocates of the program won a victory, though: the bill does not include language that was in the report accompanying the Senate version of the bill that would have required "certified cost and pricing data" from companies participating in the commercial crew program, which program supporters said would have added unnecessary and unreasonable costs to the program.

 

One program that was a loser in the budget was NASA's space technology program. While NASA requested $705.5 million for the program in its 2015 budget request, the omnibus bill provides $596 million. Neither the bill nor the accompanying report provided a reason for the cut, or direction on how it should be applied to its various projects. (NASA's aeronautics program, meanwhile, received a $100-million increase to $651 million, with direction to apply the increase proportionally among its projects.)

 

Overall, though, it's hard to argue against the conclusion that NASA did quite well in 2015: an increase over both its 2014 budget and its proposed 2015 budget; both, in addition, are well above the sequestration-scarred 2013 budget of less than $17 billion.

 

But, as the statement normally associated with investments goes, past results do not guarantee future performance. NASA is working on its fiscal year 2016 budget request with the White House, due for release in February. The 2015 budget proposal included a five-year runout of future budgets that projected a $17.6 billion NASA budget in 2016, but that projection was caveated with the disclaimer "notional." In other words, don't put too much weight on that figure.

 

Whatever that request turns out to be, it'll face a different Congressional environment. In November's elections, Republicans increased their majority in the House of Representatives and took control of the Senate. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), a patron of at least some NASA programs, will move from being chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee to its ranking member, with Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) slated to chair the committee. (Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who had been ranking member of the committee and a close partner with Mikulski on NASA issues, is instead taking over the Senate Banking Committee.)

 

In the House, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) will take over the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, whose jurisdiction includes NASA. Culberson, succeeding the retiring Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), has been a vigorous supporter of many NASA programs, and perhaps best known as the biggest advocate in Congress of a Europa mission, securing funding for it in 2015 and previous years.

 

A two-year budget deal that helped reduce some of the effects of budget sequestration also expires after 2015, meaning the fiscal year 2016 budgets may face new pressures to cut spending. That could slow any future growth in NASA's budgets or push for cuts, pitting science versus exploration.

 

Those long-term, if notional, increases in NASA's budget included in the 2015 budget request—out to nearly $18.2 billion by fiscal year 2019—should also be taken with caution for other reasons. The 2017 budget will be the last prepared by the Obama Administration. A new president will take over the budgets beyond then, and he or she may have very different opinions about how much to spend on NASA, and on what programs.

 

There are also the lessons of history. One of the largely forgotten aspects of the Obama Administration's fiscal year 2011 budget request—the one best known for seeking the cancellation of the Constellation Program—was that it included steady increases in NASA's budget, starting with the $19 billion requested for 2011 (itself $1 billion more than what NASA will get for 2015.) Those budgets gradually rose to, in the final year of the five-year budget projection, to nearly $21 billion for 2015.

 

Today, $21 billion for NASA seems like a fantasy, and perhaps it was even then. But times changed, politics changed, and priorities changed, and instead of getting $21 billion, NASA considers itself fortunate to get $18 billion for 2015. Will even that amount be envied come 2019?

 

Editorial | Saving the Best for Last

SpaceNews Editor

 

ESA Ministerial, Orion Debut Close 2014 with a Flourish

 

The European Space Agency's ministerial meeting and the maiden flight of NASA's Orion deep-space capsule capped a topsy-turvy 2014 — a year marked by controversy and failures — on a positive note.

 

Both successes must be qualified, however — mostly in Orion's case given the reality that the capsule won't fly again until 2018. ESA's Dec. 2 ministerial, meanwhile, though successful in resolving some difficult funding issues, raised new questions about the agency's future role in the international space station.

 

On the positive side of the ledger, the ministerial produced agreements — and funding to match — to proceed with a next-generation Ariane 6 launcher, major upgrades to the Vega small launcher and the dual-launch ExoMars mission to Mars. It also produced a commitment from members, most notably cash-strapped Italy, to continue supporting the NASA-led space station at least through 2017 and in all likelihood through 2020. Notably, the deal fully funds ESA's commitment, as part of its space station obligations, to provide the service and propulsion module for Orion's next flight.

 

Germany, ESA's biggest space station supporter, had demanded that Italy resume its traditional 19 percent share of Europe's annual contribution to the program, which declined significantly in 2012 due the latter's financial crisis. Italy agreed, despite having less funding available for space activities than had been expected in the weeks leading up to the conference.

But there's a catch. Italy's agreement assumes ESA will not participate in the space station beyond 2020. NASA in January said it would continue supporting station through 2024 and has asked its partners to make similar commitments.

 

As explained by Italian Space Agency President Roberto Battiston, Italy's space station spending for the next three years will be less than 19 percent of the ESA total but then will rise relative to other members' contributions so that after six years the threshold is met. The formula works, at least on paper, because Italy is assuming overall ESA funding for station declines starting around 2018 in advance of a pullout during or immediately after 2020.

 

This was not a statement of ESA policy, nor does it necessarily telegraph what's to come. But it does underscore the point that ESA's support for station beyond 2020 is far from assured.

 

The successful launch, flight and recovery of Orion, meanwhile, demonstrated the re-entry systems and heat shielding for a vehicle that could one day take astronauts to destinations beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo era. Despite a minor glitch with a mechanism designed to right the vehicle in case of an upside-down splashdown — two of the five balloons failed to inflate — the Lockheed Martin-built vehicle performed well, validating the work of its design and engineering teams.

 

The high-profile success provided a much-needed public relations and morale boost for NASA's human spaceflight program, which since the space shuttle's 2011 retirement has lacked an independent means of launching astronauts to space.

 

But Orion won't fly again until 2018, when a more advanced version is slated to launch on the maiden flight of NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System on an unmanned trip to lunar space and back. Orion's first crewed mission, expected to fly a similar profile, isn't scheduled to happen until 2021.

 

After that, things get murky. NASA currently has no credible plan or funding for a future Moon landing or other mission utilizing Orion, notwithstanding the White House's proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission, which has little support in the U.S. Congress.

 

That said, the nearly flawless execution of Orion's mission, and the public's response, were encouraging. Together they offer a promising prelude to the next milestone event in the human spaceflight program: the initial flight of a commercial crew capsule developed by Boeing or SpaceX, which if all goes well will happen in the next three or so years.

 

In that sense both the ESA ministerial and the Orion flight are best viewed as noteworthy steps in a never-ending march. For ESA, the next ministerial meeting, scheduled for 2016, already looms large, while for Orion, the horizon is a bit further out.

 

NASA evaluating modified Shuttle ACES for Asteroid EVA

Philip Sloss - NASAspaceflight.com

NASA experts are evaluating the use of a modified version of the famous Space Shuttle launch and entry suit – or Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES) – for use not only during launch and re-entry for crews riding in Orion, but also for use on spacewalks (EVAs), such as during the proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in the middle of the next decade.

The Next Space Suit:

 

As NASA prepares to choose between two robotic concepts for its proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), the Agency is also evaluating whether the Space Shuttle launch and entry suits can be modified for use by astronauts – on the crewed leg of the mission – to carry out extravehicular activities (EVAs) from their Orion spacecraft, as they get hands on with the asteroid.

 

ARM is a proposal that begins with a robotic spacecraft traveling to a near-Earth asteroid.

Depending on which mission concept is chosen, the spacecraft would capture either a small asteroid or a sample of an asteroid and then drag that into a high Lunar orbit.

 

An Orion spacecraft with a crew of two astronauts would then be launched on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to rendezvous and dock with that spacecraft, retrieve asteroid samples and return home.

 

"We're going into the downselect (this week) and then we'll go do a mission concept review in mid-February," noted Steve Stich, head of the new Exploration Integration and Science Directorate at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) to NASASpaceFlight.com.

 

"Then (we will) work it through the funding process as well – and hopefully – we'll get (political) approval to go do the flight."

 

Per the evaluations, Mr. Stich is overseeing whether the Shuttle launch and entry suit – the ACES – can be modified for use not only as Orion's launch and re-entry suit, but also for EVAs on the ARM.

 

"What we've been trying to do with the Asteroid Redirect Mission is to be as efficient as we can with everything that either exists within our toolkit, or with some small modifications," he noted.

 

"So one of the things that we started looking at relative to EVAs on this Asteroid Redirect Mission are these launch and entry suits for Orion."

 

For the ARM, the astronaut sample retrieval is planned to only utilize the Orion spacecraft. Mr. Stich explained that the EVA suits – currently in use on the International Space Station (ISS) and previously on the Space Shuttle – have some disadvantages given that requirement.

 

"The Shuttle EVA suits and the ones we use on Station are great for EVA, but they are 'hard' and they're not designed for launch and entry. So it was (a question of) 'can we use one suit for both?'

"Orion has a certain amount of stowage and a certain amount of volume and we wanted to minimize cost by not flying an airlock. So (we thought) let's do it all out of Orion – that's why we ended up with this concept."

Stich noted that the Orion program had already discussed using a derived version of ACES for launch and entry, likely based on its awareness of the volume constraints.

"They modified it to have what is called a suit loop interface, where it could connect to a fan that scrubs the carbon dioxide, versus the Shuttle suits that would just dump out oxygen into the cabin," he added.

"(Compared to Shuttle) Orion is very small and that doesn't work very well. So they were going to use this suit anyway; (since) it's designed to go to vacuum – because if Orion loses pressure (the suit has) to protect the crew.

"(The question is) could we make it adaptable from a mobility perspective? It's designed to protect the crew only in the event of a rapid depress for launch and landing or if they've got to get out of Orion, (but) could we use it for spacewalks?"

Shuttle crews used ACES from 1994 through to the end of the program. However, it has rich history ranging back to the early days of human space flight.

 

"That suit is almost a derivative of the suit used for Gemini, way, way back in the Sixties," Mr. Stich added. "It's changed a little bit over time, (but) the important thing was can we do (EVA) tasks.

 

"We actually practised a few tasks in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) with some pretty complicated Station assembly tasks where you would take off a GPS box that's outside on the truss and we showed the crew could do it.

 

"We modified that suit, we put the same gloves that the Station crew uses on the suit, we adapted it to use the same boots that the spacewalking crews use on the Station, we added a drink bag and we added different cooling garments – so we did a few things and it looks very feasible."

 

This suit – known as the Modified Advanced Crew Escape Suit, or MACES – has been in development for some time.

 

"We did a fair amount of work over the last 18 months to convince ourselves that this suit – this concept – looks feasible," Stich noted.

 

"The crew office (Astronaut Office) has been involved, we've had four or five astronauts that have flown on Space Station (and) done EVAs in the Space Station suit.

 

"We have worked in that suit in the NBL so they can kind of compare their experience in microgravity and then in the pool in the Station suit to what it's like to work in this Modified ACES in the water and how that might translate to zero-gravity."

 

Footage from a promotional video provided to a recent political hearing showed images from NBL runs using the suit during a mock up mission involving the hammering of samples free from an asteroid's surface.

 

"We did a series of about 12 runs in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, modifying that suit – we added some arm bearings, we changed where the arm positions are – and we convinced ourselves that from a mobility perspective if the suit fit well, for about a four-hour EVA we thought we could make that suit work."

 

Mr, Stich, a former Space Shuttle flight director, recently became head of the new directorate overseeing evaluation of the MACES concept.

 

"It's called (the) 'Exploration Integration and Science Directorate' at JSC (Johnson Space Center), newly formed on August 11th, so we've only been existence a few short months," he added.

 

"We've combined what was ARES, the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science organization. They do sample curation – they do comet sample curation, they do asteroid sample curation – and we've combined that with EVA, Exploration, mission planning, and integration and partnerships all in one office."

 

Mr. Stich added that a big focus area in this new directorate is integrating Orion and SLS and planning missions.

 

"The directorate makes sense in that you bring together scientists with spacewalk experts and then mission planning experts for these Exploration missions and put those all in one directorate together.

 

"It's been an interesting three months."

 

NASA's Morpheus completes final test at KSC

James Dean – Florida Today

An experimental NASA lander took flight today for the last time at Kennedy Space Center, successfully completing a quarter-mile hop testing technologies that future exploration missions might incorporate.

 

The four-legged Morpheus lander lit its engine at 4:11 p.m. and climbed about 800 feet, then flew forward 1,300 feet while descending to a pad in a simulated moonscape north of the shuttle runway, where it touched down in a cloud of dust.

 

Team members reported that Morpheus' laser-guided navigation system had controlled the entire flight, a key objective not achieved during several previous attempts.

 

The 97-second flight was the last planned before Morpheus is shipped home next month to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

 

Part of NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems division, Morpheus, which measures 10 feet on a side, was established not to fly in space but to demonstrate technologies that could support future human or robotic exploration.

 

Those included a liquid methane propulsion system and a package of laser sensors and software designed to identify landing hazards and steer Morpheus to safe landing sites.

The project arrived at KSC with a bang in 2012, immediately suffering a crash and explosion that destroyed the first vehicle.

A new "Bravo" vehicle returned just over a year ago for the first of a dozen free flights.

 

After a summer break to analyze the results from those flights, the team reconvened recently for what NASA hoped would be two more flights in Florida to wring out the laser sensors called ALHAT, short for Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology.

 

But weather and a series of technical glitches left only enough time for one flight.

Before liftoff, Jon Olansen, the Morpheus project manager, congratulated his team on years of work resulting in the opportunity to prove technologies that could be applied to missions to the moon, an asteroid or Mars.

 

"Rely on your training and let's make some history," he radioed from a control center near the Shuttle Landing Facility tower.

 

As Morpheus rose on a blue streak of flame about an hour before sunset, an onboard camera showed the three-mile runway stretch out below and the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building in the distance.

 

Morpheus — named for the Greek god of dreams — then scanned a simulated patch of lunar boulders and craters, identified hazards and guided the vehicle to touchdown on a concrete pad.

 

The Morpheus team applauded, and later gathered for a photo to celebrate the milestone.

 

Lockheed Martin, Boeing to explore deep space together with Russia

ITAR TASS, of Russia

 

Russian Space Corporation Energiya and Lockheed Martin plan adapting the newest US manned spaceship Orion for dockings with Russian spaceships, Vladimir Solntsev, the president of the corporation said in an interview published by Izvestia daily.

"The space ships should be adapted to one another and common sense prompts us we should be able to dock them," he believes. "It's important to know how to lend shoulder to each other because any kind of situations may emerge."

"And the Orion should also have capability to dock with other ships as it performs deep-space missions," Solntsev said.

Energiya representatives discussed prospects for joint cooperation with counterparts from Lockheed Martin and Boeing last week.

"We signed a range of protocols on further collaboration at the end of those meetings," Solntsev said. "Our US partners are interested in joint programmes for deep space exploration."

"US companies and research organizations engaged in manned space flights have offered a range of new programmes to the Russian side recently," he said. "In spite of a statement by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin on a forthcoming withdrawal from the International Space Station project, Russian experts feel quite enthusiastic about US proposals on the whole."

The first-ever docking of Russian and US spaceships took place in 1975 in the framework of the Soyuz-Apollo experimental project.

SyFy's 'Ascension' Takes 1960s Nuclear Spaceship Idea to the Stars

Tariq Malik - Space.com

A spaceship powered by nuclear bombs secretly launched in the 1960s. A colony ship on 100-year journey to spread humanity to the stars. These central themes of the SyFy Channel's epic "Ascension" miniseries this week sound like pure science fiction, U.S. scientists actually worked to build such a spaceship in the 1960s.

In "Ascension," a three-part SyFy miniseries that launches tonight (Dec. 15), 600 people live aboard an Orion-class nuclear spacecraft on a mission to Proxima Centauri. The mission launched in 1963, when the Space Race was in full swing and the Cold War made the threat of global nuclear war an uncomfortable possibility. This leads to Project Ascension, led by a Werner von Braun-esque Abraham Enzmann, who dreamed up a spaceship taller than the Empire State Building that is propelled by nuclear bombs.

 

There is certainly a lot going on in "Ascension" to grab the average space fan, not the least of which is the fact that the ship Ascension itself is based on Project Orion, a real-life 1960s project by the U.S. government to build a 4,000 ton spaceship propelled through space by nuclear explosions. "Ascension" takes the potential of Project Orion and asks the simple question: What if the U.S. actually did it?

 

Science fiction powered by space facts

The real-life Project Orion began in the late 1950s and ran through the early 1960s until it was shut down after the passage of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, according to a project description on NASA's Glenn Research Center website. But the promise of such a craft was tantalizing, especially given how it worked.

 

"About five bombs per second are dropped out the back and detonated to propel the craft along. A huge shock plate with shock absorbers make up the base of the craft," reads one NASA description. "Experiments using conventional explosives were conducted to demonstrate the viability of this scheme. Although this vehicle was conceived to take a crew to Mars, it can also be considered for sending smaller probes to the stars."

 

In his book "Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship," author George Dyson (son of famed scientist Freeman Dyson who worked on Project Orion) writes that the project, which began in 1957, aimed to launch manned missions to Mars by 1965, with trips to Saturn by 1970. According to Dyson, the project ran through 1965, was overseen by General Atomic and gained NASA's interest in 1963 because of its high specific impulse for space propulsion.

 

Engineering a space colony

SyFy's "Ascension" embraces its space history, with the crew of its ship garbed in 1960s style, using retro tech and showing a glimpse of what life on a generational colony spaceship would be like. The show begins in the present day, 51 years after the ship's launch, as the mission hits its midpoint.

 

Without giving too much away, the show does make a point of describing the psychological effects of a decades-long spaceflight, particularly on children who have to grow up knowing they will be stuck inside a spaceship — the "glorious tin can" as one character puts it — for most of their lives.

 

"Battlestar Galactica" reboot alum Tricia Helfer stars as Viondra Denniger, Ascension's Chief Stewardess and wife of Captain William Denniger (Brian Van Holt). First Officer Aaron Gault (Brandon P. Bell) rounds out the top tier cast after being placed in charge of the investigation of the murder of a young woman — the first murder in Ascension ship history. The show was created by showrunner Philip Levens ("Smallville") and executive produced by Jason Blum (film franchises "Paranormal Activity" and "The Purge"), as well as Ivan Fecan, Tim Gamble and Brett Burlock with Sea To Sky Studios.

 

To say there's a lot of intrigue and scheming going on aboard Ascension is an understatement. But I don't want to spoil the fun for you. To experience the full thrill of the show's twists and turns, you'll just have to tune in.

 

"Ascension" debuts on the SyFy Channel Monday, Dec. 15, at 9 pm/8 pm Central. Check local listings. Parts 2 and 3 will air on Tuesday and Wednesday (Dec. 16 and 17) at 9 pm/8 pm Central.

 

NASA's $349 million monument to its drift

Construction of a test tower in Miss. continued long after the rocket project was scrubbed

David Fahrenthold - Washington Post

GULFPORT, Miss. — In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction project here in Mississippi: a $349 million laboratory tower, designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space.

Then, NASA did something odd.

As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially "mothballed" — closed up and left empty — without ever being used.

"You lock the door, so nobody gets in and hurts themselves," said Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who oversaw the project.

The reason for the shutdown: The new tower — called the A-3 test stand — was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010.

But, at first, cautious NASA bureaucrats didn't want to stop the construction on their own authority. And then Congress — at the urging of a senator from Mississippi — swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what.

The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it didn't need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to maintain it in disuse.

The empty tower in Mississippi is evidence of a breakdown at NASA, which used to be a glorious symbol of what an American bureaucracy could achieve. In the Space Race days of the 1960s, the agency was given a clear, galvanizing mission: reach the moon within the decade. In less than seven, NASA got it done.

Now, NASA has become a symbol of something else: what happens to a big bureaucracy after its sense of mission starts to fade.

In the past few years, presidents have repeatedly scrubbed and rewritten NASA's goals. The moon was in. The moon was out. Mars was in. Now, Mars looks like a stretch. Today, the first goal is to visit an asteroid.

Jerked from one mission to another, NASA lost its sense that any mission was truly urgent. It began to absorb the vices of less-glamorous bureaucracies: Officials tended to let projects run over time and budget. Its congressional overseers tended to view NASA first as a means to deliver pork back home, and second as a means to deliver Americans into space.

In Mississippi, NASA built a monument to its own institutional drift.

The useless tower was repeatedly approved by people who, in essence, argued that the American space program had nothing better to do.

"What the hell are they doing? I mean, that's a lot of people's hard-earned money," said David Forshee, who spent 18 months as the general foreman for the pipefitters who helped build the tower. Like other workmen, he had taken pride in this massive, complicated project — only to learn that it was in mothballs.

"It's heartbreaking to know that, you know, you thought you'd done something good," Forshee said. "And all you've done is go around in a damn circle, like a dog chasing his tail."

Creating a vacuum

Seven years ago, when the tower still seemed like a useful idea, the governor came to the groundbreaking. So did a congressman. Two senators. On a hot morning in August 2007, next to a canal full of alligators, somebody laid down AstroTurf and clean dirt over the sandy Mississippi soil. The dignitaries stood on the fake grass. They stuck gold-painted   shovels into the fake earth.

They said they were starting one of the greatest journeys in human history.

Right here — at a 30-story tower rising out of the woods — NASA would test the rockets that would take Americans back to the moon. And then even farther, on to Mars.

"You who live in Mississippi and who work at this space center will see that frontier opening," said Shana Dale, who was then NASA's second-in-command. "You'll hear it, too: the rumble of moon-bound rockets being tested here. The thunder of possibility; the roar of freedom."

This tower was intended to test a rocket engine called the J-2X. The plan was for a spacecraft to carry this engine, un-lit, up out of the Earth's atmosphere. Then the engine would ignite and propel the spacecraft toward the moon.

But, before NASA stuck an astronaut on top of that idea, it wanted to test the engine. In the near-vacuum at the edge of space, would the whole thing vibrate, crack or blow apart?

There was only one way to know.

"You have to fake the vacuum," said Dumbacher, the former NASA official.

To do that, NASA had to create a giant pressure cooker on stilts. Workers would build a sealed metal container, big enough to hold a school bus. Then they would install it in the middle of a 300-foot-tall steel tower, reinforced to resist 1 million pounds of upward thrust from a rocket.

Then, they would put the rocket engine in the container. Seal the door. Suck out the air. And light the fire.

At the very beginning, NASA projected that the tower would cost $119 million. It was supposed to be finished by late 2010.

Giving up on the moon

Back in Washington, it wasn't long after the groundbreaking that NASA officials began to hear about problems with the project.

For one thing, the estimated cost increased to $163 million. To $185 million. Then beyond that. NASA's inspector general said the main contractor, Jacobs Engineering Group, blamed changes in the design, plus unforeseen increases in the cost of labor and steel.

NASA paid the higher price. The builders kept building.

"I don't think the contractors were attempting a scam. I think, in all honesty, that they did not understand the magnitude of the job," said one former senior NASA official who was familiar with the project. "I know people involved as human beings. I do not think they were trying to take advantage" of NASA, the former official said.

Jacobs declined to comment.

At NASA, as at other large government agencies, this was an old institutional vice: making a big purchase, then letting the cost get bigger and bigger. Studies had found that when NASA projects ran way late or way over budget, the agency rarely took the hard step of killing them.

It kept paying

"The [International] Space Station was sold as an $8 billion program. It ended up costing $100 billion. The Webb telescope was sold as a $1 billion program. It's now up to $8 billion," said Lori Garver, who served as the number two official at NASA from 2009 until last year. "It usually works out for them," she said, meaning the contractors get paid, even when they raise the price.

Decision-making about NASA was twisted, she said, because of a mismatch between its huge funding and its muddled sense of purpose. "There's no 'why' " in NASA anymore, Garver said.

Instead, she said, there was only a "how," a sense that something big still needed to be done. "And the 'how' is all about the [construction] contracts and the members of Congress."

At the same time that the test stand was busting its budget, NASA  had a much bigger problem to deal with. The whole effort to return to the moon — a suite of projects called "Constellation," which included the A-3 tower and the engines it was meant to test — was falling deeply behind.

That program had begun in 2004, with a call from President George W. Bush. "We will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015," Bush said then.

But its funding never matched its ambitions. The nation's ETA on the moon was repeatedly pushed back. By 2009, a study commissioned by President Obama found that — at its current budget — NASA might not get a man back to the moon until the 2030s.

"They were trying to do more work than they had money to do. And they tried to make it up by slipping" the due date further and further into the future, said Norman R. Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, who led the study.

What was left was a choice, he said.

"We have to decide in this country whether we want a jobs program," he said, "or a space program."

Finally, in early 2010, Obama made a stunning announcement.

He wanted to give up on the moon. In fact, he wanted to scrap the entire Constellation program, including the rocket engines that the Mississippi tower was meant to test.

At that point, NASA officials said, about $200 million in federal money had been committed to the Mississippi project. But the thing was still nowhere near done. In fact, officials said, it might need another year and a half of work.

What was left was a choice.

"If it didn't look like we were going to use it again, I would have stopped it right there. Just to save the money," said Douglas Cooke, the NASA official who was tasked with making that decision. He was a lifer, 35 years in.

In the spring of 2010, Cooke was not ready to kill the tower.

After all, Obama had only proposed killing the Constellation program. Congress hadn't signed off. In fact, lawmakers already were howling, outraged that home-district projects might be cut. So what if lawmakers decided to save that rocket engine that fired in space after all?

Just to be safe, Cooke kept it going.

"If we just stopped work on it, in the middle, it was going to be a pretty high recovery cost, to go back and restart it," he said. "So we just decided to go ahead."

Keeping eyes on the prize

In Mississippi, construction continued without a break. To the workers on the ground, the test stand was looking like a major achievement — a demonstration of what NASA and America and they were capable of.

First, they put up the steel. There was 4 million pounds of it, with holes for 450,000 bolts — a thicket of metal so dense that workers joked about a "bird test." Any bird that tried to fly straight through it would conk into a beam.

For workers, the job was hard because the structure was naked. No ladders. No railings. No floors. To build it, they had to stand on the bare skeleton itself, high enough in the air that the swinging steel blended in with the passing clouds.

"You're standing on a steel beam 100 feet in the air," said James Blackburn, whose company, then called Lafayette Steel Erector, worked on this phase of the project. "The crane is swinging, one of these large steel members is coming toward you. .?.?. As the clouds are moving by, this piece is moving at you, your brain easily gets confused."

After the steel went up, the workers attached the sealed metal container. The hardest part to build was the 120,000-pound door. It had to swing open to let the rocket engine in, then swing shut and hold up under 40 pounds per square inch of pressure from the atmosphere outside.

"You stop and realize 40 psi is — what's 40 times 144?" Jasper Reaves asked aloud at American Tank & Vessel, in the basement of a grand mansion in Mobile, Ala.

"Five thousand two hundred sixty pounds" per square inch, said William Cutts, the company's chief executive, working the calculator.

" .?.?. per square foot," Reaves, the chief engineer, finished the sentence. "That's a hell of a lot of pressure on this thing." Reaves gestured toward a photo of the door, crosshatched with a grid of steel bars. It looked like the door to a super-villain's jail cell. "So that's all to make the door keep its shape."

Just the paint job was enormous. It took two days for a man hanging in a "spider basket" to paint one wide stripe from bottom to top. Then he moved  over a few feet, and started at the bottom of another section.

But the payoff would be enormous, too.

Years later, they would have touched the thing that touched the thing that put humans on another planet.

"I mean, you talk about something neat," said Brent Anthony, who spent days inspecting the stand, hanging in a basket that swung unnervingly in the breeze. "You're talking about building something that's going to help us go to Mars."

In the final years of the project, however, word began to filter out on the jobsite. The thing they were working on might not be needed after all. Not for Mars. Not for anything.

"Yeah, yeah. It was a pretty strange feeling. To know that we were working on a project that, you know, seemed like that was just the local politician's pet project but didn't necessarily fit into the national scheme. Well, I don't think the rank and file really had a morale issue with that. You know, to them, it was another construction project," said Joel Ellis, a contractor who helped install the pipes on the stand.

For Ellis personally, the key was to take pride in the work, even if the work wasn't ever used. "There's no sense in dwelling on it," he said.

Sealing tower's fate

In the summer of 2010, Congress saved the tower in Mississippi for good.

It happened without anybody mentioning the project's name aloud.

"This is a big day for America," said then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), as it was about to happen. Hutchison was speaking in July 2010 at a meeting of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

"We're doing the right thing for America. For our economy. For our creativity," she said. "For our science. And for our security."

Hutchison was announcing a new compromise with the White House, which would finally settle the fight over Constellation. Constellation was dead. Instead, the senators were telling NASA to build something that they had just made up: a "Space Launch System" (jokers at NASA call it the "Senate Launch System").

The new plan for NASA was, as usual, long on "how" and short on "why."

The senators were clear about what they wanted NASA to do: keep some Constellation-era projects going, with all their salaries and spending, and try to integrate them into a new system.

But what was the goal of all that? The moon was off the table. Instead, NASA is now focused on a less impressive rock: an asteroid. Sometime in the 2020s, NASA wants to capture one about the size of a house, and then have astronauts zoom up and examine it. This was not a mission chosen to captivate the world's imagination. It was a mission chosen to use the leftovers that Congress had told NASA to reheat. (Mars still remains a distant goal: At the earliest, NASA might get there in the 2030s.)

At first, the Senate's new plan looked bad for the tower in Mississippi. At best, it now would be a project built on spec: erected in the hope that someday NASA might return to the idea of a giant rocket engine that fired in a vacuum.

But, in the committee room, Hutchison was still talking.

"I move that the following amendments to the NASA reauthorization bill be adopted," she was saying. "Wicker Two, as modified. Wicker Three, . . .and Wicker Four," Hutchison said.

"All those in favor?" said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee chairman.

Everybody said aye.

"Opposed?"

Nobody said anything.

"It does appear to the chair that the ayes have it," Rockefeller said.

"Sherlock Holmes, you are," Hutchison said.

And that was it. "Wicker Three" was an amendment sponsored by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). His amendment said NASA "shall complete construction and activation of the A-3 test stand with a completion goal of September 30, 2013."

That language was included in the bill that passed the committee. Then the Senate, then the House. In October 2010, Obama signed it into law.

"Administrations come and go. I think it makes sense not to leave a partially constructed asset sitting there," Wicker said this month, in an interview in a hall outside the Senate chamber. "I do believe, a decade from now, we'll look back and see that it has been used in a very positive way." He did not name a specific NASA program that he believed would use it.

In a separate interview this year, Hutchison — who is now retired — had said she couldn't remember how Wicker managed to get his amendment included in that compromise.

So how did he do it?

In the Capitol hall, the senator burst out laughing.

"Just talented legislating," he said, and then walked away.

Test stand, at a standstill

Work on the tower finally concluded this past summer. By then, the project had cost $349 million, which was nearly three times the original NASA estimate. It had lasted almost seven years, which was 3 1 /2 years longer than first expected.

But at last, the A-3 test stand was done.

Or, mostly done.

"A-3 could not be used for testing right now, if we wanted to," said Dumbacher, the NASA official, who left in July to become a professor at Purdue University. He said instruments still needed to be installed, and the pressure vessel needed to be tested to see if it would hold a vacuum. How much work would it take to get it ready?

"Probably another two to three years, I would guess," Dumbacher said. (A current NASA spokesman gave a slightly shorter time frame, saying that "probably less than two years would be required.") But, he said, Congress had assured NASA behind the scenes that this stage of completion would be enough to satisfy them. So construction work ended on June 27, and workers began the job of mothballing the stand.

The dignitaries did not come back to see that.

"There was no ceremony," a NASA spokesman said.

The revelation that the tower was going to be mothballed was revealed in an inspector general's report in January.

For now, the stand does not seem likely to be needed anytime soon. NASA says it has no rockets, even in development, that would require the kind of test this tower does.

So the tower stand has taken its place on NASA's long list of living dead. Last year, the agency's inspector general found six other test stands that were either in "mothball" status, or about to be. Some hadn't been used since the 1990s. Together, those seven cost NASA more than $100,000 a year to maintain.

Forshee, the pipefitting foreman, had no idea. He had left the tower job years ago, had gone to work in Montana, and then had come back to Mississippi to build a firehouse. But he had kept a jacket with the NASA logo, which he had been given on the tower project. He savored the idea that his kids might one day see an American walk on Mars, and know their father helped make it possible.

Then, in July, Forshee got an odd job offer. Could he come to Stennis Space Center to work on a new rocket test stand?

Forshee was confused. Didn't he just build one of those?

"They told me, "Hey, you know, they mothballed A-3.' I said, 'What?' " he said, in an interview at the bar at a Hooters restaurant in this industrial city of Gulfport. "And they said, 'Yeah, they're gonna do this one' " instead, he said.

It turned out that the engines required for the new Space Launch System needed a new test stand, with no vacuum involved. So NASA is renovating another stand just a short distance away from the A-3, called the B-2. That project is supposed to cost $134 million.

Forshee is a tea party supporter, somebody who hates for government money to be misspent. And here, he sees, it was misspent on him. After his interview at Hooters, he called a reporter back to be sure he had it right.

"They're just saying they spent $350 million for no reason?" he asked.

Yes, he was told.

"Well," he said. "Nice." (He took the job at the new test stand anyway, to be sure the work stayed with his union local: "If we don't do this work, then they're going to give it to Local 60 out of New Orleans.")

NASA would not allow a reporter to visit the disused tower up close. The only way to see it at all was to pay $10 at the visitor center and take the official Stennis Space Center bus tour.

On the tour, the guide drove by several test stands left over from the glory days of the 1960s, and recounted how exhaust billowed, and the earth shook. The bus drove by the B-2 stand, now under construction.

Then the bus passed a skeletal, white-painted tower, alone in the distance.

"The one to the left there is called the A-3," the guide said.

So what does that one do?

"It actually does not have a customer," the guide said. "So it's just kind of hanging out right now."

From Michigan to the Moon

Shane Hannon – The Space Review

Renowned 18th century British explorer and navigator Captain James Cook wrote in his journals that "Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go." One cannot deny that Cook's first voyage to the South Pacific and Australia was historic, and almost exactly 200 years later, the crew of Apollo 15 set off on a momentous mission of their own to the Moon.

 

Surely Cook would have deemed such a voyage impossible. And yet desire, drive, and of course some friendly competition made lunar exploration a reality, two centuries on from Cook's expeditions on the HMS Endeavour. It was that ambition that Cook spoke of which led a young man from Jackson, Michigan, to an eventual flight around the Moon as part of that Apollo 15 crew. Al Worden spent three days alone orbiting our lifeless neighbor while his two crewmates explored an area of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains), 28 degrees north of the lunar equator, on the surface below. The name of the Apollo cmmand module he piloted during that time was of course Endeavour, in honor of their aforementioned fellow explorer who had sailed very different seas in a time long before Saturn V rockets and lunar modules.

 

Growing up in 1930s America, Worden could never have imagined the paths he would take, and the places he would see, in his own lifetime. "There wasn't such a thing as an astronaut when I was a kid. There were television shows that had 'spacey' type themes like 'Buck Rogers,' but that was it," he recalled. Worden earned a scholarship to Princeton University, but a scholastic records check found he hadn't studied Latin and so that opportunity was taken away from him.

 

An appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, was the next definitive port of call after a successful Civil Service competitive examination. Graduating from West Point in 1955 with a Bachelor of Military Science degree, Worden's career from then on went down a route now accepted as the norm for an Apollo-era astronaut. "It was only in the early 60s that I realized we actually had a space program and that it might be something worth looking into."

 

Having chosen the Air Force after graduation from West Point, Worden went on to receive flight training at various bases in Texas and Florida. A Master's degree in Astronautical/Aeronautical Engineering with Instrumentation Engineering at the University of Michigan in 1963 preceded stints as a test pilot at the Empire Test Pilot's School (then situated in Farnborough, England) and then as an instructor at the Aerospace Research Pilot's School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Worden remembers his time flying in England particularly fondly, having decided to live with his family in a bungalow five miles south of Aldershot as opposed to staying holed up in an American base.

 

Selected as one of nineteen members of NASA's fifth group of pioneering astronauts in 1966, Worden was eventually assigned as the backup Command Module Pilot (CMP) on Apollo 12. The prime CMP that eventually flew on that mission was Dick Gordon, and the constant training together meant a lifelong friendship was formed. "Dick was my buddy," he said. "We flew together and worked together for a year and a half when he was training for Apollo 12 and I was his backup. We just went everywhere together. We worked really hard but it was also a lot of fun."

 

Worden was selected, along with fellow distinguished Air Force pilots Dave Scott (Commander) and Jim Irwin (Lunar Module Pilot), to form the crew of Apollo 15, the fourth human lunar landing, which launched on July 26, 1971. When asked if he would have traded his mission for any others, Worden said, "Well, maybe Apollo 11, that would've been nice. But no, I think we had the best mission of them all. We did the most science and concentrated on that." He points out that "there were a lot of firsts on our flight that made it a really great flight to be on." He's right: Apollo 15 was the first of three "J" missions that concentrated more on science than any previous flights. The mission included the first Scientific Instrument Module (SIM) bay flown and operated on an Apollo flight, the longest lunar surface stay time (Scott and Irwin's lunar module Falcon remained on the surface for almost 67 hours), the first use of the lunar roving vehicle to travel further on the Moon's surface than ever before, as well as the first sub-satellite launched in lunar orbit.

 

On the return trip to Earth, Worden himself completed an historic first spacewalk in deep space. During his 38 minutes outside Endeavour, he retrieved film cassettes from the SIM bay and observed the general condition of equipment situated there. As the first person to view the Earth and the Moon from deep space outside a spacecraft, it was a personal mission highlight for Worden. "I'd watched the Earthrise 75 times before that so that was an old thing by then, but to see the Earth and the Moon at the same time like that was kind of unique."

 

Training for that spacewalk was a key element of Worden's mission preparation, with underwater training and parabolic zero-g flights in the aptly named "Vomit Comet" KC-135 aircraft. Worden asserts, however, that the water training wasn't much of a help. "The underwater training was useless," he said. "The problem is you have to get into your spacesuit and then get into the water and get neutrally buoyant. Everything you work with in the water has to be neutrally buoyant and that's a far different thing than working with the same mass in space." He does note, however, that "The water tank is okay for procedures, but to get a real view of what it is like in space it's not the right thing. The zero-g airplane is the way to go."

 

One key aspect of training for Apollo 15 was geology, and it is said that all of the "J" mission astronauts (Apollos 15, 16, and 17) had the equivalent of a Master's degree in geology by the time they each flew. While Scott and Irwin were taught field geology, Worden became completely immersed in learning how to be an aerial lunar geologist. His teacher was Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian-American scientist who would take Worden on flights above places of geologic interest so he could practice describing what he saw. El-Baz is still a big name in his homeland, Worden points out. "Farouk was trained as a petroleum geologist. But what he has really done is remote-sensing geology and his big thing right now is ground-penetrating radar. He has found several Egyptian tombs and artifacts and they've been excavating those things. He's kind of a hero over there."

 

The flights to the Moon between 1968 and 1972 affected each of the astronauts in very different ways. When asked if the Apollo 15 mission changed him at all, Worden said, "Only from the standpoint of what I could see when I was there that I couldn't see here." He adds that "…you see how many stars there are out there and you realize that the Earth is a finite object. Five billion years from now there won't be an Earth—it may occur sooner than that, who knows?"

 

Worden seems convinced that it is only a matter of time before humans take the next giant leap in human space exploration. "My opinion is that we are genetically driven to go into space. We might take a thirty-year slow walk, a hiatus, or whatever you want to call it, but we're eventually going to get back to it and we're eventually going to go on and do these things that we're talking about."

 

Many of the Apollo astronauts seem somewhat divided on the matter of whether we should go back to the Moon before sending people on to Mars. Worden is certain, though, that a return to the Moon is a waste of time. "There's one thing that it would be very nice to go back to the Moon for. If we could put a big observatory on the surface of the backside of the Moon, that would be absolutely unbelievable. Other than that the Moon is no good to us for anything." Even in terms of a launch platform to Mars, the Florida resident believes the International Space Station (ISS) would be a much wiser option than the lunar surface.

 

In September, NASA announced that it had chosen Boeing and SpaceX as the two companies that will fly astronauts on commercially-developed vehicles to the ISS, starting as soon as 2017. The $4.2 billion awarded to Boeing and $2.6 billion to SpaceX will eventually end the American reliance on the Russian Soyuz vehicles to get its astronauts into orbit. Worden feels that for any human spaceflight venture to work, "You've got to have a vision and you've got to have a focus if you're going to bring people together and do things efficiently."

 

Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon capsules are both set to be reusable vehicles that will carry at least four crewmembers and limited cargo to the ISS, as well as act as an emergency lifeboat by remaining docked to the station for up to 180 days. SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk sees the announcement as "a vital step in a journey that will ultimately take us to the stars and make humanity a multi-planet species." Worden thinks space travel is being privatized because commercial companies will do it "more efficiently" than government. When asked whether the move is a long-term solution or just a mere stopgap measure, he said, "I think it's a long-term thing. Commercial flights into low-Earth orbit or to the ISS is a good thing because it takes the pressure off NASA to do that."

 

In terms of whether we'll ever find any other living species in the universe, Worden seems convinced. "If you talk about whether there is intelligent life out there, the answer is absolutely, resoundingly yes. It's deductive reasoning really." With 300 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone, it is hard to argue with him.

 

Worden's autobiography, Falling to Earth, was released in 2011 and made it to the top 12 of the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list (see "Review: Falling to Earth", The Space Review, August 8, 2011). Written with Francis French, the Manchester-born space historian, author, and current Director of Education at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, the book is a fascinating insight into the thoughts and experiences of an Apollo astronaut.

 

Worden's recent visit to the Irish west coast was organized by Limerick native Paul Ryan. A hugely successful few days included a lecture at Limerick IT on September 16, before concluding with a dinner event at the Pavilion in the University of Limerick the following day.

 

The 82-year-old has no intention of slowing down his schedule just yet: "I enjoy doing this, I enjoy talking to people. It keeps my feet on the ground." Having flown a half-million-mile round trip to the Moon more than 43 years ago, terra firma must feel that bit more precious. Al Worden: the boy from Michigan who took a trip to the Moon.

Shane Hannon is studying English and History at University College Dublin (UCD) and is the Sports Editor and Space Science correspondent for its award-winning newspaper, The University Observer, where a version of this interview was originally published. The above interview was exclusively conducted at the dinner with Al Worden event held at the Pavilion on the University of Limerick campus on September 17, 2014.

First results from NASA's MAVEN may offer clues to how Mars lost its water

MAVEN, which arrived at Mars in September, has returned data highlighting two key processes that may have played a role in Mars's missing water, which scientists believe was lost to space.

Pete Spotts – The Christian Science Monitor

 

NASA's MAVEN orbiter is beginning to help planetary scientists unravel the mystery of Mars' missing water – once abundant on the red planet early in its history, but now long gone, mainly lost to space over billions of years.

 

Evidence is mounting that during that early, wet period, Mars hosted conditions that were hospitable to microbial life, although so far no clear evidence has emerged that life ever gained a foothold there. That's a far cry from the dry, desolate planet astronomers see today.

 

Two general observations that predate MAVEN lend credence to the idea that the planet lost its water to space, researchers say.

 

One is the apparent dearth of large deposits of minerals that formed in water (think Britain's White Cliffs of Dover). So Mars itself didn't soak up much over time.

 

The second comes courtesy of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. It has measured the relative abundance of two forms of argon in the atmosphere from the floor of Gale Crater, where the rover currently is operating. One form of argon is heavier than the other. The heavier form, or isotope of argon, dominates, suggesting that the lighter ones escaped to the upper atmosphere to be swept away via the sun's solar wind.

 

In the case of water, over time interactions with ultraviolet light from the sun and with charged particles streaming from the sun as solar wind are thought to have split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen at high altitudes. As such splits took place, the solar wind would absconding with the lighter hydrogen, leaving the heavier oxygen behind.

 

But until MAVEN, which arrived at the red planet in September, no craft has explored the region of Mars' atmosphere where such losses are thought to have taken place.

 

Now, MAVEN instruments have returned data highlighting two key processes that could have played a role, according to scientists presenting their results Monday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, currently underway in San Francisco.

 

Using the craft's Suprathermal and Thermal Ion Composition (STATIC) instrument, researchers have made their first map of the effect temperature has on ions at different altitudes in the upper atmosphere. The temperature rises with altitude, boosting the speed of flitting ions until they reach levels that allow them to escape Mars's gravity. Once free, they can accelerate to very high energies as they move away from the planet, explained the University of California at Berkeley's Jim McFadden, STATIC's lead scientist.

 

The STATIC team's initial results looked at acceleration of atomic and molecular oxygen, helium, and hydrogen at four altitudes in the ionosphere. These heights ranged from 155 miles up to 500 miles up. At 155 miles the ions are less than -100 degrees C, or about 150 degrees below zero F. By 180 miles up, hydrogen ions begin to wake up, becoming more energetic relative to heavier atoms and molecules. At 250 miles up, hydrogen ions are moving fast enough to leave the planet.

 

As they reach 300 miles up, they continue to gain energy with altitude, reaching about 10,000 times the energy they started with.

 

Eventually some of the heavier ions can achieve energies of more than a million times the energy they started with, Dr. McFadden explained. This leaves Mars with a flowing mohawk of ions streaming spaceward, he adds.

 

Mars's upper atmosphere and ionosphere presented the MAVEN team with a surprise: The ionosphere apparently doesn't deflect the solar wind, as previously thought. Protons – essentially hydrogen ions – from the sun hit the upper atmosphere, take on an electrically neutral form, then pass through the ionosphere. Once through, they become ions again.

 

At the moment, it's unclear what role this might have played in the mystery of vanishing water on Mars. But it provides researchers with an immediate boon, noted Jasper Halekas, a University of Iowa researcher who heads the team using another instrument on MAVEN, the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer.

 

Ideally, MAVEN should be making several measurements simultaneously as its orbit repeatedly takes it deep into Mars's ionosphere and back out. But researchers were concerned that the craft would have no way of measuring what was going on with the solar wind during MAVEN's "deep dip" excursions into the ionosphere – important for understanding the wind's effect on that atmospheric layer.

 

This new discovery about the interactions between the solar wind and upper atmosphere means those simultaneous measurements will be possible. Dr. Halekas said.

 

Assessing the asteroid impact threat: Are we in danger?

Tomasz Nowakowski - Spaceflight Insider

"Watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour," could be still an actual description of our ability to predict asteroid threats to Earth. This sentence, pulled from the Bible (Matthew 25:13), provides a reminder of a vast number of the more than 1,500 potentially hazardous objects, floating in space, that meander throughout the solar system.

Some of them may be destined to pay our planet a close visit someday, unexpectedly, like the Chelyabinsk meteor that struck Russia in February of 2013. The impact caused serious damages and injured about 1,500 people.

Lately, one of these potentially hazardous asteroids, named 2014 UR116, created quite a buzz when various media reported that the 1,300 foot (400 meters) -wide space rock may hit Earth. Its impact would cause an explosion 1,000 times greater than the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Vladimir Lipunov, a professor at Moscow State University, has worked to calm the public's fears. "This asteroid will not collide with Earth during the next 100 years," Lipunov told astrowatch.net.

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks that are larger than 328 feet (100 meters) and that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU (Astronomical Units – about 93 million miles). Currently none of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.

Lipunov said it is difficult to calculate the orbit of big rocks like 2014 UR116 because their trajectories are constantly being changed by the gravitational pull of other planets. He noted that the scientists can't say precisely when the asteroid will approach Earth. "We should track it constantly. Because if we have a single mistake, there will be a catastrophe. The consequences can be very serious," he said in the documentary "Asteroids Attack" posted on Roscosmos website.

He emphasizes that the asteroid was missed by other, much larger telescope networks. "It's funny that much larger American telescopes than our MASTER (robotic telescope), missed such utter lump! The reason is that all previous flybys of the Earth took place during the full Moon, when the anti-asteroid system is idle," Lipunov wrote on his blog.

2014 UR116 is often compared to the famous asteroid Apophis which is similar in size and has also created worldwide concern when in 2004 the initial observations indicated a probability of up to 2.7 percent that it would hit our planet. Now, the risk of impact has been eliminated and Apophis is expected to fly-by Earth in 2029 and in 2036.

"I don't think there is any possibility of Apophis striking the Earth in the next few decades, as JPL has shown that it will miss by a safe distance," Gordon Garradd, Australian astronomer, the discoverer of numerous asteroids and comets told astrowatch.net. Garradd has worked for a number of astronomical institutions in the USA and Australia, most recently at Siding Spring Observatory on the Siding Spring Survey, part of the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey for near-Earth objects.

Robert McMillan, Principal Investigator of the Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona is also convinced that Apophis won't hit Earth. He notes that "Its orbit is already tightly constrained by many observations including radar." He added that any potential debris that could pose a threat is unlikely to be emitted by the asteroid. Spacewatch Project finds potential targets for interplanetary spacecraft missions, provides followup astrometry of such targets, and finds objects that might present a hazard to the Earth.

Apophis or 2014 UR116 are approximately the size of three football stadiums, but what about objects big enough to wipe out the entire human population? For example, in August 2014, two 2 mile (3 km) wide asteroids passed by Earth. Luckily, at a safe distance. In February we will see asteroid 2000 EE14, 1 mile wide (1.6 km in diameter), but 72 LD (Lunar Distance, 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon) is safe enough, so at present, these leftovers from the early days of the solar system do not present a threat.

Russia considers building its own space station: RIA

Gabriela Baczynska – Reuters

 

Russian state space agency Roscosmos is considering building its own space station, RIA news agency quoted its chief as saying on Monday, underlining how international tensions are affecting space cooperation.

 

Such a project would rival the International Space Station (ISS), an orbiting laboratory that involves 15 nations including Russia and the United States. Moscow has cast doubt on the ISS's long-term future as ties with Washington plummet over Ukraine.

"I confirm we are considering such an option. This is a possible direction of development," RIA quoted Roscosmos head Oleg Ostapenko as saying when asked about whether Russia has plans to develop it own space station.

He said such a space station could become a key part of Russian missions to the Moon.

It is not clear how such a project would be financed as Russia is widely expected to enter recession next year and the economic crisis is aggravated by Western sanctions over Russia's policy in the Ukraine crisis.

Washington wants to keep the $100 billion ISS in use until at least 2024, four years beyond the previous target. But a Russian government official said in May that Moscow would reject Washington's request to prolong its operations.

The Russian space station Mir, launched by the Soviet Union in 1986, operated until 2001 and President Vladimir Putin is now seeking to reform Russia's once-pioneering space industry after years of budget cuts and a brain drain that led to a series of embarrassing and costly failed launches in recent years.

3D printed rocket propulsion system for satellites successfully test-fired

Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider

The MPS-120 CubeSat High-Impulse Adaptable Modular Propulsion System (CHAMPS ) was put through its paces via a hot-fire test carried out by California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne. This particular engine design is a hydrazine-integrated propulsion system for use on small CubeSats and could open up missions that were previously unavailable to the tiny spacecraft. Funded by the NASA Office of Chief Technologist's Game Changing Opportunities in Technology Development and awarded out of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center also in California. The test itself was carried out in Redmond, Washington.

Four small rocket engines and the elements of the feed systems that keep them supplied with propellant were only parts of a larger equation. There also were propellant and pressurant tanks as well as a 3D-printed titanium piston. The engines have been designed to use both the highly-toxic hydrazine – as well as the so-called "green" AF-M315E propellant. Engines can be changed out so as to upgrade to the MPS-130 "green" propellant version.

"The MPS-120 hot-fire test is a significant milestone in demonstrating our game-changing propulsion solution, which will make many new CubeSat missions possible," said Christian Carpenter, MPS-120 program manager. "We look forward to identifying customers to demonstrate the technology on an inaugural space flight."

The system – is very small, with a description of it stating that it can fit into a chassis – about the size of a coffee cup.

During the hot-fire test, the MPS-120 displayed more than five times the required throughput as well as several discharges on the propellant tank. According to the engine's manufacturer, with the completion of this hot-fire, the system has reached Technology Readiness Level 6 and a Manufacturing Readiness Level 6.

"Aerojet Rocketdyne continues to push the envelope with both the development and application of 3-D printed technologies, and this successful test opens a new paradigm of possibilities that is not constrained by the limits of traditional manufacturing techniques," said Aerojet Rocketdyne's Vice President of Space Advanced Programs Julie Van Kleeck in a press release.

With the test fire complete, the next steps will be to qualify the engine – and then to have it fly an actual mission into space.

The use of 3D printing, or Additive Manufacturing (AM), has been increasingly used by aerospace companies as it lessens complexity, production times and in so doing – lowers the cost to send payloads to orbit.

"Demonstrating the speed at which we can manufacture, assemble and test a system like this is a testament to the impact that proper infusion of additive manufacturing and focused teamwork can have on a product," said Ethan Lorimor a project engineer working on the MPS-120. "The demonstration proved that the system could be manufactured quickly, with the 3D printing taking only one week and system assembly taking only two days."

This is not the first 3D-printed rocket engine or components to be tested out – or flown. The following are just some of components that have either been tested or flown to date:

Thrust Chamber Assembly using copper alloy produced via 3D-printing – Oct. 2014.

Bantam demonstration engine built entirely through 3D-printing – June 2014.

Falcon 9 rocket with a 3D-printed Main Oxidizer Valve (MOV) body in one of the nine Merlin 1D engines – Jan. 2014.

Liquid-oxygen/gaseous hydrogen rocket injector assembly designed through 3D-printing – July 2013.

 

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