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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: January 13, 2015 at 11:54:53 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Tuesday – Jan. 13, 2015 ...folks left on the list to leave for now
Stay warm everyone—the wind chill is awesome today!And fYI,,,, regarding the Texas new car inspection and car tag law that takes effect March 1st. my car inspection person said that it means he will lose a litte business as result….for folks with car inspections not due until December 2015—they will get an extra 11 months of use for their current inspections….and do not have to get reinspected until Dec. 2016 it sounds like…..!!!!
Loss Type Center Org Employee Type Name Separation Date RETIREMENT JSC EV211 FTP BENBENEK, DANIEL 01/30/15 RETIREMENT JSC BR111 FTP ROBB, NANCY 02/03/15 RETIREMENT JSC GP111 FTP DYER, H 01/30/15 RETIREMENT JSC LD411 FTP MAYHORN, JULIUS 02/03/15 RETIREMENT JSC AC111 FTP PHILLIPS, JEFFREY 01/31/15 RETIREMENT JSC JE111 FTP KINES, MELONEE 01/31/15 RETIREMENT JSC EA411 FTP MORRIS, MICHELLE 02/03/15 RETIREMENT JSC BR111 FTP ANUMELE, MATRENIA 02/03/15 RETIREMENT JSC BH111 FTP PERRY, BILLY 01/30/15 RETIREMENT JSC ES511 FTP TSAI, TED 01/31/15 RETIREMENT JSC EA541 FTP PIATEK, IRENE 02/03/15 RETIREMENT JSC CA121 FTP PAPENDORF, ANITA 01/31/15 RETIREMENT JSC EC511 FTP WOODS, RONALD 02/03/15 RETIREMENT JSC ES611 FTP NG, CHING-KAM 01/29/15 RETIREMENT JSC SF211 FTP RYTLEWSKI, PATRICIA 01/30/15 RETIREMENT JSC AH811 FTP HUMPHREY, NIESJE 02/01/15 RETIREMENT JSC OA111 FTP GIBSON, JUANITA 01/30/15 NASA and Human Spaceflight NewsTuesday – Jan. 13, 2015HEADLINES AND LEADS5,200 Days in SpaceAn exploration of life aboard the International Space Station, and the surprising reasons the mission is still worthwhileCharles Fishman – The Atlantic (January/February 2015)When humans move to space, we are the aliens, the extraterrestrials. And so, living in space, the oddness never quite goes away. Consider something as elemental as sleep. In 2009, with the expansive International Space Station nearing completion after more than a decade of orbital construction, astronauts finally installed some staterooms on the U.S. side—four private cubicles about the size of airplane lavatories. That's where the NASA astronauts sleep, in a space where they can close a folding door and have a few hours of privacy and quiet, a few hours away from the radio, the video cameras, the instructions from Mission Control. Each cabin is upholstered in white quilted material and equipped with a sleeping bag tethered to an inside wall. When an astronaut is ready to sleep, he climbs into the sleeping bag.Air Force turns a keen eye on space junkIlima Loomis - Science MagazineSometimes you'd rather not know the bad news. An estimated 500,000 pieces of space junk—old satellites, rocket parts, debris from collisions—swarm in orbit around Earth. Much of it is potentially deadly: NASA officials say anything larger than 1 centimeter in diameter poses a threat to the International Space Station (ISS). But current tracking systems can generally only watch objects 10 cm or larger, and the U.S. government now follows less than 5% of space hazards—just 23,000 objects.SpaceX Supply Ship Arrives at Space Station With GroceriesMarcia Dunn - APA shipment of much-needed groceries and belated Christmas presents finally arrived Monday morning at the International Space Station.SpaceX's Dragon cargo ship arrives at ISSJames Dean – Florida TodaySpaceX's Dragon cargo craft safely reached the International Space Station this morning, completing a two-day journey from Cape Canaveral.SpaceX cargo ship captured by space station crewWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsApproaching from directly below, a SpaceX cargo ship loaded with more than 5,000 pounds of equipment, supplies and belated Christmas gifts, caught up with the International Space Station early Monday, and then stood by while commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, operating the lab's robot arm, snared a grapple fixture to complete a two-day rendezvous.Space Station Astronauts Capture SpaceX Dragon Resupply CapsuleMark Carreau – Aviation WeekA SpaceX Dragon commercial resupply capsule carried out an early rendezvous with the International Space Station Monday, delivering just over 5,100 pounds of crew supplies and scientific research equipment to the orbiting science laboratory's six astronauts.
Cruz gets key NASA committee appointmentEric Berger – Houston ChronicleTexas Senator Ted Cruz will chair the Senate subcommittee with oversight over NASA's activities.NASA test SLS rocket engineThe Associated PressNASA has successfully tested the rocket engine that may one day power men to Mars.Sierra Nevada Vows To Continue Dream Chaser DevelopmentFrank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week & Space TechnologySierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) says it "plans to further the development and testing of the Dream Chaser and is making significant progress in its vehicle design and test program," despite its failure to overturn NASA's selection of its two competitors—Boeing and SpaceX—in bidding for NASA's planned commercial crew vehicles.Russia has no immediate plans to build new space station of its own — RoscosmosITAR-TASS News AgencyRussia does not plan to build a new space station of its own till 2025, Sergey Savelyev, chief of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily that will be published on Tuesday.Ice researchers capture catastrophic Greenland meltGeoffrey Mohan – Los Angeles TimesOver a few summer days in 2012, nearly all of the Greenland ice sheet surface thawed right under the feet of a UCLA-led team of scientists.Iceland lava field may now be the biggest in 200 yearsNick Kirkpatrick – The Washington PostBigger than the island of Manhattan, the lava flow from the Holuhraun lava field in Iceland is now the largest the country has seen in more than 200 years, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.NASA water mapper set for move to the launch padJustin Ray – Spaceflight NowMaking a scientific measurement of planet Earth on a global scale never before attempted by NASA is the objective of an environment satellite to be mounted atop its booster rocket Tuesday in California.COMPLETE STORIES5,200 Days in SpaceAn exploration of life aboard the International Space Station, and the surprising reasons the mission is still worthwhileCharles Fishman – The Atlantic (January/February 2015)When humans move to space, we are the aliens, the extraterrestrials. And so, living in space, the oddness never quite goes away. Consider something as elemental as sleep. In 2009, with the expansive International Space Station nearing completion after more than a decade of orbital construction, astronauts finally installed some staterooms on the U.S. side—four private cubicles about the size of airplane lavatories. That's where the NASA astronauts sleep, in a space where they can close a folding door and have a few hours of privacy and quiet, a few hours away from the radio, the video cameras, the instructions from Mission Control. Each cabin is upholstered in white quilted material and equipped with a sleeping bag tethered to an inside wall. When an astronaut is ready to sleep, he climbs into the sleeping bag."The biggest thing with falling asleep in space," says Mike Hopkins, who returned from a six-month tour on the Space Station last March, "is kind of a mental thing. On Earth, when I've had a long day, when I'm mentally and physically tired—when you first lie down on your bed, there's a sense of relief. You get a load off your feet. There's an immediate sense of relaxation. In space, you never feel that. You never have that feeling of taking weight off your feet—or that emotional relief." Some astronauts miss it enough that they bungee-cord themselves to the wall, to provide a sense of lying down.Sleep position presents its own challenges. The main question is whether you want your arms inside or outside the sleeping bag. If you leave your arms out, they float free in zero gravity, often drifting out from your body, giving a sleeping astronaut the look of a wacky ballet dancer. "I'm an inside guy," Hopkins says. "I like to be cocooned up."Hopkins says he didn't have unusual dreams in space, although now, back on Earth, he does occasionally dream of floating through the station. "I wish I dreamed every night of floating," he says. "I wish I could recapture that."Spaceflight has faded from American consciousness even as our performance in space has reached a new level of accomplishment. In the past decade, America has become a truly, permanently spacefaring nation. All day, every day, half a dozen men and women, including two Americans, are living and working in orbit, and have been since November 2000. Mission Control in Houston literally never sleeps now, and in one corner of a huge video screen there, a counter ticks the days and hours the Space Station has been continuously staffed. The number is rounding past 5,200 days.It's a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. But chances are, most ninth-graders don't know the name of a single active astronaut—many don't even know that Americans are up there. We've got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a stunning achievement, and it's completely ignored.As a culture, we remain fascinated by the possibilities, discoveries, of space travel. The 2013 movie Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, brought in $716 million at the box office and won seven Academy Awards. But we seem indifferent to what is happening in reality all the time now. Without any fanfare, we have slipped into the era of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. We just know the fictional characters better than the real ones. Perhaps that's unsurprising. The Space Station is an engineering marvel, but all it seems to do is soar in circles—a fresh sunrise every 92 minutes. Scientific research on the station hasn't yielded any noteworthy breakthroughs, and daily life there, thankfully, lacks the drama of a movie script.But all of that does the station and its astronauts a disservice: The details and challenges of life in space are weird and arresting, revealing and valuable. In them, one can begin to make out a greater purpose for the station's 82,000 manned orbits—even if it's not the one NASA seems to be pursuing.The International Space Station is a vast outpost, its scale inspiring awe even in the astronauts who have constructed it. From the edge of one solar panel to the edge of the opposite one, the station stretches the length of a football field, including the end zones. The station weighs nearly 1 million pounds, and its solar arrays cover more than an acre. It's as big inside as a six-bedroom house, more than 10 times the size of a space shuttle's interior. Astronauts regularly volunteer how spacious it feels. It's so big that during the early years of three-person crews, the astronauts would often go whole workdays without bumping into one another, except at mealtimes. Indeed, it's so big, you can see it tracing across the night sky when it passes overhead (there are apps for finding it, ISS Spotter among them).The station is a joint operation: half American, half Russian, with each nation managing its own side of the craft (the U.S. side includes modules or equipment from Canada, Japan, and Europe, and typically a visiting astronaut from one of those places). Navigation responsibilities and operation of the station's infrastructure are shared, and the role of station commander alternates between a cosmonaut and an astronaut. The Russian and U.S.-side astronauts typically keep to their own modules during the workday. But the crews often gather for meals and hang out together after work.As a facility, a spacecraft, and a habitation, the station is most comparable to a ship. It has its own personality, its own charms and quirks. Crew members come and go, bringing their own style, but the station itself imposes a certain rhythm and tone. It has a more sophisticated water-recycling system than any on Earth. An astronaut who mixes up an orange drink for breakfast on Monday morning and urinates on Monday afternoon can use that same water, newly purified, to mix a fresh drink on Thursday. Yet the station lacks a refrigerator or freezer for food (there is a freezer for science experiments), and while the food is much better than it was 20 years ago, most of it's still vacuum-packed or canned. The arrival of a few oranges on a cargo ship every couple of months is cause for jubilation.On the station, the ordinary becomes peculiar. The exercise bike for the American astronauts has no handlebars. It also has no seat. With no gravity, it's just as easy to pedal furiously, feet strapped in, without either. You can watch a movie while you pedal by floating a laptop anywhere you want. But station residents have to be careful about staying in one place too long. Without gravity to help circulate air, the carbon dioxide you exhale has a tendency to form an invisible cloud around your head. You can end up with what astronauts call a carbon-dioxide headache. (The station is equipped with fans to help with this problem.)Since the station's first components were launched, 216 men and women have lived there, and NASA has learned a lot about how to live in space—about the difference between rocketing into zero-G for two weeks and settling in for months at a time. Day-to-day life in space is nothing like the sleek, improvisational world that TV and movie directors have created. It is more thrilling and dangerous than we earthlings appreciate, and also more choreographed and mundane. Often those qualities coexist in the very same experience, such as spacewalking. Space is a brittle and unforgiving place—a single thoughtless maneuver can trigger disaster. NASA has reduced the risk by scripting almost everything, from the replacement of a water filter to the safety checks on a space suit. In 54 years of flying humans in space, NASA has suffered three fatal spacecraft accidents that killed a total of 17 people—the Apollo 1 capsule fire in 1967, the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, and the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003. But none of those resulted from any error on the part of the astronauts. The meticulous scripting can make watching the astronauts at work boring, but NASA knows that excitement means mistakes.Even by the low estimates, it costs $350,000 an hour to keep the station flying, which makes astronauts' time an exceptionally expensive resource—and explains their relentless scheduling: Today's astronauts typically start work by 7:30 in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, and stop at 7 o'clock in the evening. They are supposed to have the weekends off, but Saturday is devoted to cleaning the station—vital, but no more fun in orbit than housecleaning down here—and some work inevitably sneaks into Sunday.From 2003 to 2010, 10 American astronauts who lived on the station kept a diary as part of a research study conducted by Jack Stuster, an anthropologist who studies people living in extreme environments. The anonymous diaries—nearly 300,000 words in all—reveal people who are thrilled by life in space, and occasionally bored, and sometimes seriously irritated. For a nation accustomed to 50 years of smiling, can-do astronauts who almost never say anything genuinely revealing about flying in space, the diaries are refreshingly frank."I had to laugh to myself at the procedures today," wrote one station astronaut.To replace a light bulb, I had to have safety glasses and a vacuum cleaner handy. This was in case the bulb broke. However, the actual bulb is encased in a plastic enclosure, so even if the glass bulb did break, the shards would be completely contained. Also, I had to take a photo of the installed bulb, before turning it on. Why? I have no idea! It's just the way NASA does things.Astronauts never tire of watching the Earth spin below—one wrote of stopping at a window and being so captivated that he watched an entire orbit without even reaching for a camera. "I have been looking at the Earth, from the point of view of a visiting extraterrestrial," wrote another. "Where would I put down, and how would I go about making contact? The least dangerous thing would be to board the International Space Station and talk to those people first."The diary entries make it very clear that six months is a long time to be in space—a long time to go without family and friends, without fresh food, without feeling sunshine or rain or the pleasures of gravity; a long time to be tethered to the tasks of maintaining body and station, on a ship with no bathing or laundry facilities. The entries also reveal that keeping a diary significantly improves an astronaut's morale.During short missions, even two-week shuttle missions, the excitement of being in space never fades. On the station, NASA and the astronauts themselves have had to be more attentive to morale, simply because there's a lot of work that's uninteresting. The Space Station has a telephone—astronauts can call anyone they want, whenever it's convenient—and their families get a specially programmed iPad for private videoconferences. The astronauts have private conversations with NASA psychologists once every two weeks. They also have regular conferences with NASA strength coaches—twice as frequently as they talk to the shrinks.In space, says Mike Hopkins, "Everything is new. Simple hygiene, eating a meal, sleeping—you name it, it's all completely different from what you're used to." That's from someone who, like most astronauts, trained full-time for two years before launch, so that he would know what to expect.The Space Station is stocked with movies and has a locker filled with paperback books. But Ed Lu, one of the earliest crew members, in 2003 decided that he wasn't going to spend his free time doing something so earthly as reading a paperback. "I don't know if I'm ever coming back here," Lu remembers thinking to himself. "I want to do things I can never do at home."When Lu arrived at the Space Station—he was half of a two-person crew that kept the station active in the wake of the Columbia disaster—he'd already flown two shuttle missions, and had 21 days' experience living in zero-G. "I decided to learn to fly better, to learn acrobatics," he says. "I would pick a module and say to myself, Every time I go through this module, I'm going to fly through without touching the sides. I would pick a compartment and say, Every time I go through this compartment, I'm going to do a double flip. Being on station was my third flight, and I thought I knew what I was doing. But I got an awful lot better with months of training."The singular experience of space is the flying—not flying the spaceship you're in, but flying, yourself, inside it. That's what really makes you an astronaut—not altitude, but the almost unbelievable liberation from gravity. Astronauts speak of it with bemused awe, because it is pure delight but also totally counterintuitive and sometimes inconvenient."What's it like to live in zero-G?" asks Sandra Magnus, who took three spaceflights, including 130 days on the station, before her recent retirement from the astronaut corps. "It's a lot of fun," she says, then bursts out laughing. "I learned to carry things with my knees—tuck them between my knees and shove off. That way I had my hands free to propel myself. The thing is, in space, Newton's laws rule your life. If you're doing something as simple as typing on a laptop, you're exerting force on the keyboard, and you end up getting pushed away and floating off. You have to hold yourself down with your feet." Magnus developed calluses on her big toes because she used them continuously, in stocking feet, to navigate and position herself.Gravity is an indispensable organizing tool, she says, one you don't appreciate until you have to live without it. "Just look around the room you're in … There's stuff sitting on tables, on shelves, in drawers, on the floor. In space, all of that would be all over the place." Every single item you use needs to be secured, or it will float off. Astronauts mutter quietly about the amount of time they spend searching for misplaced equipment—"Keeping track of stuff can eat your whole day," says the astronaut Mike Fincke—but securing everything also takes time.Magnus liked to cook for her colleagues on the station, finding new dishes to make with the food NASA supplied, especially with the delivery of, say, a fresh onion. "It takes hours, so I could only do it on the weekend," she says. "Why hours? Think about one thing: when you cook, how often you throw things in a trash can. How can you do that? Because gravity lets you throw things in the trash. Without gravity, you have to figure out what to do. I put the trash on a piece of duct tape—duct tape is awesome—but even dealing with the trash takes forever."When you're in zero-G, all the fluids in your body are in zero-G too, so astronauts often have a stuffy-head feeling, from fluid migrating to their sinuses; some end up literally puffy-faced. And zero-G causes the nausea and space sickness that many astronauts have quietly suffered during the first day or two in orbit, going back at least to Apollo. Leroy Chiao, 54 and retired from the astronaut corps after four flights, describes what happens even before you float out of your seat. "Your inner ear thinks you're tumbling: the balance system in there is going all over the place … Meanwhile your eyes are telling you you're not tumbling; you're upright. The two systems are sending all this contradictory information to your brain. That can be provocative—that's why some people feel nauseous." Within a couple of days—truly miserable days for some—astronauts' brains learn to ignore the panicky signals from the inner ear, and space sickness disappears.Mike Fincke has spent more time in space than any other American astronaut—381 and a half days, spread over three missions. He has done nine space walks, totaling 48 hours. When his first station posting was unexpectedly moved forward in 2004, Fincke became the first U.S. astronaut to become a father while in space. Mission Control patched him through to his wife's cellphone while she was in labor.For Fincke, there's nothing like the flying. "There is sheer joy in it," he says. "Just sheer joy in flying in space. You can take the most serious 50-year-old curmudgeon and put him into orbit, in zero-G, and he'll smile, he'll laugh, he'll giggle."Fincke has degrees from MIT and Stanford, and graduated from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School before becoming an astronaut. He's disarmingly chatty compared with the stereotype, unable to suppress his exuberance about his job, even after 18 years. In 2011, he participated in a video call between the Space Station and Pope Benedict XVI in Vatican City. At the end, Fincke launched himself straight up out of the video frame, inspiring the Italian press to joke about Christ's Ascension. "We even made the pope laugh," Fincke says."A little push with your big toe will take you halfway across the station. It's like being Superman—with just the brush of a finger. It does not get old, even after 381 days."The very quality that makes space travel so delightful also makes it invisibly dangerous. Zero-G is harmful to the human body in insidious ways.Significantly, astronauts lose bone mass. Bones regenerate and grow partly in response to the work they have to do each day. Without weight to support in space, the rate at which they make fresh cells slows down, and the bones thin and weaken. A postmenopausal woman on Earth might lose 1 percent of bone mass a year. An astronaut of either gender can lose 1 percent of bone mass a month.Mark Guilliams is the lead strength-and-conditioning coach for NASA astronauts. He works out of the expansive astronaut gym at Houston's Johnson Space Center, where the 43 active American astronauts are based."Living in zero-G is the equivalent of a long stay in a hospital," Guilliams says. You lose muscle mass and strength. You lose blood volume. You lose aerobic fitness, anaerobic fitness, stamina. "Spaceflight is hard on the body. Period."It's hard on the body because it's so easy on the body. The antidote is vigorous, almost relentless exercise while in space. The U.S. part of the station has three exercise machines—the seatless bike, a treadmill, and a weight machine known as the ARED (advanced resistance exercise device) with a 600-pound capacity. Astronauts are scheduled for two and a half hours of exercise a day, six days a week, but most exercise seven days a week. Exercise is considered so vital that NASA puts it right on the workday schedule, although some astronauts wake up early and do it in their own time.Mike Hopkins is a fitness buff, and he made a series of YouTube videos to show what astronaut workouts are like. The treadmill is the hardest piece of equipment to get used to, he says, because you have to be bungee-corded down to provide the sense of weight to your body that a runner on Earth would have. "You run with a backpacking harness on, and that's attached to bungees, and you can change the load, how hard it is pulling against you," Hopkins says. "I would try to get up to my body weight, simulating what it was like to run on Earth. But you're carrying that load on your shoulders and hips; it's like trying to run with a 180-pound pack on your back."Zero-G doesn't make sweating any more pleasant. "You sweat buckets up there," says Hopkins. "On the ground, when you're riding the bike, the sweat drips off you. Up there, the sweat sticks to you—you have pools of sweat on your arms, your head, around your eyes. Once in a while, a glob of it will go flying off." The astronauts use large wipes and dry towels to clean off. "The shower was one of those things that I missed." Still, the sponge-bath method works just fine, and the station generally has a neutral smell. Astronauts wear fresh clothes for a week, which then become workout clothes for a week, which are then discarded with the rest of the trash.The focus on fitness is as much about science and the future as it is about keeping any individual astronaut healthy. NASA is worried about two things: recovery time once astronauts return home, and, crucially, how to maintain strength and fitness for the two and a half years or more that it would take to make a round-trip to Mars, which President Obama has said he believes NASA can do by the mid-2030s (although there is no detailed plan). Figuring out how to get to Mars safely, in fact, underlies much of what happens on the station. "If astronauts have a 10 percent loss of strength, of cardio capacity, how much does that impair their functioning on station? Not much," says Guilliams. "But if you're going to Mars, that kind of loss could be critical. What would they be able to do when they land?""I have been looking at the Earth, from the point of view of a visiting extraterrestrial … how would I go about making contact?"We don't yet understand all the implications of long-duration spaceflight. "Five years ago," says John Charles, of NASA's Human Research Program, "we had an astronaut on station all of a sudden say, 'Hey, my eyesight has changed. I'm three months into this flight, and I can't read the checklists anymore.'?" It turns out, Charles says, that all that fluid shifting upward in zero-G increases intracranial pressure. "Fluid pushes on the eyeball from behind and flattens it," says Charles. "Many astronauts slowly get farsighted in orbit."In fact, the station is now stocked with adjustable eyeglasses, so astronauts who don't normally wear glasses will have them if they need them. Those who already wear glasses bring along extra pairs with stronger prescriptions.Astronauts need precise, reliable vision, so its deterioration during spaceflight is hardly a minor problem. And it's a particularly humbling one. NASA has known about the eyesight issue for decades. "We saw this on Skylab"—the first U.S. space station, which intermittently housed astronauts for up to three months at a time from 1973 to 1974—"and on the shuttle," Charles says. The importance of it just wasn't clear until astronauts were regularly spending months in orbit. And at the moment, NASA doesn't know how to fix it back on Earth. Bone mass, muscle mass, blood volume, aerobic fitness all return to normal, for the most part. But astronauts' eyes do not completely recover. Nor do doctors know exactly what would happen to eyesight over the course of a mission four or five times longer than those of today."We're not watching anything else as significant as this right now," Charles says. In March, the longest mission ever for an American astronaut will begin: a full year on the station. (Four cosmonauts have lived in space for a year or more, aboard the Russian space station Mir.) Before tackling a two-and-a-half-year trip to Mars, Charles says, "we have to see if there are any other things we aren't anticipating—psychologically or physiologically. We have to see if there are any cliffs.""Hey, Houston, this is Station. Good morning. We're ready for the morning DPC."That's U.S. station commander Steven Swanson, hailing Mission Control from orbit one morning last July to start another fully scheduled space workday. For Americans of a certain age, those first seven words—"Hey, Houston, this is Station. Good morning"—remain packed with a sense of romance, adventure, and unassuming competence. The astronauts are flying with the stars; Mission Control has things in hand on the ground.On shuttle missions—there were 135, stretching from 1981 to 2011—Mission Control would wake the astronauts, radioing up a burst of music to start each day. The wake-up-song tradition stretches back to Gemini, and its passing is meaningful, at least symbolically. The station is a permanent outpost, with a measure of independence. So Mission Control doesn't shake the astronauts awake. They get up in their mini-staterooms well before any contact with Houston, and then signal the start of the workday by radioing down to Mission Control. They also end the day, by signing off for the night. When the astronauts get ready to turn in, they float through the station, switching off lights and closing window shutters, to shade their sleep from all those sunrises. Mission Control does not normally radio the station during off-hours.But it's a thin layer of independence, as acknowledged in that next line from Swanson—"We're ready for the morning DPC." Every day starts and ends with a daily planning conference, during which the astronauts briefly check in with all five control centers around the world to talk about schedule glitches or pending maintenance, or look ahead to the next day. (NASA has a second facility, in Huntsville, Alabama, to handle scientific research; Moscow has a Mission Control for the Russian half of the station; and the European Space Agency and Japan's space agency also have their own 24-hour control centers.) The astronauts may be rocketing around Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, 10 times faster than the average bullet leaves a gun, but they can't escape regular meetings.Although the astronauts live and work in the Space Station, they don't fly it or otherwise control it. That's all done from Houston and Moscow. Mission Control monitors the station's position in space and adjusts it as necessary, using gyroscopes and thrusters; Mission Control also monitors all the onboard systems—electrical, life support, IT, communications. A vast team on the ground supports the station—more than 1,000 people for every astronaut in orbit. And while astronauts get to kick off the workday, the pace and rhythm of the day are unequivocally set by the people on the ground. Life on the station is managed via spreadsheet: every minute of each astronaut's workday is mapped out in blocks devoted to specific tasks. When an astronaut clicks on a time block, it expands to present all the steps necessary to perform the task at hand—whether it's conducting an hours-long experiment on the behavior of fire in zero-G or stowing supplies from a cargo ship.In its own way, the schedule can be a source of freedom for astronauts who surrender to it, but it is also a symbol of a certain tyranny. Science experiments, maintenance tasks, cargo-vehicle arrival and departure: all are set from the ground. Each astronaut's schedule has a red line that slowly shifts across the laptop screen, left to right, showing the current time and what the astronaut should be doing at that particular moment. "The red line, no matter what I do, it just keeps moving and moving to the right," groans the astronaut Garrett Reisman, in a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video he recorded in space. "I can't stop it!"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.The schedulers get input and priorities from everyone—what is the point of a particular six-month mission? What scientific experiments will be done? What cargo ships will visit? What maintenance tasks are necessary? Getting each individual item onto the schedule requires detail and coordination. For a particular experiment, what equipment and tools are required? Where are those things stowed? How long will setup take? What steps will the astronaut need to follow to conduct the experiment? Will enough power be available at that time? Will the experiment get in the way of what another astronaut is doing? Who are the investigators on the ground? Will they need video observation? Is there sufficient bandwidth for all the video and audio being used at a given moment? Each day has dozens of individual activities requiring that level of planning, which begins 18 months out.Highly educated, highly motivated astronauts end up doing one task after another, all day long, some of them fun and intellectually challenging (doing research with ground-based scientists), some of them tedious (recording the serial numbers of the items in the trash before sending them to be burned up in the atmosphere). No one signs up to fly through space in order to empty the urine container or swap out air filters. But of course even the research is commissioned and directed by other people—the astronauts are merely highly skilled technicians.NASA struggles to balance the independence of its astronauts with the desire to keep them on schedule. In the anonymous diary study conducted by Jack Stuster, work was the most frequent topic raised by astronauts in their journal entries, and when Stuster analyzed the work entries, scheduling was the second most frequently discussed topic, after simple descriptions of tasks."Only 30 minutes [scheduled] to execute a 55-step procedure that required collecting 21 items," wrote an astronaut. "It took 3 or 4 hours." Another wrote, "It has been a pretty tedious week with tasks that were clearly allotted too little time on the schedule. Talking to [a Mission Control staffer] today, I realized he just doesn't understand how we work up here."Astronauts need precise vision, so its deterioration during spaceflight is a significant, and humbling, problem.That's a pretty standard complaint, of course: Soldiers at the front line have one impression of how the war is going; military headquarters has another. Sales reps in the field see the products and the customers one way; the vice president of sales sees them differently. In part because of the care NASA takes picking astronauts and assigning them to crews, and in part because the astronauts appreciate the need to work together, they all report getting along well, and being able to quickly resolve minor disputes. But at the same time, from their perspective, it's hard for NASA's Space Station ground staff to understand life in space. As with anything else, the privileges and joys of working in space don't neutralize ordinary office politics.Stuster's study has a whole subcategory of diary entries devoted to "praise inflation," a phenomenon whereby the astronauts feel compelled to pass out "profuse compliments, even when undeserved," to ground personnel, "and a general avoidance of criticizing ground personnel for deficiencies, real and perceived." The tradition of praise goes back to the moon effort—when the astronauts were bathed in glory, and worked hard to pass that on to the army of technicians who made the mission possible.But on the station, it can sometimes grate. Wrote one astronaut: "I feel that the ground has often made my life more difficult here, thus making it hard to hand out praise on such a frequent basis." Almost anyone who has ever had a job can imagine the eye-rolling that goes on, both in Houston and on the station: What are those guys up there/down there thinking?For the most part, such sentiments go unexpressed. Peggy Whitson, a veteran of two six-month station postings, was the chief of NASA's astronaut office—the astronauts' direct boss—from 2009 to 2012. Communication was something she paid close attention to, on both ends of the radio. "One thing I can tell you," Whitson says. "Sarcasm does not work in space travel."Scott Kelly and Tim Kopra are standing back-to-back on a steel platform in July, outfitted in NASA space suits. A yellow crane slowly lifts the platform, swings it out over the surface of a huge swimming pool, then lowers the astronauts into the water. Kelly and Kopra are going to spend most of the day—six hours—underwater, doing a practice space walk in the pool, going through every step of replacing part of the Space Station's robotic arm. It's a maintenance task they will do in space next November.Kelly and Kopra spend 30 minutes getting latched into the suits, each of which weighs 230 pounds empty. A fellow astronaut, Kevin Ford, is watching. "See how each astronaut has three or four guys helping him?" says Ford, who was the commander of the Space Station for four months in 2012 and 2013. "On station, it's just one guy suiting up two astronauts. The procedure to get into the space suits and out the hatch is a 400-step checklist. And you don't want to skip too many of those steps."Four hundred steps, just to get one astronaut ready to float into the station's air lock and prepare to egress. Before a NASA astronaut starts the first minute of a space walk, he or she has spent four hours getting into the suit and checking it over. And long before that, the astronaut has rehearsed that specific six-to-eight-hour space walk five or more times on Earth, in the pool, which NASA calls the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.Nothing captures the strange contradictions of modern spaceflight as well as spacewalking—shoving off into space with only your wits and training, sealed into your one-person spacecraft. An EVA (extravehicular activity) is, for almost all astronauts, the ultimate professional challenge and the ultimate thrill ride. When you're outside the station, you are literally an independent astronomical body, a tiny moon of Earth, orbiting at 17,500 miles an hour. When you look at Earth between your boots, that first step is more than 1 million feet down.But spacewalking is also a window into how dangerous space is, how a single connector not properly mated can lead to disaster, and how NASA has grappled with that risk by wringing all the spontaneity, all the surprise, out of it. That's why every scheduled space walk is scripted, and then rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in a pool big enough to immerse two space shuttles.Working in space to construct or repair a spaceship that weighs 1 million pounds is so challenging that the station's exterior elements have a remarkable engineering feature: although the station is made up of more than 100 components, with a surface area spanning almost three acres, most bolts the astronauts work with are a single size. That way astronauts almost never have to worry about changing sockets. Imagine constructing a whole building that way. All the scripting, the rehearsal, the design considerations—life in space isn't just stranger than ordinary folks realize; it's harder. Harder even than NASA has always imagined.The agency originally promised that space shuttles would fly at least 25 times a year. In actuality, the shuttle program averaged fewer than five flights a year; in the peak year, 1985, the shuttle flew nine times. It was President Ronald Reagan, in his 1984 State of the Union speech, who directed NASA to create and permanently staff a space station, which he predicted would "permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, in metals, and in lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space." NASA's original vision for the station was as ambitious as it had been for Apollo or the shuttles. The station was to have seven major functions—it was to be a research lab, a manufacturing facility, an observatory, a space transportation hub, a satellite-repair facility, a spacecraft-assembly facility, and a staging base for manned missions to the solar system.Thirty years later, just one of those functions remains: research lab. And Reagan's aspirations notwithstanding, no one today is using materials or medicines invented on the station, let alone manufactured there. Currently, about 40 percent of the station's commercial-research capacity is unused—in part, perhaps, because some companies don't know it's available; in part because others aren't sure how zero-G research would be worthwhile.The space walk is in some ways a microcosm of the whole space-station program: difficult, awe-inspiring, and strangely tautological. Astronauts walk in space to maintain and repair the Space Station, so that future astronauts will have a base to fly to. As the station runs now, with a crew of three on the U.S. side, almost two-thirds of the work done by each astronaut each day is devoted merely to maintaining the station, handling logistics, and staying healthy.The cost to run and sustain the Space Station is about the same as the cost to run a single U.S. Navy aircraft-carrier battle group.NASA has always said that understanding how to live and work in space for long periods was itself a key purpose of the Space Station. But without a road map from the White House and Congress for where human spaceflight is going, that part of the mission can seem circular, especially at $8 million a day.And yet we've always had an odd standard for judging the cost and the value of manned space exploration. As it happens, the cost to run and sustain the Space Station is about the same as the cost to run a single U.S. Navy aircraft-carrier battle group. We have 10 aircraft carriers at sea, with two more under construction. And while an aircraft carrier at sea is a hive of nonstop activity, that activity is arguably just as circular as what goes on in space. It involves maintenance and routine operations and practice for fighting that most likely will never happen.Space makes us impatient. We're impatient for things to go smoothly, as if spaceflight should already work as infallibly as a flight to Dallas (witness the surprise in October when a supply rocket headed to the Space Station exploded 15 seconds after launch). And we're impatient for a return on investment, as if going to space couldn't possibly be worthwhile unless it rapidly becomes a commercial bonanza.We fly in space because of human ambition, because nothing tests our ability and character like stretching ourselves beyond what we can do now. And we fly in space because space is the eighth continent. Thomas Jefferson didn't simply make the Louisiana Purchase; he dispatched Lewis and Clark to tramp the terrain and report back. We fly in space as curious explorers now because one day we may need to fly in space, as miners or settlers. The arguments for a manned space program are familiar. But their familiarity doesn't reduce their force.We may eventually need resources from asteroids or the moon, depending on how we manage the resources we've got here on Earth. We may eventually need to become a multiplanet species—either because we literally outgrow the Earth, or because we damage it. Or we may simply want to become a multiplanet species: one day, some people may prefer the empty black silence of the moon, or the uncrowded red beauty of Mars, just as they preferred Oklahoma to Philadelphia in the 1890s.These are long-horizon ideas—centuries-long. Even so, what's missing from them is a sense of how hard living, working, and traveling in space still is, and how long we may need in order to change that. We're still at the beginning of the space age. More people can fit on a single commercial passenger jet, the Airbus A380, than have been in orbit. The Space Station's most important purpose may turn out to be teaching us how to begin to make life in space more practical and less dangerous.Almost anyone you talk with about the value of the Space Station eventually starts talking about Mars. When they do, it's clear that we don't yet have a very grown-up space program. The folks we send to space still don't have any real autonomy, because no one was imagining having to "practice" autonomy when the station was designed and built. On a trip to Mars, the distances are so great that a single voice or e-mail exchange would involve a 30-minute round-trip. That one change, among the thousand others that going to Mars would require, would alter the whole dynamic of life in space. The astronauts would have to handle things themselves.That could be the real value of the Space Station—to shift NASA's human exploration program from entirely Earth-controlled to more astronaut-directed, more autonomous. This is not a high priority now; it would be inconvenient, inefficient. But the station's value could be magnified greatly were NASA to develop a real ethic, and a real plan, for letting the people on the mission assume more responsibility for shaping and controlling it. If we have any greater ambitions for human exploration in space, that's as important as the technical challenges. Problems of fitness and food supply are solvable. The real question is what autonomy for space travelers would look like—and how Houston can best support it. Autonomy will not only shape the psychology and planning of the mission; it will shape the design of the spacecraft itself.Learning to let astronauts manage their own lives in space is going to be as hard as any engineering challenge NASA has faced—and it's an element of space travel neither Houston nor American astronauts have any experience with.Between the TV shows, the movies, even the goofy videos from the Space Station, we have the wrong impression about life in space. We already take for granted something that is anything but routine. The astronauts experience this every day.In a slow moment one day on the station, Mike Fincke decided it would be fun to call one of his professors from MIT."So the department secretary answers the phone—you know what they're like," Fincke says. "She said, 'Well, he's really busy right now.' Pause. 'But I guess because you're calling from space, I'll put you through.'?"Air Force turns a keen eye on space junkIlima Loomis - Science MagazineSometimes you'd rather not know the bad news. An estimated 500,000 pieces of space junk—old satellites, rocket parts, debris from collisions—swarm in orbit around Earth. Much of it is potentially deadly: NASA officials say anything larger than 1 centimeter in diameter poses a threat to the International Space Station (ISS). But current tracking systems can generally only watch objects 10 cm or larger, and the U.S. government now follows less than 5% of space hazards—just 23,000 objects.That should change with the addition of a powerful new Air Force radar system, scheduled to break ground this month on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. When it comes online in 2019, Space Fence is expected to find and track as many as 150,000 additional humanmade objects, some as small as a golf ball, says Dana Whalley, Space Fence program manager, who is stationed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. In addition to enabling the Air Force to better protect Defense Department satellites from collisions, the new system will improve the military's ability to observe and track foreign satellite activity, especially in the busy Asia-Pacific region.The flood of information passed along to nonmilitary spacecraft operators will bring reassurance—but also some wrenching choices about which hazards to ignore. "It's a bit of a two-edged sword," says William Lark Howorth, trajectory operations officer for the ISS at NASA. "The whole community is really going to have to start coming up with answers about how do you deal with all the new data you're going to be receiving."Being built under a $914.7 million contract with Lockheed Martin, the new radar will replace an older Space Fence radar on the U.S. mainland that was decommissioned in 2013. The two systems are "like comparing apples to automobiles," Whalley says. "Their levels of performance are orders of magnitude apart."Space Fence gets its name from the beam pattern it will create. Rather than focusing its beam on a particular object of interest, Whalley says, it will "create many little beams," fanning out to form a picket fence that will intercept objects in low Earth orbit and up to an altitude of 3000 km. Space Fence will also be able to power up a "pencil beam" that can track objects in higher orbits or a "minifan" for tracking objects flying lower on the horizon, he says. The beams can track debris more accurately than the earlier Space Fence could. They can also detect smaller objects and reveal the altitude of orbital debris.These improvements will deliver an unprecedented flood of data about space hazards. Existing Air Force computer systems will be unable to keep up, a 2013 report from Congress's Government Accountability Office (GAO) predicted. A major upgrade of hardware and software at the Joint Space Operations Center, or JSpOC, is now under way, in part to accommodate Space Fence.Many civilian satellite operators find the coming data deluge from Space Fence as daunting as it is promising. Most collision warnings, they note, turn out to be low risk or false alarms; historically, the ISS has executed avoidance maneuvers only once or twice a year, even though it receives about 12 to 15 warnings a month from JSpOC. Space Fence will increase the number of warnings by as many as 10 times, Howorth says. His office may be forced to significantly increase the time and resources it spends on data analysis, or it may simply ignore some warnings and hope for the best.Whalley downplays those concerns. With the more accurate tracking data from Space Fence, "we are going to significantly reduce the number of false alarms," he says. "I think the satellite owners are going to quickly realize that."The massive project is already several years behind schedule, and ballooning costs have led the military to downsize earlier, more ambitious plans. Although the original Space Fence design called for Kwajalein to be the first of three radar fences strategically placed around the globe, the Air Force is now planning only a tentative second fence, to be built in western Australia. The second location would generate more accurate predictions by allowing the Air Force to track objects for longer periods throughout their orbits. It would also catch a significant number of objects that can't be observed outside the Southern Hemisphere. Even so, the costs are approaching $2.1 billion, according to the 2013 GAO report.One of the biggest impacts of Space Fence might be on space policy, says Brian Weeden, a technical adviser for the Secure World Foundation in Washington, D.C. Weeden notes that Space Fence and other technological advances are drawing new attention to broad questions about how to handle orbital debris and who should decide when, where, and how satellites should maneuver to avoid colliding with one another. Although the role of tracking space traffic has been largely filled by the U.S. military to date, that might change as space becomes increasingly commercial and international."It raises interesting questions about what does it make sense for government to do, and what does it make sense for the private sector to do," Weeden says. "It's no longer just the military that uses space—we all do."SpaceX Supply Ship Arrives at Space Station With GroceriesMarcia Dunn - APA shipment of much-needed groceries and belated Christmas presents finally arrived Monday morning at the International Space Station.The SpaceX company's supply ship, Dragon, pulled up at the orbiting lab two days after its liftoff from Florida. Station commander Butch Wilmore used a robot arm to grab the capsule and its 5,000 pounds of cargo, as the craft soared more than 260 miles above the Mediterranean.The space station's six astronauts were getting a little low on supplies. That's because the previous supply ship, owned by another company, was destroyed in an October launch explosion. NASA scrambled to get equipment lost in the blast aboard Dragon, as did school children who rustled up new science projects.Then Dragon was stalled a month by rocket snags; it should have gotten to the space station well before Christmas.Mission Control joked about missing not only the December shipment date, but Eastern Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7 as well for the three Russian crew member. There are also two Americans and an Italian on board."We're excited to have it on board," said U.S. astronaut Wilmore said. "We'll be digging in soon."He's especially eager to get more mustard. The station's condiment cabinet is empty.NASA is paying SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. for shipments. Orbital's rockets are grounded until next year, however, because of its launch accident. SpaceX, the only supplier capable of returning items to Earth, is picking up as much slack as it can. Russian and Japan also plan deliveries this year.SpaceX is still poring over data from Saturday's attempt to land the rocket on a floating barge, the first test of its kind.After the first stage of the Falcon rocket peeled away as planned following liftoff, it flew back to a giant platform floating off the Florida coast. The guidance fins on the booster ran out of hydraulic fluid, however, right before touchdown, and it landed hard and broke into pieces.The California company's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, was encouraged nonetheless and plans another rocket-landing test next month.SpaceX's Dragon cargo ship arrives at ISSJames Dean – Florida TodaySpaceX's Dragon cargo craft safely reached the International Space Station this morning, completing a two-day journey from Cape Canaveral.Operating the station's 58-foot robotic arm, NASA astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore snared the unmanned spacecraft at 5:54 a.m. EST as it floated 262 miles over the Mediterranean Sea."It's nice to have it onboard, and we'll be digging in soon," Wilmore, commander of the six-person Expedition 42 crew, radioed to flight controllers on the ground.He was assisted by Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.The Dragon is packed with more than 5,000 pounds of food, supplies and science experiments, including a NASA science instrument designed to improve the study of climate change.The spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:47 a.m. Saturday.After the launch, SpaceX tried to land the Falcon 9 booster on an ocean platform, but the rocket stage was unable to slow down enough and crashed into the ship.This morning's capture of the Dragon, however, confirmed a successful first leg of SpaceX's fifth of 12 resupply missions under a $1.6 billion NASA contract.It was the first commercial cargo delivery by a U.S. company since the October failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket shortly after liftoff from Virginia, an event that has increased NASA's reliance on SpaceX throughout this year.About two hours astronauts grappled the Dragon, engineers in Houston planned to send commands to the robotic arm to berth the spacecraft at a station port, after which its hatch could be opened and the cargo unloading begin.Once scheduled to launch in mid-December, the capsule's cargo includes belated Christmas presents.The Dragon is expected to remain bolted to the ISS for about a month before returning to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.SpaceX cargo ship captured by space station crewWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsApproaching from directly below, a SpaceX cargo ship loaded with more than 5,000 pounds of equipment, supplies and belated Christmas gifts, caught up with the International Space Station early Monday, and then stood by while commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, operating the lab's robot arm, snared a grapple fixture to complete a two-day rendezvous.Working from a robotics work station in the multi-window cupola compartment, Wilmore -- assisted by European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti -- guided the arm's latching end effector over the Dragon's grapple fitting and locked it in place at 5:54 a.m. EST (GMT-5), as the two spacecraft sailed 262 miles above the Mediterranean Sea."Congratulations, Butch and Samantha, we'll call that one an OK three-wire," astronaut Randy Bresnik, a Marine test pilot, radioed from Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Everybody says not bad for a Navy guy. The folks in Mt. Juliet ... could not be more proud than they are right now."
"We're pretty thrilled up here, too," replied Wilmore, a native of Mt. Juliet, Tenn. "Hey, thanks for that, and like you mentioned, you cued it, so 'fly Navy.'"Originally scheduled for launch in December, the cargo ship's flight was delayed into the New Year by problems with its Falcon 9 booster and temperature constraints related to the space station's orbit. The mission finally got underway Saturday with a picture-perfect pre-dawn launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, followed by a series of rendezvous rocket firings to catch up with the space station.It was the fifth of 12 planned SpaceX resupply flights under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA, and the first flight of a U.S. resupply ship since an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff Oct. 28, destroying a Cygnus cargo ship."And we apologize for Santa and his Dragon sleigh to be a little bit more on the Eastern Orthodox schedule and calendar," Bresnik joked, referring to Christmas gifts packed aboard the Dragon. "But definitely a huge congratulation, and thanks to our friends at SpaceX for bringing to ISS such a beautiful vehicle.""We concur," Wilmore replied. "It's been a couple of days getting here, and we're excited to have it on board. We'll be digging in soon."Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston then took over arm operations and guided the Dragon capsule to the Earth-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module. Wilmore and Cristoforetti the monitored the common berthing mechanism as motorized bolts drove home to lock the spacecraft in place.If all goes well, hatches will be opened later today or early Tuesday, clearing the way for the astronauts to collect their gifts and begin the process of unloading the tightly-packed spacecraft.Getting the Dragon capsule into orbit was the primary goal of the mission, but SpaceX also attempted to land the Falcon 9 first stage on a barge stationed off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., a key step in company founder Elon Musk's drive to lower costs by recovering, refurbishing and reusing rocket hardware.But the landing attempt was only partially successful. The booster made it through re-entry and followed a precise trajectory to reach the "autonomous spaceport drone ship." But the rocket crashed onto the deck and was destroyed.The landing try took place in darkness, and SpaceX has not released any pictures or video. But reporters awaiting the support ship's return to Jacksonville said the barge appeared to suffer relatively minor damage. Cranes were used to offload a few pieces of what appeared to be wreckage after the ship reached the dock.Musk summed up the landing attempt by tweeting:Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.But the primary goal of the flight was delivery of needed supplies and equipment to the space station, and that part of the mission went off without a hitch.The pressurized section of the cargo ship is loaded with food, clothing and personal items for the station crew, research equipment and spare parts, along with high-priority items intended to replace cargo lost in the Antares launch failure, including a variety of student experiments.Among the science gear is a fruit fly lab for studies of the immune system; an investigation to learn how proteins clump together in fibrous structures (like those believed to play a role in Alzheimer's disease); and an experiment to learn more about how flatworms regenerate damaged cells.Housed in the Dragon's unpressurized trunk section is an atmospheric research instrument that will be extracted by the robot arm later and mounted on a deck attached to the Japanese Kibo module.If all goes well, the Dragon will be reloaded with 3,600 pounds of research samples, no-longer-needed equipment and trash, and detached from the station Feb. 10 for re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego.Space Station Astronauts Capture SpaceX Dragon Resupply CapsuleMark Carreau – Aviation WeekA SpaceX Dragon commercial resupply capsule carried out an early rendezvous with the International Space Station Monday, delivering just over 5,100 pounds of crew supplies and scientific research equipment to the orbiting science laboratory's six astronauts.
ISS commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, positioned at the controls of the station's 57 foot-long Canadian robot arm in the U. S. segment Cupola observation deck, reached out to grapple the space freighter at 5:54 a.m., EST, about 18 minutes ahead of schedule.
"We are pretty thrilled up here," said Wilmore, who was assisted in the grapple of the 14 foot-long gleaming white capsule by European Space Station Samantha Cristoforetti. "We are excited to have it on board. We will be digging in soon."
"Good luck, Butch," NASA's Mission Control told Wilmore as ground controllers determined the capsule was steady and correctly positioned within 35 feet of the ISS. "We are counting on you."
The delivery marked the fifth for Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX under a $1.6 billion, 12-flight Commercial Resupply Services agreement with NASA. The unpiloted Dragon was launched early Saturday atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Fla., and carried out a series of automated rendezvous maneuvers without difficulty.
The mission marks the first cargo delivery by a U.S. commercial launch services provider since the Oct. 28 loss of Orbital Sciences third Cygnus re-supply craft loaded with 4,800 pounds of food, research equipment and other hardware. The Cygnus launch vehicle was lost in a first stage explosion moments after lifting off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops, VA.
After the successful grapple of Dragon by Wilmore and Cristoferretti, operations of the robot arm were turned over to NASA's Mission Control. Ground controllers were to command the robot arm to latch Dragon to the station's Harmony module shortly after 8 a.m., EST.
Hatches to the spacecraft were to be opened early Tuesday, though Wilmore, Cristoforetti and NASA astronaut Terry Virts could access the capsule later Tuesday.
The deliveries include NASA's Cloud Aerosol Transport System, a lidar sensor developed to study clouds and aerosols, including pollutants in the Earth's atmosphere, from the station's 260 mile-high vantage point. The CATS observatory is slated for extraction from Dragon's unpressurized trunk early Friday, using a combination of the station's Canadian and Japanese robot arms. CATS is to be installed outside the station's Japanese Kibo research module using the robotic limbs.
The fifth Dragon is scheduled to remain berthed to the station until Feb. 10, when it will undock with a 2,900 pound return cargo, comprised primarily of research experiments and no longer needed equipment. SpaceX is tasked with recovering the capsule and its science bounty after a splashdown under parachute in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Santa Barbara, Calif.Cruz gets key NASA committee appointmentEric Berger – Houston ChronicleTexas Senator Ted Cruz will chair the Senate subcommittee with oversight over NASA's activities.Cruz, a Republican, will chair the Senate's subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, which oversees the space agency.In past actions and speeches Cruz has expressed a desire the cut the agency's funding for climate change research, but his views on human spaceflight are less clear.Cruz favors cutting government spending, but at the same time Texas is home to Johnson Space Center, with an annual budget of about $4.5 billion and nearly 12,000 civil servants and contractors.The appointment is expected to be confirmed later this month.NASA test SLS rocket engineThe Associated PressNASA has successfully tested the rocket engine that may one day power men to Mars.The test was conducted Friday at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County.Steve Wofford, with the SLS Liquid Engines Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, says the RS-25 was fired for 500 seconds. He says the test provided data on the engine controller unit and inlet pressure conditions.Wofford says it was the first "hot fire" of an RS-25 engine since testing of space shuttle engines ended in 2009. Four of the engines will power the Space Launch System on future missions.Testing will resume in April after a system that provides cool water for the test facility during a hot fire test is upgraded.Eight more tests are planned.Sierra Nevada Vows To Continue Dream Chaser DevelopmentFrank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week & Space TechnologySierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) says it "plans to further the development and testing of the Dream Chaser and is making significant progress in its vehicle design and test program," despite its failure to overturn NASA's selection of its two competitors—Boeing and SpaceX—in bidding for NASA's planned commercial crew vehicles.The Louisville, Colorado-based company says it plans to propose the reusable lifting-body vehicle for the second-round NASA competition to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), and will continue to develop domestic and international partnerships to further the development without federal funding."SNC remains fully committed to being a part of returning [U.S.] world-class human spaceflight and enhanced cargo capabilities to low Earth orbit," the company stated Jan. 5 after Government Accountability Office (GAO) attorneys rejected its bid protest in NASA's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) decision.SNC had argued that NASA overemphasized the development schedule in its selection of Boeing and SpaceX for the flight phase of its public-private commercial crew vehicle development, but GAO allowed the selection to stand."GAO disagreed with Sierra Nevada's arguments about NASA's evaluation, and found no undue emphasis on NASA's consideration of each offeror's proposed schedule, and likelihood to achieve crew transportation system certification not later than 2017," said Ralph O. White, managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO, in announcing the watchdog agency's decision on the bid protest filed by Sierra Nevada. "GAO also noted that, contrary to Sierra Nevada's assertions, the [request for proposals] clearly advised offerors that their proposals would be evaluated against the goal of certification by the end of 2017."Sierra Nevada had proposed the reusable lifting body as one of the two commercial crew vehicles NASA is helping industry develop as a post-space shuttle route to the ISS for its astronauts. The company says its vehicle's cost to NASA was $900 million less than Boeing's figure, and argued that NASA changed its evaluation criteria to give more weight to the schedule for getting to first flight than to the cost the U.S. space agency must pay.In his statement, GAO's White cites prices of $3.01 billion for Boeing, $2.55 billion for Sierra Nevada and $1.75 billion for SpaceX. He also reveals that Sierra Nevada charged that NASA's review of "SpaceX's price and overall financial resources" was "inadequate," along with the agency's evaluation of mission suitability for the winning vehicles and the winning companies' past performance."Based on our review of the issues, we concluded that these arguments were not supported by the evaluation record or by the terms of the solicitation," White says, adding that GAO would wait to release its decision document until the companies have a chance to suggest redactions to protect proprietary information."GAO expects to publish a public version of the decision as soon as possible; however, the release of a public decision may take a few weeks," he adds.The prices White cites apparently do not reflect the per-flight cost the companies bid to deliver four-person crews to the ISS. In announcing the contract award last fall, NASA said Boeing's contract would be worth as much as $4.2 billion, and SpaceX would receive as much as $2.6 billion for flight test and up to six crew-transport missions each. After SNC's protest failed, the space agency said only that it had been notified of the GAO decision and was "pleased" that work on the commercial-crew development effort can continue.Late last year, the agency released funds to Boeing and SpaceX to continue the development work, but citing the protest, it has declined to say exactly how much each received. "The case remains under the protective order and blackout until the GAO releases its decision," the agency says.Dream Chaser is a reusable spaceplane designed to reach orbit on the Atlas V or other conventional expendable launch vehicle and return to a gliding runway landing for reuse. Boeing's CST-100 capsule is also designed to launch on an Atlas V initially, and return to a parachute/airbag landing on dry land, while SpaceX is human-rating its Dragon cargo vehicle—launched on the company's Falcon 9—for a parachute splashdown at sea.Russia has no immediate plans to build new space station of its own — RoscosmosITAR-TASS News AgencyRussia does not plan to build a new space station of its own till 2025, Sergey Savelyev, chief of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily that will be published on Tuesday."A possibility of creating a new Russian space station does exist in principle. Such project may be implemented in international cooperation, with China for example. But neither the current, nor the draft of a future federal space program have such provisions. Such project can be linked with the lifecycle of the International Space Station," he said.As for cooperation with China, the most probable projects in the immediate future, in his words, are joint experiments onboard the Russian segment of the International Space Station."Further plans might include experiments onboard OKA-T orbiting unmanned modules that might be fitted for various inclinations, and equipping our countries' automated interplanetary stations with research tools of the partner country," Savelyev noted.He explained that an OKA-T module was a multipurpose orbiting laboratory to conduct microgravitation and applied technological and biotechnological research. "The lab is to work independently in the orbit occasionally docking to the International Space Station or any other low-orbit station. Servicing research equipment, refueling the lab and other operations will be the competence of cosmonauts," he noted.Ice researchers capture catastrophic Greenland meltGeoffrey Mohan – Los Angeles TimesOver a few summer days in 2012, nearly all of the Greenland ice sheet surface thawed right under the feet of a UCLA-led team of scientists.What was not absorbed into snow quickly gathered and flowed across the 20,000-square-mile sheet, coalescing into roaring turquoise rivers. And then most of it disappeared.Where all that water went may seem an easy guess. But that's just the problem with Greenland ice science -- some of the guesses have been wrong, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.A model that has assumed most meltwater hangs around the surface in large lakes is missing an important and complicated subplot and may overestimate sea level rise as a result. The study found that meltwater quickly moves from the surface to deep below the ice surface, and about of a quarter of it apparently lingers there, according to the study."The entire surface is incredibly well drained," said UCLA geographer Laurence C. Smith, lead author of the study. "It's like water running off a shed. And that's at odds with most of the previous work that's been done on this subject."The finding not only could change the focus of scientists studying the surface of the ice sheet, it could also alter their calculations for how ice flows to the North Atlantic Ocean, where it contributes to a worldwide rise in sea level.Research teams fanned out in the treacherous 5,328-square-kilometer watershed of the Isortoq River using a drone boat and floating GPS beacons, among other devices, as well as satellite imagery.They chronicled the flow of 523 stream and river networks totaling about 3,600 miles, all of which feed the Isortoq River, which flows into the sea.All of the surface channels ended in deep, unexplored holes in the ice, called moulins, where water cascaded into the depths of the ice sheet, the study found. So much water flowed that it was the equivalent of filling every lake, pond, stream and river in the drainage area every day or two, the study found. It was like getting an inch of rain a day, over many weeks, Smith said.Some rivers abruptly disappeared while researchers were on the ice. Researchers tossed a GPS device into one roaring river, then checked to see if its data were transmitting, said Smith. The technician said he thought the transmitter had broken -- it indicated the beacon was stationary."We got back in the helicopter and went around the bend," Smith said. "A crack had opened and the river got swallowed up in the half-hour since we had set down. A moulin had opened up in 30 minutes and our big, long river got swallowed up, right around the corner."Since researchers can't follow the water in the miles-thick ice sheet, they measured the flow from its edge, at the Isortoq River. The volume did not match that of the meltwater. Less water was reaching the sea during the peak of the melt, the study suggests."Once it goes down the moulins, not all of it is coming out," Smith said. "There's a little bit less water coming out than the climate models predict."Where water goes once it disappears in these internal cataracts has been an abiding mystery."People have gone as far as throwing rubber ducks down the holes to see where the rubber ducks come out," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager for NASA, which funded the research. "And no one has ever found a rubber duck."Some water may linger in recently discovered aquifers inside the ice, one of which is estimated to be the size of West Virginia.Regardless, a significant fraction is not coming out right away, the study found. During the peak of the rare melt event, the atmosphere-based model overpredicted the flow to the sea by a few fractions of a cubic kilometer a day. Nonetheless, by late summer, the model and actual outflow were about in sync, Smith said.So, the model gets big melt events wrong, even if it is close to capturing the flow in the longer run."That water isn't just going to stay; it's going to start coming out eventually," Smith said. "It might have come out 18 months later. I can't envision the ice sheet absorbing that water for centuries."There are other immediate implications to the finding. If that much meltwater, which is warmer than the ice, rapidly reaches the ice sheet interior, it can change the way the ice deforms and flows. And ice flow toward the much warmer sea is a major factor in future sea level rise."These are the kinds of things that we need to take into account as we go forward and we try to estimate the contribution of the Greenland ice sheet to sea level rise," Wagner said. "Right now we have a pretty simplistic model for how it melts."Waleed Abdalati, a University of Colorado geographer and former NASA scientist who was not involved in the study, said the catastrophic flood event offered a laboratory for understanding the type of abrupt thaws that may be typical in the future.Smith will return to examine the Isortoq River in February. "Maybe the missing water is actually draining out during the winter time," he said. "If you look at the climate models, they all say there's zero runoff leaving the ice sheet in the winter. They just shut down."Smith and Wagner noted that the bottom line on Greenland is that melting has been accelerating over a period of a decade or more, and that the melt line is moving higher and higher in elevation. All that fresh water ultimately will flow to the ocean, they said. The details on how it gets there are still being worked out, though.The study also involved researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Wyoming, NASA-JPL, City College of New York, the University of Utah and the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and the Earth Vision Trust, in Boulder, Colo.The paper was dedicated to coauthor Alberto E. Behar of NASA-JPL and Arizona State University, who designed and helped deploy the drone used to capture water flows. He died Friday in an aviation accident near the Van Nuys Airport.Iceland lava field may now be the biggest in 200 yearsNick Kirkpatrick – The Washington PostBigger than the island of Manhattan, the lava flow from the Holuhraun lava field in Iceland is now the largest the country has seen in more than 200 years, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.Since August of last year, massive amounts of lava have been spewing from a fissure that erupted in Iceland's largely uninhabited Bárðarbunga volcanic system. In the past six months, the lava flow spread a total of 32 square miles, making it now the largest lava flow since the 1783–84 Laki eruption that wiped out 20 percent of Iceland's population.According to the University of Iceland's Institute of Earth Sciences, the eastern part of the lava field was about 30 feet thick, and the center and western parts were about 40 feet thick.Adam Voiland of NASA wrote: "While Holuhraun continues to spew copious amounts of lava and sulfur dioxide, some observations suggest the eruption may be slowing down. … This doesn't mean that the eruption will stop soon. Like the weakening spray from an aerosol can, the eruption rate declines exponentially. The lower the flow, the more slowly it declines."NASA water mapper set for move to the launch padJustin Ray – Spaceflight NowMaking a scientific measurement of planet Earth on a global scale never before attempted by NASA is the objective of an environment satellite to be mounted atop its booster rocket Tuesday in California.Liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket is slated for Jan. 29 at 6:20 a.m. local time (9:20 a.m. EST; 1420 GMT).The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) spacecraft will detect the moisture content in land surfaces and determine whether it's frozen or thawed during a three-year mission."The relevance is (soil moisture) is a pretty sensitive indicator of future water availability and can be used in climate models to help improve forecasts," said Kent Kellogg, the project manager for SMAP."One of the really nice things about this mission is we have a lot of relevance for climate science, but the data is also very useful for everyday practical applications. It will improve weather forecasting significantly, drought and flood forecasting, food productivity and diseases."The mission was born out of first-ever Earth Science Decadal Survey in 2007, which tagged a soil moisture mission like SMAP as a high-ranking objective.Capable of peering beneath clouds, vegetation and other surface features, the SMAP mission will produce global maps every 2-3 days.Early Tuesday morning, crews with United Launch Alliance will carefully transport the 2,081-pound satellite from the commercial Astrotech processing facility to the pad at Space Launch Complex 2 of Vandenberg Air Force Base.Once at the ocean-front pad, workers will lift the canister containing the observatory into the gantry for payload mating to the rocket's second stage.A combined systems check of the rocket and spacecraft is coming up this week. The payload fairing will be installed next week.A two-stage Delta 2 rocket, with three strap-on solid motors, will haul the observatory into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit.ENDMore at www.spacetoday.net
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