March 1 News Items

Stephen Hawking Plans ZERO-G Flight From Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: New York Times)
Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, Cambridge professor and best-selling author who has spent his career pondering the nature of gravity from a wheelchair, says he intends to get away from it all for a little while. On April 26, Dr. Hawking, surrounded by a medical entourage, is to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral on a so-called vomit comet, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce periods of weightlessness. He is getting his lift gratis, from ZERO-G Corp. Peter H. Diamandis, chief executive of ZERO-G, said that "the idea of giving the world's expert on gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity" was irresistible.

Budget Cuts to Delay Orion, NASA Warns (Source: SpaceToday.net)
A cut of half a billion dollars in NASA's exploration program approved by Congress last month will push the first manned flight of the agency's new Orion spacecraft into early 2015, NASA administrator Mike Griffin warned Congress Wednesday. Griffin said that the cut would force the agency to slip development of the Orion spacecraft by four to six months, meaning that the first flight would not take place until early 2015. Senators expressed concern about the effects of an extended gap between the retirement of the shuttle in 2010 and the introduction of Orion, and said they would look into ways to give NASA authority to transfer money from other agency programs or other solutions to make up for the shortfall.

Northrop Restructuring Will Bring Job Cuts (Source: Florida Today)
Northrop Grumman will cut jobs as part of the reorganization of its Integrated Systems unit. The company will cut up to 100 jobs in Melbourne, Fla. More jobs may be shed at the company's facility in Bethpage, N.Y.

Airbus Job Cuts Spark Protests Among Workers (Source: AIA)
Nearly 14,000 French workers on Wednesday protested Airbus' plan to shed jobs and sell up to six factories. When Airbus said it would shut two plants in Germany and seek a partner for another, workers at the affected plants retaliated by walking out in protest. Airbus hopes its restructuring plan will cut billions in costs and help it compete against Boeing.

ESA Science Director Says Europe Can Think Big (Source: International Herald Tribune)
As a young space scientist in the early 1980s, David Southwood backed an offbeat idea for a joint US-European mission to Saturn's moon Titan: Let the Europeans build the spacecraft's lander. "In 1982 it was a joke," said Southwood, now science director for the European Space Agency. "My astronomer colleagues, who had better ways to spend the money, said, 'What do you want to do that for? Everyone knows only Americans can land on things.'" Yet the lander did come to fruition in 2005, when the Huygens probe — carried on NASA's Cassini spacecraft — parachuted to Titan's surface and sent back pictures of a strange, cold world with an orange-brown atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane.

Southwood is now laying the foundations for missions that today's young European space scientists will bring to completion, building on ESA's growing expertise in flying interplanetary spacecraft. "The Americans are still No. 1," he said before the Rosetta flyby, noting the U.S. spends far more on science missions. "One thing we have to get over in Europe, and this is the thing that we haven't done, is that we could be doing anything anyone else could do. We could put people on the moon, certainly, send probes anywhere in the solar system."