February 27 News Items

Astronaut Alumna to Speak at Florida Tech on Feb. 29 (Source: FIT)
The public is invited to a lecture by NASA Astronaut and Florida Tech Alumna Sunita Williams from 2-3 p.m. Friday, Feb. 29, in the Gleason Auditorium. Williams ’95, M.S. engineering management, will talk about her experiences and answer questions from the audience. Williams holds the record for the longest duration space flight by a woman — 195 days. She also holds the record for most hours outside a spacecraft by a female by completing four spacewalks with a total time of 29 hours, 17 minutes. For more information go to http://today.fit.edu/archives/winter07/index.html.

NASA Awards Constellation Program Support Contract (Source: NASA)
NASA has awarded SGT Inc. of Greenbelt, Md., a contract for support services for Constellation Program, which is developing new spacecraft to travel beyond low Earth orbit. The Constellation fleet includes the Orion crew vehicle, the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles and Altair human lunar lander. The small business contract has a potential value of $60 million with options. Work on the contract will be performed at Johnson Space Center with additional work possible at Kennedy Space Center, Langley Research Center, and Marshall Space Flight Center. Services will include business management, configuration and data management, requirements analysis and integration, schedule management and integration and technology protection.

Loral and Northrop Grumman Agree to Pursue Satellite Opportunities (Source: Loral)
Northrop Grumman and Loral are pursuing a group of initiatives that could to broaden each company's opportunities to provide the U.S. government with cost competitive satellite systems. The resulting agreement also will enable Loral to expand its manufacturing capacity as needed, in order to address near-term increased satellite demand, through use of the satellite test facilities and services at Northrop Grumman facilities in California.

Orbital Awarded Contract for System F6 Satellite Program (Source: Orbital)
Orbital Sciences Corp. has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a Phase 1 concept for System F6 (Future Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft united by Information eXchange). The objective of the F6 program is to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of a satellite architecture in which traditional “monolithic” spacecraft are replaced by clusters of wirelessly-interconnected spacecraft modules.

New Orion CEV Requirements Force Contract Renegotiation (Source: Flight International)
NASA and Lockheed Martin are restructuring the Orion design, development, test and evaluation contract, awarded in 2006, following new CEV requirements that emerged from project reviews in November and December. Lockheed expects the restructured seven-year deal to increase costs in the short term but require no overall change to the total contract award of $3.9 billion. Requirements for the Orion that have already been dropped are two-failure tolerant specifications for some of its subsystems while others, such as the ability of the capsule to cope with Atlantic or Pacific sea-states for up to 36h before the crew can be recovered, are in negotiation.

NASA Adds Power and Height to Ares V Rocket (Source: Flight International)
NASA's Ares V cargo launch vehicle (CLV), named after its five first-stage cryogenic engines, could end up with six engines, be taller than the Saturn V and diminish the space agency's common element approach to its new transportation system. For missions to the Moon, Ares V will launch the Earth departure stage (EDS) and Altair lunar lander that will dock with the manned Orion crew exploration vehicle. The ongoing changes to the CLV are to provide more performance margin to help with possible future mass growth in the Altair and Orion. Click here to view the article.

California Atlas Launch Delayed to Avoid Spy Satellite Debris (Source: Florida Today)
The planned launch of an Atlas 5 rocket with a classified payload is being pushed back about two weeks to avoid the scattered remnants of a spy satellite that was destroyed last week in a deliberate Navy missile shot. The powerful United Launch Alliance rocket and its National Reconnaissance Office payload had been slated to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Friday.

Thousands of Objects Called 'Space Junk' Orbiting the Earth (Source: Alabama Times Daily)
As if Earth didn't have enough litter to worry about on its surface, now it's got a mess of stuff hanging over its head. It's called "space junk," a term referring to satellites and other man-made debris that orbit the planet. There are more than 12,000 objects orbiting Earth, according to NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office, based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. About 95 percent of the objects are classified as orbital debris, meaning they are not operating satellites.

Former President Clinton Stumps for Hillary in Houston (Source: Houston Chronicle)
In the heart of the mostly Hispanic near north side of Houston today, President Clinton delivered an unbleached populist message on behalf of his wife. Clinton pointed out that Hillary Clinton places more of an emphasis than Obama on human space travel. "This is the center of American space travel," he said of Houston and the Johnson Space Center. "Sixteen thousand (local) jobs -- and a lot of America's future -- rely on this."

Ares I-X Test Launch To Study Vibrations (Source: Aerospace Daily)
NASA engineers are adding instrumentation to the first full-scale flight version of the Ares I crew launch vehicle to gather real data about vibrations from its solid-fuel first stage that initially were predicted to be seriously out-of-spec. Those predictions, which could mean expensive modifications to the Ares I and the Orion crew exploration vehicle that will ride atop it, are based largely on ground-test data. Managers hope flight-test results from the Ares I-X flight will give them a much better idea of just how bad the problem is, and what it will take to solve it.

Clinton, Obama Surrogates Debate Science Policy (Sources: CQ Politics, NASA Watch)
It wasn't in primetime. In fact, it wasn't broadcast at all. The audience wasn't hand-picked to equally represent the candidates. But a weekend debate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science between science advisors to the Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns was strikingly similar to forums between the candidates.

Clinton, Obama Address Houston Hot Topics (Source: Houston Chronicle)
On space exploration, the energy industry and the Latino vote, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton dispelled any impression Friday that they are policy twins inside different outer shells. Clinton was more enthusiastic than Obama about human space travel and domestic oil production when the Democratic presidential candidates conducted separate telephone conferences with the Houston Chronicle editorial board. "I intend to pursue an ambitious agenda in both space exploration and earth sciences," Clinton said. "I want to support the next generation of spacecraft for a robust human spaceflight program."

Obama agreed that NASA, which employs thousands of Houston-area voters who work at or with the Johnson Space Center, should be a tool for inspiring the nation. But, he said, the next president needs to have "a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs — and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment."

Indian Official Proposes Joint Investment in Space With Israel (Source: The Hindu)
India and Israel should consider jointly investing up to $1 billion in selected areas in space technology based on their mutual core competence, former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam said. Pointing towards the large number of satellites in the geosynchronous orbit leading to a "clutter", Kalam, a renowned rocket scientist, emphasized on the need of immediate steps to enhance cooperation between the space-faring nations. As a first step towards achieving these goals, Kalam suggested that the Indian and Israel aerospace agencies should consider establishing a world knowledge platform to enable joint design, development, cost effective production and marketing of the aerospace systems and products.

Loral Selected by SES to Build Largest, Most Powerful Satellite in SES Fleet (Source: Loral)
Loral and SES, the world's leading provider of high-power commercial satellites, announced that Loral has been awarded a contract to manufacture a new spacecraft for SES. Designed as the largest most powerful satellite in the SES fleet, NSS-14 expands and enhances the company's ability to provide Fixed Satellite Services (FSS) to the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. NSS-14 is the second satellite contract that SES has awarded to Loral and it will be positioned to support trans-Atlantic traffic. The spacecraft is a state-of-the-art, hybrid C- and Ku-band satellite that includes Loral's heritage ion propulsion system and a 15 year design life.

Editorial: KSC Launch Complex Plan May Not Prove Feasible (Source: Florida Today)
While we're on the subject of the environment, NASA just got an earful about a proposal to build a private launch complex at KSC. The plan has merit although it's a serious long shot. That's because the state of Florida or industry would have to spend more than $500 million to construct the twin pads and still more to operate them to fly astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station aboard private rockets after the shuttle fleet retires. If the financial hurdles aren't great enough, the impact on the environment and local businesses are no less major.

NASA Views Possible Lunar Landing Site (Source: UPI)
NASA has obtained the highest-resolution terrain mapping to date of a possible landing site at the moon's south polar region. The new images, containing a resolution to about 66 feet per pixel, were obtained using the Goldstone Solar System Radar located in California's Mojave Desert. NASA said the imagery has been incorporated into animation depicting the descent to the lunar surface of a future human lunar lander and a flyover of Shackleton Crater. The data indicates Shackleton Crater is much more rugged than previously understood, NASA said, noting the crater's rim area is considered a candidate landing site for a future human mission to the moon. The imagery shows the lunar south pole has peaks as high as Mount McKinley and crater floors four times deeper than the Grand Canyon.