Italy Assumes Licensing Responsibility
for Commercial UHF Payload (Source: Space News)
The government of Italy has agreed to assume control of a UHF-band
military payload on board the Intelsat IS-27 satellite scheduled for
launch in early 2013 following Intelsat’s failure to enlist U.S.
Defense Department interest. In a move that further illustrates the
continued scattershot nature of Europe’s procurement of military
satellite communications capabilities, Italy will be the licensing
administration for IS-27, now scheduled to be launched in February into
an Intelsat orbital slot at 55.5 degrees west longitude. (10/19)
NASA Seeks Student Experiments For
2013 High-Altitude Scientific Balloon Flight (Source: NASA)
NASA is accepting applications from graduate and undergraduate
university students to fly experiments to the edge of space on a
scientific balloon next year. The balloon competition is a joint
project between NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium (LaSPACE) in
Baton Rouge. NASA is targeting fall 2013 for the next flight
opportunity for the High Altitude Student Platform (HASP). HASP is a
balloon-borne instrument stack that provides an annual near-space
flight opportunity for 12 instruments built by students. (10/19)
Mack Supports Posey Plan for NASA
Changes (Source: Florida Today)
U.S. Senate candidate Connie Mack (R-FL), currently serving in the U.S.
House, said he supports legislation proposed by a group of Republican
colleagues, including Space Coast U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, that would turn
the NASA Administrator into a 10-year position and create a board of
directors to oversee the appointment and agency budgets. He said more
funding for NASA could be discussed but only in the context of current
trillion-dollar deficits.
“We talked today about how even the space program can be more efficient
in what it’s doing,” said Mack. “Even if the funding is less, but they
know that they have a 10-year plan or a 20-year plan, it helps them in
their planning and how to move their business and their ideas forward.
That’s what we’re talking about doing.” Mack was the only member of the
Florida congressional delegation to vote against the bipartisan 2010
NASA Authorization Act shaped by Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican
Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. (10/19)
Departing ORS Director Leaving a Legacy
(Source: USAF)
Like the phrase "it's a marathon, not a sprint," the five-year-old
Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office has focused on the
viability, applicability and achievability of rapid and responsive
space in support of the warfighter today, tomorrow and in the future.
Under the leadership of its second director, Dr. Peter Wegner, the
Department of Defense organization has accomplished giant strides in
expeditiously designing, developing and deploying a satellite for
operational use.
Wegner has left ORS to become the director of advanced concepts for
Space Dynamics Laboratory in Utah. "I am really excited about where the
ORS Office is headed. There are two launches, ORS-3 and ORS-4, slated
in summer 2013 that will lead to additional milestones in achieving
rapid and responsive (within weeks to days) spaceflight. ORS is in a
great position right now and I have no doubt that the office's future
is very bright and assured," Wegner said. Editor's Note:
As part of a spending reduction plan, the ORS office is among those
proposed for closure in the White House budget request for FY-2013.
(10/19)
Did the Solar System Start with an
Extra Planet? (Source: Nature)
The Solar System may have formed with an extra planet that ultimately
got the boot. The sacrificed planet, the size of Uranus or Neptune,
could have served to stabilize the rest of the Solar System, including
Earth and the other terrestrial planets.
That scenario was presented by two theorists who performed nearly
10,000 simulations of the evolution of the early solar system. They
began their simulations with the assumption that the Solar System was
initially much more compact than it is now. That view of the youthful
Solar System, known as the Nice model, can account for much of the
present-day architecture of the outer Solar System.
But it’s not a perfect model. When the researchers started out with
only four giant planets—the Solar System’s present-day allotment—things
went terribly wrong. One of the four bodies would often get ejected,
the terrestrial planets would sometimes collide with each other, or
Jupiter’s orbit would not have the correct shape. Click here.
(10/19)
Proposed Colorado Spaceport Could Be
Suborbital Spaceflight Hub (Source: Space.com)
The proposed Spaceport Colorado is moving closer to reality, with its
supporters seeing it as an ideal hub to support high-speed suborbital
flights with intercontinental range. Front Range Airport, striving to
be the home of Spaceport Colorado, signed a letter of intent last month
with Rocket Crafters Inc. for horizontal launch, dual-propulsion,
suborbital flight operations at the general aviation airport.
Rocket Crafters Inc. of Titusville, Florida, is focused on development,
manufacturing and distribution of rocket propulsion and dual-propulsion
(jet/rocket) suborbital flight vehicle products to the commercial
markets in the space, space exploration and defense industries. The
company plans to help promote and develop Spaceport Colorado as the
preferred commercial spaceport in America’s heartland.
In a joint statement issued Sept. 25, U.S. senators Michael Bennet and
Mark Udall of Colorado applauded a recent FAA grant for Spaceport
Colorado. “Having a spaceport in Denver will make Colorado a leader in
space travel and solidify our reputation as a pioneer in the 21st
century innovation economy,” Bennet said. “It will bring jobs to our
state and fuel economic development and scientific research. This
effort has been an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach and I’m proud to
partner with leaders throughout the state to work on making this dream
a reality.” (10/19)
Prospecting for Quasicrystals in
Siberia (Source: Science News)
The rock came in a box labeled “khatyrkite.” It didn’t look like much,
just a chunk less than a centimeter long with a whitish rind and
studded with several dark metals. But when Paul Steinhardt got a good
look inside, he saw something he’d been waiting years to see. The
quasicrystals nestled within displayed a bizarre symmetry that had
never been seen outside the lab, an interlocking structure with no
repeats. Steinhardt had been captivated by these almost-crystals since
the early 1980s, when they were still a hypothetical form of matter.
But now, there they were. Where had they come from? And how could
Steinhardt get more of them? Those questions launched a three-year
quest culminating in an expedition to one of the most remote parts of
Siberia — and a scientific discovery that has yet to be fully revealed.
More than a hundred quasicrystals have been synthesized in labs.
Researchers suspected that the quasicrystals could be useful in
electronics. But making them required idiosyncratic conditions such as
an argon atmosphere, a vacuum and precisely controlled temperatures. No
one knew whether the crystals could grow outside the lab, how strong
they would be or how long they would remain intact. It seemed unlikely
that quasicrystals could exist in nature. Click here.
(10/19)
NASA Deep-Space Program Gaining Focus
(Source: Aviation Week)
In an election year, with a “fiscal cliff” looming that could whack
NASA's budget by $1.7 billion, U.S. space officials are not eager to
declare a new destination in space for human crews just yet. But once
the post-election dust clears, and Congress decides how to handle the
funding-sequestration box it created in lieu of making difficult
deficit-reduction choices publicly, work underway here and in other
space communities around the nation is likely to give some focus to
NASA's next steps into the Solar System.
Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center are using a medium-fidelity
mockup cobbled together from scrap space hardware to run human-factors
tests and equipment fit checks on one of the missing pieces in NASA's
human-exploration planning—somewhere for deep-space crews to live. They
are working with experts at JSC, under the leadership of astronaut
Alvin Drew. “We're looking at volume studies—-are the crew quarters
going to be the right size, the waste and hygiene compartment, the
wardroom, the exercise area-—we're looking at all those for this
extended stay,” says Paul Bookout, who manages the Marshall portion of
the Habitat Systems Project.
Using engineering articles from the International Space Station, museum
mockups and a 5-ft. aluminum-lithium cylinder left over from Marshall's
shell-buckling knockdown factor recalculations, Bookout and his
colleagues have built a notional ISS-derived deep-space habitat in the
building where the Apollo Moon buggy was developed. Inside the
full-size mockup experts can move walls and structural elements around
to figure out the best internal configuration for a habitat that would
support a crew of four from an Orion multipurpose crew vehicle for as
long as 500 days. Click here.
(10/22)
A New Future for NASA in Technology
R&D? (Source: Houston Chronicle)
Over the past four years, the Obama administration has put together a
plan to better link NASA and private industry and, with NASA’s support,
several very ambitious companies have successfully launched privately
financed spaceships, albeit not yet manned. But alongside the shuttle
going into retirement and the cancellation of the Constellation
program, Obama and Congress have put plans for federally-funded, manned
space travel on hold due to overall budgetary restrictions.
A new policy report from the Baker Institute describes how
focused research and development (R&D) of new technologies — such
as nanotechnology — could be the future of NASA. Nanotechnology has
great potential for advancing many traditional NASA technologies beyond
their current state. Most notably, nano-engineered materials are known
for their strength, lightness and thermal robustness, making them ideal
candidates for inclusion in future aircraft and space vehicles. Click here.
(10/19)
Coming Soon: Traffic Reports on Space
(Source: Ottawa Citizen)
Canada is getting a traffic-cam in space to watch for flying objects
that can turn a multi-million-dollar satellite into scrap. The
$65-million satellite called Sapphire will be launched “in a couple of
months” on an Indian rocket. And its builder calls it a bargain. “If we
talked to our allies about the price tag for this thing, they would
probably add another zero,” said David Caddey, executive vice-president
of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA).
On Thursday, Defence Minister Peter MacKay unveiled Sapphire at the
David Florida Lab, where the Canadian Space Agency tests satellites
before launch. He said the danger is that traffic is becoming congested
in space. In addition to rocks that drift through space, each year adds
more satellites and more “space junk,” such as burnt-out rocket motors
that haven’t fallen down. The military depends enormously on satellites
“and we must safeguard them,” MacKay said. They carry signals from
battlefields in Afghanistan, they provide images of shipping near our
huge coasts, and they allow communications over Canada’s “massive,
massive land and water space.” (10/18)
Logos in Space (Source:
Wellington Times)
Sunday presented another opportunity to witness history in the making,
with the Red Bull Stratos mission, streamed live on YouTube. Over 8
million people watched as Felix Baumgartner ascended 38 kilometres in a
balloon capsule, unbuckled himself, and then leapt from the edge of
space, becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in
free-fall. Where scientific exploration was once a top government
funding priority and source of national pride, we now accept, and
perhaps expect, the commercialization of space travel. From Red Bull to
Virgin Galactic, logos in space are the next frontier.
Barely an eye has batted over the fact that an energy drink company
funded a five-year scientific mission collecting data on pressurized
space suits that could help future space travellers and pilots survive
a bailout. Just as no one bats an eye when Coca-Cola—perhaps the
world’s top pusher of highfructose corn syrup—sponsors our foremost
international competition of athletic excellence, the Olympics.
It’s generally agreed that the private sector is where the money’s at.
So rather than lamenting the diminishing role of pure scientific
inquiry in the public sphere, the pundits are gushing over Red Bull’s
marketing coup. You can’t report on Baumgartner’s mission without
saying “Red Bull.” That wouldn’t fly in 1969. Imagine the moon landing
brought to you by Lucky Strike. Instead of a U.S. flag, they could have
planted a glossy headshot of Buzz Aldrin with a pack of smokes: “An
American original.” (Or perhaps their other slogan, if things had gone
badly: “It’s toasted!”) (10/19)
Falcon-9 Anomaly Investigation Begins
(Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
A post-flight investigation board is carrying out a comprehensive
examination and analysis of all Falcon-9 launch data, with the goal of
understanding what happened and how to correct it prior to future
flights. The board has dispositioned systems and components that data
show were not part of the anomaly, typical for the early steps in a
failure analysis. The next step will be to review the build records of
the remaining components that could be suspect.
Meanwhile, parallel efforts are reviewing past test data of engines and
stages at the McGregor Rocket Development Facility in Texas to look for
similar data signatures to that observed during Falcon 9′s ascent. The
extensive test history of Merlin engines, even where there was a
problem during testing, lends an empirical base to the investigation.
It is not clear if any specific details into the root cause of the
failure will ever be revealed to the public, due to the proprietary
nature of SpaceX’s hardware.
Editor's Note:
With this investigation, SpaceX benefits from a thorough
government-sponsored review of its systems and subsystems, allowing
lessons learned to be incorporated into vehicle and engine
design/processing upgrades. All this without having had to suffer a
mission failure. Good deal for SpaceX! (10/19)
Nelson Efforts Helped Shape NASA
Policy, For Better or Worse (Source: Florida Today)
Sen. Bill Nelson chairs the Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA
policy, and with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas was the primary
author of the 2010 authorization act that set NASA’s current direction,
opposed by Mack. The legislation canceled the Constellation
back-to-the-moon program that a White House panel had concluded was on
an “unsustainable trajectory.”
Instead it supported development of commercial vehicles to fly
astronauts to the International Space Station by 2017; extension of the
station’s life to 2020; development of a heavy-lift rocket and a crew
capsule for deep space exploration missions by 2025; and modernization
of Kennedy Space Center infrastructure. The shuttle program was retired
last year after the addition of two missions.
“Sen. Nelson always has been a firm believer in the U.S. being the
leader in space exploration and his and Sen. Hutchison’s plan keeps the
U.S. the leader in science and technology for defense and national
security reasons,” Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin said. “On the other
hand, Mack was the only member of the 27-member Florida delegation to
vote against the plan.” Editor's Note:
If reelected, with inevitable changes in the Senate's leadership, Sen.
Nelson will gain seniority and could become more influential on space
policy and funding issues. Rep. Mack, on the other hand, would have no
seniority in what likely will be the minority party in the Senate.
(10/19)
Is Space Tourism the Right Stuff?
(Source: Las Cruces Bulletin)
The scaling back of government support for the traditional space
program could be reversed if the new private space entrepreneurs are
successful, said a keynote speaker on the first day of the two-day
International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight
(ISPCS). Robert Dickman, executive director of the American Institute
of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said the space program has been going
through a lot change since NASA made the decision to retire the space
shuttle fleet eight years ago.
Since then, the purpose of NASA has also been revised to focus more on
space exploration beyond Earth’s orbit, and servicing the orbiting
International Space Station has been turned over to the private sector
with the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket and capsule delivery
system. How companies such Dynetics that supported the traditional
space program will adapt or survive remains to be seen, Dickman said,
but there is still potential for great space exploration. However, they
will require new developments in space propulsion systems and more
public interest.
The good part of retiring the shuttle fleet, Dickman said, is that this
should spur development of future systems, but there is currently a
lack of public interest and support. Unlike the space race with Russia
during the Cold War, there isn’t public concern about current space
exploration by other countries, he said. “The public doesn’t care about
a space race with China or going back to the moon,” Dickman said.
(10/19)
Mack: NASA Needs Stability, Focus on
Building U.s. Human Launches (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
U.S. Senate candidate Connie Mack was non-committal about increasing or
even sustaining funding for NASA during a discussion with Space Coast
officials. He said that what the agency really needs is mission
stability. Mack demonstrated a lapse in knowledge when he twice
complained about NASA relying on Russia and China to ferry astronauts
into space. "The idea that Russia and China are responsible for manned
space launches for us is not right," he said.
Currently, NASA contracts with Russia to ferry U.S. astronauts to and
from the International Space Station, but there are no deals with
China. In three to five years, NASA intends to turn to American private
rocket companies. Mack said his point is that NASA should be launching
U.S. astronauts: "We just have to make it a priority." (10/19)
NSS Announces Partnership with New Mexico Museum of Space History (Source: NSS)
The National Space Society (NSS) and the New Mexico Museum of Space History (NMMSH) announced a new partnership on Wednesday for the establishment of a permanent home for historic records chronicling the development of the space activist community and the U.S. space industry.
This alliance is the result of four years of discussions and negotiations about the disposition of the Society's archives (which go back as far as the mid-1970's when Wernher von Braun founded the National Space Institute, a predecessor of the NSS) and will officially enable the Museum to begin accepting materials from the Society. (10/17)
Wealthy Adventurers Could Turn Space
Travel Into A $1.6 Billion Industry (Source: Business Insider)
A new report predicts that under the right conditions, space tourism
could become a boom industry, generating $1.6 billion in revenue over
the next decade. The report, 'Suborbital Reusable Vehicles: A 10-Year
Forecast of Market Demand,' was funded by the FAA Office of Commercial
Space Transportation and Space Florida, and produced by The Tauri Group.
It breaks the suborbital reusable vehicle (SRV) industry into eight
markets, among which commercial human spaceflight (aka space tourism)
is dominant, accounting for 80 percent of predicted trips. That market
is driven by extremely wealthy "space enthusiasts," 925 of whom already
have made reservations to fly into space. In the growth scenario
outlined in the report, that number could climb to 11,000 over the next
ten years. Click here.
(10/19)
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