August 11 News Items

Microgravity Enterprises and California Space Authority Sign MOU (Source:
Microgravity Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) and the California Space Authority (CSA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to help provide access to space for educational payloads for California students grades K-12. “Free flights for education are the foundation of our ACCESS for Education Program,” said MEI's Jeff Ganley. “Our goal is to get youth interested in space again and excited about what can be done there. We know that CSA has similar goals in wanting to help children.”

MEI will donate payload space on every commercial launch for the purpose of conducting research and executing experiments that are aimed at advancing the commercialization of space. Payload space will be dedicated to a full spectrum of activities ranging from K-12 inspirational experiments to next-generation commercial space demonstration payloads. MEI is a small, privately held company founded on one principle: to commercialize space and make it a part of everyday life. MEI is headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently uses Spaceport America to fly the company’s products and educational payloads to space and back.

Alliant Techsystems Lands $1.8 Billion Ares Contract (Source: Huntsville Times)
NASA has signed a $1.8 billion contract with Alliant Techsystems to design, develop, test and evaluate the first stage of the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles. The contract continues work that began last year and includes delivery of five ground static test motors, two ground vibration test articles and four flight test stages, including one for the Ares I-X test flight. Ares I is an in-line, two-stage rocket designed to transport the Orion crew exploration vehicle to low Earth orbit. Ares V will enable NASA to launch a variety of science and exploration payloads, as well as key components, needed to travel to the moon and later to Mars.

Space Hotel Slated to Open in 2012 (Source: Space.com)
The first space hotel is being planned to open as soon as 2012. The hotel, "Galactic Suites," will allow adventurous travelers to enjoy a spectacular starry view from their hotel rooms, see the Sun rise 15 times a day and take part in scientific experiments while they're not using Velcro suits to crawl around their pod-room walls. The trip won't be cheap though--a three-day stay will cost around $4 million.

"It's the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest challenge," company director Xavier Claramunt told Reuters. "How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy." The hotel was no more than a dream of Claramunt's until a generous space enthusiast fronted the $3 billion needed to build the hotel. An American company aimed at colonizing Mars has invested in the hotel, which will be built from pods connected in a molecule-like structure, Reuters reported. Visit http://www.galacticsuite.com/ for information.

Why Progressives Should Care About Human Destiny in Space (Source: AlterNet)
As we approach our 50th anniversary as a spacefaring civilization, what is the space program for? And why should progressives, with a full menu of more immediate causes on our activist plates, care about this one? All of us now alive, on behalf of all those not yet alive, have only just barely embarked on an endless expedition. That is the journey, for the Human Race, toward immortality.

What does immortality have to do with progressive values? Conservatives, most fundamentally, are about the idea that individuals ought to devote their blood, tears, toil and sweat to pursuing their own individual interests ... and leave it to other individuals to do the same. But if political progressives are about anything, we are about the idea that our lives are about something larger than ourselves. The idea that, as Michael Moore says in Sicko, we are not a "me society" but a "we society." The idea that we have obligations and responsibilities not just to ourselves and our immediate families, but also to the community of the whole.

And that means ultimately not only the human community of the present moment, but also the community of our remotest ancestors and our distant descendants as well. Space is ultimately about our duties to generations beyond our own. A second core progressive value beckons to us from space as well. Progressives believe that our national citizenship must be accompanied by a global citizenship, that our allegiance to our nation stands alongside an allegiance to humanity, that our national patriotism must in the end be transcended by a planetary patriotism. And space has already shown that it can serve as perhaps the single greatest engine of human unity.

Document Your ITAR Horror Stories (Source: ERAU)
The Space Foundation is launching a study to assess the space-related impact of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) on companies and government projects. Visit http://www.itarsurvey.org/ for information, and visit http://www.itarsurvey.org/worksheet.pdf to download their survey worksheet.

NASA Finds Gouge on Endeavour's Belly (Source: AP)
NASA discovered a worrisome gouge on Endeavour's belly soon after the shuttle docked with the international space station Friday, possibly caused by ice that broke off the fuel tank a minute after liftoff. The gouge - about 3 inches square - was spotted in zoom-in photography taken by the space station crew shortly before Endeavour delivered teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan and her six crewmates to the orbiting outpost. The astronauts will inspect the area, using Endeavour's 100-foot robot arm and extension beam. Lasers on the end of the beam will gauge the exact size and depth of the gouge, Shannon said, and then engineering analyses will determine whether the damage is severe enough to warrant repairs.