September 24 News Items

NASA Quest Announces the Student HiRISE Image Targeting Challenge (Source: NASA)
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera now orbiting Mars is helping NASA search for signs of water on Mars. Students are invited to help choose regions of Mars for HiRISE to image. The HiRISE team will pick several suggestions and image them with the camera in the coming months. The participants will represent the first people on Earth to see the resulting image and will have the chance to search for signs of water in the image. Background information, teacher guides, student activity books and tutorials are available online to help students choose a region. Visit http://quest.nasa.gov/challenges/hirise/ for information.

Dawn Launch Slips a Day (Source: SpaceToday.net)
NASA announced Monday that the launch of a mission to the main asteroid belt will be delayed a day after weather hampered launch preparations. The Dawn mission, which had been scheduled for launch Wednesday on a Delta 2 from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, will now launch between 7:20 and 7:49 am EDT Thursday. Once launched, Dawn will fly to the main asteroid belt and visit the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta. The launch had been scheduled for earlier this summer, but was postponed by a number of problems, and the launch team stood down in July so that NASA could focus on the time-critical August launch of the Phoenix mission to Mars.

Second Galileo Satellite Delayed to 2008 (Source: The Register)
Media reports suggest the Giove-B satellite, second in a series of testbed and validation platforms preceding the main Galileo birds, will not now be launched until next year. Giove B, which has already suffered delays, was to be orbited aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in December. Now, however, a spokesman from launch company Arianespace said it will now be held in March 2008. Problems with the launch rocket rather than the satellite were blamed for the delay.

NASA Means Business Student Competition 2008 (Source: SGC)
The NASA Means Business Student Competition program invites undergraduate and graduate students to employ their skills to help NASA articulate the contributions of space exploration to everyday life. This year¹s challenge is: Help NASA to increase the number of corporate researchers, university researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors who utilize the Nation's investment in spaceflight to grow their investments in knowledge and commerce. Specifically, participating teams will compete by designing and preparing a NASA Spaceflight Promotion Plan and illustrative flagship promotion projects including a fully implemented Internet Solution with a 20-second promotional video and other concept design/media elements. Visit http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/nmb/ for information.
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West Oakland, California, Space Academies Close (Source: Alameda Timmes-Star)
In September 2006, two space-themed charter academies opened in West Oakland with a lofty vision and support from NASA and the University of California, Berkeley. Less than a year later, the Space Exploration Academies are gone, and the families that bought into the dream now must find new schools, weeks into the semester. The junior high and high schools, which had a combined enrollment of about 75 children, closed last week after losing an appeal to the state board of education. The Oakland school district revoked the schools' charters in February, citing low enrollment and substandard instruction, but the academies appealed the decision.

"We were railroaded, and that's the bottom line," said co-founder Camron Gorguinpour, a doctoral physics and astronomy student at UC Berkeley. George Gagnon, director of pre-engineering partnerships at UC Berkeley and a board member of SSOAR, a nonprofit organization that runs the schools, said he believed the appeals process was deeply flawed. As an Oakland public school parent as well as an educator, Gagnon said, he also found it troubling the school district would try to close the academies just months after they opened.

Please, Mr. Bezos (Source: Space Review)
So far, all we really know about Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin reusable launch vehicle (RLV) project, is that they flew a test vehicle to an altitude of less than 100 meters in Nov. 2006 from their private Texas spaceport. That test item, called “Goddard”, is a precursor to a suborbital vehicle called the New Shepard that may fly sometime around 2010. Beyond this, we know from their web site that they want to hire people “with turbopump or propulsion experience on large, modern, cryogenic engines such as the RS-68.” That leaves us with lots of room to speculate about what they are up to.

A suborbital vehicle that will be able to take tourists up to the edge of space and compete with Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipTwo will be a welcome addition to the suborbital market: may the best rocket win. But why all the secrecy if that is all there is to it? Why build a craft that can almost reach orbit unless, eventually, one wants to go all the way? So are we going to see a New Shepard 2? Will it be single stage to orbit (SSTO) or will it need two stages? Will it use plug aerospike engines or something more conventional?

The team that Bezos has built has no obligation to provide the public with any information on its plans other than what it has to give to the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation in order to get a license to operate. Thanks to Jeff Bezos’ money they do not have to seduce investors or satisfy politicians or bureaucrats. They can just get on with the job with no distractions or pressure. In many ways it’s an ideal situation. Yet for the space industry, and in the long term for Blue Origin itself, it might be wise for them to be a bit more forthcoming about their long-term plans. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/article/959/1 to view the article.

The Case for Withdrawing From the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (Source: Space Review)
This year is the 40th anniversary of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration of Outer Space Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, more commonly known as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Born out of anxiety about the Cold War and excitement about the Space Age, the agreement is a tribute to the ability of diplomats to draft international law that is simultaneously effective but bad. Successful in preventing states from claiming sovereign territory in outer space the treaty also hobbled space exploration and development. Today, human activity in outer space is confined to low Earth orbit and unmanned space exploration of the solar system proceeds at a leisurely pace. The Space Age has sputtered to a crawl and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty deserves a large measure of the blame.

The core legal principle of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared that everywhere beyond the atmosphere to be res communis, an international commons rather akin to the “international waters” of the open oceans on Earth, rather than terra nullius, the sort of territory that is unclaimed yet claimable by states as sovereign territory. In what was then stirring, and today preposterous, language of the agreement, all of outer space was declared the “Common Home of Mankind” to be explored and exploited by all countries and for the benefit of all humanity. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/article/960/1 to view the article.