October 22 News Items

Safety Concerns Aside, Discovery to Launch as Planned (Source: Palm Beach Post)
NASA engineers are evenly split over whether Discovery should fly its next mission without having repairs made to three of its 44 heat panels. "There was a great deal of evidence presented, and the preponderance of evidence in my mind says that we have an acceptable risk to go fly," shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said Tuesday. "And let me make sure you understand that. I didn't say it's safe to go fly and I wouldn't say that. We have an acceptable risk to go fly."

Entrepreneurs Envision a Sea Change in Commercial Space (Source: Space.com)
Entrepreneurial companies are determined to reshape the commercial space industry in the years ahead with ventures designed to reduce the cost of access to space. The wide scope of projects includes the development of vehicles for suborbital tourism, eventually leading to orbital vehicles that could provide transportation to and from lower cost habitats and laboratories in space and even take advantage of one of the planned orbiting fuel depots.

But bullish predictions such as these must be tempered by the realities of a gauntlet of policy, technology, finance and regulatory issues facing all of the entrepreneurs trying to provide public access across the space frontier. Jason Andrews, president of Andrews Space, in Seattle, predicted that vehicles capable of horizontal takeoff and airplane-like operations not only will reduce launch costs, but also stimulate new business in low Earth orbit and ultimately out to the Moon. Visit http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/071022-busmon-entrepreneurs.html to view the article.

Florida Teacher-Astronauts Assigned to 2008 Mission (Source: Houston Chronicle)
Two more of NASA's classroom teachers turned astronauts have been assigned to their first spaceflights. Ricky Arnold and Joe Acaba, who left teaching posts three years ago to join NASA's astronaut corps, are among seven astronauts assigned to the same assembly mission to the Space Station. Scheduled for the fall of 2008, the mission will deliver the last of four solar power modules to the orbital outpost. Acaba joined the space agency after five years of teaching high school and middle school math and science in Florida.

A Guggenheim Fund for Spaceflight (Source: Space Review)
Early aviation benefited from a private foundation that endowed research programs that improved the state of the art of key technologies. Pat Bahn makes the case for creating a similar fund to support the emerging commercial suborbital spaceflight industry. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/article/986/1 to view the article.

China, The US, and Space Solar Power (Source: Space Review)
A new study has concluded that space solar power is feasible, but leaves unanswered who should proceed and how. Taylor Dinerman argues that China, with its voracious appetite for energy, can play a role as both a customer and co-developer. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/article/985/1 to view the article.

Space War and Futurehype (Source: Space Review)
Projecting the future of space utilization, including the weaponization of space, is fraught with peril. Nader Elhefnawy looks back at one particularly alarmist prediction and what it means for current concerns about military activities in space. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/article/984/1 to view the article.

China Considers Commercial Shenzhou Flights (Source: Flight International)
In the second quarter of 2008 a legal bill may be introduced into China's legislative upper chamber, the National People's Congress, to enable public private partnerships (PPP) for the use of the nation's spaceports and its manned spacecraft Shenzhou. The legislation will at the very least update the country's law covering its space transport assets. This information adds detail to a pro-commercial spaceflight statement made earlier this year by the head of the China National Space Administration, Sun Laiyan. The PPP commercial options could include, private management of existing spaceports, China's rockets launching other country's low-Earth orbit microgravity experiments, its spaceports used by third parties' rockets for orbiting similar experiments, or even manned flights and LEO science missions using Shenzhou.

20,000 Fragments of Space Debris Circling the Earth (Source: InterFax)
"Space litter" may hamper future exploration projects, deputy representative of the Federal Space Agency to the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) Vladimir Priklonsky said. "There are 20,000 registered pieces of space debris in orbit alongside fragments invisible from the Earth," Priklonsky said. The space debris, including dead satellites, rocket stages and their fragments, is moving at various orbits, at heights from several hundreds of kilometers to 36,000 kilometers. Most of the space debris has been traced on low circumterrestrial orbits at a height lower than 2,000 kilometers.

Alabama Space Club Chapter Honors Filmmakers (Source: Huntsville Times)
The man who created the megasuccessful "Star Wars" franchise was honored in Huntsville by the National Space Club. Legendary movie director George Lucas received the National Space Club media award. The club also presented awards in space flight, astronautics, community service, aerospace education and scholarship. Previous media winners have included the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon"; Discovery Channel founder John S. Hendricks, who grew up in Huntsville; producer/director Ron Howard and CNN's Lou Dobbs.

NASA Withholds Survey on Air Safety (Source: AP)
Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized. NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers. A NASA official said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits. NASA also cited pilot confidentiality as a reason, although no airlines were identified in the survey, nor were the identities of pilots, all of whom were promised anonymity. Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" - potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans. Officials at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have said they want to publish their own report on the project by year's end. Discussing NASA's decision not to release the survey data, Congressman Brad Miller said: "There is a faint odor about it all."