February 16 News Items

Correction on Space Florida Meeting Dates (Source: ERAU)
The FLORIDA SPACErePORT newsletter for Feb. 16 included two incorrect meeting times for upcoming Space Florida board meetings. The Feb. 18 meeting will be held from 1:00 - 5:00 p.m. The Feb. 19 meeting will be held from 1:30 - 5:00 p.m. Both meetings will be held in Tallahassee. Contact Juanell Kirkendoll at jkirkendoll@spaceflorida.gov or 321-730-5301 ext 241 for information. (2/16)

No Trial, But Many Changes for Nowak (Source: Florida Today)
Two years after Lisa Nowak's infamous drive halfway across America to confront a romantic rival, the former NASA astronaut still awaits her day in court. Nowak is charged with attempted kidnapping, battery and attempted burglary with assault. Authorities say Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando International Airport in February 2007 to confront Colleen Shipman about their mutual love interest, then-astronaut Bill Oefelein. Shipman was returning from a trip to visit Oefelein. While Nowak's trial has not been scheduled, much has changed for Nowak, Oefelein and Shipman in the past two years. Click here to view the article. (2/16)

Satellite TV Push Key to Eutelsat's Profits (Source: Space News)
Satellite fleet operator Eutelsat said demand for satellite capacity in recent months has been strong throughout its coverage region but especially in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine and part of Africa. The Paris-based company said the near-term growth picture is even better than it had expected, enabling it to raise its revenue target for the fiscal year ending June 30, to 910 million euros ($1.18 billion) from the previous 900 millions euros.

Eutelsat said its profit margin and free cash flow all increased in the second half of 2008 as television demand continues to show strength, even in mature markets such as Western Europe. The number of TV channels on Eutelsat's fleet over Western Europe has increased by 16 percent in the past two years, while the channels beaming over Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Russia and parts of Africa have increased by 55 percent in the same period. (2/16)

Simulated Moon Landings at Ames Help Altair Lander Take Shape (Source: AIA)
At NASA's Ames Research Center, former astronauts are using a flight simulator to practice moon landings, all part of developing the lunar lander that will return Americans to the moon in 2020. The Vertical Motion Simulator, billed as the world's most advanced motion-based flight simulator, is helping NASA engineers determine everything from engine thrust to instrument placement for the new Altair lander. NASA says the simulations are important because it is 10,000 times more expensive to fix a problem once a vehicle goes into production. (2/16)

India Boosts Space Budget by 27 Percent (Source: The Hindu)
ISRO today got a 27 per cent hike in budgetary allocation, a major chunk of which is will be spent on missions to moon, development of the semi-cryogenic engine and building a rocket for launching heavier satellites. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was allocated Rs 4,459 crore, an increase of Rs 960 crore over the previous year's sanction of Rs 3,499 crore, in the interim budget presented by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee here. Development of a semi-cryogenic engine for future advanced satellite launch vehicles has been allocated Rs 75 crore as against Rs 4.09 crore last year. The Cabinet had approved the project for development of the semi-cryogenic engine recently. (2/16)

Space Buoys Boulder County Economy (Source: Boulder Daily Camera)
Over the last 60 years, the University of Colorado has cemented its reputation as a leader in space science, progressing from launching sounding rockets in the late 1940s to organizing NASA’s next mission to Mars. In fact, when the Mars mission launches in 2013, CU will have designed and built a space instrument to study every planet in our solar system. Boulder County is well-known for its environmentalists, artists, climate scientists, athletes and peace activists. But since the middle of the 20th century, it's the rocket scientists who have really taken off.

The county has become a major hub for the aerospace industry, which employs thousands of people and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. And while there appears to be no real escape from the current economic meltdown, the wealth of well-paying aerospace jobs will help the area weather the recession better than most, according to the latest economic forecast from the University of Colorado.

"The aerospace industry in general has a higher economic multiplier than a lot of other industries," said Frances Draper, executive director of the Boulder Economic Council. "An aerospace company will hire contract engineers, hire machine shops to tool specific parts, hire analysts to help it come up with the correct trajectories. Aerospace companies create more jobs and overall spending than a lot of other industries." The aerospace industry has an economic multiplier of almost two, which means that every 10 jobs at Ball Aerospace creates nearly 10 other jobs in the community. (2/16)

The Sky Isn't Falling in Texas — Yet (Source: Time)
If anyone has a reason to be skittish about space debris, it's the people of Texas. It's in Houston, after all, that much of what we launch into orbit is monitored. And it's in rural Texas that much of the flaming wreckage of the shuttle Columbia landed in 2003. Sunday morning, it looked like Texas was in the path of danger again, when police received numerous reports of a sonic boom, a visible fireball and debris descending in various spots around the state. That debris, people figured, had to be space junk reentering from last week's satellitee collision.

FAA spokesman Roland Herwig confirms that a warning did go out to pilots to be alert to the possibility of satellite wreckage. But the critical bits of evidence — actual debris recovered on the ground — has not turned up. For now, there's little reason to worry. NASA said the events bore the hallmarks of a natural incident; debris from a satellite collision is generally too small to be seen. The satellites involved in last week's cosmic crack-up were relatively small machines. The Russian ship weighed 1,235 lbs.; the American ship was about a ton. Once that mass is broken up into smaller pieces, the atmosphere ought to do a pretty good job of incinerating it. (2/16)

Space Vacuums? (Source: New York Times)
It’s hard to know whether to be more concerned about the debris spewed into orbit by the collision of two satellites last week or by the fact that no one was able to predict the collision. Neither bodes well for the long-term safety of space operations. Those who thought that our nation’s space tracking systems could see such things coming will be surprised to learn that there are gaps in coverage and capabilities. The military does indeed track some 19,000 objects in space, including active and nonfunctioning satellites, hordes of debris fragments, and thousands of unknown objects that might threaten the safety of American satellites. But it lacks the resources to predict collisions for everything up there. Instead, it focuses primarily on potential collisions that might endanger U.S. government assets.

A private company fills part of the gap by assessing collision threats to other satellites. It publishes a top 10 list of likely close encounters, but the recent incident did not make the list that day; other items looked even more likely to collide. The United Nations has adopted voluntary guidelines to minimize the creation of new space debris. It recommends such steps as designing spacecraft so that no debris is released during normal operations, removing leftover propellants at the end of a mission and moving nonoperational satellites out of congested orbits. A U.N. meeting in Vienna this month will assess how well that effort is going. The looming problem yet to be addressed is how to get rid of the debris and objects already up there and proliferating with every collision. (2/16)

CERN and Mars (Source: Space Review)
Many of the ideas that space advocates dream of usually have one main barrier in common: prohibitive costs. Space ideas from orbital hotels and spaceplanes to colonies on the Moon and Mars require significant investment—-in the billion-dollar range—-to become reality. I would like to pose a question to the space community made up of scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts across the world: “Can we fund even one of our larger scale ideas here in the economic crisis of 2009?”

I believe we can and that there is evidence for this in the vast particle physics project known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle physics organization. You will find striking similarities in CERN’s justification for “why” it deserves funding with the arguments many space advocates use. One statement in that explanation really stood out to me: “Science needs the space for curiosity and imagination”. Was it really on that basis alone that CERN managed to gain and sustain a multibillion-dollar program over decades? Or was it something else? Click here to view the article. (2/16)

A Bilateral Approach From Maritime Law to Prevent Incidents in Space (Source: Space Review)
Several recent events have raised concerns about space weapons and the potential to cause serious harm in orbit through the proliferation of debris. Michael Listner offers a proposal for an agreement based on maritime law that could ease those concerns without getting caught up in contentious issues like space weapons. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/index.html to view the article. (2/16)

Galileo and the Chinese: One Thing After Another (Source: Space Review)
Just when Europe had resolved its issues with the US regarding the Galileo satellite navigation system, a new obstacle has emerged: China, and its plans for its own system. Taylor Dinerman examines the prospects for Galileo given China’s plans and other developments. Visit http://www.thespacereview.com/index.html to view the article. (2/16)