March 4 News Items

California City Council Votes to Allow ATK Expansion (Source: Goleta Daily Sound)
In a rare moment of harmony for the sometimes acrimonious Goleta City Council, the panel voted last night to allow an aerospace and defense company to dramatically expand its office building in the city’s Old Town redevelopment area. About 160 people work at Alliant Techsystems, (ATK) campus in Goleta. The Minnesota-based company has about 17,000 employees in 21 states and projects revenues of about $4.6 billion in 2009. The Mars Phoenix Lander got its start out of the Goleta building, and in a partnership with NASA, the company currently is developing solar array technology prototypes, which essentially connect solar cells, out of the Goleta building. Expanding the building, company officials said last night, is crucial for them to complete their contract obligations. (3/4)

KSC Might Lose Thousands of Jobs to Alabama (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
Aerospace-industry leaders plan to tell Florida legislators today that unless some miracle takes place to breathe new life into the space business at Cape Canaveral, the state's most skilled workers will almost certainly be leaving in droves to take jobs in Alabama. Thousands of top engineers are needed by 2011 at the Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon in charge of developing an integrated U.S. missile-defense system for the country. The agency is moving its operations from its current home in northern Virginia to Huntsville, Ala.

Already NASA's shuttle contractor, United Space Alliance, is negotiating with the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce to find work for many space-shuttle engineers when the shuttle program ends 18 months from now. The brain drain will be a huge blow to Florida and especially Brevard County, which is already braced for the hardship that the end of the shuttle program will bring to the area. At least 3,500 workers at Kennedy Space Center are in line to lose their jobs by the end of next year.

But NASA and state policymakers have been counting on the highly skilled workers staying on the Space Coast to attract new aerospace business to the area and to help NASA build its next rocket program to go the moon in 2020. A mass exodus of engineers would severely complicate those plans. "This is not our first choice by any means," said Lisa Rice, president of the Brevard Workforce Development Board. (3/4)

Long March 5 Will Have World's Second Largest Carrying Capacity (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
A Chinese space expert said here on Tuesday that China's Long March 5 large-thrust carrier rocket, currently under development and scheduled to be put into service in 2014, uses less fuel for the same load than any other rocket in the world except Boeing's Delta 4 Heavy. The jumbo rocket's "carrying capacity factor" - a key parameter reflecting rocket's performance - was "the world's second largest", said Liang Xiaohong, vice president of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

The Long March 5's "carrying capacity factor" is 0.0146 while Boeing's Delta 4 Heavy is 0.0175, the world's largest, he said. When carrying the same load, a rocket with a higher factor needs less fuel, said Liang, also a member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top political advisory body, which opened its annual session on Tuesday. (3/4)

Russian General Says US May Have Planned Satellite Collision (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
A collision between a U.S. Iridium satellite and a Russian Cosmos-2251 satellite in early February may have been a test of new U.S. technology to intercept and destroy satellites rather than an accident, a Russian military expert has said. Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Leonid Shershnev, a former head of Russia's military space intelligence, said the U.S. satellite involved in the collision was used by the U.S. military as part of the "dual-purpose" Orbital Express research project, which began in 2007.

Orbital Express was a space mission managed by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a team led by engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). According to the DARPA, the program was "to validate the technical feasibility of robotic, autonomous on-orbit refueling and reconfiguration of satellites to support a broad range of future U.S. national security and commercial space programs."

China To Land Probe On Moon At Latest In 2013 (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
Beijing (XNA) Mar 03, 2009 - China plans to land Chang'e-3 on the moon at latest in 2013, Ye Peijian, chief designer of Chang'e-1, the country's first moon probe, said here Monday. The mission of Chang'e-3 is to make soft landing and probe the moon, said Ye, a member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top political advisory body. (3/4)

Cisco, NASA Team Up to Monitor Climate Change (Source: Mercury News)
Cisco and NASA launched a partnership to develop new online tools to measure and analyze climate change, aiming for a global platform that would help leaders make decisions on emissions controls. The first pilot project of the "Planetary Skin" initiative — mostly coordinated by NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View — will focus on rain forests and deforestation. Some climate experts estimate that the loss of forests, which absorb carbon dioxide, has contributed about 30 percent of the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. (3/4)

NASA Missing Out on Funds Without Leader (Source: Florida Today)
The lack of an official NASA administrator may be hampering the agency from getting its fair share of federal dollars during current budget negotiations, lawmakers said. President Obama and his economic advisers are making budget projections that will stretch years down the road, and "NASA needs to be at the table when these decisions are being made," said Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican on the Appropriations Committee.

Lennard A. Fisk, a former NASA associate administrator, argued that several congressional bills have treated science within NASA as less important than similar programs in other agencies. As an example, he cited the recently implemented stimulus bill that only singled out Earth science for substantial funding. (3/4)

GAO: NASA Recycling Effort Flawed (Source: Florida Today)
Inconsistent descriptions and wrong information are hampering a $29 million equipment recycling program being used by NASA as it prepares to retire the space shuttle program, according to a federal audit. NASA started the program to help it decide what to do with more than 1.2 million types of equipment resulting from the shuttles' retirement next year. (3/4)

Beijing Frets Over Pyongyang's Launch (Source: Asia Times)
As the world watches and the leaders of North Korea look to the sky and relish their satellite dreams, the United States, South Korea and Japan are watching their radar screens and scrambling their ballistic missile defense (BMD) forces. This planned launch by North Korea is a "sovereign right universally recognized which does not allow mere puppets to take issue with it", a spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in response to remarks issued by South Korea. "If the puppet warmongers infringe upon our inviolable dignity even a bit...we will not only punish the provokers but reduce their stronghold to debris." (3/4)

Launch Failure Costs Orbital $5.6 Million (Source: Washington Business Journal)
Last month’s satellite launch failure will cost Orbital Sciences Corp. more than $5 million. Orbital won’t get a $5.3 million mission success bonus it had expected to receive from NASA, and it will incur unanticipated costs to investigate the cause of the failure. Orbital’s fourth-quarter 2008 revenue was revised to $305.2 million from $310.8 million. Fourth-quarter 2008 net income was revised to $9.7 million, or $0.16 per diluted share, from $13.2 million, or $0.22 per diluted share. (3/4)