Enjoy this great taste of Autumn while it last. Hope to see some of you Saturday at the E & D reunion!
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- PBS MAKERS Highlights Women in Space Program
- It's Here! Celebrate Hispanic Heritage at Festival
- STOP | THINK | CONNECT
- National Cybersecurity Awareness Month - Organizations/Social
- Graveyard Dash 2K - Part of Fright Fest 2014
- Space Serenity Al-Anon Meeting Today
- Tomorrow: Evolution of Precision Medicine Oncology
- Join Us for a DAG Meeting - Oct. 23
- Specialty Testing of Light Sources and Displays - Jobs and Training
- CGE Travel System Live Lab - Oct. 15
- IRDLive Presents: NAMS Upgrade Coming - November
- Human Systems Academy Lecture
- Healthier You Webinar: Healthy Food Choices
- Engineer to Entrepreneur
- Job Opportunities - Community
- SCH is Houston's First Smithsonian Affiliate
- View the Partial Solar Eclipse |  |
| Headlines - PBS MAKERS Highlights Women in Space Program
Several NASA astronauts and space-industry engineers will be included in PBS' upcoming MAKERS episode, "Makers: Women in Space." JSC Director Ellen Ochoa and astronauts Peggy Whitson, Anna Fisher, Cady Coleman, and several former astronauts (including Eileen Collins and Shannon Lucid), are highlighted in the piece, which traces history of women pioneers in the U.S. space program. JSC Historian Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is featured as a commentator, and the program used materials from the JSC History Office and Oral History Project. Producers selected images (still and moving) from JSC repositories. The hour ends with the next generation of women engineers, mathematicians and astronauts—the new group of pioneers, who continue to make small but significant steps forward. "Makers: Women in Space" airs TONIGHT, Oct. 14, at 8 p.m. CDT on KUHT Channel 8. For more information, click here. NASA will be highlighting its Women@NASA program via social media in the days leading up to the episode. Follow live updates on the @WomenNASA Twitter account and join in the conversation using #MAKERSfilms. JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
[top] - It's Here! Celebrate Hispanic Heritage at Festival
Today, JSC will be hosting ¡Festival!, a Celebration of Hispanic Heritage, to showcase the richness of Hispanic culture. We'll have Mariachis, food and drink samples, artwork and cultural displays and a dance demonstration featuring several JSC team members. We are also proud to welcome Anna Park, CEO of Great Minds in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), who will give an inspirational talk in the Teague Auditorium. Volunteers will be hosting tables for a variety of countries, including Argentina, Columbia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama and Peru (just to name a few). Come see the art! Come enjoy the music! Come sample the food! Come sample the aguas frescas! Come be inspired! ¡Festival! will include a formal portion in the Teague Auditorium starting at 11 a.m. The cultural festival in the Teague lobby starts at noon. See you then! - STOP | THINK | CONNECT
October marks the 11th Annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Cybersecurity is critical to ensuring the integrity of NASA data and, ultimately, the overall NASA mission. NASA's Chief Information Officer Larry Sweet tells us how cybersecurity begins and ends with YOU. Watch his message now. - National Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Cybersecurity Tip for Today: STOP, THINK, CONNECT Protect your laptop, smartphone or other portable devices when traveling. Use full-disk encryption on laptops unless a waiver has been submitted. Just as your wallet contains lots of important and personal information that you wouldn't want to lose, so too do your portable devices. Don't let them out of your sight! Never store your laptop as checked luggage. If there is a room safe available at your hotel, use it to securely store your devices. In addition, make sure you have strong passwords on these devices in case they are lost or stolen. Organizations/Social - Graveyard Dash 2K - Part of Fright Fest 2014
Starport's terrifying Halloween race is back: The Graveyard Dash 2K! Navigate the Gilruth trails and forests, but watch out for hordes of monsters, ghouls and zombies. The top three finishers will receive awards in this fun run/walk. Warning: This event is meant to scare. Not recommended for young children. - Graveyard Dash 2K - REGISTER NOW
- Graveyard Trails
Make sure you come check out all of the great activities going on at the Gilruth Center that evening. Other activities include: - Bare Bowls Kitchen
- The Waffle Bus
- Angie's Cake
- Kids Bash - REGISTER NOW
- Haunted House (kid-friendly)
- Family Halloween movie
- Thriller dance class - ages 6 and up
Don't miss this frightfully fun event for the whole family! - Space Serenity Al-Anon Meeting Today
"Easy does it" reminds Al-Anon members to shuffle and sashay through the fall leaves (or whatever falls our way) with care and grace. Our 12-step meeting is for co-workers, families and friends of those who work or live with the family disease of alcoholism. We meet today, Oct. 14, in Building 32, Room 146, from 12 noon to 12:45 p.m. Visitors are welcome. - Tomorrow: Evolution of Precision Medicine Oncology
Attend tomorrow's JSC's SAIC/Safety and Mission Assurance speaker forum featuring Dr. David C. Heimbrook, laboratory director of Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and president, Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc. Topic: The Evolution of Precision Medicine in Oncology Date/Time: Tomorrow, Oct. 15, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. CDT Location: Gilruth Alamo Ballroom Heimbrook will discuss: - What is precision medicine, and why is it important in oncology?
- How are precision medicines developed?
- What are the limitations of highly targeted drugs in oncology?
- Will precision medicine be applied to other diseases and behaviors?
- Are their ethical considerations to gathering the data needed to implement precision medicine?
Join us for this fascinating session. - Join Us for a DAG Meeting - Oct. 23
Our next Differently-abled Advisory Group (DAG) meeting will be held on Thursday, Oct. 23, in Building 1, Room 106G, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Whether you are an expert in a specific area or merely interested in learning more about disabilities, please join us. The JSC DAG was established to facilitate the creation of a working environment that is accessible to and inclusive of all abilities, which in turn makes our campus a safer and better place to work for the entire JSC workforce. Accommodations are available upon request. If you require special accommodation for a specific disability, please notify David Powell at x42905 no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 20. - Specialty Testing of Light Sources and Displays
The Lighting Environment Test Facility at JSC maintains a high-resolution imaging colorimeter. This device provides a new measurement technology to capture detailed light measurements for displays and solid-state light sources. The facility owns spectroradiometers and maintains a large dark room for controlled testing of lights and cameras. If your project is responsible for specification, design or verification of new lighting and displays, we may have the services you need to ensure product quality. Please feel free to contact us. Jobs and Training - CGE Travel System Live Lab - Oct. 15
Do you need some hands-on, personal help with the Concur Government Edition (CGE) Travel System? Join the Business Systems and Process Improvement Office for a CGE Travel System Live Lab tomorrow, Oct. 15, any time between 9 a.m. and noon in Building 12, Room 142. Our help desk representatives will be available to help you work through your travel processes and learn more about using the CGE Travel System during this informal workshop. Please feel free to bring any travel documents to be worked. This is real-time help, not a training class. Please click on the direct SATERN link below to register and receive SATERN credit. For additional information, please contact Judy Seier at x32771. - IRDLive Presents: NAMS Upgrade Coming - November
The Information Resources Directorate (IRD) invites you to participate in an IRDLive session to introduce you to the NAMS 7.0 upgrade. We will focus on the NAMS 7.0 new look, capabilities and user navigation. You can attend the presentation, demonstration and Q&A from your desk via Lync and telecom. NAMS 7.0 is scheduled to go live Nov. 12. Bring your questions about NAMS 7.0 to one of the following IRDLive sessions. Save the link for the session you would like to attend. You must dial in to the telecom and join the Lync Meeting. • Telecom for all sessions: (866)459-2110, passcode 1561614 - Human Systems Academy Lecture
Join the Human Systems Academy lecture today on "Flight Analogs/Bed Rest Research." This project provides NASA with a ground-based research platform to complement space research. By mimicking the conditions of weightlessness in the human body here on Earth, NASA can test and refine scientific theories and procedures on the ground before using these in space. Future space exploration will challenge NASA to answer many critical questions about how humans can live and work for extended missions away from Earth. The Flight Analogs Bed Rest Research Project is one way NASA will answer these questions and devise ways to ensure astronaut safety and productivity on extended missions. - Healthier You Webinar: Healthy Food Choices
The choices we make every day go a long way toward promoting our well-being in a sustainable manner. Healthy behaviors improve our energy levels and daily functions, such as handling challenges and our ability to focus. A healthy breakfast, lunch and snacks boost our brain function and our ability to tackle complex problems. The investment we make in healthy foods versus traditionally unhealthy, "quick" foods enhances our health identity and ultimately improves our self-esteem. Join us on Oct. 22 and learn how to introduce healthful foods into your diet on a regular basis. We will reveal how to develop a healthy kitchen pantry and prepare healthy foods for a busy schedule. If good health means improved energy and productivity, or just plain fun, these webinars are for you! All civil servants, contractors and family members are invited to attend. - Engineer to Entrepreneur
The Houston Technology Center is pleased to host a 10-week lunch-and-learn course series entitled "Engineer to Entrepreneur." If you've ever thought about launching your own business, this is the program for you. You will learn how to establish a corporate entity, develop a business strategy, pitch your strategy and market your products. Join us for a fun-filled program instructed by some of Houston's most accomplished business executives. Classes will be held for 10 consecutive Thursdays from Aug. 21 to Oct. 30 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Building 45, Room 451. For enrollment information, contact Evelyn Boatman at 281-244-8271. - Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities? To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop-down menu and select "JSC HR." The "Jobs" link will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. Lateral reassignment and rotation opportunities are posted in the Workforce Transition Tool. To access, click: HR Portal > Employees > Workforce Transition > Workforce Transition Tool. These opportunities do not possess known promotion potential; therefore, employees can only see positions at or below their current grade level. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies or reassignment opportunities, please call your HR representative. Community - SCH is Houston's First Smithsonian Affiliate
It's another first for Houston and Space Center Houston (SCH), Johnson Space Center's official visitor center, as the nonprofit museum becomes the first Smithsonian Affiliate in the city. The new status grants access to the national archive of more than 138 million artifacts, specimens and works of art, as well as entree to more than 50 traveling exhibitions developed by the Smithsonian Institution. The national recognition and exposure for SCH is expected to increase annual visits, boosting the center's current $45 million annual impact on the greater Houston area. In addition, Houstonians can look forward to Smithsonian exhibitions and programs. "Space Center Houston is proud to be the first Smithsonian affiliate in Houston," said Richard E. Allen Jr., president and CEO of SCH. "This is a result of our continuous dedication to preserving the unique history of space exploration and sharing NASA's bold vision to expand humanity's presence into deep space. This affiliation will help us to inspire all generations through the wonders of space exploration." JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
[top] - View the Partial Solar Eclipse
The George Observatory will be open on Thursday, Oct. 23, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. for the partial solar eclipse. We will have a solar telescope and astronomers available. Please remember that this is weather dependent. For more information about the George Observatory, click here. Note: Park entrance fees apply at $7 per person for everyone over 12 years old. | |
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| JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday – October 14, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Dreaming a Different Apollo
David S. F. Portree - Wired News
Apollo didn't die; it was killed. The Apollo Program might have continued for many years, evolving constantly to achieve new goals at relatively low cost. Instead, programs designed to give Apollo a future beyond the first lunar landing began to feel the brunt of cuts even before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. By the time Apollo drew to its premature conclusion – the last mission to use Apollo hardware was the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) of July 1975 – NASA was busy building a wholly new space program based on the Space Shuttle. Throwing out the Apollo investment and starting over with Shuttle was incredibly wasteful both in terms of learned capabilities and money.
Canadian space at a crossroads
Jeff Foust – The Space Review
Two weeks ago, the world's space community converged on Toronto for the 65th International Astronautical Congress. The weeklong conference, organized by the International Astronautical Federation, attracted more than 3,000 participants for sessions on a broad range of civil and commercial space topics.
Search for Mars Life Starts on Earth
Frigid lakes bombarded by UV radiation and boiling, acidic springs are some of the otherworldly Earth environments where scientists plan to hunt for clues to life on Mars.
The Amazing Story Behind The Story Of NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Mission
David Freeman - Huffington Post
How many planets are there? Not long ago the answer to that question was simple: eight, or nine if you counted Pluto (now officially a dwarf planet). The only planets known to exist were the ones in our own solar system.
Goodnight, Moon: Messenger Probe Tracks Lunar Eclipse From Mercury
Alan Boyle – NBC News
Millions of Earthlings were in a position to watch the full moon go dark during last Wednesday's total lunar eclipse — and so was NASA's Messenger probe, which is orbiting the planet Mercury, 66 million miles (107 million kilometers) away. Now you can get a Mercury's-eye view of the eclipse as well.
Beyond Pluto: NASA Eyes Distant Targets for New Horizons Probe
Pluto may not be the end of the line for a far-flung NASA spacecraft.
Leaky galaxy is a star factory that could shed light on early universe
Amina Khan – Los Angeles Times
Astronomers searching for hints of leaky galaxies have picked up radiation from a star-forming galaxy in the nearby universe that behaves rather like some of the earliest stellar factories that gave a dark universe its first rays of light.
The role of international cooperation in China's space station plans
Jeff Foust – The Space Review
The annual International Astronautical Congress (IAC) offers an opportunity to get a global perspective on space efforts often lacking elsewhere. That is, when delegates from other nations can actually attend. This year's IAC, held two weeks ago in Toronto, was marked by the absence of top Chinese and Russian officials, who were denied—or, at least, somehow unable to obtain—visas for the event, for reasons never made clear by conference organizers or Canadian officials (see "Canadian space at a crossroads", The Space Review, October 13, 2014.)
Keep ISS Alive!
Rick Tumlinson | Space News
In the 1990s as a leader of the Space Frontier Foundation, I worked to cancel what was then called Space Station Freedom. Announced in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, the original concept had been pitched at around $8 billion. Based on what we saw happening to what might have been a good idea, we were the only space organization to come out against the project. We believed that if the president's goal was to open the frontier as stated, there were much better and lower-cost ways to do so that were more directly evolvable and supportive than where it seemed the station was going.
X-37B space plane scheduled to return to Earth soon
Stephen Clark – Spaceflight Now
A robotic U.S. Air Force space plane is set to land in California as soon as this week after a secretive 22-month flight hundreds of miles above Earth.
Air Force X-37B Due to Land Tuesday, SWF Wants More Transparency About Its Missions
The Air Force announced on Friday that its secretive X-37B spaceplane, in orbit for almost two years, will land on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA. At the recent International Astronautical Congress (IAC2014) in Toronto, Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation encouraged the U.S. government to be more open about what the X-37 is doing as part of the Transparency and Confidence Building Measures (TCBMs) the United States is advocating to help ensure space sustainability.
Smith to Bolden: Why Not Orion for Commercial Crew?
Dan Leone – Space News
House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) wants to know when NASA's Orion deep-space capsule will be ready to provide backup crew and cargo delivery services to the international space station and whether the Lockheed Martin-built vehicle should replace one of the two commercial crew taxis NASA is now funding.
COMPLETE STORIES
Dreaming a Different Apollo
David S. F. Portree - Wired News
Apollo didn't die; it was killed. The Apollo Program might have continued for many years, evolving constantly to achieve new goals at relatively low cost. Instead, programs designed to give Apollo a future beyond the first lunar landing began to feel the brunt of cuts even before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. By the time Apollo drew to its premature conclusion – the last mission to use Apollo hardware was the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) of July 1975 – NASA was busy building a wholly new space program based on the Space Shuttle. Throwing out the Apollo investment and starting over with Shuttle was incredibly wasteful both in terms of learned capabilities and money.
Apollo as we knew it included over its seven-year series of flights a total of seven major hardware elements. They were: the Saturn V rocket, available in three-stage and two-stage varieties; the two-stage Saturn IB rocket; the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) spacecraft; the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) moon lander; the jeep-like Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV); the Skylab Orbital Workshop; and the ASTP Docking Module (DM).
Apollo missions 1, 2, and 3 either did not fly (in the case of Apollo 1, which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee on 27 January 1967) or were cancelled (in the case of Apollo 2 and Apollo 3). Flown missions began with Apollo 4, the first unmanned test of the Saturn V rocket (9 November 1967). Apollo 5 was a Saturn IB-launched unmanned Lunar Module (LM) test. Apollo 6 was a second unmanned Saturn V rocket test.
All subsequent Apollo and Apollo follow-on missions save one were launched bearing three-man crews. Apollo 7 (11-22 October 1968), the first piloted Apollo, was a Saturn IB-launched CSM-only mission in low-Earth orbit. In large measure, it accomplished the mission originally planned for Apollo 1. Apollo 8 (21-27 December 1968) was a Saturn V-launched lunar-orbital CSM-only mission motivated by rumors of a Soviet piloted circumlunar flight; Apollo 9 was a Saturn V-launched, Earth-orbital CSM/LM test. Apollo 10 was a lunar-orbital dress rehearsal for Apollo 11 (16-24 July 1969), which carried out the first piloted lunar landing.
NASA gave alphanumeric designations to the Apollo missions; Apollo 8 was, for example, designated C-prime. Apollo 11 was the first and only G-class mission. The Apollo 11 moonwalk lasted a little over two hours and the crew remained on the moon for only 22 hours. Though momentous (and the signal to most people that Apollo could end), Apollo 11 was really a full-up engineering test of the Apollo lunar mission system from Earth launch to Earth splashdown and post-mission quarantine. It paved the way for the H-class missions: Apollo 12 (H-1) which, after a pinpoint landing near the unmanned Surveyor III lander, included a 32-hour surface stay and two moonwalks; Apollo 13 (H-2), the "successful failure" (as NASA called it) which through adversity hinted at Apollo's untapped potential; and Apollo 14 (H-3), which included the longest lunar surface traverse on foot of the Apollo Program.
NASA originally planned for Apollo 15 to be H-4, but upgraded it to J-1 after NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, in an ill-advised attempt at horse-trading with the Nixon White House, cancelled one H mission and one J mission. J missions included LMs with longer landing hover times, lunar surface stays of about three days, improved space suits supporting up to four moonwalks, and an electric-powered LRV. Individual moonwalk duration was stretched to almost eight hours, in part because of suit improvements, but also because riding the LRV reduced astronaut metabolic rates; seated, they used less oxygen and cooling water than when on foot.
Apollo 16 was called J-2 and Apollo 17 in December 1972 was J-3. The last piloted moon mission of the 20th century, Apollo 17 was the final flight of the LM, the LRV, and the three-stage Saturn V.
Six months after it abandoned the moon, NASA launched Skylab 1, the first and only Skylab Orbital Workshop, on the first and only two-stage Saturn V to fly. Three Saturn IB rockets each launched a CSM bearing three men to Skylab 1 for stays of up to 84 days. They lifted off from a makeshift raised platform ("the milkstool") on Saturn V Pad 39B. The last mission, Skylab 4, returned to Earth in February 1974.
Eighteen months after Skylab, the last Saturn IB launched the last CSM, designated only "Apollo," into low-Earth orbit for a meet-up with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. The first and only DM, an airlock that enabled crews to move safely between the incompatible atmospheres of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft, rode inside the tapered shroud that linked the bottom of the CSM to the top of the Saturn IB's S-IVB second stage. The ASTP Apollo spacecraft turned end for end, docked with the DM, detached it from the S-IVB, and began maneuvers that led to the first international docking in space.
On 24 July 1975, six years to the day after Apollo 11 returned from the moon, the ASTP Apollo parachuted to a splashdown in the Pacific. Though Apollo hardware remained, none of it reached space. A second Skylab workshop was placed on display in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC. Two Saturn Vs, one of which might have launched the second Skylab, and an assortment of Saturn IB rockets, CSMs, and LMs in various states of completion were parceled out to NASA centers and museums or were scrapped.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a NASA supporter (in 1958, as Senate Majority Leader, he had been instrumental in its creation), had predicted Apollo's premature end. In 1967, Congress slashed to just $122 million the $450 million he requested to start the Apollo Applications Program (AAP). AAP – which would rapidly shrink to become the Skylab Program – had been intended to exploit Apollo hardware and operational experience to accomplish new lunar and Earth-orbital missions. As news of the deep cuts in his AAP request reached the White House, Johnson mused that, "the way the American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away."
What if Johnson had got it wrong? What if, somehow, Americans cared more about space exploration and so sought to wring from their $24-billion Apollo investment everything they could?
The Soviet Union for many years numbered its Soyuz missions consecutively regardless of changes in spacecraft purpose and design. If Apollo had been allowed to survive and thrive, perhaps the United States would have adopted a similar numbering policy, ultimately yielding impressively high alphanumeric mission designation numbers.
What follows is an unabashed exercise in alternate history speculation (and, above all, shameless wishful thinking). It is based on actual NASA and contractor plans described elsewhere in Beyond Apollo (see the links at the bottom of this post) and is written as though the events it recounts actually occurred.
One word of caution: in order to simplify an already complex timeline, I have ignored the possibility of accidents. Spaceflight is risky, yet in this alternate history timeline all missions occur exactly as planned. The likelihood that every mission described below would come off as planned, with no mishaps or outright disasters, would in fact be very small.
1971-1972
Because no one sought to kill Apollo, Paine felt no urge to trade away two Apollo missions in the vain hope that Nixon would support his plans for a large Earth-orbital space station. This meant that Apollo 15 remained H-4. The first J mission (J-1) was Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 was J-2.
Apollo Earth-orbital space station flights began in late 1971. Apollo 18 was the unmanned launch of the first two-stage Saturn V bearing a temporary Earth-orbiting space station. In keeping with NASA's old penchant for program names from Greek and Roman mythology, the station was dubbed Olympus 1. The Olympus name had a heritage in the world of space station planning going back to the early 1960s. The Apollo-derived Olympus station resembled Skylab, but lacked its side-mounted Apollo Telescope Mount and "windwill" solar arrays. It also included more internal decks.
Within days, Apollo 19, the first K-class Earth-orbital CSM, lifted off on a Saturn IB from Launch Complex 34 bound for Olympus 1 with three astronauts on board. K-class CSMs included batteries in place of fuel cells, an electricity umbilical for linking to the Olympus station power system, a retractable main engine bell to make more room in the S-IVB shroud, extra storage compartments in the Command Module (CM) capsule, an option to install up to two extra crew couches, a pair of small steerable dish antennas in place of lunar Apollo's large four-dish system, smaller main-engine propellant tanks, and modifications enabling it to remain semi-dormant attached to an Olympus station for up to six months (for example, heaters).
Apollo 19 remained docked to Olympus 1′s axial ("front") docking port while its crew worked on board the station for 28 days – twice as long as any previous U.S. crew. The Apollo 20 (K-2) crew subsequently demolished Apollo 19′s new record by living on board Olympus 1 for 56 days.
Apollo 21 (I-1), a Saturn V-launched mission to lunar polar orbit, marked the start of a new phase of Apollo lunar exploration. Two astronauts orbited the moon for 28 days in a CSM with an attached Lunar Observation Module (LOM) in place of an LM. The astronauts charted the moon's surface in great detail to enable scientists and engineers to select future Apollo landing sites and traverse routes.
Apollo 22 (K-3) delivered a three-man crew to Olympus 1 for a 112-day stay, doubling Apollo 20′s stay-time. Ninety days into their mission, the two-man Apollo 23 (K-4) CSM docked at Olympus 1′s single radial ("side") docking port for 10 days. One of the Apollo 23 astronauts was a medical doctor; he conducted health evaluations of the Apollo 22 astronauts. If any member of the Apollo 22 crew had been found to be unhealthy, then all would have returned to Earth in either their own CSM or with the Apollo 23 crew in its CSM, which included three spare couches (the empty Science Pilot couch and two couches located against the Apollo 23 CM's aft bulkhead). As it turned out, the Apollo 22 astronauts were in good shape and high spirits, so NASA authorized continuation of their mission to its full planned duration. Before returning to Earth, the Apollo 22 crew used their CSM's main engine to boost Olympus 1 to a higher orbit, postponing its reentry by up to 10 years.
NASA referred to the Apollo 22 crew as the third Olympus 1 resident crew and the Apollo 23 crew as the first Olympus 1 visitor crew. The full alphanumeric designations for Apollos 22 and 23 were O-1/K-3/R3 and O-1/K-4/V1, respectively. Most people did not pay attention to those designations, however, being satisfied to call the missions by their Apollo numbers.
1973
NASA ordered 15 Saturn V rockets for the Apollo Program. In 1968, NASA Deputy Administrator for Manned Space Flight George Mueller asked NASA Administrator James Webb for permission to order more Saturn V rockets. With budgets for post-Apollo space programs already under fierce attack, Webb rejected Mueller's request. In our alternate timeline, Webb's answer was different. Apollo 24 (J-3) used the last Saturn V of the original Apollo buy. This fact aroused only passing interest, however, since in our alternate timeline no one ever considered halting the Saturn V assembly lines. Apollo 25 (J-4) launched atop the first new-buy Saturn V, the 16th Saturn V to be built.
Apollos 24 and 25 together explored a single scientifically interesting landing site. Apollo 25 also carried out technology experiments. Two months after the Apollo 24 ascent stage departed the site, the Apollo 25 LM landed about a kilometer away from the derelict Apollo 24 descent stage. The Apollo LM descent engine kicked up potentially damaging dust during landing, so the Apollo 25 astronauts inspected Apollo 24′s descent stage, LRV, and ALSEP experiments to determine whether a one-kilometer landing separation distance was adequate. Apollo 25 also deployed an experimental solar array and a small battery-driven remote-controlled rover. Controllers on Earth drove the small rover several hundred meters over the two months that followed.
Apollo 26 (O-2) was the Saturn V launch of the Olympus 2 space station. It lifted off from Pad 39C, a new Complex 39 launch pad north of the existing 39A and 39B pads at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida. 39C was designed for both Saturn V and Saturn IB launches, putting NASA on track to retiring the Complex 34 Saturn IB pad located south of Kennedy Space Center, within the boundaries of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Soon after Olympus 2 reached orbit, the last Saturn IB to use Complex 34 launched Apollo 27 (O-2/K-5/R1). Its epic mission: to stretch the world spaceflight endurance record to 224 days.
Over the course of the Apollo 27 mission, NASA launched four unmanned Saturn IB rockets with Centaur upper stages. Two lifted off from Pad 39C and two from newly upgraded Pad 39A. Each boosted into geostationary orbit one Radio/TV Relay Satellite (RTRS); three operational satellites and a spare. Olympus 2 thus became the first space station capable of uninterrupted voice, data, and TV contact with Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and Payload Control at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Saturn IB-launched Apollo 28 CSM lifted off from Pad 39C 45 days into the Apollo 27 crew's stint on board Olympus 2. The six-day, three-person mission, designated O-2/K-6/V1, included the first female U.S. astronaut.
Apollo 29 (O-2/K-7/V2), another 6-day, three-person mission, reached Olympus 2 110 days into the Apollo 27 mission. It included the first non-American to fly on a U.S. spacecraft.
1974
Apollo 30 (O-2/K-8/V3), a 10-day, two-person mission nearly identical to Apollo 23, reached Olympus 2 about 180 days into the Apollo 27 mission. The Apollo 27 astronauts proved to be in good health, so NASA authorized them to continue their mission to its full planned duration. The Apollo 30 crew returned to Earth in Apollo 27′s CSM, leaving behind their fresh CSM for the long-duration astronauts.
Just before the Apollo 27 crew ended their record-setting stay in space – a record that would hold for more than a decade – the unmanned Apollo 31 Saturn V launched a pair of modified RTRS satellites (one operational and one spare) into a loose orbit around the quasi-stable Earth-moon L2 point, 33,000 miles beyond the moon. When NASA launched Apollo 34 (J-5) to the moon's Farside hemisphere, out of sight of Earth, the satellites provided continuous radio, data, and TV communication with both the CSM while it orbited over the Farside hemisphere and the LM parked on the Farside surface.
The Apollo 32 (O-3) Saturn V launched Olympus 3 – intended to be the first "long-life" space station – from Pad 39A. It included three equally spaced radial docking ports, expanded solar arrays, an uprated life support system, a "greenhouse" plant growth chamber, an improved internal lighting system, and observation cupola, and guest living quarters. The next day, the three-man Apollo 33 (O-3/K-9/R1) crew lifted off from Pad 39C to begin a 180-stay on board. Starting with Apollo 33, 180 days became the standard duration for Olympus station missions. The Apollo 27 crew had remained on board Olympus 2 for 224 days so that NASA could have in place a "cushion" of biomedical knowledge in the event that a 180-day mission had to be extended; for example, if a resident crew's CSM proved faulty when time came to return to Earth and a rescue mission had to be mounted.
Apollo 34 (J-5) was, as indicated above, the first piloted mission to the moon's hidden Farside. The last of the J-class lunar landing missions, its crew included the first woman on the moon.
Olympus 3 could support visiting crews for longer periods, so Apollo 35 (O-3/K-10/V2) was the first 10-day, three-person visitor mission. It delivered the first Cargo Carrier (CC-1) to Olympus 3 two months into the Apollo 33 mission. Drum-shaped CC-1 rode to orbit inside the segmented shroud between the top of the Saturn IB's S-IVB second stage and the bottom of the Apollo 35 CSM's retracted engine bell. After S-IVB shutdown, the Apollo 35 crew separated their CSM from the shroud, which peeled back in four parts and separated from the stage. They then turned their CSM end-for-end to dock with CC-1′s "outboard" docking port and detached the carrier from the S-IVB.
The Apollo 35 CSM docked with one of Olympus 3′s three radial ports using CC-1′s "inboard" docking port. Its crew then entered the station through CC-1′s meter-wide central tunnel. When their visit with the Apollo 33 crew drew to an end 10 days after it began, they undocked their CSM from CC-1, leaving the carrier attached to Olympus 3 so that it could serve as a "pantry" or "walk-in closet."
The crew of Apollo 36 (O-3/K-12/V3), another 10-day, three-person visitor mission to Olympus 3, included an African-American mission Commander. The Apollo 36 CSM docked with CC-1′s outboard port 120 days into Apollo 33. When time came to return to Earth, they undocked CC-1′s inboard port from Olympus 3. Following their deorbit burn, they undocked their CSM from CC-1′s outboard port and performed a small separation maneuver. CC-1, packed with trash, burned up in Earth's atmosphere, and the Apollo 36 CM capsule splashed down in the Pacific.
1975
The Apollo 32 resident crew undocked from Olympus 3 and returned to Earth, and two days later the Apollo 37 (O-3/K-13/R2) CSM arrived with Olympus 3′s second resident crew and, on its nose, a hefty telescope module. The crew gingerly docked the telescope module to the radial port on the side of Olympus 3 opposite the radial port used for Cargo Carriers, then undocked their K-class CSM from the telescope module's outboard port and redocked with Olympus 3′s axial port. Olympus 3 thus became the world's first multi-modular space station.
Attention then shifted back to the lunar track of the on-going Apollo Program. Apollo 38 (L-1A) saw an unmanned Saturn V rocket launch directly to the lunar surface an LM-derived Lunar Cargo Carrier (LCC-1) bearing a nuclear-powered Dual-Mode Lunar Rover (DMLR). Apollo 40 (L-1B) saw the first Augmented CSM (ACSM) and the first Augmented Lunar Module (ALM) launched to lunar orbit.
The Apollo 40 ACSM remained in continuous contact with Earth over the moon's Farside hemisphere through the RTRS satellites at Earth-moon L2. The ALM descended to a landing within about a kilometer of LCC-1. The astronauts deployed the DMLR and drove it on five traverses during their one-week stay on the moon. They then reconfigured it for Earth-guided operation. After the DMLR retreated to a safe distance under Earth control, the Apollo 40 ALM ascent stage ignited to return the crew to the orbiting ACSM and, subsequently, to Earth.
The DMLR then began a 500-kilometer overland trek to the next planned Apollo landing site. As it moved slowly over the rugged surface, it imaged its surroundings, took magnetometer readings, and occasionally stopped to collect an intriguing rock or a scoop of dirt. A pair of spotlights permitted limited lunar night-time driving. Assuming that the DMLR reaches its goal, the next ALM crew, set to land next to a pre-landed LCC next year (1976), will retrieve its samples for return to Earth, reconfigure it for astronaut driving, use it to explore their landing site, and then reconfigure it again for Earth-guided operation.
Sandwiched between Apollo 38 and Apollo 40 was Saturn IB-launched Apollo 39 (O-2/K-14/V4), a routine 10-day visitor mission to Olympus 3 bearing Cargo Carrier-2. Apollo 39 docked CC-2′s inboard port with one of Olympus 3′s two unoccupied radial docking ports.
The Apollo 41 (O-3/K-15/R3) CSM docked with the third Olympus 3 radial port bearing the station's third resident crew. The start of their mission overlapped the end of the Apollo 37 resident crew's 180-day stay in space. The handover marked the start of Olympus 3′s continuous occupation, which lasted until the station was safely deorbited in July 1979.
Apollo 42 (O-3/K-16/V5), another 10-day visitor mission to Olympus 3, docked at the CC-2 outboard port and, when they returned to Earth, deorbited CC-2 over the Pacific Ocean. Apollo 43 (O-3/K-17/V6), the second 10-day mission to visit the Apollo 41 resident crew, rounded out NASA's 1975 piloted spaceflight schedule.
In our alternate timeline, NASA's Apollo-based piloted space program is hitting its stride. Earth-orbital operations are becoming routine; lunar-surface operations are continuing to evolve and advance. In our own timeline, Apollo has already drawn to its ill-considered close. For us, on this timeline, Apollo would surface again twice before the first Space Shuttle flight in April 1981: in September 1977, when NASA was compelled by funding cuts to shut off the science instruments the six Apollo lunar landing crews had left behind on the moon; and in July 1979, when Skylab reentered Earth's atmosphere just ahead of Apollo 11′s 10th anniversary, pelting Australia with debris.
Canadian space at a crossroads
Jeff Foust – The Space Review
Two weeks ago, the world's space community converged on Toronto for the 65th International Astronautical Congress. The weeklong conference, organized by the International Astronautical Federation, attracted more than 3,000 participants for sessions on a broad range of civil and commercial space topics.
It was also an opportunity for the host city and nation to show off. Delegates filled a theater in downtown Toronto for the opening ceremonies on September 29, a two-hour affair that featured the usual welcoming speeches from organizers and politicians interspersed with performances by members of a Cirque du Soleil troupe and another where figure skaters danced with hockey players on artificial ice (along with "referees" who were wearing uniforms a little more low-cut than standard NHL attire.)
Serving as masters of ceremonies for the event were two members of the Canadian astronaut corps, Jeremy Hansen and David Saint-Jacques. They oversaw the ceremonies in a lighthearted way, pointing out early in the festivities the different types of attendees at the IAC. One of those classes of attendees was "retirees," which they illustrated with a photo of former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. "And boy, do they love to tell you their stories," Hansen quipped, to laughter from the audience.
Hansen and Saint-Jacques were involved in other events associated with the conference, from the unveiling of a coin marking the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to a social media event called "The Amazing Canadian Space Race," where the two led competing teams through a series of space-themed events around Toronto.
What was less frequently mentioned, though, was that Hansen and Saint-Jacques weren't simply representing the Canadian astronaut corps: they are the Canadian astronaut corps. With Hadfield's retirement last year after his mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the two are the only active Canadian astronauts today. Neither of them has yet to fly to space, and the opportunities for them to do so through the end of the decade are scarce.
At the IAC, Canadian officials played up the country's space efforts. "Canada's space sector is critical to our economic well-being moving forward," said Industry Minister James Moore, whose portfolio includes the CSA, at the opening ceremony. "The industry is vital to our economy, to our security, and, of course, to our well-being."
"We've had a very active and, I think, a very fruitful year at the space agency," said CSA president Walter Natynczyk, a retired general who took over the agency last year, on a panel of space agency leaders later that day. That included the launch, almost exactly one year earlier, of the Cassiope space weather and technology demonstration satellite, and the release in February of a space policy framework.
That framework outlines five key principles for Canadian space activities: placing Canadian interests first, positioning the private sector at the forefront of space activities, making progress through partnerships, supporting excellence in key capabilities like space robotics and remote sensing, and inspiring Canadians.
That framework "kind of lays out the future of our space program from a principles standpoint, but also areas of action," said Natynczyk at a press conference after the space agency leaders panel.
That framework, though, is short on specific strategies. The document discusses a greater role for commercialization, support for research and development activities, and keeping Canada a "sought-after partner in the international space exploration missions that serve Canada's national interests," but offers few other details, or guidance on the CSA's budget.
It's that budget that has caused some concerns among Canadian space advocates. The fiscal year 2014–15 budget gives CSA C$462.4 million (US$411.5 million), up from the C$413.7 million (US$368.2 million) it received in 2013–14. However, that same budget document projects a decline in CSA's budget over the next two fiscal years, to C$360.3 million (US$320.7 million) in 2016–17. By comparison, the United States, with a population nine times that of Canada, funded NASA for fiscal year 2014 at $17.6 billion, or more than 40 times the CSA's 2014–15 budget.
At the IAC press conference, Natynczyk said the budget supports CSA's key areas of investment over the next five years, including the ISS and an instrument that has already been delivered for the James Webb Space Telescope. However, he said no decision had been made yet on whether Canada would participate in any extension of the ISS beyond 2020.
"Right now, our focus is to maximize the use of the International Space Station," he said. "Then we will have a look at the entire value proposition before putting a case before the government of Canada" about any potential extension.
An extension of the ISS is key to giving Hansen and Saint-Jacques more opportunities to fly. The six-person ISS crews are currently split evenly between Russia and the "US Orbital Segment," (USOS) which includes the US, Europe, Japan, and Canada. Typically two of the three USOS crewmembers are from NASA, and the third from another partner. Canada, as the smallest ISS contributor, gets the fewest crew slots: only one Canadian astronaut is slated to fly between now and 2020.
The ISS, though, isn't the only space program where some Canadians would like to see more—or at least a different use of—resources. One such area is Mars exploration, where Canada has contributed instruments for a number of spacecraft, but has yet to fly its own mission.
"When you see a country like India being able to do this," said Gordon Osinski, associate director of the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration at the University of Western Ontario, referring to India's low-cost Mars Orbiter Mission, "as Canadians, we can do this, and we should be doing it."
That line got cheers from the audience that filled an auditorium on the University of Toronto campus October 1 for an event organized by The Planetary Society titled "We See Thee Rise: The Canadian Space Program Today and Tomorrow." ("We see thee rise" is from a line in the Canadian national anthem, "O Canada.") The biggest draw for the event—and the recipient of the most frequent, and often raucous, cheers—was Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, who gave an opening monologue and then joined a panel with Osinski, Hansen, and Canadian space journalist Elizabeth Howell.
"I'd to see Canada keep on contributing instruments to missions, but also do a flagship mission beyond low Earth orbit," Osinski said. "Canada leading a mission to Mars, to an asteroid, or to the Moon would just be fantastic, in my opinion."
During a question-and-answer session with the audience, one person asked if Canada should invest in a launch vehicle program. Canada is alone among major space powers without the ability to launch spacecraft, relying instead on other nations. There have been proposals over the years to develop vehicles, as well as launch sites in locations from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, but none have made much progress.
For example, this summer Halifax-based Open Space Orbital ran a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in an attempt to raise $100,000 to start work on a microsatellite launch vehicle. The campaign ended last month with only $5,568 in pledges.
That question brought the panel back to a central issue: should Canada continue to do more of the same in space, or branch out? "We have a small budget. There's only so much we can do," Hansen said. "It makes more sense to me to work on areas that other people are not already working on." Developing launch systems when many other vehicles exist worldwide, he suggested, "doesn't really make sense to me."
One reason to do so, Howell offered, was sovereignty. She noted that earlier in the year, Canada removed a spacecraft called M3MSat that was scheduled to launch this summer on a secondary payload on a Soyuz rocket, citing sanctions against Russia because of the Ukraine crisis. CSA only recently arranged an alternate launch, on an Indian rocket, in 2015. "If we had our own launch capability, it would be easier for us to launch these things" without worrying about such geopolitical issues, she said.
However, she noted taking on new programs was a question of priorities given the flat CSA budget over the last decade, and that Canada should be doing "more of what we're doing" in space currently. "I think we should be broadcasting more widely the accomplishments that we have. We should be proud of what we do," she said. "We're a small community, we're very tightknit, and we're mighty."
For the time being, that appears to be the most likely course of action for the Canadian space program: making the most out of a small budget. "The Canadian Space Agency is notorious for doing more with less," Nye said in opening speech.
One person who might feel differently is someone who was largely overlooked at the IAC, but could be in a position in the near future to do something about it. Despite being the first Canadian in space, flying on the space shuttle Challenger 30 years ago this month, Marc Garneau had only a cameo appearance at the conference, making a brief speech in a makeshift lecture area in the back of the exhibit hall that was not widely publicized nor included in the official conference program.
Garneau, giving the Peter Glaser Memorial Lecture, talked about his interest in space-based solar power, but the current member of Parliament for the opposition Liberal party couldn't help but mention space policy. "Everybody in my party knows how much I care about space," he said. "Space is an area where Canada has done very well."
"I think we have a distinguished past and a very promising future," he said. "My fellow caucus members in the Liberal party of Canada know that if we become the government of Canada, they'll never hear me shut up about space." Canada is scheduled to hold its next federal election no later than next October.
Hansen, the current Canadian astronaut who may fly later this decade, or may never get a chance, depending on flight schedules, budgets, and the future of the ISS, remained optimistic. "I have significant optimism about where Canada is going with respect to space," he said near the end of The Planetary Society event. "I see everything pointing in the right direction."
"Some day," he added, "somebody's going to come into my office or, more likely, call me and say, 'Hey, it's go time. It's your turn to fly in space.' And that's pretty incredible."
Search for Mars Life Starts on Earth
Frigid lakes bombarded by UV radiation and boiling, acidic springs are some of the otherworldly Earth environments where scientists plan to hunt for clues to life on Mars.
Funded by a new, five-year NASA grant, the researchers will tour the three ages of Mars on Earth — when Mars was cold, wet and habitable; the transition period when water disappeared; and the modern, dry period. The Mars-like environments include hot springs in California and Yellowstone National Park, permafrost on cold Arctic islands, some of Earth's oldest rocks in Australia, and volcanic lakes and soils in Chile.
"We chose these environments because we want to understand the signature of life on Mars at different times," said Nathalie Cabrol, the project leader and a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
The SETI-led team will scope out "biosignatures," or evidence of life, with instruments similar to those NASA plans to install on the next Mars rover, expected to launch in 2020. The car-size robot is designed to seek out ancient life.
On Mars, the clues could be concealed in rocks more than 3.5 billion years old. If the planet's ancient environment was akin to that of early Earth, then the rover might discover fossils of microbial mats similar to stromatolites, which are some of Earth's oldest fossils. Or primitive microbes could have left behind chemical calling cards, such as the altered minerals created by rock-eating bacteria known as chemolithotrophs. The rover may also find subtle shifts in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen isotopes, trapped and preserved in rock layers, which can signal the presence of life. (An isotope is an atom of an element with a different number of neutrons.)
Cabrol and her team will practice searching for promising rocks from the air, by scanning sites with a quadcopter or octocopter, she said. They'll also analyze samples in the field with portable instruments, and in a laboratory for more-precise measurements.
"Our goal is not to prove more efficient at finding biosignatures," Cabrol told Live Science. "We want to get metrics and data that will lead us to detection."
By honing their skilles in Earth's extreme environments, the scientists will learn where and how to look for life for when the rover arrives at Mars. The research may also help narrow down the list of best landing sites for the rover.
"We're not saying we're going to detect life, but we're increasing the chances we're going to the right outcrop," Cabrol told Live Science.
The $8 million grant is one of five awarded to seven research groups across the United States to study the origin of life. The teams will be affiliated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
The Amazing Story Behind The Story Of NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Mission
David Freeman - Huffington Post
How many planets are there? Not long ago the answer to that question was simple: eight, or nine if you counted Pluto (now officially a dwarf planet). The only planets known to exist were the ones in our own solar system.
But Kepler might never have gotten off the ground without the perseverance of William Borucki, the mission's principal investigator and a NASA legend whose career at the agency has spanned more than half a century.
As Borucki explains in this recent interview with HuffPost Science editor David Freeman (click on the link above to listen), it took years of R&D--and lots of wrangling--to get the agency to proceed.
Goodnight, Moon: Messenger Probe Tracks Lunar Eclipse From Mercury
Alan Boyle – NBC News
Millions of Earthlings were in a position to watch the full moon go dark during last Wednesday's total lunar eclipse — and so was NASA's Messenger probe, which is orbiting the planet Mercury, 66 million miles (107 million kilometers) away. Now you can get a Mercury's-eye view of the eclipse as well.
Mercury and Messenger are currently on the other side of the sun, off to the side from Earth's perspective. That was a perfect spot for seeing the sunlit moon blink out as it passed into Earth's shadow.
"From Mercury, the Earth and moon normally appear as if they were two very bright stars," Hari Nair, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a news release issued Friday. Earth is just five pixels across in the field of view for Messenger's narrow-angle camera, and the moon is just over one pixel across.
Messenger's science team produced a time-lapse video from 31 images of Earth and the moon, taken at two-minute intervals. Those pictures span the hour from 5:18 to 6:18 a.m. ET Oct. 8 — a time period during which the full moon's disk gradually became fully covered by the darkest part of Earth's shadow.
To enhance the eclipse effect, Nair said the images were enlarged to double the apparent size of the Earth-moon system, and the moon's brightness was increased by a factor of about 25.
This isn't the first time Messenger has gotten in on an interplanetary phenomenon. A year ago, the Mercury probe snapped a portrait of Earth and the moon at the same time that NASA's Cassini probe was taking a picture of Earth as seen from Saturn.
Seeing pictures of celestial bodies together, from different far-flung perspectives, helps us realize that we're all in one big solar system — and that today's robotic explorers are expanding our view of the planetary neighborhood.
Earth and Mars together
Another example of that wider perspective comes from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. That spacecraft's narrow-angle camera snapped a full-disk, black-and-white picture of Earth — with a teeny-tiny Mars photobombing the scene.
Mars was about 70 million miles (112.5 million kilometers) away when the image was acquired on May 24, and Earth was about 234,062 miles (376,687 kilometers) away.
Arizona State University's Julie Stopar said the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team made practice images of Mars for weeks to fine-tune the timing and the camera settings for the two-planet picture.
"The juxtaposition of Earth and Mars seen from the moon is a poignant reminder that the moon would make a convenient waypoint for explorers bound for the fourth planet and beyond," she wrote in an Oct. 2 posting to the website for the team behind the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC.
Volcanism on the moon
The evidence comes from about 70 topographic anomalies, informally called "irregular mare patches," that have been linked to relatively recent basaltic eruptions.
"This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon," John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA news release.
Beyond Pluto: NASA Eyes Distant Targets for New Horizons Probe
Pluto may not be the end of the line for a far-flung NASA spacecraft.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted a few objects that the New Horizons probe might be able to explore after it zooms past the Pluto system during a highly anticipated flyby on July 14, 2015. Mission team members are assessing the candidates now, to get a better understanding of their orbits — a difficult task that could take a few more months.
"We hope to know before the year is out, and we will keep you posted as soon as we've made a determination [of] whether there are reachable objects — we certainly hope so," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute's Planetary Science Directorate in Boulder, Colorado, said during a news conference in late August.
A long journey
New Horizons launched in January 2006 on a $700 million mission to study Pluto and its five known moons. The probe's flyby should return the first up-close looks at the dwarf planet, which is so distant and dim that it remains cloaked in mystery more than eight decades after its 1930 discovery.
"Everything that we know about the Pluto system today could probably fit on one piece of paper," Stern said, adding that New Horizon's observations should provide "a bonanza for science in so many ways."
But the New Horizons team has never been fixated solely on Pluto. Stern and his colleagues are also preparing for a possible extended mission, which would send New Horizons out to explore another object in the Kuiper Belt— the ring of frigid bodies beyond Neptune's orbit that includes Pluto.
Finding another Kuiper Belt object (KBO) to explore has proven challenging, however.
"These are objects that are much smaller than Pluto, and probably much more primitive in terms of their chemistry and their appearance," Stern said. "These are objects the size of counties, for example, not the size of planets. They're very faint."
Indeed, mission scientists have spent about four years searching for post-Pluto targets, using some of the world's biggest ground-based telescopes. The hunt turned up some KBOs, but none of them was within New Horizons' fuel reach, Stern said.
So the team applied for time on Hubble, which is always hotly contested. In June, the researchers were granted observation time on 200 Hubble orbits of Earth.
Possibilities for New Horizons
The Hubble search is complete, and the New Horizons team is now going through the telescope's data.
"Hubble has done a spectacularly good job, and has yielded literally hundreds of images of that part of the sky, from which we've found some candidates," Stern said. "We don't know if any of them, though, are within our fuel reach, and we won't still for some months, because we have to track them as they move in their orbits."
New Horizons' fuel reach will apparently be a bit greater than the probe's handlers had originally envisioned. A trajectory-correction burn performed this summer was so accurate that an additional potential burn planned for January won't be necessary, mission officials said.
"This is a good omen for our hoped-for Kuiper Belt flyby because each burn we can cancel saves a little fuel and makes the Kuiper Belt mission more feasible," Stern wrote in a mission update last month.
New Horizons has been in hibernation since Aug. 29. It will wake up on Dec. 6 to begin preparing for the Pluto flyby, which officially begins in January, team members said. (The July 15 event marks the closest approach of a months-long encounter phase.)
Leaky galaxy is a star factory that could shed light on early universe
Amina Khan – Los Angeles Times
Astronomers searching for hints of leaky galaxies have picked up radiation from a star-forming galaxy in the nearby universe that behaves rather like some of the earliest stellar factories that gave a dark universe its first rays of light.
The galaxy known as J0921+4509, as described in the journal Science, is pushing out 50 solar masses' worth of new stars per year – about an order of magnitude greater than the Milky Way's rate. This galaxy could help scientists shed light on one of the earliest epochs after the universe's birth — a formative period known as reionization, which took place a few hundred million years after the birth of the universe.
During reionization, the first stars that were coalescing out of the soup of neutral gas filling the universe began to send radiation out into their surroundings, separating the electrons from protons in the neutral hydrogen around them. This process gave the first starlight to the dark universe and helped to determine its cosmic structure, said Sanchayeeta Borthakur, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
"It has consequences for how [large-scale] structures formed, how galaxies got bigger and bigger … and what kind of dark matter makes up the universe," she said.
Scientists aren't sure exactly what caused reionization, but they knew that the process needed starlight that was much more energetic than visible light: extreme ultraviolet rays or higher, known as Lyman continuum radiation.
But even though these young stars in the universe were presumably putting out a whole lot of Lyman continuum radiation, it's unclear how extreme ultraviolet radiation could have escaped and affected the surrounding universe. That's because the same clouds of neutral gas that give birth to the stars also imprison their light. If that high-energy ultraviolet could not escape, then how did reionization happen?
"That has been the quest, the mystery for astronomers for the last couple of decades," Borthakur said, "to understand if and how the galaxies were able to let their ionizing photons escape so that they could go out and ionize the universe."
Researchers have found what appeared to be "leaky" galaxies, which appeared to be letting light escape the cloudy prisons. But these galaxies seem few and far between – high-energy ultraviolet is not easy to look for, and it often quickly gets used up as it ionizes the atoms it hits. The handful of other Lyman continuum emitting galaxies in the nearby universe are allowing something like 2% or 3% of that radiation to escape. That's about a tenth of what would have been needed to reionize the universe.
For this study, the researchers looked for these special galaxies in an indirect way; they first scanned for slightly lower-energy radiation to narrow the list of targets and then homed in on the shortlist by looking for Lyman continuum with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
To trigger reionization, it's estimated that a galaxy would need to be leaking some 20% of its Lyman continuum radiation. Lo and behold, J0921+4509 was leaking 21%.
How was this crucial radiation escaping? In some star-forming galaxies, the stars could be packed extremely close together – perhaps a billion solar masses across a mere 300 light years. All those newly forming stars stuffed into this tiny patch of real estate can generate such strong winds – perhaps around 2.2 million mph – that they blow holes through the wall of neutral gas, allowing light to escape.
Now, this galaxy is relatively nearby in the universe – about 3 billion light-years away. But the scientists say these galaxies offer a valuable analogue they can use to study aspects of reionization – since, for now, it's virtually impossible to study it in the very distant galaxies, which are closer to the birth of the universe (which is 13.8 billion years old). That may change with better telescopes on the way, Borthakur said.
The role of international cooperation in China's space station plans
Jeff Foust – The Space Review
The annual International Astronautical Congress (IAC) offers an opportunity to get a global perspective on space efforts often lacking elsewhere. That is, when delegates from other nations can actually attend. This year's IAC, held two weeks ago in Toronto, was marked by the absence of top Chinese and Russian officials, who were denied—or, at least, somehow unable to obtain—visas for the event, for reasons never made clear by conference organizers or Canadian officials (see "Canadian space at a crossroads", The Space Review, October 13, 2014.)
However, whatever issues that prevented officials from the China National Space Administration and Roscosmos from attending were not blanket prohibitions against all Chinese and Russian participants. Some delegates from both countries, primarily from industry and academia, were able to attend. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation had a large exhibit as well, showing off models of Long March rockets, the Chang'e-3 lander, and Yutu rover.
One presentation in particular shed some light on China's long-term human spaceflight plans, which center on the development of a permanent space station in low Earth orbit in the early 2020s. While those plans have been widely publicized, what hasn't been as well known is the role of international cooperation in that effort.
"The Chinese people stand ready to work together with people from all over the world," said Zhou Lini of the Center for National Security and Strategic Studies at China's National University of Defense Technology in a presentation at the IAC on September 30.
International cooperation in China's human spaceflight program has been limited so far. A few Shenzhou missions have flown experiments from Canada and Europe. Russia supported development of Chinese spacecraft development and astronaut training, and also provided one spacesuit used on China's first—and, to date, only—spacewalk on the Shenzhou-7 mission in 2008 (a second spacesuit used in the spacewalk was developed in China.) However, China's human spaceflight program has otherwise relied exclusively on domestic resources, capabilities, and personnel.
However, in her presentation and accompanying paper, Zhou suggested China would be open to far more significant cooperation with other nations as it develops its space station. That three-person station, as currently envisioned, would consist of three modules: a core module named "Tianhe" and two experiment modules, "Xuntian" and "Tianwen." The three modules would join together at a central node, giving the station an appearance not unlike the Soviet/Russian Mir station at an early phase of its life.
Zhou suggested that China would be open to having other nations contribute modules to the station. "China's space station will still have three docking locations for other modules," she said, referring to three unoccupied docking ports on that central node. (One of those three, in illustrations of the station, is occupied by a visiting Shenzhou spacecraft; presumably at least one additional module would need to include a Shenzhou docking port.)
Those modules, she said, could either be developed by other nations independently, or jointly with China. "US, Russia, ESA, and Japan may all have the ability to develop experiment modules and collaborate with China," she said.
The concept of other nations developing modules for China's space station is supported by comments made last month by Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut and currently deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency. "We've reserved a platform to cooperate with other countries in missions by having designed interfaces for our space modules so that they can dock with modules of other countries," he said at a meeting of the Association of Space Explorers last month in Bejing, as reported by the state-run news agency Xinhua.
Zhou said that China would also be open to flying astronauts from other nations. All Shenzhou missions to date have flown only Chinese astronauts, and the country recently announced it would soon select a new round of astronauts, including both test pilots and engineers (although, curiously, ruling out selecting any women in this upcoming round.) However, space station missions might offer more opportunities to fly "guest" astronauts in much the same way the American and Soviet/Russian programs have over the years.
"The most important role for the space station is to accommodate astronauts for scientific research," Zhou said. Those international astronauts could be trained and flown by China, but she said it might also be possible for the station to accommodate visits by crewed spacecraft from other nations.
Another role for international cooperation could be in logistics. China is developing its own cargo spacecraft, called Tianzhou, to carry supplies to the station and dispose of trash from it. Tianzhou will fly to the station on China's Long March 7 rocket, also under development, from the new Wenchang spaceport on Hainan island.
However, Zhou suggested that other cargo spacecraft could also support the Chinese station, noting the redundancy the International Space Station currently enjoys by the different cargo spacecraft servicing it. "Progress, ATV, and HTV are welcome," she said, referring to cargo spacecraft from Russia, Europe, and Japan, respectively. (Europe, though, does not plan to produce additional ATVs after the launch of the fifth such spacecraft to the ISS this summer.)
Missing from that list of vehicles, though, were the two American commercial cargo vehicles currently supporting the ISS, Cygnus and Dragon. Zhou, in response to an audience question, indicated that was an oversight and not a deliberate exclusion. "We want to cooperate with Dragon," she said.
Whether Dragon, or any other American vehicle, could dock with or otherwise support a Chinese space station likely faces greater political rather than technical barriers. A liberalization of export control policy in the United States for spacecraft and their components still explicitly prohibits the export of such items to China, which would, at the very least, hinder the technical interchanges needed to support such efforts.
In addition, while Zhou noted that China has "started dialogues and exchanges" with the United States in the area of human spaceflight, those efforts have been on hold in the US for the last few years: provisions in appropriations bills that fund NASA have prohibited bilateral cooperation between the agency and its Chinese counterparts.
"We do have to deal with the realities of politics and diplomacy," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden during a "heads of agencies" press conference at the IAC on September 29. "The prohibition is aimed mostly at human spaceflight, so we don't collaborate or cooperate with them there."
Those realities could change in the near future. The politician largely responsible for the existing prohibition is Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that funds NASA. He has frequently expressed concerns about human rights violations in China, including persecution of religious minorities there. Wolf, however, is retiring after this year, and his successor may be more willing to consider enhancing Sino-American space cooperation.
While that may take time, China does not appear to be in any rush. Although American officials warned in the mid-to-late 2000s that China could land humans on the Moon before 2020, China has shown no interest—or ability—to rush its human spaceflight program. Chinese officials said a few years ago they planned to instead have a permanent space station in place by 2020, but now say it will be in place by 2022 or 2023.
Indeed, China's human spaceflight program is in a bit of a lull, at least from an operational standpoint. After conducting two crewed missions to the Tiangong-1 module in June 2012 and June 2013, China is instead focusing on development of the Tiangong-2 module, slated for launch in 2016. (Tiangong-1, launched three years ago, remains in orbit, but there appear to be no plans to launch additional crewed missions to it.) The first Tianzhou mission is also planned for 2016, along with the next crewed mission, Shenzhou-11.
By the time the Chinese space station is in place in the early 2020s, both the technical and geopolitical environments of spaceflight may have changed considerably from where they are today. The United States and other Western nations may be more interested in cooperating with China as the International Space Station enters its final planned years of operation. Or, they may be moving on to bigger and better—or, at least, different—things, leaving China to seek other international partners for its space efforts.
Keep ISS Alive!
Rick Tumlinson | Space News
In the 1990s as a leader of the Space Frontier Foundation, I worked to cancel what was then called Space Station Freedom. Announced in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, the original concept had been pitched at around $8 billion. Based on what we saw happening to what might have been a good idea, we were the only space organization to come out against the project. We believed that if the president's goal was to open the frontier as stated, there were much better and lower-cost ways to do so that were more directly evolvable and supportive than where it seemed the station was going.
We were right. By the time construction stopped (notice I did not say "completed" — as it never has been) NASA and its partners had spent over $100 billion on what we now call the international space station. Actually, the cost may be much higher, depending on whose numbers you believe, and if they do or do not count the space shuttle in the total. (Given that over 75 percent of all shuttle flights were in some way in support of the station, we probably should.)
It was a tough battle, and at one point we got within one vote of killing the program. (Or as my then and current NASA friends say, they saved the program by one vote.) At that point, given our limited resources and the virtually unlimited money on the other side, we decided it was time to be for something good rather than against something bad. In fact, in a set of behind-the-scenes phone calls right after the vote, we traded our campaign to stop the station for then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's support of an exciting and revolutionary new space transportation project called the DC-X, short for Delta Clipper Experimental, which had run out of military funding and needed help.
Shortly thereafter, I was confronted by one of the old heroes of what would become the "new space" movement, Tom Rogers. He stabbed his finger into my chest and said: "Well, Rick, you did the right thing, but now you've got a multibillion-dollar lemon up there in orbit! So what are you going to do about it? How are you going to use it to get what you kids want?"
I listened. A bit later, I testified in front of the House Science space subcommittee. Speaking for the foundation, I laid out how we could use the space station as a customer and catalyst to accelerate the opening of the frontier.
Using the analogies of Lewis and Clark exploring in support of the pioneers, and of a government fort on the frontier as the seed of many a modern city, I spoke of how NASA could turn the space station from a dead-end financial black hole into a port and shining star of public-private partnership whose visibility, both literal and in real terms, would demonstrate a path forward that would help everyone get what they want in space.
I saw the space station not just as a port on the ocean of space and a lab at which we would learn how to live there, but as a primer for the economic pump that would help kick-start an industrial economy, as a testing facility for new ideas, as a purchaser of goods and services and, yes, as the first new building on the orbital street. In keeping with the then-current conceptual name of the station and as an indicator of its being the nucleus of the first community in space, I called it Alpha Town.
In that 1995 testimony and opinion pieces that followed, I called for all NASA transportation to and from the station to be provided by commercial companies, all new power needs to be supplied by off-site utilities to enable space-to-space power beaming, and all expansion of needs to be supported by leasing commercial or recycling existing space assets (including Mir, then scheduled for deorbit).
At the core of these ideas was a cultural shift at NASA, the idea being that if it adopted the role of gardener instead of turf protector, instead of being threatened by new space facilities or activities it could celebrate them and present them as signs of victory and success.
At the time this didn't go over well. In fact, a few years later, when some of us actually began to turn the Mir station into the first commercial space station, we got almost literally shot down. Rather than a welcome sign of success, our project was seen as a direct threat to the international space station. Now Mir is a very expensive aerospace-grade metal habitat for various sea creatures off the coast of
Tahiti.
I tell these stories to set up the rather interesting and somewhat ironic situation in which I find myself today in terms of the ISS. You see, as someone who once fought to stop its being built, and yet also is a hands-on advocate of not throwing away perfectly good space facilities, I am now in the position of defending that same station I tried to get canceled against those who would knock it out of space and add it to the list of government-funded anchor points for sea anemones.
Not only do I believe we must dramatically increase the maximum use of the space station by any and all, it is my stand that it never, ever under any circumstances should be brought back down to Earth — period.
The debate over the current use and future fate of ISS cuts directly to the core of what we are going to do there. If space is a government program, then throw it away and let's try and raise the money for the next one. If it is our intention to open space as a frontier to the people of Earth, then it is hugely important that we treat our first permanent outpost as a treasured resource, both figuratively and literally. Rather than a piece of space trash to be tossed into the sea, ISS is a symbol that we intend to stay, our first tiny island on this new ocean.
In the new ethos of the space frontier, when it comes to materials, supplies and facilities, we must insist on maximum utilization of anything we carry or find there and never throw away anything we can ever possibly reuse in any form. Thus ISS is not just valuable based on its current ability to provide leverage to open the frontier, but even at the end of its life as a human facility, if it is not turned into a human monument, it is still incredibly valuable as hardware and material at the top of the gravity well.
Making plans to deorbit ISS beyond emergency contingencies is not just irresponsible but short-sighted and self-defeating. Beyond where it fits in the frontier equation, the signal it sends to those in government who are going to be asked to support the next steps into the frontier is completely wrong and works diametrically against the efforts of anyone wanting to gain support for the next facility out into free space or further facility development investments on the Moon or Mars.
Why would any legislator, in the U.S. or a partner nation, support billions of dollars in funding for the next promised shiny object in space when the one we just built is being thrown away? It defies logic.
How could any honest NASA official look the U.S. taxpayers in the eye and ask for more money to develop an infrastructure in space that will allow us to permanently inhabit the Moon and Mars when they are going back to meetings at their headquarters to plan the deorbit of the first part of that infrastructure?
Instead, NASA needs to begin to plug the current ISS into a new agenda that is focused on how the U.S. government can support the American people in their quest to open, develop and settle space. This means an immediate focus on how to accelerate private-sector (academic and commercial) use of the station, removing roadblocks, increasing incentives and raising awareness. It also means showing how the ISS is not a roadblock or distraction but part of a new space infrastructure.
To move forward into the frontier we must use the ISS to its maximum capability to learn how to survive and thrive in space. Thus experimental focus should be in these two prime areas:
What we need to know to survive in space — health, well-being and reproduction.
What we need to thrive there — new products and ways to profit from the space environment.
If pursued vigorously and supported generously, these two areas of focus will transform not just the support ISS gets now, but how much support we can generate in the future for all of our plans, both public and private.
Then when the time comes, we either piece it out or push it up, way up into a storage orbit so time can be taken to decide on its fate.
This idea that "there can only be one" is silly, outdated and anti-frontier. We need to add more space stations to the mix including a gateway, gas station and free space research lab farther out in high lunar orbit, commercial facilities, new research labs and eventually human habitats in low Earth orbit and at the Lagrange points as part of an expanding infrastructure that includes the Moon and Mars. This simply will not happen if the word is out that the space community has just walked away from the taxpayers' very generous gift to us so far.
Finally, NASA and its partners on ISS need to develop a legal and technical plan to either hand off the station over time at the end of its "useful" life (for them) or place it in a high storage orbit so that pioneers can utilize it or its components to leverage other activities.
As we enter the frontier era, new thinking is required. Interestingly, it fits well with the new ethos of recycling, reuse and repurposing that is sweeping the younger generation. In fact, right now I have a young team working on plans to go out millions of kilometers to harvest materials for use in space. Frankly, on its way up I don't want our spacecraft to pass a multi-ton piece of burning aerospace-grade metal on its way down — just because some bureaucrat couldn't handle the paperwork.
Keep ISS alive!
X-37B space plane scheduled to return to Earth soon
Stephen Clark – Spaceflight Now
A robotic U.S. Air Force space plane is set to land in California as soon as this week after a secretive 22-month flight hundreds of miles above Earth.
Built by Boeing Co., the X-37B space plane will touch down on a runway at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., the Air Force said Friday, but officials did not say when the spacecraft was scheduled to land.
The return will end the mysterious X-37B space plane program's third mission, which passed 671 days in orbit Monday. Its activities in space have been kept secret by the Air Force, but some analysts speculate the winged spaceship could test next-generation surveillance, communications and intelligence-gathering instruments, deploy small satellites, or demonstrate new materials for use in future military programs.
The program's cost is also kept under wraps by the Pentagon.
Resembling a miniature space shuttle, the 29-foot-long X-37B space plane takes off on top of a conventional launch vehicle, deploys solar panels to generate electricity in orbit, then returns to Earth like a glider for an automated landing on a runway.
"Preparations for the third landing of the X-37B, the Air Force's unmanned, reusable space plane, are underway at Vandenberg Air Force Base," the Air Force said Friday in a press release. "The exact landing date and time will depend on technical and weather considerations."
The spaceship's return could come as soon as Tuesday. The Air Force has warned pilots to stay away from Vandenberg's three-mile-long runway from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. local time (1500-0000 GMT; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. EDT) Tuesday.
"Team Vandenberg stands ready to implement safe landing operations for the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, the third time for this unique mission," said Col. Keith Baits, commander of the Air Force's 30th Space Wing.
The X-37B space plane launched on the Orbital Test Vehicle 3, or OTV 3, mission from Cape Canaveral on Dec. 11, 2012, aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
The flight shattered the X-37B's officially stated orbital lifetime of 270 days, but Air Force officials offered no explanation for the mission's long duration.
The Air Force's two earlier X-37B missions landed in June 2012 and December 2010 after 224 days and 469 days in orbit.
The space plane set to conclude the X-37B program's third mission flew on the program's first space mission in 2010. Air Force and Boeing engineers refurbished the spacecraft and launched it again two years after it landed.
Experienced observers who track objects in space noted the X-37B space plane recently lowered its orbit to about 275 kilometers, or 170 miles. The two previous X-37B missions conducted similar maneuvers just before landing.
"OTV 3 recently lowered its altitude to roughly match that of its predecessors prior to their landings, which led some us to speculate that it may land in the near future," said Ted Molczan, a respected Canadian amateur satellite tracker who coordinates observations from worldwide observers.
Unlike the two earlier missions, the X-37B stayed at approximately the same altitude for most of its 22 months in space. The craft began lowering its orbit some time this spring.
When Air Force officials select a landing opportunity, ground controllers will send commands for the mini-shuttle to retract its solar panel, close its cargo bay doors and fire a rocket engine for a burn to drop out of orbit.
The X-37B will fall from space and plummet back into the atmosphere, weathering blazing temperatures with a shield of thermal blankets and ceramic tiles. The lifting body space plane will be flying on autopilot and touch down on Vandenberg's runway at nearly 300 mph.
With a wingspan of nearly 15 feet and a height of 9.5 feet, the X-37B is about one-fourth the size of a space shuttle orbiter. Its cargo hold is about the size of a pickup truck bed.
According to a Boeing fact sheet, the X-37B weighs about 11,000 pounds fully fueled for launch. It is made of composite structures, and its heat shield is made reusable insulation blankets and silica thermal protection tiles tougher than the tiles flown on the space shuttle.
Fitted with wings lined with heat-resistant ceramic tiles at the leading edge, the X-37B is designed to withstand fiery-hot temperatures of re-entry as it approaches Vandenberg from the west. A GPS navigation system will guide the automated spaceship toward the runway, and a three-piece landing gear will lower from the craft's belly just before touchdown.
The Air Force has plans to move the X-37B program's home base to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Boeing is overseeing modifications to two decommissioned space shuttle hangers at KSC, aiming to complete the work by December, NASA said in a statement last week.
An Air Force spokesperson said in July that the X-37B's fourth mission could return to Earth at the space center's Shuttle Landing Facility and tow over to one of the hangers for refurbishment for another launch from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Air Force X-37B Due to Land Tuesday, SWF Wants More Transparency About Its Missions
The Air Force announced on Friday that its secretive X-37B spaceplane, in orbit for almost two years, will land on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA. At the recent International Astronautical Congress (IAC2014) in Toronto, Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation encouraged the U.S. government to be more open about what the X-37 is doing as part of the Transparency and Confidence Building Measures (TCBMs) the United States is advocating to help ensure space sustainability.
Officially called the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), the vehicle resembles a very small space shuttle. The Air Force launches the robotic spacecraft for lengthy on-orbit classified missions. This flight is the longest to date. Launched on December 11, 2012, its mission duration will be approximately 667 days. There are at least two OTVs. The first, OTV-1, made a 224 day flight in 2010. The second, OTV-2, made a 469 day flight from March 2011 to June 2012. The OTVs are reusable and this is the second flight for OTV-1.
The Air Force statement said the exact time of the landing "will depend on technical and weather considerations." Bob Christy at zarya.info calculates a likely landing time of 17:30 GMT (1:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time; 10:30 am Pacific) plus or minus 20 minutes based on amateur observations of its orbit and the previous OTV landings. The classified nature of the missions prompts much speculation about what they are doing. In an era when the United States and other countries are advocating for establishing TCBMs to help ensure space sustainability, some question why the missions are kept secret. In an October 1 session at IAC2014 on "Assuring a Safe, Secure and Sustainable Space Environment for Space Activities," the Secure World Foundation's (SWF's) Samson cited the X-37B's secrecy as at odds with TCBMs. TCBMs are norms of behavior that "nations that mean no harm" should follow, she said, including a willingness to share information about technical capabilities in order to avoid misperceptions. She remarked that the U.S. "refusal to explain what the X-37B is [doing] has led a lot of people to assume the worst, and probably wrongfully so."
A 2010 SWF analysis concluded it "has near zero feasibility as an orbital weapons system for attacking targets on the ground" and has "limited capability for orbital inspection, repair and retrieval," although speculation often centers on exactly such missions. SWF concluded its most likely purpose is "flight testing new reusable space launch vehicle (SLV) technologies ... and on-orbit testing of new sensor technologies and satellite hardware primarily for space-based remote sensing."
The OTVs are launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL, adjacent to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). NASA and the Air Force announced last week that the Air Force will use two of KSC's Orbiter Processing Facilities (OPFs) to process the X-37B in the future. To date the OTVs have landed across the country at Vandenberg, but the NASA-Air Force announcement also said that tests were conducted to demonstrate the X-37B could land at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility. The landing facility and the OPFs are left over from NASA's space shuttle program, which was terminated in 2011.
The X-37, built by Boeing, initially was a NASA test vehicle designed to lead to an Orbital Space Plane that could serve as a Crew Return Vehicle to bring International Space Station astronauts back to Earth in an emergency and, eventually, as a taxi to take them to the ISS as well. NASA terminated that program in 2004 after President George W. Bush reoriented the human spaceflight program toward returning astronauts to the Moon instead of ISS utilization. The X-37 program then was transferred to the Department of Defense.
Smith to Bolden: Why Not Orion for Commercial Crew?
Dan Leone – Space News
House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) wants to know when NASA's Orion deep-space capsule will be ready to provide backup crew and cargo delivery services to the international space station and whether the Lockheed Martin-built vehicle should replace one of the two commercial crew taxis NASA is now funding.
Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. beat out Sierra Nevada Corp. in September for a pair of contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to complete competing crew taxis that would ferry crews to and from station starting in 2017.
"If Orion could provide a redundant capability as a fallback for the commercial crew partners, why is it necessary to carry two partners to ensure competition in the constrained budget environment?" Smith asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in an Oct. 7 letter co-signed by Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.), chairman of the House Science space subcommittee.
The 2010 NASA authorization law that requires the agency to build Orion also requires that the capsule be capable of servicing ISS should other U.S. vehicles be unavailable. Bolden has said repeatedly that NASA is not planning to send Orion to ISS. Doing so, the NASA chief has said, would be expensive, inefficient and possibly viewed by the agency's commercial crew partners as unfair government competition.
Smith and Palazzo gave Bolden until Oct. 21 to respond.
END
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