Please let me know if you wish to come off the email list.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
- Free Flu Shots Today
- Institutional Data Center System Outage - Tonight
- National Cybersecurity Awareness Month - Organizations/Social
- Deck the Door for Orion
- JSC Child Care Kids Trick-or-Treating
- Let's Celebrate JSC at the #JSCelebration: Dec. 12
- JSC NMA Book Club
- Virtual Seminar Speakers Wanted
- Promote a Drug-Free Workplace: Red Ribbon Week
- Parenting Series: Talking to Your Teen - Jobs and Training
- Correction: Modern Mentoring Agency Webcast
- JSC Imagery Online Training - Nov. 3
- Virtual Workshop: Relationships Matter - Community
- The Humans in Space Art Video Challenge is Open |  |
| Headlines - Joint Leadership Team Web Poll
The Wildlife Management Coalition is not one of our sustainability teams, although our critters have been rather active lately. Texas A&M avoided the upset this past weekend with a convincing performance in their "bye" week. Tennessee … not so much. We are barely a month away from Exploration Flight Test-1, Orion's test flight. It's not launching on a Saturn V or "Little Joe," so what's the launch vehicle? Proton? Falcon? Ariane? Next Wednesday are the Country Music Awards, so I have a throwback question for you. Without Googling it, guess who won Entertainer of the Year way back in 1967. I saw him in concert, and he was the best singer I've ever heard. Cheating your Heart on over to get this week's poll. - Free Flu Shots Today
The Occupational Health Branch is providing FREE flu shots to JSC civil servants and contractors who are housed on-site TODAY in the Teague Auditorium lobby from 8:30 a.m. until noon. To expedite the process, PLEASE visit the website below, read the Influenza Vaccine Information Statement and complete the consent form prior to arrival. Please wear clothing that allows easy to access your upper arm (short sleeves or sleeveless). This may be our last outreach session of the flu season, and flu vaccinations are the single best way to prevent seasonal influenza. Do not forget to cover your coughs and sneezes, wash your hands often—and, if you are sick, please stay home! - Institutional Data Center System Outage - Tonight
The Information Resources Directorate is scheduled to work on the JSC Data Center distribution switch to repair a hardware issue. The activity is scheduled for TODAY, Oct. 30, from 6 to 7 p.m. CDT. End-user impact to data center resources will be minimal. There will be a 15-minute period between 6 and 7 p.m. where data-center resources may be unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working diligently to address this issue. For questions regarding this outage/update activity, please contact the Enterprise Service Desk at 281-483-4800 - option 2, option 2. - National Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Cybersecurity Tip for Today: STOP, THINK, CONNECT Stop and think before you click on links and attachments. Most infections come in through "social engineering"—that is, convincing people to open up a file or click a link with a virus payload. Don't open email attachments from unknown sources. Organizations/Social - Deck the Door for Orion
Today is the last day to sign up for the Deck the Door for Orion contest! Pick a door in your organization's building, decorate with an Orion-related theme and show your support for Exploration Flight Test-1. What's in it for you? A chance to join in the celebration of Orion's first flight and the following: - 1st place: VIP tickets to view the launch
- 2nd place: Item flown on Orion's first flight
- 3rd place: Taking your selfie inside the Orion medium fidelity mockup to share with all your friends and followers
Enter the contest by sending an email to jsc-orion-outreach@mail.nasa.gov with the name of your team, participants, organization and location of your decorated door by Oct. 30. We will only judge the doors of the first 15 teams to enter. Please limit teams to 4 people per team. All JSC employees are encouraged to participate! Door judging will take place Nov. 13 and winning teams will be announced in JSC Today Nov. 14. - JSC Child Care Kids Trick-or-Treating
Join us Halloween morning (Friday) at 9:45 a.m. in front of Building 1. The children will start their Halloween costume parade and "creep and crawl" through the mall area, head past Building 12 and end up at Building 45. Dress in your best costumes! Bring candy, treats and all your friends to join in the JSC Child Care Center costume parade fun. Event Date: Friday, October 31, 2014 Event Start Time:9:45 AM Event End Time:10:30 AM Event Location: Starting at B1 ending B45 Add to Calendar Brooke Stephens x26031 [top] - Let's Celebrate JSC at the #JSCelebration: Dec. 12
You are invited, bring your family, too! All JSC team members are welcome to join the festivities on Dec. 12 at the #JSCelebration in Building 9 beginning at 4:30 p.m. Tickets, just $5, will be available at Starport in mid-November. There will be food trucks, a bounce house, robotic demonstrations, great photo opportunities, music, a cake decorating contest, Cosmo, Santa, door prizes, surprises and lots of laughter. Make plans to be there—it's going to be FUN! Event Date: Friday, December 12, 2014 Event Start Time:4:30 PM Event End Time:6:30 PM Event Location: Building 9 and surrounding areas Add to Calendar Susan Anderson x38630 [top] - JSC NMA Book Club
JSC National Management Association (NMA) Professional Development - 4 Disciplines of Execution Do you sometimes allow the "whirlwind" of urgent activity required to keep things running day-to-day devour all your time and energy, so there's nothing left to execute your strategy for tomorrow? If so, you're welcome to join the JSC NMA Professional Development session covering the #1 national bestseller business book "The 4 Disciplines of Execution," facilitated by Dr. Jose Bolton. By following the four disciplines—focusing on the wildly important, acting on lead measures, keeping a compelling scoreboard and creating a cadence of accountability—you can produce breakthrough results. All JSC team members (civil servants and contractors) are welcome to participate. JSC NMA members who RSVP to Bridget Niese by Nov. 14 will receive a copy of the book's executive summary. Event Date: Nov. 19 Event Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Event Location: Building 1, Room 257A - Virtual Seminar Speakers Wanted
JSC is hosting an agencywide virtual seminar next month as part of an effort by the Early Career Scientists and Engineers Working Group to promote work being done by early career scientists and engineers. We are looking for four early-career speakers (two scientists and two engineers) to give 10-minute presentations to an agencywide audience. The seminar is scheduled for Nov. 19 at noon CST. For consideration, please send a title and brief (three- to five-sentence) description of the talk you'd like to give. Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Event Start Time:11:45 AM Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Virtual Add to Calendar Aaron Burton x42773 [top] - Promote a Drug-Free Workplace: Red Ribbon Week
Did you know that according to the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 10 percent of Americans use illegal drugs or abuse prescribed drugs? Or that drug abuse is growing among people in their 50s, and that 15 percent of the population report becoming intoxicated at least once a week? Chances are that someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction. Stop by our table and learn what you can do to intervene. The JSC Employee Assistance Program will be in Building 3 café today, Oct. 30, from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. Please stop by and show your support. - Parenting Series: Talking to Your Teen
If you were to ask teens if they want more positive communication with their parents, the majority of them would say "Yes!" Can you believe it? Your teens want a connection with you as much as you want one with them! Your kids want to talk to you. No, this is not part of a late Halloween trick … but the "trick" with talking to teens is to listen before you talk. As with most of us, the most valuable and underused skill in talking, or communication, is the least verbal one—listening. We will discuss additional techniques that will help invite your teen to open up and allow him/her to listen to you, too. We will also identify the influence of teenage cognitive development and impact on their communication style. Please join Anika Isaac, MS, LPC, LMFT, NCC, LCDC, CEAP, as she presents "Talking to Your Teen." Jobs and Training - Correction: Modern Mentoring Agency Webcast
In an effort to promote continuous mentoring opportunities around JSC, please join us by participating in the Modern Mentoring agency webcast. This webcast will provide valuable knowledge focusing on 21st century style mentoring; demonstrate best practices; and give tips on how to better connect across the agency, including the use of the NASA Connect tool. Date: TODAY, Oct. 30 Time: 1:30 to 3 p.m. **note time correction** Location: Tune in to the Adobe Connect session here, or attend a viewing party in Building 12, Room 146 - JSC Imagery Online Training - Nov. 3
Need to find NASA mission pictures or videos? Learn how during a webinar on Monday, Nov. 3, from 3 to 4 p.m. Mary Wilkerson, Still Imagery lead, will show users how to find NASA mission images in Imagery Online (IO) and the Digital Imagery Management System (DIMS). Leslie Richards, Video Imagery lead, will show users the video functionality in IO. Register here. For more information, go to: IO and DIMS - Virtual Workshop: Relationships Matter
Relationships Matter: Acknowledging the Importance of Relationships and Practical Ways to Improve Relationships at Work There are a few slots left in this mini workshop sponsored by the agency's LASER supervisory development program. Get some tips to help you understand others better and deal with people more effectively. Learn how to create an environment that supports other people in feeling significant, competent and likable, and how to work with your own and others' defenses as they arise. With this knowledge, you can make more intentional choices about how you want to lead your people and encourage them to fully engage and contribute to NASA's mission. Target Audience: First-line supervisors, as well as other interested supervisors, managers and team leads Date/time: Tuesday, Nov. 4, from noon to 3:30 p.m. CDT. Location: Gilruth Center Ballroom Register in SATERN: LMD-LASER-RM (ID: 76030) Community - The Humans in Space Art Video Challenge is Open
Join NASA's International Space Station Program and Humans in Space Art in a journey of exploration. Interested college students and early-career professionals worldwide are invited to influence the future of life on Earth and human space exploration. Individuals and teams should submit a three-minute video capturing their vision of "How will space, science and technology benefit humanity?" Video artwork may be any style. Younger participants may submit a video, but artwork from artists of all ages will be judged together. Winning artwork will be given worldwide visibility and flown in orbit on the space station! Entries are due Nov. 15. There are only two weeks left! Please share this information with interested artists, teachers, parents and more. A printable poster in multiple languages is also available on the website. Thank you, | |
| |
| 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
Thursday – October 30, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Russian Cargo Ship Docks with ISS
Cargo launches to the International Space Station (ISS) usually are so routine that they barely get mentioned in the news, but the docking of a Russian Progress spacecraft this morning (October 29) is noteworthy following the failure of a U.S. Antares rocket last night. If nothing else, the Progress docking demonstrates that there are several ways to get cargo to the ISS and while the Antares failure is disappointing, it is not a showstopper for ISS operations.
U.S. Air Force Successfully Launches Eighth GPS 2F Navigation Satellite
Mike Gruss - Space News
The U.S. Air Force successfully launched another Boeing-built positioning, navigation and timing satellite Oct. 29, just days after saying first of its next-generation GPS satellites, developed by Lockheed Martin, is now expected to launch in December 2016.
Antares Rocket Explosion Leaves Questions and Dead Mosquito Eggs
Kenneth Chang – The New York Times
No people were hurt when a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station exploded just after launching Tuesday night — but the mosquito eggs did not survive.
Wallops Launch Site Spared Major Damage
Jeff Foust – Space News
A launch site at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility sustained some damage in the Oct. 28 failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket, but company officials said the complex escaped major damage.
Antares Failure: Damage Not Too Bad, Identifying Likely Cause Days Not Weeks Away
Orbital Sciences Corporation said today that an initial survey of the Antares launch pad and surrounding areas at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, VA shows that the damage is not as bad as initially feared. Also today, Orbital's President said it should be days, not weeks, before investigators can identify a "handful" of likely causes though finding the root cause will take longer.
Trying to go to space on the cheap has had disastrous consequences in the past
Andrea Peterson - The Washington Post
When reporters asked the first U.S. man in space, Alan Shepard, what he thought about as he sat atop a Mercury launch vehicle, he's said to have responded, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder."
Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion
Ukraine's Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the first stage of Antares
TASS, of Russia
Experts of the Ukrainian design bureau Yuzhnoye, which took part in designing and manufacturing the Antares carrier rocket, have launched their own investigation of an explosion of the Antares rocket Tuesday seconds after liftoff from a launch pad in Virginia, Ukrinform news agency said quoting officials at the design bureau.
The Antares Explosion: Confronting the Inevitable Risks of Space Travel
Michael Lemonick – The New Yorker
No one seems to know why an Antares booster rocket, operated by the Orbital Sciences corporation, exploded in a fireball six seconds after it lifted off from a launch pad, on Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday morning. The rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule packed with about two and a half tons of food, equipment, and scientific experiments for delivery to the International Space Station (I.S.S.). There were no astronauts onboard; NASA handed the transport of humans to and from the I.S.S. over to the Russian space agency in 2011, when the Space Shuttle program ended.
How a 1960s Soviet Engine Appeared on an Exploded U.S. Rocket (Video)
Matthew Bodner - Moscow Times
A U.S. commercial rocket powered by a Soviet-built Russian rocket engine exploded seconds after liftoff early Wednesday morning Moscow time, adding fire to debates concerning the U.S. space industry's heavy use of Russian rocket engines.
Asteroid-Mining Tech Among Casualties of Antares Rocket Explosion
The rocket explosion that destroyed a cargo vessel bound for the International Space Station Tuesday (Oct. 28) also took out an asteroid-mining company's first spacecraft.
Lockheed Martin opens Colorado commercial space HQ as it adds hundreds of jobs (Video)
Greg Avery - Denver Business Journal
Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. Wednesday opened the new headquarters for its commercial satellite business, heralding the addition of hundreds of local jobs by Colorado's largest private-sector aerospace employer.
MIT scientist proposes asteroids as destinations before Mars
Carolyn Y. Johnson – Boston Globe
Asteroid scientist Richard Binzel is often preoccupied by questions about the rocky bodies that sit in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Spraypainted styrofoam asteroids hang from the ceiling of his MIT laboratory -- evidence of his passion for a topic that usually captures public attention only when one passes too close for comfort.
'Interstellar' Black Hole is Best Black Hole in Sci-Fi
Christopher Nolan's movie 'Interstellar' will be an epic space adventure encapsulating humanity's need to explore the Universe, but it's the visual effects for the movie that are garnering early attention.
COMPLETE STORIES
Russian Cargo Ship Docks with ISS
Cargo launches to the International Space Station (ISS) usually are so routine that they barely get mentioned in the news, but the docking of a Russian Progress spacecraft this morning (October 29) is noteworthy following the failure of a U.S. Antares rocket last night. If nothing else, the Progress docking demonstrates that there are several ways to get cargo to the ISS and while the Antares failure is disappointing, it is not a showstopper for ISS operations.
Russian Progress spacecraft have resupplied space stations since the 1970s. Developed initially to support the Soviet Union's Salyut and Mir space stations, today they routinely take cargo to the ISS. Progress M-25M launched at 4:09 am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) this morning and docked with ISS at 9:08 am EDT. It is carrying 1,940 pounds of propellant, 48 pounds of oxygen, 57 pounds of air, 926 pounds of water, and 2,822 pounds of supplies.
Orbital Sciences Corporation's Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft would have delivered another 5,050 pounds of supplies, experiments and equipment on its third operational ISS cargo run if the launch had been a success.
Orbital's commercial cargo competitor, SpaceX, just ended its fourth operational cargo mission to the ISS and another is scheduled for launch on December 9. SpaceX's Dragon not only takes cargo to the ISS, but also returns cargo to Earth. It is the only ISS cargo spacecraft designed to survive reentry through Earth's atmosphere and splash down in the ocean.
Japan also launches cargo spacecraft to the ISS designated HTV for H-II Transfer Vehicle (H-II is the name of the rocket that launches it). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has launched four HTVs already and the next is scheduled for early 2015.
Europe developed the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to deliver cargo, but no more ATV launches are planned. The final ATV mission, ATV-5, is currently docked to the ISS.
In short, as NASA officials made clear last night, Antares was not carrying any cargo that was "absolutely critical" for ISS operations and the 6-person ISS crew is fine. The impact of the Antares failure is more likely to be financial in terms of who pays to build a replacement rocket and spacecraft, not to mention the cargo. Orbital's Frank Culbertson said last night that the company had "some" insurance for the launch, but was not specific about how much. He said the cost of the Antares and Cygnus was approximately $200 million. Costs will also be incurred for the investigation into the accident, making any needed changes to the rocket, and cleaning up the debris. Orbital provides cargo services to NASA under a fixed price contract ($1.9 billion to deliver 20 tons to the ISS through 2016), which may mean that the company will have to cover all those costs, but last night NASA's ISS program manager Mike Suffredini was vague about that issue. He said the contract was set up for such contingencies and NASA would work with Orbital to get the hardware replaced.
U.S. Air Force Successfully Launches Eighth GPS 2F Navigation Satellite
Mike Gruss - Space News
The U.S. Air Force successfully launched another Boeing-built positioning, navigation and timing satellite Oct. 29, just days after saying first of its next-generation GPS satellites, developed by Lockheed Martin, is now expected to launch in December 2016.
Col. Bill Cooley, director of the GPS directorate at the Air Force Space and Missile Systems in Los Angeles, told reporters in an Oct. 24 conference call that the service has been "spending a lot of time and attention" on its next-generation GPS 3 program, including the space and ground segment.
Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services of Dulles, Virginia, is developing the GPS 3 ground system, known as the Operational Control Segment (OCX), while Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver is prime contractor on the satellites. Both are behind schedule — the satellites originally were supposed to start launching in 2014 — and while Cooley said there is "some cause for optimism," he is nonetheless waiting for the contractors to "show" that they are making the necessary progress.
"We'd like to get the first GPS 3 on orbit as soon as possible," Cooley said.
Meanwhile, the Air Force on Oct. 29 successfully launched the eighth of the current-generation GPS satellites from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
The GPS 2F satellites, built by Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems of El Segundo, California, provide better accuracy and resistance to jamming than the previous generation of GPS satellites, most of which are still in operation.
In a press release issued Oct. 29, Boeing said the first signals from the on-orbit satellite were acquired about three-and-a-half hours after its 1:21 p.m. EDT liftoff. The satellite is expected to complete in-orbit testing and begin operational service in December, Boeing said.
GPS 2F-8 will replace an older satellite, launched in 2000, that will be placed into a reserve mode, Cooley said. The current GPS constellation consists of 38 satellites, 31 of which are in active mode.
The launch was the fourth and last of a GPS 2F satellite this year, a pace Cooley described as "the most aggressive launch campaign schedule" for the GPS program since 1993.
"The schedule this year has put the GPS team through its paces, with launches occurring approximately every three months to continue GPS modernization," Dan Hart, vice president of government space systems at Boeing, said in a prepared statement. "We typically were processing two satellites concurrently at the Cape, requiring strong execution, an unrelenting focus on mission assurance and solid team work with the Air Force and United Launch Alliance."
The next satellite in the series is not expected to launch until March 2015, Cooley said. The 10th is tentatively manifested for June 2015, with the 11th and the 12th — the latter being final satellite in the series — to follow in September 2015 and January 2016, respectively.
The launch was the 50th mission for the Atlas 5 rocket and came a day after an Antares rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corp. exploded shortly after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia. Following the failure, the Air Force's 45th Space Wing at Cape Canaveral conducted an evaluation and found that "common components do not introduce any additional risk to the success" of the GPS launch, according to an Oct. 29 press release from the service.
Antares Rocket Explosion Leaves Questions and Dead Mosquito Eggs
Kenneth Chang – The New York Times
No people were hurt when a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station exploded just after launching Tuesday night — but the mosquito eggs did not survive.
Julia Ellis, 13, was across the bay from the launching pad on Wallops Island, Va., less than two miles away, watching as the rocket lifted off. Amid the 5,000 pounds of cargo was an experiment that she and four classmates at Columbia Middle School in Berkeley Heights, N.J., had devised to study whether mosquito larvae can grow in zero gravity.
"Everyone was just so excited and happy," she said. "You could hear everyone cheering."
Then there was a flash, and the rocket fell. "It feels like someone smacked you in the chest," she said. "You hear one small explosion, one really large explosion and then two small explosions."
On Wednesday, investigators started looking through the wreckage of the Antares rocket, built by the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., one of two private companies that NASA relies on to take cargo to the station. Four previous Antares launches, three of which went to the space station, were successful.
During a conference call with financial analysts, David W. Thompson, Orbital's chairman and chief executive, said the rocket experienced a catastrophic failure about 15 seconds after liftoff, destroying the rocket and its payload. "It appears that the launch complex itself was spared from any major damage," he said.
Garrett E. Pierce, the company's chief financial officer, said the failure would not affect the company's finances this year, because insurance would cover repairs to the launching site and the payments from NASA that might be held back.
Orbital has a $1.9 billion contract from NASA for eight cargo flights, or $237 million each.
NASA officials said the loss would have no immediate effect on the operations of the space station, which has several months of supplies. A Russian cargo rocket successfully launched on Wednesday, as scheduled, and docked at the space station six hours later.
Among the items lost in the Antares explosion were a suite of student experiments arranged by NanoRacks, a small company in Houston that flies commercial payloads to the space station. Also lost were 29 nanosatellites, the largest weighing about 22 pounds, that the company had arranged to be launched from the space station.
Jeffrey Manber, NanoRacks's managing director, spent the day like an airline customer service agent trying to rebook passengers from a canceled flight.
"We're sitting here right now working through the needs of our customers," Mr. Manber said. "What are the priorities of the payloads? Who can rebuild? Who's ready to go?"
SpaceX, the other company that NASA has hired to ferry cargo, completed its most recent flight to the station last week, and its next rocket is scheduled to launch in December. Mr. Manber said some of the rebuilt student experiments could be on that flight. Mr. Thompson said he expected that the next Antares launch, set for April, would be delayed by several months.
While he said it was too early to speculate on why the Antares crashed, Mr. Thompson added: "Itwill likely not take very long — I think a period measured in days, not weeks — for the investigation team to define the handful of most likely causes of the accident. It may take a little longer than that to zero in on the final root cause."
Certain to be scrutinized are the two engines in the rocket's first stage. They were built in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s to power a giant rocket to go to the moon. After NASA's successful moon landings, the Soviets abandoned their effort, and the engines lay in storage for decades.
Then an American company, Aerojet, bought and refurbished them, and Orbital incorporated them into the Antares design.
One of the engines failed during testing in May, delaying the previous Antares flight. Orbital officials said the company was considering accelerating its plans to replace the old Soviet engines.
Orbital has had two other high-profile NASA failures in recent years. In 2009, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory on top of Orbital's Taurus XL rocket was lost when the nose cone protecting the satellite failed to separate, and the satellite crashed into the ocean.
Two years later, a similar failure destroyed NASA's Glory satellite, which was to have made climate observations.
Wallops Launch Site Spared Major Damage
Jeff Foust – Space News
A launch site at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility sustained some damage in the Oct. 28 failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket, but company officials said the complex escaped major damage.
"Based on the preliminary inspections that were conducted this morning at Wallops Island, it appears that the launch pad complex itself was spared from any major damage," Orbital Chief Executive David Thompson said in an Oct. 29 conference call with financial analysts.
In a statement issued late Oct. 29, the company confirmed that assessment. "The overall findings indicate the major elements of the launch complex infrastructure, such as the pad and fuel tanks, avoided serious damage, although some repairs will be necessary," the company stated.
A separate statement from NASA late Oct. 29 provided more details about the initial review of Pad 0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA Wallops in Virginia. In the statement, NASA said there was damage to the transporter erector launcher, the platform that supports the rocket as it is transported to the launch pad in the horizontal position, then erects it vertically for launch.
NASA also reported damage to lightning suppression rods surrounding the launch pad. The agency did not describe the extent of the damage to either the transporter or the lightning rods in the statement.
In addition to the damage to the pad itself, NASA said there was some damage to support buildings in the vicinity of the pad, in the form of broken windows and imploded doors. A sounding rocket launcher near the Antares launch pad and other buildings closest to the pad suffered the most damage.
Speaking at the American Astronautical Society's Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, Oct. 29, William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that nitrogen, oxygen and kerosene tanks near the launch pad were holding pressure after the accident.
In addition, the Horizontal Integration Facility, the hangar where Antares is mated with the cargo-carrying Cygnus spacecraft that actually makes the deliveries to the international space station, is unharmed. The facility is more than a kilometer away from the pad and was outside of the blast zone, Gerstenmaier said.
Orbital executives confirmed on the conference call that the Horizontal Integration Facility and other Cygnus processing facilities at Wallops were not damaged in the Antares explosion.
NASA cautioned in the statement that a full assessment of the damage to the launch site, and the time and expense to repair the damage, will take weeks. "In the coming days and weeks ahead, we'll continue to assess the damage on the island and begin the process of moving forward to restore our space launch capabilities," Bill Wrobel, director of NASA Wallops, said in the agency's statement.
Orbital, in its separate statement, also said that additional evaluation is needed to determine what repairs are needed and the schedule for completing them. The company expects insurance to cover the cost of those repairs.
"The cost of any necessary facility repairs is also reimbursable by insurance," Orbital Chief Financial Officer Garrett Pierce said in the call with financial analysts Oct. 29. "Hopefully, repairs will not be extensive."
Dan Leone contributed to this article from Huntsville, Alabama.
Antares Failure: Damage Not Too Bad, Identifying Likely Cause Days Not Weeks Away
Orbital Sciences Corporation said today that an initial survey of the Antares launch pad and surrounding areas at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, VA shows that the damage is not as bad as initially feared. Also today, Orbital's President said it should be days, not weeks, before investigators can identify a "handful" of likely causes though finding the root cause will take longer.
Orbital's Antares rocket with a Cygnus spacecraft full of more than 5,000 pounds of experiments, equipment and supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) failed seconds after liftoff from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops last night. No one was injured.
David Thompson, Orbital's Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and one of the company's founders, held a telephone conference call with investors and financial analysts to discuss the failure this afternoon. The company's stock was down almost 17 percent. Orbital is in the midst of a merger with ATK. When asked if he was considering a delay in the shareholder vote with regard to the merger, Thompson said it is too early to tell.
"Too early to tell" was an oft-repeated theme throughout the teleconference as Thompson and Orbital Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer Garrett Pierce provided what information they could about the failure and attempts to ascertain its cause. Thompson said he thought it would take only days, not weeks, to narrow the list of potential causes to a few, although it would take longer to determine the root cause. Based on past experience, he anticipates that the next Antares launch, currently scheduled for April, will be delayed. "I think a reasonable best-case estimate would bound that at three months but it could certainly be considerably longer than that depending on what we find in the review. I would hope it would be not more than a year," he said.
Although Thompson cautioned that first impressions are not always the correct ones in accidents like this, there is a widespread assumption that the rocket's first stage engines were at least part of the cause considering how early in the launch the failure occurred. Antares is powered by two NK33 engines built by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and imported to the United States for refurbishment by Aerojet and redesignated AJ26. Orbital has been considering replacing the AJ26s with a different engine in about two years because they "have presented us with some serious technical and supply challenges in the past," he said, adding that the accident may accelerate those plans: "I certainly think we can shorten that interval, but at this point I don't know by how much." The company has not revealed what alternative engine it has selected.
Thompson said the launch complex "was spared from any major damage" and the Antares assembly building and Cygnus spacecraft processing facilities "were not affected ... in any way." The company issued a press statement later in the day reaffirming that based on an aerial survey and an on-site preliminary visit, serious damage was avoided, but the full extent of repairs or how long they will take will not be known until a more detailed inspection is conducted.
NASA posted an aerial view of the damaged area on its website. NASA Wallops Director Bill Wrobel expressed confidence that "we will rebound stronger than ever." NASA said there was damage at the MARS facility to the transporter erector launcher and lightning suppression rods. A sounding rocket launcher adjacent to the pad and buildings nearest the pad suffered the greatest damage, NASA said, and support buildings have broken windows and imploded doors. Environmental damage appears to be contained within the southern third of Wallops Island. No hazardous substances were detected in air samples at the Wallops mainland area, the Highway 175 causeway, or nearby Chincoteague Island. The Coast Guard and Virginia Marine Resources Commission have not observed any obvious signs of water pollution. Anyone who finds debris is warned not to touch it and to call 757-824-1295.
Thompson and Pierce said insurance would cover the cost of launch site repairs to its facilities as well as the loss of near-term receivables that the company would have collected if the launch had been a success. The company still plans to submit a bid for NASA's follow-on Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract. Yesterday's launch was part of the original CRS contract under which Orbital was awarded a $1.9 billion contract to deliver 20 tons of cargo to the ISS by 2016.
An Accident Investigation Board (AIB) led by Orbital and including NASA, MARS, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will determine the cause of the accident and recommend corrective actions. Orbital's Dave Steffy, Senior Vice President and Chief Engineer of the Advanced Programs Group, is chairing the AIB.
The loss of the spacecraft is not expected to affect ISS operations. None of the cargo on this third operational Orbital mission to the ISS, Orb-3, was critical and a Russian Progress cargo spacecraft docked with the ISS this morning on a regularly scheduled flight bringing fuel, water, air, oxygen, food and other supplies.
Trying to go to space on the cheap has had disastrous consequences in the past
Andrea Peterson - The Washington Post
When reporters asked the first U.S. man in space, Alan Shepard, what he thought about as he sat atop a Mercury launch vehicle, he's said to have responded, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder."
That sentiment may hang heavy over the launch failure at a NASA facility near the coast of Virginia on Tuesday night. An Antares rocket from contractor Orbital Sciences came crashing back down onto the launch pad within moments of the launch of a flight intended to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The mission was unmanned, and there were no injuries reported on the ground.
The cause of the failure remain unknown. But Orbital has marketed the Antares as a "cost effective" way to launch payloads, due at least in part on its reliance on recycled Soviet-era rocket engines — a move that has drawn criticism from some, including competitor SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk. Here's what he told Wired in a 2012 interview:
One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.
Orbital has previously acknowledged some issues with the engines, with Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson telling Space Flight Now last year that the company has done refurbishing work on the supply. "As we went through testing, we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for a while, including some stress corrosion cracking," he said. "That's what we're correcting with the weld repairs and other inspections."
In May, one of the refurbished engines was destroyed in a ground test at a NASA center in Mississippi — with some sources saying it "exploded" — although the exact cause has not been disclosed. In a news conference Tuesday night, Culbertson said a thorough investigation would need to be completed before it could determine whether the engine was a factor in the failure.
NASA's share of the federal budget has shrunk dramatically since the peak of the space race, and it has faced significant challenges even maintaining its ability to support current missions in recent years.
Past U.S. launch failures have sometimes been blamed on poor work by contractors, who became more directly involved in U.S. government launches after a push toward privatization aimed at lowering costs in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the late 1990s, the U.S. space industry suffered a string of problems, including three military and two civilian flight failures. The military launch failures resulted in the loss of payloads totaling more than $3 billion dollars. A broad area review report of the issues ordered by President Bill Clinton cited contractor mishaps for the bulk of the problems, saying "factory-introduced engineering and workmanship errors predominate."
The final report from the board that investigated the 2003 Columbia disaster, which cost the lives of all seven crew members aboard the space shuttle, cited "years of resource constraints" as among the factors that resulted in the accident.
Ukrainian aerospace company launches own investigation of Antares rocket explosion
Ukraine's Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the first stage of Antares
TASS, of Russia
Experts of the Ukrainian design bureau Yuzhnoye, which took part in designing and manufacturing the Antares carrier rocket, have launched their own investigation of an explosion of the Antares rocket Tuesday seconds after liftoff from a launch pad in Virginia, Ukrinform news agency said quoting officials at the design bureau.
"We've begun the 'hotwash' already and are scrutinizing the possible causes of the explosion," the press service of the design bureau said. "The results will be reported later."
The two-stage Antares carrier rocket exploded in the air just seconds after liftoff from NASA's space center on Wallops Island in Virginia. It was carrying the Signus cargo craft with two tonnes of payload to the International Space Station, including 720 kilograms of equipment and materials for research experiments.
One of the experiments was to do chemical analysis of the substances formed by meteorites burning in the Earth's atmosphere.
Yuzhnoye design bureau developed the Antares' first stage.
Antares, which was known as Taurus II in the initial phases of its development, was designed for orbiting small payloads of up to 5,000 kilograms. Its developers are the Orbital Science Corporation and Ukraine's Yuzhmash R & D Group.
Under the terms of the project, the Ukrainian side designed and manufactured the first stage of the rocket, while the US company took charge of the second stage and the ground launch site.
The program was partly financed by NASA and the entire cost of its implementation reached $ 1.9 billion. The first four launches of the Antareses were successful.
The Antares Explosion: Confronting the Inevitable Risks of Space Travel
Michael Lemonick – The New Yorker
No one seems to know why an Antares booster rocket, operated by the Orbital Sciences corporation, exploded in a fireball six seconds after it lifted off from a launch pad, on Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday morning. The rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule packed with about two and a half tons of food, equipment, and scientific experiments for delivery to the International Space Station (I.S.S.). There were no astronauts onboard; NASA handed the transport of humans to and from the I.S.S. over to the Russian space agency in 2011, when the Space Shuttle program ended.
The Russians have been handling some of the station's supply runs, as well—an unmanned rocket blasted into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, early this morning. But, despite official declarations of confidence from NASA, it's always been somewhat anxiety provoking to rely on the Russians, which is why the U.S. has increasingly been using Orbital and the SpaceX corporation for non-human cargoes. Despite yesterday's explosion, the privatization of space missions will certainly continue. NASA simply doesn't have the resources to carry out all of its own launches. SpaceX, which completed its fourth I.S.S. resupply mission in September, will likely mount a fifth next month, to fill the gap left by yesterday's explosion. Orbital Sciences will be out of the game temporarily, of course, until investigators figure out what happened.
One possibility is the presence of a flaw in the Antares, whose engines are modified versions of a Soviet rocket engine developed in the nineteen-sixties. But the history of rocketry is so full of failures of all kinds that it would be foolish to jump to any conclusions. "Spaceflight is tough," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the lead scientist for the New Horizons probe, which is en route to a rendezvous with Pluto next July, told me. "They don't call it rocket science for nothing."
It's easy to wax philosophical when you're talking about a supply rocket that exploded without a loss of human life. Things will get dicier in 2017, however, when two private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, begin carrying astronauts to the I.S.S., an arrangement that NASA announced in September. When those men and women start taking their privatized trips into space, a choice that the space agency made back in the sixties will reverberate once again. In order to get Americans excited about the manned spaceflight program and the race to the moon, NASA turned its first seven astronauts into media stars. This was in sharp contrast to the way that test pilots, a few of those seven astronauts among them, had been treated in the past. The men who flew jet fighters while they were being developed were mostly anonymous, so that when one of them died in a crash or a fire it wasn't an occasion for national mourning.
But space capsules and shuttles have never been more than experimental. There were fifteen Apollo missions, and the Space Shuttles flew just a hundred and thirty-five times—far too few to work out all the kinks. In this way, the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts on the ground in 1967, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003, were, in a sense, inevitable. Problems were going to arise—the tragedy was one of timing, not of chance.
Similarly, no matter how carefully they focus on safety, Boeing and SpaceX will be operating experimental spacecraft. So will Virgin Galactic, if and when it begins flying tourists into space. Failures won't necessarily happen at a greater rate than they have on government spacecraft; private space companies have at least as much incentive as NASA to keep mishaps at a minimum, but given the scope of vision of some of what's been proposed, both by NASA and by private companies, there may be a point where great risk becomes impossible to avoid.
The probability of catastrophe only increases, for example, if astronauts fly beyond the moon, to visit a captured asteroid, or if they try to match orbits with a near-Earth asteroid—or, of course, if they eventually set out for Mars. It's not clear which, if any, of these adventures will actually happen, but given Americans' continued enthusiasm for space exploration, in principle at least, payloads will continue to be destroyed. And yes, people will occasionally die. This is nothing more than the nature of space travel.
How a 1960s Soviet Engine Appeared on an Exploded U.S. Rocket (Video)
Matthew Bodner - Moscow Times
A U.S. commercial rocket powered by a Soviet-built Russian rocket engine exploded seconds after liftoff early Wednesday morning Moscow time, adding fire to debates concerning the U.S. space industry's heavy use of Russian rocket engines.
While unfortunate, the incident does not threaten the International Space Station (ISS), which was hoping to receive supplies from the ill-fated rocket. The ISS crew has supplies to last until the middle of next year, and a Russian Progress cargo ship successfully lifted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome on Wednesday with goods for the station.
Regardless, the failure of the Antares rocket — which uses a Russian engine and Ukrainian components in the rocket's body — shines light on the deeply co-dependent nature of space flight after the Cold War.
As Dr. James Oberg, a former NASA engineer and expert on the Russian space program, told The Moscow Times by phone on Wednesday: "In the end, we are too mutually co-dependent to do anything but scream and shout and then take the money."
The NK-33
The story of the engine used in Wednesday's launch — the NK-33 — is a perfect illustration of this co-dependence. Originally built for the Soviet's massive N1 moon rocket, Russia's Kuznetsov design bureau dumped its stock of NK-33s on the market in the 1990s for purchase by Western aerospace firms.
A testament to Soviet engineering prowess, the NK-33 today is purchased by U.S. middleman Aerojet-Rocketdyne in bulk from Kuznetsov for restoration under contract for Orbital Sciences another U.S. firm. Orbital Sciences then plugs them in to the first stage of its Antares rocket.
But the decision to use a 40-year-old rocket engine has not been without its critics. Shortly after the explosion on Wednesday, an excerpt from a 2012 interview in Wired magazine with Elon Musk, founder of U.S. space firm SpaceX, made the rounds on Twitter: "One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were built in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s. I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."
But according to Oberg, this misses the point.
"High-pressure liquid engines [like the NK-33] were really perfected back during the moon race," Oberg said. "The designs since then have been marginally improved but not enough to justify the fabrication [production] expenses." This makes buying existing engines extremely economical for private space companies worried about their bottom line.
Glory Days
The NK-33 was a child of the 1960s space race, a result of failed Soviet efforts to answer U.S. President John F. Kennedy's challenge in 1961 to land a man on the moon by 1970.
The Soviets were slow to rally a response. Only in 1964 did Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev finally gave his ace in the hole — genius Ukrainian-born rocket designer Sergei Korolyov — the go-ahead to build a heavy-lifting rocket to eventually challenge NASA's Saturn V in the race to the moon.
But the program was troubled from inception. As with any large technological project, key design decisions and bureaucratic competition for lucrative contracts sparked serious internal power struggles between factions of Soviet space officials.
The most prominent internal struggle led to the creation of the NK-33. Korolyov had a long-standing dispute with another major player in the Soviet space industry — Valentin Glushko. The two had testified against the each other during Stalin's purges, resulting in both of them being thrown in the gulag.
Glushko and Korolyov tried to work together on the N1, but Glushko wanted to use a type of engine with poisonous fuel, something unacceptable to Korolyov. So, in an effort to find a designer that would remain loyal to his projects he had to look outside the space industry.
Nikolai Kuznetsov's design bureau, which had only ever built engines for aircraft and cruise missiles, stepped up to the task and produced the engines Korolyov needed for his massive rocket — first the NK-15, and later the NK-33.
Before the rocket even began testing in 1969, Korolyov died. Internal bleeding during an operation in 1966 took the rocket designer's life, and Soviet lunar aspirations went with him.
Without Korolyov to rally the disparate elements of the Soviet space-industrial complex, the N1 project was eventually torpedoed by Glushko and his political patrons in 1974, after the rocket had exploded on four consecutive launch attempts.
While Glushko would lead the Soviet space industry to several great accomplishments over the next 15 years, including its pioneering space station program and the Soviet space shuttle program, the Soviets would never land on the moon.
Korolyov's legacy lived on, however. His N1 was a huge rocket, using 30 of the NK-33 engines. Some 200 of the engines were built for the program, and after the N1 was scrapped no one was quite sure what to do with them.
Decades in Limbo
With the engines already built, the waning years of the Soviet empire saw numerous proposals to integrate the powerful NK-33s into existing and developing rocket designs. None of them came to fruition. The engines sat in storage.
"Evidently, the people who built these engines took very good care in mothballing them," Oberg said. "Russians use the word 'konservirovat' — which I always have fun translating into 'greasing', as they are referring to the process with [maintaining] weapons. Anyway, whoever did the onservirovat on these engines did a very good job."
When the Soviet Union collapsed and Soviet space firms were forced to improvise during the chaotic privatization process of the 1990s, they turned to Western markets and surprised aerospace companies with their high-quality hardware and relatively low prices.
Kuznetsov had hundreds of NK-33s sitting in storage. In the late 1990s, it went into partnership with Aerojet-Rocketdyne to refurbish the engines and sell them to commercial space upstarts in the U.S.
Lockheed Martin was interested in the engines for its Atlas V rocket, but in the end opted for another Russian engine — NPO Energomash's RD-180, which is still in production.
The engines waited in the U.S. for a new potential buyer until 2010, when Orbital Sciences bought 20 of the engines from Aerojet in 2010 for its Antares rocket, which was competing for a NASA contract to take over resupply launches for ISS from the retiring space shuttle fleet.
Back in Russia, there has been increasingly serious talk of restarting production of the NK-33 at the Kuznetsov factory in Samara, a city in central Russia. Russian media reports last year said Russian space officials were interested in resurrecting the engine for use in future Russian rockets.
The loss of the Antares rocket with a Russian engine on Wednesday is not likely to unravel U.S.-Russia commercial space cooperation. Both industries have become close over the past 20 years, engaging in a number of joint-ventures. Russian rockets are called upon frequently to launch Western commercial satellites, while the U.S. Air Force relies on another Russian rocket engine — the RD-180 — to power the Atlas V rocket for military launches.
Orbital will eventually have to find itself a new engine, as plans to restart production of the NK-33 have not materialized. Indeed, there appears to be no need for the engine in Russia or abroad, as the direction of the industry is changing to embrace cheaper and easier to produce technologies — philosophies enshrined in SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Russia's new Angara.
"Perhaps the future of high efficiency Russian engines like the NK-33 is already behind us. It's not the type of approach that the vehicles now on the drawing boards and approaching the launch pad are using," Oberg explained.
Asteroid-Mining Tech Among Casualties of Antares Rocket Explosion
The rocket explosion that destroyed a cargo vessel bound for the International Space Station Tuesday (Oct. 28) also took out an asteroid-mining company's first spacecraft.
Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket exploded in a huge fireball just seconds after launching from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Tuesday evening. The crash caused no injuries but destroyed Orbital's unmanned Cygnus capsule, which was toting 5,000 lbs. (2,268 kilograms) of food, supplies and other gear to the International Space Station for NASA.
Among Cygnus' cargo was the Arkyd 3 satellite, a tiny technology demonstrator built by asteroid-mining firm Planetary Resources.
The plan was to deploy Arkyd 3 (also known as A3), which measured just 12 by 4 by 4 inches (30 by 10 by 10 centimeters), from the space station into free-flying low-Earth orbit, where it would test out avionics, control and other systems for future asteroid-prospecting spacecraft.
Planetary Resources is taking the loss of A3 in stride.
"While we are saddened about the unfortunate consequences of this launch failure, our own development schedule, budget and plan are practically unaffected," Planetary Resources President Chris Lewicki wrote in a blog post today (Oct. 29). "In fact, we are already hard at work developing our next test vehicle, the Arkyd 6, which is planned for launch in Q3 2015," he added. "It will build on the learnings from our development of the A3 and iterate to our next level of design. Multiple spacecraft and safety in numbers is part of our strategy, and we will continue with it for just these occasions."
Representatives of the Washington state-based firm, which counts Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among its investors, have said they hope to launch asteroid-hunting "Arkyd 100" scouts to low-Earth orbit in the next few years. Further down the road, Planetary Resources plans to launch other robotic probes to investigate potential mining targets up close, in deep space.
Eventually, the company aims to extract and sell asteroid resources, starting with water. Asteroid water can be split into oxygen and hydrogen — chief components of rocket fuel — allowing voyaging spaceships to top up their tanks without returning to Earth, mining advocates say.
Lockheed Martin opens Colorado commercial space HQ as it adds hundreds of jobs (Video)
Greg Avery - Denver Business Journal
Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. Wednesday opened the new headquarters for its commercial satellite business, heralding the addition of hundreds of local jobs by Colorado's largest private-sector aerospace employer.
About 200 guests gathered at the company's 4,000-employee campus near Waterton Canyon in Jefferson County to mark the opening.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems (LMSS) is moving its communications and remote sensing satellite-building operation from Newtown, Pennsylvania, a location it's closing as part of a larger restructuring.
LMSS' top executive, Rick Ambrose, told the Denver Business Journal that concentrating the commercial division at the same site where the company builds GPS III global positioning satellites, GOES-R weather satellites and other projects for the U.S. military makes sense because that work relates to the company's A2100 core satellite platform.
Other projects, such as the OSIRIS-Rex asteroid mining probe for NASA, add to the kinds of work LMSS employees in Colorado could have a hand in. That provides LMSS flexibility to keep highly trained workers on staff as space projects come and go, Ambrose said.
"We get a lot of knowledge sharing as people work across the many customers and technologies we have," Ambrose said. "And you provide some stability ... This is aerospace and defense — programs build up and ramp down, and it's hard if you're in a remote site with people and giving them the kind of security they want with their families."
LMSS is one of four large business divisions of Bethesda, Maryland-based defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. LMSS is best known for its military and NASA work locally. But nationally, the company has built 100 commercial communications and remote sensing satellites for client companies dating back to the 1960s.
About 180 workers relocated from Newtown and other LMSS sites in recent months, filling about half of the positions LMSS ultimately plans to move in to the new commercial space headquarters.
The remaining jobs from the total of 350 commercial space positions being relocated to Jefferson County should be moved in by mid-2015, Ambrose said.
The positions are high-paying and span everything from engineering and software to supply-chain management and manufacturing, said Mike Hamel, general manager of the commercial satellite business at LMSS.
"The jobs that are coming here and will be created here are very, very important," he said.
The company expects growth across all aspects of its Jefferson County headquarters in coming years as both private sector space and, eventually, military and NASA space missions rebound and create more business, Ambrose said.
The commercial satellite headquarters building once was a testing site for Titan rockets but today has been repurposed as an office building. It's where satellite design, on-orbit operations and some testing is done. Manufacturing and some other facets of satellite production are handled elsewhere on the LMSS campus.
In September, the state office of economic development approved LMSS to receive up to $15 million in state tax breaks over the next eight years if it creates 500 new jobs.
It's money well invested, Gov. John Hickenlooper said in remarks before helping cut the ribbon on the commercial space headquarters building. The way the incentives are structured, the state will make more money in income taxes from each position added than is provided in tax-breaks to LMSS, he said.
Being home to the company's commercial satellite division is the kind of economic development win that states vie for nationally, Hickenlooper said.
"This is what it's all about," he said. "It's not just the 500 jobs, or the construction leading up to this — it's that Lockheed is a corporate leader."
With 3 percent of the workforce directly employed in aerospace, Colorado already has the highest rate of aerospace workers per-capita of any state, Hickenlooper said.
Other companies pay attention to that, and it adds to national recognition of the highly educated workforce Colorado offers and that draws the interest of employers, Hickenlooper said.
The state's aerospace industry roots are in military and civil government space projects, but federal budgets are tight and that's not expected to change in the next year or two.
Landing the commercial satellite production of Lockheed Martin is significant given aerospace trends, said Maj. Gen. Jay Lindell, the state government's aerospace and defense industry "champion"
"Commercial space is the way space is going — it's the growing segment right now," Lindell said.
About 40 of the commercial satellites that LMSS has built are based on the company's A2100 satellite platform, which LMSS is redesigning to be more capable and affordable.
The new version will be more compact inside a rocket fairing, allowing two to be launched side-by-side into orbit despite having larger solar arrays than current versions. The changes make the satellites cheaper to launch and give the satellite more power, the company says.
MIT scientist proposes asteroids as destinations before Mars
Carolyn Y. Johnson – Boston Globe
Asteroid scientist Richard Binzel is often preoccupied by questions about the rocky bodies that sit in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Spraypainted styrofoam asteroids hang from the ceiling of his MIT laboratory -- evidence of his passion for a topic that usually captures public attention only when one passes too close for comfort.
Which is why it might be surprising that Wednesday in the journal Nature, Binzel makes a strong case for why we should think about asteroids not for their scientific value, but as destinations for human space travel. Millions of near-earth asteroids sit further away from the moon, but much closer than Mars. Those, Binzel argues, offer appealing destinations for trips that could test equipment and protocols as technology and systems are developed capable of ferrying people further and further -- and eventually all the way to Mars.
"It's the destination that's important, not the object," Binzel said in an interview. "Certainly, some objects will be more interesting than others, but the fundamental goal is to have an interplanetary test flight."
Binzel is critical of a current multibillion NASA plan to lasso an asteroid and tow it into close enough range so that spacecraft and people could visit it, a feat that Binzel likens to putting an asteroid in a baggie. Such a stunt would, he argues, neglect the true power of these rocky bodies as landing spots between us and a two-year round-trip journey to Mars.
Binzel answered a few questions about his ideas. His answers, edited for length, are below.
Q: Why do you disagree with a strategy to tow an asteroid close to Earth and then visit it?
A: The main thing is that retrieving an asteroid is a misstep off the path to Mars. ... Mars is too far, Mars is out of reach of our first steps. When we first start flying our new system, we'll stay in the Earth-moon system because that is a safe place to test out your new hardware that makes great sense. And when we are confident that we are ready to try for the first time to leave the cradle of the Earth-moon system, we can simply go venture out into space and come back. That would be fine, but there are also an abundance of these asteroids and that's what is new -- the realization of nearly 10 million near-Earth asteroids larger than 10 meters. ... We have an abundance of destinations to go to when we're ready to take our first interplanetary baby steps.
Q: What kind of asteroid should we visit?
A: The flight matters more than the object you have right outside your window. Eventually, a scientist could say which [asteroids] out of 10 million -- maybe there are 50 to 100 that are more perfect [destinations]. Scientists could tell you which one they prefer, but the point is really having stepping stones for advancing toward Mars.
Q: What would you want to do once you get there?
A: I'm an asteroid scientist, but I downplay science. It is not the driver here. This is all about destinations, proving you have destinations capability. ... Yes, we can do experiments and explore what these asteroids are like once they're outside our window, but the most important thing is we're in interplanetary space.
Q: To identify destinations, you point out we would need to do a survey of nearby asteroids. Does this have implications for understanding hazardous asteroids that could strike Earth?
A: A survey should be of great interest to the human exploration side of NASA, because a survey will deliver thousands of destinations and sooner or later those destinations are going to come into play for human spaceflight. So isn't it interesting that the survey that will deliver human exploration destinations will, at the same time, address the long overdue assessment of impact hazards? So they converge. It's a win-win.
What I'm trying to insert that's new here is the survey is of enormous value to human exploration -- that adds a new element to motivate the survey.
'Interstellar' Black Hole is Best Black Hole in Sci-Fi
Christopher Nolan's movie 'Interstellar' will be an epic space adventure encapsulating humanity's need to explore the Universe, but it's the visual effects for the movie that are garnering early attention.
By combining the help of one of the world's leading black hole physicists with a cutting-edge visual effects (VFX) team, 'Interstellar' will depict the most scientifically accurate black hole in science fiction history. And, during production, some new discoveries were made as to how a black hole would appear if we could view it up close.
"Neither wormholes or black holes have been depicted in any Hollywood movie in the way they actually would appear," said Caltech physicist Kip Thorne in a behind-the-scenes video released by Paramount Pictures (featured below). "This is the first time that the depiction (of a black hole) began with Einstein's general relativity equations."
General relativity describes the nature of gravity. How a black hole, being the most gravitationally dominant object in the known Cosmos, would look to an observer can therefore be totally described by Einstein's equations — except for when tangling with the Black Hole Information Paradox, then you'll need some quantum equations to boot.
Thorne is a lifelong friend of fellow black hole guru Stephen Hawking and between both of the theoretical physicists, our modern understanding of how these singularities work has flourished. So with the help of Thorne, Nolan has done something very smart; he's been able to provide the movie-viewing public with a rare sci-fi look into the actual science of a black hole while maintaining an artistic representation that we can easily comprehend.
"The visual effects department under Paul Franklin and everybody at Double Negative took Kip's mathematical data and they created real visual representations of what a black hole is meant to look like," said 'Interstellar' producer Emma Thomas.
Warped Spacetime
While crunching the mathematics and arriving at graphical representations of Einstein's famous equations, Thorne and the movie's VFX team realized that if a star is positioned behind the black hole, the starlight may become trapped in the warped spacetime close to the black hole's event horizon. Known as gravitational lensing, this spacetime effect can be used by astronomers to detect exoplanets, for example. But during the production of 'Interstellar,' the team realized a spacetime subtlety.
Intuitively, light from a star behind a black hole may circle the event horizon several times before being released in the direction of the observer (in this case the 'observer' is the camera). Visually, the edge of the black hole will be stunning — several different images of the same star will be created at the event horizon's edge.
This produces "a strange sort of funnel in the sky," with a black disk surrounded by gravitationally warped starlight, said VFX supervisor Paul Franklin.
The Matter of an Accretion Disk
Of course, no black hole would be complete without the addition of a radiating accretion disk. But how would that appear on film?
As matter falls toward the spinning black hole's event horizon, the gas collects into a hot accretion disk, shining brilliantly. By adding the disk, "we found that if you then render this whole thing and you visualize it all through this extraordinary gravitational lens, the gravity twists this glowing disk of gas into weird shapes and you get this extraordinary 'rainbow of fire' across the top of the black hole," said Franklin.
"When I saw this disk wrap up over the black hole and under the black hole, I'd known it intellectually, but knowing it intellectually is completely different from seeing it," said Thorne.
It's all very well having a scientifically accurate black hole, but if the visual interpretation of a black hole's mathematics makes no sense, Nolan was under no illusions that he may have had to take some artistic liberties to make the black hole appear more familiar to the viewing public.
"But what we found was as long as we didn't change the point of view too much … we could get some very understandable, tactile imagery from those equations. They were constantly surprising," said Nolan.
Now Thorne and the VFX team are preparing some technical papers about their findings for the astrophysical and computer graphics communities. The publications will say: "Here are some things that we've discovered about gravitational lensing by rapidly spinning black holes that we've never knew before," added Thorne.
Science fiction movies are produced to entertain, first and foremost. But as computer graphics become more sophisticated and the science fiction-viewing public becomes more savvy, there is a growing motivation by filmmakers to make space phenomena as 'real' as possible. And often that will mean employing the help of scientists to make our most extreme space fantasies as scientifically accurate as possible to maintain a credible storyline.
'Interstellar' is shaping up to be one of those rare movies that will combine science and fiction, exciting the viewing public, potentially engaging us with astrophysics in a way we've never experienced before.
'Interstellar opens in the US on Nov. 5.
END
No comments:
Post a Comment