Have a great Veteran's Day tomorrow…..pray for our Veteran's and our active military women and men around the world and at home keeping us all safe. Thank them for their sacrifices every chance you get.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Badging Offices Closed for Veterans Day
- Nominees Wanted: Native American Heritage Month - Jobs and Training
- Job Opportunities |  |
| Headlines - Badging Offices Closed for Veterans Day
All badging offices will be closed tomorrow, Nov. 11, in observance of Veterans Day. Normal working operations will resume Wednesday, Nov. 12, as listed below: Building 110 - 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Building 111 - 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Ellington Field - 7 to 11 a.m. Sonny Carter Training Facility - 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. - Nominees Wanted: Native American Heritage Month
The November 2014 National Native American Heritage Month theme is "Native Pride and Spirit: Yesterday, Today and Forever." The theme demonstrates the importance of having high expectations for all Native American individuals, offering work environments open to the talents of all qualified individuals, and encouraging people to be empowered. We would like to highlight one JSC/White Sands Test Facility employee whose story serves as an inspiration to others. Please submit your nomination, or self-nomination, for consideration to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity via email by close of business TODAY, Nov. 10. Be sure to include the nominee's name, organization, job title and why you nominate the individual or yourself in 300 words or less. The selected individual will be highlighted in JSC Features during November! Jobs and Training - 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. | |
| |
| 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. |
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Badging Offices Closed for Veterans Day
- Nominees Wanted: Native American Heritage Month - Jobs and Training
- Job Opportunities | |
| Headlines - Badging Offices Closed for Veterans Day
All badging offices will be closed tomorrow, Nov. 11, in observance of Veterans Day. Normal working operations will resume Wednesday, Nov. 12, as listed below: Building 110 - 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Building 111 - 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Ellington Field - 7 to 11 a.m. Sonny Carter Training Facility - 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. - Nominees Wanted: Native American Heritage Month
The November 2014 National Native American Heritage Month theme is "Native Pride and Spirit: Yesterday, Today and Forever." The theme demonstrates the importance of having high expectations for all Native American individuals, offering work environments open to the talents of all qualified individuals, and encouraging people to be empowered. We would like to highlight one JSC/White Sands Test Facility employee whose story serves as an inspiration to others. Please submit your nomination, or self-nomination, for consideration to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity via email by close of business TODAY, Nov. 10. Be sure to include the nominee's name, organization, job title and why you nominate the individual or yourself in 300 words or less. The selected individual will be highlighted in JSC Features during November! Jobs and Training - 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. | |
| |
| 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
Monday – November 10, 2014
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: Expedition 41 Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman of NASA, Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency and Commander Maxim Suraev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) landed their Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft in Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. CT last night. The trio arrived at the International Space Station on May 29, and spent more than five months conducting research and maintenance activities.
Baltimore Sun: NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman was one of three International Space Station crew members who descended to Earth late Sunday to end a 5 1/2 month tour of duty. Wiseman was prolific in his use of visual social media to share his adventure.
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Soyuz TMA-13M carries three station fliers back to Earth
William Harwood – CBS News
A veteran cosmonaut, a German volcanologist and a Navy test pilot-turned-astronaut whose mastery of social media earned him -- and NASA -- a global following, undocked from the International Space Station and returned to Earth Sunday, descending through low clouds to a jarring parachute-and-rocket-assisted touchdown on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 165-day stay in orbit.
Expedition 41 blazes fiery trail across the atmosphere before safely landing in Kazakhstan
Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider
Three Expedition 41 crew members – are back home. After departing from the International Space Station (ISS ), a European Space Agency (ESA ) astronaut, cosmonaut and NASA astronaut conducted a fiery plunge through Earth's atmosphere on Sunday, Nov. 9. Consisting of ESA's Alexander Gerst, Roscosmos' Maxim Suraev and NASA's Reid Wiseman touched down northeast of the remote town of Arkalykat at 10:58 p.m. (9:58 a.m. Nov. 10 Kazakh time). The trio spent 165 days in space since they were launched to orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrone also located in Kazakhstan on May 29.
Adrift: Part 5
Beyond politics, America and Russia soar in space
Eric Berger – Houston Chronicle
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan -- Butch Wilmore and Alexander Samokutyaev sit elbow-to-elbow and knee-to-knee inside a tiny Russian spacecraft, waiting for the rocket beneath them to erupt with a million pounds of thrust.
Private space: Don't overreact to recent mishaps
Ledyard King – Florida Today
Two high-profile mishaps involving private spacecraft last week have sparked new debate about whether the government should increase its oversight and regulation of a fledgling industry tackling complicated, risky ventures.
WHAT WE THINK
Don't let accidents drag down commercial space
Orlando Sentinel
The contrast was as unmistakable as a solar eclipse. This week, as NASA unveiled Orion, its next manned space capsule, news was still fresh from two accidents last week involving private spaceships. The timing might have left critics who think space travel would be better left under government control feeling vindicated. But the best hope for reviving the world's leading manned space program still depends on nurturing both public and private components.
Editorial: Persevering with space exploration
Dallas Morning News
Films and books like Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff have fueled a nostalgic view of America's early experimentation with space travel, when heroic pioneers like Chuck Yeager pushed the envelope of supersonic flight and paved the way for future explorers. That adventurous spirit hasn't died; it's just gone private. Does that make today's pioneers any less heroic?
Dream Chaser lines up network of public airport landing options
Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has presented an overview on the wealth of potential landing site options available to its Dream Chaser spacecraft, outlining how the company could add an array of public airports – with minimum disruption – for both nominal and emergency End Of Mission (EOM) scenarios when the primary CONUS landing sites are not available.
Weak Sun Poses Radiation Risk for Mars-Bound Astronauts
Decreasing solar activity could make the journey to Mars and back riskier for astronauts, a new study warns.
NASA Approves Exoplanet Mission for Development
Jeff Foust – Space News
NASA announced Nov. 7 that it has given approval for development to proceed of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a spacecraft to search for extrasolar planets around the brightest stars in the sky.
Comet's brush with Mars more dramatic than expected
Comet Siding Spring's close flyby of Mars last month dumped several tons of primordial dust into the thin martian atmosphere, likely creating a brief but spectacular meteor shower with thousands of shooting stars had any astronauts been there to see it, scientists said Friday.
First-Ever Comet Landing Next Week to Be Truly Epic, Scientists Say
European scientists and engineers are gearing up to soft-land a robotic probe on the mysterious surface of a comet for the first time.
Boulder researchers anxious as historic comet landing nears
Southwest Research Institute a key contributor to Rosetta mission
Charlie Brennan - Boulder Camera, of Colorado
If all goes as planned early Wednesday, humans will land their first robot on the surface of a comet.
What's Happening in Space Policy November 9-15, 2014
Here is our list of space policy-related events for the week of November 9-15, 2014 and any insight we can offer about them. Congress returns to work on Wednesday, November 12.
COMPLETE STORIES
Soyuz TMA-13M carries three station fliers back to Earth
William Harwood – CBS News
A veteran cosmonaut, a German volcanologist and a Navy test pilot-turned-astronaut whose mastery of social media earned him -- and NASA -- a global following, undocked from the International Space Station and returned to Earth Sunday, descending through low clouds to a jarring parachute-and-rocket-assisted touchdown on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 165-day stay in orbit.
Despite freezing weather that hampered recovery crews earlier in the day, the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft, carrying commander Maxim Suraev, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and NASA flight engineer Reid Wiseman, landed on target near Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, at 10:58 p.m. EST (GMT-5; 9:38 a.m. Monday local time), three-and-a-half hours after the trio undocked from the orbiting lab complex.
Touchdown marked the end of a 5.3-month mission spanning 2,640 orbits covering more than 70 million miles since launch May 28 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in southwest Kazakhstan.
The Soyuz descent module tipped over on its side after touchdown, pulled over by its parachute. It took recovery crews about a half hour to get Suraev, Wiseman and Gerst out of the charred entry craft, carrying them to recliners set up nearby and covering them in thick blankets to ward off the cold. All three appeared relaxed and in good shape as the smiled and chatted with flight surgeons, technicians and assorted space agency officials.
"Here we have (Russia), Germany and the U.S., we've worked together for half a year," Suraev said. "Everything was fine, everything was in the spirit of cooperation. So I think everybody needs to learn and follow the example of ISS crew members -- don't get insulted, don't try to prove anything to each other, let's try to live together, side by side."
After brief satellite phone calls to friends and family, the station fliers were carried to an inflatable tent for routine medical checks. After that, the crew faced a two-hour flight to nearby Kustanai for a traditional Kazakh welcome-home ceremony.
Suraev then planned to board a Russian jet for a flight back to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City near Moscow. A NASA jet was standing by to ferry Wiseman and Gerst to Prestwick, Scotland, where Gerst will change planes for a flight to Europe. The NASA jet will take Wiseman and his contingent back to Houston.
Left behind in orbit were Expedition 42 commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova. They will have the station to themselves until Nov. 23 when Soyuz TMA-15M commander Anton Shkaplerov, NASA astronaut Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti arrive to boost the station's crew back to six.
"They say this is the most complex machine that humanity has ever built," Gerst said Saturday, floating with his crewmates in the Japanese Kibo lab module. "Now, even after half a year on board, it is impossible for me to fathom how complex it is to actually operate this machine. What I'm sure of is this is the finest example of teamwork that I've ever seen in my life. I'd like to say thanks to all the ground support teams, all those people who dedicated all those hours of work to us."
Wiseman became a rock star of sorts during his stay in space, using Twitter, six-second Vine videos and other social media avenues to share his experiences -- and spectacular views of Earth -- with a wide audience: 361,000 followers on Twitter alone.
"This is my first spaceflight, and I just wanted to share some of the newness, some of the uniqueness of this environment," he told CBS News in an interview last week. "And I think we've been successful with that. I think the Vines, putting this imagery in motion, has really captured the imagination of a good number of folks. And that was my goal, was to use that imagery, put it in motion, and let people try to experience this, let them try to live this with me. For that, I think it was great."
Gerst posted frequent Tweets as well, including this one Sunday: "Thanks to all of you for flying to space with me, it's been a blast. I am glad we did this together!"
Both men downlinked scores of Earth scenes, many of them spectacular views of towns, cities, mountains and other striking features.
"I think the biggest thing I'll take away from this is watching our Earth change over the six months I've been up here," Wiseman said, "watching the weather patterns change, seeing summer, fall and now into winter, it really makes you realize we don't just live on Earth, Earth is just a part of all of us. I really love looking out the window at that.
But he clearly looked forward to coming home and "hugging my wife and kids, that's number one."
"And then just being able to select the food that I want to eat," he added. "The food up here is actually pretty good, but (after) six months it'll be nice to be able to just get in the car, drive to the store and grab whatever I want and then having my kitchen at my disposal to make some good food."
He's also looking forward to simply sitting down.
"I haven't sat down in 160 days and just that feeling of sitting down and having gravity pull me down onto a chair, I'm really looking forward to that," he said.
The trip home began at 7:31 p.m. when the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft undocked from the space station's Rassvet module as the crew sailed 260 miles above northern China.
After moving a safe distance away, Suraev monitored a four-minute 41-second rocket firing starting at 10:05 p.m. to slow the ship by about 286 mph, just enough to lower the far side of the orbit deep into the atmosphere. After a half-hour free fall, the three modules making up the Soyuz spacecraft separated and the crew, strapped into the central descent module, plunged back into the discernible atmosphere around 10:35 p.m.
Using atmospheric friction to slow down, the descent module reached an altitude of just under 7 miles at 10:44 p.m. when the main parachute was expected to deploy. Touchdown followed about 15 minutes later.
During his stay aboard the station, Wiseman participated in two spacewalks, venturing outside with Gerst on Oct. 7 to move a pump module and again on Oct. 15, with Wilmore, to replace a solar array electronics component. He and Gerst also carried out a full slate of science experiments, performed routine maintenance and participated in numerous interviews and videochats with reporters and students.
"I'm going to miss the work," he said. "Really, the work up here, I didn't expect this, but it turns out it's actually really fun. I love doing the science, I love working with the team on the ground. So from the start to end of my day, I'm going to miss it all."
Near the end of his stay in space, two dramatic failures sent shock waves through the commercial space industry. An Orbital Sciences Antares rocket carrying a cargo capsule bound for the space station exploded 15 seconds after launch from Wallops Island, Va. on Oct. 28. Three days later, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane broke apart during a test flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and injuring another.
Wiseman said he had friends at both companies "and that touches me pretty closely."
"The great part about this industry is, it will be better at the end for both of these mistakes, or mishaps, and we'll pull through. ... We'll figure out what happened, and if it's the correct time we'll fly again, both of these vehicles, and if they determine that they can't, then we'll look for other options down the road. This is a setback that happens in this industry, and there will be recovery, there will be healing, and then there will be success down the road."
Expedition 41 blazes fiery trail across the atmosphere before safely landing in Kazakhstan
Jason Rhian – Spaceflight Insider
Three Expedition 41 crew members – are back home. After departing from the International Space Station (ISS ), a European Space Agency (ESA ) astronaut, cosmonaut and NASA astronaut conducted a fiery plunge through Earth's atmosphere on Sunday, Nov. 9. Consisting of ESA's Alexander Gerst, Roscosmos' Maxim Suraev and NASA's Reid Wiseman touched down northeast of the remote town of Arkalykat at 10:58 p.m. (9:58 a.m. Nov. 10 Kazakh time). The trio spent 165 days in space since they were launched to orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrone also located in Kazakhstan on May 29.
The three space-flyers return home after their Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft disembarked from the ISS at 7:31 p.m. EDT (0031 GMT), with the reentry module arcing a white-hot trail across the stratosphere. Conditions on the ground were chilly, with temperatures around 20 degrees and with clouds obscuring the landing which was by all accounts: "flawless."
Within just a few months, tensions between Russia and the United States placed the future of the 16-nation project in doubt. With Russia's military actions in the Crimea, the U.S. imposed an array of sanctions which caused Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin stated that U.S. use of Russian-made rocket engines could not be used for Department of Defense missions, that Russia would discontinue cooperating on the ISS in 2020 – and other, various threats.
Things appear to have calmed down since then and the situation has gone back to normal (relatively speaking).
Given that seats on board Soyuz run an estimated $70 million a seat, NASA has been working to have U.S. commercial companies take over the responsibility of delivering cargo and crews to the International Space Station. At least some of that effort has experienced difficulties of late.
On Tuesday, Oct. 28 at 6:22 p.m. EDT (2222 GMT) an Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket encountered an anomaly within the first few seconds of flight which caused range safety to activated the flight termination system – resulting in a massive fireball which enveloped NASA's Wallops Flight Facility's Pad-0A.
Politics and trends notwithstanding, the six (now three) person crew on the station have being working to conduct a wide range of science experiments. In the end, the station cannot operate without the various partners collaborating with one another.
While one segment of an ISS Expedition has returned home, yet another is getting ready to ride fire aloft. Expedition 42 crew members, ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, NASA's Terry Virts and Roscosmos' Anton Shkaplerov will ride the Soyuz 41 rocket
Launching on the Soyuz 41 launch vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, the booster will take the trio on the first leg of a journey that is scheduled to last six months. The fact that more than three years after the final space shuttle drew to a close – NASA is still unable to launch astronauts on its own.
While NASA is hoping to send crews to destinations beyond the orbit of Earth, it is depending on Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX ) to handle the transportation of crews to the microgravity research facility.
Shkaplerov took point, directing the spacecraft to carry out the plunge which put it on course for reentry and then, home. The Soyuz TMA-15M backed away from the Rassvet (Russian for "Dawn") module right on time at 6:31 p.m. EDT (0031 GMT).
After this Soyuz left the so-called "keep out" sphere which surrounds the ISS, the spacecraft conducted a deorbit burn, which slowed the spacecraft approximately 180 miles (451 meters). This was just enough to allow Soyuz to stop falling "around" Earth – and start falling toward it.
Some 6 thrusters provided attitude control, helping finish the job that the parachutes started, slowed the craft at the most critical moment of descent. Just seconds before this pivotal event the heat shield which had protected the trio from the extreme temperatures of descent – was jettisoned.
The crew, weakened by their stay on orbit, were carried from their spacecraft and deposited into chairs nearby. Despite the chagrin of many in NASA, past arrivals were celebrated with the flow of vodka. Given that the crew had traveled an estimated 70 million miles – perhaps a celebration was in order. Shortly afterward they were transported to an inflatable medical tent.
Recovery crews arrived just a short period after the crew touched down and began the process of reintroducing them to life on Earth after their six-month stint on orbit. It is at this point that the crew separated with Wiseman, Gerst and Suraev going their separate ways. Wiseman and Gerst will initially be sent to Scotland, before Gerst heads to the European Astronaut Center located in Koln, Germany – with Wiseman traveling to Johnson Space Center in Texas. Suraev to Star City located near Moscow.
One aspect of scientific research that Expedition 41 conducted was human health management for long duration space travel. The test comes at a time when both NASA and Roscosmos are planning year long stays aboard the ISS starting next year.
"It went well, nominal for us, for me, my first trip into space," Gerst said. "…great team with our leader, Max. Thank you for your support everybody!"
With the Expedition 41 crew safely home, the Expedition 42 mission can officially get underway. Currently on orbit are cosmonauts Alexander Samoukutyaev, ESA astronaut Elena Serova and NASA astronaut, Barry Wilmore.
Adrift: Part 5
Beyond politics, America and Russia soar in space
Eric Berger – Houston Chronicle
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan -- Butch Wilmore and Alexander Samokutyaev sit elbow-to-elbow and knee-to-knee inside a tiny Russian spacecraft, waiting for the rocket beneath them to erupt with a million pounds of thrust.
Once, they were top gun fighter pilots and Cold War adversaries, trained to shoot each other down.
Now, they are wingmen and comrades. They rely on one another for their lives, having spent the last two years learning how to keep one another away from harm.
Samokutyaev will fly Wilmore in this Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station. Wilmore will ensure Samokutyaev makes it safely back inside after he walks in space.
"When it gets into the political realm, there are some differences," Wilmore said of the Russian and American pairing in space.
"Man to man, we differ on very little. There are people passionate about human spaceflight in America, just like in Russia. And when you're passionate about something you can figure out a way to get it done together."
There are never guarantees with rockets, but Wilmore and NASA have no choice but to trust their fates to the Russians, America's great Cold War enemy.
Without the space shuttle this launch pad in Khazakhstan is NASA's sole lifeline to the $140 billion national laboratory that flies around the planet. Having to hitch a ride from the nation we beat to the moon could have been a bitter irony for NASA. Instead, it's a paradox the space agency has had to embrace -- the only way for NASA and the United States to maintain their preeminent role as space pioneers may well be to explore the universe with Russia, the Europeans and, if Mars really is the ultimate frontier, the Chinese.
To reach this barren desert in eastern Kazakhstan, Wilmore flew 12 hours non-stop from Houston to Moscow in August after his wife and two daughters dropped him off at Bush Intercontinental Airport. For NASA astronauts accustomed to beachside shuttle launches in sunny Florida, it's a radical change. Wilmore has said those goodbyes, and made that flight, a dozen times.
But that hardly mattered on Sept. 26, in the middle of the night, with the Soyuz capsule bathed in brilliant white light beneath an inky black sky.
Nearby a small contingent from Houston's Johnson Space Center, who've taken up temporary residence here in Khazakhstan, ran through their mental checklists. Wilmore's wife, Deanna, held her breath.
If all goes well, in a moment the Russian rocket would belch a ribbon of fire and blast skyward.
Russia has a Johnson Space Center, too, where its astronauts train. It's called Star City. Built in 1960 amid a forest of birch trees, the space center lies 25 miles east of Moscow, the sprawl of which now approaches its fence line.
Wilmore arrived in mid-August for the September launch, virtually a native son. He'd spent much of the past two years here living alone, training for the mission, earning the equivalent of a third graduate degree. The former electrical engineering major and star linebacker at Tennessee Tech now speaks Russian. Russia's space program is so formal that Wilmore had to pass oral exams, in Russian, conducted by panels of three uncompromising scientists and engineers.
There are some touches of home in Star City. NASA astronauts live in six "cottages" that wouldn't look at all out of place on a cul-de-sac in Katy, each an incongruous slice of American suburbia complete with leather sofas, hard wood floors and big screen TVs . Inside cottage four, where Wilmore stayed, Russian-English language books line the shelves. Down the wooden stairs there's an old school weight room in the basement, with barbells, treadmills and a bench press.
In the cottage's front room there are four bikes, two for adults, two for kids. During his final month-long stay in Star City, as Wilmore completed training, Deanna and his daughters, Daryn, 10, and Logan, 7, who are homeschooled back in Clear Lake, visited for several days. They rode on trails through the woods and played in a small lake.
NASA has had a permanent presence in Star City since 1994, when astronaut Norman Thagard began training for both the first American launch on a Soyuz spacecraft, and first visit to Russia's Mir space station, which finally broke down in 2001. Back then, there were no "cottages." He lived in a spartan, Soviet-syle flat.
As Thagard launched in 1995, back in the United States a college student named Sean Fuller watched on TV. Two years later, after finishing a degree in engineering physics at Embry Riddle University and landing a job with NASA, Fuller came to Russia to help plan astronaut Dave Wolf's Soyuz flight.
Those were the early days of the international partnership, including Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, to build and operate the International Space Station. The two Cold War enemies were still feeling one another out. There was, Fuller recalled, a lot of "trust but verify."
Today, having reached middle age, Fuller has become NASA's man in Moscow, leading the space agency's operations in Russia and Kazakhstan. An affable man with an engineer's mind but a diplomat's words, Fuller's staff manages astronaut visits to Star City. His flight controllers work side-by-side with station flight directors at Russia's mission control. He has mastered most creature comforts thanks to his Amazon account, except one -- every time a delegation arrives from Houston, they must, on Fuller's directive, bring chips and salsa.
Even as U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated this year, Fuller says the partnership between Roscosmos and NASA has rarely been closer. That's because Russians value personal relationships, he said, and more than 15 years working alongside Americans has strengthened those bonds.
Americans and Russians share a common goal of flying safely, first around the Earth and then to destinations such as the moon and Mars. The two countries realize the only way to do that now may be together, and by doing so they are setting an example for humanity.
"It's one of the things we often talk about with our Russian colleagues over toasts," Fuller said.
"The space station is this bright star shining overhead. There are troubled areas in the world, but the station stretches well above and beyond that. We may can come from very different backgrounds, but we can still come together and develop the greatest engineering achievement of mankind in peacetime."
If Star City is Russia's Johnson Space Center, Baikonur is its Cape Canaveral.
It's not much to look at. More camels than people may live in Baikonur. The nearest major city, Tashkent, lies 500 miles away. But in the years following World War II, as the Soviets looked for a place to test ballistic missiles, this place seemed ideal. Uninhabited, relatively close to the equator and near the Syr Darya river, the steppe had 300 sunny days a year.
Ironically, Baikonur means "rich soil," which is true for the original Baikonur hundreds of miles to the north. In a classic bit of Cold War gamesmanship, Soviet forces built a fake launch site at the town of Baikonur and the real thing in the desert. Eventually, when the ruse was up, they simply called the new site Baikonur too.
After the Soviet Union broke up Russia had to lease it from the Khazaks, but the town retains the look of 1950s and 1960s Soviet architecture with block apartments. The handful of trees that have been coaxed to grow in the harsh environment are painted white at the base to prevent their bark from cracking during winter freezes.
The spaceport, a 30 minute drive from town on jarring roads, shows its age with buildings in various states of collapse, most dating to a time when Americans watched The Honeymooners on black-and-white TVs.
Two weeks before his launch, Wilmore arrived there by jet from Star City and went into quarantine.
Despite the crumbling infrastructure, Russia launches more rockets than anyone in the world with time-tested hardware -- American engineers still don't understand some of the intricacies of their engines -- and nearly sacrosanct traditions.
The Russians love their traditions. They do a lot of things because that's what Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the earth, did. Gagarin's rocket rolled out at 7 a.m. before his launch, and precisely at 7 a.m. on the Tuesday before Wilmore's Friday launch, a train pulled his Soyuz rocket out of the hangar where it was built.
Broken clouds colored the dawn sky as Wilmore's family looked on, an arms length from the tracks. From here the train will crawl along five miles of track to reach the launch pad.
Later, near the pad, the train approached a railroad crossing. Astronaut Scott Kelly was among the onlookers there. He's preparing for his own launch from Baikonur in six months, when he is to become the first U.S. astronaut to spend a full year in space. Scientists hope Kelly's flight will improve their understanding how long-duration spaceflight affects human health, lessons NASA must learn to safely fly to Mars or beyond.
NASA spends the largest single chunk of its $17.5 billion budget, about $3 billion, on maintaining the station.
As its biggest selling point NASA touts the station as a unique platform for scientific experiments in a weightless environment. And while it is, critics who want NASA to push beyond Earth orbit contend the station is a drag on the space agency's limited budget. Viewed only as a science laboratory, it may be. But for would-be explorers, the station also offers an essential gateway to deep space.
Not only are physicians learning how to keep astronauts healthy on long trips, engineers use the station to build life-support systems to keep astronauts alive away from the umbilical of Earth.
A Mars mission might take two or three years, explained Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut who has twice lived on the station. Mars-bound explorers couldn't possibly bring all of their drinking water with them.
"Imagine I have a crew, they just departed for Mars and their toilet breaks," Pettit said. "You've probably just killed the crew. And it will be a slow, long, tortuous death."
That's because astronauts going to Mars will have to drink their recycled pee, and the toilet is an important part of the water recycler. So before leaving for Mars, NASA needs a toilet it knows darn well will work.
"The station is the perfect place to do that," Pettit said.
If a toilet breaks on station NASA can send up a replacement. There are no supply depots on the road to Mars. So during his time aboard the station, Wilmore will experiment with a 3D printer that could fabricate parts for in-flight repairs.
The science, health and engineering of long duration flight are interesting problems, Kelly said from beside the train tracks. And they are solvable. But there's one problem NASA hasn't been able to crack since the days of Apollo, when President Kennedy used the space agency as a weapon in the Cold War.
Mars might cost as much as half a trillion dollars.
"It's going to be really expensive," Kelly says. "The more people you have sharing the expense, the less of a burden it will be on the American public."
Soon the train reached the pad where, in 1955, some 15,000 Soviet workers toiled for 19 months to pour concrete and build the launch towers.
Two years later the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik. And in 1961 Gagarin made history with a 108-minute spaceflight. Wilmore's will be the pad's 496th launch.
The train backed the rocket in, carefully lifting it into a standing position. Four clamps suspended it into place, above the ground. When the rocket launches and its thrust exceeds gravity, the clamps will fall away.
For the astronaut families it's an intimate moment. To Deanna Wilmore, who can almost touch her husband's rocket, "This is a surreal experience."
In three days, fire will engulf the very spot where she's standing. But she's not nervous. For Deanna, who like Butch grew up in Tennessee and exudes Southern charm, the experience is a blessing. The safety of Butch's launch is in God's hands.
And she does not lack faith.
It also helps that, like the launch pad, the Soyuz is a reliable workhorse. After fatal accidents in 1967 and 1971 the Soyuz rocket and capsule have always gotten humans to and from space in one piece.
It hasn't always been easy for the Russians to watch the Americans and their flashy space shuttles.
Russia remained second fiddle in space until the summer of 2011, when a failure to prepare for life after shuttle left America with a spaceflight gap that will last until at least 2017. Now the tables have turned -- NASA must defer to the Russians' rocket superiority, which gives them the upper hand in the space station partnership.
When the political rift between the two countries deepened this spring, Russia's chief space official, Dmitry Rogozin, created a firestorm by saying if Americans didn't like his country's Ukraine policy they could get to space by jumping on a trampoline. Later he said Russia didn't want to work with America on the station beyond 2020 because it was an "unreliable partner." U.S. politicians responded with Congressional hearings and more rhetoric.
One person who didn't respond was Michael Suffredini, who manages the station program for NASA, from Houston. Balding and bespectacled, with a gifted engineering mind, Suffredini is also known for a fiery temper and a lack of patience with unprepared subordinates.
In response to provocations this spring and summer Suffredini did something he is not known for. He held his tongue. Reality eventually caught up to Rogozin. America spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year buying Soyuz seats and Russian rocket engines for its commercial launchers. Brought to heel by internal pressure Rogozin backed off. Russia, he said in September, would be happy to work with America through at least 2024.
Now on the day before Wilmore's launch, Suffredini has established a temporary command center on the second floor of the Baikonur Hotel, the nicest in town. Yellow leather chairs ring a large conference table, with monitors on the wall showing NASA TV. "A lot of people don't get this, but the conflict in Ukraine is an excellent example of how we are holding our two countries together by space," he said. "That is the one area that hasn't been touched by either nation. That's NASA helping national and global security."
And NASA should be allowed to go one step further, he and others at the space agency say, by bringing China into the partnership. "It is very, very, very difficult to get to the point we are at with the Russians today," Suffredini said. "It takes time to agree to build systems that are going to rely on one another."
Some Congressional leaders adamantly oppose NASA's working with China because they fear the loss of technical secrets. But if NASA could work with one Cold War enemy, some say, surely it can work with another, now America's largest trading partner. Leroy Chiao, a four-time NASA astronaut who launched from Baikonur a decade ago and commanded the station, is among those who would like to see it happen.
"China would be a very different partner," said Chiao, whose parents grew up in China.
"With Russia, by and large the United States is footing the bill. Russia has been unable to. They've done a few things in-kind. I mean look at how much we're paying for Soyuz seats these days. China would be a very different partner. Their economy is going well."
There's money, of course, but international cooperation promises NASA something potentially even more valuable, stability. A large international partnership could force Washington to stick to its NASA commitments.
The list of space exploration programs canceled by new Presidents is long. In contrast the International Space Station survived near death in 1992, six years before its first module flew, because of its foreign policy implications. It survived in 2010, too, because of international involvement.
A broad international exploration goal would leave NASA far less susceptible to the vagaries of new Presidents and Congresses.
Later in the day before launch, as the sun set, Suffredini and other key NASA officials walked from the Baikonur Hotel across the street to the more basic cosmonaut quarters where Wilmore has been in quarantine for two weeks.
There, they met him one final time before the launch, wishing him good luck and Godspeed. After they left Wilmore and his two Russian cosmonauts made the traditional walk out of the hotel, down a path lined with onlookers, to waiting buses that would take them to suit up, and then onto the launch pad.
For Wilmore it was a special moment. Because he'd been in quarantine since his family arrived in Baikonur, he'd mostly seen his kids through glass walls, almost is if they were prison visitations. This was his final chance to see them up close, in the flesh. As the astronauts walked toward the buses they made a right-hand turn. Deanna and the two girls stood just behind the ropes. Wilmore broke his stride, and took a step toward his daughters, saying, "I love you."
It was a break with Russian tradition. His kids had come halfway around the world and he worried they might be overwhelmed by the launch. Daddy really was going to space. Now. So Wilmore departed from the script. He had asked NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough to bring him two roses as he left the hotel. Now, he stopped and handed one to Daryn, and one to Logan. A Russian soldier raised his hand and tried waving Kimbrough away as he handed off the flowers, but Wilmore was not to be denied. He got his moment.
"It's going to be good, alright?" Wilmore told his kids, before rejoining the cosmonauts and boarding the bus. From inside he blew the girls kisses.
The bus took the crew to suit up in the cosmodrome, and then onto the pad.
For families now came a wait of several hours. Mike Fossum, who rode a Soyuz into space three years ago and was one of the Wilmore family chaperones, knew this could be tense.
"There's nothing scarier for a family member than watching a loved one climb on top of a bomb," Fossum said.
To keep their minds occupied Fossum had planned a busy night of activities for the Wilmore family, including a visit to a spaceflight museum on the cosmodrome, and then a dinner.
The Wilmores didn't arrive at the viewing site, less than a mile from the pad, until 20 minutes before the launch.
Just 180 seconds before the scheduled liftoff at 2:25 a.m. local time, the International Space Station passed directly over the launch pad, a tiny speck of light in the sky. This is why the girls had to stay up long past their bedtime. The launch was timed so that the Soyuz reached space just behind the station and could chase it down within about six hours.
Suddenly the engines boomed to life. Smoke and fire billowed outward and upward. The thunderous roar could be felt as much as heard. Finally, after a very long second or two, the rocket began to climb above the launch pad chaos.
As her dad went up Logan turned to her mother and asked, "Are you breathing?"
The rocket traced a dazzling arc into the sky, breaching a wispy layer of clouds and soon becoming a point of light. Then it was gone. For the Wilmores, it was back to the bus for the bumpy ride into Baikonur. Along they way they learned that, after launch, one of two solar panels on the Soyuz failed to deploy. The panels provide power for life support and guidance. It was a significant failure, but not a catastrophic one. Indeed, the hardy old Russian spacecraft just needs one.
Later, the Wilmores gathered inside an old Soviet theater with family of the two Russian cosmonauts. The all-nighter finally bested the littlest Wilmores. They were sleeping.
But when the Soyuz safely linked to the station six hours after launch, the families cheered loudly. Deanna could finally exhale. For the next half year, Butch had found a safe home.
Everyone retired to the theater lobby, lined with murals of Russia's great space pioneers. The visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was on the left, Gagarin in the middle and rocket builder Sergei Korolev on the right. The holy trinity of Russian spaceflight.
Champagne corks popped (and there was juice for the children).
Mike Fossum, the astronaut chaperone, led the toasts with a quip, "Don't try to out drink a Russian."
They toasted to the health of the crew, the success of the mission and international cooperation.
Once Soviet soldiers mingled in this lobby, and sat in the theater's wooden chairs. They came here after long days building or guarding a cosmodrome with the sole purpose of beating Americans in space and winning the arms race.
Now Russians, Kazakhs and Americans hoisted their glasses as one, weary but happy comrades.
They toasted again. Outside the sun had risen well above the horizon.
Private space: Don't overreact to recent mishaps
Ledyard King – Florida Today
Two high-profile mishaps involving private spacecraft last week have sparked new debate about whether the government should increase its oversight and regulation of a fledgling industry tackling complicated, risky ventures.
But commercial space advocates say Congress and the administration shouldn't view the unrelated accidents — one involving a rocket launch to the International Space Station, the other a space tourism vehicle — as an invitation to clamp down on a sector that needs as much nurturing as it does supervision.
That's especially true while the causes of the accidents are still being determined, they say.
Different agencies were involved in the accidents. The launch of Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket in Virginia was closely overseen by NASA, though the launch was licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The test flight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo was licensed by the FAA with no direct involvement by NASA. That accident killed one of the space plane's pilots and seriously injured the other.
And both involved different levels of oversight.
The rocket launch was tightly regulated by the space agency because it used a government launch pad and carried government supplies bound for a government lab. The test flight of a space tourism vehicle, by contrast, required about the same level of FAA attention that the agency gives test flights of commercial airliners.
Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said the private space industry remains a safely run sector. He called the two accidents in the space of three days "a terrible coincidence," and said he can't think of any new rule or additional oversight that would have prevented either mishap.
"The system worked," said Stallmer, whose trade group represents some of the most prominent players, including Virgin Galactic, in the new space industry. "I don't know how much more at this stage of the game you can regulate the industry."
Both incidents are on Congress' radar. And while hearings are inevitable, they could lead to overreaction by lawmakers, said John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.
Both accidents "were very visible," he said. "One person got killed. You just can't walk away from that. I would like to be optimistic enough to think that the response will be measured and thoughtful, but I'm not an optimist."
The House Science, Space and Technology Committee is already considering hearings on the accidents.
"I have been briefed by those involved in both ongoing investigations and will continue to monitor progress," said Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who chairs the panel. "I place the highest priority on getting independent, thorough and responsible feedback on these incidents."
It's less clear what the Senate will do because control of the chamber will flip from Democrats to Republicans in January.
Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee's space panel, said he doesn't believe many of his colleagues will rush to judgment.
"I don't think a lot of folks in Congress would be sufficiently informed to know what to do," he said.
The accidents occurred following a string of impressive accomplishments by private aerospace firms since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011 and began relying more on the commercial sector, partly because of a shrinking budget.
Orbital Science had successfully delivered cargo twice to the space station before the Oct. 28 explosion. SpaceX, the other company hired by NASA to transport supplies and equipment, transported cargo to the orbiting lab in September — the fourth delivery without incident. SpaceX also has been chosen as one of two firms (the other is Boeing) to develop a vehicle to carry astronauts to the space station.
Spaceports have begun popping up around the country as companies like Virgin Galactic hope to take advantage of public fascination with a trip to suborbital space.
Both companies involved in the mishaps are vowing to find out what went wrong and move on.
Orbital Sciences, working with NASA and the FAA to investigate the incident, said it plans to develop a replacement for the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ26 engine, which initially appears to be the source of the launch failure. The firm pledged to complete its cargo deliveries to the space station by the end of 2016 at "no cost increase to NASA." Orbital has said it considering two U.S. companies and one from Europe as potential launchers of one or two Cygnus cargo spacecraft.
While Orbital didn't identify the companies, the U.S. providers presumably are SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, either of which would fly from Cape Canaveral.
Virgin Galactic said it's determined to forge ahead with plans to take tourists to space once an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board is complete and fixes are made.
Initial findings indicate that accident may have happened after one pilot prematurely unlocked the vehicle's "feathering" mechanism that turns the wing booms into position for re-entry.
Stallmer, who's been communicating with lawmakers, their aides and government regulators, said he's pleasantly surprised there hasn't been a stampede to overhaul current rules.
"I think they're waiting for the dust to settle, for the answers to come out of the investigation and take it from there," he said.
"There's a better understanding that the two events were completely separate and these things occasionally happen. It's how we react to it that will help us go forward."
Even if they wanted to reduce commercial space funding and return to the days of large government NASA programs, budget realities would dictate otherwise — especially under a Republican Congress.
"If NASA had unlimited dollars, things may be different," Stallmer said. "But they don't."
WHAT WE THINK
Don't let accidents drag down commercial space
Orlando Sentinel
The contrast was as unmistakable as a solar eclipse. This week, as NASA unveiled Orion, its next manned space capsule, news was still fresh from two accidents last week involving private spaceships. The timing might have left critics who think space travel would be better left under government control feeling vindicated. But the best hope for reviving the world's leading manned space program still depends on nurturing both public and private components.
In one of last week's accidents, a Virgin Galactic LLC rocket ship, designed to carry tourists someday but with only two test pilots on board, broke up in flight, killing one of the pilots. In the other, just four days earlier, an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket carrying cargo bound for the International Space Station exploded shortly after liftoff.
The circumstances behind the two accidents were completely different. Their nearness in time, however, compounded their impact and added to lingering doubts about whether private companies have the right stuff to carry men and women into space.
The Obama administration wisely decided in 2010 to let the commercial space industry take over manned trips to low Earth orbit after the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. The shift left NASA freer to concentrate its limited resources for human exploration on more-distant destinations, including asteroids and Mars.
Deep-space exploration is the best hope for bringing back the glory days for the U.S. program, with all the accompanying scientific, technological and economic benefits. But Orion isn't scheduled to be carrying astronauts until at least 2021.
The first private mission with astronauts is now set for 2017. It might have come sooner, but Congress slashed hundreds of millions of dollars that the president requested to advance commercial space development. Now, the accidents could become an excuse for more cuts, or excessive new restrictions that also would bog down the industry.
Space travel, of course, is inherently dangerous. But NASA has its own history of deadly accidents. And the longer it takes for the U.S. to regain its capability to blast astronauts into orbit, the longer NASA will have to pay extortionate prices — $70 million a seat — to the Russian space program for trips to the space station.
A thriving commercial space industry is especially important for Florida. SpaceX and Boeing, the companies chosen by NASA to carry U.S. astronauts to low Earth orbit, plan to launch from the Space Coast. Space Florida, a state agency, is working to persuade other rocketeers to launch from Cape Canaveral.
It's critical that the commercial space industry and regulators carefully investigate what went wrong in last week's accidents, and make adjustments to prevent similar incidents in the future. But this is no time to abort the mission.
Editorial: Persevering with space exploration
Dallas Morning News
Films and books like Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff have fueled a nostalgic view of America's early experimentation with space travel, when heroic pioneers like Chuck Yeager pushed the envelope of supersonic flight and paved the way for future explorers. That adventurous spirit hasn't died; it's just gone private. Does that make today's pioneers any less heroic?
The privatized effort suffered serious setbacks two weeks ago when an unmanned Antares rocket, operated by NASA contractor Orbital Sciences, exploded shortly after liftoff in Virginia. Three days later, a Virgin Galactic test craft broke apart over California's Mojave Desert. The co-pilot was killed and the pilot seriously injured after ejecting 10 miles above Earth.
Space exploration, and the supersonic flight required to achieve it, has always been dangerous stuff. Even Yeager, recognized as the first to pilot a supersonic flight, on Oct. 14, 1947, had a serious problem later when he lost control of a test plane 21 miles above Earth. Many test pilots who followed didn't fare so well, including an X-15 pilot killed in 1967 and another who suffered career-ending injuries in 1962.
Then there were the secret flights in the 1960s and early 1970s of the CIA's Blackbird-class tri-sonic planes that flew, literally, faster than a speeding bullet. It flew so fast, the fuselage reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees, melting its exterior paint. Only 150 pilots, including contractors, ever qualified to fly it because of the high chance of blackouts in flight. Three pilots died, and 20 aircraft were lost.
More of us are familiar with the much-higher-profile stories of sacrifice among NASA astronauts, such as the three who died aboard Apollo 1, the seven aboard the space shuttle Challenger and the seven aboard the shuttle Columbia.
The message here is not that such experiments should stop. Exploration and experimentation is what humans have done since we began walking the earth. Some explorers were eaten by wild beasts. Others were swallowed by giant ocean waves. Instead of halting exploration, we learned from mistakes, adapted and continued to advance.
Today, visionaries like Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson propose to open the space experience to a new class of adventurers who, for a steep price, might be among the first passengers on a 90-minute commercial flight from New York to London.
Others are working to pick up the important work NASA left behind when it ended the space shuttle program. Billionaire Elon Musk's venture, SpaceX, seeks ultimately to enable people to live on other planets.
Setbacks, tragic as they are, are inevitable in this quest. The right stuff comes not from succumbing to the danger but seeing past it and never letting fear overcome the curiosity-driven sense of adventure.
Dream Chaser lines up network of public airport landing options
Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has presented an overview on the wealth of potential landing site options available to its Dream Chaser spacecraft, outlining how the company could add an array of public airports – with minimum disruption – for both nominal and emergency End Of Mission (EOM) scenarios when the primary CONUS landing sites are not available.
Dream Chaser Final Approach:
The baby orbiter is currently embattled in a legal challenge against NASA's decision to award continued Commercial Crew funding to SpaceX's Dragon V2 (Dragon 2) and Boeing's CST-100.
Ironically, both SpaceX and Boeing have become somewhat mute during this challenge, while SNC have been firing out media releases portraying an active program, despite NASA's CCtCAP decision – albeit while laying off key workers involved in the development of the spaceplane.
SNC did note that Dream Chaser would live on, regardless of NASA's decision, although she is now at the mercy of finding alternative customers in the commercial field. That, in part, explains SNC's active media drive of late.
The latest information pertains to one of Dream Chaser's star turns, namely her ability select and land on numerous runway options, post mission.
While CST-100 will land via airbags, and crewed Dragon's are eventually expected to propulsively return to a designated landing site – after initial missions will parachute into the ocean – Dream Chaser would utilize her cross range capability and pick a runway for a post-mission scenario that mimicked her auntie, the Space Shuttle.
This "dissimilar redundancy" was supposed to be a winning ticket in the eyes of NASA.
Instead, the Agency opted for a future of that only involves capsules -both commercial and NASA – for its astronaut transportation needs.
Dream Chaser To An Airport Near You:
This week, SNC and partner organization RS&H, Inc., presented findings regarding the challenges and opportunities of landing Dream Chaser at public-use airports during the Space Traffic Management Conference at the space-famous Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU).
The presentation showed Dream Chaser would have the option to land at an array of options around the planet.
However, work analyzing the applicable standards and unique requirements that must be addressed to receive approval for Dream Chaser to land either at a spaceport or commercial airport is continuing.
Although SNC summarized the findings in a short media release, the presentation has since been acquired, providing insight into the current evaluations.
The key elements of the presentation noted Dream Chaser could follow in the footsteps of the Space Shuttle, a vehicle that had three primary landing sites (KSC, Edwards and the less-than-desirable White Sands) but also a multitude of alternative, emergency sites.
A full landing site option overview presentation provided to shuttle crews (available in L2) showed each site – ranging from Atlantic City International to Amberley in Australia – along with a number of highly sporty landings at some exotic island landing strips – with numerous navigational aids and photography included.
Most, however, were for the event of an emergency (immediate) return from orbit, something that was thankfully never required during the history of the Space Shuttle Program.
A continually updated Google Earth program (L2) – known as the complete ELS runway database – also showed thousands of landing sites across the planet, each with an array of data.
Most of options were ruled out from hosting a returning orbiter, mostly due to the large runway dimensions a shuttle required when touching back down on terra firma.
NASA's Landing Support Officer (LSO) worked on color coding every runway in rank of ability for an orbiter to stand a chance of landing and coming to a stop.
During the Shuttle era, NASA's Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) briefed the teams at least once a year on what to do if a shuttle was forced to make an emergency landing.
These evaluations included the basic requirements for a 1,200 feet exclusion zone while the crew powered down the orbiter, prior to the arrival of the NASA rapid response team within 24 hours.
The emergency response for a Shuttle orbiter would have been far more elaborate when compared to Dream Chaser due to the major difference of the SNC spaceplane's lack of any hazardous materials for operation.
As such Dream Chaser should be able to land at any suitable runway, over 8,000 feet long, without requiring specialized equipment. Shuttle orbiters historically required a 12,000 feet long runway as a general minimum requirement, added to an array of support vehicles to care for the orbiter.
According to the presentation, Dream Chaser sports a cross-range capability of 1,100 nmi for the Dream Chaser, cited as exceeding Space Shuttle performance and allowing for the vehicle to maintain at least one runway landing opportunity every orbit.
As with Shuttle, a primary landing site within the contiguous United States (CONUS) is the first priority. Dream Chaser has secured three such sites, namely the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) in Florida, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and Houston's Ellington Airport in Texas.
SNC has also initiated discussions and assessments with multiple landing sites around the world.
Disruption to a public airport hosting a scheduled – or unscheduled – landing of a Dream Chaser would be minimal, with SNC noting she could be removed from the runway within minutes of landing, further reducing any opportunity for landing site conflicts for nominal (planned) landing sites as well as abort or emergency (unplanned) landing sites.
The presentation covers both nominal, emergency returns from orbit and also ascent aborts, with Dream Chaser enjoying continuous runway landing capability from the launch pad through the Atlas/Centaur launch vehicle trajectory. SNC are in "regular collaborative dialogue" with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the identification and confirmation of such sites.
Also covered is Dream Chaser's impressive Delta-V margins and fault tolerance Reaction Control System (RCS) to ensure the spacecraft would be able to conduct the passage towards an emergency landing site.
In the emergency event of an incapacitated crew, Dream Chaser would be able to find her way home, via the use of her autoland capability.
Notably, work was conducted to give the Shuttle orbiter's such a capability (Autonomous Orbiter Rapid Prototype (AORP)/Remote Controlled Orbiter IFM cable) to end their missions without crew assistance.
However, this was later explained as evaluations into the highly undesirable event of a mortally injured orbiter being able to leave her crew at the "safe haven" of the ISS, ahead of either making an "attempt" to land, or conduct a tail first destructive re-entry.
An injured orbiter would have had to depart the ISS to free up the docking port for the LON (Launch On Need) orbiter.
In the event of a Dream Chaser making a surprise visit to a public airport, the post landing turnaround would be speedy, per the planning that has already taken place.
Following rollout, the crew would remain inside the spacecraft while she was towed off the runaway – unlike the scenario of the Space Shuttle. An option would still be available – likely in a medical emergency scenario – for the crew to egress out of the Dream Chaser after wheels stop.
The return of an uncrewed Dream Chaser would require the deactivation of the Flight Termination System (FTS) ordnance – although SNC note they are looking at other FTS options that do not include ordnance.
Should that "worst case" FTS solution be implemented, a post-landing Dream Chaser would require a two-person crew to install safing pins in the Safe and Arm devices for the FTS.
Evaluations into the timeline for a Dream Chaser landing and being successfully towed to a safe area off the runway shows the process can be completed in just 10 to 20 minutes.
Other considerations covered in the evaluations note the the ideal runway options would be constructed of concrete instead of asphalt.
This is because an asphalt runway landing may require the modification to the Dream Chaser nose skid material.
Tests of the landing skid have demonstrated that concrete runways are durable enough to withstand the vehicle's existing skid material without causing unusual wear and degradation to the runway.
Data on the nose skid's interactions have already been acquired during the Dream Chaser ETA (Engineering Test Vehicle) testing at Edwards Air Force Base, where the vehicle was dragged behind a truck for more than 20 miles in numerous ground taxi tow tests.
This is one of the important factors a commercial airport operator would need to be consulted on, given the goal would be to free an undamaged runway in a timely manner to allow for the airport to reopen the runway for commercial aircraft.
The Edwards testing noted that the nose landing skid imparted no damage to the runway, striping, or runway centerline lighting.
Additionally, no damage was done to the runway when the left main landing gear did not properly deploy during the infamous landing test that ended with Dream Chaser taking a tumble off the runway.
The presentation shows that despite the large amount of evaluations that have already taken place, negotiations will be required closer to the time Dream Chaser would require such landing options to become available.
This includes airspace requirements, given Dream Chaser descends from orbit as a glider, with both a very high velocity and a high sink rate. This renders her incompatible with typical aircraft operations and requires special handling from Air Traffic Control facilities.
Evaluations note that "all commercial aircraft operating at altitudes between 18,000 feet mean sea level (msl) (FL180) and 60,000 feet msl (FL600) are required to operate on flight plans generally under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) requirements and must be in contact with FAA air traffic controllers.
"Below 18,000 feet msl (FL180), many aircraft are not on flight plans with a mix of IFR and Visual Flight Rules (VFR) operations and, depending on the geographic area, may not be in contact with air traffic controllers.
"These combined considerations make it essential that the Dream Chaser descent be planned in coordination with air traffic control. Specific blocks of airspace must first be identified before planning an airport descent and approach."
Letters of Agreement among the various controlling agencies would set pre-authorized reservations in place, allowing for commercial air traffic to be routed around the intended flight corridor until the Dream Chaser vehicle lands.
Work with the FAA is expected to cover a number of certification and requirements, ranging from airspace to public safety – including the impact of the sonic boom that Dream Chaser will create to announce her return from supersonic velocities.
"The need for future work in the areas of environmental analyses due to sonic boom and trajectory shaping will need to be completed to gain final NEPA approval for Dream Chaser landing at spaceport and/or public use airports, such as Ellington Airport," added the presentation.
"Through the use of sonic boom analytical software such as PCBoom, a standardized method can be used to understand the impact and develop an optimal flight path."
Overall, the evaluations show Dream Chaser is likely to be able to land at public-use airports, pending negotiations, safety outlines and FAA approval.
Weak Sun Poses Radiation Risk for Mars-Bound Astronauts
Decreasing solar activity could make the journey to Mars and back riskier for astronauts, a new study warns.
The sun's magnetic field acts as a barrier to high-energy galactic cosmic rays, which originate outside the solar system in supernova explosions. The magnetic field is stronger when the sun is more active, deflecting more of this potentially dangerous radiation.
But the last "solar minimum," which occurred in 2009, was the weakest ever measured in the space age, and some scientists believe solar activity is going to weaken further — which would be bad news for manned missions through deep space.
The new study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Space Weather, found that a 30-year-old male astronaut who flew to Mars during a period of low solar activity would surpass NASA's radiation safety limits in less than 400 days, which is barely enough time to get to the Red Planet and back. (A female would reach the limit in under 300 days.)
If the sun's activity continues to decrease as many researchers predict, the male astronaut's limit would be reached in under 320 days and a woman's in less than 240, the study determined.
"While these conditions are not necessarily a showstopper for long-duration missions to the moon, an asteroid or even Mars, galactic cosmic ray radiation in particular remains a significant and worsening factor that limits mission durations," study lead author Nathan Schwadron, of the University of New Hampshire, said in a statement.
Sunspots are generally used to estimate solar activity, because these patches on the sun are produced by magnetic field lines. As these lines twist and snap, they can produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) that send particles out into the solar system. These are all indications of a strong magnetic field on the sun.
The sun has an 11-year cycle of sunspots and solar activity, but the last minimum in 2009 was the weakest ever seen since the space age began in the 1950s. Even the peak this year has been somewhat subdued. Some researchers believe the sun's next minimum of activity could be even lower than 2009.
The new research also used data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to estimate how much time it would take for an astronaut in deep space to exceed radiation limits. Measurements came from LRO's Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CraTER), which has a material called "tissue-equivalent plastic" that reacts to radiation as human muscle would.
Variations in radiation limits depend not only on solar activity, but also on how old the astronaut is, the study authors noted.
NASA Approves Exoplanet Mission for Development
Jeff Foust – Space News
NASA announced Nov. 7 that it has given approval for development to proceed of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a spacecraft to search for extrasolar planets around the brightest stars in the sky.
TESS passed a confirmation review, project officials said, which allows the mission to move into the development phase. NASA selected TESS as part of its Explorer program of small astrophysics missions in April 2013.
"After spending the past year building the team and honing the design, it is incredibly exciting to be approved to move forward toward implementing NASA's newest exoplanet hunting mission," Jeff Volosin, TESS program manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement announcing the successful review.
The mission, scheduled for launch in 2017, will place a spacecraft built by Orbital Sciences Corp. into a high Earth orbit. The spacecraft's cameras will look for small, periodic variations in the brightness of stars caused by planets passing in front of the star, a technique also used by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.
TESS will monitor the brightness of more than 500,000 stars during its planned two-year mission. Scientists anticipate the mission will discover more than 5,000 potential exoplanets, including 50 the size of Earth.
Comet's brush with Mars more dramatic than expected
Comet Siding Spring's close flyby of Mars last month dumped several tons of primordial dust into the thin martian atmosphere, likely creating a brief but spectacular meteor shower with thousands of shooting stars had any astronauts been there to see it, scientists said Friday.
The comet dust also posed a much more serious threat than expected to an international fleet of spacecraft in orbit around the red planet. While engineers did not think the comet posed a major hazard, the orbiters were maneuvered to put them on the far side of Mars during close approach. Just in case.
As it turned out, that was a smart decision.
"After observing the effects on Mars and how the comet dust slammed into the upper atmosphere, it makes me very happy that we decided to put our spacecraft on the other side of Mars at the peak of the dust tail passage and out of harm's way," Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA headquarters, told reporters during a teleconference. "I really believe that hiding them like that really saved them, and it gave us a fabulous opportunity to make these observations."
Siding Spring, more formally known as Comet C/2013 A1, originated in the Oort Cloud, a vast realm of icy relics left over from the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago that extends from beyond the orbit of Pluto halfway to the nearest star. It was Siding Spring's first trip into the inner solar system, a journey that began a million or more years ago when the gravity of a passing star, perhaps, nudged it onto a different trajectory.
On Oct. 19, the comet passed within about 87,000 miles of Mars at a relative velocity of some 35 miles per second, or 126,000 miles per hour. Had the comet flown by Earth at that distance, it would have been just a third of the way to the moon.
"We believe this type of event occurs once every eight million years or so," Green said. "So it is indeed a rare opportunity for us to observe this."
Three NASA orbiters — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Odyssey and the newly arrived MAVEN — along with the European Space Agency's Mars Express and India's Mars Orbiter Mission all trained their cameras and instruments on the comet or the martian atmosphere to study the possible effects of Siding Spring's passage.
MAVEN, an acronym for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, was built to study the martian atmosphere. Its Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument detected major changes as dust from the comet slammed into atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, high-energy collisions that caused the thin air to glow. The spacecraft's Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer detected clear signs of eight ionized metals — sodium, magnesium, potassium, chromium, manganese, iron, nickel and zinc — that spiked immediately following the comet's flyby and then faded away.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter trained its high-resolution camera on Siding Spring and while the instrument was not able to resolve the nucleus, brightness variations indicated the comet was rotating once every eight hours.
By analyzing photos taken at different distances, and given the comet's trajectory and sun's illumination, Siding Spring could be larger than a mile across or just a few hundred yards.
"So we have an exciting time ahead to untangle that," said Alan Delamere, a co-investigator for MRO's camera.
Another instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter uses a 130-foot-long antenna to probe the subsurface of the planet with radar. The surface appears sharply defined in images taken just before the comet's passage. But images in the immediate aftermath are slightly blurred, the result of atmospheric ionization caused by comet dust dust that affected the radar beam as it passed through the atmosphere to the ground and bounced back to the orbiter.
The amount of dust and its effects on the atmosphere were a surprise. Green said initial modeling indicated Mars would just skirt the edge of Siding Spring's dust tail. More recent photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, however, showed the comet's trajectory was slightly different than expected. And the dust tail was larger than initially believed.
"The analysis seemed to indicate Mars would miss the dust tail in a significant way," Green said. "In other words, as the comet flies by the dust tail is following the trajectory…. it still would not have reached Mars to any significant amount. The surprise was indeed the dust tail seemed to be larger. The other surprise, the comet wasn't quite in the same position we thought it was."
Most of the particles were very small, tiny fractions of an inch across. But given their extreme velocity, they had a noticeable effect.
"With the amount of dust that came in, it's very possible that these are not just micron size, but they can be quite large, perhaps up to a centimeter size," Green said. "And anything that is of any size could easily destroy a spacecraft given it's high velocity and hitting in the right location. So, we were speculating the spacecraft would survive (in the dust tail's path), but I think it's pretty obvious they wouldn't have based on the tremendous response of Mars' atmosphere to the comet tail."
By measuring the glow of magnesium ions — material from the comet that had electrons stripped away in high-energy collisions with particles in the atmosphere — scientists could make a rough estimate of how much dust must have been deposited as the planet encountered Siding Spring's tail.
"And the answer we're coming up with is a few tons," said Nick Schneider, a leader of the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph team at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Based on this mass, we can make a rough estimate of what the meteor shower would have looked like, and it's looking like that meteor shower must have had thousands of shooting stars an hour, possibly what's called a meteor storm, although we're still working on the numbers.
"Numbers aside, it must have been a spectacular meteor shower on Mars," he said.
Meteor storms with more than 1,000 per shooting stars per hour are rare in Earth's sky and whether Siding Spring's display at Mars was a storm or a very intense shower, "I don't think anybody on the phone has ever seen that," Schneider said. "It's extremely rare in human history."
Asked what an astronaut on the surface might have seen, he said "it would have been truly stunning to the human eye."
"Now, we've got all these high tech robots around, but I have to say it might be the most sensitive science instrument of all having a human lying outside with dark-adapted vision looking up at that sky and to see many shooting stars happening at once," he said. "I think it would have been really mind blowing."
First-Ever Comet Landing Next Week to Be Truly Epic, Scientists Say
European scientists and engineers are gearing up to soft-land a robotic probe on the mysterious surface of a comet for the first time.
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is just days away from releasing its Philae lander down to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and scientists working with the mission can feel the anticipation building for the Nov. 12 landing.
"We're all excited about this," Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor said during an ESA Google+ webcast today (Nov. 7.). "You should be excited about this … My kids finally think their dad is cool because he works on Rosetta."
If successful, the Philae landing will be the first time humans have ever soft-landed a probe on a comet's surface. The small Philae lander — named for an obelisk found on an island in the Nile River in Egypt — is designed to study the surface of the comet. Meanwhile, the Rosetta probe will study Comet 67P/C-G from orbit.
It took 10 years for the probes to catch up with the comet, and landing on the "dirty snowball's" surface will be no easy task. A number of steps and specific commands must be executed in order to ensure that Rosetta doesn't crash into the comet and that Philae arrives at its landing site safely.
Rosetta should release Philae when the two spacecraft are flying about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) from the center of Comet 67P/C-G. European Space Agency officials will have to wait for 7 to 10 hours before finding out if the landing was successful.
"The surface of this comet is very, very rough," Andrea Accomazzo, ESA Rosetta flight director, said during the webcast. "It's not the ideal place to land on, but this is what we have, and this is what we're trying to do. We have to be a bit lucky, as well. If the lander hits the surface of the comet in the proximity of a boulder or something like this, then there's nothing we can do. We cannot actively steer the trajectory of the lander on descent. That's the part that worries me most."
That said, Accomazzo added, the teams on the ground feel fully prepared to accomplish the difficult task of landing Philae on the comet. Once Philae gets to the surface, the lander will deploy a harpoon into the comet, which should tether the probe to the dusty cosmic body.
Rosetta is expected to stay with Comet 67P/C-G as it makes its closest approach with the sun in August 2015. The two spacecraft will beam back scientific data to Earth that could help scientists understand more about comets and the early solar system (when the balls of ice and dust first formed), among other things. Instruments on Rosetta have already revealed that the comet smells a bit like rotten eggs.
Rosetta launched to space in 2004 on a 4-billion-mile (6.4 billion km) journey to the comet. The spacecraft arrived at Comet 67P/C-G in August.
Boulder researchers anxious as historic comet landing nears
Southwest Research Institute a key contributor to Rosetta mission
Charlie Brennan - Boulder Camera, of Colorado
If all goes as planned early Wednesday, humans will land their first robot on the surface of a comet.
The $1.7 billion mission known as Rosetta — with the European Space Agency at the helm — aims to place the robotic lander Philae on a comet known as 67P, a remnant of the early phases of the solar system's 4.6 billion-year history.
Rosetta scientists hope its up-close-and-personal probe of the comet — which reflects the composition of the pre-solar nebula out of which the sun and the planets were formed — will produce a better understanding of the origin and evolution of the solar system.
And the spacecraft, which launched a decade ago, is carrying instrumentation designed and built in Boulder.
Rosetta is now escorting the target comet, 67P — formally Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a double-lobed space traveler named for the pair who discovered it in 1969 — through the solar system at a speed of about 66,000 kilometers per hour, or roughly 41,000 mph.
Philae will be deployed toward a landing site on the comet's "head" at 1:35 a.m. MDT Wednesday. If all goes well, it will alight on 67P about seven hours later — with confirmation expected to reach Earth around 9 a.m.
'A 50-50 shot'
Among those tracking events closely will be Alan Stern, of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.
Stern is principal investigator for Alice, the ultraviolet spectrograph aboard Rosetta that began mapping the comet's surface after Rosetta reached the comet's orbit at the culmination of a 10-year journey Aug. 6.
Although Alice will remain on Rosetta, continuing its work from the spacecraft, Stern and his SwRI colleagues are anxious to see how the first-of-its-kind landing unfolds.
Asked what could go wrong, Stern said, "Lord, what couldn't?"
"It's like that scene in 'Apollo 13' after the explosion, when everybody is reporting to the mission control boss, Ed Harris (the actor portraying NASA flight director Gene Kranz), 'The fuel is dropping, the oxygen is dropping, we're running out of power, and he says, 'What do we got on the spacecraft that's good?'"
Joel Parker, SwRI's deputy principal investigator on the Alice instrument, pointed out that gravity on the comet is about 60,000 times weaker than on Earth.
"Landing something in such a low-gravity environment is incredibly difficult," Parker said. "There are a lot of unknowns. There are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns, and we have to plan for all of them."
Stern offered a short list of the problems the Philae lander could encounter in its 22.5-kilometer descent to the targeted touchdown site.
"I think the challenges are so great, and the attempt so heroic, that it's more or less a 50-50 shot," Stern said.
"Not because they did a shoddy job, but because they dare flying into the unknown. If any of the assumptions of the 1990s (when the project was designed) are wrong, the thing could not land. It could miss the comet. It could bounce off it. It could tumble, it could fall over. It could land in a place of too much shadow and die of power starvation. It could be lifted back off the surface by wind.
"There are so many things that could go wrong, none of them the fault of the engineers who designed it."
Screws on the lander's feet, to drill anchors into the comet's surface, and so-called "harpoons" that will shoot from its body into the comet's skin should help in anchoring Philae to its celestial target.
Space missions have flown near comets six times before. Parker said while those were "one-night stands," this mission represents a "long-term relationship."
Stern likened the attempt this week to the first successful summiting of Mount Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
"They didn't know if they could make it up, or get back down," Stern said of the pioneering mountaineers. "They were really exploring in an environment that was unknown, and no one had ever been before. It's like a first ascent of Everest in terms of the unknown and the danger to the spacecraft.
"I would be ecstatic if the first attempt worked. The moment of landing is the riskiest bit, and we'll have to see. That's part of the excitement."
'A good part of a person's career'
The excitement has been building for quite some time.
Rosetta launched March 2, 2004, and the mission design and planning dates back to 1995. Carrying no fewer than 21 instruments, including 10 that will be aboard the Philae lander, Rosetta represents a collaboration of scientists from across Europe and the United States.
The lander itself represents a European consortium led by the German Aerospace Research Institute, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, along with the European Space Agency, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, and institutes from Austria, the United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Italy, Ireland and Finland.
Stern said working with such a coalition poses a few challenges that set it apart from, for example, projects directed exclusively by NASA. Mission control for the Rosetta mission is in Darmstadt, Germany.
Already, before the Philae lander is even deployed, Rosetta is returning valuable science, thanks to Alice, the SwRI ultraviolet spectrograph about the size of a shoebox that has been mapping the comet's surface since August. Alice has more than 10,000 times as many imaging pixels as the spectrometer on the Galileo mission, launched in 1989.
The Alice team has found that the comet is unusually dark at ultraviolet wavelengths, and that the comet's surface has yet to show any large water-ice patches. Alice is also detecting hydrogen and oxygen in the comet's atmosphere.
Alice separates ultraviolet light into a rainbow, Parker said, enabling scientists to isolate the gases by their distinctive fingerprints.
"We have already learned that the comet is a much more complex place, with much more complex geology and interior structure than anyone expected," Stern said.
Imagery suggests comet 67P could be what's known as a contact-binary — two objects that have fused together.
Its shape, with a roughly defined head, neck and body, had some scientists initially remarking that it looks like an icy, rocky, dusty rubber duck hurtling through space. It is roughly 4.5 kilometers in length and 3.5 kilometers across.
"The comet looks stuck together," Stern said. "The question is whether it started off as something else and evolved into that shape, or whether it's two things stuck together that formed separately. We're really asking if we're seeing a double comet or not."
Stern said scientists are already seeing "chemical evidence that the comet was formed in a very, very, very cold place, with temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero," as they had expected.
Alice is not the only instrument that SwRI has on the Rosetta spacecraft. It also designed and built Rosetta's ion and electron spectrograph, an instrument with miniaturized electronic systems and weighing just over 1 kilogram. That instrument, known as the IES, was contributed by scientists at the company's home base San Antonio, Texas. A vast majority of its 2,900 employees work there, with only about 80 located in Boulder.
Jim Burch, who is based in Texas and is the company's principal investigator on the IES, said SwRI's contract to participate in the project is for about $20 million.
"It's going to be 20 years since I wrote the proposal, so it's pretty much a 20-year thing," Burch said. "That's a good part of a person's career."
'It may sound like science fiction'
And as the comet approaches the sun, excitement builds — and will continue to, up to and through the point it reaches its closest approach to the sun, projected to occur Aug. 13, 2015.
The comet, in the lingo of the scientists, "turns on" as it nears the sun.
"Ultimately, people like myself are interested with the interaction of solar wind with the bodies in space," Burch said. "With gases coming off the comet, basically you've got a chemistry lab going on up there.
"We've seen comets after they've developed, but we've never seen any of these bodies where nothing is happening, but then you're right in the middle of it when the interactions are beginning, with the comet starting to interact with the solar wind. It's really historical in this particular field."
Comet 67P is what is known as a short-period, Jupiter-family comet, meaning it has an orbital period of less than 20 years. Such comets likely come from the region at the far reaches of our solar system known as the Kuiper belt.
As Parker put it, "Comets are like little notes from the formation of the solar system, telling us what things were like back then."
And no launcher alone could have put Rosetta in the comet's orbit. It required gravity assists from four planetary flybys — one of Mars, in 2007, and three of Earth — in 2005, 2007 and 2009, to complete Rosetta's epic and circuitous trip.
"It may sound like science fiction, but it's a reality for the teams that have dedicated their entire lives to this mission, driven to push the boundaries of our technology for the benefit of science and to seek answers to the biggest questions regarding our solar system's origins," project scientist Matt Taylor said in a statement posted to the European Space Agency website.
The mission is officially scheduled to end Dec. 31, 2015, but it could be extended beyond that date.
The potential for revelations, or spectacular failure, is considerable.
"It's in the spirit of brave exploration — like Columbus and Magellan — to fly into the unknown, with the best tools available," Stern said. "Columbus didn't know what he would find, and neither did Magellan.
"We learn more as the story unfolds. I can't tell you the end. I can only tell you the beginning."
What's Happening in Space Policy November 9-15, 2014
Here is our list of space policy-related events for the week of November 9-15, 2014 and any insight we can offer about them. Congress returns to work on Wednesday, November 12.
During the Week
From a policy perspective, certainly the biggest event this week is the return of Congress after a long break leading up to last week's mid-term elections. As everyone knows, Republicans won control of the Senate and House Republicans added many seats to their side of the aisle. Some races remain undetermined so there is not yet a final count of how many R's and D's there will be in the 114th Congress that convenes in January, but in the Senate there will be at least 52 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and 2 Independents (both currently caucus with Democrats and one has said he will continue to do so in the next Congress). The Senate race in Alaska has not been called yet, and there will be a run-off for the Louisiana Senate seat next month. In the House, there will be at least 244 Republicans and 184 Democrats. The other races have not been called yet. As many observers are pointing out, it has been 80 years since the Democrats have had so few seats in the House. We'll have more on how the changes in Congress could impact space programs in an article later this week.
That's next year, though. On Wednesday, it is the 113th Congress that reconvenes and it still has work to do. The one must-pass piece of legislation is the FY2015 appropriations. The government is currently operating under a Continuing Resolution (CR) that expires on December 11, so Congress has until then to pass another CR or the 12 regular appropriations bills probably packaged together into a single omnibus bill or series of "mini-buses." It is possible that some Republicans may try to delay passage of final appropriations bills until next year when they are in control of both chambers and therefore will agree only to a short-term CR to carry the government over into the New Year, but the betting at the moment seems to be that the matter will be settled by the end of this year. That could change, of course.
There also are big events in space activities coming up. Tonight (Sunday) three International Space Station (ISS) crew members return to Earth in their Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft: NASA's Reid Wiseman, Europe's Alexander Gerst and Russia's Max Suraev. NASA TV will cover undocking (7:30 pm EST) and landing in Kazakhstan (10:58 pm EST).
Then on Wednesday, November 12, ESA's Philae lander will land on Comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko, the first spacecraft to achieve such a feat. ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, with Philae aboard, arrived at the comet in August after a 10 year journey. Lots of media events in Europe are scheduled for the days before, of, and after the landing. Confirmation that Philae successfully landed is expected about 11:00 am EST on Wednesday. NASA TV will cover that part of the mission from 9:00 - 11:30 am EST. Those and other events we know about as of Sunday morning are listed below.
Sunday, November 9
Tuesday, November 11
Wednesday, November 12
Friday, November 14
Saturday, November 15
END
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