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> From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
> Date: November 17, 2014 12:21:15 PM CST
> To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
> Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Monday – November 17, 2014 and JSC Today
>
> Happy Monday everyone. Sorry for so many notes regarding our good friends and NASA colleagues passing recently. Unfortunately it is the situation these days.
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> Monday, November 17, 2014 Read JSC Today in your browser View Archives
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> JSC 2.0
> Space To Ground
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> JSC TODAY CATEGORIES
> Headlines
> - Got a Burning Question for the All Hands?
> - JSC CFC Agency Fair TODAY
> - Orion Employee Launch-Viewing Tickets Available
> - Astronaut Reid Wiseman Featured on NBC Today Show
> - Gilruth Center Closed: Nov. 22 to 30
> Organizations/Social
> - Let Your Starport Café Cook Your Thanksgiving
> - NSBE Visions for Human Spaceflight Brown Bag
> - Human Systems Integration ERG Meeting - November
> - IEEE Meeting: Networked Unmanned Aircraft Systems
> - Emerge Monthly: Open Season
> - JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum
> Jobs and Training
> - JSC Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) - Nov. 19
> - Russian Language Training - Phase II
> - Job Opportunities
>
> Exploring the World's Protected Areas from Space
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> Headlines
> Got a Burning Question for the All Hands?
> Tomorrow, Nov. 18, is your chance to join JSC Director Ellen Ochoa for an all-hands meeting from 10 to 11 a.m. in the Teague Auditorium. You will also get to hear from many JSC leaders, including:
> Flight Operations Director Brian Kelly; Director of Exploration Integration and Science Steve Stich; and Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer.
> Got a burning question to ask? If you would like to submit a question for consideration in advance of the event, please email it to: JSC-Ask-The-Director@mail.nasa.gov Questions will also be taken via email during the event.
> We hope to see you there!
> Event Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Event Start Time:10:00 AM Event End Time:11:00 AM
> Event Location: Teague Auditorium
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> Add to Calendar
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> JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
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> [top]
> JSC CFC Agency Fair TODAY
> JSC will be hosting a Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) Agency Fair TODAY in the Building 3 café for 15 different charities—open to all JSC civil servant and contractor employees. This event is an opportunity to show that we, the "NASA family," truly support the organizations that directly help those in our community and our country who are less fortunate than we are.
> Representatives from these CFC-approved charities will be available to answer questions and meet with JSC employees. These charities are just a sample of the thousands that are greatly impacted by CFC contributions.
> One-time check or cash donations designated to the charity of your choice will be accepted during the fair. Small refreshments will be provided.
> Every dollar given counts! Give for good.
> Event Date: Monday, November 17, 2014 Event Start Time:10:00 AM Event End Time:2:00 PM
> Event Location: Buliding 3 Cafeteria
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> Add to Calendar
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> Ashley White x34835 http://jscpeople.jsc.nasa.gov/cfc/cfc.html
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> Orion Employee Launch-Viewing Tickets Available
> Are you excited to see Orion's first launch to space? Join us at Space Center Houston (SCH) for "Still Curious," an opportunity to see Orion blast off into space for Exploration Flight Test-1. The event is FREE and open to the public, so don't sit at your desk and watch the show—bring your family over and experience the launch with the rest of JSC employees, their families and the public as we watch the mission from liftoff to splashdown.
> The event will include a special astronaut appearance, balloons and confetti, Orion hands-on activities, Orion giveaways and a special light show your kids won't want to miss at splashdown!
> SCH is offering breakfast tickets at a discounted price to JSC team members for $8.
> Tickets are now available to purchase at the Starport Gift Shops in Buildings 3 and 11. Don't miss out!
> Orion Outreach
>
> [top]
> Astronaut Reid Wiseman Featured on NBC Today Show
> After 165 days experiencing the wonders of space aboard the International Space Station, astronaut and Twitter sensation (@ASTRO_REID) Reid Wiseman and two crew members came back down to Earth on Nov. 10. Tamron Hall, NBC Today Show reporter, highlighted Wiseman's final sunset from space and what he planned to do first upon returning to Earth. If you haven't seen it, watch the clip.
> JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111
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> [top]
> Gilruth Center Closed: Nov. 22 to 30
> The Gilruth Center will be closed from Nov. 22 to 30 for biannually scheduled maintenance.
> During this time, the following Gilruth facilities and programs will be unavailable:
> Strength and Cardio Center
> Studios 1, 2 and 3 (Group Ex, spin, yoga)
> All conference facilities and the ballroom
> Indoor locker rooms and restrooms
> During the closure, the following facilities will be available:
> Outer Space Studio and OSFx classes
> Sports fields (soccer/softball)
> Jogging trails
> Outdoor restrooms
> In the event that the scheduled maintenance is completed early, the Gilruth Center may open with limited hours.
> For updates, please continue to check this website.
> Starport Fitness x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov
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> [top]
> Organizations/Social
> Let Your Starport Café Cook Your Thanksgiving Meal
> Let your Starport Café do the heavy lifting this Thanksgiving!
> Simply fill out a "Home for the Holidays" order form located at any cash register in the Buildings 3 or 11 cafés, and our chefs will prepare your Thanksgiving meal.
> If you just want a fresh-baked pie or whipped mashed potatoes, no problem. No order is too small or too large.
> Happy Thanksgiving!
> Danial Hornbuckle x30240
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> NSBE Visions for Human Spaceflight Brown Bag
> The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Houston Space Professionals invites members of the JSC community, with a special invitation to all Employee Resource Groups, to join us for our November Visions for Human Spaceflight Brown Bag tomorrow, Nov. 18, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Building 1, Conference Room 360.
> This series is essentially an open discussion/review of the NSBE's Unlimited Horizons white paper, with each month devoted to review of a different section of the paper. Thus far, we have discussed rationales, spacecraft, mission manifests and commercial/international involvement for moon, Mars and asteroid missions. This month we will cover pages 44 to 55 on Program Management and Systems Engineering.
> The NSBE is introducing this brown-bag series as a JSC 2.0 effort to stimulate independent and innovative discussion on topics of importance to the future of the agency and center. You are encouraged to download a copy of the paper.
> Event Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM
> Event Location: Building 1 Conference Room 360
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> Add to Calendar
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> Robert Howard x41007 http://nsbe-hsp.org/index.php/chapter-events/projects/visions-for-human-...
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> [top]
> Human Systems Integration ERG Meeting - November
> Join us for a presentation by Dr. George V. Kondraske, professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.
> The notion of performance pervades most engineering efforts, including those involving human systems integration (HSI). Yet, approaches generally rely on ad-hoc performance constructs and the application of them without a unifying conceptual framework. General Systems Performance Theory, while applicable to modeling and measurement of any system, was motivated by human performance and HSI challenges. It responds to the needs noted and is argued to provide key insights for measurement and modeling of system performance. Basic concepts will be presented, along with discussion of several applications of interest within an HSI context.
> Event Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM
> Event Location: 1/620
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> Add to Calendar
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> James Taylor x34339 http://collaboration.jsc.nasa.gov/iierg/HSI/SitePages/Home.aspx
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> IEEE Meeting: Networked Unmanned Aircraft Systems
> Dr. Carrillo of Texas A&M-Corpus Christi will present "Unmanned Aircraft Systems: From Specialized Agents to Intelligent Networked Societies." The first part will include discussion of general ideas related to the design and development of rotary-wing UAS experimental platforms equipped with onboard sensing and control capabilities, and specific challenges encountered when automating this type of aerial robot. The problem of stabilizing the UAS during autonomous flights and real-time experimental applications, such as relative positioning and navigation tasks, will be presented. The second part is devoted to multi-agent systems and will address the problem of estimating the state of a multi-agent system where measurements are corrupted by impulsive noise, whose dynamics are subjected to impulsive disturbances. Finally, ongoing work on biologically inspired flocking control for multi-agent dynamic systems will be addressed.
> Lunch is available for $8. Please RSVP before noon tomorrow, Nov. 18, indicating lunch or no lunch.
> Event Date: Friday, November 21, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:1:00 PM
> Event Location: Gilruth Recreation Center
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> Add to Calendar
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> Zafar Taqvi http://ewh.ieee.org/r5/galveston_bay/events/events.html
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> [top]
> Emerge Monthly: Open Season
> The Emerge Employee Resource Group invites all JSC employees to the November general monthly meeting. This meeting will feature a presentation by Ricky Villareal on the highlights of FERS retirement and federal health benefits to provide information on the current open season. Come learn about planning ahead for the future and taking advantage of the health benefits available to you.
> Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Event Start Time:12:00 PM Event End Time:1:00 PM
> Event Location: Bldg 12/Rm 134
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> Add to Calendar
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> Elena C. Buhay 281-792-7976 https://collaboration.ndc.nasa.gov/iierg/emerge/SitePages/Home.aspx
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> [top]
> JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum
> Our next JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 9, in the Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Our guest speaker for this event is Dr. Robert Emery, vice president for Safety, Health, Environment and Risk Management at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. His presentation topic will be "What Every Safety Professional Needs to Know About Global Health Security." In addition, David Loyd, chief of the Safety and Test Operations Division (JSC-NS), will be presenting the "JSC Safety Metrics Snapshot for 2014."
> Hope to see everyone there!
> Event Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2014 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:10:30 AM
> Event Location: Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom
>
> Add to Calendar
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> Patricia Farrell 281-335-2012
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> [top]
> Jobs and Training
> JSC Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) - Nov. 19
> The JSC Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) collaborative workshop provides students a strategy to integrate RIDM and Continuous Risk Management (CRM). Course materials include a discussion of the benefits of ensuring decisions include risk considerations with appropriate rigor commensurate with the significance. Facilitators will lead students through exercises demonstrating the steps to evaluate options and select a decision alternative that is risk informed. After completing this course, the student should be able to: 1) Describe the RIDM process and applicability; 2) Have an understanding of how RIDM is integrated into the overall risk-management process for institutional risks and resident program/project risks; and 3) Describe the interrelationship of RIDM and CRM.
> Location: Building 12, Room 134
> Direct Link: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...
> For information, contact Paula Gothreaux at 281-335-2441 or Russell Hartlieb at 281-335-2443.
> Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:12:00 PM
> Event Location: Building 12/Room 134
>
> Add to Calendar
>
> Paula Gothreaux 281-335-2441
>
> [top]
> Russian Language Training - Phase II
> The JSC Language Education Center announces Phase II Russian Language course offerings for the 2015 winter quarter (Jan. 5 to March 27). Only the following classes will be offered this quarter: 2A, 2B and 2C. Registration for all courses is now conducted exclusively through NASA's SATERN system. Continuing students, both JSC contractors and civil servants who have approval of their supervisor and training coordinator, can enroll in the appropriate level group class through SATERN. Enrollment preference is, however, given to civil servants.
> Students new to the program and who have had previous Russian language training, or students who are resuming their Russian language training after a break of two or more quarters, should contact Dr. Anthony Vanchu (281-483-0644 or via email) to schedule a placement interview to determine the appropriate class level to join.
> Natalia Rostova 281-851-3745
>
> [top]
> Job Opportunities
> Where do I find job opportunities?
> Both internal Competitive Placement Plan and external JSC job announcements are posted on the Human Resources (HR) Portal and USAJOBS website. Through the HR portal, civil servants can view summaries of all the agency jobs that are currently open at: https://hr.nasa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/employees_home/239/job_opportu...
> 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.
> Brandy Braunsdorf x30476
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> JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles.
> Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.
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>
> NASA and Human Spaceflight News
> Monday – November 17, 2014
> INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: Astronaut Butch Wilmore is installing the first zero-g printer on the space station today. Launched into orbit on September 21, 2014, this first version of the Zero-G printer will usher in the era of off-world manufacturing and may change the way we live and work in space. Follow the happenings on Twitter using #3Dprinting.
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> HEADLINES AND LEADS
> NASA IG Adds Voice to Chorus that NASA Lacks Adequate Funding
> Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com
>
> Echoing what reports from expert groups have been saying for many years, NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) yesterday warned that the biggest challenge facing NASA is getting the budgets needed to accomplish the programs and tasks the agency has been assigned.
>
> Humans on Mars by 2035? NASA's sci-fi dream could be realit
> Sheena McKenzie – CNN
>
> We've just landed a washing machine-sized robot on a comet and NASA's chief scientist has no idea.
>
> Guest column: Orion effort will come full circle with test flight
> Lynda Weatherman – Florida Today
>
> In less than three weeks, get ready to watch a piece of history from your own backyard. While the Space Coast has served as the backdrop to hundreds of launches, Lockheed Martin's EFT-1 Orion test flight, scheduled for Dec. 4, may be one of the most historic launches to lift off here for a number of reasons.
>
> Next stop, Mars: Eighth grader Alyssa Carson is a media darling and 12-time Space Camp vet with a big dream
> Matt Wake - Huntsville Times
> There are replica Eifel Towers in 13-year-old Alyssa Carson's bedroom. Soccer team photos. Really the only outer-space-related item in view is a painting of the solar system. But at one end of in the dining room of the Baton Rouge condo Alyssa shares with her dad Bert Carson, this is where you'll find the ever-growing "space museum," as the Carsons call it. Model rockets. Commemorative coins given to Alyssa by astronauts and NASA officials and a collection of vintage Life Magazine issues featuring Apollo astronauts.
> Pushing into space not free, but worth it
> Gene Seymour – CNN
>
> Practically from the day the Space Age started on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite into Earth orbit, it's been like this. Every time there's a conspicuous breakthrough in space, somebody, somewhere will find a way to kill the buzz.
>
> A New Dawn: The Troubled History and Future Promise of NASA's Orion Program (Part 2)
> Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com
> Three weeks from now, the first human-capable vehicle for Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) exploration in more than four decades is scheduled to roar away from Space Launch Complex (SLC)-37B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on its first voyage. NASA's Orion spacecraft will ride a Delta IV Heavy, the largest and most powerful rocket currently in active operational service, anywhere in the world, on the Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 mission. Following a planned liftoff at 7:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, 4 December, the Heavy will boost Orion to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), whereupon the spacecraft will complete two orbits in 4.5 hours, then plunge back to Earth in excess of 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h), testing its heat shield at lunar-return velocities and temperatures of up to 2,200 degrees Celsius (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit). Without doubt, EFT-1 represents the most significant advance in human space exploration of the second decade in the 21st century.
>
> Morpheus Prototype Lander Ready for New Series of Flight Tests at Kennedy Space Center
> Mike Killian - AmericaSpace.com
> At NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, at the northern edge of the former Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF), is an area that looks very much like the surface of the Moon, complete with rocks and craters to serve as a site to flight test the agency's Morpheus prototype planetary lander. A total of 14 free flight tests have been conducted so far, the last of which took place under cover of darkness on May 28, 2014, and although Free Flight 14 (FF14) concluded Project Morpheus' flight test campaign the team feels there are some areas they can improve upon, and so operations are again in full swing for a new series of flight tests, the first of which is currently scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014.
> Out of ISS: Russia going solo with space station?
> Russia Today
>
> The Russian space agency is reportedly considering construction of a high-altitude orbital station starting from 2017. This means that Moscow may walk away from the ISS after 2020, when its obligations under the current project are fulfilled.
>
> Loss of contact with Philae
> William Harwood - CBS News via Spaceflightnow.com (STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION)
> Trapped in a forbidding jumble of sun-blocking cliffs and rocky debris, the Philae comet lander, its batteries nearly depleted, somehow managed to contact the Rosetta mothership Friday in true cliffhanger fashion, relaying stored science data back to Earth and receiving commands to turn in place in a last-ditch bid to bring a larger set of solar cells into the meager sunlight.
> OPINION: ESA's comet landing highlights a public accustomed to less
> Collin Skocik - Spaceflight Insider
> On Nov. 12, 2014, history was made. The Philae lander detached from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft and landed on Comet 67P, or Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This was the culmination of a space project decades in the making. The Rosetta spacecraft was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on Mar. 2, 2004, from the Guiana Space Center in Khouru in French Guiana. During its long mission, Rosetta flew by two small asteroids and approached the orbit of Jupiter using solar cells as its main power source. With some 2,000 people assisting in the mission, Rosetta is a triumph for the European Space Agency (ESA) and the world.
> Russia's Energomash Dreams Up Reusable Rocket Engine Design
> Matthew Bodner – Moscow Times
> Russia's NPO Energomash, one of the world's leading rocket engine manufacturers, has cooked up an ambitious plan to make its engines reusable up to 10 times, news agency TASS reported Friday.
> Away
> Chris Jones – Esquire
>
> In March, astronaut Scott Kelly will undertake the longest space mission in American history. He and a cosmonaut will begin an uninterrupted year aboard the International Space Station—a year exposed to the strange and deep effects of weightlessness, acute stress, isolation, and cosmic radiation. It is the most ambitious manned space mission in years. And it will also be the first step in a human expedition to Mars.
> What's Happening in Space Policy November 17-21, 2014
> Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com
> Here is our list of space policy events in the coming week, November 17-21, 2014, and any insights we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session.
> COMPLETE STORIES
>
> NASA IG Adds Voice to Chorus that NASA Lacks Adequate Funding
> Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com
>
> Echoing what reports from expert groups have been saying for many years, NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) yesterday warned that the biggest challenge facing NASA is getting the budgets needed to accomplish the programs and tasks the agency has been assigned.
>
> The report goes into detail about seven "top management and performance challenges," but the overall theme is the sustainability of NASA's programs amid budget uncertainty.
> "NASA's ability to sustain its ambitious exploration, science, and aeronautics programs will be driven in large measure by whether the Agency is able to adequately fund such high profile initiatives as its commercial cargo and crew programs, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars 2020 Rover, and the personnel and infrastructure associated with these and other missions."
> Noting that NASA began FY2015 without a full-year appropriation (NASA is operating under a Continuing Resolution through at least December 11), the OIG report also pointed out that projections for NASA's future funding are flat. "Accordingly, we believe the principal challenge facing NASA leaders in FY2015 will be to effectively manage the Agency's varied programs in an uncertain budget environment."
> Having said that, the report identified seven "top challenges," a number of which have been the subject of earlier OIG studies:
> Managing NASA's Human Space Exploration Programs: the International Space Station, Commercial Crew Transportation, and the Space Launch System
> Managing NASA's Science Portfolio
> Ensuring the Continued Efficacy of the Space Communications Networks
> Overhauling NASA's Information Technology Governance
> Ensuring the Security of NASA's Information Technology Systems
> Managing NASA's Infrastructure and Facilities
> Ensuring the Integrity of the Contracting and Grants Processes and Proper Use of Space Act Agreements
> The 41-page report goes into some detail under each of those topics based primarily on previous OIG audits.
> Some of the key takeaways include the following:
> NASA expects to continue spending $3-4 billion per year on the International Space Station, but the OIG judges that estimate to be based on "overly optimistic assumptions and the cost to NASA likely will be higher."
> Regarding SLS and Orion, "NASA's challenge ... continues to be managing the concurrent development of a launch system and crew vehicle and modifying the necessary ground systems while also meeting the Administrator's mandate that exploration systems be affordable, sustainable, and realistic."
> Regarding IT, in response to previous OIG recommendations NASA is "eliminating unused and duplicative web applications and moving Agency websites to a public cloud-computing environment" to "counter the threat of cyber attacks." but the OIG has "found deficiencies in the design and implementation of NASA's program that leaves the Agency's publicly accessible web applications at risk of compromise." The OIG report also notes that it has conducted more than 110 investigations of IT breaches at NASA and helped get hackers from a wide range of countries convicted and getting over $22 million in restitution.
> Regarding infrastructure, "The OIG has conducted 12 audits over the past 5 years examining various aspects of NASA's efforts to manage its aging infrastructure. ... NASA has yet to address our recommendations."
> Humans on Mars by 2035? NASA's sci-fi dream could be realit
> Sheena McKenzie – CNN
>
> We've just landed a washing machine-sized robot on a comet and NASA's chief scientist has no idea.
>
> Dr Ellen Stofan is deep in conversation with a journalist when, unable to contain himself any longer, an adviser with phone triumphantly held aloft blurts out: "Rosetta -- It's landed!"
> "Wonderful" Stofan beams, and the handful of reporters gathered in a lecture theater at University College London excitedly fidget in their seats.
> Barely has the probe touched down on a comet 310 million miles from Earth, then one of science's great minds is discussing humanity's next cosmic milestone.
> Stofan wants to land a man on Mars by the mid-2030s.
>
> Or rather, "land a human on Mars," the mother-of-three corrects me with a wry smile.
> "In a sense it's our destiny to move beyond this planet and Mars is the logical choice," said the 53-year-old geologist.
> "It's a place where humans could live and work -- not out in the open -- but with not too-radical modifications."
> Indeed, life on the 'Red Planet' may not just be the stuff of science fiction.
> "Mars is the other body in the solar system that we're very likely to find that life evolved," said Stofan.
> "So being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think is critically important for science."
> Next stop: Mars
> Surviving an eight-month journey to Mars is one thing -- staying alive once there is another.
> Astronauts would face high levels of radiation -- "we still have to figure out how to adequately protect them," said Stofan.
> The thin atmosphere would also make landing difficult, particularly for a heavy spaceship loaded with equipment and people.
> "If you think of the Apollo capsule coming into Earth with a parachute, the Mars atmosphere is just so thin you've got to find some way of slowing yourself down really rapidly," explained Stofan, the daughter of a NASA engineer who watched her first rocket launch as a four-year-old.
> At the time, the un-manned launch spectacularly exploded, leaving a huge impression on the little girl who decades later has set her sights on a mission to Mars.
>
> The interplanetary endeavor has more to do with unlocking Earth's secrets than you might think.
>
> "Being able to compare the Earth to Venus, to Mars, and studying these same processes all around the solar system -- all of a sudden you get smarter about your own planet," explained Stofan.
>
> "If you're a doctor and you only have one patient, then you'd never really understand the progression of disease. You need lots of patients, and scientists learn more about the Earth by studying lots of planets."
>
> Star Wars reality
>
> But with so many earthly problems, does it pay to point billion dollar budgets at the skies?
> "You know, we're really spending that money here on Earth," said Stofan.
>
> "We get amazing technology spinoffs from the work NASA has done," she adds, listing everything from fuel efficient winglets on airplanes, to air traffic control systems, and equipment for measuring climate change.
>
> Science fiction becomes reality in NASA's lab, with the hovering orb seen in Star Wars -- fans will remember Luke Skywalker using it during light-saber training -- inspiring real-life gadgets on board the International Space Station.
>
> "Think about these things you used to see on TV from science fiction, like communicators on Star Trek, well now we actually have them," said Stofan.
> "Space exploration pushes us to say 'here's things we've just dreamed about, but we can turn that into reality.'"
> Marvin the Martian
> Does that mean she also believes in intelligent life?
> "I think there has to be in the universe -- how easy it's going to be to find, is another question," said Stofan.
> "Statistically every time you're looking at a star you're likely to be looking at a planetary system. Play the math game, there's billions of stars, so eventually you'll come out saying there has to be another body where life could have evolved to a fairly sophisticated level.
> "Now, do I think they're visiting here and altering people's crop patterns? No. If they were smart enough to get here, we would know about it."
> Women's business?
> As a women working at NASA, sometimes it's Stofan who feels like the alien in the room, admitting: "I had to work four times as hard to be taken half as seriously."
> "I still go into most meetings and I will look around the room and I just suddenly register the male to female ratio -- women usually make up 10% to 20% in any room I'm in, at best."
> It's a ratio fairly consistent with women working across STEM sectors (science, technology, engineering, math) in the U.S., and Stofan speaks passionately about the need for "all hands on deck."
>
> "When you have problems like trying to get humans down onto the surface of Mars, if you don't have all the best minds in the world -- not just white men -- then you're not utilizing humanity the way you should."
>
> Landing a human on Mars would inspire a new generation of scientists -- the likes of which we haven't seen since the Apollo mission 45 years ago, says Stofan.
>
> "It's a great international human endeavor, with all the nations of the world moving out beyond Earth to explore a new planet, a new world.
>
> "And doing it together."
>
> Guest column: Orion effort will come full circle with test flight
> Lynda Weatherman – Florida Today
>
> In less than three weeks, get ready to watch a piece of history from your own backyard. While the Space Coast has served as the backdrop to hundreds of launches, Lockheed Martin's EFT-1 Orion test flight, scheduled for Dec. 4, may be one of the most historic launches to lift off here for a number of reasons.
>
> Yes, the final destination for Orion — Mars — is compelling. And the fact Orion marked the beginning of assembly and checkout operations for our community is groundbreaking. But the ultimate success story? How a team of aerospace advocates, led locally by the Economic Development Commission, brought the vision and reality of Orion to the Space Coast and simultaneously mitigated one of the worst economic challenges the Space Coast has ever faced.
>
> This economic development success story and journey to bring Orion home began in 2005, only a year after then-President George W. Bush announced a new vision for America's space program.
>
> With the space shuttle program nearing its final descent, the Vision for Space Exploration detailed a bold new mission, which included landing humans on the moon, paving the way for eventual journeys to Mars and beyond. It also meant the loss of thousands of jobs on the Space Coast through a multi-year program gap.
>
> This represented a significant shift in the mindset and setup of space center locations around the country. The EDC, together with county leaders, aerospace organizations like Space Florida, and a team of aerospace consultants, led by Marshall Heard, Conrad Nagel and Lee Solid, formed a group informally known as The Capture Team.
>
> This forward-looking group set out to determine how best to capitalize on new opportunities that would result from this new vision. It turned into the genesis of a strong private-public partnership that would later revolutionize existing facilities across Kennedy Space Center.
>
> At the heart of the win strategy was the notion of capitalizing on Florida's strengths, including multibillion-dollar infrastructure, a highly technical workforce, and making our local resources easy to integrate into NASA's new plan. The notion of increasing and expanding our services made its way to the top of our pitch.
>
> For 50 years, we have launched and processed rockets and shuttles on the Space Coast, but never has assembly formally taken place here. To capture these services, in tandem with launch, would bring an entirely new dynamic and new economic opportunity to the local aerospace community.
>
> And, that's just what we did.
>
> While NASA conducted a competition to define, design, develop and produce a new crew exploration vehicle (CEV), a vehicle capable of ferrying crews of astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station, the capture team worked closely with the two contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman/Boeing, to present Brevard's business case as the most cost- effective location in the U.S. as both companies competed to build the final crew vehicle.
>
> By the time Lockheed Martin was selected in August 2006, the groundwork had been laid for the company's selection of the Space Coast for not only launch, but also final assembly and checkout. It was, in essence, a historic paradigm shift for the Space Coast, a community where our destiny now includes more than simply launching hopes and dreams. Here, we also build them.
>
> Landing the Orion assembly and checkout project on the Space Coast has led to hundreds of new jobs, millions in economic impact, an enhancement to our broad network of suppliers, and utilization of existing facilities at Kennedy Space Center, such as the Operations & Checkout Building that once supported the shuttle program.
> This is the catalyst to creating a sector bustling with new ideas and innovations.
>
> The first step starts with EFT-1, Orion's descent into the heavens, scheduled for Dec. 4.
>
> More than ever, the Space Coast has a vested interest. Not only did we launch Orion here, we all played a role in building Orion here. And we are poised to meet our destiny as both launch site and manufacturing site as we maintain our central role in America's space program.
>
> Weatherman is president and chief executive officer of the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast.
>
> Next stop, Mars: Eighth grader Alyssa Carson is a media darling and 12-time Space Camp vet with a big dream
> Matt Wake - Huntsville Times
> There are replica Eifel Towers in 13-year-old Alyssa Carson's bedroom. Soccer team photos. Really the only outer-space-related item in view is a painting of the solar system. But at one end of in the dining room of the Baton Rouge condo Alyssa shares with her dad Bert Carson, this is where you'll find the ever-growing "space museum," as the Carsons call it. Model rockets. Commemorative coins given to Alyssa by astronauts and NASA officials and a collection of vintage Life Magazine issues featuring Apollo astronauts.
> See, since the age of 3, Alyssa has wanted to be the first human being on Mars.
> "At first you just go, 'Yeah, baby you can be whatever you want to be' and you think it's just a phase or whatever," Bert says. "Then, at 5 or 6 years old she's studying the Mars map and needing to know everything about Mars in case they bounce off-course whenever they get there. That's what made me take her a little more serious and I started bringing her to Space Camp. And it's that a-ha moment, 'Oh, this is what my kid's going to do.'"
> Alyssa, now in the eighth grade, has already been to Space Camp in Huntsville a dozen times. She's also been to Space Camp in Laval, Quebec and in Izmir, Turkey, as well as the National Flight Academy in Pensacola, Fla. and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
> "Space centers are her Disney World and astronauts are her Mickey Mouse," Bert says. "It's like a little kid opening a present on Christmas morning."
> Alyssa traces her fascination with a space to the Nickelodeon animated TV show "The Backyardigans." "It's a TV show where these creature characters go into their backyard and have adventures and one episode they go to Mars," Alyssa says. "I saw that and I asked my dad if anyone had been to Mars and he told me all about the moon landing and told me going to Mars would be my generation's moon travel and from there it all snowballed."
> More like a snow storm. During a recent past two-and-a-half week stretch, Bert has received more than 160 media requests for interviews with Alyssa, who has already appeared on the "CBS Morning News," BBC, NPR, Australian TV and the American talk show "Steve Harvey," to talk with her about her goal of Mars travel. She's definitely getting used to dealing with the press. She's startlingly poised and articulate for her age.
> Asked about what drives her dream of going to Mars, Alyssa says, and this quote is not cleaned up for teen-speak, "Eventually the Earth and our entire solar system as a whole will die out when the sun stops burning, and so going to Mars is not going to absolutely save humanity because Mars will die with the rest of the solar system but it will show the human race that we can live on other planets. And then hopefully after that someone can take it out of the solar system and out of the galaxy as technology develops. Earth is our home but we can have other homes. We don't have to just rely on this one."
> Told you she was articulate. Alyssa recently traveled to Chicago to tape an episode of "Steve Harvey," which is hosted by the mustachioed comedian of the same name. As part of her appearance on the show, Alyssa talked Mars and space -travel with Harvey, who Space Camp crew trainers Rob Hammond and Katie Mouton strapped into a Multi-axis Astronaut Trainer (MAT), a metallic contraption that resembles a cross between a torture device and a gigantic collapsed Slinky toy. "That simulates a tumble-spin in space, and a tumble-spin is when your space ship is tumbling out of control," Alyssa says of the MAT. "It took a while to start up the machine and have it running due to (Steve Harvey) having second thoughts. But I thought the way it looked and came out was hilarious.
> Alyssa could only stay in Chicago one day because she had to return to her studies. She attends the Baton Rouge International School, where she learns each course in four languages, and lest you think her head was 100 percent consumed by all-things-space, her other interests include piano, soccer, book club and Girl Scouts. That said, Alyssa is psyched to see the new Christopher Nolan-directed space sage "Interstellar." Her all-time favorite space flicks include Ron Howard's 1995 opus "Apollo 13."
> Alyssa's heroes include astronaut Sandra Magnus, who she had the chance to meet at age 9. If she is able to realize her goal of traveling to Mars, Alyssa is particularly looking forward to exploring Valles Marineris, the giant canyon there.
> So why does Alyssa's keep returning to Space Camp? "I love the Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama because even if you go to the camp and go through the same learning you're learning it a different way," she says. "It's interesting to see how each person teaches and some people will tell you stories the others don't. And then the simulators are so much fun you just want to go again and again anyway." Bert, a single father who works in the video and TV industry, adds, "It's like our second family up there."
> Pushing into space not free, but worth it
> Gene Seymour – CNN
>
> Practically from the day the Space Age started on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite into Earth orbit, it's been like this. Every time there's a conspicuous breakthrough in space, somebody, somewhere will find a way to kill the buzz.
>
> After Philae's touchdown on the comet Wednesday, this hashtag #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant (as in #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant find a missing plane on our own planet) started trending in the Twitterverse. Ah, yes. And Americans are especially good at this grousing.
> People have been shouting "Oh, wow!" and then "Oh no!" since the 1950s. Americans on the one hand were alarmed that their Cold War nemesis had rockets big enough to hurl heavy metal projectiles at us and on the other were camping outside at night to see the little beeping ball fly over their backyards.
>
> Americans' consensus love-hate for space exploration has assumed many forms over the years. Once the nation got over its collective shock-and-awe of Sputnik, its citizenry demanded that its scientists and politicians figure out a way to get our own projectiles up there ASAP. We did it, with some notable disasters on the way, at which time the moaning over whether we should spend so much taxpayer money on such risky endeavors would begin.
>
> We were taken back to those dismal days in recent weeks when a rocket launched by the privately owned (but government contracted) Orbital Sciences Corp. with cargo for the International Space Station exploded in midair shortly after lifting off from Wallops Island, Virginia. Three days later, SpaceShipTwo, built by Virgin Galactic (private, not taxpayer, dollars in this case) as a working prototype for a passenger spacecraft, broke up during a flight test over California's Mojave Desert and crashed, killing its co-pilot and seriously injuring its pilot.
>
> Both these catastrophes were too reminiscent of the serial test failures of the 1950s in which rockets regularly blew up before reaching the stratosphere and test pilots seeking faster, higher records in the same Mojave skies lost their planes and their lives. It was through such trial and error that, eventually, America got proficient enough to send satellites and people into space and succeed much more often than it didn't.
>
> And we fell in love.
>
> The romance of space flight became part of our national identity, especially after we started sending humans of our own. As we exceeded our planetary boundaries by sending probes, and then men to the moon, other boundaries seemed less daunting and forbidding.
>
> And yet, with many cheering and goading the country to fly higher, farther and faster, there were just as many Americans wondering if too many of our resources were being squandered for what was mostly a speculative endeavor.
>
> My own cheerleading for space travel was often countered with some spoilsport, honest and sincere, complaining that all that money being shot into the skies could be put to better use on Earth: e.g. Why do we need to go to Mars when we have all these problems on Earth to solve?
>
> For a long time, I had no strong counterargument. But now, with the space shuttle program literally mounted in museums and no government plans to return to the moon or head for Mars any time soon, I find myself asking how that solving-problems-on-Earth thing is going now.
>
> I'm still waiting for a sensible answer, but I don't think one exists. The urge to explore and push ourselves out into the universe is not mutually exclusive from the effort to improve our own minds and environment.
>
> Consider: Last year, 7 million people visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, beating out New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art by roughly a million. Many of them look at vintage spacecraft and archival mockups and openly wonder where our yearning for adventure has gone since the turn of this century.
>
> Even the movies bring this up. "We used to be explorers and pioneers," says a character in the just-released science fiction spectacular, "Interstellar." "Now we're a generation of caretakers." Christopher Nolan's film conceives a potential future in which what's left of NASA has gone underground to figure out options for humankind literally choking to death on ecological decay on Earth. In this future, it seems as though the moon-landing-denial constituency has gained such a foothold in the public schools that a student can get in trouble for suggesting we did in fact land on the moon.
>
> Can't we all just be happy that human beings can do what the European Space Agency did this week? Probably not. I'm just waiting for some troll to claim that it isn't a real breakthrough unless Americans do it first.
>
> A New Dawn: The Troubled History and Future Promise of NASA's Orion Program (Part 2)
> Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com
> Three weeks from now, the first human-capable vehicle for Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) exploration in more than four decades is scheduled to roar away from Space Launch Complex (SLC)-37B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on its first voyage. NASA's Orion spacecraft will ride a Delta IV Heavy, the largest and most powerful rocket currently in active operational service, anywhere in the world, on the Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 mission. Following a planned liftoff at 7:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, 4 December, the Heavy will boost Orion to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), whereupon the spacecraft will complete two orbits in 4.5 hours, then plunge back to Earth in excess of 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h), testing its heat shield at lunar-return velocities and temperatures of up to 2,200 degrees Celsius (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit). Without doubt, EFT-1 represents the most significant advance in human space exploration of the second decade in the 21st century.
>
> As described in yesterday's AmericaSpace article, the Orion spacecraft consists of two primary components, a conical Crew Module and a cylindrical Service Module, and is designed to eventually support deep-space missions of up to 21 days in duration, plus another six months in "quiescent" mode. The shape of the Crew Module was deemed the safest and most reliable means of re-entering Earth's atmosphere at the extreme velocities—far in excess of 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h)—required for direct return trajectory profiles from the Moon. It stands 10 feet (3.3 meters) tall and measures 16.5 feet (5 meters) across its base, as opposed to 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) for the Apollo command module, thereby providing an interior volume of 690 cubic feet (19.5 cubic meters), significantly larger than its 1960s-era ancestor.
>
> Moreover, the Crew Module is equipped with "smart cockpit" digital controls, derived from the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which will provide its future crews with enhanced situational awareness. "Whereas the shuttle's cockpit screens are filled with data that astronauts have to interpret and act upon," Flight International explained in October 2006, "Orion's displays will use graphics along with enhanced synthetic vision and additional flight-related symbology." At the apex of the Crew Module will be the NASA Docking System (NDS), which has compatibility with the two International Docking Adapters (IDAs), to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a pair of SpaceX Dragon resupply missions in June and August 2015. Orion's cabin atmosphere is an oxygen-nitrogen mixture at close to terrestrial sea-level pressure.
> Mounted at the base of the Crew Module is the cylindrical Service Module, which marks out Orion as the first piloted spacecraft in U.S. history—excluding space stations—to carry solar arrays. In the original design, the arrays took the form of two circular panels, deployed from the main body of the Service Module shortly after launch, which would give the spacecraft a total span of about 55.7 feet (17 meters). The Service Module stands 15.5 feet (4.8 meters) in height and measures 16 feet (5 meters) in diameter, with an empty mass of 8,000 pounds (3,700 kg). At its base is the Aerojet-built main engine, capable of 7,500 pounds (3,400 kg) of thrust, with a Reaction Control System (RCS) providing maneuverability and backup capability to execute the critical Trans-Earth Injection (TEI) "burn" from deep space. Inside the bowels of the Service Module, a pair of liquid oxygen tanks and smaller nitrogen tanks will maintain Orion's habitability, whilst lithium hydroxide cartridges will scrub the crew's exhaled carbon dioxide with oxygen and nitrogen and recycle them back into the life-support loop. The Service Module for EFT-1 has been fabricated by Lockheed Martin, with batteries in place of solar arrays, although that of the next flight in 2018 will be developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and will feature an X-shaped layout of four electricity-generating "wings".
>
> By the summer of 2006, after more than a year of initial design and definition, Orion had received its program name and on 31 August NASA revealed that Lockheed Martin would be the prime contractor to design, develop and build the spacecraft. "Manufacturing and integration of the vehicle components will take place at contractor facilities across the country," it was reported. "Lockheed Martin will perform the majority of the Orion vehicle engineering work at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, and complete final assembly of the vehicle at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla." The initial Design, Development, Testing and Evaluation (DDT&E) phase of the contract totaled $3.9 billion and extended for seven years from September 2006. Several months later, in April 2007, the contract was further modified to $4.3 billion, with two years added to the design phase and two test flights of Orion's Launch Abort System (LAS) incorporated into the schedule. "This spacecraft will be a cornerstone of America's human exploration of the Solar System by a new generation of explorers," explained Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation Program at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, "and these changes and additional tests will ensure that it is robust enough to accomplish its missions."
>
> As these decisions were being made, initial testing of parachute systems for the new spacecraft and rockets got underway at the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground, near Yuma, Ariz. By mid-September 2006, Boeing had been selected to support the design of Orion's primary lunar-return-capable heat shield, with options including Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) and alternate technologies explored in subsequent contracts. For more than three years, NASA's Orion Thermal Protection System Advanced Development Project worked on eight candidate materials, before finally narrowing them down to the previously flight-proven PICA and Avcoat, the latter of which had been utilized in the Apollo command module's heat shield and on parts of the shuttle. At length, in April 2009, NASA selected Avcoat—a material composed of silica fibers with an epoxy-novalic resin, filled in a fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb and manufactured directly onto Orion's heat shield substructure and installed as a complete unit onto the crew module—which was described as "the more robust, reliable and mature system".
>
> During this period, other aspects of Orion's development continued. The spring of 2007 was an "eventful" time, according to Jeff Hanley. Reviews of launch vehicle and spacecraft systems requirements, including more than 1,700 issues pertaining to performance, design and qualification, were completed by the end of May to clear the way for a summer of system definition reviews, leading up to the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) process in mid-2008 and the Critical Design Review (CDR) stage in early 2010. Dovetailed into this manifest, it was anticipated that the Constellation Program would also undergo a Lunar Architecture System Requirements Review in the spring of 2009.
>
> Elsewhere, the effort to build the critical LAS was also gaining momentum. In April 2007, NASA partnered with the Air Force's Space Development and Test Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque, N.M., to stage a series of tests between 2008-2011 of an escape rocket mechanism to pull the crew capsule to safety in the event of a launch malfunction. "A total of six tests are planned, pending environmental assessments," NASA reported. "Two will simulate an abort from the launch pad and will not require a booster. The rest will use abort test boosters and simulate aborts at three stressing conditions along the Ares launch vehicle trajectory."
>
> Groundbreaking operations for the construction of the abort test pads got underway at the Army's White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces, N.M., in November 2007, and in the spring of the following year a full-scale, 20,000-pound (9,000 kg) Orion crew capsule test structure was shipped from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., to the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., to participate in the "Pad Abort-1" test. Concurrently, in April 2008, the solid-fueled motor to jettison the LAS during ascent was successfully static-fired by Aerojet at its facility in Sacramento, Calif. Meanwhile, ATK Thiokol performed tests of the LAS igniter system and test-fired the motor itself at its own site in Promontory, Utah, in November 2008. Burning for 5.5 seconds, the successful motor test cleared the way for Pad Abort-1.
>
> After several delays, the full-scale Pad Abort-1 test took place at White Sands on 6 May 2010. An abort motor, with a momentary 500,000 pounds (226,800 kg) of thrust, burned for six seconds to boost the Orion capsule away from the pad. It reached a peak velocity of 540 mph (870 km/h). Simultaneously, a 7,000-pound-thrust (3,170 kg) attitude control motor was also ignited to provide steering, whilst a jettison motor pulled the LAS away from the capsule to permit parachute deployment and a safe landing. Overall, Pad Abort-1 lasted 135 seconds and Orion was brought to a touchdown about a mile (1.6 km) north of the pad.
> The performance of the spacecraft in other critical areas was also being steadily proven and brought closer to flight readiness. In March 2009, a full-scale mockup, known as the Post-Landing Orion Recovery Test (PORT), was successfully placed in a test pool at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock Division in West Bethesda, Md., as part of efforts to understand the kind of motions the astronauts might experience after a water splashdown. Orion swept through its Preliminary Design Review (PDR) with flying colors in August 2009, following six months of focused subsystems evaluations across all ten NASA field centers and its success prompted Cleon Lacefield, vice president and Orion Project Manager at Lockheed Martin, to remark that its design was "much more mature than you might see on many programs at the PDR checkpoint". He paid tribute to the close partnership between Lockheed Martin and NASA during the design of the spacecraft, which involved 300 technical reviews, 100 peer reviews and 18 subsystem design reviews.
>
> Alongside the Orion, the vehicle which would transport it into space was also well into its own development. From February 2006, engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., performed initial wind tunnel testing of what came to be known as the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV). This two-stage rocket had an anticipated payload capacity of 50,000 pounds (22,300 kg). It would feature a first stage fabricated by ATK Thiokol, builder of the shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters, which would be based upon an expanded, five-segment SRB. This would be topped-off by a Boeing-built second stage, to be fed by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's oxygen/hydrogen J-2X engine. The latter was an evolved and modernized version of the very same engine employed by the Saturn IB and Saturn V boosters in the Apollo era and would be utilized to power the second stage of the Ares I CLV and a larger Ares V Cargo Launch Vehicle (CaLV). The "Ares" name honored the Greek variant of the ancient Roman god of war, Mars, whose planetary namesake formed the major celestial target of exploration for the VSE.
>
> Construction of a 300-foot-tall (90-meter) test stand at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, Miss., commenced in mid-2007, in order to perform full-scale firings and evaluations of J-2X hardware, including its powerpack and gas generator. The engine itself passed its Critical Design Review (CDR) in November 2008, which allowed it to progress into the manufacturing phase. Meanwhile, Boeing was selected to build Ares I's avionics system, responsible for developing the mechanized "brains" of the vehicle for guidance, navigation and control until it delivered Orion safely into low-Earth orbit.
> Elsewhere, ATK Thiokol, which had signed a $1.8 billion contract with NASA in August 2007 to build the five-segment SRB for the Ares I and Ares V first stages, was required to perform a test flight, known as "Ares I-X". In effect, this would be an evaluation of many of the key systems of the first stage of the Ares I, with a standard four-segment SRB and a dummy, "ballasted" fifth segment to make it aerodynamically accurate. The performance of the hardware was critical, for its 2.6 million pounds (1.2 million kg) of thrust would power the vehicle to an altitude of 25 miles (40 km) during the first two minutes of each flight.
>
> Hardware for Ares I-X began to arrive at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for processing in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) from November 2008, with the Solid Rocket Motors (SRMs) themselves arriving in March 2009. Concurrently, testing of the rocket's parachute and igniter systems was also completed. Ares I-X was originally targeted for July 2009—although KSC's historic Pad 39B was not handed over by the Shuttle Program to the Constellation Program for appropriate modification until 31 May—and the launch in any case slipped until late October. "The Ares I-X rocket is a combination of existing and simulator hardware that will resemble the Ares I crew vehicle in size, shape and weight," NASA explained. "It will provide valuable data to guide the final design of the Ares I, which will launch astronauts in the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle."
>
> Although the "Orion" for Ares I-X actually took the form of a "boilerplate" crew module, topped by a 46-foot-tall (14-meter) LAS, it was instrumented with 150 sensors to measure aerodynamic pressures and temperatures in order to contribute to an understanding of the performance of the vehicle. A further 550 sensors were also mounted on the body of Ares I-X itself to monitor its flight. "This launch will tell us what we got right and what we got wrong in the design and analysis phase," said Jonathan Cruz, deputy project manager for the Ares I-X crew module and LAS, based at the Langley Research Center. "We have a lot of confidence, but we need those two minutes of flight data before NASA can continue to the next phase of rocket development."
> By August 2009, the Ares I-X vehicle—which stood 327 feet (100 meters) high, far taller than the 149-foot (45-meter) shuttle-era SRBs—had been fully stacked inside the VAB and was transported to Pad 39B on 20 October. By this stage, confidence had been further bolstered by ATK Thiokol's successful full-duration test firing of the five-segment SRB in Promontory, Utah, on 10 September, with a second ground test planned for the summer of 2010. Liftoff on 27 October was postponed by 24 hours, due to concern over the "triboelectrification rule", one of the weather-related aspects of Launch Commit Criteria (LCC). At length, Ares I-X roared aloft at 11:30 a.m. EDT on 28 October. The mission spanned six minutes, from launch through to parachute deployment and splashdown, and was declared an unbridled success. In the words of Doug Cooke, NASA's Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., the test represented "a huge step forward" for the agency's exploration goals.
>
> Sadly, the following year, 2010, would bring the Constellation Program to the nadir of cancellation and a whole new architecture for BEO exploration would take center stage. Although the Pad Abort-1 test of the Orion/LAS hardware was successfully performed in May and ATK Thiokol supported a second ground firing of the five-segment SRB at its Utah test site on 31 August, the new president, Barack Obama, had directed NASA to cancel the Constellation Program, terminate work on Orion and the Ares I and Ares V boosters, and recommended a new human space exploration architecture. It was a decision which would win the president praise and vilification in equal measure.
>
> Morpheus Prototype Lander Ready for New Series of Flight Tests at Kennedy Space Center
> Mike Killian - AmericaSpace.com
> At NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, at the northern edge of the former Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF), is an area that looks very much like the surface of the Moon, complete with rocks and craters to serve as a site to flight test the agency's Morpheus prototype planetary lander. A total of 14 free flight tests have been conducted so far, the last of which took place under cover of darkness on May 28, 2014, and although Free Flight 14 (FF14) concluded Project Morpheus' flight test campaign the team feels there are some areas they can improve upon, and so operations are again in full swing for a new series of flight tests, the first of which is currently scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014.
> "Since our last flight, the team's engineers have been reviewing the volumes of data we collected during all the free flights. The analysis enhanced our understanding of the underlying performance of the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) system and revealed some areas that we felt were important to improve upon at this stage rather than waiting for a later flight implementation," says Dr. Jon Olansen, Morpheus project manager at Johnson Space Center (JSC).
> Morpheus, which has been in development under a strict budget since 2010, is a testbed and technology demonstrator for the development of planetary landers that will, in the future, be capable of accessing hard-to-reach areas on missions to destinations such as the Moon, Mars, or even an asteroid. The vehicle, which some would say resembles a UFO, has conducted many dozens of successful static hot-fire tests and tethered-flight tests at JSC in Houston, but the vehicle's development has not come easily. In August 2012, during its second free-flight test at KSC, Morpheus Alpha crash landed moments after lift-off—an accident blamed on a malfunction that resulted in the total loss of the vehicle.
>
> Project Morpheus pressed on to design and build a new upgraded prototype vehicle, Morpheus Bravo, utilizing the lessons learned from the crash, and in the time since Morpheus has had one success after another, excelling at exceedingly difficult and higher flights to prove the technology.
>
> The Vertical Takeoff / Vertical Landing (VTVL) technology used on Morpheus is not something new, as the Apollo Lunar Modules were the first planetary landers to utilize it. ALHAT, on the other hand, comprises a new set of innovative technologies that would allow a future planetary lander to autonomously identify its landing area by creating 3-D maps of the surface on the fly, while being able to navigate and avoid hazardous terrain and ensuring a safe landing for future missions.
>
> The work being done with the Morpheus Lander could lead to the development of planetary landers capable of reaching many places previously thought as inaccessible, like the Moon's polar regions or deep craters on Mars, and Morpheus' successful flights are a positive sign for a developing capability that could make future missions to those places a reality.
>
> Morpheus' last flight on May 28, 2014, was similar to previous tests, except it was done at night and was conducted with a finer-tuned ALHAT based on what was learned in FF13 to navigate Morpheus' entire approach with ALHAT in closed-loop mode. Morpheus jumped skyward to an altitude of about 800 feet, solely using ALHAT's Hazard Detection System for guidance, and—assisted by three light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors—the system detected rocks and craters on the ground before performing a safe landing a quarter mile away.
>
> "The flash lidar performed very well, and we could clearly identify rocks as small as one foot (0.3 m) in size from the largest range that Morpheus could give us, which was approximately a quarter mile," said Eric Roback, ALHAT flash lidar lead engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "With this sensor we could even find the safest landing site in a pitch black crater."
> Now, nearly six months later, after a lengthy post-flight analysis, data review, and evaluation of Morpheus and its ALHAT performance, the team is ready to fly Morpheus again. All of the required vehicle modifications are now complete, and so Morpheus is scheduled for a tethered flight test this week to exercise all of its systems before proceeding to the next round of free flight tests in December.
> "The tests we flew last spring successfully met all the objectives we had established for demonstrating integrated Lox/Methane propulsion and precision landing advances using ALHAT," says Olansen. "The rationale for pursuing now is to fully demonstrate the system-level performance that would more readily enable infusion into future spaceflight missions. As a result, we developed a number of software updates, primarily to the navigation algorithms. We also designed hardware improvements, including relocating the Doppler lidar velocimeter to eliminate the interference from heated air due to the engine plume. The combination of identified modifications provide a sufficiently different ALHAT capability that warrants demonstration in the closed-loop flight environment that Morpheus provides."
> "The expectation is that these flights will establish the ALHAT suite with a TRL6 level of maturity, thereby reducing the development risk that future missions would have to endure in order to incorporate any of the components in their flight design," added Olansen.
>
> Morpheus' propellant is a mixture of "green," non-toxic liquid oxygen/liquid methane fuel, which is stored inside the lander's four spherical propellant tanks. Future missions to the Moon and Mars could potentially produce these elements through in-situ resource utilization, thus largely mitigating the need for carrying all the necessary fuel required from Earth, and though the current Morpheus prototype vehicle is relatively small, having a payload capacity of 500 kg, the Morpheus team hopes to scale it up in the future to accommodate both crew and cargo.
>
> "The first intent would more than likely be a robotic-type of mission, and depending on the path forward, and vehicles out there to get us beyond Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), the ALHAT technology and other Morpheus technologies could be part of that – at least we HOPE," said Roback earlier this year. "So basically it's not really the 'Lander design' as the intended tests for us, but rather the technologies we tested on these vehicles. If we were to continue testing, we'd probably use different vehicle designs as well."
>
> "Once this technology goes into service, the days of having to land 20 or 30 miles from where you really want to land for fear of the hazardous craters and rocks will be over," added Roback. "Then we can land near the truly interesting science and near the critical resources that will be needed for eventual colonization, and we can do it over and over again safely."
>
> Three flight tests are scheduled for the rest of the year, with the first tethered test expected on Nov. 18, weather permitting. Assuming all goes well, the team hopes to free fly Morpheus twice more during the first two weeks of December, with each of those flights following the same trajectory profile as FF10-14 did last spring.
> Out of ISS: Russia going solo with space station?
> Russia Today
>
> The Russian space agency is reportedly considering construction of a high-altitude orbital station starting from 2017. This means that Moscow may walk away from the ISS after 2020, when its obligations under the current project are fulfilled.
>
> Kommersant newspaper reported that the manned space exploration program for the period until 2050 implies step-by-step assembly of a new scientific space station, citing its sources in Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology, Roscosmos space agency's leading space scientific and research enterprise.
> The principal difference from the currently operating International Space Station will be the new Russian station's high-altitude orbit with a 64.8-degree inclination, which would make up to 90 percent of the Russian territory visible from on board, including Arctic shelf seas.
> From the ISS, which has an orbit inclination of 51.6 degrees, no more than 5 percent of the Russian territory is currently visible.
> Additionally, the new station will be better positioned for manned flights from Russia's under-construction Vostochny Cosmodrome, which will see the first rocket launch in the end of 2015.
> A manned flight from Vostochny to the ISS, were it to happen today, would bear a certain risk in case of an emergency cancelation of a mission. In that case the flight trajectory would see the module come down in open sea, whereas for the new station it would fall over land, Kommersant reports.
> The Plesetsk Military Cosmodrome in Russia's north will also become handy for delivery of cargo to the new space station. The use of the old Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan will continue as usual.
> "The initial configuration will consist of a node module mated with multipurpose research module and space laboratory OKA-T," Kommersant quotes an unnamed source in the Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology.
> The station will be maintained with new rocket boosters under development: Progress-MS (first launch – latter half of 2015) and Soyuz-MS (first launch May 2016).
> Once the station is functioning, Roscosmos is planning to run there trials of an energy and transformer modules for a future lunar program.
> "In fact we are talking about creating a bridgehead: first space hardware will be delivered to the station, then it will be going to the moon," the source said.
> The new manned space exploration program is being readied by scientific institutes united under Roscosmos.
> The Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology declined to comment to RT regarding the construction of a new space station.
> Roskosmos is considering several options for a new national space station to replace the ISS, Denis Lyskov, the federal space agency's official secretary, confirmed to Itar-TASS news agency.
> "We're considering a number of options," Lyskov said.
> Without going into details, Lyskov criticized news about the station already circulating in the media.
> "Premature options should not be given to the media,"Lyskov stressed.
> Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced in May that Roscosmos receives little commercial payback from the International Space Station, despite spending up to 30 percent of its annual budget on the project.
> "Our profit is flat low… so we see no business interest in it [going on with the ISS]," Rogozin said, adding that Russia is set to fulfill its international obligations regarding the ISS.
> "There are rumors about Russia leaving the ISS project. We will not, the program is set to run until 2020 and we will stick to our international obligations. As for prolonging it till 2024 – that's what we're really doubtful of," Rogozin stressed.
> Last week Roscosmos head Oleg Ostapenko told NASA administrator Charles Bolden at the Airshow China exhibition that the decision on further use of the ISS after 2020 will be made by the end of the year.
> The US space industry, which uses Russian Soyuz vehicles to deliver its astronauts to the ISS, insists on using the ISS until at least 2024. Other participants in the project, such as Japan, have also expressed interest in sustaining operability of the station for a longer period.
> In 2013, the US spent $3 billion on the ISS, six times more than Roscosmos allocated for the station, whereas Russia has the right to form half of the ISS crew.
> The ISS project was initiated in 1998, with Russia contributing the first modules needed for its construction. Before the ISS, Roscosmos operated its own Soviet-era MIR station, which remained operational for 15 years, from 1986 to 2001, before it was de-orbited and sank in the Pacific Ocean.
> Loss of contact with Philae
> William Harwood - CBS News via Spaceflightnow.com (STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION)
> Trapped in a forbidding jumble of sun-blocking cliffs and rocky debris, the Philae comet lander, its batteries nearly depleted, somehow managed to contact the Rosetta mothership Friday in true cliffhanger fashion, relaying stored science data back to Earth and receiving commands to turn in place in a last-ditch bid to bring a larger set of solar cells into the meager sunlight.
> But a few moments after the pirouette, battery voltage suddenly plummeted and engineers said the end was near. Trapped between a rock and a dark place beyond its ability to survive, Philae dutifully sent back stored data and even made fresh measurements until finally, just after 7:30 p.m. (EST-5), contact was finally lost.
> "Link is intermittent," the European Space Agency tweeted. A few moments later: "The @Philae2014 Lander has switched to stand by due to low power. All instruments off." ESA followed with a tweet saying the lander was "now sending only housekeeping data at very low rate. All instruments are off."
> Stephan Ulamac, the Philae lander operations manager, said he was thrilled with the spacecraft's performance. As Philae entered "idle mode," sending the occasional data packet and final bits of housekeeping telemetry, Ulamec marveled "we can even watch it falling asleep."
> A few minutes later, ESA tweeted: "Loss of signal. No more comm with @Philae2014. All science data from First Science Sequence successfully downloaded."
> It was not immediately clear whether contact was lost because Philae's battery power dropped below the 21.5 volts needed for normal operation or because Rosetta passed out of view in its orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
> Either way, stranded in the cold shade of comet cliffs more than 310 million miles from Earth, the 220-pound Philae presumably began slipping into the equivalent of an electronic coma as its battery power steadily draining away.
> "Congratulations to the amazing work by the Rosetta/Philae/ESA team," @BadAstronomer tweeted. "You had an entire planet cheering on a small robot 500 million km away."
> More than any space mission in recent memory, Rosetta's encounter with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and Philae's wild, bouncing touchdown have played out in public on the internet with Twitter capturing the thoughts of many during the lander's apparently final moments.
> "Now Philae down to sleep,
> "We pray a sunbeam soon to sweep
> "And if the hibernation break
> "We have more science yet to make," tweeted @BadPhysics.
> "…this is why we feel emotions for little @Philae2014 — it may be nuts, bolts, aluminum and circuits, but it represents us. And science," wrote @astroengine.
> "Sleep well, @Philae2014! Thank you for the images and data. Come back to us when panels are warmed up (hopefully soon!)," said @spacewriter.
> Tweeted @BBCPallab: "This death scene by #Philae2014 is almost Shakespearean."
> But reports of Philae's demise may be premature. While engineers were not particularly optimistic, the lander's final maneuver should have brought a larger set of solar cells into the limited light of the sun. It might possibly be just enough to revive the hardy spacecraft when Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves closer to the sun next year and the light falling on the solar cells intensifies.
> "So there is some hope that at some stage when we're closer to the sun that Philae wakes up again and talks to us," Ulamec said earlier. "But we need to be very lucky that this happens."
> Regardless of the long-term outlook, engineers at the European Space Operations Center were clearly thrilled the lander managed to send home a final set of science data, possibly including the results of an attempt to drill into the crust of the nucleus to collect pristine material for analysis.
> Asked how he felt about the mission, Ulamec said "satisfied, I have to say."
> "Of course, it's a little bit sad to see the power voltage curve going down," he said. "But I'm very happy. … We lived longer than we could expect in the conditions we had."
> He said the science teams had a wealth of data to study from the observations Philae was able to complete and "they should be really happy" with "a lot of data. From what I've seen, it looks pretty good."
> Philae's wild ride began early Wednesday when Rosetta released it for a seven-hour descent to the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The lander was equipped with harpoons and ice screws to anchor itself to the nucleus at the moment of touchdown, but the systems failed to operate and Philae bounced back up into space, reaching an altitude of more than 3,000 feet before coming back down again two hours later.
> The lander then bounced away again, finally coming to rest more than half a mile from its original touchdown point. Or so the telemetry indicates. Engineers do not yet know precisely where the spacecraft ended up, whether the initial two-hour bounce was mostly vertical and how that played in with the comet's 12.4-hour rotation.
> Wherever it ended up, frames from a panorama taken after it came to rest revealed nearby cliffs and a chaotic jumble of dark rock-like debris casting long shadows and allowing only minimal sunlight to reach Philae's solar cells.
> "We are not toppled over," Valentina Lommatsch said from the lander control center. "It looks like we're kind of surrounded by rocks. … But pictures show all three legs on the ground, and I can confirm from the solar data we have not moved at all since the first set of panorama images after the third landing. So we are on the ground, we just have really (been) unlucky in a corner surrounded by rocks."
> Philae was launched with 50 to 60 hours of charge in its primary and secondary batteries. By Friday morning, most of that was depleted.
> In the lander's original orientation sunlight reached the solar panels during a roughly 90-minute period each 12.4-hour "day." For most of that time, less than 1 watt is available, but power output climbs to 3 or 4 watts for about 20 minutes.
> "The lander needs 5.1 watts to boot, so we have to at least get that," Lommatsch said. "After we have that, in order to charge the batteries we have to heat it up to zero degrees Celsius. In the simulations that we've run, that would mean that we'd need about 50 to 60 watt-hours a day in order to reach zero degrees and still have some of the daylight left to charge the battery. So it doesn't look that great."
> But Lommatsch said as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves closer to the sun and warms up, the amount of sunlight hitting the spacecraft will intensify enough to possibly rouse the lander from its slumber.
> But it would take a considerable amount of luck. Rosetta would need go be within line of sight and the lander would need enough power to drive is computer and radio gear.
> "Having a link would need additional power again, so we'd have to have something in the battery in order to have a link or be extremely lucky that Rosetta is looking for us in the moment that sunlight reaches the solar panels," Lommatsch said.
> While "it looks a bit bad," she said, "we can only hope that as we approach the sun, maybe in August if we don't have too much dust or a huge coma blocking the sun, perhaps there would be a chance that at some point we could come back and at least see how the lander's doing. "So cross your fingers, or press your thumbs if you're German, perhaps we'll hear something from the lander again."
> OPINION: ESA's comet landing highlights a public accustomed to less
> Collin Skocik - Spaceflight Insider
> On Nov. 12, 2014, history was made. The Philae lander detached from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft and landed on Comet 67P, or Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This was the culmination of a space project decades in the making. The Rosetta spacecraft was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on Mar. 2, 2004, from the Guiana Space Center in Khouru in French Guiana. During its long mission, Rosetta flew by two small asteroids and approached the orbit of Jupiter using solar cells as its main power source. With some 2,000 people assisting in the mission, Rosetta is a triumph for the European Space Agency (ESA) and the world.
> Upon confirmation that Philae had landed on Comet 67P, Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager, announced, "We're on the comet." Whether deliberately or accidentally, his words echoed the iconic words of Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969: "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." Comet 67P is much further away than the Moon, and Rosetta had a longer, more arduous journey than the primitive Apollo 11 spacecraft in that long-ago decade—yet the landing on a comet has failed to engage the world to nearly the extent that Apollo 11 did.
> There has been a lot of media attention to the Rosetta mission, and it's always nice to see the news media devote their airtime to space activities. And of course all the space enthusiasts are busy posting the latest photos from the comet and expressing their congratulations—as they should. But all the attention feels a little forced. This is a great day in space because…well, because it is.
> Landing on a comet is an important step forward. And in its own way, the Philae landing was as dramatic and hair-raising as any manned mission—the harpoons which were meant to anchor the lander in place did not fire, meaning that even as ESA personnel celebrated their achievement, the lander bounced a kilometer off the surface before landing lopsided in a hilly terrain where the solar panels may not receive enough sunlight to recharge its batteries. Yet it is doing science.
> Eight of its ten experiments are operating and beaming data back via the orbiting Rosetta mothership. The ESA has decided, since the craft is not anchored, that it would be too risky to use the experiment that would sink a drill 8 inches (20cm.) into the comet's surface. It's also feared that extending the Multi-Purpose Sensor for Surface and Subsurface Science (Mupus) would destabilize the lander.
> Yet space highlights like this, and the brief giddiness that follow, have become more or less routine. Various countries have become very good at landing robots on planets and moons. There's instant coverage of the landing, shots of smiling strangers shaking hands, and then life goes on. Scientific American or Physorg.com will provide mission highlights for those who are interested. But they are not iconic, world-changing achievements.
> And the reason is simple. There are no crews.
> Few people could name the first unmanned spacecraft to land on the Moon (Luna 2). Yet everyone knows the name of Neil Armstrong. Perhaps the name of the Viking lander, the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars (technically the first craft to land on the Red Planet was the USSRs Mars-3 – which operated for 14.5 seconds), is known to a fair percentage of people, not least because of humanity's ongoing love affair with the Red planet, but nothing fires the imagination quite like the vision of human beings forging a path into the unknown.
> These unmanned missions are important. They provide invaluable data that will keep scientists busy for many years. But they are stepping stones. Without the crewed missions to follow, their value has to be questioned. Like everything else in space exploration, they're path finding steps into the black. They're important accomplishments, yes, but they're bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that we're just not bothering to put together.
> It's been 55 years since Luna-2 impacted with the Moon, 50 years since Ranger 7 transmitted the first photograph of the lunar surface, 38 years since the first Viking landing on Mars. And yet it's been 42 years since any human being has left low Earth orbit (LEO). Without human follow-up missions, the unmanned surveys of Mars, Venus, asteroids and comets are of little practical value. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a fine thing, and curiosity is one of the things that make us human, but why do we continue to take small steps without attempting giant leaps?
> Rather than congratulating ESA, NASA, China and Russia on all those unmanned landings…and then moving on to other things…why not say, "That's a good first step—what next?" Are we really that impressed with the Philae landing, or are we simply pretending to be impressed because there's just nothing else going on? And because loudly applauding every achievement in space shows political support for those next big steps that we know aren't actually coming, or at least not coming anytime soon.
> In the Christopher Nolan epic, Interstellar, a sad future is painted for mankind. Humanity has focused its efforts on raising crops as the "blight" makes Earth ever-more unlivable. Just as the U.S. did in the 1960s, in order to beat the Russians to the Moon – humanity finally "gets it" and realizes that we must explore space for our survival.
> This is what awaits us. Rather than treat space as some cool "event" like a rock concert – it must be treated as something pivotal to our very survival – because it is. As this author has noted before, we are on a planet whose habitable life is on the decline, all the while our population increases exponentially.
> It is in our nature to want to focus on the short term issues – rather than address the long-term problems. The world's space programs have been forced to get by with minimal resources – one day – we will all come to regret that.
> But why wait for "one day?" Interstellar intoned a poem over and over again – it is one that the space community should take to heart. There is one emotion the current state of our industry should inspire – rage.
> We are going gently into the "good night" mentioned in that poem. We are accepting less and less in terms of space efforts. Rather than traveling to other worlds, we accepted an orbital space plane. Now? We hope commercial companies can achieve the task of sending crews to orbit as NASA attempts to complete vague missions with no clear long-term objectives.
> Who is to blame for this decline. Simple. We are. We fight internecine battles over ever-diminishing funds, tearing each other down with the ferociousness of hyenas who have just brought down a gazelle. We tell ourselves it is either one of the other. We work to break the backs – of those with whom we should work to forge friendships in the name of some cult of personality, from being set in our ways – or out of plain spite.
> What could we accomplish if, instead of fighting each other – we stood shoulder-to-shoulder? Where would we be if, instead of accepting the scraps doled out by politicians – we demanded the future we deserve? While ESA's accomplishments this past week should be applauded and while Nolan's space epic is a must-see – both should cause one emotion to smolder within us – rage.
> We should be further along than we are now. International crews should have already traveled to Mars. Our robotic explorers should have shown the way – and we should have followed. Instead? We sit on our couches, watching the antics of pawn brokers and duck hunters, gossiping about Kim Kardashian's latest photo spread.
> We need to put down the remote. We need to work with those we have placed on the opposing side – and we need to fight the slow-roll backwards that is taking place. We need to cease the "new" "old" nonsense and realize that what we need is "NowSpace" – as in we need to be developing our space capabilities "now" – not when we are threatened by a super power or world is incapable of supporting us.
> Russia's Energomash Dreams Up Reusable Rocket Engine Design
> Matthew Bodner – Moscow Times
> Russia's NPO Energomash, one of the world's leading rocket engine manufacturers, has cooked up an ambitious plan to make its engines reusable up to 10 times, news agency TASS reported Friday.
> Reusability is the buzzword of the modern space industry. Born of exorbitant Cold War budgets, space programs across the globe have struggled over the last two decades to survive with less funding — and reusability is the key to radically cutting down costs.
> Energomash has devised a novel, albeit limited, solution to the problem of returning rocket parts safely to earth. The company proposes housing its RD-191 engine in a capsule attached to the bottom of Russia's Angara rockets. After the engine has exhausted its fuel, the capsule will detach and fall back to earth, protected by a heat shield on one side.
> A parachute will deploy once the capsule hits the atmosphere, allowing the engine to land safely either with the help of a special airbag or small rockets to slow its descent.
> The added weight of this recovery system would knock 2.6 percent off of the Angara rocket's payload capacity, or the maximum weight it can lift to a given altitude above the earth.
> The proposal was presented at a conference hosted by Russia's largest space company, RSC Energia, TASS reported Friday.
> On the other side of the globe, U.S.-based SpaceX is also moving forward with ambitious reusable designs. The company is working to make its Falcon 9 and upcoming Falcon Heavy rockets — which Angara is often compared to — completely reusable, with the entire rocket returning to earth and landing itself.
> Angara, the first rocket developed by the post-Soviet Russian space industry, was originally also designed to be entirely reusable. Its boosters to deploy wings after use that would allow the rocket to fly back home and land like an airplane. This design was ultimately dropped in favor of the conventional single-use approach.
> Away
> Chris Jones – Esquire
>
> In March, astronaut Scott Kelly will undertake the longest space mission in American history. He and a cosmonaut will begin an uninterrupted year aboard the International Space Station—a year exposed to the strange and deep effects of weightlessness, acute stress, isolation, and cosmic radiation. It is the most ambitious manned space mission in years. And it will also be the first step in a human expedition to Mars.
> In cavernous Building 9 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, tucked behind a privacy screen, there is a working model of the International Space Station's toilet. Scott Kelly flicked the three switches that power it up—its control panels, stamped in Cyrillic, flashed with a succession of green lights—and he nodded when a familiar hum filled the air. Three years ago, he commanded the space station for six months, and he came to know the Waste and Hygiene Compartment well. In late March, Kelly will return to his former home as the first American astronaut assigned to live in space for twelve months. This summer, between his morning robotics training and his afternoon Russian class, he took a refresher course in the orbital evacuation of his bowels. The toilet does not have a seat. It dawned on him that he will not sit down for a year.
> He will spend that year falling so fast he will appear to float—in the instance of the toilet, over a small square of plastic with a circular hole just a few inches across. Only his feet will be anchored by restraints. It is better than it used to be. For the two shuttle missions earlier in his career, Kelly's training included a toilet with a closed-circuit camera in its bowl, pointing straight up. He had to learn to assume the position by checking a nearby monitor, as though he were using a bombsight.
>
> Now, on the space station, considerable air suction assists in maintaining alignment. Stool is drawn into a clear plastic bag that lines the hole; the bags have distinctive red release tabs. After the astronaut cleans up with gauze and Huggies Natural Care wipes—NASA doesn't endorse any particular brand of wipe; it just happens to fly Huggies—they're pushed into the same bag, which is removed, tied up, and shoved into a metal canister the size of a milk jug that, when full, will be jettisoned in a trash ship and turned into a shooting star. Finally, the bag is replaced as a courtesy to the toilet's next occupant. When the new bag isn't properly installed, it's called short bagging, and short bagging is the sort of thing that can strain crew relations.
>
> Weightlessness changes everything, and it will change Scott Kelly. Because he won't be sitting, and because the human body is a ruthless and efficient machine, over time his pelvis will lose its bursa sacs, which cushion his hip joints against earthly hazards like toilet seats but become obsolete in space. He will also urinate some significant percentage of his blood reserve—stored in his legs on the ground, but risen into his overstuffed core in the absence of gravity—into a separate piece of the WHC. More specifically, he will take the hose that hangs to the left of the toilet, remove the plastic cap off the yellow, narrow-mouthed funnel at its end, open the urine valve, check to see that there's sufficient air suction in it, too, and aim for the middle. The urine will then pass through a series of centrifuges and purification systems and come out the other end as his water supply.
>
> Before the urine enters the first separator—a $700,000 Russian-built piece of hardware that spins the air out of it—it will be given a dose of a syrupy, almost black liquid called pretreat. Its exact composition is secret, but it's some toxic combination of chromium trioxide and sulfuric acid. Human urine, left untreated, will release particulates that will give the water-purification system the equivalent of the bends. This is a problem that had a team of engineers scratching their heads. Their literal solution was to fight the particulates with pretreat, now one of thousands of responses to the challenges of life in space, our ever-growing collection of improvisations and sidesteps that will allow us, one day, to get from here to there.
>
> In such a complicated environment, however, solutions often give rise to more confounding problems. One day during Kelly's six-month mission, in 2010–11, the toilet's lights flashed red instead of green. He removed a panel and discovered a faulty hose connection had led to a pretreat leak. In microgravity, the solution didn't drip or conveniently pool. It formed a shimmering sphere of acids the size and color of a cannonball that now floated out of the cabinet.
>
> Kelly hadn't been in space long enough to have suppressed all of his gravity-bound instincts. He grabbed an old T-shirt to soak up the pretreat, as though he'd spilled oil in his garage. Unfortunately, that old T-shirt had sweat and therefore water molecules trapped in its fibers. Pour a little acid into enough water and it will disperse. Introduce a small amount of water to a cauldron of acid and something else happens. That old T-shirt didn't act like a sponge. It was flint. Now Kelly saw and smelled smoke.
>
> Fire is the primal fear of astronauts. Every American astronaut who has been killed in a space suit has died in flames. There was a terrible fire on Mir, the old Soviet space station, and it's whispered about in Houston like a ghost story. (It wasn't fatal; cosmonauts tend to die by asphyxiation or in falls to earth.) That's not only because the crew can't escape outside or because the fire will consume their oxygen. Fire, like just about everything else, behaves differently in weightlessness.
>
> A candle's flame always points up because of gravity. Fire is superheated gas that's lighter than the air around it. That's why volcanic plumes and hot-air balloons rise. We can fight fires because they have a predictable architecture, built with a spine like a book. In orbit, fire is not lighter than air. It weighs the same as air, which weighs the same as everything else. A candle's flame no longer points up because there is no up. A candle's flame is round. A fire will imitate the sun. Kelly's trip to the bathroom now threatened to turn into a ball of anchorless flame.
>
> Happily, one of Kelly's crewmates was a chemist named Cady Coleman. She understood the nature of acids—she knew that too little water might ignite them, and yet enough water rendered them harmless. But how could she bring one to the other? There was no hauling a bucket from the sink. Coleman found a large plastic bag, soaked some towels, threw them in the bag, and then caught the smoldering ball of acids with it as though she were scooping up a fish in a net. In time, the bag—its combination of enough water and not enough oxygen—snuffed out the threat. It was less warfare than a kind of siege.
>
> Now, in Building 9, Scott Kelly looked down at the toilet that will again be his. The lights on the panels continued to flash, and the fans continued to whir. There was the hose with the yellow funnel. There were those clear plastic bags with the distinctive red tabs, and the metal canister into which they will be stuffed. There was the pouch of Huggies.
>
> "A year is a long time," he said.
>
> The Russians proposed the one-year mission. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, has always been more intrigued by the risks and rewards of long-duration flight than NASA has been. Four cosmonauts spent more than a year in space on the uncomfortable bucket that was Mir, the last in 1999. A narrow-faced Russian named Sergei Krikalev is the current record holder for the most time lived in orbit. Over six missions, he has spent eight hundred and three days, nine hours, and thirty-nine minutes weightless. Semi-famously, he was on Mir when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Mir didn't have many windows, but whenever Krikalev found his way to one, he looked down on a new world.
>
> The International Space Station was built in that tumultuous reality. Fearful that aimless Russian rocket scientists might seek stable employment in places like North Korea or Iran, the Americans proposed a more harmonic convergence: the grandest and most difficult construction project in history, built out of Russian wisdom and American largesse. Today, the station comprises two distinct halves, augmented by Japanese, European, and Canadian contributions. The Russian segments are narrower and more austere. The Russians don't process their urine; they just piss into tanks. They also carpet their modules in Velcro, using nearly every available surface to secure a battalion of objects that otherwise would be satellites. The Americans don't have nearly as much Velcro in their quarters. They've deemed it a fire risk.
>
> By treaty, there is agreement between the U. S. and Russia that their conjoined space programs are out of political bounds. Whatever events might be unfolding on earth, whatever airliners might be shot out of the Ukrainian sky, there are no sides in space. It helps that the Russians possess our only means to manned orbit—the Soyuz spacecraft—and that the Americans control much of the station's electrical plant and the gyroscopes that maintain its attitude. "We have something up there that is holding us together," says Michael Suffredini, NASA's manager of the ISS Program Office. "Right now we have six crew onboard, and we all understand that these men and women are the next step for humanity."
>
> But like countries and their arrangements, the station has a life span: It will stop defying gravity in 2024, or not long after. While it always has been used as a weightless laboratory—more than a thousand investigations in materials and medical research have been undertaken since Expedition 1 in 2000—the Russians wondered whether the station's residents might be part of a larger experiment in the time they have left. Six-month expeditions have become the industry standard, but a journey to Mars—MAPC in Cyrillic—will require a crew to spend as long as three years in space. So the Russians proposed that, in the decade or so before the station falls to earth, as many as twelve subjects be rocketed up, delivered in pairs, to test the physical and psychological limits of humans in weightlessness. (Those four brawny men on Mir were never subjected to intensive diagnostic study; cosmonauts still refuse to give stool samples.) The Americans, fresh off the stunning success of the Mars rover Curiosity, agreed. We've proved we can reach Mars with our machines; the exiled dozen will help us decide whether we can reach it with our feet.
>
> Such an undertaking requires equal parts optimism and resignation. It takes a certain measure of faith to strap into a seat on a missile in Kazakhstan and trust that you will end up safely in orbit. It also takes the belief that we will one day need to. For all the hopefulness astronauts represent, they are among the least delusional people on earth. What Chris Hadfield, a former astronaut and station commander, calls the "North American subculture of pretense"—that sense that we can make all our wishes come true—has been stripped from them over years of simulations that end in their deaths. Astronauts are experts in weakness.
>
> "I'm in this business to take humans beyond low-earth orbit," Suffredini says. "I believe that's how this species will survive, when we can inhabit other planets if something happens to this one. We need to start proving to ourselves that we can do it." Scientific research is often a parade of analogues. NASA uses Antarctica and giant swimming pools as analogues for life in space; the International Space Station is about to become an analogue for an interplanetary Noah's Ark.
>
> A mustachioed fifty-four-year-old cosmonaut named Mikhail Kornienko will be the first to represent the Russians. The American is Scott Kelly.
>
> He is not a formidable human specimen. Like fighter pilots and test pilots—both of which he has been—Kelly is fairly short. (Because of height restrictions on Soyuz, and because aerospace engineers are obsessed with mass and volume, NASA won't consider astronaut applicants who stand taller than six foot three.) Five foot seven, 185 pounds on the ground—more like five foot nine, 170 after his year in space; "like a supermodel," he says—Kelly is coiled and capable of significant momentum, but he's also fifty years old. He shaves what's left of his hair with a blade. He has sometimes worn a mustache, but he doesn't anymore. He does wear glasses. (Astronauts do not need to have perfect vision, but it can't be worse than 20/100 uncorrected.) On formal occasions he'll wear his Navy uniform—he is a retired captain with more than 250 carrier landings to his credit—but Kelly mostly sports jeans and NASA-issued golf shirts. When he pulls into a place like Chelsea's, an astronaut hangout just down the road from the Johnson Space Center, and sits at a table with Cady Coleman and Mike Fossum, his fellow station veterans, they look like a group of teachers unwinding after school. You would never know by looking at them what they have done.
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> That's until Kelly makes the drive to Ellington Field and pulls on his blue flight suit and survival vest and walks toward a T-38 jet, white with a blue stripe and a NASA logo shining on its tail, a little like a man who knows he has the biggest balls in the room. Astronauts are required to spend a certain number of hours in T-38's each month to keep their flying, navigation, and troubleshooting skills sharp. Some days, Kelly hurtles across to Mobile or Little Rock and then pounds his way back home. On others, he loops through touch-and-goes, taking off and landing and taking off again. He peels into the sky and disappears into the brightness, announcing his return with the roar of his engines, and he whispers across the ground, the faintest of grazes, before he lifts back up where he belongs. To see Kelly in flight is to see a man transformed.
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> He was selected for this mission for several cold and rational reasons. NASA wanted a previous commander to take the critical first spot, and it wanted someone who had completed a six-month expedition without any evident physical or mental fissures. NASA also wanted to send up an older astronaut, so the cosmic radiation he will absorb will have less time to turn into cancer before something else kills him. American astronauts are subject to strict exposure limits, the so-called red line they all fear, not because of the tumor risk but because they'll be grounded. Those limits were established in part using data culled from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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> Kelly also has an identical twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut and close-to-flawless genetic copy. By the end of Scott's mission, he will have spent exactly ten times as long in space as Mark, who has agreed to serve as a control in a series of detailed comparison studies, tracking everything from the microbiomes in their guts to the relative lengths of their telomeres, a sequence in our chromosomes that's believed to shorten with stress.
>
> But mostly, Scott Kelly was chosen because of the stomach sense that he is, more than just about anybody else on earth, purpose-built to fly. NASA's psychologists and psychiatrists look for two contradictory-seeming traits in its candidates for long-duration missions: adaptability and resiliency. The first represents an astronaut's tolerance for the chronic, low-level stress of being away—the confinement, the nearly constant white noise, the shitting into plastic bags. You yield in the fights you cannot win. The second indicates an astronaut's ability to withstand acute stress, usually associated with an unfortunate turn of events. You fight the fights you must win. "Scott is highly adaptable and highly resilient," says Al Holland, a NASA psychologist who has tested him extensively. He is some rare combination of grit and give.
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> One barometer of an astronaut's adaptability is his feet. Many first-time astronauts, in their opening days and weeks of weightlessness, will cling to some facsimile of verticality: head up, feet down. It makes them look clumsy in their movements, like skiers trying to push uphill. That's despite the clear messages being sent by their feet that the rules have changed. After about a month in orbit, astronauts begin sloughing off vast quantities of skin from their soles; it takes only that long for their bodies to decide that calluses, like bursa sacs, are biological ballast.
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> The results can be dramatic. Don Pettit, who has completed two long-duration missions on the station, filmed a crewmate taking off his socks against a black backdrop and a spotlight. It looked like a snow globe. One astronaut made a call to his flight surgeon after a thick wedge of his heel came floating off. "Should I be worried?" he asked Houston. After Kelly returned from his six-month mission, he remembers going for a massage and the woman gasping when she got to his feet. She said they were the softest feet she'd felt in her life.
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> Kelly's feet weren't really feet anymore. It wasn't just that he had been launching himself headfirst around the station, having discarded every last upright instinct. Because he had no longer needed his feet to be feet, he'd used them as hands. Rather than having two arms and two legs, he'd had four equal limbs. Handrails became footrails. The calluses that he'd lost from the bottoms of his feet migrated to the tops, where he had hooked them around restraints like a trapeze swinger.
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> Given another year of pure flight, Kelly might evolve into human history's first true spaceman. Perhaps the migration of his calluses is just the beginning of his adaptation. We always depict aliens as some version of us. They won't look like us, because in space, even we stop looking like us. We become spiders that don't need webs.
>
> Not every part of the human body is so easily recast. NASA keeps a risk matrix, a list of thirty-two areas of ongoing physical concern. (Roscosmos has an entire division in Moscow, the Institute of Biomedical Problems, dedicated to addressing them. The Russians usually abbreviate it to the Institute of Problems, because nearly every problem in space is a biomedical one.) Some former crises, like bone loss—studies showed that on long missions astronauts were losing as much as 2 percent of their bone mass per month—have been resolved with new exercise regimes and therapies. Others—like persistent sinus congestion, a side effect of the same fluid shifts that lead to the loss of our blood reserves—have proved harder to remedy but seem relatively minor inconveniences. A sinister few continue to pose major obstacles to prolonged expeditions. One in particular didn't even present as a problem until the last year or two, and it risks making a trip to Mars impossible.
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> It's been dubbed Ocular Syndrome, or VIIP—Vision Impairment and Intracranial Pressure—so named after its possible cause. It was missed for all these years because most astronauts and cosmonauts are middle-aged, and they've reached that stage of life when they might be holding instructions a little farther from their faces to read anyway. But as the number of six-month missions on the station increased, more and more residents began experiencing startling changes to their vision. In one instance, it was so bad that NASA considered bringing the sufferer home.
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> Neither the Americans nor the Russians yet know the cause of Ocular Syndrome. The current hypothesis is that increased pressure in the brain—again, from fluid shifts—is damaging the retinas or optic nerves of certain people, though not all, for whatever equally unclear reason. The one-year missions will help NASA chart these changes and others like them beyond six months. Maybe the effects of weightlessness on the body level off or improve. Maybe they get exponentially worse. Maybe there is the real and terrifying prospect that by the time the first humans get to Mars or try to come home, they won't be able to see.
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> Although flight surgeons say only that further study is required, there is some evidence that Ocular Syndrome affects only men, and that if it affects them in only one eye, which it sometimes does, it will always take hold in their right eye. That might be a quirk of limited sample sizes; far more men than women have been to space. Or it might prove the opening to some stunning revelation, an invitation to discover a fundamental difference in the human eye not only between men and women but also between the hemispheres of the brain.
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> We can't just choose to send women to Mars instead, because the women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved far more receptive hosts to cancer. At higher orbits, cosmic radiation is so intense, astronauts see fireworks through their sleeping masks; Scott Kelly could tell when he was between South America and Africa even with his eyes closed, because of the fiery presence of the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the inner Van Allen radiation belt bends closest to the earth.
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> If we don't give ourselves a better option than crews of blind men or radiation-sick women, then we won't survive Mars or its defenses. Getting there is only half the equation. Living and working there, in one-third earth's gravity—already weak, light-headed, and sore, and now your blood and bursa sacs and feet adapting again—is the other. The most beautiful lure of interplanetary space is its demand that we first conquer us.
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> Each week in space, long-duration astronauts have private conferences with NASA's shrinks. Not even their flight surgeons can listen in. Together they work through a long mental-health checklist: workload and habitability, family and personal relationships, mood and cognition. If the call is a videoconference, note will be made of the astronaut's appearance and mannerisms. The psychologists and psychiatrists are looking for the speed wobbles that can be the precursors of a larger crash. In Kelly's case, one of the measures of his orbital mood will be his sense of humor. He is deadpan and dry on the ground, and the working theory is that space makes you more of what you are. It is a compounding environment. If you are a man of faith here on earth, you will be devout above it. What concerns the shrinks is subtraction, anything that looks like lessening.
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> After his six months away, even Kelly, born flyer, was ready to land. "I've taken all my pictures," he said to Coleman, and his bags were packed well in advance. He's a scattershot sleeper on earth, and he gets less sleep in space, and it was beginning to tell on him. Residents on the station are each assigned private quarters, a soundproof box about the size of a phone booth; nobody underestimates the importance of having a door to close. Most astronauts strap sleeping bags on the wall and hang like bats, but Kelly often woke up in strange positions that took his sensory system time to parse. He missed resting his head on a pillow and never shook the desire to roll over, even though without pressure points, sides and backs become as meaningless in orbit as up and down. Some nights he kicked his way out of his bag in his sleep, his zombie arms stretched out in front of him, before he settled against what would have been a corner of his bedroom ceiling at home. He didn't remember many dreams while in space, but in the dreams he did, he was always on the ground.
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> At its essence, his one-year mission will be an exercise in absences and their mitigation. Before each trip, astronauts sit through a series of "contingency sims." They walk through what will happen if something bad occurs to them and what will happen if something bad occurs to someone they love, and they handpick their emissaries to gravity, the people assigned to call them in the event of an earthly emergency or, alternatively, to knock on their family's door in the middle of the night. No astronauts have lost children while in space, considered the worst of the possibilities to confront, but one learned his mother was killed in an accident. Regardless of the sim, none of them ends with an astronaut returning early. "That's something you need to understand before you leave," Kelly says. "There's no going home."
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> Buzz Aldrin once described bravery as a "gradual accumulation of discipline." Being able to leave comes in stages. Kelly has tried to occupy the doubtful parts of his brain with the countless small details of his departure. He has put all of his bills on automated payment. He noticed during a Russian class that his credit card is set to expire shortly after his launch; he will have to renew it early. He has updated his will. He hasn't yet reached the gratitude stage most astronauts pass through, when they take the time to savor last steaks or cold bottles of beer, but he has started preparing for goodbye. "Six months is a huge commitment for any astronaut," his brother, Mark, says. "I think this is a lot more than just twice as hard."
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> Kelly is divorced, but his marriage produced two daughters: twenty-year-old Samantha, who recently moved back with him in Houston, and eleven-year-old Charlotte, who lives with her mother in Virginia. Kelly also has a longtime girlfriend, Amiko Kauderer, who works in NASA's public-affairs office and has two children of her own. He also has his widower father, Richard, who moved down from New Jersey to join his twin astronaut boys in Houston; Mark and his family; and a wide circle of friends. Kelly will stay connected with them while he is in orbit—there is Internet, a phone, and regularly scheduled videoconferences on iPads—but his six-month mission taught him that it isn't always enough. Amiko would go outside and record the sound of crickets or the rain to send him, but he is aware of the limitations of substitutes. As much as he loved weightlessness, some aches never went away.
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> This is really starting to hurt me, he wrote to Amiko one sleepless night. He had hit the three-quarter mark of his expedition, considered by the shrinks to be the hardest time: close enough to the end to see it, but not close enough to feel it. (This time around, Kelly will face a special test at the nine-month mark of his mission. Sarah Brightman, the soprano, will be arriving on the station as Russia's latest space tourist.) He began watching more TV, even though he rarely does on earth. Recordings of Houston Texans football games were important weekly benchmarks. He saved Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for his daily workouts. He became obsessed with American Idol. "That's because Sam sings," Amiko says.
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> Over the last several months, Samantha has become one of his principal tethers. For years they were miles apart. After his former wife and daughters left for Virginia, Kelly lived an unattached man's life. When he went up for his six-month mission, he'd been dating Amiko for only a year. He gave up the apartment he was renting and trucked his stuff into storage. Upon reflection, that was a mistake. It left him too groundless. There is a cupola on the station, a half-diamond of flawless windows opening toward the earth. Studies have shown that astronauts are pulled into it mostly when they are passing over home. Kelly didn't have one. He has since moved into an immaculately kept new house with a yard and a pool, and it felt even more like home when Sam came back to him to start college, bringing her pets with her. She has a collection of tarantulas.
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> Kelly knows the longer he's away, the harder it becomes to remember. He will miss a year of Sam's and Charlotte's lives. What was once his finish line will soon be his halfway point. He recently decided to have a set of security cameras installed at his house; he can monitor them online. Most of the cameras point outside. His phone chimes when his doorbell does, and he can check to see who's at the door. But one of them is inside, with a view of his kitchen and living room. When he's back in orbit, he'll be able to drop into his sleeping bag with his laptop and see his couch, and his fridge, and his daughter and her family of surrogate spiders. He won't have to worry about remembering his dreams at all.
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> It was nearly one hundred days into his six-month mission. Kelly is certain that it was a Saturday, because the rhythms on the station change on the weekends. With sixteen sunsets and sunrises each day, and without seasons to measure the passage of time, it's considered psychologically beneficial for a workweek in space to mirror a workweek on earth.
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> Monday through Friday, each day is planned down to the minute, and crews are constantly chasing a line that moves through their schedules like a scanner: fifteen minutes to draw a blood sample; five minutes to tend to the experimental crop of red lettuce. Sunday is, in theory, a day of reflection and rest. Saturdays are something in between. There is work, but it's Saturday work: stocking the galley, vacuuming skin out of filters. On this particular Saturday, Kelly remembers that he was fixing the toilet again. He remembers, too, that he had the TV on in the background. It was on CNN.
> He had just talked to Amiko on the phone. He had caught her at home, where she was indulging in her fully functional bathroom, taking a bath. She was shy to tell him where she was, but the now-strange sound of water splashing had bounced off the satellite between them.
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> Just down the road, Mark Kelly was spending the day with his teenage daughters, Claire and Claudia. A thousand miles to the east in Virginia, Samantha and Charlotte Kelly were with their mother, an hour deeper into their day. They were helping Sam's godmother move. A thousand miles to the west and an hour earlier in Tucson, Gabby Giffords, Mark Kelly's wife and Scott Kelly's sister-in-law, was meeting constituents in a supermarket parking lot. A twenty-two-year-old man whose name nobody knew approached her.
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> Back on the station, Kelly was burying himself in his work. He hadn't noticed that the TV feed had gone out. The signal is lost fairly routinely, whenever the station blunders into a gap in the Ku-band's coverage. Only a call from the ground finally broke his concentration. It was Houston. The CapCom told him that Peggy Whitson, a veteran astronaut and chief of the astronaut office, needed to talk to him. She would be on with him in five minutes.
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> Astronauts endure some long minutes, but those were some of Kelly's longest. During his contingency sims, he had asked that Whitson be his principal bearer of bad tidings. Now, on an otherwise uneventful Saturday, she wanted to talk to him. He felt heavier than he had in a hundred days. Maybe his grandmother had died, he thought. Maybe Sam had been in a car accident. He hadn't yet connected the black screen on the TV and the phone call. It hadn't dawned on him that the signal wasn't lost but cut.
> Whitson came on the line. The conversation was made private. "I don't know how to tell you this," Whitson said, "so I'm just going to tell you: Your sister-in-law Gabby was shot."
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> The way gravity makes weightlessness hard to imagine, space can make life on earth seem like an illusion. When the sun is shining, even our biggest cities become washed out and invisible, swallowed by the vaster stretches of brown and green around them. Vapor trails become clouds, and oil rigs become icebergs. It can be hard to believe that there are traffic jams and baseball games and border crossings down there. And it's next to impossible to comprehend that someone might have just shot your sister-in-law in the head in a supermarket parking lot on a Saturday morning in Tucson.
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> Kelly told Whitson that he wanted to know everything, that she shouldn't seek to spare him. He wanted to feel what his family on the ground was feeling. He couldn't be with them physically, but he could be with them in every other way. He told his crewmates what had happened, and he told them that he was going to be okay, but he was going to need to spend some time in his sleeping quarters.
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> The first phone call he made was to his brother. Mark Kelly was still packing his bags in Houston, preparing to fly to Tucson. Over the coming hours and days, Scott made dozens more phone calls—to Mark, to Amiko, to his daughters. He worried that he was calling too much, that in trying to make up for not being there, he might have become too present. "No, it was actually really helpful," Mark says today.
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> In fact, "he was the rock, pretty much," Sam Kelly says. Because of his distance, his sense of disbelief dug in for longer than it stayed in the others, and maybe that's what allowed adaptation to turn into resiliency, as though he were the last of them with any hope that a different reality might be true.
> President Obama announced that on Monday the nation would observe a moment of silence. Kelly would lead it from space, after he had said a few words. Just before he was scheduled to speak, he called Amiko. She was in Mission Control in Houston. He wasn't sure how long the moment of silence should be. She told him it should be as long as he wanted.
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> Kelly soon floated in front of the camera and onto the giant screens in front of her and everybody else. "Houston, Station, on Space-to-Ground One," he said.
> "Yes, Station, this is Houston. Go ahead."
>
> Kelly began by talking about his vantage point and how peaceful the planet looked in that instant from space, and how sharply what he saw diverged from what he knew. As he spoke, his voice grew harder through the crackle, a military man about to give an order. "We are better than this," he said. "We must do better." Then he asked for the moment of silence in honor of the victims of another one of those days when we did our worst. It was just long enough. He floated out of the camera's range, swimming back into his sleeping quarters. Amiko's phone soon rang beside her again.
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> The one place where astronauts still leave our planet is the place where the first one did: Site No. 1 in the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome, carved out of the middle of the Kazakh desert. The launchpad was poured in 1955 under a veil of secrecy so thick—including mislabeled maps and a diversionary mining town also named Baikonur located hundreds of miles to the northeast—most of the men who built it didn't know what they were building. Sputnik was launched from it two years later. Four years after that, a star-crossed young Russian named Yuri Gagarin sailed into orbit from this Soviet monument to the invisible.
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> Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia leased the site from Kazakhstan; it is the last colony of a former empire. The pad is a wide, cracked concrete slab with train tracks embedded in it. The tracks end at an enormous hole framed by steel gantry towers. Underneath the pad, below that hole, a great crater has been dug out of the brown earth, vertigo-deep and wider than the pad itself. The Russians call the crater the otvod, which roughly translated means "getaway." In September, six months before he was scheduled to leave the earth for a year, Scott Kelly climbed down into that pit.
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> Officially, he was in Kazakhstan as a backup for an American named Barry "Butch" Wilmore, a crew-cut Tennessean with a wife and two young daughters who was about to launch to the space station with two Russian crewmates as part of Expedition 41. If Wilmore had fallen in the shower or betrayed some previously undiscovered cavity in his nerve, Kelly would have taken his seat on Soyuz TMA-14M, and another American would have taken Kelly's place in history in March. Less formally, and more hopefully, Kelly was there to complete a dress rehearsal for his departure, another step in his gradual accumulation of discipline. He would do everything that he will do except go.
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> The Russians put much faith in patterns and their repetition, and part of their prelaunch ritual is that the backup crew clambers down into the otvod and inspects the bottom of the Soyuz FG on behalf of their captive colleagues, quarantined against prelaunch illness. Kelly was awed to look up at essentially the same collection of boosters that the Russians have employed since 1967. Two nights later, where he was standing would be filled with white-hot flame, but on that bright morning, in the silence and shadow, he was afforded a lung-emptying view. He wasn't looking up at a "bird" or a vessel or a ship. Soyuz, plainly and unmistakably, is a big fucking rocket.
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> Earlier that morning, at precisely seven o'clock—because that's when Gagarin's Vostok had been ferried to the pad, and so that's when every manned rocket the Russians have fired up since has begun its long journey into space—the rocket was pulled horizontally, business-end first, through a gaping maw in the side of Building 112 by a green locomotive. It can seem as though Russia's space program is a celebration of the past as much as it is a hedge against the future. There are constant reminders of who and what came before. As always, one of the locomotive's headlights had been put out; nobody seems to remember why anymore. A soldier with a sniffer dog walked the track ahead of it. Other soldiers with machine guns marched beside it. The track was aimed due east, toward a just-rising sun, its glow banking bright orange off clouds. In one of humanity's great pieces of theater, Soyuz rolled out into the light.
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> It was muscular and sleek in the thin morning air, the locomotive clanging and whistling ahead of it in wordless testimony to the evolution of our engines. It was more than 160 feet of power and restraint, of stages and modules, from its rhino's ass through its four gunmetal-gray boosters and its lathe-perfect middle, tapering to its gleaming white cap with its seamless hatch and, somewhere behind it, three seats, shaped more like cradles. When the locomotive stopped and the rocket sat still before a small crowd that could see its breath in the cold, it felt almost impossible that so much of this great and artful machine would be burned up and spent, except for its most essential parts, which would require only five hours and sixteen minutes to catch and dock with the station, orbiting at 17,500 miles an hour, somewhere up there. On some nights, if the mathematics and angles are right, you can see the light of the space station streak across the sky three minutes and sixteen seconds before the huge rocket lifts off like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. It can feel like too great a distance to close in so little time.
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> Mars can seem that way. Michael Suffredini believes that it's possible for one of us to stand on it by 2035, if the will is found and the right investments are made and we figure out a less diabolical way to dissolve particulates in urine. That means it will probably take longer than he hopes. Whether we reach it in the lifetime of Scott Kelly is a function less of our ability than our desire. Mars never seems more remote than when we're putting bullets into congresswomen in parking lots. It never seems closer than when we're standing on the cracked concrete at Baikonur. The Kazakh desert already looks as though it belongs to another planet, barren except for conquering packs of wild dogs and herds of camels. "It's a good first step," Kelly says. It already feels so far from home.
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> At the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow, underneath a shining titanium monument of a rocket soaring into the sky, there is a black-and-white photograph of Yuri Gagarin as a boy. He was short because his family was poor and he was malnourished—it was wartime—but he was a beautiful boy. The photograph is there mostly for other children to see, mounted close to the floor, so that they might remember that this giant was once their size. When the Russians were more deeply invested in the hero-building business, they knew that children needed to believe that someone like them could grow up to be someone like him. Belief is the first of our gaps that needs to be bridged.
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> A galaxy away in Baikonur, not far from the launchpad, two cottages sit among the desert's few trees. These are for grown-ups to visit. They are made of white plaster and green wood, with corrugated sheet metal for roofs. In one, Gagarin slept, apparently soundly, before his fateful launch. His small bed, neatly made, sits in the corner of one room, with a table and chairs and a record player. In the other cottage, Sergei Korolev worked more than he slept. He was Russia's preeminent rocket engineer and designer. He dreamt up Vostok and Soyuz here. In the Energia factory where the Soyuz capsule is assembled, a massive mural of his face is on the wall, with a quote: "The road to the stars is clear." In his office in his cottage, preserved like Gagarin's bedroom, there is a plain desk and a single wooden chair and a lamp. These were his instruments to overcome magnitudes.
>
> Now, all these years later, Korolev's rocket inched its way down the tracks, taking more than two hours to cover the not quite five miles to Gagarin's pad. Then the locomotive's engineer reversed it up to the hole in the concrete. The rocket was made vertical by hydraulics and levers, and it became even more titanic upright than it had been on its side. Four weighted support arms were swung into position and placed against its hull. The train soon pulled away, and the rocket was left suspended over the otvod as though by magic. When the American shuttle was on its pad, it was pinned to the ground by a series of explosive bolts, showy and pyrotechnic and one more thing that could go wrong. The Russians rely on Korolev's more ancient and simple physics. The rocket waits, held in place only by those four delicate arms, which act the way flying buttresses hold up a Gothic cathedral's soaring ceiling, gravity made to work against itself, weakness turned into strength. Soyuz can float on its pad only because it is so heavy.
>
> Later, two bearded Russian orthodox priests would visit it, their black robes whipping around them like flags. They chanted and sang baritone hymns in Soyuz's shadow and waved a cross and threw holy water at it. That was after Kelly had dropped down into the getaway to stare up at the bottom of it, six months before he would strap into a cradle at its top. Twice graced, by Russian mysticism and American marvel, that big fucking rocket was deemed ready for launch.
>
> Kelly has never thrown up in space, but when he came back to earth last time, he had gravity sickness. The muscles that held up his head hurt. His spine was painfully compressed. He didn't smash coffee mugs like so many of his colleagues, letting go of them in midair and expecting them to float, but he did try to kick himself to his bathroom one night and couldn't figure out why he wasn't flying out of his bed.
>
> For every day they spend in space, astronauts can expect to need a day on the ground to return to some version of their former selves. By that measure, Kelly is about to spend two years away. In the quiet before his departure, he answered a question about whether his time in orbit had changed him in more fundamental ways than the redistribution of his calluses. Whether he and his insides were something they weren't before.
> "No," he said.
>
> Not everybody who knows him agrees.
>
> Before their six-month mission together, Cady Coleman had been a little leery of being his crewmate for such a long time. They could be stony with each other on the ground. He was sometimes too blunt, she thought, oblivious to the needs and feelings of others. She played the flute and was more finely tuned. "There couldn't be people who are more different than Scott and me," she says today. "I know there are things he didn't see."
>
> With the soles of his feet stripped, he was forced to take lighter steps. She was taken by how gentle and kind he was in orbit, how measured he was in how he moved and spoke. "Somehow the imperatives are just more clear up there," Coleman says. Their time in space didn't align exactly; she came down after him. She was shocked to find him waiting for her when she landed.
>
> Samantha Kelly saw changes in her father, too. In the six months before he went into space, they hadn't been easy on each other. The breakup of their family had done the damage that all breakups do, and the distance between Texas and Virginia had made it harder for them to repair it. Now they are back under the same roof. They listen to each other. He is more demonstrative in his love.
>
> In their first days back together the last time, father and daughter retreated to a friend's pool. "You have no idea how good this feels," he said to her as they sat with the sun warm on their faces. The way he said it struck her.
>
> "I noticed him being more appreciative of everything," she says. "I don't know if he ever knew this about himself, but prior to it—I think he was grateful, but he didn't really express it a lot. He's more positive. When I make him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, he looks at me like I made him a four-course meal."
>
> Amiko Kauderer talks about those six months her new boyfriend was away as though each were a forge that shaped and strengthened their bond. "We already shared so much, but the launch was when we really kicked off," she says.
>
> They didn't talk every day at first, but they came to speak most days, and more and more when he began to struggle with the lengths of silence. "We did this together," she says. They were leveled by his time in space, the astronaut and the small-town Texas girl who works on the ground on behalf of people like him. Now each weighed as much as the other. For the first time in their relationship, there were ebbs and flows in their dependency. Space had made it harder to tell who had needed saving and who had come to the rescue.
>
> In Kazakhstan, Kelly helped Butch Wilmore navigate his farewell to earth. Kelly knew that his last pillow would be one in the Cosmonaut Hotel, where they spend their quarantine; he knew that his last meal with knives and forks would be plates of cured meat and pies with fruit for dessert; he knew that his last goodbyes to the people he loved would be made through glass.
>
> There is always a final press conference at which the three members of the prime crew and their three reserves sit in a row, speaking with microphones to a crowd of family and friends and reporters from behind germproof windows. This time, once it was over and the crowd had moved outside, Kelly suddenly appeared in the sunshine. He told Mike Fossum, in Baikonur as an extra set of astronaut shoulders, to find Wilmore's shy blond wife, Deanna. Fossum, who had completed a long-duration flight in 2011, understood. Kelly had smuggled Wilmore outside, in the cover of a distant stand of trees. Fossum soon brought over Deanna. Kelly and Fossum went on lookout, turning their backs on the moment they had created. For a free minute or two, husband and wife, though careful not to touch, shared the air and each other, the last time they would be alone together for six months.
>
> Two nights later, in the early-morning blackness, Wilmore and his Russian crewmates waved through bus windows one last time, their alien Sokol suits made phosphorescent by the flashes of cameras. The way it always is, an old Russian rock song by a band named Zemlyane—Earthlings—about going into space and missing grass had been played for them over speakers. They went to their rocket. Their families headed for a stretch of desert just a mile from the pad; the Russians believe in proximity. The Wilmores did their best to hide their tension with their smiles. They didn't succeed.
>
> So much effort and hope had come down to these last tugs of gravity, the rocket turned white with a thick blanket of frost, clouds of steam belching out of and up its groaning sides. Once it was pumped full with liquid oxygen and kerosene, it had become a living thing with impulses and desires of its own. Shuttle launches had felt less predetermined and inevitable; they were so often scrubbed late because of a rainstorm at one of the emergency-landing sites in Spain or some small mechanical failure. The shuttle was built with so many outs, liftoff never felt certain until it was. Soyuz leaves no room for alternatives. It is never late, and it is never scrubbed. If you are strapped into one of its seats, you are about to be launched out the other side of the sky.
>
> And then the fire was lit, and it filled the getaway and spilled over its banks like a river in flood, those four arms capitulating to the surge and swinging clear. The fire pushed down in a thickening stream, and the rocket lifted off, the sound of its engines taking longer to reach Deanna and her girls than the light, but now it rolled across the sand in a wave, not a rumble but a crack, a thunderclap in their chests. Soyuz somehow found in itself more speed, and within seconds it was truer to say that it had left than it was leaving. It reached into the night like a flare, the desert illuminated in its wake, and when it neared the clouds, the fire lit its way forward, too. Korolev was right, and then he was right again: The road really is clear. Now the earth had a ceiling as well as a floor, and the rocket burst through it, leaving concentric circles of eerie light. On and up it went, disappearing except for the last of its noise, until it faded out, leaving the early morning dark and quiet again. The Wilmores, exhausted and tearful and joyous, cheered and hugged and turned to make their way to the bus that would start them on their way home. Before they had collapsed into their seats, their husband and father was weightless. Only eight minutes and counting, and he was long gone.
>
> After, Kelly resumed his own countdown, T minus one hundred and eighty-three days. There are American astronauts for whom a year in space would pass as quickly as a dream. They are more curious than him, more inventive, less tied to earth and their girlfriends and their daughters. But he's the right astronaut for this trial expedition because the right astronaut for the real one will be someone just like him. Kelly is the analogue for the beautiful boy out there who has the notion but not yet the evidence that he will be our first Martian. He will likely be a man and by then middle-aged, because he will need to be cancer resistant, and he will have armored eyes, because he will need to be able to see, and he will be a pilot, because he will need to know how to fly, and he will be military, because he will need to give and follow orders.
>
> "If someone asks you to do something, especially if it's hard, you shouldn't say no," Kelly says.
>
> But going to Mars will be so much more than a function of obedience and strength. It will take more than making an engine powerful enough or a descent module responsive enough or the rest of the machine and its crew durable enough. None of us has ever looked out a window and seen the earth as just another light in the sky. We can't know what that will do to us until one of us does it. So our beautiful boy will also be doubtful, because he will need to be subject to change, and he will be reticent, because he will need to be incapable of lies, and he will be in love, because we will need him to come back home.
>
> Published in the December 2014 issue of Esquire. Check back for updates on this story as Kelly's mission to space progresses.
>
> What's Happening in Space Policy November 17-21, 2014
> Marcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.com
> Here is our list of space policy events in the coming week, November 17-21, 2014, and any insights we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session.
> During the Week
> Congress is in session this week, but anything they are working on regarding space policy and funding is taking place behind the scenes. One set of negotiations is over a compromise version of a FY2015 omnibus appropriations bill that is expected to combine all 12 regular appropriations bill into one and fund the government through the rest of FY2015 (September 30, 2015). Word has it the bill will be publicly released the week of December 8, just in time to get it passed - hopefully - by midnight December 11 when the current Continuing Resolution (CR) expires.
> It's not a sure bet, though. House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) warned this past week that if President Obama issues an Executive Order on immigration (i.e., takes action without waiting for Congress to act) before a deal is done on appropriations, there will be an "explosion." He's worried appropriations will get caught in the crossfire. If a new appropriations bill is not enacted by December 11, the government will shut down like it did in October 2013. Some Tea Party Republicans consider government shutdowns a useful tactic and might try to cause another one in reaction to any Presidential action on immigration. Even absent that, some have been arguing in favor of passing just another CR to fund the government for the first few weeks of the New Year when Republicans will control both the House and Senate and have more power to decide funding matters. (We talked about the road ahead for appropriations in an earlier article.)
>
> Negotiations also are underway on a FY2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It is the only annual authorization bill that Congress routinely passes, even if that happens at the very last minute. The House passed its version in May, and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved a version in June, but it has not gone to the Senate floor for debate yet. They will probably skip that step and just bring the compromise to the floor. Congress hasn't missed passing an NDAA for more than 50 years no matter how high the political tensions. Senate John McCain (R-AZ), who likely will chair SASC in the next Congress, included a provision in the SASC-version of the bill prohibiting DOD from contracting with space launch services providers that use Russian suppliers -- aimed at the United Launch Alliance's (ULA's) use of Russian RD-180 engines for the Atlas V. ULA President Tory Bruno said last week that congressional staffers now understand the "very harmful" unintended consequences of that language and are revising it as part of the NDAA negotiations.
> Like appropriations, the NDAA probably won't become public for a while yet. Congress will be in recess next week for Thanksgiving, then return for two more weeks to finish what they can for the 113th Congress.
> Off the Hill, three NASA Advisory Council committees or subcommittees will meet this week in person or virtually (Planetary Protection on Monday and Tuesday, Institutional on Wednesday and Thursday, and Planetary Science on Friday). The NSF-NASA-DOE Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee meets at NSF on Monday and Tuesday. Alan Ladwig and Courtney Stadd's ISU-DC Space Café discussion is on Tuesday evening (rescheduled from last Tuesday, which was Veterans Day and HBO's Concert for Valor essentially took over DC). And the Secure World Foundation and American Astronautical Society will host a briefing on space weather on the Senate side of the Capitol Visitor Center at lunchtime on Thursday.
>
> Those and other events we know about as of Sunday afternoon are listed below.
> Monday-Tuesday, November 17-18
> Interagency Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA
> NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Planetary Protection Subcommittee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC
> Tuesday, November 18
> ISU-DC Space Café Featuring Alan Ladwig and Courtney Stadd (rescheduled from November 11), The Science Club, 1136 19th St., NW, Washington, DC, 7:00 pm ET
> Tuesday-Thursday, November 18-20
> Orbital Debris Education & Research Workshop (CODER), University of Maryland, College Park, MD
> Tuesday-Friday, November 18-21
> Reinventing Space (British Interplanetary Society), London, England
> Wednesday-Thursday, November 19-20
> NAC Institutional Committee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC
> Thursday, November 20
> AIAA-NCS Luncheon Featuring Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, Lockheed Martin Global Vision Center, 2121 Crystal Drive, Arlington, VA, 11:30 am - 1:30 pm ET
> Beyond the Flare: An SWF-AAS Briefing on Space Weather, SVC-201 Capitol Visitor Center (Capitol Hill), Washington, DC, 12:00-1:30 pm ET
> Friday, November 21
> NAC Planetary Science Subcommittee, virtual, 12:00-3:00 pm ET
> Heinlein Prize for In Space Demonstration of New Technology that can Benefit Commercial Activities to Daniel O'Shaughnessy, National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC, 7:00 pm ET
>
> END
> More at www.spacetoday.net
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Subject: =?utf-8?Q?Fwd:_NASA_and_Human_Spaceflight_News_-_Monday_? =?utf-8?Q?–_November_17,_2014_and_JSC_Today?References: <7F10211CD602224DB7B4BB3E4E6DB4A61141D44A@NDJSMBX104.ndc.nasa.gov>
From: Bobby Martin <bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com>
Content-Type: m
<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><br><br>Sent from my iPad</div><div><br>Begin forwarded message:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>From:</b> "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <<a href="mailto:larry.j.moon@nasa.gov">larry.j.moon@nasa.gov</a>><br><b>Date:</b> November 17, 2014 12:21:15 PM CST<br><b>To:</b> "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <<a href="mailto:larry.j.moon@nasa.gov">larry.j.moon@nasa.gov</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Monday – November 17, 2014 and JSC Today</b><br><br></div></blockquote><div><span></span></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>
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<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font color="#1F497D">Happy Monday everyone. Sorry for so many notes regarding our good friends and NASA colleagues passing recently. Unfortunately it is the situation these days.</font></div>
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<td style="background-color:#336699;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font color="#1F497D"><span style="background-color:#336699;"><b>Monday, November 17, 2014</b></span></font></td>
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<td style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font color="#1F497D"><b> JSC TODAY CATEGORIES</b>
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<font color="#0563C1">
<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b><u>Headlines</u></b><u> <br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Got a Burning Question for the All Hands?<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> JSC CFC Agency Fair TODAY<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Orion Employee Launch-Viewing Tickets Available<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Astronaut Reid Wiseman Featured on NBC Today Show<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Gilruth Center Closed: Nov. 22 to 30</u></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b><u>Organizations/Social</u></b><u> <br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Let Your Starport Café Cook Your Thanksgiving<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> NSBE Visions for Human Spaceflight Brown Bag
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</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Human Systems Integration ERG Meeting - November<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> IEEE Meeting: Networked Unmanned Aircraft Systems<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Emerge Monthly: Open Season<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum </u></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b><u>Jobs and Training</u></b><u> <br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> JSC Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) - Nov. 19<br>
</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Russian Language Training - Phase II
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</u><font color="#1F497D"><b>- </b></font><u> Job Opportunities</u></li></font>
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<div><b> Headlines</b></div>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Got a Burning Question for the All Hands? </b></li></ol>
<div>Tomorrow, Nov. 18, is your chance to join JSC Director Ellen Ochoa for an all-hands meeting from 10 to 11 a.m. in the Teague Auditorium. You will also get to hear from many JSC leaders, including:</div>
<div>Flight Operations Director Brian Kelly; Director of Exploration Integration and Science Steve Stich; and Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer.</div>
<div>Got a burning question to ask? If you would like to submit a question for consideration in advance of the event, please email it to: <a href="mailto:JSC-Ask-The-Director@mail.nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>JSC-Ask-The-Director@mail.nasa.gov</u></b></font></a>
<i>Questions will also be taken via email during the event.</i></div>
<div>We hope to see you there!</div>
<div>Event Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Event Start Time:10:00 AM Event End Time:11:00 AM<br>
Event Location: Teague Auditorium<br>
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<a href="http://events.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCToday/eventInfo.cfm?id=20952"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Add to Calendar</u></b></font></a><br>
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JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 <br>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>JSC CFC Agency Fair TODAY </b></li></ol>
<div>JSC will be hosting a Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) Agency Fair TODAY in the Building 3 café for 15 different charities—open to all JSC civil servant and contractor employees. This event is an opportunity to show that we, the "NASA family," truly support
the organizations that directly help those in our community and our country who are less fortunate than we are.</div>
<div>Representatives from these CFC-approved charities will be available to answer questions and meet with JSC employees. These charities are just a sample of the thousands that are greatly impacted by CFC contributions.</div>
<div>One-time check or cash donations designated to the charity of your choice will be accepted during the fair. Small refreshments will be provided.</div>
<div><b>Every dollar given counts! Give for good.</b></div>
<div>Event Date: Monday, November 17, 2014 Event Start Time:10:00 AM Event End Time:2:00 PM<br>
Event Location: Buliding 3 Cafeteria<br>
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<a href="http://events.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCToday/eventInfo.cfm?id=20962"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Add to Calendar</u></b></font></a><br>
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<a href="mailto:ashley.r.white@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Ashley White</u></b></font></a> x34835 <a href="http://jscpeople.jsc.nasa.gov/cfc/cfc.html"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>http://jscpeople.jsc.nasa.gov/cfc/cfc.html</u></b></font></a>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Orion Employee Launch-Viewing Tickets Available </b></li></ol>
<div>Are you excited to see Orion's first launch to space? Join us at Space Center Houston (SCH) for "Still Curious," an opportunity to see Orion blast off into space for Exploration Flight Test-1. The event is FREE and open to the public, so don't sit at your
desk and watch the show—bring your family over and experience the launch with the rest of JSC employees, their families and the public as we watch the mission from liftoff to splashdown.</div>
<div>The event will include a special astronaut appearance, balloons and confetti, Orion hands-on activities, Orion giveaways and a special light show your kids won't want to miss at splashdown!</div>
<div>SCH is offering breakfast tickets at a discounted price to JSC team members for $8.</div>
<div>Tickets are now available to purchase at the Starport Gift Shops in Buildings 3 and 11. Don't miss out!</div>
<div><a href="mailto:jsc-orion-outreach@mail.nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Orion Outreach</u></b></font></a>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Astronaut Reid Wiseman Featured on NBC Today Show </b></li></ol>
<div>After 165 days experiencing the wonders of space aboard the International Space Station, astronaut and Twitter sensation (@ASTRO_REID) Reid Wiseman and two crew members came back down to Earth on Nov. 10. Tamron Hall, NBC <i>Today Show</i> reporter, highlighted
Wiseman's final sunset from space and what he planned to do first upon returning to Earth. If you haven't seen it, <a href="http://www.today.com/video/today/56397470"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>watch the clip</u></b></font></a>.</div>
<div>JSC External Relations, Office of Communications and Public Affairs x35111 <br>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Gilruth Center Closed: Nov. 22 to 30 </b></li></ol>
<div>The Gilruth Center will be closed from Nov. 22 to 30 for biannually scheduled maintenance.</div>
<div>During this time, the following Gilruth facilities and programs will be <b>unavailable</b>:</div>
<ol style="margin:0;padding-left:72pt;">
<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Strength and Cardio Center</b></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Studios 1, 2 and 3 (Group Ex, spin, yoga)</b></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>All conference facilities and the ballroom</b></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Indoor locker rooms and restrooms</b></li></ol>
<div>During the closure, the following facilities will be <b>available:</b></div>
<ol start="5" style="margin:0;padding-left:72pt;">
<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Outer Space Studio and OSFx classes</b></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Sports fields (soccer/softball)</b></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Jogging trails</b></li><li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Outdoor restrooms</b></li></ol>
<div>In the event that the scheduled maintenance is completed early, the Gilruth Center may open with limited hours.</div>
<div>For updates, please continue to <a href="http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>check this website</u></b></font></a>. </div>
<div><a href="mailto:jsc-starport@mail.nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Starport Fitness</u></b></font></a> x30304 <a href="http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov</u></b></font></a>
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<div><b> Organizations/Social</b></div>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Let Your Starport Café Cook Your Thanksgiving Meal </b></li></ol>
<div>Let your Starport Café do the heavy lifting this Thanksgiving!</div>
<div>Simply fill out a "Home for the Holidays" order form located at any cash register in the Buildings 3 or 11 cafés, and our chefs will prepare your Thanksgiving meal.</div>
<div>If you just want a fresh-baked pie or whipped mashed potatoes, no problem. No order is too small or too large.</div>
<div>Happy Thanksgiving!</div>
<div><a href="mailto:danial.a.hornbuckle@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Danial Hornbuckle</u></b></font></a> x30240
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>NSBE Visions for Human Spaceflight Brown Bag </b></li></ol>
<div>The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Houston Space Professionals invites members of the JSC community, with a special invitation to all Employee Resource Groups, to join us for our November Visions for Human Spaceflight Brown Bag tomorrow, Nov.
18, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Building 1, Conference Room 360.</div>
<div>This series is essentially an open discussion/review of the NSBE's Unlimited Horizons white paper, with each month devoted to review of a different section of the paper. Thus far, we have discussed rationales, spacecraft, mission manifests and commercial/international
involvement for moon, Mars and asteroid missions. This month we will cover pages 44 to 55 on Program Management and Systems Engineering.</div>
<div>The NSBE is introducing this brown-bag series as a JSC 2.0 effort to stimulate independent and innovative discussion on topics of importance to the future of the agency and center. You are encouraged to <a href="http://www.nsbe-space.org/downloads/UnlimitedHorizons.pdf"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>download
a copy of the paper</u></b></font></a>.</div>
<div>Event Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM<br>
Event Location: Building 1 Conference Room 360<br>
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<a href="http://events.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCToday/eventInfo.cfm?id=20958"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Add to Calendar</u></b></font></a><br>
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<a href="mailto:robert.l.howard@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Robert Howard</u></b></font></a> x41007 <a href="http://nsbe-hsp.org/index.php/chapter-events/projects/visions-for-human-space-flight-working-group"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>http://nsbe-hsp.org/index.php/chapter-events/projects/visions-for-human-...</u></b></font></a>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Human Systems Integration ERG Meeting - November </b></li></ol>
<div>Join us for a presentation by Dr. George V. Kondraske, professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.</div>
<div>The notion of performance pervades most engineering efforts, including those involving human systems integration (HSI). Yet, approaches generally rely on ad-hoc performance constructs and the application of them without a unifying conceptual framework.
General Systems Performance Theory, while applicable to modeling and measurement of any system, was motivated by human performance and HSI challenges. It responds to the needs noted and is argued to provide key insights for measurement and modeling of system
performance. Basic concepts will be presented, along with discussion of several applications of interest within an HSI context.</div>
<div>Event Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:12:30 PM<br>
Event Location: 1/620<br>
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<a href="http://events.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCToday/eventInfo.cfm?id=20933"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Add to Calendar</u></b></font></a><br>
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<a href="mailto:JSC-ERG-HSI@mail.nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>James Taylor</u></b></font></a> x34339 <a href="http://collaboration.jsc.nasa.gov/iierg/HSI/SitePages/Home.aspx"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>http://collaboration.jsc.nasa.gov/iierg/HSI/SitePages/Home.aspx</u></b></font></a>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>IEEE Meeting: Networked Unmanned Aircraft Systems </b></li></ol>
<div>Dr. Carrillo of Texas A&M-Corpus Christi will present "Unmanned Aircraft Systems: From Specialized Agents to Intelligent Networked Societies." The first part will include discussion of general ideas related to the design and development of rotary-wing
UAS experimental platforms equipped with onboard sensing and control capabilities, and specific challenges encountered when automating this type of aerial robot. The problem of stabilizing the UAS during autonomous flights and real-time experimental applications,
such as relative positioning and navigation tasks, will be presented. The second part is devoted to multi-agent systems and will address the problem of estimating the state of a multi-agent system where measurements are corrupted by impulsive noise, whose dynamics
are subjected to impulsive disturbances. Finally, ongoing work on biologically inspired flocking control for multi-agent dynamic systems will be addressed.</div>
<div>Lunch is available for $8. <b>Please RSVP before noon tomorrow, Nov. 18, indicating lunch or no lunch.</b></div>
<div>Event Date: Friday, November 21, 2014 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:1:00 PM<br>
Event Location: Gilruth Recreation Center<br>
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<a href="http://events.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCToday/eventInfo.cfm?id=20939"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Add to Calendar</u></b></font></a><br>
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<a href="mailto:z.taqvi@ieee.org"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Zafar Taqvi</u></b></font></a> <a href="http://ewh.ieee.org/r5/galveston_bay/events/events.html"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>http://ewh.ieee.org/r5/galveston_bay/events/events.html</u></b></font></a>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Emerge Monthly: Open Season </b></li></ol>
<div>The Emerge Employee Resource Group invites all JSC employees to the November general monthly meeting. This meeting will feature a presentation by Ricky Villareal on the highlights of FERS retirement and federal health benefits to provide information on
the current open season. Come learn about planning ahead for the future and taking advantage of the health benefits available to you.</div>
<div>Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Event Start Time:12:00 PM Event End Time:1:00 PM<br>
Event Location: Bldg 12/Rm 134<br>
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<a href="http://events.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCToday/eventInfo.cfm?id=20961"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Add to Calendar</u></b></font></a><br>
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<a href="mailto:elena.buhay@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Elena C. Buhay</u></b></font></a> 281-792-7976 <a href="https://collaboration.ndc.nasa.gov/iierg/emerge/SitePages/Home.aspx"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>https://collaboration.ndc.nasa.gov/iierg/emerge/SitePages/Home.aspx</u></b></font></a>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum </b></li></ol>
<div>Our next JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 9, in the Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Our guest speaker for this event is Dr. Robert Emery, vice president for Safety, Health, Environment and Risk Management
at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. His presentation topic will be "What Every Safety Professional Needs to Know About Global Health Security." In addition, David Loyd, chief of the Safety and Test Operations Division (JSC-NS), will
be presenting the "JSC Safety Metrics Snapshot for 2014."</div>
<div>Hope to see everyone there!</div>
<div>Event Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2014 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:10:30 AM<br>
Event Location: Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom<br>
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<a href="mailto:patricia.a.farrell@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Patricia Farrell</u></b></font></a> 281-335-2012
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<div><b> Jobs and Training</b></div>
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>JSC Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) - Nov. 19 </b></li></ol>
<div>The JSC Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM) collaborative workshop provides students a strategy to integrate RIDM and Continuous Risk Management (CRM). Course materials include a discussion of the benefits of ensuring decisions include risk considerations
with appropriate rigor commensurate with the significance. Facilitators will lead students through exercises demonstrating the steps to evaluate options and select a decision alternative that is risk informed. After completing this course, the student should
be able to: 1) Describe the RIDM process and applicability; 2) Have an understanding of how RIDM is integrated into the overall risk-management process for institutional risks and resident program/project risks; and 3) Describe the interrelationship of RIDM
and CRM.</div>
<div>Location: Building 12, Room 134</div>
<div>Direct Link: <a href="https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_OFFERING_DETAILS&scheduleID=76722"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_...</u></b></font></a></div>
<div>For information, contact <a href="mailto:paula.j.gothreaux@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Paula Gothreaux</u></b></font></a> at 281-335-2441 or Russell Hartlieb at 281-335-2443.</div>
<div>Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Event Start Time:9:00 AM Event End Time:12:00 PM<br>
Event Location: Building 12/Room 134<br>
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<a href="mailto:paula.j.gothreaux@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Paula Gothreaux</u></b></font></a> 281-335-2441
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Russian Language Training - Phase II </b></li></ol>
<div>The JSC Language Education Center announces Phase II Russian Language course offerings for the 2015 winter quarter (Jan. 5 to March 27). Only the following classes will be offered this quarter: 2A, 2B and 2C. Registration for all courses is now conducted
exclusively through NASA's SATERN system. Continuing students, both JSC contractors and civil servants who have approval of their supervisor and training coordinator, can enroll in the appropriate level group class through SATERN. Enrollment preference is,
however, given to civil servants.</div>
<div>Students new to the program and who have had previous Russian language training, or students who are resuming their Russian language training after a break of two or more quarters, should contact Dr. Anthony Vanchu (281-483-0644 or <a href="mailto:anthony.j.vanchu@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>via
email</u></b></font></a>) to schedule a placement interview to determine the appropriate class level to join.</div>
<div><a href="mailto:natalia.rostova-1@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Natalia Rostova</u></b></font></a> 281-851-3745
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<li style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><b>Job Opportunities </b></li></ol>
<div><i>Where do I find job opportunities?</i></div>
<div>Both internal Competitive Placement Plan and external JSC job announcements are posted on the Human Resources (HR) Portal and <a href="http://www.usajobs.gov/"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>USAJOBS website</u></b></font></a>. Through the HR portal, civil
servants can view summaries of all the agency jobs that are currently open at: <a href="https://hr.nasa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/employees_home/239/job_opportunities/133142"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>https://hr.nasa.gov/portal/server.pt/community/employees_home/239/job_opportu...</u></b></font></a></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div>Lateral reassignment and rotation opportunities are posted in the Workforce Transition Tool. To access, click: <a href="https://hr.nasa.gov/"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>HR Portal</u></b></font></a> > 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.</div>
<div>If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies or reassignment opportunities, please call your HR representative.</div>
<div><a href="mailto:brandy.r.braunsdorf@nasa.gov"><font color="#0563C1"><b><u>Brandy Braunsdorf</u></b></font></a> x30476
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<td style="background-color:#F6F9FE;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font color="#1F497D"><span style="background-color:#F6F9FE;">JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles.
<div>Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="5"><span style="font-size:20pt;"><b>NASA and Human Spaceflight News</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="5"><span style="font-size:20pt;"><b>Monday – November 17, 2014</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" color="red"><b>INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:</b> <font color="black">Astronaut Butch Wilmore is installing the first zero-g printer on the space station today. Launched into orbit on September 21, 2014, this
first version of the Zero-G printer will usher in the era of off-world manufacturing and may change the way we live and work in space. Follow the happenings on Twitter using </font><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%233Dprinting&src=tyah"><font color="#0563C1"><u>#3Dprinting</u></font></a><font color="black">.
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<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial"> </font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><img src="cid:5ABED17EEB54BE4DAE07475C3D64C188@mail.nasa.gov"> </div>
<div style="margin-top:12pt;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="4"><span style="font-size:14pt;"><b><u>HEADLINES AND LEADS</u></b></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:12pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>NASA IG Adds Voice to Chorus that NASA Lacks Adequate Funding</b></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Marcia S. Smith - <a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com"><a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com">Spacepolicyonline.com</a></a></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Echoing what reports from expert groups have been saying for many years, NASA's Office
of Inspector General (OIG) yesterday warned that the biggest challenge facing NASA is getting the budgets needed to accomplish the programs and tasks the agency has been assigned. </span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Tahoma" size="6"><span style="font-size:26.5pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Humans on Mars by 2035? NASA's sci-fi dream could be realit</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Sheena McKenzie – CNN</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We've just landed a washing machine-sized robot on a comet and NASA's chief scientist has no idea.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Guest column: Orion effort will come full circle with test flight</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Lynda Weatherman<font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> – Florida Today</span></font></span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In less than three weeks, get ready to watch a piece of history from your own backyard. While the Space Coast has served as the backdrop to hundreds of launches, Lockheed Martin's EFT-1 Orion test
flight, scheduled for Dec. 4, may be one of the most historic launches to lift off here for a number of reasons.</span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Next stop, Mars: Eighth grader Alyssa Carson is a media darling and 12-time Space Camp vet with a big dream</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Matt Wake - Huntsville Times</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">There are replica Eifel Towers in 13-year-old Alyssa Carson's bedroom. Soccer team photos. Really the only outer-space-related item in view
is a painting of the solar system. But at one end of in the dining room of the Baton Rouge condo Alyssa shares with her dad Bert Carson, this is where you'll find the ever-growing "space museum," as the Carsons call it. Model rockets. Commemorative coins given
to Alyssa by astronauts and NASA officials and a collection of vintage Life Magazine issues featuring Apollo astronauts.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Pushing into space not free, but worth it</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Gene Seymour – CNN</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Practically from the day the Space Age started on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite into Earth orbit, it's been like this. Every time there's a conspicuous
breakthrough in space, somebody, somewhere will find a way to kill the buzz.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>A New Dawn: The Troubled History and Future Promise of NASA's Orion Program (Part 2)</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Ben Evans - <a href="http://AmericaSpace.com"><a href="http://AmericaSpace.com">AmericaSpace.com</a></a></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Three weeks from now, the first human-capable vehicle for Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) exploration in more than four decades is scheduled to roar away from Space Launch Complex (SLC)-37B at Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station, Fla., on its first voyage. NASA's Orion spacecraft will ride a Delta IV Heavy, the largest and most powerful rocket currently in active operational service, anywhere in the world, on the Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 mission. Following
a planned liftoff at 7:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, 4 December, the Heavy will boost Orion to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), whereupon the spacecraft will complete two orbits in 4.5 hours, then plunge back to Earth in excess of 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h),
testing its heat shield at lunar-return velocities and temperatures of up to 2,200 degrees Celsius (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit). Without doubt, EFT-1 represents the most significant advance in human space exploration of the second decade in the 21st century.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Morpheus Prototype Lander Ready for New Series of Flight Tests at Kennedy Space Center</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Mike Killian - <a href="http://AmericaSpace.com"><a href="http://AmericaSpace.com">AmericaSpace.com</a></a></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:7.5pt;margin-bottom:7.5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">At NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, at the northern edge of the former Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF), is an area that looks very much
like the surface of the Moon, complete with rocks and craters to serve as a site to flight test the agency's Morpheus prototype planetary lander. A total of 14 free flight tests have been conducted so far, the last of which took place under cover of darkness
on May 28, 2014, and although Free Flight 14 (FF14) concluded Project Morpheus' flight test campaign the team feels there are some areas they can improve upon, and so operations are again in full swing for a new series of flight tests, the first of which is
currently scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Out of ISS: Russia going solo with space station?</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Russia Today</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#1E1E1E"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Russian space agency is reportedly considering construction of a high-altitude orbital station starting from 2017. This means that Moscow may walk away from the ISS after 2020, when its obligations
under the current project are fulfilled.</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#1E1E1E"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Loss of contact with Philae</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">William Harwood - CBS News via <a href="http://Spaceflightnow.com">Spaceflightnow.com</a> (STORY WRITTEN FOR <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/spacenews1.html"><font color="#0563C1"><u>CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE"</u></font></a>
& USED WITH PERMISSION)</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Trapped in a forbidding jumble of sun-blocking cliffs and rocky debris, the Philae comet lander, its batteries nearly depleted, somehow managed to contact
the Rosetta mothership Friday in true cliffhanger fashion, relaying stored science data back to Earth and receiving commands to turn in place in a last-ditch bid to bring a larger set of solar cells into the meager sunlight.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>OPINION: ESA's comet landing highlights a public accustomed to less</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Collin Skocik - Spaceflight Insider</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">On Nov. 12, 2014, history was made. The Philae lander detached from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft and landed on Comet 67P, or Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
This was the culmination of a space project decades in the making. The Rosetta spacecraft was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on Mar. 2, 2004, from the Guiana Space Center in Khouru in French Guiana. During its long mission, Rosetta flew by two small asteroids
and approached the orbit of Jupiter using solar cells as its main power source. With some 2,000 people assisting in the mission, Rosetta is a triumph for the European Space Agency (ESA) and the world. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Russia's Energomash Dreams Up Reusable Rocket Engine Design </b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Matthew Bodner – Moscow Times</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Russia's NPO Energomash, one of the world's leading rocket engine manufacturers, has cooked up an ambitious plan to make its engines reusable up to 10 times,
news agency TASS reported Friday.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Away</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Chris Jones – Esquire</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>In March, astronaut Scott Kelly will undertake the longest space mission in American history. He and a cosmonaut will begin an uninterrupted year aboard
the International Space Station—a year exposed to the strange and deep effects of weightlessness, acute stress, isolation, and cosmic radiation. It is the most ambitious manned space mission in years. And it will also be the first step in a human expedition
to Mars.</i></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:12pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>What's Happening in Space Policy November 17-21, 2014</b></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Marcia S. Smith - <a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com"><a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com">Spacepolicyonline.com</a></a></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Here is our list of space policy events in the coming week,
November 17-21, 2014, and any insights we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session.</span></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="4"><span style="font-size:14pt;"><b><u>COMPLETE STORIES</u></b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="4"><span style="font-size:14pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:12pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>NASA IG Adds Voice to Chorus that NASA Lacks Adequate Funding</b></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Marcia S. Smith - <a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com"><a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com">Spacepolicyonline.com</a></a></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Echoing what reports from expert groups have been saying for many years, NASA's Office
of Inspector General (OIG) yesterday warned that the biggest challenge facing NASA is getting the budgets needed to accomplish the programs and tasks the agency has been assigned. </span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Tahoma" size="6"><span style="font-size:26.5pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">The report goes into detail about seven "top management and
performance challenges," but the overall theme is the sustainability of NASA's programs amid budget uncertainty.</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><i>"NASA's ability to sustain its ambitious exploration, science,
and aeronautics programs will be driven in large measure by whether the Agency is able to adequately fund such high profile initiatives as its commercial cargo and crew programs, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule, James Webb Space Telescope,
Mars 2020 Rover, and the personnel and infrastructure associated with these and other missions."</i></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Noting that NASA began FY2015 without a full-year appropriation
(NASA is operating under a Continuing Resolution through at least December 11), the OIG report also pointed out that projections for NASA's future funding are flat. "Accordingly, we believe the principal challenge facing NASA leaders in FY2015 will be to effectively
manage the Agency's varied programs in an uncertain budget environment."</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Having said that, the report identified seven "top challenges,"
a number of which have been the subject of earlier OIG studies:</span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Managing NASA's Human Space Exploration Programs: the International Space Station, Commercial Crew Transportation, and the Space Launch System</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Managing NASA's Science Portfolio</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Ensuring the Continued Efficacy of the Space Communications Networks</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Overhauling NASA's Information Technology Governance</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Ensuring the Security of NASA's Information Technology Systems</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Managing NASA's Infrastructure and Facilities</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Ensuring the Integrity of the Contracting and Grants Processes and Proper Use of Space Act Agreements</span></li></span></font>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">The 41-page </span><a href="http://oig.nasa.gov/NASA2014ManagementChallenges.pdf"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>report</u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">
goes into some detail under each of those topics based primarily on previous OIG audits.</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Some of the key takeaways include the following:</span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">NASA expects to continue spending $3-4 billion per year on the International Space Station, but the OIG judges that estimate to be based on "overly optimistic assumptions and
the cost to NASA likely will be higher."</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Regarding SLS and Orion, "NASA's challenge ... continues to be managing the concurrent development of a launch system and crew vehicle and modifying the necessary ground systems
while also meeting the Administrator's mandate that exploration systems be affordable, sustainable, and realistic."</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Regarding IT, in response to previous OIG recommendations NASA is "eliminating unused and duplicative web applications and moving Agency websites to a public cloud-computing
environment" to "counter the threat of cyber attacks." but the OIG has "found deficiencies in the design and implementation of NASA's program that leaves the Agency's publicly accessible web applications at risk of compromise." </span><font color="#1E3300"><span style="background-color:white;">The
OIG report also notes that it has conducted more than 110 investigations of IT breaches at NASA and helped get hackers from a wide range of countries convicted and getting over $22 million in restitution.</span></font></li></span></font>
</ul>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Regarding infrastructure, "The OIG has conducted 12 audits over the past 5 years examining various aspects of NASA's efforts to manage its aging infrastructure.
... NASA has yet to address our recommendations."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Humans on Mars by 2035? NASA's sci-fi dream could be realit</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Sheena McKenzie – CNN</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We've just landed a washing machine-sized robot on a comet and NASA's chief scientist has no idea.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Dr Ellen Stofan is deep in conversation with a journalist when, unable to contain himself any longer, an adviser with phone triumphantly held aloft blurts out: "Rosetta
-- It's landed!"</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Wonderful" Stofan beams, and the handful of reporters gathered in a lecture theater at University College London excitedly fidget in their seats.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Barely has the probe touched down on a comet 310 million miles from Earth, then one of science's great minds is discussing humanity's next cosmic milestone.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Stofan wants to land a man on Mars by the mid-2030s.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Or rather, "land a<i> human</i> on Mars," the mother-of-three corrects me with a wry smile.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"In a sense it's our destiny to move beyond this planet and Mars is the logical choice," said the 53-year-old geologist.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"It's a place where humans could live and work -- not out in the open -- but with not too-radical modifications."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Indeed, life on the 'Red Planet' may not just be the stuff of science fiction.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Mars is the other body in the solar system that we're very likely to find that life evolved," said Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"So being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think is critically important for science."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><b>Next stop: Mars</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Surviving an eight-month journey to Mars is one thing -- staying alive once there is another.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Astronauts would face high levels of radiation -- "we still have to figure out how to adequately protect them," said Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The thin atmosphere would also make landing difficult, particularly for a heavy spaceship loaded with equipment and people.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"If you think of the Apollo capsule coming into Earth with a parachute, the Mars atmosphere is just so thin you've got to find some way of slowing yourself down really
rapidly," explained Stofan, the daughter of a NASA engineer who watched her first rocket launch as a four-year-old.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">At the time, the un-manned launch spectacularly exploded, leaving a huge impression on the little girl who decades later has set her sights on a mission to Mars.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The interplanetary endeavor has more to do with unlocking Earth's secrets than you might think.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Being able to compare the Earth to Venus, to Mars, and studying these same processes all around the solar system -- all of a sudden you get smarter about your own planet," explained Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"If you're a doctor and you only have one patient, then you'd never really understand the progression of disease. You need lots of patients, and scientists learn more about the Earth by studying
lots of planets."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><b>Star Wars reality</b></span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But with so many earthly problems, does it pay to point billion dollar budgets at the skies?</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"You know, we're really spending that money here on Earth," said Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"We get amazing technology spinoffs from the work NASA has done," she adds, listing everything from fuel efficient winglets on airplanes, to air traffic control systems, and equipment for measuring
climate change.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Science fiction becomes reality in NASA's lab, with the hovering orb seen in Star Wars -- fans will remember Luke Skywalker using it during light-saber training -- inspiring real-life gadgets on
board the International Space Station.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Think about these things you used to see on TV from science fiction, like communicators on Star Trek, well now we actually have them," said Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Space exploration pushes us to say 'here's things we've just dreamed about, but we can turn that into reality.'"</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><b>Marvin the Martian</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Does that mean she also believes in intelligent life?</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"I think there has to be in the universe -- how easy it's going to be to find, is another question," said Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Statistically every time you're looking at a star you're likely to be looking at a planetary system. Play the math game, there's billions of stars, so eventually you'll
come out saying there has to be another body where life could have evolved to a fairly sophisticated level.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Now, do I think they're visiting here and altering people's crop patterns? No. If they were smart enough to get here, we would know about it."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><b>Women's business?</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">As a women working at NASA, sometimes it's Stofan who feels like the alien in the room, admitting: "I had to work four times as hard to be taken half as seriously."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"I still go into most meetings and I will look around the room and I just suddenly register the male to female ratio -- women usually make up 10% to 20% in any room I'm
in, at best."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It's a ratio fairly consistent with women working across STEM sectors (science, technology, engineering, math) in the U.S., and Stofan speaks passionately about the need for "all hands on deck."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"When you have problems like trying to get humans down onto the surface of Mars, if you don't have all the best minds in the world -- not just white men -- then you're not utilizing humanity the
way you should."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Landing a human on Mars would inspire a new generation of scientists -- the likes of which we haven't seen since the Apollo mission 45 years ago, says Stofan.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"It's a great international human endeavor, with all the nations of the world moving out beyond Earth to explore a new planet, a new world.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"And doing it together."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Guest column: Orion effort will come full circle with test flight</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Lynda Weatherman<font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> – Florida Today</span></font></span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In less than three weeks, get ready to watch a piece of history from your own backyard. While the Space Coast has served as the backdrop to hundreds of launches, Lockheed Martin's EFT-1 Orion test
flight, scheduled for Dec. 4, may be one of the most historic launches to lift off here for a number of reasons.</span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Yes, the final destination for Orion — Mars — is compelling. And the fact Orion marked the beginning of assembly and checkout operations for our community is groundbreaking. But the ultimate success
story? How a team of aerospace advocates, led locally by the Economic Development Commission, brought the vision and reality of Orion to the Space Coast and simultaneously mitigated one of the worst economic challenges the Space Coast has ever faced.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">This economic development success story and journey to bring Orion home began in 2005, only a year after then-President George W. Bush announced a new vision for America's space program.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">With the space shuttle program nearing its final descent, the Vision for Space Exploration detailed a bold new mission, which included landing humans on the moon, paving the way for eventual journeys
to Mars and beyond. It also meant the loss of thousands of jobs on the Space Coast through a multi-year program gap.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">This represented a significant shift in the mindset and setup of space center locations around the country. The EDC, together with county leaders, aerospace organizations like Space Florida, and
a team of aerospace consultants, led by Marshall Heard, Conrad Nagel and Lee Solid, formed a group informally known as The Capture Team.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">This forward-looking group set out to determine how best to capitalize on new opportunities that would result from this new vision. It turned into the genesis of a strong private-public partnership
that would later revolutionize existing facilities across Kennedy Space Center.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">At the heart of the win strategy was the notion of capitalizing on Florida's strengths, including multibillion-dollar infrastructure, a highly technical workforce, and making our local resources
easy to integrate into NASA's new plan. The notion of increasing and expanding our services made its way to the top of our pitch.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">For 50 years, we have launched and processed rockets and shuttles on the Space Coast, but never has assembly formally taken place here. To capture these services, in tandem with launch, would bring
an entirely new dynamic and new economic opportunity to the local aerospace community.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">And, that's just what we did.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">While NASA conducted a competition to define, design, develop and produce a new crew exploration vehicle (CEV), a vehicle capable of ferrying crews of astronauts and cargo to and from the International
Space Station, the capture team worked closely with the two contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman/Boeing, to present Brevard's business case as the most cost- effective location in the U.S. as both companies competed to build the final crew vehicle.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">By the time Lockheed Martin was selected in August 2006, the groundwork had been laid for the company's selection of the Space Coast for not only launch, but also final assembly and checkout. It
was, in essence, a historic paradigm shift for the Space Coast, a community where our destiny now includes more than simply launching hopes and dreams. Here, we also build them.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Landing the Orion assembly and checkout project on the Space Coast has led to hundreds of new jobs, millions in economic impact, an enhancement to our broad network of suppliers, and utilization
of existing facilities at Kennedy Space Center, such as the Operations & Checkout Building that once supported the shuttle program.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">This is the catalyst to creating a sector bustling with new ideas and innovations.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The first step starts with EFT-1, Orion's descent into the heavens, scheduled for Dec. 4.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">More than ever, the Space Coast has a vested interest. Not only did we launch Orion here, we all played a role in building Orion here. And we are poised to meet our destiny as both launch site and
manufacturing site as we maintain our central role in America's space program.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Weatherman is president and chief executive officer of the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast.</span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Next stop, Mars: Eighth grader Alyssa Carson is a media darling and 12-time Space Camp vet with a big dream</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Matt Wake - Huntsville Times</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">There are replica Eifel Towers in 13-year-old Alyssa Carson's bedroom. Soccer team photos. Really the only outer-space-related item in view
is a painting of the solar system. But at one end of in the dining room of the Baton Rouge condo Alyssa shares with her dad Bert Carson, this is where you'll find the ever-growing "space museum," as the Carsons call it. Model rockets. Commemorative coins given
to Alyssa by astronauts and NASA officials and a collection of vintage Life Magazine issues featuring Apollo astronauts.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">See, since the age of 3, Alyssa has wanted to be the first human being on Mars.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"At first you just go, 'Yeah, baby you can be whatever you want to be' and you think it's just a phase or whatever," Bert says. "Then, at
5 or 6 years old she's studying the Mars map and needing to know everything about Mars in case they bounce off-course whenever they get there. That's what made me take her a little more serious and I started bringing her to Space Camp. And it's that a-ha moment,
'Oh, this is what my kid's going to do.'"</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Alyssa, now in the eighth grade, has already been to Space Camp in Huntsville a dozen times. She's also been to Space Camp in Laval, Quebec
and in Izmir, Turkey, as well as the National Flight Academy in Pensacola, Fla. and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Space centers are her Disney World and astronauts are her Mickey Mouse," Bert says. "It's like a little kid opening a present on Christmas
morning."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Alyssa traces her fascination with a space to the Nickelodeon animated TV show "The Backyardigans." "It's a TV show where these creature
characters go into their backyard and have adventures and one episode they go to Mars," Alyssa says. "I saw that and I asked my dad if anyone had been to Mars and he told me all about the moon landing and told me going to Mars would be my generation's moon
travel and from there it all snowballed."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">More like a snow storm. During a recent past two-and-a-half week stretch, Bert has received more than 160 media requests for interviews
with Alyssa, who has already appeared on the "CBS Morning News," BBC, NPR, Australian TV and the American talk show "Steve Harvey," to talk with her about her goal of Mars travel. She's definitely getting used to dealing with the press. She's startlingly poised
and articulate for her age.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Asked about what drives her dream of going to Mars, Alyssa says, and this quote is not cleaned up for teen-speak, "Eventually the Earth
and our entire solar system as a whole will die out when the sun stops burning, and so going to Mars is not going to absolutely save humanity because Mars will die with the rest of the solar system but it will show the human race that we can live on other planets.
And then hopefully after that someone can take it out of the solar system and out of the galaxy as technology develops. Earth is our home but we can have other homes. We don't have to just rely on this one."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Told you she was articulate. Alyssa recently traveled to Chicago to tape an episode of "Steve Harvey," which is hosted by the mustachioed
comedian of the same name. As part of her appearance on the show, Alyssa talked Mars and space -travel with Harvey, who Space Camp crew trainers Rob Hammond and Katie Mouton strapped into a Multi-axis Astronaut Trainer (MAT), a metallic contraption that resembles
a cross between a torture device and a gigantic collapsed Slinky toy. "That simulates a tumble-spin in space, and a tumble-spin is when your space ship is tumbling out of control," Alyssa says of the MAT. "It took a while to start up the machine and have it
running due to (Steve Harvey) having second thoughts. But I thought the way it looked and came out was hilarious.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Alyssa could only stay in Chicago one day because she had to return to her studies. She attends the Baton Rouge International School, where
she learns each course in four languages, and lest you think her head was 100 percent consumed by all-things-space, her other interests include piano, soccer, book club and Girl Scouts. That said, Alyssa is psyched to see the new Christopher Nolan-directed
space sage <font color="black">"Interstellar."</font><font color="black"> </font>Her all-time favorite space flicks include Ron Howard's 1995 opus "Apollo 13."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Alyssa's heroes include astronaut Sandra Magnus, who she had the chance to meet at age 9. If she is able to realize her goal of traveling
to Mars, Alyssa is particularly looking forward to exploring Valles Marineris, the giant canyon there.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#363636"><span style="font-size:10pt;">So why does Alyssa's keep returning to Space Camp? "I love the Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama because even if you go to the camp and
go through the same learning you're learning it a different way," she says. "It's interesting to see how each person teaches and some people will tell you stories the others don't. And then the simulators are so much fun you just want to go again and again
anyway." Bert, a single father who works in the video and TV industry, adds, "It's like our second family up there."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Pushing into space not free, but worth it</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Gene Seymour – CNN</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Practically from the day the Space Age started on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite into Earth orbit, it's been like this. Every time there's a conspicuous
breakthrough in space, somebody, somewhere will find a way to kill the buzz.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">After Philae's touchdown on the comet Wednesday, this hashtag #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant (as in #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant find a missing plane on our own planet) started
trending in the Twitterverse. Ah, yes. And Americans are especially good at this grousing.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">People have been shouting "Oh, wow!" and then "Oh no!" since the 1950s. Americans on the one hand were alarmed that their Cold War nemesis had rockets big enough to hurl heavy metal projectiles
at us and on the other were camping outside at night to see the little beeping ball fly over their backyards.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Americans' consensus love-hate for space exploration has assumed many forms over the years. Once the nation got over its collective shock-and-awe of Sputnik, its citizenry demanded that its scientists
and politicians figure out a way to get our own projectiles up there ASAP. We did it, with some notable disasters on the way, at which time the moaning over whether we should spend so much taxpayer money on such risky endeavors would begin.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We were taken back to those dismal days in recent weeks when a rocket launched by the privately owned (but government contracted) Orbital Sciences Corp. with cargo for the International Space Station
exploded in midair shortly after lifting off from Wallops Island, Virginia. Three days later, SpaceShipTwo, built by Virgin Galactic (private, not taxpayer, dollars in this case) as a working prototype for a passenger spacecraft, broke up during a flight test
over California's Mojave Desert and crashed, killing its co-pilot and seriously injuring its pilot.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Both these catastrophes were too reminiscent of the serial test failures of the 1950s in which rockets regularly blew up before reaching the stratosphere and test pilots seeking faster, higher records
in the same Mojave skies lost their planes and their lives. It was through such trial and error that, eventually, America got proficient enough to send satellites and people into space and succeed much more often than it didn't.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">And we fell in love.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The romance of space flight became part of our national identity, especially after we started sending humans of our own. As we exceeded our planetary boundaries by sending probes, and then men to
the moon, other boundaries seemed less daunting and forbidding.</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#363636"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">And yet, with many cheering and goading the country to fly higher, farther and faster, there were just as many Americans wondering if too many of our resources were being squandered for what was
mostly a speculative endeavor.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">My own cheerleading for space travel was often countered with some spoilsport, honest and sincere, complaining that all that money being shot into the skies could be put to better use on Earth:
e.g. Why do we need to go to Mars when we have all these problems on Earth to solve?</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">For a long time, I had no strong counterargument. But now, with the space shuttle program literally mounted in museums and no government plans to return to the moon or head for Mars any time soon,
I find myself asking how that solving-problems-on-Earth thing is going now.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">I'm still waiting for a sensible answer, but I don't think one exists. The urge to explore and push ourselves out into the universe is not mutually exclusive from the effort to improve our own minds
and environment.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Consider: Last year, 7 million people visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, beating out New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art by roughly a million. Many of them look at vintage
spacecraft and archival mockups and openly wonder where our yearning for adventure has gone since the turn of this century.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Even the movies bring this up. "We used to be explorers and pioneers," says a character in the just-released science fiction spectacular, "Interstellar." "Now we're a generation of caretakers."
Christopher Nolan's film conceives a potential future in which what's left of NASA has gone underground to figure out options for humankind literally choking to death on ecological decay on Earth. In this future, it seems as though the moon-landing-denial constituency
has gained such a foothold in the public schools that a student can get in trouble for suggesting we did in fact land on the moon.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Can't we all just be happy that human beings can do what the European Space Agency did this week? Probably not. I'm just waiting for some troll to claim that it isn't a real breakthrough unless
Americans do it first.</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#1E1E1E"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>A New Dawn: The Troubled History and Future Promise of NASA's Orion Program (Part 2)</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Ben Evans - <a href="http://AmericaSpace.com"><a href="http://AmericaSpace.com">AmericaSpace.com</a></a></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Three weeks from now, the first human-capable vehicle for Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) exploration in more than four decades is scheduled to roar away from Space Launch Complex (SLC)-37B at Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station, Fla., on its first voyage. NASA's Orion spacecraft will ride a Delta IV Heavy, the largest and most powerful rocket currently in active operational service, anywhere in the world, on the Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 mission. Following
a planned liftoff at 7:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, 4 December, the Heavy will boost Orion to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), whereupon the spacecraft will complete two orbits in 4.5 hours, then plunge back to Earth in excess of 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h),
testing its heat shield at lunar-return velocities and temperatures of up to 2,200 degrees Celsius (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit). Without doubt, EFT-1 represents the most significant advance in human space exploration of the second decade in the 21st century.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">As described in yesterday's AmericaSpace article, the Orion spacecraft consists of two primary components, a conical Crew Module and a cylindrical Service Module, and is designed to eventually support
deep-space missions of up to 21 days in duration, plus another six months in "quiescent" mode. The shape of the Crew Module was deemed the safest and most reliable means of re-entering Earth's atmosphere at the extreme velocities—far in excess of 20,000 mph
(32,000 km/h)—required for direct return trajectory profiles from the Moon. It stands 10 feet (3.3 meters) tall and measures 16.5 feet (5 meters) across its base, as opposed to 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) for the Apollo command module, thereby providing an interior
volume of 690 cubic feet (19.5 cubic meters), significantly larger than its 1960s-era ancestor.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Moreover, the Crew Module is equipped with "smart cockpit" digital controls, derived from the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which will provide its future crews with enhanced
situational awareness. "Whereas the shuttle's cockpit screens are filled with data that astronauts have to interpret and act upon," <i>Flight International</i> explained in October 2006, "Orion's displays will use graphics along with enhanced synthetic vision
and additional flight-related symbology." At the apex of the Crew Module will be the NASA Docking System (NDS), which has compatibility with the two International Docking Adapters (IDAs), to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a pair
of SpaceX Dragon resupply missions in June and August 2015. Orion's cabin atmosphere is an oxygen-nitrogen mixture at close to terrestrial sea-level pressure.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Mounted at the base of the Crew Module is the cylindrical Service Module, which marks out Orion as the first piloted spacecraft in U.S. history—excluding space stations—to carry solar arrays. In
the original design, the arrays took the form of two circular panels, deployed from the main body of the Service Module shortly after launch, which would give the spacecraft a total span of about 55.7 feet (17 meters). The Service Module stands 15.5 feet (4.8
meters) in height and measures 16 feet (5 meters) in diameter, with an empty mass of 8,000 pounds (3,700 kg). At its base is the Aerojet-built main engine, capable of 7,500 pounds (3,400 kg) of thrust, with a Reaction Control System (RCS) providing maneuverability
and backup capability to execute the critical Trans-Earth Injection (TEI) "burn" from deep space. Inside the bowels of the Service Module, a pair of liquid oxygen tanks and smaller nitrogen tanks will maintain Orion's habitability, whilst lithium hydroxide
cartridges will scrub the crew's exhaled carbon dioxide with oxygen and nitrogen and recycle them back into the life-support loop. The Service Module for EFT-1 has been fabricated by Lockheed Martin, with batteries in place of solar arrays, although that of
the next flight in 2018 will be developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and will feature an X-shaped layout of four electricity-generating "wings".</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">By the summer of 2006, after more than a year of initial design and definition, Orion had received its program name and on 31 August NASA revealed that Lockheed Martin would be the prime contractor
to design, develop and build the spacecraft. "Manufacturing and integration of the vehicle components will take place at contractor facilities across the country," it was reported. "Lockheed Martin will perform the majority of the Orion vehicle engineering
work at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, and complete final assembly of the vehicle at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla." The initial Design, Development, Testing and Evaluation (DDT&E) phase of the contract totaled $3.9 billion and extended for seven years
from September 2006. Several months later, in April 2007, the contract was further modified to $4.3 billion, with two years added to the design phase and two test flights of Orion's Launch Abort System (LAS) incorporated into the schedule. "This spacecraft
will be a cornerstone of America's human exploration of the Solar System by a new generation of explorers," explained Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation Program at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, "and these changes and additional tests
will ensure that it is robust enough to accomplish its missions."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">As these decisions were being made, initial testing of parachute systems for the new spacecraft and rockets got underway at the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground, near Yuma, Ariz. By mid-September
2006, Boeing had been selected to support the design of Orion's primary lunar-return-capable heat shield, with options including Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) and alternate technologies explored in subsequent contracts. For more than three years,
NASA's Orion Thermal Protection System Advanced Development Project worked on eight candidate materials, before finally narrowing them down to the previously flight-proven PICA and Avcoat, the latter of which had been utilized in the Apollo command module's
heat shield and on parts of the shuttle. At length, in April 2009, NASA selected Avcoat—a material composed of silica fibers with an epoxy-novalic resin, filled in a fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb and manufactured directly onto Orion's heat shield substructure
and installed as a complete unit onto the crew module—which was described as "the more robust, reliable and mature system".</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">During this period, other aspects of Orion's development continued. The spring of 2007 was an "eventful" time, according to Jeff Hanley. Reviews of launch vehicle and spacecraft systems requirements,
including more than 1,700 issues pertaining to performance, design and qualification, were completed by the end of May to clear the way for a summer of system definition reviews, leading up to the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) process in mid-2008 and the
Critical Design Review (CDR) stage in early 2010. Dovetailed into this manifest, it was anticipated that the Constellation Program would also undergo a Lunar Architecture System Requirements Review in the spring of 2009.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Elsewhere, the effort to build the critical LAS was also gaining momentum. In April 2007, NASA partnered with the Air Force's Space Development and Test Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque,
N.M., to stage a series of tests between 2008-2011 of an escape rocket mechanism to pull the crew capsule to safety in the event of a launch malfunction. "A total of six tests are planned, pending environmental assessments," NASA reported. "Two will simulate
an abort from the launch pad and will not require a booster. The rest will use abort test boosters and simulate aborts at three stressing conditions along the Ares launch vehicle trajectory."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Groundbreaking operations for the construction of the abort test pads got underway at the Army's White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces, N.M., in November 2007, and in the spring of the following
year a full-scale, 20,000-pound (9,000 kg) Orion crew capsule test structure was shipped from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., to the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., to participate in the "Pad Abort-1" test. Concurrently,
in April 2008, the solid-fueled motor to jettison the LAS during ascent was successfully static-fired by Aerojet at its facility in Sacramento, Calif. Meanwhile, ATK Thiokol performed tests of the LAS igniter system and test-fired the motor itself at its own
site in Promontory, Utah, in November 2008. Burning for 5.5 seconds, the successful motor test cleared the way for Pad Abort-1.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">After several delays, the full-scale Pad Abort-1 test took place at White Sands on 6 May 2010. An abort motor, with a momentary 500,000 pounds (226,800 kg) of thrust,
burned for six seconds to boost the Orion capsule away from the pad. It reached a peak velocity of 540 mph (870 km/h). Simultaneously, a 7,000-pound-thrust (3,170 kg) attitude control motor was also ignited to provide steering, whilst a jettison motor pulled
the LAS away from the capsule to permit parachute deployment and a safe landing. Overall, Pad Abort-1 lasted 135 seconds and Orion was brought to a touchdown about a mile (1.6 km) north of the pad.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The performance of the spacecraft in other critical areas was also being steadily proven and brought closer to flight readiness. In March 2009, a full-scale mockup, known as the Post-Landing Orion
Recovery Test (PORT), was successfully placed in a test pool at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock Division in West Bethesda, Md., as part of efforts to understand the kind of motions the astronauts might experience after a water splashdown. Orion
swept through its Preliminary Design Review (PDR) with flying colors in August 2009, following six months of focused subsystems evaluations across all ten NASA field centers and its success prompted Cleon Lacefield, vice president and Orion Project Manager
at Lockheed Martin, to remark that its design was "much more mature than you might see on many programs at the PDR checkpoint". He paid tribute to the close partnership between Lockheed Martin and NASA during the design of the spacecraft, which involved 300
technical reviews, 100 peer reviews and 18 subsystem design reviews.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Alongside the Orion, the vehicle which would transport it into space was also well into its own development. From February 2006, engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.,
performed initial wind tunnel testing of what came to be known as the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV). This two-stage rocket had an anticipated payload capacity of 50,000 pounds (22,300 kg). It would feature a first stage fabricated by ATK Thiokol, builder
of the shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters, which would be based upon an expanded, five-segment SRB. This would be topped-off by a Boeing-built second stage, to be fed by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's oxygen/hydrogen J-2X engine. The latter was an evolved and modernized
version of the very same engine employed by the Saturn IB and Saturn V boosters in the Apollo era and would be utilized to power the second stage of the Ares I CLV and a larger Ares V Cargo Launch Vehicle (CaLV). The "Ares" name honored the Greek variant of
the ancient Roman god of war, Mars, whose planetary namesake formed the major celestial target of exploration for the VSE.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Construction of a 300-foot-tall (90-meter) test stand at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, Miss., commenced in mid-2007, in order to perform full-scale firings
and evaluations of J-2X hardware, including its powerpack and gas generator. The engine itself passed its Critical Design Review (CDR) in November 2008, which allowed it to progress into the manufacturing phase. Meanwhile, Boeing was selected to build Ares
I's avionics system, responsible for developing the mechanized "brains" of the vehicle for guidance, navigation and control until it delivered Orion safely into low-Earth orbit.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Elsewhere, ATK Thiokol, which had signed a $1.8 billion contract with NASA in August 2007 to build the five-segment SRB for the Ares I and Ares V first stages, was required to perform a test flight,
known as "Ares I-X". In effect, this would be an evaluation of many of the key systems of the first stage of the Ares I, with a standard four-segment SRB and a dummy, "ballasted" fifth segment to make it aerodynamically accurate. The performance of the hardware
was critical, for its 2.6 million pounds (1.2 million kg) of thrust would power the vehicle to an altitude of 25 miles (40 km) during the first two minutes of each flight. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Hardware for Ares I-X began to arrive at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for processing in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) from November 2008, with the Solid Rocket Motors (SRMs) themselves arriving
in March 2009. Concurrently, testing of the rocket's parachute and igniter systems was also completed. Ares I-X was originally targeted for July 2009—although KSC's historic Pad 39B was not handed over by the Shuttle Program to the Constellation Program for
appropriate modification until 31 May—and the launch in any case slipped until late October. "The Ares I-X rocket is a combination of existing and simulator hardware that will resemble the Ares I crew vehicle in size, shape and weight," NASA explained. "It
will provide valuable data to guide the final design of the Ares I, which will launch astronauts in the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Although the "Orion" for Ares I-X actually took the form of a "boilerplate" crew module, topped by a 46-foot-tall (14-meter) LAS, it was instrumented with 150 sensors
to measure aerodynamic pressures and temperatures in order to contribute to an understanding of the performance of the vehicle. A further 550 sensors were also mounted on the body of Ares I-X itself to monitor its flight. "This launch will tell us what we got
right and what we got wrong in the design and analysis phase," said Jonathan Cruz, deputy project manager for the Ares I-X crew module and LAS, based at the Langley Research Center. "We have a lot of confidence, but we need those two minutes of flight data
before NASA can continue to the next phase of rocket development."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">By August 2009, the Ares I-X vehicle—which stood 327 feet (100 meters) high, far taller than the 149-foot (45-meter) shuttle-era SRBs—had been fully stacked inside the VAB and was transported to
Pad 39B on 20 October. By this stage, confidence had been further bolstered by ATK Thiokol's successful full-duration test firing of the five-segment SRB in Promontory, Utah, on 10 September, with a second ground test planned for the summer of 2010. Liftoff
on 27 October was postponed by 24 hours, due to concern over the "triboelectrification rule", one of the weather-related aspects of Launch Commit Criteria (LCC). At length, Ares I-X roared aloft at 11:30 a.m. EDT on 28 October. The mission spanned six minutes,
from launch through to parachute deployment and splashdown, and was declared an unbridled success. In the words of Doug Cooke, NASA's Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., the test
represented "a huge step forward" for the agency's exploration goals.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Sadly, the following year, 2010, would bring the Constellation Program to the nadir of cancellation and a whole new architecture for BEO exploration would take center stage. Although the Pad Abort-1
test of the Orion/LAS hardware was successfully performed in May and ATK Thiokol supported a second ground firing of the five-segment SRB at its Utah test site on 31 August, the new president, Barack Obama, had directed NASA to cancel the Constellation Program,
terminate work on Orion and the Ares I and Ares V boosters, and recommended a new human space exploration architecture. It was a decision which would win the president praise and vilification in equal measure.</span></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Morpheus Prototype Lander Ready for New Series of Flight Tests at Kennedy Space Center</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Mike Killian - <a href="http://AmericaSpace.com"><a href="http://AmericaSpace.com">AmericaSpace.com</a></a></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:7.5pt;margin-bottom:7.5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">At NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, at the northern edge of the former Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF), is an area that looks very much
like the surface of the Moon, complete with rocks and craters to serve as a site to flight test the agency's Morpheus prototype planetary lander. A total of 14 free flight tests have been conducted so far, the last of which took place under cover of darkness
on May 28, 2014, and although Free Flight 14 (FF14) concluded Project Morpheus' flight test campaign the team feels there are some areas they can improve upon, and so operations are again in full swing for a new series of flight tests, the first of which is
currently scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Since our last flight, the team's engineers have been reviewing the volumes of data we collected during all the free flights. The analysis enhanced our understanding
of the underlying performance of the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) system and revealed some areas that we felt were important to improve upon at this stage rather than waiting for a later flight implementation," says Dr. Jon Olansen,
Morpheus project manager at Johnson Space Center (JSC).</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Morpheus, which has been in development under a strict budget since 2010, is a testbed and technology demonstrator for the development of planetary landers that will, in the future, be capable of
accessing hard-to-reach areas on missions to destinations such as the Moon, Mars, or even an asteroid. The vehicle, which some would say resembles a UFO, has conducted many dozens of successful static hot-fire tests and tethered-flight tests at JSC in Houston,
but the vehicle's development has not come easily. In August 2012, during its second free-flight test at KSC, Morpheus Alpha crash landed moments after lift-off—an accident blamed on a malfunction that resulted in the total loss of the vehicle.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Project Morpheus pressed on to design and build a new upgraded prototype vehicle, Morpheus Bravo, utilizing the lessons learned from the crash, and in the time since Morpheus has had one success
after another, excelling at exceedingly difficult and higher flights to prove the technology.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Vertical Takeoff / Vertical Landing (VTVL) technology used on Morpheus is not something new, as the Apollo Lunar Modules were the first planetary landers to utilize it. ALHAT, on the other hand,
comprises a new set of innovative technologies that would allow a future planetary lander to autonomously identify its landing area by creating 3-D maps of the surface on the fly, while being able to navigate and avoid hazardous terrain and ensuring a safe
landing for future missions.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The work being done with the Morpheus Lander could lead to the development of planetary landers capable of reaching many places previously thought as inaccessible, like the Moon's polar regions
or deep craters on Mars, and Morpheus' successful flights are a positive sign for a developing capability that could make future missions to those places a reality.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Morpheus' last flight on May 28, 2014, was similar to previous tests, except it was done at night and was conducted with a finer-tuned ALHAT based on what was learned in FF13 to navigate Morpheus'
entire approach with ALHAT in closed-loop mode. Morpheus jumped skyward to an altitude of about 800 feet, solely using ALHAT's Hazard Detection System for guidance, and—assisted by three light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors—the system detected rocks
and craters on the ground before performing a safe landing a quarter mile away.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"The flash lidar performed very well, and we could clearly identify rocks as small as one foot (0.3 m) in size from the largest range that Morpheus could give us, which
was approximately a quarter mile," said Eric Roback, ALHAT flash lidar lead engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "With this sensor we could even find the safest landing site in a pitch black crater."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:7.5pt;margin-bottom:7.5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Now, nearly six months later, after a lengthy post-flight analysis, data review, and evaluation of Morpheus and its ALHAT performance, the team is ready
to fly Morpheus again. All of the required vehicle modifications are now complete, and so Morpheus is scheduled for a tethered flight test this week to exercise all of its systems before proceeding to the next round of free flight tests in December.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"The tests we flew last spring successfully met all the objectives we had established for demonstrating integrated Lox/Methane propulsion and precision landing advances
using ALHAT," says Olansen. "The rationale for pursuing now is to fully demonstrate the system-level performance that would more readily enable infusion into future spaceflight missions. As a result, we developed a number of software updates, primarily to the
navigation algorithms. We also designed hardware improvements, including relocating the Doppler lidar velocimeter to eliminate the interference from heated air due to the engine plume. The combination of identified modifications provide a sufficiently different
ALHAT capability that warrants demonstration in the closed-loop flight environment that Morpheus provides."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"The expectation is that these flights will establish the ALHAT suite with a TRL6 level of maturity, thereby reducing the development risk that future missions would have to endure in order to incorporate
any of the components in their flight design," added Olansen.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Morpheus' propellant is a mixture of "green," non-toxic liquid oxygen/liquid methane fuel, which is stored inside the lander's four spherical propellant tanks. Future missions to the Moon and Mars
could potentially produce these elements through in-situ resource utilization, thus largely mitigating the need for carrying all the necessary fuel required from Earth, and though the current Morpheus prototype vehicle is relatively small, having a payload
capacity of 500 kg, the Morpheus team hopes to scale it up in the future to accommodate both crew and cargo.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"The first intent would more than likely be a robotic-type of mission, and depending on the path forward, and vehicles out there to get us beyond Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), the ALHAT technology and
other Morpheus technologies could be part of that – at least we HOPE," said Roback earlier this year. "So basically it's not really the 'Lander design' as the intended tests for us, but rather the technologies we tested on these vehicles. If we were to continue
testing, we'd probably use different vehicle designs as well."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Once this technology goes into service, the days of having to land 20 or 30 miles from where you really want to land for fear of the hazardous craters and rocks will be over," added Roback. "Then
we can land near the truly interesting science and near the critical resources that will be needed for eventual colonization, and we can do it over and over again safely."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Three flight tests are scheduled for the rest of the year, with the first tethered test expected on Nov. 18, weather permitting. Assuming all goes well, the team hopes
to free fly Morpheus twice more during the first two weeks of December, with each of those flights following the same trajectory profile as FF10-14 did last spring.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Out of ISS: Russia going solo with space station?</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Russia Today</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#1E1E1E"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Russian space agency is reportedly considering construction of a high-altitude orbital station starting from 2017. This means that Moscow may walk away from the ISS after 2020, when its obligations
under the current project are fulfilled.</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#1E1E1E"> </font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kommersant newspaper reported that the manned space exploration program for the period until 2050 implies step-by-step assembly of a new scientific space station,
citing its sources in Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology, Roscosmos space agency's leading space scientific and research enterprise.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The principal difference from the currently operating International Space Station will be the new Russian station's high-altitude orbit with a 64.8-degree inclination,
which would make up to 90 percent of the Russian territory visible from on board, including Arctic shelf seas.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">From the ISS, which has an orbit inclination of 51.6 degrees, no more than 5 percent of the Russian territory is currently visible.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Additionally, the new station will be better positioned for manned flights from Russia's under-construction Vostochny Cosmodrome, which will see the first rocket launch
in the end of 2015.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">A manned flight from Vostochny to the ISS, were it to happen today, would bear a certain risk in case of an emergency cancelation of a mission. In that case the flight
trajectory would see the module come down in open sea, whereas for the new station it would fall over land, Kommersant reports.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Plesetsk Military Cosmodrome in Russia's north will also become handy for delivery of cargo to the new space station. The use of the old Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan will continue as usual.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>"The initial configuration will consist of a node module mated with multipurpose research module and space laboratory OKA-T,"</i> Kommersant quotes an unnamed source
in the Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The station will be maintained with new rocket boosters under development: Progress-MS (first launch – latter half of 2015) and Soyuz-MS (first launch May 2016).</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Once the station is functioning, Roscosmos is planning to run there trials of an energy and transformer modules for a future lunar program.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>"In fact we are talking about creating a bridgehead: first space hardware will be delivered to the station, then it will be going to the moon,"</i> the source said.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The new manned space exploration program is being readied by scientific institutes united under Roscosmos.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology declined to comment to RT regarding the construction of a new space station.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Roskosmos is considering several options for a new national space station to replace the ISS, Denis Lyskov, the federal space agency's official secretary, confirmed
to Itar-TASS news agency.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>"We're considering a number of options,"</i> Lyskov said.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Without going into details, Lyskov criticized news about the station already circulating in the media.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>"Premature options should not be given to the media,"</i>Lyskov stressed.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced in May that Roscosmos receives little commercial payback from the International Space Station, despite spending up to
30 percent of its annual budget on the project.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>"Our profit is flat low… so we see no business interest in it [going on with the ISS],"</i> Rogozin said, adding that Russia is set to fulfill its international obligations
regarding the ISS.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>"There are rumors about Russia leaving the ISS project. We will not, the program is set to run until 2020 and we will stick to our international obligations. As
for prolonging it till 2024 – that's what we're really doubtful of,"</i> Rogozin stressed.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Last week Roscosmos head Oleg Ostapenko told NASA administrator Charles Bolden at the Airshow China exhibition that the decision on further use of the ISS after 2020
will be made by the end of the year.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The US space industry, which uses Russian Soyuz vehicles to deliver its astronauts to the ISS, insists on using the ISS until at least 2024. Other participants in
the project, such as Japan, have also expressed interest in sustaining operability of the station for a longer period.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In 2013, the US spent $3 billion on the ISS, six times more than Roscosmos allocated for the station, whereas Russia has the right to form half of the ISS crew.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The ISS project was initiated in 1998, with Russia contributing the first modules needed for its construction. Before the ISS, Roscosmos operated its own Soviet-era MIR
station, which remained operational for 15 years, from 1986 to 2001, before it was de-orbited and sank in the Pacific Ocean.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Loss of contact with Philae</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">William Harwood - CBS News via <a href="http://Spaceflightnow.com">Spaceflightnow.com</a> (STORY WRITTEN FOR <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/spacenews1.html"><font color="#0563C1"><u>CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE"</u></font></a>
& USED WITH PERMISSION)</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Trapped in a forbidding jumble of sun-blocking cliffs and rocky debris, the Philae comet lander, its batteries nearly depleted, somehow managed to contact
the Rosetta mothership Friday in true cliffhanger fashion, relaying stored science data back to Earth and receiving commands to turn in place in a last-ditch bid to bring a larger set of solar cells into the meager sunlight.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But a few moments after the pirouette, battery voltage suddenly plummeted and engineers said the end was near. Trapped between a rock and a dark place beyond
its ability to survive, Philae dutifully sent back stored data and even made fresh measurements until finally, just after 7:30 p.m. (EST-5), contact was finally lost.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Link is intermittent," the European Space Agency tweeted. A few moments later: "The @Philae2014 Lander has switched to stand by due to low power. All instruments
off." ESA followed with a tweet saying the lander was "now sending only housekeeping data at very low rate. All instruments are off."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Stephan Ulamac, the Philae lander operations manager, said he was thrilled with the spacecraft's performance. As Philae entered "idle mode," sending the
occasional data packet and final bits of housekeeping telemetry, Ulamec marveled "we can even watch it falling asleep."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">A few minutes later, ESA tweeted: "Loss of signal. No more comm with @Philae2014. All science data from First Science Sequence successfully downloaded."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It was not immediately clear whether contact was lost because Philae's battery power dropped below the 21.5 volts needed for normal operation or because
Rosetta passed out of view in its orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Either way, stranded in the cold shade of comet cliffs more than 310 million miles from Earth, the 220-pound Philae presumably began slipping into the equivalent
of an electronic coma as its battery power steadily draining away.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Congratulations to the amazing work by the Rosetta/Philae/ESA team," @BadAstronomer tweeted. "You had an entire planet cheering on a small robot 500 million
km away."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">More than any space mission in recent memory, Rosetta's encounter with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and Philae's wild, bouncing touchdown have played out in
public on the internet with Twitter capturing the thoughts of many during the lander's apparently final moments.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Now Philae down to sleep,<br>
"We pray a sunbeam soon to sweep<br>
"And if the hibernation break<br>
"We have more science yet to make," tweeted @BadPhysics.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"…this is why we feel emotions for little @Philae2014 — it may be nuts, bolts, aluminum and circuits, but it represents us. And science," wrote @astroengine.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Sleep well, @Philae2014! Thank you for the images and data. Come back to us when panels are warmed up (hopefully soon!)," said @spacewriter.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Tweeted @BBCPallab: "This death scene by #Philae2014 is almost Shakespearean."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But reports of Philae's demise may be premature. While engineers were not particularly optimistic, the lander's final maneuver should have brought a larger
set of solar cells into the limited light of the sun. It might possibly be just enough to revive the hardy spacecraft when Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves closer to the sun next year and the light falling on the solar cells intensifies.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"So there is some hope that at some stage when we're closer to the sun that Philae wakes up again and talks to us," Ulamec said earlier. "But we need to
be very lucky that this happens."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Regardless of the long-term outlook, engineers at the European Space Operations Center were clearly thrilled the lander managed to send home a final set
of science data, possibly including the results of an attempt to drill into the crust of the nucleus to collect pristine material for analysis.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Asked how he felt about the mission, Ulamec said "satisfied, I have to say."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Of course, it's a little bit sad to see the power voltage curve going down," he said. "But I'm very happy. … We lived longer than we could expect in the
conditions we had."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">He said the science teams had a wealth of data to study from the observations Philae was able to complete and "they should be really happy" with "a lot
of data. From what I've seen, it looks pretty good."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Philae's wild ride began early Wednesday when Rosetta released it for a seven-hour descent to the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The lander was equipped
with harpoons and ice screws to anchor itself to the nucleus at the moment of touchdown, but the systems failed to operate and Philae bounced back up into space, reaching an altitude of more than 3,000 feet before coming back down again two hours later.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The lander then bounced away again, finally coming to rest more than half a mile from its original touchdown point. Or so the telemetry indicates. Engineers
do not yet know precisely where the spacecraft ended up, whether the initial two-hour bounce was mostly vertical and how that played in with the comet's 12.4-hour rotation.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Wherever it ended up, frames from a panorama taken after it came to rest revealed nearby cliffs and a chaotic jumble of dark rock-like debris casting long
shadows and allowing only minimal sunlight to reach Philae's solar cells.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"We are not toppled over," Valentina Lommatsch said from the lander control center. "It looks like we're kind of surrounded by rocks. … But pictures show
all three legs on the ground, and I can confirm from the solar data we have not moved at all since the first set of panorama images after the third landing. So we are on the ground, we just have really (been) unlucky in a corner surrounded by rocks."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Philae was launched with 50 to 60 hours of charge in its primary and secondary batteries. By Friday morning, most of that was depleted.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In the lander's original orientation sunlight reached the solar panels during a roughly 90-minute period each 12.4-hour "day." For most of that time, less
than 1 watt is available, but power output climbs to 3 or 4 watts for about 20 minutes.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"The lander needs 5.1 watts to boot, so we have to at least get that," Lommatsch said. "After we have that, in order to charge the batteries we have to
heat it up to zero degrees Celsius. In the simulations that we've run, that would mean that we'd need about 50 to 60 watt-hours a day in order to reach zero degrees and still have some of the daylight left to charge the battery. So it doesn't look that great."</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But Lommatsch said as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves closer to the sun and warms up, the amount of sunlight hitting the spacecraft will intensify enough
to possibly rouse the lander from its slumber.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But it would take a considerable amount of luck. Rosetta would need go be within line of sight and the lander would need enough power to drive is computer
and radio gear.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Having a link would need additional power again, so we'd have to have something in the battery in order to have a link or be extremely lucky that Rosetta
is looking for us in the moment that sunlight reaches the solar panels," Lommatsch said.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">While "it looks a bit bad," she said, "we can only hope that as we approach the sun, maybe in August if we don't have too much dust or a huge coma blocking
the sun, perhaps there would be a chance that at some point we could come back and at least see how the lander's doing. "So cross your fingers, or press your thumbs if you're German, perhaps we'll hear something from the lander again."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>OPINION: ESA's comet landing highlights a public accustomed to less</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Collin Skocik - Spaceflight Insider</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">On Nov. 12, 2014, history was made. The Philae lander detached from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft and landed on Comet 67P, or Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
This was the culmination of a space project decades in the making. The Rosetta spacecraft was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on Mar. 2, 2004, from the Guiana Space Center in Khouru in French Guiana. During its long mission, Rosetta flew by two small asteroids
and approached the orbit of Jupiter using solar cells as its main power source. With some 2,000 people assisting in the mission, Rosetta is a triumph for the European Space Agency (ESA) and the world. </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Upon confirmation that Philae had landed on Comet 67P, Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager, announced, "We're on the comet." Whether deliberately or accidentally,
his words echoed the iconic words of Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969: "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The <i>Eagle</i> has landed." Comet 67P is much further away than the Moon, and Rosetta had a longer, more arduous journey than the primitive Apollo 11 spacecraft
in that long-ago decade—yet the landing on a comet has failed to engage the world to nearly the extent that Apollo 11 did.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">There has been a lot of media attention to the Rosetta mission, and it's always nice to see the news media devote their airtime to space activities. And
of course all the space enthusiasts are busy posting the latest photos from the comet and expressing their congratulations—as they should. But all the attention feels a little forced. This is a great day in space because…well, because it is.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Landing on a comet is an important step forward. And in its own way, the Philae landing was as dramatic and hair-raising as any manned mission—the harpoons
which were meant to anchor the lander in place did not fire, meaning that even as ESA personnel celebrated their achievement, the lander bounced a kilometer off the surface before landing lopsided in a hilly terrain where the solar panels may not receive enough
sunlight to recharge its batteries. Yet it is doing science.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Eight of its ten experiments are operating and beaming data back via the orbiting Rosetta mothership. The ESA has decided, since the craft is not anchored,
that it would be too risky to use the experiment that would sink a drill 8 inches (20cm.) into the comet's surface. It's also feared that extending the Multi-Purpose Sensor for Surface and Subsurface Science (Mupus) would destabilize the lander.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Yet space highlights like this, and the brief giddiness that follow, have become more or less routine. Various countries have become very good at landing
robots on planets and moons. There's instant coverage of the landing, shots of smiling strangers shaking hands, and then life goes on. <i>Scientific American</i> or <a href="http://Physorg.com">Physorg.com</a> will provide mission highlights for those who are interested. But they are not iconic,
world-changing achievements.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">And the reason is simple. There are no crews.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Few people could name the first unmanned spacecraft to land on the Moon (Luna 2). Yet everyone knows the name of Neil Armstrong. Perhaps the name of the
Viking lander, the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars (technically the first craft to land on the Red Planet was the USSRs Mars-3 – which operated for 14.5 seconds), is known to a fair percentage of people, not least because of humanity's ongoing
love affair with the Red planet, but nothing fires the imagination quite like the vision of human beings forging a path into the unknown.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">These unmanned missions are important. They provide invaluable data that will keep scientists busy for many years. But they are stepping stones. Without
the crewed missions to follow, their value has to be questioned. Like everything else in space exploration, they're path finding steps into the black. They're important accomplishments, yes, but they're bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that we're just not
bothering to put together.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It's been 55 years since Luna-2 impacted with the Moon, 50 years since Ranger 7 transmitted the first photograph of the lunar surface, 38 years since the
first Viking landing on Mars. And yet it's been 42 years since any human being has left low Earth orbit (LEO). Without human follow-up missions, the unmanned surveys of Mars, Venus, asteroids and comets are of little practical value. Knowledge for the sake
of knowledge is a fine thing, and curiosity is one of the things that make us human, but why do we continue to take small steps without attempting giant leaps?</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Rather than congratulating ESA, NASA, China and Russia on all those unmanned landings…and then moving on to other things…why not say, "That's a good first
step—what next?" Are we <i>really </i>that impressed with the Philae landing, or are we simply pretending to be impressed because there's just nothing else going on? And because loudly applauding every achievement in space shows political support for those
next big steps that we know aren't actually coming, or at least not coming anytime soon.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In the Christopher Nolan epic, <i>Interstellar</i>, a sad future is painted for mankind. Humanity has focused its efforts on raising crops as the "blight"
makes Earth ever-more unlivable. Just as the U.S. did in the 1960s, in order to beat the Russians to the Moon – humanity finally "gets it" and realizes that we must explore space for our survival.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">This is what awaits us. Rather than treat space as some cool "event" like a rock concert – it must be treated as something pivotal to our very survival
– because it is. As this author has noted before, we are on a planet whose habitable life is on the decline, all the while our population increases exponentially.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It is in our nature to want to focus on the short term issues – rather than address the long-term problems. The world's space programs have been forced
to get by with minimal resources – one day – we will all come to regret that.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But why wait for "one day?" <i>Interstellar</i> intoned a poem over and over again – it is one that the space community should take to heart. There is one
emotion the current state of our industry should inspire – rage.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We are going gently into the "good night" mentioned in that poem. We are accepting less and less in terms of space efforts. Rather than traveling to other
worlds, we accepted an orbital space plane. Now? We hope commercial companies can achieve the task of sending crews to orbit as NASA attempts to complete vague missions with no clear long-term objectives.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Who is to blame for this decline. Simple. We are. We fight internecine battles over ever-diminishing funds, tearing each other down with the ferociousness
of hyenas who have just brought down a gazelle. We tell ourselves it is either one of the other. We work to break the backs – of those with whom we should work to forge friendships in the name of some cult of personality, from being set in our ways – or out
of plain spite.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">What could we accomplish if, instead of fighting each other – we stood shoulder-to-shoulder? Where would we be if, instead of accepting the scraps doled
out by politicians – we demanded the future we deserve? While ESA's accomplishments this past week should be applauded and while Nolan's space epic is a must-see – both should cause one emotion to smolder within us – rage.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We should be further along than we are now. International crews should have already traveled to Mars. Our robotic explorers should have shown the way –
and we should have followed. Instead? We sit on our couches, watching the antics of pawn brokers and duck hunters, gossiping about Kim Kardashian's latest photo spread.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We need to put down the remote. We need to work with those we have placed on the opposing side – and we need to fight the slow-roll backwards that is taking
place. We need to cease the "new" "old" nonsense and realize that what we need is "NowSpace" – as in we need to be developing our space capabilities "now" – not when we are threatened by a super power or world is incapable of supporting us.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Russia's Energomash Dreams Up Reusable Rocket Engine Design </b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Matthew Bodner – Moscow Times</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Russia's NPO Energomash, one of the world's leading rocket engine manufacturers, has cooked up an ambitious plan to make its engines reusable up to 10 times,
news agency TASS reported Friday.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Reusability is the buzzword of the modern space industry. Born of exorbitant Cold War budgets, space programs across the globe have struggled over the last
two decades to survive with less funding — and reusability is the key to radically cutting down costs.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Energomash has devised a novel, albeit limited, solution to the problem of returning rocket parts safely to earth. The company proposes housing its RD-191
engine in a capsule attached to the bottom of Russia's Angara rockets. After the engine has exhausted its fuel, the capsule will detach and fall back to earth, protected by a heat shield on one side.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">A parachute will deploy once the capsule hits the atmosphere, allowing the engine to land safely either with the help of a special airbag or small rockets
to slow its descent.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The added weight of this recovery system would knock 2.6 percent off of the Angara rocket's payload capacity, or the maximum weight it can lift to a given
altitude above the earth.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The proposal was presented at a conference hosted by Russia's largest space company, RSC Energia, TASS reported Friday.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">On the other side of the globe, U.S.-based SpaceX is also moving forward with ambitious reusable designs. The company is working to make its Falcon 9 and
upcoming Falcon Heavy rockets — which Angara is often compared to — completely reusable, with the entire rocket returning to earth and landing itself.</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:9pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Angara, the first rocket developed by the post-Soviet Russian space industry, was originally also designed to be entirely reusable. Its boosters to deploy
wings after use that would allow the rocket to fly back home and land like an airplane. This design was ultimately dropped in favor of the conventional single-use approach.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><b>Away</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Chris Jones – Esquire</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>In March, astronaut Scott Kelly will undertake the longest space mission in American history. He and a cosmonaut will begin an uninterrupted year aboard
the International Space Station—a year exposed to the strange and deep effects of weightlessness, acute stress, isolation, and cosmic radiation. It is the most ambitious manned space mission in years. And it will also be the first step in a human expedition
to Mars.</i><font color="#CFCFCF"> </font></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">I<font color="black">n cavernous Building 9</font> at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, tucked behind a privacy screen, there is a working model of
the International Space Station's toilet. Scott Kelly flicked the three switches that power it up—its control panels, stamped in Cyrillic, flashed with a succession of green lights—and he nodded when a familiar hum filled the air. Three years ago, he commanded
the space station for six months, and he came to know the Waste and Hygiene Compartment well. In late March, Kelly will return to his former home as the first American astronaut assigned to live in space for twelve months. This summer, between his morning robotics
training and his afternoon Russian class, he took a refresher course in the orbital evacuation of his bowels. The toilet does not have a seat. It dawned on him that he will not sit down for a year.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">He will spend that year falling so fast he will appear to float—in the instance of the toilet, over a small square of plastic with a circular hole just a few inches across. Only
his feet will be anchored by restraints. It is better than it used to be. For the two shuttle missions earlier in his career, Kelly's training included a toilet with a closed-circuit camera in its bowl, pointing straight up. He had to learn to assume the position
by checking a nearby monitor, as though he were using a bombsight.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Now, on the space station, considerable air suction assists in maintaining alignment. Stool is drawn into a clear plastic bag that lines the hole; the bags have distinctive red release
tabs. After the astronaut cleans up with gauze and Huggies Natural Care wipes—NASA doesn't endorse any particular brand of wipe; it just happens to fly Huggies—they're pushed into the same bag, which is removed, tied up, and shoved into a metal canister the
size of a milk jug that, when full, will be jettisoned in a trash ship and turned into a shooting star. Finally, the bag is replaced as a courtesy to the toilet's next occupant. When the new bag isn't properly installed, it's called short bagging, and short
bagging is the sort of thing that can strain crew relations.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Weightlessness changes everything, and it will change Scott Kelly. Because he won't be sitting, and because the human body is a ruthless and efficient machine, over time his pelvis
will lose its bursa sacs, which cushion his hip joints against earthly hazards like toilet seats but become obsolete in space. He will also urinate some significant percentage of his blood reserve—stored in his legs on the ground, but risen into his overstuffed
core in the absence of gravity—into a separate piece of the WHC. More specifically, he will take the hose that hangs to the left of the toilet, remove the plastic cap off the yellow, narrow-mouthed funnel at its end, open the urine valve, check to see that
there's sufficient air suction in it, too, and aim for the middle. The urine will then pass through a series of centrifuges and purification systems and come out the other end as his water supply.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Before the urine enters the first separator—a $700,000 Russian-built piece of hardware that spins the air out of it—it will be given a dose of a syrupy, almost black liquid called
pretreat. Its exact composition is secret, but it's some toxic combination of chromium trioxide and sulfuric acid. Human urine, left untreated, will release particulates that will give the water-purification system the equivalent of the bends. This is a problem
that had a team of engineers scratching their heads. Their literal solution was to fight the particulates with pretreat, now one of thousands of responses to the challenges of life in space, our ever-growing collection of improvisations and sidesteps that will
allow us, one day, to get from here to there.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In such a complicated environment, however, solutions often give rise to more confounding problems. One day during Kelly's six-month mission, in 2010–11, the toilet's lights flashed
red instead of green. He removed a panel and discovered a faulty hose connection had led to a pretreat leak. In microgravity, the solution didn't drip or conveniently pool. It formed a shimmering sphere of acids the size and color of a cannonball that now floated
out of the cabinet.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly hadn't been in space long enough to have suppressed all of his gravity-bound instincts. He grabbed an old T-shirt to soak up the pretreat, as though he'd spilled oil in his
garage. Unfortunately, that old T-shirt had sweat and therefore water molecules trapped in its fibers. Pour a little acid into enough water and it will disperse. Introduce a small amount of water to a cauldron of acid and something else happens. That old T-shirt
didn't act like a sponge. It was flint. Now Kelly saw and smelled smoke.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Fire is the primal fear of astronauts. Every American astronaut who has been killed in a space suit has died in flames. There was a terrible fire on Mir, the old Soviet space station,
and it's whispered about in Houston like a ghost story. (It wasn't fatal; cosmonauts tend to die by asphyxiation or in falls to earth.) That's not only because the crew can't escape outside or because the fire will consume their oxygen. Fire, like just about
everything else, behaves differently in weightlessness.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">A candle's flame always points up because of gravity. Fire is superheated gas that's lighter than the air around it. That's why volcanic plumes and hot-air balloons rise. We can
fight fires because they have a predictable architecture, built with a spine like a book. In orbit, fire is not lighter than air. It weighs the same as air, which weighs the same as everything else. A candle's flame no longer points up because there is no up.
A candle's flame is round. A fire will imitate the sun. Kelly's trip to the bathroom now threatened to turn into a ball of anchorless flame.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Happily, one of Kelly's crewmates was a chemist named Cady Coleman. She understood the nature of acids—she knew that too little water might ignite them, and yet enough water rendered
them harmless. But how could she bring one to the other? There was no hauling a bucket from the sink. Coleman found a large plastic bag, soaked some towels, threw them in the bag, and then caught the smoldering ball of acids with it as though she were scooping
up a fish in a net. In time, the bag—its combination of enough water and not enough oxygen—snuffed out the threat. It was less warfare than a kind of siege.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Now, in Building 9, Scott Kelly looked down at the toilet that will again be his. The lights on the panels continued to flash, and the fans continued to whir. There was the hose
with the yellow funnel. There were those clear plastic bags with the distinctive red tabs, and the metal canister into which they will be stuffed. There was the pouch of Huggies.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"A year is a long time," he said.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Russians proposed the one-year mission. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, has always been more intrigued by the risks and rewards of long-duration flight than NASA has been.
Four cosmonauts spent more than a year in space on the uncomfortable bucket that was Mir, the last in 1999. A narrow-faced Russian named Sergei Krikalev is the current record holder for the most time lived in orbit. Over six missions, he has spent eight hundred
and three days, nine hours, and thirty-nine minutes weightless. Semi-famously, he was on Mir when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Mir didn't have many windows, but whenever Krikalev found his way to one, he looked down on a new world.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The International Space Station was built in that tumultuous reality. Fearful that aimless Russian rocket scientists might seek stable employment in places like North Korea or Iran,
the Americans proposed a more harmonic convergence: the grandest and most difficult construction project in history, built out of Russian wisdom and American largesse. Today, the station comprises two distinct halves, augmented by Japanese, European, and Canadian
contributions. The Russian segments are narrower and more austere. The Russians don't process their urine; they just piss into tanks. They also carpet their modules in Velcro, using nearly every available surface to secure a battalion of objects that otherwise
would be satellites. The Americans don't have nearly as much Velcro in their quarters. They've deemed it a fire risk. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">By treaty, there is agreement between the U. S. and Russia that their conjoined space programs are out of political bounds. Whatever events might be unfolding on earth, whatever
airliners might be shot out of the Ukrainian sky, there are no sides in space. It helps that the Russians possess our only means to manned orbit—the Soyuz spacecraft—and that the Americans control much of the station's electrical plant and the gyroscopes that
maintain its attitude. "We have something up there that is holding us together," says Michael Suffredini, NASA's manager of the ISS Program Office. "Right now we have six crew onboard, and we all understand that these men and women are the next step for humanity."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But like countries and their arrangements, the station has a life span: It will stop defying gravity in 2024, or not long after. While it always has been used as a weightless laboratory—more
than a thousand investigations in materials and medical research have been undertaken since Expedition 1 in 2000—the Russians wondered whether the station's residents might be part of a larger experiment in the time they have left. Six-month expeditions have
become the industry standard, but a journey to Mars—<i>MAPC</i> in Cyrillic—will require a crew to spend as long as three years in space. So the Russians proposed that, in the decade or so before the station falls to earth, as many as twelve subjects be rocketed
up, delivered in pairs, to test the physical and psychological limits of humans in weightlessness. (Those four brawny men on Mir were never subjected to intensive diagnostic study; cosmonauts still refuse to give stool samples.) The Americans, fresh off the
stunning success of the Mars rover Curiosity, agreed. We've proved we can reach Mars with our machines; the exiled dozen will help us decide whether we can reach it with our feet.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Such an undertaking requires equal parts optimism and resignation. It takes a certain measure of faith to strap into a seat on a missile in Kazakhstan and trust that you will end
up safely in orbit. It also takes the belief that we will one day need to. For all the hopefulness astronauts represent, they are among the least delusional people on earth. What Chris Hadfield, a former astronaut and station commander, calls the "North American
subculture of pretense"—that sense that we can make all our wishes come true—has been stripped from them over years of simulations that end in their deaths. Astronauts are experts in weakness.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"I'm in this business to take humans <i>beyond</i> low-earth orbit," Suffredini says. "I believe that's how this species will survive, when we can inhabit other planets if something
happens to this one. We need to start proving to ourselves that we can do it." Scientific research is often a parade of analogues. NASA uses Antarctica and giant swimming pools as analogues for life in space; the International Space Station is about to become
an analogue for an interplanetary Noah's Ark.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">A mustachioed fifty-four-year-old cosmonaut named Mikhail Kornienko will be the first to represent the Russians. The American is Scott Kelly.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">He is not a formidable human specimen. Like fighter pilots and test pilots—both of which he has been—Kelly is fairly short. (Because of height restrictions on Soyuz, and because
aerospace engineers are obsessed with mass and volume, NASA won't consider astronaut applicants who stand taller than six foot three.) Five foot seven, 185 pounds on the ground—more like five foot nine, 170 after his year in space; "like a supermodel," he says—Kelly
is coiled and capable of significant momentum, but he's also fifty years old. He shaves what's left of his hair with a blade. He has sometimes worn a mustache, but he doesn't anymore. He does wear glasses. (Astronauts do not need to have perfect vision, but
it can't be worse than 20/100 uncorrected.) On formal occasions he'll wear his Navy uniform—he is a retired captain with more than 250 carrier landings to his credit—but Kelly mostly sports jeans and NASA-issued golf shirts. When he pulls into a place like
Chelsea's, an astronaut hangout just down the road from the Johnson Space Center, and sits at a table with Cady Coleman and Mike Fossum, his fellow station veterans, they look like a group of teachers unwinding after school. You would never know by looking
at them what they have done.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">That's until Kelly makes the drive to Ellington Field and pulls on his blue flight suit and survival vest and walks toward a T-38 jet, white with a blue stripe and a NASA logo shining
on its tail, a little like a man who knows he has the biggest balls in the room. Astronauts are required to spend a certain number of hours in T-38's each month to keep their flying, navigation, and troubleshooting skills sharp. Some days, Kelly hurtles across
to Mobile or Little Rock and then pounds his way back home. On others, he loops through touch-and-goes, taking off and landing and taking off again. He peels into the sky and disappears into the brightness, announcing his return with the roar of his engines,
and he whispers across the ground, the faintest of grazes, before he lifts back up where he belongs. To see Kelly in flight is to see a man transformed.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">He was selected for this mission for several cold and rational reasons. NASA wanted a previous commander to take the critical first spot, and it wanted someone who had completed
a six-month expedition without any evident physical or mental fissures. NASA also wanted to send up an older astronaut, so the cosmic radiation he will absorb will have less time to turn into cancer before something else kills him. American astronauts are subject
to strict exposure limits, the so-called red line they all fear, not because of the tumor risk but because they'll be grounded. Those limits were established in part using data culled from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly also has an identical twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut and close-to-flawless genetic copy. By the end of Scott's mission, he will have spent exactly ten times as long
in space as Mark, who has agreed to serve as a control in a series of detailed comparison studies, tracking everything from the microbiomes in their guts to the relative lengths of their telomeres, a sequence in our chromosomes that's believed to shorten with
stress.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But mostly, Scott Kelly was chosen because of the stomach sense that he is, more than just about anybody else on earth, purpose-built to fly. NASA's psychologists and psychiatrists
look for two contradictory-seeming traits in its candidates for long-duration missions: adaptability and resiliency. The first represents an astronaut's tolerance for the chronic, low-level stress of being away—the confinement, the nearly constant white noise,
the shitting into plastic bags. You yield in the fights you cannot win. The second indicates an astronaut's ability to withstand <i>acute</i> stress, usually associated with an unfortunate turn of events. You fight the fights you must win. "Scott is highly
adaptable and highly resilient," says Al Holland, a NASA psychologist who has tested him extensively. He is some rare combination of grit and give.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">One barometer of an astronaut's adaptability is his feet. Many first-time astronauts, in their opening days and weeks of weightlessness, will cling to some facsimile of verticality:
head up, feet down. It makes them look clumsy in their movements, like skiers trying to push uphill. That's despite the clear messages being sent by their feet that the rules have changed. After about a month in orbit, astronauts begin sloughing off vast quantities
of skin from their soles; it takes only that long for their bodies to decide that calluses, like bursa sacs, are biological ballast.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The results can be dramatic. Don Pettit, who has completed two long-duration missions on the station, filmed a crewmate taking off his socks against a black backdrop and a spotlight.
It looked like a snow globe. One astronaut made a call to his flight surgeon after a thick wedge of his heel came floating off. "Should I be worried?" he asked Houston. After Kelly returned from his six-month mission, he remembers going for a massage and the
woman gasping when she got to his feet. She said they were the softest feet she'd felt in her life.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly's feet weren't really feet anymore. It wasn't just that he had been launching himself headfirst around the station, having discarded every last upright instinct. Because he
had no longer needed his feet to be feet, he'd used them as hands. Rather than having two arms and two legs, he'd had four equal limbs. Handrails became footrails. The calluses that he'd lost from the bottoms of his feet migrated to the tops, where he had hooked
them around restraints like a trapeze swinger. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Given another year of pure flight, Kelly might evolve into human history's first true spaceman. Perhaps the migration of his calluses is just the beginning of his adaptation. We
always depict aliens as some version of us. They won't look like us, because in space, even we stop looking like us. We become spiders that don't need webs.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Not every part of the human body is so easily recast. NASA keeps a risk matrix, a list of thirty-two areas of ongoing physical concern. (Roscosmos has an entire division in Moscow,
the Institute of Biomedical Problems, dedicated to addressing them. The Russians usually abbreviate it to the Institute of Problems, because nearly every problem in space is a biomedical one.) Some former crises, like bone loss—studies showed that on long missions
astronauts were losing as much as 2 percent of their bone mass per month—have been resolved with new exercise regimes and therapies. Others—like persistent sinus congestion, a side effect of the same fluid shifts that lead to the loss of our blood reserves—have
proved harder to remedy but seem relatively minor inconveniences. A sinister few continue to pose major obstacles to prolonged expeditions. One in particular didn't even present as a problem until the last year or two, and it risks making a trip to Mars impossible.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It's been dubbed Ocular Syndrome, or VIIP—Vision Impairment and Intracranial Pressure—so named after its possible cause. It was missed for all these years because most astronauts
and cosmonauts are middle-aged, and they've reached that stage of life when they might be holding instructions a little farther from their faces to read anyway. But as the number of six-month missions on the station increased, more and more residents began
experiencing startling changes to their vision. In one instance, it was so bad that NASA considered bringing the sufferer home.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Neither the Americans nor the Russians yet know the cause of Ocular Syndrome. The current hypothesis is that increased pressure in the brain—again, from fluid shifts—is damaging
the retinas or optic nerves of certain people, though not all, for whatever equally unclear reason. The one-year missions will help NASA chart these changes and others like them beyond six months. Maybe the effects of weightlessness on the body level off or
improve. Maybe they get exponentially worse. Maybe there is the real and terrifying prospect that by the time the first humans get to Mars or try to come home, they won't be able to see. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Although flight surgeons say only that further study is required, there is some evidence that Ocular Syndrome affects only men, and that if it affects them in only one eye, which
it sometimes does, it will always take hold in their right eye. That might be a quirk of limited sample sizes; far more men than women have been to space. Or it might prove the opening to some stunning revelation, an invitation to discover a fundamental difference
in the human eye not only between men and women but also between the hemispheres of the brain.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">We can't just choose to send women to Mars instead, because the women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved far more receptive hosts to cancer. At higher orbits, cosmic radiation is so
intense, astronauts see fireworks through their sleeping masks; Scott Kelly could tell when he was between South America and Africa even with his eyes closed, because of the fiery presence of the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the inner Van Allen radiation belt
bends closest to the earth. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">If we don't give ourselves a better option than crews of blind men or radiation-sick women, then we won't survive Mars or its defenses. Getting there is only half the equation. Living
and working there, in one-third earth's gravity—already weak, light-headed, and sore, and now your blood and bursa sacs and feet adapting again—is the other. The most beautiful lure of interplanetary space is its demand that we first conquer us.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Each week in space, long-duration astronauts have private conferences with NASA's shrinks. Not even their flight surgeons can listen in. Together they work through a long mental-health
checklist: workload and habitability, family and personal relationships, mood and cognition. If the call is a videoconference, note will be made of the astronaut's appearance and mannerisms. The psychologists and psychiatrists are looking for the speed wobbles
that can be the precursors of a larger crash. In Kelly's case, one of the measures of his orbital mood will be his sense of humor. He is deadpan and dry on the ground, and the working theory is that space makes you more of what you are. It is a compounding
environment. If you are a man of faith here on earth, you will be devout above it. What concerns the shrinks is subtraction, anything that looks like lessening.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">After his six months away, even Kelly, born flyer, was ready to land. "I've taken all my pictures," he said to Coleman, and his bags were packed well in advance. He's a scattershot
sleeper on earth, and he gets less sleep in space, and it was beginning to tell on him. Residents on the station are each assigned private quarters, a soundproof box about the size of a phone booth; nobody underestimates the importance of having a door to close.
Most astronauts strap sleeping bags on the wall and hang like bats, but Kelly often woke up in strange positions that took his sensory system time to parse. He missed resting his head on a pillow and never shook the desire to roll over, even though without
pressure points, sides and backs become as meaningless in orbit as up and down. Some nights he kicked his way out of his bag in his sleep, his zombie arms stretched out in front of him, before he settled against what would have been a corner of his bedroom
ceiling at home. He didn't remember many dreams while in space, but in the dreams he did, he was always on the ground.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">At its essence, his one-year mission will be an exercise in absences and their mitigation. Before each trip, astronauts sit through a series of "contingency sims." They walk through
what will happen if something bad occurs to them and what will happen if something bad occurs to someone they love, and they handpick their emissaries to gravity, the people assigned to call them in the event of an earthly emergency or, alternatively, to knock
on their family's door in the middle of the night. No astronauts have lost children while in space, considered the worst of the possibilities to confront, but one learned his mother was killed in an accident. Regardless of the sim, none of them ends with an
astronaut returning early. "That's something you need to understand before you leave," Kelly says. "There's no going home."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Buzz Aldrin once described bravery as a "gradual accumulation of discipline." Being able to leave comes in stages. Kelly has tried to occupy the doubtful parts of his brain with
the countless small details of his departure. He has put all of his bills on automated payment. He noticed during a Russian class that his credit card is set to expire shortly after his launch; he will have to renew it early. He has updated his will. He hasn't
yet reached the gratitude stage most astronauts pass through, when they take the time to savor last steaks or cold bottles of beer, but he has started preparing for goodbye. "Six months is a huge commitment for any astronaut," his brother, Mark, says. "I think
this is a lot more than just twice as hard." </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly is divorced, but his marriage produced two daughters: twenty-year-old Samantha, who recently moved back with him in Houston, and eleven-year-old Charlotte, who lives with her
mother in Virginia. Kelly also has a longtime girlfriend, Amiko Kauderer, who works in NASA's public-affairs office and has two children of her own. He also has his widower father, Richard, who moved down from New Jersey to join his twin astronaut boys in Houston;
Mark and his family; and a wide circle of friends. Kelly will stay connected with them while he is in orbit—there is Internet, a phone, and regularly scheduled videoconferences on iPads—but his six-month mission taught him that it isn't always enough. Amiko
would go outside and record the sound of crickets or the rain to send him, but he is aware of the limitations of substitutes. As much as he loved weightlessness, some aches never went away.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>This is really starting to hurt me,</i> he wrote to Amiko one sleepless night. He had hit the three-quarter mark of his expedition, considered by the shrinks to be the hardest
time: close enough to the end to see it, but not close enough to feel it. (This time around, Kelly will face a special test at the nine-month mark of his mission. Sarah Brightman, the soprano, will be arriving on the station as Russia's latest space tourist.)
He began watching more TV, even though he rarely does on earth. Recordings of Houston Texans football games were important weekly benchmarks. He saved Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for his daily workouts. He became obsessed with <i>American Idol</i>. "That's
because Sam sings," Amiko says.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Over the last several months, Samantha has become one of his principal tethers. For years they were miles apart. After his former wife and daughters left for Virginia, Kelly lived
an unattached man's life. When he went up for his six-month mission, he'd been dating Amiko for only a year. He gave up the apartment he was renting and trucked his stuff into storage. Upon reflection, that was a mistake. It left him too groundless. There is
a cupola on the station, a half-diamond of flawless windows opening toward the earth. Studies have shown that astronauts are pulled into it mostly when they are passing over home. Kelly didn't have one. He has since moved into an immaculately kept new house
with a yard and a pool, and it felt even more like home when Sam came back to him to start college, bringing her pets with her. She has a collection of tarantulas.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly knows the longer he's away, the harder it becomes to remember. He will miss a year of Sam's and Charlotte's lives. What was once his finish line will soon be his halfway point.
He recently decided to have a set of security cameras installed at his house; he can monitor them online. Most of the cameras point outside. His phone chimes when his doorbell does, and he can check to see who's at the door. But one of them is inside, with
a view of his kitchen and living room. When he's back in orbit, he'll be able to drop into his sleeping bag with his laptop and see his couch, and his fridge, and his daughter and her family of surrogate spiders. He won't have to worry about remembering his
dreams at all.</span></font></div>
<div style="text-indent:18pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It was nearly one hundred days into his six-month mission. Kelly is certain that it was a Saturday, because the rhythms on the station change on the weekends. With sixteen sunsets
and sunrises each day, and without seasons to measure the passage of time, it's considered psychologically beneficial for a workweek in space to mirror a workweek on earth.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Monday through Friday, each day is planned down to the minute, and crews are constantly chasing a line that moves through their schedules like a scanner: fifteen minutes to draw
a blood sample; five minutes to tend to the experimental crop of red lettuce. Sunday is, in theory, a day of reflection and rest. Saturdays are something in between. There is work, but it's Saturday work: stocking the galley, vacuuming skin out of filters.
On this particular Saturday, Kelly remembers that he was fixing the toilet again. He remembers, too, that he had the TV on in the background. It was on CNN.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">He had just talked to Amiko on the phone. He had caught her at home, where she was indulging in her fully functional bathroom, taking a bath. She was shy to tell him where she was,
but the now-strange sound of water splashing had bounced off the satellite between them.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Just down the road, Mark Kelly was spending the day with his teenage daughters, Claire and Claudia. A thousand miles to the east in Virginia, Samantha and Charlotte Kelly were with
their mother, an hour deeper into their day. They were helping Sam's godmother move. A thousand miles to the west and an hour earlier in Tucson, Gabby Giffords, Mark Kelly's wife and Scott Kelly's sister-in-law, was meeting constituents in a supermarket parking
lot. A twenty-two-year-old man whose name nobody knew approached her.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Back on the station, Kelly was burying himself in his work. He hadn't noticed that the TV feed had gone out. The signal is lost fairly routinely, whenever the station blunders into
a gap in the Ku-band's coverage. Only a call from the ground finally broke his concentration. It was Houston. The CapCom told him that Peggy Whitson, a veteran astronaut and chief of the astronaut office, needed to talk to him. She would be on with him in five
minutes.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Astronauts endure some long minutes, but those were some of Kelly's longest. During his contingency sims, he had asked that Whitson be his principal bearer of bad tidings. Now, on
an otherwise uneventful Saturday, she wanted to talk to him. He felt heavier than he had in a hundred days. Maybe his grandmother had died, he thought. Maybe Sam had been in a car accident. He hadn't yet connected the black screen on the TV and the phone call.
It hadn't dawned on him that the signal wasn't lost but cut.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Whitson came on the line. The conversation was made private. "I don't know how to tell you this," Whitson said, "so I'm just going to tell you: Your sister-in-law Gabby was shot."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The way gravity makes weightlessness hard to imagine, space can make life on earth seem like an illusion. When the sun is shining, even our biggest cities become washed out and invisible,
swallowed by the vaster stretches of brown and green around them. Vapor trails become clouds, and oil rigs become icebergs. It can be hard to believe that there are traffic jams and baseball games and border crossings down there. And it's next to impossible
to comprehend that someone might have just shot your sister-in-law in the head in a supermarket parking lot on a Saturday morning in Tucson.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly told Whitson that he wanted to know everything, that she shouldn't seek to spare him. He wanted to feel what his family on the ground was feeling. He couldn't be with them
physically, but he could be with them in every other way. He told his crewmates what had happened, and he told them that he was going to be okay, but he was going to need to spend some time in his sleeping quarters.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The first phone call he made was to his brother. Mark Kelly was still packing his bags in Houston, preparing to fly to Tucson. Over the coming hours and days, Scott made dozens more
phone calls—to Mark, to Amiko, to his daughters. He worried that he was calling too much, that in trying to make up for not being there, he might have become too present. "No, it was actually really helpful," Mark says today. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In fact, "he was the rock, pretty much," Sam Kelly says. Because of his distance, his sense of disbelief dug in for longer than it stayed in the others, and maybe that's what allowed
adaptation to turn into resiliency, as though he were the last of them with any hope that a different reality might be true.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">President Obama announced that on Monday the nation would observe a moment of silence. Kelly would lead it from space, after he had said a few words. Just before he was scheduled
to speak, he called Amiko. She was in Mission Control in Houston. He wasn't sure how long the moment of silence should be. She told him it should be as long as he wanted.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly soon floated in front of the camera and onto the giant screens in front of her and everybody else. "Houston, Station, on Space-to-Ground One," he said.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"Yes, Station, this is Houston. Go ahead."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly began by talking about his vantage point and how peaceful the planet looked in that instant from space, and how sharply what he saw diverged from what he knew. As he spoke,
his voice grew harder through the crackle, a military man about to give an order. "We are better than this," he said. "We must do better." Then he asked for the moment of silence in honor of the victims of another one of those days when we did our worst. It
was just long enough. He floated out of the camera's range, swimming back into his sleeping quarters. Amiko's phone soon rang beside her again.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The one place where astronauts still leave our planet is the place where the first one did: Site No. 1 in the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome, carved out of the middle of the Kazakh
desert. The launchpad was poured in 1955 under a veil of secrecy so thick—including mislabeled maps and a diversionary mining town also named Baikonur located hundreds of miles to the northeast—most of the men who built it didn't know what they were building.
Sputnik was launched from it two years later. Four years after that, a star-crossed young Russian named Yuri Gagarin sailed into orbit from this Soviet monument to the invisible.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia leased the site from Kazakhstan; it is the last colony of a former empire. The pad is a wide, cracked concrete slab with
train tracks embedded in it. The tracks end at an enormous hole framed by steel gantry towers. Underneath the pad, below that hole, a great crater has been dug out of the brown earth, vertigo-deep and wider than the pad itself. The Russians call the crater
the <i>otvod,</i> which roughly translated means "getaway." In September, six months before he was scheduled to leave the earth for a year, Scott Kelly climbed down into that pit.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Officially, he was in Kazakhstan as a backup for an American named Barry "Butch" Wilmore, a crew-cut Tennessean with a wife and two young daughters who was about to launch to the
space station with two Russian crewmates as part of Expedition 41. If Wilmore had fallen in the shower or betrayed some previously undiscovered cavity in his nerve, Kelly would have taken his seat on Soyuz TMA-14M, and another American would have taken Kelly's
place in history in March. Less formally, and more hopefully, Kelly was there to complete a dress rehearsal for his departure, another step in his gradual accumulation of discipline. He would do everything that he will do except go.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">The Russians put much faith in patterns and their repetition, and part of their prelaunch ritual is that the backup crew clambers down into the <i>otvod</i> and inspects the bottom
of the Soyuz FG on behalf of their captive colleagues, quarantined against prelaunch illness. Kelly was awed to look up at essentially the same collection of boosters that the Russians have employed since 1967. Two nights later, where he was standing would
be filled with white-hot flame, but on that bright morning, in the silence and shadow, he was afforded a lung-emptying view. He wasn't looking up at a "bird" or a vessel or a ship. Soyuz, plainly and unmistakably, is a big fucking rocket.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Earlier that morning, at precisely seven o'clock—because that's when Gagarin's Vostok had been ferried to the pad, and so that's when every manned rocket the Russians have fired
up since has begun its long journey into space—the rocket was pulled horizontally, business-end first, through a gaping maw in the side of Building 112 by a green locomotive. It can seem as though Russia's space program is a celebration of the past as much
as it is a hedge against the future. There are constant reminders of who and what came before. As always, one of the locomotive's headlights had been put out; nobody seems to remember why anymore. A soldier with a sniffer dog walked the track ahead of it. Other
soldiers with machine guns marched beside it. The track was aimed due east, toward a just-rising sun, its glow banking bright orange off clouds. In one of humanity's great pieces of theater, Soyuz rolled out into the light.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">It was muscular and sleek in the thin morning air, the locomotive clanging and whistling ahead of it in wordless testimony to the evolution of our engines. It was more than 160 feet
of power and restraint, of stages and modules, from its rhino's ass through its four gunmetal-gray boosters and its lathe-perfect middle, tapering to its gleaming white cap with its seamless hatch and, somewhere behind it, three seats, shaped more like cradles.
When the locomotive stopped and the rocket sat still before a small crowd that could see its breath in the cold, it felt almost impossible that so much of this great and artful machine would be burned up and spent, except for its most essential parts, which
would require only five hours and sixteen minutes to catch and dock with the station, orbiting at 17,500 miles an hour, somewhere up there. On some nights, if the mathematics and angles are right, you can see the light of the space station streak across the
sky three minutes and sixteen seconds before the huge rocket lifts off like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. It can feel like too great a distance to close in so little time.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Mars can seem that way. Michael Suffredini believes that it's possible for one of us to stand on it by 2035, if the will is found and the right investments are made and we figure
out a less diabolical way to dissolve particulates in urine. That means it will probably take longer than he hopes. Whether we reach it in the lifetime of Scott Kelly is a function less of our ability than our desire. Mars never seems more remote than when
we're putting bullets into congresswomen in parking lots. It never seems closer than when we're standing on the cracked concrete at Baikonur. The Kazakh desert already looks as though it belongs to another planet, barren except for conquering packs of wild
dogs and herds of camels. "It's a good first step," Kelly says. It already feels so far from home. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">At the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow, underneath a shining titanium monument of a rocket soaring into the sky, there is a black-and-white photograph of Yuri Gagarin as
a boy. He was short because his family was poor and he was malnourished—it was wartime—but he was a beautiful boy. The photograph is there mostly for other children to see, mounted close to the floor, so that they might remember that this giant was once their
size. When the Russians were more deeply invested in the hero-building business, they knew that children needed to believe that someone like them could grow up to be someone like him. Belief is the first of our gaps that needs to be bridged.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">A galaxy away in Baikonur, not far from the launchpad, two cottages sit among the desert's few trees. These are for grown-ups to visit. They are made of white plaster and green wood,
with corrugated sheet metal for roofs. In one, Gagarin slept, apparently soundly, before his fateful launch. His small bed, neatly made, sits in the corner of one room, with a table and chairs and a record player. In the other cottage, Sergei Korolev worked
more than he slept. He was Russia's preeminent rocket engineer and designer. He dreamt up Vostok and Soyuz here. In the Energia factory where the Soyuz capsule is assembled, a massive mural of his face is on the wall, with a quote: "The road to the stars is
clear." In his office in his cottage, preserved like Gagarin's bedroom, there is a plain desk and a single wooden chair and a lamp. These were his instruments to overcome magnitudes.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Now, all these years later, Korolev's rocket inched its way down the tracks, taking more than two hours to cover the not quite five miles to Gagarin's pad. Then the locomotive's
engineer reversed it up to the hole in the concrete. The rocket was made vertical by hydraulics and levers, and it became even more titanic upright than it had been on its side. Four weighted support arms were swung into position and placed against its hull.
The train soon pulled away, and the rocket was left suspended over the <i>otvod</i> as though by magic. When the American shuttle was on its pad, it was pinned to the ground by a series of explosive bolts, showy and pyrotechnic and one more thing that could
go wrong. The Russians rely on Korolev's more ancient and simple physics. The rocket waits, held in place only by those four delicate arms, which act the way flying buttresses hold up a Gothic cathedral's soaring ceiling, gravity made to work against itself,
weakness turned into strength. Soyuz can float on its pad only because it is so heavy.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Later, two bearded Russian orthodox priests would visit it, their black robes whipping around them like flags. They chanted and sang baritone hymns in Soyuz's shadow and waved a
cross and threw holy water at it. That was after Kelly had dropped down into the getaway to stare up at the bottom of it, six months before he would strap into a cradle at its top. Twice graced, by Russian mysticism and American marvel, that big fucking rocket
was deemed ready for launch.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Kelly has never thrown up in space, but when he came back to earth last time, he had gravity sickness. The muscles that held up his head hurt. His spine was painfully compressed.
He didn't smash coffee mugs like so many of his colleagues, letting go of them in midair and expecting them to float, but he did try to kick himself to his bathroom one night and couldn't figure out why he wasn't flying out of his bed.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">For every day they spend in space, astronauts can expect to need a day on the ground to return to some version of their former selves. By that measure, Kelly is about to spend two
years away. In the quiet before his departure, he answered a question about whether his time in orbit had changed him in more fundamental ways than the redistribution of his calluses. Whether he and his insides were something they weren't before.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"No," he said.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Not everybody who knows him agrees.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Before their six-month mission together, Cady Coleman had been a little leery of being his crewmate for such a long time. They could be stony with each other on the ground. He was
sometimes too blunt, she thought, oblivious to the needs and feelings of others. She played the flute and was more finely tuned. "There couldn't be people who are more different than Scott and me," she says today. "I know there are things he didn't see." </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">With the soles of his feet stripped, he was forced to take lighter steps. She was taken by how gentle and kind he was in orbit, how measured he was in how he moved and spoke. "Somehow
the imperatives are just more clear up there," Coleman says. Their time in space didn't align exactly; she came down after him. She was shocked to find him waiting for her when she landed.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Samantha Kelly saw changes in her father, too. In the six months before he went into space, they hadn't been easy on each other. The breakup of their family had done the damage that
all breakups do, and the distance between Texas and Virginia had made it harder for them to repair it. Now they are back under the same roof. They listen to each other. He is more demonstrative in his love.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In their first days back together the last time, father and daughter retreated to a friend's pool. "You have no idea how good this feels," he said to her as they sat with the sun
warm on their faces. The way he said it struck her. </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"I noticed him being more appreciative of everything," she says. "I don't know if he ever knew this about himself, but prior to it—I think he was grateful, but he didn't really express
it a lot. He's more positive. When I make him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, he looks at me like I made him a four-course meal."</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Amiko Kauderer talks about those six months her new boyfriend was away as though each were a forge that shaped and strengthened their bond. "We already shared so much, but the launch
was when we really kicked off," she says.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">They didn't talk every day at first, but they came to speak most days, and more and more when he began to struggle with the lengths of silence. "We did this together," she says.
They were leveled by his time in space, the astronaut and the small-town Texas girl who works on the ground on behalf of people like him. Now each weighed as much as the other. For the first time in their relationship, there were ebbs and flows in their dependency.
Space had made it harder to tell who had needed saving and who had come to the rescue.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">In Kazakhstan, Kelly helped Butch Wilmore navigate his farewell to earth. Kelly knew that his last pillow would be one in the Cosmonaut Hotel, where they spend their quarantine;
he knew that his last meal with knives and forks would be plates of cured meat and pies with fruit for dessert; he knew that his last goodbyes to the people he loved would be made through glass.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">There is always a final press conference at which the three members of the prime crew and their three reserves sit in a row, speaking with microphones to a crowd of family and friends
and reporters from behind germproof windows. This time, once it was over and the crowd had moved outside, Kelly suddenly appeared in the sunshine. He told Mike Fossum, in Baikonur as an extra set of astronaut shoulders, to find Wilmore's shy blond wife, Deanna.
Fossum, who had completed a long-duration flight in 2011, understood. Kelly had smuggled Wilmore outside, in the cover of a distant stand of trees. Fossum soon brought over Deanna. Kelly and Fossum went on lookout, turning their backs on the moment they had
created. For a free minute or two, husband and wife, though careful not to touch, shared the air and each other, the last time they would be alone together for six months.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Two nights later, in the early-morning blackness, Wilmore and his Russian crewmates waved through bus windows one last time, their alien Sokol suits made phosphorescent by the flashes
of cameras. The way it always is, an old Russian rock song by a band named Zemlyane—Earthlings—about going into space and missing grass had been played for them over speakers. They went to their rocket. Their families headed for a stretch of desert just a mile
from the pad; the Russians believe in proximity. The Wilmores did their best to hide their tension with their smiles. They didn't succeed.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">So much effort and hope had come down to these last tugs of gravity, the rocket turned white with a thick blanket of frost, clouds of steam belching out of and up its groaning sides.
Once it was pumped full with liquid oxygen and kerosene, it had become a living thing with impulses and desires of its own. Shuttle launches had felt less predetermined and inevitable; they were so often scrubbed late because of a rainstorm at one of the emergency-landing
sites in Spain or some small mechanical failure. The shuttle was built with so many outs, liftoff never felt certain until it was. Soyuz leaves no room for alternatives. It is never late, and it is never scrubbed. If you are strapped into one of its seats,
you are about to be launched out the other side of the sky.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">And then the fire was lit, and it filled the getaway and spilled over its banks like a river in flood, those four arms capitulating to the surge and swinging clear. The fire pushed
down in a thickening stream, and the rocket lifted off, the sound of its engines taking longer to reach Deanna and her girls than the light, but now it rolled across the sand in a wave, not a rumble but a crack, a thunderclap in their chests. Soyuz somehow
found in itself more speed, and within seconds it was truer to say that it had left than it was leaving. It reached into the night like a flare, the desert illuminated in its wake, and when it neared the clouds, the fire lit its way forward, too. Korolev was
right, and then he was right again: The road really is clear. Now the earth had a ceiling as well as a floor, and the rocket burst through it, leaving concentric circles of eerie light. On and up it went, disappearing except for the last of its noise, until
it faded out, leaving the early morning dark and quiet again. The Wilmores, exhausted and tearful and joyous, cheered and hugged and turned to make their way to the bus that would start them on their way home. Before they had collapsed into their seats, their
husband and father was weightless. Only eight minutes and counting, and he was long gone.</span></font></div>
<div style="text-indent:18pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">After, Kelly resumed his own countdown, T minus one hundred and eighty-three days. There are American astronauts for whom a year in space would pass as quickly as a dream. They are
more curious than him, more inventive, less tied to earth and their girlfriends and their daughters. But he's the right astronaut for this trial expedition because the right astronaut for the real one will be someone just like him. Kelly is the analogue for
the beautiful boy out there who has the notion but not yet the evidence that he will be our first Martian. He will likely be a man and by then middle-aged, because he will need to be cancer resistant, and he will have armored eyes, because he will need to be
able to see, and he will be a pilot, because he will need to know how to fly, and he will be military, because he will need to give and follow orders.</span></font></div>
<div style="text-indent:18pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">"If someone asks you to do something, especially if it's hard, you shouldn't say no," Kelly says.</span></font></div>
<div style="text-indent:18pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:10pt;">But going to Mars will be so much more than a function of obedience and strength. It will take more than making an engine powerful enough or a descent module responsive enough or
the rest of the machine and its crew durable enough. None of us has ever looked out a window and seen the earth as just another light in the sky. We can't know what that will do to us until one of us does it. So our beautiful boy will also be doubtful, because
he will need to be subject to change, and he will be reticent, because he will need to be incapable of lies, and he will be in love, because we will need him to come back home.</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:12pt;"><br>
<font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>Published in the December 2014 issue of </i></span></font><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">Esquire.</span></font><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><i>
Check back for updates on this story as Kelly's mission to space progresses.</i></span></font></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Tahoma" size="6" color="#1E1E1E"><span style="font-size:26.5pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="3" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:12pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>What's Happening in Space Policy November 17-21, 2014</b></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Marcia S. Smith - <a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com"><a href="http://Spacepolicyonline.com">Spacepolicyonline.com</a></a></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Here is our list of space policy events in the coming week,
November 17-21, 2014, and any insights we can offer about them. The House and Senate are in session.</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>During the Week</b></span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Congress is in session this week, but anything they are working
on regarding space policy and funding is taking place behind the scenes. One set of negotiations is over a compromise version of a FY2015 omnibus appropriations bill that is expected to combine all 12 regular appropriations bill into one and fund the government
through the rest of FY2015 (September 30, 2015). Word has it the bill will be publicly released the week of December 8, just in time to get it passed - hopefully - by midnight December 11 when the current Continuing Resolution (CR) expires. </span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">It's not a sure bet, though. House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY)
warned this past week that if President Obama issues an Executive Order on immigration (i.e., takes action without waiting for Congress to act) before a deal is done on appropriations, there will be an "explosion." He's worried appropriations will get caught
in the crossfire. If a new appropriations bill is not enacted by December 11, the government will shut down like it did in October 2013. Some Tea Party Republicans consider government shutdowns a useful tactic and might try to cause another one in reaction
to any Presidential action on immigration. Even absent that, some have been arguing in favor of passing just another CR to fund the government for the first few weeks of the New Year when Republicans will control both the House and Senate and have more power
to decide funding matters. (We talked about the road ahead for appropriations in an earlier </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/house-and-senate-return-to-work-today-to-finish-113th-congress-prepare-for-next-year"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>article</u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">.)</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:10pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Negotiations also are underway on a FY2015 National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA). It is the only annual authorization bill that Congress routinely passes, even if that happens at the very last minute. The House passed its version in May, and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved a version in June, but it has not
gone to the Senate floor for debate yet. They will probably skip that step and just bring the compromise to the floor. Congress hasn't missed passing an NDAA for more than 50 years no matter how high the political tensions. Senate John McCain (R-AZ), who likely
will chair SASC in the next Congress, included a provision in the SASC-version of the bill prohibiting DOD from contracting with space launch services providers that use Russian suppliers -- aimed at the United Launch Alliance's (ULA's) use of Russian RD-180
engines for the Atlas V. ULA President Tory Bruno said last week that congressional staffers now understand the "very harmful" unintended consequences of that language and are revising it as part of the NDAA negotiations.</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Like appropriations, the NDAA probably won't become public
for a while yet. Congress will be in recess next week for Thanksgiving, then return for two more weeks to finish what they can for the 113th Congress. </span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Off the Hill, three NASA Advisory Council committees or subcommittees will meet this
week in person or virtually (</span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/nac-planetary-protection-sbcmte-nov-2014-dc"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Planetary Protection </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">on
Monday and Tuesday, </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/nac-institutional-cmte-nov-2014-dc"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Institutional </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">on Wednesday
and Thursday, and </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/nac-planetary-science-sbcmte-nov-2014-virtual"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Planetary Science </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">on
Friday). The NSF-NASA-DOE </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/astronomy-astrophy-adv-cmte-aaac-nov-2014-arlington-va"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">meets
at NSF on Monday and Tuesday. </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/isu-dc-space-cafe-with-alan-ladwig-and-courtney-stadd-nov-2014-dc"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Alan Ladwig and Courtney Stadd's ISU-DC Space
Café </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">discussion is on Tuesday evening (rescheduled from last Tuesday, which was Veterans Day and HBO's Concert for Valor essentially took over DC). And the </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/beyond-the-flare-swf-aas-bfg-on-space-weather-nov-2014-dc"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Secure
World Foundation and American Astronautical Society will host a briefing on space weather </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">on the Senate side of the Capitol Visitor Center at lunchtime on Thursday.</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;">Those and other events we know about as of Sunday afternoon
are listed below.</span></span></font></div>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Monday-Tuesday, November 17-18</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><span style="background-color:white;">Interagency </span><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/astronomy-astrophy-adv-cmte-aaac-nov-2014-arlington-va"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>Astronomy
and Astrophysics Advisory Committee </u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">(AAAC), National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA</span></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/nac-planetary-protection-sbcmte-nov-2014-dc"><font color="#0563C1"><span style="background-color:white;"><u>NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Planetary Protection Subcommittee</u></span></font></a><span style="background-color:white;">,
NASA HQ, Washington, DC</span></li></span></font>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Tuesday, November 18</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<span style="background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/isu-dc-space-cafe-with-alan-ladwig-and-courtney-stadd-nov-2014-dc"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>ISU-DC
Space Café Featuring Alan Ladwig and Courtney Stadd </u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">(rescheduled from November 11), The Science Club, 1136 19th St., NW, Washington, DC, 7:00
pm ET</span></font></li></span>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Tuesday-Thursday, November 18-20</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<span style="background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/orbital-debris-education-research-workshop-coder-nov-2014-college-park-md"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>Orbital
Debris Education & Research Workshop </u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">(CODER), University of Maryland, College Park, MD</span></font></li></span>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Tuesday-Friday, November 18-21</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<span style="background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/reinventing-space-2014-bis-nov-2014-london"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>Reinventing Space
</u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">(British Interplanetary Society), London, England</span></font></li></span>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Wednesday-Thursday, November 19-20</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<span style="background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/nac-institutional-cmte-nov-2014-dc"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>NAC Institutional Committee</u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">,
NASA HQ, Washington, DC</span></font></li></span>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Thursday, November 20</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<span style="background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/aiaa-ncs-luncheon-featuring-lt-gen-ellen-pawlikowski-nov-2014-arlington-va"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>AIAA-NCS
Luncheon Featuring Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski</u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">, Lockheed Martin Global Vision Center, 2121 Crystal Drive, Arlington, VA, 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
ET</span></font></li><li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/beyond-the-flare-swf-aas-bfg-on-space-weather-nov-2014-dc"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>Beyond
the Flare: An SWF-AAS Briefing on Space Weather</u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">, SVC-201 Capitol Visitor Center (Capitol Hill), Washington, DC, 12:00-1:30 pm ET</span></font></li></span>
</ul>
<div style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin-bottom:11.25pt;"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#1E3300"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:#ECEFF1;"><span style="background-color:white;"><b>Friday, November 21</b></span></span></font></div>
<ul style="background-color:#ECEFF1;margin:0;padding-left:22.5pt;">
<span style="background-color:#ECEFF1;">
<li style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/nac-planetary-science-sbcmte-nov-2014-virtual"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;"><u>NAC Planetary Science
Subcommittee</u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;background-color:white;">, virtual, 12:00-3:00 pm ET</span></font></li></span>
</ul>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><a href="http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/events/heinlein-award-for-in-space-demo-of-new-tech-for-cmrcl-nov-2014-dc"><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#0563C1"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><u>Heinlein Prize for In Space Demonstration
of New Technology that can Benefit Commercial Activities to Daniel O'Shaughnessy</u></span></font></a><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#282828"><span style="font-size:10pt;">, National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC, 7:00 pm ET</span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"><font color="#1E1E1E"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><b>END</b></span></font></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;">More at <a href="http://www.spacetoday.net"><font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"><u>www.spacetoday.net</u></span></font></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom:10pt;"> </div>
</span></font>
</div></blockquote></body></html>
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--Apple-Mail-2--141683113--
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