Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Fwd: Cause sought for Antares space-supply rocket explosion



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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: October 29, 2014 11:31:30 AM EDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Cause sought for Antares space-supply rocket explosion

 

 

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October 29, 2014 10:27

 

Resupply ship routed to ISS blows up after takeoff from U.S. launch site (Part 2)

MOSCOW. Oct 29 (Interfax) - An Antares rocket coupled with a Cygnus resupply ship routed to the International Space Station (ISS) blew up seconds after it blasted off from a launch site in Virginia, the United States.

The NASA website was broadcasting the takeoff.

The rocket crashed approximately ten seconds after the launch while the first stage's engines were running. Judging by the video, an engine exploded.

The Antares first stage is made in Ukraine. It is powered by upgraded Soviet rocket engines NK-33.

A source in the Russian rocket and space industry told Interfax-AVN the explosion of the Antares rocket carrying the Cygnus spaceship would complicate the supplies to the U.S. segment of the International Space Station.

"Cygnus was supposed to bring about 2.5 tonnes of cargo for ISS American crewmembers - water, oxygen, food, equipment and fuel. The mishap thwarted those plans," the source said.

He noted that the ISS had certain reserves of food and water, and another U.S. cargo spaceship, a SpaceX Dragon, would go to the ISS in December. It will be propelled by a different launch vehicle and take off from a different launch site.

"It seems that the Antares rocket crash has seriously damaged the launch pad. It is unlikely that the consequences will be cleaned up rapidly. In my opinion, the next launch from there will be possible no earlier than in spring or summer of next year. So, it is possible that the Americans may ask Russia for a [Progress] resupply ship to deliver cargo to their segment," the source said.

He recalled that a similar request was made after the U.S. space shuttle wreck.

In turn, NASA said that the failure to deliver the cargo would have no effect on the ISS crew.

"The crew of the International Space Station is in no danger of running out of food or other critical supplies," says a statement posted by NASA.

"While NASA is disappointed that Orbital Sciences' third contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station was not successful today, we will continue to move forward toward the next attempt once we fully understand today's mishap," the statement reads.

"Today's launch attempt will not deter us from our work to expand our already successful capability to launch cargo from American shores to the International Space Station," it says.

U.S. resupply ships have twice delivered cargo to the International Space Station.

Too

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Antares rocket with U.S. cargo spacecraft Cygnus explodes on launch

 

October 29, 4:09 UTC+3
Cygnus was to deliver to the International Space Station more than 2 tonnes of payload, including food, equipment and materials for scientific experiments

WASHINGTON, October 29. /TASS/. The Antares rocket with the American cargo spacecraft Cygnus exploded during blastoff from NASA launch facility on the Wallops Island near the Virginia coast on Tuesday.

The NASA website was transmitting a live broadcast of the rocket launch. The explosion occurred immediately after the liftoff at 18:23 pm, local time (01:23 am, Moscow time, October 29).

There were no immediate reports about casualties or damage to the spaceport facilities. NASA said a special commission comprising representatives of NASA and Orbital Sciences will be formed to investigate the catastrophe.

Cygnus was to loiter in orbit until Nov. 2, then fly itself to the station so astronauts can use a robotic crane to snare the capsule and attach it to a berthing port. The ISS, a $100 billion research laboratory owned and operated by 15 nations, flies about 260 miles (418 km) above Earth.

In addition to food, supplies and equipment, the Cygnus spacecraft was loaded with more than 1,600 pounds (725 kg) of science experiments, including an investigation to chemically analyze meteors as they burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

 

NASA probing Antares rocket crash during lift-off in Virginia

 

October 29, 9:44 UTC+3
The Cygnus, equipped with an AJ-26 engine, a rebuilt version of Soviet NK-33, was to deliver to the International Space Station (ISS) more than 2 tons of payload

 

NEW YORK, October 29. /TASS/. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is investigating the cause of the explosion of the Antares rocket with the US cargo spacecraft Cygnus during the blastoff from the Wallops Island launch facility in Virginia.

The unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff at 22:22 GMT on Monday (01:23am Moscow time on Tuesday).

The Cygnus, equipped with an AJ-26 engine, a rebuilt version of Soviet NK-33, was to deliver to the International Space Station (ISS) more than 2 tons of payload, including food, equipment and materials for scientific experiments.

Frank Culbertson, the vice president of the Orbital Sciences company that manufactured the Antares rocket, said at a press conference on Wednesday that an investigation board has been formed to determine the cause of the incident.

The Antares engine had earlier passed all the necessary testing, including in Russia, which found no problems, Culbertson said. "It is far too early to know the details of what happened," the company's statement also quoted Culbertson as saying. "We will conduct a thorough investigation immediately to determine the cause of this failure and what steps can be taken to avoid a repeat of this incident," he said.

Culbertson said the explosion has no harmful impact on the environment, as the Antares rocket was designed to burn a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene shortly after the launch.

The US space agency said in a statement NASA "will continue to move forward toward the next attempt once we fully understand today's mishap."

The crew of the ISS, a $100 billion research laboratory owned and operated by 15 nations, is in no danger of running out of food or other critical supplies.

"Launching rockets is an incredibly difficult undertaking, and we learn from each success and each setback. Today's launch attempt will not deter us from our work to expand our already successful capability to launch cargo from American shores to the International Space Station," NASA said.

The Orbital Sciences company said it will resume rocket launches only after the causes of the blast are found.

 

Antares rocket explosion to hamper scientific research — NASA

October 29, 10:59 UTC+3 

The unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from the Wallops Island launch facility in Virginia

 

NEW YORK, October 29. /TASS/. The crash of the Antares carrier rocket with the US cargo spacecraft Cygnus is not expected to negatively affect the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) in the short term, but will somehow hinder the scientific research, NASA spokesperson Jay Bolden told TASS.

During the first couple of weeks, the crew of the ISS, a $100 billion research laboratory owned and operated by 15 nations, will not have any difficulties. However, the crash will certainly affect the research that the crew planned to carry out using the equipment that was part of the cargo, he said.

Cygnus, equipped with an AJ-26 engine, a rebuilt version of Soviet NK-33, was to deliver to the International Space Station (ISS) more than 2 tons of payload, including food, equipment and materials for scientific experiments.

In particular, Cygnus was loaded with more than 1,600 pounds (725 kg) of science experiments, including an investigation to chemically analyze meteors as they burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

The spacecraft also carried a prototype satellite owned by Redmond, Washington-based startup Planetary Resources Inc., which is developing technology to mine asteroids.

The unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from the Wallops Island launch facility in Virginia at 22:22 GMT on Monday (01:23am Moscow time on Tuesday).

Manager of NASA's ISS Program Michael Suffredini said, "We keep enough on board to keep going for 4-6 months." An investigation board has been formed to determine the cause of the mishap.

 

©   2014 TASS

 

 

​

Antares rocket explodes, destroys station cargo ship

10/28/2014 11:25 PM 

Editor's note...

  • Posted at 08:20 PM EDT, 07/28/14: Orbital Sciences rocket, station cargo ship, lost in spectacular launch mishap
  • Updated at 11:25 PM EDT, 07/28/14: Rocket mishap no immediate threat to station; cause not yet known

By WILLIAM HARWOOD
CBS News

An Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket making only its fifth flight exploded seconds after launch from the Virginia coast Tuesday, erupting in a spectacular fireball and destroying an uncrewed Cygnus cargo ship in a disheartening failure for NASA's commercial space station resupply program.The mishap occurred about 15 seconds after liftoff from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility as the 139-foot-tall two-stage rocket climbed away on the power of its two Russian-built first-stage engines."We have ignition... and we have liftoff of the Antares Orb 3 mission to bring Cygnus on its third (resupply) mission to the ISS," said NASA's launch commentator as the Antares lifted off. "Main engines at 108 percent, attitude nominal."




An Orbital Sciences Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus cargo ship bound for the International Space Station suffered a catastrophic malfunction seconds after liftoff Tuesday from Wallops Island, Va. (Credit: NASA)


At roughly that moment, the exhaust plume suddenly intensified, followed an instant later by a detonation of some sort at the base of the rocket. The booster, engulfed in flames, then slowly fell back to Earth, exploding in a titanic conflagration as its remaining liquid oxygen and refined kerosene propellants ignited in a huge fireball.At impact, flaming debris shot away into the night sky like a fireworks display, some of it presumably from solid propellant used in the rocket's second stage. Scattered fires erupted around the launch pad and a towering cloud of smoke climbed into the night sky.While property damage appeared extensive, Orbital officials said there were no injuries.It was not clear watching video replays of the launching what might have gone wrong, whether it involved one or both Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ26 first stage engines or some other system.An AJ26 engine being test fired last May for an Antares flight next year suffered a catastrophic failure 30 seconds into a planned 54-second burn. After a detailed failure investigation, Orbital managers cleared the powerplants for use in downstream missions based on corrective actions implemented in the wake of the failure.








The Antares rocket falls back to Earth, engulfed in flames. (Credit: Stephen Clark/SaceflightNow)


Frank Culbertson, a former shuttle commander and space station crew member who serves as Orbital's executive vice president, said engineers had not yet had time to examine telemetry in any detail and "we don't know whether the engine was involved in this or not. That's something we'll try to determine as quickly as possible."The rocket's self-destruct system apparently was triggered at some point, but Culbertson said he did not yet know the timing of the events or how that might have contributed to the rocket's breakup. He warned the public not to pick up any debris that might be found in the area, saying unburned propellant could pose a threat.In any case, the loss was a major setback for Orbital's plans to establish routine space station access under a $1.9 billion contract with NASA calling for delivery of 20 tons of hardware over at least eight flights through 2016.It also marked a major setback for the space station program, which is attempting to fill in the void left by the space shuttle's retirement, using commercially developed cargo ships to carry supplies and equipment once carried by the manned orbiter. More than 5,000 pounds of cargo and supplies, including research hardware, student experiments, spare parts, food and crew supplies, 32 small nanosatellites and other gear, were lost in the mishap.






The doomed rocket explodes in a fireball of burning propellant. (Credit: Stephen Clark/SaceflightNow)


"It's a tough time to lose a launch vehicle like this and it's payload," Culbertson said. "It's not as tragic as losing a life, and so we're very happy to report there were no injuries ... and all we lost was hardware."That hardware, however, is very important and very high value to the company and to our customers. Our team worked very hard for this mission. However, something went wrong and we will find out what that is. We'll determine the root cause, and we will correct that, and we will come back and fly here at Wallops again, hopefully in the very near future."Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said nothing critical was lost in the mishap."As a program, of course, we manage the station to protect for just such an event should it occur," he told reporters in a post-flight news conference. "Therefore, we keep logistics on board the ISS to protect us for about four to six months in the event other logistics vehicles can't make it to ISS. So in fact, our logistics on board today, if no other spacecraft showed up, takes us well into next year. So from a consumables standpoint, we're in good shape."He said NASA would work with researchers to get experiment hardware rebuilt and relaunched while assembling more spare parts to replace components lost in the accident."But the station's in great shape, the crew's in good shape, we've got plenty of work for them to do on orbit and plenty of supplies on orbit to keep them going for quite some time," Suffredini said. "So while this event is very unfortunate, we will support the Orbital team as they work through their anomaly and continue to operate station well into the next several months while we wait for Orbital to return to flight."Orbital's Antares/Cygnus cargo vehicle is one of two resupply systems funded by NASA in the wake of the shuttle's retirement.Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, holds a $1.6 billion contract for at least 12 missions to deliver 44,000 pounds of cargo to the station. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo ship remain operational, with the next two resupply flights planned for December and February."Sorry to hear about the @OrbitalSciences launch," SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk tweeted. "Hope they recover soon."The Russians, meanwhile, planned to launch a Progress supply craft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Wednesday.How the Antares failure might impact NASA's resupply strategy in the near term is not yet known. While a high-pressure nitrogen tank needed to top off tanks in the station's Quest airlock was lost with the Cygnus, the station is not expected to suffer any immediate problems."While NASA is disappointed that Orbital Sciences' third contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station was not successful today, we will continue to move forward toward the next attempt once we fully understand today's mishap," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's chief of space operations, said in a statement."Orbital has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in its first two missions to the station earlier this year, and we know they can replicate that success. ... Today's launch attempt will not deter us from our work to expand our already successful capability to launch cargo from American shores to the International Space Station."
























A long-distance view of the Antares mishap. (Credit: NASA)


The next Antares/Cygnus mission is currently planned for April, but that flight could be delayed pending the results of an investigation into the failure Thursday.Tuesday's launching went off on time at 6:22 p.m. EDT (GMT-4), roughly the moment Earth's rotation moved the pad into the plane of the space station's orbit.After a final round of computer checks to verify the first stage engines were working properly, the Antares was released from its launching stand at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and the rocket began climbing away.The initial seconds of the ascent appeared normal as the booster climbed straight up, its first stage engines burning oxygen and RP-1 kerosene rocket fuel. But just 12 to 15 seconds or so after liftoff, a catastrophic failure occurred, appearing to originate at the base of the rocket."What we know so far is pretty much what everybody saw on the video," Culbertson said. "The ascent stopped, there was some, let's say, 'disassembly' of the first stage, it looked like, then it fell to Earth."We don't have access to all the data yet because of the way the accident investigation proceeds. We lock it all down and then we go through a very methodical process to recreate that data and evaluate it. So we don't have any early indications of exactly what might have failed, and we need some time to take a look at that, from a video and telemetry standpoint."The AJ26 first stage engines originally were developed for the Soviet Union's ill-fated N-1 moon rocket. When that program was cancelled after multiple launch failures, the engines were put in storage. In the 1990s, Aerojet Rocketdyne bought about 40 of the powerplants and modified them for use aboard U.S. rockets.The May 22 test failure "obviously sparked a very thorough investigation led by Aerojet Rocketdyne, our engine supplier, supported fully by Orbital with a lot of help by NASA," Mike Pinkston, Orbital's Antares program manager, said before the company's third resupply flight in July. "That was a lengthy process."While details were not provided to the media, the engines used in July and in Tuesday's launching were subjected to exhaustive pre-flight checks and tests to make sure they were healthy and ready for flight. "It's an extensively tested engine that is very robust and rugged and it goes through extensive testing by a team at (NASA's) Stennis Space Center before it's ever installed on the rocket and used as the powerplant," Culbertson said."These engines were taken through the normal acceptance testing and pressure testing, etc., both at Stennis and here at Wallops prior to the launch. We didn't see any anomalies or anything that would indicate there were problems with the engine."

© 2014 William Harwood/CBS News

 

 

 

 

 


A sequence of images from the NASA TV broadcast of the ill-fated launch of the Antares rocket.

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The moment an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded moments after lifting off carrying a Cygnus cargo craft bound for the International space Station. 

 

© 2014 Spaceflight Now Inc.

 

A space station resupply rocket blew up shortly after launch

October 28, 2014 | By Eric Berger

A private rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station blew up six seconds into its flight on Tuesday evening.

The Antares rocket, built by Orbital Sciences, was making its third resupply mission to the space station. It was the first failure in five launches of this particular rocket.

The rocket carried no people, and there were no reports of deaths or injuries at the launch site. However there was considerable property damage at the launch pad at Wallops, in Virginia.

The Antares carried 5,000 pounds of food and other supplies for astronauts on board the station, including scientific experiments, including some developed by high school students in Houston. Here's a detailed manifest of what was on board the rocket.

It's not clear how the loss of this supply vehicle will affect station operations in the long run. NASA has several supply lines open, including SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, the Russian Progress vehicle as well as international partners. A source at NASA told me that, for the time being, is "good" on supplies.

Orbital has contracted with NASA to perform eight resupply missions.

The loss of the Antares rocket offers a grim reminder that rocketry is hard, and things can always go wrong.

© The Hearst Corporation

 

 

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Cause sought for space-supply rocket explosion

Associated Press

By BROCK VERGAKIS and MARCIA DUNN 

 

ATLANTIC, Va. (AP) — The owners of a commercial supply ship that exploded moments after liftoff promised to find the cause of the failed delivery mission to the International Space Station and warned residents to not touch any debris they might stumble across from the craft, which was carrying hazardous materials.

Crews planned to hit the ground at daybreak Wednesday to search for pieces of Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo module, which blew up Tuesday night just moments after lifting off from NASA's launch complex at Wallops Island, Virginia, said Bill Wrobel, director of the facility.

The cargo ship was carrying 5,000 pounds of experiments and equipment for NASA, as well as prepackaged meals and freeze-dried Maryland crabcakes for a Baltimore-born astronaut who's been in orbit for five months. All of the lost materials will be replaced and flown to the 260-mile-high space station, NASA space station program manager Mike Suffredini said. He said astronauts at the station currently have enough supplies to last until spring.

The accident could draw scrutiny to the space agency's growing reliance on private U.S. companies in the post-shuttle era. NASA is paying billions of dollars to Virginia-based Orbital Sciences and the California-based SpaceX company to make station deliveries, and it's counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start flying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting lab as early as 2017. It was the fourth Cygnus bound for the orbiting lab; the first flew just over a year ago. SpaceX is scheduled to launch another Dragon supply ship from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December.

Until Tuesday, all of the supply missions by Orbital Sciences and SpaceX had been near-flawless.

President Barack Obama has long championed this commercial space effort. He was in Wisconsin for a campaign rally and was kept informed.

Orbital Sciences' executive vice president Frank Culbertson said the company carried insurance on the mission, which he valued at more than $200 million, not counting repair costs. The explosion hit Orbital Science's stock, which fell more than 15 percent in after-hours trading.

By coincidence, the Russian Space Agency was proceeding with its own supply run Wednesday, planned well before the U.S. mishap.

 

An unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket explodes shortly after takeoff at Wallops Flight …

John Logdson, former space policy director at George Washington University, said the explosion was unlikely to be a major setback to NASA's commercial space plans. But he noted it could derail Orbital Sciences for a while given the company has just one launch pad and the accident occurred right above it.

At a news conference Tuesday night, Culbertson and others said everyone at the launch site had been accounted for and the damage appeared to be limited to the facilities.

He noted that the cargo module was carrying hazardous materials and warned residents to avoid any contact with debris.

"Certainly don't go souvenir hunting along the beach," he said.

Things began to go wrong 10 to 12 seconds into the flight and it was all over in 20 seconds when what was left of the rocket came crashing down, Culbertson said. He said he believes the range-safety staff sent a destruct signal before it hit the ground, but was not certain at this point.

This was the second launch attempt for the mission. Monday evening's try was thwarted by a stray sailboat in the rocket's danger zone. The restrictions are in case of just such an accident that occurred Tuesday.

Culbertson said the top priority will be repairing the launch pad "as quickly and safely as possible."

"We will not fly until we understand the root cause," he said, adding that it was too early to guess how long it might take to make the rocket repairs and fix the launch pad. It will take a few weeks, alone, to assess the damage and extent of potential repairs.

Culbertson also stressed that it was too soon to know whether the Russian-built engines, modified for the Antares and extensively tested, were to blame.

"We will understand what happened — hopefully soon — and we'll get things back on track," Culbertson assured his devastated team. "We've all seen this happen in our business before, and we've all seen the teams recover from this, and we will do the same."

The Wallops facility is small compared to NASA's major centers like those in Florida, Texas and California, but vaulted into the public spotlight in September 2013 with a NASA moonshot and the first Cygnus launch to the space station.

Michelle Murphy, an innkeeper at the Garden and Sea Inn, New Church, Virginia, where launches are visible across a bay about 16 miles away, saw the explosion.

"It was scary. Everything rattled," she said. "There were two explosions. The first one we were ready for. The second one we weren't. It shook the inn, like an earthquake. It was extremely intense."

Among the instruments that were lost from the cargo module: a meteor tracker and 32 mini research satellites, along with numerous experiments compiled by schoolchildren.

The two Americans, three Russians and one German on the orbiting space station were watching a live video feed from Mission Control and saw the whole thing unfold, Suffredini said.

___

Dunn reported from Cape Canaveral, Florida. AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington and Associated Press Writer Alex Sanz in Atlanta contributed to this report.

 

Copyright © 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

 

 

 

 

Private Rocket Explosion Sparks Investigation by NASA, Orbital Sciences

by Miriam Kramer, Space.com Staff Writer   |   October 29, 2014 01:00am ET

 

The explosion of a commercial Antares rocket just seconds after lifting off from Virginia's Eastern Shore Tuesday night has touched off an in-depth investigation into the launch failure by NASA and the rocket's builder, the Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The Antares rocket exploded in a massive fireball just after its 6:22 p.m. EDT (2222 GMT) launch on Tuesday evening (Oct. 28) from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The rocket was carrying an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft — also built by Orbital — that was packed with about 2.5 tons of supplies for astronauts on the International Space Station.

Orbital Sciences, based in Dulles, Virginia, will lead the investigation into the Antares rocket launch failure, with the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA supporting the company's analysis. No one was injured during the rocket explosion, according to NASA and Orbital, and it is too early to tell what caused the failure. [See photos of the Antares rocket explosion]

An Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes in flames during a failed launch on Oct. 28, 2014 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The rocket was carrying an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft filled with 5,000 lbs. of supplies for the

An Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes in flames during a failed launch on Oct. 28, 2014 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The rocket was carrying an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft filled with 5,000 lbs. of supplies for the International Space Station.Credit: NASA TV

View full size image

"As far as the next steps for Antares, we will not fly until we understand the root cause and the corrective action necessary to ensure this doesn't happen again," Orbital Sciences executive vice president Frank Culbertson said during a news conference after the rocket failure. "It's way too early to tell how long that might take. We will go through the proper processes. We will do it professionally and thoroughly … But I can assure you that we will find out what went wrong. We will correct it, and we will fly again."

The Cygnus spacecraft was carrying about 5,000 lbs. (2,268 kilograms) of food, science supplies and other items when the rocket failure occurred. If the launch had gone off as planned, it would have kicked off Orbital Sciences' third resupply mission to the space station under a $1.9 billion contract for eight flights to the orbiting outpost for NASA.

Infographic: How Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft service the space station.

How Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft service the space station. See how Orbital's Cygnus spacecraft and Antares rockets works here.Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist

View full size image

Another company, the California-based firm SpaceX, has a separate contract for $1.6 billion to fly 12 robotic cargo delivery missions using its own Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX has flown four of those missions so far.

Orbital Sciences representatives do not yet know if the failure is related to the failed test of an AJ26 rocket engine (the type of rocket engines used in the Antares first stage) last May.

While Tuesday's launch failure is disappointing, the crewmembers on the space station have more than enough supplies onboard the orbiting outpost, according to Mike Suffredini, the head of NASA's International Space Station program office.

"We did inform the crew immediately after it [the launch failure] occurred," Suffredini said during the news conference. "We actually had the feed up to them, so they were witness to it. They were disappointed … Of course, they are well aware that they have plenty of resources on orbit to get along for some time and the vehicles that are getting up there in the near-term."

Russian officials are planning to launch an unmanned Progress cargo ship to the space station from Russia in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (Oct. 29), and SpaceX's fifth cargo mission is scheduled to launch in early December.

Two members of Congress also expressed their feelings about the failed launch.

"We add our disappointment to the thousands in the space community who worked tirelessly in support of Tuesday evening's launch attempt at Wallops Island," Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) said in a joint statement. "We are relieved to hear there are no reported fatalities, and we anticipate learning more about the circumstances surrounding the launch failure in the near future."

Smith is the chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, while Palazzo serves as the chair on the committee's Space subcommittee.

Editor's note: NASA officials are urging residents of the area around the launch site to keep away from any rocket debris that might wash up on shore or be found on land. If you think you may have found pieces of the rocket, please call the incident response team at (757) 824-1295.

 

 

Copyright © 2014 TechMediaNetwork.com All rights reserved. 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Fwd: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Tuesday – October 28, 2014 and JSC Today



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Date: October 28, 2014 11:52:07 AM EDT
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Tuesday – October 28, 2014 and JSC Today

 
 
 
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Orbital Antares Rocket at the Launch Pad
 
 
 
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reporting that there are early signs that influenza activity is increasing, including local activity in Texas, Florida and several other states. Locally, the majority of Texas' health service regions are reporting an increased level of flu activity. Seasonal influenza activity usually peaks between December and February; however, outbreaks can occur as early as October.
The CDC recommends an annual flu vaccine for everyone 6 months of age or older. It takes two weeks for your body to develop antibodies against the flu after the vaccination, so now is the time to act!
Our next (and probably last) flu shot outreach session is scheduled for this Thursday, Oct. 30, in the Teague lobby from 8:30 a.m. until noon. Please visit the website below for additional information.
Event Date: Thursday, October 30, 2014   Event Start Time:8:30 AM   Event End Time:12:00 PM
Event Location: Building 2 (Teague Lobby)

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Bob Martel x38581 https://sashare.jsc.nasa.gov/sd/SD3/SitePages/Flu%20Program.aspx

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  1. SpaceX-4 Returns Science Samples to Earth
Over the weekend, scientists eagerly awaited the return of important science samples from the SpaceX-4 Dragon capsule. Read about it here.
Liz Warren x35548

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  1. Flight Controllers AND Flight Instructors WANTED
Test Subject Screening seeks flight controllers AND flight instructors (including those in training flow) to evaluate a self-guided, multimedia stress management and resilience training computer program called SMART-OP, in comparison to watching videos and reading information on stress management. Volunteers will:
  1. Complete one information/consent session (via telephone - 10 minutes)
  2. Attend two assessments (pre and post, 60 to 90 minutes each) involving questionnaires, neuropsychological tasks, physiological data and stress biomarker samples in 4N
  3. Attend six weekly computer-based stress management training sessions (30 to 60 minutes) in 4N
  4. Complete a three-month follow-up questionnaire (15 minutes)
  5. Total of 10 session contacts
    6.
Volunteers must be healthy non-smokers taking no medications and have a current Category I physical.
Volunteers will be compensated. (Restrictions apply to NASA civil servants and some contractors. Individuals should contact their Human Resources department.) Please contact both Linda Byrd, RN, x37284, and Rori Yager, RN, x37240.
Linda Byrd x37284

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  1. Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v9.0 Release
The JSC Chief Knowledge Officer is pleased to announce the ninth release of SKC. This release will contain a new sitemap to identify the major content repositories and better facilitate searching through them; a set of 22 Aircraft System Engineering course videos from MIT; and 6,000 new documents totaling 7.3GB. This release will also be the first round of content reorganization, placing 86,000 series documents into named folders. To date, we have captured nearly 6 million documents totaling 2.7 terabytes. Click the "Submit Feedback" button located on the top of the site navigation and give us your comments and thoughts.
   Organizations/Social
  1. America Recycles Day Events
JSC will be celebrating its recycling capabilities Nov. 10 to 13.
Art Contest: Show off your creative side AND environmental side by participating in the Recycled Art Contest. Team up or individually create art using recycled materials. Drop off artwork in the Teague lobby on Nov. 6 from 9 a.m. to noon. Contact Alexandra Moore-VanDyke for more information and submission details if you are interested in participating. All artwork will be displayed in the Teague lobby from Nov. 10 to 13.
Book Swap Event: The Environmental team will be collecting books and magazines for the swap. There will be a book drop box in the Building 11 café and a collection table at the Building 3 café's west entrance from Nov. 10 to 12 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Bring new and used books and magazines for all ages and categories to the drop-off locations. On Nov. 13, come to the Teague lobby to pick up new reads!
Event Date: Thursday, November 13, 2014   Event Start Time:9:00 AM   Event End Time:2:00 PM
Event Location: Teague Lobby and Auditorium

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Alexandra Moore-VanDyke x28255 http://www6.jsc.nasa.gov/ja/ja13/index.cfm

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  1. Red Ribbon Week: Combating Substance Abuse
Red Ribbon Week is an ideal way for people and communities to unite and take a visible stand against substance abuse. Learn about addiction intervention and show your personal commitment to a drug-free lifestyle through the symbol of the red ribbon from Oct. 20 to 28. The JSC Employee Assistance Program will be in the Building 11 café today, Oct. 28, from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. Please stop by and show your support.
Event Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2014   Event Start Time:11:00 AM   Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Building 11 Cafeteria

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Lorrie Bennett, Employee Assistance Program, Occupational Health Branch x36130

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  1. Face 2 Face (F2F) With Sumara Thompson-King
Do you know what it takes to assume senior-level responsibilities within NASA?
If not, don't worry! An F2F with Sumara Thompson-King, NASA general counsel, will be held at JSC on Thursday, Nov. 6. Thompson-King is the first woman to serve as general counsel of NASA. As a functional office associate administrator, Thompson-King serves in an advisory capacity to the administrator and works with enterprise associate administrators and center directors to ensure agency activities are conducted in accordance with all statutory and regulatory requirements. She will talk about her personal experience in becoming a female NASA executive.
Seating is limited to the first 50 people. Civil servants and contractors are encouraged to attend. Light refreshments will be provided.
Click HERE to RSVP no later than Oct. 31. Please submit your questions on the "Question" tab with your RSVP.
Event Date: Thursday, November 6, 2014   Event Start Time:5:00 PM   Event End Time:6:30 PM
Event Location: Gilruth/Lone Star Room

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Stacy G. Houston x39649

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  1. Starport Boot Camp: Registration Now Open
Starport's boot camp is back, and registration is open and filling fast. Don't miss a chance to be part of Starport's incredibly popular program.
The class is filling up, so register now!
Regular Registration (Oct. 25 to Nov. 3):
  1. $110 per person
    2.
The workout begins on Monday, Nov. 3
Are you ready for 18 hours of intense workouts with an amazing personal trainer to get you to your fitness goal?
Don't wait—sign up today!
Register now online or at the Gilruth Center information desk.
   Jobs and Training
  1. Engineer to Entrepreneur
The Houston Technology Center is pleased to host a 10-week lunch-and-learn course series entitled "Engineer to Entrepreneur." If you've ever thought about launching your own business, this is the program for you. You will learn how to establish a corporate entity, develop a business strategy, pitch your strategy and market your products. Join us for a fun-filled program instructed by some of Houston's most accomplished business executives. Classes will be held for 10 consecutive Thursdays from Aug. 21 through Oct. 30 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Building 45, Room 451. For enrollment information, contact Evelyn Boatman at 281-244-8271.
Evelyn Boatman x48271

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   Community
  1. Astronomy Day
Astronomy Day is Nov. 8 at the George Observatory inside Brazos Bend State Park. Daytime activities for the kids include face painting and learning the phases of the moon by eating Oreo cookies. There are also outdoor and indoor speakers on various astronomy-related topics, a how-to-make-a-comet demo and telescopes set up to safely observe the sun. Once nighttime arrives, out come all the telescopes! Up to 35 telescopes will be set up for observing the moon, star clusters and nebulae, and there's an opportunity to go inside the observatory's three telescope domes.
The Astronomy Day event starts at 3 p.m. and goes (clouds or shine) until 10:30 p.m., but telescope viewing may be impacted by weather. Come have a fun-filled day/night and learn a little astronomy in the process. It's a great time for the whole family.
Normal park entry fees apply, but Astronomy Day is FREE!
Event Date: Saturday, November 8, 2014   Event Start Time:3:00 PM   Event End Time:10:30 PM
Event Location: George Observatory inside Brazos Bend State Park

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Jim Wessel x41128 http://www.astronomyday.net/

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JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles.
Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.
 
 
 
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday – October 28, 2014
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: Orbital Sciences is set for a second attempt later today to launch its Antares rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, and to send the Cygnus resupply craft on a five-day journey to reach the station. A boat in the range safety zone southeast of Launch Pad 0A at Wallops last night forced a scrub of the launch. Today's liftoff is scheduled at 5:22pm Central time. That equates to 15 minutes after local sunset. At the time of launch, the station will be traveling 260 miles in altitude over the South Atlantic Ocean off the northeast coast of Brazil. Watch the launch live on NASA TV on the web or the NASA app, and follow along on Twitter.
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Lessons from Apollo for Mars One
James C. McLane III - The Space Review
 
Mars One is promoting the challenging goal of establishing the first colonists on the Red Planet only 11 years from now. NASA's Apollo program had an even shorter time horizon (eight years from John F. Kennedy's public national commitment to place a human on the Moon to the Apollo 11 mission) so it's inevitable that these two very ambitious space projects will be compared.
 
The Space Pioneer Act
Wayne White - The Space Review
Recently, two companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have begun work to develop asteroid mining capabilities. This summer, US Representatives Bill Posey (R-FL) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA) introduced HR 5063, the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act. This bill would protect mining companies' personal property rights in extracted resources. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
 
Antares rocket launch from Wallops Island canceled due to boat downrange in hazard area
Tamara Dietrich - Daily Press, of Virginia
 
NASA Wallops canceled tonight's launch attempt of Antares rocket due to a boat downrange in the hazard area, according to a NASA tweet. Launch has been rescheduled for 6:19 p.m. on Tuesday.
 
Wayward Boat Scrubs Antares Launch
Jeff Foust – Space News
A boat that entered restricted waters forced Orbital Sciences Corp. to postpone the launch of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft Oct. 27.
Antares rocket's enhanced upper stage debuts Tuesday
Stephen Clark – Spaceflightnow.com
An upgraded Castor 30XL upper stage motor will provide the Antares rocket with an extra boost during launch Tuesday with supplies and experiments for the International Space Station, a critical upgrade Orbital Sciences says will ensure it meets contractual cargo delivery requirements.
Film Review: 'Interstellar'
Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.
Scott Foundas - Variety
 
To infinity and beyond goes "Interstellar," an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director's ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director's best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, "Interstellar" reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside "The Wizard of Oz," "2001," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Gravity" in the canon of Hollywood's visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.
 
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Could Be Ticket to Mars
Product Design and Development
 
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion technologies are the subject of a new test series at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Finding the Right Rocks
Jim Howe – Space News
The NASA inspector general (IG) recently excoriated the agency's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program, finding that the effort to locate potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets was poorly resourced and far behind its mandated detection goals. In 2005 Congress tasked NASA with locating 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters in size and larger, but currently only 10 percent of this population has been found. The IG concluded that program management and funding for the planetary defense effort were insufficient for the task at hand.
 
Aerojet Rocketdyne's Mars 2020 Contracts Worth a Combined $14.5M
Dan Leone – Space News
Aerojet Rocketdyne will build landing system thrusters for NASA's Mars 2020 rover and install the craft's nuclear power source under separate sole-source contracts from the space agency and U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) worth roughly $14.5 million combined.
 
COMPLETE STORIES
 
Lessons from Apollo for Mars One
James C. McLane III - The Space Review
 
Mars One is promoting the challenging goal of establishing the first colonists on the Red Planet only 11 years from now. NASA's Apollo program had an even shorter time horizon (eight years from John F. Kennedy's public national commitment to place a human on the Moon to the Apollo 11 mission) so it's inevitable that these two very ambitious space projects will be compared.
 
Mission risk and safety
A general impression is that the crew risk for the Mars One mission and for Apollo expeditions may be of a similar order of magnitude. However, some aspects of safety are not comparable. For example, in all segments of an Apollo mission there was a way to terminate the trip and bring the crew back to Earth. The lack of a return-to-Earth option is the key feature that makes Mars One's goal feasible, but it also makes the risk harder to quantify.
 
Equipment failures are inevitable on an open-ended Mars colonization effort. This was not a big concern on the one- to two-week Apollo lunar expeditions. Machine technology has advanced tremendously in the last 50 years, so mechanical and electrical failures are less frequent, better understood, and more predictable that ever before. Techniques to detect impending failure can drastically reduce the risk of adverse consequences from that hazard.
 
Apollo's early preliminary design concepts, though feasible, were soon obsolete as more efficient and safer ways to accomplish the mission were developed. In similar manner, Mars One's plans may change a lot before they freeze the concept and progress on to detailed design. Flaws that appear as major risks in the current preliminary scheme should not be viewed with undue alarm.
 
Critical emerging technologies
In the early 1960s, the Apollo program gambled that it would be able to take advantage of several newly emerging technologies. NASA judged these developments to be so very desirable as to warrant the risk that they might not be perfected in time. These technologies included high power transistorized electronics, miniature on-board guidance computers, and the liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engine. If there had been problems that slowed development of any of these, the lunar landing would not have occurred in the '60s.
 
Problems with major new hardware did come very close to delaying the lunar landing program. Two examples were the catastrophic failure of bearings on the giant crawler transporters that moved the Saturn rocket out to the launch pad, and the structural failure of a huge space simulation vacuum chamber built to qualify the Apollo Command and Service Modules for space.
 
Mars One will also have to gamble that new, enabling technologies (such as advanced spacesuits) will be perfected in time for use on the planet.
 
Human resources
From the earliest years of the human space program, NASA and its contractors faced unprecedented technical problems. For solutions they needed the best talent they could find. Many of the country's most motivated engineers were attracted to the program because they wanted to be part of something exciting. And it wasn't just engineers. Other people, from nurses to machinists, wanted to make history so they migrated to the NASA centers. The working environment was especially stimulating because the Space Race with the Soviet Union to land humans on the Moon was a real competition. Employees felt like they were on a team participating in a sporting event.
 
NASA's efforts to obtain outstanding talent included personal visits by managers to college campuses, where engineering school deans had been asked to look for exceptional students. When such individuals were identified, the agency would encourage them to come work for the government after graduation. That's how legendary engineer Max Faget (whose name is on the patent for the Mercury capsule) and Guy Thibodaux (designer of the Scout solid fuel satellite launcher) were recruited. NASA's talent search was not restricted to just the US. In the early 1960s, Canada cancelled its AVRO Arrow supersonic interceptor aircraft project, and suddenly scores of top engineers and designers didn't have a job. NASA was able to scoop up these Canadians and relocate them to Texas to take critical roles in the Apollo program.
 
An obvious lesson from Apollo is that Mars One needs to acquire the best staff possible. Today that would mean recruiting folks who have actual hands-on human spaceflight experience. While there is plenty of public knowledge that shows what worked, the old hands know what was tried, but didn't work, and that information is seldom found in books or on the Internet. For example, many of the unsuccessful X Prize teams included enthusiastic, highly motivated people, but the teams lacked actual spaceflight experience and that is important for success.
 
Promoting the idea
During the Apollo era, there were some who believed the goal of landing humans on the Moon by the end of the decade was too audacious and virtually impossible. But, the dynamic personalities and public persuasiveness of prominent individuals like Kennedy, rocket genius Wernher von Braun, and the leaders of that era's magnificent aerospace industry provided enough momentum to carry the program forward. Politicians got on board once they realized the fantastic economic potential that Apollo would bring to their constituents. The general public understood that the Moon landing would be a unique event in the history of humanity and was proud to support such an effort. It helped that hundreds of thousands of Americans worked directly or indirectly on the project.
 
It will be hard for Mars One to gather similar support. A major public relations effort might help. It should be easier to persuade the public that settlement of our neighboring planet is a worthy goal, especially if they do not have to pay for it with their taxes. This Mars program must be endorsed by prominent national leaders and business personalities. Naturally the support of space heroes, like former astronauts and cosmonauts, is important, but for success the entire scientific community must get behind this endeavor. This will be a challenge.
 
During Apollo, scientists across a broad spectrum of fields supported NASA, in part because the Space Agency financed numerous research projects. Other federal agencies, for example the US Geological Service were heavily involved. A steady flow of scientific papers appeared in the technical literature reflecting studies done to support the program. Magazines ran articles, for example regular features by Wernher von Braun in Popular Mechanics magazine kept the general public informed and excited. It will not be so easy for Mars One to attract that level of attention.
 
In the early Apollo days some naysayers predicted failure. For example, one scientist incorrectly warned that any Moon landing was doomed since radar reflections proved the surface was covered with dust dozens of meters deep. Similarly, Mars One has no shortage of critics who are ready to point out flaws in its mission plan, no matter how preliminary the proposals.
 
Mars One faces especially daunting funding challenges, but so did Apollo. I remember passing by the front entrance at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston during a Moon mission. A group of demonstrators stood near the gate holding signs that stated, "We Are Hungry!" These protestors were a reminder that some people view taxpayer funds spent on space exploration as money that should instead go to social welfare.
 
Apart from successfully capturing the public's imagination, the best thing about Mars One is that it seems to be addressing important questions about the hardware needed for Mars settlement. Recent criticisms of Mars One's plans questioned whether regenerative life support systems can allow indefinite stays on the planet. As design progresses, will Mars One conclude that current or near future technology simply can't provide a relatively autonomous, self-supporting colony?
 
A more feasible scheme
If Mars One comes to that conclusion, it could embrace a more feasible scheme: Send only one astronaut to the Red Planet and periodically resupply that single individual with all required provisions and consumables from Earth. This is the simplest and cheapest way to begin to colonize the planet.
 
Will Mars One have the audacity to propose a one-person, one-way mission? The concept is far too bold for NASA, but with the hope of the world as inspiration, Mars One has a chance to capture the legacy of Apollo and plant the seeds of humanity on the Red Planet.
 
James C. McLane III is an Associate Fellow in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has personal exposure to the human space program extending back to the Apollo era.
The Space Pioneer Act
Wayne White - The Space Review
Recently, two companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have begun work to develop asteroid mining capabilities. This summer, US Representatives Bill Posey (R-FL) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA) introduced HR 5063, the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act. This bill would protect mining companies' personal property rights in extracted resources. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
 
Bigelow Aerospace is a company that has successfully orbited two inflatable space habitats. Based upon these prototype demonstrations, NASA has awarded Bigelow a contract to install and test an inflatable module on the International Space Station. Bigelow eventually plans to land its inflatable modules on the Moon. The company recently asked the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) for a lunar "payload review" to recognize ownership of extracted resources by Bigelow and other US firms.
 
These efforts seek to clarify the law that applies to commercial space activities. A number of intriguing legal questions have remained unanswered since the Outer Space Treaty entered into force in 1967. Can a company mine celestial bodies, and own the resources that it extracts? Are real property rights legal under international space law? What law applies to satellite servicing and removal of space debris? Companies are unsure of their rights, investors aren't sure that their investments will be protected, and lawsuits are inevitable if these issues must be resolved in court.
 
Legally, outer space is an international area that is treated in much the same way as international waters in the Earth's oceans. International treaties govern national activities, and nations are free to enact national laws and regulations that do not violate the treaties that they have agreed to.
There are five United Nations treaties that govern space activities. The 1979 "Moon Treaty" is the only one that directly addresses resource appropriation and real property rights. It prohibits real property rights, and it would establish an international organization to govern resource appropriation. Only 16 nations have ratified or acceded to the treaty, and none of the spacefaring nations are party to the treaty.
 
The Moon Treaty has no practical effect at present, but two of the nations that are party to the treaty acceded recently, so you can't quite argue that the Moon Treaty is "dead." That's cause for concern. Prohibition of property rights is contrary to western nations' laws and institutions. And the international resource organization, if ever established, could impose additional costs and regulatory uncertainty upon a nascent industry. The International Seabed Authority, an organization established by the Law of the Sea Treaty, is an example. The Seabed Authority has proposed to the United Nations that it tax deep sea mining activities, an action that they refer to as "innovative financing." This is hardly an incentive for pioneering work in a difficult environment.
 
The most broadly accepted treaty, the 1967 "Outer Space Treaty," is more benign. One hundred nations are party to this treaty, including the United States and all other spacefaring nations. The Outer Space Treaty does not specifically refer to resources or real property rights. However, Article I says that "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States." Space lawyers generally agree that this freedom of use includes the right to appropriate resources, in much the same way that nations are free to remove fish from the ocean.
 
There is also some history of resource ownership. The United States appropriated 382 kilograms of lunar rocks during six Apollo missions, and the USSR returned 320 grams to Earth during three Luna spacecraft missions. President Richard Nixon ordered the distribution of fragments of a Moon rock collected during the Apollo 17 mission to 135 foreign heads of state, the 50 US states, and US territories. Each of the fragments were encased in an acrylic sphere, and mounted on a plaque which included the recipient's flag. No nations objected to the US and the USSR taking possession of lunar rocks and returning them to Earth, and no nations objected to, or qualified their acceptance of the gifts of Moon rocks.
 
The United States has adjudicated a court case, the "One Lucite Ball" case, to determine ownership of the moon rock and plaque that President Nixon presented to Honduras. A private party attempted to sell the plaque on the black market, and the US seized it in a sting operation. In a subsequent letter to the US government, the government of Honduras asserted its ownership of the lunar rock pursuant to Honduran law. The United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Miami Division, held that Honduras did indeed own the rock, and ordered its return to Honduras (unpublished Case No. 01-0116-CIV-JORDAN).
 
The Lucite Ball case included in its findings of fact two reports of sales of lunar rock samples, one a slide with specks of lunar dust that sold at Sotheby's auction for $500,000, and the second the lunar sample and plaque given by the US to Nicaragua, which a Middle Eastern buyer reportedly bought along with some pre-Columbian artifacts for an amount between $5 and $10 million. A more recent Associated Press story ("Moon Chips from Vegas Casino Mogul sent to NASA," May 23, 2012) reports a different chain of ownership for the Nicaraguan lunar sample and plaque that does not include a Middle Eastern buyer. The article quotes a NASA attorney's promise that if the lunar sample is authentic, "NASA will return the rock to the people of Nicaragua."
 
Because the US District Court did not select the Lucite Ball case for publication, it is not a precedent for subsequent cases in the District of Florida or in any other United States federal courts. However, this court ruling, Honduras's assertion of ownership, other nations' failure to object to gifts of Moon rocks, and nations' failure to object to private sales of Moon rocks, do support an interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty that permits ownership of extracted resources.
 
What about commercial mining of space resources, i.e., the systematic extraction and sale of resources for the purpose of making a profit? Is that legal? The Moon Treaty does not explicitly say that commercial resource appropriation is legal; this implies that treaty negotiators considered commercial appropriation legal under the Outer Space Treaty. That would be consistent with the rule of international law that says any activity is legal unless it is expressly prohibited. The Moon Treaty does say that "States Parties may in the course of scientific investigations… use mineral and other substances… in quantities appropriate for the support of their missions." Other clauses in the Treaty say that commercial appropriation is not permitted until the international resource organization is established, and only after that organization approves commercial ventures on a case-by-case basis.
 
I believe that the resource provisions in the Moon Treaty are bad policy. Limiting resource appropriation to the amount necessary to support an individual mission means that each mission must purchase and transport its own equipment if it wishes to mine and process materials. Allowing unfettered commercial appropriation, on the other hand, would allow all sorts of specialized activities to take place without the necessity of each individual mission having to mine and process its own resources. Mining ice and processing it into hydrogen and oxygen could supply fuel depots, and enable service companies to boost dead satellites to parking orbits, refuel active satellites, recharge life support systems, clear orbits of debris, and fuel transportation in the Earth-Moon system.
 
The resource provisions in the Moon Treaty are based on a terrestrial frame of reference—an assumption that resources are limited. But space resources are not limited; they exist in vast quantities throughout the universe. The Moon Treaty is also based on an assumption that countries with large, expensive space programs are the only nations that will benefit from space resources. That view implicitly assumes that technology will remain static, that launch costs will not change, and that nations that don't have space programs will not have access to space.
 
I don't agree with that view. SpaceX has demonstrated that significantly lower launch costs are possible, and it is selling its launch services to a wide variety of international customers. Other companies are developing launch vehicles, and there are already two space mining companies. This competition should bring the cost of acquiring space resources within the reach of even the poorest nations.
 
As we consider a new frontier with abundant resources, we must change our frame of reference. As resources on Earth become increasingly difficult and expensive to mine, and as the need for orbital debris removal becomes increasingly critical, it is clear that our laws and policies must encourage appropriation of space resources. Enacting a mining law which addresses all aspects of resource extraction is one way to encourage commercial activity. The General Mining Act of 1872 is a good model, as it does not include mineral leasing or royalties, which would violate the Outer Space Treaty.
 
Real property rights is another way to encourage commercial activity. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty says that "Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." Sovereignty is a bundle of national rights that includes, among other things, authority over territory, jurisdiction to enact and enforce laws, jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes, authority to exclude foreign nationals from areas where they might interfere with activities or threaten safety, and the authority to defend citizens and property.
 
All of these rights are granted by the Outer Space Treaty, except for authority over territory. Article II of the Treaty prohibits territorial sovereignty. Article VIII confers jurisdiction to enact and enforce laws, and to adjudicate disputes. Article III says that "States… shall carry on activities… in accordance with international law, including the Charter of the United Nations." The right to exclude foreign nationals to prevent interference and ensure safety is an inherent attribute of national sovereignty as it is defined in international law, so this right is incorporated by Article III. The right of national defense is set forth in Article 51 of the UN Charter, and the right to defend citizens and property is a sovereign right in international law, so this right is also incorporated by Article III.
 
The right to exclude people and vehicles to prevent interference, and to defend people and facilities against safety threats is in part expressed through the concept of a "safety zone." Safety zones are areas where the operator of a facility exercises control over navigation of vehicles in the vicinity of the facility, and in which it may exclude vehicles, equipment, and people to ensure the safety of the facility and its occupants. Examples of this concept are the safety zones around oil rigs on the continental shelf, and the International Space Station's control zone. Space lawyers of various nationalities have written in favor of formalizing safety zones (or in the case of Russian authors, "keep out zones"), and I am not aware of any space lawyers who have argued against the concept.
 
In the years since the Outer Space Treaty entered into force, several proposals for space property rights have been publicized. All of these proposals would confer permanent titles to territory without requiring the actual presence of people or facilities in areas where some or all of the title is conferred. These proposals violate the Outer Space Treaty because parties to the Outer Space Treaty only have jurisdiction over space objects, personnel, and safety zones. Parties have no jurisdiction to grant or recognize permanent titles to territory.
 
In 2000, Gregory Nemitz registered a claim to Asteroid 433 Eros. Mr. Nemitz did not claim private ownership of extracted resources; he claimed real property rights over the asteroid as whole. Mr. Nemitz registered his claim on a website maintained by the Archimedes Institute, an organization that takes no position regarding the validity of such claims.
 
After Mr. Nemitz registered his claim, NASA landed the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on Eros, and Nemitz submitted an invoice to NASA for parking and storage fees. NASA and the State Department denied Nemitz' claim. In NASA's final agency decision, a former General Counsel of NASA said Nemitz's "individual claim of appropriation of a celestial body (the asteroid 433 Eros) appears to have no foundation in law. It is unlike an individual's claim for seabed minerals, which was considered and debated by the U.S. Congress that subsequently enacted a statute, The Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act… expressly authorizing such claims. There is no similar statute related in outer space. Accordingly, your request for a 'parking/storage fee' is denied." 
 
Nemitz then filed a lawsuit, arguing that the United States had occupied his property without just compensation. The Federal District Court for the District of Nevada granted the US Government's Motion to Dismiss, and said that Nemitz did not prove that he had any property rights, so there was no basis for compensation. The Court also ruled that "neither the failure [of] the United States to ratify the… Moon Treaty, nor the United States' ratification in 1967 of the… Outer Space Treaty, created any rights in Nemitz to appropriate private property rights on asteroids." Nemitz appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and that court affirmed the lower court's dismissal of the case "for the reasons stated by the district court."
 
These courts did not certify their opinions for publication, so these cases do not establish a binding legal precedent. However, in the opinion of the former General Counsel of NASA, some form of property rights may be permissible in outer space, perhaps similar to the rights granted by the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act (30 USC § 1401 et seq.)
 
Because the Outer Space Treaty does not permit full-fledged territorial property rights, some people say that the spacefaring nations should withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and make claims of territorial sovereignty. I believe, however, that there are many reasons why spacefaring nations should not take this course of action:
  • The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, where the Outer Space Treaty was negotiated, operates on the basis of consensus. In light of the Committee's past experience, I expect it will be very difficult to achieve consensus in support of any other comprehensive treaty that might replace the Outer Space Treaty.
  • Withdrawal from the Outer Space Treaty, followed by territorial claims, would almost certainly lead to strong political opposition, and I would not expect any other nations to recognize such claims.
  • The modern standard for establishing territorial sovereignty, "effective occupation," requires national defense of territorial borders, which would be very expensive.
  • History shows that competition for territorial claims often leads to war.
  • The Outer Space Treaty has no provisions for taxation, technology transfer, and expensive governing bodies (unlike the Moon Treaty).
  • There is little in the Outer Space Treaty that is really objectionable. For the most part the treaty lets nations govern their own activities, subject to general principles that they already subscribe to.
A realistic approach to property rights, and the path of least political resistance, is to adopt a system consistent with the terms of the Outer Space Treaty. I have proposed that the United States and like-minded nations enact national legislation establishing systems of property rights that do not assert jurisdiction over territory. These laws would only grant title to entities that actually occupy outer space and celestial bodies, and would grant to private entities no more rights than those rights conferred upon nations that are party to the Outer Space Treaty. The property rights would only encompass the area actually used, plus a safety zone, and they would only be valid for as long as the area is occupied by people and/or facilities. In all other ways, these rights would be identical to real property rights on Earth—properties could be sold, inherited, and serve as collateral for financing.
 
Participating nations would honor other nations' property rights pursuant to reciprocity provisions in their property statutes. This approach follows the example of the United States' Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Resources Act, and similar laws enacted by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in 1981 through 1983. Each of these laws have reciprocity provisions that say they will honor the claims of other nations that enact similar laws. In the same manner, the US and other nations could collaborate and coordinate the establishment of an international system for reciprocal recognition of space property rights, including jurisdiction over safety zones.
 
A third way to encourage commercial activity is through space salvage law. The space community has grown increasingly concerned about orbital debris in recent years, but the prospect of capturing, and de-orbiting or recycling satellites, and destroying smaller debris, raises many legal questions, particularly when the parties and space objects are of different nationalities. Satellite and space-vehicle refueling, repair, and upgrade activities could also benefit from greater legal certainty.
 
The risks posed by space debris provide considerable incentive for its removal, but the cost of such operations may be prohibitive. Such costs might be offset, however, if the entity removing the debris received some or all of the economic benefit derived from that debris.
 
Ocean salvage operations are analogous to space salvage operations, so ocean salvage laws provide a convenient model for outer space. US law defines salvage as "the compensation allowed to persons by whose assistance a ship or her cargo has been saved, in whole or in part, from impending peril on the sea or in recovering said property from actual loss as in cases of shipwreck, derelict or recapture." The only instance in which the salvor would become the owner of salvaged property would be in those cases where the property has been abandoned, or when it is unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam. In those instances the property is deemed to have returned to a state of nature, and the first person to find it and reduce it to actual or constructive possession becomes its owner. This is known as the law of finds. In the absence of express abandonment by the property's owner, United States courts have only found abandonment when adjudicating salvage of long lost wrecks.
 
Like the space mining and real property laws that I've proposed above, space salvage laws would be based upon the jurisdiction conferred by the Outer Space Treaty. Only identifiable objects can be the subject of national jurisdiction. Unidentifiable debris would be considered abandoned, returned to a state of nature and subject to appropriation or destruction by the first to find it. Inoperative, identifiable space objects, however, should never be classified as abandoned, to ensure that nations remain responsible for liability under the Outer Space Treaty.
 
Space salvage laws can permit salvage of government-owned and private space objects, while still addressing concerns regarding national security and technology transfer. Nations can specifically allow contract salvage of space objects on a case-by-case basis. Activity within safety zones would only be permissible pursuant to the terms of a salvage contract, and any unauthorized foreign activity within safety zones would be a violation of national sovereignty. National export control laws would address issues of technology transfer.
 
Nations can add a column to their registries of space objects, wherein they identify objects that are available for contract salvage, and objects that are subject to related mining and property-rights claims. I anticipate that the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs would cooperate and add an identical column to their international registry of space objects.
 
There is historical precedent for the laws that I'm proposing. Homesteading acts were a principal factor in the settlement of the western United States. Among the most successful laws in US history, these laws remained in effect for over a century, until the last homesteading act for Alaska left the United States Code in 1986. The General Mining Act of 1872 is still in effect. Basing space laws on analogous terrestrial laws will make the outcome of legal disputes more predictable, as courts can look to terrestrial law for precedents. Also, nations can implement these laws at no cost to taxpayers, because the only costs are administrative, and these costs can be recovered through filing and processing fees.
 
I therefore propose that the United States enact a "Space Pioneer Act" that would include real property rights, mining law, salvage law, safety-zones, and reciprocity provisions. I encourage like-minded nations to collaborate with the US and enact similar laws. The Space Pioneer Act is something we can do right now, to provide for our future.
Wayne White is President and CEO of SpaceBooster LLC, an aerospace technology company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a longtime member of the International Institute of Space Law, and represented the United States as a member of the State Department Delegation to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Legal Subcommittee in 2003. Copies of Wayne White's published articles, and a slide presentation of the Space Pioneer Act, are available for download at https://independent.academia.edu/WhiteWayne.
Antares rocket launch from Wallops Island canceled due to boat downrange in hazard area
Tamara Dietrich - Daily Press, of Virginia
 
NASA Wallops canceled tonight's launch attempt of Antares rocket due to a boat downrange in the hazard area, according to a NASA tweet. Launch has been rescheduled for 6:19 p.m. on Tuesday.
An unmanned Antares rocket is scheduled to launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on the Eastern Shore about 6:45 p.m. today, boosting a Cygnus cargo freighter to rendezvous with the International Space Station.
 
The launch of the Antares — a medium-lift rocket — should be visible throughout Hampton Roads and the mid-Atlantic. It's carrying a Cygnus spacecraft packed with about 5,000 pounds of cargo — the heaviest payload to date for rocket-maker Orbital Sciences Corp.
 
The Cygnus is expected to remain in orbit for several days before berthing with the space station in the early hours of Nov. 2, when station crew are set to use a robotic arm to grapple the spacecraft into port. Station astronauts will unpack provisions, hardware and science experiments, then begin to reload the craft with trash — or disposable cargo — that will eventually burn up in the atmosphere upon re-entry.
Cargo spacecraft typically remain at the space station for about 30 days before making their return flight.
Wayward Boat Scrubs Antares Launch
Jeff Foust – Space News
A boat that entered restricted waters forced Orbital Sciences Corp. to postpone the launch of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft Oct. 27.
The launch of the Antares rocket, scheduled for 6:45 pm EDT, was scrubbed when a sailboat entered a restricted zone off the coast from the launch site at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia. The boat was not able to leave the zone before the ten-minute launch window closed.
There were no technical issues reported with the Antares rocket or the Cygnus spacecraft prior to the scrub, and weather conditions were favorable. Orbital Sciences and NASA announced the next launch attempt would be Oct. 28 at 6:22 pm EDT. Forecasts call for a 95 percent chance of acceptable weather at the new launch time.
The mission, designated Orb-3 by NASA, is the third of eight Commercial Resupply Services missions that Orbital Sciences is under contract to perform for the space agency. The Cygnus, named by Orbital the "SS Deke Slayton" after the late astronaut, is carrying 2,290 kilograms of cargo for the station.
That cargo includes a number of small satellites that will later be released from international space station. Those satellites include 26 from Earth imaging company Planet Labs and a technology demonstration satellite developed by asteroid mining company Planetary Resources.
The launch is also the first Antares mission to use the Castor 30XL motor for the upper stage. The motor, an extended version of the Castor 30B solid-propellant motor previously used by the Antares, will allow the vehicle to carry additional cargo on future Cygnus missions.
Despite the launch delay, the Cygnus is still scheduled to arrive at the ISS early Nov. 2.
Antares rocket's enhanced upper stage debuts Tuesday
Stephen Clark – Spaceflightnow.com
An upgraded Castor 30XL upper stage motor will provide the Antares rocket with an extra boost during launch Tuesday with supplies and experiments for the International Space Station, a critical upgrade Orbital Sciences says will ensure it meets contractual cargo delivery requirements.
Packed with additional propellant and fitted with a modified exhaust nozzle, the upper stage will give the Antares rocket power to lift about 800 more kilograms — about 1,760 pounds — more mass into the space station's orbit, officials said.
Less powerful Castor 30 motors built by ATK have flown on the Antares rocket's previous four missions. The Castor 30XL upper stage on Tuesday's launch of the Orb-3 resupply flight is longer than the earlier motors.
"The Castor 30XL is an extended-length version of the Castor family of motors that we've flown on all of the first four missions," said Mike Pinkston, the Antares rocket's program manager at Orbital Sciences Corp. "In specific terms, it's about double the total impulse compared to the original Castor 30B on Orb-1 and Orb-2 — a little higher thrust and burns about 30 seconds longer than the Castor 30B — so overall it has a much higher performance."
Orbital Sciences' $1.9 billion cargo resupply contract with NASA requires delivery of 20 metric tons, or about 44,000 pounds, of supplies to the space station over eight missions with the Antares rocket and Cygnus supply ship.
Frank Culbertson, executive vice president of Orbital's advanced programs group, said Sunday that the Orb-3 mission — the third of the eight-mission slate — will take up about 5,000 pounds.
Including a demonstration flight last year, Orbital will have delivered more than 13,000 pounds of cargo to the space station with a successful Orb-3 mission, Culbertson said.
The Cygnus spacecraft has removed about 10,000 pounds of trash and disposal cargo from the space station so far. That number will increase to about 15,000 pounds after Orb-3's departure in December.
Orbital plans to introduce an enlarged Cygnus cargo module on the next mission set for launch in April to provide more volume for supplies.
"When we won the contract, we already had plans for an performance enhancement program partway through the program to make sure we could in fact carry our contracted amount of 20 metric tons to ISS," Culbertson said. "We started with lower delivery numbers to begin with, and then have gradually increased it as we work off our contingencies and our margins. But we needed this part of it — the enhanced cargo-carrying module, which is a meter longer, and the increased performance of the upper stage — to really meet our goals."
The Antares rocket launching Tuesday — known as the 130 version — is about 8 feet taller than the launcher's earlier configuration. Engineers added a spacer ring below the 12.8-foot-diameter nose cone — which is unchanged on this flight — to make more room for the larger Castor 30XL motor and the longer Cygnus cargo module on the next mission.
"I think it's going to be a great enhancement to our cargo service, and we need it," Pinkston said.
ATK finished development of the Castor 30XL in 2013, according to Jason Meredith, director of business development for ATK Aerospace Group's defense and commercial division.
The upper stage is about 8 feet longer than the motors flown on the Antares rocket's first four flights.
It weighs about 58,000 pounds with a load of pre-packed solid propellant and is about twice the size of the older Castor 30 motor, Meredith said.
"That's mainly the the way it provdes the additional capability to the Antares — with the much larger mass of propellant," Meredith said Monday. "It also has some design changes to the nozzle to provide more ISP, or impulse, to the system. Those are the main changes between the Castor 30XL and the other two versions.
"There's more thrust and it burns a little bit longer, but to a large extent, it's just more impulse — more total energy that it is able to impart to the launch vehicle and provide the additional performance," Meredith said.
Film Review: 'Interstellar'
Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.
Scott Foundas - Variety
 
To infinity and beyond goes "Interstellar," an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director's ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director's best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, "Interstellar" reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside "The Wizard of Oz," "2001," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Gravity" in the canon of Hollywood's visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.
 
We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world's armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.
 
"We're a caretaker generation," notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot who hasn't stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. "We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars," Cooper muses. "Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt."
 
And oh, what dirt! As "Interstellar" opens, the world — or at least Cooper's Steinbeckian corner of it — sits on the cusp of a second Dust Bowl, ravaged by an epidemic of crop blight, a silt-like haze hanging permanently in the air. (Some of this scene-setting is accomplished via pseudo-documentary interviews with the elderly residents of some more distant future reflecting on their hardscrabble childhoods, which Nolan films like the "witness" segments from Warren Beatty's "Reds.") And as the crops die, so the Earth's atmosphere becomes richer in nitrogen and poorer in oxygen, until the time when global starvation will give way to global asphyxiation.
 
But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it's gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan's films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth's current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand's ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth's gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium.")
 
Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of "2001," by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey's laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard's as Yeager in "The Right Stuff" (another obvious "Interstellar" touchstone).
 
Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth's surface — "Interstellar" (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience's ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn't glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It's hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth's ingenious 2004 Sundance winner "Primer" — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)
 
The mission itself is a relatively intimate affair, comprised of Cooper, Brand's own scientist daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other researchers (Wes Bentley and the excellent David Gyasi) and a chatty, sarcastic, ex-military security robot called TARS (brilliantly voiced by Bill Irwin in a sly nod to Douglas Rain's iconic HAL 9000), which looks like a walking easel but proves surprisingly agile when the going gets tough. And from there, "Interstellar" has so many wonderful surprises in store — from casting choices to narrative twists and reversals — that the less said about it the better. (Indeed, if you really don't want to know anything more, read no further.)
 
It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of "The Prestige" and "Batman Begins," or the multi-tiered memory maze of "Inception." The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like "Space Station" and "Hubble 3D," suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn's great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole's shimmering plasmic vortex.
 
With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber's playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet's surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)
 
This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades' worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent "Zero Dark Thirty" mode). It's a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.
 
That moment signals a shift in "Interstellar" itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.
 
On the one hand, the movie marvels at the brave men and women throughout history who have dedicated themselves, often at great peril, to the greater good of mankind. On the other, because Nolan is a psychological realist, he's acutely aware of the toil such lives may take on those who choose to lead them, and that even "the best of us" (as one character is repeatedly described) might not be immune from cowardice and moral compromise. Some people lie to themselves and to their closest confidants in "Interstellar," and Nolan understands that everyone has his reasons. Others compensate by making the most selfless of sacrifices. Perhaps the only thing trickier than quantum physics, the movie argues, is the nature of human emotion.
 
Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie's ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. "Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light," harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance's journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet "Interstellar" is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child's twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.
 
It's hardly surprising that "Interstellar" reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film's lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie's interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on "Inception") again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film's effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), "Interstellar" begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.
 
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Could Be Ticket to Mars
Product Design and Development
 
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion technologies are the subject of a new test series at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Researchers there are using an innovative test facility to study the properties of highly promising nuclear fuels - without the risk of radiation exposure associated with handling these potent power sources.
The current test series focused on analysis of a variety of fuel elements in a simulated thermal environment kicked off in early October with completion targeted in June 2015.
 
Michael Houts, NTP manager at the Marshall Center, said the safety factor is good news for scientists and technologists developing the technology - and the advances enabled by the study will yield even better news for flight engineers and NASA mission planners.
 
Nuclear thermal rockets "may be ideal to enable delivery of very large, automated cargo payloads to Mars, paving the way for human explorers," he said.
 
The same nuclear thermal propulsion technology, reconfigured for speed rather than mass, then could potentially transport human crews to the Red Planet as well, which would get them there more quickly and efficiently than conventional rockets while reducing astronauts' solar radiation exposure during the voyage.
 
In short, Houts said, "Nuclear thermal propulsion could be the ticket to Mars. The results from this study will give us a better idea of whether that is the case by experimentally measuring key factors related to engine performance and lifetime."
 
Housed in the Marshall Center's Propulsion Research and Development Laboratory, the test facility used for these innovative studies is dubbed "NTREES," short for the Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator.
 
Licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the facility is certified to test prototypical nuclear rocket fuel elements.
 
These are identical to the fuel elements used in a nuclear thermal rocket, but because the test facility uses non-nuclear heating instead of nuclear fission, the fuel does not become radioactive during the test and can be easily handled and examined once the test is complete.
 
NTREES safely tests these stand-in, prototypical fuel elements in hot flowing hydrogen at power levels and temperatures comparable to those found in a working nuclear thermal rocket engine.
 
Induction heating is used to mimic the fission process, with pressures reaching 1,000 pounds per square inch and temperatures approaching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
 
"The cost savings is remarkable," said Marshall researcher Bill Emrich, who manages the NTREES facility at Marshall. "Whereas it costs tens of millions of dollars to perform full-scale testing of nuclear rocket fuel elements in specially designed nuclear reactors, our research costs just tens of thousands - and no radiation protection is required!"
 
Houts concurred. "By using this non-nuclear induction heating process for testing, we avoid the environmental, legal and security issues associated with performing full-powered nuclear tests - and advance this research far more quickly than we could do otherwise," he said. "And when, in time, we conduct actual nuclear testing, we will have very high confidence that those tests will be successful, thanks to these initial, non-nuclear studies."
 
The focus on safety extends beyond the laboratory to the launch pad, Houts noted. A chemically powered launch vehicle, such as NASA's next flagship, the Space Launch System, could safely carry a nuclear-thermal-powered upper stage to orbit.
 
During ascent to orbit, the nuclear system would remain "cold," with no fission products generated and radiation below significant levels.
 
Once safe orbit was achieved, the upper stage would deploy, and its nuclear reactor would be activated, heating hydrogen to extremely high temperatures. The hydrogen then would expand through a nozzle, generating thrust.
 
Such an engine is expected to operate twice as efficiently as a standard chemical engine, Houts said. The Space Shuttle Main Engine, which powered space shuttle missions to Earth orbit for 30 years and is generally considered one of the best, most efficient chemical engines ever built, delivered a specific impulse (ISP) of 450 seconds.
 
A nuclear thermal rocket, in comparison, would deliver an ISP of 900 seconds. That dramatic increase in efficiency could enable reliable delivery of high-mass automated payloads into the deep solar system, or help high-velocity, human-rated vehicles speed to and from Mars and other destinations in as little as half the time required by today's rockets.
 
Right now, though, NTREES research is driven by one critical goal: enabling a human mission to Mars. The current round of testing lays the groundwork for large-scale ground tests and eventual full-scale testing in flight.
 
After that? "Mars, here we come," Houts said.
 
Nuclear thermal research at the Marshall Center is part of NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Division, managed by the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and including participation by the U.S. Department of Energy.
 
AES focuses on crew safety and mission operations in deep space, seeks to pioneer new approaches for rapidly developing prototype systems, demonstrating key capabilities and validating operational concepts for future vehicle development and human missions beyond Earth orbit.
 
Marshall researchers are partnering on the research with NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio; NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls; Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
 
For more information about NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, visit www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall.
 
Finding the Right Rocks
Jim Howe – Space News
The NASA inspector general (IG) recently excoriated the agency's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program, finding that the effort to locate potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets was poorly resourced and far behind its mandated detection goals. In 2005 Congress tasked NASA with locating 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters in size and larger, but currently only 10 percent of this population has been found. The IG concluded that program management and funding for the planetary defense effort were insufficient for the task at hand.
 
Unfortunately, the IG's audit missed a much broader and far more important point: NASA is not looking for the right rocks.
 
Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets that pass within 1.3 astronomical units — about 200 million kilometers — of the sun, displaced from the main asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud by gravitational perturbations or collisions with other objects. Over time, some of these objects strike Earth, as evidenced by the hundreds of impact craters that dot our planet. The Barringer crater in Arizona highlights the destructive forces in play: The 50-meter asteroid that struck there 50,000 years ago gouged a hole 1.2 kilometers in diameter and released the same amount of energy as a large thermonuclear bomb.
 
The size of asteroids is inversely proportional to the frequency in which they appear in nature. In our solar system there are fewer than a thousand NEOs greater than 1 kilometer in diameter, but more than 500,000 greater than 30 meters. While not civilization-killers, the smaller asteroids can wreak enormous regional devastation, as witnessed in the 1908 Tunguska air burst, which leveled more than 2,000 square kilometers of desolate Russian forest — all from the explosion of a body estimated between 30-70 meters in diameter. How many of the half-million Tunguska sized NEOs have been discovered? Half of 1 percent.
 
This is incredibly relevant since it is the smaller objects that hit Earth much more frequently than their larger cousins. Collisions from monster asteroids are exceedingly rare, with the average time between impacts measured in millions of years. However, a 10-meter-wide asteroid strikes Earth about once per decade and a 30-meter object every few hundred years. The probability that a Tunguska-sized asteroid will collide with Earth on any given day is five or six orders of magnitude more likely than the impact of a kilometer-wide space rock, and roughly 100 times that of a 140-meter object, which strike our planet about once every 30,000 years.
 
A strategy to search for the larger, "high consequence" NEOs would make sense if we could accept the damage caused by objects smaller than 140 meters. We can't. In the century since the 10-megaton Tunguska blast, the world's population has more than tripled, cities have spread into previously uninhabited areas, and coastal communities — vulnerable to tsunamis created by an ocean impact — have grown incessantly.
 
More troubling, mankind has assembled a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, some of which are in the hands of unpredictable regimes. It is easy to see how a surprise air burst from a 20- or 30-meter asteroid could be mistaken for hostile military action, and horrifying to consider the consequences if such a natural event led to a retaliatory nuclear attack. The hair-trigger world of the 21st century is no place for an unexpected asteroid strike.
 
To reduce this risk, planetary defense activities should focus on finding all space objects that present a reasonable hazard, notionally anything larger than the 17-20-meter asteroid that exploded in 2013 over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The U.S. National Research Council and other advisory bodies have recommended enhanced efforts to find these smaller objects but neither Congress nor the Obama administration has adopted such a policy.
 
Policymakers need to set the bar high, with high meaning small. The good news is that searching for the smaller NEOs will yield discoveries of the bigger ones. The reverse is not true.
 
Today's NEO search efforts are conducted primarily by terrestrial observatories, which are less effective in finding asteroids than telescopes stationed in space. The ideal is to orbit an infrared telescope around the sun, inside the trajectory of Earth and looking outward, to find the smaller space rocks that ground-based or Earth-orbiting telescopes will miss.
 
The B612 Foundation's proposed Sentinel space telescope would be, in its Venus-like orbit, the most effective asteroid hunter ever employed. NASA's developmental NEOCam telescope could be a close second, operating from the L1 Lagrange point. Unfortunately, neither spacecraft is fully funded and it remains to be seen if either will find its way into active service. We should hope they do.
 
It must be noted that NASA's NEO Program has done commendable work with the extremely limited resources at its disposal. Through years of dedicated effort, it has located more than 11,000 NEOs, including 95 percent of the kilometer-sized asteroids that pass through the inner solar system. None of these mammoth rocks is expected to pose any threat to Earth over the next 200 years. It is reassuring to know that humanity will not be snuffed out anytime soon by a gargantuan asteroid like the one that eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
 
What is deeply troubling, however, is the possibility that a smaller, undiscovered NEO could plow into our atmosphere tomorrow and rain destruction on an unsuspecting populace — and today there is little we are doing about it.
 
NASA leadership is culpable for not deeming the planetary defense mission a top priority: Placing responsibility over the entire effort in a niche component within the Science Mission Directorate — managed by a single program executive — dooms it to second-tier status, unable to harness all of the agency's resources. Further, funding for asteroid detection, while having grown to $40 million per year, clearly is insufficient for the task at hand. Even more striking is the tiny amount of money allocated to the study of mitigation techniques for threatening asteroids, currently limited to only $1 million annually.
 
It's been 106 years since Tunguska and the law of averages dictates that a similar-sized object will collide with Earth in the near future, perhaps in our lifetime. We have the technology to find these smaller objects and just need the political and policy wherewithal to make their detection and mitigation a priority.
 
An asteroid strike is a wholly preventable natural disaster, but only if we locate the full population of hazardous space bodies before one of them streaks unexpectedly from the depths of space and devastates part of our planet.
 
Now is the right time to find the right rocks.
 
Aerojet Rocketdyne's Mars 2020 Contracts Worth a Combined $14.5M
Dan Leone – Space News
Aerojet Rocketdyne will build landing system thrusters for NASA's Mars 2020 rover and install the craft's nuclear power source under separate sole-source contracts from the space agency and U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) worth roughly $14.5 million combined.
 
The hardware Aerojet Rocketdyne will provide is substantially the same as what it contributed to the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover, which landed on the red planet in 2012 and was cleared this year to continue traversing the martian surface through 2016. Mars 2020 will be based on Curiosity's design, but modified to cache Mars surface samples.
 
Like Curiosity, Mars 2020 will use the skycrane system to land on the martian surface. The system lowers the rover by cable to the martian surface from a mothership that hovers above using thrusters.
 
Sacramento, California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne will again provide the skycrane's thrusters, this time under a contract worth roughly $7 million, NASA spokesman Guy Webster wrote in an Oct. 21 email. The company is slated to deliver the hardware by Aug. 1, 2015, to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which is leading the mission, Webster wrote.
 
Aerojet Rocketdyne will provide eight hydrazine-fueled MR-80B thrusters, which can be throttled from 7 to 700 pounds of thrust, and eight MR-107U 68-pound-thrust motors. Some of these thrusters will also help steer Mars 2020 during its roughly seven-month interplanetary cruise to Mars.
 
Meanwhile, the company is also being paid to install Mars 2020's power source, a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), under a DoE contract worth roughly $7.5 million, a department official wrote in an Oct. 23 email. The MMRTG is one of three such units built under a DoE contract awarded in 2003 to Boeing, which at the time owned the Rocketdyne propulsion and energy business.
 
One of those MMRTGs is powering Curiosity on Mars now. Mars 2020 will use one of the other two, which are mostly complete and currently in storage in an undisclosed DoE facility. Besides installation, Aerojet Rocketdyne's contract also calls for the company to complete some final manufacturing tasks on the hardware, including "completing installation of the cooling tubes and emissive coating on the second and third units," DoE said in an emailed statement.
 
An MMRTG converts heat generated by the decay of radioactive plutonium-238 into electricity. Heat not converted to electricity is used to keep the rover's instruments warm in the frigid martian environment.
 
Plutonium-238, which must be artificially refined, is in short supply in the United States. The material is kept in iridium-coated capsules known as clads, of which DoE currently has 24 set aside for NASA missions. The department plans to start production of another eight clads in the U.S. government's 2015 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That will give DoE enough to fully fuel the Mars 2020 MMRTG, plus a few spares. The plutonium-238 will be produced at DoE's Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. NASA is paying for the plutonium refinement.
 
The MMRTG will be one of the last critical subsystems integrated with the rover before launch, according to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars 2020 Mission released in June by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
 
According to that document, Mars 2020 will be built at the Jet Propulsion Lab and then shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the MMRTG will be installed before the spacecraft is placed atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket — the only U.S. launcher certified to carry nuclear material. Mars 2020 will launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, next-door to Kennedy.
 
 
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