USA > History > 2010 > Space (I)

NASA’s Quest

to Send a Robot to the Moon

November 1, 2010
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

For $150 billion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration could have sent astronauts back to the Moon. The Obama administration judged that too expensive, and in September, Congress agreed to cancel the program.

For a fraction of that — less than $200 million, along with about $250 million for a rocket — NASA engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston say they can safely send a humanoid robot to the Moon. And they say they could accomplish that in a thousand days.

The idea, known as Project M, is almost a guerrilla effort within NASA, cooked up a year ago by Stephen J. Altemus, the chief engineer at Johnson. He tapped into discretionary money, pulled in engineers to work on it part time, and horse-traded with companies and other NASA units to undertake preliminary planning and tests. “We’re doing impossible things with really very little, if any, money whatsoever,” Mr. Altemus said.

A humanoid dextrous robot — at least the top half — already exists: Robonaut 2, developed by NASA and General Motors, is packed on the shuttle Discovery, scheduled for liftoff on Wednesday.

Bound for the International Space Station, it will be the first humanoid robot in space. It is to help with housekeeping chores at the space station as NASA learns how astronauts and robots can work together. Eventually, an upgraded Robonaut is to take part in spacewalks.

Project M also draws on other NASA projects that were already under way, including rocket engines that burn liquid oxygen and methane — a cheap and nontoxic fuel combination — and an automated landing system that could avoid rocks, cliffs and other hazards.

Integrating the technologies into working prototypes sped up development. “That’s the magic,” Mr. Altemus said. “A lot of times technologies end up in the lab cooking, and then there’s this valley of death where they never get to maturation or to flight.”

Project M’s planners say that a robot walking on the Moon would capture the imagination of students, just as the Apollo Moon landings inspired a generation of scientists and engineers 40 years ago.

“I think that’s going to light a few candles,” said Neil Milburn, vice president of Armadillo Aerospace, a tiny Texas company working on Project M.

But as NASA’s attention turns away from the Moon — “We’ve been there before,” President Obama declared in April — the prospects for sending a robot there are at best uncertain.

The quandary over Project M encapsulates many of the continuing debates over the future of the space agency: What should NASA be told to do when there is not enough money to do everything? What is the best way to spur advances in space technologies? And given the costs and dangers, how important is it to send people into space at all?

“The tricky part is whether it fits in the agency’s framework for exploration,” Mr. Altemus said.

Last year, a blue-ribbon panel was reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight program, in particular an ambitious project called Constellation to send astronauts back to the Moon. Although NASA has spent $10 billion on Constellation, most of the program is to be canceled when Congress finishes work on the 2011 budget.

Mr. Altemus, for one, was frustrated by criticism of NASA that emerged during the Constellation debate and elsewhere. “I always felt like our organization was a Ferrari, and we were never allowed to drive with our foot on the gas,” he said. “We were kind of at idle speed all the time.”

Talking to his son at his kitchen table, Mr. Altemus wanted something that was exciting but not so big that it would require years of deliberation. The idea popped into his head: a walking robot on the Moon, one that could send back live video, in a thousand days.

Mr. Altemus took it to his staff the next day, telling them, “Let’s do something amazing.”

He recalled: “I said, ‘Will you get behind me if I put this into the organization? I don’t know if we can do it. I don’t know if we’ll get the money for it or will get approved — let’s try.’ And so we just started, and it caught like wildfire.”

Sending a robot to the Moon is far easier than sending a person. For one, a robot does not need air or food. And there is no return trip.

The thousand-day deadline was arbitrary, said R. Matthew Ondler, Project M’s manager. “It creates this sense of urgency,” he explained. “NASA is at its best when it has a short time to figure out things. You give us six or seven years to think about something, and we’re not so good. Administrations change and priorities of the country change, and so it’s hard to sustain things for that long.”

For the purpose of aiding science education, a thousand days fit easily into the four years that a student spends in high school or college. By contrast, even if NASA achieved Mr. Obama’s stated goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, a 7-year-old today would have already graduated from college.

To get the parts they need, Mr. Altemus and Mr. Ondler have resorted to barter. Boston Power gave them a $300,000 prototype of an advanced lithium battery in exchange for engineering help on battery management issues.

“It was an easy trade, so we made several deals like that,” Mr. Ondler said.

Armadillo provided a prototype it had built for a lunar lander competition, and NASA exchanged engine technology and access to test facilities.

NASA also paid Armadillo about $1 million, but NASA’s traditional development processes would have cost more and taken longer. In six months, the lander flew 18 times under tether and twice in free flight.

Not all the flights went perfectly, which was the point. “It’s O.K. to put a hole in the ground once in a while,” Mr. Ondler said. “It’s O.K. to have flame coming out of the wrong end of the engine once in a while, as long as we’re learning quickly and building and iterating.”

Mr. Ondler told the story of an engineer going to Home Depot to buy about $80 worth of materials to test whether fuel sloshing in the tanks could destabilize the lander during descent. “From that, we were able to confirm our math models and design the full-scale test,” he said, all in two weeks.

Project M slipped under the radar of everyone else in NASA, including the administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. In February, in response to a question about projects that NASA might undertake with other nations, General Bolden cited a two-legged robot that the Japanese space agency wants to send to the Moon by 2020.

“Do I think I can do that?” General Bolden said. “Probably not.”

At that time, the Project M team was hoping to get a go-ahead to start in March and accomplish the robotic Moon landing by the end of 2012.

Despite the sophistication of the project, the robot’s capabilities would be slight compared with what a human could do on the lunar surface. Project M was conceived as a technology demonstration, not a scientific mission.

One of the main tasks envisioned for the robot would be to simply pick up a rock and drop it, as part of an education program broadcast to schools. Students could do the same and compare the relative gravity of Earth.

Work continues on Project M, which has cost about $9 million so far. Armadillo is building a second prototype lander, but there is no money for other aspects, like finishing the legs for Robonaut. Mr. Obama’s vision for NASA called for investing $16 billion over five years for space technologies, but the compromise blueprint drawn up by Congress shifts most of the money to a heavy-lift rocket.

The project did spark interest among the International Space Station managers, which is why a Robonaut is heading there. “I’m excited to see how we can evolve the technology in space and actually have a pair of hands and a working humanoid dextrous robot on the space station,” Mr. Altemus said. “It’s a big move forward for the agency.”

But for now, the plans for sending one to the Moon are on the back burner.

    NASA’s Quest to Send a Robot to the Moon, NYT, 1.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/space/02robot.html

New Planet May Be Able

to Nurture Organisms

September 29, 2010
The New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.

Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

But if the finding is confirmed by other astronomers, the planet, which has three to four times the mass of Earth, would be the most Earthlike planet yet discovered, and the first to meet the criteria for being potentially habitable.

“It’s been a long haul,” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who, along with R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, led the team that made the discovery. “This is the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.”

In a recent report for the National Academy of Science, astronomers declared the finding of such planets one of the major goals of this decade. NASA’s Kepler satellite — which was launched in March 2009 as a way to detect Earthlike bodies — is expected to harvest dozens or hundreds.

Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

“This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” Dr. Butler said.

Other astronomers hailed the news as another harbinger that the search for “living planets,” as Dimitar D. Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls them, is on the right track.

“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Caleb Scharf of Columbia University.

But they expressed caution about this particular planet, noting uncertainties about its density, composition and atmosphere, and the need for another generation of giant telescopes and spacecraft in order to find out anything more about it. Other Goldilocks planets have come and gone in recent years.

The discovery was announced at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, and the findings have been posted on the National Science Foundation’s Web site and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The authors said the relative ease by which planet was found — in only 11 years — led them to believe that such planets must be common.

“Either we have just been incredibly lucky in this early detection, or we are truly on the threshold of a second Age of Discovery,” they wrote in their paper.

Pressed during the news conference about the possibility of life on Gliese 581g, Dr. Vogt protested that he was an astronomer, not a biologist. Then he relented, saying that, speaking strictly personally, he believed that “the chances of life on this planet are almost 100 percent.”

Asked the same question, Dr. Butler squirmed and said, “I like data.” After a pause he added: “And what the data say is that the planet is the right distance from the star to have water and the right mass to hold an atmosphere. What is needed simply to find lots and lots of these things is lots and lots of telescope time.”

The latest results from Gliese 581 were harvested from observations by two often competing teams, using telescopes in Chile and Hawaii to measure the slight gravitational tugs the star gets as its planets swing by.

This is hardly the first time around the block for Gliese 581, which is a longtime favorite of planet hunters and now is known to have six planets in its retinue. It is a dwarf star about one-third the mass of the Sun and only about one-hundredth as bright, allowing planets to huddle closer to the campfire. “It hauntingly reminds us of our own solar system,” Dr. Butler said.

Two of Gliese’s planets have already had their moment in the limelight as possible Goldilocks planets. One, known as Gliese 581c, circles just on the inner edge of the habitable zone and was thus thought to be habitable three years ago. But further analysis suggested that the greenhouse effect would turn it into a stifling hell. Another planet, just on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone, is probably too cold.

“One is on the hot side, the other is on cold side,” and the new planet is right in between, Dr. Vogt said. “It’s bookended.”

He and his colleagues estimated the average temperature on the surface of Gliese 581g to be between 10 and minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit, about the same as a summer day in Antarctica.

But that means very little, he said, because the planet, like all the others in that system, keeps the same face to the star all the time. So the temperature could vary wildly from the day-side to the night-side of the planet, meaning that an organism could perhaps find a comfortable zone to live in.

But nobody really knows what is going on on Gliese 581g, said Sara Seager, a planetary astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it was all carbon dioxide, like Venus, it would be pretty hot,” she said, adding that she would give the planet a 90 percent chance of holding water.

That, she pointed out, is faint praise in scientific circles. “Sounds high, but would you fly on a plane that only had an 8 or 9 chance out of 10 of making it?” she asked.

“Everyone is so primed to say here’s the next place we’re going to find life,” Dr. Seager said, “but this isn’t a good planet for follow-up.”

    New Planet May Be Able to Nurture Organisms, NYT, 29.9.2010,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/science/space/30planet.html

Obama Reverses Bush’s Space Policy

June 28, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and KENNETH CHANG

The Obama administration on Monday unveiled a space policy that renounces the unilateral stance of the Bush administration and instead emphasizes international cooperation, including the possibility of an arms control treaty that would limit the development of space weapons.

In recent years, both China and the United States have destroyed satellites in orbit, raising fears about the start of a costly arms race that might ultimately hurt the United States because it dominates the military use of space. China smashed a satellite in January 2007, and the United States did so in February 2008.

The new space policy explicitly says that Washington will “consider proposals and concepts for arms control measures if they are equitable, effectively verifiable and enhance the national security of the United States and its allies.”

The Bush administration, in the space policy it released in August 2006, said it “rejects any limitations on the fundamental right of the United States to operate in and acquire data from space,” a phrase that was interpreted as giving a green light to the development and use of antisatellite weapons.

The policy also stated that Washington would “oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access or use of space,” a phrase that effectively ruled out arms control.

In secret, the Bush administration engaged in research that critics said could produce a powerful ground-based laser, among other potential weapons meant to shatter enemy satellites in orbit.

By contrast, the Obama policy underlines the need for international cooperation. “It is the shared interest of all nations to act responsibly in space to help prevent mishaps, misperceptions and mistrust,” the new policy says in its opening lines. “Space operations should be conducted in ways that emphasize openness and transparency.”

Peter Marquez, director of space policy at the White House National Security Council, told reporters on Monday that the policy was reverting to a less confrontational approach that the United States had championed in the past.

“The arms control language is bipartisan language that appeared in the Reagan policy and George H. W. Bush’s policy and the Clinton policy,” Mr. Marquez said in a White House briefing. “So we’re bringing it back to a bipartisan agreed-upon position.”

Jeff Abramson, a senior analyst at the Arms Control Association, a private group in Washington, said the new policy “sets the stage for progress in space arms control — without getting into specifics.”

For many years, diplomats from around the globe have gathered in Geneva to hammer out a treaty on the “prevention of an arms race in outer space,” which would ban space weapons. Arms control supporters say that China and Russia have backed the process, and that the United States during the Bush administration dragged its feet.

In 2006, John Mohanco, a State Department official, told the diplomats in Geneva that as long as attacks on satellites remained a threat, “our government will continue to consider the possible role that space-related weapons may play in protecting our assets.”

Now, the Obama administration has stopped the saber-rattling and started what might end in a new kind of peaceful accord — though with plenty of caveats and vague conditions.

Although the new policy calls on the United States to “lead in the enhancement of security, stability and responsible behavior in space,” it also says that any resulting arms treaties would have to be equitable, verifiable and enhance the security interests of the United States and its allies.

“Those are the gates,” Mr. Marquez told reporters, “that the arms control proposals must come through before we consider them.”

The White House said the State Department would make more details public in coming weeks.

President Obama said in a statement that the new policy was “designed to strengthen America’s leadership in space while fostering untold rewards here on Earth.”

On the civilian use of space, the policy, which is 14 pages long, puts renewed emphasis on the commercial space industry, reflecting the administration’s desire to get the National Aeronautics and Space Administration out of the business of launching astronauts.

Listed first among the administration’s space goals is to “energize domestic industries.” That contrasts with the top goal of the 2006 Bush administration policy, to “strengthen the nation’s space leadership,” and that of the 1996 Clinton administration policy, to “enhance the knowledge of the Earth, the solar system and the universe.”

The Bush policy asserted that the government would buy commercial services “to the maximum practical extent” and refrain from federal activities that would discourage or compete with commercial options.

The Obama policy retains those provisions and, in addition, calls on federal agencies to “actively explore the use of inventive, nontraditional arrangements” like creating public-private partnerships, flying government instruments on commercial spacecraft or buying data from commercial satellite operators.

The commercial space section of the Obama policy also includes provisions for promoting American commercial space industry in foreign markets.

In contrast, the Bush administration highlighted national security concerns, like preventing unfriendly countries from obtaining advanced technologies.

Critics of that approach said the same technologies could often be bought from other countries, adding that the limitations hurt American aerospace companies without improving the nation’s security.

    Obama Reverses Bush’s Space Policy, NYT, 28.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/space/29orbit.html

For Shuttle Atlantis, a Final Landing

May 26, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HARWOOD

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Gliding into retirement after 32 missions covering 120 million miles, the shuttle Atlantis dropped out of orbit and returned to Earth on Wednesday, wrapping up a storied 25-year career with a near-flawless space station assembly mission.

Taking over manual control 50,000 feet above the Florida spaceport, Capt. Kenneth T. Ham of the Navy, the commander, guided the 105-ton space plane through a sweeping right overhead turn before a steep descent to Runway 33.

Just shy of the runway threshold, Captain Ham pulled the shuttle’s nose up, Cmdr. Dominic A. Antonelli of the Navy, the pilot, deployed the ship’s landing gear and Atlantis swooped to a picture-perfect touchdown at 8:48 a.m. Eastern time.

“Houston, Atlantis, we have wheels stopped,” Captain Ham radioed a few moments later as the shuttle coasted to a stop on the runway centerline.

“For you and your crew, that was a suiting end to an incredible mission. I’m sure the station crew members hated to see you leave, but we’re glad to have you back,” Marine Col. Charles Hobaugh replied from mission control in Houston.

The astronauts, including Captain Ham; Commander Antonelli; Michael T. Good, a flight engineer and retired Air Force colonel; Garrett E. Reisman; Piers J. Sellers; and Capt. Stephen G. Bowen of the Navy, doffed their pressure suits and joined NASA managers and engineers on the runway for a walk-around inspection before returning to crew quarters.

During a busy week docked to the International Space Station, the astronauts installed a Russian research module, delivered several tons of supplies and carried out three spacewalks to install a backup Ku-band antenna, an equipment mounting platform and six new solar array batteries.

It was the final planned mission for Atlantis as NASA phases out the shuttle program after three decades and more than 130 flights. Only two more missions are planned, a flight by Discovery in September or October and a final flight by Endeavour late this year or early next.

But Atlantis, along with a final set of solid-fuel boosters and NASA’s last external tank, will be processed for launch on a possible rescue mission in case of any major problems that might prevent Endeavour’s crew from making a safe re-entry.

While there are no official plans to actually launch Atlantis, NASA managers are seeking permission from the Obama administration to send the shuttle back up on one final space station resupply mission. Using a crew of four, NASA could avoid the need for a shuttle rescue vehicle, relying on the space station for safe haven and Russian Soyuz spacecraft for the crew’s eventual return to Earth if a major problem stranded Atlantis in space.

A decision is expected later this summer.

Atlantis blasted off on its maiden flight, a classified military mission, on Oct. 3, 1985. The orbiter flew another 31 times over the next 25 years, crossing the 120-million-mile mark early Wednesday.

Among the highlights of its quarter century of service were the launchings of robotic probes to Venus and Jupiter, deployment of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite, five military missions and seven flights to the Russian Mir space station.

Atlantis also flew 11 missions to the International Space Station and visited the Hubble Space Telescope last year for a final overhaul.

“It’s a real honor to be among the 191 crew members that have flown on Atlantis in her over 300 days in orbit, 120 million miles,” Captain Bowen, a former submariner, said before re-entry. “Atlantis is actually named after a ship of research and discovery from a place I happened to study, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. And she has definitely lived up to her name.”

    For Shuttle Atlantis, a Final Landing, NYT, 26.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/science/space/27shuttle.html

Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft’s Main Role

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.

Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway.

In interviews and statements, Pentagon leaders strongly denied that the winged plane had anything to do with space weapons, even while conceding that its ultimate goal was to aid terrestrial war fighters with a variety of ancillary missions.

The secretive effort seeks “no offensive capabilities,” Gary E. Payton, under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, emphasized on Friday. “The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development.”

The secretive flight, civilian specialists said in recent weeks, probably centers at least partly on testing powerful sensors for a new generation of spy satellites.

Now, the amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.”

In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky.

“This looks very, very good,” Mr. Molczan said of the identification. “We got it.”

In moving from as far as 40 degrees north latitude to 40 degrees south latitude, the military spacecraft passes over many global trouble spots, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea.

Mr. Molczan said team members in Canada and South Africa made independent observations of the X-37B on Thursday and, as it turned out, caught an earlier glimpse of the orbiting spaceship late last month from the United States. Weeks of sky surveys paid off when the team members Kevin Fetter and Greg Roberts managed to observe the craft from Brockville, Ontario, and Cape Town.

Mr. Molczan said the X-37B was orbiting about 255 miles up — standard for a space shuttle — and circling the planet once every 90 minutes or so.

A fair amount is known publicly about the features of the X-37B because it began life 11 years ago as a project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which operates the nation’s space shuttles. The Air Force took over the program in 2006, during the Bush administration, and hung a cloak of secrecy over its budget and missions.

The X-37B has a wingspan of just over 14 feet and is 29 feet long. It looks something like a space shuttle, although about a quarter of the length. The craft’s payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed, suggesting that it can not only expose experiments to the void of outer space but also deploy and retrieve small satellites. The X-37B can stay aloft for as long as nine months because it deploys solar panels for power, unlike the space shuttle.

Brian Weedon, a former Air Force officer now with the Secure World Foundation, a private group based in Superior, Colo., said the duration of the X-37B’s initial flight would probably depend on “how well it performs in orbit.”

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office leads the X-37B program for what it calls the “development and fielding of select Defense Department combat support and weapons systems.”

Mr. Payton, a former astronaut and senior NASA official, has acknowledged that the spacecraft is ultimately meant to give the United States new advantages on terrestrial battlefields, but denies that it represents any kind of space weaponization.

On April 20, two days before the mission’s start, he told reporters that the spacecraft, if successful, would “push us in the vector of being able to react to war-fighter needs more quickly.” And, while offering no specifics, he added that its response to an “urgent war-fighter need” might even pre-empt the launching of other missions on expendable rockets.

But he emphasized the spacecraft’s advantages as an orbiting laboratory, saying it could expose new technology to space for a long time and then “bring it back” for inspection.

Mission control for the X-37B, Mr. Payton said, is located at the Air Force Space Command’s Third Space Experimentation Squadron, based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. He added that the Air Force was building another of the winged spaceships and hopes to launch it next year.

The current mission began on April 22, when an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida fired the 5.5-ton spacecraft into orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity, said the secrecy surrounding the X-37B even extended to the whereabouts of the rocket’s upper stage, which was sent into an unknown orbit around the sun. In one of his regular Internet postings, he said that appeared to be the first time the United States had put a space vehicle into a solar orbit that is “officially secret.”

David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said many aerospace experts questioned whether the mission benefits of the X-37B outweighed its costs and argued that expendable rockets could achieve similar results.

“Sure it’s nice to have,” he said. “But is it really worth the expense?”

Mr. Weedon of the Secure World Foundation argued that the X-37B could prove valuable for quick reconnaissance missions. He said ground crews might rapidly reconfigure its payload — either optical or radar — and have it shot into space on short notice for battlefield surveillance, letting the sensors zoom in on specific conflicts beyond the reach of the nation’s fleet of regular spy satellites.

But he questioned the current mission’s secrecy.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with weapons,” Mr. Weedon said. “But because of the classification, and the refusal to talk, the door opens to all that. So, from a U.S. perspective, that’s counterproductive.”

He also questioned whether the Pentagon’s secrecy about the spacecraft’s orbit had any practical consequences other than keeping the public in the dark.

“If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”

    Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft’s Main Role, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/science/space/23secret.html

The U.S. Issue | Journeys

Getting Close to the Last Liftoff

May 16, 2010
The New York Times
By KATE MURPHY

THE crowd, all facing the same direction, waits nervously. Some fiddle with cameras on tripods while others sit in camp chairs, slapping at mosquitoes and checking their cellphones for updates. A voice comes over a loudspeaker: “T minus 9 minutes and counting.” After hours of excruciating anticipation, the final checks for the space shuttle launching have been made and all systems are go.

Parents chase after small children dressed up in orange astronaut suits who can no longer contain their excitement. There is a collective gasp at T minus 2 minutes, 55 seconds, when the so-called “beanie cap,” or oxygen vent arm, retracts, making it appear that the shuttle is tipping its hat in farewell. T minus zero and there is a brilliant burst of billowing flame and a thunderous roar that shakes the ground and vibrates vital organs.

The spectators gape with unblinking eyes and dropped jaws. Awestruck, many forget to take pictures. As the shuttle climbs into the air, there are whispers of “Oh, my God,” along with a few incredulous profanities. As it recedes from sight, leaving behind a spiraling contrail, there are finally cheers and some tears along with hugs and slaps on the back. “Did you see that!” exclaimed more than one viewer.

A space shuttle launching is an unforgettable and intense experience, and there are just two more opportunities to feel the rush. The program will end this year after 29 years and 134 missions, so if watching a launching has been on your to-do list, start planning now.

Just make sure those plans are flexible.

Launchings are scrubbed 60 percent of the time because of weather or a technical issue — sometimes with just minutes left in the countdown. Indeed, the final ones from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida were originally scheduled for July 29 and Sept. 16, when the Endeavor and Discovery, respectively, were to rendezvous with the International Space Station. But a recent change to an experiment planned for the Endeavor has pushed that one back to November. (The Discovery date, for now, is still on track.)

“You have to be flexible and grit your teeth if it doesn’t happen when you thought it was going to happen,” said Todd Sears, a chief financial officer for a commercial real estate company in Indianapolis. He traveled with his wife and their two children to see a shuttle launching last August, which was postponed daily for five consecutive days before it finally blasted into orbit. “I was tempted to give up, but once I saw the shuttle on the launch pad with all the spotlights on it, I knew I had to see it go up,” he said. “It was absolutely worth the hassle.”

Mr. Sears was fortunate to see it from the Kennedy Space Center Causeway, seven miles from the launching pad on the other side of the Banana River. It is the closest public viewing area and offers an excellent, unobstructed vantage. The effect is magnified by the river’s reflection of the fiery rocket boosters. Tickets sell out within minutes of going on sale, typically three to six weeks before a launching.

Another viewing option is from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, about the same distance from the launching pad as the causeway. Tickets are easier to come by, but with trees and power lines partly in the way, you have to wait for the shuttle to climb some distance before getting a clear view.

Still, the shock waves are just as resonant. And with the simulcast on jumbo video screens, a countdown clock and astronaut appearances, the whole thing has a campy vibe reminiscent of New Year’s Eve in Times Square. A similar experience can be found at the Astronaut Hall of Fame, in Titusville, about 12 miles from the Kennedy Space Center. But the view from there is no better than a spot along the side of the road, where there is no admittance fee.

Portions of the Beach Line Expressway, otherwise known as State Road 528, that cross the Indian and Banana Rivers offer as good a view. There are decent sightlines, too, off U.S. 1 along the Indian River and on State Road A1A along the Atlantic. Some landowners on those roadways may charge parking fees of $20 for a car and $30 for a van.

But Space View Park in Titusville, less than 15 miles from the shuttle launching pad, directly across the Indian River, probably offers the best view beyond the confines of the Space Center. Shuttle spotters start arriving about 12 hours early to stake out a spot. The park turns into a patchwork of blankets and sleeping bags as people nap, play cards and picnic while they wait.

Jim McGiness, a retired chemical engineer from Midland, Mich., has witnessed two shuttle launchings, one from the causeway two years ago and another from Space View Park last month. He said he thoroughly enjoyed both. “It’s impossible to describe how tremendous and fantastic it is to see in person,” he said. “Television doesn’t come close to capturing what it’s like.”

Both Mr. McGiness and Mr. Sears stayed at hotels in Orlando, about 44 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, during their visits. Despite the distance, Orlando may be the best bet for accommodations. Titusville, about 10 miles from space center, is a small, sleepy and, some might say, seedy town with a handful of not too luxurious motels and hotels that jack up their prices whenever there is a scheduled shuttle liftoff. And don’t expect much more than fast food for dining options.

Cocoa Beach, 19 miles away, is where NASA engineers, astronauts and their families tend to stay. The town has a larger selection of accommodations and restaurants, but it isn’t a dream destination either (read: crowded, touristy and tacky) and there, too, prices are astronomical during shuttle launchings.

There are options for activities if a launching is delayed. The area around the Kennedy Space Center features the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and Canaveral National Seashore. But most people who travel to see a launching are oblivious to anything other than finding a good spot to watch the liftoff and hear the sonic boom.

“You come and camp and pray, ‘Please go up, please go up,’ ” said Mary Beth Ford, a mother of two from Lorida, Fla., who has seen two shuttles go up in the last two years, from Space View Park. “And when it finally does, the ground shakes and you get goose bumps and realize nothing is impossible.”

IF YOU GO

Tickets to view a launching from the Kennedy Space Center Causeway ($56; $46 for ages 3 to 11), the Visitor Complex ($38 and $28) and the Astronaut Hall of Fame ($17 and $13) are available by phone (866-737-5235) or at kennedyspacecenter.com three to six weeks before a launch, and they sell out quickly. You can sign up for an e-mail alert to know when they will go on sale.

Tour operators offering viewing packages include Florida Dolphin Tours (floridadolphintours.com) and Gator Tours (gatortours.com), with prices starting at $115 for adults, and $105 for children. The package includes Kennedy Space Center Causeway tickets as well as round-trip transportation from Orlando area hotels.

To get an idea of the views from various locations, visit launchphotography.com, which has pictures and video of shuttle launchings taken from different sites.

    Getting Close to the Last Liftoff, NYT, 16.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/travel/16journeys.html

Shuttle Atlantis Blasts Off on Final Mission

May 14, 2010
Filed at 2:21 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Space shuttle Atlantis is on its way to orbit for the last time.

Atlantis and an experienced crew of six blasted off Friday afternoon. More than 40,000 guests gathered at the Florida launch site, all of them eager to catch one of the few remaining shuttle flights. NASA said it was the biggest launch-day crowd in years.

The shuttle is bound for the International Space Station. It should reach the orbiting complex Sunday.

Atlantis is carrying a full shipment of space station gear.

Only two shuttle flights remain after this one. Discovery is due to fly in September, followed by Endeavour in November. The fleet is being retired so NASA can pursue more ambitious exploration.

This is the 32nd flight for Atlantis.

    Shuttle Atlantis Blasts Off on Final Mission, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/14/science/AP-US-Space-Shuttle.html

Bad Weather Delays Shuttle Landing

April 19, 2010
Filed at 11:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Rain and overcast skies prevented space shuttle Discovery from returning to Earth on Monday, and Mission Control instructed the astronauts to spend a 15th day circling the world and awaiting better weather.

Mission Control radioed up the disappointing news after passing up two landing attempts.

''The folks really worked it hard down here. There was a lot of cause for optimism ... but in the end of the day'' the clouds remained too low and too thick, Mission Control radioed.

''We appreciate everything you've done,'' replied shuttle commander Alan Poindexter, ''and we'll be hopeful for better weather tomorrow.'' He urged flight controllers to get some rest.

Clearer skies are expected over Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday. If the clouds linger, however, NASA will try for the backup landing site in Southern California. The first landing opportunity is at 7:34 a.m., shortly after sunrise in Florida.

Discovery and its seven astronauts can remain in orbit until Wednesday. They're wrapping up a resupply mission to the International Space Station.

If Discovery aims for Kennedy, it should provide a rare visual treat. The streaking, glowing trail will be visible from below, weather permitting, as the shuttle zooms down the Eastern Seaboard toward Cape Canaveral.

The last time a returning shuttle flew over a large portion of the United States was in 2007. No further re-entries like this are planned as the shuttle program draws to a close. NASA has tried to keep continental flyovers to a minimum for public safety reasons, ever since space shuttle Columbia shattered over Texas in 2003.

Typically, a shuttle returns from the southwest, zooming up over the South Pacific, Central America, and the Gulf of Mexico. NASA changed Discovery's flight path before liftoff on April 5, to maximize the crew's work time in orbit and reduce fatigue. Monday's landing attempts would have had Discovery crossing North America, coming in from the Pacific Northwest.

A touchdown at Edwards Air Force Base in California would eliminate a coast-to-coast flyover.

The volcanic eruption in Iceland, at least, was not interfering with NASA's effort to bring Discovery home. The re-entry path does not go anywhere near the European airspace threatened by volcanic ash.

Discovery undocked from the space station Saturday, leaving behind tons of science experiments and equipment so the orbiting outpost can operate for years to come. The astronauts' biggest contribution was a new tank full of ammonia coolant, which took three spacewalks to hook up.

A pressure valve in the space station's cooling system got stuck after the ammonia tank was plugged in. Astronauts will have to deal with the problem on a future spacewalk. For now, though, the lab complex is being cooled properly.

This is Discovery's next-to-last flight. NASA has only three shuttle flights left before retiring the fleet. Atlantis is next up in less than four weeks. The final shuttle mission -- by Discovery -- is scheduled for September.

------

On the Net:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission(underscore)pages/shuttle/main/index.html 

NASA: http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ 

    Bad Weather Delays Shuttle Landing, NYT, 19.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/19/science/AP-US-Space-Shuttle.html

Shuttle Lifts Off for Space Station

April 5, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HARWOOD

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Lighting up the pre-dawn sky, the shuttle Discovery climbed out of darkness and into the glare of the rising sun early Monday, putting on a spectacular sky show as it thundered away on a space station resupply mission.

Carrying a crew of seven and 10 tons of supplies and equipment, Discovery lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 6:21 a.m. E.D.T. after a problem-free countdown.

Riding atop a rushing plume of fire from the ship’s twin solid-fuel boosters, the fuel-loaded 4.5 million-pound spacecraft accelerated through 100 mph — straight up — in just seven seconds, majestically wheeling about to line up on a northeasterly trajectory paralleling the East Coast.

The launch was timed for the moment when Earth’s rotation moved the pad into the line of the space station Destiny’s orbit. The lab complex streaked above the Florida spaceport 15 minutes before Discovery’s liftoff, a brilliant target hurtling through space at 5 miles per second.

Discovery’s climb to orbit appeared uneventful, with no obvious signs of problems. A camera mounted on the side of the ship’s external tank showed a few pieces of presumed foam insulation falling away halfway through the ascent, but it was well after the period when debris poses a serious threat to the shuttle’s heat shield.

The crew will carry out a detailed inspection of the shuttle’s nose cap and wing leading edge panels early Tuesday. If all goes well, commander Alan G. Poindexter, a Navy captain, and pilot James P. Dutton, an Air Force colonel, will guide the shuttle to a docking with the space station around 3:44 a.m. Wednesday.

Waiting to welcome the seven shuttle fliers will be the station’s five-man one-woman Expedition 23 crew, including two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut who arrived at the lab early Sunday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. All six watched Discovery’s launching on video beamed up from mission control.

"We’re absolutely delighted to have our friends and comrades joining us here in a couple of days,” Army Col. Timothy J. Creamer said via radio from the station.

"Stand by for a knock on the door,” a flight controller replied.

Discovery’s mission is one of NASA’s final four shuttle flights as the space agency races to complete the international laboratory before retiring the orbiters later this year.

The station is essentially complete, but NASA is trying to stock the lab with spare parts and equipment as a hedge against potential problems after the shuttle is grounded and the station becomes dependent on smaller, less capable Russian, Japanese and European cargo craft.

Discovery’s crew is delivering 10 tons of science gear, spare parts and supplies, including ammonia coolant, experiment hardware, an astronaut sleep station, an experiment sample freezer and a darkroom-like camera enclosure for the Destiny module’s Earth-facing window.

Three spacewalks are planned by Richard A. Mastracchio, a shuttle veteran, and Clayton C. Anderson, who spent six months on the station in 2007. The men will replace one of two 1,700-pound ammonia coolant tanks. They also plan to prepare an aging set of solar array batteries to be replaced on an upcoming flight. Capt. Poindexter, Col. Dutton, flight engineer Dottie M. Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie D. Wilson, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Mastracchio and Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki plan to undock from the space station on April 16 and land back at the Kennedy Space Center two days later.

    Shuttle Lifts Off for Space Station, NYT, 5.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/space/06shuttle.html

W. E. Gordon, Creator of Link to Deep Space, Dies at 92

February 26, 2010
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William E. Gordon, an electrical engineer who conceived, designed, built and operated the world’s largest radio telescope, which has been described as Earth’s ear to outer space, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 92.

Rice University, where Dr. Gordon served as professor, dean and provost, announced the death.

The telescope, a dish the size of 26 football fields, occupies a small valley in Puerto Rico. It is big enough to emit the strongest radio waves and receive the weakest ones.

Dr. Gordon named the telescope and its observatory after a nearby town. The Arecibo Observatory has been used to make scores of landmark discoveries in atmospheric physics and astronomy, including one that garnered a Nobel Prize.

It was the first instrument to accurately measure the rotation of Mercury, where it also detected ice. It furnished detailed maps of the Moon, Venus and Mars. It provided the first solid evidence that neutron stars exist. It discovered the first planets outside the solar system. It created the first three-dimensional images of the universe.

The telescope can track asteroids veering near the Earth much more accurately than other instruments. It listens for minuscule signals from distant space that might suggest intelligent life.

Paul Cloutier, a retired professor of physics and astronomy at Rice, said in an interview Thursday that Arecibo has “the capability of producing a detectable signal clear across the galaxy and a sensitivity to be able to receive a signal from anywhere in the galaxy.”

Referring to the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie about extraterrestrial life, Dr. Cloutier said Dr. Gordon had “built the telephone that would allow E.T. to call home.”

In the 1997 film “Contact,” that sort of communication is actually established. Jodie Foster, playing a brilliant scientist at Arecibo, captures and deciphers a message from aliens.

William Edwin Gordon was born on Jan. 8, 1918, in Paterson, N.J. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from what is now Montclair State University and enlisted in the Army in 1942. An early assignment was studying why radar can be very effective hundreds of miles away and ineffective at just a few miles.

A colleague persuaded him to pursue this interest at Cornell University, where he researched how radar signals behave in the uppermost part of Earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere.

It was his desire to measure the properties of electrons 2,000 miles up that led him to radio telescopes. Nobody had built one remotely big enough to catch the minute signals he was after.

In praising Dr. Gordon’s achievement at Arecibo, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2001 pointed out the difficulty he had faced: All the energy collected by radio telescopes until then over 60 years had amounted to no more than the energy of a few raindrops hitting the ground.

Dr. Cloutier said that part of Dr. Gordon’s success was casting his project as a military endeavor, when his personal interest was the pure scientific one of studying the ionosphere of Earth and other planets. Dr. Gordon told the Defense Department that the observatory would be able to pick up faint Soviet radio signals bouncing back to Earth from the Moon. Its research arm supported the project.

The receiver’s huge size was another problem. Much smaller receiving dishes had been suspended on platforms and collapsed under their own weight.

Dr. Gordon decided that the solution was to mount the dish on the ground. After many aerial surveys and tramping through the snake-infested countryside, he found a limestone sinkhole in which tobacco was growing. It would cradle the dish.

His design called for a metallic dish with a diameter of 1,000 feet; the biggest radio telescope at the time was just 150 feet across..

“We were taking a pretty big leap,” Dr. Gordon said in an interview with The Houston Chronicle in 2001. “They didn’t know whether I was a crackpot or whether I really had something.”

The observatory was completed in 1963, five years after Dr. Gordon had the idea, at a cost of $9.3 million, and it has been significantly updated several times.

The huge, curved dish of the telescope acts as a reflector, bouncing back radio waves to a movable focal point suspended overhead. Computers interpret the data received. It is operated by Cornell through the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center for the National Science Foundation. Dr. Gordon was director for the first two years.

With upgrades, Arecibo has become 10 times more sensitive every 10 years, and can now chart chemical phenomena that occurred in galaxies billions of years ago.

Perhaps its most noteworthy use came from a series of observations that began in 1974 by Dr. Joseph Taylor of Princeton and his student Russell Hulse.

Their work, for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1993, was the first proof that gravity waves, never directly detected but predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, actually exist.

Dr. Gordon taught at Cornell from 1953 until 1965, when he moved to Rice. With Norman Hackerman, a former Rice president, he is one of only two Rice faculty members to be given the title distinguished professor emeritus.

Dr. Gordon’s wife of more than 60 years, the former Elva Freile, died in 2002. He is survived by his second wife, the former Mary Elizabeth Bolgiano; his son, Larry; his daughter, Nancy; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

At Arecibo’s 40th birthday in 2003, Dr. Gordon said he and his colleagues had not remotely grasped the challenges they faced.

Their saving grace, he suggested, was that they “were young enough that we didn’t know we couldn’t do it.”

    W. E. Gordon, Creator of Link to Deep Space, Dies at 92, NYT, 28.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28gordon.html

Trouble in Space Station Construction

February 14, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — Astronauts ran into trouble on Saturday while setting up the International Space Station’s newest room, Tranquility: a critical insulating cover does not fit.

The multilayered fabric is supposed to go between Tranquility and its observation deck, but the metal bars are not locking down properly because of interference from a hand rail or some other structure at the hatch.

The flight director, Bob Dempsey, said engineers were trying to figure out how to proceed. Until this snag, everything had been going smoothly in what is NASA’s final major construction job at the space station.

The space shuttle Endeavour delivered Tranquility and its observation deck last week.

The cover is needed to protect Tranquility’s seals and docking mechanisms with the viewing deck from the cold. The port between the two rooms will be briefly exposed when the domed lookout is moved to its permanent location on the other side of Tranquility. That relocation is supposed to happen Sunday, but it may be delayed.

Mr. Dempsey said the astronauts might be asked to remove the interfering pieces or do away with the cover and proceed with the relocation plan. Once the lookout is moved, a docking adapter will take its place so the port would not be exposed for too long, provided nothing else went wrong.

Another option, Mr. Dempsey said, may be to hold off on moving the observation deck until a properly fitting cover can be flown on another shuttle flight.

Only four more shuttle missions remain. The next visit is scheduled for next month.

    Trouble in Space Station Construction, NYT, 14.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/science/space/14shuttle.html

Editorial

A New Space Program

February 9, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama has called for scrapping NASA’s once-ambitious program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 as a first step toward reaching Mars. That effort, begun by former President George W. Bush, is behind schedule and its technology increasingly outdated.

Mr. Obama is instead calling on NASA to develop “game-changing” technologies to make long-distance space travel cheaper and faster, a prerequisite for reaching beyond the Moon to nearby asteroids or Mars. To save money and free the agency for more ambitious journeys, the plan also calls for transferring NASA’s more routine operations — carrying astronauts to the International Space Station — to private businesses.

If done right, the president’s strategy could pay off handsomely. If not, it could be the start of a long, slow decline from the nation’s pre-eminent position as a space-faring power.

We are particularly concerned that the White House has not identified a clear goal — Mars is our choice — or set even a notional deadline for getting there. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Congress need to keep the effort focused and adequately financed.

The most controversial element of the president’s plan is his proposal to scrap NASA’s mostly Moon-related technology programs that have been working to develop two new rockets, a new space capsule, a lunar landing capsule and systems for living on the lunar surface. Those efforts have been slowed by budgetary and technical problems. And at the current rate, the Moon landing would likely not occur until well after 2030. The technologies that looked reasonable when NASA first started in 2005 have already begun to look dated.

A lunar expedition would be of some value in learning how to live on the Martian surface but would not help us learn how to descend through Mars’ very different atmosphere or use that planet’s atmospheric resources effectively. Nor would it yield a rich trove of new scientific information or find new solutions for the difficulties of traveling deeper into space.

The president’s proposal calls for developing new technologies to make long-distance space travel possible: orbiting depots that could refuel rockets in space, lessening the weight they would have to carry from the ground; life-support systems that could operate indefinitely without resupply from Earth; new engines, propellants and materials for heavy-lift rockets; and advanced propulsion systems that could enable astronauts to reach Mars in a matter of weeks instead of roughly a year using chemical rockets.

Leaping to new generations of technology is inherently hard and NASA’s efforts may not bear fruit in any useful time period. To increase the odds of success, Congress may want to hold the agency’s feet to the fire and require that a specified percentage of its budget be devoted to technology development.

The idea of hiring private companies to ferry astronauts and cargo to the space station is also risky and based on little more than faith that the commercial sector may be able to move faster and more cheaply than NASA. The fledgling companies have yet to prove their expertise, and the bigger companies often deliver late and overbudget.

If they fail or fall behind schedule, NASA would have to rely on Russia or other foreign countries to take its astronauts and cargoes aloft. That is a risk worth taking. It has relied on the Russians before when NASA’s shuttle fleet was grounded for extensive repairs. It would seem too expensive for NASA to compete with a new rocket designed to reach low-Earth orbit — far better to accelerate development of a heavier-lift rocket needed for voyages beyond, as NASA now intends.

The new plan for long-distance space travel also needs clear goals and at least aspirational deadlines that can help drive technology development and make it clear to the world that the United States is not retiring from space exploration but rather is pushing toward the hardest goal within plausible reach.

We believe the target should be Mars — the planet most like Earth and of greatest scientific interest.

Many experts prefer a flexible path that would have astronauts first travel to intermediate destinations: a circle around the Moon to show the world that we can still do it; a trip to distant points where huge telescopes will be deployed and may need servicing; a visit to an asteroid, the kind of object we may some day need to deflect lest it collide with Earth. That makes sense to us so long as the goal of reaching Mars remains at the forefront.

At this point, the administration’s plans to reorient NASA are only a proposal that requires Congressional approval to proceed. Already many legislators from states that profit from the current NASA program are voicing opposition.

Less self-interested colleagues ought to embrace the notion of a truly ambitious space program with clear goals that stir all Americans’ imaginations and challenge this country’s scientists to think far beyond the Moon.

    A New Space Program, NYT, 9.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/opinion/09tue1.html

Shuttle Blasts Off for Space Station

February 9, 2010
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The space shuttle Endeavour thundered into orbit before dawn Monday morning, briefly turning darkness into daylight.

It was the second effort to get the Endeavour off the ground, 24 hours after clouds over the launching pad scrubbed Sunday’s attempt.

Clouds again encroached, but there were enough holes to allow the Endeavour to lift off on schedule at 4:14 a.m., a bright streak rising to the northeast along the East Coast. It was the 130th launching of a shuttle and probably the last night launching as the program winds down and ends after four more flights.

“What a beautiful launch we had this morning,” William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said in a news conference.

The Endeavour is carrying the last major piece of the International Space Station. Two of Endeavour’s crew members, Nicholas J. M. Patrick and Lt. Col. Robert L. Behnken of the Air Force, will conduct three spacewalks to install a 23-foot-long, 15-foot-wide Tranquility module.

The module includes a seven-windowed dome, or cupola, that will offer panoramic views of Earth and space. The viewing area, large enough for two astronauts, will be used for controlling the station’s 60-foot-long robotic arm and to observe other activities outside the station.

The Endeavour is also delivering space parts for the station’s water system that recycles urine and sweat into clean water.

A camera on the shuttle’s external tank detected a strip of insulating foam falling off about two minutes into the flight. Mr. Gerstenmaier estimated it at a quarter-inch thick and a foot long.

“It didn’t appear to impact the orbiter,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said, “and we see no damage to the orbiter.”

As with all shuttle missions since the loss of the Columbia in 2003, engineers will spend several days examining the foam loss to ensure there was no damage to the Endeavour’s heat shield.

The commander of the 13-day mission is Col. George D. Zamka of the Marines, and the pilot is Col. Terry W. Virts Jr. of the Air Force. The other crew members are Stephen K. Robinson and Capt. Kathryn P. Hire of the United States Navy Reserve.

While the Endeavour mission was off to a smooth start, Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, admitted he had not done a good job of laying out a clear picture of the agency’s future.

At a news conference on Saturday, he accepted blame for the rocky reception that has greeted President Obama’s plans to revamp NASA’s human spaceflight program.

The plans, revealed in Mr. Obama’s budget request for 2011, call for the cancellation of Constellation, the program that was to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020. Under the new budget proposal, money that went to the Constellation would instead be used to develop new space technologies like fueling stations in orbit, and the task of developing rockets for carrying astronauts to the International Space Station would be turned over to commercial companies.

General Bolden said some of the work in the Constellation program might yet be preserved. “I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water, if you will,” he said.

General Bolden also offered some conciliatory words as he acknowledged that the proposal for NASA would probably change as it winds through the budget process. “I do have to negotiate with my partners in Congress,” he said.

He said NASA would still work on a heavy-lift rocket even as the budget proposal seeks to cancel the Ares V, the behemoth rocket that would have carried the cargo for a lunar mission.

General Bolden said, however, that he did not expect the heavy-lift rocket to be until after 2020.

    Shuttle Blasts Off for Space Station, NYT, 9.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/space/09shuttle.html

Obama Calls for End to NASA’s Moon Program

February 2, 2010
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

President Obama is calling on NASA to cancel the program that was to return humans to the Moon by 2020, and focus instead on radically new space technologies.

Mr. Obama’s 2010 budget proposal for NASA asks for $18 billion over five years for fueling spacecraft in orbit, new types of engines to accelerate spacecraft through space and robotic factories that could churn soil on the Moon — and eventually Mars — into rocket fuel.

Plans for a new mission to leave Earth’s orbit will probably not be spelled out for a few years, and the budget proposal makes it clear that any future exploration program will be an international collaboration, not an American one, more like the International Space Station than Apollo.

“I think this is a dramatic shift in the way we’ve gone about particularly human spaceflight over the past almost 50 years,” said John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University who was one of about a dozen people who were briefed about the NASA proposal Sunday evening.

“It is a somewhat risky proposition,” Dr. Logsdon said, “but we’ve been kind of stuck using the technologies we’ve developed in the ’50s and ’60s.”

To pay for the new technology development, the budget calls for a complete stop in NASA’s Constellation program, the rockets and spacecraft that NASA has been working on for the past four years to replace the space shuttles.

“We are proposing canceling the program, not delaying it,” Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Sunday.

The proposal would officially end aspirations to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 — President George W. Bush’s “vision for space exploration” developed in the aftermath of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

In place of the Moon mission, Mr. Obama’s vision offers, at least initially, nothing in terms of human exploration of the solar system. What the administration calls a “bold new initiative” does not spell out a next destination or timetable for getting there.

In the meantime, instead of using the Constellation’s Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsule to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, $6 billion would instead go to financing space taxi services from commercial companies.

Under the proposal, NASA’s budget would rise to $19 billion in the 2011 fiscal year from $18.7 billion. It would also get additional increases in subsequent years, reaching $21 billion in 2015. In total, NASA would receive $100 billion over the next five years.

Whether Congress agrees to the restructuring of NASA remains to be seen. As reports of the impending cancellation of Constellation leaked out last week, members of Congress, particularly in Alabama, Florida and Texas, the homes of the NASA centers most involved with Constellation, expressed concern.

“If early reports for what the White House wants to do with NASA are correct, then the president’s green-eyeshade-wearing advisers are dead wrong,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said in a statement last week.

Congress may also balk at the price tag. After spending $9 billion over the past four years on Constellation, canceling the contracts with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Alliant Techsystems and other companies will cost an additional $2.5 billion, Dr. Logsdon said NASA officials had told him.

If implemented, the NASA a few years from now would be fundamentally different from NASA today. The space agency would no longer operate its own spacecraft, but essentially buy tickets for its astronauts.

Dr. Logsdon said the officials said NASA would evolve into a role more akin to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which preceded NASA. The committee did not manufacturer aircraft, but performed aeronautical research that was adopted by aircraft manufacturers.

“The assumption is that there are technological breakthroughs out there ready to be discovered and exploited,” Dr. Logsdon said. “I’m impressed and a little surprised how large the investment in new technology is planned to be. It does represent a shift away from developing systems to developing technologies before developing systems.”

If the approach succeeds, it could jumpstart a vibrant space industry, but it is also risky. By canceling Ares I, NASA would have no backup if the commercial companies were not able to deliver.

One likely competitor for the commercial crew contract is Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX for short. But its Falcon 9 rocket, the one that would be used to carry astronauts to the space station, has yet to have its first launching. When SpaceX, a startup led by Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, won in 2006 a contract to carry cargo to the space station, the company said it would have six flights of the Falcon 9 by the end of 2009.

Conversely, another likely competitor, United Launch Alliance, which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has decades of experience building space hardware for NASA, and its rockets, the Delta IV and the Atlas V, have successfully carried military and commercial satellites to space. But modifications needed for carrying astronauts could be costly and the launch alliance has also experienced delays and cost overruns.

NASA has also not yet spelled out how it would go about verifying that commercial rockets are sufficiently safe for carrying astronauts. A worry is also that the decades of expertise and experience within NASA in operating spacecraft will be lost, and that the commercial companies might stumble as they learn.

A move to an international collaboration would also make future exploration programs susceptible to buffeting from diplomatic winds on Earth. For example, after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, lawmakers questioned whether the United States should continue flying astronauts on the Russian Soyuz rockets.

While more countries would share the cost, an international collaboration would probably be more expensive and cumbersome to manage, and could be slowed down by delays of any of the partners.

“I’m optimistic this provides a path to a long term and sustainable and high quality program,” Dr. Logsdon said. “But I think there will be a lot of debate over the details over the next few months.”

    Obama Calls for End to NASA’s Moon Program, NYT, 2.2.1010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02nasa.html