Blogs / 80beats

An exhaustive report on what happened in the crew cabin during the final moments before the space shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas in 2003 found numerous equipment flaws that failed to protect the astronauts from the extreme conditions they were abruptly exposed to during the disaster. But in somber tones, NASA’s report also acknowledged that “the breakup of the crew module … was not survivable by any currently existing capability” [CNN].

The mission was doomed when a chunk of foam broke away from an external fuel tank and struck the shuttle’s left wing during its launch; 15 days later, during reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere, superheated gases poured into the hole created and melted the shuttle’s structure. From the crew’s perspective, the shift from what appeared to be a normal descent on 1 February 2003, into disaster happened so fast that the astronauts didn’t even have time to close the visors on their helmets…. The crew cabin broke away from the ship and started spinning rapidly. Analysis of the wreckage indicated the crew members had flipped cockpit switches in response to alarms that were sounding. The astronauts had also reset the shuttle’s autopilot system, the report said [New Scientist].

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In a vote of confidence for the fledgling commercial space industry, NASA has awarded contracts that could total $3.5 billion to two companies that plan to build rockets and ferry supplies to the International Space Station. The companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation, could begin launches as soon as 2010 to help fill the gap between the space shuttle’s expected retirement and the introduction of NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Ares I. The companies beat out traditional NASA contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to snag the contracts.

Experts say that giving a contract to the young company SpaceX is a particularly bold bet. SpaceX, the plan’s linchpin because it is intended to begin the service, carries a relatively short pedigree as a government contractor and can point to only one successful launch, after three failures, of a smaller version of its Falcon rocket intended to supply the space station. Orbital Sciences is an established, midsize aerospace contractor but lacks a proven track record for the revamped version of the Taurus rocket it will use to supply the station [The Wall Street Journal, subscription required].

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NASA officials have long pronounced themselves ready to move on from the aging space shuttles, which could be retired as soon as 2010, but the incoming Barack Obama administration has raised new doubts about what the next step should be. Last week, news reports surfaced that Obama’s transition team was questioning NASA about alternatives to the Ares I rocket that is currently under development as the shuttle’s replacement, and now transition team members are reportedly considering using modified military rockets instead. No decision has been made and the concept raises major technical, funding and policy issues. But in recent weeks, the transition team assigned to [NASA] has been asking aerospace industry officials about the feasibility of such a dramatic shift in priorities [The Wall Street Journal].

The Ares I rocket is designed to bring the new Orion crew capsule to the International Space Station, and eventually back to the moon and on to Mars. Technical difficulties and budget problems have raised doubts about the program, but NASA officials have dismissed these issues as a normal part of the process, and have argued against a change in plans. NASA officials stressed that moving away from the current Ares rocket designs almost certainly would entail extra costs and lengthy delays in getting the shuttle replacement off the ground. With the first Ares 1 test flight tentatively scheduled for next summer, “going to completely different hardware would put a big gap” in the workforce focusing on rocket development, said Steve Cook, Ares program manager. “We would really be stepping backward” by deciding that the shuttle replacement could ride safely on an alternate rocket [The Wall Street Journal].

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The scrappy space start-up Xcor Aerospace is ready to begin selling tickets to tourists who have a hankering to soar 37 miles up to the edge of space, the company announced today. It also presented its first paying customer, whom they hope to send up in 2011: Danish investment banker Per Wimmer, who will pay $95,000 for his suborbital flight. Wimmer seems enthusiastic about Xcor’s plans, but he’s certainly hedging his bet. He is so keen to leave earth’s atmosphere that he has bought another two tickets to space, one with Virgin Galactic and one with rival firm Space Adventures. “It will be a real race to see which of them goes up first - but if it is Xcor, I will become the first affordable space tourist,” he said [Daily Mail].

In the small world of private space companies, Xcor is considered a cheap, no-frills provider. The announced ticket price is about half the $200,000 cost of a suborbital flight aboard Virgin Galactic’s deluxe SpaceShip Two. That vehicle is expected to bring six passengers aloft at a time, and may let them float around the cabin during the five minutes of weightlessness they’ll experience at the apogee of their flight, 62 miles above the earth’s surface. In contrast, Xcor’s small suborbital vehicle, the Lynx, is a two-seater, and the one paying passenger will stay strapped into the copilot’s seat.

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A Virginia physicist and entrepreneur pled guilty yesterday to violating arms control laws by selling information on rocket technology to China, which prosecutors say will aid China in its space program. The scientist, Quan-Sheng Shu, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Shanghai; he’s also an expert on cryogenics and liquid hydrogen rocket systems. According to the Justice Department, China intends to use the technology to send space stations and satellites into orbit, as well as provide support for manned space flight and future lunar missions from its new Hainan space facility [The Virginian-Pilot]. An FBI press release regarding Shu’s case notes that an arm of the People’s Liberation Army is involved in the Hainan project.

Shu, who is the president of a high-tech company called AMAC International Inc., pled guilty to two counts of violating the federal Arms Control Act and one count of bribing Chinese officials, and faces up to 25 years of jail time and fines of up to $2.5 million. Sentencing in the case is scheduled for April 6, 2009.

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The space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station yesterday, bringing almost seven tons of supplies and a crew that’s determined to give the cramped station a thorough renovation. After the hatch opened, the astronauts floated weightlessly through a tunnel and into the welcoming arms of their colleagues aboard the $100 billion station. “We understand that this house is in need of an extreme makeover and that you are the crew to do it,” station commander Mike Fincke said. “Welcome to space” [Reuters].

The Endeavour crew brought up a host of home improvements that will allow the space station to support three additional crew members: The cargo includes a second kitchen module, and extra bathroom, two sleeping cabins and exercise gear. Other new equipment will provide both creature comforts and the necessities of life: the crew will soon install a space cooler so station astronauts can have cold drinks for the first time in the eight years astronauts have lived aboard. Endeavour is also toting a new water recycling system designed to collect astronaut urine, sweat and other wastewater into drinkable water [SPACE.com].

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Today the entire nation of India rejoiced as the nation’s first lunar orbiter send an impact probe smashing into the moon’s surface. As the probe was painted with the jaunty tricolor flag of India, millions of ecstatic citizens saw it as a near equivalent to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s planting of the American flag on lunar soil almost 40 years ago. “Just as we had promised, we have given India the moon,” said G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation [The Hindu].

Lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 — Chandrayaan means “moon craft” in Sanskrit — was successfully launched from southern India on October 22 and is now orbiting the moon. Its two-year mission is to take high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the moon’s surface, especially the permanently shadowed polar regions. It also will search for evidence of water or ice and attempt to identify the chemical composition of certain lunar rocks [CNN]. The Indian government has said that the $79 million mission to map the lunar surface is just a prelude to the landing of a robotic lunar rover in 2012, and a manned mission to the moon by 2020.

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Researchers have tested a small, portable magnetic field that could be just the protection required for a manned expedition to Mars, when astronauts would need to be protected from radiation from solar storms. Researchers say the lab experiment is the proof of concept for a magnetic force-field that mimics the protective qualities of the Earth’s magnetosphere, which shields our planet from that same radiation.

Outside Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetic field, supersonic particles from stellar processes run amok, screaming through space and tearing through just about anything in their path—including the bodies of astronauts, where they can wreak havoc on genetic material [Scientific American]. Astronauts on the International Space Station are within Earth’s protective magnetic field, so the Apollo astronauts who went to the moon are the only humans who have been exposed to this radiation; happily, there were no major solar storms during their quick trips to the moon and back. However, a manned mission to Mars would take about six months each way, leaving astronauts much more vulnerable.

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After several weeks of remote-control repair work, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in action, and is once again taking breathtaking images of distant galaxies. Today, NASA released an image which it called a “perfect 10″ because the paired galaxies resemble the number 10. The picture was released this morning by NASA to demonstrate that the observatory’s workhorse Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 is on the job again [Baltimore Sun], and a happy NASA press release added that the camera scored a perfect 10 for both its performance and the beautiful results.

The image shows a pair of galaxies, known as Arp 147, which are about 400 million light years away from Earth. The two galaxies are thought to have collided, and the image shows that aftermath. The blue ring was formed after the galaxy on the left passed through the galaxy on the right. Just as a pebble thrown into a pond creates an outwardly moving circular wave, or ripples, an outwardly propagating ring of higher density was generated at the point of impact of the two galaxies, astronomers explained. As this excess density collided with outer material that was moving inwards due to the gravitational pull of the two galaxies, shocks and dense gas were produced, stimulating star formation [SPACE.com].

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A new technical problem with NASA’s next generation Ares I rocket is causing headaches for the space agency, and could leave engineers scrambling to keep the project on time and on budget. Rumors are flying that this new glitch, in addition to other technical issues that have cropped up in the past few years, may cause the agency to abandon the design altogether. A former Florida congressman and current lobbyist told state officials that NASA’s next rocket is “on the chopping block” and that a new administration may abandon the Ares I as successor to the space shuttle. The next president may look instead to use military rockets to launch NASA astronauts [Orlando Sentinel blog].

After the space shuttles retire, NASA expects to complete work on the Ares I rocket and its matching Orion crew capsule, with hopes of resuming manned flights by 2015. But the Ares I has already been criticized for lacking lift power, and then for a vibration problem that could dramatically shake up astronauts. The latest concern arises from computer models showing that the Ares I could crash into the launch tower during liftoff.

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Space startup company Armadillo Aerospace won the $350,000 prize on Friday in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, proving that a private company has the know-how to build a craft capable of ferrying supplies or astronauts around the lunar surface. At the X Prize event in New Mexico, Armadillo’s craft won the Level One Challenge when it successfully lifted off and climbed vertically 160 feet, scooted sideways in the air for more than 90 seconds and touched down on a landing pad; finally, the craft had to refuel and make the return journey.

The challenge is meant to encourage private space companies to literally aim for the moon with their technology, and X Prize officials called Armadillo’s triumph a validation of that approach. Peter Diamandis, X Prize Foundation CEO, said: “The incredible legacy of Armadillo is their ability to fly over and over again in a low-cost fashion. They actually build the vehicle, fly it, see what happens, and make the repairs. They can iterate multiple times in a couple of days…. It’s really the garage rocket scientist approach to low-cost reliable vehicles. I think it’s something that the larger companies and the government should be learning from” [SPACE.com].

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Early tomorrow morning, India will launch its first lunar satellite, making it the sixth country to do so, following the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, China, and Japan. The lunar-orbiting spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, is scheduled to blast off aboard an Indian-built rocket at 6:20 am (0050 GMT) on Wednesday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on India’s southeastern coast [AFP].

If all goes to plan, the satellite, weighing half a [metric] tonne, will enter a lunar orbit some 62 miles above the moon’s surface on November 8 and begin its two-year mission to map the moon in 3D, survey its surface for mineral wealth and start its 11 hi-tech probes, including five from the US, Sweden, Japan, Germany and Bulgaria [Guardian] Specifically, Chandrayaan-1 will be looking for uranium, helium-3 (used for nuclear fusion), and water ice. Although the unmanned spacecraft itself will not land on the moon, it will eject a small craft to land on and investigate the lunar surface.

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Just yesterday, the NASA engineers who are working on a remote-controlled reboot of the malfunctioning Hubble Space Telescope were thrilled with their progress: “Everything’s going perfectly,” a NASA spokeswoman said, and she estimated that the telescope would resume sending science data back to earth today. But today NASA reported that engineers had run into a problem while powering up the system after its reboot.

After the Hubble’s main data handling computer went on the fritz in late September, engineers devised a plan to switch over to the telescope’s “Side B” backup computer, which had been dormant for 18 years. NASA said yesterday that the backup system was successfully brought up, and that the only task that remained was testing and calibrating the telescope’s scientific instruments to ensure they were working properly with the new computer. However on Friday NASA posted a notice on its website saying “the activation of the telescope’s science instruments and resumption of observations has been suspended following two anomalies seen in systems on the telescope Thursday” [Reuters].

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NASA has good news for fans of the spectacular stellar images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been unable to send data back to earth since a computer malfunctioned several weeks ago: Engineers have successfully powered up the Hubble’s backup data handling computer, which has slumbered in a dormant deep-freeze for the Hubble’s 18 years of operation, and NASA officials say the telescope should be sending scientific data again by tomorrow.

Engineers switched on the “Side B” backup system late Wednesday night. The engineers then briefly switched back on several of Hubble’s instruments — the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer — to ensure that each had a working interface with the duplicate unit. The instruments were then commanded back into a dormant “safe mode,” in which they were hibernating since the observatory went silent [Science News].

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Tomorrow NASA engineers will begin a challenging remote-control fix of the malfunctioning Hubble Space Telescope; if all goes well, the Hubble should regain the capacity to send breathtaking stellar images back to Earth by Friday. The breakdown of a data-handling computer two weeks ago left the telescope crippled and unable to send data from its instruments; it also caused NASA to postpone its Hubble upgrade mission from October to sometime next February or so. The delay is costing NASA about $10 million a month, officials said [AP].

The fix requires powering down the entire telescope into “safe mode” and then turning on a backup data-handling system that has never been activated in the Hubble’s 18 years of space flight. Says Hubble manager Art Whipple: “It’s probably not unlike what an IT professional might do with an office network” [BBC News]. While NASA officials say there’s always a chance that the backup system won’t work, they also say they expect everything to go as planned. Says Whipple: “There’s very little ageing that goes on with an unpowered component in space,” he said. “It’s actually a very benign storage environment” [Reuters].

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