The Orion capsule is dead; long live the Orion capsule. Yesterday in the New Mexico desert, NASA successfully completed a test of the resurrected craft’s launch-abort system. Rockets blasting with 500,000 pounds of thrust carried it more than a mile into the sky before releasing it for a parachute-aided descent back to the Earth.
The launch-abort system is designed to pull the astronauts and the Orion capsule away from the launch pad in the event of a problem such as fire. It is also designed to catapult them away from the rocket if an emergency occurs during the climb to orbit [The Denver Post].
Orion, however, may never need this launch-abort system. The craft was originally intended to be the crew capsule in the Constellation program, riding into space atop heavy-lift rockets and ferrying astronauts back to the moon or to Mars. Like the rest of Constellation it was left out of President Obama‘s January budget.
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Battered, drained of fuel, and travel-weary, Japan’s asteroid-sampler is almost home. The Hayabusa, which the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched in 2003, is scheduled to drop its sample canister in the Australian outback in June. But, the project leaders warn, there’s still a chance than the beleaguered sojourner won’t make it. And even if it does successfully return to Earth, it’s possible that the sample capsule may not contain extraterrestrial rock.
Hayabusa spent three months exploring the Itokawa asteroid in late 2005, even making an unplanned landing on the asteroid’s surface. The probe spent up to a half-hour on Itokawa, making it the first spacecraft to lift off from an asteroid [Space.com]. The craft also took 1,600 pictures and more than 100,000 infrared images.
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If you wanted dangerous, you got it.
One week ago today, in response to heavy criticism for killing the Constellation program begun under his predecessor, President Obama presented his revised vision for NASA: To build a new heavy lift spacecraft that will go beyond low Earth orbit and land on an asteroid by around 2025. This goal is far more ambitious than going back to the moon. Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers. “It is really the hardest thing we can do,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said [AP].
NASA doesn’t know which of the nearby asteroids it might pick for a visit, but the main candidates are around 5 million miles from Earth. The moon, by contrast, is a little less than a quarter-million miles away. The asteroids are about a quarter-mile across; the moon is more than 2,000 miles in diameter. And a trip to an asteroid could take 200 days, as opposed to the Apollo 11 lunar round-trip, which required little more than a week. That means NASA may have to devise new radiation shields and life-support systems for the asteroid-bound astronauts.
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When it comes to keeping secrets, the U.S. Air Force knows how to stay mum. On Thursday, the Air Force will launch its secret space plane, the unmanned X-37B aircraft, from Cape Canaveral. The project has been a decade in the works and cost millions of dollars to develop–but we civilians have little idea what it’s for.
Once launched via an Atlas V rocket, the plane is expected to spend days or weeks orbiting Earth and performing classified experiments before landing back in California. If successful, the launch will fulfill the Defense Department’s long-time dream: the orbital flight of a military vehicle that combines an airplane’s agility with a spacecraft’s capacity to travel in orbit at 5 miles per second [Popular Mechanics].
The project itself has had an interesting past. It was begun by NASA in 1999 but was later adopted by the Defense Department, and was first placed under the auspices of DARPA before finally finding a home with the Air Force. The Air Force immediately threw the X-37B behind a veil of secrecy, leading some experts to speculate that this could be the military’s attempt to weaponize the final frontier. There are also concerns that the mysterious project could set off an orbital arms race with countries like China.
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Americans will go to asteroids, to Mars, and maybe beyond–and all in this lifetime, stated President Obama at Cape Canaveral this afternoon as he reassured Americans that space exploration will continue. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center, where America launched its moon mission decades ago, Obama said he was “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future.”
Obama’s proposed space policy (pdf) would increase NASA’s budget by $6 billion over the next 5 years, which he says will create 2,500 additional jobs at the Kennedy Space Center by 2012. Acknowledging criticism for some of his changes to NASA’s missions, Obama stated that the country must “leap into the future” and not “continue on the same path as before,” saying: “The bottom line is: Nobody is more committed to manned space flight, the human exploration of space, than I am. But we’ve got to do it in a smart way; we can’t keep doing the same old things as before” [The New York Times].
In his speech, the President declared that by 2025 the nation would have a new spacecraft designed to carry humans “beyond the moon into deep space.” He added that by the mid-2030′s America would also be able to send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth, adding “a landing on Mars will soon follow.” President Obama stated: “Space exploration is not a luxury, not an afterthought in America’s brighter future…. It is an essential part of that quest” [The New York Times].
For more details on Obama’s new space policy and what it means for NASA and the future of space exploration, head over to Bad Astronomy for Phil Plait’s post, “Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy.”
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Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls
This week marks the anniversaries of both stunning success and nearly catastrophic failures in human spaceflight—it’s been 49 years since Yuri Gugarin became the first man in space, and 40 years since the life-threatening drama on board Apollo 13. So perhaps it’s fitting that this is the week the fight over the future of NASA comes to a head. Tomorrow, President Obama will defend his new plans for manned spaceflight, which he has changed somewhat after his proposal to cancel the Constellation program was met with a flood of criticism.
When the President announced his budget in January, which came without funding for Constellation and its plans to go back to the moon and beyond, members of Congress had a fit (especially those who represent areas with jobs connected to Constellation).
Former astronauts came out of the woodwork, too, and that list of critics now includes Neil Armstrong. The first moon-walker typically shies away from media controversies, but this week issued an open letter to the President. He writes: “The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope. It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation” [The Times]. Armstrong also writes that if the United States finds itself without spacecraft that can travel to the Earth’s orbit and beyond, our nation will be destined “to become one of second or even third rate stature.”
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You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and President Obama is hitting plenty of it over his proposal to end NASA’s Constellation program. In January his budget proposal put forth no funding for Constellation, the space shuttle successor program that included the Ares rockets, Orion crew capsule, and plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA would become more reliant on private companies to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and would explore new ideas for visiting Mars or nearby asteroids. But the proposal has already ruffled lots of feathers, prompting the President to say he will hold a conference to further outline his plan.
First, many high-profile space experts balked at the proposal. Former astronaut Tom Jones said Obama was surrendering human spaceflight, and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, was equally displeased. “It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt said. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism” [Washington Post]. Dissent wasn’t universal; DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, for one, praised the possibilities for commercial space-faring.
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China will soon have an outpost in space. The government has announced that its first unmanned space module, the Tiangong-1 (or “The Heavenly Palace”), will be launched next year.
The module will serve as a docking station for other spacecraft before being transformed into a permanent taikonaut residence and space lab within two years of the launch [Nature blog]. It was originally due to launch this year, but now will see flight only late in 2011, due to technical reasons, Chinese officials said. The Tiangong-1 is expected to be 30 feet long and capable of housing three taikonauts; future missions will add other modules to construct a larger Chinese space station.
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A few days after the White House released its budget that proposes axing NASA’s Constellation program and providing more support to private space flight, the Obama administration began to follow through on the second part of that equation. NASA has announced that it’s giving $50 million to five companies to support new space vehicles.
That $50 million isn’t from the revised budget, but rather the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (or in more common parlance, the $787 billion federal stimulus package). Nevertheless, NASA chief Charles Bolden said these five companies–Sierra Nevada Corporation, Blue Origin, Boeing, Paragon Space Development Corp., and United Launch Alliance–would play a large part in future plans. “Ladies and gentlemen, these are the faces of the new frontier. The vanguard,” said Bolden. “We will certainly be adding to this group in the near future” [Space.com].
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Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, has been working on top secret rocket plans that may one day carry passengers on suborbital flights that reach just beyond the boundary of outer space. In hush-hush surroundings, the Bezos Blue Origin business plan has been resolute in developing its New Shepard, a vertical takeoff and landing rocket. The plan: To develop a craft that can routinely fly multiple astronauts into suborbital space at competitive prices [SPACE.com]. The flights would reach up to 62 miles in the air, which would allow the passengers to see the blue curve of the Earth (which you, the reader, can see for free atop this post) and experience momentary weightlessness. Bezos has been conducting flight tests on his private Texas ranch, but beyond these general plans, no one really knew what the billionaire might have up his sleeve—until now.
The publicity shy Blue Origin recently announced that it has selected three research payloads—basically zero-G flight experiments—to fly aboard the New Shepard rocket.
The three experiments are:
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With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.
The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)
By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].
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Image: JPL / Microsoft
If NASA ever wants to send astronauts on long-term space flights, it needs to know how radiation will affect the crew. Testing humans obviously isn’t going to happen, so NASA is funding a round of experiments to study how radiation effects monkeys, the first time monkeys have been used as test subjects by NASA in decades. The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield [Discovery News]. The monkey studies will advance previous radiation experiments with rats and mice and will focus on how radiation affects the monkeys’ central nervous system.
Researchers will expose 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys with a small dose of radiation, similar to what astronauts would receive on a round trip flight to Mars. The monkeys, previously trained to perform a variety of tasks, will be tested to see how the exposure affects their performance [Telegraph] at different times after exposure to gamma rays. The monkeys will not be killed during the experiments, and after testing staff and veterinarians will look after them for the rest of their lives at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston.
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A laser-powered robot took a climb up a cable in the Mohave Desert in Wednesday, and pushed ahead the sci-fi inspired notion of a space elevator capable of lifting astronauts, cargo, and even tourists up into orbit. The robot, built by LaserMotive of Seattle, whizzed up 2,953 feet (nearly 1 kilometer) in about four minutes, which qualifies the team for at least $900,000 of the $2 million in prizes offered in the NASA-backed Space Elevator Games.
Theorized in the 1960s and then popularized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” space elevators are envisioned as a way to gain access to space without the risk and expense of rockets. Instead, electrically powered vehicles would run up and down a cable anchored to a ground structure and extending thousands of miles up to a mass in geosynchronous orbit — the kind of orbit communications satellites are placed in to stay over a fixed spot on the Earth [AP].
The LaserMotive vehicle that climbed up the cable (held by a hovering helicopter) was powered by a system that resembles an upside-down solar power mechanism. Laser beams on the ground were fired up at the ascending craft and hit its photovoltaic cells–like those used in solar panels–in a process known as “power beaming.” LaserMotive will have a chance to improve its vehicle’s speed at another trial today, and other teams will also be vying for prizes.
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Image: Space Elevator Games. The LaserMotive vehicle gets weighed in.
NASA’s Ares I-X experimental rocket completed its first test flight—but the successful endeavor ended on a sour note. The rocket’s first booster stage, which splashed down in the ocean as planned six minutes after launch, was found to be significantly dented when divers reached the mammoth cylinder to prep it for retrieval [Scientific American]. A malfunctioning parachute system caused the hard splashdown, according to mission manager Bob Ess. However Ess argued that it’s not a real cause for concern, since test flights are intended to reveal and work out the technology’s glitches.
The Ares I-X was a prototype for the controversial Ares I rocket that may carry astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond once the space shuttle is retired. The rocket’s design calls for the first booster stage to be retrieved after each flight for reuse. While NASA’s main objective on the test flight was to evaluate the rocket booster’s power, the test of the new parachute system was one of several major objectives of the Ares 1-X test flight [Spaceflight Now]. Despite the test flight’s overall success, the parachute system’s failure is a black eye for the $450 million project, since the heavy Ares I booster rocket will be difficult to ease back down to Earth. The booster is being retrieved from the Atlantic Ocean to determine what exactly went wrong with the parachute system.
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Image: NASA
The Russian space agency has proposed a powerful new way to get a spacecraft to Mars or beyond: just put a big ole nuclear reactor on board.
The head of the agency, Anatoly Perminov, just proposed this new class of nuclear-powered spaceships for manned missions to explore our solar system. “The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts” [AP], Perminov wrote in an online statement. He suggested that preliminary designs could be completed by 2012, and said it would then take about nine years and $600 million to build the spacecraft. Some experts call these numbers utterly unrealistic, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev insists that the government is very serious about the project.
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