Spaceports will enable thousands of people from around the world to go to outer space. The Spaceports Blog endeavors to provide information linking those with interest in the pursuit of space to spaceport development and the people and vehicles that fly from them.
On Thursday, thousands [nearly 5,000] of Southwest Virginia schoolchildren took a trip to space.
Well, sort of.
In a $40,000 event paid for by a host of local sponsors, children bused from seven different localities had the chance to speak with astronauts on the International Space Station via video downlink for about 20 minutes Thursday morning [while hearing and meeting private astronaut Anousheh Ansari and NASA astronaut Leland Melvin and Robonaut-2 (video).
On January 27, 1967, tragedy struck the Apollo program when a flash fire occurred in command module 012 during a launch pad test of the Apollo/Saturn space vehicle being prepared for the first piloted flight, the AS-204 mission. Three astronauts, Lt. Col. Virgil I. Grissom, a veteran of Mercury and Gemini missions; Lt. Col. Edward H. White, the astronaut who had performed the first United States extravehicular activity during the Gemini program; and Roger B. Chaffee, an astronaut preparing for his first space flight, died in this tragic accident.
An unmanned Russian cargo ship launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a two-day trip to deliver almost three tons of food, fuel and supplies to the six crew members on the International Space Station. The ISS Progress 46 resupply craft launched in near zero-degree weather from Baikonur at 6:06 p.m. EST on Jan. 25 (5:06 a.m. on Jan. 26 Baikonur time). The spacecraft is scheduled to dock to the station's Pirs Docking Compartment on Jan. 27, 2012.
The final Thursday in January of every year is a "Day of Remembrance" for the 17 fallen astronauts of Apollo-1, Space Shuttles Challenger 51-L and Columbia STS-107 within and outside the NASA community. The Day of Remembrance will be acknowledged on January 26, 2012 in Wise, VA.
At the University of Virginia's College at Wise, there will be a pause to reflect upon both the past, the present, and the future with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle, high and college students.
Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA's enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago. Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At Endeavour's rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an earlier period of Martian history than anything it examined during its first seven years.
Opportunity landed in Eagle Crater on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, three weeks after its rover twin, Spirit, landed halfway around the planet. In backyard-size Eagle Crater, Opportunity found evidence of an ancient wet environment. The mission met all its goals within the originally planned span of three months.
During most of the next four years, it explored successively larger and deeper craters, adding evidence about wet and dry periods from the same era as the Eagle Crater deposits. In mid-2008, researchers drove Opportunity out of Victoria Crater, half a mile in diameter, and set course for Endeavour Crater, 14 miles in diameter. The trek took three years. In a push to finish it, Opportunity drove farther during its eighth year on Mars -- 4.8 miles -- than in any prior year, bringing its total driving distance to 21.4 miles.
Parents are encouraged to attend alongside their children for an unique space exploration exhibit next Thursday in the convocation center of the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. The morning will feature a live downlink with astronauts on the International Space Station and museum quality NASA exhibits, depicting several milestones of the country’s past and present space excursions. Activities will begin at 9 a.m. with the live downlink set for 9:25 to 9:45 AM. The downlink will be carried on NASA-TV and webcast.
Close to 4,000 students in fourth, sixth and ninth grades in Wise, Lee, Scott, Dickenson and Russell counties and Norton, as well as Wise County Christian School, UVa-Wise and Mountain Empire Community College have been invited to attend. Seventeen students will have an opportunity to ask questions to astronauts on the space station during the live video link.
Gov. Bob McDonnell will also appear via Skype and US Senator Mark R. Warner is sending a video message to the students. Two former astronauts, Anousheh Ansari and Leland Melvin, will also attend and talk about their own space flight experiences. Dr. Bille Reed will talk about the launches being planned this year to the ISS from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, VA.
Exhibits will include a moon rock from the Apollo 14 mission and a full-scale model of Robonaut 2 (R2), a humanoid robot sent to the space station last year. Adam Sanders, a graduate of Powell Valley High School and the University of Virginia, was the lead software engineer on the R2 project. PC Magazine has recently rated R2 as among the Top 10 Research Projects to Watch in 2012.
There will also be a lunar globe, lunar space suit and full-scale model of the Mars Science Laboratory rover "Curiosity", which will arrive on Mars this coming August. The rover was launched late last year to determine whether the planet has ever been able to support life and whether it could in the future.
If the reader is within a two-to-three hour drive from this event in Wise, Virginia (near Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee and Western North Carolina), it is one not to miss as a human space flight, robotics, or lunar exploration enthusiast. Call 276.328.6111 for more information today.
Meanwhile, the Russians are preparing for the launch of Progress-46 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station Wednesday, January 25 to dock at the ISS on January 27, 2012 with additional cargo and supplies.
As expected, the first of the two Florida pre-primary debates touched upon space policy. The debate between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, the two leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, pointed to the growth potential within the emerging NewSpace commercial space sector - one preparing to provide commercial cargo resupply to the International Space Station this year.
Romney says the space exploration should be a priority. He’s calling on NASA to partner with the military and private business interests and educational institutions to help pay for it.
Gingrich wants to offer the private sector special prizes. He says that such incentives, as opposed to a government spending, would help Americans go back to the moon, explore Mars, and develop extraterrestrial space exploration. Gingrich says the prizes could create a romantic and exciting future for the space program.
Romney has been critical of Gingrich's space proposals in past debates mocking his interest in mining the moon for minerals or space-based solar power, ideas that Gingrich has embraced in books and articles previously authored.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum did not get the journalist question on space policy at the Monday night debate; however, the second debate may result in enhanced journalist questioning about the multi-billion dollar civil, commercial and military space spending and programs.
In past debates, the four remaining candidates have failed to indicate their support for the federal government to fund NASA to design and build a successor for the space shuttle. Instead, Gingrich and Romney point to commercial fixed price commercial service contracting, instead of government designed cost-plus contracting models.
Russian ISS Progress 46 will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with NASA providing live television and internet coverage at 5:45 PM EST, Wednesday January 25, 2012. The is scheduled for 6:06 p.m. EST on Jan. 25 (5:06 a.m. Baikonur time Jan. 26).
The next broadcast of the re-supply mission to the ISS will occur 2 days later, on Friday, Jan. 27. At that time, NASA television will carry the live images from space as the Progress 46 will automatically dock to the Pirs Docking Compartment at 7:08 p.m. The unpiloted cargo craft will deliver 2,050 pounds of propellant, 110 pounds of oxygen and air, 926 pounds of water and 2,778 pounds of maintenance and experiment hardware for the station crew.
Dr. Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai (12 August 1919-31 December 1971) was an Indian physicist. The establishment of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was one of his greatest achievements. Dr. Sarabhai successfully convinced the Indian government of the importance of a space program for a developing country like India after the Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957.
India today has one of the stronger emerging space programs with a strong remote sensing satellite capability, including a developing lunar and human space efforts.
Colorful gullies in a fresh impact crater, gullies in Bamberg Crater on Mars, tongue-shaped flow below a scarp in Phlegra Montes and the floor of Beer Crater are highlighted in these recent images. The impact crater has an extremely eroded and terraced rim.
However, the gullies do not have extensive aprons and overall there appears to be very little material accumulated on the crater floor -- unlike many other craters with gullies. This may indicate the gullies are young features. Gully formation on Mars is still not completely understood, and more information and observations are needed to improve our interpretation of these unique features.
Students at Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana won a nationwide contest to re-name the twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory spacecraft formerly known as GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B. The winning names -- 'Ebb' and 'Flow'. The spacecraft have been in orbit around the moon since New Year's Day -- collecting data to create a gravity map of the moon. Also, Moving Earth for the new home of Space Shuttle Atlantis, The Invention Challenge, Astronaut Cady Coleman in Cleveland, a new App to keep track of meteors and more.
The abrupt flush presidential campaign of former Speaker Newt Gingrich provides an opportunity to begin an active and serious discussion of the nation's space policy between tonight's primary victory and the close of the January 31st Florida presidential primary.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has been critical of Speaker Gingrich for being supportive of a public-private partnership to build a lunar mining colony and build private-sector space-based solar power projects. Romney will have to explain more of his previous space policy critique of Gingrich in the large civil, military and commercial space state.
The space policy debate, largely centered between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, will begin to take a more mainstream center stage along the Interstate 4 highway in Central Florida where thousands of space-related jobs have been lost the past two-to-three years. The real question now is if the mainstream media will enable a real space policy debate with meaningful questions.
While the Florida primary may help start the debate, especially between Gingrich and Romney, the Sunshine state will be "in play" for its electoral votes in the fall General Election. Defining space policy in Florida is important to state voters and the President does understand the importance. Commercial space states Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado will also be critical electoral vote states "in play" this fall. The four critical swing states do have significant aerospace economies.
The politics of 2012 will demand the presidential candidates to talk commercial, civil and military space policy regardless of the candidate's personal desires. It can not be mocked as a sideshow or a joke any more. Newt Skywalker, or not - his South Carolina victory may result in launching a more serious space policy debate.
A look back at the crew and mission of the European, Russian and Chinese Mars 500 simulated Mars planetary mission for 520 days. The search for post-flight effect continue at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia.
For 17 months six volunteers took part in the first full-length, high-fidelity simulation of a human mission to our neighbouring planet. The international crew, two Europeans, three Russains and a Chinese, were isolated in a spacecraft mock-up.They were faithfully following the phases of a real mission: a long flight to Mars, insertion into orbit around the planet, landing, surface exploration, return to orbit, a monotonous return trip and arrival at Earth. Americans did not participate in the unique and highly publicized experiment.
During the flight, the crew performed more than 100 experiments, all linked to the problems of long-duration missions in deep space.
Russia's Space Agency's announced ambitious plans to step up exploration of the Moon and has even called for the creation of a permanent base there. Roscosmos says it'll also boost cooperation with its partners in the US and the European Union. RT's Peter Oliver brings more on the lunar plans proposed.
Lunar colonization has been an ambition of many-a-space pioneer and one of science fiction's most prevalent themes. Because of its proximity to Earth, the Moon has been seen as a prime candidate for the location of humanity's first permanently occupied extraterrestrial base in the first-half of the 21st century.
Compilation video of NASA's field tests - Lunar Surface Systems.
When planners consider the robotic technologies needed on the surface of the Moon to commence the first human outpost, human skills must be considered for the first missions. Interaction with electronics, robots, surface mining and building skills must be considered as prime mission skills for the human crew.
In the next twenty-years, perhaps the NextGeneration of lunar explorers will have to have construction engineering and mining engineering backgrounds to operate in the lunar environment. Of course, there will be the need for lunar spacecraft pilots, doctors, nutritionists, biologists and other careers, especially as a surface colony grows in scale.
Astronauts (commercial or government) will need power sources when they return to the moon and establish a lunar outpost. NASA engineers are exploring the possibility of nuclear fission to provide the necessary power and taking initial steps toward a non-nuclear technology demonstration of this type of system.
NASA Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) requires a Human Robotic Systems project. The effort requires development of technologies for surface mobility and equipment handling, human-system interaction, and lunar surface system repair. Dexterous robots and autonomous rovers that can traverse rough terrain will help the crew explore, assemble, and maintain the lunar outpost.
Colorado’s biggest obstacle in becoming a center of commercial space travel is not a lack of infrastructure or marketing, but the threat of injury-related lawsuits, economic development leaders believe. So, the 2012 Colorado General Assembly (state legislature) may join Virginia, Florida, New Mexico and Texas with a liability limit on human space travel - known as the Colorado Space Jobs Act.
With the Front Range Airport in Colorado applying for Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) designation to become a commercial spaceport, Colorado state Sen. Mary Hodge, D-Brighton, has introduced a bill that would limit liability for any space-travel company that gets customers to sign an injury waiver, reports Ed Sealover at the Denver Business Journal.
Virginia was the first state to adopt a spaceflight liability waiver in 2007, followed by Florida in 2008, New Mexico in 2010, and Texas in 2011. If Colorado enacted a similar measure, ten percent of the states will then limit the exposure of commercial spaceflight companies as to passenger liability, thereby negating more costly insurance.
Perhaps, California or Hawaii may be next to adopt the spaceflight passenger liability waiver in 2013. Or, in the alternate, will the Federal government give states designated jurisdiction to uphold the state laws from subsequent challenge. There does appear momentum building in the states for federal recognition of state jurisdiction.
Winter seems to have been on hold this year in some parts of the United States. Snowfall has been scarce in places that were overwhelmed with the white stuff at the same time last year. In this ScienceCast, JPL climatologist Bill Patzert explains what's going on.
Earth from Space is presented by Kelsea Brennan-Wessels from the ESA Web-TV virtual studios. In the seventh edition, we examine an image showing graceful golden curves - can you guess what they are? The ESA video discusses satellite remote sensing for minerals.
NASA will join the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and high school student teams from the U.S. and abroad for the third annual Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge on Monday, Jan. 23. The event will take place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass., and be broadcast live on NASA Television from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST.
For the competition, NASA will upload software developed by high school students onto Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites (SPHERES), which are bowling ball-sized spherical satellites aboard the International Space Station. The top 27 teams from previous competitions will have their code sent Monday to the space station, where an astronaut will command the satellites to execute the teams' flight program. During a simulated mission, the teams will complete a special challenge inspired by future satellite technologies, such as formation flight and close proximity operations.
Student finalists will be able to see their flight program live in the televised finals. The team with the highest software performance over several rounds of the competition will win the challenge. The winning team will be awarded certificates and a SPHERES flight patch that was flown to the space station.
In addition to their use in this competition, the satellites are used inside the space station to conduct formation flight maneuvers for spacecraft guidance navigation, control and docking. The three separate satellites that make up SPHERES fly in formation inside the space station's cabin. The satellites provide opportunities to test a wide range of hardware and software at an affordable cost. (NASA)
Moon Express Inc. is a Google Lunar X PRIZE Team based at NASA-Ames Research Park and partnered with NASA-Ames on lunar lander development.
Moon Express plans to fly a series of robotic commercial lunar landing missions. These missions will carry scientific, educational, and commercial payloads to the lunar surface, beginning in late 2013 with Moon Express-1 (ME-1). Moon Express is also now soliciting payloads for ME-2, to fly in 2014/2015.
Several payloads are already under agreement to fly on ME-1 but open payload space remains on ME-1, and ME-2 has not yet begun to fill.
Moon Express seeks to discuss payload flight opportunities with funded US or overseas PIs and organizations with research or educational payloads that can be ready for launch aboard ME-1 in late 2013, as well as PIs/organizations interested in proposing to NASA, NSF, or other agencies/sources for the ME-2 launch in 2014/2015. Those interested should be in contact with Dr. Alan Stern.
NASA's twin GRAIL spacecraft have new names, thanks to some enthusiastic 4th graders from Bozeman, Montana who reveal the names in dramatic fashion. The two spacecraft were previously known as GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, now Ebb and Flow.
The students came up with the name and wrote the winning essay in this nationwide contest. As a prize, they will be the first classroom to target the MoonKAM cameras on board the spacecraft. The complete press conference below.
In the past two decades, astronomers have made a truly revolutionary discovery: that the cosmos is not only expanding, but is doing so at an ever-faster rate. The discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Year of Space 2011 in spectacular pictures from spacecraft exploration and cosmic observations set to the music of the Future Sound of London (FSLO). Delightful living in the golden age of cosmology and astrophysics, the period from 1992 to the present in which important advances in observational cosmology have been made.
While the data is pouring down from the heavens, in large part from 14 state-of-the-art NASA space telescopes, each represented in a timeline below, the future of space-based observations are not as bright as they have been in the last decade as one looks into the future. Significant space-based assets could be lost over he next five years due to age or inability to repair. The 2020 vision may fade to black.
The cornucopia of observation astronomy is about to come to a grinding, abrupt halt. The next few years are going to see a rapid decline in the number of observatories in space without more modern replacement. Space astronomy missions take years, if not multiple decades, to plan, finance and execute. They are Big Science.
The James Webb Space Telescope, an international collaboration of about 17 countries, is running behind schedule and extremely over budget. The JWST launch date is now expected between 2018 and 2021 at a price tag of $8-billion, at least four times more than originally proposed.
Two projects on the drawing boards, the NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) was cancelled and the ESA's Darwin was cancelled earlier. Both were being designed to look for Earth-like planet candidates. Unfortunately, neither effort will see first light.
The Joint Dark Energy Mission-Omega (JDEM) or WFIRST is a proposed 1.5-metre telescope with a 144-megapixel HgCdTe focal plane array, located at the L2 Lagrange point; the expected cost is around $1.6 billion for development and operation targeted for 2020. Whether it makes it to space is suspect.
Jack Lissauer lecture at the SETI Institute: "Who Needs the Moon?"
Lissauer is an American research scientist who has worked for the NASA's Ames Research Center since 1996. He is a science co-investigator on the Kepler space telescope mission. His primary research interests are the formation of planetary systems, planetary dynamics and chaos, planetary ring systems, and circumstellar/protoplanetary disks. He a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982.
We have numerically explored the obliquity variations of a hypothetical moonless Earth using a range of initial conditions and extending our calculations for up to 4 billion years. We find that while obliquity varies significantly more than that of the actual Earth over 100,000 year timescales, the obliquity remains within a constrained range, typically 20-25 degrees in extent, for timescales of hundreds of millions of years. Retrograde planets' obliquities are more stable than that of the real Earth. So having a large moon may not be needed for a planet to be habitable.
New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project(LAMP) aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed features of the Moon’s northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible.
The LAMP team estimates that the loss of water frost is about 16 times slower than previously believed. In addition, the accumulation of water frost is also likely to be highly dependent on local conditions, such as temperature, thermal cycling and even geologically recent “impact gardening” in which micrometeoroid impacts redistribute the location and depth of volatile compounds.
Finding water frost at these new locations adds to a rapidly improving understanding of the Moon’s water and related species, as discovered by three other space missions through near-infrared emissions observations and found buried within the Cabeus crater by the LCROSS impactor over two years ago.
Mountain Empire Community College will host a pre-International Space Station downlink gathering on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at the Goodlow Center on the Big Stone Gap, Virginia campus from 10 AM to 12:30 PM featuring Robonaut-2 software engineer Adam Sanders and NASA Langley mechanical engineer Amanda Cutright.
Sanders, a native of Big Stone Gap and 2006 University of Virginia graduate, will discuss his work at General Motors supporting Robonaut-2 during its development by NASA in Houston, Texas. He worked as “the lead architect for the human-machine interface and task programming language." He previously served as "the principal engineer for the power distribution monitoring and control hardware, firmware, and software for the robot.”R2 has been aboard the International Space Station since being launched on a space shuttle last year. Sanders now is the lead software architect at Euclid Innovations.
Cutright, a native of Hampton, will discuss her work at the NASA Langley Research Center relating to the the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) and Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE 3) projects being developed to land spacecraft on Mars. She transferred to the "space brakes" project after having previously worked on the NASA Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (Orion). Cartright, a graduate of Virginia Tech and Old Dominion University, has been honored for her advanced mechanical engineering work at NASA.
The Mountain Empire Community College-sponsored event will precede the International Space Station live in-flight downlink starting at the University of Virginia's College at Wise convocation center beginning at 9 AM, Thursday, January 26, 2012. The event will feature NASA Associate Administrator Leland Melvin and the first private female space explorer, Anousheh Ansari.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich seeks bold space program while Willard Romney mocks Gingrich ideas of space and lunar mining efforts.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, campaigning in Florida for the January 31, 2012 primary, has endorsed a "bold" space program.
The former U.S. House speaker told the Orlando Sentinel editorial board he wants America to "reclaim [the] vision" expressed in President John F. Kennedy's 1961 call for the United States to lead exploration of space. "I love the romance of space," Gingrich said. "I love the idea of going out there. I love the idea of [following] John F. Kennedy's speech on why we should go to the moon."
Gingrich clearly hopes his views on space will distinguish him from his five GOP rivals and especially front-runner Willard Mitt Romney, who recently mocked him for wanting to colonize the moon in a presidential debate in Iowa.
Gingrich said NASA must be "more realistic about risk taking," both for itself and in encouraging the private space industry, including offering large cash prizes to entrepreneurs willing to invest in new space technology, including a private space station, moon colonization and a trip to Mars.
"People take risks to climb Mt. Everest. People take risks to hang-glide. People take risks to do lots of things," Gingrich said. "If you offer a more open-ended system, you say, 'Here's the prize to get there but we understand it's risky,' I think you'll see a lot more people investing and taking risks."
Appointed by Virginia's Governor to the board of directors of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority and to membership of the Virginia Aerospace Advisory Council,
Jack has taken active interest in space public policy especially in Virginia. He is also an elected "ADVOCATE" of the Space Frontier Foundation. The SFF presented him the "In Service of the Frontier Award" in 2009.
Jack holds a B.Sc., B.A., M.A., M.Sc. J.D.
One may contact Jack by dialing [276] 275-4700; or via e-Mail: Jack [at] JackKennedy.NET.
