NASA and the Private Sector - Page 30

On March 03 2013 14:47 Cutlery wrote:
This looks nice and flashy and all, but who is taking care of the base/pure/fundamental research? (or whatever you call it, to build up science from the ground up). This interests me more than who can build the flashiest rockets for the cheapest price.

Got an article where spaceX tries to figure out what dark matter is ?

Astronauts on the International Space Station began unloading cargo from the SpaceX Dragon capsule on Monday, a day after the commercially delivered capsule was attached to the station.

Tom Marshburn, a space station astronaut and flight engineer, opened the hatch to the Dragon on Sunday, enabling Commander Kevin Ford of NASA and Canadian Space Agency Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield to enter the cargo craft.

Ford and Hadfield began unloading 1,268 pounds of Dragon's cargo early Monday. Over the course of the next few weeks, astronauts will then load 2,668 pounds of used items and experiments onto Dragon to be brought back to Earth on March 25.

The commercial SpaceX rocket venture has launched Dragon cargo capsules to the International Space Station three times in the past year, and every time there's been a problem. Should NASA be upset?
Not really.

The fact that glitches have cropped up — and have been solved, with no impact on the multimillion-dollar cargo resupply missions — isn't a black mark against the California-based company. Rather, it's a sign that the designs for SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 are resilient in the face of the inevitable glitches associated with spaceflight. It's also a sign of things to come.

"We may see more mission aborts, where the cost of a mission may be a fraction of the cost of a 'perfect' spacecraft," says James Oberg, NBC News' space analyst. "For the same cost, you could launch three or four, or even eight or 10 'not-perfect' vehicles, with a success rate of 90 to 95 percent. and as a result, for the same starting cost launch many times more missions."

Rand Simberg, a former rocket engineer who now writes about spaceflight for a variety of publications, made a similar point in a PJMedia piece touting SpaceX's latest "successful failure": a problem with the Dragon's thruster system that was resolved when SpaceX's engineers issued commands to cycle the system's valves and clear out the lines with a blast of pressurized gas.

"It was a valuable failure in that it identified a potential problem with either the design or operations but didn't cost them the mission," Simberg wrote. After the system reset, the Dragon's thrusters performed without a hitch. The capsule was brought in for its berthing at the space station on Sunday, just a day later than originally scheduled.

"They did everything exactly right about the vehicle," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told reporters after the thruster system was fixed.

On March 03 2013 15:02 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Perhaps when companies such as Bigelow, SpaceX, Deep Space Industries become bigger, more experienced and more complex they will start to branch out further into R&D. Right now it is just focused on hardware.

A growing roster of Canadian aerospace and mining companies is setting its sights on asteroids as the next frontier for precious metals and reserves of water on the moon that could make it an ideal pit stop on the way to the deeper reaches of space.

That’s what brought several dozen representatives from aerospace and mining companies, as well as geologists, academics and legal experts to the 6th annual conference put on by the Canadian Space Commerce Association (CSCA) at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Thursday.

“It sounds like it’s a new area, but in actual fact, it’s been around for more than a decade, Dale Boucher, director of product design, prototyping and testing at the Northern Centre of Advanced Technologies, a Sudbury-based training and technology development centre for the mining industry.

NORCAT, as the facility is known, has developed rover chassis specifically designed for lunar mining activities. In the last decade, it has developed drills for the Canadian Space Agency and NASA.

There’s no full scale interplanetary mining projects right now. But proponents say the groundwork is being laid. Last month, the Curiosity rover completed its first drill hole on Mars as part of its continuing hunt for signs of life.

Last year, Planetary Resources, a group back by the billionaire founders of Google, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, as well as film maker James Cameron, and Charles Simonyi, former chief software architect at Microsoft announced itself as the world’s first asteroid mining company.

“It will happen and it will happen on an enormous scale. But whether that starts now or in 20 years or 50 years, that’s a lot of what the conference is about,” said Arny Sokoloff, conference organizer and president of the CSCA.

Geologists believe that iron, nickel and precious metals could be mined from asteroids at much higher concentrations than on Earth.

And as humans explore deep space, scientists believe that resources such as water may be gathered for use on the journey. That’s referred to as in-situ resource utilization.

Scientists know that the moon for instance, has huge reserves of water. “If you took that water and broke it into hydrogen and oxygen and used it to refuel the shuttle (which is no longer flying), you could launch one shuttle a day for 2000 years with all the water that’s on the moon,” Boucher said.

In effect, “the moon could be used as a refueling stop for spacecraft headed into deep space, thus reducing the amount of fuel that needs to be lofted out of the Earth’s gravity field,” Mark Whittington, author of Children of Apollo, writes.

Canada has been invited to participate in RESOLVE, a NASA-lead mission that would prospect for water and other resources on the moon.

SpaceX's Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet) today, hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safely using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control.

Grasshopper touched down with its most accurate precision thus far on the centermost part of the launch pad. At touchdown, the thrust to weight ratio of the vehicle was greater than one, proving a key landing algorithm for Falcon 9. Today's test was completed at SpaceX's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

Grasshopper, SpaceX's vertical and takeoff and landing (VTVL) vehicle, continues SpaceX's work toward one of its key goals - developing fully and rapidly reusable rockets, a feat that will transform space exploration by radically reducing its cost. With Grasshopper, SpaceX engineers are testing the technology that would enable a launched rocket to land intact, rather than burning up upon reentry to the Earth's atmosphere.

This is Grasshopper's fourth in a series of test flights, with each test demonstrating exponential increases in altitude. Last September, Grasshopper flew to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet), in November, it flew to 5.4 meters (17.7 feet) and in December, it flew to 40 meters (131 feet).

By Mike Loucks, John Carrico and Dennis Tito: Dennis Wingo provided some comments for us in his article Inspiration Mars: Some Thoughts About Their Plan. Dennis Wingo is a friend of ours. We welcome input from any source, especially visionaries like Dennis.

Our IEEE Paper is an attempt to show the feasibility of the simplest possible Mars flyby mission. We chose a simple Mars flyby trajectory (the one from the Patel reference), and will choose a simple ECLSS, heat shield, etc., using existing designs and technologies on a single launch. We may eventually deviate from these assumptions, but only when we have proven that we must.

The paper is not an attempt to flush out every feasible technology that could be made available in the next 5 years nor does it contain all analysis that has been done by the Inspiration Mars team. Our paper represents the work-in-progress that had been done when the paper's deadline for peer-review came. We added additional details for the IEEE conference last week, and more will come out in the following weeks. We intend for our process to be open and public, and invite input from all sources.

We have a very experienced and savvy trajectory team, and we are aware of most of the technologies and trajectory options available. We explored those options when they were relevant, dismissed some that we felt were not, and left others for analysis at a later date.

Hawthorne, CA – Space Exploration Technologies’ (SpaceX) Merlin 1D engine has achieved flight qualification, a major milestone for the next generation Merlin engine. Through a 28 test qualification program, the Merlin 1D accumulated 1,970 seconds of total test time, the equivalent run time of over 10 full mission durations, and is now fully qualified to fly on the Falcon 9 rocket.

The program included four tests at or above the power (147,000 pounds of thrust) and duration (185 seconds) required for a Falcon 9 rocket launch. The Merlin 1D engine was also tested at propellant inlet and operating conditions that were well outside the bounds of expected flight conditions.

SpaceX's testing program demonstrated a ratio of 4:1 for critical engine life parameters such as firing duration and restart capacity to the engine's expected flight requirements. The industry standard is 2:1.

“The Merlin 1D successfully performed every test throughout this extremely rigorous qualification program,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and chief designer. “With flight qualification now complete, we look forward to flying the first Merlin 1D engines on Falcon 9’s Flight 6 this year.”

The Merlin 1D builds on the technology of the Merlin engines used on the first five flights of Falcon 9. With nine Merlin 1Ds on the first stage, the Falcon 9 rocket will produce nearly 1.5 million pounds of thrust in a vacuum. The Merlin 1D has a vacuum thrust-to-weight ratio exceeding 150, the best of any liquid rocket engine in history. This enhanced design makes the Merlin 1D the most efficient booster engine ever built, while still maintaining the structural and thermal safety margins needed to carry astronauts. Additionally, the new engine is designed for improved manufacturability by using higher efficiency processes, increased robotic construction and reduced parts count.

Testing took place at SpaceX's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

Business deals don’t get much bigger than this one. Have you ever read a contract that gives a governmental green light to a program to “place a base on the surface of the moon?” Ever see an agreement signed by the U.S. government that declares a specific goal “to extend and sustain human activities across the solar system?” Me, either.

Yet that is essence of an adventurous deal already reached between NASA and Las Vegas space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow. An official announcement is still a few days away and will likely happen during a news conference at NASA headquarters. In the meantime, I have a draft copy of what could be an historic contract, one that reads like a Kubrick screenplay or an Arthur C. Clarke story. It is flat-out otherworldly.

Bigelow made his fortune building apartment buildings and weekly-rental hotel rooms in Las Vegas. In 1999, he launched what must have seemed a pipe dream at the time — his own private space program. But within a few short years he stunned the aerospace world by launching two of his own locally built spacecraft, both of which still circle the Earth (and one of which contains my weightless, floating business card). The focus of Bigelow Aerospace is an expandable module, small and light enough to make for less expensive launches but so strong and durable when expanded to full size that it accomplishes what NASA has been unable to do on its own: It puts more space in space, that is, more room for companies and governments to work, live and conduct research.

Back in January, NASA bigwigs came to Bigelow’s main plant to announce a landmark deal that calls for one of Bigelow’s modules to be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) within two years. Bigelow used that occasion to let slip some even bigger news — the fact that he is spending $250 million of his own money to build a private space station, larger than the ISS, and that he plans to have it in low-Earth orbit by 2016. What few knew at the time was that he was secretly negotiating an even bigger deal with NASA, one that represents a fundamental, across-the-board change in our approach to space.

NASA has been coasting for a long time, kept alive by the now-distant memory of the moon landings and less spectacular but more important missions such as the Hubble and unmanned probes to Mars and beyond. Basically, NASA has become a job-protection racket, spending public dollars on programs and ideas that always seem to get cancelled. For instance, we spent tens of billions on the ISS but no longer have a way to get there.

The long-term answer has been well-known to NASA and the private space industry for a long time: Figure out how NASA can get out of the way and help private companies take the next step by commercializing space. Make it profitable for Americans to be up there, doing things that will ultimately benefit Earth. Few individuals in the aerospace world have been more critical of NASA than Bigelow, which makes the pending agreement all the more remarkable.

Orbital Sciences Corporation Sunday launched its Antares rocket at 05:00 p.m. EDT from the new Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The test flight was the first launch from the pad at Wallops and was the first flight of Antares, which delivered the equivalent mass of a spacecraft, a so-called mass simulated payload, into Earth's orbit.

"Today's successful test marks another significant milestone in NASA's plan to rely on American companies to launch supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, bringing this important work back to the United States where it belongs," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Congratulations to Orbital Sciences and the NASA team that worked alongside them for the picture-perfect launch of the Antares rocket. In addition to providing further evidence that our strategic space exploration plan is moving forward, this test also inaugurates America's newest spaceport capable of launching to the space station, opening up additional opportunities for commercial and government users.

"President Obama has presented a budget for next year that ensures the United States will remain the world leader in space exploration, and a critical part of this budget is the funding needed to advance NASA's commercial space initiative. In order to stop outsourcing American space launches, we need to have the President's budget enacted. It's a budget that's good for our economy, good for the U.S. Space program -- and good for American taxpayers."

The test of the Antares launch system began with the rocket's rollout and placement on the launch pad April 6, and culminated with the separation of the mass simulator payload from the rocket.

"SpaceX's Grasshopper flies 820 feet, tripling its March 7th leap. Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle that SpaceX has designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact. While most rockets are designed to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, SpaceX's rockets are being designed to return to the launch pad for a vertical landing."

The Mars Rover "Spirit" may be gone, but it left us something special to remember it by: a drawing of a giant penis on the surface of the red planet.

It is perhaps the most impressive bit of peen graffiti ever created, and yet it wasn't created by human hands. It's not even here on Earth, in fact, but on Mars, thanks to the efforts of the Mars Rover "Spirit," which did a little spinning and burning in appropriate places to leave its mark on the surface of the planet - and by "leave its mark," I mean "drew a picture of a giant wang." It's legit, too; the image appeared on the Mars Exploration Rovers page of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website.

And so it sat, harmlessly, until a sharp-eyed reader spied the thing and uploaded it to Reddit with the caption, "Mars Rover = $800m, Team to operate = $1bn. Drawing a penis on the surface of another planet = priceless." The sudden surge of viewers that followed was enough to crash the JPL site for awhile, but NASA was cool about it and even demonstrated a sense of humor by uploading a higher resolution version of the image after the site was back online.

Alas, the giant space schlong was not the result of a rogue AI or a NASA engineer with too much time on his hands. "The truth is much more prosaic. The phallic shape naturally resulted when the six-wheeled Spirit, which was declared dead in 2010, made a turn," Space.com explained. "NASA's currently active Mars rovers - Spirit's twin Opportunity and the much larger Curiosity - have also made similar tracks on the Red Planet."

That's a little disappointing, but on the bright side it means there are actually multiple giant wangs scrawled across the surface of Mars, surely a fitting tribute to humanity's ingenuity. It opens the door to some potentially great new slogans, too. "NASA: We take pics, we leave dicks."

Yeah, I'd be cool with my tax dollars funding that.

Good news for all you frugal travelers out there: A private startup's manned moon missions could end up costing around $500 million per seat instead of the originally advertised $750 million.

The Golden Spike company, which aims to start flying paying customers to the lunar surface and back by 2020, has pegged the cost of these two-person trips at about $1.5 billion. But the company plans to bring the per-seat ticket price down considerably by staging an Olympics-like media spectacle around each mission.

"We think that we can lower the effective ticket price, by selling the air time, the naming rights and the merchandising rights to these missions, by between 20 and 30 percent — by creating that other revenue stream and sharing it with our customers," Golden Spike president and CEO Alan Stern told reporters Thursday (April 11) at the 29th National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. [Golden Spike's Manned Moon Plans (Photos)]

Golden Spike's main customers will probably be corporations and countries, Stern said, adding that the company's services should be particularly attractive to nations without big-time space programs.

"We can offer a tremendous scientific expedition, tremendous national pride — a step up in planetary exploration for countries that are otherwise in the minor leagues of spaceflight," said Stern, a former NASA science chief who is also principal investigator of the agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto.

NASA has not had the ability to send astronauts to the International Space Station since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, and that's not going to change anytime soon. A plan to replace the shuttle by paying for rides on commercial spacecraft from SpaceX, Boeing or several other private companies has been delayed from its original 2015 anticipated start date due to budget cuts, NASA announced today. Instead, NASA has extended a contract with the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), paying another $424 million to allow US astronauts to fly aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft through 2016, and to return them or provide rescue services through 2017. That comes out to about $63 million per seat, while SpaceX estimates it will be able to fly astronauts at a cost of $20 million per seat.

Although this type of contract extension with Russia is far from new (NASA has signed extensions for Russian space transportation services several times since the original contract was inked in 2009), the move is a blow to NASA and its commercial crew partners. "While our Russian counterparts have been good partners, it is unacceptable that we don't currently have an American capability to launch our own astronauts," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement released on NASA's website today. "Because the funding for the President's plan has been significantly reduced, we now won’t be able to support American launches until 2017." Bolden called upon Congress to approve President Obama's budget request of $821 million for NASA's commercial crew program or risk further delays in getting NASA astronauts off the ground on American-made spacecraft. That's a $300 million increase from funding approved in fiscal year 2013, but closer to the $850 million NASA originally asked for.