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Moon or Asteroid? NASA's Next Giant Leap Depends On Who'll Be President

2012-01-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer

The United States may start working toward establishing a moon colony by 2020, or an asteroid may remain the next target for manned exploration; it depends on who wins this November's presidential election.

America's space policy tends to change on four- or eight-year cycles, often shifting dramatically when a new commander-in-chief is sworn in. With the next election less than 10 months away, it appears that incumbent Democrat Barack Obama will take on one of two Republicans — former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney or former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Romneyand Gingrich are currently leading the Republican primaries, ahead of Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.

Here's a brief look at the vision the president and each of the two Republican frontrunners have professed for NASA and the nation's space activities.

Barack Obama: The Status Quo President Obama announced his adminstration's space policy in 2010, one year after taking office. The plan called for a radical change in direction for NASA.

Obama cancelled George W. Bush's Constellation program, which had instructed NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. Instead, Obama directed the space agency to focus on getting humans to an asteroid by 2025, then on to Mars by the mid-2030s.

The president's vision entails, in part, the development of a new heavy-lift rocket. In response, NASA has begun working on a booster called the Space Launch System, which it hopes will be operational by late 2021.

Obama's policy also seeks to jump-start commercial spaceflight capabilitites. Since the space-shuttle fleet was grounded last year, NASA has relied on Russian Soyuz vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

But over the long haul, Obama wants private American spaceships to take over this taxi role. So the president promised NASA an extra $6 billion over five years, which the agency would use to help companies develop these new craft.

NASA has said it hopes some of these commercial vehicles will be up and running by 2017 or so.

Newt Gingrich: Grand Plans Newt Gingrich has big ideas for American spaceflight, which he laid out in a speech Wednesday (Jan. 25) on Florida's Space Coast.

The self-professed space geek said that, if elected president, he would push for a permanent manned lunar colony by 2020. He also wants a bustling commercial spaceflight industry by that year, as well as a next-generation propulsion system capable of sending astronauts to Mars quickly and efficiently.

But Gingrich wouldn't count on NASA to make all of this happen. Instead, he would look to develop the capabilities of private industry by establishing a system of cash prizes. As an example, he said he'd propose a $10-billion prize for the first company or entity to get a human to Mars.

"You put up a bunch of interesting prizes, you're going to have so many people showing up who want to fly, it's going to be unbelievable," Gingrich said. "So the model I want us to build is largely the model of the '20s and '30s, when the government was actively encouraging development [in the aviation industry], but the government wasn't doing it."

Gingrich announced he would set aside 10 percent of NASA's budget to help fund these prizes. He seems keen to cut the space agency's funding overall, saying repeatedly that he wants NASA to be "leaner" and less bureaucratic.

Mitt Romney: Steering NASA By Committee Mitt Romney hasn't been as voluble on space policy as Gingrich, but he shares his Republican rival's desire to shift more of the spaceflight burden from NASA to private industry.

In fact, Romney wants the business community to help chart NASA's course and provide part of its funding. At a Republican primary debate in Florida on Monday (Jan. 23), he suggested that leaders from the private sector, academia and the military should work together with the president and NASA officials to map out the nation's space activities.

"Bring them together, discuss a wide range of options for NASA, and then have NASA not just funded by the federal government but also by commercial enterprises," Romney said. "Let's have a collaborative effort, with business, with government, with the military as well as with our educational institutions."

Compared with a Gingrich presidency, a Romney administration would likely place less weight on exploring and exploiting the final frontier. However, the former Massachusetts governor has said that he views space exploration as a priority.

We need to "have a mission, once again excite our young people about the potential of space, and the commercial potential will pay for itself down the road," Romney said.

CALLING ALL VISIONARIES

These presidential hopefuls are following in the footsteps of past leaders by declaring sweeping visions for our nation's space program. Most famously, John F. Kennedy said on May 25, 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

Those words prompted a countrywide push to carry out the Apollo program, culminating in the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969.

Ever since, leaders have been trying to reproduce the Kennedy effect.

"I have been puzzled for years by a statement that goes something like, 'If we just had a president with the vision and foresight of John F. Kennedy to announce a bold space initiative, all would be well with NASA,'" said Roger Launius, space history curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

The problem is that Apollo succeeded because of the very specific political, technological and economic environment of the time, Launius said. It's not necessarily for a lack of vision that NASA hasn't quite reached those heights since.

"We have had those national leaders who made those bold proclamations," Launius told SPACE.com in an email. "Twenty years to the day after the Apollo 11 landing, President George H.W. Bush made another Kennedy-like speech announcing the ambitious Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) that was intended to return people to the moon by 2000, establish a lunar base, and then, using the space station and the moon, reach Mars by 2010. The price tag for this effort was estimated at a whopping $400 billion over two decades and the initiative never gained traction in Congress or with the American people."

That president's son tried again 15 years later.

"On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush performed essentially a reenactment of his father by announcing a 'Vision for Space Exploration' that called for humans to reach the moon and Mars during the next thirty years. It did not gain much political or funding support either," said Launius.

Whether Obama's, Gingrich's, or Romney's plans will succeed remains to be seen.

SPACE.com assistant managing editor Clara Moskowitz contributed to this report. You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Saturn's Moon Titan May Be More Earth-Like Than Thought

2012-01-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

Saturn's moon Titan may be more similar to an Earth-like world than previously thought, possessing a layered atmosphere just like our planet, researchers said.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere. A better understanding of how its hazy, soupy atmosphere works could shed light on similar ones scientists might find on alien planets and moons. However, conflicting details about how Titan's atmosphere is structured have emerged over the years.

The lowest layer of any atmosphere, known as its boundary layer, is most influenced by a planet or moon's surface. It in turn most influences the surface with clouds and winds, as well as by sculpting dunes.

"This layer is very important for the climate and weather — we live in the terrestrial boundary layer," said study lead author Benjamin Charnay, a planetary scientist at France's National Center of Scientific Research.

Earth's boundary layer, which is between 1,650 feet and 1.8 miles (500 meters and 3 kilometers) thick, is controlled largely by solar heat warming the planet's surface. Since Titan is much further away from the sun, its boundary layer might behave quite differently, but much remains uncertain about it — Titan's atmosphere is thick and opaque, confusing what we know about its lower layers. [Amazing Photos of Titan]

For instance, while the Voyager 1 spacecraft suggested Titan's boundary layer was about 2 miles (3.5 km) thick, the Huygens probe that plunged through Titan's atmosphere saw it as only about 1,000 feet (300 m) thick.

To help solve these mysteries about Titan's atmosphere, scientists developed a 3D climate model of how it might respond to solar heat over time.

"The most important implication of these findings is that Titan appears closer to an Earth-like world than once believed," Charnay told SPACE.com.

Their simulations revealed the lower atmosphere of Titan appears separated into two layers that are both distinct from the upper atmosphere in terms of temperature. The lowermost boundary layer is shallow, only about 2,600 feet (800 meters) deep and, like Earth's, changes on a daily basis. The layer above, which is 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) deep, changes seasonally.

The existence of two lower atmospheric layers that both respond to changes in temperature help reconcile the formerly disparate findings regarding Titan's boundary layer, "so there are no more conflicting observations," Charnay said.

This new work help explains the winds on Titan measured by the Huygens probe, as well as the spacing seen between the giant dunes on Titan's equator. Also, "it could imply the formation of boundary layer clouds of methane on Titan," Charnay said. Such clouds were apparently seen before but not explained.

In the future, Charnay and his colleagues will include how methane on Titan moves in a cycle from surface lakes and seas to atmospheric clouds, just as water does on Earth.

"3D models will be very useful in the future to explain the data we will get about the atmospheres of exoplanets," Charnay said.

Charnay and his colleague Sébastien Lebonnois detailed their findings in the Jan. 15 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

First Commercial Spaceport Hangar Dedicated In New Mexico

2011-10-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

by Leonard David, SPACE.com’s Space Insider ColumnistDate: 17 October 2011 Time: 10:07 AM ET

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. — The hangar at the operating hub for public space travel is being dedicated here today (Oct. 17), home base for pay-per-view suborbital treks out of Earth's atmosphere.

The Spaceport America Terminal Hangar Facility is to be utilized by Virgin Galactic, a spaceline operation backed by British billionaire and adventurer Richard Branson.

The hangar-dedication ceremony is the latest in a string of opening events for the spaceport. In October 2010, officials dedicated the facility's long runway, named "The Governor Bill Richardson Spaceway."

The hangar itself is a Tomorrowland-looking piece of work. It is expected to house up to two of Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo launch planes and five SpaceShipTwo tourist-carrying rocket planes, in addition to all of Virgin's astronaut preparation facilities and a mission control. [Photos: Spaceport America Blooms in New Mexico Desert]

The Terminal Hangar Facility "has turned out better that anyone could have imagined," said Christine Anderson, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority.

"It is a beautiful building befitting of the beginning of a new era where all of us can now not only dream of going into space but actually have the opportunity to do so," Anderson told SPACE.com. She said that there are more milestones ahead in anchoring the future of commercial space travel.

Spectators at the dedication event were treated to a flight of the combined WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo twosome, circling to high altitude and zooming over Spaceport America.

Branson characterized the terminal design as not only being a real landmark with its iconic architecture, "but also something that was at the cutting edge of environmentally sustainable design."

Simply put, Branson said, "it is a 21st century building for a 21st century business."

Branson was in rare form, living up to his adventuresome past – with a keen eye on grabbing the media spotlight.

He joined an aerial ballet group that pranced and flew across the glass edifice of the terminal building. Hanging on a rope tangling attached high on the structure, he popped open a champagne bottle and sipped while announcing that the structure is now named the "Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space."

Rambling Desert Locale

Spaceport America is tagged as the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport. The rambling desert locale is roughly 45 miles north of Las Cruces, N.M., covering 18,000 acres and containing a nearly 2-mile-long (3.2 km), 200-foot-wide (61 meter) "spaceway" – a specially built runway that can handle Virgin Galactic's use of the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo dual-action system.

The Terminal Hangar Facility was designed by United Kingdom-based Foster + Partners, along with URS and local New Mexico architects SMPC. The trio won an international competition to build the first private spaceport in the world.

Now undergoing extensive testing, the SpaceShipTwo craft dubbed the VSS Enterprise, and carrier WhiteKnightTwo, christened the VMS Eve, have both been developed for Virgin Galactic by Mojave, Calif.-based Scaled Composites.

This launch system is designed to haul six customers and two pilots on suborbital space flights, allowing an out-of-the-seat, zero-gravity experience and out-the-window views of Earth from the black sky of space.

After VSS Enterprise and VMS Eve test flights are completed, Virgin Galactic will begin commercial operations here at Spaceport America.

Iconic Infrastructure

Today's Terminal Hangar Facility dedication "is a very important milestone on the path to commercial operations for Virgin Galactic," George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic president and chief executive officer told SPACE.com.

"While there is still work to be done in driving to completion of the vehicle development program," Whitesides said, "the dedication event is an opportunity for us to recognize all the people in New Mexico and around the world who have worked so hard to turn a patch of ranch land into the world's first commercial spaceport."

Whitesides said that architectural teams from abroad and here in New Mexico have designed iconic infrastructure that will long be remembered as the first dedicated home for operational commercial spaceships. "We anticipate that over the coming years, thousands of our customers will receive their space training here, preparing for the experience of their lifetimes," he said.

There remains more work on outfitting Spaceport America, Whitesides added. "Over the coming months, we will be working closely with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority," he said, "to finish the overall facilities of the spaceport, including certain infrastructure features and fit-out of the building's interior."

This Is Hard

While the festive nature of the dedication was in high gear, much work is ahead to propel trial runs of suborbital jaunts into ticket-holder flight status.

"This is hard," said Stephen Attenborough, Commercial Director for Virgin Galatic.

"Since I started, this project for me has been characterized by the fact that, in some ways, what we’re doing is very simple … but actually achieving it is very hard," he told SPACE.com.

Attenborough said that "there’s probably a reason why this hasn’t been accomplished in the last 50 years, because we have to start off with standards of safety that are multiple of anything that has been achieved to date."

There’s a very close correlation between funding and success, Attenborough added. Being well-capitalized, using proven technology, gaining operational experience, having customers and a spaceport are key ingredients.

"So we should be able to make it," Attenborough concluded.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

Private Space Station Builder Downsizes Dramatically

2011-10-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

By Brian Berger and Dan Leone, Space News

Space.com | SPACE.com – 11 hrs ago

WASHINGTON and LONG BEACH, Calif. — Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing inflatable space habitats for commercial use, laid off some 40 of its 90 employees Sept. 29, a company official confirmed.

"We are proceeding with a core group of fifty plus engineers, managers and support staff," Mike Gold, Bigelow Aerospace's director of Washington operations and business growth, said in an emailed response to questions from Space News. "This core group allows us to retain key human capital and capabilities, with which we are continuing to aggressively pursue the development and eventual deployment of the BA 330 system."

The BA 330 is a six-person inflatable space station Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nev., is developing to serve commercial and government human spaceflight markets. The BA 330 is one of the proposed commercial platforms Boeing Co. intends to serve with the CST-100 space capsule it is developing with financial assistance from NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.

Bigelow Aerospace employees told Space News that the company laid off nearly all of its machinists and that most of the workers retained are associated with the Boeing CCDev effort. Bigelow’s partnership with Boeing on the CST-100 predates Boeing’s 2010 CCDev award.

Gold, in his email, said the layoffs "were caused by a perfect storm of events."

"We had hoped that by 2014 or 2015 that America would again be able to fly its own astronauts. Unfortunately, the prospect of domestic crew transportation of any kind is apparently going to occur years after the first BA 330 could be ready," Gold wrote. "For both business and technical reasons, we cannot deploy a BA 330 without a means of transporting crew to and from our station, and the adjustment to our employment levels was necessary to reflect this reality.

"If anything, Bigelow Aerospace has been suffering from its own early success, and we’re years ahead of where the rest of the industry is."

Bigelow Aerospace, founded by motel mogul Robert Bigelow, views space agencies around the world as a key market for its planned space habit. The company has deployed two smaller-scale inflatable test habitats in space using Russian rockets.

Space News correspondent Debra Werner contributed from San Francisco. This article was provided by Space News,dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

SpaceX to Fly to Int'l Space Station In November

2011-08-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

HAWTHORNE, Calif. (AP) — SpaceX's next mission is to the International Space Station.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based private rocket maker said Monday its Dragon capsule will launch on Nov. 30 on a cargo test run to the orbiting outpost. SpaceX said the launch will be followed by a station docking more than a week later.

With the space shuttle fleet retired, NASA is depending on private companies like SpaceX to handle space station supply runs and astronaut rides. Until then, the space agency is paying for trips aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Last December, the Dragon capsule made the world's first private trip to and from orbit. During the test flight, the capsule simulated some of the maneuvers that would be needed for a docking.

_______________________

Online

SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com/

Texas Space Alliance Celebrates New Space "Tourism" Law

2011-05-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

by Staff Writers
Austin TX (SPX) May 12, 2011

The Texas Space Alliance congratulated the governor and legislatureon passing what it hopes will be the first of a new wave of pro-commercial space laws in the last weeks, and called for the Texas government to move quickly to pass other pro-commercial space legislation - before other states seal their leads in courting this billion dollar industry.

With the signature of Texas Governor Rick Perry affixed, and its publication by the Texas Secretary of State, the new Texas space liability law goes into immediate effect.

It restrains unlimited personal liability for passenger travel to/from space via the state of Texas, providing what should be the first of many steps to enhance space business in the state, moving Texas toward the goal of being a premiere space launch and landing destination for all customers -- personal, educational, commercial, military and governmental.

"We at the Texas Space Alliance salute the government for taking this first small step towards making Texas a space state," said Wayne Rast, Director-Governmental Affairs for TXA. "After having offered testimony in the Texas Senate on behalf of this legislation, we are thrilled to see it become the law in Texas."

The TXA, which worked with other pro-commercial space supporters to help pass the legislation saluted State Senator Carlos Uresti (TX-19), and Texas Congressmen Pete Gallego (TX-74), for introducing and then championing passage of this important new law, which it believes will help usher in an age of commercial space travel in Texas, including so called space "tourism" flights to the edge of space.

They also acknowledge the work of Keith Graff and others on the governor's staff, and the governor himself, who they believe can help rally the state to this important cause.

"This is the beginning of a new effort on our part to "awaken the sleeping giant" of Texas when it comes to the emerging commercial space industry," said TXA President Rick Tumlinson.

"But we have to move quickly. Other states such as Florida, Virginia and New Mexico are far ahead of us in courting and supporting this potentially multi-billion dollar industry, and if we want a part of it dramatic and determined action will be necessary - as the deals are being cut right now that will determine its future for decades."

With the liability law in place, the TXA is working on a Texas Space Plan that includes important items for improving the space business climate in Texas, including a zero-gravity, zero-tax law (ZGZT) to draw new jobs and industry to Texas, and the development of Space Enterprise Zones and a set of Texas Spaceports.

ZGZT has received enthusiastic support from the Chair of the Senate Economic Development Committee - State Senator Mike Jackson (TX-11) and early efforts and interest from Texas Congressmen Larry Taylor (TX-24) and House Economic Development Chair John Davis (TX-129)."

Channel Island Named First 'Dark Sky' Community

2011-01-31T15:46:00.000-08:00

– Mon Jan 31, 12:07 pm ET

LONDON (AFP) – The Channel Island of Sark has been designated the first dark sky community in the world in recognition of the lack of light pollution that allows clear views of the stars at night, officials said Monday.

The tiny island, located west of France's Cotentin Peninsula and about 80 miles (130 kilometres) off the south coast of England, hopes the designation from the US-based International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) will help boost tourism from star gazers.

"Sark becoming the world's first dark sky island is a tremendous feather in our environmental cap, which can only enhance our appeal," said Paul Williams, chairman of the Sark government's agricultural committee.

The island, which is three miles long and 1.5 miles wide, has no cars and no public street lighting, but local residents and businesses have also made an effort to reduce the amount of light spilled upwards.

As a result, the Milky Way is clearly visible stretching from horizon to horizon and streaking meteors can be picked out among bright stars.

After an audit last year, Sark now joins a select group of global dark sky sites, although it is particularly special, according to Martin Morgan-Taylor, chairman of the IDA's international committee.

He notes that all the other sites are uninhabited natural parks, with the exception of Flagstaff, Arizona, which has a major observatory -- making Sark the first "dark sky community".

"Here we have a living, thriving community that has made a conscious effort that they themselves will help to protect and help to restore the view of the night sky," Morgan-Taylor told AFP.

Hungary's Hortobagy National Park has also been newly designated by the IDA, Morgan-Taylor said. The other two dark sky sites in Europe are Galloway Forest in Scotland and Zselic Park in Hungary.

"This is a great achievement for Sark," said Professor Roger Davies, president of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"People around the world are become increasingly fascinated by astronomy as we discover more about our universe, and the creation of the world's first dark sky island in the British Isles can only help to increase that appetite."

SpaceX Launches Success With Falcon 9/Dragon Flight

2010-12-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2010)

SpaceX Corp. tested its Falcon 9 and a fully functioning Dragon capsule combination during a brief mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on December 8, 2010. The uncrewed capsule parachuted back to Earth about three hours after liftoff following maneuvers in orbit, a first for the privately owned company.

Flames erupted from the base of the Falcon 9 at 10:43 a.m. as it sat at Launch Complex-40. A few seconds later, the rocket and its Dragon capsule pushed above the surrounding lightning towers and headed into orbit.

The first stage separated on time and the second stage took over as planned. A camera on board the rocket showed the Dragon capsule separate from the second stage and trunk to orbit on its own.

After working through its maneuvers, the Dragon fired its braking rockets to begin re-entry. Like the Apollo spacecraft of the 1960s and 70s, the Dragon pierced Earth's atmosphere protected by an ablative heat shield. Parachutes deployed and the spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

"This has really been better than I expected," said Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX. "It's actually almost too good."

The test flight was the first under a NASA contract called COTS, short for Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. The contract was set up to encourage private companies to ship cargo to the International Space Station.

"This is really an amazing accomplishment for SpaceX," said Alan Lindenmoyer, NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo program manager. "From all indications, it looks like it was 100 percent successful."

It was the second test flight for the Falcon 9, a 180-foot-tall, medium-lift booster SpaceX developed in part to service the station. The first Falcon 9 successfully launched a Dragon capsule simulator into orbit on June 4.

"We're beyond the 'Is it possible?' We did it and now we move on," said Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX.

The successful mission could clear the way for a Dragon spacecraft to rendezvous with the station sometime next year, potentially delivering cargo on that flight.

Before the launch, NASA voiced a high level of support for the mission.

"Getting this far this fast has been a remarkable achievement," said Phil McAlister, NASA's acting director of Commercial Space Flight Development. "No matter how this spaceflight goes, we are committed to this program."

NASA wants rockets like the Falcon 9 and Orbital Sciences' Taurus II to carry important supplies, experiments and equipment to the space station after the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2011.

The rockets and capsules could one day carry astronauts to the station as well. But for this flight, the pressure was on SpaceX to demonstrate its nine-engine booster and accompanying capsule would work as advertised.

The next Falcon 9/Dragon launch is slated for 2011.

Robot's Space Debut 'Giant Leap For Tinmankind'

2010-11-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn, Ap Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space is about to get its first humanoid from planet Earth. Robonaut 2 — affectionately known as R2 — is hitching a one-way ride to the International Space Station this week aboard the final flight of space shuttle Discovery.

It's the first humanoid robot ever bound for space, a $2.5 million mechanical and electrical marvel that NASA hopes one day will assist flesh-and-bone astronauts in orbit.

Imagine, its creators say, a future where Robonaut could take over space station cleaning duties; spend hours outside in the extreme heat and cold, patiently holding tools for spacewalking astronauts; and handle emergencies like toxic leaks or fires.

Why, Robonaut's descendants could even scout out asteroids, Mars and other worlds in the decades ahead, paving the way for humans.

The adventure begins Wednesday afternoon, with the planned final launch of Discovery and Robonaut's six human crewmates. Mission managers gave the green light Monday for the new launch date; shuttle gas leaks had to be repaired before the countdown could begin and forced a two-day delay.

"While it might be just a single step for this robot, it's really a giant leap forward for tinmankind," said Rob Ambrose, acting chief of Johnson Space Center's automation, robotics and simulation division in Houston.

For now, R2 — a collaboration between NASA and General Motors — exists only from the waist up. It measures 3 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 330 pounds. Each arm is 2 feet 8 inches long.

Legs are still in the works. But, oh, what an upper body: perfectly toned arms and hands with palms, a robotic rarity, along with broad shoulders and a washboard stomach. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hollywood's cyborg Terminator, would be proud.

Watch Robonaut lifting a 20-pound dumbbell, and "you can kind of feel the burn," Ambrose said, showing a video at a recent news conference.

Unlike people who tend to cheat, "this robot will really do what the physical trainers tell you to do, which is to do the bicep curls nice and slow," he said.

Made of aluminum and nickel-plated carbon fiber, the torso and arms are padded to protect Robonaut and the astronauts, all the way down to the five fingers on each hand. No metal, bony-looking fingers for this robot.

R2's eyes are where they should be: in its gold-colored head. Four visible light cameras are located behind the robot's visor, and an infrared camera is in its mouth for depth perception.

But its brain is in its tummy; engineers had nowhere else to put the computerized gray matter.

A backpack holds a power system for plugging R2 into the space station. On an asteroid or Mars, the backpack would contain batteries.

The joints are filled with springs for give, and more than 350 electrical sensors are scattered throughout, allowing R2 to sense even a feather with its fingertips.

NASA began working on its first dexterous robot — the landlubbing Robonaut 1 — in 1997. Lacking money, the project ceased in 2006. General Motors stepped in with the intention of improving car manufacturing and better protecting workers. Early this year, the much speedier R2 was unveiled.

NASA made room for the robot on one of its last few shuttle flights. It is Discovery's 39th mission and the next-to-last shuttle flight for NASA, although an additional trip may be added next year.

R2 is boxed up and stowed away for launch. Its identical twin — identical on the outside, anyway — is at Kennedy Space Center, posing for pictures and awaiting liftoff.

"I'm not even a little nervous; NERVES OF ALUMINUM!!!" R2 said last week in a Twitter update under AstroRobonaut. (OK, so a NASA public relations woman and Robonaut team member are serving as ghost tweeters.)

The robot will remain tucked away at the space station until late December — a nice Christmas present for the station's six inhabitants, Ambrose figures.

While the space station already has Canadian and Japanese robotic arms — resembling cranes — human operators are needed. Once given orders, R2 can carry out preprogrammed tasks by itself.

First will come a series of tests to see how Robonaut operates in weightlessness atop a fixed pedestal.

Legs will be needed before Robonaut can tackle indoor chores like wiping handrails or vacuuming air filters. NASA hopes to send up legs in late 2011, followed a year later by torso and computer enhancements enabling the robot to venture out on spacewalks.

The objective is to help astronauts, not replace them, NASA stresses. Humans have been living continuously on the space station for 10 years — the actual record-setting anniversary is Tuesday — and the wish is for 10 more.

The beauty of Robonaut, officials say, is it's strong yet safe and trustworthy enough to work right next to humans. Think good Autobots rather than evil Decepticons from "Transformers." It's also serenely mute, more WALL-E than R2-D2 of "Star Wars" fame.

Discovery's astronaut-physician, Michael Barratt, would have loved to pawn off toilet cleaning while living at the space station last year. As appealing as Robonaut is, he cautions "it will be a long time" before the robot can do a job as quickly and efficiently as a space station human.

Robonaut's strength, Barratt said, will be emergencies.

"Going into a toxic atmosphere to throw a switch or close a valve," he explained.

And, in a final salute, going down with the ship.

R2 will be on board when the space station stops operating sometime after 2020 and NASA sends it hurtling toward a grave in the Pacific.

___

Online:

NASA: http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp

Twitter: http://twitter.com/AstroRobonaut

GM: http://www.gm.com/vehicles/innovation

NM Spaceport Sets Stage For Commercial Space Race

2010-10-28T05:06:00.000-07:00

By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Associated Press – Wed Oct 27, 7:05 pm ET

UPHAM, N.M. – British tycoon Richard Branson has dreamed of going to space since he was a teenager. He'll get his wish when Virgin Galactic begins taking tourists into suborbital space from a specially designed spaceport in the New Mexico desert.

Gov. Bill Richardson, a longtime space buff, remembers when astronaut Alan Shepard first reached space and man first walked on the moon. He wants to see space too, but he's not willing to be among the first passengers on Branson's out-of-this-world venture.

Branson and Richardson shook hands five years ago to build the world's first dedicated spaceport. With the runway 45 miles north of Las Cruces complete, and the terminal and hangar facility nearly done, they see their partnership as a major milestone for the world's burgeoning commercial space tourism industry.

It's only a matter of time now — and not much time — before the industry starts to take off, experts say.

"It's a dream come true. It's happened. New Mexico is going to be a leader in space tourism," Richardson proclaimed last week, standing on the nearly two-mile-long concrete runway at Spaceport America.

Others who were present included 130 journalists from around the world, a group of British school children, a few dozen people who have already paid hefty deposits to be among Virgin Galactic's first customers, and former NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon in 1969.

Branson and Richardson predict this place in southern New Mexico will be a hot spot in the next nine to 18 months. But it won't be the only one.

The commercial space industry is rapidly developing with companies like SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., seeking to supply the International Space Station for NASA. SpaceX, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, has successfully placed a dummy payload into orbit and has contracts to lift satellites next.

Other firms, including Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., and Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Texas, are testing systems that would carry unmanned payloads to space.

Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos is also in the race with Blue Origin, a Washington state company that plans to compete as a space taxi.

Boeing Co. has lined up Virginia-based Space Adventures to sell seats on the seven-person spaceship it wants to build to fly to the International Space Station starting in 2015. Space Adventures currently sells seats on trips to the space station aboard the Russian-built Soyuz spaceship.

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said the recent flurry of development in the commercial space industry dovetails perfectly with the agency's intention of working more closely with the private sector. Just last month, Congress approved legislation affirming President Barack Obama's intent to use commercial carriers to lift humans into near-Earth space.

After 50 years of NASA space exploration, Garver said, "we need to be confident that credible, innovative, enterprising and bold individuals and entities are ready, willing and able to receive the torch."

The spaceport, she said, will provide a jump start for the commercial space industry by providing a place to launch and land, and by piquing more private interest and competition in space travel.

"No question that over the next five to 10 years there will be more people going to space, whether it's from here in New Mexico with Virgin Galactic, with other entities or from other parts of the country," Garver said.

Private Spaceship Makes First Solo Glide Flight

2010-10-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

– Sun Oct 10, 11:51 pm ET

MOJAVE, Calif. – Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo achieved its first solo glide flight Sunday, marking another step in the company's eventual plans to fly paying passengers.

SpaceShipTwo was carried aloft by its mothership to an altitude of 45,000 feet and released over the Mojave Desert. After the separation, SpaceShipTwo, manned by two pilots, flew freely for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway followed by the mothership.

The entire test flight lasted about 25 minutes.

"It flew beautifully," said Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides.

The six-passenger SpaceShipTwo is undergoing rigorous testing before it can carry tourists to space. In the latest test, SpaceShipTwo did not fire its rocket engine to climb to space.

Until now, SpaceShipTwo has flown attached to the wing of its special jet-powered mothership dubbed WhiteKnightTwo. Sunday was the first time the spaceship flew on its own.

"It's a very big deal," Virgin president Sir Richard Branson told The Associated Press. "There are a number of big deals on the way to getting commercial space travel becoming a reality. This was a very big step. We now know that the spaceship glides. We know it can be dropped safely from the mothership and we know it can land safely. That's three big ticks."

SpaceShipTwo will make a series of additional glide flights before rocketing to space.

"The next big step will be the rocket tests actually on the spacecraft itself," Branson said. "We've obviously have done thousands of rocket tests on the ground, the next big test is in the air. We'll be doing gentle rocket tests in the air, ultimately culminating into taking the spaceship into space."

SpaceShipTwo, built by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan, is based on a prototype that won a $10 million prize in 2004 for being the first manned private rocket to reach space.

Tickets to ride aboard SpaceShipTwo cost $200,000. Some 370 customers have plunked down deposits totaling $50 million, according to Virgin Galactic.

Commercial flights will fly out of New Mexico where a spaceport is under construction. Officials from Virgin Galactic and other dignitaries will gather at the spaceport Oct. 22 for an event commemorating the finished runway. The event will also feature a flyover by SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo.

___

Online:

Virgin Galactic: http://www.virgingalactic.com

Russia to Launch Commercial Space Station By 2016

2010-09-29T03:45:00.000-07:00

Associated Press [5:05am (EST) September 29, 2010]

MOSCOW – A private Russian space firm and a state-controlled spacecraft manufacturer are planning to build and operate the world's first commercial space station and expect it to launched by 2016.

Sergey Kostenko, chief executive of the Moscow-based Orbital Technologies, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the station will cater to space tourists and researchers.

Kostenko said the station will initially be equipped to host seven people but will be capable of significant expansion.

The Russian state space agency, which stands to benefit from the proposed station by leasing launching pads for service modules, says it could be used as a safety back-up for the International Space Station in emergencies.

[U.S.] Air Force to Launch Satellite to Keep Close Eye On Space Junk

2010-09-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer space.com – 4:06pm (Friday, September 24, 2010)

A new U.S. Air Force satellite built to track space junk and other spacecraft orbiting Earth is set to launch tomorrow (Sept. 25) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite, called SBSS, is part of an evolving goal to dramatically improve awareness of space debris and other objects around our planet, Air Force officials said.

"Every day, threats to our nation's valuable satellites and space platforms are growing," said Col. J.R. Jordan, vice commander of the Space Superiority Systems Wing at the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, in a statement. "SBSS will revolutionize our ability to find and monitor objects that could harm the space assets we depend on for security, communications, weather forecasting and many other essential services." [Worst Space Debris Moments Ever]

The 2,277-pound (1,031 kilograms) SBSS satellite system will be launched into orbit on a Minotaur 4 rocket, designed by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. Liftoff is set for 9:41 p.m. PDT (12:41 a.m. Sept. 26 EDT, or 0441 GMT).

The satellite was originally scheduled to launch in Oct. 2009 but was delayed due to technical concerns with its rocket launch vehicle.

Space Junk Sentinel

There are about 500,000 known pieces of space junk orbiting around our planet. Of those, about 21,000 objects are larger than 4 inches (10.1 cm) in diameter, and are being tracked by the Department of Defense as part of the Space Surveillance Network. These are items such as spent rocket stages and broken satellites.

Space junk – even tiny pieces of it – can be dangerous because they orbit the Earth at high speeds and pose risks for impacts and collisions.

The SBSS satellite will provide data for the Air Force's Space Surveillance Network, which already keeps an eye on orbital debris. Aerospace juggernaut Boeing is responsible for the overall SBSS program management.

The Colorado-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. developed, designed, manufactured, integrated and tested the satellite, using the Boeing-built onboard mission data processor.

The overall cost of the SBSS program is about $858 million, Air Force officials said.

Sensors In Space

The SBSS spacecraft will be equipped with a visible sensor mounted on an agile, two-axis gimbal. This device will give ground controllers the flexibility to quickly move the camera between targets without needing to reposition the satellite itself or expend additional fuel.

"With its gimbaled camera, reprogrammable onboard processor and open-ground-system architecture, SBSS can respond quickly to today's changing mission requirements and adapt to meet tomorrow's threats as well," said Craig Cooning, vice president and general manager of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems. "Boeing looks forward to putting these advanced capabilities into action for the Air Force."

The SBSS satellite will collect data to be used in conjunction with observations from ground-based radars and telescopes, but with one clear advantage. As the Air Force's only space-based tracker, SBSS will not be limited by weather, atmosphere or time of day.

"The SBSS team is ready to go on Sept. 25," said Todd Citron, director of the Boeing Advanced Space and Intelligence Systems. "We've thoroughly rehearsed all plans and procedures, the Satellite Operations Center has been configured for flight operations, and the SBSS satellite and Minotaur launch vehicle are completing final preparations. We're looking forward to putting this spacecraft into orbit so that it can perform its vital mission."

NASA Sends Shuttle Discovery to Pad For Last Time

2010-09-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn, Ap Aerospace Writer – Mon Sep 20, 7:57 pm ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Discovery is headed to the launch pad for the last time.

NASA moved Discovery out of its hangar Monday night. The 3 1/2-mile trip to the pad was bittersweet for the space agency, which has only two shuttle missions remaining.

Discovery is set to lift off Nov. 1 for the International Space Station. Endeavour will follow in February to wrap up 30 years of shuttle flight.

Scores of shuttle workers and their families gathered to watch Discovery take its last ride to the pad atop a giant transporter.

Several hundred contract employees will lose their jobs Oct. 1 in a continuing wave of layoffs. NASA's future is uncertain because of disagreement in Washington over the next rocketships.

Seats On Boeing Spaceships Could Go Up For Sale

2010-09-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

By JOSHUA FREED, AP Business Writer Joshua Freed, AP Business Writer – Wed Sep 15, 5:44 pm ET

MINNEAPOLIS – Boeing and a space tourism company announced a deal on Wednesday to sell tickets on rocket rides to the International Space Station. Now Boeing just has to build a spaceship.

Space Adventures Ltd. has already been selling seats aboard the Russian-built Soyuz spaceship. Its last passenger was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, who paid $35 million for a 10-day trip.

Now, Boeing says Space Adventures will sell seats on its planned CST-100, which would carry seven people. NASA has been encouraging aerospace companies like Boeing to develop spaceships that can carry government-sponsored astronauts as well as paying tourists to the space station. The idea is to spread around the cost of NASA missions while also boosting privately funded space efforts.

Big questions remain. Congressional funding isn't assured. And Boeing and Space Adventures will have competition from a California company called SpaceX, which is also seeking NASA work for space station missions.

So far, seven customers have ridden on eight flights through Spacecraft Adventures.

The trips will be for millionaires, at least for now. Boeing and Space Adventures executives didn't have pricing details, but said on a conference call that prices would be "competitive" with the cost for a flight on the Soyuz craft.

The more people fly to space, the sooner the cost will come down, said Eric Anderson, co-founder and chairman of Space Adventures. He said people ask him when it will cost, say, $40,000, or $4,000, instead of close to $40 million.

"I don't know," he said, "but I know that it'll never be $40,000, or $4,000, if it doesn't start off at $40 million. ... We'll get there. Until launch technology radically changes, the price is still going to be quite expensive."

Boeing's CST-100 is a reusable capsule with a round bottom and pointed top that, from the outside, bears some resemblance to the Apollo capsules launched beginning in the 1960s. Boeing is doing design and testing work now, and hopes to have the craft ready in 2015.

Boeing plans to build two at first, which would be used for testing and then refurbished for missions. Each spaceship would need about six months in between flights to have its heat shield restored and its systems tested, said John Elbon, vice president and program manager for Boeing Commercial Crew Transportation Systems.

"Together we can open space to more people, and expand a new market, and I find that terribly exciting," said Brewster Shaw, a former astronaut and vice president and general manager of Boeing's Space Exploration division.

Anderson, of Space Adventures, said he's aiming to reduce the months of training that precede flights on the Soyuz craft, which includes Russian language training that won't be needed on the U.S.-led flights. He said shorter training will encourage more people to sign up, while still being sufficient to get them ready for the flight.

He objected to the notion that the people who accompany government-sponsored astronauts are "tourists."

"It's not the case that a bunch of people show up to the station in their flowered T-shirts with sunglasses on," he said. "I think this is much more about private citizens who are opening the frontier alongside government space explorers, and are doing so in a very serious fashion with lots of serious work behind it."

Still, the Cirque du Soleil founder wore a red clown nose on his trip.

Boeing Co. shares fell 3 cents to close at $62.73.

Spaceport Seeks Tour Contractor

2010-07-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

Tue Jul 13, 9:38 am ET
LAS CRUCES, N.M. –

The New Mexico Spaceport Authority is seeking proposals for a contractor to provide regular sightseeing tours of the spaceport facilities and construction site.

Officials hope to start regular weekend tours as early as Sept. 1.

The so-called "Hard Hat Tours" will be conducted every Friday, Saturday and Sunday with clearly defined operational schedules.

Spaceport director Rick Homans says the tours will offer visitors an opportunity to watch as Spaceport America takes shape. Construction is continuing at the spaceport site, 40 miles north of Las Cruces.

Millionaire Space Tourist Wants to Go Back

2010-06-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

Clara Moskowitz Senior Writer
SPACE.com – Wed Jun 9, 10:15 am ET

The third private citizen to fly in space, American millionaire Gregory Olsen, says he's excited about the future of space travel — especially if it means he might have another chance to fly.

Olsen visited the International Space Station in October 2005 as a paying passenger aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. His ticket, which cost about $20 million at the time, was brokered with the Russian Federal Space Agency through the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures.

A scientist and entrepreneur, Olsen founded the Princeton, New Jersey-based optics firm Sensors Unlimited. The sale of that company in 2000 largely financed his later space trip. Olsen recounts his long road to space in a new memoir, "By Any Means Necessary," published by his new company, GHO Ventures.

"I'd go in a heartbeat," Olsen said of a second space visit. Of particular interest would be an orbital trip around the moon on a Soyuz spacecraft. No space tourist has yet traveled beyond low-Earth orbit, but Space Adventures is working on offering such an excursion.

"I just have to sell another company to afford the trip", Olsen said. And private space travel to orbit may be getting more expensive.

Pricier Space Seats

With private seats for orbital trips to the space station in short supply and increased production demands, the price for flights similar to Olsen's voyage are now going for a steeper price.

The seventh space tourist to fly, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, paid a reported $35 million for his 12-day trip to space in October 2009. "It looks like I got a bargain," Olsen told SPACE.com.

For now, orbital spaceflights have been the bulk of space tourism offerings, though a number of private companies are hoping to offer suborbital joy rides in the next few years at a cost of up to $200,000 or so.

If Olsen does manage to make it back to orbit, Olsen won't be the first repeat customer for Space Adventures. The fifth-ever space tourist, American billionaire Charles Simonyi, revisited the space station on a second mission in March 2009, two years after his first flight. Both trips were booked through Space Adventures. Simonyi paid $35 million for his second space tourist trek. His first trip in 2007 cost about $25 million.

Private Space Travel's Bright Future

Olsen said he is eager to see how the future of U.S. human spaceflight plays out. President Barack Obama has proposed a new direction for NASA in which commercial companies take the lead in ferrying astronauts to low-Earth orbit, while the space agency focuses on going to an asteroid and to Mars.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a California-based company among the first tapped to provide commercial space cargo delivery services for NASA, successfully launched the first of its new private rockets called Falcon 9 into orbit on Friday. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets are built to launch the company's capsule-shaped Dragon vehicles into space on unmanned cargo missions, though the company hopes to modify them to carry people as well.

"I'm really glad they're pushing for the commercialization," Olsen said.

He could easily envision a commercial taxi service going to the International Space Station, and said he would like to see the industry take things even further.

"I'm a moon fan," he said. "This mission that Space Adventures is planning that's all possible. The moon could eventually go to the private sector too."

The spaceflyer said he reminisces about his space journey almost every day. "It'll be five years in October and not a day goes by when I don't think about it."

The experience was truly life-changing, he added. "When you fly over the Earth, there's no sign of life," Olsen said. "There's nothing to indicate that there's anything going on there occasional jet trails, but other than that it just looks serene, perfect. When I was up there I just said, 'Wow, I'm the luckiest guy in the world to be able to see this.' "

Japanese Solar Sail Headed For Venus and Beyond

2010-05-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Hsu SPACE.com Senior Writer
space.com – Sun May 16, 1:00 pm ET

An ambitious solar sail mission designed by Japan is poised for launch tomorrow could become the first successful mission powered solely by sunlight, but that's not all. The spacecraft is also aimed at Venus and beyond, and could pave the way for a future hybrid space engine.

The solar sail will hitch a ride aboard an H-2A rocket slated for launch on Monday (Tuesday local time) from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center. That rocket carries the main mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Venus Climate Orbiter called Akatsuki — which means "Dawn" in Japanese.

But only Akatsuki has a planned meet-up with Venus, even though the sail — called Ikaros (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) — will also launch along the same trajectory toward the mysterious planet.

"This will be the world's first solar powered sail craft employing both photon propulsion and thin film solar power generation during its interplanetary cruise," said a JAXA mission website.

Venus would mark just a six-month pit stop for the solar sail during a three-year trek toward the far side of the sun.

"To me it's a very bold activity to be conducting a technology test like this on an interplanetary mission," said Louis Friedman, an executive director of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif. "I think it shows a lot of foresight on their part."

Past solar sail demonstrations have fallen short of achieving actual solar-propelled spaceflight, but that certainly has not stopped JAXA from planning an ambitious technological debut. Even Ikaros itself represents just a stepping stone to a "hybrid" space engine that incorporates solar sail technology, mission planners have said.

Space Hybrid Vehicle

The kite-shaped Ikaros relies upon the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, but it also carries thin film solar cells built within its sail. Such cells could generate electricity from the same sunlight pushing the solar sail along.

That won't do much good by itself for a solar sail without an engine. But JAXA hopes that the power-gathering demonstration could eventually lead to spacecraft with ion-propulsion engines that draw electricity from solar cells and also take advantage of solar sail propulsion — a hybrid propulsion system.

"They want to ultimately have a solar electric [ion propulsion] and solar sail vehicle that would be used for outer planetary missions," Friedman told SPACE.com.

Yet the history of solar sail tests presents a sobering reminder of the troubles that can arise. The California-based Planetary Society attempted to fly its Cosmos-1 solar sail in 2005, but lost their prototype because of a Russian rocket malfunction. NASA's NanoSail-D was also lost in the third failed flight of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket in 2008.

A British shoebox-sized mission slated for launch next year might also test solar sail propulsion, but would mainly test the sails as brakes for taking defunct satellites down.

Japan did deploy a solar sail from a sounding rocket in 2004, but did not actually attempt to demonstrate controlled flight. If that represented the dry run, then Ikaros comes as the real deal.

True Solar Sailing

Ikaros is designed to unfurl its sail during its first stage by taking advantage of its spinning momentum, and then actively deploying the rest of the way during a second stage.

"The membrane is deployed, and kept flat, by its spinning motion," the JASA mission website stated. "Four masses are attached to the four tips of the membrane in order to facilitate deployment."

The Planetary Society still has ambitions to someday launch a solar sail mission into deep space, but its first planned solar sail test would involve a much smaller spacecraft than Ikaros, which stretches almost 66 feet (20 meters) at the diagonal of its square sail.

A refitted NASA solar sail might weigh a little less than 10 pounds (4.5 kg) compared to the 700-pound (315 kg) Ikaros.

The Planetary Society would aim first for launch to low-Earth orbit, before eventually launching a second mission that lasted perhaps weeks. Only the third mission would try for interplanetary traveler status, Freidman said.

For now, Friedman and the Planetary Society will share technological information and results from the JAXA mission, and keep an eye on their own hopes for the future.

"We wish we were first, of course, but it doesn't matter," Friedman said. "It's about advancing solar sail technology."

Moon Vets Say Obama's NASA Cuts Would Ground U.S.

2010-04-15T14:46:00.000-07:00

By Todd Halvorson, Florida Today

Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong at a "Legends of Aerospace" event in New York City last March.

CAPE CANAVERAL — President Obama's plans for NASA could be "devastating" to the U.S. space program and "destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature," three legendary astronauts said in a letter Tuesday.

READ THE LETTER

Neil Armstrong, who rarely makes public comments, was the first human to set foot on the moon. Jim Lovell commanded the famous Apollo 13 flight, an aborted moon mission. And Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan remains the last human to have walked on the lunar surface.

In statements e-mailed to the Associated Press and NBC, Armstrong and other astronauts took exception with Obama's plan to cancel NASA's return-to-the-moon program, dubbed Project Constellation.

Armstrong, in an e-mail to the AP, said he had "substantial reservations." More than two dozen Apollo-era veterans, including Lovell and Cernan, signed another letter Monday calling the plan a "misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the foreseeable future."

The statements came days before Obama is to visit Kennedy Space Center on Thursday to explain his vision for NASA.

READ HIGHLIGHTS OF SPEECH

Not all former astronauts have come out against the plan. Armstrong's crewmate Buzz Aldrin, the second man to stand on the moon, has endorsed Obama's plan, which includes investing $6 billion to develop commercial space-taxi services for astronauts traveling to and from the International Space Station. Aldrin said the proposal will "allow us to again be pushing the boundaries to achieve new and challenging things beyond Earth."

The plan would also extend the space station operations through 2020. It would cancel Project Constellation and the Ares rockets, which NASA has been developing for six years at a cost of more than $9 billion. Obama would retain the Constellation project's Orion capsule. The capsule, which was to go to the moon, will instead be sent unoccupied to the International Space Station to stand by as an emergency vehicle to return astronauts home.

Administration officials told the AP that NASA will speed up development of a rocket that would have the power to blast crew and cargo far from Earth, although no destination has been chosen. The rocket would be ready to launch several years earlier than under the moon plan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to not detract from the presidential announcement.

The former astronauts said, "It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus-billion investment in Constellation. … Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downward slide to mediocrity."

Contributing: Associated Press

Russia raises price tag for giving US astronauts rides to space after shuttles get scuttled

2010-04-10T05:24:00.000-07:00

Tue Apr 6, 6:51 PM

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The price for American astronauts to hitch a ride on a Russian spaceship is going sky high.

NASA on Tuesday signed a contract to pay $55.8 million per astronaut for six Americans to fly into space on Russian Soyuz capsules in 2013 and 2014. NASA needs to get rides on Russian rockets to the International Space Station because it plans to retire the space shuttle fleet later this year.

NASA now pays half as much, about $26.3 million per astronaut, when it uses Russian ships. NASA spokesman John Yembrick said the cost is going up because Russia has to build more capsules for the extra flights. NASA had already agreed to pay as much as $51 million a seat for flights in 2011 and 2012, before the latest increase.

Branson Spacecraft Completes Test Flight

2010-03-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- British billionaire Richard Branson's dream of space travel that thousands of people can afford took a leap toward reality with the maiden flight of the world's first commercial spacecraft over California's Mojave Desert.

Branson's company Virgin Galactic announced Monday that the VSS Enterprise had successfully completed what it called a captive carry flight attached to a carrier plane.

The spacecraft's developer called it a "momentous day."

"The captive carry flight signifies the start of what we believe will be extremely exciting and successful spaceship flight test program," said Burt Rutan, founder of Scaled Composites, which built the spacecraft.

The VSS Enterprise remained attached to its carrier aircraft for the duration of the 2-hour, 54-minute flight, reaching an altitude of 45,000 feet, according to a statement from Virgin.

Eventually, the 60-foot long rocket plane will be taken 60,000 feet above the Earth by its carrier and fire rockets to propel itself into space.

The test-flight program is expected to continue through 2011, going first to a free glide and then to a powered flight before commercial flights begin.

"Seeing the finished spaceship in December was a major day for us but watching VSS Enterprise fly for the first time really brings home what beautiful, ground-breaking vehicles Burt and his team have developed for us," Branson said.

"Today was another major step along that road and a testament to U.S. engineering and innovation," he said.

Virgin Galactic has envisioned one flight a week, with six tourists aboard. Each will pay $200,000 for the ride and train for at least three days before going. About 80,000 people have placed their names on the waiting list for seats.

"What we want to be able to do is bring space travel down to a price range where hundreds of thousands of people would be able to experience space, and they never dreamed that [they] could," Branson said last year.

He has said he hopes the technology will lead to a new form of Earth travel, jetting people across oceans and continents faster through suborbital routes.

___________________________________________

US Lawmakers Urge Obama to Save NASA Moon Program

2010-03-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

Thu Mar 11, 6:26 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A group of US lawmakers Thursday urged the US administration to save NASA's Constellation project aimed at returning Americans to the moon in the next generation of space travel.

"Space exploration has been the guiding star of American innovation," the lawmakers -- 10 Republicans and five Democrats -- said in a letter to the NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

"It is imperative that the United States remain the world's leading spacefaring nation," they added.

They urged Bolden to assemble a team of NASA experts to review how exploration spacecraft and launch vehicle development can be kept within the existing budget to ensure "uninterrupted, independent US human space flight access to the International Space Station and beyond."

The team should report back within 30 days on its findings, the lawmakers urged.

Seeking to cut the massive US budget deficit, President Barack Obama's administration has proposed scrapping the costly and over budget Constellation rocket program designed to return Americans to the moon by 2020.

Instead, NASA would concentrate on research and development that could, over a longer time-frame, eventually see astronauts travel outside low Earth orbit and even aim for Mars.

The US space agency would also be encouraged to develop operations with commercial partners to fly astronauts to the ISS.

But the 15 lawmakers, most of them from Texas and Florida where much of the US space industry is based, were heavily critical of the plan.

"I am concerned that the Russians and the Chinese will get ahead of us... that English won't be the dominant language in space," Republican Representative Michael McCaul from Texas told a House hearing.

The United States is due to retire its aging shuttle fleet this year, and from then on will depend on Russian Soyuz flights to transport its astronauts to the ISS until the Ares 1 rocket and its Orion capsule are operational in 2015.

"By the time commercial low-Earth orbit vehicles are cleared for flight, US astronauts may have nowhere to go," the lawmakers said in the letter.

"NASA will no longer have a clear vision on its direction and ultimately the US will no longer be a spacefaring nation."

Obama is to host a space conference on April 15 in Florida to chart his vision for the future of human spaceflight, the White House revealed at the weekend.

Obama has proposed dropping the massively over-budget Constellation program launched by his predecessor, George W. Bush, because it was too costly, used outdated technology and would not be ready to ferry humans to the moon before 2028.

"The president's ambitious new strategy pushes the frontiers of innovation to set NASA on a more dynamic, flexible, and sustainable trajectory that can propel us on a new journey of innovation and discovery," the White House said in a statement Sunday.

"After years of underinvestment in new technology and unrealistic budgeting, the president's plan will unveil an ambitious plan for NASA that sets the agency on a reinvigorated path of space exploration," the statement added.

Just One Hitch In Choosing China's First Women Astronauts

2010-03-12T17:45:00.000-08:00

By Tariq Malik
SPACE.com Managing Editor
posted: 10 March 2010
06:12 pm ET

China has selected two military air transport pilots as its first female astronauts, the country's state media reported Wednesday. The only hitch? The women had to be hitched – as in married – to make the cut.

Zhang Jianqi, the former deputy commander of China's human spaceflight program, told the state-run Xinhua News Agency that aside from being married to their respective spouses, the two female astronauts met the exact same criteria as the country's male spaceflyers.

"In the selection, we had almost the same requirements on women candidates as those for men, but the only difference was that they must be married, as we believe married women would be more physically and psychologically mature," Xinhua quoted Zhang as saying during a break at an annual parliamentary session.

Zhang also said that female astronauts may also have more "endurance and circumspection" than their male counterparts, Xinhua reported.

The women are both pilots with the People's Liberation Army Air Force. They were selected alongside five men as China's second class of astronauts as the country pushes forward with its manned spaceflight program. The addition of seven new recruits boosts China's total astronaut corps to 21 spaceflyers.

The China National Space Administration selected its first 14 astronauts, also called taikonauts, in the mid-1990s.

China is the third country after Russia and the United States to build spacecraft capable of launching humans into orbit.

The country's spaceship of choice is the Shenzhou (Chinese for "Divine Vessel"), a three-module vehicle derived from Russia's workhorse Soyuz craft. But unlike the Soyuz, the Shenzhou has an orbital module equipped with solar arrays, allowing it to stay in orbit long after its crew returns to Earth.

China launched its first manned spaceflight – the one-man Shenzhou 5 flight – in 2003. A two-man Shenzhou 6 mission followed in 2005, leading to a three-man Shenzhou 7 spaceflight in September 2008, which included China's first spacewalk by astronaut Zhai Zhigang.

In 2011, China plans to launch Tiangong 1 – the first module of a new space station – from the Jiuquan space center in the Gobi desert.

The country is also planning to launch its second moon orbiter, called Chang'e 2, in October to search for potential landing sites for future robotic lunar probes. A third moon mission, Chang'e 3, is slated to launch in 2013, Xinhua quoted Ye Peiujian – who designed the first moon probe (Chang'e 1) and is commanding the second mission – as saying.

Chinese space officials have also said a new heavy-lift rocket, called Long March 5, is also in development and due to make a launch debut in 2014. The new rocket should be capable of hauling up to 55,000 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit, they added.

Other Relative Link: China's First Two Women Astronauts Selected

(People's Daily Online, English Version)

Say Hello to NASA's New Tech Guru

2010-02-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Hsu, SPACE.com Contributor space.com – Fri Feb 19, 2:00 pm ET

NASA hopes to jumpstart its new direction in space exploration by refocusing on transformational technologies, and the agency has a new tech guru to help lead the way.

As part of the shakeup, NASA administrator Charles Bolden named Robert Braun as the U.S. space agency's new chief technologist. Braun is currently an aerospace engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, but returns to NASA after spending 16 years working on robotic space exploration at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.

SPACE.com spoke with Braun near the end of his first week doing what he calls his dream job. The chief technologist talked about how NASA can tap new innovations and game-changing technologies to realize any number of possible futures for exploring the moon, the asteroids, Mars and beyond:

SPACE.com: So what's your job as NASA's new chief technologist?

Braun: As chief technologist, I report directly to the NASA administrator. I'm his principal advisor and advocate concerning matters of technology across the agency.

I consider what types of technology the agency should pursue, what are the proper investment strategies, what are the appropriate mechanisms for engaging the larger aerospace community, what kind of partnerships should we establish with other government agencies, and how to best invest NASA's technological capital on the significant needs facing society today. I'll be directly managing a new space technology program that invests in early-stage and game-changing technologies for future application in NASA missions or other national needs.

S: How has NASA's shift in space exploration changed its emphasis on different areas of technology?

B: Previously NASA was marching toward a single human exploration future, if you will, where it was leveraging Apollo and Shuttle technologies to return to moon.

When I think about the future now, I see a lot of possibilities. I see humans going to moon, to the asteroids, and eventually to Mars. I see robotic explorers traveling throughout the solar system and eventually into interstellar space. I see the possibility of identifying life on other planets and exploring worlds around other stars.

I see an Earth observation system that can accurately forecast the emergence of major storms and natural disasters. I see NASA supporting an emerging commercial spaceflight industry and being a significant contributor to solving our nation's technological needs. In my opinion, through a focus on innovation and technology, NASA's new strategy is much more likely to accomplish these possible futures. To me, that's extremely exciting. As a university professor, I imagine young people all around the country may feel the same way.

There are several major tenets to this strategy. One is to fully utilize the International Space Station [ISS]. This human spaceflight laboratory is now a major piece of our human space exploration strategy. We're going to fully utilize the ISS to learn what it takes to send humans beyond low Earth orbit. To me, that's one benefit of the new approach. In addition, we will focus on the development of game-changing technology and early-stage innovation. NASA is going to cast a wide net for the best ideas from industry, academia, NASA centers, or partnerships with other agencies. These innovations will enable the development of new approaches to our current mission set and allow us to pursue entirely new missions for the country.

S: What transformational technologies are needed to realize NASA's goals for robotic or human space exploration?

B: I'm going to be in a position where I'm responsible for the selection of some of these things, and so I can't tip my hand. But in general, we clearly need better materials. We clearly need more lightweight structures.

We perhaps need more inflatable habitats or technologies which could be used to get around the limitations of existing launch vehicle volumes. We need advanced propulsion for heavy lift, but also for in-space transportation. In-situ resource utilization — we need to learn how to live off the land, so to speak, at the moon and Mars.

S: What destinations or goals would you like to see for NASA's robotic missions in the near future?

B: First of all, I started out with NASA because I was interested in human Mars exploration. My first job at NASA Langley was to figure out how to send humans to Mars and land them safely. I worked with the first President Bush on his space exploration initiative. I honestly thought we were going to Mars, when I was right out of college as a young engineer.

When human Mars exploration fell apart, I worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on sending out a variety of landers to the surface of Mars. The technological challenges of that alone were significant. I learned how hard it is to land even small rovers on Mars. NASA's been getting better at that, leading up to the Mars Science Laboratory that will land around 2012.

I'd like to see us continue on the scientific pathway we're on. It started out as follow the water, then became follow the carbon, and there's no doubt the Mars program is on the path to one day address the question of life. I think that's really exciting. Was there life on Mars, could there be life in Mars? Those questions have major implications for our society and our world. The ramifications are pretty significant regardless of whether the answer is yes or no.

In parallel to that, I think we need to start working on human precursor missions. If we want to someday send humans to Mars — and I do want to send humans to Mars — we need to know how to land the really huge payloads needed for human exploration. If you think of the Mars Science Laboratory as a small car, humans need a two-story house. That's a big leap.

S: Are there any overshadowed technologies that people don't typically think of as important for space exploration?

B: As you're probably aware, there's been a revolution in IT [information technology], robotics, nanotechnology, and in bio-inspired design. The reason I'm excited about those three or four topics is that there's a huge research world centered on those topics outside NASA. In academia or industry, people want to invent the next Internet, or the next big Internet application. What we need to do is tap into those innovations that are occurring outside NASA and bring some of those innovations inside NASA.

S: Do you think NASA has not looked to outside innovation so much in the past?

B: I left NASA in 2003, so I've been outside the agency for the past seven years. As an outside observer, it appeared to me that NASA was all about "let's go to the moon with existing systems, let's build what we can now to get there." Given the budget and schedule constraints they were working within, this was likely the only viable approach.

However, this also meant that NASA had to forego any substantial technology investments. While I do believe this nation needs to go back to the moon, I think America's plan should be bigger than that. In order to get to a range of other destinations and accomplish other missions, a significant technology development effort is required.

America should be about innovation. America should be about pushing the boundaries scientifically and technologically. If we are going to send humans back to the moon and one day on to Mars, I'd like to think of us taking a technological approach that's economically viable.

The NASA administrator announced the other day that seven companies are going to compete for commercial access to space. In what other nation in the world could that happen?

S: Do you hope NASA can create more spin-off technologies that private companies can license?

B: That is definitely a big part of the greater goal, to spin in and spin out technologies. I'm interested in spinning off NASA technologies to use in applications that help solve national needs. I think it's true that the space program has always been a very good investment for America, for a number of reasons.

One, I think it's inspiring. It's a great model, an inspirational model, and it draws in a lot of young talent to related technological fields. There's a lot of commercialization potential and partnership potential that started in government and transitioned to industry. Over time, through the new space technology program, a number of new businesses could be created — in theory, whole new industries.

S: What new technology investments do you think will have huge benefits for Earth as well as space exploration?

B: The area where NASA could perhaps lead — an area which could affect society greatly — is robotics. NASA is doing amazing things in both robotics and human exploration assisted by all kinds of autonomous systems. There's a large number of applications right here on the ground that will benefit from NASA research in that area.

S: What personal gadgets do you like?

B: I like all gadgets. When a new gadget comes out, I'm not usually the first one to get it. Being a university professor, I have engineering students around all the time who love technology. I basically watch them. This is an example of them teaching me. So when the students came out with all the social networking stuff, I learned about that from students. When the iPhone came out and was all the rage on campus, I learned about that from students.

Astronauts Hold Winter Olympics In Space

2010-02-22T14:15:00.000-08:00

Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor
space.com – Fri Feb 19, 2:00 pm ET

They don't have snow or ice, but an international team of astronauts held their own weightless Winter Olympics this week. Their venue: a $100 billion space station.

The 11 astronauts aboard the linked shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station (ISS) tried their hand at several space Winter Olympics events this week during breaks from adding a new room and observation deck to the outpost.

Their events? Space skiing, the zero-G luge and a graceful weightless figure skating. The crew beamed some space sports video of their antics to Mission Control.

Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, a space station resident, even donned a pair of short space skis for his slalom and jump events.

"I did send out my ski jump on ISS," Noguchi told reporters in Japan late Thursday.

Endeavour shuttle pilot Terry Virts took a shot at the luge, floating down a space station module feet first. His crewmate Kathryn "Kay" Hire twirled endlessly in what the spaceflyers called the ultimate "figure skating triple-lindys."

Virts said he and his crewmates have enjoyed looking down at Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, where the 2010 Winter Olympic Games are in full swing.

"We've been having some really nice night passes over the Olympics," Virts radioed Mission Control early Friday.

They also squeezed in some zero gravity diving — basically somersaulting while floating in place — though admittedly they should probably save that for the Summer Olympics, the astronauts said.

And like the Olympics, the shuttle and station astronauts even have a special emblem. But instead of five interlocked rings, they have mission patches emblazoned on their space clothes and equipment.

Playing sports in space is nothing new.

Astronaut Alan Shepard — one of the first seven NASA astronauts — played golf on the moon in 1971 during the Apollo 14 mission. His first swing was a bust, but he hit home on the second try — his ball going for "miles and miles," he radioed Mission Control at the time.

Thirty-five years later, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin whacked a golf ball off the International Space Station as part of a publicity stunt. A golf jacket is still on the space station today.

But there are some sports that have cropped up that defy any Olympic category.

Space station astronauts have come up with their own zero gravity sports. One involves tossing hefty bags of water around like medicine balls, then jumping on them while they move to see how far they could ride in weightlessness.

They have also held relay races from one end of the space station to another and challenged one another to float as far as they could without touching anything. The space station has about the same living space as a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Still, Earth's Winter Olympics stoke the international spirit of the space station and shuttle astronauts. Currently, there are six astronauts on Endeavour — all from NASA and American. But one, mission specialist Nicholas Patrick, was born in England.

The space station is home to five spaceflyers: two Russians, two Americans and Noguchi.

Noguchi, who represents the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, told reporters in Japan that he has been keeping up with the Winter Olympics as much as possible, particularly because Japan has won a few medals.

His favorite so far: ski jumping and figure skating. Noguchi has been using the station's Internet connection to keep current on the Olympic standings.

"I know that there are wonderful athletes there, so we're hoping for great medals," Noguchi said in a message of support to the Olympic athletes. "I look forward to that. Good luck to you all."

Noguchi and his crewmates will say a final farewell to the Endeavour shuttle crew later today. The shuttle is due to undock from the space station tonight at 7:54 p.m. EST (0054 Saturday GMT).

Mission Control congratulated the crew late Thursday on a “mission of 'Olympic' proportions.”

"You are officially the only folks who are able to get more hang time then Shaun White," Mission Control said in a message.

White, the American snowboarder, took the gold Wednesday night in the men's halfpipe at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

Endeavour and its crew are wrapping up a 14-day mission that delivered the new Tranquility room and Cupola observation deck to the $100 billion space station. The astronauts locked themselves inside the shuttle early Friday morning to prepare for tonight's undocking, after saying farewell to the station crew.

"Quiet dinner," Noguchi wrote on his Twitter page (Astro_Soichi) after saying farewell. "I already miss the shuttle guys."

______________________

Who to Watch In Private Space Taxi Field

2010-02-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

By The Associated Press The Associated Press – Sun Jan 31, 8:32 am ET

Here are some leading companies that are or could be developing a private space taxi system to take astronauts to the International Space Station. More firms may join in.

• THE COMPANY: Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif.

THE BASICS: Run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, this company has already built and tested a private rocket, Falcon, and has a capsule, Dragon. It already has a demonstration contract for private cargo with NASA. It is considered a leader in the field and has connections with Google.

THE WEB SITE: http://www.spacex.com/

• THE COMPANIES: Boeing Co. of Chicago and Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas.

THE BASICS: An interesting pairing. Boeing is one of the oldest companies in aerospace with corporate history going back to Mercury missions. Bigelow is a pioneer in the private space business that is developing a commercial space station/hotel. Boeing has its own much-launched rocket family, the Delta, and also is partners with Lockheed Martin Corp. in a firm that launches Delta and Atlas rockets.

THE WEB SITE: http://www.boeing.com/ and http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/

• THE COMPANY: Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev.

THE BASICS: A high-tech government contractor that recently bought one of the early private space firms, SpaceDev Inc.

THE WEB SITE: http://www.sncorp.com/

• THE COMPANY: Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.

THE BASICS: One of the first private space companies. It has its own in-use rocket family, Taurus, which launches from Wallops Island, Va. It also has a demonstration contract for private cargo with NASA.

THE WEB SITE: http://www.orbital.com/

• THE COMPANY: Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., or as part of United Launch Alliance of Denver.

THE BASICS: Lockheed Martin had been building the capsule for NASA's moon mission that is being canceled. It is an aerospace giant with a long history in manned space and has its own family of decades-old rockets, the Atlas. It could compete on its own or as part of the United Launch Alliance, which is a joint venture with Boeing that launches unmanned commercial rockets.

THE WEB SITES: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/ and http://www.ulalaunch.com/

Businessman to Fly African Flags On Space Trip

2010-02-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

by Staff Writers
Nairobi (AFP) Feb 9, 2010

A Dubai-based businessman who has signed up to be a spacetourist said Tuesday he planned to fly the flags of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda on his out-of-world journey in honour of his childhood in Africa.

Real estate magnate Ashish Thakkar was in Nairobi to receive a Kenyan flag from Prime Minister Raila Odinga ahead of a space voyage expected next year.

"I feel honoured that I will be the first to take Kenya's flag into space," said Thakkar, 28.

"I believe Kenya can use this historic trip to market itself internationally. I want to boost Kenya's image abroad," he said.

Thakkar, co-founder of the international Kensington Group real estate agency, is among 40 people who have paid 200,000 dollars for a trip on Richard Branson'scommercial rocket plane SpaceShipTwo.

He was born in Britain but spent 15 years of his childhood in Africa before his family returned to Britain. He has been in Dubai for the past eight years.

Thakkar has already received the Tanzanian flag from President Jakaya Kikwete and is due to also meet Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who will hand him the country's flag.

NASA's 7 New Space Pioneers Are Companies

2010-02-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Tue Feb 2, 5:09 pm ET

WASHINGTON – A half century ago the Mercury Seven embodied America's space future. Now it's the merchant seven — space companies for hire.

Mimicking a scene 51 years ago when the Mercury astronauts were revealed, NASA's boss beamed Tuesday as he introduced the "faces of a new frontier:" representatives of the seven companies that NASA is funding to develop future private spacecraft.

And more money is coming. In President Barack Obama's proposed budget, he not only killed his predecessor's $100 billion moon program, he proposed spending $6 billion over five years to develop private space taxis. NASA would then pay them to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Some of the players include companies run by Internet pioneers Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk of PayPal. Bezos runs Blue Origin, a Kent, Wash., company that until Tuesday had only talked about going into suborbital space; now it will compete to go into orbit as a space taxi. Musk runs SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif. and already has built a rocket called Falcon and a capsule called Dragon.

Others include Boeing Co. of Houston; Paragon Space Development Co. of Tucson, Ariz.; Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev.; United Launch Alliance of Denver, and Orbital Science Corp. of Dulles, Va.

NASA on Tuesday detailed $50 million worth of seed grants for development of a space taxi to Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Paragon, United Launch and Blue Origin.

A year ago, the space agency gave $3.5 billion in contracts to Orbital Science and SpaceX for 20 commercial cargo resupply flights to the space station. Both are likely to develop crew taxis too, with Musk of SpaceX saying he could fly astronauts within three years of a final contract. And he said he could do it for $20 million a head, less than half the price NASA pays Russia for astronauts flying on that country's Soyuz capsule.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden and officials from the companies said just because space will become for-profit, safety will not be forgotten, as some congressional critics worry.

"It's all about crew safety," United Launch Alliance President Mike Gass said. Gass's company got a $6.7 million NASA grant so the firm's Atlas and Delta rockets could be better monitored to provide safety for any astronauts sitting on capsules on top of them. Bezos' Blue Origin received $3.7 million from NASA to work on a new type of launch escape system for a crew on top of a rocket.

"I know personally the great challenges involved in sending humans into orbit and have lost friends in trying to do so," said Bolden, a former shuttle commander. "I pledge to you that I will make it my job everyday to ensure that everything is done efficiently and safely."

There won't be just one winner, officials said. NASA hopes there will be multiple spaceships carrying crews, pushing costs down and safety up. There may be even more than just these seven, Bolden said.

With the dramatic changes ordered by the Obama administration, NASA is going back to its pre-Apollo 1959-60 roots, when it was a research-and-development powerhouse more than an engineering factory, said Harry Lambright, a professor of public policy at Syracuse University.

"It turns NASA inside out; it takes it back to the old days, pre-Apollo days," Lambright said. He called it a gamble that might not work.

What's happening is part spin, part needed reinvention, said American University space policy and historian Howard McCurdy.

"Clearly what they're trying to do is it make it look positive. Instead of making it a story of cancellations, it's a story of new beginnings," McCurdy said. "It probably is in some ways as dramatic as the appointment of the first new astronauts."

Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and now a SpaceX vice president, was one of those introduced and said he couldn't help but notice the parallel to the Mercury astronauts — right down to the number seven.

___

On the Net

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov

Lost In Space Race: Female Pilots

2009-10-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Women had the "right stuff," too, back in the '60s. But the data on their performance tests were buried in the Mad Men era, and it was two decades before there was an American female astronaut.

A report in the current Advances in Physiology Education reveals that the "Mercury 13" members of the private Woman in Space Program of the early 1960s did about as well as, or better than, male candidates identically tested.

"Some of these women were told they were as good as men. The data show it was true," says lead author Kathy Ryan of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

But the 13 women who passed the astronaut tests at Lovelace saw their chance at "one giant step for womankind" canceled in 1961. "I quit my job teaching flight instruction, and … there I was, unemployed," says Gene Nora Jessen, 72, of Boise.

The push for female astronauts began in 1959 when clinic chief W. Randolph Lovelace II and Gen. Donald Flickinger of the U.S. Air Force began a program to test female pilots as astronaut candidates. "They reasoned women were smaller and breathed less oxygen," Ryan says. When the Air Force canceled the effort later that year, Lovelace's clinic took over privately, running the same physical tests on 19 female pilots that 32 male candidates underwent. Of the women, 13 passed (68%); of the men, 18 passed (56%).

The top four women tested as fit as the Mercury 7 astronauts, Ryan says. One in particular, Jerrie Cobb, "really had the right stuff." Cobb passed all tests and far exceeded Mercury 7's average in flight time and endurance.

Almost none of the data were published. But one of Ryan's co-authors, Jack Loeppsky of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Albuquerque, had studied with one of the testing physicians and kept the data on aerobic capacity. When Ryan became interested in the subject, Loeppsky produced the data.

"If we had access to the data, we'd have known they were quite capable," says Margaret Weitekamp of the National Air & Space Museum, author of Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women In Space Program. It was never an official NASA program, but the agency embraced the Mercury 13, crediting them with paving the way for others.

Jessen, who is on a tour for her book, The Fabulous Flight of the Three Musketeers, harbors no grudges: "It was wonderful to be part of that time."

After 5 Years, Space Tourism A Work In Progress

2009-10-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

By JOHN ANTCZAK and ALICIA CHANG, Associated Press Writers

LOS ANGELES – When a private spaceship soared over California to claim a $10 million prize, daredevil venture capitalist Alan Walton was 68 and thought he'd soon be on a rocket ride of his own.

Walton plunked down $200,000 to be among the first space tourists to make a suborbital thrill-ride high above the Earth aboard a Virgin Galactic spaceship.

Now he intends to ask for his deposit back if there's no fixed launch date by his 74th birthday next April.

"This was going to be the highlight of my old age," he said.

It has been five years since SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed manned spacecraft, captured the Ansari X Prize on Oct. 4, 2004, by demonstrating that a reusable rocket capable of carrying passengers could fly more than 62 miles high twice within two weeks — showing reliability and commercial viability.

Enthusiasm over SpaceShipOne's feats was so high that year that even before the prize-winning flight, British mogul Richard Branson announced an agreement to use the technology in a second-generation design, SpaceShipTwo, to fly commercial passengers into space under the Virgin Galactic banner by 2007.

It seemed that anyone who had the money would soon be experiencing what SpaceShipOne pilot Brian Binnie called "literally a rush — you light that motor off and the world wakes up around you." And then the sensation of weightlessness and the sight of the world far below.

Turning the dream into reality has taken longer than many expected in those days, and spaceflight remains the realm of government astronauts and a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who have paid millions for rides on Russian rockets to the international space station.

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis says, however, that things have not been at a standstill.

More than $1 billion has been invested in the industry, regulatory roadblocks have been addressed and as many as three different passenger spaceships will emerge in the next 18 to 24 months and begin flying, he said.

"You'll get another large injection of excitement in public interest once those vehicles begin operating and the public starts getting flown," he said.

Freight business owner Edwin Sahakian has seen signs of progress. He and four other Virgin Galactic customers got a peek at SpaceShipTwo this summer during a visit to the Scaled Composites plant at the Mojave Airport, where it is being built by maverick aviation designer Burt Rutan.

At the time it was the color of carbon fiber — dark gray — and had not been painted. Its engine had not been assembled either, but Sahakian was impressed with one aspect: lots of big windows.
"This is not a grandiose mock-up. This is the real thing," said the 46-year-old Sahakian, who is a flight instructor in his spare time.

During the campaign to win the X Prize, Rutan had stressed that a tourism spacecraft would have to have big windows to give passengers a view and it would have to be at least 100 times safer than any spacecraft ever flown.

The project was dealt a setback two years ago when three technicians were killed in an explosion while testing SpaceShipTwo's propellant system. Scaled Composites, which was bought by Northrop Grumman Corp., was cited for five workplace violations and fined $28,870 in connection with the blast that also critically injured three men.

Like SpaceShipOne, its successor will be carried aloft by a special jet aircraft dubbed the WhiteKnightTwo. The rocketship will be released at high altitude before the pilot ignites its motor. After reaching the top of its trajectory, it will fall back into the atmosphere and glide to a landing.

Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn said testing of WhiteKnightTwo is in full swing, with flights above 52,000 feet.

The completed SpaceShipTwo is expected to be unveiled in December in Mojave and first test flights will begin next year, with full-fledged space launches to its maximum altitude by or during 2011, Whitehorn said.

But no timetable for the start of commercial operations is being released, he said.

Whitehorn said Virgin Galactic continues to hold $40 million in deposits by 300 customers.

X Prize Foundation President Robert K. Weiss acknowledged that "things are a few years behind what was originally anticipated" but said he is certain there will be commercial spaceflights within this decade and the interest of people will be reinvigorated.

"When the demand starts to ramp up, the price is going to come down and so it's not going to be a couple hundred thousand dollars, it's going to be the price of, let's say, an automobile," he said.

The foundation, meanwhile, has branched out with its concept of spurring innovation through monetary incentives. Multimillion-dollar X Prizes are being offered in competitions to send a privately funded robot to the moon, build production-capable cars with the equivalent of 100 mpg efficiency, and for developing technology to greatly reduce the time it takes to sequence human genomes.

Diamandis said that while 10 years ago, he found it hard to get anyone to listen to the concept of the X Prize until telecommunications millionaire Anousheh Ansari and her family funded the first one.

Now he says he is seeing a substantial increase in interest from philanthropists, corporations and government agencies in spurring innovation through incentives.

"In financial stress times, prizes really work very well because you only pay upon success," he said.

Space Shuttle Undocks From Space Station

2009-09-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn, Ap Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Discovery and its seven astronauts pulled away from the international space station on Tuesday and headed home, leaving tons of fresh supplies behind as well as a new face.

The shuttle is due back on Earth on Thursday.

"We're pretty fat with supplies now thanks to you," called out space station astronaut Michael Barratt. "God speed you on your way home."

Discovery undocked as the two spacecraft soared 220 miles above China. Pilot Kevin Ford guided the shuttle in a lap around the station, essentially for picture-taking. Barratt said he and his station crewmates were glued to the windows watching "that magnificent spaceship that just flew under us."

The shuttle astronauts quickly got started on an evening of surveying to check for any signs of micrometeorite damage and make sure their ship can return safely.

"The mission is far from complete for us, but we couldn't be more pleased with how it's gone," said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.

Discovery's departure ended nearly nine days of linked flight in which more than 18,000 pounds of equipment and experiments were dropped off. Astronaut Nicole Stott took up residence aboard the space station, replacing Timothy Kopra, homeward bound after being off the planet for nearly two months.

Kopra should have stayed longer at the orbiting complex, but had his mission cut short by launch delays to his shuttle ride up. Tuesday marked his 55th day in space.

Despite his abbreviated stay, Kopra was eager to be reunited with his wife and two children, and said he was looking forward to a sip of beer.

Also returning aboard Discovery: Buzz Lightyear. The 12-inch action figure spent 15 months at the space station as part of a NASA educational program. The doll will take part in a tickertape parade at Walt Disney World early next month.

Another piece of pop culture, though, remained on board the space station: a treadmill named after Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert.

Colbert had campaigned for naming rights to a yet-to-be-launched space station room, but NASA went with Tranquility for that and the comedian had to settle for the exercise machine that flew up on Discovery. The $5 million treadmill won't be assembled until later this month.

Six astronauts stayed behind to continue their own lengthy missions. Stott, the newest station occupant, will remain on board until November.

Mission Control, meanwhile, determined that the space station will not need to move out of the way of a piece of space junk that will pass within roughly 45 miles early Wednesday. It's a fragment from a Chinese satellite that was blasted by a missile two years ago.

It won't be long before another spacecraft drops by. Japan's brand new cargo ship will be launched Thursday and hook up to the space station one week later. Then at the beginning of October, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft will arrive with a fresh station crew and a billionaire tourist, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte.

The space station is now 84 percent complete with a mass of more than 710,000 pounds. Six shuttle flights remain to wrap up construction. Atlantis is up next in November with a load of big spare parts.

NASA hopes to finish the station and fly the shuttle for the last time by the end of 2010 or early 2011. The future of human spaceflight, however, is unclear. A White House panel of independent space experts said in a report Tuesday that NASA cannot afford to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 as envisioned.

___

On the Net:

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

India Loses Contact With Its First Moon Mission

2009-08-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

Sat Aug 29, 9:23 am ET

BANGALORE, India (Reuters) – India has lost all contact with an unmanned spacecraft conducting its first moon mission, the national space agency said on Saturday.

Communications with the Chandrayaan-1 craft broke down early on Saturday. "It is a serious problem. If we do not re-establish contact we will lose the spacecraft," said S. Satish, spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

The $79-million mission was launched amid national euphoria last October, putting India in the Asian space race alongside rival China, reinforcing its claim to be considered a global power.

A probe vehicle landed on the moon a month later and sent back images of the lunar surface.

But a critical sensor in the main craft, orbiting the moon, malfunctioned in July, raising fears that the two-year mission may have to be curtailed.

One of the mission's main aims was to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but could be an energy source in the future in nuclear fusion.

ISRO has plans to send a manned mission to space in four years' time and eventually on to Mars.

China, U.S. May Cooperate On World's Biggest Telescope

2009-08-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

Fri Aug 28, 11:59 am ET

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Astronomers from China and the United States may cooperate on building the world's largest telescope aimed at providing deeper insight into the very early stages of the universe, Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

The Thirty-Meter-Telescope (TMT), conceived and headed by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is expected to be completed in 2019, the official Chinese news agency said.

"It is a big undertaking and it will define the future of astronomy and astrophysics for about 60 or 70 years, so it will automatically involve a large international community," said Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau in an interview with Xinhua.

Xinhua said the university and Caltech are talking to Chinese astronomers and scientists about cooperation on funding and technology, although no final decision has been made.

Canada and Japan have signed up to the project, which needs total financing of $1 billion, it said.

The telescope, with a mirror 30 meters in diameter, will have the sharpest view possible of the universe and will pick up images of galaxies and stars forming 13 billion light years away. It will be located on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Problem Cancels Moon Rocket Test Firing In Utah

2009-08-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

By PAUL FOY, Associated Press Writer Paul Foy, Associated Press Writer – Thu Aug 27, 7:42 pm ET

PROMONTORY, Utah – A mechanical failure forced a NASA contractor on Thursday to call off the first test firing of the main part of NASA's powerful new moon rocket.

The test wasn't immediately rescheduled as officials scrambled to learn the root cause of the failure.

Alliant Techsystems Inc. called off the rocket burn with just 20 seconds left on the countdown clock. Operators cited failure of a power unit that drives hydraulic tilt controls for the rocket's nozzle. The rocket was anchored to the ground in a horizontal position for the test.

It was a setback for a carefully staged, $75 million event that drew thousands of onlookers. Alliant hoped the routine test would prove the performance of a new program for space exploration that, like the test rocket, may not fly because of NASA budget problems.

There was no indication anything was wrong with the rocket itself, which packs 1 million pounds of chemical propellant, enough to boost a 321-foot-long vehicle 190,000 feet into the atmosphere.

At a news conference in Utah, officials said the power unit for the nozzle controls, which steer a rocket in flight, was robbed of fuel, apparently because of a faulty valve.

That had potential implications for the space shuttle, which uses a nearly identical system. Officials in Utah notified their counterparts at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where NASA has had to twice delay the launch of Discovery for other reasons.

The Ares test problem could introduce a new delay in the launch of Discovery, previously set back because of weather and again because of a problem with a different shuttle fuel valve.

Shuttle managers said Thursday they will examine what went wrong with Ares and decide by early Friday whether to go ahead with a launch set for 11:59 p.m. EDT Friday.

In Utah, Alliant executives said their valve problem had never before emerged to scrub a rocket's test firing. Engineers could have fired the rocket anyway, but they halted the two-minute burn because they wouldn't have been able to test the agility of the rocket nozzle.

"This test is really important to the program, and it's a rare occurrence to have a problem with a booster," said Charlie Precourt, Alliant's general manager for launch systems, who was a four-time shuttle astronaut. "We should have this sorted out shortly."

Alex Prisko, a NASA manager for the Ares booster rocket, said the delay would add no more than a few million dollars to the $75 million cost of making and testing the rocket.

The Ares rocket is the centerpiece of the plan started by President George W. Bush to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars.

That plan, and all of NASA's human space program, is under review by a special independent panel, which will make recommendations to President Barack Obama on Monday. Some space experts expect the Ares rocket program, which has already cost $7 billion, will be modified or canceled.

But Thursday's glitch won't be a reason for that, experts said.

Problems, delays and outright failures are common in tests of new rockets and was nothing to worry about, said two former top NASA officials.

"The development of all launch vehicles is spotty and checkered at best," said Scott Hubbard, once director of NASA's Ames Research Center and now a professor of astronautics and aeronautics at Stanford University. "The fact that they are having troubles is not surprising at all."

Even after more than 125 flights, the space shuttle gets glitches like this that causes delays, Hubbard said. The shuttle Discovery was delayed twice this week.

Former NASA associate administrator Alan Stern, now associate vice president of Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio, said the company was prudent in not pushing with the test.

"This is a big deal, if it goes badly there are serious consequences," Stern said. But a delay in a test isn't necessarily a bad thing and shouldn't influence the White House's decision on whether to continue with the Bush moon program that features Ares rockets.

"This is a normal occurrence," Stern said.
____________

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington, D.C., contributed to this eport.

Asteroid Threat? Call the Space Lawyers

2009-04-30T13:03:00.000-07:00

Asteroid Threat? Call the Space Lawyers

By Jeremy Hsu Staff Writer posted: 28 April 200911:54 am ET

Asteroids that might threaten Earth could pose a challenge beyond the obvious, if nations can't get their act together and figure out a unified plan of action.

There are currently no known space rocks on a collision course with Earth, but with ample evidence for past impacts, researchers say it's only a matter of time before one is found to be heading our way.

A swarm of political and legal issues bedevil any national or international response, whether it's responsibility for collateral damage from deflected asteroids or the possible outcry if one country decides to unilaterally nuke the space threat.

"The word 'unorganized' is spot on here," said Frans von der Dunk, space law expert at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "There is no such thing as even a platform for some level of coordination regarding possible responses — and, to be honest, some quarters very much would like it to remain that way."

Legal experts discussed such problems last week at a University of Nebraska-Lincoln conference titled "Near-Earth Objects: Risks, Responses and Opportunities-Legal Aspects." Their talks underscored how underprepared the international community is to deal with policy and legal fallout from a potential asteroid threat.

Saving Earth vs. scaring everybody
Many scientists have already brainstormed a variety of ways to deflect or destroy rogue asteroids, such as sending out spacecraft to nudge the space rock aside for a near-miss or simply blasting it apart. But some solutions may have different levels of appeal for various nations, especially when they involve launching potential weapons into space.

For instance, international concern surrounded a U.S. shoot-down of a failing satellitelast year, not to mention China's 2007 knockout of its own aging weather satellite with a ballistic missile. Both cases raised worries about the demonstration of potential missile defense systems or satellite-killer technologies.

"The international political reactions to the U.S. shooting down of its own satellites a year ago to prevent presumably dangerous and toxic fuel from reaching Earth only foreshadows what would happen if the U.S. would detonate nukes claiming to destroy an incoming asteroid," von der Dunk told SPACE.com.

Other scenarios could highlight the question of international unity. A United Nations Security Council decision on a certain asteroid response would likely shield participating nations against any liabilities for collateral damage from a failed deflection or interception attempt, if the past serves as any guide — the U.S. and other coalition nations that kicked Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 were not held responsible for damages to Iraq under Security Council mandate.

Depends on who'll get hit
Von der Dunk also posed the tricky question of what the international response would be if a smaller asteroid was headed for North Korea. The politically isolated nation attempted but failed to put a communications satellite into orbit in April, and would almost certainly require assistance from the U.S., Russia or China to deal with an asteroid threat.

Better international cooperation might also help in figuring out how to assess asteroid threats and release potentially scary info to the public.

"We have already seen scares raised by scientists ready to put out alarms out there, when either their data (fortunately quickly!) turned out to be considerably flawed, or later data allowed for a much more precise estimate of the risk — which turned out to be much lower," von der Dunk said.

He pointed to the case of the Apophis asteroid, in which astronomers initially gave a one-in-37 chance of it striking Earth in 2029, but later refined chances of collision to almost zero.
Experts at the conference agreed to keep pushing forward on legal issues, as well as focus on general education on the asteroid threat for policymakers. And they even discussed how private companies might join in the effort to monitor asteroids, potentially for the purpose of extracting mineral wealth from space rocks.

Von der Dunk heads next to the Planetary Defense Conference in Spain April 27-30, where he will present the conference recommendations to the International Academy of Astronautics and the European Space Agency.

Video - Asteroid Hunting
Video - Killer Comets and Ominous Asteroids
Images: Asteroids

Death Valley Works to Preserve Night Sky

2009-01-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer Alicia Chang, Ap Science Writer – Fri Dec 26, 8:25 am ET, AP

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, Calif. – High atop Dante's View, overlooking sheets of salt flats and ribbons of sand dunes, night watcher Dan Duriscoe shone a laser beam at the North Star and steadied his digital camera at the starry heavens.

Duriscoe panned the camera toward the light factory of Las Vegas, 85 miles away but peeking out

like a white halo above the mountains in the eastern horizon.

"You can see the Luxor vertical beam," said Duriscoe, pointing to a time-exposure shot on his camera-connected laptop showing the Vegas Strip pyramid-shaped hotel's famous searchlight. "That's the brightest thing out there."

Acclaimed for its ink black skies, Death Valley, the hottest place in North America, also ranks among the nation's unspoiled stargazing spots. But the vista in recent years has grown blurry.

The glitzy neon glow from Las Vegas and its burgeoning bedroom communities is stealing stars from the park's eastern fringe. New research reveals light pollution from Vegas increased 61 percent between 2001 and 2007, making it appear brighter than the planet Venus on clear nights as seen from Dante's View.

Duriscoe, a soft-spoken, mustachioed physical scientist with the National Park Service, is part of a roving federal team of night owls whose job is to gaze up at the sky and monitor for light pollution in national parks.

"What is alarming to me is, what's going to happen three or four generations from now if this growth of outdoor lights continues?" he asked.

Amid such concerns, Death Valley, the largest national park in the Lower 48, has set an ambitious goal: It wants to be the first official dark-sky national park.
___

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have been enthralled by the night sky's romantic mystique. Early seafarers relied on stars to steer their ships. Farmers looked toward the night sky for clues to plant and harvest crops. Ancient cultures spun mythologies from staring at the cosmos.

Civilization is also the chief reason why the night sky is vanishing in many corners. As the world grows, so do the number of lamp posts that sprout up like trees in sprawling subdivisions. Pass by Anywhere, USA and chances are you will see lighted shopping strips, twinkling auto malls and flashy billboards.

Today, it's estimated about one fifth of the world's population and more than two-thirds in the United States cannot see the Milky Way from their backyards.

Further, studies have shown exposure to artificial lights can interrupt animals' biological clocks and disrupt ecosystems. Migratory birds have been known to be confused by blinding lights on skyscrapers and fly smack into them. Last year, the cancer arm of the World Health Organization listed the graveyard shift, where workers toil under artificial lights, as a probable carcinogen.

The International Dark-Sky Association, an Arizona-based nonprofit whose slogan is "Carpe Noctem," has noticed an increased awareness about the perils of light pollution, but acknowledged there's a limit to promoting dark skies.

"I don't think you can get Paris to turn off the Eiffel Tower or persuade Times Square to turn off all of its lights," said Pete Strasser, the association's managing director.

The same could probably be said for Las Vegas, the sparkly desert playground where neon signs blend into the natural landscape.

"It's part of the whole ambiance. It's the selling point of Las Vegas," said Barbara Ginoulias, director of comprehensive planning for Clark County, Nev., where Vegas is located. Still, she added, "We're certainly cognizant of light pollution and we try to address it in the best way."

Ginoulias' department oversees unincorporated parts of Clark County, which are required to shield outdoor lights or cast the light downward. Next month, the county commission will consider an ordinance that would set lighting standards on digital billboards on Interstate 15 that runs along the Vegas Strip.

As for the main drag, Las Vegas Boulevard, Ginoulias said signs are reviewed case-by-case. Newer signs tend to be less flashy or not have the glaring white background, she said.
___

With no control over the Vegas glow, park rangers at Death Valley are looking inward to fix the light problem at home as they pursue their goal of becoming the first dark-sky national park.

To gain that distinction, the park must shield or change out two-thirds of its existing outdoor light fixtures. Death Valley has about 700 lights in its 3.3 million acres, including parking lot light poles, flood lights, fluorescent tubes and egress lights next to doors. Only about 200 lights meet the sky-friendly standard.

At the Furnace Creek Visitor Center located 190 feet below sea level, the pedestrian walkway leading to the front entrance is lined with overhead rows of fluorescent tubes under a canopy. From Dante's View at night, the visitor center appears as dancing white and blue dots.

"This is a really bright spot in the park," said Terry Baldino, chief of interpretation at Death Valley. "All the campgrounds have to share their night sky with the lights here. If we can reduce that, then we're going to improve their night stay."

The park has replaced some fixtures with tin can-shaped designs that focus light onto the ground instead of sideways or upward. Rangers are also debating whether to turn off outdoor lights in some cases.

"We're doing little by little," said Baldino.

So far, Utah's Gold Tier Natural Bridges National Monument and Pennsylvania's Cherry Springs State Park are the only two parks certified by the International Dark-Sky Association as dark-sky enclaves. This fall, the group gave a tentative OK to the Geauga Park District's Observatory Park 40 miles east of Cleveland for its work to preserve darkness over the observatory and nearby park land.

Despite Death Valley's lighting challenges, city dwellers from all over still flock to take in the view.

On a recent December evening, a naturalist couple from northern Los Angeles admired the star-studded sky from Zabriskie Point, a popular lookout just south of the visitor center.

"You don't see this in L.A.," said Karen Zimmerman, 49, who works at the Huntington Library, Art

Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. "You forget how many stars there are."

As Zimmerman spoke, a hazy glare could be seen from a distance.

Zimmerman's wife, Debra, 44, chimed in: "One of the things that concerns us is losing darkness. You just don't get darkness in Los Angeles. It's just nonexistent."
___

Back at Dante's View, a 5,475-foot panoramic viewpoint overlooking the glimmering valley floor, Duriscoe is working his second night taking sky brightness readings. The crescent moon, which formed a triangle with Jupiter and Venus earlier in the night, has dropped below the horizon.

The night is still — save for the occasional breeze and whirring noise of Duriscoe's camera mounted on a moving tripod that automatically takes 45 images, covering the entire sky. The images are then stitched together, and by subtracting the light by known stars, scientists create

fisheye and panoramic maps of light invasion.

Duriscoe has been skygazing at national parks for a living since 1999 and made the first sky brightness comparisons two years later. A self-described desert rat, Duriscoe excitedly points to the Orion, Aquarius, Pisces and Aries constellations. The Milky Way, which arches across the night sky, bleeds into the Vegas light dome 30 degrees above the horizon. The glow from the greater Los Angeles region forms a long, narrow band.

Skywatchers can theoretically see some 6,000 stars in the blackest and pristine skies of Death Valley. With light pollution from Vegas, scientists estimate about 2,500 stars are visible from Dante's View.

Advances in technology have enabled people to see the cosmos like never before. Take the Hubble Space Telescope, which has beamed stunning images of exotic galaxies and distant supernovae to people's computers. But Duriscoe noted that these onscreen images are just not the same as being out under the sky.

Sitting on the ledge of Dante's View, his legs stretched out and his back toward Vegas, Duriscoe pondered the shrinking sky.

"This is the real universe," he said, taking in the celestial light show until clouds moved in, drawing a curtain on the stars for the night.

Ensuring U.S. Access to the International Space Station

2008-08-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

Vincent Sabathier, G. Ryan Faith, and Alexandros Petersen
August 15, 2008

In his highly publicized July 24 speech in Berlin, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama struck a conciliatory chord in saying, “we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past and resolve to work with Russia when we can.” A few days later, Russia’s envoy to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, raised the idea of a new security framework for Eurasia that would include the United States and Russia, as well as China and India. Skeptics’ views that this might be a ploy to undermine NATO were significantly reinforced on August 11, when Russia launched a punitive expedition against Georgia. Destruction of the U.S. ally’s prospects of joining the alliance is most certainly one of Russia’s objectives.

But, Russia’s invasion of its Western-leaning south Caucasus neighbor is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pervasive increase in tensions between Washington and Moscow. Just before Obama’s July 24 speech, the Kremlin leaked plans to deploy, for the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems in Cuba as a response to U.S. missile defense plans involving Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia’s new president Dmitri Medvedev has also followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, in scuttling agreed UN Security Council plans for sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe and in selling advanced air-defense units to Iran in the midst of international concerns over its uranium enrichment program.

It is contentious points like these that have led some commentators to speak of a new Cold War. Some policymakers argue that Europe and the United States should see things for what they are. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has more than once called for Russia to be expelled from the G-8 as unqualified and uncooperative. He is also a strong supporter of U.S. efforts to bolster the NATO and EU membership aspirations of nascent democracies Ukraine and Georgia—even in the face of violent Russian opposition. Other potential flashpoints loom: Russia has made claims to the Arctic seabed, with its vast mineral and hydrocarbon deposits, while the United States and Europe look toward exploiting the same Caspian energy resources that Moscow covets.

Despite hopes for a new world order, tension is spreading into almost every realm of U.S.-Russia relations—except for that most visible of Cold War battlegrounds: space. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia have cooperated, along with Canada, Japan, and Europe, to build and operate the International Space Station (ISS), the most technologically complex and ambitious international project ever undertaken. From the first crew to take up residence in the ISS in October 2000, the station has been inhabited continuously, principally by U.S. and Russian crews, with additional visitors from Europe, Japan, Canada, and elsewhere. Currently, all station partners rely on the U.S. space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz capsule together as the only vehicles able to transport people to and from the space station. That is, until the 2010 retirement of the U.S. space shuttle. The retirement of the three-decade-old system will mark the beginning of a U.S. inability to send its own astronauts into space, a gap in capability that will last for at least five years, as well as the start of an absolute reliance on the Russian Soyuz.

However, even the U.S. ability to continue to purchase seats on the Soyuz capsule is now in jeopardy. The Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act (PL 109–112) prevents the purchase, either in kind or in cash, of Russian space technology and services, so long as Russia remains viewed as a proliferation threat for nuclear and missile technology. Due to a 2005 congressional waiver of these restrictions for operating the ISS, the United States has been able to purchase seats on launches of the Soyuz spacecraft to augment U.S. space shuttle flights. Although the current purchase of Soyuz flights will extend through 2011, the manufacturer of the Soyuz has stated that there is a three-year lead time to manufacture new capsules. Therefore, the uncertain fate of a new waiver currently under discussion in Congress means that the United States would lose access to a key component of the station logistics and transport system, requiring it to radically restructure its ability to maintain a presence on the station. This already precarious situation could become disastrous when combined with the planned 2010 retirement of the aging U.S. space shuttle fleet.

Granted, the ISS is the most significant achievement remaining from the glory days of Russia’s space endeavors and remains both a potent symbol and a steady source of income for their cash-strapped program. Today, the Russian inclination to rely on the ISS as source of revenue may provide some reason to believe that Russia will continue to ensure access to the ISS. If recent Russian actions are any indicator, a technical excuse to completely block U.S. access to the ISS for geopolitical reasons would fit nicely into the Kremlin toolkit. Almost immediately after the Czech Republic signed an agreement with the United States to place a missile defense tracking radar in its territory, oil supplies through the Druzhba pipeline to the Central European country were reduced to a trickle. Lithuania, one of the Europeans Union’s most vocal critics of Moscow’s policies, has grappled with similar cuts to its energy supplies from Russia for years, ostensibly for technical reasons. Given the current tense climate between the United States and Russia, Moscow would have ample incentives to exert oblique leverage over Washington or other countries by restricting access to the ISS.

These vulnerabilities come at a particularly sensitive time for the United States and its allies in the area of space cooperation. The United States and its partners on the station will have spent more than $100 billion on the ISS by the time of its completion in 2010. Current U.S. spaceflight plans will effectively cede the control of the ISS to Russia on its 2010 completion by leaving with Russia a monopoly on the ability to transport crew—including U.S., European, and Japanese astronauts—to and from the station. Effectively, the United States will have worked at great length with its partners to give Russia the best space station money can buy. Beyond this, as we have seen with the aftermath of the 2003 Columbia disaster, logistical support for the ISS is always difficult, and without an alternate means to send crew and supplies to the station, continued operation of the ISS could be seen as too risky to continue. In the longer term, there are already significant doubts about the future of ISS after 2015, when the United States is planning to shift its focus to returning to the Moon before the 50th anniversary of the first 1969 Moon landing. However, these plans to return to the Moon are also somewhat shaky and reflect a lack of concrete international participation. This host of future uncertainties makes it clear that it is in the interest of the United States and other ISS partners to strongly consider other options for transporting astronauts to the station and space in general.

At first glance, the possibility of a U.S.-led joint effort with Europe and Japan to quickly develop a backup transportation system, perhaps a capsule that could make use of existing U.S., European, or Japanese launch technologies. A joint program would bring the original space station partners together, finally delivering on the more than 20-year-old promises of the space station. A joint effort would leverage resources and capabilities using the U.S., European, and Japanese common interest in succeeding on the ISS, even if only to declare the station a success and move forward. However, the lack of any discussions thus far—let alone any concrete planning along these lines—means that although such an approach might be most beneficial, such an outcome is by no means certain and will most certainly require a fair amount of time to implement.

It therefore behooves U.S. policymakers to explore other options for access, if nothing else to prevent the reintroduction of Cold War competition to space. Perhaps somewhat ironically, a more promising option may lie with the world’s fastest-growing space power: China. Since China generated great controversy with its unannounced and highly polluting antisatellite test in early 2007, the United States and other space-faring nations have been skeptical about the underlying nature of China’s space program. Although there is no real practical way for China to immediately step up as an alternate means of station access today, such an option could still prove to be a fairly quick remedy, despite the fact that the United States has substantially blocked any dialog on the subject. However, Chinese officials have for many years expressed a keen interest in joining the ISS and seem determined to push forward with ambitious objectives for a Chinese role in space. The United States’ space gap—the half-decade period in which it will not be able to launch its own astronauts into space—would seem an opportune time to attempt confidence-building measures with Beijing. Although China has seen Russia as its historical partner in developing much of its spaceflight infrastructure, an overture from Washington could serve to break down significant barriers on space policy.

After China’s antisatellite test, the strong world reaction led many analysts to speak anew about the weaponization of space. It was thought that Beijing was either testing its ability to counter the U.S. asymmetric advantage in networked warfighting prowess or was reacting to intelligence about U.S. plans for satellite defense mechanisms. However, there have been few notable incidents since, and details have emerged that suggest Chinese military planners may have overstepped their bounds in ordering the test. That said, although cooperation on specific military technology is unlikely between China and the United States, exploring synergies in the realm of commercial space activities and civil space exploration hold the potential to build confidence and reduce skepticism across the board.

With China rallying its growing resources to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the sensitivity of its decisionmakers to the advantages and ideals of international cooperation will be heightened. This presents an excellent opportunity for senior U.S. policymakers to begin a new era of space cooperation with the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Alternately, the United States could pursue cooperation with its traditional partners in space to find solutions to the problems it faces. Either option has the potential to not only provide much-needed international support for U.S. plans to return to the Moon but also to ensure access to the ISS for the foreseeable future, effectively isolating the United States from any potential new Cold War tensions. U.S. civil space activity should not become a hostage to Russian objections to Georgia’s NATO membership goals, U.S. missile defense plans, or any facets of new Cold War political maneuvering. In a time of increasing tensions, the International Space Station can now help to serve the mission for which it was undertaken: greater cooperation among all space-faring nations.

Vincent Sabathier is a senior fellow and the director of Human Space Exploration Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. G. Ryan Faith is a program manager with the CSIS Human Space Exploration Initiative, and Alexandros Petersen is an adjunct fellow with the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program.

Next Space Tourist, Station Crew Eager to Fly

2008-07-31T15:13:00.000-07:00

By Clara Moskowitz

Staff Writer

Originally Posted: 30 July 2008

6:10 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON - America's next space tourist and a new space station crew are gearing up for an October launch to the International Space Station (ISS).

Computer game developer Richard Garriott, along with U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov are slated to launch Oct. 12 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport.

Garriott, the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who flew aboard the U.S. Skylab station and a U.S. shuttle, is set to become the first second-generation U.S. spaceflyer. He is flying under a $30 million deal brokered with Russia's Federal Space Agency by the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures to visit the ISS for about a week.

"To be frank this price tag is the majority of my wealth, to be honest," Garriott said Wednesday at a NASA briefing in Houston. "The reason why it's worth that to me is that this is the goal I've been working toward for a significant portion of my adult life."

The Austin, Texas resident is famous for creating the "Ultima" series of online computer games. His latest release, "Tabula Rasa," is an online science fiction game chronicling humanity's exodus from Earth after a major cataclysm. He plans to carry a so-called "immortality drive," a flash drive repository of information, including digital versions of the DNA from some computer gamers, copies of the avatars in one of his games, as well as an archive of mankind's greatest achievements.

"Since I'm getting a chance to go to space myself, I would be remiss without finding a way to connect to the community of gamers from space," Garriot said.

Garriott will be the sixth space tourist to vacation at the ISS. He plans to devote his stay to research, including protein crystallization and Earth observation experiments, with his father serving as chief scientist. He is scheduled to return to Earth with Expedition 17 Commander Sergei Volkov, himself a second-generation cosmonaut, and flight engineer Oleg Kononenko on Oct. 23 in a Soyuz.

Fincke, who made one previous trip to the space station as a flight engineer on the Expedition 9 crew, is set to lead the new Expedition 18 crew as commander. Lonchakov will serve as flight engineer. The main goal of their mission is to outfit the ISS to host six-person crews, double the population of its current three-person capacity.

"It's going to take us a lot of work, but it's the next step in getting the space station fully operational and we've got the right crew for it," Fincke said. "We think of ourselves as a can-do crew."

Two other members of the Expedition 18 crew, NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, are scheduled to fly on later shuttle missions. Magnus plans to ride aboard the November STS-126mission to become a space station flight engineer, while Wakata intends to arrive on the STS-119 mission in early 2009 to relieve her.

One member of the Expedition 18 crew is already aboard the space station. NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who launched to the ISS in June, is currently serving as a flight engineer with the station's Expedition 17 crew. He plans to stay aboard with Fincke and Lonchakov for the first stage of Expedition 18 before turning his slot over to Magnus in November.

On the Net:

VIDEO: ISS Commander Peggy Whitson Takes Charge
Future of Flight: Space Tourism, Investment and Technology
VIDEO: ISS Commander Peggy Whitson Takes Charge

Virgin Galactic Shows Off Mothership Aircraft

2008-07-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

Virgin Galactic unveils mothership for passenger rocket trips into space

By ALICIA CHANG AP Science Writer
MOJAVE, Calif. July 28, 2008 (AP) The Associated Press

Virgin Galactic give sneak peek at its secret space tourism program.

The space tourism race marked a milestone Monday as British mogul Sir Richard Branson and American aerospace designer Burt Rutan waved to a crowd from inside the cabin of an exotic jet that will carry a passenger spaceship to launch altitude.

The photo-op was the public unveiling of the White Knight Two mothership before a crowd of engineers, dignitaries and space enthusiasts at the Mojave Air & Space Port in the high desert north of Los Angeles.

The four-engine jet, with its 140-foot single wing, is an engineering marvel. The space between its twin fuselages is where SpaceShipTwo, the passenger rocket being built for Branson's Virgin Galactic, will be mounted.

White Knight Two, billed as the world's largest all-carbon-composite airplane, is "one of the most beautiful and extraordinary aviation vehicles ever developed," Branson proclaimed.

White Knight Two is the brainchild of Rutan, who made history in 2004 when his SpaceShipOne became the first private, manned craft to reach space. SpaceShipOne accomplished it with help from White Knight Two's smaller predecessor, White Knight. After winning $10 million for the feat, Rutan partnered with Branson, chairman of Virgin Group, to commercialize the prototype.

White Knight Two's long-awaited rollout, a year after a deadly explosion rocked Rutan's test site, is the first tangible sign of progress toward making space tourism a reality. Despite the glitz surrounding the event, significant hurdles remain.

The aircraft must undergo at least a year of rigorous flight tests starting in the fall. In addition, workers have to finish building SpaceShipTwo, which will be flown by two pilots and carry six passengers.

Matthew Upchurch, 46, who reserved a future flight, said he felt goosebumps when he saw White Knight Two.

"It was very emotional for me," said Upchurch, who heads a luxury travel company that works with Virgin Galactic. "I thought, `Oh my God, we're getting closer.'"

The mothership rollout also moved Rutan, who has made a career of designing unconventional aircraft.

"Even though this is a pretty weird airplane, we all expect it fly very well," said Rutan, who traded his usual leather jacket for a white button-down shirt with a Virgin Galactic logo.

Meanwhile, SpaceShipTwo, which is 70 percent complete, remained under wraps. It sat in a hangar several hundred feet away from White Knight Two shrouded in a black tarp. A sticker on it read "Coming Soon ... To A Spaceport Near You."

In the history of spaceflight, most astronauts have been in government programs. In recent years, a handful of wealthy people have paid about $20 million each to ride Russian rockets to the international space station.

Virgin Galactic envisions a future where space voyages will become as common as airplane travel. It wants to fly 500 people into space in the first year for $200,000 a head. If it succeeds, that would be on par with the same number of people who have gone up in 45 years of space travel.

So far, more than 250 wannabe astronauts have paid the full amount or put down a deposit to fly with Virgin Galactic, but when they will float in zero gravity is unknown. Rutan has declined to release a schedule. Virgin Galactic stopped predicting after it said in a 2004 press release that flights could begin in 2007.

Virgin Galactic renamed White Knight Two after Branson's mother, Eve. After the rollout, Branson and his mother popped open a bottle of Champagne next to the craft, which sports a decorative motif of a blond woman flying a Virgin flag.

White Knight Two has a wingspan of 140 feet, about the same as a World War II B-29 Superfortress bomber.

The mothership is designed to tuck SpaceShipTwo under the center of its wing and release it at 50,000 feet. After separation, SpaceShipTwo will fire its hybrid rocket and climb some 62 miles above Earth, the internationally recognized boundary of space.

The spaceflight — up and back down without circling the Earth — will include about five minutes of weightlessness. The total trip, from White Knight Two's takeoff to SpaceShipTwo's unpowered landing, will last about 2 1/2 hours.

Monday's unveiling was bittersweet for Rutan's company, Scaled Composites LLC. A year ago, three technicians were killed in an explosion while testing SpaceShipTwo's propellant system. Scaled, which was since bought by Northrop Grumman Corp., held a ceremony last week in honor of the fallen workers.

____________________

On the Net:

Virgin Galactic: http://www.virgingalactic.com
Scaled Composites: http://www.scaled.com

Air Hostess Picks Up Chocolate Bar, Wins Space Trip

2008-07-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

I thought Willy Wonka only gave away tours of the Chocolate Factory - not space...

Wed Jul 16, 11:02 AM ET

PARIS (Reuters) - A French air hostess will become one of Europe's pioneer space tourists after picking a chocolate wrapper out of the rubbish and finding a winning number in a competition to fly to the upper reaches of the earth's atmosphere.

Mathilde Epron, 32, said she had bought a Kit Kat chocolate bar at her local supermarket but initially threw the wrapper in the bin, telling herself that "it's only others who win."

Two hours later, thinking back to the competition, she decided to try her luck and fished the wrapper out of the bin, only to find a code marked inside.

"For someone who works in air travel it's really a dream come true," she told France Info radio.
A spokeswoman for Nestle in France confirmed that Epron had won the prize to take a flight on a four-seater, fighter-sized aircraft built by Rocketplane, a company that builds aircraft intended to provide cheap flights into space.

She will receive four days of astronaut training in Oklahoma City in the United States before boarding the Rocketplane XP aircraft which will reach an altitude of 100 km (60 miles) and allow a five-minute experience of weightlessness.

Researchers Predict Tourism to the "Final Frontier"

2008-07-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

February 25, 2008

Seeking an out-of-this-world travel destination?

Outer space will rocket into reality as "the" getaway of this century, according to researchers at the University of Delaware and the University of Rome La Sapienza.

In fact, the "final frontier" could begin showing up in travel guides by 2010, they predict.

"In the twenty-first century, space tourism could represent the most significant development experienced by the tourism industry," says Prof. Fred DeMicco, ARAMARK Chair, in UD's Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management program.

"With the Earth under attack from a myriad of environmental impacts, including climate change concerns and pollution, outer space is the next viable frontier to explore and make longtime plans for," he notes. "While there are global policies to be determined relating to private ventures in space, the technology to make space travel safer and cheaper is moving forward."
DeMicco and Silvia Ciccarelli, a geoeconomist who was a recent visiting scholar at UD, co-wrote "Outer Space as a New Frontier for Hospitality and Tourism," which is in review for an upcoming issue of the Hospitality Educator. Ciccarelli is a consultant to the Italian Association of Aerospace Industries.

What kind of person will be lured to space travel? Is it those of us who've loved "The Jetsons," "Star Trek," or peering at the heavens through a telescope?

"This is a destination for the 'extreme tourists'--tourists who want the ultimate new travel adventure and the thrill of outer space," DeMicco says. "They want something new and interesting--the room with the best view of Earth from space."

According to surveys of the demand for space tourism undertaken in 2001 and 2006 by Futron, a U.S. consulting company, the average age of the wannabe space tourist is 55 years old, 72% are males and 28% are females, 46% have above average or better fitness, 48% spend a month or more on vacation annually, and 41% work full-time and 23% are retired. The projected demand is 13,000 passengers in 2021, with the ability of the celestial industry to generate revenues of $700 million annually.

While only a few multimillionaires have been able to afford the current $20 million pricetag to go up in a Russian rocket for a two-week stay at the International Space Station, shorter, more affordable "suborbital" space flights, costing on the order of $80,000 per trip, likely will drive space tourism in the near term, according to Ciccarelli.

"During these flights, a spacecraft reaches space, but it does not enter Earth's orbit," she explains.

Suborbital trips are likely to become available to tourists by 2010-2015, Ciccarelli says, while tourism in space hotels is on a longer trajectory, predicted to become a reality in 2025.
So what will tourists in space do?

"Passengers will enter a world that only astronauts and cosmonauts have experienced--the acceleration of a rocket launch, weightlessness, and a spectacular view of the Earth," Ciccarelli says.

The low-gravity environment 600 to 2,000 kilometers above Earth would suddenly make Leonardo da Vinci's dreams and drawings of human-powered flight possible, using fabric wings attached to the arms, and tails attached to the ankles, according to Ciccarelli.

"Many recreational and sports activities also could exploit this possibility given a fairly large chamber," she notes.

A slowly rotating, cylindrical swimming chamber would enable people to become more like 'flying fish'-to swim in low gravity, but then propel themselves out of the water and 'fly' in a central air space, Ciccarelli says.

A safer, cheaper launch system is critical if space travel is to become more commonplace in the future. An elevator rising tens of thousands of miles into space is one possibility that scientists and entrepreneurs are considering.

"First envisioned some forty years ago, the space elevator will climb an enormous cable, like Jack up the beanstalk, to a terminal where passengers and cargo can board spacecraft for the trip farther out," Ciccarelli says.

"Until recently this was a fantasy because there were no materials strong enough to build such a cable," DeMicco notes. "Today, however, so-called carbon nanotubes up to twenty times stronger than steel are approaching mass production, and engineers say a space elevator could be completed within fifteen years."

The non-profit Spaceward Foundation was formed in 2004 and NASA established a competition in 2005 to accelerate research on the space elevator concept.

While short excursions into outer space may be on the itinerary in the near term, a "space port" currently is being built in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with support from Virgin Galactic and other companies, and hoteliers are scoping out new locations some 238,000 miles above--on the moon.

"Lunar hotels are now being planned," DeMicco says. "Galactic Suites is known as the first space hotel, and they promote delivering 15 sunrises and sunsets in a single day--for the adventure travelers who are willing to spend approximately $4 million for a three-day 'stay' in space," DeMicco says.

In 1967, in an address to the American Astronautical Society, Barron Hilton, then president of Hilton Hotels, described a "Lunar Hilton" with its entrance on the surface of the moon and most of its rooms located 20 to 30 feet below the surface. The hotel would have an aptly named "Galaxy Lounge."

More recently, companies such as Japan's Shimizu Corporation have focused on the design of an orbital hotel in space, with rotating rings to provide artificial gravity.

Who will run these space-age hotels?

DeMicco says UD's students will be up to the challenge.

"Our Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management students are taught the latest trends in strategic management and forecasting including land, sea, and space among them, and UD is not only a Land Grant, Sea Grant, and Urban Grant university, but also a Space Grant university," he notes.

"Indeed, they are the global travelers today through UD's study abroad programs, with aspirations for the stars in their hospitality and tourism careers of tomorrow."

Private Race to the Moon Takes Off

2008-07-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

By Dave Mosher, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera

21 February 2008, 02:01 pm ET

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. -- Google and X PRIZE officials unveiled nine new privately funded teams today that will compete for $30 million in the Google Lunar X PRIZE challenge, a race to the moon.

"It's not just a new mission," said Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, during the announcement here at Google's headquarters. "It's a new way of doing business."

The new teams join the Isle of Man-based Odyssey Moon team that was the first group to take up the challenge.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he was amazed that so many competitors had signed up so soon after the prize's announcement.

"I was floored," Brin told the team members and reporters who attended the press conference. "We had no such expectation."

Brin credited Google's participation to conversation he had had with Diamandis and mutual friend and Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-rocket builder, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX.

Large companies often invest money in entertainment ventures or sponsor competitions and competitors in events like boat races, Brin said. But those ventures are limited in their purpose.

"We should be doing new kinds of things as companies," Brin said. "If we're going to sponsoring things it should be for discoveries."

That's Incentive

The Google Lunar X PRIZE Cup organizers also announced their partnership with Space Florida, a group vested in drawing the Sunshine State onto the commercial spaceflight map. Voted into creation in 2006, the local organization is offering launch site services and $2 million in extra prize money to the winning team if they blast off from Florida.

"The folks at Space Florida are really offering to enhance the prize purse at a significant level," Brett Alexander, executive director of space prizes for the X PRIZE Foundation, told SPACE.com. "It lowers the bar and makes it easier for teams to compete."

Steve Kohler, Space Florida president, said that launching a commercial spacecraft to the moon from Florida would add to the state's rich spaceflight history as home to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

"Florida's long been recognized as a preeminent leader in any activity that involves our exploration of the moon," Kohler said. "Part of our effort as a state and as an organization is to continue that legacy. We believe [this competition] will allow the state to become a future hub for commercial projects."

According to Google Lunar X PRIZE rules, 90 percent of a winning team's funding must come from the private sector to qualify for a piece of $30 million in total prize money.

The first team to land their robot on the moon and complete a gauntlet of tasks with it by Dec. 31, 2012, will snatch the $20 million grand prize. In 2013, the first-place purse drops to $15 million and will expire on Dec. 31, 2014.

The second team to achieve lunar victory by 2014 will take $5 million in prize money, and another $5 million is on the table for difficult bonus objectives. Such challenges include moving a robot an extra 1,600 feet (500 meters), photographing man-made objects on the moon such as the Apollo 11 flag and surviving more than two weeks in frigid lunar darkness.

On top of the potential to win $25 million with a single launch, Alexander explained that Space Florida's extra funding is quite an incentive — especially to a number of teams aiming for a 2009 or 2010 launch.

"A million dollars is not trivial to any one of these teams, let alone two million dollars," Alexander said. "I definitely think somebody's going to make it and I think it's going to happen earlier than we expect."

Bring It On
Odyssey Moon, a team based out of Europe's Isle of Man, was announced as the first competitor in December 2007. The group is hopeful their "MoonOne (M-1)" spacecraft will take the grand prize.
The nine new teams officially drafted into the competition today have submitted lengthy applications and $1,000 deposits.

"To have 10 teams now, so early on, is incredible and great," Alexander said, noting that the 1996 to 2004 Ansari X PRIZE for suborbital spaceflight took years — not a few months — to attract as many teams. "We thought it would take longer for people to organize and get entered into this competition."

"The fact that there are this many teams [competing] does give us some confidence that someone should be able to prevail at the end of the day," Kohler said of the numbers, which he explained will inevitably grow before the Dec. 31, 2010, application cutoff.

The new competitors include:

Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ACRA): This Romanian group competed in the Ansari X PRIZE and will enter their "European Lunar Explorer" in the new competition.
Astrobotic: Headed by William "Red" Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon University, the team expects their "Artemis Lander" and "Red Rover" spacecraft to touch down first on the moon.
Chandah: Adil Jafry leads this team as chairman and CEO of Tara, the largest independent retail electricity provider in Texas. Chendah's spacecraft is called "Shehrezade."

FREDNET: Developers, engineers and scientists make up FREDNET, headed by Fred Bourgeois III, president and CEO of Applios Inc.

LunaTrex: A mix of U.S. rocket, robotics, aviation, energy and propulsion experts, the LunaTrex team led by Peter Bitar (founder of Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems) is entering "Tumbleweed" into the competition.

Micro-Space: Richard Speck of Micro-Space, Inc. and his team hopes their "Human Lunar Lander" will secure the grand prize.

Quantum3: This team intends to land "Moondancer" at the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 — the first manned moon mission — touched down in 1969.

Southern California Selene Group: Their "Spirit of Southern California" spacecraft will rely on early communications satellite technology along with the latest developments in electronics and sensors.
Team Italia: This Italian group intends to launch a colony of light, mobile robots on a lander for quick distribution on the Moon's surface.

Alexander said the 10 challengers now entered in the Google Lunar X PRIZE Cup aren't participating for show.

"I'd say that the teams out there have a high degree of credibility," he said. "Several of them are really off and running full-steam ahead already."

VIDEO: Moon 2.0: Join the Revolution
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Future of Flight: Space Tourism, Investment and Technology

China Seeks Space War Capability

2008-07-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

March 04, 2008

WASHINGTON - China is developing the ability to limit or prevent the use of satellites by potential adversaries during times of crisis, the Pentagon said March 3 in a report to Congress.

The report, the latest in a series of annual assessments of China's military power, says Beijing views its efforts in space warfare as not only a practical advance of military power but also a boost to national prestige.

In space and other aspects of China's military modernization, the Pentagon stuck to its oft-repeated view that China's first priority is to build a broad-based capability to prevent Taiwanese independence. It said China's focus on space warfare is an important part of that Taiwan strategy.

"China further views the development of space and counter-space capabilities as bolstering national prestige and, like nuclear weapons, demonstrating the attributes of a world power," the report said.

China typically objects to the Pentagon's depiction of its military programs and policies. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the report.

At a Pentagon news conference, David Sedney, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, predicted the Chinese would protest this year that the report is "anti-China" and misleading. Sedney said that for the first time, U.S. and Chinese officials will meet to discuss the report; he said it was briefed March 3 to China's senior military representative in Washington.

The Chinese military, known as the People's Liberation Army, is acquiring technologies to improve its ability to operate in space and is "developing the ability to attack an adversary's space assets," the report said.

"PLA writings emphasize the necessity of `destroying, damaging, and interfering with the enemy's reconnaissance/observation and communications satellites,' suggesting that such systems, as well as navigation and early warning satellites, could be among initial targets of attack to `blind and deafen the enemy," the report said.

The Bush administration was highly critical of China's shootdown in January 2007 of one of its weather satellites, asserting that the orbiting debris created by the attack poses a danger to other assets in space.

Last month, when the Pentagon shot down a dead U.S. spy satellite, China expressed concern, although U.S. officials said the shootdown did not mean the United States had dropped its objections to possessing a permanent anti-satellite capability.

More broadly, the Pentagon report released March 3 asserted that Beijing's reluctance to share details about its military buildup poses a risk to stability in Asia. It said the international community has limited knowledge of the motivations, decision-making and capabilities of China's military modernization. This includes a lack of clarity about China's defense spending. Washington contends that Beijing understates that spending program by the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars.

"The lack of transparency in China's military and security affairs poses risks to stability by increasing the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation," the report said. "This situation will naturally and understandably lead to hedging against the unknown."

This year's report place increased emphasis on concern about China's space programs and potential for space warfare. It also said China is improving its own satellite capability, including construction of a new satellite launch complex on Hainan Island.

And it said China expects to replace all foreign-produced satellites in its inventory with home-produced models by 2010.

In a similar vein, the report said China appears to be developing a cyberwarfare capability.

"In the past year, numerous computer networks around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, were subject to intrusions that appear to have originated within the PRC," the report said, using the initials for the People's Republic of China. "These intrusions require many of the skills and capabilities that would also be required for computer network attack."

The overall military buildup in China has increased in recent years, the Pentagon said.

"China's expanding and improving military capabilities are changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China's strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region," the report said.

The main short-term focus of China's military buildup is the Taiwan Strait, the report said.

As of November 2007, the Chinese military had deployed between 990 and 1,070 short-range ballistic missiles to garrisons opposite Taiwan, according to the Pentagon's latest estimate. That compares with 900 such missiles reported in last year's Pentagon report.

Every spring, the Pentagon is required by Congress to provide a comprehensive assessment of China's security and military strategy, an analysis of developments in its military doctrine and capabilities, and an update on the security situation in the Taiwan Strait.

U.S.-China military relations have been strained in recent years over numerous issues, not limited to American concerns about the scope of Beijing's military buildup. But there also have been some positive moves, including two agreements signed last week in Shanghai - one on installing a telephone hot line between the Chinese Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Defense Department, and the other on research in Chinese military archives related to U.S. MIAs from the Korean War.

A Taste of Space on Earth: Pilots, Passengers Train For Spaceliner Flights

2008-07-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

Monday, February 25, 2008
Originally published by:
Space News Business Report

By Leonard David
Special Correspondent, SPACE.com

Future space passengers are getting a leg up on appreciating the physiological rigors of suborbital spaceflight they plan to take in the future, but without leaving the Earth. Using state-of-the-art equipment, the National Aerospace Training and Research Center (NASTAR Center) in Southampton, Pa., is helping to train both the pilots and prospective passengers of commercial spaceliners.

The NASTAR Center is a wholly owned subsidiary of Environmental Tectonics Corp. and houses an array of training devices, including a specialized high-performance human centrifuge. Known as the Space Training System-400, the centrifuge mimics the flight dynamics and sustained Gs of a rocket-powered flight to the edge of space, while providing a realistic view from the simulated cockpit windows. Along with G-force exposure, center facilities make available to patrons altitude exposure, spatial disorientation and other physiological effects they will encounter as they enter the space environment.

Major changes in technology — not only in computing power but also in visual display systems — have transformed the training simulator experience over the years, said Glenn King, the NASTAR Center's chief operating officer and a chief instructor at the facility.

"Those old trainers of the past were just a little box that spun about, pulled by bellows and cables," King said. Today, electrical and computer power, along with high motion control algorithms can position training hardware quickly and very dynamically, giving pilots very accurate feelings of flight, he told Space News in a Feb. 18 interview.

Along with handling space travel training, King said the center supports a variety of military and civil aviation needs, making use of highly modular equipment and programs. "We've invested anywhere between $25 million to $40 million in this facility and are privately funded. We receive no funds from the U.S. government or outside sources. We've funded it ourselves," he said.

Serious People, Serious Money

The emerging commercial space travel business is a real market to service, King noted. "There are serious people out there with serious money. This is going to happen," he said, pointing particularly to the ongoing work at Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif., and that firm's building of the passenger-carrying SpaceShip Two suborbital system.

Training at the NASTAR Center is an integral part of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company, which was bankrolled by the U.K. billionaire to create the world's first commercial spaceline based on SpaceShipTwo and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier/drop plane. Seats are selling for $200,000 each.

Dozens of Virgin Galactic spaceflight customers — known as "founders" — have trained at the NASTAR Center for their SpaceShipTwo suborbital encounters.

"We began our NASTAR program last year to help test our hypothesis that at least 80 percent of adults were capable of flying to space from a medical and psychological point of view," said Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic in a Feb. 14 e-mail response to a Space News inquiry.

Whitehorn said that during the fall of 2007 more than 80 paid-up founder astronauts, including himself and Sir Richard Branson,

made simulated SpaceShipTwo flights, with a visual simulation of going to space as part of the NASTAR experience. That flight profile involved a span ranging from 3.5 Gs, that pushes a person's back against their seat, to 6 Gs, that drives an individual down into their seat.

"We discovered that over 94 percent of adults are capable of coping with this level of G force including individuals with a medical condition, provided these were properly understood and accounted for," Whitehorn said.

Whitehorn declined to discuss the pricing for the training, but in a Feb. 21 e-mail he said: "There is a product being developed now to give the undecided potential customers the chance to have a centrifuge experience and we will be announcing the price shortly."

Physical and Mental Demands

Earlier this year, Whitehorn said the SpaceShipTwo training at the NASTAR Center was extended to accredited sales agents, the international sales force that is selling seats for Virgin Galactic.

"By giving people that sell seats a direct experience of what the flight will feel like, we have given them the confidence to help potential astronauts understand the experience," Whitehorn said.

The more prepared a person is for the physical and mental demands of a flight, the better, agreed Jane Reifert, president of Incredible Adventures Inc., based in Sarasota, Fla. Her group offers a range of adventure tour packages, including space training and travel experiences.

"Customers need prior experience of high-g and zero-g in order to be capable of fully relaxing and enjoying their space flight," Reifert said. "You don't want someone who's spent $200,000 or more for a suborbital flight to be too nervous or nauseous to enjoy the view. You also don't want to be the passenger sitting next to someone who becomes violently ill or suffers a panic attack at 300,000 feet (91,000 meters)," she told Space News via a Feb. 20 e-mail.

Self-Regulating Industry

NASTAR's King took note of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) role in developing guidelines for commercial space crew and passenger training. "They are taking a hands-off approach at this point in time. I understand their position and their oversight to give the commercial space traveler a safe environment. If you start putting regulations out, it would stifle the industry at this point. It's just too early."

Keeping that hands-off approach

for a few more years is King's advice. "Let the dust settle and we'll figure out what we're doing. Let the industry self-regulate right now. So far that's the FAA approach. They've put out guidelines ... but haven't mandated them to actual regulations. Let's not put out regulations before we see the data," he said.

For one, there are several variations of suborbital spaceships now being designed, King added. "Each one will have its own set of criteria for crew training and passenger training. It's going to be very difficult for the FAA to set up a generic mandate for all the different carriers to comply with," he explained.

Last month, the center began offering two-hour, half-day, full-day and two-day-combo programs that simulate space voyages, as well as jet flights. Dubbed the Air and Space Adventure Programs, the cost per participant is anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000, King said, for one-day and two-day programs. "People can come in and get a taste of space."

What if a person finds out they are not space travel worthy? King said the center can work with that individual to learn countermeasures such as anti-G training maneuvers or breathing techniques. "All those things that we've taught fighter pilots for years ... we transfer that directly to the space travelers."

Akin to the evolution of aviation, King senses that commercial space travel will become a very routine enterprise. "There will be some hiccups and bumps along the road. But eventually, it will settle down into a regular commercial endeavor," he concluded.

For more information on the National Aerospace Training & Research Center (NASTAR Center), go to: http://www.nastarcenter.com.

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NASA Engineers Work On Alternative Moon Rocket

2008-07-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

By JAY REEVES, Associated Press Writer

Mon Jul 14, 4:13 PM ET

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - By day, the engineers work on NASA's new Ares moon rockets. By night, some go undercover to work on a competing design. These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle.

They call their project Jupiter, and like Ares, it's a brainchild of workers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA facilities. The engineers involved are doing the work on their own time and mostly anonymously, with the help of retirees and other space enthusiasts.

A key Ares project manager dismisses their design as little more than a sketch on a napkin that won't work.

A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares plans but can't speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired.

The Jupiter design is being reviewed by a team of 57 volunteer engineers, from line engineers up to NASA middle managers, Tierney said. Those numbers are dwarfed by NASA's Ares workforce, which has thousands of government workers and contractors.

The head of the Ares office at Marshall said he can't rule out the possibility that some of his people are involved with the underground program.

"I don't know what people do on their own time," Steve Cook said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

But Cook said he is familiar with the Jupiter project, and he's not impressed. NASA informally reviewed plans for the rocket last fall and determined the idea to be a flawed scheme based on shaky numbers.

"It's not feasible. We said, 'It doesn't work' and moved on,'" Cook said.

Meanwhile, he said, work on the Ares I rocket is so far along that the first test flight is less than a year away.

"We're down to the nuts and bolts ... on this rocket. This is not a napkin drawing," he said.

The debate reflects disagreement over the direction of U.S. spaceflight as NASA prepares to retire the shuttle in 2010. By 2015, the agency plans to begin orbital flights with Ares I and a companion heavy-lift cargo rocket, Ares V. Officials hope to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Astronauts will ride into orbit in a capsule aboard the Ares I, which will have a modified shuttle booster rocket at its core. They will dock with a lunar stage that was carried aloft separately by an Ares V rocket and head to the moon.

The Jupiter design would also require two separate launches to get to the moon, but its rockets would both rely on a shuttle external tank at their center. Some of the design concepts go back to proposals floated at Marshall in the early 1980s. Others date to the early '90s, when Marshall worked on a new rocket system that never flew.

Besides being a simpler, more powerful system, backers say, the Jupiter rockets would save NASA $19 billion in development costs and another $16 billion in operating costs over two decades.

The Government Accountability Office last year raised questions about the cost of NASA's current plan for returning to the moon, which a report estimated at $230 billion over 20 years. NASA said it already has spent about $7 billion on Ares.

Steve Metschan, an engineer and former NASA contractor who supports the Jupiter team, said the upcoming presidential election could change NASA's plan. He accused NASA of suppressing information that shows Jupiter would perform better than Ares.

"Our concern is that by the time everyone figures this out, we will have destroyed our heavy-lift system," said Metschan, of Seattle. "At the end of the day, all we're asking for is an independent review of all this stuff."

Cook said all the estimates on Jupiter were preliminary, and he denied critics' claims that NASA did a full-fledged study of the Jupiter rocket or the engineers' alternate moon-mission program, which they call Direct 2.0.

NASA has looked at "all sorts" of proposed designs, he said, and none was as powerful or safe as Ares.
________________________________________

ON THE WEB:

NASA Constellation: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html
Direct 2.0: http://www.directlauncher.com

Russia Seals Agreement With Private Investor For Space Tourism

2008-07-08T19:28:00.000-07:00

by Staff Writers
Moscow (AFP) July 2, 2008

The Russian space agency has sealed a deal with a private investor to build a Soyuz spacecraft specially for tourist hire and operational in 2011, a statement said Wednesday.

"We have concluded an agreement with an investor to begin financing such a Soyuz vessel with an anticipated launch date of 2011," the Roskosmos website stated.

The craft, piloted by a professional astronaut, is designed to carry two so-called space adventurers.

Quizzed by AFP, a Roskosmos spokesman refused to identify the investor despite the agency having signed a deal in June with private American company Space Adventures for a commercial flight to the International Space Station.

Set up in 2001, Space Adventures has already sent five tourists into space on board a Soyuz.
The firm has been in negotiations with Roskosmos to rent the third seat on board a ship which regularly ferries Russian and American astronauts to the ISS.

American Dennis Tito, South African Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen of the United States, Iranian-born Anousheh Ansari and Hungarian-born Charles Simonyi are the five who have each paid up to 25 million dollars (16 million euros) for the thrill of a lifetime.

The next independent space traveller is Richard Garriott, an American electronic games entrepreneur and son of former astronaut Owen Garriott. His flight is due to take off in October.

Click here for full stroy

Who Owns the Moon? Lunar Property Rights (Real Estate On the Moon)

2008-06-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

Date Retrieved: June 9, 2008
Source: Popular Mechanics (Magazine)
Title: Who Owns the Moon? The Case for Lunar Property Rights

By: GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

The moon has been in plain view for all of human history, but it's only within the past few decades that it's been possible to travel there. And for just about as long as the moon has been within reach, people have been arguing about lunar property rights: Can astronauts claim the moon for king and country, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and individuals to own its real estate?

The first article on the subject, "High Altitude Flight and National Sovereignty," was written by Princeton legal scholar John Cobb Cooper in 1951. Various theoretical discussions followed, with some scholars arguing that the moon had to be treated differently than earthbound properties and others claiming that property laws in space shouldn't differ from those on Earth.

With the space race in full flower, though, the real worry was national sovereignty. Both the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to reach the moon first but, in fact, each was more worried about what would happen if they arrived second. Fears that the competition might trigger World War III led to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which was eventually ratified by 62 countries. According to article II of the treaty, "Outer Space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."

So national appropriation was out, along with fortifications, weapons and military installations. But what about private property rights—personal and corporate? Some scholars argue that property rights can exist only under a nation's dominion, but most believe that property rights and sovereignty can be distinct.

In something of an admission that this is the case, nations that thought the Outer Space Treaty didn't go far enough proposed a new agreement, the Moon Treaty, in 1979. It explicitly barred private property rights on the moon. It also provided that any development, extraction and management of resources would take place under the supervision of an international authority that would divert a share of the profits, if any, to developing countries.

The Carter administration liked the Moon Treaty, but space activists, fearful that the sharing requirement would subjugate American mineral claims to international partners, pressured the Senate, ensuring that the United States didn't ratify it. Although the Moon Treaty has entered into force among its 13 signatories, none of those nations is a space power.

So property rights on the moon are still the subject of international discussion. But would anyone buy lunar land? And what would it take to establish good title?

The answer to the first question is clearly "yes." Lots of people would buy lunar land—and, in fact, lots of people have, sort of. Dennis Hope, owner of Lunar Embassy, says he's sold 500 million acres as "novelties." Each parcel is about the size of a football field and costs $16 to $20. Buyers choose the location—except for the Sea of Tranquility and the Apollo landing sites, which Hope has placed off-limits.

To convey good title, Hope essentially wrote the U.N. to say he was going to begin selling lunar property. When the U.N. didn't respond with an objection, he asserted that this allowed him to proceed. Although I regard his claim to good title as dubious, his customers have created a constituency to recognize his position. If he sells enough lunar property, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So there's demand, even for iffy titles. But what would it take to establish title, rather than Dennis Hope's approximation? That's not so clear. In maritime salvage law, which also deals with property rights beyond national territory, actually being there is key: Those who reach a wreck first and secure the property are generally entitled to a percentage of what they recover. There's even some case law allowing that presence to be robotic rather than human. Traditionally, claims to unclaimed property require long-term presence, effective control and some degree of improvement. Those aren't bad rules for lunar property, either. But who would recognize such titles?

Individual nations might. In the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, the United States recognized deep-sea mining rights outside its own territory without claiming sovereignty over the seabed. There's nothing to stop Congress from passing a similar law relating to the moon. For that matter, there's nothing to stop other nations from doing the same.

Ideally, title would be recognized by an international agreement that all nations would endorse. The 1979 Moon Treaty was a flop, but there's no reason the space powers couldn't agree on a new treaty that recognizes property rights and encourages investment. After all, the international climate has warmed to property rights and capitalism over the past 30 years.

I'd like to see something along these lines. Property rights attract private capital and, with government space programs stagnating, a lunar land rush may be just what we need to get things going again. I'll take a nice parcel near one of the lunar poles, please, with a peak high enough to get year-round sunlight and some crater bottoms deep enough to hold ice. Come visit me sometime!

PM contributing editor, Instapundit blogger and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the author (with Robert P. Merges) of Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy.

Is the private sector about to overtake NASA in space? In a PM Roundtable, new FAA commercial space chief George Nield, XCOR spokesman Doug Graham and Teal Group analyst Marco Cacheras predict the future of backyard rocket power. Plus: Glenn Reynolds calls on Congress for the re-opening of a moon treaty, and software geek-cum-space engineer Fred Bourgeois breaks down his team's open-source plan to win the Google Lunar X Prize—featured on the cover of PM's new issue.

New Report Identifies Dangerous Web Domains

2008-06-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Date: June 3, 2008 (21:01 PDT)
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Title: New Report Identifies Dangerous Web Domains

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer
Wed Jun 4, 7:09 AM ET

SAN JOSE, Calif. - When surfing the Internet for safe Web sites, not all domains are equal.
Companies that assign addresses for Web sites appear to be cutting corners on security more when they assign names in certain domains than in others, according to a report to be released Wednesday by antivirus software vendor McAfee Inc.
McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are ".hk" (Hong Kong), ".cn" (China) and ".info" (information).
Of all ".hk" sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of ".cn" sites and 11.7 percent of ".info" sites that way.
A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the ".com" domain — the world's most popular — were identified as dangerous.
More spammers, malicious code writers and other cybercriminals can establish an online presence when domain name registry businesses cut requirements for registering a site in order to boost their profit and profile. The report doesn't identify domain name registration companies McAfee believes are responsible for those lapses.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies are in the business of registering domain names; some are large and well known, while others are small and less reputable, offering their services on the cheap and with flimsy or no background checks to lure in more customers.
The fact that Internet scam artists gravitate to domain name services with lower fees and fewer requirements isn't new.
What McAfee's "Mapping the Mal Web" report, now in its second year, tries to do is identify the domains that are populated with the highest concentration of risky sites.
The servers for ".hk" and ".cn" Web sites don't have to be in China; Web site operators can register sites from anywhere to target different geographies.
Other risky domains include ".ro" (Romania), with 6.8 percent, and ".ru" (Russia), with 6 percent of sites flagged as dangerous.
Shane Keats, research analyst for McAfee and lead author of the report, said the increase in dangerous sites registered under the ".hk" and ".cn" domains over last year's report was caused in part by better data collection on McAfee's part on those domains and by apparent security lapses in some registrar companies' processes for registering addresses.
"My advice about surfing behavior is that if you're really desperate for cheap Prozac and the pharmacy ends in '.cn,' don't do it. Just don't do it," Keats said. "Find another place to get your Prozac."
Many Internet frauds involve fake sites for pharmaceuticals.
The McAfee report is based on results from 9.9 million Web sites that were tested in 265 domains for serving malicious code, excessive pop-up ads or forms to fill out that actually are tools for harvesting e-mail addresses for sending spam.
Keats said domain name registrars that are strict about authenticating that Web site owners are operating a legitimate business see far fewer malicious Web sites using their services.
Where McAfee found some of the least-risky domain names:
· ".gov" (government use), with 0.05 percent flagged;
· ".jp" (Japan), with 0.1 percent flagged and
· ".au" (Australia), with 0.3 percent flagged.

______________________

URL For This Article: San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/03/financial/f210133D61.DTL&feed=rss.technology

Russia Ends Space Joy Rides

2008-04-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Russia announces end to space tourism in 2010 Apr 21, 2008

"On Cosmonaut's Day (April 12th 2008) the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) announced that they will cease it's $40,000,000-a-flight space tourism enterprise.
Anatoly Perminov, the head of Roskosmos, elaborated on this statement by citing national criticism of the space tourism project; all the while reiterating Roskosmos's focus on the International Space Station and the new launch site at Vostochny Cosmodrome: 'Vitaly Lopota, the president of the Energia space rocket corporation, said he believes space tourism is a forced measure compensating for insufficient financing of the Russian space program.'
This statement (made the day before) by Vitaly Lopota follows another announcement that 'Energia is ready to send missions to the Moon and Mars if told to do so by the government.'"
news.slashdot.org. Read full article here>>.

"The Rights Stuff"

2008-02-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

At the Boston Globe, Sacha Pfeiffer intervews Rosanna Sattler about commercial space travel. Read it here!

The Telescope Tourists

2007-11-21T16:01:00.000-08:00

Stargazing Fanatics Go to Ends of the Earth; 'The Great Refractor'
By GEORGE ANDERS, May 18, 2007
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117944849494106986-9R2G4BurUhcmhfh0ZRwkMrdLheM_20070529.html?mod=yahoo_free

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii -- Two-and-a-half miles above sea level, David Monahan inches forward in the dark, popping open his cellphone to serve as an emergency flashlight. Nighttime temperatures have plunged below freezing. Snack food atop this dormant volcano consists of a bucket of dried squid.
For Mr. Monahan and five fellow adventurers, this is bliss. They have slipped inside a dome at the W.M. Keck Observatory, home to two of the world's biggest optical telescopes. While astronomers prepare to search the skies, the newcomers shiver excitedly alongside celestial-imaging equipment, perched on a catwalk 75 feet off the ground. They look like stowaways on a space ship.
The Bolshoi Azimuthal Telescope on Mount Pastukhov, a windy slope in the Russian Caucasus.
Ordinarily, security guards would dash into the dome and eject such intruders. These visitors, however, have special privileges. Like Mr. Monahan, a hotel executive, each has donated $1,000 or more to the observatory, entitling them to an up-close glimpse of the frontiers of astronomy.
Stargazing conjures up staid images of field trips to the local planetarium or puttering with a backyard telescope. But a new breed of obsessed fans is crisscrossing the globe to visit legendary observatories. Destinations include remote deserts, mountaintops -- even the South Pole.
Many of these travelers are engineering buffs, people who love nothing more than to gawk at the one-of-a-kind quirks of multimillion-dollar machines. Even the smell of old telescopes' lubricants -- a bit like crayons -- intrigues them. Others are astronomy pilgrims retracing great moments in scientific history. Some simply like pioneering their own form of extreme travel.
For observatories, affluent tourists can become welcome new funding sources. In Hawaii, the Keck has collected more than $6 million from private donors in the past few years to help pay for new instruments. Other sites regard steady visitor traffic as a good way to build up astronomy's image, particularly with school groups, which may include future scientists. Some popular sites get more than 100,000 visitors a year.
One of the most ardent telescope tourists on the circuit is 47-year-old Louis Berman, who says he fell in love with stargazing as a boy. His passions turned to theater lighting as a young man before more job changes led him to become chief technology officer at a New York-based hedge fund. About seven years ago, Mr. Berman rekindled his infatuation with astronomy.

ASTRONOMICAL VIEWS
For a close encounter with galaxies far, far away, here are a few observatories to consider.
Now he plans to visit one major observatory a month until he has enough material to write a book, which he plans to call "Scope Seeing." So far he has completed more than a dozen U.S. trips and is working on a European jaunt in August. His wife isn't too thrilled about his new hobby, he concedes, but if she doesn't want to come along, he travels alone.
"Visiting observatories is like going to a scientific church," Mr. Berman explains. "There's something wonderful about seeing stars that are so far away that you're looking back in time by billions of years."
The longtime king of telescope tourism is William Keel, an astronomy professor at the University of Alabama. His adventures started in the 1980s, right after graduate school, during a research stint in Holland. He and his wife used their weekends to dash across Europe exploring old observatories, some dating back to the Renaissance. In Bonn, Germany, they saw the telescope that Friedrich Argelander used to compile the first major atlas of the stars in the mid-19th century. "It's almost mystical," Prof. Keel says. "You're in touch with this romantic legacy of the lone observer gazing into the sky."
Prof. Keel has since trekked to observatories ranging from Chile to West Virginia. On his Web page (www.astr.ua.edu/keel/telescopes/1), he provides photos and chatty commentary about each stop, including his 1990 visit to Russia's Caucasus mountain range, home of the enormous -- but poorly engineered -- Bolshoi Azimuthal Telescope. Russian astronomers told him about a design quirk that made the Bolshoi, known as the Cyclops of the Caucasus, so elongated that it couldn't withstand strong winds. At one point astronomers there were forced to cover cracks in the telescope's mirror with black cloth in hopes of salvaging image quality.

'The Great Refractor'
Amateurs are crisscrossing the world in search of stellar adventures, too. Some 200 of them belong to the Antique Telescope Society, which attracts engineers, woodworkers and casual historians. The ATS meets at a different observatory each year. This October the group will gather in Greenville, S.C., to see "The Great Refractor," a 125-year-old instrument that once belonged to Princeton University, and next year, it's off to Holland to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the invention of the telescope.
For many members, old-fashioned craftsmanship is everything. "These older telescopes are controlled by amazing clockworks," says Peter Abrahams, an ATS member in Portland, Ore., who builds computer workstations.

The Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis.
One of Mr. Abrahams's favorites is at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis. Completed in 1897, it was built in a gaudy Victorian style, with celestial and mythological figures rendered in ornate terra cotta inside and out. One of the last big telescopes to be built with lenses, rather than mirrors, to focus light, Yerkes was used for important scientific work until the 1980s. Academics hardly bother with it anymore, making it easier for amateur stargazers to use the instrument at night.
Another ATS member, Walt Breyer, spent most of his career as a chemical engineer at Scott Paper Co., designing diapers and toilet-seat covers. Retired now, he says his growing interest in astronomy makes for better dinner-table chatter. Among his favorite tales: visiting Birr Castle in Northern Ireland, home of a huge, 19th-century telescope, and staying for dinner with Lord Rosse, whose forebears built the observatory.
"There we were in sweatshirts and other casual clothes, suitable to explore the telescope, having dinner in the castle," Mr. Breyer recalls. "I wonder what Lord Rosse and his wife thought of the Americans who came to dinner so casually dressed."
Modern facilities usually aren't as obliging. Visitors' galleries provide daytime glimpses of some equipment, but doors are generally locked at night so that astronomers can work without distractions. An extreme case in point is the South Pole Observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation. Created in 1957, it hosts as many as 200 visiting astronomers at a time. Scientists there study submillimeter radiation from stars, which usually is obscured by water vapor in the earth's atmosphere. Visibility improves at the South Pole, however, thanks to the extremely cold, dry air.
Travelers who stop by for a quick tour might get a cup of coffee or a meal -- but that's all, says D.A. Harper, a former director of the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, where he oversaw the South Pole outpost. "Space is very tight," Prof. Harper explains. "The rule is, if they want to spend the night, they've got to bring their own tent."

Star Party, $600
That frosty welcome -- plus the $40,000 round-trip cost of flying to the Pole from the Antarctic coast -- has kept unplanned tourist traffic down to 10 guests or fewer most years, Prof. Harper says. Still, a few teachers, journalists and politicians who make the trip each year get friendlier treatment, as part of the NSF's outreach efforts. Arlene Sharp, a Chicago educator, spent six days at the South Pole Observatory in 1996 with a middle-school student. She says she has been sharing her experiences with teachers and parents ever since.
A technician at the W.M. Keck Observatory, inspecting the laser guide star beam on the K2 telescope.
In Texas' Big Bend region, the McDonald Observatory offers tourists a pragmatic compromise. Nighttime access to its largest telescopes is highly restricted. But for $600, the observatory will throw a private "Star Party," letting guests spend hours gazing at planets, nebulae and distant galaxies through three of its smaller scopes.
"Being out there is elemental, wild and simple," says Mike Halperin, a Seattle-area doctor, who took such a trip in April. He was especially moved by up-close views of Saturn's rings.
Some of his friends on the trip were ex-Microsoft Corp. employees who had hoped to see one of their former colleagues, Charles Simonyi, orbiting the earth during his brief stint as an astronaut. No luck. Mr. Simonyi's spaceship was in too low an orbit to be visible. But other spectacular attractions, such as globular star clusters, made up for it.
In Hawaii, about 100,000 visitors a year come to a viewing station partway up the slopes of Mauna Kea, where they can see the night stars through relatively small telescopes. About 25,000 make it to the 13,796-foot summit, usually for a daytime look at the Keck and eight other major observatories operated by European, Japanese and North American universities.
As for getting inside the Keck at night, that's a rarer experience afforded only about 60 major donors a year. On such trips, the observatory's development officer, Debbie Goodwin, cheerfully barges through doors marked "No Visitors," her guests in tow. A popular stop is the "mirror barn," where the observatory stores spare hexagonal tiles for the Keck's two, 32.8-foot primary mirrors. The 4-inch-thick tiles are polished to within one-millionth of an inch of design specifications and cost more than $800,000 apiece. Visitors can't touch them, but no one stops people from cavorting in front of them, watching their reflections as they giggle and make faces.
To some visitors' surprise, there aren't any chances to see actual stars through the Keck's main telescope. Images are captured digitally, turned into columns of numbers -- and transmitted to astronomers at computer stations miles away. That helps researchers do their work more efficiently, but it creates a sightseeing experience that isn't much different than watching bond traders adjust their portfolios.

Into Thin Air
There are other stops on the tour that are crowd pleasers, however. One involves a thin orange laser beam that's shot into the sky, helping the Keck's telescope produce images so clear they rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The thin air atop Mauna Kea reduces the sort of atmospheric distortion that makes stars twinkle, but doesn't eliminate it altogether. Fancy computer software can correct for this, as long as astronomers are able to calibrate their adjustments on a precisely defined object in the heavens.
Thus the laser. Its thin orange beam excites atoms in the upper atmosphere, creating a disk-shaped image that's 60 miles away -- and just 20 inches wide. Software analyzes that artificial "star" and makes adjustments until its image is as crisp as possible. This tinkering, known as adaptive optics, greatly sharpens the images of celestial objects.
As the orange streak lights up the Hawaiian sky one evening, visitors inside the dome involuntarily lift up their arms and point to it. They try to guess how far out it can be tracked -- a mile? two miles? -- before it disappears into the infinity of space.
Among the most delighted spectators is Clive Davies, the retired president of Linear Technologies Inc., a Silicon Valley chip company. Forty years earlier, he was a graduate student in physics, curious about all kinds of things, but it's been a long time since he has thought about lasers, optics and the heavens. Now he's enjoying the chance to revisit that part of his life -- so much so that he has donated more than $20,000 to the Keck in the past few years.
"It keeps the gray cells active," Mr. Davies says.

Write to George Anders at george.anders@wsj.com2

Astronomical Views
For a close encounter with galaxies far, far away, here are a few observatories to consider:
NAME/LOCATION
HOURS/WEB SITE
COMMENT
Palomar Observatory Palomar Mountain, Calif.
open daily, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., no nighttime hours; free; www.astro.caltech.edu3
Edwin Hubble worked here. Completed in 1949 and formerly the world's biggest optical telescope, it took 21 years -- and much turmoil -- to build. Within driving distance of Disneyland.
Royal Observatory Greenwich Greenwich, England
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; free; evening stargazing for private parties; www.rog.nmm.ac.uk4
Founded in 1675; the Prime Meridian that separates Eastern and Western longitude runs through the middle of the site. Visitors can put one foot in each half of the world.
U.S. Naval Observatory Washington, D.C.
limited evening tours; must book 4-6 weeks in advance; free; www.usno.navy.mil5
Founded in 1830; an astronomer here discovered the two satellites of Mars in 1877. The official source of time for the Global Positioning System.
Southern African Large Telescope Sutherland, South Africa
open Mon.-Sat.; day and evening tours; advanced booking required; about $3-$5 www.salt.ac.za6
Daytime visitors can see a newly constructed, 11-meter optical telescope that is being readied for scientific use. Nighttime guests are limited to two smaller, visitors' telescopes.
Very Large Array Socorro, N.M.
open daily, 8:30 a.m. to dusk; free; www.vla.nrao.edu7
This is a cluster of 27 radio antennas, each more than 80 feet wide, spread across the desert, listening to the sounds of outer space.

URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117944849494106986.html

URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117944849494106986.html

(2) mailto:george.anders@wsj.com

Commercial Space Travel Exempt From FAA Oversight... For Now

2007-10-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

Law Protects Those Who Take Risk Of Early Flights
In the latest commercial US space race, aviation safety regulators occupy a new niche... it's hands off, until someone gets killed.
Federal Aviation Administration officials have a unique relationship with the emerging space-tourism industry, which was discussed at a recent gathering of air and space lawyers this month in Memphis, TN according to USA Today.
"We're going to kill some people," says Tracey Knutson, a lawyer who has advised the FAA and who moderated a panel discussion on the topic. "The question is how the relationship then changes."
Laura Montgomery, senior attorney in the FAA's Office of the Chief Counsel, said once somebody dies, "we then have the authority to act and we would." Until then, Congress "told us to keep our mitts off."
Congress, in an effort to allow commercial competition among potential commercial space carriers, has exempted the space industry from FAA oversight, and protects space bound private citizens.
The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 treats the industry more like mountain climbing adventurers who are exploring new routes, or like visionaries who are learning from fatal mistakes.
FAA officials agree that participating passenger in commercial space flight will have to sign waivers explaining their risks, and agree not to sue the federal government for the thrill of space's weightlessness, should they be killed.
"This is an ultra-hazardous business," Patti Grace Smith, the FAA's associate administrator for Commercial Space Transportation told attendees at an American Bar Association forum on air and space law. She said part of the agency's effort to promote the industry's success means giving it room to fail.
The FAA however is restricted and can't provide safety regulations by law until 2012, unless there is a fatal flight accident. FAA will watch launches and space flight programs closely, promising to work with the companies involved, according to government officials. Read more>>

Source: Aero-News Network.

Risky space tourism gets a boost from a hands-off FAA

2007-10-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

By Robert Davis, USA TODAY
MEMPHIS — In the latest space race — to lift paying customers out of Earth's atmosphere — aviation safety regulators occupy a new niche: They are promoting an industry expected to suffer deadly accidents instead of applying strict safety rules.
Federal Aviation Administration officials detailed their unique relationship with the emerging space-tourism industry for a gathering of air and space lawyers this month.
Several firms are racing to serve people willing to pay a steep price for the privilege of floating briefly in space, perhaps in as little as two years. Some scientists believe commercial competition will fuel rapid development of space travel technology.
In the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, Congress told the FAA to treat the industry more like an adventure business than an air carrier. The law protects the rights of those who wish to be among the first private citizens to go into space — likening them to visionaries and adventurers who knowingly take other risks like climbing mountains — while giving the people who operate the new types of unproven spacecraft the scientific latitude to learn from their first fatal mistakes.
"This is an ultra-hazardous business," Patti Grace Smith, the FAA's associate administrator for Commercial Space Transportation told attendees at an American Bar Association forum on air and space law. She said part of the agency's effort to promote the industry's success means giving it room to fail.
By law, the FAA cannot impose safety regulations on the industry until 2012 unless there is a serious accident in flight or if the agency — which will attend every launch and is working closely with industry professionals — detects a safety threat that companies refuse to fix.
Read more>>

Int'l space station ticket price climbs

2007-08-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press Writer Wed Jul 18, 8:13 PM ET
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - When it comes to complaining about poor exchange rates for the U.S. dollar, American tourists traveling to Europe have nothing on tourists headed into space. The cost of flying to the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship has increased from $25 million earlier this year to $30 million. Trips planned in 2008 and 2009 will cost $40 million.
"It's mostly because of the fallen dollar," Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, said Wednesday. His company brokers the trips with Russia's space agency.
A U.S. dollar currently is worth about 25 1/2 Russian rubles, compared with 32 rubles in 2002.
Five space tourists have paid $20 million to $25 million to visit the space station via the Soyuz vehicles through trips arranged by Space Adventures. The company announced Wednesday that two more Soyuz seats have been purchased for tourists to fly in 2008 and 2009.
Anderson said the space tourists flying in the two new seats likely would be an American and an Asian, but he offered no details. Prospective space tourists must put down a 20 percent deposit, pass physical examinations and later undergo training at a Russian space facility.
About a dozen prospective space tourists are in the process of reserving flights to the space station, even as the number of available seats on the three-man Soyuz vehicles is likely to diminish after space shuttles are grounded in 2010.
NASA is going to rely on the Soyuz vehicles to deliver astronauts to the space station between the end of the shuttle program in 2010 and the expected first manned flight in 2015 of the next-generation spacecraft, Orion, which NASA hopes takes astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Additionally, the three-member space station crew, consisting of U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, is expected to double in size in 2009.
"We're certainly working out ways to get more seats," Anderson said. "With the competition at that point, it becomes more difficult."
___
On the Net:Space Adventures at http://www.spaceadventures.com/