NASA Balloon Crashes in Australia

Narrow Escape for Onlookers as NASA Balloon Crashes in Oz

A huge NASA balloon loaded with a telescope painstakingly built to scan the sky at wavelengths invisible to the human eye crashed in the Australian outback Thursday, destroying the astronomy experiment and just missing nearby onlookers, according to Australian media reports.

In dramatic video released by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the giant 400-foot balloon is seen just beginning to lift its payload, then the telescope gondola appears to unexpectedly come loose from its carriage. The telescopes crash through a fence and overturn a nearby parked sport utility vehicle before finally stopping.

The attempted balloon telescope launch took place at the Alice Springs Balloon Launching Centre, near the town of Alice Springs, in the northern territory of Australia.

The wayward balloon overturned one car, but missed another parked nearby with local Alice Springs couple Stan and Betty Davies, who had come to watch the launch, still inside.

actually about a foot of being wiped out," ABC quoted Davies as saying.

The balloon was carrying the Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT), a gamma-ray telescope built by astronomer Steven Boggs and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, California to study astrophysical sources in space.

"Today was a terrible day for a lot of people," wrote Eric Bellm, a graduate astronomy student at the UC Berkeley, in a blog chronicling the science mission. "For the NCT team, we've poured our hearts into this instrument for years. It was an almost unfathomable shock to find ourselves cleaning up the wreckage of our gondola rather than watching it lift off towards space."

The unmanned research balloon was built by NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas and expected to haul its two-telescope payload up to an altitude of about 120,000 feet. That's about 23 miles, though smaller home-built balloons have been built to reach high altitudes as well.



In his account of the crash, Bellm said an investigation into the balloon's launch failure will be performed, though a first glance found that at least some of the components for the Nuclear Compton Telescope appear to have survived relatively intact. The science team has cleaned up the wreckage and returned it to a staging hangar, he added.

Ravi Sood, director of the Alice Springs Balloon Launching Centre and a professor at Australia's University of New South Wales, said no one was hurt in the incident, but sometimes balloon launches can go awry.

"Ballooning, that's the way it happens on occasions but it is very, very disappointing. Gut-wrenching actually," he told ABC.

The failed balloon launch in Australia marked NASA's second balloon science campaign this month at the remote site. On April 15, NASA's balloon science program launched Tracking and Imaging Gamma Ray Experiment (TIGRE), a gamma-ray telescope, to search the galactic center of the sky for emissions from radioactive materials, NASA officials said.

That launch, which sent the telescope and its balloon to an altitude of 127,000 feet, went according to plan, the space agency said.

The balloon's next payload to fly, an X-ray telescope called HERO aimed at mapping the galactic center for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, was targeted for May, Australian officials added.

Missing Soviet nuclear electrocar found on moon

The editor of this article...or whoever is responsible for writing headlines, is trying a scare tactic here. Here's how the headline looks at their website:

Missing Soviet nuclear electrocar FOUND ON MOON
By putting "Found on moon" in all caps, doesn't this give the impression that the electrocar wasn't supposed to have been foudn on the moon, that it was "transported there" somehow?

It is only when you actually read the story that you learn that the electrocar was always on the moon, the Russians just didn't know where it was because of the primitive technology at the time the electrocar had been sent there.

Probe-sat locates vanished pinnacle of 1970s USSR tech

By Lewis Page

A long-lost Soviet solar/nuclear robot buggy - mislaid in the early 1970s - has been found on the moon by a NASA survey satellite.

The vehicle in question is the Lunokhod 1 rover, which landed in the Mare Imbrium aboard the Luna 17 lander in 1970. During the fortnight-long lunar days the machine was able to prowl about on electric drive, topping up its batteries using the fliptop solar panel mounted above its tub-like main body. During the long, chilly nights the lid would shut and the systems inside the tub were kept alive by a Polonium-210 radioisotope powered heater.

Lunokhod 1 stayed in touch with Soviet ground controllers for no less than 11 months, prowling the moon even as the US astronauts of Apollo 14 and 15 were driving about elsewhere in their manned moon buggies. However the robot crawler eventually ceased communications, and the project was officially terminated on October 4, 1971.

The Lunokhod carried a French-made reflector unit, intended to help with measurements of the moon and its orbit, which should have meant that the defunct rover could be easily located from Earth.

However the Soviet operators had only a sketchy notion where their craft actually was at any given time and in fact since Lunokhod 1 went off-line nobody has known exactly where it finished up. (The Russians went so far as to cadge US Apollo photos of the moon's surface for the subsequent Lunokhod 2 mission.) The reflector doesn't perform well enough for Earthly astronomers to pick up sunlight from it, and the alternative technique - beaming a laser from Earth at the rover and looking for the reflected light - requires that one have a fairly close idea where it is in order to aim the laser.

A team of boffins in California, whose research involves measuring the Moon's orbit with extreme precision in order to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, have long made use of other lunar reflectors left by the Apollo programme.

"We yearned to find Lunokhod-1," says Professor Tom Murphy, head of the moon-gazer team. "It would provide the best leverage for understanding the liquid lunar core, and for producing an accurate estimate of the position of the center of the moon—which is of paramount importance in mapping out the orbit and putting Einstein’s gravity to a test," he adds.

'It's got a lot to say after forty years of silence'

Now and again over the years Murphy and his fellow boffins would fire a blast of laser illumination at a likely area on the Moon and look out for a reflection in their powerful telescopes, but it turned out that the best guess as to the rover's final resting place was wildly out.

“It turns out we were searching around a position miles from the rover,” said Murphy. “We could only search one football-field-sized region at a time."

Salvation came last month, when NASA released a tranche of detailed orbital photos of the Mare Imbrium, taken by its new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite as it made repeated passes just 30 miles above the surface. With these, it was possible to finally get a decent idea where the lost Lunokhod and its parent lander were.

"The recent images and laser altimetry from LRO provided coordinates within 100 meters, and then we were in business," says Murphy.

Using the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico, Murphy and his colleagues were able at last to get a laser reflection back from the missing moon-prowler, getting its range to within a centimetre. A second reading less than 30 minutes later gave another line of position and pinned the machine down to within 10 metres. In time, Murphy believes he can refine this down to within a centimetre.

"We got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try," exults Murphy. "It’s got a lot to say after almost 40 years of silence.”

Lunokhod 1's successor, Lunokhod 2 - nowadays the property of wealthy game developer and space tourist Richard Garriott - was also recently relocated with the aid of LRO photographs. Its reflector, unlike Lunokhod 1's, would provide a weak laser return, but because of the uneven way in which known laser reflectors are positioned on the Moon it couldn't be pinpointed on a map with any accuracy until LRO came on the scene

Change in Experiment Will Delay Shuttle’s End

Change in Experiment Will Delay Shuttle’s End

A $1.5 billion seven-ton cosmic-ray experiment scheduled to be carried aloft July 29 on the space shuttle Endeavour won’t be ready until August, according to the experiment’s leader, Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delaying the end of the 29-year-old shuttle program.

NASA officials acknowledged that there would be a delay but said they had not yet decided when the final launching would be.

The experiment, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, was to be installed on the International Space Station as one last scientific errand before the final shuttle launching, of the Discovery, now scheduled for Sept. 16.

Last week, however, Dr. Ting told NASA that he would replace a key component of the spectrometer, a powerful superconducting magnet, with an ordinary magnet. The redesigned instrument would not arrive at the Kennedy Space Center until August. It would be too late for July and is not a part of the final Discovery mission.

“We have an issue,” Dr. Ting said in a telephone interview from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland, where the instrument was built.

NASA officials said they had not made any decisions on a new shuttle schedule this fall, including whether to switch the last two flights so that Endeavour’s flight would be the finale. “That launch is still where it is,” said Kyle Herring, a spokesman at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Asked about a possible delay at a news conference after the recent landing of Discovery, Mike Moses, director of shuttle integration at Kennedy, said that the agency was still looking at the potential impacts to the shuttle schedule, “but we’re still looking to finish this calendar year.”

The cost of extending shuttle flights past September has already been covered by Congress, which allocated $600 million to cover potential shuttle operations in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011, in case the schedule slipped. “So it doesn’t matter if it’s one flight or two flights,” Mr. Herring added.

Dr. Ting said the collaboration had been pondering changing magnets for at least a year and had mentioned it to NASA.

The superconducting magnet, which produces a field 17,000 times that at the Earth’s surface and allows scientists to determine the charge and momentum of particles by how their tracks bend, needs to be cooled to near absolute zero by liquid helium. But tests and calculations showed that the helium would boil away too quickly, within two or three years, leaving the seven-ton spectrometer a dead hulk. Under the Obama administration’s new plan, however, the space station will stay up to 2020 or even 2028.

“I don’t think it’s correct to go there for three years where there is a chance to do physics for 18 years,” Dr. Ting said. “Because there is no way to remove it.”

Dr. Ting plans to replace the magnet with an ordinary one of the exact same size that flew in a test flight aboard the space shuttle in 1998, since it doesn’t need helium cooling and thus will last as long as the station. The new magnet is only one-fifth as strong as the superconducting one, but Dr. Ting said the much longer running time of the experiment along with rearranging some of the layers of silicon that record tracks of particles would more than compensate for the weaker magnet.

Mark Sistilli, an astronomer who is NASA’s program manager for the experiment, said that eliminating the need for handling supercold liquid helium would make things simpler and safer. When it warms up, liquid helium can boil explosively, as scientists at CERN found out a year and a half ago when part of the Large Hadron Collider, whose magnets are also cooled with liquid helium, exploded, delaying its operations for a year. The initial reaction at NASA, he said, was, “Our life just got easier.”

The last-minute switch has caused head-scratching among some physicists, who despite Dr. Ting’s protestations worry that the experiment has been degraded. Gregory Tarle, a physicist at the University of Michigan, said: “It’s highly unusual for an experiment to be redesigned this close to launch. I would question the wisdom of flying something redesigned so close to launch.”

This is only the latest adventure for an experiment that dates to the beginning of the space station era, in 1994, and has been controversial for about as long. It was originally meant to look for antimatter, but in recent years scientists have become more excited about the possibility that it could pick up signals from the mysterious dark matter that pervades the universe. Despite disagreement among scientists about the priority NASA gave to the experiment, a coalition of some 500 physicists from 16 countries, welded together by Dr. Ting’s legendarily iron will, pressed ahead and put it together at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion.

It was tossed off the shuttle manifest in 2004 after the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, and some prominent American physicists accused NASA of not sticking to its international commitments. Dr. Ting began making regular visits to Washington. In the fall of 2008 Congress subsequently ordered NASA to add one more shuttle flight for Dr. Ting’s experiment.

The second man in space: August 6, 1961

Gherman Stepanovich Titov (September 11, 1935 – September 20, 2000) was a Soviet cosmonaut and the second man to orbit the Earth. He was named after Saint Germanus. A month short of 26 years old at launch of the Vostok 2, he remains the youngest person to fly in space.

Titov was born in the village of Verkhneye Zhilino in the Altai Krai, and eventually attended the Stalingrad Military Aviation School.

After graduating as an air force pilot, he was selected for cosmonaut training in 1960, and was chosen to fly the Vostok 2 mission launched in August 6, 1961. The mission lasted for 25.3 hours and accomplished 17 orbits of the earth.

His call sign in this flight was Eagle. He landed close to the town of Krasny Kut in Saratov Oblast, Russia.

Titov was a fine sportsman, and keen on gymnastics:

In August 1961, he was the first person to suffer from "space sickness" (i.e. motion sickness in space) and was also the first human to sleep in space. He slept roughly for one orbit, and was surprised to awake with his arms floating in the air due to the absence of gravity. After securing his arms under a security belt, he went back to sleep, overslept and awoke 30 minutes later than predicted by the flight plan. He states (vide English version of his biography) that "Once you have your arms and legs arranged properly, space sleep is fine ... I slept like a baby".

Following his space flight, Titov went on various senior positions in the Soviet space programme until his retirement in 1992. In 1995 he was elected to the State Duma as a member of the Communist Party. He died of cardiac arrest in his sauna at the age of 65 in Moscow. He was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Awards and medals
Gherman Titov was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, two Orders of Lenin, numerous medals and foreign orders. He was also bestowed a title of the Hero of Socialist Labor of Bulgaria, Hero of Labor of Vietnam, and Hero of Mongolia. A crater on the far side of the Moon and an island in Halong Bay are named after Titov.

Fictional references
In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two (and the film adaptation 2010), the opening dialogue/scene features a conversation between Dimitri Moisevitch of the Soviet Space Council and Dr. Heywood Floyd. When Moisevitch informs Floyd that the Soviets will be traveling to Jupiter on their new spaceship named for Alexey Leonov, Floyd is initially puzzled, claiming that he thought the ship was to be named for Gherman Titov. In the book, Moisevitch just mentioned that it had been changed to Leonov; in the film, he replies that Titov has fallen out of favor, though he does not elaborate.

The first man in space: April 12, 1961

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (March 9, 1934 – March 27, 1968), Hero of the Soviet Union, was a Soviet cosmonaut. As a full-grown man, Gagarin was 5 ft 2 in tall, (which was an advantage in the small Vostok cockpit. On 12 April 1961, he became the first human in outer space and the first to orbit the Earth.

Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia), on March 9, 1934. [The adjacent town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968 in his honor].

His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. His mother was reportedly a voracious reader, and his father a skilled carpenter.

Yuri was the third of four children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked.

Like millions of people in the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family suffered during Nazi occupation in World War II. His two elder siblings were deported to Nazi Germany for slave labour in 1943, and did not return until after the war.

While a youth, Yuri became interested in space and planets, and began to dream about his space tour which would one day become a reality. He was described by his teachers in the Moscow satellite town of Lyubertsy as intelligent and hard-working, if occasionally mischievous. His mathematics and science teacher had flown in the Soviet Air Forces during the war, which presumably made some substantial impression on young Gagarin.

After starting an apprenticeship in a metalworks as a foundryman, Gagarin was selected for further training at a technical high school in Saratov. While there, he joined the "AeroClub", and learned to fly a light aircraft.

In 1955, after completing his technical schooling, he entered military flight training at the Orenburg Pilot's School. While there he met Valentina Goryacheva, whom he married in 1957, after gaining his pilot's wings in a MiG-15.

Post-graduation, he was assigned to Luostari airbase in Murmansk Oblast, close to the Norwegian border, where terrible weather made flying risky.

He became a Lieutenant of the Soviet Air Force in 1957 and in 1959 he received the rank of Senior Lieutenant.

Gagarin kept physically fit throughout his life, and was a keen sportsman. The cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky wrote:

"Service in the Air Force made us strong, both physically and morally. All of us cosmonauts took up sports and PT seriously when we served in the Air Force. I know that Yuri Gagarin was fond of ice hockey. He liked to play goal keeper... I don't think I am wrong when I say that sports became a fixture in the life of the cosmonauts."

Gagarin was also a basketball fan, and coached the Saratov Industrial Technical School team, as well as being an umpire/referee

Career in the Soviet space program
Selection and training
In 1960, after the search and selection process, Yuri Gagarin was selected with 19 other cosmonauts for the Soviet space program. Along with the other prospective cosmonauts, he was subjected to experiments designed to test his physical and psychological endurance; he also underwent training for the upcoming flight. Out of the twenty selected, the eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov because of their performance in training, as well as their physical characteristics — space was at a premium in the small Vostok cockpit and both men were rather short.

On 12 April 1961, Gagarin became the first man to travel into space, launching to orbit aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1). His call sign in this flight was Kedr (Cedar).

During his flight, Gagarin famously whistled the tune "The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows." The first two lines of the song are: "The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows/Where her son flies in the sky". This patriotic song was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951 (opus 86), with words by Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky.

Around the same time, some Western sources claimed that Gagarin, during his space flight, had made the comment, "I don't see any God up here." However, no such words appear in the verbatim record of Gagarin's conversations with the Earth during the spaceflight. (In a 2006 interview a close friend of Gagarin, Colonel Valentin Petrov, stated that Gagarin never said such words, and that the phrase originated from Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, where the anti-religious propaganda was discussed. In a certain context Khrushchev said, "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any God there". Colonel Petrov also said that Gagarin had been baptised into the Orthodox Church as a child.)

Fame and later life
After the flight, Gagarin became a worldwide celebrity, touring widely with appearances in Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Japan to promote the Soviet achievement.

In 1962, he began serving as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He later returned to Star City, the cosmonaut facility, where he worked on designs for a reusable spacecraft. Gagarin worked on these designs in Star City for seven years. He became a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Air Force in 1962 and in 1963 he received the rank of Colonel of the Soviet Air Force.

Soviet officials tried to keep him away from any flights, being worried of losing their hero in an accident. Gagarin was backup pilot for Vladimir Komarov in the Soyuz 1 flight. As Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash (on April 24, 1967), Gagarin was ultimately banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights.

Death and legacy
Gagarin then became deputy training director of the Star City cosmonaut training base. At the same time, he began to re-qualify as a fighter pilot. On March 27, 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, he and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin (Seregin) died in a MiG-15UTI crash near the town of Kirzhach. Gagarin and Seryogin were buried in the walls of the Kremlin on Red Square.

It is not certain what caused the crash, but a 1986 inquest suggests that the turbulence from a Su-11 'Fishpot-C' interceptor using its afterburners may have caused Gagarin's plane to go out of control.

Russian documents declassified in March 2003 showed that the KGB had conducted their own investigation of the accident, in addition to one government and two military investigations. The KGB's report dismissed various conspiracy theories, instead indicating that the actions of air base personnel contributed to the crash. The report states that an air traffic controller provided Gagarin with outdated weather information, and that by the time of his flight, conditions had deteriorated significantly. Ground crew also left external fuel tanks attached to the aircraft. Gagarin's planned flight activities needed clear weather and no outboard tanks. The investigation concluded that Gagarin's aircraft entered a spin, either due to a bird strike or because of a sudden move to avoid another aircraft. Because of the out-of-date weather report, the crew believed their altitude to be higher than it actually was, and could not properly react to bring the MiG-15 out of its spin.

In his 2004 book Two Sides of the Moon, Alexey Leonov recounts that he was flying a helicopter in the same area that day when he heard "two loud booms in the distance." Corroborating other theories, his conclusion is that a Sukhoi jet (which he identifies as a Su-15 'Flagon') was flying below its minimum allowed altitude, and "without realizing it because of the terrible weather conditions, he passed within 10 or 20 meters of Yuri and Seregin's plane while breaking the sound barrier." The resulting turbulence would have sent the MiG into an uncontrolled spin. Leonov believes the first boom he heard was that of the jet breaking the sound barrier, and the second was Gagarin's plane crashing.

A new theory, advanced by the original crash investigator in 2005, hypothesizes that a cabin air vent was accidentally left open by the crew or the previous pilot, leading to oxygen deprivation and leaving the crew incapable of controlling the aircraft.

On April 12, 2007, the Kremlin vetoed a new investigation into the death of Gagarin. Some experts who had been involved in the original investigation had formulated a new theory, based on modern technology and investigative methods. Government officials said that they saw no reason to begin a new investigation. All found parts of the wrecked MiG-15UTI were collected and are stored in sealed barrels.

There were two commemorative coins issued in the Soviet Union to commemorate 20th and 30th anniversaries of his flight: 1 ruble coin (1981, copper-nickel) and 3 ruble coin (1991, silver). In 2001, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Gagarin's flight, a series of four coins bearing his likeness was issued in Russia: 2 ruble coin (copper-nickel), 3 ruble coin (silver), 10 ruble coin (brass-copper, nickel), and 100 ruble coin (silver).

Howard Nemerov's poems regarding the Space Shuttle

Howard Nemerov's space shuttle poems
Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) wrote two poems about the space shuttle. "On an Occasion of National Mourning" was written after the Challenger accident. "Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis" was written for NASA, during the time that Nemerov was poet laureate of the United States.

On an Occasion of National Mourning

It is admittedly difficult for a whole
Nation to mourn and be seen to do so, but
It can be done, the silvery platitudes
Were waiting in their silos for just such
An emergent occasion, cards of sympathy
From heads of state were long ago prepared
For launching and are bounced around the world
From satellites at near the speed of light,
The divine services are telecast
From the home towns, children are interviewed
And say politely, gravely, how sorry they are,

And in a week or so the thing is done,
The sea gives up its bits and pieces and
The investigating board pinpoints the cause
By inspecting bits and pieces, nothing of the sort
Can ever happen again, the prescribed course
Of tragedy is run through omen to amen
As in a play, the nation rises again
Reborn of grief and ready to seek the stars;
Remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom.


Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis

So much of life in the world is waiting, that
This day was no exception, so we waited
All morning long and into the afternoon.
I spent some of the time remembering
Dante, who did the voyage in the mind
Alone, with no more nor heavier machinery
Than the ghost of a girl giving him guidance;

And wondered if much was lost to gain all this
New world of engine and energy, where dream
Translates into deed. But when the thing went up
It was indeed impressive, as if hell
Itself opened to send its emissary
In search of heaven or "the unpeopled world"
(thus Dante of doomed Ulysses) "behind the sun."

So much of life in the world is memory
That the moment of the happening itself—
So much with noise and smoke and rising clear
To vanish at the limit of our vision
Into the light blue light of afternoon—
Appeared no more, against the void in aim,
Than the flare of a match in sunlight, quickly snuffed.

What yet may come of this? We cannot know.
Great things are promised, as the promised land
Promised to Moses that he would not see
But a distant sight of, though the children would.
The world is made of pictures of the world,
And the pictures change the world into another world
We cannot know, as we knew not this one.

Copyright notice:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/572439.html
Excerpted from War Stories and Trying Conclusions by Howard Nemerov, published by the University of Chicago Press. © Howard Nemerov. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.

Obama should "rethink" NASA's space program

Obama should rethink NASA's space program

An editorial in the Washington Times

PRESIDENT OBAMA had the right idea when he recommended scrapping the Bush administration's ill-conceived, under-funded program to return to the moon by 2020 and reach Mars by 2037. As a presidential commission headed by former Lockheed Martin chief executive Norman Augustine concluded last year, the human spaceflight program appears "on an unsustainable trajectory," with resources falling woefully short of an unclear goal. So we agree with the president's instinct to hit the reset button. But his plan also is fundamentally flawed, although for the opposite reason than the one most of Mr. Obama's critics have cited.

Those critics, including some former astronauts, accuse Mr. Obama of effectively abandoning human spaceflight by replacing an existing program with a new one. We blame him for not making a cleaner break from unsustainable schemes to put people into space. "The bottom line is nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space than I am," Mr. Obama said at the Kennedy Space Center last Thursday. His proposed route is to skip the moon and instead head to Mars, with interim stops at intriguing destinations such as near-Earth asteroids or the moons of Mars. That's too bad.

While we understand the romantic attraction of human spaceflight, the drive for exploration can be satisfied by less costly and less hazardous means. Human spaceflight is not an affordable priority given the pressing demands on Earth and the scarce resources available to meet them. Equally worrying, the Obama plan risks repeating the mistakes of the past: budgeting too little. As the Augustine commission urged, "These challenging initiatives must be adequately funded, including reserves to account for the unforeseen and unforeseeable. . . . Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations." Under Mr. Bush's Constellation program, NASA was spending 39 percent of its budget on human spaceflight; Mr. Obama proposes devoting just 18 percent. It's hard to see how that will be enough if the mission remains largely the same, even with the prospect of cost savings from new technologies and increased reliance on the private sector.

Mr. Obama would give NASA $6 billion more -- for all purposes, not just for spaceflight -- over five years. Mr. Obama said last week that he was committing $3 billion to begin developing the heavy-lift rocket necessary to get crew and supplies into deep space. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that won't be enough. The smaller rocket that Mr. Obama announced he was canceling, the Ares I launch vehicle, has already cost $9 billion. In the face of congressional unhappiness, Mr. Obama also announced that he would revive a scaled-back version of another part of the Bush program, the Orion space capsule, at a cost of $1 billion to $3 billion. This is certain to further strain other NASA priorities.

It would be better to rethink the space program entirely. The era of the space shuttle is limping to a close, with just three more flights planned. The international space station is slated to shut in 2015, after 25 years of planning and assembly and just five scheduled years of full operations. The Augustine commission recommended, and Mr. Obama has agreed, that the station's operations should be extended until 2020. We're skeptical: to what end, at a cost of $2 billion annually? With the decommissioning of the shuttle, the United States will not have the capacity to transport crew or cargo to the station; it will rely on, and pay, Russia to do so. In addition, with the cancellation of Ares I, the administration wants to rely on private companies to develop vehicles to get passengers to low-Earth orbit. These "space taxis" would stretch current capabilities, but the private sector could play an important, and potentially cost-effective, role. It is odd for those who accuse this administration of wanting to take over the private sector to blast this initiative.

NASA's budget, currently $19 billion, represents a minuscule part of federal spending. But the agency performs important missions that too often have been shortchanged to finance spaceflight. Mr. Obama has wisely rededicated resources to studying the effects of climate change and other phenomena on Earth. NASA's robotics program has produced reams of important scientific information, not to mention inspiring images. The agency's aeronautics program is studying ways to increase fuel efficiency and lower pollution, and to develop the next generation of air traffic control systems. Meanwhile, the world's oceans remain woefully underexplored. In an era when government will not be able to do everything, reaffirming a mission to Mars remains a long, and costly, shot.

What the author of this piece doesn't consider is that, while the US drops back and becomes a third-rate power when it comes to space exploration, China is going full speed ahead and will have based on the Moon by the end of the decade - or at least be in the process of building it. (IMHO.)

China with bases on the moon, and the US at their mercy. Of course, we're at their mercy now, considering they own all our debt...

Instead of abandoning the space program, I'd curtail the welfare programs. No more subsidizing women to have illegitimate babies! If they can't afford to buy their own milk, and their own school supplies, and shoes for the kid and coats during winter time (everything that charity drives have provided to them for decades) they shouldn't be having kids at all.

Space News: Thursday, April 22, 2010

The New York Times has a couple of articles devoted to space exploration:

Spectacular Images of Sun From NASA
NASA has released spectacular, new images of the sun, taken from a spacecraft called the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which was launched into space in February. Videos, released to the media, were made from images shot by the craft’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which is a series of four telescopes that look at the sun in different wavelengths, producing images of different colors. More images of the sun, and video reports explaining the project, can be found on the mission’s YouTube channel.
http://www.youtube.com/user/SDOmission2009#g/u

Lawmakers Question NASA's Plan for Private Rockets
Citing safety and budget concerns, members of a Senate appropriations subcommittee Thursday voiced strong opposition to plans to have private rockets transport astronauts to the international space station by the middle of the decade.

During the panel's first hearing on the issue, Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, its influential chairman, joined Republican members in challenging the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's proposals as risky and lacking sound technical support.

It's "all part of the glitz and the glory" of the Obama administration's focus on using commercially developed and operated spacecraft....

Air Force's Mystery X-37B Robot Spaceship to Launch Today

The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket and poised for an evening blastoff from Florida tonight on a mission shrouded in secrecy.

The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket and poised for an evening blastoff from Florida tonight on a mission shrouded in secrecy.

The spacecraft, called the Orbital Test Vehicle, is poised to launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from a seaside pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is slated for sometime during a nine-minute window that opens at 7:52 p.m. EDT.

There's an 80 percent chance of good weather to launch the X-37B space plane. But what it will actually do in space and when it will autonomously fly itself back down to Earth remain a mystery.

The Air Force would like to keep it that way. At least for now.

"Well, you can't hide a space launch, so at some point extra security doesn't do you any good," said Gary Payton, Air Force deputy under secretary for space systems, in a Tuesday teleconference with reporters. [X-37B spacecraft photos.]


The U.S. Air Force is on the verge of showcasing the new X-37B space plane -- in a space mission that's cloaked in secrecy.

"On this flight the main thing we want to emphasize is the vehicle itself, not really, what's going on in the on-orbit phase because the vehicle itself is the piece of news here," Payton said.

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Shuttle soars over county in next-to-last flight

TAHLEQUAH — Local authorities received a flood of calls Tuesday morning after many area residents believed an explosion had occurred somewhere in the county.

Callers said a loud noise shook their windows around 8 a.m. It turned out to be the sonic boom created by NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, returning from its next-to-last mission.

After the shuttle soared over the Oklahoma sky, several county residents reported seeing it, making them part of NASA history as the space shuttle program winds toward its retirement this year. Minutes after zooming over Oklahoma, Discovery made a safe landing at 8:09 a.m. CST at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

The shuttle’s return was a day later than scheduled after two opportunities to land were delayed Monday because of weather conditions. Because of the delay, the return utilized a return path that took it over the North Pacific, over Vancouver, then southeast over Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

NASA said Discovery’s seven astronauts aboard traveled more than six million miles on the journey. The shuttle carried more than 7 tons of equipment and supplies to the International Space Station.

The flight was the second of 2010, and was reportedly the first time four women have been in space at one time. Under future plans, only three shuttle missions are left before NASA’s fleet of craft retire: Atlantis is expected for a flight in May, Endeavour is slated for its last mission in July, and Discovery will take its final flight - as well as the program’s - in September.

[Grammatical note. "reportedly" is used in the wrong context in the above sentence. It was the first time four women have been in space at one time. Why even introduce that modifier??]

According to NASA, during re-entry and landing, the orbiter is not powered by engines, but flies like a glider. About half an hour after the deorbit burn, the craft will start to experience effects of the atmosphere, usually at an altitude of about 80 miles and more than 5,000 statute miles from the landing site in Florida. It will then slice through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound, bringing with it a sonic boom that may rattle windows, but has little or no effect on humans, wildlife or property.

The landing process, once the orbiter is about 25 miles out from its landing strip, will take only another five minutes or so, according to NASA. The main landing gear hits the runway between 214 and 226 mph, and will eventually coast to a stop.

The paved runway at Kennedy is 15,000 feet long with a 1,000-foot overrun on each end. The width is about the length of a football field at 300 feet, according to NASA, with 50-foot asphalt shoulders on each side. Kennedy’s concrete runway is 16 inches thick in the center, and 15 inches thick on the sides. The landing strip also has a slope of 24 inches from the center line to the edge.

Discovery lands in Florida

Space shuttle glides into Florida

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--The shuttle Discovery, delayed a day by cloudy Florida weather, glided to a pinpoint landing here on Tuesday morning to close out an extended space station assembly mission.

"We're glad the International Space Station is stocked up again," Commander Alan Poindexter told mission control after the 9:08 a.m. EDT landing.

The 131st shuttle mission covered 238 complete orbits and 6.2 million miles since blastoff on April 5 for a mission duration of 15 days.

Already running a day late because of low clouds here Monday, the astronauts were aiming for a 7:34 a.m. landing in Florida, but nearby showers and concern about fog prompted the entry flight director to order a one-orbit wave-off.

Discovery plunged back into the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of about 76 miles above the central Pacific Ocean south of the Aleutian Islands, crossing the western Canadian coast near Vancouver at an altitude of about 40 miles. Discovery sailed high above Helena, Mont., just west of Casper, Wyo., and across the northeastern corner of Colorado before descending across Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, passing north of Little Rock before continuing across Mississippi, Alabama Georgia, and Florida.

With Discovery back on the ground, engineers at the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building were prepping the shuttle Atlantis for an overnight trip to launch pad 39A for liftoff May 14 on another space station assembly mission. It will be the 32nd and final planned flight for Atlantis as NASA faces the shuttle program's last three flights.

The final missions are devoted to delivering as much in the way of spare parts and supplies as possible to the space station before the shuttle fleet is retired and the station becomes dependent on less capable Russian, European, and Japanese cargo craft.

Discovery's crew delivered more than 17,000 pounds of supplies, equipment, and science gear and staged three spacewalks to replace an ammonia coolant tank on the station's main power truss. The new tank was successfully installed, but flight controllers were unable to pressurize the coolant loop because of trouble with a valve in an associated nitrogen tank.

Mission managers briefly considered a fourth spacewalk to install a spare nitrogen tank. But engineers concluded the coolant loop could be safely operated for at least a month without pressurization. As it now stands, the station's crew likely will stage a spacewalk later this spring to install a replacement tank.

About the author of this report:

William Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He has covered more than 115 shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune, and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of "Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia." You can follow his frequent status updates at the CBSNews.com Space Place, where this story was first published.