US Military Launches New Missile Warning System Into Space

Fox News: US Military Launches New Missile Warning System Into Space
A new U.S. military satellite launched into orbit Saturday (May 7) on a mission to enhance the country's missile defense and detection capabilities.

The satellite blasted off atop an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket from a seaside pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 2:10 p.m. EDT (1810 GMT). The mission had been delayed one day due to bad weather.

The Atlas 5 rocket carried the first satellite in the U.S. military's planned four-satellite Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS). The satellites, the first of which is called GEO-1, will replace the military's Defense Support Program satellites that are currently in orbit.

"Today, we launched the next generation missile warning capability," Air Force Space Command commander Gen. William Shelton said in a statement. "It's taken a lot of hard work by the government-industry team and we couldn't be more proud. We look forward to this satellite providing superb capabilities for many years to come." [Video: U.S. Defense Satellites Watch Entire World]

The rocket launch provider United Launch Alliance (ULA) oversaw Saturday's successful liftoff. The GEO-1 satellite rode atop an Atlas 5 configuration that did not use solid rocket boosters.

U.S. military's latest space sentinel
The $1.3 billion GEO-1 satellite is expected to provide the military with advanced warning of potential incoming threats while they are on the battlefield. It will circle the Earth in a geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) above its coverage area.

"It's a great day for United Launch Alliance, we have been entrusted to launch the most important missions for this country - be it for NASA, the military or for the private sector," said ULA spokesman Chris Chavez. "This is our 50th launch overall, our 26th using the Atlas 5 launch vehicle and our fifth launch this year already."

This new satellite will give better early warning of incoming missiles. GEO-1 will also provide related information such as intelligence-gathering, missile defense and situational awareness for military personnel.

"SBIRS GEO-1 represents the dawn of a new era in overhead persistent infrared surveillance that will greatly improve our national security for years to come," said Brig. Gen. (select) Roger W. Teague, the U.S. Air Force's Infrared Space Systems Directorate director, in a statement.

The satellite can track multiple areas and potential threats at once as opposed to the system currently in orbit. The satellite utilizes heat-sensitive technology to perform its mission and has an expected design life of about 12 years.

"This launch represents the culmination of hard work and dedication from an elite team of individuals," said Michael Friedman a spokesman for Lockheed-Martin, which built the satellite. "Together we've built and launched a spacecraft that will protect citizens for years to come a spacecraft the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin SBIRS team knows the nation will be very proud of."

Space surveillance for missile defense
The SBIRS program is viewed as one of the nation's highest priority space security programs as it is expected to provide global, constant infrared surveillance that will accomplish a number of national defense requirements, program officials said. The system is expected to provide accurate early warning of incoming missiles to the U.S. President, Secretary of Defense and military commanders in the field. [Most Destructive Space Weapons Concepts]

GEO-1 will compare the heat signature of potential targets (in this case the heat from a missile's exhaust) against the ambient background temperature and relay its observations to its control team.

The launch had been originally schedule to take place on Friday, but intermittent rain and cumulous clouds thwarted the attempt. Weather was not a concern at the time of launch with completely clear skies in the Cape Canaveral area.

"The Atlas 5 has a 100 percent success rate, we simply cannot ask more from this launch vehicle,” said U.S. Air Force spokeswoman Glorimar Rodriguez. “This mission was number 26 for the Atlas 5 rocket; again and again the launch vehicle performs flawlessly."

Want to Fly Around the Moon? Commercial Spaceship Gets Another Seat

PC Magazine: Want to Fly Around the Moon? Commercial Spaceship Gets Another Seat
Room for one more? Virginia-based Space Adventures announced Thursday that it will add another seat to a Soyuz spacecraft that will take space tourists into low-Earth orbit by 2015.

Working with Rocket Space Corporation Energia, Space Adventures will add a second habitation module to the Soyuz TMA lunar complex, which will take those with (a lot) of extra cash around the moon.

"Space Adventures will once again grace the pages of aerospace history, when the first private circumlunar mission launches. We have sold one of the two seats for this flight and anticipate that the launch will occur in 2015," Richard Garriott, vice chairman of Space Adventures, said in a statement. "Having flown on the Soyuz, I can attest to how comfortable the spacecraft is, but the addition of the second habitation module will only make the flight that more enjoyable."

About that price. Space Adventures Tom Shelley told Space.com that its trips to the International Space Station, which normally take one person at a time, can set someone back between $20 million and $50 million. The lunar trip, however, could cost up to a whopping $150 million, Shelley said.

Space Adventures has flown seven spaceflight participants on eight missions to the ISS. The company is currently celebrating the 10th anniversary of the first orbital spaceflight, manned by Dennis Tito (video below).

Space Adventures estimates that by 2020, about 140 people will have been launched into orbital space. That could include private individuals, corporate, university and non-profit researchers, lottery winners, and journalists. Destinations would include the International Space Station, commercial space stations and orbital free-flys, the company said.

"The next 10 years will be critical for the commercial spaceflight industry with new vehicles and destinations coming online," said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures chairman. "But, in order to truly develop the industry and extend the reach of humanity over the course of time, there will need to be breakthrough discoveries made and innovative propulsion systems designed that will bring the solar system into our economic sphere of influence."

In September, Boeing partnered with Space Adventures to sell commercial space flights on the Boeing Crew Space Transportation spacecraft. Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft can fit seven people, and is expected to be operational by 2015. Last year, Boeing received a $50 million grant from NASA to work on commercial transport of space station crew and the development of human spaceflight opportunities. Boeing was one of five companies that received a total of $50 million from the government space agency as part of the stimulus package.

Another company exploring commercial space flight is Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Earlier this week, one of Branson's spaceships completed a re-entry technique known as a "feather" configuration for the first time.

In April, meanwhile, commercial spaceflight company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) unveiled plans for the Falcon Heavy (above), which SpaceX said will be the world's largest rocket.

Mother's Day in Space: Astronaut Mom Connects With Son From Orbit

FoxNews: Mother's Day in Space: Astronaut Mom Connects With Son From Orbit
Cady Coleman won't be the only mom spending this year's Mother's Day away from her child and family, but she will be higher up than any other.

Coleman is a NASA astronaut who's been living 220 miles above the planet on the International Space Station since December 2010. And, she's the only mom in space for Mother's Day (her five crewmates are all men).

Coleman and her husband Josh have a 10-year-old son.

"I miss them so much and I appreciate them," Coleman told the CBS television show The Talk, speaking recently from space. "It’s a lot of work for them for me to be gone. I'm just hoping that while I'm up here the things that I'll be doing end up being worth it, and I really think they will be."
A mom in space

While Cady Coleman is the only mother in space at the moment, she isn't the first. Many spaceflyers are parents; the first mom to fly to orbit was NASA astronaut Anna Fisher, who flew on the space shuttle Discovery's STS-51A mission in 1984.

Coleman is a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force, and has a Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering. This trip to the International Space Station is her third mission to space, following two stints on the space shuttle Columbia in 1995 and 1999. Coleman is scheduled to return to Earth on May 23 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft landing in Kazakhstan.

But even when Coleman has both feet on the ground, staying close to her family is never easy.

"My husband lives in Massachusetts, I live in Texas, and I spent the last three years getting ready for the space station, spending about a third of my time in Russia, some in Japan, some in Europe," Coleman said during an educational event for the Women's Academy of Excellence in New York in March. "So I'm already a long-distance marriage person. I think if you have a challenging situation, you just have to figure out what's good for you and not worry about whether other people might think that it's different or not as good. For my husband and I and our son I think it works really great."

Keeping in touch
Coleman admitted that being diligent about communication is the key to staying connected with the people she loves.

"I can call on the phone from here every night," she said. "Certainly I've talked to them, I think every day but three days that I've been here. We do thing like read stories from space, my son and I, and I try to make sure that we talk about all the important things that husbands and wives need to talk about."

Coleman even brought up a stuffed "Hobbes" tiger from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which she carries around the International Space Station to help her son get into the space spirit.

"I bring Hobbes with me to do experiments and I take pictures and send them down to the ground so he understands what I'm doing every day," Coleman said on The Talk.

Coleman is one of six astronauts living on the space station right now. Her crewmate, Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency, will be having a more somber Mother's Day after receiving the news that his mother died on Monday (May 2).

The astronauts, along with Mission Control on the ground, all took a moment of silence to honor her Wednesday (May 4) following her funeral.

"We are remembering her by looking at the beautiful view from our cupola of our planet," Nespoli said then. "We are sure she has the same view from where she is now."

It Took More Than 50 Years, But NASA Proves That Einstein Was Correct

PC Magazine: It Took More Than 50 Years, But NASA Proves That Einstein Was Correct
NASA's six-year Gravity Probe B (GP-B) mission has confirmed two major predictions from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The four ultra-precise gyroscopes used by GP-B measured the hypothesized geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a gravitational body, and frame-dragging, which is the amount a spining object pulls space and time with it as it rotates.

To do this, GP-B was pointed at a single star, IM Pegasi, while in orbit around Earth. NASA said that if gravity had no effect on space and time, the gyroscopes on GP-B would point in the same direction indefinitely while in orbit. However, researchers found that the gyroscopes experienced very small changes in spin direction as Earth's gravity pulled at them, confirming Einstein's theories.

"The mission results will have a long-term impact on the work of theoretical physicists," said Bill Danchi, senior astrophysicist and program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Every future challenge to Einstein's theories of general relativity will have to seek more precise measurements than the remarkable work GP-B accomplished."

"Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey. As the planet rotates, the honey around it would swirl, and it's the same with space and time," Francis Everitt, GP-B principal investigator at Stanford University, said in a statement. "GP-B confirmed two of the most profound predictions of Einstein's universe, having far-reaching implications across astrophysics research. Likewise, the decades of technological innovation behind the mission will have a lasting legacy on Earth and in space."

The GP-B experiment launched in 2004 and completed its data collection by December 2010. But it is actually one of the longest running NASA projects ever, with the idea first suggested in 1959. Several years later, NASA received funding to develop a relativity gyroscope experiment, which eventually led to the development of technologies that allowed airplanes to land by themselves and help determine the universe's background radition, among other things. The measurement also helped NASA physicist John Mather develop the Bing Bang Theory, for which he earned a Nobel Prize, NASA said.

GP-B also aided in the development of a drag-free satellite concept, which has helped develop the most precise satellite photos ever.

More than 350 college and four dozen high school students have worked on the GP-B project, including Sally Ride, who eventually became the first American woman in space.

GP-B was a joint effort between NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Stanford University, and Lockheed Martin, which designed the space vehicle.

Thursday, meanwhile, also marks the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's historic flight, making him the first American in space.

NASA Considering Gas Stations in Space

Fox News: NASA Considering Gas Stations in Space
Any road trip requires a pit stop or two. Soon, trips to space could be no different.

NASA has quietly put out feelers for what the space agency calls an “In-Space Cryogenic Propellant Storage and Transfer Demonstration.” It sounds far more interesting in civilian speak, however -- gas stations in space.

Since the beginning of manned space flight, NASA has utilized the “one-stop shop” approach; both the Apollo missions of the '60s and '70s and the more modern space shuttles carry all the fuel they need for the duration of a mission. But it would be next to impossible for a vehicle to carry all the fuel it would need on a venture into deeper space, said Chris Moore, deputy director of advanced capabilities division for NASA.

“Instead of sending the rockets fully fueled to asteroids or to Mars, we would launch them partially fueled to get more payload into orbit,” Moore told FoxNews.com. “Then we’d top off the propellant by docking with depots in lower Earth orbit."

The system would be set up ahead of time, he said, with depots drifting idly through the blackness while waiting for a rocket to dock. "All the fuel and the propellant depots would be launched before the human mission left for the asteroids or for Mars,” Moore said.

He envisions large arrays of propellant tanks all joined together, with tanks that can be added or removed depending on the length of the deep-space mission.

To establish these zero-gravity way stations, NASA must overcome a number of obstacles. The propellant used for space flight requires extremely cold temperatures, and any solar flares or fluctuations in temperature could cause it to evaporate. So finding a means of maintaining the propellant is a top priority.

Engineers also need to come up with ways to transfer the propellant to the space flight vehicles upon docking. And plans also need to be made on how to get the gas up there in the first place -- which is potentially where private space companies could step in.

“We would launch propellants from Earth on expendable rockets,” Moore told FoxNews.com. “A commercial market could be established where companies could launch propellant into space to the depot. Then NASA could purchase propellant from those companies."

"We could create a small space economy in propellants and refueling,” he suggested.

Private companies such as SpaceX and United Launch Alliance have already launched rockets into lower Earth orbit and could potentially step up to the task of transporting gas to these hypothetical stations. Neither company would comment on future plans.

But private spaceflight companies have weighed in in the past. Boeing proposed it in 2007, for example. "If there were a fuel depot available on orbit, one capable of being replenished at any time, the Earth departure stage could, after refueling, carry significantly more payload to the Moon," reads one slide from a presentation the company made at a spaceflight conference.

Space policy advocates say that this idea has been a long time coming, noting that NASA entertained the concept as early as the '70s. James Muncy, a space policy consultant with PoliSpace, says space depots will soon become the norm when it comes to future space travel.

“We have to think of it in terms of setting up an infrastructure and looking for long-term efficient approaches,” Muncy told FoxNews.com. “People who think of space as a frontier say we should separate the idea of carrying propellant from that of carrying the spacecraft and people.”

Muncy goes so far as to say the concept is common sense, claiming the road trip analogy isn’t too far-fetched.

“Your car isn’t designed to carry 100 gallons of gas. We don’t design vehicles to do that anymore,” Muncy told FoxNews.com. “If we want to keep exploring forever, it has to be affordable and sustainable.”

“We will need the technologies eventually anyway,” added Muncy. “We can’t go to Mars without them.”

Space Sensor Helps Produce 'Greener' Glass

Red Orbit: Space Sensor Helps Produce 'Greener' Glass
What has making glass in common with space exploration? The special technology to measure oxygen atoms outside space vehicles is now being used in the glass industry to produce super-efficient energy-saving windows.

With modern architecture featuring large glass facades, it has become important to improve the insulating characteristics of glass.

The windows must protect the interior against heat loss during cold weather and against overheating on warm summer days.

“By using sensor technology from space this has been possible,” explained Frank Hammer, founding member of the German company ESCUBE, which developed the special instrument initially for spaceflight.

Through MST Aerospace, the German technology broker of ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme, contacts were established with a glass manufacturer.

Today, the sensor is mounted outside the International Space Station and used in a German glass factory.

“For space, the sensor was developed to measure atomic oxygen, known for its erosion effect and for degrading optical surfaces,” said Mr Hammer.

“In the glass industry the technology is now used to control the industrial glass-coating process to obtain improved insulating properties.”

The complex coating procedure requires reliable and precise monitoring to control the process.

“The gas sensor developed to handle the harsh space environment turned out to be the right solution to handle the difficult glass-production conditions of high temperatures and reactive gasses,” added Mr Hammer.

Started with reentry space vehicles
It all started back in 1993 when ESA asked the University of Stuttgart to develop ceramic gas sensors to measure the atomic-oxygen levels around reentry craft under extreme test conditions.

Further miniaturized by the University of Dresden, the Flux-(Phi)-Probe-Experiments (FIPEX) were flown on several space experiments, including the Russian Inflatable Reentry and Descent Technology research capsule.

In 2008 FIPEX was launched on the STS-122 Shuttle mission and mounted outside ESA’s Columbus laboratory module on the International Space Station.

“Part of the European Technology Exposure Facility outside Columbus, FIPEX helps to understand the atmospheric environment in low orbit by measuring the highly aggressive corrosive atomic oxygen around the Station,” explained Martin Zell, Head of ESA’s Research Operations Department.

“The people from the University of Dresden and ESCUBE developed a very efficient sensor fulfilling our requirements for space, with reduced size, weight and power consumption.

“I can see the same sensor technology could provide advantages in many applications on Earth as well, compared to existing similar sensors.”

Owing to its miniaturization, low power consumption and other technical benefits, considerable interest arose from industry for terrestrial use of the sensors in medicine, environmental research and vacuum applications.

ESCUBE was set up in 1999 to introduce this innovative space technology in non-space markets.

Based on FIPEX and the specific glass-industry requirements, ESCUBE developed the new VacuSen sensor for vacuum and plasma applications, providing easy, low-cost, time-resolving process control for industrial processes such as a magnetron reactive gas sputter plant for float-glass coating.

“The goal was to optimize the coating process and enhance the quality of the coating,” added Mr Hammer.

Space technology helped produce ecological glass products
Peter Hennes from ESCUBE partner company iSATT added, “With ESCUBE’s sensor it is today possible to offer new types of glass."

"Their surfaces not only take into account economic and ecological criteria but also fulfill aesthetic criteria, saving energy by the low overall heat transfer coefficients.

“With the new coating the overall heat transfer coefficients have been reduced to about a third of what they were in the 1980s, while maintaining light transmittance at 80%.

“The light passing through is almost the same as standard glass, but the heat loss during winter and the heat gain during summer have been reduced significantly.”

HP bags $2.5bn services contract from NASA

CBR IT Services: HP bags $2.5bn services contract from NASA
NASA employees to collaborate in a secure computing environment


HP enterprise services has been awarded a single-award firm-fixed-price, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract worth up to $2.5bn by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Under the contract, which consists four-year base period with two three-year option periods, HP will provide end-user desktop services and devices that will increase NASA's efficiency and allow its employees to collaborate in a secure computing environment.

In addition, as a part of NASA's Agency Consolidated End-User Service (ACES) Program, HP will modernise NASA's entire end-user infrastructure by delivering a full range of personal computing services and devices to more than 60,000 users, said the company.

HP will also provide a variety of computing seat, Tier 2/3 service desk support and collaboration services to manage NASA's end-user infrastructure at all NASA sites across the US.

HP said that the computing seat and cellular seat services are designed with security and collaboration capabilities to help the NASA team safely share information.

HP enterprise services US public sector senior vice-president and general manager Dennis Stolkey said the ACES contract will help evolve NASA's IT environment to a centralised, adaptable IT infrastructure to enable economies of scale, agency-wide visibility and improved management and security.

"HP will build on our deep industry, infrastructure and end-user services expertise to support this significant work for the agency that is pioneering the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research," Stolkey said.

HP will be teaming with other small businesses to meet NASA's small business participation guidelines and diverse mission needs.