Top officials of China’s human spaceflight organization met counterparts from Europe, Russia and Canada during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Beijing last month, pushing their agenda of international cooperation and receiving at least friendly hearings from some of the major space powers.
SAFELY UNSAFED: NASA’s Jupiter-bound Juno probe exited safe mode Oct. 11, according to a statement from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) of San Antonio, the institutional home to the principal investigator for the $1.1 billion NASA-funded mission to study the atmosphere, origins and evolution of Jupiter. “The spacecraft is currently operating nominally and all systems are fully functional,” SWRI reported. The spacecraft swung by Earth Oct. 9 as part of a gravity assist strategy to reach Jupiter on July 4, 2016.
Ad Astra Rocket Co., developers of the Vasimr commercial solar-electric propulsion (SEP) system, is proposing launching a Space Plasma Laboratory (SPL) to the International Space Station that would address fundamental questions of solar physics while flight-qualifying SEP technologies to advance human exploration and take on other deep-space roles.
The second American to orbit the Earth, Mercury astronaut M. Scott Carpenter, died Oct. 10 in Denver of complications following a stroke. He was 88. A naval aviator during the Korean War who went on to become a test pilot at NAS Patuxent River, Md., Carpenter conducted some of the first scientific experiments in space and ate some of the first solid food consumed there.
It wasn't exactly a happy birthday. After 55 years of pushing humankind to places we have never been before—including literally out of the Solar System—NASA's staff got to celebrate the Oct. 1 anniversary of their agency's founding on furlough, sent home without pay while the nation's leaders postured for prime time. Even more upsetting was just how many of them there were, compared to their colleagues at other agencies.
While the uncertainty of two years of budget cuts and stop-gap spending bills may still not seem tangible to the public, “sequestration” is creating “chaos” for defense contractors.
Hobbled by the government's partial shutdown, the National Transportation Safety Board is standing down, except for the most pressing cases. “The agency can engage in those activities necessary to address imminent threats to safety of human life or for the protection of property,” the board said Oct. 10. Though it is clear investigators would be recalled for a major transportation disaster, how the NTSB is defining other “imminent threats” is murkier.
Among advanced developments hindered by the ongoing budget saga on Capitol Hill is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's proposed XS-1 experimental spaceplane. Darpa is polling industry for interest in developing a reusable hypersonic vehicle with expendable upper stages that can put as much as 5,000 lb. in space up to 10 times over 10 days. But Boeing, which has a lot of relevant technology in its X-37 spaceplane, isn't ready to commit. There is some uncertainty about what is and isn't going to be funded, Muilenburg says.
One way to try to escape cataclysmic budget uncertainty is to cover all the bases. Consider EADS's Lakota Light Utility Helicopter, one of the programs that fared poorly in President Barack Obama's long-term budget plans. The Army asked for just 10 this year and no more after that. But members of Congress appear to be persuaded by EADS's pitch of a low-cost, robust platform that delivers on time and is entrenched in the U.S. industrial base. The House's spending committee added funding to procure 31 Lakotas, and its Senate counterpart funded 20.
Gregory Johnson, the newly named president and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (Casis), hopes the International Space Station (ISS) can be a proving ground for a new type of commercial spaceflight just getting underway.
A LEGEND PASSES: Mercury astronaut M. Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit the Earth, died Oct. 10 in Denver of complications following a stroke. He was 88. A naval aviator during the Korean War who went on to become a test pilot, Carpenter conducted some of the first scientific experiments in space and ate some of the first solid food consumed there. His sole spaceflight — three orbits over five hours on May 24, 1962 — ended 250 mi.
L’Garde Inc., prime contractor for NASA’s Sunjammer solar sail mission, has successfully executed a partial ground deployment of the mechanisms that comprise the centerpiece of the deep-space propulsion demonstrator. Sunjammer, a $27 million NASA Science and Technology Mission Directorate initiative, is tentatively scheduled for a January 2015 liftoff as a secondary payload aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Deep Space Climate Observatory (Discovr) launch.
Engineers at Lockheed Martin and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are downloading data from NASA’s Juno probe after the $1.1 billion spacecraft put itself into safe mode during a close Earth flyby designed to sling it toward Jupiter.
PARIS — Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has announced the appointment of Deputy Defense Minister Oleg Ostapenko to replace Vladimir Popovkin as head of Russian space agency Roscosmos. The Oct. 10 announcement comes as Moscow reviews proposals to centralize oversight of its space industry in an effort to curb government waste and restore confidence in the nation’s space program following a spate of spacecraft and launch vehicle failures in recent years (AWIN First, Oct. 9).
MARS SIM: The Mars Society is looking for six volunteers to participate as members of the crew of the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) during a year-long simulation of a human Mars expedition set to take place in northern Canada starting in August 2014. The crew will conduct a sustained program of field exploration on Devon Island, 900 mi. from the North Pole, while operating under many of the same constraints that will be faced by explorers on an actual human Mars mission, according to the Mars Society.
PARIS — Moscow is reviewing a proposal to centralize its space industry in an effort to curb government waste and restore confidence in Russia’s space program following a spate of launch vehicle failures in recent years. The proposal was unveiled by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin in a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, during which Rogozin said a new state entity will be formed to centralize oversight of Russian production plants, leaving Russian space agency Roscosmos to serve as system integrator and procurement authority.
Swiss Space Systems (S3), a new commercial space company based in Payerne, Switzerland, will use the planned Colorado spaceport near Denver as the North American base for its air-launched Soar suborbital spaceplane. Under a preliminary agreement announced Oct. 8, Spaceport Colorado will be the U.S. home to S3’s converted A300, which will conduct dorsal launches of the Soar to deliver small satellites to orbit.
Officials at NASA’s Ames Research Center triggered a scientists’ boycott of a conference on the search for exoplanets with an inaccurate characterization of federal law governing access by Chinese nationals to NASA facilities, according to the lawmaker who wrote the law.
LOS ANGELES — Test pilots pushing Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2) toward a planned suborbital space flight in the coming months report the vehicle is rugged and stable, without any of the potential transonic flutter issues that could have bedeviled the design.
LADEE ARRIVES: NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) has reached lunar orbit, one month after lifting off from Wallops Island, Va., on a Minotaur V solid-fuel rocket. Operated by a skeleton crew at Ames Research Center during the federal government shutdown, the 884-lb. orbiter fired its main engine early October 6 to enter an elliptical orbit. The orbit’s apogee will be lowered with subsequent burns to move the spacecraft into its commissioning orbit at 124-186 mi., where it will spend 40 days.
NASA has exempted the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission preparations from the federal government shutdown, primarily because the orbiter will be needed as a communications relay for the two rovers operating on the planet’s surface. Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder said in a post on the mission website that the agency “has analyzed the Maven mission relative to the Anti-Deficiency Act and determined that it meets the requirements allowing an emergency exception.”
