Earlier this year, it was reported that an astronaut in space had developed a potentially life-threatening blood clot in the neck. This was successfully treated with medication by doctors on Earth, avoiding surgery. But given that space agencies and private spaceflight companies have committed to landing humans on Mars in the coming decades, we may not be so lucky next time.

Surgical emergencies are in fact one of the main challenges when it comes to human space travel. But over the last few years, space medicine researchers have come up with a number of ideas that could help, from surgical robots to 3D printers.

Mars is a whopping 54.6 million kilometres (33.9 million miles) away from Earth, when closest. In comparison, the International Space Agency (ISS) orbits just 400 kilometres above Earth. For surgical emergencies on the ISS, the procedure is to stabilise the patient and transport them back to Earth, aided by telecommunication in real time. This wont work on Mars missions, where evacuation would take months or years, and there may be a latency in communications of over twenty minutes.

As well as distance, the extreme environment faced during transit to and on Mars includes microgravity, high radiation levels and an enclosed pressurised cabin or suit. This is tough on astronauts bodies and takes time getting used to.

We already know that space travel changes astronauts cells, blood pressure regulation and heart performance. It also affects the bodys fluid distribution and weakens its bones and muscles. Space travellers may also more easily develop infections. So in terms of fitness for surgery, an injured or unwell astronaut will be already at a physiological disadvantage.

But how likely is it that an astronaut will actually need surgery? For a crew of seven people, researchers estimate that there will be an average of one surgical emergency every 2.4 years during a Mars mission. The main causes include injury, appendicitis, gallbladder inflammation or cancer. Astronauts are screened extensively when they are selected, but surgical emergencies can occur in healthy people and may be exacerbated in the extreme environment of space.

Surgery in microgravity is possible and has already been been carried out, albeit not on humans yet. For example, astronauts have managed to repair rat tails and perform laparoscopy a minimally invasive surgical procedure used to examine and repair the organs inside the abdomen on animals, while in microgravity.

These surgeries have led to new innovations and improvements such as magnetising surgical tools so they stick to the table, and restraining the surgeonaut too.

One problem was that, during open surgery, the intestines would float around, obscuring view of the surgical field. To deal with this, space travellers should opt for minimally invasive surgical techniques, such as keyhole surgery, ideally occurring within patients internal cavities through small incisions using a camera and instruments.

A laparoscopy was recently carried out on fake abdomens during a parabolic zero gravity flight, with surgeons successfully stemming traumatic bleeding. But they warned that it would be psychologically hard to carry out such a procedure on a crew mate.

Bodily fluids will also behave differently in space and on Mars. The blood in our veins may stick to instruments because of surface tension. Floating droplets may also form streams that could restrict the surgeons view, which is not ideal. The circulating air of an enclosed cabin may also be an infection risk. Surgical bubbles and blood-repelling surgical tools could be the solution.

Researchers have already developed and tested various surgical enclosures in microgravity environments. For example, NASA evaluated a closed system comprising a surgical clear plastic overhead canopy with arm ports, aiming to prevent contamination.

When orbiting or settled on Mars, however, we would ideally need a hypothetical traumapod, with radiation shielding, surgical robots, advanced life support and restraints. This would be a dedicated module with filtered air supply and a computer to aid in diagnosis and treatment.

The surgeries carried out in space so far have revealed that a large amount of support equipment is essential. This is a luxury the crew may not have on a virgin voyage to Mars. You cannot take much equipment on a rocket. It has therefore been suggested that a 3D printer could use materials from Mars itself to develop surgical tools.

Tools that have been 3D printed have been successfully tested by crew with no prior surgical experience, performing a task similar to surgery simply by cutting and suturing materials (rather than a body). There was no substantial difference in time to completion with 3D printed instruments such as towel clamps, scalpel handles and toothed forceps.

Robotic surgery is another option that has been used routinely on Earth, and tested for planetary excursions. During NEEMO 7, a series of missions in the underwater habitat Aquarius in Florida Keys by NASA, surgery by a robot controlled from another lab was successfully used to remove a fake gallbladder and kidney stone from a fake body. However, the lag in communications in space will make remote control a problem. Ideally, surgical robots would need to be autonomous.

There is a wealth of research and preparation for the possible event of a surgical emergency during a Mars mission, but there are many unknowns, especially when it comes to diagnostics and anaesthesia. Ultimately, prevention is better than surgery. So selecting healthy crew and developing the engineering solutions needed to protect them will be crucial.

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From floating guts to 'sticky' blood here's how to do surgery in space - The Conversation UK

Laurel Kornfeld

July 7th, 2020

Northrop Grummans Cygnus is grabbed by the ISS Canadarm2 robotic arm. SpaceXs Dragon is visible behind the arm, attached to the ISS Unity module. Photo Credit: NASA Commercial Space Image Gallery

Bruce Pittman of NASAs Space Portal Office, a 35-year advocate for commercial spaceflight, outlined his vision of the endeavor over the next 42 months in a June webinar run by NASAs Night Sky Network.

Titled A Revolution in Commercial Space Development: The Next 42 Months, Pittmans talk began with a historic perspective starting with NASAs retiring of the space shuttle in 2009.

The decision to end the shuttle program was actually made in 2004 and announced by then-President George W. Bush after construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was completed. It left the space agency in a difficult situation because the shuttle was used regularly to bring both astronauts and supplies to the space station.

Early Stages of Public-Private Partnership:

Bruce Pittman of NASAs Space Portal team. Photo Credit: NASA Ames

Pittman, the Director of Commercial Space Development at OffWorld Inc., is currently working as a contractor in the Space Portal Office. Emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not for NASA in an official capacity, he referenced how he had joined NASAs newly-formed Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which was allocated $500 million over a five-year period to to develop partnerships with commercial companies for the transportation of supplies and eventually astronauts to the ISS.

Partnering with private industry shifts some risk and funding government takes to private companies but gives private companies more flexibility, he said.

The programs first contracts were awarded to SpaceX and the Orbital Sciences Corporation. SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon supply capsule while Orbital Sciences Corporation, now part of Northrop Grumman, produced the Antares rocket and Cygnus vehicle.

Falcon 9 made its first flight in 2010 and its first docking at the ISS two years later. Since then, it has doubled its initial performance. But its most notable feature is its reusability.

The space shuttle never flew more than nine times a year, mostly because refurbishing it and readying it for new flights took a long time. By introducing reusability, SpaceX has made frequent launches a reality.

In terms of the capsule, the Dragon returns to Earth by landing in the ocean, where a ship carries it back to land. In contrast, Cygnus can transport just one load of supplies to the ISS because it burns up on re-entry into the Earths atmosphere.

To date, SpaceX has conducted 20 cargo flights to the space station while Antares and Cygnus delivered 14.

SpaceX has been driving innovation in the aerospace industry, Pittman stated, noting that both they and Boeing contracted with NASA in 2014 to carry astronauts to and from the ISS. In May of this year, SpaceX famously conducted the first launch of American astronauts from American soil using American rockets in nine years via the Crew Dragon.

Boeing conducted an un-crewed test of its Starliner, also designed to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, but experienced some problems during that test. The company will likely launch its first crewed flight next year, Pittman said.

This opens a new era of commercial space development and private access to space, he emphasized.

The US has been paying Russia $81 million per seat per launch to send American astronauts to the ISS over the last nine years, he noted.

Benefits of Using Private Companies:

In contrast to NASA, private companies can own and operate their own systems. The governments role is simply that of a client. Commercial spaceflight will allow private companies to fly astronauts, including space tourists, completely independent of NASA. Bigelow Aerospace (who in March 2020 laid off its entire workforce) currently has one of its expandable modules on the space station, and Axiom Spacenegotiated the right to dock its own module there in 2024.

Actor Tom Cruise plans to ride with Axiom to the space station, where he hopes to film a movie.

Private companies are also launching their own satellites. SpaceX also leads in that area, having launched the Starlink system, a series of low-Earth orbit communications satellites that provide broadband Internet to all locations on Earth. These satellites, which fly below the ISS, will have laser interconnects that will enable them to communicate with one another.

The market for this could be in the $20-$30 billion dollar range, especially for undeveloped areas, Pittman emphasized.

Planet, a private company that images the Earth every day to facilitate global change, launched approximately 250 extremely small satellites and three higher-resolution satellites, all of which take detailed pictures of every part of Earths solid surface every day. By this fall, 21 of the latter group will be in orbit. This technology makes it possible to closely observe crucial developments, such as deforestation in the Amazon.

Commercial spaceflight is also making it easier for non-NASA individuals to access the ISS. The US portion of the space station has been made into a national science laboratory operated but not owned by NASA, Pittman said. Science experiments now being conducted include research in the life sciences, fiber optics, and 3D printing. The latter marks the start of manufacturing items in space.

Two 3D printers currently on the ISS are printing beating heart tissue from human stem cells in microgravity. Eventually, scientists will be able to print kidneys, lungs, and livers as well. In space, you can print whatever shape that you want, and it will stay where you put it.

NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan setting up BioFabrication Laboratory on ISS using 3D printer. Photo Credit: NASA

Beyond the ISS, commercial spaceflight is also facilitating the development of robots, tethers, and a mission extension vehicle that can extend the life of satellites.

Over the next 18 months, private companies will roll out new launch vehicles and capsules, such as the ULA Vulcan, which will replace the Atlas V,the New Glenn, and SpaceXs Starship and Falcon Heavy.

Pittman foresees launch vehicles having point to point suborbital capability, meaning they will be able to launch from offshore platforms and travel long distances, such as going from London to Sidney in 51 minutes. This will be used only for cargo until until flight safety for people is demonstrated, which he expects to occur by the end of the decade.

The Moon and Mars:

Private companies are facilitating a new era in lunar exploration as well. NASA has two programs in this area. One, the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) program, calls for robotic return to the Moon. This includes private landers, a water exploration rover, and various other robotic payloads.

The other program is aimed at landing humans on the Moon. NASA has allocated nearly$1 billion to three companiesDynetics, SpaceX, and Blue Originto design vehicles capable of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024.

For the more distant future, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin have much bigger plans. Musk wants to build a city on Mars, for which SpaceX is developing the Starship, which will be capable of carrying 100 people to the Red Planet. Bezos envisions millions of people living in space and rezoning the Earth for solely residential and light industrial activity.

Commercial spaceflight will be a subject of discussion at the National Space Societys (NSS) Day in Space virtual event, scheduled for July 16, Pittman said. Registration is now open for this free event.

Tagged: commercial spaceflight ISS Moon SpaceX The Range

Laurel Kornfeld is an amateur astronomer and freelance writer from Highland Park, NJ, who enjoys writing about astronomy and planetary science. She studied journalism at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a Graduate Certificate of Science from Swinburne Universitys Astronomy Online program. Her writings have been published online in The Atlantic, Astronomy magazines guest blog section, the UK Space Conference, the 2009 IAU General Assembly newspaper, The Space Reporter, and newsletters of various astronomy clubs. She is a member of the Cranford, NJ-based Amateur Astronomers, Inc. Especially interested in the outer solar system, Laurel gave a brief presentation at the 2008 Great Planet Debate held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD.

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Commercial spaceflight advocate outlines revolution in the field - SpaceFlight Insider

July 10, 2020 NASA Tracks Tropical Storm Fays Development and Strongest Side

NASA used satellite data to create an animation of Fays development and progression over the past few days, showing how the storm organized into a tropical storm. Additionally, NASAs Aqua satellite used infrared light to find the location of the strongest storms in Tropical Storm Fay occurring in the northeastern quadrant of the storm, mostly over the Atlantic Ocean.

Tropical Storm Fay was officially named as the sixth tropical storm the Atlantic Ocean Hurricane Season by 5 p.m. EDT on July 9. The storm formed just off the North Carolina coast. For several days before that, forecasters were using satellite data to track the storm as it developed.

Animating the Development of Fay

Previously designated as System 98L, the low-pressure area formed off the Georgia coast and moved north. At NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. NASA Worldview was used to create an animation of visible imagery of the storm using data from NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite. The animation showed the development and progression of System 98L into Tropical Storm Fay from July 6 to July 9.

NASAs Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks right now. Worldview is a tool that can be used to generate satellite imagery and animations.

NASA Worldview was used to create an animation of visible imagery from the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite was animated and showed the development and progression of System 98L into Tropical Storm Fay from July 6 to July 9. Image Courtesy: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).

NASA Analyzing Fay in Infrared Light

On July 10 at 2:55 a.m. EDT (0655 UTC), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASAs Aqua satellite gathered temperature information about Tropical Storm Fays cloud tops. MODIS found powerful thunderstorms where temperatures were as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 Celsius) mostly over the western Atlantic Ocean and along coastal areas of Delaware and southern New Jersey. Cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms with the potential to generate heavy rainfall.

Warnings and Watches on July 9

At 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC), the National Hurricane Center (NHC) noted a Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for Fenwick Island, Delaware to Watch Hill, Rhode Island including LongIsland and Long Island Sound, as well as Southern Delaware Bay. A Tropical Storm Warning means that tropical storm conditions are expected somewhere within the warning area.

What to Expect from Fay

The National Hurricane Center noted that in addition to tropical-storm force winds, storm surge and a possibility for isolated tornadoes, Fay is expected to produce heavy rainfall. Fay is forecast to generate 2 to 4 inches of rain with isolated maxima of 7 inches along and near the track from the lower Maryland Eastern Shore and Delaware northward into New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, southeast New York, and southern New England. These rains may result in flash flooding where the heaviest amounts occur.

Fays Status on July 9

At that time the NHC reported the center of Tropical Storm Fay was located by an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft near latitude 37.6 degrees north and longitude 74.7 degrees west. Fay was centered about 55 miles (85 km) south-southeast of Ocean City, Md. Fay is moving toward the north near 10 mph (17 kph). A northward to north-northeastward motion at a faster forward speed is expected over the next couple of days.

Maximum sustained winds are near 50 mph (85 kph) with higher gusts. Little change in strength is forecast today and tonight while the center remains over water. Weakening should begin after the center moves inland. The estimated minimum central pressure based on aircraft data is999 millibars.

A Weatherflow station at Lewes, Delaware recently reported a sustained wind of 33 mph (54 kph) and a wind gust of 39 mph (63 kph).

Fays Forecast Track

NHC forecasters expect the center of Fay to move near the mid-Atlantic coast today and move inland over the mid-Atlantic or the northeast United States late tonight or on Saturday.

Typhoons/hurricanes are the most powerful weather events on Earth. NASAs expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

ByRob GutroNASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

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Fay 2020 Hurricane And Typhoon Updates - NASA

On July 1, 1960, the technical and administrative core of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency became Marshall Space Flight Center. The transfer of this experienced group provided the young agency with a solid foundation in propulsion expertise. Sixty years of historic leaps and strides later, Marshall is celebrating its milestone anniversary with a look back at some of its most iconic accomplishments.

I could not be more proud to be part of the history Marshall has made, Marshall Director Jody Singer said. The world has witnessed us achieve 60 consecutive years of discovery, exploration, and victories for all of humankind. Celebrating these achievements reminds us of all the groundbreaking history still to come from the Marshall team.

In its first decade as a NASA center, Marshall worked on the Mercury-Redstone rocket that carried the countrys first astronaut, Alan Shepard, into space. Propulsion remained a focus area as the team developed the Saturn I, Saturn IB, and the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo Program. Science also formed a considerable part of Marshalls accomplishments, through the development and launch of three Pegasus satellites and several balloon flights of the 36-inch aperture optical system Stratoscope II.

The 1970s saw the five final flights of the Apollo Program, including three expeditions via the Marshall-developed Lunar Roving Vehicle which allowed astronauts to expand the amount of science conducted on the lunar surface for the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. This second decade also included the United States first space station, Skylab, whose three crewed missions provided NASA with critical insight on living and working in space. The end of the decade expanded the centers role in the development of scientific missions with the Marshall-managed High Energy Astronomy Observatory Program, including the launch of three large low-Earth orbiting satellites known as HEAO 1, 2, and 3.

Marshalls third decade, the 1980s, saw a continuation in propulsion work for humanitys first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle including the development of the shuttles main engines, solid rocket booster and external tanks. Space shuttle Columbias STS-1 mission ushered in three decades of operations in low-Earth orbit through 135 missions, including scientific experiments and payloads. Marshall also built upon its extensive microgravity research capabilities as the team developed systems for the Spacelab program including the Hubble Space Telescope, which continues to reshape humanitys view of the universe.

In the 1990s, while continuing work to refine the shuttle propulsion systems, Marshall took a giant leap forward in microgravity with the development and operation of several new research programs known as Astro, the International and U.S. Microgravity Laboratories, and the U.S. Microgravity Payloads. Marshall engineers also explored the limits of propulsion technology through advanced transportation systems. Throughout the decade, Marshall scientists helped rewrite understanding of gamma rays with the Burst and Transient Source Experiment for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The decade culminated with the launch of both the first U.S. module for the International Space Station and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The 2000s involved continued development of the space station, space shuttle programs, and propulsion systems including systems associated with the Ares crewed rocket. Marshall gained even more experience helping astronauts live and work in space with the development of the Destiny Laboratory, which supports a wide range of experiments and studies contributing to the health, safety, and quality of life for people all over the world; the EXPRESS racks, multipurpose payloadracksystems that support and store research experiments; and the Microgravity Science Glovebox, which provides a safe, contained environment for research with liquids, combustion and hazardous materials in microgravity conditions. Marshall continued its role in understanding the universe and fundamental physics with oversight of the Gravity Probe B satellite, Gamma Ray Burst Monitor space telescope and Hinode satellite.

In the 2010s, the space station continued to serve as both a proving ground for environmental control systems and an exceptional platform for scientific experiments. Marshall built upon a legacy of propulsion excellence with the development of the agencys most powerful rocket to date, the Space Launch System. This advanced vehicle will launch a new era of human exploration beyond Earths orbit to the Moon and later on to Mars through the Artemis program.

Six decades of Marshall history includes an impressive number of extraordinary achievements in both human spaceflight and scientific discovery, Marshall Historian Brian Odom said. Those accomplishments now form the core capability that the center will employ as it continues to make vital contributions to programs like Artemis and the Human Landing System, and a whole range of astrophysics missions. The center has certainly made its mark in the evolution of space exploration, and we still have so much more to contribute.

As Marshall enters its next decade of operation, the team is leading NASAsSpace Launch System and Human Landing System programs, key elements of Artemis. The team is preparing to return American astronauts to the Moon by 2024 and establish a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface by 2028. Lessons learned on and around the Moon will lead to the next giant leap sending astronauts to Mars.

Editors note: Taylor Goodwin, an ASRC Federal/Analytical Services employee, supports the Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications.

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Celebrating 60 years of Marshall Space Flight Center | Military Scene | theredstonerocket.com - Theredstonerocket

July is the month of Mars.

Three missions are poised to launch toward the Red Planet this month, including NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and cache samples for future return to Earth.

The action will start next week, if all goes according to plan. The United Arab Emirates' (UAE) first-ever interplanetary effort, the Hope Mars mission, also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, is scheduled to launch on July 14.

Related: NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance in pictures

The Hope orbiter will reach Mars in early 2021, then use three science instruments to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, weather and climate from above. The probe's observations should help researchers better understand Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, desert planet we know today, mission team members have said. That transition was driven by the stripping of Mars' once-thick atmosphere by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun.

The Hope spacecraft was built by the UAE's Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University and the University of California Berkeley. And the project is breaking ground for more than just the UAE: Hope is the first planetary science mission led by an Arab-Islamic nation.

China will follow with a landmark launch of its own a little more than a week after Hope takes flight. On July 23, China's first-ever fully homegrown Mars mission, known as Tianwen-1, is scheduled to lift off atop a Long March 5 rocket. (China put a piggyback orbiter called Yinghuo-1 aboard Russia's Mars mission Fobos-Grunt, which got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its November 2011 launch.)

Tianwen-1 is an ambitious project that consists of an orbiter, a lander and a 530-lb. (240 kilograms) rover that's the size of a small golf cart. Chinese officials have remained characteristically tight-lipped about the mission they still haven't publicly announced a final landing site for the lander/rover pair, for example but these robots' scientific gear suggests that Tianwen-1 will conduct a broad reconnaissance of the Martian environment.

The orbiter sports six instruments, including a high-resolution camera, a magnetometer and a mineral spectrometer, which will allow mission team members to determine the composition of surface rocks. The rover also has six instruments, including a weather station, a magnetic field detector and a ground-penetrating radar, which could spot subsurface water ice down to a depth of about 330 feet (100 meters).

If Tianwen-1 is successful, China will become just the third nation, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to land a spacecraft on Mars. And that epic touchdown may lead the way to even bigger things in the near future: Chinese space officials have voiced a desire to mount a Mars sample-return mission, which could perhaps launch as early as 2030.

Related: Occupy Mars: History of robotic Red Planet missions (infographic)

The United States and Europe also plan to bring pristine Red Planet material to Earth, and that project will really get up and running with Perseverance's launch. The 2,315-lb. (1,050 kg) rover, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30 and land inside Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

Perseverance will use its seven onboard instruments to characterize the geology of Jezero and search for signs of ancient Mars life in the rocks of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago.

The six-wheeled robot will also collect and cache several dozen samples from particularly promising study sites. This material will be recovered and brought to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031, in a campaign conducted by NASA and the European Space Agency. Scientists in labs around the world will then scrutinize the Mars material in great detail, looking for signs of life and clues about the planet's evolutionary history.

Mars 2020 also aims to lay groundwork for crewed missions to the Red Planet, the first of which NASA wants to launch in the 2030s. For instance, like the Tianwen-1 rover, Perseverance is outfitted with ice-hunting ground-penetrating radar. And another of the NASA rover's instruments, the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide by volume. ("ISRU" stands for "in situ resource utilization." NASA is big on acronyms, in case you hadn't noticed.)

MOXIE isn't Mars 2020's only technology demonstration. A 4-lb. (1.8 kg) helicopter called Ingenuity will journey to the Red Planet on Perseverance's belly. After touchdown, Ingenuity will drop free and make a few short test flights in the Martian sky the first-ever aerial exploration of a world beyond Earth.

If Ingenuity is successful, future Mars missions could commonly incorporate helicopters, NASA officials have said. Such rotorcraft couldserve a variety of purposes, from scouting out promising study sites for rovers to exploring hard-to-reach areas such as caves or steep-walled craters.

Hope, Tianwen-1 and Mars 2020 all must get off the ground this summer or be put in storage for more than two years, because Earth and Mars align favorably for planetary missions just once every 26 months. And the current launch window isn't open for very long; Mars 2020's closes on Aug. 15, NASA officials have said. (The mission's window originally opened on July 17, but several technical issues have pushed things back to July 30.)

One Mars mission hoping to launch this year has already been packed away until 2022. The life-hunting rover Rosalind Franklin, part of the European-Russian ExoMars program, encountered parachute problems and several other issues that could not be resolved in time for a 2020 liftoff.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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It's the month of Mars! 3 Red Planet missions set to launch in July - Space.com

On July 1, 1960, the technical and administrative core of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency became Marshall Space Flight Center. The transfer of this experienced group provided the young agency with a solid foundation in propulsion expertise. Sixty years of historic leaps and strides later, Marshall is celebrating its milestone anniversary with a look back at some of its most iconic accomplishments.

I could not be more proud to be part of the history Marshall has made, Marshall Director Jody Singer said. The world has witnessed us achieve 60 consecutive years of discovery, exploration, and victories for all of humankind. Celebrating these achievements reminds us of all the groundbreaking history still to come from the Marshall team.

In its first decade as a NASA center, Marshall worked on the Mercury-Redstone rocket that carried the countrys first astronaut, Alan Shepard, into space. Propulsion remained a focus area as the team developed the Saturn I, Saturn IB, and the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo Program. Science also formed a considerable part of Marshalls accomplishments, through the development and launch of three Pegasus satellites and several balloon flights of the 36-inch aperture optical system Stratoscope II.

The 1970s saw the five final flights of the Apollo Program, including three expeditions via the Marshall-developed Lunar Roving Vehicle which allowed astronauts to expand the amount of science conducted on the lunar surface for the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. This second decade also included the United States first space station, Skylab, whose three crewed missions provided NASA with critical insight on living and working in space. The end of the decade expanded the centers role in the development of scientific missions with the Marshall-managed High Energy Astronomy Observatory Program, including the launch of three large low-Earth orbiting satellites known as HEAO 1, 2, and 3.

Marshalls third decade, the 1980s, saw a continuation in propulsion work for humanitys first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle including the development of the shuttles main engines, solid rocket booster and external tanks. Space shuttle Columbias STS-1 mission ushered in three decades of operations in low-Earth orbit through 135 missions, including scientific experiments and payloads. Marshall also built upon its extensive microgravity research capabilities as the team developed systems for the Spacelab program including the Hubble Space Telescope, which continues to reshape humanitys view of the universe.

In the 1990s, while continuing work to refine the shuttle propulsion systems, Marshall took a giant leap forward in microgravity with the development and operation of several new research programs known as Astro, the International and U.S. Microgravity Laboratories, and the U.S. Microgravity Payloads. Marshall engineers also explored the limits of propulsion technology through advanced transportation systems. Throughout the decade, Marshall scientists helped rewrite understanding of gamma rays with the Burst and Transient Source Experiment for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The decade culminated with the launch of both the first U.S. module for the International Space Station and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The 2000s involved continued development of the space station, space shuttle programs, and propulsion systems including systems associated with the Ares crewed rocket. Marshall gained even more experience helping astronauts live and work in space with the development of the Destiny Laboratory, which supports a wide range of experiments and studies contributing to the health, safety, and quality of life for people all over the world; the EXPRESS racks, multipurpose payloadracksystems that support and store research experiments; and the Microgravity Science Glovebox, which provides a safe, contained environment for research with liquids, combustion and hazardous materials in microgravity conditions. Marshall continued its role in understanding the universe and fundamental physics with oversight of the Gravity Probe B satellite, Gamma Ray Burst Monitor space telescope and Hinode satellite.

In the 2010s, the space station continued to serve as both a proving ground for environmental control systems and an exceptional platform for scientific experiments. Marshall built upon a legacy of propulsion excellence with the development of the agencys most powerful rocket to date, the Space Launch System. This advanced vehicle will launch a new era of human exploration beyond Earths orbit to the Moon and later on to Mars through the Artemis program.

Six decades of Marshall history includes an impressive number of extraordinary achievements in both human spaceflight and scientific discovery, Marshall Historian Brian Odom said. Those accomplishments now form the core capability that the center will employ as it continues to make vital contributions to programs like Artemis and the Human Landing System, and a whole range of astrophysics missions. The center has certainly made its mark in the evolution of space exploration, and we still have so much more to contribute.

As Marshall enters its next decade of operation, the team is leading NASAsSpace Launch System and Human Landing System programs, key elements of Artemis. The team is preparing to return American astronauts to the Moon by 2024 and establish a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface by 2028. Lessons learned on and around the Moon will lead to the next giant leap sending astronauts to Mars.

Editors note: Taylor Goodwin, an ASRC Federal/Analytical Services employee, supports the Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications.

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Celebrating 60 years of Marshall Space Flight Center | Military Scene - Theredstonerocket

ANCHORAGE, Alaska A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earths surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planets atmosphere.

Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune, The Anchorage Daily Newsreported.

The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium.

Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey.

Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will support Alaska tourism.

You will have people from around the world who want to come to Alaska and see the northern lights from the edge of space, Lester said.

Alaska Aerospace and Space Perspective will test and refine spaceport operations and secure spaceflight licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Space Perspective plans to complete an unmanned test flight from the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida next year.

Passengers will begin with a two-hour ascent to about 19 miles (31 kilometers) above Earth. They will then be able to post on social media about the experience or send data.

Neptune then makes a two-hour descent under the balloon and splashes down, where a ship retrieves the passengers, along with the capsule and balloon, Alaska Aerospace said.

Capsule recovery would occur in the waters around Kodiak Island and the Aleutian Island chain, depending upon the seasonal wind patterns.

The balloon design is derived from technology NASA has used for decades to fly large research telescopes, Space Perspective said.

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Firm to offer balloon rides from Alaska to the edge of space - WITI FOX 6 Milwaukee

The first unmanned test flight of Indian rocket Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), as part of the country's human space mission Gaganyaan, will not happen this year, said officials.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had planned the first of the two test flights later this year.

"The first flight of the rocket as part of Gaganyaan mission will not happen this year (2020)," a senior ISRO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told IANS.

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In his address at the 70th Annual General Meeting and National Conference on "Recent Developments in Aerospace and Defence Technology" organised by Aeronautical Society of India in February, ISRO chief K. Sivan had said that the "design and engineering of the launch vehicle and orbital module system for India's human space flight has been completed. A series of tests have to be competed to validate the design and engineering of the systems in 2020".

As per the original plans, during the first test flight ISRO would send its humanoid Vyommitra.

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Meanwhile, suspense continues on the revised date of launch of India's first Geo Imaging Satellite-1 (GISAT-1).

On March 4, a day before the scheduled launch GISAT-1 onboard the GSLV-F10 rocket and hours before the start of the launch countdown, ISRO announced postponement of the mission owing to some technical glitch.

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SEE ALSO:A Russian rocket broke up in space above the Indian Ocean leaving dangerous debris in its wake

Chinas unmanned spacecraft makes a successful return to Earth racing ahead of India on the path to having a space station

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Gaganyaan's first unmanned test flight won't be happening this year - Business Insider India

This collection of images from NASA and SpaceX photographers shows the Crew Dragon spacecraft lifting off on top of a Falcon 9 rocket May 30.

Taking advantage of a break in the weather, the 215-foot-tall (65-meter) Falcon 9 rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center at 3:22:45 p.m. EDT (1922:45 GMT) on May 30. Around 12 minutes later, the Falcon 9s upper stage deployed the Crew Dragon spaceship into orbit.

The launch marked the first time astronauts have flown into orbit from a U.S. spaceport since the last launch of NASAs space shuttle program July 8, 2011.

These photos show the Falcon 9 launching atop nine Merlin 1D engines, each consuming kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, producing a combined 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The final photo in the series shows the Falcon 9s first stage booster landing on SpaceXs drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean for potential reuse on a future mission.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Photos: SpaceX's first crewed mission launches from pad 39A - Spaceflight Now

Astronauts will get some next-gen training before they ride Boeing's next-gen spacecraft.

Crewmembers preparing to fly on Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule will train using virtual reality (VR) headsets provided by Finland-based Varjo, both companies announced today (June 11).

Varjo's VR-2 devices will allow astronauts to simulate, in high resolution and with high fidelity, every aspect of a Starliner mission to the International Space Station (ISS), Varjo and Boeing representatives said.

Related: Boeing's 1st Starliner flight test in photos

"We are proud to be delivering the technology that is pushing industrial training applications to their furthest reaches even to space," Varjo co-founder and CEO Niko Eiden said in a statement.

"With our devices, astronauts can see and virtually interact with the switches and control panels inside their Starliner capsule and read the real-time data on their crew displays," Eiden said. "Advancements like this have the potential to transform the way any pilot is trained."

Boeing has been developing Starliner with funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Program, most notably a $4.2 billion contract signed in 2014 that also covers six operational crewed missions to and from the ISS. SpaceX holds a similar deal, which Elon Musk's company will fulfill with its Crew Dragon capsule.

SpaceX just launched its first crewed mission, sending NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS on a test flight called Demo-2. Starliner should follow suit relatively soon; Boeing plans to launch its version of Demo-2, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), early next year.

The astronauts who will fly on CFT Boeing's Chris Ferguson and NASA's Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann have been training for their mission for a while now, using Starliner mockups in Houston and other tools. The VR headset will augment such work, Boeing representatives said.

"We're not looking to replace the physical simulators in Houston," Connie Miller, a Boeing Starliner software engineer, told Space.com. "But it will certainly enhance that training, to be able to do it from remote locations."

One such "remote location" is the launch site itself, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Astronauts will spend the two weeks immediately before liftoff in quarantine at NASA's nearby Kennedy Space Center, ensuring that they launch in good health and don't carry disease-causing germs to the ISS. With the new VR tool, Starliner crewmembers can continue in-depth training for their mission during this home stretch, Miller said.

In the next couple of weeks, Boeing plans to ship the VR hardware to Florida, where Ferguson, the CFT commander, can start working with it. The wheels for this move were first set in motion several months ago, but the rollout was halted by measures taken to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Miller said.

The pandemic's emergence highlights the need for the VR tech, she said.

"We had the vision," Miller said. "We didn't realize it would be a mandatory piece of things as quickly as it did."

Astronauts have used VR tools before; NASA astronauts commonly use such tech to prep for spacewalks, for example. But the Starliner training will break new ground in its extensive use of VR gear, which will help prep astronauts for every aspect of their mission, from liftoff to landing, Boeing representatives said.

Varjo, for its part, will apply the lessons learned from the Starliner work to other aspects of its business, such as pilot training, Eiden said. But the company is also getting something else out of the newly announced partnership.

"This is one of those passion things; we have a bit of space fever at Varjo at the moment as well," he told Space.com. "So, having the chance to be part of this Boeing program it's been just fantastic."

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Virtual reality will be a big part of Boeing's Starliner astronaut training - Space.com

Keeping humans alive and well in space is hard enough. How will this be accomplished on a 3-year journey to Mars and back? Paragon President and CEO Grant Anderson shares the great progress weve made and the remaining challenges. Astronauts headed for the Red Planet may not need ice cream to stay alive, but will life be worth living without it? You may win a pint of Ben & Jerrys moooony new flavor and a Netflix Space Force spoon to eat it with in this weeks space trivia contest.

A coupon for a pint of Ben & Jerrys new flavor Boots on the Moooon, inspired by the Netflix original series Space Force. (Or any other flavor!) Also, a Space Force spoon.

What was the last flight or mission of an astronaut who had been in the Apollo program, and who was that astronaut?

What was the last two-person, orbital spaceflight launched from the United States?

The winner will be revealed next week.

Who is scheduled to be the first non-American astronaut to launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft?

Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese Space Agency is scheduled to be the first non-American astronaut to launch on a Spacex Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Mat Kaplan: Staying alive as you cross the expanse this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Mat Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We're back with another fascinating expert for you to meet. This time it's the leader of a company that is working toward keeping men and women alive and well as they make the long journey to Mars and back also to the moon.

Mat Kaplan: It's a big challenge possibly as big as any other we face if humans are going to reach the red planet. President and CEO Grant Anderson of Paragon Space Development Corporation will join us shortly. Ice cream may not be essential for life support on that mission but it would be nice and it's what you might win in the new what's up space trivia contest. I don't know if Bruce Betts will ever forgive me for the torture I'm about to inflict on him.

Mat Kaplan: We're back to headlines from the down lake this week where there is great news about the InSight mission. We don't want to become overconfident but it appears that the long-suffering mole heat-flow probe is finally under the surface of Mars. NASA and German Aerospace Center engineers have used the lander scoop to help the self-hammering instrument bury itself, maybe now it can get a grip and head down to several meters scientists have hoped for. Godspeed InSight.

Mat Kaplan: With its big Long March 5B rocket back on track, China has laid out a very ambitious schedule of launches to assemble its big modular space station. The work gets underway next year. Crew Dragon astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have settled into life aboard the International Space Station which may be their home for as long as four months. The Planetary Society has a terrific guide to their mission at planetary.org where you can also read about the Commercial Crew Program and the ways the ISS is helping us learn how humans will survive in deeper space.

Mat Kaplan: As always, you'll find the downlink at planetary.org/downlake. It offers much more than space headlines. For example, did you know that past Planetary Radio guest, Mae Jemison, filed a police complaint when her arm was twisted and she was thrown on the pavement during a traffic stop? This was four years after she became the first black woman in space.

Mat Kaplan: Let's face it, humans are ever so much more fragile than robots. It takes a lot to keep us alive in the not very friendly and nurturing environs of space and other worlds but we're learning, we're adapting. As you're about to hear, some of the advances are stunning. But Grant Anderson knows we have a long ways to go before we can travel the solar system or live on the moon as comfortably as we must. Grant is co-founder, president and CEO of Paragon Space Development Corporation. He used to be the company's VP of Engineering and chief engineer.

Mat Kaplan: You can tell his heart and soul are still in engineering. He holds several patents and he was the chief design engineer for development of the ISS solar arrays back when he worked at Lockheed Martin. We covered a wide range of challenges when we talked a few days ago and he left me feeling hopeful. Grant, it is great to get you back on Planetary Radio. It has been almost exactly three years since we talked. Long overdue for a conversation and my understanding is that there's some new stuff, some developments to talk about. But first, welcome back.

Grant Anderson: Well, thank you very much. It's really great to be back.

Mat Kaplan: Let me start with the question that may be uppermost in our space geek audiences mind. How confident are you now that we will before too long be able to keep some number of astronauts alive and well on a Mars mission lasting at least a year and a half, could be as long as three years?

Grant Anderson: Well, there's two parts to that. One, I'm confident it will happen, that it can be done, and the other part is that I know we're not there yet.

Mat Kaplan: Okay. In spite of these advances that I think we're going to talk about in a minute or two, I mean where are we lacking? What's left to be done to make this happen? I mean we know we can get rockets there and back but keeping people alive, that's the bigger challenge?

Grant Anderson: That's the part that we have no existence proof to show that we can do. We know we can navigate to Mars. We know we can land on Mars although probably lower amounts of mass than we need to for a human mission but we really don't know if the life-support system will function and function correctly for all that time. The space station has been a wonderful testbed and, of course, it's been supporting people but there's been a fair amount of failures and glitches and stuff like that that are that dangerous because we're 30 minutes from an escape to the ground from Earth and from orbit, but when you light the candle and you're on the way to Mars, that's a whole another ball of wax.

Mat Kaplan: Let me back up some and go back to the beginnings of this topic, life support systems, because they go back a lot further than when humans started going into space and Paragon is involved with some of this. I mean you make systems to support divers and do you have stuff on submarines?

Grant Anderson: We do not right at this moment. We actually have an active program on a submarine rescue system. I can't get too much into it but it's how to rescue people from a submarine that has been stranded below surface and, yes, people have been diving in valves and within suits for years now. It's interesting, it's related and it is in our field, which is life support in extreme environments and being 200 feet underwater is an extreme environment but things happen a lot faster with the altitude.

Grant Anderson: You change altitude in the sea and you get a multiple change of psi, its 14.7 pounds per square inch for every 33 feet of water. Of course, you don't have that happening in space but then you got to protect yourself from everything else. Generally, the ocean doesn't try to boil you or otherwise but it's still a matter of providing the right supplies that are required by a human at the right time and continuously until the mission is over.

Mat Kaplan: They make this look so easy on Star Trek even though periodically on the Starship Enterprise they would say life support is disabled and people would start to choke almost immediately it seemed. There's so much to this. I mean maybe we can break it down into some of the categories that you and Paragon actually work with beginning with the air that we breathe. I saw one of the sections on the website is air revitalization systems that you're doing some of this work for a spacecraft that Boeing hopes to put some humans in pretty soon.

Grant Anderson: Yeah. We supply the humidity control system and when humans breathe, really you can think of humans as one big chemical factory. We breathe in oxygen to use nitrogen as a buffer gas and we drink water, and then we expel all these things. We expel out the oxygen we don't use. In general, you breathe in nominal layer that has almost no carbon dioxide in it, about 21% oxygen. You breathe out about 16% oxygen and 5% CO2, and then the rest is still the nitrogen gas.

Grant Anderson: It's funny you mentioned about the Star Trek thing because, yeah, what always fascinates or frustrating to us in life support is nothing happens that fast. It's just as deadly but the life support is broken down and within a few minutes, a few seconds suddenly people are choking on their own CO2, that's not really true. It takes a little while to build up gases to noxious level or, at least, or even a toxic level. But I will say at the same time, the fans on a spacecraft in zero gravity or microgravity are life-critical because if you're not moving the air past your face, you're building up yourself in a bubble of CO2 just like a candle would build up a bubble of combustion products and it will eventually snuff out the candle and you have the same problem with humans.

Mat Kaplan: I read this once in a science fiction story and I wondered if that was seriously a problem because somebody actually does pass out in this story because the air is not circulating. I mean how in a space as complex and large as the International Space Station, how do we make sure that the air is constantly being refreshed in in every place that an astronaut might stick their head?

Grant Anderson: That is an issue and we've done that. We executed contracts way back in the early 2000s for what was then called Space [inaudible 00:09:04] because they had a module that went back in the shuttle and it went up to the space station and it was packed full of supplies and they would over a few days unpack the system. We had to analyze what would the airflow be like with it halfway unpacked or a third unpacked or three-quarters unpacked because very often the astronauts to try to, especially the ones that have been on the Space Station for a long time would escape to the module as sort of a place to be away from everybody else that's isolation while you're isolated from everybody on Earth, getting a few days away from the people you're stuck in a small can with is considered premium time.

Grant Anderson: We had to analyze, actually, how the airflow happened in different levels of unpacking. The other thing we've seen on Space Station is that there are times when they have to go behind the panels and either rotate down a rack or take off something and get into rack and they have had problems with astronauts getting headaches because the circulation isn't very good there, and so they try to limit that and they also have monitors and buddies to make sure that they're watching each other while it happens.

Grant Anderson: It is a concern for the Orion vehicle. We did the analysis on airflow. We generally have a requirement that when anywhere within the cabin, you have to have about a foot per second worth of air flow past a person's face in order to wash away the CO2 and bring fresh air in, and we do the analysis to show that, yes, that is the case that no matter where the person is in the vehicle and we model all of the different fans or all the different registers that are pushing out air and all the intakes, and then we move a human model around in a CFD analysis computational fluid dynamics model and we check to see whether the face velocities are correct. It's a very real concern and it's something we're doing with say the Moon lander.

Mat Kaplan: Absolutely fascinating. We're going to get back to that work that you're contributing to toward putting humans back on the moon as well. But we'll stick with CO2 for a moment. What do you do with it? I mean once you pull it back into a system, how do you control the level of CO2 to say nothing of making sure we're getting enough oxygen?

Grant Anderson: Well, there's a few ways to remove the CO2 from the air for short missions and we define missions in person day. So, in other words, if you have four people for two days, that's eight person's days or if you have 2 people for 10 days, that's 20-person days. In general, when you're below about 70 or 80-person days, we use what's called lithium hydroxide, which is a chemical that will combine with the CO2 and make a calcium product, calcium carbonate I think it is. I'm not a chemist so don't quote me on that. If you just lock it into that and then you throw away the canister when it's done.

Grant Anderson: However, when you get to something like Space Station or for these longer missions. You use either a molecular sieve. What they do is they preferentially pass oxygen faster than CO2 so you keep switching from one bed to the other and you let the oxygen wave go through and you end up with almost pure oxygen coming out the other side. Until such time as the CO2 starts to break through, then you switch over to the other bed which has now been cleaned, and while that one is doing the same process, the one you just switched from.

Grant Anderson: You vent the CO2 to space or in the case of some systems, we collect that CO2, bottle it up, and then we use it in another reaction called a Sabatier reaction where we react it with hydrogen and you end up getting out water as well as methane, and then figure out what to do with the methane and one of the things that many people have talked about including Robert Zubrin is then using the methane for fuel for returning say a rocket from Mars.

Mat Kaplan: The thing that sticks in my mind is when you're talking about these person days. I mean it could be 10,000 person days for a trip to Mars. That's a lot without being able to stop off to pick up more oxygen or fix your CO2 absorber.

Grant Anderson: Yeah. That depends on how many people. If it's a 5-year round-trip mission to Mars, you'll end up spending for each person about 1825 days. So, if you have 5 people, you're up to 9000 hours. When you get to that, you have to recycle it. Either you recycle it or you somehow pay the penalty of having to launch extra mass in order to replace the oxygen that goes out with the CO2. One problem with blowing the CO2 overboard is well that oxygen has been used by your body for energy and the CO2 is a byproduct you breathe out. Well, that means every time you vent that CO2 to space, you're losing that oxygen too. You have to bring it along to replace it.

Grant Anderson: Definitely for a longer mission on say to Mars, you want to recycle that. You want to break down the CO2 and there's one way, one technology we work on for that, it's called SOE, which stands for solid oxide electrolysis. If you think about your high school or even middle school experience, you put through wires in water and you get hydrogen coming off one wire and oxygen coming off the other. You can do pretty much an analogous thing with CO2 so that you end up back with, actually, with oxygen coming up one side and carbon monoxide coming off the other.

Grant Anderson: Then, you can crack the carbon monoxide to get the rest of the oxygen out and you end up with nothing but carbon and carbon dust. So, you have to be able to then recycle that oxygen back into the system. You'll still always have to replace them, you also, of course, metabolize oxygen, not only the CO2, but in the sugars that are used by your body and those go into building molecular systems for your body, and so you will end up using oxygen that is non-recoverable. So, there's always going to be a little bit of replenishment on a long trip.

Mat Kaplan: Is that fairly energy intensive cracking the CO2 to get the oxygen back?

Grant Anderson: Yes. It's not only energy intensive but it takes a pretty high temperature. Yes. So he has run at about 500 degrees centigrade or Celsius. Sorry. Yes. It takes a fair amount of energy. So, it takes electrical energy to rip the bonds apart because of carbon dioxide bond is pretty darn strong.

Mat Kaplan: We could spend the rest of our time just talking about the air we breathe but maybe I'll just leave it with one sidelight. You've already mentioned humidity, why is it so important to have a system to control the levels of humidity? What would happen on a closed system like the International Space Station or a spacecraft on its way to the Moon or Mars if you didn't have something to control humidity?

Grant Anderson: When you breathe out, you're not only breathing out carbon dioxide but you're breathing out moisture. In fact, most of the water you lose in your body say, I live here in the desert in Tucson, Arizona, if I'm out hiking, I may not be sweating that much but every time I breathe, I'm putting out moisture in my breath. If you're in a closed capsule and you're breathing, the humidity will quickly drum to 100%. So, if you've got four people in a small capsule it's a matter of minutes. It's not hours.

Grant Anderson: Well, when you get up to a certain level, anybody who's lived in Florida and had a glass of cold beer you know that there's a lot of water in the air that will condense on your glass and it's the same thing. Your spacecraft walls will be cool, most likely at least one wall, the wall that's not facing the Sun, depending on how you rotate and everything else but still it's going to be cooler. So, if you get the relative humidity up above what's the dew point as we call it, so what the dew point is say the air is at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, if your dew point though is 55, that means that if it touches a surface that's 55 degrees or less, the water will condense out of the air onto your surface.

Grant Anderson: Well, if people have seen the movie Apollo 13 and I think Swigert comments, well, it's like flying a toaster through a carwash is when you get all this condensation on the inside of the vehicle. That's really bad for electronics. You don't want to have a whole bunch of condensation. Also, condensation promotes mold growth and that's a big problem on long durations. Missions, the Space Station they go through a whole protocol of wiping down surfaces to keep mildew and mold from growing on surfaces, even though they have a good humidity control system but you have to be able to remove that water.

Grant Anderson: There's really two ways to do it. One is a condensing heat exchanger where you have a heat exchanger, you know it's colder than the dew point and you force water to be condensed out, and then sucked up and separated, and then you use the water for recycling, and then there's other ones like what Paragon supplied to Boeing which is a membrane based system that selectively passes water through and then just ejects water to the vacuum of space and that's good for short missions. Again, like the commercial crew programs like the one that's flying Space Station right now.

Mat Kaplan: Let's turn to the other end of what makes water so important particularly on, well, on any mission but particularly a long one and that's recovering enough, recycling enough that your astronauts have something to drink and maybe even grow food. When we talk three years ago, you told me that the system then on the International Space Station was maybe 65%, 70% efficient at recovering the water in that closed loop system. Are we doing much better now because I assume we're going to have to do a lot better to get to Mars?

Grant Anderson: Yes. We are. Yeah. That's true that 65%, 70% is when it's operating. If you take out over the whole lifespan of the system when it's not operating, of course, it's not producing anything. So, the efficiency of course those down, the calculations on efficiency. Yeah. Paragon actually develop a technology, again, using a sort of selective membrane that will recover 98% of the water especially that you urinate. So, yes, you are drinking your pee in the end but that will close the environment to 98%.

Grant Anderson: So, then really with our system, you end up with a bag of salt, which is the salts that are in your urine when you pee and that one is supposed to fly to space station early next year and start working and that will substantially reduce the amount of water they have to ship at the station by hundreds of kilograms a year. That's an experiment but it is necessary for sustainability on the Moon. So, we're very hopeful that once that experiment runs its course that will be baseline for the Moon missions also.

Mat Kaplan: Is 98% recovery? Is that good enough to get to Mars and back?

Grant Anderson: Yes. That is. We have worked and are working on a program right now for doing the same thing for feces or for poop, maybe some of your listeners will understand better. In fact, in the normal weird humor of the aerospace world, we actually call that program STOOLE, S-T-O-O-L-E. That's doing the same thing. It's desiccating the feces and taking the water out because that's the other part where water is lost over time.

Grant Anderson: But, yeah, at the 98% level, people will consume about 2 kilograms of water a day so you're only needing to provide a few ccs, cubic centimeters of water per day and that's something that you can carry with you. By the way, you want to carry with you because water is also a great radiation shield.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah. So, I've read. I think you should call it SCAP by the way and I guess that's important because you needed to fertilize your potatoes you're going to grow on Mars, right? Kidding. Just kidding. Much more of my conversation with Paragon's Grant Anderson is seconds away.

Bill Nye: Greetings. Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society. Even with everything going on in our world right now, I know that a positive future is ahead of us. Space exploration is an inherently optimistic enterprise, an active space program raises expectations and fosters collective hope. As part of the Planetary Society team, you can help kick-start the most exciting time for US space exploration since the Moon landings with the upcoming election only months away, our time to act is now.

Bill Nye: You can make a gift to support our work. Visit planetary.org/advocacy. Your financial contribution will help us tell the next administration and every member of Congress how the US space program benefits their constituents and the world. Then, you can sign the petitions to President Trump and presumptive nominee Biden and let them know that you vote for space exploration. Go to planetary.org/advocacy today. Thank you. Let's change the world.

Mat Kaplan: Thermal control. It's puzzling to some people why that is difficult to maintain on a spacecraft after all it's flying through something that's a medium that is not much above absolute zero and yet it is a challenge, isn't it?

Grant Anderson: Oh, it's a really big challenge. There's, again, a few things. You are a chemical factory, a human is. A human at rest just sitting there, not doing anything, not doing any vigorous exercise but thinking runs about 100, 120 watts. So, everybody in the world is bright because we're about the same power as a bright light bulb. So, if you have five people in a spacecraft that's built like a thermos bottle, by the way, because it's protecting from the outside. I'll talk about that in a second.

Grant Anderson: You'll build up heat just because five people will put out 500 watts. So, think of it as essentially starting an oven inside of your vehicle and you've got to get rid of that heat. Now, it is true that on average space, especially if you're in low Earth orbit, you've got this beautiful planet that's running at about 300 Kelvin or generally a little cooler than what we're used to. But the rest of the space is pretty bad. If you're looking away from the Sun, you're looking at a four Kelvin environment. It's sucking heat out of you, and then if you have the Sun on you, even with the good reflective clothing, you've got 1500 watts per meter squared hitting you.

Grant Anderson: So, you got to reflect that and not absorb that heat. Maintaining that thermal balance and you and, of course, there's no air to take the air way. It's not like your car, take the heat away. It's not like your car like you have a radiator that airs running through all the time and you're rejecting heat to the atmosphere. The only real way to get rid of heat external of the spacecraft is radiation and that's pretty inefficient. I won't go into the equations but you have to get the radiator, the hotter it is the faster it radiates heat but the hot, you also need to get it down to a temperature where that it's useful enough to then cool the equipment inside. It takes a real thermal balance and a lot of analysis to make sure that you're rejecting enough heat.

Mat Kaplan: This thermal control and these radiators, that's another area of expertise for Paragon, isn't it?

Grant Anderson: Yes. There's really two different areas for radiators. One is making sure you have what's called a turndown ratio. So, sometimes you want to reject a lot of heat when you're say approaching Space Station and you've got all of you computers running because you want to have your avionics both your primary and your backup and even your second backup running and they're all doing a lot of work to make sure that your rendezvous and you're docking correctly, you're putting out a lot of heat there and you're near the Earth and a few other things.

Grant Anderson: So you have a lot of trouble rejecting heat and you're producing a lot. Then, you'll say on the way from Earth to the Moon and you're out in the middle of nowhere. So, all you can really see is a four Kelvin environment. For those who are privy to Apollo, they actually had something called the BBQ roll they did where they rotated the spacecraft very slowly in order to make sure that all the sides were sort of heated up and cooled down and maintained a good overall temperature.

Grant Anderson: At that time, they also shut down a lot of systems because they weren't in launch mode or docking mode or anything else. So, you have low heat production and a really big good environment for rejecting heat. You can actually get too cold. One of the key technologies there is, again, what we call turn down ratio, which is how much can you turn down the radiator so that they don't reject too much heat and get you too cold when you're in that type of environment.

Grant Anderson: Paragon works a lot on different turndown technologies, shape-memory alloy radiators and what we call stagnating radiators, which is what Apollo used. Where generally you let certain lines freeze and not flow your coolant and other ones flow it, and then when you get back into a high heat environment or when you're trying to fire up your computer to getting the moon, it then melts those lines and you end up using your radiator again.

Grant Anderson: The other side is how you construct radiators. Traditionally, radiators, again, not Apollo but other ones like on space shuttle were a honeycomb face sheet material. So, there's an aluminum honeycomb with aluminum face sheets, and then a tube running through it. That has a lot of problems both because you're only using one side of your radiators very often. There you also have a bond line, the blue line between your tubes and your radiator and your radiating surface which then cuts down on the amount of heat you can transfer.

Grant Anderson: Paragon developed something about 10 years ago called ExRad technology and that's actually trademarked. What we do is we extrude the radiator and so it's all one piece and build the radiator out of these extrusions and there's two good things about that. One is that it's a very efficient radiator because there's no losses in bond lines but the other one is that we can change the design very quickly and not have to totally redo the tooling like you would have to do on a honeycomb radiator.

Mat Kaplan: That's a great segue into the next question I was going to ask you anyway. When you're describing a lot of systems, machines some of them fairly complex, what are the things that worry you the most about these systems when they have to keep running, it's truly a matter of life and death? I mean the seals, bearings, contamination. I mean what are things that keep you up at night when you think about keeping this running?

Grant Anderson: That's the big problem going to Mars right now. In the past, we've designed things for like the space station that it assumes you could have another one sent up from Earth in a few months. So, if a pump fails you could have a new pump. Well, when you're on your way to Mars, you can't have a new pump sent to you. So, what you need is two things. One is access to what you need to fix. So, you need to make sure that unlike modern cars today where you can hardly find the spark plugs anymore, you need to be able to make it so that the astronauts can get into the system and fix something. You have to have planned in advance for what you might have to fix.

Grant Anderson: One of the things we consistently do is the risk analysis of what is likely to break? So, like a resistor sitting there on a board is probably not going to go bad but now a microcontroller that said the radiation might. So, can you make it so you can replace the microcontroller? Are the pumps sealed? Very often I hear about taking a 3D printer to Mars and one of the problems with that is 3D printers only print certain materials. So, then you have to have the discipline all the way back in the design phase to say, "We will only make say O-rings out of this material because we know this 3D printer can build them," or if you don't trust the 3D printer because that, of course, it's something that can break down too. Then, what, you need two of them or three of them? How do you the spares into the 3D printer that might break?

Grant Anderson: The other option is to carry them with you, and then you've got to have a good analysis to say, "Okay. We're going to have, need at least 3 more O-rings but we won't need 10 more 0-rings. So, we're going to take seven." You've got to do that down to the last little iota of things that might go wrong and plan for it. There's got to be a paradigm shift in how we build stuff because, of course, engineers like to optimize. If this O-ring for this pump pumping this fluid at this pressure, the best O-ring is made out of say nitrile rubber. But then this O-ring over here for this pump the best O-ring because it's pumping a different fluid at a different pressure in a different way should be some other type of soft material.

Grant Anderson: Well, if you do that and every engineer optimizes there for one thing, you end up with 18 different types of material that you need to take with you or spares. So, you have to have a little discipline in saying, "Okay, engineers, you're only going to build seals out of nitrile rubber." Some engineer will say, "But that won't last that long." "Great. We're going to take spares but" Then, an engineer says, "But if you make it out of this rubber it will never break maybe."

Grant Anderson: Then, you have to have that push me pull you for a little bit until you have discipline on what you are building things out of and it's very hard for an engineer to be told you're going to have to sub-optimize in order to satisfy the maintainability and replacement requirements.

Mat Kaplan: I got to say, again, this is so fascinating. We talk a lot on this show about why it's so difficult to get humans to Mars and back and you are providing a terrific additional demonstration of that. Let's go to the Moon. NASA recently announced the three companies, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Dynetics have been selected for further development of the Artemis Human Landing System. Basically, the 21st Century version of the lunar module.

Mat Kaplan: NASA still hopes it's going to get men and women up there in less than four years. What's Paragons role on one of these teams? You're working with Dynetics, right?

Grant Anderson: That's correct. We're on Dynetics team that was announced. Our role is the life support system of course.

Mat Kaplan: How important for your work is going to the Moon before we go to Mars? I mean we've had the International Space Station as a testbed. Is the moon an essential step to teach us how to get to the red planet?

Grant Anderson: Yeah. I do believe so and I know that some people in the space community disagree with it but like I said there's no existence proof that says that we can build a life-support system and go to Mars. The Moon is a good midway place where you can test out systems, do a little bit of what I was talking about with the discipline of how you design and see what works and what doesn't work where you can at least get home in a few days, which is doable and you stick the extra things on you need, whether it's lithium hydroxide like I talked about four CO2 in case something breaks down.

Grant Anderson: But there's operationally an issue also. One thing that a lot of people I don't think realize is, but they do maybe now because of coronavirus. If you've been on a Zoom call and you're not running video or you can't see people and somebody pauses for one second too long to say something, people start jumping on top of each other. Well, we have this problem and it takes training going the Moon, you've got one and a half seconds for the light to go in either direction so you have to have this three second pregnant pause every time you say something and that's not accounting for when people have to think about something before they talk.

Grant Anderson: Really when you get like three or four or five light seconds away from Earth, which is only a few days into the mission going to Mars, you're no longer really able to discuss things with the ground. You can do video clips back and forth or vlogs in a way or podcasts but you really can't carry on a conversation. It may seem like I've gone far away from what we do is life support but say you're trying to repair something, if you don't have the materials and the instructions and the training and you need to call home to figure out how to do something, it's not like Joe mechanic in Nevada that built the system down here on Earth can walk you through it.

Grant Anderson: It's going to have to be something where they send you up with a manual or whatever else. But going back to the technology itself, there are certain absolutes. When you're maybe not so much with HLS, which is the human landing system but with the HALO, the human orbiter system around moon. I see that is absolutely the testbed for Mars missions. Because you're far away enough from Earth that you need to pay attention to P's and Q's. You don't have an immediate escape. It also has to operate for long, long periods of time and sometimes have quiescent periods, which we may also need where you launch it and it doesn't operate for a bunch of years until you get the crew on and go.

Grant Anderson: You've got to make sure that the system will survive and started up afterwards. All that will be tested on the HALO and what they call Gateway. I would be really reluctant to look the spouse and children of an astronaut in the eye and say, "I'm confident that we've done everything to keep your spouse alive all the way to Mars and back until we've tested it to that degree in an environment like around the Moon."

Mat Kaplan: I have become a convert to your way of thinking largely because of talking to people like you about this topic. I got just one more question that's sort of about the physical challenges. We know pretty well that the dirt on the surface of Mars wants to kill us. Moon dust maybe even more so. Is this something that you're already taken into account and have to take into account as you design the system that may be keeping people alive when they land this Dynetics lander on our satellite, the Moon?

Grant Anderson: Oh you bet. Yes. It keeps me up at night. There's a joke in the industry that there's two types of people. Those who thinks the Moon dust is a problem but we can fix it. The other one think that Moon dust means the sky is falling. Don't mind me coining the phrase for what we're talking about. I'm more on the sky is falling side of it. At least, with the Moon, the morphology of the Moon dust, the regolith is unlike anything, not only on Earth but that we can even simulate on Earth because when you've had something bombarded for four billion years by my micro meteorites in a 10 to the negative 12 or very, very low pressure environment, it just does not have any of the characteristics that were used to of dealing with say Moon simulants on the ground, which have interstitial air which is a great lubricant by the way.

Grant Anderson: So, Moon dust, it will harm seals. The astronauts that went to the Moon in Apollo said that zippers were falling apart. Their gloves were falling apart. The dust got under, in their fingernails, went straight in their fingernails and didn't come out for weeks after they got home and they pretty much have to wait for their fingernails to grow out. It's pretty nasty stuff. Seals and seals that will work with that are a concern.

Grant Anderson: I will say that Paragon recognizes two decades ago but we think we have the right materials that will survive exposure to this dust but it's really not a known. One of the things we'd love to do is as part of the Klipsch program, which is a commercial lunar payload program that NASA is running to plunk down a few testers on the Moon that will test rotating seals and static seals and see how they will survive the lunar dust, and then one other very important part is that as one element of going to the Moon that is not translatable to Mars.

Grant Anderson: The dust on Mars is a very different thing than the dust on the Moon. We may find all the ways to mitigate dust and prevent it from harming our equipment and everything on the Moon, and then we get to Mars and none of that is applicable anymore and we have to rediscover over again. So, what I'd love to do again is those same experiments we punk down on the Moon and test before we do the final build of the Moon lander, I'd love to be able to stick that same device on a Martian Lander and test it in Martian dust and see if the types of seals we think will work will actually work.

Grant Anderson: Lunar dust is a real issue. There's requirements within our spec that are no surprise. A lot of filtering systems, HEPA filters as we call them. The high efficiency filters but knowing that those will actually work is a problem. The Apollo program spent millions of dollars on dust mitigation and as far as I know, none of them worked. John Young used to say that to me and some of the others. I haven't talked to Harrison Smith a little while but I know that dust is an issue in their minds.

Mat Kaplan: Well, I hope that within a year or two, you may be able to start sending some of those seals and devices up there on some of those [CLPS 00:38:02] landers. Wish them luck. On a slightly different direction here, before we wrap up, Paragon is a great example of the thousands of subcontractors who you may not build rockets or spacecraft but you make it possible for other companies, the Boeings, SpaceXes of the world [inaudible 00:38:20]. Can you talk about that the role, the role that is played by these literally thousands of companies that makes it possible for us to do things in space?

Grant Anderson: Sure. They're a necessary part of the ecosystem, of course. I run a company so I have to say I'm a necessary part of the ecosystem but it's true. If you look today in an industry as mature as the airline industry. Well, they have been consolidating. The good thing about having multiple tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers is that you spread the risk.

Grant Anderson: One of the issues that I think SpaceX is going to run into and maybe Blue Origin to a lesser degree, if they want to do it all themselves. They want to have in-house environmental control, in-house propulsion, in-house structures everything like that. The problem is is that works for the first generation of vehicle and you can actually push the envelope in a lot of different areas but when you're working on the second or third or fourth generation of vehicle, the expense starts going up.

Grant Anderson: Boeing right now or Airbus does not foot the whole bill for developing a new aircraft. They spread the risk among these other big suppliers and other tier, what we call tier one, tier two or tier three suppliers. Those suppliers know their part of the business really well, whether it's avionics or the air pressure control system or the landing gear or the elevons or whatever on the aircraft. It's equivalent in space too.

Grant Anderson: What I see is this ecosystem of the suppliers. What we're doing is we're advancing our state of the art and our technology, we're putting the money into it. We have the best visibility into what might be needed, what might work. Sure, the big primes can come down and say, "Hey, we have this challenge but we're probably in a better place to discover the solution or we may already have a solution, we just haven't told you about it yet.

Grant Anderson: So, if you really want the whole commercial space industry to thrive, making sure that these sub-suppliers that specialize is really important to make sure that you end up with the best of the best really.

Mat Kaplan: You got to forgive me. I stupidly forgot that SpaceX does try to do as much as they can on their own. It seems to me and confirm this for me if you can, that another advantage of having all these subcontractors like Paragon is that you're in competition with other companies that are roughly the size of yours and are trying to get contracts to create the same kinds of devices, and that competitive pressure just as there is among the prime contractors, that might just be I'm sorry if you might prefer to do without it but it probably drives innovation and keeps costs down, doesn't it?

Grant Anderson: Oh, yeah. No. I will say that we do a little special dance when we win a job in direct competition with our competitors. That's the free market way. It's a good way of coming up with the best that way and it does keep us on our toes. Our job is to stay ahead of the curve in innovation and if you really want to distill Paragon down into one thing is we are a company of innovation that does life support, and part of our business model is actually that innovation is very applicable to say the outside world and non-space stuff.

Grant Anderson: So, we work actively with our patents and with our licensing and even in joint ventures or spin-offs to take that technology out to benefit a lot broader community than just the commercial space sector or the government space sector. It's definitely a sporty game, which is the name of a book that came out in the '80s about the airline industry but it applies still today. It keeps us all on our toes. That's for sure.

Mat Kaplan: I got just one more for you, Grant. Do you still spend a lot of time on your bike?

Grant Anderson: Yes, I do. I do. I tend to bike every weekend. Every two years I do an epic trip. Last year I did London to Glasgow which is about 540 miles, which didn't go all according to plan. I crashed one day and broke a rib but I did complete the last 280 miles with a broken rib, and then I came home and got fixed. One of the things that I think really makes Paragon unique is we really do pay attention to work/life balance.

Grant Anderson: The old saying is nobody on their deathbed said, "Gee, I wish I spent more time at the office." We want to make sure that people go out and live their lives while we are mission driven and we have a mission that is critical for the future of humanity we feel. You've got to also remember that we are human beings with 80 plus or minus 10 or 20 years on this planet. Life's too short to give up everything.

Grant Anderson: What I do is get out and bike. It satisfies two things. One is it keeps me in shape because if even if I'm not on the bike ride, I'm preparing for a bike ride. So, when I want to have that second doughnut, I refrain. But it also allows me to meet new people and go to new places and I'm a people person, I'll admit. I like to meet new people.

Mat Kaplan: That's apparent. Ever been out there pedaling along and come up with a solution that you weren't able to come up with sitting at your desk?

Grant Anderson: If you were to ask me, I don't know if I could point to one, but I can tell you that most of my best ideas are in the shower in the morning.

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Staying Alive in Space - The Planetary Society

An Atlas 5 rocket, seen inside its Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral, is set for launch Saturday morning with the U.S. Air Forces X-37B spaceplane. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Working under physical distancing requirements and other precautions against the coronavirus pandemic, range teams at Cape Canaveral are preparing for launches of Atlas 5 and Falcon 9 rockets from neighboring pads this weekend.

The back-to-back launches are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, hauling up the U.S. Air Forces X-37B spaceplane and another batch of around 60 satellites for SpaceXs Starlink Internet network.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is first in line, with liftoff scheduled Saturday from Cape Canaverals Complex 41 launch pad. The Atlas 5 will carry into orbit the militarys reusable winged X-37B mini-space shuttle some time between 8:24 a.m. and 10:53 a.m. EDT (1224-1453 GMT), according to airspace warning notices associated with the launch.

Meanwhile, at pad 40 around a mile-and-half to the south of pad 41, SpaceX is gearing up to launch a Falcon 9 rocket at 3:53 a.m. EDT (0753 GMT) Sunday with 60 more Starlink spacecraft for the companys satellite broadband network.

The Falcon 9 launch attempt Sunday will only go ahead if the Atlas 5 rocket takes off as scheduled Saturday, according to Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess, commander of the 45th Space Wing, which manages range operations at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

For now, the Atlas 5 has Sunday booked as a backup launch opportunity on the Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral.

We do have a really busy couple of weeks coming up here, Schiess said Tuesday. Were working ver diligently for Saturdays (Atlas 5) launch then if that goes on schedule on Saturday morning, about 20 hours later, early Sunday morning, we will support a SpaceX commercial launch for Starlink.

The two launches this weekend will be followed by the liftoff of two NASA astronauts atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASAs Kennedy Space Center adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. That will be the first launch of astronauts from Floridas Space Coast since the last flight of the space shuttle in July 2011.

In our partnership and SpaceX we are excited for the return of human spaceflight from the Eastern Range, Cape Canaveral, Kennedy Space Center and the Space Coast on May 27 for the SpaceX crew mission, Schiess said.

In addition to the usual safety, weather forecasting and security support it provides for all missions from the Space Coast, the 45th Space Wing will host an emergency team that would be dispatched to rescue the astronauts in the event of a launch abort. In such a scenario, the rescue personnel would fly offshore on military helicopters and transport planes and parachute into the Atlantic Ocean to meet the astronauts.

Our Detachment 3, which has been re-designated for this event as Task Force 45, is preparing to be able to rescue astronauts if for some reason there was a catastrophic event, Schiess said. We dont think that will happen, and we hope that it never does, but we are preparing for the possibility and being prepared to do that.

If the Atlas 5 and Falcon 9 launches go off as scheduled this weekend, they would occur 20 hours, 31 minutes apart. That would mark the shortest turnaround between two orbital launches from Cape Canaveral since September 1967 when Delta-G and Atlas-Centaur rockets took off within a 10-hour span from separate launch pads, according to a launch log maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global satellite and launch activity.

Last August, a Falcon 9 and an Atlas 5 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in a period of less than 35 hours. That was the shortestspan between two orbital missions at Cape Canaveral since May 1981.

Schiess said Tuesday that range teams at Cape Canaveral are working to reduce the time required between launches. In the last few decades, the range team needed up to 48 hours to reconfigure infrastructure between launches.

That was primarily driven by readying tracking radars, transmitters and other equipment to monitor the trajectory of rockets as they arced downrange, and to send a destruct command if the launcher flew off course.

The range now tracks rockets using the GPS satellite navigation network, and the Falcon 9 launches with an autonomous flight safety system, an on-board computer that would automatically terminate the flight in the event of a major problem.

Schiess said the range team for an Atlas 5 launch, which uses a ground-commanded flight termination system, numbers around 300 people, including range operations, security forces, the fire department and other support teams. That number is around 200 people for this weekends Falcon 9 launch, which uses an autonomous flight safety system and will fly with commercial satellites, rather than a military payload.

The fact that one is a flight termination system (with a human in the loop), and one is an autonomous flight safety system is what really gets us to the ability to do (two launches) within 24 hours, Schiess said.

Schiess said that the range recently assessed the possibility of launching two SpaceX missions within six hours from different launch pads. That appears feasible with two rockets that use autonomous flight safety systems, Schiess said.

Launch operations at Cape Canaveral have continued amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Schiess said 11 people connected with Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and nearby Patrick Air Force Base where the 45th Space Wing is headquartered have tested positive for the COVID-19 viral disease.

There have been no deaths attributed to the coronavirusamong military personnel at Cape Canaveral, he said.

Range teams have introduced new physical distancing measures inside operations centers at Cape Canaveral, and workers are assigned to rotating shifts to minimize contact. When possible, teams are working remotely.

Were now all wearing face coverings any time that you enter into a building on Patrick Air Force Base or Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Schiess said. Then within the operations center, if you cannot maintain 6 feet of physical separation, then youre wearing masks.

He said morale is high among the military team at Cape Canaveral.

There are a lot of different things going on that impact people, but our own folks are really excited about this weekend with a couple of launches, and the whole team is very very excited about the return of human spaceflight to the Space Coast and the Eastern Range, Schiess said.

NASA Administrator has urged people not to travel to Floridas Space Coast to view the crewed launch May 27, and the Kennedy Space Center will not allow the public to access the closest viewing sites. Schiess said the 45th Space Wing is following a similar policy.

While Kennedy and Cape Canaveral are two different installations, they are joined, so we make sure were doing things together, he said. Right now, theyre in the status where they wont have any public viewing, so we wont have any public viewing or placard viewing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at this time for the May 27 (crew) launch.

SpaceX test-fired a Falcon 9 rocket at pad 40 Wednesday in preparation for Sunday mornings launch. The rockets nine Merlin engines fired up for several seconds while hold-down restraints kept the 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket on the ground.

The Falcon 9 will launch on the eighth dedicated flight since May 2019 for SpaceXs Starlink broadband network. SpaceX has launched 420 Starlink spacecraft on seven previous missions, making the company the operator of the worlds largest fleet of commercial satellites.

SpaceX aims to launch around 1,000 more Starlink satellites later this year and next year to begin offering worldwide Internet service. Initial beta testing of the Starlink network could begin later this year, beginning in higher latitude regions like Canada and the northern United States.

The Falcon 9 launch this weekend is the final planned SpaceX mission before the Crew Dragon demonstration flight launching May 27.

ULA ground crews plan to transfer the Atlas 5 rocket to pad 41 Thursday morning from the Vertical Integration Facility, where the launcher was stacked over the last few weeks. ULA installed the X-37B spacecraft on top of the Atlas 5 inside the vertical hangar May 5.

There is a 40 percent chance of favorable conditions for launch of the Atlas 5 rocket Saturday, according to the official launch weather forecast.

The launch Saturday will be the sixth flight of the Air Forces reusable X-37B spaceplane, which takes off on top of a conventional rocket and lands on a runway. Around one-quarter the length of NASAs space shuttle, the Boeing-built X-37B will deploy a small experimental satellite developed by cadets at the Air Force Academy and perform other research investigations in orbit for NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Back-to-back launches scheduled from Cape Canaveral this weekend - Spaceflight Now

Ever wanted to be an astronaut but didn't know how to break into the highly competitive industry? Well, Sir Richard Branson's commercial spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, just put out a job posting for two pilots to fly its space-bound aircraft and it's the next best thing to being a NASA astronaut.

The ambitious endeavor aims to eventually open up space for tourist travel, with seats on the Virgin-branded spaceship costing around $250,000. But while the passengers in the back will be paying through the nose for the opportunity, pilots with the "right stuff" will be getting paid to chart a new course.

While spaceflight missions are still potentially years away, the current day-to-day involves flying and assisting in the crafting of test missions for Virgin Galactic's two aircraft, SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. The opportunity to take to space is, however, on the table as the job posting elaborates that the candidates will eventually be part of "commercial spaceflight operations," bringing passengers to the edge of space for a one-of-a-kind experience.

Taking the job would require relocation to Virgin's home base at Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, right in the middle of nowhere in the vast American Southwest, with additional opportunities to travel for missions in Mojave, California.

Take a look at the requirements of what it takes to be a Virgin Galactic pilot.

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Virgin Galactic job application looking to hire pilots for spaceflight - Business Insider - Business Insider

Jim Sharkey

May 13th, 2020

Members of NASAs Curiosity Mars rover mission team photographed themselves on March 20, 2020, the first day the entire mission team worked remotely from home. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

While the majority of scientists and engineers who work at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California are currently off-site, that doesnt mean that their work supporting interplanetary missions has ground to a halt. NASAs Curiosity Mars rover continues to explore the Red Planet, guided by a mission team that is working remotely from home.

No one from the mission team was present at JPL on March 20, 2020 when the first completely remote planning of the rovers operations took place. Two days later, the rover executed the commands they had sent to Mars, successfully drilling a rock sample at a location named Edinburg.

The team began preparations to go fully remote about two weeks earlier. Headsets, monitors and other necessary equipment were distributed via curbside pickup. There were some pieces of equipment that team members werent able to bring home.

For example, mission planners and rover drivers rely heavily on 3D images from Mars to help them determine where to drive the rover and how far they can extend its robotic arm. At JPL, the normally use special goggles that shift rapidly between left and right-eye views to better show the contours of the terrain.

These goggles require high performance computers with advanced graphics cards. In order to view 3D images on ordinary laptops, rover drivers have switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses. While these arent quite as comfortable or immersive as the goggle, they are sufficient for planning drives or arm movements.

The team also had to adjust how they worked together during planning sessions. Team members at JPL usually work with hundreds of scientists from research institutions all over the world in order to decide where to drive Curiosity and which rock targets to examine. While working remotely with these scientists isnt new, working apart from teammates usually based at JPL is.

Were usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data. People are talking in small groups and to each other from across the room, said Alicia Allbaugh, who leads the team.

Now the team collaborates by holding several conferences at once and using messaging apps. The team conducted several tests and one full practice run before planning the drilling operation at Edinburg.

Science operations team chief Carrie Bridge makes sure that team members understand each other by proactively talking to scientists and engineers to insure that there are no gaps in communications. Under normal circumstances, Bridge would be making her rounds to check in with several groups in the situation room where Curiositys images and data are viewed a commands to the rover are composed. Now she is calling into up to four video conferences a day, while also monitoring several conversations in online chats.

I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times, Bridge said. Youre juggling more than you normally would.

While the transition to remote-only planning and operations has taken some getting used to, Bridge feels that effort to keep Curiositys mission going is an example of the can-do spirit that attracted her to NASA.

Its classic, textbook NASA, she said. Were presented with a problem and we figure out how to make things work. Mars isnt standing still for us; were still exploring.

Members of NASAs Perseverance rover mission work remotely from home during the coronavirus outbreak. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The team working to ready NASAs Perseverance Mars rover for its July 17-August 5 launch period has also made adjustments to the way they work in this time of social distancing. The planetary alignment of Earth and Mars puts the team under considerable time pressure. If Perseverance isnt ready to launch by August 5, the team will have to wait until September 2022 to try again.

90% of the JPL-based Perseverance team has transitioned to working remotely. From their homes, the team is continuing to work on software, mission planning and procedures and systems engineering in prepartion for launch.

Some tasks still require a physical presence at JPL. Mission essential staff recently completed the assembly and cleaning of sample tubes that will store Martian rock and soil samples for return to Earth on a later mission. Other mission-critical lab personnel will continue to work on-site as need, running critical tests on rover systems and software that need to be completed before launch.

To ensure the safety of personnel working on site, JPL has instituted a number of safe@work procedures including social distancing, protective equipment and ready access to hand sanitizer and other cleaning supplies.

NASA has determined that Perseverance is the science program that has the agencys highest priority and the project has responded superbly to this challenge, said Michael Watkins, director of JPL. When we realized the pandemic would affect Lab access, we were quick to define their chief objective as being workplace safety for team members and their families, and then built a plan around that providing the clearest path to the launch pad.

Perseverance is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas 541 booster between July 17-August 5, 2020. If all goes well, the rover will land at Mars Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021.

Ian Clark walks past mission countdown clocks in the Perseverance offices at JPL. Clark was needed on-Lab to supervise the assembly and cleaning of the sample tubes that will hold Martian sediment and rock. Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Tagged: Atlas V Curiosity Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL Lead Stories Mars Mars 2020 Mars 2020 Rover Mars Science Laboratory MSL Perserverance

Jim Sharkey is a lab assistant, writer and general science enthusiast who grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, the hometown of Skylab and Shuttle astronaut Owen K. Garriott. As a young Star Trek fan he participated in the letter-writing campaign which resulted in the space shuttle prototype being named Enterprise.While his academic studies have ranged from psychology and archaeology to biology, he has never lost his passion for space exploration. Jim began blogging about science, science fiction and futurism in 2004.Jim resides in the San Francisco Bay area and has attended NASA Socials for the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover landing and the NASA LADEE lunar orbiter launch.

Originally posted here:

Curiosity mission team operates rover from home - SpaceFlight Insider

Still, low earth orbit satellites circle the planet at incredibly high speeds and their maneuverability is limited, so there will be limitations to the Navys latest beamed power system, but as a proof of concept, it is essential. A constellation of satellites would likely be necessary to have a truly 24/7 supply of power, enabling UAVs to be passed from satellite to satellite for continuous or tightly scheduled recharging. The same can be said for any receiver applications on the planet's surface.

In 2014, the superintendent of the Naval Research Laboratorys Plasma Physics Division Thomas Mehlhorn published a paper in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Sciences which offered an overview of plasma physics and pulsed power as they relate to national security. The article spans a wide variety of topics including nuclear weapons, inertial confinement fusion, and high-energy laser weapons. In the paper, Mehlhorn also touches upon the Navys beamed power UAV research at the time, writing that the continuous flight times offered by beamed power systems could change surveillance, reconnaissance, and communications gateway/relay missions forever:

"Building upon the concept of scalability, rather than using a laser beam to kill a UAV, they began to pursue the idea of beaming power to a UAV to allow continuous flight, with potential application to both surveillance [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR)] and countermeasure missions. The team has pursued this idea using NRL applied research funds with the vision that long-range laser power beaming to UAVs could allow for long-duration flights with reduced manpower requirements for many Navy and DoD missions, including off-board decoys, persistent surveillance, and communication relays."

According to an October 2019 Navy.mil press release, the Navys beamed power system has also been endorsed by the Marines, Army, and Air Force and is expected to throughout the Department of Defense in the near future. The extent to which such systems have already been tested or deployed is unclear, although the Department of Energy has explored the concept of beaming microwaves from space since at least 2014. Doing the same from the ground, within line of sight of the aircraft, which can still be dozens or even hundreds of miles away depending on the altitudes involved, is such an easier task that it would be a bit puzzling if the technology isn't already under development, or even possibly in some sort of clandestine operational state.

Doing so from another aircraft is also clearly an objective based on the existing literature and would help mitigate the line of sight limitations with ground-based power beaming stations, but would sacrifice endurance and simplicity. In the 2011 RAND study cited above, the authors write that possibilities for beamed power applications include "ultra-high-altitude observation stations or communication relays and flocks of high-altitude sensor probes powered remotely from a large aircraft 'mother ship.'"

Meanwhile, the China Academy of Space Technology claimed to already be testing such a system in 2019 and said that a fully-functional Chinese microwave beaming power station in space could be deployed by 2050.

As you can probably tell at this point, this technology has massive implications not only for the future of UAVs, but for all of mankind. Such a system could be used to keep UAVs in the air for very long periods of time to replace cell towers or communications satellites in the event of a crisis in a region or even for normal operations of increasingly complex communications networks. Unlike a tethered aerostat, these UAVs would require far less infrastructure, could be moved around at will for optimum coverage, and could land quickly for servicing. They could even deploy dozens of miles, or even further, away from their base stations. With a space-based power source, they could fly anywhere on earth. Obviously, the implications for overhead surveillance are equally impactful.

So, while the X-37B's latest mission details seem neat on a scientific level, the reality is the microwave system it is testing could change the game for many military-related applications and could actually open the door for near-continuous unmanned flight throughout the atmosphere.

Contact the editor: Tyler@thedrive.com

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The X-37B Space Plane's Microwave Beam Experiment Is A Way Bigger Deal Than It Seems - The Drive

Salad seeds that went on a round trip to outer space and back grew at a slightly slower rate than their Earth-bound counterparts, scientists have found.

A million rocket seeds (Eruca sativa) amounting to 2kg were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015 in a project supported by British astronaut Tim Peake.

When they returned to Earth six months later, 600,000 children across the UK took part in an experiment organised by the Royal Horticultural Society to grow and monitor these seeds.

Although spaceflight did not compromise seed viability and development of the seedlings, the researchers said the germination vigour of the seeds was reduced.

They believe their findings, published recently in the journal Life, take scientists a step closer to knowing whether edible crops can be cultivated on long space missions.

Dr Jake Chandler, of the Royal Holloways department of biological sciences in London and lead author on the paper, said: Transporting high quality seeds to space and beyond will be crucial for growing plants that support human exploration of space, Mars and other worlds.

Our study found that a six month journey to space reduced the vigour of rocket seeds compared to those that stayed on Earth, indicating that spaceflight accelerated the ageing process.

The researchers say that to maintain the quality of dormant seeds during spaceflights, they need to be protected from the harmful effects of cosmic radiation and mechanical vibrations of the spacecraft.

While aboard the ISS, the absorbed radiation dose of the seeds was found to be 100 times greater compared to the Earths surface.

The researchers believe the radiation exposure during Mars missions would be at least five times greater than that of the ISS.

But despite these challenges, the experts say growing crops on long space missions could be achievable, if the seeds are sufficiently protected.

Dr Chandler said: Thus, while we should carefully consider protecting seeds from potentially harmful factors including space radiation and mechanical vibration, the seeds remained alive, and the prospect of eating home-grown salad on Mars may be one small step closer.

Major Peake, added: In one of the largest and most inspirational experiments of its kind, more than half a million young people collected reliable data to help the scientists at Royal Holloway investigate the effects of spaceflight on rocket seeds.

When humans travel to Mars, they will need to find ways to feed themselves, and this research helps us understand some of the biology of seed storage and germination which will be vital for future space missions.

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Salad seeds sent to outer space 'grew slightly slower when planted on Earth' - The Irish News

The thin atmosphere of Pluto may be far more resilient than scientists thought

The dwarf planet's thin shell of air is generated by the vaporization of surface ices, which leads to the lofting of nitrogen and small amounts of methane and other gases. That vaporization is driven by sunlight, the intensity of which varies greatly during Pluto's highly elliptical, 248-year-long trek around the sun.

Many scientists have thought that Pluto's atmosphere waxes and wanes dramatically as a result, probably even collapsing completely when the dwarf planet is at its farthest from the sun. However, recently published results based on observations by NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) may force scientists to rethink such notions.

Related: Photos of Pluto and its moons

"Now, we're questioning if Pluto's atmosphere is going to collapse in the coming years it may be more resilient than we thought," study lead author Michael Person, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Wallace Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement this week.

Most of what we know about that atmosphere, and Pluto itself, comes courtesy of NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew by the dwarf planet in July 2015.

Two weeks before that epic flyby, SOFIA got a much longer-range look at Pluto's air, studying the dwarf planet as it passed in front of a distant star. SOFIA, a modified Boeing 747 jet outfitted with a nearly 9-foot-wide (2.7 meters) telescope, stared as starlight streamed through Pluto's atmosphere.

This "occultation" was visible for just 2 minutes, and only from a small patch of the Pacific Ocean near New Zealand. SOFIA got into position in plenty of time initially, but the plane had to course-correct just two hours before the event when updated predictions revealed that the faint shadow would actually settle onto the waves 200 miles (320 kilometers) farther north than previously thought.

"Capturing that shadow required a bit of scramble. SOFIA has the benefit of being mobile, but the revised flight plan had to be cleared by air traffic control," William Reach, SOFIAs associate director for science operations, said in the same statement.

"There were a few tense moments, but the team worked together, and we got clearance," Reach said. "We reached Plutos shadow at exactly the right time and were very happy to have made it!"

Related: Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons mission in pictures

SOFIA was able to peer into the middle layers of the dwarf planet's atmosphere, gathering data in infrared and visible-light wavelengths. Two weeks later, during its flyby, New Horizons collected information about the upper and lower layers, in radio and ultraviolet frequencies.

"These combined observations, taken so close in time, have provided the most complete picture yet of Plutos atmosphere," NASA officials wrote in the same statement.

For example, New Horizons' imagery revealed that the atmosphere has a distinct blue tint, like the air of Earth. The color is thought to come courtesy of tiny haze particles, which reflect short-wavelength blue light preferentially.

SOFIA's observations confirmed the existence of those particles and characterized them, revealing that each fleck is just 0.06 to 0.10 microns wide, study team members said about 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

After analyzing these and other results including information gathered by SOFIA's predecessor, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which operated from 1975 to 1995 Person and his colleagues determined that Pluto's haze likely evolves on short timescales, fading and thickening over the course of just a few years.

This brief cycle suggests that something other than Pluto's distance from the sun is driving the abundance of haze particles. For example, periods of thick haze may result when particularly ice-rich regions of Pluto's surface get their time in the sun, the researchers said.

"Theres still a lot we dont understand, but were forced now to reconsider earlier predictions," Person said. "Plutos atmosphere may collapse more slowly than previously predicted, or perhaps not at all. We have to keep monitoring it to find out."

The study was published online in November 2019 in the journal Icarus.

It's unclear how many more occultations SOFIA will be able to chase down: President Donald Trump's proposed budget for 2021 would eliminate funding for the program. But that's not necessarily a death sentence. No budget is final until Congress passes it, and SOFIA a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, known by its German acronym DLR has escaped proposed termination before.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Pluto's wispy atmosphere may be surprisingly robust - Space.com

A crane hoisted the Space Launch System core stage into the B-2 test stand at NASAs Stennis Space Center in January. Credit: NASA/SSC

With the Space Launch Systems inaugural test flight now officially delayed to November 2021, NASA says work halted by the coronavirus pandemic will resume within weeks to prepare for the first test-firing of the SLS core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The last official schedule from NASA had the first SLS test launch in March 2021, but managers have said for months that schedule was no longer achievable. After a thorough review, NASA says the first SLS launch named Artemis 1 is now planned in November of next year.

The most powerful launch vehicle since the Apollo-era Saturn 5 moon rocket, the Space Launch System will carry an unpiloted Orion crew capsule into space. The Orion spaceship will orbit the moon to demonstrate the capsules capabilities and performance before NASA commits to flying astronauts around the moon on the second SLS/Orion flight in late 2022 or early 2023.

According to NASAs current plans, the Artemis 3 mission scheduled as soon as 2024 will send astronauts back to the moon on the third SLS/Orion flight. Once in lunar orbit, crew members will dock with a lunar lander and attempt a landing near the moons south pole.

But the development of the Space Launch System, which kicked off in 2011, has faced ballooning costs, delays and a change in strategy ordered after the Trump administration took office in 2017. Since then, the White House has directed NASA to accelerate the return of U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface to 2024.

Years behind schedule, the march toward the first SLS test launch hit another hurdle in March when NASA ordered teams at the Stennis Space Center to pause operations on the B-2 test stand, where the heavy-lift rockets core stage arrived in January from its factory in New Orleans.

We basically shut down operations there March 17, said Doug Loverro, associate administrator for NASAs human exploration and operations mission directorate.

Originally scheduled for a debut test launch in 2017, the Space Launch System has faced repeated delays, primarily due to difficulties in building the rockets first flight-ready main stage, a large structure with cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks measuring 212 feet (64.6 meters) long.

The core stage built by Boeing finally left its factory at NASAs Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans earlier this year. In January, the stage arrived at the B-2 test stand at Stennis, the same facility once used for test-firings of the main stage of NASAs Apollo-era Saturn 5 moon rocket.

Before the pandemic hit, NASA and contractor teams were readying for a test-firing of the SLS core stages four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 main engines as soon as early August. Known as the green run, the test is the culmination of the core stages construction and test campaign before delivery of the rocket to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to final launch preparations.

In mid-March, rising numbers cases of the COVID-19 viral disease in the area around the Stennis Space Center including the first confirmed positive case among the Stennis workforce prompted NASA to stop work on the test stand. NASA also paused production of hardware for subsequent SLS launches at Michoud.

Theres no question were going to lose some time to (the coronavirus pandemic), but weve tried to go ahead and maximize what weve got done, Loverro said in an interview Wednesday. And were right now working the reopening plans For each activity that were doing, we are putting together a specific plan.

In a sign that operations at Stennis are beginning to resume, Loverro said NASA has approved the painting of a different test stand used to to test-fire individual RS-25 engines that are used on the SLS core stage.

We have three other plans in work right now that will be submitted later this week to restart work at MAF (the Michoud Assembly Facility), and restart work at Stennis in different areas, Loverro said.

We are going to be resuming work on the B-2 test stand in support of green run within the next couple of weeks, Loverro said. It wont be at full speed, but it will be done in a safe manner so we can protect our Boeing and NASA workers down there. And we will work on the engine section, well work on the thermal protection system. Each element will be started when we have the plans and the gear ready to protect those workers.

Loverro said NASA and contractor teams continued with virtual training sessions and reviewed paperwork.

Its often the case in these developments that the last thing that gets done is the paperwork, so we decided that wed get ahead on the paperwork and get a lot of it signed off. And the software development has still continued as well, he said.

Loverro, a veteran manager in U.S. military space programs, led a comprehensive review of the SLS and Orion schedules since arriving at NASA late last year.

We went through an entire re-baseline of the program, he said. We looked at every schedule, and we came to the conclusion that we had a very high confidence date of November 2021.

Theres no question the COVID shutdown puts pressure on that date that we had not anticipated, Loverro said. I would say the work and the experience that Boeing has done so far in green run gives me great hope and confidence that they are going to get back into this and get us very near to the original schedule on this.

He said NASA and Boeing teams at Stennis were working 10 days ahead of schedule during the green run test campaign before the shutdown in March.

So performance was excellent, Loverro said. Assuming we can get back to work in the next several weeks, I think that November 2021 date is still going to hold.

Development of the Orion spacecraft, led by Lockheed Martin and Airbus Defense and Space, has encountered its own delays. But the spaceship is on track to be ready to begin Artemis 1 launch preparations within the next few months, well ahead of the SLS timeline.

The Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1 arrived back at the Kennedy Space Center in March after thermal vacuum and electromagnetic testing at NASAs Plum Brook Station in Ohio.

We were able to continue with Orion using the right protective gear to make sure we took care of our people and the Lockheed people, Loverro said. We were able to continue with that, not as we would normally do it. But under very safe conditions, we were able to continue work there, and in fact have progressed.

A Government Accountability Office report released this week said one of the top remaining technical risks with the Space Launch Systems core stage is that the rocket may develop leaks when filled with cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the first time.

NASA plans to load 730,000 gallons super-cold propellants into the rocket during a rehearsal for the green run test-firing. If all goes according to plan, engineers would follow the fueling test called a wet dress rehearsal with another propellant load culminating in a burn of all four RS-25 main engines lasting more than eight minutes.

The next big unknown as a program is when we put the cryogenic liquids in the oxygen tank and the hydrogen tank, and we look at the plumbing and all the systems and make sure that they remain tight, and that they perform as expected through our qualification test, said John Shannon, Boeings SLS program manager, in January. We have high confidence that they will, but until you see it in an integrated fashion, you dont really know.

NASA has spent more than $15 billion on developing the Space Launch System since 2011.

The program reported further development cost growth of $700 million since 2019, for a total increase of approximately $1.7 billion or 24.6 percent above the programs development baseline, the GAO reported of the SLS program this week.

Those figures assumed the SLS could lift for the first time in March 2021, a schedule that is no longer achievable.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Hopeful for launch next year, NASA aims to resume SLS operations within weeks - Spaceflight Now

The United Arab Emirates had its sights set on Mars the day before it launched its second satellite ever.

The resulting mission, a Mars orbiter dubbed Hope, has finished construction and is scheduled to launch this summer among a rush of spacecraft bound for the Red Planet. If all goes well, the UAE will become the fourth or fifth country to orbit Mars next February. While the country's newly minted scientists are dedicated to learning something new about Mars, inquiry wasn't the motivation for the mission.

"Going to Mars was not the main objective," Omran Sharaf, mission lead for the Hope spacecraft, which is also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, told Space.com. "It's a means for a bigger goal: to expedite the development in our educational sector, academic sector."

Related: Meet Hope: The UAE's first spacecraft bound for Mars is now complete

Sharaf first heard about the Mars plan in November 2013, as he was preparing to see his prior project, an Earth-observing satellite called DubaiSat-2, launch. The Hope mission began with an order from UAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum: Send a UAE-built science probe to Mars before the country's 50th anniversary in December 2021, within a set budget.

There were other constraints too: "The science needs to be unique. Whatever you do, it shouldn't be something that's been done before," Sharaf said the prime minister directed. "We should build it and not buy it, and work with others, don't start from scratch."

Jumping from Earth orbit to Mars in less than a decade is quite a leap, but a purposeful one for the UAE, which turned its gaze to spaceflight in 2006. "Only 50% of those missions [to Mars] succeed," Sarah Al Amiri, science lead for the mission and the UAE's minister of state for advanced sciences, told Space.com. "It provides the mindset that the UAE needed to have in youth who are going to be a vital part of the UAE's post-oil economy. It's about expanding their horizons and putting them in challenges at a time when the UAE is relatively comfortable as a nation."

The mission is, after all, timed to celebrate the nation's 50th anniversary. "We need to catch up with nations that have been around for centuries," Al Amiri said.

As the Hope mission grew from proposal to project, team members began building connections with Mars scientists who could help them shape the goals of the spacecraft and with seasoned Mars-goers who could teach them how to design and build the probe.

For the latter, the UAE space center signed on with the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, impressed by center members' experience with Mars missions and demonstrated ability to foster less experienced team members into full-fledged participants.

For help with the science side of things, UAE representatives reached out to the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, an advisory group convened by NASA that includes scientists from around the world. In particular, the Hope team members needed to identify a scientifically valuable task that was feasible for this mission.

"We're not there just to declare arrival to Mars," Al Amiri said. "It doesn't really make sense to call it planetary exploration and just make it about technology demonstration and about arrival."

From that consultation, Al Amiri and her colleagues found a mission for the mission. "There was a large gap in the complete understanding of the atmosphere of Mars," she said. "We don't have a full understanding of the weather system of Mars throughout an entire year."

Previous and current missions have gathered observations of the Martian weather, but only a couple of times throughout a day, Al Amiri said. These measurements have often come from surface missions and so are quite limited geographically. Weather is too complex and interconnected for scientists to really get a handle on how it works from such piecemeal data.

So, Hope aims to monitor what's happening in the Martian atmosphere for a full local year, including making connections between layers of the atmosphere. That will help scientists understand not only Martian weather, but also how Mars has lost some of its atmosphere over billions of years of planetary history.

"That science was a sweet spot for us," Al Amari said. "You're complementary to other current missions, so you maximize the benefit that scientists are going to get globally from this mission, because it feeds into the current areas of research and expands on human knowledge as a whole."

The goal of integrating data collected across layers of the Martian atmosphere means that Hope's three instruments a camera sensitive to optical and ultraviolet wavelengths and spectrometers tuned to infrared and to ultraviolet light need to take simultaneous measurements that scientists can stack together.

To facilitate that process, Hope carries all its instruments on the same arm. The spacecraft also has a precisely tuned 55 hourlong orbit that enables two different views of Mars: One in which the planet rotates beneath the spacecraft, and one in which the spacecraft keeps pace and watches the same spot over time, Al Amiri said. That combination of views should make it easier for scientists to put together a complete map of the Martian atmosphere, she said.

Hope is scheduled to launch in late July or early August the same window being targeted by NASA's Perseverance rover and China's first Mars mission, Tianwen. Until March, the European Space Agency and Russia were also in on the Red Planet rush with their joint ExoMars mission. But parachute problems had plagued the ExoMars mission for months, and with the travel restrictions prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, mission personnel weren't confident they could be addressed in time. The mission is now scheduled to launch in 2022.

The Hope mission has also had to contend with pandemic complications, Sharaf said. "The coronavirus has definitely brought a different level of challenge into all this," he said. "We thought that this phase would be the quiet phase, that we would be preparing for the launch, and it turns out that it's not really the quiet phase because of COVID-19."

As of late April, the spacecraft has arrived in Japan, from where it will launch aboard a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket. The spacecraft headed over earlier than originally planned to ensure it didn't get caught in a pandemic-related hold-up.

The team also had to adjust its staffing plans. Rather than having teams bounce between the UAE and Japan, the agency sent a smaller team to Japan early enough that they would clear quarantine when the spacecraft arrived; those personnel will remain for three months straight.

Even still, something could go wrong, Sharaf said, potentially interfering with the launch. If everything goes smoothly, Hope should reach Mars sometime in February the exact date hasn't been set yet. And if everything continues to go smoothly, the spacecraft will spend about two terrestrial years at work around the Red Planet, with a potential mission extension likely to be evaluated a year into orbit.

"I never even fathomed the minute possibility of doing this, I don't think any of us would have proposed to even say that 'OK, let's build a mission to Mars,'" Al Amiri said. "We would have thought incrementally, incrementally what's the next best thing. But incrementally never works here. If you did not leap, if you didn't push the bounds forward really, really fast you're not able to overcome challenges."

When asked how it felt to be looking ahead to the launch, especially with the US and China also targeting the Red Planet on the same time table, Sharaf said he is "Absolutely terrified, to be honest. Proud and optimistic, but terrified."

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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The UAE is going to Mars. Here's the plan for its Hope orbiter. - Space.com

Virgin Galactic has taken an important step toward the launch of its space tourism service after successfully completing the first test flight from Spaceport America the soon-to-be starting point for paying passengers trip of a lifetime.

The team previously launched test flights from Mojave, California, before relocating to its new home in New Mexico in February 2020.

The SpaceShipTwo passenger craft, also known as VSS Unity, made its debut outing from Spaceport America with VMS Eve, the aircraft designed to carry Unity on the first part of its journey toward space during the tourism trips. Together, the vehicles climbed to an altitude of 15,240 meters (50,000 feet) before Eve released Unity, allowing it to fly freely for the first time in New Mexico airspace.

The spaceship achieved a glide speed of Mach 0.70 and completed multiple test points, before touching back down smoothly for a runway landing at Spaceport America, the team wrote in a piece describing the flight.

A video (below) shows parts of the test, including the moment Eve releases Unity, and the passenger crafts landing back at Spaceport America.

The glide flight offered the first opportunity to test all of the components required to fly Eve and Unity in glide configuration, from its new home base and in new airspace, Virgin Galactic said.

During the outing, Unity pilots Dave Mackay and C.J. Sturckow successfully executed a variety of maneuvers that enabled it to gather data regarding the spacecrafts performance and handling qualities. The flight test also allowed the pilots and ground team to continue familiarization with the airspace around Spaceport America, as well as the chance to conduct further pilot training.

Competing with the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic has an eye on launching its $250,000-a-seat space tourism service in the coming months, though its yet to set a firm date for the maiden trip. The next stage of testing will involve additional rocket-powered flights to confirm Unitys readiness for rides to the edge of space.

The experience will take passengers toward the generally agreed boundary of where space begins, around 62 miles up, with stunning views and a brief period of weightlessness all part of the package.

Weve reached out to Virgin Galactic for information on when it hopes to launch its first commercial space tourism flight and will update this article when we hear back.

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Virgin Galactic readies space tourism trips with first Spaceport America flight - Digital Trends