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World View Makes 1st Commercial Balloon Flight to Near Space

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A company that plans to send tourists to near-space by balloon has just completed its first commercial flight.

The Arizona-based companyWorld View lofted two payloads during an umanned balloon flight Sunday (March 8) from southeastern Arizona. The mission was part of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate's Flight Opportunities Program, which flies experiments designed by students, educators and researchers.

"World View is committed to furthering stratospheric exploration and research," Taber MacCallum, World View's chief technology officer, said in a statement. "Our first flight as a NASA flight service provider marks the launch of our commercial efforts to aid research and education by providing a new way for NASA and others to access near-space."

One of the experiments measured the properties of cosmic rays, which are believed to emanate from supernova explosions. The payload was developed by 18 undergraduate students and three faculty members at Gannon University in Pennsylvania.

The second experiment, known as the Planetary Atmospheres Minor Species Sensor, is designed to measure the distribution of gases in the air of Earth and other worlds. It was designed by students from the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida.

"Many types of space applications and research need more access to near-space than has been possible previously," World View chief scientist Alan Stern, who is also principal investigator of NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons mission, said in the same statement..

"With this flight," Stern added, "World View illustrates its ability to provide expanded access to the near-space environment for NASA, private corporations and universities."

In February, Arizona-based World View announced it had broken the world altitude record for a parafoil flight. The altitude of 102,200 feet (31,151 meters) is the same that officials hope to reach when they loft passengers, officials added.

World View's passenger flights would cost $75,000 per person and would soar high enough for passengers to see black sky and the curvature of the Earth. Last year, the organization said it plans to offer these flights starting in 2016.

Follow Elizabeth Howell@howellspace, or Space.com@Spacedotcom. We're also onFacebookandGoogle+.Originally published onSpace.com.

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World View Makes 1st Commercial Balloon Flight to Near Space

US betting on 3D printing to win the space race

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NASA is now using 3D printing techniques to manufacture rockets in order to regain competitiveness versus the Russian space industry.

The George C. Marshall Space Flight Centre(MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama is currently using 3D printing in pursuit of an objective which sounds as if it came straight out of the pages of the Cold War annals: building 100%-US-made space rockets with superior performance to those being made by Russian manufacturers. Since the demise of the USSR, the United States has seriously neglected its own equipment production and has instead been buying a huge amount of space gear from the old enemy. In the early 1990s, the abundant, reliable and low-cost Russian rockets provided a highly attractive alternative to the expensive American variety. This cooperative trend continued unabated until the recent cooling of relations between the two countries.

3D printing should enable the US government to build space rockets faster and at a lower cost

In order to reduce dependence on Russian rockets which are today used to take satellites that are vital for national security up into orbit the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has recently made massive investments in the MSFC, which, back in the 1960s, was one of the flagship US space industry bases. The major issue is how to become competitive again given that the US has been importing Russian rockets for over twenty years. The main hopes of NASAs revitalised rocket programme are resting on state-of-the-art digital technology combining computer modelling and additive layer manufacturing (ALM), popularly known as 3D printing. One of the project management team, Steve Cook, who was quizzed recently by the Popular Science website, underlined that this approach is likely to save both a great deal of time and considerable amounts of raw material.

To take just one example, agas generator injector, which would take fifteen months to build using traditional assembly methods, can now be built in just fifteen days, with a 70% reduction in the cost of manufacturing. Moreover, the process of superimposing layer upon layer of material to create a solid object without welds, joins or fasteners, which is characteristic of the 3D printing method, also considerably reduces the weight of the part, thus freeing up precious pounds of thrust that can then be used for payload. In the same vein, printing out a thrust chamber (the main part of the engine, which includes the combustion chamber and fuel nozzle), will cost an estimated 35% less than assembling it in the traditional way, while at the same time the additive manufacturing approach will save months of work. In the longer term, most of the rocket components could be printed, resulting in a powerful, cost-effective, fast-built engine. A first demonstration model is expected to be available sometime in 2018.

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US betting on 3D printing to win the space race

Space rocket passes key test ahead of Nasa deep-space launcher flight

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The motor is 25% more powerful than the four-segment engines used to help lift the space shuttle

A beefed-up space shuttle solid rocket motor passed a two-minute test firing in Utah on Wednesday, a key milestone toward the debut flight of Nasas deep-space launcher in 2018, the US space agency said.

Anchored horizontally to a test stand in the desert in Promontory, Utah, the five-segment motor, built by Orbital ATK, ignited at 9.30am local time.

Bright flames shot out the rear of the rocket for two minutes, marking the first full-duration burn of the enhanced solid-fuel shuttle booster rocket, a live Nasa broadcast showed.

It looked really clean. Were very excited. Great result, said Charlie Precourt, an Orbital ATK vice-president and former Nasa astronaut.

The 177-foot (54-meter) motor is 25% more powerful than the four-segment engines used to help lift the space shuttle. The shuttles were retired in 2011 after 135 flights, two of which ended in disaster.

Several shuttle-era components are being incorporated into the new rocket program, known as the Space Launch System. The motor tested on Wednesday included hardware flown on the first shuttle mission in 1981, Nasa spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said.

The test was the first of two planned before two boosters are paired with four liquid-fueled modified shuttle main engines and topped with an Orion capsule for an unmanned debut run around the moon in 2018. Orion, flying on top of a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket, made its initial test flight in December.

United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Nasa is spending about $3bn a year to develop the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, which are designed to fly astronauts to asteroids, the moon, Mars and other destinations beyond the International Space Stations 260-mile-high (418km) orbit.

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Space rocket passes key test ahead of Nasa deep-space launcher flight

Sarah Brightman creates space song with Andrew Lloyd Webber

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Sarah Brightman

Sarah Brightman's ex-husband Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber has written a song for her to sing in space.

The 54-year-old classical singer will travel to the International Space Station later this year and intends on becoming the ever international artist to perform live from space.

Sarah wants the track to be something special so she enlisted the help of the revered composer - who she divorced in 1990 - to create a

poignant piece of music.

Speaking at a press conference in London on Tuesday (10.03.15) to announce her journey into space, she said: "I've been working on something with my ex-husband, Andrew Lloyd Webber and he's thought of the most beautiful line for something so we're just taking it slowly at the moment. Because of the complexities of this, I don't want to promise too much because there is a reality to all this."

Sarah - who is believed to have paid 35 million to fund the trip - is also taking into consideration the difference between singing on Earth and in zero gravity.

She explained: "I've been working on various things, it's finding a song which suits the idea of space and something that's incredibly simple because to sing in micro-gravity is a very different thing to singing down on Earth."

Sarah has been training as an astronaut since January after being accepted by the Russian Federal Space Agency as a space-flight participant for a planned flight arranged by Space Adventures, Ltd. The singer has been learning everything from wilderness survival to the Russian language in preparation for her journey and 10-day stay on the International Space Station.

For Sarah it is the realisation of a life-long dream to go into space.

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Sarah Brightman creates space song with Andrew Lloyd Webber

Deep Space Flight and Communications: Exploiting the Sun …

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The majority of books dealing with prospects for interstellar flight tackle the problem of the propulsion systems that will be needed to send a craft on an interstellar trajectory. The proposed book looks at two other, equally important aspects of such space missions, and each forms half of this two part book.

Part 1 looks at the ways in which it is possible to exploit the focusing effect of the Sun as a gravitational lens for scientific missions to distances of 550 AU and beyond into interstellar space. The author explains the mechanism of the Sun as a gravitational lens, the scientific investigations which may be carried out along the way to a distance of 550 AU (and at the 550 AU sphere itself), the requirements for exiting the Solar System at the highest speed and a range of project ideas for missions entering interstellar space.

Part 2 of the book deals with the problems of communicating between an interstellar spaceship and the Earth, especially at very high speeds. Here the author assesses a range of mathematical tools relating to the Karhunen-Love Transform (KLT) for optimal telecommunications, technical topics that may one day enable humans flying around the Galaxy to keep in contact with the Earth. This part of the book opens with a summary of the authors 2003 Peek Lecture presented at the IAC in Bremen, which introduces the concept of KLT for engineers and newcomers to the subject. It is planned to include a DVD containing the full mathematical derivations of the KLT for those interested in this important mathematical tool whilst the text itself will contain the various results without outlines of the mathematical proofs. Astronautical engineers will thus be able to see the application of the results without getting bogged down in the mathematics.

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Deep Space Flight and Communications: Exploiting the Sun ...

India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

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The author has posted comments on this articleTNN | Feb 22, 2015, 02.57AM IST

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Calling human space flight the next logical step, he said the mission is targeting a weeklong journey.

"Human space flight is in our plans. In 2006-07 a feasibility study began on the capability of India to launch a human space flight. The spacecraft will travel 275 to 400 million kilometres around the earth for a week and on its return will launch in the ocean. We found it is feasible," Radhakrishnan told the D D Kosambi Festival of Ideas.

He added that constructing a spacecraft reliable enough to carry humans is the biggest challenge for Isro.

"A vehicle should be such that only one failure in 100 flights can be tolerated. Several things have to be taken care of in the design. If some failure is taking place in the vehicle, we have to know at least nine seconds before so that the crew can be ejected out safely."

He said the GSLV-MK-IIIthe Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk-III, India's largest rocket to dateis suitable for the human space flight mission as its lower section can carry a weight of up to 10 tonnes, which amounts to around 2-3 crew members.

Asked if the country is also working towards a programme that can send humans as tourists to and from Mars, Radhakrishnan indicated that such a plan is far off for the country for now.

Speaking about India's Mars Orbiter Mission, he said ISRO had plan B in place if the onboard liquid engine of Mangalyaan failed to start for the Mars orbit insertion after being in sleep mode for 300 days. "If the main rocket refused to fire, we had plan Bto fire the small thrusters for a very long time. But we didn't have to use plan B."

He said Mangalyaan has now provided a great amount of technology to feed other missions for the country.

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India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

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XCOR will offer suborbital flights that will reach the edge of space, about 100km above the ground.

There are a number of misconceptions about space tourism, the most significant being that it doesn't exist yet.

In fact, it's been around since 2001, when Dennis Tito reportedly stumped up $US20 million ($25.6 million) to tag along on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission. The NASA rocket scientist-turned-entrepreneur spent almost eight days orbiting the earth.

It won't be long until people are saying 'travelling into space is so last year'.

Another widespread misapprehension is that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the only company offering extra-terrestrial travel. As we'll get to shortly, there is actually a healthy field of commercial space travel companies developing a diverse range of trips.

An artists' impression of the World View capsule suspended from a balloon at the edge of space. Photo: World View

The good news for aspiring astronauts is that it should soon be possible to travel into space for as little as $75,000. The bad news is the fare will still translate to a minimum of $250 for every minute spent aloft - and that's without even considering the inescapable dangers involved.

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Commercial space travel can be divided into three categories: orbital, suborbital and what might be labelled sub-suborbital.

Space tourist Dennis Tito (left) on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission in 2001. Photo: AP

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Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

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IMAGE:The 2012 image (bottom) is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million year-old star Beta Pictoris. The 1997 Hubble image (top) shows... view more

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed edge on picture to date of a large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is the only star to date where astronomers have detected an embedded giant planet in a directly-imaged debris disk. The planet, which was discovered in 2009, goes around the star once every 18 to 20 years. This allows scientists to study in a comparably short time how a large planet distorts the massive gas and dust encircling the star. These observations should yield new insights into how planets are born around young stars.

The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk to within about 650 million miles of the star. The giant planet orbits at 900 million miles, and was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope six years ago.

"Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the giant planet. The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models that will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks," said Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona, Tucson. These structures include a warp in the inner disk caused by the giant planet.

When comparing the latest 2012 images to Hubble images taken in 1997, astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15 years despite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. This means the disk's structure is smooth and continuous, at least over the interval between the Hubble observations.

In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. Since then, Beta Pictoris has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes.

The disk is easily seen because of its edge-on angle, and is especially bright due to a very large amount of starlight-scattering dust. What's more, Beta Pictoris is 63 light-years away, closer to Earth than most of the other known disk systems.

Though nearly all of the approximately two-dozen known light-scattering circumstellar disks have been viewed by Hubble to date, Beta Pictoris is the first and best example of what a young planetary system looks like.

For one thing, the Beta Pictoris disk is exceptionally dusty. This may be due to recent major collisions among unseen planet and asteroid-sized objects embedded within the disk. In particular, a bright lobe of dust and gas on the southwestern side of the disk may be the result of the pulverization of a Mars-sized object in a giant collision.

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Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

ORCA prototype ready for the open ocean

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IMAGE:From left to right: Gerhard Meister, Bryan Monosmith and Chuck McClain are shown here with the ORCA prototype, which is a strong contender for a NASA Earth science mission. view more

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Hrybyk

Its name refers to one of the biggest animals in the sea, but ORCA, the Ocean Radiometer for Carbon Assessment instrument, will be observing the smallest.

If selected for a flight mission, ORCA will study microscopic phytoplankton, tiny green plants that float in the upper layer of the ocean and make up the base of the marine food chain.

Conceived in 2001 as the next technological step forward in observing ocean color, the ORCA-development team used funding from Goddard's Internal Research and Development program and NASA's Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) to develop a prototype. Completed in 2014, ORCA now is a contender as the primary instrument on an upcoming Earth science mission.

Should it be chosen, ORCA will take ocean-color monitoring to the next level, helping scientists to more precisely measure marine photosynthesis, which is key to the carbon cycle and the ocean food chain.

Like its predecessors that also measured ocean color, the instrument will observe phytoplankton, which blooms en masse, covering hundreds of square miles of the sea surface at once and leaving a trail that is clearly visible from space. In particular, researchers will observe global changes in ocean color to estimate concentrations of chlorophyll, the pigment plants use for photosynthesis -- the process during which the tiny plants convert energy from the sun and carbon dioxide into organic compounds that support life.

About a fourth of man-made carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean, said Chuck McClain, former ORCA principal investigator with Goddard's Ocean Color Group. "The ocean is a big sink for CO2 and part of that sink involves ocean biology."

ORCA builds on the work Goddard scientists and engineers pioneered in the development of ocean color sensors. Goddard's proof-of-concept -- the Coastal Zone Color Scanner that flew on Nimbus-7 from 1978 to 1986 -- was the first sensor to demonstrate that ocean chlorophyll could be measured from space. NASA's Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor mission, which collected data from 1997 to 2010, was the first flagship mission to routinely observe ocean color for long-term climate research. Currently, researchers employ the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, and the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite.

ORCA's Distinguishing Characteristics

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ORCA prototype ready for the open ocean

NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise

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IMAGE:In this photo, Huang is holding a test board upon which her Ka-band/microwave design is mounted and bonded. Marrero-Fontanez is on her right. view more

Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

The radio frequency band that many NASA missions use to communicate with spacecraft -- S-band -- is getting a bit crowded and noisy, and likely to get more jammed as science missions demand higher and higher data rates.

A team of NASA technologists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, just may have a solution, particularly for potential missions that plan to operate in low-Earth orbit and have limited real estate to accommodate communications gear.

Under two different research and development projects, technologists Mae Huang and Victor Marrero-Fontanez have collaborated to test and verify components of a prototype end-to-end Ka-band space communications system, which promises significantly higher data rates -- a whopping 2.4 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) -- over more traditional S-band systems, which theoretically could achieve data rates of 90 megabits of data per second (Mbps).

Huang is working with Goddard's Jeffrey Jaso -- a pioneer in Ka-Band communications -- to develop a Ka-band transmitter. Marrero-Fontanez, meanwhile, is designing Ka-band antennas to receive the Ka-band signals. Huang and Marrero-Fontanez plan to assemble a prototype in 2015.

Huang also will be delivering an engineering test unit of her transmitter to a Goddard team that is considering the technology's use on the proposed Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST, a next-generation observatory proposed for launch in the mid-2020s. WFIRST would carry out wide-field imaging and slitless spectroscopic surveys of the near-infrared sky, with an emphasis on studying dark energy and exoplanets. Due to its heavy data-rate requirements, the project provided Huang with some funding to advance her technology, she said.

WFIRST isn't the only mission looking for a compact, low-power, end-to-end system. Future Earth-observing missions also are expected to generate higher and higher data rates that could overwhelm the S-band allocations that are shared by space missions using NASA's Near-Earth Network and Deep Space Network and Federal and commercial operations.

"In a sense it's like rush-hour traffic. When you start your morning commute, you may notice fewer cars, but before you know it, you're in stop-and-go traffic as more cars merge onto the highway. The world's frequency bands are beginning to look a lot like bumper-to-bumper traffic," she said. "Cell phones, streaming video, and data communications are all placing big strains on available bandwidth. Meanwhile, commercial businesses are putting pressure on the government to free up other bands, pushing more Federal operations into the S-band that NASA uses. Couple that with NASA's expected need to transmit and receive greater and greater amounts of mission data, something will have to give."

Although NASA has had the Ka-band allocation for years and has used the frequency on past missions, the band has remained underused for a variety of reasons, mainly because of limited technology development, perceived technical challenges, among other things," Marrero-Fontanez said. "However, NASA has always had a strong interest in using this frequency allocation," he added, particularly because it can significantly increase data throughput by a factor of more than 100 as compared with S-band.

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NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise


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