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Space station crewmen return safely to Earth

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A veteran Russian cosmonaut and two International Space Station crewmates, one from the United States and one from Germany, returned safely to Earth on Sunday with a parachute landing of their Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan, ending 5-1/2 months in orbit.

Maxim Suraev of the Russian space agency, who was commander of the station during the mission, climbed into the Soyuz craft with NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and German flight engineer Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency and departed the orbital outpost at 7:31 p.m. EST.

About 3-1/2 hours later, the capsule descended through cold, windy and overcast skies to touch down on the frozen steppes northeast of Arkalyk.

Early-morning temperatures in Kazakhstan registered just -5 degrees Celsius, mission commentator Rob Navias said on a live NASA Television broadcast of the landing.

Recovery teams were standing by to help Suraev, Wiseman and Gerst out of their capsule, the same spacecraft they rode to reach the station on May 28.

The crew's last few weeks in orbit were among the busiest of their mission, with the departure of a Dragon cargo capsule sent to the station by private launch company Space Exploration Technologies and the arrival of a Russian freighter.

The Russian cargo ship docked with the station less than a day after an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket carrying another supply capsule bound for the space station exploded seconds after liftoff from Virginia.

"Its been an honor and a privilege to spend 165 days up here. With that said, Im looking forward to heading home," Wiseman said during a change-of-command ceremony carried live from the space station on NASA Television.

Two other Russian cosmonauts and the newly named station commander, NASA astronaut Barry Butch Wilmore, remained aboard the orbital outpost, a $100-billion research laboratory that flies about 260 miles (418 km) above Earth.

They will be joined on Nov. 23 by cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, NASA astronaut Terry Virts and Italys Samantha Cristoforetti, who will fly aboard another Soyuz capsule launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

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Space station crewmen return safely to Earth

On a Mission to Mars

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Kennedy Space Center, Fla. NASA is preparing to launch its next-generation, deep-space capsule Orion next month on its first space flight, a mission that a NASA administrator recently called our first step in our journey to Mars.

At a Nov. 6 briefing, Deputy Associate Administrator William Hill and other NASA and industry officials outlined hopes and expectations for a mission on Dec. 4 that will blast an unmanned Orion capsule from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., sending it more than 3,500 miles into space and back for a splashdown off Baja California, Mexico.

The flight, which will involve two Earth orbits and last less than five hours, will give NASA and its Orion business partner, Lockheed Martin, their first space test of the capsule envisioned as a critical part of any NASA trips to the moon, an asteroid, Mars or beyond.

Those missions are not envisioned until the 2020s and 2030s, and even the first manned flight of Orion is not expected before 2021.

For the Dec. 4 test, Orion will be staged on top of the most powerful rocket available in the world today, a three-booster Delta IV Heavy, provided by United Space Alliance. As launched, the capsule will be fully configured to carry four crew members, although it will be unoccupied.

All the tests and research NASA will be conducting on the flight will be with the assumption that there are astronauts on board.

The launch is set for 7:05 a.m., with Dec. 5 and 6 available as backup launch days.

The mission will test Orions capabilities ranging from the 17 separations that will occur as various parts of the rocket and capsule system fall away, to the computers ability to withstand space radiation, to the heat shields and parachutes operations for re-entry and splashdown.

The test flight will cost about $370 million including the rocket, but not including the capsule, which NASA and Lockheed Martin intend to recover and reuse.

Orion will go 3,600 miles into space by comparison, the International Space Station orbits the Earth just 260 miles away so that it can built up to a top speed of 20,000 miles per hour on its return. Thats almost as fast as it would have to go for a journey to the moon.

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On a Mission to Mars

Swiss Space Systems Concludes 1st Phase Drop-Test Flight Campaign in North Bay, Canada

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These first test flights were done with the purpose of testing and validating avionics systems, drone systems, Guidance-Navigation-Control instruments and various sensors.

All system components were inserted into an avionics system container suspended by a local custom-manufactured flight support and release jig structure. The flight support and release jig structure was custom-manufactured by North Bay Machining Centre Inc. and assembled at the Canadore College Aviation Campus by Canadore College faculty in collaboration with the S3 design team. The first phase of a drop-test flight campaign in North Bay included contributions from seven local companies, with all work completed and delivered on-time and on-budget.

The flight support and release jig construction was carried by a helicopter at a maximum altitude of 3,800 m /12,500 ft. to test system control and telemetry in-flight, which was connected and monitored in real-time with the ground station. It was also an opportunity for a delegation of S3 engineers to strengthen their collaboration with the supporting teams of Canadore College, North Bay Jack Garland Airport (YYB), and the City of North Bay, in preparation for the future drop-test flight campaign of a fully functional, but reduced-scale SOAR suborbital shuttle mock-up, scheduled to take place in the spring of 2015 from the same location.

During the week-long flight test campaign, various helicopter flight profiles were successfully performed in order to evaluate the flight systems, which will ultimately be integrated into a reduced scale mock-up of the SOAR suborbital shuttle. The fully-equipped mock-up and flight-tested jig system will be used in the spring of 2015 for captive flights from a helicopter. These tests will be helicopter-carried and eventually drop from an altitude of nearly 5,000 m / 16,500 ft. in order to allow its autonomous flight approach and landing with monitoring and eventual control from the ground, if needed. The results of the preparatory SOAR shuttle drop-test flights conducted this week in Canada are very encouraging, according to Robert Feierbach, Head of S3 Americas.

As a team, we had the opportunity to successfully test our telecommunication and guidance systems, and to collaborate closely with the Canadore College and North Bay Jack Garland Airport (YYB) teams. This bodes well prior to the forthcoming drop-test flights aimed to take place next spring, said Feierbach.

The first phase of test flights completed last week presented a good opportunity for Canadore Colleges Aviation Campus experts and North Bay Jack Garland Airport (YYB) staff to meet the various S3 engineers and operational staff - with whom they had been working remotely over the past few months - to perform a full-scale rehearsal before the forthcoming spring flight tests.

This is a promising spaceflight-related collaboration starting on a solid base, and we already look forward to contributing to the success of the second phase of this drop-test flight campaign, and to S3's SOAR project in general, said George Burton, Canadore Colleges President and CEO. These operational activities will enable Canadore to strengthen our technical and logistical expertise in flight test operations with an international scope, as this one demands.

North Bay Mayor Al McDonald says that the city is looking forward to hosting S3 again in the spring after such a successful trial.

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Swiss Space Systems Concludes 1st Phase Drop-Test Flight Campaign in North Bay, Canada

Exoplanet Mission Cleared For Next Development Phase

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Provided by Claire Saravia, NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA has officially confirmed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, clearing it to move forward into the development phase. This marks a significant step for the TESS mission, which would search the entire sky for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

Designed as the first all-sky survey, TESS would spend two years of an overall three-year funded science mission searching both hemispheres of the sky for nearby exoplanets. This is an incredibly exciting time for the search of planets outside our solar system, said Mark Sistilli, the TESS program executive from NASA Headquarters, Washington. We got the green light to start building what is going to be a spacecraft that could change what we think we know about exoplanets.

During its first two years in orbit, the TESS spacecraft will concentrate its gaze on several hundred thousand specially chosen stars, looking for small dips in their light caused by orbiting planets passing between their host star and us, said TESS Principal Investigator George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the third year, ground-based astronomical observatories would continue monitoring exoplanets identified earlier by the TESS spacecraft.

TESS is expected to find more than 5,000 exoplanet candidates, including 50 Earth-sized planets. It will also find a wide array of exoplanet types, ranging from small, rocky planets to gas giants. Some of these planets could be the right sizes, and orbit at the correct distances from their stars, to potentially support life.

The most exciting part of the search for planets outside our solar system is the identification of earthlike planets with rocky surfaces and liquid water as well as temperatures and atmospheric constituents that appear hospitable to life, said TESS Project Manager Jeff Volosin at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Although these planets are small and harder to detect from so far away, this is exactly the type of world that the TESS mission will focus on identifying.

Now that NASA has confirmed TESS, the next step is the Critical Design Review in 2015. This would clear the mission to build the necessary flight hardware for launch.

After spending the past year building the team and honing the design, it is incredibly exciting to be approved to move forward toward implementing NASAs newest exoplanet hunting mission, Volosin said.

TESS is designed to complement several other critical missions in the search for life on other planets. Once TESS finds nearby exoplanets to study and determines their sizes, ground-based observatories and other NASA missions, like the James Webb Space Telescope, would make follow-up observations on the most promising candidates to determine their density and other key properties. By figuring out a planets characteristics, like its atmospheric conditions, scientists could determine whether the targeted planet has a habitable environment.

TESS should discover thousands of new exoplanets within two hundred light years of Earth, Ricker said. Most of these will be orbiting bright stars, making them ideal targets for characterization observations with NASAs James Webb Space Telescope.

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Exoplanet Mission Cleared For Next Development Phase

Why space tourist loophole in life insurance may end

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Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft mothership is seen in a hangar at Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California. Photo by Lucy Nicholson, Reuters

NEW YORK - While private pilots and skydivers have to take out extra life insurance to cover the added risk of their pursuits, space tourists do not need special policies on their high flying rides.

That loophole is likely to disappear, slowly, after the fatal crash last week of a test flight of a Virgin Galactic space ship designed to take tourists into space.

The loophole exists because U.S. life insurance policies don't ask about space tourism or exclude it from coverage, meaning insurers most likely would have to pay if the holder died on a space trip, insurance industry veterans said.

Insurance companies, which say they are considering what to do about space tourists after the Virgin crash, are likely to start adding questions about space travel and may even explicitly exclude space coverage, the industry observers said.

The companies themselves are taking a cautious approach.

"If we had an applicant with such plans, we would postpone any underwriting decision until they returned," Prudential spokeswoman Sheila Bridgeforth said.

Northwestern Mutual said that it is paying close attention to the issue after the crash, but that there is too little safety data to assess the risk of space tourism. U.S. life insurer MetLife said it doesn't have imminent plans to offer space tourism insurance.

Still, the industry is starting to gear up for sparce tourists, just as they cover satellite launches. Pembroke Managing Agency offers a policy that pays up to $5 million per space passenger or up to $20 million per trip, according to parent Ironshore International, which announced the policy in June.

"I suspect in insurance company offices all over the country right now - as a result of what's happened to the Virgin Galactic plane - it's being discussed," said Burke Christensen, former insurance lawyer and chief executive who has authored or edited three textbooks on insurance law.

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Why space tourist loophole in life insurance may end

Daring Orion Spaceship Test Flight Is NASA’s 1st Step …

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NASA is getting ready to launch a daring test flight of a capsule that could eventually bring humans to deep-space destinations like Mars or an asteroid.

On Dec. 4, NASA officials are expected to launch the Orion spacecraft on its first test flight, putting the capsule through its paces in space before it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean. The goal of the flight is to see how some key Orion systems like its huge heat shield and parachutes work before launching humans into deep space sometime in the future.

The mission called Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) is currently scheduled to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the flight, Orion will make two orbits of Earth, with one of them taking the capsule 3,600 miles (5,793 kilometers) into space. (For reference, the International Space Station orbits about 248 miles (400 km) above Earth.) [See images of the Orion space capsule]

"This is really our first step on our journey to Mars," William Hill, deputy associate administrator for explorations systems development at NASA, said during a news conference today (Nov. 6).

The test flight is also designed to help people on the ground learn more about the riskiest aspects of an Orion flight.

Although officials working with Orion (which is being built for NASA by Lockheed Martin) didn't need to make any changes to their plans in light of the recent Antares rocket explosion and tragic SpaceShipTwo accident, the risks of spaceflight are still at the forefront of their minds.

"We already recognize that space is hard," Geyer said. "We know we have challenges with that, but the whole idea of EFT-1 is to test those things, to learn about where the challenges are so that we can minimize the risk when we actually put people on board. It just reminds us of the risks we already understood, but we have not changed any of our plans."

Once launched, the spacecraft will jettison its launch-abort system, a structure put in place to propel an Orion capsule and its crew out of harm's way if something were to go wrong during a crewed launch. Once it completes its first orbit of Earth, the spacecraft will fire its rocket engine, boosting it up thousands of miles from the planet.

NASA officials on the ground will monitor key systems on the spacecraft during the 4.5-hour test.

"We do have radiation sensors on board, for example, so we're actually measuring different parts of the vehicle for what we're seeing, what the environment is inside," said Mark Geyer, Orion program manager. "We have 1,200 sensors, and a lot of those are loads, so they measure the impact loads when we land [and during] ascent. We'll get acoustic data inside and out, so we know how loud it is those kinds of things. A lot of that is for the vehicle, but it's also to understand what the environment for the crew is going to be."

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Daring Orion Spaceship Test Flight Is NASA's 1st Step ...

Space News: NASA Test Flight Still On Track & Comet Landing Latest

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- NASA's biggest test flight in years remains on track for next month, despite last week's space-related accidents.

Officials said Thursday everything looks good for the Dec. 4 launch of NASA's new Orion capsule. This one will not carry a crew. Future Orions are meant to carry astronauts on missions of deep-space exploration, including, one day, trips to Mars.

The spacecraft will blast off atop a Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The four-hour flight will send it on two laps around Earth - and as far as 3,600 miles into space - before parachuting into the Pacific, Apollo style.

William Hill, who helps run exploration systems development for NASA, said the test flight systems have nothing in common with either the Orbital Sciences rocket that blew up at liftoff on Oct. 28 or the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two destroyed in flight last Friday. So no reviews were needed, and no plans have been changed.

"Space operations is hard, and they proved that last week," Hill told reporters. "It was a tough week. It's a tough business we're in."

Mark Geyer, Orion's program manager for NASA, said even before the back-to-back accidents, everyone involved with the upcoming test flight recognized just how difficult it is to send up spacecraft, especially those designed for humans. The two events serve as an important reminder more than anything, he said.

The whole idea of the test flight, Geyer said, is "to learn about where the challenges are so we can minimize the risk when we actually put people on board." The capsule will be equipped with 1,200 sensors to measure vibration, heat and noise, among other things.

The flight test readiness review a couple weeks ago already was "very thorough," Geyer noted, and the NASA-Lockheed Martin Corp. team is going into it with "our eyes wide open and making sure that we all understand the risks."

NASA is paying Lockheed Martin to carry out this mission, which is valued at $370 million, excluding the Orion capsule itself. The space agency plans to reuse the capsule in a practice launch abort around 2019, a year after the second Orion flight. That second unmanned flight will be with NASA's new megarocket that's still under development, called SLS for Space Launch System.

Astronauts are expected to start flying on Orion in 2021. The capsules are built for four passengers, one more than the old Apollo spacecraft.

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Space News: NASA Test Flight Still On Track & Comet Landing Latest

Space tourists apply for refunds

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Would-be space tourists have applied to Virgin Galactic for refunds following last month's doomed test flight.

Company chief executive George Whitesides said "a few" of its 800 customers have pulled out of taking part in a future mission into space.

It comes after co-pilot Michael Alsbury died when the test flight aircraft crashed in the Mojave Desert in California on October 31.

Surviving pilot Peter Siebold was said to be alert and speaking with family members and medical staff in hospital days after the fatal launch.

Virgin Galactic, owned by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Aabar Investments PJS of Abu Dhabi, plans to fly passengers to altitudes more than 100km above Earth.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Whitesides said he wasn't surprised by the refund requests.

"I think what is relevant is that the vast majority have said 'Don't give up, keep going, we're with you'," he said.

"So 97 per cent have been very supportive, but a few people have asked for a refund.

"My resolve is unshaken. I have always known that this would be a challenge."

The company, which sells seats on each prospective journey for $US250,000 ($A270,500), has denied reports that it ignored safety warnings ahead of the test flight crash.

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Space tourists apply for refunds


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