"To date, agencies have closed 81 data centers and will close 114 more during this calendar year for a total of 195 in 2011.This represents an increase in both planned and actual closures from the data released in April 2011. As agencies have continued to update their data center inventories, they have increased their planned closures, demonstrating the seriousness in which they are attacking waste."
Keith's note: 15 10 centers at NASA have been or will be closed (list)
Why Is NASA Caving to the Russians On ISS?, OpEd, Jim Oberg, Txchnologist
"With the retirement of the Space Shuttle Atlantis last week, American astronauts are now totally dependent on Russian vehicles for access to space. The question in front of us is how best to negotiate for fair compromises in the US-Russian space alliance. Some of NASA's recent agreements are not encouraging. The US needs to realize that it holds some high cards. True, the Russians have, in the Soyuz, the only vehicle that can carry passengers. But the destination - the International Space Station, which is more than 80 percent funded by the U.S. - provides many critical space services without which getting into orbit is pretty pointless for the Russians. Chief among them is electrical power and space-to-Earth communications, most of which comes via American equipment."
Keith's note: Word has it that Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division Director at SMD also announced his resignation today. FYI John Morse is married to Laurie Leshin so a joint departure/move by both of them sort of makes sense.
NASA Internal Memo: Senior Managers to Leave NASA for Academia
"Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division and Laurie's husband, also will be leaving government to join RPI as the associate vice president for research."
NASA Internal Memo: Laurie Leshin Is Departing
"I wanted to share some news with you. I have accepted a position outside of NASA. I will be the Dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York starting in October. RPI will be announcing my appointment today. I will remain here at NASA HQ until mid- to late-September and look forward to continuing to work with all of you on the creation of HEOMD. I will continue as Deputy AA in ESMD until the HEOMD unification takes place and will continue to work to stand up the two Divisions I was named acting Director of (AES AND SLPSRA) in HEO."
NASA Internal Memo: Bryan O'Connor is Retiring From NASA
"I told my staff this morning that I plan to retire effective 31 August. From June, 2002, when Sean O'Keefe asked me to return to NASA for a third time to serve in this position, until this very day, I have been privileged to work on important projects with and among the best people in the world. Over time you have celebrated great successes and suffered and learned from horrific failures with determination, skill and a world beating attitude, and by so doing have kept me in a continuous state of awe."
"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Johnson Space Center (JSC) is seeking to identify potential industry interest in an agency real property asset located at JSC in Houston, TX for the purpose of establishing a "JSC Acceleration Center". This announcement describes a NASA asset that is currently underutilized as a result of the transition from the Space Shuttle Program (SSP) to the future mission activities authorized by Congress in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010."
From Discovery News - Top Stories:
An 11-year-old girl was struck by lightning on a bright, clear day. How does that happen?
Read the whole article
From INHABITAT:
A solar energy system that doesn't require sunlight is almost as bizarre as a tidal power system that doesn't use water - however that's exactly what researchers at MIT have cooked up. The team just unveiled a new photovoltaic energy conversion system that can be powered
From INHABITAT:
In a new study released this week, it was revealed that among the 1.2 million residents living in parts of Appalachia, an additional 60,000 cases of cancer are directly linked to mountaintop removal mining, a practice that occurs most commonly in West Virginia's Appalachi
From BBC News:
Until fairly recently many people using fingerprint or retinal scanners to get through doors would have done so to an exciting soundtrack and almost certainly have very good teeth and hair. The use of such biometric devices was the domain of Hollywood films, as companies a
Because of the central role that maintenance technicians perform when it comes to building control systems, lighting systems, HVAC, and many other electrical systems, the maintenance pro is also at the heart of the greening of industry. Are sustainability efforts such as cutting electrical bills and
Expense has always been the biggest threat to the shuttle program. Every time a shuttle takes off, it costs $500 million. Then there's the maintenance expense. But the shuttles made it possible to build the international space station, launch the Hubble space telescope, and send multiple probes to V
From Gizmodo:
You've seen the Godzilla of Khazakstan and sure, it's an impressive piece of machinery. But it's a Tonka Truck compared to its big brother, the Bagger 288. This 13,500-ton leviathan chews the tops of mountains clean off.
Read the whole article
A recent survey shows that participation in the pan-European EUREKA program, designed to support research and development, has had a positive affect on sales and employment growth. Could a similar program create jobs in the U.S.?
The preceding article is a "sneak peek" from Industrial Processing Eq
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Remember how in the 80's all those little fly-by-night companies cropped up and started building their own electric cars? Some of them were based on recognizable makes and models like the Jet Electrica (Ford Escort) and Solargen (AMC Concord), while others were out-of-this-world one-offs. This
Much of the attention commercial spaceflight has been getting recently has been focused on NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, including, as noted here, concerns about contracting mechanisms for future phases of the program. But CCDev is very much based on the earlier Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program for developing commercial cargo transportation to and from the ISS; the success of CCDev is dependent in part on the success of COTS. And the two companies that have COTS agreements with NASA are making some news recently on their efforts.
SpaceX has, for some time, been working to get NASA to agree to combine their second and third COTS missions (their first successfully flew last December), allowing them to both approach and berth with the station on the same flight. Last Wednesday Aviation Week reported that NASA has tentatively agreed to combine the two flights, pending resolution of some issues, including the planned deployment of two small satellites during that mission. If approved, the mission would launch as soon as November 30, berthing at the ISS on December 7.
The following day, at the STS-135 post-landing press conference at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier confirmed that NASA was close to working out a deal to combine the two SpaceX flights, designed C2 and C3. “We technically have agreed with SpaceX that we want to combine those flights, but we haven’t given them formal approval yet,” he said. “We still want to go through some more analysis” on various technical aspects of the mission, he added, but said that if those issues can be worked out, combining the C2 and C3 flights made the most sense. “Overall, what we want to do is get to cargo delivery as fast as we can, and if the systems are mature enough and the design is mature enough, combining those two flights is that best way to get cargo to the ISS in the fastest manner possible.”
(While that news took place last week, there was very little notice of it then, perhaps as it was lost in the attention about the final shuttle landing. But when SpaceX tweeted effectively the same news Tuesday, although with a nine-day gap between launch and berthing, instead of seven from the AvWeek announcement, it got a lot more attention.)
The news is a little different for the other COTS awardee, Orbital Sciences. Its original plans called for a single demonstration mission of its Taurus 2 launch vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft in late 2010; like SpaceX, it suffered delays, pushing that mission back to later this year. Last Thursday, company officials announced that they were delaying that mission further, into next year. “We are targeting a test firing of the full stack in November, with a test launch, with a non-Cygnus payload on the top, in late December,” said Orbital senior vice president Frank Culbertson at an AIAA commercial space panel on Capitol Hill. The official COTS demo flight is now planned for late February 2012, he said, with full-fledged cargo flights to follow in the spring.
In a briefing with financial analysts earlier that day to talk about the company’s second quarter earnings, company executives blamed the delay on development of the launch site infrastructure at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia. “Work related to installing and checking out the Wallops launch complex’s propellant and pressurization management systems has taken longer than we previously anticipated, delaying the turnover of the launch pad to us by some 6 to 8 weeks from the planned date,” Dave Thompson, chairman and CEO, said.
Another issue for the Taurus 2 was a problem last month during a test firing of one of the AJ-26 engines that powers the rocket’s first stage. During the test, at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, a metal fuel line ruptured, “badly damaging” the engine on the test stand, according to a Space News account of the test.
“Orbital, Aerojet, and NASA have substantially completed our analysis of the cause of this test failure,” Thompson said on Thursday’s call, and were now screening the remaining AJ-26 engines that Aerojet has. Thompson said it appears that two-thirds of the engines can be used “as-is”, but one third “will require some level of rework or repair.” That two thirds, though, would be enough to avoid any schedule delays.
Last week NASA officials raised alarm in some corners of the space industry about its proposal to shift from a pure Space Act Agreement (SAA) for the next Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) round towards a hybrid approach that incorporates elements of both an SAA and a traditional contract. Not surprisingly, this topic came up again Thursday at the NewSpace 2011 Conference, although some made it clear contracting mechanisms were the lesser of their concerns about the future of CCDev.
Brent Jett, deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program at NASA, told attendees during one panel session of the conference that he was aware of the concerns industry has raised since he and program manager Ed Mango outlined their proposed approach last week. “I know there’s a lot of angst in the community about the direction of the Commercial Crew Program,” he said. “There’s a group of people out there who strongly feel that Space Act Agreements is the only way to do it, the only way a program can be successful. There’s another group of people out there—not in this room, but within the government, within NASA—who strongly feel that to ensure crew safety, a cost-plus contract is the only way to it. So it’s almost like the debate in Washington over the debt ceiling.”
Companies have made clear their concerns about shifting from the SAA structure of previous CCDev rounds to this hybrid approach, which would incorporate many more elements of Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs). But beyond general worries about an increase in paperwork associated with the FAR, what are the specific problems with NASA’s proposed approach?
Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s space systems division, said he didn’t absolutely reject NASA’s approach request. “From our company’s perspective, we don’t really have a concern, one way or another,” he said. However, the hybrid approach NASA is proposing could have some sticking point, he said, such as how to account in a FAR-based contract for the coinvestment companies are supposed to make in their systems, as well as how to account for the cost and schedule impacts of any changes imposed by NASA. “It’s not that these are things that can’t be overcome, but it’s an unusual set of circumstances, and I think that’s why many people are looking at one more round of Space Act Agreements leading to a FAR contract.”
Garrett Reisman, the former astronaut who is managing SpaceX’s CCDev-2 work, said his company wanted to stick to the fixed-price milestone-based approach used in CCDev and COTS. A FAR-based approach would require SpaceX to hire “a whole bunch more accountants” to deal with the overhead imposed by the FAR, he said. “In addition, it’s a big corporate culture change,” he said, noting that SpaceX engineers don’t fill out timecards. “It’s all an overhead burden we don’t currently have.”
How to handle the contract for the next round of CCDev might be overshadowed by a bigger concern: how much funding, if any, that will be available for it in the next round of the program. The House version of the FY12 appropriations bill that funds NASA would give CCDev $312 million, the same as for FY11 but well below the administration’s request of $850 million.
“What we really need is money, and support from Congress and the executive branch,” Jett said. Support from the executive branch is there, but Congress, given what it’s proposed so far in FY12, is lagging. He noted the CCDev budget is about one tenth the budget of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), which combined would get just over $3 billion in FY12 in the House bill.
“I can tell you that if that number holds for the next year, it’s going to be very challenging for us to maintain multiple partners, to maintain the type of progress we’ve made, and meet a goal to fly folks in the mid part of the decade,” Jett said. “At some point we’re going to have to spend more than a couple hundred million dollars a year.”
Company officials agreed with that concern. “The bigger issue [than contracting mechanisms] is making sure we have the proper funding for this program and making sure all of us make our milestones and go forward,” Sirangelo said.
“These are the things that keep me up at night,” Reisman said. “Worrying about how we can possibly succeed with the budgets cut way down.”
Any scientist can tell you that research is a time-consuming pursuit. In fact, it can take decades to show results, as the knowledge compounds and inspires additional studies. This building of information is what led to the Recombinant Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine or RASV investigation, which launched to the International Space Station on July 8, 2011.
The investigation combines decades of expertise between two Arizona State University research teams. One team, led by Cheryl Nickerson, Ph.D. specializes in the use of the spaceflight platform to provide insight into how microbial pathogens cause infection and disease in the human body. The other team, led by Roy Curtiss III, Ph.D. focuses on the design and clinical testing of next generation vaccines to protect against diseases caused by pathogenic microbes. In addition, the Arizona State University researchers partnered with Mark Ott, Ph.D., at NASA's Johnson Space Center to strengthen the team's core expertise of space microbiology.
The vaccine samples that were flown on STS-135 are a genetically altered strain of Salmonella that carries a protective antigen against Streptococcus pneumonia -- a bacteria that causes life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia, meningitis, and bacteremia. This organism is responsible for more than 10 million deaths annually and is particularly dangerous for newborns and the elderly, as they are less responsive to current anti-pneumococcal vaccines. "We have the opportunity," commented Nickerson, "to utilize spaceflight as a unique research and development platform for novel applications with potential to help fight a globally devastating disease."
Nickerson and Curtiss designed the RASV experiment to use the unique microgravity environment of the space station National Laboratory to increase the vaccine's anti-pneumococcal effectiveness by maximizing its ability to induce a protective immune response. Already a promising oral vaccine candidate that is in human clinical trials, RASV has many advantages over vaccines delivered by a needle. This includes activation of an additional arm of the immune system that cannot be engaged by vaccines that are administered as a shot. The Salmonella vaccine strain is genetically modified not to cause disease in humans, but instead carries an antigenic protein from Streptococcus pneumonia. This addition stimulates a protective immune response without actually causing the disease.
According to Nickerson, the initial clinical trials indicated a need for additional enhancement to the vaccine's ability to induce a potent protective immune response. By sending samples back to the space station for continued microgravity research, scientists hope that they will be able to better genetically engineer the vaccine strain to enhance its immunogenicity, while reducing or eliminating any unwanted side effects.
To accomplish this goal, special growth chambers containing the vaccine strain traveled to the station aboard the shuttle Atlantis, where crew members activated the samples. Scientists simultaneously are growing a control sample on the ground for comparison under otherwise identical conditions. The spaceflight cultured RASV strain returned to Earth with STS-135 on July 21, 2011.
Researchers will now evaluate the space-flown strain against the control sample for its ability to protect against pneumococcal infection and changes in gene expression. Molecular targets identified from this work hold promise for translation to develop new and improve existing anti-pneumococcal RASVs to prevent disease for the general public. Moreover, because RASVs can be produced against a wide variety of human pathogens, the outcome of this study could influence the development of vaccines against many other diseases in addition to pneumonia.
Early work that laid the foundation for the microgravity RASV investigation began in 1998 when Nickerson initially was funded by NASA. This was the first of what would be multiple studies from this team on Salmonella bacteria grown in true microgravity or ground-based analogues of microgravity. The goal was initially to see how the bacteria would respond to a microgravity environment.
The ground study led to 2006's Effect of Spaceflight on Microbial Gene Expression and Virulence or Microbe investigation. The findings for Microbe were surprising, as scientists discovered that Salmonella cultured in the spaceflight environment became more virulent -- meaning there was an increase in its disease-causing potential. This study also showed that spaceflight globally altered Salmonella gene expression in key ways that were not observed during culture on Earth, leading to the identification of a master switch that regulates this response.
The Nickerson team followed Microbe with 2008's Microbial Drug Resistance and Virulence or MDRV investigation. This study both reproduced the increased virulence effect in spaceflight-grown Salmonella and identified a way to turn off the increased virulence. Collectively, these investigations enabled researchers to devise the RASV flight experiment in an effort to develop a better vaccine against pneumonia. "The key to this research is the novel way that bacterial cells adapt and respond to culture in the microgravity environment," said Nickerson, "as they exhibit important biological characteristics that are directly relevant to human health and disease that are not observed using traditional experimental approaches."
The current investigation is not the final chapter in this journey towards vaccine development. Thanks to the recent signing of a Space Act Agreement between NASA and the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, Nickerson and her team are now users of the space station as a National Laboratory. Scientists participating in this study plan to fly a continuing series of experiments to the space station. This streamlined access will help to accelerate progress for this lifesaving vaccine.
For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/RASV.html
