NASA HQ Furlough Plans Move Forward

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Notice of Furlough Status for NASA Headquarters Civil Service Employees

"All NASA Headquarters employees, unless individually informed today, April 7, 2011, via an email message from Yvette Coles, Acting Director, Headquarters Human Resources Management Division, are designated as non-excepted. This means that, if funding lapses, you will be furloughed. Our contingency plan assumes that International Space Station activities will continue to protect the lives of the crew members on orbit and the safety and security of the space station. Existing satellite missions in operation also will continue to protect the satellites and the data being collected. In addition, all other activities involving protection of life and property will continue. All other agency activities not determined to be legally exempt will close, including all satellites in development. Our contingency planning for the potential funding lapse includes legal determination of which agency functions are excepted from a furlough. These determinations have been made."

Stealth CCDev-2 Announcement? (Update)

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Keith's 5 April note: Word has it there is going to be a CCDev-2 announcement by NASA on Wednesday, 6 April. If so, where is the media advisory?

Keith's 6 April update: Industry sources are reporting that they have been given semi-official tip that no one is going to get a heads up phone calls from NASA in advance of the CCDev 2 announcement - whenever that happens. This is somewhat of a departure from the way this is normally done.

NASA mulls commercial space plan, MSNBC

"Update for 11 a.m. ET April 7: The CCDev2 announcement has been delayed indefinitely, apparently because of the continuing back-and-forth over the federal budget, according to John Elbon, vice president and program manager for commercial crew programs at the Boeing Co."

Why Does JSC Hide Their Cool Stuff?

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Project Morpheus To Begin Testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center

"Neighbors of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston may notice some loud noises coming from the 1,600-acre site in the coming weeks. Johnson's Engineering Directorate is ready to begin testing its prototype lander as part of - Project Morpheus - a vertical test bed designed to integrate technologies that could be used to build future spacecraft intended to land on the moon, Mars, asteroids or any other foreign surface."

Keith's note: I am baffled. JSC is doing cool stuff like this - but in this press release they offer no pictures of the lander, the test site, not even a website for it?  No streaming video is offered, nothing on YouTube?  Why do you hide cool things, JSC? FAIL.

Keith's 2:15 pm EDT update: According to a NASA Watch reader, here are NASA JSC's Stealth Social Media sites (awaiting some sort of approval): Twitter.com/morpheuslander, Flickr.com/morpheuslander, Youtube.com/morpheuslander, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Project-Morpheus/156555054405321?ref=sgm. Their Facebook page also lists http://morpheus.jsc.nasa.gov and another Project Morpheus page as well.

Keith's 3:05 pm EDT update: When I first posted these links, with the exception of the Facebook page, they were devoid of content. Suddenly things are being posted. Too bad JSC PAO needs to be kicked in the butt to do this stuff - stuff they should just do naturally as a standard part of their job.

EADS North America Beefs Up Its Space Team

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EADS North America expands Space and related product activities in the U.S.

"EADS North America today announced that it has further integrated and expanded the company's Space and related product activities in the U.S., supporting government agencies, private sector customers and academia. The line of business (LOB) will be led by John Schumacher, who will serve as Vice President, Space line of business. "John Schumacher brings decades of demonstrated leadership in developing and growing world-class cooperative programs in Space-based research, exploration, human Space flight, and communications, as well as formulating government policy related to this key area of aerospace and defense," said Sean O'Keefe, CEO of EADS North America."

Local Confusion/Enthusiasm for "NASA" Park/Campus in Colorado

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NASA campus in Loveland could mean 10,000 new jobs

"At the cost of $5.5 million, the Agilent technology campus could soon have dozens of companies working to turn thousands of NASA patents into products. They are jobs the mayor of Loveland says the town welcomes. "These are the kind of jobs that are good paying jobs and the kind of jobs you can raise your family on," Mayor Cecil Gutierrez said. The Federal Space Act agreement calls for the creation of the park. It also calls for NASA to partner with a nonprofit designed to strengthen Colorado's clean energy industry, a group known as CAMT (Colorado Association of Manufacturing and Technology)."

CAMT: Loveland's Agilent campus not a done deal for ACE park, TimesCall.com

"The Aerospace Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Park is a joint effort by NASA and the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology. CAMT and the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. are partnering to select sites for the park. One, an existing facility for a portion of the park and the other, a "greenfield" site where new facilities will be built. Various news reports Tuesday stated that the former Agilent site in Loveland had been chosen as the location for the existing facility portion of the park. CAMT issued a statement Wednesday morning contradicting those reports."

NASA Deal Could Bring 10000 Jobs To Colorado, 7news

"This is incredible potential for Loveland and Northern Colorado," said Gutierrez. Betsey Hale of Loveland said it's anticipated 10,000 jobs will come to the state as a result of this venture. Hale said up to about 100 companies could move in to the business campus."

Loveland officials: ACE will take time but will bring revenue, Loveland Connection

"The park, which will house up to 100 clean energy and aerospace companies, could create 7,000 primary employment jobs regionally and 10,000 statewide within five years, Cahill said. Businesses in the park will have access to a NASA innovation official and resources such as education and shared services to assist in faster product development, according to an informational sheet about the program."

ACE deal not final yet, NOCO5news

"The long-vacant Agilent Technologies, Inc. campus in Loveland has been selected as the preferred site for ACE. However, during a press conference Thursday, Loveland city officials stressed that negotiations have yet to take place to finalize the deal."

Reactions To Barry Blumberg’s Passing

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Baruch Blumberg Passes Away, David Morrison, SETI Institute

"I was privileged to have lunch with Barry the day he died. He was attending a conference at Ames discussing exploration planning and its relationships with science and education. He presented a paper on the value of citizen science, where thousands of ordinary people can contribute significantly to science while also enjoying themselves in working with real spacecraft data, such as the high-resolution images now being received from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter."

Nobelist Baruch Blumberg, who discovered hepatitis B, dies at 85, Washington Post

"He also enjoyed canoeing, running and playing squash, and he co-owned Antietam Meadows, a cattle farm in Western Maryland. "Shoveling manure for a day on my farm," he said, "is an excellent counterbalance to intellectual work."

Baruch Blumberg, Nobelist who discovered Hep B, dies, Nature

"In 1976, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering hepatitis B and showing how the virus causes liver disease. In the 1960s, Blumberg found a mysterious blood protein in Australian aboriginals who had received transfusions and developed jaundice. The protein, which he named Australia antigen, turned out to be a surface protein of hepatitis B."

Baruch Samuel Blumberg 1925-2011, earlier post

Yet Another Commercial Crew/Cargo Report

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Commercial Crew Market Study Generates Small Firestorm, Space News

"Meanwhile, Braukus said, NASA is wrapping up a much more comprehensive commercial market analysis that was called for in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. "The Aerospace report was a completely different type of analysis than what was requested in the Authorization Act for the Commercial Market Assessment," Braukus said in the email. "The objective of the Aerospace work, as it was described in the report, was 'to provide ballpark results for what it would take to make a stand alone private enterprise business case close.'"

NASA Authorization Act of 2010

"Sect. 403 (2) COMMERCIAL MARKET ASSESSMENT. Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Administrator shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress an assessment, conducted, in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, for purposes of this paragraph, of the potential non-Government market for commercially-developed crew and cargo transportation systems and capabilities, including an assessment of the activities associated with potential private sector utilization of the ISS research and technology development capabilities and other potential activities in low-Earth orbit."

Keith's note: This report should be finding its way to Congress in the next few days ...

Huntsville Layoffs as High as 300

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Ala. NASA center cutting up to 300 jobs, AP

"Center spokesman Dominic Amatore told The Huntsville Times on Wednesday that a combination of factors led to the layoffs. He cites the lack of a federal budget for this year, continued funding by stop-gap measures and cuts in this year's budget including nearly $300 million removed from the line-item that funds general operations at all of NASA's centers."

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center cuts spending and up to 300 more jobs in Huntsville, Huntsville Times

"A statement issued by Marshall today said that, "Due to budget constraints, Marshall Space Flight Center officials have conducted a comprehensive review of all institutional procurement and other expenditures and established funding priorities, ensuring that essential Center functions are maintained and that operational capabilities are in no way compromised."

NASA’s Response – and Aerospace Corp’s Damage Control

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Commercial Crew Market Study Generates Small Firestorm, Space News

"NASA spokesman Michael Braukus said the Aerospace Corp. analysis, paid for by the agency's Independent Program and Cost Evaluation office, led by Michael Hawes, is one of many commissioned to assess the business case for private space taxis. "The Aerospace Corporation used their own assumptions for many of the inputs to the analysis; they did not use proprietary data inputs from companies developing commercial crew systems or from NASA, which makes their analysis of limited use," Braukus said in a April 5 email, one day after a set of Aerospace Corp. briefing charts on the study surfaced on NASA Watch. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF), an advocacy group here, blasted the report's assumptions as not based in reality, and said many of its findings are flawed."

Aerospace Corp Study Dumps on Commercial Crew Prospects, earlier post

Aerospace Corp Background and Messages: Commercial Crew Financial Feasibility/Reliability White Paper

"Q. So the results are to determine what?

A. We produced a modeling tool that could be applied to a variety of data sets to produce conclusions about the costs associated with scenarios for a commercial crew transportation system. The results shown to NASA and Congress recently were not intended to represent any specific real world scenario. We modeled a scenario utilizing data from as long as 10 months ago in order to demonstrate the tool's viability, not the viability of any specific commercial crew transportation system."

Keith's note: Hmm ... if they did not use actual company data - or NASA data - then why do this in the first place - and why brief it to the Administrator, Deputy Administrator, and Associate Administrator of NASA? Shouldn't Bolden/Garver/Scolese be focusing on the "real world" - not Aerospace Corp's parallel universe?

According to the overview from actual 1 Feb 2011 report: [continued after the link] :

"In late 2009, The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) undertook an internally funded research project to assess the viability, from a business perspective, of a commercial crew transportation system provider. That work was subsequently expanded and refined through NASA Headquarters Independent Program & Cost Evaluation (IPCE) funded activities. The initial research was driven by the Aerospace's mission of understanding trends in space development, and was based on staff experience associated with modeling private enterprises engaged in the exploitation of space.

The research and subsequent analyses were conducted using preliminary models to provide ballpark results for what it would take to make a stand alone private enterprise business case close. The following is an overview of the primary findings:

- Using parametric analyses, aggressively low cost estimates, and an assumption of no flight failures, Aerospace determined that the price per seat (PPS) for a 4 person capsule could be well in excess of $100M (FYI0).

- Sensitivities derived from parametric inputs to the model, moving away from the aggressive cost assumptions, showed how costs could approach and go well beyond $200M per seat.

- Aerospace introduced private pay passengers into the analysis to develop a first order effect on how that would impact the ability to close the business cases. There appears to be a significant difference in the PPS the government would have to pay under sustainable commercial business cases and the amount the public might be willing to pay for identical services. Under these scenarios, the more private passengers there are, the more the government would have to pay to offset the one to two orders of magnitude reduced prices that the public would be willing to pay.

- NASA questions about acquisition options, our prior work on initial assessments of human-rating expendables, and our own assumption about "no failures" in the business case led us to examine options for developing a commercial crew transportation system that would have a goal of demonstrated reliability better than Shuttle. With overall reliability as a surrogate for safety, Aerospace's assessment showed the magnitude of the values necessary in the capsule, launch abort, and launch systems necessary to achieve such a goal. This analysis indicates that the capsule and launch abort system may have to be built to the most stringent of human rating options so that the launch system's estimated reliability would be consistent with a commercial approach to human rating. Aerospace's assessment also suggests that even with that combination, an order of magnitude or any improvement in total system reliability over Shuttle will be difficult to achieve or validate. Even with 14 to 17 successful flights in a row of an identical system, demonstrated reliability will be well below that of the Shuttle and most expendable systems.

Searching for business cases that closed, Aerospace did find that, under the assumption of no flight failures and for the lowest levels of government investment and commercial unit costs that we evaluated, a 7 seat capsule flying 2 NASA missions a year plus 70 private pay passengers over 10 years, did yield a 25% IRR to the service provider (thereby closing the business case). However the company's cash flow did not go positive for 12 years indicating a remarkable (unbelievable) series of no failures."

Engineering in the Cloud: From Simulation to Storage

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Engineers have one very keen sense in life, and that is to ferret out usefulness from perceived buzz. Trained as such, unless we are reading the weather report, the word “cloud” sends our buzz-o-meters into an alarm-sounding red zone. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at how the cloud might apply to us. Clearly, it has taken hold in the consumer world, and has possible compelling uses in many engineering domains.

Old School – New Thinking

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U.S. mustn't give up on space, Opinion, Gerry Griffin, USA Today

"Going forward, commercial space companies and NASA must be considered partners, not competitors, in the U.S. human spaceflight enterprise. NASA's plan to support commercial spaceflight would significantly strengthen the agency's chances to have humans explore beyond Earth orbit once again. Human spaceflight to and from Earth orbit provided by commercial companies would enable NASA to focus more of its energies and very constrained budget on exploration beyond Earth's orbit. Today, it will be better, even necessary, to have NASA focus its tight resources on preparing to send astronauts ultimately to destinations such as Mars."

Lights Out for South Africa?

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"The threat of power supply interruptions is never far from the public imagination," complains Business Day, a daily newspaper from Johannesburg, South Africa, "while the poor state of the distribution sector goes unnoticed." But is South Africa's power distribution industry really a "ticking ti

Good News for Gallium Nitride

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Demand for gallium nitride (GaN) LEDs is expected to grow nearly 40% in 2011, according to a recent study by IMS Research. The nearly $11-billion (USD) market for these blue/green light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is expected to rebound strongly from what Ross Young, IMS Senior Vice President of Disp

Seven Indirect Costs of a Failed Safety Program

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Indirect costs are 4 to 10 times the actual direct costs of an accident or serious OSHA violation.

Accidents don't just happen.

We all know the direct cost of a failed safety program - an accident that results in Fines, Medical Costs, Temporary Total Disability, Permanent Partial Disability, P

Escalator Fires

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Almost seems like a bad joke; people stuck on an escalator…..awaiting rescue.

Except 31 people died in the escalator fire at London England King's Cross Underground Station on 18^th November 1987. It was apparent to investigators that several fires had previous started and then had gone out

Car Reviews – 2011 Chevrolet Cruze

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I started out really excited about the Cruze. A week later, I'm still pretty excited. First of all, the design. I think the Cruze looks great from any angle, which is not something I'd also say about most cars these days. I'd say it looks like a car that costs more than $16,000. Nice work, Chevy.

How to Turn the Vacuum into a Superconductor

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From New Scientist - Online News:

Turning a vacuum into a superconductor could be as simple as zapping it with a super-powerful magnet. That's according to Maxim Chernodub of the University of Tours in France, who believes powerful magnetic fields could pluck charged particles out of