Astronauts as cable guys: Biggest wiring job in space station history (+video)

Posted on by

Cape Canaveral, Fla. Astronauts stepped out on a spacewalk Saturday to perform some tricky cable work needed before new American-made crew capsules can dock at the International Space Station.

It was the first of three spacewalks planned for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Terry Virts over the coming week.

Altogether, Wilmore and Virts have 764 feet of cable to run outside the space station. The longest single stretch, for installation Saturday, is 43 feet.

NASA considers this the most complicated cable-routing job in the 16-year history of the space station. Equally difficult will be running cable on the inside of the complex.

The extensive rewiring is needed to prepare for NASA's next phase 260 miles up: the 2017 arrival of the first commercial spacecraft capable of transporting astronauts to the orbiting lab. NASA is paying Boeing and SpaceX to build the capsules and fly them from Cape Canaveral, which hasn't seen a manned launch since the shuttles retired in 2011. Instead, Russia is doing all the taxi work for a steep price.

The first of two docking ports for the Boeing and SpaceX vessels still under development is due to arrive in June. Even more spacewalks will be needed to rig everything up.

Virts, who arrived at the space station in December, savored the moment as he floated out on his first spacewalk high above the South Pacific. "Pretty cool," Virts said. The men hauled out with them a big white bundle containing cables. Saturday's space walk began at 7:45 a.m. EST and was expected to last 6.5 hours. NASA is broadcastingthe spacewalk live online.

The second spacewalk will be Wednesday and the third on March 1.

Spacesuit concerns stalled the work by a day.

NASA wanted to make certain that the suits worn by Wilmore and Virts had reliable fan and pump assemblies. Two other fan-pump units failed aboard the space station in recent months and were returned to Earth earlier this month for analysis. Corrosion was discovered, the result of water intrusion from testing.

Read the original post:

Astronauts as cable guys: Biggest wiring job in space station history (+video)

Poll: Space Travel in the 21st Century: American Public Sees Benefits But Balks at Cost

Posted on by

West Long Branch, N.J. This week marks the 53rd anniversary of John Glenn's first manned orbital space flight. The Monmouth University Poll finds that most Americans feel the nation's 1960s space program gave us long-lasting benefits and many say increased spending on the space program today would be a good investment. However, less than half the public supports spending billions of dollars specifically to send astronauts back to the moon or to other planets a program that is currently in the works at NASA. Interestingly, this reluctance is similar to the public mood in the 1960s. A majority of Americans do support private space exploration, though.

A majority (56%) of Americans feel that the money and effort spent on the country's quest to land an astronaut on the moon in the 1960s left society with long-lasting benefits. Another 34% feel those benefits were short-lived. Young adults age 18 to 34 (60%) are somewhat more likely than older Americans age 55 and over (51%) i.e. those old enough to remember NASA's early space flights to feel that the program had long-lasting benefits. Fifty-five percent of those age 35 to 54 feel the same. A bare majority (51%) of the country feels that increased spending on the space program today would be a good investment, while 43% think it would not. Similar numbers of Democrats (54%), Republicans (51%) and independents (51%) see benefits in increased spending on space exploration. Men (57%) are more likely than women (45%) to see this as a good investment.

NASA launched the initial test spaceship for its new Orion program two months ago. This is designed to be the first step toward long-range human exploration of space including potential interplanetary travel. Just over 4-in-10 (42%) Americans are in favor of the U.S. government spending billions of dollars to send astronauts to places like the moon, Mars, and asteroids, while half (50%) oppose such an expenditure. There are no partisan differences in this opinion, although men (50%) are more supportive than women (36%) of funding this new program.

"Half a century after NASA's heyday, America is still fascinated by the prospects of space exploration, but balk at the price tag. However, they opposed the space program's cost in the 1960s as well," said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch, N.J.

A Harris Survey taken in July 1967 two years before the successful Apollo 11 moon landing found that only 34% of the public felt that the space program was worth its annual $4 billion price tag at the time while 54% said it wasn't worth it. Also, the same 1967 poll found the public to be divided 43% in favor to 46% opposed over NASA's drive to land an astronaut on the moon.

The future of space travel may now lie in private ventures, which most Americans do support. A number of entrepreneurs have already begun to sell seats on private space flights, although those efforts have been set back by the crash of a Virgin Galactic test run last October. Still, nearly 6-in-10 (58%) Americans say that private companies and individuals should be able to build their own rockets to take people into space. Another 37% feel that space travel should be restricted to national governments.

Just under half of the public believes that ordinary people traveling regularly into space is very (13%) or somewhat likely (31%) in the next twenty or thirty years. Most think regular passenger flights to space are either not too (28%) or not at all (27%) likely in the next few decades. It is worth noting that public opinion has not been a very good prognosticator of the pace of space exploration in the past. A Gallup Poll taken in 1954 found that just 38% of the public believed that "men in rockets will be able to reach the moon" by the end of the 20th century. When Gallup asked in 1965 whether a moon landing would occur within twenty years, 59% said yes but 31% said no just four years before the feat was actually accomplished.

Just over 1-in-4 (28%) Americans in the current Monmouth University Poll say they would like to take a free trip on a private spaceship if it was offered to them, including 38% of men and 17% of women. This is slightly higher than the number of people who felt brave enough to attempt a space flight in the early days of the space program. A Gallup Poll taken in 1966 found that 17% of Americans were interested in hitching a ride on the first moon shot, while 80% said they would give it a pass. The Monmouth University Poll was conducted by telephone from December 10 to 14, 2014 with 1,008 adults in the United States. This sample has a margin of error of + 3.1 percent. The poll was conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch, New Jersey.

Polling results

View post:

Poll: Space Travel in the 21st Century: American Public Sees Benefits But Balks at Cost

NASA African American History Month Profile-Ryan Warner (Armstrong Flight Research Center) – Video

Posted on by


NASA African American History Month Profile-Ryan Warner (Armstrong Flight Research Center)
Ryan Warner Williams works as an aerospace engineer at Armstrong Flight Research Center. He currently works on the Assurance of Flight Critical Systems proje...

By: NASA

Read the original:

NASA African American History Month Profile-Ryan Warner (Armstrong Flight Research Center) - Video

The 5 coolest NASA missions that never happened

Posted on by

Provided by Vox.com The MOLAB could travel at 21 miles per hour. (USGS)

NASA is full of ambitious dreamers. But those dreams cost money. And Congress has to approve them first.

Ever since the end of the Apollo program, this tension has meant that many of NASA's ideas are killed before they ever progress much beyond concept drawings.

These ideas have ranged from far-fetched fantasies to financially prudent missions. Some were just sketches and equations on paper, while others materialized into models and test materials. But they all share one characteristic: they never happened.

Here are some of the most fascinating ideas concocted over the years.

As the Apollo program made progress toward a crewed moon landing, some NASA scientists made plans for longer human missions to explore and study the moon's surface.

Toward that end, in 1963, NASA contracted with GM to produce an inhabitable lab on wheels that astronauts could live in for weeks at a time as they drove around the moon. It was essentially a lunar RV, powered by an engine from a Chevrolet Corvair (the car that eventually became infamous as the subject of Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed).

But after a few successful Apollo landings, plans for longer-term exploration of the moon were cancelled. GM had built a single prototype, and it was eventually loaned to the US Geological Survey (which used it for several projects in the deserts of the southwest).

Following the success of the Apollo program, some scientists began drawing up ideas for enormous space colonies that would be established on stations in Earth's orbit. A 1975 NASA study, for instance, envisioned "a space habitat where 10,000 people work, raise families, and live out normal human lives."

Plans were devised for several different space stations, each of which would have rotated to use centrifugal force to simulate the feeling of gravity. Residents would use soil brought from the moon to grown their own food, purify their own water, and have their own parks, shops, schools, and hospitals. One of the colony's purposes would be industry: "Using solar energy to generate electricity and to power solar furnaces the colonists refine aluminum, titanium, and silicon from lunar ores shipped inexpensively into space," the report noted.

Original post:

The 5 coolest NASA missions that never happened

Meet the Team That Makes It Possible for the Blind to Use Facebook

Posted on by

Jessie Lorenz cant see Facebook. But it gives her a better way to see the worldand it gives the world a better way to see her.

Lorenz has been blind since birth, and in some ways, this limits how she interacts with the people around her. A lot of people are afraid of the blind, she explains. When you meet them in person, there are barriers. But in connecting with many of the same people on Facebook, she can push through these barriers. Facebook lets me control the narrative and break down some of the stigma and show people who I am, she says. It can change hearts and minds. It can make people like mewho are scarymore real and more human.

Lorenzuses Facebook through an iPhone and a tool called Voiceover,which converts text into spoken words. Its not a perfect arrangementFacebook photos are typically identified only with the word photobut in letting her read and write on the social network, Voiceover and other tools provide a wonderfully immediate way to interact with people both near and far.

I can ask other parents about a playdate or a repair man or a babysitter, just like anyone else would, says Lorenz, the executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center, a non-profit that supports people with disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Blindness becomes irrelevant in situations like that.

Lorenz is one of about 50,000 people who actively use Facebook through Apple Voiceover. No doubt, many more use it through additional text-to-speech tools. And tens of thousands of otherspeople who are deaf, or cant use computer keyboards or mice or touch screensuse the social network in ways that most of its 1.3 billion users do not. They use closed captioning, mouth-controlled joysticks, and other toolssome built into Facebook, some that plug into Facebook from the outside.

So many people are using the social network through such tools, Facebook now employs a team of thinkers dedicated to ensuring they work as well as possible. We wanted to build empathy into our engineering, says Jeff Wieland, who helps oversee this effort.

He calls it the Facebook Accessibility team, and its a vital thing. Not all online services are well suited to people with disabilities. Google is really lousy, says Lorenz, explaining that she can use Gmail but not Google Docs or Google Calendar. And as a service like Facebook evolveswith engineers changing things on an almost daily basisthey consistently run the risk of undermining Voiceover and other alternative means of using the social network.

Tech companies have long worked to ensure their software and services can be used by people with disabilities. Ramya Sethuraman, who helps drive Facebooks effort, worked on similar issues with old-school software at IBM. But in the modern age, where so many services change from day to day, this requires a greater diligence.

As Sethuraman points out, other companies are tackling these issues in ways similar to Facebook, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and eBay, and for Lorenz, the improvement is apparent. The industry is becoming more conscious about these things, she says, and very slowly, its getting better.

The task is certainly more difficult in the modern age. But at the same time, the possibilities are greater. And the stakes are higher. There are more people with disabilities than ever before. People are living longer. People are more likely to survive accidents, says Adriana Mallozzi, who has cerebral palsy, typically uses Facebook and other services through a joystick she can control with her mouth, and serves as a kind of tech consultant for people with disabilities in the Boston area. Companies have to take this into consideration.

More here:

Meet the Team That Makes It Possible for the Blind to Use Facebook