Monthly Archives: March 2021

Long before SpaceX's self-landing rockets, Tesla-riding space mannequin or Starship prototype tests for future Mars missions, the California company was already doing daring things in space exploration.

Veteran Houston-based space reporter Eric Berger, now of Ars Technica and formerly of The Houston Chronicle, tackles the early years of SpaceX in his new book "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" (William Morrow, 2021). The book, while focusing heavily on SpaceX's early years, shows the roots of the daring steps the now-famous company is taking into even newer frontiers: human missions and Mars exploration.

You'll read about the development of SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1, built at a time when few companies dared to create these flying machines themselves. It took four tries to even get the rocket safely into orbit, and Berger's book shows the conversations and innovation that SpaceX embraced over several years to get Falcon 1 launched safely.

Related: See the evolution of SpaceX's rockets in pictures

Berger told Space.com that when Falcon 1 finally made it to space on Sept. 28, 2008, he didn't notice. But he did have a valid excuse Hurricane Ike had just hit Houston and he, along with many other reporters in the city, pulled many extra hours to keep the community informed.

"I was completely swamped in coverage for that storm and I was completely oblivious," he told Space.com in an interview. Even Berger's home field of space was busy, as at least one space station delivery was delayed due to Ike and NASA was working extra hours itself to keep space shuttle flights running on time and safely.

But Berger has been following SpaceX closely in the years since, and decided to write the book after witnessing the spectacular debut launch of the company's new Falcon Heavy rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in 2018. That mission saw the booster rockets safely self-land near the launch site, as a Tesla soared into space with a mannequin nicknamed "Starman."

"I realized not just that SpaceX was a super interesting company, but this really was a transformative space company of my generation," Berger said. "There's been a lot of efforts in the past to do what SpaceX has done, but they failed. I wanted to see how they succeeded."

Berger focused on the Falcon 1's development, testing and launch as SpaceX being such a small company at the time didn't receive nearly as much media coverage about that rocket as subsequent generations. He recalls, like many other reporters of the era, having a "healthy skepticism of all the grand claims" SpaceX was discussing at the time like building a spaceship called Dragon (which has now flown 20 cargo missions and two crewed missions to the International Space Station and counting) or making launches happen with reusable, landable rockets now a fairly routine thing after many failed, explosive tests.

Looking back at SpaceX's claims, Berger says he has come to realize those claims had value and vision: "It wasn't going to be done on time, but they probably would get there," he said. Berger urged everyone to therefore keep an eye on the early Starship development; while prototypes are exploding now, SpaceX is just getting started.

Fortunately for the book, the early part of Berger's research in 2019 took place well before the novel coronavirus pandemic, allowing Berger to make several visits to the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California and to do interviews in person. Once the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020, naturally he pivoted the remaining work to phone interviews and remote research. Berger added he was able to find time for writing in between his normal duties at Ars Technica, as he has a flexible work schedule but a lot of writing also took place at night, away from family duties that normally take up much of his time.

Readers new to SpaceX may be disappointed that Berger stops the story after Falcon 1's first flight, but he said he hopes to one day carry on the tale to the modern day in more depth; the book briefly touches upon the last decade of SpaceX work, but more could be said.

"I think the key message is the world's most interesting space company almost didn't exist, and if it hadn't been for these crazy adventurers for a small group of engineers SpaceX would not exist," Berger added. "You wouldn't see drone ship landings on the Atlantic Ocean, or the Falcon Heavy launches, or Crew Dragon missions to the International Space Station. SpaceX is a great American success story and it was fun to go back and find out how it happened."

You can buy "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger on Amazon.com as hardcover book ($23.79), Kindle e-book ($14.99), or an audiobook narrated by Rob Shapiro ($21.55). You can also read excerpts of "Liftoff" on Ars Technica and Space News.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Continued here:

'Liftoff': Eric Berger's tale of the wild years of SpaceX's youth - Space.com

A Laconia company is hoping to fill a vacuum and is willing to send a satellite you might think of it as a Roomba for low-earth orbit into space to do it. If their plans pan out, the owners of Rogue Space Systems expect their venture might make space a little tidier and, by extension, a safer place to operate.

One of the two worst days in the history of space exploration occurred on Feb. 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart as it re-entered the Earths atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard and grounding the Space Shuttle program.

Investigators determined that the disaster was caused by a piece of foam that broke off one of the fuel tanks during launch. The foam, which can be seen on a video recording, strikes one of the shuttles wings, and likely caused a hole in the ceramic heat shield on the exterior of the wing. That damage allowed heat caused by the re-entry to penetrate into the wing, destroying the internal structure of the wing and causing the rest of the vehicle to disintegrate in the skies over Texas.

In the years since, damage from debris has only increased, as small particles left behind in low-Earth orbit number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. One article published on NASAs Headquarters Library website notes that theres more than 6,000 pounds of debris in orbit around the Earth, and each of those pieces is traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour.

On Union Avenue, in an old mill building across the Winnipesaukee River from downtown, a small start-up is aiming to create and operate satellites that make space safer for other satellites. Rogue Space Systems is less than a year old, but it already has the attention of NASA and the Air Forces Research Laboratory.

The company was founded by Jeromy Grimmett, who left the information technology world to step into what he sees as the biggest business opportunity that is being completely unserved.

Grimmett is a Louisiana native who worked on missile guidance systems for the U.S. Army. He moved to Alton to take an IT job based in Kittery, Maine, then in 2018 decided to go back to school so he could find a new career path.

He never finished his degree, though, because he attended a space conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 15, 2019. He traces the beginning of Rogue to the moment that conference ended.

I left the MIT space conference, called my partner and said, Im starting a space company.

In less than the span of a lifetime, human civilization has become deeply dependent on satellites, and that dependency only grows with each rocket launch. Grimmett said there are more than a trillion dollars worth of assets in orbit at any given time, and no one offering to take care of them.

Theres nobody providing the services Rogue does, Grimmett said.

Rogue Space Systems is designing orbital robots orbots, they call them as well as an artificial intelligence system they will use to approach satellites. The orbots which can also be controlled by engineers on Earth can provide close-up visual inspection and can listen to the internal operations of the satellite. The orbots will be able to provide maintenance and repairs without taking them out of service.

Grimmett said that, in the case of the Columbia, one of his orbots could have been dispatched to inspect the shuttles exterior prior to its re-entry into the atmosphere and therefore could have saved the lives of those astronauts.

Rogues orbots are also being designed to address the plague of space debris. Rogue engineers are designing the orbots to be able to encounter space debris, caused by accidental or intentional destruction of satellites, and use a laser to change their mass. That state change would cause the particle, which could be smaller than one millimeter, to fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Grimmett envisions a fleet of his orbots flying in formation ahead of particularly valuable assets, such as the International Space Station, and sweeping a path through its orbit.

It might sound like science fiction, but Grimmett and his team are serious about bringing their idea into reality, and theyve attracted some powerful believers.

When youre doing something like this, first, everyones skeptical, Grimmett said. Among his first believers was another space entrepreneur, someone whose business was already successful. That contact said he could see about getting Rogue a meeting with NASA scientists who, if they thought the project could work, would be willing to give a prototype a ride into orbit on one of their rockets. Sure, said Grimmett.

Some time went by, and then one Sunday afternoon he got an email. NASA would meet with them that Thursday, June 4. He was told he would be meeting with a team from NASA, who would pepper them with questions and look for holes in their plan they didnt want to waste a spot on the rocket on something that wasnt ready for prime time.

It was a make-or-break moment, and Grimmett and his team had less than 100 hours to prepare.

I was nervous as hell. I was scared out of my mind. I was talking to heroes, people who are doing what you dream of doing, Grimmett said. To top it all off, their internet connection was flaking out the morning of the meeting, so he called in a favor and moved his whole team to the Huot Technical Center, and it went off without a hitch, he said.

The team from NASA liked what they heard and gave him a verbal OK. Shortly afterward, though, he was contacted by another space-minded governmental body, the Air Force.

At the end of February, Rogue announced the signing of a three-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The agreement means the Air Force and Rogue will work together on testing and development in areas where Rogues interests overlap with the Air Forces mission. It also means that the Air Force will be the one to give a Rogue orbot its first ride into space. Grimmett said he and his team are working toward a launch sometime in 2022.

Rogue currently has about 20 employees, a mix of full-time and part-time, some of whom are working on salary but most of whom are laboring in exchange for equity in the company. Grimmett said he expects to have about 25 workers, almost exclusively engineers, when fully staffed.

Rogue is currently in fundraising mode. Rather than chase venture capitalists, Grimmett is hoping to raise $5.5-million through the crowdfunding site TruCrowd.

It might be unconventional, but that is how Grimmett got to the point where he is today.

We break the rules, he said, explaining the name he gave his company. While other satellites are made to last for years, Rogues are disposable by design. They are built to get as much done as they can with the fuel they carry, reserving the last bit of energy in its tank to shove it out of orbit to be burned up by the atmosphere.

The way that we solve problems and develop solutions is not the same way that traditional space and engineering firms do. Theres a lot of chaos engineering, Grimmett said.

See the article here:

Laconia tech company eyes the vacuum of space - New Hampshire Business Review

Along with millions of others, I was elated when the Perseverance Mars 2020 rover touched down safely on Mars a couple of weeks ago. That was followed by being awestruck with the picture of Perseverance dangling below the sky crane just above the surface with the wisps of dust blowing from the sky cranes thrusters and then actual video of the entry, descent and landing from various cameras on the rover, sky crane and back shell the following day. It was absolutely awesome, jaw-dropping, breathtaking and magnificently wonderful!

In addition to the unveiling of the landing video as seen by the various cameras, there were two other segments from the press briefing that stood out for me. The first was when the question was asked about why we explore, why we spend money on exploring other planets and how does that benefit humanity.

This question about NASA spending is raised usually because NASA is very open about the costs of its research and exploration and also because most people have a significant misunderstanding of the proportion of the U.S. budget that is devoted to NASA. Of the almost-$5 trillion federal budget, NASA accounts for just 0.5 percent; for every federal dollar spent, just half of one penny goes to NASA. The U.S. economy is about $20 trillion, so one calculation found that U.S. citizens spend more on dog biscuits than we spend on NASA.

Most of NASAs budget is directed to aeronautics (making flying more fuel-efficient and safer with improved air traffic control systems and better airplanes) and Earth-observing science missions (looking down instead of looking up) to give us the data we need to predict how energy, water and nutrients will flow in the near future as well as the long-term future. A minority of NASAs half penny is devoted to space exploration. With that less than half a penny, Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate of NASA noted that we want to address questions that have driven humanity truly historic questions in so many ways are what were really about. He continued that as humans we want to be sure that the contributions of our generation are things that really move humanity forward of what we know and that we really affect how we think about ourselves that so often comes through our research. He also noted the commercial spinoffs that result from developing the technologies needed to answer the basic (fundamental) science questions, e.g., GPS, weather forecasting satellites, dialysis machines, freeze-dried food, etc. (see spinoff.nasa.gov for other examples).

Matt Wallace, Perseverance deputy project manager at JPL, has given public talks during the 25-plus years hes been landing things on Mars. He used to give a long list of reasons to explore the planets but now hes come to the conclusion of how can we not explore? Its just who we are, its what we are. Its in our DNA. You couldnt stop us as a species from exploring. We want to answer questions we dont know the answer to and we even want to find the questions we dont even know need to be asked. I hope we can be OK with spending at least half a penny on things like that.

About five minutes later, a young person asked if there was a point they thought the mission was going to be impossible. Wallace said for him it was last March when COVID-19 shut things down just after they had shipped the rover to Kennedy Space Center for launch. How were they going to do all the reassembly of the spacecraft pieces after they arrived in Florida and test it as they put everything together in the rocket that had to launch in July (or theyd have to wait another 26 months for the launch window)? How could they do all that and keep the workers and their families safe from the virus?

A lot of smart, passionate people came together to figure it out. Justin Maki, Perseverance imaging scientist and instrument operations team chief, and Jessica Samuels, Perseverance surface mission manager, noted that JPL is a team of really smart people who ask a lot of tough questions of any project (withering reviews) of what could go wrong to make sure that they are thinking about all the things they need to think about for that project to work. As a community, as a team, they help each other make sure theyre covering all those bases.

If youre going to build a rover that has to land itself in a dangerous location without help because the humans are over 11 light-minutes away, that critical review is what you need to do. If were going to be successful in pushing the envelope to develop the techniques and analytical tools necessary to answer fundamental questions and solve global problems, were going to need to adopt that same attitude of critical examination of assumptions and evidence-based decision-making by a team working together. Yes, thats worth at least half a penny!

Contributing columnist Nick Strobel is director of the William M. Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College and author of the award-winning website AstronomyNotes.com.

Read more:

NICK STROBEL: Awe-inspiring exploration worth every half-penny - The Bakersfield Californian

The founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is currently the second richest man on Earth. In the last few months, Elons company has prepared for and launched a few rockets aiming to explore the space, but has faced failure upon their crashing and destruction soon after launch. However, the ambitious engineer appears to have an everlasting determination to win over space with his company and aerospace rocket projects.

Watch the video here:

Also read: Covid-19 Vaccine News: Arvind Kejriwal Receives The First Dose Of Covishield Along With His Family

Not too long ago, a Mars-bound rocketship was launched by the worlds second-richest man, Elon Musks company SpaceX. The rocket prototype, named SN10 was launched for testing from a launching pad situated in Texas, the United States of America. Upon launch, this rocket made its way up to around 10 kilometres above the earth, which took about 5 minutes. Loaded with around 100 tonnes of weight inside, to ensure its capacity to transport human beings to the Moon and Mars in the future, it began its landing procedure next. 6 minutes and 20 seconds post-launch, the rocket made a soft touchdown at the pad. However, soon after the announcement of its successful landing, it exploded. This made for the third time that one of Elon Musks rockets failed.

Also read: Celeb Spotting: Nora Fatehi, Kriti Sanon Make A Style Splash In The City

Before this, SpaceX had launched another rocket prototype named SN8 from the Texas launching pad. And something very similar had happened then too with the rocket exploding upon its landing on the pad. The explosion was massive and it led to the rocket bursting into numerous pieces. While most people feel disappointment upon the failure of their missions, Elon Musk seemed to have felt nothing like it. Instead, he was seen tweeting out to congratulate the team while explaining what had gone wrong and led to the failure of the rockets safe and sound landing. Due to his determination and zeal, the team of SpaceX succeeded in preparing for another rocket testing within the next two months as well. Later, the company sent out satellites into space, which successfully installed itself there.

Also read: Amazon Changes Its Mobile App Icon Again After Users Compare The Previous One To Adolf Hitlers Moustache

Stay updated with thelatest trending news only on ZEE5!

The rest is here:

Elon Musks Ultimate Dream And Goal Is To Succeed at Space Exploration And Transport; Read - Zee Kannada

Since July, a small helicopter drone named Ingenuity had been hitched to the underbelly of the Perseverance rover as it made its way to Mars. The drones arrival this February marked the first time an autonomous aerial platform is operated outside Earths atmosphere.

The drone was also the first to be used in space science exploration and other firsts will likely follow. Ingenuitys planned experiential flights on Mars will aim to prove the effectiveness of aerial exploration for future interplanetary missions to scout areas once considered out of sight and reach.

The project like any other scientific advancement leverages decades of scientific expertise. But the drone, based on Qualcomms Snapdragon Flight platform, also leverages private sector knowledge and guidance. This advancement would not have been possible unless the two core collaborators NASA and Qualcomm Technologies had not connected at the right time and in the right way.

To fully understand the scientific achievement Ingenuity represents, its necessary to detail the challenges that Mars exploration presents. First, Mars atmosphere is 99% less dense than Earths, which means achieving lift is very difficult. Second, because of the time it takes for communication signals to pass between Earth and Mars anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes remote controlled flight is not possible.

To enable this mission in the face of these challenges, Ingenuity required high computational performance at extremely low power for autonomous navigation via computer vision, intelligent decision making, and a small, lightweight design. Such a project required not just NASAs expertise in space science exploration, but also required knowledge of cutting-edge technologies. These technologies included flight navigation based on computationally-complex flight algorithms and a rich array of computer vision enablement technologies for drone location determination and object avoidance, something only a private sector company could provide.

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the worlds attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will helpnot harmhumanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, blockchain, data policy, digital trade, drones, internet of things (IoT), precision medicine and environmental innovations.

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

Want to help us shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Contact us to find out how you can become a member or partner.

NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) approached Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI) in 2015 as the Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight platform was being developed. The Flight Platform was designed to enable drone manufacturers to build drone platforms quickly and efficiently.

These specifications fit with JPLs needs: a commercial-based platform with the correct size and power constraints that could manage flight, control, and the ability to take and store images that would ultimately prove the utility of drones on another planet for the betterment of space science.

Through this process, it became evident that the autonomous capabilities Qualcomm was commercializing for next generation automotive experiences were in lockstep with the mission requirements JPL was seeking for aerial space exploration and that QTI could understand its program objectives. As a result, QTI was brought on as a consult to act as a sounding board while JPL was integrating a solution.

Several factors led to the successful partnership, revealing elements any collaborators in the public and private sector could put into place. They include:

This two-way engagement enabled QTI and JPL to take an empathetic view that unified their collective thinking toward a common goal. Early open discussions and brainstorming sessions revealed how commercial technology could best address mission specifications. By focusing on the needs of the mission, the teams could guide one another through in-person visits early on. Later, a cadence of collaboration via teleconference and email was created to help answer questions as they arose.

Conventional wisdom suggests that public sector and private sector ecosystems are vastly different in structure, composition, language and priorities. Common ground can be found, however, because many of the problems each ecosystem tries to solve for its constituents are often remarkably similar.

"Engagement cannot be one and done it must be continual, ensuring that the key collaborators can keep problem solving through different phases of development."

Still, the opportunity for public and private partnerships isnt just to find short-term solutions that benefit both parties. As the public sector cannot match the scale at which the private industry invests in developing new capabilities, the public sector needs to find ways tap into that momentum and dynamic expertise, enabling government to move at the speed of innovation.

Governments that continually work with industry do not limit themselves to waiting for technology when it is productized and available commercially on the shelf (COTS). As this partnership with Qualcomm and JPL shows, by utilizing an early engagement point with the commercial industry, governments can dramatically shift the cycle of change and innovation. In this case, the cycle shrank from almost 20 to just 5 years.

The more the public and private sector learn how to leverage their strengths, the better technology will address existing and anticipated needs. Ingenuity provides a perfect reminder of collaborative power a pioneering technology thats the unique product of great minds coming together.

Follow this link:

The first drone on Mars shows what the right collaborations make possible - World Economic Forum

For All Mankind, the alternative space race story from Apple TV+, returns with US-Soviet relations at a new low and NASA under pressure to militarise the moon

By Bethan Ackerley

Molly Cobb (played by Sonya Walger) faces some tough choices

Apple TV

For All Mankind

Created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi

Advertisement

Apple TV+

EARLY in the second season of For All Mankind, Ronald D. Moores counterfactual take on the space race, astronaut Molly Cobb is faced with an impossible decision: let a friend die on the lunar surface as a massive solar storm hits, or rescue him and risk getting a fatal dose of radiation. Viewers know Cobb has beaten tougher odds before, but as she is forced to choose, you fear that she is living in a world that no longer rewards heroics.

The shows alternative history began with one key change: in this universe, the US was beaten to the moon by the Soviet Union in 1969. The rivalry between the nations grew and accelerated progress in space, with NASA sending women to the moon in the early 1970s and establishing a base, Jamestown, there in 1973.

After a slow start, the first season did a terrific job of conveying the importance of space travel, while killing off astronauts left and right to show what a grim endeavour it can be. All the same, despite the thrills, it felt a little soulless at times.

When the second series begins, after a jump to 1983, life on Earth doesnt look too rosy. In its version of world events, Ronald Reagan became president earlier than he really did and superpower relations curdled, prompting yet more resources to be poured into space exploration. History fans should comb through the opening montage to catch all the ways this drama diverges from the real timeline: the Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Iran hostage crisis among them.

Politicking threatens to scupper plans for an astronaut and a cosmonaut to shake hands while in orbit

In this version of the 1980s, the moon is just another front of the cold war. Up to 30 astronauts at a time now live at Jamestown while looking for lithium at Shackleton crater, but the Russians edge ever closer to US mining operations. On Earth, the Johnson Space Centers director Margo Madison and other NASA officials are under pressure to militarise the moon. Politicking even threatens to scupper plans for an astronaut and a cosmonaut to shake hands while in orbit, the lone gesture of peace in a world on the brink of annihilation.

For All Mankind is hardly the most nuanced take on the US-Soviet relationship aside from a few scenes between Madison, astronaut Danielle Poole and their Russian counterparts, almost no common ground is acknowledged between the nations. Yet the cold war setting has made the show a leaner, darker beast.

Underdeveloped characters like Ed Baldwin, the sour-faced, square-jawed lead, have fewer but better things to do this time around. Ed, for instance, is now unhappily settled in his role as head of the astronaut office, sartorially muzzled by milquetoast sweaters and clearly longing for adventure.

And despite the streamlining, key plot threads from last season arent left dangling. Take Pooles decision to break her own arm to hide a fellow astronauts declining mental health. Though she was the first African-American person in space, Pooles accident gave NASA an excuse to sideline her like the few other black astronauts.

As the season progresses, it is clear the astronauts and the NASA team are at the mercy of natural and geopolitical forces almost entirely outside their control almost. It is in the small moments of defiance and sacrifice, whether that is staring down a solar storm or shaking an enemys hand, that For All Mankind proves it has figured out what kind of show it wants to be.

TV

Battlestar Galactica (2004-9)

Ronald D. Moore

When human civilisation is decimated, survivors must travel the galaxy in search of a home. Moores thoughtful series doesnt shy away from the grim practicalities of space exploration.

Film

The Martian Ridley Scott

Stranded on Mars, astronaut Mark Watney goes to ingenious lengths to survive. A rare space blockbuster in terms of its homage to realism or something close.

More on these topics:

Read more from the original source:

For All Mankind season 2 review: The cold war is raging on the moon - New Scientist

As a high school student, Terry Himes dreamed of exploring space. Today, the Spartan who graduated in 1975 from Michigan State Universitys College of Engineering is living his dream.

Himes is helping NASA communicate with its robotic spacefaring explorers.

Just today, I was building the relay commands for Mars 2020, but also Curiosity and InSight, says Himes, a spacecraft and software engineer for NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASAs Perseverance rover arrived on Mars, landing safely on Feb. 18, joining the missions Himes references. The InSight lander touched down on Mars in 2018, and Curiosity is a rover thats clocked more than 3,000 Martian days on the red planet.

The Mars 2020 mission is unique, however, in that it became the first to successfully beam footage of landing on another planet back to Earth. And this footage of Perseverances dramatic descent has captivated the globe.

But this monumental landing was also, in a way, Perseverances morning commute, albeit a one-way trip. The rover has clocked in and is getting to work, looking for evidence that life once existed on the planet and collecting Martian rock and soil samples.

And Himes is on the team working to bring those samples to Earth. He's no stranger to retrieving extraterrestrial samples, having helpedgather specimens from a comet and the Sun's solar wind as part of the Stardust and Genesis missions, respectively. Now, he's joinedthe Mars Sample Return mission, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency that aims to bring pieces of Mars to our planet in the early 2030s.

In the meantime, Himes is helping care for a fleet of rovers, landers and orbiters exploring our solar system.

Terry Himes at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in 2008, working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission. Courtesy of Terry Himes.

Most of the days are really looking at the health and welfare of the spacecraft, then getting prepared for the next time we have to uplink something, he says.

NASA also has satellites orbiting Mars that, among other things, help relay communications to and from the missions on the Martian surface as the orbiters fly over. Over the next two weeks, there are dozens of planned flyovers, so Himes is a busy guy.

Flight operations is not for everyone. Its a little more intense, its a little more stressful than some of the other things, he says. I like to say that an hour is forever and a day is an eternity.

Fortunately, Himes always has liked keeping busy. Hes also a musician and, during high school, he played gigs around southeast Michigan even crossing paths with the likes of Bob Seger to help pay for college.

He chose to pursue a degree at MSU in computer science, which he saw as his ticket to NASA.

I was kind of gearing my whole education around working for NASA. I was shooting rockets up when I was 14, he says. I was looking at pictures of galaxies and thinking, NASA is where I gotta be.

When Himes finished his education, though, the Jet Propulsion Lab wasnt hiring. But in 1990, when Himes was running his own company, a former colleague reached out with an opportunity.

I got a call from a computer science guy that I worked with and he said, Hey, were building this spacecraft that you always wanted to do. Its called the Mars Observer.

Himes joined the mission as a consultant and has been working with space exploration spacecraft ever since. In 2001, he began working as a direct employee of JPL, and then, he says, 20 years flew by.

Thats what started it. It was just pure fate, Himes said. A fate of his own making, though, which is why Himes encourages students to start cultivating their own paths as soon as they can.

Work as hard as you can in the area that youre interested in, Himes says, urging current Spartan students to take advantage of summer internships if they can. The internships are invaluable for not only the work experience, he says, but also growing a network and developing interpersonal skills, which make job candidates stand out.

You dont have to be the top person in your class, Himes says. But if youve worked on projects and you know how to communicate, work in teams and present your ideas, thats what people are looking for.

Himes says his education at Michigan State helped prepare him to be the driven team player that NASA needs for its missions.

I always thought that Michigan State had a top-notch computer science department, he says. It prepared me for the idea that you have to work in teams if you want to get big jobs done. Thats all there is to it.

Continued here:

Meet the Spartan who helped NASA go to Mars (again) - MSUToday

With the sensational exploits of the Mars rover, space reinscribes itself on our minds

Humans have always looked up. The verticality of our imagination helps us imagine what the worlds out there may be like.

Outer space is not just about NASA, ISRO and the superspecialised scientist. It has mattered from the ancient world to the present, from cosmographers to warmongers, philosophers to Christopher Nolan. Astroculture is science and fiction, imagination and data. It is as old as humanity.

Once the Copernican revolution altered forever the view of the universe, cultural imaginaries grew around it, exemplified in texts like Alexander von Humboldts Cosmos (1849). Telescopes, 20th century expeditions to the farther reaches of the solar system, satellites and the rapidly advancing sciences of astronomy, brought planets and other bodies literally into our ken.

With the sensational exploits of the Mars rover, Perseverance, space reinscribes itself on our minds as a new astroculture emerges which repeats, albeit differently, such a culture from the modern era.

How would earth look like from the Moon or outer space? Not until the Blue Marble photographs (1972) would we know. But humankind could certainly imagine. All imaginings of outer space emerge from the horror vacui: the fear of vast, sublime, inky emptiness. Humanity, therefore, wished to know what space contained which led to space explorations or imagined what it contained. Literature and later popular culture stepped in where no man had gone before (as the cult TV series, Star Trek, put it).

Ancient astronomers in various civilisations produced cosmographies, the first texts of astroculture. The earliest recorded observations in Europe date back to 2000 BC, with Egyptian, Indian and Mesopotamian cosmologies dating farther back. The Greeks may well have systematised cosmology. In more modern times, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote his Somnium in 1608, about how the earth would look from the moon. Francis Godwins The Man in the Moon (1638) visualised space travel and is often treated, alongside Somnium and Margaret Cavendishs The Blazing World (1666) as one of the first exercises in science fiction.

Keats spoke of astronomers rejoicing over a new planet. An entire English nursery rhyme, popular even today, is devoted to stars. Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Percy Shelley, Robert Frost and numerous canonical poets were influenced by and imagined astronomical developments. The moon and stars are ubiquitous in films and songs in Indian languages. UFOs are the stuff of everyday imagining through much of the 20th century, of course.

In the 20th century, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and, of course, Hollywood saw potential in outer space. Aligning current science with considerable imaginative ideas of what outer space was, these popular texts across media altered outer space into an extension of human geography, economics and politics. Space in these discourses was variously imagined: interplanetary space, deep space, interstellar space, the cosmos, and of course, the heavens. This imagining of space has produced major discourses and images: from our fates as determined by astronomical alignments to terraforming in which humanity modifies the atmosphere and conditions on other planets to make them amenable to human life.

It is the place of and for adventure, when there are no longer unexplored places on earth. It houses strange and often threatening creatures, from the Alien and Independence Day films to The Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton), or creatures more intelligent than us so that when they arrive, they wish to understand us (Octavia Butlers Xenogenesis trilogy suggested this).

Space was the habitation of the Other of humanity, exactly how people from Africa and Asia were once the Other in colonial imaginings. Just as maps once marked distant areas of the earth with here lie monsters to describe people of other races, the literary-visual imagination of outer space maps it as monstrous. This is where astroculture repeats humanitys colonial histories. And as the human imagination moves towards the posthuman, cohabitation with alien species (we return to Octavia Butler here) becomes the subject of a new outer-space mythology.

However, as Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) would say, Sometimes I think the surest sign thatintelligent lifeexists elsewhere in theuniverseis that none of ithas triedtocontact us.

The visual construction of outer space not least in the form of artists rendering of Pioneer or Voyager spacecraft traversing the outer reaches of the solar system produced a space iconography that is comparable only to the Double Helix and the visuals of the human insides (that is a nice balance: the world within us, and the world out there). Outer space is mainly a visual journey, and an epic.

School textbooks with images of the solar system imprint the very idea of outer space, and its constituents, on growing children, so much so that we can envisage a space-pedagogy at work. Recognisable images of space heroes like Neil Armstrong, Rakesh Sharma or Kalpana Chawla enable such a pedagogy. Photographs of Apollo, Challenger, Chandrayaan produce the popular mythology of space.

Every Space Shuttle mission of NASA has a unique mission patch worn by the astronauts the patches are part of the American space iconography because later they are showcased in museums and enter space lore in popular culture. As Andrew Maclaren has argued in a 2019 essay in the journal Geopolitics, the patches underscore the American domination, and perhaps ownership, of outer space.

Then there is astronomical art, dating back to Neolithic times, with paintings of the night sky, the 14th century manuscript illustrations of the same, Durers famous globe, the paintings of astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux, among others. The work of artists such as Arthur Woods (Cosmic Dancer, a sculpture) that have become fixtures on space stations, are a part of this visual iconography of space.

In the recent past, HubbleSite, from NASA, has presented images of the birth of stars in the Eagle Nebula. Evaporating Gaseous Globules (abbreviated appropriately as EGGs)take the form of towers of gases:

The columns dubbed elephant trunks protrude from the wall of a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen, like stalagmites rising above the floor of a cavern. Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow

With stunning images of supernovae, Neptune Dark Spots, and others, HubbleSite is space iconography taken to new heights. What is also interesting is that many of the images are artists reconstructions, based on both theory and data, of astronomical events such as how the exoplanet HD 106906b may have evolved over time, arriving at its current, widely separated, eccentric and highly misaligned orbit

Then there were the political imaginings. Nationalism began to extend into outer space at the height of the Cold War, and outer space, like Antarctica, was a domain to be explored, and perhaps owned. The pride in space exploration by any country that has ever sent up a satellite indicates that all nationalism is finally about territory, whether terra firma, the aqueous world or outer space.

Space museums mushrooming in these nations, the exhibition of space shuttles, the biographies of space heroes all signal an astro-nationalism. Astro-nationalism generates frenzied support for the space programme, and ignores the cost of astro-pride, as Gary Westfahl pointed out in his 1997 essay, The Case Against Space. Astro-nationalism sees potential in outer space, and the objects out there whether this was the harnessing of solar energies on earth or possible human colonies on a suitable planet.

Space iconography and the innumerable films about outer space notably, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity, The Martian, Interstellar, Contact generate myths and aspirations for the human future. As mankind evolves over/in time, these films propose that the evolution will also be an evolution in space: moving beyond the earth, outward.

Whether terraforming outer space will solve problems on earth is of course a moot point. (Carl Sagan supposedly said that all civilisations must become spacefaring or die)

But how we imagine outer space and its bodies determines how we extend our practices, from the political to the economic, to those regions. Terraforming is a subset of the human need to pantrope (a term coined by the science fiction author James Blish in 2001), which means changing everything. As the critic Chris Pak argues in his Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction, terraforming and pantropy can also be combined, such as when humans are genetically engineered to cope better with the climate of [alien planets].

Colonialism began with the European imagining of the distant parts of the world as available for conquest today outer space is represented in similar fashion. Hence, Klara Anna Capova in a pithy essay (2016) in the International Journal of Astrobiology observed that we can discern the making of an astro-capitalism in the form of exo-mining (from asteroids), exo-burials and exo-marketing. This too is a result of the imagining of outer space in particular ways, and labelled it the new space age.

Stars Wars (1977) may have been fiction, but space wars are most definitely not. With the uncanny ability to weaponise and militarise anything and everything, the arms race on earth extended into outer space.

In March 1983, Ronald Reagan underscored the importance of space for the American military-and-war modernisation programme: this Reagan speech came about six years after George Lucas extravagant astrodrama. Between these two events in 1978, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released a study titled Outer Space: Battlefield of the Future? The distant world was never to be the same again.

Proceeding as the dark side of aerospace exploration, the militarisation of space occupied the better part of the 20th century. Although as of now no direct battle has ever been staged in space, the fact that satellites could be weaponised, or made to determine the nature of weapons (the premise of Geostorm) on earth ensures that we recognise the militarised nature of space.

There is one specific feature of this militarisation that the historians Alexander Geppert and Tilmann Siebeneichner in their Introduction to the neat volume, Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War (2021) point to:

The militarization of outer space was thus notably geocentric, in stark contrast to those space wars of science fiction and science fantasy imagined in unspecified galaxies far, far away.

Earth, in other words, remains the centre of a militarised outer space.

The anthropologist Klara Anna Capova proposes that space fictions construct humans as extremophiles living in extreme conditions, with whole new challenges (physical, technological and emotional), such as exist on Mars. This itself is a prognostication of sorts: the course of human evolution, and is one more element in astroculture today.

Astroculture is one of the oldest cultural practices on earth. Alternating between the mythic and the fantastic, the improbable (who thought one could hear Mars?) and the triumphant, astroculture is a complex and complicated human practice. While the visual and cinematic fantasies generate hope and aspirations, it is now impossible to disentangle astroculture from its militaristic and political inflections.

All of us are now in the age of space fiction, aware of the possibilities, hopes and dreams that distant astronomical bodies carry. We agree with the novelist Doris Lessing: space or science fiction is the dialect of our time.

(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)

Now you can get handpicked stories from Telangana Today onTelegram everyday. Click the link to subscribe.

Click to follow Telangana Today Facebook page and Twitter .

See the article here:

Rewind Astroculture: Mars and beyond - Telangana Today