Obama Administration Mulls U.S. Human Spaceflight Future

U.S. President Barack Obama is not expected to significantly boost the projectedfunding profile for NASA's manned spaceflight program in the next few years, despite warnings from a blue-ribbon panel that the U.S. space agency needs between $3 billion and $4 billion more annually to send astronauts back to the Moon, according to sources with ties to the administration.

Instead, White House and NASA officials are scrubbing NASA's 2010 budget proposal, and the assumptions made by the blue-ribbon panel it underpins, for potential cost savings over the next decade that could help fund some means of sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit as soon as 2020. One possibility being weighed by the administration is abandoning the idea of astronaut landings on the Moon in favor of missions that would take astronauts on close flybys of heavenly bodies such as asteroids.

Under NASA's current program of record, dubbed Constellation, the agency is developing hardware to return astronauts to the Moon, including a space shuttle replacement system consisting of the Orion crew capsule and its Ares 1 launcher. On Aug. 14, however, a White House-appointed panel led by former Lockheed Martin chief Norman Augustine told NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and White House science adviser John Holdren that NASA's projected spending profile over the next several years is nowhere near sufficient to carry out that plan.

Part of the problem is that NASA has been operating under the assumption that U.S. support to the international space station — which costs some $3 billion annually — would end in 2016, even though that support is widely expected to be extended at least through 2020. On top of that, the president's five-year projected funding profile for Constellation, unveiled with the White House's 2010 budget request, is roughly $3.4 billion less than what was envisioned by the previous administration.

The challenges confronting Constellation were brought into stark relief by the Augustine panel's findings, which indicate that Orion and Ares 1, currently slated to debut in 2015, are unlikely to be ready to ferry astronauts to the station before 2017. At best, the panel concluded, NASA needs between $3 billion to $4 billion more annually to send humans to the Moon by the mid-2020s, according to briefing charts available on the panel's Web site.

"We've been acting as if we were doing something that there's no money to do," said John Logsdon, a space policy expert at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum here. "And I think with the visibility in our community, and the visibility of Obama's conclusions, the issue can no longer be avoided. Let's hope we don't make choices without understanding their consequences."

With the Obama administration just beginning to digest the Augustine panel's preliminary findings, it is too early to know what direction NASA will be given, though some likely options are beginning to emerge. Among them is a plan to spend some $2.5 billion over the next five years to develop a commercial crew transportation system to low Earth orbit.

While this option in theory would free NASA to pursue more challenging missions in deep space, sources familiar with the administration's thinking say the agency should not expect any more than an extra $1 billion for manned exploration beginning in 2012 or 2013; the $2.5 billion proposed for commercial crew transportation would be tapped from existing manned exploration budgets over the next five years, these sources said.

NASA's budget profile for human spaceflight, about $80 billion through 2020, is some $28 billion less than what the agency was told it could expect four years ago when it selected the Constellation architecture, which also includes a heavy-lift rocket dubbed Ares 5 and the Altair lunar lander.

But despite these funding reductions, sources say there are prospects for finding cost savings within NASA's existing program. For example, shifting NASA's acquisition strategy for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle from a traditional government procurement to one that is commercial in nature could yield significant savings in the near-term, according to sources familiar with NASA spending processes.

"Going from a cost-plus contract to a firm-fixed price would mean that there's less government people from [NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston] involved in the design process," said one source familiar with NASA spending. "Forty percent cost savings on Constellation is probably not unreasonable."

Another option under review would hand space station operations over to a private contractor, potentially saving $500 million to $1 billion per year, industry sources said.

Additional funding for human spaceflight operations could come from pots of money historically vulnerable to plunder, including technology development. While the Augustine panel assumed NASA would ramp up spending in this area from $500 million in 2011 to $1.5 billion by 2015, sources close to the administration say that investment could be held at around $800 million a year.

However, some question the wisdom of the cost-saving options being discussed, particularly relying on private companies to transport humans in low Earth orbit.

"I think the budget constrictions created by the fiscal 2010 budget are forcing the Augustine Committee toward approaches with a great deal of new risk," said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University here. "A government system capable of going to the Moon, like Ares 1/Orion, is also capable of going to [low Earth orbit] and that's the 'public option,' if you will, that allows NASA to place responsible bets on commercial suppliers," said Pace, who held senior posts at NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under former President George W. Bush.

While the future of Orion and Ares 1 remain uncertain, sources close to the administration say the latter is likely to meet the budget ax in favor of an alternative launcher. Likewise, Orion could be vulnerable if a safe, reliable commercial option for crew transport to the space station could be quickly developed, though observers suggested the Lockheed Martin-designed crew capsule could serve as a government backup to any future commercial capability.

Lift options being weighed include a shuttle-derived vehicle — other than Ares 1 and Ares 5, both of which are shuttle-derived — or a commercially developed rocket fueled by kerosene. United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 has a kerosene-fueled main engine that is built in Russia; one of the company's industrial partners, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, has taken preliminary steps toward manufacturing that hardware domestically.

The White House is expected to submit an amended 2010 budget request for NASA's exploration program by mid-September, according to sources with ties to the administration. Political watchers note that activity in the Senate — which has yet to pass a NASA appropriations bill this year — likely will be dominated by health care reform in the coming weeks

Jupiter hides its moons.

If you were out observing late Wednesday night, September 2 and you just happened to point your telescope at Jupiter, you might have been surprised at what you saw or, more to the point, what you did not see. This was a very rare case of all of the 4 of Jupiter's Galilean moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto NOT being visible in a telescope or binocular. Unfortunately, I did not see it as I was recovering from a sinus infection, but Bob, my fellow astronomer here at OpticsPlanet, did. Bob now has the honor of claiming that he witnessed a sight that won't be visible, again, according to Astronomy.com magazine until 2019. With any luck at all, I will not have another sinus problem until after 2019.

Shuttle Discovery Arrives at Space Station By Tariq Malik

After a two-day orbital chase, space shuttle Discovery linked up with the International Space Station late Sunday to deliver a new crewmember and a cargo pod full of vital supplies.

Discovery commander Rick Sturckow docked the 100-ton shuttle with the space stationas both spacecraft flew more than 200 miles (341 km) above the Atlantic Ocean.

"It's great to hear your voices," station astronaut Michael Barratt radioed Discovery's crew as the two spacecraft drew close. "We can't wait to see you."

Sturckow flew Discovery without the aid of six small thrusters, which are usually extensively used during docking, because one had a leak. Instead, he used Discovery's larger, more powerful thrusters, which use more propellant and can make for a louder ride and more challenging docking.

"He just flew it like a champ today," shuttle flight director Tony Ceccacci told reporters after docking.

A rendezvous first

Sturckow has trained to use the larger thrusters during docking, but NASA never had to try it until today, Cain said. The smaller thrusters will not be used for the duration of Discovery's 13-day mission, he added. Sturckow also had to compensate for a slight misalignment of the space station, which was 1 degree out of position during tonight's docking, NASA officials said.

Before docking at the space station, Sturckow flew Discovery through an orbital back flip so station astronauts could photograph the shuttle's tile-covered belly in a routine heat shield check. Analysts on Earth will review the images once they are sent to Mission Control.

Discovery docked at the station about 10 minutes early at 8:54 p.m. EDT (0054 Aug. 31 GMT). Hatches between Discovery and the space station opened just over 90 minutes later with the seven shuttle astronauts boosting the station's six-person crew up to 13 people - a record-tying high - for only the second time.

Stocking up station

Discovery launched toward the space station late Friday carrying a cargo pod packed with about 15,200 pounds (6,894 kg) of new science gear and a treadmill named aftertelevision comedian Stephen Colbert.

Colbert rallied fans of his Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report" to help him win naming rights for a new space station room during an online NASA poll earlier this year. But NASA named the module Tranquility instead. As a consolation prize, NASA named the new treadmill the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT.

Discovery is also ferrying NASA astronaut Nicole Stott to the space station to begin a three-month mission aboard the orbiting laboratory. She will replace fellow spaceflyer Tim Kopra, who has lived on the station for more than a month and will return home on Discovery.

Earlier Sunday, Stott sent her 7-year-old son Roman "ginormous thanks" and "big space hugs" after he sent her a long-distance dedication as a wake up call. "I just want to let him know that I love him more than anything," Stott said.

Discovery and its crew will spend just over a week linked to the space station to move the nearly 8 tons of cargo to the orbiting laboratory. Three spacewalks are planned during the mission to replace an ammonia coolant tank as massive as a small car and perform other upgrades and maintenance.

Deputy shuttle program manager LeRoy Cain told reporters Sunday that an early review of data from an inspection of Discovery's heat shield by astronauts has found the shuttle in good health. A final analysis of the inspection data and imagery collected during Sunday's docking should be completed in the next few days, he added.

Discovery docked at the space station on the 25th anniversary of its maiden launch on Aug. 30, 1984. That mission, STS-41-D, deployed three satellites and tested solar array technology for a future space station.

Big Artistic Performance to Be Set in Space By Clara Moskowitz

The first ever widely acknowledged artistic performance from space will be broadcast from the International Space Station on Oct. 9.

Orchestrated by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, who is set to launch to the station as a space tourist Sept. 30, the event will feature artists performing from 14 cities around the world, as well as Laliberte broadcasting from space.

Laliberte described the event, called "Moving Stars and Earth for Water," as a "poetic social mission" to communicate the importance water has for the planet and its people.

Scientists have warned that water shortages rank with energy and food issues around the globe as top governmental issues now and in the future.

Global million-dollar effort

The Canadian acrobat is due to fly along with two professional astronauts aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Laliberte booked his trip with the Russian Federal Space Agency through the U.S. firm Space Adventures, which usually charges about $30 million for the excursions. Laliberte is set to stay aboard the International Space Station for about 12 days.

In addition to founding Cirque du Soleil, Laliberte started the ONE DROP Foundation, which aims to fight poverty in the world by working to provide clean water to everyone.

"This artistic mission will permit me to raise awareness for [the] water issue," Laliberte said Wednesday in a press conference. "I believe through art and emotion we can convey a universal message."

The artistic event is planned to be broadcast simultaneously on Oct. 9 at 8:00 p.m. ET (0000 GMT) on huge screens in 14 cities, as well as online at Onedrop.org and Aol.com. A cadre of personalities, including former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Peter Gabriel, Shakira, and U2, are set to perform from Montreal, Moscow, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Sydney, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and London, as well as the U.S. cities New York, Santa Monica, and Tampa.

Laliberte has been working with various artists on a poetic fairy tale that will tell about the importance of water through the perspective of four characters: a star, the moon, the sun and a drop of water.

During the event, artists in each city will read part of the tale, as well as perform in other ways. Laliberte will also read from space coordinate the worldwide events.

"People should see that as a moment where the voices of the world are unifying in a specific moment and participating at an event together to talk about water," he said. "This is a moment of great friendship, of great artistic rendering, I believe, and hopefully this artistic project will touch people."

Though Laliberte is spending millions of dollars on this project, he said he thinks it's worth it.

"The space community is excited about this project," he said. "We're building up a global event. I don't know what will be the end result, but so far, so good, and we're very, very happy."

Training for months

Laliberte has been training for moths alongside professional spaceflyers in Russia's Star City for his mission. Soon he and his crewmates, Russian Cosmonaut Maksim Surayev and NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams, will fly to Baikonur and enter quarantine in advance of their launch. Surayev and Williams are due to take up long-term residence on the space station as Expedition 21 crewmembers.

"I'm starting to get some butterflies inside me flying around," Laliberte said. "I'm starting to get the little buzz of going up there."

Laliberte, 50, is married and has five children. He said traveling to space has been a dream of his since he was a young boy watching men land on the moon for the first time.

"This whole thing is so much a privilege," Laliberte said."This is a fairly tale for me."

Laliberte is due to become the seventh private explorer to journey to space. The last space tourist to fly was Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian software executive who made his second trip to the space station in March, also brokered through Space Adventures.

Trash in Space May Force Shuttle, Station to Dodge By Tariq Malik

NASA is tracking a large chunk of rocket trash hurtling through space just in case it might require the linked shuttle Discovery and International Space Station to move out of the way late Thursday.

The space junk, an old piece of a spent European rocket body, is expected to zoom past the space station and Discovery on Friday and make its closest approach just after 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT).

It could come as close as 2 miles (3 km), about five miles closer than previous estimates, of the spacecraft, said John McCullough, NASA's flight director office chief.

McCullough told reporters that, as of late Wednesday, NASA is confident the station-shuttle complex won't have to dodge the object, which is a derelict chunk of an Ariane 5 rocket. But Mission Control will keep an eye on it to be safe.

Old rocket returns

NASA officials are unsure of the exact dimensions of the space debris, but said it is part of a rocket that launched in August 2006 to send two communications satellites into orbit.

It is relatively massive by space junk standards, about 204 square feet (19 square meters) in area, and flying in an extremely elliptical orbit that reaches nearly 20,000 miles (32,000 km) at its high point, making it hard to track. A decision on whether or not to move the space station and Discovery is not expected until Thursday, but will not affect plans for an evening spacewalk by two shuttle astronauts, McCullough said.

"We're getting more and more data, and we're getting more and accuracy," he added.

Mission Control radioed Discovery commander Rick Sturckow Wednesday afternoon to say that if a maneuver is required, it would be performed after a planned spacewalkThursday. Engineers discarded a third option to lower the shuttle-station complex, which would have delayed Thursday's spacewalk to Friday.

Space debris has been a growing concern for the space station, shuttle missions and other satellites in low-Earth orbit since the Feb. 10 crash of an American communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite. The orbital collision created two clouds of debris that have increased the risk to the space station and docked shuttles by about 6 percent to a 1-in-318 chance of a hit, NASA officials have said.

A leak in one of the small thrusters aboard Discovery has forced NASA to keep the shuttle's small reaction control jets off-line. The larger thrusters are more powerful and engineers worked diligently earlier this week to make sure Discovery can fire those jets safely while attached to the space station.

Unpacking space station science

News of the space junk did not hinder work aboard the shuttle and space station.

The astronauts spent Wednesday moving new science experiment racks, each the size of a refrigerator, into the space station from a cargo pod delivered by Discovery earlier this week. They also hooked up a new astronaut bedroom, also delivered on the shuttle, in the station's Japanese Kibo lab.

Shuttle astronauts and Mexican-Americans Danny Olivas and Jose Hernandez, a former migrant farm worker who dreamed of reaching space, took time to answer questions in English and Spanish from people and reporters on Earth.

In Spanish, Hernandez told reporters in Mexico that the country looks stunning from space and he has been able to see his parents' home state of Michoacán during the day and the blazing lights of Mexico City at night.

"I think that it's very beautiful," Hernandez said.

Discovery's crew is in the middle of a 13-day mission to deliver new science gear, supplies and a treadmill named after Stephen Colbert to the International Space Station. Three spacewalks are planned for the mission, one of which was performed late Tuesday.

Mission Control told Discovery's crew to prepare for Thursday's spacewalk as planned. The spacewalk will be performed by NASA astronaut Danny Olivas and Swedish spaceflyer Christer Fuglesang, and will be primarily aimed at installing a new ammonia tank for the space station's cooling system.

Kepler Telescope Could Find Habitable Moons By SPACE.com Staff

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope, which astronomers hope will find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, might also find habitable moons in other solar systems, new research suggests.

Kepler's primary mission is to monitor thousands of stars looking for characteristic dips in their brightness as orbiting planets pass in front of them in so-called "transit" events.

The orbiting observatory, launched in March, already detected the giant extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b within its first 10 days of taking data. The planet had previously been discovered by ground-based telescopes, but the observations showed Kepler works as expected.

While ground-based observatories, and even some space telescopes, such as Spitzer and Hubble, can find Jupiter-sized extrasolar planets, Kepler is the first telescope aimed at detecting alien worlds closer to the size of our own home planet.

One astronomer suggests that Kepler's capabilities may even be able to detect so-called "exo-moons."

Modeling moons

David Kipping of University College London has already devised a method for detecting exomoons but no-one was sure whether it could really be used with current technology. He and his team have now modeled the properties of the instruments on Kepler, simulating the expected signal strength that a habitable moon would generate.

An exomoon's gravity tugs on the planet it orbits, making the planet wobble during its orbit around its host star. The resulting changes in the position and velocity of the planet should be detectable by Kepler through accurate timing of the transits.

The scientists considered a wide range of possible planetary systems and found that a fluffy Saturn-like planet, which would be low in mass for its size, gives the best possible chance for detecting a moon, rather than a denser Jupiter-like world. This is because planets like Saturn are large – blocking out a lot of light as they pass in front of their star – but very light, meaning they will wobble much more than a heavy planet.

If the Saturn-like planet is at the right distance from its star, then the temperature will allow liquid water to be stable on any sufficiently large moons in orbit around it. Such water-bearing moons might be habitable for life.

"For the first time, we have demonstrated that potentially habitable moons up to hundreds of light years away may be detected with current instrumentation," Kipping said.

Millions of moons possible

The team found that habitable exomoons down to 0.2 times the mass of the Earth are readily detectable with Kepler.

"As we ran the simulations, even we were surprised that moons as small as one-fifth of the Earth's mass could be spotted," Kipping said.

While it is not known if habitable exomoons are common in the galaxy, the observatory could potentially look for Earth-mass habitable moons around 25,000 stars up to 500 light-years away from the sun. In the whole sky, there should be millions of stars which could be surveyed for habitable exomoons with present technology.

"It seems probable that many thousands, possibly millions, of habitable exomoons exist in the Galaxy and now we can start to look for them," Kipping said.

The team's findings will be detailed later this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moon dust not as strange as hoped

EVER since a 1998 space shuttle experiment saw what appeared to be an anomalously heavy variety of matter, the hunt has been on for more of the same. Now, a search of lunar soil for so-called "strange matter" has come up short, casting doubt on whether it exists at all.

The standard model of particle physics describes six types of quark, including the up and down quarks which make up protons and neutrons, found inside ordinary atoms. Physicists have long theorised about strange matter that would also contain strange quarks. Strange matter is heavier and denser than ordinary matter, as the strange quark has roughly 10 times the mass of the up or down quark.

Some neutron stars - the dense remnants of supernovae - might actually bemade of strange matter. If two such stars collided, bits of strange matter called strangelets could be spewed out. "You could get strange matter floating around in space," says Jack Sandweiss, a physicist at Yale University.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-01), which flew on the space shuttle Discovery, appears to have detected a strangelet - a nucleus like that of oxygen but with three times its mass. Delays in flying the more advanced AMS-02 instrument after the Columbia shuttle disaster have meant that this result has never been confirmed. So Sandweiss turned to an altogether different kind of detector: the moon. It has no magnetic field to deflect charged particles, so any strangelets arriving would hit its surface and stay embedded there.

Any strangelets arriving at the moon would hit its surface and stay embedded there

Sandweiss's team took 15 grams of lunar soil from the Apollo missions and accelerated the grains past a powerful magnet. Any strangelets present would curve less in the magnetic field than normal matter - but none was observed (www.arxiv.org/abs/0903.5055). "If AMS-01 had been a real event, we would have found it," says Sandweiss.

The study was designed to find the oxygen-like strangelet seemingly seen by AMS-01. Other strangelets might have slipped by unseen. The issue could be settled when AMS-02 is flown up to the International Space Station next year. "Then we'll finally answer the question," Sandweiss says. "AMS is really the right way to do this."

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