NASA? Didn't they shut down a few years ago?

Despite my persistent (annoying?) posting and sharing efforts, I've been getting the impression that the general public is still in the dark regarding the ongoing efforts of my most favorite US-based, government-operated aeronautical and spaceflight focused agency. I speak, of course, about NASA! Yes, the space shuttle people. The people who, after retiring the shuttles, didn't just pack up and go home. They have moved on to some amazing and exciting developments. Sadly though, when I recently surveyed the people around me to find out what they knew about NASA’s current mission, the results were a bit disappointing. In fact, the results can be summarized as, “No idea!” *Sigh* Well there's only one thing to do. It's back to square one.

Below is the "big picture," which will be the basis for all my upcoming entries. If you learn and understand this, you're already ahead of most people. As the days go on, I'll be putting up entries that will detail each of these projects and show you what the heck they're good for because, sadly, some people think we're wasting our time, effort, and money with this crazy spaceflight business. (Those people should learn that every dollar invested in NASA yields approx. $10 in US economic benefit!)
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NASA’s current vision can be split into two primary categories: manned and unmanned missions. 

·         Unmanned missions: space telescopes, rovers, landers, or orbiting probes that are studying the planets, comets, asteroids, stars and galaxies in very specialized ways with very specialized instruments. These studies will give us a better understanding of how our entire universe came to exist and our place within it.

·          

     The manned missions can be further split into two categories:

o   Low Earth orbit: within a few hundred miles of Earth. This means our orbiting science laboratory, the International Space Station. Here we perform lots of science that can only be accomplished in orbit where there is nearly no effect of gravity. The bulk of this research is in materials science and human biology under long-term effects of microgravity.
   In days of old, this was serviced primarily by the Space Shuttle. The shuttles were retired in 2011 and now NASA contracts commercial companies (SpaceX and Orbital Sciences) to send resupply spaceships to the ISS. Within the next few years they will also begin commercially operated transportation of astronauts to the station. (Boeing CST-100 and SpaceX Dragon v2)

These operations are much more economical than the shuttle, allowing NASA to focus more of their budget developing spacecraft for…

o   Beyond Earth orbit. NASA is developing a new capsule (Orion) and new rocket (SLS) that will allow us to travel for months, possibly even years, away from our safe and comfortable home world. Plans are most likely to ignore the moon (for now), and initially try to intercept asteroids, allowing us to develop new techniques for living and operating on long-term missions as well as studying those big stone solar system left-overs. Ultimately, the goal is humans on Mars. A trip to the Red Planet will be a minimum of 9 months. Each way. So the goal is to develop self-sustaining systems that will allow us to travel safely, live comfortably and in good health, and begin inhabiting a second planet in our solar system.

 So that's the BIG picture. In the coming days I'll add detail to each segment of NASA's space operations and hopefully give everyone a better understanding of what's in store for the future. Got questions? Feel free to leave 'em in the comments section below.

My Journey to NASA Wallops - Part 1: Excitement and Frustration

On December 4th of 2013, I received the most exciting e-mail that has yet to grace my inbox. It was from NASA Social, a small crew that coordinates the social media efforts of NASA as a whole and organizes special events. The e-mail was to inform me that my application had been accepted for media credentials to attend their next event: the launch of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket with Cygnus resupply ship, departing from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, destined for the International Space Station. After a lifetime of obsession with spaceflight I was finally going to see a full-scale launch in person! As a bonus, it turned out that the launch date was December 17th, exactly 110 years to the day that the Wright Brothers first flew.

I confirmed my intention to attend, I booked a hotel room, I took off from work. All that was left was the awful wait. Knowing that I was attending made the next few days crawl like molasses and the two weeks until launch say seemed a torturous wait.

December 9th - I got an e-mail stating that the launch had slipped back a day, to the 18th. Not a big deal. It's spaceflight and these things happen. The hotel happily changed my reservation and my work was kind enough to change my days off. The schedule of events arrived not long after and this particular rocket nerd was overjoyed seeing the specifics of what was in store for me.

I was so glad we got that delay out of the way early. The Antares is a reasonably simple rocket and they'd reported that they were working no issues and there was a 95% chance of favorable weather. "Let's do this!" I thought.

December 11th - The International Space Station experienced a major malfunction of the ammonia Cooling Loop A, causing heating issues onboard. The crew was fine but a number of systems aboard ISS had been shut down to preserve power for sensitive experiments. If the issue wasn't resolved soon it would have an impact on launch date because there is an added level of risk anytime two spacecraft dock together but to do so with one spacecraft (the station) in a deficient state would be unnecessarily dangerous.

December 14th - Planners/controllers at NASA decided to delay the launch until December 19th while the ISS ground controllers attempted to regulate the temperature control system through a software modification. So far the software changes had limited success and they were attempting to find a "sweet spot" that would allow the Antares to fly up and dock with the ISS on time, then astronauts could conduct spacewalks to replace the malfunctioning flow valve. NASA was going ahead and loading time-sensitive cargo into Cygnus in case it all worked out. I called the hotel to push my reservation back another day. The woman on the phone asks why I needed to change and when I tell her about the launch delay she say, "Oh, we're going to get a LOT of that today!"

December 17th - With no word advising otherwise, I began to pack a bag to depart the next morning for my two days down in Virginia. While checking to see what my fellow Social attendees were saying via Facebook and Twitter I stumbled across the NASA announcement that they would indeed be delaying the Antares launch until some time in January. My mind has a tendency, which I sometimes like and sometimes dislike, to easily notice connections between events, such as the fact that this flight was delayed until "some time" on the day that I originally thought I would see that rocket climb to space while hearing and feeling the roar of those AJ-26 rocket engines... Stupid brain. Why would you go and point out something like that when you know I'm already annoyed?

December 20th - It was announced that the launch had been reschedule for NET (No Earlier Than) January 7th, 2014. Again, the requisite plans were assembled. Took a couple more days off from work and booked a hotel room again. One cool aspect of all this was that the woman at the hotel gave me the room for the same rate that I had in December "because you're with the NASA group." It is pretty awesome to have somebody say you got something because you're "with" NASA!

In the coming days we learned that the software patch for the ISS ammonia flow control valve wasn't working and after a series of very successful spacewalks the malfunctioning components were swapped out for functional ones. With this, the problem was resolved and the station was once again ready to receive a visitor, in the form of a Cygnus resupply spacecraft.

And then we all got to learn an evil new phrase:  

"Polar Vortex"

I don't know the technical details behind it (I'm more interested in things that fly through the atmosphere than the actual atmosphere itself) but I've come to believe that it's when that guy Snow Miser from "The Year Without A Santa" beats his brother Heat Miser in a boxing match and everywhere gets to measure local temperature with single digits. Both Fahrenheit and Celsius.

On January 3rd, the launch was delayed another day, until January 8th, because the air temperature dropped below the operating temperature of some of Antares' components.

What did I do to deserve such torment from the universe?!

Thankfully, no further delays occurred and in the early hours of January 7th I left home on an exciting journey to see things in person that I had heretofore only seen in pictures or read about.

To be continued in My Journey to Wallops - Part 2: My Dream Day

Catching up with a 17,500 mph Space Station

When the Antares rocket took off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia this past Thursday, its Cygnus payload didn't go straight to the International Space Station. The fact is that very few vehicles destined for the ISS go straight from launch to the station. A typical trip to the station is a multi-day voyage and it's only been in the past year that manned flights have begun taking an expedited path and timing that can get crews there within 6 hours of launch.

To understand why we don't usually go from ground to station in one quick trip there is a key concept to know first: in orbit, speed equals altitude. 

The basic concept of an orbit is that an object is moving parallel to the surface of the Earth. Gravity is still pulling on that object so it's in a constant state of "falling", but the object is moving so quickly that by the time it reaches the horizon the surface of the planet has curved down and away from the object. So if that object, such as a Cygnus capsule, keeps going fast enough it will "fall" indefinitely and remain in orbit around the planet!

Hopefully this terrible illustration above helps to visualize the concept. As a projectile (the black circle) moves faster it travels farther along the horizon before finally falling to the ground (the black line).

This second terrible illustration shows that with enough speed the projectile would move forward and downward at the same rate as the surface of the planet, creating an orbit. Because of this concept we have to operate differently in space when trying to go "up", or away from the planet. A spacecraft can't just point away from the planet and fire its engine because it would actually slow down. What it needs to do is fire its engine in the direction of travel! If it goes faster it won't just move parallel to the horizon but actually overshoot the path of the ground. Hm...this may seem confusing. Perhaps its time for yet another awful illustration?

On the left side we see an object orbiting a blue planet. To get that object farther from the planet it fires its engines, pushing it in the direction of the arrow. Eventually it moves so quickly that its path (the red curved line) gets wider than it was before and it moves outward to the second orbit seen on the right side of the diagram.

Now that you have this concept in mind I can tell you that the reason why a vehicle doesn't usually go directly to its destination orbit is because a higher orbit means a faster orbit and a faster orbit means a bigger rocket to give it the "get up and go." Bigger rockets are more complex, heavier, and more expensive so their use is a potential hindrance to regular and affordable launches. But wait! Science to the rescue! Once the vehicle is in orbit it has shed the weight of the rocket that carried it there and its in a vacuum so there's no air resistance. This means a rocket motor is MUCH more efficient in space than in our atmosphere, allowing the Cygnus, in this case, to use its own on-board rocket motor to fire several times and incrementally increase its orbit, which during the ongoing Orb-1 mission calls for 5 "Delta V" (change in velocity) burns that take the vehicle from its original orbit of 134 miles to 226 miles. This stops Cygnus four miles beneath the space station where it then makes a slow, controlled approach. That approach occurred this morning (Jan 12) around 6:00 am EST and by 8:00 am the astronauts aboard the station used the Canadarm 2 robotic arm to grapple and reposition the vehicle for final docking.

Antares, International Rocket for an International Station

One of the two rockets being put to use these days in resupplying the International Space Station is the Orbital Sciences Antares, named for a star in the constellation Scorpius. Antares is a two-stage rocket intended to carry the Cygnus resupply vehicle (a more detailed post can be written about that if there's interest).

Antares is a multinational project, assembled from components built in 4 different countries on 3 continents, which is incredibly appropriate for a vehicle intended to resupply an international scientific outpost. So let's check out the parts from the bottom up:


 AJ-26 Rocket Engines - The part that really makes the thing get up and go! Antares has two of them and when they were originally built they were called NK-33's. These engines have a pretty interesting history because they were built in the late 1960s. 
By the Kuznetsov Design Bureau. 
In the Soviet Union. 
For the N1...their MOON ROCKET!

That rocket was unsuccessful overall but these engines were so advanced at the time that they're still up to modern performance standards with some relatively minor upgrades from the Aerojet Rocketdyne company in California, who has a large enough stock of those motors to supply the Antares for all eight contracted flights to the ISS with some to spare. Antares has two engines that are gimballed, meaning they're mounted in a way that they can be tilted to steer the rocket.

First Stage Fuel Tanks & Structure - The bulk of the rocket is made up of this first stage structure that contains a fuel tank for liquid oxygen (takes up about 2/3 of the length) and a fuel tank for RP-1, a modified form of kerosene. There are also helium tanks built into the fuel tanks that are used to force the oxygen and kerosene out of their tanks and into the engine as quickly as possible. This major section is designed and built by Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in the Ukraine, based in large part on the Russian Zenit rocket.

Interstage Assembly - This is the section that connects the first stage to the second and helps keep the rocket on the right course as it gets close to orbit by operating thrusters, small rockets used to control direction, as the rocket cruises between stages. Built largely from US-based Orbital Sciences' flight computers used on the Pegasus air-launched rocket, this hardware is considered exceptionally reliable which is great because if the rocket can't stay on course then there's no point in launching at all.

CASTOR® 30B Second Stage Motor - Unlike the first stage motors, the second stage is a solid-fueled motor built by Alliant Techsystems (ATK), a manufacturer from Utah that also built the Solid Rocket Boosters for the Space Shuttle. At a recent tour of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility a representative of ATK stated that the fuel formula they're using for Antares is a drastically better than the shuttle fuel which was designed in the 1970s.

Cygnus - The only part of the entire launch that will make it to orbit is this capsule-type spacecraft. It's made of two sections, the Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) and the Service Module (SM). The SM is the "brains" of the vehicle, containing the solar panels, the rocket engine and thrusters, communications systems, and the environmental controls for inside the PCM, which is where the supplies and hardware meant for the station are stowed away. The SM is based largely on satellite hardware developed and built by Orbital Sciences in the United States. The PCM, on the other hand, was developed and built by Thales Alenia of Turin, Italy, sharing its design heritage with many sections of the space station and the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) built by the European Space Agency.

 All those pieces from all those countries come together at the Horizontal Integration Facility at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility where they become the Antares rocket, one of America's newest launch options that is making low-Earth-orbit resupply an economic and routine process.

I hope you enjoyed this explanation of the Antares rocket and if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions then go ahead and leave a comment below! As always, thanks for reading!

Second Space Age - Orbital Sciences Corporation

If you live on the east coast of the United States then it's likely that over the past year you've been introduced to the work of one of the major players in the Second Space Age, Orbital Sciences Corporation. (If you don't live in that area or have never heard of them, please read on anyway!) They've built and operated the various rockets that have been flying out of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern shore of Virginia. Their launches have caught the attention of the public lately thanks to their frequent night-time launch windows (the short time that physics dictates as just the right time to launch a particular mission).

Orbital Sciences is one of two companies contracted by NASA to deliver supplies and new science experiments to the International Space Station under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. (We'll discuss the other company in the near future.) Based in Dulles, VA, Orbital Sciences was founded in 1982 and has developed an impressive reputation in the small- and medium-class satellite business, having produced about 140 satellites with two primary focuses. The first is communications and the second is remote sensing which means using instruments aboard the satellite to make measurements and observations of Earth which can be used in scientific studies, military operations, and commercial uses like urban planning and farming.

They've also been building and flying rockets very successfully, and interesting ones at that! Their Pegasus rocket has a triangular wing and is launched horizontally after being dropped by a Lockheed L-1011 carrier plane at 40,000 feet. This has the great advantage of getting the rocket above the thickest part of the atmosphere so the rocket experiences less resistance and it's above most of the weather so the odds of being able to launch are increased greatly.

The rockets that have been catching the public's attention, however, are the Minotaurs (like the one used to launch LADEE a few months ago) that Orbital Sciences have created by acquiring decommissioned US Air Force Minuteman and Peacekeeper missiles and using them as the first two stages then mounting their own flight-proven rockets and computers on top with their satellite payloads. This gets to the heart of what Orbital Sciences does often and does well: assembling pieces that have excellent success rates and are readily available. In this way they are able to put together launch vehicles that are safe, reliable, capable, and cost-effective. That is a crucial ability for any company hoping to hold a position as major player in the satellite launch world and especially when helping pioneer commercial cargo service to our space station.

The next entry will be about Orbital Sciences' newest rocket, the Antares, which will be launching this Wednesday, January 8th, and later in the week I'll introduce you to do Cygnus cargo vehicle that is serving as one of two  commercial resupply vessels for the International Space Station.

If you have any questions about Orbital Sciences or anything referenced here please leave a comment!

This Week in Spaceflight, January 5-11 2014

Here's a rundown of the launches that are scheduled (or rumored!) to happen this week.

The Second Space Age: An Overview

Whether the general public knows it or not, we're in the middle of something amazing. We're living through a "Second Space Age." These past couple years, new rockets and new spacecraft have been coming online and entering service as spaceflight in the United States shifts from government-based to commercially-operated. During the Space Shuttle era, NASA owned and operated their fleet of vehicles and over the shuttle's 30-year history that ownership and operation proved to be more costly than anticipated. While it allowed us to build the International Space Station, the next necessary step to permanent human habitation off this planet, the complex and maintenance-heavy shuttle fleet also drained funding away from new vehicle development. So many people were screaming out to the whole of the internet when the shuttle fleet was retired, fearing that NASA was closing up shop, giving up on sending people into space...but the reality is the exact opposite. NASA had cleared up an immense portion of their ever-declining budget to move on to the next target: exploration beyond Earth orbit.

NASA's new capsule, the Orion, has been making steady progress towards providing us with a vehicle that can take us to asteroids, the moon, and beyond. Most people seem to think it's still just an idea, a concept on a drawing board, but in September of this year the Orion is scheduled to make its first unmanned trip into space. Several years from now it will ride skyward with a crew atop one of the newest and largest rockets in the world: the Space Launch System (SLS).

This rocket makes use of flight-proven hardware such as solid rocket boosters and Space Shuttle main engines (which were so reliable that they were reusable) while also adding in 21st century technology such as composite structure fuel tanks that will be lighter and stronger than the old aluminum alloy tanks. Less weight there means more weight that can go into space. More bang for the buck, figuratively and literally.

But what about the Station? It's still there and still needs to be resupplied and crews exchanged every few months, right? Of course, and this is where the Second Space Age really comes into being. In the short term we've been able to ride with our partners from Russia, who took up the task of manned flight with their Soyuz spacecraft, a vehicle with an impressive safety record over its nearly 50 years of operation. (Don't worry, it's had many upgrades and modifications since the old days!) That's the beauty of an International Space Station, you can work with others to assure continued service.

A lot of people in this country, however, disapprove of sending astronauts (and dollars) to another country to get to space. The long-term side of the plan has been for NASA to work with private corporations to develop several different spacecraft and rockets that will be able to deliver crew and cargo to the ISS, in a way handing over the "routine" aspect of space to private companies that can compete to do it efficiently and at competitive costs. NASA has shared its vast technical knowledge with US-based aerospace corporations and some of those companies are already providing results. 

SpaceX's Dragon and Orbital Sciences' Cygnus have already made trips to the ISS under cargo resupply contracts and may just be a few years until we see private companies operating crewed spacecraft. And the day that a commercially operated, manned vehicle makes it to space will be a VERY big day.

So to summarize the future: private companies operate the rockets that put people into earth orbit and send cargo to the ISS, leaving NASA a bigger chunk of budget to do the bolder, more ambitious projects that take us away from Earth.


There's an impressive collection of companies and individual that are doing amazing things now and in the near-future. Through this "Second Space Age" series you'll be introduced to the new rockets, the new spacecraft, the companies that are building/operating them, and the amazing way it all fits together to expand humanity's ability to understand and navigate through our universe.

Any questions or feedback will be much appreciated. I want to write what you want to read about so let your opinions be known!