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NASA, Private Enterprise Enter New Era

Photos include three capsules in various stages of work and the service module area.

illustration: Inside Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a technician works on one of the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Photo credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Vice President Pence believes that in restoring America’s preeminence in space,  the nation should   “look beyond the halls of government for insight and expertise.”

That concept will move into high gear this month. Arstecnica  notes that The Trump administration  came into office “at a time when new space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin are challenging dominant aerospace industry companies, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. A key difference between the new competitors is that they’re willing to invest more of their own funds into developing launch vehicles—both SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets have been substantially funded by private money. Successful flights by these vehicles may raise questions about why the federal government should spend billions of taxpayer dollars on traditional contractors for other heavy lift vehicles… So far, the Trump administration has played it both ways—acknowledging the importance of the newly emerging private space sector but also offering praise for NASA’s large and costly Space Launch System. However, sources have indicated that Pence’s office is closely watching the private companies and success here could have policy implications.”

Mallet Finger The authors feel non-operative management of mallet finger is indicated in cases of all soft tissue mallets and bony mallets which are well reduced in a splint without DIP viagra generika mouthsofthesouth.com joint subluxation. Lasts up to 4 mouthsofthesouth.com order levitra online – 6 hours of pleasure. For those who wish to know more about mouthsofthesouth.com wholesale viagra 100mg these pills, As a man, we all know how precious our erections are to us. This key ingredient has ensured an effective treatment of discount viagra cialis men’s erectile dysfunction, just because of its ingredient. A major step forward in the process will take place when SpaceX launches  its “Falcon Heavy” rocket early this month. According to the corporation, “When Falcon Heavy lifts off in 2018, it will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two. With the ability to lift into orbit over 54 metric tons (119,000 lb)–a mass equivalent to a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel–Falcon Heavy can lift more than twice the payload of the next closest operational vehicle, the Delta IV Heavy, at one-third the cost. Falcon Heavy draws upon the proven heritage and reliability of Falcon 9. Its first stage is composed of three Falcon 9 nine-engine cores whose 27 Merlin engines together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft. Only the Saturn V moon rocket, last flown in 1973, delivered more payload to orbit. Falcon Heavy was designed from the outset to carry humans into space and restores the possibility of flying missions with crew to the Moon or Mars. Falcon Heavy missions will deliver large payloads to orbit inside a composite fairing, but the rocket can also carry the Dragon spacecraft.”

And, if all goes according to plan, NASA/private sector partnerships should move quickly ahead. The space agency reports that “NASA and industry partners, Boeing and SpaceX, are targeting the return of human spaceflight from Florida’s Space Coast in 2018. Both companies are scheduled to begin flight tests to prove the space systems meet NASA’s requirements for certification in the coming year.Since NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX, the companies have matured space system designs and now have substantial spacecraft and launch vehicle hardware in development and testing in preparation for the test flights. The goal of the Commercial Crew Program is safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation to and from the International Space Station from the United States through a public-private approach. NASA, Boeing and SpaceX have significant testing underway, which will ultimately lead to test missions when the systems are ready and meet safety requirements.

Boeing’s Starliner will launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon will launch on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A. After completion of each company’s uncrewed and crewed flight tests, NASA will review the flight data to verify the systems meet the requirements for certification. Upon NASA certification, the companies are each slated to fly six crew missions to the International Space Station beginning in 2019 and continuing through 2024.

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U.S. Returning to Human Space Flight

President Trump has reconstituted the National Space Council, a step towards fulfilling his emphasis on restoring America’s lead in space exploration and utilization, a hope he included in his inaugural address.

During his tenure in the Oval Office, Barack Obama prematurely ended the Space Shuttle program, then eliminated funding for developing the Constellation system, which had been scheduled to replace the Shuttle as America’s manned space effort.  This rendered the United States dependent on Russia for manned access to orbit. He changed NASA’s budgetary focus from human exploration to endeavors meant to bolster his climate change beliefs. The National Space Council was disbanded.

Writing for The Hill, Mark R. Whittington reported:

A new study has found that ginger increases sensuality by allowing the body to secrete more testosterone in men. levitra sildenafil Make sure you read all the instructions are not followed and the right dose is not this fast generic cialis taken. It is sildenafil prices the similar working medicine in comparison to Kamagra. A man my feel guilty as he is not able to satisfy his partner in bed. soft tab cialis “…it is useful to look back on how profoundly and adroitly President Barack Obama crippled the space agency’s efforts to send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit….The Augustine Commission, so named after its chairman former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, returned with a set of recommendations some months later…The government’s response was formulated in secret. …Project Constellation would be canceled, root and branch….Congress, which had not been consulted, reacted with bipartisan fury. The Obama administration made two critical errors. It had not consulted with Congress or anyone else when it developed its plans to kill Constellation. The White House also blatantly pulled a bureaucratic dodge that was apparent even to a first-term member of the House from the sticks… Nowhere in the Obama plan was there a commitment to send astronauts anywhere. Clearly, the White House had no intention of doing space exploration. President Obama had expressed an antipathy to American exceptionalism, and nothing speaks to that quality than American astronauts exploring other worlds.”

In a dramatic reversal of the prior administration, Vice President Pence’s announcement this month of the restoration of the National Space Council, which he will chair, (the secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and State, will be members) outlined its role in coordinating the White House’s ambitious scientific, commercial and security goals beyond Earth. In his opening remarks to the restored Council, Pence noted “…in recent years, the clarity of our purpose and the confidence of our conviction that propelled the United States to be a vanguard of space exploration seems to have waned. America seems to have lost our edge in space — and those days are over… for too long our government’s commitment has failed to match our people’s spirit and meet our nation’s needs. The truth is that America entered this new millennium without a coherent policy, a coherent vision for outer space. And in the absence of American leadership, other nations have seized the opportunity to stake their claim in the infinite frontier. Rather than lead in space, too often, we have chosen to drift. And, as we learned 60 years ago, when we drift, we fall behind…

“…sending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated. Every passing year that the moon remained squarely in the rearview mirror further eroded our ability to return to the lunar domain and made it more likely that we would forget why we ever wanted to go in the first place. And now we find ourselves in a position where the United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low-Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect. “When the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, we had four years to find an assured way for our astronauts to get into space. In the meantime, we agreed to pay Russia to hitch a ride on their rockets to the International Space Station. But four years turned into five, and five years turned into six, and here we are, in 2017, still relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station — at a cost-per-seat that now stands at more than $76 million…rather than competing with other nations to create the best space technology, the previous administration chose capitulation. According to the U.S. intelligence community, Russia and China are pursuing a full range of anti-satellite technology to reduce U.S. military effectiveness, and they are increasingly considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine.”

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NASA’s Mission to Protect Humanity

This week will mark the 48th anniversary of the historic first landing on the moon, what has been to now NASA’s greatest accomplishment. But what the space agency is engaged in now may be of even greater significance.

For decades, those with little concept of the future economic, scientific and national security needs of the U.S. have questioned support for NASA. Now that it is clear that humanity may need the space agency to literally save it from extinction, perhaps some of those opponents of the space agency will reassess their perspective.

Mariette Le Roux, writing for the Phys.Org site, notes that “Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummeled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation. When the next big impact will be, nobody knows…‘Sooner or later we will get… a minor or major impact,’ Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany [said.] …the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high… the next impact could well ring in the end of human civilization.”

Max Wehner, writing for BGR, notes that even something less than an extinction-level event, such as that which wiped out the Dinosaurs, would be catastrophic. “Asteroids are the most clear and present threat that our Solar System poses to us, and you only need to look at the scars on the Earth, our moon, and other planets in our neighborhood to see exactly how real that danger is… a Queen’s University Belfast researcher is warning that the Earth is definitely going to be hit, it’s just a matter of when.The expert, Alan Fitzsimmons, points out that an event similar to that of the 1908 meteoroid explosion over the Tunguska region in Russia’s Siberia — which leveled a forest and damaged buildings but didn’t result in any human deaths — could happen again, and if it did happen over a major city, the results would be devastating.”

NASA has taken up the issue. Its’ JPL division asked last October, “What would we do if we discovered a large asteroid on course to impact Earth?…” that was the high-consequence scenario discussed by attendees at a NASA-FEMA tabletop exercise. The third in a series of exercises hosted jointly by NASA and FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency — the simulation was designed to strengthen the collaboration between the two agencies, which have Administration direction to lead the U.S. response. “It’s not a matter of if — but when — we will deal with such a situation,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation.”

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“AIDA will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impact technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space. AIDA is a dual-mission concept, involving two independent spacecraft – NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), and ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM). The DART mission is in Formulation Phase A, led by JHU/APL and managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.  AIM, managed by ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) is in Preliminary Definition Phase B1.

“AIDA’s primary objective is to demonstrate, and to measure the effects of, a kinetic impact on a small asteroid. Its target is the binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos, which consists of a primary body approximately 800 meters across, and a secondary body (or “moonlet”) whose 150-meter size is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose a more common hazard to Earth.

“The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6 km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software. The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth. By targeting the small moonlet in a binary system, the AIDA mission plan makes these precise measurements possible and ensures that there is no chance the impact could inadvertently create a hazard to Earth.”

In an effort to enhance NASA’s role and invigorate America’s bid to return to space leadership, President Trump issued an executive order on June 30 re-establishing the National Space Council, to be led by Vice President Mike Pence.