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April 09, 2009

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying space station commander Mike Fincke, flight engineer Yury Lonchakov and space tourist Charles Simonyi returned to Earth on Wednesday -- and apparently NASA photographer Bill Ingalls was airborne to see it. Hope the landing was softer than this looks. To the left is Fincke with the official welcoming committee. 

Space Tourism Program Still Ticking

April 03, 2009

Space Adventures, the Virginia-based firm that so far has cornered the market on commercial spaceflight, isn't letting a little thing like no more flight opportunities spoil its business plans.

In a conference call with reporters, company president Eric Anderson said the ongoing flight of space tourist Charles Simonyi (they prefer the term "spaceflight participant") shouldn't be its last. 

Simonyi, who is flying for the second time, is among six wealthy business people who have ventured into orbit thanks to Space Adventures' business ties with Russian space officials. NASA won't fly anyone other than professional astronauts, in case you're wondering.

Space Adventures has been selling spare seats on the Russian Soyuz capsules traveling to the International Space Station to swap out crews. But beginning in May, when the live-aboard crew size doubles to six, there aren't going to be any spare seats available, barring last-minute hiccups. That's one of Space Adventures' business models: Be prepared to pounce if something opens up. Anderson said the company is keeping a close watch on a potential issue that may free a seat on the Soyuz slated to fly on September 30 with a flier from Kazakhstan, which is paying Russia directly for the venture.

Space Adventures also is trying to put together dedicated commercial Soyuz flights, though the capsule manufacturer, which already has to double production to handle the extra flights to ferry the station's larger crews, may find it impossible to crank out more vehicles. Also, there's limited parking space at the station -- assuming that's still the tourist destination of choice. Two of the station's docking ports will be filled with Soyuz craft serving as the crew's lifeboats. The leaves just one port free for either a third Soyuz, a Russian Progress cargo ship, or Europe's ATV cargo ship, which docks at the Russian side of the station. 

Still, there's reason to hope, Anderson said. The world economic situation apparently hasn't hit his clientele (Simonyi paid $35 million for his flight) as much as other industries.

"The kind of person … who has indicated an interest in going to space is a long-term thinker. Someone who has had a life dream of going to space is not going to let an economic downturn -- even if it’s a longer one than we would have hoped -- change their objective," Anderson said.

That's a load off. 

(Caption: Charles Simonyi in space. Courtesy: NASA) 

Spurned Contractor Wants New Deal from NASA

January 15, 2009

NASA is suspending contract awards to two firms selected to fly cargo to the International Space Station after a third contender formally protested the outcome of the competition.

PlanetSpace, a Chicago-based partnership set up by three of the U.S. space agency’s prime contractors -- Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co, and Alliant Techsystems Inc. -- filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Wednesday, contesting contracts awarded last month worth $3.5 billion to startup Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif., and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp.

The contracts called for a total of 20 flights to the space station to deliver cargo after the space shuttles are retired in 2010.

NASA has 30 days to respond to the complaint and the GAO is required to issue a ruling by April 29, 2009.

You can read some details about the complaint here and a statement by PlanetSpace on the matter.

Guess Who's Coming to Visit?

July 14, 2008

There’s a long list of topics to discuss at the big International Space Station partners meeting in France this week: payloads for the shuttle's last nine flights to the outpost; two mini-research modules Russia wants to attach; bunking arrangements for when the crew size doubles next year -- and my personal favorite: what to do about uninvited guests.

Now I’m being blatantly ethnocentric here and looking at the prospect of visitors solely from NASA’s point of view, which seems a bit like the proverbial housewife putting up with the husband’s relatives. Sure, NASA needs her Russian hubby, particularly since he’s got the only car service running after the shuttle retires, but just how far does this arranged marriage bend?

Russia, which has embraced capitalism as no entity in the U.S. government  has dared, has cut a deal with a Virginia-based firm to supply spaceships and pilots to ferry paying passengers to the station. Russia has been running a small-scale tourist transport service since Dennis Tito forked over $20-plus million for run to the ISS in 2001.

NASA was none-to-pleased with the stunt and begrudgingly “allowed” access to the ISS only when it became apparent that it had no choice. But Tito and the handful of entrepreneurs who followed his footsteps (Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott’s son Richard, millionaire computer game developer, is set to become tourist space flight participant No. 6 in October) hitched rides on Soyuz capsules that were needed to change out resident space station crewmembers. The new gig would add three folks at a time for independent research, educational, commercial or other programs.

Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson tells me he’d like to fly a commercial Soyuz once a year beginning in 2011. (He declined to reveal a target price for each excursion.)

NASA learned of the plan last month the same way most folks did: from a press conference. The initial response was polite, but muted. One program manager did let slip that he thought commercial Soyuz trips marked “a radically different” way of operating.

I’m sure they’ll work things out though, for in this world of uncertainty, NASA has indeed staked a claim in at least one final frontier: There’s no divorce in space.

Caption: Dennis Tito suiting up to become the first fare-paying passenger in space. (Photo: Space Adventures.)

No Atheists in Space

July 10, 2008

Think you had a rough day? Imagine this: You and a roommate step outside your house, which happens to be orbiting 217 miles above the planet, and head over to the rocket ship that is supposed to take you home in another three months. The last two crews flying aboard these capsules hit the ground hard, off-course and out of radio contact with rescue teams and Mission Control.

By “ hard” I mean that instead of just feeling like an elephant was sitting on your chest -- which I’m told is what a normal Soyuz landing of two- to three times the force of Earth’s gravity is like  -- the last two crews re-entered the atmosphere on ballistic trajectories, briefly enduring more than eight times the force of Earth’s gravity. This on the heels of six months of weightlessness.

The Russians haven’t figured out yet what’s gone wrong, but they suspect the last section of the Soyuz that is supposed to jettison prior to re-entry is hanging on a bit too long, sort of like the famed hanging chads of Florida. We're living with that legacy.

So, in the pursuit of information to help solve the puzzle, cosmonauts Sergei Volkov, the space station commander, and lead flight engineer Oleg Kononenko, dutifully donned their pressurized spacesuits and bailed out for a six-hour spacewalk, the first for both. It wasn’t a pretty assignment.

First Kononenko couldn’t get himself strapped to the crane that would put him in position to work on the Soyuz, so eventually he just hung on for the ride. Then it took four hours of hard work open a locking mechanism and remove a bolt that engineers want the crew to bring back with them for analysis on the ground.

One thing about this bolt: It’s explosive -- has the blast capability of an M-80 firework, which I personally have never handled, but I know would make me the coolest and stupidest mom in the world if I got one for my teen-age son.

If that’s not sporty enough, there was the open-bladed serrated knife Kononenko used to slice through insulation to get at the bolt. (Remember these guys are essentially wearing a balloon.) And oh, by-the-way, watch out for those Soyuz thrusters, Mission Control repeatedly reminded the spacewalkers. The rockets may hold traces of highly toxic fuel. Wouldn’t want that in the airlock.

When reporters asked about the wisdom of having astronauts handle live explosives or housing the device onboard the space station, NASA program manger Mike Suffredini offered this perspective:

"We dream of a lot of wild things to do and after much analysis, sometimes we do them and sometimes we don't. In this case, both safety communities thoroughly looked at all the data surrounding this. So we have quite a bit of confidence we're perfectly safe for the crew to both remove the power connector from the charge, remove the pyrobolt from the mechanism and bring the pyrobolt, in the blast canister, inside. This has been done with all the rigor we would expect for a system that was critical like this."


Still, I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one holding my breath at 6:44 p.m. EDT, when Volkov handed off the ordnance to Kononenko to put inside a blast-proof canister.

“It is in,” he said through a translator. “Thank God.”

Caption: Oleg Kononenk training for the spacewalk.

Let's Steal the Soyuz

June 11, 2008

Well not “steal” it exactly, just do what Japan has done to our automobile industry, China to textiles and India to tech support. Import it, then re-label ‘Made in America.’ It’d be a neat way around the prohibition against buying Soyuz from the Russians, who are being punished -- not really -- for providing technology and dangerous ideas widely available on the internet to Iran, which is next door to Iraq and probably what the Bush Administration was really aiming for when they got us embroiled in the bruhaha over there.

And the U.S. really needs a spaceship because we can’t afford to fly the shuttles and simultaneously develop safer ships that can transport people to the space station as well as beyond low-Earth orbit, which we’ve been going ‘round and ‘round in since 1972, the last moon landing.

Unfortunately it took a national tragedy to buck up to the fact that the shuttles are too expensive and risky to fly forever, wonderful machines that they are. Problem is, it’s going to take five or six years to get the new crafts flying after the shuttles are retired. NASA has taken to calling this period “the gap.”

Leaving aside the fact that right now NASA is banned from purchasing Soyuz after its current exemption expires in 2011, the United State’s plan for staffing the space station during the gap is to get another exemption to buy more Soyuz. We’ll need twice as many as before, in fact because next year the size of the space station’s crew doubles to six. The Soyuz can hold three people.

Now comes the news today that Google co-founder Sergey Brin has plunked down $5 million for his own Soyuz so that he and another tourist can go visit space. (Apparently the Congressional ban doesn’t apply to private companies.) The firm arranging the jaunt will even hire a full-fledged Russian cosmonaut to pilot the rocketeers.

Which brings me to this: Why not import the Soyuz or get a license to manufacture them here? Florida, which just lost out to Virginia to be the launch site for a proposed commercially developed station cargo hauler, would be game. Might even get our Congressional delegation focused on an issue they need to be concerned with, like trade, economics and foreign affairs, rather than deciding if an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer dark matter device should fly on the shuttle or not.

Just a thought ….

Rough landing

April 21, 2008

An investigation is under way into why the Russian Soyuz capsule carrying NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and guest researcher Yi So-yeon landed more than 250 miles short and nearly three times harder than planned. It took the Russian recovery team a half-hour to find the capsule, which was burnt from overheating during its steep plunge through the atmosphere. It was the third so-called ballistic return of the capsule with a space station crew. Whitson and her crewmates were able to climb out of the Soyuz unassisted while they awaited rescue. The spacecraft is believed to have set off a grass fire at touchdown. Photo by Reuters.

It’s not as if Peggy Whitson, the NASA astronaut returning from a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station was lacking excitement and adventure in her life. During her stint as commander, the 48-year-old biochemist oversaw five different flight engineers, two guest researchers, three shuttle crews, each of which added new rooms to the station, and then the arrival of Europe’s first unmanned cargo ship. She also conducted five spacewalks and somehow managed to make the whole mission look easy and fun.

Whitson surely could have done without the crash landing of the Soyuz capsule which because of a technical glitch dove through the atmosphere much steeper than planned, subjecting the crew to 10 times the force of Earth’s gravity -- nearly triple the usual force. But what was really unnecessary were the off-color comments of yet another Russian official regarding women in space. Whitson, you may remember, was given a going-away gift by her Russian hosts of a whip.

Noting that Whitson was accompanied by another woman aboard the capsule -- with females outnumbering men for the first time ever aboard a spaceship -- Anatoly Perminov, head of the the Russian space agency Roskosmos, cracked that perhaps the landing was rough and off-target because of a superstitious belief that woman on vessels are bad luck.

Course that doesn’t explain the botched landing of the previous, all-male, crew, but as a colleague once joked: “Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.”

Welcome home, Peggy. Times, unfortunately, have not changed much.