Discovery News: Space Diary

Guess Who's Coming to Visit?

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

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.

A World A'Twitter

Curious what’s happening on Mars? No need to comb the net looking for news. NASA’s newest robot probe will phone you with its updates.

Phoenix, which is busily analyzing ice and soil samples from Mars’ northern polar cap, is using the social networking site Twitter to text-message the science-minded about its progress. Apparently, more than 27,000 folks are following Phoenix’s words, which can flash across your cell phone, pop up in your Instant Messaging program or passively wait to be read on its Twitter homepage.

Hungry for a direct outreach to the public, NASA has given more than a dozen machines a virtual life. Among Phoenix’s colleagues on Twitter are LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) which hasn’t even left the ground yet, the Hubble Space Telescope, the new gamma ray observatory GLAST and the space shuttles Atlantis , Discovery and Endeavour. Even space shuttle missions are incarnating.

It’s not just the ‘droids who are coming into their ‘lectronic lives. Apparently blogs are Twitter-fodder too so I took the plunge and signed up Free Space. At least I think I did. I’m waiting for my cell phone to ring to let me know if I’ve posted or not.

Send Your Name to the Moon

I’m a (recovering) deadline junkie. It’s a product of 25 years of news writing. So even when I don’t have to write on deadline, it’s the fallback position, the environment I’m most accustomed to.

All that is by way of explanation -- and apology -- for giving you exactly one day’s notice to send your name to the moon.

It’s part of an educational outreach program NASA is running as it prepares to send off a new orbiter to map the moon’s surface. A microchip etched with people’s names -- NASA's goal is 1 million -- will be installed on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is scheduled for launch later this year.

LRO is a predecessor mission to NASA’s return to the moon with astronauts. It is designed to map the lunar surface so the space agency can decide where to land its crews and where to set up a base. The last time anyone set foot on the moon was in 1972. I’m not saying you’ll win a cosmic lottery or something, but it’s kind of cool to know that your name will be up there.

Metaphysically Speaking

I’d like to know about dark matter as much as anyone. And it sure would be swell if the United States made good on its word to fly the particle detector known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, to the International Space Station, especially after it got 16 countries to foot most of the $1.5 billion construction bill.

With great fanfare -- press conferences with the Nobel Prize winner behind the project, etc. -- NASA flew a prototype on the shuttle 10 years ago. The agency agreed to send another AMS to the space station in 2002 or 2003 for a three-year study. Then came the Columbia accident, the decision to retire the shuttles and ultimately a cancellation of AMS’ ride to orbit.

Except that Samuel Ting, the Nobel-holding lead scientist for AMS, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He lobbied Congress. He got his international partners involved. He literally turned it into a federal case. And now, Ting's relentlessness may be about to pay off.

Last week, the House passed a NASA funding bill adding one more flight of the shuttle to deliver AMS to the space station. This week, it's the Senate's turn. On Monday, NASA chief Michael Griffin told a Senate oversight committee it’d run a few hundred million dollars for the extra flight, with one huge caveat: That figure presumes there is no extension of any shuttle equipment contracts. Griffin wouldn’t come straight out and say it, but what he means is that if the AMS flight is added on, there won’t be a shuttle available to mount a rescue mission. Since Columbia, NASA routinely adds the contingency mission to every flight.

That’s not to say that a crew tapped to deliver AMS to the station would be abandoned should the shuttle be too damaged to return to Earth. They could all use the station as a temporary shelter until folks figured out how to get enough Soyuz capsules to the outpost to fly them all back home. Or something along those lines. (At this part of the hearing it was NASA space operations chief Bill Gerstenmaier’s turn at obtuse.)

Griffin came back after the morning proceedings ended to clarify that maintaining the shuttle contracts past their cut-off dates would be prohibitively expensive -- something on the order of $3 billion to $4 billion, which “we don’t need to do to fly the final flight.”

No, all NASA needs to do is tell it straight: If AMS is the last flight, it’ll go without the safety net provided to all previous missions since Columbia. After listening to all the circumfusion, I think I have a clearer picture of dark matter, metaphysically speaking.

Let's Steal the Soyuz

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 ….

A Transcendental Moment -- Not

Rookie astronaut Garrett Reisman was sort of expecting a transformation of human spirit when he finally got to orbit and took his first look at the majesty of Earth in its global, planetary context. Nice idea, but it never happened.

"My fundamental outlook hasn’t changed," the 40-year-old Reisman told a reporter on Tuesday as he prepared to leave the International Space Station after a three-month mission.

"I don’t mean to rain on anybody’s parade, but I was kind of thinking that when I first saw the Earth out the window it may be a real transcendental moment.

"I got to tell you that it was beautiful -- I’ve never tired of looking at the Earth -- but it was similar to what I’ve seen from high-altitude airplanes. I didn’t have a sudden urge to hold all my crewmembers’ hands and sing Kumbaya, which I thought maybe might happen to me."

Reisman may be a realist, but he's also a romantic. He told the press yesterday he could state in two words what he was most looking forward to about coming home: Simone Francis, his wife.

"I talked to her last night on our IP telephone from up here and she was furious with me for embarrassing her like that," Reisman added today. "But the truth is, when I look out the window at the planet and I look down at all the people down there, I'm usually just thinking about just one of all those billions of people. And that's definitely who I'm looking forward to seeing the most."

Thanks for sharing the love, Garrett.

Caption: He will hug, but apparently not from seeing the Earth. That's Reisman in the middle, his replacement Greg Chamitoff on the left, and Discovery astronaut Mike Fossum on the right.

Stranded in Space

That big sparkling new laboratory attached to the International Space Station this week has one short-coming: It's so spacious you can get stuck mid-air, says the commander of the shuttle crew that delivered Kibo.

“You have to be a little extra careful," Kelly explained during an inflight interview. “You can get out in the middle of it and you can’t reach a handrail and you could possibly get stuck there for a little while.”

Launch Pad Problems

Perhaps it is a sign. NASA is planning to wrap up its space shuttle program, which has been delivering people
and payloads into low-Earth orbit since 1981, after 10 more flights. But its launch pad may have petered out a bit early.

The launch of shuttle Discovery gouged a big hole in the pad's underground, brick-lined pit, known as the flame trench. Cleanup is not as easy as it sounds. First of all, NASA doesn't know why 1,000 bricks were blasted out of the wall and wants to make sure it doesn't happen again. The concern is that debris could be

tossed upward and hit the shuttle. As we sadly learned with Columbia's demise, the shuttle is a fragile creature.

Secondly, the flame trench, originally built for the 1960s-era Apollo program, contains that lovely 1960s era insulation, asbestos.

There's a few month for NASA to figure out what to do. The pad isn't scheduled to be used again until October.

Phoenix, Descending

Phoenix's arrival at Mars did not go unnoticed... this image of its parachute descent toward the northern arctic region was captured by a sister spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.