Space Junk - What's Up (or down) in Space

The White House is looking to give U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) the authority to negotiate orbital data sharing agreements with other nations as part of a broader effort to ensure safety of operations in the increasingly congested space environment, a senior U.S. Defense Department official said. Ambassador Gregory Schulte, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, also said the United States and China have agreed in principle to hold regular military space consultations. He cautioned that no such meetings have been scheduled yet but said the two sides have an ongoing military dialogue and share a common interest in preserving the space environment and ensuring that it does not become a flash point in their relations. Formal agreements with spacefaring countries would facilitate regular exchanges, with data flowing in both directions, Schulte said. For example, other countries could notify Stratcom in advance of plans to move their satellites, he said.  Read more…

A Republican lawmaker is looking to make the Obama administration pay a price for what he sees as its defiance of Congress in pursuing cooperation with China in science and space technology. A proposal by Rep. Frank Wolf, a fierce critic of Beijing, would slash by 55 percent the $6.6 million budget of the White House's science policy office. The measure was endorsed by a congressional committee this week, but faces more legislative hurdles, and its prospects are unclear. President Barack Obama has sought to deepen ties with China, which underwrites a major chunk of the vast U.S. national debt and is emerging a challenge to American military dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. Among the seemingly benign forms of cooperation he has supported is in science and technology. Last year NASA's administrator visited China, and during a high-profile state visit to Washington by China's President Hu Jintao in January, the U.S. and China resolved to "deepen dialogue and exchanges in the field of space." Caught at the sharp end is Holdren's office, whose mandate is to develop sound science and technology policies by the U.S. government and pursue them with the public and private sectors and other nations.  Read more…

In a briefing this morning with reporters, Gregory Schulte, the Pentagon's space policy chief, said the U.S. aimed to maintain its strategic advantage in space -- but it would have to implement that strategy "in a tight budget environment." The Department of Defense currently spends around $26 billion a year on space projects, funding that sustains a wide array of communications and surveillance satellites. Mr. Schulte said the Pentagon was looking at "different approaches" to launching and operating satellites, in hopes of saving money. As an example, Mr. Schulte pointed to the Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload, or CHIRP, an Air Force sensor assembly that will be installed on board a commercial communications satellite. Defense space policy now encourages the concept of "hosted payloads" -- in other words, allowing military equipment to piggyback aboard privately funded and operated satellites. The new national security space strategy, signed in February by former Secretary of DefenseRobert Gates and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, was in large part developed to address those three concerns. But as Mr. Schulte suggested, the military was also keeping an eye on another: cost.  Read more…

After 30 years and 135 missions, it's curtains for NASA's Space Shuttle. The Shuttle Atlantis blasted off on Friday for one last rendezvous with the International Space Station, bringing to an end the current era of impressive -- but pricey and dangerous -- manned spaceflight. But never fear! America's space arsenal might be down four giant Shuttles, but there's still plenty of U.S. government hardware orbiting the Earth, much of it top secret. Counting commercial satellites with government missions, Washington has access to around 400 spacecraft -- four times as many as the number-two space power, Moscow. U.S. spacecraft include communications satellites, orbital cameras and other sensors, craft designed to eavesdrop on radio traffic and at least one secretive, robotic space plane similar to in shape to the retiring Shuttle.  Read more…

As the space-shuttle era draws to a close and budget pressures threaten to constrain spending, a senior Defense Department official said on Tuesday that the government needs to take steps to protect the aerospace industrial base and to preserve the United States' technological edge in space. The Defense Department has not been involved in the shuttle program since the 1980s, but NASA and the military's own space operations remain inextricably linked. "While we don't share the shuttle, we do share the industrial base," Gregory Schulte, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for space policy, told reporters at a breakfast on Tuesday morning. "And so anything that NASA does is important to us in terms of the industrial base. And anything that we do is important to NASA as well." The end of NASA's 30-year shuttle program opens the door to more commercial investment in space. But concerns remain about the industry's health--particularly as the Defense Department, whose space budget totals about $26 billion annually, weighs significant cuts to its accounts. "We're worried about the state of the industrial base," Schulte said.  Read more…

In the geeky world of space engineering, this large, high-ceilinged room is close to holy. Inside, people speak in hushed tones and observe time-honored traditions. The place is Mission Control. Beginning moments after launch, flight controllers here choreograph everything astronauts do, from waking up and eating to walking in space. When Atlantis lands Thursday, the famous room will seem even more ghostly. After 30 years and 135 missions, shuttles will no longer need controlling. NASA plans to turn the space into a training venue, mostly for astronauts going to the International Space Station and flight controllers working with the station. Over the next couple of months, 800 or 900 people in the mission operations division will be laid off, said Paul Hill, head of that division and a former flight director himself.  Read more…

Some of the several thousand former NASA contractors being put out of work by the termination of the space shuttle program are finding a soft landing in Houston's vast energy sector. After a couple of lean years, local energy companies are hiring again -- and many like what they see in the large and highly skilled pool of jettisoned space workers. Among companies that have hired or are recruiting former NASA contractors are major oil producers, oil field services providers, chemical makers and firms that build large-scale energy projects. They've snapped up engineers and other technical experts that are once again in high demand as high oil prices and improving economic conditions worldwide give the industry a boost, even as other sectors take longer to rebound. The shuttle program is shutting down after 30 years and 135 flights, taking thousands of jobs with it. At Johnson Space Center in Houston, about 2,000 contractors have been let go since late last fall and another 2,000 will be cut by September, said Rachel Kraft, a JSC spokeswoman. Additional job losses are taking place in Florida and Alabama.  Read more…

Astronauts left behind more than souvenirs as Atlantis departed Monday from the International Space Station, preparing for today's final undocking of the space shuttle. A host of science experiments remained as the four shuttle astronauts bade farewell to their six space station crew hosts. With unpacking finished last week, shuttle astronauts turned their focus to delivering science experiments they brought with them, space station Flight Director Chris Edelen said. Experiments are typically picked that offer benefits to astronauts now and potential future explorers of the moon or Mars, as well as ones offering benefits for people on Earth. Among their deliveries: * Ten mice for a 12-day look at bone loss in spaceflight, common in astronauts, and two drugs designed to lessen the problem. * Equipment for a Defense Department study of how outer skin tissues heal in space so that scientists can understand why wounds repair slower in orbit and look for similar effects underlying slow-healing wounds on Earth. * Filters designed to convert sweat and urine into drinking water, which might be added to the space station's plumbing or future "long-duration" spacesuits. *The shuttle also delivered a "robotic refueling" experiment, installed last week during a spacewalk. Equipped with a variety of refueling caps, and a half-gallon of ethanol, the experiment will allow the test of a robotic arm to remotely refuel or service satellites already in orbit.  Read more…

Now that the space shuttle Atlantis has lifted off, NASA is closing the books on its shuttle program, prompting a final reckoning. One piece of the history is surprisingly elusive: the price tag. Some media outlets have pegged the total cost of the shuttle program, and its 135 launches, at between $115 billion and nearly twice that amount, demonstrating the challenge of tallying a bill over such a long time span. Beyond inflation, there are other wild cards with the space-shuttle cost estimates. As Prof. Pielke noted in his original report on space-shuttle costs at the behest of a journal reviewer, his calculations don't account for the opportunity costs of capital invested that otherwise might have been spent elsewhere, which often is included in estimates of private-sector spending but not government spending. His calculation doesn't include Defense Department spending on the shuttle, which by 1996 had totaled roughly $18 billion, in today's dollars, according to Mr. Schwartz. And it excludes some non-itemized NASA spending in the shuttle program's first two decades. Prof. Pielke says he is encouraged that the latest estimates he and NASA have produced are both close to $200 billion, once NASA's figures are adjusted for inflation. "I'm not going to quibble about $10 billion more or less."  Read more…

Nasa, the story goes, once spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would work in zero gravity. The Russians, obliged by budgetary constraints to think a little further out of the box, bypassed the problem by issuing its cosmonauts with pencils. Though delightful, the story is unfortunately an urban-spaceman myth. The "Space Pen" is just one of many developments with which Nasa has been credited erroneously. Daniel Lockney, Nasa's technology transfer programme executive says, a long list of other inventions regularly and wrongly credited to Nasa, including Velcro, Teflon, and the microwave oven. Most exciting of all, however, there will also be "new technology that we can't anticipate, technologies we don't even know we need yet". One thing he says Nasa does know "after 50-plus years of history, is that whatever we do will end up providing substantial and practical benefits to the public". Practical returns, however, may be the least important of the gifts Nasa has brought back to Earth. The true value of space research, Mr Lockney told the conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics last year, was often felt "in immeasurable ways", such as in "the shift in global understanding of the Earth as a fragile ecosystem that came about after the widespread distribution of [Apollo 8's] historic Earthrise photographs, oft cited as integral to the birth of the environmental movement in the 1970s". Indeed, that one photograph may yet prove to be the greatest spin-off of the space race. As William Anders, an Apollo 8 astronaut, said of the famous photograph he took on Christmas Eve, 1968: "We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."  Read more…

Once the smoke clears from the three-year debate over U.S. space policy ushered in by the return of a Democratic administration to the White House, NASA's human-spaceflight activities will look a lot like those planned and started under the preceding Republican administration. As was the case then, astronauts will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on Russian Soyuz vehicles while they wait for a new capsule/launch vehicle combination that owes more in basic design and operation to Apollo and its predecessors than to the space shuttle. And NASA will be working on a heavy-lift rocket comparable to the Saturn V, hopeful that it will take humans beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) someday. Perhaps the biggest difference in the old approach and the new will be the time lost while the politicians and contractors sorted out the details. And only time will tell if the new approach is faster--and cheaper, as NASA's leaders promise.  Read more…

The Boeing Co. is in negotiations with NASA and Space Florida to build a commercial space taxi in a former shuttle hangar at Kennedy Space Center. If it pans out, the deal would bring hundreds of jobs to KSC starting in the next 12 to 18 months, when the center's employment will be at its lowest level since the end of the Apollo program. John Elbon, the manager overseeing development of Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft, said Space Florida and KSC were still working out which facilities would be made available, including the hangar that formerly housed the orbiter Discovery. Boeing wants to locate its manufacturing, engineering, integration and flight teams in the same place to increase cost-saving synergies, Elbon said, and is exploring options in multiple states.  Read more…

The end of the NASA space shuttle program spells opportunity for space insurers and brokers as commercial ventures will take astronauts, equipment and even tourists into space. The 135th and final space shuttle mission launched July 8 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., taking the Atlantis to the International Space Station with its final return to earth scheduled for this week. While there are few immediate changes for insurers because the shuttle has carried no commercial payloads since the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA already is funding various commercial launch systems, which should mean more business for insurers, said Simon Clapham, London-based head of the marine division at Liberty Syndicates, a Liberty Mutual Group Inc.-owned Lloyd's of London insurer.  Read more…

As President Obama pushes for more spending on science education and research to keep America globally competitive, the nation's scientific community continues to suffer a number of setbacks that appears to undermine the president's goal. The U.S. is abandoning its space shuttle program, closing the Tevatron, considering defunding the James Webb Space Scope (Hubble's replacement) and could possibly reject a cutting-edge underground research lab that would restore some prestige to the field of U.S. science. But the past few months have been filled with setbacks for science advocates. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee released its funding bill for Commerce, Justice and Science for the next fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The bill eliminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's next-generation space telescope which would be the successor to Hubble and is the space agency's biggest post-shuttle project. The committee says the project is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management. "This legislation includes funding for some of the most critical aspects of government," House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers said in a statement. "However, given this time of fiscal crisis, it is also important that Congress make tough decisions to cut programs where necessary to give priority to programs with broad national reach that have the most benefit to the American people." Obama is now hoping new investments in science and technology will help create new jobs in an economy struggling to regain its footing after the worst recession in decades.  Read more…