The Columbia crater group

The Columbia crater group in the Apollo impact basin, in memory of the first Space Shuttle and its crew, lost ten years ago in a catastrophic accident during re-entry, February 1, 2003. Chang'E-2 global medium resolution mosaic [CNSA/CLEP].

The Columbia crater group (ellipse), in context with the Apollo basin, a site set aside for remembering heroes, beyond the naked eye of Earth, on the most remote plains of the Earth-Moon system. LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) monochrome mosaic [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

The Moon's farside, with the Columbia crater group designated with an arrow, and the Apollo basin itself in context of the ancient South Pole-Aitken basin. LROC WAC DTM [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Forty years ago

Diver crews off the carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga hustle recover Apollo 16 command module soon after splashdown in the Pacific (0°43′S 156°13′W), April 27, 1972. Along with the distinct scarring of their fiery direct-return re-entry John Young, Charlie Duke and Ken Mattingly return, arrive following 11 days in Space with 95.71 kg of lunar samples. During their mission the U.S. House of Representatives directed development of a Space Shuttle transportation system to debut in 1976. The next and last expedition to the lunar surface would take place the following December, and Young commanded the first orbital flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981 [NASA/JSC/ALSJ].

The Gap in U.S. manned spaceflight

The drop tests of the Enterprise Space Shuttle test platform, beginning in 1977 and four years before Columbia finally launched, were dreary teasers of a program long on promises and short on funding. The original manned spaceflight 'gap,' according to David S. F. Portree, colors the end of the Shuttle program with unnecessary dread. The "Gap" of the present day is hardly a gap at all in comparison. The needless dread attaches itself to an all-too-human inability to fully prepare one's self for the "wholly new" [NASA].

David S. F. Portree
WIRED

July 1979 was the busiest month for American spaceflight I could remember, and it was a mixed bag. On the one hand, Skylab fell from orbit, pelting Australia with debris. Where the heck was the Shuttle, which was supposed to have saved it? That was bad. On the other hand, Voyager 2 zipped through the Jupiter system, returning more breathtaking (and freaking weird) views of the planet’s intricate zones and bands and crazy moons. (Voyager 1 had flown by Jupiter earlier in the year, making new data from Voyager 2 eagerly anticipated.) That was terrific.

July 1979 also marked four years since Americans had flown in space, three years since Viking 1 had landed on Mars and found no recognizable life, and 10 years since the first men had walked on the moon. The Shuttle was late, I couldn’t get a date, and the first Star Trek movie wouldn’t be out until Christmas.

Much has been made of the current “gap in U.S. spaceflight.” Some even bemoan “the end of U.S. spaceflight.” Poppycock. You call this a gap? I’ll tell you about a gap. I was in 6th grade when the last crew left Skylab (February 1974). A year and a half later Apollo-Soyuz flew. Then, nothing – no Americans in space at all – until April 1981, when I was a sophomore in college. On the plus side, somewhere in there I got a date.

There was no Internet then and no cable TV. Unless a mission was happening, space news was tough to come by. Heck, even if a mission was happening, it was hard to find out what was going on. NASA published infrequent mission updates on paper, and wasn’t always good about sending them via snailmail to space-cadet teenagers. I remember specific issues of magazines that contained a lot of space news because that made them unusual. They were like freak rain squalls in the space cadet desert.

Being able to remember the Apollo landings made the 1970s gap worse. Even though I had been about to start 2nd grade when Neil and Buzz cavorted on the Sea of Tranquillity, I had sensed that we were at the beginning of something magnificent. I lacked the words to express how terribly wrong it seemed when, just three and a half years later, Apollo 17 returned to Earth and the moon missions ended.

During The Great 1970s Gap, humans continued to fly in space. Soviet cosmonauts worked on board Salyut space stations, but their program was deeply mysterious. They claimed that they had never intended to send men to the moon. We had, they said, spent a lot of money and risked astronaut lives to race ourselves. Many spaceflight opponents repeated that propaganda on the 10th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Skylab’s untimely demise happened 11 days before the 10th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, spoiling the party. Not that anyone threw a party to celebrate Apollo 11′s 10th anniversary; there was nothing like Yuri’s Night in 1979. It seemed that no one mentioned Apollo 11 without also mentioning Skylab, as if the latter had diminished the epic significance of the former. They didn’t mention Voyager 2 much on the Apollo 11 anniversary, as I recall, even though it was inside the Jupiter moon system when Skylab fell. After all, the Voyagers were just machines operated on behalf of goofy scientists (this was before Cosmos and planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s rise to pop culture icon).

Fast forward to April 2012.

Forty years ago: 'a big ol' Navy salute.'

Joy - The second of two 'mid-air' salutes. (Detail from AS16-113-18340, April 21, 1972, Apollo 16, EVA 1) by Cmdr. John Young answering Charlie Duke's request that he to pose for a photograph with two jumps, accompanying each with 'a big ole Navy salute.' [NASA/JSC/ALSJ].

From the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal: 120:25:42 "John Young jumps off the ground and salutes for this superb tourist picture. He is off the ground about 1.45 seconds which, in the lunar gravity field, means that he launched himself at a velocity of about 1.17 m/s and reached a maximum height of 0.42 m. Although the suit and backpack weigh as much as he does, his total weight is only about 65 pounds (30 kg) and, to get this height, he only had to bend his knees slightly and then push up with his legs. In the background, we can see the UV astronomy camera, the flag, the LM, the Rover with the TV camera watching John, and Stone Mountain. Journal Contributor Joe Cannaday notes that high-point of John's first jump was at a time close to 120:25:49 and the second was almost exactly three seconds later."

After trading places for Young to capture Duke's 'Air Force salute' Houston passes along 'good news.' The U.S. House of Representatives has authorized the Space Shuttle program. 

Young, who will command the first Space Shuttle mission 9 years later, answers, "Beautiful. Wonderful. The country needs that Shuttle mighty bad. You'll see."

From the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal: "John became the Chief of the Astronaut Office in 1975 and, later, appointed himself to command the first Shuttle flight. STS-1 was 36-orbit mission launched on April 12, 1981, the twentieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's Vostok flight. The pilot - and only other crewmember - on STS-1 was Robert Crippen.".

Landing site of Apollo 16, between North Ray and South Ray craters, northwest of the Descartes Formation ("Stone Mountain, at lower right) in the nearside lunar highlands. Full 52 meter resolution detail from LROC Wide Angle Camera monochrome (604nm) observation M177535094C, LRO orbit 11299, December 3, 2011; angle of incidence 69.4° from 38.2 kilometers altitude [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

U.S. Space Shuttle program ends

An unprecedented view of the space shuttle Atlantis and the ionization of its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, "appearing like a bean sprout against clouds and city lights," on its way home, July 21, 2011. Photographed by Expedition 28 from the ISS. Pre-dawn airglow over Earth can be seen in the background [NASA].

0957 UT, 21 July 2011: Atlantis returns to Earth for the final time, bringing an end to the program after more than thirty years, after 200 orbits and 8.5 million km. It was the 25th night landing and 78th landing at KSC, only the 133rd landing since 1981. MET: 12 days, 18 hours, 28 minutes and 50 seconds. Since April 12, 1981, 355 individuals from 16 countries flew 852 times aboard the shuttle, deploying 180 payloads, including satellites, returned 52 payloads from space and retrieved, repaired or redeployed seven spacecraft. STS-135 was the 33rd and final flight for Atlantis after totaling 307 days in space, 4,848 orbits and 872.3 million kilometers (roughly 48.49 light minutes or 5.8 AU) [NASA].

Apollo 16 launch shrapnel found in North Carolina

[Ed. Note: The following story "bleeds" irony for me, personally, the following local story coming out the week of the 135th and final Space Shuttle mission. First, because I now live only eight miles, and on the same shoreline, as Bath (North Carolina's colonial capital city), and also because the Young & Duke expedition to Descartes in April 1972 is high on my list of all-time favorite missions. I doubt I would have notified NASA of the miraculous artifact. Having endured more than seven tropical storms in the same area as the find, I also have to wonder whether other similar materials might be found at the water's edge, in and around the Albemarle Penisula.

Second, John Young was in command of the first Space Shuttle flight, nine years after becoming the ninth man to walk on the Moon in 1981. - JCR.]

Still near-miraculously embossed with mission shield, this battered piece of the Saturn V that launched Apollo 16 to the Moon in April 1972, turned up on inland shore of North Carolina following Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2002 [NBC17/Durham].

Penn Holderness
NBC17 (Durham)

For Shannon Schanze, it started when she was a kid, watching the space race and the Apollo missions in the '60s. For millions of Americans, that's how it started.

Then there's Shannon's 16-year-old son, Kevin. His love affair of space exploration started when it washed up down the street from his beach house.

It was a one-in-a-million discovery. When he was 11, Kevin was riding on a golf cart around his family's beach home neighborhood in Bath, N.C. It was 2006 and Hurricane Ernesto had flooded parts of the Pamlico sound, so there was debris all over the place.

"My buddy and I saw this metal sheet on the ground, and we thought it was a stop sign or something," Kevin recalls. "I turned it over and it was a really old piece of metal, and there was a little stamp on it. I looked closer and saw that it said "Apollo 16.'"

"I heard everyone screaming come outside," Shannon recalled. "We were just stunned. It was the coolest thing that could ever happen to an 11-year-old."

After a few painstaking years trying to confirm the authenticity of their find, the Schanzes received a letter from NASA telling them the good news: Kevin had indeed found a piece of Apollo 16.

Follow the Story, HERE.

Discarding Shuttle: The Hidden Cost

NASA spending as fraction of federal budget by year, in constant dollars. From NASA Is On An “Unsustainable Trajectory,” Jeffrey Ellis, The Thinker, September 9, 2009.

Paul D. Spudis
The Once & Future Moon
Smithsonian Air & Space

On February 15, 2011 a symposium entitled “U.S. Human Spaceflight: Continuity and Stability” was held at Rice University’s James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy. Organized by George Abbey, the resident space expert at the Baker Institute, one might have suspected that it would be Shuttle-centric and indeed, it was. Many pertinent points relevant to the current discussion about NASA’s human space program and its future (or lack thereof) came out of the presentations at this symposium.

The program featured several speakers, all of whom played major roles in the Shuttle program. I found comments by Robert F. “Bob” Thompson most interesting. Bob Thompson is one of the true “old guard” – an original member of Bob Gilruth’s Space Task Group at NASA Langley, a group pre-dating the Mercury Program. Thompson was head of the Apollo Applications Program (Skylab) and the first manager of the Space Shuttle program. Many of his remarks resonate strongly with points I have made here and elsewhere about serious problems being dismissed or ignored in the unseemly rush to re-vamp NASA from an operational space flight agency into a check-writing bureaucracy for New Space endeavors.

Thompson’s theme was a considered and educated look at what discarding the country’s Space Shuttle Program means. Both his talk and the talk by Howard DeCastro (Shuttle Program Manager at the United Space Alliance, which operates the Shuttle system for NASA) carefully outlined the history of the Shuttle program and the possibility of flying the Shuttle commercially until a new system becomes available, thereby retaining our national spaceflight capability. They covered the many compromises made both in Shuttle’s conception and in its execution, as well as its unique capabilities. The Shuttle can both deliver and retrieve payloads from space; it is a fully integrated transport and servicing system in low Earth orbit. The famous Hubble Space Telescope would be a useless piece of junk instead of a national treasure without the Shuttle missions that first allowed for the repair of its defective vision and then returned to service the instrument in space multiple times over the ensuing decade.

An often ignored but critically important issue is the supporting infrastructure for spaceflight. Thompson made the analogy that when people see a Shuttle Orbiter, they really are seeing just the “tip of an iceberg.” The Shuttle is more than an orbiter vehicle; it is also the servicing facilities at the Cape that process and prepare the orbiter for launch. It is the ET fabrication facilities at Michoud and the SRB plant at Promontory as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that has performed flawlessly over the 133 flights to date. It is the mobile crawler and the launch towers at Pad 39-A. And it is the trained cadre of people that put all the pieces together and make them work in concert to deliver and return people and equipment from space. Thompson rhetorically encompassed his argument thusly: The Shuttle is a “dumb vehicle that cost too much” but is a “fully functional part of a space transportation system – an 18-wheel, extended cab work vehicle.” He told the audience that Orion, Soyuz and Progress were more like “taxis” and “pickup trucks.” He said that the Constellation vehicles (chosen to implement the 2004 Vision) were bad decisions, followed on now by an even worse decision.

Thompson used a familiar graphic, the chart showing NASA’s fraction of the annual federal budget over decades (see above). The large spike centered around 1966 represents peak spending for the Apollo program. Thompson made two specific observations about this graph. First, Richard Nixon (who took office in 1969) is often damned as the President who “killed Apollo.” But the graph shows that the ramp-down in spending for Apollo began two years earlier in 1967, in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The Vietnam War required some of NASA’s money, so Apollo-Saturn production managers were told to build the equipment needed to fulfill Kennedy’s decadal goal and shut down thereafter.

Additionally, Thompson made the very significant point (one usually ignored by many engaged in space policy debates) that the “Apollo spike” paid for the infrastructure – the buildings, laboratories, test and training facilities, and launch systems – that Apollo used and that the Shuttle uses to this day. By terminating the Shuttle with no follow-on, the fate of most of this infrastructure is the scrap heap. Note that the “Apollo spike” in funding happened forty years ago. To design and build the supporting infrastructure for human spaceflight in the mid-1960s, we annually spent ten times the fraction of the budget that we do now. Given the reality of the nation’s finances, NASA will be lucky if they can continue to get one-half of one percent of federal spending per year. This does not seem to be a good time to throw away three functioning Shuttle orbiters, thereby discarding a working national space faring capability, one carefully built and paid for over the last 50 years.

Several New Space companies are working on vehicle designs, which, if successful in creating a replacement space “work vehicle,” will need their own supporting infrastructure. These efforts will necessitate creating all the facilities mentioned above for their vehicles and systems. The cost of any given single launch is rolled into one number, but it must cover a multitude of expenses. Amortized over many decades, they may eventually pay for it all, but only if they can get enough business to fly their vehicles regularly and often. With NASA as their principal customer, will enough flights be purchased to take these New Space companies to the level they need in order to make a profit and survive?

Finally, Thompson asked, what is exploration if not living and working in space and contributing to the economy? He understands that exploration is more than going somewhere and planting a flag or collecting some rocks. Each time NASA launches a Shuttle, it puts 100 tons in space. By replacing the orbiter body with a cargo faring, we are creating a heavy lift launch vehicle. This Shuttle side-mount launch vehicle is something that fits the requirements placed on NASA for a new heavy lift vehicle. Its reliability has been consistently improved over the course of more than 30 years of flight experience and is more than adequate for many different kinds of missions throughout cislunar space. This is where the focus of our space program ought to be – and a zone of space specifically mentioned in the new agency authorization.

Preserving, adapting and using what we already have is smarter than destroying capability and starting again from scratch. We are putting faith in the emergence of space systems that will do what we want, when and where we want. We are told that to nurture and foster other providers of space access, we must throw away the bird in our hand and plant a revolutionary new bush, hopeful that it will grow and attract a variety of new birds. I leave it to you to decide the wisdom of such a restrictive course. Plant the bush but don’t throw away the only bird we now hold. We must be fully conscious about the realities of non-existent systems and preserve the space transportation capability on which America can rely.

Dr. Spudis has just published "Blogging the Moon," a collection of postings to his Smithsonian Air & Space blog "The Once & Future Moon."

Rollback

From NASA/KSC high-definition video taken during the Winter Solstice lunar eclipse, December 21, as seen over Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as Discovery was being prepared for rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Technical issues have forced a postponement of its scheduled final mission until at least March 2011. Justin Ray of SpaceflightNow "took some frame grabs from that video to create" a photo gallery. [HT: RLV and Space Transport News]

1POV - The “Von Braun Paradigm”

Dr. Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), appearing in an episode of Walt Disney's enormously popular television program in December 1955. (The episode would later be re-shown in public schools throughout the U.S. as "Tomorrow the Moon.") Von Braun, like all working academics in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), was a Party member. In World War II he and his team of engineers are rightly credited with the remarkable design, development and successful deployment of Germany's advanced liquid-fueled ballistic rocket program, most famously the "V-2." As prisoners-of-war his team reconstructed that program in New Mexico for the U.S. Army. Regardless, Von Braun's eventual influence over the course of the American space program would be hard to over-estimate, as a very influential popularizer, visionary, rocket engineer and as administrator of Marshall Space Flight Center.

NASA's long-term planning for human spaceflight

Michael J. Neufeld
Smithsonian Institution

In 1994, political scientist and space historian Dwayne A. Day coined the term "von Braun paradigm*" to describe what he saw as an entrenched.and counterproductive.NASA long-term strategy for human spaceflight.1 Roughly speaking, he boiled that strategy down to: space shuttle->space station->Moon->Mars. Day was responding to the ignominious failure of President George H. W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) from 1989 to 1990, which he, like many others, blamed on the space agency's penchant for gigantomania in its human exploration program.

In response to the presidential announcement on the steps of NASM on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA's 90-day study group advocated building, on the foundation of the Shuttle and then-projected space station, a lunar base and an ambitious spacefaring infrastructure that within 20 or 30 years would lead to a permanent human foothold on Mars. The cost turned out to be politically suicidal: several hundred billion dollars. The 90-day study reprised the Space Task Group report of 1969, which was an almost equally ignominious political failure. From that earlier proposal for a grand (or grandiose) post-Apollo space program, NASA salvaged only a scaled-back version of its first goal: a winged, reusable Space Shuttle.

Day traced this strategy back to the German-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, of course, specifically the series of articles the space visionary wrote or co-wrote in Collier s magazine between 1952 and 1954. These laid out his grand vision, which Day argued "had its greatest influence on how the U.S. space community envisions space. Von Braun convinced those who worked in the field that space was worthy of a concentrated, integrated human exploration effort." In fact, his vision was controversial from the start, drawing vigorous objections from many rocket engineers, but it was undeniably influential over the long run, especially on spaceflight true believers inside the movement and in the general public...

NASA's First 50 Years: Historical Perspectives
Page 325-347, (PDF) HERE.

March 5, 1969 - Newly inaugurated President Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994) announces NASA acting Administrator Thomas Paine’s nomination as NASA Administrator. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (right) looks on. Agnew and Paine later pushed an ambitious Shuttle-Space Station-Moon-Mars strategy for the post-Apollo space program that Nixon and the U.S. Congress refused to support [NASA Image 69-H-225].

*Dwayne A. Day, “The Von Braun Paradigm,” Space Times (November–December 1994): 12–15; Day expanded that opinion piece in the AAS newsletter as “Paradigm Lost,” Space Policy 11 (1995): 153–159.

Dr. Armstrong visits Intrepid Air & Space Museum

Neil Armstrong was a speaker at 'Legends of Aerospace' at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum.

Talk about star power.

The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum seized on a visit by the first man on the moon Sunday to ramp up its bid to bring a space shuttle to New York.

The museum collected signatures for a petition in favor of bringing a shuttle to the Intrepid from the hundreds of schoolkids and their parents who showed up for a talk by Neil Armstrong.

Read the full story HERE.

The long shadow of the Space Shuttle

Endeavour briefly casts a moving shade over the now-virtually completed International Space Station after undocking Friday evening (UT), February 19, 2010 as both huge vehicles orbited 334.7 km above the Atlantic, west of North Africa. "Shuttle pilot Terry Virts performed a fly-around of the station, enabling his crewmates to conduct a photo survey of the complex." The long shadow over the huge ISS solar arrays seem to symbolizes both the long end and the nearly as long beginning of two historic moments of "The Space Age." After more than a decade of assembly the Shuttle finally has a true destination in low Earth orbit, as the thirty-year-old manned reusable heavy-lift vehicle program draws to an end. In the long run, perhaps the most notable accomplishment for the Shuttle, the United States and for all of "humankind" will have been having proved large-scale construction off-Earth is possible, a sheer existential fact that everywhere humans live on Earth, in every state of civilization, they can see (now often even in daylight) in the sky overhead. The first Space Age, then, may now be said to have arrived at its end. How our humans will learn to survive beyond low Earth orbit is the next real challenge.

The Vision Thing

July 20, 1989, National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC - Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Apollo 11 and chosen venue for then-President George H.W. Bush's announcement of a proposed Space Exploration Initiative. (Left to Right, Chair of the National Space Council Vice President Dan Quayle, President Bush, Dr. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11 [NASA Image 89-H-382].

Wayne Hale
NASA Blogs

George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President, calls Houston home. He and Barbara can be frequently seen at Astros baseball games, he made his early career in business here, was a congressman from here, even once taught a course as an adjunct professor at my alma mater, Rice University.

As you may recall, Mr. Bush failed in his re-election bid; there were a number of reasons for his loss, but one of the frequently cited reasons was “the vision thing”. The critics felt that he had not clearly articulated his vision for the future of the nation, which is a vital function that an effective chief executive must do. Keep that in mind.

On July 20, 1989 – the 20th anniversary of the first lunar landing – President G. H. W. Bush had made a speech proposing what would come to be known as the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). This proposal included a permanent return to the Moon and human missions to Mars. In spite of the bold and visionary words, this initiative quickly failed.

Thor Hogan has written an excellent book on the history of the fiasco. His book is “Mars Wars, The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative” NASA SP-2007-4410, August 2007. I highly recommend this book for those who are interested in how national space policy is made and how federal agencies can be dysfunctional at times. Dr. Hogan is a Professor of Political Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Let me reiterate – I highly recommend this book if you are interested in these topics.

When “Mars Wars” was first published in 2007, it was widely circulated in NASA management and caused considerable discussion. Everyone was trying to make sure to avoid the mistakes made in 1989 and create a successful program. There are many lessons to be learned from that earlier experience, and Dr. Hogan hit many of them.

The most frequently cited lesson from SEI is the need to build a “sustainable” program. That is a shorthand way of saying stay within an affordable budget. One of the principle reasons the Space Exploration Initiative failed was its price tag. The SEI package was dead on arrival at Congress because of the high cost. Trying to apply this lesson, the NASA program of the last five years to send crews to the Moon and Mars strove mightily to remain within the budget line announced in 2004.

The notional Lunar Exploration Vehicle that arose from NASA's sketching out, in broad strokes, a frame work for the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative [Report of the 90-Day Study on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars, November 1989].

But back to 1989, because there are other lessons to be learned there. That year I was a rookie Space Shuttle Flight Director, learning the ropes in Mission Control, and I had no time to be involved in SEI. But I was immersed in the NASA culture of the day and I remember that time with great clarity. Dr. Hogan’s “Mars Wars” book does a wonderful job of capturing the motivations of agency personnel in those days.

It was a bare three years following the Challenger accident and the wound was still raw. Challenger was a driving factor in the SEI story. Remember that widely held beliefs are important whether they are accurate or not. That is because what people believe to be true motivates them. So take the following paragraph not necessarily as historical truth but as the mythos which psychologically undergird folks running SEI.

NASA was not allowed to build the shuttle the “right” way, that is, to make both engineeringly elegant and safe. Lives were lost in Challenger due to basic design choices forced on the agency by severe budgetary restrictions. In the early 1970s, when NASA was authorized to design and build a revolutionary reusable winged space vehicle, the Office of Management and Budget capped the total development cost of the shuttle at $5 billion. (Money went further back then.) This cap was far too low to allow development of several of the more innovative design options. Fly back liquid fueled boosters were out of the question, for example. Operational costs were higher because of choices required to keep the development costs low. Safety was lower. So we got an aero-space plane with a big dumb drop tank and two scaled up JATO bottles.

Read Wayne Hales post, HERE.

Space Shuttle demise hits Brevard County in Florida

Jerry Hart and Ryan Flinn
Bloomberg

Laurilee Thompson says her Dixie Crossroads seafood restaurant near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center will lose $50,000 a year in tourist business after the space shuttle flies for the last time in September. She’s not the only taxpayer in Brevard County to feel pain.

Local unemployment climbed to almost 15 percent after Apollo lunar launches ended in 1972. Now Brevard, Florida’s 10th-most populous county, where per capita income is already 8.3 percent less than the state average, is bracing for another blow as the U.S. shifts to moon and Mars flights from orbital missions.

Contractors led by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. will cut 7,000 Florida jobs, almost half the nationwide shuttle workforce that stretches to Alabama, Texas and California. Brevard, on the Atlantic coast, 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of Orlando, got $1.8 billion of the $2 billion the space program injected into the state in 2008, according to a National Aeronautics and Space Administration report. County borrowing costs rose about 2 percent since November after some of its bonds were downgraded by Fitch Ratings on concern over rising unemployment and falling revenue.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Lisa Rice, president of Brevard Workforce, which administers the Aerospace Workforce Transition Program, a county retraining agency for shuttle employees facing dismissal. “You have the economy going down, the shuttle retiring and defense contracts decreasing.”

Read the feature article HERE.

Second to final flight for Atlantis

Textbook touchdown: Streams of smoke trail from the main landing gear tires as space shuttle Atlantis touches down on Runway 33 at the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida after 11 days in space, completing the 4.5-million-mile STS-129 mission on orbit 171. On STS-129, the crew delivered 14 tons of cargo to the International Space Station, including two ExPRESS Logistics Carriers containing spare parts to sustain station operations after the shuttles are retired next year.

Thanksgiving Memories

“If we don’t get it fixed, the crew will have to break out the Apollo bags”

Wayne Hale
NASA Blogs

The shuttle is in flight once again this Thanksgiving Day, not the first time a holiday has come during a shuttle flight. My station friends remind me that they fly 24/7/365 and Christmas is really just GMT day 359. But when the shuttle is flying during Thanksgiving, I am always reminded of one significant day:

STS-33 was one of those classified DoD shuttle flights we can’t really talk about. But I don’t think I’ll be in any trouble with security over this mostly true story. I was the Orbit 1 team Flight Director and the shift schedule called for my team to be on console about noon. We had a big family Thanksgiving meal early that year (a real challenge for my wife). Satiated with turkey, all the trimmings, and pie, I arrived at the MCC to start handover from the planning team lead by Rob Kelso. We were expecting a really quiet shift.

Falcon Flight gave me the big news before I even plugged my headset into the console: “Potty is broken!” Sigh. Flight Directors spent hundreds of hours studying the various systems: engines, fuel cells, navigation. Everybody’s least favorite system was not working. “If we don’t get it fixed, the crew will have to break out the Apollo bags” Rob continued. If you don’t know what an Apollo bag is, well . . . let’s just say that you really didn’t really want to know. It’s a big plastic bag with sticky substance on the lip which you apply to your . . . anatomy . . . to take care of your . . . business. Not glamorous.

Fixing the potty is not exactly the kind of problem you want to work on following a big meal.

Read Wayne Hale's latest HERE.

Shuttle Workers fear end of program

“At the end of the day, flying high-technology machines into space is a business in which safety rides on the shoulders of skilled, hard-working folks.”

The Jacksonville Observer

Half of NASA’s shuttle workers are worried about their future after next year’s fleet retirement, an employee survey shows.

Sixty percent are dissatisfied with information they are receiving about the shutdown and NASA’s future.

Three of four might leave for the right opportunity.

But only 5 percent are actively seeking new jobs.

In fact, 80 percent are likely to stay through the six remaining missions. And most supervisors believe they’ll have the right people with the right skills to finish the program safely.

The findings – outlined in NASA employee surveys obtained by Florida Today through the Freedom of Information Act – illuminate a major safety issue.

Losing critically skilled workers is a top risk for the $3 billion-a-year shuttle program, ranking right up there with potential rocket booster or engine failures.

An exodus would raise the chances of catastrophe as NASA aims to complete the International Space Station.

“I can’t think of anything more important,” said Retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which was created by Congress after the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad fire.

Read the story HERE.

Jacobs gets 3 year, $973 million NASA contract extention

Dow Jones Newswire

Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. received a three-year extension of its engineering and science contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the Johnson Space Center.

The $978 million extension at the Houston facility, one of seven current contracts with NASA centers, calls for the engineering consulting company to provide various services related to the International Space Station, the final space shuttle flights and the next-generation Orion spacecraft.

The contract's value is now $2.16 billion as it gets extended to eight years. Jacobs has various subcontractors for the Johnson Space Center work.

From life in the fields to life in Space

Forty-year-old Jose Hernandez, mission specialist on STS-128 Discovery, still targeted for launch August 24, at 05:50 UT (1:58 AM EDT). Because interception with the International Space Station required insertion into an orbit inclined 58 degrees from the equator, boost phase for this night launch should be easily visible up the Atlantic Seaboard of North America, as far north as New England.

Rob Kuznia
HispanicBusiness.com

Later this month, when Jose Hernandez joins the ranks of the dozen or so Hispanic astronauts -- and the handful of Mexican-Hispanics -- who have ventured into space, the gravity-defying thrust of the rockets will serve as a symbol of his life's journey.

Hernandez's quest to visit space began with his feet planted firmly in the earth, hoeing sugar beats in the fields as a child. Back then, Hernandez -- who didn't learn English until age 12 -- traveled with his migrant-farm family from Mexico to Southern California and back.

On Aug. 25, the 47-year-old engineer's dream is scheduled to culminate with the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery.

The seven-member Discovery crew will include another Hispanic, Danny Olivas, a graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso. It will be the first NASA shuttle crew to include two Hispanic astronauts, according to the San Antonio Express.

Hernandez has already launched a Twitter account -- NASA's first bilingual Twitter feed -- to keep followers apprised of his day-to-day activities before the big event. He will continue the tweets in space.

(At 2200 UT, Aug. 13, Hernandez has 6,425 Twitter 'Followers.')

The short passages range from the technical to the mundane.

"Had our L-10 physical, talked to the crew on board station and redlined our procedures. Now sleep shifting," he wrote on Wednesday, just minutes after posting this tweet: "Watching the Mexico vs USA soccer game. Awesome game!"

To get to where he is, Hernandez overcame long odds.

Read the Full Article HERE.

Official NASA Biography of Jose Hernandez

Pamela Melroy retires from NASA

By Clara Moskowitz
Staff Writer
SPACE.com

Astronaut Pamela Melroy, the last-ever female space shuttle commander, is leaving NASA's spaceflying ranks for a new career in private industry.

Melroy is a veteran of three shuttle missions. On her third flight, the STS-120 flight of Discovery in 2007, she became the second woman to command a space shuttle - a role reserved for astronauts who have been trained as pilots, rather than mission specialists.

Read the Article HERE.

NC Native finally gets his flight

On Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, STS-127 Mission Specialists Tom Marshburn, Tim Kopra and Dave Wolf hold onto the slidewire basket as they practice emergency exit procedures.
Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
View High Res. HERE.

Jill Michaels
Mooresville Tribune

The patient in spirit shall become the patient in orbit.

After years of doctoring astronauts assigned to space shuttle and space station crews, doctor-turned-astronaut Tom Marshburn will finally get his opportunity to fly in circles around Earth.

The Statesville native will be aboard STS-127 Endeavour when it launches on Saturday.

Marshburn, 49, will reap the best of all worlds: flying on the shuttle, visiting the International Space Station for nearly two weeks, floating with the station's first six-member crew and performing three spacewalks to support space station construction.

"I've always been interested in the space program, ever since I was 6 or 7 years old," Marshburn told the R&L after his crew's pre-flight news conference May 28 in Houston. A book about Apollo 13 by Henry S.F. Cooper titled "Thirteen: The Flight That Failed" sparked his interest.

The youngest of seven children, Marshburn spent part of his childhood near Bost Street and Davie Avenue.

"For 17 years, my father was the preacher at the First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church," he said.

The future astronaut moved to Atlanta when he was almost 9 years old.

But he made it clear that he considers Statesville his hometown.

Read the story HERE.