Local man takes first-hand pride in space program

From The Columbian: Local man takes first-hand pride in space program

Images and keepsakes in Farouk Huneidi’s office reflect four decades of America’s space program.

The program is on pause for a while, after the final space shuttle flight returned Thursday morning to Earth. But the retired NASA engineer can look at the wall next to his desk for reminders of just how far we’ve come.

Inside a frame, there is a small American flag that was aboard Columbia during the very first shuttle flight — STS 1 — in 1981.

A similar flag went into space in 1990 when the Discovery crew deployed the Hubble space telescope.

A framed photograph of a Challenger launch notes Huneidi’s role in the investigation following the1986 accident that killed seven crew members.

Huneidi received another framed photograph for his role in the “Return to Flight” mission in 1988, when Discovery made the first launch following that Challenger disaster.

That’s just a brief portion of space history represented in Farouk and Janette Huneidi’s Salmon Creek home. Two certificates of appreciation on his wall are signed by Huneidi’s first boss — Wernher von Braun, who helped develop the V-2 rockets that killed more than 2,500 people in England during World War II.

U.S. forces whisked von Braun away after the war and the German rocket expert became director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

And several photos of shuttle launches show one of Huneidi’s indelible contributions to the space program, starting with the third shuttle launch and continuing right up to the final shuttle launch on July 8.

He’s the reason the external fuel tanks — the big orange structures that dwarfed the actually shuttle vehicles — were orange.

For the first two missions, those tanks were painted white, he said. But Huneidi told NASA officials that the paint didn’t offer any protection for the orange spray-on foam that insulated each 530,000-gallon fuel tank.

NASA could shave 600 pounds off the weight of the tank by not painting them.

There is a plaque that recognizes Huneidi’s work on the Saturn 5 rocket that put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969, and a charred piece of heat shield that went to the moon and back.

Looking back recently at his contribution to manned space flight, Huneidi selected one word to summarize his 32-year career.

“Amazing,” the retired thermal engineer said. “Sometimes you’re lucky” to wind up in a job.

Of course, a trip into space would have been pretty good, too.

“Yes,” Huneidi (pronounced hoo-NAY-dee) acknowledged. “I wished that I could go. But my eyesight wasn’t good enough. Astronauts go through a lot of work, and I couldn’t do it.”

Every once in a while, Huneidi was part of a team that shared a little bit of the risk the astronauts faced.

“We did pre-launch checkouts,” he said.

“Our team, the astronauts, and the team that dressed the astronauts were the only people who got to be on the launching pad,” he said.

By way of explaining the risk factor, he showed a vintage photograph of four men, dressed in orange flame-resistant coveralls. Huneidi was the one with the big number 6 on his back.

“If something happened, the number would make it easier to identify you,” Huneidi said.

Don Lips is another retired engineer who played a role in developing the shuttle. Now a part-time Ridgefield resident, he worked for a California company that made flight indicators for shuttles.

“When it took off and landed, they measured the altitude and air speed. I did those sensors,” Lips said.

The shuttle program was capped by its role in building the International Space Station, which NASA calls the most complex engineering and construction project in the world.

“I think it was a real milestone in society,” Lips said of the American space program.

Now it’s in a downward spiral.

“We have friends whose children now are engineers at Huntsville and Kennedy,” Janette Huneidi said.

NASA already is cutting a lot of those jobs, with more layoffs on the way.

“We will lose a lot of brain power,” she said.

But the Huneidis, who moved to Vancouver in 1995 after Farouk’s retirement, have seen ebbs and flows before.

“In the 1960s and early ’70s, there would be a lull between programs,” Janette Huneidi said. “We’d invite guys in the program over for dinner, and they would say, ‘What will we do? This is coming to an end.’

“We will go on,” she said.

Next ISS Crew Prepares For Commercial Freighters

From Aviation Week: Next ISS Crew Prepares For Commercial Freighters

CAPE CANAVERAL — The first International Space Station crew in the post-shuttle era had an additional stop in its training flow — Space Exploration Technologies’ Hawthorne, Calif., facility for familiarization with the company’s Dragon cargo freighter.

Two-time shuttle veteran Dan Burbank, 50, and rookie cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov, 39, and Anatoly Ivanishin, 42, are due to launch on Sept. 22 onboard a Russian Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They will join the Expedition 29 crew of NASA astronaut Michael Fossum, 53, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, 47, and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, 38.

The first of NASA’s new commercial cargo ships is expected to make a trial run to the station in December. A successful docking of the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule would clear the way for the company to begin working on its 12-flight, $1.6 billion station cargo resupply missions for NASA in 2012.

Burbank says the crew also received training to handle berthing with NASA’s second cargo resupplier, Orbital Sciences Corp., which expects to debut its Cygnus capsule with a docking at the space station in early 2012, possibly before Burbank and his crewmates return to Earth in mid-March. Orbital Sciences holds a second NASA cargo resupply contract worth $1.9 billion for eight Cygnus flights.

“We’ve got some visiting vehicles that we’re hoping for and looking forward to seeing while we’re onboard [the] space station, one of which at least — hopefully more — will be the first of the commercial resupply ships,” Burbank told reporters July 27.

Both ships will be berthed to the station’s Harmony node with the station’s robotic arm, a maneuver that is very similar to the docking of Japan’s HTV capsules.

“Our operations as far as monitoring the rendezvous, monitoring the vehicles as they come up the R-bar, toward the space station’s nadir, or Earth-facing side, and then how we track and capture them ultimately with the space station robotic arm and then mate them to Node 2 — those are essentially the same,” Burbank says.

Burbank, who will take over command of the station from Fossum in December, and his crewmates also will be onboard during a major upgrade of the station’s avionics software, intended to increase the communications bandwidth as the station shifts into full-time research operations. “Now that assembly is complete, it’s time to actually get our return on the investment,” Burbank says.

What should spaceships look like?

BBC News Magazine: What should spaceships look like?
Generations of schoolchildren, openly, and many adults, perhaps more guardedly, have delighted in fantastical depictions of space travel.

From Star Wars back to 2001: A Space Odyssey and even further back to comic hero Dan Dare and Victorian illustrations for the stories of Jules Verne and HG Wells, the way spaceships should look has been an important issue - before the first rocket booster ever fired.

But the fanciful reputation of sci-fi novels and films aside, the illustration of spacecraft might actually have a realistic place in the design of future vessels.

The line has often been blurred between the realm of the sci-fi artist and the real spacecraft designers.

Often referred to as the father of modern space art, Chesley Bonestell had a significant impact on not only science fiction illustration, but the whole of the American space programme.

German rocket developer and champion of space exploration Dr Wernher von Braun, who was inspired by the works of Verne and Wells, commissioned Bonestell to illustrate his spaceflight concepts in a 1952 issue of Collier's Weekly magazine.

The combination of von Braun's technology and Bonestell's artistic vision made the science come alive for the layman readers. Of course, the tax dollars and votes of those inspired layman readers would be needed to realise ambitious space projects.

The Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists now honours work in the sci-fi and fantasy art industry with its annual Chesley Awards.

Science fiction academic
Harry Lange was a German artist who got his start in military flight manual illustrations and was appointed to lead the future projects section for Nasa. He and his team found themselves illustrating von Braun's ideas to promote his vision of a US space station. Lange ended up as production designer on Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

On the other hand it's hard to imagine the designs of Chris Foss, the subject of a new retrospective book, Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss, easily crossing the line into the real world of space travel. With Picasso as an inspiration, Foss created book covers that pioneered a new style of space art, featuring prominently placed gigantic colourful craft in swirling spacescapes.

Marked with mysterious symbols and complex patterns, his illustrations have breathed life into sci-fi writings of everyone from Isaac Asimov to EE "Doc" Smith and AE van Vogt. Foss was also commissioned to do work for Alien, Superman and Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade film version of Dune.

Seeing Kubrick's 2001 made a lasting impression on his work, as did the Cold War years and the bleakness of some of the derelict areas of post-war Britain. "People were really looking for a new kind of explosion," says Foss. "Humans want hope. They want something to believe in."

So is it fanciful to imagine Foss's ships - or those of equally florid artists - being like Bonestell's and infiltrating real design?

Perhaps not if a new age of privately-financed space travel needs to rally support in the same way von Braun and Bonestell did.

The end of the space shuttle programme presents a new challenge for spacecraft engineers and designers - one that could even benefit from collaboration with artists.

With government funding constricted, many will be looking to private investors to lead the future of space vessels.

More and more, the aim of companies, such as Boeing, will be to entice consumers to pay for space travel. Just as airlines have done, they will have to appeal to potential passengers - and investors - in order to establish their brands against the competition.

"An enterprising company seeking to attract government and private passengers might achieve success by offering them spaceships that resembled the unique visions of Chris Foss," says science fiction academic Dr Gary Westfahl.

Exotic design might play a part similar to that of airline insignia - from Alaska Airlines' themed craft to Aer Lingus's shamrocks. The goal is to establish brand recognition and visual appeal.

"Foss made his spaceships beautiful not by streamlining them but by adding bright, decorative colours," says Westfahl.

Some might find it strange that a Nasa worker like Lange could make the jump from a deep space project to Hollywood and end up with Oscar nomination for the art direction on The Empire Strikes Back.

But space is a particularly romanticised part of our vision of exploration, says Dr Eric Rabkin, a professor of English at the University of Michigan who specialises in science fiction.

It's because of the unknown, he says. Trains must go where tracks have previously been laid down and planes have to fly where they can ultimately land.

"Ships are inherently romantic because they can go where no one has before. Ships are associated with freedom and conquest," says Rabkin

Unique volcanic complex discovered on Moon’s far side

From Washington University in St. Louis: Unique volcanic complex discovered on Moon’s far side


Analysis of new images of a curious “hot spot” on the far side of the Moon reveal it to be a small volcanic province created by the upwelling of silicic magma. The unusual location of the province and the surprising composition of the lava that formed it offer tantalizing clues to the Moon’s thermal history.

The hot spot is a concentration of a radioactive element thorium sitting between the very large and ancient impact craters Compton and Belkovich that was first detected by Lunar Prospector’s gamma-ray spectrometer in 1998. The Compton-Belkovich Thorium Anomaly, as it is called, appears as a bull’s-eye when the spectrometer data are projected onto a map, with the highest thorium concentration at its center.

Recent observations, made with the powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) optical cameras, have allowed scientists to distinguish volcanic features in terrain at the center of the bull’s-eye. High-resolution three-dimensional models of the terrain and information from the LRO Diviner instrument have revealed geological features diagnostic not just of volcanism but also of much rarer silicic volcanism.

The volcanic province’s very existence will force scientists to modify ideas about the Moon’s volcanic history, says Bradley Jolliff, PhD, research professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, who led the team that analyzed the LRO images.

“To find evidence of this unusual composition located where it is, and appearing to be relatively recent volcanic activity is a fundamentally new result and will make us think again about the Moon’s thermal and volcanic evolution,” he says.

The work is described in the July 24 advance online issue of Nature Geoscience.

Volcanism on the Moon
Lunar volcanism is very different from terrestrial volcanism because the Moon is a small body that cooled quickly and never developed rock-recycling plate tectonics like those on our planet.

The Moon, thought to have been created when a Mars-size body slammed into Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, was originally a hellish world covered by a roiling ocean of molten rock some 400 kilometers deep.

But because the Moon was small and had no atmosphere, the magma ocean cooled quickly, within perhaps 100 million years. Eventually lighter minerals such as feldspar crystallized out of the magma and floated to the top to create huge masses of feldspathic rock that formed the lunar highlands. Denser iron- and magnesium-rich minerals sank when they crystallized, forming the upper part of the Moon’s mantle.

The differentiation of the crust and mantle was followed by a wave of volcanic activity between about 3 to 4 billion years ago, when basaltic lavas erupted on the lunar surface, filling old impact craters and other low spots to form the lunar mare.

One of the mysteries of lunar volcanism is the unequal distribution of these flood basalts. Nearly a third of the Moon’s near side is covered by ancient flood basalts but the Moon’s far side, where the crustal rocks are thicker, has much less.

Moreover, almost all of the volcanism on the Moon is basaltic rather than silicic, enriched in minerals containing the elements iron and magnesium rather than the elements silicon and aluminum.

Earth’s continental crust, which reflects active geological processes such as subduction, magma intrusion and mountain building, includes many rocks whose compositions are intermediate between basalt and silica-rich rocks like granite, which are common on Earth. On the Moon, on the other hand, there are many basaltic rocks and only a small fraction of granite. Rocks of intermediate composition are all but missing.

Procellarum KREEP Terrane
It wasn’t so very long ago, Jolliff says, that scientists talked about the Moon as having two sorts of terrain, the dark maria, or “seas,” and the light terra, or highlands.

This simple picture of the Moon’s geology served for many years, but in 2000, Jolliff and his colleagues in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and WUSTL’s McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences introduced a concept in which they distinguished three different “terranes,” or regions of the Moon with distinctive geologic histories.

One of these, which encompasses much of the mare basaltic volcanism on the Moon, is called the Procellarum KREEP Terrane, or PKT for short. This immense lunar “hot spot” contains high concentrations of thorium and other radioactive, heat-producing elements, such as potassium and uranium. [KREEP stands for potassium, (K), rare-earth elements (REE), and phosphorus (P).]

As the magma ocean cooled, Jolliff explains, elements such as thorium were preferentially excluded from crystallizing minerals, forming pockets of KREEP-rich magma sandwiched between the crust and mantle.

A concentration of heat-producing elements under the Procellarum KREEP Terrane may be partly responsible for the intensive mare volcanism there. The maria, Jolliff explains, were formed when the hot radioactive elements melted minerals deep in the Moon’s mantle, forming basaltic lava which erupted through fissures onto the Moon’s surface. Well over half the Procellarum KREEP Terrane was resurfaced by volcanism.

Although most of the volcanism was of the basaltic variety, resulting in the large, dark patches on the Moon visible to the unaided eye from Earth, a much rarer form of volcanism, one that produced lavas rich in silica, also occurred in the PKT. These volcanic deposits are known as “red spots” because of their spectral characteristics, and recent results from the LRO spacecraft confirmed their silica-rich compositions. The red spots include some with distinctive dome shapes, some quite large, and all within the boundaries of the PKT.

A new volcanic province
Ever since the Lunar Prospector mission first revealed the thorium-rich bull’s-eye isolated on the far side of the Moon and distant from the Procellarum KREEP Terrane, Jolliff’s group has been curious as to what it was. “When the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched in 2009, we were finally able to image it at high resolution,” he says.

Private Spacecraft Plans Landmark Docking With International Space Station

Fox News: Private Spacecraft Plans Landmark Docking With International Space Station

Fly me to the moon? Sure thing.

Private spaceflight company Space Exploration (SpaceX) has received tentative approval from NASA to send its Dragon cargo craft on a landmark first mission to the International Space Station on November 30, which would make it the first private company to dock with the space station.

A successful docking on December 9 would be a dramatic validation of NASA's plan to replace the now-retired space shuttle fleet with cheaper, private vehicles -- though how the space agency would send astronauts to space remains an open question.

The Dragon capsule, one of several vehicles competing to haul cargo for NASA into space, had planned two test missions for this winter. One would gauge the capsule's ability to do a "drive-by" of the space station, where it would approach close enough to test navigation and communication gear. A second mission would test the craft's ability to dock.

But SpaceX is ready now, the company argues. Why not combine the two and hit the milestone earlier?

“We technically have agreed with SpaceX that we want to combine those flights,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said at a July 21 media briefing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “We are doing all the planning to go ahead and have those missions combined, but we haven’t given them formal approval yet.”

If approved, SpaceX would deliver cargo to the space station in early December. And if successful, it would validate NASA's plan to replace the shuttle with dramatically cheaper private spacecraft.

SpaceX will charge NASA at least $1.6 billion for 12 cargo shipments to the ISS, or $133 million per flight. The space shuttle costs exceed $1 billion per flight.

SpaceX is not alone, however: Orbital Sciences Corp. also has a contract with NASA to supply cargo ships. And it plans to launch the Cygnus resupply ship into space in February 2012.

David Thompson, chairman and CEO of Orbital Sciences, recently noted that the addition of the final Atlantis flight allowed NASA to stock up on food and other consumables, giving private industry a little wiggle room -- but only a little.

"This most recent space shuttle mission ... was able to stock up the space station with supplies and consumables to buy some time for both us and SpaceX to get our cargo systems operational, but the pressure is on to get both of these delivery systems proven and into service over the course of the next year," Thompson told industry blog Spaceflight Now.

SpaceX's craft consists of two parts: the Falcon 9 rocket, a multistage reusable rocket capable of lifting significant amounts of cargo, and Dragon, a reusable space capsule that will carry the cargo, dock and parachute back to Earth, ultimately splash-landing in the ocean.

The first and second stages of the Falcon 9 rocket for SpaceX's cargo flight are already at the company's Cape Canaveral launch pad. The Dragon spacecraft is due to arrive in August or September, the news site noted.

"We're doing all the planning to go ahead and combine those missions," Gerstenmaier said. "The capsule is being designed that way and the software is being built that way, and we're just kind of waiting for the right formal time where we collectively agree that this is the right thing to go forward."

A half-century of America sending Americans into space came to an end July 21, when space shuttle Atlantis became the final shuttle to touch down from space.

"Job well done, America," mission control told Atlantis pilot Doug Hurley and the thousands watching and listening to the landing in the pre-dawn dark. Russian space agency Roskosmos used the occasion to give a nod to America's contributions -- and signal the beginning of the era of its spaceships instead.

"From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability," Roskomos said.

SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. may see things differently.

Largest Ever Water Reservoir Discovered in Space

International Business Times: Largest Ever Water Reservoir Discovered in Space
Astronomers have found a massive water vapor cloud, floating around a black hole in the universe, marking the largest discovery of water -- anywhere.

The reservoir is gigantic, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth's oceans, residing 10 billion light years away.

"Since astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early universe, the discovery of water is not itself a surprise," the Carnegie Institution, one of the groups behind the findings, said.

The water cloud was found to be in the central regions of a faraway quasar.

"Quasars contain massive black holes that steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out amounts of energy," the Institution said in its statement.

The quasar where the gigantic water reservoir is located is some 12 billion years old, only 1.6 billion years younger than the Big Bang. It is older than the formation most of the stars in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy.

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The discovery was part of a larger study of the quasar named APM 08279+5255, where the black hole is 20 billion times greater than the sun. There researched found water vapor around the black hole extending hundreds of light-years in size.

Astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early, distant universe, but had not detected it this far away before.

There's water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, because most of the Milky Way's water is frozen in ice.

"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water. It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.," said NASA scientist Matt Bradford.

Research on the discovery is slated to be published in a coming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

NASA made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology's Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California

Astronomers and scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science in Japan were involved.

The research team was comprised of a wide array of international talent. The Carnegie Institution's Eric Murphy headed up the study.

Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Research Corporation and the partner institutions.

'What a Beautiful View': Early Radio Programs About Space Travel

From The Atlantic: 'What a Beautiful View': Early Radio Programs About Space Travel

At 11:29 a.m. EDT on July 8, 2011, the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched for the last time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I sat in awe of the live feed on the NASA website, witnessing the final Shuttle take off with people all over the world. Thirty years after the first Shuttle launched, it is strange to think that we'll no longer see these beautiful and familiar ships lift off and disappear into the sky. There's a little Shuttle-shaped hole in my heart now.

Watching the launch reminded me that Folkways had some space-themed documentary recordings that I had never listened to. Moses Asch made more than folk music records -- being an audiophile, what he really wanted to do was create a catalog of the world's sound. Leaps in sound production quality during the space age made it possible to make scientifically useful recordings that also managed to capture the wonder of the time.

On October 4, 1957, Russian scientists, from somewhere in Russia, fired the rocket that put the first artificial satellite into an orbit going around the world once in about 96 minutes. Man's first artificial satellite is called "Sputnik," Russian for traveler.

So begins Folkways Record FX 6200 Voices of the Satellites!, a recording I never thought I would listen to from beginning to end. Narrated by Professor T.A. Benham of Haverford College and released in 1958, it predates human spaceflight. As a result, it provides a fascinating look at not only the history of space exploration, but the world's reaction to it. The album consists of the recorded radio signals of the first fourteen American and Soviet satellites, as well as the heartbeat (!) of the first creature sent into space, Laika the dog. It's a whole lot of beeping, but the exclamation at the end of the record's title says it all: The fact that people could listen to sounds emitted by "man's first space travelers" was exciting.

Folkways issued another documentary album in 1964 chronicling space exploration called Man in Space: The Story of the Journey (FX 6201). Originally a Voice of America radio program, it tells the story of the the first manned Mercury mission in May 1961 where Alan Shepard became the first American in space. I find the second track of this album especially poetic, so I will present the transcript here in full:

Our story begins on the morning of Friday, May 5th, 1961, at 34 minutes past the hour of ten, at Cape Canaveral in the state of Florida. A man touches a button, the touch ignites the engines of a powerful rocket standing not too far away, gleaming white in the powerful light of the tropical sun. With a roar and a blast of flame, the rocket starts to lift straight up. For the hundreds of men and women who usually work at Cape Canaveral the launching of a rocket has become almost routine, but not in this case. For at the top of the rocket, inside a strange looking vehicle that looks something like a child's toy top, there was a man.

He is at this moment inside the cone shaped capsule perched atop the missile, awaiting the final seconds of the countdown which is already begun. The rocket itself is in full view. It is a gleaming white Mercury Redstone rocket, towering nearly 83 feet into the sunny sky, and is a modified version of the one that helped push America's first satellite into orbit some five years ago.

Holy Moley! Can you imagine? Later on we hear the Mercury Control Center quote Shepard as saying "What a beautiful view." (Bonus! You can see that view here.)

These recordings are gems of the Folkways Collection. Time capsules of the era's fascination with space travel, they were made before we sent a man to the moon, before we landed a rover on Mars, before we sent satellites beyond our orbit and off to the farthest reaches of our solar system.

From satellite beeps to astronaut tweets, space travel will continue to fascinate us. The age of the Shuttle might have come to a close, but as evidenced by the tremendous progress we've made since these albums were issued, we have a whole lot to look forward to