Virgin Galactic Prepares to Unveil Space Liner
Virgin Galactic readies for Monday’s unveiling of SpaceShipTwo — the first-class space tourist’s wonder machine at the core of the space tourism firm’s suborbital fleet.
The scene is spacecraft manufacturer Scaled Composites at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. No doubt, there’s plenty of pomp and circumstance that’s due this debut — although specific aspects about the rocket plane’s rollout remain under wraps.
SpaceShipTwo is a carbon composite cousin in construction and design to SpaceShipOne — the privately financed, single-piloted spacecraft that bagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize purse by flying back-to-back treks to suborbital space in 2004.
SLIDESHOW: Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo
That “Tier One” project was under the wing of veteran aerospace designer Burt Rutan, along with his team at Scaled Composites, and funded by greenbacks from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Over $100 million in cold cash was doled out in hot pursuit of the prize.
Fast forward to the present
SpaceShipTwo is a six-passenger, two-pilot affair. But this time, the endeavor is backed by British billionaire and knighted adventurer Sir Richard Branson.
Never short on entrepreneurial chutzpa, Branson created Virgin Galactic, a firm keen on cornering the public-travel-to-outer-space market — first to suborbital heights and then, given a follow-on spaceship design, onward to orbital jaunts.
The suborbital SpaceShipTwo is powered by a hybrid rocket motor, with strap-in accommodations going for $200,000 a seat. Some 250 Virgin Galactic astronauts-in-training have already reserved tickets, according to the group’s website.
The airliner-sized White Knight Two — painted in the livery of Virgin Galactic and dubbed VMS Eve — has also been built under contract by Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic and will serve as the high-altitude mothership – not only for deploying the passenger-carrying SpaceShipTwo but also for lobbing satellites into low Earth orbit.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic is establishing its headquarters to operate private space flights from Spaceport America, billed as the world’s first “purpose built” commercial spaceport which is now under construction outside Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Unveil event
“Everyone at Scaled is looking forward to the Virgin Galactic ‘unveil event’ on December 7,” said Rutan, who founded Scaled Composites and now serves as the firm’s chief technology officer and chairman emeritus.
Rutan is quick to offer a tip of his draftsman hat to the developers of Scaled Composites Commercial Suborbital Space System: Designers Jim Tighe, Bob Morgan, Matt Stinemetze, and Marc Zeitlin, along with their design and assembly teams “that have worked long and hard for this milestone,” he told SPACE.com.
“They look forward to seeing SpaceShipTwo join WhiteKnightTwo in the air over Mojave Spaceport as it conducts the critical flight tests under the direction of Flight Test Operations Chief Pete Siebold,” Rutan explained.
“Scaled is proud indeed to be growing during the recession and to be making history again by developing the world’s first manned spaceflight systems intended to fly the public,” Rutan added.
Utilize space forever
Also hungry to see SpaceShipTwo’s rollout and a successful shakedown of the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo combo is Steve Landeene, Executive Director of New Mexico’s Spaceport America — the home launch site for Virgin Galactic’s commercial operations.
“The rollout symbolizes the reality of commercial space and the next era of space exploration, experimentation, and transportation,” said Steve Landeene, executive director of Spaceport America.
From Landeene’s front-row view, Virgin Galactic’s flight test program and Spaceport America’s construction are running in parallel. In his estimation, that matching up of events “will culminate in what promises to change the world and how we access and utilize space forever.”
As captured in a 2005 Memorandum of Agreement, Landeene said, the vision of Richard Branson and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is now becoming real.
New paradigm in space access?
“Spaceport America is rapidly becoming reality in concert with Virgin Galactic’s flight test program,” Landeene said. As evidence, the 10,000-foot-long by 200-foot-wide concrete runway is to be finished by the summer of 2010 and ready for action. By the way, that runway apron is capable of taking on the landing of nearly any aircraft in the world.
Also, the contract to build Spaceport America’s Terminal/Hangar Facility that will house the operational offices of Virgin Galactic’s world headquarters has recently been awarded. That structure is projected to be complete by early 2011.
“This is bigger than space tourism,” added Landeene. “It is about the industrialization of space through development of unique and innovative ways to access space.”
Landeene’s bottom line for next week’s Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo rollout: “It represents a huge milestone in the reality of a whole new paradigm in space access.”
Space Tourism a Reality by 2012
Space Tourism a Reality by 2012 
The latest trend in eco-tourism is completely out of this world … and right around the corner.
Routine commercial travel to outer space may be the norm as soon as 2012, as the next generation of spacecraft — designed by private sector firms like Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences Corp., Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and others — transport adventure-seeking civilians into low-Earth orbit.
There, they can see the sun rise many times a day, and experience the breathtaking curve of planet Earth that only NASA astronauts such as Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin have previously seen. If they want to extend their stay, they can check in to the solar system’s first orbiting hotel, The Galactic Space Suite Hotel, set to open in three years.
SLIDESHOW: Next-Generation Spaceships
“There are more projects like this going on than most experts even know about,” Doug Raybeck, a futurist and an emeritus professor at Hamilton College in New York, tells FoxNews.com. “There are a lot of people developing this technology under the radar and they want it that way.”
As NASA retires its space shuttle fleet in the coming years, these next-generation ships will also launch science experiments and satellites into space, or to the International Space Station (ISS).
Here’s just a sampling of cutting-edge spacecraft:
• WhiteKnightTwo is a jet-powered carrier that will launch the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft; the two vehicles form a two-stage manned launch system, and Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has already ordered a pair of WhiteKnightTwos. The ships will form the basis for Virgin Galactic’s suborbital fleet, which will charge space tourists $200,000 a head for a 2-hour space flight. The first services will operate from Spaceport America in New Mexico, though other spaceports may open in the U.K. or Sweden.
• The Dragon, a free-flying, reusable spacecraft is being developed by SpaceX for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. Developed in 2005, the Dragon spacecraft consists of a pressurized capsule for personnel and an unpressurized trunk for transport of cargo.
• The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle is NASA’s next-generation spacecraft. It will transport crews to and from the International Space Station, the moon and Mars and is being developed by Lockheed-Martin and Orbital Sciences Corp.
Some technologies, still in the concept stage, are even more mind-blowing, including spacecraft powered by “solar sails,” which harness solar winds to travel between galaxies a thousand light-years apart. Thousand-year-long flights may seem absurd, but rocket scientists have a solution for that, too. More on that topic in a minute.
“These technology entrepreneurs are on the verge of creating a new economy, just like Bill Gates did with the PC in the 1980s,” says Patricia Hynes, director of the NASA New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, and organizer of an annual conference on commercial space flight, recently held in Las Cruces, N.M.
The Burgeoning Industry
Space buffs have talked about commercial space for decades; President Reagan had an office of commercial space in his Department of Commerce 20 years ago. But a number of factors have converged, of late, to make the visions something that can be achieved quickly.
First, experts tell FoxNews.com, new materials and space propulsion technologies are enabling developers to build these spacecraft more cheaply than before. Next, the federal government — facing unprecedented debt from the Obama administration’s stimulus spending — is hardly keen about funding NASA’s dream projects.
To keep its long-term systems planning going, the space agency is working more in partnership with private-sector firms, which can use money from investment bankers to get launch vehicles and spacecraft going more quickly and cheaply than the government. “The smartest thing they ever did is reach out to the business community,” says Raybeck, the futurist. “There’s money in them there hills.”
This has given the U.S. a “five-year lead on the Chinese, and other nations, in terms of the commercial space industry,” says Hynes. “They can’t compete with us technically, financially or in terms of regulatory structure.”
The federal regulatory aspect emerged, publicly, for the first time at the 60th International Astronautical Conference in South Korea. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. government agency that regulates air flight, is now charged with licensing space launch companies in the U.S.
George Nield, associate administrator of the FAA, space transportation initiative, spoke at the show about these new rules.
“This is a very exciting time for commercial space transportation. There are some very dramatic and far-reaching changes that are coming. Up to this point, government agencies have dominated human space flight efforts. Over the next few years, I expect that private industry will play a key role in low-Earth orbit and suborbital space flight,” Nield told conference attendees. “This will require a launch license from our office at the FAA. We are on the threshold of a new era in space transportation…suborbital space tourism.”
The FAA is working with “half a dozen space companies” on this now, Nield indicates. There will be “hundreds” of commercial space launches every year in the coming years, he adds, and that will “change the way we think about space.”
How Much Will It Cost Me?
According to the president of Virgin Galactic, Will Whitehorn, his company is planning to carry people into orbit two times a day when it is operational in the coming years. “This will be the experience of their lives,” Whitehorn indicates. Hundreds of people have already booked for the first flights on Virgin.
Initially, tourism will be very expensive, around $200,000 per passenger. “But costs will go down,” John Lindner, a professor of physics at the College of Wooster in Ohio, tells FoxNews.com. “And services will evolve.”
For example, passengers may be able to travel out to visit asteroids, speculates space engineer Greg Matloff, a professor at The City College of New York, in an interview with FoxNews.com. “But for interstellar, and inter-solar system travel, you’ll have to use the resources of the solar system to make it viable,” Matloff says.
Matloff reckons that those solar sails could be constructed out of nano-technologies that would soak up solar wind and gamma rays for power. Going to another galaxy would be quite difficult, however. Robots would have to power the ships, as the trip would take well over 1,000 years. For humans to take such a voyage, they would have to start off as cryogenically frozen zygotes, says Matloff, and brought to life as the spacecraft neared its final destination.
American firms are not the only ones exploring this technology niche, though they seem to have a big lead now. The Russians and the French are eyeing future commercial space transportation too. Mario Delepine, a spokesman for Parisian commercial launch company Arianespace, tells FoxNews.com that his firm is already “starting to think about the next generation of launch technology. This must be ready by 2025, roughly.”
Though the global economy has hit a rough patch during the last year or so, the space sector has grown 9 percent a year over the past decade, more than three times faster than the economy as a whole during that time. “We’re creating a new economy,” says Hynes.
‘Big Bang’ Machine Sets Power Record
The finally working Large Hadron Collider
GENEVA – The world’s largest atom smasher broke the record for proton acceleration Monday, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts around the massive machine.
The Large Hadron Collider eclipsed the previous high of 0.98 1 TeV held by Fermilab, outside Chicago, since 2001, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, said.
The latest success, which came early in the morning, is part of the preparation to reach even higher levels of energy for significant experiments next year on the make-up of matter and the universe.
It comes on top of a rapid series of operating advances for the $10 billion machine, which underwent extensive repairs and improvements after it collapsed during the opening phase last year.
CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said early advances in the machine located in a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border have been “fantastic.”
SLIDESHOW: World’s Largest Atom Smasher
“However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010,” Heuer said in a statement. “I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”
The organization hopes the next major step will be to collide the proton beams at about 1.2 TeV before Christmas for an initial look at the tiny particles and what forces might be created.
Ultimately, scientists want to create conditions like those 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang — which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billion of years ago.
Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.
The level reached Monday isn’t significantly higher than what Fermilab has been doing, and real advances are not expected until the LHC raises each beam to 3.5 TeV during the first half of next year.
CERN said one of the two small beams of protons first broke the energy level Sunday evening when it was accelerated from the initial operating energy of 450 billion electron volts late Sunday evening.
“Three hours later both LHC beams were successfully accelerated to 1.18 TeV,” shortly after midnight, the organization said.
Beams were colliding last week at low energy, to make sure the machine was working properly. But they have yet to be smashed together at higher intensity.
Steve Myers, CERN’s research and technology director, said he had been at CERN when it switched on the last major particle accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron collider that operated from 1989-2000.
“I thought that was a great machine to operate, but this is something else,” he said. “What took us days or weeks with LEP, we’re doing in hours with the LHC. So far, it all augurs well for a great research program.”
CERN said operators will continue preparing the 2,000 superconducting magnets and other parts so that the energy can be increased safely.
Attempts to make new discoveries at the LHC are scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).
The electron volt is an extremely small measure used in particle physics. One TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito, but it becomes signficant in the submicroscopic collisions of the collider.
The energy is concentrated in the hairline beams of particles that whiz around the accelerator at near the speed of light. Although apparently small to the outsider, CERN uses a great amount of electricity and powerful equipment to raise the energy of the beam.
The speed can increase only slightly when the accelerator steps up the power, but that raises the force with which the protons will collide, revealing more insight into what makes them up.
It may take several years before the LHC can make the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the particle or field that theoretically gives mass to other particles. That is widely expected to deserve the Nobel Prize for physics.
The LHC operates at nearly absolute zero temperature, colder than outer space, which allows the superconducting magnets to guide the protons most efficiently.
Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom’s nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.
More than 8,000 physicists from labs around the world also have work planned for the Large Hadron Collider. The organization is run by its 20 European member nations, with support from other countries, including observers from Japan, India, Russia and the United States, which have made big contributions.
NASA Moon Crash Found ‘Significant Amount’ of Water
It’s official: There’s water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.
NASA’s LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.
“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from
The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket
stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.
Those signs were visible in the data from spectrographic measurements (which measure light absorbed at different wavelengths, revealing different compounds) of the Centaur stage crater and the two-part debris plume the impact created. The signature of water was seen in both infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopic measurements.
“We see evidence for the water in two instruments,” Colaprete said. “And that’s what makes us really confident in our findings right now.”
How much?
Based on the measurements, the team estimated about 100 kilograms of water in the view of their instruments — the equivalent of about a dozen 2-gallon buckets — in the area of the impact crater (about 80 feet, or 20 meters across) and the ejecta blanket (about 60 to 80 meters across), Colaprete said.
“I’m pretty impressed by the amount of water we saw in our little 20-meter crater,” Colaprete said.
“What’s really exciting is we’ve only hit one spot. It’s kind of like when you’re drilling for oil. Once you find it one place, there’s a greater chance you’ll find more nearby,” said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.
This water finding doesn’t mean that the moon is wet by Earth’s standards, but is likely wetter than some of the driest deserts on Earth, Colaprete said. And even this small amount is valuable to possible future missions, said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters.
Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India’s now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.
Water wasn’t the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.
“There’s a lot of stuff in there,” Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn’t yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.
More questions
The findings show that “the lunar poles are sort of record keepers” of lunar history and solar system history because these permanently-shadowed regions are very cold “and that means that they tend to trap and keep things that encounter them,” said Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. “So they have a story to tell about the history of the moon and the solar system climate.”
“This is ice that’s potentially been there for billions of years,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator at Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The confirmation that water exists on the moon isn’t the end of the story though. One key question to answer is where the water came from. Several theories have been put forward to explain the origin of the water, including debris from comet impacts, interaction of the lunar surface with the solar wind, and even giant molecular clouds passing through the solar system, Delory said.
Scientists also want to examine the data further to figure out what state the water is in. Colaprete said that based on initial observations, it is likely water ice is interspersed between dirt particles on the lunar surface.
Some other questions scientists want to answer are what kinds of processes move, destroy and create the water on the surface and how long the water has been there, Delory said.
Link to Chandrayaan?
Scientists also are looking to see if there is any link between the water observed by LCROSS and that discovered by Chandrayaan-1.
“Their observation is entirely unique and complementary to what we did,” Colaprete said. Scientists still need to work out whether the water observed by Chandrayaan-1 might be slowly migrating to the poles, or if it is unrelated.
Bottom line, the discovery completely changes scientists’ view of the moon, Wargo said.
The discovery gives “a much bigger, potentially complicated picture for water on the moon” than what was thought even just a few months ago, he said. “This is not your father’s moon; this is not a dead planetary body.”
Let’s go?
NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 for extended missions on the lunar surface. Finding usable amounts of ice on the moon would be a boon for that effort since it could be a vital local resource to support a lunar base.
“Water really is one of the constituents of one of the most powerful rocket fuels, oxygen and hydrogen,” Wargo said.
The water LCROSS detected “would be water you could drink, water like any other water,” Colaprete said. “If you could clean it, it would be drinkable water.”
The impact was observed by LCROSS’s sister spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other space and ground-based telescopes.
The debris plume from the impacts was not seen right away and was only revealed a week after the impact, when mission scientists had had time to comb through the probe’s data.
NASA launched LCROSS — short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — and LRO in June.
First Rocky Planet Outside Solar System Found
First Rocky exoplanet discovered!
WASHINGTON — Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there’s a firm place to stand — if only it weren’t so broiling hot.
As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. But they all have been gas balls or can’t be proven to be solid. Now a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet.
Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal.
“We basically live on a rock ourselves,” said co-discoverer Artie Hartzes, director of the Thuringer observatory in Germany. “It’s as close to something like the Earth that we’ve found so far. It’s just a little too close to its sun.”
So close that its surface temperature is more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, too toasty to sustain life. It circles its star in just 20 hours, zipping around at 466,000 mph. By comparison, Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, completes its solar orbit in 88 days.
“It’s hot, they’re calling it the lava planet,” Hartzes said.
This is a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. It was the buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It’s in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.
Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
In addition, the planet is about as close to Earth in size as any other planet found outside our solar system. Its radius is only one-and-a-half times bigger than Earth’s and it has a mass about five times the Earth’s.
Now that another rocky planet has been found so close to its own star, it gives scientists more confidence that they’ll find more Earth-like planets farther away, where the conditions could be more favorable to life, Boss said.
“The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe,” Boss said.
Violent Star Explosion Breaks Records
Biggest explosion in the Universe...ever!
Light from a star that exploded 13 billion years ago has been detected, becoming the most distant object in the universe ever observed.
The light from the distant explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, first reached Earth on April 23 and was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite. Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be associated with the formation of star-sized black holes as massive stars collapse.
Within hours, telescopes around the world were turned on the burst — the most violent explosions in the universe — observing its fading afterglow to glean clues about its source and location.
Two teams, one using the European Southern Observatory’s 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope, located in La Silla, Chile, and the other using the 3.6-meter Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in Spain, pinpointed the distance to the blast, dubbed GRB 090423, at more than 13 billion light-years from Earth. (The previous record holder, GRB 080913, was 12.8 billion light-years distant.)
This enormous distance means that the gamma-ray burst occurred just 630 million years after the theoretical Big Bang, when the universe was only four percent of its current age.
‘Spine-tingling’ discovery
In recent years, astronomers have been detecting gamma-ray bursts, galaxies and quasars at ever farther distances, closer to the birth of the universe’s first stars and galaxies. So it was only a matter of time before they detected such an early explosion, said Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the U.K. Tanvir worked on the ESO team.
“We have been looking for a burst like this for several years, so we of course expected that we’d get lucky one day — but it was a “spine-tingling” moment to realize that this was finally it,” Tanvir told SPACE.com.
Astronomers hope that observations of this and other gamma-ray bursts just as far away (and thought to represent some of the earliest stellar populations) will shed light on the so-called “cosmic dark ages,” a time before the first stars and galaxies ignited.
“This explosion provides an unprecedented look at an era when the universe was very young and also was undergoing drastic changes,” said Dale Frail of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “The primal cosmic darkness was being pierced by the light of the first stars and the first galaxies were beginning to form. The star that exploded in this event was a member of one of these earliest generations of stars.”
Cosmic dark ages
After the Big Bang, the universe had cool rapidly as it expanded. About 400,000 years later, free electrons and protons (negative and positive charges, respectively) combined to form neutral atoms, leaving the universe awash in a background radiation that we currently can detect in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum (the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background).
The universe stayed in this neutral stage until the first stars and galaxies light it up. The photons from these stars knocked electrons free from the atoms, “re-ionizing” the universe. But detecting the most distant galaxies and quasars from this period is difficult, and so astronomers are hoping that distant gamma-ray bursts such as GRB 090423 will give them information about this re-ionization period.
It will likely take many more gamma-ray bursts to say anything definitive about this cosmic dark age though.
At present, we have only a few observations from these early epochs. Thus, even a single, new data may provide useful constrain to our models of the early Universe. However, to be frank, a decisive step forward for our knowledge of this period of the Universe’s history requires the collection of a relatively large sample of distant [gamma-ray bursts],” Ruben Salvaterra of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy told SPACE.com. Salvaterra worked on the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo team.
Both team’s observations are detailed in the Oct. 29 issue of the journal Nature.
Asked how long he thought this distance record would hold, Tanvir replied, “Based on past experience, it could certainly be a few years before it’s broken, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if it was tomorrow.” He said he did expect the next record holder to be another gamma-ray burst.
Mum’s the Word for NASA’s Secret Space Plane X-37B
Artist concept of the X-37 advanced technology flight demonstrator re-entering Earth's atmosphere. (NASA)
You would think that an unpiloted space plane built to rocket spaceward from Florida atop an Atlas booster, circle the planet for an extended time, then land on autopilot on a California runway would be big news. But for the U.S. Air Force X-37B project — seemingly, mum’s the word.
There is an air of vagueness regarding next year’s Atlas Evolved Expendable launch of the unpiloted, reusable military space plane. The X-37B will be cocooned within the Atlas rocket’s launch shroud — a ride that’s far from cheap.
SLIDESHOW: A Glimpse at NASA’s Secret Plane
While the launch range approval is still forthcoming, SPACE.com has learned that the U.S. Air Force has the X-37B manifested for an April 2010 liftoff.
As a mini-space plane, this Boeing Phantom Works craft has been under development for years. Several agencies have been involved in the effort, NASA as well as the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and various arms of the U.S. Air Force.
Over the last few months, I’ve been in touch with DARPA, Boeing, the Pentagon, the U.S. Air Force Space Command, as well as NASA itself. Either you get a “not in our portfolio” or are given a “go to” pass to another agency. Just a few weeks ago, I even commandeered a face-to-face “no comment” from a top Pentagon official for Air Force space programs about X-37B.
Tight-lipped factor
The tight-lipped factor surrounding the space plane, its mission, and who is in charge is curious. Such a hush-hush factor seems to mimic in pattern that mystery communications spacecraft lofted last month aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, simply called PAN. Its assignment and what agency owns it remains undisclosed.
But in a brief burst of light eking from the new era of government transparency, I did score this comment from NASA.
While the program is now under the U.S. Air Force, NASA is looking forward to receiving data from the advanced technology work.
“NASA has a long history of involvement with the X-37 program. We continue to monitor and share information on technology developments,” said Gary Wentz, chief engineer Science and Missions Systems Office at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We are looking forward to a successful first flight and to receiving data from some advanced technologies of interest to us, such as thermal protection systems, guidance, navigation and control, and materials for autonomous re-entry and landing.”
Full NASA Coverage on FoxNews.com
The vehicle itself is about 29 feet long with a roughly 15-foot wingspan and weighs in at over five tons at liftoff. Speeding down from space, the craft would likely make use of Runway 12/30 — 15,000 feet long by 200 feet wide — at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Vandenberg serves as an emergency space shuttle landing strip, as a second backup after California’s Edwards Air Force Base – which has also been noted as a landing spot for the X-37B.
Once in orbit, what such a vehicle might enable depends on the eye of the beholder. Intelligence gathering, kicking off small satellites, testing space gear are feasible duties, as is developing reusable space vehicle technologies.
Space test platform
Just last month, a U.S. Air Force fact sheet noted that the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), located in Washington, D.C. “is working on the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle to demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the United States Air Force.”
The mission of the RCO is to expedite development and fielding of select Department of Defense combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities.
“The problem with it [X37-B] is whether you see it as a weapons platform,” said Theresa Hitchens, former head of the Center for Defense Information’s Space Security Program, now Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland.
“It then becomes, if I am not mistaken, a Global Strike platform. There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about Global Strike as a concept,” Hitchens told SPACE.com.
The implications of the program as a possible space weapon are surely not lost on potential U.S. competitors, Hitchens said, who may well see anti-satellites (ASATs) as a leveler.
“Would this thing be vulnerable to ASATs? Yes, if it stayed on orbit any length of time,” Hitchens added. “While I see value of such a platform as a pop-up reconnaissance or even communications platform, if weaponized it becomes yet another reason for other nations to consider building dangerous ASATs,” she cautioned.
Another mission question is, to what extent the X-37B might play into the recent announcement that NASA is partnering with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a technology roadmap for the commercial reusable launch vehicle, or RLV, industry.
All that said, and after years in the making, the X-37B is approaching its first globe-trotting, milestone making and historic flight – that much is known.
Phew! NASA Downgrades Asteroid-Strike Threat
LOS ANGELES — NASA says the chances of an 885-foot (270-meter) asteroid striking Earth in 2036 have been downgraded.
Scientists initially believed there was a 1-in-45,000 chance that Apophis could hit the planet on April 13, 2036. But NASA said Wednesday the threat has been dropped to 1-in-250,000 after it recalculated the asteriod’s path.
Earth got a scare in 2004, when initial readings suggested the newly discovered Apophis seemed to have a chance of hitting in 2029. Further observations ruled out any possibility of an impact.
Apophis is scheduled to make a close but harmless approach in 2029.
Out There: Water, Water EVERYWHERE !
Water water EVERYWHERE !
It’s now official that water has been found on the moon, and scientists have long seen it on Mars as well. In fact, water is all over the solar system and the rest of the galaxy – and since water is key to life as we know it, these discoveries raise the hope that we are not in fact alone.
The inner planets
Although the moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, new observations from three different spacecraft have uncovered what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.
On Mars, giant cracks were recently found etched across crater basins that hinted at ancient lakes, and liquid water is thought to have been common across a vast region of ancient Mars billions of years ago. Craters recently even revealed that more water ice is buried closer to the red planet’s equator than would be expected, “which implies there was more water in the atmosphere of Mars in the not too distant past,” explained Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
But liquid and frozen water are not limited to Earth’s closest neighbors in space.
Even hellish Venus may once have been lush with oceans. Although space probes in the 1960s found the surface of Venus was now hot enough to melt lead, images collected from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft suggest hints of past oceans. A runaway greenhouse effect – a far magnified version of the global warming seen occurring on Earth – apparently led its seas to evaporate away. “Its water, by absorbing heat, might have actually helped contribute to its greenhouse warming,” Meyer said.
The outer worlds and beyond
Most moons of the solar system’s gas giants are also rich in water.
- On Saturn’s moon Titan, “cryovolcanoes” are thought to erupt with cold slurries of water ice and ammonia.
- Another Saturnian moon, Enceladus, is thought to have an ocean beneath its icy shell that likely feeds jets of water ice seen spurting from that moon.
- Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, Neptune’s Triton and the Uranian moons Titania and Oberon are also thought to potentially harbor hidden seas.
The outer worlds themselves are rather icy. Neptune and Uranus are often dubbed “ice giants” because they are rich with water, ammonia, and methane. Pluto is thought to consist roughly of 30 percent water ice. Beyond them lie the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud and the scattered disk, home to untold numbers of comets and icy dwarf planets such as Eris.
In fact, water is often found as ice or gas around stars and in the clouds between them. Signs of water have even been seen on planets outside our solar system.
What does it mean?
The fact that water is so water is abundant should not be such a surprise. “Water is ridiculously common, one of the most common molecules in the universe,” said Nicolas Cowan, an astronomer and astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
What seems rare is finding water in liquid form. In space, it either vaporizes if it is too hot or freezes if it is too cold .
“The only time you ever find it stable as a liquid is when you get enough atmosphere down to provide enough pressure to keep it liquid,” Cowan explained.
Scientists looking for aliens consider liquid water “the Holy Grail, the thing that people really want to find,” Cowan said. “Water is the main requirement we can see that life on Earth seems to have.” Although life also needs a source of energy of some kind, in many ways, “you don’t have to worry too much about that,” Meyer added, since Earth shows that life can live off many different kinds of energy, from the sun or heat or chemicals.
Other life forms
Of course, alien life might not require water at all. Although it makes sense for life to require carbon, “since carbon chemistry is amazingly complex, affording one the opportunity to become complex enough to start life,” Meyer explained, “you could have a liquid medium for carbon-based chemistry besides water – ammonia, for instance.”
The most exciting aspect of the water that researchers are uncovering in the solar system might be how it can support humanity, not aliens.
“If we find water in sufficient quantities that it makes sense for us to use it, we can go to there and make rocket fuel out of it by separating hydrogen from oxygen, make use of resources in situ rather than shipping everything from Earth,” Meyer said.
Still, don’t rule out extraterrestrial life in the solar system. All the water discovered on Mars is challenging what scientists know of the red planet – enough perhaps to “dream up scenarios where the surface of Mars was a more habitable place in the distant past, with critters retreating to the subsurface to still live,” Cowan noted.
Magnetic Fields Guide Star Birth
Magnetic Fields effect starbirth
The picture of star formation just got a little more complicated: Cosmic magnetic fields, which can channel condensing interstellar gas, play a more important role in the birth of stars that previously thought, a new study suggests.
The simplified story of stellar birth involves giant clouds of gas and dust collapsing inward due to gravity, growing denser and hotter until nuclear fusion ignites a newborn star.
But in reality, there’s much more to the story: When a molecular cloud collapses, only a small fraction of the cloud’s material forms stars, and scientists haven’t been sure why that is.
Since gravity favors star formation because it draws material together, some other force must be hindering the process, scientists reason. The two leading candidates are turbulence and magnetic fields.
Magnetic fields (produced by moving electrical charges and present around stars and most planets, including Earth) channel flowing gas, making it hard to draw the gas in from all directions. Turbulence stirs the gas and induces and outward pressure that counteracts gravity.
“The relative importance of magnetic fields versus turbulence is a matter of much debate,” said astronomer Hua-bai Li of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “Our findings serve as the first observational constraint on this issue.”
Li and his team studied 25 dense patches, or cloud cores, each one about a light-year in size. The cores, which act as seeds from which stars form, were located within molecular clouds as much as 6,500 light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or 6 trillion miles.)
The researchers studied polarized light, which has electric and magnetic components that are aligned in specific directions. From the polarization, they measured the magnetic fields within each cloud core and compared them to the fields in the surrounding, tenuous nebula.
The magnetic fields tended to line up in the same direction, even though the relative size scales (1 light-year cores versus 1,000 light-year nebulas) and densities were different by orders of magnitude. Since turbulence would tend to churn the nebula and mix up magnetic field directions, their findings show that magnetic fields dominate turbulence in influencing star birth.
“Our result shows that molecular cloud cores located near each other are connected not only by gravity but also by magnetic fields,” Li said. “This shows that computer simulations modeling star formation must take strong magnetic fields into account.”
The study will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
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