Shuttle/Shuttle Concept Restart: August 2016

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Have we lost the will?
http://www.waltercunningham.com/op_ed_022810.htm

Sent from my iPad

How the End of NASA Affects US National Security

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2299/nasa-us-national-security

Sent from my iPad

Fwd: Well, well well...Look what just Surfaced!

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert Hooi" <rwlh21@sbcglobal.net>
Date: August 30, 2016 at 11:50:44 PM CDT
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: Fw: Well, well well...Look what just Surfaced!
Reply-To: "Robert Hooi" <rwlh21@sbcglobal.net>

Awesome – a foreign student!

Actually, it's been around for sometime---always labeled as "phototshopped"! (The WH show know what (and how to do) that is—since they put out his alleged birth certificate a few years back!

Wonder where it's been, and why it surfaced

after the deceitful liar is about to leave the barn?

Facebook is taking this photo down left and right.

Make it go viral! You think the liberals will ignore this and

replace him with another major league liar?

Given control of space to Russia & China !

Jim Worrall

23 mins

WE HAVE GIVEN CONTROL OF SPACE TO RUSSIA & CHINA

Prior to the Obama regime the USA excercised greater control over Earth's Orbit (EO) and especially Low Earth Orbit ( LEO), than any other nation. Protecting the space around Earth is vital to our national security.

China and Russia already have the capability to attack our communication satellites. Iran and North Korea will have ICBMs within 5 years and nuclear warheads shortly thereafter. Controlling EO ia vital to Missle Defense.

For 50 years every President has understood the vital nature of our space program until Obama. Obama has gutted NASA by wrecklessly slashing budgets, eliminating critical programs and laying off vital scientists and engineers.

Of all the damaging decsions Obama has made regarding the space program, the retirement of the Space shuttle seems most irresponsible. The Space Shuttle gave the USA launch capability unmatched by other nations. Termination of the Space Shuttle without a replacement was self destructive and places us at the mercy of our enemies. Who believes China and Russia don't carefully examine our satellites before launching them?

The private sector initiatives that Obama touted to replace the Shuttle have born little fruit. I'm not sure it's wise to place national security in the hands of start ups.

The ability to launch frequently and reliably ( shuttle ) along with heavy lift capabilities ( big rockets ) are absolutely critical to maintaining control of EO and future ICBM Missle defense.

It's wise to continue investing in research and new technology to build a superior replacement to the Space Shuttle. Until we have that replacement we can use the Boeing X-37B and X-37C mini shuttles but we still need the heavy lift capabilities the shuttle provides. We must bring the Shuttle out of retirement and rehire the geniuses that built the world's preeminent space program that protected us so well for 50 years.

Please contact your Senators and Congressman and insist they support NASA and the Shuttle.

GOD bless you,

Jim Worrall

To learn more please visit:

http://keeptheshuttleflyingc.blogspot.com/p/how-space-explo…

https://m.facebook.com/bobby.martin.144

Sent from my iPad

Shuttle C

http://www.astronautix.com/s/shuttlec.html

Sent from my iPad

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Fwd: Russia Plans To Let Go Of Their Part In The ISS, Leaving The Space Station Handicapped : Space : Science World Report

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Peter M. Callahan" <pmcallah@gmail.com>
Date: August 30, 2016 at 2:56:32 PM CDT
To: Bobby G Martin <bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Russia Plans To Let Go Of Their Part In The ISS, Leaving The Space Station Handicapped : Space : Science World Report

Thank you. I believe Obama intentionally destroyed NASA and retired the shuttles to weaken America in preparation for a Muslim invasion. The fact that Obama has gotten this far, makes me very angry.

I believe talk of a manned mission to Mars is total fantasy. If it happens at all, it won't take place for another 75-100 years. We can't even get to LEO, or the Moon.

Trump must prevail in November!

On Tuesday, August 30, 2016, Bobby G Martin <bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/46279/20160829/russia-plans-go-part-iss-leaving-space-station-handicapped.htm

Sent from my iPad

--
Sent from Gmail Mobile

Fwd: 45 Years Since Apollo 15

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: August 29, 2016 at 10:37:54 PM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: 45 Years Since Apollo 15

Almost no one knows and it doesn't show up in released mission reports, that the MSFC Director asked the Mission Evaluation Room Manager Don Arabian to investigate some unrelated anomalies that were occurring when the Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV) was on the Moon and exposed to some very low temperatures. They had an Investigation Board put together but they had been unable to determine the cause of what appeared to be unrelated anomalies that occurred on Apollo 15 & 16. At low temperatures multiple and intermittent anomalies occurred (battery 2 voltmeter off-scale-low, battery 1 & 2 temperature meters off-scale-low, and battery 2 ampere-hour meter showed increasing ampere-hours). I was at the MER involved in the investigation and developed a grounding schematic from the LRV "As Built Wire List", as there was on integrated drawing on the electrical system. While I was putting the drawing together, low and behold, the ground wire on all the instruments with anomalies came down to a single crimp wire splice. The small 22 gauge return wires to the meters and ampere-hour integrator were crimped spliced with the large 12 gauge battery return wire (total of 5 wires in the splice). The number of these return wires and the size difference exceeds the JSC spacecraft requirements on the splicing of different gauge wires in a single splice, as large difference can result in loose connection on some of the small gauge wires. Investigation also revealed that the Qualification LRV that was tested in a Thermal Vacuum Chamber had solder connections; it did not have the crimp splices as used on the lunar mission rovers.
Don Arabian and I then went to MSFC and presented our finding to their Investigation Board. We pointed out to correct the problem for the Apollo 17 LRV they needed to either solder the splice or go to multiple splices meeting the spacecraft requirements. Since these problems had not prevented the LRV from completing the mission and they now knew the cause, no change was made to the Apollo 17 LRV. I would have liked to asked Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt did the anomalies occur on their LRV. A good lesson for engineers, the Vehicle Qualification Test Configuration should be the same as flight even for small things like wire splices.

Gary
281-433-7735 cell

AmericaSpace
For a nation that explores
July 30th, 2016
'The Reality of the Situation': 45 Years Since the Mission of Apollo 15 (Part 1)
By Ben Evans

For each Apollo landing crew, the cramped confines of the Lunar Module (LM) provided their sanctuary against the hostile extremes of an airless, lifeless world beyond. Photo Credit: NASA
Four hundred miles (640 km) to the north of the Moon's equator lies a place called Hadley: a small patch of Mare Imbrium at the base of the Apennine Mountains—some of which rise to 4,000 feet (1,200 meters)—and a 25-mile (40-km) meandering gorge, known as Hadley Rille. In July 1971, Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Jim Irwin expertly negotiated these forbidding landmarks in the Lunar Module (LM) Falcon and set down in one of the most visually spectacular regions ever visited by mankind. They brought back a scientific yield which revealed more about the Moon's origin and evolution than ever before. Forty-five years ago, this week, in July-August 1971, Apollo 15 conducted one of the most brilliant missions ever undertaken in the annals of space science.
It is therefore ironic that this triumph actually arose from the ashes of defeat. Original plans called for four "H-series" lunar landing missions—Apollo 12 through 15—which would each spend 33 hours on the Moon and feature two periods of Extravehicular Activity (EVA). The final missions, belonging to the "J-series," would perform longer missions, spend 70 hours on the surface, make three EVAs, and utilize a battery-powered rover. In September 1970, everything changed when NASA canceled one H-series mission and one J-series mission; as a result, the schedule shifted to maximize the scientific harvest from the remaining flights. Apollo 15 was upgraded to the ambitious J-series, and it was this decision which altered its scope and its place in history.
Apollo 15 thunders into orbit on 26 July 1971, heading for the Moon and the first piloted voyage to the lunar mountains. Photo Credit: NASA
The countdown on 26 July 1971 was near-perfect. In fact, Launch Director Walter Kapryan described it as "the most nominal countdown that we have ever had." The astronauts—Scott, Irwin, and Command Module Pilot (CMP) Al Worden—were awakened early that morning, breakfasted on steak and eggs, caught a brief nap as they were being suited-up, and were helped into their couches aboard the Apollo 15 Command and Service Module (CSM), Endeavour, at around 7 a.m. EDT. The clang of the hatch shutting them in startled Irwin. "I think that is when the reality of the situation hit me," he wrote in his memoir, To Rule the Night. "I realized I was cut off from the world. This was the moment I had been waiting for. It wouldn't be long now."
From his couch on the right-hand side of the spacecraft, Irwin had little to do and had some brief respite to reflect on his life, consider the enormity of the mission ahead of him, and, more than anything, give himself over to an air of anticipation and expectancy as he waited for the Saturn V to boost them toward the Moon.
Fifteen minutes before launch, they felt and heard the unearthly clanking of Pad 39A's access arm moving away from the spacecraft, then beheld the stunning blaze of sunlight through the command module's only uncovered porthole. As the countdown entered its final seconds, the glare of the Sun was so intense that Scott had to shield his eyes just to read the instrument panel in front of him. Precisely on time, at 9:34 a.m. EDT, the five F-1 engines of the Saturn V's first stage came to life with a muffled roar. "You just hang there," Irwin wrote. "Then you sense a little motion, a little vibration and you start to move. Once you realize you are moving, there is a complete release of tensions. Slowly, slowly, then faster and faster; you feel all that power underneath you."
Four days later, after crossing 240,000 miles (370,000 km), Apollo 15 slipped into orbit around the Moon. Scott and Irwin, aboard Falcon, undocked from Worden in Endeavour and began their descent to the surface. Moving in a sweeping arc toward the Apennines, at an altitude of four miles (6.4 km), Scott began to discern the long, meandering channel of Hadley Rille. The terrain was less sharply defined that he had anticipated on the basis of simulations, yet he was able to find four familiar craters: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Index—the latter of which they had used in landmark sightings from orbit. (The name "Index" was deliberately chosen instead of "John" in order to stave off complaints from the atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whose criticism of overtly religious symbolic gestures on missions had scalded NASA during Apollo 8 in December 1968.)
Dropping through a gap in the lunar mountains, Scott had the surreal feeling that he was "floating" with strange slowness toward his landing site. "No amount of simulation training," he wrote in his memoir, Two Sides of the Moon, "had been able to replicate the view we saw out of our windows as we passed by the steep slopes of the majestic lunar Apennine Mountains." In the simulator, they "flew" a television camera toward a small, relatively flat patch of plaster-of-Paris; now they drifted between the astonishing 16,400-foot (5,000-meter) peaks of the mountains to both their left and right as they threaded their way toward Hadley. "It made us feel," he added, "almost as if we should pull our feet up to prevent scraping them along the top of the range."
As they continued to descend, Falcon's computer transitioned to "Program 66," enabling Scott to fly manually. "Dave didn't want me looking at the surface at all," Irwin wrote. "He wanted me to concentrate on the information on the computer and other instruments. He wanted to be certain that he had instant information relayed to him. He was going to pick out the landmarks. But Dave couldn't identify the landmarks; the features on the real surface didn't look like the ones we had trained with." Scott could see Hadley Rille and used that long gouge as his marker, but was worried that they might land "long" and far to the south of their intended spot. This fear was confirmed by Capcom Ed Mitchell; they were, indeed, 0.5 miles (0.8 km) or more south of track. Scott knew that, even with the lunar rover, this might impair the effectiveness of their explorations. During those final moments, he clicked his hand controller 18 times, forward and to the side, adjusting their trajectory to bring Falcon back onto its prescribed path.
The Apollo 15 crew, pictured during pre-launch water survival exercises. Left to right are Al Worden, Jim Irwin and Dave Scott. Photo Credit: NASA
Those seconds were so unreal—the clarity of the scene, the weird behavior of the lunar dust, the strange, almost-unpowered sense of drifting like a snowflake through the majesty of the lunar mountains—that Irwin mentally convinced himself that he was still in the simulator back at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas. If he had admitted to himself that this was for real, he felt that he would have been just too excited to do his job properly. Yet if this was a simulation, it was one of the smoothest that he had ever flown. They were very close to the surface now and lunar dust obscured the landing site entirely, like a thick fog. It was only Irwin's call that the blue Contact Light had illuminated which finally convinced them that they had touched down.
The time was 6:16 p.m. EDT on 30 July 1971 and, with a firm thud, the seventh and eighth men from Earth reached the surface of the Moon. "Okay, Houston," radioed Scott, "the Falcon is on the Plain at Hadley!" His reference to the landing site as a "plain" paid due tribute to Scott's alma mater, the Military Academy at West Point, whose parade ground was also nicknamed "The Plain."
What did cause concern was that Falcon had come down on uneven ground and one of its rear footpads had planted itself inside a small crater. (Mission Control would later call their lunar module "The Leaning Tower of Pisa," an epithet which Scott did not appreciate!) Irwin remembered the landing as the hardest he had ever been involved in; "a tremendous impact with a pitching and rolling motion. Everything rocked around and I thought all the gear was going to fall off. I was sure something was broken and we might have to go into one of those abort situations. If you pass 45 degrees and are still moving, you have to abort. We just froze in position as we waited for the ground to look at our systems. They had to tell us whether we had a STAY condition." With some relief, 77 seconds after touchdown, Mission Control radioed their approval for Scott and Irwin to STAY.
"The excitement was overwhelming," Irwin wrote, "but now I could let myself believe it." They had set down in a beautiful valley, with the mountains of the Apennines on three sides of them and Hadley Rille about a mile (1.6 km) to the west. In his mind, it conjured up boyhood memories of the mountains of Colorado, high above the tree line; yet there was something else about it, too. Irwin was certainly one of the more religious men in the astronaut corps, and he would later make little secret of the fact that he acutely sensed the presence of a supreme being on the Moon. This sensation reached its sharpest whenever he looked up at Earth in the black sky. "That beautiful, warm living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart," he wrote. "Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God." This profound experience would remain with Irwin and guide his steps for the rest of his life.
One of the skills that Scott learned during his geology training was the need to gain a visual perspective of the site that he was about to explore. With this in mind, he requested mission planners to schedule a Stand-Up EVA (SEVA) a couple of hours after touchdown, in which he would stand on the ascent engine cover, poke his helmeted head through Falcon's top hatch, and photograph his surroundings. At first, Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton opposed the idea, on the grounds that it would waste valuable oxygen, but Scott fiercely argued his case and eventually won approval. To conduct this half-hour SEVA, Scott pulled a balaclava-like visor over his clear bubble helmet, clambered onto the ascent engine cover, and removed the top hatch. It was, he wrote, "rather as if I was in the conning tower of a submarine or the turret of a tank."
Spectacular view of Hadley Delta, captured by Dave Scott during his Stand-Up EVA (SEVA) through the lunar module's overhead hatch. Photo Credit: NASA
Meanwhile, Irwin shaded the instrument panel from the unfiltered lunar sunlight and arranged Scott's oxygen hoses and communications cables to allow him to stand upright. "He offered me a chance to look out," Irwin wrote, "but my umbilicals weren't long enough and I didn't want to take the time to rearrange them." In the weak gravity, Scott found that he could easily support himself in the hatch on his elbows … and saw the stunning brown-tan Apennines. Irwin passed up a bearing indicator and a large orientation map, which Scott used to shoot a couple of dozen interconnected stereo pictures of the landing site now officially known as "Hadley Base."
As his eyes adapted, and his mind connected it with months spent examining Lunar Orbiter geology maps, Scott began reeling off the landmarks. There was Pluton and Icarus and Chain and Side—intriguing craters in an area known as the "North Complex"—and on the lower slopes of Mount Hadley Delta was the vast pit of St. George Crater. One prominent, rocky landmark which they had dubbed "Silver Spur" in honor of their geology professor, Lee Silver, showed clear evidence of stratigraphy in its flanks.
"The SEVA was a marvelous and useful experience, for a lot of reasons," Scott later explained for the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. "One of our problems at Hadley was that the resolution of the Lunar Orbiter photography was only 60 feet (18 meters), so they couldn't prepare a detailed map. The maps we had were best guesses and we had the radar people tell us before the flight that there were boulder fields … all over the base of Hadley Delta. So another reason for the stand-up EVA was to look and see if we could drive the rover, because if there were boulder fields down there, and nobody could prove there were no boulder fields, it changed the whole picture."
The view set his mind at ease, appearing totally unhostile and contradicting his pre-flight fears. The "trafficability," as Scott put it, would be excellent. Back inside Falcon, acutely aware that they were the only inhabitants of Earth ever to visit this barren place, the astronauts removed their suits and set about preparing their evening meal and getting ready for sleep. "Tomato soup was big on the menu, as I recall," Scott wrote in Two Sides of the Moon. "There was no hot-water supply in the LM, as there was in the command module, so all our meals on the lunar surface were served cold and we soon discovered that there was not really enough to eat, either."
Scott and Irwin later recommended that more food be carried on Apollo 16 and 17, for walking on the Moon required huge reserves of energy and stamina and was hungry work. Irwin, too, remembered Apollo 15's staple of soups. "Eating them required some acrobatics," he wrote. "They were … in plastic bags, but they had a Teflon seal that you had to peel off. We added water to the soups, then very carefully pulled the tab to open them up. If you opened them slowly, invariably the soup would start coming out in bubbles or blobs that would float all over the place. The trick was to open the bag fast, so that the viscosity or capillary action would encourage the soup to adhere to the plastic. The object was to take advantage of whatever adhesiveness the soup had." When it had been thus "contained," they could eat quite normally, with a spoon, directing it approximately toward their mouths.
Sleeping on the Moon, in their long johns, without the bulky space suits, was more comfortable in one-sixth gravity than it had been in pre-launch rehearsals. It was very much like a water bed, Irwin wrote, and they felt as light as feathers in the weak lunar gravity. They popped in earplugs, pulled down the blinds over the two triangular windows, and drifted into a fitful sleep. Scott arranged his hammock in a fore-to-aft direction above the ascent engine cover, whilst Irwin stretched "athwart ship."
Despite having long since accepted being here, Scott still succumbed to the temptation to raise the blind and take a long look at the astonishing panorama beyond Falcon's windows, and called on Irwin to come and take a look. There was, however, little time to wonder and the strictness of the timeline forced them to begin preparations to put on their suits for the first of three Moonwalks. Irwin would subsequently relate, with a hint of humor, that he and Scott did more talking to one another during the donning of the suits than they had in the past several days. With all the added bulk of a backpack, oxygen and water hoses, and electrical cabling, and with the suit fully pressurized, Scott found it surprising that he actually fitted through Falcon's small, square hatch when the time finally came to venture outside.

Copyright © 2016 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

AmericaSpace
For a nation that explores
July 31st, 2016
'Exploration at Its Greatest': 45 Years Since the Mission of Apollo 15 (Part 2)
By Ben Evans

Dave Scott works with the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) on the slopes of Hadley Rille during Apollo 15. Photo Credit: NASA
Since the evening of 20/21 July 1969, it had become something of a tradition for the commander of each Apollo lunar landing mission to make a comment as he took his first steps on the Moon. Following Neil Armstrong's historic words to the tongue-in-cheek quip made by Apollo 12's Pete Conrad to Al Shepard's remark about the figurative and literal length of his journey to the Moon, it was widely expected that Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott would continue the tradition. And for an astronaut whose career started as an Air Force fighter pilot, but who was gradually won over by the science of geology, Scott's words at 9:29 a.m. EDT on 31 July 1971—45 years ago, today—were wholly appropriate. "As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley," he said as he became the seventh son of Earth to set foot on another celestial body, "I sort of realize there's a fundamental truth to our nature: Man must explore. And this is exploration at its greatest!"
As outlined in yesterday's AmericaSpace history article, Scott and Apollo 15 Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Jim Irwin were tasked with spending almost three days exploring the mountainous region of Hadley, located deep in the Moon's Apennine Mountains, on the first so-called "J-series" mission. Theirs benefited from a long-duration Lunar Module (LM)—which the all-Air Force crew nicknamed "Falcon"—together with long-duration space suits and the battery-powered Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). The latter, known as the "rover," would allow Scott and Irwin to explore a far broader area of the Moon's terrain than their predecessors. Meanwhile, in orbit, Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot (CMP) Al Worden operated a complex battery of research instruments aboard the Command and Service Module (CSM) Endeavour.
Apollo 15, originally the last of the H-series lunar landing missions, evolved to become the first member of the J-series, following the tumultuous events of 1970. Photo Credit: NASA
With Dave Scott having just become the seventh man on the Moon, the time soon came for Irwin to join him in eighth place. The pair quickly set to work deploying the rover from its berth in Falcon's descent stage. To do so, they tugged on a series of pulleys and braked reels, and it required both of them, working in tandem. As it flopped into the lunar dust, the rover was secured with pins. Scott clambered aboard to give it a test drive and the front steering seemed to be inoperable, requiring them to rely instead on rear-wheel steering. After installing the color television camera and loading up the geology tools, they buckled themselves aboard and set off. Reaching peak speeds of 5-6 mph (8-9.5 km/h), it was a bouncy ride and if the rover hit a rock, it literally went airborne for a couple of seconds. Irwin later likened it to a bucking bronco or an old rowing boat on a rough lake.
"I've never liked safety belts," he wrote in his memoir, To Rule the Night, "but we couldn't have done without them on the rover. You could easily get 'seasick' if you had any problem with motion." In fact, Irwin's seat belt turned out to be too short and before they could set off Scott had to come around to his side of the rover to buckle him in properly. "We didn't realize," Irwin explained, "when we made the adjustments on Earth, that at one-sixth-G the suit would balloon more and it would be difficult to compress it enough to fasten the seat belt."
The rover was also slightly different to drive than the training version they had used on Earth. Scott found that he had to concentrate all of his energies simply driving and keeping track of craters—the harsh glare of sunlight made the terrain appear deceptively smooth, literally "washing-out" surface features, as hummocks and furrows appeared out of nowhere, at a split-second's notice. Its maneuverability was good ("it could turn on a dime," Scott recalled in his memoir, Two Sides of the Moon), but its wheels kicked up enormous rooster-tails of dust, which were thankfully deflected by its fenders. As the navigator, Irwin tried to plot their course on the map, but had difficulty identifying their route because they were uncertain of precisely where they had set Falcon down. However, the towering bulk of nearby Mount Hadley Delta was clear to see, with St. George Crater—an enormous gouge the size of two dozen football fields—on the lowermost slopes, and all they had to do was drive with it on their port quarter and they knew that eventually they would come upon Hadley Rille.
Cresting the top of a ridge, they were rewarded with their first unearthly glimpse of Hadley Rille and gained a clear awareness of its enormous size. Half an hour after leaving Falcon, they made their first scheduled halt at a place called "Elbow Crater," right on the rim of the rille at the base of the mountain. From here, Scott took a series of pictures of the far side of Hadley Rille, whose interior wall showed clear evidence of layering in outcrops not far below its rim, and the two men took a few minutes to gather samples. Next, they set off toward the rim of St. George Crater. It had been expected that the area would be littered with large blocks of rock, but upon finding the flank of the mountain remarkably clean, Scott decided to halt short of the rim and sample an isolated boulder. It was more than 3.3 feet (1 meter) across and its "half-in-half-out" nature, part-buried in the soft soil.
Haunting view of Jim Irwin with the lunar rover, backdropped by the grandeur of Mount Hadley. Photo Credit: NASA
Simply walking was as strange as the world upon which they were now operating. It felt, Irwin explained, very much like walking on the surface of a trampoline, although the bulk of the space suit made it virtually impossible to move in a natural, Earthly gait. "When you don't have the weight of your legs available to push against the suit," he wrote, "you are constrained as to how far you can move. Consequently, you just use the ball of your foot to push off. That's why we looked like kangaroos when we walked. We flexed the boot and that pushed us forward."
"One of the Moon's most striking features," Scott related, "was its stillness. With no atmosphere and no wind, the only movements we could detect on the lunar surface, apart from our own, were the gradually shifting shadows cast to the side of rocks and the rims of craters by the Sun slowly rising higher in the sky." There was absolutely no trace of anything which exhibited either life or color or movement and the only sound came from the gentle hum of life-sustaining machinery in their backpacks, the hiss of the air flowing through their suits, or the crackle of each other's voices or the voice of Houston in their earpieces.
The problem of judging distances had been noted by earlier crews. "There's nothing of scale which is familiar," Scott told the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. "There are no trees, there are no cars, there are no houses … and, as an example, we all know what size trees are in general. There are no trees and there's nothing in the landscape that has any familiarity. There's no 'hook.' So when you look out there, you see boulders, but you can't really tell whether it's a large boulder at a great distance or a small boulder nearby. If it's very nearby, it's easy because you can run out along the ground and start calibrating your eyes. If you're looking close to the LM, you know what three or four inches are, but as you start going out, you start losing your perspective, because there's nothing to measure out there. It's a very interesting phenomenon that everybody gets fooled on these distances."
Having said this, Scott added that the tracks of the rover lent some indication of distance. "Once you have some tracks," he said, "you can start seeing things. As an example, up on the side of Hadley Delta, looking back at the Lunar Module, boy, it was small!" In the absence of an atmosphere or the slightest trace of haze, Falcon appeared far closer and far smaller than it actually was. "But it gives you a scale of how far away it is," Scott concluded. Even decades later, Scott expressed frustration with his inability to describe how it felt: The ability of his eyes and how well they transmitted images to his brain was good on the Moon. Yet there was nothing on Earth to compare with it.
Heading back toward Falcon after a little more than two hours, the two men could take great pride in their achievements so far. Yet they still had a sizeable portion of work to do before returning inside. Of primary importance was the assembly of their Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). Scott picked a spot a few hundred feet from the lander and Irwin lugged it over, one pallet on each end of a carrying bar, not dissimilar to a giant dumbbell. On his cuff checklist, Irwin checked a small "map" of where each component was supposed to go. Meanwhile, Scott was experiencing his own problems. One of the ALSEP's experiments was the heat-flow investigation. This had been assigned to the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, but never made it to the Moon.
The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), pictured here with Apollo 15 Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Jim Irwin, was of fundamental importance in enabling the crews of the J-series Apollo missions to expand the scope of their scientific exploration. Photo Credit: NASA
It required Scott to use a small, box-like drill to bore a couple of deep holes into the surface and emplace a pair of temperature probes. He would then drill a third hole for a core sample. He made excellent progress on the first hole, reaching a depth of 1.6 feet (0.5 meters), then met a hard subsurface. Despite leaning on the drill to give it extra bite, he fell behind schedule and was advised to insert the first set of probes. The second hole proved even harder, and Mission Control called a halt with the drill only a couple of feet into the ground. Capcom Joe Allen told Scott to take a breather, then help Irwin with deploying the retroreflector and a solar-wind experiment. They would have to complete the drilling later. Their first Moonwalk ended slightly earlier than planned, after 6.5 hours. Back inside Falcon, both men were exhausted. The stress of driving and the toughness of handling the drill for the heat-flow experiment had worn out Scott's hands and forearms. Irwin described the pain in his fingers as excruciating.
They took each other's gloves off to inspect the damage: Perspiration poured from them, but there was no evidence of bleeding or bruising. Then they realized that their fingernails, which had grown during the last five days, had been immersed in sweat for the last seven hours. To aid movement, their gloves had been designed to fit tightly against the tips of their fingers; the pressure and the pain was on the ends of the nails. Irwin resolved to cut his nails and advised his commander to do the same, but for some reason—perhaps fearful that it might compromise his own dexterity on the surface—Scott declined.
Irwin was also uncomfortable. A problem with his drinking water bag had left him absolutely parched for more than seven hours. "There was a nozzle that you'd bend down to open a valve so you could suck the water out and drink it within the protection of the space suit," he explained, "but I could never get my drink bag to work and I never got a single drink of water during the whole time I was out on the surface of the Moon." He did, however, manage to gobble down a fruit stick inside his helmet and that helped him to keep going when the time came to assemble the ALSEP. Now, having doffed his suit, Irwin guzzled water like a jogger, then settled down with Scott for their second night on the Moon.
"Settled" probably was not an appropriate word, for conditions inside Falcon cannot have been pleasant: With the presence of all the rocks and soil specimens, the smell of the Moon—a strong, gunpowder-like aroma—pervaded the air and dust covered everything. They stashed their filthy suits at the back of the cabin, making sure that the gloves were fitted, so as not to impair their seals, then debriefed to Houston and bedded down for their second night's sleep on the Moon. The next two EVAs would bring tremendous scientific discoveries, which continue to resonate to this day.
The concluding parts of this series will appear next weekend.

Copyright © 2016 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

Monday, August 29, 2016

A very important capability! Not understood by DS liberals.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Fwd: 15 Years Since STS-105

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: August 28, 2016 at 9:12:05 AM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: 15 Years Since STS-105

AmericaSpace
For a nation that explores
August 27th, 2016
'To Train a Mission': 15 Years Since STS-105 (Part 1)
By Ben Evans

Fifteen years have now passed since STS-105 exchanged crews and supplies at the International Space Station (ISS). Photo Credit: NASA
Fifteen years ago, this month, 10 astronauts and cosmonauts from the United States and Russia celebrated 1,000 days of orbital operations for the International Space Station (ISS). In August 2001, Shuttle Discovery's STS-105 astronauts—Commander Scott "Doc" Horowitz, Pilot Rick "C.J." Sturckow, and Mission Specialists Pat Forrester and Dan Barry—delivered the third resident crew to the fledgling outpost, supported a pair of critical EVAs, and returned to Earth with its outgoing second crew. Additionally, STS-105 transported over 7,000 pounds (4,000 kg) of equipment and supplies to the space station, aboard the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM).
Designated "Assembly Mission 7A.1," STS-105 was inserted into the manifest relatively late, to accommodate tasks after the arrival of the Quest airlock on shuttle flight STS-104, Assembly Mission 7A. In the words of Dan Barry, 7A.1 was a dot flight, "where we really are trying to respond to the things that the station needs to have." These "things" might include breakages or the appearance of specific issues and differed from "non-dot-flights"—7A or 8A, for instance—whose precise objectives and cargoes had been laid out several years before. "In some ways, it's more interesting … to make some of these late changes," said Barry. "It certainly is a challenge and we have trained for some things which, it turns out, we're not going to do. But I think that's part of business on being on space station and it's rewarding when you get out there and do the task on short notice."
Commander Scott "Doc" Horowitz (right) and Pilot Rick "C.J." Sturckow confer during a training session in April 2001. Photo Credit: NASA
Unusually, crew trained to perform their two EVAs from the shuttle's airlock, rather than from the newly-installed Quest. However, in the aftermath of Assembly Mission 6A in late April 2001—which installed "Canadarm2"—a series of subtle problems were detected with the station's 57.7-foot-long (17.6-meter) robotic manipulator. These problems arose in May 2001, following a communications error between Canadarm2's shoulder pitch joint and its main computer commanding unit.
Since the "Big Arm" was critically necessary to install Quest during shuttle flight STS-104 on Assembly Mission 7A, there existed a real possibility that STS-105 might end up flying first. "Right at a critical point in our training," said Forrester, "there were some real questions about whether or not [Assembly Mission 7A] and, specifically, getting Quest installed was going to happen or not. We had to make a decision that we needed to continue training in a way that we knew we would be able to duplicate it on flight. And so, early on, we started designing our EVAs around the shuttle airlock, to be able to cover the contingency that we went before 104, or, in this case, after 104."
As efforts to rectify Canadarm2's woes continued through late May and into early June, STS-104 was postponed until no sooner than early July. Fortunately, on 20 June, NASA announced that its launch with Quest would go ahead on 12 July, allowing STS-105 to be formally scheduled for early August. "It wasn't sure during training for STS-105 whether all the equipment necessary to install the airlock would be ready to support," Horowitz told a NASA interviewer, in the weeks before launch. "So in order for us to train a mission, we had to sort of divorce ourselves from the 104 flight and obvious way to do that was to train to do our EVAs out of our airlock on the space shuttle." By Horowitz's own admission, the decision "gave us a little bit of a hit" with regard to efficiency in terms of transferring the spacewalkers between the ISS and the shuttle. "But it gained us the ability to plan and train and execute a spacewalk," he added, "with a known configuration that, no matter when we flew, we would be able to support."
"Coming out of the shuttle airlock means that the hatches between the shuttle and the space station have to be closed," added Dan Barry. "And that kind of impact to our timeline we had to determine early on. If we waited until today, effectively, to determined that we did have [Quest] available, it's really too late to make the final planning changes to our flight plan and to our EVAs."
Pat Forrester (left) and Dan Barry use Virtual Reality (VR) tools to prepare for their two EVAs. Photo Credit: NASA
In addition to their EVAs, the STS-105 crew—named in December 2000 and originally targeted for launch in June 2001 (a tight, six-month training flow)—were tasked with exchanging two ISS increments. The Expedition 2 crew of Commander Yuri Usachev of Russia and his NASA flight engineers Jim Voss and Susan Helms would close out a multi-month stay about the station and be replaced by the Expedition 3 crew of Commander Frank Culbertson of NASA and his Russian flight engineers Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin. "We haven't had a lot of training with Expedition 3, because they're so busy training for their increment," said Horowitz before the flight. "We have had several exercises together. We've done a couple of integrated simulations together, where they simulate that they're on the station or they're on the shuttle getting ready to go to the station. We've done some training together over in the mockups, where we practice emergency egress training that we will have to do as a crew. Other than that, though, they've spent a lot of time in Russia in training for their increment."
A further complication was that, for only the second time in the ISS assembly sequence, a dedicated shuttle crew would number only four members. Horowitz and Barry were joined by Sturckow and Forrester, with the remaining three seats aboard Discovery dedicated to the Expedition 3 crew for the uphill journey and to Expedition 2 for the return to Earth. This required the shuttle crew to adopt multiple tasks. For example, Horowitz assumed some RMS duties whilst the prime arm operator, Forrester, was outside on the mission's two spacewalks. "It's been a little bit of a training issue, because of all the time required to train to fly the arm, as well as do command duties," Horowitz admitted, "but everybody's pretty equally loaded. We've kind of spread the wealth around the crew to get everybody ready to do their tasks for this mission."
The mission faced potential delay in early August 2001, when the health of an injector stem in a Hydraulic Power Unit (HPU) on the left-hand Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) came into question. Engineers suspected that the injector might have sustained cracking, caused by age-related stress corrosion, probably a result of repeated water immersion as the booster splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean after each of its previous launches. The possibility of replacing the suspect unit might have delayed STS-105's launch by several days, but the Mission Management Team (MMT) concluded on 6 August that it was healthy and pressed ahead with countdown operations, tracking an opening launch attempt at 5:37 p.m. EDT on the 9th. However, high humidity and sea breezes threatened rain showers and a pall of ominous thunderclouds was observed off the end of the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at the Cape. The latter would be needed in the unlikely event of a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort during ascent. At length, the launch attempt was called off at T-9 minutes.
After a 24-hour delay, due to poor weather at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Discovery roars to orbit on 10 August 2001. Photo Credit: NASA
This offered a period of discomfort for the crew. "Getting into your spacecraft is akin to going out in the drive in the morning to your car," Horowitz later joked, "except some joker overnight parked it on its rear bumper with the nose pointed in the air and you need about three people to push you up in the seat!" Next day, conditions had improved somewhat. "Tell the Expedition 2 guys to stand by," Horowitz told Launch Director Mike Leinbach. "We're on our way."
Weather conditions threatened to deteriorate on 10 August, causing mission managers to move T-0 a few minutes earlier to 5:10 p.m. EDT, right on the opening of that day's 10-minute "window." And without further ado, Discovery roared aloft, kicking off the 106th flight of the shuttle program. "A significant event in your life," was Horowitz's description of the shake, rattle and roll of what was his fourth launch into space. Two minutes and five seconds after liftoff, the twin SRBs were jettisoned and, said Horowitz, "then, there's a train-wreck," as a bright flash and a clang enveloped Discovery's cabin. The astronaut continued under the impulse of the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) for the next six minutes, until Main Engine Cutoff (MECO) and jettison of the External Tank (ET).
Shortly after orbital insertion, Sturckow noted that his Commander set to work devouring a pack of cheese tortellinis. "The rest of us weren't feeling up to that," the pilot wryly added, but this was nothing compared to the view of Discovery's middeck, where the upcoming Expedition 3 crew had already begun science-gathering, with the "Effects of Altered Gravity on Spinal Cord Excitability" experiment, known as "H-Reflex," which involved electrically stimulating the nerves in their legs as part of efforts to understand changes in locomotor function in weightlessness. "It looks like a lot of fun," Sturckow said later, with a measure of sarcasm, "but we didn't try it!"
As Horowitz and Sturckow oversaw the maneuvers, Barry and Forrester worked on the checkout of the Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) for their two spacewalks. Early on the 12th, the shuttle had was about nine miles (15 km) from its quarry and had begun its final approach with the Terminal Initiation (TI) burn. Reaching 600 feet (180 meters), Horowitz assumed manual control of his ship and guided it through a quarter-circle to a point directly in "front" of the ISS, bearing toward the Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA)-2 at the forward end of the U.S. Destiny lab. The maneuver was known as "TORVA"—a "Twice-Orbital-Rate +R-Bar to +V-Bar Approach"—which brought the shuttle from the Earth-radius-vector (R-bar) to a position along the station's velocity vector (V-bar) for docking.
Inside Discovery's cabin, the four STS-105 astronauts clustered together to bring the two spacecraft into a close mechanical embrace. As Horowitz floated near the aft flight deck controls, Sturckow oversaw a series of four "burns" from the Commander's seat and Forrester monitored the trajectory. Meanwhile, Barry was occupied with a hand-held laser to determine range and rate-of-approach numbers. "And then, finally at the end, I'll be looking out the window," Barry told a NASA interviewer, before launch, "telling Scott Horowitz what the final very close distances are, so that when we get within just a few inches, we know the right time to make the contacts that we need to make to get a successful docking."
Pausing at 30 feet (9 meters) to await a formal go-ahead from the Mission Control Centers (MCC) in Moscow and Houston, Texas, Horowitz then accomplished a smooth docking at 2:42 p.m. EDT. At the time of contact, the two spacecraft were about 240 miles (380 km) over northwestern Australia. "The connection is just the first part," said Barry. "We then have to pull the pieces together; we have to pull the space station together with the orbiter and make an airtight seal."
After two years of training for his expedition, Culbertson was eager to get on board the station. "C'mon, y'all, let's go!" he urged his crewmates. After concluding a ballet of pressure and leak checks, the hatches were opened at 4:41 p.m. and the incumbent Expedition 2 crew—Commander Yuri Usachev and Flight Engineers Jim Voss and Susan Helms, who had been aboard the complex since March—welcomed their new visitors.
By his own admission, Forrester had no idea what to expect on his first spaceflight. However, he was presented with what he described as "a real unique opportunity." In July 1993, when the U.S. Army sent him as an aerospace engineer to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, Army astronaut Jim Voss was his first boss. "In fact, he was instrumental in bringing me down here," Forrester remembered. "I feel I owe a lot to him, just the fact that I was selected. If you had told me, eight years ago, that I would eventually be on the shuttle, going up to bring him back from his stay on the space station, I just couldn't have imagined it."

Copyright © 2016 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

AmericaSpace
For a nation that explores
August 28th, 2016
'Easier to Destroy Than Create': 15 Years Since STS-105 (Part 2)
By Ben Evans

STS-105 Mission Specialist Dan Barry translates along the U.S. Destiny lab during one of the flight's two EVAs. Photo Credit: NASA
Fifteen years have now passed since Shuttle Discovery dropped off and picked up crew members at the International Space Station (ISS) and supported a pair of Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) to transition the multi-national outpost toward a state of full utilization. By August 2001, the U.S. "core" of the station—its Destiny lab, its Unity node, its Canadarm2 robotic arm, its Quest airlock, and its first gigantic set of power-producing solar arrays—were in place, thereby wrapping up "Phase II" of the ISS Program and enabling the science-focused Phase III to begin. With the arrival of Expedition 3 Commander Frank Culbertson of NASA and his Russian flights engineers Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin, science was to take center-stage, with the arrival of key research facilities aboard STS-105.
As outlined in yesterday's AmericaSpace history article, STS-105 was designated "Assembly Mission 7A.1," one of several dot flights, added to the ISS construction manifest to accommodate late plans and changes. After launching successfully on 10 August 2001, Commander Scott "Doc" Horowitz, Pilot Rick "C.J." Sturckow, and Mission Specialists Pat Forrester and Dan Barry oversaw two days of rendezvous and phasing maneuvers, which produced a successful docking about 46 hours into the flight. This was followed by pressurization and leak checks and the hatches were opened between Discovery and the space station. The outgoing Expedition 2 crew—Commander Yuri Usachev of Russia and NASA flight engineers Jim Voss and Susan Helms—were on hand to welcome the new arrivals aboard their orbital home.
"Hey, how you doing?" called Horowitz. "You ready for visitors?"
"Good to see you," replied Usachev.
The combined STS-105, Expedition 2 and Expedition 3 crews assemble in the Zvezda service module aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for a joint meal. Photo Credit: NASA
After the bear-hugs and handshakes, one of the first joint tasks centered upon the Soyuz TM-32 spacecraft, where the outgoing and incoming expedition crews swapped out the seat liners of Usachev, Voss, and Helms and exchanged them with the seat liners of Dezhurov, Tyurin, and Culbertson. Leak checks were also performed on their Russian-made Sokol ("Falcon") space suits. This was to ensure the Soyuz and the suits could support a crew-return capability in the event of an emergency. In completing this step, Expedition 3 officially took control of the ISS, although it would be a few more days before a ceremonial handover of command would occur.
Although this was the second time that ISS crews had been changed via shuttle—following on the heels of the Expedition 1/2 swap on STS-102 in March 2001—Horowitz noted in his pre-flight interview that there were some differences. "One of the lessons we learned about crew exchange is you'd like to try to keep the crew exchange all at the same time, if you can," he said. "They [STS-102] had some other operational reasons they could not, because of the complexity of their mission and the different tasks that had to be done by different crew members on both sides. We've taken those lessons learned and tried to simplify their plan to make our exchange go smoother. One of the ways of doing that is to have the exchange all happen on one day, so that, if you have to do operations on either side of a closed hatch, you have the correct crew members on each side."
On the morning of 13 August, Forrester deftly unberthed the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM) from Discovery's payload bay, using the RMS. Aboard the ISS, the Expedition 2 crew activated the latching mechanisms at the Earth-facing (or "nadir") Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM) of the Unity node. Forrester "flew" the 9,000-pound (4,000-kg) Leonardo into position and, after receiving a Ready-to-Latch (RTL) indicator, it was attached to the station and a half-dozen fluid, power, and data connectors were connected. One of three MPLMs, Leonardo was making its second flight, having previously journeyed to the ISS in March 2001, and was securely in place at Unity nadir by 11:55 a.m. Over the next few hours, the RMS was detached from the module and the crews and Mission Control set to work pressurizing the vestibule between the Unity nadir CBM and Leonardo, ahead of hatch opening at 3:47 p.m.
Efforts then entered high gear to unload more than 7,000 pounds (3,200 kg) of equipment, food, clothing, and supplies. "Where the rubber meets the road" was the description offered by Dan Barry, who was responsible for the transfer to the station, as well as the loading of around 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of unneeded gear to bring back to Earth. Heading uphill were two new Expedite the Processing of Experiments for Space Station (EXPRESS) research racks—the 1,175-pound (533-kg) EXPRESS Rack-4 and the 1,199-pound (544-kg) EXPRESS Rack 5—for the Destiny lab. In organising the transfer, Barry picked up some advice from ISS "old hand" Voss, who suggested transferring everything over to the station, ensuring it was on "the right side of the hatch," before unpacking it. This prompted some praise from Yuri Usachev, who remarked that it was the fastest MPLM unloading he had seen. However, he cautioned: "Dan, it's easier to destroy than it is to create!"
An amused Susan Helms floats in front of supplies and equipment newly moved over from the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM). Photo Credit: NASA
As unloading operations progressed, Discovery herself conducted 240 thruster "burns" over the course of an hour on 14 August to slightly nudge the station's orbit a little higher. A second re-boost, which included 253 thruster firings, was performed on the 17th.
With their first EVA planned for the 16th, Barry and Forrester worked with Sturckow to checkout their suits and tools. The first spacewalk was tasked with installing the 1,000-pound (450-kg) Early Ammonia Servicer (EAS) onto the station's P-6 truss structure. The latter was designed to provide a spare ammonia supply for the early cooling system, should the need arise. "There are two completely separate coolant loops which are redundant, for the most part," said Barry, "but if there were to be a leak and it were to be severe enough to lose a significant amount of coolant, this device allows us to replenish that coolant."
Although the Quest airlock had been attached to the station and activated a few weeks earlier, neither EVA on STS-105 would use it. As a result, the hatches between Discovery and the rest of the station were closed on the afternoon of 15 August, in order that the pressure in the shuttle's cabin could be lowered from 14.7 psi to 10.2 psi to accommodate "pre-breathing" requirements. Next morning, at 9:58 a.m. EDT, on the 1,000th day since the first ISS hardware had launched to orbit in November 1998, Barry and Forrester headed out of the shuttle's airlock. Theirs was the 25th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance in just 32 months.
With only four "dedicated" crew members on the shuttle side, STS-105 saw Horowitz assume control of the RMS during the EVA. His first task was to grapple the EAS, whereupon Barry—designated "EV1," the lead spacewalker, with red stripes on the legs of his suit for identification—proceeded to tether himself to the mechanical arm. He was followed in short order by Forrester ("EV2," wearing a pure white suit) and the duo set to work removing six bolts to release the EAS from its Integrated Cargo Carrier (ICC) in Discovery's payload bay. When the payload was released, Horowitz gave it and the spacewalkers a ride on the RMS up to the P-6 truss. Upon reaching their destination, Barry set up an Articulating Portable Foot Restraint (APFR).
Since the limited reach of the 50-foot-long (15-meter) mechanical arm meant that it could not directly install the EAS, Horowitz instead released it into Barry's gloved hands. The sheer size of the EAS required Forrester to issue verbal directions on how to maneuver it into position. Next, the duo set to work tightening a bolt to hold the EAS in place and hooking up and securing a pair of cables for "keep-alive" electrical heaters. Completion of the EAS installation task put Barry and Forrester two-thirds of the way through their mandated tasks for EVA-1.
Dan Barry (left) and Pat Forrester work to install the Early Ammonia Servicer (EAS) during EVA-1. The EAS can be clearly seen at the center of the image. Photo Credit: NASA
As Horowitz handled RMS duties, Sturckow was the Intravehicular (IV) crew member, talking Barry and Forrester through each step and task and liaising with the Mission Control Center (MCC) to handle unforeseen problems and get-ahead tasks. In addition to installing the EAS, the duo also mounted the first pair of suitcase-sized Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-1 and 2) packages onto handrails on the exterior of the Quest airlock, exposing hundreds of samples—including solar cell materials, optical coatings, and various composites—to the harsh atomic oxygen of low-Earth orbit. MISSE-1 and 2 were scheduled to be retrieved during shuttle mission STS-114 in March 2003, but the loss of Columbia postponed their returned to Earth for several years. Not until August 2005 did they finally reach terra firma.
Also on 17 August, following several days of "hand-over" briefings, Expedition 3 Commander Frank Culbertson ceremonially took control of the space station from his outgoing Expedition 2 counterpart, Yuri Usachev.
Barry and Forrester's second and final EVA got underway at 9:42 a.m. EDT on the 18th. They installed a pair of 45-foot-long (14-meter) heater cables along the port and starboard sides of the Destiny lab, setting the stage for the arrival of the S-0 hardware—the central component of the massive Integrated Truss Structure (ITS)—on Assembly Mission 8A in early 2002. Known as Launch-to-Activation (LTA) Cables, they were several inches thick and would provide backup power capability for the truss, if necessary. The S-0 hardware had to be deployed in a very short period of time and the risk of leaving its avionics boxes unpowered for too long carried the risk of damage. "Should 8A run into trouble during their spacewalk and be unable to get the truss completely installed, these cables provide an emergency source of power," Barry explained. "So they're really there just in case things don't go as planned during 8A's spacewalks."
"In order to tie those cables down, they have to be tied to handrails," added Horowitz, "and the handrails are not installed on the lab." When Destiny rose into orbit on Assembly Mission 5A in February 2001, clearances between the gigantic lab and the envelope of the shuttle's payload bay were so tight that it was not possible to install the handrails before launch. The only option was to install then on-orbit. This required Barry and Forrester to haul four bags—two laden with the LTA cables and two others with 11 handrails—out of Discovery's airlock and to the worksite. Once then, one man set himself up on the port side of Destiny and the other took up position on the starboard side, then unreeled the LTA cables like a pair of fire hoses and anchored them to the handrails. They hooked the cables to power receptacles on the lab. Altogether, the astronauts spent five hours and 29 minutes in vacuum. Upon their return to Discovery's airlock, Barry had accrued more than 25 hours of spacewalking time, across four excursions, with Forrester wrapping up the first pair of EVAs of his career.
Newly stocked and newly staffed, the International Space Station (ISS) disappears into the blackness as Discovery departs. Photo Credit: NASA
It was turning into a busy first mission for Forrester. Next morning, backed up by Horowitz, he was at the controls of the RMS to detach Leonardo from the Unity nadir port and return it to Discovery's payload bay at 3:15 p.m. Between June 2002 and its final installation onto the ISS as the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) in March 2011, Leonardo would fly a further six shuttle missions.
Bidding farewell to Culbertson, Dezhurov, and Tyurin, the STS-105 astronauts and departing Expedition 2 crew headed over to Discovery in the opening hours of 20 August, with hatch closure at 8 a.m. Undocking occurred at 10:52 a.m. and Sturckow took manual control, performing a strategic fly-around of the space station at a distance of 450 feet (140 meters), before withdrawing. It would not be his final flight to the ISS. In fact, at the time of writing, Sturckow is one of only four U.S. astronauts—joining Rick Mastracchio and the Kelly twins—to have visited the station as many as four times. The flyaround was not only a shuttle tradition, but was a fundamental necessity for upcoming crews, particularly through its photography component. "These photographs are very important for not only general publicity purposes, but we've actually used similar photographs," Sturckow said. "During our training, we'll pull out fly-around photos and see the exact configuration of different cables, for example."
Late in the mission, the STS-105 crew deployed the SimpleSat payload, designed to demonstrate inexpensive and commercially available hardware, including Global Positioning System (GPS) attitude control and pointing, in low-Earth orbit. The small satellite was ejected from a Getaway Special (GAS) canister at the rear end of Discovery's payload bay.
With landing at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) planned for 22 August, the day prior was spent configuring the shuttle's systems and setting up incumbent seats in the middeck for Usachev, Voss, and Helms. These seats would help the trio, as they ended more than five months in weightlessness, to better withstand the forces of re-entry and a return to terrestrial gravity. "The reclined position," NASA noted, "has been proven to the most comfortable method of return to Earth from space by long-duration crew members."
Landing conditions in Florida were predicted to be excellent, obliging the Mission Management Team (MMT) to opt against activating the backup site at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. The crew was awakened at 4:10 a.m. EDT on the 22nd and began stepping smartly through plans for a deorbit burn of the shuttle's Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines at 11:37 a.m. This would produce the proper conditions to descend across southern Mexico, cross the Bay of Campeche, skirt the northwestern tip of the Yucatan peninsula, and head over the Gulf of Mexico, before entering Florida airspace and touching down at 12:46 p.m. Unfortunately, a rain shower popped up at the end of the SLF, leading to a one-orbit wave-off. Next time around, luck was on the crew's side. Horowitz and Sturckow executed the deorbit burn at 1:17 p.m. and Discovery alighted smoothly on the KSC runway at 2:23 p.m., wrapping up a spectacular 12-day mission.

Copyright © 2016 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

Saturday, August 27, 2016

In museum, capabilities of USA continue to decline, no replacement planned! Impacts national security!

Sent from my iPad

Friday, August 26, 2016

SpaceX Dragon Splashes Down with Crucial NASA Research Samples - Spokane, North Idaho News & Weather KHQ.com

http://www.khq.com/story/32849545/spacex-dragon-splashes-down-with-crucial-nasa-research-samples

Sent from my iPad

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Fwd: 14 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became an Astronaut

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: August 24, 2016 at 11:33:14 AM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: 14 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became an Astronaut

http://bit.ly/2bg1FOP

14 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became an Astronaut
Shannon Walker applied five times in 14 years before she finally got selected.

NASA
As told to Arielle Pardes
Aug 23, 2016

1. There's no one path to becoming an astronaut. All astronauts have degrees in science, engineering, or medicine, but other than that, there's no one path to NASA. The one thing everyone has in common is we've all exceled in our chosen field. My degrees are in physics and space physics, and I did well enough in university that I actually started working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as a robotics flight controller right after college. Seventeen years and a PhD later, I was selected as an astronaut candidate.
2. Astronaut selection is even more competitive than you think. Getting hired by NASA is like getting through the world's strictest HR screen. We're actually going through the selection process now: We've had 18,000 people apply and we'll probably select around eight new astronauts. You need to be extremely good at what you do, but there's also a lot of luck involved. You might be extremely qualified and still looked over, depending on what NASA needs during that cycle — maybe we're short on medical doctors or test pilots, so we're looking for someone with that background rather than, say, an engineer. Even if you're exactly what they're looking for at that exact moment, you still have pass through two rounds of interviews and undergo extensive medical testing to make sure you're healthy enough to do the job. Plus, NASA only hires every couple of years, because it takes an actual act of Congress to hire astronauts. So if you're passed over once, it could be years before you get another chance. I made it to the final stage of the interview process five times over a period of 14 years before I was finally selected as an astronaut in 2004.

NASA
3. You will spend 90 percent of your time on earth. In the heyday of the shuttle program, we were flying 40 or 50 people into space a year. These days, we're flying four Americans a year, tops. We've got about 45 active astronauts, so you're going to maybe fly once every 10 years. Being in space is amazing — it's the reason we all become astronauts — but you also have to love what you're doing on the ground, since that's how you'll spend most of your time.
4. For the first few years, you'll feel like you're in school again. When you're first selected, you go through about two years of training before you're even eligible for your first space flight. Most of that training is in the classroom: You're listening to lectures, taking tests, and learning all the systems on the space station. Even though everyone is coming in with high-level degrees and very technical backgrounds, it still takes about two years to learn the basics. Then, once you're assigned to a flight, it can be anywhere from two to three years of training just for one space station mission. Training for my first flight took about three years, which is like going through an entire degree program just for one flight.

NASA
5. You have to be in the best shape of your life. Mental fitness is obviously important to being an astronaut, but so it physical fitness. For example, space walks are extremely physically demanding. We train for them in a giant swimming pool and we wear this suit that weighs about 300 pounds. Each training session is about six hours long, which is longer than it takes most people to run a marathon — and during those six hours, you're underwater, dragging around this suit, with the resistance of the water holding you back. It's probably one of the hardest parts of training. Even if you're not assigned to a mission, you have to do this space walk training once every few months.
6. You're never in charge of your own schedule. If you've been assigned to a space flight, that means for three years, someone else is telling you when you have to show up at work, what you're going to do that day, when you're going to get on a plane and travel to another country. Once you're in space, overnight while you're sleeping, the ground team is making your schedule for the next day, and you have to do what's on that schedule. If you can't let go of being in control of your own life, then you're not going to do well as an astronaut.

NASA
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
7. Being an astronaut is more of a lifestyle than a job. You don't always get to choose when you work: While you're waiting for a flight assignment, you might have technical assignments like working in the control center. The space station operates on Greenwich Mean Time (five hours ahead of Central Time at the Johnson Space Center) and we have people in the control center 24-hours a day, so you may be working in the middle of the night, because that's when the crew is awake and doing their work on the space station. You also don't get to choose where you live: The Johnson Space Center is where our training takes place, so all American astronauts live in the Houston area. We also train in Japan, Russia, Germany, and Canada, where we have international partners, so astronauts will likely spend time living in those places too.
8. You're a government worker, so you're paid a government salary. Which is to say, you're not going to get rich. In the old days, all astronauts used to get Corvettes, but they don't do that anymore. We also don't get hazardous duty pay when we go into space, because that's not how the government classifies space travel, but we do get a small stipend for incidentals since the trip is considered "government travel." I think I made $354 extra [for those] for my six months in space.

NASA
9. Learning Russian is pretty much mandatory. Right now, the Russians are our main partner and we're launching on Russian space crafts, so all the training is in Russian. I started learning the Russian language when I was in my 40s, and it was extremely hard. On the space station, officially, the language is English. But everyone has different language skills, so you have to meet in the middle somewhere and talk in whatever pieces of language make sense. When we're talking to our control centers, we're speaking English; if we're talking to the Russian control center, then we need to speak in Russian.
10. The job can be very hard on families. These days, a typical flight on the space station is six months. Before your flight, you're training for two or three years, during which time you're working long hours and training in other countries. Then you're in space for six months, and when you come back, you still have about six months' worth of post-flight stuff to do — reconditioning [retraining your body to adjust back to life on earth], public appearances, and so on. It's at least four years that you're not around. So for a family, that's really hard. If you have kids, you need to have a partner who can be independent and get along without you. We don't have cell phones in space, but we do have email capability and voiceover telephone capability, so if the satellites are hooked up properly, you can call them.

NASA
11. It's impossible to know what zero gravity feels like until you're in space. There is no real "zero gravity chamber" on earth. A lot of the simulators have the look of what you will encounter as you're launching into space, but you just can't understand what it's like until you're there. That's true of a lot of things in space — like, for example, washing your hair. There's no running water in space, so you have to dot shampoo and water from drink bags into your hair very carefully. You can't use too much, otherwise it won't stick to your hair [because there's no gravity] and it goes everywhere. You can use dry shampoo to hold off on washing your hair as often, but you do have to wash it eventually, because you're exercising daily. There's also no hair dryer, so once you're done, you have this Medusa-like head of wet hair that's going all over the place, since your hair doesn't lay flat without gravity. Your taste preferences also change in space. Without gravity, you end up with more fluid in your head, which feels a little like having a cold where you can't taste as well. So many astronauts like spicier foods in space than they would on earth, because everything else seems less flavorful.
12. Being in space is taxing on the body. The body works amazingly well in space, but there are some key differences. We're required to exercise every day to prevent muscle atrophy, but we don't use the same muscles you do to get around on earth: You're never sitting down in a chair or walking around on your feet. When you come back, it's quite an adjustment. You may be physically strong, but your body has almost forgotten how to do simple things, like walk. Your inner ear also gets messed up. It's the part of your ear that gives you your sense of balance, and it operates off of gravity. If you haven't had gravity for a while and you come back, you can feel very dizzy for quite a long time. It takes several months before you feel normal again.

NASA
13. You have to be good at basically everything. In addition to your own specialty, you have to know how to do a little of everything. Mechanical skills are important, since a lot of the work we do is assembling experiments or doing maintenance on the space station. You have to understand a wide range of technology. Public speaking is part of our job, too, as we have to explain our discoveries to everyone from school groups to Congressmen to magazine journalists. And then there's the fitness requirement, learning a second language, and being at the top of your own individual field.
14. You have to put aside your own individual ambitions to be a team player. Let's say you came to NASA as a scientist with a chemistry background. You may be the best chemist in the world, but if your mission doesn't involve any chemistry experiments, you'll have to do biology experiments or material science experiments instead. You're here to do the work of a team, not the work you're personally most interested in. You're also living very closely with your crewmembers on the space station, and everybody has to depend on each other. You have to get along with everyone and understand how other people will respond in emergency situations, because if something goes wrong, you have to deal with it as a crew.
Shannon Walker is a NASA astronaut. Her first space mission was Expedition 24 on the International Space Station in 2010.

©2016 Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.