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Today’s CSExtra offers the latest reporting and commentary on space related activities from across the globe. Op-eds urge more policy definition, urgency for U.S. human space flight. Mars One cuts pool of those aspiring to settle Mars. Lowering the cost of imaginative unmanned Mars missions. Young scientists need grants to continue pace of solar, space physics discoveries. Congressional auditors find rising costs for future solar mission. Cosmic lensing brings the faint and distant into focus. Robots unload space station cargo. Government investments in space energy, clarification of property rights could spur new space commerce, according to op-ed. U.S. commercial space industry surges, while NASA idle. Elon Musk professes he’s open to out of court settlement in U.S. Air Force suit. Editorial urges care by U.S. policy makers in Russian space sanctions — they could cause more damage here than abroad.
Human Deep Space Exploration
Squandering America’s leadership in exploration
Space News (5/5): America’s human space exploration program is floundering, not because of NASA or the American people, writes U.S. Rep. Frank Wolfe, chair of the House appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA’s budget. In an op-ed, Wolfe blames poor leadership and suggests a need to isolate NASA management from politics.
Griffin, Albaugh: Mars mission could serve to refocus purpose of NASA
Houston Chronicle (5/5): Mike Griffin, NASA’s previous administrator, and Jim Albaugh, former president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Integrated Defense Systems, back the Mars 2021 human flyby mission initially proposed by Inspiration Mars and backed by some in Congress. The risk and cost have the potential to bring new focus to U.S. led human deep space exploration planning, they write in an op-ed. “…our nation should settle for nothing less than partnering from the front as humankind undertakes to explore and develop what President John F. Kennedy first called ‘this new ocean.'” they write.
Mars trip one step closer for Dalhousie engineering student
CBC News, of Canada: MarsOne nonprofit cuts to 705 those from across the globe still eligible for Mars settlement venture. Three Nova Scotians among those making the cut for the first missions planned for the mid-2020s.
Unmanned Deep Space Exploration
The Space Review (5/5): The recent Human to Mars Summit produced a pair of examples. Time Capsule to Mars is a $25 million CubeSat educational venture that would take a cultural record to the surface of the red planet at a cost of $25 million. Exolance would deliver a cargo of surface penetrators instrumented to detect biological activity just below the Martian surface. The concept could be tested for $500,000 in the Mojave Desert, using largely existing technologies, say proponents.
The tipping point for solar and space scientists
Space News (5/5): Grant opportunities for a next generation of scientists interested in advancing the understanding of solar and space physics are disappearing, write three experts in the field. The absence will jeopardize the numbers of new scientists prepared to sustain the current pace of discovery, they write.
GAO: NASA heliophysics mission heading for $26M overrun
Space News (5/5): U.S. Government Accountability Office finds NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission in need of $26 million. Development of the four satellite heliophysics mission hindered by defective parts.
How cosmic lenses reveal the depths of deep space (video)
Space.com (5/5): How the Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to make distant observations in the universe.
Low Earth Orbit
SpaceX supply ship unloaded by robots and astronauts
Spaceflightnow.com (4/5): Aboard the International Space Station, a pair of Canadian robot arms remove external experiments from the “trunk” of the latest SpaceX Dragon resupply capsule. One is a collection of high definition cameras, the other a NASA laser communications demonstration.
Commercial to Low Earth Orbit
How to energize the space economy
The Space Review (5/5): Essayist Kenneth Silber suggests a new focus for the federal government and New Space, investments in space technologies that could bring new sources of energy to Earth and favorable property rights legislation. Too much of the government’s efforts to commercialize space are focused on launch providers for the delivery of cargoes and crew to the International Space Station, writes Kilber, senior editor of the magazine Research.
While NASA idles, commercial space revs up
Scientific American (5/5): U.S. commercial space sector displaying a sense of the urgency that sparked NASA’s Cold War era race to the moon. Major players in U.S. promise breakthroughs within two years at New York City’s Explorers Club last Friday.
Musk open to settlement with USAF over launch dispute
Aviation Week & Space Technology (5/5): SpaceX founder Elon Musk prepared to settle out of court in dispute with U.S. Air Force over contract award to United Launch Alliance. “If there is some settlement to be attained, I am all for it,” Musk told Aviation Week during a May 4 interview. “Our goal is not to be obstructionist.”
Editorial: Don’t punish the space industry
Space News (5/5): Editorial urges care with space sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea and other tensions. U.S. space companies are being penalized financially as their hardware remains in the U.S. unable to make its way to Russian launch vehicles. Also, two U.S. commercial alternatives to Russia’s Soyuz for the transportation of American astronauts to the International Space Station depend on the Atlas 5 as launch vehicles. First stage Atlas rocket engines are imported from Russia.
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