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Today’s CSExtra offers the latest reporting and commentary on space related activities from across the globe. U.S. Apollo missions may offer lesson to Mars One ambitions of red planet settlement. Property rights a major incentive for future deep space exploration, but legal obstacles persist. New feature film Interstellar dramatizes response to Earth’s decline. Op-ed urges more focus on finding smallest asteroids that pose an impact threat. NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will take over critical exploration role. The view from Wally Shirra’s camera. Stray sail boat stops efforts by Orbital Sciences to launch an International Space Station re-supply mission on Monday; Launch is rescheduled for Tuesday, Orbital space station mission will feature more powerful ATK upper stage.
Human Deep Space Exploration
Lessons from Apollo for Mars One
The Space Review (10/27): The nonprofit Mars One aims to colonize the red planet in a little over a decade. Essayist James C. McClain III, compares the effort to the U.S. Apollo moon landings and finds that the former succeeded in drawing top talent and gambling on game changing technologies like guidance computers and electronics with transistors. Mars One will be challenged to do the same, writes McClain, who wonders if launching a single colonist may be a strategy with the best odds for success.
The Space Review (10/27): Startups Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries are raising anew the complex issue of property rights as they make plans to mine the asteroids. The reigning legislation, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1979 Moon Treaty, discourage the notion. But new legislation before the U.S. House, the Space Pioneer Act, receives an endorsement from essayist Wayne White, president of SpaceBooster, LLC, and a longtime member of the International Institute of Space Law.
Variety (10/27): Soon to open feature film Interstellar will take its place alongside such space feature movies as Gravity and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, according to review.
Nuclear thermal propulsion could be ticket to Mars
Product Design and Development (10/27): NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has started a new series of tests to check out promising fuel sources without a radiation threat. Nuclear thermal propulsion may one day deliver cargos to Mars ahead of human explorers. The same technologies, with changes to accelerate the mission, could then be used to transport human explorers.
Unmanned Deep Space Exploration
Space News (10/28): Op-ed urges more effort by NASA and the White House to identify the smaller near Earth asteroids that pose a threat of regional or local devastation if they collide.
Curiosity’s successor, Mars 2020 will continue search for habitability
Astrobiology Magazine (10/27): NASA’s Mars 2020 robotic rover will take over from the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in August 2012. Curiosity was assigned to climb Mount Sharp, drilling into the soil and rock along the way to determine whether past environmental conditions were favorable for microbial life. Mars 2020 will find and store Martian samples for eventual return to Earth.
Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Mars 2020 contracts worth a combined $14.5M
Space News (10/27): NASA has selected Aerojet Rocketdyne to build landing thrusters for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover and equip the mobile probe with a nuclear power source.
Low Earth Orbit
Camera that changed how humans view the Earth up for auction
Houston Chronicle (10/27): Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra’s store bought camera changed the way Earthlings view their home planet.
Commercial to Low Earth Orbit
Antares rocket launch from Wallops Island canceled due to boat downrange in hazard area
Daily Press, of Virginia (10/27): Orbital Sciences will try again Tuesday to launch a third commercial re-supply mission to the International Space Station. The first attempt on Monday was delayed by a sail boat in the launch zone. Tuesday’s launch attempt is scheduled for 6:19 p.m., EDT.
Wayward boat scrubs Antares launch
Space News (10/27): A sail boat in the launch hazard zone prompts a 24 hour delay in the lift off of Orbital Sciences’ cargo mission to the International Space Station.
Antares rocket’s enhanced upper stage debuts Tuesday
Spaceflightnow.com (10/28): Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket features upgraded ATK Castor 30XL upper stage. The improvements permit a 1,760 pound increase in the payload mass delivered to the International Space Station.
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