November 27, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

NASA still doesn’t know if it wants Boeing to perform another test flight of its passenger spacecraft – The Verge

NASA still doesn’t know if it wants Boeing to perform another test flight of its passenger spacecraft

The company is issuing 61 corrective actions in the meantime

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An artistic rendering of NASA’s Starliner vehicle Image: Boeing

NASA still doesn’t know if it wants Boeing to perform another test flight of its new passenger spacecraft without people on board — three months after the vehicle’s first test flight failed to go according to plan.

Today, NASA announced that it had finished an investigation into the botched debut flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, a new crew capsule designed to take NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA’s team identified 61 corrective actions that Boeing needs to take in order to fix all the issues the Starliner experienced during that first mission. But NASA officials will not say whether Boeing needs to repeat the flight or if the company’s next flight will have its first passengers on board.

“Quite frankly, right now, we don’t know,” Doug Loverro, NASA’s associate administrator for human spaceflight, said during a press conference on the investigation. “The findings and the corrective actions that Boeing has laid out — they have to now come back to NASA with a plan, how they’re going to go ahead and address all of those.”

No people were on board Starliner’s first flight on December 20th from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission was a test, meant to demonstrate that the vehicle can do what it’s supposed to do: safely dock with the International Space Station and then return to Earth. But that didn’t happen. A glitch with Starliner’s clock prevented the capsule from firing its main engines at the right time, and the vehicle got into the wrong orbit. As a result, Starliner never made it to the space station and had to come back to Earth earlier than planned. The capsule landed safely in the New Mexico desert using its parachutes two days after launch.

Boeing’s Starliner, after landing in the desert in December (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

At the time of the mission, NASA and Boeing only detailed the software issue with Starliner’s clock. But in the months since, even more problems have come to light. On February 7th, Boeing and NASA admitted there was a second software glitch the Boeing team caught before the Starliner landed. If it hadn’t been corrected, it’s possible the Starliner could have fired its thrusters incorrectly during the descent to Earth, and it might have bumped into a piece of hardware it shed on the way down. NASA noted that both of these software bugs went unnoticed before the flight, even though there were “multiple safeguards” in place. Today, NASA claimed that the investigation team identified 49 gaps in software testing at Boeing.

It’s unclear exactly what Boeing’s 61 corrective actions entail, though NASA said they will be both “organizational and technical.” Loverro said there will be a discussion with the company on whether to make the list of corrective actions public. While Boeing implements these corrections, NASA plans to embed more of its own software experts within Boeing’s software team.

In the meantime, NASA has also decided to do another review at Boeing, one that will look at both the company’s and NASA’s organizational processes. This new review is in addition to a more rigorous safety review that NASA announced it would do with Boeing in February.

Back in 2018, Boeing and SpaceX (NASA’s other human spaceflight partner) had to undergo safety reviews, after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk smoked marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Boeing got away with a much smaller review at the time, but the Starliner flight prompted a more extensive look from NASA. This new review, according to Loverro, is meant to “make sure we truly do learn from this event, and that we know how to fix it and make sure it does not happen again.”

NASA did not say when to expect a decision on how Boeing will proceed with its next Starliner flight. Boeing claims the company is prepared to conduct a second uncrewed test flight if NASA wants and has set aside $410 million of its own budget if that’s the case. However, NASA officials have repeatedly argued that performing an uncrewed test flight was not an original requirement from the agency when it set up the Commercial Crew Program. NASA only made the decision to include the requirement after both companies suggested doing test missions. Loverro argued that there are other ways Boeing might be able to prove that its Starliner can perform in orbit — without the vehicle going to space.

“There are many things that we can do to provide the confidence that we can fly safely without docking,” Loverro said. “I’m not saying we will or we won’t. I’m saying that Boeing will come back to us with a plan. They will propose to us whether they intend to go ahead and do another flight to dock or if they propose to do other things that give us the confidence they can do it. And we’ll make sure that every decision we make is with crew safety and spacecraft safety in mind.”

As Boeing tries to move on from the Starliner debut, SpaceX is gearing up for the next test flight of its crew capsule, the Crew Dragon. After performing an uncrewed flight of the Crew Dragon one year ago, SpaceX is poised to finally put people on the spacecraft in the months ahead, though NASA has not formally announced a target date for the launch. If everything goes to plan, SpaceX will likely be the first commercial company to send astronauts to space for NASA.

November 23, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

What’s it Like Living in Space: Reddit AMA with NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly

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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly recently did a Reddit AMA to discuss living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) since last March, making him the first American to spend a whole year in space.

Here is what Kelly himself had to say about it:

“On this flight, my fourth spaceflight, I also became the record holder for total days in space and single longest mission. A year is a long time to live without the human contact of loved ones, fresh air and gravity, to name a few. While science is at the core of this groundbreaking spaceflight, it also has been a test of human endurance.

Connections back on Earth are very important when isolated from the entire world for such a period of time, and I still have a way to go before I return to our planet. So, I look forward to connecting with you all back on spaceship Earth to talk about my experiences so far as I enter my countdown to when I will begin the riskiest part of this mission: coming home.”

The Reddit users asked Kelly pretty much anything and everything. From questions about health, to creepy occurrences, to rogue spaceships, Kelly provided answers and engaged the Reddit community from afar.

Here are some of the highlights:

Doug_Lee: Why do you always have your arms folded?

Kelly: Your arms don’t hang by your side in space like they do on Earth because there is no gravity. It feels awkward to have them floating in front of me. It is just more comfortable to have them folded. I don’t even have them floating in my sleep, I put them in my sleeping bag.

Pighalf: Could you tell us something unusual about being in space that many people don’t think about?

Kelly: The calluses on your feet in space will eventually fall off. So, the bottoms of your feet become very soft like newborn baby feet. But the top of my feet develop rough alligator skin because I use the top of my feet to get around here on space station when using foot rails.

Engr89: Being up in space for an entire year is a LONG time. Have you noticed any effects on your body from weightlessness? Are your plans for recovery once you’re back on earth more intensive than traditional programs for other astronauts who only go up for shorter time periods?

Kelly: Good question. Yeah, there are a lot of changes that happen. Some of them you can’t see, cause it’s your eyes! Probably too many changes to go into detail here. I think my rehab plan is the same as if I were here for 6 months, but I’m not positive.

Get it? Because he sleeps in a bag? Credit: Scott Kelly Twitter

JFSOCC: What’s it like to sleep in zero G? It must be great for the back. Does the humming of the machinery in the station affect your sleep at all?

Kelly: Sleeping is harder here in space than on a bed because the sleep position here is the same position throughout the day.

You don’t ever get that sense of gratifying relaxation here that you do on Earth after a long day at work. Yes, there are humming noises on station that affect my sleep, so I wear ear plugs to bed.

Emshedoesit: What does zero G feel like on your body when you are just hanging out? Does it make your eyes open a little bit wider, or anything like that?

Kelly: It feels like there is no pressure at all on your body. Sometimes it feels like you are just hanging but you are not hanging by anything, just hanging there. If I close my eyes, I can give myself the sensation that I am falling. Which I am, I am falling around the Earth.

Buymeapickle: What is the largest misconception about space/space travel that society holds onto?

Kelly: I think a lot of people think that, because we give the appearance that this is easy, that it is easy. I don’t think people have an appreciation for the work that it takes to pull these missions off, like humans living on the space station continuously for 15 years. It is a huge army of hard working people to make it happen.

Beccastainton: What ONE thing will you forever do differently after your safe return home?

Kelly: I will appreciate nature more.

Jenniferpanas: How do you regulate your sleep cycles? How heavy is your space suit? How well have you adjusted to keeping social relationships while away? Will you have transitioning issues with this when you return home?

Kelly: We use Greenwich Mean Time and we get up at 6 in the morning and go to sleep at 10 at night. It’s really light up here! On Earth, it weighs about 200 pounds. It’s not the easiest thing, but we do have a good way to communicate. I do suspect there will be an adjustment period when I get back.

ItsBasil: What is like to work with members of other nations space programs? Do the politics that take place on Earth affect your relationship with them?

Kelly: I think one of the great things about the space station program is that it’s an international program. We get along very well. We have to because we rely on each other for our lives.

Lula2488: What’s the creepiest thing you’ve encountered while on the job?

Kelly: Generally it has to do with the toilet. Recently I had to clean up a gallon-sized ball of urine mixed with acid.

Curtquarquesso: The ball of urine I get, but… Acid? How? Where from?

Kelly: The acid is added to the urine so the urine doesn’t damage the machinery that moves it through the system. It keeps it from clogging up the system.

Kezeemom: Does everything seem to take a really long time or do you get used to that? What would you like to see the next president do for the space program? And how often do you get to talk to your brother and daughters?

Kelly: It absolutely takes longer to do things when you can’t put anything down. I would like the next president to support a budget that allows us to accomplish the mission that we are asked to perform, whatever that mission may be. I talk to my brother and daughters every few days.

Chancycat: I am dad to a couple of boys who are very much into space and astronaut work. Here are their two astronaut questions:

Peter (7yrs old): How long does it take to get used to being in space?

Simon (5yrs): Could a rogue spaceship sneak up on the space station without you being aware, and dock?

Kelly: Peter, 302 days and counting! The longer I am here the more normal I feel. It always seems to be getting better. Simon, maybe an alien spaceship with a cloaking device. But not your normal spaceship, no. Unless it had a cloaking device, which doesn’t exist, the U.S. Air Force would see it coming.

Jlhatfield: Hi, I’m a Kindergarten Teacher. My students and I have been following you since you went up last year. My past and present students are curious; what kind of things do you do for fun?

Kelly: I read, write and do arithmetic like a Kindergartner (just kidding). But I do read, take photos of the Earth and play with my food.

Equilateralistic: Does the ISS have any particular smell?

Kelly: Smells vary depending on what segment you are in. Sometimes it has an antiseptic smell. Sometimes it has an odor that smells like garbage. But the smell of space when you open the hatch smells like burning metal to me.

RagingRachel: Do you ever feel alone/afraid? If so, how do you combat those feelings?

Kelly: I don’t feel alone or afraid. I was up here for 6 weeks as the only American on the U.S. side of the space station and I was fine. I have been afraid when the ground has called and privatized the audio generally meaning something bad has happened.

FHayek: Do you really feel the change in outside pressure when getting outside during the EVAs, where your suit inflates more and is it harder to move? Do you have sense of stereoscopic depth, as to how far the earth is from you, or is it one scary and inconceivable distance?

Kelly: Our spacesuit when we are spacewalking has about 4psi above the outside pressure, so when you are in it, it’s generally the same stiffness as when you are doing a spacewalk. When I look at the clouds over the Earth, and I know how high clouds are, I get a sense we are really, really far above those clouds. So, it does look like we are very high. I wouldn’t call it scary, but I am aware I am in space. A spacewalk requires an incredible amount of mental concentration, so it’s not something I think of when I am spacewalking.

SkeerRacing: Today is your 302nd consecutive day aboard ISS, if you could go back and give yourself advice on day 1, what would you say?

Kelly: I’d like to have some involvement and continue to work towards people going to Mars. The advice I would give myself on day 1 would be pack lighter!

The ISS team on movie night. Credit: Scott Kelly Twitter

Therickshawme: Do you watch sci-fi while you’re up there or does some of that stuff hit a little too close to home?

Kelly: I watched the movie Gravity not long after I arrived back in last March. I thought it was a cool movie to watch here aboard the space station that is also the setting of Gravity.

TMahlman: Now that you are able to count down the days to come home in March, what will you miss most about the Space Station daily life?

Kelly: The challenge of living here. It’s not easy and I have always liked to do things that are hard.

ImPastamonium: Out of all the things you’ve accomplished in your career, what is the one thing that you have done which you are most proud of? What are some of your favorite things to do in zero gravity? During a space walk what does it feel like having nothing but a suit (all be it a rather sophisticated one) between you and space?

Kelly: This mission isn’t easy. So I think when I complete this mission, it will be up there, definitely. Sleeping, taking pictures of the Earth, and getting to the end of a satisfying day of work. It is a little bit surreal to know that you are in your own little spaceship and a few inches from you is instant death.

Urciolo: What is your view on how the ISS hardware/modules have been aging? Do you believe it makes more sense to de-orbit the ISS or attempt to keep it going by replacing modules as they become too old to maintain?

Kelly: It seems like the inside of the space station has very good material condition. The outside looks a little aged. As far as maintaining it versus de-orbiting it, it just depends what our priorities are. I think it would be great to keep it going forever, but of course everything has costs.

Arandomkerbonaut: What is your favorite space-related movie? Also, if you had the chance to ride the space shuttle again, or take Orion on a journey to Mars, which would you pick?

Kelly: really enjoyed the Martian. I was able to watch it here aboard the space station. I’ve flown the space shuttle a couple of times, so I would want to fly to Mars. That would be something new and exciting, and is the next step in our journey of space exploration.

Jclishman: What is your favorite part of Earth to see from space?

Kelly: My favorite spot on Earth to see from space is probably the Bahamas. The brilliant and varied colors of the blue water and contrast from here is pretty spectacular.

Questions have been edited for length and clarity.

November 21, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

SpaceX – s Crew Dragon Signals Sea Change in U

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Signals Sea Change in U.S. Spaceflight

An uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station will be a crucial milestone for the company’s grand vision of private spaceflight

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It looks like a big, white bullet—and it will travel much faster. SpaceX, its maker, calls the ship Crew Dragon, and it sits 230 feet above the ground on a Falcon 9 rocket, waiting to lift off from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Before dawn on Saturday, if all goes well, Crew Dragon will leave for the International Space Station—one last test flight before it actually carries astronauts for the first time. No U.S. company has ever launched a space traveler into orbit in its own ship before. “It’s great to get that feeling again of getting ready to go flying,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, after the final flight readiness review on February 22.

And so what, you say? No fewer than 109 spacecraft have launched from Pad 39A before, and most of them—starting with the Apollo lunar missions and then the space shuttles—were bigger, more powerful and built to take astronauts on more ambitious flights. They just happened to be government projects. “This is a modest step toward flying in space commercially, but you have to underline the word ‘modest,’” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus of space policy at The George Washington University.

That is a fair argument. Crew Dragon is, for now, a government project organized in a different way. But SpaceX and its allies say it is a step toward much bigger things. “This is a huge deal,” says Chad Anderson, the CEO of Space Angels, a $50-million venture capital fund that focuses on space start-ups. “SpaceX ushered in the era of entrepreneurial space. I don’t give them a little credit, I give them a lot of credit.”

The immediate goal, as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine puts it, is for “American astronauts to fly American spacecraft from American soil for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011”—significant because the U.S. has been reduced since then to renting seats for its astronauts on Russian Soyuz rockets. Assuming this first flight is successful, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will fly the next Dragon mission in July.

Crew Dragon, 27 feet long and capable of carrying seven astronauts, will only carry about 400 pounds of cargo on this flight, designated Demo 1. It is scheduled to reach and dock with the space station on the day after launch, spending five days there before returning for a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.

It and its booster are meant to be reusable—a crucial aspect of SpaceX’s cost-cutting business model, which treats the company’s multimillion-dollar hardware as investments to be repeatedly reused, rather than as “single-serving” products flown once and then thrown away. The company has posted sensational video of its rockets routinely achieving what used to look like pure fantasy, flying back from space to land safely, tail-first, near their launch sites.

And in the spirit of American enterprise, NASA has arranged for SpaceX to have competition. Boeing, with a similar capsule called the CST-100 Starliner, currently plans an uncrewed test flight in April. If it goes well, astronauts Eric Boe, Nicole Aunapu Mann and Christopher Ferguson are expected to follow in August. (Boe and Mann are NASA astronauts; Ferguson, a former space shuttle commander who retired from NASA, will have the distinction of being Boeing’s first staff astronaut to fly.)

Boeing is a longtime aerospace contractor, and that’s reflected in the contracts NASA made with it and SpaceX. To do fundamentally the same job, Boeing was awarded some $4.2 billion whereas SpaceX was given up to $2.6 billion. The first Boeing launches will use the expendable Atlas 5 rocket, making them inherently more expensive. Considering how frequently launch schedules get rearranged, the Boeing crew could well win bragging rights by flying before the first SpaceX crew does. “The fundamental significance of commercial crew is reestablishing U.S. access to space,” Logsdon says. “It gets us out of relying on the Russians, and that’s important.”

To entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, the colorful, controversial CEO of SpaceX, the larger vision is to bring the skies closer. Think also of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is funding a transformative space transport company of his own, Blue Origin. Or Richard Branson, the flamboyant businessman who has moved from music to airlines to Virgin Galactic—his shot at making suborbital “space tourism” a reality. Other ambitious space companies have come and gone in the last quarter century but few, if any, have embraced a vision as big and bold as Musk’s. He has said his goal is to make us a spacefaring species, with waves of Mars colonists settling there as a backup plan for life on Earth. “What’s different are the companies that are involved, and the way they are capitalized or funded,” says Marco Cáceres, the senior space analyst at Teal Group, an aerospace market intelligence firm. “Twenty years ago, they weren’t as wealthy as Bezos, as charismatic as Musk or as risk-taking as Branson.”

In the early days of the space age, when human spaceflight was part of cold war competition, the big risk-taker was NASA, sending astronauts on dangerous voyages to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. That was reflected in its spending; aerospace companies benefited from the largesse of so-called cost-plus government contracts —essentially guaranteeing they would make money even if they ran far over budget, because each mission was seen as vital to national security. Nobody really knew what space travel was supposed to cost anyhow. When legislators and taxpayers complained, someone always answered that the future of freedom was at stake.

But then Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and with the space race “won,” NASA struggled for a new direction. Suddenly all the risk-taking was harder to justify. Space vehicles were increasingly designed by committee in hope of making flights safer, but also making them less efficient. New technology, which might have brought costs down, was trumped by tried-and-true established technology. So, although NASA’s space shuttles were intended as cost-cutters, flights remained insanely expensive—and they were still dangerous. The 1986 Challenger explosion brought the shuttle program to a two-year halt and the loss of Columbia in 2003 ultimately ended it.

Anderson says NASA’s problem was systemic. “We’ve been developing space technology for 60 years, mostly funded by government. There have been a handful of contractors—and one customer. The result: we’ve had the opposite of innovation. We went from nowhere to low Earth orbit to the moon—then back to low Earth orbit, and eventually back to nowhere. Things didn’t change until SpaceX.”

The breakthrough, Anderson says, came quietly in 2009. It was not a technological advance or high-profile launch—it was a list. SpaceX published its prices for launching payloads. Now if a company wanted to launch a satellite, it knew how much money to raise, and could plan around it. Before that, he says there were a couple of dozen entrants willing to invest in new space ventures. Since then his firm has counted $18 billion invested by 412 companies.

It is still a tough business. SpaceX struggled for six years to loft its first payload into orbit, and suffered spectacular rocket failures in 2015 and 2016 that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In January word got out that it was laying off 10 percent of its 6,000-person workforce—a necessary move, SpaceX said, for the “extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead.” One is reminded of a cynical old joke: Anyone can make a small fortune in space—all you have to do is spend a large one.

But the skies have opened for entrepreneurial space, partly because of aggressive businesses like SpaceX, partly because Washington is more welcoming to private enterprise in orbit. Now perhaps the most momentous thing about SpaceX launching astronauts is that it is not really so momentous at all. “The fact that they lowered the price is critical,” says Marcia Smith, president of the Space and Technology Policy Group. “They wowed people with their booster landings. They’ve done things that were very difficult. But they also did it efficiently and at lower cost.”

What to do in space if the cost to get there is no longer insurmountable? Ideas (not necessarily involving astronauts) have—literally—taken off. SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit, just launched the world’s first privately developed lunar lander on a SpaceX rocket. Earth-observing satellites, which have often been hulking objects placed in higher orbits passing over a given spot only once a day, are being replaced by lower-flying swarms of smaller, more agile satellites sending real-time readings. And so on.

The single-biggest driver of near-future demand for space business may be internet traffic, Cáceres says: In many cases it is cheaper to transmit data by satellite than over land. There have long been communications satellites in very high orbits, but there’s a noticeable delay in transmitting signals up and back. In 2015 SpaceX announced plans for a broadband network called Starlink, with signals to be sent and received by a low-orbiting constellation of 11,943 satellites. Nobody blinked.

Of course, satellites are simpler and safer to fly than human beings; even Musk has said there is only a 70 percent chance he will someday retire on Mars. To date, governments remain the only entities launching humans into space. Will that change anytime soon?

Smith has her doubts: “Someone would have come along already if there were demand.” John Logsdon is dubious, too: “These companies could in principal fly on their own, but where would they go?”

Far, say Musk and his fellow entrepreneurs. Assuming they are successful, they see themselves taking passengers to Mars—and soon. “They have longevity, long-term vision,” says Teal’s Cáceres. “They see the day when we’re actually living in space. They have limitless amounts of confidence, in space and in themselves.”

November 19, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

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John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA: “The space shuttle orbiter Columbia is showered with lights in this nocturnal scene at Launch Pad 39A, as preparations are underway for the first flight (STS-1) of NASA’s new reusable spacecraft system.” This photograph was taken in March 1981 by NASA.

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San Francisco Bay, California, photographed in April 1981 by an astronaut orbiting Earth aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia. “The coast is seen from near Santa Cruz northward to Point Reyes. The great valley is in the foreground.” Photo credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

November 17, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

Scott Kelly answers Reddit – Ask Me Anything – questions – from orbit – SpaceFlight Insider

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Answering questions from everyday people, Scott Kelly conducted NASA’s first Ask Me Anything from space on Jan. 23, 2016. Photo Credit: NASA

International Space Station (ISS) Commander Scott Kelly conducted NASA’s first Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) from space, answering questions ranging from what it’s like to work with an international crew to whether-or-not a rogue spaceship could sneak-up on the orbiting outpost.

The AMA lasted a little over an hour on Saturday, Jan. 23 starting at 3 p.m. CST (20:00 GMT). It was the Expedition 46 commander’s 302nd consecutive day in space since he arrived at the outpost last March for his Year in Space mission. This is his fourth spaceflight and he is the current American record-holder for the most total days in space was well as for the single longest mission.

“I still have a way to go before I return to our planet,” Kelly said on Reddit, “So, I look forward to connecting with you all back on spaceship Earth to talk about my experiences so far as I enter my countdown to when I will begin the riskiest part of this mission: coming home.”

Kelly is scheduled to return home with Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Korniyenko and Sergey Volkov on March 3, in Soyuz TMA-18M.

Kelly, who has been on two spacewalks in his career, was asked by Reddit user ImPastamonium what it feels like to have nothing but at suit between him and space. Kelly responded that it was a little surreal to know he was in his own personal “spaceship” and only a few inches from him was instant death. Photo Credit: NASA

Many of the questions asked had to do with health effects on Kelly’s body due to weightlessness.

“There are a lot of changes that happen [to your body in space],” Kelly said. “Some of them you can’t see, because it’s your eyes!”

In space, body fluids shift upwards toward the head. This causes, among other things, the eye to experience more pressure, changing its shape. This shape change can alter vision.

“My muscles and joints are a whole lot better up here than with gravity,” Kelly said, responding to a user’s question about stretching in space versus on Earth. “It’s almost like you are in a bed rest. There is no pressure or pain. I do stretch before I exercise because my muscles aren’t stretched out, they are somewhat dormant.”

While some questions were more technical, other were more about life in space.

“If you had a big scoop of something powdery, like if you were measuring out cinnamon or another powered spice, would it float around in a little powdered blobby cloud,” user ventphan asked.

“It would be a disaster to have something powder like that,” Kelly said. “Depending on how much it was, we would possibly consider shutting down the ventilation to stop it from spreading.”

Kelly also mentioned that he uses a liquid salt, as opposed to granular salt used on Earth, to season his food as to avoid it spreading throughout the modules.

User Maximsalehson asked what Kelly focused mostly on in high school.

“Unfortunately for me, I focused on looking out the window and daydreaming, which took a lot of effort to recover from,” Kelly said adding that it proves anything is possible.

Kelly told user pighalf what he thought was the most unusual thing about being in space that most people don’t think of: calluses.

“The calluses on your feet in space will eventually fall off,” Kelly said. “So, the bottoms of your feet become very soft like newborn baby feet.”

Kelly said, however, that the top of his feet develop “rough alligator skin” due to the use of hand and foot rails to get around the modules of the station.

One user asked what Kelly thought was the largest misconception about space exploration that society holds onto. He said he thinks it is the idea that space is easy.

“I think a lot of people think, that because we give the appearance that this is easy, that it is easy,” Kelly said. “I don’t think people have an appreciation for the work that it takes to pull these missions off, like humans living on the space station continuously for 15 years. It [takes] a huge army of hard working people to make it happen.”

Other questions included what he thought the most interesting science experiment he worked on was, if the ISS has any particular smell, and what it feels like having nothing but a suit between him and space.

The first flower from the Veggie experiment bloomed last week. Kelly tweeted a picture of the flower with the caption, “Yes, there are other life forms in space!” The experiment first grew lettuce, before being used to test growing techniques for flowers in November. Next, the Veggie experiment will attempt to grow tomatoes. Photo Credit: Scott Kelly / NASA

Also asked was Kelly’s view on how the space station has aged over the last decade and a half.

“It seems like the inside of the space station has very good material condition,” Kelly said. “The outside looks a little aged.”

Regarding whether or not to keep the space station going indefinitely, Kelly said it depends on what priorities are.

“Everything has costs,” Kelly said.

Finally, a father asked for one of his children if a rogue spaceship could sneak up on the space station without the crew being aware.

“Maybe [if it was] an alien spaceship with a cloaking device,” Kelly said, “but not your normal spaceship, no. Unless it had a cloaking device, which doesn’t exist, the U.S. Air Force would see it coming.”

“Thanks [Commander] Kelly for your response,” the father replied back, “I just read this to the boys and now they think this sort of exchange is an everyday occurrence. Boy, the future is awesome.”

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield beat NASA to the punch in terms of being first to conduct a Reddit AMA from on orbit—in 2013.

To read more questions and answers, visit the Scott Kelly AMA page.

Video courtesy of Scott Kelly

Derek Richardson

Derek Richardson has a degree in mass media, with an emphasis in contemporary journalism, from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. While at Washburn, he was the managing editor of the student run newspaper, the Washburn Review. He also has a blog about the International Space Station, called Orbital Velocity. He met with members of the SpaceFlight Insider team during the flight of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 551 rocket with the MUOS-4 satellite. Richardson joined our team shortly thereafter. His passion for space ignited when he watched Space Shuttle Discovery launch into space Oct. 29, 1998. Today, this fervor has accelerated toward orbit and shows no signs of slowing down. After dabbling in math and engineering courses in college, he soon realized his true calling was communicating to others about space. Since joining SpaceFlight Insider in 2015, Richardson has worked to increase the quality of our content, eventually becoming our managing editor. @TheSpaceWriter

November 14, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

Another Reminder that Spaceflight is Difficult

Another Reminder that Spaceflight is Difficult. Starship Prototype Explodes and Falls Over

SpaceX’s Starship has been hitting some bumps making its way from the drawing board to space. As the spacecraft element of the Elon Musk’s proposed super-heavy launch system, the Starship will one day become the workhorse of SpaceX, replacing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launchers. Unfortunately, another Starship prototype recently experienced a structural failure during pressure testing that caused it to explode.

The explosion took place at around 11:00 p.m. EST (0:800 p.m. PST) on Feb. 28th, about an hour after ground crews began loading simulated propellant (liquid nitrogen) into the SN1 prototype. It was here that the liquid oxygen tank violently burst, causing the entire launch vehicle to be tossed a few dozen meters into the air before it came crashing down and burst again on the launch pad.

This was the second time in the past six months that SpaceX lost a prototype vehicle during load testing. This process consists of filling the liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX) propellant tanks with a cryogenic liquid to ensure they can withstand being fully-pressurized. The last accident occurred back in November, when the Mk. 1 prototype blew up on the pad, casting its nose cone into the air.

This time around, the SN1 prototype (which had not yet had its nose cone or Raptor engines installed) appeared to have come apart near the bottom. This caused the upper section to be launched into the air and the hull to implode. The top section then came down on its side and experienced a second explosion, this time from the top.

This second explosion was clearly the methane tank (also pressurized with liquid nitrogen), which then shot off and flew about 150 to 300 meters (500 – 1000 ft) from the pad. Several observers who were on the scene captured the explosion on video – including famed NASASpaceFlight member BocaChicaGal, who captured the video shown above.

Mercifully, no injuries have been reported in the area. But the next day, photos taken of the site revealed that very little was left of the SN1 prototype. And while the company did not issue a statement immediately thereafter, Musk responded to the incident on Monday morning (March 2nd) by uploaded a video of the accident on his official Twitter account (shown above).

In true Musk fashion, he also made some cheeky comments that let his followers know that SpaceX was taking this latest setback in stride. In the original Tweet, the video appears with the caption, “So… how was your night?” He later added, “It’s fine, we’ll just buff it out,” and “Where’s the Flextape when you need it?”

No word has been given yet how this might affect the overall development of the Starship and Super Heavy launch system. However, it will mean some changes in terms of time tables. Prior to the accident, Musk had indicated that the SN1 was intended for a full wet dress rehearsal (WDR) with LOX and methane, which was to be followed by a static fire test with a Raptor engine.

Obviously, that won’t be happening anymore. However, Musk has also confirmed that his crews are currently focused on finishing work on the next Starship prototype (SN2). If all goes well, SpaceX’s ground crews could have the SN2 assembled and ready for testing within a few weeks.

November 10, 2015 Spaceflights Post a Comment

SpaceX will launch private citizens into orbit – The Verge

SpaceX will launch private citizens into orbit

A truly out-of-this-world experience

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SpaceX is planning to send up to four private citizens into space to take a trip around Earth sometime at the end of 2021 or in early 2022. The spaceflight company announced an agreement on Tuesday with Space Adventures, a space tourism business that has helped seven different private citizens take trips to (and from) the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket and spacecraft.

Space Adventures said the price of the mission will not be disclosed, and the two companies were light on other details, like what kind of preparation the tourists will have to go through. The companies did say Tuesday that the tourists will fly in the human-rated version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and that they will orbit Earth at two to three times the roughly 250-mile height of the ISS.

SpaceX has spent the last few years building and testing out this new version of Dragon as part of a contract with NASA to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS, after years of using the spacecraft to shuttle cargo to the space station. The private spaceflight company recently completed the second major flight test of the Crew Dragon, as it’s called, which demonstrated the capsule’s ability to escape an exploding rocket.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased the idea of space tourism as a business for a few years now, though he’s been overly optimistic about how soon that could happen. The company announced in early 2017 that it had accepted undisclosed payments from two customers for a trip around the Moon using Crew Dragon and the Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX said at the time that the trip would happen by the end of 2018. But in September 2018, the company announced that it now intends to send one of those passengers — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — around the Moon using the company’s massive, yet-to-be-built Big Falcon Rocket. (It’s still unclear what happened to the second customer.)

SpaceX has similarly had to delay the first Crew Dragon flight with NASA astronauts as it worked through the process of certifying the spacecraft with NASA. That flight is now supposed to take place later this year.

Other private spaceflight companies are vying to establish the space tourism market. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are in the running, though both of those companies are promising far briefer experiences. Virgin Galactic says it plans to send its first space tourists up later this year where they will experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the company’s plane-like spaceship. Blue Origin is promising customers a similar amount of time in space, though in a spacecraft that’s more similar to SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. (Both of those tickets cost in the neighborhood of $200,000 a pop.)

While little is known about the newly-announced flight, SpaceX has detailed the inside of the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will ferry the tourists around the Earth. The capsule’s interior is a minimalist affair, with just a few suspended seats and an array of touchscreens. The spacecraft is ringed with windows, though they’re not as large as the ones Blue Origin built into its own capsule. SpaceX has also shown off sleek, custom-designed spacesuits and helmets that Crew Dragon passengers will wear. The suits are less bulky-looking than past designs, but are still pressurized, cooled, and flame resistant. They come with touchscreen compatible gloves, and will lock into the seats for the ride up to space.

Update February 18th, 11:51AM ET: Added new information in the second paragraph from Space Adventures about cost and orbit height.

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Issabove HD-1837, ISS Above

ISS Above