John Glenn: Astronaut ace

By

February 21, 2012


John Glenn fever gripped Cape Canaveral last week, just as it did half a century ago when America was on the verge of launching its first man into orbit.

Hundreds of NASA workers jammed a space center auditorium, three days before the 50th anniversary of Glenn’s historic flight, to see and hear the first American to circle the Earth. Then journalists got a crack at Glenn, ever patient at describing his momentous flight aboard Friendship 7 and the decades since.

The 90-year-old Glenn was joined at both events by Scott Carpenter, 86, the only other survivor of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, as the weekend of anniversary festivities began.

Glenn said he recollects the flight so often it seems like it took place just a couple weeks ago. He and Carpenter visited their old launch pad, Complex 14; it was from the blockhouse there that Carpenter called out “Godspeed John Glenn” before the rocket ignited.

The national attention then was “almost unbelievable,” Glenn said, adding that he and his colleagues learned to live with the acclaim “or tried to anyway.”

Former U.S. Sen. John Glenn talks, via satellite, with the astronauts on the International Space Station, before the start of a roundtable discussion titled "Learning from the Past to Innovate for the Future" Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth, piloting Friendship 7 around it three times in 1962, and also became the oldest person in space, at age 77, by orbiting Earth with six astronauts aboard shuttle Discovery in 1998. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

Magical time: The early 1960s were a magical time in Cape Canaveral and adjoining Cocoa Beach, Carpenter said. “Everyone was behind us. The whole nation was behind what we were doing,” he said.

Glenn’s Friendship 7 capsule circled Earth three times on Feb. 20, 1962. Carpenter followed aboard Aurora 7 on May 24, 1962.

Not the first: They were the third and fourth Americans to rocket into space. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom flew short suborbital missions in 1961, the same year the Soviet Union launched two cosmonauts into orbit on separate shots.

The Cold War was raging, and America was desperate to even the score. Glenn could have died trying if the heat shield on his capsule was loose as flight controllers feared. But the protective shield was tight, and Glenn splashed down safely.

Return to space: Glenn, a U.S. senator for Ohio for 24 years, returned to orbit aboard shuttle Discovery in 1998, becoming the world’s oldest spaceman at age 77 and cementing his super-galactic status.

“Flying in space at age 77, you’ve given me hope. I’ve got a few good years left, and I’m ready,” Kennedy Space Center director Robert Cabana, a former shuttle commander, told Glenn. Another retired shuttle commander, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., shared how the Mercury astronauts “really lit up the world for me in terms of probability or possibility of things that we could do.”

Glenn recalled how the Mercury astronauts traveled during their training to Cape Canaveral to watch a missile blast off. It was a night launch, and the rocket blew apart over their heads.

“That wasn’t a very good confidence-builder for our first trip to the cape,” Glenn said. Improvements were made, and Glenn said he gained confidence in his Mercury-Atlas rocket, a converted nuclear missile. Otherwise, he said he would not have climbed aboard.

No launch:Glenn and his wife, Annie, for the attempted liftoff of the newest of the Atlas rockets, an unmanned booster that NASA contractors hope one day will carry astronauts. Windy weather forced a scrub of the Navy satellite launch.

Astronaut John Glenn climbs into the Friendship 7 space capsule atop an Atlas rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla. for the flight which made him the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. (AP Photo/NASA)

“Scrub! Welcome to the space program,” Glenn said at the news conference held in the old Mercury Mission Control, now located at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. “Not anything brand new to me.” Lousy weather spoiled Friday night’s launch attempt as well.

It took 11 tries for Glenn to get off the pad in 1962. He boarded three times before finally taking off, which he believes created even more of a public frenzy over his flight.

Reunion: On Saturday, Glenn and Carpenter will reunite with more than 100 retirees who worked on Project Mercury. And on Monday, the actual anniversary, Glenn will be feted at Ohio State University; its school of public affairs bears his name.

Glenn said he’s uncertain how he’ll mark the exact time of liftoff — 9:47 a.m. — come Monday. He admitted sometimes forgetting to mark the precise moment in the past. But not for this golden one, “for sure.”

What’s next? Besides reminiscing Friday, Glenn and Carpenter spoke of the future of space travel. When asked by Cabana “given where we’ve come, where are we going,” Carpenter had a one-word response. “Mars.” The crowd applauded.

Glenn had more to offer, stressing the importance of exploration as well as scientific research. He criticized the previous administration for promoting lunar bases and Mars travel, but providing no funds, and for canceling the space shuttle program. “A big mistake,” he said.

Glenn noted how NASA is relying on the Russians to transport American astronauts to and from the International Space Station, now that the shuttles are retired. That will continue until private U.S. companies have spacecraft ready to fly crews, an estimated five years away.

“What a big change that is from the days when there were the depths of the Cold War … fueling a lot of the interest in the space program,” he said.

Carpenter said he deplores the fact that America seems to have lost its resolve to press ahead in space exploration, as evidenced by NASA’s small share of the federal budget.

“I really miss my citizenship that was once in a can-do nation,” he said.

Another change in five decades: Glenn pointed out how cellphones have “more computing capacity than anything back at the time when we were flying in ’62.” Society has become so accustomed to new things, he said, that it will be difficult for NASA to generate the kind of excitement that Project Mercury or Apollo’s moonwalks did.

Repeatedly Friday, Glenn and Carpenter paid tribute to their five deceased Mercury colleagues: Shepard, Grissom, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton.

“We need five more chairs here,” Glenn told the NASA crowd.

The two pioneers received standing ovations.

Here’s a look at Glenn’s launch: http://youtu.be/8T0i0YkxGOU


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Online:

NASA:http://www.nasa.gov/

Ohio State University: http://glennschool.osu.edu/
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Reported by MARCIA DUNN of the Associated Press from CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.

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Wanted: New astronauts

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November 16, 2011

WASHINGTON—Looking for a job? NASA is hiring astronauts. You can even apply online at a giant government jobs website.

There’s only one hitch: NASA doesn’t have its own spaceship anymore and is sending fewer fliers into orbit right now.

Astronaut class member Mark Vande Hei, left, and Navy instructor Victor Mower train during a 2009 ASCAN water survival training at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Pensacola, Fla. NASA is hiring astronauts. You can even apply online at a giant government jobs website. There's only one hitch: NASA doesn't have its own spaceship anymore and is sending fewer fliers into orbit right now. "The experience is well worth the wait," promised NASA flight crew operations director Janet Kavandi as the space agency started a public search Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011, for new astronauts. (AP Photo/NASA, James Blair)

“The experience is well worth the wait,” promised NASA flight crew operations director Janet Kavandi as the space agency started a public search Tuesday for new astronauts.

There will be flights, but not many, with the space shuttle fleet retired. A handful of astronauts each year are launching on a Russian Soyuz spaceship to the International Space Station for six-month stays.

In about three to five years, NASA hopes to purchase trips for astronauts headed to the space station on American-built commercial rockets instead. And eventually, NASA hopes to fly astronauts in a government owned Orion capsule to an asteroid or even Mars, but those pioneering trips are more than a decade away.

With veteran astronauts leaving the space agency, Kavandi said NASA is afraid it will not have enough astronauts, something a National Research Council report pointed out in September.

NASA needs about 55 astronauts, and with a new class of nine graduating earlier this month, the astronaut roster is up to 58. One of those new astronauts will get to fly to the space station as early as 2013, Kavandi said.

“We’re ready to serve, we’re ready to get going,” new astronaut Serena Aunon said Tuesday at NASA headquarters.

Candidate search: So to find candidates, NASA on Tuesday unveiled what its personnel chief called its biggest ever push to hire new astronauts —with dozens of cheering elementary school students there to ask questions.

In the past—when NASA had a space shuttle—the space agency didn’t make such a big deal of searching for astronauts, and they were inundated with applications. This new drive comes with a YouTube recruitment video complete with flashy images and driving techno-beat background music.

“We need you to help plan for this future of exploration,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says in the video. “Join NASA. Get your application in now for the 2013 astronaut candidate class. Your spaceflight experience begins right now.”

Requirements: But before you polish up your resume, NASA isn’t loosening its standards. You must have at least a bachelor’s degree—most astronauts have a master’s or a doctorate—in engineering, biological science, physical science or math. You must learn Russian, but be a U.S. citizen. You must know basic physics. Being a medical doctor or a teacher helps. You must have vision that can be corrected to 20/20, no high blood pressure and be between 5 foot 2 inches and 6 foot 3 inches.

Given these tight requirements, NASA will still probably get 3,000 qualified applicants, Kavandi said. The job pays between $64,700 and $141,700.

And if you are hired expect to do lots of traveling to foreign countries, Kavandi said. And oh yes, maybe into space.

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Online:

NASA’s site for seeking astronauts: http://astronauts.nasa.gov/

NASA recruitment video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vhLblEzuX8Zo

Government jobs site: http://tinyurl.com/astronautjob

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Rocket’s test flight fails

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September 3, 2011

An unmanned spacecraft bankrolled by Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos failed during a recent test flight.

The vehicle became unstable at 45,000 feet and ground controllers had to terminate it as a precaution. Additional details about what went wrong were not released.

“Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard,” Bezos wrote in a blog post Friday.

Bezos founded Blue Origin to develop a vertical takeoff and landing rocketship that would fly passengers to suborbital space. It recently won money from NASA to compete to go into orbit as a space taxi now that the space shuttle fleet is retired.

The mishap occurred during a test flight last week from Blue Origin’s West Texas spaceport. The ultra-secretive company notified the Federal Aviation Administration about the launch and only acknowledged the accident publicly on Friday.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported about the failure, said the test did not use federal funds and was not part of the development agreement with NASA.

Blue Origin’s failure shines a spotlight on the risks of commercial space ventures.

SpaceX, which has a NASA contract to develop a commercial vehicle to haul supplies and astronauts, suffered three rocket failures before it found success. Later this year, the company, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, will launch a capsule on a cargo test run to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic, founded by Sir Richard Branson, lost three workers in 2007 after an explosion rocked a California airport during testing of a propellant system for its space tourism vehicle. The company is currently conducting flight tests in the Mojave Desert and has not set a date for the first passenger flights.

Reported by the Associated Press from VAN HORN, Texas.

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NASA focus is on asteroids

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July 26, 2011

With the space shuttle now history, NASA’s next great mission is so audacious, the agency’s best minds are wrestling with how to pull it off: Send astronauts to an asteroid in less than 15 years.

The challenges are innumerable. Some old-timers are grousing about it, saying going back to the moon makes more sense. But many NASA brains are thrilled to have such an improbable assignment.

And NASA leaders say civilization may depend on it.

The Orion space vehicle, originally meant to take astronauts back to the moon, is being repurposed for NASA's asteroid mission. (Lockheed Martin Co.)

An asteroid is a giant space rock that orbits the sun, like Earth. And someday one might threaten the planet.

But sending people to one won’t be easy. You can’t land on an asteroid because you’d bounce off—it has virtually no gravity. Reaching it might require a NASA spacecraft to harpoon it. Heck, astronauts couldn’t even walk on it because they’d float away.

The future: NASA is thinking about jetpacks, tethers, bungees, nets and spiderwebs to allow explorers to float just above the surface of it while attached to a smaller mini-spaceship.

Such a ship—something like a “Star Trek” shuttlecraft melded with a deep sea explorer with pincer-like arms— is needed just to get within working distance of the rock. That craft would have to be big enough for astronauts to live in for a week or two. They’d still need a larger habitat for the long term.

It would take half a year to reach an asteroid, based on current possible targets. The deep space propulsion system to fly such a distance isn’t perfected yet. Football-field-sized solar panels would help, meaning the entire mothership complex would be fairly large. It would have to protect the space travelers from killer solar and cosmic ray bursts. And, they would need a crew capsule, maybe two, for traveling between the asteroid complex and Earth.

And all those parts—mini-spaceship, habitat/living area, crew capsule, solar arrays and propulsion system—would have to be linked together in the middle of space, assembled in a way like the International Space Station but on a smaller scale.

Beyond all those obstacles, NASA doesn’t even know which asteroid would be the best place to visit.

Deadline: All this has to be ready to launch by 2025 by presidential order.

“This is the big step,” said Kent Joosten, chief architect of the human exploration team at Johnson Space Center. “This is out into the universe, away from Earth’s gravity completely… This is really where you are doing the ‘Star Trek’ kind of thing.”

It has the dreamers of NASA both excited and anxious.

“This is a risky mission. It’s a challenging mission,” said NASA chief technology officer Bobby Braun. “It’s the kind of mission that engineers will eat up.”

This is a matter of sending “humans farther than ever before,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. It is all a stepping stone to the dream of flying astronauts to Mars in the mid 2030s.

“I think it is THE mission NASA should embrace,” said University of Tennessee aerospace professor John Muratore. “To be successful at this mission, you’ve got to embrace all of the technologies that you need for Mars.”

Controversy: Critics, including former Apollo astronauts and flight directors, have blasted President Barack Obama for canceling George W. Bush’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. They dismiss talk of asteroid visits.

But that’s because NASA has not done a good job of outlining the fascinating details and explaining why it is important, said astronomer and former astronaut John Grunsfeld.

“NASA doesn’t have a story right now,” said Grunsfeld, deputy director at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “Exploration is nothing if not the articulation of a great story.”

The story begins with why NASA would want to go to an asteroid. The agency has sent small spacecraft off to study asteroids over the years and even landed on one in 2001. Just last week, a space probe began orbiting a huge asteroid called Vesta, which lies beyond Mars.

This unusual asteroid was visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa in 2005. The probe documented the rock's unusual structure and mysterious lack of craters. (ISAS, JAXA)

Scientifically, an asteroid is a remnant from the birth of the solar system, offering clues about how our planetary system began. Logistically, NASA wants to go to Mars, but that is distant and more difficult. So the argument is that going to an asteroid is a better testing ground than returning to the moon.

Killer rock: The reason NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and others give is that this mission could save civilization. Every 100 million years or so an asteroid 6 miles wide—the type that killed off the dinosaurs— smacks Earth, said NASA Near Earth Object program manager Donald Yeomans.

If NASA can get astronauts to an asteroid, they can figure out a way of changing a potential killer’s orbit. They’ll experiment with the safe one they land on, Braun said.

One joke going around is that dinosaurs couldn’t stop catastrophe because they didn’t have a space program.

“One of the statements going to an asteroid will make is that humans are smarter than dinosaurs,” Grunsfeld said.

If you are going to reroute a killer asteroid, first you have to know one is coming and where it is now. And that’s also a problem for NASA’s mission. Astronomers figure there are about 50,000 asteroids and comets larger than 300 feet in diameter and they only know where fewer than 1 percent of them are, Yeomans said. NASA is focusing on rocks that size or larger that would come relatively close to Earth in the 2025 time frame.

Where to go? At the moment, there are only a handful of asteroid options and they all have names like 1999AO10 or 2009OS5. NASA deputy exploration chief Laurie Leshin figures NASA will have to come up with, not just more targets, but better names.

Getting to one will be even tougher.

Huge powerful rockets are needed to launch spacecraft and parts out of Earth orbit. NASA promises to announce its design idea for these rockets by the end of the summer and Congress has ordered that they be built by 2016. It will take two or three or maybe even more launches of these unnamed rockets to get all the needed parts into space.

An inside look at the Orion space vehicle, which is being modified for deep-space travel. (Lockheed Martin Co.)

The crew capsule is the farthest along because NASA is using the Orion crew ship it was already designing for the now dead moon mission and repurposing it for deep space. NASA has already spent $5 billion on Orion.

Once in space, the ship needs a propulsion system to get it to the asteroid. One way is to use traditional chemical propulsion, but that would require carrying lots of hard-to-store fuel and creation of a new storage system, Joosten said.

Another way is to use ion propulsion, which is efficient and requires less fuel, but it is enormously slow to rev up and gain speed. It would also require an electrical ignition source, thus the giant solar power wings.

If NASA goes to ion propulsion, the best bet would be to start the bulk of the ship on a trip to and around the moon without astronauts. That would take a while, but if no one is on it, it doesn’t matter, Joosten said. Then when that ship is far from Earth, astronauts aboard Orion would dock and join the rest of the trip. By this time, the ship would have picked up sufficient speed and keep on accelerating.

Orion isn’t big enough for four astronauts to live on for a year. They would need a larger space habitat, a place where they can exercise to keep from losing bone strength in zero gravity. They would need a place to store food, sleep and most importantly a storm shelter to protect them from potentially deadly and radiation-loaded solar flares.

Blow it up: Much of the habitat could be inflatable, launched in a lightweight form, and inflated in space. On Friday, NASA announced a competition among four universities to design potential exploration habitats.

Meanwhile NASA is pursuing its concept for a mini-spaceship exploration vehicle, about the size of a minivan. And it’s planning an underwater lab for training, an effort to mimic an asteroid mission’s challenges, Joosten said.

Leshin notes 2025 is not that many years away: “There’s a lot of things we need to invent and build between now and then.”
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Reported by SETH BORENSTEIN of the Associated Press from HOUSTON, Texas
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Online

NASA animation of a possible asteroid mission: http://1.usa.gov/pMFyay

NASA’s exploration office: http://1.usa.gov/nV6ZPn

NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid Vesta: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/

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