The New Mexico Spaceport Authority has secured long term access to 18,000 acres for Spaceport America that will be built and operated 45 miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

The multi-part deal was struck December 21 by the signing of legal agreements with the State Land Office, Sierra County, and two private ranch operations.

The 25 year lease contains the option to renew for successive 25 year terms.

A set of agreements has been signed between two ranches, the Bar Cross Ranch, Inc. and the Lewis Cain Ranch, Inc., owned, respectively, by Ben and Jane Cain, and Phil and Judy Wallin.

Each ranch family will receive a combination of upfront and annual fees, as well as possible reconstruction or modification funds as construction of the New Mexico spaceport moves forward.

The Spaceport Authority has also agreed to create a permanent, standing memorial to commemorate the Cain and Wallin family history and ranching heritage in the valley.

The lost-in-space Mars Global Surveyor remains in “unknown status”. Last contact with the red planet orbiter was early November.

But there’s new news in the high-tech, hide-and-seek use of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express — also orbiting the planet — to sight MGS.

Michel Denis, Head of Mars Express Mission Operations, reported to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that their orbiter may have spotted the errant MGS. An image of MGS was taken on December 9 and contains “possible evidence” for a MGS sighting - but it’s still debatable.

Mars Express data “suggests that the spacecraft [MGS] might be tumbling,” advised Tom Thorpe, MGS Project Manager at JPL.

Another Mars Express photo session to try and spot MGS is slated for December 21.

Many people in North America might have a chance to see the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle tonight during twilight shortly after they separate.

The question is whether they’ll appear as one point of light or two.

SPACE.com’s Skywatching Columnist Joe Rao told subscribers to his newsletter that they might be too close together to be seen as separate objects with the naked eye. Binoculars should reveal the pair as two distinct moving points of light, Rao figures.

Find out when to watch at this NASA site.

> Complete mission coverage.

Ever hear of raising money to fend off incoming, Earth-bruising Near Earth Objects?

That’s the ticket on January 13 at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, California. You can join in on the cosmic cause and rub elbows with astronauts, cosmonauts, industry leaders and concerned citizens.

Money raised will support a series of international workshops that will draft a United Nations Treaty on Near Earth Object (NEO) deflection. It’ll take a core sum of $250,000 to hold the UN workshops sponsored by the Association of Space Explorers.

The fundraiser is being led by Russell Schweickart, Apollo 9 astronaut.

Among a host of activities, those attending will be treated to the first west coast showing of “Cosmic Collisions” - a new immersive full dome planetarium production from the American Museum of Natural History.

“If a Near Earth Object — whether large or small, tomorrow or next century — strikes Earth, our lives on this blue planet will be forever changed. We can act together to prevent such a catastrophe,” the invite explains.

To take part, go to:

http://www.collectspace.com/events/neo/

HOUSTON — In order to add Monday’s spacewalk to send shuttle astronauts to subdue a pesky solar array outside the International Space Station (ISS) without giving up the mission’s late inspection of Discovery’s heat shield, mission managers have sacrificed one of two optional days typically reserved at the end of each spaceflight.

Discovery spacewalkers Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang are due to help shake and shimmy the stubborn portside solar array, one of two extending from the station’s mast-like Port 6 (P6) truss, at 1:47 p.m. EST (1847 GMT).

NASA’s mission operations representative Phil Engelauf told reporters here at the Johnson Space Center that in the end, it was safety versus schedule and safety wins out.

NASA has been committed to ensuring the health of its spacecraft since the 2003 Columbia accident, and has used late inspections on the past two shuttle flights to scan for signs of damage from micrometeorites or orbital debris. During September’s STS-115 flight, a piece of orbital debris apparently pierced a radiator panel along one of the Atlantis orbiter’s payload bay doors, causing minor damage but no risk to the shuttle’s crew.

“The ultimate conclusion was, we wanted to protect the safety issue of late inspection over the schedule issue,” Engelauf said late Saturday.

That schedule issue revolves around where Discovery will land, and the potential ripple effect pushing the solar array spacewalk into an already EVA heavy ISS Expedition 14 mission or tacking it onto a subsequent shuttle flight would have on efforts to complete the station’s assembly by NASA’s September 2010 mandate.

NASA typically reserves two days (for example, Discovery carries supplies for a 12-day mission, plus two more) in the case of bad weather at its Kennedy Space Center landing site in Florida or a systems glitch aboard the spacecraft.

The shuttle can land on three sites in the continental U.S.: KSC’s Shuttle Landing Facility, a desert landing strip at Edwards Air Force Base in California or the White Sands Space Harbor at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Since NASA launches shuttles out of KSC, landing there is always preferable. An Edwards landing typically adds a full week and $1 million to the turnaround costs of one more readying a shuttle for launch, and a White Sands touchdown - a shuttle last landed there during STS-3 in 1982 - carries its own schedule hit.

Discovery was originally scheduled to land on Thursday, Dec. 21, with Friday and Saturday as backups. With the landing now set to Friday with only one backup, Engelauf said that Discovery’s crew will land Friday barring poor weather at all three shuttle touchdown sites or some unforeseen spacecraft glitch.

“We have incurred, I think, some programmatic schedule risk that we’re going to put the orbiter at a landing strip that might cost us a little bit more turnaround time,” Engelauf said. “But we think that the bigger picture trade warrants that given the significance of getting this array retracted means for the station and what it means for the rest of the [assembly] sequence.”

 Click here for SPACE.com’s shuttle mission coverage, and here for an archive of Discovery’s STS-116 mission stories.

Yes, there’s out-of-the-box thinking. But that’s sort of old hat. Then there are inside-the-expandable-habitat ideas.

The Bigelow Aerospace folks in Las Vegas, Nevada have been busy having fun, stuffing payloads into their Genesis II module now being readied for liftoff into Earth orbit early next year.

According to Maijinn Chen of the Payload Development & Integration department at Bigelow Aerospace, Genesis II will carry a “Biobox” - a three-chamber contraption that houses roaches, scorpions, as well as ants.

This colony of “arthroponauts” will all share the same air as they cruise through space - and under the watchful eye of cameras positioned inside the habitat.

Additionally, a high-roller innovation is being flown, Chen reports. Genesis II will tote along a “space bingo” game.

A set of 40 bingo balls are to be carried onboard Genesis II, with the game reset as onboard fans blow the balls back into a mixing chamber via a set of opened doors internal to the expandable structure.

Upon a command sent up via mission control, computers on Genesis II will operate all the components and control the games, as well as store video images of the bingo games until ground controllers are ready to download them via satellite-to-ground communications systems.

Place your bets if this first casino of the cosmos catches on.

 

If you’ve been saying all year you should go out and check out the night sky but haven’t made the time, this is a good week to do so.

Three planets are converging in the early morning sky. Jupiter, Mercury and Mars fit right now within a 5-degree circle. That’s about half the width of your hand on an outstretched arm. Guide

The reliable, annual Geminid meteor shower is underway. It’s a no-brainer, other than the frigid weather. Bundle up, go out, look up. Wednesday night or Thursday morning are your best bets, but give this shower will likely offer a rewarding practice run tonight or Thursday morning. Guide

If a rocket is launched as planned from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia at 7 a.m. Saturday, residents along much of the East Coast could get a surprising view. Guide

Also, Venus is emerging again as the evening star. It’ll be a standout by Christmas. Joe Rao will provide a complete viewer’s guide Friday in his weekly Night Sky column on SPACE.com.

Space engineers are still pressing forward trying to recover the still-silent sentinel that is Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). It went into deaf, dumb and blind status in early November.

Commands from Earth continue to be shot outward in the hopes of regaining contact with MGS, Tom Thorpe, MGS Project Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told me. It is anticipated that these efforts will continue through the calendar year.

But if MGS remains mum by that time, steps will be taken to terminate most MGS operations tasks, Thorpe said.

The latest twist to the MGS detective story comes from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express.

Mars Express has been used to image the lost-to-space MGS. If that ESA Mars orbiter does provide a position update for the MGS, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter might be used again to use its star tracker in an attempt to “look” for MGS.

Credit: Associated Press Photo

Being a science journalist does occasionally have its perks, like being allowed on site for a NASA shuttle launch.

With five minutes and counting to liftoff on Saturday evening, I left the news office at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and hurried down to the grassy lawn next to NASA’s famous countdown clock to watch Discovery blast into space. According to a NASA VIP guest list, watching somewhere on KSC with me that night was the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Maud Olofsson—no doubt in attendance to witness the ascent of his fellow countryman and astronaut, Christer Fuglesang—and Joey Fatone, a former member of the band N Sync.

It was my first time seeing a NASA shuttle launch, and even though I had watched video of past night launches so I’d have an idea of what I was in store for, it didn’t quite prepare me for what I actually saw.

Discovery’s launch dazzled. One minute the evening was dark, and Discovery was still on its pad, illuminated by bright ground lights like the star of some Broadway show. The next moment, flames were erupting from the shuttle’s twin boosters and Discovery was wreathed in thick, curling smoke. A heartbeat later, I heard the dull roar of the shuttle’s engines and then Discovery was off the ground. The shuttle shot spaceward, arcing like a flare and leaving behind it a cloudy trail that darkened and expanded before dissolving away. Discovery floated higher and higher until it was just a pinprick in the night sky, and then it was gone.

————————————————————

Later that night, NASA held a news conference to discuss Discovery’s successful liftoff. NASA chief Michael Griffin was one of the panelists. Earlier in the week, an article in the Times questioned the purpose of the International Space Station (ISS), where Discovery was heading:

“Once again, the shuttle Discovery is about to blast into space. And once again, it will dock with the International Space Station, and astronauts will continue the process of building the half-completed orbiting laboratory in a mission full of daunting challenges.

“But the majesty of the first nighttime liftoff in more than four years, now scheduled for Thursday just before 9:36 p.m. Eastern time, will not dispel a question that has long been the subject of sharp debate among experts: What is the space station for?”

During the postlaunch news conference, a reporter asked Griffin to describe how the ISS fit into the big picture of space exploration. His reply to the reporter could easily have been interpreted as an answer to the Times article as well.

“The questions about the space station were very appropriate. I asked many of them myself early in my career when the United States lacked plans for going beyond the space station,” he began.

Paraphrasing a quote by Navy Admiral Harold Gehman Jr., the chief of the NASA Accident Investigation team that investigated the Columbia tragedy in 2003, Griffin said: “‘For the foreseeable future, space travel is going to be expensive, difficult and dangerous, but for the United States it is strategic. It is part of what makes us a great nation.’ I believe that.”

The ISS is not a goal in itself, he continued, but a stepping stone in the United State’s larger ambition of returning to the Moon, and going beyond, to Mars.

“On the space station, we will learn how to live and work and space. We will learn how to make hardware survive and function for three years, that we’re going to need if we’re going to go to Mars. The space station is on the footpath toward becoming a spacefaring nation,” he said. “Similarly, if we’re going to go to Mars, if we’re going to go beyond, we have to learn how to live on other planetary surfaces and use what we find there, to bend to nature to our will, just like the pilgrims did when they came to what is now New England.

“The pilgrims, if you might recall, half of them starved the first winter. There was a reason their celebration was called ‘Thanksgiving.’ They were only a few thousand miles from home, and they were people who farmed for a living, and yet when they came to a new arena, they didn’t know how to farm, they didn’t know what food would grow and what food wouldn’t, they didn’t know what food they could eat.

“We’re going to have to learn how to live and survive in other places. The Moon is a stepping stone on that path. When you bring it all together, the space station, the moon, looking forward past that to Mars, these are the steps that we have to take if we want to become a spacefaring nation. I think that we should want that. I want that. I want that for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great grandchildren.

“NASA is the arm of the federal government that takes on this task. We do it as well as we can,” he said. Bringing it back to the night’s launch, Griffin added “Sometimes we stumble. Today we didn’t stumble.”

For NASA, the cost of a space shuttle launch scrub—like that which afflicted the Discovery orbiter on Thursday—can come with a hefty toll.

A typical weekday scrub like Discovery’s carries an estimated cost of about $500,000 on top of the mission’s total price tag due to the additional unloading—and later reloading—the spacecraft’s 15-story external tank of the more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold propellant required for launch.

Discovery and its seven-astronaut crew are currently slated to launch on Dec. 9—a Saturday—at 8:47:34 p.m. EST (0147:34 Dec. 10 GMT). Their STS-116 mission is bound for the International Space Station (ISS) to continue assembly of the orbital laboratory.

Weather predictions call for a 70 percent chance of unfavorable weather, so if Discovery is forced to scrub again it will add $600,000—the extra $100,000 is because it’s a weekend—according to NASA officials.

Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson at the space agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, tells me that the total cost of Discovery’s STS-116 mission (which includes launch preparations, workers’ salaries, launch equipment, transport vehicles, spacecraft hangars and other vital infrastructure) comes in at about $1 billion. That figure apparently comes from NASA’s annual shuttle budget, which is set at $4 billion for the 2007 Fiscal Year and includes not only Discovery’s STS-116 mission, but next year’s STS-117, STS-118 and STS-120 spaceflights.

The bare bones cost of the shuttle mission alone, without the other costs—all of which, however, are currently necessary to prepare a shuttle for flight—is about $100 million, Beutel added.