The playing field has tightened up in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge to be held this October at the Wirefly X Prize Cup in New Mexico.

To date, there have been nine designated drivers — teams of rocketeers – competing for Challenge cash prizes courtesy of NASA. But there’s new news.

William Pomerantz, director of Space Projects for the X Prize Foundation in Washington, D.C. told me today that the ninth “mystery team” has elected to withdraw from the competition. The identity of that ninth competitor has been under hush-hush conditions - and continues to remain so, he said, as they have requested to maintain their anonymity.

Another team — Micro-Space of Denver, Colorado has missed a required milestone — a Team Summit — making them ineligible to win prize money in 2007. The team will continue their development, however, and have a presence at this year’s Wirefly X Prize Cup.

So now the field eligible to win the $2 million in Lunar Lander Challenge prizes is now at seven competitors.

The Wirefly X Prize Cup ‘07 Holloman Air and Space Expo is being held October 27-28 at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Meanwhile, Armadillo Aerospace — one of the seven remaining Challenge competitors — reports recent success. Armadillo rocketeers pulled off new tethered flights of their vertical takeoff/landing vehicle at the Greyson county airport north of Dallas. “This is the first time we have taken a vehicle and done back-to-back 180-second flights on the same day, with the exact same vehicle configuration, John Carmack, head of Armadillo Aerospace, advised me earlier this week.

 

 

 

The U.S. Spacewalk of Fame Foundation needs your help to complete a monument dedicated to NASA’s Apollo, space shuttle and International Space Station efforts.

The foundation is holding a silent auction to fund the completion of its Project Apollo Monument, which forms part of a multi-monument effort to honor the space workers and astronauts that participated in NASA’s manned and unmanned spaceflights. The foundation’s Mercury and Gemini monuments have been completed so far at Space View Park in Titusville, Florida. Still incomplete are monuments to NASA’s unmanned, Apollo and space shuttle efforts, as well as the International Space Station program.

To fund the memorial, the foundation has set out a catalog of space memorabilia and space-themed experiences as part of a silent auction hosted by collectSPACE.com, a SPACE.com partner and contributor. But be quick on the click if you’re hoping to bid, the auction ends Thursday, Aug. 30.

If you’re interested and in the Houston area, the foundation is also hosting a benefit at Space Center Houston, where director Jeff Roth will screen his Apollo documentary “The Wonder of it All” on Aug. 30 as well.

For more about the U.S. Spacewalk Hall of Fame’s auction, click here.

Northrop Grumman Corporation announced August 24 that it has completed a transaction that increases its ownership in the Mojave, California-based Scaled Composites, LLC from roughly 40 percent to 100 percent.

The mega-aerospace company agreed July 5 to increase its stake in Scaled Composites - the builder of the X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne and an array of record-breaking aircraft.

Scaled Composites is led by aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, with his enterprise busy at work on SpaceShipTwo - a passenger-carrying suborbital spaceliner. That company suffered a setback in its work on SpaceShipTwo’s propulsion system when a July 26 explosion at the Mojave Air and Space Port left three dead and other workers injured.

The Scaled family is honoring their fallen heroes and has vowed to “find greater ways to commemorate them as the SpaceShipTwo program continues to unfold and other space-oriented initiatives are developed,” explains the Scaled Composites website.

 

The first agreement for the commercial use of the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) has been signed. Work on the VASIMR concept has been championed by former NASA astronaut, Franklin Chang Diaz. 

The agreement involves the Houston, Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company — Diaz is Chairman and CEO of the firm — and Excalibur Exploration Ltd., a British company based in Douglas, Isle of Man.

The deal grants Excalibur the right of first refusal to acquire VASIMR engines for space resource recovery.

Furthermore, the agreement — signed August 20th between the two groups — also provides for an Excalibur-funded six month study to support the development of a conceptual asteroid mission using the VASIMR engine.

That engine is a high power and high specific impulse plasma rocket, currently under development by Ad Astra to support solar and, ultimately, nuclear electric in-space propulsion needs.

Ad Astra Rocket Company was founded in 2005 to commercialize the VASIMR engine, a promising propulsion breakthrough initially studied by NASA.

For more information, go to: www.adastrarocket.com

 

HOUSTON — Astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the shuttle Endeavour have their first chance to spot a piece of junk tossed overboard from the orbital laboratory last month.

A video camera support, known in NASA-ese as a Video Support Stanchion Assembly, will pass about 3.1 miles (five kilometers) below the space station between 2:17-2:21 p.m. EDT (1817-1821 GMT).

Last month, Expedition 15 flight engineer Clayton Anderson tossed the 212-pound (96-kilogram) piece of unneeded equipment into space along with a refrigerator-sized ammonia coolant container, casting them off to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in a few months’ time. In honor of Anderson’s Nebraska roots, his crewmates dubbed the VSSA “Nebraska 1″ and its partner “Nebraska 2.”

“It is no threat whatsoever,” NASA spokesperson Lynette Madison told me here at the Johnson Space Center this morning, adding that the docked space station-Endeavour complex will not have to maneuver to avoid the space junk.

NASA’s general rule is to fire the station or shuttle’s engines for a debris avoidance maneuver if the orbital detritus comes will about 1,640 feet (500 meters), she says.

Meanwhile, NASA flight controllers sent the Expedition 15 and Endeavour astronauts detailed instructions to find the best viewport to witness the passing debris.

“Photography for this event is optional for an ISS or Shuttle crew member,” Mission Control wrote in the crew’s morning mail, adding that they hope to record video of the event as well.

You can follow along with SPACE.com’s NASA TV feed and blow-by-blow STS-118 mission updates by clicking here.

If you’re looking for 8.4 fluid ounces of patent pending Antimatter, check in with Microgravity Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

MEI was founded in 2006 and is now cranking out drinkable products produced from ingredients that have flown in space courtesy of suborbital rockets.

Antimatter is an energy drink using “spaceflight-enriched vitamin power complex”. Another product is purified water with spaceflight-enriched electrolytes. The drinks are making a big splash here at this week’s Small Satellite conference being held in Logan, Utah.

An additional MEI beverage offering is Comet’s Tail Amber Ale using yeast that flew into space. It was premiered earlier this month at a popular Albuquerque brewery.

MEI has announced an ACCESS for Education program too, donating payload space on every MEI launch. Payload space will be dedicated to a full spectrum of activities ranging from K-12 inspirational experiments…to next generation commercial space demonstration payloads developed by U.S. universities, said Jeff Ganley, MEI’s Chief Operations Officer.

A second phase of MEI product development — churning out made-in-space pharmaceuticals to space food — involves orbital production runs starting in 2010, Ganley said.

For more information regarding MEI’s educational initiative and its commercial space products, go to:

www.microgravityenterprises.com

 

 

HOUSTON - Long before NASA found damage on the heat tiles of its space shuttle Endeavour, the space agency was playing down the appearance of teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan on the orbiter’s STS-118 flight.

Given that Morgan, whom NASA first chose as the backup to its first Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe in 1985 before the Challenger accident, has waited and worked through 22 years and two shuttle disasters to fly, it seemed like a public affairs coup to finally launch her into space. Especially during a roller coaster year that has seen a now-former astronaut’s arrest, solid rocket booster train wrecks, a shocking murder-suicide at the Johnson Space Center here and a freakish hail storm that pushed the entire year’s schedule of shuttle flights three months to the right.

And yet, Morgan’s role was somewhat muted going into last week’s launch (though Mission Control did mark her space arrival with a glib, “For Barbara Morgan and her crew, class is in session.”) and even more so now as Endeavour’s tile damage overshadows her space presence.
It is both perplexing and understandable at the same time.

Through the karma of shuttle flight scheduling, Morgan’s flight falls outside the school year, limiting the agency’s education reach to schools across the nation.

And since her assignment to STS-118 in late 2002 and the Columbia accident a year later, NASA has shifted its shuttle missions to make completion of the International Space Station a priority, so construction - not education - takes center stage.

Endeavour’s commander Scott Kelly said before flight what he thought of Morgan as an astronaut first, who happened to once work as teacher. And that makes sense too, since what he really needs on a busy construction flight, now extended with an extra fourth spacewalk, is a spaceship full of steely-eyed spaceflyers.

But there is still a part, deep down, that would like to see a bit more pomp.

Perhaps we’ll get it today, with Morgan’s first of three broadcasts to students on Earth. She and her STS-118 crewmates are expected to talk about their spaceflight, answer questions and demonstrate orbital living at about 5:09 p.m. EDT (2109 GMT) for students at the Discovery Center of Idaho in Boise live on NASA TV.

So tune in and watch. It should be educational.

Former Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, is on a globe-trotting quest to raise international awareness regarding near-Earth asteroids that can threaten our planet - trying to pull together “mission rules” for dealing with a trouble-making near-Earth object (NEO).

As Chairman of the Association of Space Explorers Near-Earth Object Committee, Schweickart is organizing a set of workshops to shape a report headed in 2009 for the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).

The first workshop was held last May in Strasbourg, France.

Next month a workshop will be held in Sibiu, Romania, followed by an April 2008 confab tentatively set for Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and a fourth workshop to be held possibly in September 2008, perhaps in the United States.

Drawing from his human spaceflight background, Schweickart sees need for a set of NEO mission rules — established well ahead of time — that outline “if this happens, this is what you will do.”

“It’s a decision-making process,” Schweickart told me, setting up criteria, rules, policies, etc., so that timely response can be made. “You can argue about mission rules for months and months…even years in some cases. But that’s what you don’t want to do when confronted with a problem.”

For more information, go to:

http://www.space-explorers.org/committees/NEO/neo.html

 

 

Seven astronauts are poised to launch into space today aboard NASA’s shuttle Endeavour today with fairly straightforward monikers, though why its pilot goes by “Scorch” is up for grabs.

STS-118 shuttle pilot Charlie Hobaugh, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, goes by the call sign “Scorch” and isn’t telling any tales on the hot name’s genesis.

“You know, you’re the third reporter to ask me that and the third guy I probably won’t tell,” Hobaugh told me leading up to today’s launch attempt.

Hobaugh did concede that his call sign stems from his days flying vertical takeoff and landing Harrier jets in the Marine Corps, but more than that he’s mum.

“I usually say sometimes a call sign sounds a lot better when you don’t know where it came from,” Hobaugh says.

The rest of Endeavour’s crew have intuitive names or nicknames. Commander Scott Kelly and mission specialists Tracy Caldwell and Rick Mastracchio seem to prefer their given names, while teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan is frequently referred to as ‘Barb.’

Rounding out the crew are Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr., who goes by Alvin or Al, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Dafydd “Dave” Williams.

UPDATE: So a day after launch it has become clear that Tracy Caldwell does indeed have a nickname. You’ll hear astronauts call her “TC” during space-to-ground chats.

So stick that in your back pocket when you’re listening to NASA’s live coverage on NASA TV which, incidentally, you can find along with SPACE.com’s blow-by-blow mission updates by clicking here.

The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), based in Vallejo, California, has investigated that November 7 incident allegedly involving an unidentified aerial object that violated controlled airspace at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

As viewed by airline and airport employees at O’Hare, the object was round and revolving, gray in color and metallic. It hovered at an altitude less than 1,900 feet above ground level.

“The identity of the UAP [unidentified aerial phenomenon] remains unknown,” notes the over 100 page NARCAP report.

The group has called for an official government inquiry into the matter, noting that their analysis suggests that a “significant air safety problem existed at O’Hare International Airport” given the UAP incident. The NARCAP assessment of the sighting states further inquiry should be carried out “to evaluate whether or not current sensing technologies are adequate to insure against a future incident such as this.”

The report in its entirety can be viewed at www.NARCAP.org

Meanwhile, the Chicago airport sighting — and a host of other UFO-related insights — are to take center stage at the Mutual UFO Network’s (MUFON) 38th International UFO Symposium, to be held August 10-12 in Denver, Colorado.

Drop by the event in the travel convenience of choice, be it car, airplane, or UFO - but first teleport yourself via Internet to the MUFON site at: http://mufon.com/symposia.htm