ULA wants NASA to accelerate commercial crew decision

The head of United Launch Alliance (ULA) would like to see NASA speed up the timetable for downselecting a company or companies to develop commercial crew systems, Florida Today reports. ULA CEO Michael Gass, speaking at a press conference Tuesday marking the joint venture’s fifth anniversary, noted that ULA has agreements with three commercial crew developers—Blue Origin, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada—to provide launch services for their proposed commercial crew vehicles. (Those companies account for three of the four firms with funded second-round Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev-2, awards from NASA; SpaceX, which proposes to use its own Falcon 9 rocket, is the fourth.) While those agreements would appear to be ringing endorsements of ULA’s launch capabilities, Gass said it hinders ULA from taking steps to support any single company, including investing in them.

“Why would you continue to invest when one of three of your investments could only be the potential winner?” Gass asked, according to the report. He added it would be “helpful” if NASA made a decision earlier on the vehicle or vehicles it will support full-fledged development of. Gass was also critical of the limited funding provided for the program in FY 2012, with its original request of $850 million cut by more than half to $406 million. “We talk about wanting to close the gap and not be dependent on foreign sources only, but then we don’t fully fund the capability.”

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Russian Mars Probe Phobos-Grunt remains silent in Earth's Orbit

From Spaceflight Now--

By Stephen Clark

Russia officially remained silent on the status of its beleaguered Phobos-Grunt Mars probe Friday as concerns grew that the toxic fuel-laden spacecraft could crash back to Earth by December.

File photo of Phobos-Grunt during launch preparations. Credit: Roscosmos

Efforts to salvage the Phobos-Grunt mission Wednesday and Thursday were unsuccessful, but the Russian space agency issued no updates on the recovery following an initial statement after launch.

Phobos-Grunt is still circling Earth at an altitude between 128 miles and 210 miles after launching Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

After being shot into orbit by a Zenit rocket, the 29,000-pound spacecraft was supposed to fire its engines twice to accelerate to escape velocity, the speed required to overcome Earth's gravity and head for Mars.

But neither rocket burn occurred, and Russian engineers don't know why. Phobos-Grunt's rocket pack was scheduled to fire over South America, out of range of Russian ground tracking sites.

Russia did not request support from European and U.S. communications stations in the Americas before the mission, but ESA ground sites in South America and Australia have been listening for radio signals from Phobos-Grunt.

Phobos-Grunt was heading to the Martian moon Phobos, where it would touch down, gather a half-pound of samples and return them to Earth in a shielded re-entry capsule.

With no success so far in reviving the $163 million mission, experts are more convinced Phobos-Grunt will crash somewhere on Earth in the next few weeks. For now, Russia plans to keep trying.

Major General Vladimir Uvarov, a former space expert in the Russian military, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper he has lost optimism in Phobos-Grunt's chances for recovery.

"In my opinion, the Phobos-Grunt probe has been lost. This probability is very high. At any rate, it is much higher than the chances for reactivating the probe," Uvarov told the newspaper.

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Do neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light?

From Nature News--By: Geoff BrumfielHas OPERA found super-speedy neutrinos? Photo credit:CERN

Neutrino results challenge cornerstone of modern physics.

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics — that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 metres underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometres away near Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us — the Sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second.

The 1,800-tonne OPERA detector is a complex array of electronics and photographic emulsion plates, but the new result is simple — the neutrinos are arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light allows. "We are shocked," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and OPERA's spokesman.

Breaking the law

The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are travelling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science — that the rules of physics are the same for all observers — would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.

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Expedition 28 crew lands safely in Kazakhstan at midnight (ET)

By Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor--

This still from a camera on the Internaitonal Space Station shows the Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft with three astronauts onboard shortly after undocking from the orbiting lab on Sept. 15, 2011 for a landing on Sept. 16. Credit: NASA TV

A Russian-built Soyuz space capsule landed safely back on Earth late Thursday (Sept. 15), returning an American astronaut and two cosmonauts home after more than five months in space.

The Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft touched down at about 11:59 a.m. EDT (0359 GMT), though it was 9:59 a.m. Friday local time at their landing site on the steppes of Kazakhstan in central Asia.

Russia's Mission Control center in Moscow lost direct communications with the Soyuz during its descent through Earth’s atmosphere, but the glitch apparently did not affect the spacecraft's normal landing operations.

"A bull's eye landing for the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft," said NASA spokeman Rob Navias during the agency's landing commentary. Earlier, Navias said a recovery team aircraft was able to contact the Soyuz crew and confirmed that its crew was doing well.

The spacecraft returned NASA astronaut Ron Garan and cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev back to Earth after 164 days in space. Three other space station residents stayed behind on the orbiting lab to complete their own months-long space trek.

• Gallery: Building the International Space Station

"It's been great sharing space with you," space station commander Mike Fossum of NASA told the departing crew just after the Soyuz undocked. "Safe journey and soft landing, my friends. Godspeed from the International Space Station."

Months-long space mission

Garan and his Russian crewmates launched on April 4 just ahead of the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight by famed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.

The spaceflyers were aboard the station during NASA's final two space shuttle missions — one in May and another in July — which delivered a major astrophysics experiment and vital supplies to the orbiting lab.

Throughout the mission, Garan posted stunning photos of Earth from space on Twitter under the name @Astro_Ron in order to share his experience with the public. Even on his last day in space, he managed to send his 86,000 followers a message.

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Rep. Dana Rohrabacher calls for emergency funds for commercial crew systems

From Spaceref.com--Photo credit: Spaceref.com

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) issued the following statement in reaction to today's failure of the Russian Progress Soyuz cargo rocket:

"Today, Russia's Soyuz launch vehicle failed to boost the Progress M-12M cargo ship into orbit to deliver needed supplies to the International Space Station. This failure should be a cause of grave concern, and a moment of reexamination of America's space strategy," said Rohrabacher.

"Today's Russian rocket failure will interrupt ISS cargo deliveries, and could threaten crew transportation as well. NASA needs to conduct an investigation before another Soyuz spacecraft with new ISS crew members can be launched, and it is unknown how long such an investigation will take."

"I hope this is a minor problem with a quick and simple fix," said Rohrabacher. "But this episode underscores America's need for reliable launch systems of its own to carry cargo and crew into space. The only way to achieve this goal is to place more emphasis on commercial cargo and crew systems currently being developed by American companies.

"We need to get on with the task of building affordable launch systems to meet our nation's needs for access to low Earth orbit, instead of promoting grandiose concepts which keep us vulnerable in the short and medium terms. The most responsible course of action for the United States is to dramatically accelerate the commercial crew systems already under development.

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