Category Archives: Transhuman News

This animation shows what Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser shuttle would look like launching, docking with the space station and landing on a runway. (Sierra Nevada Corporation)

They had been waiting for this moment for the better part of a decade the announcement from NASA on who would build the next spaceship to take astronauts to the International Space Station.

Sierra Nevada Corp., a more than 3,000-person outfit headquartered in Nevada, was a distinct underdog. Its competitors were Boeing, which traces its space legacy to the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs, and SpaceX, the brash upstart founded by billionaire Elon Musk that became the first private company to resupply the space station.

But the executives at the Sierra Nevada had built something they considered ground-breaking: a sporty space plane called the Dream Chaser that looked like a miniature version of the shuttle and gave them confidence they would win the contract, potentially worth billions of dollars.

It was also a chance to make history by restoring Americas ability to launch its own astronauts from U.S. soil, ending reliance on Russia, to which the United States has paid hundreds of millions of dollars for trips to the space station since the shuttle was retired in 2011.

On the day of the contract announcement, Mark Sirangelo, director of the companys space program, took the call at his desk. It was not good news. Like a death in the family, he would later say.

And so Sierra Nevada entered a realm particular to the world of government contracting: that of the big-time corporate loser.

Ford will survive if someone decides to buy a Chevrolet, and it wont break Dennys if you eat breakfast at IHOP. But the stakes are higher for contractors who put everything on the line in a marketplace dominated by a single customer: the federal government.

The losers locker room is a scene of despair, anger, calls for litigious revenge. There is lost revenue, sometimes layoffs, even bankruptcy. In Sierra Nevadas case, it had a spaceship suddenly in search of a mission and now even more pressure to find a customer to fly it.

As federal procurement spending has been cut dramatically by almost $100 billion between 2010 and last year the stakes have only climbed. Having to absorb defeat with less business to fall back on is driving a wave of industry consolidation, and many contractors are looking to foreign governments and the commercial sector to help offset the losses.

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Grounded: Left behind in the contracting race to restore Americans to space

4 hours ago

A European supply ship will undock from the International Space Station on Saturday as scheduled but be destroyed 12 days earlier than planned because of a power hitch, the European Space Agency (ESA) said Friday.

The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) Georges Lemaitre will separate from the ISS on Saturday at 1344 GMT at the end of its six-month mission, it said.

But the loss of one of its four power sources means that, as a precaution, the ATV will be destroyed on Sunday rather than on February 27 as initially planned.

"It's a minor concern rather than a critical problem," Dominique Siruguet, deputy head of ESA's ATV programme, told AFP.

"The ATV has four solar panels," he said.

"It can operate as normal using three power chains, but even if this were reduced to two, it would still be able to separate from the ISS and perform re-entry satisfactorily."

Re-entry entails sending the vehicle earthward at a steep angle so that it burns up on friction with the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.

The ATV is the fifth and final cargo ship that ESA contracted to provide for the US-led ISS project.

Named after the father of the "Big Bang" theory, the spaceship is designed to navigate by starlight and dock automatically with the manned outpost in space.

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Power hiccup to speed end of Europe's space truck

SpaceX's Dragon cargo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean about 7:44 p.m. EST Tuesday 259 miles southwest of Long Beach, California, with nearly 3,700 pounds of NASA cargo, science and first-of-its-kind technology demonstration samples from the International Space Station.

The Dragon spacecraft will be taken by ship to Long Beach, where some cargo will be removed and returned to NASA. Dragon will then be prepared for a return trip to SpaceX's test facility in McGregor, Texas, for processing.

"The ability to resupply and return this critical research continues to be an invaluable asset for the researchers here on Earth using the International Space Station as their laboratory in orbit," said Kirt Costello, deputy chief scientist for the International Space Station Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at Johnson robotically positioned Dragon safely away from its docking port earlier Tuesday, where it was released for its deorbit maneuver, sending it on its way to a parachute-assisted splashdown.

Among the returned investigations were printed parts and hardware from the first technology demonstration of 3-D printing in space. The 3-D printer demonstration used relatively low-temperature plastic feedstock on the space station. The test phase ended with a printed ratchet wrench made with a design file transmitted from Earth to the printer.

"Experiments like 3-D printing in space demonstrate important capabilities that allow NASA and humanity to proceed farther on the journey to Mars," Costello said.

"Other investigations such as those focused on protein crystal growth take advantage of the unique microgravity environment and offer us new avenues to investigate troubling diseases back on Earth."

Dragon also returned samples, hardware and data from several biology and biotechnology studies performed on the station. The Advancing Membrane Protein Crystallization by Using Microgravity investigation explored the production of high-quality crystals of the cystic fibrosis protein and other closely related proteins.

Because many medically relevant proteins are difficult to crystalize on Earth, researchers attempt to grow them in space to help determine their shape and structure with the hope of improving drug therapies for cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that causes severe damage to the lungs and digestive system.

Samples from the Advanced Plant Experiments 03-1 will help scientists better understand the effects of microgravity on the development of roots and cells on plant seedlings.

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Critical NASA Science Returns to Earth aboard SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft