WINTER 2015
BACK TO THE MOON
Getting There Faster for Less
ISDC 2015: Space Beyond Borders ‘Tis Not Too Late to Seek a Newer World Tweeting From Space ®
NSS OFFICERS
NSS BOARD OF DIRECTORS
NSS ADVISORS
HUGH DOWNS
Larry Ahearn Dale Amon Al Anzaldua (Region 3) Mark Barthelemy Stephanie Bednarek Brad Blair (Region 4) David Brandt-Erichsen Myrna Coffino (Region 8) Hoyt Davidson Art Dula David Dunlop (Region 6) Anita Gale Peter Garretson Al Globus Daniel Hendrickson Alice M. Hoffman Mark Hopkins Kirby Ikin
David R. Criswell Marianne Dyson Daniel Faber Don M. Flourney Graham Gibbs Jerry Grey Peter Kokh Alan Ladwig Florence Nelson Ian O’Neill Chris Peterson Seth Potter Stan Rosen Stanley Schmidt Rick Tumlinson Lee Valentine James Van Laak Paul Werbos
Chairman, Board of Governors
KEN MONEY President
KIRBY IKIN
Chairman, Board of Directors
MARK HOPKINS
Chair of the Executive Committee
DALE SKRAN
Executive Vice President
BRUCE PITTMAN
Senior VP and Senior Operating Officer
DAVID STUART
Vice President, Chapters
HOYT DAVIDSON
Vice President, Development
RONNIE LAJOIE
Janet Ivey-Duensing Aggie Kobrin (Region 1) Ronnie Lajoie (Region 5) Jeffrey Liss Karen Mermel Ken Money Geoffrey Notkin Bruce Pittman Joe Redfield Dale Skran Michael Snyder (Region 2) John K. Strickland, Jr. David Stuart Paul Werbos (Region 7) Lynne Zielinski
Vice President, Membership
NSS VISION
NSS BOARD OF GOVERNORS
LYNNE ZIELINSKI
The Vision of NSS is people living and working in thriving communities beyond the Earth, and the use of the vast resources of space for the dramatic betterment of humanity.
Hugh Downs, Chair Mark J. Albrecht Buzz Aldrin Eric Anderson Norman R. Augustine Lance Bass Howard Bloom Ben Bova Frank Borman Bruce W. Boxleitner Daniel C. Brandenstein Tom Cruise Hugh Downs K. Eric Drexler
Vice President, Public Affairs
ANITA GALE Secretary
MICHAEL SNYDER
Assistant Secretary (ex officio)
JOE REDFIELD Treasurer
Arthur M. Dula Freeman J. Dyson Edward Finch Don Fuqua Newt Gingrich John H. Glenn Jeffrey Greason Tom Hanks Barbara Marx Hubbard Mark Jannot Edwin R. Jones Lon Levin John S. Lewis James A. Lovell
Marvin Minsky Kenneth Money Nichelle Nichols Scott N. Pace Glenn H. Reynolds John B. Slaughter Harrison Schmitt Michael K. Simpson Anthony Tether Maria Von Braun Gordon Woodcock Simon “Pete” Worden James Wyeth
NATIONAL SPACE SOCIETY MAJOR DONORS NSS appreciates the financial support of all of its members, and would like to recognize the top donors.
BUZZ ALDRIN COUNCIL Matthew Abrams Steve Adamczyk Kennith G. Amour Janet Asimov Jack Bader Majel Barrett-Roddenberry L. Baxter Richard Beers Michael Blum Kenneth Bowdon Christopher Butcher Paul Canolesio Lori Cooke-Marra Michael Cronin Stephen Donaldson Hugh Downs Mike Dudley Lars Easterson Robert Edwards Walter Ellison Edward Ewell Howard Finch Gregg Foote Marc Foulkrod Richard Garriott David Hamlin
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Mark Herrup Daryl Hester David Hindi Robert Hunter John Irwin William Jaeger Dana Johnson Edwin Jones David Peter Kapelanski Don Kimball PJ King Jeffrey Kodosky Ronnie Lajoie J. Michael Lekson Charles Lenzmeier Dean London Raymond Marshall John McQuilkin Mary Morss Elon Musk Florence Nelson Stanley Novak Frederick I. Ordway III John Pascoe Jared Polis Guillermo Rodriguez Greg Rucker
Edwin Sahakian Allan Schiffman Randall Skinner Don Springer Trevor Stone Mike Symond Eric Tilenius Michael Tomkins Jeffrey Walker Alan Wasser Dave Welden Barry Watson Glen Wilson estate Jay Wittner VISIONARY DONORS Edward Apke Jack Bader Keith Barbaria Michael Blum Kenneth Bowdon Randal D. Buss Greg Brand John Brennan Randall Buss Lammot Copeland Roger Davidson
Gerald W. Driggers Stephen Donaldson Michael Downey Vernon Edgar Eugene Ely Bob Everett Amy Freitas Dan Geraci Joseph Gillmer Steven Goddard The Gryphon Fund David Hampton Jim Haislip Mark Herrup Alice Hoffman Adrian Hooper Mark Hopkins Hugh Hotson, Jr. Robert Hunter Mijan F. Huq Dave Jacques Carol Johnson David & H.B. Kaplan Major James Keaton Randy Kelley Dean Kennedy PJ King
J. Michael Lekson Georgette Koopman Evan Malone Alla Malko Donald McClellan George McIntyre Karen R. Mermel Kenneth Money Eugene Montgomery M. Montoure Ronald Murdock James O’Neil Joseph Orr Ed Post John Pritchard James L. Rankin Edwin Sahakian James Skaggs Dale Skran John Swanson Neil Thomas Adrian Tymes George Walden Rich Wall George Whitesides
COUNTDOWN...03 NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) captured photographs and video of auroras from the International Space Station on June 22, 2015. Kelly wrote, “Yesterday’s aurora was an impressive show from 250 miles up. Good morning from the International Space Station! #YearInSpace”
IMAGE CREDIT: © NASA
Flying Over an Aurora
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IMAGE CREDIT © NASA
Stark Beauty of Supersonic Shock Waves
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Using a massive update to a 150-year-old German photography technique, NASA and the United States Air Force recently released what’s called a “schlieren” image of the shock wave from a USAF Test Pilot School T-38C aircraft flying at supersonic speeds over the Mojave Desert. Schlieren imagery, invented in 1864 by German physicist August Toepler, can be used to visualize supersonic flow phenomena with full-scale aircraft in flight.
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Astronaut Kjell Lindgren Corrals the Supply of Fresh Fruit
IMAGE CREDIT: © NASA
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren corrals the supply of fresh fruit that arrived August 25, 2015 on the Kounotori 5 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-5.) Visiting cargo ships often carry a small cache of fresh food for crew members aboard the International Space Station.
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...LIFT OFF!
IMAGE CREDIT: © NASA/AUBREY GEMIGNANI
Soyuz Rocket Boosts Expedition 44 Crew to the International Space Station The Soyuz TMA-17M launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station on July 23, carrying Expedition 44 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren of NASA, and Flight Engineer Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) into orbit to begin their five-month mission on the Station.
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Hubble Finds a Little Gem This color ful bubble is a planetar y nebula called NGC 6818, also known as the Little Gem Nebula. The rich glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across—humongous compared to its tiny central star—but still a little gem on a cosmic scale.
The world witnessed an incredible event on July 14, 2015. It was the day that the majesty of Pluto was put on display, and we had the chance to imagine a new world. Years of research and effort were put in to ensure that this event would be possible. Read about Pluto and the events leading up to this historic mission from New Horizons in “William Tell at Three Billion Miles: New Horizons Visits Pluto,” by Clifford McMurray (page 12). Charles Miller and Sarah Preston’s article on returning to the Moon explores a recent study conducted by NASA entitled, “Evolvable Lunar Architecture That Leverages Public Private Partnerships.” In “Back to the Moon: Getting There Faster for Less” (page 22), you’ll gain an understanding of the barriers at hand, and the strategies and solutions to return. In “’Tis Not Too Late to Seek a Newer World: Finding Planets Outside Our Solar System” (page 28), you can immerse yourself in the research and development by NExSS (The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science). You’ll see how the collaboration from Earth scientists, planetary scientists, heliophysicists and astrophysicists, all supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, work together to discover life outside the Solar System. Imagine a world where space exploration is taught in a personalized fashion, where students can learn at their own speed. This world is in the works with the NSS initiative, Enterprise in Space (EIS). EIS’s goal is to educate future generations to engage and discover space exploration and the possibilities outside the Earth. Lynne F. Zielinski, Fred Becker, and Alice M. Hoffman explain the vision for EIS in “A Breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence and Education Helps Students Reach for the Stars” (page 32). Discover the world of possibilities in this captivating and exciting issue. One thing is for sure, the future to the stars will be an extraordinary ride!
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NSS AFFILIATES
Dear Ad Astra Reader,
IMAGE CREDIT: © ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: JUDY SCHMIDT
LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
Ad Astra!
Canadian Space Society Conrad Foundation Explore Mars Innovate Our World International Space Elevator Consortium Mars Foundation Moon Society NASA Federal Credit Union OpenLuna Foundation SEDS Space Studies Institute SpaceFlight Insider United Societies in Space Yuri’s Night
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Chuck Fisher “Ad Astra,” ISSN 1041-102X, is published quarterly for the National Space Society. The Winter 2015 edition (volume 27, issue 4) of “Ad Astra” was published by Silver Marketing, Inc. at 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 914, Bethesda, MD 20814. No material in this magazine may be reproduced without permission. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the National Space Society, 12100 Sunset Hill Road, Suite 130, Reston, VA 20190
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NSS CORRESPONDENCE BY ALLA MALKO, PHD
NewSpace 2015 Conference
NSS members convene at the NewSpace conference in Silicon Valley, California.
O
n July 16-18, 2015, the Space Frontier Foundation held the annual NewSpace conference in Silicon Valley, California.
This conference about commercial space development was sponsored and supported by many space commercial organizations like Shackleton Energy Company, Hogan Lovells, Heinlein Prize Trust, Elysium Space, Rocket Science, Made in Space, and many others, including NSS.
represented by Tiffany Crawford from the Space Society of Silicon Valley. The young and talented attendees also participated in big celebrations every night. NSS member Gary Barnhard sponsored the party of the conference with a lot of champagne and fun. Join us next year!
During the three days, conference attendees had the opportunity to participate on many different panels and presentations and discuss important commercial space development topics. The conference was full of opportunities to network, exchange information, and gain more business for participants. Cooperation between NSS and the Space Frontier Foundation has greatly increased and more NSS members participated than ever before, including Mark Hopkins, Art Dula, Bruce Pittman, Dale Skran, Al Globus, and more. In the exhibit hall, NSS was
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Marvin Killgore poses with his meteorite and NSS members.
CONTENTS
WINTER 2015
This lunar mining base is close to the Moon’s North pole, with crew habitats at left, power storage batteries and propellant depot at rear, and a lunar ferry taking off in the distance. The site is surrounded by tall solar power arrays, with a rocket propellant production plant in the right foreground and a trencher operating in the left foreground. IMAGE CREDIT: © ANNA NESTEROVA
The largest of Pluto’s moons, Charon, appears to have cliffs that run hundreds of miles across and canyons that are four to six miles deep. Some of the chasms on Charon are larger than the Grand Canyon, and it also has a dark polar region. IMAGE CREDIT: © NASA
FEATURES 12 WILLIAM TELL AT THREE BILLION MILES: NEW HORIZONS VISITS PLUTO
36 TWEETING FROM SPACE By Travis K. Kircher
38 HOW TO CHANGE A LIFE: A LONGSTANDING NSS LEARNING PROGRAM INSPIRES YOUNG MINDS TO SEEK SPACE-FOCUSED FUTURES By Mark Barthelemy
By Clifford R. McMurray
18 ISDC® 2016: SPACE BEYOND BORDERS: THE INSIDE SCOOP By Luisa Fernanda Zambrano-Marin 22 BACK TO THE MOON: GETTING THERE FASTER FOR LESS By Charles Miller and Sarah Preston 28 ‘TIS NOT TOO LATE TOO SEEK A NEWER WORLD: FINDING PLANETS OUTSIDE OUR SOLAR SYSTEM By Lance Frazer 32 A BREAKTHROUGH IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND EDUCATION HELPS STUDENTS REACH FOR THE STARS By Lynne F. Zielinski, Fred J. Becker, and Alice M. Hoffman
40 KIP THORNE, SCIENCE STAR WEIGHS IN ON ISDC® 2015 By Alla Malko, PHD 44 BECAUSE IT WOULD BE FANTASTIC: AN INTERVIEW WITH ERIK WERNQUIST, MASTERMIND BEHIND THE INTERNET’S MOST VIRAL SPACE ANIMATIONS By Mark Barthelemy 47 NSS CHAPTER DISCUSSIONS OF NEW HORIZONS SPARK PUBLIC INTEREST By Claire Stephens McMurray
DEPARTMENTS 7 LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER 8
NSS CORRESPONDENCE
10 NSS ANNOUNCEMENTS 48 LETTER FROM EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE By Mark M. Hopkins
49 SPACE SETTLEMENT COLUMN By Brad Blair 50 BOOKS Reviews from Bart Leahy and Claire S. McMurray 52 CHAPTER LISTINGS 55 SIGNING OFF Winter 2015 AD ASTRA
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NSS ANNOUNCEMENTS BY AL ANZALDUA
ISDC 2015 Virtual Reality Blowout ®
The Oculus Rift experience entertained attendees at ISDC© 2015.
S
omething was very different about one of the NSS exhibition tables during the 2015 International Space Development Conference® May 20-24, 2015: People were lining up day after day, hour after hour—sometimes past midnight! In fact, more than 300 people, most under 40 years old, stood in line patiently to experience the mysterious new offering at this NSS table. As they stood in line, they chatted excitedly among themselves and with curious bystanders. At one end of the exhibit table, bystanders could see a seated person wearing goggles and earphones. Near the seated person was Christian Meza from the Tucson L5 Space Society (TL5SS), periodically speaking into a microphone. At times, he seemed to be coaching the seated person. Others, working in rotations, helped with the NSS exhibit by maintaining order in the line of people, or sometimes by taking Christian’s place coaching the seated person. Often, after the participant finished, by-standers could hear
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an exclamation of wonderment, like “Wow!” “Amazing!” “Cool!” “Awesome!” What caused this joyful commotion? Why were people willing to wait in line for long periods to experience this exhibit? All attention was on a virtual reality (VR) system called Oculus Rift, displaying one of three space simulations for each participant: either a Mars walk, a spaceship ride through the Solar System, or an Apollo launch to the Moon. As entertaining as the Oculus Rift experience is today, this is only the dawn of virtual reality for space enthusiasts. In the near future, these systems will give enthusiasts more and more realistic and entertaining trips into space, without having to move from a chair—or perhaps from a special VR room. Knowing this, members of the TL5SS are already looking into upgrades in equipment and software for ISDC® 2016. Their goal is that by next year in Puerto Rico, they will have an even more amazing experience in store for the conference attendees!
A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427—more commonly known as WR 124—and the nebula M1-67 that surrounds it. Both objects, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, are found in the constellation of Sagittarius and lie 15,000 light-years away.
IMAGE CREDIT: © ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: JUDY SCHMIDT
FEATURES
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This image of Pluto’s largest moon Charon was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft 10 hours before its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 290,000 miles (470,000 kilometers). The huge canyon on the right limb is more than 1,000 miles long—four times longer than the Grand Canyon, and in some places twice as deep. IMAGE © NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE
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WILLIAM TELL AT THREE BILLION MILES:
NEW HORIZONS VISITS PLUTO
BY CLIFFORD R. MCMURRAY
“Pretty good day today. How about yours?” – Tweet from Alan Stern the evening of July 14, 2015, just after reestablishing contact with New Horizons after its flyby of Pluto
At the edge of the Solar System, mountains of ice as tall as the Aleutians are waiting to be climbed. The 11,000-foot peaks of the Norgay Montes, rising out of the plains of Sputnik Planum, had never been seen by human eyes before the New Horizons probe transmitted pictures back to a waiting global audience in mid-July of this year. It was the first time in a generation that humanity got a first close-up look at a new world, and those scenes mark the end of an era. The preliminary reconnaissance of the Solar System is now complete. And this chapter of the history of exploration closes with an exclamation point. “I have to tell you,” said New Horizons (NH) Principal Investigator Alan Stern, “I’m a little biased, but I think the Solar System saved the best for last.”
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If that’s true—and the first close-up pictures of Pluto from NH give good reason to agree—it’s also true that NASA saved the best planetary exploration probe for last. NH packed the most sophisticated set of remote sensing instruments—along with the propulsion, electrical power, communications, navigation, attitude control, and the computers and data recorders needed to support them— into a box the size of a baby grand piano that weighs just 1,054 lb. (The seven instruments weigh 66 lb., less than the camera on the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn). The scientific payload performs its job on 28 watts of electricity, equivalent to two small energy-efficient light bulbs. The navigation challenges for this flight were daunting. With a 248-year orbital period, Pluto hadn’t even completed a third of an orbit from the time of its discovery in 1930 to the time NH roared skyward in January 2006. When Pluto was last at its current position in the sky, the battle between American rebels and British redcoats at Bunker Hill was still eight years in the future. The more of an object’s orbit you can actually observe, the more precisely you can plot its future position in space. NH’s navigation team had a pretty good idea where Pluto was going to be when the probe reached its orbit, but “pretty good” wouldn’t be good enough. They’d have nine and a half years en route to sharpen their estimate. The Atlas V rocket that lifted the half-ton probe off the pad was the biggest rocket available to NASA; with five strap-on solid fuel boosters, the first stage was pushing with 2.45 million pounds of thrust. Combine the smallest possible spacecraft with the largest possible rocket, and the result was the fastest departure from Earth in history: 36,000 mph (16 kilometers per second). NH passed the Moon’s orbit, a trip that took Apollo astronauts three days, in just nine hours. It was traveling the distance from New York to Los Angeles every five minutes—but its target was three billion miles away. It still wasn’t moving fast enough. The spacecraft navigation team aimed the craft for Jupiter, where it could pick up extra velocity with a gravitational assist. On February 28, 2007, after only 13 months (Pioneer 10 took 21 months to cover the same distance, 35 years ago), NH sailed through Jupiter’s gravitational field, picking up an extra 9,000 mph that would shave 3.7 years off the transit time to its ultimate destination. On the spacecraft’s way past the Jovian satellites, the NH scientists didn’t let the opportunity to test and calibrate their instruments go to waste. Among other observations, NH captured time-lapse photography of a volcanic eruption on Io, the first such observation on any body outside of Earth. Now the probe was heading out into the real empty spaces of the outer Solar System. When it passed the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, it was farther from those planets than they were from the Sun. Ground control put the ship into
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spin-stabilized hibernation mode. For most of the next eight years, they’d hear only a weekly beacon tone from the probe to signal all systems were still working. Two or three times a year, NH sent a more detailed systems report to the ground. This was a brand-new mode of operation for space probes, to reduce wear and tear on spacecraft systems while they weren’t needed, lower operations costs, and free up the radios of the Deep Space Network to talk to other probes. On December 6, 2014, with the music of Russell Watson’s “Where My Heart Will Take Me” playing in the control room, the NH team gathered to wake their Sleeping Beauty for the last time. Pluto was still seven months and more than a hundred million miles ahead, but it was time to start observing. By May 2015, it was close enough to send back measurements better than any obtained by Hubble. NH was closing on its target at three quarters of a million miles a day. As Stern said, “It feels like you’ve been walking on an escalator for almost a decade, and then you step onto a supersonic transport.” But just 10 days before the flyby, a computer overload of much the same type that had lent drama to the Apollo 11 Moon landing caused a heart-stopping communications dropout. On July 4, the probe’s primary computer became overloaded when it attempted to load commands for the upcoming flyby while simultaneously compressing the data it had already collected for transmission to Earth. NH went into safe mode; it switched to its backup computer, stopped all observations with its instruments, and lost communication with its controllers for more than an hour. After they reestablished contact, the control team still had to get the primary computer back online if all the goals of the flyby were to be met. “I never heard a single member of the team say a word about a 4th of July commitment,” said Stern. “They just worked…They saved the mission.” With two days of round-the-clock effort, the team saved 57 data files, but the anomaly still cost about 6 percent of the total planned observations. Stern noted, however, that observations at closest approach were more valuable than those taken farther out, so the real loss was only about 1 percent of the planned scientific return. By the day before the encounter, the main computer was back online and all systems were running smoothly, but tension continued to build along with anticipation. To minimize the chance of failure, NH was designed to be as simple and robust as possible. One of the results of that design philosophy is a radio antenna with no moving parts. It can’t swivel to track Earth, so the probe can’t communicate with Earth while its instruments are pointed at other targets. During the hours of closest approach, while its instruments were drinking in pictures and other data by the gigabyte, it would be out of touch with the ground. Within its computer was a set of 162 “autonomy rules” to account for all the
CREDIT: NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this nearsunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon.
contingencies its creators could think of, but NH would be on its own. At four and a half light-hours from home, even if ground control had been able to receive a radio signal telling of a problem, it would have been much too late to send any corrective commands. The last contact with NH took place at 11:17 p.m. EDT on July 13. Its creators settled in for a 22 hour vigil. They wouldn’t hear from their baby again until 13 hours after the flyby, as the probe exited the Pluto system. As the NH team assembled in the control room at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the hours before dawn on July 14, the 70-meter dish of the Deep Space Network was beaming an 80-kilowatt radio signal toward
Pluto. As it passed behind Pluto, the 2.1-meter NH radio dish would be measuring that radio signal, diminished by distance to 1/1,000th of its power at Earth, to determine the pressure and composition of Pluto’s thin atmosphere. At 7:49 a.m., the moment of closest approach (about 7,750 miles), flags were waving in the auditorium nearby, where family and friends of the NH team joined other invited guests and NASA leaders to celebrate. The timing couldn’t have been more auspicious: it was 50 years earlier to the day that Mariner 4 made the first flyby of Mars. American patriots took justifiable pride in remembering that from Mercury to Pluto, every planet in the Solar System had been visited first
NEW HORIZONS ON THE INTERNET Both NASA and the Applied Physics Laboratory have websites devoted to the New Horizons mission. The APL website is: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ The NASA website is: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html Both websites have numerous features and updates on the mission. The APL website includes all pictures from the spacecraft. Even though the sunlight on Pluto is only about 1/1,000 as bright as sunlight on Earth, the human eye is adaptable enough to see quite a bit. To see what sunlight at Noon on Pluto would look like, you can plug in your geographic location to get the exact time in the morning and evening when you can experience “Pluto Time” at the following website: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/ To see where New Horizons or any NASA robotic spacecraft is located and what it’s doing at any given time, visit http://eyes.nasa.gov/.
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by an American spacecraft. “I think this is an example of a great society, and a great nation, and what great nations do,” Stern had said earlier. “It’s a gift to the ages.” Mariner 4 managed to send back just 22 low-resolution black-and-white pictures, but those images forever changed humanity’s view of the Red Planet. The LORRI camera on NH was busy taking 1,500 close-up pictures during the flyby, to say nothing of the thousands of other images, many in color, which had already been taken. Those pictures were sure to hold many surprises of their own.
IMAGE CREDIT: NASA
If, that is, the little spacecraft survived its passage through the Pluto system. Ten years of coasting uphill out of the Sun’s gravity well had slowed the spacecraft a bit, but it was still travelling at about 31,000 mph. At that speed, a hit
Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, died in 1997, but New Horizons is carrying a small portion of his ashes. These ashes will be the first human remains to leave the Solar System.
by even a pebble-sized grain of rock from one of Pluto’s five moons could prove fatal. The best guess was that there was a one in ten thousand chance the probe would be destroyed by dust. Good odds—but what else might go wrong while NH was incommunicado? One thing the NH team didn’t have to worry about any longer: They were going to hit their target. After 10 years and three billion miles, they needed to hit a keyhole 40 by 60 miles in size and 100 seconds in duration in order to have their instruments pointed correctly, taking pictures of Pluto and its moons and not empty space. They now knew they were going to hit that keyhole, just slightly off dead center. The world’s longest shot was going to be a bullseye. For the waiting crowd, time passed swiftly, until the last hour or so. As the time for NH to call home came nearer, there was a restless hush in the auditorium. Then, at 8:52 p.m. on July 14 came the word from Mission Operations Manager
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Alice Bowman, televised from mission control: Contact was reestablished, all systems were operating perfectly, and no autonomy rules had been triggered. Among the cheering crowd, there were no smiles bigger than those of the children of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto. It will take 16 months for NH to download the 44 gigabits (5.5 GB) of data stored on its recorders during the July 7-15 period. With only 12 watts of power, equivalent to three bedroom night lights, its radio transmitter can only trickle the data down to Earth at about 1,000 bits/sec. As team members wait impatiently for the datasets from their particular instruments to download, one project scientist calls this phase of the mission “the Christmas that keeps on giving.” Already there are surprises. Planetary scientists had expected an icy dwarf like Pluto to be too cold for any geologic activity, but the mountains seem young, and the surface has fewer craters than expected; it’s been smoothed over in recent geologic time. Even as it leaves Pluto in its rear-view mirror, NH is setting its sights on another target deeper in the Kuiper Belt. The probe has about 33 kilograms of fuel left, enough to change its velocity by about 100 meters per second. Using data from an intensive search by the Hubble Space telescope, NH project scientists had earlier identified two Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) that would be in reach with that fuel/velocity constraint. Six weeks after the Pluto encounter, they made their choice. In late October and early November, a series of four engine burns will put NH on course toward a January 1, 2019 encounter with a KBO named 2014 MU69. By the time it reaches this typical KBO (at about 30 miles in diameter, it’s less than 1 percent as big as Pluto, and roughly the same size as Pluto’s two smallest moons), NH will be a billion miles farther from the Sun than it was at Pluto. 2014 MU69 is the only KBO it will be able to examine at close range, but before its nuclear battery goes dead sometime in the 2030s it will be able to observe a dozen or so other KBOs at much better resolution than Hubble. In fact, it had already made the first such observation in April, before it even reached Pluto, when it trained its instruments on 1994 JR1. There are no current plans to send another probe to Pluto, and it will probably be a long time before the view transmitted by a robot from the edge of the Solar System is seen directly by human eyes. But go out some night and look toward the constellation of Sagittarius, where Pluto makes its slow way across the sky, too dim for the naked eye to see. It’s been only 112 years from Kitty Hawk to robotic presence in the Kuiper Belt. Those first human explorers may be climbing the peaks of Norgay Montes sooner than anyone now thinks. Clifford R. McMurray is a former executive vice president of the National Space Society.
PLUTO
Best Hubble Picture 2110
New Horizons July 7, 2015
The best view of Pluto from the Hubble Space telescope is compared here with one taken by New Horizons a week before its closest approach.
A TALE OF TWO SPACECRAFT The 1964 Mars flyby of Mariner IV and the Pluto flyby of New Horizons are bookends to the first half-century of Solar System exploration. Comparison of the two missions reveals how much technology has advanced in that time. MARINER IV
NEW HORIZONS
Launch Vehicle/Upper Stage
Atlas LV-3/Agena D
Atlas V 551/STAR-48
Liftoff Thrust
533,000 lb.
2,452,000 lb.
Time en route to flyby
7.6 months
9.5 years
Weight
575 lb.
1,054 lb.
Power
4 Solar Panels (310 Watts)
RTG (245 Watts)
Magnetic tape recorder (634KB capacity)
2 solid state recorders (8 GB each)
Data transmission speed
8.3 to 33.3 bits/sec
about 1-2,000 bits/sec
Closest approach distance
6,118 mi.
7,750 mi.
Spacecraft active lifetime
3.1 years
25-30 years (estimate)
Cost
$83M ($638M adjusted for inflation) $720M
Data Storage
Mariner IV
New Horizons
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ISDC
®
2016
SPACE BEYOND BORDERS: THE INSIDE SCOOP
BY LUISA FERNANDA ZAMBRANO-MARIN
Artwork by Alex Brady depicting a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon.
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ISDC ® 2016: Space Beyond Borders celebrates the increasingly collaborative, multinational, multidisciplinary, and interconnected nature of space development in the 21st century. ISDC ® 2016 is where space leaders, astronauts, enthusiasts, and the next generations of young students and professionals contribute their knowledge, research, thoughts, and ideas on space development; its scientific, economic, technical, and social challenges; and its potential for the future of mankind. A Letter From the Conference Chair These are exciting times! In the last few years, the space industry has become increasingly more adept at educating the public on the benefits and opportunities the emerging space economy can bring to science, technology, and humanity. The International Space Development Conference® (ISDC®) is the preeminent gathering place for everyone around the world who seeks to accelerate our pursuits beyond planet Earth. The conference brings together aerospace industry leaders, startups, space exploration pioneers, academic thought leaders, and space supporters young and old—all united by a common goal to explore and develop space for the benefit of humankind. We will host various sessions and workshops focused in multiple areas of space development: Moon and Mars exploration and settlement, deep space exploration, innovative technology, science fiction’s influence in today’s technology, collaboration in space, planetary sciences, living in space, space-based solar power, space debris, space law and policy, and much more. The speakers and panelists have key roles in the industry, and our interactive discussions during panel sessions will allow you to ask the right questions. We would like to recognize the support from the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and the Puerto Rico Aerospace Technology Consortium, as well as the Puerto Rico Construction Cluster and the Arecibo Observatory. On behalf of our organizing team, we look forward to welcoming you to Puerto Rico May 18-22, 2016. Ad Astra! - Luisa Fernanda Zambrano-Marin, Conference Chair, ISDC ® 2016 - Jose Molina, Conference Co-Chair, ISDC ® 2016
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Conference Overview
Sponsorships:
ISDC ® 2016 has plenary sessions, keynote speakers, multidisciplinar y special topic breakout tracks, an exhibit hall, NASA/NSS Space Settlement Design Contest, book signing, and much more for executives, managers, i n d u s t r y p rof e s s i o n a l s, e n t r e p r e n e u r s, yo u n g professionals and students, and space leaders and space enthusiasts.
ISDC® 2016 provides an excellent marketing opportunity for your company or organization through our sponsorship program. We have multiple levels of conference sponsorships and specific Gala sponsorships, and for the first time we will offer young professional sponsorships. Whether you would like an ad in the program book or you want all of the perks that come with being the official presenting sponsor for the ISDC® 2016 Conference or the Saturday Night Gala, there is something for every budget.
Thought leaders in the space industry will share about past, current, and upcoming innovations. Keynote speakers will include (tentative list, for updates visit http://isdc.nss.org/2016): • George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic and The Spaceship Company
• Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut, Explorer, Rocket Scientist
• Rick Tumlinson, Chairman of the Board of Deep Space Industries • Jim Keravala, COO and Co-Founder of Shackleton Energy Company Inc.
About the location: Puer to Rico might be a tropical island in the Caribbean, but it’s also a U.S. Commonwealth. All flights from the U.S. to Puerto Rico are domestic. That means you can travel without a passport if you’re a U.S. citizen, and your flight is considered domestic. Furthermore, the currency in Puerto Rico is the U.S. dollar.
Special Topic Breakouts will include: *Near Earth • Suborbital
• Orbital Debris Mitigation
• Cube-Sat Development
• ISS and Other Orbital Facilities
• Space Solar Power
• Lunar COTS
• Evolvable Lunar Architecture
IMAGE CREDIT: NASA
*CIS Lunar
* Living in Space *Mars
Puerto Rico imaged from International Space Station.
• Settlement
• Remote Exploration
*Asteroids and Beyond
• Planetary Defense
• Asteroid Survey and Mining
• Space Law & Policy
• SETI *Next Generation
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• Space Settlement Design
• SunSat Design
• Space Engagement
• Preparing a Global Workforce for Space Development
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Q and A with organizers: 1. What is ISDC ® ? ISDC® is the annual event of the National Space Society. It is held once a year around the world for space advocates to convene and discuss the space industry. 2. How is ISDC ® different from other space conferences? Most space conferences are concentrated on a specific topic, mainly commercial space, research, and reports. ISDC ® is much bigger, covers more topics, and is focused on settlement of space.
old paradigm and making space business far more accessible, with lower cost to the government. At ISDC ®, NSS members and chapters get to present their activities and hold town hall meetings to develop the messages we want to lobby for in Congress and at other meetings about space policy.
Sheraton Hotel and Casino, Puerto Rico
3. What are the three biggest accomplishments of ISDC ® ? 1.
We have had a steady attendance for more than 30 years! NSS has more than 8,000 full members and more than 1,500 associate members. At ISDC® we are able to recognize those members who have done great things for space during the year.
2.
We are the world’s leading conference on spacebased solar power. We also have a strong focus on commercial space, including asteroids and of course space settlement.
It is no longer enough to only watch space development in the movies and media; now we can build it! For the first time in human history we have the technology, the resources, and the people willing to invest to make space development happen. Join us May 18-22, 2016 in San Juan, Puerto Rico for ISDC ® 2016. For more information visit http://isdc.nss. org/2016. Register today and see space beyond borders!
3. We par tner with NASA Ames to host the p r e s e n t a t i o n s a n d a w a r d s f o r t h e i r Space Set tlement Design contest, where s t u d e n t s i n 7t h -12 t h g r a d e d e s i g n a space settlement. The entries are judged by s c i e n t i s t s a n d a d m i n i s t r a to r s a t N A S A and we usually get around 400 students who present their work.
4. How has NSS helped space industry? According to Mark Hopkins, “The foundation of our strategic plan for moving toward our main goals is to spread certain key ideas. Ideas are very powerful over the long run... Since 1975 we started pushing some concepts that were considered to be really far out and now they are considered mainstream. Among those is the use of lunar and asteroid resources, the importance of energy from space, and commercial space. Just look at the record number of bills coming up on the [Congressional] floor relating to space! It is unprecedented.”
5. Why should I come to ISDC ® 2016? It is a very exciting time for space. The NASA COTS program is one demonstration of the paradigm shift from primarily government into more of a public-private funding model. Programs like that are changing the
Artwork by Stanley Von Medvey depicting a final approach to a commercial spaceport in LEO.
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BACK TO T GETTING THERE FASTER FOR LESS BY CHARLES MILLER AND SARAH PRESTON
Alliance for Space Development (ASD): Lunar Polar Mining Base with solar power system and propellant production plant. IMAGE CREDIT: © ANNA NESTEROVA
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THE MOON
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Humans have not traveled beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) since the end of the Apollo program in 1972, but not for a lack of trying. We have made three major attempts since Apollo—the Apollo Space Task Group, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), and the Constellation program. All these initiatives collapsed from a lack of affordability. SEI’s estimated cost was more than $900 billion (FY15) to send humans to the Moon and Mars. The Constellation program cost more than $120 billion (FY15) to place the next human footstep on the surface of the Moon. These attempts provide clear, unequivocal evidence that American taxpayers are not willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to send humans to the Moon and Mars. Fortunately, there is another way. NASA recently funded a study titled “Evolvable Lunar Architecture That Leverages Public-Private-Partnerships” that assessed a new strategy. The study demonstrates that humans can establish a permanent industrial base on the Moon within NASA’s existing budget. The report was announced to international media by the NSS and the Space Frontier Foundation on July 20, 2015 at the National Press Club. It provides evidence disproving the widely held opinion that an American-led human return to the Moon needs to cost taxpayers $100 billion or more. NASA funded NexGen Space LLC, which assembled a team of former NASA executives and engineers to assess the economic and technical viability of an “Evolvable Lunar Architecture” (ELA) that leverages commercial capabilities that are existing or likely to emerge in the near term. The ELA
IMAGE CREDIT © PAT RAWLINGS
he National Space Society’s two predecessor organizations—the National Space Institute and the L5 Society—were formed in the aftermath of Apollo’s success, when anything was possible. Since that time, a question has haunted the members and leaders of the National Space Society. If we could put a man on the Moon in 1969, why can’t we do so in 2015?
Artist’s comception of lunar mining, after 2020. Many believe that the resource rich Moon may one day sustain human efforts to remain in space indefinitely.
assumes the use of public-private partnerships that NASA has recently proven with its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transporation Services), ISS Commercial Resupply, and Commercial Crew programs. The ELA is a plan to incorporate the Moon into the Earth’s economic sphere of influence. The immediate, most valuable economic resource on the Moon is water or hydrogen discovered in the cold traps of the lunar poles. Scientists estimate the Moon may have 10 billion cubic meters of water at the poles, useable for creating liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen (LH2) propellant. A commercial industrial lunar base could extract water from the regolith, convert the water to propellant, and then transport the propellant to a depot in lunar orbit. The ELA strategic goal is to develop a commercially owned and operated lunar mining base from which NASA and others could purchase propellant to enable low-cost deep space missions to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System. The study results were independently reviewed by a team of nearly two dozen former NASA executives, led by Joe Rothenberg, former head of NASA human spaceflight. NexGen Space selected a specific architecture and destination to examine whether public-private-partnerships are technically feasible for deep space human spaceflight, and how much they would cost. The same COTSlike partnership might work for other architectures and destinations…assuming the same step-by-step commercialfriendly strategic principles are observed.
IMAGE CREDIT © NASA
Study Conclusions
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS)
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The NASA-funded study concludes that it is technically feasible for humans to return to the surface of the Moon within five to seven years after industry has the authority to proceed. For a total estimated cost of $10 billion (+/- 30%) America could stimulate two independent commercial lunar transportation service providers, such as SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance. We could then incrementally evolve
IMAGE CREDIT © ANNA NESTEROVA
Alliance for Space Development (ASD): Propellant depot fueling a Mars transit vechicle (background) & crewed waystation at Earth-Moon LaGrange Point.
this capability—staying within NASA’s existing human spaceflight budget—to a permanently crewed lunar base and mining facility that could produce the 200 metric tons of propellant per year needed by NASA for human missions to Mars. The estimated cost of this permanently crewed industrial base on the Moon is $40 billion (+/- 30%). The ELA concept is to develop a large, fully reusable lunar lander that uses the propellant produced on the Moon (to minimize the launch requirements from Earth) to transport 200 metric tons of propellant per year to a propellant depot located at the Earth-Moon L2 region. This is the amount of fuel NASA needs to transport its standard Mars Transfer Vehicle (MTV) to Mars and to return it to Earth once every 26 months. One of the study’s implications is that much more affordable and realistic human trips to Mars are feasible. Instead of throwing away the MTV after every trip, which is extremely expensive and wasteful, the MTV would return the Mars astronauts to the Earth-Moon L2 depot to be reused. The astronauts returning from Mars would exit the MTV at the L2 gateway and return to Earth. At the L2 gateway, the MTV would be refueled, filled with food and water, repaired as needed, and be boarded by astronauts for the next trip to Mars. The result would be a reusable Mars spaceship, championed by Buzz Aldrin and others for its huge cost
savings for human trips to Mars. One of the interesting results of this strategy is that it could end the fight between the Moon and Mars. NASA could stay focused on Mars as industry would operate the lunar base. Lunar industry and its advocates would become the biggest proponents of NASA going to Mars as NASA’s Mars program would be a major customer of the commercially operated lunar base. We believe this strategy offers the possibility of a peace treaty, and future cooperation, between Moon and Mars advocates.
A Step-by-Step “Evolvable” Lunar Plan The ELA plan has three incremental step-by-step phases, and maximizes the use of commercial technologies that either exist or are in development. In phase one, three parallel independent activities will begin. First, commercial robotic prospectors will be sent to many different lunar polar sites to scout for the best place to construct a lunar base that produces propellant. Proving that water is easily and economically accessible near the surface is a top priority. In parallel, at least two private companies will begin development of the systems needed to return humans to the Moon. The study assumes incremental upgrades to crew capsules (Boeing CST-100 Starliner and the SpaceX Crewed Dragon) and the development of lunar landers by SpaceX
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In phase two, with the advent of LEO propellant storage and transfer, the same systems used to transport humans and cargo to the lunar equator can now transport humans to the lunar poles to begin work on the lunar mining facility. In parallel, we will accelerate the work to develop the technologies and systems: A) to convert lunar ice into propellant, B) to store and transfer LOX and LH2 propellants, and C) to create a large reusable lunar lander that uses the propellant. We transition to phase 3 when the propellant production, propellant storage, and large reusable lunar lander have become operational. The existence of the reusable lunar lander that uses lunar propellant produces a tremendous improvement in the economics of the lunar base. Up to
IMAGE CREDIT © NASA
and ULA. ELA will use launch systems that either exist today, or that are already in development, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and ULA’s Vulcan. Using this approach, we can develop two independent and competing systems, with standardized rendezvous and docking systems, which can each land humans on the Moon. This kind of dissimilar redundancy is critical to safe, reliable and robust operation of the lunar base—as demonstrated by the dissimilar redundancy of both crew and cargo systems to the ISS. Both of these systems can be commercially developed for a total estimated cost of $10 billion. Finally, in phase one, we will develop the technologies needed for LEO propellant storage and transfer, demonstration of which is the key transition point to phase two. This image shows a single-stage, dual thrust-axis lunar lander with “ut-rigger” hypergolic propellant tanks.
this point, in phases 1 and 2, we can only afford “sorties” to the Moon within NASA’s existing budget. After the large reusable lunar lander becomes operational, we can afford a permanently crewed outpost of four civilian astronauts. This reusable lunar lander will deliver 200 metric tons of lunar propellant to the L2 waystation per year, and also transport large habitation modules, such as the Bigelow 330, and many other pieces of critical equipment to the surface of the Moon. At this point, we will have established a gateway to the entire Solar System. With an operational Solar System Gateway, it will be much more affordable to send humans to Mars, and much larger robotic spacecraft almost anywhere in the Solar System. Further, the marginal cost of a private week-long trip to the surface of the Moon will be $200 million or less. While the study does not evaluate the size of the commercial market, there are a hundred or more countries that can afford, and probably want, to send their first citizen to the Moon. Further, there are more than a thousand billionaires on planet Earth who could afford to take a trip to the Moon. At this point, it is possible the lunar base could become economically self-supporting, and we could be on the path for the permanent human settlement of the Moon.
IMAGE CREDIT © NASA
Lowering Costs is the Key
Artist’s concept of a proposed United Launch Alliance propellant depot with sun shields.
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Dream as we may, many forget there are always costs to consider. The unique part of the ELA is using a new strategy to achieve affordability. Public-private partnerships that leverage multiple customers, combined with competition, are the key to reducing costs. Competition forces companies such as ULA and SpaceX to constantly innovate and watch the bottom line, and provide a much more efficient alternative to government-owned infrastructure in space. The Saturn V cost $46,000 per kilogram to LEO, and the
IMAGE CREDIT © NASA
A concept image shows the Ares I crew launch vehicle, left, and Ares V cargo launch vehicle. Ares I will carry the Orion crew exploration vehicle to space. Ares V will serve as the agency’s primary vehicle for delivery of large-scale hardware to space.
Space Shuttle cost $60,000 per kilogram delivered to LEO when you account for development and fixed costs. But SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is $4,750 per kilogram placed into LEO when fully priced. We now have a proven formula for success. The COTS program, and the similar EELV program before it, both used funded Space Act Agreements. Together, they have produced four successful American launch systems in a row (Delta IV, Atlas V, Falcon 9, and Antares). The ELA would use the same proven method to produce the same costlowering results. Industry will own the launch vehicles, the L2 depot, and all the industrial infrastructure on the lunar base. NASA will serve as a customer, buying commerciallyprovided propellant at the L2 gateway for its own missions.
Conclusion The ELA represents a new strategic approach by leveraging public-private partnerships. This NASA-funded study shows it is a more affordable and sustainable way to achieve human expansion into space, and to enable the large-scale human settlement of the Solar System. After more than four decades of repeated failure of the big government paradigm
of sending humans to deep space, it is time to try something different. A copy of the fully study report is available at http://www.nss. org/docs/EvolvableLunarArchitecture.pdf. Charles Miller is the president of NexGen Space, LLC, and the principal investigator of the ELA study. Miller is the co-founder of Nanoracks, and former NASA senior advisor for commercial space. He is a former administrator of the National Space Society, and started his first chapter of the L5 Society in 1983. Sarah Preston is the director of communications for the Alliance for Space Development, and a senior at American University. She will graduate in May 2016, and is looking forward to a long and successful career in the commercial space industry.
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‘TIS NOT TOO LATE TO SEEK A NEWER WORLD
Finding Planets Outside Our Solar System BY LANCE FRAZER
The search for life beyond our Solar System requires unprecedented cooperation across scientific disciplines. IMAGE CREDIT: © NASA
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quipped with his five senses,” astronomer Edwin Hubble once said, “man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.” NASA’s NExSS project is the latest effort to broaden the scope and reach of that adventure. NExSS, or “The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science,” is the gathering of scientists from the four science communities supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Earth scientists will bring their study and understanding of the complex inter-relationships that drive our home planet; planetary scientists bring their understanding of the other worlds in the Solar System, how they began and evolved; heliophysicists will focus on how the Sun interacts with orbiting planets, and astrophysicists will provide information on exoplanets, their host stars, and and their complex inter-relationship. The 16 teams are being drawn from 10 universities and two private research entities, and the goal, according to NASA, is to better understand how biology interacts with the atmosphere, geology, oceans, and interior of a planet, and how these interactions are affected by the host star.
NExSS: What Are We Missing? According to NASA Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Dr. Mary Voytek, it began when conversation turned toward a deeper understanding of what was needed to look for life on other planets. “We came to realize we still had a very limited understanding of what makes a planet habitable,” she says. “Our only ideas were things like it had to be in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, and it had to have a similar mass to Earth, but that was about it. Just brute force factors. We soon realized we had a great number of disparate scientific communities who could contribute a great deal to this search, none of whom were talking with any of the other groups.” “The concept of NExSS revolves around the question of ‘what are we missing?’ All of the different research groups have developed their own concepts of what makes something habitable, but it’s a very ‘stonepiped’ arrangement. Two groups thought they owned the research on this subject—astrophysicists and astronomers—but the truth is, regarding habitability, we were naïve and uninformed. Even my own group (astrobiology) has only begun to realize how complex a concept habitability is. We all tend to work within our own community and not communicate outside of that community.” Dr. Tony Del Genio, adjunct professor of applied physics, mathematics, and earth and environmental science at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and head
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“Twenty years ago, we knew of no exoplanets around stars like ours,” he says. “For most of the two decades since then, exoplanet science has been the province of astronomers, who used mostly indirect methods to find planets. All of the early planets were very big—gas giants—which were interesting and exciting, but not fitting to our concepts of what defines ‘habitable.’ Over the past few years, people have begun to think about how a planet, once detectable, could be habitable, and now we’re finding planets closer to the size of Earth. The game has changed. We still need astronomers, but we need more of them. We need to pull together all of the scientific communities within NASA. Each of these disciplines has it’s own unique expertise, and each has its own unique way of looking at the question we all want to answer: Are we alone in the Universe?” Dr. Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planet Laboratory, describes NExSS as a “research network, where different disciplines can approach the question from different perspectives, generating a ‘system science’ approach. And not just what life ‘looks like,’ but also what hinders life.” “My discipline,” says Voytek, “is to try and poke at what we know about life on Earth—our ‘n of 1’—and see where what we know takes us. We know, for example, that life as we understand it requires liquid water, and we know that liquid water exists within a certain range of temperatures and pressures. Our study of extremophiles on Earth has helped expand our understanding of life and its boundaries, but the laws of chemistry and physics tell us that there is still a point where life is not possible. And you can’t have life if you don’t have energy, but what we’ve learned has shown us there are many different ways to acquire energy. “Now if we’re just looking for humanoids, that narrows our boundaries considerably. But we also know that microbial life has very different boundaries. It’s difficult to move science forward if you’re not working in an interdisciplinary setting. Any phenomenon you observe is unlikely to stem from only one cause.” Take the presence of oxygen in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, says Del Genio. “If you’re looking for signs of life, you have to ask, ‘What are the gases that life puts into an atmosphere?’ Oxygen and ozone would be an exciting find. However, while it could be a biosignature, there are also several ways to produce oxygen without life. So then you have to ask what else you’d need to find, what would be the smoking gun? One promising new idea is to look at the fact that atmospheres can be either oxidizing or reducing.” An oxidizing atmosphere, he explains, might have a lot of carbon, which could react to form carbon dioxide, or an
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abundance of hydrogen, which could form methane. “The thing is,” he says, “you look for an atmosphere whose chemical composition is out of equilibrium with what you’d expect. The right kind of disequilibrium—say the simultaneous presence of oxygen and methane—could be interpreted as a sign of life.”
IMAGE CREDIT © ESA–C. CARREAU
of the team from the Institute, talks about NExSS with the undisguised glee of a kid in a candy store after hours.
The Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission will identify and study thousands of exoplanetary systems, with an emphasis on discovering and characterizing Earth-sized planets and super-Earths. It will also investigate seismic activity in stars, enabling a precise characterization of the host sun of each planet discovered, including its mass, radius, and age.
In an interview in Nature/News (April 17, 2015; “Climate Scientists Join Search for Alien Earths,” Jeff Tolleson), Del Genio said of exoplanets, “We have to start thinking about these things as more than planetary objects. All of a sudden, this has become a topic not just for astronomers, but for planetary scientists and now climate scientists.”
Evolution on Earth as a Guide “With billions of stars and planets out there,” Voytek feels, “it’s only logical that, at some point, we’ll find a planet that looks like Earth at a different point in its evolution.” By forming this interdisciplinary group of researchers, Meadows feels that “each discipline can learn from the other, and thus begin to see a planet, whether Earth or a planet 1,400 light years away—as a complex process. You can only go so far by looking at one aspect of the question. You can’t address the huge question of life elsewhere without an interdisciplinary approach, and this is going to help us push on into new regions of science.” “Our planet was able to support life millions of years ago; things like sulfur bacteria, that resembled nothing like life on Earth today, under conditions like nothing on Earth today,” she continues. “But if we study the environment of Earth through time, and find an exoplanet with an atmosphere like the one historical records tell us existed during this time in Earth’s history, then we can see an environment that might bear further study.”
With SETI, success might be a bit easier to define: All you need is for someone out there to pick up the phone in response to messages from Earth, or look into the source of those odd radio signals. But Voytek points out it closes a lot of windows if we rely on something that has only been available for a very small time on this planet. We’re leaving the search for humanoids to SETI, says Meadows with a chuckle. “We’re looking for a global change in the environment due to life dominated by bacteria. They’re looking for little green men. We’re looking for little green pond scum.” She has a point, says Del Genio, “But think of it. If we could find something that we could interpret as ‘little green pond scum,’ think what a gigantic leap forward that would be. Maybe not as exciting as little green men, but still …” The last five to six years have brought an explosion in the discovery of exoplanets, says Del Genio, “to the point where we are now able to image large exoplanets from the ground. I remember meeting Clyde Tombaugh in the early 1980s. Man, what a rush, to meet someone who had actually discovered a planet. At that time, I couldn’t imagine the discovery of another planet, but now, not that many years later, we’re discovering planets all over the place.”
NExSS: Will NASA Pay the Bills? So now NASA has funded NExSS, bringing together 16 different groups from very different disciplines, all with the ultimate goal of changing the balance in what Meadows calls a “probability game.” While the Holy Grail is finding life on another planet, the more immediate goal is to whittle the possibilities down to those with the best odds of success in order to take the best advantage of funding opportunities. One question arises: What will success actually look like? “We’ll never be able to say for sure, at least not at this stage of our development, unless it’s something with which we can actually communicate,” says Del Genio. “You’ll hear a lot of careful language; you know, ‘it’s an interesting planet,’ ‘it shows promising signs of life,’ that sort of thing. And then there will be other scientists who’ll be skeptical, who’ll say ‘well, can’t there be other causes’ for whatever phenomena we’ve observed. And that’s fine. Science is only as good as our present level of understanding, and it’s always subject to further testing and revision.
“Look at our technology now vs. 20 years ago, and think about where we might be 20 years from now. Things have progressed so rapidly that I don’t think any of us could have predicted where we’d be today, let alone where we will be 20 years from now. We’re at a moment in time when exoplanet science has the potential to grow with a rapidity we can’t begin to imagine, and we need a different strategy from that of the past. “We’re only at the start of trying to imagine a universe of different scenarios, and I think NExSS is a tremendous thing to be involved in. It’s not just an astronomy problem anymore. Now we have four different disciplines working together for the first time. NExSS is a lab experiment, and the onus is on us to make it work.” A laudable goal, but if the last 50 years of the space program have proven anything, it’s that funding for NASA programs is far from a certainty. “Look,” says Del Genio. “First and foremost, it comes down to the American people. Everything we do depends upon the interest and support of the American people. If we do a good job and move the field along, the people will be behind us. The future question of funding depends on who’s in the White House and in control of Congress, as well as what’s going on in the country. If we can convince the people this is a good idea we’re working on, they’ll push their representatives to get behind us as well.” The NExSS program is only a few months old, he says, and he believes he’s already seen signs of that interest and excitement. “We were at Awesome Con back in May,” he remembers. “And I was part of a panel set for early Saturday morning that was going to talk about exoplanets and the search for life. Early morning on a Saturday. You know, I figured, after a wild Friday night, nobody’d be there, but we had a standing room only crowd that was really into it. That felt good. “So right now, NExSS is like the rookie in spring training that has to impress the team so that they’ll bring him north for opening day. And I think, if we make the kind of progress that a group like this is capable of, we’ll be there on opening day.” Lance Frazer is a Northern California writer specializing in science, technology, nature, and the environment.
The “Goldilocks zone” The “Goldilocks zone” is a somewhat fanciful term used to describe the zone around a star that is not too far away (and thus too cold to support life), or too close (and thus too hot), but “just right.” Think Mars, Venus, and Earth. IMAGE CREDIT © PETIGURA/UC BERKELEY, HOWARD/UH-MANOA, MARCY/UC BERKELEY.
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A BREAKTHROUGH IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND EDUCATION HELPS STUDENTS REACH FOR THE STARS
BY LYNNE F. ZIELINSKI, FRED J. BECKER, AND ALICE M. HOFFMAN
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magine a future where children everywhere have a personal tutor in the palm of their hands—allowing them to reach for the stars. Imagine students using the internet to interact with their experiments onboard an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Science fiction? Or science fact? It could become a reality. Now, to set in motion a tangible paradigm shift that supports these educational visions, comes the next bold project of the National Space Society: an exciting initiative known as Enterprise In Space™ (EIS). EIS, founded by Shawn Case, aims to bring the excitement of space exploration to everyone, with the goal to design, engineer, build, launch, orbit, recover, tour, and exhibit a spacecraft named NSS Enterprise. With education as its primary focus, the spacecraft will carry more than 100 subsidized student experiments. Through the NSS Enterprise orbiter, EIS pays homage to NewSpace enterprises and entrepreneurs, space and science fiction visionaries, and all the pioneering ships, both real and imagined, bearing the name Enterprise, as it engages and inspires the next generation of explorers.
An important mission of the NSS Enterprise is to motivate students everywhere to reach for the stars and to give them the tools they need to get there. To accomplish this, a demonstration of a breakthrough cognitive computing technology, an artificial intelligence program (AI) with a synthetic personality called ‘Ali,’ will inspire tens of thousands of students to learn independently and at their own pace. Ali is being developed by EIS partner Value Spring Technology, and will run on cloud services atop the IBM Watson stack. Ali will converse with students and teachers in natural language, encourage individualized learning, and help identify learning barriers. The EIS mission will serve as a highly visible demonstration of this breakthrough educational technology. This innovative learning tool provides the first step toward making Ali available to every student around the world, thus turning the science fiction future seen in Star Trek™ into a reality. With the help of its members’ support of this project, NSS is leading the way to a better future.
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The Need: Why an AI Tutor? Students learn at different rates and have different learning styles. An artificial intelligence program like Ali can help teachers recognize these differences. This is important because the availability of quality teachers and schooling varies widely in the United States and around the world. Some students have access to the very best schools, teachers, and materials. This allows them to be highly successful, envision their goals, see a path to achieve their goals, and fulfill their potential.
IMAGE CREDIT © HAROON OQAB
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the disadvantaged, remote, orphaned, working children, or children living in poverty that have few educational opportunities. Still others live in areas that are so war torn (gangs or actual political turmoil) or far from civilization that it is difficult for children to imagine a way forward, much less a way to succeed academically. Some live in areas where religious or moral beliefs do not allow children (especially girls) to attend school. In the middle are children who receive an adequate but limited education; they are often seeking more knowledge than local resources provide.
Each student can use Ali to learn at their won pace, any place, in their own style, exploring knowledge at will!
Reaching the World All children can benefit from an exciting vision of humanity’s future in space and a personal tutor who knows them and how they learn best. A technology like Ali can be the future of education for all, blending classroom and individual learning with an AI tutor in the most exciting frontier known to humanity: space. Space is a proven igniter for the imaginations of students. Ali will mentor each student, providing individualized teaching, learning their strengths, assessing their mastery, and answering their questions. Ali can benefit teachers as well, working in tandem with them during the project, reporting their student’s progress toward concept mastery, and identifying the student’s strengths and weaknesses. The teachers can then take the necessary measures to redirect their students toward success. EIS wants to use space as the catalyst to place the highest quality education into the hands of all students, accelerating their learning, and enriching their world.
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EIS and Ali can provide some of the educational tools needed now and even more in the future. As of July 2015, 3G and 4G wireless access is available in 176 countries, and the majority of their citizens have a device that allows them to access the internet. By 2020, initiatives like OneWeb™ may allow the majority of people on Earth to have this kind of access. Similarly, IBM alone currently has 45 cloud computing centers around the world, and people everywhere (except central Africa and the polar regions of other continents) are within 1,000 miles of at least one of these centers. IBM and other companies are committed to growing their capabilities to meet the demand. To be ready to serve the language needs of a global population, these companies are also developing natural language tools to expand capabilities beyond the currently served 2.3 billion people speaking English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. Ali could be a personal tutor to a third of the world’s seven billion people now, and be able to reach nearly every student on Earth by approximately 2020.*
How Ali Makes EIS Education Work The EIS team is developing educational curricula for students related to future endeavors in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). They are incorporating Ali in order to assist each student’s learning process. Using a natural language Socratic dialog and visual examples, Ali will function as a mentor, engaging students one-on-one with lessons that stimulate critical thinking. She will have a friendly personality, one that actively seeks to help students learn independently. She has access to the web of human knowledge, never tires of explaining, and helps students connect science and technology to the history of ideas, art, and literature. Ali enables each student to go beyond any curriculum because she is attuned to each individual’s thinking. The NSS Enterprise payload of 100+ experiments represents the best of three yearly worldwide student design competitions open to students from kindergarten to the post-graduate level. The EIS team is developing partnerships with universities to provide mentoring opportunities and high level, multi-year competitions in the fields of space solar power, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, astronomy, and medical research. Students can also participate in one of the many non-experiment activities or collaborate in spacerelated projects with other students around the world. EIS will bring students together to create the first generation of global space collaborators. For humanity to thrive, live, and work in space, people with diverse skills will be needed from all walks of life, and they will need STEAM skills to be hired by the space-related companies of today or to form their own companies in the future. Those who participate in the EIS education program
will learn many of those diverse skills. They will learn about the scientific method, experimental design, and data analysis. They will gain research, writing, and presentation skills—all with the help of Ali. Designing an orbital experiment; witnessing integration, launch and recovery; and engaging with an international team to study its results are lifechanging opportunities for any student. Ali will coach the student teams from the development of the flight experiment proposal through the orbiter integration process. During the orbital mission, Ali will provide the voice and mind of the NSS Enterprise and communicate between students and their experiments aboard the spacecraft, just like the computers in the Star Trek™ series did with their crew members!
The Future After the flight, NSS/EIS will continue to support Ali for years to come as she uses STEAM as the basis for teaching students all over the world. The flight and recovery of the first Enterprise in Space, with the voice and mind of the NSS Enterprise supplied by Ali, will dramatically publicize the capabilities of a unique artificial intelligence-based educational tool, a world-changing technology that will put a personal tutor in the hands of every child. EIS is showcasing a new way to bring people on our planet together to work on the problems of today and achieve the great future that lies ahead for humanity. We hope you will support Enterprise In Space™ as we engage and inspire the pioneers of tomorrow.
IMAGE CREDIT © STANLEY VON MEDVEY
The EIS Orbiter Design Contest Grand Prize winning entry was submitted by Stanley Von Medvey.
To find out more, check out Enterprise in Space online at www. enterpriseinspace.org and our partner Value Spring Technology, Inc., at www.thevaluespring.com/enterprise-in-space/. Lynne F. Zielinski is a member of the NSS board of directors, vice president of public affairs, and chairwoman of the education and outreach committee. She is the education program manager for Enterprise In Space. She has won numerous awards including the 2014 Alan Shepard Technology in Education Award and the 2013 NSS Activist of the Year Award. A retired physics teacher of 32 years, she resides in Long Grove, Illinois. Fred J. Becker is a systems engineer and chief engineer for Enterprise In Space. He has worked on many key space programs including Space Shuttle, Space Station, X-33, Spitzer Space Telescope, Lunar Prospector, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Pluto New Horizons. He has worked at three of NASA’s major centers: JSC, MSFC, and KSC. He has a degree in electrical engineering and resides in Indianapolis. Alice M. Hoffman is a member of the NSS board of directors and program manager of Enterprise In Space. As the president of Hoffman Management Partners, LLC, she has managed dozens of complex projects, including stadiums, hospitals, airports, and renewable power. A professional engineer with degrees in civil engineering from MIT, she resides in Chicago.
* Assumes sufficient funds, expansion of global access to broadband internet, computerized Mandarin, and access to Western cloud services by China.
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Tweeting From Space
Astronauts post and tweet their views from the International Space Station BY TRAVIS K. KIRCHER IMAGE CREDIT © REID WISEMAN/NASA
In the age of social media, everyone is a star. Day by day, we tweet the minutia of life: everything from the soggy nature of our breakfast cereal, to waterlogged images of our frantic dog Sputnik in the bath, to our own insights into the 2016 Presidential election (unsolicited, of course, but nonetheless correct.) But imagine if you were one of only a handful of people currently in orbit on the International Space Station. What might your Pinterest page look like then? Images of coupons and calendars would be replaced with breathtaking vistas showing the Earth at dusk, with the pale-blue Moon in glorious repose. Instead of sharing that viral Vine video of the tranquilized bear falling out of a tree, you’d be posting video from a Go-Pro camera floating weightless inside a water globule. In recent years, astronauts have discovered just how valuable a tool social media can be for sharing the experience of spaceflight with the rest of us Earth-bound souls. But posting a tweet from space isn’t always as simple as clicking your mouse. Rookie tweets By the time astronaut Reid Wiseman arrived on the International Space Station in May 2014, he already knew he wanted to make Twitter posting a regular part of his daily routine. And he already had his own cadre of social media heroes to draw from. “I definitely saw what Chris Hadfield did up there,” Wiseman said, recalling the astronaut who eventually amassed more than one million Twitter followers, and who reached social media acclaim with his famous “Space Oddity” David Bowie tribute. “And then the first astronaut that I followed—truly followed—on Twitter was Karen Nyberg,” Wiseman continued. “She brought a really awesome perspective, I thought, showing the Earth the way it really looks from space, and using some genuine, heartfelt comments.” For his part, Wiseman said he planned on adding his own social media voice to the mix: that of a space station greenhorn. “His whole thing was that he was a rookie,” recalled Megan Sumner, the public affairs specialist in charge of social media at Johnson Space Center. “It was his first time in the space station. Everything was the first: seeing
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There is nothing that could ever come close to preparing you for what your human eyes are going to see—and your brain is going to process— when you look out the window from 200 miles up for the first time,” said astronaut Reid Wiseman.
the Earth from space for the first time. And he was just so enthusiastic. His personality really came across on his Twitter feed and in his videos.” “Can you hear me now?” But Internet service aboard the space station can be painfully slow—Sumner likens it to dialup speeds—and posting directly to Twitter can be time consuming, as Wiseman soon discovered. “One weekend I tried to tweet directly from the space station using our Internet connection, and it took about 25 minutes to get one single tweet out,” Wiseman said. “So you can imagine trying to do that during the workday is totally impossible.” Fortunately, Sumner says, NASA implemented a “game changing” new social media policy for Wiseman’s mission. From Expedition 40/41 onward, NASA astronauts on the space station would be assigned a social media specialist on the ground. Instead of posting directly to social media, the astronauts could attach pictures, video, and captions in an email (which can be sent from the station much more quickly), and then send the emails to the specialist on the ground, who could subsequently post the information to social media.” Despite the middleman, Sumner says the social media posts are the astronauts’ own words. “There’s no ghost-writing involved,” Sumner said, “so everything that is posted on their accounts…is written by them, or at least, if it’s changed at all, is approved by them. So they see everything before it goes out.” Wiseman says the new policy allowed him to post more often.
“I would take a picture, write the tweet, put it in an email, and 30 seconds later, it was on Twitter,” he said. “I mean, it was as real-time as you could possibly get, and it took no effort on my part, so it enabled me to do much more than the previous guys had done.” 12,000 to 370,000 in just six months… If knowing how to tweet is important, knowing what to tweet is critical. In space, as on Earth, content is king. From the moment he first looked out the window of the Cupola, Wiseman said he knew he was going to be posting a lot of pictures. “There is no photograph,” he said. “There is no video. There is no IMAX movie. There is nothing that could ever come close to preparing you for what your human eyes are going to see—and your brain is going to process— when you look out the window from 200 miles up for the first time. There is just nothing.” Eager to do his best to share the view with his expanding pool of Twitter followers—which he says grew from about 12,000 before launch, to 370,000 when he returned to Earth six months later—Wiseman took several pictures of sunsets, land masses, and weather formations a day. “I posted this one picture of an atoll, and I didn’t know where it was,” he recalled. “I just said it looked cool. And a guy wrote back and said, ‘Oh, my name is Muhammad, and I was born there, and I still live there.’ I’ve actually kept in touch with that guy over email.” Wiseman admitted that some followers kept him on his toes.
When it comes to posting on social media—whether from space or from the ground—Sumner says there are definitely do’s and don’ts. “We’re a government agency: no endorsements,” she said. “A lot of people want to go up and talk about their favorite musician or sports team…and we have to be very careful with the way that we put those words out not to come across as endorsements.” Political commentary, Sumner said, is also taboo. The line can be painful at times. Wiseman confided that, on one occasion, he was looking out the space station window when he saw something on the ground (we’re withholding what it was, at his request), and wanted to craft a tweet about it—but he changed his mind when he realized the tweet might be construed as a political statement. “There were probably half-a-dozen times when I wanted to post something, but I didn’t even ask—I just knew I couldn’t,” Wiseman said. “I’d think, ‘You know what? Not from this position. I’m here at the behest of the taxpayers, and they’ve thrown a lot of money at me to get here, so I can’t take a stand while I’m up here.’” But there is one case when Wiseman said he crossed the line—and it paid off. “One that was really funny that I got advised not to post, but I posted anyway: I was closing in on 100 days up there, and I just said, ‘Hey, I haven’t showered in 90-some days. I wanted to get that off my chest,’” he laughed. “And now that I’ve come back, more people talk about that one post because that really connected with them.”
“One of my first pictures I put on there was a picture of what I called the Falkland Islands,” he said. “And there was so much angry replying that it was not the Falkland Islands.”
“That was one where there was no picture: it was just a few simple words about my life in space, and a lot of people identified with it.”
He added that many residents were “really upset about that. That taught me that…I have to be really careful with my interpretation of global geography, and not offend people.”
Travis K. Kircher is an executive web producer for WDRB-TV in Louisville, Kentucky, a student pilot, and a freelance writer who often covers topics related to space exploration. He can be reached at
[email protected].
“There were like 20 people who were really hardcore Reid Wiseman followers on Twitter,” he said. “And I loved the fact that they would reply to everything, but I did not use Twitter as an interactive tool from that perspective, just because it’s too tough… I mean for one tweet, you get several hundred replies—and if I’m only replying to one or two people, to me, it’s just not fair to the others.” To tweet…or not to tweet…?
IMAGE CREDIT © NASA
Despite the numerous replies and comments, Wiseman said he only had time to read a small fraction of them— and he opted not to reply.
Breathtaking shadows are the result when clouds and sunshine meet—and because of social media, astronauts aboard the International Space Station are able to share the view with those on the ground in virtual real time.
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How to Change a Life
A Longstanding NSS Learning Program Inspires Young Minds to Seek Space-Focused Futures BY MARK BARTHELEMY
T
he National Space Society exists to accelerate and celebrate humanity’s pursuit of our space-faring future. We work to accomplish this in a myriad of ways: political advocacy, thought leadership, global community building, and efforts in public outreach. But to me, the most meaningful of our efforts are those in youth education. Space is not just hard and expensive: it’s an inherently multi-generational enterprise. Many of us may not have a chance to settle ELEO or L5 or Mars or Titan. But we can contribute directly to future endeavors by fostering young minds—on a global scale—toward the active pursuit of spacefocused engineering and sciences. The NSS/NASA Space Settlement Design Competition, directed since 1994 by program founder Al Globus, is the crown jewel that inspired me to get involved in NSS in the first place. For this competition, students work individually or in teams to create novel concepts for orbital space settlements— large, pressurized, rotating spacecraft where thousands of people live, work, and raise their children. The result is typically a paper of significant length that details broad aspects of such a settlement, from its construction design and layout, to life support concerns, to agricultural systems and governance structure. Participants often spend months engaged in inquiry-based learning, often teaching themselves new concepts in physics and psychology and skills in 3D design along the way. A team from NASA Ames reviews all entries, and NSS extends invitations to winning teams to attend our annual ISDC® conference, where they formally present their settlement via poster and presentation, and engage actively with conference speakers and participants. To build the path to a spacefaring future, we must pass our passion to the youth, and show them how to pursue it. The NSS seeks to broaden our educational efforts and build scalable programs able to drive meaningful learning outcomes throughout the education lifecycle. Nothing is more crucial to foster the spacefaring future of which we dream. Here are a few experiences of previous participants in the competition, in their own words: Srishti Gupta - Delhi, India - Georgia Tech (aerospace engineering, undergrad) Being a part of the NSS competition and working on the project opened me to a completely new field of innovation combined with imagination! When people think of space exploration, they usually think of astronauts in a confined space on Earth or in the Moon’s orbit. However, the project reached beyond the boundaries of current technology and gave me an opportunity to look into the future. This completely changed my relationship with science! Now, I look at concepts and think about what more can be done instead of just accepting what is there. Nothing has helped me more than this competition in my life— it is the reason why I was able to gain confidence to come here
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and study at Georgia Tech and pursue my passion. It taught me how to do research, leadership, teamwork, handiwork, and so many other things! NSS and its efforts helped me gain confidence to aim to be someone great and to do something great and I will keep working on that. Please don’t stop. You are changing lives and inspiring us! Students: DO IT! It will change your life! After all, it changed mine! Don’t let anything stop you because this will change you forever. Robert Gitten - Weston, Florida - University of Michigan (aerospace engineering, undergrad) German composer Richard Wagner had this concept that he called the Gesamtkunstwerk: the “complete” or “ideal” work, a project so broad in scope that it encompasses every discipline. Designing a space colony is to create a Gesamtkunstwerk in its purest form. You are literally designing an entire world and society for people to live in and you have total freedom to just run with it. The only rules are that your design cannot break the known laws of physics. Now I’m part of the U of M rocket team, working with a research group to build a greenhouse for growing crops on Mars. This summer, I interned at Lockheed Martin Space Systems as a systems and integration engineer on the Orion spacecraft. It was awesome waking up each day realizing that I was going to work to help send humans back to the Moon. I got to tackle the high-level multidisciplinary problems that I encountered in the NSS competition. My current professional goal is to become a spacecraft architect: the engineer responsible for designing spacecraft at a fundamental level. To NSS and its supporters, I have nothing to express but gratitude. Your competition has introduced an entire generation to the idea that settling is something we could, should, and will do. You are helping pass the torch lit at the dawn of the 20th century by Goddard, Verne, Tsiolkovsky, and others. Ricardo Rodriguez Garcia - Puerto Rico - MIT (aerospace engineering, undergrad) We were set free to learn. Unlike a regular high school curriculum, we were expected to learn what was necessary to design and operate a space settlement by ourselves using the resources we could find. Inquiry-based learning, as this technique is known, led to some stumbling, but in the long run, it helped me take responsibility for my own learning. Selective colleges are interested in knowing how you pursued your interests beyond the classroom. The space settlement design competition was one of the projects I showcased in my college applications. It was the single activity I talked the most about, for it demonstrated not only my compromise with space exploration, but also a transition from vague professional goals to a life purpose. Ultimately, two years of space settlement design and scientific research led me to live for the exploration and understanding of the Universe.
Hemanth Harikrishnan - Bangalore, India - Sri Chaitanya Techno High School This exposure has made me mad for space and a geeky guy! It transformed my interest into a passion for pursuing studies in this discipline in reputable space universities. I planned to be a doctor but now an astrophysicist. Doing the NSS project made me decide my ambition to work in NASA. I also became a hero of my school. I felt very happy to be at ISDC®. Aleksandra Voinea - Bucharest, Romania - Cornell (aerospace engineering, undergrad) The Space Settlement Design Contest completely changed my career path. I created my first submission in 2012 with the certainty that I’d become a brain surgeon. Afterwards, I had my heart set on aerospace engineering. You could say I got the “space bug” in the process. There’s no cure for that. I definitely learned a lot while writing these projects, not only about engineering, but also other fields, ranging from medicine to government, management to computer graphics. Most of all, I learned to never give up and that there’s a solution to every problem. Students out there: Go for it! It’s an amazing experience, creating a concept and outlining it, attending ISDC® and presenting your project, the opportunity to network with aerospace professionals—everything about this contest has been life changing. Alex Reeves - Ann Arbor, Michigan - Caltech (applied physics, undergrad) This project was incredibly special because it was completely self-driven—I worked on it because I wanted to, not for a grade. I taught myself a few principles of physics, and explored more advanced topics in rotational mechanics and energy transfer than I had studied in school. Working on such a long time frame really forced me to plan ahead and organize carefully. ISDC® really opened my mind to the possibilities out there. Before, it was all very remote; after the conference, I finally realized that it was all real, and that this field really does have tangible opportunities for development in the present and near future. NSS educational programs are huge forces for good in young people’s lives. By allowing students to flex their creative muscles and experience hands-on design work in the pursuit of a complex goal, you are helping to train the next generation of engineers, social scientists, explorers, artists, and so many more in ways that stretch far beyond the aerospace industry. You’re helping those students find and follow their passions in a way that unites them with others in a common goal. Mike Teodorescu - Iasi, Romania - Harvard Business School (strategy, PhD student) Once we started thinking about the complexities of living in space as a self-sufficient settlement, we just kept going. There are many aspects of life on a space settlement that need to be explored when we think of self-sustainability. As such, this project was very different from regular coursework—every problem we tried to solve resulted in more questions and more learning. As a participant from 2003-05, the contest has been a turning
point in my life toward a path of search and discovery. It pushes students onto a path of innovative thinking, beyond what they thought was possible. I learned to come up with new questions and find the skills that would help solve them— in essence, how to do research and keep an open mind. It inspired me to always look for new questions. Vansh Murad Kalia - Jalandhar, India - University of Chicago (physics, undergrad) At ISDC® I got to meet the most distinguished space personalities—something I couldn’t even dream of before. I got to see real space suits, real astronomical artifacts, and real astronauts. It was SO AMAZING! The presentation I gave on my settlement made me very confident about undertaking such tasks again. I learned a lot of new concepts at a very young age, attained confidence, and developed leadership skills. This contest ignited a love for physics in me which is still glowing bright. I’d like to thank the generosity of those people who support NSS to make such a beautiful platform for young minds to unlock their full potential. Catalina Cremeneanu - Bucharest, Romania - Tudor Vianu Natl HS of Comp Sci I would like to thank you for this tremendous and unforgettable opportunity you have offered us. ISDC® was truly a place where students could learn more about astrophysics and cosmology from great scientists and professors and share experience with other students. There, we bonded new friendships and managed to substantiate our knowledge. ISDC® also offered me the opportunity to present my project in front of large number of physicists and scientists. Zareen Cheema - Pune, India - University of Pune (mechanical engineering, undergrad) Working on the Space Settlement Competition was one of the most thrilling times in my life. I have been always passionate in the field of space sciences, but I didn’t have an opportunity to implement all that I had read and learned. This was a fantastic opportunity for me to think outside of the box and implement ideas I had read in books. Fourteen other girls from my school have worked on this project since my first ISDC® visit. I am extremely proud of these girls and have witnessed their transition into independent and smart engineers and scientists. They have since shared with me how the project and ISDC® has influenced their lives and future path. The beauty of this contest and the ISDC® conference is its power to boost a student’s interest and passion in space science and technology. It certainly influenced my decision to select mechanical engineering as my major. Currently, I am vice chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers chapter at my college and aim to spread STEM education in my community. The NSS experience gave me a clear picture about the path I’ll take forward to pursue my passion in space sciences and fulfill my goal of becoming an astronaut. Mark Barthelemy (
[email protected]) is an NSS board director and co-founder of Kynda, a Seoul-based firm offering nextgeneration K-12 educational products and services to students and families in Asia.
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IMAGE CREDIT © ALLA MALKO
Kip Thorne poses with NSS’s award for mass media.
Kip Thorne, Science Star, Weighs in on ISDC® 2015 BY ALLA MALKO, PHD
O
n May 23, 2015 NSS had the great honor of welcoming the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, Kip Thorne, to ISDC ® 2015 in Toronto, Canada. He is one of the most recognized names today in theoretical physics, known for his contributions to gravitational physics and astrophysics, and a leading expert on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Thorne received his BS degree from Caltech in 1962 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1965. After two years of postdoctoral study, he returned to Caltech in 1967. His career at Caltech has spanned more than five decades. Thorne has written and edited books on gravitational theory and high-energy astrophysics. Worldwide fame came to him in 1973 after he co-authored the classic textbook Gravitation with Charles Misner and John Wheeler. A generation of scientists learned general relativity theory from this book.
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In 1994, Thorne published Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, a book for non-scientists, for which he received numerous awards. In 2009, Thorne retired from his Caltech professorship, launching what he fondly calls his “second career” in filmmaking and writing while continuing scientific research. With film producer Lynda Obst, Thorne initiated and executive produced Christopher Nolan’s 2014 blockbuster, Interstellar. Working closely with the filmmaker to embed science throughout the movie, Thorne ensured that the depictions of black holes and other cosmic phenomena were based on physics, which contributed to the film’s 2014 Oscar for visual effects. He now has a second movie and two more books in the works, and is collaborating with a team of young physicists on the dynamics of curved space-time. In 2014, Thorne published The Science of Interstellar, in which he explains the science behind Christopher Nolan’s film. The book has helped to popularize complex astrophysical science.
Thorne’s keynote presentation, “The Science of Interstellar,” attracted a large audience of students and adults. It was a phenomenal explanation of the scientific basis for physics and visualization of exotic concepts like black holes and wormholes from the movie. His work on the movie’s visual effects resulted in the discovery of how a real black hole and wormhole would look. Thorne also presented real pictures of black holes and worm holes that were not featured in the movie, but were published in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum Gravity after the movie was released. Kip Thorne’s Legacy as a Mentor Benefits Young ISDC® Attendees Among all his achievements, Thorne is most proud of his role as a teacher, noting the 52 physicists he has mentored, many of whom have gone on to become leaders in their chosen fields. He enthusiastically watches as they tackle some of the deepest, most important questions about the nature of the universe.
Thorne agreed to be photographed with the student participants of the Space Settlement Contest. Three hundred students from many different countries, divided into 80 groups, were able to take their photo with him. NSS hopes that in the future, when all these students become specialists in different fields of science and technology, they will proudly show the picture from this conference and say: ”Here I am with Kip Thorne, one of the greatest physicists of the century, who made a breakthrough in gravitational physics searching for gravitational waves.”
IMAGE CREDIT © IMAGE: CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY, 2015. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF IOP PUBLISHING
It was exciting to observe that the majority of conference attendees—professionals, enthusiasts, a n d s tu d e nts—u n d e r s to o d a n d a p p re c i ate d the unique opportunity to personally talk to, ask a question of, or shake hands with one of the greatest scientists and promoters of science of our time.
Kip Thorne answers questions from students at ISDC© 2015.
Kip Thorne presented a true black hole image based on Einstein’s equations at ISDC© 2015.
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IMAGE CREDIT © ALLA MALKO
through the warp space and warp time around the black hole and to produce something. This is just the way it would be if you were there yourself and I thought—we thought—everyone involved in the film thought—that this would be really wonderful to do it right for the first time ever in Hollywood and I think that it’s a significant part of the inspiration in this film. Mortillaro: It was absolutely beautiful. Now about this conference (ISDC® 2015): how pleased are you that this type of conference exists? Thorne: I think it’s very wonderful, particularly getting the young people involved around the world and being an inspiration for them. It’s very important for the future of science and the future of space.
Kip Thorne is shown at ISDC® 2015 with students from India.
At the conference gala event, Thorne was given the Pioneer award for his role as producer and science consultant in the movie Interstellar. Science Comes to Life Below is a partial transcript of the conversation between Kip Thorne and Nicole Mortillaro from Global News, Canada, on ISDC® 2015, revealing his ideas about the future of humanity in space, which align with NSS goals:
Nicole Mortillaro, Global News Canada: So about the science and about worm holes and black holes: How important was bringing that real science to the public? Thorne: All the visualizations of astrophysical objects— worm holes, black holes, the brilliant accretion disc around the black hole—were done by solving Einstein’s equations by propagating light from the source of light
IMAGE CREDIT © ALLA MALKO
Regarding how he became involved in the movie Interstellar, Thorne answered: “I saw this as a great opportunity to be in on the ground floor of a film and integrate science into it from the onset and try to turn it into an inspiration for people all around the world that science is cool, that science is interesting, and so that’s what happened and we succeeded.”
Kip Thorne receives NSS’ award for mass media from his former student, Mark Hopkins, chair of NSS’ executive committee.
IMAGE CREDIT © ALLA MALKO
Mortillaro: What do you think about the future of space travel?
Nicole Mortillaro from Global News, Canada, interviews Kip Thorne at ISDC® 2015.
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Thorne: I think that it’s clear that is attainable to colonize the Solar System. Getting beyond the Solar System is going to be exceedingly difficult. We are going to either require a lot of brute force over a period of several centuries or else a brilliant idea that none of us has grasped yet. But the first thing is the Solar System. We have not been moving at anything like the pace that we could or we should.
Mortillaro: As a scientist, what is the coolest thing in the universe? Black holes, the theory of wormholes, what actually exists that you think is the most fascinating? Thorne: What I think the most fascinating thing, the thing that I want to understand the most is the birth of the universe, creation of the universe. How it came about, how did we get to be here, was there anything before? These are questions that largely have been in the realm of religion in the past, but for the first time we are close to having the tools in science to be able to answer these questions and I look forward to getting answers, to getting real answers in the next decade or two. Mortillaro: Would you go to space? Thorne: Of course I would, wouldn’t you? Mortillaro: And what of private enterprise? Do you think that space belongs to everybody, do you think that we should be there? Thorne: I think space belongs to everybody and I think the private entrepreneurs that are now building rockets to go into space, to lift cargo into space, to soon take people into space, I think it’s wonderful. They have a vision, they also have a realistic understanding of the economics and the technology. I’m particularly impressed by the achievements of SpaceX in the last few years, so this
might be a game changer for the future, at least for the near future of humans in space. Mortillaro: Do you think something like Interstellar will ever happen to the human race? That we will be able to voyage? Thorne: I think we will be able to voyage beyond the Solar System. In Interstellar we were very lucky because some highly advanced civilization that we can’t fathom provided a wormhole, but as a scientist that understands wormholes better than any other scientist, I am skeptical that this will ever happen. I can’t show that it won’t happen—it is certainly allowed as far as we know. It may be forbidden by the laws of physics, but we don’t know at this point and we can’t count on that—we can’t begin to count on that. We have to make our own way with our own technology. I believe we will. I’m quite sure we will. It’s only a matter of a large effort over a long period of time. It was an unforgettable event involving a great scientist, a great person, the science star Kip Thorne. Alla Malko, PhD, is a long time space enthusiast with a degree in electrical engineering and medicine.
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Because It Would Be Fantastic
An Interview with Erik Wernquist, Mastermind Behind the Internet’s Most Viral Space Animations BY MARK BARTHELEMY
IMAGE CREDIT © ERIK WERNQUIST
But though we may attempt to change minds by filling our interlocutors’ ears, what have we done to change their hearts? Ultimately that’s the origin of this all, isn’t it? Think back to the moment you fell in love with space, and you’ll find that underneath all of our intensely rational arguments is a burning passion, a foundation constructed not of logic, but of feelings! Of awe, hope, pride… even envy as we stare mouths agape at videos from Apollo, the shuttle, and the ISS, imagining the feeling of weightlessness and wishing we could be there too. To convince someone that space matters, perhaps we’d do well to put aside the rational arguments, just for a bit, and focus first on leading them to feel, sense, and imagine.
A still from “Wanderers” visualizes graffiti-like etchings in dust that may emerge as a form of artwork among human settlers of the Saturnian moon Iapetus. Due to video resolution constraints, much of the above art is not visible in the video itself, and is visible here for the first time.
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IMAGE CREDIT © ERIK WERNQUIST
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ave you ever met someone who thinks space exploration is a waste of time? If you’re like me, your first response is one of shock. Perhaps a bit of snark, with a smidge of righteous indignation. And finally a well-rehearsed litany of rational arguments that spell out, in excruciating detail, just Why Space Matters. The advancements in science and engineering. The commercial benefits. The manifestation of that distinctly human compulsion to explore the unknown in search of adventure and reward.
A still from “Wanderers” is shown from above Saturn’s cloud tops at night.
Enter digital artist Erik Wernquist, the most important accidental space evangelist on the planet. Last winter, the release of his Internet video, “Wanderers,” compelled millions around the world to feel space exploration. If you haven’t seen it yet, Google it or head to http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/ and prepare to revel in humankind’s future excursions throughout the Solar System, full of soaring music and Sagan narration. (We’ll wait.) The video caught the attention of NASA New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. “’Wanderers’ was absolutely stunning in its vision of the future—it drew me in and propelled me to the very space exploration future I hope for.” Stern reached out to Wernquist, inviting him to make something to commemorate the historical mission to Pluto. The resulting video, “New Horizons,” was released exclusively via the National Space Society YouTube channel. It quickly went viral after being picked up by mainstream and Internet press media around the world. The must-see video effectively served as a trailer for the then-upcoming Pluto flyby, contextualizing the mission as the grand finale of NASA’s first 50 years of planetary reconnaissance. Here are a few highlights of a Q and A interview with Wernquist, two months after the world saw Pluto up close for the first time.
IMAGE CREDIT © ERIK WERNQUIST
A still from “Wanderers” depicts humans base-jumping from Verona Rupes, the tallest cliff in the Solar System, located on Uranus’ moon Miranda.
Q: Let’s start with “Wanderers.” It seems largely a meditation on the beauty of our Solar System, as witnessed up close by human travelers or settlers. Did you have some underlying reason for creating it in this way? A: I wanted to visualize the fantastic imagery from around the Solar System. If you go through the process of learning about those places, and absorbing the facts behind the photos, you get an indescribably fantastic picture of the grand, beautiful nature that surrounds us but isn’t well known. I wanted to make it easier for myself and for others, to spare them of having to read up on a lot of stuff and just look at the pictures and get the feeling for how beautiful it could be there. I need to credit Carl Sagan for any emotional effect from “Wanderers.” His words from Pale Blue Dot create most of the emotional aspects. Q: So you didn’t set out to communicate the importance of space exploration and settlement? A: I do think the general concept of exploratory science is vital. In order for humanity to survive in the long run, we need to learn to live on other worlds. The rational reasons
are compelling within the space community. But it’s hard to come up with the “We have to go to space because…” reasons that are enough to motivate people to support the pursuit of space missions. It’s not about that really, it’s about it being exciting. You need to do it emotionally. With “Wanderers,” I just made it out of a sense of “Wouldn’t that be nice?” And this is the most important reason I can think of: not because it’s important, but because it would be fantastic. Q: What kind of memorable feedback have you received on these two videos? A: A few museums have chosen to play my films as part of their exhibits, which makes me extremely proud. One of the best things to come of these videos so far was when I discovered an American high school teacher had posted YouTube videos he’d filmed of lectures he’d done for his physics class. He’d used “Wanderers” to teach kids about physics and space, and about gravity and the concept of artificial gravity. He was taking it scene by scene, explaining what was happening. It blew me away. I could never have anticipated that kind of response.
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Q: I mentioned on the NSS Facebook page that we’d be interviewing you. Harry Thring asked: Do you harbor genuine hope for the future?
this extraterrestrial life interesting, but any kind of science fiction about it is so boringly human. We tend to simply reflect ourselves in whatever ideas we have in alien life.
A: I’m excited about the future and have very high hopes for humanity. We’re very accustomed, in the western world, to the idea of the future as grim and dark. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff going on that could be the end of us, including what is happening with the climate and our environment. Those are big problems. But in general, most of us are trying to make this world a better place for all of us.
Before “Wanderers,” it had been awhile since I’d seen Solar System artwork made with a true scientific perspective behind it. If you look at the paintings of Chesley Bonestell, you’ll see that “Wanderers” is basically his paintings in motion. Instead of showing fantasy worlds that can be anything you like, I personally find it a lot more interesting to think about real worlds that actually exist like planets and moons and asteroids. Alien invasions can be interesting, but there’s a lot of other stuff too.
With “Wanderers,” I felt it important to show off a future where we haven’t destroyed ourselves, where there’s no police state surveillance, where everything is not bleak, grey doom. I think it’s kind of sad, the way a lot of science fiction, without even reflecting on it, portrays the future as a post-disastrous world just because it’s cool and interesting to look like this. So I think more positive views of the future is a good thing. Q: How do you place “Wanderers” in the context of other space-focused art or science-fiction? A: Space imagery has been very “sci-fi-ificated.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with science fiction. I love it. But a lot of science fiction in film has been a series of tropes that have been generating an expectation of what space would look like. It’s always far, far in the distant future or some other kind of galaxy, or some other place where the author’s fantasy can roam free. I think that there’s a big disappointment that has happened in space science fiction, once we started to cover the Solar System with our probes and photographs. For every world we go to, everything is more and more clear, and it seems there’s no one in the Solar System, and we’re all alone. For sci-fi, there’s suddenly no room for Martian invasions, so the perspective was shifted further, to beyond the Solar System, where we can still be thinking of alien life. I find
Q: I noticed in “Wanderers” a lack of overt signs of industry or even resource extraction—the humans depicted are either engaged in ambiguous tasks or reveling in communions with nature. A: The plan was to include traces of people in the images, to give a sort of human perspective of a few places in the Solar System. We like to see new places and learn about them, and the best and most engaging way is to be there. We can go with robots, but it’s not as nice and as exciting as real people walking on the Moon. Q: Are there any “Easter egg” hidden features in your videos? A: A lot of people have been asking me what’s up with the yin-yang symbol in the Iapetus scene in “Wanderers.” It’s a celebration of Iapetus being known as a “yin-yang” moon in appearance. The idea that settlers would make artistic etchings came from Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312.” Actually, there’s a lot more art besides the yin-yang: a smiley face, a symbol for Saturn, and lots of others. Only a few are visible in the video due to resolution constraints.
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NSS Chapter Discussions of New Horizons Spark Public Interest BY CLAIRE STEPHENS MCMURRAY
S
everal National Space Society chapters and individual members have been active in talking to the public about NASA’s New Horizons Pluto flyby.
On July 14, 2015, Fox 4-TV in Texas interviewed Ken Ruffin, President of the National Space Society of North Texas chapter, about his talk, “Pluto: Ice Planet, or Something Cooler?” Ruffin spoke to about a third of the 500 people attending the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History’s “Pluto Palooza” event in the Noble Planetarium. Early in 2015, the National Space Society of Phoenix president, Mike Mackowski, contacted a number of local institutions, urging them to do a public event for the New Horizons flyby. The Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration did so, with major participation by the chapter.
IMAGE CREDIT © G. PAUL HUDAK
Activities started with afternoon socializing featuring Dawn mission handouts from ASU and the NSS/NASA/JHUAPL Pluto Palooza package. In the auditorium, Ric Alling of SESE gave the welcoming remarks and introduced Mackowski, who made a brief presentation to around 100 people about the local NSS chapter and the historic nature of the day’s events.
Michael Mackowski on stage talking about NSS and AIAA.
A talk by NSS member Dr. David Williams followed, focusing on his research about Vesta and Ceres and how that relates to Pluto and Charon. By the time of the NASA TV feed showing the New Horizons mission operations team receiving the “phone home” signal from the spacecraft, the audience numbered around 180. Mackowski provided “play by play,” interpreting the activities in the control room and explaining some of the acronyms and other terms they were using. Dr. Steven Desch, associate professor of astrophysics at Arizona State, spoke toward the end of the evening about
The NOVA program audience.
the Pluto/Charon system and about Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) in general. Joe Bland of the Sacramento L5 Society gave New Horizons literature he received through NSS to Sacramento’s Discovery Museum. Their staff used it for at least two gatherings focusing on the Pluto flyby: one involving 24 summer camp children about 7 or 8 years old, and one at a branch of the Sacramento Library. Bennett Rutledge gave a Pluto Palooza presentation at the Englewood, Colorado Public Library on July 16, 2015. Jim Plaxco from the NSS Chicago Society for Space Studies gave Pluto Palooza presentations to several groups around the country, using the poster, handouts, decals, and 3D-printed model of the spacecraft provided by the New Horizons team through NSS. More than 50 members and others showed up at his own chapter presentation, and about 35 came to a joint meeting between the HAL5 chapter and Huntsville’s astronomical society. Although Plaxco’s talk at the Chicago Public Library drew only three, 30 came to his Rotary Club presentation. All these received copies of the “Pluto” issue of Ad Astra, as well as the New Horizons decals. Finally, at the September 26-27 Maker Faire at Wisconsin State Fair Park in Milwaukee, he was able to give a 3D-printing workshop as well as his “Pluto Palooza” presentation, and to give away more than 80 copies of that Ad Astra issue. Oklahoma Space Alliance held their Pluto Palooza party during their regular August meeting at a Moore, Oklahoma restaurant, open to the public as always. The speaker was Clifford McMurray, who had attended the New Horizons/Pluto press conference at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as the Ad Astra correspondent.
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FROM THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE CHAIR
Cost Of Returning To The Moon Reduced By a Factor Of Ten
O
n July 20, 2015, the National Space Society (NSS) and the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF) held a press conference at the prestigious National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This date was the 46th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin, the man who was the pilot for that landing, was one of the speakers. The press conference was held because of the importance of the just completed NASA funded Evolvable Lunar Architecture (ELA) study and because of NSS’ Strategic Plan, which stresses the promotion of key ideas. Central to the study were the use of lunar materials, commercial space, and eventual lunar settlement—all ideas that NSS has promoted for decades. The study found that we can return to the Moon at a cost that is an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) below the cost of earlier studies.
is the study’s principal investigator. He is also a former administrator of NSS. The study’s full name is Economic Assessment and Systems Analysis of an Evolvable Lunar Architecture that Leverages Commercial Space Capabilities and Public-Private Partnerships. The press conference was a smashing success. Our Associated Press release was repeated word for word on at least 267 blogs and websites, which have a combined potential audience of 230,842,700. In addition, at least 77 articles were written, including many in prestigious places, such as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, the Houston Chronicle, Space News, the Christian Science Monitor, Popular Mechanics, the Discovery Channel, and Popular Science. A copy of the full ELA report, a video of the press conference, and a list of media coverage (which includes links to all 77 of the articles) is available at nss.org/NextGenStudy.
A factor of 10 cost reduction changes everything! It is loosely equivalent to saying that the benefits of returning to the Moon, for whatever reasons, just went up by a factor of 10! The key reasons for the cost reduction are the discovery of water on the Moon and the recent success of commercial space in general and the COTS program in particular. Water on the Moon can be broken up into hydrogen and oxygen, which make an excellent rocket fuel. This means that spaceships can be refueled for returns to Earth rather than having to bring the fuel from Earth— greatly reducing costs. The COTS program utilized a public-private partnership where private companies, such as SpaceX, pay for much of the development costs, thus incentivizing them to be efficient. COTS has demonstrated order of magnitude cost reductions for the development of rockets. The ELA study uses a COTS-like approach. Earlier in the last year two workshops, both co-sponsored by NSS, found similar results. The NASA-funded ELA study examined the relevant issues in much greater detail. This issue of Ad Astra includes a detailed article about the study by Charles Miller and Sarah Preston. Miller
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From left to right, press conference participants: Tom Mosser, first Space Station director; Charles Miller, ELA principal investigator; Gary Oleson, Space Frontier Foundation board member; and Mark Hopkins. Not shown participants include: Christopher Kraft, former director NASA Johnson Spaceflight Center; and Buzz Aldrin.
The big picture implications of the EL A study are profound. Utilizing a COTS-like approach could dramatically reduce the cost of other space projects, such as Mars exploration. More importantly, all of this suggests that humanity’s drive into space toward settlement, and the utilization of its vast resources will happen much faster than previously thought. We are winning!
SPACE SETTLEMENT COLUMN BY BRAD BLAIR Release of IAA Cosmic Study 3.17 on
Space Mineral Resources
Space Mining and Property Rights Gain International Recognition
A
recently released study by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) found that space mineral resources (SMR) can serve as an economic gamechanger, opening a vast new source of wealth to benefit humanity. The study examined technical, economic, legal, and policy-related requirements to enable SMR, and offered specific recommendations to international space agencies and commercial enterprise for moving humanity forward into a new era of space settlement and commercial resource development. The study was assembled by two prominent space lawyers. Art Dula is a professor of law at the Houston Law School, trustee of the Heinlein Prize Trust, and founder of Excalibur Exploration Limited. Zhang Zhenjun is secretary general of the China Institute of Space Law, a resident director of the Chinese Society of Astronautics, and holds an MBA from George Washington University. The work solicited and included extensive input by entrepreneurial startup companies including Deep Space Industries, Shackleton Energy Company, Planetary Resources, Excalibur Exploration, Moon Express, and Tethers Unlimited. Study findings on SMR technology and engineering design are that mining asteroids and lunar regolith is within reach of the current state of the technical art. The extrapolation of Earth-based mining appears to be a one-for-one trade with alterations due to vacuum, low gravity, and temperature, with bench and lab-scale testing to date in private and government labs on Earth affirming this conclusion. Indeed, the primary roadblocks to SMR today are more intimately related to reducing market, legal, and financial risk. A focus on customers, demographics, and increasing market certainty is needed to create a solid foundation for the future of space enterprise. The study found that the cost to develop Moon or asteroid water sources could become significantly lower than the delivery price from Earth, especially as distance increases, making space water a potential basis for future currency. Indeed, establishing spaceports and selling water mined in space is a key to unlocking a robust and sustainable space economy, enabling human expansion into the Solar System. The study synthesizes a roadmap intended to maximize the speed and likelihood of economic SMR development, with the corollary benefit of protecting humanity from civilization-ending asteroid impacts. A critical element of the study is an entire chapter devoted to systems modeling and analysis, which presents a quantitative model of future space infrastructure and propellant demand. This work is based on a space population forecast stemming from Elon Musk’s stated goal to put 10,000 people on Mars within his lifetime. This goal was used to translate technical requirements for human space settlement into a deep space economic forecast based upon the ultimate consumer: the future space colonist. This per-capita
approach offers a unique point of departure that can then be disaggregated into technical, financial, and policy goals, milestones and objectives. In principle, the agreement by both entrepreneurs and international space agencies on a baseline human space settlement model can serve to underwrite private business plans as well as facilitate the timing of key technology investments. Four companylevel entrepreneurial roadmaps relating to space mineral resources were included in the study, laying out different approaches that each of these companies is taking. The SMR study offers detailed analysis of SMR-related international treaties and policies around the world, recommending a proactive space law stance including property rights for harvested resources. The current body of international space law, Corpus Juris Spatialis (CJS), has established that national laws govern national activities in outer space within the current framework. Mining and ownership of space mineral resources is parallel to national laws and, as such, is consistent within current international law. History has repeatedly demonstrated that areas controlled primarily by national (as opposed to international) law prosper most readily. According to study co-lead Professor Zhang Zhenjun, “While concerns remain, and some scholars may say otherwise, the CJS is clear that the mineral bounty of space may be freely harvested for the benefit of private space actors, as well as all mankind. Any person without preoccupied prejudice could draw a solid conclusion to this effect if he or she simply imagines the benefits of increased supply of mineral resources to satisfy both terrestrial and extraterrestrial demand for all countries, especially at a time when traditional mineral resources on our planet are running out at unprecedented speed.” Principle findings of the study are that SMR ventures cannot wait for government programs to lead in lowering the technological and programmatic risks. Commercial ventures will determine the optimum path for commercial success and aggressively lead the way beyond low Earth orbit. During the first half of the 21st century, space leadership must come from commercial enterprises and not depend upon government space programs. One concept that would leverage this series of initiatives is to convince government agencies that commercial enterprises will be there first and will be able to support government explorations by selling products to them at designated locations. These types of actions, in the past, have led to development of major new industries. The study can be ordered from www.heinleinbooks.com. Brad Blair is a geologist, mining engineer, and mineral economist and currently serves as the representative for Region 4 on the NSS board of directors.
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BOOKS
WELCOME TO MARS:
MAKING A HOME ON THE RED PLANET REVIEW BY BART LEAHY
When you combine the talents of a brainy Apollo astronaut and an award-winning children’s author and former NASA flight controller, you get Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet, a high-quality, thoughtful, and clearly written book that encourages young people to build a settlement on the planet Mars. A couple of disclosures up front: Marianne Dyson is a friend and editor of mine. Like many NSS members, I know both Dyson and Aldrin from when Buzz was chairman of the Board and Dyson was a VP/director/ ISDC® chairman. Buzz is now on the board of governors and Dyson is on the board of advisors and a frequent contributor to Ad Astra. And yes, I’ve met Buzz several times. I’ve also got a self-interested motive for reviewing this book: I want my nine-year-old nephew Connor— who’s already got a bit of the “space bug”—to continue pursuing that interest. I am the target buyer: an older space advocate looking to give this book to its target audience, young people ages 8-12. That said, this is a good book for adults, too; I enjoyed reading it. Welcome to Mars is written in a series of two-page articles covering a wide variety of topics, as one might expect in a book discussing the complexity of building a settlement on Mars. The book is addressed to “you,” the reader, who will participate in building the settlement. The two-page format is good for impatient or timeconstrained readers who might only be able to absorb a couple pages at a time. Aldrin and Dyson manage to pack a lot of information into each section, touching on everything from the history of Mars orbiters and landers to the cost of launching things into space, to a favorite proposal of Aldrin’s: the “Mars cycler.” The early pages lay the intellectual groundwork for getting the reader thinking about Mars by moving from what is known to what still needs to be done to make traveling to Mars a reality. The book also includes a glossary and list of further reading. The contents are not all technology-focused, though: there is one article that discusses the early “exploration” of Mars by Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell and the origin of the Martian “canals” as well as another article on Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. One article toward the end even makes the leap into discussing terraforming Mars into something more Earthlike. The book is a large-format, slick-paper hardcover book with gorgeous photos and illustrations as well as a good visual design, with callout boxes for interesting facts and activity pages scattered throughout the text. In fact, given the number and types of activities, this might be
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a good book for interested parents and children to read and do projects together. The activities include showing a way to visualize Earth and Mars orbits, comparing Earth and Mars size and density, and building a model Mars habitat. If the projects are not quite at a science fair level of complexity, they are at least things that kids in the targeted range can do on their own using common household items without creating a lot of havoc. Again, given the complexity of their subject, Aldrin and Dyson managed to cover the broad range of topics necessary to show what goes into a Mars settlement: life support, food production, propulsion, electrical power, etc. It’s not too much information—just enough to whet the appetite and get the inquisitive reader to ask more questions. The only two topics I noticed the book did not cover were the presence of superoxides in the Martian regolith and the potentially controversial aspects of finding life on Mars. That might be getting into the weeds a bit. While Aldrin and Dyson are not calling Mars settlement an easy task, they are advocating for the project, after all. I highly recommend this book for its target audience. It’s a great, broad-based introduction to space settlement for an impressionable audience. Whether Mars is the next destination for human exploration remains to be seen. Young people would benefit from reading this type of high-quality book about settling the Solar System’s other destinations. In fact, Dyson already has written similar books regarding living on the Moon and on a space station. I guess she needs to get to work on the asteroids next. I’m looking forward to giving this book to my nephew. My sister will be thrilled with the questions he’ll come up with after he’s done. Bart Leahy is a freelance technical writer living in Orlando, Florida.
Title:
Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet
Author:
Buzz Aldrin with Marianne J. Dyson
Format:
Hardcover
Pages:
96
Publisher: National Geographic Children’s Books Date:
September 1, 2015
Retail Price: $28.90
ISBN:
978-1-4263-2206-8
BOOKS
HUBBLE’S UNIVERSE:
GREATEST DISCOVERIES AND LATEST IMAGES REVIEW BY CLAIRE S. MCMURRAY
The universe is the ultimate art gallery, and this beautiful coffee-table book is a splendid guide to the visual treasures of space. If you love visual astronomy, or simply love beauty, Hubble’s Universe will keep you turning pages. Spectacular full-page, full-color photographs abound, with little area wasted on margins. Even the table of contents faces a dazzling full-page star cluster image. Frequent use of brief white text within black margins, so that the black sky has no obvious edge, brings the images into the reader’s environment. Terence Dickinson is an award-winning Canadian astrophotographer and amateur astronomer who has written more than a dozen popular books on astronomy and astrophotography. It’s no surprise to find that the images in Hubble’s Universe are chosen with an artist’s eye. In most chapters, the text serves primarily to orient the reader and explain the pictures. However, chapters 1-3 do provide an overview of astronomical observations, and explain why modern telescopes provide so much more information than even the best unaided eyesight. Even in these chapters, full-color astronomical photographs dominate.
two-page map. In fact, over a third of the book’s pages are devoted to full-page and double-page spreads of individual photographs. In later chapters, written explanations and explanatory drawings share space with the still-prominent photographs. This is especially helpful in Chapter 7: Hubble’s Invisible Universe, and Chapter 10: Hubble’s Strange Universe. The two-page index, which includes the astronomical catalog numbers of many objects, will be useful to those who want to know more; as will the two pages of photo credits. We dream of floating in space to see the universe without atmospheric distortion. Yet, since our eyes lack pupils able to match Hubble’s 7.9-foot wide aperture for gathering light, perhaps this book provides a better view. Claire Stephens McMurray is a member of the NSS conferences coordinating and chapters committees, and a former member (as Claire Stephens) of the NSS board of directors.
The Hubble is a space telescope, so there are also pictures of the bus-sized instrument floating serenely above Earth, or undergoing its in-orbit service missions, along with a brief history of the Hubble Space Telescope’s design and construction. Brief nods are also given to Hubble’s orbital colleagues and collaborators, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope (which studies infra-red wavelengths). Some of the best images combine data from all three instruments. This book is organized as a celebration of the Hubble’s window on celestial beauty, rather than a textbook on astronomy. For example Chapter 9, “Neighbor Worlds: the Planets,” fails to show Mercury or Venus. Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are well depicted, but Uranus and Neptune appear only as three small pictures sharing a page with a crisp photo resolving the Pluto/Charon system, including the pinpoints of tiny Nix and Hydra. However, the best images of Pluto’s surface (before New Horizon’s 2015 flyby) are relegated to chapters 1 and 3. Neptune also appears in Chapter 3: “The Message of Starlight.” Most of the rest of the book is devoted to wonderful images of star fields and nebulae. Hubble’s 270-hour exposure of one tiny patch of sky (often called the Deep Space Field) completely covers four pages; an additional one-page “map” of the same images in a smaller size shows how those pages fit together. A wider view, the “galaxy panorama,” covers another eight pages plus a
Title:
Hubble’s Universe: Greatest Discoveries and Latest Images
Author: Terence Dickinson Ages:
Young Adult and up
Format:
Hardcover
Pages:
300
Publisher:
Firefly Books
Date:
2014
Retail Price: $29.95
ISBN:
978-1-77085-433-8
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LOCAL AND SPECIAL INTEREST CHAPTERS Learn what is going on at local NSS chapters at: http://chapters.nss.org/ Get the latest chapter contact information updates at: http://chapters.nss.org/a/lists/ Please send any changes to the Chapters List Administrator at: ChapList_Admin_N5©nss.org. CHAPTER COORDINATORS Vice-President for Chapters David Stuart
[email protected] 206-241-6165 Chapters Committee Chair David Stuart
[email protected] 206-241-6165 Chapters Support Liaison at NSS HQ Jill Jackson
[email protected] 202-429-1600 Chapters Resources Coordinator Larry Ahearn
[email protected] 773-373-0349 Chapters Internet Coordinator Ronnie Lajoie
[email protected] 256-509-3833 Chapters Assembly Chair Christine Nobbe
[email protected] 314-323-0053 UNITED STATES CHAPTERS U.S. Chapters Coordinator Bennett Rutledge
[email protected] 720-641-7987 U.S. REGION 1 CHAPTERS: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, HAWAII Region 1 Chapters Organizer James Spellman, Jr.
[email protected] 760-379-2503 CA – NSS Western Spaceport Chapter 4617 Oak Lane, Mtn. Mesa Lake Isabella, CA 93240-9713 Contact: James Spellman, Jr.
[email protected] 760-379-2503 westernspaceport.wix.com/home CA – NSS Mojave Space Society P.O. Box A, Mojave, CA 93502 Contact: Brandon Larson
[email protected] 562-777-6831
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AD ASTRA Winter 2015
CA – OASIS P.O. Box 1231 Redondo Beach, CA 90278 Contact: Lisa Kaspin-Powell
[email protected] 310-364-2290 www.oasis-nss.org
AZ – Tucson L5 Space Society 3524 N. Treat Avenue Tucson, AZ 85716 Contact: Al Anzaldua
[email protected] 520-409-5797 www.tucsonspacesociety.org
UT – Utah Space Association 378 I Street Salt Lake City, UT 84103 Contact: J. David Baxter
[email protected] 801-359-0251 www.utahspace.org
U.S. REGION 2 CHAPTERS: ALASKA, NORTHERN/CENTRAL CALIFORNIA, OREGON, WASHINGTON
OK – Oklahoma Space Alliance NSS P.O. Box 1003, Norman, OK 73070 Contact: Stephen T. Swift
[email protected] chapters.nss.org/ok/osanss.html
U.S. REGION 5 CHAPTERS: ALABAMA, ARKANSAS, FLORIDA, GEORGIA, KENTUCKY, LOUISIANA, MISSISSIPPI, N/S CAROLINA, TENNESSEE, PUERTO RICO
Region 2 Chapters Organizer James Spellman, Jr.
[email protected] 760-379-2503 CA – Genesis – NSS SF Bay Area Chapter 1130 Mission Ave, Apt #1 San Rafael, CA 94901 Contact: Dr. Wun C. Chiou, Sr.
[email protected] 415-827-4411 CA – Sacramento L5 Society 7482 Greenhaven Drive Sacramento, CA 95831 Contact: Joseph Bland
[email protected] 916-429-6252 www.SacL5.org CA – Space Society of Silicon Valley 650 Castro Street #120-516 Mountain View, CA 94041 Contact: Tiffani Crawford
[email protected] 408-829-7096 www.spacesociety-sv.org OR - Oregon L5 Society, Inc. P.O. Box 86, Oregon City, OR 97045 Contact: Thomas Billings
[email protected] 360-314-4309 www.OregonL5.org WA – NSS Seattle 14618 21st Avenue SW Burien, WA 98166-1606 Contact: David Stuart
[email protected] 206-241-6165 chapters.nss.org/wa/seattle U.S. REGION 3 CHAPTERS: ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO, OKLAHOMA, TEXAS Region 3 Chapters Organizer Claire McMurray
[email protected] 405-329-4326 AZ – Phoenix Chapter of The NSS 1022 W. Juanita Ave Gilbert, AZ 85233 Contact: Michael Mackowski
[email protected] 480-926-4765 nssphoenix.wordpress.com
TX – Clear Lake Area NSS 8327 Lanham Lane Houston, TX 77075 Contact: Eric H. Bowen
[email protected] 713-991-3575 www.nss-houston-moon.org TX – National Space Society of North Texas P.O. Box 541501, Dallas, TX 75354 Contact: Ken Ruffin
[email protected] www.nssofnt.org TX – NSS Austin Space Frontier Society 12717 Bullick Hollow Road Austin, TX 78726-5204 Contact: John Strickland, Jr.
[email protected] 512-258-8998 www.austinspacefrontier.org TX – San Antonio Space Society 609 Ridge View Drive San Antonio, TX 78253 Contact: Joe B. Redfield
[email protected] 210-679-7625 home.earthlink.net/~theredfields U.S. REGION 4 CHAPTERS: COLORADO, IDAHO, IOWA, KANSAS, MINNESOTA, MISSOURI, MONTANA, NEBRASKA, NEVADA, N/S DAKOTA, UTAH, WYOMING Region 4 Chapters Organizer (open) CO – Denver Space Society 1 Cherry Hills Farm Drive Englewood, CO 80113 Contact: James W. Barnard
[email protected] 303-781-0800 www.denverspacesociety.blogspot.com MN – Minnesota Space Frontier Society 433 South 7th Street #1808 Minneapolis, MN 55415 Contact: Ben Huset
[email protected] 612-333-1872 www.MNSFS.org MO – NSS St. Louis Space Frontier P.O. Box 1813 Saint Peters, MO 63376 Contact: Christine Nobbe
[email protected] 636-674-9668 StLouisSpaceFrontier.org
Region 5 Chapters Organizer Fred Becker
[email protected] 321-271-9064 AL – Huntsville Alabama L5 Society P.O. Box 22413, Huntsville, AL 35814 Contact: Yohon Lo
[email protected] 256-881-8213 www.HAL5.org GA - Georgia Space Society 1179 Cockrell Drive Kennesaw, GA 30152 Contact: Michael Mealling
[email protected] 678-640-6884 spacegeorgia.org KY – NSS Louisville Space Society 1019 Lampton Street Louisville, KY 40204 Contact: Gregory J. Hart
[email protected] 502-500-9485 PR - Puerto Rico NSS Chapter, Inc. 700 Ave. Fernandez Juncos, Apt. 1A San Juan, PR 00907-4224 Contact: Jose Molina
[email protected] 515-966-5462 nssprchapter.wix.com/nssprchapter TN – Middle Tennessee Space Society 508 Beechgrove Way Burns, TN 37029 Contact: Chuck Schlemm
[email protected] 615-441-1024 U.S. REGION 6 CHAPTERS: ILLINOIS, INDIANA, MICHIGAN, OHIO, WISCONSIN Region 6 Chapters Organizer Larry Ahearn
[email protected] 773-373-0349 IL – NSS Chicago Society for Space Studies 700 Cape Lane Schaumburg, IL 60193 Contact: Jim Plaxco
[email protected] 847-923-7122 www.chicagospace.org
OH – Cuyahoga Valley Space Society 3433 North Avenue Parma, OH 44134-1252 Contact: George Cooper
[email protected] 216-749-0017
NJ - NSS Space and Astronomy Society of NW Jersey P.O. Box 270, Oxford, NJ 07863-0270 Contact: Karl J. Hricko
[email protected] 908-227-3852
Newcastle Space Frontier Society P.O. Box 1150, Newcastle, NSW, 2300 Contact: Jack Dwyer
[email protected] 61-2-4963-5037 www.nssa.com.au/nsfs
WI – Milwaukee Lunar Reclamation Society P.O. Box 2102, Milwaukee, WI 53201 Contact: Peter Kokh
[email protected] 414-342-0705 www.moonsociety.org/chapters/ milwaukee
PA – NSS Philadelphia Area Space Alliance 928 Clinton Street, #6 Philadelphia, PA 19107 Contact: Earl Bennett
[email protected] 856-261-8032 pasa01.tripod.com
Sydney Space Frontier Society GPO Box 7048, Sydney, NSW, 2001 Contact: Wayne Short
[email protected] 61-2-9150-4553
WI – Sheboygan Space Society 728 Center Street, Kiel, WI 53042 Contact: Wilbert G. Foerster
[email protected] 920-894-1344 www.sheboyganspacesociety.org U.S. REGION 7 CHAPTERS: DELAWARE, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, MARYLAND, NEW JERSEY, PENNSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA, WEST VIRGINIA
U.S. REGION 8 CHAPTERS: CONNECTICUT, MAINE, MASSACHUSETTS, NEW HAMPSHIRE, NEW YORK, RHODE ISLAND, VERMONT Region 8 Chapters Organizer Dennis Pearson
[email protected] 610-434-1229 INTERNATIONAL CHAPTERS
Region 7 Chapters Organizer Dennis Pearson
[email protected] 610-434-1229
International Chapters Coordinator Al Anzaldua
[email protected] 520-409-5797
DC – DC-L5 P.O. Box 3955, Merrifield, VA 22116 Contact: Donnie Lowther
[email protected] 703-354-2665 www.AroundSpace.com
Australia National Space Society of Australia GPO Box 7048, Sydney, NSW, 2001 Contact: Wayne Short
[email protected] 61-2-9150-4553 www.nssa.com.au
Canada Calgary Space Frontier Society 218-200 Lincoln Way Calgary, AB, T3E 7G7 Contact: Paul Swift
[email protected] 403-686-7430 www.members.shaw.ca/pswift Germany Deutsche Raumfahrtgesellschaft e.V. German Space Society Greta-Buenichmann-Str. 3 D-48155 Muenster Contact: Michael Stennecken
[email protected] 49-251-3944863 www.deutscheraumfahrt.de India October Sky Society Plot no. 24, Manikanta Colony, Old Bowenpally, Secunderabad Hyderabad, Telangana, 500 011 Contact: Rahul Kanuganti
[email protected] 91-9866496464
Romania Bucharest NSS Chapter 40-42 Washington Street Bucharest, 011796 Contact: Alexandra Voinea
[email protected] 0745-343-498 SPECIAL INTEREST CHAPTERS Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Initiatives Office 107, Near kashivishweshwar Temple, Kasaba Baramati, Maharashtra, 413 102 India Contact: Karishma Inamdar
[email protected] 1-650-305-5811 Interest: Space Solar Power Moonwards Avenida Nacional 25 Colonia Tzurumutaro Patzcuaro, Michoacan, 61615 Mexico Contact: Kim Holder
[email protected] 52-433-202-0079 moonwards.com Interest: Lunar Settlement Space Nursing Society 3053 Rancho Vista Blvd, #H377 Palmdale, CA 93551 Contact: Linda Plush
[email protected] 661-949-6780 www.spacenursingsociety.net Interest: Space Nursing
JOIN A CHAPTER OR START A NEW ONE If you support the exploration and development of space and the creation of a spacefaring civilization, joining the National Space Society (NSS) is a good first step. But what if you want to do more? If you want to meet others of like mind, if you want to explore how your special interests and abilities fit into the larger picture, if you want to share your enthusiasm, if you want to engage in research or teach others about space, then you should join an NSS Chapter. It’s easy! Your first step is to see if there is a chapter that meets your needs already. Chapter contact listings are in every issue of Ad Astra and online at http://chapters.nss.org/a/lists. Then contact the local leaders or check their Chapter Web sites for upcoming events and activities near you.
Local Chapters also often concentrate in special areas (e.g., rocketry, education, original peerreviewed research on space settlement, etc.) and will generally welcome distant members who share their particular interests. If there are no existing Chapters that meet your needs, you may want to form a new one. Instructions are available on the NSS Web site at: http://chapters.nss.org/. You may also contact Chapters Resources Coordinator Larry Ahearn to get a NSS Chapter Starter Kit emailed or mailed to you. Chapters in good standing with the NSS have access to assistance and resources from both NSS national and other nearby Chapters. Resources include promotional materials, educational materials, & membership recruitment rebates. See http://chapters.nss.org/a/resources/ for more details.
Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1) Publication Title: Ad Astra. 2) Publication Number: 1041-102X. 3) Filing Date: 10/1/15. 4) Issue Frequency: Quarterly. 5) Number of Issues Published Annually: 4. 6) Annual Subscription Price: $55. 7) Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 1875 I Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20006; Contact Person: Bruce Pittman; Telephone: 202-429-1600. 8) Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: Silver Marketing, Inc., 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 914, Bethesda, MD 20814-7028. 9) Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: National Space Society, P.O. Box 98106, Washington, DC 20090-8106; Editor: Katherine Brick (National Space Society) P.O. Box 98106, Washington, DC 20090-8106; Managing Editor: Pat Silver (Silver Marketing, Inc), 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 914, Bethesda, MD 20814-7028. 10) Owner: National Space Society, P.O. Box 98106, Washington, DC 20090-8106. 11) Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1% or More of Total Amount of Bonds Mortgages, and Other Securities: None. 12) Tax Status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13) Publication Title Ad Astra. 14) Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: Fall 2015, 08-24-15. 15) Extent and Nature of Circulation: Average No. Copies Each Issue No. Copies of Single Issue During Preceding 12 Months Published Nearest to Filing Date A. Total Number of Copies (Net press run):…………………………….............................................................……………11,250…………………………...............................................……..…11,000 B. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541:………………………………………….7,178…………………………...............................................……........6,749 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541:…………………………………………………...0………………............................................…………………………..0 (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers, Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Outside USPS: …………………………….....................................................…...205……………………………............................................………….233 (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail®):………………………...0……………………………............................................……………..0 C. Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15B):…………………………………………..............................................................…...7,383……………………………............................................………..6,982 D. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Outside-County Copies on PS Form 3541:…………………………….........................................................………..0………………………………...........................................…………..0 (2) In-County Copies stated on PS Form 3541:………………………………….........................................................….0………………………...........................................…………………..0 (3) Other Classes Mailed Through the USPS:………………………………...........................................................…...250………………………..........................................………………....50 (4) Distribution Outside the Mail:………………………………………............................................................…………3,567……………………...........................................………………..3,968 E. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution:………………………………….............................................................……..….3,617…………………………............................................……….….4,018 F. Total Distribution (Sum of 15C and 15E):…………………………………...............................................................………11,250……………………..........................................………………11,000 G. Copies not Distributed:……………………………………………............................................................................................0……..………………………...........................................…………...0 H. Total (Sum of 15F and 15G):……………………………………………………....................................................................11,250……………………...……..........................................……….11,000 I. Percent Paid:…………………………………………………………………………...........................................................….67.1%....................................................................................................63.5% 17) Publication of Statement of Ownership, publication required, will appear in Winter 2015 issue. 18) Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: (signed) Bruce Pittman, 10/1/15; I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. PS Form 3526
Winter 2015 AD ASTRA
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Join the team for Space. NSS is leading the New Space Age. From X Prize to the Space Station, from the Moon to Mars and beyond, NSS is at the forefront of the New Space Age. New Members can join now for a special introductory rate of only $20, and get a one-year subscription to Ad Astra, the only magazine of its kind! Membership makes a great gift. Bring the gift of space to someone new, and give them the special feeling that comes with knowing they’re supporting the greatest adventure of our
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European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti checks her Sokol pressure suit in preparation for the Expedition 43 crew’s departure from the International Space Station after 6 1/2 months in space. Since Saturday, June 6, 2015, Cristoforetti holds the record for the longest single spaceflight for a woman, a record previously held by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams with 195 days after Expedition 33. Cristoforetti also holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight of an ESA astronaut.
IMAGE CREDIT: © ESA/NASA
Preparing For the Journey Home
Winter 2015 AD ASTRA
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