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Mission managers have deferred the decision on whether to proceed with or postpone the launch of the Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus commercial cargo craft until more is known about the flow control valve issue

Cygnus is currently scheduled to launch Dec. 18 from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and rendezvous with the station on Dec. 21

Wednesday, the first of two reboosts of the station took place to raise the station’s orbit and set up

for Russian vehicle launches and dockings in 2014

also places the station in position for the arrival of Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus commercial cargo vehicle this month

e 7-minute, 41-second firing

Expedition 38 crew members also tackled a variety of other tasks Thursday, including maintenance work and scientific research

work on the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, or ARED, which allows the crew to perform a wide range of weightlifting exercises in the weightless environment of the station

installed a jumper in the Quest airlock to provide contingency power to the airlock’s secondary shell heaters

prepared the U.S. spacesuits for some upcoming scheduled maintenance

deployed eight bubble detectors for the RaDI-N experiment, which seeks to characterize the neutron radiation environment of the station

removed and stowed a NanoRacks platform. NanoRacks provides lower-cost microgravity research facilities for small payloads utilizing a standardized “plug-and-play” interface

spoke with students in Kyoto, Japan, via the amateur radio aboard the station

unloading cargo from the Progress 53 cargo vehicle that docked to the station on Nov. 29

collected micro-accelerometer data for the Identification experiment, which examines the station’s dynamic loads during events such as dockings and reboosts

continued the replacement of fans in the Zvezda service module with low-noise units and used a sound level meter to measure the results.

conducted routine maintenance on the life support systems in the Zvezda service module

Dragon will remain attached to the station until May 18

There are over 150 science experiments loaded aboard the Dragon capsule for research to be conducted by the crews of ISS Expeditions 39 and 40

CRS-3 mission will deliver some 5000 pounds of science experiments

a pair of hi tech legs for Robonaut 2

a high definition Earth observing imaging camera suite (HDEV)

a laser optical communications experiment (OPALS) and essential gear

the VEGGIE lettuce growing experiment

spare parts, crew provisions, food, clothing and supplies to the six person crews

In September 2032, the European spacecraft will arrive at Ganymede, becoming the first probe to enter orbit around the moon of another planet

Equipped with radar, a mapping camera and other instruments, JUICE will measure the thickness of global ice sheets covering Jupiter's moons and produce terrain and mineral maps of Ganymede

Russia's plan is to implement a Ganymede Lander

Russian mission planners initially proposed the lander to target Europa, another of Jupiter's moons with a frozen crust thinner than the ice cap covering Ganymede

After a NASA mission to orbit Europa never materialized, Russia retooled the project to focus on Ganymede, falling in line with the goals of Europe's Jupiter mission

advantages of landing on Ganymede as opposed to Europa

The radiation environment at Ganymede is less severe than at Europa, which lies closer to Jupiter

this is one of the reasons ESA picked Ganymede as the destination for JUICE

Russian scientists say mapping and reconnaissance of Ganymede are required before any attempted landing

If Russia becomes a full partner in Europe's JUICE mission, the development of the lander will need to be accelerated to launch in 2022, if managers want the Russian craft to ride to Jupiter as a piggyback payload.

The three crewmembers are slated to spend a total of 15 days in orbit, which would make their Shenzhou 10 mission the longest manned spaceflight in China's history.

According to a statement from the China National Space Administration, the nation carried out a 40-day ground test to mimic the lunar environment, in an attempt to make sure that Chang’e 3 can endure the extreme temperatures on the moon

Chang'e 3 lunar probe consists of two main parts: a service module and a lunar landing vehicle

Dragon in Space, a website that monitors China's space program

the mission will be launched this December

The probe would land softly on the moon’s surface and deploy a six-wheeled rover to explore the areas surrounding the landing spot

Ready to watch the Chinese moon landing and rover action from above is NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO

Looking further into the future, China's step-by-step robotic moon effort also includes a return to Earth of lunar surface materials

head of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of the lunar exploration program, said some lunar materials would be scooped up from the moon’s surface, while other material would be acquired from a depth of about 6.6 feet (2 meters).

In 1959, Rhesus monkey Abel and squirrel monkey Baker, both female, were launched for a brief suborbital space flight in the nose cone of Jupiter Missile AM-18. They reached 300 miles altitude, and travelled 1500 miles at speeds over 10,000 mph. Heart rate and sounds, body temperature, blood pressure and radiation were monitored, plus muscle performance by electromyogram. Abel was trained to tap a switch when a red light flashed, to collect data on performance. After the mission, their successful recovery was the first for living beings. The monkeys survived the flight. Afterwards Able died during anesthesia as doctors were about to remove an electrode from under her skin. Baker died of kidney failure in 1984 at age 27.

The content of the message will be determined by whomever wants to participate in the planet-wide project

The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects

If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system—after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2.

it's the only one of the five not to launch with a message for any alien travelers it might encounter along the way

The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).

When New Horizons' journey was being planned

other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight

didn't have the bandwidth for

the message

. "Now

It doesn't cost massive amounts because there's no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes

Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally

In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.

Lomberg approached Stern, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support

This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago

The 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands

Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software—the formats haven't been finalized)

Then everyone will be able to vote on what to include

"Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message," says Lomberg, "but we'll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send."

, a National Geographic emerging explorer

will have to figure out how to wrangle a planet's worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.

the project will officially launch August 25, the final file may not be sent for several years

The New Horizons computer won't have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year

"The spacecraft is so far away," says Lomberg, "that download times are like dial-up Internet."

Pluto may not be the final mission target

hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system

If that happens, the message upload will be delayed

As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working," he says, "there's no particular rush to send it

cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft's electronic memory

The New Horizons message won't last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager will

comes as NASA reboots its Mars exploration program during tough fiscal times

many other details still need to be worked out, including where the rover will land and the types of tools it will carry to the surface

the science goals remain fuzzy

at the very least should kickstart a campaign to return Martian soil and rocks to Earth

a team of experts will debate whether the new rover should have the ability to drill into rocks and store pieces for a future pickup

under orders by the White House to send astronauts to circle Mars in the 2030s followed by a landing

Curiosity

ran over schedule and over budget

the engineering hurdles have been fixed and he expected the new rover to cost less than Curiosity

One independent estimate put the mission at $1.5 billion, though NASA is working on its own figure

Next year, NASA plans to launch an orbiter to study the atmosphere

After NASA pulled out of a partnership with the Europeans in 2016 and 2018, it announced plans to fly a relatively low-cost robotic lander in 2016 to probe the interior

since said it will contribute to the European missions, but in a minor role

reportedly the goal with Grasshopper is to eventually create a reusable first stage for its Falcon 9 rocket

would be able to land safely instead of falling back into the ocean and not being usable again

Grasshopper test program is to have three phases of test launches

SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas

Phases 1 and 2 would consist of very low test fires

with the rocket rising to not more than 73 meters (240 feet) during Phase 1 and

204 meters (670 feet

Both Phase 1 and 2 flights would last up to 45 seconds.

Phase 3 tests have the goal of increasingly higher altitudes with higher ascent speeds and descent speeds

altitude test sequence likely would be 366 meters (1,200 feet); 762 meters (2,500 feet); 1,524 meters (5,000 feet); 2,286 meters (7,500 feet); and 3,505 meters (11,500) feet

maximum test duration would be approximately 160 seconds. If all goes well

Grasshopper would land back on the launch pad

will now be inspected via cameras, brought to the Earth-facing port of the ISS's Harmony module and bolted into place by commands from mission control

SpaceX says it has 50 launches planned—both NASA missions and commercial flights—totaling about $4 billion in contracts

NASA also has a $1.9 billion resupply contract for the station with Orbital Sciences Corporation, which will launch the first test flight of its Antares rocket from a base in Virginia in the coming weeks

Bigelow is also eyeing a possible outpost on the moon, for which the company envisions using its BA-330 modules (so named because they offer 330 cubic meters of usable internal volume).

Several BA-330 habitats, along with propulsion tanks and power units, would be joined together in space and then flown down to the lunar surface.

Lunar dirt would be piled over the modules to protect against radiation, thermal extremes and micrometeorite strikes.

previous reports have indicated the inflatable module would be used for adding additional storage and workspace, and the module would be certified to remain on-orbit for two years

In 2006 Bigelow launched their Genesis I inflatable test module into orbit and according to their website, it is still functioning and “continuing to produce invaluable images, videos and data for Bigelow Aerospace

A second Genesis module was launched in 2007 and it, too, is still functioning in orbit.

even though the outer shell of their module is soft, as opposed to the rigid outer shell of current modules at the ISS, Bigelow’s inflatable modules are more resistant to micrometeoroid or orbital debris strikes

uses multiple layers of Vectran, a material which is twice as strong as Kevlar

anyone who is at least 18 years old can apply to become a Mars colony pioneer

important criteria, officials say, are intelligence, good mental and physical health and dedication to the project, as astronauts will undergo eight years of training before launch.

Mars One plans to launch a series of robotic cargo missions between 2016 and 2021, which will build a habitable Red Planet outpost ahead of the arrival of the first four colonists in 2023.

More settlers will arrive every two years after that. There are no plans to return the pioneers to Earth

fund most of its ambitious activities by staging a global reality-TV event

Well before the official Astronaut Selection Program, we received more than 1,000 emails from individuals who desire to go to Mars

It was hard to get people to recognize that we do that, but you don’t need to be the nearest five degrees

didn’t solve any problems in the simulator

actually ran those procedures, verified them, made some red lines, I think, brought them back over

They had to take their flight plan and turn it over and tear out pages and write on the back of it. The only thing they had were pencils and ball pens

actually had extra electrical power in the lunar module batteries

Somebody came in and found a way to do a jumper cord and take battery power out of the lunar module and top off the command module and to use that power to help get the command module stuff started so we didn’t use all the power from the batteries. So we ended up with a good margin on the batteries

Because all our procedures were based on two practical rules. One of them is, structural things don’t break. Actually, that drove everything. Fluid lines and structural—you know, joints can leak, shorts can happen to wires, but physical structure doesn’t break

if you admitted to that, then the number of things that you could have to prepare for is infinite.

had done a lot of testing of this, a lot of margin of safety in the hardware, so we never looked at those kinds of implications

Got in the car to drive back up. This is two days, I think, two days before launch, I think. I’m driving up the road, turned the radio on, and they interrupt the news announcement that this afternoon NASA has announced that they have changed and substituted Jack Swigert for me.

Gene says, “Sy, didn’t Jim say that he looked out the window and there’s stuff out in the sky and he heard something?” He says, “Does that sound like instrumentation to you?”

thanks to the kind of simulation training program we had, maybe the things weren’t exactly the same or in an exactly the same order, but everything we ended up doing had been done somewhere.

somewhere in an earlier sim, there had been an occasion to do what they call LM lifeboat, which meant you had to get the crew out of the command module and into the lunar module, and they stayed there

when you get out in space, that all those black spots in between the stars are filled with stars, and those constellations are nowhere near as obvious as they were

The guys in the lunar module electrical system had calculated how much time we had, and the two numbers didn’t match. So bringing on this platform is probably the biggest energy user in the spacecraft. Didn’t want to do it

They had a capability to maneuver, and they knew where they were, and now they could figure out what to do

a big debate about what to do next, as I recall, the books and the movies and all don’t really capture.

That debate of what to do next was also rather charged because there was one group of people that said, “You know, this has really been a bad day. We don’t know the condition of any piece of hardware we’ve got. We don’t want to do anything. Don’t touch anything. Let’s just figure this out.”

There’s others that said, “There’s only this much electricity and water in the lunar module. We need to turn around and come home as fast as possible.

Somewhere in there—I don’t remember all the details—we found out that a family that had gone to a picnic with Charlie and his family over the weekend, one of their kids had the measles, and Charlie was considered exposed

One of the many lessons out of all this is starting on day one it was from the very first moment, assume you’re going to succeed and don’t do anything that gets in the way.

you had to write down all the numbers in the command module, put them on a list, and then do some math, and then punch the numbers into the lunar module computer

you could get a very good alignment so that now you could go in with the lunar module and make a little tweak to tighten up the alignment

to get back before the batteries run out

while

debating what to do with this inertial unit in the command module we had to bring up from scratch, these units are very, very delicate

they were allowed to run at a temperature of like 70 plus or minus one. They were tested to see that they would work at plus or minus 10.

had one that we don’t know what its temperature is, but we know it’s below freezing

didn’t do any testing at those kind of temperatures

semi-apocryphal story is that one of the employees at the company

had a snowstorm

last winter

had an IMU in the back of the station wagon

took it inside

hooked it up and ran it, and they didn’t have any trouble

they had had a problem down on the spacecraft, some kind of a problem with detanking the oxygen from the service module

took all night and a good bit of the next day

to review

they’d seen a problem like this before, and even though the regular drain system wasn’t working, they could boil the oxygen out

the oxygen tank that we discussed prior to launch was, in fact, the culprit in the explosion. It was damaged in the process that we used in ways that we didn’t anticipate

in, the most promising of which were presented in early February

The two scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture

cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency

the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view

Seven big ideas

Mars-orbiting space telescope

Exoplanet observatory

General-purpose faint object explorer

Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope

Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)

Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)

Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)

Whatever missions NASA ultimately assigns to the NRO scopes, the instruments are a long way from launch

they're far from being fully outfitted spacecraft.

no instruments on these two telescopes — just primary and secondary mirrors and the support structures

It's going to take a while to develop the instruments and integrate them into the structure

there's no guarantee that it will be

the funding to bring the scopes up to speed, launch them into space and maintain their operations has not been granted. And

paper Tito plans to present at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March, which discusses

a crewed free-return Mars mission that would fly by Mars

no going into orbit or landing

Such a 501-day mission would launch in January 2018, “using a modified SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket,”

existing environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) technologies would allow such a spacecraft to support two people for the mission,

Crew comfort is limited to survival needs only.

sponge baths are acceptable, with no need for showers

the paper outlines how NASA would also have a role in this mission in terms of supporting key life support and thermal protection systems, even though this is a private-sector effort

No estimates of what such a mission would cost are included in the paper, but it does say it would be financed privately

The paper adds that if they miss this favorable 2018 opportunity, the next chance to take advantage of this lower energy trajectory would be in 2031.