Supersonic Flying Wing Nabs $100,000 from NASA

An aircraft that resembles a four-point ninja star could go into supersonic mode by simply turning 90 degrees in midair. The unusual “flying wing” concept has won $100,000 in NASA funding to trying becoming a reality for future passenger jet travel.

A flying wing aircraft design resembling a ninja star can turn 90 degrees in midair to go into supersonic mode.
CREDIT: Ge-Chen Zha | Florida State University

The supersonic, bidirectional flying wing idea comes from a team headed by Ge-Chen Zha, an aerospace engineer at Florida State University. He said the fuel-efficient aircraft could reach supersonic speeds without the thunderclap sound produced by a sonic boom

— a major factor that previously limited where the supersonic Concorde passenger jet could fly over populated land masses.
“I am hoping to develop an environmentally friendly and economically viable airplane for supersonic civil transport in the next 20 to 30 years,” Zha said. “Imagine flying from New York to Tokyo in four hours instead of 15 hours.”

NASA liked the idea enough to give Zha and his colleagues a $100,000 grant from the Innovative Advanced Concepts program. But

the U.S. space agency does not expect such funded concepts to fly for at least another 20 years or so.

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Read more: esciencenews.com

First American Woman In Space Dies At 61

Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into space, has passed away Monday at the age of 61, the Associated Press reported.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to a statement posted on the website of Sally Ride Science, a science education company she founded in 2001. She had been battling the disease for 17 months.

On June 18, 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly in space when she blasted off on the Challenger as part of the STS-7 crew, according to NASA.

She flew her second shuttle mission on October 5, 1984, again aboard the Challenger. That mission, STS-41G, was the first shuttle crew to include two women.

After she retired from NASA in 1987, Ride became a member of the faculty of the University of California, San Diego and the California Space Institute, according to a statement posted to Sally Ride Science.

According to its website, Sally Ride Science is “dedicated to supporting girls’ and boys’ interests in science, math and technology.”

Ride is survived by her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, as well as her mother, sister, niece and nephew.

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News Source: Huffingtonpost.com

Space Shuttle Enterprise for Exhibit in NYC’s Intrepid Museum on July 19

A four day ‘Space fest’ beginning on July 19 for the opening at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City for the exhibit of the Space Shuttle Enterprise. The event will offer 40 interactive displays, activities and other Space-related exhibitions. Visitors will be able to view the original prototype orbiter from all angle including from above and below.

Inside the pavilion, museum-goers will discover the Space Shuttle Enterprise displayed 10 feet or 3 meters above the deck floor – allowing visitors to walk directly underneath the shuttle. And if guests prefer a different view, they can ascent to a viewing platform positioned near Enterprise’s nose to get an up-close overhead look at the iconic spacecraft. Dramatic lighting and a series of back lit images and video stations will highlight Enterprise inside its display as”A vehicle that continues to enable a greater understanding of science and technology.”

The Space Shuttle Enterprise flew in an atmospheric approach and landing tests in the late 1970s to prove the pathway home for its sister space-worthy shuttles, that will also make its debut inside the Intrepid’s new “Space Shuttle Pavilion” also on the same date of event, July 19, 2012, Thursday.

“The exhibition brings to life the remarkable story of the Enterprise as the original prototype space shuttle orbiter in relation to NASA’s historic role in experimental aircraft throughout the twentieth-century,” according to a Press Release by the Intrepid. “The experience will inspire visitors of all ages, offering an unforgettable look at the past, present and future of space missions.”

The four day “Space fest” is sponsored by Samsung will kick off on July 18, the night before the Space Shuttle Pavilion opens to the public with a free concert on the Intrepid’s flight deck. The music will feature cutting edge, eclectic and curatorial concerts and DJ sets and will be based on the EDM and indie rock global scenes. The next day, the exhibit will began with a ribbon cutting around 11a.m. with a group of shuttle astronauts including several native New Yorkers including Ellen Baker, Mario Runco, Charles Camarda and Mike Massimino.

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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com

New NASA Spaceship Arrives in Florida for Test Flight

Built by Lockheed-Martin, the unmanned spacecraft that is being developed to fly astronauts to asteroids, the moon and eventually to Mars, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a test flight to happen on 2014.

An Orion space capsule, the Delta 4 heavy rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is the newest NASA spaceship adjacent to their spaceport. The spacecraft was originally designed to carry a crew of four, the Orion will make its first two flights, unmanned. On Monday, July 2, Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said during a ceremony for the capsule’s arrival that it’s not a PowerPoint chart but a real spacecraft that they’re dealing.

The 2014 test flight is intended to see Orion’s heat shield, parachutes and other systems. It is expected to reach about 3,450 miles above Earth – more than 10 times beyond where the International Space Station flies – then slam back into the planet’s atmosphere with 84 percent of the force that a spaceship returning from the moon would have.

A second test flight in 2017 using NASA’s planned heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, is intended to put an unmanned Orion capsule around the moon. The third test flight, targeted for 2021, is expected to include astronauts. By 2025, NASA intends to send astronauts to explore a near-Earth asteroid and then head on to Mars in the 2030s.

The Delta 4 rocket which will be used for Orion’s second test flight is made by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Boeing also is the prime contractor for the Space Launch System core stage, which consists of a modified space shuttle fuel tank.

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Source: http://in.reuters.com

NASA’s First Woman in Space Marks her 29th Anniversary of Mission Launch

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first woman astronaut to launch in space. NASA marks Monday, June 18, 2012 as her 29th Anniversary as she was one of the three astronauts to launch their rocket to the stars – this act of Ride showed that women can do a lot of things that even the sky wasn’t the limit.

A Los Angeles native, Ride was a nationally ranked tennis player and became a professional right after her college years. At 31, Ride was also the youngest American to go in space. Ride said she was back in school, earning a Ph.D. in Physics at Standford University in 1977 when she spotted a “Help: Wanted” Ad in a college newspaper. It said that NASA was looking for scientists to work on a new project: a reusable spacecraft to be called the Space Shuttle. It was the year NASA finally started accepting women in the astronaut training corps.

Of the 8,000 applicants, only 35 were chosen and just six were women. “Out of roughly 4,000 technical employees at the Johnson Space Center, I think there were only four women, so that gives you a sense of how male the culture was,” Ride later said in an interview for the Academy of Achievement. Ride was also still a newlywed when she went to space: she had married fellow astronaut Steve Hawley a year earlier.

In 1983, after working on two previous missions, she became the first American woman tapped to go to space, part of the crew of five assigned to the Space Shuttle Challenger. Her flight was the seventh shuttle mission and Challenger’s second trip into space.

“I don’t think I appreciated how much of a trailblazer I was for women and how much women would look up to me as a role model and the things that I had done until after my first flight, after I landed,” she said. “I wasn’t face to face with women until I came back from my flight, and then it hit home pretty hard how important it was to an awful lot of women in the country.”

One male reporter asked her, “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” Others wanted to know if she’d wear a bra or makeup in space. Johnny Carson joked that the flight was delayed so Ride could find a purse to match her shoes. The one person who wasn’t really impressed with all the Sally Ride phenomena was Sally Ride, who was so busy training she didn’t pay attention.

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Source: http://www.nydailynews.com

NASA Building A New Unmanned Aircraft: X-56A MUTT

NASA’s Research Center, Dryden Flight, will soon have an unmanned aircraft named X-56A MUTT – short for Multi-Use Technology Testbed – it is being developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to start on testing technologies needed for new kinds of lightweight and flexible aircraft.

The newly-built aircraft is under contract to Lockheed Martin Corp., it is being made in California and will conduct the  flight experiments for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). X-56A MUTT is one of the Air Force’s newest designed X-planes. The 7.5 foot-long aircraft has a 28-foot wingspan and will be powered by two 52-pound thrust has JetCat P200 SX turbine engines.

Gary Martin, the Deputy Project Manager for NASA’s Subsonic Fixed Wing Project at Dryden Flight said to the press, “flexible wings and fuselages can result in significant reductions in the structural weight of aircraft. To maintain the long-term health of the structure and ride quality in a more flexible airplane, we need to actively alleviate gust loads on the airplane and suppress flutter, so gust load alleviation and active flutter suppression are two of the key technologies that NASA is working to advance.”

The MUTT is designed to address this problem by enabling engineers to practice suppressing flutter by adjusting software programs in the aircraft’s flight control computer. Researchers also expect to learn how better to ease gust loads, which will make flexible airplanes safer when they experience in-flight turbulence. The knowledge gained about flutter and gust suppression will be used in designing the proposed supersonic X-54, an aircraft that will demonstrate sonic boom-quieting technologies that could someday alleviate the noise concerns currently preventing supersonic commercial flight over land in the United States.

Dryden Research Center will oversee the flights for AFRL during summer 2012, and then take ownership of the X-56A MUTT for follow-on research after the Air Force tests are finished in early autumn.

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Source: http://www.nasa.gov

Amazon CEO Wants to Recover Apollo 11 Engines from the Ocean

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, revealed his plans to recover the F-1 engines used on Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew members to the moon.

“I’m excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we’re making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor,” Bezos wrote.

“We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in; they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in saltwater for more than 40 years,” he added. “On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.”

Bezos shared that he watched the original mission on televison when he was five years old. It had inspired him to dream big, and now he wants to venture on this huge task of recovering the engines.

Each of the spacecraft engines approximately weigh about nine tons and they are clustered into five. Every second, they burned 60,000 pounds of fuel to produce 32 million horsepower. The five engines propelled the largest rocket in history 38 miles up in just under three minutes.

After launching the rocket into space, the engines plummeted into the ocean where it stayed for four decades. NASA had a general idea of its location and a piece of debris landed on a German merchant ship that provided more clues.

Robert Pearlman, a space memorabilia expert, said that there are 65 of these engines launched. Once the engines had been brought back to surface, it can be authenticated by their serial number. But bringing the spacecraft engines up would be a challenge. It can be liken to bring up a big part of the Titanic.

But this venture is hardly the first in retrieving spacecraft memorabilia, in 1999, NASA’s Mercury 7 space capsule piloted by Gus Grissom was found and recovered.

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News source: edition.cnn.com

Space Shuttle Fleet to retire in museums

The shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth for the final time today (July 21), but the orbiter has one more mission left on its docket — teaching and inspiring the public as a museum showpiece.

Atlantis landed at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. EDT (0957 GMT), officially ending NASA’s iconic shuttle program after 30 years of operation.

But Atlantis and the other surviving orbiters — Discovery, Endeavour and the prototype Enterprise used in landing tests — won’t fade into obscurity. Rather, they’ll occupy pride of place at museums around the country, serving as ambassadors for the shuttle program for years to come.

“We’re going to put Atlantis in a museum now, along with the other three orbiters, for the generations that come after us to admire and appreciate,” Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson said from the shuttle runway just after landing the orbiter. “I want that picture of a young 6-year-old boy looking up at a space shuttle in a museum and saying, ‘Daddy, I want to do something like that when I grow up,’ or ‘I want our country to do fantastic things like this for the continued future.’”

Atlantis, in particular, is NASA’s pride and joy. Unlike the other orbiters, which are bound for museums across the country, Atlantis will stay in Florida to be displayed at the nearby Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

“I think people will come here and finally appreciate the sort of underappreciated shuttle program,” said Bill Moore, chief operating officer of the Visitor Complex. “The shuttles did such a great job that spaceflight became relatively routine.”

Atlantis won’t roll off the runway and head immediately over to the Visitor Complex. It will undergo a months-long decommissioning and safing process, during which NASA technicians will remove some pieces for research purposes and others for safety reasons.

They’ll hold onto the orbiter’s main engines permanently, for example. And they’ll scrub away all traces of rocket fuel from the thruster system inside Atlantis’ nose before handing the shuttle over.

This process should be done by late 2012 or early 2013, Moore said. The Visitor Complex hopes to have Atlantis on display by July 2013 — perhaps two years to the day after its final launch, which took place July 8.

“I think it would be great to open on July 4, or July 8,” Moore told SPACE.com. “Do we open on the anniversary of its last flight? Do we open on America’s birthday? I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

-news.yahoo.com

-nasa.gov

 

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Fire damages Taurus II engine

An Aerojet AJ26 engine destined to power the Orbital Sciences Corp. Taurus II launch vehicle in the run-up to commercial resupply flights for the International Space Station (ISS) was badly damaged in a fuel fire June 9.

“There was significant damage to the engine,” Orbital spokesman Baron Beneski said June 21.

NASA is counting on the Taurus II/Cygnus and the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Falcon 9/Dragon combinations to help resupply the station when the space shuttle fleet retires after the upcoming final flight of shuttle Atlantis.

Beneski and Glenn Mahone, a spokesman for Aerojet, say the AJ26 engine shut down prematurely after a fuel leak developed during a hot-fire acceptance test, and the leaking kerosene fuel ignited. While the engine was damaged, the test stand at Stennis Space Center suffered only minor damage, the spokesmen said in separate telephone interviews.

Mahone says a team of rocket engine experts from Aerojet, Orbital and NASA is investigating the cause of the mishap and the extent of the damage to the engine.

“How much we’re not sure,” Mahone says. “There is an investigation going on. The engine did not burn up.”

The results of the investigation and prognosis for the engine and the Taurus II should come together by the end of this week or early next week, Beneski says. Two other AJ26 engines have completed hot-fire acceptance testing without mishap, according to the Aerojet website.

Beneski said the engine mishap potentially affects the testing planned to get the Taurus II ready for operational missions to resupply the ISS. The new Taurus II pad at Wallops Island, Va., should be completed in two weeks, he says, and ready for a NASA certification process that will take six to eight weeks.

The Cygnus cargo carrier that will ride atop the Taurus II is being prepared for shipment from the Thales Alenia manufacturing facility in Turin, Italy, to an integration facility at Wallops Island. Orbital is building the spacecraft service module at its satellite factory in Dulles, Va.

Original plans called for a hold-down hot-fire test of the two-engine Taurus II’s Ukrainian-built first stage at Wallops, a test flight, and the qualification flight required under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) seed-money effort before the end of the year.

“A lot has to go right for all of that to happen in 2011,” Beneski says, noting that acceptance tests are conducted to avoid problems later in the launch flow.

The AJ26 is a modification of the Soviet-era NK-33 engine originally developed for the N-1 heavy-lifter in the 1960s. Aerojet acquired 40 of the old engines, and is refurbishing them for the Taurus II. It also has proposed using the AJ26 to power a liquid-fueled strap-on booster for NASA’s planned heavy-lift Space Launch System, and is beginning development of a U.S.-built follow-on that would raise the engine’s thrust from about 340,000 lb. at sea level to 500,000 lb.

The final flight of Atlantis will carry enough supplies to buy Orbital and SpaceX an extra year of development time without requiring station managers to trim the six-member crew and cut scientific experiments, NASA managers have said.

 

-aviationweek.com

Giffords will Attend Endeavour Launch

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), the wife of shuttle Endeavour commander Mark Kelly, has been medically cleared to attend the April 29 launch of Kelly’s STS-134 mission from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, according to a television interview with the veteran astronaut.

Giffords is recovering from a gunshot wound to the head at the TIRR Memorial Hermann rehabilitation hospital at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, where Kelly and his five crewmates have been in training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. She was among 19 people killed or wounded during a shooting spree at a Jan. 8 political event in Tucson.

Endeavour’s liftoff on the 14-16 day mission to the International Space Station is set for April 29 at 3:47 p.m., EDT.

“I’ve met with her doctors, her neurosurgeon, and they’ve given us permission to take her down to the launch,” Kelly told CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric in the segment. “We’re pretty excited about that.”

Asked by Couric of Giffords’ reaction to the news, Kelly said, “I think she said ‘Awesome,’ and pumped her fist.”

President Obama and his family have also announced plans to attend Endeavour’s launch, the 19-year-old orbiter’s 25th and final flight.

-aviationweek.com

-wikipedia.org