AirSpaceMag.com

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After your holiday visit, by the time your relatives have dropped you off at the airport, you may be so full of home cooking that your usual comfort food joints near Gate 35 don’t look that good. If you’re in Detroit, airport vendors have made it easier than anywhere to shun the cheeseburgers and gloppy pastry rolls.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine just released a list of airports with the most healthful food options. The group keeps an eye on 15 of the nation’s busiest airports and ranks them by percentage of restaurants with at least one low-fat, high-fiber, cholesterol-free vegetarian entrée (nothing assures you the  holidays are over quite like chowing down on a plate of lettuce with dressing on the side). Detroit’s Metropolitan Wayne County Airport topped that list for the third year in a row, with all 59 establishments offering at least one healthy option.

Just the existence of the list might be serving everyone’s healthy interests: When PCRM first compiled the list in 2001, Detroit ranked dead last, with only 33 percent of its vendors offering healthy options. And the 15 busy airports have all improved — which may, of course, just be the sign of the times, but a little shaming can’t hurt.

Other than Detroit, where every stop will have an option (and possibly just one, so we hope you’re not too picky), we don’t know exactly where those options exist in each airport, just the percentage you’ll hit one at your first stop. Shouldn’t dragging your luggage around looking for a darn place to eat get points in the healthy column, too? Well, you might just consult Eater’s handy Airport Dining Guide, compiled earlier this month, and hope that “tasty” and “healthy” cross-reference a few times.

Predicting the future is never easy, things don’t always turn out the way you expect, blah blah blah….

Here goes anyway, with our forecast of space program events and trends for the coming year:

1.  Russification of space.  Human spaceflight will feel a little more Russian now that the space shuttle’s retired and all astronauts and cosmonauts are launching on the Soyuz. On any given day, half the International Space Station crew is Russian, with the three remaining slots shared by the other international partners. While this causes angst in some quarters, the situation is temporary, and has occurred before—notably in the 1970s, between Apollo-Soyuz and the first shuttle launch, when the only spaceflights were to Salyut stations. As for NASA’s current reliance on the Soyuz, perhaps we should no longer care, 50 years into the Space Age, who’s launching whom to Earth orbit. There’s a whole Solar System to explore—does it matter who drives the taxi to the airport?

2.  Showtime for SpaceShipTwo… If Virgin Galactic hopes to begin suborbital passenger trips in 2013, as NASA, for one, is expecting, look for them to wrap up their test program and start announcing firm launch dates sometime in the next year. XCOR’s one-passenger Lynx spaceplane is also supposed to begin flight tests in 2012. Who knows what Blue Origin is up to? They don’t disclose much, other than “We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”

3. …and for SpaceX. For Elon Musk, the revolution begins now. On February 7, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will launch a Dragon capsule to execute the first commercial spacecraft docking to the International Space Station. If that and the other Falcon launches planned for 2012 are successful, will the doubters start to consider SpaceX an established launch company? Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus cargo vehicle, which doesn’t get as much attention, is also scheduled to make its debut next year.

4.  Curiosity drops in on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory’s landing on August 5 will be exciting, and a little hair-raising; project scientists will be nervously peeking through their hands in those last few moments before touchdown. If it works, they can look forward to the most ambitious Mars mission ever. As for what’s next in Mars exploration….that’s a dilemma. The sample return mission proposed by a recent National Academy of Sciences panel to set planetary exploration priorities is so complex and expensive that NASA may not be able to afford it.

The aurora as seen from the space station -- more such views to come.

5.  NASA bloat and drift. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney drew laughs at a recent candidates’ debate with the mere mention of lunar colonies. Not a good sign for those advocating a NASA return to the moon. An election year in a down economy is hardly the best time to push for a grand new space project. Still, there are ways to start small, with a robots-first approach. And NASA is mulling other near-term goals, like sending astronauts to a nearby asteroid (a report on likely destinations for human spaceflight is due to Congress in mid-year).

But unless the agency finds some clever way to do more with less, most of its money and attention will go to a few large, expensive projects: running the space station, finishing the James Webb Space Telescope, and building the large, Congressionally mandated rocket known as the Space Launch System. Meanwhile, legislators cut in half NASA’s $1 billion request for space technology—the cool, experimental stuff—which makes innovation unlikely.

6.  Occupy Tiangong. China’s space program is about where the U.S. and Russian programs were in the mid-1960s, but it’s progressing rapidly and methodically, and has the attention of top politicians.  Look for Chinese astronauts launched on Shenzhou spacecraft—perhaps even the country’s first woman space traveler—to board (temporarily) the Tiangong 1 proto-space station sometime in 2012.

7.  One giant leap for robotkind. Actually, two leaps. A robotic refueling test using the space station’s two-armed Dextre robot is scheduled 2012, after years of planning by some of the same people who once hoped to demonstrate robotic rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope. The even more human-looking Robonaut 2 will continue to go through its paces on the space station, undergoing evaluation as a mechanized astronaut helper.

8. Putting the Global in GPS. The U.S. Global Positioning System, used by everything from battleships to smartphones for pinpointing their location in 3-D space, will have more foreign competition in 2012: China’s BeiDou (Compass) system, Europe’s Galileo, and Russia’s GLONASS. Soon getting lost will be a lost art.

9. The closing of the outer solar system? All those cool concepts for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan and the seas on Jupiter’s moon Europa? Forget ‘em—unless the price tag comes down dramatically (there are ways), and Congress finally takes steps to ensure U.S. production of plutonium needed for nuclear batteries when traveling far from the sun.

10. Shuttle Junior. Maybe this year the Air Force will tell us, or some satellite-watching sleuth will figure out, what exactly is going on with the X-37 mini-shuttle. Winged spaceplanes don’t appear to be extinct after all.

11. More Earthlike worlds. Expect the count of habitable planets to go up as scientists using NASA’s Kepler telescope sift through thousands of candidates, looking to nail down statistics on how common these earthlike planets are around distant stars. This is the space program’s future.

12.  The world won’t end.  Mayan calendars and collisions with Planet Nimrod (or whatever it’s called) notwithstanding, we’ll just keep soldiering on. Happy New Year, everyone.

A U.S. Army soldier with the 10th Special Forces Group and his military working dog jump off the ramp of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during water training over the Gulf of Mexico, March 2011. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez, U.S. Air Force/DoD.

Susan Orlean writes in her book Rin Tin Tin that at the outset of World War II, the movie-star dog reported with his owner Lee Duncan to Camp Haan, “where he was tattooed with his army serial number and rank (sergeant), and put through the same six-week training as the other dogs.

“As in World War I, the dogs were trained as sentries, messengers, scouts, mine detectors, airplane spotters, and cadaver dogs. The U.S. Army Air Corps also began experimenting with dropping the dogs by parachute behind enemy lines. (One accounting of the program states that a purebred boxer named Jeff ‘made thirteen jumps, twelve successfully.’)”

Wait…airplane spotters?

Yep, that’s right; according to author Orlean and Ron Aiello, who maintains the United States War Dogs Association Web site, the information is taken from an Army pamphlet describing what types of jobs Dogs for Defense might undertake for the war effort—not necessarily tasks they actually did. (We’re still not sure how the airplane spotting was supposed to work. Possibly the dogs would have been trained to tell one airplane engine from another by sound?)

Courtesy Simon & Schuster.

In 1958, Anna M. Waller wrote a study called “Dogs and National Defense” for the Department of the Army. In her history she notes that of the more than 10,000 dogs trained during World War II, their tasks were broken down as follows: sentry (9,295), scout (571), sled and pack (263), messenger (151), mine detection (140).

Today, there are about 650 dogs—helping to detect explosives—currently being used by the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the New York Times reported on December 1, when American soldiers leave Iraq, their bomb-sniffing dogs will remain behind.

This is sad news for animal lovers, but we bring you a story of a bomb-sniffing dog with a happy ending: Sergeant Rex, by Mike Dowling and Damien Lewis, just published this month by Simon & Schuster. Read an excerpt on Amazon.

(Photo: rwh)

As expected, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg tossed out a lawsuit filed by North American airlines that would have asked for a waiver on “cap-and-trade” carbon emissions taxes that will be imposed on all aircraft operating to and from Europe’s airports. Numerous other nations, including China and India, supported the suit.

The European Union claims it was forced to act because a U.N. agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, has not imposed restrictions on carbon emissions. Aircraft account for an estimated three percent of global carbon emissions, and engine makers have accounted for an average one percent per year in improved fuel efficiency. Not enough for Europe, though. The EU is perhaps the most aggressive of any community of nations in taxing carbon emissions in an attempt to mitigate global warming. The problem is that the tax does not apply in European airspace alone, but is calculated on an aircraft’s total emission from its point of departure. That means a flight from JFK International to Paris gets a bill for every mile flown between those two points, and for the entire return flight. The lawsuit argued that by extending the reach of the tax beyond its own borders and into the airspace of other nations, the EU violates basic laws of national sovereignty and aviation treaties.

The new tax takes effect on January 1, 2012. Expect airfares to Europe to go up.

Last week a handful of lucky aviation fans got a special tour through the Lockheed Martin factory in Marietta, Georgia, to attend the rollout ceremony for the last F-22 Raptor off the production line. The group took part in the company’s first Tweetup, an outreach phenomenon organized via Twitter and popularized by NASA over the past few years.

The Tweetup is an ingenious (sly?) way to accomplish two things: 1) increase goodwill among current supporters — that is, rile up the fan base, and 2) circumvent direct media coverage to get attention. Participants are given behind-the-scenes access to facilities and special events, and usually spend much of it hunched over their smartphones live-tweeting it to their combined thousands (or more) of followers. The infectious, earnest, enthusiasm of a couple of tweets can be more effective than most professional goodwill campaigns.

NASA tracked the outgoing tweets from 150 participants at their August 2011 event to watch the launch of the Juno Jupiter spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center, and estimated that it resulted in a whopping 29.9 million impressions. Of course, NASA has capitalized on the Tweetup like no other public agency, so we were interested to see the practice expand to the private sector. Aside from ATK, which held a space-related Tweetup for fans to watch a solid rocket test this past September, Lockheed seems to be the first aerospace company to hold an event for ordinary people to get a behind-the-scenes look at a modern fighter jet.

But unlike NASA centers, Lockheed facilities are understandably shrouded in secrecy. In fact, the participants in the Tweetup weren’t allowed to take photos — despite being given free rein to tweet unfiltered details about everything they saw.

Lockheed’s Tweetup organizer Alison Orne told us:

We’ve seen how powerful Tweetups can be in increasing public awareness and engaging audiences in a new and innovative way…  We intentionally decided to start small and local with our first Tweetup around the  F-22 Final Assembly Rollout ceremony.

That’s probably smart, given that successive Tweetups seem to be exponentially more successful as an organization’s social media fan base grows.

We were curious about the origins of these events, so we asked the person who conceived them as a tool for NASA: Veronica McGregor, Manager for News and Social Media at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (She was also the voice behind the endearing first-person @MarsPhoenix account.) She emails:

Going back to 2008, tweetups were being held in various cities as informal get-togethers of “tweeps” residing in the same geographic location.  They usually took place in coffee shops, bars and restaurants.  I noticed a few of these going on, and I attended probably the first Los Angeles-area tweetup in late 2008.  It was a nice way to meet other people on Twitter,  but the get-together wasn’t focused on anything in particular.  Everyone split off into smaller groups of 2 to 4 people when they found people who shared similar interests.   I remember I found only one person at that tweetup who was remotely interested in space.

From that, the idea occurred to me to hold a tweetup at JPL to bring together like-minded people. I had seen the space community grow (especially with space fans finding each other through the @MarsPhoenix account)  and thought it would be a great idea to have them come to JPL to see our missions first-hand and have the opportunity to meet each other. I proposed the tweetup on twitter first, asking how many would be interested and what would be the best day/time (weekend, weekday, daytime or evening, etc.).  We got tremendous feedback and organized the first tweetup for an evening in January 2009 for about 120 people. We did pre-registration online and the event was filled in less than 90 minutes. People from around the country (and a few foreign nations) signed up.

McGregor also mentioned the CEO of Zappos came to the first JPL Tweetup; he was impressed enough to start holding them for his own company. Since 2009, other companies like Ford, Disney, and Sea World, not to mention museums and educational institutions like the Smithsonian and even the White House, have embraced this social media tool to get the word out.

It sounds like Lockheed is gearing up for more fan-centric events — maybe if you lobby nicely they’ll let you sit in the Joint Strike Fighter, hmm? Well, maybe not. But perhaps other aviation companies will follow Lockheed’s lead, and open their doors to the tweeting public.