It’s no longer a surprise, at least not for Americans, when a woman goes into space. NASA took more than 20 years after Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight to launch Sally Ride, but since then dozens of U.S. women have blasted into orbit, done spacewalks, commanded shuttle missions, and even headed the astronaut corps (Peggy Whitson, until just last year). Not a big deal anymore.

China’s new space program is starting off, deliberately, with gender equality in mind. The last two Shenzhou flights have included women astronauts, and Chinese space officials have hinted that this will be the norm.

And the Russians? Well….

It was lonely for a female cosmonaut in Valentina Tereshkova's day, and it's lonely still. (Photo: NASM)

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to reach orbit (50 years ago on Sunday) was Russian. So was the second — Svetlana Savitskaya — who flew 19 years after Tereshkova. A decade later came Elena Kondokova, who lived on the Mir space station and flew on NASA’s space shuttle. Since then, though, it’s been all men for Russia. Not a single Russian woman has been on the International Space Station in the 13 years that people (more than 200 so far) have been living and visiting there.

Next year that will change. Elena Serova, a 37-year-old former engineer chosen for the cosmonaut corps in 2006, is scheduled to fly on Expedition 41 in September 2014. Here’s a long interview/profile of Serova done last year for Roscosmos TV. It’s in Russian (sorry), but there are interesting scenes of her training, and interviews with her female cosmonaut predecessors.

The crew of Shenzhou-10 is now in orbit, after launching from the Jiuquan space center at 5:38 p.m. Chinese time on June 11. The 15-day mission of Nie Haisheng, Zhang Xioguang and Wang Yaping will be the last to the Tiangong-1 space station. We’ll be posting updates throughout the flight, and you can follow the action here on China Central TV.

Update: June 17, 2013

As promised, the Tiangong-1 module has new flooring. The Shenzhou-10 astronauts did a little Home Depot installation job on Friday.

Chinese media also passed on a message that American teacher-in-space Barbara Morgan sent to Wang Yaping, who plans to deliver a science lecture from orbit during her mission. Calling Wang “China’s first teacher in space” seems a bit of a stretch, since she’s not a professional teacher, and practically all astronauts, from all nations, interact with school children during their missions. But this apparently will be more of a formal physics lesson, as opposed to just a fun demonstration. Let’s hope, as Morgan wrote, that “these are all going to be broadcast on the Internet, so that all of those on the ground in the world can watch.”

Update: June 14, 2013

Chinese TV coverage of the Shenzhou-10 mission seems a little stingier than on past missions, or maybe the astronauts are busier. Still, this segment (in Chinese) shows a few scenes right after the crew boarded the Tiangong-1 module yesterday.

The module still appears to have its flexible, trampoline-like floor. During the pre-launch press conference, Chinese space agency spokesperson Wu Ping mentioned that the floor would be changed, so maybe we’ll see a more solid one by mission’s end.

Update: June 13, 2013

Shenzhou-10 docked with the Tiangong-1 mini-space station (what else to call something smaller than the Spacehab module that used to ride in the U.S. space shuttle’s cargo bay?) at 1:18 p.m. Thursday afternoon, Chinese time.  For the next 12 days you’ll be able to follow their combined orbital track to see when the docked vehicles are flying overhead.

Here’s a shot of the crew inside Tiangong-1. More photos are here, from the Xinhua news agency.

Update: June 12, 2013

The Shenzhou-10 astronauts are on their way to the Tiangong-1 space station. If the orbit-matching and rendezvous follow the same timetable as last year’s Shenzhou-9 mission, we can expect the docking to take place early Thursday afternoon, Beijing time (U.S. Eastern time is 12 hours behind, so it would be late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning here).

CCTV has broadcast a few scenes (in Chinese) of the weightless crew inside their Shenzhou spacecraft:

Update: June 11, 2013

The walkout to the launch pad has been a ritual for astronauts and cosmonauts for more than 50 years, and each of the three spacefaring nations — the U.S., Russia, and China — does it a little differently. “Walkout” is a bit of a misnomer, actually. The crews ride in a bus to the pad, and their sendoff before boarding the bus is just the last in a series of goodbyes from well-wishers, family, and even the viewing public. American astronauts are probably the most casual. After suiting up, space shuttle crews would quickly board their Astrovan, waving to a crowd of friends, co-workers and news photographers, sometimes without even breaking their stride. Russians like to pile on the ritual, with seemingly endless signing ceremonies, tree-plantings, and other customs added over the years, in both Star City (where cosmonauts say a tearful goodbye to their families) and the launch center at Baikonur.

Here’s how the Chinese do it. The Shenzhou-10 crew sendoff earlier today was a mix of protocol and pageantry, with a slightly more military vibe than you’d see at an American or Russian launch.

June 10, 2013

A crew of three Chinese astronauts is making final preparations for a 15-day mission to the nation’s Tiangong-1 space station. Their launch, on a Long March 2F Y10 rocket, is scheduled for 5:38 p.m. Chinese time (5:38 a.m. U.S. Eastern time) on Tuesday.

The Shenzhou-10 mission will be very similar to the Shenzhou-9 flight a year ago, with a couple of minor adjustments (for example, this time the astronauts won’t work round-the-clock in shifts). Once again the crew consists of two men and one woman. Commander Nie Haisheng was the flight engineer on Shenzhou-6 in 2005, and Zhang Xioguang and Wang Yaping are both rookies.

Here’s the crew’s press conference, from earlier today:

Here’s a profile of Wang, the country’s second female astronaut:

And here’s American planetary scientist John Lewis offering perspective on China’s human space exploration program in an interview for Chinese TV.

Artist's view of the SOLAR payload mounted on Columbus module. Image credit: ESA

As the saying goes, it’s tough to turn a big ship. That’s why an experiment last winter that required shifting the International Space Station’s attitude became an important lesson in what it takes to move a million-pound structure in space. According to European Space Agency operations engineers Nadia This and Denis Van Hoof, an undertaking like this requires patience and preparation — not to mention a few gutsy scientists.

The move was to accommodate an ESA experiment called SOLAR, a nickname for the “Sun Monitoring on the External Payload Facility of Columbus” project, which measures sun activity and radiation. Mounted to the outside of the station, SOLAR normally can rotate to keep the sun in view for 14 days in a row — called a Sun Visibility Window. But eventually the station’s orientation changes so that it blocks the sun, sometimes for up to 25 days.

During a meeting of the SOLAR team in 2010, one of the heliophysicists mentioned it was a pity the instrument couldn’t see a full 27-day rotation of the sun, especially now that it’s in the active phase of its 11-year cycle. Couldn’t they move the space station to point the instrument at it for that long?

At least they could ask.

“For scientific investigators, the sky is the limit,” says Van Hoof. “They will propose whatever crazy idea they might have. Of course there is a filter in between. Two years ago, I talked with my team leader about this, and he said ‘let’s make a technical [description of the procedure], but I’m pretty sure this is not going to get through.’ ”

Fortunately, celestial timing favors SOLAR twice a year. Around the summer and winter solstices, when the sun reaches its highest or lowest point relative to the celestial equator, the blackout period shortens to just eight days. So if the team could move the station for just those days, they could combine two observation windows back-to-back, and see a full rotation of the sun.

Adjustments to the ISS orbit are carefully planned and executed in collaboration with the five international partners and their scientific communities.  Because many sensitive instruments are mounted outside and inside, changing the station’s orientation might mean exposing them to different radiation, temperature fluctuations, drag and other hazards, not to mention changing their own planned targeting. The station can fly in three flight attitudes, but some instruments are only rated to fly a limited number of hours in certain configurations.

Station managers also needed to consider everything from the position of the station’s robotic arm to the amount of momentum stored in the station’s control gyros (read more about ISS steering here)

After two years of planning and negotiations, the move was approved. “I don’t know if we got lucky or if it’s politics now, but the ISS program is really wanting to show that they are there for science,” Van Hoof says.

Last fall, with all the parameters set and the SOLAR experiment ready, the station prepared to move. On November 19, SOLAR came out of shadow and began recording the sun. On December 1, the station spent about two hours shifting seven degrees, holding the angle for 10 days before returning to its regular position. The  team was able to gather 35 straight days of observations.

The science team is still analyzing their data, but they noticed changes in the sun’s activity in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, related to newly forming sunspots, Van Hoof says. A full rotation provides a much more complete data set that the team can use to compare with other solar-observing experiments, such as NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The team was so pleased with the results that they hope to perform the maneuver again during the summer solstice later this month.

Commander Chris Hadfield returns to Earth this evening, along with Expedition 34/35 crewmates Dr. (not Major) Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko. NASA TV coverage of their departure from the International Space Station begins at 3:30.

There was a subtext of desperation in Dennis Tito‘s plea at this week’s Humans to Mars conference in Washington, considering  he’d just spent the last few minutes dashing all hope that the U.S. government will send people to Mars any time soon.

But Tito doesn’t seem desperate. In fact, it’s amazing how cool and collected he and his fellow space pioneers sounded as they described two wildly ambitious, privately funded Mars missions: a 500-day round-trip for two (Tito’s Inspiration Mars), and an even more daring one-way trip to the surface for four pioneers (Mars One).

The backers admit that yes, they have their work cut out for them. They talk like sober space engineers, with data, viewgraphs, and a list of technical advisors.  It’ll be tough, they say, but doable.  And we’re meant to find that inspiring.

Well, you may say I’m not a dreamer — and I’m not the only one.

Consider Tito’s plan.  They’ll need to launch in 2018 to hit the launch window for their particular mission design (a swingby with no landing). Elon Musk of SpaceX, maybe the most audacious engineer of our time, took 10 years to design, build and launch unmanned cargo ships to low Earth orbit. Judging from his experience alone, I’d say there’s almost no chance Inspiration Mars will be ready in just five years.

Mars One aims to launch in 2022, but will need to start sending technology demo missions in 2016, just three years from now. Again, I have to think  it’s very, very unlikely.

Still, there’s something poignant about this business of passing the hat for space settlement. In the first two weeks of accepting applications (the registration fee varies according to country; Afghans pay just $5, while Qataris pay $73) the organization got 78,000 applicants.  Some of the applicants’ videos can be seen here.

Mars One isn’t the first company to believe they can finance a multibillion dollar space mission by selling media rights. Others thought they could do the same with trips to the International Space Station and robots on the moon.  None of it has come to pass.

The current enthusiasm for crowdsourcing space, from Astronaut Abby to Uwingu, seems driven partly by the early success of commercial ventures like SpaceX, and partly by the explosive growth of social media. It has more to do with Twitter than Apollo, but in 2013, that’s where we’re at.

Astronauts head out to meet up with an asteroid, somewhere beyond the Moon, ca. 2021. (NASA artist's conception)

This week NASA announced plans to capture a small asteroid in 2019 and bring it back to the vicinity of the Moon for later study by astronauts. It’s a good idea, for several reasons.

It’s of real importance to society.

The asteroid threat is sometimes overhyped, and it’s no wonder politicians don’t consider it an emergency when the last Extinction Level Event (to borrow a term from Deep Impact) happened 64 million years ago. Still, the fireball over Chelyabinsk in February demonstrated that even a small space rock can do damage, and hinted at even scarier scenarios. The rock that NASA plans to retrieve would be just half the size of the 60-foot Chelyabinsk object, small enough to burn up harmlessly if it entered our atmosphere. But learning to deflect or move even a mini-asteroid should give us valuable experience.

The 2012 DA14 asteroid that bypassed Earth last February compared to the (smaller) object that entered the atmosphere over Russia on the same day. The rock to be retrieved by NASA would be half the size of the smaller asteroid. (Art by Michael Carroll, courtesy B612 Foundation)

Public support for asteroid research is a no-brainer, yet NASA has had trouble allocating even a few million dollars a year (in an $18 billion budget) for a comprehensive search using a modest, space-based telescope. This new mission would help get the hunt started, because it requires an inventory of even smaller objects than we’ve tracked in the past.

Meanwhile, NASA still struggles to find a compelling destination for future astronauts that will sell with the general public. Expeditions to Mars or setting up an outpost on the Moon are fascinating projects, but hardly essential, and many taxpayers still consider them frivolous. Understanding asteroids and learning how to alter their course, on the other hand, are critical to humanity’s ultimate survival.

It advances space technology.

A mission that sounds straightforward, and is expected to cost no more than NASA’s latest Mars rover, would nonetheless require several new technologies that could also be applied to other projects. Solar electric engines for the unmanned tug that retrieves the asteroid can be used on future planetary spacecraft. Robotic tools for snagging an “uncooperative” target like a tumbling asteroid might also be used to clean up space debris or refuel satellites in orbit. After the rock is retrieved, astronauts will have to learn to live and work in what’s called cislunar space, something they’ve never done. In short, there’s plenty of cool and useful technology in an asteroid retrieval mission.

It sends astronauts farther than they’ve ever gone.

Does human spaceflight have a future?  In 2013, the answer is not obvious. The technologies of robotics and telepresence are advancing far faster than rockets and space capsules, which are still spinning off ideas developed in the 1950s. Those who doubt that humans will ever be content to explore deep space virtually, as opposed to going there in person, should consider Skype and Oculus Rift. Behaviors deeply embedded in human culture are changing before our eyes. Military forces are rapidly evolving from a centuries-old model of flesh-and-blood warriors facing off on battlefields to drones fighting drones. Why should space exploration be any different?

This may not, in fact, be the last hurrah for old-school (human) astronauts. But choosing a just-over-the-horizon destination like the lunar far side, while reviving some of the old Apollo mojo, will help us decide whether to continue sending people farther out into the solar system.

It encourages cooperation.

Groups including the B612 Foundation already are working to characterize the threat of larger incoming asteroids (“city killers” upwards of 100 feet in size), while others have announced plans to mine smaller rocks. NASA might be able to leverage these private ventures to keep its own costs down and encourage more players in the space business.

Within the agency itself, an asteroid retrieval mission would demand closer collaboration between the astronaut program and the science side of the house than at any time since Apollo. Meanwhile, partners in the International Space Station, who’ve shown only polite interest in the Moon or Mars, might be more willing to join in a smaller-scale mission with obvious benefit to all nations.

It’s doable.

Maybe the biggest advantage of all.

Every so often, a U.S. President (Bushes 41 and 43 most recently) proposes a grandiose go-to-the-Moon or –Mars scheme, which quickly peters out when everyone realizes, once again, that it costs way too much. Space advocates with long memories might be forgiven if they no longer expect Charlie Brown to kick the football.

Today the economic situation is worse than at any time in the space age. With millions unemployed and uninsured, and with public and private debt skyrocketing, no politician is about to suggest an expensive mission to the moon or Mars. Sorry, that’s not strictly true. Those representing districts with NASA centers will.  But don’t expect many others to join them.

That leaves NASA building a new rocket (the Space Launch System) and new vehicle (Orion), with no obvious place to go. Space agency managers rightly asked themselves what they could realistically do with the tools and money on hand, in a relatively short time. And the asteroid retrieval mission is what they came up with.

Some will say that grabbing a space rock – a tiny one at that – is not ambitious enough, not worthy of the nation that launched Apollo. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” so this argument goes. Maybe. But while Robert Browning’s advice may be good for an artist, it can lead to frustration and failure for engineers and accountants.

So here’s a more pertinent line from the same poem: “Less is more.”

Let’s do something we can actually accomplish. And let’s get on with it.

In all the national shock and grief over Columbia, and all the policy and technical discussions that followed, I never thought the astronauts at NASA got enough credit for their role in the investigation. They had just lost friends — the astronaut corps is a small, close-knit group — but there they were on national TV that same morning, fielding questions on what happened, and why, and who or what was to blame. It was a tough time for all of them.

In 2003 Melroy was working at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as head of the small contingent of “Cape Crusader” astronauts that helps shuttle crews prepare for launch (she later became one of only two women to command a shuttle mission). After the accident she was assigned to the team that had the massive job of reconstructing Columbia from all the bits of debris collected by field workers in Texas.

Debris from Columbia, arranged in place in a NASA hangar.

Here’s how she remembered that time:

I was there at the Cape when it happened. So when [NASA] decided to have the vehicle reconstruction in Florida, they recollected that after Challenger, there had been a crew module reconstruction, and it was overseen by astronauts. They wanted an astronaut there to take over the reconstruction of the cockpit. It was, “Okay, Pam, you’re the lead Cape Crusader, go figure out what KSC needs.” After that I ended up taking over the lead for the crew module reconstruction.

We had set aside a small room in the hangar [where Columbia was being reconstructed], a corner room where a wall was built with a single door in it. The crew module reconstruction happened behind there. The reason was that it was extremely emotional and difficult for everyone. There was just no reason to expose 300 or 400 people working on the main part of the vehicle to look at all the parts. It’s just harder to look at the switch panels and all the things that the crew touched. There were personal items of the crew’s mixed in with the debris. It was very stressful for everyone, so the idea was that no one should have to look at it every day except this small group of people who were designated to do that.

Over the months that the reconstruction was happening, astronauts wound up in Florida for some business or another. Most of the folks in the office felt very strongly about going to see the reconstruction of the orbiter, to try to understand and to see it. I can’t think of anyone who was there to visit the orbiter who did not want to see the crew module. Everyone came in to see it. The feelings and the emotions were fairly universal as for the grief, but it was different things that triggered it in different people. One person would walk past the switch panels, but lock in on a checklist page. You could see them stop and be completely arrested. Someone else would stand in front of a switch panel for 20 minutes. For all of us, it was very personal. Whatever memories you had about your own spaceflight was what connected you to the debris.

I took the families on a tour through the reconstruction, the ones who chose to go. Eventually all the families did end up visiting, so I had the opportunity to talk to all of them. They’re all different. Some were technically driven, some were emotionally driven.

My military aviation training had led me to believe that every single thing was important. As I worked among the debris, I began to see things that I thought might be stories, or might pose questions. Why did the seats look like they did? Why did we get checklist pages back almost intact? I thought, “We could learn a lot from this.”

Later, after the primary investigation conducted by the CAIB [Columbia Accident Investigation Board], NASA started a crew survival investigation to understand what happened to the crew and their equipment, and I was the deputy project manager. Astronauts don’t typically get involved in leading this kind of investigation due to our other duties, but a combination of the fact that I had been involved in the reconstruction, and was the astronaut office point of contact for the stored debris made it important for me to be so engaged. It was a very, very personal thing for me.

Window frames from the crew cabin.

Five years after the accident, the team’s crew survival report was published. You can read it here.

A gondola carrying live payload to be carried up to the stratosphere by balloon. Photo: Winzen Research Inc

As the U.S. government was gearing up to send the first man into space in the 1950s, questions abounded as to how people would survive in this foreign environment: What kind of vehicle would best protect them? How should environmental controls be configured? Will people even survive the radiation levels, unprotected by the Earth’s atmosphere?

One way to prepare for the journey was to send biological material — plants and animals — to near-space on a balloon, with various instruments, and measure the effects. In 1955, doctor and writer Webb Haymaker followed around a Navy crew as they launched balloons from Minnesota and raced to recover the live payloads. He published the account in what was likely one of the more exciting articles to appear in the journal Military Medicine.

“Operation Stratomouse,” as Haymaker dubbed it, began with the biggest foil of balloon launches: the weather. The many last-minute “no-gos” finally started to turn the anxious crew members against each other. “Once, after a favorable forecast had ushered in utterly impossible weather, and a crew member had remarked that ‘that crowd of parasitic bandits over in the weather station ought to be sent up in one of the balloons,’ [launching chief Ed] Lewis squelched him by commenting quietly that he would be dispatching them in the wrong direction!”

Mice, those perennial lab creatures, were among the payloads to be studied for any effect from cosmic rays. Project lead Otto Winzen noted that although they had “sent balloons up for many purposes, even some with rockets dangling from them which are fired into the upper stratosphere when the balloons reach 80,000 feet… the flights to come have a particular significance because of their living cargoes.”

And those living cargoes required special packing:

They were in a flat wire mesh cage, each in its own compartment, gnawing away on pieces of raw potato, which would quench their thirst on the long cruise. The cage was placed on the platform which covers the lower hemisphere of the gondola. Then the two hemispheres were sealed airtight by means of 134 bolts and nuts, and around the sphere went a thick shell of insulating plastic and over that a layer of shiny aluminum foil to reflect the sun’s rays. The oxygen tanks were strapped into place, and filled to capacity. The gondola purred from the vibration of its cooling fans like something alive.

While certainly risky for the near-space-traveling mice, it wasn’t always a safe venture for the human crew, either.

[Balloon] Evelyn A leaped skyward, giving off an agonizing, crashing, echoing sound. As she moved swiftly in the direction of the truck, a gust of wind caused her to hesitate; her long nylon rope then lashed out to one side in an undulating movement as though it were a whip being cracked. Agile little Herk Ballman, standing at the level of the beacon, just managed to jump out of its way. An old hand at balloon launching, he had always been successful at outwitting a rampaging balloon. His close call brought to mind a launching in Europe in which one crewman had had his scalp ripped from one end to the other by a rising gondola, and another his forearm mangled and his shoulder dislocated by a swerving nylon rope which had momentarily looped itself around his arm.

Photo: Winzen Research Inc.

Once aloft, the 175 foot-diameter balloon was quite the sight:

“There’s something eloquent about a gigantic balloon when being launched, whether it slips away tranquilly into the unknown or goes charging forward like an enraged elephant,” Winzen went on to say. “Each has a personality of its own and every one is a solo performer. From where I stand on the launch platform, I can catch from one balloon the satiny swish of a wedding gown as a breeze twists it, and from another the full resilience of a four-master after it has lurched suddenly before a gust of wind.”

The team had a C-47 at their disposal to chase the balloon, which would travel hundreds of miles away, giving the gondola payload extended exposure to near-space. Meanwhile, calls of flying saucer sightings came pouring in to newspapers and even the FBI as the balloon floated over farms and nearby towns. But Haymaker was taken with the romance of the sight:

Brilliantly lighted by the setting sun, she looks like the evening star. A little later, having taken on a harvest moon hue, she is outshone by Venus. A pity that she is expendable! Tomorrow, after she has accomplished her noble mission, a segment of her wall will be ripped out by a line attached to the top of the falling parachute, and she will wallow and sink, like a harpooned whale, and ultimately be found in farmers’ refrigerators, reduced to vegetable bags.

The Navy boys were just as excited, but less moony-eyed, as one sergeant observed “that she is ’tighter’n a bullfighter’s pants,’ and should be belching off some gas soon.” Eventually, the gondolas were cut from the balloons and parachuted to the ground, where the crew frantically searched for it before time — that is, the oxygen — ran out. “They are looking for congregations of cows, who are curious about gondolas, and for a line-up of cars along a road, for farmers, too, take advantage of extraordinary diversions such as this.”

Sometimes it was good news, such as when the gondola from Evelyn A was recovered: “There they were, all 60 mice cocking their eyes at the warden and me as though asking for food.” Other times, it was total loss, such as when the gondola on Emma V didn’t sever properly, the payload clinging on far too long for the animals to survive. Emma V continued on its flight, making newspapers around the region as the crew tried anything to get it down:

Our Emma V was described as an unruly giant. The following morning the account was continued, the caption reading, ”Balloon Dips But Evades Plane Guns”… On the fifth morning there was this surprising announcement: ”Wandering Balloon is First Satellite.” The Emma V was sighted over Bathhurst, New Brunswick, and was headed over the Atlantic for ”a high-altitude European tour.”

Haymaker grandly concluded his story about the ballooners, championing their role in future spaceflight:

Up there, in the as yet hostile and forbidding fringes of space, where it is always night, the ubiquitous mouse has gained a foothold. Before man can do likewise, or, indeed, pierce the stratosphere and travel through the black unknown beyond, he will continue to need balloon-borne animals as forerunners-unless, per chance, man himself is willing to serve as “guinea pig” for his fellowman.

The Apollo 8 flight of December 1968, the first voyage to lunar orbit, was a close second to the Apollo 11 moon landing in terms of its societal impact — one of those rare moments in history where humanity looked outward together and seemed united.

One of my favorite Apollo 8 stories is this anecdote from the novelist William Styron, writing in the foreword to the 1988 book The View From Space:

It was an icy Connecticut evening in a house filled with noisy festivity. My host — a teacher of renown whom I greatly esteem — has a mind of generous curiosity and of eclectic concern, but is a man with a blind spot, at least at that time; he had found the space program a technocratic scam, overblown, financially extravagant, and basically a bore. As close as we always had been we rarely spoke of the astronauts and their flights. I had trouble that evening making him interrupt the party so that we could turn on the television set and follow the progress of the Apollo module as it began its circuit around the moon. Suddenly, there before us was that stark sphere, the craters, the jagged shadows that one knew to be chaotic mounds of rubble, the glistening white landscape projected against a backdrop of unfathomable darkness. The murmur and laughter of the party diminished and died, and we watched in silence while William Anders spoke the words from Genesis:

In the beginning God created
the Heaven and the Earth,
And the Earth was without
form, and void…

Ceremonial words tend to sound hollow and inappropriate, generally because they are predictable, touched by the stale hand of prearrangement. But these words, spoken at one of history’s truly heroic ceremonials, seemed entirely appropriate, and I remember that a chill coursed down my back and an odd sigh went through the gathering like a tremor or a wind. Then how was it possible to be more deeply affected, to discover a pitch of eloquence more grand than those incantatory lines? Simple. Listen to Frank Borman, whose cheery valedictory brought home the reality, nearly lost in the sheer awesomeness of the occasion, that we were witnessing the exploits not of some crew of demigods or archangels, but of mortally fleshed men like those of us gathered around a winter’s fire: “Goodbye, good night. Merry Christmas. God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.”

I glanced at my host, the mistrusting and scornful teacher, and saw on his face an emotion that was depthless and inexpressible.

Last week I heard another Apollo 8 story, just as powerful. It was told by Betty Sue Flowers, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas and former director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, during a National Research Council panel discussion on the future of human spaceflight (more about that meeting in a future post). Flowers, whose academic specialty is the study of mythology, has told the story before (here at an Apollo 8 reunion in 2009). She also included it in an essay in the 2012 book The Transforming Leader, in which she describes her favorite object in the LBJ library.

I am haunted by a little piece of paper in the library archives — a note from Ho Chi Minh, leader of North Vietnam, with whom we were at war. It had been sent indirectly, through France. The note simply thanked President Johnson for a picture of the earth rising over the moon — Earthrise, it was called. The picture had been taken in December 1968 by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first humans to escape earth’s gravitational field, the the first to see the dark side of the moon. As one of his last acts as president, Johnson had sent Earthrise to all the world’s leaders — even to those, such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, with whom we had no diplomatic relations. From the transformational perspective of the earth as seen from space, all of us, even our enemies, travel together.

Twenty-five years ago, writer Frank White came up with a name for the profound aesthetic — almost religious — feeling that many astronauts report after seeing the Earth from space. He called it The Overview Effect, and wrote a book and founded an institute of the same name to explore the phenomenon further. Now, to mark the 40th anniversary of the famous Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” photo, there’s a documentary film.

The folks at the Overview Institute are aware that this is all a little too touchy-feely for some people. As they say on their website, “The Overview Effect, while intuitively valid to many, is often marginalized as a philosophical, metaphysical or aesthetic epiphany, not the fundamental perspective-altering experience that both astronauts and scientists suggest that it is.”

I used to be skeptical myself. I figured the view of Earth from space would be breath-taking, sure, but just an extension of other awe-inspiring natural sights. But after hearing many astronauts — who tend to be practical, no-nonsense people –  talk about the experience, I’m prepared to accept that there’s something qualitatively different about seeing the planet from space.

I often recall this observation by Millie Hughes-Fulford, a scientist who flew on the shuttle in 1991, and who contributed to our 2002 oral history Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years:

When you look down on the planet and realize how small it is, it’s really very interesting—you have emotions you didn’t think you were going to have. My name is not “Moonbeam,” but when you look at the planet and realize it’s the only place you can see that has life on it, you start feeling very protective toward it. It’s like a delicate crystal ball, and it looks alive. The first time I looked at it, I thought it was alive. When I’m looking at living cells in a microscope, they have a glow to them that dead cells don’t. And the whole planet had that iridescence of life about it. It moved me.

Harvard is sponsoring a live-streamed forum on the Overview Effect this evening, and you can see the film on Vimeo (click their logo on the screen to watch it at higher resolution):

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

As part of the METERON project, astronauts operated the Mocup test robot in Darmstadt, Germany. Image: ESA

The first humans that head out to Mars might never set foot on the planet. Instead, they could orbit on a Martian space station, where the astronauts remotely command robots working on the planet’s harsh surface. Operating from an orbiting platform — one that’s already set up to support humans, because they flew to Mars inside it — would give the astronauts a wide field of view; they could send robots almost anywhere on the planet and change course as needed, without having to find the kind of safe route that people would require. Indeed, these robots would find it for us.

Astronauts are starting to test these techniques now, except instead of operating robots from low-Mars orbit, they’re driving Lego rovers in Germany from the International Space Station. In late October, then-station commander Sunita Williams opened a laptop and sent the terrestrial toy through a short obstacle course. The tricky part is not the remote operation itself, though it requires some training (no doubt the Mars Curiosity drivers could offer some tips), it’s the infrastructure needed to transmit the signal: the interplanetary Internet.

“The history of space communications is largely what we call point-to-point — we point a big antenna on Earth up at a spacecraft, squirt commands up to it, and we get telemetry back,” explains Adrian Hooke, NASA’s project manager for Space DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking). He adds that the Mars Curiosity rover is a step ahead of this, using two Mars orbiters as communication relays. “But what we want is a more Internet-like system… of pretty ubiquitous communications, anywhere you want to go.”

You’re reading this blog post thanks to a nearly 40-year-old technology called Internet Protocol (IP). Information travels in packets, hopping from router to router, but if a router has nowhere to send the data because the next router is down, it simply discards those packets.

DTN, however, aims to be a more careful, and thus more reliable system. When mission control on Earth is waiting for a commander’s update from Mars, or when astronauts are carefully constructing our first Martian base from 200 miles up, they don’t want to risk losing any of that data forever if a router burps. So DTN uses Bundle Protocol (BP) — the IP of the interplanetary Internet. Here, when a router receives data packets, it stores them until the next hop becomes available. If the delays are large — due to the vast distances between planets, or because a Mars orbiter is on the far side of the planet — DTN can use a secondary system, called Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP), which will store the data even if the sender has to go offline before the transmission is complete.

When Williams instructed the Lego rover in Germany to move, the command went from her laptop to the space station’s communications terminal, where a DTN access point began, operated by the University of Colorado. Then it went to NASA’s fleet of tracking and relay satellites, which transmitted the data packets to ground stations in White Sands, New Mexico, then to NASA’s operations center in Huntsville, Alabama, and on to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where they hopped the pond to the European Space Agency’s user support center in Belgium, and finally to ESA’s operations center in Darmstadt, Germany. Then the Lego rover moved. Measurements confirming the movement then traveled the reverse route back to Williams.

“Each one of those was a DTN ‘hop,’” Hooke says. “Sunita steered the robot around some obstacles, and got some very basic data back from the rover…given all those hops, it probably took a couple seconds round trip. She probably saw the response three seconds after she sent the commands.”

For this test, NASA’s DTN team worked with ESA’s METERON project, Multi-purpose End-To-End Robotic Operations Network, which is focused on developing astronaut “telepresence” — operating robots remotely. The ESA hopes that in the coming year or so, astronauts will be tele-operating “Justin,” an android, from the space station.

Eventually, the DTN developed for space could be used by regular folks here on Earth in times of emergency, when communication links are disrupted or jammed, such as during a hurricane or terrorist attack. But NASA’s sights are set far from home. Hooke says interplanetary probes like the Saturn-orbiting Cassini and the upcoming Juno mission to Jupiter, could be repurposed by uploading them with DTN software after their science missions are done. That way, they can serve as Internet nodes throughout the solar system.

“There is nothing inherent in the network that can constrain how far out you can go. It’s more [constrained by] the patience of human beings to wait for a response,” he says.

Detail from a unique wide-angle hand mosaic of Surveyor 1's shadow on the Oceanus Procellarum, June 13, 1966. The mosaic is made of 66 gelatin silver prints in all, and measures 18 by 59 inches. (Each image mounted on the mosaic is approximately 6 by 6 inches.) The piece (lot #62) is estimated to go for $80,000 to $100,000. Photograph courtesy Bonhams auction house.

If you grew up near Bethpage, New York in the early 1960s, you probably were obsessed with the Apollo Lunar Module built by the Long Island-based Grumman Corporation. And if you were an extremely prescient teenager, you might have started amassing your own world-class collection of space-related items, including photographs, manuscripts, and prints.

Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Lowey's large-format quadrant of the moon. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

This Wednesday, Bonhams is auctioning off one such private collection. In a video on Bonhams’ Website, the collector (who wishes to remain anonymous) explains that he grew up “during the height of the windup to the Apollo era,” just a few miles from Grumman, and many of the fathers in his neighborhood worked on the Lunar Module. “I was working towards a goal fairly early on,” he recalls in the video. “In my early- to mid-teens, what I wanted to do was to have an exhibition focusing on unmanned space travel.”

Many of the items are one-of-a kind. The lunar photomosaic above (see the full image here), was made as a five-foot-wide presentation piece in 1966, and was painstakingly assembled by Kay Larson of the U.S. Geological Survey using images captured by Surveyor 1. “I’m lucky to have found this—it would have been thrown in the trash, eventually,” the collector notes.

John Russell's lunar globe, circa 1797. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

There are objects relating to Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, but Earth’s moon is the centerpiece of this show. Some of the items predate the space age. One particularly lovely object is a photograph made up of four large-format quadrants of the moon, taken in 1899, and probably created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The photogravures, by Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Loewy, were taken at the Paris Observatory. “It was only with NASA’s Lunar Orbiters in the 1960s,” reads the collection note, “that images substantially better than those of Loewy and Puiseux were obtained.” The plates are from Puiseux and Loewy’s Atlas photographique de la lune. The two men were able to photograph the moon only during perfect weather, the catalog notes, which meant just 50 or 60 nights each year—explaining why the Atlas took 14 years to complete. These may be the first oversize plates from the Atlas to come up for auction, and are expected to bring $12,000 to $18,000.

British pastel portraitist John Russell (the appointed painter to the King and the Prince of Wales) was so fascinated with the moon that he created a lunar globe in 1797, which he called a Selenographia. Russell spent many years drawing and observing the moon; his globe even accounts for lunar motion, or libration. No more than 11 Selenographias are believed to exist; six are in public collections. This example, lot number 23,  is expected to fetch between $200,000 to $300,000.

NASA has published another one of their cool, interactive roadmaps, like the one from last February that we enjoyed. Be sure to click through to the interactive full-size version to learn where NASA is headed in technology fields ranging from space power to nanotechnology and, of course, new launch systems.

Spacefish! The medaka fish aboard the ISS are genetically modified so certain cells glow red or green.

Thirty-five new occupants arrived at the International Space Station in late October. Three were astronauts, the rest were fish.

“This is the first experiment in the world to take care of animals for such a long time in the space station — for two months,” says Akira Kudo of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “Normally, animals are cared for for just two weeks. Only astronauts stay longer than that.”

Kudo is the principal investigator for a study called Medaka Osteoclast, or MOST, examining how the bones of the medaka fish — also known as Japanese killifish, which are popular both as pets and research animals — will respond to microgravity. (Medaka fish were the first vertebrates to mate in space; four of them successfully laid and hatched eggs in an experiment aboard Columbia in 1994.)

The fish are living in a specially designed space aquarium called the Aquatic Habitat, partitioned into two, 1.5-pint sections. Housed in the Japanese Kibo module, the habitat has temperature control, water circulation and bacterial filtration systems, and an oxygen supply from a modified artificial lung machine. It also has an automatic feeder — no fish flakes floating around. Like diligent home aquarists, astronauts have to test and clean the water twice a week for the first three weeks, then three times every 14 days after that.

The Aquatic Habitat aboard the ISS houses the spacefish.

Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide started the experiment by sacrificing and preserving eight of the fish in a stabilizing solution as controls, and moving 16 more from the transport unit into the Habitat. Today, after two weeks of swimming in microgravity, Hoshide removed six more medakas and preserved them in a type of formaldehyde; they’ll return with the astronauts next week on the Soyuz. Other station crew members will care for the remaining 10 fish, preserve them after 60 days, and send them back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Kudo plans to dissect them in ultra-thin slices to examine their bone densities.

His main goal is to understand the formation of osteoclasts, cells that absorb bone, and how microgravity affects the interaction between these and osteoblasts, bone-forming cells. Scientists already know that bone density decreases in space, and Kudo suspects it has to do with increased osteoclast production.

Medaka fish are particularly useful for this study because they’re transparent, which allows easy viewing of their bones and organs. They are also easy to modify genetically: those aboard the station have fluorescent proteins that cause osteoclasts to glow green and osteoblasts to glow red. (How nice that they’ll be aboard for Christmas!)

The aquarium also is set up for observation. Astronauts and scientists on the ground are able to watch the fish swim in loops, rather than in straight lines, because there’s no sense of up or down to orient them. The medaka are  rapid breeders, so there’s a strong possibility for fish fry (fish babies, that is, not a dinner buffet) in space, up to three generations in the time they’ll be aboard — that would be a first for space fish. Further experiments will study organ formation, and the aquarium is also designed to house frogs.

At JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center, Kudo can watch a live video feed to check whether the fish are swimming and eating normally. The medaka are already of great interest to the six space astronauts, who can look in on the fish as they go about their work. Kudo says: “We call them fishonauts.”

In space, fuel burns in a sphere. The FLEX-2 experiment studies this type of combustion.

In space, a drop of fuel burns in a sphere, symmetrically sucking in oxygen and producing heat and gas equally on all sides. With no gravity to make hot gas rise, flames lack the teardrop shape they assume on Earth. “It’s a ball of fire, more or less,” explains Forman Williams, a combustion researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Williams is the principal investigator for Flame Extinguishment Experiment 2, or FLEX-2, which studies these fireballs on board the International Space Station. Williams hopes his experiment will provide insight into the basic physics and chemistry of combustion, and lead to improved fire safety in space.

FLEX-2 takes place in the 560-pound Combustion Integrated Rack, which is located in the station’s Destiny lab module. Inside the rack, an apparatus about the size of a bread box can be filled with different mixtures of oxygen, nitrogen and helium gas. Tiny droplets of fuel, like methanol or heptane, are dispensed into the combustion zone through a syringe. “Since there is no gravity, the droplet just sits there,” Williams says. The droplets are ignited and can burn for up to 20 seconds or so (the exact time depends on the gas and fuel), shrinking as the fuel is consumed. While one camera records the droplet size, radiometers and an ultraviolet camera record the flame radiation, and another visible-light camera records the droplet and the flame.

Last summer, astronauts completed multiple rounds of experiments, typically doing four to 10 droplet burns in a session, twice a week. The first FLEX experiment studied the physics of flame extinction — how flames die out when there’s not enough fuel or oxygen — and was geared toward spacecraft safety. FLEX-2 is “more science-oriented,” says Williams, and is investigating fuel mixtures that might be used in high-efficiency automobile engines.

In the video above, a suspended droplet of heptane burns for a couple of seconds in a “hot flame,” then — when the scene appears mostly dark — burns in a “cool flame,” a steady, lower-temperature combustion. Finally, the droplet extinguishes in a bright orange vapor cloud.

The team has already made one interesting observation. “We were burning these heptane droplets out there on station, and we saw the hot flame extinguish, but the droplet kept decreasing in size. It was just like if it was burning, but we could not see any flame — it was almost like an invisible flame was causing these heptane droplets to burn steadily,” Williams says. “We didn’t even believe it for a year.” The team’s research was published in the December 2012 issue of the journal Combustion and Flame.

“Cool flames” have long been known to exist, but understanding more about how they work could help in the development of efficient, low-emission engines. Alternative fuels used by these types of engines often produce cool flames during combustion.

“If we hadn’t done these experiments in station, this phenomenon [that cool flames can support steady droplet combustion] would not be known today, so we were really excited about that,” Williams says.

Rebecca Boyle is an Air & Space contributor based in St. Louis.