Entrance to the new Time and Navigation exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum

You’re going to need a clock. That’s what the National Air and Space Museum wants to get across to visitors with its new permanent exhibit, Time and Navigation, opening tomorrow.

“If you want to know where you are, or if you want to know where you’re going, you need a reliable clock,” said Carlene Stephens, a curator at the National Museum of American History, which houses the Smithsonian’s collection of clocks and contributed to the exhibit. Appropriately, visitors enter the exhibit by walking under a beautiful blue and gold clock, in the “spirit of the early and truly magnificent European clocks,” says exhibit designer Heidi Eitel. She wanted to include the automaton clock that comes to life every quarter hour to tell “the story of when people began sharing time.”

The exhibit takes you through three eras, starting with Navigating at Sea, when sailors first used sextants and star charts to find their way across vast oceans. Though ships have had navigators since the 1600s, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that they had marine chronometers that kept reliable time at sea and allowed navigation with any precision. Galileo’s pendulum clock and an interactive 19th-century ship’s sextant that lets visitors navigate by the stars are highlights.

Next, the exhibit takes flight. Even aviation heros like Charles Lindbergh got lost before Navy Lieutenant Commander P.V.H. Weems developed air navigation techniques. Overhead, visitors can see the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae, which Wiley Post and famed navigator Harold Gatty flew around the world in 1931 in just eight days — a feat that could not have been accomplished without precise location-determining skills.

The Lockheed Vega "Winnie Mae," now on display in the Time and Navigation exhibit, was flown around the world in 1931 in just eight days. Photo by Dane Penland, National Air and Space Museum

In the third and final era, navigation gets three-dimensional as it moves into space. Throughout this section of the exhibit are star charts where Earth becomes just another potential destination on the map. Our education on space navigation starts with the story of NASA’s nine Ranger spacecraft, notorious for their failures to reach the moon, including two that completely missed the mark. But astronauts eventually made it to the surface, and visitors can see the Apollo sextant and space shuttle star tracker here. “When we go back into deep space,” said curator Andrew Johnston, “it’ll be very interesting to see how far we’ve come with navigation.” With the technology available today, the exhibit explains, spacecraft missions in 2012 were 100,000 times more accurate than they were in the 1960s.

Finally, the exhibit shows us how we navigate today. Atomic clocks (one is on view in case you need to set your watch) that keep time to three billionths of a second, GPS satellites that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, and smartphones that crunch all sorts of data have replaced chronometers and sextants and bulky books of charts. In fact, navigation today doesn’t even need people: Stanford’s driverless-car Stanley is also on display. It won DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge by navigating an off-road 132-mile race. But proving its necessity in our everyday modern lives, Time and Navigation ends with stories from today — a farmer, a fireman and a student explain how their livelihoods are affected by the technology developed since the first sailor located the North Star.

Satellite communications technicians conduct routine maintenance on a satellite dish at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr.)

“Disaggregation” is the word you want on your bingo card if you’re following the military satellite business these days. After spending decades focused on aggregation — that is, packing as many capabilities as they can onto one satellite to get the most bang for their buck in a single launch — the military is starting to think about reversing this trend. Disaggregation, then, is sending up less complex systems in smaller packages, but larger quantities. Threats of budget sequestration have allowed supporters, who argue this strategy will cut costs, to really turn up the volume.

Yesterday, the George C. Marshall Institute and the TechAmerica Space Enterprise Council held a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. as a way to turn an idea into a full-blown conversation. The U.S. Air Force has already decided that 2015 is the go or no-go time for disaggregating two important space missions: secure communications (which includes nuclear command and control) and weather forecasting. Representatives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Horizons Strategy Group (a consultant on security technology) spoke on the panel, along with the former director of space policy at the National Security Council.

There are three primary arguments for disaggregation: resiliency, promoting “tech refresh,” and affordability. A constellation of disaggregated satellites would be more resilient because if one was destroyed (by an enemy or otherwise), it would only affect that one system; whereas destruction of one of the current, larger milsats would be a massive blow to a whole host of systems. It would promote a constant refreshing of technology because lead times (and lifetimes) would be much shorter. As Horizons CEO Josh Hartman noted, instead of a satellite taking eight years to build, with a lifetime of up to 25 years — which inevitably saddles users with decades-old tech — a move to small, simple satellites that take only a year or two to build would let designers and engineers stay more current. And the potentially lower cost, meaning lower risk, of these satellites would let the engineers “push the envelope” and take chances on new technology.

Affordability seems like the easiest point to make, and this is hardly the first time someone has argued for smaller, cheaper military satellites. But not everyone agrees. Lockheed’s Marc Berkowitz held the mild dissenter’s seat at the table: “The assertion that disaggregation will save taxpayer money needs to be proven. More platforms means more launches to get them to orbit.” And while losing one small satellite is better than losing one massive satellite, Berkowitz pointed out that enemies might consider the risk for retribution lower for taking one down. Furthermore, the biggest obstacle toward disaggregation right now is simply that there isn’t really a plan for the transition, nor many models that actually analyze the resilience and cost factors. Essentially, supporters are just going by their instincts that smaller and faster is by definition better.

Hartman from Horizons explained that there are steps the military can take now to test some of these theories, most of which involve taking a current spacecraft that needs upgrades or repairs, and instead of fixing it, disaggregating it into smaller replacement satellites. Between now and 2015 the Pentagon can work on creating reliable models, based on these kinds of experiments, before deciding that swarms of smallsats are the way to go.

That vehicle re-entered the atmosphere on September 14, and as promised, onboard cameras caught the disintegration of the pressure vessel as it broke up. Japanese space agency officials are still reviewing the data, but have released preliminary pictures of the debris. These two were taken at an altitude of 70 kilometers (photos courtesy JAXA / IHI Aerospace):

No cameras are onboard Edoardo Amaldi, but the same REBR instrument that flew on the Japanese ship will be collecting data on this breakup.

Kounotori’s departure from the space station caused some tense moments. NASA astronaut Cady Coleman describes the scene in NASA Mission Control after the ship was released from the space station’s robot arm, when it appeared that the schoolbus-size spacecraft was moving backward to collide with the arm.  The vehicle had to execute an automatic abort. Astronaut Suni Williams was watching from inside the space station:

[Kounotori] hovered there for a little while, then seemed to want to come back to us – moved ever so slightly toward the ISS instead of drifting away.  We release her in a slightly lower orbit than us – which means she should be going faster according to orbital mechanics, which means she should have been moving away, and forward of us.  Instead she was drifting back toward us a little.  Well, the software in the system detected this as a “safety net/corridor violation” and sent an ABORT command.  As a result, she sped away from us at warp speed!  It was seriously like a Star Wars film.  She flew away so fast that we had a hard time tracking her on the camera.  Her name was Kounotori, meaning stork – so maybe she is like one of those heavy birds that take a while to get going, and then flies away at lightning speed.

It all turned out fine in the end. Here’s video of the faster-than-normal getaway. Everything’s moving pretty slowly until about the 4:38 mark, when Kounotori beats a hasty retreat.

Kounotori, packed full of supplies, arrived at the space station in July.

Shortly after Japan’s Kounotori cargo ship undocks from the space station on Wednesday, ground controllers will fire its rockets to steer the schoolbus-size craft into the atmosphere so that it burns up over the ocean. Normally, the end would come discreetly off camera. This time, we’ll get to watch the fireworks.

In the 55-year history of satellites re-entering the atmosphere, nobody (or at least nobody in the unclassified world) has ever gotten pictures from the satellite’s point of view. For Kounotori’s demise, Japanese investigators have placed a camera-equipped device called i-Ball inside the spacecraft. The spherical i-Ball has two cameras. One will return 10 images from inside Kounotori as it’s breaking up. The second camera will take 40 pictures after the breakup, and the i-Ball will continue on to a splashdown in the ocean.

This Japanese space agency video shows how it’s all supposed to go:

Japan’s i-Ball won’t be the only instrument recording the spacecraft’s breakup. Another experiment package, called REBR (Re-Entry Breakup Recorder), will collect information on temperature and accelerations as Kounotori is torn to pieces during re-entry.

“Getting data off a satellite that’s coming in and breaking apart is a bit of a trick,” says William Ailor of The Aerospace Corporation, principal investigator for REBR, whose team worked on the technology for more than a decade before flying it for the first time on another Kounotori last year. REBR is contained in a copper shell held together by plastic bolts. Once the spacecraft starts to break up, the bolts melt and the instrument package is set free. “The whole vehicle that we’re riding in has to come apart for us to get out at all,” says Ailor. REBR has no cameras, but its data — transmitted to the ground during a five-minute fall to the ocean — will tell scientists about the timing and conditions of the breakup.

Why do they care? Currently, spacecraft operators err on the side of caution when it comes to de-orbiting a satellite at the end of its lifetime. Rather than risk an uncontrolled entry over a populated area, they command the satellite to re-enter slightly early. “If your casualty expectation exceeds 1 in 10,000, you have to put it in the ocean,” says Ailor. The risk of casualties is based on estimates of when a given satellite would break up as its orbit decays. “What we’re trying to do [with REBR] is calibrate the models that make these estimates.” If satellite owners could be less conservative in their estimates, they could leave valuable satellites — say, the Hubble Space Telescope — operating longer in space.

Information on satellite breakup is considered important enough that a commercial venture called Terminal Velocity Aerospace has licensed the technology from The Aerospace Corp. to do routine data collection on future spacecraft. Meanwhile, Ailor is looking forward to i-Ball’s first-time photos. “I hope they succeed,” he says. “That will be really significant in itself.”

Below: In 1984, cameras in Hawaii captured the space shuttle’s external tank breaking up over the ocean. The STS-41C astronauts narrated video of the re-entry during a postflight press conference:

In 2008, the European ATV cargo vehicle was filmed during re-entry:

Prelaunch checkout of the receiver that registers instructions radioed from the ground. (Photo by B. Anthony Stewart, originally published in National Geographic.

Launched 50 years ago today, Telstar (developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories for AT&T) was the first satellite to relay live TV signals.

On July 11, 1962, a ground station in Andover, Maine, sent a signal to the Telstar satellite that was processed and amplified, then resent to ground stations in the United Kingdom and France. The French station (at Pleumeur-Bodou in Brittany) reported that the images and sound came through clearly; the British station received images only.

It had been agreed that on July 23, television broadcasts between Europe and the United States would be exchanged. But the French couldn’t wait. “On July 12,” notes the National Postal Museum, “Pleumeur transmitted a seven-minute program that was carried by the American networks. It opened ‘Relax, you are in Paris!’ and featured the popular singer Yves Montand. The British scrambled to get their own program out while complaining that France had violated the broadcast agreement.”

The formal transmission on July 23 beamed President John F. Kennedy’s press conference to Europe. “I understand that part of today’s press conference is being relayed by Telstar, the communication satellite, to viewers across the Atlantic,” Kennedy said, “and this is another indication of the extraordinary world in which we live.”

In 1962, space-themed stamps and covers appeared on the market for the first time. This launch cover, part of the National Postal Museum's collections, celebrates Telstar's ascent into orbit.

The American Broadcasting Company (in cooperation with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) presented an 18-minute program that opened with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, then flashed to a baseball game at Chicago’s Wrigley field, before turning to Kennedy’s press conference. Astronauts John Glenn and Wally Shirra spoke briefly beside a model of the space capsule before the program switched to folk dancing in Quebec, and then traveled to Niagara Falls. The program concluded with a view of the U.N. building in New York City while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir belted out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

An unidentified man poses beside the 170-pound Telstar I satellite circa early 1962. Image courtesy NASA and NASM.

The British Broadcasting Corporation began its 19-minute broadcast with a close-up of Big Ben, then raced over to the Arctic Circle so a Lapp girl could show off her reindeer calf. The broadcast then jumped over to the Champs Elysee and the Arc de Triomphe, then on to the Houses of Parliament and the Thames in London. The whirlwind tour concluded with shots of the Sistine chapel in the Vatican, and then back to the British Museum.

While Telstar’s expected lifespan was two years, in November 1962 the satellite stopped transmitting, its electronics damaged by Van Allen Belt radiation. But it is still in orbit; you can track it here.

On Thursday, July 12, the National Air and Space Museum, in collaboration with the French Embassy, will host a symposium (with a live Webcast) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Telstar.

Orbital Science's airborne launch system, the Lockheed L-1101 "Stargazer" with a Pegasus rocket strapped underneath. Photo courtesy Orbital Science Corps.

Making it easier, cheaper, and quicker to get things into orbit is the hot ticket right now. In our latest issue we cover the ongoing efforts by the Operationally Responsive Space office, working out of Kirtland Air Base in New Mexico, to make quick-launch spacecraft. DARPA’s also in that game: last week they awarded Boeing a $4.5 million contract to study airborne satellite launch systems. DARPA’s website explains:

The goal of [the Airborne Launch Assist Space Access] ALASA is to develop a significantly less expensive approach for routinely launching small satellites, with a goal of at least threefold reduction in costs compared to current military and US commercial launch costs. Currently, small satellite payloads cost more than $30,000 per pound to launch, and must share a launcher with other satellites. ALASA seeks to launch satellites on the order of 100 pounds for less than $1M total, including range support costs, to orbits that are selected specifically for each 100 pound payload.

They also note other disadvantages of fixed launch sites, like weather delays and limitations on the types of orbits available. Of course, the idea for aircraft-based launches goes back to NASA’s X-planes in the 1950s. Today, Orbital Sciences Corp. sends satellites into space with its Pegasus rocket that launches from a Lockheed-1101 Tri-Star (NASA’s NuSTAR spacecraft is scheduled for a June 13 airborne launch). And Stratolaunch Systems, the collaboration of Scaled Composites, SpaceX, and Dynetics, is in the works to take payloads up “affordably and responsibly” (and if successful, “mark the dawn of a new era of space transportation,” if they do say so themselves).

With ALASA, which has been in the works since November 2011, DARPA is looking for something a bit lighter-duty for smaller satellites — the Pegasus/Tri-Star can carry up to 1,000 pounds, while the Stratolaunch will likely be rated for payloads upwards of 100,000 pounds. And somehow, they want this launch system designed so that it requires “no recurring maintenance or support, and no specific integration to prepare for launch.” A pick-it-up-and-go system, indeed. We’ll be interested to see what Boeing comes up with by the end of their 18-month contract.

Apollo 11

Where were you on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon? What were you doing on October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik? Do you remember April 12, 1981, when the space shuttle Columbia made its first flight?

In 2008, the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival included the program “NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond,” and as part of that program, visitors were encouraged to document (written on note cards and recorded on tape) their memories of America’s space program.  A few of the festival-goer’s memories appear below.

As the 50^th anniversary year of human spaceflight draws to a close, we ask you to remember your own space milestones. After you read the remembrances here, leave a comment to tell us where you were, what you saw, and how you felt.

I had just learned to drive my husband’s stick shift car. He worked in the simulation lab with astronauts. I was stopped in front of their building to pick up my husband. As he got into the car, he said, “There’s Neil.” I said, “Neil who?” He said, “Armstrong! Who else?” At that point I went limp, the clutch jumped, the car lurched forward, and Neil just missed being hit.

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. I remember Werner von Braun was our most famous citizen. Huntsville was very sleepy until Sputnik was launched. All of a sudden, Huntsville became a hotbed of activity, all centered on the space program. Within three years, the U.S. had an active space program. Many of the engines for spacecraft were built in Huntsville. Huntsville calls itself “The Space Capital of the Universe” now. In 1950, it was known as “the Watercress Capital of the U.S.” Things change!

In 1957 Sputnik went up and the talk was that U.S. students had to catch up academically. I was 10 years old—the next day was the first time we ever had homework in school.

I was in second grade when the entire student body of Norfeld Elementary reported to the auditorium to watch a not-very-big portable black-and-white TV for a Mercury capsule splashdown in the Atlantic. We were all worried that it could miss and veer back into space forever. (It went OK.)

When I was in elementary school, a man came to the school and sang songs about Black Holes. Needless to say, I was terrified.

I’ve been fascinated by space exploration for my entire life. My family tells me that my first word was “moon.” Now I work as a NASA contractor, on a mission to the Moon (LRO). I’m grateful to be standing on the shoulders of giants, the men and women before and beside me that helped NASA and all space agencies achieve what they have. And we’re only at the beginning of the adventure.

The Soyuz ST-B awaiting its October 20 launch from the European Spaceport in French Guiana. Credit: ESA - S. Corvaja, 2011

This Thursday morning (Update: Launch was postponed to Friday due to a fueling problem) when a Soyuz rocket lifts off from French Guiana, it will mark a couple of important milestones: the first Soyuz to launch outside of Russia or Kazakhstan in the rocket’s 44-year history, and the first step in assembling Europe’s new Galileo satellite navigation system.

The French first built this launch facility near Kourou in 1964. The European Space Agency started funding the spaceport when the agency was created in 1974, and now uses the prime location — just five degrees north of the equator — for launching geostationary satellites. In 2003, the spaceport began construction of a launch site for the newest model of the Russian vehicle, a version of the Soyuz-2 called the Soyuz ST. Construction was completed in 2008 and, though not planned at this time, the pad can be adapted for human-rated Soyuz launchers, of the kind used to send cosmonauts and astronauts to the space station.

The three-stage Soyuz ST-B was lifted into vertical position on the launchpad last Friday, while the Arianespace team — which runs launch operations in French Guiana — went through full dress rehearsals to prepare for the launch tomorrow. You can see a slideshow of the launch preparations here.

The vehicle carries two Galileo In-Orbit Validation satellites, the first in Europe’s planned navigation system. These two testbed satellites will eventually be joined by about 30 fully operational spacecraft; the ESA and the European Union hope the system will be fully functional by 2014. Galileo is built to be even more accurate than the U.S. GPS (Global Positioning System), and will be freely available to civilians, giving European nations their own independent system.

You can watch the launch online at Arianespace’s good-looking new website that went live earlier this week.

Hurricane Irene is currently bearing down on the Turks and Caicos Islands, and may hit the east coast of the United States by week’s end. Here’s a gallery of different views. I love the names of the different types of color enhancement, like “Rainbow” and “Funktop” (developed by a meteorologist named Ted Funk, it shows areas of intense rainfall).

Hurricane Irene from the GOES East satellite, infrared view, "Funktop" enhancement.

Below is another enhanced infrared GOES-East image. You can see an animated version here. Blue is warmer, red is colder, white coldest. This type of coloring, by the National Hurricane Center, is done, basically, because TV viewers like pretty pictures. Really, no kidding. From the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s product description:

This enhancement is mainly utilized by the National Hurricane Center/ Tropical Prediction Center in Miami, Florida for enhancement of infrared (11µm) imagery for television, newspaper, and internet displays. This enhancement is typically provided for/by the media since they prefer to work with color imagery rather than simple black & white enhanced imagery.

And even though it’s not as colorful, here’s an impressive photo taken yesterday by Ron Garan on the International Space Station:

Photo: JAXA

We had hoped that Japan’s IKAROS solar sail would work as advertised, and it did. Here’s an animated image of the fully deployed sail, taken by a “separation camera” from a short distance away.

In other happenings:

• The Hayabusa asteroid sample return capsule came home in spectacular style last week. Video here.
• Scientists on NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting mission have released a new batch of data, and now have 400 “objects of interest” that could turn out to be new planets. There’s some disagreement over whether the team should be able to hold on to the data until they’re sure, though.

In seven years, SpaceX has grown from a dream to a growing company with 800 employees, major NASA contracts, and a busy launch schedule. Next up is the debut of the larger Falcon 9 rocket—not from the tiny Kwajalein range in the remote Pacific, but from the big boy launch site, Cape Canaveral.

This presentation by Musk last month to the Augustine commission on the future of the space program gives a pretty good idea where SpaceX is headed.

Faster, work faster

Small satellites used to be all the rage. Now, to be really cutting edge, they have to be fast, too, as in fast to build, test, and launch.

“Operationally responsive” is military-speak for fast: Field commanders want spacecraft that can return images and other data quickly from some hot spot they’d never even heard of six months ago (say, the coast of Somalia). The trouble is, most satellites take years to plan, build, and launch into orbit.

Chuck Finley of the Pentagon’s Operationally Responsive Space office thinks that ordering a satellite should be as easy as ordering a computer from Dell. So to prove his point, he plans to build a fully functional, 330-pound satellite in just three days, starting this morning.

His “customer” will be the attendees at the 7th Responsive Space Conference, who are meeting this week at a hotel in Los Angeles. At around 11:30 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, Finley will take the group’s satellite order. You want imaging and UHF communications? Fine. How much power do you want with that? Then he’ll relay the information back to a team of six engineers at the ORS workshop at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, who’ll be connected by webcam to the conference, and who will immediately set to work, says Finley, “like gerbils in a cage.”

He figures that by Wednesday morning, they’ll have already assembled the modular spacecraft bus and added the requested components, using standardized parts and standard interfaces (just like Dell does). Now comes the interesting part. The satellite builders in New Mexico will ask the customers how much testing they want. Do the vibration test, but skip the vacuum test? No problem. Finley intends for this part of the demonstration to be instructional as well as practical. Sometimes good means good enough, and the conference-goers, a savvy bunch of buyers, will help the engineers decide, in real time, which tests can be eliminated without sacrificing too much quality.

When he first started planning the demo, Finley thought the satellite could be built, shipped to Los Angeles, and presented to the conference goers before they wrapped up on Thursday afternoon. Now he’ll settle for getting it built and tested in time, and showing off the results via webcam. As the starting gun approaches, he admits to some trepidation. “Could be a nightmare,” he laughs.

Then again, it’s supposed to be a learning exercise. So wish the team luck. And follow their progress on this blog.