AirSpaceMag.com

NASA’s Open Government initiative is tasked with “expanding transparency, participation, and collaboration and creating a new level of openness and accountability.” Part of accomplishing those goals is finding a way to present NASA, its mission, and the volumes of data it collects to the public in an easy-to-understand “I’m not a scientist” way.

Recently they’ve been working on this pretty neat “Global Exploration Roadmap” to illustrate the upcoming endeavors for the space program, including trips to asteroids and Mars. The graphic itself is pretty snazzy, but if you head over to the interactive site, you can click on each section to get more information. For those of us with a deep interest in space exploration, it’s mostly a pretty poster (I printed one out for my office wall!), but for folks who only keep up a casual interest — or want to get more educated while hearing the presidential candidates discuss future space programs — this is a fantastic way to quickly get caught up on the initiatives already planned for the next decade.

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.

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.

We’ve been loving these new time-lapse views from the International Space Station ever since the ISS crew started posting them last summer.

Now artists like Berlin-based Michael König have started improving and remixing the originals. Man, is this pretty.

Most of you know about the Google Lunar X Prize already: the race for “the first privately funded team to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth.”  Google is offering up $30 million in prizes to the 26 teams from around the world who joined the competition by the December 2010 application deadline.

In their efforts to “ignite a new era of lunar exploration,” GLXP wants more than just to send hardware to the moon. Along the way the teams must record their work and reach out through blogs and social media so that the rest of us (including the passionate but less engineering-inclined) can follow their progress. According to the rules, each team must write one blog post a week and post 45 minutes of video each quarter; Facebook and Twitter are not required, but many of the teams have incorporated them as well.

Amanda Stiles, GLXP’s Online Community and Google Liaison, says this about the online outreach requirement:

We hope that by encouraging the teams to tell their stories, the public will have the opportunity to get to know the personalities of the people involved with the competition and understand their motivations for pursuing the prize. These teams are pushing boundaries and doing great things in many arenas — technical, political, educational, and business, to name a few — all around the world, and we hope to showcase those efforts. And ultimately, when the winning teams eventually claim the prize purses then there will be well-documented stories of their trials, tribulations, and successes along the way.

GLXP recently redesigned their website so that it focuses more on these outreach efforts, with a streaming feed of all the competitors’ updates and pages for each team. Naturally, some of the output is better than others; many of the Twitter feeds don’t really seem to “live-tweet” the experience the way an observer might hope. Team Astrobotic Tech has one of the better Twitter feeds, with lots of interesting updates and links to pictures and video of their two Personal Exploration Rovers (PERs), Juno and Kosh.

Team Astrobotic Tech's Twitter update, featuring their GLXP rovers.

Here’s a particularly informative video from Team Italia describing their rover engineering.

Space exploration outreach group Evadot has been keeping a running scorecard for each section of the GLXP competition, which puts team Part-Time Scientists in the lead for social outreach, though we’re not sure if that’s for strictly following the quantity requirements or if it takes into account quality, as well.

The online outreach is just one part of an obviously much bigger and more difficult challenge. But as Evadot notes, GLXP “is NOT just a simple race to the moon. The point is the change it can bring through the competition. It’s not the race, it’s what happens because of the race.” And the hope is that this kind of outreach will, as Stiles puts it, ”encourage teams to be seen as modern-day space heroes,” inspiring not just by reaching a goal, but by bringing us all along for the ride.