Are We There Yet?

To celebrate the second year of the podcast “Are We There Yet?”, we commissioned designer Tim Gagnon to create a mission patch.

Gagnon has designed mission patches for NASA since the shuttle days and joins the program to talk about how these space coat of arms are designed and why so many people go bonkers collecting them. What’s the big deal with these things anyways?

You can get your own “Are We There Yet?” patch here. 

To celebrate the second year of the podcast "Are We There Yet?" we commissioned designer Tim Gagnon to create a mission patch. What's the big deal with these things anyways?

Florida’s Space Coast is roaring back to life. Nearly a decade after the shuttle was retired, we’re on the brink of a new age of space exploration that leverages commercial and academic partnerships to send humans farther into the solar system than ever before. And NASA is working on its next big rocket, the Space Launch System, at the Kennedy Space Center.

To explore this bright future of space exploration from the sunshine state, WMFE hosted a panel of astronauts, scientists and space visionaries in front of a live studio audience in Orlando.

Panelists:

Robert Cabana – Director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He was selected as an astronaut in 1985 and hisfirst flight was on STS-41 Discovery, launching in 1990. He’d go on to fly on three more shuttle missions, logging 37 days in space. He has served as the director of KSC since 2008.

Dr. Addie Dove – Planetary scientist and assistant professor of physics at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests include dusty plasmas, collisions and understanding how planets formed. Her experiments have flown to space on many different launch vehicles and she has conducted experiments on parabolic flights.

Bob Richards – As a space entrepreneur and futurist he co-founded the International Space University and the group Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. In 2008 he foundered the Singularity University, an institution based at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley dedicated to preparing humanity for accelerating technological change. Now he’s hoping to land the first commercial payload on the moon with his company Moon Express, where he serves as founder and CEO.

Nicole Stott – Retired NASA astronaut who served as a shuttle mission specialist and flight engineer on the International Space Station.

Florida’s Space Coast is roaring back to life. Nearly a decade after the shuttle was retired, we’re on the brink of a new age of space exploration that leverages commercial and academic partnerships to send humans farther into the solar system than ever before.

There has only been one person who has flown on all five space shuttles. His name is Story Musgrave. He’s been to space six times.

Musgrave led the team that serviced the Hubble space telescope in orbit, fixing a flaw in the $1.5 billion observatory while it was more than 300 miles above Earth.

“I know how to fix stuff,” said Musgrave. “If you look at the path I took, it’s leading to Hubble. No one at the time had the skills or the imagination to create solutions to the problem.”

Story has a humble background coming up as a farm-boy who eventually dropped out of school. He joins the program to talk about his rise from farm-boy to rocket-man and why having an imagination is one of his best assets.

There has only been one person who has flown on all five space shuttles. His name is Story Musgrave.

You’ve probably heard about exoplanets, right? They’re planets that live outside of our solar system. The Kepler spacecraft has identified thousands of these things, and some of those planets it discovered are similar to Earth and reside in a zone around their host starts known as the Goldilocks zone — which means they could contain liquid water.

Kepler is about to get some help hunting for exoplanets in April. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, we’ll call it TESS, launches into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center, and it hopes to find not just thousands, but tens of thousands more exoplanets.

We speak with TESS principle investigator George Ricker and Orbital ATK’s Robert Lockwood about the mission.

I’m sure you’ve watch rocket launches on TV or streaming, right? You know those tight shots that follow the rocket into space and in SpaceX’s case the ones that follow them back down to earth? Well, someone like Rick Wetherington is responsible for those images.

He’s a photo planner for Abacus Technology a contractor at Kennedy Space Center. He tracks rockets as they take off using this huge camera rigs. He tracks them by hand, usually just a mile away from the launch or landing pads.

He tracked the Falcon Heavy launch, but I met with him a few weeks before that assignment. We spoke at the Kennedy Space Center’s Press Site ahead of that launch about what goes in to tracking rockets and why his film is so important to engineers.

One of Rick’s most memorable assignments was when a Delta II rocket exploded shortly after liftoff. This is what it looked like. Watch for the shots following the burning debris as it falls to the Earth. That was shot by someone just like Rick.

There’s a bunch of exciting space exploration mission slated for 2018. From SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to NASA’s next Mars lander, space enthusiasts have a lot to look forward to in the new year.

Chris Gebhardt, NASASpaceflight.com‘s managing editor, joins the program to talk about all the exciting missions ahead this year.

Highlights from Chris’ 2018 watch list:

Cassini

Even thought Cassini crashed into Saturn last year, Gebhardt said there’s still plenty to learn about the ringed planet. “Towards the latter part of it’s final orbits, it was actually brushing up against the top of Saturn’s atmosphere and dip-diving into Saturn,” he said. “All of that data, while it was returned last year in the final days of Cassin’s mission, scientists are analyzing it and looking at all of that.”

LightSail

This Planetary Society-backed project hopes to provide spacecraft propulsion by harnessing the power of the sun in a space “sail”. LightSail captures the particles released from the sun and uses them to push a sail through space. “Once it’s in orbit, it’s going to deploy this really huge sail relative to the size of the spacecraft itself. What they’re going to try to do is use that sail to progressively raise that satellites orbit,” said Gebhardt.

The mission is slated for a launch on Falcon Heavy later this year.

New Horizons Flyby

In 20115, New Horizons thrust Pluto back into the spotlight after sending incredible images of the dwarf planet back to Earth. The spacecraft is now targeting a flyby of Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69.

“This mission just keeps on giving in very surprising and intriguing ways,” said Gebhardt. “It’s revealing a lot about a region of the solar system that’s very difficult to see.” The flyby begins in the early hours of January 1, 2019 — but most of the prep is happening in 2018.

NASA’s InSight

The InSight lander launches en route to Mars from South America in May, and when it gets there, it hopes to uncover how rocky planets of the inner solar system, including Earth, came to be more than four billion years ago.

“What’s really cool is that there are CubeSats going on this mission,” said Gebhardt. The tiny satellites will be deployed right before the lander makes its final approach of the red planet, and they’ll be used to help navigate the lander onto the surface of Mars and relay all that information back to Earth. “It’s a really cool experiment to use CubeSats to really help maintain contact with landing spacecraft on another planet.”

Before we send humans to Mars, it’s probably a smart idea to do a few test runs first, right? That’s what analogs are for. They’re a great way to test the human aspect of space exploration.

HI-SEAS is one of those analogs. The ‘Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation’ is a habitat on an isolated Mars-like site on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The habitat is about 1,200 square feet and has a small sleeping quarters for a crew of six, as well as a kitchen, laboratory, simulated airlock and of course a bathroom.

The location also has a geology similar to Mars, so a crew can perform similar ‘outside’ tasks as if they were on Mars. They have to suit up in an air lock and use space suits to step outside.

Each mission in HI-SEAS looks to test the human factors of a Mars mission. The last mission, HI-SEAS V, was an 8 month stay for 6 test subjects.

One of those test subjects was Brian Ramos. He’s a Portuguese-American pursuing a life of exploration. He grew up in Rhode Island and holds dual engineering degrees in biomedical and electrical engineering.