Are We There Yet?

Tony Antonelli spent 24 days in space as a shuttle pilot, working on building the International Space Station.

Now, he’s the chief technologist for Lockheed Martin’s civil exploration division. And he’s working on building the next space station, this one bound for Mars.

Lockheed formally announced the plan earlier this month with hopes NASA will consider it as they finalize their plans to send humans to Mars. As Antonellio explains  the idea uses technology we already have or are close to developing.

NASA’s Kepler telescope discovered 1,284 new planets outside our solar system. They’re called exoplanets and the total count is now more than 3,000 confirmed planets.

The hunt is on for what we call ‘Goldilocks’ planets. Planets that aren’t too hot, not too cold and just right for pooling water. Get it, like the three bear?

Kepler is leading the charge finding and confirming these planets, and along with ground-based systems we think we’ve discovered about 3 dozen. Kepler is just one step in the search for exoplanets.

The telescope is only looking at a tiny fraction of the sky. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — or TESS for short — is the next chapter in the search for other planets. To talk more about TESS and the hunt for new planets, Scientist Stephen Reinhart joined the program from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Remember going on road trips as a kid – all cooped up in a car for what seemed like forever? Were you like me? Did you have an annoying little brother to deal with? Did you miss your friends from home while you were away?

Well, imagine being cooped up like that for six months. That’s the typical mission duration on the International Space Station. So how do astronauts put up with each other? And how do they make that tin can in the sky a bit more like home?

Phyllis Johnson is a sociologist at the University of British Colombia, and she’s hoping to answer some of those questions. Her study ‘At Home In Space‘ is especially important when you consider a trip to Mars is at least six months…and that’s just one way.

It was a good news/bad news week when it comes to Mars exploration.

On one hand, SpaceX announced plans to launch a Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. On the other, NASA scaled back funding for a critical landing demonstration needed for a Mars landing.

While it might be a setback for NASA, Casey Dreier, Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society, thinks there’s a lesson to be learned here: when it comes to Mars, you’ve got to have a plan.

Casey joins the podcast via Skype to talk about a piece he wrote for the Planetary Society: “What NASA Can Learn from SpaceX. A man, a plan, Mars”

 

Every space exploration mission begins with a countdown. The clock hits zero, the rocket launches and heads to space.

Rockets are big. They need to be. They’ve got to hold a massive amount of fuel to produce enough thrust to escape Earth’s gravity. And there’s the potential that something could go wrong.

But What if we could get rid of rockets all together? Is there an alternative?

The documentary “Sky Line” explores one alternative: an elevator into space.

It’s an idea as old as the Tower of Babel and imagined by science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clark.

Director Miguel Drake-McLaughlin follows a few pioneering engineers who are taking the idea from the book to the real world. He joins the podcast from his office in New York to talk about the documentary

What happens when there’s an emergency on a spacecraft 75 million miles away? Operators of the Kepler deep space telescope ran into that problem recently when a scheduled check-in proved to be a bit more difficult than expected.

Kepler is searching for exoplanets outside our solar system. Orlando Sentinel’s Emilee Speck tells us how the operators acted fast to save the spacecraft and what’s ahead for Kepler.

Plus, our home turf of Orlando played host to a space engineer conference. Emilee was there and has some interesting details on the future of the Mars 2020 Rover, along with an update from Alan Stern and New Horizons.

 

Exploring space is a lot like camping — you need to bring everything with you. And that includes power. I did some reporting on a shortage of a vital resource to provide power in space when solar panels just won’t work. We’ll talk to one NASA scientist who says that shortage is over and the possibilities of exploration are now limitless.

Deep space rovers use this thing called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator – or RTG for short. This is how it works: So when something radioactive decays, it gives of heat. In this case, it’s a marshmallow sized chunk of Plutonium-238. On these rovers is one of these RTGs which turns the heat of the material decaying into electric power.

Now the great thing about RTGS is Plutonium decays for a really long time, like decades, so it’s constantly providing heat and thus providing power.

But at the end of the Cold War, the US scaled back its nuclear weapons production. Well, Plutonium 238 was a product of weapons manufacturing, so there was a diminished supply.

Not until recently did the U.S. Department of Energy get the funding and the go-ahead to produce more Plutonium for NASA to use. And it figured out a way to make it without a big nuclear reactor like they were using before. So they’re ramping up production for folks like Jim Green

Jim Green is the Director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences division. His job is to oversee all these deep space probes and rovers. He gave me a call to talk about how important RTGs are to deep-space exploration.

On the last episode of this podcast, we talked with Stu McClung, an engineer working on the Orion space capsule. If you remember, this is the capsule that’s going to take humans into deep space.

The interesting thing about the Orion capsule is that it’s being put together at Kennedy Space Center where it will eventually launch. That’s a new technique for NASA. In the past, capsules were shipped to KSC fully assembled.

Now, only the shell of the capsule is shipped to Kennedy. Once it arrives, some assembly is required, like outfitting the computers, consoles, outer shell and heat shield.

It’s all done at the revamped Operations and Checkout Facility. This long building was once used for final preparations of the Apollo missions, as well as final preparations for parts heading to the International Space Station.

Now, it’s redesigned to piece together Orion. Today, the Orion capsule that NASA plans to use on Exploration Mission 1 is being worked on. What they call the pressure vessel arrives from a factory in New Orleans. It’s basically just the inner shell of Orion with holes cut out for windows and hatches.

NASA Engineer Scott Wilson and his team handle the rest.

Listen by clicking on play button above, on the WMFE mobile app, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or RSS Feed.

If we’re going to go to Mars, we’re going to need a new spacecraft. That’s what NASA’s Orion capsule is for.

It looks like the capsules of the Apollo days. Engineers say the capsule’s shape is perfect for deep space exploration and re-entry into the atmosphere. But it’s a bit bigger than the Apollo command module. It was originally designed to hold six astronauts.

Engineers are borrowing what they learned from the shuttle program, too. Decades of space exploration are coming together for this crew capsule.

In 2014, NASA launched an Orion into a high orbit around the Earth to test the capsule’s structure and heat shield. They called that test flight EFT-1, and by all accounts the mission was a success.

Their sights are now set on Exploration Mission One, or EM-1, an unpiloted mission set for 2018 that will send the Orion capsule into space, past the moon and back.

So what goes into designing the next big thing in space exploration? And how are engineers preparing for the next test flight?

Orion Engineer Stu McClug gave me a call from his office in Houston to bring me up to speed on Orion and the new rocket they’re designing to blast it into deep space.

Listen to previous episodes:

RED ROVER, RED ROVER

THE MARTIAN

Listen by clicking on play button above, on the WMFE mobile app, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or RSS Feed.

Before we send humans to new worlds, we’re sending robots first.

Currently, there are two rovers exploring the surface of Mars, Opportunity and Curiosity. They’re both responsible for uncovering scientific data from the red planet that help us better understand the surface of Mars – what was once there and what to expect when we get there?

Opportunity, launched in 2003, is uncovering what was once on Mars and searching for evidence of water by examining rocks found on the surface.

Curiosity, launched in 2011, followed in the footsteps of Opportunity by searching for clues to the red planet’s past. But this mobile lab has more sophisticated equipment and an array of high-definition cameras. We’re seeing images of the surface of Mars we’ve never seen before. Curiosity, with a social media personality of its own, is capturing the attention of folks back here on Earth with robotic Martian selfies posted to Twitter.

There’s a whole slew of new probes heading to Mars, and other destinations of our Solar System, that will help get humans to new worlds.

Emilee Speck writes for Orlando Sentinel’s ‘Go For Launch’ blog about these probes and rovers, and she joins me to bring us up-to-speed on what’s happening in space.

Listen to the next episode: BUILDING A DEEP SPACE CAPSULE