Nasa picks future astronaut ship

25 May 2011 Last updated at 07:36 GMT By Jonathan Amos BBC science correspondent The MPCV will take humans beyond the ISS, to destinations such as Mars Nasa has confirmed that the vehicle it will use to send astronauts to places like asteroids will be based on its Orion capsule concept.

Orion was the ship being built to return America to the Moon before the project was cancelled last year by President Barack Obama.

The US space agency says the financial investment and the engineering lessons learned should not be wasted.

It wants the new Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle to benefit from that heritage.

Mr Obama has said he would like humans to visit a space rock in the 2020s. The MPCV would be the ship that takes them there. It would also have a role in any human mission to Mars - the destination Nasa is aiming to reach in perhaps the 2030s.

Orion was conceived as a high-spec vehicle that could visit the ISS and do deep-space destinations

Lockheed Martin was the American company leading the development of Orion. It will keep the prime contractor role on the new ship.

"We are committed to human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and look forward to developing the next generation of systems to take us there," said Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement.

The MPCV will be capable of carrying four astronauts on 21-day missions. It would start those journeys by launching on the top of an as-yet-undefined big rocket and end them by splashing down in the Pacific off California.

Nasa says the 23-ton spacecraft would have a pressurized volume of 19.5 cubic metres (690 cu ft), just over nine cubic metres (300 cu ft) of which would be habitable.

On missions longer than 21 days, the MPCV would be attached to other modules.

"During these missions to asteroids or Mars, or to the moons of Mars, this vehicle would be just maintained in more dormant mode while the crew would be in another volume which would have longer-term consumables and capability to support them," explained Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the agency's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington.

"In terms of deep space exploration, we hope to have test flights obviously in this decade. We're not exactly sure when, but certainly as early as possible. Those would be missions beyond low-Earth orbit."

Investment in Orion has already topped $5bn

Orion was one of the centrepieces of former President George W Bush's Constellation programme, which sought to return Americans to the Moon using two new rockets and a high-spec capsule.

But the initiative was cancelled by his successor because of its burgeoning cost - $9bn at the time Mr Obama ordered it be shut down. Investment in Orion alone to date is put at slightly more than $5bn.

Many commentators expected elements of Constellation to re-surface in whatever programme replaced it, and some sort of Orion derivative was an obvious prospect.

But Nasa moved swiftly on Tuesday to correct the idea that the adoption of the MPCV was somehow a move on the part of the agency to protect "old ways" of doing business.

Mr Cooke said the Orion government and industry team had shown exceptional creativity in finding ways to push costs down.

However, he could not say what the final development bill would be or how much the recurring costs would be on operational MPCVs.

Nasa will also need at some stage to define a heavy-lift rocket to put in orbit the MPCV and any associated exploration equipment.

The SpaceX company claims its Dragon capsule will also be a highly capable vehicle

The US Congress, through the Nasa Authorisation Act 2010, has mandated that this rocket should be launching by the end of 2016, although the agency has previously stated that it views this timeline as challenging. It promises more details on the launcher "in the coming weeks".

Nasa's current fleet of space vehicles - the shuttles - are being retired, with the Atlantis orbiter set to end their operation for good with a final flight in July.

America will then rely on Russian Soyuz vehicles to get its astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) until a new wave of US commercial carriers enter service around the middle of the decade.

In the main, these crew carriers will be substantially cheaper to build and operate than the MPCV, and will not be capable of venturing beyond low-Earth orbit where the ISS resides.

However, the SpaceX company claims the Dragon capsule it is developing for journeys to the ISS will eventually be able to match any task given to the Lockheed Martin ship, and do it at a greatly reduced price.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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Resource demand threatens future

12 May 2011 Last updated at 17:37 GMT By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News Since the turn of the century, prices for resource - like copper - have been rising in real terms The world is set to consume three times more natural resources than current rates by the middle of the century, according to a United Nations report.

It predicts that humanity will annually use about 140 billion tonnes of fossil fuels, minerals and ores by 2050.

The authors call for resource consumption to be "decoupled" from economic growth, and producers to do "more with less".

Growth in population and prosperity are the main drivers, they observe.

The report is the latest in a series by the UN Environment Programme's (Unep) International Resource Panel.

"Decoupling makes sense on all the economic, social and environmental dials, " said Unep executive director Achim Steiner.

"People believe environmental 'bads' are the price we must pay for economic 'goods'.

"However, we cannot and need not continue to act as if this trade-off is inevitable."

Co-lead author Mark Swilling from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, explained what would drive the surge in demand for resources.

"The reality is that there is another billion middle-class consumers on the way as a result of rapid industrialisation in developing countries," he told BBC News.

Continue reading the main story

The easiest and cheapest contribution to sustainability is promoting the existing trend to smaller families”

End Quote Simon Ross Population Matters "If the resources required to generate these goods and services are used as efficiently as they currently are, then you are looking at that massive growth to 140 billion tonnes."

Professor Swilling added that population growth also played a role in the projected increase.

"If you add one Indian to the global population, you are talking about adding up to four tonnes of resource consumption each year. If you add an average Canadian, then you are adding another 25 tonnes," he explained.

"Developed world populations are stable, and some are even falling, so the real challenge... is in the developing world."

'Global test case'

The projection is based on data on four key resources: minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass.

Global average annual per capita consumption in 2000 was 8-10 tonnes, about twice as much as in 1900, the report said.

The combination of population growth, continuing high levels of consumption in industrialised countries, and increased demand for material goods - particularly in nations such as China, India and Brazil - saw total resource use grow eight-fold in the 20th Century.

Decoupling of economic growth and resource consumption is occurring, the authors observe, but not quickly enough.

Strong economic growth in Asian nations has triggered a sharp rise in the demand for resources

They describe China as a test case "because it wants to continue its rapid economic growth, but use resources more sustainably".

"The measures that China introduces to reconcile these objectives will be of crucial significance for every other developing country with similar policy intentions," they add.

Professor Swilling acknowledged that the need to use the planet's finite natural resources more efficiently was not a new concern, but added he had "huge optimism" because of one recent emerging factor.

"Prices for resources between 1900 and 2000 fell in real terms," he explained.

"From 2000, resource prices have started going up and there is a consensus among economists that this is not a blip but probably the beginning of a long-term trend.

"It is still assumed that we live in a world with declining resource prices, and rising resource prices is so new that we have not yet configured it into mentality when it comes to economies.

"Price signals are good when it comes to trying to shift policies and recognise the need for resource efficiency - I think there is a new ball game afoot."

He suggested that policymakers must ensure that developing nations reconsidered their development strategies - "especially how they configure the infrastructures" for energy, water, transportation and sanitation.

"How we design and construct those infrastructures will have a major impact on the way resources flow through economies."

Mission impossible

In the report's three scenarios, the most optimistic one would see annual per capita consumption return to 2000 levels, with 50bn tonnes being consumed each year.

But the authors acknowledge that the measures required to deliver that scenario would be so restrictive and unappealing to politicians that it is almost a non-starter.

They also admit that even this scenario is too little for some scientists, who feel it would not cut consumption and associated emissions to sustainable levels.

Responding to the report's findings, Simon Ross, chief executive of Population Matters (formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust), said continued global population growth and the continual rise in consumption was "impossible in the long-term and devastating to our environment in the short-term".

"We should seek to improve resource productivity and move to more equitable consumption levels," he told BBC News.

"However, the easiest and cheapest contribution to sustainability is promoting the existing trend to smaller families, and providing universal access to family planning to allow people to limit the number of children they have."

Professor Swilling said that rapid industrialisation offered another opportunity to improve resource efficiency - urbanisation.

"We are in the middle of what we refer to in the report as the 'second urbanisation wave', which is resulting in three billion people living in cities," he observed.

"The largest growth in urbanisation will be in developing countries; so a lot, again, is going to depend upon how we understand cities in developing nations and how we plan them, and how we accommodate large numbers of people.

"The advantage of cities is that they deliver a quality of life with fewer resources than the same quality of life outside of cities; cities are potentially key for the more efficient use of resources, and they are also melting pots for innovation."

A spokeswoman for Defra, the UK government's environment department, said a recent report showed that, in Britain alone, businesses could save about ?18 billion by using raw materials more efficiently and generating less waste.

"Becoming more resource efficient contributes to a business's bottom line, increases profitability and their capacity to grow," she told BBC News.

"In addition to improving competitiveness, businesses could reduce carbon emissions by 29 million tonnes a year; so it's a win-win for business and the environment."

The Unep International Resource Panel said it planned to focus future reports on ways to "improve productivity and find viable alternatives for policymakers".

The next report is expected to be published in early 2012.

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Magnetic space future

17 May 2011 Last updated at 06:23 GMT UK engineers spent 12 years working on the device, only to see it dropped from the mission late on It's thought as many as half a million people crammed the roads and beaches outside the Kennedy Space Center to see Endeavour's final launch.

Thousands more had official guest status and got a slightly closer view from inside the spaceport itself. A magnificent morning ascent for the youngest of the Nasa spaceplanes as it began its final mission - the delivery of the $2bn Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) instrument to the International Space Station.

There will, however, be a group of British engineers for whom Monday's lift-off was a bitter-sweet moment. These are the people whose technology got dropped from AMS in the year before launch.

For those not familiar with this story, let me back up and reprise events. They have some potentially fascinating implications for deep space travel.

AMS is one of the most expensive science experiments ever put in space - probably the most expensive.

It has taken a group of 600 or so researchers from 16 nations a total of 17 years to prepare it for flight. It promises some dramatic new insights into the origin and make-up of the cosmos.

AMS will do this by studying the storm of high-energy particles (cosmic rays) that are hurled at Earth from the deepest reaches of the Universe.

Critical to its operation is a very strong magnet. As the particles enter AMS, they will bend through this magnet. How they bend reveals their charge, a fundamental property that says a great deal about the nature of those particles and where they came from.

Endeavour climbs into the sky, the AMS packed in its payload bay

The UK at a programmatic level never got involved in AMS, presumably because it was a space station project (and the UK doesn't engage with human spaceflight), but one British company was contracted to build the all-important magnet.

Scientific Magnetics (formerly Space Cryomagnetics) of Culham, in Oxfordshire, spent 12 years developing this super-cooled beast, and it was - so the project leaders on AMS told me - a marvel.

It was incredibly powerful and directed its entire field inwards, like an enclosed bubble. From the outside, the magnet appeared as an inert beer can.

This was really important because if you put such a device on a shuttle or a space station and it hasn't been carefully designed, it will start to interact with its surrounding - even try to orientate itself with the Earth's magnetic field. Not what you want on a space vehicle.

But to cut a long story short, the British magnet's super-fluid-helium cooling mechanism meant that it was only ever going to be a short-lived device. And when the space station's life was extended last year to 2020, the AMS project leaders took the decision to remove the UK magnet and replace it with a less powerful, but much longer-lived, Chinese one.

Now, as I say, this is a story with some interesting outcomes.

The British magnet is currently sitting in store at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) where AMS was assembled and tested, and there's a lot of interest in seeing its technology put to other uses.

The first of these is astronaut protection. The cosmic rays that AMS is trying to characterise are particles that also represent a hazard to humans in space.

Ad Astra has been running a testbed incorporating British superconducting-magnet technology

When astronauts eventually go beyond the space station - back to the Moon, and on to asteroids and Mars - they will need to shield themselves from these high-energy particles. The idea of using a powerful magnetic field to do this job is being investigated Dr Roberto Battiston, the deputy principal investigator on AMS. He told me:

"We continue to work to understand how this technology could be used for future shielding of astronauts undergoing long exposure, for instance at a Moonbase or on a trip to Mars… because this is by far the most advanced super-conducting magnet-design ever built and completed for a space mission. It is not going to fly but it had everything that would allow it to fly.

"The European Space Agency asked me to submit a proposal for a feasibility study and [Scientific Magnetics] is part of it.

"We would design the magnet in a different way to the AMS one. AMS was designed to have a very strong magnetic field within an inner bore. By modifying the coils and the currents, we can design a magnetic field confined in an external ring surrounding an inner bore that is magnetic-field free. In this internal module will be the habitable part for the astronauts - where they will live. We are talking about something having a diameter of about five to six metres and the length of 10m - surrounded by this magnetic field that is intense enough to bend away cosmic rays coming from deep space."

The AMS (left) will sit on the station's truss, or backbone, slightly tilted to look past the giant solar wings

There are immense practicalities to overcome, of course. These special magnets get their strength because they are superconducting. This means running them at cryo-temperatures, which demands a lot of liquid helium.

This has a tendency to boil off over time, limiting the life of your device, which brings us back to AMS. All that said, Professor Battiston is encouraged by the research. He says it should be possible to limit radiation exposure on a Mars flight to something similar to that currently experienced by astronauts on a six-month stay at the space station.

The other big space application for which a magnet like the British device might be useful is in the plasma rockets that could one day propel all spacecraft.

These rely on the motion of highly excited gases, or plasmas, moulded by magnetic fields to provide thrust. Although they don't give the initial big kick you get from chemical combustion, their supreme efficiency means they can go on thrusting for extended periods, achieving far more acceleration per kilogram of fuel consumed. Proponents of plasma rockets say they could dramatically cut the journey time to Mars from months to weeks.

Scientific Magnetics has already produced a superconducting magnet for a testbed at Ad Astra in Texas, the company at the forefront of this propulsion technology.

Steve Harrison from Scientific Magnetics told me:

"These rockets use radio frequency heating to generate the plasma and then the magnets contain the plasma in the same way they do in a tokomak fusion reactor. The magnets are profiled such that they form a sort of nozzle out the back; and because the plasma is expanding and supersonic, it flies out and gives you thrust. For the system Ad Astra has been testing for the last two years, we designed and built the super-conducting magnet."

Similar obstacles to the magnetic shield prevent immediate adoption of the propulsion application as well, but both concepts are definitely worth watching for the future.

Magnet technology could provide both radiation shielding and propulsion on future deep-space vehicles

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