NASA intends to use future U.S. commercial crew vehicles to carry not only its astronauts, but also those of its Russian partner, to the International Space Station (ISS), said Dan Hartman, deputy space station program manager, at a NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meeting on Monday (July 28).

Different international vehicles routinely transport crew and cargo to and from the ISS, a laboratory circling some 250 miles above Earth. Currently, the U.S. commercially provided Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Cygnus and SpaceX’s Dragon, Russia’s Progress, Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) and Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) provide cargo resupply to the space station.  ATV-5, scheduled to lift off today from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, is the last of its kind.

Russia’s Soyuz, however, remains the world’s sole operational crew vehicle, on which NASA must continue to rely until U.S. commercial alternatives are ready.

“We’re going to stay mixed” though, Hartman said at a meeting of NAC’s Committee on Human Exploration and Operations at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.  NASA’s plan is for some NASA astronauts to continue launching on the Soyuz from Kazakhstan and some Russian cosmonauts to be launched from the United States by private companies, he explained. The idea is to barter: “It would be just a seat for a seat.”

Soyuz spacecraft not only transport crews to and from ISS, but serve as “lifeboats,” always docked to the ISS as an emergency evacuation route if needed.  The number of crew aboard the ISS is, in part, limited by how many Soyuz seats are available for evacuation.  Each Soyuz can accommodate a three-person crew.  If two Soyuz are attached, six people can be in residence.  Soyuz spacecraft can remain attached to the ISS for as long as six months, setting up what is now the routine 4-6 month crew rotation schedule. SpaceX, at least, is designing its Dragon V2 so that it could serve as a lifeboat as well. Other commercial crew competitors may have similar plans.

Hartman’s point was that in an emergency, it might not make sense to have all the Russians leave on one spacecraft and the Americans and others on a separate spacecraft because a mixture of experience may be needed to conduct operations.  “When you have these rescue vehicles on orbit and you have to leave the station…it doesn’t make much sense for three Russians to leave and expect the four Americans onboard to operate the Russian segment [of the ISS] and vice versa, right?” Hartman said.

NASA plans to award at least one contract under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) phase of the commercial crew program in August or September 2014.  NASA officials are prohibited from providing any details of the bids that have been submitted, including which companies made the bids.   NASA is funding three companies in the current phase of the program, CCiCap (Commercial Crew Integrated Capability) – Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX.   Under CCtCap, at least one crewed flight test to the space station is required before certification is granted.  NASA hopes that at least one U.S. commercial crew vehicle will be ready to transport astronauts to the ISS by late 2017.

President Obama has proposed extending ISS operations until at least 2024.  The governments of NASA’s space station partners—Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan—have not formally accepted yet.

“I don’t think we need that answer from them for another year or so,” Hartman said. Other NASA officials have said they do not expect answers from the partners for several years and today’s strained U.S.-Russian geopolitical relationship complicates future planning on many fronts.

Presently, three Russians, one European and two Americans are living and working aboard the space station.

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Like a giant flame against a mostly clear sky, an Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket carrying the company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft blasted off today (July 13) en route to the International Space Station (ISS).

Cygnus is in orbit and all systems are operating nominally, said Frank Culbertson, Orbital’s executive vice president, at a post-launch press conference at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility shortly after the launch.  The cargo resupply mission, dubbed “Orb-2,” is the second of eight that Orbital has planned through 2016 under a Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA worth $1.9 billion.  NASA’s other commercial cargo resupply provider is SpaceX.

Cygnus is scheduled to arrive at ISS on Wednesday (July 16) where it will be grappled by astronauts using the Canadarm2 robotic arm at approximately 6:39 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). The capsule will deliver approximately 3,300 pounds of cargo, of which about half is food and the remainder includes hardware, experiments, other supplies and more than 30 cubesats.

NASA was happy the launch finally took place because things were “getting to be where it was a little tense” with supplies aboard the ISS said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, at the post-launch briefing.  He stressed that establishing a regular cadence of resupply flights is very important.  But “things went really smooth” today he said of the on-time 12:52 p.m. EDT liftoff from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops.

 “An enhanced version of Cygnus will begin flying next year,” Culbertson added, and eventually Cygnus will be able carry 700 kilograms more than the current version.  Europe’s last Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is being readied for launch.  In future years, other cargo systems, such as Cygnus, will have to compensate for the absence of the ATV.   Japan’s HTV also delivers cargo to the ISS.  Gerstenmaier said four more are planned and NASA is in talks with Japan about whether there will be more after that.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden made an unannounced appearance at the Wallops Visitor Center prior to the launch to talk with students and other visitors about the agency’s ongoing efforts to engage with the public and encourage kids to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

Orb-1 was launched in January 2014.  Orb-2 was originally scheduled for May, but slipped several times.  An initial postponement was due to a delay in the launch of SpaceX’s third cargo resupply mission to the ISS. A fire during a test of an Antares AJ-26 rocket engine at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in May caused Orb-2’s launch date to slip several more times to July. Then weather issues delayed the launch from July 11 until today.  

This Cygnus will remain attached to the ISS until August 15.  The next in the series, Orb-3, is tentatively scheduled for launch in October 2014.

NASA has found six valid candidates so far in its ongoing hunt to find an asteroid to use for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) agency officials announced on Thursday.  They also announced the award of 18 system concept study contracts valued at a total of $4.9 million.

The progress update comes roughly one year after the Obama Administration announced plans for ARM, a modification of President Obama’s 2010 directive to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 as the next step in human space exploration.  Instead of sending astronauts to an asteroid, the ARM concept would bring the asteroid to the astronauts.

NASA divides ARM into three phases:  identifying an appropriate asteroid; using a robotic spacecraft to capture the asteroid and nudge it into orbit around the Moon; and sending astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft to collect and bring back samples of the asteroid.

“We don’t plan to, nor do we want to, stop looking for targets,” said Michele Gates, ARM program director, at Thursday’s press conference that featured panelists in Washington and others from around the globe joining in virtually.  “We actually wouldn’t need to make a final selection of a target until one year before launch.”

Under current plans, the ARM robotic spacecraft is scheduled for launch in 2019. Two mission concepts are being considered.  “Option A” would capture an entire asteroid less than 32 feet (10 meters) in diameter whereas “Option B” would collect a boulder less than 32 feet in diameter off of a large asteroid.  The agency will choose which option to move forward with likely in mid-December, Gates said.

More than 11,000 near-Earth objects have been discovered and approximately 100 are being found monthly, said Paul Chodas, program scientist at NASA’s Near Earth Object Program. “Discovery is not enough,” he added. “We also have to consider characterization—that is learning about the physical properties of the asteroids.”

The asteroid candidates are being categorized as “potential” or “valid”.  Potentials are “the ones that look good roughly and have roughly the right size,” Chodas said, whereas valids are those for which detailed information such as mass and boulders on the surface already have been derived and are “within the capability of the asteroid retrieval vehicle to bring back.”

The list so far is nine potentials for Option A, three of which are valids; and thousands of potentials, but only three valids, for Option B, Chodas said.

The panelists focused on asteroid 2011 MD, a valid candidate for Option A.  “What you need to have is the kind of asteroid orbit that is very similar to Earth’s orbit and 2011 MD is one of those type of asteroids,” said David Tholen, astronomer at the University of Hawaii.

Infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope reveal it is approximately 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter “perhaps resembling … a rubble pile” with a “remarkably low density” according to a NASA press release.  

The asteroid could fit in a home garage or might actually float in a swimming pool, Michael Mommert, a post-doctoral researcher at Northern Arizona University, said at the press conference.

“This is pretty unexpected because traditionally people thought that small asteroids like 2011 MD are just single pieces of rock or single boulders floating in space,” Mommert continued.  The findings from Spitzer were published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The opportunity to capture 2011 MD would be in 2024, but more observations are needed to find out what the asteroid really looks like. Other candidates include asteroid 2008 HU4, which will pass close enough to Earth in 2016 for better observations of its size, shape and rotation rate, and Bennu, which will get close up shots by NASA’s Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission in 2018. OSIRIS-REx is a robotic asteroid sample return mission.

At Thursday’s press conference the agency also announced 18 winners of contracts for system concept studies to further refine ARM. Approximately $4.9 million total will be awarded to fund the six-month studies, which will begin in July.  The awards are in five areas:  asteroid capture system, rendezvous sensors, adapting commercial spacecraft for the Asteroid Redirect Vehicle, partnerships for secondary payloads, and potential partnerships to enhance U.S. exploration activities in cis-lunar space in conjunction with the crewed mission.

NASA describes ARM as part of a pathway toward attaining the goal of eventually sending humans to Mars in the 2030s.   The mission is very controversial and has won little support outside of the Obama Administration.  The recently released National Research Council (NRC) report on the future of human space exploration was the latest to cast doubt on its utility as a step toward human exploration of Mars.  The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on the NRC study on Wednesday (June 25).

Thursday’s press conference kicked off a two-day public virtual workshop series that celebrated the one-year anniversary of the White House’s Asteroid Grand Challenge to engage the public in the ARM effort.