MLAS—named after Maxime Faget, the designer for the Aerial Capsule Emergency Separation Device in the Mercury program—is an alternative abort launch system concept developed by a team of NASA engineers, working in parallel with the Constellation program team. It won't replace the Orion abort system, however, but according to NASA this concept has serious potential for future missions:

MLAS is of potential interest because it is theorized to have aerodynamic performance benefits, weight savings and be relatively simple in some spacecraft applications. Much of the potential gains would be accomplished by eliminating the launch abort tower, which also means eliminating the attitude control motors.

[NASA]

Ares V Unmanned Cargo Rocket, EDS and Altair: The Gear Goes Up First
First it's the turn of the giant unmanned Ares V, carrying most of the real hardware you'll need on your journey. You and the rest of your astronaut compadres walk around the pad hours ahead of the launch—a metaphorical kicking of Ares' tires. Man, that thing seems hellish big.

Six hours later you're watching the countdown from VIP bleachers, and all 360 feet of rocket looks even more ominous. You all have on the "spaceman" face for the news cameras—confident, professional, all smiles. But when the five RS68 engines at the bottom of that rocket light up, followed by the two solid boosters, and that thundering noise finally reaches you, you're all suddenly kids on Christmas morning. Literally tons of fuel is burned every second, pushing a blunt needle skywards. It makes a heck of a show, and the noise of Ares V racing to space barely covers your whoops. Quickly you remember to use your crappy little digicam to snap the rocket's launch—there'll be thousands of official photos, but these will be yours.

Minutes later, you and the crew watch monitors in a nearby viewing room as the rocket makes it to orbit. Everyone's quiet, as they see the final stage, the Earth Departure Stage, fire its engines. The huge aerodynamic nose cone isn't needed any more and it pops off, revealing the lunar lander, an Altair. It's bolted at the top of the EDS, and looks more like a sci-fi fantasy than a real moon ship. Eventually, the instruments aboard the EDS all phone home to NASA with a digital OK, and the spacecraft pauses. It's waiting for you to join it out in space.

Ares I Crew Rocket, Orion Capsule: Time For You To Hit the Road
Twelve hours later, it's your turn to go up. All six of you are suited-up and sardined into an Orion capsule, 280 feet above the launch pad at the top of an Ares I rocket. While ticking off mission control's checklist, you think about the imminent journey. If Ares V is a giant space truck, the smaller Ares I you're strapped to is a crazy-ass custom-engined dragster—a dragster without a parachute brake, that is.

Eventually the time ticks down to T-Zero: The booster's solid fuel is ignited, and acceleration slams you and the crew in the back as "The Stick" races skywards. Holy crap, it's a wild ride: Pure rocket chemistry, raw chest-squeezing thrust from a giant Roman candle. The booster burns out in just 150 seconds, and detaches with a wrenching noise and a jolt—the external camera view you see of it tumbling away behind you is awesome. Then comes thrust from the liquid-fuel J2X engine—the first taste of Apollo-era tech, updated for the 21st century. The ride is now smoother, a little less like Aliens, a little more like 2001.

Rendezvous in Orbit: The Delicate Mating Dance of Spaceships
Switches are thrown and your ship's computer matches the Orion's orbit with the waiting Earth Departure Stage with Altair moon ship. Your skin feels alternately hot and cold, which has nothing to do with the air conditioning or the sunlight stabbing through the capsule window—just excitement. And finally there it is: The EDS, clear in the sunlight, spinning gently as the laser-guided rendezvous process with your capsule begins. At one point the Altair's given name is visible, hand painted in copperplate by some techie a thousand miles away: Rama. That had given you a shiver. You hear the clunk of mating adapters as Orion joins the EDS, greeted by cheers from Houston over the radio and a bunch of zero-g hand shaking with the rest of the crew.

Moon Shot: Leaving Earth's Orbit
"The Stick" has become "The Stack," and all is ready to leave earth orbit, and head out toward the moon. The mood is calm: No one aboard will let themselves believe it yet. But twelve hours later, when long checklists are complete, and the magic words, "Go for lunar orbit burn," come over the radio, emotion arrives with a rush. "Want a drink?" comes a request from behind you, and the accompanying wink made you curious. Sipping at the plastic squeeze bag you suddenly weren't surprised to taste a tiny stab of whiskey: Totally against the rules, but frankly the people who made those rules weren't riding a flimsy steel, titanium and composite can mated to a couple dozen tons of explosive gases in outer space.

The EDS's engine fires up again, this time pushing the Altair and the Orion forward and you—tucked inside—into a head-back, eyeballs-out position as you fly, backwards as it were, to your date with history.

When its fuel is gone, the EDS is ejected, leaving you racing to the moon for three days in the combined Altair/Orion moon ship at 25,000 miles per hour. You're just desperate to take a walk.

The Lunar Landing: Pulling a Neil Armstrong, 50 Years Later
40m... 35m... The counter in the middle of the Altair's hi-res display screen has simulated LEDs, like an old alarm clock, and it makes you smile. Those numbers are a serious wake up call though: They're exactly how far above the dusty surface of the moon this little spacecraft hovers. Altair—wasn't that the name of an old computer? Probably had more CPU power than the original Eagle did, you think. Armstrong landed that old thing on a wing and a prayer. Now it's your turn, and your mind's free to wander because computers are largely in control, steering, firing the RL10 rockets and monitoring radar. It's just a question of checking in case you need to intervene. Your hand hovers over that big red "LANDING ABORT" button, which you hope never to push.

25m... 20m... A lateral shove from a thruster shakes you and your fellow moonwalkers behind you, a minor course correction. 15m... "Kicking up a little dust," you say over the radio, and you know the guys behind are grinning. "Aye captain!" quips back the mission's chief engineer.

10m... 5m... And here came history. Dust really does stream up in the bright sunlight past the windows as the final meters pass. At least you know the surface you'd be arriving on—the Apollo guys had no idea if they were landing on concrete or cake icing.

0.8m... 0.6m... 0.4m... The Altair's descent rocket shuts down so very suddenly that the silence is a shock. With less of a jolt than you get when riding on a roller coaster, it's touchdown. Velcroed to the control panel, the tiny nodding dog trinket—a present from some young fan—had been wobbling broken-necked in zero-gravity, but now it begins to behave properly, and nods its approval of the landing.

You're on the moon.

This is the full scale Orion model at the Johnson Space Center's anechoic chamber, where it's body and antennas were recently tested to see how they absorb sound waves and electromagnetic energy as if it was in space.

And yes, this would make one big badass Margarita. [NASA]

It's such a short time before the skies over Florida will no longer thunder to the sound of the Space Shuttle's main engines under full thrust. But that doesn't mean that after September 16, 2010, there will be any letup in the requirements to put people and hardware into orbit. What ships are in line to hop into the venerable old Shuttle's shoes? Five, at last count, all with their own talents and differences.

Check out each photo in the gallery, a dossier of facts about the next vehicles that will take us and our crap into orbit, and possibly to the moon and Mars:

And there you have it. Though none of these Space Shuttle replacements appears quite as glamorous or high-tech, each is special in its own way—and with any luck they could all be cheaper and more reliable in getting people and hardware into space. Orion, of course, has a historic future ahead of it, as it follows in the Apollo program's footsteps and takes man back to the Moon.

Additional Resources and Photo Sources:
Orion: NASA and Wikipedia
Dragon: SpaceX and Wikipedia
Cygnus: Orbital and Wikipedia
PPTS: Russian Space Web and Wikipedia
Kliper: Russian Space Web and Wikipedia

First, a primer. Fire in microgravity isn't the flickering kind that happened when you set the house ablaze with your chemistry set as a kid. It's actually spherical (see image), and spreads around space stations, space shuttles or special projects like Orion faster than you can say "Hey, I didn't know NASA let us smoke on the space shuttle?"

NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger got to experience space fire first hand in 1997, when an oxygen candle aboard Mir caught fire and filled the space station with smoke. "I did not expect smoke to spread so quickly," Linenger said in an interview with Discovery. "(It) was about 10 times faster than I would expect a fire to spread on a space station."

So NASA, not wanting to roast its astronauts alive, has continued to research and fine tune a variety of next generation space fire-fighting systems. A few prototypes work well, but they're messy, coating the fire spheres and pretty much everything else in the vicinity with a fine mist, fog or "water foam" made up of a non-toxic oxygen-nitrogen mix.

The special extinguishers have actually been around for about a decade, but only recently has NASA noticed them, funded them, and started testing in microgravity experiments. Previously, NASA's main advice for astronauts in a dangerous fire-related situation was "abandon ship" (seriously)— an option which would be, obviously unavailable to an Orion crew on a Mars or Moon mission.

I say bring on the mess so long as the "Go Directly to Earth" autopilot button stays dry. If I were in a tin can millions of miles from home, I'd take soggy, foamy clothes over the other option any day of the week. Better messy than dead, says I. [MSNBC]

[NASA's Orion at Gizmodo]

While the written piece prods and pokes at the budgetary and bureaucratic challenges (shocker!) NASA is jumping through to get their plan for Constellation (which includes the Apollo-like Orion capsule, a lunar lander and two rockets, the Ares I and larger Ares V) off the ground, the graphic is a great 90-second summary of what will probably be our main space vehicle system for many years to come. [NYTimes]

Estimate the feasibility of designing a resized Orion capsule that could be launched by international launch vehicles such as the [European] Ariane 5 or the [Japanese] H2A.

I don't know about the feasibility of that, I—even while I am not American—doubt about its convenience. After all, even if the economy is broken, wouldn't government investment in the aerospace industry help it come back and help the US as a whole, just like the Apollo program did, generating thousands of jobs and creating new technologies that put the US ahead of every other country in the planet?

Fortunately, it seems that some people think this is not really a setback, even while the questionare doesn't ask about the cancellation or scaling of any other programs currently under progress or in the drawing table. John Logsdon, a space expert at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, has hope:

After all, these are the questions that everyone is asking, and the transition team certainly must get NASA's best answers to them. I would not overinterpret and come to any conclusion regarding what direction the team may be headed — after all, there is still almost two months left in the transition.

Maybe he is right, maybe he is not. After all, during the campaign, Obama pledged to inject two billion dollars into NASA. However, he may not be interested in taking us to Mars but improving our understanding of Earth climate, beaming solar energy from space, and defend Earth against asteroids and comets. I hope his space advisors are aware about the fact that it only takes a bunch of guys from an oil perforation rig to do that. I mean, even Dick and Condi know that the oil industry are the only ones who can save us against global scale wars and doomsday meteors. [Space News via Slashdot]

What you're seeing above is a test of this new ejector seat system, dubbed the Launch Abort System. It burns through half of its fuel in three seconds flat, NASA says, but then again if you're escaping from an exploding, disintegrating tin can filled with jet fuel, that's kind of the idea.

Fun fact: Like much of the Orion capsule/Areas rocket program, this ejector mechanism is also an example of NASA going back in time to deliver tomorrow's explorers to the moon. In the LAS's case, the Apollo program's old-school abort system is the inspiration. [Wired]

"We started working together at the end of June to track down any Apollo-era heat shields that they had in storage," said Elizabeth (Betsy) Pugel of the Detector Systems Branch at NASA Goddard. "We located one and opened it. It was like a nerd Christmas for us!"

Specifically, the team is hoping to gather information on how to build next gen shields by examining the design of the carrier structure that connected the shield to an Apollo capsule that flew in Low Earth Orbit. They are also interested in the shields thermal response.

Honestly, every time I watch a documentary, read an article or visit a museum dealing with early spaceflight I am reminded of how brilliant the engineers behind these accomplishments really were. This is yet another example. [NASA and Science Daily]

Here, the initial chutes that position the craft for the main chutes' test (so, not a part of the final system) failed shortly after being dropped from a C-17 cargo plane at 25,000 feet. As you can see, it all goes downhill from there, terminating in "a landing that severely damaged the test mock-up." Well said, NASA—I'm guessing any test dummies inside for pressure measurements had to be scraped off the desert floor with a knife. [NASA - Thanks Travis!]

Statement on Inaccurate Reports About Japanese Cargo Services

WASHINGTON — Contrary to news reports, NASA has not officially or unofficially been discussing the purchase of H-II Transfer Vehicles (HTV) — uninhabited resupply cargo ships for the space station — from the Japanese Space Agency, or JAXA.

NASA is committed to domestic commercial cargo resupply to the space station and does not plan to procure cargo delivery services from Japan. As part of our original agreements as compensation for common system operating costs NASA has limited cargo capability on the Japanese and European cargo vehicles. NASA has recently issued a request for proposal for the cargo needs of International Space Station beyond those supplied by our current international agreements. NASA has chosen to depend on commercial resupply of cargo delivery to the station.

[Reuters]

The researchers need this massive amount to try to figure out what to do with all the urine the Orion astronauts will produce over the course of their missions on the lunar surface, which could last as long as six months. Urine is full of solid particles that tend to clog waste venting systems, making it a challenge to dispose of efficiently. And as Jeff Lewis, head of life support for the Orion craft told the AP, "you can't make fake urine." Here's the full email in all its glory:

Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 3:00 PM

Subject: Urine Collection Study Donor Request

Who: All Houston-SLS Associates, employees at 2200 Space Park, and any visitors to the building

What: Please donate your urine to our study

When: Monday, July 21 - Thursday, July 31 from 6 a.m. until goal amount is collected each day including weekends

Where: First floor lab Kick-off Meeting: Thursday, July 17 11-11:30 am in the first floor conference room

SLS-Houston Associates,

The Orion Program will be holding a urine collection study starting Monday, July 21 and running through Thursday, July 31, 2008. We are looking for donors as we need to collect a large amount of urine per day for the entire 11 day period. Please contact [deleted] at [deleted]@hs.utc.com to express interest in donating or to get answers to any questions you have regarding the study.

We will be hosting an informational meeting with encouraged attendance for potential urine donors from 11-11:30 a.m. Thursday, July 17, 2008 in the first floor conference room. In this meeting we will go over instructions and guidelines for the study and introduce volunteers to the equipment that will be used in the study. If you are unable to attend this meeting due to scheduling conflicts, we can set up another time to clarify the study operations on an individual basis.

Please see the attached Donor Guide for further information on donating.

Urine Collection - Donor Guide

General Guidelines

1. Do not add urine to the collection that was collected more than 1 hour before addition. This is necessary so that urine is exposed to the pretreatment chemical in a timely manner.

2. Do not add urine with blood in it into the system. This is an issue of personnel safety.

3. Some previous tests have limited donation size to 350mL per donation. While this is not a regulation of our testing, you are not encouraged to over-hydrate as this could dilute the urine we collect.

4. Our test is meant to be as flight-like as possible. This means that unlike in the doctor's office, you do not need to worry about starting collection midstream. Our testing will be more accurate if you collect as much of the entire urination as possible including the beginning.

Procedure for donation

1. Donation

1. At work

1. Take a wide mouthed beaker to the bathroom to collect your urine. You may pick up a beaker from the first floor lab in advance.

2. Fill the beaker and take it to the first floor lab to pour it into the collection.

3. Fill out the donation sheet as instructed in step 2.

2. At home

1. If you are collecting urine at home in the morning before coming in to work, remember to take collection beakers and labels home with you. You are welcome to take both a wide mouthed beaker for collection and bottle with a lid for transport. Record the volume of your sample before transferring as the bottles with lids are not marked with volumetric measurements.

2. Once you put the urine into the bottle with a lid, fill out a label or a piece of masking tape with the time of collection and sample volume and stick it on the bottle.

3. Urine older than 1 hour cannot be put into the system, so please keep that in mind when collecting urine at home. We suggest that morning urine be collected at home but not nighttime urine.

2. Fill out the donation sheet with the following information:
1. Time of sample collection
2. Time of addition to the system
3. Volume

1. Measure donation volume while it is in the wide mouthed beaker, before pouring it into the bottle with a lid

4. Your donor number
1. A donor number will be assigned to you so that we can keep track of donations without listing names

[NASA Watch via AP]

Rather than building a huge, expensive, and very complicated rocket carrying a smaller space ship—like the powerful Saturn did in the Apollo missions—the Constellation program will use two rockets to send a larger spacecraft. The first rocket will carry the lunar lander along with a propulsion stage into Earth orbit. The second one, the Ares I launch vehicle, will carry the Orion spaceship with the astronauts on board, which will be rendezvous with the lunar lander in orbit and dock. Once docked, the propulsion stage will push the combined craft to the moon and some lucky, smart, and courageous astronaut would be able to say: "It may not be the first step, and it certainly won't be the last one." Or "Oh boy, whooooopeeeee-doooo!"

Both work for me. [Constellation Program]

The first implementation is a lightweight, flexible design to be used for launches, spacewalks and the occasional cabin leak. But for when astronauts will be walking around the moon's surface, they'll need a heavier duty suit with, among other apparent upgrades, sturdier boots. So that's where the second design comes into play. It looks gloriously weighty and awkwardly restricting, just like a spacesuit should be.

Look for the new suits in 2015 when they're part of NASA's Orion mission. [newscientist]

Five Big Wins

The internet - You know, ARPANET, or a communications network that heals thyself. The whole porn-music-movie triangle trade was not in the original blueprint.

GPS - The idea that satellites up there could tell us where we are down here is as old as Sputnik, and DARPA had an attempt or two before getting it right with GPS. Again, not originally purposed for civilians and their "points of interest"—more about targeting ballistic warheads, but you know, potato, po-tah-to.

Speech translation - Soldiers in Iraq use handheld machine translators to aid in communication with some degree of success, meaning it's only a matter of time before some German tourists ask you to speak into the microphone.

Stealth planes - Stealth airplane technology was so sneaky it even snuck up on Air Force top brass, who were apparently shocked to learn about the prototype for the original F-117.

Gallium arsenide - Yep, some DARPA egghead discovered you can do more with arsenic than poison KGB triple-agents. It's now found in all kinds of everyday electronics. That may not last, though, because environmentally speaking it's still some pretty nasty stuff.

Five That Didn't Quite Make It

Hafnium bombs - DARPA put $7 million into researching a bomb with massive initial devastation but no radioactive fallout, but alas, it didn't ever work. Apparently if you want the good, you gotta take the bad.

The mechanical elephant - Hannibal would have been proud of this one: During the Vietnam War, some dudes at DARPA wanted to take terrain-friendly robot elephants into the jungle. Even DARPA's director was embarrassed.

Telepathic spies - People who claimed psychic powers were on the receiving end of a lot of government funding in the 1970s. Even though the project was a failure, getting rich by pretending to be psychic does seem to suggest a kind of sixth sense.

FutureMap - Apparently a bunch of Dick Cheney's friends betting on terror targets was considered grotesque by some people. I've still got $30K riding on Dubuque.

Project Orion - This is a nerd favorite: it's the spaceship powered by atomic-bomb turds. I think everyone was sad to see that one go.

Check out the New Scientist story for the real deal behind these 10 projects, and a look at some crazy projects that might make the list in the next 50 years. [New Scientist]

This capsule won't leave Earth's atmosphere: it will be used in a 90-second flight to demonstrate the features of the new ship, built using the same concept as the Apollo capsule but on a much larger scale. The Orion is 16.5 feet in diameter, with a mass of 22.7 metric tons, which gives it "two and a half times the volume" inside the Apollo capsule.

Knowing how small Apollo was, it's not going to be the Enterprise flight deck, but it will be able to fit four crew members comfortably starting in 2014, the year in which it will travel to the International Space Station. Six years later, it will go to the moon. [NASA]

Given the time frame, the planners on the Orion had even built in defense systems meant to retaliate against the Russians. This project was the first contract funded by DARPA. In this video, George also steps through passenger acceleration profiles, emergency plans if Orion failed to clear the atmosphere and the not so cool 700 rads of radiation you'd get while riding it. George's final take? If an asteroid headed for our planet, an Orion type ship is one of the only emergency plans that NASA could depend on, "off the shelf." And that's why NASA bought roughly 1700 pages of the notes he collected on Orion from him.

George has a book on Orion, but unfortunately, it's on Amazon for 80 bucks, used. [TED, Amazon]