Orion Medical Blog

Ask schoolchildren what they’d like to be when they grow older and you’re likely to hear pop star, singer, maybe train driver… and from the more imaginative, astronaut.

Flying through space is a dream few get to realise.

But a British astronaut who spent 13 days in orbit on a trip to the International Space Station has said he would now like to travel to the Moon.

Nicholas Patrick said he could not wait for the chance to go back into space, having taken part in his Shuttle mission, one of the most complex ever conducted.  Read more

The U.S. Air Force HiFire hypersonic flight test program with NASA and the Australian Defense Force is getting underway at the same time the Pentagon and space agency are retooling their relationship for a broad new U.S. aeronautics test strategy.

The HiFire (Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation) project, set for its first launch by year-end, will test 21st-century aeronautics and space technologies for application to advanced scramjet-powered space launch vehicles and weapons applications.  Read more

Without a fully funded fiscal year 2008 budget for its exploration systems programme NASA administrator Michael Griffin has told the US Congress he expects the current US human spaceflight capability gap to grow to more than four and a half years.

He described how NASA’s four-person Orion crew exploration vehicle’s planned September 2014 maiden flight would be delayed to March 2015 because of the FY2007 budget cuts already imposed by Congress and that without a fully funded FY2008 budget that delay would be pushed further.

Griffin was speaking to the US Senate subcommittee on justice, science and related agencies and the House of Representatives’ committee on science and technology on 15 March. NASA’s fiscal year is from October to September.  Read more

The NASA Glenn Research Center has landed another $63 million piece of creating the new spacecraft for missions to the moon.

Glenn Director Woodrow Whitlow learned Thursday that the agency will have Glenn test the vibrations of the engines for the new Orion spacecraft at Glenn’s Plum Brook testing facility near Sandusky.

Glenn is already supervising design and construction of the service module for the $8.2 billion project, due to be ready for flights in about five years and lunar missions by 2018. Engines were also already slated to be test-fired at Plum Brook’s large vacuum chamber.  Read more

Adorning the entranceway to the U.S. Destiny Laboratory in the International Space Station are two pennants: one for the Army and one that reads “Go Navy, Beat Army.”

They are not the first pennants to fly in space: hundreds of flags and banners championing colleges, societies and even sports teams have been carried to orbit by the space shuttle. Now, NASA wants a pennant of its own and is turning to grade school students to design it.

In partnership with Mad Science and AOL’s Kids Service KOL, NASA is hosting a contest for 6- to 12-year-olds to create pennants that celebrate either of two themes: the upcoming STS-118 shuttle mission including the flight of the first educator astronaut Barbara Morgan or the Vision for Space Exploration, NASA’s plans to send humans to the Moon, Mars and beyond.  Read more

A NASA scientist has proposed using the replacement to the space shuttle to land on a near-Earth asteroid. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is due to make its maiden flight in 2014, with the eventual aim of ferrying astronauts to and from the Moon.

Dr Paul Abell said such a mission could help efforts to protect against an asteroid on course to hit Earth.

Currently, the project is envisaged to include two or three crew members and last a total of 90-180 days.  Read more

NASA’s first Apollo capsule (left) ever to take flight returns to its birth site as an exhibit.

This demonstrator capsule first flew on Nov. 7, 1963 in an escape tower test (right) at White Sands, New Mexico. After a roundabout tour around the city of Downey, California, the Apollo capsule boilerplate now sits a few hundred feet from its construction site in that city, where it will be restored and displayed as part of the Columbia Memorial Space Science Learning Center, according to the Aerospace Legacy Foundation.  Read more

During mid-February, Canadian firm D-Wave Systems unveiled and demonstrated what it calls “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer.” The demonstration of the technology was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, but the actual hardware remained in Burnaby, BC.

The via-satellite demonstration, coupled with the lack of ivory tower support from academia, scientists quickly expressed their skepticism about D-Wave’s claims. Much skepticism of the Canadian company’s claims may soon be washed away, as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed last week that it had a hand in building a special chip used in D-Wave’s demonstration, according to IDG News Service.  Read more

After having one of its (now former) astronauts charged with assault… a hailstorm that damaged and delayed the shuttle Atlantis… and a funding shortage that will keep its next generation spacecraft on the ground until 2015, NASA could use some good news right now. Well, it’s not a miracle donation of $545 million in cash… but NASA does have some reason to celebrate, courtesy of its upcoming Orion crew exploration vehicle.

NASA announced this week the agency has established a requirements baseline for the Orion crew exploration vehicle, bringing America’s next human spacecraft a step closer to construction. The Orion Project completed its system requirements review in cooperation with its prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, on March 1.  Read more

As a child living in Oak Forest, Mike Mirowski hung posters of rockets on his bedroom walls and glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling and dreamed of one day exploring the depths of space.

He kept folders on his desk full of information about space shuttles and how they worked, facts he got from writing letters to NASA.

“It’s the last frontier. It’s all so new,” the 29-year-old said of his fascination with space. “It’s just this wide-open thing that’s waiting to be discovered.”  Read more