A just released report has taken a first look at using NASA’s monster booster — the Ares V — to support visionary space science missions. Ares 1 and Ares 5 are booster elements of the space agency’s Constellation system of Moon, Mars and beyond hardware.

The interim report, Science Opportunities Enabled by NASA’s Constellation System, is a product of the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board, written by a blue ribbon panel of experts.

The report notes that the first flight of Ares V is not expected until 2018 at the earliest. Lunar missions would begin in 2019 or 2020, and for at least the first several years of flights, the mega-booster would be tied up tossing hardware to the Moon to build a lunar outpost. Therefore, Ares V could not be available to support science missions until the early or mid-2020s at the earliest.

At this point, the report explains, NASA doesn’t have reliable price tag info on the Ares V.

But given its development, the report spotlights a number of vision missions that might benefit from the opportunities enabled by the Constellation system, and are therefore deserving of future study, such as the Modern Universe Space Telescope, a Stellar Imager, an Interstellar Probe mission, Solar Polar Imager, Neptune Orbiter with Probes, and a Titan Explorer.

The committee believes that Ares V offers the greatest potential for an impact on science. The big launcher would be capable of hurling large-diameter, large-volume, heavy spacecraft into orbit, seemingly removing the physical — although not the financial — constraints on missions that would benefit from being able to fly large, heavy payloads to their destinations.

But the report stresses that using the Ares V could have a potentially dramatic effect on the price tags of these missions. That is, incorporating the use of an expensive launch vehicle could increase costs. But it could also possibly balance increased costs by simplifying mission design - for instance, by cutting out the requirement for on-orbit assembly or eliminating complicated deployment mechanisms.

The committee found that the greatly increased payload lift capacity promised by Ares V could lead to more costly science payloads.

Also, it was determined that the Ares 1 capabilities are not sufficiently distinct from those of Atlas V and Delta IV to enable different types or a higher quality of space science missions.

Noted in the report is that by adding a heavy-lift launch vehicle option could lead to larger science missions and even higher costs. There is a direct relationship, the report adds, between the size of a spacecraft and its cost. Expensive space science programs will place “a great strain” on the space science budget, which has been essentially flat for several years and is already under strain from an ambitious slate of flight missions, the report states.

By the way, one little financial footnote in the report caught my eye: The James Webb Space Telescope, now planned as a 2013 liftoff on an Ariane booster, is pegged as a $4.5 billion mission.

That’s something to reflect on too.

It is billed as a small jump for a man…a big jump for humanity: The Le Grand Saut.

Skydiver Michel Fournier is back in gear and stepping up his campaign to jump — perhaps this month — from the stratosphere at an altitude of about 130,000 feet (40,000 meters) above the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Thwarted in early attempts by technology snags, bad weather and funding, the plan for this 62-year old sky/space diver is to set no less than four world records:

– Altitude record for freefall
– Altitude record for human balloon flight
– Time record for longest freefall
– Speed record for fastest freefall

This grand Fournier fall from high-altitude balloon, wrapped in high-tech skydiving gear, is meant to contribute to the development of future technologies and the safety of stratospheric flight.

Fournier has more than 8,500 jumps to his credit, and over a hundred from very high altitudes - all leading to his “Big Jump” to show that a man can walk home from space.

If money, technology, stick-to-itness and downright guts converge, you can keep an eye on the daring drop at:

http://www.legrandsaut.org/index.php?Message=maināŒ©=eng

There’s a growing buzz in the astrobiology community that ancient hydrothermal springs may have been spotted on Mars.

Thanks to the eagle-eyed work of Carlton Allen and Dorothy Oehler of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, “spring-like” mounds have been found in Vernal Crater in Arabia Terra on the red planet.

The high-powered zoom lens of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has picked up the features - two possible ancient hydrothermal springs are viewed as light-toned, elliptical structures.

The martian features have a striking similarity to spring mounds here on Earth, such as those in Dalhousie, Australia.

The potential big news here is that, if true, hydrothermal spring deposits on Mars might preserve evidence of martian life. These features would not only have supplied energy-rich waters in which martian life may have evolved, but also would have provided warm, liquid water to martian life forms as the climate on the red planet became colder and drier.

Allen told me that more work is needed to better analyze these features - and also look for other similar spots on Mars. In particular, use of MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) can sort out the composition of the features in Vernal Crater. However, due to the dusty nature of Arabia Terra, that has crimped mineralogical assessment of the mounds. So more work to do there - or hope for strong winds to blow clarity into the picture.

Meanwhile, the prospect of identifying ancient thermal springs on Mars would be a boost for astrobiologists, Allen and Oehler report.

These could be sites where martian life evolved, sought refuge as the climate on Mars became colder and drier…and where evidence of that life may be preserved.

Think Mars…think really Old Faithful.

The voters of Sierra County, New Mexico gave a thumbs up on April 22 to increase a local gross receipts tax tied to construction of the state’s Spaceport America.

Voters turned out in record numbers to okay the 1/4 of 1 percent gross receipts tax increase - giving Spaceport America officials the funding and ability to form a tax district the state requires to construct the facility. Voter turnout for the special election was high.

Sierra County has now joined adjacent Dona Ana County in forming a Tax Development District.

In November, voters in adjacent Otero Country will head for the polls to decide on a similar tax in that county.

Meanwhile, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority continues to press ahead to acquire a site operator’s license from the FAA…along with a finalized agreement from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic as the spaceport’s anchor tenant.

Virgin Galactic would fly passengers on suborbital jaunts at an initial pay-per-Earthview seat price of $200,000. Space travelers would buckle up aboard SpaceShipTwo now under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California.

If all keeps on track, Spaceport America would be completed sometime in 2010.

It looks like the folks over at Lockheed Martin Space Systems near Denver, Colorado are pushing the launch button on a new type of automated and reusable spaceship design - one able to transport payloads into space in future years.

Way back in December of last year, a hush-hush test flight of a small, unmanned aerial vehicle took place from the site of New Mexico’s Spaceport America.

Linking up with the expertise and launch site hardware available from UP Aerospace of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, a Lockheed Martin research vehicle flew under its own power. Soaring just a few thousand feet into the air, the small winged craft was recovered a few hours after liftoff.

Thanks to the investigative spunk of Bob Martin at KRQE-TV in Albuquerque, he has helped pull back the curtain on what was flown - a small scale prototype of a space launch system.

Take a look at his spotlight story at:

http://www.krqe.com/global/story.asp?s=8173339

All the more reason that Lockheed Martin recently inked a Memorandum of Understanding with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority to carry out future testing at the spaceport.

“We completed the December 19, 2007 launch for Lockheed Martin in record time,” said Jerry Larson, President of UP Aerospace, Inc. “Contract signing to launch was only a few months,” he told me.

“We firmly believe that developing this lean launch operations capability is an essential element of the ultimate success of space commercialization,” Larson added.

NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander made a planned trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) on April 10, burning its thrusters for 35 seconds. If the analysis shows that this TCM was spot on, a TCM 4 won’t be needed, Lockheed Martin space central officials have told me.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the aerospace firm that built the outward-bound Mars craft that’s headed for a red planet landing next month, on May 25th. The University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory heads the Phoenix scientific mission, a hub for researchers around the world teaming together to explore the arctic plains of Mars.

Meanwhile, the landing spot for Phoenix in the martian arctic was okayed on March 27th at NASA HQ in Washington, D.C.

The Phoenix landing locale: polygonal plains in “Green Valley” - a site that offers smooth plains with a few scattered rocks, explained Ray Arvidson at Washington University in Saint Louis. He’s a co-investigator of the robotic arm on the Phoenix mission and a leading Mars scientist.

Arvidson told me that the plains are covered with polygons a few meters across and perhaps roughly 10 centimeters high. Dirty water ice is expected just beneath the surface, perhaps with some depth variations from the polygon centers to the troughs that ring the polygons.

Picking that landing zone has been a team effort, Arvidson added, making use of assets not only on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Odyssey orbiter, but also thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, also circling the red planet.

Thanks to the super-powerful zoom camera on MRO as it sweeps over Mars landscape, there’s been an ability to characterize and map the widths and heights of over 5 million rocks, Arvidson said.

Keep an eye on a bill introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher on Near Earth Objects (NEOs).

The NEO Preparedness Act calls upon the NASA Administrator to establish an Office of Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Object Preparedness. That office would “prepare the United States for readiness to avoid and to mitigate collisions with potentially hazardous near-Earth objects in collaboration with other Agencies through the identification of situation- and decision-analysis factors and selection of procedures and systems.”

NASA has also been tasked to request the National Academy of Science to look into issues with detection of potentially hazardous NEOs and approaches to mitigate these hazards. The exact statement of task is still being hashed out, but that study should be underway in a couple of months or so, I’ve been advised.

According to Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, speaking at a recent meeting on outer planet exploration, part of the NEO assessment will focus on use of ground-based or space-based observations for NEOs and approaches to developing deflection capability.

It’s not within NASA’s charter to protect the planet from threatening NEOs, Green noted. Such a mission could go to the Department of Defense, he said, “but we’ll see how it goes.”

In NEO-related news, Green also reported on the huge Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. “We have confirmed with the NSF [National Science Foundation] that they will fully-fund Arecibo operations in fiscal year 2008,” he explained.

Conversation between NSF and NASA about funding Arecibo operations in upcoming years has begun, Green said.

The push is on to get NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) off the Earth and onwards to Mars by 2009.

The primary MSL launch period is scheduled to extend from September 15 through October 4, 2009.

NASA is engaged in a variety of creative accounting steps to try and get the over-budget mega-rover through this fiscal year.

The rover project being led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California is now roughly a $2 billion mission, with the hope of keeping the cost overrun under $200 million.

“It’s a tough mission. It is a spectacular mission. We want to see it happen,” said Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. He said the space agency would like to keep the cost overrun under $200 million…”but there are always the unknown unknowns,” he explained March 31st at the meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group in Boulder, Colorado.

If the sky rocketing cost for MSL can’t be contained, then NASA will have to report the overrun to Congress, Green said, as the project busts the Nunn-McCurdy Amendment that’s designed to curb cost growth in government-financed programs.

If MSL isn’t on the way to Mars in 2009, Green said it would be “disastrous” - particularly to the Mars community and to the health of NASA’s Mars program overall.

Green also said that the MSL project team at JPL is working under a revised schedule, part of which includes working double-shifts. “We actually believe they can make it. There’s a couple miracles along the way…miracles are not cheap, we know that,” he noted.

NASA is removing all barriers from JPL, “making sure that they have everything they need both financially and anything that [NASA] headquarters can do to help them make that schedule,” Green said.

What went wrong with MSL is now being tagged as a “lesson learned” experience that needs exploring, to help chart the scientific, technical — and financial trajectory — for NASA’s next outer planet mission.

When I was in Houston attending the huge Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, I picked up an interesting NASA brochure, simply titled: Astronaut Candidate Program.

It’s a freshly printed handout, clearly dedicated to attracting future astronauts to the fold.

Couple of things caught my eye: “Following the shuttle retirement in 2010, trips to and from the ISS [International Space Station] will be aboard the Russian Soyuz vehicle. Consequently, astronauts must meet the Soyuz size requirements…standing height between 62 and 75 inches.”

So the shuttle going-out-of-business is a go for sure, at least according to the brochure.

Also I noted, if designated as an Astronaut Candidate, the person has to be able to swim 3 lengths of an 80-foot long (25-meter) pool without stopping, and then swim 3 lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes.

The good news is that there is no time limit for doing this…but you must also be able to tread water continuously for 10 minutes. Seemed semi-symbolic, to me, if budget cuts waylay NASA’s replanting of bootprints on the Moon and flinging flesh to Mars.

Meanwhile, check out all the current requirements at: www.nasajobs.nasa.gov/astronauts

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) folks that operate the Spirit and Opportunity robots on the red planet have gotten some bad news.

A directive has come from NASA Headquarters to take a 40 percent financial cut in their program - some $4 million in fiscal year 2008.

It all comes down to a financial stun gun for one of the rovers - both still busy at work doing science. Cost per year to run the Mars twins is $20 million per year.

Steve Squyres, the MER principal investigator at Cornell University, told me that the 40 percent cut is huge. “We’re rapidly coming to the conclusion that if we have to implement this cut, it’s going to mean essentially shutting off science activities for one of the vehicles.”

Safely shutting down a rover on a temporary basis is doable, Squyres said, a move that could save money but at the expense of science. “We’re going to go off and look at what our options are…but I feel confident that we have to essentially halt science operations on one of the two vehicles.”

While both robots are healthy and doing good science, it looks like the one to hibernate for the remainder of this fiscal year could be Spirit, Squyres suggested.

The MER group has also been told to expect an $8 million cut in fiscal year 2009. It would essentially be the same magnitude of cut. At that time, it is expected there would be two healthy rovers both able to move, drive and explore.

“We would have to make some very tough decisions about which one we would hibernate and which one we would keep active. That’s a situation I do not want to face…but that’s a future worry,” Squyres added.

For now, the message back to NASA Headquarters is that, if the MER team has to take the first cut, there is going to be an impact on science return…and in fiscal year 2009, it will be much more severe.

The two priceless assets on Mars continue to crank out good science, Squyres emphasized, and are in good health. Another concern sparked by the budget cut, along with keeping the rovers healthy, is keeping the MER team together and morale high, he said.

In an email just received, it also looks like the venerable NASA Mars orbiter, Odyssey, is on the cost-cutting table too.