In photos available at http://friendfeed.com/spaceastro/1b5b5a02/ares-i-x-cord-is-loose-from-5-hole-probe-launch-now, the left top picture shows the probe at the tip of the rocket.

NASA’s Ares I-X test rocket lifted off Oct. 28, at 11:30 a.m. EDT from Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a two-minute–powered flight. The flight test lasted about six minutes from its launch from the newly modified Launch Complex 39B until splashdown of the rocket’s booster stage nearly 150 miles downrange.

Courtesy of NASA

Dr. Zoubeida Ounaies

Ounaies is an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University. She is also a faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Program and a researcher in the Polymer Technology Center of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station. She joined the faculty in 2005 and shortly after established the Electroactive Materials Characterization Laboratory (EMCL), an experimental research facility dedicated to the processing and characterization of materials that combine structural integrity with the ability to sense or actuate in response to an electric field.

Ounaies earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, and her Ph.D. in engineering science and mechanics, all from the Pennsylvania State University.

Ounaies received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) in 2007, as well as the TEES Select Young Faculty Award and the Montague Teaching Scholar Award in recognition of her research and teaching accomplishments.

Written by Lesley V. Kriewald, lesleyk@tamu.edu

Dr. Tamás Kalmár-Nagy

His award is the 11th CAREER award received by Texas A&M Engineering faculty in 2008-2009.

Kalmár-Nagy received the award for his proposal, “Stability and Performance of Systems with Network-Induced Delays.”

Through the next five years, Kalmár-Nagy will receive $440,000 for his research, which is aimed at developing a novel theoretical and computational framework for studying interconnected systems with random time delays.

Interconnected systems are common in chemical and nuclear plants, cars, and aircrafts, making research about their stability and security important. Since interconnected systems communicate large amounts of dynamic data, signal delays are common and, to date, can only be characterized statistically.

Kalmár-Nagy, who earned his doctoral degree from Cornell University in 2002, joined the faculty at Texas A&M University 2006. His research interests include the control of autonomous vehicles, networked control systems, systems with delay and nonlinear dynamics.

His research could impact a broad range of applications that use interconnected components, including space exploration, mobile sensor networks, teleoperated surgical robots and integrated building systems.

Kalmár-Nagy said that his project “integrates research and education at a FUNdamental level.”

Students will have the opportunity to participate in a multidisciplinary, multilevel project that emphasizes practical problem solving, creative design and the scientific method. To couple educational activities with experimental validation of the proposed theory, a distributed testbed of vehicles/robots will be built by a multidisciplinary and multilevel team under Kalmár-Nagy’s supervision.

The CAREER Award was established to support junior faculty within the context of their overall career development, combining in a single program the support of research and education of the highest quality and in the broadest sense. Through this program, the NSF emphasizes the importance on the early development of academic careers dedicated to stimulating the discovery process in which the excitement of research is enhanced by inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning.

Written by Marissa Doshi

The picostaellite was deployed from STS-127 Space Shuttle Endeavour’s payload bay on Thursday 30 July 2009 at 7:34:30 CDT. It communicated with the AggieSat team at the ground control station for the first time in the evening on the same day.

AggieSat2 was one of two satellites deployed from Endeavor. The other satellite, Bevo-1, has been built by students from the University of Texas.

AggieSat2 will beam information about its position (180 minutes of GPS data) by using the on-board GPS, called DRAGON, developed by Johnson Space Center. Information from the satellite will be transmitted to a ground control station set up on the Riverside campus and collected by students. The information will be sent to NASA, where it will be compared with NASA’s predictions to check the new GPS for accuracy. The mission will be considered a success after this information has been completely received by the ground control station and delivered to NASA.

AggieSat2 will pass over College Station at least once every day and remain in orbit for an estimated 4 months. On completing its mission, it will burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.

To follow AggieSat2 on the Twitter network or Facebook, visit the AggieSat Lab website. The website is being continuously updated and has the flight teams listed on the Mission Control page along with, eventually, live health and communication window updates from AggieSat2.

The AggieSat Lab was set up in 2005 by Dr. Helen Reed, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. The lab aims to provide students with hands-on engineering experiences.

Written by Marissa Doshi

Additional coverage

KBTX

The Associated Press

Man on the Moon

Numerous reasons have been advanced. Many of them cloak our deep yearning for awe and wonder beneath the claims of fear, ambition and greed. Space exploration to advance national pride and to assuage our fear of hostile nations was what fueled Apollo. The ephemeral nature of this motive is amply demonstrated by the subsequent history of the space program. Once we had beaten the Soviets in the “race to the Moon”, there was no obvious reason to continue the journey. NASA struggled mightily but unsuccessfully to devise alternative motives. Some suggested that commercial ventures involving resource extraction or space tourism could be the basis for a space-faring society. However, this has proved chimerical since space exploration will remain an expensive, unprofitable and dangerous undertaking for a long time to come. Of perhaps greater merit is the claim that continued space exploration will result in technological and scientific advances benefiting society as a whole. To a restricted extent, this is certainly true; although space-related technology development primarily benefits the enterprise of space exploration itself – “spin-offs” are a secondary effect. Of signal importance, however, is the fact that once we refrain from such technological advances, we do not stay in place, but rather move backward. Retrogression has indeed occurred. As Michael Griffin rightly remarked, “What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon is that we can no longer do what we’re celebrating. Not “do not choose to,” but “can’t.””

Once we reject military, economic and technological motives, what is left? First there is survival of our species. The ultimate threat to an Earth-bound species, of course, is that in five billion years, the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and become a red giant, incinerating the Earth. Less frequently noted is that, in its progression through the main sequence of stellar development, the Sun will steadily increase its luminosity, until, a billion years hence, the Earth, its oceans having boiled away, will become uninhabitable to all but microbial life. The same main sequence progression will likely doom large-scale human civilization within a quarter to half a billion years. Of more immediate concern, a gamma ray burst or the impact of a large asteroid could happen almost any time within the next millennium. There is less time than we think. To survive such events, we need to build bridges to other worlds and it is not too soon to start. So, survival of external threats is a real and powerful motive to become space-faring.

But our survival faces a more immediate and deeply rooted peril. The extinction of humankind may turn out to be, not a case of murder by external calamity, but a case of destructive stagnation. What we have most to fear is the loss of nerve, the narrowing of perspective, and the spiritual poverty that follow from the lack of a frontier. The yearning to explore new worlds appears to be a fundamental human trait – one of the most noble of human traits - and it is a portion of our humanity that we deny only at our peril. The best way to understand this yearning is to examine the motives of the explorers themselves. Wyn Wachhorst (The Dream of Spaceflight – Essays on the near edge of infinity, Basic Books, 2000) asks: “What motivates those who venture over the edge, who trek over barren plains, through tangled jungle, or across the Arctic waste; who ride on fire over the rocks of the moon, only to yearn for the relentless red desert of Mars?” It is certainly something more fundamental than any of the motives so far listed. In Wachhorst’s words: “What the biographies of most explorers reveal, in fact, is a sometimes selfless obsession with reaching the pristine edges of reality. At the heart of exploration, it seems, is the attempt to complete the grand internal model of reality, to broaden the context of meaning, to find the center by completing the edge.” One is reminded of the transformative impact of the Apollo photos of the Earth seen from the Moon on many people’s concept of our planetary home. To know truly who we are and where we come from, it is necessary that we leave our home, look back, and see it from a cosmic perspective.

To summarize: The true and enduring motive for space exploration is the value and necessity of the enterprise in itself. It is absolutely necessary to our physical and spiritual survival that we become space-faring. My personal view is that behind this necessity there is a teleological imperative: As stewards of the Creator, it is our sacred duty to spread life and consciousness throughout the cosmos. Understanding and accepting this imperative will be a most difficult challenge because a true change of heart is required. But our young people are up to the challenge and I am confident they will find the will to go forward. I maintain that the basic technologies for human habitation of the solar system exist now and wait only for the will to muster, perfect and harness them. The path ahead will be long, difficult, and dangerous, not the clean, convenient romp of a Star Trek adventure. But it is certain that our journey to the stars will be ennobling; will change us for the better. In the end, curiously enough, it may be that in claiming many worlds for our own, we may attain the insight and courage to resolve our perennial, down-to-Earth problems. But this is, perhaps, the subject of another essay.

David Hyland

July 23, 2009

Man on the Moon

Reflecting on this project, it stands with the Manhattan Project as the two most impressive historical examples where the our country rolled back the frontiers of basic science and engineering on many parallel fronts at an amazing pace, while simultaneously pursuing an incredibly aggressive large scale design and implementation goal. These days, we have somehow lost sight of the truth that basic and applied research can be effectively and aggressively coupled. Both of these projects took place during a time of national emergency with looming external threats. It is relevant to observe that we face equally monumental threats these days, but they are not in a politically convenient (i.e., an external nation state military threat) form that has historically served to best mobilize our national body politic. These mega projects, however, show what dramatic progress we can make when the right combination of political and technical leadership come together. It is also relevant that in today’s dollars (about 150 billion dollars), the total cost of the Apollo program is a small fraction of the bailout money (pennies on the dollar, actually) spent over the past six months. The challenge for modern society in general and the community of scientists and engineers in particular is to draw inspiration from the Apollo program as we tackle, for example, the energy challenges before us. It is not really about money (we are truly wasting much more federal money than the entire Apollo program cost, in any given year). It is about marshalling our political and technical wisdom, committing to pursue aggressively a worthy and ambitious goal, and finding the staying power to pursue the quest over more than one presidential term. Can we do it? Yes We Can! But will we?

John L. Junkins, PhD, PE, NAE

Regents Professor, Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering

Holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker ‘39 Chair in Engineering

Director of Center for Mechanics and Control

Sunday, July 19, 2009

The Washington Post

What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we’re celebrating. Not “do not choose to,” but “can’t.”

By the 40th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail was carrying settlers to the West. By the 40th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a web of rail traffic crisscrossed the continent. By the 40th anniversary of Lindbergh’s epic transatlantic flight, thousands of people in jetliners retraced his route in comfort and safety every day. And on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik, hundreds of satellites were orbiting the Earth.

Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.

The United States spent eight years and $21 billion — around $150 billion today — to develop a transportation system to take people to the moon. We then spent less than four years and $4 billion using it, after which we threw it away. Not mothballed, or assigned to caretaker status for possible later use. Destroyed. Just as the Chinese, having explored the world in the early 15th century and found nothing better than what they had at home, burned their fleet of ships.

We gave up the frontier of our time — hardly typical American behavior. We see ourselves as people who, in all things, push past the boundaries that halt others. Abandoning the enterprise of space exploration is a striking decision because it violates something that makes us human: the desire to know new things through personal experience. Mankind is mankind in part because we voyage, and because we do it personally, not because we send machines in our stead.

If that is true, why did we close the door to space?

It is sometimes said that Apollo was cancelled because, after we landed on the moon, the public lost interest. But NASA’s budget began its decline in 1966 — three years prior to Apollo 11 — a casualty of Vietnam-era financial pressures. And after the moon landing, long before any possible diminution of its popular appeal, President Nixon cancelled three planned space missions. The hardware for these missions had already been procured; you can find it in museums at NASA’s Johnson, Kennedy and Marshall space centers. Voyaging to the moon was not undertaken in response to public opinion, and it was not abandoned because that opinion flagged.

A more insightful view is that Apollo and the manned space program lacked any goal more compelling than that of besting the Soviet Union. When we won the race, the imperative for space exploration vanished. Had President Kennedy couched Apollo as the initial step in a larger strategy to become a permanently space-faring nation, the outcome might have been different. But with the quintessentially American ability to bring focus to a goal that was both impossibly audacious and ridiculously short-sighted, once we had beaten the Russians to the moon, there came . . . what? There was no answer.

For 30 years after Apollo, NASA drifted. Not in a tactical sense; indeed, some of the best minds in the country devoted themselves to the development of the space shuttle and after that the international space station. But the agency lacked a guiding vision to unify its efforts. Where was the space shuttle going, what was it carrying, what would be done with that payload and why? In the simplest of terms, what was it all about?

To fly regularly into space is the most difficult technical challenge we know. It is just barely possible, and even when done successfully, it is expensive, difficult and dangerous. To justify it requires an overarching vision. You either believe that expanding the range of human action and thereby creating options for the future is a noble endeavor, worthy of the cost and risk, or you do not. No lesser justification is acceptable, and no greater justification is needed.

But for three decades that logic was missing from U.S. space policy, and in that absence NASA and the human spaceflight program were reduced to a year-by-year, piecewise justification of activities and budgets that cannot easily be defended in that fashion. Without a multi-decade strategy, the manned spaceflight program found its argument in the politics of jobs and national prestige and . . . no one really knew.

Thirty years and six weeks after the last manned flight to the moon, the space shuttle Columbia was lost, and with it seven lives and many billions of dollars. In August 2003, Adm. Hal Gehman, chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, released an extraordinary report concluding that the root cause of the disaster was the fact that NASA had lacked a guiding vision for more than 30 years. Gehman said both the executive and legislative branches were to blame.

The community involved in our nation’s space program vowed that it would never happen again. A remarkably logical and well-crafted civilian space policy was put forth, one that respected existing commitments to complete the international space station while readying bold new ventures — returning to the moon, establishing a sustained presence there and preparing for a voyage to Mars.

In 2005, a Republican Congress approved this policy as the guiding strategy for NASA, and three years later a Democratic Congress did the same. President Obama’s first budget request calls for lunar return by 2020.

The words are great, but the actions aren’t. In early 2005, about $110 billion was allocated to the task of returning American and international partner astronauts to the moon by 2020. Less than five years later, that figure has been slashed to about $70 billion, not enough to do the job. We’re willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out failed enterprises, but we’re not willing to spend more than a half-penny of the federal budget dollar to support one of the greatest enterprises in history.

In any era, extending humanity’s reach is always the hardest thing a society does. We stretch ourselves, and what we learn yields broad benefits. Our solar system is the new frontier; its exploration and exploitation will benefit those who take the lead in pursuing it.

What kind of people are we? That is the most important question we face. Are we explorers, pioneers and leaders, or will we sit back and watch others assume those roles? Are we to focus solely on immediate problems, allowing the future to happen to us, or do we want to create that future?

If we no longer understand the importance of defining, occupying and extending the human frontier, we can be assured that others do. Russia is building a new lunar-capable manned spacecraft, China continues to pursue a methodical, carefully crafted human spaceflight program, and India is planning to join the club in 2015. We should wish them well. But we must be there too. No one can wrest leadership in space from the United States. But we can certainly cede it, and that is the path we are on.

At this 40th anniversary of Apollo, we need to ask ourselves a simple question: Do we want to have a real space program, or do we just want to talk about what we used to be able to do?

Michael.Griffin@UAH.edu

Michael D. Griffin, a former NASA administrator, is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

John Valasek, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering

John Valasek, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, received the Outstanding Alumnus of the Year Award for 2009 from the aerospace engineering department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The award, which recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the field of aerospace engineering, was presented in a ceremony at the department’s 15th Annual Alumni & Student Awards Banquet, held June 6th 2009.Valasek was also the featured speaker at the banquet and presented results of his current research at Texas A&M University.

John has been with Texas A&M University aerospace engineering department for twelve years, where his research and teaching is focused on bridging the gap between traditional computer science topics and aerospace engineering topics. It encompasses machine learning and multi-agent systems, intelligent autonomous control, vision based navigation systems, fault tolerant adaptive control, and cockpit systems and displays. John is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Member of the Society of Industrial & Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and member of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). He has received several teaching and education awards, including the university level Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching (2008), college of engineering level Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching (2004), Scholar Of The Montague Center For Teaching Excellence (2001), college of engineering level B.P. Amoco Teaching Excellence Award (2001, 2003), and the Thomas U. McElmurry Teaching Excellence Award in the aerospace engineering department (2001, 2004). From 2006 – 2009 he served as the National President of Sigma Gamma Tau, the aerospace engineering honor society, and he received the National Faculty Advisor Award from AIAA in 2005.

John earned the B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 1986 and the M.S. degree with honors and the Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas, in 1991 and 1995 respectively.

During the Fall 2008 semester, Dr. Carlson challenged the teams to provide a conceptual and preliminary design of a Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) capable of carrying a 2000 lb payload for a range of 800 nm at transonic speeds (Mach 0.8) and at altitude of 40,000 ft.

During the Spring 2009 semester, the instructor team of Drs. Strganac, Valasek and Boyd guided the teams through wind tunnel and scaled flight vehicle stages. Each team built and tested a wind tunnel model based on their design in the 3 x 4 ft Low Speed Wind Tunnel at H.R. Bright. The purpose of these tests was to validate conceptual design parameters with scaled models, as well as provide benchmark information for the scaled flight vehicles. Then, following wind tunnel tests, the teams built and flew flying scaled versions of their design at the Riverside campus.

The photos show the 3 teams with their aircraft. The three teams are:

1. Applied Industries, designers of the XF-77 Dark Wolf:

kneeling, L to R: Alexander Pankonien, Justin Wilkerson;

standing, L to R: Ainsley Vanrooyen, Professor Boyd, Jesse Mooney, Professor Valasek, Justin Freels, Professor Strganac (seated),

not shown - Matthew Kuester

XF-77 Dark Wolf

2. Ascension Aerospace, designers of the FQ-1 Phoenix:

L to R: Randell Labio, Leyton McElduff, Professor Boyd, Professor Strganac (seated), Michael Yager, Professor Valasek, Brad Burgess, Chase Caruth, Daniel Greisser

FQ-1 Phoenix

3. Manureva Aerospace, designers of the F-75 Loki:

back row, L to R: Adam Sexton, Professor Strganac, Tyler Rudloff, Professor Valasek, Professor Boyd, Adam Campbell,

front row, kneeling L to R: Edgar Wingo, Taylor Vaughn, Stephen Wells, Robert Keiser

F-75 Loki

The following individuals are acknowledged for their assistance: John Bowling - pilot, Cecil Rhodes - mechanic/technician, Yogesh Babbar - graduate research assistant, Arun Surendran - graduate research assistant, Shalom Johnson - graduate research assistant, and Drew Beckett - graduate research assistant.

Photo credit - Kasey Strganac.

Dr. Thomas William Strganac, P.E.

Professor of Aerospace Engineering

The OWN Low Speed Wind Tunnel is a part of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES).

Engineers from Asia, Europe, South Africa and North America met to exchange knowledge, ideas and processes used for the operation and maintenance of Low Speed Wind Tunnels. The conference included presentations by the various representatives as well as tours of A&M laboratory and testing facilities.

SATA started in 1965 and the OWN LSWT is a charter member. The OWN LSWT, which was built in the mid 1940s, last hosted the conference in 1983. An upgrade on the tunnel was started in the late 50s and it opened in its current state in 1960. The main parts of the wind tunnel have not changed, but all the controls and data acquisition have been modernized to state of the art technology.

The LSWT is in the center of the new wind tunnel complex, which supports research by faculty and students in aerospace. Low Speed Wind Tunnels are used to test the aerodynamic characteristics of objects and were started mainly as a tool for airplane design. They still fill this role, but have expanded to test spacecraft, missiles, cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, oil platforms, buildings, outdoor structures and even golf clubs and golf balls.