Space Exploration

PEOPLE ARE fickle. All the "oohs" over photographs taken by the little Pathfinder robot on Mars last year have been replaced by a general public attitude toward space exploration of "so what?"Last year, the nation's space administration chief, Daniel S. Goldin, basked in the glow of a successful mission to the Red Planet. This year, though, Mr. Goldin has had to threaten to kill the space station project to get Congress to give it more money.Once again, NASA needs to generate public excitement.

IT BECOMES CLEARER daily that the Russians aren't capable of fulfilling the ambitious role set for them in efforts to make space exploration international.Chronic fiscal problems left by the former Soviet Union are preventing Russia from meeting deadlines in construction of the space station. Funding may have been a factor in whatever technical problem caused Russia's Mars 96 spacecraft to fall back to Earth only hours after blasting off in November. The Russian probe was to be part of a three-pronged exploration of the Red Planet that included two U.S. probes which were successfully launched.

If the Pathfinder spacecraft's exploration of the terra-cotta martian terrain proves anything, it's that the Soviet Union didn't win the space race. Neither did the United States.Robots won it, and seem to be widening their lead.When someone finally sets a well-insulated boot on the frigid martian surface, she or he is likely to be greeted by a menagerie of smart and at least partly autonomous rovers, weather stations and other gadgets.This state of affairs irritates some earthlings. No serious work gets done, they insist, until humans arrive.

THE EARTH that astronaut Shannon Lucid returned to yesterday was not the same one she left 188 days before. The old Earth included a United States that had boldly committed to sending a man to Mars by 2019, a very expensive proposition.While Ms. Lucid was in space President Clinton shifted policy from that set by his predecessor, George Bush. No longer is the stated goal of NASA a manned flight to Mars, though that remains a more distant possibility. The emphasis will instead be on safer and less costly robotic missions through the solar system.

ONE OF THE FIRST persons to admit that NASA hasn't always been as cost-conscious as it should be is the space administration's director, Daniel S. Goldin. Cost overruns, expensive redesigns and pork-barrel spending to gain congressional support for extravagant projects were common before he took over the agency in 1991.Mr. Goldin said then that NASA must have "better, faster and cheaper" missions. And it has. NASA has seen its budget cut every year since 1992. Yet it has managed to conduct valuable scientific missions that have so reignited the nation's interest in space exploration that even a movie about a failed mission, "Apollo 13," became an instant box office hit.But the budget cuts keep coming.

OF ALL THE experiments in space exploration, this nation may have begun the most daring Tuesday with the awarding of a revolutionary contract to Lockheed Martin Corp. to build a new version of the space shuttle. More exciting than the company's new arrowhead design for a completely reuseable shuttle is the prospect that private industry will assume the central role in American space exploration. That has been a stated goal of NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin, a former TRW Inc. executive who believes privatization is key to cutting the cost of space travel.

Space: a close-up viewSee a 3.9 billion-year-old moon rock or tour a 41-foot Coast Guard patrol boat that uses a Global Positioning Satellite system for navigation at Baltimore's "Take Up Space Week."An exhibit, "Take Up Space," opens Saturday at the Maryland Science Center. Visitors can view a scale model of the International Space Station, a moon rock and more. From 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday, "Take Up Space Night" at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center will include a demonstration on how a "Ranger" robot is used to service satellites and collect data, with exhibits and a slide presentation on the Hubble Telescope at 7: 30 p.m.The science center will hold a "Town Hall in Space" on Wednesday.

THE CLIMATE is good for solar system exploration," said Glenn Carle, at the NASA-Ames Research Center in California.And then, slipping into the Columbus-and-Queen-Isabella analogy that comes easily to people working in space exploration, he added: "It seems the queen has given us new ships."

WASHINGTON -- ''Apollo 13'' is a super spellbinder in its depiction of astronaut Jim Lovell and crew, guided by unflappable colleagues on Earth, barely making it back home in their crippled space ship. The stirring message of the film is that, despite the setback, humankind must return to the moon, where man last set foot 25 years ago. But a simple matter gets lost in the high-tech clamor and glory of the failed mission:If humans hadn't been aboard the ill-fated Apollo craft, the episode would long be forgotten as just another of many bloodless mishaps in the evolution of space technology.

I am amazed every time I hear reports of teen suicide or stories about people who despair because of boredom or because they have nothing left to look forward to.We are on the verge of enormous frontiers of knowledge and opportunity, although our elite and entertainment cultures are so negative and cynical -- and so scientifically and technologically ignorant -- that you would never know it.They fail to energize the sense of excitement that is potentially available...

When Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar lander and became the first human to set foot on the surface of the moon 40 years ago this week, it was, as he announced, "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." In those heady times it was widely assumed humanity had arrived on the verge of a new era of space exploration that would shortly lead travelers to Mars and beyond. That did not happen, however: The race to the moon, which grew out of the Cold War military competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, had outlived its political usefulness by the time of the last Apollo landing in 1972.

There's no way to spin it: 2008 was one tough year for the American economy. Rising unemployment, mortgage defaults, bank failures, stock market losses, rising personal and national debt, and a slow holiday shopping season were capped off by news of Wall Street investor Bernard L. Madoff's collapsed Ponzi scheme. Looking ahead, we are not facing another Great Depression, but the situation is pretty ugly. We have been relying on foreign credit too long. And now the federal government, in an effort to reinvigorate the economy and calm worried consumers, is about to go even further into debt to the tune of what may well exceed a trillion dollars.

Philip K. Morris, a retired commercial photographer who worked in space exploration in the 1960s, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at College Manor in Lutherville. The former Rodgers Forge resident was 93. Born in Baltimore and raised in Hamilton, he attended St. Dominic's Parochial School. He dropped out of high school to help support his family during the Depression. He wanted an education and took evening vocational classes offered by city public schools in 1937. He joined his father and brothers at the Glenn L. Martin aircraft plant in Middle River.

America is headed for the moon again, and Maryland scientists will be in the vanguard of the effort. NASA has chosen research teams from the University of Maryland, College Park and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt to work on ideas for upgrading instruments that Apollo crews left behind in the lunar dust. Two other scientific proposals from area institutions - a small radio telescope array from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and a Goddard instrument to measure X-rays were also selected.

As if space travel isn't cool enough. The three astronauts living on the International Space Station - one American and two Russians - will receive the mother of cosmic phone calls today when Queen Elizabeth II rings them up during a visit to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. It's the Old Guard meeting the final frontier. The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, will visit Goddard as part of a six-day U.S. tour scheduled to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America.

The Naval Academy Foundation is going to new heights to highlight the school's long-standing connection with space exploration, hosting a live online radio show tomorrow featuring nine graduates-turned-astronauts, including two who will talk from the International Space Station. The program will precede the academy's latest effort to bring that connection into the classroom: On Tuesday and Wednesday, three satellites built by midshipmen will be launched into orbit from the space shuttle Discovery.

An international team of astronauts will be living and working at a permanent moon base to be built at one of the resource-rich lunar poles within two decades, NASA announced yesterday. Earth's first off-world colonists will cruise the surface in a new-generation lunar lander that will function like a low-gravity pickup truck, possibly journeying to the dark side to build the most ambitious collection of observatories ever constructed, NASA said. The announcement of NASA's vision to build a permanent scientific research station on the moon represents the space agency's first outline of its plans once it reaches the moon, scheduled no later than 2020.

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- The biggest gambler around these parts is not a high roller going all in with a pair of deuces. He's a real estate magnate who's betting $500 million that he can open the first inflatable hotel in outer space. As far out as the idea sounds, multimillionaire Robert Bigelow has already launched a one-third scale model of his inflatable space module called Genesis I. The spacecraft was launched in July atop a Russian rocket. "I'm on cloud nine," Bigelow said at his production facility here, where his team of engineers was tracking the spacecraft after it inflated and entered an orbit 348 miles above Earth.

HOUSTON - The space shuttle Discovery's astronauts are safe to come home without further repairs to the ship's heat shielding, NASA managers decided yesterday. Engineers had debated whether to have the crew perform the mission's fourth spacewalk to deal with a torn thermal blanket beneath a window outside Discovery's flight deck. The concern was that parts of the woven ceramic material might break free during the latter stages of the shuttle's return to Earth and hit another part of the orbiter.

One is as famous as a rock star in his native Japan. Another is a veteran military pilot once rejected as undersized for a Russian space flight. A third is an Air Force colonel who is about to take her fourth trip into space. To one another, they are "Squeegee," "Too Short" and "Mom." To the rest of the world, they and their colleagues are a bunch of not-quite-average Americans, plus a Japanese, who will be the first to take the teeth-rattling ride into orbit since the Columbia space shuttle accident about 2 1/2 years ago. As ambassadors for a humbled NASA, the seven-member crew of Discovery - scheduled to be launched tomorrow - has become the most photographed and interviewed set of spacefarers in nearly two decades.