SPACE TAXI, PLEASE! NASA INVESTING $1.1 BLN

NASA plans to more than triple its investment in commercial space taxis, with new awards to three of the four firms already hired to design passenger ships to put astronauts -- and tourists -- into Earth orbit. Sticking with its tried and true, NASA signed agreements worth more than $1 billion for Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp to continue work on commercial space taxis that could fly astronauts to the International Space Station.

The new awards, announced Friday, will enable the trio to continue work through May 2014. Boeing and SpaceX, which are both working on capsules, will split the lion’s share of the funds, receiving $460 million and $440 million, respectively. Sierra Nevada, which is developing the winged Dream Chaser vehicle, will receive $212.5 million. Shut out of the competition was ATK, which offered a rocket based on the space shuttle’s solid boosters and a crew capsule originally developed as an alternative to NASA’s planned deep-space Orion capsule. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s startup, Blue Origin, which won $25.7 million during two predecessor programs, did not bid for the integrated design contracts awarded Friday. Three other firms -- Space Operations, American Aerospace and Space Design -- submitted proposals but were eliminated for not meeting requirements, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations Bill Gerstenmaier said during a conference call with reporters. The new awards will more than triple NASA’s investments in commercial crew programs, which so far total about $365 million. In its proposal, SpaceX said that if funding and technical milestones were met, it could conduct a crewed test flight in 2015. Boeing’s target is the end of 2016.

Dark galaxies of the early universe spotted for the first time

For the first time, dark galaxies--an early phase of galaxy formation, predicted by theory but unobserved until now--may have been spotted. These objects are essentially gas-rich galaxies without stars. An international team has reported the possible detection of these elusive objects by observing them glowing as they are illuminated by a quasar. The team published their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "After several years of attempts to detect fluorescent emission from dark galaxies, our results demonstrate the potential of our method to discover and study these fascinating and previously invisible objects," said lead author Sebastiano Cantalupo, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz. Dark galaxies are small, gas-rich galaxies in the early universe that are very inefficient at forming stars. They are predicted by theories of galaxy formation and are thought to be the building blocks of today's bright, star-filled galaxies. Astronomers think that they may have fed large galaxies with much of the gas that later formed into the stars that exist today. Because they are essentially devoid of stars, these dark galaxies don't emit much light, making them very hard to detect. For years astronomers have been trying to develop new techniques to confirm the existence of these galaxies. Small absorption dips in the spectra of background sources of light have hinted at their existence. However, this new study marks the first time that such objects have been seen directly. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), the astronomers searched for the fluorescent glow of the gas in dark galaxies when they are illuminated by the ultraviolet light from a nearby and very bright quasar. "The light from the quasar makes the dark galaxies light up in a process similar to how white clothes are illuminated by ultraviolet lamps in a night club," said coauthor Simon Lilly of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The team took advantage of the large collecting area and sensitivity of the VLT and used a series of very long exposures to detect the extremely faint fluorescent glow of the dark galaxies. They used the FORS2 instrument to map a region of the sky around the bright quasar HE 0109-3518, looking for the ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas when it is subjected to intense radiation. Because of the expansion of the Universe, this light is actually observed as a shade of violet by the time it reaches the VLT. The team detected almost 100 gaseous objects which lie within a few million light-years of the quasar. After a careful analysis designed to exclude objects where the emission might be powered by internal star-formation in the galaxies, rather than the light from the quasar, they finally narrowed down their search to 12 objects. These are the most convincing identifications of dark galaxies in the early universe to date. The astronomers were also able to determine some of the properties of the dark galaxies. They estimate that the mass of the gas in them is about 1 billion times that of the sun, typical for gas-rich, low-mass galaxies in the early universe. They were also able to estimate that the star formation efficiency is suppressed by a factor of more than 100 relative to typical star-forming galaxies found at a similar stage in cosmic history. "Our observations with the VLT have provided evidence for the existence of compact and isolated dark clouds. With this study, we've made a crucial step towards revealing and understanding the obscure early stages of galaxy formation and how galaxies acquired their gas," Cantalupo said. In addition to Cantalupo and Lilly, Martin Haehnelt of the University of Cambridge was a coauthor of the paper. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Armstrong criticizes NASA

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, told lawmakers Thursday that the end of the space shuttle era has left the American human spaceflight program in an "embarrassing" state. "We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Armstrong told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. "For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable." Armstrong was part of a four-member panel of space experts who told lawmakers that NASA needs a stronger vision for the future and should focus on returning humans to the moon and to the International Space Station. "A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain," said the US astronaut, now 81, who was commander of Apollo 11 and walked on the moon in 1969. President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation program that would have returned humans to the Moon and called on NASA to instead focus on new, deep-space capabilities to tote people to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by 2030. The retirement in July of the three-decade-old space shuttle program brought an end to the US capability to send humans to space until private industry can come up with a new commercial space capsule to the ISS, maybe by 2015. In the meantime, Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only taxis for the world's astronauts heading to low-Earth orbit, and each ticket to the ISS costs global space agencies between 50 and 60 million dollars each. "Get the shuttle out of the garage down there at Kennedy (Space Center), crank up the motors and put it back in service," said Eugene Cernan, who commanded the Apollo 17 flight and was the last man to walk on the Moon in 1972. "You want a launch vehicle today that will service the ISS? We've got it sitting down there. So before we put it in a museum, let's make use of it. It's in the prime of its life, how could we just put it away?" Cernan hailed the vision of John F. Kennedy, "a bold and courageous president who started us on a journey to the stars," and said thousands of Americans have been inspired by the space race with the Soviet Union. "Today, we are on a path of decay. We are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration," Cernan said. "As unimaginable as it seems, we have now come full circle and ceded our leadership role in space back to the same country -- albeit by a different name -- that spurred our challenge five decades ago." He said Constellation has been replaced by a "mission to nowhere" and called on NASA to make plans to return to the moon.