Cape Canaveral, U.S.A. — Media are invited to an interview availability and facilities tour with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden at noon EDT, Thursday, Aug. 23, at various locations in and around the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the media tour, Bolden will detail recent progress related to NASA’s commercial spaceflight initiatives.

Media must be at Kennedy’s press site by 11:15 a.m. for transportation to the first location. Media will return to the press site by 3:30 p.m. For media wanting to cover a separate XCOR event at Kennedy’s Visitor Complex, transportation to the Bolden event will be provided and depart the Visitor Complex at1 1:30 a.m.

Bolden and media will tour two locations on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station: SpaceX’s facility at Space Launch Complex 40 and United Launch Alliance’s Space Launch Complex 41, where the Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) spacecraft is on the launch pad. RBSP is scheduled to launch Friday morning.

Bolden and media then will go to Kennedy’s Operations and Checkout Building to see the latest progress on NASA’s Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which is being prepared for launch on the Exploration Flight Test-1 in early 2014.

The tour ends at Kennedy, where The Boeing Co. is preparing its CST-100 spacecraft, which is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program work. NASA is working with U.S. companies to eventually provide crew transportation to and from low Earth orbit and the space station.

NASA RBSP media badges will be honored for this event. No new credentials for international media will be issued. U.S. journalists without media credentials must apply online by noon, Aug. 22, at: https://media.ksc.nasa.gov

For more information about NASA’s Orion, Space Launch System, Commercial Crew, Ground Systems Development and Operations and International Space Station programs, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration

Image Courtesy of   eddtoro / Shutterstock.com

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Newark, U.S.A. – Today’s Presidential primary election is meaningless for citizens living in New Jersey, California, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota. “This creates an alienated and cynical electorate that is becoming more disenfranchised with every election cycle,” says Jim Lynch, author of “The 2020 Players: A Futuristic View of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Lynch asks, “Can you blame Americans for tuning out? This is not democracy; in fact, it just may be as bad as the backroom politics back in the old days of bosses and political machines.”

“As a result, millions of Americans had absolutely no voice in the Presidential selection process. Let’s face it; the primary system is broken,” says Lynch.

After today’s vote, which involves some 299 uncontested electoral votes, only Utah has yet to weigh in and they’ll hold off until June 26.

“Voting in America should be cherished as a sacred right, as a meaningful experience to every American. But voting has become totally meaningless for almost a third of the states participating in 2012 Republican primary balloting,” says Lynch.

“This flawed process is a ringing endorsement of the reform proposal to have a National One Day Primary on the same day in all 50 states for all presidential candidates. The single day primary would bring an end to local pandering to voters – like Newt Gingrich telling the people in Cape Canaveral ‘We should build a moon base’ – and to months of negative campaigning on TV and radio, one harmful and nauseating attack after another, without end.  And it would be far easier for both parties to unite behind the winners who emerge from the one day balloting,” says Lynch.

Lynch believes Americans must overhaul the political process and the insidious role that media advocacy plays in this process. “In my novel, The 2020 Players, I also advocate a viable three-party system, a single six-year term for President, and a ban on any political campaigning while in office.”

Jim Lynch is a native New Yorker, married with eight children and four grandchildren. His parents worked for the FBI. He spent eight years as an investigator and was an executive for AT&T. Lynch is a full time novelist.

Image Courtesy of  Jim Lynch

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NASA’s car-sized ‘Curiosity’ rover has begun monitoring space radiation during its 8-month trip from Earth to Mars. The research will aid in planning for future human missions to the Red Planet. Curiosity launched on Nov. 26 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. aboard the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). The rover carries an instrument called the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) that monitors high-energy atomic and subatomic particles from the sun, distant supernovas and other sources.

These particles constitute radiation that could be harmful to any microbes or astronauts in space or on Mars. The rover also will monitor radiation on the surface of Mars after its August 2012 landing.

“RAD is serving as a proxy for an astronaut inside a spacecraft on the way to Mars,” said Don Hassler, RAD’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “The instrument is deep inside the spacecraft, the way an astronaut would be. Understanding the effects of the spacecraft on the radiation field will be valuable in designing craft for astronauts to travel to Mars.”

Previous monitoring of energetic-particle radiation in space has used instruments at or near the surface of various spacecraft. The RAD instrument is on the rover inside the spacecraft and shielded by other components of MSL, including the aeroshell that will protect the rover during descent through the upper atmosphere of Mars.

Spacecraft structures, while providing shielding, also can contribute to secondary particles generated when high-energy particles strike the spacecraft. In some circumstances, secondary particles could be more hazardous than primary ones. These first measurements mark the start of the science return from a mission that will use 10 instruments on Curiosity to assess whether Mars’ Gale Crater could be or has been favorable for microbial life.

“While Curiosity will not look for signs of life on Mars, what it might find could be a game- changer about the origin and evolution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the universe,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “One thing is certain: the rover’s discoveries will provide critical data that will impact human and robotic planning and research for decades.”

As of noon EST on Dec. 14, the spacecraft will have traveled 31.9 million miles (51.3 million kilometers) of its 352-million-mile (567-million-kilometer) flight to Mars. The first trajectory correction maneuver during the trip is being planned for mid-January.

Southwest Research Institute, together with Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, built RAD with funding from the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington, and Germany’s national aerospace research center, Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt.

The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission’s rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

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