Long Delayed Falcon Heavy To Launch Soon

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2015/09/03/long-delayed-falcon-heavy-flight-set-spring-2016/

We Are Looking For Chemical Finger Prints of Life

http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/were-looking-chemical-fingerprints-of-life

Men Into Space -12- Christmas on the Moon

What Happened To Mars' Atmosphere?

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4708&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NASAJPL&utm_content=daily20150902-3

The Mars Society Announces A New Agenda

MARS SOCIETY ANNOUNCEMENT View this email in your browser Mars Society Announces New Initiatives Following Steering Committee Meeting During the 18th Annual International Mars Society Convention, held in mid-August in Washington, D.C., the Mars Society convened its Steering Committee and decided on a number of major initiatives for the coming year. These include: + The Mars Society will attempt to intersect the political ferment associated with the now unfolding U.S. presidential campaign to mobilize its American members and chapters to take every opportunity to meet all presidential hopefuls while they are out on the campaign trail, as well as members of Congress in their home offices, to impress on them the message that the U.S. space program needs a goal, and that goal should be humans to Mars in our time. As part of this effort, the Mars Society will establish a political task force and reach out to other U.S. space advocacy groups to try to arrange collaboration with them on this initiative. + As part of the effort to provide the currently adrift U.S. space program with real direction that could get the humans to Mars program underway, the Mars Society will launch an international student engineering contest to design the Gemini Mars mission, creating a plan for a two-person Mars flyby that could be placed on the desk of the President-elect in late 2016 and be completed by the end of his or her second term. The Gemini Mars mission has some similarities to the previously proposed Inspiration Mars mission, but eliminates its principle weakness by avoiding the use of a rarely-employed high energy trajectory that imposed excessive technology development, launch capacity and schedule demands on the mission. Instead, much easier and more frequently-used low energy trajectories will be employed. The contest will be open to teams of engineering students from universities around the world, with the team offering the best design proposal receiving a $10,000 prize, with additional prizes of $5,000, $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 going to the second, third, fourth and fifth place contestants, respectively. Commenting on the planned contest, Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin said, “We are calling this mission Gemini Mars, not just because it will have a crew of two, but because we aim to have it serve to open the way to the Red Planet in the same way that the 1960s Gemini program paved the way to the Moon.” Further details on the contest rules will be released in the near future. + The Mars Society intends to advance the plans for its one-year Mars Arctic 365 project by down-selecting to a single crew that will first be “put to the test” as part of an 80-day mission at the organization’s Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the fall of 2016. The crew, including alternates, of Mars Awakening 80 (MA80), as the mission is being called, consists of nine individuals drawn from the U.S., France, Canada, Germany and Russia who previously made the cut of 21 finalists chosen from an initial pool of over 200 volunteers. More information regarding the new MA80 mission will be announced soon. + The Mars Society has decided to move its annual international convention from August to late September, so as to obtain much greater attendance from university students and faculty. Furthermore, next year’s convention will be held in Washington, D.C., placing it right in the heart of the “political storm” during election year. In addition, holding the convention in late September will position it close to the time of the landing of NASA’s INSIGHT probe, which is scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet towards the end of September. Additional details about the convention will be posted online in the near future. + Finally, a major effort will be launched to reactivate the Mars Society’s local chapters and task force organizations. To facilitate this, as well as many other Mars Society activities and initiatives, the Mars Society Steering Committee has selected Lucinda Offer to serve as the organization’s Executive Director. Mrs. Offer previously held the position of Executive Director, but left several years ago to pursue other opportunities in the United Kingdom.Welcome back Lucinda! [Mars Society Steering Committee, 08.12.15]   Facebook Twitter Website YouTube Share Tweet The Mars Society 11111 West 8th Avenue, unit A Lakewood, CO 80215 U.S.A. www.marssociety.org @TheMarsSociety Copyright (c) 2015 The Mars Society All rights reserved.

The World's Largest Plane Is Set To Make Its Maiden Flight Next Year

Ron Clatworthy	9:41 AM (16 hours ago)
to

World’s Biggest Plane is Set to Make Its Maiden Flight Early Next Year

Image courtesy Sierra Nevada

A gigantic aircraft named the Stratolaunch Carrier is being built at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

Wingspan Comparison of the Stratolaunch

This giant airplane will have a huge wingspan of an astonishing 117 meters, which is longer than a football field. It will be 123 feet longer than world’s largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380, which makes it the world’s biggest plane.

Image-Courtesy-Wikiwand.com

Stratolaunch will act as a giant air pad in the sky to put satellites into orbit at a much lower cost than existing technologies.

Stratolaunch is the brainchild of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and legendary spacecraft designer Burt Rutan, who won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

The new partnership involves Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well. While the spacecraft will be built at the Mojave Spaceport, the rockets will be built by SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.

Key features of the Stratolaunch at a glance:

• The plane will climb to 30,000 feet (5.7 miles) to help launch satellites that will orbit up to 1,200 miles above Earth.
• High altitude launching will avoid the huge fuel costs of launching from Earth.
• The Stratolaunch Carrier is powered by six 747-style engines.
• The Stratolaunch Carrier can be used again and again for multiple launches.
• It will need around 12,000 feet of runway to take off. In comparison, most commercial planes need around 7,000 to 8,000 foot runways.
• Each of the twin fuselages of the Stratolaunch Carrier aircraft will be supported by 12 main landing gear wheels along with two nose gear wheels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgJFKUiuDBE

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Stratolaunch Systems, A Paul G. Allen Project

Stratolaunch Systems, A Paul G. Allen Project

The Mars Society Convention 2015

MARS SOCIETY ANNOUNCEMENT View this email in your browser

Mars Society Washington, D.C. Conference a Great Success The 18th Annual International Mars Society Convention held at the Catholic University of America August 13-16, 2015 was a great success. Some 250 people attended to hear over 80 presentations covering all aspects of Mars exploration, including the latest robotic missions, human expeditions and settlement of the Red Planet and Mars habitability. By most accounts, the high points of the four-day conference were two dramatic debates conducted on the evenings of Thursday, August 13th and Friday, August 14th. The first was a real knock down encounter between Mars One (with its team led by Bas Lansdorp) and MIT graduate research critics arguing the proposition “Is Mars One Feasible.” The second, also very forceful, featured former Apollo 17 astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmitt, Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin, and Planetary Society Director of Advocacy Casey Dreier facing off on the proposition “Where Next for Human Exploration,” (with the three making the case for the Moon, Mars and Mars orbit, respectively). We won’t tell you who won, but the debates were filmed and can be viewed on ourYouTube page, so watch them and decide for yourself.  Commenting on the debates, Dr. Zubrin said, “This was great. This is exactly the kind of thing the U.S. space program has needed for a long time. We’ve wasted four decades by allowing the space program to be diverted into quagmires like the Space Shuttle and the ISS that could not have survived the scrutiny afforded by open debate. Now we face another potential decade-long diversion in the form of the Asteroid Redirect Mission. These things need to be debated in the open, so the truth can be brought into the light, and we can start making the right decisions moving forward. We are certainly going to have a lot more of these debates at our conventions in the future.”  Another high point was the Mars Society banquet, which was addressed via Skype by Andy Weir, the author of “The Martian” (soon to be released as a major motion picture starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott). In the words of one banquet attendee, Andy Weir was “a hoot.” We look forward to seeing his great novel on screen this October.  There were far too many talks to list here (a complete agenda may be found on our web site), but one standout that simply must be mentioned was a plenary given Friday evening by Dr. Carol Stoker of NASA Ames Research Center, who presented a review of all the evidence gathered over the past two decades of successful Mars probes that support the suspicion that life may well exist on the Red Planet today. “We need to send a life detection mission to Mars,” Dr. Stoker concluded, eliciting near universal agreement on the basis of her very strong case.  Referencing Dr. Stoker’s address, one of the scientists present noted that there would be plenty of room on the Mars 2020 rover for life detection experiments and many other additional instruments as well, if two-thirds of the rover’s science capability was not being sacrificed to allow it to cache samples for a Mars Sample Return mission which is not currently funded and may never come, or if it does, will certainly have its own sample collection capability. To watch all of the plenary talks, panel discussions and public debates held during the 2015 International Mars Society Convention, please visit the Mars Society's YouTube page.   Mars One vs. MIT public debate Facebook Twitter Website YouTube Share Tweet

The Mars Society 11111 West 8th Avenue, unit A Lakewood, CO 80215 U.S.A. www.marssociety.org @TheMarsSociety Copyright (c) 2015 The Mars Society All rights reserved.