NASA - In the Trump Era

"Why you should take a closer look at this week's NASA bill" by Andrew Wagner and Nsikan Akpan, PBS NewsHour 3/24/2017

President Donald Trump has signed the 2017 NASA Authorization Act, the first complete authorization for the agency since 2010.  The bill lays out NASA's directives along with a proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal year at $19.5 billion — a $0.2 billion raise from the previous year.  It must still run through a congressional appropriations process to set the final funding for NASA.

While the bill reaffirms NASA's commitments to the International Space Station (through 2024) and to future manned missions into deep space, certain elements — or the lack thereof — have caused concern among some scientists, including space baron Elon Musk.

Here are some of the bill's biggest changes.

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So long, Earth science

Rewind to 1958:  The act that formally created America's space agency had a set of objectives.  The first goal listed: “The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.”

Congress has maintained this objective for NASA, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, until Trump signed this most recent bill Tuesday.

What changed:

• The new authorization bill removes all mention of earth sciences, a section that was included in the NASA authorization bill signed in 2010.

• It also removed sections on NASA's collaboration with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the investigation of the Earth's atmosphere.

The 2015 Antarctic ozone hole area was larger than the continent of North America, based on research by NASA and NOAA.

Photo by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Why it happened:

• The new bill was authored by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has said in the past that he “is concerned in the current environment, that NASA has lost its focus” by focusing on climate change.

• During a debate over the new bill, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said the bill ensures “NASA is not burdened with funding other agency missions.”

Why it matters:

• “Those programs provide the space-based measurements to help scientists understand the Earth's systems and changing climate to predict space weather events, which can have devastating impacts on our terrestrial infrastructure,” Rep.  Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), said of the missing science and heliophysics programs .

• Scientists have pointed out that the items in question also include a lot of practical programs, “such as safeguards to avoid eating toxic shellfish, reduce aviation disruptions and tracking unhealthy air quality,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

• The fate of those programs won't be clear until the bill goes through the budget appropriations process.  The authorization act passed in the Senate with unanimous support and by voice vote in the House.

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Who's on the hook if a commercial spaceship goes kaboom?

Meanwhile, the commercialization of space travel has strolled into its heyday.

In the 2017 authorization, Congress restates its dedication to NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a six-year-old initiative that provides government funds to private sector companies — like Blue Origin, SpaceX or Boeing — to develop space transportation vehicles.

What changed:

• The bill requires NASA to prioritize the use of its own launch vehicles or commercial providers over those of foreign entities like Russia.  Russian space vehicles had transported a number of American astronauts, including Scott Kelly, to the ISS in recent years.

• The 2017 authorization act also calls on NASA to facilitate the “commercialization and economic development” of low-earth orbit activities, such as lowering the costs of commercial satellite operations and exploring the possibility of transferring the International Space Station into the private sector.

• The power to invoke indemnity clauses — which place risk, or financial liability for an accident, on the government instead of private suppliers — moves from Congress to the executive branch, in this case, the NASA Administrator.

Shortly after the signing, Vice President Mike Pence announced plans to reinstate the National Space Council.  The space policy committee , which ran from 1958 to 1973 and again under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, has a long legacy of executive control over NASA.

“We're going to be bringing together the best and the brightest in NASA and also in the private sector,” said Pence, who will lead the NSC.  “We have elected a builder president and, as he said, America once again has to start building and leading to the stars.”

Why it happened:

• “This bill will make sure that NASA's most important and effective programs are sustained,” Trump said after Tuesday's signing.  “It orders NASA to continue transitioning activities to the commercial sector where we have seen great progress.  So many people and so many companies are so into exactly what NASA stands for, so the commercial and the private sector will get to use these facilities and I hope they're going to be paying us a lot of money.”

Why it matters:

• The indemnity clause provisions actually aren't new.  “We have had commercial space transportation law going back to 1984 that codifies a risk-sharing agreement between the government and the private sector,” said Joanne Gabrynowicz, editor-in-chief emerita of the Journal of Space Law.  “It would be triggered in the event of a catastrophic loss — and happily, that provision of the law hasn't been needed yet.”  But the shift gives more power to the executive branch rather than Congress.

• The bill calls on private companies to buy insurance coverage of $500 million for any launch or reentry mission.  This kind of mandate has appeared in similar legislation before, but the 2017 version re-ups the terms.  By comparison, the Mars Curiosity Rover mission cost $2.6 billion.  (Reminder: NASA's current budget is $19.3 billion, approximately 0.5 percent of the total federal budget).

• Despite the commercial commitments to near-Earth travel, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he wasn't happy with new act's prospects for deep space.  “This bill changes almost nothing about what NASA is doing,” Musk stated via Twitter.  “Existing programs stay in place and there is no added funding for Mars.”

Deep space and cyberspace

Two additional tidbits in the act address NASA prospects in deep space and cyberspace.

What’s changed:

• The bill creates the TREAT Astronauts Act, which addresses the need for medical coverage for U.S. astronauts that spend extensive time in space flight, such as on future missions to the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the Solar System.

• Unless new technology is developed, these trips will feature extensive exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation with unknown ramifications.  The TREAT Act would provide medical monitoring for astronauts years after they return and retire, namely for those who may not have access to military insurance plans.

• The bill also requires NASA to establish agency-wide information security and to establish accountability, governance and implementation oversight to meet standard cybersecurity best practices.

Why it matters:

• Scientists have observed bone loss and eye injuries among long-term residents of space stations.

• But Gabrynowicz pointed out the bill only states the government “may provide” this medical coverage — but “it does not have to be provided,” she said.  “In other words, it is allowed but not obligatory.”

• Meanwhile, NASA computers, like any connected to a modem, are vulnerable to attacks, as demonstrated last year, when hackers caused breached a drone operated by the space agency.  The hack was minor relative to other recent government hacks, but still exposed the names, phone numbers and emails of more than 2,400 employees.

• The bill forces the agency to “modernize its cybersecurity defenses into a layered, security-by-design approach,” said James Scott, co-founder and senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) in Washington D.C.  “These low-level attackers typically exploit trivial vulnerabilities, such as FTP access to servers, that should have been mitigated.”

"What do the stars hold for the Trump administration?  Here's how NASA's mission could change" PBS NewsHour 4/12/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Some big changes could be in store for American space exploration under President Trump and the Republican Congress.  Sending more humans to the moon, as well as a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa seem to be part of a plan that extends years beyond the Trump administration.  Science correspondent Miles O'Brien explores how NASA's mission could be reshaped.

NASA - Space Station, Fighting Fire With Fire

"NASA scientists try to stop space fires — by setting them" PBS NewsHour 6/8/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Confined spaces, low gravity and high concentrations of oxygen mean any unexpected fire on a space station could well be a death sentence, especially since fire extinguishers aren’t very effective away from Earth.  So NASA scientists are trying to develop a new kind of firefighting tool by starting their own space fires and studying how they unfold.  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.

JOHN GRUNSFELD, NASA:  We are crossing an international boundary.  We are on the U.S. side now, and now we are on the Russian Mir space station.

MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):  By 1997, the Russian space station Mir was 11 years old and showing its age.  During the fifth shuttle mission to the station, astronaut John Grunsfeld documented the warren of modules brimming with a disorienting maze of cables, hoses and trash.

JOHN GRUNSFELD:  I feel like I am exploring a cave.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Can you imagine being in a fire here?

U.S. astronaut Jerry Linenger lived that nightmare on February 23, 1997 (see "Fire! How the Mir Incident Changed Space Station Safety").

JERRY LINENGER, Former NASA Astronaut:  The fire was basically in this region here with the flames shooting across this way.

MILES O’BRIEN:  The source was a canister filled with chemicals designed to generate oxygen.

JERRY LINENGER:  You have got a two- or three-foot flame, blowtorch-like in intensity, sparks flying off the end of it.  It looks like a hundred sparklers all at once.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Linenger and his Russian crewmates donned masks and frantically fought the fire.

JERRY LINENGER:  The fire took about 14 minutes total, and 14 minutes is a long time with a roaring fire and a blackout from the smoke, and no place to go.  And if it were any bigger, I’m pretty darn sure we would have lost that spacecraft.

MILES O’BRIEN:  For NASA scientists and engineers, it was a big wakeup call.

GARY RUFF, NASA:  One of the things that you learn is, we really didn’t have a way to put that fire out.

NASA - BEAM Me Up

"Beam me up — NASA experiments with inflatable modules" PBS NewsHour 6/1/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Over the weekend, astronauts aboard the orbiting International Space Station added a module like none other.  Think an RV that expands out the back with extra space for sleeping quarters.  In the case of the ISS, it was an inflatable Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM).  It's made of a material stronger than kevlar and could be a game-changer.  Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.

MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour):  NASA just added some space to the space station, and it is 16 cubic meters like no other.  Inflated carefully with short spurts of air, it is an expandable module, the first designed for human habitation ever to reach low-Earth orbit.

It's a big step on the long road to building spacecraft and habitats for human missions to Mars.  Expandables allow engineers to color outside the lines, beyond the diameter of the nose cone of the rocket called the fairing.  That's the constraint when launching a module made of rigid aluminum.  It's sort of like carrying a tent to space.

Jason Crusan is NASA's director for advanced exploration systems.

JASON CRUSAN, NASA:  Expandables allow you to pack up whatever your habitat is and fit in more potential volume in the same fairing volume.  So that's the key advantage, is the volume advantage.

MILES O'BRIEN:  It's called BEAM, an acronym for Bigelow Expandable Activity Module.  It's a technology demonstrator, an experiment to see how well it performs in space.

The man behind BEAM, Robert Bigelow, watched it all unfold in the viewing room overlooking the space station flight control room in Houston.  His company, Bigelow Aerospace, is based in North Las Vegas.

All right, so what are we looking at here?

Bigelow made his fortune in real estate, contracting and extended stay hotels.  He is now pursuing a lifelong passion for space.  He believes expandables are a game-changer.

ROBERT BIGELOW, Bigelow Aerospace:  It's that dramatic.  It's that huge in terms of concept change.  We didn't invent the change.  This is a NASA idea.

MILES O'BRIEN:  It is an idea as old as the space age itself.  In a seminal series on space exploration in “Collier's” magazine in 1954, legendary rocket scientist Wernher von Braun envisioned humans flying to, and living on, Mars in inflatables.

The first communications satellites, Echo 1 and Echo 2, launched in 1960 and '64 respectively, were inflatable metallic balloons, passive reflectors of microwave transmissions.  At about the same time, NASA pondered several early space station designs with expandable modules.  And in the 1990s, when the International Space Station was becoming a reality, the agency designed an expandable called TransHab that would have replaced the U.S. crew quarters.

Expanded, it would have twice the diameter, and three times the volume, of the rigid aluminum structure currently in use.  But amid cost overruns, Congress canceled TransHab.  And Bigelow Aerospace obtained the patents from NASA.

SPACE STATION - Scott and Mark Kelly Identical Twin Study

"Astronaut Scott Kelly sets out to break an American record in space" PBS NewsHour 3/30/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  This week, astronaut Scott Kelly arrived at the International Space Station, where he will stay for a year -- the longest duration of time any American has spent in space.  While Scott is in orbit, researchers on Earth will be studying his identical twin brother Mark Kelly for insight into how space affects the human body.  Jeffrey Brown learns more from former astronaut Chris Hadfield.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Finally, a conversation about an out-of-this-world experience: living in space.

Astronaut Scott Kelly arrived this weekend at the International Space Station.  He will stay there for almost a year, the longest duration an American has ever spent in space.  He’s the identical twin brother of former astronaut Mark Kelly.  And both will participate in a study to see the effects of living in space.

After Scott Kelly lifted off on Friday, Jeffrey Brown spoke with a former astronaut, Chris Hadfield, whose final stay on the space station lasted five months.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Chris Hadfield, welcome to you.

The twin study is especially interesting this time, right, the research on the two brothers, Scott and Mark Kelly, one in space, one on the ground.  What kinds of things are being looked at?

CHRIS HADFIELD, Canadian Space Agency:  Yes, it sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it, to have an identical twin on a space ship and another one down on the ground?

But it’s just luck, but, boy, it sure provides some interesting medical and scientific opportunity.  You take two people that are as identical as they can be.  You put them in wildly different environments, one of them that is really brand-new for humanity, living in weightlessness off the planet, and then you watch how they change over a year.  You measure all of those subtle things, bone density, muscle strength, psychology, vision, blood pressure, blood pressure regulation, all of those, liver function, everything.

And it is really going to help us not only understand spaceflight for long-term flight, for going from here to the moon and Mars and beyond, but also just understand the effects on the body of flight itself, the subtle changes that happen within the body, and teach us inherently about physiology.  It’s a really cool thing.  It’s never been done before.

SPACE - Private Cygnus Robotic Cargo Ship to Launch

The Antares rocket carrying Orbital Sciences' first cargo-carrying Cygnus spacecraft rolls to its launch pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. ahead of launch.
Liftoff is set for Jan. 7.

"Private Cygnus Cargo Ship Launching Delivery Mission to Space Station Next Week" by Mike Wall, Space.com 1/3/2014

A private spaceship is scheduled to launch on its first official cargo run to the International Space Station next week.

The unmanned Cygnus spacecraft, which is built by Virginia-based firm Orbital Sciences, is slated to blast off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Tuesday afternoon (Jan. 7), in a launch that could be visible from large stretches of the U.S. East Coast, weather permitting.

If all goes according to plan, Cygnus will arrive at the station on Friday morning (Jan. 10), delivering 2,780 pounds (1,261 kilograms) of supplies and science experiments to the crewmembers of the orbiting lab's Expedition 38, NASA officials said.

A Cygnus spacecraft has visited the space station once before during a landmark demonstration flight last September.  But Tuesday's launch will initiate the first of eight robotic supply runs that Orbital Sciences plans to make using Cygnus and its Antares rocket, under a $1.9 billion contract the company signed with NASA.

Tuesday's five-minute launch window opens at 1:55 p.m. EST (1855 GMT), Orbital Sciences officials said.  According to viewing maps released by the company, the liftoff may be visible from as far south as South Carolina and as far north as Boston.

When the Cygnus arrives at the station next Friday, NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins and Japanese spaceflyer Koichi Wakata will snag it using the orbiting lab's huge robotic arm.  The Cygnus will stay berthed to the space station for 42 days, Orbital Sciences officials said, at which point it will be filled with trash and depart, eventually burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

The mission was originally supposed to blast off last month, but it was delayed after a cooling pump module malfunctioned on Dec. 11.  NASA decided to replace the pump module over the course of two holiday spacewalks, pushing the Cygnus launch into January.

Orbital Sciences isn't the only firm with a NASA cargo deal.  SpaceX holds a $1.6 billion contract to fly 12 robotic supply missions using its Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket.  The California-based company has already completed two of these missions, and the third is slated to blast off next month.

HISTORY - Legacy of Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space

"Honoring Sally Ride's Legacy as Scientist, Trailblazer, Educational Role Model" PBS Newshour 5/21/2013

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  And, finally tonight, the legacy of Sally Ride.

Yesterday, President Obama announced he would confer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, on a woman remembered as a pioneer in space travel and an educator and role model for women in the sciences.

It was 1983 when Sally Ride made history as the first American woman in space.  Ride was just 32 at the time, and she said then that she thought her age was more important than her gender.

DR. SALLY RIDE, Former NASA Astronaut:  I guess that I was maybe more excited about getting a chance to fly early than I was about getting to be the first woman.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Ride was a physicist and one of the first six women chosen for the program.  She would fly into space again a year later.

But when her flying days were over, she continued to play an important role in the space program.  She served on two investigative boards that examined what went wrong in the Challenger and Columbia disasters.  And after her NASA years, Ride focused on engaging young people in science, particularly girls and women.

In a 2008 video, she promoted EarthKAM, an effort to put cameras on the space station, allowing middle schoolers to take pictures from space.

SALLY RIDE:  We provide a website that allows them to do all the appropriate calculations, figure out exactly when the station is going to be going over that part of the Earth, and then command the camera to take a picture at that second.

SPACE - Tiny Company Delivers Low-Cost Space Station Research

"The Space Station Is The Final Frontier Of Biological Research" by Alex Knapp, Forbes 2/13/2013

The frontier of biomedical research is inside an unassuming green box with a black-and-white touchscreen mounted on a rack in the International Space Station.  Within that green box is a microplate reader, a workhorse appliance in labs on Earth but the first of its kind to work in the near-zero gravity at 250 miles up.  A microplate reader screens hundreds of liquid samples at once for drug candidates or infectious disease, but fluids at zero Gs can float around or settle in unwanted ways.  This barred scientists from using microplates in space, where researchers prize the absence of gravity for its insights into how crystals, bacteria and drug agents behave.

Solving that problem was one small step for a tiny company called NanoRacks, which has carved out an unusual niche (and a monopoly, for now) adapting lab gear to the U.S. National Lab on the ISS.  Since 2010 it has designed and built all 36 of the modular labs there.  It has also acquired for the ISS two microscopes and a centrifuge that can simulate the gravity on, say, the moon or Mars. NanoRacks has flown 70 payloads to the ISS and is contracted to fly 80 more.  Last year it generated more than $3 million in revenue, of which only one-quarter comes from NASA.  Other customers include European and Saudi space agencies, universities in the U.K. and Vietnam, and even Scotch distiller Ardbeg, which sent up flavor molecules called terpenes to age for two years in charred oak (more on that experiment here).

NanoRacks’ entrepreneurial approach has cut the cost of doing science in space just as Elon Musk’s SpaceX has shown that startups can deliver payloads safely and more cheaply than governments can.  NASA told NanoRacks that a space-ready microplate reader would take years and cost millions.  “We told them we could do it in six months for less than a million,” says NanoRacks managing director Jeffrey Manber.  NanoRacks ended up doing it for $500,000 and even gave NASA the same money-back guarantee it offers commercial customers.  “We’ve only done that one other time,” says Marybeth Edeen, who manages the U.S. National Lab aboard the space station.  “It’s a good model in that incentivizes companies to build robust hardware.”

To make its microplate reader space-ready, NanoRacks had to tweak the capillary action of its 96 tiny wells to ensure that liquids were placed correctly on a slide and had to dumb down the machine’s user interface so an untrained astronaut could use it.  “When astronaut Kevin Ford turned it on and ran the initial experiment, we had to wait for it to run overnight,” says Manber.  “We had trouble sleeping. But in the morning we downloaded the data, and it was perfect.”

NanoRacks charges roughly $60,000 for each microplate reader experiment and is getting a lot more new customers beyond NASA, so it shouldn’t take the company too long to get a return on its investment.  “We were profitable last year, and we’ll be profitable this year,” says Richard Pournelle, NanoRacks’ senior vice president for business development.

Here’s a video showing the installation of the microplate reader on board the Station with some more information about Nanoracks.

SPACE - Latest Spacewalk

"Astronauts begin spacewalk to fix space station cooling system" by Mike Wall (Space.com), Fox News 11/1/2012

Two astronauts are floating outside the International Space Station today (Nov. 1) in an effort to isolate and repair an ammonia leak in part of the orbiting lab's cooling system.

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and Japanese spaceflyer Akihiko Hoshide officially begun the spacewalk — also known as an extra-vehicular activity, or EVA — this morning at 8:29 a.m. EDT (1229 GMT). They're expected to stay outside for about 6 1/2 hours, NASA officials said. You can watch live coverage of the spacewalk here on NASA TV.

Each of the orbiting lab's eight huge solar arrays has its own associated power system, and circulating ammonia helps cool this gear down. The spacewalk's first objective is to find the source of the leak, which could affect one of these power channels if it's not addressed soon.

"We don't know exactly where the leak is," space station manager Mike Suffredini of NASA told reporters during a teleconference last Friday (Oct. 26). "It's possible the leak is in the PVR itself, the [photo-voltaic] radiator itself. It could be in the pump system, or it could be in any one of the [coolant] lines." [Gallery: Building the International Space Station]

On Thursday's EVA, Williams — commander of the station's current Expedition 33 mission — and Hoshide will make their way over to the port side of the station's backbone-like truss. They'll reconfigure some lines in the affected coolant system and install a spare radiator to see if that stops the leak.

"We're real suspicious of the radiator," said spacewalk flight director Mike Lammers, of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It kind of stretches out there and is susceptible to micrometeorite impacts."

Because the leak is so slow, it will likely take several weeks before it's known if the fix works, officials said.

If ammonia continues to escape, the station's operators will eventually have to try something else. For example, they may direct astronauts to swap out some of the coolant system's pump gear on another spacewalk. But there likely won't be an urgent need for a new fix, since the spare radiator should provide enough ammonia to keep the coolant system operating until next October or so, officials said.

NASA and its space station partners have known about the ammonia leak since 2007, and they've taken measures to deal with it before. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour recharged the coolant system with 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) of ammonia last year.

Spacewalks are always challenging, but Thursday's EVA is unlikely to throw anything at Williams and Hoshide that the two astronauts can't handle. In late August and early September, the duo replaced a vital power unit over the course of two spacewalks, defeating an unexpectedly stubborn stuck bolt in the process.

"I would say this is an average-skill-level EVA — maybe slightly more challenging than an average EVA," said lead spacewalk officer Allison Bolinger of the Johnson Space Center.

SPACE - Latest Soyuz Docking

"Russian Soyuz rocket docks at space station" by PETER LEONARD (AP), USA Today 10/25/2012

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts and a consignment of fish successfully docked Thursday with the International Space Station after a two-day voyage.

The arrival of NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russians Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin on Thursday brings the crew at the orbiting outpost to six.

Novitsky gently slotted the Soyuz craft into the Russian Poisk research module around 410 kilometers (255 miles) above southern Ukraine around six minutes ahead of the scheduled 1235 GMT (8:35 a.m. EDT) arrival.

The trio blasted off Tuesday from a Russian-leased facility in the southern Kazakhstan town of Baikonur.

Incoming cargo includes 32 guppy-like fish that will be used to test how conditions in space impact on living organisms.

Akihiko Hoshide, an astronaut with Japan's JAXA space agency, spent early Thursday morning preparing an aquarium on the Japanese experiment module called "Kibo," or Hope.

"The importance of these very small fishes is that they have bones and muscles just like human beings," Hoshide told NASA TV earlier this year before the start of his mission. "What we're trying to do is have them stay in space for a longer duration and then bring them down to look at their bone structure and muscles."

The hardy Medaka fish, which can grow up to four centimeters (1.6 inches), are considered particularly suitable for the study as they have transparent bodies that enable scrutiny of their internal organs.

A spacewalk by Hoshide and U.S. astronaut Suni Williams to repair an ammonia leak from the station's temperature control system is planned for next Thursday.

NASA says ammonia is pumped through the station's system to keep electronics and other equipment cool.

Another task in the frenetic workload over the incoming crew's first week in orbit will be the unberthing Sunday of a commercial Dragon cargo vehicle.

The capsule loaded with completed scientific experiments will splash down in the afternoon in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Baja California.

The growing capabilities of private space vehicle companies have boosted hopes that NASA will be able to focus increasingly on more ambitious exploration projects.

Earlier this month, California-based SpaceX successfully delivered supplies to the space station on Dragon, the first official shipment under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. It calls for 12 such shipments.

Cygnus, the first cargo vehicle to the station from Orbital Sciences Corp., of Dulles, Virginia, is scheduled for December.

NASA - Space Station Integration Services

"NASA Selects Space Station Integration Services Contract" by NASA, Sacramento Bee 8/22/2012

NASA has selected Barrios Technology Ltd. of Houston to provide mission and program integration services for the International Space Station Program at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The two-year base contract is a small business set aside. It begins Oct. 1 and extends through Sept. 30, 2014. There are three potential two-year options valued at approximately $84 million and a provision for additional work not to exceed $50 million. The total potential value of the contract is $384.7 million.

Under the contract, Barrios will provide program support related to strategic and tactical planning, engineering analysis, manifest development and hardware certification, safety and mission assurance, risk management, information technology, payload integration, program science and research. The company also will be responsible for configuration, data resource and business management.

Subcontractors on the contract include ARES Technical Services Corp. of Houston and Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Va.

Federal government spending creating jobs.