Anúncio de emprego: Procura-se Astronauta (m/f)

É mesmo verdade! Chegou finalmente a oportunidade de haver um astronauta português! Um astronauta verdadeiro, e não um turista, que tenha pago 20 ou 30 milhões de dólares para ir passear à ISS a bordo de uma cápsula Soyuz. Não, este anúncio surgiu no StarTracker, uma social network em que só se entra por convite, mas reproduzo aqui o anúncio na íntegra.

Se é jovem, saudável, em forma, e está a estudar num curso relevante, e se a Conquista do Espaço o anima, sugiro-lhe que cumpra o sonho de muitos de nós, incluindo os que, como eu, são de uma geração que já não terá esta possibilidade! Quem sabe, poderá ser o primeiro Europeu a caminhar sobre a Lua! Já não é fantasia!

Job opportunity details

Role Name:	Astronauta
Company:	European Space Agency
Description:	A Ciência Viva e a Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia organizam a Sessão de Informação sobre o concurso para recrutamento de astronautas da Agência Espacial Europeia (ESA), o primeiro aberto à participação de cidadãos portugueses. Este evento, que conta com a colaboração da ESA, terá lugar no próximo dia 15 de Maio, às 10h30, no Pavilhão do Conhecimento – Ciência Viva. Esta sessão conta com a presença de Ernst Messerschmid, astronauta do Centro Europeu de Astronautas (EAC), de Horst Schaarschmidt, responsável pela divisão de astronautas do EAC e de Manuel Paiva, que coordenou numerosos projectos de investigação biomédica associados ao Espaço. Com os seus astronautas a trabalharem no laboratório Columbus, a bordo da Estação Espacial Internacional (ISS), e com o sucesso da missão ATV, a Agência Espacial Europeia está à procura de novos talentos para reforçar o seu corpo de astronautas em futuras missões. Os candidatos seleccionados passarão a integrar o Corpo Europeu de Astronautas e iniciarão a sua formação básica no Centro Europeu de Astronautas em Colónia, na Alemanha. Portugal é um dos 17 Estados-Membros cujos cidadãos podem candidatar-se a este desafio. Mais informações em http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM2SS3XQEF_Portugal_0.html
Until:	2008/08/19
Name:	Pedro Pereira
Link:	www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM2SS3XQEF_Portugal_0.html
Location:	- Global, - Global

Sugiro também que visitem o link da ESA, que contém mais informações. Os astronautas seleccionados irão participar em missões à ISS, mas também, previsivelmente, à Lua, daqui a cerca de 10 anos!

Procuram-se: Astronautas

Procuramos os candidatos mais brilhantes e em melhor forma física. Devem tolerar bem o trabalho sob stress e apresentar boa tolerância às alturas. Exige-se disponibilidade para trabalhar longe de casa. Se acha que está à altura deste desafio, envie o seu CV actualizado para a Agência Espacial Européia.

Este poderia ser o texto de um anúncio para um emprego qualquer. Mas na realidade a ESA - Agência Espacial Européia - está, pela primeira vez em 15 anos, a contratar astronautas. Existem 8 vagas, para as quais a ESA espera ter mais de 50.000 candidaturas!

Fonte: The Guardian


Situations vacant: applicants should be fit, fearless - and have a head for heights
Europe recruits astronauts for first time in 15 years
· Up to 50,000 applications expected for eight places

• Ian Sample, science correspondent
• The Guardian,
• Saturday March 22 2008

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday March 22 2008 on p3 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 00:02 on March 22 2008.

Astronaut Piers J. Sellers participates in a spacewalk

Wanted for unique opportunity: brilliant, physically fit people. Must be cool under pressure, willing to work away from home and have a good head for heights. Free uniform included.

The wording might be a little different, but when the advert appears in newspapers in the next few weeks, it will mark the beginning of one of the most exciting recruitment drives in more than 40 years. The European Astronaut Centre (EAC) needs more astronauts, and from them it expects to choose the first European to walk on the moon.

The EAC, part of the European Space Agency (ESA), last went looking for astronauts 15 years ago. The recruitment comes at a time of enormous change in human space exploration. The space shuttle, until now a workhorse for transporting crews to and from the International Space Station, is due to be mothballed in 2010 or shortly after. And the lifetime of the space station itself is only guaranteed until 2015.

But the plans for humans in space suggest a new era is about to begin. Next year, Nasa plans the first test flight of its shuttle replacement, the Orion module, with which it intends to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The ESA hopes to be there with them.

"The average age of our astronaut corps is 50 years old, and with that corps, we cannot master the challenges of the future," said Gerhard Thiele, head of the astronaut division at the EAC in Cologne. "I'd not be surprised if one of the candidates we select this time round will be among the first Europeans to walk on the moon."

Thiele, a former astronaut, is looking for four new astronauts plus four back-ups. Applications will be taken via a website, and will be followed by a year-long selection process of interviews, medicals and psychological tests. Up to 50,000 applications are expected.

"People have to be operationally very skilled and must be able to stay cool if things get tense. But what is important to me is that the person is a team player, a servant. They might seem a hero type with the 'right stuff', but they have to understand they are just one small part in the entire scenario. We need people who understand what it means to be humble," said Thiele.

Astronauts traditionally come from strong technical backgrounds, so scientists, engineers and doctors will be high on the list. Piloting skills - though not needed as Europeans are not allowed to fly the shuttle or the Russian Soyuz - are also desirable. The agency has a policy of not recruiting people older than 55, but the physical fitness required to make it through selection usually weeds out plenty of people who are much younger.

For Britons, getting into the astronaut corps is made all the harder by the government's opposition to human spaceflight. While Britain is the fourth largest contributor to ESA, paying €265m (£208m) this year alone, none of that goes towards the astronaut programme.

"To the best of my knowledge, there has never been an ESA astronaut from a country that wasn't supporting human space flight, but this should change in the future," said Thiele. "From the number of letters I get, I'd say almost half the applications will be coming from Great Britain and I can assure every British candidate we are absolutely blind to the colour of the passport during the application process."

At Britain's Empire Test Pilots' School at RAF Boscombe Down, Wiltshire, a spokesman said a shift in the government's position would quickly get people talking. "Anyone in flight test probably has, deep in their soul somewhere, an ambition that it would be a great thing to do, and historically test flying is where astronauts have been recruited.

"It's not really been a topic of conversation in this country because it's not been seen as a possibility. If things changed, we would be very surprised if it didn't become a very hot topic of conversation indeed," he said.

The government recently published its space strategy for the next five years, and announced that it would review its position on human space flight.

Lançamento da ATV 'Jules Verne'

O lançamento do Automated Transfer Vehicle 'Jules Verne', hoje de madrugada, a partir de Kourou, na Guiana Francesa.

A primeira cápsula espacial européia

Clique para aumentar.

Será lançada no Domingo uma nave espacial de concepção inteiramente européia, designada Automated Transfer Vehicle, com a função de reabastecer a Estação Espacial Internacional.

É a primeira vez que a Agência Espacial Européia (ESA) desenvolve uma cápsula capaz de albergar seres humanos. Apesar de não transportar astronautas no momento do lançamento, será capaz de os receber uma vez atracada à ISS.

Oxalá o próximo passo seja o desenvolvimento de uma cápsula ou de um veículo reutilizável capaz de transportar astronautas até à ISS, onde a Europa tem agora um investimento que não pode ser menosprezado.

Fonte: MSNBC

Link: ESA - Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs)


‘Jules Verne’ set for maiden voyage

European cargo ship will deliver fresh supplies to space station

By Tariq Malik

Senior editor

Space.com

updated 2:24 p.m. ET March 5, 2008

A European cargo ship the size of a double-decker bus is primed for its maiden flight to haul fresh supplies toward the international space station.

Jules Verne, a massive unmanned cargo ship built for the European Space Agency (ESA) is set to launch Sunday, March 9 from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. A modified European Ariane 5 rocket will loft the nearly 21-ton Jules Verne into orbit from its equatorial launch site on the northern coast of South America.

"It's the biggest spacecraft we've built in Europe and by far the most complicated," said John Ellwood, ATV mission manager for the ESA.

Jules Verne is the first of a new fleet of unmanned spacecraft, called Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs), to launch fresh supplies to station crews through at least 2015. The 32-foot (10-meter) long cylinder with a diameter of about 14.7 feet (4.5 meters) and a roomy cargo hold for food, clothes, new equipment and rocket fuel for the space station.

It is the first new spacecraft in nine years to join the flotilla of U.S space shuttles, Russia's manned Soyuz and unmanned Progress spacecraft that make station-bound flights, NASA officials have said.

"The ATV, as a logistics vehicle, carries almost three times the hardware, fuel, water and oxygen that a Russian Progress carries," said NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffredini. "It is a major contribution to the program."

For its inaugural flight, Jules Verne is packed with propellant and equipment for the station's three-astronaut crew, though ATVs are designed to haul up to 10 tons of supplies to orbit, according to ESA officials. The launch was delayed from a planned late Friday EST liftoff to late Saturday to double check work on its spacecraft separation system.

Jules Verne is due to spend about a week chasing the space station after launch, then park about 1,243 miles (2,000 kilometers) from the station to await the departure of NASA's shuttle Endeavour before proceeding with rendezvous demonstrations. The U.S. space shuttle is scheduled to launch March 11 on a 16-day construction flight to deliver a Japanese-built room and Canadian robot to the space station.

A European first
Built by France's EADS-Astrium, Jules Verne and its fellow ATV spacecraft are Europe's first spacecraft to launch and rendezvous with a crewed orbital outpost. ESA partner nations have spent $1.9 billion (1.3 billion euros) developing the spacecraft as part of a barter system to send future European astronauts and experiments to the space station.

"It's an extremely exciting vehicle for us," said ESA station program manager Alan Thirkettle, adding that the spacecraft has been under development since 1998. "It contains a number of new technologies."

Chief among those new technologies is the ATV's videometers, a visual-based navigation system that relies on lasers to home in on the space station.

Jules Verne and other ATVs will use a global positioning satellite (GPS) system to maneuver within about 816 feet (249 meters) of an aft docking port on the station's Russian-built Zvezda service module, then activate the videometer to beam laser pulses at a set of reflectors near the berth. By analyzing the light patterns reflected back, the videometer should be able determine precisely how far the ATV is from its docking port.

The spacecraft is also equipped with a secondary, radar-like sensor — called a telegoniometer — to monitor its position, mission managers said.

During two demonstration days, as well as the final docking, ESA flight controllers at the agency's new ATV control center in Toulouse, France, will put Jules Verne through its paces and test vital collision avoidance maneuvers to ensure the spacecraft won't crash into the space station should its rendezvous attempt go foul.

Unlike Russia's unmanned Progress ships, which can be remotely guided in by astronauts from a console inside the station, Jules Verne and other ATVs are fully autonomous.

"They cannot drive us in like they can a Russian Progress," Ellwood said. "All they can do is essentially press a red button if they feel we're being unsafe, and send us away."

Expedition 16 flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, a Russian cosmonaut, and commander Peggy Whitson of NASA are the prime ATV controllers for Jules Verne's flight. Malenchenko performed the first-ever remote controlled docking of an unmanned Progress cargo ship from inside Russia's Mir Space Station in 1994.

"We're absolutely confident with the safety aspects of this spaceflight," Suffredini said.

Ellwood added that each ATV is also equipped with a complete backup system to take control of the spacecraft should its primary systems fail.

"We really have two spacecraft in the middle of this very great bird," Ellwood said.

Thirkettle said ESA plans to launch five ATVs to the space station by 2015 in order to secure a six-month slot aboard the space station for a European astronaut every other year. Astronauts recently delivered Europe's other major contribution, the Columbus laboratory module, to the station last month.

The interior of each ATV can be loaded with up to eight racks worth of equipment for astronauts to retrieve once the spacecraft reaches the space station. They are also designed to use their rocket engines to boost the station into a higher orbit and transfer new fuel into tanks inside outpost's Russian-built thrusters.

Each unmanned cargo ship is designed to stay docked at the station for about six months, then be filled with trash and other unneeded items for disposal in the Earth's atmosphere.

"We're now really feeling that Europe is really coming to the space station," Ellwood said.

Lançamento espetacular do Space Shuttle Atlantis!

Clique nas imagens para aumentar.

Desafiando com sucesso as previsões do tempo, que indicavam 70% de possibilidades de mau tempo, o Shuttle Atlantis foi lançado com todo o sucesso há minutos. A bordo leva o módulo europeu Columbus, que será a maior contribuição da Agência Espacial Européia (ESA) para a Estação Espacial Internacional (ISS). O Shuttle deverá atracar com a ISS no Sábado. A cobertura da missão será básicamente contínua através da NASA TV.


Fonte: MSNBC

Liftoff! Atlantis rockets into the sky

Despite weather worries, NASA launches shuttle delivering European lab

The Associated Press

updated 3:07 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2008

After two months of delay, shuttle Atlantis blasted off Thursday with Europe's gift to the international space station, a $2 billion science lab named Columbus that spent years waiting to set sail.

Atlantis and its seven-man crew roared away from their seaside launch pad at 2:45 p.m., overcoming fuel gauge problems that thwarted back-to-back launch attempts in December.

The same cold front that spawned killer tornadoes across the South earlier in the week stayed far enough away and, in the end, cut NASA a break. All week, bad weather had threatened to delay the flight, making liftoff all the sweeter for the shuttle team. The sky was cloudy at launch time, but rain and thunderstorms remained off to the west.

"All systems are go," launch director Doug Lyons told the astronauts. "I'd like to wish you a successful mission and safe return."

Replied shuttle commander Stephen Frick: "Looks like today's a good day, and we're ready to go fly."

Probably no one was happier than the 300 Europeans who gathered at the launch site to see Atlantis take off with their beloved Columbus lab.

Twenty-three years in the making, Columbus is the European Space Agency's primary contribution to the space station. The lab has endured space station redesigns and slowdowns, as well as a number of shuttle postponements and two shuttle accidents.

It will join the U.S. lab, Destiny, in orbit for seven years. The much bigger Japanese lab Kibo, or Hope, will require three shuttle flights to get off the ground, beginning in March.

Frick, and his U.S., German and French crew will reach the space station on Saturday and begin installing Columbus the very next day. Three spacewalks are planned during the flight, scheduled to last 11 or, more likely, 12 days.

Besides Columbus, Atlantis will drop off a new space station resident, French Air Force Gen. Leopold Eyharts, who will swap places with NASA astronaut Daniel Tani and get Columbus working. Tani will return to Earth aboard the shuttle, ending a mission of nearly four months.

To NASA's relief, all four fuel gauges in Atlantis' external fuel tank worked properly during the final stage of the countdown. The gauges failed back in December because of a faulty connector, and NASA redesigned the part to fix the problem, which had been plaguing the shuttles for three years.

NASA was anxious to get Atlantis flying as soon as possible to keep alive its hopes of achieving six launches this year. The space agency faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring the shuttles. That equates to four or five shuttle flights a year between now and then, something NASA Administrator Michael Griffin considers achievable.

"We're coming back, and I think we are back, from some pretty severe technical problems that led to the loss of Columbia. We understand the foam now," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said, referring to the chunks of insulating foam that kept breaking off the fuel tanks.

Barring any more major mechanical trouble or freak hailstorms like the one that battered Atlantis's fuel tank one year ago, "this should be like some of those earlier times when we had some fairly interrupted stretches with no technical problems where we could just fly," Griffin said in an interview with The Associated Press. "That's what I'm looking forward to."

A Europa planeia vir a operar um vaivém espacial!

Os entusiastas da exploração espacial provavelmente lembrar-se-ão da euforia dos primeiros dias do Space Shuttle, em que se sonhava - como mais tarde se constatou amargamente ser impossível - com ritmos de lançamento na ordem dos 60 por ano!

Nessa altura a Europa planeava, assim como o Japão, criar um Space Shuttle próprio, o Hermes, que foi estudado e re-estudado durante anos a fio, e que foi cancelado por fim em 1989.

Soube hoje que estão a ser feitos estudos para um veículo de características semelhantes às de um vaivém espacial, num projecto designado IXV (Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle).

O resultado destes estudos deverá possibilitar um novo tipo de nave reutilizável depois de 2020!

Acho curioso os americanos se terem acobardado com os dois desastres do Space Shuttle - Challenger e Columbia - e voltado a tecnologias antigas, em muito semelhantes às da Apollo de há 40 anos, e que sejam os europeus a querer avançar nesta área tecnológica.

Diagrama do vaivém espacial Hermes.
O projecto foi cancelado em 1989.

Mas não nos podemos iludir. O projecto Hermes foi um enorme escoadouro de dinheiro, atribuído a empresas com melhores relacionamentos políticos no Parlamento Europeu e na ESA - Agência Espacial Européia. É bem possível que todos estes estudos nada mais sejam também que formas de dar dinheiro - muito dinheiro - a grandes empresas da indústria aeroespacial, sem haver a vontade real de criar um veículo operacional! Ou seja, os estudos seriam um fim em si. Um fim meramente económico.

Peço desculpa se pareço pessimista, mas já observo os vários programas espaciais há algumas décadas, e é difícil estar optimista em relação a projectos de naves tripuladas, sobretudo quando não há benefícios políticos para as pôr a funcionar!


Links:

• Gunter's Space Page
• NASA SpaceFlight
• ESA