NASA Railroad rides into sunset
The NASA Railroad has reached the end of its line.
Last month, the Florida East Coast Railway pulled NASA locomotives No. 1 and No. 3 from Kennedy Space Center on their way to new homes.
Their departure closed another chapter in the story of the space shuttle program’s retirement.
One of the trains’ primary responsibilities was to haul large solid rocket booster segments from the Jay Jay yard near Mims across the river to the Launch Complex 39 area.
The segments were joined to form the twin, 149-foot boosters placed on either side of a shuttle, which last launched nearly four years ago.
NASA’s next rocket, the Space Launch System, will start out using even taller solid rocket boosters, combining five segments instead of four.
But with only two launches certain to use those boosters, currently planned around 2018 and 2022, and then at most one flight a year to follow, NASA decided there was no need to keep its own railroad active.
The NASA Railroad cost $1.3 million a year to operate and maintain by the end of the shuttle program.
The space agency had already given away Locomotive No. 2 last year, to the Gold Coast Railroad Museum in Miami.
On April 10, Nos. 1 and 3 rolled north past the Vehicle Assembly Building, crossed a drawbridge over the Indian River Lagoon and into the Jay Jay yard for the last time.
No. 1 will be used by the Natchitoches Parish Port in Natchitoches, Louisiana. No. 3 is headed to the Madison Railroad in Madison, Indiana, for regular freight service and passenger excursion train service, NASA said.
The EMD SW 1500 locomotives originally were built for the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railway between 1968 and 1970. NASA acquired them in 1983 to replace aging ex-Army Alco S2 locomotives.
Although the trains have departed, NASA will continue to maintain about 17 miles of a rail network that once spanned 38 miles, branching out to KSC’s two launch pads and to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. No decision has been made yet about who will deliver the early SLS booster segments.
Meanwhile, an environmental study is also looking at the impacts of a potential extension of KSC’s rail line to Port Canaveral, which would increase traffic on the line.
Shape change for ISS
NASA robotics officers on Wednesday morning plan to relocate an International Space Station storage module, the biggest change to the station’s structure since its assembly was completed in 2011.
Teams in Houston will command the station’s 58-foot, Canadian-built robotic arm to pull the Permanent Multi-purpose Module, or PMM, from the Unity node’s Earth-facing port to the Tranquility node’s forward port. It should take a few hours, with NASA TV coverage starting at 8 a.m.
Watch: Animation of PMM's robotic relocation on ISS.
The vacated port will become a spare docking site for commercial crew capsules that could blast off with astronauts from the Space Coast as soon as 2017.
Before the PMM took up residence on the station and was given that acronym, it was better known as Leonardo — one of several Italian-built Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules, or MPLMs, cared for in Kennedy Space Center’s Space Station Processing Facility.
Shuttles ferried the modules up and down, but during its last mission in February 2011, the shuttle Discovery left Leonardo at the outpost permanently.
Crew tower progress
The first several tiers of the crew access tower that will be erected at United Launch Alliance’s Launch Complex 41 pad on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station are complete, Boeing reports.
They’ll be stacked and installed at the pad this summer before ULA’s next Atlas V rocket launch, planned for July 15.
The 200-foot tower will enable astronauts to board Boeing’s CST-100 capsule atop ULA’s Atlas V for flights to the International Space Station targeted for 2017.
Summer reading
During a recent media interview, International Space Station commander Terry Virts was asked if he recommended any books that might help people understand what it’s like to be an astronaut.
Virts said his favorite books were about the Apollo program, citing Andrew Chaikin’s “A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts.”
He also mentioned “Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir,” by Bryan Burrough, and Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Virts first read the latter as a teenager, and said the ISS crew recently watched part of Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of it.
“There’s a lot of good books about space,” he said. “The question is, do you want to read science fiction or do you want to read science fact about what it’s really like up here?”
On the fiction side, KSC Director Bob Cabana has been recommending “The Martian,” by Andy Weir.
If you’re more of a policy wonk, check out the semi-annual report just released by NASA’s Office of Inspector General for a sense of the challenges currently facing the agency. The top one is “is to effectively manage the Agency’s varied programs in an uncertain budget environment.”
Barbree honored
Merritt Island resident and longtime NBC News space correspondent Jay Barbree picked up another honor this past week.
The National Space Society presented Barbree with its 2015 Space Pioneer Award for Mass Media at the 34th International Space Development Conference held in Toronto.
Barbree has worked for NBC since 1958, covering every manned launch to orbit. He has authored or co-authored eight books, most recently “Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight,” published in 2014.
Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at facebook.com/jamesdeanspace.